HAVING suited themselves with the furnished house of a junior civilian,
who had suddenly decamped before heat apoplexy and gastric
complications, the Brownes settled down, if the expression is not too
comfortable, to wait for the rains. I should dislike any
misunderstanding on the point of comfort. It is not too much to say that
the word is not understood in Calcutta. We talk of _aram_ here instead,
which means a drugged ease with heavy dreams.
The Brownes stored their furniture in the godowns of the other man, and
had _aram_ nevertheless in contemplating his, which was ugly. _Aram_ is
cheap—the price of a cup of coffee and a long veranda chair—and
seductive; but I was annoyed with Helen Browne for accepting the other
people’s furniture so pacifically. It seemed to me that she was becoming
acclimatised too soon. There is a point in that process where a born
British gentlewoman will live without antimacassars and sleep on a
charpoy; but I do not wish to be considered a morbid modern analyst, so
this need not be enlarged upon. The other people’s furniture, moreover,
would have been entertaining if it could have talked, to so many people
it had been let and sub-let and re-let and leased, always with the
house, since it left Bow Bazar, where it was originally bought outright
by an extravagant person second-hand. It had never belonged to anybody
since: it had always been a mere convenience—a means of enabling people
to give dinner parties. No one had ever regarded it, or mended it, or
kept it any cleaner than decency required. It was tarnished, cracked,
frayed, soiled; it included tables with white marble tops, and bad
chromo-lithographs and dusty bunches of dried grasses which nobody had
ever taken the trouble to eliminate. In the cold weather certain people
had paid five hundred rupees a month for the privilege of living with
it; in the hot weather certain other people had lived with it for
nothing, to keep the white ants out. Withal it was typical Calcutta
furniture—a typical part of the absurd pretence that white people make
of being at home in this place.
The rains are due, as all Calcutta knows, on June the fifteenth. That is
the limit of our time of pure grilling. We know it is written upon our
foreheads that we must turn and writhe and bite the dust in the pain of
the sun to that day; but on that day we expect that the clouds will come
up out of the east and out of the west and clothe the brazen sky, and
interpose between us and the dolour of India. It is what we call a pucca
bandobust, arranged through the Meteorological Department, part of the
bargain of exile with the Secretary of State. For so many years of
active service we get so much pension and so much furlough, and we are
to be rained upon every fifteenth of June for three months.
Therefore when the sun arose upon the fifteenth of June of this current
year of the Brownes, and marched across the sky without winking, the
Brownes were naturally and properly aggrieved together with the Bengal
Government and all Calcutta. When one has defined the very point and
limit of one’s endurance, it is inconsistent and undignified to go on
enduring. The ticca-gharry horses were so much of this opinion that they
refused too, and dropped down dead all up and down Chowringhee, as a
preferable alternative—those that were driven. The more prudent
gharry-wallah drew up in the reeking shade of some great building—it was
cooler in the streets than in the stables—and slept profoundly, refusing
all fares till sundown; and the broker-sahib, who spends his life upon
wheels, changed horses four times a day. On the night of the fifteenth
of June young Browne got up stealthily and deftly turned a jug of water
over a hole in the floor through which a punkah rope hung inert. There
was a sudden scramble below, the punkah rope sawed convulsively, and
young Browne, with a ghastly smile, put out the glimmering candle and
went back to bed. It is a popular form of discipline in Calcutta, but as
applied by young Browne it bore strikingly upon the weather.
The Maidan cracked and split, and even the broad leaves of the teak-wood
tree hung limp and grey under the powder of the road. The crows had
nothing to say all day, but hopped about with their beaks ridiculously
agape, while the sun blazed down through the flat roofs of Calcutta, and
made Mrs. Browne’s chairs and tables so hot that it was a surprise to
touch them. At the same time it drew up the evil soul of the odour of
the bazars, the “_burra krab_[120] smell,” as Kipling calls the chief
characteristic of Calcutta, and cast it abroad in all the city. The
Brownes squandered sums upon Condy’s fluid wholly disproportionate with
their income vainly, for nothing yet known to pharmacy can cope with
that smell. It grew hotter and hotter, and sometimes the south wind
failed, and then the smell became several smells, special, local,
individual, though the frangi-panni tree leaned blooming on its spiky
elbows over every garden wall, and made them all sweet and langorous and
interesting and truly Eastern. The smells were not of great consequence;
one gets accustomed to the smells as one gets accustomed to the curries.
Mrs. Browne declared, too, that one could put up with the weather, and
the cholera, and sunstroke—one didn’t particularly mind even having
one’s house turned inside out occasionally by a dust-storm. The really
trying things—the things one hadn’t reckoned with beforehand—were that
one’s envelope flaps should all stick down; that the pages of one’s
books should curl up; that the towel should sting one’s face; that the
punkah should stop in the night. Even under these greater afflictions we
are uncomplaining up to the fifteenth of June. But the sixteenth passed
over these Brownes, and the seventeenth and the eighteenth, and many
days more, and still the dusty sun went down in the smoky west, and
against the great red glow of his setting the naked beesties ran like
black gnomes with their goat skins on their hips, slaking the roads that
were red too.... And a mile and a league all round about the city the
ryot folded his hands before his baking rice-fields, not knowing that
men wrote daily in the _Englishman_ about him, and wondered in what way
he had offended Lakshmi that for so many days she should withhold the
rain!
Footnote 120:
Very bad.
* * * * *
A shutter banged downstairs at three o’clock in the morning, there came
a cool swishing and a subsiding among the fronds of the date palms, the
gold mohur trees raised their heads and listened—it was coming. Far down
in the Sunderbunds it was raining, and with great sweeps and curves it
rained further and further inland. Calcutta turned more easily upon its
pillow, and slept sound and late, the punkah-wallah slept also with
impunity, and when the city awoke in the morning the rains had come.
Mrs. Browne professed to find a great difference and novelty in the
rains of India. She declared that they came from lower down, that they
were whiter and greyer, that they didn’t refresh the earth, but beat it
and sat upon it, that there was quite an extraordinary quality of
moisture about them. I believe every new-comer makes similar
observations. To the rest of us, it has been obvious for so many years
that during July, August, and September a considerable amount of water
descends upon Bengal, that we have ceased to make original remarks about
it. But Bengal certainly gets very wet, and Mrs. Browne’s observations
as the time went on, and the floods abated not, were entirely excusable.
Every day it rained, more in the morning and less in the evening, or
less in the morning and more in the evening. The garden became a jungle,
the English flowers that had died a puzzled death in May, sent up
hysterical long shoots; one could see the grass growing. An adjutant
sailed in from the mofussil[121] marshes, trailing his legs behind him,
to look for frogs on the Maidan. He stood on one leg to look for them,
upon the bronze head of Lord Lawrence, and his appearance, with his chin
buried thoughtfully in his bosom, was much more sapient than that of the
administrator underneath. In the evening he flew back again, and then
the frogs were at liberty to express their opinion of him. They spoke
strongly, as was natural; one of them, in the tank of Ram Dass
Hurrymunny, barked like a pariah. The crickets did their concerted best
to outvoice the frogs, the cicadas reinforced the crickets, and all the
other shrill-voiced things that could sing in the dark, sang in such a
wheezy heaving eternal monotone, that Mr. and Mrs. Browne, sitting
damply behind their open windows, were quite reduced to silence.
Footnote 121:
A Country.
[Illustration: HE STOOD UPON ONE LEG ON THE BRONZE HEAD OF LORD
LAWRENCE.]
They were planting the little green rice shoots in the mofussil, they
wanted it all and more; but Mrs. Browne in Calcutta was obliged to look
in the newspapers for the assurance that she ought to be thankful for
quite so much rain. It seemed to Mrs. Browne that all her relations with
the world were being submerged, and that she personally was becoming too
wet. She found it an unnatural and unpleasant thing that furniture
should perspire; and when in addition to the roof leaking, and the
matting rotting, and the cockroaches multiplying, the yellow sunset and
the blue sea of her nicest water-colour mixed themselves up in a
terrible and crumpled and impossible manner, Mrs. Browne added tears to
the general moisture, and thought the very fabric of her existence was
dissolving. Besides that, the Rev. Peachey came unglued out of his blue
plush frame, and Aunt Plovtree developed yellow spots. Moreover, a green
mould sprouted in the soles of their shoes, fresh every morning, and
Helen’s evening dresses and gloves “went,” as she expressed it in
writing to Canbury, “all sorts of colours.” To pass over the fact that
centipedes began to run in their playful zigzag way across the floor,
and young Browne killed a snake in the veranda, which he was not
indisposed to believe a cobra. Helen thought there was no room for doubt
about it, and, as a matter of fact, one hardly ever hears of a snake
being killed in Calcutta that is not a cobra. The harmless varieties
have a remarkable facility in keeping out of the way.
All over India it was raining, coming down hard on the marginless
plains, on the great slopes of the Himalayas, on the great cities where
the bunnias hive gold in the bazars, on the little thatched brown
villages where the people live and die like harmless animals, with the
memory that once or twice they have had enough to eat.
But more than anywhere it seemed to rain in Calcutta, where only about
six feet of solid ground intervenes between the people and the
bottomless miry pit. So that it is telling the literal truth to say that
Calcutta was soaked through and through, dripping, reeking,
pestilentially drunken with water. Infinite deeps below, infinite
sources above, between the two a few macadamised roads, and an
inadequate supply of gutters and drain-pipes. And yet it is not recorded
that at any time Calcutta has succumbed to the rains, and sunk swamped
into herself.
Nevertheless, at first it was a few degrees cooler, and, to borrow a
phrase from the press, there was a slight increase in social activity.
People began to give dinners. There are people in Bengal whom all the
manifestations of Providence and of Nature together would not prevent
giving dinners. They find it agreeable to feel the warming, drying
influence of the various forms of carbon prepared by the khansamah in
company. They talk of appointments, promotions, and the
Lieutenant-Governor, and they chatter as if the ague were already upon
them, about how much more sociable Calcutta is in the rains than in the
cold weather—you get to know people so much better.
Then there were days when it didn’t rain; it shone. Early in the morning
it shone with a vague and watery brilliance in the sky, and a curious
white gleam over the earth. Later the shining was hot, and straight, and
strong, and then Calcutta steamed, and one saw a parboiled baboo at
every corner. Later still the sun went down over the river, and then one
saw hundreds of parboiled baboos everywhere; and on the Maidan, driving
about in carriages, a few score of the very whitest people on earth. The
Brownes were as white as anybody. Privately Helen thought her complexion
much more interesting than it used to be, and coveted a barouche to lean
back and look languidly bored in like the few burra memsahibs that
devotedly stayed in Calcutta. It was impossible to be languid in a
tum-tum, which is an uncompromising vehicle, not constructed to
encourage poses.
Behind their stubby little country-bred, Mr. and Mrs. Browne, taking the
air, saw a Calcutta that never revealed itself to any globe-trotter, and
which you will not find described in the printed experiences in cloth,
at 7s. 6d., of Jonas Batcham, for instance. They saw the broad Maidan
laid out in lakes and rivers, with a theatrical sun, set in purple and
gold, dissolving in each of them, and all the spaces between a
marvellous lushgreen, where the horses sank to their fetlocks. Floating
over it they saw a gossamer white pall that consisted of water and
bacilli in a state of suspension, and hung abreast of the people.
Calcutta has a saving grace, known to her Anglo-Indians as the
Casuarina-avenue. You can lose your soul in the infinite filmy shadows
of the marching trees. Even the Indian sunlight, filtering through their
soft dead green, becomes a delicate thing. The Brownes saw this ranged
before them, misty and wonderful in the evening, hiding the last of the
glow in its plumy nearer branches, and piling up soft clouds of dusk as
it stretched further away. They saw the fort and all the pillared façade
of Chowringhee, with its monuments and palaces and praying places yellow
against a more and more empurpled sky, and the grey spire of the
cathedral rising in its green corner of the Maidan behind a cluster of
trees and a brimming lake, just as it might do in England. Calcutta sits
close beside her river, and there are no miles of teeming wharfage
between her and it. The great ships lie with their noses against the
bank, and the level road runs beside them. Thus, by a wise provision of
the municipality, people who live in Calcutta are able to drive down
every day and see for themselves that it is possible to get away. For
this reason the Brownes loved the close ships and all the populous
river, lying under the wraith of the rains—the faint outlines of the
crowding masts, with the sunset sky behind them as far as they could
see; the majestic grey ghost of the old East Indiamen at anchor, with
her “state cabin” full of dates from Mocha; slipping towards them
solitarily out of the unreality the dipping red-brown three-cornered
sail of an Arab dhow. Eloquently always the river breathed of exile and
of home-going, sometimes with her own proper voice, sometimes with the
tongue of a second mate from Portsmouth, or the twang of a negro cook
from Savannah, full of airs and superciliousness. It depended on where
you lived yourself when you were at home.
On a corner of the Maidan a number of mad young Englishmen played
football; in another place there was a lively sale of goats for
sacrifice. An erection of red and gold paper, like a Chinese pagoda,
still wobbled about the biggest tank in propitiation of its god.
Calcutta emptied itself on its wide green acres. The Brownes met a smart
turnout with a thoroughbred, driven at a spanking pace by a pucca
Chinaman, who leant forward nonchalantly with his pigtail streaming out
behind. They met a fiery pair in a mail-phaeton, with two anxious syces
behind, and driving on the high seat a small, bold, brown lady, all in
green and pink gauze, tinselled, bareheaded, wearing her iniquity as
lightly as a feather. They met a big roomy barouche, with two servants
on the box, two more behind, and an ayah inside, all in attendance upon
a tiny white mite of a belati baby. A small British terrier met them,
regarded them, sniffed them, wagged his tail and followed them. They
were not personal friends of his, but they were sahibs, and his
countrymen; they would understand his lost estate, a sahib’s dog; he
could confide himself to their good feeling and hospitality pending
explanations. And so the stubby little country-bred trotted down the
river road till he came to a place where the road widened—where, beside
an octagonal erection with a roof, a great many other stubby little
country-breds and slender Arabs and big Walers stood very quietly
between their shafts with drooping heads; and here he turned, almost of
his own accord, and trotted in amongst them until he found comfortable
standing room, when he stopped. This was Calcutta’s place of pleasure.
Behind the octagonal erection, where presently the band would play,
stretched those Eden Gardens which the photographers reproduce so
effectively, and the globe-trotters buy so abundantly. Here we have the
elements of the most romantic municipal scenery—tall palms and red
poinsettias, a fine winding artificial lake with a beautiful arched
artificial bridge, realistic artificial rocks cropping out of the grass,
and a genuine Burmese pagoda of white chunam, specially constructed for
the gardens, in the middle of it all. The pagoda runs up into a spire,
or a lightning conductor, or something of that nature; and on the top of
this a frolicsome British tar once placed an empty soda-water bottle
upside down. I think the native municipal commissioners regard this with
some pride as a finial ornament; certainly nobody has ever taken it
down. And that is as well, for the soda-water bottle gives, one might
say, the key to the design of the place, which might otherwise puzzle
the stranger. I should not omit to say that the gardens are illuminated
with electric light, as such gardens of course should be. The people
walk up and down under the electric light, looking at each other; the
young men go in among the carriages and talk to the ladies they know.
Calcutta makes a violent attempt to distract itself. On this particular
evening the Brownes also came to distract themselves—it becomes a habit
in time.
The electric light sputtered and fizzled over the crowd of standing
carriages. Helen thought it darkened the black circle round young
Browne’s eyes; and he asked his wife apprehendingly if she were feeling
chilled or anything—she looked so white. The damp, warm air clung to
their faces. A man in a ticca-gharry said to a man in the road that it
was damned muggy. Several people in the carriages near heard him say
this—it was so quiet. The crowd of carriage-tops gleamed motionless, the
horses stood dejectedly on three legs, and under every horse’s nose a
cotton-clad syce “bitoed”[122] on the ground with his chin on his knees.
A peddling native thrust up a round flat bouquet of pink and white roses
that smelt of “Jockey Club.” “_Jao!_” said young Browne.
Footnote 122:
Sat on his heels.
Presently the band played a gay and lightsome air, very sad to hear,
from an opera long superseded at home, and with the playing of the band
the general depression seemed to thicken and close down. There are
people in Calcutta who, even for distraction’s sake, cannot stand
selections from the _Mikado_ so near the end of the century. One by one
the carriages began to roll away. Perhaps along the river road there
would be a breath of air. The band played a medley, all sorts of things,
and then “The Land o’ the Leal.” I saw the MacTaggarts drive off.
“_Syce!_” said Mr. Perth Macintyre; “_buttie jallao!_ _Gur ko!_”[123]
... The last of the pink flush faded out of the sky behind the ships.
The air grew sodden and chill, a little raw breeze crept in from the
east. Young Browne took off his hat to “God Save the Queen,” and then “I
think we ought to hurry him a little,” said Helen, referring to the
stubby little country-bred. “It’s going to rain.”
Footnote 123:
“Light the (carriage) lamps. To the house!”
It was in this month of August, I remember, that we lost a partner of
the firm, in a sad though not unusual way. He died, as a matter of fact,
from a little Calcutta mud which rubbed itself into his elbow one
afternoon when he was thrown out of his brougham. Tetanus the doctors
called it, and they said he would have had a better chance if he had
been thrown out of his brougham at another time of year. He was buried,
poor man, in seven inches of water; and Mr. Perth Macintyre had two
months’ fever after attending the dripping funeral.
It would be an affectation to write about Mrs. Browne’s experiences and
to omit a chapter on at least one phase of the weather; but I could have
told you in the beginning that it would not be amusing.
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