[Illustration]
THE CITY OF
DREADFUL NIGHT
By
RUDYARD KIPLING
With Illustrations by
CHARLES D. FARRAND
[Illustration: colophon]
ALEX. GROSSET & CO.
11 EAST SIXTEENTH ST., NEW YORK
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899
BY
ALEX. GROSSET & CO.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
A Real Live City, 5
CHAPTER II.
The Reflections of a Savage, 14
CHAPTER III.
The Council of the Gods, 25
CHAPTER IV.
On the Banks of the Hugli, 37
CHAPTER V.
With the Calcutta Police, 49
CHAPTER VI.
The City of Dreadful Night, 58
CHAPTER VII.
Deeper and Deeper Still, 72
CHAPTER VIII.
Concerning Lucia, 82
THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT.
CHAPTER I.
A REAL LIVE CITY.
We are all backwoodsmen and barbarians together--we others dwelling
beyond the Ditch, in the outer darkness of the Mofussil. There are no
such things as commissioners and heads of departments in the world, and
there is only one city in India. Bombay is too green, too pretty, and
too stragglesome; and Madras died ever so long ago. Let us take off our
hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent, as we
drive in over the Hugli Bridge in the dawn of a still February morning.
We have left India behind us at Howrah Station, and now we enter foreign
parts. No, not wholly foreign. Say rather too familiar.
All men of certain age know the feeling of caged irritation--an
illustration in the _Graphic_, a bar of music, or the light words of a
friend from home may set it ablaze--that comes from the knowledge of
our lost heritage of London. At home they, the other men, our equals,
have at their disposal all that town can supply--the roar of the
streets, the lights, the music, the pleasant places, the millions of
their own kind, and a wilderness full of pretty, fresh-colored
Englishwomen, theatres, and restaurants. It is their right. They accept
it as such, and even affect to look upon it with contempt. And we, we
have nothing except the few amusements that we painfully build up for
ourselves--the dolorous dissipations of gymkhanas where every one knows
everybody else, or the chastened intoxication of dances where all
engagements are booked, in ink, ten days ahead, and where everybody’s
antecedents are as patent as his or her method of waltzing. We have been
deprived of our inheritance. The men at home are enjoying it all, not
knowing how fair and rich it is, and we at the most can only fly
westward for a few months and gorge what, properly speaking, should take
seven or eight or ten luxurious years. That is the lost heritage of
London; and the knowledge of the forfeiture, wilful or forced, comes to
most men at times and seasons, and they get cross.
Calcutta holds out false hopes of some return. The dense smoke hangs
low, in the chill of the morning, over an ocean of roofs, and, as the
city wakes, there goes up to the smoke a deep, full-throated boom of
life and motion and humanity. For this reason does he who sees Calcutta
for the first time hang joyously out of the _ticca-gharri_ and sniff the
smoke, and turn his face toward the tumult, saying: “This is, at last,
some portion of my heritage returned to me. This is a city. There is
life here, and there should be all manner of pleasant things for the
having, across the river and under the smoke.” When Leland, he who wrote
the Hans Breitmann Ballads, once desired to know the name of an austere,
plug-hatted redskin of repute, his answer, from the lips of a
half-breed, was:
“He Injun. He big Injun. He heap big Injun. He dam big heap Injun. He
dam mighty great big heap Injun. He Jones!” The litany is an expressive
one, and exactly describes the first emotions of a wandering savage
adrift in Calcutta. The eye has lost its sense of proportion, the focus
has contracted through overmuch residence in up-country stations--twenty
minutes’ canter from hospital to parade-ground, you know--and the mind
has shrunk with the eye. Both say together, as they take in the sweep
of shipping above and below the Hugli Bridge: “Why, this is London! This
is the docks. This is Imperial. This is worth coming across India to
see!”
Then a distinctly wicked idea takes possession of the mind: “What a
divine--what a heavenly place to _loot_!” This gives place to a much
worse devil--that of Conservatism. It seems not only a wrong but a
criminal thing to allow natives to have any voice in the control of such
a city--adorned, docked, wharfed, fronted and reclaimed by Englishmen,
existing only because England lives, and dependent for its life on
England. All India knows of the Calcutta Municipality; but has any one
thoroughly investigated the Big Calcutta Stink? There is only one.
Benares is fouler in point of concentrated, pent-up muck, and there are
local stenches in Peshawur which are stronger than the B.C.S.; but, for
diffused, soul-sickening expansiveness, the reek of Calcutta beats both
Benares and Peshawur. Bombay cloaks her stenches with a veneer of
assafœtida and _huqa_-tobacco; Calcutta is above pretence. There is no
tracing back the Calcutta plague to any one source. It is faint, it is
sickly, and it is indescribable; but Americans at the Great Eastern
Hotel say that it is something like the smell of the Chinese quarter in
San Francisco. It is certainly not an Indian smell. It resembles the
essence of corruption that has rotted for the second time--the clammy
odor of blue slime. And there is no escape from it. It blows across the
_maidan_; it comes in gusts into the corridors of the Great Eastern
Hotel; what they are pleased to call the “Palaces of Chouringhi” carry
it; it swirls round the Bengal Club; it pours out of by-streets with
sickening intensity, and the breeze of the morning is laden with it. It
is first found, in spite of the fume of the engines, in Howrah Station.
It seems to be worst in the little lanes at the back of Lal Bazar where
the drinking-shops are, but it is nearly as bad opposite Government
House and in the Public Offices. The thing is intermittent. Six
moderately pure mouthfuls of air may be drawn without offence. Then
comes the seventh wave and the queasiness of an uncultured stomach. If
you live long enough in Calcutta you grow used to it. The regular
residents admit the disgrace, but their answer is: “Wait till the wind
blows off the Salt Lakes where all the sewage goes, and _then_ you’ll
smell something.” That is their defence! Small wonder that they consider
Calcutta is a fit place for a permanent Viceroy. Englishmen who can
calmly extenuate one shame by another are capable of asking for
anything--and expecting to get it.
If an up-country station holding three thousand troops and twenty
civilians owned such a possession as Calcutta does, the Deputy
Commissioner or the Cantonment Magistrate would have all the natives off
the board of management or decently shovelled into the background until
the mess was abated. Then they might come on again and talk of
“high-handed oppression” as much as they liked. That stink, to an
unprejudiced nose, damns Calcutta as a City of Kings. And, in spite of
that stink, they allow, they even encourage, natives to look after the
place! The damp, drainage-soaked soil is sick with the teeming life of a
hundred years, and the Municipal Board list is choked with the names of
natives--men of the breed born in and raised off this surfeited
muck-heap! They own property, these amiable Aryans on the Municipal and
the Bengal Legislative Council. Launch a proposal to tax them on that
property, and they naturally howl. They also howl up-country, but there
the halls for mass-meetings are few, and the vernacular papers fewer,
and with a _zubbardusti_ Secretary and a President whose favor is worth
the having and whose wrath is undesirable, men are kept clean despite
themselves, and may not poison their neighbors. Why, asks a savage, let
them vote at all? They can put up with this filthiness. They _cannot_
have any feelings worth caring a rush for. Let them live quietly and
hide away their money under our protection, while we tax them till they
know through their purses the measure of their neglect in the past, and
when a little of the smell has been abolished, bring them back again to
talk and take the credit of enlightenment. The better classes own their
broughams and barouches; the worse can shoulder an Englishman into the
kennel and talk to him as though he were a _khidmatgar_. They can refer
to an English lady as an _aurat_; they are permitted a freedom--not to
put it too coarsely--of speech which, if used by an Englishman toward an
Englishman, would end in serious trouble. They are fenced and protected
and made inviolate. Surely they might be content with all those things
without entering into matters which they cannot, by the nature of their
birth, understand.
Now, whether all this genial diatribe be the outcome of an unbiased mind
or the result first of sickness caused by that ferocious stench, and
secondly of headache due to day-long smoking to drown the stench, is an
open question. Anyway, Calcutta is a fearsome place for a man not
educated up to it.
A word of advice to other barbarians. Do not bring a north-country
servant into Calcutta. He is sure to get into trouble, because he does
not understand the customs of the city. A Punjabi in this place for the
first time esteems it his bounden duty to go to the _Ajaib-ghar_--the
Museum. Such an one has gone and is even now returned very angry and
troubled in the spirit. “I went to the Museum,” says he, “and no one
gave me any _gali_. I went to the market to buy my food, and then I sat
upon a seat. There came a _chaprissi_ who said: ‘Go away, I want to sit
here.’ I said: ‘I am here first.’ He said: ‘I am a _chaprissi_! _nikal
jao!_’ and he hit me. Now that sitting-place was open to all, so I hit
him till he wept. He ran away for the Police, and I went away too, for
the Police here are all _Sahibs_. Can I have leave from two o’clock to
go and look for that _chaprissi_ and hit him again?”
Behold the situation! An unknown city full of smell that makes one long
for rest and retirement, and a champing _naukar_, not yet six hours in
the stew, who has started a blood-feud with an unknown _chaprissi_ and
clamors to go forth to the fray. General orders that, whatever may be
said or done to him, he must not say or do anything in return lead to an
eloquent harangue on the quality of _izzat_ and the nature of “face
blackening.” There is no _izzat_ in Calcutta, and this Awful Smell
blackens the face of any Englishman who sniffs it.
Alas! for the lost delusion of the heritage that was to be restored. Let
us sleep, let us sleep, and pray that Calcutta may be better to-morrow.
At present it is remarkably like sleeping with a corpse.