THE REFLECTIONS OF A SAVAGE.
Morning brings counsel. _Does_ Calcutta smell so pestiferously after
all? Heavy rain has fallen in the night. She is newly-washed, and the
clear sunlight shows her at her best. Where, oh where, in all this
wilderness of life, shall a man go? Newman and Co. publish a three-rupee
guide which produces first despair and then fear in the mind of the
reader. Let us drop Newman and Co. out of the topmost window of the
Great Eastern, trusting to luck and the flight of the hours to evolve
wonders and mysteries and amusements.
The Great Eastern hums with life through all its hundred rooms. Doors
slam merrily, and all the nations of the earth run up and down the
staircases. This alone is refreshing, because the passers bump you and
ask you to stand aside. Fancy finding any place outside a Levée-room
where Englishmen are crowded together to this extent! Fancy sitting down
seventy strong to _tâble d’hôte_ and with a deafening clatter of knives
and forks! Fancy finding a real bar whence drinks may be obtained! and,
joy of joys, fancy stepping out of the hotel into the arms of a live,
white, helmeted, buttoned, truncheoned Bobby! A beautiful, burly
Bobby--just the sort of man who, seven thousand miles away, staves off
the stuttering witticism of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning reveller by
the strong badged arm of authority. What would happen if one spoke to
this Bobby? Would he be offended? He is not offended. He is affable. He
has to patrol the pavement in front of the Great Eastern and to see that
the crowding _ticca-gharris_ do not jam. Toward a presumably respectable
white he behaves as a man and a brother. There is no arrogance about
him. And this is disappointing. Closer inspection shows that he is not a
_real_ Bobby after all. He is a Municipal Police something and his
uniform is not correct; at least if they have not changed the dress of
the men at home. But no matter. Later on we will inquire into the
Calcutta Bobby, because he is a white man, and has to deal with some of
the “toughest” folk that ever set out of malice aforethought to paint
Job Charnock’s city vermillion. You must not, you cannot cross Old Court
House Street without looking carefully to see that you stand no chance
of being run over. This is beautiful. There is a steady roar of traffic,
cut every two minutes by the deeper roll of the trams. The driving is
eccentric, not to say bad, but there is the traffic--more than
unsophisticated eyes have beheld for a certain number of years. It means
business, it means money-making, it means crowded and hurrying life, and
it gets into the blood and makes it move. Here be big shops with
plate-glass fronts--all displaying the well-known names of firms that we
savages only correspond with through the V. P. P. and Parcels Post. They
are all here, as large as life, ready to supply anything you need if you
only care to sign. Great is the fascination of being able to obtain a
thing on the spot without having to write for a week and wait for a
month, and then get something quite different. No wonder pretty ladies,
who live anywhere within a reasonable distance, come down to do their
shopping personally.
“Look here. If you want to be respectable you musn’t smoke in the
streets. Nobody does it.” This is advice kindly tendered by a friend in
a black coat. There is no Levée or Lieutenant-Governor in sight; but he
wears the frock-coat because it is daylight, and he can be seen. He also
refrains from smoking for the same reason. He admits that Providence
built the open air to be smoked in, but he says that “it isn’t the
thing.” This man has a brougham, a remarkably natty little pill-box with
a curious wabble about the wheels. He steps into the brougham and puts
on--a top-hat, a shiny black “plug.”
There was a man up-country once who owned a top-hat. He leased it to
amateur theatrical companies for some seasons until the nap wore off.
Then he threw it into a tree and wild bees hived in it. Men were wont to
come and look at the hat, in its palmy days, for the sake of feeling
homesick. It interested all the station, and died with two seers of
_babul_ flower honey in its bosom. But top-hats are not intended to be
worn in India. They are as sacred as home letters and old rosebuds. The
friend cannot see this. He allows that if he stepped out of his brougham
and walked about in the sunshine for ten minutes he would get a bad
headache. In half an hour he would probably catch sunstroke. He allows
all this, but he keeps to his hat and cannot see why a barbarian is
moved to inextinguishable laughter at the sight. Everyone who owns a
brougham and many people who hire _ticca-gharris_ keep top-hats and
black frock-coats. The effect is curious, and at first fills the
beholder with surprise.
And now, “let us see the handsome houses where the wealthy nobles
dwell.” Northerly lies the great human jungle of the native city,
stretching from Burra Bazar to Chitpore. That can keep. Southerly is the
_maidan_ and Chouringhi. “If you get out into the centre of the _maidan_
you will understand why Calcutta is called the City of Palaces.” The
travelled American said so at the Great Eastern. There is a short tower,
falsely called a “memorial,” standing in a waste of soft, sour green.
That is as good a place to get to as any other. Near here the
newly-landed waler is taught the whole duty of the trap-horse and
careers madly in a brake. Near here young Calcutta gets upon a horse and
is incontinently run away with. Near here hundreds of kine feed, close
to the innumerable trams and the whirl of traffic along the face of
Chouringhi Road. The size of the _maidan_ takes the heart out of anyone
accustomed to the “gardens” of up-country, just as they say Newmarket
Heath cows a horse accustomed to more shut-in course. The huge level is
studded with brazen statues of eminent gentlemen riding fretful horses
on diabolically severe curbs. The expanse dwarfs the statues, dwarfs
everything except the frontage of the far-away Chouringhi Road. It is
big--it is impressive. There is no escaping the fact. They built houses
in the old days when the rupee was two shillings and a penny. Those
houses are three-storied, and ornamented with service-staircases like
houses in the Hills. They are also very close together, and they own
garden walls of _pukka_-masonry pierced with a single gate. In their
shut-upness they are British. In their spaciousness they are Oriental,
but those service-staircases do not look healthy. We will form an
amateur sanitary commission and call upon Chouringhi.
A first introduction to the Calcutta _durwan_ is not nice. If he is
chewing _pan_, he does not take the trouble to get rid of his quid. If
he is sitting on his _charpoy_ chewing sugarcane, he does not think it
worth his while to rise. He has to be taught those things, and he cannot
understand why he should be reproved. Clearly he is a survival of a
played-out system. Providence never intended that any native should be
made a _concierge_ more insolent than any of the French variety. The
people of Calcutta put an Uria in a little lodge close to the gate of
their house, in order that loafers may be turned away, and the houses
protected from theft. The natural result is that the _durwan_ treats
everybody whom he does not know as a loafer, has an intimate and
vendible knowledge of all the outgoings and incomings in that house, and
controls, to a large extent, the nomination of the _naukar-log_. They
say that one of the estimable class is now suing a bank for about three
lakhs of rupees. Up-country, a Lieutenant-Governor’s _charprassi_ has to
work for thirty years before he can retire on seventy thousand rupees of
savings. The Calcutta _durwan_ is a great institution. The head and
front of his offence is that he will insist upon trying to talk English.
How he protects the houses Calcutta only knows. He can be frightened out
of his wits by severe speech, and is generally asleep in calling hours.
If a rough round of visits be any guide, three times out of seven he is
fragrant of drink. So much for the durwan. Now for the houses he guards.
Very pleasant is the sensation of being ushered into a pestiferously
stablesome drawing-room. “Does this always happen?” No, “not unless you
shut up the room for some time; but if you open the _jhilmills_ there
are other smells. You see the stables and the servants’ quarters are
close too.” People pay five hundred a month for half-a-dozen rooms
filled with _attr_ of this kind. They make no complaint. When they think
the honor of the city is at stake they say defiantly: “Yes, but you must
remember we’re a metropolis. We are crowded here. We have no room. We
aren’t like your little stations.” Chouringhi is a stately place full of
sumptuous houses, but it is best to look at it hastily. Stop to consider
for a moment what the cramped compounds, the black soaked soil, the
netted intricacies of the service-staircases, the packed stables, the
seethment of human life round the _durwans_’ lodges, and the curious
arrangement of little open drains means, and you will call it a whited
sepulchre.
Men living in expensive tenements suffer from chronic sore-throat, and
will tell you cheerily that “we’ve got typhoid in Calcutta now.” Is the
pest ever out of it? Everything seems to be built with a view to its
comfort. It can lodge comfortably on roofs, climb along from the
gutter-pipe to piazza, or rise from sink to verandah and thence to the
topmost story. But Calcutta says that all is sound and produces figures
to prove it; at the same time admitting that healthy cut flesh will not
readily heal. Further evidence may be dispensed with.
Here come pouring down Park Street on the _maidan_ a rush of broughams,
neat buggies, the lightest of gigs, trim office brownberrys, shining
victorias, and a sprinkling of veritable hansom cabs. In the broughams
sit men in top-hats. In the other carts, young men, all very much
alike, and all immaculately turned out. A fresh stream from Chouringhi
joins the Park Street detachment, and the two together stream away
across the _maidan_ toward the business quarter of the city. This is
Calcutta going to office--the civilians to the Government Buildings and
the young men to their firms and their blocks and their wharves. Here
one sees that Calcutta has the best turn-out in the Empire. Horses and
traps alike are enviably perfect, and--mark the touchstone of
civilization--_the lamps are in the sockets_. This is distinctly
refreshing. Once more we will take off our hats to Calcutta, the
well-appointed, the luxurious. The country-bred is a rare beast here;
his place is taken by the waler, and the waler, though a ruffian at
heart, can be made to look like a gentleman. It would be indecorous as
well as insane to applaud the winking harness, the perfectly lacquered
panels, and the liveried _saises_. They show well in the outwardly fair
roads shadowed by the Palaces.
How many sections of the complex society of the place do the carts
carry? _Imprimis_, the Bengal Civilian who goes to Writers’ Buildings
and sits in a perfect office and speaks flippantly of “sending things
into India,” meaning thereby the Supreme Government. He is a great
person, and his mouth is full of promotion-and-appointment “shop.”
Generally he is referred to as a “rising man.” Calcutta seems full of
“rising men.” _Secondly_, the Government of India man, who wears a
familiar Simla face, rents a flat when he is not up in the Hills, and is
rational on the subject of the drawbacks of Calcutta. _Thirdly_, the man
of the “firms,” the pure non-official who fights under the banner of one
of the great houses of the City, or for his own hand in a neat office,
or dashes about Clive Street in a brougham doing “share work” or
something of the kind. He fears not “Bengal,” nor regards he “India.” He
swears impartially at both when their actions interfere with his
operations. His “shop” is quite unintelligible. He is like the English
city man with the chill off, lives well and entertains hospitably. In
the old days he was greater than he is now, but still he bulks large. He
is rational in so far that he will help the abuse of the Municipality,
but womanish in his insistence on the excellencies of Calcutta. Over and
above these who are hurrying to work are the various brigades, squads,
and detachments of the other interests. But they are sets and not
sections, and revolve round Belvedere, Government House, and Fort
William. Simla and Darjeeling claim them in the hot weather. Let them
go. They wear top-hats and frock-coats.
It is time to escape from Chouringhi Road and get among the long-shore
folk, who have no prejudices against tobacco, and who all use pretty
nearly the same sort of hat.