CONCERNING LUCIA.
“Was a woman such a woman--cheeks so round and lips so red?
On the neck the small head buoyant like the bellflower in its bed.”
Time must be filled in somehow till five this afternoon, when
Superintendent Lamb will reveal more horrors. Why not, the trams aiding,
go to the Old Park Street Cemetery? It is presumption, of course,
because none other than the great Sir W. W. Hunter once went there, and
wove from his visit certain fascinating articles for the _Englishman_;
the memory of which lingers even to this day, though they were written
fully two years since.
But the great Sir W. W. went in his Legislative Consular brougham and
never in an unbridled tram-car which pulled up somewhere in the middle
of Dhurrumtollah. “You want go Park Street? No trams going Park Street.
You get out here.” Calcutta tram conductors are not polite. Some day one
of them will be hurt. The car shuffles unsympathetically down the
street, and the evicted is stranded in Dhurrumtollah, which may be the
Hammersmith Highway of Calcutta. Providence arranged this mistake, and
paved the way to a Great Discovery now published for the first time.
Dhurrumtollah is full of the People of India, walking in family parties
and groups and confidential couples. And the people of India are neither
Hindu nor Mussulman--Jew, Ethiop, Gueber, or expatriated British. They
are the Eurasians, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them in
Dhurrumtollah now. There is Papa with a shining black hat fit for a
counsellor of the Queen, and Mamma, whose silken attire is tight upon
her portly figure, and The Brood made up of straw-hatted, olive-cheeked,
sharp-eyed little boys, and leggy maidens wearing white, open-work
stockings calculated to show dust. There are the young men who smoke bad
cigars and carry themselves lordily--such as have incomes. There are
also the young women with the beautiful eyes and the wonderful dresses
which always fit so badly across the shoulders. And they carry
prayer-books or baskets, because they are either going to mass or the
market. Without doubt, these are the people of India. They were born in
it, bred in it, and will die in it. The Englishman only comes to the
country, and the natives of course were there from the first, but these
people have been made here, and no one has done anything for them except
talk and write about them. Yet they belong, some of them, to old and
honorable families, hold “houses, messuages, and tenements” in Sealdah,
and are rich, a few of them. They all look prosperous and contented, and
they chatter eternally in that curious dialect that no one has yet
reduced to print. Beyond what little they please to reveal now and again
in the newspapers, we know nothing about their life which touches so
intimately the white on the one hand and the black on the other. It must
be interesting--more interesting than the colorless Anglo-Indian
article; but who has treated of it? There was one novel once in which
the second heroine was an Eurasienne. She was a strictly subordinate
character, and came to a sad end. The poet of the race, Henry
Derozio--he of whom Mr. Thomas Edwards wrote a history--was bitten with
Keats and Scott and Shelley, and overlooked in his search for material
things that lay nearest to him. All this mass of humanity in
Dhurrumtollah is unexploited and almost unknown. Wanted, therefore, a
writer from among the Eurasians, who shall write so that men shall be
pleased to read a story of Eurasian life; then outsiders will be
interested in the People of India, and will admit that the race has
possibilities.
A futile attempt to get to Park Street from Dhurrumtollah ends in the
market--the Hogg Market men call it. Perhaps a knight of that name built
it. It is not one-half as pretty as the Crawford Market, in Bombay, but
... it appears to be the trysting-place of Young Calcutta. The natural
inclination of youth is to lie abed late, and to let the seniors do all
the hard work. Why, therefore, should Pyramus who has to be ruling
account forms at ten, and Thisbe, who _cannot_ be interested in the
price of second quality beef, wander, in studiously correct raiment,
round and about the stalls before the sun is well clear of the earth?
Pyramus carries a walking-stick with imitation silver straps upon it,
and there are cloth tops to his boots; but his collar has been two days
worn. Thisbe crowns her dark head with a blue velvet Tam-o’-Shanter; but
one of her boots lacks a button, and there is a tear in the left-hand
glove. Mamma, who despises gloves, is rapidly filling a shallow basket,
that the coolie-boy carries, with vegetables, potatoes, purple brinjals,
and--Oh, Pyramus! Do you ever kiss Thisbe when Mamma is not
near?--garlic--yea, _lusson_ of the bazar. Mamma is generous in her
views on garlic. Pyramus comes round the corner of the stall looking for
nobody in particular--not he--and is elaborately polite to Mamma.
Somehow, he and Thisbe drift off together, and Mamma, very portly and
very voluble, is left to chaffer and sort and select alone. In the name
of the Sacred Unities do not, young people, retire to the meat-stalls to
exchange confidences! Come up to this end, where the roses are arriving
in great flat baskets, where the air is heavy with the fragrance of
flowers, and the young buds and greenery are littering all the floor.
They won’t--they prefer talking by the dead, unromantic muttons, where
there are not so many buyers. How they babble! There must have been a
quarrel to make up. Thisbe shakes the blue velvet Tam-o’-Shanter and
says: “O yess!” scornfully. Pyramus answers: “No-a, no-a. Do-ant say
thatt.” Mamma’s basket is full and she picks up Thisbe hastily. Pyramus
departs. _He_ never came here to do any marketing. He came to meet
Thisbe, who in ten years will own a figure very much like Mamma’s. May
their ways be smooth before them, and after honest service of the
Government, may Pyramus retire on Rs. 250 per mensen, into a nice
little house somewhere in Monghyr or Chunar.
From love by natural sequence to death. Where _is_ the Park Street
Cemetery? A hundred _gharriwans_ leap from their boxes and invade the
market, and after a short struggle one of them uncarts his capture in a
burial-ground--a ghastly new place, close to a tramway. This is not what
is wanted. The living dead are here--the people whose names are not yet
altogether perished and whose tombstones are tended. “Where are the
_old_ dead?” “Nobody goes there,” says the _gharriwan_. “It is up that
road.” He points up a long and utterly deserted thoroughfare, running
between high walls. This is the place, and the entrance to it, with its
_mallee_ waiting with one brown, battered rose, its grilled door and its
professional notices, bears a hideous likeness to the entrance of Simla
churchyard. But, once inside, the sightseer stands in the heart of utter
desolation--all the more forlorn for being swept up. Lower Park Street
cuts a great graveyard in two. The guide-books will tell you when the
place was opened and when it was closed. The eye is ready to swear that
it is as old as Herculaneum and Pompeii. The tombs are small houses. It
is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall axe they and
so closely do they stand--a town shrivelled by fire, and scarred by
frost and siege. They must have been afraid of their friends rising up
before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of
masonry. Strong man, weak woman, or somebody’s “infant son aged fifteen
months”--it is all the same. For each the squat obelisk, the defaced
classic temple, the cellaret of chunam, or the candlestick of
brickwork--the heavy slab, the rust-eaten railings, the whopper-jawed
cherubs and the apoplectic angels. Men were rich in those days and could
afford to put a hundred cubic feet of masonry into the grave of even so
humble a person as “Jno. Clements, Captain of the Country Service,
1820.” When the “dearly beloved” had held rank answering to that of
Commissioner, the efforts are still more sumptuous and the verse....
Well, the following speaks for itself:
“Soft on thy tomb shall fond Remembrance shed
The warm yet unavailing tear,
And purple flowers that deck the honored dead
Shall strew the loved and honored bier.”
Failure to comply with the contract does not, let us hope, entail
forfeiture of the earnest-money; or the honored dead might be grieved.
The slab is out of his tomb, and leans foolishly against it; the
railings are rotted, and there are no more lasting ornaments than
blisters and stains, which are the work of the weather, and not the
result of the “warm yet unavailing tear.” The eyes that promised to shed
them have been closed any time these seventy years.
Let us go about and moralize cheaply on the tombstones, trailing the
robe of pious reflection up and down the pathways of the grave. Here is
a big and stately tomb sacred to “Lucia,” who died in 1776 A.D., aged
23. Here also be verses which an irreverent thumb can bring to light.
Thus they wrote, when their hearts were heavy in them, one hundred and
sixteen years ago:
“What needs the emblem, what the plaintive strain,
What all the arts that sculpture e’er expressed,
To tell the treasure that these walls contain?
Let those declare it most who knew her best.
“The tender pity she would oft display
Shall be with interest at her shrine returned,
Connubial love, connubial tears repay,
And Lucia loved shall still be Lucia mourned.
“Though closed the lips, though stopped the tuneful breath,
The silent, clay-cold monitress shall teach--
In all the alarming eloquence of death
With double pathos to the heart shall preach.
“Shall teach the virtuous maid, the faithful wife,
If young and fair, that young and fair was she,
Then close the useful lesson of her life,
And tell them what she is, they soon must be.”
That goes well, even after all these years, does it not? and seems to
bring Lucia very near, in spite of what the later generation is pleased
to call the stiltedness of the old-time verse.
Who will declare the merits of Lucia--dead in her spring before there
was even a _Hickey’s Gazette_ to chronicle the amusements of Calcutta,
and publish, with scurrilous asterisks, the _liaisons_ of heads of
departments? What pot-bellied East Indiaman brought the “virtuous maid”
up the river, and did Lucia “make her bargain,” as the cant of those
times went, on the first, second, or third day after her arrival? Or did
she, with the others of the batch, give a spinsters’ ball as a last
trial--following the custom of the country? No. She was a fair Kentish
maiden, sent out, at a cost of five hundred pounds, English money, under
the captain’s charge, to wed the man of her choice, and _he_ knew Clive
well, had had dealings with Omichand, and talked to men who had lived
through the terrible night in the Black Hole. He was a rich man, Lucia’s
battered tomb proves it, and he gave Lucia all that her heart could
wish. A green-painted boat to take the air in on the river of evenings.
Coffree slave-boys who could play on the French horn, and even a very
elegant, neat coach with a genteel rutlan roof ornamented with flowers
very highly finished, ten best polished plate glasses, ornamented with a
few elegant medallions enriched with mother-o’-pearl, that she might
take her drive on the course as befitted a factor’s wife. All these
things he gave her. And when the convoys came up the river, and the guns
thundered, and the servants of the Honorable the East India Company
drank to the king’s health, be sure that Lucia before all the other
ladies in the fort had her choice of the new stuffs from England and was
cordially hated in consequence. Tilly Kettle painted her picture a
little before she died, and the hot-blooded young writers did duel with
small swords in the fort ditch for the honor of piloting her through a
minuet at the Calcutta theatre or the Punch House. But Warren Hastings
danced with her instead, and the writers were confounded--every man of
them. She was a toast far up the river. And she walked in the evening on
the bastions of Fort-William, and said: “La! I protest!” It was there
that she exchanged congratulations with all her friends on the 20th of
October, when those who were alive gathered together to felicitate
themselves on having come through another hot season; and the men--even
the sober factor saw no wrong here--got most royally and Britishly drunk
on Madeira that had twice rounded the Cape. But Lucia fell sick, and the
doctor--he who went home after seven years with five lakhs and a half,
and a corner of this vast graveyard to his account--said that it was a
pukka or putrid fever, and the system required strengthening. So they
fed Lucia on hot curries, and mulled wine worked up with spirits and
fortified with spices, for nearly a week; at the end of which time she
closed her eyes on the weary, weary river and the fort forever, and a
gallant, with a turn for _belles lettres_, wept openly as men did then
and had no shame of it, and composed the verses above set, and thought
himself a neat hand at the pen--stap his vitals! But the factor was so
grieved that he could write nothing at all--could only spend his
money--and he counted his wealth by lakhs--on a sumptuous grave. A
little later on he took comfort, and when the next batch came out----
But this has nothing whatever to do with the story of Lucia, the
virtuous maid, the faithful wife. Her ghost went to Mrs. Westland’s
powder ball, and looked very beautiful.