A bazar had been opened in aid of a Cause. The philanthropic heart of
Calcutta, laid bare, discloses many Causes, and during the cold weather
their commercial hold upon the community is as briskly maintained as it
may be consistently with the modern doctrine of the liberty of the
subject. The purpose of this bazar was to bring the advantages of the
piano and feather-stitch and Marie Bashkirtseff to young native ladies
of rank. It had been for some time obvious that young native ladies of
rank were painfully behind the van of modern progress. It was known that
they were not in the habit of spending the golden Oriental hours in the
search for wisdom as the bee obtains honey from the flowers: they much
preferred sucking their own fingers, cloyed with sweetmeats from the
bazar. Yet a few of them had tasted emancipation. Their husbands allowed
them to show their faces to the world. Of one, who had been educated in
London, it was whispered that she wore stays, and read books in three
languages besides Sanscrit, and ate of the pig! These the memsahibs
fastened upon and infected with the idea of elevating their sisters by
annual appeals to the public based on fancy articles. Future generations
of Aryan lady-voters, hardly as yet visible in the effulgence of all
that is to come, will probably fail to understand that their privileges
were founded, towards the end of the nineteenth century, on an
antimacassar; but thus it will have been.
The wife of the Lieutenant-Governor had opened the bazar. She had done
it in black lace and jet, which became her exceedingly, with a pretty
little speech, which took due account of the piano and feather-stitch
and Marie Bashkirtseff under more impressive names. She had driven there
with Lady Scott. The way was very long and very dusty and very native,
which includes several other undesirable characteristics; and Lady Scott
had beguiled it with details of an operation she had insisted on
witnessing at the Dufferin Hospital for Women. Lady Scott declared that,
holding the position she did on the Board, she really felt the
responsibility of seeing that things were properly done, but that
henceforth the lady-doctor in charge should have her entire confidence.
“I only wonder,” said Mrs. Church, “that, holding the position you do on
the Board, you didn’t insist on performing the operation yourself”; and
her face was so grave that Lady Scott felt flattered and deprecated the
idea.
Then they had arrived and walked with circumstance through the little
desultory crowd of street natives up the strip of red cloth to the door,
and there been welcomed by three or four of the very most emancipated,
with two beautiful, flat, perfumed bouquets of pink-and-white roses and
many suffused smiles. And then the little speech, which gave Mrs. Gasper
of the High Court the most poignant grief, in that men, on account of
the unemancipated, were excluded from the occasion; she would simply
have given anything to have had her husband hear it. After which Mrs.
Church had gone from counter to counter, with her duty before her eyes.
She bought daintily, choosing Dacca muslins and false gods, brass
plaques from Persia and embroidered cloths from Kashmir. A dozen or two
of the unemancipated pressed softly upon her, chewing betel, and
appraising the value of her investments, and little Mrs. Gasper noted
them too from the other side of the room. Lady Scott was most kind in
showing dear Mrs. Church desirable purchases, and made, herself,
conspicuously more than the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor. On every
hand a native lady said, “Buy something!” with an accent less expressive
of entreaty than of resentful expectation. One of the emancipated went
behind a door and made up the total of Mrs. Church’s expenditure. She
came out again looking discontented: Lady Spence the year before had
spent half as much again.
Mrs. Church felt as she drove away that she had left behind her an
injury which might properly find redress under a Regulation.
She was alone, Lady Scott having to go on to a meeting of the “Board”
with Mrs. Gasper. The disc of pink-and-white roses rolled about with the
easy motion of the barouche, on the opposite seat. It was only half-past
four, and the sun was still making strong lines with the tawdry
flat-roofed yellow shops that huddled along the crowded interminable
streets. She looked out and saw a hundred gold-bellied wasps hovering
over a tray of glistening sweetmeats. Next door a woman with her red
cloth pulled over her head, and her naked brown baby on her hip, paused
and bought a measure of parched corn from a bunnia, who lolled among his
grain heaps a fat invitation to hunger. Then came the square dark hole
of Abdul Rahman, where he sat in his spectacles and sewed, with his long
lean legs crossed in front of him, and half a dozen red-beaked
love-birds in a wicker cage to keep him company. And then the
establishment of Saddanath Mookerjee, announcing in a dazzling fringe of
black letters:
―――――――――――――――
PAINS FEVERANDISEASES CURED
――――――――
WHILE YOU WAIT
She looked at it all as she rolled by with a little tender smile of
reconnaissance. The old fascination never failed her; the people and
their doings never became common facts. Nevertheless she was very tired.
The crowd seethed along in the full glare of the afternoon, hawking,
disputing, gesticulating. The burden of their talk—the naked coolies,
the shrill-jabbering women with loads of bricks upon their heads, the
sleek baboos in those European shirts the nether hem of which no canon
of propriety has ever taught them to confine—the burden of their talk
reached her where she sat, and it was all of _paisa_[A] and _rupia_, the
eternal dominant note of the bazar. She closed her eyes and tried to put
herself into relation with a life bounded by the rim of a copper coin.
She was certainly very tired. When she looked again a woman stooped over
one of the city standpipes and made a cup with her hand and gave her
little son to drink. He was a very beautiful little son, with a string
of blue beads round his neck and a silver anklet on each of his fat
brown legs, and as he caught her hand with his baby fingers the mother
smiled over him in her pride.
-----
Footnote A:
Halfpence.
-----
Judith Church suddenly leaned back among her cushions very close to
tears. “It would have been better,” she said to herself—“so much
better,” as she opened her eyes widely and tried to think about
something else. There was her weekly dinner-party of forty that night,
and she was to go down with the Bishop. Oh, well! that was better than
Sir Peter Bloomsbury. She hoped Captain Thrush had not forgotten to ask
some people who could sing—and _not_ Miss Nellie Vansittart. She smiled
a little as she thought how Captain Thrush had made Nellie Vansittart’s
pretty voice an excuse for asking her and her people twice already this
month. She must see that Captain Thrush was not on duty the afternoon of
Mrs. Vansittart’s _musicale_. She felt indulgent towards Captain Thrush
and Nellie Vansittart; she give that young lady plenary absolution for
the monopoly of her lieutenant on the Belvedere Thursdays; she thought
of them by their Christian names. Then to-morrow—to-morrow she opened
the _café chantant_ for the Sailors’ Home, and they dined at the Fort
with the General. On Wednesday there was the Eurasian Female Orphans’
prize-giving, and the dance on board the _Boetia_. On Friday a “Lady
Dufferin” meeting—or was it the Dhurrumtollah Self-Help Society, or the
Sisters’ Mission?—she must look it up in her book. And, sandwiched in
somewhere, she knew there was a German bacteriologist and a lecture on
astronomy. She put up both her slender hands in her black gloves and
yawned; remembering at the same time that it was ten days since she had
seen Lewis Ancram. Her responsibilities, when he mocked at them with
her, seemed light and amusing. He gave her strength and stimulus: she
was very frank with herself in confessing how much she depended upon
him.
The carriage drew up on one side of the stately width of Chowringhee.
That is putting it foolishly; for Chowringhee has only one side to draw
up at—the other is a footpath bordering the great green Maidan, which
stretches on across to the river’s edge, and is fringed with masts from
Portsmouth and Halifax and Ispahan. When the sun goes down behind
them——But the sun had not gone down when Mrs. Church got out of her
carriage and went up the steps of the School of Art: it was still
burnishing the red bricks of that somewhat insignificant building, and
lying in yellow sheets over the vast stucco bulk of the Indian Museum on
one side, and playing among the tree-tops in the garden of the
Commissioner of Police on the other. Anglo-Indian aspirations, in their
wholly subordinate, artistic form, were gathered together in an
exhibition here, and here John Church, who was inspecting a gaol at the
other end of Calcutta, had promised to meet his wife at five o’clock.
The Lieutenant-Governor had been looking forward to this: it was so
seldom, he said, that he found an opportunity of combining a duty and a
pleasure. Judith Church remembered other Art Exhibitions she had seen in
India, and thought that one category was enough.
At the farther end of the room a native gentleman stood transfixed with
admiration before a portrait of himself by his own son. Two or three
ladies with catalogues darted hurriedly, like humming-birds, from
water-colour to water-colour. A cadaverous planter from the Terai, who
turned out sixty thousand pounds of good tea and six yards of bad
pictures annually, talked with conviction to an assenting broker with
his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, about the points of his
“Sunset View of Kinchinjunga,” that hung among the oils on the other
wall. There was no one else in the room but Mr. Lewis Ancram, who wore a
straw hat and an air of non-expectancy, and looked a sophisticated
twenty-five.
For a moment, although John Church was the soul of punctuality, it did
not seem remarkable to Mrs. Church that her husband had failed to turn
up. Ancram had begun to explain, indeed, before it occurred to her to
ask; and this, when she remembered it, brought a delicate flush to her
cheeks which stayed there, and suggested to the Chief Secretary the
pleasant recollection of a certain dewy little translucent flower that
grew among the Himalayan mosses very high up.
“It was a matter His Honour thought really required looking into—clear
evidence, you know, that the cholera was actually being communicated
inside the gaol—and when I offered to bring his apologies on to you I
honestly believe he was delighted to secure another hour of
investigation.”
“John works atrociously hard,” she replied; and when he weighed this
afterward, as he had begun to weigh the things she said, he found in it
appreciably more concern for John’s regrettable habit of working
atrociously hard than vexation at his failure to keep their engagement.
They walked about for five minutes and looked at the aspirations. Ancram
remembered Rhoda Daye’s hard little sayings on the opening day, and
reflected that some women could laugh with a difference. Mrs. Church did
it with greatest freedom, he noticed, at the prize pictures. For the
others she had compunction, and she regarded the “Sunset View of
Kinchinjunga” with a smile that she plainly atoned for by an inward
tear. “Don’t!” she said, looking round the walls, as he invested that
peak with the character of a strawberry ice. “It means all the bloom of
their lives, poor things. At all events it’s ideality, it isn’t——”
“Pig-sticking!”
“Yes,” she said softly. “If I knew what in the world to do with it, I
would buy that ‘Kinchin.’ But its ultimate disposal does present
difficulties.”
“I don’t think you would have any right to do that, you know. You
couldn’t be so dishonest with the artist. Who would sell the work of his
hand to be burned!”
He was successful in provoking her appreciation. “You are quite right,”
she said. “The patronage of my pity! You always see!”
“I _have_ bought a picture,” Ancram went on, “by a fellow named Martin,
who seems to have sent it out from England. It’s nothing great, but I
thought it was a pity to let it go back. That narrow one, nearest to the
corner.”
“It is good enough to escape getting a prize,” she laughed. “Yes, I like
it rather—a good deal—very much indeed. I wish I were a critic and could
tell you why. It will be a pleasure to you; it is so green and cool and
still.”
Mr. Ancram’s purchase was of the type that is growing common enough at
the May exhibitions—a bit of English landscape on a dull day towards
evening, fields and a bank with trees on it, a pool with water-weeds in
it, the sky crowding down behind and standing out in front in the quiet
water. Perhaps it lacked imagination—there was no young woman leaning
out of the canoe to gather water-lilies—but it had been painted with a
good deal of knowledge.
Mr. James Springgrove at the moment was talking about it to another
gentleman. Mr. Springgrove was one of Calcutta’s humourists. He was also
a member of the Board of Revenue; and for these reasons, combined with
his subscription, it was originally presumed that Mr. Springgrove
understood Art. People generally thought he did, because he was a
Director and a member of the Hanging Committee, but this was a mistake.
Mr. Springgrove brought his head as nearly as possible into a line with
the other gentleman’s head, from which had issued, in weak commendation,
the statement that No. 223 reminded it of home.
[Illustration: There was a moment’s pause.]
“If you asked what it reminded _me_ of,” said Mr. Springgrove, clapping
the other on the back, “I should say verdigris, sir—verdigris.” Mrs.
Church and the Honourable Mr. Lewis Ancram looked into each other’s eyes
and smiled as long as there was any excuse for smiling.
“I am glad you are not a critic,” he said. She was verging toward the
door. “What are you going to do now?”
“Afterward—we meant to drive to Hastings House. John thought there would
be time. It is quite near Belvedere, you know. But——And I shall not have
another free afternoon for a fortnight.”
They went out in silence, past the baboo who sat behind a table at the
receipt of entrance money, and down the steps. The syce opened the
carriage door, and Mrs. Church got in. There was a moment’s pause, while
the man looked questioningly at Ancram, still holding open the door.
“If he invites himself,” said Judith inwardly, with the intention of
self-discipline; and the rest was hope.
“Is there any reason——?” he asked, with his foot on the step; and it was
quite unnecessary that he should add “against my coming?”
“No—there is no reason.” Then she added, with a visible effort to make
it the commonplace thing it was not, “Then you will drive out with me,
and I shall see the place after all? How nice!”
They rolled out into the gold-and-green afternoon life of the Maidan,
along wide pipal-shadowed roads, across a bridge, through a lane or two
where the pariahs barked after the carriage and the people about the
huts stared, shading their eyes. There seemed very little to say. They
thought themselves under the spell of the pleasantness of it—the lifting
of the burden and the heat of the day, the little wind that shook the
fronds of the date palms and stole about bringing odours from where the
people were cooking, the unyoked oxen, the hoarse home-going talk of the
crows that flew city-ward against the yellow sky with a purple light on
their wings.
“Let the carriage stay here,” Judith said, as they stopped beside a
dilapidated barred gate. “I want to walk to the house.”
A salaaming creature in a _dhoty_ hurried out of a clump of bamboos in
the corner and flung open the gate. It seemed to close again upon the
world. They were in an undulating waste that had once been a stately
pleasure-ground, and it had a visible soul that lived upon its memories
and was content in its abandonment. It was so still that the great teak
leaves, twisted and discoloured and full of holes like battered bronze,
dropping singly and slowly through the mellow air, fell at their feet
with little rustling cracks.
“What a perfection of silence!” Judith exclaimed softly; and then some
vague perception impelled her to talk of other things—of her
dinner-party and Nellie Vansittart.
Ancram looked on, as it were, at her conversation for a moment or two
with his charming smile. Then, “Oh, dear lady,” he broke in, “let them
go—those people. They are the vulgar considerations of the time which
has been—which will be again. But this is a pause—made for _us_.”
She looked down at the rusty teak-leaves, and he almost told her, as he
knocked them aside, how poetic a shadow clung round her eyelids. The
curve of the drive brought them to the old stucco mansion, dreaming
quietly and open-eyed over its great square porch of the Calcutta of
Nuncomar and Philip Francis.
“It broods, doesn’t it?” said Judith Church, standing under the yellow
honeysuckle of the porch. “Don’t you wish you could see the ghost!”
The gatekeeper reappeared, and stood offering them each a rose.
“This gentleman,” replied Ancram, “will know all about the ghost. He
probably makes his living out of Warren Hastings, in the tourist season.
Without doubt, he says, there is a _bhut_, a very terrible _bhut_, which
lives in the room directly over our heads and wears iron boots. Shall we
go and look for it?”
Half way up the stairs Ancram turned and saw the gatekeeper following
them. “You have leave to go,” he said in Hindustani.
At the top he turned again, and found the man still salaaming at their
heels. “_Jao!_” he shouted, with a threatening movement, and the native
fled.
“It is preposterous,” he said apologetically to Mrs. Church, “that one
should be dogged everywhere by these people.”
They explored the echoing rooms, and looked down the well of the ruined
staircase, and decided that no ghost with the shadow of a title to the
property could let such desirable premises go unhaunted. They were in
absurdly good spirits. They had not been alone together for a fortnight.
The sky was all red in the west as they stepped out upon the wide flat
roof, and the warm light that was left seemed to hang in mid-air. The
spires and domes of Calcutta lay under a sulphur-coloured haze, and the
palms on the horizon stood in filmy clouds. The beautiful tropical day
was going out.
“We must go in ten minutes,” said Judith, sitting down on the low mossy
parapet.
“Back into the world.” He reflected hastily and decided. Up to this time
Rhoda Daye had been a conventionality between them. He had a sudden
desire to make her the subject of a confidence—to explain, perhaps to
discuss, anyhow to explain.
“Tell me, my friend,” he said, making a pattern on the lichen of the
roof with his stick, “what do you think of my engagement?”
She looked up startled. It was as if the question had sprung at her. She
too felt the need of a temporary occupation, and fell upon her rose.
“You had my congratulations a long time ago,” she said, carefully
shredding each petal into three.
“Don’t!” he exclaimed impatiently: “I’m serious!”
“Well, then—it is not a fair thing that you are asking me. I don’t know
Miss Daye. I never shall know her. To me she is a little marble image
with a very pretty polish.”
“And to me also,” he repeated, seizing her words: “she is a little
marble image with a very pretty polish.” He put an unconscious demand
for commiseration into his tone. Doubtless he did not mean to go so far,
but his inflection added, “And I’ve got to marry her!”
“To you—to you!” She plucked aimlessly at her rose, and searched vainly
for something which would improve the look of his situation. But the
rush of this confidence had torn up commonplaces by the roots. She felt
it beating somewhere about her heart; and her concern, for the moment,
in hearing of his misfortune, was for herself.
“The ironical part of it is,” he went on, very pale with the effort of
his candour, “that I was blindly certain of finding her sympathetic. You
know what one means by that in a woman. I wanted it, just then. I seemed
to have arrived at a crisis of wanting it. I made ludicrously sure of
it. If you had been here,” he added with conviction, “it would never
have happened.”
She opened her lips to say “Then I wish I had been here,” but the words
he heard were, “People tell me she is very clever.”
“Oh,” he said bitterly, “she has the qualities of her defects, no doubt.
But she isn’t a woman—she’s an intelligence. Conceive, I beg of you, the
prospect of passing one’s life in conjugal relations with an
intelligence!”
Judith assured herself vaguely that this brutality of language had its
excuse. She could have told him very fluently that he ought not to marry
Rhoda Daye under any circumstances, but something made it impossible
that she should say anything of the sort. She strove with the instinct
for a moment, and then, as it overthrew her, she looked about her
shivering. The evening chill of December had crept in and up from the
marshes; one or two street lamps twinkled out in the direction of the
city; light white levels of mist had begun to spread themselves among
the trees in the garden below them.
“We must go,” she said, rising hurriedly: “how suddenly it has grown
cold!” And as she passed before him into the empty house he saw that her
face was so drawn that even he could scarcely find it beautiful.