IT is time, perhaps, to state a few facts about Mr. George William Browne in addition to those which are in the reader’s possession already. I have mentioned, I think, that he played tennis badly and was fond of privacy; it runs in my mind also that I have in some way conveyed to you that he is a rather short and thickly built young gentleman, with brown eyes and a dark moustache, and a sallow complexion and a broad smile. Helen declares him handsome, and I never considered him unpleasant-looking, but it is undoubtedly the case that he is very like other young men in Calcutta, also clerks in tea and indigo houses on five hundred rupees a month, with the expectation of partnership whenever retirement or fever shall remove a head of the firm. His tastes were common to Calcutta young men also. He liked golf and polo, and regretted that his pony was not up to the paper-chases; in literature he preferred Clark Russell and the Pioneer, with Lord Lytton for serious moments. He complied with the customs of the Cathedral to the extent of a silk hat and a pair of gloves in the cold weather, and usually attended one service every Sunday, invariably contributing eight annas to the offertory. His political creed was simple. He believed in India for the Anglo-Indians, and despised the teaching and hated the influence, with sturdy reasons, of Exeter Hall. Any views that he had of real importance mainly concerned the propagation of tea in distant markets; but his spare ideas had a crispness that gave them value in a society inclined to be intellectually limp, and his nature was sufficiently cheerful and sympathetic to make him popular, in connection with the fact that he was undeniably a good fellow.

When all this has been said, I fear that Mr. Browne will not appear in these pages with the equipment proper for a young man of whom anything is expected in the nature of modern fiction. Perhaps this, however, is not so important as it looks, which will be more evident when we reflect that in marrying Miss Helen Frances Peachey Mr. Browne performed considerably the greater part of what will be required of him in this history.

That Young Browne’s tulub^[10] was only five hundred rupees a month is, however, a fact of serious importance both to the Brownes and to the readers of these chapters. It must be borne in mind, even as the Brownes bore it in mind, to the proper understanding of the unpretending matters herein referred to. There are parts of the world in which this amount translated into the local currency, would make a plutocrat of its recipient. Even in Calcutta, in the olden golden time when the rupee was worth two invariable shillings and the stockbroker waxed not so fat as now, there was a sweet reasonableness about an income of five hundred that does not exist to-day. There is no doubt, for one thing, that at that time it did not cost so much to live in a house. At the present time, and in view of the degeneracy of the coin, that luxury is not so easy to compass as it used to be.

The Brownes would live in a house, however. Young Browne, when the matter was up for discussion, stated with some vehemence his objection to the Calcutta system of private hostelries. Helen said conclusively that if they had no other reason for housekeeping, there were those lovely dessert knives and forks from Aunt Plovtree, and all the other silver things from people, to say nothing of the complete supply of house and table linen, ready marked with an artistically intertwined “HB.” In the face of this, to use other people’s cutlery and table napkins would be foolish extravagance—didn’t George think so? George thought so, very decidedly, that was quite a strong point. It must be a whole house, too, and not a flat; there was no autonomy in a flat and no proprietorship of the compound; moreover, you were always meeting the other people on the stairs. By all means a house to themselves—“if possible,” added young Browne.

“About what rent does one pay for a house?” Helen inquired.

“You get a fairly good one for three hundred a month, on lease. A visiting Rajah down for the cold weather to try for a ‘C. I. E.’^[11] sometimes pays a thousand.”

“But we,” responded Mrs. Browne blankly, “are not Rajahs, dear!”

“No, thank the Lord,” said Mr. Browne, with what struck his wife as unnecessary piety; “and we’ll make ourselves jolly comfortable notwithstanding. Nellums—you’ll see!” George Browne was always over-optimistic. If those two young people had come to me—but it goes without saying that they went to nobody.

Helen desired a garden, a tennis-court, and, if possible, a cocoanut palm-tree in the garden. She would prefer a yellow house to a pink one, in view of the fact that the houses were all yellow or pink, and she would like a few pillars in front of it—pillars seemed so common an architectural incident in Calcutta that she thought they must be cheap. Mr. Browne particularly wanted air in the house, “a good south veranda,” and a domicile well raised above its native Bengal. Mr. Browne was strong upon locality and drains, and the non-proximity of jungle and bushes. Helen bowed to his superior knowledge, but secretly longed that a garden with a cocoanut palm in it might be found in a neighbourhood not insanitary. And so they fared forth daily in a ticca-gharry to inspect desirable addresses.

They inspected many. There was no unnecessary formality about permission to look, no “Enquire of Messrs. So and So,” no big key to procure from anywhere. The ticca-gharry^[12] stopped, and they alighted. If the high wooden gates were closed, Mr. Browne beat upon them lustily with his stick, shouting, “Qui hai!”^[13] in tones of severe authority. Then, usually from a small and dingy domicile near the gate, issued a figure hastily, a lean, brown figure, in a dirty dhoty, that salaamed perfunctorily, and stood before them waiting.

“Iska ghur kali hai?”^[14] Mr. Browne would inquire and the figure would answer, “Ha!”

Whereat, without further parley, the Brownes would enter the place and begin to express their minds about it. Generally it invited criticism. If the previous sahib had been but three weeks departed the place had an overgrown look, the bushes were unkempt, the grass ragged; there were cracks in the mortar and stains on the walls; within it smelt of desolation. Helen investigated daintily; it looked, she said, so very “snaky.” The general features of one house were very like the general features of another; that is to say, their disadvantages were fairly equal. They all had jungly compounds, they were all more or less tumble-down, all in fashionable Eurasian neighbourhoods, and all at least fifty rupees a month more than the Brownes could afford to pay. Helen found some Æsthetic charm, and young Browne some objectionable odour in every one of them. She, one might say, used nothing but her eyes, he nothing but his nose. With regard to the attractions of one address in particular they came almost to a difference of opinion. It was a bungalow, and it sat down flatly in a luxuriant tangle of beaumontia, and bougainvilliers, and trailing columbine. It had a veranda all roundabout, and the veranda was a bower of creeping things. Not only cocoanut palms, but date palms, and areca palms, and toddy palms grew in the corners of the compound with hibiscus bushes all in crimson flower along the wall, a banyan-tree in the middle, and two luxuriant peepuls, one on each side, almost meeting over the roof of the house. The walls and pillars of the bungalow were in delicate tones of grey and green; close behind it were all the picturesque features of a native bustee, and immediately in front a lovely reflection of the sky lay in a mossy tank in places where the water was deep enough. The rent was moderate: it had been empty a long time.

“George!” Helen exclaimed, “it has been waiting for us.”

George demurred. “It’s far and away the worst place we’ve seen,” he remarked.

“I think it’s perfectly sweet,” his wife maintained.

“If we took it,” he returned implacably, “within three months two funerals would occur in this neighbourhood: one would be yours and one would be mine. I don’t speak of the mortality among the servants. I’ll just ask the durwan^[15] how many sahibs have died here lately. And he asked the durwan in his own tongue.”

“He says three in the last family, and it was the ‘carab bimar,’ which is the bad sickness or the cholera, my dear. What a fool of a durwan to leave in charge of an empty house! If you still think you’d like to have it, Helen, we can inquire——”

“Oh, no!” Helen cried. “Let us go away at once!”

“I was going to say—at the undertaker’s for additional accommodation. But perhaps we had better not take it. Let’s try for something clean.”

I consider that the Brownes were very lucky in the end. They found a house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had already survived for several years, at a rent they thought they could afford by careful managing. It turned its face aside from the street and looked towards the south; sitting on its roof, they could see far across those many-laned jungle suburbs where the office baboo^[16] lives, and whither the sahibs go only on horseback. The palm fronds waved thick there, fringing the red sky duskily when the sun went down. The compound was neglected, but had sanitary possibilities; there was enough grass for a tennis-court and enough space for a garden. A low line of godowns ran round two sides of it, where the servants might live and the pony. Palms and plantains grew in the corners. It was very tropical, and it was inclosed by a wall coloured to match the house, in the cracks of which sprouted every green thing. The house itself was pink, which Helen declared her one disappointment: she preferred the yellow ones so much. Inside it was chiefly light green, stencilled in yellow by way of dadoes, which must have been trying, though Helen never admitted it. There were other peculiarities. The rafters curved downwards and the floor sloped toward the middle and in various other directions. In several places trailing decorations in mud had been arranged by white ants. None of the doors had locks or bolts; they all opened inwards and were fastened from the inside with movable bars. The outermost room had twelve French windows; the innermost room had no windows and was quite dark when its doors were shut. Irregular holes appeared at intervals over the wall for the accommodation of punkah-ropes, each tenant having fancied a different seat outside for his punkah-wallah. Two or three small apartments upstairs in the rear of the house had corners divided off by partitions about six inches high. These were bath-rooms, arranged on the simple principle of upsetting the bath-tub on the floor and letting the water run out of a hole in the wall inside the partition. Most of the windows had glass in them, but not all, and some were protected by iron bars, the domestic conditions inside having been originally Aryan and jealous.

I do not wish it to be supposed from these details, that the Brownes were subjected to exceptional hardships, or took up housekeeping under particularly obscure circumstances. On the contrary, so few people with their income in Calcutta could afford to live in houses at all, that young Browne had his name put up on the gatepost with considerable pride and circumstance. “George W. Browne,” in white letters on a black ground, in the middle of an oblong wooden tablet, according to the custom of the place. The fact being that the characteristics of the Brownes’ house are common, in greater or less degree, to every house in Calcutta. I venture to say that even the tub of a Member of Council, on five thousand rupees a month, is discharged through a hole in the wall.

Perhaps their landlord was more or less unique. The landlord common to Calcutta is a prosperous Jew, a brocaded Rajah, at least an unctuous baboo fattened upon dhol-bat and chutney. The Brownes’ landlord wore a pair of dirty white trousers and a lean and hungry look, his upper parts being clad in yards of soiled cotton, in which he also muffled up his head. He followed them about the place in silent humility—they took him for a coolie, and young Browne treated his statements with brevity, turning a broad British back upon him. I don’t think this enhanced the rent; I fancy it would have been equally extortionate in any case. But it was only when Mr. Browne asked where the landlord was to be found that he proudly disclosed his identity, with apologetic reference, however, to the state of his attire. He said that his house had been vacant for many months, and that he had just spent a thousand rupees in repairing it. His prospective tenant accepted the first of these statements, and received the second with open laughter. They closed the bargain, however, and as the landlord occupied an adjoining bustee, and was frequently to be met in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Browne was for some time uncertain as to whether she ought to bow to him or not.