A WEEK later Helen took over the accounts. In the meantime she had learned to count rupees and annas, pi and pice, also a few words of that tongue in which orders are given in Calcutta. She arose on the seventh morning of her tenure of office rigidly determined that the office should no longer be a sinecure. She would drop curiosity and pleasure, and assume discipline, righteousness and understanding. She would make a stand. She would deal justly, but she would make a stand. It would be after George had gone to office. When he came home, tired with tea affairs, he would not be compelled to rack his brain further with the day’s marketing. He would see that the lady he had made Mrs. Browne was capable of more than driving about in a tum-tum and writing enthusiastic letters home about the beauties of Calcutta.

George went to office. The kitmutgar softly removed the blue and white breakfast things. Outside the door, in the “bottle khana,” the mussalchi, squatting, washed them in an earthen bowl with a mop-stick. It occurred to Helen that she might as well begin by going to look at the mussalchi, and she did. She looked at him with a somewhat severe expression, thereby causing him dismay and terror. She walked all round the mussalchi, but found nothing about him to criticise. “But, probably,” thought she, as she went back to the dining-room, “my looking at him had its moral effect.” Then she sent for the cook.

The cook arrived with an expression of deep solemnity, tempered by all the amiable qualities you can think of. He held in his hand an extremely dirty piece of paper, covered with strange characters in Nagri—how little anybody would have thought, when they were designed in the dawn of the world, that they would ever be used to indicate the items of an Englishman’s dinner! The cook put a pair of spectacles on to read them, which completed the anomaly, and made him look more benevolent than ever.

“Well, bawarchi,” said Helen, ready with pencil and note-book, “account hai?”

“Gee-ha, hai!” responded he. Then after a respectful pause, “S’in-beef,” he said, “char anna.”

“Shin beef,” repeated Helen, with satisfaction, “four annas. Yes?”

“Fiss—che^[34] anna. Bress mutton—egrupee, che anna. Eggis—satrah—aht^[35] anna.”

“Seventeen eggs, bawarchi? When did we eat seventeen eggs? How did we eat seventeen eggs yesterday?”

Mrs. Browne spoke impulsively, in English, but Kali Bagh seemed to understand, and with an unruffled front proceeded to account circumstantially for every egg. His mistress was helpless. But, “to-morrow,” thought she earnestly, “I will see whether he puts four in the soup!”

The cook went on to state that since yesterday the Browne family had consumed three seers of potatoes—six pounds—at two annas a seer, which would be six annas. “And I don’t believe that, either,” mentally ejaculated Mrs. Browne, but Kali Bagh continued without flinching. He chronicled salt, pepper, sauce, sugar, he mentioned rice, dhal, “garden-isspice,” “guava isstew,” “k’rats,”^[36] “kiss-miss,”^[37] “maida,”^[38] and enough “mukkan”^[39] to have supplied a charity-school. Helen was amazed to find the number of culinary articles which undeniably might have been used in the course of twenty-four hours—she did not consider the long calm evening that went to meditation over the list. When it was finished she found that the day’s expenses in food had been exactly eight rupees six annas, or about eleven shillings. Helen had had a thrifty education, and she knew this was absurd. She turned to the flagrant eggs and to the unblushing potatoes, and she made a calculation.

“Bawarchi!” said she, “Potatoes—four annas. Eggs—five annas, daga.”^[40]

“Bahut atcha!” said the cook, without remonstrance. He still had twenty-five per cent of profit.

Helen observed, and was encouraged. She summoned up her sternest look, and drew her pencil through the total. “Eight rupees,” she remarked with simplicity, “daga na. Five rupees daga,” and she closed the book.

Kali Bagh looked at her with an expression of understanding, mingled with disappointment. He did not expect all he asked, but he expected more than he got. As it was, his profit amounted only to two rupees, not much for a poor man with a family. But in after days, when his memsahib grew in general sagacity and particular knowledge of the bazar, Kali Bagh had reason to look back regretfully to those two rupees as to the brief passing of a golden age.

“I will now go down,” said Mrs. Browne with enthusiasm, “and look at his pots.”

The compound, as she crossed it, was full of the eternal sunlight of India, the gay shrill gossip of the mynas, the hoarse ejaculations of the crows. A flashy little green parrot flew out of a hibiscus bush by the wall in full crimson flower; he belonged to the jungle. But a pair of grey pigeons cooed to each other over the building of their nest in the cornice of a pillar of the Brownes’ upper veranda. They had come to stay, and they spoke of the advantages of co-operative housekeeping with another young couple like themselves, knowing it to be on a safe and permanent basis. The garden was all freshly scratched and tidy; there was a pleasant smell of earth; the mallie, under a pipal tree, gathered up its broad dry fallen leaves to cook his rice with. It was a graphic bit of economy, so pleasantly close to nature that its poetry was plain. “We are the only people who are extravagant in India,” thought Helen, as she regarded the mallie, and in this reflection I venture to say that she was quite correct.

The door of the bawarchi khana^[41] was open—it was never shut. I am not sure, indeed, that there was a door. There were certainly no windows. It is possible that the bawarchi khana was seven feet square, and its mistress was just able to stand up straight in it with a few inches to spare. It contained a shelf, a table, and a stove. When Kali Bagh sat down he used his heels. The shelf and the table were full of the oil and condiments dear to the heart of every bawarchi. The stove was an erection like a tenement house, built with what was left over from the walls, and artistically coloured pink to be like them. It contained various hollows on the top, in one or two of which charcoal was glowing—beyond this I cannot explain its construction to be plain to understandings accustomed to the kitchen ranges of Christianity and civilisation. But nothing ever went wrong with Kali Bagh’s stove, the boiler never leaked, the hot water pipes never burst, the oven never required relining, the dampers never had to be re-regulated. He was its presiding genius, he worked it with a palm leaf fan, and nothing would induce him to look at a modern improvement. Kali Bagh was a conservative institution himself, his recipes were an heritage, he was the living representative of an immemorial dustur.^[42] Why should Kali Bagh afflict himself with the ways of the memsahib!

The bawarchi khana had another door, opening into a rather smaller apartment, otherwise lightless and airless, which contained Kali Bagh’s wardrobe and bed. The wardrobe was elementary and hung upon a single peg, the bed consisted of four short legs and a piece of matting. Kali Bagh had reposed himself on it, and was already snoring, when Mrs. Browne came in. He had divested himself of his chuddar and his spectacles, and looked less of a philosopher and more of an Aryan. Mrs. Browne made a rude clatter among the pans, which brought him to a sense of her disturbing presence. Presently she observed him standing behind her, looking anxious. His mistress sniffed about intrepidly. She lifted saucepan lids and discovered within remains of concoctions three days old; she found the day’s milk in an erstwhile kerosene tin; she lifted a kettle and intruded upon the privacy of a large family of cockroaches, any one of them as big as a five-shilling piece. Kali Bagh would never have disturbed them. She found messes and mixtures and herbs and spices and sauces which she did not understand and could not approve. The day’s marketing lay in a flat basket under the table. Helen drew it forth and discovered a live pigeon indiscriminately near the mutton with its wings twisted around one another at the joint, while from beneath a dÉbris of potatoes, beans and cauliflower, came a feeble and plaintive “Quack!”

“What is this?” said Mrs. Browne with paler and sterner criticism, looking into a pot that was bubbling on the fire.

“Chaul hai, memsahib! Hamara khana!”^[43]

“Your dinner, bawarchi! All that rice?” And, indeed, therein was no justification for Kali Bagh. It was not only his dinner, but the dinner of the sweeper and of the syce and of the mussalchi, to be supplied to them a trifle below current market rates, and Mrs. Browne had paid for it all that morning. Helen found herself confronted with her little domestic corner of the great problem of India—the natives’ “way.” But she had no language with which to circumvent it or remonstrate with it. She could only decide that Kali Bagh was an eminently proper subject for discipline, and resolve to tell George, which was not much of an expedient. It is exactly what we all do in India, however, under the circumstances. We tell our superior officers, until at last the Queen Empress herself is told; and the Queen Empress is quite as incapable of further procedure as Mrs. Browne; indeed, much more so, for she is compelled to listen to the voice of her parliamentary wrangling-machine upon the matter, which obeys the turning of a handle, and is a very fine piece of mechanism indeed, but not absolutely reliable when it delivers ready-made opinions upon Aryan problems. At least I am quite sure that is my husband’s idea, and I have often heard young Browne say the same thing.

There was a scattering to right and left when Helen reappeared in the compound. Her domestics were not dressed to receive her, and they ran this way and that, noiselessly like cockroaches to their respective holes. There seemed to be a great many of them, more by at least half a dozen than were properly accredited to the house; and Helen was afterwards informed that they were the bhai^[44] of the other servants, representing a fraction of the great unemployed of Asia, who came daily for fraternal gossip in the sun and any patronage that might be going. They were a nuisance, these bhai, and were soon sternly put down by the arm of the law and the edict of the sahib, who enacted that no strange native should be allowed to enter the compound without a chit. “It’s the only way to convince them,” said he, “that the Maidan is the best place for public meetings.”

The quarters of the syce and the pony were the only ones that invited further inspection. The same roof sheltered both of these creatures of service, a thatched one; but between them a primitive partition went half way up. On one side of this the pony was tethered and enjoyed the luxuries of his dependence, on the other the syce lived in freedom, but did not fare so well. The pony’s expenses were quite five times as heavy. His food cost more, his clothes cost more, his medical attendance cost more, to say nothing of his requiring a valet. He was much the more valuable animal of the two, though the other is popularly believed in England to have a soul. His wants were even more elaborately supplied than the syce’s—he had a trough to feed from, and a pail to drink out of, a fresh bed every night, a box for his grain, and a curry-comb for his skin; while the syce’s domestic arrangements consisted of an earthenware pot, a wooden stick, and a rickety charpoy. When he was cold he borrowed the pony’s blanket, and I never heard of any toilet articles in connection with him. The accommodation was not equally divided between him and the pony, either. The pony had at least twice as much, and it was in better repair.

The pony looked much askance at Helen. He was accustomed only to the race of his dark-skinned servitor. The sahib with his white face and strange talk he associated with the whip and being made to pull an objectionable construction upon wheels from which he could not get away; but a memsahib might be something of inconceivable terror—her petticoats looked like it. Therefore the pony withdrew himself into a remote corner of his stable, where he stood looking ineffably silly, and declined to be seduced by split pieces of sugar-cane or wheedling words.

“Gorah atcha hai?”^[45] asked Helen, and was assured that he was very “atcha,” that his grain he ate, his grass he ate, his water he ate, and “cubbi kooch na bolta——” “he never said anything whatever,” which was the final proof of his flourishing condition.

It was getting a little discouraging, but Helen thought that before retreating she might at least inspect the bearer’s cow, a cow being a gentle domestic animal, of uniform habits, all the world over. One’s own cow is a thorn in the flesh and a source of ruin, in India. She declines to give milk, except to the outside world at so much a seer,^[46] she devours abnormal quantities of food, she is neglected and becomes depraved, being nobody’s particular business. But it is impossible to draw lacteal supplies from an unknown source in India. It is paying a large price for cholera bacilli, which is absurd, since one can get them almost anywhere for nothing. To say nothing of the depravity of the milk-wallah,^[47] who strains his commodity through his dhoty, and replenishes his cans from the first stagnant tank he comes to. The wise and advisable thing is to permit the bearer, as a gracious favour, to keep a cow on the premises and to supply the family at current rates. It is a source of income to him, and of confidence to you, while the cow does her whole duty in that clean and comfortable state whereto she is called. The bearer, too, is honoured and dignified by the possession of the sacred animal. He performs every office for her himself, though he would scorn to bring a pail of water to a horse, and he is happy to live in the odour of her sanctity. Helen discovered the cow of their establishment tied with her calf outside the best “go-down” in the compound—the largest and cleanest—which she occupied at night. The bearer himself had not nearly such good quarters, and this was of his own dispensation. She wore a string of blue beads around her horns, and munched contentedly at a large illegal breakfast of straw which had been bought and paid for to supply the pony’s bed.

“Poor cooey!” said Helen, advancing to attempt a familiarity, but the cow put down her head and made such a violent lunge at her that she beat a hasty and undignified retreat. This was partly on account of the calf, which stood a little way off, but well within the maternal vision, and it was quite an unreasonable demonstration, as the calf was stuffed, and put there to act upon the cow’s imagination only. This is a necessary expedient to ensure milk in India from a cow that has no calf of her own; it is a painful imposition, but uniformly successful. The fact is one of reputation, as being the only one invariably rejected by travellers as a lively lie, whereas they are known to swallow greedily much larger fictions than stuffed calves.

From an upper window, shortly after, Helen saw the cow’s morning toilet being performed by the bearer. And it was an instructive sight to see this solemn functionary holding at arm’s length the utmost end of her tail, and with art and precision improving its appearance.

In the cool of the evening after dinner, the two Brownes sat together in the shadow of the pillars of their upper veranda, and Helen told the story of her adventure in the compound. Overhead the pigeons cooed of their day’s doings, the pony neighed from his stable in the expectation of his content. A light wind stirred the palms where they stood against the stars, the smoke of the mallie’s pipal leaves curled up faintly from his roof where he dwelt beside the gate. Below, in the black shadow of the godowns, easeful figures sat or moved, the subdued tones of their parley hardly came to the upper veranda. They had rice and rest and the comfortable hubble-bubble. And the sahib and the memsahib devised how they might circumvent these humble people in all their unlawful doings, till the air grew chill with the dew, and the young moon showed over their neighbour’s tamarind tree.