CALCUTTA, in social matters, is a law unto herself, inscrutable, unevadable. She asks no opinion and permits no suggestion. She proclaims that it shall be thus, thus it is, and however odd and inconvenient the custom may be, it lies within the province of no woman—the men need not be thought of—to change it, or even to discover by what historic whim it came to be. Calcutta decrees, for example, that from twelve to two, what time the sun strikes straightest and strongest on the carriage-top, what time all brown Bengal with sweet reasonableness takes its siesta, in the very heat and burden of the day—from twelve to two is the proper hour forsooth for the memsahib to visit and be visited. Thus this usually tepid form frequently reaches a boiling point of social consideration, becomes a mark of recognition which is simply perfervid. It is also an unamiable time of day. The cheering effects of breakfast have worn off, and tiffin looms distantly, the reward of virtue. It would be impossible to say for how much malice it is directly responsible. But this is of the gods; we stew obediently, we do not dream of demurring. Another honoured principle is that all strangers, except brides, shall make the first call. Herein is the indolence of Calcutta generous and unreckoning. All new-comers, of whatever business, jat, or antecedents, have the fee simple of her drawing-rooms, the right to expect their calls to be returned, and even to feel slighted if no further recognition is made of them. Anybody may tacitly request Calcutta to invite him to dinner, and lay upon Calcutta the disagreeable onus of refusing to do it. Strangers present themselves on their merits; the tone of society naturally therefore becomes a little assertive. There are other methods of indirect compulsion. A man may call—this invariably at mid-day on Sunday—and thereby invite you to leave cards upon his wife, and the lady is aggrieved if you decline the invitation. Calcutta suffers all this. It is the dustur.

Mrs. George William Browne of course was a bride, and had made her appearance at church. It was not an imposing appearance, and probably did not attract as much attention as the Brownes imagined; they occupied one of the back seats of a sacred edifice of Calcutta which is known to be consecrated to official circles, and the Brownes were only mercantile. But the appearance had been made, whether or not anybody was aware of it; and Mrs. Browne was assuredly entitled to sit from twelve to two in the days that followed at the receipt of congratulations.

“All Calcutta won’t come,” remarked young Browne, in a tone of easy prophecy. “But Mrs. Fisher will probably look you up, and Mrs. Jack Lovitt, and the Wodenhamers—I’ve known the Wodenhamers a long time. And Mrs. P. Macintyre”—the person who undertakes this history—“Mrs. P. is the only lady in the firm just now. She’s sure to call.”

“Where are the rest, George?”

“One of ’em dead. Mrs. J. L. Macintyre’s dead—two of ’em, Mrs. Babcock and Mrs. Walsh, home in England with their babies.”

“But, George—all the people who came to the wedding?”

“Out of compliment to the Macdonalds. Yes, they’ll probably call—in their own good time. They’re very busy making other visits just now, my dear. We mustn’t allow ourselves to forget that we’re popularly known to be living on five hundred a month. Society bows to five hundred a month—with possibilities of advance—but it doesn’t hurry about calling. You see there are so many people with superior claims—fifteen hundred, three thousand a month. It’s an original place in that respect—Calcutta. The valuation of society is done by Government. Most people arrive here invoiced at so much, the amount usually rises as they stay, but they’re always kept carefully ticketed and published, and Calcutta accepts or rejects them, religiously and gratefully, at their market rates. It’s rather an uninteresting social basis—especially from our point of view—but it has the advantage of simplicity. You have a solemn official right to expect exactly what you can pay for.”

With which treble cynicism young Browne received a bit of mignonette in his button-hole, kissed his wife, and departed. They were not really much concerned, these Brownes, about the conduct and theories of their fellow-beings at this time. Society was homogeneous, a human mass whose business it was to inhabit other parts of Calcutta, and do it as unobtrusively as possible. Even as a subject for conversation, society was perfunctory, and rather dull. It was a thing apart, it did not menace them yet, or involve them, or tempt them. They had not arrived at a point when anything it chose to concern itself with was important to them. It is charming, this indifference, while it lasts, but it is not intended to endure.

“It is certainly pretty,” Helen remarked in a tone of conviction, looking round her little drawing-room. “It’s charming!” And it was. The walls were tinted a delicate grey, and the windows were all hung with Indian saris, pale yellow and white. The fresh matted floor was bespread in places with blue and white dhurries, and a big beflowered Japanese vase in a corner held a spiky palm. There were books and pictures—perhaps neither of the sort to bear the last analysis, but that at a glance didn’t matter—and bits of old china, and all Aunt Plovtree’s crewel work, and two or three vases running over with roses. There were some comfortable wicker chairs from the China bazar, gay with cushions after Liberty, and there were all the little daintinesses that accompany the earlier stages of matrimony. Through the windows came in bars and patches the sunlight of high noon, and the rustling of the palms, and the cooing of the doves in the veranda.

“It hasn’t much character,” said Mrs. Browne, with her head at a critical angle, “but it’s charming.”

The fact is that it expressed cleanliness and the Brownes’ income. I fear that Mrs. Browne belonged to that very numerous class of ladies in whose opinion character is a thing to arrange, just a matter to be attended to like the ordering of dinner. If you had asked her what particular character she wanted her room to express I think she would have been nonplussed. Or she might have said, Oh, she wanted it to be “artistic,” with a little smile of defiance which would have been an evasion, not to say an equivocation of the matter. Helen Browne was not “artistic,” and why she should have wanted her drawing-room to express what she did not understand is one of those enigmas common to the sex, as it flowers from day to day into new modern perplexities.

Perhaps it was much more charming of her to be what she was. It led her, at all events, into no burlesques. Nothing could be less extravagant, for instance, than that she should presently occupy herself, with amused concern and mock despair, in turning over a collection of young Browne’s garments with a view to improving them. The bearer brought them to her in a basket, laid them deprecatingly at her feet, and retired, doubtless thinking that though the memsahib might be troublesome in various ways, she had her advantages. She would perhaps destroy the sahib’s partiality for old clothes. He himself had struggled with these ancient socks and shirts a long and fruitless time, had cobbled them until his soul revolted, especially when the sahib, observing the result of his labour, had laughed deep laughs. The sahib was in no wise stingy—he would give new harness to the pony and new kupra^[73] to the syce, and the bazar was full of beautiful garments for the apparelling of sahibs, yet persistently and without sense of dishonour he enrobed himself daily thus! It was a painful, incomprehensible eccentricity. Now, perhaps, there would be a new order of things, and a chance for a little reasonable dusturi.^[74] And Kasi spent the rest of the morning discussing contracts in the bazar.

To his wife, however, young Browne was obliged to be explanatory, and even apologetic, upon this point. He had to tell her it was a way they had in India of sticking to their old things—it was only the most hideous swells that ever got anything new. You couldn’t keep up with the fashion in India anyhow—the thing was to be superior to it altogether. Oh, she wouldn’t have him discard that hat; he’d had that hat four years, and he was attached to it. If he might be allowed to keep it another year or two the shape would very likely “come in” again. Surely he wasn’t inexorably condemned to a new coat. It would take years to make another as comfortable as that, and it was only a bit ragged in the cuffs. But Helen was inflexible over the shortcomings of her husband’s wardrobe, as it is the first duty of the ladies of Anglo-India to be, and young Browne shortly paid one penalty of matrimony in being reclad at vast expense, and suffered much contumely in consequence from his bachelor contemporaries. This morning Helen smiled over her basket with content and entertainment.

“What aren’t shreds are patches,” said she to the pigeons. “Dear me! Fancy having married a person who hasn’t been properly mended since he left England.” The pigeons replied with suitable sympathy. There was a roll of wheels under the porch, and the bearer brought up cards, “Mr. and Mrs. John Lawrence Lovitt.”

“Bearer,” said Helen, mistress of the situation, “all these things lejao!^[75] Memsahib salaam do.”^[76]

“Bahut atcha,”^[77] said the bearer, whisking them away as he went. Not for worlds would Kasi have allowed his master’s dilapidations to become public. And Mrs. Jack Lovitt tripped up.

“How d’ye do, Mrs. Browne?” she said. “I hope I haven’t come too soon. Some one told me you’d been seen—somewhere—church, I suppose. People always do go to church at first, in Calcutta. After a while you won’t—at least not so regularly. It gets to be rather a bore, don’t you know, either morning or evening. In the morning it takes it out of you so that you haven’t energy to receive your callers, and in the evening—well, if you go in for Sunday tennis you’re too much done for church. But perhaps you won’t go in for Sunday tennis.”

Mrs. Lovitt sank into a chair and crossed her knees so that one small high-heeled boot stuck out at a sharp and knowing angle. She was a very little person, and she wore a very smart gown, though it was only a spotted cotton, and a very small bonnet. Her long-handled parasol had an enormous bow on it, and her small hands were buttoned up in an excessive amount of kid. She had a tiny waist, and her dress fitted her with an absurd perfection. There was a slight extravagance about Mrs. Jack Lovitt everywhere. No one could describe her without saying “very” and “exceedingly” a great many times. Her thin little face hadn’t a shade of colour—it was absolutely pale, and there were odd little drawn lines about it that did not interfere with its particular kind of attractiveness. She wore a pince nez astride her small, sharp features, and when she sat down it dropped into her lap quite as if it belonged to a man of fashion.

Helen said, with a conscious effort not to be priggish, that she didn’t think she would go in for Sunday tennis.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Lovitt, smiling tolerantly, “don’t believe in it, I suppose? Neither did I when I came out. You’ll soon get over that. You’ll begin virtuously by doing it for your husband’s sake, and by and by you’ll find that kind of prejudice doesn’t thrive in India. I played with your husband the last Sunday before you came out. The other side completely smashed us up; I don’t think your husband was in his usual form.”

“Oh, I dare say he was,” said Helen, smiling; “he doesn’t play a very strong game.”

“Oh, I wasn’t either. I played abominably. But, of course, I blamed it all upon him; I declared his nerves were affected—on account of you, you know. He admitted there might be something in it,” and Mrs. Lovitt laughed casually. “He says you’re a tremendous swell at it,” she continued inquiringly.

Helen protested, and Mrs. Lovitt went on to say that it didn’t matter much how one played anyway, for tennis was certainly going out—everybody went in for golf now—links all over the place. Did Helen go in for golf, and had she done any cricket before she left England? Mrs. Lovitt had a cousin, Stella Short, who was in the Wilbarrow Eleven. Perhaps Helen had seen her photograph—it had been in all the ladies’ papers.

“What do you think of the climate, Mrs. Browne?”

Helen said she thought it perfectly delightful; she found the glare a little trying.

“Oh, glare! Wait till the hot weather comes. It’s all very well now and will be till March, but the hot weather’s simply beastly; and in the rains—well, in the rains you feel exactly like a dead rat.”

“That must be an extraordinary feeling,” Helen responded, with some astonishment at the directness of the lady’s similes.

“It is—rather! I suppose you’re going to see the Viceroy’s Cup won this afternoon?”

“Yes,” said Helen, “are you?”

“Very much so! I’m one of those happy people who have got a tip. Jimmy Forbes gave me mine. You don’t know Jimmy. He and I are great chums—we’re always out together.” Mrs. Lovitt spoke with virtuous candour. “He’s an awfully pucca^[78] sort of fellow, is Jimmy—you’ll like him when you know him. He’s a great friend of my husband’s, too,” Mrs. Lovitt added. “Jack thinks a lot of him. And he’s very knowing about horses. How do you get on with the servants? They’ll stick you no end at first—of course you know that. When I began I used to pay three rupees for a leg of mutton. It used to cost us two hundred a month more than our income to live!”

“Dear me!” said Helen. “Wasn’t that very inconvenient?”

“Inconvenient as the—as possible, sometimes, till Jack got his promotion. Now we manage all right.”

“Have you any children, Mrs. Lovitt?” Helen ventured, as the bearer brought up another card.

“Children! Bless me, no, I should think not!” replied Mrs. John Lawrence Lovitt. “But I’ve got the littlest black and tan in Calcutta. Jimmy Forbes gave him to me. You must come and see him. Hello, Kitty Toote, so you’re on the rampage! Good-bye, Mrs. Browne; don’t let her prejudice you against Calcutta. She’s always running it down, and it’s the sweetest place in the world!”

Mrs. Toote made polite greetings to Mrs. Browne. “You know it isn’t really,” she said, disposing her tall figure gracefully among the cotton cushions of Helen’s little sofa. “But of course it depends upon your tastes.” Mrs. Toote had fine eyes, and an inclination to embonpoint. Her expression advertised a superior discontent, but there was a more genuine suggestion of gratified well-being underneath which contradicted the advertisement. “It’s really awfully frivolous here,” Mrs. Toote remarked. “Don’t you think so—after England?”

“How can I possibly tell—so soon?” said Helen.

“No, I suppose not. Personally, I wouldn’t mind the frivolity. The frivolity’s all right—if there were only anything else, but there isn’t.”

“Anything else?” Helen inquired.

“Yes, anything really elevating, you know—anything that one could devote one’s self to. I haven’t a word to say against frivolity; I like it myself as well as anybody,” said Mrs. Toote with engaging naÏvetÉ, “but there ought to be something behind it to back it up, you know.” Mrs. Toote spoke as if she were objecting to dining exclusively upon ortolans. But the objection was a matter of pure dietetic theory. In practice, Mrs. Toote throve upon ortolans.

“Nobody reads,” said Mrs. Toote.

“Nobody?” asked Helen.

“Nobody that I know—except novels, of course.”

“And you prefer other kinds of books,” Helen said, impressed. “More solid reading?”

“Oh, I enjoy a good novel,” Mrs. Toote conceded; “but I don’t think people ought to confine themselves to fiction. There’s biography and philosophy, and—and social economy. All very interesting—to me.”

“Which are your favorite authors?” asked Helen, with deference.

Mrs. Toote thought a minute. “John Stuart Mill,” said she, “is a very fine writer. My husband has all his books. So is Herbert Spencer; we have all his, too. So is Sir Henry Cunninghame. Have you read The Chronicles of Dustypore?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Helen. “Is it very good?”

“Oh, awfully. You must read it. Then, of course, there’s Kipling. I’m devoted to Kipling.”

“Do you think he’s nice?” asked Mrs. Browne, doubtfully.

“I think he’s everything. And I must say for the people here they do read their Kipling. But they don’t talk about him. I don’t believe they know the difference between Kipling and anybody else.”

“Perhaps,” Helen ventured, “they’re tired of him.”

“That’s just where it is. How could anybody get tired of Kipling! You’ll find plenty of gaiety in Calcutta, Mrs. Browne; but you won’t find much—culture!” And Mrs. Toote lifted her eyebrows and twisted her lips into a look of critical resignation.

“Aren’t there any societies?”

“Oh, if you mean the Asiatic, that’s for scientists and people of that sort, you know, and they read awful papers there about monoliths and ancient dynasties and things. You can’t consider that the Asiatic represents any popular tendency. I don’t know anybody that’s fond of Sanskrit. Of course,” Mrs. Toote continued, “I’m speaking generally, and I mean particularly the women out here. There are some clever men in the departments, naturally. One or two of them are my greatest friends, and it is refreshing to talk to them.”

“But are the ladies all frivolous?” Helen asked.

“Oh, dear, no!”

“And the unfrivolous ones—what do they do?”

“They mess about charities, and keep their husbands in their pockets, and write eternal letters to their children in England. I’ve less patience with them than with the other kind,” Mrs. Toote avowed.

“Well,” said Helen, smiling, “I’m not very literary, so I daresay it won’t matter much to me.”

“Then you’ll either go in for society or philanthropy—that’s the way everybody ends up. You are going to the Drawing-Room next Thursday?”

“I think so.”

“Well, immediately after you must write your names down in the Government House books. Then they ask you to everything, you see. Don’t put it off,” advised Mrs. Toote, on the point of departure. “Don’t put it off a day.”

In a quarter of an hour the Wodenhamers came—Colonel and Mrs. Wodenhamer, a large lady and a generously planned gentleman. The smallest and slightest of Helen’s wicker chairs creaked ominously, as Colonel Wodenhamer sat down in it with an air of asserting that he wasn’t the weight you might think him. As to Mrs. Wodenhamer, her draperies completely submerged Helen’s cotton cushions upon the sofa. Colonel Wodenhamer had mutton-chop whiskers and a double chin and a look of rotund respectability that couldn’t be surpassed in Hyde Park on Sunday. He was not a fighting colonel, and in the adding up of commissariat accounts there is time and opportunity to develop these amplitudes. Mrs. Wodenhamer matched him more perfectly than is customary in the odd luck of matrimony, and had a complexion besides, which the Colonel couldn’t boast. The complexion spread over features generously planned, and a smile that contained many of the qualities of a warm sunset, spread over both. Helen wondered in vain to which of Mrs. Toote’s two social orders they belonged, for as soon as Colonel Wodenhamer had explained how it was he had come to call on a week-day—Colonel Wodenhamer made this a point of serious importance—Mrs. Wodenhamer led the conversation into domestic details. It wandered for a time among pots and pans—enamelled ones were so much the best—it embraced all the servants, took a turn in the direction of the bazar, and finally settled upon jharruns.

“You’ll find them so troublesome!” said Mrs. Wodenhamer.

“I don’t know what they are,” said Mrs. Browne, reflecting upon the insect pests of India.

“Don’t you, really! It’s a wonder you haven’t found out! They’re towels or dust-cloths—anything of that sort. Almost every servant must have his jharruns. You have no idea how they mount up.”

“I suppose they must,” returned Helen, and turned to Colonel Wodenhamer with intent to venture something about the weather.

“I don’t see how you’ve got on without them so long!” Mrs. Wodenhamer remarked, glancing round with involuntary criticism. “I assure you I give out weekly in my house no less than five dozen—five dozen!”

“That’s a great many,” Helen agreed. “A very fair passage, I believe, Colonel Wodenhamer—thirty-one days.”

“It’s just a question whether they’re better made in the house,” Mrs. Wodenhamer went on placidly; “I don’t know that I wouldn’t advise you to go to the Women’s Friendly—they work very neatly there.”

“For the jharruns. Oh, yes!” said Helen. “The captain’s name? I’m afraid I forget, Colonel Wodenhamer. He was a little man.”

“They wear out so frightfully fast,” his lady remarked.

“P. and O. captains? But consider the life, my dear!”

“Jharruns, John! Mrs. Browne really shouldn’t begin with less than six dozen.”

“I must see about them at once,” Helen said. “I’m sure they are very important.”

“The whole comfort of your life depends upon them,” her visitor replied, rather ambiguously, and at that moment Mrs. Macdonald came up, and the conversation became so general that nobody noticed Mrs. Wodenhamer’s being lost in thought. As she and her husband rose to go, “Your house is smaller than mine,” said Mrs. Wodenhamer, “I forgot that. I think “—conscientiously—” you might do with four dozen.”

Neither could Helen bring Mrs. Macdonald under Mrs. Toote’s classification, for Mrs. Macdonald certainly did not give one the idea of a serious person, and yet she talked a great deal about committees. Mrs. Macdonald expressly advised Helen to “go in for” philanthropy, and in the next breath declared that of course she and young Browne must get themselves put up at the Saturday Club, where a proportion of Calcutta banded itself together for purposes of dancing and amateur theatricals, tennis and light literature. It was puzzling, this combination of good works and fashionable recreation, until Mrs. Macdonald explained, the explanation being inferential.

“You see,” said Mrs. Macdonald, “you must take up something, you know, and then you will get to be known, and it will make all the difference. Of course if you came out as the wife of a major-general or a commissioner or a bishop it wouldn’t matter—you could be independent. But as it is,” continued Mrs. Macdonald with delicate vagueness, indicating the Brownes’ five hundred a month, “it would be better for you to take an interest in something, you know. There’s the Home for Sailors’ Orphans—Mrs. Leek and Mrs. Vondermore—they’re not very important, though. And there’s Lady Blebbin’s Hindu Widow Institute—that’s overcrowded now. I believe the very best thing for you”—with an increase of business-like emphasis—“would be the East Indian Self-Help Society! Mrs. Walter Luff runs that, and she’s just the woman to appreciate anybody fresh and energetic like you! I’ve got influence there too—I’ll get you nominated.”

“But,” said Helen, in some dismay, “it’s not at all likely that I should be able to be of any use.”

“Use? Of course you will. You’ll be driven to death, but if Mrs. Walter Luff takes you up, you won’t mind that! Besides,” said Mrs. Macdonald with an effect of awakened conscience, “the East Indian Self-Helps do a lot of good. You’re interested in the East Indians, aren’t you—the Eurasians?”

“I don’t know them when I see them,” said Helen. “I always confuse them with the Jews and the Greeks.”

“Oh, well, you soon will. As a rule they’re awfully poor, you know, and give us a lot of trouble in Calcutta. Dear me!” Mrs. Macdonald ejaculated, looking round, “how pretty you are! But if I were you I’d have a Mirzapore rug for the middle of the floor; it makes the room so much richer, you know—shows up everything. And you ought to get two or three good engravings—there are some lovely new French things at Thacker’s—only fifty rupees each. Go and see them. But I must be off,” said this sprightly lady, and Helen was presently again alone, with a delicate disappearing odour of jessamine and her reflections.

I dropped in that morning too, after all the rest; but it is not essential to the progress of this narrative that you should be allowed to gather from my conversation the sort of person that I am.