IT would be improper to pretend to chronicle even the simple adventures of a memsahib without a respectful reference to their clerical side. The reference will be slight; but it must be made, if only in answer to Aunt Plovtree’s communication upon the subject, in which she took the trouble to remark particularly how curious it was that Helen’s letters said so little about parish matters or a clergyman. One might almost fancy, said Aunt Plovtree, that such things did not exist in India; and it is highly inadvisable that these chapters should produce a similar impression. Helen replied to her aunt that on the contrary there were several churches scattered about Calcutta, with clergymen attached to all of them, also an Archdeacon and a Bishop. Some were higher than others—the clergymen she meant—and she believed that a number of them were very nice. She didn’t know any of the clergymen themselves yet; but she had met one or two of the wives of the junior chaplains, and one she thought an awfully sweet woman. The Archdeacon she didn’t know by sight, the Bishop she had seen once at a distance. They—the Brownes—were not quite sure which parish they belonged to yet; but when they found out she would be sure to mention anything connected with it that she thought would interest her dearest Aunt Plovtree. Doubtless Mrs. Plovtree thought that this left something to be desired, and if my chapter should provoke the same opinion I can only deplore without presuming to question it.

The Government of India provides two medical departments for the benefit of its servants: one for the body and one for the soul. The Government of India has the reputation of being a hard taskmaster, but its liberality is not questioned here, unless one cavils at being obliged to pay one’s own undertaker. It has arranged, educated, graduated, and certificated assistance in all cases of bodily and spiritual extremity free of charge, assuming, however, no ultimate responsibility, except towards the higher grades of the Covenanted Ones. To them, I believe, it guarantees heaven; but it is difficult to obtain accurate information upon this point, especially as that state is apt to be confounded out here with the rank and privileges of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India.

It is, of course, a debatable question—I speak here of the senior chaplains; the junior chaplains suffer an almost prohibitive baby-tax, which, to a junior chaplain, is a serious financial consideration, and his pay is not luxurious—but I have always understood that the spiritual service of the Raj is not such an excessively bad thing. I know that comparatively few of its members are of this opinion, and I have no doubt that the peculiarly agreeable absence of theological controversy in India is due to the fact that the energy of reverend gentlemen is largely occupied in popularising a different one. Still it remains the lay idea that the chaplains of the Government of India are in their father-in-law’s house. The term of service is brief, and during its course the reverend servant may claim to write his sermons and proclaim the example of the wicked man for three years comfortably in a hill-station, where his clerical liver need never compel his clerical temper to spend itself unbecomingly upon kitmutgars. His pay is moderate, but as high probably as could be considered prudent in view of the undesirability of encouraging worldliness in a spiritual department, and it is not written in his contract that the beady simpkin shall enhance his little dinner parties.

“Pegs, claret, and beer for a junior chaplain,” remarked one of Calcutta’s spiritual advisers to me once; “but sherry is expected as well of a senior chaplain, and even curaÇoa!” He spoke ruefully, for he was a senior chaplain, and given to hospitality. The reverend brotherhood are eligible for three months’ privilege leave every year upon full pay, and three years’ furlough during service on half pay. In addition to which they do not scruple to hold “retreats,” also doubtless upon full official allowances, though their cardinal features may be fish and eggs. They enter into their reward early, and it is a substantial one—three hundred a year, and such pickings as offer themselves in England to reverend gentlemen with a competency. Neither is the exercise of faith required of them in regard to it; it is in the bond. In this respect it is obvious that the Indian vineyard offers a distinct advantage over others, where the labourers are expected to be contented with abstract compensations to be enjoyed after their decease. Popularly they are known as “padres,” which is a Portuguese survival more respectable than any other, and a demi-official tag which admits its owner to society. It ought to be mentioned that the Indian padre does not move in the atmosphere of feminine adoration which would be created for him in England; there are too many other men for that. Doubtless the more attractive of the junior chaplains, sent out, as it were, in cotton wool, miss the little attentions of the ladies of the parish at home, but then they have their polo ponies and their pegs.

There were various reasons why Mrs. George Browne had been compelled to write to her inquiring aunt that as yet she had not the pleasure of any clergyman’s acquaintance. The padres are official, for one thing, and one does not approach an official in India—especially if one is a commercial—without some appropriate excuse. When the Brownes wanted to be married a reverend gentleman married them, and did it very well—as they always do in the cathedral—for I was looking on. If either of them had since required to be buried he would doubtless have done that with the same ability, despatch, and desire to oblige. He might also in the future be applied to with propriety in connection with a christening. If the Brownes’ water-pipes leaked the Brownes would with equal and similar propriety request the Municipal Engineer to mend them and they would be mended, but the Municipal Engineer would probably not consider himself naturally drawn within the circle of the Brownes’ amicable social relations in consequence. Mrs. Browne would not call upon Mrs. Municipal Engineer to assure her that they were well mended. The spiritual official also discharges his duty as specified, and one would have an equal hesitation, generally, in interpreting it too broadly. And, indeed, with only the forms and papers relating to the nuptial, baptismal, and burial business of the capital upon his hands the Calcutta cleric may claim to be overburdened. His cemetery work alone would keep a hill padre from all sloth and fatness.

Bien entendu, the missionary padres are different. The missionary padres are not official. I have no doubt the Government would interfere to prevent their being eaten if the Bengali baboo were carnivorous; but he is not, he has no fleshy tastes; he prefers an inglorious diet of rice, fried sweetmeats and mango chutney, to even a stalled chaplain, beside whom a missionary padre is lean and tough. Moreover, the Bengali baboo was never designed for the shedding of blood. So that the Government has really no responsibilities toward the missionary padres. It will educate and sanitate the baboo, but it leaves his salvation to private enterprise, undertaking nothing on behalf of the entrepreneurs.

The missionary padre receives his slender stipend from the S. P. G. or from some obscure source in America. It is arranged upon a scale to promote self-denial, and it is very successful. He usually lives where the drains are thickest and the smells most unmanageable, and when we of the broad river and the great Maidan happen to hear of his address, we invariably ejaculate, “What a frightfully long way off!” The ticca-gharry is not an expensive conveyance, but the missionary padre finds himself better commended of his conscience if he walks and pays the cost of his transportation in energy and vitality, which must be heavy in the hot weather and the rains. For the rest, he lives largely upon second-class beef and his ideals, though they don’t keep very well either in this climate. Those who come out celibates remain celibates if not by force of conviction by force of circumstances. The expensively home-bred young ladies of Anglo-India are not for missionaries! Whereas those who are married are usually married to missionary ladies of similar size and complexion labouring in the same cause. Covenanted chaplains, on the contrary, with the prospects I have mentioned, may be yoked together with the dÉbutante of any season. So there is this further difference, that while the official padre’s wife looks like any other memsahib, the missionary padre’s wife looks like the missionary padre. I believe that chaplains sometimes ask missionary padres to dinner “quietly,” and always make a point of giving them plenty to eat. And I remember meeting a married pair of them at the Brownes’, a Mr. and Mrs. Week. Young Browne had known Mr. Week at school before his vocation appeared to him. He was an undersized young man, high-shouldered, very hollow-chested, and wore his long hair brushed back from his high forehead, almost, one might say, behind his ears. She was a little white woman in a high dress, and wore her locks, which were beginning to thin, in a tiny knot at the very back of her crown. It was in the hot weather, and they spoke appreciatively of the punkah. They had no punkah, it seemed, either day or night; but the little wife had been very clever, and had made muslin bags for their heads and hands to keep off the mosquitoes while they were asleep. We couldn’t ascertain that either of them had ever been really well since they came out, and they said they simply made up their minds to have sickness in the house during the whole of the rains. It was either neuralgia or fever that season through, and neither of them knew which was worst. I asked Mrs. Week inadvertently if she had any children. She said “No,” and there was a silence which Helen explained afterwards by telling me that Mrs. Week had lost her only baby from diphtheria, which they attributed to a certain miasma that “came up through the floor.”

Young Browne tried to make the conversation, but it invariably turned to some aspect of the “work,” and left him blundering and embarrassed, with no resource except to beg Mrs. Week to have another slice of the joint. They knew little of the Red Road or the Eden Gardens, where the band plays in the evening; they talked of strange places—Khengua Puttoo’s Lane—Coolootollah. Mrs. Week told us that her great difficulty in the zenanas lay in getting the ladies to talk. They liked her to come, they were always pleased and polite, but they seemed interested in so few things. When Mrs. Week had asked them if they were well, and how much of a family they had, and how old the children were, there seemed to be no getting any further, and she could not chew betel with them. Mrs. Week said she had tried, but it was no use. She loved her zenana ladies, they were dear things, and she knew they were attached to her, but they were provoking, too, sometimes. One day last week she had talked very seriously to them for nearly an hour, and they had seemed most attentive. Just as she was going away one of them—an old lady—approached her, with cast-down eyes and great reluctance, wishing to speak. Mrs. Week encouraged her to begin—was she at last to see some fruit of her visits? And the old lady had said “Eggi bat,” would the memsahib please to tell them why she put those shiny black hooks in her hair?

Everybody laughed; but Mrs. Week added gravely that she had shown them the use of hairpins, and taken them a packet next day, to their great delight. “One never can tell,” said Mrs. Week, “what these trifles may lead to.”

And Mr. Week had been down in the Sunderbunds, far down in the Sunderbunds where the miasmas are thickest, and where he had slept every night for a week on a bench in the same small room with two baboos and the ague. Mr. Week had found the people very much interested in the joys of the future state; their attention only flagged, he said, when he referred to the earthly preparation for them. Mr. Week was more emaciated than clever. He spoke with an enthusiastic cockney twang of his open-air meetings and discussions in Dhurrumtollah, of the anxiety with which the baboos wished to discuss the most recondite theological points with him. “Yes,” said Mr. Perth Macintyre, “the baboo is a great buck-wallah.”^[119] There is reason to fear that the lay community of Calcutta is rather inclined to consider the baboo’s soul an unproved entity.

Returning to the senior and junior chaplains, it is delightful to see the natural man under the Indian surplice. At home the padre is an order, in India he is an individual. He is not suppressed by parish opinion, he is rather encouraged to expand in the smile of the Raj, which is above all and over all. He is official, joyous, free, and he develops happily along the lines which Nature designed for him before ever he turned aside into the crooked paths of theology. It is seeing by these lights that we say so often of an Indian padre, “What an excellent politician, broker, soldier, insurance agent he would have made?”

Being now, as one might say, a sheep of some age and experience and standing in the community, I have agreeable recollections of many shepherds. Most of them have long since retired upon pension, while the flock is still wistfully baaing over the bars toward the west. Doubtless the reunion will not be long deferred. It will take place at Bournemouth, and we will talk of the debased value of the rupee. For one, I should like to see Padre Corbett again—he would be able to express himself so forcibly on the subject of the rupee. Padre Corbett, it is my certain belief, entered the Church because there was no practicable alternative. He looked facts in the face in a business-like manner, shook his big square head over them, smoked a farewell pipe to the sturdy bÉtises of his youth, and went in for orders under the advice of a second cousin in the India Office. Then he came out to minister to the soul of Tommy Atkins in Murshidabad, where it is very hot, and whether it was the heat of Murshidabad, or the atmosphere of military discipline there, Padre Corbett got into the way of ordering Tommy Atkins to come to be saved and not to answer back or otherwise give trouble about it, that I remember him by. Padre Corbett never lost the disciplinary air and ideas of Murshidabad. As he marched up the aisle of peaceful St. Ignatius in Calcutta behind his choir boys, there was a distinct military swagger in the rear folds of his surplice, and he put us through our devotional drill with the rapidity and precision of a field-marshal. “Fours about! Trot! you miserable sinners!” he gave us to understand at the beginning of the Psalms, and the main battalion of St. Ignatius in the pews, following the directing flank under the organ came on from laudite to laudite at a magnificent pace. The sermon was a tissue of directions and a statement of consequences; we were deployed out of church. We bowed to it, it was quite befitting. We were not Tommy Atkinses, but we were all officially subordinated to Padre Corbett in a spiritual sense; in the case of an archangel from Simla it would be quite the same, and he was perfectly entitled to “have the honor to inform” us that we would do well to mend our ways. This sense of constituted authority and the fitness of things would naturally lead Padre Corbett to the chaste official glories of the archdeaconry. Indeed, I’m not sure that it didn’t.

The Rev. T. C. Peterson, too, once of St. Pancras. I wonder in what rural corner of South Devonshire Padre Peterson to-day entertains Dorcas meetings with innocently amusing accounts of domestic life in India! He was always by way of being amusing, was Padre Peterson; he had a fine luminous smile, which he invariably took with him when he went out to dine. He was kindly and unostentatious, he lived simply and quietly, giving a little of his money to the poor and putting a great deal of it into the Bank of Bengal pending a desirable rate of exchange. Padre Peterson was every inch a padre; there was nothing but ecclesiastical meekness in his surplice of a Sunday; and even his secular expression, notwithstanding the smile, spoke of high ideals and an embarrassed compromise with week-day occupations. He had a humble, hopeful way of clasping his hands and sloping his shoulders and arranging his beard over his long black cassock, especially when he sat at meat, which reminded one irresistibly, though I admit the simile is worn, of an oriel apostle in stained glass. He was seriously happy, and he made old, old Anglo-Indian jokes with his luminous smile in a manner which was peculiarly maddening to the enlarged liver of Calcutta. He would have hesitated to employ coercion even as a last resort with his flock of St. Pancras. He was no shepherd with a cracking whip, he would go before rather, and play upon the lute and dance and so beguile the sheep to follow. His amiability was great; he was known to “get on” with everybody. Nobody knew precisely why Padre Peterson always got everything he wanted, but it was obscurely connected with the abounding charity for sinners in general, and official sinners in high places in particular, which was so characteristic of him. He could placate an angry Under-Secretary, and when an Under-Secretary is angry India quakes and all the Lieutenant-Governors go to bed. The finances in St. Pancras were never in better hands. St. Pancras had a new organ, a new font, and new beams and rafters all through in Padre Peterson’s day. If new graves and gravestones had been as urgently required then as they are now, Padre Peterson would have found the money and had the thing done at the lowest contract rates. A remarkable man in many ways, and now that I think of it, he’s dead, quite a long time ago.

Others I seem to remember best in some secular connection. Padre Jenkins, whose pony won the Gymkhana Cup at the Barrackpore races of I can’t remember just what year; Padre MacWhirter, who used to say very truly that he made golf what it was in Alipore; Padre Lewis-Lewis, who had for five years the most charming manners and the best choir in Calcutta. But there is no reason why I should count them over to you. Long since they have disappeared, most of them, with their little flat black felt hats on their heads and their tennis racquets in their hand, into the fogs of that northerly isle whither in the end we all go and whence none of us return. This chapter is really more of an apology to Mrs. Plovtree than anything else.

Mrs. Plovtree will be grieved, however, and justly so, that I have not said more about the Indian bishop. The explanation is that I have never known a bishop very well, as I have never known a Viceroy very well. Even at my own dinner-table I have never permitted myself to observe a bishop beyond the point of admiration. Some day in Bournemouth, however, I will write a thoughtful essay on the points of similarity, so far as I have noticed them, between Indian bishops and other kinds, and sent it to the Guardian, where Mrs. Plovtree will be sure to see it; but it is not considered wise in India to write critical estimates of bishops or of any other heads of departments until after one retires. I might just say that the bishop, like the Viceroy, is a foreign plenipotentiary. He does not rise from the withered ranks of the Indian service, but, like the Viceroy, comes out fresh from the culling hand of the Secretary of State. He divides with the Viceroy certain Divine rights, divinest of which is the right not to care a parrot’s eyelash for anybody. In consequence the bishop holds his venerable head high and dines where he pleases. Certain of the Raj-enthralled of Calcutta find the independence of a bishop offensive. In me it provokes a lively enthusiasm. I consider the episcopal attitude even more valuable than the episcopal blessing, even more interesting than the episcopal discourse. And I agree with Mrs. Browne, who thinks it must be lovely to be a bishop.

But neither for our spiritual pastors and masters are times what they were. There was a day, now faded, with all the rollicking romance of John Company Bahadur, when two honest butts of golden crown madeira a year helped to alleviate the sorrows of exile for King George’s chaplains in India—the present Secretary of State would probably see them teetotallers first! The mails come out in a fortnight, the competition-wallah over-runs the land, the Rajah studies French. India is not what it was, and another of the differences is that the padres buy their own madeira.

I saw a priest of Kali, wrapped in his yellow chuddar, sit hugging his knees under a mahogany tree to-night beside the broad road where the carriages passed rolling into the “cow’s dust” of the twilight. A brother cleric of the Raj went by in his victoria with his wife and children, and the yellow robed one watched them out of sight. There was neither hatred nor malice nor any evil thing in his gaze, only perhaps a subtle appreciation of the advantages of the other cloth.