HAVING suited themselves with the furnished house of a junior civilian, who had suddenly decamped before heat apoplexy and gastric complications, the Brownes settled down, if the expression is not too comfortable, to wait for the rains. I should dislike any misunderstanding on the point of comfort. It is not too much to say that the word is not understood in Calcutta. We talk of aram here instead, which means a drugged ease with heavy dreams.

The Brownes stored their furniture in the godowns of the other man, and had aram nevertheless in contemplating his, which was ugly. Aram is cheap—the price of a cup of coffee and a long veranda chair—and seductive; but I was annoyed with Helen Browne for accepting the other people’s furniture so pacifically. It seemed to me that she was becoming acclimatised too soon. There is a point in that process where a born British gentlewoman will live without antimacassars and sleep on a charpoy; but I do not wish to be considered a morbid modern analyst, so this need not be enlarged upon. The other people’s furniture, moreover, would have been entertaining if it could have talked, to so many people it had been let and sub-let and re-let and leased, always with the house, since it left Bow Bazar, where it was originally bought outright by an extravagant person second-hand. It had never belonged to anybody since: it had always been a mere convenience—a means of enabling people to give dinner parties. No one had ever regarded it, or mended it, or kept it any cleaner than decency required. It was tarnished, cracked, frayed, soiled; it included tables with white marble tops, and bad chromo-lithographs and dusty bunches of dried grasses which nobody had ever taken the trouble to eliminate. In the cold weather certain people had paid five hundred rupees a month for the privilege of living with it; in the hot weather certain other people had lived with it for nothing, to keep the white ants out. Withal it was typical Calcutta furniture—a typical part of the absurd pretence that white people make of being at home in this place.

The rains are due, as all Calcutta knows, on June the fifteenth. That is the limit of our time of pure grilling. We know it is written upon our foreheads that we must turn and writhe and bite the dust in the pain of the sun to that day; but on that day we expect that the clouds will come up out of the east and out of the west and clothe the brazen sky, and interpose between us and the dolour of India. It is what we call a pucca bandobust, arranged through the Meteorological Department, part of the bargain of exile with the Secretary of State. For so many years of active service we get so much pension and so much furlough, and we are to be rained upon every fifteenth of June for three months.

Therefore when the sun arose upon the fifteenth of June of this current year of the Brownes, and marched across the sky without winking, the Brownes were naturally and properly aggrieved together with the Bengal Government and all Calcutta. When one has defined the very point and limit of one’s endurance, it is inconsistent and undignified to go on enduring. The ticca-gharry horses were so much of this opinion that they refused too, and dropped down dead all up and down Chowringhee, as a preferable alternative—those that were driven. The more prudent gharry-wallah drew up in the reeking shade of some great building—it was cooler in the streets than in the stables—and slept profoundly, refusing all fares till sundown; and the broker-sahib, who spends his life upon wheels, changed horses four times a day. On the night of the fifteenth of June young Browne got up stealthily and deftly turned a jug of water over a hole in the floor through which a punkah rope hung inert. There was a sudden scramble below, the punkah rope sawed convulsively, and young Browne, with a ghastly smile, put out the glimmering candle and went back to bed. It is a popular form of discipline in Calcutta, but as applied by young Browne it bore strikingly upon the weather.

The Maidan cracked and split, and even the broad leaves of the teak-wood tree hung limp and grey under the powder of the road. The crows had nothing to say all day, but hopped about with their beaks ridiculously agape, while the sun blazed down through the flat roofs of Calcutta, and made Mrs. Browne’s chairs and tables so hot that it was a surprise to touch them. At the same time it drew up the evil soul of the odour of the bazars, the “burra krab^[120] smell,” as Kipling calls the chief characteristic of Calcutta, and cast it abroad in all the city. The Brownes squandered sums upon Condy’s fluid wholly disproportionate with their income vainly, for nothing yet known to pharmacy can cope with that smell. It grew hotter and hotter, and sometimes the south wind failed, and then the smell became several smells, special, local, individual, though the frangi-panni tree leaned blooming on its spiky elbows over every garden wall, and made them all sweet and langorous and interesting and truly Eastern. The smells were not of great consequence; one gets accustomed to the smells as one gets accustomed to the curries. Mrs. Browne declared, too, that one could put up with the weather, and the cholera, and sunstroke—one didn’t particularly mind even having one’s house turned inside out occasionally by a dust-storm. The really trying things—the things one hadn’t reckoned with beforehand—were that one’s envelope flaps should all stick down; that the pages of one’s books should curl up; that the towel should sting one’s face; that the punkah should stop in the night. Even under these greater afflictions we are uncomplaining up to the fifteenth of June. But the sixteenth passed over these Brownes, and the seventeenth and the eighteenth, and many days more, and still the dusty sun went down in the smoky west, and against the great red glow of his setting the naked beesties ran like black gnomes with their goat skins on their hips, slaking the roads that were red too.... And a mile and a league all round about the city the ryot folded his hands before his baking rice-fields, not knowing that men wrote daily in the Englishman about him, and wondered in what way he had offended Lakshmi that for so many days she should withhold the rain!

A shutter banged downstairs at three o’clock in the morning, there came a cool swishing and a subsiding among the fronds of the date palms, the gold mohur trees raised their heads and listened—it was coming. Far down in the Sunderbunds it was raining, and with great sweeps and curves it rained further and further inland. Calcutta turned more easily upon its pillow, and slept sound and late, the punkah-wallah slept also with impunity, and when the city awoke in the morning the rains had come.

Mrs. Browne professed to find a great difference and novelty in the rains of India. She declared that they came from lower down, that they were whiter and greyer, that they didn’t refresh the earth, but beat it and sat upon it, that there was quite an extraordinary quality of moisture about them. I believe every new-comer makes similar observations. To the rest of us, it has been obvious for so many years that during July, August, and September a considerable amount of water descends upon Bengal, that we have ceased to make original remarks about it. But Bengal certainly gets very wet, and Mrs. Browne’s observations as the time went on, and the floods abated not, were entirely excusable. Every day it rained, more in the morning and less in the evening, or less in the morning and more in the evening. The garden became a jungle, the English flowers that had died a puzzled death in May, sent up hysterical long shoots; one could see the grass growing. An adjutant sailed in from the mofussil^[121] marshes, trailing his legs behind him, to look for frogs on the Maidan. He stood on one leg to look for them, upon the bronze head of Lord Lawrence, and his appearance, with his chin buried thoughtfully in his bosom, was much more sapient than that of the administrator underneath. In the evening he flew back again, and then the frogs were at liberty to express their opinion of him. They spoke strongly, as was natural; one of them, in the tank of Ram Dass Hurrymunny, barked like a pariah. The crickets did their concerted best to outvoice the frogs, the cicadas reinforced the crickets, and all the other shrill-voiced things that could sing in the dark, sang in such a wheezy heaving eternal monotone, that Mr. and Mrs. Browne, sitting damply behind their open windows, were quite reduced to silence.

They were planting the little green rice shoots in the mofussil, they wanted it all and more; but Mrs. Browne in Calcutta was obliged to look in the newspapers for the assurance that she ought to be thankful for quite so much rain. It seemed to Mrs. Browne that all her relations with the world were being submerged, and that she personally was becoming too wet. She found it an unnatural and unpleasant thing that furniture should perspire; and when in addition to the roof leaking, and the matting rotting, and the cockroaches multiplying, the yellow sunset and the blue sea of her nicest water-colour mixed themselves up in a terrible and crumpled and impossible manner, Mrs. Browne added tears to the general moisture, and thought the very fabric of her existence was dissolving. Besides that, the Rev. Peachey came unglued out of his blue plush frame, and Aunt Plovtree developed yellow spots. Moreover, a green mould sprouted in the soles of their shoes, fresh every morning, and Helen’s evening dresses and gloves “went,” as she expressed it in writing to Canbury, “all sorts of colours.” To pass over the fact that centipedes began to run in their playful zigzag way across the floor, and young Browne killed a snake in the veranda, which he was not indisposed to believe a cobra. Helen thought there was no room for doubt about it, and, as a matter of fact, one hardly ever hears of a snake being killed in Calcutta that is not a cobra. The harmless varieties have a remarkable facility in keeping out of the way.

All over India it was raining, coming down hard on the marginless plains, on the great slopes of the Himalayas, on the great cities where the bunnias hive gold in the bazars, on the little thatched brown villages where the people live and die like harmless animals, with the memory that once or twice they have had enough to eat.

But more than anywhere it seemed to rain in Calcutta, where only about six feet of solid ground intervenes between the people and the bottomless miry pit. So that it is telling the literal truth to say that Calcutta was soaked through and through, dripping, reeking, pestilentially drunken with water. Infinite deeps below, infinite sources above, between the two a few macadamised roads, and an inadequate supply of gutters and drain-pipes. And yet it is not recorded that at any time Calcutta has succumbed to the rains, and sunk swamped into herself.

Nevertheless, at first it was a few degrees cooler, and, to borrow a phrase from the press, there was a slight increase in social activity. People began to give dinners. There are people in Bengal whom all the manifestations of Providence and of Nature together would not prevent giving dinners. They find it agreeable to feel the warming, drying influence of the various forms of carbon prepared by the khansamah in company. They talk of appointments, promotions, and the Lieutenant-Governor, and they chatter as if the ague were already upon them, about how much more sociable Calcutta is in the rains than in the cold weather—you get to know people so much better.

Then there were days when it didn’t rain; it shone. Early in the morning it shone with a vague and watery brilliance in the sky, and a curious white gleam over the earth. Later the shining was hot, and straight, and strong, and then Calcutta steamed, and one saw a parboiled baboo at every corner. Later still the sun went down over the river, and then one saw hundreds of parboiled baboos everywhere; and on the Maidan, driving about in carriages, a few score of the very whitest people on earth. The Brownes were as white as anybody. Privately Helen thought her complexion much more interesting than it used to be, and coveted a barouche to lean back and look languidly bored in like the few burra memsahibs that devotedly stayed in Calcutta. It was impossible to be languid in a tum-tum, which is an uncompromising vehicle, not constructed to encourage poses.

Behind their stubby little country-bred, Mr. and Mrs. Browne, taking the air, saw a Calcutta that never revealed itself to any globe-trotter, and which you will not find described in the printed experiences in cloth, at 7s. 6d., of Jonas Batcham, for instance. They saw the broad Maidan laid out in lakes and rivers, with a theatrical sun, set in purple and gold, dissolving in each of them, and all the spaces between a marvellous lushgreen, where the horses sank to their fetlocks. Floating over it they saw a gossamer white pall that consisted of water and bacilli in a state of suspension, and hung abreast of the people. Calcutta has a saving grace, known to her Anglo-Indians as the Casuarina-avenue. You can lose your soul in the infinite filmy shadows of the marching trees. Even the Indian sunlight, filtering through their soft dead green, becomes a delicate thing. The Brownes saw this ranged before them, misty and wonderful in the evening, hiding the last of the glow in its plumy nearer branches, and piling up soft clouds of dusk as it stretched further away. They saw the fort and all the pillared faÇade of Chowringhee, with its monuments and palaces and praying places yellow against a more and more empurpled sky, and the grey spire of the cathedral rising in its green corner of the Maidan behind a cluster of trees and a brimming lake, just as it might do in England. Calcutta sits close beside her river, and there are no miles of teeming wharfage between her and it. The great ships lie with their noses against the bank, and the level road runs beside them. Thus, by a wise provision of the municipality, people who live in Calcutta are able to drive down every day and see for themselves that it is possible to get away. For this reason the Brownes loved the close ships and all the populous river, lying under the wraith of the rains—the faint outlines of the crowding masts, with the sunset sky behind them as far as they could see; the majestic grey ghost of the old East Indiamen at anchor, with her “state cabin” full of dates from Mocha; slipping towards them solitarily out of the unreality the dipping red-brown three-cornered sail of an Arab dhow. Eloquently always the river breathed of exile and of home-going, sometimes with her own proper voice, sometimes with the tongue of a second mate from Portsmouth, or the twang of a negro cook from Savannah, full of airs and superciliousness. It depended on where you lived yourself when you were at home.

On a corner of the Maidan a number of mad young Englishmen played football; in another place there was a lively sale of goats for sacrifice. An erection of red and gold paper, like a Chinese pagoda, still wobbled about the biggest tank in propitiation of its god. Calcutta emptied itself on its wide green acres. The Brownes met a smart turnout with a thoroughbred, driven at a spanking pace by a pucca Chinaman, who leant forward nonchalantly with his pigtail streaming out behind. They met a fiery pair in a mail-phaeton, with two anxious syces behind, and driving on the high seat a small, bold, brown lady, all in green and pink gauze, tinselled, bareheaded, wearing her iniquity as lightly as a feather. They met a big roomy barouche, with two servants on the box, two more behind, and an ayah inside, all in attendance upon a tiny white mite of a belati baby. A small British terrier met them, regarded them, sniffed them, wagged his tail and followed them. They were not personal friends of his, but they were sahibs, and his countrymen; they would understand his lost estate, a sahib’s dog; he could confide himself to their good feeling and hospitality pending explanations. And so the stubby little country-bred trotted down the river road till he came to a place where the road widened—where, beside an octagonal erection with a roof, a great many other stubby little country-breds and slender Arabs and big Walers stood very quietly between their shafts with drooping heads; and here he turned, almost of his own accord, and trotted in amongst them until he found comfortable standing room, when he stopped. This was Calcutta’s place of pleasure. Behind the octagonal erection, where presently the band would play, stretched those Eden Gardens which the photographers reproduce so effectively, and the globe-trotters buy so abundantly. Here we have the elements of the most romantic municipal scenery—tall palms and red poinsettias, a fine winding artificial lake with a beautiful arched artificial bridge, realistic artificial rocks cropping out of the grass, and a genuine Burmese pagoda of white chunam, specially constructed for the gardens, in the middle of it all. The pagoda runs up into a spire, or a lightning conductor, or something of that nature; and on the top of this a frolicsome British tar once placed an empty soda-water bottle upside down. I think the native municipal commissioners regard this with some pride as a finial ornament; certainly nobody has ever taken it down. And that is as well, for the soda-water bottle gives, one might say, the key to the design of the place, which might otherwise puzzle the stranger. I should not omit to say that the gardens are illuminated with electric light, as such gardens of course should be. The people walk up and down under the electric light, looking at each other; the young men go in among the carriages and talk to the ladies they know. Calcutta makes a violent attempt to distract itself. On this particular evening the Brownes also came to distract themselves—it becomes a habit in time.

The electric light sputtered and fizzled over the crowd of standing carriages. Helen thought it darkened the black circle round young Browne’s eyes; and he asked his wife apprehendingly if she were feeling chilled or anything—she looked so white. The damp, warm air clung to their faces. A man in a ticca-gharry said to a man in the road that it was damned muggy. Several people in the carriages near heard him say this—it was so quiet. The crowd of carriage-tops gleamed motionless, the horses stood dejectedly on three legs, and under every horse’s nose a cotton-clad syce “bitoed”^[122] on the ground with his chin on his knees. A peddling native thrust up a round flat bouquet of pink and white roses that smelt of “Jockey Club.” “Jao!” said young Browne.

Presently the band played a gay and lightsome air, very sad to hear, from an opera long superseded at home, and with the playing of the band the general depression seemed to thicken and close down. There are people in Calcutta who, even for distraction’s sake, cannot stand selections from the Mikado so near the end of the century. One by one the carriages began to roll away. Perhaps along the river road there would be a breath of air. The band played a medley, all sorts of things, and then “The Land o’ the Leal.” I saw the MacTaggarts drive off. “Syce!” said Mr. Perth Macintyre; “buttie jallao! Gur ko!”^[123] ... The last of the pink flush faded out of the sky behind the ships. The air grew sodden and chill, a little raw breeze crept in from the east. Young Browne took off his hat to “God Save the Queen,” and then “I think we ought to hurry him a little,” said Helen, referring to the stubby little country-bred. “It’s going to rain.”

It was in this month of August, I remember, that we lost a partner of the firm, in a sad though not unusual way. He died, as a matter of fact, from a little Calcutta mud which rubbed itself into his elbow one afternoon when he was thrown out of his brougham. Tetanus the doctors called it, and they said he would have had a better chance if he had been thrown out of his brougham at another time of year. He was buried, poor man, in seven inches of water; and Mr. Perth Macintyre had two months’ fever after attending the dripping funeral.

It would be an affectation to write about Mrs. Browne’s experiences and to omit a chapter on at least one phase of the weather; but I could have told you in the beginning that it would not be amusing.