Miss Eden to Mrs. Lister.
GOVERNMENT HOUSE,
August 24, 1836.
MY DEAREST THERESA. After I wrote you that long letter of upbraiding for never having written to me, your Edinburgh letter, which had reached the respectable age of ten months, was forwarded to me, it having been mislaid with a large packet of other letters, and remained four months in the Custom House! So pleasant when one is almost stamping with impatience for letters—or rather, would be so, if the climate did not prevent those active expressions of feeling.
I think I told you how the American edition of Dacre[439] had been one of my first purchases here, and I read it over with considerable pleasure. I do not know exactly what I mean, but I do not think you and your book are like each other. I do not mean any disparagement to either; there may be a very pretty fair mother with a very pretty dark child, both good in their way, but not like, and I cannot put your voice to any of the sentences in your book, or say to any part of it, “So like Theresa!” I am glad of that. I hate those banale likenesses of books to their author. Why did you not tell me the name of your new book? I daresay everybody has read it and discussed it in England, and I don’t know its name. And to think of you writing about it in that vague way to me, 15,000 miles off!
The English editions of novels are to be had here for about three guineas apiece. They charge rupees for shillings, and a rupee is about two shillings and a penny. I have bought quantities of American editions of English books; but then it is a bore waiting till a work is two years old before one reads it. The Americans are valuable creatures at this distance. They send us novels, ice, and apples—three things that, as you may guess, are not indigenous to the soil. I own, I think the apples horrid, they taste of hay and the ship, but the poor dear yellow creatures who have been here twenty years, and who left their homes at an age when munching an unripe apple was a real pleasure, and who have never seen one since, fly at this mucky fruit and fancy themselves young and their livers the natural size, as they eat it. The first freight of apples the Americans sent covered the whole expense of the ship’s passage out.
We are all so grieved to-day for poor Mrs. Beresford, whom you may remember as a Miss Sewell, going out with Mrs. Hope. Colonel Beresford is the Military Secretary to Sir H. Fane,[440] and came here just a year ago. She has always declared the climate disagreed with her, and as she hated this place and its inhabitants, they did not like her, and said her ailments were all fancy. I never thought so; and she has proved the climate really disagreed with her, by having a violent fever that has lasted two months. The doctors said there was nothing for it but a return to England. Colonel Beresford came out with Sir H. Fane by way of bettering his fortunes, but as they have been here only a year, they have not yet got over the expense of coming out, so there was nothing for it but her going alone. She is one of those people entirely dependent on her husband’s care. I hardly know such another attentive servant as he is to her—weighed her medicines, carried her about, etc.—in short, been what she could not find here for millions—an excellent English nurse.
On Tuesday she was to have gone on board, and I wrote to offer her carriage, assistance, etc., and got back a wretched note from him saying a sudden and rapid change had come on, and she was not expected to live an hour. However, she has lived on, and the doctors still say that, though they do not think she can live, the only chance for it will be going to sea; so she is to be carried on board this afternoon with her little girl, who is a dear little thing, but wants a cool climate too. I cannot imagine a more painful time for Colonel Beresford than the next few months, for as he is obliged to go up the country with the Commander-in-Chief, and The Perfect, her ship, may not speak another till they get to the Cape, it may be six months before he hears if she survives the first week of change. If she does, I think she will recover. I am so sorry for them; and here, where we are a limited set who know each other at all, one thinks more of these stories.
I never could take to the Calcutta society, even if there were any, but there is not. Almost everybody who was here when we landed five months ago are gone either home or up the country. They come to Calcutta because they are on their way out to make their fortunes, or on their way home because they have made them, or because their healths require change of station, and they come here to ask for it.
To-day was our receiving day. We receive visits from eleven to one every Thursday morning, and out of seventy or eighty people there were few who were not new introductions. “Have you been here long?” “Only just landed from the Marianne Webb—a tiresome voyage.” “Did you suffer much at sea?” And so on. “Did you come in the same ship?” “No, we are just come from Lucknow.” And then there comes all the story about the hot winds up the country, and whether it is worse or better than Bengal. So tiresome! I rather like to see the new arrivals, if they do not put off calling for more than a week, as they arrive with a little pink colour in their cheeks which lasts nearly ten days, but I heard one of our visitors to-day, who has been in India twenty years, declare seriously that he hated that colour; he thought it looked unnatural and like a disease. I begin to see what he means.
God bless you, dearest Theresa. I want to send this by The Perfect, and am so tired with our visits I cannot write any more. I hope you have written again and sent yours. I hoped to send you something pretty by this ship, but (it is not a mere façon de parler) in this rainy season there is not an item of any description to be bought in Calcutta. Nobody opens even the packages that arrive by mistake, as twenty-four hours spoils everything, but when the cold weather begins, they say that the merchants will have plenty of scarfs, silks, etc., from China and up the country. I want something Indian. We have written to China for any or everything, in the meantime. Your most affectionate