The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

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.

[119]. Talker.

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.

MR. WEEK SLEPT ON A BENCH IN THE SAME SMALL ROOM, WITH TWO BABOOS AND THE AGUE.