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.
CHAPTER XXII.
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.