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!
[120]. Very bad.
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.
[121]. A Country.
HE STOOD UPON ONE LEG ON THE BRONZE HEAD OF LORD LAWRENCE.
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.