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.
[122]. Sat on his heels.
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.”
[123]. “Light the (carriage) lamps. To the house!”