The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

“One could so easily boil the water, dear,” objected Mrs. Browne.

“For the other meals. But we can’t cook our chota hazri. Everything’s at the bottom. We shouldn’t get it ready till midnight. The fact is,” said young Browne decisively, “we ought to have brought a kitmutgar—that would have been a saving if you like!” And as the steaming tea came through the window and the price went out, “I don’t think it’s so very much,” said young Browne.

That is the way they began. The precise number and extent of the economies effected by the tiffin-basket will never be recorded, but I believe they drank the champagne.

I doubt either your information or your gratification at being told that they changed at Mogulsarai. Mogulsarai is on the map, but you will not find it there because you will not look—which I do not say censoriously; it is quite enough that Anglo-Indians should be obliged to remember the names of such places. They are curiously profane, with their crowded little roofs and their mosque-towers; and they are very hot. The Brownes’ train lay on a side-track baking, as they entered it, four coolies bearing the tiffin-basket. The place grilled almost silently, black and white and grey with converging railway lines encumbered with trucks; an engine moved about snorting painfully, and nearly naked men ran in and out under the carriages smiting the wheels. They rolled out of the place and on for an hour, then over the bridge of the Ganges and past some old fortifications, and out of the windows they saw Benares, Benares the impressively filthy, trailing her skirts and her sins in her great sacred river, but fair, very fair indeed, with the morning sunlight on the faces of all her gods, and the morning sky behind the minarets of Aurungzebe.

It was the middle of the night before they reached Lucknow, where they awoke thirsty. A wide, lighted, orderly station platform, railway guards walking about in white duck and gold buttons, a single dissipated-looking little subaltern promenading with his hands in his pockets. There was no ice, and young Browne sleepily abused the first railway official that passed the window. “A big station like this, and the ice allowed to run out in such weather! The thing ought to be reported.”

“It’s in weather the like o’ this, sir, that the ice diz run out,” suggested the guard. “Tickets, sir!”

Lucknow, with her tragedy still upon her lips, her rugged walls still gaping in the white moonlight up yonder, her graves still tenderly remembered—and the Brownes’ bitter complaint of Lucknow was that they found no ice there! Ah, little Brownes! I write this of you more in sorrow than in anger; for I know a soldier’s wife whose husband’s name you might have read graven on a Lucknow tablet in the moonlight that night, and when I remember all that she has told me, I find it grievous that you should even have been aware that there was no ice in Lucknow!

In the morning they were rolling through a lightsome country, all gay fields and gravelly river-beds, with billows of sunlit air coming in at the windows, an hour from Saharanpore. A blue hill stood like a cloud on the edge of the horizon, the Brownes descried it simultaneously and laughed aloud together. It was so long since they had seen any elevation greater than their own roof, or a palm-tree, or an umbrella. They got out at Saharanpore, and Kasi got out at Saharanpore, and the bundles and the boxes and the bags got out at Saharanpore. They were all as dirty as they could possibly be, but the people who did not get out at Saharanpore looked at them enviously, for they had the prospect of being dirtier still. Arrived at the place of the dâk-bungalow, and the solace of unlimited ablutions, Mrs. Browne could not imagine in what respect she had ever found a dâk-bungalow wanting. Could anything be more delightful than that they should have it entirely to themselves! Between her first dâk-bungalow and this one Mrs. Browne had made steps towards the solitary Calcutta ideal. On this occasion she pulled down all the chicks,[^[130]] and told the solitary box-wallah who had outspread his wares in the veranda against her arrival to “Jao, jeldi!”

[130]. Venetian blinds.

Here they tarried till the following day, when the blowing of a trumpet aroused them at what they considered an excessively early hour of the morning. It was their trumpet; they had bought the exclusive right to it for twelve hours. It belonged to the dâk-gharry that was to take them from Saharanpore to Dehra, “a distance,” as any guide-book will tell you, of “forty-two miles.” If you could see a dâk-gharry you would probably inquire with Mrs. Browne if there wasn’t any other way of going. There is no other way of going. There are large numbers of places in India to which there is no other way of going. And if one had answered you thus, you would have said that if you had known that you wouldn’t have come. Mrs. Browne said that when she saw the travelling-carriage of this Orient land of dreamy luxury, but she didn’t particularly mean it, and neither would you.