[4]. Native beds.
[5]. Little breakfast.
After chota hazri they went for walks, long walks, stepping off the dâk-bungalow veranda, as Helen said, into India as it was before ever the Sahibs came to rule over it. For they could turn their backs upon the long straight bank of the railway and wander for miles in any direction over a country that seemed as empty as if it had just been made. As far as they could see it rolled in irregular plains and low broken ridges and round hillocks all covered with short, dry grass, to the horizon, and there, very far away, the gray outlines of an odd mountain or two stood against the sky. A few sarl trees were scattered here and there in clumps, all their lower branches stolen for firewood, and wherever a mud hut squatted behind a hillock there grew a tall castor oil bean tree or two, and some plantains. There were tracks of cattle, there was an occasional tank that had evidently been dug out by men, and there were footpaths making up and over the hillocks and across the stony beds of the empty nullahs;[[6]] but it was only in the morning or in the evening that they met any of the brown people that lived thereabouts. Then they came in little straggling strings and bands, looking at these strangers from under inverted baskets, appearing from nowhere and disappearing in vague and crooked directions. Helen’s husband told her that they were coolies working in coal mines on the side of the railway. There were crows, too, and vultures—the crows were familiar and impertinent, the vultures sailed high and took no notice of them—and that was all. They went forth and they came back again. Helen made a few primitive sketches in her husband’s note-book. I do not think she did the country justice, but her sketches seemed to me to indicate the character of her impressions of it. They went forth and they came back again, always to a meal—breakfast, or tiffin, or dinner, as the case might be. Helen liked dinner best, because then the lamps were lighted, and she had an excuse for changing her dress. They partook of these meals with three-tined steel forks, and knives worn down to dagger points, according to the unfathomable custom of the mussalchi.[[7]] The courses consisted of variations upon an original leg of mutton which occurred at one of their earlier repasts, served upon large cracked plates with metal reservoirs of hot water under them, and embellished by tinned peas of a suspicious pallor. And always there was moorghy[[8]]—moorghy boiled and fried and roasted, moorghy cutlets, moorghy curry, moorghy stew. “Nice old person,” said Helen, the first time it appeared, “he has given us fowl! Dear old patriarch.” “He may or may not be a dear old patriarch,” George responded, fixing grim eyes upon the bird, “but he is tolerably sure to have the characteristics of one. You aren’t acquainted with the indigenous moorghy yet, Helen. You regard him in the light of a luxury, as if he were a Christian fowl. He isn’t a luxury out here upon my word. He stalks up and down all over India improving his muscular tissues, he doesn’t disdain to pick from a drain, he costs threepence to buy. He is an inferior creature still. It may be a prejudice of mine, but if there’s any other form of sustenance to be had I don’t eat moorghy.”
[6]. Stream beds.
[7]. Dishwasher.
[8]. Fowl.
“He tastes,” said Mrs. Browne after experiment, “like an ‘indestructible’ picture-book.” It was an unwarrantable simile upon Mrs. Browne’s part, since she could not possibly remember the flavour of the literature she used to suck as an infant; but her verdict was never reversed, and so one Indian staple passed out of the domestic experiences of the Brownes.
These two young people had unlimited conversation, and one of them a great many more cigars than were good for him. So far as I have been able to discover, by way of diversion they had nothing else. It had not occurred to either of them that the equipment of a honeymoon required any novels; and the dâk-bungalow was not provided with current fiction. They covered an extensive range of subjects, therefore, as they thought, exhaustively. As a matter of fact, their conversation was so superficial in its nature, and led to such trivial conclusions, that I do not propose to repeat it. They were very unanimous always. Young Browne declared that if his views had habitually received the unqualified assent which Helen gave them he would have been a member of the Viceroy’s Council years before. They could not say enough in praise of the air of Patapore, and when the wind rose it blew them into an ecstasy. Frequently they discussed the supreme advantages of a dâk-bungalow for a honeymoon, and then it was something like this on the afternoon of the third day.
“The perfect freedom of it, you know—the being able to smoke with one’s legs on the table——”
“Yes, dear. I love to see you doing it. It’s so—it’s so home-like!” (I think I see the Rev. Peachey with his legs upon the table!) Then, with sudden animation, “Do you know, George, I think I heard boxes coming into the next room!”