“If we took it,” he returned implacably, “within three months two funerals would occur in this neighbourhood: one would be yours and one would be mine. I don’t speak of the mortality among the servants. I’ll just ask the durwan[[15]] how many sahibs have died here lately. And he asked the durwan in his own tongue.”
[15]. Doorkeeper.
“He says three in the last family, and it was the ‘carab bimar,’ which is the bad sickness or the cholera, my dear. What a fool of a durwan to leave in charge of an empty house! If you still think you’d like to have it, Helen, we can inquire——”
“Oh, no!” Helen cried. “Let us go away at once!”
“I was going to say—at the undertaker’s for additional accommodation. But perhaps we had better not take it. Let’s try for something clean.”
I consider that the Brownes were very lucky in the end. They found a house in a suburban locality where a number of Europeans had already survived for several years, at a rent they thought they could afford by careful managing. It turned its face aside from the street and looked towards the south; sitting on its roof, they could see far across those many-laned jungle suburbs where the office baboo[[16]] lives, and whither the sahibs go only on horseback. The palm fronds waved thick there, fringing the red sky duskily when the sun went down. The compound was neglected, but had sanitary possibilities; there was enough grass for a tennis-court and enough space for a garden. A low line of godowns ran round two sides of it, where the servants might live and the pony. Palms and plantains grew in the corners. It was very tropical, and it was inclosed by a wall coloured to match the house, in the cracks of which sprouted every green thing. The house itself was pink, which Helen declared her one disappointment: she preferred the yellow ones so much. Inside it was chiefly light green, stencilled in yellow by way of dadoes, which must have been trying, though Helen never admitted it. There were other peculiarities. The rafters curved downwards and the floor sloped toward the middle and in various other directions. In several places trailing decorations in mud had been arranged by white ants. None of the doors had locks or bolts; they all opened inwards and were fastened from the inside with movable bars. The outermost room had twelve French windows; the innermost room had no windows and was quite dark when its doors were shut. Irregular holes appeared at intervals over the wall for the accommodation of punkah-ropes, each tenant having fancied a different seat outside for his punkah-wallah. Two or three small apartments upstairs in the rear of the house had corners divided off by partitions about six inches high. These were bath-rooms, arranged on the simple principle of upsetting the bath-tub on the floor and letting the water run out of a hole in the wall inside the partition. Most of the windows had glass in them, but not all, and some were protected by iron bars, the domestic conditions inside having been originally Aryan and jealous.
[16]. Native clerk.
I do not wish it to be supposed from these details, that the Brownes were subjected to exceptional hardships, or took up housekeeping under particularly obscure circumstances. On the contrary, so few people with their income in Calcutta could afford to live in houses at all, that young Browne had his name put up on the gatepost with considerable pride and circumstance. “George W. Browne,” in white letters on a black ground, in the middle of an oblong wooden tablet, according to the custom of the place. The fact being that the characteristics of the Brownes’ house are common, in greater or less degree, to every house in Calcutta. I venture to say that even the tub of a Member of Council, on five thousand rupees a month, is discharged through a hole in the wall.
Perhaps their landlord was more or less unique. The landlord common to Calcutta is a prosperous Jew, a brocaded Rajah, at least an unctuous baboo fattened upon dhol-bat and chutney. The Brownes’ landlord wore a pair of dirty white trousers and a lean and hungry look, his upper parts being clad in yards of soiled cotton, in which he also muffled up his head. He followed them about the place in silent humility—they took him for a coolie, and young Browne treated his statements with brevity, turning a broad British back upon him. I don’t think this enhanced the rent; I fancy it would have been equally extortionate in any case. But it was only when Mr. Browne asked where the landlord was to be found that he proudly disclosed his identity, with apologetic reference, however, to the state of his attire. He said that his house had been vacant for many months, and that he had just spent a thousand rupees in repairing it. His prospective tenant accepted the first of these statements, and received the second with open laughter. They closed the bargain, however, and as the landlord occupied an adjoining bustee, and was frequently to be met in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Browne was for some time uncertain as to whether she ought to bow to him or not.
