MRS. BROWNE WAS FOR SOME TIME UNCERTAIN WHETHER SHE OUGHT TO BOW TO HIM OR NOT.
CHAPTER VI.
THERE are a number of ways of furnishing a house in Calcutta. I, who have known the ins and outs of the place for twenty odd years, have learned the unsatisfactoriness of all of them, and am prepared to explain. You can be elaborately done up by a fine belati upholsterer, who will provide you with spindle-legged chairs in velvet brocade, and æsthetic window curtains with faded pink roses on them, everything only about six months behind the London shops, with prices however considerably in advance. This way is popular with Viceroys. Or you may go to the ordinary shops and get Westbourne Grove sorts of things only slightly depreciated as to value and slightly enhanced as to cost, paying cash—a way usually adopted by people of no imagination. Or you may attend the auction sale that speeds the departure of some home-going memsahib, and buy her effects for a song: but that must be at the beginning of the hot weather, when the migration of memsahibs occurs. Or you can go to Bow Bazar, where all things are of honourable antiquity, and there purchase pathetic three-legged memorials of old Calcutta, springless oval-backed sofas that once upheld the ponderous dignity of the East India Company, tarnished mirrors which may have reflected the wanton charms of Madame Le Grand. Baboos sell them, taking knowledge only of their outward persons and their present utility; and they stand huddled in little hot low-roofed shops, intimate with the common teak-wood things of yesterday, condescending to gaudy Japanese vases and fly-blown coloured prints and cracked lamps and mismatched crockery. Bow Bazar is not always bad and it is always cheap, granting some previous experience of baboo morals, and the proprietors charge you nothing for the poetry of your bargain. They set it off, perhaps, against necessary repairs. This is not a popular way, as the baboos will testify, but it is a pleasing one, and it is the way the Brownes took in the main, supplementing these plenishings with a few from the China Bazar, where a multitude of the almond-eyed sell you wicker chairs and tables.
It is a divinely simple thing to furnish a house in India. It must be cleaned and it must be matted. This is done in a certain number of hours while you sleep, or ride, or walk, or take your pleasure, by a God of Immediate Results, whom you colloquially dub the “bearer,” working through an invisible agency of coolies. Then you may go and live in it with two chairs and a table if you like, and people will only think you have a somewhat immoderate hatred of hangings and furniture and other obstacles to the free circulation of air. This you might easily possess to an extreme, and nobody will consider you any the worse for it. I should have added an “almirah” to the list of your necessaries, however. You would be criticised if you had not one or more almirahs. An almirah is a wardrobe, unless it contains shelves instead of hooks, and then it is a tall cupboard with doors. Almirahs, therefore, receive all your personal property, from a dressing-gown to a box of sardines, and it is not possible to live decently or respectably in India without them. But the rest is at your good pleasure, and nobody will expect you to have anything but plated forks and bazar china. Outward circumstance lies not in these things, but in the locality of your residence and the size of your compound. If you wish to add to your dignity, buy another pony; if you wish to enhance it, let the pony be a horse and the horse a Waler. But think not to aggrandize yourself in the eyes of your fellow Anglo-Indians by treasures of Chippendale or of Sèvres, by rare tapestries or modern masters, or even a piano. Dust and the mosquitoes and the monsoon war against all these things; but chiefly our inconstancy to the country. We are in conscious exile here for twenty or twenty-five years, and there is a general theory that it is too hot and too expensive to make the exile any more than comfortable. Beside which, do we not pass a quarter of our existence in the cabins of the P. and O.? But I must not digress from the Brownes’ experiences to my own opinions.
The Brownes’ ticca-gharry turned into Bow Bazar out of Chowringhee, out of Calcutta’s pride among her thoroughfares, broad and clean, and facing the wide green Maidan, lined with European shops, and populous with the gharries[[17]] of the sahibs, into the narrow crookedness of the native city, where the proprietors are all Baboo This, or Sheik That, who sit upon the thresholds of their establishments smoking the peaceful hubble-bubble, and waiting until it please Allah or Lakshmi to send them a customer. Very manifold are the wants that Bow Bazar provides for, wants of the sahib, of the “kala sahib,”[[18]] of its own swarming population. You can buy a suit of clothes there—oh, very cheap—or a seer of rice; all sorts of publications in English, Bengali, and Urdu; a beautiful oil painting for a rupee, a handful of sticky native sweetmeats for a pice. You can have your beard shaved, your horoscope cast, your photograph taken, all at a rate which will deeply astonish you. There is a great deal of noise in the Bow Bazar, coming chiefly from strenuous brown throats, a great deal of dust, a great number and variety of odours. But there the sahiblok, in the midst of luxury, can enjoy economy—and you can’t have everything.
[17]. Carriages.
[18]. “Black sahibs,” i.e. Eurasians.
The sellers of sahib’s furniture have the largest shops in Bow Bazar, and the heaviest stock; they are important among the merchants; they often speak a little English. The baboo to whom the Brownes first addressed themselves had this accomplishment, and he wore the dual European garment of white duck, and a coat. He was a short baboo, very black, with a round face so expressive of a sense of humour that young Browne remarked to Helen privately that he was sure the fellow had some European blood in him, in spite of the colour—no pukka Bengali ever grinned like that!
“What iss it, sir, that it iss your wish to buy?” he inquired. He spoke so rapidly that his words seemed the output of one breath; yet they were perfectly distinct. It is the manner of the native who speaks English, and the East Indians have borrowed it from him.