“But, George—all the people who came to the wedding?”
“Out of compliment to the Macdonalds. Yes, they’ll probably call—in their own good time. They’re very busy making other visits just now, my dear. We mustn’t allow ourselves to forget that we’re popularly known to be living on five hundred a month. Society bows to five hundred a month—with possibilities of advance—but it doesn’t hurry about calling. You see there are so many people with superior claims—fifteen hundred, three thousand a month. It’s an original place in that respect—Calcutta. The valuation of society is done by Government. Most people arrive here invoiced at so much, the amount usually rises as they stay, but they’re always kept carefully ticketed and published, and Calcutta accepts or rejects them, religiously and gratefully, at their market rates. It’s rather an uninteresting social basis—especially from our point of view—but it has the advantage of simplicity. You have a solemn official right to expect exactly what you can pay for.”
With which treble cynicism young Browne received a bit of mignonette in his button-hole, kissed his wife, and departed. They were not really much concerned, these Brownes, about the conduct and theories of their fellow-beings at this time. Society was homogeneous, a human mass whose business it was to inhabit other parts of Calcutta, and do it as unobtrusively as possible. Even as a subject for conversation, society was perfunctory, and rather dull. It was a thing apart, it did not menace them yet, or involve them, or tempt them. They had not arrived at a point when anything it chose to concern itself with was important to them. It is charming, this indifference, while it lasts, but it is not intended to endure.
“It is certainly pretty,” Helen remarked in a tone of conviction, looking round her little drawing-room. “It’s charming!” And it was. The walls were tinted a delicate grey, and the windows were all hung with Indian saris, pale yellow and white. The fresh matted floor was bespread in places with blue and white dhurries, and a big beflowered Japanese vase in a corner held a spiky palm. There were books and pictures—perhaps neither of the sort to bear the last analysis, but that at a glance didn’t matter—and bits of old china, and all Aunt Plovtree’s crewel work, and two or three vases running over with roses. There were some comfortable wicker chairs from the China bazar, gay with cushions after Liberty, and there were all the little daintinesses that accompany the earlier stages of matrimony. Through the windows came in bars and patches the sunlight of high noon, and the rustling of the palms, and the cooing of the doves in the veranda.
“It hasn’t much character,” said Mrs. Browne, with her head at a critical angle, “but it’s charming.”
The fact is that it expressed cleanliness and the Brownes’ income. I fear that Mrs. Browne belonged to that very numerous class of ladies in whose opinion character is a thing to arrange, just a matter to be attended to like the ordering of dinner. If you had asked her what particular character she wanted her room to express I think she would have been nonplussed. Or she might have said, Oh, she wanted it to be “artistic,” with a little smile of defiance which would have been an evasion, not to say an equivocation of the matter. Helen Browne was not “artistic,” and why she should have wanted her drawing-room to express what she did not understand is one of those enigmas common to the sex, as it flowers from day to day into new modern perplexities.
Perhaps it was much more charming of her to be what she was. It led her, at all events, into no burlesques. Nothing could be less extravagant, for instance, than that she should presently occupy herself, with amused concern and mock despair, in turning over a collection of young Browne’s garments with a view to improving them. The bearer brought them to her in a basket, laid them deprecatingly at her feet, and retired, doubtless thinking that though the memsahib might be troublesome in various ways, she had her advantages. She would perhaps destroy the sahib’s partiality for old clothes. He himself had struggled with these ancient socks and shirts a long and fruitless time, had cobbled them until his soul revolted, especially when the sahib, observing the result of his labour, had laughed deep laughs. The sahib was in no wise stingy—he would give new harness to the pony and new kupra[[73]] to the syce, and the bazar was full of beautiful garments for the apparelling of sahibs, yet persistently and without sense of dishonour he enrobed himself daily thus! It was a painful, incomprehensible eccentricity. Now, perhaps, there would be a new order of things, and a chance for a little reasonable dusturi.[[74]] And Kasi spent the rest of the morning discussing contracts in the bazar.
[73]. Clothes.
[74]. Profit.
To his wife, however, young Browne was obliged to be explanatory, and even apologetic, upon this point. He had to tell her it was a way they had in India of sticking to their old things—it was only the most hideous swells that ever got anything new. You couldn’t keep up with the fashion in India anyhow—the thing was to be superior to it altogether. Oh, she wouldn’t have him discard that hat; he’d had that hat four years, and he was attached to it. If he might be allowed to keep it another year or two the shape would very likely “come in” again. Surely he wasn’t inexorably condemned to a new coat. It would take years to make another as comfortable as that, and it was only a bit ragged in the cuffs. But Helen was inflexible over the shortcomings of her husband’s wardrobe, as it is the first duty of the ladies of Anglo-India to be, and young Browne shortly paid one penalty of matrimony in being reclad at vast expense, and suffered much contumely in consequence from his bachelor contemporaries. This morning Helen smiled over her basket with content and entertainment.