So does all Calcutta, except the baboos. The ticca is an uncompromising shuttered wooden box with a door in each side and a seat across each end. Its springs are primitive, its angles severe. When no man has hired the ticca, the driver slumbers along the roof and the syce by the wayside. When the ticca is in action, the driver sits on the top, loosely connected with a bundle of hay which forms the casual, infrequent déjeuner of the horses. The syce stands behind, and if the back shutters are open he is frequently malodorous. There may be some worldly distinction between the syce and the driver, but it is imperceptible to the foreign eye. I have never been able to decide which is the more completely disreputable of the two. Their rags flutter in competition. There is more variety among the horses. They are large and gaunt and speckled. They are small and lean and of one colour. They are fly-bitten, unkempt, knock-kneed, vicious, and nasty. They have bad and vulgar habits. Some of them have seen Australia and better times, but it is not evident in their manners. Some of them have been country-bred for so many generations that the original animal has almost disappeared, leaving a stricken and nondescript little representative that might more fitly be harnessed to a wheelbarrow, if wheelbarrows lent themselves to harness. The ticca-gharry horse is always ridiculous when he is not pitiful; his gait under pressure is a gallop, and his equipment is made out in places with pieces of rope and other expediencies. The baboo loves the ticca-gharry because the baboo knows not mercy and gets a long ride, yea and seven of his kind with him, for threepence. Calcutta people hate it for reasons which are perhaps obvious. And for another. The ticca-gharry directly aids and abets Government in its admirable system for the valuation of society, represented, as has been seen, by the Accountant-General. A person who habitually drives in a ticca-gharry is not likely on the face of it to be in receipt of more than a very limited income, and is thus twice gazetted as not being a particularly desirable person to know. It is evident therefore that when the Brownes decided to go to the Viceregal Drawing-Room in a ticca they bowed to circumstances.
“Only don’t get one, George,” said Helen, plaintively, “with a pink rosette on its ear.”
There were a few, a very few, other ticca-gharries in the crowd of vehicles that blocked the street leading to Government House, and presently they all found themselves unaccountably in the rear of the line that was made to preserve order and prevent aggression. The stately landaus, the snug broughams and the smart victorias rolled naturally into their places in front. The British policeman whether in Hyde Park or Imperial India, knows his duty. So that Mr. and Mrs. Browne were not the first who alighted under the wide porch and made their way with more trepidation than they allowed to appear, into the crimson-carpeted precincts of the Burra Lord Sahib.
“Where shall I meet you after—after it’s over, George?” asked Helen coming out of the cloak-room, very pretty in her soft white silk and the fresh Wiltshire colour that showed in her cheeks and proclaimed her newly “out.”
“Oh I’ll find you—I’ll be waiting with the other men outside the door. Good-bye, dear. Don’t be nervous!”
“I am nervous,” said Mrs. Browne. “But I don’t propose to show it. Good-bye!” and Mrs. Browne followed in the wake of other shimmering trains that were being marshalled from corridor to corridor on their way to the Throne Room, where Their Excellencies, doubtless very bored, were returning bows to the curtseys of all feminine Calcutta. How very fine those trains were, some of them. How elaborate and marvellous—how effective! And indeed they had come forth straight from Bond-street, many of them, for this very occasion, and therefore, why not? What use, pray, in being wives and daughters of thousands a month in the land of exile, if measures could not be sacredly kept in England and “decent things” got out at least once a year! And how the trains of thousands a month rejoiced in their contrast with others representing a smaller tulub. I do not speak of Helen’s, for hers was a flowing credit to the Canbury dressmaker and quite up to date, but of gowns of an elder fashion and another day that showed themselves with delightful naïveté among the glittering creations of the season. They had seen, some of them, a great many December dissipations; they had been carefully packed away through a great many hot weathers and monsoons; they smelt of camphor; there was a quaintness in their very creases. One or two of them even told of trousseaux, Helen thought, that must have come to India in the old sailing days, round Cape Horn. Doubtless this new little memsahib felt amused in her trim feathers, but I have worn creases and smelled of camphor myself in my day, and I could have told her that with five sons at college and a daughter at school in England, one becomes necessarily indifferent to the fashions, even if the daughter does spend the holidays with an aunt in the country, free of expense. But of course one can’t forecast one’s own camphor and creases, and Helen Browne may never have any.
The dames who waited or who didn’t wait their turn at the various barriers that regulated the road to Viceroyalty were chiefly imported English ladies of the usual pale Anglo-Indian type and pretty, either intrinsically or with the prettiness that comes of being well spoilt. Most of them had curtseyed formally to Their Excellencies every December for several years, yet they were quite as happily a-tremble as the brides or the débutantes—the brides of next season.
“I suppose,” Helen overheard one little woman remark with animation, “Their Excellencies won’t bite!” But she continued to behave as if she thought they would. There were also a few ladies who had not been imported. These were noticeable for a slight and not unbecoming Oriental duskiness under the powder, an unusual softness and blackness of eye, and an oddity of inflection that struck Helen as so pretty and “foreign.” These ladies usually wore the feathers in their hair—the three feathers that compliment Royalty—of the same hue as their gowns, pink or blue or perhaps yellow, which was doubtless a survival of some lavish and tropical taste for colour that may have been peculiarly their own. The Ranees and the Maharanees made no attempt to subdue the gorgeousness of their natural instincts, but showed undisguisedly in purple and gold and eccentric gems, disposed according to the fashion that best liked them; and it was Helen’s lot to proceed into the Viceregal presence immediately behind a Mohammedan lady of enormous proportions, who represented matrimonially a great Nawab, and did it wholly in crimson satin.
Their Excellencies stood upon a daïs, near enough to the Throne chair to suggest their connection with it. There were two stately lines of the Body-Guard, imperturbable under the majesty of their turbans; there were five or six A.-D.-C.’s, and secretaries in uniform with an expression of solemn self-containment under their immature moustaches. And there were, gathered together at Their Excellencies’ right, the ladies of the Private Entrée. These ladies were the wives of gentlemen whose interests were the special care of Government. It was advisable therefore that their trains should not be stepped on, nor their tempers disarranged; and they had been received an hour earlier, with more circumstance, possibly to slower music, different portals being thrown open for the approach of their landaus—they all approached in landaus. If you stay in India long enough, Government will see that you get the Private Entrée before you go, as a rule. That is if you are a person of any perseverance, and have objected with sufficient stolidity to getting out of anybody else’s way. This is not invariably the case, however, or John Perth Macintyre, my husband, with his success in tea and the knowledge of Indian commerce he has got in the last twenty years, would have been in the Viceroy’s Council long ago, and Mrs. Macintyre’s landau approaching with proper distinction in consequence, which it never has. I have no objection whatever to this coming out in print, for everybody knows that we wouldn’t take it now. Moreover I daresay it is one reason why I always notice that the ladies of the Private Entrée are disposed to giggle slightly and otherwise forget the caste of Vere de Vere, as they look on upon the curtseys that come after. On this occasion, though Helen Browne was much too nervous to observe it, they were politely convulsed—of course with cast-down eyes and strained lips, and in the manner of good society—at the genuflections of the Mohammedan lady in red satin. I have no doubt one wouldn’t observe this to the same extent if one were amongst them.
When it was over it had been very simple. The first A.-D.-C. had handed Helen’s card to the second A.-D.-C., and so on, until it reached the Military Secretary who stood at the end, and he had read distinctly aloud from it the perfectly inoffensive description, “Mrs. George Browne.” Whereat Mrs. George Browne had gone down several unsteady inches first before one Excellency, and then before the other, not at all able to observe the kindly smile with which they encouraged her unreliable equilibrium. After which she followed the other ladies whose ordeal was over, with hurrying footsteps and much relief through sundry tall pillared apartments to the corridor where Mr. George Browne awaited her, and took his arm with the greatest satisfaction she had yet experienced in its protection.