“What did Sir William get his K for?” asked Mrs. Macdonald. “I’ve forgotten.”
“For trimming up Calcutta the time some Royalty or other came out. He made a very good municipal milliner, got out a most unusual amount of bunting. They had to recognise it. The man who drained the place got nothing, so far as I remember.”
“George, you don’t like him,” Mrs. Browne remarked astutely.
“Oh, yes, I do, for two months in the year, when he likes me. They occur in the rains. Then he’s passionately fond of everybody who will speak to him. For the rest of the time he’s exclusively occupied with Sir William Peete and a few other people of similar standing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Macdonald.
“About August and September,” young Browne continued suavely, “Sir William comes out in boils—comes out copiously. He gets ’em on his neck and on his face and in the middle of his forehead. He becomes an awful spectacle. He fawns on his fellow-beings then. As soon as they leave him he returns to the sublime consideration of the social eminence of Sir William Peete. Boils are the only known method of reminding him that he belongs to the human race, so Providence takes it.”
Mr. Macdonald came up at this moment and carried off his wife, leaving these young Brownes alone on the sofa in the corner of the room, looking on. They seemed to themselves as they sat there to have drifted into some tranquil place from which they could watch the steady current passing, the current that changes every year and yet is always the same, of English life in India. The old, old ambitions, the stereotyped political aims, the worn competitions, the social appraisements—how they have repeated themselves through what illustrations of the great British average, even in my time! How little more than illustrations the men and women have been, as one looks back, pictures in a magic lantern, shadows on a wall! Good illustrations, though sharp reflections of the narrow conditions they lived in, solemn warnings to those that are so eager to come after, if only the glamour of India left people with eyes to see. How gay they were and how luxurious, and how important in their little day! How gorgeous were the attendants of their circumstance, on the box with a crest upon their turbans—there is a firm in Calcutta that supplies beautiful crests. And now—let me think!—some of them in Circular Road Cemetery—cholera, fever, heat—apoplexy; some of them under the Christian daisies of England—probably abscess of the liver; the rest grey-faced Cheltenham pensioners, dull and obscure, with uncertain tempers and an acquired detestation of the climate of Great Britain. And soon, very soon, long before the Brownes appear in print, the Perth Macintyres also will have gone over to the great majority who have forgotten their Hindustani and regret their khansamahs. Our brief day too will have died in a red sunset behind clustering palms, and all its little doings and graspings and pushings, all its pretty scandals and surmises and sensations, will echo further and further back into the night.
Of course the Brownes did not moralize thus unpardonably. Why should they? They sat in their corner and looked at the brilliant scene before them, and young Browne talked with more or less good-natured cynicism about everybody he saw, and Helen quite failed to understand why George should take such ridiculous views of things. And by and by they went down the broad stairs, past the brown men that stood aside in their garments of crimson and gold, and the Browne’s ticca-gharry rolled home with as light-hearted a sahib and memsahib as left Government House that night. As they had forgotten all about refreshments it was perhaps fortunate that they were able to find two mutton cutlets cold from the hands of Kali Bagh and some biscuits and marmalade, when they arrived, which afforded them keen satisfaction. They could still, poor dears, with the solace of a cold cutlet enjoy seeing the world go by.