The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

CHAPTER XIII.

INDIA is a country of ameliorations. The punkah is an amelioration. So is the second-rate theatrical company from Australia, notwithstanding its twang. So, for those who like it, is the custard-apple. It is our complaint that our ameliorations are too numerous and too obvious. It is painful to us that they should obscure everything else in the vision of the travelling public, and suggest themselves as the main facts of an idyllic existence which runs sweetly among them to the tinkle of the peg and the salaams of a loyal and affectionate subject race—which they do. When the travelling public goes back and represents this to be the case in the columns of the Home Press we do not like it. The effect is that we are embittered, and the single one of us who is clever enough writes the ballad of “Paget M. P.” This is natural and proper. We are none of us constituted to see our trifling advantages magnified, and our tragic miseries minimised, especially in the papers, without a sense of the unpardonable obtuseness of the human race. I do not intend to be drawn into personal anathema in this chapter though. It will always be so. The travelling public will continue to arrive and tarry during the months of November, December, January, and February, and to rejoice in the realisation of all they have ever read in the Sunday School books. The travelling public will continue to prefer its own impressions. In British journalism and Great British Parliamentary opinion there will always be a stodgy impracticability which the returned Anglo-Indian can never be strong enough to influence. We are a little leaven, but we cannot leaven the whole lump.

We die too soon. Besides, it is easier and more comfortable to philosophise when one is going home next hot weather for good. I am content, as I write, to think of my ameliorations even with gratitude, and will only say what so many have said before me, that a protracted residence under ameliorations is necessary to the full understanding of how grievous a thing an ameliorated existence may be.

The Brownes were not contented with what Nature does for us in this way in the cold weather—green peas and cauliflowers, red sunsets, oranges and guavas at twopence a dozen. Ever since the evening they dined with Mr. Sayter they had been of opinion that the only people whose existence was properly ameliorated in Calcutta were the people with the joy of a fireplace in their houses. As a family young Browne declared they were entitled to a fireside—it was monstrous that they should lack such an elemental feature of the domestic habit. True they had a “siggaree,” a funnel-shaped pot of charcoal, like everybody else—the kitmutgar made toast with it and the bearer dried damp sheets over it—but one couldn’t be comforted at the risk of asphyxiation, and besides, it smelled. There was nothing else, and the Brownes felt that they could not accustom themselves to gather in a semicircle round a tall Japanese vase, or a blank space in a white wall fifteen feet high, for anything like cheerful discourse. They considered that the enduring bliss which they seemed to have taken with the house lacked this one thing only. It was impossible to persuade the Spirit of the Hearth to make himself comfortable in a flower-pot.

It was also impossible to build a chimney—their local tenure being of that brief and uncertain kind which is popular in Calcutta. A long lease is not desirable when a neighbourhood may develop typhoid any day, when beams may take to dropping any night, when one may want six months’ leave just at a season which is unpropitious for sub-letting. All these conditions obtain in Calcutta, and any of them might be the Brownes’! Besides, a chimney would cost rupees incalculable.

There were alternatives, however. The Brownes went to the ironmonger’s to look at them. They were disposed to take an alternative if it could be had at a moderate price. Most of those they saw were connected with a length of stove pipe which went through the wall, some of them were decoratively tiled, some involved a marble mantel, and they all required an outlay which, for a matter of pure sentiment, seemed large to the Brownes.

“For forty-nine weeks in the year,” remarked young Browne gloomily, “it would have to be stored.”

“Wouldn’t it rust?” inquired Helen.

“Inches!”

“I don’t think we can depend on being able to make a new hole in the wall every time we move,” Mrs. Browne suggested. “The landlord mightn’t like it.”