MRS. LOVITT.
The night was propitiously and comfortably cold. As they drove home from tennis at Mrs. Jack Lovitt’s, muffled up in the striped flannel jackets with which Calcutta protects itself from the inclemency of the weather after tennis, Helen declared, with the kerosene stove in anticipation, that it was really almost piercing. “It’s a pity, though, George,” she said regretfully, “that we were quite in such a hurry about buying the stove, for I was telling Mrs. Lovitt about it, and she said she was so sorry she didn’t know we wanted one—we could have had theirs, and it’s in perfect order, for ten rupees.”
“Oh, next cold weather,” returned her lord, “we’ll have the pleasure of selling ours for ten rupees instead. It comes to much the same thing, you see.”
It is almost impossible to persuade a sahib of Calcutta to take his domestic accounts seriously. If his natural proclivities are in that direction, he is usually not to be respected.
The Brownes had a hump for dinner, and a hump costs a rupee and several annas. Nevertheless they hurried through it, the more speedily to avail themselves of their unaccustomed luxury in kerosene, to “cluster round the cheerful blaze,” as George Browne put it, which stood solemnly between two long windows in the drawing-room awaiting a match. Entering, they found the bearer, the kitmutgar and the mallie kneeling about it, with varied expressions of concern, the machine still grim and black, in the midst of a pervasive odour of kerosene. The Brownes felt palled. It was not what they had expected.
“Bilcul na hona sucta,”[[81]] said the bearer, rising and surveying the thing as if it were an obdurate Hindu deity.
[81]. Simply it may not be!
“What does he say?” inquired Mrs. Browne. Mrs. Browne was always inquiring what the bearer said. Mr. Browne was rapidly becoming a peripatetic hand-book of Hindustani. He implored his wife to have a munshi,[[82]] and Helen thought it would be delightful but sternly declined on the score of economy. So young Browne had no surcease.
[82]. Instructor.