And then opposite, across the weedy road and the stagnant ditch, a riotous Rajah resided, in a wonderful castellated place with four or five abandoned acres around it. The Rajah was very splendid and important. He had a slouching guard at his gate with a gun, who probably bullied the dhoby; and when he went abroad in the evenings, four badly uniformed horsemen, and no less, pranced uncertainly behind his carriage. The Rajah gave entertainments to European gentlemen of circumstance, whereat I do not think any single variety of food or drink procurable in Calcutta was omitted; but ladies did not participate, except, of course, those who contributed to the entertainment—the ladies of the nautch, or those of a stray theatrical company whose performances the Rajah fancied. In return the Rajah was invited to evening parties at Government House, where he appeared in a turban and diamonds, supremely oiled and scented, stood about in corners with his hands behind his back, and never for an instant dreamed in his disdainful Hindu soul of eating at the Viceroy’s supper-table. At the end of the cold weather he went back to his own state, where he sat on the floor and hatched treason against the British with both majesty and comfort. In the evening his domain was dotted with the cooking-fires of his people, who made a sort of tented field of it. The wind blew the smoke across the Brownes’ compound, causing young Browne to use language uncomplimentary to Rajahs, and that was all they ever had to do with this one.
I mention the local isolation of these young people because it is typical of Calcutta, where nobody by any chance ever leans over anybody else’s garden gate. Doubtless this has its advantages—they are probably official—but Helen, not being official, found it cramping.
There was always the garden, though; she had that much liberty. The garden had begun with the Brownes, it was a contemporary success. There had been desolation, but you have heard how they engaged a mallie. Desolation fled before the mallie by daily degrees, though he was seldom seen in pursuit of it. When gardeners work in Christendom, this one sought repose and the balmy hubble-bubble, or bathed and oiled and ate in his little mud house under the pipal tree. It was very early in the morning, at crow-caw one might say in poetic reference to the dawn in India, that the mallie scratched and scraped along the garden beds with his wonderful little trowel, and spoke to the flowers so that they sprang up to answer him. When the shadow of the house fell on the hibiscus bushes he came out again, and slaked the hot beds with water from the tank in many buckets. Here and there he stooped over them like a glistening brown toad-stool, but Helen never knew what he did or his reason for doing it—that was hid with the mallie-lok.
As to the garden, there was not a tropical seed in it, they were all English flowers, which made the mallie’s excellent understanding with them more remarkable, for they spoke a different language. It was not much of a garden, there was absolutely no order or arrangement—it would have worried me—but the Brownes planted a vast amount of interest and affection and expectation in it; and it all grew. There were such nasturtiums as Helen longed to show her mother, there were phloxes white and purple, pansies too, and pinks, and not a quiet corner but was fragrant with mignonette. A row of sunflowers tilted tall against the side of the house, and they actually had corn-bottles, and balsams and daisies. Violets too—violets in exile, violets in pots, with the peculiar property that violets sometimes have in India, of bringing tears to the eyes if one bends over them.
The Brownes began by counting them—the first pansy-bud was an event, and I have heard references between them to “the day the sunflower came out.” They chronicled daily at breakfast: “Two nasturtiums and a pink,” “two pinks, three nasturtiums, and the monthly rose,” with great gratulation, while I am convinced neither of them looked twice at the fine bunch I sent round occasionally from my garden while their garden was growing. It grew so fast, their garden, that presently, if you met them in society, they could talk of nothing else. It was new to them, this friendly solace of the flowers of home. One would have thought it specially invented for their honeymoon, whereas the rest of us demanded it every cold weather, as regularly as the punkah on the fifteenth of March. Mrs. Browne used to go about saying what a wonderful amount of comfort one could get out of a verbena, if it were only the right colour, without the slightest suspicion of the triteness of the remark; and young Browne would show you his home-grown button-hole, as if no other man in the place possessed one. It was eminently good for them, as it is for all of us. To some of us, you know, England at last becomes a place where one dies daily of bronchitis, and is obliged to do without a kitmutgar; but this never happens if every cold weather one plants one’s self round about with English flowers. They preserve the remnant of grace which is left in the Anglo-Indian soul, and keep it homesick, which is its one chance of salvation. Young Browne seldom said anything cynical in the garden, and as for Helen, it was simply Canbury to her. She could always go down and talk of home to her friends in the flower-beds, who were so steadfastly gay, and tell them, as she often did, how brave and true it was of them to come so far from England, forgetting, perhaps, that from a climatic point of view nasturtiums like heathendom. And in the evening the smoke of the hubble-bubble was lost in the fragrance of the garden.
Mrs. Browne says that if I am writing about their compound, I ought not to omit to mention the fowl-yard, which was situated at one end of it, near the stable. It was another experiment in economy—the cook used such a quantity of eggs that the Brownes saw no reason why they should not be produced on the premises. So they enclosed a fowl-yard and stocked it, and the cock vied with the crows in informing them of the earliest hint of daylight. But the Brownes do not now advise the keeping of fowls on the ground of economy; they say, indeed, that only the very rich can afford to keep them. It seems that the syce kindly supplied their food out of the pony’s gram, charging the deficit to the memsahib, who also paid liberally for barley, a visionary provision at which her birds had never a pick. They were, notwithstanding, sound healthy hens, and the marvel was that they did not lay—except an egg or two a week for pure ostentation. Kali Bagh was doing a good business with the rest, supplying them to Mrs. Browne at full market rates, and to Mrs. Green Pink Sleeves at about half, to secure her custom. The hens in the meantime clucked cheerfully, and Helen was in a parlous state when in the end they had to be cut off untimely and stewed. “But with ruin staring us in the face,” she said, “what else could we do!”
This will serve as an explanation to posterity, if any should inquire why it was that toward the end of the nineteenth century in Bengal only Members of Council were in the habit of keeping hens.