MISS JOSEPHINE LOVITT REFRAINED FROM HANDING HIM BACK TO MRS. LOVITT.
I am not interested in deciding whether it was from purely conscientious motives that Miss Josephine Lovitt, having discovered Mr. Forbes to have sustained considerable damage, refrained from handing him back to Mrs. Lovitt. All I wish to establish is that the Brownes did not leave No. 61, Park-street until quite three weeks after the engagement was announced. Mrs. Lovitt was obliged to wait until they found a house. And of course their going had nothing whatever to do with dear Josie’s engagement—Mrs. Lovitt made that match, and was very proud of it. The incident that brought about their misunderstanding with the Brownes was the merest trifle, Mrs. Lovitt would tell you if you knew her well enough, the merest trifle. They, the Lovitts, had asked the Honourable Mr. Justice Lamb of the High Court to dinner on, say, Friday of next week. His lordship was suffering very much from the weather when the invitation came, and declined it, fabricating another engagement as even their lordships will. Mrs. Browne and Mrs. Lovitt had then reached that point in the development of the chumming system—hastened a little by circumstances—when one thinks it isn’t absolutely necessary for those people to concern themselves in all one’s affairs, and the circumstance was not mentioned. As it happened, therefore, the Brownes two days later invited Mr. Justice Lamb to dinner on the same Friday, the old gentleman being a second cousin of young Browne’s, and in the habit of dining with them once in six months or so. The thermometer having gone down a few degrees, his lordship, who was a person of absent mind, accepted with much pleasure, putting the note in his pocket-book so that he wouldn’t forget the youngster’s address.
“We have a man coming to dinner to-night,” Helen remarked casually at breakfast, and Mrs. Lovitt was of course not sufficiently interested to inquire who it was, if Mrs. Browne didn’t choose to say. The man came, ate his dinner with a good conscience and a better appetite, and being as amiable as he was forgetful, mentioned particularly to Mrs. Lovitt how sorry he was not to have been able to accept her kind invitation of last week.
It was a little thing, but Mrs. Lovitt foresaw that it might lead to complications. And so the Brownes departed from No. 61, Park-street, not without thanksgiving.
CHAPTER XX.
FOR the furtherance of a good understanding between the sahibs and the Aryans who obey them and minister unto them, the Raj[[91]] has ordained language examinations. This was necessary, because in war, contract-making, or the management of accounts, neither a Ghurka nor a Bengali will comprehend you if you simply swear at him. He must be approached through a rudimentary medium of imperative moods and future tenses. Therefore the institution of the Higher and the Lower Standard, and much anguish on the part of Her Majesty’s subalterns. The Raj attaches rather more credit to the former of these examinations, but afterwards the difference is nominal—you forget them with equal facility.
[91]. Government.
It might be respectively pointed out, however, that the Government of India has done nothing in this direction to stimulate intercourse with the native population among memsahibs. In fact the Government of India does not recognise memsahibs in any way that is not strictly and entirely polite. And so the memsahib “picks up” Hindustani—picks it up in her own simple artless fashion which dispenses with all ordinary aids to the acquirement of a foreign tongue. She gathers together her own vocabulary, gathers it from the east and the west, and the north and the south, from Bengal and Bombay, from Madras and the Punjab, a preposition from Persia, a conjunction from Cashmere, a noun from the Nilgherries. She makes her own rules, and all the natives she knows are governed by them—nothing from a grammatical point of view could be more satisfactory than that. Her constructions in the language are such as she pleases to place upon it; thus it is impossible that she should make mistakes.
The memsahib’s Hindustani is nevertheless not perfectly pure, entirely apart from questions of pronunciation, which she regulates somewhat imperiously. This is because she prefers to improve it by the admixture of a little English; and the effect upon the native mind is quite the same. It really doesn’t matter whether you say, “That’s bote atcha hai khansamah-gee,”[[92]] or “This is very carab,[[93]] you stupid ool-ka-beta,”[[94]] or use the simple Hindustani statements to express your feelings. The English may adorn them, but it is the Hindustani after all that gives vitality to your remarks. “Chokee lao,” means “bring a chair,” but if you put it, “bring me a chokee lao,” the meaning of the command is not seriously interfered with, beside convincing you more firmly that you have said what you wanted to say. I suppose Mrs. Browne talked more Hindustani to Kali Bagh than to anybody else, and one dinner’s dialogue, so to speak, might be like this: