CHAPTER XXVIII.
YOU might have read in this morning’sEnglishman, in the list of passengers booked per P. and O. steamerGanges, sailing 3d April, “Mr. and Mrs. Perth Macintyre and Miss Macalister, for Brindisi.” Miss Macalister is a niece of the Perth Macintyres. She has been out two years and a half, and, so far as her opportunities are concerned, we have nothing to reproach ourselves with. For the first time in fifteen years we have attended the subscription dances to take her, and did not shirk the fancy dress ball, Mr. Perth Macintyre going as Falstaff, for her sake. At our time of life this is a great deal of exertion for a niece, and I consider, if such things are possible, Mr. Perth Macintyre’s deceased sister ought to have felt gratification at what we did. Nevertheless, I have not had occasion to mention Miss Macalister before, and it is only in connection with her return-ticket that I mention her now. It represents an outlay which we did not expect to be obliged to make.
We are due in England about the 1st of May, when we will endeavour to find the warmest south wall in Devonshire—I shiver at the thought—and hang ourselves up on it. As the summer advances and the conditions of temperature in Great Britain become less severe, we will make an effort to visit the parental Peacheys in Canbury, if neither of us have previously succumbed to influenza; in which case the box of chutneys and guava jelly that the Brownes have charged us to deliver will be sent by luggage train. The survivor—we expect there will be at least a temporary survivor—is to attend to this.
It will make a difference to the Brownes, our going, the difference of a junior partnership; and although I hope I have a correct idea of the charms of our society, I fully expect that their grief at our departure will be tempered by this consideration. Some one of our administrators is always being quoted in the newspapers as having called India “a land of regrets.” It is to be feared, however, that the regrets are felt exclusively by those who are going. The satisfactions of retirement are obscure, and the prospect of devoting a shrunken end of existence to the solicitous avoidance of bronchitis is not inviting. Whereas it is always to somebody’s profit that an Englishman leaves India, and he is so accustomed to the irony of the idea of being his own chief mourner, that he would suspect the deeply-afflicted at his going of more than the usual manœuvres to obtain his shoes. The Brownes are very pleased, undisguisedly very pleased, though Mrs. Browne has condoled with me sincerely, in private, on the subject of Miss Macalister; and we quite understand it.
There is nothing, on the other hand, to mitigate our regret at parting with the Brownes, which is lively. I may not have been able to make it plain in these few score pages, but I like the Brownes. They are nice young people, and my advice has been so often useful to them. As the wife of the junior partner in Macintyre and Macintyre’s, Mrs. Browne will be obliged to depend upon her own for the future; but I am leaving her a good deal to go on with, and a certain proportion of our drawing-room furniture as well, which she will find equally useful. I inherited it myself from Mrs. J. Macintyre; it has been a long time in the firm. Further, we have put off sailing for a fortnight so that I can be godmother in person to the Browne baby, for whose prospective future I knitted fifteen pairs of socks this last cold weather; and that I consider the final proof of our regard.
If it is necessary to explain my interest in these young Brownes, which you, I regret to think, may find inexplicable, it lies, I dare say, as much in this departure of ours as in anything else. Their first chapter has been our last. When you turn down the page upon the Brownes you close the book upon the Perth Macintyres, and it has been pleasant to me that our story should find its end in the beginning of theirs. If this is not excuse enough, there is a sentimental one besides. For I also have seen a day when the spell of India was strong upon my youth, when I saw romance under a turban and soft magic behind a palm, and found the most fascinating occupation in life to be the wasting of my husband’s substance among the gabbling thieves of the China bazar. It was all new to me once—I had forgotten how new until I saw the old novelty in the eyes of Helen Browne. Then I thought of reading the first pages of the Anglo-Indian book again with those young eyes of hers; and as I have read I have re-written, and interleaved, as you see. It may be that they will give warning to some and encouragement to others. I don’t mind confessing that to me they have brought chiefly a gay reminder of a time when pretty little subalterns used to trip over their swords to dance with young Mrs. Perth Macintyre also, which seems quite a ludicrous thing to print—and that has been enough.
I think she will avoid the graver perils of memsahibship, Mrs. Browne. I think she will always be a nice little woman. George and the baby will take care of that. With the moderate social facilities of the wife of a junior partner in Macintyre and Macintyre’s, she will not be likely even to make the acquaintance of the occasional all-conquering lady who floats on the surface of Anglo-Indian society disreputably fair, like the Victoria Regia in the artificial lake of the Eden Gardens. As to the emulation of such a one, I believe it is not in the power of circumstances to suggest it to Mrs. Browne. Besides, she is not clever, and the Victoria Regia must be clever, clever all round, besides having a specialty in the souls of men.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Browne has become a memsahib, graduated, qualified, sophisticated. That was inevitable. I have watched it come to pass with a sense that it could not be prevented. She has lost her pretty colour, that always goes first, and has gained a shadowy ring under each eye, that always comes afterwards. She is thinner than she was, and has acquired nerves and some petulance. Helen Peachey had the cerebral placidity and good temper of one of Fra Angelico’s piping angels. To make up, she dresses her hair more elaborately, and crowns it with a little bonnet which is somewhat extravagantly “chic.” She has fallen into a way of crossing her knees in a low chair that would horrify her Aunt Plovtree, and a whole set of little feminine Anglo-Indian poses have come to her naturally. There is a shade of assertion about her chin that was not there in England, and her eyes—ah, the pity of this!—have looked too straight into life to lower themselves as readily as they did before. She has come into an empire among her husband’s bachelor friends, to whom she will continue to give gracious little orders for ten years yet, if she does not go off too shockingly; and her interests have expanded to include a great many sub-masculine ones, which she discusses with them in brief and casual sentences interspersed with smiles that are a little tired. Without being actually slangy she takes the easiest word and the shortest cut—in India we know only the necessities of speech, we do not really talk, even in the cold weather.
SHE HAS FALLEN INTO A WAY OF CROSSING HER KNEES IN A LOW CHAIR THAT WOULD HORRIFY HER AUNT PLOVTREE.
SHE HAS FALLEN INTO A WAY OF CROSSING HER KNEES IN A LOW CHAIR THAT WOULD HORRIFY HER AUNT PLOVTREE.
SHE HAS FALLEN INTO A WAY OF CROSSING HER KNEES IN A LOW CHAIR THAT WOULD HORRIFY HER AUNT PLOVTREE.
Domesticity has slipped away from Mrs. Browne, though she held it very tightly for a while, into the dusky hands whose business is with the house of the sahib. She and young Browne and the baby continue to be managed by Kasi with a skill that deceives them into thinking themselves comfortable, and Helen continues to predict with confidence that next month there will be a balance in her favour instead of Kasi’s. On the contrary, the accounts will show that the Brownes have had all they wanted to eat and drink, that the dhoby has been paid, the memsahib has had a rupee’s worth of postage stamps, and there is one anna and six pices to pay to Kasi.
It was a very little splash that submerged Mrs. Browne in Anglo-India, and there is no longer a ripple to tell about it. I don’t know that life has contracted much for her. I doubt if it was ever intended to hold more than young Browne and the baby—but it has changed. Affairs that are not young Browne’s or the baby’s touch her little. Her world is the personal world of Anglo-India, and outside of it, except in affection of Canbury, I believe she does not think at all. She is growing dull to India, too, which is about as sad a thing as any. She sees no more the supple savagery of the Pathan in the market-place, the bowed reverence of the Mussulman praying in the sunset, the early morning mists lifting among the domes and palms of the city. She has acquired for the Aryan inhabitant a certain strong irritation, and she believes him to be nasty in all his ways. This will sum up her impressions of India as completely years hence as it does to-day. She is a memsahib like another.
Her mother still occasionally refers to the reports of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that reach them in Canbury, and freely supposes that the active interest her daughter took in Indian Missions has increased and intensified in India. In reply, Helen is obliged to take refuge in general terms, and has always discreetly refrained from mentioning the prejudice that exists in Calcutta against Christian cooks.
I hope she may not stay twenty-two years. Anglo-Indian tissues, material and spiritual, are apt to turn in twenty-two years to a substance somewhat resembling cork. And I hope she will not remember so many dead faces as I do when she goes away—dead faces and palm fronds grey with the powder of the wayside, and clamorous voices of the bazar crying, “Here iz! memsahib! Here iz!”...
So let us go our several ways. This is a dusty world. We drop down the river with the tide to-night. We shall not see the red tulip blossoms of the silk cottons fall again.
Transcriber’s Note:Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.Unpaired quotation marks were left as the author intended.Typographical errors were silently corrected.Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.