morning brings counsel. does calcutta smell so pestiferously after all? heavy rain has fallen in the night. she is newly-washed, and the clear sunlight shows her at her best. where, oh where, in all this wilderness of life, shall a man go? newman and co. publish a three-rupee guide which produces first despair and then fear in the mind of the reader. let us drop newman and co. out of the topmost window of the great eastern, trusting to luck and the flight of the hours to evolve wonders and mysteries and amusements.
the great eastern hums with life through all its hundred rooms. doors slam merrily, and all the nations of the earth run up and down the staircases. this alone is refreshing, because the passers bump you and ask you to stand aside. fancy finding any place outside a levée-room where englishmen are crowded together to this extent! fancy sitting down seventy strong to tâble d’hôte and with a deafening clatter of knives and forks! fancy finding a real bar whence drinks may be obtained! and, joy of joys, fancy stepping out of the hotel into the arms of a live, white, helmeted, buttoned, truncheoned bobby! a beautiful, burly bobby—just the sort of man who, seven thousand miles away, staves off the stuttering witticism of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning reveller by the strong badged arm of authority. what would happen if one spoke to this bobby? would he be offended? he is not offended. he is affable. he has to patrol the pavement in front of the great eastern and to see that the crowding ticca-gharris do not jam. toward a presumably respectable white he behaves as a man and a brother. there is no arrogance about him. and this is disappointing. closer inspection shows that he is not a real bobby after all. he is a municipal police something and his uniform is not correct; at least if they have not changed the dress of the men at home. but no matter. later on we will inquire into the calcutta bobby, because he is a white man, and has to deal with some of the “toughest” folk that ever set out of malice aforethought to paint job charnock’s city vermillion. you must not, you cannot cross old court house street without looking carefully to see that you stand no chance of being run over. this is beautiful. there is a steady roar of traffic, cut every two minutes by the deeper roll of the trams. the driving is eccentric, not to say bad, but there is the traffic—more than unsophisticated eyes have beheld for a certain number of years. it means business, it means money-making, it means crowded and hurrying life, and it gets into the blood and makes it move. here be big shops with plate-glass fronts—all displaying the well-known names of firms that we savages only correspond with through the v. p. p. and parcels post. they are all here, as large as life, ready to supply anything you need if you only care to sign. great is the fascination of being able to obtain a thing on the spot without having to write for a week and wait for a month, and then get something quite different. no wonder pretty ladies, who live anywhere within a reasonable distance, come down to do their shopping personally.
“look here. if you want to be respectable you musn’t smoke in the streets. nobody does it.” this is advice kindly tendered by a friend in a black coat. there is no levée or lieutenant-governor in sight; but he wears the frock-coat because it is daylight, and he can be seen. he also refrains from smoking for the same rea{17}son. he admits that providence built the open air to be smoked in, but he says that “it isn’t the thing.” this man has a brougham, a remarkably natty little pill-box with a curious wabble about the wheels. he steps into the brougham and puts on—a top-hat, a shiny black “plug.”
there was a man up-country once who owned a top-hat. he leased it to amateur theatrical companies for some seasons until the nap wore off. then he threw it into a tree and wild bees hived in it. men were wont to come and look at the hat, in its palmy days, for the sake of feeling homesick. it interested all the station, and died with two seers of babul flower honey in its bosom. but top-hats are not intended to be worn in india. they are as sacred as home letters and old rosebuds. the friend cannot see this. he allows that if he stepped out of his brougham and walked about in the sunshine for ten minutes he would get a bad headache. in half an hour he would probably catch sunstroke. he allows all this, but he keeps to his hat and cannot see why a barbarian is moved to inextinguishable laughter at the sight. everyone who owns a brougham and many people who hire ticca-gharris keep top-hats and black frock-coats. the effect is curious, and at first fills the beholder with surprise.
and now, “let us see the handsome houses where the wealthy nobles dwell.” northerly lies the great human jungle of the native city, stretching from burra bazar to chitpore. that can keep. southerly is the maidan and chouringhi. “if you get out into the centre of the maidan you will understand why calcutta is called the city of palaces.” the travelled american said so at the great eastern. there is a short tower, falsely called a “memorial,” standing in a waste of soft, sour green. that is as good a place to get to as any other. near here the newly-landed waler is taught the whole duty of the trap-horse and careers madly in a brake. near here young calcutta gets upon a horse and is incontinently run away with. near here hundreds of kine feed, close to the innumerable trams and the whirl of traffic along the face of chouringhi road. the size of the maidan takes the heart out of anyone accustomed to the “gardens” of up-country, just as they say newmarket heath cows a horse accustomed to more shut-in course. the huge level is studded with brazen statues of eminent gentlemen riding fretful horses on diabolically severe curbs. the expanse dwarfs the statues, dwarfs everything except the frontage of the far-away chouringhi road. it is big—it is impressive. there is no escaping the fact. they built houses in the old days when the rupee was two shillings and a penny. those houses are three-storied, and ornamented with service-staircases like houses in the hills. they are also very close together, and they own garden walls of pukka-masonry pierced with a single gate. in their shut-upness they are british. in their spaciousness they are oriental, but those service-staircases do not look healthy. we will form an amateur sanitary commission and call upon chouringhi.
a first introduction to the calcutta durwan is not nice. if he is chewing pan, he does not take the trouble to get rid of his quid. if he is sitting on his charpoy chewing sugarcane, he does not think it worth his while to rise. he has to be taught those things, and he cannot understand why he should be reproved. clearly he is a survival of a played-out system. providence never intended that any native should be made a concierge more insolent than any of the french variety. the people of calcutta put an uria in a little lodge close to the gate of their house, in order that loafers may be turned away, and the houses protected from theft. the natural result is that the durwan treats everybody whom he does not know as a loafer, has an intimate and vendible knowledge of all the outgoings and incomings in that house, and controls, to a large extent, the nomination of the naukar-log. they say that one of the estimable class is now suing a bank for about three lakhs of rupees. up-country, a lieutenant-governor’s charprassi has to work for thirty years before he can retire on seventy thousand rupees of savings. the calcutta durwan is a great institution. the head and front of his offence is that he will insist upon trying to talk english. how he protects the houses calcutta only knows. he can be frightened out of his wits by severe speech, and is generally asleep in calling hours. if a rough round of visits be any guide, three times out of seven he is fragrant of drink. so much for the durwan. now for the houses he guards.
very pleasant is the sensation of being ushered into a pestiferously stablesome drawing-room. “does this always happen?” no, “not unless you shut up the room for some time; but if you open the jhilmills there are other smells. you see the stables and the servants’ quarters are close too.” people pay five hundred a month for half-a-dozen rooms filled with attr of this kind. they make no complaint. when they think the honor of the city is at stake they say defiantly: “yes, but you must remember we’re a metropolis. we are crowded here. we have no room. we aren’t like your little stations.” chouringhi is a stately place full of sumptuous houses, but it is best to look at it hastily. stop to consider for a moment what the cramped compounds, the black soaked soil, the netted intricacies of the service-staircases, the packed stables, the seethment of human life round the durwans’ lodges, and the curious arrangement of little open drains means, and you will call it a whited sepulchre.
men living in expensive tenements suffer from chronic sore-throat, and will tell you cheerily that “we’ve got typhoid in calcutta now.” is the pest ever out of it? everything seems to be built with a view to its comfort. it can lodge comfortably on roofs, climb along from the gutter-pipe to piazza, or rise from sink to verandah and thence to the topmost story. but calcutta says that all is sound and produces figures to prove it; at the same time admitting that healthy cut flesh will not readily heal. further evidence may be dispensed with.
here come pouring down park street on the maidan a rush of broughams, neat buggies, the lightest of gigs, trim office brownberrys, shining victorias, and a sprinkling of veritable hansom cabs. in the broughams sit men in {22}top-hats. in the other carts, young men, all very much alike, and all immaculately turned out. a fresh stream from chouringhi joins the park street detachment, and the two together stream away across the maidan toward the business quarter of the city. this is calcutta going to office—the civilians to the government buildings and the young men to their firms and their blocks and their wharves. here one sees that calcutta has the best turn-out in the empire. horses and traps alike are enviably perfect, and—mark the touchstone of civilization—the lamps are in the sockets. this is distinctly refreshing. once more we will take off our hats to calcutta, the well-appointed, the luxurious. the country-bred is a rare beast here; his place is taken by the waler, and the waler, though a ruffian at heart, can be made to look like a gentleman. it would be indecorous as well as insane to applaud the winking harness, the perfectly lacquered panels, and the liveried saises. they show well in the outwardly fair roads shadowed by the palaces.
how many sections of the complex society of the place do the carts carry? imprimis, the bengal civilian who goes to writers’ buildings and sits in a perfect office and speaks flippantly of “sending things into india,” meaning thereby the supreme government. he is a great person, and his mouth is full of promotion-and-appointment “shop.” generally he is referred to as a “rising man.” calcutta seems full of “rising men.” secondly, the government of india man, who wears a familiar simla face, rents a flat when he is not up in the hills, and is rational on the subject of the drawbacks of calcutta. thirdly, the man of the “firms,” the pure non-official who fights under the banner of one of the great houses of the city, or for his own hand in a neat office, or dashes about clive street in a brougham doing “share work” or something of the kind. he fears not “bengal,” nor regards he “india.” he swears impartially at both when their actions interfere with his operations. his “shop” is quite unintelligible. he is like the english city man with the chill off, lives well and entertains hospitably. in the old days he was greater than he is now, but still he bulks large. he is rational in so far that he will help the abuse of the municipality, but womanish in his insistence on the excellencies of calcutta. over and above these who are hurrying to work are the various brigades, squads, and detachments of the other interests. but they are sets and not sections, and revolve round belvedere, government house, and fort william. simla and darjeeling claim them in the hot weather. let them go. they wear top-hats and frock-coats.
it is time to escape from chouringhi road and get among the long-shore folk, who have no prejudices against tobacco, and who all use pretty nearly the same sort of hat.
