From Sea to Sea Part 42

She huddles herself into a heap on the _charpoy_ and groans.

A tiny, pitch-black closet opens out of the long room, and into this the Police plunge. "Hullo! What's here?" Down flashes the lantern, and a white hand with black nails comes out of the gloom. Somebody is asleep or drunk in the cot. The ring of lantern light travels slowly up and down the body. "A sailor from the ships. He'll be robbed before the morning most likely." The man is sleeping like a little child, both arms thrown over his head, and he is not unhandsome. He is shoeless, and there are huge holes in his stockings. He is a pure-blooded white, and carries the flush of innocent sleep on his cheeks.

The light is turned off, and the Police depart; while the woman in the loose-box shivers, and moans that she is "seek; vary, _vary_ seek."

CHAPTER VII

DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL.

"I built myself a lordly pleasure-house, Wherein at ease for aye to dwell; I said:--'O Soul, make merry and carouse.

Dear Soul--for all is well.'"

--_The Palace of Art._

"And where next? I don't like Colootollah." The Police and their charge are standing in the interminable waste of houses under the starlight.

"To the lowest sink of all, but you wouldn't know if you were told."

They lead till they come to the last circle of the Inferno--a long, quiet, winding road. "There you are; you can see for yourself."

But there is nothing to be seen. On one side are houses--gaunt and dark, naked and devoid of furniture; on the other, low, mean stalls, lighted, and with shamelessly open doors, where women stand and mutter and whisper one to another. There is a hush here, or at least the busy silence of an officer of counting-house in working hours. One look down the street is sufficient. Lead on, gentlemen of the Calcutta Police. We do not love the lines of open doors, the flaring lamps within, the glimpses of the tawdry toilet-tables adorned with little plaster dogs, gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s from Christmas-trees, and--for religion must not be despised though women be fallen--pictures of the saints and statuettes of the Virgin. The street is a long one, and other streets, full of the same pitiful wares, branch off from it.

"Why are they so quiet? Why don't they make a row and sing and shout, and so on?" "Why should they, poor devils?" say the Police, and fall to telling tales of horror, of women decoyed and shot into this trap. Then other tales that shatter one's belief in all things and folk of good repute. "How can you Police have faith in humanity?"

"That's because you're seeing it all in a lump for the first time, and it's not nice that way. Makes a man jump rather, doesn't it? But, recollect, you've _asked_ for the worst places, and you can't complain."

"Who's complaining? Bring on your atrocities. Isn't that a European woman at that door?" "Yes. Mrs. D----, widow of a soldier, mother of seven children." "Nine, if you please, and good evening to you," shrills Mrs. D----, leaning against the door-post, her arms folded on her bosom.

She is a rather pretty, slightly made Eurasian, and whatever shame she may have owned she has long since cast behind her. A shapeless Burmo-native trot, with high cheek-bones and mouth like a shark, calls Mrs. D---- "Mem-Sahib." The word jars unspeakably. Her life is a matter between herself and her Maker, but in that she--the widow of a soldier of the Queen--has stooped to this common foulness in the face of the city, she has offended against the White race. "You're from up-country, and of course you don't understand. There are any amount of that lot in the city, say the Police." Then the secret of the insolence of Calcutta is made plain. Small wonder the natives fail to respect the Sahib, seeing what they see and knowing what they know. In the good old days, the Honourable the Directors deported him or her who misbehaved grossly, and the white man preserved his face. He may have been a ruffian, but he was a ruffian on a large scale. He did not sink in the presence of the people. The natives are quite right to take the wall of the Sahib who has been at great pains to prove that he is of the same flesh and blood.

All this time Mrs. D---- stands on the threshold of her room and looks upon the men with unabashed eyes. Mrs. D---- is a lady with a story. She is not averse to telling it. "What was--ahem--the case in which you were--er--hmn--concerned, Mrs. D----?" "They said I'd poisoned my husband by putting something into his drinking water." This is interesting. "And--ah--_did_ you?" "'Twasn't proved," says Mrs. D---- with a laugh, a pleasant, lady-like laugh that does infinite credit to her education and upbringing. Worthy Mrs. D----! It would pay a novelist--a French one let us say--to pick you out of the stews and make you talk.

The Police move forward, into a region of Mrs. D----'s. Everywhere are the empty houses, and the babbling women in print gowns. The clocks in the city are close upon midnight, but the Police show no signs of stopping. They plunge hither and thither, like wreckers into the surf; and each plunge brings up a sample of misery, filth, and woe.

A woman--Eurasian--rises to a sitting position on a cot and blinks sleepily at the Police. Then she throws herself down with a grunt.

"What's the matter with you?" "I live in Markiss Lane and"--this with intense gravity--"I'm _so_ drunk." She has a rather striking gipsy-like face, but her language might be improved.

"Come along," say the Police, "we'll head back to Bentinck Street, and put you on the road to the Great Eastern." They walk long and steadily, and the talk falls on gambling h.e.l.ls. "You ought to see our men rush one of 'em. When we've marked a h.e.l.l down, we post men at the entrances and carry it. Sometimes the Chinese bite, but as a rule they fight fair.

It's a pity we hadn't a h.e.l.l to show you. Let's go in here--there may be something forward." "Here" appears to be in the heart of a Chinese quarter, for the pigtails--do they ever go to bed?--are scuttling about the streets. "Never go into a Chinese place alone," say the Police, and swing open a postern gate in a strong, green door. Two Chinamen appear.

"What are we going to see?" "j.a.panese gir--No, we aren't, by Jove! Catch that Chinaman, _quick_." The pigtail is trying to double back across a courtyard into an inner chamber; but a large hand on his shoulder spins him round and puts him in rear of the line of advancing Englishmen, who are, be it observed, making a fair amount of noise with their boots. A second door is thrown open, and the visitors advance into a large, square room blazing with gas. Here thirteen pigtails, deaf and blind to the outer world, are bending over a table. The captured Chinaman dodges uneasily in the rear of the procession. Five--ten--fifteen seconds pa.s.s, the Englishmen standing in the full light less than three paces from the absorbed gang who see nothing. Then the burly Superintendent brings his hand down on his thigh with a crack like a pistol-shot and shouts: "How do, John?" Follows a frantic rush of scared Celestials, almost tumbling over each other in their anxiety to get clear. One pigtail scoops up a pile of copper money, another a chinaware soup-bowl, and only a little mound of accusing cowries remains on the white matting that covers the table. In less than half a minute two facts are forcibly brought home to the visitor. First, that a pigtail is largely composed of silk, and rasps the palm of the hand as it slides through; and secondly, that the forearm of a Chinaman is surprisingly muscular and well-developed.

"What's going to be done?" "Nothing. There are only three of us, and all the ringleaders would get away. We've got 'em safe any time we want to catch 'em, if this little visit doesn't make 'em shift their quarters.

Hi! John. No pidgin to-night. Show how you makee play. That fat youngster there is our informer."

Half the pigtails have fled into the darkness, but the remainder a.s.sured and trebly a.s.sured that the Police really mean "no pidgin," return to the table and stand round while the croupier manipulates the cowries, the little curved slip of bamboo, and the soup-bowl. They never gamble, these innocents. They only come to look on, and smoke opium in the next room. Yet as the game progresses their eyes light up, and one by one put their money on odd or even--the number of the cowries that are covered and left uncovered by the little soup-bowl. _Mythan_ is the name of the amus.e.m.e.nt, and, whatever may be its demerits, it is clean. The Police look on while their charge plays and loots a parchment-skinned horror--one of Swift's Struldburgs, strayed from Laputa--of the enormous sum of two annas. The return of this wealth, doubled, sets the loser beating his forehead against the table from sheer grat.i.tude.

"Most immoral game this. A man might drop five whole rupees, if he began playing at sun-down and kept it up all night. Don't you ever play whist occasionally?"

"Now, we didn't bring you round to make fun of this department. A man can lose as much as ever he likes and he can fight as well, and if he loses all his money he steals to get more. A Chinaman is insane about gambling, and half his crime comes from it. It _must_ be kept down. Here we are in Bentinck Street and you can be driven to the Great Eastern in a few minutes. Joss houses? Oh, yes. If you want more horrors, Superintendent Lamb will take you round with him to-morrow afternoon at five. Good night."

The Police depart, and in a few minutes the silent respectability of Old Council House Street, with the grim Free Kirk at the end of it, is reached. All good Calcutta has gone to bed, the last tram has pa.s.sed, and the peace of the night is upon the world. Would it be wise and rational to climb the spire of that kirk, and shout: "O true believers!

Decency is a fraud and a sham. There is nothing clean or pure or wholesome under the stars, and we are all going to perdition together.

Amen!" On second thoughts it would not; for the spire is slippery, the night is hot, and the Police have been specially careful to warn their charge that he must not be carried away by the sight of horrors that cannot be written or hinted at.

"Good morning," says the Policeman tramping the pavement in front of the Great Eastern, and he nods his head pleasantly to show that he is the representative of Law and Peace and that the city of Calcutta is safe from itself for the present.

CHAPTER VIII

CONCERNING LUCIA.

Time must be filled in somehow till five this afternoon, when Superintendent Lamb will reveal more horrors. Why not, the trams aiding, go to the Old Park Street Cemetery?

"You want go Park Street? No trams going Park Street. You get out _here_." Calcutta tram conductors are not polite. The car shuffles unsympathetically down the street, and the evicted is stranded in Dhurrumtollah, which may be the Hammersmith Highway of Calcutta.

Providence arranged this mistake, and paved the way to a Great Discovery now published for the first time. Dhurrumtollah is full of the People of India, walking in family parties and groups and confidential couples.

And the people of India are neither Hindu nor Mussulman--Jew, Ethiop, Gueber, or expatriated British. They are the Eurasians, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them in Dhurrumtollah now. There is Papa with a shining black hat fit for a counsellor of the Queen, and Mamma, whose silken dress is tight upon her portly figure, and The Brood made up of straw-hatted, olive-cheeked, sharp-eyed little boys, and leggy maidens wearing white, open-work stockings calculated to show dust. There are the young men who smoke bad cigars and carry themselves lordily--such as have incomes. There are also the young women with the beautiful eyes and the wonderful dresses which always fit so badly across the shoulders. And they carry prayer-books or baskets, because they are either going to ma.s.s or the market. Without doubt, these are the People of India. They were born in it, bred in it, and will die in it. The Englishman only comes to the country, and the natives of course were there from the first, but these people have been made here, and no one has done anything for them except talk and write about them. Yet they belong, some of them, to old and honourable families, hold houses in Sealdah, and are rich, a few of them. They all look prosperous and contented, and they chatter eternally in that curious dialect that no one has yet reduced to print. Beyond what little they please to reveal now and again in the newspapers, we know nothing about their life which touches so intimately the White on the one hand and the Black on the other. It must be interesting--more interesting than the colourless Anglo-Indian article; but who has treated of it? There was one novel once in which the second heroine was an Eurasienne. She was a strictly subordinate character, and came to a sad end. The poet of the race, Henry Derozio,--he of whom Mr. Thomas Edwards wrote a history,--was bitten with Keats and Scott and Sh.e.l.ley, and overlooked in his search for material things that lay nearest to him. All this ma.s.s of humanity in Dhurrumtollah is unexploited and almost unknown. Wanted, therefore, a writer from among the Eurasians, who shall write so that men shall be pleased to read a story of Eurasian life; then outsiders will be interested in the People of India, and will admit that the race has possibilities.

A futile attempt to get to Park Street from Dhurrumtollah ends in the market--the Hogg Market men call it. Perhaps a knight of that name built it. It is not one-half as pretty as the Crawford Market, in Bombay, but ... it appears to be the trysting place of Young Calcutta. The natural inclination of youth is to lie abed late, and to let the seniors do all the hard work. Why, therefore, should Pyramus, who has to be ruling account forms at ten, and Thisbe, who _cannot_ be interested in the price of second-quality beef, wander, in studiously correct raiment, round and about the stalls before the sun is well clear of the earth?

Pyramus carries a walking stick with imitation silver straps upon it, and there are cloth tops to his boots; but his collar has been two days worn. Thisbe crowns her dark head with a blue velvet Tam-o'-Shanter; but one of her boots lacks a b.u.t.ton, and there is a tear in the left-hand glove. Mamma, who despises gloves, is rapidly filling a shallow basket, that the coolie-boy carries, with vegetables, potatoes, purple brinjals, and--Oh, Pyramus! Do you ever kiss Thisbe when Mamma is not by?--garlic--yea, _lusson_ of the bazaar! Mamma is generous in her views on garlic. Pyramus comes round the corner of the stall looking for n.o.body in particular--not he--and is elaborately polite to Mamma.

Somehow, he and Thisbe drift off together, and Mamma, very portly and very voluble, is left to chaffer and sort and select alone. In the name of the Sacred Unities do not, young people, retire to the meat-stalls to exchange confidences! Come up to this end, where the roses are arriving in great flat baskets, where the air is heavy with the fragrance of flowers, and the young buds and greenery are littering all the floor.

They won't--they prefer talking by the dead, unromantic muttons, where there are not so many buyers. There must have been a quarrel to make up.

Thisbe shakes the blue velvet Tam-o'-Shanter and says, "Oah yess!"

scornfully. Pyramus answers: "No-a, no-a. Do-ant say thatt." Mamma's basket is full and she picks up Thisbe hastily. Pyramus departs. _He_ never came here to do any marketing. He came to meet Thisbe, who in ten years will own a figure very much like Mamma's. May their ways be smooth before them, and after honest service of the Government, may Pyramus retire on 250 rupees per mensem, into a nice little house somewhere in Monghyr or Chunar!

From love by natural sequence to death. Where _is_ the Park Street Cemetery? A hundred hack-drivers leap from their boxes and invade the market, and after a short struggle one of them uncarts his capture in a burial-ground--a ghastly new place, close to a tramway. This is not what is wanted. The living dead are here--the people whose names are not yet altogether perished and whose tombstones are tended. "Where are the _old_ dead?" "n.o.body goes there," says the driver. "It is up that road."

He points up a long and utterly deserted thoroughfare, running between high walls. This is the place, and the entrance to it, with its gardener waiting with one brown, battered rose for the visitor, its grilled door and its professional notices, bears a hideous likeness to the entrance of Simla churchyard. But, once inside, the sightseer stands in the heart of utter desolation--all the more forlorn for being swept up. Lower Park Street cuts a great graveyard in two. The guide-books will tell you when the place was opened and when it was closed. The eye is ready to swear that it is as old as Herculaneum and Pompeii. The tombs are small houses. It is as though we walked down the streets of a town, so tall are they and so closely do they stand--a town shrivelled by fire, and scarred by frost and siege. Men must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry. Strong man, weak woman, or somebody's "infant son aged fifteen months," for each the squat obelisk, the defaced cla.s.sic temple, the cellaret of chunam, or the candlestick of brickwork--the heavy slab, the rust-eaten railings, the whopper-jawed cherubs, and the apoplectic angels. Men were rich in those days and could afford to put a hundred cubic feet of masonry into the grave of even so humble a person as "Jno. Clements, Captain of the Country Service, 1820." When the "dearly beloved" had held rank answering to that of Commissioner, the efforts are still more sumptuous and the verse.... Well, the following speaks for itself:--

"Soft on thy tomb shall fond Remembrance shed The warm yet unavailing tear, And purple flowers that deck the honoured dead Shall strew the loved and honoured bier."

Failure to comply with the contract does not, let us hope, entail forfeiture of the earnest-money; or the honoured dead might be grieved.

The slab is out of his tomb, and leans foolishly against it; the railings are rotted, and there are no more lasting ornaments than blisters and stains, which are the work of the weather, and not the result of the "warm yet unavailing tear."

Let us go about and moralise cheaply on the tombstones, trailing the robe of pious reflection up and down the pathways of the grave. Here is a big and stately tomb sacred to "Lucia," who died in 1776 A.D., aged 23. Here also be lichened verses which an irreverent thumb can bring to light. Thus they wrote, when their hearts were heavy in them, one hundred and sixteen years ago:--

"What needs the emblem, what the plaintive strain, What all the arts that sculpture e'er expressed, To tell the treasure that these walls contain?

Let those declare it most who knew her best.

"The tender pity she would oft display Shall be with interest at her shrine returned, Connubial love, connubial tears repay, And Lucia loved shall still be Lucia mourned.

"Though closed the lips, though stopped the tuneful breath, The silent, clay-cold monitress shall teach-- In all the alarming eloquence of death With double pathos to the heart shall preach.

"Shall teach the virtuous maid, the faithful wife, If young and fair, that young and fair was she, Then close the useful lesson of her life, And tell them what she is, they soon must be."

That goes well, even after all these years, does it not? and seems to bring Lucia very near, in spite of what the later generation is pleased to call the stiltedness of the old-time verse.

Who will declare the merits of Lucia--dead in her spring before there was even a _Hickey's Gazette_ to chronicle the amus.e.m.e.nts of Calcutta, and publish, with scurrilous asterisks, the _liaisons_ of heads of departments? What pot-bellied East Indiaman brought the "virtuous maid"