The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib

CALCUTTA, in social matters, is a law unto herself, inscrutable, unevadable. She asks no opinion and permits no suggestion. She proclaims that it shall be thus, thus it is, and...

I HAVE hinted, perhaps broadly, how the Government of India assists society in determining the Values of People. But this is not wholly done by columns of figures prepared with...

IT would be improper to pretend to chronicle even the simple adventures of a memsahib without a respectful reference to their clerical side. The reference will be slight; but it...

I HAVE no doubt that the present Mrs. Browne would like me to linger over her first impressions of Calcutta. She has a habit now of stating that they were keen. That the pillare...

HAVING suited themselves with the furnished house of a junior civilian, who had suddenly decamped before heat apoplexy and gastric complications, the Brownes settled down, if th...

I HAVE not yet mentioned the one matter of all the grievous matters that came under his observation in India, about which Mr. Batcham was particularly grieved. So bitterly, so l...

HELEN thought the prospect of England slipping away from her in the rain as the ship throbbed down the river, too desolate for endurance, so she descended to her cabin with the...

NOTHING happened. Thus for three months, three hot weather months. The punkah wallahs came and ministered to the sahiblok with creakings and snorings that cannot be uttered, muc...

MRS. BROWNE was not permitted to know any of her immediate neighbours, which she thought unfortunate. It was a pity in a way, and yet not a great pity, for if I know anything ab...

IT was clearly impossible to attend Her Excellency’s Drawing-Room in a tum-tum. The Brownes discussed it with fulness and precision at some length. Most people resident in Calcu...

SOCIALLY, as I have said, Mr. Batcham represented one of our cold weather phenomena. They remain phenomena, the globe-trotters, notwithstanding the regularity of their reappeara...

Mr. Browne was smoking a cigar after breakfast in his own house. There had been a time when Mr. Browne smoked his morning cigar on his way to office, but that was formerly. The...

MRS. BROWNE’S ayah was a little Mussulman woman of about thirty-five, with bright eyes and an expression of great worldly wisdom upon her small, square, high-boned face. She dre...

TO Mrs. Peachey, one very consoling circumstance connected with Helen’s going to India was the good she would probably be able to do to “those surrounding her.” Helen had always...

THE cold weather is not a season of unqualified delight in Calcutta, in spite of the glorious coming of the Raj into his winter palace, and the consequent nautch. The cold weath...

IF you have not entirely forgotten your geography you will know that against the eternal gold and blue of the Indian sky, across and across the middle of the land, there runs un...

A WEEK later Helen took over the accounts. In the meantime she had learned to count rupees and annas, pi and pice, also a few words of that tongue in which orders are given in C...

PRESENTLY they met a wonderfully pretty lady with red cheeks, such red cheeks as all the Miss Peacheys had in Canbury, being swung along in a dandy on the shoulders of four stou...

ALL night long the Jumna purred in their ears, rolling over the stones at the bottom of the shady hill, whereon the Raj had built a travellers’ rest. Looking out through the dew...

THERE are a number of ways of furnishing a house in Calcutta. I, who have known the ins and outs of the place for twenty odd years, have learned the unsatisfactoriness of all of...

HELEN BROWNE never could be brought to understand that she was not rich with five hundred rupees a month. Every now and then she reduced the amount—reduced it indeed, with the r...

INDIA is a country of ameliorations. The punkah is an amelioration. So is the second-rate theatrical company from Australia, notwithstanding its twang. So, for those who like it...

IT is time, perhaps, to state a few facts about Mr. George William Browne in addition to those which are in the reader’s possession already. I have mentioned, I think, that he p...

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 nece...

IN Dehra the Brownes were within sight of the promised land, not always but often. Sometimes it lay quite hidden in some indefinable matted cloud-region of the sky, and then the...

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 summe...

HELEN FRANCES BROWNE was formerly a Miss Peachey. Not one of the Devonshire Peacheys—they are quite a different family. This Miss Peachey’s father was a clergyman, who folded hi...

THE Brownes had left the sunset behind them red upon the heights when they reached Futtehpore, but there was still light enough for them to descry a white horse from afar, brows...

information and construct a trousseau for Helen out of it; six months indeed, as Mrs. Peachey said, seemed too little to give to it. They collected a great deal of information....

YOU might have read in this morning’s _Englishman_, in the list of passengers booked per P. and O. steamer _Ganges_, sailing 3d April, “Mr. and Mrs. Perth Macintyre and Miss Mac...