he went out!’ ‘Do you mean to say that you can from this absurd pigeon-loft locate the wards in the night-time?’ ‘What would be the good of a look-out if the man couldn’t tell where the fire was?’ ‘But it’s all pitchy black, and the lights are so confusing.’
‘You’ll be more confused in ten minutes. You’ll have lost your way as you never lost it before. You’re going to go round Bow Bazar section.’
‘And the Lord have mercy on my soul!’ Calcutta, the darker portion of it, does not look an inviting place to dive into at night.
Chapter 6.
The City of Dreadful Night
And since they cannot spend or use aright
The little time here given them in trust,
But lavish it in weary undelight
Of foolish toil, and trouble, strife and lust —
They naturally clamour to inherit
The Everlasting Future — that their merit
May have full scope. . . . As surely is most just.
The City of Dreadful Night.
The difficulty is to prevent this account from growing steadily unwholesome. But one cannot rake through a big city without encountering muck.
The Police kept their word. In five short minutes, as they had prophesied, their charge was lost as he had never been lost before. ‘Where are we now?’ ‘Somewhere off the Chitpore Road, but you wouldn’t understand if you were told. Follow now, and step pretty much where we step — there’s a good deal of filth hereabouts.’
The thick, greasy night shuts in everything. We have gone beyond the ancestral houses of the Ghoses and the Boses, beyond the lamps, the smells, and the crowd of Chitpore Road, and have come to a great wilderness of packed houses — just such mysterious, conspiring tenements as Dickens would have loved. There is no breeze here, and the air is perceptibly warmer. If Calcutta keeps such luxuries as Commissioners of Sewers and Paving, they die before they reach this place. The air is heavy with a faint, sour stench — the essence of long-neglected abominations — and it cannot escape from among the tall, three-storied houses. ‘This, my dear Sir, is a perfectly respectable quarter as quarters go. That house at the head of the alley, with the elaborate stucco-work round the top of the door, was built long ago by a celebrated midwife. Great people used to live here once. Now it’s the — Aha! Look out for that carriage.’ A big mail-phaeton crashes out of the darkness and, recklessly driven, disappears. The wonder is how it ever got into this maze of narrow streets, where nobody seems to be moving, and where the dull throbbing of the city’s life only comes faintly and by snatches. ‘Now it’s the what?’ ‘The St. John’s Wood of Calcutta — for the rich Babus. That “fitton” belonged to one of them.’ ‘Well, it’s not much of a place to look at!’ ‘Don’t judge by appearances. About here live the women who have beggared kings. We aren’t going to let you down into unadulterated vice all at once. You must see it first with the gilding on — and mind that rotten board.’
Stand at the bottom of a lift-shaft and look upwards. Then you will get both the size and the design of the tiny courtyard round which one of these big dark houses is built. The central square may be perhaps ten feet every way, but the balconies that run inside it overhang, and seem to cut away half the available space. To reach the square a man must go round many corners, down a covered-in way, and up and down two or three baffling and confused steps. ‘Now you will understand,’ say the Police kindly, as their charge blunders, shin-first, into a well-dark winding staircase, ‘that these are not the sort of places to visit alone.’ ‘Who wants to? Of all the disgusting, inaccessible dens — Holy Cupid, what’s this?’
A glare of light on the stair-head, a clink of innumerable bangles, a rustle of much fine gauze, and the Dainty Iniquity stands revealed, blazing — literally blazing — with jewellery from head to foot. Take one of the fairest miniatures that the Delhi painters draw, and multiply it by ten; throw in one of Angelica Kaufmann’s best portraits, and add anything that you can think of from Beckford to Lalla Rookh, and you will still fall short of the merits of that perfect face! For an instant, even the grim, professional gravity of the Police is relaxed in the presence of the Dainty Iniquity with the gems, who so prettily invites every one to be seated, and proffers such refreshments as she conceives the palates of the barbarians would prefer. Her maids are only one degree less gorgeous than she. Half a lakh, or fifty thousand pounds’ worth — it is easier to credit the latter statement than the former — are disposed upon her little body. Each hand carries five jewelled rings which are connected by golden chains to a great jewelled boss of gold in the centre of the back of the hand. Ear-rings weighted with emeralds and pearls, diamond nose-rings, and how many other hundred articles make up the list of adornments. English furniture of a gorgeous and gimcrack kind, unlimited chandeliers, and a collection of atrocious Continental prints are scattered about the house, and on every landing squats or loafs a Bengali who can talk English with unholy fluency. The recurrence suggests — only suggests, mind — a grim possibility of the affectation of excessive virtue by day, tempered with the sort of unwholesome enjoyment after dusk — this loafing and lobbying and chattering and smoking, and unless the bottles lie, tippling, among the foul-tongued handmaidens of the Dainty Iniquity. How many men follow this double, deleterious sort of life? The Police are discreetly dumb.
‘Now don’t go talking about “domiciliary visits” just because this one happens to be a pretty woman. We’ve got to know these creatures. They make the rich man and the poor spend their money; and when a man can’t get money for ’em honestly, he comes under our notice. Now do you see? If there was any “domiciliary visit” about it, the whole houseful would be hidden past our finding as soon as we turned up in the courtyard. We’re friends — to a certain extent.’ And, indeed, it seemed no difficult thing to be friends to any extent with the Dainty Iniquity who was so surpassingly different from all that experience taught of the beauty of the East. Here was the face from which a man could write Lalla Rookhs by the dozen, and believe every word that he wrote. Hers was the beauty that Byron sang of when he wrote . . .
‘Remember, if you come here alone, the chances are that you’ll be clubbed, or stuck, or, anyhow, mobbed. You’ll understand that this part of the world is shut to Europeans — absolutely. Mind the steps, and follow on.’ The vision dies out in the smells and gross darkness of the night, in evil, time-rotten brickwork, and another wilderness of shut-up houses.
Follows, after another plunge into a passage of a courtyard, and up a staircase, the apparition of a Fat Vice, in whom is no sort of romance, nor beauty, but unlimited coarse humour. She too is studded with jewels, and her house is even finer than the house of the other, and more infested with the extraordinary men who speak such good English and are so deferential to the Police. The Fat Vice has been a great leader of fashion in her day, and stripped a zemindar Raja to his last acre — insomuch that he ended in the House of Correction for a theft committed for her sake. Native opinion has it that she is a ‘monstrous well-preserved woman.’ On this point, as on some others, the races will agree to differ.
The scene changes suddenly as a slide in a magic-lantern. Dainty Iniquity and Fat Vice slide away on a roll of streets and alleys, each more squalid than its predecessor. We are ‘somewhere at the back of the Machua Bazar,’ well in the heart of the city. There are no houses here — nothing but acres and acres, it seems, of foul wattle-and-dab huts, any one of which would be a disgrace to a frontier village. The whole
