And if these things were meant to be drawbacks, there was the other side. In India there was power - the power of the white man over the black - and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers, and if you were well-off and properly connected, as I was, there was the social life among the best folk who clustered round the Governor-General. And there were as many women as you could wish for.
There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot - but that is another story.
I knew nothing of this when we dropped anchor in the Highly, off Calcutta, and I looked at the red river banks and sweated in the boiling sun, and smelt the stink, and wished I was in hell rather than here. It had been a damnable four-months voyage on board the crowded and sweltering Indiaman, with no amusement of any kind, and I was prepared to find India no better.
I was to join one of the Company's native lancer regiments(9) in the Benares District, but I never did. Army inefficiency kept me kicking my heels in Calcutta for several weeks before the appropriate orders came through, and by that time I had taken fortune by the foreskin, in my own way.
In the first place, I messed at the Fort with the artillery officers in the native service, who were a poor lot, and whose messing would have sickened a pig. The food was bad to begin with, and by the time the black cooks had finished with it you would hardly have fed it to a jackal.
I said so at our first dinner, and provoked a storm among these gentlemen, who considered me a Johnny Newcomer.
"Not good enough for the plungers, eh?" says one. "Sorry we have no foiegras for your lordship, and we must apologise for the absence of silver plate." "Is it always like this?" I asked. "What is it?" "What is the dish, your grace?" asked the wit. "Why, it's called curry, don't you know? Kills the taste of old meat."
"If that's all it kills, I'm surprised," says I, disgusted. "No decent human being could stomach this filth."
"We stomach it," said another. "Ain't we human beings?"
"You know best about that," I said. "If you take my advice you'll hang your cook." And with that I stalked out, leaving them growling after me. Yet their mess, I discovered, was no worse than any other in India, and better than some. The men's messes were indescribable, and I wondered how they survived such dreadful food in such a climate.
The answer was, of course, that many of them didn't.
However, it was obvious to me that I would be better shifting for myself, so I called up Basset, whom I had brought with me from England - the little bastard had blubbered at the thought of losing me when I left the 11th, God knows why - gave him a fistful of money, and told him to find a cook, a butler, a groom, and half a dozen other servants. These people were to be hired for virtually nothing. Then I went myself to the guard room, found a native who could speak English passably well, and went out to find a house.(10) I found one not far from the Fort, a pleasant place with a little garden of shrubs, and a verandah with screens, and my nigger fetched the owner, who was a great fat rogue with a red turban; we haggled in the middle of a crowd of jabbering blacks, and I gave him half what he asked for and settled into the place with my establishment.
First of all I sent for the cook, and told him through my nigger:
"You will cook, and cook cleanly. You'll wash your hands, d'ye see, and buy nothing .but the finest meat and vegetables. If you don't, I'll have the cat taken to you until there isn't a strip of hide left on your back."
He jabbered away, nodding and grinning and bowing, so I took him by the neck and threw him down and lashed him with my riding whip until he rolled off the verandah, screaming.
"Tell him he'll get that night and morning if his food's not fit to eat," I told my nigger. "And the rest of them may take notice."
They all howled with fear, but they paid heed, the cook most of all. I took the opportunity to flog one of them every day, for their good and my own amusement, and to these precautions I attribute the fact that in all my service in India I was hardly ever laid low with anything worse than fever, and that you can't avoid. The cook was a good cook, as it turned out, and Basset kept the others at it with his tongue and his boot, so we did very well.
My nigger, whose name was Timbu-something-or-other, was of great use at first, since he spoke English, but after a few weeks I got rid of him. I've said that I have a gift of language, but it was only when I came to India that I realised this. My Latin and Greek had been weak at school, for I paid little attention to them, but a tongue that you hear spoken about you is a different thing. Each language has a rhythm for me, and my ear catches and holds the sounds; I seem to know what a man is saying even when I don't understand the words, and my tongue slips easily into any new accent. In any event, after a fortnight listening to Timbu and asked him questions, I was speaking Hindustani well enough to be understood, and I paid him off. For one thing, I had found a more interesting teacher.
Her name was Fetnab, and I bought her (not officially, of course, although it amounted to the same thing) from a merchant whose livestock consisted of wenches for the British officers and civilian residents in Calcutta. She cost me 500 rupees, which was about 50
guineas, and she was a thief s bargain. I suppose she was about sixteen, with a handsome enough face and a gold stud fixed in her nostril, and great slanting brown eyes. Like most other Indian dancing girls, she was shaped like an hour-glass, with a waist that I could span with my two hands, fat breasts like melons, and a wobbling backside.
If anything she was a shade too plump, but she knew the ninety-seven ways of making love that the Hindus are supposed to set much store by - though mind you, it is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed. But she taught me them all in time, for she was devoted to her work, and would spend hours oiling herself with perfume all over her body and practising Hindu exercises to keep herself supple for night-time. After my first two days with her I thought less and less about Elspeth, and even Josette paled by comparison.
However, I put her to other good uses. In between bouts we would talk, for she was a great chatterbox, and I learned more of the refinements of Hindi from her than I would have done from any munshi. I give the advice for what it is worth: if you wish to learn a foreign tongue properly, study it in bed with a native girl - I'd have got more of the classics from an hour's wrestling with a Greek wench than I did in four years from Arnold.
So this was how I passed my time in Calcutta - my nights with Fetnab, my evenings in one of the messes, or someone's house, and my days riding or shooting or hunting, or simply wandering about the town itself. I became quite a well-known figure to the niggers, because I could speak to them in their own tongue, unlike the vast majority of officers at that time - even those who had served in India for years were usually too bored to try to learn Hindi, or thought it beneath them.
Another thing I learned, because of the regiment to which I was due to be posted, was how to manage a lance. I had been useful at sword exercise in the Hussars, but a lance is something else again. Any fool can couch it and
(ride straight, but if you are to be any use at all you must be able to handle all nine feet of it so that you can pick a playing card off the ground with the point, or pink a running rabbit. I was determined to shine among the Company men, so I hired a native rissalder of the Bengal Cavalry to teach me; I had no thought then of anything beyond tilting at dummies or wild pig sticking, and the thought of couching a lance against enemy cavalry was not one that I dwelt on much. But those lessons were to save my life once at least - so that was more well-spent money. They also settled the question of my immediate future, in an odd way.