The dates were ripe. Great drooping bunches of them hung under the swaying palm-leaves--rose-pink and purple-black, yellow and brown, many-tinted like some rare agate. Shâhbâsh gorged himself on the sickly-sweet fruit, and every one, far and near, grew visibly fatter. But Deen Ali's Arabian dates were too valuable for home consumption, and Suttu only awaited the new moon in order to summon the pluckers and driers to prepare the fruit for market. Shâhbâsh, with a sigh at the shortness of opportunity, ate all the more and thought of little else.
Yet the four weeks since the saint's death had not been uneventful. The Kâzi's son and the accountant had joined issue in their desire to see Suttu worsted. As yet, however, there had been no overt act. To begin with, the native of India does nothing in a hurry. In addition, none gauges better than he the indisputable advantage of an old lie over a new one. It is like port wine depositing a crust for itself out of its own sediment. Finally, even a false claim acquires dignity by being preferred deliberately, moderately. All these considerations had coincided towards inaction--as yet.
But a day or two before the new moon matters changed. Suttu, coming at dawn from her hut, saw a sight which literally took her breath away. Three of the tallest stems in the nearest clump of palms were swaying under the weight of men clinging to them by clamps and a rope passed round their waists. Below, the freshly gathered fruit lay in heaps under the fingers of women busy in sorting it and carrying it in baskets to a drying enclosure already fenced in by hedges of plaited leaves. In a word, date-picking was in full swing. Had she by chance given the orders in her sleep?
Incredulous of her own sight, she roused Shâhbâsh, who still lay snoring on the raised platform of the tomb.
He was on his feet in a moment, and shouting "Thieves!" loudly as the only explanation, swung himself down like a monkey, and ran gesticulating with windmill arms towards the trees. His ugliness, even when familiar, was phenomenal; seen by the date-pickers, who as usual were strangers employed by a big contractor, it appeared supernatural; and the women, taking him to be nothing more nor less than the demon in charge of the grove, flung down their baskets and fled, screaming. The men would doubtless have followed their example, had it been possible; but, rather than run the gantlet of the dancing, yelling creature below, they dug their clamps tighter and held on in mortal terror of what would happen next.
Suttu's more tardy appearance led to an explanation; from which it appeared that the pickers had been sent by a contractor, who had formally bought the crop from one Hussan the accountant.
"Leave them to me,maiSuttu!" shrieked Shâhbâsh, in an ecstasy of rage over this calm appropriation. "Lo, I will give them a crop of blows if they come down. If not, let them starve and drop like bats in the cold. I am in no hurry." He squatted himself on the matting and helped himself to the gathered dates with both hands. But Suttu saw further than the immediate present, and knew a protest must be raised, and that quickly. She turned at once to that confidence in the power of personal appeal which, thank Heaven, still lingers in India, despite Western attempts to strangle it with red tape and smother it with sealing-wax.
"Yea, watch thou," she cried, "while I go to the bigsahib'shouse and cry for justice. He listens to the poor."
"Wâh! wâh!" assented the clingers, "but see us safe first, O mother!"
"Let them be," said Shâhbâsh, confidentially, "else they may make away with the dates they have picked. Lo, they are safer there till the police come."
So there they clung, while thefakeerni, her indignation increasing at every swinging stride, made her way to the deputy-commissioner's bungalow.
He was a small, fair English lad, put in charge--with many instructions to telegraph to headquarters if he saw signs of the millennium or another mutiny--during the absence on three weeks' leave of a senior man. He was just mounting his polo pony in order to keep his hand in by chivying a ball round a stick, when wronged womanhood appeared and flung out a pair of remarkably beautiful arms for justice. Perhaps the fact that the complainant was superbly handsome and struck a most impressive attitude had something to do with the readiness with which he turned to the red-coated orderlies for a translation of herpatoispetition.
"'Tis Suttu, thefakeerni, and she comes to tell the Protector of the Poor that contractors are feloniously picking her dates."
"Send and stop 'em. And, and--what the deuce is the right thing to do. Oh, yes. Tell the police to report as usual." Then, as he rode off, he nodded affably to Suttu. "Take comfort, mother; I'll see to it."
He had been swished at Harrow quite an incredibly short time before, but he did the part of Providence neatly, while men for whom he had fagged were enjoying the inestimable privilege of sitting on a vestry--or the knife-board of an omnibus conveying them citywards to act as copying-machines for the term of their natural lives.
Suttu's apparent triumph, however, dwindled in Shâhbâsh's eyes to ignominious defeat when the police refused permission for any one to pick the dates until the petition of Hussan for the land on behalf of his son Murghub should be decided.
"What has that idiot to do with my land?" cried thefakeerni, indignantly. "Lo, there is no drop of saint's blood in him. He is of the second marriage."
The policeman sniggered. "I know not, mother! But this I hear, that Hussan saith otherwise, and the Kâzi is with him. And births and marriages are ticklish things to date, if the Kâzi be not friendly."
Suttu's heart throbbed. If the Kâzi were indeed her only refuge, she might have to face the storm in the open.
"O thou with the yellow trousers on thy legs, and wisdom in head and heart," moaned Shâhbâsh, "dost mean that these dates--Deen Ali's famous dates--are to be food for parrots? while I----" He sat in the sand, clasping his stomach, rocking backwards and forwards, a ludicrous spectacle of woe; yet there was tragedy in the comedy.
That evening, when supper consisted of a few millet-cakes and a tray of waterypilu-berries, which Suttu had gathered from the jungles, he looked at the ripe dates overhead and felt that the hour of apostasy had come. After the barmecidal feast he took his mattock and went to the graveyard--not to dig, but solemnly to consider which of Suttu's two enemies should have his services. Dawn found him returning from the Kâzi's house, with the black bottle full of rum, and the remains of a perfect feast ofbakkar khanatied up in a handkerchief--both of which he hid carefully. All that day he did nothing but vaunt the delights of a sheltered home combined with rich food; especially to a woman--more especially to a woman who had nothing to eat butpilu-berries and millet cakes! Suttu smiled at him indulgently.
"Lo, God did not make me all stomach," she said. "I eat the air and the sunshine; and I like to see the parrot people and the squirrel people eat my dates, even if I can't."
Shâhbâsh gave a rumble of despair, and bolstered up his uneasy conscience by telling himself such views were unnatural, accursed.
"Is a grave ordered?" asked Suttu, in surprise, when, that evening after supper, the dwarf shouldered his mattock. "Who is dead?"
"The saddler's son. Leastways he was so nigh his end to-day that his people gave me warning it might be wanted. And like as not they would eat oaths had it been bespoke in form, for they are keen to quarrel. Aye, aye, if lies were satisfying, my belly wouldn't be empty."
He disappeared into the soft, balmy darkness, grumbling and muttering--to come back circuitously to the hiding-place of the black bottle. He would need that for consolation, aye, for forgetfulness, before midnight brought the bribed watchmen to guard the date-grove. Then sooner or later after that some one's cries---- Well, why not? Suttu would not be the first woman who had been carried off to a rich marriage, and had lived to tell the tale cheerfully. Still, the thought of those cries when the Kâzi and his friends came was disturbing. Shâhbâsh took a great pull at the bottle. It would bring the fairy, and the fairy was unfailing consolation.
Meanwhile Suttu sat on the steps of the tomb, too much disturbed, by this outrageous claim of Hussan's, for sleep. The grounds which he would put forward were easy to guess. He and the Kâzi would post-date the second marriage, and ante-date Murghub, the idiot's birth, so as to make him out her full brother. Besides, they had money for evidence; she had none, and the neighbours were unfriendly. Her only help lay in the Lord, and that, she knew, had nothing to do with a court of justice. Still, it was as well to omit nothing which might be of use; so she brought out the trestle-shaped stool, on which her grandfather's copy of the Koran lay, and began to chant an additional chapter of Holy Writ as a kind of bribe to favour. As she rocked herself backward and forward, her lips busy with the long rhythm in which the unknown words quite lost all identity, her mind was busy over the time when she had learned it all with tears and trouble from the saint, stern on this one point. How fond he had been of divinations!--and Suttu paused in the middle of a pious apothegm to recollections of her grandfather compiling date-names for his neighbours--names, that is to say, which by the values of the composing letters would give the date of birth. What if her own name, Sutara Begum, was one of these, and the idiot's also? That would be proof indeed! Perhaps Shâhbâsh---- She had started to her feet, when she remembered her chapter, in some trepidation, since half a bribe was no bribe. She would just go on chanting till Shâhbâsh came home. It could do no harm, and might do good. Her round, full voice echoed back from the tomb, and out into the date-palms.
"Wâh!if she were really, after all, a pious one, and not a bad walker," said one of the watchers to the other. His companion clucked a denial. "Thchu!'tis likely she knows the Kâzi is to be here to-night. That is woman's way."
Suttu chanted and chanted till she grew hoarse. Then she stood up and listened. The night was still and silent. Not even the distant thud of the mattock, so Shâhbâsh must be on his way back. She waited with the little oil-lamp in her hand, eager for her question. Then impatience gained the mastery, and still with the oil-cresset in her hand--for the new moon gave little light, and snakes were common--she set off swiftly through the palms towards the cemetery.
"Shâhbâsh!" she cried, but nothing stirred or answered as she picked her way through the short graves. Suddenly she was brought up sharply by something at her feet--something she had deemed another grave. It was the dwarf stretched fast asleep on a white sheet. His grey hair was twined with jasmine blossoms, and a black bottle lay empty by his side. He had been dancing to amuse his fairy. That was no uncommon affair; but whence had he got the inspiration, and the greasy remnants of a feast which the light of the lamp disclosed? What villainy had he been bribed to commit? Something, she felt sure, even if it were nothing more serious than a failure to fulfil the duties of her freehold, by having Deen Ali's bed ready for the saddler's son. If it were that! She seized the shovel, and swinging it over her head brought it down on the ground, where Shâhbâsh had outlined a grave, with a thud which set her arms tingling. The soil was hard, indeed, and surely that was twelve o'clock chiming from the court gong! Not much time left; but softer spots were to be found than the one Shâhbâsh had chosen. She took up the oil-cresset again and wandered round to the extreme edge of the graveyard where it merged into the sandier common.
Thud! thud! The strokes of the mattock echoing through the night made the Kâzi's son smile as, about an hour after midnight, he crept alone to the tomb. A man who is the prey of a purely animal passion does not have his ears boxed for nothing, and his idea of revenge went further than marriage. No one would heed Suttu's cries for help this time, and the watchers were in his pay.
Thud! thud! Suttu's respect for her henchman increased at every stroke. She was well into the grave by this time, digging round and round methodically, though she ached all over. Yet, if she died of it, that grave should be ready. What was that? Metal on metal! The surprise sent a tingle all through her. Then she was down on hands and knees, groping in the loosened soil.
Yes, it was the treasure at last, and no one, no soul alive, except herself, must know of it. She looked round hastily into the darkness and silence. There was no fear of interruption now; there might be afterwards. Her best plan was to finish the grave, so as to obliterate all trace of the spot whence she had taken that heavy brass pot, and then, but not till then, to go home quietly. The next instant the thud of the mattock began again. A lucky decision; for the Kâzi's son, surprised at finding Suttu absent, was beginning to suspect treachery from the silence, when the digging recommenced. Shâhbâsh, then, meant to keep faith, and not seek safety in flight. But Suttu? As the spoiler sat beside the friendly watchman he asked himself if the lies he himself had circulated so diligently about the religious were true, and she had an assignation elsewhere. He gnashed his teeth over the thought and his own rejection.
"A step, my lord! it was a step!" whispered one of the guardians, and the Kâzi's son crept towards the hut. He had not entered it before, being assured it was empty; but now, thinking Suttu might have seen him and slipped into the darkness for safety, he felt his way through the door and so on by the wall.
Then a yell burst from him--a cry once heard never to be forgotten:
"Snake! snake!"
The watchmen heard it and came slowly, feeling their dark way with sticks, lest where one snake was there might be two. Suttu heard it also, and, lamp in hand, ran back to the hut, knowing that friend or foe was in deadly peril.
Something huddled up, writhing, moaning, clasping one hand with the other, shapeless, convulsed by fear, lay upon the ground--something that flung itself before her and yelled for a charm--the saint's charm--for mercy--for help--for anything.
"Thou!" she cried, "thou! What dost here?"
She knew well enough, and she thrust him back savagely.
"Never mind that now, mother," whimpered one of the men. "Give him the charm. Sure God gave such to the saints for all men, and all men are sinners."
"For men--not for dogs! Go, hound--go and die! I have no charm for thee."
The wretched creature, struggling from the hands of the watchmen, who strove to set him on his feet, caught her by the ankle. "Save me! save me, to be thy friend! I know--I can save--I--"
He sank down helpless, foaming at the mouth from abject fear.
Suttu paused. There was something in that view of the case. If anything could be done, if by chance-- By the light of the lamp she examined the bitten finger closely, and an odd look came to her face.
"It was near the door, breast-high by the sticks of the thatch thou wast bitten," she said, as she hastily concealed the wound under a bandage.
"Yea, yea, thou knowest! The charm, mother Suttu, the charm! I swear to be thy friend!"
Thefakeernilooked contemptuously at her writhing lover. "Swear by thy son's head, fool! naught else will satisfy me!"
When the only oath a native will not break had been pronounced, Suttu stood up with a laugh.
"The charm is worked, Mir Sahib. Thou wilt not die of that bite." Then she checked herself, and with the same odd look on her face assumed a graver tone. "Lo, I will work the charm. As for thee--go home, swift as thou canst. Call the barber, let him bleed thee to faintness. Takekâla dâna[11]and sulphur to the full. Eat naught for two days, live righteous, and look not on the bite for a month. Then give a hundred rupees to the saint's shrine."
"'Tis all right, master," whispered one of the men. "There is no fear of the bargain when payment follows cure. Lo, thou art better already, and by this thou shouldst have been worse, had not the charm worked. Hurry, hurry, lest harm come from disobedience!"
When they were quite out of sight and hearing, Suttu took the lamp, went to the door of the hut and chirruped. From a hole in the wall a pair of bright eyes looked out.
"The Brahmans say true," she chuckled, "and Ram befriends those who befriend his favourite. Shâhbâsh would have had me tear the squirrel's nest down, but I love the chattering things."
She had little time, however, to spare for amusement at her own trick. The grave had to be completed, the treasure brought home by dawn. Her arms ached worse than ever from their short rest, and there was a grey glimmer in the east, before she judged that her work would pass muster. Then she removed all Shâhbâsh's belongings to the side of the grave, leaving him still in a drunken sleep upon the bare ground.
Finally, lifting the brass pot, which was carefully luted over with hard clay, she carried it to the hut, shut the door, and by the growing light through the chinks began to open up her treasure.
The pot was full of farthings--nothing but farthings. She sat and looked at them hopelessly. What did it mean? Why should any one take the trouble to bury farthings? The puzzle was beyond her, and when a gleam of real sun warned her that time was passing, she hid the pot under a pile of brushwood, and stepped out with a feeling of relief into the open air. The world was ablaze with the clear, uncompromising light of an Indian morning. The parrots were wheeling round the blue dome, and a squirrel sat on the top of the thatch chirping over a date stolen from the disputed crop.
Suttu thought of the Kâzi's son physicked, bled, and hungry. Her laugh echoed out among the palms, and she felt more comforted than when, the night before, she had sought solace in chanting.
Shâhbâsh sat up and opened his mouth with a tremendous yawn. Then he opened his eyes, and at the same moment reached around for the black bottle. Its absence woke him thoroughly, and the further discovery that he was on the bare ground made him instinctively cry "Thieves!" before he was alert enough to notice the sight of his belongings on the ground some little way off. Rising slowly, for he was stiff in his limbs, he stumbled towards them, conscious only of a racking headache. Memory of his own treachery had not yet returned, and when he all but fell into a new-made grave on his way to the black bottle, his mind seemed to him a perfect blank, and he stood transfigured before this evidence of an industry which he could not remember. He sat down helplessly on its edge, dangling his legs over the side, and peered into it critically. Without doubt, if that was his handiwork, he must have been very drunk indeed. The mere force of habit made him slip into it, and, seizing the mattock, begin to trim the shape. Suddenly he gave a yell, and the next moment was up on solid earth again, clutching at something which had rolled out of the last spadeful of earth--something which had clinked and glittered.
Undoubtedly; for all that, it was only a farthing. His face fell. Still, a farthing was money, and pointed to money. Ah, how pleased little mother Suttu would be!
The thought transfixed him again; this time by excess of memory. What had happened to her? What had he done? What cursed fate was this, that he should find money on the very day when he had given up hope and faith? His trembling legs would scarcely support him, as, driven by the necessity of knowing the worst, he stumbled towards the hut, wondering how he should ever face the saint's roly-poly, or how he would endure life without Suttu's laugh to lighten his labours.
What was that echoing among the palms? Surely, surely, it was her laugh. Were the fiends playing tricks with him, or-- Hope literally gave him wings, for, as he galloped forward, the sheet he had thrown round his shoulders spread out on either side, and his matted hair, still bound with chaplets, blew round his head like an aureole. Suttu, standing on the steps, laughed louder at the ridiculous figure gambolling towards her, uttering little cries of joy.
If he had looked like a whipped hound a minute before, he was like a cur restored to favour now, in his delight quite forgetting the necessity for caution, till Suttu sternly asked him to explain. Then, inspired by elation, he lied magnificently. Was there no just cause for joy when he had found the treasure?
"The treasure! Thou hast found it?" cried thefakeerni, paling before the fear lest she had overlooked the real prize. "Where--what treasure?"
"The saint's treasure--lakhs on lakhs! Listen, O incredulous! O suspicious! and eat shame. Last night, urged by the virulence of thine enemies, I vowed a mighty vow for the accomplishment of thy desires, caring naught for my own ruin. I spread a cloth for my fairy, setting it well with flowers, and dancing to please her. But when she came, allured by my graces, I spurned her. Yea, I trampled her under foot. I took my heart and hers out of our bodies and ate them before her face. 'Show me the treasures,' I cried; 'rescue my little mother Suttu from the necessity of marrying a one-eyed, pock-marked man, or I set no more cloths for thee!' Lo, thou shouldst have seen her clinging to me like a weanling child; but I would none of her! Then she grew wroth, saying she would ne'er return; but I answered, 'Who cares?' Think,maiSuttu--I, Shâhbâsh, said that to my fairy for thy sake, and thou hast suspicions. Nay, smite me, but I said more. I said--what did I not say?--till--till she smote me on the forehead, so--and I died. Yea, I died as much as a man may and yet live. So--so--she dug a grave for me--for she would not the jackals had my beauty. Yea, a grave! See you, it was not much of a grave--a poor grave, such as a woman's hand could make. Lo, my heart aches for the blisters there must be--"
"Go on, liar," said Suttu, calmly, "and let the blisters be. They will heal without thy lip-salve."
"May I eat dirt if it be not true! Then, towards morning, being chastened by blisters, her heart melted: so she buried the treasure instead of me. That is how it came about."
Suttu could not resist a smile.
"But the treasure, fool--the treasure?"
Shâhbâsh, dancing round her, flourished a coin, which she snatched from him hastily.
"Lo!" she cried, in tones of disappointment, "'tis only a farthing."
"Only a farthing!" echoed Shâhbâsh, ironically. "Hark to the incredulous. Aye, but it means gold close at hand. Dost not know that wise men put pennies when they take pounds, so that thejinnwho guards the treasure may find the tale true when he counts the coins?"
Suttu's hand went up swiftly to her forehead; she gave a little cry.
"Dost mean they put farthings in place of gold?"
"Aye! Sure, a coin is a coin to thejinn, and when the last gold bit is gone he sits guarding a pot of farthings till judgment. Ho, ho!--ha, ha!"
His mirth left Suttu smileless.
"A pot--of--farthings," she muttered slowly. Then a light broke in on her, and she threw up her hands, exclaiming: "Gone! Aye, he said it was gone, and we thought he meant--gone! Yea, it is clear! Gone, gone, gone!"
"What is clear? What hath gone?" asked Shâhbâsh, curiously. The need for caution came home to her.
"'Tis clear thou art a fool," she said, "and my trust in thee is gone. Why cannot folk leave me alone?" she continued, querulously. "I only ask peace and quiet."
And then, to the dwarf's horror and amazement, she suddenly began to cry--maiSuttu crying like any other woman!
"'Tis but thepilu-berries," he whimpered. "Did I not tell thee they were watery diet, apt to turn acid and destroy the courage? But there shall be no more wild meats for thee,maiSuttu. The treasure is found."
It was, indeed. All that day thefakeernisat wondering what she had better do; but, if she was quick to carry out a suggestion, she had no head for the weaving of plots and plans. The pot of farthings represented a few rupees, but not enough to purchase witnesses and conduct a case in court. The Kâzi's son would at least not give evidence against her, but even the break-down of this particular claim would benefit her little. She must have something to live upon; and, what is more, nothing but the hope of discovering treasure would keep Shâhbâsh faithful to his salt, or induce the accountant to come to terms.
Towards evening she strolled over to watch the dwarf, who had been digging the grave deeper and deeper, longer and longer.
"Art going to bury a saint, O Shâhbâsh?" she asked, with a broad smile.
From the trench behind the growing mountain of soil came grunts and groans. Then a verse of the Koran, mingled with something suspiciously like curses.
She sat down on the pile and looked over the level stretch dotted by mud hillocks, with here and there a masonry tomb. On one of these a squirrel sat perched, hard at work on a peach-stone which some wayfarer on the adjoining path had flung aside.
Suttu's keen delight in open-air sights and sounds kept her watching the dainty little creature as it shifted the prize this way and that in its deft fingers so as to bring its teeth to bear on the hard shell. It worked as hard as Shâhbâsh, she thought, with another of her broad smiles, and deserved the sweet kernel. No, another squirrel had caught wind of the affair and came pirating along with tail full set. Lo, 'twas a play to watch! Up and down, round and round. The peach-stone dropped here, snatched up there, now in this one's possession, now in that, until finally the new-comer sat in the place of the old, gnawing at the hard shell, and twisting it about with deft fingers.
Suttu, with her chin on her hands, watched the second as she had the first.
And, after all, there was no kernel in the peach-stone, nothing but a shrivelled skin which had once----!
Suttu stood up, clapping her hands.
"Shâhbâsh! Shâhbâsh!" she cried.
The dwarf stuck his head out of the grave.
"Well,maiSuttu, what is it now?"
She turned with a flaunt of her petticoat, a flinging out of her round arms.
"'Twas the other 'Shâhbâsh' I meant, but 'tis all one. Leave digging, and go and call Hussan, the father-in-law. I have made up my mind."
* * * * *
It was ten years after these events that the English boy, who had stayed proceedings in the date-picking, returned to the district as deputy commissioner. Gratitude, she averred, was her first reason for appearing in my garden with a cunningly plaited basket of Deen Ali's fruit. Afterwards a mutual fancy between her and my young barbarians led to confidences when she came over with all sorts of odd toys made out of palm-leaves and supplies of young squirrels for the children. She was still undoubtedly handsome, and the indisputable possessor of the tomb and the date-trees. The graveyard with its rights of alms and treasure had passed into the hands of the village accountant, in consideration of a monthly pension of ten rupees.
It was in answer to a query why she kept so many tame squirrels that this tale was told.
"And you had no difficulty in persuading your father-in-law?"
"None,Huzoor!God gave the bait, the fool swallowed it. The farthing Shâhbâsh found bought him, greed and all. It was better than fighting when the Kâzi would not swear to the marriage, and our names were birth-names. He signed the stamp paper gladly; and the perquisites have gone up again, so he hath lost nothing."
"Shâhbâsh?"
A big, broad smile came to her face.
"He digs, and his stomach is always full. What more can he want? The squirrels are quite happy over the peach-stones while they are gnawing. Shâhbâsh and the father-in-law think the kernel is inside, that is all. I know it is not. So we are both content."
When I left the district on promotion, Suttu came out as I rode past the blue-tiled tomb on my way to the river, with a great sheaf of lotus-blossoms in her arms. A tame squirrel, reared from the perennial nest in the thatch, peered from the folds in her veil, with furtive, bright eyes. The parrots circled, screaming round the ripening dates, and but a minute before my horse had shied from akarait, curving back to the prickly covert. The well known setting seemed a part of that familiar figure.
"May the Lord have theHuzoorin his keeping ever!" she said, decorously, as became afakeerni. But her smile seemed to dim the sunlight, as with a gesture full of grace she flung the lotus-blossoms in my path.
That was my last sight of Suttu.
It was a large, square block of a building, which had once been somebody's palace. Not very old. That could be recognized by the odd, reminiscent air of a Genoese palazzo which clung to it, proclaiming the influence of some Italian adventurer in the Mogul times. In those days, doubtless, its blank arcaded walls had risen from a terraced orange-garden; but now the surrounding slums of a big, native city ended abruptly, at varying distance, in an irregular brick-strewn space, where buffaloes were tethered to eat street sweepings, and their refuse in its turn was set out to dry in fuel cakes--that being the last resort of matter in India, where poverty and greed fight for the uttermost farthing of utility. Besides the buffaloes and the refuse-heaps, the space in its longest angle showed the inevitable weaver's warp twined in and out of tiger-grass stalks stuck slantwise in the dust--inevitable, because it is never absent from an open space in a native city. Sometimes solitary, like a huge worm impaled and left to dry; more often tended by two chattering Fates, one on each side, whose tongues gabble an accompaniment to the whirring bobbins tied to long sticks which dance a ladies' chain through the grass-stalks, as the bearers walk swiftly up and down the long length of growing warp--up and down, with an outward swirl of a full petticoat and a veil bulging backward, as the free brown arms twist and twine. A common sight, a picturesque one withal, seeing that it shows a good figure at its best. Sometimes beyond these two Fates you may see Clotho spinning her lacquered wheel, but not often. As a rule she hides in narrow alleys, where, set well over the central gutter on a stool, she can discuss past, present, and future with half a dozen neighbours at a time.
For the rest, the building was distinctly imposing. Like a palazzo, it was tunnelled by one single high archway, leading into a central court-yard, decorously circled by orange-trees in tubs. Above these, again, was a further likeness in the three tiers of graceful arcades surrounding a square of deep ultramarine sky. There, however, the resemblance ended. A Genoese palace is sacred to silence and shadow; this was set apart to sunshine and sound, excepting on a gala day, when the philanthropic great ones came down to distribute prizes. Then it burst forth into carpets, awnings, curtains, and even theAlif-Bey--wallahs(alphabet-class) in the first story bit their tongues to keep them still. That was the noisiest story. All day long the inmates chanted letters in high childish voices, while the monitors stood over them like the parent bird, ready to drop a fresh titbit of knowledge into the clamorous mouths.
Up-stairs, in the primary department, the babel had lost its first barbarous simplicity; the makers of it did not always understand what they themselves were saying, and the uncertainty of all things had damped their infant light-heartedness. Higher again, in the third story, quite an academic silence prevailed among the girls working away at Euclid, algebra, and all the 'ologies, and they had learned an automatic thrust forward of the arm towards the teacher worthy of a British board school. This never failed to please exotic philanthropy. The connection may not have been quite clear, but this particular branch of knowledge was invariably looked upon as a sign that education was really at last beginning to leaven the mass of deplorable female ignorance in India.
Perhaps it was. Certainly this school, with its court-yard devoted to thedhooliesin which the pupils were carried to and from their lessons, and its three stories of different standards, formed a perfect ladder of learning; the lowermost rung being the listless, lazy group of bearers lounging in the gateway with the female chaperons until four o'clock chimed from a hundred gongs in the city. Then they earned a monthly pay from the Government by carrying the climbers of the ladder back to their homes in decent seclusion--playing, as it were, the part of Prince Hassan's carpet in transporting them into another hemisphere--nay, more, another world. At any rate, from algebra and the exact sciences to a cell of four walls, and, if Fate were kind, a few square yards of flat roof open to the sky. Something of a mental somersault; therefore it was perhaps as well in one point of view, if not in another, that many of the claimants to genteel seclusion who were comfortably carried by a paternal Government to their own doors, could, on arrival, set aside the convenient pretence and go about to see their friends with the more simple and less costly protection of a veil.
"Ari, sister!" said a young, dissipated-looking lounger in the gate; "there is that baby awake again. Go, Chundoo, and call Fâtma."
The woman addressed--a big, brazen lump--went yawning and stretching to stand on the bottom step of the arched stairway. Then she called into the clamour above:
"Fâtma! Fâtma! The baby is awake."
Her hard tones echoed up the arcades, but the sing-song went on without a break. After a while, however, a pattering step came down the stairs, bringing into view a child of about ten, with a sharp, old face. Her blue trousers were rent at the knees, her skinny hands inconceivably smeared with ink--there was more ink than hand--and the coarse cotton cloth she wore as a veil was frayed, worn, and dirty. Beneath it, the odd little galloon of plaited hair on her forehead showed sun-bleached and rumpled, despite its tightness. A competent observer could have told at once that she belonged to the Cashmiri quarter, and to either a poverty-stricken or a bereaved house. No mother's fingers had been at that plaited hair for weeks.
"Where is Peru?" she began shrilly, still coming down the stairs. "Gambling and dicing, or snoozing and sleeping. How am I to win scholarships if my days are lost over a baby?Ai, sluggard! is that you? Art not ashamed of thyself?"
So, passing through the knot of jeering men into a dark recess in the entry, till her rating ceased over a year-old baby whimpering on the floor on a ragged quilt. "Peace! peace, my son, it is I, Fâtma--yea, it is Fâtma, thy father's sister."
The baby's fat, yellow legs--for it was one of those fair Cashmiri children who look sickly among the brown ones--were astride her curved hip, the whole balance of her thin bare body against its weight, as she paused once more among the men to fling a parting gibe at the sluggard.
"Ai, teri nâni!'Tis thy baby, I suppose--not mine."
A roar of laughter greeted the words, in which the girl joined, not because she quite understood its cause, but because she was quick enough to see that it was at Peru's expense, not hers. The veil which Nature draws to protect childhood counts for little among the men and women busy in drawing one to conceal their own unnatural vice, but Fâtma's hoary knowledge of evil did not extend to adouble entendre. She repeated her sally in childish ineptitude, till Peru with a curse bade her begone and take the boy to his mother.
"Tobah!but she hath a tongue," murmured another lounger.
"Pucki, burri pucki" (ripe or ready--very ready), assented Chundoo, shaking her head wisely. "'Tis time thou hadst a husband for her, O Peru!"
"Not I. Who is to bake bread and take the child? 'Tis ten rupees a month for the other, remember; and Fâtma--I swear it--is a good sort, for all her tongue."
Meanwhile the object of their remarks had begun to climb the stairs with her heavy burden. She had to sit down every now and again to rest, for she was but a poor scrap of a thing, ill-fed from her birth. She paused longer than usual at the turn of the stair whence you could see both ways along the first-story corridors.
"One and one make two--oo--oo,One and one make two--oo--oo,"
chanted the infant classes in full choir over their first table.
One and one certainly made two; and two were heavier to carry than one. Fâtma clutched her burden tighter and toiled up the steps once more, leaving the clamour behind her.
"Ari!Is that babe hungry again?" queried a tall girl, flashing past the next landing, plumaged like a parrot in red and green. "Babies seem hungry things. I'm glad I haven't one as yet." She was a bride, kept from her husband's house in order to enjoy a scholarship.
Fâtma, out of breath, said nothing, but leaned against a pillared shaft. The baby, having seized on her inky thumb, was sucking at it contentedly, for India ink is sweet and sticky.
"Fifteenth page, second paragraph. Among the lower animals the maternal instinct falls little short of that displayed by the human race. Even in the family of Aves the female, during the period of incubation--"
Fâtma's foot was on the ladder again, for the babe, having sucked the ink from her thumb, demanded something more satisfying.
Oh, how quiet it was up here in the long, matted corridor! One seemed to have left the stress of life behind. Through the doorways leading into darker rooms you could see groups of girls and women squatted on the floor over their low desks. Here busy over pen and ink, here murmuring from books. More circled round the terrestrial globe. An odd company: some wrinkled and old, with shaven head and white shroud; others dressed in the same fashion, but fair and fresh. Hindu widows these, seeking solace for death in life endured or yet to come. A young Sikh wife or two ablaze--ears, nose, and forehead--with jingling gold set thick with jewels. And here, sharper than any, with finger pointing to the pole, a small Bengali girl, who had been married these seven years gone, and looked a perfect child.
All this interested Fâtma not at all. She had seen it too often. Her goal lay in the end room among the second-year students, who sat on benches.
"Find the value of B in the following equation: A square plus X squared equal AX plus B," read out the teacher from her desk as Fâtma entered. Whereat she promptly added in English, "Bother that baby!"
It must be remembered that the B, representing baby, does not enter into equations at Girton or Somerville.
"I wonder you don't give it a bottle, Hoshiaribi?" continued the teacher, sternly, as a delicate-looking young woman, rather overdressed and overscented, took the child from Fâtma with a sigh, and retired to a corner.
"Fâtma breaks them on purpose," replied the mother, sullenly; "she says they disagree with him."
"Yea, 'tis true," assented Fâtma, gravely; "they give him a pain in his inside; then he cries, and I have to sit up, since Hoshiaribi is always tired, and Peru is too lazy."
Teacher looked at the little sharp face and was silent. That household, consisting of disreputable, good-for-nothing Peru, who gambled away the five rupees he gained by helping to carry his wife and other students to and from the school; shiftless Hoshiarbi, who spent half her scholarship of ten rupees on her clothes; and Fâtma, whose eight annas, a week for cleaning the writing-boards seemed to keep the whole going, was a perpetual puzzle to the English lady, even without the child. And with it? She felt quite relieved when Hoshiaribi came back to her equation minus the baby.
The afternoon sun was slanting in bars through the closed grass chicks, making the floors ring-streaked. It was close on four o'clock; the tide of learning slackened at full flood. Down-stairs among the little ones, first to go, there would only be time to chant "One and one make two--oo--oo" a few times more; so Fâtma sat down in the sunny, sleepy corridor, with the baby in her limited lap; and as she sat thinking, heaven knows of what, she jogged the base of its skull backward and forward on the palm of her supporting hand in approved native fashion. She did not know that it conduces to slight concussion of the brain and consequent coma, convenient to the nurse; but she knew mother always did it. This odd little woman of ten knew most of the old-fashioned, old-established ways of the world she lived in; and when the value of B had been discovered, she saw Hoshiaribi and the baby into the folds of a white domino, and so, on their way down-stairs to the husband, the curtaineddhoolie, and the oblong room up two flights of stairs in the Cashmiri quarter. Then she came to linger sturdily yet unobtrusively in the corridor, till teacher, coming out, busy over a mass of papers, nearly fell over her.
"Gracious me, child! what do you want? Why aren't you down-stairs?"
Perhaps Fâtma had been rehearsing her petition while she was nursing the baby; anyhow, she had it clear and pat.
"Huzoor, I want promotion to the primary department. It is such a long way to carry the baby to Hoshiaribi, and he sleeps not at all among the infants. We make too much noise. And Peru goes away gambling and forgets him, so I get no time for study. Thus, when Hoshiaribi's scholarship ends next year we shall be destitute, since Peru's money goes in quail-fighting, and we cannot fill our stomachs on eight annas."
Incontrovertible facts, every one of them.
"Have you read your grammar through?"
Fâtma shook her head.
"Oh no,Huzoor!But the baby could sleep in the upper primary, and then, Miss Sahib, I could soon read it. Now I am always on the stairs."
Another incontrovertible fact. Teacher had visions of the big, yellow-legged baby going up and down the ladder of learning on Fâtma's curved hip. That, however, could not possibly be held equivalent to a pass from one department to another. Yet the child's face was deadly earnest; a sudden sympathy and compassion brought a promise to consider the matter.
"But there are already three babies in the primary!" shrilled the Mohammedan head of that department, a portly lady with voluminous skirts trailing behind her, and red betel-stained teeth. There was no one in the school from the top story to the bottom who was the equal in deportment of Mumtaza Mihr--un--nissa Begum, whose father had been Munshi to some dead-and-gone Mogul. To begin with, she could silence every one with Persian epithets, and the pebbles of her polished speech hit hard. "These may Providence protect, but God hath sent this proof of his bounty to a handmaiden who is 'second-year student.' What! are we to reduce this gift of the Most High to a standard beneath its birth? Let Hoshiaribi, out of her plenty, appoint a wet-nurse, or let its amiable aunt supply it with 'Maw' at four annas. To allow her a primary pass without due qualification, in my poor thought, is non-regulation; and, in addition, a bad precedent."
Mumtaza mihr-un-nissa bowed her sleek, net-veiled head, and threw out her podgy fat hands, as if deprecating her own opinions.
For all that, Fâtma stayed among the infants, and spent most of her time on the wide stairs with the yellow-legged baby, while Peru joked shamelessly with Chundoo on the sunshiny steps, and Hoshiaribi, in the academic silence up-stairs, worked a crewel antimacassar between the equations. It suited her indolent, comfort-loving nature. Ever since she entered the school, nearly sixteen years ago, she had been in receipt of a scholarship of sorts. At the beginning influence may have had something to do with her good fortune, for her mother was only a poor, good-looking Cashmiri, and her reputed father dead. But since then she had justified her selection. If not clever, she was studious, and quite understood that learning meant livelihood. In the good old days when the one great object was to catch and keep a scholar, this might have gone on indefinitely; but now, under new rules, Hoshiaribi's scholarship would cease in a year, whether she passed or did not pass. Then she must become a teacher, or starve on Peru's five rupees.
The prospect was not pleasing. It would be a very different thing having to worry over thirty unwilling pupils in a poky little room, spending part of your own pay in bribes so as to get the grant for attendance, and then never knowing from day to day if some neighbourly spite would not result in empty mats on inspection-days.
"But if you pass," suggested a Hindu widow in her class, "you can go on, as I am doing, into the medical school. That is two years' more scholarship, and certain employment afterwards."
"'Tis all very well for you," muttered Hoshiaribi, sullenly. "You only came in three years ago. I have been here all my life. I like it. I don't want to go home and nurse the babies. I don't want to work. The committee paid me to learn, and I have learned. I will learn anything else they like. Why, then, should they take away my scholarship?"
"How foolish you are!" said the little Bengali; "you don't seem tounderstandwhat ascholarshipis."
"Perhaps I don't," retorted Hoshiaribi, flushing up. "My fathers were not scriveners and quill-drivers since creation, like yours. My people are poor. If I go home I must spin and grind corn. I will not. I tell youI will not!That is an end of it."
"Then you must teach."
"I don't want to teach. I want to stay here and learn."
"Be quiet, girls!" reproved the English teacher. "Do stick to your lessons, and remember why you come here. Think, just think, of the money that is being spent on your education!"
Hoshiaribi gave a triumphant glance at the Bengali girl. That was it. They had paid her to learn, and she had learned. The rest was an injustice.