'Send it back! It is hers; it is not mine! He gave it her! I stole it.
Don't tell. Oh! send it back! send it back!'
Over and over again, through the long hot days and nights, the murmur,
in its monotonous hurry, blent with the hum of the potter's wheel. The
old man had removed the latter to the farther courtyard, where he sat
working feverishly, yet without avail, so far as the village people
could see through the door, beyond which they were forbidden to go. The
simple folk were agog at the potter's strange looks and strange ways.
He never seemed to cease working, for even when the familiar sound of
the wheel was hushed something like an echo of it rose from within.
Those were the times when he stood wistfully in the dark airless hut
beside a restless head turning itself from side to side on the hard
pillow, and keeping time to the monotonous rhythm of the murmur, 'Send
it back, send it back.'
'Yea! dear heart, I will send it.' Then there would be silence for a
while; but only for a while, since the fever strengthened day by day.
Small wonder, when all Nature seemed in the grip of heat. The
thermometer, we are told, is accurately divided into degrees. If so,
the fallacy of such classification is self-evident, since every one
with experience knows that the difference between eighty-four degrees
and eighty-six degrees of Fahrenheit's instrument embraces the
difference between comfort and discomfort. Between these two points
that engine of torture, the punkah, trembles ere it begins the steady
swing which is only one degree less awful than the unsteady swing
necessitating the occultation of boots and other light articles of
furniture with a human head. Doubtless to the uninitiated it seems a
trivial affair to loop a parti-coloured rope through hooks in the
rafters, and to attach to it a whitewashed board with a newly starched
frill tacked to its lowest edge, thereinafter making mysterious
dispositions of a leathern thong, the neck of an old whisky bottle
thrust through the mud wall, and a circumambient flask of evil-smelling
oil. But those who know what it is, on returning from a morning ride,
to find the punkah in possession of your home, feel a chill at the very
thought, such as the thing itself will never produce by legitimate
means. The hot weather is upon one, and God only knows if fever,
cholera, home-sickness, sheer deadly _ennui_, will allow you to pass
through it unscathed as an honest gentleman.
George Keene, however, over in the branded bungalow, knew nothing of
the horrors of a hot weather in the jungles, and, while poor little
Aziz lay moaning out her impotent repentance, was actually
superintending the swinging of his punkahs; which is equivalent to a
man personally conducting his own hanging. He even, after the manner of
engineers, took pride in a device which was to secure a perfect silence
in the infernal machine. All unwitting of a time when, in the scorched
darkness, it might be preferable to curse a monotonous scroop giving
tangible excuse for wakefulness, than to lie visualising the unseen
swoop, as of some vampire eager to suck your heart's-blood.
Those two degrees of heat bring a thousand other changes. Even at
Hodinuggur, arid as it always was, they intensified the drought till a
drop of water seemed as visionary a consolation to the parched horizon
as it must have been to poor Dives in the fires of hell. The very canal
denied its nature as it slipped past yellow and thick with silt from
the clayey defiles of the lower hills, each little swirl and eddy
looking as if streaked and pitted in mud. Yet the chill of its snowy
birth came with the flood, so that in the red-hot evenings George's
factotum used to call through the yellow-dust haze to the groom who sat
on the edge of the canal, apparently moored to his place by a
soda-water bottle tied to a string, and then Ganesha would haul in the
strange buoy and scramble up the bank with it rapidly, so as to give
the master's dinner-drink a chance of being cool.
All this amused George Keene hugely at first. He drew caricatures of it
for the rectory, and sent a very impressionist sketch of his world to
Mrs. Boynton. It consisted of a dust-storm, a caper-bush, and a
rat-hole. She put it on the mantelpiece of the pretty drawing-room in
the little house among scented pine-woods, where she was just beginning
to appreciate the soothing effect of having a decent balance at your
banker's. Her lady-visitors laughed and said it was very clever, but
some of the men looked queer and muttered 'poor devil' under their
breath. Not that George looked on himself in that light. On the
contrary, Hodinuggur amused him. Its dreary antiquity was all new to
him, and as he went through the cool, dark passages of the old palace
on his way to play chess with the Diwan, he learnt to admire some
things about it; notably the thickness of its walls, through which the
sun never filtered, though it soaked piteously into his red-brick
bungalow. Upon the roof Zubr-ul-Zaman shrivelled under the heat almost
as much as a certain figure which still lay huddled up on the landing
of the secret stair in the thickness of the tower beneath him as he sat
at chess. Below that again Khush-hal Beg lay stark naked, like a huge
baby, in a swinging cradle, which was pulled to and fro by a drowsy
coolie, while a bheestic supplied the fat carcass alternately outside
and inside with tepid water from his skin bag, and as the latter
shrank, Khush-hal swelled visibly--horribly.
Yet further, in the bazaar by the Mori gate, Dalel Beg, abandoning
Europe-fashion under the stress of climate, slept all day and waked all
night, doing both more viciously than before, like a snake rendered
lively and dangerous by the heat. But Chandni, from her cool arches,
smiled calmly, even when 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay' rose from the opposite
balcony, which was now occupied by some one who could dance as well as
sing. To tell truth, she was glad to be quit of Dalel's amusement for a
time. Such deviations from her control never lasted long, and this time
she knew that the Diwan himself was on her side. So she lounged about
in the shadows, watching the pigeons in the niches, and rubbing her
soft palms together. Sometimes a pellet of opium lay between them;
sometimes nothing at all, for it was a trick of hers. Sometimes, on the
other hand, it was a great deal; neither more nor less than one of the
Hodinuggur pearls, which were as well known to all the jewellers of
that part of the country as the Koh-i-nur diamond is to the keeper of
the regalia. That was why Chandni on her return from Delhi, whither she
had gone ostensibly to learn new music-hall songs for Dalel's benefit,
had laughed so triumphantly at her own cleverness as she sat at the
Diwan's feet telling him what she had done.
'It was easy, with my cousin a jeweller; and we of the bazaar know a
trick or two with goldsmiths. Manohar Lal hath the pearls, sure enough.
All thou hast to do is to offer him a rupee more than he gave the mem
(which will not be half their value). The Hindu pig will take it,
seeing it is better than having the yellow-trousered ones[3] set on him
as a receiver of stolen goods.'
Zubr-ul-Zaman looked at her approvingly from under his bushy eyebrows.
She was a clever woman, but he would improve on her plan. He would put
the screw tighter on the Hindu pig, and get the pearls back in exchange
for a promise to pay. So far, however, Chandni's plot had been
unexpectedly successful. Both George Keene, by giving the Ayodhya pot
to the mem, and Dan Fitzgerald, by taking the jewels himself to Manohar
Lal, as Chandni's spies said he had done, were mixed up in the affair.
There was sufficient foundation for an _esclandre_, of course, but how
would that help them? They did not merely want revenge, as is so often
the case, they wanted the key of the sluice-gate. The courtesan
standing with wide-spread arms to fold her veil around her decently ere
she left the Diwan's presence, laughed shrilly at his difficulties.
'How? sayest thou. Who can tell? Save this. The mem will send for more
if she get the chance. That is our way. One rupee claims another. Bid
the vakeel at Rajpore go to her and suggest a marrow to the pot. All
things go in pairs, and we could send it through Keene sahib. For the
rest we must wait. There is a time yet, and if we are to work by fear
of exposure, that comes ever at the last moment. I play for a high
stake, as I have told thee, O my father! and I mean to win.'
Then it was that the old man, with regretful thoughts of his past
youth, had promised her one of the pearls in pledge for a future, when,
if she succeeded, she could wear the whole necklace as Dalel's wife.
That was how she came to be rolling the pearl against her palm lazily
one moonlit night, when George, who began to find the long empty
evenings coming at the end of a long empty day rather wearisome,
strolled over for the first time since his return from Rajpore to see
the potter, and while away half an hour in hearing some of his tales.
Rather to his surprise--since he knew nothing of the novel freak for
solitude--he found the outer palisade barred by thorn bushes, and going
a little farther along to where it joined the mud wall, vaulted over
the latter lightly into the inner courtyard. It was empty, and the door
of the hovel closed. Supposing the old man to be absent, he turned to
go, when a low cough from within made him pause and knock.
The next instant the potter burst out on him with eyes ablaze. 'Devils!
wilt not leave me in peace?' he began before recognising his visitor.
Then his manner changed; he drew the door to behind him, saying
hurriedly, 'This slave mistook; the children tease. But if the Huzoor
wants songs he must come to the outer court. The wheel is there now.
Will not the Huzoor come?'
He moved away like a plover luring an intruder from its nest, but
George paused again to listen to a repetition of the quick, low cough.
'Who is that ill?' he asked unwarily. The potter echoed the sound
instantly.
'It is I who cough, Huzoor,' he went on, still moving away. Pity of
God, how I cough! And I have fever, too. Mercy of the Most High! fever
always with mutterings hard to understand. But 'tis no matter. The
potters of Hodinuggur do not die; we go and come, we come and go.'
He had reached the wheel and set it a-spinning. But it seemed pivoted
askew in its new place and whirled in fitful ovals. Then he looked up
with a foolish laugh.
'My thumb will slip often now, Huzoor. Maybe 'twere better Fuzl turned
no more pots.'
The thought made him slacken the wheel to silence. He sat staring at it
vacantly, while George looked at him, wondering at the change in the
old man. His face had the weary, over-strained expression of those who
have wilfully forsaken sleep; the look which comes to those who are on
the rack day and night beside a sick-bed, and George, remembering the
cough, jumped to the conclusion that the potter had an invalid in the
hut. Most likely some female relation; whence his desire for secrecy.
To be sure, the old man had often said he lived alone, but in India one
never could be sure how far modesty interfered with truth. So, being
accustomed to such vicarious prescribings, the young man suggested he
should send some medicine for the cough.
His companion brightened up immediately, 'It is not all a cough,
Huzoor,' he replied hurriedly. 'It is fever. God! what fever. It is
only a little cough, with a rattle, as of dead wheat-straw under my
bosom as I draw breath; quick, quick, with curving nostrils like a
horse galloping fast.'
The vivid accuracy of the word-picture made George realise an idea
which had of late haunted his fancy. The idea of a hand-to-hand fight
with death alone, unaided, as the beasts of the field meet the
destroyer. Here was some one doing it; dying, perhaps, of pneumonia,
when others were being nursed through a finger-ache. The pity, the
injustice of it struck him fairly. Then the potter's voice going on
softly gave inconsequent answer to the vague doubt surging against the
boy's youthful content.
'Not that it matters, as I tell myself in the night season when I am
worst. We of Hodinuggur do not die. We go and come, we come again and
go.'
Something in his own words, perhaps, seemed to arrest the old man's
attention, and he paused.
'Huzoor!' he cried suddenly, 'I have something which belongs to the
madr mihrban. If the Huzoor would write an address.'
'Belonging to Miss Tweedie,' echoed George in surprise.
'Do not thanks belong to those who earn them!' replied the potter
evasively. 'If the Huzoor could write. I have pen and ink. Lo! it is
naught but potter's work, and the miss was kind.'
He fumbled in the niche beside his seat, and drew out a parcel done up
in waxcloth. Evidently a pot of some sort, thought George, beginning to
print boldly, as one of his profession should, with the slant-cut
native pen. The moonlight shone full on the potter seated at his wheel,
and the young Englishman pencilling Rose Tweedie's name. What was that
rising on the stillness of the night? A murmur from the hut? George
could not say for certain, as the old man set his wheel a-humming
instantly, but once more the feeling of injustice, the flash of pity
came to disturb his self-complacency. The feeling lasted longer this
time, and as he walked home his thoughts were full of that uncertainty
which is so hateful to the young. The Mori gate showed black and white
in the moonshine; a clash of silver bells rose from the shadows as he
passed; a pomegranate blossom fell at his feet. He took a step aside to
crush it fiercely, passionately; it lay between that and picking it up
he felt uneasily. Life here, at Hodinuggur, was so simple, so confusing
in its simplicity. To live and to die. Was that all?
He spent the remainder of the evening in writing to Mrs. Boynton,
putting his heart into reserved, half-jesting hints at his own puzzles.
And as he wrote, the potter, standing at the door of his hut, was
listening to a murmur coming from the darkness within.
'It is sent, dear heart! She has it. No one shall know,' he answered
softly. Then there was silence for a while. But only for a while. The
murmur came again and again through the hot night, to be stilled by the
same reply.
The post in due time brought Mrs. Boynton her letter. She read it with
great interest, and then promptly put it into the fire; her favourite
maxim being, that the keeping of letters was, at any rate, one reason
for the slow progress of humanity; since improvement was dangerous when
you were tied down in black and white to past opinions. And the
postman, after leaving the snug little house in the pine-woods, came on
to Colonel Tweedie's with a packet for Rose. Half-an-hour afterwards
the girl was sitting with the contents of the parcel on the table in
front of her, puzzling her brains why any one should have sent her back
the Ayodhya pot, or one exactly like it. There could be no doubt about
it, however. She took up the wrapper more than once; but the clear
print, if unmistakable, was also unrecognisable. She felt carefully
inside, hoping for a scrap of paper, a hint of any kind; but there was
nothing save a few bits of crumbling clay, leaving a rough rim near the
bottom of the pot. And all the time her first impression remained
unaltered. There was a mistake; it had been meant for Mrs. Boynton.
Undoubtedly it was meant for her. Under ordinary circumstances Rose
would most likely have taken the Ayodhya pot over to the little house
without more ado, but, though she did not acknowledge it to herself,
she could not treat its occupant in an ordinary way. Besides, there was
an element of mystery in the whole affair, and Rose hated mystery. The
memory of her dream on the night of the storm at Hodinuggur annoyed
her. She had slurred it over at the time, merely mentioning it as part
of a feverish attack; but now she wondered if the Diwan, or some one
else, could really have arranged a theft. And gradually there grew up
in her one distinct dislike to the whole business. She would have
nothing to do with it. She would say nothing, but simply send the thing
back whence it came. She would not even suppose that George had sent
it; she would return it straight. After all, it might be another pot,
and if she made a mistake in thinking this, they would know the truth
at Hodinuggur. A knock at the door roused her, and she slipped the vase
behind another on the mantelpiece ere she said 'come in.'
'Only to say, Miss Tweedie,' came in Lewis Gordon's voice from the
threshold, 'that I shall not be in to lunch. Your father has given me a
half-holiday, and, like a good little boy, I am going to spend it with
my relations. You will be at the Graham's tennis, I suppose? We shall.'
'No. I shall utilise my half-holiday with my relations also,' she
replied. 'Father and I will go for a ride. I don't often get him to
myself.'
'Then _au revoir_ till dinner. How comfortable your little snuggery is!
It and Gwen's drawing-room are the two prettiest rooms in Simla.'
There was a hard, almost angry look on Rose's face as she repacked the
parcel. Gwen's pretty room should at least be none the prettier for the
Ayodhya pot.
The result being that three days after this Chandni sat at the Diwan's
feet once more, holding it in her hands.
'So I am right, O father!' she cried, with that shrill laugh of hers;
'the mem hath sent for more. Lo! I shall wear the pearls ere long.'
'If they are sent again, thou mayest lose them this time,' retorted the
old man, but there was no warmth in his warning. He had begun to
believe in her luck, and the two sat in the purgatorial heat on the
roof, imagining evil as unconcernedly as if the universe could hold no
fiercer fire for the wicked. The pearls must be sent again, of course,
and the parcel given to be addressed by Keene sahib. So much was clear.
And Manohar Lal might be told to offer a less sum this time.
'Thy father was the devil!' remarked Zubr-ul-Zaman again--this time
more suavely, 'and pearls or no pearls thou shalt have Dalel. For look
you, Khush-hal is a waterbutt, a grease jar, and Dalel hath forgotten
how to deal fair, even by himself; but thou hast brains. So bring thine
ear within reach of a whisper. There is much to tell of Hodinuggur ways
ere I forget with age.'
She bent her head back till it almost rested on the old man's breast
and brought her flower-decked ear close to his mouth. One elbow touched
his knee, the hand giving light support to her chin: the attitude of
one all ears to hear. The Diwan, still as a statue, nothing but a
voice. A queer couple up there on the roof overlooking the red-hot, red
brick house, where George Keene was being introduced to what is
familiarly called a go of fever.
Even that was to begin with somewhat of an amusement, for a certain
feeling of self-complacency comes with the first intermission. After
the tortures and fires of the damned for some hours, the sudden and
complete escape from them seems to rebound to the credit of your
constitution, and you are confirmed in the impression that you are a
fine fellow. But it is not long before the fever fiend can knock that
sort of conceit out of a man if it chooses. In George's case it did
choose, and, having got him well in its grip, refused, after a day or
two, to let him go again.
The factotum lingered round with something he called beef-tea, and
another thing he called barley-water. Which was which, the patient,
with his mouth full of Dead Sea apples and quinine, could not say; nor
after a time did he very much care. He cared for nothing; unless indeed
it was to get rid of that vision of the schoolroom in the rectory--a
schoolroom with a cheery-cheeked boy roasting blackbirds at the fire.
If you didn't twist the bit of brown worsted stolen from your sister's
work-basket, then the birds slackened--slackened like the potter's
wheel. Oh! it was a lifetime of twisting, or there you were plumb,
burning with a horrid smell. When the factotum sat in the room the
blackbirds didn't; but then he breathed. Wasn't it rough that a man
could not stop breathing for half-an-hour just to oblige a friend? Yet
if the breathing beast sat outside, a '_whittering_, beast came in its
place. '_Whitter! Whitter!_' under the bed; behind the boxes. That was
the worst of a musk rat; no one could possibly tell where it would
'_whitter_' next. It wasn't its fault, of course; it meant no harm.
Poor little beggar! what a rummy sight it must be, if the yarn was
true, taking its kids out for a walk, tail by tail, in a string! And
then to George's infinite surprise and discomfiture, the feeble laugh
ended in a flood of tears; tears like a woman's, drenching the dry, hot
pillow. That was one comfort, they were as good as a water-cart! So
they came again between the laughs; for George, seventy miles away from
a white face, was down with the worst type of jungle fever.
Sometimes when he felt a little better the factotum brought out the
medicine-chest and between them they made wonderful compounds, which
the latter administered when his master had gone back to the
blackbirds.
It is a common enough experience, and George, not being a whit behind
many another young Englishman, fought his way through it pluckily,
while Ganesha, the groom, fished for soda-water bottles all day long,
and the water carrier circled round the house, cooling the dust with
sprinklings, and keeping an eye on the punkah coolie during the
factotum's absence over more barley-water or beef-tea.
Scorching nights, blistering days, devils in sparrow shape, the fringe
of the towel pinned to the punkah, flicking your nose, yet sparing the
mosquito battening on your cheek. All this George knew, till discomfort
itself grew dim, and he ceased to care for anything in this world or
the next.
Then after a time there was something dead cold--cold as ice--trickling
down his nose, and that surely was Dan's face. At any rate it was Dan's
voice.
'It's all right, dear boy. Sure the doctor's ridden out too, and you'll
be round in a jiffy.'
It is an Eastern record of life which tells us of a love passing the
love of women, and, even in these latter days one sees it more often
East than West; perhaps, paradoxically, because men have so often to
play a woman's part towards each other in India. Dan Fitzgerald in
particular was as gentle as any sister of mercy, and stronger than
most. To be sure he sat on the bed smoking, and after a day or two his
language over the barley-water was simply disgraceful. But by this time
George had come back from No-man's-land and could remember a little
booklet called 'Home Comforts Abroad,' which had been given him by his
grandmother. So Dan ferreted it out from the bottom of a box full of
canal records, and ordered the charcoal brazier into the verandah. Then
he stirred diligently while George, propped up by pillows, read out the
directions weakly. The result being that the factotum bore away a
deadly mixture in triumph, because even with this surpassing love in
his heart for the compounder, the boy could not swallow it.
Nevertheless, wearied out by feeble laughter, he slept the first real
sleep of recovery and woke to extol the factotum's beef-tea. That
functionary being thus appeased, the little red brick furnace out in
the wilderness became a home indeed; that is to say, an abode of love,
and peace, and a great contentment.
It was on the very day of promotion to an arm-chair and a cigarette
that George received a letter from Colonel Tweedie, enclosed in one
from Rose. His eyes grew moist as he read it; he had to pause ere he
could turn to where his companion sat busy over his share of the post,
and even then his voice faltered.
'You--you _beast_, Dan!'
The words were uncomplimentary; the tone was a caress. His hearer did
not affect to misunderstand.
'Well, it will be jolly for you at Simla. The gayest fortnight of all
just before the rains, and there is nothing like a whiff of hill air
for killing the microbes. Besides, the Tweedies' house is awfully jolly
to stay in.'
'But you?--you will be here,' said George remorsefully, despite the
eager pleasure in his eyes.
Dan laughed.
'It isn't the first time I've been in a jungle station. Are you
thinking of the whisky bottle again? Sure I'll take a temperance ticket
for the fortnight, if it would make my keeper easier.'
'Don't be a fool, Dan.'
He came round to lean over the back of George's arm-chair.'
'Is that the thanks I get for warming a viper in my bosom? But I must
get back to the office for a day or two first. Then I'll start you off
with my blessing and all the boiled shirts you have in the world. And
more, by token, that picture of the girl with the Ayodhya pot that's
lying underneath them. Why didn't you show it me before? It's the best
thing you ever did, and must go to the exhibition. Always put your best
foot foremost up at Simla among the big-wigs. That is my advice.'
'Which you don't follow yourself.'
'But I do!--only my foot's a beetle-crusher, and the worms don't like
it. So that is settled, and we will tell the washerman about the white
ties. And look here, George, I'll bring the duplicate of that key back
with me. Then you can take yours, and I shall know----'
George's hand went up to the back of his chair as if to find another to
clasp; then he changed the _venue_ with an odd little laugh.
'Give me a light, old man. I--I can't keep this cigarette going,
somehow.'
As Dan stooped over him their eyes met, and that was enough.