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 the _fakeerni_, 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,
_mai_ Suttu--I, Shahbash, 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?"
Shahbash, 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 Shahbash, 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 the _jinn_ who
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 the _jinn_, 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 Shahbash, 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--_mai_ Suttu crying like any other woman!
"'Tis but the _pilu_-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, _mai_ Suttu. The treasure is
found."
It was, indeed. All that day the _fakeerni_ sat 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 Kazi'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
Shahbash 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 Shahbash?" 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 Shahbash, 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.
"_Shahbash! Shahbash!_" she cried.
The dwarf stuck his head out of the grave.
"Well, _mai_ Suttu, what is it now?"
She turned with a flaunt of her petticoat, a flinging out of her round
arms.
"'Twas the other 'Shahbash' 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 Shahbash found bought him, greed and all. It was better than
fighting when the Kazi 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."
"Shahbash?"
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. Shahbash 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 a _karait_, curving
back to the prickly covert. The well known setting seemed a part of
that familiar figure.
"May the Lord have the _Huzoor_ in his keeping ever!" she said,
decorously, as became a _fakeerni_. 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.
AT A GIRLS' SCHOOL.
I.
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 the
_Alif-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
the _dhoolies_ in 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 Fatma."
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:
"Fatma! Fatma! 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, Fatma--yea,
it is Fatma, 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 nani!_ '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
Fatma's hoary knowledge of evil did not extend to a _double 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 Fatma--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. Fatma 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.
Fatma, 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_--"
Fatma'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 Fatma 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 Fatma
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 Fatma with a sigh,
and retired to a corner.
"Fatma breaks them on purpose," replied the mother, sullenly; "she
says they disagree with him."
"Yea, 'tis true," assented Fatma, 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 Fatma,
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 Fatma 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 curtained _dhoolie_, 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 Fatma 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?"
Fatma 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 Fatma'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.