Then she let them down by a cord through the window; for her house was
upon the town-wall, and she dwelt upon the wall.—_Joshua_ ii. 15.
Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith
was her very-great-grand-mamma, and that was before the days of Eve, as
every one knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s
profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to
young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East,
where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter,
nobody writes lectures or takes any notice; and that is a distinct proof
of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.
Lalun’s real husband, for even ladies of Lalun’s profession in the East
must have husbands, was a big jujube-tree. Her Mamma, who had married a
fig-tree, spent ten thousand rupees on Lalun’s wedding, which was
blessed by forty-seven clergymen of Mamma’s church, and distributed five
thousand rupees in charity to the poor. And that was the custom of the
land. The advantages of having a jujube-tree for a husband are obvious.
You cannot hurt his feelings, and he looks imposing.
Lalun’s husband stood on the plain outside the City walls, and Lalun’s
house was upon the east wall, facing the river. If you fell from the
broad window-seat you dropped thirty feet sheer into the City Ditch. But
if you stayed where you should and looked forth, you saw all the cattle
of the City being driven down to water, the students of the Government
College playing cricket, the high grass and trees that fringed the
river-bank, the great sand-bars that ribbed the river, the red tombs of
dead Emperors beyond the river, and very far away through the blue
heat-haze, a glint of the snows of the Himalayas.
Wali Dad used to lie in the window-seat for hours at a time, watching
this view. He was a young Muhammadan who was suffering acutely from
education of the English variety, and knew it. His father had sent him
to a Mission-school to get wisdom, and Wali Dad had absorbed more than
ever his father or the Missionaries intended he should. When his father
died, Wali Dad was independent and spent two years experimenting with
the creeds of the Earth and reading books that are of no use to anybody.
After he had made an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Roman Catholic
Church and the Presbyterian fold at the same time (the Missionaries
found him out and called him names, but they did not understand his
trouble), he discovered Lalun on the City wall and became the most
constant of her few admirers. He possessed a head that English artists
at home would rave over and paint amid impossible surroundings—a face
that female novelists would use with delight through nine hundred pages.
In reality he was only a clean-bred young Muhammadan, with penciled
eyebrows, small-cut nostrils, little feet and hands, and a very tired
look in his eyes. By virtue of his twenty-two years he had grown a neat
black beard which he stroked with pride and kept delicately scented. His
life seemed to be divided between borrowing books from me and making
love to Lalun in the window-seat. He composed songs about her, and some
of the songs are sung to this day in the City from the Street of the
Mutton-Butchers to the Copper-Smiths’ ward.
One song, the prettiest of all, says that the beauty of Lalun was so
great that it troubled the hearts of the British Government and caused
them to lose their peace of mind. That is the way the song is sung in
the streets; but, if you examine it carefully and know the key to the
explanation, you will find that there are three puns in it—on “beauty,”
“heart,” and “peace of mind,”—so that it runs: “By the subtlety of Lalun
the administration of the Government was troubled and it lost such and
such a man.” When Wali Dad sings that song his eyes glow like hot coals,
and Lalun leans back among the cushions and throws bunches of
jasmine-buds at Wali Dad.
But first it is necessary to explain something about the Supreme
Government which is above all and below all and behind all. Gentlemen
come from England, spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great
Sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its works,
denouncing or praising it as their own ignorance prompts. Consequently
all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no
one, not even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the
administration of the Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh
drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the
Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are
worried to death or broken in health and hope in order that the land may
be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually
become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone, but the
idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the
work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into
good living goes forward. If an advance be made all credit is given to
the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If
a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame.
Overmuch tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many
natives that the native is capable of administering the country, and
many devout Englishmen believe this also, because the theory is stated
in beautiful English with all the latest political colour.
There be other men who, though uneducated, see visions and dream dreams,
and they, too, hope to administer the country in their own way—that is
to say, with a garnish of Red Sauce. Such men must exist among two
hundred million people, and, if they are not attended to, may cause
trouble and even break the great idol called “Pax Britannic,” which, as
the newspapers say, lives between Peshawur and Cape Comorin. Were the
Day of Doom to dawn to-morrow, you would find the Supreme Government
“taking measures to allay popular excitement” and putting guards upon
the graveyards that the Dead might troop forth orderly. The youngest
Civilian would arrest Gabriel on his own responsibility if the Archangel
could not produce a Deputy Commissioner’s permission to “make music or
other noises” as the license says.
Whence it is easy to see that mere men of the flesh who would create a
tumult must fare badly at the hands of the Supreme Government. And they
do. There is no outward sign of excitement; there is no confusion; there
is no knowledge. When due and sufficient reasons have been given,
weighed and approved, the machinery moves forward, and the dreamer of
dreams and the seer of visions is gone from his friends and following.
He enjoys the hospitality of Government; there is no restriction upon
his movements within certain limits; but he must not confer any more
with his brother dreamers. Once in every six months the Supreme
Government assures itself that he is well and takes formal
acknowledgment of his existence. No one protests against his detention,
because the few people who know about it are in deadly fear of seeming
to know him; and never a single newspaper “takes up his case” or
organises demonstrations on his behalf, because the newspapers of India
have got behind that lying proverb which says the Pen is mightier than
the Sword, and can walk delicately.
So now you know as much as you ought about Wali Dad, the educational
mixture, and the Supreme Government.
Lalun has not yet been described. She would need, so Wali Dad says, a
thousand pens of gold and ink scented with musk. She has been variously
compared to the Moon, the Dil Sagar Lake, a spotted quail, a gazelle,
the Sun on the Desert of Kutch, the Dawn, the Stars, and the young
bamboo. These comparisons imply that she is beautiful exceedingly
according to the native standards, which are practically the same as
those of the West. Her eyes are black and her hair is black, and her
eyebrows are black as leeches; her mouth is tiny and says witty things;
her hands are tiny and have saved much money; her feet are tiny and have
trodden on the naked hearts of many men. But, as Wali Dad sings: “Lalun
_is_ Lalun, and when you have said that, you have only come to the
Beginnings of Knowledge.”
The little house on the City wall was just big enough to hold Lalun, and
her maid, and a pussy-cat with a silver collar. A big pink and blue
cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling of the reception room. A
petty Nawab had given Lalun the horror, and she kept it for politeness’
sake. The floor of the room was of polished chunam, white as curds. A
latticed window of carved wood was set in one wall; there was a
profusion of squabby pluffy cushions and fat carpets everywhere, and
Lalun’s silver _huqa_, studded with turquoises, had a special little
carpet all to its shining self. Wali Dad was nearly as permanent a
fixture as the chandelier. As I have said, he lay in the window-seat and
meditated on Life and Death and Lalun—specially Lalun. The feet of the
young men of the City tended to her doorways and then—retired, for Lalun
was a particular maiden, slow of speech, reserved of mind, and not in
the least inclined to orgies which were nearly certain to end in strife.
“If I am of no value, I am unworthy of this honour,” said Lalun. “If I
am of value, they are unworthy of Me.” And that was a crooked sentence.
In the long hot nights of latter April and May all the City seemed to
assemble in Lalun’s little white room to smoke and to talk. Shiahs of
the grimmest and most uncompromising persuasion; Sufis who had lost all
belief in the Prophet and retained but little in God; wandering Hindu
priests passing southward on their way to the Central India fairs and
other affairs; Pundits in black gowns, with spectacles on their noses
and undigested wisdom in their insides; bearded headmen of the wards;
Sikhs with all the details of the latest ecclesiastical scandal in the
Golden Temple; red-eyed priests from beyond the Border, looking like
trapped wolves and talking like ravens; M. A.’s of the University, very
superior and very voluble—all these people and more also you might find
in the white room. Wali Dad lay in the window-seat and listened to the
talk.
“It is Lalun’s _salon_,” said Wali Dad to me, “and it is electic—is not
that the word? Outside of a Freemason’s Lodge I have never seen such
gatherings. _There_ I dined once with a Jew—a Yahoudi!” He spat into the
City Ditch with apologies for allowing national feelings to overcome
him. “Though I have lost every belief in the world,” said he, “and try
to be proud of my losing, I cannot help hating a Jew. Lalun admits no
Jews here.”
“But what in the world do all these men do?” I asked.
“The curse of our country,” said Wali Dad. “They talk. It is like the
Athenians—always hearing and telling some new thing. Ask the Pearl and
she will show you how much she knows of the news of the City and the
Province. Lalun knows everything.”
“Lalun,” I said at random—she was talking to a gentleman of the Kurd
persuasion who had come in from God-knows-where—“when does the 175th
Regiment go to Agra?”
“It does not go at all,” said Lalun, without turning her head. “They
have ordered the 118th to go in its stead. That Regiment goes to Lucknow
in three months, unless they give a fresh order.”
“That is so,” said Wali Dad without a shade of doubt. “Can you, with
your telegrams and your newspapers, do better? Always hearing and
telling some new thing,” he went on. “My friend, has your God ever
smitten a European nation for gossiping in the bazars? India has
gossiped for centuries—always standing in the bazars until the soldiers
go by. Therefore—you are here today instead of starving in your own
country, and I am not a Muhammadan—I am a Product—a Demnition Product.
That also I owe to you and yours: that I cannot make an end to my
sentence without quoting from your authors.” He pulled at the _huqa_ and
mourned, half feelingly, half in earnest, for the shattered hopes of his
youth. Wali Dad was always mourning over something or other—the country
of which he despaired, or the creed in which he had lost faith, or the
life of the English which he could by no means understand.
Lalun never mourned. She played little songs on the _sitar_, and to hear
her sing, “O Peacock, cry again,” was always a fresh pleasure. She knew
all the songs that have ever been sung, from the war-songs of the South
that make the old men angry with the young men and the young men angry
with the State, to the love-songs of the North where the swords
whinny-whicker like angry kites in the pauses between the kisses, and
the Passes fill with armed men, and the Lover is torn from his Beloved
and cries, _Ai, Ai, Ai!_ evermore. She knew how to make up tobacco for
the _huqa_ so that it smelt like the Gates of Paradise and wafted you
gently through them. She could embroider strange things in gold and
silver, and dance softly with the moonlight when it came in at the
window. Also she knew the hearts of men, and the heart of the City, and
whose wives were faithful and whose untrue, and more of the secrets of
the Government Offices than are good to be set down in this place.
Nasiban, her maid, said that her jewelry was worth ten thousand pounds,
and that, some night, a thief would enter and murder her for its
possession; but Lalun said that all the City would tear that thief limb
from limb, and that he, whoever he was, knew it.
So she took her _sitar_ and sat in the window-seat and sang a song of
old days that had been sung by a girl of her profession in an armed camp
on the eve of a great battle—the day before the Fords of the Jumna ran
red and Sivaji fled fifty miles to Delhi with a Toorkh stallion at his
horse’s tail and another Lalun on his saddle-bow. It was what men call a
Mahratta _laonee_, and it said:—
Their warrior forces Chimnajee
Before the Peishwa led,
The Children of the Sun and Fire
Behind him turned and fled.