Part 10

The facts in this case were extremely bald. Chundoo, the chaperone, an elderly widow, had taken a fancy to the handsome young scamp; and having been appointed doorkeeper to a new female hospital, thought it more respectable to have a man of her own. Then, _dhooli_-bearers got six rupees at the hospital, instead of five at the school. That, sordid as it may seem, was why Peru had news to tell. The reason for his telling it was this: he knew perfectly well that Hoshiaribi would never consent to live in the same house as Chundoo, and so his responsibility for her maintenance would cease, as he could plead poverty against any claim for separate alimony. As for her pay as a teacher, that, if Central school gossip said true, would not be for long; but Fâtma would look after the babies somehow. Such were his thoughts as he sat watching the child's odd little figure busy over the cakes, which he did not want, seeing that his new bride had given him _kababs_ and _bakkharkana_ for breakfast. He had a sort of affection for Fâtma, who was the only relation he had in that part of the world. He did not mean her to starve, and, if she could not manage, it would be easy to give a rupee or two on the sly. What he _did_ want was to keep Chundoo in a good temper, by showing conclusively that Hoshiaribi had no hold on his affections.

To be sure, he had shown this illegally for some months back, but now law and order demanded something legitimate; so he would respectfully command her to come and live with Chundoo, and, when she refused, be quit of responsibility: for polygamy is made for the virtuous, not for the vicious.

Suddenly Fâtma looked at him, sniffed, and looked at him again.

"Thou hast been to a wedding--whose?" she asked, suspiciously. In truth, an odour of orange blossom and _attar_ began to be apparent in the close room. Peru coughed, hesitated; it was a good beginning, and might save him a scene with his wife; so he began.

"H'm!" commented Fâtma; "then that's an end of bread for your stomach. God be praised!" That is how it struck her.

"Little imp of sin!" cried Peru, seizing her half roughly, half jestingly, by the shoulder. "Keep a quieter tongue in thy head, or I'll find a husband to gag thee."

She gave a shrill laugh of scorn, and twisted herself from his hold.

"A husband, indeed! Then Chundoo will take the babies? _Ai budzart!_ Think not I do not understand. Let be. They are my babies, not thine; and, thank God, I go not to bed hungry this night."

She sat herself down on the floor as she spoke, and began calmly on the cakes she had been toasting.

"Go, my brother--go back to thy Chundoo," she said, eying him disdainfully--from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, dissolute idler was writ all over him--"Go! we have no need of thee." Then her dignity gave way; she leaped to her feet, scattering the broken cakes upon the floor, and the echoes of her plain speaking followed him down-stairs and flooded up into the room where Lalu the cripple sat, with a ray of sunlight glittering on the gold thread he was laying on the leather.

"Heaven save her husband!" he muttered good-humoredly. Then he sighed. Perhaps the thought that he would never have even a shrewish wife oppressed him. When his grandmother died he would be quite alone in the dark room, with the glittering thread which seemed to make the darkness more dingy and dreary. He was a young man of five-and-twenty, who might stand years of imprisonment in those four walls, with--Heaven be praised!--a scrap of roof open to the sunlight beyond; that is to say, if he could pay the rent. He looked down at his fine, supple hands and smiled, knowing that so long as they were left there was no fear. If only the rest of him had been to match, instead of marred, twisted, helpless!

"'Tis God's will," he said half aloud, as fervently as any Christian; for there are saints of all creeds, and this poor cripple, up three flights of stairs in the Cashmiri quarter, was one of them. Then he took to thinking tenderly of the odd little girl downstairs, whom his grandmother did out of the uttermost farthing. Poor little soul! when he was alone he would at least be able to give her what was due.

Meanwhile Fâtma, down-stairs, was nursing her childish yet all too comprehending wrath against Peru for Hoshiaribi's return. Would she not be angry? It would serve Peru right if she went off straight to Chundoo's house and clawed her.

The room, with its one small window, darkened early. Fâtma put the babies to sleep and went out into the alley to watch, eager to give the first words of disaster. After a time she ventured round the corner. No one. A little farther. No one. Down the next turn. No one still. Perhaps she had chosen the other way. Back up the now pitchy stairs to the dim room. No one there save the sleeping babies. Fâtma's wrath--cooled, rose again against the loiterer, had time to cool again into dismay. She knew well enough, young as she was, what Meran's guidance might mean in the Badami bazar. For all that she waited patiently, crouching on the stairs, peering down into the darkness, watching, listening for the shuffling footstep of a veiled woman--watching and waiting stolidly, without fear or blame.

Such things were, and neither Peru nor Hoshiaribi counted for much with her save as extra appetites for dinner. When ten o'clock chimed from the police station gong at the Mori gate, she went back to the room and drew the bolt of the door. All was dark, save where a ray of moonlight shone through a chink in the shutter. She stole over to this, and, standing in the bar of light, undid a knot in the corner of her veil. One, two, three annas, some pice, and a few cowries.

If the worst came to the worst, and Hoshiaribi did not come back, that would buy a "Maw" at the gimcrack shop round the corner. So she cuddled up on the bed beside the babies contentedly.

III.

"_One and one make two--oo--oo, Two and two make four--or--or_."

"That is enough, my daughters," said Fâtma, royally. "Miream and Anna will play with Mohammed Ali; Janet and Kareem will take Ahmad Hassan for a walk down the alley and back again. The rest of you will sit still and think how good you are going to be to-morrow."

The little, large-eyed, gentle mites, ranged solemnly behind a row of ink-pots, primers, and writing-boards, did as they were bid decorously--for the organization of Mussamat Fâtma's school was excellent, its discipline first class. The cleanliness, too, of its primers, its pens, and its writing-boards was quite abnormal. Not because of abnormal neatness, but because none of these things were ever used. They were there because that was part of the game of school, and Fâtma's school was emphatically a school with the learning left out. To be sure, the pupils chanted their letters, and asserted the gospel that one and one make two all the world over; but, after that, education went down the by-path of learning how to sit still and do as you were bid. Yet somehow the wee girlies liked it well, and their busy mothers liked it better still. In that crowded quarter of evil repute it was something to have a _crêche_, where for a few hours the little ones with a tempting jewel or two were safe from the avarice of any passer-by. And then Fâtma's pupils gave no trouble at home. So the school throve, and though educationally, of course, it was a miserable sham, it gave great satisfaction to all concerned; Fâtma finding sufficient payment in the general good-will of her neighbours, and the constant relays of nurse-maids she secured. She had plenty of time now for the golden stars; and since Lâlu, the cripple's grandmother, had died, Fâtma not only got full price for the work she did for him, but earned something besides by cooking his bread and doing his marketing when she did her own. An excellent plan, said the neighbours, since Mussumat Fâtma, aged fourteen, was as sedate as a great-grandmother, and poor Lâlu, for all his kind face and clever hands, was not to be reckoned as a possible husband for any one. The only thing over which the women shook their heads was this lack of a husband for the girl, who, though she was a little crooked perhaps, with hauling those big children up and down stairs, had not, like Lâlu, lost her right to be married. What excuse could that rascal Peru offer to his conscience for his neglect of the natural guardian's first duty? He, and Chundoo, and Hoshiaribi flaunting away in the Badâmi bazar, were no better than pigs of infidels. It would serve them right if Fâtma were to appeal modestly to the elders, and let herself go to a husband for the beggarly five _dumris_ the law demands. Then Peru would have to support his boys, and would not even get compensation in the price of the bride. But Fâtma herself scouted the idea. She had seen enough of husbands, and would never marry. She had her babies and her school; and then there was always Lâlu, who was as wise as any saint, and as good as any father to the boys. She used to leave them in his charge when she did her marketing; for this was after hours, when her little school-maidens had gone home. And as for Hassan Ahmad, the yellow-legged baby of two years past, if ever he went a-missing, Fâtma knew she would find him cuddled up among Lâlu's helpless legs, watching the gold thread loop itself into dainty patterns very different from her coarse, crooked stars, and listening contentedly to Lâlu's musical voice intoning some versicle of the Koran. He knew as many as a Moulvi, she used to say proudly; for all that she repulsed with scorn his suggestion that she should teach some to her pupils.

"_Ai tobak, Mian_ Lâl Khan! Dost forget mine is 'primary girls' school'? It is not a 'missen' or an 'indigenous school.' We do not teach such things. Only letters and tables, and such like."

She did not care to confess that she herself knew none of the versicles which even the poorest girl ought to know.

"Well, well, perhaps thou art right, Mussumat Fâtma," he replied. "All learning is good." As he sat at his work he used often to pause and listen with a smile to the chorus of children's voices, insisting on the fact that one and one make two. After all, it did not differ much from the creed he had somehow extracted from the sonorous Arabic phrases which were so constantly on his lips. What was, was; what would be, would be.

Meanwhile life was brighter for him because of Fâtma and the baby, Hassan Ahmad cuddling close to him, and the children's chorus echoing up the stairs. It was easier for Fâtma also. When she had closed the door at ten o'clock one night, nearly two years ago, and counted out the money in order to buy a "Maw," she had thought of nothing but the immediate morrow. Now, when she barred it, she closed it deliberately against all interference. Peru, at first, had come prowling round to see how matters went, and Hoshiaribi had sent inquiries from the Badami bazar. Fâtma had given both a cool reception. She was quite happy, quite content. The babies did not belong to those _budzarts_; they belonged to her. So, by degrees, they had left her to her own devices, and for the last year she had seen or heard nothing of them.

It was a stifling afternoon in August. The dry heat which had baked into the bricks with the June sun, had boiled out of them again with the scanty rain of July into a sort of sodden vapour, like the hot breath of some evil creature. The alley smelled horribly. Even the inhabitants spat as they emerged from the dark drain of a tenement stair, which all the sweeping in the world could not keep clean. The very water spilled on it, as the woman carried the _chatties_ full to their rooms, seemed to dissolve the dirt and give it greater freedom. When those on the ground-floor sprinkled the entry for the sake of coolness, the stench rose to the roof. And in and out the highways and byways of the city cholera played pranks with the people--here to-day, gone tomorrow; biding its time, till on some steamy, dull morning folk would wake to find it in earnest.

"The sickness was at Haiyatun's yesterday," Râjjun would say to Fâjjan; "it took the cousin who came from Umritsur. The police were burning clothes and sulphur as I went by this morning. It is tyranny when the Lord is over all."

"Yea, and they carried Mai Jeswant's man to the hospital, and the doctors never left him, but he died all the same. Look you, 'tis God's will."

And the two women grinding at the mill ground on. The one might be taken and the other left before the day was out, but the meal was wanted for the survivors' supper. People all over the world die silently from pluck, or pride, or piety; but not all of them die as these do, casting no shadow of blame either on the heaven above or on the earth beneath. One has to go to civilized lands, and to a people who profess a faith which proclaims its triumph over the grave, before we find the fear of infection producing a selfish panic.

Fâtma, having attended the Central school during an epidemic, had views on sanitary subjects and the procedure due to the dignity of a primary school. She fumigated her maidens solemnly with sulphur, she had covers to the water-pots, and confiscated melon-rinds with the utmost rigour. This proved a vast amusement to the squatting circle.

"_Ari, Muallama!_" would come a little pipe. "Juntu hath a bit of pumpkin in her veil; I saw it."

Then would ensue a sort of hunt the slipper, beset for each with delicious tremors, lest, after all, the contraband morsel should be found in your possession; until some one, seized by shyness or sudden virtue, would give it up to be burned.

Fâtma, on a sultry August afternoon, had just been playing the part of grand inquisitor over a gnawed fragment of cucumber, when a big heavy-browed woman pushed her way unceremoniously into the room, and sat down on the bed with an air of possession. It was Chundoo. Fâtma had last seen her gossiping on the palazzo steps, and something told the girl the visit boded no good. Her heart gave a throb, her usual courage seemed to leave her.

"So this is thy school," began her sister-in-law. "Lord, what a farce! But that is over. I have come for thee because thy wedding is settled at last. The dates will be brought to-morrow, so thou hadst as well return with me to-night. 'Twill save trouble."

The studiously careless tone of undoubted authority had its effect. There was nothing incredible in it. Marriage in Fâtma's world meant coercion. She had seen most of her contemporaries handed over to a husband without even a pretence of consulting their wishes.

"I--I--want no husband," she faltered, utterly taken aback.

Chundoo laughed--a nasty laugh.

"_Wah illah!_ So girls say ever. 'Tis pretty behaviour, and thou hast said it. The thing is settled."

"By Peru?" asked the girl, quickly.

"By Peru; who else? Look you, the scoundrel is in jail. Nay, why shouldst start? It was his appointed end, and serve him right, wasting my substance to a shadow. He robbed a peasant in the _serai_, treating him with liquor, after '_Englis fassen_.' Well, he is there for two years, and hath repented him of the evil and bethought him of his duty. So I have found thee a husband--honourable, if somewhat old. But thou, God knows, art a grandmother, so that matters not. And he can afford to pay for a young wife, and keep her in plenty. So send these brats away, and the woman I have downstairs will take them to Hoshiaribi. Their father being in jail, they are her charge, not mine. Come, chicken, there is no time to lose."

She laid her hand on the girl's arm as Fâtma stood stupidly staring at her. The touch seemed to make her realize the situation, for she darted with a cry to where her babies sat in the charge of the first class.

Perhaps the little nurses, gazing with that stolid, wide-eyed dislike at the strange woman who spoke so roughly to their teacher, thought that the latter sought their protection. They gave it anyhow. In a second, Chundoo was surrounded by a mob of twenty mites, full of shrill cries and ineffectual beatings of tiny hands--ineffectual, till the tiniest, giving way to the natural Eve, slipped down and deliberately bit the enemy in the calf. Chundoo, yelling with pain, slapped right and left. Fâtma, her fear gone before this attack on her pupils, flew to the rescue. Such a scene had not been enacted within those walls for two years. Before five minutes passed even the stairs were blocked by infuriated mothers.

When Chundoo had been dragged off the Kôtwal, followed by half the matrons in the alley, Fâtma sat down, dazed and dry-eyed, between her two charges. That bite had saved her; she would not have to go that evening, perhaps not even to-morrow. But afterwards? Girls had to be married, and Peru could marry her to any one he chose. Even the neighbours, when they heard about the husband, would side against her. And it would be of no use to beg mercy of Peru in jail. That was the very reason why they had thought of marrying her. The money would be useful to keep Chundoo comfortable, and yet she would not be bothered with the boys, as she would have been had Peru been free. Now Hoshiaribi, their mother, must keep them, but Chundoo would get the dowry. What did it matter who got it, if she must marry?--and if Peru said she must, she must. There was no help; even the neighbours would side against her.

A rapping on the floor above reminded her that she had forgotten Lâlu's dinner. Poor Lâlu! Who would look after him when she was gone? Drearily and still dry-eyed, she hitched the two-year-old on her hip, and with a pile of dough-cakes and pease porridge in her hand toiled up the stair behind Hassan Ahmad, who climbed the high brick steps on all-fours, slowly, methodically.

It was almost dark in the room above, and Lâlu's voice came kindly from a shadowy corner.

"Trouble no further, Mussumat Fâtma. I was loath to knock, yet knew thou wouldst be vexed to forget. Set the food down--so. Sure thou hast enough to-day without my service."

She gave way to tears then, and crouched down on the floor suddenly, an image of forlorn, crushing grief.

"O Lâlu, Lâlu! Peru is going to marry me, and what will become of my school? And what will become of my babies? And what will become of you, O Lâlu?"

Hassan Ahmad had toddled over to the cripple's helpless knee, and Mohammed Ali, half asleep, buried his head on the girl's thin breast. There was no sound in the room save her sobbing, and a passing rustle as if something in the shadows had tried to move and sank back to the old position again. After a time the response came feebly:

"_Ai_, my sister, cry not. Marriage is good. It is the Lord's will, and Peru hath the right."

Perhaps for the first time the cripple hesitated in his creed. To say sooth, it seemed odd to put Peru on the Lord's side.

"Yes, he hath the right. Therefore I cry, Lâlu. Is there nothing to be done, Lâlu? Canst thou not help at all?"

Lâlu, in the shadows, looked down at his dexterous hands, then covered his face with them. They were good for nothing else. A girl must marry where she was bidden, and even had the rest of him been as face and hands, there would have been nothing to be done, nothing to be said. What chance had a cripple, a girl, and two babies, against the will of the Lord represented by law backed up by principalities and powers, by custom and chief courts, by wisdom and civilization?

"Cry not, my sister, cry not. Marriage is honourable in all."

So by degrees Fâtma's sobs ceased before the inevitable.

"Come, Hassan Ahmad," she cried; "it grows late. 'Tis time for sleep."

"He sleeps already," replied the voice from the shadows; "'twere pity to wake him, sister."

"I will carry Mohammed Ali first and then come back." Her old decision and motherliness showed even through her utter dejection.

Lâlu gathered the boy closer and half mechanically hummed the chorus he had so often heard Fâtma use as a lullaby. Yes, one and one made two, and two and two made four. But only if God willed it so; not otherwise.

"Stoop down, little mother, and I will lift the boy to thee," he said, when Fâtma, feeling her way through the dark, paused as her fingers touched Lâlu's knee. She felt his fine hands linger as he drew them from the burden he laid in her arms--linger almost caressingly.

"One and one, and two and two, are what He chooses to make them. Remember that, my sister."

"Not so, Lâlu. In school they are ever the same. The big teacher said so. One and one is two all the world over."

He sighed, sitting crouched up in the dark; then he called after her, "Peace go with thee, Mussumat Fâtma."

"And peace be thine, Lâlu," echoed back from the stairs.

The next morning the whole alley was being censed. A group of policemen were standing round a bonfire of beds and clothes over which the flames licked blue and clear as the brimstone was scattered on it.

Fâtma's room was empty, so was Lâlu's. So were several others in the high pestilential tenements of the quarter. The cholera had grown tired of playing at school. It had taken arithmetic and education and creeds and customs all into its own hands and settled the problem its own way. Two and two were not four, but none; and only Chundoo called Heaven to witness that she had been defrauded of the remuneration justly due to those who possess a marriageable female relation. The rest of the neighbours said it was God's will.

IN A CITRON GARDEN.

This is a very idle tale--only the record of five minutes in a citron garden. Not a terraced patch set like a puzzle with toy trees, such as one sees on the Riviera, but a vast scented shade, unpruned by greed of gain, where sweet limes, mandarins, shaddocks, and blood-oranges blended flower and fruit and leaf into one all-sufficing shelter from the sun. There are many such gardens in India, lingering round the ruined palaces or tombs of bygone kings. This particular one hid in its perfumed heart a white marble mausoleum, where the red and green parrots inlaid themselves like mosaic among the tracery. For they are decorative birds, and, being untrammelled by prejudice regarding the position of their heads, lend themselves to many a graceful, topsy-turvy pattern. Girding the garden was a wall twenty feet high, bastioned like a fort, but, despite its thickness, crumbling here and there from sheer old age; invisible, too, for all its height from within, by reason of the tall thickets of wild lemon on its inner edge. Four broad alleys, sentinelled by broken fountains, converged to the mausoleum, high above a marble reservoir where the water still lingered, hiding its stagnation beneath a carpet of lotus-leaves. From these, again, narrower paths mapped the garden into squares, each concealed by the dense foliage from the next. It was a maze of shadowy ways edged by little runnels of water and bordered by roses and jasmine, with here and there a huge white dræcena usurping the path. Day and night the water ran clear and cool, to flood each square in turn, till it showed a shining lake, wherein the roof of fruit and blossom lay reflected as in a mirror.

A Garden of Eden; like it, tenanted by a woman and a snake; famous, also, for its forbidden fruit.

Nowhere did shaddocks grow so regardless of possible danger to the world. The green-gold globes weighed the branches to the ground; the massive flowers burdened the air with perfume. For all their solid, somewhat stolid look, they are fragile flowers. Gather a spray as gently as you can, and only the buds remain; the perfect flower has fallen. So, in a citron garden it is well to purge the soul from "_karma_" or desire, in order to reach the "_nirvana_" of content in which--so say the Buddhists--lies the full perfection of possession.