Part 9

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 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 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 to _understand_ what a _scholarship_ is."

"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 you _I 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.

II.

A loud, resounding slap, another, and another! A torrent of irrelevant abuse in a strange tongue. Then something which is the same all over the world--a fit of hysterics.

Hoshiaribi, as she stormed and sobbed and laughed, might have been any spoiled, overwrought young woman in any country.

That was an end of everything. After slaving for months, after doing without a new bodice in order to pay the ungrateful imps, after cozening and flattering their stupid, cow-like mothers, it had come to this: that Sultani, on whose performances Hoshiari relied for a fair inspection, had divided four thousand one hundred and seven by six thousand three hundred and two. She had not only tried to divide it--she had divided it--with a quotient of fifty-six, and a remainder of five thousand and three. It was too much--too much in every way; with Peru lounging all day at the Central flirting with Chundoo, Fâtma thinking of nothing but the babies, the gold edge on the dress she must wear at the wedding next week wanting renewal, and inspection-day next month.

She propped herself up against the whitewashed wall at one end of the room, Sultani, the injured prize pupil, at the other, and the two sobbed vindictively across the intervening space, while a connecting circle of alphabet-learners whimpered in sympathy with some one, which, they scarcely knew, for they were mites of babies, not six years old any of them.

The women up and down the central stair, which served also as a sort of drain and dust-bin, came attracted by the hope of a scene, to discuss the whole aspect of the affair without the least reserve. Peru was a bad lot, and it was sheer tyranny of the _Sirkar_ to have refused Hoshiar a scholarship after all these years. At the same time she was a poor, flighty creature, and had no business to slap their children; the latter train of thought becoming accentuated by the arrival from a neighbouring tenement of Sultani's mother. Was it for this her daughter had been bribed away shamelessly for a neighbouring "missen," where, if they did read the Bible and try to pervert the scholars, they made up for it in prizes? Was it for this that base-born brat of a base-born mother had taken one rupee a month out of Hoshiar's own pocket? These two questions were the theses of a controversy, which spread like wild-fire till it embraced the personal history of every one present, and the room was a seething mass of excited women, bordered by a whimpering circle of small girls, until a little figure came rushing up the stairs and forced itself into the thickest of the clamour.

It was Fâtma returning from her daily marketing. Her already scrimped veil was further abridged by all the corners being utilized as bags for her various purchases; and as she flung out her skinny brown arms in the small space still left between the combatants, and turned first to one side and then to the other in vociferous reproach, her weighted veil swung out, leaving her body quite bare. It was not much bigger; certainly no fatter than it had been, eighteen months gone, when she had struggled up the ladder of learning with the yellow-legged baby.

"_Ari_, mothers! _Ari_, sisters!" she scolded in her thin child's voice. "This is unseemly! This is a deplorable word! Have you forgotten this house is a school? You come here to learn, not to make beast-like noises! What a bad example! Does not shame come to you?"

The fateful phrases, which had so often reduced the infant department to tears, fell powerless, and Fâtma's own imperious temper asserted itself. She turned like a whirlwind to the alphabet-learners; they were her special charge, they at least should obey her.

"Come, my daughters," she cried, "let us leave this scene of infamy. This is no place for us people. Come, let us go!"

The circle stood up instinctively. They adored Fâtma; besides, the chance of escape was welcome. She thrust her new nephew, a babe of three months, who had been squalling patiently in a corner, into the biggest girl's arms, seized on the yellow-legged one herself, and so, full of dignity, headed the little procession.

The women, touched by the passionate delight in children's ways which is so marked among them, fell back with sudden laughter.

"_Ai! dil aziz! Wah_, the little marionettes. See how they go like old women! Heart's-core! are we so wicked? Look at my Amma, Fuzli--not four, I swear, and grave as a judge! _Tobah! tobah!_ Go not, little lives. We are sorry. See, we bite our tongues, we hold our ears."

So, squatting down, standing aside, reaching over, the women, chattering their amusement, let the babies pass. And, as for Fâtma, she was "_pucki, burri pucki_." God knows why, but the bairns were set to obey her. This one's Miriam, not four till _Baisakh_, leaped out of bed at her first call, as she came her morning rounds for the pupils, and that one's Janet had been known to refuse her breakfast if Fâtma said it was late. Aye--_pucki, burri pucki_--for good, not evil, and 'twere well others were more like her. So, with side sniffs, they pattered up and down the stairs to their several abodes, leaving Hoshiaribi sulkily exhausted. Sultani and her mother, as they went casting glances of final scorn at the odd little row of maidens ranged along the gutter in the sunshine, piping away the incontrovertible fact that "_one and one make two--oo--oo_" while Fâtma and her babies sat opposite on a door-step and led the chorus.

So that was an end of the incident for one day. Unfortunately, it was not the first of its kind, and Hoshiaribi had almost made up her mind that it should be the last. She lay, feeling a perfect worm, as any woman, East or West, might have done after the turmoil, kicking one heel petulantly over the side of the string-bed on which she had flung herself, and looked at the map of Asia and the map of Europe, which hung on opposite walls, with equal abhorrence. She hated everything, everybody. The last six months, since her failure to pass had sent her as a favour to the lowest pay of a branch-school teacher, had been sheer misery to her. For her husband's neglect she did not care, save in so far as it gave her complaint a sound basis. She had been betrothed to him, and so she had married him; but the six years since she had lived with him as his wife had only taught her that she could set her duty to him aside without reproach, for the sake of ten rupees a month, and that he was quite content with this arrangement. She looked once more round the long, narrow slip of a room with its mud floor, its smoky rafters, its single-shuttered window two feet square, giving on a close alley; then she thought of the cool, matted corridors of the Genoese palazzo, the leisurely studies, the ease of ten rupees compared with six, and rolled over, face down on the bed, whimpering. She hated teaching, but it was that or starvation. At least--unless--

Some one came jingling up the stairs, heralded by a strong smell of musk. Hoshiaribi set up frowning; for all that, content to be interrupted, since Meran bibi, reputation or no reputation, was at any rate able to talk. At least she knew something of the world beyond that swarming yet dead-alive Cashmiri quarter, for she had been show-pupil for years at another branch school, knew the three first readers by heart, and, after a somewhat tarnished girlhood, had married a policeman; consequently, she was not a woman to be scorned in the quarter, just because folks' tongues had cause to wag. She was a buxom person, with oily hair, great bosses of silver tassels in her ears, and a perfunctory veil of Manchester hitched on to the very back of her head and drawn tight over her high bust. Finally, she had the usual shrill voice in which she could always tell her gossip of the latest "fassen" in the cutting of a bodice or the number of suits in a bride's trousseau, for she came of a tailor family, and spent all her days in gadding about, despite her pretence to the _purdah_; an institution which is, as a rule, only inviolable when exotic benevolence seeks to interfere with it.

She and Hoshiaribi fell on each other's necks in an elaborate stage embrace, and then crouched up side by side upon the string-bed.

After a time, however, Hoshiaribi moved to put her head out of the window and call to Fâtma below:

"Send those brats away--it must be close on four--and make some tea. My head aches."

Surely, when the Creator made women with his right hand, his left must have been busy over tea. These two groups had it sickly sweet, cinnamon-flavoured, in little basins with an English flag, and "Union is Strength" upon them in gay colours.

"Yea, 'tis true, Hoshiaribi. A star of emerald with a red centre, three crinkles of gold lace, like a 'heart's comfort' in pattern on the breast, and two rows of seed-pearls round the collar. Then the bridal dress! To begin with, a full skirt--for, look you, the newest 'fassen' is six breadths, gored--"

So on, and so on, while the map of Europe winked at the map of Asia; and Fâtma, after making the tea, was kneading as for dear life at the dough of bare flour and water which, with the smear of some curd, was to form the household dinner.

"Thou couldst see it easily," continued Meran, "and thou deservedst something to cheer thee after those senseless fools. Come! I could take thee by the Mori gate, a step from here; so into the gardens. Lord! how they smell of orange blossoms--like any bride. Then we could come home by the Badâmi bazar. To think thou hast never seen these things, and thou so clever--one who has learned wisdom of the _sahibs_! _Wah!_ it tickles me."

Meran's peal of laughter crackled like thorns, and Hoshiaribi flushed up.

"I could have gone had I wished. Peru should not stop me. But I have not chosen."

"Peru! Why, I tell thee, Hoshiaribi, he will marry the widow Chundoo. Tchut! what matters it if thou art not a fool, slaving away to no purpose? Look you, they wanted me to keep school. Not I! Come, Hoshiaribi, 'twill do thy head good. I have to buy new tinsel for a _kurta_, and the bazar is worth seeing. A fair for noise, with the criers selling sugar-cane and fresh fritters. The shops full of jewels, the people crowding, the soldiers marching up and down, the _mem-sahibas_ in their carriages, and, above all, the wooden balconies with the girls in white nodding and smiling; but the great ones like Chandni, of Delhi, stand up and salaam as the big folk go by. Yet she is naught to look at. Thou wouldst be twice her match for looks wert thou not so pale."

Half an hour afterwards Fâtma was alone in the room. The babies were asleep, so she had taken out a sort of lapstone, and was busy punching gilt thread into stars through the front of a shoe upper. That, by rights, was Peru's hereditary trade, which he had deserted in favour of _dhooli_ bearing and a fixed salary of five rupees a month. It came, therefore, more naturally than anything else to Fâtma, and so, when the babies left leisure, she earned a pice or two by sweating for an old woman and her crippled grandson who lived up the same stair and were employed by a big shop. But for these odd earnings life could not have gone on at all, what with Hoshiaribi's tea, and Peru's inroads for dinner or supper when he was short himself.

There he was, even now, coming up the stair lazily. Fâtma had put away her lapstone ere he arrived, and was ready to greet him with calm contumely, even while she set two cakes a toasting in the embers, and brought out the green leaf of curds. If the one was his right, as master of the house, the other was hers as mistress; and she exercised it fully, Hoshiaribi being away with Mai Rajjun, who had a new baby; for Fâtma had no scruples about abstract truth when face to face with the absence of a wife and the presence of an inquiring husband. With that same unconscious knowledge that it was the right thing to do which had made her jog the baby's cerebellum to keep it quiet, she lied cheerfully to avoid possible disturbance. Peru accepted the explanation with a like indifference to its truth. To begin with, that same indifference to all save appearance is a common feature among husbands; and then Peru would not have been exactly sorry to feel cause of complaint. It would have balanced his own indiscretion. Briefly, he had married Chundoo two days before, and had come to break the fact to his first wife. There must be something painfully bald about such a statement to European readers. When fully one half of harrowing modern fiction is based upon the axiom that Thingumbob, having married So-and-So, cannot possibly marry What's-his-name also, it takes the starch out of a story when a hero can have as many wives as he likes, and his religion counsels four.