From the Five Rivers

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

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 Fâtma."

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:

"Fâtma! Fâtma! 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, Fâtma--yea, it is Fâtma, 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 nâni! '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 Fâtma'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 Fâtma--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. 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.