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.
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.