From the Five Rivers

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

III.

The dates were ripe. Great drooping bunches of them hung under the swaying palm-leaves--rose-pink and purple-black, yellow and brown, many-tinted like some rare agate. Shâhbâsh gorged himself on the sickly-sweet fruit, and every one, far and near, grew visibly fatter. But Deen Ali's Arabian dates were too valuable for home consumption, and Suttu only awaited the new moon in order to summon the pluckers and driers to prepare the fruit for market. Shâhbâsh, with a sigh at the shortness of opportunity, ate all the more and thought of little else.

Yet the four weeks since the saint's death had not been uneventful. The Kâzi's son and the accountant had joined issue in their desire to see Suttu worsted. As yet, however, there had been no overt act. To begin with, the native of India does nothing in a hurry. In addition, none gauges better than he the indisputable advantage of an old lie over a new one. It is like port wine depositing a crust for itself out of its own sediment. Finally, even a false claim acquires dignity by being preferred deliberately, moderately. All these considerations had coincided towards inaction--as yet.

But a day or two before the new moon matters changed. Suttu, coming at dawn from her hut, saw a sight which literally took her breath away. Three of the tallest stems in the nearest clump of palms were swaying under the weight of men clinging to them by clamps and a rope passed round their waists. Below, the freshly gathered fruit lay in heaps under the fingers of women busy in sorting it and carrying it in baskets to a drying enclosure already fenced in by hedges of plaited leaves. In a word, date-picking was in full swing. Had she by chance given the orders in her sleep?

Incredulous of her own sight, she roused Shâhbâsh, who still lay snoring on the raised platform of the tomb.

He was on his feet in a moment, and shouting "Thieves!" loudly as the only explanation, swung himself down like a monkey, and ran gesticulating with windmill arms towards the trees. His ugliness, even when familiar, was phenomenal; seen by the date-pickers, who as usual were strangers employed by a big contractor, it appeared supernatural; and the women, taking him to be nothing more nor less than the demon in charge of the grove, flung down their baskets and fled, screaming. The men would doubtless have followed their example, had it been possible; but, rather than run the gantlet of the dancing, yelling creature below, they dug their clamps tighter and held on in mortal terror of what would happen next.

Suttu's more tardy appearance led to an explanation; from which it appeared that the pickers had been sent by a contractor, who had formally bought the crop from one Hussan the accountant.

"Leave them to me, mai Suttu!" shrieked Shâhbâsh, in an ecstasy of rage over this calm appropriation. "Lo, I will give them a crop of blows if they come down. If not, let them starve and drop like bats in the cold. I am in no hurry." He squatted himself on the matting and helped himself to the gathered dates with both hands. But Suttu saw further than the immediate present, and knew a protest must be raised, and that quickly. She turned at once to that confidence in the power of personal appeal which, thank Heaven, still lingers in India, despite Western attempts to strangle it with red tape and smother it with sealing-wax.

"Yea, watch thou," she cried, "while I go to the big sahib's house and cry for justice. He listens to the poor."

"Wâh! wâh!" assented the clingers, "but see us safe first, O mother!"

"Let them be," said Shâhbâsh, confidentially, "else they may make away with the dates they have picked. Lo, they are safer there till the police come."

So there they clung, while the fakeerni, her indignation increasing at every swinging stride, made her way to the deputy-commissioner's bungalow.

He was a small, fair English lad, put in charge--with many instructions to telegraph to headquarters if he saw signs of the millennium or another mutiny--during the absence on three weeks' leave of a senior man. He was just mounting his polo pony in order to keep his hand in by chivying a ball round a stick, when wronged womanhood appeared and flung out a pair of remarkably beautiful arms for justice. Perhaps the fact that the complainant was superbly handsome and struck a most impressive attitude had something to do with the readiness with which he turned to the red-coated orderlies for a translation of her patois petition.

"'Tis Suttu, the fakeerni, and she comes to tell the Protector of the Poor that contractors are feloniously picking her dates."

"Send and stop 'em. And, and--what the deuce is the right thing to do. Oh, yes. Tell the police to report as usual." Then, as he rode off, he nodded affably to Suttu. "Take comfort, mother; I'll see to it."

He had been swished at Harrow quite an incredibly short time before, but he did the part of Providence neatly, while men for whom he had fagged were enjoying the inestimable privilege of sitting on a vestry--or the knife-board of an omnibus conveying them citywards to act as copying-machines for the term of their natural lives.

Suttu's apparent triumph, however, dwindled in Shâhbâsh's eyes to ignominious defeat when the police refused permission for any one to pick the dates until the petition of Hussan for the land on behalf of his son Murghub should be decided.

"What has that idiot to do with my land?" cried the fakeerni, indignantly. "Lo, there is no drop of saint's blood in him. He is of the second marriage."

The policeman sniggered. "I know not, mother! But this I hear, that Hussan saith otherwise, and the Kâzi is with him. And births and marriages are ticklish things to date, if the Kâzi be not friendly."

Suttu's heart throbbed. If the Kâzi were indeed her only refuge, she might have to face the storm in the open.

"O thou with the yellow trousers on thy legs, and wisdom in head and heart," moaned Shâhbâsh, "dost mean that these dates--Deen Ali's famous dates--are to be food for parrots? while I----" He sat in the sand, clasping his stomach, rocking backwards and forwards, a ludicrous spectacle of woe; yet there was tragedy in the comedy.

That evening, when supper consisted of a few millet-cakes and a tray of watery pilu-berries, which Suttu had gathered from the jungles, he looked at the ripe dates overhead and felt that the hour of apostasy had come. After the barmecidal feast he took his mattock and went to the graveyard--not to dig, but solemnly to consider which of Suttu's two enemies should have his services. Dawn found him returning from the Kâzi's house, with the black bottle full of rum, and the remains of a perfect feast of bakkar khana tied up in a handkerchief--both of which he hid carefully. All that day he did nothing but vaunt the delights of a sheltered home combined with rich food; especially to a woman--more especially to a woman who had nothing to eat but pilu-berries and millet cakes! Suttu smiled at him indulgently.

"Lo, God did not make me all stomach," she said. "I eat the air and the sunshine; and I like to see the parrot people and the squirrel people eat my dates, even if I can't."

Shâhbâsh gave a rumble of despair, and bolstered up his uneasy conscience by telling himself such views were unnatural, accursed.

"Is a grave ordered?" asked Suttu, in surprise, when, that evening after supper, the dwarf shouldered his mattock. "Who is dead?"

"The saddler's son. Leastways he was so nigh his end to-day that his people gave me warning it might be wanted. And like as not they would eat oaths had it been bespoke in form, for they are keen to quarrel. Aye, aye, if lies were satisfying, my belly wouldn't be empty."

He disappeared into the soft, balmy darkness, grumbling and muttering--to come back circuitously to the hiding-place of the black bottle. He would need that for consolation, aye, for forgetfulness, before midnight brought the bribed watchmen to guard the date-grove. Then sooner or later after that some one's cries---- Well, why not? Suttu would not be the first woman who had been carried off to a rich marriage, and had lived to tell the tale cheerfully. Still, the thought of those cries when the Kâzi and his friends came was disturbing. Shâhbâsh took a great pull at the bottle. It would bring the fairy, and the fairy was unfailing consolation.

Meanwhile Suttu sat on the steps of the tomb, too much disturbed, by this outrageous claim of Hussan's, for sleep. The grounds which he would put forward were easy to guess. He and the Kâzi would post-date the second marriage, and ante-date Murghub, the idiot's birth, so as to make him out her full brother. Besides, they had money for evidence; she had none, and the neighbours were unfriendly. Her only help lay in the Lord, and that, she knew, had nothing to do with a court of justice. Still, it was as well to omit nothing which might be of use; so she brought out the trestle-shaped stool, on which her grandfather's copy of the Koran lay, and began to chant an additional chapter of Holy Writ as a kind of bribe to favour. As she rocked herself backward and forward, her lips busy with the long rhythm in which the unknown words quite lost all identity, her mind was busy over the time when she had learned it all with tears and trouble from the saint, stern on this one point. How fond he had been of divinations!--and Suttu paused in the middle of a pious apothegm to recollections of her grandfather compiling date-names for his neighbours--names, that is to say, which by the values of the composing letters would give the date of birth. What if her own name, Sutara Begum, was one of these, and the idiot's also? That would be proof indeed! Perhaps Shâhbâsh---- She had started to her feet, when she remembered her chapter, in some trepidation, since half a bribe was no bribe. She would just go on chanting till Shâhbâsh came home. It could do no harm, and might do good. Her round, full voice echoed back from the tomb, and out into the date-palms.

"Wâh! if she were really, after all, a pious one, and not a bad walker," said one of the watchers to the other. His companion clucked a denial. "Thchu! 'tis likely she knows the Kâzi is to be here to-night. That is woman's way."

Suttu chanted and chanted till she grew hoarse. Then she stood up and listened. The night was still and silent. Not even the distant thud of the mattock, so Shâhbâsh must be on his way back. She waited with the little oil-lamp in her hand, eager for her question. Then impatience gained the mastery, and still with the oil-cresset in her hand--for the new moon gave little light, and snakes were common--she set off swiftly through the palms towards the cemetery.

"Shâhbâsh!" she cried, but nothing stirred or answered as she picked her way through the short graves. Suddenly she was brought up sharply by something at her feet--something she had deemed another grave. It was the dwarf stretched fast asleep on a white sheet. His grey hair was twined with jasmine blossoms, and a black bottle lay empty by his side. He had been dancing to amuse his fairy. That was no uncommon affair; but whence had he got the inspiration, and the greasy remnants of a feast which the light of the lamp disclosed? What villainy had he been bribed to commit? Something, she felt sure, even if it were nothing more serious than a failure to fulfil the duties of her freehold, by having Deen Ali's bed ready for the saddler's son. If it were that! She seized the shovel, and swinging it over her head brought it down on the ground, where Shâhbâsh had outlined a grave, with a thud which set her arms tingling. The soil was hard, indeed, and surely that was twelve o'clock chiming from the court gong! Not much time left; but softer spots were to be found than the one Shâhbâsh had chosen. She took up the oil-cresset again and wandered round to the extreme edge of the graveyard where it merged into the sandier common.

Thud! thud! The strokes of the mattock echoing through the night made the Kâzi's son smile as, about an hour after midnight, he crept alone to the tomb. A man who is the prey of a purely animal passion does not have his ears boxed for nothing, and his idea of revenge went further than marriage. No one would heed Suttu's cries for help this time, and the watchers were in his pay.

Thud! thud! Suttu's respect for her henchman increased at every stroke. She was well into the grave by this time, digging round and round methodically, though she ached all over. Yet, if she died of it, that grave should be ready. What was that? Metal on metal! The surprise sent a tingle all through her. Then she was down on hands and knees, groping in the loosened soil.

Yes, it was the treasure at last, and no one, no soul alive, except herself, must know of it. She looked round hastily into the darkness and silence. There was no fear of interruption now; there might be afterwards. Her best plan was to finish the grave, so as to obliterate all trace of the spot whence she had taken that heavy brass pot, and then, but not till then, to go home quietly. The next instant the thud of the mattock began again. A lucky decision; for the Kâzi's son, surprised at finding Suttu absent, was beginning to suspect treachery from the silence, when the digging recommenced. Shâhbâsh, then, meant to keep faith, and not seek safety in flight. But Suttu? As the spoiler sat beside the friendly watchman he asked himself if the lies he himself had circulated so diligently about the religious were true, and she had an assignation elsewhere. He gnashed his teeth over the thought and his own rejection.

"A step, my lord! it was a step!" whispered one of the guardians, and the Kâzi's son crept towards the hut. He had not entered it before, being assured it was empty; but now, thinking Suttu might have seen him and slipped into the darkness for safety, he felt his way through the door and so on by the wall.

Then a yell burst from him--a cry once heard never to be forgotten:

"Snake! snake!"

The watchmen heard it and came slowly, feeling their dark way with sticks, lest where one snake was there might be two. Suttu heard it also, and, lamp in hand, ran back to the hut, knowing that friend or foe was in deadly peril.

Something huddled up, writhing, moaning, clasping one hand with the other, shapeless, convulsed by fear, lay upon the ground--something that flung itself before her and yelled for a charm--the saint's charm--for mercy--for help--for anything.

"Thou!" she cried, "thou! What dost here?"

She knew well enough, and she thrust him back savagely.

"Never mind that now, mother," whimpered one of the men. "Give him the charm. Sure God gave such to the saints for all men, and all men are sinners."

"For men--not for dogs! Go, hound--go and die! I have no charm for thee."

The wretched creature, struggling from the hands of the watchmen, who strove to set him on his feet, caught her by the ankle. "Save me! save me, to be thy friend! I know--I can save--I--"

He sank down helpless, foaming at the mouth from abject fear.

Suttu paused. There was something in that view of the case. If anything could be done, if by chance-- By the light of the lamp she examined the bitten finger closely, and an odd look came to her face.

"It was near the door, breast-high by the sticks of the thatch thou wast bitten," she said, as she hastily concealed the wound under a bandage.

"Yea, yea, thou knowest! The charm, mother Suttu, the charm! I swear to be thy friend!"

The fakeerni looked contemptuously at her writhing lover. "Swear by thy son's head, fool! naught else will satisfy me!"

When the only oath a native will not break had been pronounced, Suttu stood up with a laugh.

"The charm is worked, Mir Sahib. Thou wilt not die of that bite." Then she checked herself, and with the same odd look on her face assumed a graver tone. "Lo, I will work the charm. As for thee--go home, swift as thou canst. Call the barber, let him bleed thee to faintness. Take kâla dâna[^[11]] and sulphur to the full. Eat naught for two days, live righteous, and look not on the bite for a month. Then give a hundred rupees to the saint's shrine."

"'Tis all right, master," whispered one of the men. "There is no fear of the bargain when payment follows cure. Lo, thou art better already, and by this thou shouldst have been worse, had not the charm worked. Hurry, hurry, lest harm come from disobedience!"

When they were quite out of sight and hearing, Suttu took the lamp, went to the door of the hut and chirruped. From a hole in the wall a pair of bright eyes looked out.

"The Brahmans say true," she chuckled, "and Ram befriends those who befriend his favourite. Shâhbâsh would have had me tear the squirrel's nest down, but I love the chattering things."

She had little time, however, to spare for amusement at her own trick. The grave had to be completed, the treasure brought home by dawn. Her arms ached worse than ever from their short rest, and there was a grey glimmer in the east, before she judged that her work would pass muster. Then she removed all Shâhbâsh's belongings to the side of the grave, leaving him still in a drunken sleep upon the bare ground.

Finally, lifting the brass pot, which was carefully luted over with hard clay, she carried it to the hut, shut the door, and by the growing light through the chinks began to open up her treasure.

The pot was full of farthings--nothing but farthings. She sat and looked at them hopelessly. What did it mean? Why should any one take the trouble to bury farthings? The puzzle was beyond her, and when a gleam of real sun warned her that time was passing, she hid the pot under a pile of brushwood, and stepped out with a feeling of relief into the open air. The world was ablaze with the clear, uncompromising light of an Indian morning. The parrots were wheeling round the blue dome, and a squirrel sat on the top of the thatch chirping over a date stolen from the disputed crop.

Suttu thought of the Kâzi's son physicked, bled, and hungry. Her laugh echoed out among the palms, and she felt more comforted than when, the night before, she had sought solace in chanting.