This the girl herself desired, so we felt obliged to accede, and she gave the cabman the address in Hindustani. Returning in the carriage, down an unfamiliar street, we alighted, and Katy ran ahead in all haste to find her mother, while we followed after. To our astonishment, we found we had entered the chakla again, from a side we had not recognised, and by an entrance which we had never before seen. We took alarm at once, and hastened on toward the wretched old woman who lay ill on a cot on the verandah, with whom Katy was talking earnestly.

A big, coarse woman (this was Katy’s sister, but it must not be forgotten that we at this time did not know that her family were so disreputable) came out and sat down on the cot by the sick woman; but as soon as she heard enough of the girl’s pleading to know that she was asking permission to escape from her wretched existence, she flew into a passion and struck Katy, and blow would have followed blow had we not interfered. Poor Katy flung herself dejectedly into a chair, and could not summon up courage to follow us against all this opposition; then a British soldier came up and spoke to her and led her away, while two or three more British soldiers looked on in contemptuous amusement at the scene. The poor creature was too cowed in spirit, from constant bad usage, to resist the determination of officials and soldiers to keep possession of so attractive a slave.

Weigh the soul of that one dark-skinned heathen girl against the diseased bodies of a standing army of men, and God knows which has most weight in his sight, even if a whole materialistic nation may have forgotten. Men and women, Governments and Armies, cannot, combined, reduce the estimate which He puts upon one immortal soul; but in a near judgment-day, these will have to drink the full measure appointed for such a crime as thwarting a woman in her God-given right to lead a decent moral life. When a Government begins to drag down the moral character of its subjects, it has begun to dig out its own foundations.

We talked with over three hundred Cantonment women, held to prostitution by the iron law of military regulation, collected together by Government procuresses, who were used as the ultimate tools of administration in carrying out Lord Roberts’ military order for a sufficient number of attractive women, forced to the indecent exposure of their persons by misnamed “doctors,” under penalty of fine or expulsion from the Cantonment, which was tantamount to starvation; imprisoned for several days of each month, even when in perfect health, in the Lock Hospital; imprisoned for an indefinite length of time in the hospital whenever found diseased; often turned out when seriously diseased, with their British children, to starve, or to spread disease at will among the natives, the final scapegoats of British profligacy; dismissed to starvation when too old to be any longer “sufficiently attractive” to the soldier, if only a fresh victim could be found to take the place; universally so poor as to be weighed down by debts, and receiving a pittance fixed by military usage, that kept many of them on the verge of starvation.

What were the circumstances that brought women to such a lot as this? We will give only a few, in bare outlines, of the many cases not already mentioned:—

1. A nurse-maid enticed to the chakla by a British sergeant.

2. A wife brought by her own husband, the man himself being engaged by an officer of the regiment as a servant, and allowed to hold his unwilling wife in such servitude.

3. British, granddaughter of a former Governor-General, daughter of a General, wife of a Commissioner; eloped with a soldier, and when deserted entrapped by a Mohammedan and kept as a slave, to whom British soldiers resorted in troops, almost, because a white woman; they paid the price of shame to her native master; rescued when almost dead. We found her in a miserably dirty bed at a native Lock Hospital, where the Government allowed her four annas (about fourpence) a day for subsistence. We ourselves rescued another British woman from the clutches of the same Mohammedan slave-holder. We found her in a fortified room, built on the top of a large house, a neck-breaking outside stairway leading to her abode. She had suffered horribly at the hands of the British soldiers admitted to her. Her reason was injured beyond repair. In the absence of her master, she was guarded by a native servant armed with a knife, who had been instructed in her presence to plunge it into her if she tried to escape. A very courageous gentleman accompanied us, and succeeded in so frightening her master that we were permitted to lead her away.

4. An orphan seized by a wicked woman and reared to shame.

5. A young girl brought by her own brother and sold to the chakla.

6. Cabul girl of high birth who lost her father in the Afghan war. She was only twelve when left without protection, and her father’s groom persuaded her to come away with him under promise of marriage; sold by him to shame. She wept bitterly, exclaiming, “Oh, the shame of being pointed out as a bazaar woman!” We asked her why she did not go to the Cantonment magistrate and plead her own case, for she said she had money secreted with which she could take care of herself, if once she could get away. She replied, “Why should I tell him? I am only a black woman; I fear him.” When about to return to the south, we revisited this station and hunted this woman up, offering to assist her to escape; but her courage failed at the last moment, and we were obliged to leave her behind to her fate.

7. An Egyptian woman from Cairo, enticed away from her home when a child and sold to an old woman in Quetta, then carried to India.

8. A Kashmiri woman; ill-treated by her husband, she ran away with another man who promised to make her his wife, but sold her into shame. “It is a bad job; I don’t like it,” she said in the best English she could control, while the tears were in her eyes.

9. A hill girl of respectable family lost her parents and her husband (perhaps only betrothed, yet possibly already married), before ten years of age. A deceitful woman came to comfort her in her grief and unprotected condition, and enticed her to travel with her a month to assuage her grief; sold her to a British official, with whom she lived one year, when he died. She then became a chakla woman. She was only sixteen. She said, “It is a bitter life.”

10. A high-caste Brahmin girl, not able to understand a word of the language of her captor, found deserted and starving. The captor admitted that she was a perfectly respectable girl, yet she was examined by the surgeon, her name entered on the list of prostitutes, and taken to the Lock Hospital to be prepared for her fate. The poor thing was so grateful to be taken in and fed, and little dreamt of what would be demanded of her in return. We tried in vain to make her understand us, and to warn her of her fate.

11. Taken in famine time by the daughter of a sepoy (native soldier). The soldier sold her at eleven years of age “to sit in the chakla.” “In all the years of my life, I have not known one day of happiness; my heart is full of wounds,” was her pathetic ending of the story.

12. We witnessed the purchase of a girl by a mahaldarni. A woman seized the girl as payment for a debt, and bringing her sold her to the mahaldarni in our very presence.

13. Married at eleven, and widowed almost immediately. After three years with her family as a widow, she was so miserable that she ran away and wandered in the streets. She was arrested by the police, and at the age of fourteen put in the chakla.

14. Her husband was beating her cruelly, at the age of fourteen, and she ran away; a policeman seized her and sent her to the Lock Hospital.

15. Deserted at the age of eleven by her husband; a British man took her by force to his bungalow. When he discarded her, her family would not receive her again. She was then “taken by the Government and put in the chakla.”

[III.]

The Habitations of Cruelty.