She turned towards the highroad. Creeping along, half walking, half crawling, she reached the well. There beside it she tore off her own dirty white covering, and, having changed the rice from the blue cloth into a piece of the white, she wrapped the ragged blue sari around her and drew it up over her shaven head.
Having, with the shrewdness of the native, placed her old clothes on the brink of the well, Mundra, now no longer in the garb of a widow, turned down the main road towards the great city. She knew not what might await her there, but, childlike, she had faith to believe that even unknown people would not treat a beggar more cruelly than she, a widow, had been treated by her own.
VI
Of the Tribe of Haunamon
The great bungalow, set far back in the grassy compound and shaded by mango trees, looked peaceful and sleepy in the afternoon sunlight. The very roses in the carefully rounded beds in the centre of the lawn before the house were nodding as if resting in the shade after the blaze of an Indian noonday sun. The only human creature in sight, a dhersy, sitting cross-legged on the little side porch, was asleep over his sewing. Between the rows of potted ferns and palms along the front veranda appeared glimpses of white as if the occupants of the bungalow might be taking their siestas on the open rattan couches in preference to the warmer curtained beds within, one of which could be seen through an open bedroom door. A mongoose, tied to a post of the veranda, had, for a moment, ceased to fret at his bondage and gone to sleep. Even several lizards half-way across the gravel path from one grassy hunting ground to another had stopped as if too exhausted to pursue the never-ending chase. Only the shadows moved, little by little lengthening out, creeping towards the compound wall, as the never-sleeping sun continued his ceaseless journeying towards the west.
Still one hundred and twenty by the thermometer which on the wall behind the sleeping dhersy caught the direct rays of the sun! At three o'clock of an afternoon in India after a morning's combat with the heat how could Nature do aught but sleep in whatever shade she could find for her weary head? But even in sleepy, dreamy India there are the exceptions that prove the rules. Suddenly a wail arose upon the sleepy air and a most terrified cry broke up all quiet and repose.
The dhersy, startled from his stolen slumber, looking up guiltily, quickly began to turn the wheel of the hand-sewing machine beside him. The mongoose tugged at his cord. And a frightened woman started up from her couch on the front veranda, as a little white figure with flying feet and topiless curly head came running from behind the bungalow with the usual cry of childhood's terror:
"Mother! Mother! Oh, mother!"
Even the ayah, who was trying to keep up with the child but having a hard time to run in her long, tightly-drawn sari, looked frightened. An ugly chattering, sounding from behind the house, kept up for some moments as the mother, having gathered the child up in her arms, sat down again with her, soothing and quieting her as only a mother can, while the ayah dropped panting on the floor beside them.