"I will go and stop at the well, mother," he said at last; "the air is freer out there, and I weary to death looking at these dull mud walls."
So, leaning on his mother's arm, Gunesh Chund, the lumberdar, made his way for the last time down the village street, to meet Death in the open.
"It is good to be here," he said, with peace in his face and heart, as he lay day after day, gazing with dull, contented eyes at the broad expanse of newly-tilled soil, where the sun gleamed on the furrows. The birds chattering in the mulberry-tree overhead, and the ceaseless babble of the life-giving water flowing past him, filled his ears with familiar comfort. There was nothing here to puzzle his slow brain; nothing to disturb a nature welded, by long centuries of toil under the sunny skies, into perfect accord with its environment.
So his mother, coming back from her unavailing spells, found him one day looking out over the springing crops with sightless eyes and placid face.
"I might have saved him," she said to herself with infinite bitterness, as from the sleeping-place on the roof she watched the smoke of his funeral pyre drift away into the cloudless blue--"I might have saved him but for the letter. Oh, curses, curses, ten thousand curses on those who taught her to write! Curses to all eternity on all new-fangled ways!"
Once more her lean brown arms flung themselves in wild appeal towards heaven, as she stood out against the sky facing the future--old, sonless, hopeless.
[THE BLUE MONKEY.]
"Willie," Mark Twain tells us, "had a purple monkey climbing up a yellow stick"; he further informs us that this quadruman made its owner "deathly sick."
The following story shows the effect that a blue monkey on a gilt spike had in a remote Indian village called Jehâdpore--a very ordinary village set out on high, unirrigated soil, beside a large irregular tank, whence the bricks of many generations of houses had been dug; the only peculiarity about it being a glaringly whitewashed mosque façade, rising above the whole and flanked by a palm-tree. Merely a façade: viewed frontwise, distinctly imposing, with minarets and domes in orthodox numbers and positions; viewed sidewise, as distinctly disappointing. The jerriest of London jerry builders could have done nothing better than this one brick front elevation, of which even the domes were but basso-relievos.
Still it dominated the village in every way; for it was built in the court-yard of ex-Rissaldar-Major Azmutoollah Khan Sahib Bahadur's house, and he with his hangers-on represented Jehâdpore. It was a Rângur village--that is to say, a village of Mohammedan Rajputs, a race which supplies half the native cavalry of upper India with recruits. That was the case at Jehâdpore. When the district officer came round every year to attest and write up the big village note-book there was always something to add on this score. Either the number of those away a-soldiering had to be increased, or an entry made that So-and-so had returned with a "pinson"[[5]] to his wife and family. On these occasions the district officer invariably found an escort awaiting him at the boundary, consisting of sowars on leave from various regiments (with their horses), a contingent of "pinson-wallahs" in nondescript uniform on broodmares, and Khan Azmutoollah Khan Bahadur, C.I.E., ex-rissaldar, at their head. He was a very old man, as deeply wrinkled as a young actor doing the part of an ancient retainer. In the privacy of that court-yard, garnished by the jerry mosque, he clothed himself scantily in limp white muslin, and his beard was tricoloured--white at the roots, red in the middle, purple at the ends. But on his screaming stallion, sword in hand, a goodly row of medals on his worn tunic, Azmutoollah's beard was of the fiercest black, and the line of moustache shaved from the hard mouth into an arched curve under his aquiline nose, curled right up to his eyes. His voice, too, lost its quaver of age, and before he had safely inducted the Huzoor into his tents down by the tank that irregular troop of cavalry had been put through enough manœuvres to last out three ordinary field days. It was the old soldier's Kriegspiel.