From the Five Rivers

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

"Alias, I should say," murmured the policeman. "Bell, conch, call to prayer: that's the spirit. Fire away, old chap!--Bearer, bring the doctor-sahib another peg."

So the precedent of a far-away cathedral, whose schismatic chime annoyed good Calvinists, was brought to bear on Hunumân and the conch, and the latter, not being an integral part of public worship, was proclaimed a nuisance.

The deputy commissioner himself had no doubt about its being one, as he wiped the perspiration from his brow, and remarked to Dhunput Rai that that ought to finish the business.

The courteous old gentleman smiled.

"Huzoor," he said, "I have heard my father say that Akbar's order to his judges was, 'Write ever with the pen which has been cut by the sword; then there is peace in the land.' The case will be appealed, and the pen of the Huzoors is cut by machine."

He was a true prophet. Hunumân, backed by the 'Sun of Asia,' not only appealed the conch question, but raised another in the interim by putting a small blue plaster monkey on the top of the gold spike, in fulfilment, it was urged, of the pre-natal vow made for him by his mother, a pious Hindu lady, whose virtuous life was crowned with honour.

The monkey remained there exactly five-and-twenty minutes after the first beams of the rising sun disclosed the fact that it had been put there during the night. That it remained so long was due to three reasons: First, that the Jehâdpore troopers, if good swordsmen, were uncommonly bad shots; second, that Azmutoollah's blunderbuss was a flint-lock; third, that he insisted on letting it off himself until it knocked him down.

This time the case was taken direct to the deputy commissioner, who, urged on the one side by a remembrance of Dhunput Rai's remark, and on the other by a sneaking fear of revision, decided that the blue monkey, as an idolatrous image, was a distinct nuisance when displayed unnecessarily over the top of a Mohammedan gentleman's private mosque. On the other hand, viewed from the Hindu standpoint, the image of a blue monkey might be an integral part of public worship. Azmutoollah Khan Bahadur, C.I.E., ex-rissaldar, must therefore pay over to Mool Raj and to Hunumân Sing the price of the destroyed blue monkey, as they might wish to erect a similar one in a less conspicuous place.

Now, though Mool Raj's name was duly entered in the file as complainant, the affair had long ago passed out of his hands and become a real, solid, Heaven-sent grievance to a small knot of advanced young pleaders. Indeed, the old man was so distinctly unsatisfactory as chief victim, that they had more than once taken the opportunity of his absence to advance matters a step. Azmutoollah Khan, as shrewd an old soldier as could be found on either side of the Indus, was not slow to notice this, and his blind opposition covered a great longing to have these youngsters on the hip. After all, he and Mool Raj had pulled along well enough for years before this B.A. was thought of--ay, and their fathers before them. If the usurer had been alone, the money screw could have been put on him somehow; since he would not risk a pice for all the blue monkeys in heaven or on earth.

Azmutoollah Khan was cogitating these matters one afternoon on the wooden bed, with his turban as usual standing like a helmet beside him, when a party of boys rushed into the court-yard full of news and excitement. Hunumân Sing, who, as every one knew, had come with some friends in a bullock cart that morning, must have brought the thing with him; but as sure as fate there was a blue monkey sitting on the square pedestal in front of the temple which Alla Ditta, the mason, had built in all innocence of heart last week--a blue monkey, not a miniature marionette at the top of a gilt spike like the last, but a life-sized affair, and, what is more, all the Hindus in the place and many more from neighbouring villages were doing poojah to it.