[AT A GIRLS' SCHOOL.]
I.
It was a large, square block of a building, which had once been somebody's palace. Not very old. That could be recognized by the odd, reminiscent air of a Genoese palazzo which clung to it, proclaiming the influence of some Italian adventurer in the Mogul times. In those days, doubtless, its blank arcaded walls had risen from a terraced orange-garden; but now the surrounding slums of a big, native city ended abruptly, at varying distance, in an irregular brick-strewn space, where buffaloes were tethered to eat street sweepings, and their refuse in its turn was set out to dry in fuel cakes--that being the last resort of matter in India, where poverty and greed fight for the uttermost farthing of utility. Besides the buffaloes and the refuse-heaps, the space in its longest angle showed the inevitable weaver's warp twined in and out of tiger-grass stalks stuck slantwise in the dust--inevitable, because it is never absent from an open space in a native city. Sometimes solitary, like a huge worm impaled and left to dry; more often tended by two chattering Fates, one on each side, whose tongues gabble an accompaniment to the whirring bobbins tied to long sticks which dance a ladies' chain through the grass-stalks, as the bearers walk swiftly up and down the long length of growing warp--up and down, with an outward swirl of a full petticoat and a veil bulging backward, as the free brown arms twist and twine. A common sight, a picturesque one withal, seeing that it shows a good figure at its best. Sometimes beyond these two Fates you may see Clotho spinning her lacquered wheel, but not often. As a rule she hides in narrow alleys, where, set well over the central gutter on a stool, she can discuss past, present, and future with half a dozen neighbours at a time.
For the rest, the building was distinctly imposing. Like a palazzo, it was tunnelled by one single high archway, leading into a central court-yard, decorously circled by orange-trees in tubs. Above these, again, was a further likeness in the three tiers of graceful arcades surrounding a square of deep ultramarine sky. There, however, the resemblance ended. A Genoese palace is sacred to silence and shadow; this was set apart to sunshine and sound, excepting on a gala day, when the philanthropic great ones came down to distribute prizes. Then it burst forth into carpets, awnings, curtains, and even the Alif-Bey--wallahs (alphabet-class) in the first story bit their tongues to keep them still. That was the noisiest story. All day long the inmates chanted letters in high childish voices, while the monitors stood over them like the parent bird, ready to drop a fresh titbit of knowledge into the clamorous mouths.
Up-stairs, in the primary department, the babel had lost its first barbarous simplicity; the makers of it did not always understand what they themselves were saying, and the uncertainty of all things had damped their infant light-heartedness. Higher again, in the third story, quite an academic silence prevailed among the girls working away at Euclid, algebra, and all the 'ologies, and they had learned an automatic thrust forward of the arm towards the teacher worthy of a British board school. This never failed to please exotic philanthropy. The connection may not have been quite clear, but this particular branch of knowledge was invariably looked upon as a sign that education was really at last beginning to leaven the mass of deplorable female ignorance in India.
Perhaps it was. Certainly this school, with its court-yard devoted to the dhoolies in which the pupils were carried to and from their lessons, and its three stories of different standards, formed a perfect ladder of learning; the lowermost rung being the listless, lazy group of bearers lounging in the gateway with the female chaperons until four o'clock chimed from a hundred gongs in the city. Then they earned a monthly pay from the Government by carrying the climbers of the ladder back to their homes in decent seclusion--playing, as it were, the part of Prince Hassan's carpet in transporting them into another hemisphere--nay, more, another world. At any rate, from algebra and the exact sciences to a cell of four walls, and, if Fate were kind, a few square yards of flat roof open to the sky. Something of a mental somersault; therefore it was perhaps as well in one point of view, if not in another, that many of the claimants to genteel seclusion who were comfortably carried by a paternal Government to their own doors, could, on arrival, set aside the convenient pretence and go about to see their friends with the more simple and less costly protection of a veil.
"Ari, sister!" said a young, dissipated-looking lounger in the gate; "there is that baby awake again. Go, Chundoo, and call Fâtma."
The woman addressed--a big, brazen lump--went yawning and stretching to stand on the bottom step of the arched stairway. Then she called into the clamour above:
"Fâtma! Fâtma! The baby is awake."
Her hard tones echoed up the arcades, but the sing-song went on without a break. After a while, however, a pattering step came down the stairs, bringing into view a child of about ten, with a sharp, old face. Her blue trousers were rent at the knees, her skinny hands inconceivably smeared with ink--there was more ink than hand--and the coarse cotton cloth she wore as a veil was frayed, worn, and dirty. Beneath it, the odd little galloon of plaited hair on her forehead showed sun-bleached and rumpled, despite its tightness. A competent observer could have told at once that she belonged to the Cashmiri quarter, and to either a poverty-stricken or a bereaved house. No mother's fingers had been at that plaited hair for weeks.