"I wonder you don't give it a bottle, Hoshiaribi?" continued the teacher, sternly, as a delicate-looking young woman, rather overdressed and overscented, took the child from Fâtma with a sigh, and retired to a corner.
"Fâtma breaks them on purpose," replied the mother, sullenly; "she says they disagree with him."
"Yea, 'tis true," assented Fâtma, gravely; "they give him a pain in his inside; then he cries, and I have to sit up, since Hoshiaribi is always tired, and Peru is too lazy."
Teacher looked at the little sharp face and was silent. That household, consisting of disreputable, good-for-nothing Peru, who gambled away the five rupees he gained by helping to carry his wife and other students to and from the school; shiftless Hoshiarbi, who spent half her scholarship of ten rupees on her clothes; and Fâtma, whose eight annas, a week for cleaning the writing-boards seemed to keep the whole going, was a perpetual puzzle to the English lady, even without the child. And with it? She felt quite relieved when Hoshiaribi came back to her equation minus the baby.
The afternoon sun was slanting in bars through the closed grass chicks, making the floors ring-streaked. It was close on four o'clock; the tide of learning slackened at full flood. Down-stairs among the little ones, first to go, there would only be time to chant "One and one make two--oo--oo" a few times more; so Fâtma sat down in the sunny, sleepy corridor, with the baby in her limited lap; and as she sat thinking, heaven knows of what, she jogged the base of its skull backward and forward on the palm of her supporting hand in approved native fashion. She did not know that it conduces to slight concussion of the brain and consequent coma, convenient to the nurse; but she knew mother always did it. This odd little woman of ten knew most of the old-fashioned, old-established ways of the world she lived in; and when the value of B had been discovered, she saw Hoshiaribi and the baby into the folds of a white domino, and so, on their way down-stairs to the husband, the curtained dhoolie, and the oblong room up two flights of stairs in the Cashmiri quarter. Then she came to linger sturdily yet unobtrusively in the corridor, till teacher, coming out, busy over a mass of papers, nearly fell over her.
"Gracious me, child! what do you want? Why aren't you down-stairs?"
Perhaps Fâtma had been rehearsing her petition while she was nursing the baby; anyhow, she had it clear and pat.
"Huzoor, I want promotion to the primary department. It is such a long way to carry the baby to Hoshiaribi, and he sleeps not at all among the infants. We make too much noise. And Peru goes away gambling and forgets him, so I get no time for study. Thus, when Hoshiaribi's scholarship ends next year we shall be destitute, since Peru's money goes in quail-fighting, and we cannot fill our stomachs on eight annas."
Incontrovertible facts, every one of them.
"Have you read your grammar through?"