From the Five Rivers

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

The women up and down the central stair, which served also as a sort of drain and dust-bin, came attracted by the hope of a scene, to discuss the whole aspect of the affair without the least reserve. Peru was a bad lot, and it was sheer tyranny of the Sirkar to have refused Hoshiar a scholarship after all these years. At the same time she was a poor, flighty creature, and had no business to slap their children; the latter train of thought becoming accentuated by the arrival from a neighbouring tenement of Sultani's mother. Was it for this her daughter had been bribed away shamelessly for a neighbouring "missen," where, if they did read the Bible and try to pervert the scholars, they made up for it in prizes? Was it for this that base-born brat of a base-born mother had taken one rupee a month out of Hoshiar's own pocket? These two questions were the theses of a controversy, which spread like wild-fire till it embraced the personal history of every one present, and the room was a seething mass of excited women, bordered by a whimpering circle of small girls, until a little figure came rushing up the stairs and forced itself into the thickest of the clamour.

It was Fâtma returning from her daily marketing. Her already scrimped veil was further abridged by all the corners being utilized as bags for her various purchases; and as she flung out her skinny brown arms in the small space still left between the combatants, and turned first to one side and then to the other in vociferous reproach, her weighted veil swung out, leaving her body quite bare. It was not much bigger; certainly no fatter than it had been, eighteen months gone, when she had struggled up the ladder of learning with the yellow-legged baby.

"Ari, mothers! Ari, sisters!" she scolded in her thin child's voice. "This is unseemly! This is a deplorable word! Have you forgotten this house is a school? You come here to learn, not to make beast-like noises! What a bad example! Does not shame come to you?"

The fateful phrases, which had so often reduced the infant department to tears, fell powerless, and Fâtma's own imperious temper asserted itself. She turned like a whirlwind to the alphabet-learners; they were her special charge, they at least should obey her.

"Come, my daughters," she cried, "let us leave this scene of infamy. This is no place for us people. Come, let us go!"

The circle stood up instinctively. They adored Fâtma; besides, the chance of escape was welcome. She thrust her new nephew, a babe of three months, who had been squalling patiently in a corner, into the biggest girl's arms, seized on the yellow-legged one herself, and so, full of dignity, headed the little procession.

The women, touched by the passionate delight in children's ways which is so marked among them, fell back with sudden laughter.

"Ai! dil aziz! Wah, the little marionettes. See how they go like old women! Heart's-core! are we so wicked? Look at my Amma, Fuzli--not four, I swear, and grave as a judge! Tobah! tobah! Go not, little lives. We are sorry. See, we bite our tongues, we hold our ears."

So, squatting down, standing aside, reaching over, the women, chattering their amusement, let the babies pass. And, as for Fâtma, she was "pucki, burri pucki." God knows why, but the bairns were set to obey her. This one's Miriam, not four till Baisakh, leaped out of bed at her first call, as she came her morning rounds for the pupils, and that one's Janet had been known to refuse her breakfast if Fâtma said it was late. Aye--pucki, burri pucki--for good, not evil, and 'twere well others were more like her. So, with side sniffs, they pattered up and down the stairs to their several abodes, leaving Hoshiaribi sulkily exhausted. Sultani and her mother, as they went casting glances of final scorn at the odd little row of maidens ranged along the gutter in the sunshine, piping away the incontrovertible fact that "one and one make two--oo--oo" while Fâtma and her babies sat opposite on a door-step and led the chorus.

So that was an end of the incident for one day. Unfortunately, it was not the first of its kind, and Hoshiaribi had almost made up her mind that it should be the last. She lay, feeling a perfect worm, as any woman, East or West, might have done after the turmoil, kicking one heel petulantly over the side of the string-bed on which she had flung herself, and looked at the map of Asia and the map of Europe, which hung on opposite walls, with equal abhorrence. She hated everything, everybody. The last six months, since her failure to pass had sent her as a favour to the lowest pay of a branch-school teacher, had been sheer misery to her. For her husband's neglect she did not care, save in so far as it gave her complaint a sound basis. She had been betrothed to him, and so she had married him; but the six years since she had lived with him as his wife had only taught her that she could set her duty to him aside without reproach, for the sake of ten rupees a month, and that he was quite content with this arrangement. She looked once more round the long, narrow slip of a room with its mud floor, its smoky rafters, its single-shuttered window two feet square, giving on a close alley; then she thought of the cool, matted corridors of the Genoese palazzo, the leisurely studies, the ease of ten rupees compared with six, and rolled over, face down on the bed, whimpering. She hated teaching, but it was that or starvation. At least--unless--