The sight did not affect Gopi in the least. He had thought out a plan which filled his confused old soul with a heavenly joy. So when his two dough-cakes were given him that evening he hurried off with them to the contractor in the background, through whom the Huzoors had arranged for this supply, and exchanged them--at a loss, inevitably--for the coarse husks, the bran, the sweepings, the absolute waste which could not be used even in famine bread.
The arrangement suited both parties, the contractor and old Gopi, who day after day trudged home, hungry, with a bulky bundle of fodder for Surâbhi. It was a fair exchange all round; even with the old cow, who turned the fodder into milk. Not much, it is true, since the bundle was not over-large, but enough to keep Gopi's soul and body together.
And the soul grew if the body wasted. How could it be otherwise, when one was permitted to be the babe and suckling, as it were, of the Great Milk-Mother? The Great World-Mother, whose sacred work it was to nourish all things, even the little godlings?
The old Brahmin's eyes grew softer, more trustful, more like the eyes of a child, as the days went by; and as he milked her, Surâbhi's black frothed tongue often licked more than his shaven poll, as if she were concerned at the bones which showed through the skin of her calf.
Gopâl himself, however, took this licking as a mark of Divine favour; and, as for the thinness, were not all the babes and sucklings growing thin?
That was true. The Englishman in head charge of the Chotia Aluwala relief-work canal had that thinness on his conscience. But what could man do in a wilderness, without mothers, without milk?
He had it on his heart too, because he was a father; and because, despite a mother and milk, doctors and dosing galore, it was not two months since he had seen his first-born waste away mysteriously to death, as children will waste.
So his mind was full of it, when, for the sake of seeing a lonely wife and mother, he rode forty miles after nightfall to the little bungalow so empty of a child's voice.
"I've got quite a nursery of 'em now," he said grimly, "but they beat me. I can't get the men in charge to mix that tin-milk stuff right, you know, and the little beggars won't look at a teaspoon."
Perhaps it was his ride that had tired him. Anyhow, he crossed his hands on the table, and laid his head on them wearily.