In the Permanent Way

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

So the two young things stood looking at each other, while the pigeon gurgled and cooed: "Kaboo-tri, ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri."

II

"So, seest thou, Kabootri, thou wilt turn Christian and then I will marry thee." Aggie's outlook on the future went so far, and left the rest to Providence; the girl's went further.

"Trra!" she commented. "That is fool's talk. I am a bird-slayer: how could we live without the pigeons and the mosque? Thou hast no money."

They were sitting on the flight of steps once more, with a cage full of scarlet avitovats between them, so that the passers-by could not see the hands that were locked in each other behind the cage.

"Then I will marry thee, and become a heathen," amended Agamemnon, giving a squeeze to what he held. She smiled, and the soft curves of her chin seemed to melt into those of her long throat, as she hung her head and looked at him as if he were the most beautiful thing in her world. "That is wiser," she said, "and if thou dost not marry me I will kill myself. So that is settled." He gave another squeeze to her hand, and she smiled again. Then they sat gazing at each other across the avitovats, hand in hand like a couple of children; for there was guilelessness in his eyes and innocence in hers.

"Lo!" she said suddenly. "I know not now why I said 'hens.'" She paused, failing to find her own meaning, and so came back to more practical matters. "Thou hadst best be buying the birds, Aga-Meean[^[51]] [for so, to suit her estimate of him, she had chosen to amend his name], or folk will wonder. And if thou wilt leave them in the old place in the Queen's Gardens I will fetch them away, and thou canst buy them of me again next Friday."

There was no cunning in her manner, only a solid grasp on the exigencies of the position. Had he not a mother living in a house with a verandah, and was not her father a bird-seller? Was he not at that moment betting on the Nawab's coming pigeon-race on the platform above them? Despite these exigencies, however, the past three weeks had been pleasant; if Aggie was still rather hazy as to the difference between young cocks and old hens, it was from no lack of experience in the buying of avitovats. Kabootri used to give him the money wherewith to buy them, and leave it again in the hiding-place where she found the birds; so it was not an expensive amusement to either of them. And if Agamemnon Menelaus had not grasped the determination which underlay the girl's threats of taking life it was from no lack of hearing them, ay, and of shivering at them. The savage, reckless young figure, startling the sunshine and shadow of the narrow lanes with its shrill cry, "I will kill, I will kill, yea, I will take life!" had filled him with a sort of proud bewilderment, a sacred admiration. And other things had brought the same dizzy content with them. That same figure, sidling along the rose-red copings like any pigeon, to gain the marble cupolas where the young birds were to be found,--those young birds which must be taught betimes to play her game of Life and Death, as all her world must be taught to play it,--was fascinating. It was disturbing when it sat close to him in the Queen's Gardens, eating rose comfits bought out of the blood-money, and cooing to him like any dove, while the pigeons in the trees above it called "Ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri," as if they were jealous.

The outcome of it all, however, was, as yet, no more than the discarding of boots in favour of native shoes, and the supplanting of the grey wide-awake by a white and gold saucer-cap which only cost four annas, and lay on the dark waves of the lad's small head as if it had been made for it. Kabootri clasped her hands tight in sheer admiration as she watched him go down the steps with the cage of scarlet avitovats; but Mrs. Gibbs, while admitting the superlative beauty of the combination, burst into floods of lamentation at the sight, for it was a symptom she had seen often in lads of Aggie's age. His elder brother had begun that way; that elder brother who was now a thorn in the side of every chaplain from Peshawur to Calcutta by reason of his disconcerting desire to live as a heathen and be saved as a Christian.

So, when Aggie, with a spark of unusual spirit, had refused to put on the boots which she had made the servant (for, of course, there had to be a servant in a house with a verandah) black with the greatest care; in other words, when he had refused to go to church, since native shoes and a Delhi cap are manifestly incompatible with a surplice, she went over to a bosom friend and wept again. But Mrs. Rosario was of a different type altogether. She seldom wept, taking life with a pure philosophy, and making her living out of her handsome daughters by marrying them off to the first comer on the chance of his doing well.