In the Permanent Way

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

Deaths are rare in these small communities, and there were but two or three new graves--all but one too recent to be poor Phooli-jân's. That, then, must be hers, with its still clearly denned oblong of iris, already a mass of pale purple and white.

I sat down on a rock and began, unromantically, to eat my lunch, finishing up with a pull at my flask, and thus providentially fortified, I stooped, ere leaving, to pick one or two of the blossoms from the grave, intending to paint them round the sketch of the girl's head which I had with me.

Great heavens! what was that?

I turned positively sick with horror and doubt. Was it a hand? It was some time before I could force myself to set aside the sheathing leaves and settle the point. Something it was, something which, even as I parted the stems, fell to pieces, as the skeleton of a beckoning hand might have done. I did not stay to see more; I let the flowers close over it--whatever it was--and made my way back to the village. My baggage, having changed shoulders, was streaming out over the plank bridge again, and in the two first bearers, carrying my cook-room pots and pans, I recognised Goloo and Chuchchu. They had both grown stouter, and wore huge bunches of red rhododendron behind their ears. I found out, on inquiry, that they were both married and had become bosom friends.

I have not seen the turquoise set in diamonds since, but I often think of it, and wonder what it was I saw among the iris. And then I seem to see Phooli-jân sitting among the flowers, nodding her head and saying, "They are at my beck and call."

If I were Goloo or Chuchchu, I would be buried somewhere else.

[MUSIC HATH CHARMS][^[53]]

It was the very last place in the world where you would have expected to hear the notes of a church harmonium; and the old man who, seated on a reed stool, was playing God Save the Queen with one finger, was the very last person whom you would have expected to see performing upon it. But there it stood, quite at home, between, the wooden pillars which divided the central living-room from the crowd of latticed closets around it; and there he sat, quite at home, on the stool, his naked brown legs struggling with the bellows, his brown fingers patting down the keys with a sort of pompous precision. For Punoo was a music-master, and that was his pupil who, with a yawn, was watching his proceedings from the floor while she threaded beads on a string intermittently. That was also the last place from which one would expect any one to take a music-lesson; but old Punoo being blind was fully persuaded that Bahâni was dutifully at his elbow. This blindness of his was, however, far more to his advantage than his disadvantage as a master. It was, in short, the cause of his being one at all; since had he had the use of his eyes no mother would have dreamed of employing a man, who was not more than forty-five at the outside, in teaching her girls. As it was, his time was fully taken up in the houses of the clerks, contractors, barristers, and such like, who for some reason or another desired to impart the exotic accomplishment of music to their daughters or wives. But of all these houses Punoo loved the one which contained the harmonium best; not because of his pupil, since Bahâni, who was betrothed to a young man who might be seen any day on a Hammersmith omnibus over on the other side of the world, never learned anything; but because of the instrument itself. To tell truth it had quite a fine tone, especially when all the wind in its wheezy bellows was sent into one note. And then the playing of it seemed to satisfy him from head to foot. All the other instruments, the accordions and concertinas, even his own fiddle with seven strings, of which he was really very fond, only employed his head and his hands; but this made his whole body as it were to toil and labour after melody. As he sat, his forehead bedewed with perspiration, the expression on his sightless face, turned upwards all unconscious of the dingy, sordid, smoke-blackened rafters which limited his vision, was quite sufficient to make up for the lack of it in the music; it was the expression of a prisoner who, through the bars of a cage, sees freedom. But the odd little gridiron in the centre of the dark room, which gave it some light and air from the roof above, was scarcely large enough to allow even of Punoo's wizened figure to pass through.

"Lo, it gives one a melting of the liver, and a sinking of the heart to hear thee, Master-jee," remarked Mai Kishnu, bustling in with a handful of radishes for the pickle-stew. "Canst not play something more lively, something that goes not wombling up and down like an ill-greased wheel, something with a count in it that gives a body time to catch the beat of it? For sure I could make better music with my ladle and tray; better music for a bride anyhow; and mark my word, Bahâni, when thou art really one there shall be none of this boo-hooing and ow-wowing, that might set free thoughts of wolves and God knows what monsters to damage all thy hopes."

"'Tis not likely, Mai," said Punoo, desisting to speak with great dignity, "that Bahâni will have mastered so much. 'Tis not given to all to play God Save the Queen as I do."