In the Permanent Way

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

The door itself was broad as it was high, and had a strangely deformed look; since nearly half of its two carven stone jambs were, of necessity, hidden behind the platform. These stone jambs, square-hewn, roughly-carven, were the only sign of antiquity visible in the house from the alley; the rest being the usual straight-up-and-down almost windowless wall built of small purplish bricks set in a mortar of mud. It stood, however, a little further back in the alley than its neighbours, so giving room for the mud platform; but that was its only distinction.

The alley in its turn differed in no way from the generality of such alleys in the walled towns where the houses--like trees in a crowded plantation--shoot up shoulder to shoulder, as if trying to escape skywards from the yearly increasing pressure of humanity. It was, briefly, a deep, dark, irregular drain of a place, shadowful utterly save for the one brief half hour or so during which the sun showed in the notched ribbon of the sky which was visible between the uneven turretings of the roof.

Yet the very sunlessness and airlessness had its advantages. In hot weather it brought relief from the scorching glare, and in the cold, such air as there was remained warm even beneath a frosty sky. So that the mud platform, with its possibilities of unhustled rest, was a favourite gossiping place of the neighbourhood. All the more so because, between it and the next house, diving down through the débris of countless generations and green with the slime of countless ages, lay one of those wells to which the natives cling so fondly in defiance of modern sanitation and water-works. But there was a third reason why the platform was so much frequented; on the second story of the house to which it belonged stood the oldest Hindu shrine in the city. How it came to be there no one could say clearly. The Brahmins who tended it from the lower story told tales of a plinthed temple built in the heroic age of Prithi Râj; but only this much was certain, that it was very old, and that the steep stone ladder of a stair which led up to the arched alcoves of the ante-shrine was of very different date to the ordinary brick one which led thence to the third story; where, among other lodgers, Ramanund, B.A., lived with his widowed mother.

He was a mathematical master in a mission school, and twice a day on his way to and from the exact sciences he had to pass up and down the brick ladder and the stone stair. And sometimes he had to stand aside on the three-cornered landing where the brick and stone met, in order that the women coming to worship might pass with their platters of curds, their trays of cressets, and chaplets of flowers into the dim ante-shrine where the light from a stone lattice glistened faintly on the damp oil-smeared pavement. But that being necessarily when he was on his way downstairs, and deep in preparation for the day's work, he did not mind a minute or so of delay for further study; and he would go on with his elementary treatise on logarithms until the tinkle of the anklets merged into the giggle which generally followed, when in the comparative seclusion of the ante-shrine, the veils could be lifted for a peep at the handsome young man. But Ramanund, albeit a lineal descendant of the original Brahmin priests of the temple, had read Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill; so he would go on his way careless alike of the unseen women and the unseen shrine--of the mysteries of sex and religion as presented in his natural environment. There are dozens of young men in India now-a-days in this position; who stand figuratively, as he did actually, giving the go-by to one-half of life alternately, and letting the cressets and the chaplets and the unseen women pass unchallenged into the alcove, where the speckled light of the lattice bejewelled their gay garments, and a blue cloud of incense floated sideways among the dim arches.

And Ramanund was as good a specimen of this new India as could be found, North or South. Not of robust physique--that was scarcely to be expected after generations of in and in breeding--but of most acute intelligence, and, by virtue of inherited spiritual distinction, singularly free from the sensual, passive acquiescence in the limitations of life which brings content to the most of humanity. He was, by birth, as it were, a specialised speculative machine working at full pressure with a pure virtue escapement. As President of a Debating Club affiliated with the "Society for the General Improvement of the People of India," he was perhaps needlessly lavish of vague expressions such as the individual rights of man; but then he, in common with his kind, have only lately become acquainted with the ideas such phrases are supposed to express, and have not as yet learnt their exact use--that being an art which history tells needs centuries of national and individual struggle for its attainment.

Be that as it may, even in the strict atmosphere of the Mission School, Ramanund's only fault was that he had assimilated its morality and rejected its dogma. In the orthodox Hindu household upstairs, over which his widowed mother ruled severely, his only crime was that he refused to replace a wife, deceased of the measles at the age of six, for another of the good lady's choosing. For that other matter of slighting the shrine downstairs is too common now-a-days in India to excite any recrimination; its only effect being to make the women regard the rule which forbids their eating with the men folks, as a patent of purity, instead of a sign of inferiority; since it is a safeguard against contamination from those who, when beyond the watch of secluded eyes, may have defiled themselves in a thousand Western ways.

Regarding the wife, however, Ramanund was firm, despite the prayers that his mother offered before the Goddess downstairs for his deliverance from obstinacy. He used to accompany her sometimes on this errand so far as the three-cornered landing, and then with a smile proceed on his way to the exact sciences. Even the clang of the great bell which hung in front of the idol within tip-toe touch of the worshipper, as it used to come pealing after him down the stairs, proclaiming that the goddess' attention had been called to a new petitioner, did not bring a comprehension of facts to his singularly clear brain. Those facts being, that, rightly or wrongly, the flamboyant image of Kâli devi[^[16]]--which his ancestors had tended faithfully--was being besieged by as fervent a mother-prayer as had been laid before any divinity--or dev-inity as the word really stands.

In truth Ramanund had no special desire to marry at all; or even to fall in love. He was too busy with the exact sciences to experimentalise on the suspension of the critical faculty in man; besides, he had definitely made up his mind to marry a widow when he did marry. For he was as great on the widow question as he was on all others which appealed to his kindly moral nature. He and his friends of the same stamp--pleaders, clerks, and such-like living in the alley--used to sit on the mud steps after working hours, and discuss such topics before adjourning to the Debating Club; but they always left one of the flights of steps free. This was for the worshippers to pass upwards to the shrine as soon as the blare of the conches, the beatings of drums, and the ringing of bells should announce that the dread Goddess having been washed and put to bed like a good little girl, her bath water was available to those who wished to drink it as a charm against the powers of darkness.

That was with the waning light; but as it was a charm also against the dangers of day, the dawn in its turn would be disturbed by clashings and brayings to tell of Kâli devi's uprisal. Then, in the growing light the house-mothers, fresh from their grindstones, would come shuffling through the alleys with a pinch or two of new-ground flour, and the neighbouring Brahmins--hurriedly devotional after the manner of priesthoods--would speed up the stair (muttering prayers as they sped) to join for half a minute in the sevenfold circling of the sacred lamps; while, divided between sleep and greed, the fat traders on their way to their shops would begin business by a bid for divine favour, and yawn petitions as they waddled, that the supply of holy water would hold out till they arrived at the shrine.

But at this time in the morning, Ramanund would be sleeping the sleep of the just upstairs, after sitting up past midnight over his pupils' exercises; for one of the first effects of civilisation is to make men prefer a kerosene lamp to the sun.