On the Face of the Waters: A Tale of the Mutiny

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

"Louder, man, louder!" gibed the corporal. But the sergeant did not repeat the question; he stood looking at the upturned face awaiting an answer.

"Maybe he is Belooch, his speech not mine," he said suddenly, yet with a strange lack of curiosity in his tone. There was a faint quiver, as if some strain were over in the face below, and the silence was broken by a rapid sentence.

"Yea! Belooch!" he went on in a still more satisfied tone, "I know it by the twang. So there is small use in bursting my lungs."

Here Prince Abool-Bukr, who had been dozing tipsily, his head against his fiddle, woke, and caught the last words. "Ay, burst! burst like the royal kettle-drums of mine ancestors. Yet will I do my poor best to amuse the company and--and instruct them in virtue." Whereupon, with much maudlin emotion, he thrummed and thrilled through a lament on the fallen fortunes of the Moghuls written by that King of Poets his Grandpapa. Being diffuse and didactic, it was met with acclamations, and Abool, being beyond the stage of discrimination, was going on to give an encore of a very different nature, when a wild clashing of cymbals and hooting of conches in the bazaar below sent everyone to the balcony. Everyone save Abool, who, deprived of his audience, dozed off against his fiddle again, and the man from the corner who, as he took advantage of the diversion to escape, looked down at the handsome drunken face as he passed it and muttered, "Poor devil! He rode honest enough always." Then the Rajpoot's arrogant voice rising from the crush on the balcony, he paused a second in order to listen--that being his trade.

"'Tis the holy Hindu widow to whom God sent fire on her way to the festival. A saint indeed! I know her brother, one Soma, a Yadubansi Rajpoot in the 11th, new-come to Meerut."

The clashings and brayings were luckily loud enough to hide an irrepressible exclamation from the man behind. The next instant he was halfway down the dark stairs, tearing off cap, turban, beard, and pausing at the darkest corner to roll his baggy northern drawers out of sight, and turn his woolen green shawl inside out, thus disclosing a cotton lining of ascetic ochre tint. It was the work of a second, for Jim Douglas had been an apt pupil. So, with a smear of ashes from one pocket, a dab of turmeric and vermilion from another--put on as he finished the stairs--he emerged into the street disguised as a mendicant; the refuge of fools, as Tiddu had called it. The easiest, however, to assume at an instant's notice; and in this case the best for the procession Jim Douglas meant to join. Careless and hurried though his get-up was, he set the very thought of detection from him as he edged his way among the streaming crowd. For in that, so he told himself, lay the Mysterious Gift. To be, even in your inmost thoughts, the personality you assumed was the secret. Somehow or another it impressed those around you, and even if a challenge came there was no danger if the challenger could be isolated--brought close, as it were, to your own certainty. To this, so it seemed to him--the many-faced one vehemently protesting--came all Tiddu's mysterious instructions, which nevertheless he followed religiously. For, be they what they might, they had never failed him during the six months, save once, when, watching a horse-race, he had lost or rather recovered himself in the keen interest it awakened. Then his neighbors had edged from him and stared, and he had been forced into slipping away and changing his personality; for it was one of Tiddu's maxims that you should always carry that with you which made such change possible. To be many-faced, he said, made all faces more secure by taking from any the right of permanence. Jim Douglas therefore joined the procession and forced his way to the very front of it, where the red-splashed figure of Durga Devi was being carried shoulders high. It was garlanded with flowers and censed by swinging censers, and behind it with widespread arms to show her sacred scars walked Tara. She was naked to the waist, and the scanty ochre-tinted cloth folded about her middle was raised so as to show the scars upon her lower limbs. The sunlight gleaming on the magnificent bronze curves showed a seam or two upon her breast also. No more. As Abool-Bukr had prophesied, her face, full of wild spiritual exaltation, was unmarred and, with the shaven head, stood out bold and clear as a cameo.

Jai! Jai! Durga mai ke jai (Victory to Mother Durga).

The cry came incessantly from her lips, and was echoed not only by the procession, but by the spectators. So from many a fierce throat besides the corporal's, who from Gul-anâri's balcony shouted it frantically, that appeal to the Great Death Mother--implacable, athirst for blood--came to light the sordid life of the bazaar with a savage fire for something unknown--horribly unknown, that lay beyond life. Even the Mohammedans, though they spat in the gutter at the idol, felt their hearts stir; felt that if miracles were indeed abroad their God, the only true One, would not shorten His Hand either.

Jai! Jai! Durga mai ke jai.

The cry met with a sudden increase of volume as, the procession passing into the wider space before the big mosque, it was joined by a band of widows, who in rapturous adoration flung themselves before Tara's feet so that she might walk over them if need be, yet somehow touch them.