It was at this juncture that I suddenly became aware that the Jacquard loom of Fate was weaving a pattern; Râmchunderji! Seeta! the exile! the killing of the wild beasts! the ten-headed, many-handed monster Râvana! Yet I could tell you almost every word of the Commissioner's speech, though he prosed on for the next ten minutes complacently about the pleasure he felt, and the authorities felt, and the whole civilised world felt, at seeing "Money, the great curse and blessing of humanity, employed as it should be employed in snatching the female orphan of India from unmerited misfortune, and educating her to be an example to the nineteenth century." Every one was highly delighted, and the Committee approached me with a view of adding the Commissioner's name as a second title to the school.
But I awaited the completion of the pattern. It was on the eleventh of April, that is to say, on the High Festival of Spring, at the fair held beside the tank where humanity in thousands was washing away the old year, and putting on the new in the shape of gay-coloured clothing, that my attention was attracted by a small, dense crowd whence came hearty guffaws of laughter.
"'Tis a performing monkey," said a bearded villager in response to my question as to what was amusing them so hugely. "The boy makes him do tricks worthy of Hanumân; yet he saith he taught him yonder down by the canal. Will not the Protector of the Poor step in and see? Ho, ho! 'twould make a suitor laugh even if the digri (decree) were against him." But I recognised the pattern this time, and I had made up my mind not to interfere with the shuttle again. As I turned away, another roar of laughter and a general feeling in pockets and turbans told me that the final tip had succeeded, and that collection was going on satisfactorily.
A few days later the Chairman of the Committee came to me in excited despair. The real, genuine female Hindu orphan was not to be found, and the stucco walls were once more empty. Inquiries were made on all sides, but when it came out, casually, that a boy, a girl, and a monkey, had taken a third-class ticket to Benares I said nothing. I was not going to aid Râvana, or prevent the due course of incarnation, if it was an incarnation. That great city of men, women, and monkeys should give the trio fair play.
Last year, when I was in Simla, I overheard a traveller giving his impressions of India to a lady who was longing all the time to find out from a gentleman with a mustache when the polo-match was to begin at Annandale next day.
"The performing troupes are certainly above the European average," he said. "At Benares, especially, I remember seeing a monkey; he, his master, and a girl, did quite a variety of scenes out of the Râmayâna, and really, considering who they were, I--"
"Excuse me,--but--oh! Captain Smith, is it half-past eleven or twelve?"
The vina still hangs in my collection next the ravanastron. Sometimes I take it down and sound the strings. But the waving palms, the odorous thickets, and the shadowy, immortal forms have got mixed up somehow with that infernal humming and bumming of the four-anna bit. So I get no help in trying to decide the question,--"Who was Râmchunderji?"
[HEERA NUND.]
He stood in the verandah, salaaming with both hands, in each of which he held a bouquet--round-topped, compressed, prim little posies, with fat bundles of stalk bound spirally with date-fibre; altogether more like ninepins than bouquets, for the time of flowers was not yet, and only a few ill-conditioned rosebuds, suggestive of worms, and a dejected champak or two, showed amongst the green.