It was very cold indeed that New Year's afternoon, and Maimuna felt more than usually down-hearted; for there had been a death upstairs, and she knew that the stamping and shufflings she could hear coming rhythmically downwards over her head were the feet of those carrying a corpse. Now, weary and worn as she was, Maimuna--between the fifties and sixties--did not yet feel inclined to fold her hands and give in. Even now it needed a very little thing to bring a smile to her face; and once, when a child had fallen downstairs, she had surprised the neighbours by her alert decision. So that when she heard girls' shrill voices in half-giggling alarm through her door--which was ajar--she guessed at the cause, and called to the owners to come in until the stairs should be clear.
One (a slip of a thing ten years old) she knew as the daughter of a gold-thread worker higher up the stairs; the other (not more than five or six) was a stranger; a fat broad-faced morsel, with a stolid look, and something held very tight in one small chubby hand. She was dressed in the cleanest of new clothes, scanty of stuff, but gay, with a yard or two of tinsel on her scrap of a veil. Maimuna paused in the whirr and hum of her wheel to look at the children wistfully; her own childlessness had always seemed a crime to her.
"It is Fatma, the pen-maker's girl, Mai," said the gold-worker's daughter, patronisingly. "She is just back from the Missen School, where they have been having a big festival because it is the sahib log's big day."
"Tchuk," dissented the solemn-faced baby, clucking her tongue in emphatic denial. "It is not the Big Day. It is because Malika Victoria is--is----" The solemnity merged in confusion, finally into a sort of appealing defiance: "Is--is--that----"
She unclasped her fist, and held out a brand new shining silver two-anna bit. It was one of those struck when her Majesty the Queen assumed the Imperial title.
The gold-worker's daughter giggled. "She means Wictoria Kaiser-i-hind, you know. What the guns were about this morning. They are to go off every year, they say. That will be fun!"
"But why?" asked Maimuna, puzzled. Her life for close on five-and-twenty years had been spent in the cooking of quail curry and spinning of cotton--the very Mutiny had passed by unknown to her. She had heard vaguely of the Queen, and knew that it was her head on the rupee which, despite the hard times, she always wore on a black silk skein round her neck, because she had worn it since her babyhood, when the parents of the boy who had died of the measles had sent it her; but what the Queen had to do with John Company Bahadar, or he to her, was a mystery.
"Why," giggled the elder girl, "because she is going to be the King, and turn all the men out. That is what father says. He says she is sure to favour the women, and I think that will be fun. But Fatma knows it all. Come! dear one! Sing Maimuna that song the miss sahibs made the schools sing to-day. Sing it soft, close, close up to her ear, so that no one may hear it--for they don't like her singing, you know, at home, Mai: it isn't respectable."
So, standing on tip-toe, steadying herself against Maimuna's arm by the hand which held the two-anna bit, Fatma began in a most unmelodious whisper to chant a Hindee version of "God Save our Gracious Queen." The words as well as the tune were a difficulty to the fat, solemn-faced child, but the old woman sat listening and looking at the two-anna bit with a new interest, a new wonder in her weary eyes.
"Bismillah!" she said, half way through, when the gold-worker's daughter, becoming impatient, declared the corpse must have passed, and dragged Fatma off incontinently. "And she is a woman--only a woman!"