'Infinitely so,' assented Lewis. The house was fully a mile nearer his quarters at Colonel Tweedie's and that was a great convenience, especially during the rains.
[CHAPTER XIII]
'Send it back! It is hers; it is not mine! He gave it her! I stole it. Don't tell. Oh! send it back! send it back!'
Over and over again, through the long hot days and nights, the murmur, in its monotonous hurry, blent with the hum of the potter's wheel. The old man had removed the latter to the farther courtyard, where he sat working feverishly, yet without avail, so far as the village people could see through the door, beyond which they were forbidden to go. The simple folk were agog at the potter's strange looks and strange ways. He never seemed to cease working, for even when the familiar sound of the wheel was hushed something like an echo of it rose from within. Those were the times when he stood wistfully in the dark airless hut beside a restless head turning itself from side to side on the hard pillow, and keeping time to the monotonous rhythm of the murmur, 'Send it back, send it back.'
'Yea! dear heart, I will send it.' Then there would be silence for a while; but only for a while, since the fever strengthened day by day. Small wonder, when all Nature seemed in the grip of heat. The thermometer, we are told, is accurately divided into degrees. If so, the fallacy of such classification is self-evident, since every one with experience knows that the difference between eighty-four degrees and eighty-six degrees of Fahrenheit's instrument embraces the difference between comfort and discomfort. Between these two points that engine of torture, the punkah, trembles ere it begins the steady swing which is only one degree less awful than the unsteady swing necessitating the occultation of boots and other light articles of furniture with a human head. Doubtless to the uninitiated it seems a trivial affair to loop a parti-coloured rope through hooks in the rafters, and to attach to it a whitewashed board with a newly starched frill tacked to its lowest edge, thereinafter making mysterious dispositions of a leathern thong, the neck of an old whisky bottle thrust through the mud wall, and a circumambient flask of evil-smelling oil. But those who know what it is, on returning from a morning ride, to find the punkah in possession of your home, feel a chill at the very thought, such as the thing itself will never produce by legitimate means. The hot weather is upon one, and God only knows if fever, cholera, home-sickness, sheer deadly ennui, will allow you to pass through it unscathed as an honest gentleman.
George Keene, however, over in the branded bungalow, knew nothing of the horrors of a hot weather in the jungles, and, while poor little Azîz lay moaning out her impotent repentance, was actually superintending the swinging of his punkahs; which is equivalent to a man personally conducting his own hanging. He even, after the manner of engineers, took pride in a device which was to secure a perfect silence in the infernal machine. All unwitting of a time when, in the scorched darkness, it might be preferable to curse a monotonous scroop giving tangible excuse for wakefulness, than to lie visualising the unseen swoop, as of some vampire eager to suck your heart's-blood.
Those two degrees of heat bring a thousand other changes. Even at Hodinuggur, arid as it always was, they intensified the drought till a drop of water seemed as visionary a consolation to the parched horizon as it must have been to poor Dives in the fires of hell. The very canal denied its nature as it slipped past yellow and thick with silt from the clayey defiles of the lower hills, each little swirl and eddy looking as if streaked and pitted in mud. Yet the chill of its snowy birth came with the flood, so that in the red-hot evenings George's factotum used to call through the yellow-dust haze to the groom who sat on the edge of the canal, apparently moored to his place by a soda-water bottle tied to a string, and then Ganesha would haul in the strange buoy and scramble up the bank with it rapidly, so as to give the master's dinner-drink a chance of being cool.
All this amused George Keene hugely at first. He drew caricatures of it for the rectory, and sent a very impressionist sketch of his world to Mrs. Boynton. It consisted of a dust-storm, a caper-bush, and a rat-hole. She put it on the mantelpiece of the pretty drawing-room in the little house among scented pine-woods, where she was just beginning to appreciate the soothing effect of having a decent balance at your banker's. Her lady-visitors laughed and said it was very clever, but some of the men looked queer and muttered 'poor devil' under their breath. Not that George looked on himself in that light. On the contrary, Hodinuggur amused him. Its dreary antiquity was all new to him, and as he went through the cool, dark passages of the old palace on his way to play chess with the Diwân, he learnt to admire some things about it; notably the thickness of its walls, through which the sun never filtered, though it soaked piteously into his red-brick bungalow. Upon the roof Zubr-ul-Zamân shrivelled under the heat almost as much as a certain figure which still lay huddled up on the landing of the secret stair in the thickness of the tower beneath him as he sat at chess. Below that again Khush-hâl Beg lay stark naked, like a huge baby, in a swinging cradle, which was pulled to and fro by a drowsy coolie, while a bheestic supplied the fat carcass alternately outside and inside with tepid water from his skin bag, and as the latter shrank, Khush-hâl swelled visibly--horribly.
Yet further, in the bazaar by the Mori gate, Dalel Beg, abandoning Europe-fashion under the stress of climate, slept all day and waked all night, doing both more viciously than before, like a snake rendered lively and dangerous by the heat. But Chândni, from her cool arches, smiled calmly, even when 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay' rose from the opposite balcony, which was now occupied by some one who could dance as well as sing. To tell truth, she was glad to be quit of Dalel's amusement for a time. Such deviations from her control never lasted long, and this time she knew that the Diwân himself was on her side. So she lounged about in the shadows, watching the pigeons in the niches, and rubbing her soft palms together. Sometimes a pellet of opium lay between them; sometimes nothing at all, for it was a trick of hers. Sometimes, on the other hand, it was a great deal; neither more nor less than one of the Hodinuggur pearls, which were as well known to all the jewellers of that part of the country as the Koh-i-nur diamond is to the keeper of the regalia. That was why Chândni on her return from Delhi, whither she had gone ostensibly to learn new music-hall songs for Dalel's benefit, had laughed so triumphantly at her own cleverness as she sat at the Diwân's feet telling him what she had done.
'It was easy, with my cousin a jeweller; and we of the bazaar know a trick or two with goldsmiths. Manohar Lâl hath the pearls, sure enough. All thou hast to do is to offer him a rupee more than he gave the mem (which will not be half their value). The Hindu pig will take it, seeing it is better than having the yellow-trousered ones[[3]] set on him as a receiver of stolen goods.'