Voices in the Night

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

The fatal truth of her remarks invariably silenced Chris, born as he was of a long line of men to whom argument was a religion.

'Well! good-bye, Viva, I will try and not trouble you any more,' he said, accepting defeat with a pang of remorse at his own readiness to do so, at the sense of relief which would not be ignored.

She shrugged her shoulders. 'Don't be so tragic, please. And remember I didn't send you away. You want to go visiting your mother in the city, and I'm quite willing you should, provided you take proper precautions; so good-bye, and take care of yourself. There is nothing to worry about. You are up to the ropes there, and I am up to them here, so there is no harm done.'

Chris, however, as he packed a portmanteau of necessaries, felt that though this might be true for the present, and though--so far as she was concerned--it might even remain true, it was a different affair for him; there was danger ahead in his future.

And this became more and more certain, as, in packing, he had to decide on what were necessaries and what were not. For that depended so much on the sort of life you were going to lead. And what sort of life was he going to lead?

He ended by taking very little; but amongst that little were two things which, though they both contained the staple of life--common corn-- could scarcely be called necessaries. Man, however, does not live by bread alone.

So he put these and himself into a hired green box on wheels, and drove to a lodging he knew of, close to the city, yet not of it. It was in the upper part of a house used as a meeting-place by the Brahmo Somaj, who, by this means, paid the rent of the quaint, semi-Europeanised building. It stood in a bit of garden, thick with plantains, between which two straight mud walks and a curved one showed curiously black and damp, as if the soil was sodden with sewage, as it may have been. But upstairs, when the green shutters were thrown back, it was fresh and breezy enough.

A Brahmo-Somaj clerk in the railway, whom Chris knew and liked, had quarters on the ground floor in consideration of his services as secretary, and with his help Chris soon found himself settled in. A bed, a table, a chair--the last two doubtfully desirable--completed the furniture, and left a delightful sense of space and freedom in the wide empty room. He had escaped, he felt, from Shark Lane. Surely from this standpoint it might be possible to be sincere. Here it might be possible to reconcile himself to his environment, his environment to himself.

He took off his European dress, not from any distaste to it, but because he knew it to be an absolute barrier between him and his desire. So, in the ordinary costume of a native clerk, he strolled out to pass the time till he could safely go and see his mother; safely, because she lived amongst the strictest of neighbours, whom he did not wish to meet--as yet. That might be afterwards, but not now. It was already growing dusk--for he had changed his quarters after the day's work was over--but the irregular sort of bazaar between him and one of the city gates had not yet begun to twinkle with little lights after its usual fashion. Indeed, many of the shops were closed. Yet there was no lack of possible customers. The roadway was crowded with all sorts and conditions of men. It suddenly struck him that nearly all were coming towards him; therefore there must be some attraction behind him. He turned and drifted with the tide until, after a few hundred yards, he saw ahead of him to one side of the road, a dim clump of stunted trees, with a red rag on a stick tied to the topmost branch, and, showing in a soft yellow radiance which rose from the ground, a glint of white tombs among the lower ones. Then he remembered--an odd regret that he should have forgotten something which to his childhood had been all-important, coming with the remembrance--that this must be the day of Sheikh Chilli's fair, which was held every year at this shrine; Sheikh Chilli, the pantaloon of India; the man of straw, the lover's dupe, the butt of every one; the type which, in varying form, plays its part in the serio-comic tragedy of sex all over the world. Sheikh Chilli, whose beard any one can pull, whose wife is never his own, whom a child can deceive.

Perhaps that was the reason, Chris thought, why, as a child, Sheikh Chilli's fair had been such a supreme occasion; that and the toys--those toys which, as it were, set Nushapore the fashion in playthings for a whole year. And that meant something, since the two hundred and odd thousand people in the city, idlers by inheritance, were great in the manufacture of toys.