THE WINGS OF A DOVE[50]
I
A tall lanky boy of about seventeen sat halfway down the great flight of steps at the eastern entrance of the Jumma Mosque at Delhi, looking anxiously at a cage full of avitovats, twinkling little brown birds with a suspicion of red amid their brown; flitting, slender, silent little birds, never still for a second. He looked at them half-satisfied, half-doubtful, and as he looked he turned a four-anna bit over and over in his brown fingers. For though he was dressed as a European his complexion was as dark as that of most high-caste natives, and darker by a good bit than that of a girl some one or two years his junior, who sat fondling a pigeon on a higher step, and looking askance, also, at the avitovats.
"The Huzoor can have them for five annas if he chooses," said the evil-looking bird-catcher who was squatting among his wares. Though he used the honorific title, his manner was absolutely devoid of courtesy, and he turned without the least change in it to address a friend in the parrot line, who sat with his cages on the step above. For this particular flight of steps is set apart to the selling of birds, especially after prayer-time on Fridays, when the pigeon-racers and quail-fighters buy and bet in the wide portico of rosy stone and pale marble. The avitovats--having no value to the sportsman--commanded but a slack sale, so the boy had plenty of time in which to make up his mind; to judge by appearances a difficult task, for his face was undeniably weak, though handsome, kindly, and soft. He wore a white drill suit, clean, but sadly frayed; and his grey wide-awake was many sizes too large for his small head. Perhaps it was the knowledge of this, combined with a vague suspicion that the hat knew quite as much about bird-fancying as the head within it, which made him, in his perplexity, take it off, place it on his slack knees and drop the four-anna piece into it, as if it had better decide the question. Sitting so, with bare head, he looked handsomer than ever, for its shape was that of a young Adonis. It was, in fact, the only thing about him, or his life, which corresponded with his name, Agamemnon Menelaus. The surname, Gibbs, used after those eight resounding syllables to come as a shock to the various chaplains who at various times had undertaken to look after young Gibbs' spiritual welfare. Some of them, the more experienced ones, acquiesced in that and many another anomaly after their first glance at his soft gentle face; for it was typical of that class of Eurasian which makes the soul of a chaplain sink within him. Others reached the same conclusion after a reference to the mother, Mrs. Gibbs. She was a very dark, pious woman, tearfully uncertain of all things save that she, being a widow, must be supported by charity; by the offertory for preference. She, however, made the problem of his name less intrusive by calling him Aggie as if he had been a girl.
"They are young birds, as the Huzoor could see for himself if he had eyes," went on the bird-catcher with a yawn. "Next moulting they will be as red as a rutti seed. But it is five annas, not four."
Aggie had no lack of eyes outwardly; they were large and soft as velvet, and as they looked down at the avitovats showed a thick fringe of curling lashes. But there was an almost pathetic guilelessness in them, and one brown hand hesitated about his breast-pocket. He had another anna there, part of a monthly stipend of one rupee for attending the choir, which he had intended to spend on sweets--preserved pumpkins for choice; but the avitovats, with their promise of scarlet plumage, cozened his indolent, colour-loving eyes almost as much as the thought of the sweets did his palate. Should he, should he not? The mere sight of the birds was a strong point in their favour, and his hand had sought the inside of his pocket when a whisper met his ear.
"Hens!"
It was unmistakable, and he turned to look at the girl behind him. She was sitting on her heels, crunched up chin and knees, holding her pigeon close to her face as if to hide it. And as he turned she sidled further away along the step with the curious gliding shuffle peculiar to native girls and pigeons. "Ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri," gurgled the pigeon, as if pleased at the motion. It was a blue-rock, showing a purple and green iridescence on the breast, and the girl's dress matched its colourings exactly; for her ragged cotton skirt had washed and worn to a dark neutral tint, and the shot-silk bodice, tattered and torn, with tarnished gold embroidery on its front, took gleams of a past glory from the sunlight. Her veil had faded in its folds to a sort of cinnamon brown, touched with blue, and both it and the bodice were many sizes too large for her slight childish figure.
"If the Huzoor is not to buy, let him give place to those who will," suggested the bird-catcher cavalierly. He had been too far to catch the whisper, and thought to clinch the bargain by a threat.
Agamemnon Menelaus looked at him nervously. "Are you sure they are young birds?" he suggested timidly. "They might,--they might be hens, you know." There was a half-perceptible quiver of his handsome head as if to watch the girl. The bird-catcher broke out into violent asseverations, and Aggie's hand, out of sheer trepidation, went into his pocket again.
"Hens!"
This time there was a ring almost of command in the tone, and Agamemnon obeyed it instinctively by rising to go. "Ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri," came the gurgle of the pigeon; or was it partly a chuckle from the girl as she sidled still further along the step?
"So! that is good riddance," said the bird-catcher to the parrot-seller, angrily. "God made the rainbow, but the devil made the dye-pot! Yet I thought I had sold them at last. He looked not so sharp as that."
The parrot-seller yawned. "'Twas Kabootri did it," he remarked with bland indifference. "She said 'hens.'"
The bird-catcher stared at him incredulously, then passed the look on to the girl who still sat with the crooning pigeon held close to her face.
"Kabootri?" he echoed with an uneasy laugh. "Nay, neighbour, 'twas she who told me but an hour ago that if I sold not something this Friday she would kill herself. 'Tis a trick of words she hath learned of her trade," he went on with a curious mixture of anger and approbation. "But it means something to a man who hath cursed luck and a daughter who has a rare knack of getting her own way."
The parrot-seller gave a pull at a bulbul-seller's pipe as if it were his own. "Thou wilt be disgraced if thou give it her much longer, friend," he said calmly. "'Tis time she were limed and netted. And with no mother either to whack her!"
The uneasy laugh came again. "If the Nawab's pigeon wins we may see to a son-in-law; but she is a child still, neighbour, and a good daughter too, helping her father more than he helps her." There was a touch of real pride in his tone.
"She said 'hens,'" retorted the parrot-seller. "Ask her if she did not."
"Kabootri! Kabootri!"
The call was a trifle tremulous, but the girl rose with alacrity, throwing the pigeon into the air with the deft hand of a practised racer as she did so. The bird was practised also, and without a flutter flew off into the blue like an arrow from a bow; then, as if confused by finding itself without a rival, wheeled circling round the rose-red pile till it settled on one of the marble cupolas.
"What is't, father?" she asked, standing on the upper steps and looking down on the two men. She was wonderfully fair, with a little pointed chin, and a wide firm mouth curiously at variance with it, as were the big, broad, black eyebrows with the liquid softness of her eyes.
"Why didst say 'hens,' Kabootri?" replied her father, assuming the fact as the best way of discovering the truth, since her anger at unjust suspicion was always prompt.
"Why?" she echoed absently. "Why?" Then suddenly she smiled. "I don't know, father; but I did!"
The bird-catcher broke out into useless oaths. His daughter had the dove's name, but was no better than a peacock, a peacock in a thief's house; she had lost him five annas for nothing.
Kabootri's eyebrows looked ominous. "Five annas! Fret not for five annas!" she echoed scornfully, turning on her heels towards the gateway; and flinging out her arms she began the pigeon's note--the pigeon's name and her own--"Ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri!" It was as if a bird were calling to its mate, and the answer came quickly in the soft whir of many wings as the blue-rocks, which live among the rose-red battlements and marble cupolas, wheeled down in lessening circles.
"Lo! there is Kabootri calling the pigeons," remarked an old gentleman, who was crossing citywards from the Fort; a stoutish gentleman, clothed immaculately in filmy white muslin with a pale pink inner turban folded across his forehead and showing triangularly beneath the white outer one. He was one of the richest bankers in Delhi; by religion a Jain, the sect to whom the destruction of life is the one unpardonable sin, and he gave a nervous glance at the distant figure on the steps.
"Nay! partner, she was in our street last week," put in his companion, who was dressed in similar fashion; "and Kabootri is not as the boys, who are ever at one, with sparrows, for a pice or two. She hath business in her, and a right feeling. She takes once and hath done with it till the value is paid. The gift of the old bodice and shawl, which my house gave her, kept us free for six months. Still, if thou art afraid, we can go round a bit."
Kabootri from her coign of vantage saw them sneaking off the main road, and smiled at their caution contemptuously; but what they had said was true, she had business in her, and right feeling. It was not their turn to pay; so, cuddling a captured pigeon to her breast, she set off in an opposite direction, threading the bazaars and alleys unerringly, and every now and again crooning her own name softly to the bird which, without a struggle, watched her with its onyx eyes, and called to her again.
"There is Kabootri with a pigeon," remarked the drug-seller at the corner to his clients, the leisurely folk with ailments who sit and suggest sherbets to each other, and go away finally to consult a soothsayer for a suitable day on which to take their little screw or phial of medicine. "She will be going to Sri Parasnâth's. It is a while since she was there, and Kabootri is just, for a bird-slayer."
Apparently he was right as to her purpose; for at the turn leading to Sri Parasnâth's place of business, she sat down on a step, and after a preliminary caress fastened a string deftly to one of the pigeon's feet. Then she caressed it again, stroking its head and crooning to it. Finally with a bound she started to her feet, flung it from her to flutter forlornly in the air, her level black eyebrows bent themselves downwards into a portentous frown, and her young voice rang out shrilly, almost savagely, "Yahee, choori-yâh-mâr. Aihee, choori-yâh-mâr! (Hillo! the bird-slayer! Hullo! the bird-slayer!)"
"Look out, brother," said a fat old merchant in spectacles, who was poring over a ledger in the wooden balcony of an old house. "Look out and see who 'tis. If 'tis Kabootri, thou canst take eight annas from the box. She will not loose the bird for less; but if 'tis a boy with sparrows, wait and bargain."
It was Kabootri, no doubt. Who else but she came like a young tiger-cat down the lane, startling the shadowy silence with strange savage threats? Who but she came like a young Bacchante, dancing with fury, showing her small white teeth, and, apparently, dragging her poor victim by one leg, or whirling it cruelly round her on a string, so that its fluttering wings seemed like her fluttering veil? "Give! Ai, followers of Rishâba, give, or I kill! Ai, Jain people, give, or I take life!"
Sri Parasnâth put his turbanless bald head with its odd little tuft of a pigtail over the balcony, and concealing his certainty under a very creditable show of dismay, called down curses solemnly on her head. He would send for the police; he would have her locked up and fined. She might take the bird and kill it before his very eyes if she chose, but he would not pay a pice for its freedom. To all of which Kabootri replied with a fresh method of doing the victim to death. She played her part with infinite spirit, but her antagonist was in a hurry to get some orders for Manchester goods off in time for the English mail, so his performance was but half-hearted, and ere she had well begun her list of horrors, the eight-anna bit came clinking down on the brick pavement, and she, as in duty bound, had to squat beside it and loosen the string from the pigeon's leg. As usual she had to drive it from settling on her head or shoulders by wild antics, until it fluttered to a neighbouring roof, where it sidled along the copings with bright eyes watching her and soft cooings of "ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri!"
Once beyond Jain eyes, she always gave back the call so as to assure herself that no harm had been done. This time by some mischance there happened to be a broken feather in the wing, and her lips set themselves over the task of pulling it out; that being a necessity to even flight. After which, came renewed caresses with a passion in them beyond the occasion; for indeed the passion in Kabootri was altogether beyond the necessities of her life--as yet. True, it was not always such plain sailing as it had been with Sri Parasnâth. Newcomers there were, even old customers striving in modern fashion to shake themselves free from such deliberate blackmailing, who needed to be reminded of her methods; methods ending in passionate tears over her own cruelty in the first quiet spot she could reach. But of late years she had grown cunning in the avoidance of irretrievable injury. A dexterous slipping of the cord would leave her captive free, and she herself at liberty to go round to some poultry-seller and borrow a poor fowl under sentence of death, with which she would return to unflinching execution. These things had to be, and her young face would be like a Medea's as she did the deed. But even this was of the past, since folk had begun to recognise the uselessness of driving the girl to extremities. Thus her threat, "I will kill, I will kill!" brought at most but a broken feather in a dove's wing, and a passionate cuddling of the victim to her breast.
This one was interrupted brusquely by a question:
"Why did you say hens?"
It was Aggie. He happened to live close by in a tumble-down tenement with two square yards of verandah, which were the mainstay of Mrs. Gibbs' position. They, and the necessity for blacking Agamemnon Menelaus' boots when he went to the choir, separated her effectually and irrevocably from her native neighbours. He did not sing now,--his voice had begun to crack,--but he looked well in a surplice, and the chaplain knew he would have to pay the monthly stipend in any case. So, this being Friday, Aggie was on his way to evensong, polished boots and all; they were really the strongest barrier between him and the tall girl with her pretty bare feet who stood up to face him, with a soft, perplexed look in the eyes which were so like his in all but expression; and even that merged into his in its softness and perplexity.
"Because,--because they were hens," she said with an odd little tremble in her voice.
So the two young things stood looking at each other, while the pigeon gurgled and cooed: "Kaboo-tri, ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri."
II
"So, seest thou, Kabootri, thou wilt turn Christian and then I will marry thee." Aggie's outlook on the future went so far, and left the rest to Providence; the girl's went further.
"Trra!" she commented. "That is fool's talk. I am a bird-slayer: how could we live without the pigeons and the mosque? Thou hast no money."
They were sitting on the flight of steps once more, with a cage full of scarlet avitovats between them, so that the passers-by could not see the hands that were locked in each other behind the cage.
"Then I will marry thee, and become a heathen," amended Agamemnon, giving a squeeze to what he held. She smiled, and the soft curves of her chin seemed to melt into those of her long throat, as she hung her head and looked at him as if he were the most beautiful thing in her world. "That is wiser," she said, "and if thou dost not marry me I will kill myself. So that is settled." He gave another squeeze to her hand, and she smiled again. Then they sat gazing at each other across the avitovats, hand in hand like a couple of children; for there was guilelessness in his eyes and innocence in hers.
"Lo!" she said suddenly. "I know not now why I said 'hens.'" She paused, failing to find her own meaning, and so came back to more practical matters. "Thou hadst best be buying the birds, Aga-Meean[51] [for so, to suit her estimate of him, she had chosen to amend his name], or folk will wonder. And if thou wilt leave them in the old place in the Queen's Gardens I will fetch them away, and thou canst buy them of me again next Friday."
There was no cunning in her manner, only a solid grasp on the exigencies of the position. Had he not a mother living in a house with a verandah, and was not her father a bird-seller? Was he not at that moment betting on the Nawab's coming pigeon-race on the platform above them? Despite these exigencies, however, the past three weeks had been pleasant; if Aggie was still rather hazy as to the difference between young cocks and old hens, it was from no lack of experience in the buying of avitovats. Kabootri used to give him the money wherewith to buy them, and leave it again in the hiding-place where she found the birds; so it was not an expensive amusement to either of them. And if Agamemnon Menelaus had not grasped the determination which underlay the girl's threats of taking life it was from no lack of hearing them, ay, and of shivering at them. The savage, reckless young figure, startling the sunshine and shadow of the narrow lanes with its shrill cry, "I will kill, I will kill, yea, I will take life!" had filled him with a sort of proud bewilderment, a sacred admiration. And other things had brought the same dizzy content with them. That same figure, sidling along the rose-red copings like any pigeon, to gain the marble cupolas where the young birds were to be found,--those young birds which must be taught betimes to play her game of Life and Death, as all her world must be taught to play it,--was fascinating. It was disturbing when it sat close to him in the Queen's Gardens, eating rose comfits bought out of the blood-money, and cooing to him like any dove, while the pigeons in the trees above it called "Ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri," as if they were jealous.
The outcome of it all, however, was, as yet, no more than the discarding of boots in favour of native shoes, and the supplanting of the grey wide-awake by a white and gold saucer-cap which only cost four annas, and lay on the dark waves of the lad's small head as if it had been made for it. Kabootri clasped her hands tight in sheer admiration as she watched him go down the steps with the cage of scarlet avitovats; but Mrs. Gibbs, while admitting the superlative beauty of the combination, burst into floods of lamentation at the sight, for it was a symptom she had seen often in lads of Aggie's age. His elder brother had begun that way; that elder brother who was now a thorn in the side of every chaplain from Peshawur to Calcutta by reason of his disconcerting desire to live as a heathen and be saved as a Christian.
So, when Aggie, with a spark of unusual spirit, had refused to put on the boots which she had made the servant (for, of course, there had to be a servant in a house with a verandah) black with the greatest care; in other words, when he had refused to go to church, since native shoes and a Delhi cap are manifestly incompatible with a surplice, she went over to a bosom friend and wept again. But Mrs. Rosario was of a different type altogether. She seldom wept, taking life with a pure philosophy, and making her living out of her handsome daughters by marrying them off to the first comer on the chance of his doing well.
"There is no--need--to cry," she said comfortably, in the curious half-staccato, half-legato intonation of her race. "Your boy is--no--worse than all boys. If they do not get--on--a place or get married they fall--into mischief. God made them--so, and we must bow to--His will, as we are Christians and not heathen. And girls are--like--that too. If they--do--not--get--married they will give trouble. So, if you ask my--advice, I say that if--you--cannot--get your poor boy on--a--place you had better get--him--a--wife, or the bad black woman in the bazaar will--lead--him--to bad ways; for he is a handsome boy, almost as handsome as my Lily. He is too young, perhaps, and she--is--too--young--too, but if you like he can beau my Lily. You can ask some--one--for--clothes, and then he can beau Lily to the choir. And give a little hop in your place, Mrs. Gibbs. When my girls try me I give hops. It makes them all--right, and your boy--will--be--all--right--too. You live too quiet, Mrs. Gibbs, for young folk; they will have some pleasure. So get your son nice new clothes, and I--will--give--a--hop at my place, and send my cook to help yours."
This solid sense caused Mrs. Gibbs to lie in wait for the chaplain in his verandah, armed with a coarse cotton handkerchief soaked in patchouli, and an assertion that Aggie's absence from the choir was due to unsuitable clothes. And both tears and scent being unbearable, she went back with quite a large bundle of garments which had belonged to a merry English boy who had come out to join his parents, only to die of enteric fever. "Give them away in charity, my dear," the father had said in a hard voice, "the boy would have liked it so best himself." So the mother, with hopeless tears over the scarce-worn things, had sent them over to the chaplain for his poor.
Thus it happened that before Kabootri had recovered from her intense delight at the cap, Mrs. Gibbs was laying out a beautiful suit, cut to the latest fashion, to await Aggie's return from one of those absences which had become so alarmingly frequent. There was a brand-new red tie, also a pair of lavender gloves, striped socks, and patent-leather pumps. To crown all, there was a note on highly scented paper with an L on it in lilies of the valley, in which Mrs. Rosario and her daughters requested the pleasure of Mr. Agamemnon Menelaus Gibbs' company at a hop that evening. What more could a young man like Aggie want for his regeneration? Nothing apparently: it was impossible, for instance, to think of sitting on the steps with Kabootri in a suit made by an English tailor, a tall hat, and a pair of lavender kid gloves. Yet the fine feathers had to be worn when, in obedience to the R.S.V.P. in the corner of the scented note, he had to take over a reply in which Mr. Agamemnon Menelaus Gibbs accepted with pleasure, etc., etc.
"Oh, mamma!" said Miss Lily, who received the note in person with a giggle of admiration, "I do like him; he is quite the gentleman." The remark, being made before its object had left the tiny courtyard, which the Rosarios dignified by the name of compound, was quite audible, and a shy smile of conscious vanity overspread the lad's handsome face.
About the same time, that is to say when the sinking sun, still gloriously bright, had hidden itself behind the vast pile of the mosque so that it stood out in pale purple shadow against a background of sheer sunlight, Kabootri was curled up on a cornice with her back to one of the carven pilasters of a cupola, dreaming idly of Aga-Meean in his white and gold cap. He had not been to the steps that day, so from her airy perch she was keeping a watch for him; and as she watched, her clasp on the pigeon she was caressing tightened unconsciously, till with a croon and a flutter it struggled for freedom. The sound brought other wings to wheel round the girl expectantly, for it was near the time for the birds' evening meal. Sharâfat-Nissa, the old canoness who lived on the roof below the marble cupolas, had charge of the store of grain set apart for the purpose by the guardians of the mosque; but as a rule Kabootri fed the pigeons. She did many such an odd job for the queer little cripple, half pensioner, half saint, who kept a Koran class for poor girls and combined it with a sort of matrimonial agency; for the due providing of suitable husbands to girls who have no relations to see after such things is a meritorious act of piety; a lucrative one also, when, as in Sharâfat-Nissa's case you belong to a good family, and have a large connection in houses where a good-looking maiden is always in request as an extra wife. So, as she taught the Holy Book, her keen little eyes were always on the alert for a possible bride. They had been on Kabootri for a long time; hitherto, however, that idle, disreputable father downstairs had managed to evade the old canoness. But now that the great pigeon-race of the year was being decided on the grassy plain between the mosque and the Fort, his last excuse would be gone; for he had all but promised that, if he lost, Sharâfat-Nissa should arrange the sale of the girl into some rich house, while if he won he had promised himself to give Kabootri, who in his way he really liked, a strapping young husband fit to please any girl; one who, being of her own caste, would allow her the freedom which she loved even as the birds loved it.
She, however, knew nothing of this compact. So when the great shout telling of victory went up from the packed multitude on the plain, she only wondered with a smile if her father would be swaggering about with money to jingle in his pocket, or if she would have to cry, "I will kill, I will kill," a little oftener than usual. Sharâfat-Nissa heard the shout also, and, as she rocked backwards and forwards over her evening chant of the Holy Book, gave a covetous upward glance at the slender figure she could just see among the wings of the doves. Downstairs among the packed multitudes, the shout which told him of defeat made the bird-catcher also, reprobate as he was, look up swiftly to the great gateway which was fast deepening to purple as the sun behind it dipped closer to the horizon; for one could always tell where Kabootri was by the wheeling wings.
"Have a care!" he said fiercely to the discreetly-veiled figure that evening as it sat behind the narrow slit of a door blocking the narrow stair, which Kabootri trod so often on her way to and from the roof. "Have a care, sister! She is not easily limed or netted." A sort of giggle came from the veil. "Yea, brother! Girls are all so, but if the cage is gilt----"
It was just a week after this, and the sunlight behind the shadow of the mosque was revelling in sheeny iridescence of her tattered silk bodice, that Kabootri's figure showed clear and defiant against the sky, as she stood on the uppermost, outermost coping of the gateway. There was a sheer fall beneath her to the platform below. She had just escaped from the room where she had been caged like any bird for three whole days, and the canoness on the roof below was looking up at her prisoner helplessly.
"Listen, my pigeon, my beloved!" she wheedled breathlessly. "Come down, and let us talk it over together."
"Open the door, I say," came the shrill young voice. "Open, or I kill myself! Open, or I kill!"
"Heart's blood! Listen! He shall be a young man, a handsome man."
Handsome, young! Was not Aga-Meean young? Was he not handsome? The thought made her voice shriller, clearer. "Open the door, or I kill! Open, or I take life!" The words were the words of the young tiger-cat that had been wont to startle the sunshine and the shadow, making Sri Parasnâth seek his cash-box incontinently; but there was a new note of appeal in their determination; for if it was but three days since she had been caged, it was six since she had seen Aga-Meean. What had become of him? Had he sought and missed her? Had he not?
"Listen, my bird," came the wheedling voice; "come down and listen. Kabootri! I swear that if thou likest not this one I will let thee go and seek another. I swear it, child."
The sidling feet edged nearer along the coping, for this respite would at least give time. "Swear it on the Holy Book. So--in thy right hand and in thy left. Let me see it." She stretched her own hands out over the depths, and at the sight the expectant pigeons came wheeling round her.
"I swear by God and His prophet," began the old canoness, gabbling as fast as she could over the oath; but above her breathless mumble came a little shriek, a little giggle, and a girl's voice from below. "Ah, Mr. Gibbs! You are so naughty, so very naughty!"
Kabootri could not understand the words, but the giggle belongs to all tongues, and it jarred upon her passion, her despair. She looked down, and saw a well-known figure, changed utterly by a familiar, yet unfamiliar, dress. She saw two girls about her own age, with tiny waists, huge sleeves, and hats. It was Aga-Meean, escorting the two Miss Rosarios, who had expressed a desire to see the mosque. And she saw something else; she saw the look which the prettiest of the two girls gave to Aga-Meean; she saw the look he gave in return. Her sidling feet paused; she swayed giddily.
"Kabootri! Kabootri!" called the woman on the roof, eagerly, anxiously, "I have sworn it. Come down, my pigeon, come down, my dove! It makes me dizzy."
So that was Aga-Meean! The mistress said sooth; the wings made one dizzy, the wings,--the wings of a dove!
She had them! For the wind caught the wide folds of her veil, and claimed a place in the wide, fluttering sheen of her bodice, as she fell, and fell, and fell, down from the marble cupolas, past the purple shadow of the great gateway, to the wide platform where the doves are bought and sold. And some of the pigeons followed her, and some sat sidling on the coping, calling "Ka-boo-tri, ka-boo-tri." But those of them who knew her best fled affrighted into the golden halo of sunshine behind the rose-red pile.
THE SWIMMERS[52]
"Miriam, Miriam, what is it? Canst thou not tell a body, bound to a millstone as I? Thy tongue goes fast enough when I wish thee silent!" It was a woman's voice that was beginning to lose its fulness and sweetness, in other words, its womanliness, which called up from the courtyard, where the hum of the quern grinding the yellow Indian corn deadened all other sounds.
"It is naught, mother! Only Hussan and Husayn once more." It was a woman's voice also from the roof where the Indian corn was drying to a richer gold in the sunlight; but it was a voice which had hardly come as yet to its full roundness, in other words, to its perfect womanliness.
"Hussan and Husayn! What makes them be for ever fighting like young cocks?"
There was an instant's pause; then the voice from the roof came piously, "God knows!"
Probably He did, but Miriam herself might have been less modest as to her knowledge. For the case stood thus. It was a corner house between two sequestered alleys which intersected each other at right angles, and there had been a lingering lover, expectant of some recognition, in each alley. Now, if half-a-handful of golden corn be thrown as a guerdon over the parapet just at the angle, and if the lovers, hot-blooded young sparks, spring forward incontinently to pick up the precious grains and meet, then----
"Indeed, mother, they were very like cocks," remarked Miriam gravely, as she stepped daintily down the narrow mud-stairs again to resume her spinning in the courtyard. Once more she spoke truth, but hardly the whole truth; since when featherless bipeds are picking up grains of corn out of a gutter, they can hardly avoid a resemblance to feathered ones.
So the whir of the wheel joined the hum of the quern, and both formed a background to her sudden girlish laugh at the recollection of what she had seen through the peep-hole in the parapet.
The whole thing was a play to this Osmanzai girl, who, for all her seclusion, knew perfectly well that she was the beauty of the village, and that many another spark besides Hussan and Husayn would be only too glad of half-a-handful of Indian corn to pick up out of the gutter. But these two being the most expert swimmers in that quaint bare colony of huts set on a loose shale slope with the wild wicked rush of the Indus at its foot, were, perhaps, the most interesting. That is to say, if you excepted Khâsia, the big soft shepherd who came down sometimes from the grassy, fir-crowned slopes higher up the gorge; the Maha-bân or Great Forest Hills, beyond which lay the Black Mountain.
A strange wild country, is this of the Indus gorge, just as the great river begins to think of the level plains in front of it. A strange wild people are those who live in that close-packed, flat-roofed village upon the shale slope, where a footfall sends the thin leaves of mica-schist slithering away into the rushing river. There is no stranger country, no wilder people. For this is Sitâna, the place of refuge for every Mohammedan fanatic who finds the more civilised plains too hot even for his fiery faith; Sitâna, the dwelling-place of the Syyuds who, since the days of their great leader Ahmad, have spent their lives in killing every hell-doomed infidel they can get hold of in cold blood. And as the pigs of Hindus live on the other side of the rushing river, it follows that those who kill must also swim, since there is no bridge far or near. That was why Hussan and Husayn, and many another of their sort, with carefully oiled thews and sinews of bronze, would go down the shale slope on dark nights and slip softly into the ice-cold stream. Then, if there was a glint of moon, you could see them caught in the great upward curve of the mad current inshore, the two skin-bladders that were slung under their armpits making it look as if six dark heads, not two, were drifting down and down; yet somehow drifting nearer and nearer to the other side where the pigs of Hindus were to be found. But even a glint of moon kept them, as a rule, talking of future nights--unless there was some cause to raise their recklessness to fever-height; for even that glint was enough to make the police watchers on the other, the English, side slip softly also into the stream, and give chase. A strange, wild chase indeed it was; down and down in the dark till the blockade was run, or the venture abandoned for another night. Or stranger, wilder still, two men with knives met on the crest of the current and fought a strange, bloodless fight, hacking at the bladders because they were larger than the head, and the loss of them meant equally certain disablement. For there was nothing to be done in that wild stream if they were pricked but to cast them free and dive--to dive down and down past the current, to come up, please God! nearer home.
So, because of those watchers on the other side, the Sitâna swimmers could not start openly, nor from the same place. They went singly, silently, but the next morning ere the light came fully they would all be resting together on the steps of the little mosque; unless, indeed, some of them had not returned; were, in fact, to return no more. And the worshippers would be crowding round one or two, perhaps, while the others looked on enviously to hear how some traveller had been happened upon and done to death in the dark upon the undulating tract of low jungle on the other side. Then the worshippers going home would say casually in their houses: "Hussan killed his man last night; that makes him two ahead of Husayn. And Ahmad, the new one, hath another, so that brings him next to Husayn, who will need to work hard." And the women would gossip about it among themselves, and say that, of course, Miriam, the village-beauty, would choose the best swimmer when the time came for the curious choice which is allowed the Pathan girl among lovers whom she is supposed never to have seen. As yet, however, Miriam had only laughed, and thrown handfuls of yellow corn into the gutter, and said things to the aspirants' female relations which were sure to be repeated, and make the rivalry run fiercer than ever. She did all this partly because of the big shepherd, partly because it was good for the faith to stimulate the young men's courage, but mostly because it amused her.
It was far, however, from having that effect on the Englishman who was responsible for the reputation of the district over the water. The more so because his name happened to be John Nicholson, and John Nicholson was not a man to allow any increase of crime within his borders without knowing the reason why, and meting out punishment for the offence.
"What the deuce does it mean?" he said to the trembling native official in charge of that particular portion of the country which lay over against Sitâna. "There have been twenty murders this quarter against ten in the last. And I told you that for every man killed on our side there were to be two in Sitâna. What on earth are your swimmers about? If they are not so good as theirs, get others. Get something! There must be some fault on your part, or they wouldn't cock their tails up in this way. Remedy it; that is what you have got to do, so don't ask questions as to how it is to be done. I'll back you up, never fear."
And then he took his telescope out, as he sat on his horse among the low bushes down by the rushing river, and prospected before he galloped off, neck or nothing, as his fashion was, to regain his camp thirty miles away, and write an urgent letter to Government detailing fully the measures which he intended to adopt for the repression of these scandalous crimes. But even a telescope did not show him Miriam's face as she sat spinning in the courtyard. And the rest of the long, low, flat-roofed village clinging to the shaly slope seemed very much at its usual; that is to say, the commonplace nest of as uncommon a set of religious scoundrels as could be found north or south. So he told himself that they must have been strengthened lately by a new contingent of fanatics from the plains, or that the approaching Mohurrum-tide had raised their religious fervour to boiling-point. He allowed these reasons to himself, though he permitted none to his subordinate; but neither he nor the scared police inspector dreamed of that laughing girl's face over the water which was the cause of Hussan and Husayn's unusual activity. Still as he gathered his reins into his left hand he paused to give a more kindly look from under his dark eyebrows at the inspector's knock-knees.
"Why don't you get some of their swimmers?" he asked curtly. "I could." Doubtless he could; he was a man who got most things which he set himself to get. Yet even he might have failed here but for that girl's face, that handful of yellow Indian corn, and the fierce fight which followed for both between those two, Hussan and Husayn, who, as they were finally held back from each other by soothing, friendly hands, felt that the end was nigh if it had not already come. Brothers of the same belief,--fellow-workers in that stream of Death,--first and second alternately in the great race for men's lives, they knew that the time had come when they must be at each other's throat and settle which was to be best once and for all--which was to be best in Miriam's eyes. And then to their blind wrath came an authoritative voice, the voice of the holiest man there, the Syyud Ahmad, whom to disobey was to be accursed. "There is too much of this brawling," came the fiat. "'Tis a disgrace. Lo! Hussan, Husayn, here among the elders, swear before the Lord to have done with it. Swear that neither will raise hand again against a hand that fights for the same cause. Swear, both of you." A chorus of approval came from the bystanders as those two, thus checked, stood glaring at each other. There were a few grains of the yellow Indian corn still in the gutter at their feet; and they looked at them as they swore never again to raise a hand against one fighting the good fight.
That same day, at dusk, Hussan and Husayn sat on the edge of the stream, their feet almost touching the water, their skin-bladders beside them, their sharp knives hung in a sheath round their necks. Their bronze muscles shone even in the growing gloom; from head to foot they were lithe, strong, graceful in their very strength. They sat close to each other as they had often sat before, looking out over the tumbling rush of the wild current, to the other side of the river.
"Yea! Then I will go forth to-night as thou sayest, Hussan; and when I return equal, we will draw lots which is to take service on the other side."
"So be it, Husayn; I will wait for thee. And see, if thou couldst kill one of their swimmers, 'twere better. Then will it be easier to get his place. Hit up, brother, from the water; 'tis more deadly than the downward stroke."
And as they sat side by side, speaking quietly, almost indifferently, the evening call to prayer rang out over the wild wicked stream, and without another word they faced round from the river to the western hills. The parapet of Miriam's house stood out higher than the rest of the village. Perhaps they made it the Kaaba of their prayers, though they were orthodox enough in their genuflexions.
"Hussan and Husayn have been made by the Pir sahib, to swear they will not fight any more," said a girl, who giggled as she spoke, to Miriam when they were coming back with their water-pots from the river.
"Loh! there be plenty others who will," answered the round sweet voice that had not yet come to its full sweetness and roundness. "They are all like fighting-cocks, except the shepherds. Belike 'tis the sheep which make them peaceful, so they have time to laugh. Hussan and Husayn are ever breathless from some struggle. I would not be as they."
"Lazybones!" retorted the giggler. "Thy mother-in-law will need her tongue. Thy water-pot is but half-full even now."
"Still, it is heavy enough for my arms," replied the sweet voice indifferently, yet sharply, "and the river is far." Then it added inconsequently: "But there are streams up in the hills that folk can guide to their doors. And the grass grows soft too. Here is nothing but stones; I hate them, they are so hard."
"And the big shepherd's mother is dead," put in another girl pertly; whereat the rest giggled louder than ever.
Was it Hussan or Husayn who, three days afterwards, appeared suddenly before the District-officer in camp with a nicely written petition on a regulation sheet of English-made paper, requesting that he might be put on as a swimming patrol on the river opposite Sitâna in place of one who was supposed to have been killed or drowned? There is no need to know. No need to know which it was who won the toss when Husayn came back with a smile to say that, so far, they were quits, and might begin a new game. Whichever it was, John Nicholson looked at the lean bronze thews and sinews approvingly, and then asked the one crucial question, "Can you?"
The man smiled, a quick, broad smile. "None better, Huzoor, on the Indus. There is one, over the water, who deems himself my match. God knows if he is."
John Nicholson, who had bent over his writing again, glanced up hastily. "So that is it. Here, Moonshee, write an order to the man at Khânpur to put this man on at once." He was back at his writing almost before the order was ended, and in the silence which followed under the white wings of the tent set wide to all the winds of heaven, the sound of two pens could be heard. One was the Englishman's, writing a report to headquarters saying that the increase of crime must be checked by reprisals, the other the native's, bidding the inspector put on the bearer as a Government swimmer.
"For signature, Huzoor," came a deferential voice, and the still-busy pen shifted itself to the shiny paper laid beside it, and the dark, keen, kindly eyes looked up once more for half a second. "Well, good luck to you! I hope you'll kill him, whoever he is."
"By the help of God, Huzoor, by the help of God!"
Which was it, Hussan or Husayn, who in the growing dusk walked up and down the shaly glacis below the long cluster of Sitâna, watching the opposite bank with the eyes of a lynx for each stone of vantage, each shallow whence a few yards' start might be gained? Which was it, Husayn or Hussan, who in the same dusk paced up and down the low bank on the other side watching in his turn, with untiring eyes, for the quicker curve of the current where a bold swimmer might by one swift venture drift down faster to the calmer water, and so have a second or two in which to regain breath ere the fight began? What matters it whether the panther was on the western bank and the leopard on the eastern? They were two wild beasts pacing up and down, up and down, with their feet upon the water's edge; up and down, up and down, even when the moon rose and their shadows showed more distinctly than they did themselves; for the oil upon their limbs caught the light keenly like the glistening shale and the glistening wet sand at their feet. Up and down, up and down, they paced, in the stillness and the peace, with only the noise of the rushing river, slumberously, monotonously, insistent; up and down, up and down till the cry of the muazzim at dawn came echoing over the water.
Prayer is more than sleep! Prayer is more than sleep!
Ay! more even than sleeplessness with sheer murder in heart and brain. So peace fell between those two while they turned towards Mecca and prayed; for what, God knows. Perhaps once more the real spiritual Kaaba was what they saw with the eyes of the flesh; that flat-roofed house just beginning to blush rosy in the earliest rays of the rising sun; more probably it was not, since they had passed through love to hatred. And then, prayers over, murder was over also for the time, since they could not court detection by daylight.
"They are wondrous keen on the other side, despite the moon," said the elders of the village and the officials over the way, alike; "but there is no fear our watchman will be taken at a disadvantage. He is there from dusk till dawn."
"Ay!" replied wiseacres on either side; "but when the moon wanes, what then?"
It came even before that, came with a great purple mass of thunder-clouds making the Black Mountain beyond the Mahabân deserve its name, and drawing two pair of eyes, one on either side of the stream, into giving hopeful glances at the slow majestic march of gloom across the sky. It was dusk an hour sooner, dawn an hour later than usual that night and day, so there was plenty of time for sheer murder before prayer-time. And as there was no storm, no thunder after all, but only the heavy clouds hanging like a curtain over the moon, a faint splash into the rushing river might have been heard some time in the night, followed by another. Then after a while a cry broke the brooding silence above the hurrying whisper below; the cry of faith, and fate, and fight.
Allah-ho-Akhbar! Allah-ho-hukk!
Perhaps it was the muazzim again, proclaiming out of due time that "God is Might and Right"; or maybe it was those two swimmers in the river as they caught sight of each other in the whirling water. If so, Hussan struck upwards from the water, no doubt, and Husayn, mindful of advice, followed suit; and so the six black heads must have gone drifting down stream peacefully, save for the hatred in the two faces glaring at each other, since the river hid their blows decorously. But there was no trace of them on it far or near when the sun rose over the eastern hills, and the big shepherd, singing a guttural love-song, came leaping down the stony path towards Sitâna with a bunch of red rhododendrons behind his ear.
Some days afterwards, however, the native official at the Police Station rode over to see his superior, and reported with a smirk that he had seen through the telescope a great weeping and wailing at Sitâna. Two of their swimmers had apparently been killed in fair fight, for their bodies had been brought up for burial from the backwater further down the river; and as the new man, whom the Huzoor had appointed, had either absconded or been killed also that just made the proportion what his Honour had laid down for future guidance, two to one.
"H'm!" said John Nicholson half to himself, "I wonder which of the two was really the better man."