THE FAKEER'S DRUM
"O! most almighty wictoria, V.R., reg. britannicorum (V.I., Kaiser-i-Hind), please admit bearer to privileges of praising God on the little drum as occasion befitteth, and your petitioner will ever pray," etc.
It was written on a scrap of foreign paper duly stamped as a petition, and it did not need the interpolation of imperial titles to prove that this was not by any means its first appearance in court. To be plain, it had an "ancient and a fishlike smell," suggestive of many years' acquaintance with dirty humanity. I looked at the man who had presented it--a very ordinary fakeer, standing with hands folded humbly--and was struck by the wistful expectancy in his face. It was at once hopeful yet hopeless. Turning to the court-reader for explanation, I found a decorous smile flowing round the circle of squatting clerks. It was evidently an old-established joke.
"He is damnably noiseful man, Sir," remarked my sarishtidar, cheerfully, "and his place of sitting close to Deputy-Commissioner's bungalow. Thus European officers object; so it is always na-munzoor" (refused).
The sound of the familiar formula drove the hope from the old man's face; his thin shoulders seemed to droop, but he said nothing.
"How long has this been going on?" I asked.
"Fourteen years, Sir. Always on transference of officers, and it is always na-munzoor." He dipped his pen in the ink, gave it the premonitory flick.
"Munzoor" (granted), said I, in a sudden decision. "Munzoor during the term of my office."
That was but a month. I was only a locum tenens during leave. Only a month, and the poor old beggar had waited fourteen years to praise God on the little drum! The pathos and bathos of it hit me hard; but a stare of infinite surprise had replaced the circumambient smile. The fakeer himself seemed flabbergasted. I think he felt lost without his petition, for I saw him fumbling in his pocket as the janissaries hustled him out of court, as janissaries love to do, east or west.
That night, as I was wondering if I had smoked enough and yawned enough to make sleep possible in a hundred degrees of heat, and a hundred million mosquitoes, I was suddenly reminded of the proverb "Charity begins at home." It had, with a vengeance. I had thought my sarishtidar's language a trifle too picturesque; now I recognised its supreme accuracy. The fakeer was "a damnably noiseful man." It is useless trying to add one iota to this description, especially to those unacquainted with the torture of an Indian drum. By dawn I was in the saddle, glad to escape from my own house and the ceaseless "Rumpa-tum-tum," which was driving me crazy.
When I returned, the old man was awaiting me in the verandah, his face full of a great content; and the desire to murder him, which rose up in me with the thought of the twenty-nine nights yet to come, faded before it. Perfect happiness is not the lot of many, but apparently it was his. He salaamed down to the ground. "Huzoor," he said, "the great joy in me created a disturbance last night. It will not occur again. The Protector of the Poor shall sleep in peace, even though his slave praises God for him all night long. The Almighty does not require a loud drum."
I said I was glad to hear it, and my self-complacency grew until I laid my head on the pillow somewhat earlier than usual. Then I became aware of a faint throbbing in the air, like that which follows a deep organ note--a throbbing which found its way into the drum of my ear and remained there--so faint that it kept me on the rack to know if it had stopped or was still going on. "Rumpa-tum-tum-tum, rumpa-tum-tum-tum, rumpa----" Even now the impulse to make the hateful rhythm interminable seizes on me. I have to lay aside my pen and take a new one before going on.
I draw a veil over the mental struggle which followed. It would have been quite easy to rescind my permission, but the thought of one month versus fourteen years roused my pride. As representative of the "almighty wictoria, reg. britannicorum," etc., I had admitted this man to the privileges of praising God on the little drum, and there was an end of it. But the effort left my nerves shattered with the strain put on them. It was the middle of the hot weather--that awful fortnight before the rains break--I was young--absolutely alone. Every morning as I rode, a perfect wreck, past the fakeer's hovel by the gate, he used to ask me if I had slept well, and I lied to him. What was the use of suffering if no one was the happier for it?
At last, one evening--it was the twenty-first, I remember, for I ticked them off on a calendar like any schoolboy--I sat out among the oleanders, knowing that sleep was mine. The rains had broken, a cool wind stirred the dripping trees, the fever of unrest was over. Clouds of winged white ants besieged the lamp: what wonder, when the rafters of the old bungalow were riddled almost beyond the limits of safety by their galleries? But what did I care? I was going to sleep. And so I did, like a child, until close on the dawn. And then--by heavens, it was too bad! In the verandah surely, not faint, but loudly imperative: "RUMPA-TUM-TUM-TUM!"
I was out of bed in an instant full of fury. The fiend incarnate must be walking round the house. I was after him in the moonlight. Not a sign; the white oleanders were shining in the dark foliage; a firefly or two--nothing more.
"Rumpa-tum-tum-tum!" Fainter this time round the corner.
Not there!
"Rumpa-tum-tum-tum!" A mere whisper now, but loud enough to be traced. So on the track, I was round the house to the verandah whence I had started.
No sign--no sound!
Gracious! what was that? A crash, a thud, a roar and rattle of earth! The house! the roof!
When by the growing light of dawn we inspected the damage, we found the biggest rafter of all lying right across the pillow where my head had been two minutes before. The first sunbeams were on the still sparkling trees when, full of curiosity, I strolled over to the fakeer's hut. It also was a heap of ruins, and when we dug the old man out from among the ant-riddled rafters the doctor said he had been dead for many hours.
This story may seem strange to some; others will agree with my sarishtidar, who, after spending the morning over a Johnson's dictionary and a revenue report, informed me that "such catastrophes are but too common in this unhappy land after heavy rain following on long-continued drought."
AT HER BECK AND CALL
"What is your name?" I asked.
"Phooli-jân, Huzoor," she answered, with a brilliant, dazzling smile.
I sat looking at her, wondering if a more appropriate name could have been found for that figure among the anemones and celandines, the primulas, pansies, and pinks--the thousand-and-one blossoms which, glowing against their groundwork of forget-me-not, formed a jewel-mosaic right to the foot of the snows above us. Flowerful life! Truly that was hers. She had a great bunch of scarlet rhododendron stuck behind her ear, matching the cloth cap perched jauntily on her head, and as she sat herding her buffaloes on the upland she had threaded chaplet on chaplet of ox-eyed daisies, and hung them about her wherever they could be hung. The result was distinctly flowerful; her face also was distinctly pretty, distinctly clean for a Kashmiri girl's. But coquette, flirt, minx, was written in every line of it, and accounted for a most unusual neatness and brightness.
She caught my eye and smiled again, broadly, innocently.
"The Huzoor would like to paint my picture, wouldn't he?" she went on, in a tone of certainty. "The Sahib who came last year gave me five rupees. I will take six this year. Food is dear, and those base-born contractors of the Maharajah seize everything--one walnut in ten, one chicken in ten."
But I was not going to be beguiled into the old complaints I could hear any and every day from the hags of the village. Up here on the murg, within a stone's-throw of the first patch of snow picketing the outskirts of the great glacier of Gwashbrari, I liked, if possible, to forget how vile man could be in the little shingle huts clustering below by the river. I will not describe the place. To begin with it defies description, and next, could I even hint at its surpassing beauty, the globetrotter would come and defile it. It is sufficient to say that a murg is an upland meadow or alp, and that this one, with its forget-me-nots and sparkling glaciers, was like a turquoise set in diamonds. I had seated myself on a projecting spur, whence I could sketch a frowning defile northwards, down which the emerald-green river was dashing madly among huge rocks crowned by pine-trees.
"I will give five rupees also; that is plenty," I remarked suavely, and Phooli-jân smiled again.
"It must do, for I like being painted. Only a few Sahibs come, very few; but whenever they see me they want to paint me and the flowers, and it makes the other girls in the village angry. Then Goloo and Chuchchu----" Here she went off into a perfect cascade of smiles, and began to pull the eyelashes off the daisies deliberately. There seems a peculiar temptation in girlhood for cruelty towards flowers all over the world, and Phooli-jân was pre-eminently girlish. She looked eighteen, but I doubt if she was really more than sixteen. Even so, it was odd to find her unappropriated, so I inquired if Goloo or Chuchchu was the happy man.
"My mother is a widow," she replied without the least hesitation. "It depends which will pay the most, for we are poor. There are others, too, so there is no hurry. They are at my beck and call."
She crooked her forefinger and nodded her head as if beckoning to some one. For sheer lighthearted, innocent enjoyment of her own attraction I never saw the equal of that face. I should have made my fortune if I could have painted it there in the blazing sunlight, framed in flowers; but it was too much for me. Therefore, I asked her to move to the right, further along the promontory, so that I could put her in the foreground of the picture I had already begun.
"There, by that first clump of iris," I said, pointing to a patch of green sword-leaves, where the white and lilac blossoms were beginning to show.
She gave a perceptible shudder.
"What? Sit on a grave! Not I. Does not the Huzoor know that those are graves? It is true. All our people are buried here. We plant the iris over them always. If you ask why, I know not. It is the flower of death."
A sudden determination to paint her, the Flowerful Life against the Flowerful Death, completely obliterated the knowledge of my own incompetence; but I urged and bribed in vain. Phooli-jân would not stir. She would not even let me pick a handful of the flowers for her to hold. It was unlucky; besides, one never knew what one might find in the thickets of leaves--bones and horrid things. Had I never heard that dead people got tired of their graves and tried to get out? Even if they only wanted something in their graves they would stretch forth a hand to get it. That was one reason why people covered them up with flowers--just to make them more contented.
The idea of stooping to cull a flower and shaking hands with a corpse was distinctly unpleasant, even in the sunlight; so I gave up the point and began to sketch the girl as she sat. Rather a difficult task, for she chattered incessantly. Did I see that thin blue thread of smoke in the dark pall of pine-trees covering the bottom of the valley? That was Goloo's fire. He was drying orris root for the Maharajah. There, on the opposite murg, where the buffaloes showed dark among the flowers, was Chuchchu's hut. Undoubtedly, Chuchchu was the richer, but Goloo could climb like an ibex. It was he whom the Huzoor was going to take as a guide to the peak. He could dance, too. The Huzoor should see him dance the circle dance round the fire--no one turned so slowly as Goloo. He would not frighten a young lamb, except when he was angry--well, jealous, if the Huzoor thought that a better word.
By the time she had done chattering there was not a petal left on the ox-eyed daisies, and I was divided between pity and envy towards Goloo and Chuchchu.
That evening, as usual, I set my painting to dry on the easel at the door of the tent. As I lounged by the camp fire, smoking my pipe, a big young man, coming in with a jar of buffalo milk on his shoulder and a big bunch of red rhododendron behind his ear, stopped and grinned at my caricature of Phooli-jân. Five minutes after, down by the servants' encampment, I heard a free fight going on, and strolled over to see what was the matter. After the manner of Kashmiri quarrels, it had ended almost as it began; for the race love peace. That it had so ended was not, however, I saw at a glance, the fault of the smaller of the antagonists, who was being forcibly held back by my shikari.
"Chuchchu, that man there, wanted to charge Goloo, this man here, the same price for milk as he does your honour," explained the shikari elaborately. "That was extortionate, even though Goloo, being the Huzoor's guide for to-morrow, may be said to be your honour's servant for the time. I have settled the matter justly. The Huzoor need not give thought to it."
I looked at the two recipients of Phooli-jân's favour with interest--for that the bunches of red rhododendron they both wore were her gift I did not doubt. They were both fine young men, but Goloo was distinctly the better-looking of the two, if a trifle sinister.
Despite the recommendation of my shikari to cast thought aside, the incident lingered in my memory, and I mentioned it to Phooli-jân when, on returning to finish my sketch, I found her waiting for me among the flowers. Her smile was more brilliant than ever.
"They will not hurt each other," she said. "Chuchchu knows that Goloo is more active, and Goloo knows that Chuchchu is stronger. It is like the dogs in our village."
"I was not thinking of them," I replied; "I was thinking of you. Supposing they were to quarrel with you?"
She laughed. "They will not quarrel. In summer time there are plenty of flowers for everybody."
I thought of those red rhododendrons, and could not repress a smile at her barefaced wisdom of the serpent.
"And in the winter time?"
"Then I will marry one of them, or some one. I have only to choose. That is all. They are at my beck and call."
Three years passed before recurring leave enabled me to pay another visit to the murg. The rhododendrons were once more on the uplands, and as I turned the last corner of the pine-set path which threaded its way through the defile I saw the meadow before me, with its mosaic of flowers bright as ever. The memory of Phooli-jân came back to me as she had sat in the sunshine nodding and beckoning.
"Phooli-jân?" echoed the old patriarch who came out to welcome me as I crossed the plank bridge to the village, "Phooli-jân, the herd-girl? Huzoor, she is dead; she died from picking flowers. A vain thing. It was at the turn beyond the murg, Huzoor, half-way between Chuchchu's hut and Goloo's drying stage. There is a big rhododendron tree hanging over the cliff, and she must have fallen down. It is three years gone."
Three years; then it must have happened almost immediately after I left the valley. The idea upset me; I knew not why. The murg without that Flowerful Life nodding and beckoning felt empty, and I found myself wondering if indeed the girl had fallen down, or if she had played with flowers too recklessly and one of her lovers, perhaps both---- It was an idea which dimmed the sunshine and I was glad that I had arranged not to remain for the night, but to push on to another meadow, some six miles farther up the river. To do so, however, I required a fresh relay of coolies, and while my shikari was arranging for this in the village I made my way by a cross-cut to the promontory, with its patches of iris.
Deaths are rare in these small communities, and there were but two or three new graves--all but one too recent to be poor Phooli-jân's. That, then, must be hers, with its still clearly denned oblong of iris, already a mass of pale purple and white.
I sat down on a rock and began, unromantically, to eat my lunch, finishing up with a pull at my flask, and thus providentially fortified, I stooped, ere leaving, to pick one or two of the blossoms from the grave, intending to paint them round the sketch of the girl's head which I had with me.
Great heavens! what was that?
I turned positively sick with horror and doubt. Was it a hand? It was some time before I could force myself to set aside the sheathing leaves and settle the point. Something it was, something which, even as I parted the stems, fell to pieces, as the skeleton of a beckoning hand might have done. I did not stay to see more; I let the flowers close over it--whatever it was--and made my way back to the village. My baggage, having changed shoulders, was streaming out over the plank bridge again, and in the two first bearers, carrying my cook-room pots and pans, I recognised Goloo and Chuchchu. They had both grown stouter, and wore huge bunches of red rhododendron behind their ears. I found out, on inquiry, that they were both married and had become bosom friends.
I have not seen the turquoise set in diamonds since, but I often think of it, and wonder what it was I saw among the iris. And then I seem to see Phooli-jân sitting among the flowers, nodding her head and saying, "They are at my beck and call."
If I were Goloo or Chuchchu, I would be buried somewhere else.
MUSIC HATH CHARMS[53]
It was the very last place in the world where you would have expected to hear the notes of a church harmonium; and the old man who, seated on a reed stool, was playing God Save the Queen with one finger, was the very last person whom you would have expected to see performing upon it. But there it stood, quite at home, between, the wooden pillars which divided the central living-room from the crowd of latticed closets around it; and there he sat, quite at home, on the stool, his naked brown legs struggling with the bellows, his brown fingers patting down the keys with a sort of pompous precision. For Punoo was a music-master, and that was his pupil who, with a yawn, was watching his proceedings from the floor while she threaded beads on a string intermittently. That was also the last place from which one would expect any one to take a music-lesson; but old Punoo being blind was fully persuaded that Bahâni was dutifully at his elbow. This blindness of his was, however, far more to his advantage than his disadvantage as a master. It was, in short, the cause of his being one at all; since had he had the use of his eyes no mother would have dreamed of employing a man, who was not more than forty-five at the outside, in teaching her girls. As it was, his time was fully taken up in the houses of the clerks, contractors, barristers, and such like, who for some reason or another desired to impart the exotic accomplishment of music to their daughters or wives. But of all these houses Punoo loved the one which contained the harmonium best; not because of his pupil, since Bahâni, who was betrothed to a young man who might be seen any day on a Hammersmith omnibus over on the other side of the world, never learned anything; but because of the instrument itself. To tell truth it had quite a fine tone, especially when all the wind in its wheezy bellows was sent into one note. And then the playing of it seemed to satisfy him from head to foot. All the other instruments, the accordions and concertinas, even his own fiddle with seven strings, of which he was really very fond, only employed his head and his hands; but this made his whole body as it were to toil and labour after melody. As he sat, his forehead bedewed with perspiration, the expression on his sightless face, turned upwards all unconscious of the dingy, sordid, smoke-blackened rafters which limited his vision, was quite sufficient to make up for the lack of it in the music; it was the expression of a prisoner who, through the bars of a cage, sees freedom. But the odd little gridiron in the centre of the dark room, which gave it some light and air from the roof above, was scarcely large enough to allow even of Punoo's wizened figure to pass through.
"Lo, it gives one a melting of the liver, and a sinking of the heart to hear thee, Master-jee," remarked Mai Kishnu, bustling in with a handful of radishes for the pickle-stew. "Canst not play something more lively, something that goes not wombling up and down like an ill-greased wheel, something with a count in it that gives a body time to catch the beat of it? For sure I could make better music with my ladle and tray; better music for a bride anyhow; and mark my word, Bahâni, when thou art really one there shall be none of this boo-hooing and ow-wowing, that might set free thoughts of wolves and God knows what monsters to damage all thy hopes."
"'Tis not likely, Mai," said Punoo, desisting to speak with great dignity, "that Bahâni will have mastered so much. 'Tis not given to all to play God Save the Queen as I do."
"That is good hearing!" ejaculated the house-mother piously. "But the girl gets on, I hope, Master Punoo. Her father writes of it often; and the instrument, as thou knowest, cost fully ten shillings."
In Punoo's account, which he retailed to his other customers, it had cost five times that amount, and he had a spirited description of the auction where Colonels and Deputy-Sahibs, and Barrack-Masters had bidden in vain against Bahâni's father Mool Chand, who was municipal clerk in an outlying district. According to Punoo also it had cost five hundred times that amount when the Padre Sahib,--sometimes it was the Lord Padre Sahib--(the Bishop),--had sent for it originally from England. There was a further legend, vague and misty even to himself, which he kept holy, as it were, from profane use by locking it away in his own breast, which hinted that the harmonium had been thrown on the market from no desire to get rid of it, but simply from pecuniary necessity; the Chaplain having been forced into selling his greatest treasure in order to pay the bill for a new one. To tell truth, Punoo's estimate of the harmonium was vague and misty on more points than this. He was, in fact, absolutely ignorant of anything concerning it, save that if you blew persistently at the bellows and pressed the keys it made a noise which somehow or other seemed to set you free, and yet kept you longing for something more. Punoo knew not for what, having not the slightest idea that he had been born with music in his soul, and that if he had first seen the light in the Western hemisphere instead of the Eastern, he would most likely have been a Wagnerite or some other kind of musical enthusiast.
As it was, to oblige Mai Kishnu he played Minnia Punnieya as quickly as he could, though it was a pain and grief to him to give up the long-drawn notes which sounded so beautiful in God Save our Gracious Queen. But Mai Kishnu stirred the pickle-stew to the new rhythm, emphasising it properly with little strokes of the ladle upon the resounding brass pot. Bahâni, she said, must learn that tune against her man's return from being made into a balester (barrister); whereat Bahâni with the utmost decorum giggled and blushed over her beads. She was a pretty, pert girl, who looked upon the future with perfect serenity; for being married to her first cousin whose widowed mother lived in the house, she knew exactly what the amount of friction between her and her future mother-in-law would be; and knew also that she would generally be able to escape quietly, as she did now, from the scene of conflict, and leave the two elder women to have it out at full length if they chose. They generally did choose, because they nearly always had an interested audience; for the quaint rambling old house with its rabbit-warren of tiny rooms opening out to little bits of roof, was full of relations; chiefly women whose husbands were away in Government employ. They each had a separate lodging, as it were, though they were quite as often in some one else's room as in their own, especially when the sound of shrill altercation echoed through the wooden partitions. By a recognised etiquette, however, all serious disputes were carried on in the well-room where the women bathed. It was more a verandah than a room, though the arches were filled up breast-high with a screening wall. But through the hole in the floor, above which the windlass stood, you could not only see right down into the well on the basement story, but also see the people in the street coming for their water. It was when Bahâni was discovered lying flat on the floor so as to crane over and peep into the very street itself, that the fiercest quarrels arose between Mai Kishnu and her widowed sister-in-law. And no quarrel ever ran its course without a reference of some sort to the harmonium, and the iniquity and idiotcy of learning to play tunes as if you were a bad woman in the bazaar. In her heart of hearts Mai Kishnu agreed with this view of the question, but she would sooner have died than confess it, so she invariably carried the war into the enemy's country instead, by insisting on it that Bahâni learned in deference to the oft-expressed desire of her lawful husband, that husband being the complainant's own son. And sometimes, but not often, for she was a faithful defender of the absent municipal clerk, she would clinch the matter by telling her sister-in-law that if there was iniquity or idiotcy about, her brother was also to blame. Whereupon Râdha, who, being the widow of an elder brother, really was, in a way, the head of the house, would retort that in that case it was all the more necessary for the women-folk of the family to remember that the salvation of souls lay with them; so she would beg to remind all present, that this being a dark Saturday or a light Friday, with some particular event in prospect or some particular event in the past, it behoved no pious women of that family to eat, say radishes, on that day. Now, when you have just spent much time and skill in the preparing of pickles for a large household, it is aggravating to be told that it is an impious diet. Still there was always the obvious retort that on such days widows ate nothing at all. So then Râdha, with pharisaical acquiescence, would retire to her own little bit of a room, with her husband's photograph (he had been a clerk also) hung between two German prints of the Madonna and Herodias' daughter (which did duty respectively for the infant Krishna and Durga Devi slaying the demons) and begin counting her beads with a clatter, and repeating her texts in an aggressively loud voice; while Mai Kishnu, after sending the pickle-stew of radishes down in the window-basket as an alms to the first beggar in the street, would begin to cook something else; something as nasty as her deft hands could make it, since this, oddly enough, relieved her feelings.
But Punoo would go on playing God Save our Gracious Queen on the old harmonium with perfect serenity, all unconscious of the fact that two women were cursing it in their hearts as a malevolent demon bent on ruining the household. It was a quaint household when all was said and done, this colony of women, whose husbands were for the most part away serving the Government in remote stations. Quaintest of all it was, perhaps, when in the afternoon the boys belonging to it (and there were many, thank Heaven! despite the demon) came home from school; embryo clerks full of classes and examinations, yet with a word or two for "crickets" and a desire for pickled radishes on every day in the calendar.
"Ask your Aunt Râdha," Mai Kishnu would say shortly to their remonstrances over the nasty substitute for the delicacy. "'Twas she forced me into giving your stomachsful of my best pickles to some dirty beast of a beggar in the street. God forgive me if he was a holy man, but he may have been a Mohammedan for all I know, and what good will that do to my soul?"
But despite the "crickets" and the examinations, despite the vague leavening of Western freethought, the boys fought shy of their Aunt Râdha, perhaps from the veil of uncertainty which their education was necessarily throwing over all things. There were so many ideas, and one must be right; it might be this one. In a way they were more afraid of her and her views than Mai Kishnu was, who never doubted at all. But then Mai Kishnu knew that she could always have the upper hand over her sister-in-law in the matter of cold baths in the winter mornings; for Râdha thought twice about interfering with the beams in other folks' eyes, when the mote of her own about warm water for religious ablutions was ready to her adversary's hand.
The boys, however, though they ate the nasty substitute for pickles without more ado, were not so biddable in the matter of God Save the Queen. As they sat on the dark flight of steps between the living-room and the well-verandah they used to pipe away at it in English in the oddest falsetto. And Bahâni, who was a bit of a tomboy, would imitate them, and then go into fits of shrill laughter at her own gibberish.
Altogether it was a very quaint household, and it was a very quaint noise indeed which went up to high Heaven from it; the boys' voices, Bahâni's mocking laugh, Râdha's muttered texts, Mai Kishnu's vexed clattering of her ladles and pots, and blind Punoo's perspiring efforts after melody on the old harmonium. For he never attempted harmony; that was beyond his self-taught execution altogether. But the sense of it was there, showing itself in sheer delight at pulling out all the stops that still existed, and blowing away till he could no more from sheer exhaustion.
So the years had passed contentedly enough for every one; especially for the old music-master who every day went away with the unleavened cake, which was his only fee, knowing that even such payment was in excess of his desires, since it was enough for him to have the honour and glory of playing on the harmonium, and of boasting about his proficiency on that instrument to his other pupils who were forced to be content with an accordion or some such ignoble instrument.
And then one day the funny, old rambling house was in a perfect ferment of preparation, and even Râdha's face was beaming; for her son was coming home. He was coming from the Hammersmith omnibus and the boarding-house in Notting Hill, coming from the rush and roar of London to take up the threads of life again in the dark latticed rooms where Mai Kishnu made pickles and his mother said her prayers; above all where Bahâni waited for him, all dyed with turmeric and henna, and clothed in tinselled garments. The little household temple up on the roof, where there were more German prints doing duty as various gods and goddesses, had scarcely an instant's respite from the multitudinous rituals; and if there was a minute or two to spare, the women downstairs were sure to remember something else which if left undone would bring the most direful misfortune on the young couple. There was no quarrelling now, only a babel of shrill kindly voices. And there was no music, save of a kind to which Mai Kishnu could clatter her ladles and pans; drubbings of drums and endless tinklings of sutaras--for the good lady had set her foot down as regards the harmonium, even to the extent of showing off Bahâni's accomplishment. Accomplishment forsooth! What need was there of such fools' talk between a newly-met young couple? And though Gunesha had come back from the other side of the world dressed like a real Sahib, that did not prevent his being a young man, and knowing a pretty bride when he saw one. So, thank heaven! there they were at last, in the pleasant cool upper room on the roof, which had been all newly whitewashed and painted and strewn with flowers for the auspicious occasion, looking into each other's eyes as young people should. It was all so proper, so touching, so infinitely satisfactory, that for once Kishnu and Râdha fell on each other's necks and wept tears of sympathy.
But Punoo wandered in and out as a privileged guest among the merry-making and the bustle, sidling up to his closed treasure, feeling it all over in sightless fashion, and longing for the time when he should be called upon, as the bride's master, to display her accomplishment; for by this time she could play Minnia Punnieya and a few other tunes quite correctly. But the days passed, and those two on the roof, despite music and culture, despite all the sciences and all the 'ologies, were quite content with those things which had contented their fathers and mothers before them. It was not so with old Punoo. Even his fiddle afforded him no comfort; and though his other pupils' accordions and concertinas gave him the correct musical intervals which his ear approved instinctively, but which his hand was too unpractised to reproduce with the accuracy which satisfied him, they were poor substitutes for that splendid tone which was born of vehement pumping and perspiration. Perhaps it was really the latter he craved; that feeling of labouring body and soul to give expression to something within him.
Even billing and cooing like a couple of pigeons on the roof, however, must come to an end, and after some three weeks of it, the barrister one day discovered that there was a harmonium in the dark arches of the living-room. He was beginning by this time to think that he had perhaps drifted a little too far back into the old life, and that as he had every intention, when this first very natural and inevitable relapse was over, of setting up house on more civilised lines, it might be as well to show off his new habits a little, and so emphasise the difference which he meant to draw between his life and the life led in the quaint old ancestral house. So without more ado, without any asking of how it came there, or who played on it, he whisked his coat-tails (for he had resumed European dress on his descent from the roof) over the music-stool with the consummate air of a performer and set his feet to the pedals and his hands to the keys.
"What a wheezy old thing!" he cried, when a sort of agonised moo as from a sick cow came in response. Bahâni, standing decorously in the shadow with her veil down in most alluring bashfulness, tittered, and old Punoo, who had stood still in sheer surprise, moved forward with a superior smile.
The barrister heard and saw, and a frown came to his self-satisfied face. "The bellows are leaking," he cried again; "but never mind, it shall do something; I'll make it!"
Something indeed! The women giggled and stopped their ears, but old Punoo stood transfixed, a great pain, a great joy coming to his sightless face. Was that the harmonium? Was that God Save the Queen, that pæon of melody and harmony together, coming in great waves of sound and bearing him away, further and further and further into some unknown land that was yet a Land of Promise? And all these years he had lived in ignorance; he had boasted, he had said that he could play it, his priceless treasure! Priceless! ay, he had been right there. Listen to it! Was it not priceless? A sort of passion of pride surged up in him overpowering all thought of himself.
Then there was a loud crack, a wheeze, a sudden silence; and the barrister stood up wiping his forehead, for he had worked hard. "That has done for the old thing," he said with a laugh; "but it was past work anyhow, and I prefer a piano any day of the week. Don't stand in the corner, Bahâni. You must learn to behave like an English lady now, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in your husband, I assure you."
Mai Kishnu and Râdha looked at each other as if for support, and the vague affright and sheer surprise of their faces made them once more sympathetic. "It is a new world, sister," whispered the one to the other as they moved off respectively to their prayers and their pickles, leaving the barrister making love to his bride over the prospect of the piano he was going to give her.
But Punoo moved softly, blindly, over to his old seat and set his feet to the pedals and his fingers to the keys. But no sound came from them, not even that poor travesty of God Save the Queen which had once filled him with pride. And as he sat fingering the dumb keys, idly, a dim content that it should be so came into the old musician's soul. The swan-song had been beautiful, but it had been a song of death. He, after all, had known the harmonium best.
FOOTNOTES
Footnote 1: Jesus.
Footnote 2: Grandfather.
Footnote 3: Marjoram.
Footnote 4: Tent pitchers, men employed in measuring land.
Footnote 5: Om mi pudmi houm. The Buddhist invocation.
Footnote 6: Shiva.
Footnote 7: Mata devi.
Footnote 8: Vishnu Lukshmi.
Footnote 9: Holi, the Indian Saturnalia.
Footnote 10: Kristna.
Footnote 11: Hari.
Footnote 12: Kaniya.
Footnote 13: Gopi-nath. These are all names of Vishnu in his various Avatars.
Footnote 14: Encore.
Footnote 15: A fossil ammonite.
Footnote 16: Goddess.
Footnote 17: Victory to Mother Kâli!
Footnote 18: The first Aryan settlements were in the Punjab.
Footnote 19: A widow brings ill-luck with her.
Footnote 20: Ram anund. Ram, God; anund, happiness.
Footnote 21: The dirge in honour of the martyred Hussan and Hussain.
Footnote 22: A model of the martyrs' shrine; a permanent erection, whereas the tâzzias used for the procession are afterwards burned. There is a celebrated Imâm-bârah at Lucknow, imported from England.
Footnote 23: A pet name for mother or nurse.