The Flower of Forgiveness Part 23

"She will let thee have it when thou art stronger," said her visitor quickly. "Thou must give me back the dolly, Kirpo, now thou hast a live one of thine own."

The girl's head s.h.i.+fted uneasily on the hard pillow.

"Ay! and the prize-giving day must be close, I have been thinking. If the Miss-_sahib_ will look behind the straw yonder she will find the doll. It is not hurt. And the Miss can give it to some one else. I don't want it any more. She might give it to a little girl this time.

She could play with it."

"_Mai_ Gungo!" said Julia severely, as, on her way out, she found the mother-in-law surrounded by her gossips, exhibiting the baby to them with great pride, "you must look to Kirpo; she thrives not. And give her the baby--she pines after it."

"The Miss doth not understand," flounced Gungo. "What can Kirpo do with a baby? She is a fool; besides, a mother like that hath evil influences till the time of purification hath pa.s.sed."

Ten days afterwards the mistress of the school told Julia that Kirpo had the fever, and they did not think she would recover. It was never safe for such as she to have sons, and nothing else was to be expected.

Perhaps it was not; for Julia found her on the bare ground of the courtyard where she had been set to die. The oil lamps flared smokily at her head and her feet, and _Mai_ Gungo, with the fortnight-old baby in her arms, cried "_Ram! Ram!_" l.u.s.tily. But the girl lingered in life, turning her head restlessly from side to side on Mother Earth's bosom.

"Give her the baby--only for a minute," pleaded Julia with tears in her eyes. _Mai_ Gungo frowned; but a neighbour broke in hastily--

"Ay! give it to her, gossip, lest in her evil ways she returns for it when she is dead."

So they laid the baby beside her; but the restless head went on turning restlessly from side to side.

"My doll! my doll! I like my doll best."

Before they could fetch it from the Mission compound Kirpo was dead.

"LONDON."

The rains had fallen late, bringing unusual greenness to the stretches of waste-land, and unusual promise of harvest to the bare, brown fields where man and beast were hard at work, day and night, ploughing, harrowing, sowing, watering. Waiting--that integral part of Indian husbandry--had yet to come, but the memory, almost the dread of it, lurked ever in the slow brains of the labourers. In mine also, alien and uninterested though it was; for surely no one who has seen a Jat cultivator, tall, meagre, soft eyed, wandering amongst his green wheat, waiting for Ram to send rain, can ever forget the incarnate tragedy of the sight.

The sun was setting cloudless in a sea of light, that still flooded the scene with the brightness of noon, though the shadows lengthened in swift strides. I was sitting on a wide flight of steps leading down into a small tank closed in on all sides by masonry. Viewed thus, with the ma.s.s of brick work surrounding it, this square of placid water reflecting back the lemon-coloured sky, the fringe of dull _farash_ trees, and the gilded spires of the temple rising above them, showed like a small Dutch picture set in a heavy, deep-recessed frame. On the opposite side a woman in a saffron veil was filling her bra.s.s pot, and on the trumpery stucco arcades of the temple-plinth were painted blue elephants, gingerbread tigers, and spidery monkeys. Round and round the central spire the iridescent b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the whirling pigeons glinted in the level rays.

It was peaceful, colourful, almost in its way beautiful, especially after a long day's work in the office tent which rose a few hundred yards away. Suddenly the clear-cut silence of the scene was marred by a deprecatory voice behind me.

"The Presence will not think it so fine as '_Ide Park_, doubtless?"

"So fine as what?" I echoed carelessly, being accustomed to the thousand and one interruptions of a district officer's life.

"So fine as your '_Ide Par-k_ in the town of London."

"Hyde Park!--why! what the deuce do you know of Hyde Park?"

Intense surprise had replaced my indifference, for there was nothing to account for the strangeness of his words either in the face or figure of the man who stood behind me leaning on a long staff over which his hands were crossed. It was just such a face and figure as I saw every day. A typical Jat--in other words, a farmer by race and heritage--tall, high-shouldered, lank, with a bushy-shaped turban adding to his height, and straight folds of heavy, unbleached cotton cloth suggesting the lean, bony frame beneath. A face well cut, but not refined, marked, but not strong, in which the most noticeable features were the large dreamy eyes like those of Botticelli's Moses in the Sistine Chapel.

Immovable from the knee downwards he squatted, as the Americans say, "in his tracks," keeping his submissive face towards mine like a dog awaiting his master's pleasure.

"By the mercy of the Presence I have seen 'Ide Park. Yes, I have been there--in the city of London--where the _sahibs_ and the _mem-sahibs_ sit and walk."

A vision of the figure before me planted out amongst flower-decked mashers and powdery belles aroused such a sense of incongruity in my mind that I could only echo feebly--

"So you have been to London!"

"Yes!" he replied cheerfully, "I've been to London to see the great Queen."

For the life of me I could not help reverting to the sequence of childish days: "_p.u.s.s.y cat, p.u.s.s.y cat, what saw you there?_" and his reply fitted in so neatly that my query lost its lightness and became serious.

"I saw the _Sikattar_ (secretary) who sits in her chair."

I laughed then; I could not help it, for I felt convinced that no other words could have expressed the whole incident more truthfully.

"I went to London, O Protector of the Poor!" continued the stranger softly, "because I wanted, to get back the land. The Presence knows we Jats cannot live without our land."

Involuntarily his eyes turned to a neighbouring field, where a couple of plough bullocks were slowly scoring the levels into feeble furrows, whilst the ploughman--just such a man as the one before me--held his hookah in one hand, his goad in the other.

"So you did not get the land after all? How was that?" G.o.d knows I was not always so ready of access to the native (as the departmental pastorals put it), but then one does not meet a Jat who has been to Hyde Park every day.

"Perhaps if it had not been a _Sikattar_," replied the low soft voice--"perhaps if it had been the great Queen herself--" Here the plough bullocks he was watching turned too sharply, and his hand closed mechanically on the stick he held between his knees, as if he were responsible for the mistake. "If the Presence has not heard it all before, I will tell it why Dewa Ram the Jat went to London."

I give the story in his own words, for mine might fail to transmit the perfection of his patience.

"The land was my father's, and my father's father from Mahratta times.

In those days no one could sell the land or prevent the sons from following the father's plough. To begin with, no one wanted to sell good land, and then they could not if they would. That was before the great Sirkar--life and prosperity be with it always--came to lift the hearts of the poor and set their heads high. There was much land, and on some of it in olden days a mortgage had been put. The Presence will know the kind of mortgage, where for a hundred rupees or so of loan another man is allowed to till the soil worth thousands. Only if it is wanted back, then the owner returns the hundred rupees. That is all. It is done when a family is small and has too much land to till properly.

So the village accountant's people held the land because they were relations by marriage. It was in my father's time that the great Sirkar came, and we began paying the dues to it instead of to the Maharajah.

Then, when my father fell into evil ways because of drugs, my mother took her sons--we were twins, Sewa Ram and I--if the Presence pleases, back to her people far away beyond Amritsar. For she was of a high, proud family, and when the hemp gets into a man's head he does unclean things. So my father was alone, and the accountant made him do as he liked, bribing him with drugs. That was how it happened, as the Presence will doubtless perceive. So when my father neglected his own land, the accountant's people cultivated it for him and gave him what was due. My mother heard of this, but she said nothing, because we were but little lads, and the land could not run away--it was better that it should be tilled than left to rack and ruin. At last my father died, but they sent no word to Amritsar, because the great Sirkar was coming to count the village, and make a map of it with all the holdings of the proper shape, and all the fields coloured green. If the Protector of the Poor will forgive his dust-like slave, he will remember that fields are not green always, and so likewise the holdings are not always right, no matter how carefully they are put on the map. There was the old mortgage, a man who lied tilling the soil, and no one to come to the Sirkar and say, 'Here is the hundred rupees, give us back the land and write it in our names,' because, as I have said, Sewa Ram and I were away beyond Amritsar, and our mother thought the land could not run away. It was no wonder the Sirkar was deceived, no wonder at all, but when we came to claim the land even our names were not on the list.

They had written the wrong thing because the mortgage had been foreclosed, and there were no heirs. After this one judge--may he become the _Lat Sahib_--said he would put it right, but the accountant was rich and made it into an appeal. The Presence knows what an appeal is, doubtless, and how, when a little thing like this--just a mistake in a map--gets up amongst the pleaders and the _Sikattars_, it is sometimes too small for them to see. It would have been different if the Sirkar had seen two big noisy boys when it counted the village.

Then Sewa Ram was set free from the prison of life, and I was alone; for the Presence knows a Jat cannot marry without land, or have sons when there is no plough to keep the furrow of existence straight. So I sold my mother's jewels and went to show the great Queen herself that my father really had a son. Thus I came to 'Ide Park in London city, and saw the _Sikattar_."

"Then you did not succeed?"

"The Presence knows that the _vizier_ is not as the _badshah_. He was very kind, sending me back by s.h.i.+p P. and O. And writing! G.o.d knows how many letters he wrote, and he bade me wait. That is two years gone, so I am waiting still."

"Have you a case in my Court?"

He shook his head with a certain pride. "Oh no! it is in the big Court, or with the Financial, or a _Sikattar_ just now; but it will come to the Presence sooner or later. That is why I journey with the Protector of the Poor. When that day comes the Presence will remember how Dewa Ram the Jat went to 'Ide Park."

As I strolled back to the tent he followed at a discreet distance.

Afterwards, as I sat smoking outside, I saw him wandering in the fields listlessly, his tall figure standing out against the sky as he paused to look at the sprouting wheat. When I questioned my underlings as to his story, they smiled obsequiously, as the native will smile before the master's face. The case, it appeared, had grown to be quite a standing joke in the office, nor was this the first cold weather that Dewa Ram had haunted the camp of the Deputy Commissioner and waited for news of his land. They hemmed and hawed, however, over the rights and wrongs of his claim, until I asked them point blank what their own impressions were; then habit gave way to truth, and they frankly declared their belief in some miscarriage of justice. A man, they said, would not go all the way to London for nothing. As I inclined to the same view, I took the trouble to try working the oracle by the back stairs--a method no less successful in India than elsewhere. Replies, more or less hopeful as to some ultimate settlement of the question, came from various friends in high places. Some of these I communicated, in a guarded way, to "London," who as the sowing time pa.s.sed fell a victim to fever and deferred hope. It was impossible for mortal man to see those dreamy eyes of his watching the crops of other men without feeling an insane desire to bring the promised land within his reach.

He was very grateful. So condescending a Presence, he said, had never before dwelt in the tents of the great Sirkar; and often on Sunday afternoons, when the camp was at rest, he would steal ostentatiously to a spot about thirty yards from where I was sitting, and if opportunity offered, enter into conversation--generally beginning by some apologetic allusion to 'Ide Park, but ending with a vast amount of information. He was a perfect mine of folk-lore, and many a half hour did he beguile by old-world stories and traditions. One, in particular, I will retail in his own words, because it seems to me to give insight into the nature of the man and of his race.

I had been having my Sunday cup of afternoon tea in the shade of a huge banian tree, and was idly amusing myself by throwing crumbs to a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed palm squirrel, that had crept down the trunk not two yards from me. Attracted, partly by hunger, but more by the sheer light-hearted cussedness which makes the Indian squirrel so charming a companion, the little creature came nearer and nearer, its tail in an aggressive pluff, its large eyes scanning my face knowingly.

A pause, a dart, and it was chirruping on the branch above my head with the crumb in its deft fingers.

"The Presence is a friend of Ram's," said "London" deferentially, "that is why the heart of the Presence is so soft."

"And why do you say I am a friend of Ram's?" I asked.