Flora Annie Webster Steel

"But the tenth avatar of the Lord Vishnu is yet to come."

"Exactly so, pundit-ji," I replied, looking at my watch. "It is yet to come, seeing that time's up. Half-past eight; so not another stroke of work to-day. No, not for twice a thousand rupees!"

A thousand rupees being the sum with which the Government of India rewards what they are pleased to call "high proficiency" in languages, I, having regard to its literature, had chosen Sanskrit as a means of paying certain just debts. To which end the head-master of the district school came to me for two hours every morning, and prosed away over the doings of the Hindoo pantheon until I came to the conclusion that my Lord Vishnu had been rather extravagant in the matter of incarnations.

The pundit, however, to whom would be due a hundred rupees of the thousand if I succeeded, smiled blandly. "The tenth avatar will doubtless await his Honour's leisure; the tenth, and last."

"Last!" I echoed with scorn. "How do you know? Some authorities hold there are twenty-four, and upon my soul I don't see why there should not be twenty-four thousand. 'Tis the same old story all through; devils and demigods, rakshas and rishies, Noah's ark and Excalibur. That sort of thing might go on for ever."

Now, Pundit Narayan Das was a very learned man. He had taken a Calcutta degree, and was accustomed to educate the rising generation on a mixture of the Rig-Veda and The Spectator. So he smiled again, saying in English, "'History repeats itself.'"

Thereupon he left me, and I, going into the verandah with my cigar, came straight upon RÂmchunderji and his wife Seeta. At least I think so.

They were the oddest little couple. He, at a stretch, might have touched a decade of life, she, something more than half such distance of time. That is, taking them by size: in mind and manners, and in their grave, careworn faces, they were centuries old. His sole garment consisted of a large yellow turban twined high into a sort of mitre, with just a tip of burnished silver fringe sprouting from the top; and, as he sat cross-legged against the verandah pillar, a hand resting on each knee, his figure awoke a fleeting memory which, at the time, I failed to catch. Afterwards I remembered the effigies in Indra's celestial court as represented by some Parsee actors I had once seen. Seeta was simply a bundle, owing to her being huddled and cuddled up in a veil ample enough for an ample woman.

"I am RÂmchunderji, and this is my wife Seeta," said the boy gravely. "If the Presence pleases, I will beguile time by singing."

"What will you sing?" I asked, preparing to idle away ten minutes comfortably in a lounge-chair which lay convenient.

"I sing what I sing. Give me the vina, woman."

The veil gave up such a very large instrument that the smallness of the remaining wife became oppressive. So large indeed was it, that one gourd over-filled the boy's lap, while the other acted as a prop to the high twined turban. Even the connecting bamboo, slender though it was, seemed all too wide for those small fingers on the frets.

"Is the permission of the Presence bestowed?" suggested RÂmchunderji, with the utmost solemnity.

Twang, twang, twangle! Heavens, what a vina and what a voice! I nearly stopped both at the first bar; then patience prevailing, I lay back and closed my eyes. Twang, twangle! A sudden difference in the tone made me open them again, only to find the same little bronze image busy in making a perfectly purgatorial noise; so I resigned myself once more. Palm-trees waving, odorous thickets starred with jasmin, forms, half-mortal, half-divine, stealing through the shadows, the flash of shining swords, the twang of golden bows bent on ten-headed many-handed monsters. Bah! Pundit Narayan Das, prosing over those epic poems of his, had made me drowsy. "What have you been singing?" I asked, rousing myself.

RÂmchunderji spread his hands thumbs outwards, and the three wrinkles on his high forehead deepened: "God knows! It is what they sang before the great flood came. The vina was theirs, and my turban, and my wife's veil; the rest was too big altogether, so I gave it away for some bread. When the belly is full of greed the heart hath none left, and the nine-lakh necklace is worth no more than a mouthful. If the Presence could see into my heart now, he would find no greed there."

This delicate allusion to an inward craving produced a four-anna bit from my pocket, and sent RÂmchunderji away to the sweet-meat sellers in order to appease his hunger; for sweet-stuff is cheap in the East, especially when it is stale. Seeta and the vina, mysteriously intertwined beneath the veil, followed duteously behind.

The next day they were back again, and the twang of that infernal instrument broke in on the pundit's impassioned regrets over the heroic days of his favourite poems. "By the by," I interrupted, "can you tell me what that boy is singing? I can't make out a word, and yet--But it was no use bringing fancy to bear on Narayan Das, so we went out to listen. They were sitting under a trellised arch covered with jasmin and roses, and a great Gloire de Dijon had sent a shower of blown petals over Seeta's veil.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," quoted Narayan Das sententiously, after listening a while. "It is RÂmayÂna, the immortal poem your honour reads even now; but debase, illiterate. You say wrong, boy! it is thus."

RÂmchunderji waited till the pompous periods ceased; then he shook his head gravely. "We did not sing it so in the days before the great flood came."

His words gave me a curious thrill; but there is no more matter-of-fact being in the world than a Calcutta Bachelor of Arts; so the pundit at once began a cross-examination that would have done credit to a Queen's counsel. "What flood? who were 'we'?" These and many other questions put with brutal bluntness met with a patient reply.

It had been a very big flood, somewhere, God knows how far, in the south country. One, two, three years ago? Oh, more than that! but he could not say how much more. The bard who sang and the woman who carried the vina had disappeared, been swept away perhaps. Since then he, RÂmchunderji, had wandered over the world filling his stomach and that of his wife Seeta with songs. Their stomachs were not always full; oh, no! Of late (perhaps because the vina was so old) people had not cared to listen, and since the great flood nothing could be got without money. Seeta? Oh, yes! she was his wife. They had been married ever so long; he could not remember the time when they had not been married.

It was Narayan Das's opportunity for shaking his head. These infant marriages were subversive of due education. Here was a boy, who should be in Standard II. doing the compound rules, idling about in ignorance. It struck me, however, that RÂmchunderji must be pretty well on to vulgar fractions and rule of three, with himself, Seeta, and the world as the denominators, so I asked him if his heart were still so devoid of greed that another four-anna bit would be welcome. His face showed a pained surprise. The Presence, he said, must be aware that four annas would fill their stomachs (which were not big) for many days. They had not come for alms, only to make music for the Presence out of gratitude. Thinking that music out of an ill-tuned vina was hardly the same thing, I forced another four-anna bit on the boy and sent him away.

Nearly a month passed ere I saw him again, though Narayan Das and I used, as the days grew warmer, to sit out in the trellised arch, within sight of the road. My knowledge of Sanskrit increased as I read of RÂmchunderji's long exile, shared by Seeta, his wife; of how he killed the beasts in the enchanted forest; how she was reft from him by RÂvana, the hydra-headed many-handed monster; and of how finally she was restored to his arms by the help of HanumÂn the man-monkey, the child of the wild winds. But though the pundit used to waste many words in pointing out the beauties of a poem which held such hold on the minds of the people that their commonest names were derived from it, I never seemed to get into the spirit of the time as I had done when I listened with closed eyes to the boy's debased, illiterate rendering of the s'lokas.

It was after the school vacation had sent Narayan Das to see his relatives at Benares that the odd little couple turned up again. RÂmchunderji's face looked more pinched and careworn than ever, and as he held the vina across his knees, Seeta, losing its contours, seemed more than ever inadequate to her veil.

"Perhaps one of the many devils which beset the virtuous has entered into the instrument," he said despondently; "but when I play, folk listen not at all. So greed remaineth in the stomach, and the heart is empty."

I offered him another four-anna bit, and when he demurred at taking it before beguiling the time with music, I laid it on the flat skin top of one of the gourds, hoping thus to ensure silence.

The wrinkles on his forehead seemed to go right up into his turban, and his voice took a perplexed tone. "It used not to be so. Before the flood Seeta and I had no thought of money; but now--" He began fingering the strings softly, and as they thrilled, the four-anna bit vibrated and jigged in a murmur of money that fitted strangely to the sort of rude chant in which he went on.

"Money is in the hands, the head, the heart;

Give! give, give, before we give again;

Money hath ten heads to think out evil-doing;

Money hath twenty hands to mete out pain.

Money! money! money! money!

Money steals the heart's love from our life.

Money I have not--say! art thou hungry, wife?"

If anything was possessed of a devil it was that four-anna bit. It buzzed, and hummed, and jigged infernally, as the boy's finger on the strings struck more firmly.

"I'll tell you what it is, RÂmchunderji," said I uneasily, "that vina is enough to ruin Orpheus. As you don't care for my money, I'll give you another instrument instead. I have one inside which is easier to play, and more your style in every way."

So I brought out a ravanÂstron, such as professional beggars use, a thing with two strings and a gourd covered with snake-skin. To my surprise the boy's face lost its impassive melancholy in palpable anger.

"The Presence does not understand," he said quite hotly. "We do not beg; Seeta and I fill ourselves with songs. That thing whines for money, money, money, like the devil who made it. Rather would I live by this than by mine enemy." And as he spoke he struck the snake-skin with his supple fingers till it resounded again. "Yea! thus will I find bread," he went on, "but the vina must find a home first. Therefore I came to the Presence, hearing that he collected such things. Perhaps he will keep it in exchange for one rupee. It is worth one rupee, surely."

His wistful look as he handed me the instrument made me feel inclined to offer a hundred; but in good sooth the vina was worth five, and I told him so, adding, as I looked at some curious tracery round the gourds, that it appeared to be very old indeed.

"The Presence saith truly; it is very old," echoed RÂmchunderji drearily. "That is why folk will not listen. It is too old; too old to be worth money."

Nevertheless he cheered up at the sight of his rupee; for he would not take more, saying he had every intention of returning to claim the vina ere long, and that five rupees would be beyond his hopes of gain.

A fortnight after I came home from my early morning ride by the police office, which stood outside the native town, close to a brick-stepped tank shaded by peepul-trees, my object being to check the tally of poisonous snakes brought in for the reward given by Government for their capture. The first time I saw some six or seven hundred deadly serpents ranged in a row with all their heads one way, and all their unwinking eyes apparently fixed on me, I felt queer, and the fact of their being dead did not somehow enter into the equation. But habit inures one, and I walked along the thin grey fringe of certain death spread out on the first step of the tank with an air of stolid business, only stopping before an unusually large specimen to ask the captor, who sat behind awaiting his pence, where he had come across it.

"Six hundred and seventy in all, Huzoor" remarked the Deputy Inspector of Police, following me, resplendent in silver trappings and white cotton gloves. "That is owing to the floods, and the season, since this is the sixth of BhÂdron (August) the month of snakes. Yet the outlay is excessive to the Government, and perhaps with justice the price of small ones, such as these, might be reduced one-half."

I looked up, and behind a fringe of diminutive vipers sat RÂmchunderji and the bundle he called Seeta. On his bare right arm he wore a much betasselled floss silk bracelet bound with tinsel.

"I am glad to see the greed is in your heart again," said I, pointing to the ornament.

"The RÂm-rucki is not bought, but given, as in the days before the flood," replied the boy. "Every one wears the RÂm-rucki still, every one!"

The Deputy Inspector pulled down the cuff of his uniform hastily, but against the gleam of his white gloves I caught a glimpse of bright colours. The RÂm-rucki, he explained evasively, was the bracelet of luck given to RÂmchunderji in old days before his search for Seeta, and common, ill-educated people still retained the superstitious custom of binding one on the wrist of each male during the month of BhÂdron. There was so much deplorable ignorance amongst the uneducated classes, and did the Presence look with favour on the proposal for reducing the rewards? Perhaps it was RÂmchunderji's eager, wistful face hinting at the way promises were kept before the flood, which made me reply that I considered no one but the Viceroy in Council had power to reduce the price of snakes.

Several times after this I found the odd little couple disposed behind their tally of small vipers; then the season of serpents ceased, and one by one the habituÉs of the tank steps dropped off to pursue other professions. The fringe broke into isolated tassels, and finally the worn, ruddy steps lay bare of all save the flickering light and shade of the leaves above.

November had chilled the welcome cool weather to cold, when a report came in the usual course that a boy calling himself RÂmchunderji, and a girl said to be his wife, had been found in a jasmin garden outside the city, half dead of exhaustion and without any ostensible means of livelihood. They had been taken up as vagrants and sent to hospital, pending Government orders. Now the Jubilee year was coming to a close, leaving behind it a legacy of new charities throughout the length and breadth of India. Of some the foundation stone only had been laid by direct telegram to the Queen-Empress; others had sprung to life in a manner suggestive of workmen's tenements. Among the latter was a Female Boarding School and Orphanage for the children of high-caste Hindus, which had been built and endowed by a number of rich contractors and usurers, not one of whom would have sent their daughters to it for all their hoarded wealth. Persistent pennies had attracted a creditable, if intermittent, supply of day-scholars to its stucco walls; but despite an appropriate inscription in three languages over the gate, the orphanage remained empty. Money can do much, but it cannot produce homeless orphans of good family in a society where the patriarchal system lingers in all its crass disregard of the main chance. So at the first hint of Seeta I was besieged on all sides. A real live, genuine, Hindu female orphan going a begging! Preposterous! Sacrilegious! The Chairman of the Orphanage Committee almost wept as he pictured the emptiness of those white walls, and actually shed tears over the building estimates which he produced in order to strengthen his claim to poor little Seeta. Was it fair, he asked, that such a total of munificent charity should not have a single orphan to show the Commissioner-sahib when he came on tour? His distress touched me. Then winter, hard on the poor even in sunlit India, was on us; besides, Narayan Das tempted me further, with suggestions of a Jubilee Scholarship at the district school for RÂmchunderji himself.

I broke it very gently to the boy as he lay on a mat in the sun, slowly absorbing warmth and nourishment. He was too weak to contest the point, but I felt bad, exceedingly, when I saw him turn face down as if the end of all things was upon him. I knew he must be whispering confidences to Mother Earth respecting that happy time before the flood, and I slunk away as though I had been whipped.

Now, if in telling this veracious history I seem too intermittent, I can but offer as an excuse the fact that an official's work in India is like that of a Jacquard loom. A thread slips forward, shows for a second, and disappears; a pause, and there it is again. Sometimes not until the pattern is complete is it possible to realise that the series of trivial incidents has combined to weave an indelible record on the warp and woof. So it was early January before the RÂmchunderji shuttle stirred again. Narayan Das came to me with a look on his face suggestive that neither the Rig-Veda nor The Spectator was entirely satisfactory. The boy, he said, was not a bad boy, though he seemed absolutely unable to learn; but his influence on Standard I. was strictly non-regulation, nor did any section of the Educational Code apply to the case. If I would come down at recess time, I could see and judge for myself what ought to be done. When I reached the play-ground the bigger boys were at krikutts (cricket) or gymnastics, the medium ones engaged on marbles, but in a sunny corner backed by warm brick walls sat RÂmchunderji surrounded by a circle of Standard I. Small as he was, he was still so much larger than the average of the class, that, as he leant his high yellow turban against the wall, with half-closed eyes, and hands upon his knees, the memory of India's Court came back to me once more. He was reciting something in a low voice, and as the children munched popcorn or sucked sweeties their eyes never left his face.

"Look!" said Narayan Das in a whisper from our spying-ground behind the master's window. The song came to an end, a stir circled through the audience, and one by one the solid children of the fields, and the slender, sharp little imps of the bazaars, rose up and put something into the singer's lap. A few grains of corn, a scrap of sweet stuff, and as they did so each said in turn, "Salaam, RÂmchunderji!" "No wonder the boy has grown fat," I whispered, dropping the reed screen round which I had been peeping.

Narayan Das shook his head. "If it were only comestibles," he replied gravely, "I could arrange; but when they are devoid of victuals they give their slate-pencils, their ink-pots, even their First-Lesson books. Then, if nobody sees and stops, there is vacancy when such things are applied for. Thus it is subversive of discipline, and parents object to pay. Besides, the in forma-pauperis pupils come on contingent with great expense to Government."

I looked through the screen again with a growing respect for RÂmchunderji. "Does he eat them too?" I asked.

The head-master smiled the sickly smile of one who is not quite sure if his superior officer intends a joke, and fell back as usual on quotation, "The ostrich is supposed by some to digest nails, but--"

I laughed aloud, and being discovered, went out and spoke seriously to the offender. His calm was not in the least disturbed. "I do not ask, or beg," he replied; "they give of their hearts and their abundance, as in old days before the flood. Is it my fault if they possess slate-pencils, and ink-pots, and First-Lesson books?"

I must confess that this argument seemed to me unanswerable, but I advised him, seeing that the flood had come, to return such offerings in future to the store. He did not take my advice, and, about a week after, being discovered selling these things to the bigger boys at a reduced price, he was caned by the head-master. That night he disappeared from the boarding-house and was no more seen. His name was removed from the rolls, his scholarship forfeited for absence without leave, and the arrears absorbed in refunds for slate-pencils and ink-pots. So that was an end of RÂmchunderji's schooling, and Standard I. once more became amenable to the Code.

Winter was warming to spring, the first bronze vine leaves were budding, and the young wheat shooting to silvery ears, before the Commissioner, coming his rounds, was taken in pomp to visit the Orphanage and its occupants. I remember it so well. The Committee and the Commissioner, and I, and every one interested in female orphans and female education, on one side of a red baize table decorated with posies of decayed rosebuds and jasmin in green-glass tumblers; and on the other Seeta and the matron. The former, to enhance her value as a genuine half-caste waif, was still a mere bundle, and I fancied she looked smaller than ever; perhaps because the veil was not so large. Then the accounts were passed, and the matron's report read. Nothing, she said, could be more satisfactory than the general behaviour and moral tone of the inmates, except in one point. And this was the feeding of the monkeys, which, as every one knew, infested the town. The result being that the bunder-lÔg had become bold even to the dropping down of stones into the court--quite large stones, such as the one placed as a stepping-stone over the runnel of water from the well.

Here I unguardedly suggested an air-gun; whereupon Narayan Das, who always attended these functions as an educational authority, reminded me reproachfully that monkeys were sacred to the god HanumÂn, who, if I remembered, had finally rescued Seeta from the ten-headed, many-armed monster Ravana, the inventor of the ravanastron or beggar's fiddle.

It was at this juncture that I suddenly became aware that the Jacquard loom of Fate was weaving a pattern; RÂmchunderji! Seeta! the exile! the killing of the wild beasts! the ten-headed, many-handed monster RÂvana! Yet I could tell you almost every word of the Commissioner's speech, though he prosed on for the next ten minutes complacently about the pleasure he felt, and the authorities felt, and the whole civilised world felt, at seeing "Money, the great curse and blessing of humanity, employed as it should be employed in snatching the female orphan of India from unmerited misfortune, and educating her to be an example to the nineteenth century." Every one was highly delighted, and the Committee approached me with a view of adding the Commissioner's name as a second title to the school.

But I awaited the completion of the pattern. It was on the eleventh of April, that is to say, on the High Festival of Spring, at the fair held beside the tank where humanity in thousands was washing away the old year, and putting on the new in the shape of gay-coloured clothing, that my attention was attracted by a small, dense crowd whence came hearty guffaws of laughter.

"'Tis a performing monkey," said a bearded villager in response to my question as to what was amusing them so hugely. "The boy makes him do tricks worthy of HanumÂn; yet he saith he taught him yonder down by the canal. Will not the Protector of the Poor step in and see? Ho, ho! 'twould make a suitor laugh even if the digri (decree) were against him." But I recognised the pattern this time, and I had made up my mind not to interfere with the shuttle again. As I turned away, another roar of laughter and a general feeling in pockets and turbans told me that the final tip had succeeded, and that collection was going on satisfactorily.

A few days later the Chairman of the Committee came to me in excited despair. The real, genuine female Hindu orphan was not to be found, and the stucco walls were once more empty. Inquiries were made on all sides, but when it came out, casually, that a boy, a girl, and a monkey, had taken a third-class ticket to Benares I said nothing. I was not going to aid RÂvana, or prevent the due course of incarnation, if it was an incarnation. That great city of men, women, and monkeys should give the trio fair play.

Last year, when I was in Simla, I overheard a traveller giving his impressions of India to a lady who was longing all the time to find out from a gentleman with a mustache when the polo-match was to begin at Annandale next day.

"The performing troupes are certainly above the European average," he said. "At Benares, especially, I remember seeing a monkey; he, his master, and a girl, did quite a variety of scenes out of the RÂmayÂna, and really, considering who they were, I--"

"Excuse me,--but--oh! Captain Smith, is it half-past eleven or twelve?"

The vina still hangs in my collection next the ravanastron. Sometimes I take it down and sound the strings. But the waving palms, the odorous thickets, and the shadowy, immortal forms have got mixed up somehow with that infernal humming and bumming of the four-anna bit. So I get no help in trying to decide the question,--"Who was RÂmchunderji?"