The Potter's Thumb :: CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER VIII

'Come and see our mad potter before you go home, Miss Tweedie,' pleaded George Keene, 'he really is one of the shows, isn't he, Fitzgerald?'

They had been doing the sights of Hodinuggur as an afternoon's amusement; tennis in a riding-habit having no attractions for Rose. Mrs. Boynton, however, on the plea of being a zenana lady, had elected to remain on the roof, Colonel Tweedie keeping her company until the time came for his return visit of state to the DiwÂn on his tower. Lewis might have made the same choice had he been given it; but he was not. So he had preferred loafing round the ruins to toiling after problematical black buck with the sporting party, and made a pleasant companion, as even Rose admitted; being ready with information on most points, and between the references talking affably with Dan regarding the respective merit of Schultze versus brown powder; thus leaving the younger couple to themselves. So his change of manner stood out with unusual distinctness as Rose turned to him for consent to George Keene's invitation.

'As you please, Miss Tweedie; we are your slaves. A mad potter sounds cheerful; he is the man, I suppose, who made that jolly little pot Keene sacrificed to my cousin's greed this morning. When you are as old as I am, my dear fellow, you will really keep the pretty things out of the sight of ladies. I always do, nowadays. There was a little woman at Peshawur, I remember--she had blue eyes--who wheedled----'

'Mrs. Boynton was most welcome to the AyÔdhya pot,' blurted out George hastily.

'Cela va sans dire! It is just because we love to give the pretty things to the pretty creatures that it becomes unwise to let the pretty creatures see the pretty things.'

'Then it is your fault, to begin with,' interrupted Rose hotly.

'Exactly so. I'm sure, Miss Tweedie, you have heard me say a dozen times that we men are to blame for all the weaknesses of women. They are simply the outcome of our likes and dislikes; and they will remain so until there is a perpetual leap-year.'

'For heaven's sake, Keene,' said Dan, laughing, 'lead the way to the potter's or there will be murder done on the King's Highway! Don't mind him, Miss Rose! He "only says it to annoy because he knows it teases." He doesn't really believe anything of the kind.'

Lewis, his eye-glass more aggressive than ever, murmured something under his breath about the inevitable courses of nature, as Rose, with her head held very high, followed George Keene into the potter's yard.

It was a scene strangely at variance with the party entering it. Indeed, old Fuzl ElÂhi, who had never before set eyes on an Englishwoman, would have started from his work had not George detained him with reassuring words:

'He tells his yarns best when he is at the wheel,' he explained as he dragged forward a low string stool for Rose. 'And I want you to hear an awfully queer one called "The Wrestlers." You know enough of the language to understand him at any rate.'

'Miss Tweedie is a better scholar than most of us,' remarked Lewis Gordon curtly from the seat he had found beside Dan on a great log of wood; one of those logs so often to be seen in such courtyards--relics, perhaps, of some ineffectual intention of repair long since forgotten. This one might, to all appearance, have fallen where it lay in those bygone days of which the potter told tales, when the now treeless desert had been a swampy jungle on the borders of an inland sea.

The afternoon sun, slanting over the grass palisades, played havoc with the humanity it found gathered round the wheel by sending their shadows distorted to long lengths across the yard, and tilting them at odd angles against the irregular wall of the mud hut beyond. Altogether a conglomerate pyramid of shadows, with the potter's high turban dominating it as he sat silent, spinning his wheel. And as the clay curved and hollowed beneath his moulding hand a puzzled look came to the light eyes, which, usually so shifty, were now fixed with a sort of fascination upon that strange figure in the riding-habit.

'It is not there,' he muttered uneasily, 'I cannot find a clew.'

George gave Rose the triumphant glance of a child displaying a mechanical toy when it behaves as it ought to behave. The potter was evidently in a mad mood, and might be trusted for a good performance.

'Now, Fuzl ElÂhi, we want "The Wrestlers," please. The Miss sahiba has never heard it.'

'How could she?' broke in the old man sharply. 'She does not belong to that old time. She is new. I cannot even tell the old tale if she sits there in the listener's place. I shall forget, the old will be lost in the new; as it is ever.'

'Change places with me, Miss Tweedie,' put in Lewis with a bored look. 'I am not regenerate out of the old Adam, am I, potter-ji?'

But as he rose the pliant hand went out in a gesture of denial. 'There is room on the log for both, and crows roost with crows, pigeons with pigeons. The big Huzoor can sit on the stool if he likes. I know him. I have seen him many and many a time.'

'Only once, potter-ji,' protested Dan, as he and Rose changed places and the wheel began to hum.

'The post is going from Logborough junction to St. Potter's burgh,' murmured Lewis discontentedly. 'If we are going to play round games I shall go home.'

'Do be quiet, Gordon!' put in George eagerly; 'he is just beginning, and it really is worth hearing.

But Lewis was incorrigible. 'Proxime accessit,' he went on, to Rose, 'what crime in your past incarnation is responsible for your being bracketed with me in this?'

'Oh, do listen,' protested George again.

'Listen! Who could help listening to that infernal noise?--I beg your pardon, Miss Tweedie, but it is infernal.'

It was startling, certainly. A shrill moan coming from the racing, rocking, galloping wheel as the worker's body swayed to and fro like a pendulum. It seemed to rouse a vague sense of unrest in the hearers, a dim discomfort like the remembrance of past pain. Then suddenly the story began in a high-pitched persistent voice, round which that racing, galloping rush of the wheel seemed to circle, hurrying it, pushing at it, every now and again sweeping it along recklessly.

'It was a woman seeking something,

Over hill and dale, through night and day, she sought for something.

The wrestlers who own the world wrestled for her,

On the palm of her right hand wrestling for her,

"She is mine, she is mine," said one and the other,

While over hill and dale, through night and day, she sought for something.

"O flies? you tickle the palm of my hand,

Be off and wrestle down in your world."

So they brought flowers and grass as a carpet,

Wrestling on as she sought for something--

Over hill and dale, through night and day, seeking for something.

"Your carpet is hot, be off, you flies."

So they brought her trees and water for cooling,

Wrestling on as she sought for something--

Over hill and dale, through night and day, seeking for something.

"The grass grows long with the water," she cried,

"Be off, O flies, and tickle your world."

So they brought her flocks to devour the grass,

Wrestling on as she sought for something--

Over hill and dale, through day and night, seeking for something.

"They have trodden my palm as hard as a cake."

So they caught up a plough and ploughed her hand,

Wrestling on while she sought for something--

Over hill and dale, through day and night, seeking for something.

"You have furrowed my palm; it tickles and smarts."

So they brought a weaver and wove her lint,

Wrestling on while she sought for something--

Over hill and dale, through night and day, seeking for something.

"Foul play! Foul play! Look down and decide,"

"Not I, poor flies, I must search for something."

So they caught up a town to watch the game.

"He is right! He is wrong!" cried old and young.

"He is wrong! He is right!" And so war began.

While they wrestled away and she sought for something,

Over hill and dale, through night and day, seeking for something.

"What a noise you make; I am tired of flies."

So she swept them into a melon rind.

"Be quiet, flies! lie still in the dark."

She clapped her palm to the hole in the rind.

"I'm tired of it all, I will go to sleep;

When morning comes I will seek for something--

Over hill and dale, through night and day, I must seek for something".

She rested her head on her palm, and slept,

Down in the valley close to the river;

Slept to the tune of the buzzing flies,

Wrestling and fighting about fair play.

And while she slept the big Flood came,

And the melon pillow floated away.

And all within swarmed out to the sun--

Grass, and herds, and ploughs, and looms.

People fighting for none knows what.

"I have made a new world," she said, with a laugh.

"A brand-new world; and the flies have gone.

But the palm of my right hand tickles still,

May be it will cool when I find what I seek."

So she left her new world down by the river,

Left it alone and sought for something--

Over hill and dale, through night and day, seeking for something.'

The galloping wheel, which had responded always to the mad hurry of the recurring refrain, slackened slowly. Rose gave a sigh of relief, and glanced at Lewis Gordon to see if he too had been oppressed by that shrinking recognition of a stress, a strain, a desire, such as she had never felt before; but he was leaning forward, his chin on his curved hand, intent on listening, so she could not see his face.

'By the powers,' came Dan Fitzgerald's voice above the softening hum, 'the old chap has made an AyÔdhya pot--the same shape, I mean.'

'He always does when he tells this story,' broke in George, quite pleased with the success of his entertainment. 'I don't think he quite knows why he does it, however. Sometimes he says the woman was looking for one; sometimes that she always carries one in her left hand to balance the world in her right. But he always takes the unbaked pot to the ruins and buries it with two of those odd little ninepins, he calls men and women, inside it. He is as mad as a hatter, you know.'

'Several hatters,' assented Gordon fervently, 'but it is an interesting theory of creation.'

'Now don't,' protested Dan, sitting with his long legs crunched up on the low stool close to the potter. 'It is too human for dissection by the Folklore Society. But I'm surprised at one thing. The wrestlers--they are persistent figures in Indian tales, Miss Tweedie--are generally represented as giants. They are pigmies here.'

'The Huzoor is right and wrong,' replied the potter in answer to an inquiry; 'the pÂilwans were neither pigmies nor giants. They were as the Huzoor--two and a half hÂths round the chest--neither more nor less.'

'That's a good shot,' remarked Dan in English, 'forty-five inches according to my tailor. You have an accurate eye, potter-ji,' he added in Hindustani, 'only half an inch out.'

'Not a hair's-breadth, Huzoor,' replied the old man mildly. 'The measures of the pailwÂns is the measure of the Huzoor. I have it here; my fathers used it, and I use it.'

He sought a moment in the little niche, hollowed, close to his right hand, out of the hard soil forming the side of his sunken seat, and drew from it a fine twisted cord of brown, red, and cream coloured wool. It was divided into measures by small shells strung on the twist and knotted into their places.

'Hullo!' cried Gordon eagerly, 'that must be hundreds of years old. Those are sea-shells, and very rare. Simpson at the museum showed me one in fossil the other day. I wonder how the dickens the old man got hold of them?'

'Two and a half hÂths,' repeated Fuzl ElÂhi absently, 'the potter's full measure for a man in the beginning and the end.' He leaned forward rapidly as he spoke, passed the cord round Dan Fitzgerald's chest, and drew the ends together. The curled spirals of the two shells lay half an inch apart. 'So much for the garments,' he muttered. 'Yea! I knew it. The measure of a true pÂilwan to a hair's breadth.

'And what am I, potter-ji?' asked George, laughing.

The puzzled look came back to the old man's face. 'The Huzoor may be a pÂilwan too. Times have changed.'

'Rough on a fellow, rather!' exclaimed the boy, still laughing. 'Here, Fitz! chuck me over the thing. Is that fair, Miss Tweedie?'

She laughed back into his bright face, as he pulled his hardest to make the two second shells meet, then shook her head.

'Not on yourself, Mr. Keene. You are more of a hero than that, I should say.'

The potter's eyes were on her, then back on George. 'Everything is changed,' he muttered again, 'even the measure of the pots.'

'Then you measure them, do you?' asked Gordon, to whom George had handed the cord, and who was now examining it minutely.

'Surely, Huzoor. The first one of each batch. Then the hand learns the make.'

'Try what make you are, Gordon?' suggested Dan.

'Not I. Here, potter-ji, catch. Miss Tweedie and I, according to the best authority, are abnormal; we are not ordinary pots, so I, for one, decline to be measured by their standard. And now, if some of us are to be in time for such trivialities as dinner, we ought to be going.'

The potter rose also and stepped out of his hole. Seen thus at full length, he showed insignificant, his hairy, bandy, almost beast-like legs, contrasting strangely with the mild high-featured face, with its expression of puzzled anxiety, as he laid a deprecating hand on George Keene's sleeve.

'Wants bucksheesh, I suppose,' murmured Lewis. 'I have some rupees somewhere, if you want them, Keene.' But it was not money; it was only leave to speak to the 'mÂdr mihrbÂn.'

'That's a nice name for you, Miss Rose,' said Dan softly--'Mother of mercy--a name to be glad of.'

She blushed as she went forward a step, asking, 'What is it? what can I do for you?'

He stooped to touch her feet with his supple hands ere replying. 'Huzoor! it is a little thing. Fuzl ElÂhi, potter of Hodinuggur, has a daughter somewhere. Perhaps she has gone to the Huzoor's world; it is new, I do not know it. If the "mÂdr mihrbÂn" were to see her, she might tell her to come back--just once--only once. I would not keep her. But now I have no answer when my father says: "Where is thy little AzÎzan?"'

'AzÎzan!' echoed George quickly. But the old man seemed almost to have forgotten his own request. He stood looking past the strangers, past the village, past even the ruins, into the sunset sky.

'I will send her--if I see her,' said Rose gently, with tears in her eyes; for George had told her the story of the lost daughter, and the sudden, diffident appeal touched her. Yet the vast gulf between her and the old man touched and oppressed her still more, as she left him standing alone beside his wheel.

'Well!' said Lewis Gordon, when in silence they had reached the road again. 'You may call that amusement, Keene, if you like; I don't. When I get home, I shall have a sherry and bitters.'

'He is rather a gruesome old chap,' admitted George cheerfully. 'I felt a bit creepy myself the first time I heard that song--by the way, Miss Tweedie, talking of creepiness, did I tell you about the Potter's Thumb? I didn't! Oh,--that is really a grand tale.' He told it, happily, as an excellent sequel to the show, while Dan, in one of his best moods, piled on the imaginative agony about Hodinuggur generally, until Lewis announced his intention of returning to the palace by the longer way. He would be late, of course, but that was preferable to having no appetite for dinner!

'By Jove! seven o'clock,' cried Dan, looking at his watch. 'And you and I, George, have to get over to the bungalow. We must run for it.'

Rose watched them racing down the path, laughing and talking as they ran, with a troubled look.

'Fine specimens, Miss Tweedie,' remarked Lewis after a pause. 'I don't think you need fear their cracking in the fire.'

'I--I--' faltered Rose, taken aback by his comprehension.

'Am Scotch! That's sufficient excuse. I notice we seldom get rid of our native superstition. Besides, it was uncanny--the yard-measure and the Potter's Thumb, and that horse-leech of a woman, who was never satisfied. I felt it myself.'

She knew he was speaking down to her as a nervous woman; yet she did not resent it, because it was a distinct relief not to be taken seriously.

'I wish they had not been measured, for all that,' she persisted. 'You will own it was odd, won't you?'

'Not so odd as Dan himself! He has been cracked ever since I knew him. And Keene is one of the sterling sort, certain of success; besides, he measured himself! Now, before you go upstairs to dress, if your Scotch blood is still curdling, as mine is, have a half of sherry and bitters with me. Crows roost with crows, you remember.'

His friendliness beguiled her into playfulness.

'Crows indeed! then I've a better opinion of you than you have of me. I thought we were meant for the pigeons.'

'To bill and coo?'

If she could have boxed his ears, it would have relieved her feelings. As it was, she raced upstairs, in a fury, without vouchsafing one word of resentment, and paced up and down her tiny room with flaming cheeks. Could a girl be expected, for ever and aye, to be on the outlook for such openings? Of course Gwen Boynton would have laughed easily--would not have minded, perhaps; but then Gwen was charming--everything apparently that a woman ought to be!

Rose looked at herself in her dusty habit. She would have to go down to dinner in it, and challenge comparisons with Gwen in her silks and tinsel. Why should she? No one would care, no one would have a right to care if she did stay in her room with a headache. The next instant she was ashamed of the impulse. What did it matter?--they were welcome to their opinion. As for her, she would adopt no feminine excuse; she would leave those little devices to men's women. So she brushed her habit, and went out, with a heightened colour, to join the others.

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