The Potter's Thumb Part 22

'It isn't the first time I've been in a jungle station. Are you thinking of the whisky bottle again? Sure I'll take a temperance ticket for the fortnight, if it would make my keeper easier.'

'Don't be a fool, Dan.'

He came round to lean over the back of George's arm-chair.'

'Is that the thanks I get for warming a viper in my bosom? But I must get back to the office for a day or two first. Then I'll start you off with my blessing and all the boiled shirts you have in the world. And more, by token, that picture of the girl with the Ayodhya pot that's lying underneath them. Why didn't you show it me before? It's the best thing you ever did, and must go to the exhibition. Always put your best foot foremost up at Simla among the big-wigs. That is my advice.'

'Which you don't follow yourself.'

'But I do!--only my foot's a beetle-crusher, and the worms don't like it. So that is settled, and we will tell the washerman about the white ties. And look here, George, I'll bring the duplicate of that key back with me. Then you can take yours, and I shall know----'

George's hand went up to the back of his chair as if to find another to clasp; then he changed the _venue_ with an odd little laugh.

'Give me a light, old man. I--I can't keep this cigarette going, somehow.'

As Dan stooped over him their eyes met, and that was enough.

CHAPTER XIV

The angel Azrael had turned aside from other doors in Hodinuggur besides that of the red-hot bungalow across the ca.n.a.l. Fuzl Elahi, the potter, sat once more at his work, with the old calm on his face. The wheel was back in the inner yard again, where the westering sun sent a creeping shadow of the high wall almost to the edge of the spinning circle. It spun so slowly that the eye could see the blue outline of a pot upon the moulding pirn.

'It was a woman seeking something, Over hill and dale, through night and day she sought for something.

"Foul play! foul play! look down and decide."

"Not I----"'

The chant stopped in a start. There was a grip on one shoulder, a thin brown hand over the other pointing accusingly at the wheel.

'Why didst lie to me?' panted a breathless voice, low yet hard. 'Why didst say thou hadst sent it to her? Why? why?'

'I lied not, heart's delight.'

The slackening wheel, as his hands fell away from it, showed the Ayodhya pot, as if in denial of his words; yet he repeated them gently, looking back the while at the girl who had crept from the open door of the hut behind him. 'I sent it; but it hath come back, as all things do in Hodinuggur; as even thou didst, Azizan. Be not angry with thy father. Lo, it is fate!'

She set his deprecating hand aside roughly.

'Let be, father--if father thou art. I tell thee 'tis the pot. Give it me here. Yea; 'tis so, and thou hast put a false bottom of new clay to it. Wherefore?'

The old man's forehead wrinkled in perplexity.

'I do it always. Let me finish the task, Aziz. Chandni, the courtesan, will give money for it, as always; then thou shalt have violet sherbet to allay the cough. Pity of me! how thin thou art!'

In truth the girl was emaciated to skin and bone: her small face seemed all eyes; yet, though she swayed as she stood from sheer weakness, there was energy and to spare in her grip on the Ayodhya pot.

'Chandni!' she echoed; then suddenly the fire died down, the tension of her hold slackened. 'Lo, wherefore should I care if it be lies or truth,' she muttered to herself; 'the old man is crazy, and 'tis the Diwan's when all is said and done--not hers. Here, take it, poor soul.

I care not now, so I be left alone in peace.'

'Art not angry with thy father, Aziz?' he asked humbly; but there was no answer. He watched her languid retreat to the hut almost fearfully.

'Lo, she forgets the things I have remembered, and I forget those she remembers, he murmured, before he broke once more into his chant with a quavering voice.

This forgetfulness of the girl's, showing itself so often, was a perpetual wonder to the old man, who never for an instant doubted that his dead daughter had indeed returned to him. 'Nay, but thou knowest beloved!' he would remonstrate against her ignorance. 'Hast not played in the Mori gate, and bought sweetmeats of old Bishno, perched on my shoulder like any tame squirrel?'

'Mayhap, mayhap!' she would answer impatiently. 'I care not. There was a Hindu girl, I remember, who did not weep as the others used to do.

Life was a dream, she said. We would forget it soon in another. Mayhap 'tis true and I have forgotten.'

It suited her to deceive the old man. When she had first realised the position, she had been too weak to do more than wonder at it. Then, by degrees, while she still lay helpless, the potter's talk, her own recollections of old Zainub's hints, joined to the extraordinary similarity in those extraordinary eyes, had given her a shrewd guess as the truth. And with it came a fierce savage delight in her inheritance of witchcraft. It meant revenge; revenge and safety. The potter deemed her a ghost from another world; the village folk should think the same.

So she hid herself away in the dark hovel, spending the long hot days in dreaming of a time when she could creep out on some moonlit night and frighten the wits out of the world which had wronged her; for her whole nature was jangled and out of tune. She hated everything and everybody, herself included; at least so she told herself as she sat idle, listless, brooding over revenge. It was not difficult for her to avoid observation. To begin with, the village folk were afraid of the potter's eyes at the best of times, and of late strange tales had been told. Finally, Mai Jewun's longed-for son had been born with a distinct thumb-mark, and had died. The only person, in fact, who could have allayed these fears lay shrivelling into a mummy with the heat on the old secret stairs; so Azizan might have wandered through the village had she chosen without fear of anything save sending all the women into hysterics, and making the men give themselves up as doomed to die. She did not care to wander, however; she cared for nothing save to sit crunched up at the lintel of the hovel door and stare into vacancy until the dawn sent her back to the darkness within.

The potter found her so when he returned from taking the pot back to the Mori gate late in the evening. The fading daylight struggled still with the rising moon, making confused havoc among the shadows, and giving an odd iridescence to the dust-laden air. From without came a barking of dogs, an occasional cry, every now and again a group of bleatings from the goat-pens. All the every-day commonplace sounds of village life; and in the courtyard the same lack of outward novelty.

Only an old man with his pugree off eating his supper of millet cakes and water beside a sick girl.

'Ari, beloved, cough not so!' came his tender voice. 'Lo! I will go but now for the sherbet. Dittu was away when I pa.s.sed his shop. And see, I will seek out the sahib ere he leaves to-morrow and ask for more medicine. It did thee good.'

The girl's breath came faster.

'Leaves? Wherefore?'

'He hath been ill, dear heart, so Chandni says. He goes to the mem sahiba in the hills.'

Azizan's hand clutched the old man's arm. 'And the pot! what of the pot?'

He shook his head. 'Maybe it was for her. I know not. Cough not so, beloved. See, I will fetch the sherbet.' He bent over her, as he rose, in gentle pleading. 'Go not from me when I am away, Aziz. Lo! I will be back ere long.'

She gave a short laugh, and sank back, still breathless from her fit of coughing.

'Go! whither should I go? G.o.d knows!' The old man sighed as he turned away, to look back more than once at the listless, dejected figure. So it remained for an instant after his had disappeared through the outer yard; then, as if galvanised, it rose suddenly, and the thin arms were flung out pa.s.sionately.

'She shall not have it. Chandni shall not give it to her. She shall not, she shall not.'

Five minutes after, trembling half with weakness, half from sheer hurry, Azizan was on her way through the village wrapped in a white sheet s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hut. What she was going to do she scarcely knew, just as she scarcely knew whither she was going. Though within a stone's-throw of her birthplace, the path down which she stumbled was as unfamiliar to her feet as the tempest of emotion was to her mind. A fever of excitement, anger, mistrust of everything and everybody surged through her veins. The road was silent, deserted; but even had it been thronged, the girl would not have hesitated. Amid all the confusion, but one thing was certain: Chandni must tell the truth; she must be found and made to tell the truth. But where? Yonder was the Mori gate; she had seen that before through the lattice, and that, at any rate, was a landmark. She would go there first and see. As she came within ear-shot of the tunnelled causeway, a woman's voice rang out in shrill laughter from the dark recesses to the right. Her first instinct was to pause; then second-thought made her keep straight on her way as if to pa.s.s through, till at the farther end of the causeway she turned suddenly to the left and sank down behind a plinth. It was as if a shadow had disappeared. A minute to regain her breath, and then she crept farther into the darkness, where, unless some belated gossipers should choose that side of the arch, she was secure. From over the way a clash of anklets and a low full voice, contrasting strangely with those high trills of laughter a.s.sured her that she had come straight upon her quarry. The rest was patience, till, sooner or later, the woman would be left alone. Sooner or later the laugh must cease; sooner or later even wickedness must tire and turn to sleep. So the girl sat crouched into herself in the curiously impa.s.sive att.i.tude of her race, her thin arms round the thin knees whereon her small chin rested. Not a very startling sight outwardly; though, to describe what lay within is wellnigh an impossible task with an audience of Western ears; for Azizan's knowledge would be to such ears incompatible with her ignorance, her jealousy and pa.s.sion with her patience. Such an audience must remember an upbringing foreign to all their experience, and imagine her, still as a statue, though the blood raced like liquid fire in her limbs and throbbed like sledge-hammers in her temples. The moon, sinking slowly, sent a slanting yellow light through the dust-haze, visible beyond the arched causeway; the village dogs ceased one by one the nightly challenge to their fellows; yet, still the laugh went on.

Would wickedness never tire? The wonder, and her own heart-beats lulled the girl to a drowsier patience. She woke to silence, and, standing up, strained eyes and ears into the shadows. Not a sound. She stole softly across the causeway, slipped into the recesses at the right, and listened again. A low breathing from one corner made her feel a way towards it, and her touch, light as a breeze, hovered over a figure on the ground wrapped from head to foot in a sheet like a corpse; yet she knew it could scarcely be Chandni, for she would not choose so airless a spot. But there must be rooms above, and a roof above that, and they were worth a trial before going on to the bazaar. Slowly, for she knew nothing of where she was, Azizan groped her way to some winding stairs, thence to a suite of low chambers, empty of all save the pigeons rustling and cooing at her step in the dark. Upwards again till, at a turn, an archway gave on a terraced roof not six feet square; and there, lying on a string cot, which, from its narrow resting-place, seemed suspended in mid-air, she saw the soft curves of a woman's figure outlined against the moon-lit dust-haze beyond. It was not a place for a sleep-walker's slumbers; not a place even for a restless one; but Chandni slept the sleep of the unjust, which, nine times out of ten, is sounder than that of the just. Her conscience never troubled her; and in addition she belonged to a race apart from the customs and creeds of the people. A race born to the profession of pandars and prost.i.tutes, openly, shamelessly.

So, not being afraid, like other women-folk, of sleeping in the moonlight with face uncovered, she lay carelessly as she had thrown herself down, her tinsel-set veil turned aside by one arm thrust under her head, the other stretched almost straight into the gulf of dusty air, which glittered faintly like the ghost of a sunbeam. Beneath its filmy net covering the bold sweep of her bosom rose and fell softly, with its faded burden of the past day's jasmine chaplets. They gave out a last breath of perfume as Azizan's thin brown fingers closed round the sleeper's throat.

'If thou stirrest,' whispered the girl to the startled eyes as they opened, 'I kill. Feel!'

Only a p.r.i.c.k above the heart, but joined to that scorching, stifling grip, it was sufficient to send the coming shriek back from Chandni's lips. She lay terror-stricken, staring up at the wild light eyes which, catching the moon rays as they dipped to the horizon, seemed to glow with a pale fire. This was no ghost! it was something worse than that; something that meant more than mere fright.

'Why didst send the Ayodhya pot to her? Why? Give it me back!'

Chandni slackened all over in sudden relief. If she could have laughed with that hand on her throat the shrill sound would no doubt have risen on the hot air. So that was all? Nothing but jealousy! Of all things in the world the easiest to rouse--or to allay--by lies, and she had plenty of those at her command. So many, that poor Azizan, after a time, wondered sullenly how she came to be sitting amicably on the string cot beside the woman whom she had meant to coerce.

'Poor little chicken,' said the courtesan in contemptuous consolation.