X.

Mrs. Macnay to Miss Bayley. Dear Miss Bayley,-I very much regret to have to trouble you, but I have been reminded by my lawyer that it would be very irregular if I did not go through the formality of asking you for references. Will you kindly let me have one or two? I am,

Yours truly,

Annie Macnay.

[Several dull and rather acid letters occur at this point.]

XI.

Miss Bayley to Mrs. Macnay. Dear Mrs. Macnay,-I am at present living in a small flat at Kensington, and previously to that I was travelling. So I have not very much experience as a paying guest. But I was with a Mrs. Crewd at 5, Wilmington Terrace, Eastbourne, for a few weeks, and she would perhaps answer your purpose, although I must warn you that her nature is, as I found out only too soon, thoroughly cantankerous, and her pen may easily be poisoned against myself. I am, Yours truly, Adelaide Bayley.

XII.

Miss Bayley to Mrs. Crewd. Dear Mrs. Crewd,-It has often trouPunch,

bled me to think that we have so completely lost sight of each other since I had to give up my pleasant rooms in your house. I write now because I have just received from a friend in Hong-Kong a case of tea, and remembering how fond you were of China tea I am sending you a parcel of it in memory of old times.

Yours sincerely,

Adelaide Bayley.

XIII.

Mrs. Crewd to Mrs. Macnay. Mrs. Crewd presents her compliments to Mrs. Macnay and begs to inform her that it is some time since Miss Bayley shared her house, and she cannot remember very clearly what happened; but Miss Bayley was always prompt with her share of the expenses.

XIV.

Mrs. Macnay to her Sister-in-law. (Extract.)

I am horribly afraid that Miss Bayley has got to come. Mrs. Vincent (who mimics her to perfection) is for breaking off negotiations, even now, at this last minute, but I don't see how to do it, and the money is, after all, very important.

In England they look upon India as the birthplace and home of Romance; they talk of the glamour of the gorgeous East, and, wrapped in the cloudy atmosphere of the North, fondly picture to themselves an Orient of sunshine and mystery, where nothing is what it seems, and in everything lies more than meets the eye. But they are wrong, hopelessly wrong.

The

East is the home of Truth unveiled and unashamed. She sits in the market-place in the full glare of noon, and men pass her without even a sidelong glint of the eye; and Destiny writes for every man his doom daily in leaguelong letters across the morning sky. He cannot choose but read. Consider yonder potter trudging wearily along the high road that runs in front of this

apology for a barn, called a bungalow. I observe him from the varandah. His wife, child on hip, and household gods in a well poised basket, jingles along meekly in his wake. The man is a potter; his personality is summed and exhausted in so many words. His forefathers must have made pots for untold generations back, and his sons will pound the clay so long as his seed endureth upon earth. He is a potter from and to all time. I know he is a potter for the same reason that the Sicilian poet's friends on their country walk recognized the tuneful Lycidas to be a goatherd, namely, because he looked exceedingly like a goatherd. It is even thus that I recognize that potter. He cannot possibly be a prince in disguise, or a Dalai Lama flying from the wrath to come, or anything other than that which he seems at first sight. There is no romance in the East, no concealment, no mystery. So I mused but a short month ago for the hundredth time. I know better now.

The day had died in a typical hot weather sunset smouldering in the West. I lay in a long chair, and thought of daffodils and soft meadow flowers, cloudy April mornings, and the white may lying in drifts over the green plain betwen Islip and Iffley. Flying foxes, singly and in dark companies, floated like lost souls out of the flaming sky, and, wheeling, settled to feed among the fruit trees of my compound.

The air was breathless. But no,-a dust-devil on the white road was making strenuous efforts to be born. At first, one saw only a tiny focus of whirling dust, a gyration as it were, immaterial, and absolute, a spinning zephyr, now failing, now waxing again; then, more sand and a lazy leaf or two were snatched into service; and lo, the thing had form and had begun to dance. To and fro it swayed and pirouetted and gained in power and

stature from moment to moment, no devil as yet, but rather a lissome slave dancing at the bidding of her master. She swept off the road through a gap in the dusty mangoes; her feet touched the open country and the sand of the bare desert, and in a twinkling she became a roaring fiend, her head in the clouds and her feet tearing the panting earth. A hapless young azalea tree is touched, stripped naked, and wrecked. Then the invisible lord of sandstorms and Djinns gave the order and the dance suddenly ceased. Leaves and twigs dropped dead from where they had whirled in the high heaven, and silence fell once more, the silence of the Indian hot months.

The man that pulled the punkah from behind my chair was evidently fast asleep. The uneven tugs at the cord told as much. Something held me back from waking him for sleep was in the drowsy air. There was a shuffle in the dust outside and the sound of tired feet slipping from travel-worn shoes that clung to the sole and dropped tardily. Then I became aware of a female figure advancing softly across the front of the house. A pair of eagle eyes, felt rather than seen, probed the gloom of the verandah until they rested on the limp Englishman in the long chair. The owner of the eyes paused as if in hesitation, craned a skinny neck this way and that, finally, stepped forward with a salutation and sat down on the stone plinth at my feet. We looked at one another. A striped squirrel slid down the verandah pillar, against which the seated woman leaned, and progressed in jerks towards the latest fallen crimson blossom of the Gold Mohur tree at my gate. treasure seized, one heard the sound of nibbling across the dusk. Calmly my visitor stared at me, and leisurely after the fashion of the East I contemplated her. She wore a short green jacket and an accordion-pleated skirt of dull

The

red: she might be any age between thirty and fifty; but of one thing there could be no doubt: she came from Rajputana. The proud set of the head, the swinging gait, the action of the hips in walking, all proclaim the Rajput and are foreign to our doughy beauties of the South. As for her face, breeding and character marked every feature. She must have been very handsome in her youth, but somehow the contemplation of her present expression made one pity her husband.

came

The punkah ceased to oscillate, and snores, furtive at first but rising to a shameless pitch of resonance, from behind my chair. The syrupy air, warm and thick with odors, seemed to pour into the verandah with deliberate intent to stifle. Then the woman spoke, and at the sound of her voice the snores died in a choke and the punkah began to move with the energy of repentance.

"Presence," she said, "I am a poor old woman, whose home is far from here, for as you may see from my dress [here she spread out the pleats of her faded skirt], I do not belong to this country but to another country." She paused and I felt the gimlet eyes watching for the effect her words might produce.

"I see," said I, "I am not blind nor am I an idiot. But how is it that a lady of noble family and one so highly educated [she had spoken in the purest Persian-Urdu] is tramping the world like a beggar, without attendants and having abandoned all modesty. This is matter for wonder."

She laughed, showing magnificent teeth in the shadow. "That," she said. "is my affair, oh, my son!"

The downright brutality of this answer was disconcerting. I had used towards her the honorific form of address. She had replied in the mode of speech suitable, according to the grammars, to intercourse between parents

and children, masters and servants, and jailors or judges and criminals. Englishmen in the East are not accustomed to this mood. Also I myself am a judge.

The cultured voice continued, with a sudden and insulting return to the language of courts and ceremony. "Lofty Portico of Justice, let it not be thought that this female slave is come on an idle errand, to thrust a written petition before the eyes of the Presence or weary him with chit-chat in the twilight. I come to tell a story, ay, and bringing news."

The little demon of quotation prompted me.

O nightingale! bring me tidings of the Spring,

I sang. She took me up with alacrity and completed the couplet, mouthing the Persian vowels with a confidence that only a sound classical education could have afforded.

But as for evil news, let the Owl bear it away.

It was true then that Purda-nishin ladies lightened the long Zenana days with study of Hafiz the graceful and Sa'adi the almost divine.

"I rejoice," she said, "in that my happy star has led me to the abode of the Presence, who is evidently a youth of superior attainments, a very Joseph, not one to drive the widow from his gates, but rather such a one as, having heard her tale patiently, will dismiss her with a gift. Listen, then, to the story of an ungrateful son of mine."

"Lady," said I, "ungrateful sons are many and all alike. What have I to do with your son?"

"Even this," answered she readily. "The Presence had a mother and doubtless at times forgets her. Then would my son be, as it were, kin to the Presence, since the wise have well said,

-Kind fly with kind Pigeon with pigeon, hawk with hawk.

Who knows but that even now the halls of the Presence shelter my son?"

It was too hot to argue, too hot even to call for an iced drink, in short, it remained only to close one's eyes and submit. It occurred to me that the punkah-man was pulling steadily and with more than usual regularity and finish.

"Know, then, that we people come of a respectable Rajput clan, and that a nephew of mine is Police Inspector in the service of the Sircar. As for me, I am a widow; three villages I own in fee simple, and I have an only son. The Presence is ignorant of marriage customs among us Rajputs, but he will understand that the boys of my family marry with none but the girls of a certain other family, for such is the rule among us. Now of that other family remains but one girl, and my son is the last marriageable male of my clan. It is, therefore ordained by the gods, and very necessary, that these two should marry, otherwise, our line will be as extinct as the Phoenix."

She settled her back against the verandah pillar and an eaves-dropping squirrel fled in sudden panic among the rotten rafters. I grunted assent to her views.

"Destiny," she continued, "had marked my son for advancement. He was a diamond among sons. He went to the Mission-i-School, and the Padre Sahib commended his virtue and industry. For his maps painted in vermilion and indigo he won a reward. The science of numbers he knew to perfection, so that he would often confound his teachers by his questions as well as by his answers. As to his beauty-" Over his head, by reason of his intelligence

The star of pre-eminence was shining. I had been trapped into a second quota

tion. The old woman snapped her fingers as mothers do when the foolish or malicious praise their children in their presence.

"So the time came when he must marry the only daughter of the other branch of the Rajputs. Now it seems to me that the Padre Sahib in the Mission-i-School had induced a devil to enter into my son, then a stripling of fifteen but well grown, for when the week of weddings came round, my son fled to the jungles and refused to come home. Then there was contention between him and his family for many a month, and though we put drugs into his food, that, having stupified him, we might marry him willy-nilly, yet he would vomit these up again and then rage like a must elephant. He said 'I am a grown man and will marry whom I please.' ""

"Oh abominable!" I groaned. The conduct of this unruly son was really most unconscionable.

"Yet in those days he lingered about the village, the companion of outcasts, it is true, but still under my eye, and I hoped, for we mothers are a sanguine race. But not long ago he disappeared, and the manner of his going I will now relate to the Presence.

"There lived in a neighboring village a Thakur, addicted beyond measure to hunting. Many deer and swine had this Thakur killed, and bears also and leopards not a few, but the desire of his heart was to slay a tiger, for he would often boast of an evening, sitting among the lads upon the village assembly-place, that if God sent a tiger across his path, he would surely bring the skin home, and feast all the village from sweeper to Brahmin without favor. One day this windbag saw my son in the fields and would sharpen his wit upon him, being aware, as was the whole country side, of the youth's disinclination to marry. 'Oh, such and such a one,' he shouted,-I cannot, in

the holy ear of the Presence, repeat his words. My son heard, but made no reply. Ingrate though he be, even in his madness he was never a fool.

A

Not long after the Thakur Sahib made great feasting over the betrothal of his daughter to a neighboring Thakur. hundred Brahmins he fed within his house, and men of other castes feasted in scores, caste by caste, sitting in rows along the verandahs and in the courtyards, and extolling the liberality of the Thakur Sahib. Then my son took a calf of the sacred village kine and painted it in turmeric and black and scarlet to resemble a tiger. Observe Presence! his science of painting maps in the school had turned his heart to mischief and sacrilege. In the dark of the night after the third day of the feasting, he tied the colored calf to a tree upon the village boundary. Then, when all were merry within, he sent a worthless man to rouse the Thakur crying out: 'A tiger has come; oh master, save us and our cattle! My son had previously gone round the village byres scaring the cattle by howling like a wolf, until they lowed and broke loose in terror. The Thakur Sahib called for his gun and, attended by a great concourse, went forth to slay the tiger. He saw the painted calf, and the feet of his intelligence were caught in the snare, so that he slew the sacred animal, firing not once nor twice, but until all his ammunition was spent.

Then when the Brahmins, his guests, saw that he was polluted, they went away from his presence silently and would feast no more with him, and the low-caste men laughed immoderately at him, and the father of the bridegroom took his son home. So the Thakur Sahib's face was blackened; and being outcasted he prayed the holy men to hasten to fix the fine that would make him clean again. To make a long story short, he paid them seven hundred rupees so that the latter feasting

was even greater than the former. But it was an angry host that paid the score, and he swore, holding the tail of the sacred cow, that, if he caught my son, he would have him flayed alive, law or no law. And since that day no one has looked on the face of my son,-an arrant rogue, an unlucky accursed child, a limb of the evil one."

The storm of her indignation swept me along. "A hard-baked, twice-cooked knave," I echoed; "a shameless son of shame, one better dead than alive, without hope of emendation, a consorter damned."

with vagabonds, wholly

When we two had finished abusing her son, a silence fell between us. Then the old lady rose upon her feet, a commanding figure in the gloom. "Sahib," said she, "were I to find my son to-night, what punishment, think you, would his villany merit?"

I thought until my head began to swim. It was hard to fit this crime to the Procrustean bed of the Indian Penal Code. "He must go home with his mother," I answered lamely.

At that instant the punkah came to an abrupt full stop; the punkah man sprang to his feet and seizing my knees, crouched, an abject figure between the projecting arms of the long chair. He lifted up his face to mine, and even in the dim light I could see his features working pitifully. Then in a high-pitched croak the words burst from his throat and-was I dreaming? -he spoke in English. "Sir," he said, "Honor! Lord! let me stay. "To err is human to forgive divine,' Poet Pope,— Mission School,-study English three years, all forgot,-all forgot!"

The croak ended in a queer sort of sob, but now the man was pouring out a torrent of supplication in the vernacular. Let the old woman his mother be sent away: he would stay and serve me faithfully as clerk, orderly, anything,