Voices in the Night. Flora Annie Webster Steel
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pieces of cake, Miss Dwummond, 'cos I could lend it to other people till I weally did want it; but if it was my vewy own, you see'--he hesitated, then a sudden comprehension seemed to come to him--'then I could fight all the vewy biggest big boys wifout caring. For I could pop into my gwave an' laugh at 'em, even if I was licked--'cos--'cos I should have won weally--shouldn't I, sir?'
The moon shone clear on the ruins before them, and all around them, hidden in the shadows of the trees, lay the little world which forty years before had defied a big one. Through the still silence came only that twittering of birds fighting for a roosting-place, until the man's voice said evenly--
'It is a question, Jerry, "how far high failure overleaps the bound of low successes." Ask Miss Drummond; I don't know.'
The answering woman's voice came swiftly. 'Surely this is no place for an Englishman to talk of failure!'
He turned sharply. So this girl was at it now; she too wanted to rouse him; she had heard the story--or part of it.
'I almost wish it were,' he answered bitterly; 'then we might forget it. But the glory of it gets to our heads--we come back to it again and again.'
He stopped abruptly, for a tenor voice rose in sweet undertones upon that twittering of birds--
'There is a green hill far away,
Outside a city wall.'
The singing and the faint crush of gravel ceased together, as the singer, passing them, drew up and touched the old billycock hat.
'Beg parding, sir,' said John Ellison, loafer, 'but p'r'aps you'd care to 'ear there was a man dead o' plague taken out o' the train I come in this mornin'.'
'Thanks,' replied Jack Raymond. 'I know there have been several isolated cases.'
'Jes' so, sir; not as there's so much isolation, not to speak of, in them third-class cattle-pens,' assented the mellow voice; and as the footstep passed on, it kept time to the refrain of
'Wait for the wagon, and we'll all take a ride.'
'I expect we shall,' remarked Jack Raymond grimly, and his mind reverted to Grace Arbuthnot and her husband. There might be need for that safe-conduct ere long. Well, they must manage things as best they could; he wouldn't.
'Oh! I do hope there'll be a wow, a weal wow!' came Jerry's prayerful voice.
CHAPTER V
SHARK LANE
There was no quainter spot in all Nushapore than Shark Lane (as the road near the public offices where the lawyers congregated was generally called), though at first sight it seemed to differ little from its neighbours. Broad, white, its tree-set margins were studded with the usual inconsequent-looking stucco gate-posts of an Indian station, which, guiltless of any fence, serve to mark the short carriage-drives leading back to the houses.
And these again--colour-washed pink, yellow, or blue--were even as other houses of the second-class. Yet it did not need the placards on those same gate-posts, announcing that 'Mr. Lala Râm Nâth' or 'Mr. Syyed Abdul Rahmân,' 'barristers-at-law,' lived within, to tell the passer-by that the inhabitants were not European.
To begin with, somewhere or another, there was almost sure to be a grass hurdle visible--the grass hurdle which in India does the duty of a hoarding and ensures privacy. Indeed, a knowledgable eye could infer the exact degree to which the social life within was at variance with the Western architecture in which it dwelt by the number and position of such hurdles. Two or three, merely blocking in an arch of verandah, being indicative of a lingering dislike to publicity in some 'new woman'; a dozen or more, screening in a patch of garden ground, showing the rigorous seclusion of the old.
True, in not a few cases, this sign was absent, but then a nameless air of utter desolation, a blank stare out on the world, told its tale of a keener quarrel still--of family ties, family life, lost absolutely in the chase after Western ways, Western ideas. In such houses the only sign of life from dawn to dusk, barring a furtive wielder of a grass broom raising clouds of dust at stated intervals, would be the rickety hired carriage, like a green box on wheels, which, every morning and every evening, would turn out and in between those inconsequent gate-posts, conveying a solitary young man and a pile of law-books to and from the courts.
Such a very solitary-looking young man, that the question sprang inevitably to the spectator's lips, 'Is the game worth the candle?'
There were others, besides spectators, in Shark Lane who asked the question, and were not sure of the answer. Miriam-bibi, Hâfiz Ahmad's wife, for instance, who, as Aunt Khôjee put it, had been taken away to live as a mem, felt it was not. Of course it was dignified to eat in one room, sit in another, and sleep in a third, as if this trinity of habit were Heaven's decree. Then, undoubtedly, small bronze feet did look entrancing in small bronze high-heeled shoes. But when there could be no novel-reading, no writing of notes, no arranging of flowers and playing of the piano, and when you were accustomed to eat and sleep when the fancy took you? Then one room was quite sufficient in which to be dull and solitary, since there were no friends or relations near to come in for a gossip.
Besides, it was undeniable that the pretty bronze shoes pinched the toes that were accustomed to greater freedom.
Therefore it was a joy, indeed, when, on Sundays, the green box on wheels, instead of taking Hâfiz Ahmad to court, took her back to the close, familiar city; to the evil-smelling bazaars below, and the scented, sensual woman's life above, so full of laughter and quarrelling, so full of sunshine and seclusion, with its unending suggestion of sex.
Full also, to Miriam's intense delight, of betel-chewing and tobacco-smoking; for though Hâfiz Ahmad permitted neither in Shark Lane, he never noticed the resultant signs of either on her return. So proving himself possessed of that master's degree in the art of compromise which young India has to take before attempting even a bachelor's in any other.
For even Miriam found single-mindedness impossible in Shark Lane, and her eulogiums on her new life had to be so strenuous in the city that even simple Aunt Khôjee remarked that 'wise hens never cackled over their own nests unless they were empty!'
On Monday mornings too, after her debauch in city ways, Miriam found it necessary to be aggressively European. She would even go so far as to eat the lightly-boiled egg of civilisation for her breakfast--the egg which calls for saltcellars and spoons, in other words for refinement and luxury. And when her husband had departed in the green box with his law-books, she would yawn dutifully in all three rooms, till nature could no more. So she would send surreptitiously for the cook's wife and baby, and adjourn to a hurdle-closed verandah where her visitors could be properly screened from the new world. Since, let the master do as he chose, there would have been noses on the green in the servant's house had its womenkind allowed the tips of theirs to be seen by strangers!
So Miriam would be comparatively content till the advent of the green box sent her back to three rooms, and a pair of bronze slippers.
On the whole, this double life of hers was a very fair example of most lives in Shark Lane where, despite all the high aspirations after truth and reality, it was quite impossible to reach either; since every one was quite aware that they were trying an experiment, and that a doubtful one.
This was the case more especially in the last house in Shark Lane, just where it merged into the more fashionable River Road. Here, at the corner, a very decorative pair of posts announcing that Mr. Chris Davenant lived within, stood cheek by jowl beside a similar pair with Mr. Lucanaster's name upon them; and though one of the two houses was screened, it was screened by trellises and creepers, behind which