Part 17 (1/2)
Then we see a sweetmeat shop with a crowd outside and a cloud of flies bearing them company. While we look, many of the flies crawl slowly over the sticky, syrupy stuff which has just come from the pan, and get their legs entangled in it, but it doesn't seem to hinder the sale, which goes on cheerfully. There are sweets in rings and coils and fantastic shapes.
A child gets a large pink slab for two pice, and ten pice go to the penny, that is to say, the anna, so it is not dear. The buyer tucks the sticky stuff up in the corner of her garment and ties it carefully into a knot before starting homeward.
Standing a little aloof from the crowd and looking at them disdainfully is a small boy with a twisted cord slung across his left shoulder. ”He be Brahman, Sahib,” says Ramaswamy timidly. ”Very proud and not eating anything dirty peoples touch, just having had cord.” Standing where he is, so as not to approach nearer to the lad, he asks a few questions, which are answered curtly and proudly, with a glance thrown across at us as much as if to say they wouldn't have been answered at all except for our presence.
”Just two, three days he been made Brahman,” explains Ramaswamy.
But he was born a Brahman, of course, and what Ramaswamy means is that up till then he was counted a child and could play and run about with other children without responsibilities; now that he has been invested with the cord he has taken up his birthright and is of the highest caste, the caste from which the priests come; he may not eat anything prepared by a lower caste, or even let others touch him, for he is set apart, and very proud of his new dignity in spite of the many difficulties it carries with it.
The child who stands staring at us with her shawl over her head is a little girl about the same age as the boy. She has been grinding corn between two stones and is a very thin and miserable little wretch. Her clothes are rags and there are no bangles on her little brown ankles.
Ramaswamy tells us she is a widow! That child? She has probably never even seen the boy-husband who was so unlucky as to die; but because he did she is scorned by everyone. The worst life in all India is that of a widow. She has no ornaments, no amus.e.m.e.nts, and is treated worse than a slavey in a boarding-house, and for her there is no escape.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A POTTER.]
Right out in the street sits a man weaving a web of wonderful colours; he throws the shuttles, carrying different coloured threads, across and across, without seeming to look at them, and all the time the web is growing into an intricate pattern under his fingers. So his father wove, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. All these crafts run in families. A little farther on is a potter spinning a wheel with his feet, while the soft lump of dull-coloured clay takes shape beneath his clever thumb as it races round. It seems to grow and swell and curve exquisitely as if it were a living thing. There are few sights more fascinating than a potter at work. You have often heard of the ”potter's thumb,” I expect? The thumb grows broad and flat and capable, because it is the chief instrument with which the potter works. On the floor beside him lie many of the clay jars of different sizes and shapes ready for the baking, others are being baked. There is always a good sale for them, and a potter in India flourishes exceedingly. Even now there is a woman pa.s.sing us with a pot balanced on her head and a child on her hip. She swings along in the dust with a graceful gliding step, for she has been used to carrying things on her head almost from babyhood. These pots are brittle enough and frequently get broken, and even the poorest households must have a supply of them. But what helps the potter to make a living more than anything else is the custom that when a death occurs in a family, or a new life arrives in it, all the pots must be broken and new ones bought! It is a symbol of the life that has gone out and the new life beginning.
In church you must have heard those grandly poetic lines--
”Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
”Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto G.o.d who gave it.”
Pa.s.s on to the silversmiths' quarter. Any of these men can do fine and beautiful work with very few tools. If you want anything made you pay them in a queer way. For the finished article is put in the scales and weighed against rupees thrown into the other balance, and when the rupees equal it then you give them to the workman, together with so many annas in each rupee for his work.
How can we ever take in all this varied life, so different from the life we are used to? The women sitting on the balconies above, the pariah dogs prowling for sc.r.a.ps below, the druggists and spice-sellers, the fruit and vegetable stalls? Over it all is that peculiar, scented, musty bazaar smell, made up of saffron and wood and dirt, with which we are already so familiar.
Wonderful Delhi! A city teeming with myriads of men of many races and customs, living side by side. Successor of seven cities which have stood here or hereabout in successive ages. From the earliest days a place of consequence, a place to be reckoned with, and now, by the proclamation of the King-Emperor, the first city in the land, as it is already the centre!
[Ill.u.s.tration: CLUMSY BOATS WITH THATCHED ROOFS.]
CHAPTER XIX
TO THE DEATH!
A curious building, isn't it? I mean that one right in front of us. It is something like a very large and many-sided crown, built of stone and set upon the ground. The sides are pierced with windows of the same sort as those seen in churches, and on each of the angles there is a little pinnacle. It rises up serenely against the soft blue sky of this early morning. We are far from Delhi now, having arrived at Cawnpore late last night, and we have come out here first thing this morning. It is only seven now.
Cawnpore! The Mutiny! Those two things rush simultaneously into the mind, for Cawnpore is a.s.sociated with the most awful scenes of the Mutiny, and no Briton can ever think of it without those scenes flas.h.i.+ng before him.
Come nearer and pa.s.s inside the crown and you will see in the centre a great angel of the usual sort, with high sweeping wings, holding palm branches folded across its breast. It marks the Well of Cawnpore.
You know that story, of course, and yet, as we sit here, on the very spot where it all happened, with the Indian sky above us, we cannot help recalling it once more. In telling it I shall not dwell on the agonies and bloodshed which have hallowed this place for ever; they are done with, and those who suffered have been at rest for nearly sixty years.
The deep peace around us overlies their torments and forbids us to think too much of the darker side of the picture. But the heroism, the courage, the indomitable spirit that animated these men and women, these things live for ever, rising up from the earth in a flood of inspiration for all who pa.s.s over the place.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WELL OF CAWNPORE.]
There are certain little animals called Tasmanian devils, who do not know what it is to give in; they die fighting and attack their persecutors as long as one limb hangs on to another; of such stuff were the people besieged at Cawnpore. They were encamped here on a wretched piece of flat ground, quite open except for a low mud wall, which anyone could have jumped over easily. There were about nine hundred and fifty of them altogether, some soldiers, some civilians, some women and children and a few native soldiers who remained loyal. Outside were unending hordes of natives well armed and well trained, because the greater part were the men of the native regiments who had mutinied, known by the name of Sepoys. A few huts built of thin brick were all the shelter the beleaguered people had; they were constantly under a shrieking storm of bullets and sh.e.l.ls, and were ringed around by steel.
You would have said two days at the outside would see the end of it, and that then the black hordes would sweep clean over that field, having wiped out the garrison completely; but so amazing is the power of pluck that those within held the hordes at bay for twenty-three days! They not only prevented any single Sepoy from getting inside alive, but they constantly sallied out and acted on the defensive, burning their enemies' defences and killing scores of them, while thousands fled in confusion before them! The sublime impudence of it! And all the time they were short of food; women and children were laid in holes in the earth covered with planks to protect them from the bullets. And water--ah, that was the worst--water had to be fetched from a well which was quite exposed in the midst of the encampment, and the Sepoys kept up an incessant fire on it. We are now beside it, this well where water was drawn at the price of blood, and yet volunteers were never lacking. The very ground our feet now rest upon was ringed around with the bodies of those who laid down their lives for the women and children. There was another well, a little distance off, now marked by an Iona cross, and to this, under cover of night, the British conveyed their dead for burial.