BEYOND THE PALE.
"Love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed. I went in search of
love and lost myself."
Hindu Proverb.
A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and
breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black.
Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things--
neither sudden, alien, nor unexpected.
This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe
limits of decent every-day society, and paid for it heavily.
He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the
second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will
never do so again.
Deep away in the heart of the City, behind Jitha Megji's bustee,
lies Amir Nath's Gully, which ends in a dead-wall pierced by one
grated window. At the head of the Gully is a big cow-byre, and the
walls on either side of the Gully are without windows. Neither
Suchet Singh nor Gaur Chand approved of their women-folk looking
into the world. If Durga Charan had been of their opinion, he would
have been a happier man to-day, and little Biessa would have been
able to knead her own bread. Her room looked out through the grated
window into the narrow dark Gully where the sun never came and where
the buffaloes wallowed in the blue slime. She was a widow, about
fifteen years old, and she prayed the Gods, day and night, to send
her a lover; for she did not approve of living alone.
One day the man--Trejago his name was--came into Amir Nath's Gully
on an aimless wandering; and, after he had passed the buffaloes,
stumbled over a big heap of cattle food.
Then he saw that the Gully ended in a trap, and heard a little laugh
from behind the grated window. It was a pretty little laugh, and
Trejago, knowing that, for all practical purposes, the old Arabian
Nights are good guides, went forward to the window, and whispered
that verse of "The Love Song of Har Dyal" which begins:
Can a man stand upright in the face of the naked Sun;
or a Lover in the Presence of his Beloved?
If my feet fail me, O Heart of my Heart, am I to blame,
being blinded by the glimpse of your beauty?
There came the faint tchinks of a woman's bracelets from behind the
grating, and a little voice went on with the song at the fifth
verse:
Alas! alas! Can the Moon tell the Lotus of her love when the
Gate of Heaven is shut and the clouds gather for the rains?
They have taken my Beloved, and driven her with the pack-horses
to the North.
There are iron chains on the feet that were set on my heart.
Call to the bowman to make ready--
The voice stopped suddenly, and Trejago walked out of Amir Nath's
Gully, wondering who in the world could have capped "The Love Song
of Har Dyal" so neatly.
Next morning, as he was driving to the office, an old woman threw a
packet into his dog-cart. In the packet was the half of a broken
glass bangle, one flower of the blood red dhak, a pinch of bhusa or
cattle-food, and eleven cardamoms. That packet was a letter--not a
clumsy compromising letter, but an innocent, unintelligible lover's
epistle.
Trejago knew far too much about these things, as I have said. No
Englishman should be able to translate object-letters. But Trejago
spread all the trifles on the lid of his office-box and began to
puzzle them out.
A broken glass-bangle stands for a Hindu widow all India over;
because, when her husband dies a woman's bracelets are broken on her
wrists. Trejago saw the meaning of the little bit of the glass.
The flower of the dhak means diversely "desire," "come," "write," or
"danger," according to the other things with it. One cardamom means
"jealousy;" but when any article is duplicated in an object-letter,
it loses its symbolic meaning and stands merely for one of a number
indicating time, or, if incense, curds, or saffron be sent also,
place. The message ran then:--"A widow dhak flower and bhusa--at
eleven o'clock." The pinch of bhusa enlightened Trejago. He saw--
this kind of letter leaves much to instinctive knowledge--that the
bhusa referred to the big heap of cattle-food over which he had
fallen in Amir Nath's Gully, and that the message must come from the
person behind the grating; she being a widow. So the message ran
then:--"A widow, in the Gully in which is the heap of bhusa, desires
you to come at eleven o'clock."
Trejago threw all the rubbish into the fireplace and laughed. He
knew that men in the East do not make love under windows at eleven
in the forenoon, nor do women fix appointments a week in advance.
So he went, that very night at eleven, into Amir Nath's Gully, clad
in a boorka, which cloaks a man as well as a woman. Directly the
gongs in the City made the hour, the little voice behind the grating
took up "The Love Song of Har Dyal" at the verse where the Panthan
girl calls upon Har Dyal to return. The song is really pretty in
the Vernacular. In English you miss the wail of it. It runs
something like this:--
Alone upon the housetops, to the North
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,--
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
Below my feet the still bazar is laid
Far, far below the weary camels lie,--
The camels and the captives of thy raid,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
My father's wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father's house am I.--
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
As the song stopped, Trejago stepped up under the grating and
whispered:--"I am here."
Bisesa was good to look upon.
That night was the beginning of many strange things, and of a double
life so wild that Trejago to-day sometimes wonders if it were not
all a dream. Bisesa or her old handmaiden who had thrown the
object-letter had detached the heavy grating from the brick-work of
the wall; so that the window slid inside, leaving only a square of
raw masonry, into which an active man might climb.
In the day-time, Trejago drove through his routine of office-work,
or put on his calling-clothes and called on the ladies of the
Station; wondering how long they would know him if they knew of poor
little Bisesa. At night, when all the City was still, came the walk
under the evil-smelling boorka, the patrol through Jitha Megji's
bustee, the quick turn into Amir Nath's Gully between the sleeping
cattle and the dead walls, and then, last of all, Bisesa, and the
deep, even breathing of the old woman who slept outside the door of
the bare little room that Durga Charan allotted to his sister's
daughter. Who or what Durga Charan was, Trejago never inquired; and
why in the world he was not discovered and knifed never occurred to
him till his madness was over, and Bisesa . . . But this comes
later.
Bisesa was an endless delight to Trejago. She was as ignorant as a
bird; and her distorted versions of the rumors from the outside
world that had reached her in her room, amused Trejago almost as
much as her lisping attempts to pronounce his name--"Christopher."
The first syllable was always more than she could manage, and she
made funny little gestures with her rose-leaf hands, as one throwing
the name away, and then, kneeling before Trejago, asked him, exactly
as an Englishwoman would do, if he were sure he loved her. Trejago
swore that he loved her more than any one else in the world. Which
was true.
After a month of this folly, the exigencies of his other life
compelled Trejago to be especially attentive to a lady of his
acquaintance. You may take it for a fact that anything of this kind
is not only noticed and discussed by a man's own race, but by some
hundred and fifty natives as well. Trejago had to walk with this
lady and talk to her at the Band-stand, and once or twice to drive
with her; never for an instant dreaming that this would affect his
dearer out-of-the-way life. But the news flew, in the usual
mysterious fashion, from mouth to mouth, till Bisesa's duenna heard
of it and told Bisesa. The child was so troubled that she did the
household work evilly, and was beaten by Durga Charan's wife in
consequence.
A week later, Bisesa taxed Trejago with the flirtation. She
understood no gradations and spoke openly. Trejago laughed and
Bisesa stamped her little feet--little feet, light as marigold
flowers, that could lie in the palm of a man's one hand.
Much that is written about "Oriental passion and impulsiveness" is
exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true;
and when an Englishman finds that little, it is quite as startling
as any passion in his own proper life. Bisesa raged and stormed,
and finally threatened to kill herself if Trejago did not at once
drop the alien Memsahib who had come between them. Trejago tried to
explain, and to show her that she did not understand these things
from a Western standpoint. Bisesa drew herself up, and said simply:
"I do not. I know only this--it is not good that I should have made
you dearer than my own heart to me, Sahib. You are an Englishman.
I am only a black girl"--she was fairer than bar-gold in the Mint--
"and the widow of a black man."
Then she sobbed and said: "But on my soul and my Mother's soul, I
love you. There shall no harm come to you, whatever happens to me."
Trejago argued with the child, and tried to soothe her, but she
seemed quite unreasonably disturbed. Nothing would satisfy her save
that all relations between them should end. He was to go away at
once. And he went. As he dropped out at the window, she kissed his
forehead twice, and he walked away wondering.
A week, and then three weeks, passed without a sign from Bisesa.
Trejago, thinking that the rupture had lasted quite long enough,
went down to Amir Nath's Gully for the fifth time in the three
weeks, hoping that his rap at the sill of the shifting grating would
be answered. He was not disappointed.
There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir
Nath's Gully, and struck the grating, which was drawn away as he
knocked. From the black dark, Bisesa held out her arms into the
moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the
stumps were nearly healed.
Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one
in the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp--knife,
sword or spear--thrust at Trejago in his boorka. The stroke missed
his body, but cut into one of the muscles of the groin, and he
limped slightly from the wound for the rest of his days.
The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from
inside the house--nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall,
and the blackness of Amir Nath's Gully behind.
The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a
madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near
the river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went
home bareheaded.
What the tragedy was--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless
despair, told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and
she tortured to tell, whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what
became of Bisesa--Trejago does not know to this day. Something
horrible had happened, and the thought of what it must have been
comes upon Trejago in the night now and again, and keeps him company
till the morning. One special feature of the case is that he does
not know where lies the front of Durga Charan's house. It may open
on to a courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind
any one of the gates of Jitha Megji's bustee. Trejago cannot tell.
He cannot get Bisesa--poor little Bisesa--back again. He has lost
her in the City, where each man's house is as guarded and as
unknowable as the grave; and the grating that opens into Amir Nath's
Gully has been walled up.
But Trejago pays his calls regularly, and is reckoned a very decent
sort of man.
There is nothing peculiar about him, except a slight stiffness,
caused by a riding-strain, in the right leg.
