Waste: The Story of a Sweet Little Girl

I

I COULD tell many stories about Ayshan’s childhood; for she was a pupil in my first love among schools, in the days when no child on earth seemed to me common. I had not yet grown unappreciative of the quaint ways which the girls of that group had of showing their child-love for me. Every day, charming me, they increased my vocabulary. I remember the very hour I learned from them the Punjabi equivalent of ‘wee ’uns’ — a word which my ignorance interpreted as ‘ little chunks. ’

I liked the idea of the expression so much that I used to amuse myself and them by calling them carefully thoughtout variations of it. ‘Come on, now, wee bits,’ I would say to them, ‘let’s do it this way!' Or, ‘How many times, little pieces of life, have I to ask you not to leave your needles on the floor — for your little bare feet?’ Or, ‘Stop quarreling, small scraps; love each other.’

One day I heard Ayshan exclaim with spirit to a newcomer who was scorning my unidiomatic endearments, ‘ Of course no one else talks that way! She makes those names up for us. She pulls them right out of the love in her heart.’ Anyone who could have heard her tone, without staying awake nights to compose new names, would have been, indeed, a poor stick.

I shall always cherish one Christmas day she immortalized for me. When one is just as many miles away from home as it is possible to get on this globe, Christmas is apt to be, for the sentimental, a bitter occasion. In the middle of the morning of Ayshan’s day, one hundred small, tinkling girls were seated cross-legged on the brick pavement of the school court, golden sunlight flowing round them like a blinding sea, parrots screaming in the trees beyond the wall. I had just finished distributing to the gaudy little rainbows a hundred dolls ordered with a grand disregard for expense accounts, when I became sickeningly aware that joy had turned to tragedy. In a flash I saw my terrible mistake: only half the dolls were fair-haired! The girls with the yellow-haired children were marveling over them, glowing, caressing them with mother-ecstasy; while those who had been given dark-haired children were blinking to keep back tears.

Surely no blunder but Balaclava equaled mine! I might have known that every child would want a fair baby, like the lovely English children who are occasionally carefully conducted through our street! The second I perceived this, one small child threw down her heartbreaking gift and stretched out on the floor, sobbing. Ayshan was nearest me; so, inspired verbally for once, I picked up her rejected child.

‘What a nice baby she is!’ I said to her. ‘Don’t you think she looks like me?’

Almost before I had finished, her thin little face grew gay and proud.

‘Oh!’ she cried out to the girl next her, ‘I don’t think much of your faded doll. Look at mine! She’s the color of the Miss Sahib!’

Instantly the sun burst out over the mourners. Mourners, did I say? Triumphant boasters, rather! They hugged their children with perfect satisfaction. But Ayshan gloried most. Did anyone dare to suggest before her loyal little face that the Miss Sahib had not the most beautiful hair in the world? She tolerated no such suggestion. The Anglo-Saxon mothers were so overcome by the sudden desirability of my complexion, that I had to defend them from her vaunting. If the darkhaired dolls were like me now, the fairhaired ones were exactly like me when I was a baby. And so, having restored hilarity to the heart of each parent, I sat down among the cooing little things, and taught their dolls tricks. It was a lovely morning that we had.

That night in bed I lay thinking of a place where very pleasant voices would be saying to children rehearsing the glories of the day, ‘This is n’t a real Christmas, you remember. It is n’t really Christmas till Auntie gets home. And then— !’ That was pain. Ayshan was its healing. I remembered her earnest little face. I heard her saying, ‘I don’t care. I love a doll like the Miss Sahib better than any other kind there is. I would n’t have any other kind if they gave it to me!’ After all, I meditated, where there are lovers like Ayshan, there are compensations for anything.

She must have been about ten at that time. During the next two years, being busy with foolish necessary things, I had far too little time to play in my school, and I saw her only occasionally. She was always shabbily dressed, thin-faced, hollow-eyed, proud — much like the rest of the girls, except that she responded more eagerly to tenderness than any of them. I had only to say, in a certain tone, ‘Well, Ayshan?’ to make her face glow like a candle lighted. The third summer she left school because she was too big to come any longer, her family said; and anyway, they were making wedding arrangements for her.

I heard more of their plans for her, one day, when I was talking with an old woman who lived in one of the great windowless houses adjoining the hospital. Very seldom indeed she condescended to come to the clinic, but that morning she had slipped in to tell the doctor about the distressing symptoms of her pregnant daughter-in-law. ‘Come over to see her,’ she said to me, veiling herself as securely for the few steps to her home as if she had been going a day’s journey. ‘Her husband is marrying again, and she is very sad.’

So I went home with her, and we found the son’s wife sitting on a low stool, embroidering. She started heavily to get up before I could beg her not to, and then had my chair put close by her side. When I was seated, she laid her arm on my knee and for a moment leaned against me. That was her only complaint. From a woman with a face like hers, so finely meagre in line, so perfectly controlled, there could be no common outcry. Then, because her hand on my knee said more than I could answer, I reached for the silk thing on her lap, and began, —

‘How perfectly beautiful! Let me see it.’

Stretching it out before me, she showed me a kurta — a woman’s garment, with a hole cut for the neck and an opening about eighteen inches deep down the front. Around this opening, which was faced with pale green, and around the bottom of the garment, she had embroidered an exquisite pattern in gold and a little black.

‘For his new wife,’ she informed me, in a perfectly even voice.

‘It’s splendid of you, feeling as you do,’ I said calmly. If her voice could hide its sorrow, mine could surely hide its pity. And, still looking closely at her work, I noticed that, on either side of the conventionalized pattern down the front, there were scattered irregularly, here and there, small gold flowers. I had seen something like this on garments before, and I said, — to speak safely, — ‘This part of the design I never quite understood. What do you call it?’ Each pattern has a lovely name in our town.

‘Oh,’ she said, in the same tone, ‘if tears fall while you work, you cover the stains with that sort of little flowers.’

Thus does one stumble into tragedy. I was afraid to speak again, and I had no need to, for she went on, —

‘You know her, I believe. She was in your school. Ayshan, the daughter of Khuda Baksh Khan — the one who lives in the quarter of the foreign well. She’s quite young.’

‘It’s a perfectly senseless marriage,’ exclaimed the mother-in-law. I never heard of anything so silly. No money in it, even.’

‘The family sent me these,’ the sad woman went on, showing me a pair of thick gold bracelets she was wearing, ‘so I would be kind to her. They need not have troubled! Have I not daughters of my own ? They say she’s rather plain. What do you think?’

‘She’s just a little thing,’ I assured her; ‘just a nice little child, not especially good-looking. She’s quiet. I don’t think you’ll have trouble with her.’

‘I’m sure I won’t,’ she replied; ‘very sure.’

For a long time she kept on sitting there, while the old woman scolded away about her son’s folly.

I knew that as a young man he had been famous in the city for his business ability. When the first doctor was building the hospital, she turned to him repeatedly for help in difficulties, and for years he had bought her supply of fuel for the whole institution. But by the time the new doctor had come, he had drunk himself, not only useless, but perfectly disgusting. He was now perhaps sixty, and fat, with a red, leering face, and white hair and beard dyed red with henna — this gentleman who had bargained for Ayshan.

II

During the week of festivities which preceded the wedding, I was asked, one evening, to have dinner with Ayshan. Why her mother invited me, I don’t know. Certainly she liked me no more than I liked her. She was a hard-faced woman with a mocking tongue. Perhaps she thought that, as her daughter was to live very near me, it was well to be civil. I accepted the invitation only because I knew it would make the children happy. And as I sat at dusk in the narrow verandah off the busy courtyard, and, remembering the sage who said that love digesteth all things, ate rich and spicy meats and rice, rich and sweet puddings, and suicidal sweets which the little girls set before me with disputing ceremony and excited laughter, I was very glad I had come. The virgins who rioted through ihe wedding gayety were all from my school — more than ten of them, all very foolish and giggling. We played together for a while as it grew darker, until, all at once, the women who had gathered on the roof above struck their little drums into throbbing life, and began their wedding songs.

We rushed upstairs — it would of course have been tragic to miss the music! The guests were seated on a heavy carpet, in the starlight, and they made a place for me and the girls who crowded around me. Only a few of the women knew me, for which reason I noticed one after another stop and ask her neighbor who I was and why I was there. The musician was playing a little drum so unlike any I had seen, that for a little while I sat watching her as she thrummed out the tune on it.

When my eyes turned away from it, they met those of a little eight-year-old sitting by me, who shivered, and turned quietly away from me. Her expression aroused me. I began listening to the song, getting it word for word from the woman next to me. The more I understood, the angrier I got. I looked around at the small bits, and I saw at once that they had had no difficulty in understanding it. One by one they turned the thoughts in their eyes away from mine, in shame. It was a perfectly naked song, too hot and heavy for childhood, and it went on and on, to the crude and primitive passion of its rhythm, getting ranker all the time. I sat helplessly reflecting that this, and more like it, had been the only food for the small girls’ minds for the week, and the cruelty of it made me boil. Was n’t life ultimately to be complicated enough for these little women, without darkening them now, in their childhood, by its questions beyond solution? Ought they not to have a few days of innocence — of unconsciousness of its devastating satisfaction?

After what seemed like a long time, the singers came to the gross and noisy climax, and Ayshan’s mother asked me how I liked the song—because she knew I did not like it.

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘In my country,’ I began, — a magic phrase, ‘in my country,’ — ‘they do things differently.’

With one voice they exclaimed, ‘Tell us how they marry in your country.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘where there is the religion of Jesus, there are no marriagesongs like that for little children. He forbids it. He said one day when there were children about him that it would be better to have a millstone tied about your neck’ — in the room below there were two exhausting millstones — ‘and to be cast into the river in flood than to teach songs like that to little girls.’

In the stillness that followed we could hear, from the swollen river a few steps away, great logs floated down from Himalayan forests thunder and boom as they crashed into one another in the whirling torrent.

Ayshan’s mother shrugged her shoulders in return, and looked at the girls.

‘Oh, well, anyway,’ she said, ‘they are n’t children. All of them that are n’t married this year, will be, next.’

This was not true. Some of them — the eight-year-old—might escape four, five, even six years yet.

Then another woman, sighing, uttered their wisdom thus: ‘They must be made ready.’

After all, this was their feminine mercy. Since the prowling lust of the world made it impossible for their daughters to remain unmarried, it was the mothers’ part to see that marriage was made, if not desirable, at least tolerable. I got their only possible point of view. It made me sick.

We talked for a while about American marriages— of grown women (just fancy!); of a country where grown girls dare to remain unmarried; and of strong babies. This was a mild diet for small brides after what they had been having.

Ayshan led me down to the door when I came away, and there she seized upon me.

‘ Miss Sahib,’ she cried, ‘ take me with you. Let me go away! I will work like your servants— I will be a sweeper—an outcast — a Christian. Take me away — I am afraid! Let me go with you — ’ Oh, I wish one of the wise women of the world might have had to stand there— one of those who, knowing her way so perfectly through life, lives unperplexed. What could I say to the child? There was no way by which she could escape this marriage, since Indian girls are not old enough to decide whether or not they will marry until long after they are married; such is the wisdom of that blind nation now raving about self-government. If I had argued with her that the marriage to this drunken old man she had never seen was unnatural, it would only have added to her terror.

I said, comforting her, ‘My dear, it will be all right. Don’t worry about the other wife. She is a kind woman. And such a lovely house — you will live just near me — ’

She cried out, ‘Oh, I thought English people never told lies!’

After that, she never trusted me again.

Without much noise or many lights, or feasts and singing, they brought her at once to her husband’s home to live, a month after the other wife’s fourth baby was born. It scarcely could have been a joyful home-coming, for the house was filled with women who slipped sadly out and in the room where the prostrate mother lay dying. I have often wondered how the two women met — whether the watchers decked out the shrunken one in shining veils, and bolstered her up to see the new wife; whether with her last gasps she gave the child the silk garment embroidered with the pattern of tears. I only know what the women said and what Ayshan heard on every hand every day until the long mourning was over. They believed what I believed, and what I think the doctor believed, although she never would say so — that the woman died of a broken heart. She was not the first woman I have seen sicken and die because she wanted to die. The girl knew that the husband said it was a stubborn and inconsiderate death, interrupting his honeymoon. She knew that every accent of the death-song, every tear shed by her friends, all the deep sighs, cried out against the world’s injustice to women. They all said, — some bitterly, some with resignation,—‘It’s our luck. We’re only women.’ She understood now exactly how much she was worth to the man, and how little.

She had almost nothing to do when the mourning was over. The old mother-in-law cared for the baby till it died, and managed the large household. The family consisted normally of the husband, Ayshan, and the mother-in-law, two half-grown sons of the dead wife —his second one—and her little daughter, two decrepit aunts, and two woman servants. Besides these, the husband had a son and a daughter by his first wife, both of whom were married and away from home.

Once, after her marriage, I saw her playing dolls happily with her little step-daughter. She had put a new cloth head on a doll she had got in school, and she had made it yarn hair, and plaited it wonderfully. But after that day, although I dare say she often played, I never happened to see her happy in that little-girl way again. I watched her grow up without one of those things girls need to make them beautiful. She was shut within four walls, with nothing to do, nothing to learn, no one to admire— all the treasures of her tenderness locked away. She grew sullen and pert.

One morning, when I was trying to induce her to go on studying, her husband called to her from a doorway, ‘ Get me my coat.’

He was a gurgling old beast.

She replied without moving, ‘Get it yourself.’

I had never heard an Indian woman speak to a husband in that tone of voice. She saw my surprise. ‘Don’t worry,’she said bitterly. ‘He won’t strike me. He’s not that kind. He’s loving—’ And that morning, as we talked, she cried scornfully, ‘Yes! Scarcely as much prized as an old pair of shoes are we women. When we’re scuffed a bit — throw them away — get a new pair — ’

Common talk, that, in our city. She could not escape it, I suppose. She was bored beyond words with life. She would learn nothing.

III

Then, suddenly, the summer she was sixteen, she woke up.

She sent for me and gayly demanded to be taught English. I got her a teacher and she learned eagerly. I took it for granted that it was the company in the house that was arousing her, because her oldest step-daughter, with her two little boys, was home for a long visit, and her oldest step-son’s wife, a very charming girl, was there too, with a baby. Besides, the oldest son of the second wife was soon to be married. Naturally, all this excitement made her happy, I hought, really thinking very little about it.

Now it happened that about ten o’clock one hot summer evening, as I was coming home with an old watchman from a teacher’s whose baby was ill, I passed the house in which Ayshan lived, and met in front of it an extraordinary old cross-eyed servant of hers, wheeling the visiting grandchildren of the house back and forth in a rather dilapidated baby-carrriage. She was an irresistible old thing. I had to stop to exchange greetings with her.

‘Go on into the house a while,’she said. ‘They want to see you.'

‘Likely,’I said, ‘at this time of night.'

She continued to urge me. ‘The men are all away, every one. There’s a great party to-night at Rajah Inayat Uhlah Khan’s. They won’t be home for hours.'

So, impulsively, I went in. I ought not to have gone. It is n’t done at that hour. However, I found the old mother in the first-floor court, massaging her married granddaughter.

‘She’s had fever all day,’she explained to me. ‘And so have I.'

I saw she was feeling wretched.

‘ Are the others on the roof? ’ I asked.

She answered earnestly, excitedly, ‘ Ayshan’s there. Do go up.'

So I climbed the steep stairs — to a very great surprise.

Through the open door at the top of the stairway, I saw Ayshan, sitting on a cot, cuddled down in the arms of a man.

They saw me, and rose; and speaking most deferentially in English, he passed me and disappeared down the stairs. It was her husband’s oldest son. There she stood; at least, there stood someone — I was n’t sure it was Ayshan. It must all have been a trick of the moonlight, and the mist—only there was no mist. Anyway, there was shining around her white draperies a light, a great halo.

‘Come in, Miss Sahib,’ she cried. ‘Oh, come in!’

Her voice, too, was strange. It had its halo.

She came up to me. I turned her toward the moon. I saw it was Ayshan, but her face was new — I can’t describe its glory. Even the jasmine at her ears and throat was shining. She hid her head on my shoulder, and said, — in that voice, — ‘O Miss Sahib!’

I was too amazed to know what to say. I stammered out, —

‘Why, Ayshan, my dear child, are you perfectly crazy? Who is that?’

She answered — her words dancing, ‘Oh, that’s my son — my son.’

I stood staring at her, and she said, ‘Oh, I did n’t know there was anything in the world like this. I wanted someone to tell it to!’

I burst out, — from the depths of my fear for her, — ‘You need n’t bother to tell anyone. They must all know. Your mother-in-law might have come up instead of me. She would have come more quietly. His wife might have come — anyone might have! They will find out and tell your husband. He’ll kill you for this, Ayshan, and you know it. He’ll take no explanation.’

‘It’s safe enough,’ she answered, glowing. ‘Is he not my son? And anyway, we’ve never been caught yet.’

‘Why is n’t he at the party with the others?’ I demanded, hating the abominable lithe beauty of his youth.

‘He was n’t well enough,’ she answered. Then, dazzling me, she cried, ‘And I used to hate being a woman. But it’s sweet now, since he has come.’

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, ‘he tells you it’s safe. He won’t be the one who will die for it. Don’t you remember what happened to Phul — of your own caste? This house so full of people!’

Her manner changed, and she said with a sort of desperation, —

‘I don’t care for a minute whether it’s dangerous or not. I don’t care a bit if I do die for it. It’s worth dying for. Ah, he loves me so! No one else loved me like that. I say to you that in his very voice there is love when he speaks to me.’

‘I have no doubt he loves generally,’ I retorted. ‘Oh, my dear, he is not worth this!’

‘He never loves anyone but me,’ she replied, delighting even in the sound of the words. ‘Oh, I am going away with him — I am going to be with him forever — forever! ’

I was so sorry that joy had come to her in this fatal way that I felt as if I could die to make her happy. Sometimes dying for others seems easy. I was so sure of what she was going to pay for this that I smelled pools of blood. I could see her, lying kicked into a corner — crushed, broken. But I might as well have tried frightening a spring morning.

When I saw I could not appeal to her fear, I tried to appeal to her honor. I had not done this at first, because I had not thought of it. Where all things are so fundamentally wrong as they are in our city, the idea of honor can be only an afterthought or an accident. I sat down beside her, and told her a story. It moved her through and through. When I had finished, she cried, —

‘Oh, but that’s not true! Nobody ever did that — to give her love up because it wronged someone else. Why, we would die doing that .’

‘Some people never cease dying,’ I told her. ‘For some the world arranges it so that the only choice left them is continual unconquered dying, and rotting life. That’s the way life is. Dying with honor — or living with rottenness. Think of his wife, Ayshan. She’s your friend. She’s your guest. Where is she now?’

‘She’s gone home,’ she answered. ‘She need n’t mind. What did she expect when she married him? If it was n’t me, it would be someone else.’

‘And honor lasts so long,’ I told her. ‘As long as you lived, you would remember, in your heart, alone, that even though it cost you your happiness, you chose the high way of living — for some unknown reason you chose right. You’d have a fountain of amazement within you that you could do the beautiful thing; you would be proud of yourself.’

But she chanted, ‘Oh, no, I would n’t do that for my sake. Nothing for my sake. It’s for him. He needs me. If I should go home to my mother’s, as you suggest, he would be lonely. I could n’t make him lonely. You don’t understand. It is for him!'

I had finally to come away, in a rage of helplessness, and leave her to her fate. And she was only sixteen — sixteen !

I was unable to get to sleep that night. In the hot, still moonlight, I lay on my bed on the roof, and thought about the girl. I knew now why she had waked up. I understood how naturally it had all come about — that perfect young animal confined to the house, ill, or feigning illness, and Ayshan serving him unveiled, because in the eyes of the law she was his mother. How differently the eyes of youth see things! How amused he must have been, if he was at all an artist, to see her pale little face transformed by his glances, grateful, no doubt, at first, then admiring, confessing, confusing, entreating glances, wooing a girl who had been appropriated but not wooed before, compelled, but not entreated. Could anyone expect a girl brought up on wedding songs to resist such an appeal?

I remembered, smiling, the summer I was seventeen — a beloved long white dimity, covered with little white ruffles; all the men I had loved that summer, — the one who read me Whitman would never lend me the book; it was a long time before I knew why, — a group of lads who stopped their story suddenly when I joined them and grasped about for new subjects. I remembered that, from Ayshan’s babyhood, no one had ever refrained from saying anything in her presence because she was a girl. I recalled with benediction many things about the men of that summer. The only reason I did not pray all that night for blessings on them was because I could not think of anything good enough for God to give them.

Very late at night the returning revelers came singing down the street. They stood shouting to Ayshan’s husband after he had turned into his street to go home. Would he learn the secret of his house that night? Would he purge his shame away before morning? I listened to every sound. Had the servant insisted on my going in because she knew where Ayshan was just then? Did the old mother for that reason urge me to go to the roof? Why had his wife gone home? Because she knew? Did the big stepsons know? How could they help knowing? Which one, being angry with the little wife, would call down death upon her? I listened and listened.

Every night that summer when I went to sleep, I expected to be wakened suddenly by the death-wail from that house. Every time I wakened, startled, I listened in that direction. One night there was a shrill cry down the street. I thought the watchman would never come back with his report about it. It was only another little child dead of the heat. I went on dreading. IV

Even then I never imagined how horrible her fate was to be. The weeks wore into months and I heard no news from that house. I shrank from going near it. One grows tired hovering forever upon the outskirts of murder.

Then, one day, when I was giving a knitting lesson to a woman in that street, I heard Ayshan’s little stepdaughter telling a story to two women who sat in a verandah near me. This child was so young that her baby teeth had fallen out, and her second teeth had not yet come in. There she sat, a round-faced little thing in a vividly red veil. She was saying, —

‘They quarreled terribly and my father ordered him out of the house.

Of course, she belonged to my father first, and that’s why brother did it. They’re always fighting anyway — about his mother’s money—’

‘Are n’t you ashamed to tell such things about your own people — a little thing like you?’ chided one of the women. ‘But go on. Did she go with him?’

‘Of course!’ said the child pertly. ‘That’s why my father was so furious. My brother — Well, you know, I suppose he thought it was time for a new woman. ’

‘Do I purl now?’ asked my pupil.

I scarcely could tell. I wanted to know how Ayshan had gone away with her ‘son,’ and when, and where. How had I not known it before? I waited a long time, till the child went home, and then I carelessly asked the women.

They told me it was a Pathan dancing-girl the son had stolen away from his father. About her the fight had waxed hot.

Ayshan — so soon rejected — they had not even quarreled about! Ayshan, the fashion of whose countenance love had transfigured. Her dream was over. With her face, at least, the moon would never again be able to do that trick. After all, a very common story, not even deserving exclamation points.

I was puzzled at the time that the intrigue was never uncovered to the master of the house. Since then I have known of more perilous secrets kept, of swords hung by stretched hairs for years.

Naturally I stayed away from that house for months, not being able to endure the sight of her humiliation. After I had been repeatedly sent for, I did go, because I was sure she was visiting her mother. But she was not. It was all as painful as it could possibly be, because the old mother, seemingly so guileless, either through chance or through maliciousness, would talk of nothing but her grandson. It appeared he and his father had been estranged for a long time, about a woman,— had I heard of it? — but now the son was making offers of peace. He had sent gifts to all the family.

‘Show her the veils he sent us,’ she said to Ayshan.

‘What’s the use?’ she inquired. Every mention of his name made her flinch—she was thinking of that night.

‘Do as I tell you,’ ordered the head of the house.

Ayshan got up and went to a chest in an adjoining room. She brought them back and tossed them down on a cot beside me.

‘Cheap stuff,’ she said.

I unfolded the lovely things of jade and rose and budding violet. The old mother lifted her eyebrows to say to me, ‘Of course, she was used to better ones in her own home.’

I glanced covertly at the girl. She was faded and sullen and untidy and hard. For the first time I noticed how like her mother she was. Her love was all plundered, her loyalty outraged.

‘Cheap stuff,’ she repeated.