A Bountiful Providence

I

SHIGRAMS have rather gone out of fashion in Bombay in these days of motors, but occasionally one may still see one on iron-tired wheels trundling behind a horse. The body of the vehicle is square. Square everywhere; straight up and down sides, and roof with the slightest camber. The windows are wooden slat blinds and the whole is finished in shiny brown varnish with plenty of bright brass fittings. They are not as common as they used to be, — one would be hard put to it to find a place to buy a new one, — and those few on the streets, belonging to a generation ago, are the property of conservative Indian merchants whose sons and grandsons prefer the speed and convenience of the motor.

The driver of the shigram sits high on the roof, perched on a little box, his bare feet on a wooden ledge provided with a pedal which works a bell. The bell is hardly necessary in these days when the shigram is one of the slowestmoving units in the mass of traffic on Queen’s Road of a morning, but that does not prevent the driver from using it. One sometimes sees a coachman of a day gone by flicking the withers of his horse with the cracker of his long whip. All in white with blue puttees, he gayly clangs his bell at every corner, and brings his vehicle to a stop outside the office door with great flourish and dignity.

It is proverbial that the Bombay monsoon breaks on a Saturday afternoon just about lunch time, when all the offices are closing for the week-end. After a breathlessly hot morning, overcast and windless, the first storm comes with a flurry and roar of wind, to rain five, six, or seven inches in four or five hours. The storm-water drains, choked with rubbish after eight months of dry weather, cannot cope with the flow, and the low-lying roads on the east of Sandhurst Bridge run two and three feet in water. The streets are littered with cars, great and small, caught where they stand like beasts shot in flight, some slewed across the road in the act of turning, some where they should be — in the gutters. Then the shigram comes into its own. Driver oilskin clad, elbows squared, looking neither to right nor to left, whip held just so, bare feet braced against the ledge, horse clopping through the water, wheels scuttering up spray, bell clanging gayly, the shigram at least gets home.

II

It was no thought of practicality that led the Little Sisters of the Poor to own and use a shigram. The workings of a bountiful Providence had provided it in the first instance, and it never occurred to the Little Sisters to question the wisdom of its provision.

Before even Sister Veronica came to Bombay, some forty years ago, that particular shigram had been the pride of the House of the Sisterhood in the slums off Grant Road. Then it was black and new and shiny. Now it was still moderately black, but no longer new or shiny, and the hair had long ago begun to come through the leather of the cushions. All the same, it was still known as the ‘new shigram,’ for in those dim and distant days when fodder was cheap and wages low and a horse could be kept for twenty rupees a month or less the Sisters had owned two shigrams and three horses.

Then it was that the new shigram was really new, and it remained the new shigram even after Banoo, a little drunk, though the Little Sisters did not realize it, had scraped a wheel off the old shigram on a gatepost at the Rattanbhai Hospital and finished it forever. By that time keeping a horse was more expensive. It nowcost twenty-two rupees a month, and twenty-three if one was not very careful about the amount of ‘foot oil’ the syce included in his monthly bills. The trams, too, had arrived, swaying and clanging all the way from Colaba to Parel, so that there was really no point in keeping more than one horse and the new shigram.

It was a bitter blow to Aloysius Francis when the Little Sisters came to the point of keeping only the new shigram and one horse. He had been with the Little Sisters before even Sister Veronica came on the scene, and when Banoo had his accident with the old shigram he was in the position of head coachman, with two men under him and commission from the bunnia on all the corn that was bought and the right to put in the monthly bills for shoeing, mane hogging, grass, repairs to saddlery, and new brooms and baskets. His most guarded privilege was, of course, the elastic item at the bottom for foot oil a composition which syces consider indispensable for keeping the walls of the hoof in good condition. This always brought his bills to a pie or two on either side of the ten rupees, seven annas, and six pies for the three horses which he had long ago discovered was about the limit of what the Little Sisters would pay without asking any questions.

Sister Veronica, when she first came out from Dublin, told him flatly that he was merely using kerosene oil stolen from the kitchen. That accusation had cost him two months of paying real money for turpentine and coconut oil. However, daily production of the tin in which the concoction was kept and ostentatious swabbing of the walls of the hoof before starting out on the daily round soon convinced Sister Veronica that she could take a reasonable view of these matters. Everything returned to the status quo ante, and the cook again found a market for the surplus kerosene.

It was never quite clear how Aloysius Francis got to the position of head syce. Providence again, presumably, but without doing any injustice to anyone one would suspect that Providence was ably assisted by Aloysius Francis himself. To begin with, of course, he was not called Aloysius Francis. He was merely a low-caste Hindu lad of the syce class — what they call a ‘ Hindustani wallah’ in Bombay, meaning that he came from somewhere round Benares, which is the English name for the holy city of Kashi.

Quite early in his career he had realized that his opportunity lay in becoming head syce to the Sisters. Few other places could offer the same chances — the Sisters knew little or nothing about horses and the prices of grain and foot oil. Aloysius Francis — or Ganesh, as he was then — had had only too recent experience of one of those sunburned Englishmen who kept two Australians and a country-bred to hunt from the Jackal Club. They all seemed to know the price of everything to a pie, and Ganesh still smarted from the tongue-lashing he had got for not reporting a sore back; only a little sore, too — hardly greater than a two-anna bit.

No, the Little Sisters offered an opportunity and he settled down to take it. Quite early in his career he became a Christian and Aloysius Francis and, not long after, head syce. It mattered not a scrap to him, the boycott he received from his caste men. He was Aloysius Francis, head syce, and he squared his lean shoulders and, setting himself on the box, handled whip and rein as if he were driving fourin-hand. There was certainly style about him, but the Little Sisters paid for it.

When Banoo scraped off the wheel Aloysius Francis was very angry indeed, but his anger was tempered by the knowledge that repair would mean more rupees slipping through his fingers, some of which would be bound to stick. When, however, he heard that there were to be no repairs, that the shigram had been sold where it lay, and that two of the three horses in the stable were to be sold, his anger knew no bounds. He kicked and cuffed poor Banoo, who never had been very bright, and finally threw him out of the compound. He then set to work immediately to find another job. The glory and most of the profit of being head syce were gone.

He went to syces he knew all over Bombay, but in each case the answer was the same: virtually, that horses were few and becoming fewer, and there were not enough jobs to go around, and why should they — good Hindus — put him on to a job when their caste brothers also wanted them.

He made the best of his bad luck. He shrugged his shoulders and stayed to work at the House of the Little Sisters. The one horse that was kept after Banoo’s adventure with the gatepost was reasonably young, a dark gray Australian, big-boned, with feet like soup plates, a Roman nose, and a large head set not quite badly enough for him to be called ewe-necked. He had a long, raking, loose-actioned trot, a regular delivery-cart style, but little Aloysius Francis, perched high on the box, managed somehow to collect him into some kind of action.

For ten years Aloysius Francis drove the gray, harnessing him daily into the new shigram and driving him round from the stables at the back of the Sisterhood House. Daily on those patrols from poverty-stricken house to poverty-stricken house the Little Sisters rode pair and pair behind the gray with Aloysius Francis high on his box ever striving for style.

Whenever she could manage it, Sister Veronica came across the dusty compound where ragged crotons flamed in the sunshine to talk to the old horse in his stall. Aloysius Francis could generally be found on his string bed outside his quarters, and as she came he would bring, wrapped in a dirty cloth, carrots, little pieces of sugar cane, or brown balls of the raw sugar they call ghur.

The old gray could recognize Sister Veronica in her white habit almost before she had come round the corner of the verandah and he would whinny in his stall until she came across to talk to him. As she leaned over the bars of his stall and whispered to him of things she would never see again, — round green hills with firm galloping turf, stone walls, grass banks and blackthorn hedges, racing skies and hounds streaming away on the far side of a valley, — he would nuzzle and blow into her sleeve and pretend to try to eat the beads of her rosary.

III

The old gray began to get very old, but the Little Sisters still drove behind him. He was now nearly twenty-five and his Roman nose was more Roman than ever, the hollows above his eyes more pronounced. His back grew more and more dipped and the withers stood up high and bony. He had come to a stage when he could no longer take the new shigram with its blistered faded paint over even Camballa Hill and he now had to be driven round by the sea along Warden Road or else through the heavy traffic in the streets behind the Willingdon Club.

One day — one of those days in May when Bombay bakes in stillness under a low heavy sky — Sister Veronica and Sister Barbara had to drive down into Colaba to one of the poor quarters near the Sassoon Dock. As they went down Marine Lines they found a semblance of a breeze from the sea and the heat became more bearable, but in the lanes between the high tenement chawls in the city there was no breath to stir the heavy human smell.

No one who could avoid it was out in that heat. The policemen in blue cotton drill and primrose-colored turbans gasped in the shade at the corners, the sweat streaming down bare sinewy brown legs. Office messengers and water sellers, the only other people who really had to be out, panted under umbrellas. The old gray trotted listlessly in front of the clanging bell. In the narrow lanes — what are called gullies in Bombay — nothing stirred. In the little shops, mere holes in the walls where they sold onions, grains, and mustard-seed oil, the ghi — the clear yellow butter of India — melted and dripped from the kerosene-oil tins in which it was packed, and the smell of cardamons and tamarins grew thicker and sweeter. The fat bunnias, the grain sellers, paunchy with thick rolls of flesh, sitting cross-legged in the little shops, dozed and sweated by turns and together.

Over the fat sweets, all butter and sugar, swam flies until the white almond halwa was black with them. Even the sellers of betel nut and pan leaves sat in the black shadows — there was no chance of business until later, when the shadows would begin to lengthen. Then when dusk came with the sun setting through a thick cloak of dust all Bombay would go abroad to gather what of coolness it might find.

Now there was only heat and smell, and high up in one of the chawls a baby crying a thin hopeless wail, and across the way a woman, her voice strident in anger, shrieking obscenity.

Sister Veronica, old and bent in the service of the poor, leaned back in the shigram and wiped the sweat which dimmed the lenses of her steel-rimmed spectacles. With a thin hand she pushed the veil back a little from her forehead where the starched white linen stuck in the heat. She stole a look at Sister Barbara beside her. Sister Veronica forgot the heat and her own troubles in sympathy for the younger woman whose life was before her. There were so many hot Bombay days to come for Little Sister Barbara. So many enterings of squalid rooms, so many monsoons, so much of walking pair and pair, head bent, indistinguishable under the standardizing veil, in and out of the same crowded tenements. Sister Veronica had no illusions. Forty years had cured her belief in picturesque poverty.

She sighed and looked out of the window. They had turned away from the sea and into narrow streets between tall buildings. A solid wave of heat struck her face, bringing with it all the varied smells of humanity. As she looked she felt the old horse stumble between the shafts. There was nothing new in that, for of late he had stumbled more than once. She felt Aloysius Francis pull him to his feet again. She knew, although she could not see, that the little man had braced himself against his ledge and she heard the crack of the whip as the new shigram resumed its leisurely progress through the streets. Aloysius Francis clanged the bell twice to show what confidence he had.

There were a few more paces; the even clip-clop of the broad shallow feet faltered; another stumble, another recovery, and then the old gray horse went down for good.

By the time Sister Veronica had got out of the shigram Aloysius Francis was already at the horse’s head, undoing the throat lash and slipping the cracked bridle over the ears. The old gray lay with head outstretched and legs crumpled loosely under him. He had broken his knees in his fall, and there was a tiny trickle of blood where the skin was cut.

Sister Veronica turned to Sister Barbara, who stood behind her. The child seemed to live in a gilded mystical world of her own.

‘You go on, child,’ she said. ‘You know the way. I will see what can be done and follow as soon as I can.’

There was nothing to be done, she knew, except to telephone to the municipality for a cart to take away the old gray and to tell Aloysius Francis to arrange for the new shigram to be taken back to the House off Grant Road. She had seen horses die in the street from heat stroke before, and the sight of the municipal cart with four stiff legs pointing to the sky was not unfamiliar. She suddenly felt old and defenseless. Aloysius Francis, standing waiting for orders, the bridle in his hands, watched her in silence.

A policeman in dark blue cotton uniform pushed through the crowd that had collected, the crowd which with empty brown faces pushed and surged in a ring, the crowd which became instantly greater. Here were doings indeed. A mem-sahib, a dead horse, a shigram, and a policeman — enough to talk about for a week.

A driver of a victoria for hire stopped his horse and offered professional advice; it was not taken. He spat and passed on.

The policeman was friendly, but could offer little advice. He stood and belched twice, for he had just had a good meal, and in appreciation of it he offered such thanks as he could. He smiled amiably, but did nothing useful. He boxed the ears of a naked little boy who pushed too close and ordered off a woman who came to beg with skinny hand outstretched. No one paid any attention to him.

Sister Veronica took charge. The incident was over.

IV

The House of the Little Sisters off Grant Road lies in what is known as Byculla. The ‘Road’ is notorious in Bombay, which is probably why the Little Sisters chose it for their home. The House itself, built on a generous scale in the days when this quarter was respectable and rich, is a largish affair standing in a dusty compound of some extent. The compound, which elsewhere would be known as the yard or garden, is enclosed in four walls and carries no crop except a few orange and yellow cannas that have regenerated themselves yearly and in the process become more and more spindly, and some straggling crotons whose scarlet leaves make spots of brilliant color in the hot sunshine.

Both the House and the four walls enclosing the compound are plastered. What color the plaster was at one time is not known, and, after all, when one comes to think of it, it hardly matters. Now it is black and stained in patches, each successive monsoon dealing more hardly with it than the last. Various people have tried to smarten the place up a little by gifts of money, but somehow whenever the Little Sisters get hold of any money other uses are always found for it.

At the back of the House are the servants’ quarters, a row of a dozen rooms, each separate from the others, and the stables, six stalls in a row, all telling of the days before the arrival of the Little Sisters when the House could afford to keep its plaster on its walls and to color-wash it after every monsoon. The servants’ quarters are all but empty of servants, but they seem to have collected most of the riffraff of Bombay to live under the wing of the Little Sisters. In the end room next the stables Aloysius Francis lived with his wife and family. One might generally find him in the evening sitting on a string cot smoking. If the evening was hot he would lie in the open; if cool he would pull his cot under the shelter of the stable roof. Stables in India are sheds, open-fronted, without doors, and with only a bar across the stall to keep the horse in.

Behind the servants’ quarters lies the city. The city of Bombay is largely engaged in cotton milling, but Byculla for some reason even in these unregenerate days is given up to horses. Possibly it is because it is near the race course, which would account for one or two training stables, but there must be other reasons, and one can only imagine that the horses are there for the best of reasons — that it has always been like that.

The presence of horses in Byculla, however, did not help the Little Sisters much now that they needed something to replace the gray. Sister Veronica, more from habit than anything else walking round the corner of the verandah, suddenly realized that he was there no longer. The problem was how to replace him.

In the past their horses had been given to them, but nowadays no one seemed to have any horses — at least not one to spare. Even Father Picaute, whose wealthy parishioners lived in big houses on Malabar Hill, could offer no suggestions. All he could do was to smile sympathetically as he rubbed his hands when they went to interview him about it in the dark cool of his big study.

Aloysius Francis was the most concerned. He could see quite clearly that, having no horse, the Little Sisters would soon have no use for a head syce. His reasoning was sound. Standing before Sister Veronica on one brown skinny foot and scratching in the dust with the toe of the other, he gave it as his opinion that the best way to get another horse was to buy one.

And the cost might be what?

Aloysius Francis looked around him. He sought information from the sky, the trees, a kite wheeling in the air, from the ground. He was wondering how much he dared say.

‘Well, say two hundred rupees,’ he hazarded at last, ‘but of course that would not be a very good one.’

‘As good as the gray?’

‘Yes, about as good as the gray, he supposed. Indeed, as luck would have it, he had a friend in the bazaar who had just what the Little Sister Memsahib wanted, but this friend was asking three hundred rupees. However, leave it to him and he thought he could arrange it for two hundred.

Aloysius Francis thought lovingly of the fat silver rupees that would pass through his hands in the transaction, and the commission, the 10 per cent dustur which is customary.

Armed with information, Sister Veronica returned to the House.

The following morning as she was going out to take a tram for Parel she met Aloysius Francis in the compound.

‘Are the Sister Mem-sahibs going to buy the new horse?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Sister Veronica sadly, ‘the Sister Mem-sahibs have no money to buy a new one, but one will be provided. Let us ask and we shall receive, Aloysius Francis. We believe, and one will be provided,’ and she went on her way.

A week passed and nothing happened. Although the matter was not mentioned again, each of the Little Sisters knew that the question of the new horse was uppermost in the others’ minds. Surely one must be provided. Not one of them admitted a doubt that some day they would drive out again in the city behind a new horse in the new shigram. How it would come about no one of them could tell, but they knew that it would come about.

After the week of waiting Aloysius Francis had doubts about the efficacy of the plan. He was old and in his experience of a hard world of nothing for nothing and precious little for an anna horses were not things that were ‘provided.’ They could be bought and sold, but who had ever heard of one being provided?

The week flowed into a second week and Bombay became hotter and muggier. The skies were heavy and leadencolored and the wind seemed uncertain of the quarter from which it intended to blow. The harbor was empty of small craft. Everything waited for the first fury of storm that would bring in the monsoon blowing steadily from the southwest.

Every evening Sister Veronica went out to the empty stables just as she had done when there were horses there to feed with carrots. It was a habit of forty years, and she stood every night leaning over the bars looking at the stable clean-swept and bare.

Aloysius Francis watched her and wondered if anyone really could believe that a horse could be provided. If he expressed a doubt he would get the same answer, so that even he would be convinced — for a moment.

V

Then a night came when the sun sank white and silvery like a huge moon into a glassy, steely sea. From the sands at Kennedy Sea Face the line of Malabar Hill stood out strong and clear in detail, and Colaba Light four miles away seemed so close that one could pick out the bands of color in which it is painted. That hot still evening was followed by a storm of wind and rain. Heavy drops lashed on to wet pavements, the palms on Marine Lines bent double, and cars honking like frogs felt their way home through flooded streets. The temperature fell by tens of degrees, and Bombay woke to a new world, clean-washed and comparatively cool.

Sister Veronica, looking from the top verandah of the House in the clear light of early morning, was not surprised to see a horse, bright bay with a white sock on the near fore, grazing in the compound. The horse had been provided.

Even to her eye he was more of a horse than any she had seen before. His satiny skin shone, though a little draggled after the rain. The muscles rippled over his quarters as he moved.

She chirruped at him and he raised his small head and stood looking, ears cocked, the very picture of what a horse should be.

Sister Veronica went downstairs, and taking a piece of bread she liberally salted it. She went out into the compound. The bright bay came willingly to her hand and felt with a soft muzzle for the salted bread. He licked up the last speck of salt.

She called for Aloysius Francis.

‘The horse has come,’ she said. ‘Get the bridle and let us put him into the new shigram.’

Aloysius Francis seemed a little doubtful when he came round the comer of the house, bridle in hand. He looked over the bay with an appraising eye.

‘Is that the horse?’ he asked.

‘Yes, we have got our horse,’ Sister Veronica replied. ‘He has been provided. Put the bridle on him and get out the new shigram.’

Aloysius Francis approached him rather gingerly. The throat lash and cheek pieces had to be let out a couple of holes, but the horse quietly let himself be bitted, and Aloysius Francis felt his confidence return. He backed him in between the shafts and hooked on the traces. Sister Veronica stood back to survey his work.

The bay seemed somewhat uncertain of what was expected of him, but he allowed himself to be led docilely enough. At first he started and laid his ears back at the rumble of wheels behind him, but at a word from Aloysius Francis his ears went forward. Aloysius Francis mounted the box.

‘Wait here,’ said Sister Veronica; ‘I have to go to Mazagon. I shall be ready in a moment.’

Aloysius Francis picked up the reins. The bay started to fidget, so he moved him quietly forward at a walk round the compound, the bay stepping daintily. Aloysius Francis felt a surge of pride. No other head syce in Bombay had such a horse. More from habit than anything else he took up the whip and lightly flicked the shining withers. Immediately he washed he had n’t.

The gate stood open, and fortunately at that early hour the Road was clear of traffic. Aloysius Francis was powerless. All he could do was to watch those shoulders working like pistons and hope for the best.

VI

It was Crown Sergeant O’Neill of the Mounted Police who stopped them. Twenty-one years in the cavalry had taught him something of horses, and it took him a moment to recover his senses when he saw a bit of real blood in front of a machine like that. He galvanized into action.

A moment later he stood dismounted at the head of the bay, his own horse standing obediently by the roadside. Aloysius Francis climbed stiffly down from the box.

‘Here, where did you get this horse?’ asked Crown Sergeant O’Neill suspiciously.

Aloysius Francis’s teeth were chattering when he replied.

‘He was sent to us,’ he said. ‘We needed a horse for the Mem-sahibs and he came to us.’

‘Oh, he did, did he?’ said the Crown Sergeant. ‘Where do you come from, anyway? ’

‘I am the head syce and coachman to the Little Sisters Mem-sahibs,’ said Aloysius Francis proudly.

‘Oh, the Little Sisters,’ said the Crown Sergeant, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. ‘Well, you’d better take that horse’s head and lead him back where you got him, and I will come with you. Now, no monkey tricks,’ he went on warningly, ‘or you’ll get something you won’t like.’

The Crown Sergeant mounted, and together they returned to the House on Grant Road.

‘But he was sent to us,’ said Sister Veronica. ‘ We lost our horse from heat stroke in Colaba and prayed for another, and here he is.’

The Crown Sergeant tried to hide a smile under his moustache. ‘I am very sorry, Sister,’ he said. ‘ Providence may provide, but it does n’t provide horses like that,’ and he looked at the bay with an admiring eye. She knew that it was true.

‘ You had better let me have him to take him back where he belongs,’ he went on.

‘Do you think you know where he belongs ?’ asked Sister Veronica disconsolately.

The Crown Sergeant thought a moment. ‘We-e-ell,’ he said slowly, ‘maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but he looks to me very much like Friday’s Child.’

‘Friday’s Child? What’s that?’ said Sister Veronica inquiringly.

‘Why, Friday’s Child? Not know Mr. Gaunt’s Friday’s Child that won the Governor’s Cup last December and then made the double with the Melbourne Stakes? Why, of course, he’s Friday’s Child!’

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Sister Veronica. ‘What are the Governor’s Cup and the Melbourne Stakes?’

‘Well, I suppose you would n’t understand. They’re races and this is a race horse, one of the finest ever imported from Australia. He must have got out last night in the storm. Well, I’ll be taking him along now, Miss.’

VII

Gaunt was glad to have his horse back. He ran his hands down the clean forelegs, and even he could find nothing amiss after the adventure.

He laughed a good deal when the Crown Sergeant told his story, and then he thoughtfully lit a strong cigar, pushed his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, and walked down to the long line of stables where the thirty or forty horses under his care were being fed and watered.

He stopped when he came to the end stall. In it was a liver chestnut, old and gone in the wind, but still good for light work. He took out a pencil and notebook and wrote: —

DEAR MADAM: -
I am sending another horse which I think will be more suitable for your work than the one provided this morning. Next time you want a horse you come to me and I will see what I can do for you. Don’t tempt Providence again.