So his mother, coming back from her unavailing spells, found him one day looking out over the springing crops with sightless eyes and placid face.
"I might have saved him," she said to herself with infinite bitterness, as from the sleeping-place on the roof she watched the smoke of his funeral pyre drift away into the cloudless blue--"I might have saved him but for the letter. Oh, curses, curses, ten thousand curses on those who taught her to write! Curses to all eternity on all new-fangled ways!"
Once more her lean brown arms flung themselves in wild appeal towards heaven, as she stood out against the sky facing the future--old, sonless, hopeless.
"Willie," Mark Twain tells us, "had a purple monkey climbing up a yellow stick"; he further informs us that this quadruman made its owner "deathly sick."
The following story shows the effect that a blue monkey on a gilt spike had in a remote Indian village called Jehâdpore--a very ordinary village set out on high, unirrigated soil, beside a large irregular tank, whence the bricks of many generations of houses had been dug; the only peculiarity about it being a glaringly whitewashed mosque façade, rising above the whole and flanked by a palm-tree. Merely a façade: viewed frontwise, distinctly imposing, with minarets and domes in orthodox numbers and positions; viewed sidewise, as distinctly disappointing. The jerriest of London jerry builders could have done nothing better than this one brick front elevation, of which even the domes were but _basso-relievos_.
Still it dominated the village in every way; for it was built in the court-yard of ex-Rissaldar-Major Azmutoollah Khan Sahib Bahadur's house, and he with his hangers-on represented Jehâdpore. It was a Rângur village--that is to say, a village of Mohammedan Rajputs, a race which supplies half the native cavalry of upper India with recruits. That was the case at Jehâdpore. When the district officer came round every year to attest and write up the big village note-book there was always something to add on this score. Either the number of those away a-soldiering had to be increased, or an entry made that So-and-so had returned with a "_pinson_"[5] to his wife and family. On these occasions the district officer invariably found an escort awaiting him at the boundary, consisting of _sowars_ on leave from various regiments (with their horses), a contingent of "_pinson-wallahs_" in nondescript uniform on broodmares, and Khan Azmutoollah Khan Bahadur, C.I.E., ex-_rissaldar_, at their head. He was a very old man, as deeply wrinkled as a young actor doing the part of an ancient retainer. In the privacy of that court-yard, garnished by the jerry mosque, he clothed himself scantily in limp white muslin, and his beard was tricoloured--white at the roots, red in the middle, purple at the ends. But on his screaming stallion, sword in hand, a goodly row of medals on his worn tunic, Azmutoollah's beard was of the fiercest black, and the line of moustache shaved from the hard mouth into an arched curve under his aquiline nose, curled right up to his eyes. His voice, too, lost its quaver of age, and before he had safely inducted the _Huzoor_ into his tents down by the tank that irregular troop of cavalry had been put through enough man[oe]uvres to last out three ordinary field days. It was the old soldier's _Kriegspiel_.