The Wish House and Other Stories (20 page)

And there the matter rests.

T
HEY
were putting Punch to bed – the
ayah
and the
hamal
and Meeta, the big
Surti
boy, with the red and gold turban. Judy, already tucked inside her mosquito-curtains, was nearly asleep. Punch had been allowed to stay up for dinner. Many privileges had been accorded to Punch within the last ten days, and a greater kindness from the people of his world had encompassed his ways and works, which were mostly obstreperous. He sat on the edge of his bed and swung his bare legs defiantly.

‘Punch-baba
going to bye-lo?’ said the
ayah
suggestively.

‘No,’ said Punch. ‘Punch-fr
ab a
wants the story about the Ranee that was turned into a tiger. Meeta must tell it, and the
hamal
shall hide behind the door and make tiger-noises at the proper time.’

‘But Ju
dy-baba
will wake up,’ said the
ayah.

‘Judy
-baba
is waked,’ piped a small voice from the mosquito-curtains. ‘There was a Ranee that lived at Delhi. Go on, Meeta,’ and she fell fast asleep again while Meeta began the story.

Never had Punch secured the telling of that tale with so little opposition. He reflected for a long time. The
hamal
made the tiger-noises in twenty different keys.

“Top!’ said Punch authoritatively. ‘Why doesn’t Papa come in and say he is going to give me
put-put?’

‘Punch-baba is going away,’ said the
ayah.
‘In another week there will be no Punch-baba to pull my hair any more.’ She sighed softly, for the boy of the household was very dear to her heart.

‘Up the Ghauts in a train?’ said Punch, standing on his bed. ‘All the way to Nassick where the Ranee-Tiger lives?’

‘Not to Nassick this year, little Sahib,’ said Meeta, lifting him on
his shoulder. ‘Down to the sea where the coconuts are thrown, and across the sea in a big ship. Will you take Meeta with you to
Belait?’

‘You shall all come,’ said Punch, from the height of Meeta’s strong arms. ‘Meeta and the
ayah
and the
hamal
and Bhini-in-the-Garden, and the salaam-Captain-Sahib-snake-man.’

There was no mockery in Meeta’s voice when he replied – ‘Great is the Sahib’s favour,’ and laid the little man down in the bed, while the
ayah
, sitting in the moonlight at the doorway, lulled him to sleep with an interminable canticle such as they sing in the Roman Catholic Church at Parel. Punch curled himself into a ball and slept.

Next morning Judy shouted that there was a rat in the nursery, and thus he forgot to tell her the wonderful news. It did not much matter, for Judy was only three and she would not have understood. But Punch was five; and he knew that going to England would be much nicer than a trip to Nassick.

Papa and Mamma sold the brougham and the piano, and stripped the house, and curtailed the allowance of crockery for the daily meals, and took long counsel together over a bundle of letters bearing the Rocklington postmark.

‘The worst of it is that one can’t be certain of anything,’ said Papa, pulling his moustache. ‘The letters in themselves are excellent, and the terms are moderate enough.’

‘The worst of it is that the children will grow up away from me,’ thought Mamma; but she did not say it aloud.

‘We are only one case among hundreds,’ said Papa bitterly. ‘You shall go home again in five years, dear.’

‘Punch will be ten then – and Judy eight. Oh, how long and long and long the time will be! And we have to leave them among strangers.’

‘Punch is a cheery little chap. He’s sure to make friends wherever he goes.’

‘And who could help loving my Ju?’

They were standing over the cots in the nursery late at night, and I think that Mamma was crying softly. After Papa had gone away, she knelt down by the side of Judy’s cot. The
ayah
saw her and put up a prayer that the Memsahib might never find the love of her children taken away from her and given to a stranger.

Mamma’s own prayer was a slightly illogical one. Summarized it ran: ‘Let strangers love my children and be as good to them as I should be, but let
me
preserve their love and their confidence for ever and ever. Amen.’ Punch scratched himself in his sleep, and Judy moaned a little.

Next day they all went down to the sea, and there was a scene at the Apollo Bunder when Punch discovered that Meeta could not come too, and Judy learned that the
ayah
must be left behind. But Punch found a thousand fascinating things in the rope, block, and steam-pipe line on the big P. and O. steamer long before Meeta and the
ayah
had dried their tears.

‘Come back, Punch-baba,’ said the
ayah.

‘Come back,’ said Meeta, ‘and be a
Burra Sahib’
(a big man).

‘Yes,’ said Punch, lifted up in his father’s arms to wave goodbye. ‘Yes, I will come back, and I will be
a Burra Sahib Bahadur!’
(a very big man indeed).

At the end of the first day Punch demanded to be set down in England, which he was certain must be close at hand. Next day there was a merry breeze, and Punch was very sick. ‘When I come back to Bombay,’ said Punch on his recovery, ‘I will come by the road – in a
broom-gharri.
This is a very naughty ship.’

The Swedish boatswain consoled him, and he modified his opinions as the voyage went on. There was so much to see and to handle and ask questions about that Punch nearly forgot the
ayah
and Meeta and the
hamal
, and with difficulty remembered a few words of the Hindustani once his second-speech.

But Judy was much worse. The day before the steamer reached Southampton, Mamma asked her if she would not like to see the
ayah
again. Judy’s blue eyes turned to the stretch of sea that had swallowed all her tiny past, and she said:
‘Ayah!
What
ayah?’

Mamma cried over her and Punch marvelled. It was then that he heard for the first time Mamma’s passionate appeal to him never to let Judy forget Mamma. Seeing that Judy was young, ridiculously young, and that Mamma, every evening for four weeks past, had come into the cabin to sing her and Punch to sleep with a mysterious rune that he called ‘Sonny, my soul,’ Punch could not understand what Mamma meant. But he strove to do his duty; for, the moment Mamma left the cabin, he said to Judy: ‘Ju, you bemember Mamma?’

“Torse I do,’ said Judy.

‘Then
always
bemember Mamma, ‘r else I won’t give you the paper ducks that the red-haired Captain Sahib cut out for me.’

So Judy promised always to ‘bemember Mamma’.

Many and many a time was Mamma’s command laid upon Punch, and Papa would say the same thing with an insistence that awed the child.

‘You must make haste and learn to write, Punch,’ said Papa, ‘and then you’ll be able to write letters to us in Bombay.’

‘I’ll come into your room,’ said Punch, and Papa choked.

Papa and Mamma were always choking in those days. If Punch took Judy to task for not ‘bemembering’, they choked. If Punch sprawled on the sofa in the Southampton lodging-house and sketched his future in purple and gold, they choked; and so they did if Judy put up her mouth for a kiss.

Through many days all four were vagabonds on the face of the earth – Punch with no one to give orders to, Judy too young for anything, and Papa and Mamma grave, distracted, and choking.

‘Where,’ demanded Punch, wearied of a loathsome contrivance on four wheels with a mound of luggage atop –
‘where
is our broom-
gharri?
This thing talks so much that I can’t talk. Where is our own broom-
gharri?
When I was at Bandstand before we comed away, I asked Inverarity Sahib why he was sitting in it, and he said it was his own. And I said, “I will
give
it you”-I like Inverarity Sahib – and I said, “Can you put your legs through the pully-wag loops by the windows?” And Inverarity Sahib said No, and laughed. I can put my legs through the pully-wag loops. I can put my legs through
these
pully-wag loops. Look! Oh, Mamma’s crying again! I didn’t know I wasn’t not to do
so.’

Punch drew his legs out of the loops of the four-wheeler: the door opened and he slid to the earth, in a cascade of parcels, at the door of an austere little villa whose gates bore the legend ‘Downe Lodge’. Punch gathered himself together and eyed the house with disfavour. It stood on a sandy road, and a cold wind tickled his knicker-bockered legs.

‘Let us go away,’ said Punch. ‘This is not a pretty place.’

But Mamma and Papa and Judy had left the cab, and all the luggage was being taken into the house. At the doorstep stood a woman in black, and she smiled largely, with dry chapped lips. Behind her was a man, big, bony, grey, and lame as to one leg-behind him a boy of twelve, black-haired and oily in appearance. Punch surveyed the trio, and advanced without fear, as he had been accustomed to do in Bombay when callers came and he happened to be playing in the veranda.

‘How do you do?’ said he. ‘I am Punch.’ But they were all looking at the luggage – all except the grey man, who shook hands with Punch, and said he was a ‘smart little fellow’. There was much running about and banging of boxes, and Punch curled himself up on the sofa in the dining-room and considered things.

‘I don’t like these people,’ said Punch. ‘But never mind. We’ll go away soon. We have always went away soon from everywhere. I wish we was gone back to Bombay
soon.’

The wish bore no fruit. For six days Mamma wept at intervals, and showed the woman in black all Punch’s clothes – a liberty which Punch resented. ‘But p’raps she’s a new white
ayah,’
he thought. ‘I’m to call her Antirosa, but she doesn’t call
me
Sahib. She says just Punch,’ he confided to Judy. ‘What is Antirosa?’

Judy didn’t know. Neither she nor Punch had heard anything of an animal called an aunt. Their world had been Papa and Mamma, who knew everything, permitted everything, and loved everybody-even Punch when he used to go into the garden at Bombay and fill his nails with mould after the weekly nail-cutting, because, as he explained between two strokes of the slipper to his sorely-tried Father, his fingers ‘felt so new at the ends’.

In an undefined way Punch judged it advisable to keep both parents between himself and the woman in black and the boy in black hair. He did not approve of them. He liked the grey man, who had expressed a wish to be called ‘Uncleharri’. They nodded at each other when they met, and the grey man showed him a little ship with rigging that took up and down.

‘She’s a model of the
Brisk
– the little
Brisk
that was sore exposed that day at Navarino.’ The grey man hummed the last words and fell into a reverie. ‘I’ll tell you about Navarino, Punch, when we go for walks together; and you mustn’t touch the ship, because she’s the
Brisk.’

Long before that walk, the first of many, was taken, they roused Punch and Judy in the chill dawn of a February morning to say Goodbye; and of all people in the wide earth to Papa and Mamma–both crying this time. Punch was very sleepy and Judy was cross.

‘Don’t forget us,’ pleaded Mamma. ‘Oh, my little son, don’t forget us, and see that Judy remembers too.’

‘I’ve told Judy to bemember,’ said Punch, wriggling, for his father’s beard tickled his neck, ‘I’ve told Judy – ten – forty – ‘leven thousand times. But Ju’s so young – quite a baby – isn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ said Papa, ‘quite a baby, and you must be good to Judy, and make haste to learn to write and – and – and —’

Punch was back in his bed again. Judy was fast asleep, and there was the rattle of a cab below. Papa and Mamma had gone away. Not to Nassick; that was across the sea. To some place much nearer, of course, and equally of course they would return. They came back after dinner-parties, and Papa had come back after he had been to a place called ‘The Snows’, and Mamma with him, to Punch and Judy at Mrs Inverarity’s house in Marine Lines. Assuredly they would come back again. So Punch fell asleep till the true morning, when the
black-haired boy met him with the information that Papa and Mamma had gone to Bombay, and that he and Judy were to stay at Downe Lodge ‘for ever’. Antirosa, tearfully appealed to for a contradiction, said that Harry had spoken the truth, and that it behoved Punch to fold up his clothes neatly on going to bed. Punch went out and wept bitterly with Judy, into whose fair head he had driven some ideas of the meaning of separation.

When a matured man discovers that he has been deserted by Providence, deprived of his God, and cast without help, comfort, or sympathy, upon a world which is new and strange to him, his despair, which may find expression in evil-living, the writing of his experiences, or the more satisfactory diversion of suicide, is generally supposed to be impressive. A child, under exactly similar circumstances as far as its knowledge goes, cannot very well curse God and die. It howls till its nose is red, its eyes are sore, and its head aches. Punch and Judy, through no fault of their own, had lost all their world. They sat in the hall and cried; the black-haired boy looking on from afar.

The model of the ship availed nothing, though the grey man assured Punch that he might pull the rigging up and down as much as he pleased; and Judy was promised free entry into the kitchen. They wanted Papa and Mamma gone to Bombay beyond the seas, and their grief while it lasted was without remedy.

When the tears ceased the house was very still. Antirosa had decided that it was better to let the children ‘have their cry out’, and the boy had gone to school. Punch raised his head from the floor and sniffed mournfully. Judy was nearly asleep. Three short years had not taught her how to bear sorrow with full knowledge. There was a distant, dull boom in the air – a repeated heavy thud. Punch knew that sound in Bombay in the Monsoon. It was the sea – the sea that must be traversed before anyone could get to Bombay.