Flora Annie Steel

“ One, darker and cooler than the rest, lay eastward of the solitary kikar tree. Here it was that the little grave was to be dug if the mother's wish were fulfilled. Quite mechanically I strolled to the spot impelled by sad curiosity.
As I approached, the fragments of a low railing, half-standing, half-lying, in a small oblong, made me wonder if the inclosure had already been a resting-place. That might account for the mother's wish. Yes! there was a grave; a tiny grave no bigger than little Dot's would be, with a roughly-hewn cross as a headstone. ”

“ He was so long settling himself in a chair, pulling up his trousers in his careful economical way, and poking the fire that our attention had begun to waver, when his opening words startled us into renewed curiosity.
“I don't suppose,” he began, “that any of you know I am a widower; but I am. My wife died a year after our marriage; and the child too—a girl. If you search the whole wide world through you won't find a more desolate creature than a boy of two-and-twenty coming back alone in a strange country from the grave of his wife and child. ”

“ Sometimes I seem to forget everything except what I see—and Dot. I never forget her. Only last month I was coming down the river not far from the place where the little dear shot herself—she was playing with her father's revolver, you know—and I seemed to go through it all again. Her father—he left the Salt soon after—was downright vexed with me because I fretted so. He said no good could come of remembering grief so long. But I don't know. I've heard it said that there is only so much sorrow and happiness in the world; then if one person gets a lot there must be less trouble left for others. ”

“ I was like the boy in another of Kipling's tales, and could think of nothing but death to end it all; just to creep away and die by myself somewhere. I did not want so much to be dead, but to be quite alone—by myself. ”

“ To soothe her I repeated that there was plenty of time.
She frowned, closed her eyes with one hand, and again replied in a curiously rapid, even tone.
“No! no! there never has been time. It is always a hurry. Out in the dark digging the grave, and the sand slipping, slipping, slipping till there is no room. ”

“ As I got better I used to lie and cry like a woman. Then the other fellows would say it was all weakness, and that I must be a man and bear up. And sometimes I would lie and smile. Then they said I was a trump with more pluck than they had. And as often as not I wasn't thinking of myself or my own troubles at all, but of brave little Dot and her desire for a puff-puff-boom.
They sent me down the Indus to Bombay, so as to avoid the rattle of the train, for my head was still weak. We stuck on a sand bank at Sukkhur, being made unmanageable by two flats we were towing. ”

“ I don't know why I had risen from my sick bed full of a great curiosity, but I had. Somehow I never seemed to have looked at life before, whereas now everything interested me. So I went down to the flats and talked to the people. There was a cabin on one, carrying a few second-class passengers, and as I was walking along a gangway between some bales I saw an Englishwoman, holding a child on her lap. The crouching attitude struck me as familiar, I stopped and spoke—about the weather or something. She looked up, and then I knew where I had seen that attitude, for it was Dot's mother. ”

“ Broken mounds of earth giving a reminiscence of walks and beds, with here and there a globe amaranth doing chief mourner. Evidently bungalow Number Two had been the permanent residence of a patrol. It annoyed me to find myself wondering if he had had a wife and child, so I hastily entered the centre room, determined to put an end to all useless sympathies without delay. To my surprise it contained a few half-broken sticks of furniture; but telling myself that it would make my last task easier, I laid my revolver on the table and taking out my case sat down to write. ”

“ Perhaps, as Rudyard Kipling says, he has no business to have a wife and child. Anyhow he feels a mistake somewhere in the universe when he tries to behave like a man in the little drawing-room she made so pretty. ”

“ Every now and again little bursts of a child's voice. Dot, no doubt, recaptured and soothed to sleep. It was evident that the bungalow was occupied by others beside myself, for in the gathering dusk I thought I saw some white forms flitting about the servants' quarters. ”

“ During the pause which followed I found myself thinking, that weight for weight, inches for inches, brains for brains, I knew no man who had made a better use of life than our Major. Not over clever, certainly not handsome, handicapped heavily by having to start at scratch in worldly matters, he had a distinct personality of his own, which influenced every society he entered. ”

“ We must dig the grave under the kikar tree and bury her in the sand—for it is sand below, and it creeps and creeps into the grave and will not leave room for Dot. And the night must fall—oh, so dark!—before her father gets home. There will hardly be time to dig the little grave before sunrise ”