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"Yes," said Wali Dad, "it is curious to think that our common meeting-place should be here, in the house of a common how do you call her?" He pointed with the pipe-mouth to Lalun. "Lalun is nothing but Lalun," I said, and that was perfectly true. "But if you took your place in the world, Wali Dad, and gave up dreaming dreams" "I might wear an English coat and trouser.
But, as Wali Dad sings: "Lalun is Lalun, and when you have said that, you have only come to the Beginnings of Knowledge." The little house on the City wall was just big enough to hold Lalun, and her maid, and a pussy-cat with a silver collar. A big pink and blue cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling of the reception room.
'In this house I am a Queen and thou art a King. The Sahib' she put her arms above her head and thought for a moment 'the Sahib shall be our Vizier thine and mine, Wali Dad because he has said that thou shouldst leave me. Wali Dad laughed immoderately, and I laughed too. 'Be it so, said he. 'My friend, are you willing to take this lucrative Government appointment? Lalun, what shall his pay be?
Wali Dad was nearly as permanent a fixture as the chandelier. As I have said, he lay in the window-seat and meditated on Life and Death and Lalun specially Lalun. The feet of the young men of the City tended to her doorways and then retired, for Lalun was a particular maiden, slow of speech, reserved of mind, and not in the least inclined to orgies which were nearly certain to end in strife.
So now you know as much as you ought about Wali Dad, the educational mixture, and the Supreme Government. Lalun has not yet been described. She would need, so Wali Dad says, a thousand pens of gold and ink scented with musk. She has been variously compared to the Moon, the Dil Sagar Lake, a spotted quail, a gazelle, the Sun on the Desert of Kutch, the Dawn, the Stars, and the young bamboo.
In reality he was only a clean-bred young Muhammadan, with penciled eyebrows, small-cut nostrils, little feet and hands, and a very tired look in his eyes. By virtue of his twenty-two years he had grown a neat black beard which he stroked with pride and kept delicately scented. His life seemed to be divided between borrowing books from me and making love to Lalun in the window-seat.
Some of it was not strictly proper, but it was all very funny, and it only came to an end when a fat person in black, with gold pince-nez, sent up his name to Lalun, and Wali Dad dragged me into the twinkling night to walk in a big rose-garden and talk heresies about Religion and Governments and a man's career in life.
But Lalun began to sing, and for the rest of the time there was no hope of getting a sensible answer from her or Wali Dad. When the one stopped, the other began to quote Persian poetry with a triple pun in every other line.
When the news went abroad that Khem Singh had escaped from the Fort, I did not, since I was then living this story, not writing it, connect myself, or Lalun, or the fat gentleman of the gold pince-nez, with his disappearance.
Lalun hid her face in her hands for an instant and said something about Wali Dad that I could not catch, Then, to my extreme gratification, she threw her arms round my neck and murmured pretty things. I was in no haste to stop her; and Nasiban, being a handmaiden of tact, turned to the big jewel-chest that stands in the corner of the white room and rummaged among the contents.
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