



Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by
Google Books (Indiana University)











Transcriber's Notes:

   1. Page scan source:
      http://books.google.com/books?id=LyHQAAAAMAAJ
      (Indiana University)

   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].






                          THE POTTER'S THUMB




                                  BY

                          FLORA ANNIE STEEL





                                LONDON

                          WILLIAM HEINEMANN

                                 1900






_All rights reserved_





                          THE POTTER'S THUMB




                              CHAPTER I


'Tis only the potter's thumb, Huzoor.'

As she raised the parti- rag covering the child's body, the
noonday sun streamed down upon a pitiful sight. Yet her eyes, despite
the motherhood which lay in them, accepted it, as the sun did, calmly.
Emotion, such as it was, being reserved for the couple of Englishmen
who stood by: and even there curiosity and repulsion froze the surface
of pity, especially in the younger of the two faces.

In good sooth, not a pleasant sight for mankind, to whom sickness does
not as a rule bring that quick interest born of a desire to aid which
it does to most women. The brown skin was fair with the pallor of
disease, and the fine, sparse, black hair showed the contour of the
skull. The unnatural hollows of the temples emphasised the unnatural
prominence of the closed eyelids, round whose ragged margin of clogged
lashes the flies settled in clusters. Below this death's-head was an
over-large body, where, despite its full curves, each rib stood sharply
defined, and whence the thin limbs angled themselves in spidery
fashion.

'The potter's thumb?' echoed Dan Fitzgerald interrogatively. He was a
tall man, broad in the shoulders, lean in the flank, and
extraordinarily handsome; yet the most noticeable quality in the face
looking down at the very ordinary woman squatting upon a very ordinary
dust-heap, was not its beauty, but its vitality. 'Is that a disease?'
he added, almost sharply.

She gave the native cluck of emphatic denial. 'No! Huzoor. The child
dies because it does not drink milk properly; yet is it the potter's
thumb in the beginning. Lo! many are born so in this place. The
doctor-sahib who put the _tikka_ on the arms for smallpox said
Hodinuggur was too old for birth--that it was a graveyard. I know not.
Only this is true; many are born with this; many die of it.'

'Die of the potter's thumb--what potter?'

Her broad face broadened still more into a smile. 'The Huzoor doth not
understand! Lo! when the potter works on the clay, his hand slips
sometimes in the moulding. It leaves a furrow, so,'--her brown finger,
set with tarnished silver rings, traced a girdle round the baby's naked
breast--'then in the firing the pot cracks. Cracks like these,'--here
the finger pointed to the sherds among which she sate,--'so when
children are born as this one, we say 'tis the potter's thumb.
Sometimes there is a mark,'--again the finger softly followed the line
it had traced before--'this one had it clear when he came; sometimes
none can see it, but 'tis there all the same, all the same. The
potter's thumb has slipped; the pot will crack in the firing.'

Her voice took a cadence as if accustomed to the words.

'What _is_ she saying?' interrupted George Keene impatiently. He was a
middle-sized lad of twenty or thereabouts, powerfully made, with grey
eyes and white teeth gleaming in an aquiline, sunburnt face.

'Something ghastly,' replied Dan. 'It always is so, you'll find, my
dear boy, when you dip below the indifferent calm of these people. It's
like deciphering a tombstone. But come on. We are due already at the
World, the Flesh, and the Devil's.' Then he paused, gave a short laugh,
and flung out his hands in an impulsive gesture. 'By the Powers!' he
went on, his face seeming to kindle with the fuel