| "Darkness and solitude shine for me: |
| For life's fair outward part, are rife |
| The silver noises: let them be. |
| It is the very soul of life |
| Listens for thee, listens for thee." |
| —Alice Meynell. |
The depressingly bare, whitewashed bedroom owned a French bedstead, with brass rails;—a welcome 'find' in a dák bungalow, especially after three very broken nights in an Indian train. Tired to the point of stupefaction, Roy promised himself he would sleep the clock round; eat a three-decker Anglo-Indian breakfast, and thereafter be his own man again. In that faith he laid his head on the least lumpy portion of the pillow—and in less than five minutes found himself quite intolerably wide awake.
Though the bedstead neither repudiated him, nor took liberties with his person, ghostly clankings and vibrations still jarred his nerves and played devil's tunes in his brain. Though he kept his eyelids severely closed, sleep—the coveted anodyne—seemed to hover on the misty edge of things, always just out of reach. His body was over-tired, his brain abnormally alert. Each change of position, that was to be positively the last, lost its virtue in the space of three minutes, till the sheet—that was too narrow for the mattress—became ruckled into hills and valleys and made things worse than ever. Having started like this, he knew himself capable of keeping it up gaily till the small hours; and to-night, of all nights——!
Even through his closed eyelids, he was still aware that his verandah doorway framed a wide panel of moonlight—the almost incredible moonlight of India. He had flung it open as usual and rolled up the chick. A bedroom hermetically sealed made him feel suffocated, imprisoned; so he must, perforce, put up with the moon; and when the world was drowned in her radiance, sleep seemed almost a sin. But to-night, moon or no, he craved sleep as an opium-eater craves his magic pellets,—because he wanted to dream. It was many weeks since he last had sight of his mother. But surely she must be near him in his loneliness; aware, in some mysterious fashion, of the deep longing with which he longed for sight or sense of her, to assure him that—in spite of qualms and indecisions—he had chosen aright. Conviction grew that directly the veil of sleep fell he would see her. It magnified his insomnia from mere discomfort to a baffling inimical presence withholding him from her:—till utter weariness blotted out everything; and even as he hovered on the verge of sleep, she was there....
She was lying in her hammock under the beeches, in her apple-blossom sari, sunlight flickering through the leaves. And he saw his own figure moving towards her, without the least surprise, that he could see and hear himself as another being, while still remaining inside himself.
He heard his own voice say, low and fervently, "Beloved little Mother—I am here. Always in the battle I remembered Chitor. Now—turned out of the battle—I have come to Chitor."
Then he was on his knees beside her; and her fingers, light as thistledown, strayed over his hair, in the ghost of a caress that so unfailingly stilled his excitable spirit. Without actual words, by some miracle of interpenetration, she seemed to know all that was in his heart—the perplexities and indecisions; the magnetism of Home and the dread of it; the difficulty of making things clear to his father. And the magic of her touch charmed away all inner confusions, all headache and heartache. But when he rose impulsively, and would have taken her in his arms—she was gone; everything was gone; ... the hammock, the beeches, the sunbeams....
He was standing alone on a moonlit plain, blotched and streaked with shadows of dák-jungle and date-palm; and rising out of it abruptly—as he had seen it last night—loomed the black bulk of Chitor; the sacred, solitary ghost of a city, linked with his happiest days of childhood and his mother's heroic tales. The great rock was scarped and bastioned, every line of it. The walls, ruined in parts, showed ghostly shades of ruins beyond; and soaring high above all, Khumba Rána's nine-storied Tower of Victory lifted a giant finger to the unheeding heavens. Watching it, fascinated, trying in vain to make out details, he was startlingly beset by the strangest among many strange sensations that had visited his imaginative brain: nothing less than a revival of the long-ago dream-feeling, the strange sense of familiarity—he knew! Beyond all cavil, he knew every line of that looming shadow, every curve of the hills. He knew the exact position of the old bridge over the Gamberi river. From the spot where he stood, he could find his way unerringly to the Padal Pol—the fortified entrance to the road of Seven Gates;—the road that had witnessed, three times in three hundred years, that heroic alternative to surrender, the terrible rite of Johur:—the final down-rush of every male defender, wearing the saffron robe and coronet of him who embraces death as a bride; the awful slaughter at the lowest gate, where they fell, every man of them, before the victors entered in....
The horror and savage exaltation of it all stirred, so sensibly, in his veins that he caught himself dimly wondering—was it he, Roy Sinclair, who stood there remembering these things—or another...?
And before that crazy question could resolve itself—behold he was lying wide awake again in his ruckled bed, on the lumpy pillow, staring at the wide patch of moonlight framed by his open door.
Not morning yet, confound it all! But the tiredness and loneliness were clean gone. It was always so when she came to him thus. Tacitly, he knew it, and she knew it, for a visitation. There was no delusion of having got her back again; only the comforting assurance that she was near him still. There was also, on this occasion, a consuming curiosity and impatience not to be denied.
Switching on his electric torch, he consulted his watch. Nearly half-past four—why not ...? It was no distance to the lower gate, and only a mile of zigzag road up to the city.
Thought and action were almost simultaneous. He was out of bed, standing in the doorway. The moon's unclouded brilliance seemed to flood his brain; to clear it of cobwebs and dispel all desire of sleep. For he loved the veiled spirit of night as most men love the unveiled face of morning; and in no way, perhaps, was he more clearly of the East. In a land where the sun slays his thousands, the moon comes triumphantly to her own: and Roy decided, there and then, that in the glamour of her light he would take his first look at Chitor. Whether or no it really was his first look, he might possibly find out when he got there.
His train-basket provided him with a hurried cup of tea, biscuits and a providential hard-boiled egg. He had no qualms about rousing Bishun Singh to saddle Suráj, or disturbing the soldiery quartered at the gates. His grandfather had written of him to the Maharana of Udaipur—a cousin in the third degree: and he had leave to go in and out, during his stay, at what hour he pleased. He would remain on the rock till dawn; and from the ninth storey of Khumba Rána's Tower he would see the sun rise over Chitor....
Half an hour later, he was in the saddle trotting along the empty road; Terry, a scurrying shadow in his wake; Bishun Singh left to finish his night's rest. Eight before him loomed the magnet that had dragged him out of bed at this unearthly hour—the great rock-fortress, three miles long, less than a mile broad, aptly likened to a battleship ploughing through the disturbed sea of bush-grown hills at its base.
Riding quickly through new Chitor—a dirty little town, fast asleep—he reached the fortified gateway: was challenged by sleepy soldiery; gave his name and passed on—into another world; a world that grew increasingly familiar with every hundred yards of ascent.
At one point he halted abreast of two rough monuments, graves of the valiant pair who had fought and died, like Rajputs, in that last terrible onslaught when the hosts of Akbar entered in, over the bodies of eight thousand saffron-robed warriors, and made Chitor a place of desolation for ever. One—a mere boy of sixteen—was the only son of his house. Beside him, lance in hand, fought his widowed mother and girl wife; and in death they were not divided. The other, Jaimul of Bednore, was a far-away ancestor of his own mother. How often she had told him the tale—adding proudly that, while Rajasthán endured, the names of those two would shine clear in the firmament of time, as stars in the firmament of space.
Through gateway after gateway—under the lee of a twenty-foot wall, pierced for musketry,—he passed, a silent shadow. And gradually there stole over him afresh the confused wonder of his dream,—was it he himself who rode—or was it—that other, returning to the sacred city after long absence? For the moment he could hardly tell. But—what matter? The astonishing thrill of recognition was all....
Round about the seventh gateway clustered the semblance of a village; shrouded, slumbering forms strewn around in the open;—ghosts all. The only instant realities were himself and Suráj and Chitor, and the silence of the sleeping earth, watched over by unsleeping stars. Within, and about him, hovered a stirring consciousness of ancient, unchanging India; utterly impervious to mere birds of passage from the West; veiled, elusive, yet almost hideously real. So real, just then, to Roy, that—for a few amazing moments—he was unaware that he rode through a city forsaken by man. Ghosts of houses and temples slid by on either side of him, as he spurred Suráj to a canter and made unerringly for the main palace. There was news for the Rana—news of Akbar's army—that did not brook delay....
Not till Suráj stopped dead—there where the Palace had once stood in its glory—did he come to himself, as abruptly as when he waked in the French bedstead an hour ago.
Gone was the populous city through which he had ridden in fancy; gone the confusion of himself with that other self—how many centuries old? But the familiar look of the palace was no dream; nor the fact that he had instinctively made his way there at full speed. Bastioned and sharply domed, it stood before him in clear outline; but within sides it was hollow as a skull; a place of ghosts. Suddenly there came over him the old childish dread of dark, that he had never quite outgrown. But dread or no, explore it he must....
As his foot touched earth, a low hiss warned him he was trespassing, and clutching Terry's collar, he stood rigid, while the whip-like shadow of death writhed across a strip of moonlight—and disappeared. There was life,—of a sort, in Chitor. So Roy trod warily as he passed from room to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination of foreknowledge verified without fail.
Through riven walls and roofs, moonlight streamed: its spectral brightness intensifying every patch or streak of shadow. And there, where Kings and Princes had held audience—watched by their womenfolk through fretted screens—was neither roof nor walls; only a group of marble pillars, as it were assembled in ghostly conference. The stark silence and emptiness—not of yesterday, but of centuries—smote him with a personal pang. From end to end of the rock it brooded; a haunting presence,—tutelary goddess of Chitor. There is an emptiness of the open desert, of an untrodden snowfield that lifts the soul and sets it face to face with God; but the emptiness of a city forsaken is that of a body with the spark of life extinct:—'the silver cord loosed, the golden bowl broken, and the pitcher broken at the fountain ...'
Terry's sharp bark, a squawk and a scuffle of wings, made him start violently and jarred him all through. It seemed almost profane—as if one were in a cathedral. Calling the marauder to heel, he mounted and rode on toward the Tower of Victory. For the moon was dipping westward; and he must see that vast view bathed in moonlight. Then the dawn....
Once more deserting Suráj; he confronted Khumba's Tower; scatheless as the builder's hand left it four centuries ago. Massive and arrogant, it loomed above him; scarcely a foot of stone uncarven, so far as he could see—exploring the four-square base of it with the aid of the moon and his torch. Figures, in high relief, everywhere—animal, human and divine; a riot of impossible forms, impossibly intertwined; ghoulish in any aspect, and in moonlight hideously so:—bewildering, repellent, frankly obscene. But even while his cultured eye rejected it all, some infinitesimal fragment of himself knew there was symbolic meaning in that orgy of sculpture, could one but find the key.
Up and up, round and round the inner spiral staircase he climbed, in a creepsome darkness, invaded by moonbeams, hardly less creepsome, admitted through window-like openings set in every face of every storey. With each inrush of light, each flash of his torch, in deepest darkness, those thronging figures, weirdly distorted, sprang at him afresh, sending ignominious trickles down his spine. Walls, window slabs, door beams—the vast building was encrusted with them from base to summit; a nightmare of prancing, writhing, gesticulating unrest; only one still face repeated at intervals—the Great God holding the wheel of Law....
Never had Roy more keenly appreciated the company of Terry, who, in spite of a Celtic pedigree, was not enjoying this prolonged practical joke.
It was relief unspeakable to emerge at last, into full light and clean sweet morning air. For the ninth storey, under the dome, was arcaded on all four sides and refreshingly innocent of decoration. Not a posturing figure to be seen. Nothing but restful slabs of polished stone. There was meaning in this also—could one catch the trend of the builder's thought.
On a slab near an arcaded opening Roy sat gratefully down; while Terry, bored to extinction with the whole affair, curled himself up in a shadowed corner and went fast asleep. "Unfriendly little beast," thought Roy; and promptly forgot his existence.
For below him, in the silvery moonlight of morning, lay Chitor; her shattered arches and battlements, her temples and palaces dwarfed to mere footstools for the gods. And beyond, and again beyond, lay the naked strength and desolation of northern Rajputana—white with poppy-fields, velvet-dark with scrub, jagged with outcrops of volcanic rock; the gaunt warrior country, battered by centuries of struggle and slaughter; making calamity a whetstone for courage; saying, in effect, to friend and enemy, 'Take me or leave me. You cannot change me.'
The Border had fascinated Roy. The Himalayas had subjugated him. But this strong unlovely region of rock and sand, of horses and swords, of chivalry and cruelty and daring, irresistibly laid siege to his heart; gave him the authentic sense of being one with it all.
On a day, in that summer of blessed memory, his mother had almost promised him that, once again she would revisit India if only for the joy of making a pilgrimage with him to Chitor. And here he sat on the summit of Khumba Rána's Tower—alone. That was the way of life....
Gradually there stole over him a great weariness of body and spirit; pure reaction from the uplift of his strange adventure. His lids drooped heavily. In another moment he would have fallen sound asleep; but he saved himself, just in time. When he craved the thing, it eluded him; now, undesired, it assailed him. But it would never do. He might sleep for hours. And at the back of his mind lurked a clear conviction that he was waiting for more than the dawn....
To shake off drowsiness he rose, stretched himself, paced to and fro several times—and did not sit down again. Folding his arms, he leaned his shoulders against the stone embrasure; and stood so, a long while, absorbing—with every faculty of flesh and spirit—the stillness, the mystery, the pearl-grey light and bottomless gulfs of shadow; his mind emptied of articulate thought ... his soul poised motionless, as it were a bird on outspread wings....
Was it fantasy, this gradual intensifying of his uplifted mood, this breathless stir in the region of his heart, till some vital part of him seemed gradually withdrawn—up into the vastness and the silence...?
And suddenly, in every nerve, he knew—he was not alone. In the seeming emptiness of the place, something, some one hovered near him. Amazed, yet exultant, he held his breath; and an answering leap of the heart set him tingling from head to foot.
It was more than a vague 'sense of presence.' Fused in the central happiness that flooded him—as the moonlight flooded the desert—was an almost startling awareness; not the mere emotional effect of music or a poem; but sure knowledge that she was there with him in that upper room; her disembodied tenderness yearning towards him across a barrier of empty space that neither she nor he could traverse, for all their nearness, for all their longing....
If Lance himself had come audibly up those endless stairs and stood beside him, he could not have felt more certain of his presence than he felt, at this moment, of her companionship, her unspoken assurance that he had chosen aright. He felt himself, if possible, the less real of the two.
For that brief space, his world seemed empty of everything, every one, but they two—so irrevocably sundered, so mysteriously united.
Could he only have sight of her to complete the marvel of it! But although he kept his eyes on the spot whence the 'feel of her' seemed to come, not the shadow of a shade could he see; only—was it fancy?—a hint of brighter radiance than mere moonbeams—there, near the opposite archway?
He dared not move a finger lest he break the spell. Yet he could not restrain altogether the emotion that surged in him, that filled his ears with a soft roar as of breaking waves.
"God bless you, little Mother!" he murmured, barely above his breath—and waited; expecting he knew not what.
A ghost of a breeze passed close to him;—truly a ghost, for the night was dead still. Almost he could have sworn that if he put out a hand he would have touched her. But reverence withheld him, rather than fear.
And the next moment, the place was empty. He was alone....
He felt the emptiness as unmistakably as he had felt her presence. But the pang of her going was shot through with elation that at last his waking brain had knowledge of her—a knowledge that no man could wrest from him, even if she never so came again. He had done her bidding. He had kept his manhood pure and the windows of his soul clear—and, behold, the Light had shone through....
* * * *
Impossible to tell how long he stood there. In those few moments of intensified life, time was not. The ordinary sense of his surroundings faded. The inner sense of reality quickened in like measure; the reality of her presence, all the more felt, because it was unseen....
When he came clearly to himself again, the moon had vanished. Eastward, the sky was full of primrose light. It deepened and blazed; till, all in a moment, the sun leaped from the scabbard of the hills, keen and radiant as a drawn sword.
A full minute Roy stood there, eyes and brain blinded with brilliance. Then he knelt down and covered his face; and so remained, a long while, his whole being uplifted in a wordless ecstasy of thanksgiving.
| "The snow upon my life-bloom sits |
| And sheds a dreary blight;— |
| Thy spirit o'er my spirit flits, |
| And crimson comes for white." |
| —Anon. |
On an unclouded afternoon of October, Roy sat alone with Thea Leigh in a shady corner of the Residency garden, smoking and talking, feeling blissfully at ease in body, and very much at home in spirit. After the wrench of parting with Desmond, it was balm to be welcomed by the sister who shared his high courage and enthusiasm for life, and who was smiling at Roy now with the same hazel-grey eyes that both had gotten from their father. But Thea's hair—her crown of glory—belonged exclusively to herself. The colour of it reminded him, with a pang, of autumn beech leaves, in his own woods. It enhanced the vivid quality of her beauty, and added appreciably to his pleasure in watching her while she talked.
Roy had arrived that morning, in the mist-laden chill of dawn; had enjoyed a long talk with Colonel Leigh; had made the acquaintance of Vernon and Phyllis, aged six and four; also of Flossie Eden, a kind of adopted daughter, aged twenty; and, tiffin being over, had announced his intention of riding out to re-discover the rose-red wonderland of his childish dreams—the peacocks and elephants and crocodiles and temple bells. Thea, however, had counselled patience, threatening him with dire disillusion, if he went seeking his wonderland at that glaringly unpoetic time of day.
"An early cup of tea, and a ride afterwards," she prescribed, in her best autocratic manner. "Only sunset, or the first glimmer of dawn, can throw a spell over the municipal virtues and artistic backslidings of Jaipur! I speak with feeling; because I rushed forth untimely; and, in the full glare of afternoon sunshine, your rose-red city looked like nothing on earth but a fearful and wonderful collection of pink and white birthday cakes, set out for a giants' tea-party! It seemed almost a pity the giants had never come and eaten them up. Vinx said I was ribald. As a matter of fact, he was simply jealous of my brilliant metaphor! Look at him now—bored to death with me, because I'm telling the truth!"
Colonel Leigh—a tall pensive-looking man, who talked little and listened assiduously—met her challenge with the indulgent smile of a husband who can be at once amused and critical and devoted: an excellent conjunction in marriage.
"If you can stay Roy's impatience with your metaphors, I'll begin to have some respect for them!" said he.
And she was staying Roy's impatience now, with cigarettes and coffee and the tale of Arúna—'England-returned.' She had revealed little by letter; an uncharacteristic touch of caution derived from her husband, who questioned the wisdom of her bold incursion into the complexities and jarring elements of a semi-modern Hindu household. But Thea Leigh, daughter of Honor Desmond, was strongly imbued with the responsibility of the ruling race. She stoutly refused to preserve, in Jaipur, the correct official detachment of Anglo-India. More: she possessed a racial wisdom of the heart, not to be gainsaid; as who should know better than her husband, since it had saved him from himself. And now, having secured Roy for half an hour, she confided to him, unreservedly, all she could gather of the tragic tangle she was unravelling in her own effective fashion.
"Arúna's the dearest thing," she told him—as well he knew. "And I'm truly fond of her. But sometimes I feel helpless. They're so hard to come at—these gentle, inscrutable Hindu women. Talk of English reserve! However, I'm getting quite nimble at guessing and inferring; and I gather that your splendid old grandfather is rather pathetically helpless with that hive of hidden womenfolk and gurus. Also that the old lady—Mátaji—is a bit of a tartar. Of course, having lost caste, makes the poor child's home position almost impossible. Yet she flatly refuses to go through their horrid rites of restitution. And Miss Hammond—our lady doctor at the hospital—backs her up."
"Well played, Miss Hammond!" quoth Roy; and remembering Arúna's cheerful letters (no word of complications), all his sympathy went out to her. Might not he—related, yet free of grandmotherly tyranny—somehow be able to help? Too cruel that from her happy time in England there should spring such tragic issues. And she was not a creature made for tragedy, but for laughter and love and 'man's delight.' Yet, in the Hindu nature of things, this very matter of marriage was the crux of her troubles.
To the Power behind the curtain it spelt disgrace, that the eldest grand-daughter—at the ripe age of twenty-two—should be neither wife nor mother. It would need a very advanced suitor to overlook that damning item. Doubtless a large dowry would be demanded by way of compensation; and, before all, caste must be restored. While Arúna remained obdurate, nothing could be definitely arranged; and her grandfather had not the heart to enforce his wife's insistent demands. But if the Indian woman's horizon be limited, her shrewdness and intuitive knowledge are often amazing; and this formidable old lady—skilled in the art of imposing her will on others—knew herself a match for her husband's evasions and Arúna's flat rebellion.
She reckoned, however, without the daughter of Sir Theo Desmond, who, at this point, took action—sudden and disconcerting.
"You see the child came regularly to my purdah parties," she explained to Roy, who was impatient no longer, only absorbed. "Sometimes I had her alone for reading and music; and it was heart-breaking to see her wilting away before my eyes. So, at last, in desperation, I broke loose—as Vinx politely puts it—and asked searching questions, regardless of etiquette. After all, the poor lamb has no mother. And I never disobey an impulse of the heart. I believe I was only in the nick of time. It seemed the old tartar and her widowed sister-in-law were in touch with a possible husband. So they had given the screw a fresh turn, assisted by the family guru. He had just honoured them with a special visit, expecting to find the lost sheep regenerate and eager for his blessing. Shocked at the tale of her obstinacy, he announced that, unless he heard otherwise within a week, he would put a nameless curse upon her; in which case her honourable grandmother would not allow the poor child to eat or sleep under her honourable roof."
Roy's hand closed sharply on the arm of his chair. "Confound the fellow! It's chiefly the mental effect they rely on. They're no fools; and even men like Grandfather—who can't possibly believe such rot—seem powerless to stand up against them. Does he know all this?"
"It's hard to tell. They're so guarded—even the most enlightened—in alluding to domestic matters. Without a shade of discourtesy, they simply keep one outside. Poor Arúna was terrified at having told me. Broke down utterly. But no idea of giving in. It's astonishing the grit one comes upon under their surface gentleness. She said she would starve or drown rather. I said she should do nothing of the kind; that I would speak to Sir Lakshman myself—oh, very diplomatically, of course! Afterwards, all in a rush, came my inspiration. Some sort of secretarial work for me would sound fairly plausible. (Did you know—I'm making a name, in a small way, over my zeal for Indian women?) On the strength of that, one could suggest a couple of rooms in the Residency; and she could still keep on at the hospital with Miss Hammond, giving me certain afternoons. It struck me as flawless—till I imparted it to Vinx and saw him tweak his left eyebrow. Of course he was convinced it 'wouldn't do'; Sir Lakshman ... my position ... and so on. I said I proposed to make it do—and the eyebrow twitched worse than ever. So I mildly reminded him that he had not held Arúna sobbing in his arms, and he didn't happen to be a mother! Which was unanswerable.—And, my dear Roy, I had a hectic week of it, manipulating Sir Lakshman and Arúna and the honourable grandmother—strictly unseen! I'm sure she's anti-English. I've got at all the other high-borns; but I can't get at her. However—with a bold front and a tactful tongue, I carried the day. So I hope the holy man will transfer his potent curse to me. Naturally, the moment I'd fixed things up, came Lance's letter about you. But I couldn't back out. And I suppose it's all right?"
"Well, of course." Roy was troubled with no doubts on that score. "What a family you are! I was hoping to pick up threads with Arúna."
"You shall. But you must be discreet. Jaipur isn't exactly Oxford. Brother and cousin are almost the same word with them; but still——"
"Is she at the hospital now?" Roy cut in irrelevantly. Her insistence on discretion—with Arúna, of all people—struck him as needless fussing and unlike Thea. And by now he was feeling more impatient to see Arúna than to see Jaipur.
"No. But she seemed shy of appearing at tiffin. So I said if she came out here afterwards, she would find you and me alone. She's looked happier and less fragile lately. Even Vinx admits the event has justified me. But of course it's simply an emergency plan—a transition——"
"To what?" Roy challenged her with surprising emphasis.
"That's my puzzle of puzzles. Perhaps you can help me solve it. Sometimes I wonder if she knows herself, what she wants out of life.... But perhaps I haven't the key to her waverings...."
At that moment, a slight unmistakable figure stepped from the shadow of the verandah down the shallow steps flanked with pots of begonia; moving with the effortless grace that Roy's heart knew too well. Dress and sari were carnation pink. Her golden shoes glittered at every step: and she pensively twirled a square Japanese parasol—almond blossoms and butterflies scattered abroad on silk of the frailest blue.
"Is their instinct for that sort of thing unconscious, I wonder?" murmured Thea. "You shall have half an hour with her, to pick up threads. Help me if you can, Roy. But—be discreet!"
Roy scarcely heard her. He had gone suddenly very still—his gaze riveted on Arúna. The Indian dress, the carriage of her veiled head, the leisured grace, so sharply smote him that tears pricked his eyelids; and, for one intoxicating moment he was wafted, in spirit, across the chasm of the War to that dear dream-world of youth, when all distances were blue and all the near prospect bright with the dew of the morning. Only under a mask-like stillness could he hide that startling uprush of emotion; and had Broome been watching him, he would have seen the subtle film of the East steal over his face.
Thea saw only his sudden abstraction and the whitened knuckles of his left hand. She also realised, with a faint prick of anxiety, that he had simply not heard her remark. Was it possible—could Roy be at the back of Arúna's waverings? Would his coming mean fresh complications? Too distracting to be responsible for anything of that kind....
Without a word, he had risen—and went quickly forward to meet her. Thea saw how, on his approach, all her studied composure fell away; and both, when they joined her, looked so happy, yet so plainly discomposed, that Thea felt ridiculously at a loss for just the right word with which to effect a casual retreat. Responsibility for Sir Lakshman's grand-daughter was no light matter: at least she had done well in warning Roy. These emerging Indian girls...!
It was a positive relief to see the prosaic figure of Floss Eden, in brief tennis skirts and shady hat, hurrying across the lawn, with her boyish stride; racquet swinging, her round face flushed with exercise.
"I say, Aunt Thea—you're wanted jut put,"[6] she announced briskly. "Verney's in one of his moods—and Mr Neill will soon be in one of his tempers, if he isn't forcibly removed. Instead of helping with the balls, he's been parading up and down the verandah; two tin pails, tied on to him with string, clattering behind—making a beast of a row. Shouting wasn't any earthly. So I rushed in and grabbed him. 'Verney—drop it! What are you doing?' I said sternly; and he looked up at me like a sainted cherub. 'Flop, don't hinder me. I'm walkin' froo the valley of the shadow, an' goodness an' mercy are following me all the days of my life.' That's the fruits of teaching the Bible to innocents!"
Thea's laugh ended in a sigh. "I warned Miss Mills. But the creature is getting out of hand. I suppose it means he ought to go home. Mr Neill," she explained to Roy, "is Vinx's shorthand secretary: volcanic, but indispensable to the Great Work! So I must fly off and obliterate my superfluous son."
Her eyes tried to impart the warning he had not heard. Useless. His attention was centred on Arúna.
"Wonderful—isn't she?" the girl murmured, looking after her. Then swiftly, half-shyly, she glanced up at him. "Still more wonderful that, at last, you have come, that I am here too—only through her. She told you?"
"Yes. A little. I want to hear more."
"Presently. I would rather push away sad things—now you are here. If there was only Dyán too—like Oxford days. And—oh, Roy, I was bad never writing ... about her. I did try. But so difficult.... And—you knew——?"
"Yes—I knew," he said in a repressed voice. On that subject he could not trust himself just yet. Every curve and fold of her sari, and the half-seen coils of her dark hair, every movement, every quaint turn of phrase, set his nerves vibrating with an ecstasy that was pain. For the moment, he wanted simply to be aware of her; to hug the dear illusion that the years between were a dream. And illusion was heightened by the trivial fact that her appearance was identical in every detail. Was it chance? Or had she treasured them all this time? Only she herself looked older. Though her face kept its pansy aspect, her cheek-bones were a shade too prominent; no veiled glow of health under her dusky skin. But her smile could still atone for all shortcomings.
"Let's sit down," he added after a strained silence. "And tell me—what's come to Dyán?"
She shook her head. "Oh—if we could know. Not much use, after all, trying to push away sadness!" She sank into her chair and looked up at him. "The more you push it away, the more it comes flowing in from everywhere. Everything so broken and confused from this terrible War. At the beginning how they said all would be made new; East and West firmly united. But here, at home, while the best were fighting, the worst were too busy with ugly whispers and untrue talk. Even holy men, behind the purdah...."
"As bad as that, is it?" asked Roy, distracted from his own sensations by the subject that lay nearest his heart. "And you think Dyán's in with that crew?"
"Yes, we are afraid.... A pity he came back from France too soon, because half his left arm must be cut off. Then—you heard—he went to Calcutta?"
"Yes, I wrote at the time. He didn't answer. I haven't heard since."
She nodded. Sudden tears filled her eyes. "Always now ... no answer. Like trying to speak with some one dead. So Grandfather fears he was not only studying art. You know how he is too quick to catch fire. And too easily, he might believe those men who spin words like spider's webs. Also he was very sore losing his arm, by some small stupid chance; and there was bitterness for that trouble ... of Tara...."
Roy started. "Lord—was it Tara?" Instantly there flashed a vision of the walled lane leading to New College; Dyán's embittered mood and bewildering change of front.... Looking back now, the thing seemed glaringly obvious; but, through the opalescent mist of his own dreams, he had seen Dyán in one relation only. Just as well perhaps. Even at this distance, the idea amazed and angered him. Tara! The arrogance of it...!
"You didn't know—never thought?... Poor Dyán!" One finger-tip furtively intercepted a tear that was stealing down the side of her nose.
"I am too silly just now," she apologised meekly. "To me, he only spoke of it long after, when coming wounded from France. Then I saw how the bitterness was still there, changing the noble thoughts of his heart. That is the trouble with Dyán. First—nothing good enough for England. But too fierce love may bring too fierce hate—if they poison his mind with cunning words dressed up in high talk of religion——"
"How long since you heard? Have you any address?" Roy dared not encourage her melting mood.
"Six months now." She stoically blinked back her tears. "Not any word. Not any address, since he left Calcutta. Last week, I wrote, addressing to the office of a paper there, because once he said that editor gave him work. I told him all the pain in my heart. If that letter finds him—some answer must come."
"Well, if it does, I promise you this much;—I'll unearth him—somehow, wherever he is——"
"Oh, Roy! I hoped—I knew——!" She clasped her hands to hide their tremor, and the look in her eyes came perilously near adoration.
Roy had spoken with the cool assurance of his father's race, and without a glimmering idea how his rash promise was going to be fulfilled. "I'll do my level utmost, anyhow," he added more soberly. "But there's you—your home complications——"
She turned her hands outward with the expressive gesture of her race. "That foolish sadness we can push away. What matter for anything—now? I rest—I breathe—I am here——!" Her smile shone out, sudden and brilliant. "Almost like England—this big green garden and children and sound of playing tennis. Let us be young again. Let us, for a small time, not remember that all outside is Jaipur and the desert—dusty and hot and cruel; and dark places full of secret and terrible things. Here we are safe. Here it is almost England!"
Her gallant appeal so moved him, and the lighter vein so charmingly became her, that Roy humoured her mood willingly enough....
When his tea arrived, she played hostess with an alluring mixture of shyness and happy importance, capping his lively sallies with the quick wit of old days. And when Suráj was announced—"Oh, please—may I see him?" she begged eagerly as a child.
Suráj graciously permitted his velvet nose to be stroked by alien fingers, light as rose petals. Then Roy sprang into the saddle; and Arúna stood watching him as he went—sais and dog trotting to heel—a graceful lonely figure, shadowed by her semi-transparent parasol.
At a bend in the drive, where a sentry sprang to attention, he turned for a parting salute. Her answering gesture might or might not have been intended for him. She at least knew all about the need for being discreet. For, on leaving the tea-table, they had passed from the dream of 'almost England' into the dusty actuality of Jaipur.
[6] Instantly.
"Broadly speaking, there are two blocks of people—East and West; people who interfere and people who don't interfere; ... East is a fatalist, West is an idealist, of a clumsy sort."—Stacy Aumonier.
A mile, or less, of tree-bordered road sloped gently from the Residency gate-posts to the walled City of Victory, backed by craggy, red-grey spurs of the Aravalli range, hidden almost in feathery heads of banyan, acacia, and neem—a dusty, well-ordered oasis, holding its own against the stealthy oncoming of the desert.
North and east ran the screen of low hills with their creeping lines of masonry; but from south and west the softly encroaching thing crept up to the city walls, in through the gates, powdering every twig and leaf and lattice with the fine white dust of death. Shadeless and colourless, to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the ak plant and gaunt cactus bushes—their limbs petrified in weird gesticulation.
But on the road itself was a sufficiency of life and colour—parrokeets flashing from tree to tree, like emeralds made visible and vocable; village women swathed in red and yellow veils; prancing Rajput cavaliers, straight from the Middle Ages; ox-carts and camels—unlimited camels, with flapping lip and scornful eye; a sluggish stream of life, rising out of the landscape and flowing, from dawn to dusk, through the seven Gates of Jaipur. And there, on the low spurs, beyond the walls, he sighted the famous Tiger Fort, and the marble tomb of Jai Sing—he that built the rose-red City; challenging the desert, as Canute the sea; saying, in terms of stone and mortar, 'Here shall thy proud waves be stayed!' Nearing the fortified gateway, Roy noted how every inch of flat surface was silkily powdered, every opening silted with sand. Would it rest with desert or city, he wondered, the ultimate victory of the last word...?
Close against the ramparts, sand and dust were blown into a deep drift; or was it a deserted pile of rags——? Suddenly, with a sick sensation, he saw the rags heave and stir. Arms emerged—if you could call them arms—belonging to pinched, shadowy faces. And from that human dust-heap came a quavering wail, "Maharáj! Maharáj!"
"What is it, Bishun Singh?" he asked sharply of the sais, trotting at his stirrup.
"Only the famine, Hazúr. Not a big trouble this year, they say. But from the villages these come crawling to the city, believing the Maharáj has plenty, and will give."
"Does he give?"
Bishun Singh's gesture seemed to deprecate undue curiosity. "The Maharáj is great, but the people are like flies. If their Karma is good, they find a few handfuls; if evil—they die."
Roy said no more. That simple statement was conclusive as a dropped stone. But, on reaching the gateway, he scattered a handful of loose corns.
Instantly a cry went up: "He gives money for food! Jai déa Maharáj!"[7] Not merely arms, but entire skeletons emerged, seething, scrambling, with hands wasted to mere claws. A few of the boldest caught at Roy's stirrup; whereat Bishun Singh brushed them off, as if they were flies indeed.
Unresisting, they tottered and fell one against another, like ninepins: and Roy, hating the man, turned sharply away. But rebuke was futile. One could do nothing. It was that which galled him. One could only pass on; mentally brushing them aside—like Bishun Singh.
Spectres vanished, however, once he and Suráj were absorbed into the human kaleidoscope of the vast main street, paved with wide strips of hewn stone; one half of it sun-flooded; one half in shadow. The colour and movement; the vista of pink-washed houses speckled with white florets; the gay muslins, the small turbans and inimitable swagger of the Rajput-Sun-descended, re-awakened in him those gleams of ancestral memory that had so vividly beset him at Chitor. Sights and sounds and smells—the pungent mingling of spices and dust and animals—assailed his senses with a vague yet poignant familiarity: fruit and corn-shops with their pyramids of yellow and red and ochre, and the fat brown bunnia in the midst; shops bright with brass-work and Jaipur enamel; lattice windows, low-browed arches, glimpses into shadowed courts; flitting figures of veiled women; humbler women, unveiled, winnowing grain, or crowned with baskets of sacred cow-dung, stepping like queens....
And the animals——! Extinct, almost, in modern machine-ridden cities, here they visibly and audibly prevailed. For Asia lives intimately—if not always mercifully—with her animals; and Roy's catholic affection embraced them all. Horses first—a long way first. But bullocks had their charm: the graceful trotting zebus, horns painted red and green. And the ponderous swaying of elephants—sensitive creatures, nervous of their own bulk, resplendently caparisoned. And there—a flash of the jungle, among casual goats, fowls, and pariahs—went the royal cheetahs, led on slips; walking delicately, between scarlet peons, looking for all the world like amiable maiden ladies with blue-hooded caps tied under their chins. In the wake of their magnificence two distended donkeys, on parodies of legs, staggered under loads more distended still, plump dhobies perched callously on the cruppers. Above all, Roy's eye delighted in the jewelled sheen of peacocks, rivalling in sanctity the real lords of Jaipur—Shiva's sacred bulls. Some milk-white and onyx-eyed, some black and insolent, they sauntered among the open shop fronts, levying toll and obstructing traffic—assured, arrogant, immune....
And, at stated intervals, like wrong notes in a succession of harmonies, there sprang wrought-iron gas-lamps fitted with electric bulbs!
So riding, he came to the heart of the city—a vast open space, where the shops seemed brighter, the crowds gayer; and, by contrast, the human rag and bone heaps, beggars and cripples, more terrible to behold.
Here the first ray of actual recognition flashed through the haze of familiar sensations. For here architectural exuberance culminated in the vast bewildering façade of the Hall of the Winds and the Palace flaunting its royal standard—five colours blazoned on cloth of gold. But it was not these that held Roy's gaze. It was the group of Brahmin temples, elaborately carven, rose-red from plinth to summit, rising through flights of crows and iridescent pigeons; their monolithic forms clean cut against the dusty haze; their shallow steps flanked with marble elephants, splashed with orange-yellow robes of holy men and groups of brightly-veiled women.
At sight of them Roy instinctively drew rein;—and there, in the midst of the shifting, drifting crowd, he sat motionless, letting the vision sink deep into his mind, while Terry investigated a promising smell, and Bishun Singh, wholly incurious, gossiped with a potter, from whose wheel emerged an endless succession of chirághs—primitive clay lamps, with a lip for the cotton wick. His neighbour, with equal zest, was creating very ill-shapen clay animals, birds and fishes.
"Look, Hazúr—for the Dewáli," Bishun Singh thrust upon Roy's attention the one matter of real moment, just then, to all right-minded Hindus. "Only two more weeks. So they are making lamps, without number, for houses and shops and the palace of the Maharája. Very big tamasha, Hazúr."
He enlarged volubly on the coming festival, to this Sahib, who took such unusual interest in the ways of India; while Roy sat silent, watching, remembering....
Nearly nineteen years ago he had seen the Dewáli—Feast of Lights; had been driven, sitting on his mother's knee, through a fairy city outlined in tremulous points of flame, down to the shore of the Mán Sagar Lake, where the lights quavered and ran together and the dead ruins came alive with them. All night they had seemed to flicker in his fanciful brain; and next morning-unable to think or talk of anything else—he had been moved to dictate his very first attempt at a poem....
Suddenly, sharply, there rose above the chatter of the crowd and the tireless clamour of crows, a scream of mingled rage and anguish that tore at his nerves and sent a chill down his spine.
Swinging round in the saddle, he saw a spectral figure of a woman—detached from a group of spectres, huddled ironically against bulging sacks of grain. One shrivelled arm was lifted in denunciation; the other pressed a shapeless bundle to her empty breasts. Obviously little more than a girl—yet with no trace of youth in her ravaged face—she stood erect, every bone visible, before the stall of a bangle-seller, fat and well liking, exuding rolls of flesh above his dhoti,[8] and enjoying his savoury chupattis hot and hot; entirely impervious to unseemly ravings; entirely occupied in pursuing trickles of ghi[9] with his agile tongue that none might be lost.
"That shameless one was begging a morsel of food," the toymaker explained conversationally. "Doubtless her stomach is empty. Wah! Wah! But she has no pice. And a man's food is his own...."
As he spoke a milk-white bull ambled by, plundering at will; his privileged nose adventuring near and nearer to the savoury smell. Promptly, with reverential eagerness, the man proffered half a fresh chupatti to the sacred intruder.
At that the starving girl-mother lunged forward with the yell of a hunted beast; lunged right across the path of a dapper young man in an English suit, green turban, and patent-leather shoes.
"Peace, she-devil! Make way," he cried; and catching her wrist—that looked as if it would snap at a touch—he flung her aside so roughly that she staggered and fell, the child beneath her emitting a feeble wail....
Since the days of his imprisonment, cruelty witnessed had a startling effect on Roy. Between the moment when he sprang from the saddle, in a blaze of fury, to the moment when he stood confronting the suave, Anglicised Indian—riding-crop in one hand, the other supporting the girl and her babe—his mind was a blank. The thing was done almost before the impulse reached his brain. He wondered if he had struck the fellow, whom he was now arraigning furiously in fluent Hindustani, and whose sullen, shifty face was reminding him of some one—somewhere....
"Have you no respect for suffering—or for women other than your own?" he demanded, scorn undisguised in his look and tone.
The man's answering shrug was frankly contemptuous. "All you English are mad," he said in the vernacular. "If she die not to-day, she will die to-morrow. And already there are too many to feed—"
"She will not die to-day or to-morrow," Roy retorted with Olympian assurance. "Courage, little mother,"—he addressed the girl—"you shall have food, you and the sonling."
As she raised herself, clutching at his arm, he became uncomfortably aware that her rags of clothing were probably verminous; that his chivalrous pity was tinged with repulsion. But pity prevailed. Supporting her to a neighbouring stall, he bought fruit, which she devoured like a wild thing. He begged a little milk in a lotah and gave her money for more. Half dazed, she dropped the money, emptied the small jar almost at a gulp, and flung herself at his feet, pressing her forehead on his dusty boot; covering him with confusion. Imperatively he bade her get up. No result. So he stooped to enforce his command....
She had fainted.
"Help, mother—quick!" he appealed to an elder woman who hovered near the stall, and responded, instinctively, to the note of command.
As she stooped over the girl he said in low rapid tones: "Listen! It is an order. Give warm food to her and the child. Take her to the Burra Sahib's compound. There she will be cared for. I will give word."
He slipped two rupees into her hand, adding: "Two more—when all is done according to order."
"Hai! Hai! The Sahib is a Son of Princes," murmured the favoured one, reflecting shrewdly that eight annas would suffice to feed those poor empty creatures; and gathering up her light burden she bore it away—to Roy's unfeigned relief.
Would Thea scold him—or uphold him, he wondered,—having committed himself. The whole thing had been so swift, so unreal, that he seemed half a world away from the green Residency garden, with its atmosphere of twentieth-century England, scrupulously, yet unconsciously, preserved in a setting of sixteenth-century India. And Roy had a strain of both in his composition.
Across the road Bishun Singh—tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries—was still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned. Again there dawned on Roy the conviction that he had seen that face before. It was not in India. It was linked with the same sensations, in a milder form. It would come in a moment....
It came.
Behind the slight, foppish figure, the eye of his mind saw suddenly—not the sunlight and colour of Jaipur, but a stretch of grey-green sea, tawny cliffs, and sandy shore ... St Rupert's! Of course, unmistakable: the sullen mouth, the shifty eyes....
Instantly he went forward and said in English: "I say—excuse me—but is your name Chandranath?"
The man started and stiffened. "That is no matter to you."
"Perhaps not. Only ... you're very like a boy who was one term at St Rupert's School with me."
"Well, I was at St Rupert's. A beastly hole——"
He, too, spoke English, and scanned Roy's face with narrowed eyes. "Sinclair—is it? You tumbled down the cliff on to me—and that Desmond fellow——?"
"Yes, I did. Lucky for you," Roy answered, stiffening in his turn. But because of old days—because this unpromising specimen of manhood had incidentally brought him and Desmond together, he held out his hand. "'Fraid I lost my temper," he said casually, for form's sake. "But you put my blood up."
Chandranath's fingers lay limply in his grasp.
"Still so sensitive——? Then better to clear out of India. I only pushed that crazy girl aside. Englishmen knock and kick our people without slightest compunction. Perhaps you are a tourist—or new to this country?"
Words and manner set Roy's nerves on edge; but he had been imprudent enough for one day. "I've spent seven months on the Frontier in a cavalry Regiment," he said; "but I only came to Jaipur yesterday."
"Well, take my advice, Mr Sinclair, and leave these people alone. They don't want Englishmen making pretence of sentimental fuss over them. They like much better to be pushed—or even starved—by their own ját. You may not believe it. But I belong to them. So I know."
Roy, who also 'belonged' in a measure, very nearly said so—but again prudence prevailed. "I'm rash enough to disagree with you," he said placably. "The question of non-interference, of letting ill alone—because one's afraid or can't be bothered—isn't merely a race question; it's a root question of human character. Some men can't pass by on the other side. Right or wrong, it simply isn't arguable. It's a matter of the individual conscience—the heart——"
"Conscience and heart—if not drastically disciplined by the logically reasoning brain, propagate the majority of troubles that afflict mankind," quoth Chandranath in the manner of one familiar with platform oratory. "Are you stopping in Jaipur?"
"Yes. At the Residency. Mrs Leigh is Desmond's sister. Did you know?"
"That is curious. I did not know. Too much heart and conscience there also. Mrs Leigh is thrusting her fingers into complicated issues of which she is lamentably ignorant."
Roy, taken aback, nearly gave himself away—but not quite. "I gather she acted with Sir Lakshman Singh's approval," was all he said.
Chandranath shrugged. "Sir Lakshman is an able but deluded man. His dreams of social reform are obsolete. We of the new school adhere patriotically to social and religious ordinances of the Mother. All we agitate for is political independence." He unfurled the polysyllables, like a flag; sublimely unaware of having stated a contradiction in terms. "But your Sir Lakshman is of the old-fashioned school—English-mad."
"And your particular friends—are sane, eh?"
The apostle of Hindu revival pensively twirled an English button of his creditably-cut English coat.
"Yes. We are sane—thanks to more liberalising influences. Coloured dust cannot be thrown in our eyes by bureaucratic conjuring tricks, or imperialistic talk about prestige. To-day it is India's turn for prestige. 'Arya for the Aryans' is the slogan of the rising generation." He paused, blinked, and added with an ingratiating chuckle: "You will go running away with an impression that I am metamorphosed into red-hot revolutionary. No, thank you! I am intrinsically a man of peace!" With a flourish he jerked out a showy gold watch. "Ah—getting late! Very agreeable exchanging amenities with old schoolfellows. But I have an appointment in the Palace Gardens, at the time they feed the muggers. That is a sight you should see, Mr Sinclair—when the beasts are hungry and have not lately snapped up a washerwoman or an erring wife!"
"I'd rather be excused this evening, thanks," Roy answered, with a touch of brusqueness. "I confess it wouldn't appeal to my sense of humour—seeing crocodiles gorge, while women and children starve."
"That is what they call in a book I once read 'little ironies of life.' Good fortune, at least, for the muggers! Better start to sharpen your sense of humour, my friend. It is incomparable asset against the slings and arrows of outrageous contingencies." This time his chuckle had an undernote of malice; and Roy, considering him thoughtfully—from green turban to patent-leather shoes—felt an acute desire to take him by the scruff of his English coat and dust the Jaipur market-place with the remnant of him.
Aloud he said coolly: "Thanks for the prescription. Are you stopping here long?"
"Oh, I am meteoric visitant. Never very long anywhere. I come and go."
"Business—eh?"
"Yes—many kinds of business—for the Mother." He flashed a direct look at Roy; the first since their encounter; fluttered a foppish hand—the little finger lifted to display a square uncut emerald—and went his way....
Roy, left standing alone in the leisurely crowd of men and animals—at once so alien and so familiar—returned to Bishun Singh and Suráj in a vaguely troubled frame of mind.
"Which way to the house of Sir Lakshman Singh?" he asked the maker of chirághs, his foot in the stirrup.
Enlightened, he set off at a trot, down another vast street, all hazy in the level light that conjured the dusty air to gold. But contact with human anguish, naked and unashamed—as he had not seen it since the war—and that sudden queer encounter with Chandranath, had rubbed the bloom off delicate films of memory and artistic impressions. These were the drop-scene, merely: negligible, when Life took the stage. He had an exciting sense of having stepped straight into a crisis. Things were going to happen in Jaipur.