A tired, veiled woman with her arms thrown wide
And head pearl-crowned by Himalaya’s height
She lies asleep; her soul is drugged with light
And ease; round her crossed feet there rolls the tide
Of tropic seas where trading vessels ride.
She heeds them little, wrapped in slumbrous night
Of dreams, while through the ages races fight
To own the body of the Sun-God’s bride.Her limbs are bound by bands of caste and creed,
Yet through her lips, when drowsily they part---
Lips that are stained by cruelty and greed---
There speaks at times a strangely child-like heart.A child’s heart? Nay, it needeth more than this
To heal a soul drugged by the Sun-God’s kiss!
“Kim watched the stars as they rose,” read Father Xavier in a gentle, rapid monotone, unconsciously imparting to the text a few variations which had escaped even Mr. Kipling’s mastery of our ‘whole’ language.
The young missionary was alone in his sedate peregrination of the dusty college compound, but he read aloud because he believed that by so doing he would improve his English. He read “Kim” in preference to a more devotional work, not only for the same reason, but because it was, as yet, little more than six months since he had sailed from Belgium to begin his work among the heathen, and he strove to assimilate the atmosphere of the land he had chosen for his labours.
His eyes wandered presently from the printed to the living pages about him. The suffocating heat of an October evening in the Punjab lay on the land. Not a leaf stirred of the dusty grey trees, and beneath his feet the withered grass crisped as he walked. A sultry, sulphurous sunset had turned the west into a sea of molten gold, and in the east a huge moon was rising in ghostly pallor above the bulbous dome of a mosque. To his right, parallel with the compound wall, ran the Mall---a trim, select thoroughfare, so characteristic of its kind that, could it by some stupendous miracle have been transported to any other of the cantonments which dot the Punjab like the knots in a vast network, the miracle would have remained unrecorded, because unperceived. The evening clubward migration had begun. A procession of riders and dog-carts, of motor-cycles, ‘push’-bikes, and rattle-trap cars swept past, all bound in the same direction, and the staccato hoot of horns, the sound of laughing greetings, floated to him above the droning of a water-wheel near by.
Ahead, cutting at right-angles across the trim aristocracy of the Mall, ran a thoroughfare of a different order---one in which the heart of Kim would have delighted---a dusty, disreputable highway, which lapsed unashamedly into the unmetalled softness of the virgin plain and wandered at its will, its course demarcated solely by the huddle of houses in the native quarter to which it led. Father Xavier paused to survey it, for it might well have been the living presentment of the pages in his hand. There, surely, for all the world to see, rode Mahbub Ali, and yonder beneath the pink oleander bush stood the Sikh farmer, his child in his arms, talking to the old ressalder. There was no red-turbaned lama, but instead, beneath the college wall, an old native beggar-woman, veiled in the shroud-like garment of feminine Mahommedanism. The grey-white of the smothering, shapeless folds, the sightless darkness of the embroidered eye-holes seemed wraith-like in the eerie twilight, and the high- piping treble of her begging cry almost the wailing of a tormented banshee.
The young missionary shivered involuntarily, despite the heat, and there rushed over him, unheralded, a sudden fever of home-sickness, almost physical in its intensity. A vision of his tiny Flemish home-town swam before his eyes so vividly that he seemed to see the bright lights from the shop-windows gleaming through the long twilight, and the softer amber glow from homesteads; to feel the nip of the October air as the wind blew keenly round unexpected corners; to hear the crisp clatter of clogs on cobbles in the poorer quarter, the blithe patter of heels on pavements in the more modern streets; to see again the comfortable figures, complacent smiles and sedate comportment of the bourgeoisie, and, over all, the rain-washed sky of autumn blue, with cumulus clouds blooming in each narrow streetend like pink tulips in a purple vase.
The priest drew in his breath sharply, and his brow grew moist as he stood lost to all sense of his surroundings. The intensity of that agony of home-sickness must be experienced to be realised.
It was the sight of a familiar figure which brought him presently out of his reverie. A stout, bearded priest, in flowing brown cotton habit and damaged solar topi, was perspiringly propelling a bicycle through the soft dust of the bazaar road. This was the Guardian of the college, Father Theodor Hellenhinde, whose second name may be said to have fulfilled the promise of his first, for to hot and homesick Tommies it came as a veritable gift from heaven. “Oh, ’ell in India, ain’t it just?” was a catchword with which every barrack-room in the Punjab was familiar. At the moment Father Theodor seemed to be living up to his reputation, for, as the younger priest idly watched him, he stopped opposite the wraith-like beggar-woman, hesitated for a moment, then with a sudden dive forward took a firm grasp of her eerie draperies. There was a scuffle, a chorus of shrieks, half excited, half expostulatory, from interested onlookers, and Father Xavier, startled out of his home-sick day-dream, gasped, as from beneath the grey-white folds protruded a pair of stout boots and thin legs encased in khaki puttees. With a dexterous movement Father Theodor stripped off the smothering garment and revealed to the astonished world a hot and discomfited college pupil, from whose lips poured a string of vernacular invective of which even Kim in his more expansive moments might have been justly proud. The noise of the scuffle had brought two masters out of the college building, and delivering the delinquent into their hands with a few curt words of command, the Guardian, breathing rather heavily, retrieved his fallen cycle from the dust and made his way into the compound.
“Ach, it is varm,” he exclaimed, pausing by Father Xavier and wiping the back of his neck with a voluminous handkerchief. “Yet one bersbires not in this so unsalubrious dryness.”
The younger man’s answer was indeterminate---perhaps he was too polite to contradict his superior. The German leant his cycle against the wall.
“There is one,” he said, indicating, by an expressive gesture the vanished ‘Kim,’ who assuredly for ever will damned be.”
He made the remark dispassionately, as one who states a regrettable but incontrovertible fact. The Belgian smiled faintly.
“What is his name?” he asked. He had as yet not worked among the boys, and his acquaintance with them was slight. The guardian explained.
“Ivan---as one would say John, but of that name are there many. His mother we have been told a Russian was, a maid maybe at the Embassy. Of his father . . .” The gesture with which Father Theodor finished his sentence was expressive. “Of no badness is he incapable, but especially a hundred faces will he wear. For him all afternoon the bazaar I search, and by one boot protruding only I find him. At other times”---he flicked his fingers---“by one so small mark alone is he known.”
He mopped his brow and neck again, as though even the memory of his search engendered heat.
“Doubtless,” remarked the Belgian interestedly, “he will one day be a policeman, or maybe like Keem——” He did not finish his sentence, for he had not as yet quite fathomed Kim’s vocation. Father Theodor gestured negatively.
“Boliceman? Nein!” he exclaimed, his accent more guttural with the strength of his dissent. “For him one day boliceman look, but to find him, ach, that a different story is.”
He took his bicycle from its place against the wall, and removing his topi to serve as a fan, made his way up towards the college, while Father Xavier returned to his study of Mr. Kipling. The dusk had deepened now, and a faintly cool breeze stirred with a sudden shivering sound through the dusty trees.
“‘A Cause,’” he read, the print close to his eyes in the failing light, “‘was put out into the world’---but it is troublesome, this English. Should one then say ‘kose’ or ‘kowse’? The latter is convenient. ‘A Kowse was poot out’——”
A voice hailed him suddenly through the dusk, and turning he saw Ivan’s head silhouetted against a lamplit upper window.
“Ho, Padre-ji,” the hail came again in the vernacular.
Father Xavier continued his reading without appearing to hear. Then suddenly Ivan began to sing. It was the strangest song the young priest had ever heard and, as he listened, he paused involuntarily in his patient pacing. Wild, wailful, alluring, indefinably evil, the eerie chant rose and fell, with a haunting rhythm that broke sometimes meaninglessly, wavered, fell, then soared again as though in mocking triumph, and while he sang, Ivan’s hands beat a tattoo on the wooden window-sill in perfect imitation of a tom-tom accompaniment. The priest listened, spellbound, against his will. For the moment the prosaic details of the dusty compound had vanished, and it seemed that the voice, the very soul of India sang through the lips of this lanky, half-grown lad.
The song ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and once again Ivan hailed him.
“Ho, Padre-ji, I tell thee my secret. Dost understand? But to-day have I learnt it; but to-day did the great vision come. One day I shall be king---king of all India. Oh, this terrible land, this beautiful land! One day it shall be mine. But thou dost not know---listen, I tell thee . . .”
Again the song rose, but this time with the addition of words that brought the blood flooding to Father Xavier’s cheeks, for he knew more Urdu than English. Still he stood as though riveted to the spot, and as the weird chant soared and fell, he too seemed to see a vision---but a vision so evil that his soul reeled before it.
“Art thou a devil, then?” he exclaimed as the song ceased; and his voice was hoarse.
The answer came, pat and pert, in English:
“Oah, noh! I am boyscout!”
There was a squeal of delighted laughter from the bazaar road, where a group of interested passers-by had gathered, listening to the song, and with a sudden abrupt gesture the priest turned and hurried into the college building.
He was trembling when he reached the tiny hot room beneath the roof that served as his cell. His head swam and his hands felt strangely dry and burning. Before his mind floated a picture---not the ghastly vision of painted paganism provoked by Ivan’s song, but, once again, the trim and circumspect picture of his native town. For a few moments he stood, motionless, in the centre of the room. Then with sudden resolution, moving over to a small table, he picked up his pen and sat down to write. . . .
Night fell, the glamorous Indian night, trailing her mantle of coolness over the heat-weary plains. The strains of the club band had ceased; the last car had rattled its way homeward along the tidy Mall, and, beneath shrouding white mosquito-netting, the world of the West slept in a hundred moon-drenched compounds. On the roof of the college Father Xavier, tossing restlessly in his first bout of malaria, dreamt intermittently of a purple “Kowse” in boots and a damaged topi, that mocked him with an evil song, while Ivan, lying wakeful and motionless through the long hot hours, stared with glittering eyes into the darkness.
Behind the college the bazaar lay wrapped in that impenetrable mystery that cloaks all Eastern towns at nightfall. Only faintly, through the stillness, a tom-tom throbbed like a weary heart. India slept through the silvered night as through a myriad others, dreaming her sun-drugged dreams, unwitting that that day a Cause had gone forth that should threaten her age-long slumber with the awakening of a blood-red dawn.
“Have you ever,” enquired Captain Cameron as he dexterously piloted his partner across the crowded floor, “seen an Indianologist?”
The girl nodded without replying immediately. They were in the throes of a somewhat complicated manoeuvre, and she waited until it was successfully completed.
“There was one on my bedpost in Bombay,” she said, when at last they swung into a restful glide that made no demands on her concentration. “Bright green, with its front feet---or are they feelers?---held up in the air, praying.”
She felt a slight quiver run through his shoulder, and looked up quickly to meet a pair of laughing grey eyes.
“Isn’t that the right answer?” she demanded, while the smile spread to her own eyes. Despite his nationality, his sense of humour was no surprise to her, for she too came from north of the Tweed.
“Not quite,” he replied, “though the description is graphic. I gather you refer to a praying mantis. The creature I mean is different. It’s probably rather green, but I shouldn’t think it prays.”
Margaret Fraser did not answer, for the music had trailed to inaudibility, and the general exodus in search of cooler air had begun. She waited until they were comfortably ensconced in two basket chairs in the starlit compound before re-opening the subject.
“What insect did you mean?” she asked, with characteristic directness.
He smiled at her in contented appreciation. Almost every other girl of his acquaintance would have continued to banter, persisting in sounding the personal note, and it was just this quality of quick, impersonal interest in any and every subject that had first attracted him to Margaret Fraser. He found it, curiously, both restful and stimulating. There was a certain poise about the girl that went oddly with her brief nineteen years, and which had led some unkindly critics to remark that she took her position as Commissioner’s daughter with unnecessary seriousness. But Donald Cameron had appraised her more truly, realising the lack of self-consciousness, the genuine humour and love of fun that lurked beneath her air of aloofness, and he had come to love the quaint dignity with which she played hostess in her father’s house.
Margaret had landed in India just six months before, with her mother, Lady Fraser, and almost immediately on their arrival the latter had been recalled to England to the bedside of her own mother, who was seriously ill. The girl had remained on in her father’s charge, taking her part in the social life of Sukurpur, and it was here that Donald had met her. The friendship had grown apace, though their actual meetings were intermittent, for he himself belonged to the Survey of India, which meant that he spent three weeks out of each month in the wilds, only returning to his headquarters in Sukurpur for a brief ten days to wrestle with accounts and pay bills.
“You’ve heard of an Egyptologist, I expect?” he said, in answer to her question.
She nodded.
“People who dig up mummies, aren’t they?” she answered a trifle vaguely.
“Occasionally---yes. Well, the---er---insect I mentioned is the Indian variety of the species.”
“Oh!” The girl sat forward in her chair with a little gurgle of laughter. “I know what you mean now,” she said. “You’re talking of the discoveries in Sind.”
“Exactly,” he agreed, “I am talking of the discoveries in Sind. I don’t think I heard any capital letter in your reference to them, which argues a regrettable degree of flippancy.”
The girl laughed again, leaning further forward with her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand.
“Tell me about them,” she commanded; “everything. I’m always hearing people talk of them, and I don’t understand.”
He settled himself back in his chair, at an angle from which he could see her profile cut with cameo-like delicacy against the dark background of trees. Margaret had nothing of the showy prettiness of the modern girl, yet, in a crowd, she seemed to stand apart in somewhat the same way that a work of art will stand out amid gaudy imitations. There was about her a fineness and purity of fine, a perfection of detail that told of breeding. At the moment her rather pale, delicately modelled face, touched to a wistful spirituality by the kindly starlight, came near to genuine beauty.
“At school,” began Donald, with an assumption of an avuncular manner, “I take it you learnt geography?”
She nodded gravely.
“I seem to remember learning that Sind is a desert region situated somewhere in the northwest of the Indian peninsula,” she admitted demurely.
“Great Scott! The higher education for women must be making strides! Well, at the present time, Sind is not altogether a beauty spot. I once spent nearly six months surveying it, and you can take my word for it, its best friend couldn’t call it spectacular. I don’t know whether it’s more like a hole in the ether, or an aberration in the mind, but it’s something between the two---a kind of blank space without any stop-press. However, there’s no accounting for tastes. A few thousand years or so ago, it seems, Sind was a hub of the universe. People spoke of it with bated breath. Learned men dreamed that they might see it and die---and they generally did. In fact, they all died some time or other. But to cut a long story short, Sind was the London, New York and Paris of those days rolled into one. That was all before what is generally called the ‘dawn of history.’ I suppose directly there was some sort of dawn people saw the kind of place it was and quit. Since then, though its glory has departed, it has played a not unimportant part in the history of India. I have myself written a summary of this during my work in the desert. It is brief and easily memorised, running thus:
“‘Men came on their camels to conquer Hind,
And died in the red-hot desert of Sind.’
There you have a complete résumé of the whole of Indian history. I am thinking of publishing it.”
The girl gave another gurgle of laughter as he paused momentarily for breath.
“You’re being perfectly ridiculous,” she exclaimed, “and not very instructive, because I know all about Sind and the discoveries made there. What I really don’t understand is why people are talking of them as though they had been near here. We’re hundreds of miles from Sind.”
“I’m coming to that,” he answered, as he took his cigarette case from his pocket, and rather absently held it out to her. “It’s what is known as the ‘confusion of proximity.’ A mere paltry hundred miles or so means nothing to the popular mind, and all I have been telling you applies equally to the whole of this part of the world. They’ve taken to using Sind as a kind of general name. As you may have perceived, we have quite a useful thing in deserts round us here. The only difference between us and Sind proper in that respect is that, while they specialise in sand, we have the monopoly of dust. Their landscape is a greyish-yellow, while ours is yellowish-grey. Also, we have three more bushes to the square mile; but that, I think, is the only difference. Well, an Indianologist, by name Oswald Madderson (they often have pretty names like that) suddenly got the brain-wave of prospecting in the Sukurpur district. He sent a long screed to the Government about a buried temple or something, and asked permission to dig up Nana Sarai—a place not thirty miles from here. It was a hot day in June when the Government read the screed. The thermometer in Sukurpur stood at 120. Of course they nearly screamed themselves into a fit laughing, but as it seemed silly to tell him to go anywhere hotter, they gave permission. After all, the place is as safe as an asylum and a good deal cheaper. Well, then the old boy disappeared into the desert for several months. People forgot all about him until last January, when we heard that he had discovered his buried temple all right. The Press was rather politely bored. After all, it’s no doubt interesting to know that the ancient civilisation of Sind extended as far as Sukurpur, but it didn’t seem to make much difference to our daily lives. Then, just about a month ago, a rather curious fact got about.”
Donald paused and flicked the ash from his cigarette absently. The banter had suddenly died out of his voice, and his keen, boyish face was alive with interest. Despite his sturdy common-sense he had all the mystic imagination of the Celt.
“This is where the exciting part begins,” he went on as the girl did not speak. “It began to be suspected that the chiselled inscriptions on the stones were prophetic in character.”
Margaret leant forward in quickened interest.
“Prophetic?” she exclaimed. “But how? What do you mean?”
He did not answer immediately, but seemed to be choosing his words. His rather flippant manner had only been assumed to hide a typically British embarrassment in dealing with a serious subject, and now that he had dropped it he seemed at a loss.
“You know, of course,” he said at last, “that while we count our dates from the beginning of the Christian era, the Mahommedans count theirs from the time of Mahommed. That makes a difference of several hundred years, and the Hindus too have their own computation---a complicated affair which, I am afraid, I don’t know much about. Well---on one of those stones which were first dug up, someone discovered that a set of figures of some sort, which preceded what was undoubtedly a symbol denoting war, could be made to mean the number 1914. That was, of course, rather odd, but still it might very well have been a coincidence. People were interested but rather sceptical until a few weeks later someone else discovered that two other sets of figures near by, which up till then no one had bothered about, gave the corresponding year in the Mahommedan and the Hindu computations! Then there really was a good deal of excitement, not only in our own but in the Vernacular Press. Experts got to work over the figures and, of course, there were divided opinions, but in the end it seemed to be pretty firmly established that the figures did correspond to those dates. Interest ran high for several months and people lived in momentary expectation of new discoveries. But nothing further that was decipherable came to fight, and the thing had begun to die out rather, when one day, only a few weeks ago, another stone was dug up which had the same, or, rather, very similar sets of figures on it, and the experts got to work again.”
Donald paused to throw away the stub of his cigarette. Margaret leant forward watching him as he took out his case and extracted another. She was conscious that her breath was coming fast, and it seemed to her that his fingers were not quite steady.
“Well? What date did they give?” she exclaimed at last, as he did not speak.
He lighted his cigarette before replying, and threw the burnt match into a bush.
“They gave the present year of grace,” he said at last, quietly.
The girl sat back abruptly in her chair, and there came upon her that pringling of the skin, that genuine thrill which we sometimes seek to capture by the telling of eerie tales with lowered fights. The sense of uncanniness oppressed her and, despite the suffocating heat of the April evening, she felt suddenly cold. It was a relief when the band broke into a curdling whine of noise that preluded another dance. The blaring syncopation of the jazz melody which followed seemed to act as a sedative to her nerves, putting her into relation with the commonplace life of every day once more. But she was conscious that her voice was not quite natural when she spoke.
“And what symbol followed?” she asked, with an attempt at lightness. “What are we to expect---another world-war?”
He shook his head.
“Nothing so alarming,” he said. “Only a world teacher.”
“A . . .” Margaret frowned slightly, as she sat forward in her chair once more. “ I don’t understand,” she exclaimed.
Donald did not answer immediately, and his eyes were fixed absently on the club verandah, beyond which the dancers still swayed energetically in the ballroom.
“Who’s that man?” he asked irrelevantly, nodding to a figure which was only vaguely discernible in the gloom of the verandah.
The girl turned and peered through shadows.
“Latif Khan, I think,” she said at last; “yes, it is. He’s a Zemindar from near here, and he’s come in to see daddy on business.”
“A polo player, isn’t he?”
Margaret nodded.
“I believe so,” she said with a faint suggestion of impatience. “But I want to hear about the teacher, Don.”
He turned and looked at her, and once more he seemed to be choosing his words with difficulty.
“It’s a bit complicated, but I’ll try and explain,” he said. “The dates were followed by a whole heap of letters which were blurred and more or less undecipherable. What could be made out of them seemed to be titles or fragments of titles. The ‘Coming One’ and ‘The Ancient and Young’ were two of them, and then there followed, quite clear and distinct, the form of a flying horse, and it was this which caused the excitement in the Vernacular Press.”
“But why?” exclaimed the girl, as he paused.
“I don’t quite understand,” he answered, “don’t know enough about these things, but for some reason it seems to be taken as the sign of a new Avatar, that is Incarnation, and also, oddly enough, there were already rumours going about which spoke of a mysterious horse.”
“But . . .” the girl frowned perplexedly. She was conscious of a vague disappointment. The sense of uncanniness had gone, and the story seemed to have descended to the level of a fairy tale. “I don’t understand,” she said. “That part seems nonsense, and the rumours probably got about after the discoveries had been made. Don’t you think so?”
He nodded slowly.
“Of course,” he agreed, “it is the obvious solution, only . . .” He paused again, and seemed, for a moment, to be following out a private train of thought, then abruptly resumed his narrative. “Anyway, as I said, it raised a storm of excitement in the native Press, and then, close on the heels of that, came the last discovery of all: a large stone in an almost perfect state of repair, and with lettering which, when deciphered, seemed to be a prophecy that the stone in question should he buried in the sand for ages, and when it was discovered the Teacher would be---would be at the door, so to speak.”
“What?” Margaret peered up at him, startled out of the vague scepticism into which she had relapsed. Again he nodded.
“It’s certainly queer,” he said. “Someone translated the prophecy from the original Sanscrit. It reads rather like bad blank verse, but it is certainly queer.”
“Can you remember it?”
He hesitated for a moment, held by a characteristic shyness, then taking courage from the darkness, he began to quote softly:
“‘In the hour of thine unveiling
From the sands that engulf thee,
A myriad moons shall they engulf thee
To reveal thee in the daybreak.
When the stars are faint with expectation,
A white sword of fire from the darkness
He comes and his light is on the hill tops.
He has heeded the cry of the aged,
Of the young lovers in captivity;
He is aflame for the weariness of the stars.
In the hour of thine unveiling
His feet have troubled the quiet waters,
His breath is upon the wilderness,
His hands are shaking the portals of the morning . . .’”
Donald’s voice rang clear and unselfconscious on the last word, and for a moment, as he ceased speaking, there was silence. Margaret lay back in her chair, and once more the sense of uncanniness rushed over her. She looked from the gay, unconscious dancers, whirling past the open doors of the ballroom, out to the desert which billowed beyond the compound wall, and it seemed to her as though a ghostly hand, dead three thousand years and more, had pointed invisible fingers through the ages. A wind stirred suddenly, blowing a few grains of sand into her face, and, despite the heat, she shivered. Donald’s voice broke in on her reverie, strangely echoing her thoughts.
“Queer to think of it---us all here, dancing---and that stone---thousands of years ago-------”
With a sudden, abrupt gesture, the girl stood up.
“Don’t!” she exclaimed. “It’s creepy, Don. It frightens me. I don’t understand, and I don’t think I want to. Anyway, that part about the horse was nonsense. Let’s---let’s go and do something energetic.”
He had risen to his feet, and now he linked his arm in hers, turning towards the brightly-lighted ballroom.
“Do you think the floor looks nice, or would you like an ice?” he asked, chiming in instantly with her mood; indeed, he more than half shared it.
“A lemonade,” she corrected, “but not just at once. Let’s stand on the verandah and watch. It’s too hot to dance.”
They took up their position not far from the entrance porch, and idly watched the couples drift by. This was the last dance of the season, which was probably the reason that so much energy was displayed, in spite of the heat. Within a few weeks the feminine exodus to the hills would begin, and the little cantonment would be left desolate for five burning months among the dust of the desert.
“Is that Latif Khan talking to your revered parent?” asked Donald, indicating by a jerk of the head a group on the edge of the ballroom, where the Commissioner, a distinguished figure with his white hair and well-bred face, stood talking to an Indian.
The girl nodded.
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know who the other man is.”
“That’s John Bolney, our new policeman here. Haven’t you met him? He’s a marvel, born and bred in the country, and knows it like the palm of his hand. Hallo! there’s old Patent Medicine.”
A somewhat opulent-looking couple had approached the Commissioner, apparently with the intention of taking their leave, and Margaret craned forward to watch them.
“Don’t be irreverent,” she admonished. “Remember, Sir Tisra Kruton is a millionaire.”
“Well, it hasn’t altered his name,” Donald objected. “They don’t seem to like our simple festivities, since they leave them so early.”
A leviathan of a car had drawn up under the porch, and the two watched while the millionaire and his wife descended the steps with stately precision and became engulfed in its luxurious depths. Donald caught the gleam of a pale, Semitic silhouette as the monster purred past into the darkness.
“Gee!” he exclaimed flippantly, striking an attitude on the steps, “what a sight for a hungry Mahommedan on an April evening.
“‘Low lies within his Rolls saloon
The knighted Englishman;
His nose shows like the welcome moon
That closes Ramazan.’
If he takes the bazaar road you’ll hear the tomtoms proclaiming the glad tidings.”
Margaret gave a little gurgle of laughter. Her nerves had recovered.
“I think that’s rather vulgar,” she said. “Where did you read it?”
“Nowhere,” he protested in tones of injury. “‘A poor thing, but mine own.’ I have a fatal gift for verse-making, didn’t you know? But for that I might have been Laureate. Come---let’s stroll down and have another look at the jolly old desert. It’s cooler now.”
They sauntered down the dusty drive, coming to rest eventually by the mud wall of the compound. Before them the starlit plain loomed grey and mysterious, clothed in a beauty that daylight would sadly dissipate. A white, level road wound like a ribbon into the distance, and along it a solitary figure was trudging.
“Beastly place,” said Donald unromantically. “Looks all right in this light, but it’s the limit in the daytime. Thank goodness I’ve only got another month there. That’s more than enough even if I do meet the Indianologist.”
“Are you likely to?”
“Yes, I’m working near Nana Sarai,” he answered. “Hallo! there goes old Father Xavier.”
“Who’s he?” The girl turned in the direction he indicated without much interest.
“A Belgian padre,” he explained. “Been out here umpteen years and scarcely ever goes home. He’s got a parish about the size of a county and spends most of his time getting about it. No accounting for tastes!”
Margaret’s eyes followed the solitary figure for a little while, then she looked once more at the desert, and suddenly, unaccountably, she shivered.
“It’s no good, Don,” she exclaimed, “I’ve got the creeps to-night. Let’s go back to the ballroom. Listen---that’s a topping waltz they’re playing!”
The seductive strains of a saxophone sobbed alluringly across the hot, still air, and with one accord, defying the heat, they turned and ran hand in hand up the dusty drive.
The flickering flames of the oil lamps shed a yellow light on the mud-walled room. High up in one corner was a square opening, innocent of glass, through which the minaret of a mosque, silhouetted against a starlit sky, showed startlingly blue, like a scene on the stage. There was no other ventilation, and the hot, heavy atmosphere pressed suffocatingly upon the men assembled in the tiny room. There were twenty-six in all, seated on basket-work stools ranged round a bare wooden table. The lamplight was kind, yet not quite kind enough for the faces which it revealed. They were mostly fair of complexion---unexpectedly so in view of their environment. Here and there a Semitic, here and there a Mongolian cast of countenance was discernible, but for the rest Europe claimed them for her own. Beyond this there seemed little in common amongst them, unless it were a certain negative quality, a mental and spiritual lack-lustre. Cunning, greed, grossness, discontent, showed each in turn as the flickering flames lighted first one face, then another, but over all brooded the same dull, heavy inertia of the soul.
They sat strangely silent, seemingly charged with expectancy, and so oppressive was the quiet that the ticking of a dozen watches seemed to beat across the stillness like a tumult of hammer-strokes. Of a sudden one man spoke.
“He comes not,” he said.
The words were spoken in Russian. For perhaps a second no one answered; then it seemed as though a spell had been broken.
“Bah! He will come!” exclaimed another violently, pushing his chair back from the table as he spoke. “He will come with his laugh and his sneer and his air almighty. He will mock and he will gibe, question and command, and we---we shall answer and obey! Are we not his slaves? Bah!” The speaker stood up, kicking over his stool with a sweeping abruptness that seemed to characterise his movements. “Are we not his slaves?” he repeated, leaning forward with his hands on the table. “His Alphabet. The twenty-six letters of his adjectival English Alphabet! We have no names---but we have faces, and we must show them. We may not come disguised, for he must know us. But for his face---who sees it? Which of us can know him? The Big Brother, the Burra Bhai---who is he, I say?”
The speaker flung out his arms in a dramatic gesture on the last words, then with the same nervous abruptness picked up his stool and sat down once more, leaning his elbows on the table.
There was a moment’s silence, each man looking fearfully at his neighbour; then another voice spoke half deprecatingly.
“Nay, gently, Brother H., gently. This much we know: he has been appointed our head. It is he who has organised us. Moreover, he knows the country——”
“The country---bah, the country!” broke in Brother H. violently, and he added a picturesque epithet.
“Earth has a blister---we call it India,” said a third speaker, a Jew by the look of him. He giggled at his own wit, but the merriment did not spread. There was a strange, almost a sinister lack of humour in the assemblage.
“A blister?” Brother H. took up the word vigorously. “It is so, and for how long do we stay fomenting it? For how long now have we sweltered in this oven? And the result?”
There was a moment’s silence, then a gloomy voice spoke.
“There is no result---there will never be a result. The people here---they are not men, they are cattle!”
There was a chorus of assent, but Brother H. negatived the suggestion.
“Cattle? No, but devils!” he exclaimed in his forceful, dramatic style. “Listen!”
The tale which followed---one of a ryot who had double-crossed him---seemed to show the European astuteness in rather a poor light compared to the Oriental, more especially as it was difficult to believe that Brother H. had been misled by the generosity of a too trustful nature. It was the signal for a disgruntled outburst. Not a man but had something the same story to tell, though for the most part it was the apathy and indifference of the peasantry to their propaganda that formed the theme of the tale. The hubbub of discontent waxed high, and through it all Brother H.’s voice boomed like a turbulent organ hurling invective at the Burra Bhai.
“Bah, you are fools!” he exclaimed, obtaining a hearing by sheer force of lungs, “cattle, like these unprintables of whom you speak. Who is this man, I say? Why must we be his slaves? In his power, yet we know not his identity. Bah!”
He flung out his arms in a sweeping gesture, then paused, arrested, petrified, for from the end of the room there had come a sheep-like echo of his favourite word.
“Baa.”
Every head turned in the direction of the sound. So perfect had been the imitation that unconsciously their eyes were focused groundwards. But there was no animal there. In the dark shadows that lurked beyond the circle of yellow light a darker figure was standing, and so motionless did it remain that it was a full minute before they could be sure of its outlines. Then quietly, with complete nonchalance, the watcher moved forward into the light and stood at the head of the table. He was of medium height, but beyond that very little could be said, for the dark cotton suit which he wore was bazaar made, and of a fit guaranteed to disguise any figure. His hands were covered with black gloves from which long gauntlets stretched over his sleeves, and on his head was a black hood, ending in a kind of shoulder cape, rather like a monk’s cowl. A black silk mask hid the upper portion of his face, and from it there hung a thick silk fringe which touched the cape of his cowl. Only his eyes, gleaming with insolent mockery through the slits in the mask, gave any note of character.
For perhaps two minutes he remained staring at the sullen, angry faces ranged round the table, then a white gleam, showing through the black fringe, proclaimed that he was smiling.
“Goats must bleat,” he said suavely, his eyes fixed on Brother H., “but it is unwise when there are panthers in the jungle, even though the jungle be of mud walls. I heard the noise quite some distance away. There was a policeman there; doubtless, if I had not contrived to send him hotfoot in another direction, he would have heard it too.”
His voice was rather high-pitched, but curiously toneless, and he spoke with a monotonous, sing-song inflection. The words seemed to break the strange spell which had held the discomfited men. With a muttered imprecation Brother H. got to his feet.
“How long have you been listening, you——?” he demanded truculently.
The other disdained to reply in words. Only a slight accentuation of the white gleam told that his smile had widened.
“That was an interesting tale you had to tell, Brother Z.,” he remarked, turning towards another man seated near him. “It did credit to your heart, if not to your head.”
Despite the apparent pleasantness with which they were uttered, the words had, somehow, a sinister ring, and the man to whom they were addressed fidgeted uncomfortably. All round the table were sullen scowls and suppressed mutterings, yet none spoke until Brother H. broke out again.
“Take off that mask!” he cried violently, and the words were the signal for an outburst. From every side the slogan was taken up by angry voices, interspersed with cries of:
“Let us see your —— face!”
“No more mystery!”
“Are we your slaves?”
Yet, all through the hubbub, the man in black remained standing calmly at the end of the table, smiling mockingly through the baffling fringe of his mask. And strangely, though there were violent gestures, scufflings of feet, scrapings of stools over the mud floor, not a man of the heated, angry assembly but kept his place. The mysterious power which we call personality seemed to radiate from the dark, unperturbed figure, and backing it was the almost superstitious awe and dread with which this man had become invested in their eyes. His cat-like faculty for coming and going unperceived, his contempt of danger, above all, his uncanny knowledge of the country, had made him seem to them something superhuman, for they were, after all, strangers in a strange land.
For perhaps ten minutes the tumult lasted, and the Burra Bhai spoke little. Never once did he attempt to make his voice heard above the din, but during a slight pause he would slip in a remark, taunting them with their failure, mocking them for their cowardice, lashing them, it seemed deliberately, to fury, yet all the while dominating them with his superior will.
It was only when the storm had spent itself, dying away to a sullen, impotent silence, that he leant forward with his hands on the table, and spoke with an abrupt change of tone which instantly riveted the attention of his audience.
“Yet, after all, it is true, my Brothers. We make no progress. Why? It is on that very point I come to speak.”
There was dead silence as he paused, and every eye was fixed on him. The angry mutterings had ceased.
“We are come,” the Burra Bhai began once again, “from Holy Russia, the Pioneer of the New Age, to spread the gospel of liberty by fanning that flame of divine discontent which smoulders in the darkened soul of a downtrodden people. We have money, we have organisation, we have knowledge, yet for months now we have laboured fruitlessly. Why? What is the cause of our failure? Simply, my Brothers, that there is no divine discontent! No revolution is accomplished bloodlessly. Before the soul of a people can enter upon the higher life of liberty, it must be plunged in the waters of re-birth. A cleansing, crimson tide must flow over the land. Yet consider this---such is the deadly apathy of the human race that, before a man will face that dread cleansing, to gain the glorious liberty we promise him, his old life must be to him not only burdensome, but unbearable. So long as there is sun to warm him, water to quench his thirst, a patch of earth to grow him bread, a thatch of leaves to roof him and his family, just so long will he love life for himself better than liberty---for his grandson!”
The speaker paused, while a rather restive stir passed round his audience. Here and there was a mutter, and men looked furtively, half fearfully at their neighbours. Their less nimble minds had followed him only haltingly, yet to each there had come the suggestion---a vague smell, it seemed---of heresy. Beneath the more concrete and complex features of their Economic Gospel lay the simple fundamental dogma: “The poor groan in chains; the rich crush them beneath the wheels of their cars.” The speaker’s words had seemed to depict a dangerous degree of contentment at variance with their creed. Characteristically, it was Brother H. who spoke.
“Bah!” he exclaimed forcibly, “we waste our time. This land---it is no country; it is an (unmentionable) continent. And we---we are as three fleas on an elephant! The peasantry are cattle, as he”---he jerked his thumb in the direction of the Burra Bhai---“has shown; and in the towns what do we accomplish? A riot here, which looks good---until the police fire their (malodorous) guns. A rail strike there which dislocates, until the (unblessed) bullock-carts get through! Bah!” He flung out his arms violently, “we waste our (ruby) time! “he concluded with an air of finality.
There was a chorus of approval, then the Burra Bhai’s strange toneless voice spoke once more.
“Brother H. has a picturesque vocabulary; he has expressed all our difficulties very aptly. Firstly, a peasantry too primitive for discontent, which means that the towns are our only fruitful ground for labour. Secondly, a vast continent, with these same towns widely separated. Thirdly, a country still primitive, and therefore with a machinery less easily dislocated than that of a more highly civilised land. But I can add other difficulties. We are too small in numbers; it is emphatically necessary that we should grow before we can accomplish anything, and here at once we come up against the greatest difficulty of them all, the difficulty of disunion. We have a continent in which there are not only languages, but races, differing as widely as Swede and Spaniard, Dane and Dago. But with that we can cope. Worse than all this is the disunity of caste and of creed. How are we to unite, not only Brahmin and Outcaste, but Moslem and Hindu, Jain and Sikh, Animist and Agnostic? How are we to overcome these age-long prejudices, bring together these ancient enemies, and weld them in a common work? That, my Brothers, is the very root and core of our difficulties. For the bovine peasants”---he flicked his fingers contemptuously ---“they do not matter. There is still a hopeful flame of discontent which we can fan into a blaze. It smoulders, not among the labourers and peasants, not in the deadened heart of the cowed underdogs, but in the souls of those who have risen in the scale. Among the partially educated babus, the petty shopkeepers, may be heard hopeful murmurings of discontent. It is these we must enrol beneath the glorious red banner of the New Age. Once let our numbers increase”---he flung out his hands in a sudden, though restrained gesture, almost the first he had made. “Well, my Brothers, these English have a proverb, ‘Nothing succeeds like success.’ Once let our army grow, and the dull peasantry will awaken from its lethargy. For the present we can neglect it. It is amongst these others we must find our recruits!”
He stopped speaking rather abruptly, and stepped back a little from the table. The baffling mask gave no clue to his thoughts, but in the eyes that gleamed through the holes there seemed to shine a curious, half-mocking light. The faces round the table remained sullen and discontented, though perhaps not divinely so. Indeed, his speech had seemed to do little but emphasise their difficulties. For once, it was not Brother H. who spoke, but another man, the Jew who had essayed the witty sally.
“Could we but grow in numbers, the first part of the battle would be won,” he said. “So much is plain.”
Brother H. interjected that it was adverbially plain, and a disgruntled chorus broke out once again.
“But first we must grow,” added the Jew brilliantly.
The white gleam showed suddenly through the black fringe of the leader’s mask, and he leaned forward on the table once more.
“As Brother K. so profoundly observes,” he remarked, “first we must grow!”
Brother H. swept to his feet with the force of one about to cry “Fire.”
“Grow? But how?” he demanded. “Have we not still”---he produced a not unworthy imitation of the Burra Bhai’s voice---“to unite Brahmin and Outcaste, Moslem and Hindu? Have we not still an (ensanguined) continent to cover?”
The leader bowed his head slightly in agreement, while the white gleam showed once more through the baffling black fringe.
“We have,” he concurred; “and there is, moreover, the factor of caution. All men desire more than they have got, but few will jeopardise the little to gain the more. Still less will they risk life itself. What then are we to do?”
He paused, but only momentarily. It was obvious that he had led up to this point, deliberately provoking their pessimism. Now it was to their curiosity that he appealed, as he stood gazing at each in turn through the expressionless black silk. Suddenly he stood back, and with one of his rare gestures pointed to the mask.
“Why do I wear it?” he cried, and all could see the white gleam flashing. “To safeguard my life? Perhaps. Certainly to safeguard my prestige. A man is known by the company he keeps!” The gleam widened, and a low mocking laugh came from behind the fringe at the sight of the resentful scowls which greeted this sally. But almost immediately he continued.
“Till now you ‘ave come here undisguised, because I must see you. But now it is no longer necessary. I know you---every one. There is no disguise could hide you from me. Remember that! And for the rest---listen!”
He leant further forward with his hands on the table, holding their gaze, and, speaking in a low, even voice, he outlined his scheme. A fraternity, each member sworn severally not to reveal his identity, none ever seeing another’s face, meeting masked and disguised---would not this get round their difficulties? It would give security, for there would be then neither Brahmin nor Outcaste, neither Moslem nor Hindu, only “Secret Brothers,” in dark suits and baffling masks.
Little by little as he spoke the sullen frowns relaxed. Against their will, almost, a faint enthusiasm began to stir through the audience. The scheme was complete to the last detail, even to the manner of acquiring the clothes. The suits must be of ordinary but dark material, and of the common bazaar make. There must be nothing to distinguish them, so that they could be purchased anywhere without suspicion. For the rest, a yard or two of black material such as anyone might possess, or which could be dyed in the back compound---who could detect a Brother by such means? The enthusiasm grew. Only one mildly dissentient voice was raised.
“But---the police?” suggested the deprecating little man who had first endeavoured to placate Brother H.
The Burra Bhai threw back his head and laughed. His whole demeanour seemed charged with exaltation.
“I will make the police themselves our postmen!” he cried boastfully.
There was a murmur of approbation, but the last word seemed to suggest a new train of thought to Brother H.
“Postmen?” he exclaimed. “That is yet another point. We have still the (unsanctified) continent. How do we communicate?”
A sudden, rather crestfallen, silence fell on the room, but the Brother Bhai seemed prepared for the question.
“Of that I shall now speak,” he said readily. “To-night I was at the club dance, talking amongst others with the Commissioner, and I did much good business. Listen!”
Once more he leant forward on the table, and for perhaps a quarter of an hour he spoke in the quiet, level voice he had used before, and again as he spoke, enthusiasm dawned on the faces of his audience. When the first glow of dawn showed like a golden fan in the east, the company rose from its night-long sitting, and, joining hands across the table, swore fealty to the Secret Brotherhood.
Hope Chesney leant back in her chair and let her eyes wander to the limitless, level plain which stretched around them. It was a breathlessly hot night, and the dinner-table had been set well away from the dâk bungalow and its sheltering trees, on the very edge of the desert. The soft, loose sand had already given off the heat it had absorbed from the sun, and a faint coolness breathed from the open space, but she could feel the closer-fibred trees behind her still glowing like hot stove-pipes. A few moths and beetles fluttered and flopped round the golden glow of the lantern, which the white radiance of moonlight pouring down upon the party rendered almost unnecessary. This was the last night of the Deputy Commissioner’s monthly tour, and the last tour of the season. Hope was conscious of an unusual relief at the thought, but she refused to probe the cause of the inward uneasiness from which it rose.
The party was an unusually large one for a camp dinner. There were not only both the Maddersons, who, in fact, had been touring with them most of the month, but John Bolney and Donald Cameron, both of whom had had business with the D.C., and Father Xavier, whose wide parochial orbit they had crossed that day. Hope brought her eyes and wandering thoughts back from the desert and listened rather listlessly to the conversation, which had turned upon the discoveries at Nana Sarai. The Indianologist had, in fact, only rejoined the party that evening, after an absence of several days, and Donald Cameron had been tactfully angling for the information which he was now being given in a dry, thin, utterly unemotional voice. A sense of unreality seized upon Hope as she listened, and she glanced across at her husband as if for reassurance. Ted Chesney had been D.C. of. the Sukurpur District for over four years. This was their fifth camping season, and Hope knew the district like the palm of her hand. Yet, as she listened to Professor Madderson’s detailed description of the ancient Aryan civilisation, a cloak of unfamiliarity seemed to descend on the well-known names and places. He had the topography of these prehistoric cities at his finger-tips, and mapped it on the tablecloth with a few crumbs in a way that moved the Survey Officer to admiration.
“Nana Sarai was the heart,” he said, placing a white, delicately-pointed digit on a pile of rather larger crumbs. “It was the seat of learning, the holy of holies. It is easy to understand why. Even to-day, as we see it, it strikes us instantly---the one hill amidst this dead level plain, not high perhaps, but rising with the abruptness of a wall. What---in the days of a genuine civilisation which had not descended to the invention of howitzers and air bombs---what a fortress! It was in this light that it struck the Aryan people---a place of refuge, a citadel at first, and afterwards the shrine of all that was venerated and sacred among them. It was there that their temple must stand dominating the plain.”
“And it was there, I suppose,” said Donald Cameron, “that they chiselled those prophecies on the stones——”
The Professor made a sudden noise indicative of irritation.
“I am not interested in the prophecies,” he exclaimed. “I have too much respect for the Aryan people to suppose that they attempted anything so fantastic. It is the historic side which interests me. I like to picture, by means of the indelible footprints they have left, the life of a people of lofty intellectual attainment. I like to realise the splendid liberty they must have enjoyed before their social order had crystallised into the tyranny of caste, their aspiring philosophies into the superstitious bondage of religious dogmatism.”
He paused suddenly as though dimly aware that there might be a certain tactlessness in his remarks.
“Dogmatism always creeps in, Father Xavier,” he said apologetically.
“But of course,” agreed the Padre readily. He wore a somewhat abstracted look, and did not appear to have been attending to the conversation very closely. “We must have dogma or---dogfight, hein? It is not a wassis perfect world.”
Hope smiled faintly. She had met Father Xavier once or twice before, and on each occasion the etymology of the word “wassis” had intrigued her. She gathered that it was a contraction of “what’s this?” and was thrown in when the Padre was at a loss for the correct word, but she wondered if it might not be used to cover embarrassment rising from other causes. At the moment she felt grateful to him. The rough, ringing timbre of his voice had effectually dissipated the rather eerie sensation which had been creeping upon her, and she listened, almost with a sense of relief, as he continued the conversation.
“But of caste---that is a different question. It is an abomination, no? Without it we convert India! With it---poof!---we go like snails to a funeral. Yet what else have you to counter the climate, to hold Hinduism together? The Mahommedan, the Sikh---they have their religion. The Hindu---he has a wassis hotch-potch of superstition, a few philosophies, and caste! We remove caste before his soul awakes; that is to send him back to barbarism, to remove all fabric of his social order. It must go away, yes---but it must grow away, no?”
The Professor was too aloof from the present to reply to this somewhat confusing question, but Bolney countered the argument strongly, and for a moment or two the discussion ran high. Then Hope slid in a question.
“You have been in India a long time, Father Xavier?”
He smiled as he turned towards her, and she saw the abstracted look return to his face.
“Just twenty-five years to-night,” he said.
There was a murmur of surprise and vague congratulation round the table. Even the Professor looked across in mild interest as though the Padre had almost attained sufficient antiquity to be worthy of note. Then the talk slid to other topics. Hope looked in surprise at Donald Cameron. He had been silent for some moments and seemed wrapped in contemplation of the stars.
“Studying astronomy?” she asked him, and he came back to earth with a jerk.
“Not exactly,” he answered, smiling with faint embarrassment, “but it’s a queer thought, isn’t it? I was just thinking, if someone on one of those bright spots up there---the requisite distance away---could look down here through a telescope, they would see, not our interesting selves sitting round a table in the desert, but the ancient Aryans all bustling about their business, living and loving, fighting probably, dying——”
The remark commanded instant attention. All looked up at the stars which blazed like crystal lamps overhead, in spite of the brilliant moonlight. Ted Chesney embarked on a complicated calculation of what the necessary distance would be, which, since he could not remember with any certainty the rate of the transmission of light through the ether, did not seem to promise any great accuracy of result. Nor did a remark by Mae Madderson, made apparently under the impression that he was speaking of the anaesthetic, greatly elucidate matters. Donald brought the discussion back to a more philosophic basis by observing that, postulating ‘Someone’ capable of seeing from all points of space simultaneously, the Aryans and themselves were equally visible and present on the same spot. Time ceased to exist.
“Or doesn’t it?” he added, in sudden confusion at the depth to which his speculations had run.
None of the party seemed able to answer the question, but Hope’s imagination took wing as she looked out over the moonlit plain, picturing that ancient forgotten people and their lives. They had survived to history as a ‘civilisation,’ known only by fragmentary relics and ruins, pictured always through the medium of what was known of their philosophy and social system. Yet they had been human beings, with hopes, aspirations, passions, likes and dislikes. The most pitifully trivial things, maybe, had swayed their lives, looming, to them, more vital than the mighty irrigation works which still survived in faint tracings on the plain. Was ‘Someone’ watching them still, there on that very spot, tenderly indulgent of their childishness? Was ‘Someone’ watching her, and all of them round the table, watching them eternally? They were people of a ‘civilisation,’ living, if they were to believe all that was said, in times heavy with portent. Yet what were the things which swayed their lives? She looked round the table---at her husband, the D.C. with a promising career before him. What was the really potent factor in his life? At the moment, it seemed to be the image of himself in the mirror of Mae Madderson’s temperament. The two of them had been carrying on a sotto voce conversation during most of the meal, and as this fact swam up from Hope’s subconsciousness, she realised that she had probed the cause of the inward uneasiness that had made her welcome the advent of the hot weather. She examined Mae more closely. The girl---she was little more in years---was pretty in a commonplace way. She had light chestnut hair, which in her teens had doubtless been golden, and grey eyes. She was short and very slenderly built, with a tiny face and features to match, but in spite of their minuteness there was about them a certain carelessness and coarseness of moulding, like that of a statue in cheap plaster. Despite, too, the fairness of her colouring, there was a suspicious duskiness beneath the eyelids which betrayed a strain of the East, as did also the fact that her bloom had gone, though as yet she could not be twenty-five. Temperamentally, she belonged to what Hope termed the ‘looking-glass’ genus, born, apparently, to provide (perhaps unconsciously) all with whom she came in contact with a pleasing reflection of themselves to admire. She had quick wits which masked an absence of brain, and a talent, amounting almost to genius, of agreeing with a proposition as though it had just voiced her own thoughts. Looking at the pretty, rather common little face, with its tell-tale mouth, Hope decided that the vital factors in Mae Madderson’s life were too obvious to need comment. Almost unconsciously she glanced across at the Professor, wondering what strange mental aberration had caused him to marry the girl, then remembering that Mae had been his secretary she felt a sudden sympathy for the man. He had, so obviously, been led blindfold and unprotesting to the altar. In one thing at least he resembled his wife---he was as single-minded as she, indeed even more so, with heart, soul and even body immersed in his work and discoveries.
Hope wrenched her thoughts rather deliberately away from the Maddersons and turned to a contemplation of John Bolney, but he did not delay her long. A lean, dark man obviously ‘of the country,’ he was probably mainly intent on concealing his amazing knowledge of India and the Indians, and posing as an ‘imported’ European. Donald Cameron was even more transparent. Work, sport, a few soldierly ideals, a dream-home in the future, and occasionally a vein of poetic vision, which lifted him into a wider sphere---the plan of his life stood out, clean, sane and wholesome for all to read. Hope looked rather longer at Father Xavier. On the few occasions that she had met him he had impressed her as belonging to a comfortable, middle-class Flemish family, and she found herself at a loss to define the vital factor in his life. What possible motive could keep such a man toiling for twenty-five years in the dust and heat of the desert, on work which, as he had expressed it, went ‘like snails to a funeral’? She gave up the problem and turned to contemplate herself, only to be again baffled. What really was the most potent force in her fife? She found herself totally unable to answer the question and, feeling vaguely irritated, she brought her thoughts back to the conversation going on around her. It had quitted the heights to which it had soared and had turned, she gathered, on revolution. The priest’s strident voice was holding forth didactically.
“But no, I say, you will not get it in India! Riots---yes. Revolution---no. For revolution there must be great grievance---oppression. Without that men will not risk their wassis lives.”
Donald interrupted quickly. “A great many men died in the war who had never known oppression,” he exclaimed.
“Oh,” Father Xavier gestured from his wrist expressively. “I do not speak of men who fight for a cause,” he said. “That all will do. I speak of a mob uprising---risking all. For that there must first be tyranny.”
Neither Donald nor Chesney seemed inclined to argue the point further, but the Professor slid an unexpected oar into the conversation.
“A rather sweeping assertion, I think,” he said in his mild, thin voice. “Has not religious fanaticism often proved a potent factor in producing revolutions?”
“But certainly,” agreed the other readily. “That is history. But for that there must first be unity, hein? In India how many religions are there? Moslem, Hindu, Sikh, Jain---how then can there be a religious rising? No, no, again I say it---riots, yes. Revolution---no!”
There was silence for a moment, then Ted Chesney switched the talk into another channel.
“Well, anyway,” he remarked, “if there is to be a rising, I hope the risers will postpone the event until after the royal visit!”
The words had something the effect of an electric shock. All eyes were turned on the D.C. Bolney, Hope noticed, looked startled.
“Is there to be one?” he ejaculated.
Chesney nodded.
“It has only just been officially announced,” he said. “An Occidental Potentate will visit us next fall. Among his more arduous duties will be that of opening the dam at Sukurpur.”
“I always thought,” commented Hope lightly, “that the main function of a dam was to be closed.”
She nodded to Mae and rose from the table as she spoke. The dessert had been finished long since, and there seemed no reason to finger longer; but later, when she found herself alone with the younger woman, ensconced in two deck chairs beneath a row of mango trees, Hope regretted that she had not stayed where the conversation was at least varied. Mae might be an amusing companion at a jazz party, but for an evening in the desert she lacked inspiration. Moreover there was a feeling of constraint between them.
It was a perfect night. Hope leaned back in her chair, her hands folded behind her head, and gazed round on the dusty compound which the white moonlight had touched to an unearthly beauty. From near by there came the sleepy droning of a water wheel, and she could hear the lap and gurgle of the water as it flowed past her feet in its narrow channel. Beyond the dark silhouette of the trees the desert loomed in a vast expanse of ethereal blue, and, as she watched, her eyes made out a line of faint white, dim and distant, inconceivably high and remote.
“Oh, look!” she breathed, forgetful to whom she spoke. “Those are the snows.” Very softly, she quoted Flecker:
“‘And all around the snowy mountains swim
Like mighty swans afloat in Heaven’s pool.’”
“Yes, I love those lines,” said Mae, who had heard them that moment for the first time. “You read a lot of poetry, don’t you?” she added.
But Hope did not answer her. Once again that soaring imagination of hers had taken wing. Looking across the wide plains, she had visualised the immense triangular expanse of the Peninsula spread out map-wise, beneath a burning sun, and the strange fantastic fancy had come to her of a vast, veiled woman lying asleep, with crossed feet, wide-flung arms, and head pearl-diademed, cradled upon the heights---the Sun-God’s bride, sleeping through the ages, her soul drugged and deadened by the fiery ardour of his caresses. Some day, maybe, she would wake---and then?
Hope came to herself with a sudden shiver, though whether of cold, of fear, or of superstition, she could not have said.
“It’s growing chilly,” she said, then stopped, realising that she was addressing the air.
Mae was gone.
Later that same evening, Ted Chesney wandered through the moonlit compound. He strolled with apparent aimlessness, but almost unconsciously his steps were bent in the direction of the pipul-tree, near which he had caught the gleam of a white dress. Father Xavier had gone home, or rather to the waiting-room of the station, a mile away across the desert, where a bed had been made up for him for the night, and Madderson had returned to his work indoors. Cameron and Bolney were, Ted considered, sufficient company for Hope, and in view of Mae’s absence from the gathering, that white gleam near the pipul-tree needed no explanation.
She was standing half hidden in the dense shadow as he approached, and but for the glint of her shoe-buckles he would scarcely have seen her.
“Seeking solitude?” he demanded.
She moved quickly. Her eyes had been fixed on him unwinkingly since the moment he had left the others, but she conveyed the impression of being startled.
“No,” she answered, “not solitude---I don’t know what I’m seeking. Coolness, I think.”
“It’s not to be found under a tree,” he said. “Better try the open.” But neither of them made any movement to leave the shadow. Instead, he made a step forward, then paused, arrested.
“By Jove,” he exclaimed, “look at that!”
She came out to his side, then caught her breath in wonder. Above them towered the gigantic pipul, and of each of its myriad sticky-bright leaves the moonlight had made a star. It seemed as though the very heavens had come down to cluster in a white galaxy about their heads.
“It’s wonderful,” exclaimed Mae. “This place in the moonlight is like fairyland, but in the daytime——”
She shuddered without finishing her sentence, and drew her wrap about her almost as though she were cold.
“You don’t like the desert?” he said, more as a statement of fact than a question.
“I hate it!” she exclaimed with a vehemence which staggered him. He had not supposed her capable of such a depth of feeling.
“In spite of our company?” he exclaimed, smiling at her teasingly. “A bit too high-brow for you at dinner, weren’t we?”
She looked up at him without answering in words, pouting at this reference to her faux-pas. The moonlight was kind to her rather avid little face, and the tell-tale mouth at the moment looked only childishly mutinous.
“I wonder how you came into it all,” he said suddenly, as a mental picture of the Indianologist rose before him. “Tell me about it.”
Very frankly she gave him the story of her life. Her father had been in the Forest Department. Her mother had been born and bred in India, and she herself had remained in the country the whole of her childhood, getting what little education she had in patches. They had gone to England on her father’s retirement, and shortly after he had died. Quite simply she described her life as a typist; her hatred of the drudgery; her longing for pleasure; of the means of escape marriage had offered.
“And he’s kind to me,” she finished jerkily. “He knows, of course, I’ve never---really---cared. He doesn’t expect it. He told me he would never stand in my way if---if I met anyone else. It’s just---a convenient arrangement. After all, we’ve only one life to live.”
She glanced up at him swiftly, as if to see how he had taken her story. She looked strangely small and pathetic, standing in the white moonlight, silhouetted against the black shadow of the tree.
“Poor little kid,” he exclaimed, and almost involuntarily he laid his hand on her shoulder. He felt her quiver beneath his touch, but she did not look up at him again.
“We’ve only one life to live,” she repeated. “People seem to waste their time on fancies and theories. It’s queer---the cleverest people don’t seem to know how to live, to know what’s real. I’ve no brains, but I could live——”
She twisted her hands together, then flung them outwards in a sudden gesture, while he stared down at her amazed. The unexpected shrewdness of her philosophy came to him almost in the fight of a revelation. It seemed to shed a new light, not only on the Professor, but on Hope---on half his world.
“Poor little kid,” he murmured again, unconsciously drawing her closer to him. “I know what you mean. It’s lonely. I’ve felt the same. Even Hope, you know---she’s rather---out of touch with realities——”
“Oh yes!”
The words were quietly spoken, but the tone was perfect. It conveyed that that had been Mae’s exact thought. To Ted it was another staggering revelation that this girl, whom unconsciously he had classed as on a lower plane than his wife, had, in fact, summed Hope up---had seen all round her and penetrated to the flaws in her philosophy. Mae seemed to him suddenly something wonderful---a pathetic sprite, possessed of a strange worldly wisdom, whom the common herd in their blindness deemed devoid of brains. The fact that he alone had penetrated beneath the surface filled him with a splendid glow of satisfaction. He bent his head a little to look at her.
“Queer how we’ve met,” he said, speaking in nervous, disjointed sentences. “Seems like Fate---we’re both rather lonely---seem to understand each other---somehow——”
She looked up at him mutely. The incense, the subtle incense of her inferiority, mounted to his head in fumes. Almost unconsciously he bent closer to her, then, half swooning, she was in his arms, her lips lifted to his. For the second time that evening he was staggered, and his senses reeled as the fierce depth of her emotion, the completeness of her surrender, came home to him.
It was some minutes later that a faint noise made him look up. Perhaps twenty paces away, a native was watching them. He was dressed in the ordinary, picturesque rags of a camel man, but, even in the midst of his perturbation, there was something in the man’s face which struck Ted as vaguely familiar. For the space of a whole minute he remained with his arms round Mae, staring fiercely at the watcher. Then, with an insolent leer, the man moved off, vanishing among the trees. Ted and Mae drew apart awkwardly, and, as though by common consent, turned and walked back towards the bungalow in silence.
They did not see Hope, who, standing some paces behind them, had witnessed the whole incident. There had been no thought of eavesdropping in her mind. Bolney and Cameron had left early and she had started on an aimless stroll round the compound. The soft, sandy soil had muffled her approach.
She watched them go, then she too turned towards the house, but she took a different path. Arrived in her room, she stood for a few moments in the centre of it. She was quite quiet, but her heart was beating suffocatingly, and her hands felt icy cold in spite of the heat. After a minute or two she moved over to the glass, and by the light of the petrol lamp examined her face dispassionately. She was a good-looking woman with a small, well-bred face, clear-cut features, and dark eyes set below very level brows. Like Margaret Fraser she bore the stamp of race, but it was at her hair that she looked chiefly. She had been grey since the age of twenty-eight, as were most of her family. It was beautiful hair, sweeping back from her broad forehead with a natural wave, and shingled in a way that showed to perfection the queenly poise of her head. But it could not be denied that it aged her.
She felt curiously detached, as though what she had witnessed had been something quite apart from her own life. A sense of unreality filled her. Almost mechanically she undressed and went out to where the beds had been placed in the moonlight, well away from the hot bungalow. Lying on her back, her hands clasped behind her head, she watched the stars, striving to focus her mind on the problem which had come to her, but without much success. When Ted came out she closed her eyes and, through a fringe of lashes, watched him get into his bed. Again the sense of unreality oppressed her. She thought of the conversation at dinner and of her own meditations. How absurdly trivial seemed the incident that was filling her thoughts, yet big enough in her own life to spell either happiness or the reverse. Or was it not? Again she thought of her summary of Mae. A looking-glass! Had not Ted, after all, fallen in love simply with his own reflection? For the rest---a little moonlight, a little sob-stuff, a little ennui, perhaps, with life’s ordinary trend---nothing more. Could it possibly last? The answer was sufficiently emphatic in the negative to be reassuring. Mae Madderson was not the type of girl for whom men risk everything, even when the ‘everything’ had become a little tame. Nor, incidentally, was she the type to burn her own boats except in a moment of passion. Given time for reflection, her nature was too shallow for any irrevocable step. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ was doubtless her motto, and it would matter little to her whether they grew in her neighbour’s garden or not, but she would always find an excuse for gathering them when her neighbour was out.
Hope turned on her side and closed her eyes once again. She was feeling sufficiently reassured to make sleep a possibility. Then, suddenly, on the still cooling air, there floated the sound of a song, dim and distant, but growing momentarily louder and nearer. A strange song it was---wild, wailful, alluring, yet fraught with an indefinable suggestion of evil and of fear. Mae heard it in her bed, on the other side of the bungalow, and sat up to listen. She was alone, for a light in the house, together with the intermittent clack of a typewriter, told where the Indianologist still worked, forgetful of the heat, indoors. Mae’s heart quickened as she listened, and her pulses throbbed almost painfully. The East in her blood awoke, making the night seem full of visions. She pictured Ted lying wakeful, thinking of her, listening to the message of the song. But across the compound Ted slept peacefully, unaware of any disturbing element, while Hope, listening to the song, was conscious suddenly of a violent irritation against him and Mae and their whole outlook on life. A feeling of loneliness and desolation swept over her, bringing the tears to her eyes, but a rather contemptuous anger choked them back.
“‘A fool must follow his natural bent,’” she quoted, and fell asleep while the song still woke passionate echoes in the night.
In his tent on the plain, Donald Cameron stirred in his slumbers, muttering an imprecation on the ‘damned row’; and in the railway waiting-room Father Xavier, waking from a vivid dream, sat up and listened, a look of puzzled wonderment on his face. Then, as the song came nearer, he slipped from his bed and, crossing the room, opened the door.
Donald Cameron gripped the brass pommel of the gigantic saddle unashamedly as the camel rose to its knees. Behind him he heard Margaret gasp and her hands caught him round the waist. Then, as the beast unfolded and straightened its hind legs, she swayed forward against him, righting herself with another little gasp and a gurgle of laughter as the camel completed the manoeuvre and stood up at its full height. From all sides came suppressed squeals and protests as the rest of the party were subjected to the same ordeal. Donald with the Chesneys and John Bolney had just arrived at the road-head, where the metalled highway from Sukurpur became lost in the dusty expanse of the desert, and had found Sir James Fraser and his daughter awaiting them, having arrived by car from the cantonment. It had been arranged that the party were to visit the works of the huge dam which was being constructed at a distance of about ten miles from Sukurpur, and, though the Frasers could have reached the spot more easily by taking a car to the river and ferrying across it, Margaret had decreed that they should cross the river by the bridge a mile lower down, and motor out into the desert to meet the rest of the party, in order that she might enjoy the novelty of a camel ride.
(To Be Continued)