The Singer Passes

An Indian Tapestry

Full lasting is the song; though he,
The singer, passes: lasting too,
To souls not lent in usury,
The rapture of the forward view.
— George Meredith

Growth is slow where roots are deep; and he who lights a little candle in the darkness, may help to set the whole heavens aflame
— Radha Krishnān

To
Gerard Wathen,
C.I.E.

My Dear Gerard,

This book is for you, because you understand India and Roy Sinclair; and because your belief in the outcome encouraged me to attempt the almost impossible.

Your grateful Cousin,
Maud Diver

Our heart’s home
Is with infinitude . . .
Effort and expectation and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
—Wordsworth

Author’s Note

As I have attempted a vision of Northern India, during the eventful year 1931, I wish to make it clear that not only all events, but all Indian episodes—even the least—are based on actual fact; all opinions expressed by Indians, about themselves and the English, or about Indian affairs, are based on their actual opinions written or spoken. The characters are, of course, my own creation.

By this method I have tried to achieve a true and living presentment of Northern India’s many faces, many voices, and points of view; among these I include the soldiers and civilians of British India—Anglo-Indians; and I apply the word throughout, in its true historic sense, to the English in India.

In the words of Tagore, I ask my readers to ‘Come inside India . . . see it, understand it, think over it.’

Never was the need of all three more urgent—for the good of all concerned—than it is to-day.

The novel stands complete in itself, but its interest will be enhanced for those who have read its forerunners, ‘Lilāmani’ and ‘Far to Seek.’

Maud Diver

Pronunciation Guide

I append a brief guide for pronouncing Indian names. The vowel sounds are as follows:—

Book One — A Man Compelled

Chapter 1

Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings
And play the prelude of our fate.
—Longfellow

Sir Roy Sinclair sat alone in his library, the fire piled high, his golden retriever asleep on the hearthrug. Through tall arched windows, facing south-west, the sun streamed into the pale, lofty room, making panels of light on the carpet, revealing weak spots where the pile had worn thin, and imparting an illusion of life to an atmospheric water-colour of Udaipur—white palace, blue lake and broken reflections that seemed almost to quiver, touched by the living ray.

From his shabby leather chair by the fire Sinclair commanded a view of his rose garden and of the noble wood that had given Bramleigh Beeches its name. Flanking the garden, its massive contours climbed a bold sweep of rising ground to the open moor; and on this last day of October the great trees stood enspelled in their brittle splendour that would be shivered by the first winter gales. There were times when he would lose himself in looking, till trees and garden and sky seemed bathed in something rarer than air, till self and not-self were fused in a waking trance such as only practised gazers know.

But to-day he never shifted his eyes from the book in his hand; a small book on a great subject—the problem of modern India and the English in India. That such a problem existed was at last becoming dimly apparent even to the English in England. They wanted to know what it was all about. And, of late, the twin oracles, press and publisher, had conspired to meet their need. Intelligent readers, seeking enlightenment had been assailed by a bewildering variety of Indias; insistent, in revolt, in crisis, in excelsis, in extremis; each fresh writer seeing a different India from a different angle; till awakening interest showed signs of lapsing into a bored confusion.

But with Sir Roy Sinclair it was otherwise. His interest in that great and bewildering country was fundamental, indelible. For this English Baronet, fifteenth of the name, had India shrined in his heart and the best blood of India in his veins. There were many in the neighbourhood who could recall the shock to the county, when Sir Nevil Sinclair, on the death of his father, had returned from Italy married to a beautiful Rajput girl, whom he proposed to instal as mistress of Bramleigh Beeches.

That was thirty-eight years ago; and to Roy’s knowledge there had never been a shadow of regret on either side. He himself—the first and most significant of many consequences—had suffered from his handicap in more ways than he had ever allowed his parents to guess. But never, even in desperate moments, had he quarrelled with the fate that had given him an Indian mother.

Outwardly the Rajput strain did not advertise itself to the unskilled observer. It was hinted at in his very dark hair, his slightly opaque skin, finely modelled features, and singular grace of movement. Otherwise he looked what he was, an English gentleman; a product of Marlborough and Oxford and the country-house tradition—with a difference. For all that, his Norman blood was mingled with the blood of Rajput ancestors who claimed direct descent from the Sun. Always, at the centre, lurked that sharp cleavage between East and West, the profound uncertainty of a divided soul. More of his mother’s Indian self, he fancied, must have gone to the making of him than of the other three children, who came some years after: all the initial loving and striving and secret misgivings; the strain of adapting herself to alien ideals of marriage and holding out against the prejudiced, the puzzled, the politely aloof; against the frank hostility of her formidable sister-in-law, Lady Roscoe—the detested Aunt Jane of his own childhood and early manhood.

The little he knew of these things had been gleaned from his father, on his own return from India after the War—broken by the double loss of his mother and his closest friend. At home he had found Tara Despard, the girl companion of early days; had wooed and married her, and decided to live on at Bramleigh Beeches, as his father’s land agent, writing fitfully, in verse and prose.

Eleven years of married comradeship and congenial work seemed simply to have slipped through his fingers.

Now his father was gone; snatched from him by a sharp attack of influenza; leaving him with a wife and three children, to carry on the modern landowner’s losing battle against a taxing machine intent on his extinction; hedged about, increasingly, by the limits and inescapables of life—a less malleable affair than his young imagination had foreseen. And what had he to show, for those sheltered years, in the way of personal achievement?

So far there stood to his credit two volumes of poetry and essays, a collection of Rajput stories, and two distinctive books on India—her spiritual thinkers, her renaissance in literature and art: his first serious venture in the task of dual interpretation to which he had privately dedicated himself, in arrogant Oxford days. Both books had enhanced his reputation. But three years had brought no successor; and he began to wonder—What next? Had his mental tools gone rusty for lack of disciplined use? Or had he, because of his Eastern blood, a less purposeful grip on the work he loved than his father, who had painted vigorously to the last?

For in Roy Sinclair, son of Lilāmani, grandson of Sir Lakshman Singh, there was more to be reckoned with than the idiosyncrasies of the artist. There were ancestral forces at work in him other than the spirit of his lovely mother, or his fine and cultured grandfather. Influences, dreams, race-memories enriched his mental background, and quickened the vivid sense of India. But at times they troubled his soul with a feeling of aloofness from his own beloved corner of England; troubled him the more because he could not bring himself to share them, even with Tara, whose spirit rose instinctively to high and difficult issues, who shared with him in every sense the sharpened struggle to keep the roof of more privileged Sinclairs over their own diminished heads. It had become literally a case of ‘Your money—or your life.’ And he would find the money somehow. He would prove his Sinclair quality in the teeth of Aunt Jane’s chronic aspersions on his ‘moral backbone.’

For Lady Roscoe still survived to plague him, as she had done since very early days, when he had hated her for her attitude to his adored mother. For her whole rigid, aggressive personality, he hated her still. At seventy-three, she was as active in mind and body as at any time these ten years. She was still a ‘Die-hard of the Deepest Dye’; still playing the political game with her old trenchant vigour, her cast-iron convictions, her deadly lack of imagination and humour. She still trespassed, uninvited, on other people’s preserves; and now that his father was gone . . . ?

For several months she had correctly left her unsatisfactory nephew to mourn in peace; but lately she had begun to plague him with pointed questions. Already he was stiffening his non-moral backbone in view of the coming clash; realising, as he sprawled in his shabby leather chair, that under certain forms of her skilled aggression he might be powerless to hold his own—and hating her the more.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Young voices and laughter in the garden distracted his attention from the book in his hand. Looking up, his gaze lingered absently on the familiar portrait of his mother at the age of seventeen, a thing of astonishing delicacy and truth: the velvet dark eyes, the primrose sheen of her sari, the clear olive skin, so finely-textured that it seemed, like a magnolia blossom, fit from within, the bare arms resting on the balcony, one exquisitely finished hand on the open page of her book. What an advantage they had, those Indian women, in the sameness of their classic dress, over the fashionable vagaries of the West. His mother, at seventeen, was dressed as she had always been from his earliest memory to his last sight of her. The girl had blossomed into a woman: that was all.

It was so that his father had first seen her at Antibes, had won leave from Sir Lakshman Singh to paint the portrait that decided his fate—and his career. For it was she who had planned and inspired his famous series of pictures from India’s epic love-story, the Ramayāna, even as she had fired his son’s imagination with tales of Rajasthán; had christened him Prithvi Raj—King of the Earth. The ‘private love-name,’ still used by Tara, at endearing moments, had an ironic flavour in this day of vanishing estates.

But his own should not vanish if he and Tara could avert the catastrophe. They were hanging on, now, by their eyelids; half the house shut up, half the servants dismissed, the shooting ‘let’ to a more prosperous Sinclair; and only last week, the big car had gone. Tara—over-worked but indefatigable—had parted with her nursery-maid, taking entire charge of four-year-old Helen; and he as his own land agent, needed her sane counsel at every turn. Too rarely now could they snatch a quiet hour to themselves except at night. Then she was usually so tired that he had not the heart to worry her with estate problems, that left him scant leisure to concentrate on the more congenial task of adding a few fresh royalties to his income.

Aunt Jane—Apostle of Utility—flatly refused to believe that he could not, at will, grind out a yearly machine-made ‘best seller.’ If he were incapable of doing that much for the ‘Old Place,’ of what earthly use was his gift for ‘scribbling,’ either to himself or anyone else—she would like to know. And Roy could not point out that his work had earned him distinction in circles beyond her narrow range of vision. She saw him only as another renegade from the Sinclair tradition. His father’s paintings had at least brought in good money and cleared off the mortgage. Some of them—she darkly added—would fetch big prices now.

That broad hint was aimed at the Ramayāna pictures, the Sinclair masterpieces: six panels and three full canvasses, setting forth the royal romance of Rāma and Sita and its tragic climax. The spirit informing them all had been his mother’s; and each rendering of Sita had caught some new aspect of her beauty. But in Aunt Jane’s eyes the pictures were ‘fantastic heathen stuff,’ thoroughly out of place in a decent English country house; and now—his father being gone—no doubt she was counting on them as possible ‘grist for the mill.’

He needed none to tell him the cold money value of his treasures; the price he might get for them from a certain wealthy American, Lewis Buchanan Edom—one of his many unseen correspondents. A man of dollars and seemingly a man of taste, with an engaging enthusiasm for things Indian, he had written several times to Sinclair, in the friendly forthcoming fashion of his race. From the fruits of some trivial patent gadget, he was building a new home in California; a cross between an English country house and an Italian palace, with a marble hall that was to be his gallery of masterpieces. Could he set eyes on the Rāma-Sita pictures, there would be no rest for their owner till they had changed hands—at almost any figure he chose to name.

The knowledge had been nagging at Roy’s mind since a letter from Edom—announcing fresh designs on Europe—had reminded him of the man’s existence. The panels were sacrosanct; but he and Tara had reluctantly considered the wisdom of letting the American, if needs must, see the three big canvasses. Only the suspicion that Lady Roscoe might be looking the same way hardened him against the idea.

Here he was confronting the house again, like Alice in the Looking-glass. All roads led back to Nevil’s heritage, and how he would feel about it if he knew.

The children’s voices sounded nearer. They were outside the window now: another Nevil and Lilāmani Sinclair, aged nine and seven—Nevil as fair as Tara, Lilāmani dark as himself, with a haunting look of her namesake that made her peculiarly dear to him. They were coming in for nursery tea, which they all shared these days, unless beset by visitors. He himself had meanly cried off this afternoon, on the plea of thinking out an essay and of absorbing, in peace, his new little book on India. Presently Tara would bring him his small teapot, teacup and half a lemon. For she spoilt him, as she never spoilt her children. His mother had begun it; and it was simpler, she declared, to carry on the process than to re-educate him all along the line. With most of his kinks and creases ironed out, he would not be Roy.

The children had halted outside the window. He could see them now; mere strips of things, buttoned up in their winter coats. Nevil’s voice, crisp and clear, was laying down the law.

‘But it is. I tell you it is—like the burning bush m the Bible.’

And Lilāmani, not so meek as she looked: ‘’Tisn’t burning all the same.’

‘I know better’n you,’ Nevil hectored. ‘ I’m nearly nine. And it’s my wood.’

‘It’s Daddy’s wood—he told me—where he useter quest the Golden Tusks, for his High Tower Princess.’

‘Yes, of course, silly. But it’s mine for after, for always; the wood and the garden and home an’ all.’

There was no hint of bragging in the Roy’s tone; and his confidence in the certainty of ‘after, for always,’ struck a queer shaft of pain through his father’s heart.

But Lilāmani stuck to her own point of view.

‘You needn’t be so important over it. They aren’t yours—while there’s Daddy.’

And Nevil’s retort struck a shaft of pain more personal.

‘But there won’t always be Daddy!’

‘There must always be Daddy. How can you?’

A quiver lurked in her passionate protest.

‘It’s not me. You are a baby. Don’t you know that old people can’t be there for ever and ever. There’s grandfather gone now. And when the fathers go, the sons have to take it all on. That’s what sons are for——’

Tara’s voice from the garden door interrupted his homily on the whole duty of sons.

‘Children, where are you? Tea!’

‘Or-right, Mummy,’ Nevil sang out; and they scampered off leaving Roy Sinclair alone with an acutely sharpened sense of mortality, a profound sense of responsibility towards the Roy who knew so precisely what sons were for, who stated so coolly that old people could not be there for ever and ever. Alas, there were those who did not even wait to be old before they passed into the Next Door House of Life

Clearly Nevil knew his own mind in the matter of his heritage; and, if he were not to be defrauded, the three big pictures must go or some Sinclair old masters; or his own gift must be turned to more fruitful account. He might unearth his first ambitious novel, begun at Udaipur, in the Maharána’s Guest House, interrupted by the urgent demands of life—and never finished. After eight goodly weeks of solitude, letters from Lance Desmond, his closest friend, had drawn him back to the Punjab, to Lahore and Rose Arden, his false dawn; to the loss of Lance in those senseless riots, and his own tragic impasse in the matter of his headlong engagement to Rose. Looking back across the years, he knew that he had never loved her as Lance had done. He had simply succumbed to the magnet of her beauty, her skilled and delicate coquetry. And into what a wilderness of tragedy that fatal conjunction had led them both.

Blindly infatuated—unaware of any private understanding with Lance—he had won her, only to lose her, through his Indian blood and his own revulsion of feeling, when he discovered that, on his account, she had deceived and discarded his friend. He had heard of her marriage a few years later; and he neither envied the man, nor knew his name.

As for the novel in which he had lived and had his being, tragic reality had broken the spell. Sheets and sheets of close-written script had been tidied away without a twinge of regret. Suppose he were to unearth them, could he ever recapture that first fine careless rapture? There was no fascination, after all, like creative work; no other way of life comparable to the specialised, intensely personal life of the artist—looking closely, feeling widely, grasping detail and horizon in one clear field of vision. And a big Indian novel would give full scope for his twofold understanding and sympathy; for his vision of an India ultimately one in spirit, as she never had been yet, nor ever would become by the waving of any political wand.

The thought of India led him back to his absorbing book: the work of an honest writer seeing the country and people with new eyes: seeing her changing relation with England as a world-problem; and with quickened interest he read on:

‘Here in India I find the whole question of contact between East and West clothed in actuality. And I ask myself—Is it even now too late for the spiritual genius of the East to challenge and check the most sinister threat to Western man, the de-humanising power of applied science and the perfected machine? Japan succumbed to commercial influences; and is losing her soul. China rebelled; and relapsed into chaos. Only in India there still remains a precarious residue of hope that her foremost thinkers may yet combine with the saving remnant of idealism in Europe to preserve creative human values and renew the Western world.

‘But first she must save herself. For there is danger in her present drift away from religion, in the spread of crude political ideas, alien to her non-political soul. “Her trumpet is lying in the dust” of racial strife, awaiting the man of vision who will lift it up and proclaim that Europe has need of India’s idealism. In the conflict of many voices she has drowned the voice of her own guru: “India is immortal while she continues her search for God. If she gives it up for politics, she will die . . .”’

There Sinclair halted. Having scanned the page in a swift glow of interest, he slowly read again those few pregnant paragraphs.

One sentence stood sharply out from the rest: ‘“Her trumpet is lying in the dust——”’ In that broken line of Tagore he recognised his theme, dimly apprehended all these years. India had never lacked men of vision, Hindu and Moslem, Sikh and Christian. To each his personal seeing, his personal word—the logos that reveals the Creator to the created. And the vision of a Roy Sinclair should have a double significance springing from his two-fold origin: from his mother the soul of the East, from his father the mind and character of the West.

Already his earlier books had created a stir among the few who cared and understood. An outstanding novel might reach the larger audience, despised by literary snobs; and a fuller measure of fame would give added weight to his personal word in both countries. It might spur him to more sustained and lucrative work than he had yet achieved, and so help to keep young Nevil’s heritage intact. Not least, he himself—as poet and visionary—was alive to the peculiar integrity of truth expressed in imaginative form.

Now he knew why he had never destroyed that early fragment written in a white heat of fervour. The seed of a maturer book, it had lain all these years quickening in darkness. Now he could unearth it without fear of the old painful associations, imbued as it was with the spirit of his vanished mother, who, in some ethereal fashion, held him still. This symbolical novel of England and India should be his crowning tribute to her memory.

And with a leap of the heart he suddenly perceived that the writing of it would involve a voyage to India, several months of living in close touch with the country, the people. Yet here was he, tied and bound by the chain of his dearest earthly possession: by prosaic lack of means either to pay a responsible agent, or to transport himself half across the world. The sense of check was brief. Profoundly he knew that once the theme had fired his imagination, no obstacle, human or actual, could prevent him from carrying it through.

But to Tara not a word, till the whole plan was clearer in his mind. The long separation would come hard on them both. But for the children—those dear and difficult ties—how gladly would he and the Light of his Tents take ship for another wander-year, renew their careless youth before the rigid economies thrust on them had undermined their natural spirit of adventure. But this particular adventure was, for him, no careless flight from the daily round. It was a call to high endeavour, possibly beyond his scope; and he could not see Tara failing to understand his need for going, his imperative need to be alone out there; alone to follow up any experience that might illumine or enrich his theme; to lose himself in the artistic travail that is its own reward——

He was off on his winged horse now; excited to the depths of his soul at thought of actual India—sights and sounds and smells; released from tiresome limits of the feasible by an intoxicating enlargement of personality, a sensation as if all boundaries were dissolved by some power within him akin to the Power that rules the tides and reddens the sky at dawn: a curious infrequent sensation—very real while it lasted, purely fantastic if translated into words. Either from a profound instinct of reserve or from a too keen dread of ridicule, he had never yet risked that most infuriating of all human responses to the unusual—an uncomprehending smile of incredulity. Even Tara, if he told her, would tenderly laugh at his presumption. His mother might have understood, had she not died too soon——

The door opened softly: Tara, bringing his tea? At thought of tea and Tara, dissolving boundaries contracted into the walls of his familiar room: and he himself toppled off his winged horse, as if he had fallen through a skylight, back into the limits of his named personality and his shabby leather chair.

Instinctively, with a boyish sense of guilt, he closed the little book—still open at the page that had whisked him to the world’s end.

Chapter 2

We did not plead for love to yield its best;
We lived the best for which all lovers plead.
—Gerald Gould

Tara Sinclair, at six-and-thirty, looked less than her age; so slight and thin she was—too thin, of late. She still retained the wistful charm of youth. She was still the vivid Tara of their beech wood games; with her touch of imperiousness at need, and her eyes the blue of wild hyacinths, though time had dulled the golden hair, that softly framed her face. Her air of youth was enhanced by a blue woollen frock boldly embroidered in orange and green. Her beads were of carved jade; and two smaller ones dangled from her ears. Her fragile look and the tension of her sensitive lips suggested that her spirit might be overtaxing her body; but the small imperious chin dared any one to tell her so.

As she came forward, no tray in her hands, Sinclair was smitten by that fragile look, by the knowledge that she must have been more or less on her feet since luncheon, while he had been lounging over the fire, nominally at work, and had not written a line. But he only smiled and cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘No tea for a hard-worked husband?’ he asked, pulling her nearer.

She stooped and kissed him.

‘Lazy demon, frousting in here on this perfect evening. Before I give you a drop, you’ve got to bestir yourself and tackle—who d’you think?—Aunt Jane!’

‘Aunt Jane——?’ He sat upright, stiffened for the encounter, like a dog at sight of his favourite enemy ‘If she’s invited herself for the week-end——?’

‘Be calm, furious one! She’s on her way to Merton-under-Edge. Just looked in for a sight of her dear darling Roy!’

He sank back relieved. ‘She won’t get it.’

‘She will. She’s after business, Roy. Something to do with the Rāma pictures and an American.’

‘My pictures—an American?’ he blazed in sudden fury. ‘Tell her she’s barking up the wrong tree.’

“I think, darling, you’d better tell her that yourself!’

He sprang to his feet with an abrupt laugh.

‘Right. I will.—Has she dared to bring him here?’

‘No; but she wants to. He’s a millionaire—fearfully keen.’ A pause. ‘And we did think about the big ones.’

‘Yes. But I won’t have her ramming Americans down my throat. I’ll tell her, “my head is bloody but unbowed.” And she’ll think I’m using the fashionable adjective!’

‘Prithvi; you are a devil! She imagines she’s doing us a good turn.’

‘She doesn’t. She wants to clear those pictures out of Bramleigh Beeches.’

Tara laid a soothing hand on his arm.

‘If you don’t sell something, how will we pay those cruel duties and the January Income Tax, let alone everything else?’

Smitten by the quiver of her Ups, he drew her to him and kissed them.

‘Don’t worry, darling. Trust me to balance our budget. I’ve got an American up my sleeve, who might smile at an old master or two!’

‘Roy——! Family portraits? She wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘You bet she wouldn’t—till the deed was done! Unless I tell her for the fun of seeing her jaw drop a yard! And it’s just possible—I might be writing a novel.’

Her face lit up. ‘How wildly exciting! They love you in America. Has a notion arrived?’

‘A glimmer. I’ll tell you afterwards. Her ladyship mustn’t be kept waiting. Confound the woman. I think she sometimes forgets that the “Old Place” is mine, not hers. If I don’t gratefully swallow her millionaire, she’ll go for me—all her quills out.’

The quills referred to his boyish image of Aunt Jane as a porcupine. For her favoured few the flattened quills—smooth but hard; for himself, and his lovely mother, all the quills on end. She wanted Bramleigh Beeches purged of those unique pictures, because his Indian mother had inspired them and because she was in them.

He opened the drawing-room door in a prickle of antagonism, nerved to encounter the full force of her masterful personality.

There she sat on the sofa by the electric heater, absorbed in ‘Country Life,’ unaware of his entrance; for she was getting a little deaf—though none might dare to notice the fact. Square and sturdy, blunt nose, cleft chin and decisive underlip, she was a feminine counterpart of her father, Sir George, though the old man had a kindlier aspect. Even in trivial matters she invariably irked him, as in her habit of combining brown and black; a dismal mixture that confronted him as she rose and laid down the paper. A black cloth coat opened over a reddish brown tweed and a black scarf stamped with scarlet and ochre. A black and red quill enlivened her felt hat. Her cheeks were hard and smooth, more weathered than wrinkled; her manner, at best assertive, at worst aggressive. She was undiluted Sinclair—and proud of it.

‘Well, Roy, you’ve taken your time; and I’m in a hurry,’ she greeted him with her touch of asperity. They never kissed—to his private relief.

‘Terribly sorry,’ he apologised with cheerful impenitence. ‘Tara had to come and routle me out. She’s busy with the children’s tea. Will you have a cup?’

‘No, thanks. I’m only here on business.—I’ve a piece of good news for you. Sit down.’

In view of possible hostilities, he avoided the sofa and pulled forward a pedigree Chippendale chair, with the dismal instinctive thought, ‘These might fetch something.’

Lady Roscoe, as usual, went straight to the point. ‘Hard times for you two. Enough to make my poor old father turn in his grave. But you’ve got to hang on somehow.’

Roy crossed one leg over the other and caressed his left ankle with a shapely long-fingered hand.

‘We’ve every hope of doing so, at present.’

‘You’re optimistic, and Tara’s plucky. But she ought to have a nursemaid. She doesn’t look strong.’ It was the sort of remark she would shoot out, with callous disregard for a husband’s qualms. ‘And Nevil ought to be at school.’

Roy stiffened under the dictatorial note.

‘We don’t wish him to go too early. Besides—the death duties and super-tax amount to a capital levy.’

‘Rank Socialism——’ She clenched a resolute hand.

‘But luckily for you I’ve run across a rich American—quite a find in these desperate days. He’s out for art treasures; “just crazy” about Indian things. I told him I could put him in the way of something unique in that line. I believe he’d pay almost any sum for the Rāma pictures.’

Roy met her look with steadfast expressionless eyes.

‘My father’s pictures,’ he said, ‘are not for sale.’

‘Nonsense. It’s a chance in a thousand. Really, Roy, in practical matters, you’re a sentimental fool. How do you propose to get round this very awkward corner? Perhaps you’re selling the beech wood?’

He could have struck her; but he only said, in a sheathed voice, ‘Not that I’m aware of. And I’m not spurning American dollars wholesale. If you’ll put me in touch with your find, I’ll have him down to look round. He might take on a few old masters.’

‘Sinclair portraits?’

He was up against her brand of sentiment now. He had neatly turned the tables; and he rather enjoyed the achievement.

‘Well—we could spare a few. The Lely and Reynolds would fetch long prices.’

‘I won’t hear of it——’

She rose in her wrath, thrusting her spectacles into her bag. Roy stood up also confronting a righteous anger that was two parts pain; and the knowledge softened him in spite of himself.

‘My dear Aunt Jane,’ he reasoned with her, more placably. ‘I don’t want to distress you; but those portraits are my property; and I’ve a wife and children to consider. No, listen’—he checked her threatened protest—‘My father talked it over with me—this death duties business. And we picked out certain portraits that might go at a pinch. So I have his sanction.’

‘Nevil’s sanction——?’ Her resolute lip dropped—and so remained for a few seconds, as if she had forgotten its lapse from dignity, giving her face a helpless stupid look beneath her angry eyes. ‘Yes—he was capable of it.’

Roy checked her with a commanding hand.

‘I’m not discussing him with you. If we don’t want to quarrel, let’s stick to business. After all,’ he urged more persuasively, ‘our forebears should be glad to do their bit,—helping a ham-strung descendant over a stile.’

She thrust out her cleft chin at him.

‘Oh, you’re plausible. You don’t face up to things. And you don’t get that from Sinclair blood. Go your own way. Sell all the family silver and jewels—I’ll be no party to the transaction. I shall tell Mr Edom I was mistaken.’

‘Edom?’ Roy echoed, amazed. ‘Lewis Buchanan is it?’

She stared at him—mystified, disconcerted.

‘He signs himself Lewis B. How do you know of him?’

‘I’ve had several long letters from him. He’s a humble admirer of my Indian books. And here am I by an odd turn of the wheel—a humble suppliant for his dollars. Fate’s a queer fiddler. You didn’t mention my name?’

‘No. I said a nephew of mine.’

‘Well, now it’s out, you may as well give me his English address. You can’t keep him away from here.’

She sighed—an impatient sigh. Something vital went out of her face; and he realised, with an odd impersonal pang, how her masterful spirit must resent the futility of refusal.

‘Savile House will find him,’ she said, viciously snapping her bag. ‘He’s “crazy” about Lord Savile’s antiques. Don’t let him buy you out of house and home.’

‘I think I can promise that,’ Roy assured her, noticing how her clumsy fingers fumbled at the big buttons on her coat.

He went with her to the front door; and at parting held out his hand.

‘We can’t see eye to eye about this, Aunt Jane. But, in my own way, I care as much as you do.’

‘No, you don’t, Roy.’ She suffered her hand to be held. ‘But you are Nevil’s son. It’s your first duty in life to be worthy of his name.’

‘I’ve done my best—I’ll go on doing it,’ he murmured, discomfited by that unforeseen appeal.

She was gone: and he stood alone on the empty path staring absently after the vanishing car—a great black-beetle; the earth was crawling with them. As it vanished his antagonism subsided. They had given and taken hard knocks—he and that aggressive old woman—without breaking any bones, as only blood relations can. Her parting injunction, almost a plea, had made him feel like a lectured schoolRoy; yet, with an odd reluctance, he liked her for it. Would she ever forgive him if—in the face of it—he went off to India, ostensibly in pursuit of copy?

Yet what could a man do in his distracting case? On the one hand his Sinclair allegiance—Tara, the children, loving him, needing him—dissuaded him from the risk of renewed contact with India: on the other hand, his Rajput blood, craving that perilous contact, persuaded him to go forward, risk or no, since only so could he acquire the inside knowledge he must have for that novel—and more than the novel.

The reminder of it set him longing for a quiet spell among his beeches in this magical freak hour that distilled peace as the night sky distils dew. But Tara would be eager to hear about Aunt Jane; and Tara was adorable. Only, at the moment, he wanted an hour alone with his gift from the blue more than bread and meat, more than wife and children. Love them as he might, it was a constant element in him, his need to keep a just balance between the inhuman Roy—for whom solitude was ‘the first-born of Life’—and the friend-making human Roy, whose dependence on wife and mother had in it more of the East than of the West.

To-night, the inhuman Roy prevailed; but the other insisted that he must go in for five minutes, swallow a cup of tea and give Tara an interim account of Sinclair v. Roscoe, in cryptic terms, so that Nevil might not suspect irreverence.

He found them in the old morning-room sitting round the mahogany table, banished by his father from the dining-room.

A presentable trio—his detached mind appraised them: Nevil, with his mother’s hair and eyes, her sparkle and her spirit; very thin, and promising to be tall: Lilāmani, with smooth dark hair demurely parted, his own blue-grey eyes, and that incipient look of his mother. For so young a child, she had a quaintly withdrawn air, as if the spirit of purdah had been passed on to one who could never know the inner meaning of that lovely gift. But under the demure surface lurked a fierce intensity of feeling, at present concentrated on himself.

And over by Tara sat Helen with her elfin air—the only one of the three who advertised the Indian strain. His first sight of the child’s dusky face pressed against Tara’s fair skin had given him a queer shock. But Tara had never shown a sign, except a special care and tenderness towards the child, that might be an impulse of atonement for her own unspoken thoughts.

As he entered, she was coaxing the fretful creature to eat a few strips of bread and honey, while the other two dealt faithfully with cake and farmhouse bread, their lips stained with home-made black currant jam.

‘Oh, Daddy darling!’ Lilāmani clutched at him with a sticky hand. ‘Come on quick. We’ve nearly etten it all.’

‘You’re welcome.’

He stooped and kissed her, his eyes signalling messages to Tara across the table.

‘Hammer and tongs, was it?’ she asked, reaching for the cake.

‘A good deal of hammer, but no bones broken.’

‘How can you hammer bones and not break them?’ was Nevil’s shrewd comment on that cryptic answer.

‘I don’t advise you to try,’ his father gravely counselled him. ‘It’s a magic that doesn’t always work.’ He looked across again at Tara. ‘Her American turns out to be my unseen correspondent. How’s that for a stroke of Fate?’

‘O—oh, then something might come of it?’

He caught the note of anxiety and moved round the table to give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

‘Something shall come of it. “Over Edom will I cast out my shoe”!—Meanwhile—tea. It’s thirsty work arguing with some people.’

She filled his cup and pushed it towards him. ‘Sit down.’

‘No, I only want this. As you accused me of frousting, I’m off to the wood to snatch a whiff of evening air.’

He emptied his cup not looking towards Lilāmani; but her hand reached out again and clung to his.

‘Do come back for games after, Daddy,’ she pleaded. The clinging of her little boneless hand seemed to invade his whole being and convict him of base desertion.

‘Yes—after,’ he vaguely reassured her.

Tara said nothing. She respected, if she did not always understand, his moods and vagaries, his strain of aloofness, that was of the spirit, not of the heart. Instinctively she knew how ‘to take by leaving, to hold by letting go’; and he fully appreciated his own good fortune. A man could never tell what even the most alluring girl might do to him once he had made her his wife. That there were two sides to that far-reaching uncertainty he feelingly realised at this critical moment.

But out in the open, under a sky full of mounting colour and vanishing light, he surrendered his senses to the mysterious something that his solitary mind could call forth from Nature herself, something that needed, for its fulfilment, only earth and sky and friendly trees. There were errant moods when escape was imperative even from one’s dearest. Yet the mental image of them all persisted, mutely convicting him of desertion; not the mere truancy of an hour, but the secret conspiracy, with his other self, to desert them for months on end.

What would Lilāmani say to that? Would even Tara feel like granting him seven or eight months leave of absence to prowl round India, on the bare chance that his dual understanding might be of some service to the two great countries, twin halves of his complex personality. Strange how the difficult mingling seemed hardly to trouble Christine or Jerry—the truest Sinclair of them all. Neither of them had any wish to see that far land, for which Roy ached at times mentally and physically. Yet here he was rooted, by duty and desire, so that his human heart rebelled against the wrench of parting, the long absence from them all. That his mother’s spirit was at work in him he could not doubt. She who had written, ‘Though unseen, I shall never be far from you,’ was with him still, in some way beyond his conceiving; the inextinguishable lamp of her spirit leading him on—to what unknown purpose, what invisible ends . . . ?

Chapter 3

I ask my heart if its blood carries the wisdom of the unseen way.
—Tagore

In the depth of the beech wood, where the great trees grew closest, dusk had already begun, though the last flare of sunset still gave to yellow leaves and brown almost a light of their own. All the moist earth was strewn with them, dark and dank from recent rain. There were still many trees in full leafage, others half stripped; boughs and twigs and leaf-buds, like delicate talons, laid upon the vanishing brightness with the clean strokes of a Japanese print; and, drifting through them, the week-old moon was slowly absorbing her borrowed radiance. To the right loomed the shadowy house; three thin plumes of smoke from three chimneys tilted by a breath from the North.

A hushed expectancy seemed to pervade the wood, its shadowy remoteness quick with hidden life and Nature’s mysterious silences. Here was sanctuary; here he could sink into fathomless depths where the sleeping beast and the unknown god dwelt together in very imperfect unity; ancient wisdom of the one and intuition of the other guarding all the master-secrets of creation. For the man who would write poetry must escape at times from crowd-thoughts and emotions, back to self and Nature, to his own abysmal link with earth and air and sun. Even as a small boy, it had been his height of bliss to wander alone in this very wood at bluebell time and fancy himself lost; to lie on his back, in a trance-like stillness that was not of the West, listening and. seeing and feeling, while young beech leaves like flakes of sunlight, whispered their secrets too low for him to hear.

For many years the East in his blood had lain dormant. That first, disastrous time in India had been eclipsed by a year out there, with Tara and his father spent chiefly in Rajputana and Kashmir; a year that had wrought strange discords within him such as he could only have revealed to his mother. For the East pervaded his whole relation to her, who still lived in his deeper consciousness like a spirit in a cloud, still shared his work, his life, and the intensifying of both through his marriage to Tara. Would she—high-priestess of home and family—approve his sudden urge to leave the duty on the doorstep for the insidious appeal of the large and vague, on the chance of achieving a book that might catch England’s attention and India’s imagination?

In the library, lifted on his winged horse, he had known he would go. In this memory-haunted wood, things near and dear plucked at his heart, while the book-to-be stirred in his brain as the unborn child stirs when it quickens in darkness. His mood conspired with association to weave its potent spells. He was Roy of one-and-twenty wandering hatless in this very wood, desire of home and the ancestral pull of India contending for his soul. Then it was his mother who held him; now it was his wife and all she had given him. For poets, more than most men, are ruled by women.

Risks—? Of course there were risks, whether one went to India or crossed a crowded street. He who would achieve, must pay the price of achievement. . . .

Lost in thought, he wandered on and on—as that earlier Roy had wandered—through the dusky wood, up on to the open moor, where twilight lingered; time forgotten and his half-promise to that small Lilāmani, whom his mother had never seen.

It was only when dusk deepened to darkness that he realised his truancy and made his way home by the light of the half-moon.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

He found Lilāmani in bed and in tears; and it took him so long to comfort her that he was late for dinner. His explanation to Tara could only, as yet, be a partial affair. He was scolded, without severity; and all through dinner his mind kept slipping away from the desultory talk between Tara and her mother, Lady Despard, who came over often from the oak-panelled Black and White House, where she had lived on after her husband’s death. For all her grey hairs, she looked young enough, in her blue and silver gown, to be no more than an elder sister to the pair, and so they treated her. She was ‘Helen’ to them both. And because she never thrust her opinions on them, or met theirs with the exasperating smile of elderly sapience, she was unfailingly welcome at Bramleigh Beeches, the centre of her main interest in life.

She had hoped for one of her good talks with Roy this evening. For he had met, in Town, several Indian delegates to the Round Table Conference lately opened at St James’, where British Ministers and Indian Princes, lawyers and merchants and courageous Indian women were busy ‘creating an atmosphere’ for the friendly solution of a problem that few of them had even begun to understand. She valued his opinion and enjoyed his natural gift of words. But seeing that he was not in the mood, she followed Tara’s lead and left him in peace.

While he was basely devising some pretext to spend the evening among his books, Hester came in with the coffee—and a message that he was wanted on the telephone in the library.

‘What name?’ he asked, hating the telephone.

‘Edom, it sounded like, Sir.’

Without a word of explanation, he sprang up, secured his cup of coffee—and vanished, Prince at his heels.

If the man of millions was telephoning from Town, he meant business; and the thought provoked an acute revulsion of feeling. This intrusive stranger, this inventor of a trivial gadget turned out by the thousand, had only to name some staggering figure, and three at least of the Ramayāna masterpieces would change hands. There was something terrifying, at times, about the power of money.

With mingled curiosity and apprehension, he took up the receiver.

‘Mr Edom, is it—? Sir Roy Sinclair speaking.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ came the American formula, in a pleasant voice.

‘Are you speaking from Town?’ Sinclair asked.

‘No. Merton-under-Edge—the Vaughan-Sedleys. I had the luck to meet Lady Roscoe here. And she’s told me the name of her nephew! I’m crazy to see those pictures.’

‘When can you come?’ Roy steeled himself to face the inevitable. ‘Sunday suit you?’

‘Delighted.’

‘Can you manage lunch?’

‘Many thanks. I’ll be honoured. Make my salaams in person to the author of “This India.”’

The voice of the unseen had a genuine ring; and it moved Sinclair to an impulse of hospitality. He heard himself asking that invisible human being to dine and stay the night; heard the fellow accept with alacrity; sat down in his shabby chair by the fire with a queer sensation of fatality, as if an unseen hand had pulled the strings. A talkative stranger hanging round all day—what on earth had possessed him?

Dismissing the intruder, he sipped his coffee, encouraged the fire and decided to remain where he was; to tackle in earnest, his provocative fantasy, ‘The Modern Frankenstein,’ based on portents not altogether fantastic—on triumphs of the machine age; the fatal, logical trend of this B.B.C. era; the threat of a synthetic world, victimised by the fruits of man’s inventive skill, a fool-proof paradise for robots; the earth crawling with motor-cars, the sky darkened by a plague of aeroplanes—accursed dragons of the air.

Here and there a few imaginative men—the world’s true seers—uttered a note of warning; but so obvious were the comforts and conveniences of the early machine age, that the real danger lay in man’s unreadiness to recognise what was insidiously happening to him and his smooth-running world.

So much for the darker side of his picture. But he would not end on a fatalistic note. Man might flout Nature, but she remained invincible, ‘spirit in her clods’; and he himself would always have to reckon with the spell of things imponderable, the magnetism of things not seen. His adventurous spirit might yet discover new worlds, new outlets; might yet—like another St George, confronting a mechanised dragon—reassert itself for the unconquerable thing it was. The machine and the behaviourist should not have the last word. . . .

Absorbed in his theme, he had half forgotten his surroundings—wholly forgotten the time. His brain, that had felt blocked all day—like a frozen torrent—leapt forward, now, with an exhilarating sense of release worth days of arid labour.

Suddenly he started, to find Tara standing by him, her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her with the little twitching frown of a mind recalled from abstraction.

‘I never heard a sound.’

‘Of course not. I crept in.—Flying along?’

He nodded. ‘Making up for this afternoon.—Has Helen gone?’

‘Yes. It’s past eleven. I was waiting.’

He rubbed his cheek against her bare arm.

‘Don’t wait, Princess-of-all-work. I can’t stop yet. I’ll creep in like a mouse. You look dead beat. Run along and forget about me. You’ll soon be asleep.’

‘Such a simple prescription!’

He drew her face down to his. They kissed; and she left him.

Mechanically he lit a cigarette, picked up his pen, and was confronted by a broken sentence: ‘Increasingly the insidious assault of mass suggestion tends to undermine man’s personal liberty of opinion and desire. There are other injuries than those to life and limb: injuries that, in the long run——’

What? It was clean gone—the thread of his argument, the climax of his phrase.

Tara had been with him barely three minutes; and she had said little. Yet the sharpened sense of her dearness had wrought havoc none the less. The chill of her thin fingers, her clinging kiss—that pierced him with a foretaste of parting—had evoked the challenging question, Could he, for the sake of his castle in the air, face the self-imposed fiat of separation for eight or nine months on end?

Though they were now in the mid-summer of their lives, the security of their love and reliance on each other had not yet simmered down into friendship lit by moments of passion. That was not Roy Sinclair’s way. He was Tara’s lover, her husband or her elder son—according to the mood or need—the first, as often as not, even after eleven years of marriage. Spoilt, in a surface sense, his self-will in everyday affairs was off-set by his dependence on her in matters of greater moment. To be without her, for more than a short while, was to be but half himself. Yet palpably she could not go with him. Too many considerations forbade: home and children and the double cost at every turn. Two were not one when it came to P. & O. passages, train fares, and hotels. But how break the news to her, without undue shock?

So distracting a question banished thought; opened his mind to visions of India—memories, desires. . . .

The boom of a closing door somewhere in the silent house roused him from reverie. He noticed absently that his cigarette had gone out. So had the leaping light in his brain. And in that chilled mood his urgent protest against the Oncoming Irrevocable seemed about as effectual as a child standing in the permanent way to stop an express. It was the mood of midnight. To-morrow his brain would run clear again.

Having collected the loose sheets, his eyes sought his mother’s picture, with a curious feeling of compulsion, as though she wanted something of him that his limited faculties could not divine. He could only gaze, and marvel at her deathless charm.

Then, with a fanciful reluctance, he switched off the last light and left her there in the dark.

Slowly mounting the stairs, Prince at his heels, the inner pull of something required of him still hovered in his mind. On the bedroom landing he paused, arrested by the sense of passing suddenly through a blank space of thought into clear certainty. He knew. Before he could sleep, he must go up into the Tower—to her House of Gods. Only there could he discover if indeed she were one with him in his critical venture.

Before the door he halted, not in hesitation; but because some detached part of him knew that poised moment for ‘a gate between a life and a life.’

Then he turned the handle and went in.

Chapter 4

You have my all; you are my all; you give,
Out of your bounty and content of soul,
The only strength that makes me fit to live.
—Gerald Gould

He switched on a single shaded light—and stood very still, breathing in the mingled fragrance of sandalwood and attar of rose, the imperishable essence of herself.

In every sense it was a shrine, not only of her private god, but of her most private hopes and fears and meditations in those early days of marriage, when she had created for herself a sanctuary where she could feel safe from the intrusion of strange servants and strange ‘husband-relations,’ where she could worship, in unorthodox fashion, ‘Him whose name is Great Glory.’

The room confronted him now, in the pale amber light, virtually unchanged: her gold Punjab phulkari, her godling’s casket, the portrait of Sir Lakshman—his fine-boned face seeming carved in old ivory; and on the mantelpiece, her gleaming brass lotahs. Above them hung the familiar strip of vellum, lettered in gold: ‘There is no likeness of him whose name is Great Glory. Deathless they become who in heart and mind know Him as heart-dwelling’; an epitome of his own uncrystallised creed. There was her chair, deep-seated and curiously carved, her inlaid table and rush stool with lacquered legs. Latterly she had set a slim long mirror opposite the window. ‘So that whichever side I turn, I look out,’ she had explained, while he fixed it in position.

After her death, other treasures had been added: the last and loveliest portrait, painted when his father returned from France and realised that, even in his own home, the War was doing its murderous work. And under the portrait, two sandalwood chests held her many-tinted silks and saris, her jewels and favourite shoes—gold and silver, and pale brocades.

Here also hung the five Sita panels, each with its fresh aspect of her beauty. And on the table, by her vellum-bound Gita, stood the now familiar marvel of his father’s ‘Chitor’; the sacred City of Rajasthán, modelled in dull red clay by one who had never seen it with his actual eyes: a vision of Chitor in her great days, before Akbar and his legions had made her a widow.

With a kind of fated feeling, he went forward, sat down in the carved chair and yielded himself to the familiar sense of home-coming, the familiar stir at his heart. She was here unfailingly: she, who understood how complex were the forces at work in him. And he knew—sitting there under her portrait—that it was not he alone who would journey to the East. In the spirit she would share his brave adventure, as Tara, living and beloved, was powerless to do.

Very still he sat, the outer stillness masking a more profound quiet within. As the magnetism of the living earth had pervaded his body, so her presence pervaded his spirit. By her impalpable influence all his tiresome indecisions were resolved as if she had laid a cool hand on his forehead. Almost he could feel the touch of her skilled fingers breaking up his mental tension, as they used to dispel his boyish rages and despairs; affirming the twofold compulsion of his heritage and his gift. Others might deem it arrogance; she—never. If a man had a word to say, there could be no rest for him till it was said; no calculating its possible effect on those who had ears to hear. ‘In the beginning was the Word’—a potent instrument still; peculiarly so in India where the prophet, the poet and the saint hold the keys of eternal life. . . .

Imperceptibly the stir in his veins subsided—and he knew he was alone; knew, no less surely, that she had set her seal on his belated chance of achievement. So closely attuned they were in spirit, that perhaps, through her eyes, he might discern glimpses of intrinsic India, overlaid—in the names of religion, caste and custom—with so much that was gross and cruel, incongruous and unclean.

First—Udaipur, where Sir Lakshman, long a widower, lived in patriarchal fashion with the families of his son Ram Singh and his grandson Dyán Singh, now a Colonel in the Maharána’s Imperial Cavalry. There he would renew his intimacy with that unique old man, whose match he had not met, East or West, for wisdom and personal charm. There he would spend a month or two, browsing on Indian books, old and new, reviving his knowledge of the few languages that would carry a man easily over the greater part of Northern India. For the North was his region: Rajputana, Punjab, the Frontier and Kashmir. To get appreciably in touch with the people he must, for a time, be India; move among them freely, as one of themselves—if he could compass it, with a comrade who knew his aim. His Rajput blood would serve him, as it had done more than ten years ago when he had searched the byways of Delhi for his vanished cousin Dyán Singh, caught in the meshes of seditious intrigue.

With a queer thrill he recalled those few weeks when he had almost lived Indian life, and had felt within him a mysterious inner transfer from one self to another. All these years he had kept his few Indian clothes as a reminder, with no thought of ever wearing them again. They were here, packed away with his mother’s belongings; and now, steeped in her atmosphere, he fell to wondering—if he put them on, would they affect him as strangely as before?

Here was his chance; the whole house asleep——

With an odd sense of guilt he found his parcel, opened it and shook out the folded garments—cotton trousers, a shirt and scarlet waistcoat, a choga of soft camel’s hair bordered in green and gold. Finally yards of flesh-pink muslin for his turban. How ugly, by contrast, the discarded English clothes! Again that queer sense of guilt as he completed his transformation: white jodhpurs, wrinkled from knee to ankle, shirt hanging outside, Indian fashion, the choga and turban; one long end, gold-fringed, falling to his waist in graceful Rajput style.

There, before his mother’s slender mirror, he stood staring at himself as at a stranger—a stranger who looked back at him out of his own eyes.

For a time, he continued to stand there, his brain and senses flooded with the unforgotten atmosphere of India: the spicy smells, the wood-smoke, the blare of conches and—most Indian of all sounds—the throbbing of tom-toms, the muffled tread of bare feet on dusty roads. . . .

Suddenly, he became aware that the muffled tread was no illusion. Slippered feet were nearing his door. In a moment, Tara would open it. She would have to be told, then and there, the news for which she was to have been so carefully prepared; and the sense of guilt rushed back upon him at thought of confronting her thus in the smallest hour of the morning.

The door opened cautiously. There was a stifled scream.

He turned—and there stood Tara, very lovely and appealing in her blue dressing-gown, her hair ruffled, her eyes wide with a bewildered fear.

‘Roy—you?’

The words were a mere breath—and she did not move.

‘Who else would it be? What did you think?’

‘I thought—oh, I didn’t think. I was terrified——’

‘Darling, I’m desperately sorry. You were supposed to be asleep.’

‘I couldn’t sleep——’

But as he put an arm round her, she shrank back.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sharply.

‘I don’t know. I can’t bear you—like that.’

The sincerity of it smote him and banished irritation.

‘What’s wrong with me—like this? I’m Prithvi Raj: and you’re Tara, the star of Bednore.’

At that she closed the door and came nearer, still with faint reluctance. For her sensitiveness divined some secret purpose under his midnight freak.

‘That was our game. This is serious.’

‘How d’you know?’ he temporised, dreading the shock for her.

‘I can feel it. Besides, I saw—just now, the way you looked at yourself. It—it wasn’t you.’

‘Tara—what nonsense!’ But the truth of it startled him.

‘No. There is something serious behind this.’ Her hand on his arm constrained him.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is. Something I don’t half like telling you.’

‘I knew there was. Roy—what is it?’

At the note of fear, his arm went round her again; and she leaned to him, as if in need of support.

‘It’s my sudden idea—for a book about India. I wanted to sleep on it; to tell you in the morning. But here we are—both very wide awake.’

‘And it is morning!’

‘Sit here then—and listen. Cold?’

‘I soon will be.’

‘Wait a bit.’

He opened the chest that had held his parcel, took out a fur-lined cloak of gold brocade, and laid it round her shoulders, pushing her gently down on to the cushioned chair.

She looked up at him with troubled eyes.

‘Do take off that turban. Be yourself.’

‘I look nicer in it!’ he urged lightly.

‘Terribly nice. But—it’s not you.’

Aware of something deeper at work in her, he lifted off the offending turban and set it on his mother’s oak chest. Then he sat down on the low stool, and told her all—or as near an equivalent as any human being can ever tell another; working up her interest in the book idea with a skill that was more instinctive than deliberate.

To that part of it she listened with genuine interest; but when it came to his need for spending several months in India, possibly a year, her hand closed sharply on the arm of her chair. His own hand covered hers.

‘Sweetheart,’ he urged, ‘couldn’t you spare me—for such a special purpose? Would you hate me to go?’

And she answered with her repressed vehemence, ‘Of course I’d hate you to go.’

He said nothing; but what he felt seemed to pass from him to her through their interlocked hands. She knew the chances were remote that he would yield either to reason or argument; and the one lever she could use—did pride permit—had no relation to either.

‘Couldn’t you,’ she pleaded, ‘write your precious book—by any other means?’

‘Not the way I want to write it. If I can’t do India personally, the whole thing’s a wash-out.’

Her eyes, in one clear glance, gave him the tremor of her mind; but some force stronger than herself constrained her to say, ‘You know you’re going, Roy.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘Well, I do.’ A difficult pause. ‘She’s at the back of it: that’s why. But truly I don’t know how you’re going to manage for months and months—without me; or’—in a lower tone—‘I, without you.

The prospect visibly damped his ardour.

‘That’s what I funk most. But I suppose I must have the courage of my cowardice. The devil’s in it that you can’t come too.’

‘Oh, if I only could . . .!’

This time the tremor betrayed her.

‘Damn it all, I won’t go,’ he said stubbornly.

‘You will go.’

Her certainty sprang from a deeper source than his; and, in her low contained voice, he heard the decree of Fate.

She leaned her cheek against his hair; their linked hands tightened to a convulsive clutch.

For a time they sat thus, not moving, not saying a word; hardly aware of the fact, yet intensely aware of each other; their heads pressed close together, their minds hidden and separate; two far countries, each with its own hills and rivers and strange-blowing winds. He had tried to show her a fragment of his own country. Passionately he wanted her to see, to understand; and in the voice of Fate, she had told him he would go. But what she was really thinking about it all, while she clung to him and rested her cheek against him, he did not know—he would never know. Love, that could work many miracles, could not lift the last veil between mind and mind. Better so, perhaps. Love itself might be scorched and blinded by the white flame of truth untimely revealed.

When at last she lifted her head, sat upright and spoke, it was of practical things.

‘Would we let the dear home to help expenses? Mother would love to have us all there.’

‘But you’d be happier having her here.’

‘Yes—if you could manage.’

‘That’s the rub. Can I manage? The inspiration of a moment has to meet the test of everyday arithmetic. And the devil never fails to send in his bill! Dangerous things, these great tasks we fancy ourselves born for. Precious few can say, like Paracelsus, “I see my way, as birds their trackless way.” God knows I don’t see mine. . . .’

He paused, looking up at her: and seeing her at a loss to meet the appeal of that unexpected pause, he asked with masculine impatience, ‘Tara, did you hear a word of that? Are you listening?’

‘Of course I am, Prithvi. Listening—and thinking at the same time.’

The private nickname mollified him, and his fingers tightened on hers. ‘Thinking—what?’

Leaning down again, she kissed his cheek.

‘That you’ve got a spark of her genius in you——’

‘But my reach is exceeding my grasp?’ he prompted her, craving denial.

‘I’d be the last to quarrel with that. You will see your trackless way, Roy, once you get out there——’

‘Yes—once I get there.’ Her conviction fired him; and his need of it went deeper than she knew. ‘Out there,’ he repeated, his imagination leaping ahead, ‘I could use my double caste as she wished me to use it. I could get knowledge and understanding; impart a little, perhaps, to the prejudiced on both sides. There’s the country overrun with tin-pot journalists, handing out first impressions only half-digested. Very good stuff, some of them; but often very misleading. And here am I, with the blood of East and West in me, fairly distracted to see them both making a premature bid for the impossible. But India’s gone ahead so fast in the last ten years, I can’t judge things fairly without renewing my personal knowledge——’

‘You’ve kept in very close touch.’

‘Yes—at second hand. It’s not the same. I want to get the feel of India again, not only through my mind, but through my senses. I want to see the jungle ablaze with dāk trees in bloom—you remember?’

‘Yes—I remember.’

He was there in spirit, too far off to catch the undernote of sadness in her low voice.

‘To see the desert and the Aravális and the Himalayas; to feel the sun flaming on me, as it never really flames here. I want to smell spices and champak and dust——’

He checked himself with a quick familiar movement as if he were reining in a spirited horse: and Tara, jealous of that potent spell, pressed closer to make him aware of her.

‘So do I, Roy. I want to see and feel it all with you; not lie waiting here endless months——’

That cry from her heart brought him back to her. His arm slipped under her cloak.

‘My darling, if we could only leave the children with Helen and repeat our dream year. But you know . . .’

‘Yes—yes, I know. Dreams don’t repeat themselves. But you made me suddenly see it all.’

‘I saw it all,’ he said in a changed voice. ‘But it wasn’t fair on you.’

He could feel, through her thin nightgown, the quickened throb of her heart against his hand; and in a passionate impulse he pressed his face against her.

‘You’re mine—in all ways. Yet I can’t take you with me. Life is so damnably obstructive.’

And she—thinking that he, if he chose, could remain with her—soothingly caressed his hair.

‘You’ll have your work out there, darling. And I’ll pull through the long waiting somehow.’

He looked up at her, a boyish look of gratitude.

‘You’re a jewel, Tara. And—after the first, it won’t seem so terribly long. The months will fly round. Then—I shall come back.’

The words he intended for comfort seemed to strike at her hard-won composure. With a swift, instinctive fear she clutched his arm.

‘Oh, Roy—will you come back? How can one ever know?’

Her voice broke. She fell into a passion of weeping, her head bowed, one hand across her eyes.

‘Tara—Tara!’ he cried, startled and dismayed.

And kneeling up on the low stool, he pulled her to him, kissing her bowed head. Stricken to the heart by a lurking sense that her grief was not for this moment only, he attempted no futile word of comfort. And she lay against him, her thin body shaken by a slow deep sobbing; till the habit of control checked her tempest of grief.

At last, bewilderment forced from him the urgent question: ‘My darling, what was it?’

She pressed closer, and spoke in an awed whisper:

‘I don’t know. Truly I don’t know—— Oh, I’m an idiot. Let’s forget.’

‘I can’t forget. I can’t leave you.’ And he stubbornly repeated, ‘I won’t go.’

Rising, he pulled her up with him, held her against him close and hard, kissing her again and again. To both, in that up-rush of more than passion, it seemed as if no power on earth could wrench them apart.

Chapter 5

On one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And a look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.
—O’Shaughnessy

Lewis Buchanan Edom, of Berkeley, California, stood beside Roy Sinclair in the lofty dining-room of Bramleigh Beeches, confronted by two of the great Rāma pictures that his host was prepared to part with—at a price.

It was a room of subdued tones, half panelled in oak; carpets and curtains golden-brown; a fit setting for the barbaric splendour and terror of the three final Sita episodes, played out against the living background of Rama’s victorious army.

In the first of the three, Sita, in crimson robe and wreath, confronted the men who had avenged her abduction by Ravan, the ogre king of Ceylon. From a sky of tumbled cloud one pale shaft of light illumined her queenly beauty, unveiled for the first time by her lord’s bewildering command. Shamed and wounded to the quick, she stood there, ravished in spirit by the bold eager glances of men who believed her faithless, as she had never been ravished by Ravan.

In the second picture, the Queen triumphed over the wounded wife. Hands joined in prayer, she approached the funeral pyre, built at her own command. In proof of her purity she prayed that no hair of her head be singed, no petal of her wreath shrivelled by the flames that leaped and flickered, as if in cruel glee, then would the gods themselves arraign her humanly unbelieving lord. Every face in that half doubting, half expectant crowd was a study in itself: faces averted, in sorrow, from the tragic spectacle, faces of men unwillingly enthralled; bold eyes that had seared the woman—as no flame could do—were riveted now, in excitement and wonder on the Queen.

In the final picture, the Gods had spoken in their own spectacular fashion: strained dark faces weirdly lit, up-rushing flames blown backward as if by a strong wind: and, in the midst of them, the Lord of Fire himself carrying Rāma’s Queen—no petal scorched, no eyelash singed. Above them, the clouds also were blown backward into strange shapes that assumed the curves of golden chariots and flowing draperies: the Gods, in visible form, rebuking Rāma for dishonouring his unsullied Queen, like a man of common clay—he that was no human prince but an avatar of Vishnu the Preserver.

Not comfortable pictures to live with, they were indubitably great art. And Sinclair regarded with quickened interest the man of ready speech who seemed to have forgotten his presence.

He saw a bony figure loosely built, the head and shoulders disproportionately fine; a prominent nose under thick eyebrows and a thoughtful forehead; the lower lip thrust forward, the slate-grey eyes undisfigured by horn-rimmed glasses. More: his own alert intuition divined in the stranger a hidden streak, not quite congruous with his palpable aura of the successful moneyed man.

It must have been the hidden Edom, he decided, who had written to him of his work, who had accepted with keen, unprejudiced interest the revelation of a Rajput mother. The brain behind those eyes was clearly estimating the Rāma pictures in terms other than cash value, while their owner hardened himself to the wrench of letting them go.

It was a relief when Edom left off caressing his chin—and spoke.

“A u-nique achievement,’ he said with the slight drawl that gave an air of weight to his simplest remarks. ‘The spirit of the East working through the brain of the West. I’m in luck, Sir Roy, having the privilege to see your father’s work, and the chance to possess it.’ His eyes reverted to the bold discord of lurid flame and sunbright clouds. ‘Can you bring yourself——?’

Sinclair twitched his eyebrows. ‘ A case of the devil drives—— After all, they’re more suitable for a picture gallery.’

‘M-m. I’ve a hunch they’ll cause a sensation, though they’re not for all tastes. They’ll be more to me than priceless art treasures, because the Ramayāna is more to me than one of the world’s hundred best books.’

‘You’ve read it?’ Sinclair asked, incredulous.

‘Two good translations. A few extracts—and the Gita, in the original.’

‘Sanskrit? A scholar?’

‘In these days of tabloid culture I might take amateur rank as such,’ the man of business quietly admitted. ‘For a good many years—in between times—Indian thought and Indian languages have been my hobby. A chance meeting with one of their swamis¹ started me. Then I learnt Sanskrit to fill the blank of a long convalescence. That opened the door into a new world, where I could slough off my Western skin; get clean away from the rush and strain of big business; and creep down the ages to far-off India. No Wall Street. No Broadway——’ He checked himself and added briskly, ‘But make no mistake. New York’s Buck Edom lives by both, swears by both.’

‘Case of a dual personality?’ Sinclair queried, intrigued by this unsought glimpse into one of those childlike secrets that men rarely reveal to each other.

‘Not quite so far as that’—Edom took it seriously—‘though it’s true I was born in June under the Heavenly Twins.’

‘So was I.’

‘Yours is a clear case. You know the warning to those born under Gemini? Never try to walk in two paths at once.’

‘Is it possible?’

‘I’ve been doing something like it for many years.’

‘Have you studied astrology too, in between times?’

‘A smattering—in connection with Indian thought.’

While he spoke Sinclair became aware of the door gently opened; Hester, waiting to clear away, while this odd millionaire-philosopher was opening his own private door, with unembarrassed sincerity, to a virtual stranger, as Sinclair could hardly have done to his closest friend.

‘Come in, Hester,’ he encouraged the unseen parlourmaid, and invited Edom to ‘carry on’ in the library.

In the library they lit fresh cigars, while Edom enlarged on the youth-preserving merit of some ‘sidetrack interest,’ apart from the main stress of achievement.

‘We know right enough, in our wise young days,’ he said, ‘that life’s got all the makings of a fine adventure; but we mostly let it go stale on our hands. Fed up at forty; my age, last June. Every one around croaking, “What’s the good of it all?” A riddle God himself can’t answer in human terms. And a man never needs to ask it, once he’s found his secret bread—if it’s only a taste for dead languages, or an art that seizes him like drink or some queer bit of scientific research that’ll take him all his time for all his years—and still leave him wondering. . . .’

‘Something to go mad about,’ Roy mused aloud. ‘That’s the prime need of life. It’s your sane men that are the deadly bores.’

‘Sure. But where’d we be without ’em, Edom queried sagely,—‘to do the deadly dull work that makes the wheels go round? My stoutest friend, over in Berkeley, is dull as a mud puddle and straight as a high road. But it’s thanks to his honest one-track mind that I’m sitting here with you now.’

‘Then I make my bow to his one-track mind!’

‘Well you may, Sir Roy. It’s more than he’d do to my secret vice—if he ever got wind of it. But “Never the twain shall meet.” East and West with a vengeance—and Middle West at that! Let’s get back to the East. What’s your reaction, may I ask, to this Round Table Conference? Will a new India spring out of it, fully armed like Athene out of the forehead of Jove?’

Roy laughed. ‘It’s a plucky experiment,’ he cautiously parried, for the man compelled honesty. ‘And it’s sponsored by Englishmen chock-full of honest, if rather short-sighted, zeal.’

‘Promising, in good faith, what they can’t perform—eh? Likely to be called perfidious for their pains?’

‘There or thereabouts, I’m afraid?’

‘You’re honest, Sir Roy.’

‘I’m trying to be. But it’s a damned complex subject.’

The American scanned his half averted face.

‘For you it’s a case of walking in two paths at once? Your mother’s son, I take it, doesn’t hold with pouring the new wine of democracy into the very old wineskins of India’s theocracy?’

Roy nodded, liking the man for his discernment.

‘No. She didn’t either. She believed India’s real problem was racial and spiritual, that no good was likely to come from inoculating the East with the political diseases of the West.’

‘M-m Diseases? Over there they call blessings.’

Sinclair laughed. ‘Over there perhaps, they may be. In my negligible opinion, democracy unlimited is a very mixed blessing anywhere: and you can’t borrow other people’s history. India’s got to make her own, to meet her own peculiar needs.’

‘Mighty peculiar needs——’ Edom pensively stroked his flat chin. ‘It’s the queerest mix-up on earth, that Hindu Moslem clash. With the other cat-and-dog communities—Ireland, Palestine and Co.—the issue’s clean cut. You know where you are. But in India——’

He shot a side glance at his host, and Sinclair laughed again.

‘You don’t know where you are! They don’t very clearly know themselves. A fight on shifting sands. An unholy muddle of politics and religion. No fixed purpose or constructive leadership—so far. British rule, with all its faults, can at least give ’em both. What India really needs is a social and economic revolution run by herself—against herself. To believe that her politicians can work out her salvation is to live in a dream. They can talk till all’s blue—and they’re beating their own record at St James’—without getting much nearer to a workable solution.’

He shifted his shoulders and sighed.

‘You take it to heart, Sir Roy?’

‘I do—very deeply.’

On the personal side he could say no more: and Edom reverted to the impersonal vein.

‘Has it ever struck you that the great god Climate may have the last word? See how the fierce sun crumbles her soil. Look at her blazing hot weather. Enough to encourage the doctrines of Kismet and Karma, in any make of man, that yearly dose of hell fire; or the constant simmering down south. Of all the countries I’ve sampled, India’s the least infected by the trade microbe of modern America. Our keen dry air breeds the go-getter. Her blazing sun breeds the swami with no joints to his knees and ankles, who can sit dreaming under a bo tree for ten years, letting “the lave” go by him—whatever the lave may be! I’m not admitting he’s the better man—not yet.’

That expressive pause set Sinclair wondering——?

But stronger than curiosity was his innate reluctance to trespass on the privacy of another man’s soul.

And that other added quickly, as if to discourage comment: ‘How long, may I ask, since you were out there yourself, Sir Roy?’

‘More than ten years.’

‘India’s moved an inch or two in that time. The white man’s stock has fallen lower than your people over here quite realise. You’d find changes—good and bad.’

Sinclair neither spoke nor moved; and his pause was cardinal—a pivot on which his whole future revolved. For those few critical moments, the thought of Tara, the memory of that night, plucked at his heart-strings. But there were forces at work in him stronger than himself or her.

‘I shall find changes,’ he deliberately burnt his boats. ‘Before long I may be going there again.’

Edom leaned forward, interested, alert. ‘Well—that’s some news. I’m for India myself, in a month or so. I had a fine time there two years ago, mostly off the track. Just enough to make me crazy for more. Your first book sent me there; so I’m proud to acknowledge a debt no dollars can repay. Lady Sinclair going too?’

‘No. Worse luck. It’s not a pleasure trip.’

‘Your passage booked yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Sinclair stated in a toneless voice, still hardly realising that Tara’s “You will go” had prevailed over his genuine refusal to leave her.

‘Well, I wonder——?’ Edom’s hesitation was brief. ‘I’ll be doing the trip by air. Room for a passenger—if you’ll honour me?’

That utterly unexpected offer jerked Sinclair out of his abstraction. To India, in a month or so—by aeroplane? Fate, in the form of this purposeful American, was rushing him off his feet.

‘Thanks very much for the offer, Mr Edom,’ he said, surprise and gratitude tempered by complex personal sensations. ‘It’s a chance in a hundred; but my plans are not yet cut and dried.’

‘Time for that,’ Edom urged, obviously pleased with his impromptu move. ‘Ever travelled by air?’

‘No. And I’m not keen to. I know it sounds unenterprising.’

‘And you come of enterprising stock,’ Edom tacitly reproached him. ‘It’s an experience—seeing the whole earth from a new perspective. And you’re a poet. You’d get more out of it than time-saving.’

‘Oh, I’m alive to that. But you see—I’m my own land agent, I’d have to find a reliable man——’

‘Well—think it over. “Try the sky before you die,” as the song says. My spare seat isn’t on offer to anyone else. The ’plane’s a time-saver; and time’s our only real estate. The one form of capital we can’t afford to lose.’

‘Quite. But my disability’s personal.’

Sinclair paused. He could not leave it at that. And yet—how could he confess his private heresy to this successful product of mechanised America? Perhaps a blunt statement would serve him best.

‘You’ll label me crank, Mr Edom, but I’m all out against air-craft for peace or war.’

Edom’s eyebrows ran up. ‘That’s a tall order. How the devil do you propose——?’

‘I don’t propose. I only wish I could dispose of the lot. Oh, I know it sounds crazy. But I foresee, too clearly for comfort, a locust plague that should have been tackled in the egg and hopper stage.’

Edom chuckled. ‘Like ’em or not, Sir Roy, these locusts have come to stay. You won’t hinder the hatching of a single one by refusing a seat in my plane; and by accepting it, you’ll be giving keen pleasure to a fellowman, who isn’t machine-crazy, though he’ll use them for his own ends till all’s blue.’

To an attitude so friendly and reasonable there could be but one response.

‘You’re a sport, Mr Edom. If I do decide on India I’ll accept gratefully.’

‘And give the devil-in-the-machine his due! He mayn’t do all the harm he’s capable of doing. Every new invention’s like a bridge thrown across the void. If it holds—we’re in luck. If it doesn’t, we’re in the soup.’

‘In the devil’s cauldron—if we ever let mechanism rule creation: individuals organised out of life; automatic extinction of the human race. It’s a matter of time and logic. The way things are moving in your country is a peril worse than any world war——‘

‘I don’t deny the peril, Sir Roy; and we’re not all blind to it. The machine has changed our lives, but not our instincts. Merely thrown ’em out of gear. It’s taught the average American to fear leisure and his own company worse than he ever feared the Devil. Must be talking to someone—no matter whom—— If he isn’t motoring, he’s at the movies. At home, it’s the radio or the cross-word puzzle. Multiply him by thousands, and you get a whole town worrying out the same puzzles, listening to the same programmes, hypnotised by the same pictures. Standardised amusements; standardised human beings: that’s how it works.’

‘Same tendency here,’ Sinclair ruefully admitted. ‘But, with luck there’ll always be a few men and women who care enough for things of the mind to keep alive a sort of mental aristocracy.’

‘Well, there’s our humanist movement already, making a stand for classic values against the standardising, behaviourising devil-in-the-machine!’

‘I didn’t know of that.’

‘I’ll tell you more, presently. We’ll have time for talk—and no lack of matter. Clearly “it is written”—as the devout Moslem says—that you make that far flight with me.’

Sinclair stooped to knock the ashes out of his pipe. ‘Strange,’ he said, ‘the way we’ve come together like this. We’ll travel out together, as you’re good enough to wish it—if I go.’

‘You will go—sure as we’re sitting here.’

Again those three fateful words knocked at his heart like three hammer taps. Absorbed in the impersonal argument he had half forgotten the personal issue. Leaving England in a month or six weeks—what would Tara say to that?

Chapter 6

Kiss thou the edge of the sword.
—Eastern Saying.

And while the two men arrived, by way of impersonal argument, at vital personal decisions, Tara lay alone in the dark, tired to breaking point, yet obstinately wide awake. At thought of all that might be settled over the library fire, a vague apprehension contracted her heart, as if iron fingers were compressing it into a small hard ball.

That this fate-sent man would buy the Ramayāna pictures she had felt certain before dinner was over. He would probably buy other treasures as well. And, in her capacity of Lady Sinclair, she could not but be thankful for the easing of debts and difficulties; thankful, above all, for Roy’s insistence on the recall of her lost nursery-maid, directly the ‘deal’ was an accomplished fact. Yet as Tara, wife and lover, she was troubled by the conviction that—given the means—Roy could no more resist the pull of India than a needle could resist a magnet.

He had said ‘I can’t leave you’; and he had said it from his heart. For the moment that assurance had given her comfort unspeakable. But—she understood this gifted, lovable, difficult husband of hers more profoundly than most wives ever come to understand their husbands. For her there had been no false glamour, no resulting disillusion; so intimately she had known and loved him outside the marriage relation; so imperceptibly they had grown into each other from those early years that are sealed books for the average man and wife. In the fairy-tale phrase, they ‘divided the Apple of Life and ate it together’; and that shared background gave to their love a quality on which she set a high value. Life dwindled, events lacked their full significance, if there was no one to share them in the true sense. For one of her temperament, it was a fundamental need: a sentimental need—her sister Elinor would dogmatise. But Elinor was a sturdy person, making few demands and discouraging the demands of others, inclined to criticise Tara for being too ‘soft’ with Roy.

To be soft had become, since the War, one of the cardinal sins. A touch of hardness was the hall-mark of fashion. Women’s very faces were hardened by the mask-like effect of over-painting, the plucked eyebrows and discordant smears of red that disfigured their mouths. America gave the word: and the smart must conform at all costs.

No doubt a good many of them were heretics under their skins—those restless girls and women, whose life seemed to oscillate between hair-waving and nail-tinting and ringing-up. Some, perhaps, were almost as soft inside as she was herself, when her incessant doing left her time to be anything except the wife-of-all-work, who must somehow keep the wheels going round. Why could they not be honest about it? Were they too abjectly afraid of themselves and each other? She hoped Nevil and Lilāmani would not grow up like that. By then, quite another fashion might prevail. Human nature, after all, had not radically changed since 1914; and the pendulum would swing back. There were signs already. Her children, in any case, would be none the worse for the sentimental Indian streak that Roy himself revealed in such quaint, endearing ways.

At thought of him there sprang the memory of all he had said in his mother’s shrine, the look of him in those becoming Indian clothes—alien and far removed; and her heart contracted afresh with a foretaste of loneliness, with her hidden dread of India.

In that long ago wander-year, she had seen too clearly the magnetic effect of that compelling country on his imagination and his heart. She had hoped he would never want to go there again. Yet, for all that, she would not prevent him, if he pressed the point afresh. She had lived long enough to recognise that no soul can prevent another. The inward life, even of one’s closest and dearest, is its own impenetrable solitude.

But if he went—there would be worse to endure than the loneliness. Never had she been jealous of his devotion to his lovely little mother. But of India’s dominion over him she was more than jealous. She was afraid.

Book Two — The Threshold

Chapter 1

I have come to raise thy trumpet from the dust.
—Tagore

It was over—that incredible journey half across the world. Roy Sinclair sat alone in an upper hotel verandah, overlooking the noisy streets, the lavish impenitent ugliness of modern Bombay.

He had definitely no desire to travel by air again: but as an experience he would not have missed it, for all the minor miseries involved. Visions and sensations still thronged his brain. Still, as he lay in his long chair, he could feel under his body the shuddering heartbeats of the five hundred and sixty horse-power engine that had carried them without mishap through uncharted fields of air, through harmless-looking billows of cloud that set the machine bumping and rocking with disastrous effect.

From the blur of many impressions, certain moments stood sharply out: the half fearful excitement of dashing through a local thunderstorm; the roar of the engine—dulled by habit to a bubbling drone—as they climbed out of a dense mist that thinned and wavered till the sun blazed through; the mist miles below them solid as a snowfield; no glimpse of the world that fled backwards as they fled forward.

Isolation and detachment—for him those had been the supreme sensations of flight. The whole scale of things created had dwindled even in thought, like objects seen through the wrong end of a telescope; an illusion that recalled his boyhood’s game of ‘escaping and becoming’; staring into the heather till he grew smaller than a beetle, or gazing up at the slow drift of clouds till he seemed to emerge from his body and fill all space. At that altitude his brain had refused to work; had become a mere sensitive plate for recording impressions that changed as swiftly as they flew.

The brief nights ‘on shore’: strange places, seen only in their night and early morning aspects; the queer unreality of earth after hours in the sky. And once, at his own insistence, they had spent a whole night in the air: an experience transcending all the rest.

One moment the vanishing sun set half the heavens aflame; the next, darkness rushed up out of the east, as they sped on through a star-strewn sky—their lights cleaving the gloom ahead of them—lulled into brief dozing; roused by some jarring encounter with wind or cloud.

Waking before dawn, he had caught the full moon poised above drifts of cloud, revealing a crumpled array of mountains, dim glaciers, ghostly peaks. And while he sat lost in gazing, the clouds took colour from the hidden sun, the mountains changed to purple and dusky blues—islands in a sea of mist. Then the sun blazed through a rent cloud, sharpened every peak and ridge and filled with glory all the visible heavens.

Another day in the air had begun——

They had given him—those days in the air—many strange moods of mind other than the curious sense of detachment from life on earth: rare flashes of inner seeing, brief as dreams, and as hard to remember or define. Yet the indefinable and unremembered had left their imprint on two queer poems still awaiting transmission to paper. Then they would go straight home to Tara; would help her, perhaps, to see more clearly that which had constrained him to leave her and everything he held dearest on earth.

A substantial cheque for the Rāma pictures had solved many practical problems; and a welcoming letter from his grandfather had eased, in a measure, the first desolating sense of being loosed from his moorings—an atom in the void. Happily his fellow atom had not belied the promise of interest awakened on that first evening over the library fire. Two men cannot travel in close contact for more than a week without learning indirectly a good deal about one another; and in this case surface friendliness had ripened into genuine liking. Once only they had reverted to the trend of their first talk, the cleavage between Eastern and Western philosophy of life—the spirit of search, aiming at inner perfection; and the spirit of service, aiming at outward progress. But through the drift of that impersonal talk, Sinclair had divined, in Edom, the workings of some personal issue that had quickened interest and curiosity. Here was an American money-getter on a large scale who could frankly admit that a man’s inner welfare owed little to material gain—the Golden Calf of his enterprising country; could frankly deplore its commercial tendency to confuse perfection with success; thus virtually challenging modern man to dethrone the lower ideal, or take a short-cut back to barbarism. More than ever he found himself wondering what Edom’s personal concern with India might be.

Arrived at Karachi, they had contented themselves with a bird’s-eye view of the modernised port and town; having decided to land at Bombay, to glean a first-hand impression of affairs in that storm centre of political strife, where wealthy Indian mill-owners were financing Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience campaign, where excitable mobs could be hired from paid agents, prepared to supply a riot or a budding revolution to order.

There they had alighted in the dusk of a winter afternoon, dropping straight on to Indian soil without the mongrel prelude of tug and landing pier; massed houses and noble coast-line glittering as if handfuls of stars had been flung to earth; half-naked coolies yelling and scrambling for their negligible luggage; the smell of watered dust in their nostrils: veritable India.

Not the India of Roy Sinclair’s imagination and remembrance, that brief glimpse of boycott-mad Bombay in the throes of an abortive general strike; Congress protesting against the execution of ‘martyrs’ who had murdered, in revolting circumstances, policemen of their own race. Though, at that time, Gandhi still sat harmlessly spinning in gaol, the non-violent forces he had let loose continued to work havoc rather than healing.

They had dined at the Willingdon Club with an Indian member, one of Edom’s former friends. It was the only club in Bombay open to Indian members; possibly the only club—Sinclair reflected with a prick of resentment—that would be open to the son of Lilāmani Sinclair, if all were known. As before, so now, he was feelingly reminded that—for all his fine breeding on both sides—his double caste would be dismissed as half-caste by British and Indian alike. The official blunder of bestowing on Eurasians a name indissolubly linked with the English in India had in no way lessened the natural prejudice of both races; and the Willingdon Club bore witness to an honest yet vain attempt at ‘bridge-building.’ There, British and Indian might share one golf-links, one dining-room, one card-room; yet still, in the main, they played in separate foursomes, dined at separate tables. Any attempt at mingling involved a certain degree of mental strain; and after a long day’s work, the one thing a man craved was relaxation. Naturally enough, brown or white, he found it most readily in the company of his own kind.

Daylight had revealed an ugly situation: shops closed, seething streets, where tragedy and farce jostled each other: here a broken arm or a bloody crown, or the wail of a crumpled-up woman, injured by a lathi that had missed the sinner; there a Hindu patriot—paid to obstruct traffic—recumbent on the tram line, scrambling to his feet at sight of a policeman, while Moslem onlookers laughed him to scorn. Rows of prostrate women provided obstruction more effectual. Politely removed from one stretch of rails, they flung themselves down on another, making fools of the police, daring them to court obloquy by using force against mothers and sisters of patriots.

The whole Indian quarter was virtually in a state of civil war. No echo, there or elsewhere, of the high-sounding perorations at St James’. And, in civilised Bombay, English men and women carried on their normal round of work or pleasure, with a cool detachment that looked admirable or callous according to the point of view. Sinclair could see it both ways, as he saw most things in this disjointed country that was his by blood, yet not by birth or upbringing. To read of these things had been disquieting enough. Actually to see and hear them was to suffer a profound and jarring disillusion.

Between the inner jar and outer conflict, those first two days in India had fallen far short of his high anticipation; and both men were eager to be in touch with a less sophisticated India. After a strenuous forty-eight hours, they parted, with genuine reluctance on both sides. What Edom’s personal projects might be, Sinclair could only surmise; and his natural curiosity was sharpened by the singular silence, on that head, of the most forthcoming man alive. Both wanderers, of set purpose, each could only offer a banker’s address, in case they were moved to write.

‘It was a good day when we met; and I don’t forget that journey in your company,’ said Edom, of the readier tongue. ‘I’ve a hunch there’s been more to it than the pleasure of travelling together. We needn’t worry to make pie-crust plans. India’s a flea-bite in space. We’ll meet again. Why not change your mind and fly up to Delhi with me?’

But on that point Sinclair was immovable. He had wired to Sir Lakshman the hour of his arrival; and in any case he preferred to travel through the desert country of his remembrance at the comparative leisure of fifteen to twenty miles an hour. An order was issued that bundabust be made for the Sahib’s immediate departure by his new and alert retainer, Hari Lāl. Still fresh to the remembered way of life, the topi of Sahib-dom, the ‘Hazúr’ form of address gave him an amused sensation of having been promoted from a hard-pressed unit of England’s discredited aristocracy to a full-blown imperialist—at least in the eyes of Hari Lāl. In his own eyes, he was simply a learner, an observer, and a lover of both races; one that could never take India or himself for granted: a too common failing among the less imaginative of his kind.

Thankful to escape from Bombay in torment, he cheerfully endured his fill of dust and flies, restaurant-car meals and talkative tourists: but when at last the train entered his mother’s gaunt, warrior country, the authentic thrill atoned for his dismal lack of it in Bombay.

There are tracts of earth that possess a peculiar magic of their own. Not least among these is Rajputana. And in Sinclair a magic more potent than the spirit of place was at work. That strong unlovely region of rock and sand, of cruelty, chivalry and daring, laid siege to his heart in a language known to some distant self—the self that proved him one, in essence, with this country of Kings, of stirring traditions and stirring names. Ajmir, Jodhpur, Bikaneer, Udaipur, Amber, Chitor—their very rhythm and accent worked like a spell on the Sisodia blood in his veins. To each its proud or tragic record of resistance to the death; its burnt-offering of self-dedicated women, its wholesale sacrifice of men in the terrible last rite of johur. Winning and losing and again winning; making calamity a whetstone for courage: not even all-conquering Akbar had quite subdued Rajasthán. Six-and-thirty royal clans—born of the Sun and the Moon and of Fire—they had preserved by knightly tradition, by personal discipline and strict marriage laws, their commanding position in a semi-continent of mixed races. Politicians might overlook or underrate them: changing India would have to reckon with them.

And foremost among many royal strongholds was the Sacred City of Udaipur; foremost among its princes, the Maharána or ‘Great King,’ head of all the Solar Rajputs, by divine right of descent from Rāma, the hero of India’s epic age. Rightly had Lilāmani Sinclair seen her son as double caste, rightly implanted in him a pride of race founded on no mere myths of heavenly pedigree, but on the bed-rock of soldierly character and courage, the twofold unconquerable spirit of England and of Rajasthán.

Chapter 2

My lamp is shattered, but the star shines on.
—Vera Larminie

On the morning of that same day, Aruna—sister of Dyán Singh, cousin of Roy Sinclair—awoke in her low bed, in an upper room of her grandfather’s house, with a throb of happy expectancy such as she had not known since far off days, when the wayward desires of youth had made troubled passionate music in her veins. And now, after nearly twelve years, a ghostly echo of that music in her heart and pulses reminded her that youth was not yet dead, only half buried under a pile of withered leaves—vain dreams and vain desires, damped down by her own resolute will, because life must be lived and work done whether one’s Karma were good or bad. For she was no weakling, this daughter of a kingly race, whose women had a record of heroism unsurpassed in the history of Hindustan. But the utterly unexpected word of Roy’s coming again had set the old foolish commotion stirring afresh. For the spirit of youth dies hard, if at all, though the relentless years press on, saying, ‘It is past. It is no more.’

Was the real Aruna thirty-four or twenty-two as she lay there listening to the echo of that wild sweet music, telling her incredulous heart, ‘To-day I see his face, hear his voice—after ten years.’ Only twice she had seen him when he came back to India—married, with Uncle Nevil, kindest of men, and the fair English wife, his Star of Destiny, mother of his sons-to-be. Then, as now, she had work elsewhere; and she had not tried to see him again. It still hurt too much.

To-day these disturbing sensations carried her farther back still, to those first difficult weeks at Jaipur, when an out-of-caste Aruna—England-returned—had been driven by the women of her grandfather’s house to the tragic conclusion that henceforth she would have no true country, no true home. She could marry no Rajput of her own caste and standing; and no Englishman would marry her, were she never so willing to face the risk. So the sudden coming of Roy to stay with the Vincent Leighs had seemed her one chance of salvation. Foolishly she had supposed that, because of his Indian mother, there would be no barrier of race prejudice between them; only to find her secret hope extinguished by a promise given to his mother that for him there should be ‘no Indian wife.’

Had it not been so, perhaps——?

The bare possibility, and the fierce thrill of his tenderness on the strangest, saddest, loveliest night of her life, had emboldened her to plead for one kiss—seal of a betrothal in the spirit: a betrothal that would leave him free, but would be, for her, a pledge sacred as marriage. Roy had probably not known the full significance of a mutual kiss among her people; but she had known. For one timeless moment of rapture, she had been verily his wife.

The rapture passed—the pledge remained. And, by virtue of it, she remained, swami-bakt, worshipper of her lord, a widow in her heart. No possible return to purdah and orthodox marriage. But her Oxford degree had equipped her to follow the steeper track, to work for her own women—wives and young mothers of the Inside, who would have their say in creating the new India-to-be. Because of her inner widowhood, she denied herself the vanity of many jewels and gay saris. She wore only yellow, symbol of the Rajput emblem the rising sun, of life and light and activity of mind. For her, it symbolised also her life’s allegiance to Roy. As the sky had shed its light on him, so he and his distant work for India must be hallowed by an Indian woman’s worship. Each of his books, as they came to her, had received an individual blessing, had been read and re-read, treasured like volumes of holy writ.

And now, for a little while, he was coming back into her life. His letters though few, had been full of interest in her many activities—hospital and school, purdah clubs and Mahila Samitis² the work nearest her heart. Through those centres of knowledge and friendly intercourse, she aimed at emulating her admired Sarōj Nalini Dutt, pioneer of the movement in Bengal. Even in the backward North it was becoming a genuine movement from within. The women of India might be illiterate, they were neither unintelligent nor unenlightened. Through all the fever of political excitement and rending of veils, they retained a calm insistence on their natural functions that would save them from many deplorable excesses and errors of the West.

Of all these things she could presently talk to Roy. Because the whole family must be there to greet him, she had secured this extra holiday, under the wing of her English friend Grace Lynch, a mission doctor lately married to a Police Burra Sahib, who was away on inspection work elsewhere. Dearly though she loved her grandfather, she seldom now returned to the joint family home, where three generations lived under one roof, knit together by the technique of Hindu family life, the enforced deference, the disciplined suppression of impulse, that became almost instinctive.

Fresh from her own wider interests, she was apt to feel irked by a return to semi-purdah, troubled by the knowledge that the others—in spite of her work and learning—despised her as a wilful virgin and no true woman. There was no harsh tyranny now, as in the days when her formidable grandmother had ruled them all with her tongue and temper; a twofold tyranny sanctified by the mother-complex of India—ideally her glory, actually her bane. Old Auntie—great aunt-in-law—was too kind and woolly even for mild contempt; but she lamented the unfeminine cult of work and no marriage. She herself, though widowed and childless, was treated by her Rajput men-folk with chivalrous respect.

Dyán’s young wife, Meeta Dévi, merely pelted her rebel sister-in-law with light jests, when in a teasing mood. It was her uncle’s wife Surya Dévi—a woman of redoubtable character—who dealt in shrewd thrusts that hurt unduly, because the hidden, thwarted Aruna was no true renegade. There were moods in which she envied these sheltered wives their children, their husband-worship, their right to use every device for preserving and enhancing their charms. So, except for love of Dyán and her grandfather, she was happier elsewhere.

This was her first home-visit since the move from Jaipur to Udaipur, where Dyán commanded a regiment of State cavalry and his uncle had been appointed Minister of Education. The fine old Maharána—a cousin in the third degree—had been succeeded by his adopted son, a young man of enlightened ideas, who had taken a fancy to Dyán, and expressed his affection in princely fashion. Behind their ample two-storeyed house, there was a walled-in tennis court for the women, and a Palace car at their disposal, fitted with blue glass, so that they could drive abroad—seeing, unseen. This was the curtained life in its most favourable aspect; an aristocratic seclusion with a tinge of personal importance that atoned for many restrictions.

The inner flagged courtyard, sacred to themselves, to husbands and near relations, was spacious and pleasant with deep enclosing verandahs, tank and sacred neem tree, whose feathery leaves had many medicinal virtues. Aruna’s room overlooked a corner-wise section of the court, a balconied upper storey, and a vivid patch of sky. It was furnished in scanty Indian fashion; a strip of matting near her lacquered bed, a teapoy for her lamp, one chair, a cheap bazaar dressing-table and a mirror. On the table—with her brush and comb, and a small silver box—stood a carved frame with folding doors, fastened by a trick catch known only to herself, that none might guess the identity of her ‘private god’; and in a low glass trough before it, were set a few frail pink roses and jasmin—the flowers of her daily worship.

She had long since discarded popular Hinduism. Nominally she was a Theist, like her grandfather—Brahmo-Samáj. Actually she had evolved a composite religion of her own: a jewel from one source, a bead from another, gold and tinsel, diamonds and paste, gathered up, as it were, from the temple floor, cleansed of goats’ blood and mud, blended with fragments of higher Hindu philosophy and the Christian ideal of service. But no change of name or creed could eradicate her racial instinct of husband-worship; and Roy Sinclair was husband of her spirit, though she might not be permitted to serve him in wifely ways. To him she had owed ‘the diamonds of her happiness, the pearls of her sorrow’; unseen jewels more precious than any that rupees could buy. One actual jewel, a square topaz ring, he had given her at Jaipur. In that and the photograph there was comfort of a sort, when heart and flesh ached for more than her fanciful ritual of worship—her source of inspiration, her secret religion; a secret none must ever be allowed to guess.

Down there in the courtyard the women would soon be astir, each at her allotted task or morning ceremony. For they rose early and were no idlers, these sheltered wives and mothers. Duties and religious rites filled a great part of their day. And already, out of sight, the sun was coming on wings; not yet invading the empty courtyard, where scarlet poinsettia made splashes of passionate colour against dead white verandah pillars; the silver-clear water in the tank repeated fragments of the house and the slender form of a demoiselle crane, who slept on one leg, beak thrust under his wing. Rear the tank, in a marble-edged square of earth, grew a small tulsi plant—the sacred basil, watered and worshipped daily.

Now every instant light increased. The uneven knife-edge of ink-blue shadow crept down the opposite house-wall: and into Aruna’s expectant mood stole an oppressive sense of life’s monotonous repetition. Day after day the sun climbed thus, the empty courtyard waited thus for the coming of the women. Passing seasons wrought little variation in the unchangeable setting of their restricted lives. Even to-day—her foolishness protested—no hint that this January morning was not as other mornings, since it heralded the return of Lilamāni Sinclair’s son to the house of her father.

News of his coming had created a flutter of curiosity among the women, who would be allowed—because of near relationship—to meet and welcome him in the mardāna, the men’s room: and he, a Sahib! Only she, Aruna, must contrive to appear cool and incurious, show a correct measure of interest in the ‘tea-party’ that would be served, English fashion, in his honour.

Suddenly the early morning silence was shattered by a clanging of gongs, clashing of bells and the wandering wail of conches from some temple near-by, where priests were awakening the little stone image of their god with scarlet and purple discords, emulating the crash of an Indian dawn. And into the empty courtyard there stole a moving shadow, followed by the loose waddling form of Auntie, an ugly, good-natured old lady, peering at life through steel-rimmed spectacles, cumbered with a mass of unfettered flesh that shook like a jelly when she laughed or moved. Full-skirted and draped in the unrelieved white of widowhood, she carried a red lacquered stool and set it down with a thud on the verandah, as the crane unsheathed a beak like a rapier and stepped delicately towards her, flirting his wings.

‘Hungry one—feed.’ She scattered grain and babbled to him in the wheedling tone of one who presents a petition. Three sparrows and four crows darted down to share her largesse, and there was a scurry of squirrels from the neem tree. Those mischievous thieves Auntie greeted with a special handful, because they were beloved by Krishna, the dark god, who had left his caressing finger-marks down their backs.

While the creatures squabbled and Auntie babbled, Meeta Dévi stepped into the verandah, her incipient plumpness carried with assured poise and grace, her bare feet as carefully tended as her hands. Twelve years younger than Dyán, she was fair, even for a Rajput, eyes brightly glancing under surma-darkened lids, ripe lips reddened like those of her unknown English sisters, the vermilion mark of wife-hood set between her brows. Compact of many small vanities, she was fully alive to her increased status as mother of two sons and one superfluous girl. Prescribed respect for elders was grudgingly accorded to poor Auntie, childless and husband-bereft. Grandfather—frankly unorthodox—urged special kindness to widows; but even he could not cure her inbred contempt for the husbandless.

She herself, married to an enlightened man, without mother or grandmother, had been spared much initial misery; had never known the tyranny of a mother-in-law, jealously retaining her hold on a spoilt dependent son. Aruna had heard stories that contracted her heart and quickened her zeal for the life-work to which she was pledged. Meeta might despise her at heart: but as elder and sister-in-law she must receive due courtesy. Besides, Dyán loved her; and he was Meeta’s religion. Aruna often wondered about Dyán, who had so passionately loved Roy’s Tara in Oxford days, and had worked so hard for the Indian Civil Service; now apparently content to divide his life between polo and buck-shooting, bridge and Meeta Dévi. Possibly hoping for companionship, he had given her a smattering of education, in her own tongue and in English; a husbandly attention that she rewarded by devouring cheap novels, indigestible ideas little conducive to her happiness or to his own.

This morning, she wore an orange-red sari over a darker skirt, one slim hand was curved round a metal lotah, the other clutched by her two-year-old son in pink shift and gold necklet, as like his mother as a bud to a rose.

At sight of the crane, he darted forward; but Meeta’s business was with the tulsi plant. In passing, she greeted old Auntie with the correct murmur, ‘I fall at your feet,’ adding playfully: ‘You feed that greedy one too much, Auntie. He will never grant your petitions. He only looks for more.’

The old lady chuckled and bade the boy fling extra grain.

‘If he looks, he shall receive. You young people, because you can read and scratch with a pen, fancy your skulls are stuffed with all the wisdom of the Puranas. We, who are old, know otherwise.’

‘Take advice sometimes from the young, little Auntie! Then you may perhaps discover how much you know.’

‘From eighteen or eighty, I take no advice on Friday. Even good advice taken on Friday brings bad luck.’

Meeta flung out a rosy-tinted hand. ‘Luck or ill-luck concerns only the believer, Auntie-ji. What is your good day?’

‘Tuesday is good. Hanuman’s day.’

Meeta laughed. ‘Child’s talk! The skulls of the old are stuffed with fancies. And they call it wisdom.’

‘Peace, insolent one.’—Even Auntie’s good nature had its limits.—Dare speak thus to Big Mother, and she would pepper your tongue, so you couldn’t say one word to the new Cousin-Sahib this afternoon.

At mention of the guest, Meeta assumed a pretty self-conscious air.

‘Bápu³ showed me a picture of him. He is good to look at.—I serve the evening meal to-day.’

‘Oho! Your pretty head is stuffed full of vanity, Little Mother.’

With a disdainful whisk of her sari, Meeta passed on to the sacred tulsi, sprinkling it and murmuring mystic incantations, while Auntie fell to work on a pile of loose-skinned oranges set beside her on a brass tray. With delicate care she was breaking them up for Bápu’s midday meal; removing every wisp of white fibre, piling the sections on another brass plate covered with leaves.

Beside her stood the golden-limbed boy in his pink shift—expectant, sure of his morsel. For him it was a game, this business of food preparing, for the woman a sacred ritual, because food ministers to life. Even old Auntie, though widowed, was still permitted to prepare food for a wifeless, unorthodox brother-in-law. And Aruna, watching her busy fingers, had a sudden sharp sense of being shut out from the immemorial privilege of her kind. She brushed aside the thought, with the reminder that to-day, at least, she was privileged to make her special sweets and cakes, in honour of Roy. No more lying in bed, dreaming vain dreams. Time to be joining the others.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

When she appeared in the verandah, with a waft of yellow draperies, Meeta was still at worship; and baby Lakshman darted across the courtyard with a crowing sound. They had made friends overnight. Jostling against his mother as he ran, he nearly knocked the lotah from her hand and spilled half the water over her freshly crinkled sari.

A stinging slap sent him tumbling and noisily screaming into Aruna’s arms. She held him close, kissing his wet cheek, bidding him be a man, wishing she could slap the pretty passionate creature, who worshipped the tulsi and struck a mere baby for an accident.

Meeta, not heeding them, emptied her vessel over the humble plant with prayer and prostration. Then she rose and graciously invited Aruna to a private display of all her skirts, saris and jewels, that the fittest might be chosen for this afternoon’s function of welcoming the Cousin-Sahib. Her maid, a girl companion of pure Rajput blood, would lay out each lovely garment in turn—a bewildering choice of colours and material, though all were of one design.

‘Fifty skirts, forty broidered bodices and saris. Jewels—two boxes full!‘ she flaunted her wifely wealth—not without a spice of relish—in the face of the wilful virgin, who had neither husband nor jewels. For, among purdah women, jewels are almost an obsession—more on account of their value than their beauty.

Aruna loved them for their beauty; and her lack of them was a real deprivation. For there was more in jewels than value or beauty. They were symbols of all that was best in wifehood. So the widowed wife must lay them aside.

‘Presently,’ she said, ‘I will come. Inspection of so much finery will not soon be over! And I have work in the kitchen this morning.’

But when Meeta was gone, she still remained sitting on the verandah steps talking soft nothings to the comforted boy, while Auntie babbled unheeded, and the pile of prepared oranges was replaced by betel leaves and spices for the making of pahn, her chief delight, whether to chew herself or to prepare for others. And while she talked, her plump fingers were stripping the rib from each tender yellow leaf, spreading it with lime and a sprinkling of blended spices, folding it into a neat triangle pinned with a single clove. That done, she would set it aside, or treat herself to a fresh mouthful; for she was seldom without a cud of it between her teeth.

Little Lakshman, called from within, trotted back into the house; and still Auntie chattered on, mainly because her tongue could not be at rest for five minutes on end. It annoyed Meeta, it bored Aruna; but her disciplined heart could feel for the old lady, who had lived all her secluded days in the house of husband and brother-in-law, since the age of thirteen. And on her next birthday she would be seventy-eight. No wonder she made long stories over trifles and repeated them for sheer lack of matter.

Aruna, coming out of her own thoughts, realised that the childless widow was expounding, unheeded, the whole duty of the woman within the home, chiding her for leading others to follow her disastrous example. And Aruna listened, not troubling to justify afresh her long-ago lapse from grace, till Auntie turned on her, the light catching her spectacles, giving her full-moon face a blind blank look.

‘Doubtless I am a foolish old babbler, Aruna-ji. But the years bring knowledge; and it tells me that no good can come from teaching our women these ways of the West, uncovering their bodies in ballrooms, spurning marriage and husband-worship and household duties.’

That inaccurate indictment moved Aruna to protest.

‘We who are outside don’t spurn any sacred duties, or we would not be Indian women.’

‘What are you doing yourself then, setting this bad example?’ Auntie challenged her. ‘Indian woman; thirty-four years old—and a virgin! Shameful to admit.’

Aruna drew in her lower lip.

‘I set no example, Auntie. But some of us have to do without things we could never spurn, so that we may give education to others.’

‘Fine education!’ The plump fingers adjusted a clove. ‘You are a good girl, Aruna. But you are teaching those others all kinds of useless things. Much nonsense of “two and two.” Making them read silly English stories—“wow-wow-wow.”’

She aped the sound of reading aloud; and Aruna laughed.

‘Meeta tells me, Auntie, that you love to hear her read those silly stories, turning them into Hindi for you to follow.’

Auntie cackled good-humouredly.

‘Clever little niece! That is her excuse to read me more. I am old. I take no harm. And some are pretty tales. But others only fill her head with longing for the Outside. And that cannot be.’

‘Does Dyán say so?’ Aruna asked, recalling how valiantly Dyán of nineteen had backed up her own defiance of Mātaji and dastúr.

The old lady dismissed Dyán with a gesture.

‘Aunt-in-law would never allow. Very high family, very strict. In this house she acts the grandmother. And she knows that the honour of the Inside is a matter for women. Men don’t understand. Making their nests in the Outside, they think only of their own pleasure. They only know how to give life and how to waste it, like money. It is the women who must conserve, for them, their honour, their money and their lives. Meeta is a feather-brain, and nephew-ji is a jealous boy: jealous already, I think, because she will see this new Cousin-Sahib. Or perhaps’—with a knowing air—‘because he will see her!’

‘That’s your own invention, Auntie.’ Aruna spoke with sudden heat, forgetful of respect due to the old. ‘Dyán knows that the Cousin—has a beautiful wife in England.’

‘Beautiful wives should stay with their lords,’ Age retorted unabashed. ‘The far—even if a golden lotus—cannot always conquer the near. They should know how men are made.’

‘Perhaps English wives do know,’ Aruna ventured with less assurance, ‘how English men are made.’

‘Those that are wise take no risks. And our little Mother is far from wise. So make no trouble here, Niece-ji, with your tales of school at Peshawar. For it would only be excuse to spread her wings; and she is too old for school.’

‘She is not too old to learn many practical things, new ways of health and cooking and better care of children. We have purdah schools now, so that all who will may learn—even the mother-in-law. For not only the young are ignorant. My friend Lynch Memsahib—who loves our women as if they were her own—says that India’s greatest need is a school for grandmothers——!’

At that shrewd jest the old lady laughed aloud.

‘One advantage for me then, not being blessed with baba-lōg. Your Memsahib couldn’t catch me for her school! Don’t let her come here with such impolite talk.’

‘She is coming—perhaps, this evening, after the welcoming. She wants very much to meet—Roy. But now I must go.’ She rose briskly. ‘Time to be cooking. I am famous in Peshawar for my cakes and metai,⁴ so they mustn’t be spoilt through haste.’

She helped herself, in passing, to a leaf of pahn—the Indian woman’s equivalent for a cigarette. There was ample time for her cooking, but the ‘benevolent falsehood’ enabled her to escape without damage to courtesy; and surely the Goddess of Speech and Wisdom would make allowance for the moment’s tangled need. But the sun, who had come on wings, would rebuke her impatience by loitering across the mid-day sky.

Would it never be afternoon?

Chapter 3

And the morrow is theirs . . .
—Tagore

The afternoon, if it lagged, for Aruna, came swiftly for Roy. By the window of his railway carriage he sat alone, an unopened hook on his knee, watching mile after mile of Rajputana rush at him out of the dusty narrowing distance; crystallise into vivid detail, and flee before a new onrush of rock-crested heights or level desert, gashed into savage gullies by the monsoon, silvered here and there with fields of opium-poppy and sugar-cane. Almost it seemed a land without people, without trace of life: only at rare intervals a huddle of mud houses, a herd of black buck, petrified at gaze, then dashing madly away; a glimpse of dust-coloured figures wandering aimlessly from nowhere to nowhere, or squatting unconcerned in the midst of desolation.

At last, drawing steadily nearer, the Araváli Hills, that range through the Land of Death, transforming it with their many lovely lakes, their largesse of water and shade. Only within the region of their influence, the desert blossomed into tracts of wild woodland, where stray herds of cattle and camel rambled in search of pasture, and flights of homing wild duck made wandering designs in ebony on the turquoise blue of early evening.

The long journey was almost over. Very soon, now, he would once more see Chitor.

Lost in thought, it came upon him suddenly. A wayside station in a desert of dāk-jungle and date palm; a stark white board, and the name confronting him—Chitorgarh. Beyond, against the empty sky, loomed the battlemented bulk of the great rock fortress, three miles long, riding the billows of sand like an ironclad at anchor.

The sacred, solitary city—more than three hundred years ‘a widow‘—caught sharply at his heart. But the train, unconcerned with his sensations, emitted a fearsome shriek and rumbled on for another sixty miles or so, till it entered the Dobarra—the natural gateway in the lower Aravális that girdle Udaipur.

No desert now, but rocky foothills; more jungle scrub and date palm; and soon his eye caught a silvery gleam of water—the great Pichola lake. More trees, laid on with a bold brush, white palace, fluttering flags; and—dominating all—the vast main Palace set upon a hill, catching the last of the sun: immortal Udaipur.

The train dawdled, at last, into a prosaic railway station—journey’s end. And here was Hari Lāl running up, coolies trailing after him, like ants after spilled sugar. From the station building came a soldierly figure—Dyán unmistakeably, in cavalry uniform, his artificial left forearm and hand a legacy from the Great War, his small turban aslant, the fringed end hanging behind. To Roy, at first sight, he seemed almost a stranger—the cousin and friend of Oxford days, who had so fiercely and vainly loved Tara for many years.

No stranger now, he came quickly forward and shook hands.

‘This is good—that we meet again,’ he said in English. ‘Aruna is here, too, from Peshawar; I have pinched a room for you in the Guest House; so you can do your scribbling business there in peace. But Bápu is very keen for the senior grandson to live with him as one of the family.’

‘The senior grandson asks nothing better.’

‘That will please him no end. Come now. The Maharána has sent his new car. We are great friends. Lucky for me.’

The crowd backed away from them, salaaming. The lordly car, the scarlet chauffeurs and outriders had a Viceregal air. More than ever Roy felt as if he had risen a step in life.

Sitting beside his splendid cousin he watched the colourful passing of Indian India with a strange stirring of his pulses and a face as impassive as Dyán’s own. Something more than his eyes and imagination imbibed the unforgettable scene: the imposing entrance to the city through the tall Gate of the Sun, studded with long elephant spikes; the dramatic sense of passing from the twentieth century into the seventeenth—for, in this land of horses and elephants, the car was an anomaly—and the mighty cone of the Jugdesh temple, carved from base to summit with a wearisome profusion of gods and goddesses, monsters and men, valiantly aimed at suggesting the aimless profusion of life.

Higher than the temple towered the vast white Palace, an imposing pile, set upon the crest of a ridge; flanked by tall octagonal towers. Here again profusion almost defeated design. Had anyone ever counted the minarets, the fretted windows, the arches and balconies? Through the immense triple gateway he had a glimpse of the courtyard, and a row of picketed elephants. And roughly splashed on almost every house or doorway was one repeated picture, often a mere daub—Selim, son of Akbar, on his war elephant, challenged by a rider on a blue horse, Rāna Pertáp Singh, the famous warrior-prince of Udaipur.

As they neared his grandfather’s house, Dyán said suddenly, ‘The women have prepared a little tea function in your honour. You won’t be awfully bored, I hope?’

‘Not likely. And afterwards—a talk with Bápu?’

Dyán smiled at the ease with which he slipped into the Indian word. ‘Yes. He looks forward to that. Uncle is at the Palace. Some education conference; you will meet him later. Very clever. Very keen for educating women. Bápu’s your man for philosophy and politics; Dyán for sport; duck-shooting, black buck and pig. Also we have lately made a little polo ground a few miles out. Not full size, but pretty good fun—if you haven’t lost your skill.’

‘I’ll find it again, if you give me the chance.’ He glanced at the stiff forearm. ‘You play? Is it possible?’

‘Trust a Rajput. I can do some neat tricks with my one hand.’ He took his false hand and turned it outwards. ‘You see—a good strong clip for the ribbons. And haven’t I got a pair of heels to give my orders? If I couldn’t ride and shoot a bit, I’d jump into the Lake and hurry up a two-armed re-birth. By the way, Bápu is hoping you play Bridge? The clever old man learnt it from me.’

‘Bridge?’—The twentieth century with a vengeance. ‘I’m not a crack player, but I’ll be delighted.’

‘So will he.’

As the carriage drew up, Dyán looked squarely at his cousin, and Sinclair saw the thought in his mind before he spoke.

‘Your lady-sahib—Tara—very well?’

‘Very well,’ Roy echoed, ‘only working too hard.’

Dyán frowned. ‘Your women are always doing too much.’

‘Which can’t be said for most of yours!’

‘Not very often—yet. Better for the race, perhaps.’

‘Is it? I’m not so sure. Time to tell, when they really begin to move.’

‘By Jove, they have begun. Aruna will tell you all that.’

‘Well, I’m here to learn,’ Roy stated, as he sprang out of the barouche.

They found Sir Lakshman alone in his simply furnished room: an imposing figure in his dull red coat and flesh-pink turban: beard and moustache white as his draperies; the strongly marked face more than ever like a carving in old ivory.

‘Roy—son of my Heart’s Delight,’ the deep voice greeted him; and Roy, folded in a close embrace, thought no shame of the catch in his throat that made speech difficult, even when they sat down in two low chairs.

‘Always I knew you would return—that I would live till this hour,’ the old man said gravely, unembarrassed by his own right and natural emotion.

Sinclair, himself a trifle embarrassed, felt grateful to Dyán for proffering a gold cigar case, finely chased.

‘From my friend, the Maharána,’ he said, with a touch of complacency. ‘Cigars and all. A.1.’

Sinclair admired the case, but deferred the cigar till after tea. It lay ready on a table set against the wall, cups and saucers and plates, ‘English fashion.’ The room was large, lofty and bare, undisfigured by the hotch-potch of second-rate English furniture favoured by advanced Indians of an earlier day. Here, as at Jaipur, Sir Lakshman had the courage of his individual taste; the same cushioned divan and a few low chairs, the tall glass bookcase for his Library, and a squat, carved table for the alabaster model of Chitor. Over the inner doorway hung the same Bokhara curtain. On the walls hung the original Antibes portrait of his daughter, and two old Rajput paintings, notable specimens of Vaishnava Art.

While they talked of the pictures and of Indian art revival, sounds outside announced the coming of the women: jingle of anklets and the soft clash of bangles known to Roy’s heart.

As he stood up, his pulses quickened at thought of seeing and speaking to an Indian woman again; though he could not hope to find here—except perhaps in Aruna—any approach to his mother’s rare mingling of culture, simplicity and spiritual fragrance.

The door opened. Dyán pulled aside the heavy curtain—and they came in, with a waft of perfume and colour four of them, very close together as if for mutual protection, saris pulled a little forward, hands palm to palm in orthodox Hindu greeting. Three children dressed like dolls solemnly echoed the gesture.

There was the old great-aunt, bulkier than ever, keeping humbly behind the wives, beaming at Roy through her steel-rimmed spectacles, murmuring encouragement to the small girl half buried in her ample skirt. The houri in front must be Dyán’s wife, though not a glance of greeting passed between them: a moonfaced beauty in apple-blossom sari and vivid pink skirt with circular stripes of gold. Vivid pink also were the polished nails of her fingers and toes; the fair, tinted feet almost as shapely as her hands. Above one ear she had coquettishly set a waxen champak blossom, its scent overpowering all lesser perfumes, its half open petals just revealing the gold within. And her jewels! Roy’s taste approved the necklet of star-shaped flowers, each petal three graded pearls, each centre a fire opal, the one gem that seems almost alive. Smaller flowers hung from her ears; and one, smaller still, was set in the delicate curve of her nostril. Tinted, scented, jewelled, full lips and glancing eyes, she offered a finished picture of Rajput wifehood: in every detail a subtle appeal to the senses. But, recalling an earlier Dyán, the thought flashed, ‘After loving Tara to madness—that sugar-plum of a girl——‘

No sugar-plum was ‘Uncle’s wife,’ Surya Devi—a true woman of the desert, gold-coloured, tall and strongly made; the assertive nose under thick eyebrows giving her face almost a manly air. Over a skirt in two shades of green she wore an indigo sari, its gold border woven on. Square uncut emeralds adorned her column of a throat and dragged down the lobes of her ears. She carried herself queenly, as one who knew her own worth; clearly a woman of character, more than a match for any man.

How instinctively these Easterns understood the massing and the value of colour! Close to that bold mingling of indigo and green, Aruna, in two ethereal shades of yellow, hovered like an evening primrose—Aruna of poignant Jaipur memories; her sole ornament a thin gold chain, a few simple bangles and the topaz ring his own gift. For some indefinable reason it hurt that she should do him formal reverence.

‘Aruna——’ He went towards her, holding out his hand.

Their eyes met, and she smiled—the sudden brilliant smile that atoned for all shortcomings.

‘Shake hands—English fashion.’

She obeyed, while the others looked on, half disapproving, half impressed; and as Roy’s fingers closed on hers—cool, soft, unsubstantial—his heart turned over in him. For it was his mother’s hand he held.

He could only say, ‘It’s wonderful—to be back here again.’

‘To me——’ she answered simply, ‘it is, even now, difficult to believe. Such great pleasure you have given us all.’

Deftly including herself with the others, she rejoined them, where they stood near the long table waiting to serve the meal in which they might not share. Only afterwards and apart they could enjoy the fragments that remained—to them, prasád, ‘bread of the gods.’ For this tea-drinking, in his honour, was no convivial affair. The sanctity of food, the shyness of the women, discouraged trivial talk. Only the children—untroubled by sanctities—provided a welcome relief.

Five-year-old Lotus-bud perched, like a gay-plumaged bird, on Bápu’s knee; and on Dyán’s sat little Lakshman, in stiff brocaded coat, sucking a metai. The elder boy, with a strong look of his father, stood close to him, sucking also and frankly staring at the turbanless Cousin in strange, uncoloured clothes.

The women, handing plate after plate of delectable food, kept urging softly, ‘Won’t you have another, please? Or don’t you like this kind?’

No resisting them, or Aruna’s low voice at his ear ‘These I made myself. Very popular with English friends in Peshawar.’

It seemed their one concern to let no morsel be left over for themselves, though Meeta’s rounded charms suggested a love of sweet things. Never a direct look or word passed between her and her handsome husband, who, in the presence of others, must be discreetly ignored; so strict is Hindu etiquette, between man and wife, even after years of marriage.

The men talked little while eating; and his own interest was centred on Aruna. Every movement, every fold of her sari, every turn of her half-veiled head too poignantly recalled his mother. And she herself—no longer the ardent girl, but the poised, dedicated woman—had gained with the years a more compelling charm. On the surface she had changed little. Living more sparely and vigorously than her sheltered sisters, she had avoided the early plumpness that ages Indian women before their time. Her face had still its pansy aspect; the broad modelling of brow and cheek-bones, the velvet-dark eyes that had tempted him—very nearly—to break the promise given to his mother.

It was satisfying at first, merely to watch her and exchange a few friendly remarks. But he wanted a good talk with her alone; and he began to suspect that, in this elaborate home life, it might prove difficult to achieve.

When the tea function was ended and her departure imminent, he made his bold request in a low tone, covered by the children’s laughter.

‘Aruna, when can we have a talk—you and I?’

And she answered, lower still. ‘I would like it. I am hoping.’

‘Well, why not? You aren’t purdah, like the rest.’

‘No. But I am not so free as in Peshawar. This evening, perhaps, I shall come here to bring my great friend, Mrs Lynch, who is staying with some missionary people—the Nairs. She knows your books—wants to meet you. . . .’

The others were making a move. She joined them, and they drifted out like a cloud of tropical butterflies.

Sinclair, watching them—fascinated, yet vexed by a sense of frustration—confounded her superfluous friend who knew his books and wanted to meet him.

Chapter 4

I will not set the new against the old . . .
With counter-cry and question everywhere.
—Shakspere

Roy Sinclair and his grandfather dined alone together that evening. As the old man willed, so it had been arranged. Dyán—with his uncle, and the young cousins from Mayo College—was attending a ‘show’ at the Palace. Aruna, dining with the Nairs, would bring Mrs Lynch over later to meet the two men.

The meal had been brief and simple. Now they were back in the strange, yet familiar room, with coffee and cigars. For Sir Lakshman, though partial to his hookah, enjoyed a good cigar. And to-night he was happy beyond measure in this unlooked-for return of his eldest grandson, to whom he was doubly linked by a singular mental affinity. In a few hours they had come together again as easily as though twelve years had been twelve months. For the older man’s philosophic outlook and keen interest in world affairs had kept his mind supple, his sympathies broad. He had mellowed rather than shrivelled with age.

In his young days he had travelled widely, had himself educated Roy’s mother, and saved her from orthodox marriage with an elderly suitor; had faced with wisdom and courage the problem of an inter-racial marriage, unorthodox to the verge of impossibility. And here was his reward: a grandson, in whom East and West had wrought a twofold personality as unusual as his parentage. From the others he had the due affection and respect accorded to age in a Hindu home: from Roy, a warmth of personal feeling as warmly returned.

Very soon they had deserted their chairs for cushions near the low table, covered by a large-scale map of Northern India, thronged with names of cities, rivers, mountains, each exercising its peculiar spell. They were discussing Roy’s wander-journey, his wish to travel as a Rajput landowner from some hill estate. Both at Delhi and Benares he could lodge with men known to his grandfather, who would respect his incognito; and he had already given much thought to the difficult problem of condensing his ambitious plan for seeing and hearing at least a portion of the changed India he sought to understand and help his own people to understand: so vast his field, so inadequate the time at his command. Southern India—a continent in itself—must remain untouched; and even in the north he could only grasp outstanding places of interest.

‘You wish to create a tapestry of India’s infinite variety?’ Sir Lakshman swept a lean wrinkled hand over the map from Udaipur to the Himalayas. ‘Your difficult task is not to make it seem more like Infinite Confusion?’

‘Not to make it seem—what it actually is! Damned difficult!’ Roy countered laughing; no need to walk warily with this fine old man. ‘But it’s a chance in a lifetime. Out of the glorious confusion, I must pick my points of significance. Before leaving Rajputana, I must have a taste of the true desert and horse-mad Jodhpur. After that——?’

Sir Lakshman’s finger came down on Benares.

‘For any true vision of Hinduism—its best and worst—you have to stay awhile in the Holy City. Wearing Indian dress, you would see many things hidden and strange: often—I sadly admit—cruel and unclean. But, as Rajput, you would also discern finer things hidden from Western eyes.’

‘I’ve always felt as if Benares would repel me. But see it I must.’ He leaned, over the map, his mind swiftly at work. ‘I’ve got it—my plan of action. I’m starting right with Udaipur—Royal India. Then Benares—Religious India. Delhi—Imperial India——’ His finger pounced on each name in turn. ‘A prowl among some Punjab villages: Peasant India, not the least important by any means. Lahore—British India. Then—Peshawar: Moslem and Border India—another world. Last and greatest—the Himalayas: Sacred India, as distinct from religious: the goal of my pilgrimage. From the rest I shall get knowledge and impressions. From Himalchān—I may perhaps get vision—a light on the path ahead.’

There his hand rested; and Sir Lakshman covered it.

‘Yes, Dilkusha,⁵ there you will get vision. You have chosen your design well. But—is it intentional?—you have left out political India.’

Roy gazed at him as if his mind had returned from a distance.

‘I was climbing the skies, Bápu. The very word politics tumbles me to earth. I can’t leave out political India, worse luck. But I was hoping, in Udaipur, to get away from it.’

‘Not altogether, even here. In India politics have become an epidemic. And after all, Roy, this problem of our relation with England is more than mere politics. What comes of it may decide the future of Europe and Asia. There are fine minds at work on both sides; but too many tongues—like the Tower of Babel. Too much bewilderment——’ The old man passed a slow hand down his beard and looked steadfastly—not at the son of Lilāmani, but at the son of Nevil Sinclair. ‘You know my love for your father’s country, so to you I can say that not only Indians are getting puzzled and exasperated—ploughing the sands and no progress: but the English out here, also, can’t help feeling impatient and half-hearted, not always able to understand what these tiresome Indians are howling about, when they receive such generous treatment; not able to see that, in spite of present good intentions, they are often paying for mistakes of other days——’

His look was eloquent; and Roy helped him out——

‘They don’t mend matters—you mean?—by mounting the racial high horse for fear the rising tide of colour may splash their boots.’

Sir Lakshman smiled at the apt simile.

‘If only the high-horse kind would understand that, with us, damage to courtesy is not a little thing. Through trying, in the wrong way, to assert pride of race, they are risking damage to the true pride of their race—that great work of art, the English administration. Sometimes I feel there is greater need for reform in the English attitude and manners than for any unworkable voting machinery. I am Rajput. I do not belittle conquest: but good name is more than conquest, whether for nations or men. I’m glad you will travel most of your journey as one of us. In that way, you will see much that is hidden from English eyes. I am only grieved that clouds are so black on the horizon: this glorification of murder, this wicked senseless attack on the Punjab Governor, a fine courageous Englishman. And look at Bombay—the loss, the damage, through boycott and picketing . . . very peaceful!’

‘Clever tactics—for a saint,’ Roy mused. ‘If these terrorists aren’t sharply checked, they’ll destroy everything that the best on both sides are working for.’

‘Everything——’ the deep voice echoed. ‘Only love can create. Terror can create nothing, except chaos. Fear has always been the curse of our country, from fear of gods and priests down to fear of the police. Now it is fear of the Congress-wallah, waving his bloodstained flag of freedom. We should soon see what manner of freedom, if the hand of British justice could be removed to-morrow. —Lucky they can’t hear my heresy—— his grave face lightened. ‘Or they might think me also worthy of a bomb——!’

‘None here, Bápu-ji. You can say what you please.’

‘To you—yes. But not always to my younger grandsons; a pair of hot-heads, fresh from college. They are afraid of their mother. But to Bápu they speak all the froth in their eager minds——’ He raised his head listening. ‘Women’s voices. Aruna with her English friend. She has made many in Peshawar. Like her old-fashioned Bápu, she admires the English. And, for all reasons, I am glad of it.’

They rose to greet the two women—a striking contrast. Aruna, in her yellow draperies, a creature of soft and measured movements; Grace Lynch—the superfluous friend—thin, alert and straight-limbed, in a simple green evening gown.

Though both men were strangers to her, she greeted them without formality; and in less than ten minutes, Roy found himself sitting beside her, on Sir Lakshman’s divan, holding his own with her shrewd arguments and sallies, as if he had known her for years.

For here was no hide-bound zealot in blinkers, such as he had ruefully anticipated, but a woman of intelligence, sympathy and astringent humour: one who would not suffer gladly the shallow, the opinionated or the insincere. That was the swift impression he drew from the alert eager face, the assertive chin, the wilful crinkling of her coppery brown hair. She talked crisply and rather fast; listened with attention; contradicted without ceremony; and would—he felt sure—rather be contradicted herself than be treated to a mush of concession. If she seemed, to his critical instinct, a shade too definite, too brusque, it was only by contrast with the softer manners and aspect of Aruna—like touching tweed after silk.

On the subject of Indian women—the fine metal forged from generations of suffering and suppression—she glowed; but even so, she could be critical.

‘I’m with them, heart and soul; but I don’t say they’re justified, or even wise, in all their political fervours and sudden departures from custom.’

She smiled sidelong at Aruna, who answered, without a trace of shyness: ‘Perhaps not always wise. But useless to argue with a fountain broken loose!’

‘You only get splashed for your pains?’ Mrs Lynch reverted to Sinclair. ‘The way the women are moving, singly and en masse, is a surprise even to those who thought they knew something of them ten years ago.’

‘A surprise even to us who have known them all our lives,’ Sir Lakshman intervened, breaking his attentive silence. ‘I have long watched this stirring in the hearts and brains of our women. I helped my own daughter, also my grand-daughter’—his fingers pressed Aruna’s arm—‘to cast off purdah restrictions and use their gifts for others. But sometimes, when I read in the papers about hundreds of women coming out to join these fanatical Congress movements—picketing and boycott; squatting in the mud and defying Police, leaving husbands alone to mind house and children, while they go asking for arrest, I begin to wonder if, by moving too fast, they may hurt their own good cause——’

‘There’s always that danger, Sir Lakshman,’ Mrs Lynch agreed, ‘wherever life has been forcibly repressed for generations. When the fountain breaks loose, as Aruna says, it can’t be regulated by taps or water works. But I do believe that this remarkable movement is the beginning of great things, because it is rooted in their own ancient history. What may come of it, who dares to prophesy?’

And Sinclair, watching Aruna’s rapt face, stated simply and sincerely the faith that was in him.

‘Without daring to prophesy, my own conviction is that India’s women—through their selfless striving and reserves of spiritual strength—may, in time, weaken the power of the Brahmin and regain the noble freedom of Vedic days. Of course it will take generations; and it will need the loyal working together of all women, East and West. But between them they can, if they choose change the history of India—even of the world.’

Grace Lynch turned to him in her swift fashion.

‘That’s an unusual confession,’ she said, ‘from a man. But you have good reason for your faith in Indian women. I hope you’ll come to Peshawar and see some of the work we’re doing there, Aruna and I, backed by dear Lady Leigh, whose name will live after her.’

‘Thea——? Of course. She’s a pukka Desmond. Her youngest brother was my best friend.’

‘I’ve heard of him too, from her and from his nephew—another Lance Desmond, married to a friend of mine. He’s very like his Uncle, I believe.’

‘Yes, an astonishing likeness——’ Aruna turned to Roy.

‘What age? Where is he?’ Sinclair asked abruptly—and her eyes softened on him. She understood.

‘Twenty-seven, I think,’ Grace told him. ‘He was Sir Vincent Leigh’s Private Secretary till he married. Now he’s Political Agent at Chitral.’

‘How does one get to Chitral?’

Grace smiled. ‘One doesn’t! Except on service. It’s wildest India. Eve—his wife—has to live in Kashmir.’

But Sinclair’s mind had gone off on its own errand. ‘An astonishing likeness’: the very age of Lance that fatal year. He must emphatically meet this boy. To see Lance again in the flesh—himself, yet another. . .!

‘Who’s son is the young man?’ he shamelessly torpedoed some unheard remark.

‘Lance——?’ She seemed amused, but willing to supply information. ‘Colonel John Desmond, R.E., Thea’s second brother. Lance is my husband’s greatest friend. So you and I have more than one interest in common. And I’ve not yet said a word about your books—almost forgot I was talking to a distinguished author!’

‘Go on forgetting!’ It was lightly said, but he meant it. Discussion of his work embarrassed him. He shrank from criticism and distrusted praise. ‘Bar my books as a topic of conversation. I’m Aruna’s cousin, Bápu’s grandson, anything you please, except a touring writer out for copy.’

‘You’re a believer in India’s women—a big distinction in my eyes. But presently you will have to let me talk of the books. Now I must make my salaams to the Inside.’

But Roy had no idea of letting Aruna slip off again without a promise of the talk he coveted.

‘When am I going to see you—properly?’ he asked; and she laughed softly.

‘Isn’t it properly now?’

‘Well—is it?‘—Her eyes refused to meet his smiling challenge—‘Dyán’s booked me for to-morrow afternoon. But come out on Wednesday—purdah car, if you prefer. We’ll go on the Lake. I want to see the sunset again from the Island Palace.’

Aruna turned to Sir Lakshman.

‘If I go—would they think me shameless?’

‘You have my leave. That is enough,’ he said gravely, a hand on her shoulder. ‘I can say a word to Gurya that she will heed.—You take her out, Roy. Let her see all she can of our beautiful Udaipur while she is with us.’

‘Good. A royal order! Wednesday it is, Aruna.’

‘I shall love it,’ she said simply. And the two went out together.

‘Refreshing person,’ Sinclair remarked, as the men sat down again and he pulled out his pipe. ‘Aruna’s lucky to have her for a friend.’

‘India would be lucky if England sent her a few more such women as Mrs Lynch and Lady Leigh—and some others I have met in a very long life. Such personal friendship and understanding is the truest antidote to our wrangle-jangle of politics and these non-violent recriminations. Without it, all their fancy constitution making is simply building on sand.’

Roy sighed. ‘At Home, I felt more hopeful——’

Sir Lakshman laid a hand on his knee.

‘Over there, our own people feel more hopeful, too. From the well of hope eloquence gushes up, phrases and theories and fine ideas. But facts are like stones in the river-bed. We need, above everything, men and women of the right spirit coming together.’

‘Bringing them together—that’s the rub. How about a companion for my journey.’

Sir Lakshman smiled. ‘I was thinking of that while you three talked of other things. I believe I have found the right man for you—a family connection, Suráj Mul: a fine fellow. You would have much in common. He is son of a big landowner in Udaipur State: educated at Ajmir; never been out of India. No taste for politics——’

‘Good! He’s my man.’

‘I think you will like him; a true Rajput for courage and pride, also a touch of vanity—not without excuse. Indolent in many ways, but he has brains; and he is a budding poet.’

‘Good again!’

‘Yes—for you. But his father grumbles that, instead of helping with the land, he is writing an epic on the great days of Rajasthán.’

‘Excellent youth. What age?’

‘Just over thirty.’

‘Married—I suppose?’

‘Yes; a wife and two girl-children. But I think he would be content to leave all belongings with his own people, for a time.’

‘He sounds too good to be true. When can we meet?’

‘I shall send round in the morning and ask him to come for the midday meal. Then you can “take stock,” as you say, before we make a move.’

‘And we’ll have chances to see something of each other in advance. It’s a hopeful sign when things arrange themselves.’

‘Your karma is good.’

‘My Bápu is better!’ Roy neatly conveyed the gratitude and affection so difficult to express.

The only answer was a hand on his knee, while he pulled out his pouch for a fresh pipe. Sir Lakshman drew forward a stool on which stood his silver hookah studded with turquoise; and for a time they smoked in silence, thinking their own thoughts.

To Sinclair it seemed that, in mind and body, he had travelled a great way since Hari Lāl had brought him a station cup of early tea: the desert, the black buck and flying cranes, the Aravális, Chitor and Udaipur; Dyán, Bápu and Aruna—all crowded into one glorious day. And to-morrow—Suráj Mul.

Chapter 5

The old known memories wake,
Among the stirs and tremors of the winds—and hours.
—Gerald Gould

At the midday meal next day, there were seven of them—Rajputs all, ranging in years from seventeen to eighty-one: Sir Lakshman and his second son, Minister of Education, Dyán and his two young cousins from College, Sinclair, wearing Indian dress, and Surāj Mul.

Less striking than Dyán, he was as obviously a Rajput of quality, small hands and feet, supple build and proud bearing. The fine forehead and abrupt nose, the clear brown eyes—quick to laugh, quick to flash fire—struck Sinclair with an odd sense of recognition. The self, who is instinctively aware, told him that here was no chance encounter. He and that knightly young Rajput would go far together.

No moment for talk, however, this meal, amounting to a religious rite, because Hinduism sanctifies every act that ministers to life. Hence the peculiar sanctity of meals and marriage.

They dined together, yet apart; each on his cushion at a small table six inches high, set with a brass tray, a metal tumbler and six little bowls of vegetables, chutneys and sour milk. And in this land of opposites, men undressed for dinner. The older ones wore soft shirts over their white jodhpurs: the younger men nothing above the waist except their three-fold Brahminical cord. Sinclair had discarded his camel’s hair coat: a gesture of courtesy matched by the spoon and forks laid on the old man’s table, next his own. Though Sir Lakshman still preferred his natural mode of eating, courtesy moved him to keep his guest in countenance, to set him at ease. For in him still lived the old spirt of India, its tolerance and simple dignity and generous giving.

Dyán gave his cousin’s arm a friendly squeeze.

‘Fifteen years ago—New College, Commem, all that—I was conforming to your ways. Now you are conforming to mine!’ He sniffed with relish. ‘That black buck curry smells good. Come along and feed—Indian fashion.’

Dinner was served by Surya and Meeta Dévi in silk fibre saris set apart for cooking, such as his own mother had worn whenever she made her famous curries and sweets for their delight. So Roy’s palate was no stranger to that mysterious blend of meat and vegetables and spices freshly ground—a true Indian curry, served straight on to a pile of saffron-tinted rice, flecked with sultanas and pistachio nuts, the savour of it sharpened by chutneys from his attendant bowls.

Though silence was not rigidly preserved, they talked little; and Roy was aware of glances from his younger cousins—boys of seventeen and eighteen—disciples of the fiery Jawaharlal Nehru, very critical, no doubt, of their British relative and his clumsy shovelling in of the food they ate so skilfully that they soiled no more than the first joints of their fingers.

Pertáp Singh, clever and opinionated, looked several years older than Ranji Ráo, a stolid heavy-faced boy. They both ate, with frank relish, long after Roy had spread his hands over the tray to signify ‘No more.’

The meal and hand-washing over, normal clothes resumed, they all adjourned to the sun-filled verandah, for pahn, marsala and cheroots. Suráj Mul, very smart in green embroidered coat and lemon-yellow turban took the cushion next to Sinclair with a glance that said he felt sure of his welcome: clearly a case of friendship at sight.

In deference to their guest, they mainly talked English—and talked it well, even the anti-British cousins who were cavilling at maternal designs to saddle them with unseen brides. Approaches from professional matchmakers could no longer be ignored: and both boys were in open rebellion against the orthodox elimination of choice, the virtual sale of bridegrooms to parents seeking high-caste husbands for their daughters. Afraid of their masterful mother, they could speak their minds to wise old Bápu, when their father had hurried off to a College lecture on freedom—more honoured in theory than practice.

The boys argued, not unjustly, that the husband-elect should at least be allowed to ‘have a look.’ Man naturally desired beauty: why should he be tricked into marrying a girl with a face like a mongoose or a voice like a minah?

Pertáp—excitable and headstrong—was clearly showing off for the benefit of the new cousin.

‘They say one matchmaker offers the cost of a few years in England to make me clever enough for a wife who knows the English alphabet——’ He winked at Suráj. ‘No England for me; no fancy alphabets! Give me a pukka Rajputni with a skin like a golden lotus.’

‘A good cook for me and a quiet tongue,’ said his simpler brother shyly. ‘Who wants a wife to talk biology or Havelock Ellis, while perhaps spoiling the dinner? They offered me a moon-coloured beauty with lips like pomegranates, a dowry of five thousand rupees, a portable radio, new saddle and trappings——’

‘That five thousand would make me suspicious,’ Pertáp cut in with his man of the world air. ‘No liars on earth like matchmakers. The moon-faced beauty may have a dark skin, smothered in haldi paste, and painted lips. What a shock for you on the wedding night! Your five thousand will soon vanish. Your false beauty will cling like a leech. What do you say cousin?’

He appealed to Suráj, who shrugged and turned out his hands. ‘Too late for me to have a say—now. Choosing or not choosing—no man knows his fate in marriage.’

And Roy, watching him with interest, wondered, ‘Has his Fate gone awry that he is so willing to wander unattached?’

Pertáp, unabashed, tried his luck with the stranger.

‘No matchmakers in enlightened England, I suppose?’

‘Plenty,’ Sinclair told him. ‘But they don’t get much chance nowadays. Parents know their place.’

‘Good luck for the young! And what fun those exciting courtships they tell of in your novels. An Englishman marries with both his eyes open, eh?’

‘That can never be said, Grandson,’ Sir Lakshman remarked quietly, ‘when a man desires a woman. And it is the English fashion to be in love first.’

‘I wonder which is best,’ queried shrewd eighteen, ‘to be in love first—or last. Look at their shocking divorces——’

‘We can’t talk about divorce,’ said Suráj. ‘If permitted, we could make plenty of work for Vakils.’

‘Now we only make work for priests and women,’ Pertáp commented smartly. ‘I want no wife at present. Too much work to be done for the Mother, with these foreigners ruining her trade.’

‘It was the foreigners who created her trade,’ Sir Lakshman reminded him. ‘It is our own madness of boycott that will ruin it. Those who pledge themselves to pester others, in the name of freedom, forget that those others have the loss, while they reap the glory. That is no work for grandsons of mine.’

But the sane philosophy of eighty was, to eighteen, a tinkling cymbal.

‘Your grandsons, Bápu-ji, know that to-day the Mother needs action: a wielder of thunderbolts like Jawaharlal Nehru——’

Sir Lakshman checked him with a lifted hand. ‘The Mother needs peace and progress through settlement. Young Nehru and his kind want no settlement. They are out for a fight, while busily explaining they are not to blame.’

‘But fighting is the true road to freedom,’ Pertáp persisted, impervious to argument. ‘We are learning now that, to get, we must snatch.’

‘There is no gain in snatching at forms of freedom which you have not the capacity to use.’

‘We should soon acquire it, when we have pushed the British into the sea. Let them “Rule the Waves”—that is their proud song—and leave us to rule Hindustan. Very soon we Rajputs would once again be Emperors of India.’

‘You’d have to dispute that minor point,’ remarked Roy, ‘with the descendants of Akbar.’

‘We would dispute it, as before, on the field of battle,’ Suráj cut in. ‘Not in lawyer-made battles of words. Long before Akbar we ruled the whole land from Oudh and Lahore to the Deccan. If the British go, Moslems, Sikhs and Bengalis will have to reckon with us.’

‘True enough,’ Roy confirmed him. ‘All the same, Bápu is right’—He turned to Pertáp, ranging himself with the wise old man. ‘No lasting good can come to India through boycotting trade, or fighting for votes at the risk of losing her soul; that’s the real danger of this Congress movement.’

‘I don’t agree,’ the boy flatly contradicted him, released from the constraint of deference to elders of his own race. ‘It is too much spirituality that hampers India, when dealing with the material-minded West.’

‘Not so material-minded as it suits some to assert,’ Roy retorted sharply. ‘And India, without her spiritual genius, would no longer be India.’

The unanswerable retort fired Pertáp’s quick temper.

‘Easy for you to talk,’ he blurted out. ‘You are only half India.’

Roy, hurt and angered, was constrained by the old man’s hand on his arm.

‘Think shame of yourself,’ Sir Lakshman reproved the abashed youth. ‘Roy knows what he is talking about. You youngsters love a fight more than you love your country. If I let you speak freely in my presence, you must control your temper and your tongue.’

‘He should apologise,’ Suráj insisted, scowling at the offender; but Sinclair said low and quickly, ‘No—I want no apology.’

And Sir Lakshman, with a gesture, dismissed the culprit.

‘Run along and work off your energy knocking tennis balls about,’ he said in a kindlier tone. ‘I hear the women in the court.’

The boys, subdued, yet eager, readily obeyed; and Dyán sprang up from his cushion.

‘You go and play too, Suráj. Work off that banquet!’ He turned to Roy. ‘You come and choose a mount. Then we’ll go riding, and see the pig called from the jungle. You saw them before?’

‘Yes, I did—wonderful sight. I also saw them potted from the royal shooting box. Not my notion of dealing with pig.’

‘Well, we can’t ride them down among our hills and gullies. I’ll see you potting them yet! Come along. First choose your mount. Then go and change your skin!’

The light remark had, for Sinclair, a deeper significance than the man of one skin could fathom. In Indian dress he could feel almost a Rajput. Back in his familiar riding gear he was himself again—husband of Tara, owner of Bramleigh Beeches—recognizing, with relief, that his British half unmistakably had the pre-eminence, through wife and children and heritage, through a hundred influences of youth and manhood.

He had picked, from Dyán’s stable, a black Kathiawar christened Kala Nāg, the Black Snake. Dyán, on an excitable chestnut, caracoled alongside.

‘First I must go up to the Palace,’ he said, ‘to see some new cavalry mounts from Jodhpur. His Highness has gone driving with Thákur Bhim Singh, or you might have paid your respects.’

‘I’d sooner pay them first to Udaipur. Put me where I can get a clear view over the lake and hills, and I’ll “stay put” as long as you please.’

Dyán regarded him with amused interest.

‘Still a bit of a Yogi, are you?’

‘A Yogi without the holiness. My only temple is the Temple of the Undistracted Mind.’

Dyán laughed. ‘I don’t favour temples!’ he said; and they rode on up the hill, thinking their diverse thoughts.

This older Dyán talked less readily than the younger one; but, he seemed content with life, if he had not much to say about it. Rajputana was his world, Udaipur the kernel of that world. Outside it, politicians might wrangle, non-violence furiously rage, Hindus and Moslems cut each other’s throats till all was red, so long as the Sons of Kings held their own land and a descendant of Rāma ruled in Udaipur.

Since the days when he shed the husks of Oxford, the inner Dyán, it seemed, had remained static; while the inner Roy—thinking and living beyond the ready-made world—had travelled so far from the Roy of Oxford and the War and Rose Arden that at times he looked back at his past self as at a ghost of his own image. Responsive to new surroundings, he gained from each fresh experience a mind enriched by the artist’s power of entering into many forms. To each his own way of salvation. This firmly rooted Dyán had found his centre, and it was good to be riding with him again in Udaipur: seeing and feeling again, with more than memory, the massed trees and white palaces, gaily painted houses, shrines and temples: scarlet horsemen, with twisted moustaches and curved swords; golden-skinned women of the desert carrying brass lotahs on their sleek heads, moving like crowned queens.

And there came the dark lordly mass of an elephant, flapping impossible ears, shouldering through the drifting, shifting crowd in turbans and saris of every hue—amber, vermilion, turquoise and palest green. An open smithy resounded with clang on clang of metal. The half-naked armourer, glistening with sweat, exchanged witticisms with a lolling group of young men, olive-skinned and handsome, turbans aslant, bodies lean and sinewy as greyhounds. A triumph of human breeding—these pure Rajputs, the kernel of India’s aristocracy for over a thousand years; a race of gentlemen, for all the defects of their qualities; pride verging on arrogance; indolence, except when fired by passion or sport, with a strain of cruelty beneath their courtesy and the narrowness of enduring types.

Here was the India of tradition, rooted in the past; a people and a city separated by many centuries from hybrid Bombay; barbaric sounds and colours, that stirred his blood like martial music, and deepened the distrust of his aristocratic soul for ‘that throttling of the best by the many which is called democracy.’

Now a young man in flannels came riding towards them; a loosely knit Scot, with clumsy features and clever eyes, introduced as Gilmour, a Civil Engineer, lent by Government to the State.

He himself was presented without hint of cousinship: ‘Sir Roy Sinclair, staying here for a bit, writing about India. Can’t you come along with us to the pig-feeding?’

‘No luck! I’m booked for the Residency. Mrs Penryth has two stray Americans needing diversion.’

‘And she doesn’t invite any of us,’ Dyán remarked, without rancour, ‘though Americans like Indians.

‘Doesn’t she?’ Sinclair queried.

Dyán shrugged.

‘I should say, as far as possible, we don’t exist for her. Very beautiful—very much Burra Mem. Bored stiff with Udaipur.’

‘Prefers Americans——?’

‘Quite likely. Plenty come here gobbling up “impressions.” Some I like very much. Some—not. Often I wonder—do they think of stepping in, if the British back out?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Well—you ask their mission-people! No time to argue. I’m overdue at the Palace.’

‘Nice boy that,’ Sinclair remarked, as they rode on.

‘Yes. Quite keen about India—now. How soon will his own people—and some of ours, and too much work in this climate, rub it all out of him. British service is a grind. Good thing I chucked trying for the Indian Civil.’ A pause; and he added in a changed tone, ‘I have to thank—Tara for that; though, by God, I didn’t thank her then for turning down my presumptuous offer of marriage.’

Sinclair made no comment on that; but remembering the constraint of Dyán’s first allusion to her—he wondered . . .? Tara was a star whose light dazzled more than a man’s eyes and senses; and the fact that she had been first love to them both curiously increased his sense of kinship with this likeable cousin who had, at one time, seemed closer to him in spirit than his own brothers. . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Left alone at last on the spacious roof over the triple gateway, he forgot all about Dyán. The whole scene, near and far, absorbed his eyes and mind. The roof itself was a small world, set between the city below and Palace above. Directly beneath him seven elephants were picketed, mountains of flesh and muscle, nervous of their own bulk, docile and obedient to those whom they could kill at a stroke. On one of the battlements a peacock sat sunning its splendour—the royal bird of Rajasthán. In and out of the sun-filled courtyard groups of Udaipuris wandered aimlessly, as though time were not; and among them, officers went riding, moustaches twisted, swords dangling: a fine body of men, with now no practical raison d’être.

The Palace and the great Jagdesh temple lorded it above shops and houses and lesser palaces of Thakurs,⁶ scattered among trees, away towards the hills and down to the Pichola Lake, with its islands and marble pavilions. Southward sprang the fortified hill Eklingarh, its bold outline cleaving the sky; and beyond it a troubled sea of mountains ranged northwards, from Udaipur to Mount Abu and Ajmir.

On the coping of a corner balcony he sat down, in full sunshine, and smoked the pipe of meditation; stilling surface activities, losing count of time, till mind and sense were merged in the mysterious, yet familiar sense of dissolving boundaries.

Afloat in spacious emptiness, his spirit hung poised like a hawk. . . .

And suddenly the emptiness was invaded by a deep insistent thrumming, as if the blood were buzzing in his ears. First it seemed within him, then without; a sound that thrilled through his whole being, past and present—the mighty war drums of Rajasthán.

Louder and louder it swelled, that wild exultant thrumming; its shuddering beat and rhythm instinct with the dark yet heroic soul of war. Not the mechanised slaughter he had known and hated; but the clash of battle between Sons of Kings, who could seek each other’s lives all day and eat off one plate in the evening: jingle of chain armour, flying pennons: all the glory and excitement of hand-to-hand conflict: splendour, horror, fear. . . . A wild herd of ancient race memories went rushing through his sun-steeped brain: flashlights into the outer dark. . . .

Then—the menacing crescendo subsided to the mere audible mutter of drums. He was himself again; drowsing on the stone ledge in full sunshine. The drums had ceased. Dyán was standing by him, an amused smile on his face.

‘Well, Sadhu-ji! Did you see my men on the new mounts go by in style?’

‘No,’ Sinclair answered, aware that the admission would sound less strange to Indian ears than it did to himself. ‘I saw nothing after the drums began to talk——’

‘The Zenana guard——? Those Arabs can make them talk. And they carried you off—eh? If you get drunk on drums, you are pukka Rajput.’

‘Yes—pukka Rajput,’ the Englishman agreed, in quite another tone. Then, with a mental gesture of sharply closing a half-open door, he stood up and they returned to their horses.

Their choice lay between rowing across the lake or riding round to the fort, where coolies, with bags of grain, called the wild pig by hundreds out of gullies and ravines for their daily ration of manna from heaven.

Sinclair preferred to ride. Dyán, if he could help it, never did anything else; spurning motor-cars as mere conveniences for women, or for those not-men, unable or unwilling to ride.

Between jungle and lake the fort stood solitary. Stone steps led to a jutting roof, where a desultory audience awaited the daily tamasha. Passing along, they sat down on the low parapet apart from the rest. To the left, rocky desert: to the right, two miles of steel-blue water set in grey and purple hills. From the long white line of the marble bund, rose city and palace, far yet clear, lit by a low sun, that hung above the hills, like a caste-mark on the brow of night. The lake, at this end, petered out into shallow and broken marshy ground, bird-haunted, good for sport. Its waters took on a rosy flush: but the jungle, drained of light, was a ghostly desolation of volcanic rock and scrub: acres of bare sand, furrowed by the tramplings and rootings of pig rising to a thick belt of forest.

No sign of life yet in the darkening scene except a few coolies, half-naked scarecrows with their bags of grain; calling their weird musical cries to let the beasts know it was feeding time.

And, at that call, out of the forest the pigs came tumbling—pigs of all shades and sizes; great dark tuskers, who could rip up a horse at one stroke; sows young and old, blue-black squeakers with yellow bands round their bellies; all hustling and grunting and nosing in the sand; a very devil-dance of pigs.—five hundred at least. And the sound of their feeding was like the sound of waves on a pebbly shore; the deeper note broken by protesting yells from squeakers, thrust aside by some hungrier male. The coolies, striding bare-legged among them, knew they had no cause to fear those terrible tusks. Peacocks flew out of the jungle, trailing glorious tails, wandered among the unheeding pig, and took their share of the feast. At that singular family gathering in the wild, man and best were unhostile, unafraid.

And while they sat watching, the sun dipped—vanished. It would soon be dark. The devil-dance was ended. Pigs in their hundreds were straggling back to the jungle; a sight to haunt the mind.

Yet, in spite of the sharply closed door, it was the drums that haunted Sinclair’s mind as they rode homeward, stirring in him a closer sense of kinship with Dyán and Aruna and that fine old man than he ever remembered feeling in all his days.

Chapter 6

Is there no drinking of pearls, save they be dissolved in biting tears?
—Gretchen Warren

The afternoon was far advanced. Across the Pichola Lake the low sun flung a shining pathway. The last of his light baptised all visible Udaipur; city and palaces, marble bund, grey-white houses, and the royal Zenana building that rose stark and unadorned from massed trees and a line of slim colonnades: blind white walls, pierced with high, small windows, confronting the changeful charm of vanishing lake and hills. Above, and beyond it, loomed the vast and varied bulk of the Palace itself, towers, domes and jutting balconies; a shrine of the kingly ideal, rather than of Kings human and fallible, stewards of mysteries beyond their ken.

The kings passed on, the Palace—with all it stood for—survived. Its true period long gone by, it continued its magnificent existence unconcerned. Inviolate without, floridly furnished within, guarding its human secrets—tragic, squalid, heroic—it towered above lake and city, a stately symbol of autocracy in a reeling world, receiving its daily tribute of fight and colour from the setting sun, while the kingly people, sun-descended, held their own at Udaipur.

The two lesser and lovelier Island palaces, bosomed in trees, seemed afloat on the lake. In its stillness every detail was repeated, line and curve, light and shade, tufted heads of two tall date palms; the palace in the depths hardly less clear than the one above, but for the liquid blur that gives reflected loveliness its peculiar charm. And already the hills began to glow like opals in the mellow light.

At this late hour of a January afternoon the lake was almost empty. Hardly a ripple disturbed its dream façades and gardens and reflected sky. Across the shining pathway, flung by the sun, one slender boat moved leisurely; the oar-blades, as they turned, seeming to drip light. Roy Sinclair leaned forward letting them rest on the water, loth to pass out of the brilliance and warmth that would vanish too soon. Isolated thus, he and Aruna and their slow-moving boat seemed the only realities in an unreal world. She sat facing him holding the rudder ropes, obeying his brief directions with the intentness of a child learning a new lesson. An open fur coat revealed her graceful Indian dress, that symbolised, for Roy, an inner grace of the spirit; an indefinable atmosphere, more racial than personal, that poignantly recalled his mother. Actual likeness there was none: the cheek-bones were too broad, the mouth a shade too large, no perfect line from ear to chin. And yet—her mere presence, the half-veiled head and beautiful hands revived emotions of his boyhood, not dead but sleeping.

That strange and lovely illusion must not be allowed to prevail. Aruna, true daughter of Rajputs, was no shadow of a lovelier and more gifted being. She was herself, commanding her own meed of affection and admiration. She had developed, as Dyán had not. She was working for India on lines that his mother would have approved; and he wanted to hear more about it all. Yet now they were at last alone, she seemed to be withdrawn again behind her veil of shyness. Or perhaps, in her as in himself, more than shyness was at work.

Beyond the charm of the present hour hovered ghosts of other hours alone together; the dangers and delights of their strange sad idyll, bounded by that promise to his mother, ‘No Indian wife’; the tragic climax and the parting, without thought or hope that they might meet again. The end should be the end. But life goes on, heedless of anti-climax, weaving patterns of infinite variety from the infinite sameness of human passions dreams and desires.

After ten peaceful years of unadulterated England a pregnant phrase had revived the dormant East in Roy: and here they were together again, in much the same undesigned isolation—he a husband and father, she absorbed in her chosen work. It was well with him: and he sincerely hoped it was well with her. But beyond that comfortable hope lurked knowledge less comfortable that while he had merely hovered on the brink, she had, admittedly, loved him for years. Now, it seemed, she had found herself in work worth doing; her sympathies quickened, her understanding enlarged by all that she had felt and wrestled with—and presumably overcome. Now surely they could be friends and cousins, without the eternal emotional risk. His own heart safely anchored, he could enjoy the stimulation of a mental give and take quickened by currents from some other centre than his brain.

She had talked easily at first of Peshawar, of Thea Leigh and Grace Lynch; with repressed fervour of her personal work for the Mahila Samiti,⁷ where women of any caste or creed could come together for friendly talk, or for lectures and music; could fit themselves to become wiser mothers, better housewives, or more intelligent companions to advanced husbands.

‘And I tell them always,’ she added shyly, ‘that it is possible—though not very easy—to become all three.’

That, from her, had moved Roy to exclaim, ‘You’re a wonder-woman, Aruna-bai.’

‘No—no. Don’t look at me. Look at them,’ she had quaintly commanded him. ‘I am no wonder-woman. It is only that Sarasvati, goddess of wise speech and harmony, gives me, in return for my worship, a little pint measure from her ocean of wisdom, to help others in home-ways—that are not for me.’

As if to ward off even mental comment, she had hurried on, a little breathlessly, to talk of her active interest in the revival of Indian art and music; of her own gift for singing and playing, no longer banned as frivolous, since she could use it to enrich and beautify the restricted lives of her purdah sisters. And through it all he was poignantly aware of those ‘unseen tears of the heart that build on ruins’; of her personal loss, unconsciously transmuted to others’ gain.

Now she had fallen silent—and the illusion troubled him afresh. Talking, she was her delightful self. Silent, enspelled, light from the water playing on her face and throat, she was ‘Devi—Goddess,’ symbol of all that he held most sacred, most devoutly loved.

And she—acutely aware of him, in sense and spirit—wondered what good deed had earned for her this shining mark of favour from the goddess of her private worship. For here, too, was the unearthly beauty, the escape from her normal world, that had so strangely marked her few unforgettable times alone with Roy: that first half-hour in the Jaipur Residency, strolling with him on the moonlit lawn: Dewali⁸ night when her little lamp of destiny had so weirdly gone astray on the back of a mugger. Again that dream night in the moon-enchanted City of Amber—the wreck of her secret hope, their kiss of her betrothal. And now came this unsought wonder of being alone with him in the undying splendour of her own Udaipur.

He himself, bare-headed, in shirt sleeves, looked years younger than the titled author whom she had greeted with foolish tremors only yesterday afternoon. So finely modelled the brow and chin; so clear the grey-blue eyes, set like jewels—to her fancy—between thick black lashes under the long eye-brows; so disturbing his likeness to the Roy of her remembrance, that she was glad of the need to hold her mind on this mysterious pulling of ropes to order; glad when he lingered in the waning warmth and glow. Already from the shore, cold shadows were creeping out over the water. The larger Island Palace gleamed ghostly, beset by dark and threatening trees; tufted palms, rising out of them, printed sharply on the sky. One of its many domed and arcaded pavilions jutting out above the water, caught the last of the sun. There they could sit and take their fill of wonder.

Near a shallow flight of steps, Roy moored their boat and sprang out, giving a hand to Aruna.

‘Fairyland!’ he said lightly, to dispel the seriousness that had fallen on them both. ‘Are we real, Aruna-bai—or a dream?’

‘I think,’ Aruna said softly, ‘ we are a dream.’

And they moved on, not speaking, under the archway, through the shadowy garden, more dream than reality in its sunset mystery; its formal paths, carved and fretted balustrades, lemon and orange trees in fruit, and the sandalwood tree, whose extracted scent is so peculiarly India. A slender ibis and a marabout, with his ruff, walked delicately among the shadows, like spirits of vanished queens. From the depths of some thicket a peacock screamed. Curious bird-notes beguiled the ear; and the place was full of the ceaseless kurroo-kooing of doves. There was neither to-morrow nor yesterday. Time itself had forgotten this enchanted scene.

In the sun-flooded chhatri they stood silent—incredulous. Aruna sat down in the open archway and leaning over saw her own blurred face looking up at her from the depths. She hoped Roy would not talk any more just yet. Words—even from him—would only disturb this rare and lovely mood of content that might never visit her heart again: a mood so detached from any human hope of fulfilment that she lived—for that brief while—as angels live, by heavenly values.

And Roy, not connecting himself with her absorption, was glad of the tacit permission to smoke and watch, in silence, the changing play of light on a scene so improbable in its beauty and unearthly radiance that he could almost fancy it would vanish if they spoke or moved. While trees and palaces dreamed above their own reflections, time slept. Here, where every sense was satisfied, the soul might be held a willing prisoner, ‘its wings of aspiration furled.’

From the dream-vision in the lake came a whispered temptation: Why waste the best years of life straining after the unattainable? Why wrestle vainly with problems that could never, in one man’s brain or life-time, be resolved? What more could man and artist desire of life—for a time—than the serene and abiding beauty of this incredible Udaipur; large draughts of leisure for the book stirring in his brain; a truce to his poignant sense of alienage from the modern world. Only let the enchanted present be rounded in a globe of glass, that no breath might shatter its perfection. . . .

The sun dipped and reddened. The shining pathway was withdrawn, as if unseen hands were gathering in a net. Hills and trees darkened against a sea-green sky; and in that lucent setting Venus hung rayless, her image quivering in the lake like a splash of silver. A bird darted out of space with a low cry, arrowed the water and skimmed away. From very far off came the throbbing of a tabla,⁹ the pulse of the dying day; and wandering through it, the long-drawn notes of a reed-pipe, a thin stream of sound, rising high, high, and higher; the last note left unfinished, as if it passed beyond mortal hearing. And his own gaze, hypnotised by that cool green radiance in the flaming sky, passed beyond mortal seeing into a far country where the self, freed from human striving, could shed all husks of grief and desire

And suddenly—unheralded—there sprang a vision of Tara, so clear, so living, that it was as if she herself stood beside him in the familiar blue frock, his green beads round her throat and in her ears. He could see the network of veins in her temples, the sheen of her soft fair hair, the little line of strain about her sensitive mouth that hurt his heart like a clutch of cramp, and stirred his blood, as if the actual woman stood there within reach of his hands and lips.

Almost he had spoken her name aloud, when vision and illusion were shattered by a weird cry from the shore—the cry of a jackal, human and lacerating.

Tara was gone; and the sharp pang of loss provoked a flash of masculine irritation. Damn it all, could a man never rise an inch above the indignity of these human needs, this vain torment of desire? What devil had so mocked him with the illusion of her presence?

And here beside him sat Aruna—--who should be Tara —her dusky face framed in its pale sari; so near him, yet so far removed that it seemed she had not heard, or not heeded, the jackal’s cry. What was she thinking of in her withdrawn silence?

As if his thought had reached her—though the jackal’s cry had not—she turned and met his gaze with a limpid look, in which was no shyness, no consciousness of self. They neither spoke nor smiled. Bathed in evening light, they simply looked at one another, bound by a common wonder touched with awe.

It was Aruna who spoke first, withdrawing herself, as it were, from his strange gaze.

‘Did you hear—the small music?’

‘Yes. I heard.’

‘Did you feel how it matched this Hour of Union, when the Sun comes down to Earth, and by his light she is made beautiful to meet her lord?’

He smiled at her Indian symbolism.

‘Yes. It matched: the throbbing of the tabla and that thin sound woven into a lovely pattern.’

‘Indian music is like that. Not so much melody as your music, but more harmony with the “unheard sound of life”—the time of day or year. That was just some town boy playing out of his sad or happy heart; by true instinct, choosing right. I would choose my song for evening, knowing that sound is mantra.’¹⁰

‘Do you sing much?’ he asked, wondering what she would choose at this hour, in this mood.

‘Yes, to the women; sometimes with my sitar or sarangi, sometimes alone beating my hands to keep time.’

‘Sing now,’ he said; and the note of command was sweeter to her ears than any music.

‘Would you like Tagore? “O Ear to Seek”—English words?’

‘Yes.—Indian music?’

‘Not pukka Indian, but very like. It was made by Eve Desmond—a genius for music, wife of Lance, that we spoke of last night.’

‘She must have genius if she can catch the spirit of Indian music—and Tagore. Now, before the sun has quite gone—sing.’

Very softly she sang, not to disturb the quiet of the place; a low clear recitative, hands laid on one another clapping silently to mark the rhythm; the tension of shyness resolved into a mysterious blending of the music and Roy and the words of Tagore that seemed to have been coined out of her own heart:

‘“I am restless, I am athirst for far away things.
My soul goes out in longing to touch the skirt of the dim distance.
Thy breath comes to me whispering an impossible hope.
Thy tongue is known to my heart as its very own.
O Far to Seek! O the keen call of thy flute——
I forget, I ever forget. I know not the way; I have not the winged horse.

I am listless. I am a wanderer in my heart.
In the sunny haze of the languid hours what vast vision of thine takes shape in the blue of the sky——
O Farthest End! O the keen call of thy flute——”’

Thin and high, the clear flute call seemed tossed into the air for some invisible singer to carry it on. Roy listening in wonder neither spoke nor moved hoping for more.

Aruna turned—still under the spell, and smiled at his expectant look.

‘Not the end?’ he asked.

‘Only of my poor singing. Never any end to that keen call, though the ear cannot follow, though we have not the winged horse——’

A little catch in her breath left the sentence unfinished like the soaring note in her song; and Roy, understanding too well, could only cover her folded hands with one of his own.

She let it rest there, its warmth invading her; endured, without stir or sign, the ecstasy and anguish of his touch, praying only that he might not speak.

And without speaking he removed his hand.

The sun touched earth—and vanished. As she felt now, so the earth must feel—bereft; but the earth could be sure of to-morrow.

The sky flamed. The Palace, flushed from end to end, glowed with a light of its own; light and colour repeated in the lake, with the dark splash of trees between. There would be no twilight. Already a chill breath came up from the water, and Aruna, rising, pulled her coat together. But its warmth could not ward off the inner chill of her swift descent to earth.

No loitering now, no shining path. While Roy sculled briskly back to the landing-place, she watched the lake pass from rose-colour, through violet, to the gleam of dulled steel. Lights came out on the shore. It was almost dark as they walked along the bund towards their waiting car; and as Roy flashed his torch in that direction, a blaze of headlights extinguished it.

An open car drew up below the Palace, its occupant just visible as a woman in a high fur collar and small hat.

‘Mrs Resident, I suppose?’ he remarked. ‘Dyán says—very much Burra Mem.’

The woman was leaning forward, aware of them.

‘Robin, is that you?’

The low-pitched voice awoke an echo in some corridor of Roy’s memory.

‘My name’s not Robin,’ he answered briefly; and heard a low laugh.

‘Who are you then?’ she asked, leaning farther out. A strange Englishman was an event in Udaipur.

This time he knew that cool deliberate tone, though he could not fit a name to it. He could only think of Lahore. Turning to answer, he found that the light inside the car had been switched on, so he must needs go forward and introduce himself, unaware at first that Aruna had not followed. The light revealed a face that was almost beautiful, a glimpse of fair hair and astonishing hazel eyes. His heart gave a double jerk. For the face explained—Lahore. Rose Arden—Burra Mem of Udaipur?

Her startled look told him that she, too, had seen.

‘Roy? Here——!’ Her cool voice had its caressing note. ‘Is it you—or a ghost?’

‘I’m flesh and blood all right, thanks!’ he answered lightly, aware of an ungallant relief that Aruna was not beside him.

‘I thought you were settled in rural England?’

‘So I am—officially.’

‘And I’m queening it at the Residency: a queen without a court! Any stray courtiers more than welcome.’

She held out her hand. He took it lightly as if it were the hand of a stranger; but her touch, her voice, suddenly recalled his own anguished sensation on their day of parting, when he had held that other Rose, weeping yet resolute, in his arms.

Her moment of silence may or may not have been calculated. One could never tell with her. Withdrawing her hand, she allowed her eyes to rest on his.

‘You knew I was married?’ she asked.

‘Yes. But not your husband’s name.’

She smiled at her own thought. ‘We’ve neatly missed a dramatic encounter. Bored stranger calling on unknown Burra Mem—and discovering me! But what are you doing here?’ She glanced towards the dim form of Aruna. ‘Lady Sinclair with you?’

‘No. I’m alone.’

‘An unofficial interlude—en garçon?’

‘I’m not playing the gay grass-widower, if that’s what you mean,’ he answered, resenting the inference, while his detached self marvelled—Can this be the same man who was sharing a dream with Aruna half-an-hour ago? ‘I came out here on account of a book. Land-owning doesn’t pay its way.’

‘But why aren’t you at the Residency? Where are you?’

‘At the Guest House.’

He told his half-truth with complete sang froid.

‘And you haven’t honoured us with a call?’

‘I only arrived the day before yesterday. I intended shooting cards to-morrow.’

‘Well now—you won’t shoot cards. You’ll come to see me, and stay for tiffin.’

‘Thanks very much.’

Again her eyes dwelt on him. ‘It’s too strange,’ she mused, ‘stopping the car to pick up Leonard—and running into you!—We’ll have a great talk. And you can tell me everything.’

He laughed at the wholesale command.

‘With a few reservations!’ He lifted his hat. ‘I must be going,’ he said quickly. ‘Good-night.’

‘Au revoir.’

And as he went, he wondered—would she have the face to flirt with him, even now? Was ‘Robin’ young Gilmour? He had not the air of a carpet knight. Was her husband acquiescent, or under her spell? A dramatic stroke of Fate—this conjunction of Aruna and Rose.

He found Aruna standing by their car.

‘A shame to keep you hanging about in the cold,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you get inside?’

‘Because I like to be outside, watching the pattern of all those lights on the darkness. New ones keep coming.’

The simplicity of it smote him after the sophisticated charm of Rose.

‘Now we must go,’ she said—‘or they will wonder.’

Handing her into the car, he thought, ‘Does she not wonder? Or does she not venture to ask?’

As he started the car, she ventured.

‘I thought you didn’t know Mrs Penryth.’

‘So did I—till she switched on the light. She has changed her name since I saw her last—in 1919.’

‘So long ago? I heard her say your name. She seemed so pleased.’

He glanced at her impassive profile. Some quality in her compelled sincerity. Why not tell her the truth?

‘Merely interested. She was the girl I nearly married—after Jaipur. But as it turned out . . . I couldn’t and she wouldn’t. Lance loved her too. It was a cruel complication. A lucky escape—for us both.’

And Aruna, without turning to him, said pensively, ‘There come nearly as many mistakes, I suppose, by seeing and choosing, as by our way of not choosing?’

‘Yes—perhaps. Men are such blind passionate bunglers.’

No answer. She sat there, very still, looking through the bluish pane of glass that showed her a faintly tinted world, while it showed the world no more than a dim feminine form. Presently came the question he had half expected.

‘Does she know—about all of us and you?’

‘She will know to-morrow.’

‘She will surely not approve.’

‘That won’t worry me.’

‘But you are a famous author. She will invite you to stay in the Residency. Won’t you have to go?’

‘Not likely. You are my people. I’m proud of the connection; and I shall tell her so.’

She let out a slow breath of relief; not a look, not a word. Her silence had its indrawn secrecy; but his sensitised nerves could almost feel how she quivered inwardly, how she hated, with the inbred fierceness of her race, that cool finished English woman who had so nearly become his wife. It was all he could do not to lay an arm round her shoulders, to kiss her forehead where none would ever set the vermilion mark of marriage.

And she, troubled with her thoughts, was trying to see the face of that woman in the car. . . .

When he handed her out, her chilled fingers smote him with compunction.

‘I’ve kept you too late,’ he said.

She pressed her hands together.

‘That’s nothing. I’m all warm inside. It is beautiful to remember.’

‘Yes. We’ll go out again.’

‘Perhaps. Not often. Bápu is kind; but he doesn’t know how difficult. In Peshawar it would be easier—if you come?’

‘When I come,’ he corrected her, smiling: and knew that the assurance would deflect her mind from the trivial encounter with Rose.

Chapter 7

The flame I did not see burns on the unseen altar.
—Humbert Wolfe

It was in no spirit of doing his official duty that Roy Sinclair rode over to the Residency next morning, after a profitable three hours spent in studying Sanskrit with Sir Lakshman and renewing his acquaintance with Tod’s ‘Rajasthán.’ That brief contact with Rose—her voice, her eyes, her beguiling personality—had brought back to life the whole passionate, tragic episode of his headlong courtship, his brief engagement, and the swift, terrible death of his friend.

Half the night he had lain awake, living through scene after scene in that crowded hour of inglorious life, even to the day of their final parting, when they had faced the unflattering truth about themselves and each other, the tragic truth about Lance—who, in life, had refused to come between them, yet, in death, had subtly thrust them apart.

By some malicious, or merciful, trick of Life one seldom realised what was happening—at the time. Only the backward look, in true perspective, gave any approach to clear-seeing. But her charm had a quality that defied even clear-seeing. Here was he detached from her utterly; yet the prospect of meeting her again created an inner stir, half attraction, half antagonism; a quickened interest in the piquante conjunction of this finished, sophisticated English woman and mediaeval Udaipur. Here were these splendours wasted on her English aloofness. And there at Home, was Tara, whose intelligent delight in it all would have enriched his own. The mere thought of her, the sharper sense in absence of all she had been and continued to be for him, lit a flame in him that made the strain of his self-imposed separation seem unendurable to himself, unfair to her. But there it was: the eternal game of cross purposes. Tara in England, longing for Udaipur; he, self-banished, longing for her; Life, with an ironic gesture, handing him—Rose. And he was to tell her everything!

He would certainly not tell her, yet, of this incredible young Lance Desmond, whom he positively must meet on the first opportunity. The strength of his own feeling astonished him; as if some fragment of his vanished youth had sprung to life again. And it might mean nothing to Rose of seven-and-thirty. For her, Lance had been simply a romantic episode; for him, the one incomparable friend of youth and early manhood, the friend who had loved them both more finely than they were capable of loving each other Strange how the past—after shamming dead for years—would suddenly spring to life. He had come here absorbed in the present, reaching out to the future, only to be assailed by the past at every turn: Lance, Aruna, Rose——

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

He was shown into an empty room—and he was kept waiting. She had an instinct for producing the right effect. She would give him time to see Rose, the woman, reflected in her setting. Like herself, the room was gracious, low-toned, serene; in every detail an English room: high pale walls, long pale curtains and cool chintzes, old silver and glass, a few good modern watercolours, a glass-fronted bookcase and a tiled open hearth. It was as if he had walked straight out of India’s dust and glare into his own high pale drawing-room, now too seldom used. It confirmed his private distaste for those bare Indian rooms, with their lack of personal atmosphere. It so troubled him with an aching sense of Home that he was thankful for these few minutes alone.

On the hearth a wood fire leaped and crackled. A smoke-blue Persian cat slept in a cushioned basket; and near the mantelpiece hung a pastel portrait of Rose, with a small boy on her knee. Beautiful creatures, both: the same ash-blonde hair, straight nose and clear hazel eyes, set in short thick lashes like a smudge of shadow. Still seeing the woman in her setting, he strolled across the room to her bureau. Yes—here was the Rose he had known; half a dozen photographs; all men, presumably all victims; the head and shoulders, in solid silver, obviously Penryth. It was a clever, arid face; shrewd eyes that saw things as ‘things’—nothing beyond them. Of the others, three were in uniform. She had kept her taste for ‘playing with soldiers.’ No sign of himself, or Lance——

And suddenly, looking up, his heart missed a beat.

Isolated, above the bureau, hung an evident enlargement of some chance photograph: Lance, hatless, alert, mounted on Pegasus, winner of many cups and purses. He had turned in the saddle, reins loose in one hand, the other on the crupper; his chin up and a light in his eyes, as if the next moment he would speak or smile; the whole look of the man so natural, so alive, that it hurt—after all these years. More than ever he was thankful to be alone to face the shock of so surprising an encounter.

As he turned back to the fireplace, the door opened and she came forward holding out both her hands.

In the ivory white frock, sheathing her figure, she looked more like the Rose of his remembrance: the low-toned harmony of hair and skin and hazel eyes. Her air of coming swiftly, genuine or no, charmingly became her.

‘Roy! This is wonderful. And that I should keep you waiting——’

He could not choose but take her proffered hands.

‘Who am I, that I shouldn’t be kept waiting by the Burra Mem of Udaipur?’

‘I’m no Burra Mem—to you. And you’re no famous author—to me. You’re a bit of my dead self come to life. Officially—an old friend.’

Her voice had its delicious softness and distinctness; and her smiling eyes emboldened him.

‘Never a friend—that I can remember.’

‘Well, it’s a convenient word. It covers a multitude—of indiscretions! Besides’—she lightly challenged him—‘didn’t we, at one time, know each other rather well?’

‘No. We were lovers—and strangers. Quite a common paradox.’

She nodded, smiling to herself. ‘You’ve said some wise things about that in one of your poems.’

‘My poems——! You’ve read them?’

‘A good many of them.’ She indicated a small familiar volume on a far table. ‘Some are too queer for my taste. But some are beautiful—and satisfying.’

Her praise had a genuine ring that was nectar to the poet; but the man could not keep his eyes and mind away from the picture of Lance.

She was looking that way too: and he said in a careful voice: ‘It’s a very good one of him.’

‘Quite the best.—You never saw it?’

‘No.’ A pause.

‘It was taken before you turned up. His only copy went to his father. It was an achievement catching him so.’

‘You took it?’

‘Yes. And I liked it so much, I had it enlarged.’

‘I’ve got nothing half so good.’

‘If you’d like one, I’ve some spare copies.’

‘Thanks. I should be grateful.’ He glanced again at the photo. ‘It’s almost unbearably alive.’

‘Yes. I had to get over that,’ she said, in a voice of contained feeling, and moved away to the sofa by the fire. ‘Come and sit down—and tell me things.’

Roy obeyed the first injunction, conscious of a changed inner attitude that would make it both easier and harder to obey the second. Instinctively he delayed the inevitable; instinctively spoke again of Lance.

‘Has he also been conjured into an “old friend”?’

‘No.’ A faint compression of her lips—‘Leonard’s heard about him—more or less.’

‘But not about me?’

‘Not about you.’

She offered no reason for the delicate distinction; and, in view of a tale so little to her credit, he needed none.

She glanced at the clock.

‘Leonard will be home for lunch. We’ve time for a good long talk. With you one can talk. I’m sick to death of tourists, always plodding over the same old ground. We’re simply infested with them. Robin Gilmour’s my only local diversion. He’s a clever boy.’

‘One of the right sort. I met him yesterday, responding to an S.O.S.—Don’t demoralise him.’

The faint shrug and sidelong smile took him back to the days of his own demoralisation.

‘That’s his look-out. I like talking to men; and it’s not my fault that there are no others on this desert island.’

‘Desert island!’ Roy flashed out. ‘Udaipur’s unique——’

She checked him with a lifted hand. ‘I’m tired of hearing that. Of course it would appeal—to you. But don’t spill your enthusiasms over me.’

‘Not likely,’ he retorted, half annoyed. ‘Doesn’t the beauty of it all give you any sort of pleasure?’

‘Oh yes, at first it did—the elephants and the peacocks and the palaces. But it’s a dead and gone beauty. There’s an ache in it that makes one discontented. And discontent, in my case, is never divine! Those islands and pavilions on the lake suggest some sort of mediaeval Court d’Amour, days when lovers made an art of love. I used to moon about there sometimes when Leonard was in the Palace; but I found it only gave me the blues. Thrilling adventures ought to happen there. And in these drab days they never could, or would——’ She turned to him with her softened glance, and his annoyance evaporated. ‘What a grouse! And I’m not given that way. It’s your knack of sympathetic understanding—a fatal lure to egoists!—And you haven’t yet really told me anything.’

‘I enjoy listening.’

‘Even to heresy about your admired Udaipur? I’m glad the enjoyment’s mutual. For I may as well break it to you that you’re not stopping on at the Guest House, writing your beautiful book in those dreary rooms. You’re going to give us the pleasure of your company.’

Here was his awkward moment thrust on him in its most unpalatable form—an act of flat discourtesy.

‘Really, it’s more than kind of you,’ he took refuge in polite formality—‘and I hate refusing. But it’s not possible—for several reasons.’

‘Not possible? For what reasons?’ Her blank incredulity did not make matters easier. ‘They’ll have to be cast-iron, if I’m to accept them and absolve you——’

‘Oh, you’ll do more than absolve me, you’ll withdraw——’ Politeness, in their case, would not serve.

‘Reason one: I may be here for a couple of months, working hard. I simply must be on my own, have all time at my command——’

‘Well—so you could——’

‘My dear Rose, with you in the house—I couldn’t!’ He hoped the implicit compliment would soften the coming shock. It pleased her palpably.

‘Reason one is not cast-iron,’ was all she said.

‘Reason two is——’ He paused, hating himself for the obvious hesitation. ‘Though I’ve a room in the Guest House and complete independence, I’m here on a visit—to my mother’s people.’

‘Your—mother’s—people?’ No mistaking her change of tone. ‘Here——?’

‘Yes. I told you she was a Rajput of very high family. I suppose, at least, you know Sir Lakshman Singh by name?’

‘That fine-looking old man? I’ve met him at the Palace. And is he——?’

‘Yes. He’s my grandfather. And he’s as fine as he looks. The Minister for Education is my uncle and the old Maharána was a cousin of sorts. We come of an aristocracy that has kept itself pure by strict marriage laws and training in knightly ideals. So I’m not apologising for my Rajput relations.’

‘You never did.’ Voice and face were curiously blank, as if she were still uncertain how to deal with his uncomfortable revelation. Their eyes met; and she leaned towards him, speaking more naturally. ‘But Roy, what madness to come out here among them all, when you were safely settled in England. How could your wife let you come? Does she know India?’

‘Yes, she’s been out with me. If it wasn’t for the children, she’d be here now. She loves my grandfather and she loved my mother. So did Lance, so did everyone who knew her——’ He checked himself and asked with a direct look, ‘Now do you absolve me—and withdraw?’

To his complete surprise she slowly shook her head.

‘I don’t absolve you. And I don’t withdraw. Even if we weren’t friends, you ought to be here. Sir Lakshman would understand, better than you seem to do, that you’re putting yourself and us in a very awkward position. A distinguished traveller staying at the Guest House——’

‘There’s nothing unusual in an Englishman being the guest of an Indian Prince,’ he caught hopefully at the side issue. ‘There need be no awkwardness at all. His Highness knows the facts.’

‘Knows the facts——?’

Her dismay angered him.—‘Damn it all, Rose, I’ve not committed murder or forgery——’ He would have sprung up to go, but she checked him, and he said more quietly,—‘My cousin Dyán Singh and the Maharána are great friends. I’m dining at the Palace to-morrow night.’

She was frowning pensively into the fire.

‘Don’t flare up again. I—I didn’t want Leonard to know, till he knew you,’ she said in a troubled tone, that only half appeased his sensitive pride.

‘But surely a man in Political service must know enough about caste and race—to make distinctions?’

‘Perhaps he does.’ Her relief was evident. ‘I only know he feels very strongly about mixed marriages.’

‘So do most of us. But that needn’t involve penalising the victims.’

‘I’m afraid it often does——’

A car pulled up outside. A man’s voice shouted. There were quick steps in the verandah.

‘That’s Leonard—back very early. I wonder——?’

The steps were coming nearer. As the door opened, she put out an urgent hand.

‘Roy—don’t say anything, unless I give you a sign——’

He frowned, and they both stood up as Penryth came briskly towards them.

In life, as in the photograph, he looked arid and efficient, spare in mind and body, a man who played straight yet trusted few, and kept his own shutters closed.

They opened, as it were, to smile at his beautiful wife. They closed with a snap—or so Roy fancied—when he turned to greet her guest.

‘Ah—Sir Roy Sinclair. Doing the Grand Tour?’

As their hands met and fell apart the conviction flashed on Roy—‘He knows; and he doesn’t make distinctions—to any extent.’

But at the moment he was otherwise concerned.

Turning to Rose, he spoke rapidly in a hard voice: ‘Shocking news from Lahore. I came over at once, in case you might hear wild reports.’

‘Another outrage? It’s getting chronic.’

In her wide gaze there was anger rather than fear.

‘Not a man this time. An officer’s wife and two children,’ he flung out with contained fury.

‘Murdered?’ She was startled now.

‘It amounts to that. The woman has been so cut about that she can’t live. She was attacked in her verandah by a Sikh with a drawn sword. Announced himself as a Congress-wallah, out to kill the General; but it seems he found women and children better sport, damn him. When the poor lady tried to defend herself he slashed at her arms, chased her through the bungalow, cut her down and fractured her skull.’

‘Horrible!’ Rose put a hand across her eyes as if to shut out the inner vision. ‘And the children——?’

‘Both badly injured, but they may live. The Sikh flung down the bearer who pluckily tackled him, found the two small girls in the compound and cut at them. Only their topis saved them from cracked skulls. The little one has six wounds on her head and body——’

‘The devil!’ Roy exclaimed, not troubling to contain his fury. ‘Have they collared him?’

Penryth flung him a quick look. ‘Yes. The servants got him, and handed him over.’

‘He’ll hang, of course?’

‘Oh, of course. And Calcutta will canonise him. No satisfaction for the man who’s had his wife and children hacked about in the name of politics.’

This time it was Rose who spoke.

‘Hanging’s too mild for such a fiendish attack. They don’t mind losing their lives. But they mind being hurt.’

This was a changed Rose, all the softness drained out of her face and voice; sharply reminding Roy of that distant Rose—his promised wife—on the night of the Lahore riots, when she sat rigid in her saddle and watched an angry mob hurling bricks and stones at her stepfather and Lance, when he himself had felt in his veins her recoil from his link with India. As she spoke, the sense of it—actual or fanciful—galled him again.

Penryth was giving her details of the captured man.

‘He’s no mere fanatic, but a Congress worker confessed. Joined a Punjab Training Battalion simply to get the chance of potting a British officer. He swears there are plenty of men in his village ready to follow his lead. Hints darkly at a revolution brewing that’ll startle the British.’

Roy, feeling side-tracked, ventured a remark—

‘I expect our C.I.D. men could tell him as much as he knows about that.’

Again the quick look, not unfriendly, but keen.

‘Trust them. They keep their eyes open and their mouths shut. As for Nehru’s lot, if they think they can frighten us out of the country, they’ll find themselves mightily mistaken.’

‘All the same,’ Rose stated in her changed voice, ‘India will soon be no place for English women and children.’

‘To admit it, my dear, amounts to playing their game. We’ve got to let ’em see that an outrage here and there won’t scare out women into showing the white feather.’

A glint in his eyes hinted at a sharp divergence between them on that thorny subject.

‘It’s not a case of the white feather,’ she retorted very low. ‘But a thing like that makes one simply hate them all—distrust them all——’

She stopped a shade too obviously, realising her slip; and her husband, also realising, helped her out.

‘Of course, for the moment, it distorts one’s point of view,’ he said crisply. ‘But for me, personally, it’s a comfort—though not to our credit—to feel that my own wife is safer in a Native State than in British India.’

‘Oh, safer——?’

She turned from him with a faint lift of her head: and he, dismissed, reverted to the embarrassing stranger with an air of formal politeness that set Sir Roy Sinclair at exactly the right distance from the Resident of Udaipur. So, at least, it seemed to Sinclair, cursed with a skin too few for his comfort.

‘Must be getting back to the Palace, Sir Roy. A Resident’s job isn’t so soft as it looks to the outsider. People on all sides begging one, privately, to intervene in this or that; it’s not so easy to keep ears and eyes and mouth shut. But a minimum of interference is our policy—right or wrong. And my Maharána is one of the best—I just came over to give my wife the facts of this tragic affair. Anything we can do for you—delighted. See you again at tiffin.’

And Sinclair, on the spur of a prickly moment, decided otherwise.

‘Sorry, but I may have to be getting back myself,’ he said, presenting what Tara called his ‘best lacquered surface’ to the man who did not make distinctions worth mentioning. ‘My time here is limited; and I’ve a good deal of work to get through.’

He knew Rose had turned her head; and he saw Penryth twitch his colourless eyebrows.

‘I understood we were to meet at tiffin.’ It was not the official who spoke this time. ‘Man proposes—but woman disposes! If my wife intends you to stay—you will!’

‘I do intend him to stay,’ Rose said softly, and Sinclair heard the inflexible note in her low voice. He intended none the less to lunch elsewhere.

But the moment they were alone, she came close to him and said with a curious urgency, ‘Roy—why are you behaving like this? Of course you’ll stay.’

‘No, Rose. If you’ll forgive me, I won’t stay.’

‘Why not? Tell me.’

‘If you insist—your husband’s manner, at the start, touched me on the raw.’

Her fingers just rested on his sleeve. ‘Roy, my dear, you’re far too sensitive. It’s so difficult——’

‘Yes, it is—a damn sight more difficult than you people can possibly understand——’

The pain in his tone moved her to sudden protest.

‘These fatal mixed marriages! They ought to be forbidden by law, like the near relations in the prayerbook. Even if the man and woman are happy, the children pay the price. It’s cruel.’

‘I’ve been singularly fortunate myself,’ he said, more moved than he cared to let her see.

‘You’re exceptional. That’s partly what makes you feel pulled in two. D’you suppose many of the others out here feel as you do?’

That she should be even mildly interested in the others!

‘Not many. The pull’s all one way, they despise the Indian streak, because others do. It’s simpler in some ways than my tug-of-war; but it breeds their fatal sense of inferiority. They’re citizens of No Man’s Land, poor devils. And you people—who should know better—don’t improve matters by your frank contempt for “a touch of the country.” When I first came out I soon discovered that. Can you wonder if I’m a bit thin-skinned?’

She sighed. ‘It’s ingrained prejudice. But, in your case, one wouldn’t know. None of us did. And it really is asking for trouble, Roy, to come here among a lot of Indian relations——’

‘I’m proud to claim them,’ he flung out hotly. ‘If you weren’t so damned exclusive, if you’d put yourself out to know some of them personally, things would be easier—for both of us. The narrow type of Anglo-Indian, who fancies himself a Pillar of Empire, is doing quite as much damage, these times, as any other form of extremist.’

‘If you mean my husband——?’

A faint colour stained her cheeks; and for that flash of resentment he liked her the more.

‘Oh, there are scores of them. I’m not being personal.’

‘In your heart, you are. And it’s unfair—to-day especially. You don’t realise——’

‘There you go.’ His temper flared again. ‘Of course I realise. That’s the curse of it. I see both sides. I can resent Penryth’s attitude—and understand it. I saw the effect of this news on him too clearly. That’s why I won’t stay for tiffin.’

‘But if you back out, he’ll think you saw.’

‘My dear Rose, he’ll be too relieved to fuss about that. Besides——’ he faced her squarely, ‘it’s not only him. This hideous affair has touched you up too. And frankly’—a pause—‘it’s touched me up, as I hinted just now. We may as well be honest with one another. I haven’t forgotten the Lahore riots—and Lance. Nor have you. I saw the same look in your eyes.’

‘You saw——? You’re too quick-sighted, Roy. All the same——’ she turned from him, speaking in a low troubled tone—‘it’s horrible. It does, for the moment, make one hate the sight of a brown face. One can’t help wondering—who next?’

Roy sighed. ‘Yes, naturally. These senseless outrages do more than spill blood. They stir up all the dregs of race hatred. This one’ll start a Mutiny complex in the North. Oh, where’s the damned use—-’ he broke out hotly, ‘of high-minded men sitting round a conference table, trying to create goodwill on both sides, when a handful of terrorists can blow months of work to blazes by some insane murder like this one? The man may hang; Gandhi may do penance; nothing can wipe out the fatal effect on scores of our people.’

She swung round at that. ‘And can you blame them?’

‘No, I can’t. But it’s deplorable. And it hits me hard, because I’ve come out here in the firm belief that we can and must work together, that only so can India find herself——’

He broke off, chilled by the faint lift of her brows.

‘Oh, it’s easy—and cheap to be sceptical. I’m simply boring you. I’d better go. We should only grate on each other—as before. Make my excuses; or tell him this news has upset me too, in a different way.’

He held out his hand and her fingers closed on it with a slow soft pressure.

‘When are you going to honour us, Roy?—Sunday?’

‘No. Gilmour’s coming to talk temples.’

‘Monday, then?’

He hesitated. ‘Hadn’t I better keep away? I’m stopping with my people. I can’t see much of you if you’re going to ignore them—if your husband regards me as a superior sort of mongrel——’

‘Roy!’

Oh, he’d be too decent to express it so.’

‘He won’t even feel it so, when he has seen more of you. That’s why I wanted to wait—— Don’t be aggravating and perverse. Come on Monday, when we’ve all calmed down. You’ll find Leonard more interested than I am in India’s future and all the rest of it.’ Her eyes deliberately lingered in his. ‘Don’t you want to see more of me, Roy?’

‘Of course I do.’ He flung out the truth, sooner than pamper her with a sugared compliment. ‘But remember, I’m here to work, not to play.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind!’ she said meekly. ‘Is it a novel?’

‘One is a novel. The other is—“India’s future and all the rest of it”! And I’m not likely to bore you with that.’

‘Very considerate! You’ll get polo—of sorts, here. We must have a cheetah hunt for you, and a pig-drive.’ She was her social self again. ‘It’s really rather idiotic of you not to stay now; but I’ll let you off with a reprimand! And I’ll count on Monday.’

Chapter 8

The old tormenting question: pictures twain
Stamped on the civil warfare of the brain . . .
And yet are both so certain and so plain.
—Gerald Gould

He rode away from the bungalow with an injured sense of having been defrauded by no fault of his own. He had enjoyed the mental change of talking to Rose, had looked forward to a well-served English meal in pleasant company; instead, here he was turned adrift, simply on account of his tiresome racial susceptibility.

In his present mood, it amounted to an acute inner state of civil war. Self-banished from the Residency, he would be more than welcome at his grandfather’s house; but . . .? With a pang he realised that he did not want to join them all at their mid-day meal. His own immediate sensations ranged him with Rose; awoke in him, for the first time, a faint recoil from his link with India. That was detestable. It must pass. But while it lasted he could not eat their salt. He was a man of neither world.

He must content himself with a scratch lunch at the Guest House and an afternoon in the saddle. He would escape from these enclosing hills into open country; turn his face to solitude, the only begetter of wisdom. Then he would return to the one room that was sanctuary—and write. If he chose to sleep there, even to absent himself for a few days, no word would be said, no questions asked. Not that he desired an absence of days; but his normal sense of fealty must be renewed before he could face them all, or permit himself to see more of Rose.

And he definitely wanted to see more of her. The years had mellowed her self-conscious charm. Her beauty could still affect him like a light coming too close, without troubling his senses; and now that the dust of her mother’s vulgarity no longer blew in her eyes, the finer strain in her was more evident; as revealed in her surprising allegiance to the memory of Lance—incalculable creature that she was. Presently he would tell her of that other Lance. If things went well, he might, even try the effect of bringing her and Aruna together. But for the present, he was pledged to the long-deserted creations of his brain.

On the whole, he looked forward to his brief spell of ‘splendid isolation’——

And suddenly he remembered that this afternoon he had arranged to see Suráj Mul and talk over the project of their journey together. The plan, mooted by Bápu, had clearly pleased Suráj; but nothing could be settled without a family conclave—father, uncle and elder brother. This afternoon he had been bidden to the Guest House to bring word of the result. Sinclair had looked forward to their meeting; but his whole inner attitude had been changed by an hour with Rose and that grim news from Lahore. He was in no mood for drastic decisions. He wanted his ride. Above all he wanted to be alone.

Passing the small ‘chowgan,’¹¹ he noticed an excited crowd gathered round a horse and rider very much at odds. The horse, a bright bay waler, was kicking, rearing, lashing out wildly, trying every equine trick he knew to get rid of his rider, who sat him like a centaur. As Sinclair rode up, the crowd fell apart, in the swift fluid fashion of the East, and he recognised—Suráj Mul. But before he could shout ‘Shabash!’ admiration flared into anger. For the man was master now; and he was letting the bay know it with ungoverned ferocity, ruthlessly straining at the handsome head till it was bowed on the lathered chest, using his whip mercilessly behind the saddle and across the sensitive ears. The crowd callous of hurt to man or beast—yelled with sheer excitement; but to Roy’s English sentiment, a horse was sacred as any Shiva’s bull to a Hindu.

Heedless of personal risk, he rode straight at the entangled pair; raised his short whip and lashed with all his force the fingers that gripped the curb.

Stinging pain loosened them. The bay flung up his head with a sound between a cough and a sob. Suráj, infuriated, swung the leaded handle of his own whip full at Sinclair, who swerved—only just in time.

The blow grazed his thigh; the pain made him swear; and Suráj recognised his assailant.

‘You—is it?’

His few swift sentences in the vernacular were wasted on Roy.

‘Yes, it’s me. If I hadn’t swerved like lightning you’d have brained me. Look at that splendid beast—and think shame of yourself. You—a Rajput . . .?’

‘I think no shame,’ Suráj flared up again. ‘He tried to buck me off. I taught him a lesson.’

‘Cruelty teaches nothing but fear. You were angry. You wanted to hurt him. A coward’s game.’ And in rising wrath he added: ‘You needn’t come to the Guest House this afternoon. I make no friend of a man who can treat a horse like that!’

And swinging round, he cantered off before Suráj could collect his scattered wits.

Outside the Guest House, he drew rein and shouted—India’s primitive method of announcing arrival. One shout brought his sais; another brought the Moslem. khansámah—a minor prophet, straight from the Old Testament—who received without demur the impromptu order, ‘Tiffin, ek dum!’

A long chair and a stinging peg sensibly lessened Roy’s inner turmoil. With a cooler brain he confronted practical issues. Damn it all—what would happen now? The next move was up to Suráj. If he made no move their fine plan was doomed. With an ache of compunction Sinclair recalled their swift mutual attraction his own prophetic sense that they two would go far together. He believed it still. He desired it still. Suráj, with all his limitations, had the single eye of the unalloyed type; and the unalloyed type had a magnetic attraction for Roy. Yet he could not lightly dismiss that ugly glimpse of an inner devil, who would be liable to spring out on provocation. Lenient by nature to the whole tribe of human failings, he relegated cruelty to a hell of its own.

Meantime he had won his afternoon of freedom—at a price; though that infernal bruise would do all it could to spoil his ride.

As for work—he felt mentally dislocated by these swift turns of the wheel. Life in India seemed to be infected with the abruptness of her climate; more than ever liable to these sudden dislocations. At Home, in the deep peace of his study, he could keep the world at bay for weeks on end. But there he could rely on Tara, who alone understood his needs and his moods, as she more deeply understood his fits of nameless misery that had no source, no horizon, his phases of disabling self-criticism and despair. She was the core of his life. She lived in him, indestructibly as his soul. Yet, of his own will, he had put half the world between them—— He had nothing of her now but her vivid letters and her portrait that hung above the mantelpiece beside his mother: Tara at five-and-twenty, with smiling eyes and sunbeams in her hair. So fragile she looked, so durable she was, in essence; impermeable to devitalising influences of doubt and disillusion. Because her eye was single—as his was not, nor ever could be—her whole body was full of light. Belonging to no formal church, she lived inflexibly by some inner gleam direct from heaven. She alone could colour his life and his work without turning it awry. And by the unifying mystery of a genuine marriage she had made herself essential to both.

Sitting desolate in that unhomely Guest House, he longed for her with an April passion, at times magically renewed. Rose, in some sense, might be partly responsible for an emotional stir that concerned her not at all; so sharply had the sensation of her revived the pangs and fervours of youth. And always, with sudden longing, sprang the sharpened fear that Death might strike at one or the other before they could meet again. But that night, in the House of Gods, he had made his final choice. There was also a definite contract with an Olympian editor for a monthly article of something more than impressions: and his longing returned unto him void.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

An hour later he was in the saddle again, painfully aware of his grazed and bruised leg, riding along the margin of the lake where the city came crowding down to the water’s edge. Passing a small shrine of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, he halted to watch the little crowd of devotees, trailing up with offerings to the hideous scarlet image, lord of the monkey tribe, sacred through the ages because of help given to Rāma in rescuing his stolen Sita from the Ogre-king of Ceylon.

Down by the lake, white bathing ledge, white wall and silver water were lit up by a bevy of women in bright and delicate tints that the Rajputni delights to wear—raw vermilion, saffron, turquoise and indigo; girls in clinging saris wading waist-deep, others rinsing bright garments; every detail doubled in the lake. An older woman gripping a restless boy between her knees, was picking lice out of his hair, crooning a tale to keep him still. A pair of brown monkeys, not far off, were intent on the same engrossing search—in their case, fleas. There were men bathing also in dhotis; lifting the water and letting it fall like beads of light: an oblation to the sun.

Worship and washing, the ceaseless propitiating of malign powers, human and divine—that is Hindu India cramped by the iron hand of caste: wrongly used, a tyranny; rightly used, the secret of social stability core of the aristocratic idea. And on this god-ridden caste-ridden land a mixed body of political idealists would thrust the doubtful gift of yet another god—democracy the many-headed; half discredited in the West.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

On and on he rode, making for the natural gateway of escape from encircling hills. At last, with a queer sense of freedom, he passed out of Rajputana’s loveliest oasis into leagues of lifeless desert country; yielded his mind to the influence of solitude, his senses to the strong sunshine that flowed through him like a strange still wine: flesh and spirit mingled in pure sensation—the essence of poetry after all. For the spirit, living through the senses, could draw nourishment from the changeful yet familiar face of earth and sky, from patient trees and constant hills.

Alone in this sterile region there came over him—almost with a sense of lost comradeship—the spell of his beech wood at home, low skies and brooding trees, every aspect known and friendly; or the rooted security of a Nature little given to violent excesses. In India man was of no account. Gods, goddesses and demons held the field; three thousand Olympians, of high or low degree; a life’s task to propitiate them all. Here Nature told no flattering tale. The heavens were far and high. Earth had no softening veil of atmosphere. Yet, in his own case, here were roots also, not personal but racial—the more mysterious and profound.

As in England he had felt the pull of this mighty magnet, so now, in these wilds, he felt perversely homesick for Bramleigh Beeches; for his leather chair in the library, for Tara and the children and nursery tea; achingly aware of the leagues beyond leagues of space dividing him from all he loved best on earth. Anything might be happening, at this moment, to any one of them—and he not knowing. Tara’s fine long letter was full of those trivial human touches that make the far scene alive and near. But the complete loss of contact with his children troubled him more than he had foreseen. What did that small devoted Lilāmani make of his base desertion? What, after all, did the fate of this whole semi-continent matter to him, personally, compared with the fate of that one small daughter? Yet at home, in his mother’s shrine, he had seen it otherwise. That was his fate, his dharna, to be swung now this way, now that, between two selves, two lives, each resolute to keep its most important reality intact. To whichever world one self turned, the other self whispered, ‘Not here—not here——’

By the time he had ridden as far as might be, in view of getting back at dusk, he could see the events of the morning in a drier light; could admit that, in spite of that unpleasant shock, a break with Suráj was the last thing he desired. Though he could not himself make a move, he would respond to the right gesture. And that rested with Suráj. . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

When evening shadows were creeping out from rocks and trees, he rode slowly back through the same scene, harmonised and embalmed by the light laid on it from a changed angle; the near hills glowing, the farther ones shading away into infinite distance.

As the sun vanished, the stars rushed out. The darkening sky was thick with them by the time he reached his apology for home. A log fire blazed on the flat Indian hearth, and the bare room had been transformed by his own few possessions; books, photographs, a vase of gold chrysanthemums and the two portraits over the mantelpiece—his banished wife, his vanished mother. Between them all they gave the unfurnished place a personal atmosphere, that perceptible emanation from the colour, form and grouping of inanimate things as restful to the mind as colour to the senses.

Eager for work, hungry for dinner, he flung himself into the deep cane chair and shouted for Hari Lāl. He had decided to sleep on the spot. His camp bed would serve, in the small adjoining room, where he had stowed his odds and ends. At the back of his brain lurked an unacknowledged hope that the bearer might have some message or note to deliver from Suráj. But Hari Lāl had nothing to impart. He received his Master’s unexpected order with a grave ’Hazúr’; removed the riding-boots and prescribed neem leaves for the bruise.

Sinclair, left alone again, dismissed the nagging thought of Suráj only to be troubled by the appealing thought of Bápu—puzzled and anxious when he did not appear at bedtime. So he scribbled a note of regret, in affectionate terms, stating quite simply his need to be alone and work, which was the truth, if not the whole truth. That done, he closed his mind firmly against all intruders. Settled by the fire, a board across his knees, he worked peacefully till midnight at the deserted novel, which was at last beginning to create a pleasant familiar stir in his brain. After years of critical work it was a keen pleasure to be once more under the spell of a living theme that moved in its own mysterious way; and as he brooded on the unfolding pattern, the few salient characters, he found, in the haunting sensation of Aruna on the lake, the source of his secondary Indian woman—the first being, inevitably, his mother. If Aruna, herself, ever guessed that he had used her thus for his own ends, she would do more than forgive. . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

He woke early, in his comfortless camp bed; and at once there sprang the thought: what the devil was to be done about Suráj? That was a question he alone could answer; and the khansámah, coming to remove breakfast, brought the answer in a lordly sealed envelope.

Slicing it open, Sinclair read—with mingled amusement, relief and satisfaction—

‘From Suráj Mul to Sir Roy Sinclair.

‘If I have caused any injury through a blow that came from angry impulse, I ask forgiveness. If I have lost face through punishment of a stubborn horse, I ask you to consider that man is not yet God. There was rage in my blood against that horse, or my hand would never have been raised to strike at you. Because of one ill deed, will you make an end of everything, just when hope was lifting my heart?

‘I will not come to you till I know if I may come as a friend. For, by God, I am Rajput. I lay my forehead on no man’s foot. If I may still have the honour to make that journey with you, Bhai-ji, I will ride the devil inside me as I ride my ponies. I will return honour for honour—I swear it, by the Sin of the Sack of Chitor.

‘Send word—and I come. Send no word—and I do not come. But I kill that horse.

‘Suráj Mul.’

The last sentence was no mere putting on of the screw. Suráj would do as he said. In its painful way, it was a tribute to the swift and deep impress he had made on that fiery young man. Of course he would send word; though there was little to be said between two men of breeding, who shared the sense of a link rooted in past lives.

He took a half-sheet of note-paper and wrote:

‘Come—and come soon, Bhai-ji. We will speak of the future, not of the past. We come of one stock. I want no Rajput’s forehead on my foot, but a friend’s hand in mine.—R. S.’

He came soon. From the rush of hoofs on the dusty drive, he had come at a gallop. And Sinclair, not to be generous by halves, sprang up to meet him, in Eastern phrase, ‘at the edge of the carpet.’

Standing in the open doorway, they greeted and clasped hands.

‘Panchayet hogya?’¹² Sinclair instinctively used the other’s tongue.

‘Hogya. Sub teek,’¹³ Suráj answered.

‘Good. It was written,’ Sinclair said in English. ‘Now come on, and we’ll get down to brass tacks—if you know what those are?’

‘I know tin-tacks. Not much difference?’

‘Not much.’ Sinclair laughed, and took him by the elbow as they went in together.

No word was said of the violent episode, though it lurked in the minds of both. That journey together was their karma, come of it what might.

Chapter 9

By what measure do you mete—
By what I did, or what I sought and lost . . .
The little thing I am, and what I might have been?
—Humbert Wolfe

After Suráj—Rose. Many and strange were the contrasts that sprang from his link with both worlds. Lunch at the Residency went smoothly and pleasantly; Rose demoralising Gilmour under Roy’s very eyes; Penryth entertaining his distinguished guest with intelligent impersonal talk, mainly on his own specialised subject—Indian Princes; the slender chances of federation, as a working concern, among five hundred and sixty royalties, in all stages of development, ranging from the advanced rulers of Hyderabad, Mysore and Bikanir, to minor princelings, with show cabinets and toy armies, all entitled, more or less, to a voice in the working of the new scheme.

‘They talk of a united front,’ he said, with a shrewd glance at his attentive guest. ‘But you won’t find much more unity among their very mixed Highnesses than among the politicians—except on one point. They all heartily hate the Political Department, though they may swear by certain Political Agents. Yet you find a hardened politician, like Iyer, urging that the creators of that “eighth wonder,” the British Administration, should be given a freer hand in Native States. He’d even have English Chief Ministers and Justices—— So there you are! Through such a sea of contradictions, we have somehow to steer a straight course.’

If he looked for pro-Indian views from a man of semi-Indian blood, none had been offered him. Sinclair had not come out to air opinions, but to listen and learn, from the simplest villager or the driest official who could be induced to speak his honest thought: and he listened so assiduously to Penryth that Rose rallied him afterwards about the impression he had made on her unimpressionable husband.

For his benefit they had organised a cheetah hunt; and Dyán had given him a taste of black buck stalking among the low hills, of duck shooting at sunset on the lake. Abetted by his grandfather, he had one day carried Aruna off by car to Achilgar, a ruined fortress on a ridge of the Aravális. There, in an old forgotten garden, they had spent two enchanted hours that lingered in his memory: the scent of sun-warmed, over-blown roses; the marble seat under a great mulberry tree, where they had been served with grapes and oranges; the murmur of doves, and a troop of monkeys crashing through the branches—big grey langurs with fringed black faces, the true Hanuman, that none may smite whatever sins they commit.

Now there was a plan in the air for an all day outing: himself and Suráj with the two women. Aruna was eager for Grace to see the fort and lovely old garden; Suráj no less eager to push up into the hills—haunted, for him, by the spirit of Pertáp Singh, Udaipur’s greatest warrior-prince, hero of his own budding epic. His brain was buzzing with one particular Canto, the famous battle of Huldighát, when Akbar sent his legions to capture Udaipur. Roy had suggested that he should recite the tale, there among the wild hills. He had sounded his grandfather, and had secured Aruna, provided Mrs Lynch went also.

His dim idea of bringing her and Rose together had not yet borne fruit. Too well he knew the futility of mere surface contact between East and West; yet, by his own double caste, a charge seemed laid on him to make some attempt at bridge-building. This afternoon perhaps he might make a suggestion. Aruna and Mrs Lynch, with Suráj, were bidden to tea at the Guest House. She was to bring her sitar, to give them some music, if mood and atmosphere were in accord. Details for Wednesday’s outing were to be arranged.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

The old khansámah had risen to the occasion; soda scones piping hot, chocolate biscuits and an ornate iced cake. Mrs Lynch, by request, was playing hostess at his inter-racial tea-party; dispelling all tiresome race consciousness because the sense of it did not trouble her at all.

Still a doctor at heart, she had spent a long morning in the hospital, helping the zealous inexperienced matron over a serious case, complicated by the inescapable sanctities, that must be observed though the patient perish. Her tale involved a measure of plain speaking; and she glanced at Suráj with a twitch of her eyebrows.

‘Is it permitted, friend, for a doctor-woman to suggest that the cult of holiness is carried too far by Hindus for practical purposes? Just because I care so much for your women and children I get impatient. But I can generally trust an Indian to forgive impatience that springs from the heart.’

She had struck the right note. Suráj—a stranger to unadorned English speech—responded readily to the tribute implied in her appeal.

‘Yes, you can. We Indians know when we are liked. And those who like us can say what they please. You are right about impractical holiness. We are not practical people; and perhaps not so spiritual as some suppose! Because we can’t catch trains or make plain statements, or be wise with money, we often get credit for being above the earth, when we are just being careless or lazy.’

Mrs Lynch laughed. ‘I must admit I’ve often met that form of spirituality. But I’ve also met the other form among your women and your gurus—true saints, who teach the way of wisdom through the six principles: silence, listening, remembering, understanding, judgment and action.’

While Suráj gazed at her in astonishment, Sinclair asked eagerly, ‘You got those from a pukka guru?’

‘Yes: a very holy one in Kashmir; as sane as he is holy. They often go together. He has travelled and seen the fruits of our so-called progress—the wonders of flight and electricity and wireless. He was interested, but not impressed by the “multiplying of bodies”; so much activity without discrimination—a mere demon of doing. Privately, I agreed; but of course I stood up for my kind. With him, too, I was allowed to say what I pleased. I’m afraid I often do, without waiting for permission.’

The word Kashmir shifted Sinclair’s mind to a matter of more personal interest: Lance Desmond, and the earliest chance of meeting him up there. So he annexed Mrs Lynch, leaving Aruna to amuse Suráj, who had noticed the sitar and wanted music. But Sinclair wanted first to hear more of Desmond, and the guru, whom he must certainly meet: one that had been an Oxford graduate, a Deputy Commissioner and a Minister in Mysore, before he turned his back on worldly dreams and desires. Then they spoke of Lance Desmond, who would not be in Kashmir till late May or early June—half a year away; and their brief digression was ended too soon by the discovery that Suráj had persuaded Aruna to play. She was showing him her sitar—a graceful mandolin-like instrument; explaining how she plucked the first string for the melody while the others were used to produce the familiar soft resonance, never one clear note.

‘It is not only poet’s talk—“music of the spheres,”’ she was telling him simply. ‘All things in sky and earth have their own sound, always going on—a wonderful pattern without end. But we can only catch a few notes here and there to make our music’—she turned to Roy—‘often not at all beautiful to those who like Western music, loud and strong; making a “tune,” jumping from note to note leaving holes between! Ours is more like weaving a pattern——’

‘Well, weave us a pattern,’ he commanded, ‘for this time of evening. And four people in harmony.’

She drew the instrument nearer and caressed the strings.

‘Yes, that is possible, because we are in harmony. Those who listen make the music nearly as much as those who play.’

She fitted a small wire plectrum on to one finger, and softly plucked at the strings, that gave out a plaintive murmur of sound. Then she looked up.

‘There should be a tabla to mark the rhythm.’

Suráj, listening attentively, interposed. ‘ Perhaps I can imitate one very softly on this tray. You begin, and I’ll try what my fingers can do.’

‘That would be wonderful!’ Delighted, she waved a hand at the others. ‘Just sit quite at ease, reading a book or thinking of different things. Not arranged, in your bodies or your minds, for listening. Let it come.’

So they sat at ease by the fire, in the light of one shaded lamp—and let it come: soft pizzicato and thrumming tabla; timeless, tuneless; half-tones and quarter-tones too fine for untrained ears; each note blurring slightly into the one above or below it. And at intervals a sudden leap, to an unexpected note, sent a thrill along the nerves, like certain phrases in Wagner’s complex music.

At first only the sitar spoke; then Suráj caught the theme. With the tips of his fingers and the heel of his palm, he began beating out a low intricate rhythm; an undercurrent to the sitar sobbing through it, now plaintive, now fervent, making sound patterns as delicate as young fern fronds against the fight. Monotonous, unmelodious—not music, as they understood the word—its unfamiliar cadences flowed over them and around them and through them, releasing the mind from a sense of immediate things. And imperceptibly the spell began to work.

Sinclair, sunk in the deep cane chair, was staring into his own log fire, six thousand miles away. Prince lay asleep at his feet; through the cautiously opened door peeped the dark head of his small daughter, knowing herself privileged. Curled on his knee, his arm round her thin little body, she snuggled to him, demanding a ‘really truly tale.’ And of course it was the old heroic tale of Tara, the Star of Bednore. . . .

Grace Lynch, leaning forward, chin on her hands, was transported by the same spell to a house in Peshawar. The figure in the chair was no good-looking stranger. It was John Lynch, the strong man of the Border, solidly built, tanned and weathered, with pale brooding eyes and a large capacity for silence. It was John, whom she had refused to marry when they first discovered each other in the wilds of Kashmir; who had come back into her fife after eight years; and had claimed her again, defying the tyranny of work—hers no less than his own. Their need of one another had prevailed—and still prevailed—over the habits of work-engrossed years, over differences in outlook and character that cut deep. But there were hidden bits of adamant in both, and they had lost the pliability of youth—if indeed John had ever been pliable, even in his cradle. She still let him go his lone way when the necessity was on him; and he respected—something less readily—the same necessity in her. A letter from him this morning—bald and brief, yet charged with his need of her—had sharpened her impatience to be with him again. . . .

In the midst of a phrase the music ceased, with an audible twang. Hari Lāl stood in the open doorway and announced ‘Penryt Memsahib.’

The little ghost vanished from Sinclair’s knee. Grace Lynch was her doctor self again. Suráj muttered an oath; and Aruna sprang up with a glance at the clock.

‘I didn’t think it was so late. Music makes me forget things. I’m afraid I have to go.’

Sinclair, rising too, spoke low and rapidly. ‘You have to stay. If you try to bolt, I’ll say “ Darwaza bund,”¹⁴ which would be rather rude. She must have heard your music.’

‘Roy, you must not be rude.’ The appeal to her courtesy took effect. ‘But why must I stay: she will only be bored.’

‘Stay because I wish it, Aruna-bai,’ he said in a changed tone.

With a faint shrug, she pushed aside her sitar; and he sent out word that the door was open.

They were all standing when Rose came in; Sinclair and Grace by the fire, Suráj and Aruna a little apart. Rose wore the becoming hat and long fur coat of their first meeting. Her lips were slightly reddened, her natural pallor untouched. One smiling glance acknowledged them all, as she swept forward and shook hands with Sinclair.

‘Am I intruding on a party? Why didn’t you darwaza bund me?’

‘Why should I? The party is honoured!’ Sinclair answered lightly, and with a gesture he introduced them: ‘My cousins—Aruna: Suráj Mul—and Mrs Lynch.’

To the Indians Rose bowed graciously. To Mrs Lynch she held out her hand; a distinction probably automatic, but it vexed Roy, acutely aware of the hidden changes wrought by her alien presence in the minds of his harmonious little party. And she, unaware of inner discords, accustomed to be flattered and admired, could not seriously suppose herself other than welcome.

‘So sorry you and Mrs Nair couldn’t come to tea on Wednesday,’ she addressed herself to Mrs Lynch, while Suráj and Aruna sat down by the table, detached from the other three. ‘Are you staying here much longer?’

‘Another week or ten days. Then I go back with Aruna to Peshawar.’

This was not the same Mrs Lynch who had talked of the guru and Lance Desmond.

‘Peshawar?’ Rose echoed. ‘Delightful place. Are you stationed there?’

‘Yes. My husband is head of the Police—D.I.G.’

Rose stared in frank surprise.

‘Your husband—D.I.G.? And you—staying with the Nairs? Of course I thought——?

‘You thought I was a missionary?’ Mrs Lynch took her up with a touch of crispness. ‘So I was—till last summer. A medical missionary, head of the Kohat Hospital.’

‘Very trying work.’ Rose pulled out the sympathetic stop to atone for her slip. ‘You must be thankful to have done with all that.’

It was Grace Lynch who stared this time. ‘Thankful?’ I hated giving it up. I go there often, when my husband can spare me.’ Mrs Penryth’s puzzled smile moved her to add in a friendlier tone, ‘You don’t understand that?’

‘No—I don’t,’ Rose said simply: and Mrs Lynch laughed—a very pleasant laugh.

‘It’s lucky tastes vary; or how would the world’s work ever get done?’

‘Even dentists and butchers,’ Roy hazarded, ‘are probably born, not made!’—He consigned Rose to his armchair.—’ May I order fresh tea?’

She refused tea, but accepted a cigarette; and as he called for cocktails, she flung hack her coat, revealing a pale green dress and pearls.

‘I heard music.’—She glanced at the sitar—‘Who was playing?’

‘Aruna,’ Roy answered; and Rose turned to her with practised graciousness.

‘Do please go on, Miss—er?’

‘Miss Rām Singh,’ Roy filled the pause, adding unhopefully, ‘Won’t you, Aruna, give us all the pleasure of hearing some more?’

Her reproachful gaze convicted him of going over to the enemy.

‘I’m sorry—but it is not possible,’ she said, her voice low and resolute, as if she had drawn an invisible veil between herself and them; not mere shyness, but a delicate, deliberate withdrawal. Precisely so he had seen his mother veil her light when Aunt Jane came into the room.

‘I’m sorry too,’ Rose said, so genuinely that Aruna’s natural courtesy prevailed.

‘You see,’ she explained, ‘our music is not a piece, written for playing to order. It is in my head.’

‘You compose it?’ Rose was visibly impressed.

‘Not exactly. There are many themes; and out of them each player can weave different patterns.’

‘Well, can’t you go on weaving the one I heard?’

Roy saw how Aruna’s knuckles whitened with the pressure of her clasped hands; but she could only say in a troubled voice, ‘The thread is broken. If you try to speak from the heart to a stranger, the words are like shy children. They won’t show hidden thoughts to order. Perhaps you can see that?’

And Rose—who had watched her with a dawning interest—said kindly, ‘Yes—I can see that. I wouldn’t dream of pressing you. But I didn’t want to interrupt an entertainment. D’you play a good deal?’

‘Yes, among my own women. Everywhere, now, music is coming back into our lives——’

But Rose’s brief interest had flickered out. Instinctively her glance wandered to the good-looking young man who was talking in a low voice to Mrs Lynch and there fell a pause. Aruna, absently fingering her sitar, had no more to say. Rose had no more to ask. Mentally they were in different spheres, though bodily they sat in one room.

Sinclair, looking on with an amused understanding of both, came forward and sat down in the chair nearest Aruna. But it was Rose who smiled gratefully at him and began to talk of tennis. Would he come the day after to-morrow for a game, if they could contrive a four? He accepted with pleasure.

‘Aruna plays a good game,’ he added, aware of administering a small shock.

‘You play tennis?’ She turned charmingly to Aruna.

‘Yes, I’m very fond of it. We have a good court near my grandfather’s house. Didn’t you know?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t.’ Politely rebuffed, she appealed to Roy. ‘You play with them? I thought the ladies were purdah.’

‘So they are. But, as a near relation, I’m privileged,’ he told her—glad of a chance to claim the privilege in Aruna’s hearing; and grateful to Mrs Lynch who had made a move to break up their broken party.

‘Were you accepting for Wednesday?’ she asked Roy.

‘Good Lord! I forgot.’ He turned to Rose. ‘I’m terribly sorry. But we four are going off into the hills that day. Perhaps another afternoon?’

‘Oh, any day will do for me!’ Her polite smile cloaked vexation; but she slipped into her social skin again and shook hands with Mrs Lynch. ‘You must come to dinner one evening, before you go. I’m sure you won’t mind meeting Sir Roy! He’s our one attraction; though there always may be a tourist or two.’

‘Delighted to meet Sir Roy!’ Grace accepted, amused at the delicate distinction: tea for a ‘mish,’ dinner for the wife of a D.I.G. ‘He and I have already “got together” over his books and Indian women, and an odd coincidence about my husband’s great friend, Lance Desmond.’

‘Lance—Desmond?’ Rose echoed in a strange voice. ‘What Lance Desmond?’—She turned to Roy.—‘You never told me.’

‘I meant to,’ he excused himself, giving her time. ‘it’s a nephew, in the Political.’

‘How strange!’

It was the note of conventional interest; but he knew she would outstay the others.

She turned to Mrs Lynch. ‘Would Friday suit you?’

‘I think so,’ Grace temporised, doubtful whether the invitation included her uncovenanted friend. ‘I must ask Mrs Nair. We’re very much booked up this week.’

‘Booked up?’ Rose echoed, in polite surprise. ‘But who else is there here?’

Grace controlled an unseemly smile.

‘The Nairs have several friends in the city,’ she explained; ‘and Indians are so hospitable. Our time’s too short. And in this wonderful place, there’s so much—isn’t there?—to see and learn.’

‘Learn——? What is there to learn—in Udaipur?’

And Grace, smiling outright, deftly evaded a direct reply.

‘If I tried to tell you, it would take me till dinner time! After all, one’s interests are a matter of personal taste.’

Rose had the sense to leave it at that. She had also the graciousness to shake hands with Aruna. But Suráj stood aloof and bowed with a deference so excessive that Roy suspected irony.

He went out with them all into the verandah and gave his friend’s arm a private shake.

‘You must mind your manners, Suráj!’ he chaffed, under his breath.

‘She should mind her own,’ the Rajput retorted, a flash of temper in his eyes.

And Sinclair, watching them go, thought: That’s what Rose and her kind do to uphold our izzat¹⁵ out here. Hard luck, though, having Lance jumped on her.’

He found her standing by the mantelpiece, one foot on the fender, a pose of conscious grace. As he entered, she turned on him a look so revealing that it startled him.

‘Roy—when did you know about this young man?’

‘Soon after I arrived,’ he answered vaguely. ‘I’d have told you that first morning, if I hadn’t been bombed out of your house by the news from Lahore. And since then—I’ve been meaning to—at a convenient moment. Aruna says—an astonishing likeness.’

‘Did she know—our Lance?’

‘Yes, at Jaipur.’

‘I would like to meet—his double,’ she said very low.

‘I intend to, on the first opportunity. Just now, he’s buried alive in Chitral. But he’ll be coming over to Kashmir in June. I hope to be up there too.’

‘I was going to Simla. But on the chance of so strange a meeting, I think it must be Gulmarg. The three of us—how queer. . .!’

She turned to the fire again, looking from one to the other of his father’s portraits.

Suddenly she said, ‘They’re remarkable pictures. Such a contrast. Your mother—and your wife: both beautiful.’

‘Both lovely,’ Roy corrected her, ‘in the full sense of the word. Beauty can be cold.’

She smiled. ‘You always did fuss over words!’

‘Well, they’re the notes in my music, the colours on my palate. If my father hadn’t “fussed” over shades of tone, he could never have painted this.’ He laid a hand on Tara’s frame. ‘She was twenty-five then; but she’s every bit as lovely now: a loveliness that doesn’t depend on line and colour—lit from within.’

Moved by sudden longing, he spoke straight from his heart; and Rose, moved in her own fashion, regarded him with serious eyes.

‘Marvellous to have a husband who can say things like that about one—genuinely, after eleven years. Comes of marrying a poet!’

‘A most uncomfortable human specimen to marry,’ Roy assured her with a patent honesty. ‘And the fact that I can speak so, with perfect truth, is more to Tara’s credit than mine.’

‘Tara——? An Indian name?’

‘Yes. Her father was in the Civil Service; and Lady Despard cared very much for Indian women, especially my mother. Tara was her god-child; called after a Rajputni heroine—the Star of Bednore. Tara means Star. Aruna means Dawn. I’ve been wanting her to meet you.’

Rose smiled at the recollection. ‘I don’t think either she or the arrogant, good-looking young man much appreciated the honour!’

‘She’s shy—and proud. He’s prouder, but not the least anti-British. If you’d shaken hands with them——’

She made a small moue of distaste.

‘I don’t like shaking hands with them.’

‘They probably suspected as much. They’re a courteous and princely people. Arrogant—yes. A defect of their quality. And you live here among them, politely ignoring them. D’you think they aren’t aware of it?—don’t resent it? But Aruna’s wide-minded, clever and charming. If you’d let me bring her to see you——’

‘My dear Roy——! her raised hand warded off the suggestion. ‘We’ve nothing in common.’

‘You have your womanhood in common,’ he flung out, irritated by her whole attitude.

‘Oh yes. She’d talk about her children—their one topic.’

‘Children? She’s not married.’

‘Not? I thought all their girls were married in the cradle so to speak.’

And Roy, in spite of irritation, laughed at her shameless ignorance.

‘Not quite all, now-a-days. Aruna was a rebel—a plucky one. She broke purdah, came home with her brother and took an Oxford degree. She’s giving up her life to work for Indian women. You’d like her, if you’d only take the trouble to be interested——’

‘Sociology and village “uplift”? Not my line. You can’t missionise me, Roy.’

And Sinclair lost patience again.

‘I hate to hear you talk like any suburban-minded woman—which you’re not. But you’re lazy and prejudiced. You think you’re upholding British dignity, when you’re really letting it down, besides cutting yourself off from India and all you might learn from it——’

‘Like your friend—who finds such a lot to learn in Udaipur? Marvellous woman!’

‘Yes—marvellous woman. She’ll learn more in three weeks here than you’ve done in three years. Why on earth can’t you open a few windows, let in a little fresh air? The men are nearer to ourselves, in most ways, than any others in India. And the women are individuals, purdah or no. But you just can’t be bothered.’

She nodded; and the smile in her eyes hinted that she was thinking more of him than of his plea—a form of flattery seldom appreciated by a man or woman in earnest.

‘What a sermon! You do light up when you’re roused. But I’m afraid I’ve been too successfully reared—the wrong way. Let’s admit I haven’t a well-equipped mind like those two.’

‘That doesn’t at all describe Aruna. If you’d only meet her without prejudice, as my cousin——’

‘Yes—your cousin. Frankly, I hate the idea.’

‘Oh, if you take that line, I give it up.’ Vexation flared again. ‘After all, it’s your——’

He stopped—just not in time.

‘My funeral—or my loss?’ she queried sweetly. ‘As to that, you know best. You seem very fond of her. You don’t ask me to come with you on expeditions that might enlarge my mind.’

‘On your own confession, you aren’t interested,’ he parried neatly, ignoring her remark about Aruna. ‘And your husband—who only tolerates me—wouldn’t even do that if I overdosed you with my society.’

“A very tactful excuse. And as you so virtuously refrain, can I persuade you to dine this evening? Robin’s coming. It would be much pleasanter, and give us better bridge.’

He hesitated. Only half of him wanted to accept.

‘I’d like to come,’ he fatally admitted. ‘But I ought to work to-night. I’m booked for a long monthly article: and I’m already wishing the editor at Jericho.’

‘Poor dear! What a bore——’ Her correct murmur of sympathy was not seasoned with understanding; and to Roy it was clear that her need for better bridge and a square party quite eclipsed his own more urgent need for leisure to write. ‘Must be tiresome for you sometimes, as well as for others. I suppose you really ought to turn down my tactless invitation?’ Her smiling eyes challenged him. ‘All the same—I don’t believe you will——’

He laughed. ‘Delicately done, but decisive! I’ll turn up at eight. Till then, I’m dead to the world.’

Left alone, he lit a fresh cigarette and sat thinking—not of his urgent work, nor even of Tara; but of a look he had caught in the eyes of Suráj Mul when they rested on Aruna’s face: a look that set him wondering—can man and woman in India ever become friends? An achievement rare enough in the temperate West, seemed barely thinkable in the passionate inflammable East. How would it work—the new regime? Every year more and more women were breaking purdah, courting freedom, many of them unmarried, little used to meeting unrelated men on neutral ground. The heart, like the tongue, can no man tame: and Suráj had spoken so feelingly of divorce that Sinclair felt troubled by a passing qualm as to whether, with the best intentions, he might be doing an ill service to either or both?

He dismissed the thought as fanciful. Aruna’s age alone, from the Indian standpoint, ruled out emotional probabilities. In any case they would not much longer be together; and the little flare-up, in Suráj, of interest seasoned with emotion, would probably die a natural death.

Chapter 10

Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of man
The things that are not.
—Shakspere

‘Look, there’s the grand old fortress—like a lion with his teeth and claws drawn!’

Aruna—sitting by Grace Lynch in the big open car—squeezed her friend’s arm.

‘And there,’ said Suráj Mul—turning round in his seat by the driver, ‘goes the road to our widowed Queen of Cities. Mrs Lynch, you really must see Chitor.’

‘Yes, you must——’ Aruna pressed closer. ‘His Highness would be delighted to arrange it.’

‘Chitor’ remarked Roy—breaking a prolonged silence, ‘is more than a sight to see. It is a sensation—like moonrise. The dead world silvering the dead city: that’s how Chitor should be seen.’

Something in the studied quiet of his tone made Grace turn and look at him.

‘Have you seen it so?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

That was all he had to say—even to those who might understand—about the strangest and profoundest experience in his life, and Grace Lynch, who wanted to hear more, approved his British brevity, that clearly did not spring from indifference. More and more his complexity aroused her interest. For she had soon perceived that this man—with his fine, if difficult, heritage—fitted into no set category. His divided soul might make for tragedy. It certainly made for an intriguing personality. Here they were again, the four of them; England, India—and the bridge-builder. For that was clearly his métier—if any conceivable bridge could span chasms, mental and racial, that cut so deep. But this was no moment for problems. To-day was dedicated to the glory of Rajasthán.

The Maharána, kindly and hospitable, had lent them his big new car, had contributed hampers of food and drink, far beyond the needs of four ordinary mortals between breakfast and dinner. Suráj sat in front with the red and gold chauffeur; Roy, in the wide back seat with the two women. Quite simply Aruna had avoided sitting next to him. His nearness during the long drive would have been too disturbing. For already, under the bright surface, lurked the haunting shadow of the end.

One little week: and then—no more Roy, till he came to Peshawar. But he had lit a new light in her that would illumine the path ahead; and she thought no shame of her feeling for him. With her Eastern sense of fatality, she simply accepted it. Love was her form of genius. From far off ages she was destined to endure this exalted mingling of bliss and pain. For what is love but the mingled drink? Even to-day, was she happy—or sad? She could not tell. She only knew she was alive again, with a secret life independent of brittle happiness.

Leaning against soft cushions, while the sun laid its strong warm fingers on her uncovered head, she was content to watch, undetected, the familiar wonder of Roy’s face, so expressive when he talked, so impassive in repose, as if a delicate unseen mask crept over it. In his brooding stillness, he was son of Lilāmani. In talk and laughter, he became the son of Sir Nevil. Which was the real Roy? Useless to ask. Enough to feel the sense of him pervading her in the lassitude of her body, the lull of her mind and a dream-like indifference to outside things. Suráj Mul, very friendly and polite, kept turning round to make remarks. She liked him because he wrote poetry and admired Roy, so she roused herself to give him pleasant answers and smiles. It would have startled and pained her had she guessed that, by a simple act of courtesy, she was sowing seeds of fire on inflammable soil.

For Suráj Mul, in the fulness of his manhood, was emotionally unsatisfied; and never, till now, had he met that singular product of Western influence, an unmarried Indian woman. So far, he had been enjoying the experience; but the thought of her departure caused a stir in his blood, shot through with finer vibrations, that had never been aroused in him by the undesired wife. Married to order, like most of his kind, he had hoped at least for physical charms, for mutual passion and pleasure. As a Rajput, marriage had for him a far more personal significance than the orthodox Hindu’s sacramental union of two ephemeral beings in a world of illusion. But the unimpeachable wife bestowed on him had proved to be plain and sulky and virtuous, with little of education and small desire or capacity for more; and the jealous dominion of his own devoted mother had not eased for either of them.

In three years the virtuous wife had given him one daughter—not even pretty; and the arrival of a second, soon after his mother’s death, had quenched the last spark of domestic interest in his unorthodox soul. He had looked elsewhere for his pleasure; and had carried on, without zest, such work as his father required of him. But now came Roy Sinclair, Sir Lakshman’s astonishing proposal, and these meetings with Aruna: new life to quicken his brain and stir his blood. The gods who had turned their faces from him, seemed to be relenting at last.

Aruna, though not beautiful, had some magnet within her other than common womanly attraction. Near himself in age, yet still unpossessed, he could only suppose that she must be at heart a Sannyasin.¹⁶ For both reasons he could not think of her as he was apt to think of women. Yet think of her he must; and he unashamedly looked forward to the passing freedom from an unloved wife, from perpetual deference to elders.

But to-day he could hardly look beyond the nearer prospect of telling them all the deathless tale of Huldighât—telling it chiefly to Aruna, who would feel it in the marrow of her bones, because she too was Rajputni, descended from heroes——

The car halted; and visions vanished. Above them, on a rocky spur, stood the old fort, a walled remnant of past glory. There under the great mulberry tree, a substantial feast was spread in view of the lake that caught the dazzle of sunlight and ragged heads of date palms. The place was full of birds and lesser wild things. Graceful grey langurs chattered at the intruders, and leaped from palm to palm. During lunch small boys were told off to keep them at a respectful distance by valiant threats that no Hindu would ever dare to execute; and no doubt the monkeys enjoyed the joke.

Suráj ate his own food a little apart; but afterwards they all chewed pahn prepared by Aruna, and smoked Sinclair’s cigarettes. Unobtrusively they drew Suráj into talking of ‘the great days’ and the budding epic. Then Roy asked outright for the story of Huldighát, and Aruna, seeing him hesitate, urged eagerly, ‘Won’t you tell us the story of that great battle—please?’

He turned and looked full at her.

‘I will tell any tale you wish to hear. But this peaceful garden is not the right scene. There’s a pass in the hills, just above this, where we can look down to the plain and make a picture of those two armies, crashing together. If you ladies can manage a bit of a walk? Dusty and stony, but not far.’

Dusty and stony it proved: an arduous climb in the heat of early afternoon. It was Roy who called a halt, when they reached a group of low trees growing among rocks that offered seats in the shade, and a downward view to the level space below the fort. Here there were few signs of life. Lizards darted among the stones. A kite kept circling and keening overhead. The two women sat together under their sheltering tree, Sinclair on a rock a little above them. Suráj, sitting apart in full sunshine made an arresting picture in ochre-yellow coat and coppery pink turban. And as he warmed to his heroic theme a natural fount of eloquence bubbled up in him; words came with aptness and ease. His English, quaintly turned now and then, had the precision of a language mainly learnt from books.

He began with a brief sketch of Rāna¹⁷ Pertáp Singh, incarnation of Rajput chivalry and courage, son of the worthless Udai Singh, who had earned distinction only by founding Udaipur among the hills that girdled Pichola Lake, and giving it his own unworthy name. Of quite other mettle was Pertáp Singh. He would make no inglorious peace with the noble Akbar, who ruled at Delhi; and while Chitor remained ‘a widow’ he vowed he would live in no Palace. Till Chitor was rebuilt, the war drums of his royal army should march behind it instead of before; he and his nobles and their descendants would sleep on straw and eat off plates made of leaves instead of silver or gold.

‘Now tell them,’ interrupted Sinclair, who knew his ‘Annals of Rajasthán,’ ‘the way those who came after him kept that vow.’

Suráj flashed him a laughing look.

‘You know too much!’ He turned to Aruna—‘Perhaps you also know that in the “Annals” of Tod it is told how the King and his nobles of those days—more than two hundred years after—still laid straw under their soft mattresses and leaf plates under their platters of gold! But no half measures for Pertáp Singh. He lived roughly, in hut or fortress, all his days. He recalled his banished brother Sukta. But very soon they quarrelled fatally; and Sukta rode North—to Delhi. Pertáp had lost a brother—Akbar had gained an ally, That is one thread of my battle story.

‘The other concerns Raja Mān Singh of Amber—now Jaipur, who had made peace with Akbar, fought his battles, given him a Rajput princess for wife. yet he could not help admiring Rāna Pertáp Singh, who lived hard and set honour before wealth. So one day—returning from a fight—he sent word of his wish to meet the Rāna ; and Pertáp invited him to a feast on the shores of Pichola Lake. It was a great feast; much food and many nobles; but no Pertáp Singh. They said he had a bad headache; but Mān Singh did not believe them. “Tell the Rāna ,” he said angrily, “I know the cause of his headache. But none can take his place as my host.” So the messenger brought back Pertáp’s true reason: “I may not eat with a Moslem’s vassal, who has given his own sister to Akbar.”

‘Insulted and furious, the Raja went off, not eating a morsel. With a great following, he rode away; and Pertáp came forth in battered armour, to see him go.

‘The Raja shouted in his wrath, “If I do not humble your pride, my name is not Mān Singh.”

‘And Pertáp answered—very dignified—“In battle I shall ever rejoice to meet Mān Singh.”

‘But one of his followers unwisely called out: “When your Highness comes back, bring Akbar also to visit us!”

‘So Mān Singh—remembering that scornful invitation—came again to the girdle of hills round Udaipur, bringing the son of Akbar, Prince Selim, and all the legions of Delhi.

‘This time Pertáp came to meet him with twenty-two thousand Rajputs, and his faithful allies, the Bhils, little wild people of these hills. On the plain of Huldighât, he confronted that mighty host; horsemen and archers, elephants, and camels and big guns: Prince Selim on his war elephant, Mān Singh his chief General, aided by Sukta, Pertáp’s banished brother.

‘Fearless the Rāna faced them, on his “blue” horse Chytuk; over his head the royal umbrella; behind him the crimson banner with the sun’s disc. In spite of unequal numbers, he trusted in the finest horsemen on earth and those hidden Bhils, who would rain showers of arrows and stones upon the foe. The pass, among the hills behind him, was the key to Udaipur. So he would defend it to his last horse and man.’

Suráj Mul paused, as it were, before the crash of battle: and Aruna, listening, absorbed, glanced now and then at Roy’s intent face. Not even smoking, he leaned against a rock, staring past Suráj to a chain of low hills, the Yogi look in his eyes, as if his mind had slipped away into that far off time which Suráj was vividly recalling to life.

Recalling—that was Sinclair’s own sensation; a prescience of coming battle, of some adventure beyond the battle. . . .

Suráj was speaking again. He had risen to his feet and flung out an arm towards the plain, as if there lay the actual battle-field. Carried away by the stirring tale, he spoke—not with words only, but with his face, his whole body, every gesture of his hands:

‘At a signal given those unequal armies crashed together in a long and desperate fight. Always where it was fiercest there went the State umbrella and the royal banner; Pertáp, careless of danger, seeking only to cross swords with Mān Singh. Instead he found Prince Selim’s war elephant, and Imperial bodyguard. Very soon these were cut down by Rajput swords. The mahout was killed; the Prince only saved by steel plates on his howdah. All the troops of Delhi came rushing to defend him, while the sons of Mewar rallied round their lord, blooding from three sword-cuts and a shot through his armour.

‘Suddenly the royal elephant took fright. There he went—no driver, charging through friend and foe; saving the Prince, but leaving Pertáp to his angry followers.’

He saw it all, he made them see it all down there on the plain.

Roy Sinclair was no longer listening. He was there in the actual battle, feeling in his veins the horror and savage exultation of fighting man to man. Time was not: Suráj was not. Three hundred and fifty years were as yesterday.

Around him stretched the plain of Huldighât—a fearsome confusion of horses and men, camels and elephants, living, dying and dead. Here came the royal elephant, his howdah swinging, his great feet trampling on all who lay in his path. And there, in the thick of battle, was Pertáp Singh, almost spent. Then, by a bold stroke, one of his loyal chiefs seized the sun-blazoned banner and galloped off, followed by exultant Moslems, believing they pursued the Rāna of Udaipur. But those who remained with Pertáp seized his bridle and hurried him—worn and dizzy with pain—to the hills, his last refuge. The King must live—not die—for Udaipur.

And somewhere in the melée a man on a powerful charger watched them go——

It was through his eyes and mind that he, Roy Sinclair, saw and felt the whole tumult of battle; saw two chiefs of the Delhi army gallop off after the wounded King on his spent horse.

Shaken by a strange tumult of feeling, he clapped spurs to his own charger and pursued the pursuers.

On and up went Pertáp, till he came to a brawling stream: but Chytuk, answering voice and heel, sprang across and struggled on.

Now, here came the Delhi chiefs—here, up this very hill. And at last Sinclair knew who was that other—yet himself—impelled to rescue Akbar’s enemy. He was Sukta, banished brother of the proudest Prince in Rajasthán.

Breathless he reached the stream, slew one chief and fought his fellow to the death. Then he crossed the water and cantered on.

Chytuk was flagging now, and Sukta shouted to his brother, ‘Ho—rider of the blue horse! How does a man feel when flying for his life?’

No answer; but the gallant beast stumbled and rolled over, gasping out his last breath.

Then Sukta rode up and told Pertáp that he was no enemy, but a brother, who had forgotten everything except his brotherhood.

‘Take my horse,’ he said, ‘I must return to camp. But I will come again—and not empty-handed.’

Pertáp, sore and stiff, must take leave of his faithful horse and his deliverer. And Sinclair—left alone on the rough hill road—knew that he himself was verily Sukta Singh.

Then—all was gone from him: hill and battle, knowledge and vision. . . .

With a slight start, he awoke. Was it waking? to find himself not on that actual hillside, but on another, awkwardly propped against a rock, a tingle of cramp in his left arm.

There, in full sunshine, sat Suráj still reciting his saga. There, in the shade, sat Mrs Lynch and Aruna listening, absorbed. Had they noticed anything? Had he seemed, unpardonably, to fall asleep? In any case, he had seen and felt it all, had lost sight and sound of Suráj, who was telling them now of the clever story that Sukta made from his failure to capture Pertáp Singh: no word of which did Prince Selim believe.

‘“Tell me the truth,” said he, “and I swear to give you your life.”

‘Then Sukta told the truth, and Selim forgave the brotherly impulse; but he dismissed Sukta from his army.

‘So the true Rajput came back to the Rāna’s bamboo hut by the Palace—not empty-handed. He had captured a fort from the Moslems, and Pertáp gave it to him and his descendants for ever.’

That was the end of Huldighât and its dramatic sequel; but by no means the end of Rāna Pertáp—the King who for twenty-six years never lay soft or lived in his Palace, who sacked Mān Singh’s capital and won back nearly all Mewar, but never regained Chitor.

To-night his descendants would re-read it all in Tod’s “Annals.” At present he was chiefly concerned as to the nature of his freak adventure in time—dream, vision flash of reincarnate past? He could find no answer acceptable to his warring selves. Reason might combat experience; but intuition would have the last word. Whichever prevailed, he would always make his way rather by ‘the sun of poetry’ than by the arc-lights of science.

In any case he had re-lived history.

He might ask Aruna if he had appeared to fall asleep. Mrs Lynch monopolised Suráj as they made their way down to a belated cup of tea; and Roy, seeing his chance, lagged behind with Aruna, who still seemed lost in some private dream.

‘Aruna,’ he said, in a low tone, halting to let the others get well ahead. ‘When Suráj was telling his tale—did I seem to fall asleep?’

‘Did you seem——?’ She dwelt on him a moment with her caressing eyes. ‘You did seem—but I couldn’t make sure.’

‘Did I shut my eyes?’

Impressed by his urgency she hesitated.

‘I think not. You moved once, turning your head, so I couldn’t quite see. Only by your Yogi stillness, I knew some part of you had slipped away.’

‘Yes, slipped away—a trifle of three and a half centuries. Aruna—believe it or not—from the start of the fight till Suráj was telling the end—I didn’t hear a thing. But I saw—I lived it all. I fought in the battle. I rode through these hills after Pertáp. I was Sukta Singh.’

She listened intently, her eyes on his face transfigured by that strange conviction. Every throb of her carefully schooled heart acclaimed him of one blood, of one spirit for all his English name.

‘Perhaps—in far-off other lives,’ she said very low ‘your immortal spirit was in Udaipur. And to-day, by the brave story, perhaps a veil behind many veils was lifted for a moment—and you remembered.’

‘Remembered——?’ he echoed. ‘A queer sensation. I had it once before, when I rode through Chitor by moonlight—and saw the Queen of Cities as she was in life.’

‘You saw?’

Her look of awe moved him to add: ‘Yes—in a ghostly fashion. And I’ve never spoken of it to anyone else, except my father. There’s a magic in you, Aruna, that unlocks my hidden thoughts.’

He said it so simply and sincerely that her twofold ache of pride and joy was almost more than she could bear.

‘But remember,’ he added, unconscious of all he wrought in her, ‘all this is only for you. Don’t talk of it, even to your Grace. It’s a secret between ourselves.’

‘Yes—between ourselves. Don’t fear, Roy. For you it is secret. For me, it is sacred.’

‘Come on, you two,’ Grace called to them from below.

‘What’s the urgent argument?’

And they realised that they still stood facing one another, and had not moved a step.

‘Coming,’ Roy called back; and they went down quickly, not speaking, since all had been said.

For Aruna, the day had been crowned by those two words, ‘Between ourselves.’ And he did not know. He would never know.

Chapter 11

Greatness is in the vision, not the deed.
—Humbert Wolfe

There might well be those who found time lag in Udaipur. Shut away within its charmed circle of hills, a white man or woman must either possess an active hobby, or be possessed by boredom, like Rose Penryth in her charming house, with a boat on the lake, and the beautiful Durbar gardens for change of air. A marriage of little more than sincere affection, with a husband absorbed in work and sport, was not enough for a beautiful woman in the restless thirties, deprived of her son, and of the social contacts that ministered to her vanity, her intelligence and love of admiration.

Sinclair, still half attracted, half annoyed, saw her as the prisoner of her own limitations. She saw him as a godsend and was inclined to make the most of him. He had told her he was here to work; and she had meekly promised to bear it in mind; but it was not in her to understand that there were some forms of work a man could not do with half his brain, starting and stopping on demand like a train. In distracted moments, he had need to remind himself that more virtue resided in a threatened solitude, a precarious peace, than in any monkish cell.

But if there were strenuous moods when he confounded Rose, there were moods in which he missed Aruna, her spiritual charm, and her unconscious effect on hidden fragments of himself, dormant since his mother’s death—certain physical, mystical sensations that only an Eastern woman could, understand. Yet it was Suráj, not he, who had gone with her and Mrs Lynch to Chitorgarh. Even for her he could not bring himself to go there again as a mere beholder, to risk another adventure in time. These queer intimations of a spiritual link with India, though acceptable to his heart, vaguely troubled his enlightened soul. So he had left the honour to Suráj: and had courted a spell of ‘splendid isolation’ by transferring himself to a room in the larger Island Palace, lent him by the Maharána for the few remaining weeks of his stay. Hard at work, happily installed, he would spend days without crossing the water. Bápu understood. Rose laughed at him; lured him into rowing her out now and then, but tactfully refrained from invading his ‘retreat.’

At sunset, the marshy end of the lake swarmed with homing wild duck, coots and divers. But, in those few peaceful weeks, all the birds that flew and called and nested were his fellows, doves and peacocks, the turquoise blue of kingfishers, a stork building her untidy nest in the fork of a withered tree. Not least there was the lake itself, two and a half miles of steel-blue mirror so variable in its sameness, so responsive to every change of light, every passing shadow of boat or cloud. At dawn, the sun’s swift uprush behind the hills changed silver water to golden wine. At sunset the stillness shimmered with all the hues of heaven. By day, it gleamed and gloomed; a limpid vision of palaces and trees and gay-coloured bathers laid upon the blue of an inverted sky; till night flung down her largesse of stars and the full moon greeted her own image in its quiet depths.

Day by day the impress of that changeful yet unchanging scene was being woven into the book that lived and moved in him as if with a life of its own; thoughts blossoming in his mind with the effect of surprise and conviction; details emerging and fragments, long forgotten till the wick of his brain was ablaze and a sense of power invaded him, exalting his faculties to so intense a pitch that no detached self remained to stand apart and watch their incandescence.

While his theme and his creatures possessed him, he felt purely passive, steeped in the illusion of adventure and discovery—the supreme illusion of creative work; adventuring mainly in the realm of character; seeking the springs of personality, the inner significance of life, its unending variety and fascination. And there was pleasure more active than passive in the constant interplay of vision and expression; the daily defeat or victory in the absorbing pursuit of one immediate end: life winnowed, caught on the wing—framed.

News of outside events came to him as if from a different world: a disastrous earthquake in New Zealand, another senseless speed record broken, a combative ‘special’ from Gandhi to a big London daily—accusing of black repression the most long-suffering Government on earth.

For, by the end of January, he had been released again, to welcome returning delegates. Hailed at Bombay by ecstatic crowds, he was busy using his halo to save the face of Congress. Hopeful delegates called on its leaders to approve their fledgling hatched out of the Conference egg. But young Nehru, the fiery Communist, Moscow-bred, was openly hostile to fledglings hatched in London. In the early days of February 1931 the omens were not favourable for any peaceful solution of India’s complex problems.

But here, in hill-girdled Udaipur, problems and omens were of less account than the yearly spring festival: men and women and children all in yellow, feasting and dancing and worshipping at the shrine of Máha Deo, god of love: dinner up at the Palace—an unforgettable sight; everything yellow, carpets, curtains, cushions and the clothes of all the guests. Dancing boys in headdresses like the risen sun, shook gold-dust, as they whirled, from yellow kilted skirts. And to-night the whole city would be illumined, as for Dewali, the Feast of Lamps. Thousands on thousands of little clay chirāge, their cotton wicks afloat in oil, would etch in flame every line and curve of city and Palace and the lesser palaces on the lake.

This afternoon Sinclair was to spend an hour with his grandfather, planning the details of his northward journey. The parting would be a wrench. Among his father’s people he could scarcely hope to encounter a personality so steeped in the wisdom of both worlds. And reluctance sharpened the temptation to stay on in his Island Palace room, where beauty and solitude enfolded him like wings. But he had not left those whom he most loved and needed merely to luxuriate in this ethereal lust of the senses, to shirk the business for the dream.

So he joined his family at the mid-day meal in Indian dress; and early afternoon found him alone with his grandfather in the familiar room where they had all so charmingly welcomed him barely six weeks ago.

In these few weeks he had rubbed up his languages, Urdu and Pushtu, both passed with honours when he joined the Indian Army. Ably coached by Dyán and Suráj, he had practised gestures, intonations, Rajput turns of speech; had fitted himself, as far as might be, to pass as a hill Rajput from Chamba. But in order to avoid needless risk and deception, wherever he lodged, he must be known as an Englishman travelling, for a purpose, in Eastern guise. That was Bápu’s affair. He had a landowning friend in Benares; and in Delhi there was still the jeweller turned banker, Krishna Lāl, with whom Roy had lodged when he boldly adventured in search of Dyán. But in Karachi he knew no one; and Roy was inclined to shirk a Congress political meeting.

‘I get my till of politics in Delhi, if Gandhi comes up there, to wave the Congress flag. The real Delhi is incomparable; but I’m not craving to see the nouveau riche affair on the Ridge.’

‘Nor I,’ Sir Lakshman agreed. ‘I would rather keep my memory of old Delhi—India’s fated capital. That change from Calcutta was a most unlucky error of the Government.’

‘I wonder——? The luck of the British is proverbial. By choosing Delhi they may change its karma.’

‘They may. They have a genius for the impossible. And the chains of superstition still lie so heavily on India, that to break even one would be a true service. To our people they are not mere foolishness, but cruel earnest, often causing hideous tragedies. Remember that, Roy. Weave it into your pattern.’

And Roy said gravely, ‘I’ll do my best. But I sometimes wonder—can I possibly write a genuine book on India that English readers will look at, let alone understand.’

‘If anyone can—-you can. I say so with full knowledge that India is the most difficult of all countries to put clearly and truly before the English mind, which is not subtle, and too little curious about other nations’ thoughts and ways. If some of your sincere, well-meaning statesmen had more such curiosity, and less faith in their own way of government, much trouble might be avoided for both countries. In their strange shortness of vision have they ever paused to ask themselves—what kind of self-government does India really want? She is a monarch country, understanding rule, reverencing the ruler—not the figurehead. More than half her trouble is not political at all. Religion still means far more to the mass of our people. To understand them, one must perceive their differences of mind and culture. We want men like your Lord Ronaldshay, who could govern firmly, without causing anger, because he could see with Hindu eyes. If your book can bring thoughtful Englishmen to clearer seeing, you will do good service, Roy, for both countries—perhaps even for the world. That was the dream in your mother’s heart.’

The old man laid a wrinkled, shapely hand on Roy’s arm, and looked deep into his eyes.

That look, and the mention of her whose spirit had led him hither, awoke in Roy the memory of his own young, arrogant aspirations. But he only said: ‘Mothers have “God’s license” to dream of impossible destinies for their sons.’

Sir Lakshman’s smile lightened his grave eyes.

‘Who are we to say “impossible”? Many things may seem so; challenging us to disprove it.’

‘“Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it,
Into impossible things, unlikely ends,”’

Roy quoted, his eyes on the incredible model of Chitor. ‘I think that must be the keynote of my Indian book.’

‘You could choose no better. Through her, you were born with a dream in your soul. Only keep it clean from race prejudice and dust of politics, and it may yet be your destiny to unite our world of dreams with your English world of facts, because you can move in both with equal ease. And if you feel despondent because you are aiming so high, remember the words of Radha Krishnan, our wisest thinker of to-day: “Growth is slow, where roots are deep. But he who lights a little candle in the darkness, may help to set the whole heavens aflame.” Brood long and deeply over that book, Roy. It will not soon be written. May I live to read it.’

‘You will read it, Bápu-ji, while it is being written. Every page must have your blessing before it goes into print.’

‘Dilkusha—you make too much of an old man’s judgment,’ Sir Lakshman protested, deeply moved.

And Roy answered, ‘Neither your judgment nor your heart is old, Bápu. A man only grows old when he begins to turn his gaze backward. Your inner light is always thrown forward. That’s the test. Head-lights, not tail-lights. It is to you I look for my guiding gleam. What do your headlights reveal as India’s true line of advance?’

‘A very large question, Roy.’

For a few seconds the old man sat silent, as if withdrawn into some inner world; and when at last he spoke his voice had an impersonal, almost prophetic note his eyes had the look of one who sees.

‘Such light as I can throw forward reveals spiritual forces arrayed for a coming conflict of ideals; not to be fought out in any Assembly or Parliament, but in the divided soul of India. Only when she is no longer divided, can she lift her seven-pointed star above the five-pointed star of the West. India is God-intoxicated; but alas, she has become priest-ridden. Her vaunted religion must come forth out of caves and temples and the dark ways of black magic. It must come into touch with life; prove itself in service. That spirit of coming forth is already at work among us. India knows. England does not yet fully understand. Her people can hardly now think of India except as politics; and through the imitation Parliament at Delhi she has infected too many of our own men with the same bad habit. India asked to govern herself. But she did not ask for an imitation Parliament, adding a new kind of friction to those that distract her already. I can give you no “practical politics,” Roy. I see very little light on that path.’

He dismissed, with a gesture, the political tangle, important only because it had become so urgent.

‘I see India, one day, taking her true world-position,’ the deep voice went on, ‘not through any form of Government, but through the leading of one inspired man, because it is always the individual, the Light-bringer, who renews the world. I see her women more and more breaking away from the tyranny of priests and social customs; using, to great ends, the selfless power of endurance they have gained under our cast-iron system: so that what the men have forced on the women will recoil on themselves. Through women we are all born and shaped. Through our women we shall be saved——’

Again he paused, a new light in his eyes.

‘Most clearly of all I see that India, through her genius for religion, may yet find a way to harmonise her three great creeds—Hindu, Moslem and Christian. Not “back to the Vedas,” but on to new glories inspired by their spirit. Unhappily, her priests know too well the cash value of superstition and debased religion, and among students there is growing unbelief. But it remains true that religion is the only mantra which can send one wave of feeling through her three hundred and fifty million souls. In the East it is a flame that can never be put out. It will always find fresh fuel to renew its light. For, as a lamp cannot burn without oil, so man cannot truly live without God. Even to-day, there is life in those words preached by the Ganges thirty centuries ago. “They who see but One in all the manifoldness of the universe, unto them eternal truth is revealed—unto none else—none else.”’

The deep voice dropped a tone; and the old man sat motionless, one hand resting on his grandson’s knee. The silence between them was charged with understanding. No words were needed; nor could any words express Roy’s sense of privilege, of heightened vision. More; he knew himself to have received power—the power that emanates from those who have not squandered on trivial things their heritage of the spirit.

It was as if an unseen hand had lifted a curtain and he had stepped into another world.

Chapter 12

We must live our dreams. There is no other way of passing beyond them into reality.
—Charles Morgan

In a waking dream, Roy returned to his Island Palace, rowing through a water world of reflections that broke up and flowed together again, as his passed on. From his room he collected two books and a leather satchel—that held his writing gear—rug, cushion and coat, for he would be staying out till after sunset to watch thousands of little chirāgs flicker into life and ordered beauty.

Then he rowed on to the far end of the lake, where the low shore was broken up and thick with jungle scrub, where the wild duck would come winging home at sunset. To-night a veil seemed hung between him and all things beyond this peace-enfolded hour. To-night he could almost forget that the end was at hand: the end of an enchanted solitude that had so fruitfully nourished him, so favoured creative activity. Only in long solitude—especially at night—could there be any real blossoming of the spirit; only so could a man summon from deep sources the power to pit himself against Chance or Fate: something more than a stimulating gesture of defiance.

Yet a human longing would creep in for the warmth and comfort of her who was his other self. For his love, though rooted in the flesh, had become the element in which his spirit could most naturally breathe and grow.

He needed her sensitive critical instinct, her pride in his work, that gave him reassurance of its worth and silenced the devils of doubt and self-distrust. In all ways he had need of her, untutored as he was in the strain of long separation—the common lot of Anglo-Indian husbands and wives. The thwarting of one sense might quicken others, but there remained the aching need that only she could still.

In any case, good or bad, the disciplined life was his portion for many months to come; and instinctively he sought escape from longing, in a deliberate surrender to thoughts and powers other than personal. Already those mysterious powers were asserting their dominion over the lesser Roy—subject to fits of passion and indolence, depression and irritation. Rose, if she guessed, would accuse him, as before, of playing at fakir. Instinctively he edged away from the thought as if aware of some lurking truth, some lurking danger. . . .

The boat, forcing its way through denser weeds, ripped the lotus raffle and grounded in shallow water. He settled against his cushion, lit a cigarette and pulled out a pencil: but the blank page remained blank. To-day it was not the novel that moved in his brain, it was the greater book slowly forming within him; confronting him now with the challenging fascination of a mountain half seen, its summit wreathed in cloud. Fresh from that hour with his grandfather, he no longer felt cast down by his own inadequacy. That the goal was distant, the difficulties formidable, consciously sharpened his zest for the attempt, confirmed his secret faith in the issue.

Steeped in thought, he was gazing absently, yet intently, at a small kingfisher. A gleam of living turquoise among grey-green weeds, it sat very still like himself, for extremely practical reasons, tiny claws clutching the stem of a weed, the long beak lowered, ready to strike. A part of himself that was playing truant had entered into the bird, into the fated fish and the unknown insect crawling up a spear-like leaf. Subconsciously he was at his childhood’s game of escaping and becoming. Mysteriously cleansed in body and mind, a clear light illumined his brain. At the edge of the light, just beyond it, some secret hovered. If he could but keep still long enough, breathe deep enough——

Bang! Bang! Two shots in quick succession.

He started and swore, as if they had struck his chest: saw a flight of homing ducks scattered, as two rolled over and fell, some way off, on to another jutting cape, where young Rajputs were at play, shattering the peace of the lovely scene. And because part of him had entered the lives of the hunted, he almost hated those harmless, unimaginative sportsmen who enjoyed duck for dinner.

The kingfisher had fled; the insect had vanished; so had his own sense of security from intrusion. Not all at once could the soul re-enter the innermost court of quiet—the sanctuary that a part of him craved at times, as a normal man, in loneliness, craves the presence of his fellows.

What was the secret of this universal impulse to contemplative stillness? Did it spring entirely from the human spirit’s craving for ‘sight beyond the smoke’? Or was it tinctured with a natural desire for some state of soul or sense that burnt up everything but itself,—the instinctive aim of the artist, the lover, the mystic? Did the Yogi’s stilling of the soul within the body bring true vision? Would he himself, in the far Himalayas, discover the answer?

In this isolated hour the East in him felt the pull of that magnet so strongly that the West in him was afraid.

The great red sun touched earth and slid sideways behind a hill, leaving a deep after-stain upon the sky. Peace descended on unseen wings. Once again he knew the blissful security of the words ‘I am alone.’

The stain faded. The sky darkened. Here and there a star glimmered. One moment, city and palaces and island pavilions seemed to stand like waiting ghosts in the dusk. Then the first lamps flickered, wavered deepened from amber and gold. So skilled and swift were the scores of unseen hands at work that the little blown flames ran up walls and pillars, over roofs and arches, as if they caught fire from each other.

Entranced, he sat watching—himself and his problems forgotten—while the ghostly scene came alive under his eyes; more lights and more—thousands, tens of thousands——? till the transformation was complete; Palace, islands, temples, shores, even boats at their moorings—all Udaipur blossomed on darkness in flickering delicate lines of fire. In the lake itself the stars were put out by a restless shimmer of gold that seemed hardly to be of earth.

Little figures had appeared out of the dark and set a few chirāgs on his own boat; had lit the lantern swinging at its prow, ready for the return journey to his unreal-looking island home.

If he had rowed out slowly, he rowed back more slowly still. For each gentle stroke shattered a scene wrought in living light: and, in his fanciful mood, he would look round to see how quickly the broken picture was made whole.

The unearthly beauty that was balm to his senses troubled his soul with hints of a wonder beyond knowledge; with an aching under-sense of the desolation that impregnates all the loveliness of earth. One thing he knew. This hour of inner seeing would not end when the hands of a mere clock said, ‘It is finished.’ There was within it some essence that would endure.

With a certainty beyond reason he divined that, here and now, his feet were set on an unending adventure of the spirit, that wherever it led him, he would follow. For his concern was with the journey the escaping and becoming—rather than the goal. He would light his little candle in the darkness, his one chirāg, in the confident hope that it might some day help to set all heaven aflame—as one corner of it flamed now, with this actual vision of Udaipur, printed in fire on the night sky of Rajasthán.

Book Three — One Step Aside

Chapter 1

One step aside from the ways of comfortable men, and you will never regain them.
—Francis Thompson

Benares railway station, on a hot afternoon of February suggested an incipient mutiny: yet the seething congestion of men and women, babies and bundles, porters and policemen was its normal condition in the pilgrim season, whenever a train was due to arrive. Far down the platform a bell clanged with deafening strokes; and as the long train rumbled in, the crowd surged forward like a tidal wave. Ticket or no, many were certain to be left behind. If any stumbled, they must take their chance. (None stayed to help.)

Through the increasing confusion moved two purposeful, unhurried men—Roy Sinclair and Suráj Mul; Sinclair in covert coat and cloth cap, his skin a few shades darker than at Udaipur. He had skilfully achieved a tone that would allow him to pass either as a much-bronzed Englishman or a fair hill Rajput. For comfort and convenience he was travelling North as his father’s son, having endured sufficient discomfort as his mother’s son—Prithvi Raj—on the journey from Udaipur. Through the streets of Benares, and by holy Ganges, he had moved, undetected, a Hindu among Hindus. He had lived, as such, with his grandfather’s Zemindar friend, who knew his identity and kept his secret. To-day, an Englishman among Orientals, more than his outer self seemed to have suffered a change. Partly it sprang from the acute race-consciousness of these people, inimical or respectful, openly asserted or instinctively felt.

His own consciousness, at the moment, was chiefly concerned over the sleeping berth to Delhi that he had forgotten to reserve in advance, partly through the absence of Hari Lāl, who was to rejoin his master at Peshawar. The man he shared with Suráj was behind them now with the porter, and their modest luggage. Suráj himself was travelling second for the sake of his pocket and his pride. He had travelled first from Udaipur with two Englishmen whose manners had left much to be desired.

Sinclair, quickening his pace, almost fell over a naked Sadhu, at odds with an Eurasian official, who was firmly refusing to let him enter a third-class carriage.

In vain he thrust out a thin strip of cardboard.

‘Won’t work,’ the other patiently insisted. ‘You can’t go to Delhi on a platform ticket.’

The old man’s sunken eyes were smouldering fires. The rest of him was smeared with ash and daubed with dung, every bone and rib visible. Yet there was power in the gaunt frame and a natural dignity such as no frock-coat and top-hat can bestow on a civilised man who visibly lives through his stomach. In the past week Sinclair had seen scores of his kind, many purely disgustful.

‘What’s wrong, Sadhu-ji?’ he asked in Hindi; and the holy one—mildly surprised that a Sahib should wish to know—explained how he had vainly struggled to reach the booking-office. A young man had kindly offered to buy his ticket; and he, ignorant of the price, had handed over his small store of rupees. The stranger, easily forcing his way, had brought him back a ticket, plus eight annas change, and vanished without waiting for thanks. Now they told him it was only for the platform.

He held out the eight annas on his shrivelled palm. ‘No tikkut—no rupees.’ Could the Sahib persuade this half-Indian to acquire merit by letting one holy man into that carriage with the wrong ticket?

The Sahib, enraged at the cruel, petty swindle, used the only feasible form of persuasion; and the hardened official smiled as he handed over the ticket with the change.

‘The old rascal’s in luck,’ he said. ‘Almost everee day some pore devil gets that dirtee trick played on ’im. He may be an old fraud hisself, for all you know, sir.’

Sinclair, admitting that dismal possibility, pressed a ten-rupee note into the shrivelled palm.

‘There you are, Sadhu-ji. Your passport—and my offering. Don’t let any other young scoundrel help himself to it.’

As the burning eyes met his own, he had a sense of contact with electrical vitality, as if the whole man, deserting his husk of a body, lived only through those eyes.

The deep voice said gravely, ‘“May you tread the royal path and drink the fountain of its ending.”’

There was no fervour in the formal blessing. To the Hindu it seemed natural, if surprising, that even a Sahib might wish to acquire merit by a tribute to his holiness.

And Sinclair hurried on, marvelling afresh at the incongruities of this unaccountable country: so much prevalent deceit and fraud; so much incurable faith and gullibility.

As Suráj sprang into a congested second-class carriage, Sinclair’s porter shouted, ‘Here, Sahib, here. Train starting.’

He had opened the door of a first, had flung in the suitcase and bedding-roll. But when Sinclair would have followed them, he was checked by a voice of thunder: ‘No room in here. Full up.’

Angered by the stranger’s tone and manner, he insisted: ‘There’s no “reserved” label on. Train’s crowded, and we’re off.’

He pressed forward, but was checked again.

‘You can’t come in here, damn you. My wife’s not well.’

‘Sorry. My luggage is in,’ he retorted; and pushing past his stout opponent, found himself in an ample carriage copiously filled with one languid Englishwoman, a lap dog, a litter of illustrated papers, ten or twelve pieces of baggage and a small oil-stove. Ignoring the Man of Wrath he addressed the woman, who leaned against a stack of cushions looking startled and dismayed.

‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ he said politely. ‘But I forgot to reserve a berth.’

‘How tiresome,’ she sympathised with a nervous glance at her husband. ‘I’m afraid we’ve spread ourselves rather——”

Before he could answer, the train jolted on, flinging him against the large man he was trying to ignore. He caught at the strap of the upper berth; and the large man glared at him with a combative eye.

‘There must be another berth in this damned train. I told you she wasn’t well.’

Sinclair’s temper flared. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to take a header on to the line?’

‘Really, George——’ the woman limply protested, ‘we can’t monopolise the whole carriage——’ To Sinclair she added, ‘Do sit down,’ and waved vaguely into space; for they had, in effect, monopolised it.

‘George’ made a shame-faced attempt at tidying the litter of papers, the open despatch-case and padded dog-basket that covered his side of the compartment.

Sinclair, unheeding, piled roll and suitcase by the lavatory door, sat down near the end of the other berth, and began to read with less than half his mind. The other half wished he had stuck to Indian dress; taken his chance with Suráj. Indians were often trying and tiresome at close quarters, careless of truth and decency; but, for raising the devil in him, an ill-bred, ill-tempered Englishman had scarcely his match in creation.

The limp lady sank back among her cushions. George, still smouldering, lumbered up and dived into the lavatory, slamming the door full in the intruder’s ear. Ten minutes later he repeated the manoeuvre; and it was all Sinclair could do not to let out at him.

He emerged with a small sponge reeking of eau de Cologne; and the woman put out a protesting hand.

‘George dear, please don’t bother. The roses are all right. And my head is better now.’

‘George,’ thrusting the sponge at her, sat down with a muttered expletive; and Sinclair reverted to Count Keyserling’s impressions of Benares, marvelling why the average Englishman—apostle of decency and fair play—so often showed to the worst advantage on a railway journey.

The assaults on his ear-drum were not renewed; and at last thoughts of dinner crept in. The languid one would certainly eat among her cushions; and if they hoped to get rid of him for a while they would be disappointed. He hated restaurant meals; and had brought his own food.

When the train stopped, he got out to stretch his legs and look up Suráj, whom he found chewing sugar-cane in a crowded second that smelled strongly of hair oil, onions and humanity. They were all joking, coughing and spitting, untroubled by any tiresome need for privacy or clean air. Happy Suráj!

Back in his comfortless corner, he unpacked his sandwiches, fruit and wine, while the other two sat close together disposing of their food in the furtive, shame-faced way some people affect in trains, as though it were a discreditable weakness of the flesh.

By this time, from sheer infection of ill-feeling, he almost hated them. Not for either of them would he climb into the detested upper berth a moment before sleepiness compelled.

When ‘George’ at last remarked heartily, ‘Time to turn in,’ his wife only shifted her cushions and glanced at the invader. When he vanished, without slamming the door, and returned in pyjamas and dressing-gown, the weary one still made no move. Would sheer prudery prevent her from shedding a few garments in the presence of a harmless unknown man? Would she sit up all night? Oh, confound these people! He had meant to stick it out; but her non-violent tactics had won the day.

At the next stop, he would bolt and take his chance.

He had not long to wait: and as the buffers clanged together, he stood up, hurled his two packages towards the door; opened it and shouted. Then he collected his despatch-case and bowed to the astonished lady.

‘Sorry to have been a trespasser. Good-night,’ he said, not glancing at her husband—and sprang out on to the almost empty platform.

But his shout had roused a guard; and Sinclair, feeling he might as well ask for the moon, demanded a sleeping berth to Delhi.

‘We can but see, sir,’ said the man; and, in pursuit of a generous tip, he raided several carriages hermetically sealed for the night.

At last—an open door and two figures standing near it on the platform: a short lean man in spectacles, dark coat and small puggaree; a short plump woman with a cloak over her Indian dress.

‘No objection to that sort, sir?’ the guard asked hurriedly.

‘None at all,’ said Sinclair. ‘Must sleep somewhere.’ He seemed fated to intrude on the married; but his new victims would at least have better manners.

Smiling and unperturbed, they admitted that there was a lower berth available. In went his luggage; and he followed it, reflecting on the contrast so little creditable to his own people.

These two, it seemed, were only concerned to set him at ease. Both spoke perfect English. They begged him to smoke. The man offered him a recent copy of the Spectator, with the comment, ‘In this paper there are writers who understand India.’

Sinclair smiled. ‘I’ve written in it myself.’

‘You are also a writer?’ the little man asked eagerly.

‘Yes. Are you?’

‘In a modest way. Teaching is my profession. My wife writes too’—indicating the plump gentle-mannered woman who sat beside him. ‘And she speaks about women’s affairs. But we must not interrupt your reading.’

Without more ado, they curled up on the wide leather seat, took pahn from a gold box, pulled out sheets of typescript and began discussing the article in soft tones. The rise and fall of their voices made a crooning accompaniment to Count Keyserling’s profound reflections on Indian philosophy. Now and then Sinclair watched them furtively for the pleasure of it—a pair of plain, unpretentious beings, beautified by the grace of simple good manners to each other and to himself.

Presently the man proffered his gold box.

‘Do you ever take pahn, sir? Many people like my wife’s very mild blend?’

Sinclair helped himself; relishing the savour of spices, the homely atmosphere of this man and wife so happily in accord.

Their reading ended, the small woman, without embarrassment, flung a night-sari over her arm, picked up a green silk bag and vanished into the lavatory.

The men, left alone, fell into desultory talk. The Hindu, Sinclair learnt, was a Delhi University professor, teaching literature at Ramjās College, writing articles in his spare time. He frankly deplored the tone of many Indian papers, and admitted that extremist editors had brought upon themselves the Government renewal of press control.

‘They have been spoilt by British patience,’ said the honest little man. ‘And they have brought discredit on India. No other nation would permit, unchecked, such outrageous lies and abuse.’

‘We’re giving them too much rope as usual,’ said Sinclair, seeing that he could speak his mind to this enlightened stranger.

‘I am saying just that, in my article, “Help the Government to Govern . . . ”’ He hesitated. ‘May I ask—do you know India well?’

‘Parts of it. There are many Indias! I’m out here to learn more about them—a writer like yourself.’

By way of introduction, he took out his card.

The Pundit glanced at it, and exclaimed in delight. ‘Sir Roy Sinclair! My most admired author—is it possible? You know more, sir, than our country. You know our thoughts, our feelings, our aspirations. To the author of This India I make my reverence. Perhaps you saw the long review I wrote for “The Times of India?”’

‘You wrote that? My dear sir, I owe you a thousand thanks. Strange that we should meet like this——’

‘Also a great pleasure for me. Here is my card. Fair exchange! Though you are a Koh-i-nor and I am only a bright pebble in the path. I hope we may meet in Delhi. My wife and I have many English friends there. Come, Sarolāta——’

He beckoned to the plump little lady, who had reappeared in a simple night-sari edged with leaf green. And the ‘distinguished author,’ presented in superlatives, capped them with his own confession of faith in India’s women.

‘Not those forward ones,’ Nilkant Rāo insisted, ‘who make screens for illegal processions, or sit down in the mud asking for arrest. My wife, though ardent for progress, deplores such unwomanly acts. She will be speaking several times in Delhi.’

‘I would very much like to hear her,’ said Sinclair; and with joined finger-tips, she touched her forehead.

Neither flattered, nor flustered, she stood there, in her graceful night garment, discussing the ethics of agitation with a strange Englishman as naturally as if she were dressed for a reception, and had known him all her days. Then, with a formal gesture, she turned away and climbed into the upper berth, without any loss of grace or dignity; drew a silk resai over her and settled down to sleep.

Very soon the men followed suit. A cap was drawn over the light. The train’s rhythmical vibration lulled them into fitful sleep, never quite deep enough to drown the sense of clanking and rushing through space.

Sinclair’s bemused brain, dozing and waking, dozing and waking, was thronged with sights and sensations of the past week. Impressions flashed and vanished; living pictures of Benares—most bewildering of earthly cities, in her blend of the beautiful and the horrible, the exalted and the debased. There could not be her match in all the world—which perhaps was just as well. One Benares sufficed, for good or evil: and it was no easy matter, in a week’s acquaintance, to say which prevailed. As a Hindu, he had walked her swarming streets, trying to see her strangeness as familiar; to accept, with Eastern phlegm, her horrors of sacrifice and self-torment, her prevailing atmosphere of corruption and blind belief in the power of the priest.

Her temples were among the world’s wonders; their enshrined forms of worship hideous beyond belief. Every decent instinct in him had recoiled from those squalid sanctuaries, from haunting blood-smeared images, acrid smells of rancid ghi and dung, from twisted byways rank with garbage, where beggars and cripples exposed their sores, and ascetics proved their souls by distorting their haggard bodies almost out of human semblance. In the approach to the Golden Temple, slimy with all manner of filth, stricken creatures, hardly human, crawled and clutched at the passer-by—children without eyes, men without faces, their features eaten away by disease. In the Monkey Temple gifts were solemnly offered to flea-ridden apes.

For relief he would go down to the river with seekers after sanctity or health. No escape, even there, from repellent sights and smells: but no discordant detail could mar the vision incomparable of holy Ganges in the first hour of a limpid February dawn: crescent sweep of glittering water, the vast amphitheatre of crumbling palaces flaunting their untidy splendours; a forest of straw umbrellas, monkeys and milk-white bulls and millions of iridescent murmuring doves. Everywhere from the high bank to the river, descended the giant ghats, cataracts of masonry, bordered by temples and shrines. In the dawn and at sunset, worshippers without number would be entering or leaving the water, greeting the sun, in one gesture of adoration, as giver of earthly life; swarming, dripping, credulous crowds, repulsive, yet queerly fascinating to the eye of imagination. Women, with babies at their breasts, shivered as they stepped into the holy water; men lifted handfuls of it, whispering the oldest prayer ever uttered. Farther along the shore swirling columns of smoke shrouded and suggested the ghoulish horrors of those other ghats where flames devoured the dead.

Sanctified by five thousand years of worship, there seemed to hang above that sacred river an atmosphere of devotion as palpable as that which pervades the nave of a great cathedral. And here was a cathedral not made with hands. But even sunshine and pure air could scarcely cleanse his mind of hideous things seen and heard and smelled in Shiva’s sacred city, where cruelty, fraud and arrogance wore the garb of religion. Horses went limping with broken legs, yet none might shoot them. Twice he had seen a decrepit cow beset by vultures before the breath was out of her body; paying, in awful fashion, the price of her holiness. For no right-minded Hindu would put a swift, merciful end to her agony and fear.

He had seen swarms of rats devouring garbage, carrying plague; too sacred to be killed, because Ganesh had once dwelt in the body of a rat and sanctified the tribe of disease-breeders for ever.

Not all the waters of holy Ganges could wash away the outer and inner corruption of Benares and make her clean. Yet Benares was perhaps the most religious region on earth. It was a thought to shake the stoutest faith; and his own had never been of that calibre. He was a born questioner: and India breeds questions as her sun breeds flies.

But if his Rajput dress had allowed him a glimpse into the sinister background of religious ecstasies and posturings, it had also given him the privilege of intimate talks with a monk of the Rāma Krishna Mission; a man of culture and genuine holiness, who had spoken—as Indian to Indian—of the good and bad in that priest-ridden city.

‘All is not well with our temples,’ he had ruefully admitted. ‘Our gods have deserted them. Perhaps a sign that the people should seek truth elsewhere. We need a Christ to come with whips to drive out the priests, who talk of eternal verities while practising fraud and living in secret dissipation.’

‘If Christ came—would they heed him?’ had been Sinclair’s unspoken thought.

And to-morrow—Delhi; stronghold of the sturdy Moslem faith. No idols, no posturing gods and goddesses: Kismet for Karma. ‘Allah O Akbar’ in place of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and three thousand lesser deities; a city of virile men for whom life was no illusion: yet, in its own fashion, God-intoxicated, priest-ridden—or it would not be India. . . .

Lulled at last into deep sleep, he awoke to find the train at a standstill, his fellow travellers up and dressed. Someone lowered a window, pulled open the carriage door and let in a rush of morning air—the nipping, eager air of the Punjab. Suráj, with his man, sprang in to help roll up his bedding, while he took leave of the friendly Indians, and gave them, for address, Maiden’s Hotel, where he would be calling for letters. Then he slipped into his discarded coat and sprang on to the platform of yet another India: the Delhi of Akbar and Prithvi Raj, of the Jumma Musjid and the Peacock Throne; of the battered Kashmir Gate and the pseudo-Greek Assembly building, which he had heard described as a Victorian wedding-cake shorn of the top layer.

At this fevered moment of vice-regal negotiation with the rebel saint, fresh from gaol, it was Delhi of the ‘two Mahatmas’—as strange a juxtaposition as even India could achieve. And none could yet foretell which would prevail.

Chapter 2

What do these see, on opposite
Sides of the chasm?
What can they see, unless they strip their eyes
Of custom, darkness and the daily lies
Of class and habit?
—Humbert Wolfe

Chandni Chowk, the famous Silver Street of Delhi—once the richest street in the world—is still an imposing thoroughfare: still a street of jewellers and skilled ivory workers, a shifting pageant of races and types. For Delhi draws, like a magnet, all the wanderers of earth, who seek, in restless travel, a cure for restless minds. In this fateful month of February, India’s political nerve centre was also a magnet for journalists—British, American, European—ravening for colourful anecdotes of Mahatma Gandhi, in his latest avatar.

Released—to save the face of Congress and the Round Table policy—he now enjoyed the privilege of private interviews with a Viceroy whose spirit of Ahimsa¹⁸ excelled his own. Over the bungalow, where he lodged with a Nationalist Moslem, flew the Congress flag of Independence; a clear sign to the illiterate that Swaráj was at hand. Not two weeks earlier they had witnessed the belated inauguration of New Delhi; an official pageant in which they had played no active part. Now, through the same stately avenue, drove a solitary wizened man wrapped in a shawl; and Indian Delhi was tumbling over itself to catch a glimpse of the much-advertised saint, who could bind even a Viceroy with his spells.

Hindus openly rejoiced. Moslems remained suspicious and aloof. Anglo-Indians—having enjoyed their own tamasha—went unconcerned on their own busy-idle way. The more thoughtful among them knew that even a glorified Gandhi only stood for a hostile section of political India; that the Viceroy—whether they approved or deplored his policy—was making an honest bid to reconcile irreconcilables.

When Roy Sinclair and Suráj Mul arrived in Delhi, the secret conversations were still convulsing politicians and intriguing journalists. The daily procession of one motor-car was still drawing desultory crowds to New Delhi’s Memorial gateway. Sinclair had only seen Gandhi in ghoulish prints; and the day after their arrival he persuaded a reluctant Suráj to drive out with him to New Delhi, to join the crowd near the gate.

‘Why must I mix with those low class people?’ protested the proud Rajput. In his own city they were all linked by a brotherhood of racial inbreeding. ‘No bunnia Mahatma for me.’

‘Nor for me either,’ Sinclair humoured him. ‘But your bunnia-saint is “making history,” as we say.’

‘Not our fashion of history,’ said Suráj, immersed in his epic. ‘Besides, I have seen his monkey visage in the papers.’

‘Well, now you must see how the real man affects these people. Part of your education!’

That settled it. For Suráj was grateful, if indolent, and lacking in random interest. So together they went—a pair of distinguished-looking Rajputs—and pushed their way through the orderly incurious throng. Where an English crowd would have waved and cheered, these only emitted a feeble ‘Gandi Kijai!’ as the car came into view.

Beside a wealthy mill-owner—one of his backers—the Mahatma sat huddled in his shawl, bare-legged, bald-headed; his features an immense pair of spectacles, jug-handle ears, a long cunning nose and a mouth all gaps where teeth should be. To Sinclair he seemed a tired old man, perhaps a trifle disillusioned, probably happier spinning in jail. Nine years ago a younger Gandhi had said: ‘We are likely to be drowned in waters whose depth we do not know.’ Had he spoken more profoundly than he realised, as regards himself—as regards India? The fact that there were two of him interested Roy. It was the saint who sat spinning in jail. It was the lawyer-politician who would presently creep through the marble portals of Viceroy’s House, with humble aspect and heaven knew what of exalted conviction in his heart.

The crowd gave another feeble cheer as the car passed on, up the far-stretching avenue into the vista of official buildings and princely palaces—empty except on State occasions.

‘Education hogya!’¹⁹ was Suráj Mul’s only comment on that imposing city planned to express, in form and colour, the desired harmony between East and West. ‘Rather fine,’ he added pensively, ‘those many pillars and domes.’

‘Very fine. But it needs the mellowing touch of time. At present it’s painfully a huge cinema set. But I like the Viceroy’s copper dome on its white plinth. Tomorrow we’ll salute the undying glory of our ancient enemies—the Moghuls. They were “dreamers, dreaming greatly.” Now for a tonga, and we’ll rattle it back to our Street of Bankers.’

The crowd had dissolved. Truant clerks and students and shopkeepers were drifting aimlessly back to the city. And Sinclair, watching them, mused aloud, ‘I’d give a lot to see what’s going on inside their skulls.’

Suráj replied with unusual aptness: ‘No doubt a good many are thinking—“the true way to influence this Government is to abuse it.” Look at Gandhi: calling it Satanic, defying its laws and going to prison. But, because he can make trouble with Congress and excite the people, he is now driving to Viceroy’s House as an honoured guest. To us it looks as if the British are taking the dust of his feet.’

‘They’re not really doing that, Suráj,’ Sinclair urged.

He could see it all through Asiatic eyes; but he did not care to enlarge on the subject. By way of dismissing it, he hailed a passing tonga.

‘Delhi city: Khatri Street,’ he said, ‘as quickly as your noble ponies can go.’

And they rattled off.

Re-entering the city through the bastioned Delhi Gate, they clattered up the Chandni Chowk, among bullock-carts, camel-carts and foot-farers of every variety; swung round into Khatri Street, at the imminent risk of killing two children, and stopped with a dislocating jolt—not before the house of Krishna Lāl.

Another tonga-in-a-hurry filled the narrow way. The opposing drivers, Hindu and Mussulman, began shouting at each other, exchanging vivid epithets, while Suráj fumed at being implicated in a low-caste brawl.

‘Kya bhat hai?’²⁰ he demanded sharply; but the Hindu driver was busy returning with interest a stream of abuse that bespattered his female relations living and dead.

Sinclair listened, amused. ‘We’re neatly stuck,’ he said. ‘We can’t go forward. We won’t go backwards. Rather like the English in India!’

But Suráj could see no joke in being subjected to indignity.

‘These men are making us look fools. We can get out and walk.’

‘Can we? Wait a bit. We seem to be creating a local diversion.’

It was true. With incredible swiftness those arrested tongas had become the nucleus of an excited crowd, a surge of antagonism, religious and political. Merchants ran out of their shops. Passers-by forgot their errands. Even women joined in the battle that was not their battle, never troubling to ask what it was about.

‘It’s just the sort of senseless squabble that may blaze into a riot,’ remarked Sinclair, admiring the phlegm of a venerable gold-beater, who stood near his open shop front, scratching himself and chewing pahn.

Neither tonga could move now. Communal passions were alight. The trivial cause forgotten.

The first missile flew, harming no one, but changing the temper of the crowd.

A rakish young Moslem spat a mouthful of betel juice at the Hindu tonga-wallah and missed his aim. The red saliva whizzed past Suráj Mul’s cheek and sprayed the snow-white shirt of the gold-beater with a stain vivid as blood.

The rakish youth shouted with laughter; Suráj, infuriated, would have sprung at him—like a cheetah at a buck—but for Sinclair’s grip on his arm.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said low and swiftly. ‘It wasn’t meant for you.—Look there!’

A Hindu, standing near the old man, had whipped off his shoe—India’s most insulting weapon—and hurled it at the offender, catching him full in the face. That roused the whole Moslem faction. The returning slipper knocked the spectacles off an elderly clerk who was clambering into Sinclair’s tonga to escape undesired attentions.

By now, the narrow street was packed with seething, yelling humanity. Bricks hurtled; women screamed. Two big men wrenched the awning poles off the tonga and laid about them, breaking bones or cracking skulls at random. A party of students rushed a sweet-meat stall, poured milk and syrup down the gutter, and sprang back into the street, armed with solid copper ladles. A chemist, yelling for mercy, lay, huge and helpless, on the board of his shop, while angry men kicked him and his bag of drugs with equal vigour.

‘Maro maro!’²¹ ‘Din din.’²² Fierce battle-cries rose above the general tumult, the sinister hum of an angry crowd; a sound—like the mutter of war drums—once heard, never forgotten.

It swept Roy Sinclair from Delhi to Lahore. It made twelve years seem like yesterday. He was with Lance again, on duty in the Anarkalli bazaar, coping with a greater, fiercer crowd. He saw the swing of the fatal lathi²³—intended for himself—that had robbed him of his friend. . . .

And suddenly he was back in Delhi, sitting by Suráj, firmly holding his arm. The babu, lamenting the loss of his spectacles, still crouched near the driver—the forgotten cause of it all. Suráj—if released—would be out of the tonga attacking some harmless Moslem. He himself—mysteriously aware of a like instinct—felt unpleasantly strung up, impatient to get out of this inferno, at any risk.

‘We must make a dash for it,’ he said in his friend’s ear. ‘If we sham being excited, we can push through into the Chowk. But you keep your hands off Moslems—mind. I didn’t come out here to get killed in a tuppenny riot about nothing at all.’

‘Come on, then.’ The Rajput’s tone was tense with suppressed excitement. ‘Those dirty Moslems had better keep their hands off a Sisodia Rajput.’

Sinclair overpaid the astonished driver, who had almost forgotten his fares; and, as they sprang out, a straggle of students came surging in from some by-way to join the fun. Sinclair heard one of them shouting above the din: ‘ Arré, brothers! Find some kerosene and make a Moslem bonfire.’

‘A sample of the mild Hindu!’ he thought, as they pushed on, hitting out good-humouredly.

A Moslem, flourishing a dagger, jabbed playfully at Sinclair and slashed the back of his left hand; but he caught at Suráj just in time to prevent a free fight.

‘Come along quick, you fool,’ he said in Mewari. ‘Lakshmi be praised, it wasn’t my throat!’

‘If it was, you’d make some nonsense joke about it, English fashion,’ Suráj retorted, half annoyed, half impressed, as Sinclair hurriedly wrapped up the damaged hand and pushed on into the Chowk.

There also the infectious fury raged; Sinclair knew—if Suráj did not—that within an hour these irresponsible beings might be smashing kerosene tins to make more than a Moslem bonfire; or they might be going about their business, cracking jokes with each other, as if no serious clash had ever occurred.

‘Good luck! There’s a Sahib,’ he exclaimed; aware of an immediate sense of safety and stability at sight of that solitary Englishman.

A stocky unimpressive figure, in tweed suit and sun helmet, he was standing on the plinth of the tall tower that commanded the street. Hands in his pockets, a pipe between his teeth, he seemed to be simply smoking and looking on; but his very stillness and detachment from the fever of race conflict set him apart as the one stabilising influence in a scene full of sinister possibilities. He was probably either a junior civilian, or a Police Officer, bored with these chronic senseless riots, not actively aware of the impression he produced on the excited crowd, that seemed as yet not to heed him at all.

‘I like the cool way he stands there,’ said Sinclair, ‘pouring invisible oil on troubled waters.—There’s another one. Good.’

A taller man had appeared from behind the tower; and, while the two conferred, a half brick whizzed between them. They dodged it, laughing. A second knocked the tall man’s sun hat awry. There were cries of applause. But he shouted an order: and no more bricks were thrown.

Now they were assailed by half a dozen pugnacious students in Gandhi caps, making some urgent demand. The taller man clapped one of them on the shoulder and the next moment he had them all laughing—transformed from potential firebrands into six normal young men.

‘Look at that,’ Sinclair commented for the benefit of Suráj. ‘The nonsense joke—English fashion—is a power in the land! So is the neutral touch.’

‘Yes, I like them,’ Suráj nodded—gravely approving the unromantic pair. ‘All the same I wish they’d let me throttle a few Moslems while this steam is up, just to remind them that their ancestors sacked Chitor.’

‘They won’t, Bhai-ji. For them Chitorgarh is only a station on the Bombay line. And I won’t have it either—which is more to the point. Sumja?’²⁴

Suráj grinned. He coveted Roy’s esteem: but there were times when the devil in him wanted a holiday; and this infectious excitement wrought upon his nerves.

‘Sumja,’ he dutifully echoed.

‘Come on then.’ Roy drew him towards the tower.

‘I want to hear what they say; see how it’s done.’

‘You want many queer things,’ muttered the other.

His Rajput brain, steeped in tradition and custom, was untroubled by this restless disease of wanting to know. For him it sufficed that there, in tweed suit and topi, stood emblems of authority; and he saluted authority in any form. These white men were evidently born rulers, calming without effort an inflammable crowd. Impressed by the achievement, he felt no particular interest in how it was done.

As they neared the tower, the Civilian was in talk with a dishevelled old man whose small shop had been wrecked by Mussulmans—a pitiful tale. But at the magic word ‘compensation,’ he retired salaaming, and was almost knocked over by a group of excited young Hindus and Moslems arguing over some trivial point, instinctively appealing to the Englishmen, as to natural umpires and controllers of the situation.

Sinclair—near enough now to hear what was said—added a mental footnote to those brief glimpses of how it was done. It amounted to this: Indians, whether hostile or friendly, demanded and respected the impartial note of decision—which is not the prevailing note of democracy. Result: the Government of India—never consistently one thing or the other—was losing its hold on the respect and allegiance of the best elements in the country. Though the present Viceroy had scored a personal triumph, the prevalent distrust remained. Believers in kismet and karma tended to accept the inevitable. Only when the trumpet gave an uncertain sound, they made them ready for battle.

These two men sounded no trumpets, but they were armoured in impartiality; and as they calmed those nearest them, the effect spread in widening circles. Shouts and yells became sporadic. Clearly the worst was over. Between them they had scotched a serious outbreak, while Gandhi was accusing their kind of stirring up strife for racial ends. It was all in the day’s work. They would receive little credit, and expect none.

The police officer remarked to the patient, bored Civilian, ‘I think we’ve cast out the devil—pro tem. I’m overdue at the General’s for bridge.’

‘I’m overdue at a sanguinary committee,’ said the other. ‘But I’ll hang on here till things look a bit more settled.’

‘Shall I detail Ahmed Khan to make a peaceful demonstration?’

‘M-m—I’m not keen to supply food for headlines.’

So the policeman departed, and the Civilian hung on, smoking his pipe, speaking when appealed to, watching the crowd as it ebbed like a flood when the tide has turned.

Very soon—incredibly soon—the Chowk looked almost normal, except for injured innocents, limping off to a dispensary, and tonga loads of graver casualties—men, women and children—heads and arms bandaged, crumpled up, moaning. If any knew how the trouble started, the cause was forgotten. But wrecked shops and broken heads remained.

While the Civilian still stood there, chaffing or encouraging the wounded, an Englishwoman emerged from a silk shop over the way and came quickly towards him: a thin, tallish woman, with a tendency to stride.

Suráj had just murmured a weary, ‘ Bus hogya?’²⁵ But Sinclair gripped his arm.

‘Not yet. Look! There’s Grace Lynch, by all that’s wonderful! What’s she doing here? I must get at her somehow.’’

His urgency faintly puzzled Suráj.

‘You can’t go and talk to her in that dress.’

‘Can’t I? Wait a bit.’

Grace was speaking low and quickly to the Civilian. He nodded. And as she turned to go, Sinclair said, ‘Quiet now on all fronts! You run along to Krishna Lāl’s. I’ll come back and report.’

‘What about your hand?’ said Suráj; for blood was oozing through the impromptu bandage.

‘She’ll doctor that better than I can.—There she goes. I mustn’t lose sight of her.’

It was Roy Sinclair, not Prithvi Raj, who followed Grace Lynch down a narrow side street, where few English women would have dared to venture.

Standing near those two Englishmen, he had been seized with a longing to disown his Indian dress and speak in his natural tongue to his father’s people, strangers though they were, unfriendly though they might be, to a white man so demeaning himself. But there went an Englishwoman who knew him, who understood the cause of his vagary; and after more than two weeks of ‘living India’—smelling India—he craved an hour’s talk with her, as a thirsty man craves water.

How quickly she went. What was her errand?

At a discreet distance he followed her, feeling like a woman-snatcher in a cheap serial; but resolved to seize his chance.

Chapter 3

Life goes headlong; but when we meet a friend, we pause.
—Emerson

Down that narrow side street Delhi greeted him full-flavoured, the familiar composite smell of spices and drains, cow-dung fires, musk and humanity. Above the open shop-fronts, on either side, carved windows and balconies leaned forward as if whispering secrets of the strange lives passing within those sunless rooms—lives and thoughts many centuries removed from the new official Delhi on the ridge.

There were stalls, piled with fruit and flowers, rolls of coloured muslin and the azure blue of Delhi pottery. There were makers of toys and boots. There were sellers of perfumes—jasmin and narcissus, sandal and musk. No crowd here: men peacefully going their ways, beggars whining, women chaffering over a fraction of an anna. Cows wandered past, helping themselves—and welcome—to grain or green-stuff.

And among them all went that solitary Englishwoman, unmolested, unafraid. No doubt she had consulted the Civilian; and she knew Indians as few of her race ever succeed in knowing them. But—would John Lynch approve?

When she turned into a by-way, Sinclair halted outside, in case of need. He could see her bending over a girl-child, who sat crouched against the wall, trying brokenly to give an account of her plight. Watching them, he moved inadvertently; and Grace looked up—straight into the unusual eyes of a Rajput gentleman.

Not wishing to alarm her, he came forward and said quickly in English: ‘Don’t be startled, Grace. It’s Roy Sinclair.’

‘Roy——?’ She frankly appraised him in his close-fitting jodhpurs and camel’s hair coat, his orange-yellow kummerbund and turban.

‘You make a fine Rajput. Only the eyes might betray you; though they’re not impossible in the North. But what are you doing in this Delhi by-street?’

‘I’m following you! Suráj and I were standing near the tower when you came and spoke to that bored but impressive civilian. Such luck. I hadn’t a notion——’

‘I had! I’d heard of you from my friend Pundit Nilkant Rāo.’

‘Your friend, is he?’

‘Yes, I’m staying there, till I join my husband. They were going to send a note to Maiden’s Hotel.’—She glanced at his discoloured bandage.—‘You’re hurt?’

‘A young rioter jabbed at me. It’s been bleeding a bit.’

‘I’ll see to it presently. This poor child was in the crowd, bruised and frightened—lost. I can only leave her with the woman I’m going to see. A mercy I noticed her. No girl over eight is safe, here, from professional kidnappers and bride-sellers—I’m after a stolen wife now. I’ll tell you about it, if you can come back to my room for tea?’

‘Delighted. May I go along with you? Really, you shouldn’t be wandering alone, with Delhi in this inflammable state.’

She laughed. ‘I’m hardened. If I’d kept stopping to wonder—“Is it safe?” I should never have achieved anything!’

Leaning over the child again, she said in a softened voice, ‘Come, little sister, I’ll take you to kind people, till you can tell us about your own. Is it mother—or husband?’

The girl shook her head and sobbed afresh. Her limbs were shaking.

‘Poor scrap. She’s been badly frightened.’

‘May I carry her?’

‘If you will, I’d be grateful.’

The girl shrank, at first, when he lifted her, as though masculine arms had a fearsome association. But his gentleness reassured her; and the thin little body so near him made him feel as if he were carrying his own Lilāmani, not a stray girl-fragment of Delhi.

‘I’ve a small daughter of seven,’ he told Grace.

‘Lucky child, to be born and reared in England,’ was her curious answer, wrung from the depths of darker knowledge. ‘It’s futile passing laws to protect mere children from the pains and penalties of marriage, while custom condones the sin of subjecting them to licence—in the name of a sacrament.’

Her blunt words hurt him the more because he possibly held one of those very children in his arms; but he admired the courage of her plain speaking and fearless action. He was glad, on every count, that he had found and followed her.

Outside a respectable looking house, they stopped. Sinclair set the girl on her feet and stroked her hair. Grace put an arm round her; and they went in, leaving him alone, saddened by a haunting sense of unknown tragedy; refreshed by contact with his own kind. He was discovering, as before, that the more definitely he leaned toward the East, the stronger within him became the pull of the West, the clearer his perception of the chasm between—so difficult to bridge, so dangerous to leave unbridged.

While his mind wandered, he stood absently watching a Delhi craftsman beating out a pair of silver anklets under the gaze of a watchful customer, who squatted close by, hawking and spitting, keeping an eye on his precious metal.

In the next shop-front a wrinkled old merchant sat cross-legged among rare embroideries, coats and cushions and priceless scraps of old hand-woven Kashmir shawls. Sinclair was bargaining for a fragment that would make a lovely handbag for Tara, when Grace came out again, backed his price, and prevailed.

‘Any luck?’ he asked, pocketing the coveted morsel.

‘I think I’m on her track. It may mean going to Gurgáon. You shall hear more at home.’

‘Let’s get home. I propose a taxi—my taxi. I’m in charge.’

She laughed. ‘In that case, it’s useless for a lone woman to flaunt her independence!’

‘Are you flying the flag of Swaráj?’

‘For the moment, I’m doing a ticklish bit of private detective work, by special permission, because I can go where a man can’t. Up to now the police have failed, and the girl’s enlightened young husband is distracted over her loss. So I persuaded my enlightened husband to let me stay on here and follow up this clue, while he’s in Meerut.’

‘Is it the Conspiracy Case?’

‘Yes. They want his opinion on certain points. He probably knows more than any man, outside the Secret Service, about the underground tunnelings of Moscow, the net-work of plans for revolutionary outbreaks all over the Punjab. And I know, in my line—almost as much as Miss Mayo! He and I see a very different India from most of our people out here: a more terrible, interesting and vital India.’

They had reached the Chandni Chowk—a changed scene; Hindus and Moslems amicably going their ways as if no volcanic eruption had occurred within the memory of man.

‘Astonishing people,’ said Sinclair. ‘So volatile, yet so stable; so exasperating, yet so lovable.’

‘Yes—lovable,’ echoed the woman who knew more than Miss Mayo. ‘In one aspect, they are incredibly callous and cruel; in another, unfailingly courteous and kind. I really believe they need kindness more than any other race. Yet—it’s an ugly story I have to tell.—Look, there’s your taxi.’

Sinclair hailed it; and a reckless Indian driver whirled them out to the residential college built on an off-shoot of the Ridge, commanding wide views of city and plain.

The house they entered was fine and spacious: airy rooms, carved pillars and arches, good English furniture; a harmonious blending of East and West. There were many books and rich embroideries; and on the walls a collection of rare old Indian paintings.

‘They’re his hobby—almost his religion,’ Grace explained, as Roy halted to examine a Rāma and Sita quaintly unlike his father’s royal pair. ‘“Let new India learn what old India has to teach”—is his text when he gets a few of his favourites here and lectures to them on the clash within the pale of Hinduism—between the good old and the bad new, the bad old and the good new.’

‘Not only in Hinduism,’ said Sinclair. ‘It’s the eternal clash between the generations: the failure to see that life’s values are intrinsic, not a matter of new or old.’

‘That’s our main trouble with the women. But in Delhi there are many very advanced, very thoughtful. They have a purdah club, a lovely enclosed garden near the old fort; tennis and badminton, music and lectures. Some of them very fine speakers; none finer than Mrs Nilkant Rāo. Such an ordinary looking little person, that her un-ordinariness impresses one the more.’

She drew back a heavy Bokhara curtain.

‘See how comfortable they’ve made me here. Sitting-room, bedroom, bathroom, verandah—all my own. We’ll have tea out there, and catch the last of the sun. What an evening! A Punjab February is hard to beat. And it’s so peaceful being well away from actual Delhi, so desperately gay at this season—what with the Horse Show and the Hunt Ball; and the dutiful, kind Viceregal pair, entertaining en masse. . . . Poor dears! How they must sometimes hate us all!’

‘And you’ve no use for any of that?’

He regarded her with undisguised interest.

‘Not much. I was reared otherwise. Besides—to be honest, until I became Mrs John Lynch last July, not much of it had any use for me! And my tiresome pride won’t let me humbly accept the surface change of front. Perhaps we’re all snobs, in some sense; but the official and racial snobbery of Anglo-India!’ She dismissed it with a gesture. ‘Here we stand talking, when I ought to be tidying up your hand.’

The process, if painful, was brief. ‘Now sit and bask in the verandah,’ she commanded, ‘till I come back.’

He lifted off his turban, glad to be rid of it. Then he sat and basked in the afternoon sunlight that baptised the vast sad plain of the Jumna and the ruins of more than seven Delhis; broken remnants of fort and temple embalmed in amber light. The mighty river, in this dry, cold season, was little more than a ghost of itself, gliding between banks of silted sand. At the far end of the walled city loomed the Fort; white domes and airy minarets lifted above red turreted walls, catching the light.

Delhi, throughout, bore the stamp of Moslem genius—a genius that mainly expressed itself in forts, temples and tombs—insignia of battle, worship and death. The Hindu stress on life and the profusion of life was overshadowed, here, by the Moslem’s glorification of death. Mausoleums, Mutiny-battered walls, ruins of conquered cities—witnesses all to the futility of human endeavour—oppressed his imagination with a sense of profound sadness that had never troubled him in Udaipur, for all its tragic history.

Here the past overawed the present, shadowed even the promise of a greater future. Yet always there were moments that eluded the pursuing shadow; moments of ‘the pause prolonged’—as on the Pichola Lake that evening; as now, in this empty verandah, while the impartial sun shone indifferently on Delhis that had seen so much and the Delhi that had yet to see. It glinted on the brand-new copper dome of Viceroy’s House, where East and West were politely ignoring each other at a vast garden party. It haloed the lovely ancient domes of the Jumma Musjid, where thousands of Moslems were at prayer. Round those domes fluttered doves innumerable, now flakes of silver, now specks on the blue; and black against the brightness, four slender minarets pointed upward to the inscrutable heavens. . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

The return of Grace Lynch restored his normal mood. To the pleasure of his first English tea-drinking since Udaipur, was added the stimulant of open-hearted talk with this woman who had clearly decided that they were to be friends. Her mention of Gurgáon had fired him with a wish to go there also, to see for himself the famous district where a genuine attempt had been made at lifting the Indian peasant out of his fatalistic groove. Presently he might speak of it, but first he must hear the tragic story of Sunita Devi and her bereft husband. It was a case—all too common—of the ‘England returned.’ Young Rāmanand fresh from Oxford and years of mental freedom, had set his face against the usual pre-arranged marriage. But dependent on his father, hard pressed by a mercilessly loving mother, he had succumbed to the fatal complex that saps India’s manhood.

‘So he married his unknown bride.’ Grace lit a cigarette and shared her match with Roy. ‘But he vowed he would take another one, if he chanced to fall in love. That fantastic Western notion didn’t trouble them at all—till it came to pass. Riding over their lands, one day, he saw a beautiful peasant girl sowing rice: saw her again and again—and resolved to marry her. Then of course there was a battle royal; the fiercer because Sunita was of lower caste than himself. But his blood was up; and he brought her to Delhi where he married her with Arya Samáj rites—and she not fourteen. His English education got him a post as railway clerk; and so they lived for a year. Then one day, in his absence, she stole out to watch a Mohurrum procession—and she never came back. Poor Rāmanand was distracted; only clinging to the Indian’s pathetic faith in the police. They take miracles for granted, these people; and the police out here do unravel mysteries that would baffle Scotland Yard.’

‘Have they got a clue?’

‘More than that. John’s Inspector, Govind Singh, and his trained spies, discovered that Sunita had been kidnapped by a band of professionals. And for two years they’ve been on her trail. They’ve unearthed two men to whom she was sold in turn, as a high caste virgin, at a big price, because of her beauty. But they both flung her off when they found she was neither high caste nor virgin——’ Grace clenched her hand sharply, and he guessed her unspoken thought. ‘Govind Singh believes the latest husband is in Gurgáon district—Zemindar, or his son. So that’s my next move, since I’ve combed out the local ashram.²⁶ Places like that make one almost despair of India.’

‘I thought they were retreats for widows and girls in difficulties.’

She looked at him with a strange smile. ‘So they are—in name. Actually they are marriage markets, in the crudest sense: the helpless girls sold to any sort of men. Prices running from twenty-five pounds to three or four hundred, according to the man’s pocket and the girl’s charms. But no news there of Sunita. So I shall try the Zemindar.’

‘When d’you go?’

‘Wednesday’—if I can arrange it with Mr Acland, the Gurgáon D.C. He’ll provide us with tents—myself and two servants and Govind Singh.’

‘Look here ‘—Sinclair seized his chance—‘would it bore you, or bother you, if we came along independently at the same time? Peasant India’s part of my programme. I’d like the chance to see if any good has come out of the great “Uplift” experiment. We needn’t worry the D.C. We could find Indian quarters—if you wouldn’t object?’

‘Object?’ I’d be delighted. But would Suráj Mul—very much Rajput—be interested in mere Punjabi peasants?’

Roy laughed. ‘Probably not. He’s a lazy beggar. Politely bored at times with my odd interests—not quite grasping “the why and wherefore.” When he can’t get sport, and isn’t writing verse, he mostly loves to sit and stare at nautch girls, or the “pictures.” But Gurgáon’s no distance. He’s free to stay in Delhi, if he’d rather; and get on with his epic. He’ll make a fine thing of it—if he can keep it up.’

She looked thoughtfully at the man who was half Rajput; hesitated—then asked outright: ‘How does it work, Roy? I’ve been consumed with curiosity about you two: you, the seeker and questioner; he so local in outlook, for all his intelligence and imagination. I said nothing at Udaipur. Not my business. But I felt it was a biggish risk.’

‘It was. Perhaps it still is,’ Roy admitted, suddenly aware of his own relief at being able to speak his personal thought with the certainty of being understood. ‘I’m in for biggish risks all round. And this one’s working, so far, better than you might expect. There’s the blood link between us, and a real affection, which goes a long way with Indians.’

She smiled. ‘Hearts are their strong suit! Yet they leave them out of marriage. But mentally——?’

‘Oh, of course he has the narrowness of their unlimited capacity for believing in anything. India’s very mixed past is wrapped in a golden mist. The wildest Rajput legends are as true, for him, as the riot we took part in to-day. They’ve no real history sense; no critical truth-seeking instinct to draw a clear line between legend and fact. One’s up against that all the time; and another lack of interest in anything for its own sake.’

‘Doesn’t he care for poetry?’

‘Chiefly as a means to an end—the glorifying of Rajasthán! When he’s worked up over that, he’s splendid. Lately he has deserted the epic for a heroic ballad on the capture of Achilgarh Port, the place where we lunched on that wonderful day. I’ve forgotten the details of it: and he won’t tell me a word yet. But he’s fizzling with it.’

‘Couldn’t you make him tell it to me? Shall I send a very polite message begging you both to come and dine here this evening? I’m free to ask anyone I please, any time. Indians are perfect hosts. Will you come?’

‘Nothing I’d like better. If we can work him up, he’ll enjoy the telling as much as any of us. And I shall enjoy meeting that delightful pair again.—I ought to be getting back now; or Suráj may be thinking that Moslem has got me! Exit Roy Sinclair—pro tem. I’ve enjoyed the change of air.’

He replaced his turban at an angle; stood up and saluted.

‘Thákur Prithvi Raj—at your service! A landowner from Chamba.’

She laughed and returned his salute.

‘Where are you lodging?’

‘In Khatri Street, with Krishna Lāl, banker. Quite a decent house; but of course bare rooms, string beds, oil lamps and food soused in ghi. It’s odd. They dress so finely and make such beautiful things; but art and beauty seem dead in their daily lives. Such kindness and hospitality, such carelessness and dirt—except in their persons and their food. But I suppose we puzzle them too; making our rooms beautiful, wearing hideous hats and trousers. “Mighty opposites”—even in trivial things. We’ll turn up at eight. Give my salaams to the Nilkant Rāos. But look here,’ he hesitated,—‘don’t mention my Rajput blood. I’ll tell them later myself.’

‘Do. It will add to their interest in you. My special respects, please, to Suráj Mul—and my special request.’

By now the sun was conjuring Delhi’s haze of dust into powder of gold, so that the air seemed filled with pollen from a million flowers. And Sinclair drove back to the walled city, his eyes and brain dazzled with the splendour and peace of the vast Indian scene; his imagination so saturated with the tragic, yet prophetic, spirit of Delhi that he could not just then wish himself anywhere else on earth.

Chapter 4

Double gifts, fourfold sacrifice.
—Rajput Chief

At nine o’clock that evening, they were sitting together—the five of them.—in the lofty, book-filled room where the Pundit worked and mainly lived. Its double doors opened on to the same stretch of verandah, overlooking the same Delhi view, now a ghostly monochrome, with silver high lights wrought by the unbelievable Indian moon. Though the night air was still crisp, a charcoal brazier gave out warmth enough to admit of open doors. There was little furniture besides the two writing-desks, a few tables and comfortable chairs; but here also there were curious old pictures and some covetable carvings in ivory.

The Pundit—overjoyed to find his ‘distinguished author’ wearing Indian dress—had much to ask and more to say. He would clearly need a fair innings before he deserted the complexities of modern Delhi for the glories of ancient Rajasthán. Suráj himself, though neither shy nor humble-minded, was obviously out of his depth in this intellectual atmosphere; and Grace, perceiving it, drew him on to talk of Aruna and Udaipur, while their plump little hostess, in shell-pink dress and sari, hovered on the outskirts of both conversations, head tilted, eyes bright and alert as a bird’s.

The Pundit had deserted literature. He was talking of Gandhi. All Delhi was talking of Gandhi. City and station were alive with rumours. Everyone ‘wanted to know.’ Distracted journalists dramatised any hopeful fragment of news. Only tireless Anglo-Indians—caught in their whirl of winter gaiety—danced and raced and played every sort of game, and dined each other with undiminished zeal. They talked of the Viceroy’s Ball that was, of the Bachelors’ Ball to be; they lightly dismissed hair-raising statements that Gandhi was ‘striking at the vitals of the British Raj,’ or ‘sounding the death-knell of Empire.’ For if they knew little of Indian politics, they did know something of the British Raj—its ‘steel frame-work,’ its sure foundations. Inevitably most of them had less sympathy to spare for a harassed, high-minded Viceroy, than for scores of their own kind, wearing themselves out in loyal efforts to uphold an unworkable system; ground between the upper and nether millstones of rising costs and diminishing pay: falsely judged—‘according to appearance’—by hostile Indians and clever young theorists from Home.

Whatever the Pundit’s judgment, he reserved it out of regard for his valued friend Mrs Lynch and her august husband the Deputy Inspector General of those vilified police. Here in Delhi, intercourse between East and West was reputed to be friendlier than elsewhere; yet even here it came to little more than a polite contact of polished surfaces.

This afternoon, he and his wife had hopefully attended an ‘At Home’ in the grounds of the Chelmsford Club—shrine of the better-understanding cult; had spent an hour or two—less hopefully—exchanging civilities with a mixed gathering of British, Hindus, Moslems and Sikhs, all trying genuinely to like one another better than they could ever manage to do with the best will on earth. Yet out of these diverse elements the new India must be evolved. Few, except the most extreme, doubted that, in any event, the English would remain. Their just, impartial rule was the cement of the whole edifice. Whether it survived as a necessary evil or a welcome boon would depend on a radical change of attitude—not quite inconceivable. There were signs already here and there—for those who had eyes to see.

It was a chit from a fellow Pundit that had transported them from pleasant fields of literature into the dusty highway of politics. It confirmed the persistent rumour of a deadlock in the Viceroy’s study, where the ‘two Mahatmas’ fought their bloodless battle behind closed doors. Gandhi still pressed for an enquiry into the reputed excesses of police officers and men. The Viceroy flatly refused so to strain the loyalty and discipline of India’s most essential service.

‘I should think so, indeed!’ Grace Lynch flung out hotly, resenting the insult to her husband’s service. ‘Picture the state of India with the whole police force in the dock, heckled by clever Indian lawyers. The police have had a gruelling time. Who can blame them, if they do sometimes let out haphazard at the wrong people?’

Saroláta Rāo leaned across, gently touching her hand.

‘We think as you do, my very dear lady.’

‘I know that, my friend, or I wouldn’t have spoken.’ The Englishwoman curbed her indignation. ‘But if I may say so—I do feel that Gandhi’s getting above himself. He hasn’t yet tucked the whole of India into his dhoti!’

The Pundit chuckled. ‘I like your vigorous, honest talk. Proof that we are friends. Behind that strange small man there are forces of ruin. But, through his personal holiness, he has captured religious India.’

‘Also half America!’ said Sinclair. ‘They’re Gandhi-mad.’

‘Not altogether. One I met this afternoon talked, in her humorous way, of ‘the Saint’s Conflict.’ And she said, outright, the true Saint is the English one. Your Mahatma is a bag full of tricks.’

‘That’s rather tall,’ said Roy. ‘What’s your opinion, Pundit-ji—if we may hear it?’

Nilkant Rāo glanced at his wife, as if for permission, and laid a finger on his lip.

‘Strictly between these four walls and these three friends, I think our Mahatma is too much glorified. As a saint, he is genuine, especially when spinning in prison! As a politician—no. His mind remains provincial. He can only see one idea, one point of view. I would venture to say it is your own people who are paying him too much deference, making him dangerous to India. Remember, I speak as one who loves his country, and desires the spiritual unity which must come before self-government. But I do say it will be a misfortune for India and the world if the English ever lose faith in themselves and their real work for India. I don’t mean these fancy political schemes. I mean their administration—an achievement unique in history.’

‘Let us take care we don’t destroy it, through hasty snatching at political freedom.’

‘A good many of us agree with you, Pundit-ji. But the sacred trust idea has gone out of fashion.’

‘Fashion or no, the trust remains. My people still have faith abounding; and though they see the Sahibs setting out on a perilous journey letting Congress distort their case. If the English would only believe it, under all these surface hostilities, Indian friendship is there, for the asking. Why can’t they take it for granted? We talk much hot air; but we are not yet quite mad. We need you here for every reason: and I believe we shall always need you. That’s the unpatriotic truth!’

The little man laughed off his genuine emotion; but Sinclair leaned eagerly towards him.

‘We need each other, Pundit-ji. But we’re all too busy being patriotic to see the other man’s point of view. Perhaps the Round Table has done that much for both sides?’

‘Yes, that is possible. Our delegates went to London hostile and full of suspicion. They have returned with quite another view of England.’

‘But can they put it across to India? They ought to hold meetings all over the country——’

‘Yes—they ought. Only’—the Pundit hesitated—‘you know how it is with them. They fear Congress. They fear to become unpopular. So far-reaching the power of the Brahmins and social boycott. They know very well that they can’t move mountains of ignorance and apathy with a few puffs of eloquence. So they lose heart and get “cold feet” as you say. Cowards——? Not exactly.—The whole position is too complicated.’

‘Oh, it’s damned complicated. That’s India’s trouble all round. Any plain statement about the country or the people instantly sets me wondering if the opposite wouldn’t be just as true.’

‘And no doubt every opposite is true somewhere, sometime. That is the bewilderment—and the charm.’

It was Mrs Rāo who spoke, in her unaggressive voice. While the others talked, she had moved to the open door with Suráj, questioning him along his own line of interest.

‘India, after all,’ she went on, ‘is much more than just a country. One might almost say a constellation of many worlds. I, standing here, with talk of modern Delhi in my ears, have travelled with Suráj Mul to quite another India. If you have finished your friendly battle of words, let him carry us, for half an hour, into a land of gallant deeds.’

Her husband softly clapped his hands. ‘She speaks well. Let us hear this heroic tale of Achilgarh Fort. Not yet in verse?’

He turned with courteous deference to Suráj.

‘Not yet. But it will be, soon.’

‘It is part of an epic that he wishes to write in pure Urdu,’ Sinclair added, to quicken the interest of his scholarly host; and the announcement took effect.

‘Let him come to me for any polishing needed. In that beautiful and difficult language, Delhi still keeps up her ancient rivalry with Lucknow.—But at present it is my privilege to hear.’

Hands folded, he settled back in his chair. His wife took a lower one beside him; and Suráj with his instinct for dramatic effect, sat apart, at the end of a low chest. His small hands were clenched, his clear eyes clouded in a way that suggested opium. The suspicion troubled Sinclair, not for the first time. Harmless enough, in moderation, it might be dangerous for a dreamer. He must keep an eye on the budding poet of Rajasthán.

Sauntering across to the open door, he leaned against it, just outside the sill, nothing in view but Suráj and moonlit India: such patterns of bare branches, such pools of shadow; and out there on the plain, a depth and stillness more than mortal. He had discarded his turban and the chill air caressed his forehead. The beauty and stillness troubled him with a sudden distaste for the realism of Delhi, its atmosphere of politics and strife; a longing for his Island palace, for the hills and lakes and soft splendours of Udaipur, where even the soberest man could believe in anything. . . .

Suráj was speaking to Grace now, explaining the connection of his ballad theme with the epic tale of Pertáp Singh.

‘This desperate attack on Achilgarh Fort,’ he said, ‘happened long after the battle of Huldighát. Rāna Pertáp was dead. His unworthy son, Umra Singh, reigned at Udaipur. His brother Sukta Singh—dead also—had left sixteen sons, chiefs of a strong and troublesome clan, fierce rivals of another great clan, the Chondáwats. Each claimed the right to lead the Rāna’s army in battle; and at last he checked their jealous wrangling by setting them to regain his strongest fortress, occupied by Akbar’s “Toorks.” Whichever clan was first inside the walls, should afterwards march at the head of his army. There was a deed and a royal promise fit for men of valour. And my ballad is the story of that deed.

‘The Suktáwats, led by Achil and three valiant brothers, attacked the iron-spiked doors of the main gateway with axes: while their rivals, on the far side, brought ladders to scale the walls. But every time they were overturned; and those who attacked the gate fared no better. They had elephants for battering-rams, but no beast who had once felt those iron spikes would charge them again. At last, it seemed to Achil as if one determined charge would break in the weakened doors so he shouted an order. The elephant swung forward. But each time he swerved aside, though his driver was pleading and cursing and jabbing him with the sharp ankus behind his ears.

‘Then Achil saw only one thing to do. Down he flung himself from his elephant and set his own back against those cruel spikes. Facing them all in full armour, he cried to the startled mahout, “Drive the beast against my body. To disobey is instant death.”

‘So the driver was forced to obey that dreadful command. Then the elephant plunged forward, his great head lowered—and those cruel spikes pierced human flesh. The gates creaked, and the elephants crashed through into the fort—over Achil’s dead body.’

Suráj paused, staring straight before him; and Sinclair was glad of the respite. Too vividly he had seen and felt every detail of that awful scene. In the room behind him, not a stir, not a sound. From the moonlit ruins on the plain came the ghostly laughter of jackals, like lost souls, deriding all futile heroism and high endeavour. It chilled the glow in his brain. So that it was a relief when Suráj once more took up his tale.

‘But in spite of that noble sacrifice, the Suktáwats were not first within the fort after all. Just before the gates fell, came the war-cry of the other clan—a shout of triumph. Only by a few moments—by a deed of reckless daring—they had scaled the wall. And now they cut their way through to an inner room, where they found two Moslem officers quietly playing chess. The “Toorks” had heard a noise of fighting, but never imagined that fort could be taken by assault. Looking up at the victors, they coolly asked leave to finish their game of chess; and those courteous Rajputs, breathless from the battle, stood watching till the game was ended. Then they took out the two Moslems and killed them.

‘They found the main gateway choked with dead bodies, besiegers and besieged; three of the brave brothers slain and one dying of wounds. But he was not yet dead when Rāna Umra arrived to claim the captured fort.

‘In grief and pride the King stooped over his wounded warrior, who had just strength to murmur as he died, “Double gifts—fourfold sacrifice.”

‘Those words, caught up by a bard of the clan, became a part of their war-cry. And the brave dead lived, through the poet, though the hero died. Without great words there is no remembrance of great action. So, in the Rig Veda, warrior and poet are hymned as one; both born of fire. As the poet, inspired by the hero, kindles the flame in other heroes, so the torch is handed on from age to age.’

Again there fell a long silence, as if the listeners were loth to break the spell of that barbarous and tragic tale.

Roy had forgotten them; had forgotten everything but his own strange response to the noble phrase which defied even the derision of jackals.

‘“Double gifts—fourfold sacrifice,”’ he repeated, as if the words had, for him, some personal significance not yet apprehended.

And Suráj said, with a spice of his unashamed pride, ‘Perhaps you don’t know that those brave Suktáwats were long ago ancestors of our family. Through them comes our fink with the Royal House. If the great days of fighting came again, those words would still be our war-cry.’

‘Ours? That’s queer,’ Sinclair mused aloud, unconscious that he spoke as a Rajput in the presence of those who believed him English. ‘The words seemed to ring a bell at the back of my brain.’

‘Perhaps your soul remembered,’ Suráj stated simply. ‘Perhaps we were both in that fort, fighting together. Somewhere, in other lives, we have known each other.’

‘Yes—I think we have,’ Roy gravely agreed. ‘But I can’t take these mysteries for granted as you can.’

‘Take or leave them—they are true,’ said the Hindu: and at last the Pundit spoke.

‘My young friend, you have a natural gift of language—English and our own. You must write that stirring tale here, in Delhi. You must tell it to my students, who know too little of Rajput history.’

The women clapped. Suráj stood up and bowed—delighted with the small ovation. Sinclair, turning quickly, looked straight at Nilkant Rāo—and knew that he was known. They smiled; and the Pundit’s eyes dwelt on him in closer observation.

‘That explains’—many things,’ he said. ‘You also are Rajput?’

‘Yes. I am a grandson of Sir Lakshman Singh.’

The simple statement took effect, as he intended.

‘On both sides,’ said Nilkant Rāo, ‘you have a noble heritage.’

‘On both sides—I am proud of it,’ Roy stated, lest there should be any lurking doubt in the minds of either.

‘And I am proud that India has a share in the author I so much admire. Only a little sorry, because it had given me unusual pleasure that an Englishman should so deeply love and understand our difficult country. But, in you, we have that greater rarity—an Englishman who is proud of his Indian blood—his “double gifts.” It is no small privilege to claim even distant kinship with the man who spoke those noble words.’

Sinclair could only assent in silence. The aptness of that broken phrase was like a point pressed against his heart. . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Driving back to Delhi, Suráj was full of the impression he had made, eager to write his ballad at once.

Sinclair, otherwise absorbed, listened fitfully, glad enough that Suráj had made a hit and had got in touch with Nilkant Rāo. He felt anxious, a trifle, about the opium; doubtful whether to attempt a warning.

As they entered the Chandni Chowk, Suráj announced that he wished to be dropped near the tower. After the riot, he had fallen into talk with Jeswunt Singh, a certain son of a Sikh ruler, “England-returned.” They had planned to meet again in the Chowk, to sample the night-life of Delhi. That the sampling process would include opium-smoking and women was none of Roy’s affair. So he accepted the request without comment: and Suráj, after a brief pause, added, ‘Won’t you join us? Take advantage of your Indian dress—have some fun too?’

Sinclair’s hesitation was brief. ‘I think not, thanks,’ he said. ‘Two’s company.’

But Suráj, in convivial mood, pressed the point. ‘Don’t you sometimes like to have fun?’

‘Of course I do. But I’m not after—that kind of fun.’

‘Never that kind—for Englishmen?’

Sinclair smiled. ‘It depends,’ said he, ‘on the Englishman.’

Suráj said nothing. But, as a street lamp flashed past, he turned and looked at his friend—so close to him, yet so many leagues removed. Then he spoke his thought.

‘Lots of them out here, with wives away, or no wives at all. Very strange, it seems to us—very difficult.’

‘It is very difficult,’ Sinclair admitted with an honest emphasis that emboldened Suráj to put a few straight questions.

And Sinclair gave him straight answers, though he touched on things acutely personal, instinctively hid. It was easier, in some ways, expounding English standards of marriage to a Rajput, whose relation to women was coloured by traditions of chivalry and romance; and it might be worth the effort it cost him, if by any chance it gave Suráj ‘to think.’

Clearly it pleased him that Sinclair should answer his difficult queries as friend to friend. In return, he himself spoke more frankly of the Eastern standpoint; adding naively, ‘So you see—to-night I shall enjoy myself. To-morrow I make extra pujah to atone for my sins.’

‘What’s the form of your private pujah?’ Sinclair asked for the first time.

Suráj hesitated. ‘I’m afraid—to you it might sound only foolishness.’

‘No—not to me; because I know that the things which look like foolishness are often the things that pass understanding.’

Thus encouraged, Suráj went on, ‘Well—my kind of foolishness is to worship, morning and evening, my private image of Krishna—hero of the Kshattriya²⁷ caste—with oblations of rice, pulse and sandal oil. Then I make prayers——’ he paused—‘sometimes Vedic hymns, sometimes poetry of Tagore and Kabir—or even my own. I make special petitions: a clear brain, healthy body, good Karma.’

‘Those you have,’ said Sinclair gravely, moved by the simplicity of his friend’s daily rites.

‘But I have also asked—for sons,’ Suráj shyly admitted. ‘And those I have not.’

The admission, it seemed, touched too sore a point; for he capped it quickly with a light remark about a passing procession—Hindus making merry with blare of lights and discordant music.

At the tower he sprang out with a cheerful good-night; and Sinclair drove on alone, half enlightened, but still wondering about the wife at Udaipur. Among Indians, love had no direct relation to marriage. By the favour of the gods it might spring from an arbitrary union; but Sinclair gathered that the gods had not so favoured Suráj Mul. The wife he had left was merely his lawful woman, essential for the begetting of sons. There, it seemed, his obligation ended; and Sinclair could neither pass judgment on him, nor claim credit for the fact that Tara—being what she was—commanded his whole allegiance, near or far.

But to-night he was chiefly preoccupied with a trouble of the spirit engendered by the phrase that had rung a bell in his brain, by the unheard whisper of some hidden meaning that eluded him. Only the sensation remained—and would remain.

Chapter 5

The question is—not whether England has a right to keep India, but whether she has a right to leave it.
—M. Paul Boell

Suráj Mul slept heavily and woke reluctantly. Sinclair met his flash of temper with ribald allusions to ‘the morning after the night before,’ and a reminder that he had hired ponies for an early ride: ‘Kāla Nāg’—his property ‘for the duration’—having been sent on, direct, to Peshawar.

It was a morning of thin cloud, the air fresh and crisp, till the sun gained power. Out of the walled city they rode through the Lahore Gate, and on along the upper Ridge road, where a few English riders were ‘eating the air’: back by another route along the red battlemented walls; past the towered Delhi Gate; and on to the rose-coloured fort, shrine of ancient splendours—that made three hundred years seem a watch in the night.

Clouds had vanished. The sun had come into his own. Fierce light and passionate blue intensified the hard clean brilliance of the scene: swelling domes of the Pearl Mosque, towers and minarets and carven splendours of the old palace; inlaid columns of the Dewan-i-khas²⁸—the loveliest single room on earth; a vanished empire at its height of glory.

And outside, on the Jumna plain, how many other Delhis? Ghostly witnesses to the instability of Empire. True, the English had builded firmer and deeper than their forerunners. Great was their fortune; genuine their faith in dominion by divine decree—a belief rooted in the East, which imputes to each man and nation a certain measure of divine grace. But government by ikbāl²⁹ has its peculiar dangers. It must be grounded in wisdom, justice and firmness: for it implies God-given power. And when ikbāl passes, power passes too. That the record of British rule was unique in history, India had proof abounding; but to many this rebuilding of Delhi had seemed an evil portent. Was their costly monument on the Ridge to prove only a mausoleum of Empire?

No hint of these discomfortable musings to Suráj who, in his own fashion, was taking stock of Moghul art.

‘It’s all very beautiful—colour and shape,’ he said in a curiously considered tone. ‘But a dead kind of beauty. Just adornment; no inside meaning. These are caskets for Emperors. Think of our Jagdesh temple and Shiva’s temple at Benares, how different, how alive—men and gods and beasts. Sometimes ugly to the eye; but for the mind there is a meaning.’

The surprising aptness of that comment interested Roy.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is a deadness of beauty—classic and formal. But it’s impressive. It has character. The Moslem faith makes character. Those Delhi Moghuls, at their best, were some of the world’s greatest rulers.’

‘But for heroes,’ Suráj insisted, ‘look to Rajasthán.’

‘Oh, I give you the heroes,’ Roy conceded, his eyes on a group of figures, trailing in the wake of one who talked and talked. ‘But when it comes tourists, time to fade away.’

The first group, in light coats, topis and field-glasses, was obviously American. Behind, at a respectful distance, followed a family party of Indians. A prosperous merchant—his dress and turban suggesting Jaipur—shepherded an emancipated wife and two daughters, who lagged a little behind, laughing and talking.

As they passed the Rajputs, there came cycling up behind them a fresh-faced young lance-corporal, not troubling to guide his machine. Hearing him, they swerved—just too late. His front wheel knocked the taller girl’s shoulder: and Suráj turned angrily, expecting profuse apology. Instead, the soldier flung out a string of oaths.

The startled girls shrank aside, and moved on, ignoring the insult.

Not so Suráj. Before Roy could check him, he had caught the handle of the machine and was rating that astonished lance-corporal in forcible English, flourishing an inadequate fist in his face.

‘You think because you have a pink skin you can insult a Rajput girl with your filthy language. You—you——’

The right word failed him; and a vigorous out-flung arm nearly knocked him off his feet.

‘God Almighty—are you? Interfering with a British subject——? the young soldier shouted, and pedalled off at full speed.

It had all happened so swiftly that the elder pair only looked round in time to see a vanishing cyclist, and their daughters discreetly watching two Rajputs in heated colloquy.

As the girls moved on, Roy was saying imperatively, in Hindi, ‘Look here, Suráj, you’ve got to keep your tongue and hands in order here. And you must never go for a British Tommy. This isn’t Udaipur.’

‘No, by Indra. No decent Rajput would throw such dirty language at a young girl.’

‘Nor would any decent Englishman. That fellow is a low-born.’

‘Yes. But would he have thrown that gali³⁰ at any white girl, whether here or in England?’

‘Probably not,’ Roy admitted, preferring the truth to false conciliation. ‘But he didn’t mean the ugly things he said. A British Tommy swears from sheer habit. Touch a button; out comes the profanity.’

‘Time he should learn to keep his tongue in order. I don’t trouble for profanity, but for such damn bad manners—like those white “gentlemen” in the train to Benares.’

‘Oh, I don’t defend those “gentlemen.” But if you’re going to take the scum of my father’s countrymen as fair samples of English breeding, you’d better get back to well-bred Udaipur.’

‘I will not. I am going to Peshawar.’—There was repressed passion in his tone. ‘If you are already tired of me and my ways——’

‘Don’t be a fool.’ Sinclair took him lightly by the arm. ‘Come back to the ponies. I want you on this journey; and you know I speak truth.’

‘Yes. You are a man of one word, if others are not.’

But as they rode homeward, Suráj had a tale to tell which partly accounted for his inflammable mood. It was a tale of disillusion, disappointment and bitterness confided to him by his new Sikh acquaintance, Jeswunt Singh: the too common tragedy of the England-returned; new to Suráj, painfully familiar to Roy. Here was the younger son of a royal house, educated in Lahore and at Oxford, returning to India full of enlarged ambitions and interests, eager to serve his country, only to find his zeal superfluous and himself disregarded by those very English whose fellows had shown him every courtesy and kindness in their own land. And he was but one of scores: sons of princes, men of caste, drifting back into hereditary habits—idleness, opium and palace intrigue, playing at soldiers and shooting big game; their friendly feeling for Englishmen petering out, or hardening into hostility.

‘Over there—he told me—people and everything were quite different.’ Suráj tried to speak calmly, but he had not yet cooled down. ‘Work and friends, games and pleasant women. Here, among the English, all is cold and formal; among our own people all is fear and wire-pulling, with this hugger-mugger of committees and politics. Only a few English ladies will be friendly and play tennis with him; but he is not allowed to be member of their Gymkhana Club. I suppose I wouldn’t be either, just because of a dark skin.’

‘No call to get injured over it, Bhai-ji.’ Sinclair’s tone and touch gentled him, as if he were a restive horse. ‘You could either of you belong to the Chelmsford Club if you want to—which you probably don’t. It isn’t only a dark skin. The whole man springs from a different seed. Look at it in terms of caste; and you know which lot is more exclusive, Hindu or British. Their position out here is full of pitfalls that Indians naturally can’t understand. You people have no social life to speak of. And if English folk had given you the run of their clubs, and their houses, would you ever have given them the run of yours?’

‘No. I didn’t see that,’ Suráj admitted, not quite convinced. ‘But when they give us their education, which makes us like themselves——’

‘It doesn’t, my friend. That’s the rub. And perhaps it’s just as well. But when a hard-worked official takes his ease, he wants to play with his own kind, not to be minding his manners with a lot of over-sensitive Indians. I admit he’s often a bit of a snob, which doesn’t mean he’s conceited. But he’s lazy and not overburdened with imagination. As for you two, what you both really want is not a few boring afternoons at the Delhi Club, but the equal right to become members. Once you had that, you probably wouldn’t use it.’

Suráj grinned sheepishly. ‘ Perhaps not. But we don’t like the insult. Why won’t they give us the right?’

‘Because they can’t see inside your heads! Gandhi’s on the same tack over his right to a police enquiry and to cut loose from the Empire. But we have to consider the risks involved.—Now, let’s finish at a canter. I want my letters; and it’s not Prithvi Raj who can show up at Maiden’s Hotel!’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

An hour later, Sir Roy Sinclair rode out through the battered and sorrowful Kashmir Gate to Delhi’s most favoured hotel. At the bureau, he gave his name and asked for letters. A coffee-coloured young woman with a permanent wave and reddened lips, handed him four envelopes: two from Tara, the others from Aruna and Derek Blount, Lord Avonleigh, the one friend who knew and understood the cause of his errantry.

Turning over the leaves of the visitors’ book, he sought Edom’s name; and found it some way back; no date of departure.

‘Is Mr Edom here still?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. On and off. He’s out just now.’

Sinclair produced his card.

‘Give him that when he comes in. Say I’m waiting for him. I suppose he has a private sitting-room?’

‘Yes, sir——’ She hesitated, and he added, in a less formal tone, ‘Don’t be alarmed. I’m a personal friend. Mr Edom would be very vexed if I had been refused the use of his room till he came in.’

The key was handed over and he strolled into the lounge, where tourists were talking Delhi, and journalists were staying themselves with small drinks and unanswerable questions.

In spite of those letters in his pocket, Sinclair sat down at a table and glanced through a Home paper, while his ears took in a battle of words between a stout Tory Imperialist and a dapper young Liberal of readier wit.

‘We’ve taken the wrong turning over this business,’ the Tory gloomily insisted. ‘But we haven’t the moral courage to admit it. . . .’

The Liberal withered him with a glance. ‘Right or wrong, sir, you can’t put the clock back. A nation has demanded what its self-respect requires. And we ought to be proud of it. We’re in at the death of an epoch.’

A tall American near the mantelpiece looked up from a tablet he was covering with shorthand.

‘If that’s so,’ he drawled, ‘I submit they might keep us better informed as to the obsequies. The output of news in this town is a fair scandal. We fellows could give points to the children of Israel at the paltry game of making bricks without straw. But we’re writing history. And who writes history—makes it. That’s an uplifting thought.’

And he went on making history, determined not to let his editor down for lack of reliable information.

‘What’s your tit-bit, Ferrars?’ the Liberal asked enviously; and the American twitched an eyelid.

‘I’ve struck oil with little Gandhi’s mixed prayer meetings.’

At the shout of irreverent laughter, he looked pained.

‘Holy truth. Our Gandhi’s a cute little Saint. Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs and Christians, cheek by jowl on the lawn, every evening at dusk. And Gandhi reads out a nonsectarian service, standing in his dim verandah, dhoti and outsize goggles and spotlight complete; the English slave-woman kneeling to him as if he were a god. But there’s something in it. Linking up the four religions. Most impressive.’ His eyes were on the swing-door. ‘Who comes here?’

A short brisk man bustled in, bringing word of a fresh turn in the bloodless duel at Viceroy’s House, and they were all on it like gulls on garbage. But Sinclair had had enough of them.

As he departed, the newcomer was solemnly announcing, ‘I am able to reveal a fact that will be of absorbing interest to thousands of readers. Mahatma Gandhi does not squat on the floor of the Viceroy’s study. He finds the low arm-chairs comfortable and convenient.’

Sinclair closed the door on further revelations, and went in search of a man who would show him to Edom’s room.

Tara should be entertained with a lively account of ‘who writes history—makes it.’ But Gandhi’s idea of harmonising India’s religions, if crude in execution matched his own belief that the one real hope for India’s future lay in that dim and distant possibility, a blending of her many faiths on some higher ground, where the streams meet in their source. Then might a purified India learn from the West a more active charity towards man, and give the West, in exchange, a clearer faith in God: a God no longer imposed on daily details with such force as to crush man’s dignity out of existence——

Strange thoughts to spring from ten minutes in a hotel lounge among journalists at play.

He was shown into a lofty bare sitting-room; books and papers lying about, a tightly packed bowl of roses on the one table, and a wood fire roaring up the chimney. Having ordered a short drink, he pulled out his letters, savouring the comfort and pleasantness of it all after Khatri Street.

He began with Tara’s second letter, to get the latest news. And within five minutes he was transported to another continent, while the shell of him remained sitting alone in a Delhi hotel.

He was with them all in the familiar garden. Low February skies and misted trees. There was Tara, in cap and green belted mackintosh, helping old Malcolm to turn the dank soil and enrich it for the planting of his earliest seeds. Nevil and Lilāmani were at work on their own small patch of garden; each intent on digging deeper than the other. Always that spice of rivalry between them. Too vividly he could see them. Tara’s skill in bringing the far scene near was a double-edged gift.

The first letter, written in January, told of a wintry spell; snowstorms silvering garden and moor, frosting the twigs of birch and larch.

‘It has given me the first lift,’ she wrote—‘since I stood alone on the platform in that bitter wind looking for the last flutter of your hand; trying to hearten myself by fancying how I would feel nine months on, when the hateful train would be coming the other way. Even if you smile at my childishness, I know you won’t think me a fool.’

Those simple poignant sentences brought stinging tears to his eyes; achingly recalled his own last sight of her solitary figure; his mad impulse to ‘execute a wobble’ of the first magnitude and give her the biggest surprise of her life. For shame of his own weakness he had not told her; but he would tell her now. She would be glad to know; glad also—being Tara—that he had not thus demeaned himself, even for love of her and home.

He had to brush away those unbidden tears before he could read on:

‘To be our separate selves, and yet so entirely one, is a real achievement. More and more I value it, when I see how few of the “happy-though-married” really are married all through. But being in separate worlds, as we are now, takes a lot of compensating. This doesn’t mean, my darling, that I’m “registering” martyrdom. I knew you had to go. I’m not a fatalist; but I did feel as if forces outside ourselves were pulling the strings. So impossible it seemed at first, yet everything went to make it possible. When I said, “You will go,” it was as if someone spoke through me.

‘I’ve always felt you had it in you to do something much bigger than even those two fine Indian books; and here was your chance. So it wasn’t for me to stand in the light. When I said, long ago, that your work was more important than any mere wife-person, how angry you were! But I meant it; and I vowed I would put it before everything—always. So, when that big test came, I would have spurned myself if I’d broken my own private first commandment.—Now you know. I’ve been wanting you to have it quite clear in your self-tormenting head. But just at first, I was too unhappy——

‘And oh Prithvi! Those poems—I can’t tell you they lightened my darkness with a flash of the real Roy——’

There were footsteps outside; and the voice of Edom silenced the voice of Tara, whose genius was a genius of courage—winged, divinely lit. Whatever the odds, she would keep her flag flying.

The illusion of England vanished. He was back in Maiden’s Hotel with an ache in his heart; hastily pocketing his letters and cursing the legitimate intruder to whom he owed his passing escape from modern India’s conflicting desires and demands

He was greeted by Edom with un-British warmth.

‘Sinclair! Stealing a march on me? This is great. I said we didn’t have to worry about plans. Taken rooms here?’

‘No. I’m in Delhi with a Rajput friend, incog. I only called for letters. Looked you up in the book on the chance that you might still be here. I thought you’d have left long ago.’

‘So I did. But I keep these rooms for a foothold—— Sit down, man—we’ll talk in comfort.’ They sat, and Edom proffered cigarettes. ‘Since we parted, I’ve been seeing and sniffing real India in many odd places. It was the famous conversations that brought me back for a week or so. Delhi’s a nerve-centre.’

‘Nerves rather jumpy at present,’ said Sinclair. ‘And the world’s press tearing its hair over lack of information.’

‘Yes. I’ve heard them at it. Poor devils! Who’d be a journalist? Live-wire editors yammering for copy. Government officials dumb as Trappist monks! No wonder they embroider a bit. When I read, in some paper, that little Gandhi’s dhoti “had humbled the proudest Empire on earth,” I thought I’d better streak back, to be in at the death!’

Sinclair laughed. He was enjoying the change of atmosphere, after much Indian talk; the quirks of humour, the light touch on serious things.

‘No invitations out for the funeral—so far.’

‘Nor likely to be, if my opinion’s worth a cent. Mektub³¹—it is written—that the British shall survive even their own exalted attempts at suicide. See them out here, at their best—and worst. Idealised here, vituperated there; not troubling about either. Just carrying on. I’ve watched some of ’em at work in this district; one juvenile to half a million Asiatics. The much-abused public school product in excelsis. No parade of brains or force; revelling in understatement; but they’ve got guts, those boys, and a fine sense of responsibility.’

‘Vulgarly speaking,’ mused Sinclair, appreciating the tribute, ‘I suppose that “guts” have made our Empire—the good and bad of it.’

‘Guts—and the grand manner!’ laughed Edom. ‘India happened to suit the peculiar genius of the English, besides their taste for sport and adventure. They’re no thinkers; but they’re born improvisors and administrators. They’ve just sauntered down the ages, impervious to darts of criticism or hate or jealousy; armoured in their secret unshakable conviction of being IT!’

‘And are they so very far wrong?’ Sinclair twinkled.

‘Not so very far. That’s what annoys some people!’ It was a large admission from one of ‘God’s own Americans.’

‘All the same,’ said Sinclair, moved to frankness by the other’s generosity, ‘if we’re going to stay on here successfully, we’ll have to modify a few unshakable convictions, develop new faculties and fresh points of view. We’ve let ourselves in for a fight that doesn’t suit our genius. We treat an inimical Congress as a possible ally. We’ve no propaganda sense; and they’ve no sense of decency. Yet we must remain decent; and carry on with our paper constitution, while the “electorate” is still living in the Middle Ages.’

Edom shook his head. ‘It’s a dangerous game. And the British are partial to such. But if they don’t look alive, they’ll find their Federated India changed overnight into a Muscovite dependency. Russia’s out to swallow Asia. I’ve heard things this time, from Indians that I didn’t know before. The spread of irreligion’s a serious factor; and many are already wondering is the goal of India’s pilgrimage no longer Mecca or Benares but Moscow?’

Their eyes met in seriousness; and suddenly they smiled. As usual, they had plunged straight into deep waters. It had struck them both at the same moment; but it was Edom who spoke his thought.

‘One can talk to some people!—You’ll honour me for tiffin, I hope?’

‘Delighted.’

‘I’ve a Moslem gentleman coming, Sir Ahmed Jung. A man I like. He was in the Assembly; but he’s dropped politics, like a lot of their best men. He says the Assembly’s a gas-house, a hot-bed of intrigues. The only kick they get out of it is to heckle and hamper the Government. He and his kind are losing heart.—I needn’t ask if you mind meeting an Indian?’

‘You need not. I’m chiefly mixing with them.’

‘Same here. I like them more and more. They’ve mental depth and intensity; but one misses the breadth and variety of the Western outlook—the individual touch. Get ten white men together and one of ‘em will surely be some sort of individual eccentric. I’ve met scores of Asiatics. Never a crank among them.’

‘Not even Gandhi?’

‘Well—he’s the nearest specimen. But he’s caught a good bit of it from Tolstoy and America. We may be fool-idealists. Anyway, we do have a hope that we’re going to make over the world. But the East is sceptical of human power. Too many gods around.’

‘Perhaps it knows too much?’ suggested Roy. ‘Or perhaps it overlooks something important in man?’

‘Ah, that’s the riddle of this stirring century. Which holds the master-key—East or West? We have the two giants, Europe and Asia, facing each other as equals for the first time in history. And India’s challenge to the West cuts deep; dynamic thought opposed to dynamic action. We admit the supremacy of thought. She acts on it—often in queer ways. Like yourself I believe in her destiny. She’s had a wonderful past. Only a god can say what lies ahead of her. Working in alliance with England, she may yet lead the world.’

Sinclair drew a deep breath. Here was this likeable American, untroubled by inhibitions, voicing his own hidden thought that he would be chary of stating in words.

‘It’s possible—in time; if . . .?’ was all he said.

‘Yes, if? And I don’t say when. But I do say it’s a fine thing for England that fate has linked her so closely with this extraordinary people. There’s something magnetic in the atmosphere, the very soil of India. You feel it naturally?’

‘Very much so.’

‘But here am I—a Westerner from the most modern and progressive country on earth. Why does this strange secret power of India get me so profoundly? Why does it get almost everyone who stays here long enough—and even some Anglo-Indians? What is her mysterious pull that we all feel, and yet can’t analyse?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Sinclair with difficulty, ‘it is—the power of God: the power we’ve lost sight of in the machine-made West.’

The American would never guess the effort it cost him to make that simple statement; but there was a perceptible pause before Edom spoke in a changed voice.

‘Since you’ve said it, Sinclair, I can admit—I’ve felt it. Daresay others have too. In some mysterious way, God does seem nearer to Benares and the Himalayas than to London or New York. It may be partly because Indians live religion, even in its debased form, and talk naturally about things of the spirit. Only two days ago my good friend Sir Ahmed Jung—a well-to-do practical Moslem—said quite simply, “without God what is there?” How many Westerners hold that view? How many could say it out simply in the middle of dinner, as that Moslem did? If he did the others would stare politely till he wished himself under the table.’

‘Oh, they would!’ Sinclair nodded, thinking of Aunt Jane; but he added, thinking of Tara, ‘There’s plenty of spirituality hidden under bushels in England; but we’re shame-faced about it; and since the War we’ve been in the trough of a wave. But some of us can feel a change in the air—a quickening of the spirit——’

Unable to speak his full thought he dropped abruptly into a more practical vein. ‘As you say, we’re not a race of thinkers; but we have our intuitions. Perhaps we’re none the worse for not talking much about them. On the whole, we act better than we know.’

‘That’s it.’ Edom brought a hand down on his knee. ‘And the East knows better than it acts. We Westerners are the hands of the world. And blind hands can do a lot of harm—in the name of good. But let the West catch the Eastern spirit of vision—and strange things may come to pass. Time is the master of paradox. Our grandchildren may live to see London the spiritual capital of the world, while the “Unchanging East” sells its birthright for a mess of industrial pottage. I wonder——?”

‘It’s not beyond conceiving.’ Sinclair gravely pondered the prophetic utterance of that singular man. ‘Personally, I hope India will never come to that. But there’s a deal of the man and woman element in West and East. Whichever way the West swings, the East would tend to swing away from it. Even to approach understanding this British-Indian riddle, one needs a clearer grasp of India’s inherited thought, and clashing ideas. Also one needs personal contact—“the sight of eyes that see.” That’s what I’m after.’

Edom nodded. ‘I thought as much. We’re on the same track, taking different routes. Good luck to your findings, my friend. Perhaps, between us, we may manage to “lighten the darkness” of our confused countrymen.’

There were sounds outside of a car rolling up.

‘That’s Sir Ahmed,’ said Edom. ‘We’ve been upon a far journey since I mentioned him. See where India leads us, when we let her get a hold.’

And as they rose, Sinclair found himself thinking, ‘I wonder where India is leading him?’

The door opened and Edom went forward to greet his guest, a thick-set, bearded Mohammedan in dark tightly buttoned coat and imposing turban. He spoke the English of Harrow and Oxford; but both his sons were being educated in Delhi.

‘Our young men, now, don’t want to become “mock Englishmen,”’ he explained, with a disarming smile, ‘though too many are eager to become mock politicians. Our wise Aga Khan warned the British, fifteen years ago, that only harm would come from saddling India with parliament and party government. We have no tradition, like the English, of good-humoured contests. Our antagonisms are too fierce and deadly for the West to understand. Give India political freedom to-morrow—and still the riddle of many races working in harmony will not be solved. I left the Assembly because I found there no real training for responsible Government: only a short-cut to creating a race of political monkeys.’

He said it so gravely that Sinclair did not dare to catch Edom’s eye. In his swift fashion he decided that he liked Sir Ahmed Jung. Steeped in the Rajput atmosphere of Udaipur, he wanted, while in Delhi, to meet Moslems of quality: and here was a man of intellect, breeding, and natural dignity, increased by his calm Moslem air of assured pre-eminence.

Lunch being served in Edom’s room, the three of them could talk freely on the one inexhaustible subject—whither India? And Sir Ahmed talked well, with a minimum of Eastern flourish and hyperbole. His faith in the East was founded on a rock—the rock of Islam. For him India was one—Moslem. If the English wearied of their difficult task, or mistook the voice of a Hindu Congress for the voice of India, there could be but one issue. Islam would again rule India, as in the great days. Moslems could never forget their six hundred years of Empire. They had never yet been dominated by Hindus; and never would be, though dominion might be called by another name.

‘Just and benevolent rule,’ Sir Ahmed insisted, ‘is our true requisite. Ingredients of Empire are very strong among us; loyalty to a ruler only second to religion. It is my firm belief that India would be happiest with a Royal Viceroy—could that dream ever come true—and enjoyment of equal citizen rights all over the Empire; not to be treated there almost as Hindus treat their poor Untouchables here. That is where the shoe pinches.’

The pinch of that particular shoe led them far afield; and they sat on a long while over coffee and cigars talking of things within and without, above and below. Sir Ahmed—after two years of travelling in Europe and the Near East—was seeing India’s infinite variety with new eyes. It had impressed him, he said, as never before. No wonder that it caused confusion in the minds of those who had not seen and known. From India to America, from America to China, they put a girdle round the earth in less than forty minutes.

It was past three before Sinclair remembered his intention to watch the finals of the All India Polo Tournament, in which his old regiment was playing a distinguished part. But even when he rose to go they still lingered on the hearth-rug, talking and laughing in lighter vein.

If it was hard to get away, it was harder to refuse Edom’s pressing demand that he should return later for dinner, ‘and make a night of it.’ But he felt responsible for Suráj, who was safe up at the College, this afternoon, firing students with his epic tale. After that, failing companionship, he would go off and ‘make a night of it,’ Indian fashion, with Jeswunt Singh.

So the dinner was accepted—for another evening: and Sinclair promised himself, after the polo, a solitary ride along the famous Ridge. Ideas and impressions were crowding in on his mind. Chances of absorbing them, and communing with the neglected creatures of his fancy, were all too few.

Chapter 6

One among millions, who,
Planned to the image of some flawless truth,
Are blurred by what they suffer, are, or do.
—Humbert Wolfe

In the last of the daylight, Sinclair stood alone upon the roof of a battered bungalow set on a commanding point of the Ridge; a bungalow with a history. As the house of one Hindu Rāo, it had been the scene of desperate hand-to-hand fighting in that terrible summer of ’Fifty-seven, when more than the fate of Delhi hung on the issue. Near it still stood old Viceregal Lodge and the tall tower where English women and children had been pent up for one scorching day, before their exodus; had seen the familiar city changed into a human slaughterhouse; bungalows ablaze; dark faces and fluttering banners surging up wave on wave, only to be hurled back again and again.

Now, in these memory-haunted houses, guides pattered the heroic story, tourists came seeking second-hand thrills.

There was no getting away from the mutiny at Delhi: Daryagunj, Nicholson’s grave, the bullet-riddled Church and battered Kashmir Gate. Not for the first time, Sinclair wondered why England—departing from her fine tradition—had so visibly kept alive the memory of that bitter struggle, though countless Indians had stood beside her people in their dark hour—as witness the memorial on the Ridge. Those mute reminders must often have an ill effect on a generation—British and Indian—that was not Mutiny-minded; must secretly quicken the fear, or the hope—would it ever come again? Whence did it spring, that persistent fatality of Delhi? For three centuries the Afghans had battened on her like devouring wolves. The Moghuls had held her for twice that time. To each in turn she brought wealth and glamour; then—illusion of safety and power; doomed to go the way of all illusion. Were the English already drifting towards the same fate—victims of their own idealism? Or would they, in defiance of Fate, make the great venture of faith—‘to hold by letting go’?

No lack of matter for profound meditation here, where past, present and future made strange discords to the ear of the spirit. It was leisure he lacked, and spells of solitude, essential to work. Luckily Suráj also needed time to write; but his bouts of industry were fitful and spontaneous. It was no light matter to feel responsible for this gifted, excitable young Rajput, unused to so much personal freedom; his manliness and talent cramped too long by the inhibitions of mother-worship and joint family life. More and more the younger generation were breaking away from that stronghold of orthodoxy and group domination; many of them paying, individually, for their challenge to the spirit of India’s soil, that strives to keep men in pigeon-holes. But they needed to break away young. It was harder for Suráj, at thirty, to use without abusing—his unaccustomed freedom.

At present he was outside the picture. Sinclair wanted simply to smoke, to enjoy his letters in peace. And again they carried him far away. . . .

When, at last, he looked up, he realised that he had taken longer leave than he intended; and hoped the Pundit had kept Suráj happily occupied all the afternoon. The hospitable pair had already pressed them both to become their guests when Mrs Lynch left Delhi; and Sinclair welcomed the prospect of comfortable quarters, the generosity that was a fresh revealing of India at her best.

Pocketing his letters he stood up to go—and remained standing, arrested by the beauty of the scene.

The evening light lay like a bloom over domes and turreted walls and the whole darkening plain. The sun was setting in a blaze of flame and orange and gold; permeating with a reddish glow the haze of fine dust that is the aura of the Punjab. Veiled in that diffused glow the whole vast landscape was softened and saddened; near and far so blended that all the doomed, resplendent Delhis seemed united in one timeless moment of immortality.

Now the sun was gone. The empty sky flared and faded. A few pale stars pricked through the flush; and as he hurried down to his waiting pony he was followed by the ghostly ‘Here, here, here’—of jackals, seeking their meat from God.

The Kabuli carried him back at a hand gallop. They clattered through the Delhi Gate before pitch darkness fell, and on through the Chandni Chowk into the semi-lighted gloom of Khatri Street. After the spaciousness, the clean night air of Ridge and plain, the atmosphere of that narrow unsavoury street smote him with sudden acute disgust: the strange secret houses, the dirt, the smell of open drains, the very voices of the men, their habits of incessant hawking and spitting and unashamed scratching; their callous treatment of animals—and not animals only.

Behind a pair of skeleton bullocks, cruelly galled, squatted a half-naked driver with his goad, twisting their tails, prodding them in their sorest places, galvanising them into a stumbling trot. When they could go no more, he would prod them again or light a fire under their bellies. Sickened by the callous cruelty, powerless to ease those eternally patient creatures, he could only fling a few scathing words at the startled driver and hurry on.

As the pony swerved to avoid a skin-and-bone pariah, there came from one of the dark secret houses a scream of pain and fear. Repelled by the sordid underside of Indian life, he suddenly felt like riding straight back to Maiden’s Hotel, staying the night there—Suráj or no—and sending for his few traps in the morning. This game of hiding his true light under a bushel was not worth the game; though he was learning from it this much at least, that unless one looked at India through Eastern as well as Western eyes one looked asquint.

Here, in partially modernised Delhi, immemorial India still flourished, virtually untouched by British influence; unimpressed by talk of irrigation, Dominion status, or peasant welfare—words without sense. All that mattered was the price of food, the bunnia’s rate of interest, the sanctity of family priests and gods. To thousands in England, these things were unrealised, if not unknown; and on him had been laid the gift for making others see. To that end, he had returned; and an adventure that was all sugar plums would never keep him nine months away from his dearest possessions.

Instinctively he had checked the Kabuli; now he urged him on again. Suráj must not be treated in this cavalier fashion. And here, at last, was the house of Krishna Lāl, a far from orthodox Hindu home, its ramparts of dastúr undermined by forces everywhere at work in modern India. For the banker—himself a Brahmo-Samáj—had failed to convert his rigidly Hindu wife. Their jeweller son flaunted a Gandhi cap and khaddar;³² swore by young Nehru and complete Swaráj. His good-looking young wife—mother of two sons—attended committees, refused to play the dutiful daughter-in-law, and imbued with false doctrines the young student son, Vindhya Lāl, a bewildered seeker after knowledge.

Roy had found him on his first evening—alone in the central courtyard of the house—in one hand a copy of Hindu holy writ, in the other a cheap manual of modern science; his confused brain, full of Nationalist fervours vainly trying to reconcile the two. Still revering his father, and adoring his mother, he was mentally miles removed from both. He could tell his mother nothing of his new interests; nor had she any wish to hear. She preferred to give him metai,³³ to lavish caresses on him as if he were a boy of seven, and expected him to obey her like a child. Though Roy had loved his own mother to the point of worship, he perceived, for the first time, the unhealthy element in the maternal obsession of Hinduism, that never matures into that most distinguished of human relations, the love of a Western mother for her grown-up son. Never had he seen or imagined, between the two, so abnormal a mixture of mental severance and unabashed physical dependence; nor ever realised the extent to which the love of a Hindu mother could warp and repress the budding manhood of her sons.

It was Vindhya Lāl and his kind—bereft of one faith, without gaining another—who were swelling the tide of India’s drift away from religion. Sinclair had drawn him out in one brief talk; and felt hopeful—if chance favoured—of letting in a little light.

Heartened by a sense of revived zest, he opened the door of the bedroom shared with Suráj: closed it sharply—and stood still, taken aback by the sight that met his eyes.

The room was stifling; and it smelled. The one small window was shut, the floor littered with torn scraps of paper, orange-peel, cigarette ends and chewed sugarcane. And there, on his untidy charpoy, squatted Suráj—turbanless, dishevelled and demoralised. His knees drawn up, his chin sunk on them, he sat dead still, staring before him in a kind of stupor, neither asleep nor fully awake. The whole look of him suggested one word—opium.

This sort of thing would never do. A little opium-smoking and drinking, in reason, was natural to Easterns, to Rajputs in particular. But as a drug, it was the arch enemy, deadlier to the artist than to any other make of man. The sight of Suráj—proud, knightly, talented—sunk in degradation, spurred him to fight the enemy here and now, even at the risk of an open breach.

Suráj had obviously not been up to Ramjās College. The mere discourtesy of it angered Roy: and it was a relief to feel angry.

He went to the window and flung it open. Then he took Suráj firmly by the shoulders.

‘Yes, it’s Roy Sinclair,’ he said, seeing a dawn of resentment in the dulled eyes. ‘What the devil have you been up to? They expected you at the College. Did you go?’

‘Too far—too much trouble.’

The thick voice, the blank indifference to his friend’s anger, deepened Sinclair’s disgust.

‘Where are your fine manners? The Pundit and Mrs Lynch naturally suppose they are dealing with a Rajput gentleman.’

A spark of anger flashed.

‘You insult me? Take care! You have your own pleasures. I have mine——’ he blurted out, collecting his scattered senses. ‘You stop in that damned hotel all day——’

‘I knew you were with the Pundit. And I found a friend.’

‘A Sahib?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very well, go with your Sahib. I have a friend also. I’ll go with mine.’

The note of jealousy nonplussed Roy. In any other mood he would have laughed it off; now it annoyed him.

‘You’re a man,’ he flung out. ‘Don’t talk that damned nonsense.’

Too late he saw that he had taken the wrong tone.

Suráj pushed him aside and stood on his feet, none to steadily.

‘All right. I am not good enough for Sir Roy Sinclair. Better stop playing at Rajput and go back to the Sahibs where you belong. I go to the pictures and the nautch with Jeswunt Singh.’

‘I don’t think you will—brother.’ There was no mistaking the change of tone. ‘I’m not quarrelling with you; only with the accursed drug that steals away your brains and your manhood.’

‘But it gives me dreams. And out of those dreams I make more poems.’ Suráj forgot his personal grievance in defence of the precious drug.——‘It gave me one to-day, which I will write to-morrow for the Pundit.’

‘To-morrow you will make profound apologies to the Pundit, who is giving you help and hospitality.’

But Suráj had wandered off again after the poem. ‘It was Hanuman, playful and capricious, symbol of the sun’s light leaping from tree to tree. I think I wrote some verses—I forget . . .’

He looked vaguely at the torn scraps on the floor and passed a thin hand across his eyes.

Something in the helpless, childish gesture awoke in Roy a sudden rush of pity and affection that dispelled antagonism.

‘We’ll find it afterwards,’ he said, gently pushing Suráj down again on to the charpoy. ‘What you want now is a dose of pukka sleep: and I’ll see that you get it.’

Suráj looked up at him with a twitching frown.

‘But I have to meet Jeswunt for the pictures.’

‘Not to-night. If you can let down the Pundit, you can let down Jeswunt Singh.’

‘But I love the pictures. And after——’ He hesitated.

‘Yes: it’s “after” that’s the devil. I suppose it doesn’t count that you have—a wife in Udaipur?’

At that impermissible thrust, Suráj clenched his hand.

‘By God, I am Rajput. We do not talk of the life behind the curtain.’

And Sinclair said quickly, ‘I spoke as brother to brother. And though we English have no curtain, we hold all that quite as sacred as you do: more so in some ways.’

Suráj considered the implication with a frown more puzzled than resentful.

‘You make your own marriages. There’s the difference. You can unmake them also.’ With one of his graceful gestures he dismissed the subject. ‘If I put my head in cold water, it will come clearer; then I can go.’

‘No, you can’t. We’ve settled that, Bhai-ji. If you must let him know, you can scribble a note to say you’re not well. I’ll send it to the cinema box-office by young Vindhya Lāl. Here you are——’

Suráj obediently scribbled a few lines, twisted up the note, and gave a brief description of his new friend.

‘That’s all right,’ said Sinclair. ‘Now, tumble into bed.’

He tumbled in, just as he was—shirt and trousers and tousled hair; and he lay there sleepily watching Roy, who had bethought him of certain magic tablets he had used during the outward journey—those nights on shore when he could not sleep, for the vibration of the engines troubling his body, and thoughts of home troubling his mind.

Crossing to his own bed, he picked up his dispatch-case. As he did so, the annoying thing fell open, scattering abroad his untidy mass of papers and letters, and a dozen precious oddments.

Suráj gripped the sheet anticipating an explosion of wrath. To his amazement Sinclair dumped down the half-empty thing and burst out laughing. Suráj stared at him, puzzled and relieved. It was not the first time that Roy had treated as a joke the kind of mishap that would have set his own temper ablaze. Yet he would treat seriously some trifling error like this matter of not going out to the College.

And Roy himself, grovelling for his scattered treasures suddenly remembered that he had not left the hasps of his case open. The natural inference was not the kind of thing he was given to treating as a joke.

He looked across to the bed, found Suráj watching him, and said sharply, ‘I didn’t leave it like that.’

Suráj avoided his eyes. ‘How else could it come open?’ he asked.——‘It is possible to forget.’

‘It’s also possible to remember,’ Sinclair retorted. The evasion angered him, not less because he had known the temptation as a boy, when sheer dread of a scolding shook his nerve. He would rather say no more; but his British sense of privacy moved him to uphold the sanctity of personal letters and papers—a form of sanctity not fully ratified in the East.

Thrusting in the last of his treasures, he stood up and said with controlled heat: ‘This case is my private property, Suráj. I’m careless about locking things up. But with a man of breeding I didn’t suppose it would be necessary.’

Suráj raised himself on one elbow, the mists of opium almost dispelled.

‘It is not necessary.’ His tone carried conviction. ‘I wanted a clean piece of paper for that poem. But if you think I would read your letters—your manuscript——’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Roy hastened to soothe his injured pride.——‘But I want you to understand that English dastúr about letters and private papers is as strict as any dastúr of the East. I won’t lock up my case, except when we’re travelling. And I’ll take your word, as a Rajput, that it won’t fall open again.’

Suráj, with a grunt of satisfaction, sank back on his pillow.

‘If you take the word—it is given,’ was all he said: but Sinclair knew the value of a generous gesture in dealing with a Rajput.

He went over to the bazaar table, prepared a lime squash and administered it with the tablet. Suráj, with a seraphic smile, closed his eyes; and in five minutes he was sound asleep.

Sinclair lit a candle, washed his hands in a tin basin and brushed his hair. Then he stood a moment by the bed, looking down at the comely dark face on the pillow, affection, interest and vague distaste contending within him. He had felt so strongly drawn, at sight, to this promising young man of his mother’s race; so sure that here was an Indian whom he could call friend. And friends they were—up to a point. Only when it came to argument or a matter of principle, differences crept in to prove the colour of their minds as diverse as their skins. It was a fact overlooked by those who saw race prejudice as mere odium attaching to colour. Here was he unhampered by prejudice, throwing in his lot with Indians, liking them the better for it in many ways; and—just when one felt most confident—they would let one down in some disappointing fashion. With the best will on earth he could not fully accept that given assurance from Suráj as he would have accepted it from Jerry or Derek or Lance. Too well he knew that, for Indians, truth was apt to be a matter of convenience rather than principle: a difference in the grain.

As for the opium, it might or might not be serious. Many Indians took it in one form or another, and any idea of fighting a temptation was as alien to the East as the compelling ‘ought’ or ‘should’ of the West. Its imperatives were of another order; the ‘Mighty Must, Inevitable Shall’ of gods and priests and Fate. With the help of his partial understanding, he would do what he could.

And now—here was the evening flung on his hands; not a corner of his own where he could work. No need or desire for privacy in the average Indian home. In Udaipur he had merely dipped into the life for meals and companionship. Here he was in it up to the neck. He looked, round, distastefully at the untidy comfortless room; and again he was aware of that sharp recoil from Eastern actualities, as distinct from Eastern ideas. Lacking Suráj, he had no desire at all to share the men’s evening meal. He need only ride hack to Maiden’s Hotel to enjoy an informal dinner, a congenial talk with Edom. And he was sure of his welcome.

Decision lifted the cloud of despondency. A word to Krishna Lāl, a few words with the note to young Vindhya sufficed for explanation. He would deal with Suráj in the morning.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

They were up and out early strolling in the beautiful Kudsia Bagh; clipped lawns and flower-beds, trees in their young leafage, ivied walls and double domes of the inevitable mosque. Here they preferred to come and eat their simple breakfast under the trees; Suráj spruce and alert again, full of praise for the magic dewai.³⁴ He had found the rough notes for his Hanuman lyric; and was altogether as pleased with Suráj Mul—budding poet—as though yesterday’s discourtesy and opium orgy had never been. He would apologise to the Pundit, when they rode out together—as invited—for their mid-day meal.

This morning the sky was overcast; the Little Rains were at hand. As they entered the Kudsia Bagh, inky clouds rolled up; and they fled for shelter to the cloisters of the mosque—just in time. Down came the rain in solid grey sheets as if some celestial tank had burst. Sinclair, sitting on a stone seat munching an apple, felt mentally drowned out by its dismal persistence. India without sunshine lapsed into a drab dreariness. In these noble gardens the melancholy effect was modified by lawns and trees; and even the chill damp of these cloisters was preferable to Indian rooms. Here it might be possible to talk in peace.

But first he must appraise those rough notes for a paean, ‘To Hanuman’—symbol of Nature’s vitality in playful monkey form; and the poem, if it promised well, might lead naturally to a word of warning.

Suráj lovingly smoothed out the crumpled paper and read: ‘It is he, Hanuman, whom we behold in the first rays of morning, leaping from tree to tree; kissing the leaves that greet him with their unheard laughter; shining on the woodland path to gladden the wayfarer, who has wandered, hour after hour, night-weary.

‘It is he who awakens the earth-born glow at sight of forest splendour and laughing streams, who whispers strange secrets to that solitary traveller coming suddenly on some uncanny spot. And again he is at play in the evening shadows when they steal across sleepy alleys and run up the hill-tops as the sun sinks down.

‘All these are Hanuman—spirit of mirth and mischief. As the sun brings light to men’s eyes, Hanuman brings courage and laughter to their hearts. So men, women and children bring gifts to his shrine. Hanuman—hail!’

Suráj looked up from his crumpled half-sheet with a smile of boyish elation. ‘Not yet poetry? But I think it can be, when I have trimmed the words, for rhythm——’

‘Not too much trimming. You have to catch the spirit of movement—of Hanuman. There’s a poet in you all right, Suráj. And India needs poets more than politicians. Tagore is worth more to her than all those worthy Knights of the Round Table.’

Suráj nodded, well pleased. ‘It is poets and artists who create the true status of a nation; but it is politicians who get all the limelight! I thought you would like my Hanuman.’

‘I like him very much.’

He refrained from fuller praise lest it should imply credit to the mighty and compelling drug.

As it was, Suráj lightly flicked the paper, laughter lurking in his clear brown eyes. ‘If I had done my polite duty yesterday, I would not have written this—Which is best?’

Sinclair laughed. ‘I’m not going to argue which is best! I’m glad you wrote it; and the Pundit may accept it as a valid excuse! But I don’t accept it as an excuse for fuddling your brain with that fatal drug.’

‘Not any more fatal to Rajputs than your nasty whisky and soda to Englishmen,’ Suráj retorted unimpressed. ‘Without the magic of opium, giving me the dream of forest and dancing sunbeams, there would have been no poem at all.—Again which is best?’

Sinclair knew the answer; but to avoid vain argument, he shifted his ground.

‘Best or worst, there is danger in every magic unwisely used. How long have you been at it?’

‘Oh, ever since I was a boy. Sometimes more, sometimes less. At the beginning ... it was my mother——’

His hesitation pricked Sinclair’s interest.

‘She gave it you? How—and why? If you would tell me—as brother to brother, I would very much like to know.’

He deliberately used the word to obviate the least hint of taking a superior tone.

And, as brother to brother, Suráj told him, simply, how he had always been the favourite son; had very soon realised that anything he clamoured for would be given him; too many sweets, indigestible food; and when his inside rebelled, when he had pains in his stomach or his head, his mother would give him opium to ease him and keep him quiet. It was so that he came to discover its dream-giving magic, and to take it secretly for that purpose.

Sinclair said little; but he listened with a curious personal pang to that fresh revealing of the harm done by India’s overwhelming mother influence and dominion.

In the choice of a wife, as in all else, the same power had prevailed, backed by the supreme triumvirate—priests, money and caste. Against that threefold tyranny the sons of joint families had no more protection than the daughters. They too were sold, in effect, to the highest bidder: a transaction that had saddled Suráj with an unloved wife and two undesired daughters, whom he frankly regarded as penalties for some sin committed in a former life. Of those matters he spoke in more guarded phrases—mindful of prescribed reserves. Yet instinctively he was making out a case for himself; not precisely twisting facts, but telling the embroidered truth, because he was sensitive to Roy’s good opinion, and because an Indian will never put all his cards on the table, nor readily respect a man whose honesty is not tempered by subtlety.

Sinclair, drawing his own conclusions, perceived that in respect of the opium no moral issue could be raised. The strongest lever, as with most Indians, would be personal or emotional. Suráj—manly, warm-hearted and vain—would probably take some pains to stand well in a friend’s esteem.

So, when all was told, Roy said, without comment, ‘Now we know where we stand: back to back, looking in different directions, seeing this matter with different eyes. You’ve helped me to see it your way. Now you must try to see it my way. You can’t break the habit after all these years; and you don’t see the need to break it, either. But one thing I must tell you straight—the sight of you last night, all dishevelled and degraded, disgusted me so that, if it happened once or twice again, I’d have to say bus hogya and carry on alone. You know I don’t want to do any such thing. I told you so this morning.’

‘Yes—I know!’ Suráj looked uneasy; and a shade of sulkiness crept over his face.

That deadly barrier between mind and mind must not be allowed to harden; and Roy tried another tone.

‘See here, Suráj, you’re a sportsman and a gentleman. You gave me the word of a Rajput that you would ride your devil’s temper as you ride your ponies: and you’ve kept that word. Now—to stay friends with me—will you ride this opium craving in the same fashion? You can—if you choose. I don’t say it’s right or it’s wrong. I say, I don’t like it; and you’ll do better work if you put a check on it. Remember, it’s a question of breaking our friendship; and I think that means something to you, as it does to me.’

This time he had obviously struck the right note. The cloud of sulkiness vanished. The fine eyes lit up with genuine feeling.

‘Your friendship and this journey are worth more to me than anything that has happened in my thirty years of life. I will ride the opium as I ride my ponies. But to say I will drop it altogether is beyond the power of man.’

Sinclair’s hand closed firmly on his knee.

‘I’m a man myself—chock full of failings. I wouldn’t ask or expect it of you, brother. Smoke it, if you must. Drink it, in strict moderation. But for God’s sake, don’t become an opium-eater, if you want to become the epic of Rajasthán.’

Suráj pondered the sane compromise, the appeal to his ambition, looking absently at a pale strip of sky on the ragged rim of the storm; pitting the spirit of his race against its ancient enemy. Then, in his swift dramatic fashion, he flung out a hand.

‘I give you the word of a Rajput, Roy. And, by God, I will be the poet of Rajasthán, as Ikbal is poet of Islam, and Tagore of Hindu India.’

They gravely shook hands on that. And if the emotional gesture embarrassed Roy a trifle, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he could feel reasonably sure of his man.

Chapter 7

Hindu India flows by us, seething, inscrutable. We can only guess at what lies in her secret heart.
—F. Yeats-Brown

Sinclair shifted his gaze from the double avenue of great over-arching trees that narrowed away to infinity: India’s Grand Trunk Road, that carries her ceaseless slow-moving traffic for fifteen hundred miles.

He waved an arm towards it, and quoted ‘Kim’: ‘“Such a river of life as nowhere exists in the world.” But we did ought to be in a bullock cart instead of this princely car!’

He himself was driving the ramshackle Ford, that he and Mrs Lynch had chartered between them for the Gurgáon adventure. He wore his light suit and topi, deferring his change of personality till they reached the camp at Palwahn. Neither had any desire to be rushed by an Indian driver through the early morning Punjab landscape. For Sinclair, this virile northern Province had a peculiar appeal; and Grace had worked in Gurgáon as an ardent beginner. In revisiting the district of the famous village welfare experiment, she renewed her youth.

So the driver sat behind with lesser items of luggage and the peon, Dilawar Khan, in charge of affairs: a Border Moslem, rugged and bearded, his left eyebrow severed by a scar that gave the eyelid a sinister droop. Proud of the trust reposed in him by a Sahib who trusted few, he served his Memsahib as they only do for whom service is religion; and when she moved, every detail of bundobast could safely be left in his hands. Her camp equipment had been sent on by lorry at the exorbitant rate of a farthing a mile. She would find everything ready on arrival, and he was now keeping a watchful eye on the strange Sahib who had not been in the programme.

‘He regards himself as John’s Viceroy—and acts accordingly,’ Grace explained, lest Roy might misunderstand his vigilance. ‘But for the infallible D.K., I should never have been allowed to run round after Sunita Devi on my own.’

‘And you like running round on your own?’ he challenged, her with smiling eyes.

‘Honestly—I do. Marriage has caught me late, and the habit of independence dies hard.’

Not an easy remark to answer; and she would have no taste for a correct manufactured reply. So he said nothing. But he glanced sidelong at her resolute profile; more than ever wondering what manner of man was this John Lynch, whose need of her had prevailed over the work that was evidently still her breath of life.

For a space, the road stretched ahead of them almost empty: a noble road, shadowed by that double line of trees on either side: the hard main avenue for quick traffic, the two kuccha ones thronged with country carts, riders and wayfarers unnumbered: chiefly pilgrims, endless pilgrims. A hundred thousand travelled daily to and from Benares alone, untroubled by the incalculable loss of money and working days. For them, the Seen was Maya—illusion: the Unseen was all. Though trains and lorries were increasingly popular, many thousands still, of choice or necessity, took their time along the Grand Trunk Road; stalls by the wayside for food, a parao for the night’s rest and a police station every few miles for safety. If the police were extortioners, they would brook no rivals except beggars, privileged by custom and religion. Like the flies and the fleas they were everywhere; and like fleas they lived mainly on the blood of others.

When the car slowed down, beggars swarmed round it with their mechanical wail—‘booka—booka’³⁵—patting naked stomachs, poking skinny fingers into their open mouths.

Vainly Grace waved them away.

‘They’re as persistent as mosquitoes,’ she said.

‘And damn it all, they may be hungry,’ said Roy.

‘Nothing like so hungry as they pretend to be,’ she assured him, smiling and guessing his thought. ‘I’m not heartless, Roy. But I’m hardened by years of shame. I keep my sympathy for the real sufferers, mostly women. Oh!’ she caught her breath. ‘I’ve never told you—that poor child we found——’

‘What happened?’ he asked, foreseeing tragedy.

‘Only what happens in scores of cases—and nobody cares. When I got round there three days after—she was dead. She told them she had been given in marriage to an ugly old man; and she was frightened. Nothing would induce her to go back. They gave her food and a corner to sleep in. But next morning—there was only a torn scrap of her chuddah on a nail near the well. She had preferred that to the old bridegroom who frightened her. And she not eleven years old——’

‘Eleven? She seemed much less. Such a mere wisp—at the mercy of a man. It’s devilish——’

‘Yes, that’s the right word, devilish.’ Her low tone was fiercer than his. ‘I can’t get hardened to it, in spite of all I’ve seen and heard.’

‘Is there no sort of protection? What about the Marriage Restraint Bill?’

She shrugged. ‘Oh, that It was wrangled over; sat upon in committee, and passed—with its fangs drawn. In any case, laws are useless while Hindu society remains utterly indifferent to the abomination. Their eyes are blinded by custom. The selling of girl babies as brides is too commonplace even to be noticed. I don’t suppose one case in five hundred ever comes to fight.’

‘But now—the women are waking up to some purpose?’

‘Yes—the younger ones, like Aruna. The Government’s “Age of Consent” Report revealed an incredible state of things; and it gave them facts to work upon. If there’s any sign of one spirit in India, it’s among her advanced women. What’s more, their importance, as a social factor, is at last percolating into the brains of Indian men!’

And Sinclair said, after brief hesitation, ‘How it would gladden my mother, if she could know the way they are moving now.’

‘Perhaps she does know? Perhaps she is still working for them—through you.’

From her, it was no figure of speech; and he wanted to thank her for putting it so. He could only hope she would not misunderstand his disability.

By now, the sun was driving strong blades of light through the trees—a fierce reminder that March had begun.

They had left Delhi before dawn; in the east, a slip of a moon, so old that she looked young, and all the far flat Punjab shrouded in its gossamer veil of mist. Grace had sent on a request for breakfast to the Lumbadar of Vikrawa, a village where she would be known and remembered; for she had brought his first son into the world and saved his girl-wife, who would never have survived the drastic attentions of some untrained sweeper-woman. But she was not breaking her journey solely on account of a former patient. As usual, in India, there were wheels within wheels. The trained spies of Govind Singh had brought word that the Lumbadar’s wife was a daughter of Palwahn’s Chief Zemindar, Chandhri Gunpat Rai. She would know of any recent wedding in her father’s household. So an earlier service to one young wife might prove the means of helping another.

As for Roy, the whole affair was an adventure after his own heart; the easy informality of his friendship with Grace, the nearer view of peasant India and these fascinating glimpses of life as it is lived on the Grand Trunk Road.

Here were two lorries rattling past packed with road coolies, shouting at each other as if they were a mile apart. And here came a modernised lady of means in a cheap American car, driven at a discreet pace by her scarlet chauffeur; dexterously shielded by a cloth of gold umbrella. Farther on, a troop of Sikh ‘boy’ scouts, grizzled and bearded but full of zest, were matching all anyhow to snatches of song, laughing at a joke about their tender years flung at them by a dandy youth, in open yellow waistcoat, clean shirt and dhoti, carrying a brand-new pair of patent leather shoes, while he walked barefoot in the dust.

‘He has the air of a bridegroom on his way to fetch the lady,’ said Grace, ‘keeping his shoes spotless for the occasion. Let’s hope she’s over seven!’

‘Shall we stop and ask?’ Sinclair flippantly suggested.

‘Certainly not. If you come out with me, you must behave! We’d better push on a bit. I’m hungry.’

After pushing on for another five miles, they deserted the Grand Trunk for a kuchha cart track, that ended abruptly where the fields of Vikrawa began.

‘We must leave the car here,’ said Grace, ‘and walk the rest. D.K. will mount guard. Listen! A band——’

Across a rough path between the crops of maize, a band was marching out to greet them: two cymbals, three ‘carnits,’ two drums and a large triangle: playing ‘the King’ in a triumph of unearthly discords. Only the familiar rhythmic beat of drums and cymbals proclaimed their loyal intention.

‘The National Anathema!’ said Grace; and Sinclair laughed as he sprang out of the car and took it standing to show them he knew what they were at.

‘For this version—most appropriate,’ he said. ‘Who christened it?’

‘One of John’s clerks, in a fit of eloquence. John told him he was a wit; and he didn’t quite know what to make of the compliment.’

Not till the King Emperor had been twice anathematised in quick succession were they allowed to proceed; the band ahead of them making a joyful noise, the sun glaring down from a bleached blue sky.

At the village entrance—a gap in a mud wall—Grace was greeted by the Lumbadar with fulsome eastern compliments and a tight little bunch of marigolds. Her coming, he told her, was most auspicious, on the very day of their annual fair in honour of Ganesh. Yes—his ‘house’ was well. He had two more sons and a small daughter five years old, not yet betrothed. It was shameful talk; but there was too little money now, so none could marry.

Grace waved her nosegay towards several naked urchins, grinning at a respectful distance.

‘If none can marry, whence come all these?’

The Lumbadar chuckled and rubbed his hands.

‘The Lady Sahib knows—children come by the favour of the gods.’

‘And hāzari,’³⁶ she said, ‘by favour of Lumbadar Siva Rām!’

Still full of talk, he led them through a tangle of irregular mud houses, along dusty lanes, littered with garbage, to the central square, shaded by a group of India’s noble architectural trees. Here, on a raised mud platform, village elders sat in council; and here also was the Lumbadar’s house, as primitive as the rest: two unglazed windows and an ill-fitting door, never closed, except against dust-storms or rain.

Under a tall shisham, breakfast had been laid on the family bedstead: a coarse cloth, brass plates and tumblers, two strips of matting, on which they squatted in amateur English fashion.

It was a generous meal; curry with rice and chupattis, oranges and bananas and slabs of a deadly-looking cake that Roy decided he must, at all costs, find courage to refuse. Their host and his younger brother presided, to see that the visitors ate their fill; zealously peeling the fruit and proffering it, well-fingered, to a pair of disconcerted guests, who neither dared to refuse nor to meet each other’s eyes. But the deadly cake was evaded; and a bottle of tepid soda-water was enlivened by a dash of brandy from Sinclair’s pocket flask.

Grateful for the curious meal, they were hardly less grateful for the fair that enabled them to escape, without discourtesy, from the attentive Lumbadar.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Outside, on a dusty maidán,³⁷ the whole village was shopping and worshipping and making merry; for the Hindu can worship his lesser gods without undue solemnity. And the two peasant favourites, Ganesh and Hanuman, are friendlier to man, more mindful of his trivial needs, than the terrible Káli with her thirst for blood, or Shiva the Destroyer. In theory, these simple folk worshipped the supreme Hindu trinity; but it was to the lesser gods they turned if a son were desired, or an ox was stolen; humbly supposing that the Lords of Heaven were occupied with more important affairs.

To-day it was Ganesh who offered a welcome excuse for gaiety and good cheer; a chance for the women to season religion with shopping, to wander in a gaily dressed throng and break a coconut in his honour, receiving in return a garland of marigolds. His temple, under the sacred peepul tree, had been open since dawn; so had the booths around it, displaying an incongruous medley of wares. There were clay birds and animals, models of Ganesh, pot-bellied and elephant-headed, with his curling trunk and immense ears. There were trinkets and slippers and flowered muslins for the women, charms and cheap knick-knacks, obviously of the West. There were even a few old gramophones wheezing out music-hall songs, to the huge delight of men, women and children, who understood not a word.

‘Pure East—all but the gramophone atrocities!’ said Sinclair, smitten by a mingled sense of familiar and unfamiliar: dark faces and white garments, turbans, waistcoats and saris of rainbow hues, orange-yellow garlands, crows and monkeys, and flies in their thousands. A bloom of fine white dust over everything lent a curious kind of beauty to the uniquely Indian scene: and beyond it, spreading away to the dusty horizon, the formless, timeless Punjab landscape, unlike any other on earth.

‘The gentleman in horn spectacles—not pure East—seems very keen to catch our attention. Obviously hoping we’re tourists—legitimate prey. Come along and explore.’

Politely evading the attentions of a milk-white bull, he trod on a chicken that squawked and scuffled off into a forest of bare brown legs.

‘A bookshop!’ he cried. ‘The latest from Bumpus! Must buy something, if only for luck.’

The portly spectacled Hindu, looming behind stacks of old books and cheap stationery, thrust at him a shabby packet of picture post-cards, chanting mechanically, ‘To-day two annas. Special price. Obscene—obscene——’

‘Don’t encourage him,’ said Grace crisply, and would have pushed on. But Sinclair put out a hand, saying in English, ‘Let’s have a look, you hoary old sinner.’

The bookseller, having no luck with illiterate India, thrust the dirty packet into his face.

‘Obscene—obscene——’

‘Quite so,’ he gravely agreed, glancing at the cards. ‘Beastly stuff.’ He tore them all up and dropped them in the dust.

‘Sahib—Sahib!’ The amazed Hindu reasoned with him in rapid Hindustani; and, when Sinclair made a snatch at his remaining packets, he covered them with both hands.

‘Veree nice funnee pictures. People like veree much.’

‘I like very much also,’ Sinclair lied good-humouredly. Then, lowering his voice, he let himself go in the vernacular, to the greater amazement of the book-vendor unused to hearing his own language so accurately spoken by stray Sahibs.

‘Now then, I want your whole stock in that line,’ this very odd Sahib concluded persuasively. ‘Three rupees for the lot.’

‘Three rupees?’ The man gasped; handed over his small stock and grinned fatuously at those three pieces of silver. There were plenty more such cards in Bombay, but not many Sahibs queer enough to buy them in this princely fashion.

Sinclair, glancing through his unsavoury purchase, muttered: ‘Beastly stuff. English—American—German. This is the way we civilise the East.’

Tearing up several others, he stuck the rest into his pocket, Grace looking on with amused approval.

‘Your camp fire will be more to the purpose. And of course the old sinner will hopefully lay in a fresh stock.’

As they moved on, three boys darted forward to scramble for the scattered fragments; and the last they heard of that queer bargain was the wily Hindu trying to charge the boys half price for damaged goods.

Beyond the booths, a snake-charmer was piping to a cobra with its fangs drawn. Two monkeys, in red flannel petticoats and jaunty caps, were acting a blatant domestic comedy. The dancing bear, with a string through his nostrils—shuffling to the rattle of a hand-drum and the droning of a gourd-flute—was easily eclipsed by the antics of a three-foot dwarf, pug-nosed and bearded—a human Xit. Clad only in his beard and a string of wooden beads, he turned and twisted his podgy legs, stamped to the clash of his childish cymbals, emitting weird cries more animal than human. Round him, in the dust, sat a contented crowd, of all ages, solemnly absorbed in the hideous spectacle; gaping, scratching, chewing sugar-cane and spitting out the fibre in all directions.

Grace averted her eyes and hurried on to the next attraction—a troop of boys in scout uniform, shoes and stockings complete. They were singing, not untunefully, acting their song to an attentive audience, mainly women and children.

‘That movement,’ said Grace, ‘is a mustard seed that may grow into a mighty tree, if enough British are left here, after the political deluge, to keep it from sinking into a mere tamasha for fairs. Indians need such ceaseless encouragement.’

‘From people like you,’ said Roy, ‘who can keep on keeping on against odds.’

His tribute pleased her, and she let him see it.

‘The odds,’ she admitted, ‘are often appalling. To accomplish even a little out here, one must have a spark of the “fire that is not quenched,” a mind clear of prejudice, and above all—time——’

‘Precisely what the civilian is never given,’ said Sinclair. ‘ Soon as he begins to know his district and its people, he’s whisked off elsewhere. They did give Brayne a better chance—didn’t they?—for his village welfare experiment?’

‘Yes. They let him stay in this district for seven years, twice the usual time for a D.C.³⁸ But he and his wonderful wife needed twice that time again to make any lasting impression on these custom-ridden people. It was a really noble attempt to lift a corner of village India out of the rut. And four years after—well, at Palwahn you can prowl round and see for yourself how much is left of it. That was one of their ideas’—she indicated the scout performance—‘“putting it across” in song and dance: “How to wash the baby,” “How to clean up the village,” “How to save the pice.” Let’s go and hear which it is.’

As they drew nearer the women giggled and whispered.

The scouts had started a fresh song. They were dandling invisible infants to a cheerful rhythmical refrain.

‘It’s “How to wash the baby,”’ said Grace. ‘Always a favourite. Look at that shrewd old grandmother fancying she could teach them a thing or two.’

‘She probably could,’ said Roy. ‘I like her face. She knows how many beans make five.’

‘Oh, they’re often clever—the grandmother-lōg, and full of pungent humour. But they are the dead weights on the family coach that’s aspiring to become a motor car.’

Her eyes travelled swiftly along the row of dark faces, old and young, comely and plain, seeking the Lumbadar’s wife.

‘There’s Vimāla. She’s seen me.’

A pleasant-faced young woman sprang up, smiling and touching her forehead: a colourful figure in bright blue skirt and Venetian red sari, arms and ankles laden with jewellery, clusters of tiny bells dragging down the lobes of her ears. Eagerly she hurried forward, an earthenware chatti in the crook of one arm, her small daughter—shamelessly unbetrothed—clutching at her full skirt.

The child stooped to pick up a dropped toy. The mother pulling her along, jerked the chatti and spilled half her precious milk in the dust.

‘Hai! Hai! Some devil pushed my elbow,’ she wailed with a despairing gesture. Then down she went on her knees, dabbing a corner of her sari in the milky dust and squeezing it over the vessel, eager to catch every drop before the earth swallowed it.

‘Good Lord, she can’t drink that stuff,’ Sinclair protested in dismay, and Grace screwed up her nose.

‘She will. She’ll give it to her luckless children. And they’ll survive.’

‘Couldn’t you threaten her with a Devil of Defiled Milk? Or would she accept the price of a clean chatti-ful?’

‘Oh no. It’s not a case of need. It’s what were up against all the time—sanctity. Milk is one of the five sacred products of her Holiness, the Cow. Not a drop must be wasted, or dire calamity might befall.’

Roy glanced again at the thin stream of grey fluid.

‘Couldn’t the sacred stuff be put to better use as an oblation? Would Ganesh distinguish between the milk of the cow and the coconut? Is it lawful to hoodwink a God?’

Grace laughed. ‘In the interests of hygiene, all things are lawful!’

‘Well, you tell the little mother I’ll buy a coconut, punch a hole and empty the milk into a clean vessel. Then we’ll fill the shell, stop the hole and she can break her offering at the shrine. It’s certainly lawful to hoodwink a priest.’

Now it was Grace who hurried forward.

‘Have you forgotten, little mother’ she asked, as Vimāla rose to receive greeting, ‘my strict orders about clean food?’

‘Never have I forgotten, my Lady Sahib.’ The brown fingers stroked her hand. ‘But the milk—your honour knows——’

‘I know that, being sacred, it might be used otherwise than to poison your children.’

‘How otherwise?’

Then Grace tactfully explained the benevolent fraud, giving honour where honour was due, and Vimāla, awed by the bold idea—delighted at the small ruse—shyly salaamed to the strange Sahib who so surprisingly understood her people.

The coconut was procured, the miracle accomplished. Vimāla, giggling behind her hand, confided the joke to a few other young women, who entered with fearsome joy into the hoodwinking of a priest. These also bought coconuts to shield their Lumbadar’s wife from risk of detection; and four of them fluttered off like a bevy of bright birds, the child frisking alongside, flourishing her yellow stick with red paper wings.

‘Why is old Ganesh so partial to coconuts?’ asked Roy, as he and Grace watched them go.

‘Don’t you know the legend of the sage, who defied the gods by making a magic to grow men ready-made on palm trees? A better plan than Nature’s slow uncertain method of raising them from seed! When the gods saw dark hairy heads appearing among the leaves, they took fright and sent Ganesh to protest against such blasphemous flouting of deity. And it was the wise God’s tact that at last dissuaded him from trying to ape Vishnu. So nothing was grown in his plantations but a lot of hairy heads. And on birthdays or feast days, those heads are broken at the Wise One’s shrine, because he saved the world from an epidemic of tree-men and preserved the izzat of the gods!’

‘Well done, Ganesh! It’s a good yarn; but it’s a staggering thought that those young women take it for gospel truth. The things these people swallow without blinking, the way they mix up real and unreal, makes the political dream of a democratic India seem almost an absurdity beyond contempt.’

Grace Lynch sighed. She wanted the best for India that her lovable unpractical people were capable of receiving.

‘“Seven maids with seven mops,” seven hundred times multiplied and an ocean of disinfectant——’ she said. ‘That’s my incurably medical view of India’s need. And yet—when they’ve swept away all this ignorance and superstition, so much that is beautiful and harmless will vanish too.’

‘But India will remain,’ Roy said. ‘Perhaps a finer India will be revealed; one that may give credit where credit is due—to the much abused Englishman.’

The women were coming back now; and Grace said quickly, ‘I’m going to carry off Vimāla. Call for me in half an hour, and we’ll eat our lean tiffin by the way.’

‘Right. I’ll talk to some of these people: take a few notes for my next Home article.’

But, as usual, he began mentally a letter to Tara about the coconut episode. The cream of his impressions more often went to her than to the editor who was paying a long price for his name.

The scouts had finished washing the baby. They were drawn up in marching order; the scoutmaster, pug-nosed and spectacled, shouting clipped words of command. And Sinclair, watching them, wondered how far they grasped the spirit of the game that was so much more than a game? Overcoming a natural reluctance to play the catechist, he went up to the foremost boy and praised their performance, in Punjabi.

‘You look a smart lad,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you can tell me what a scout has to do?’

The boy grinned and his toes twitched inside his country-made shoes.

‘A scout must give help; show how the village should be cleaned; have pity on Untouchables and animals.’

‘Plenty of work there. What help have you given lately?’

‘I carried a load too heavy for an old man. I drew water for an Untouchable woman and her son, who could get no drink all day because they may not approach the village well.’

‘That was a pukka good deed. What would you do if you found an old cow by the roadside, sick of a fatal disease, and in great pain?’

There was a nervous clearing of throats, a shuffling of shoes in the dust. And—while the boy hovered between truth and the Indian’s fatal tendency to say what is expected of him—the voice of the scoutmaster behind said solemnly, ‘If you please, sir, that youth has not yet done first-aid course.’

Sinclair smiled at the skilful evasion and the victim’s palpable relief.

‘You’re a good scout, little brother,’ he said. ‘But you’ll be a better one when you know what to do for that sick cow.’

He said, it gravely, hoping it might sink in. The boy saluted; the troop marched off in military style—more or less.

‘Wah! Wah! These be soldier-lōg, new fashion,’ said, a deep voice behind Sinclair in Punjabi.

The speaker was a lean, grizzled Jāt in Subadar’s uniform, with a row of medal ribbons on his left breast.

‘Salaam, Sahib.’ The man saluted. ‘Those be toy soldiers. I am a true servant of the Badshah.³⁹ A cast horse. I could drill those chokras⁴⁰ better than that pug-faced “middle-fail.”’

‘Those toy soldiers do good work, Subadar Sahib. Have you no scouts in your village, teaching the people to keep their homes and streets free of filth?’

The Subadar grinned.

‘There be many that teach,’ said he. ‘There be few that learn. Our people are not like yours, Sahib. They say it is purana riväj⁴¹—filth in the streets, cattle sharing their homes. They prefer not to lift two fingers, if one will suffice; not to give more chupattis to the sweeper for extra cleaning.’

‘Does the greedy one take big wages?’ Sinclair asked innocently, and the old soldier chuckled.

‘One chupatti in three days, Sahib. But if he must also remove dung heaps, he is clamouring for one every day.’

‘Poor devil!’ Sinclair pondered on that illuminating glimpse into a higher standard of living. ‘Why don’t you persuade your people to a better way of life? You must have learnt many things in the Army. You know that it’s not only as God wills, but as man labours, in home and field; that wells and manure will often wrest a fair harvest even from poor soil.’

‘True talk, Sahib. Many in the Punjab Colonies have already discovered that manure is a second God. There is an order to dig manure pits. But they say—too much trouble.’

‘Stir them up, give them a lead, like Brayne Sahib,’ Sinclair urged, not too hopefully, as they strolled on out of the blazing sun into a patch of lukewarm shade.

But the old soldier shook his head. Out of touch with British energy and soldierly discipline, he was one of them in the grain.

‘I know my people, Sahib. It would all be as if to milk the ram. They feared Brayne Sahib’s displeasure. They would not fear mine. And without fear, men will do nothing. If trouble comes, they say it is God’s will.’

And Sinclair flung out with irrepressible impatience, ‘Is it God’s will that flies breed by thousands in open dung heaps? Do they fancy those flies take off their shoes, or wipe their feet, before they crawl on the food or into the children’s eyes?’

The Subadar laughed at the characteristic touch of humour. ‘Your Honour talks like our officer sahibs. Always joking, even when angry.’

‘I’ve been an officer myself, in Indian cavalry.’

‘Wah! I might have known. If all white men were more like your officer sahibs, there would be much less bad feeling among us. We like many sahibs. But we don’t like the Sirkar.’

‘Well, if you want to govern yourselves, you must first begin with the village,’ Sinclair drew him back to the point at issue. ‘Why not make a start?’

‘Na—na——’ the lean hands were spread out as if warding off a danger. ‘I am no Dipty⁴² Sahib. It takes a braver man to lead a village away from bad customs than to lead a company into battle. And I came home to rest after many wars, not to begin another war against devils of disease and dirt and poverty. Men cannot fight on empty stomachs.’

That was conclusive; and the Subadar’s disarming smile seemed to say that he liked this friendly Englishman well enough, but not his uncomfortable doctrine. And Sinclair was not sorry to see the stalwart form of Dilawar Khan, who came to tell him that Lynch Memsahib was ready for the road.

The soldier saluted and strolled back to his fellows, who listened so readily to words of wisdom, and paid so little heed.

He found Grace entangled in elaborate leave-takings; the band drawn up to play them off the scene. With a glance, she signalled to him that she had her clue; but no real talk was possible till they were in the car again, rolling and jolting back to the Grand Trunk Road.

‘I’m on the right track,’ she said with suppressed excitement. ‘There has been an unorthodox marriage lately in the Zemindar’s family; and it is causing trouble. Vimāla says the girl is beautiful and the mother is jealous—also suspicious. If it is my Sunita—and they discover the fraud—goodness knows what may happen. A jealous Hindu mother-in-law, whose precious son has been taken in, would have as much mercy on a helpless girl as a tiger on a kid under his claws.’ She clenched her hand—a trick she had when deeply stirred. ‘If only I can work it, and get the poor child back for Rāmanand, it will be the triumph of my life.’

And Sinclair said from his heart: ‘If there’s anything I can do to help—command me.’

She was silent a moment, considering that genuine offer of service; then she turned to him, smiling.

‘I’m going to take you at your word! There is a way that you might be able to help—if you could put up with a charpoy in the Zemindar’s house for a few nights, instead of in his guest house, which might be cleaner and more airy.’

‘Will that involve being eaten alive by bugs?’

‘Not to a certainty. But I’m afraid it’s probable. And you know I wouldn’t ever ask you to risk them if I didn’t feel it might make all the difference to my chances. If you’re his guest, I can pay my respects to his women without seeming to do so for a purpose. Also, being on the spot, you could keep eyes and ears alert: let me know at once if your suspicions were aroused. Trivial clues often lead to big results. So you see——’

‘Yes. I see.’ Her smile and her plea were irresistible. ‘On the chance of helping that poor child, I’ll risk an army of bugs! I’m well supplied with Keating’s. There was need of it at Krishna Lāl’s. So far, I’ve been known as an Englishman where I lodged. But it’s one of the few advantages of not being pukka—as Anglo-Indians say—that I can “rush in” where most of my kind would fear to tread.’

‘You can do more than that,’ she said. ‘You can see and feel and understand, as few of them can do. You can help all of us to understand the strangest and most interesting people on earth.’

Chapter 8

Come inside India, accept all her good and evil: if there be deformity, try to cure it from within; but see it, understand it, turn your face towards it.
—Rabindranath Tagore

They had arrived. The dust and dazzle of the long March day had subsided into a quiet evening. They were taking their ease in two camp chairs under a mango tree. From the cluster of small tents behind them came whiffs of smoke and savoury spices.

The camp had been pitched well away from the outskirts of Palwahn. The village itself, seen from afar, was a study in straight lines and neutral tints; relieved by an occasional cluster of tree-tops. Drifts of blue wood-smoke hung becalmed in a clear sky; and the low orange-red sun seemed to have flung largesse of his colour to earth, where a patch of jungle blazed with dāk trees in full bloom: strange trees, dwarfish and misshapen; their fiery flowers bursting from sheaths of bronze velvet, clustered on leafless boughs.

Sinclair, translated again into Thákur Prithvi Raj, sat smoking in a restful silence, relishing his brief respite from the constraints of city life, not precisely relishing the privilege of another glimpse into the sanctities and squalors of a Hindu home, or the risk of disguise at close quarters. As to that, arrangements had already been made. For the Zemindar, apprised of their coming, had been prompt in paying his respects to the ‘Mem’ of the Police Burra Sahib; and Sinclair had bargained for a bed on the roof, where at least he could feel sure of air and isolation. Grace herself had been beset almost from the hour of her arrival—by sick folk, young and old. For she had let it be known in advance that she was a ‘Doctor Mem’. She could not come among them without giving some help; though too often their cases were hopeless through long neglect. Too often, if there was no charm, they looked askance at her simple remedies and went away sorrowful, yet uncomplaining.

There were two of them now—a pitiful-looking pair; a man, ugly and misshapen; a huddled, dust-coloured woman, patiently awaiting her turn.

The man, walking all askew from a twisted hip, and complaining of a trouble in his throat, had a woeful tale to tell of a hakim⁴³ who had taken all his money, yet failed to remove the devils in his hip and throat. For the hip-devil Grace told him there was now no cure. For the throat she gave him lozenges, pleasant tasting, to ensure their being taken. And as he hobbled away, salaaming profusely, she held out a welcoming hand to the woman, who had risen and stood hesitating on account of the high-caste stranger in the chair.

‘What’s your trouble, mother?’ Grace encouraged her.

Coming nearer, she told of an evil demon that tore at her chest, so that she could not sleep: a demon peculiarly partial to India’s cooped-up women—the tubercle bacillus. Ill as she was, and alone with one small grand-daughter, she would soon be homeless also. For the Zemindar, landlord of the village, had given her notice to quit.

‘He can’t turn you out,’ Grace protested, ‘except for non-payment of rent.’

‘True talk, Memsahib. But it is not dastúr for the Zemindar to give receipt; and always he says there is still something not paid. Now he sends word that because there is ten rupees owing, I must pay all again or I have no corner to sleep and feed——’

‘It’s damnable!’ Sinclair broke out, forgetting his Indian dress.

She gazed at him in mild surprise.

‘Zulm,’⁴⁴ he corrected himself, adding in Punjabi ‘I’ll make a pukka bundobast with the Zemindar. You shall not be turned out of your house.’

She could only salaam to him with trembling hands; but to the Memsahib she could pour out a measure of her bewildered gratitude.

‘Protector of the Poor, this slave is as dust under your Honour’s feet. But there is also my little granddaughter, not seven years. When the gods took my lord, I willed to be sati. For how can the leaf live when the tree is gone? But those devils of police-lōg withheld me. And, at my son’s desire, I remained to give such service as a widow may do. Now I have no son; only his little Aminabai. We be two lone women. Who cares if one girl-child and one widow should live or die?’

‘I, too, am a woman—and I care.’ Grace laid a hand on the thin bowed shoulder. ‘Whatever money is really owing, I will pay. To-morrow I will see your little Aminabai. Be near the chowpāl at noon, and await my coming.’

It was a changed woman who went from them, inwardly elated, outwardly the same bowed figure, moving slowly, the colour of the dust, to which she had compared herself in the humility of her widowed heart.

Grace turned to find Sinclair’s eyes on her face.

‘How you do love these people,’ he said with sudden fervour.

‘It’s impossible not to, when you’ve worked among them as a healer. The tragedy is—one can help them so little. That woman would have been better off, poor dear, if they had let her die with her husband.’

His look of interest deepened.

‘You—an English wife—feel that there is something to be said for sati?’

‘For the idea—yes: the leaf and the tree . . . if one feels like that. We, with our Western vitality, simply can’t understand that, for most Hindus, life really does mean less than death.’

‘But—to burn alive——! Is it suicide—a devotional impulse? Or the iron hand of religion?’

‘In most cases,’ she said, ‘a mixture of both. But the Hindu widow, knowing her probable lot, may well prefer death—terrible yet heroic—that invests her with a halo of piety. She can drug herself into indifference with opium, soak her clothes in sandal-oil to shorten the horror of burning. But no drug can deaden her to years of indignity and drudgery. They have a better chance now, of course, for work and even for re-marriage. But in many parts of India the spirit of sati has survived all our laws and our vigilance. I’ve known several remarkable cases—and have had to back the police, while my sympathies were with the women.’

Sinclair sighed. ‘They are a strange people. But that poor doomed widow.—defrauded of her martyrdom—shan’t be turned out of her hovel if we can coerce the Zemindar. Wish I could tackle him as a Sahib.’

‘If you prepare the way, I can tackle him as a Memsahib! And I’m a practised hand.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

It was an eerie adventure wandering through that unknown village after dark, close on the heels of a shadowy figure, swinging a lantern and balancing on one shoulder two items of luggage united by a strap—Sinclair’s few accessories and his roll of bedding. The swaying lantern weirdly illumined twisted lanes and blind walls of houses packed with men, women and children, cattle and poultry. Darkness had come down on Palwahn like an extinguisher. There is no night-life in an Indian village. Once Roy’s ear caught a sound of chanting; once the low monotone of a quern—some widow justifying her undesired existence. Out on the plain, jackals were crying. Now and then Govind Singh’s boy uttered a brief kubberdar,⁴⁵ warning him to avoid a heap of garbage, or some stagnant filth, due to the careless habits of men for whom privacy and sanitation were luxuries unknown and undesired. Their own footsteps were soundless in the deep dust. They moved like ghosts, between houses silent as death—yet not dead. The thought that anything might be happening within those blind walls, that round the next corner anything might emerge, had a curiously daunting effect on the mind.

It was a relief when they came to the square, the centre of village life. Here were shadowy groups of trees, their leafy heads blotting out thousands of stars; a raised platform—Palwahn’s local house of parliament; the gleam of a white-washed shrine. And beyond it a door in a high wall gave entrance to the house of Zemindar Ganpat Rai.

The boy, Datta Rām, knocked softly; and they were admitted. A shadowy wisp, in a loin-cloth, led them across the courtyard, lit by a hurricane lantern, into a long windowless room where two chirāgs⁴⁶ made darkness darker; a row of bare string beds offered themselves to any chance traveller who might claim a night’s lodging. Two of the beds were occupied by shrouded, corpse-like figures that snored; and Sinclair was glad he had bargained for the roof. In the second room a small hand lamp showed the huddled backs of three women crouched over a fire preparing the men’s evening meal. The smoke blinded them and made them cough; but they gossiped and flapped chupattis, cheerfully unconcerned.

By a dark twisted stairway, Sinclair and his guide reached the roof, enclosed at one angle with matting screens; clearly the women’s corner when the heat drove them up from those airless rooms.

Datta Rām unstrapped the roll, Sinclair smothered his charpoy with Keating’s powder, laid on it his meagre bedding—a pillow, a country blanket and resai; then, tired with the long hot day, he flung himself down, Indian fashion, only half undressed. In a far corner, Datta Rām lay shrouded; and Sinclair—feeling suddenly desolate—was glad to have him there.

The village below them was silent as a crypt. But from within the house arose voices of two women in sharp altercation that ended in a stifled scream. Could that be Sunita Devi? It was hateful lying there so close to possible cruelties, cursed with the activity of his mind’s eye, that could not be closed at will.

It could, however, be shifted at will to Tara, alone in their primrose-yellow room—sending him her last thoughts, as he was sending his to her.

But again imagination tormented him. He felt the sense of her in every nerve. And suddenly he recalled her passion of weeping on that strange night in his mother’s shrine, her poignant cry, ‘Oh, Roy—will you come back?’

As then, so now, her anguish smote him with a personal pang. That he should impose upon himself the strain of a long separation, seemed to him—for the first time—a small matter compared with all it might involve for her. He was mentally writing her an impassioned letter when he fell asleep. . . .

The risen sun, smiting his eyelids, awoke him with a brief puzzled sensation of ‘ Where am I?’ Then the discomfort of being half dressed, the matting screen and unclouded sky recalled his queer adventure. Unrefreshed, he rose and strolled across the flat roof that dropped, on the far side, to a lower one, overlooking a narrow twisted lane.

He sent Datta Rām for a basin of water and some fresh milk. As a Hindu, he must share family meals; he had brought nothing except his brandy-flask. But he had bargained for bath and dinner later on, at the camp.

Downstairs, in the men’s apartment, he found his host, with his son and an elder brother, stripped to the waist for their simple morning meal. The slack-lipped boy looked obviously woman-ruled; but the uncle, wiry, intelligent and alert, might be worth annexing for a stroll through the village. The room had obviously been slept in. No ray of morning light invaded it, nor any whiff of air. Its only window, cob-webbed and shuttered, was blocked by an old saddle.

They were joined, as of custom, by the travellers: a wandering swami,⁴⁷ in a rag of loin-cloth, and a voluble firebrand from Calcutta in short coat and dhoti; a devout Swarajist, his immediate aim the levelling of all barriers—race, caste and creed.

‘The young must defy the old, the East must defy the imperialistic West,’ he addressed himself hopefully to the only listener, who seemed to be a man of education. ‘Hindus and Moslems—India one and indivisible—must rise against these accursed British, whose rule is hated by every race and caste from Peshawar to Tuticorin.’

Sinclair, sceptical of that sweeping statement, could only speak as a Rajput.

‘For us, who were former Emperors of Hindustan,’ he said, ‘India renewed means a Rajput India; for the Moslems, a Moghul dominion. And neither would suit the Bengali. Which India—then—shall be one?’

But the apostle of unity was blest with the large vague vision that sweeps the heavens and ignores tiresome pebbles in the path.

‘There will be no thought of Moslem or Rajput or Bengali when all are cemented by one sacred purpose, to purge our violated land of the invader, at no matter what cost of money and blood. The English, by filling their prisons, are not saving their skins. They are preparing an army of patriots who will come forth, with iron in their souls, to kill—and kill——’

‘Meanwhile, my friend, you are killing time. Others have work to do,’ the Zemindar interposed with good-humoured decision. ‘ The chowpāl is the place for talk.’

It was a polite form of dismissal that no Indian could ignore. The swami had already slipped quietly out; and Sinclair, left alone with the two elder men, ventured a cautious allusion to the widow’s plight.

‘The Doctor Memsahib,’ he urged, ‘is troubled because the woman is sick. She says it is contrary to manhood practising zulm⁴⁸ on the sick and very poor.’

The hard face hardened perceptibly. ‘Why should a strange Mem make trouble on account of one sick woman—less value than a sick cow?’

‘Mems are like that.’ Sinclair’s bored tone implied that he too had suffered from their tiresome zeal. ‘This one even desires to pay the actual sum still owing. She said there must be a record, even if there is no receipt.’

‘Record? Yes: there is record——’ The suggestion of payment changed his tone. ‘But I am not a wealthy man; and a landlord must often think out forms of zulm to pay his way. You know that, Thákur Sahib!’ He chuckled, as one addressing a fellow sinner. ‘When a tiger is hungry, he will even eat a cow. If this Memsahib has rupees to spare, I will consider the matter. I have business this morning. Uncle-ji is at leisure if you wish to hear that Independence-wallah spilling other men’s blood and money in the chowpāl! I want peaceful progress for my country. But these Congress-wallahs only inflame the young and make trouble in quiet homes. No doubt my son will go and swallow fire instead of working in his field. Wah! wah!’

Sinclair suggested to Uncle-ji a stroll through the village, that he might compare it with his own, where no Brayne Sahib had worked for better teaching and living.

Even in bright sunshine, the place was a monotone of mud houses, chimneyless, windowless, enlivened by splashes of paint, rough attempts at gods and goddesses, in grotesque distortion. One enterprising artist had painted two false windows in his blind wall to show his progressive spirit. Everywhere filth and litter; a light wind blowing the dust of it over everything, into everything; little heaps of refuse tainting the air, waiting for the sweeper to come and earn his chupatti. Round the well, several sweepers were busy scattering earth over five large heaps, instead of shifting them to the manure pits—a legacy from the Great Experiment.

Rajendra Lāl jerked his thumb at them, a gleam in his sunken eyes.

‘See how busy they are! The Dipty Sahib may arrive this evening or to-morrow.’

‘Wouldn’t he be better pleased if those went to the manure pits? I looked to find, in Gurgáon, all Brayne Sahib’s improvements working finely.’

‘Yes, they worked well enough while he and his Mem were here to give hukm. But now——’ he turned out his

hands. ‘Burri taklif.’⁴⁹ The eternal answer of the East. ‘Changes, even for good, can’t come by compulsion. Easier to give hukm for pits and plough, than to see that these are used as intended. I was a chokra⁵⁰ when the first steam-plough came to Palwahn. It is here still; never seen by Sahibs. And it has never ploughed a field.—Come outside the village. I will show you.’

Through a gap in the mud wall, he led Sinclair to a rough shrine, whitewashed and splashed with red paint. Near the opening sat a doorkeeper and a seller of flowers. Close by, under a sacred pipul, squatted the fat priest-in-charge; the brown hand mechanically held open, the blessing murmured. Year in year out, the penniless villager paid and paid again for those few empty words.

There went one, with his wife and two children. For each he must pay the priest, the doorkeeper and tribute to the god. Two pice here, two annas there, he would be mulcted of enough to feed them all for one day; faithful even unto starvation; not of piety or duty, but simply from dastúr and superstitious fear of the priest who sowed unto him spiritual things, and reaped his material things.

The new-comers also paid to enter the shrine; and within it Sinclair beheld a steel ploughshare set up on end, smeared with red and worshipped, as a phallic symbol of Shiva, by credulous peasants ignorant of its British extraction.

‘A strange lingam!’ he said—controlling his amazement. ‘ One that might puzzle Shiva himself. What is the tale behind this usurper of homage?’

And Rajendra Lāl told him, as they strolled back to the village, how forty years ago the first steam-plough had arrived, in the pride of its might, to oust the wooden blade that for centuries had turned the soil of Palwahn; how the monster was led forth—garlanded with jasmin and roses—into a field of heavy soil, and the people were called out to witness the wonders it would perform.

‘And I also was among them,’ he said, ‘a youth, eager for any new thing. First there came a snort like an angry bull; then a screech like trumpeting of wild elephants, and the hissing of steam let loose, as the devil-machine plunged forward, and women fled screaming. But they had no need to fear pursuit. The sharp blade dug so powerfully into the earth that there it remained—self-planted. All the strongest men of the village reasoned with it—in vain. A wonder indeed!’

The Thákur laughed heartily at the discomfiture of Sahibs and steam. The Englishman saw a parable for politicians in the untimely thrusting of that portentous monster into a primitive world—a protest against all untimely thrusting of Western methods on to the god-ridden East.

‘But how came the devil-machine into that shrine?’ was all he said.

And Rajendra told how the Zemindars had commanded their strongest men to dig and dig, loosening the soil, till the invader could be heaved out and sidled into a deserted temple. There no doubt it was found by some profit-seeking priest, who lifted the steel blade, splashed it with dominical red and bade men worship it as a sacred symbol, that so it might bring them better harvests than by eating up their fields.

Strolling and talking, they had reached the central square, with its Hanuman shrine, and shady trees round a raised mud platform.

There, seated on a string bed, the ‘fire-eater’ was haranguing an attentive crowd. Nearest him sat the elders, men of consequence; and beyond them a huddle of peasants in their dust-coloured garments, looking dead to the world, yet missing little that was within their range of understanding. For they were no fools, those simple unlettered men.

‘Shall we listen to his wisdom?’ asked Sinclair, willing to hear all that he might understand all.

But Rajendra Lāl was not concerned to understand.

‘We know his talk, Thákur Sahib. Fairy-tales, for the ignorant, of peaceful and prosperous times—that never were—before the British despoiled the land. When I was young, men still lived who could remember those “peaceful” days, who could tell a very different tale of dacoity and thuggi and plundering chiefs. But there are none now who can say, “We have seen, we have known.”’

As they moved on, Sinclair caught the word Gandhi.

‘Wait a bit,’ he said—and listened in blank surprise to a florid account of a victorious Mahatma imposing terms on a virtually vanquished Burra Lat Sahib.

‘That is a lie,’ he said sharply.

‘If it be a lie, give them the truth,’ urged the old Punjabi, ‘and blacken the face of that word-monger.’

For an appreciable moment Sinclair wavered, alive to the risk of letting himself go: a risk he ought not to run. But those peasants were as sheep lacking a shepherd; and he could feel the old man watching him. He could hear Chandra Dutt proclaiming a Congress victory. As an Englishman and a Rajput, he could not keep silence.

‘Bear me out, friend,’ he said, half in a joke, ‘if the liar gives me the lie!’

Unhindered he strode among those squatting human bundles, confronted his former antagonist, and spoke without heat, yet in tones that commanded a hearing.

‘Those are fine sounding words, Babu-ji. But I myself came yesterday from Delhi. And any man who spoke of a vanquished Burra Lat, said only that which he wished to make others believe.’

‘My informer also came from Delhi,’ Chandra Dutt retorted unabashed.——‘There he heard talk of Hindu victory; the Mahatma commanding entrance to the great house at his pleasure——’

‘At the pleasure of the Burra Lāt,’ Sinclair corrected him, ‘who granted much patient hearing of Gandhi-ji, that so he might win a victory for peaceful progress among our people.’

It was a bold statement coming from Indian lips, at that time of open friction. But only boldness would serve; and he followed it up by a plea to all men of goodwill that instead of cutting each other’s throats, they also should work for peaceful progress, like all true patriots, Hindus and Moslem, up and down the land—men who knew that the British were facing such a task as no other race on earth had ever attempted or achieved.

‘I am neither Congress nor Conference wallah,’ he declared, growing bolder as he caught their attention, and saw that Grace was standing, now, by Rajendra Lāl. ‘I favour no political party. I have no enmity against the British. I desire, no less than Chandra Dutt Babu, the welfare of our glorious country. And I know that the mass of our people favour the peace and justice of British rule. That is why it endures—and doubtless will endure.’

He ventured that flat contradiction of his opponent on the authority of a Hindu politician, who presumably spoke with knowledge. But the disciple of Congress was watching keenly for a chance to hit back; and some trick of voice or manner lit a spark of suspicion in his mind. He had seen more of Englishmen than these untravelled peasants: and on the last word he sprang up with a shout of derision.

‘Listen, brothers! This budmash, calling himself Thákur Sahib, lauding the accursed British, is no true Rajput——’

‘No true Rajput?’ Sinclair, startled and angered, saw in a flash the advantage of that negative indictment. He would not deny his father’s race, but he could assert his kshattriya⁵¹ heritage. ‘What can a pen-driving Bengali know of that kingly people? He who insults a Sisodia will be forced to eat his own words.’

His fist shot out; but the orator, neatly dodging it, appealed to his late audience.

‘Heed him not, brothers. It is easy to ape voice and manners. Look at that man’s eyes. They are of the West.’

‘They are of the North,’ Sinclair retorted, aware of lost ground, and the distracting disadvantage of a truthful man entangled in a lie. But, before the words were out, he saw that Rajendra Lāl was pushing his way towards the platform.

Close to it he turned and raised his hand.

‘Brothers, hear me—one of your own elders. The Thákur Sahib is an honoured guest of your Zemindar. Any man who offers him an insult will taste the wrath of my nephew, Chandri Ganpat Bai——’ He turned to the discomfited orator with an air of authority. ‘you have no further leave to speak in the chowpāl of this village. Rookshut.’⁵²

There fell a brief impressive silence. Sinclair moved not a muscle; nor did Rajendra Lāl. But his eyes never left the half insolent, half uncertain face of Chandra Dutt. Without a word, he was edging the outsider off the scene, as a dog edges off an undesired intruder.

Whether or no the man knew himself mistaken, he knew himself beaten. With a vicious glance at the supposed Rajput, he stalked off, as one who goes uncompelled, through a gap in that silent watchful crowd.

It was with acute relief that Sinclair found himself, at last, outside the circle, grasping the lean dry hand of Rajendra Lāl, and saluting Grace Lynch in correct Eastern fashion. Characteristically, she was in command of affairs, explaining that the Thákur Sahib had important business to do for her in camp; that he would return and accept the Zemindar’s hospitality for one more night.

He took his leave in grateful terms; and, as they walked away together, it was good to feel that he could say what he pleased—and say it in English.

He looked round at her—a workmanlike figure in sun hat and well-cut shantung coat.

‘I suspect you had a hand in the rescue.’

She smiled. ‘I couldn’t stand by and see you baited. I simply said to that charming old Jāt, “You can’t let my friend the Thákur Sahib be insulted by an ill-mannered stranger.” And he did the rest——’

‘Most effectively. I hated letting him in for a lie.’

‘You shouldn’t have risked it, Roy.’

‘I had no choice. Suppose they had guessed the truth—what then?’

‘It might have impressed them. It might have been dangerous. You can never tell with Indians.’

‘Well, I’m damned grateful to you both.—How goes it with your affair?’

‘Most unsatisfactory. I’ll tell you—out there. We’d better not be too obviously talking English to each other.’

Over tea and cigarettes, in the shade of the mango tree, she told him of her visit to the Zenana, which had only intensified her fears for the young wife.

‘Did you see her?’ he asked.

‘No. It was maddening. Only another son’s wife and two older women. So I guilefully revealed that I had heard of Gulab’s marriage from Vimāla, that I had hoped to see the beautiful new wife. And she—more guilefully—expected me to believe that the girl was on a visit to her own people. The old sinner didn’t know she was dealing with an old stager! It’s the curse of Zenana life, so much power in one pair of hands.—Did you hear anything last night?’

‘A sharp quarrel—and a stifled scream.’

‘That might be anything—or nothing. But the new wife’s there, I’m certain. My mention of her was a palpable hit. Whether it is Sunita—God knows. Be on the alert to-night, Roy. Datta Rām can take his bicycle, so as to reach me quickly—if there’s need. I could put Govind Singh’s spies on to the house. But I’d sooner avoid strong measures. I hear Mr Ackland is expected this evening; so, if necessary, I can consult him. But I hope we can manage without his help.’

‘I hope so too.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

They dined early: and again, when night fell, Sinclair found himself following Datta Rām’s swaying lantern through narrow evil-smelling lanes, oppressed by the weird sensation of repeating a dream. But this time the boy had exchanged his shoulder burdens for a wobbling bicycle, and his own mind was centred on the day’s events, the night’s queer possibilities. He thought, with sharpened longing, of his yellow room at Bramleigh Beeches, with acute distaste of his bug-infested charpoy on the roof-top of Chandri Ganpat Rai.

Chapter 9

Our valours are our best gods.
—John Fletcher

To-night there was no swift falling asleep. Wide awake he lay there, listening to the ghostly laughter of jackals and the rasping cough of men, who would not cease from hawking and spitting till they slept. It was cool on the dark roof-top dimly lit by starshine—a reality in India. From marge to marge they glittered like a swarm of golden bees. Here a still planet, there a flashing constellation, or the far faint glimmer of blazing suns, a million miles away.

Troubled by an aching sense of beauty, he could hardly close his eyes against their splendour, or his mind against thronging images and impressions of one mere day in one unconsidered corner of peasant India. There was much confusion of detail in this imbibing process. But as ‘artist-understander,’ he was constrained by his double gifts to lose himself thus in India, at whatever risk; to become as it were a part of her profounder consciousness.

This baffling, terrible, yet fascinating land offered her secrets and wonders to only those who sought them with understanding, with intensity of purpose, and with some knowledge of her past—the dead hand so heavily laid upon her present. For without a sense of the past, without the realism of her aristocratic outlook, India would never be ‘godly and quietly governed,’ or succeed in governing herself. His talks in Delhi, with thoughtful men of both races, had left him at once enlightened and dismayed by a problem too complex to be grasped in all its bearings. Yet go forward he must, in the spirit of the mountain climber who is aware that the summit may never be reached. Through the very difficulties of the climb came the heightened consciousness of life that alone made effort worth while. And, as poet and writer, he was less concerned with the political tangle than with social and spiritual issues—that are the root of the matter, after all.

Only from what the people are can a living nation evolve. And how many of the honest idealists at Home had any working knowledge of Indians in the mass as they lived? How comparatively little he himself had known of them—till now. From his mother and grandfather he had imbibed the highest tenets of Brahman philosophy; but contact with the rigid code of practical Hinduism fatally stripped it of idealistic gloss. How many Hindus were accounted spiritual, simply because their fluid minds were unfitted to grasp the realities of life? How few could ever understand the spirit that urged these tireless white men to combat evils which they themselves accepted as a matter of course. A veil seemed to hang between the two peoples; through it their voices came to each other muffled and dim.

In Delhi, among educated Indians, political issues had become an obsession. Even in larger villages, the motorbus and cinema had wrought changes of outlook he would hardly have credited ten years ago. But here, in Palwahn, was a typical Punjab village, narrow as its own lanes, ruled by fear, supinely ignorant of its own power and significance in the scale of things; its traditions unbreakable, its trivialities looming larger than life.

The peasant himself—born to a heritage of debt, must somehow continually pay and pay; to the bannia, interest, to the Zemindar, rent, to the priest, offerings. Yet in spite of many hardships—or because of them—he still contrived to remain the most contented class of man in the modern world. His close contact with the earth meant more than uncertain assurance of daily bread. It was a way of life, a dependence on unseen powers, that influenced the whole man. He himself would fain devote more time to these sturdy peasants of the Punjab, and the changes at work in them: time—the inexorable limit to man’s limitless aspirations. . . .

He had drifted to the verge of sleep when he was jerked awake again by two sharp screams of pain and fear. He sat upright, tense and tingling.

A third scream swiftly stifled: then silence, that made him sick with dread. Before Grace could be fetched anything might happen——

As he shook the sleep out of Datta Rām, he was startled by a wavering light from the lane he had looked into yesterday morning. He ran across and peered down, just in time to see a blazing object pushed over the lower ledge by two dark figures, seen one moment, gone the next. Was that the young wife away on a visit? He could make a dash to save her, even now.

Datta Rām must fetch his bicycle and ride like the wind; tell the Memsahib that she should come, full speed, to help a woman on fire. He himself must reach that dark lane direct, armed with blanket and resai: drop on to the lower roof—and jump, at any risk. Those cruel flames lit up the narrow place and made swift action possible.

Snatching up blanket and resai, he swung himself down to the lesser roof and hurled them over. Swiftly he gauged the desperate jump. And even while the doubt flickered—‘Can I do it?’—the thing was done.

He landed with a forward lurch, on the soles of his slippered feet; righted himself and swiftly smothered the flames—burning his hands in the process. Then he removed the wad of cloth that had stifled that third scream.

The girl’s terrified eyes had told him she was alive. Released from the gag, she fell into a piteous smothered sobbing.

‘It wasn’t your doing, little sister?’

‘Na, na—it was those evil women,’ she sobbed.

‘There’s a doctor Mem in camp, who will mend your burns. My chokra has gone on a bicycle.’

‘Let her take me away—or I die.’

‘Yes—yes,’ he assured her; and as a ribbon of sparks caught his eye, he crushed them out, thinking only of her danger, forgetful of her scorched flesh.

She shivered, choked back a cry of pain, and her head fell limply against his arm.

She had fainted: and there, in the dark, Sinclair crouched, holding her, helpless to ease her till Grace arrived. There was brandy in his pocket-flask; but unconsciousness seemed the more merciful state. He could only hope that Grace would somehow ride to the rescue on that shaky old bicycle. He believed her capable of it. . . .

And that was precisely what she did.

He had just begun to think of applying the brandy, when a star appeared in the darkness, coming swiftly towards him. She had done it in record time. She was a woman to marvel at.

‘Roy?’ She whispered anxiously.

‘Yes—she’s alive,’ he answered the implied question. ‘It was terrible. She fainted.’

He took hold of the bicycle: and Grace, opening her roll of needs, glanced up at the enclosing wall.

‘How on earth did you reach her?’

‘I jumped.’

‘Splendid!’

She was already on her knees; and he held his powerful electric torch for her, telling her all he had seen, while she restored the girl and doctored the cruel burns.

‘But—but I hope not fatal,’ was her verdict, ‘thanks to your promptness and pluck.’

The girl shrank close to her, moaning, ‘Take me away—quick, take me away.’

Grace soothed her with hand and voice. Then she decided on a bold step. ‘I’m going to take you away Sunita Devi,’ she said in Hindi.

The dark eyes dilated with excitement and fear.

‘How does your Honour know the name of this slave?’

‘Because I am the Mem of a Police Burra Sahib. For two years they have been seeking you.’

The thin fingers clutched her wrist. ‘My lord—still desires me?’

‘Since he lost you, he has known no peace. I shall send him a telegram. He is in Delhi. To him only I will give you up.—But we must carry you back to camp.’

It was no great distance; and between them they carried her as gently as might be, slung in the scorched resai, leaving the blanket and bicycle for Datta Rām to fetch in the morning. The lamp they took to light them, with the help of Sinclair’s torch, through the dark and filthy streets. But for all their care the girl fainted again before they reached camp.

As they went, Grace told him briefly of her plans for the morrow. A surprise visit from Govind Singh and two police-constables would enlighten the Zemindar as to an attempted murder, overheard and seen by his guest.

‘The women, of course,’ she said, ‘will swear to an attempt at suicide. They actually do, when things are desperate, soak their clothes in oil and turn themselves into living torches. But we have Sunita’s word, besides the witness of your eyes and ears. If the case is tried by an Indian judge, the sentence will be negligible. It’s futile work showing up this kind of thing. But it’s all we can do.’

‘It may take effect here and there,’ he consoled her. ‘What’ll you do with this poor child? Have you got the husband up your sleeve?’

‘More or less! He’s in Delhi. I’ve made John promise to take him on as a clerk. So they’ll both go with me to Peshawar.’

‘You’re a genius at this game. You ought to have married Sherlock Holmes!’

‘I’ve married his first cousin! I’ll introduce him to you in Peshawar.—Here we are. You turn in and get some sleep, while I treat my poor little brand—literally snatched from the burning.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

The scene in the Zemindar’s courtyard next morning was emphatically a tale for Tara.

There, at an early hour, Govind Singh and his police-constables laid before the outraged master of the house proof of disgraceful doings in his zenana. With him sat Rajendra Lāl, shrewdly interested, a group of near relations and his woman-ruled son looking unhappy and cowed. Thákur Prithvi Raj—who had so ill-requited a fellow-landowner’s hospitality—stood a little apart. Grace had boldly ventured behind the scenes to have a word with the women before questioning began.

And around the chief actors in that unrehearsed drama an uninvited audience clustered thick upon neighbouring roof-tops. Young boys, lithe as monkeys, straddled on the walls, or clung like bats to overhanging branches of trees. Shoo’d away by an abrupt order from below, they promptly obeyed—and as promptly returned. For already Palwahn had news of a scorched blanket, a bicycle, and a dead woman carried off by body-snatchers. Now here was a Thákur Sahib telling of attempted murder; the Zemindar’s ‘house’ telling a more likely tale of attempted suicide; she and the Roy’s aunt trying to save the girl, who fled from them and fell into the lane.

That was the story heard by those who were close enough to hear. For although Mai Radha and her accomplice kept their respectable faces hid, they gave evidence at the tops of their nasal voices, in lurid language, that all might hear how they had been wrongfully accused by a stranger, who had eaten the salt of Palwahn’s chief Zemindar.

Sinclair, when addressed, answered briefly and baldly; more and more hating his own position, as they saw it; more and more admiring Govind Singh’s respectful yet masterly way with those turbulent unseen women.

Sunita Devi had made a statement of her whole story written down by Grace and vouched for by himself—hearing unseen. The pitiful record of suffering and ill-treatment had no visible effect on any who heard it, except on the slack-lipped youth. Large tears rolled down his cheeks. And Sinclair—divided between pity and contempt—saw him lurch to his feet; heard him confirm her tragic statement, and admit that he himself had set her sari alight—acting under orders. No mention of his mother. But a yell of rage behind the curtain gave her away; and the startled boy fell to sobbing, in terror, at what he had done under stress of genuine emotion.

With that dramatic coup, the enquiry ended; and the audience drifted away. Govind Singh announced that the tearful young man and the two older women, duly muffled, would be taken into custody. Sinclair’s brief talk with the Zemindar set him on the right footing in that quarter; and Grace joined them for a last word about her widow and the paltry ten rupees—all that the record showed against her.

‘There is full payment,’ she said. ‘Was it worth dishonouring your manhood for so small a sum?’

To that shrewd thrust he had no ready answer; probably feeling more shame-faced over the trivial transaction than over his wife’s drastic fashion of upholding the family honour.

‘Leave the woman in peace, Zemindar Sahib,’ she urged; and feeling that the money was not enough, she added significantly, ‘I shall not forget to come and see my patient when I am down this way again.’

Sinclair took leave of Rajendra Lāl in friendlier terms: and at last they were alone again, the strange episode ended, walking briskly back to camp.

At the earliest hour, two wires had flashed to Delhi and Meerut: and on her table Grace found two prompt replies.

‘Rāmanand will be here to-night,’ she announced, but her eyes lingered on the other slip. Then she handed it to him with her sudden smile.

‘My triumph,’ she said; and Sinclair read two words: ‘•Shakbāsh.⁵³ John.’

‘Brief—and to the point,’ he remarked.

‘Yes. That’s his way. I like it.’

‘So do I.’

Her gaze brooded on him a moment. ‘Sometimes I wonder—how you two will like each other.’

‘So do I.’ His faint emphasis hinted at the same unspoken thought.

‘John’s such a four-square man,’ she said, ‘that people either definitely do like him—or definitely don’t! And he mostly doesn’t care a bean which way it is.’

‘So I gathered from the profile photo in your room at Delhi. Wish I could cultivate that comfortable frame of mind to more purpose. The sensible British part of me really won’t care a damn how he may feel towards—my mixed parentage. But the cursedly sensitive Indian part will at once be aware of his inner attitude—and be affected by it.’

She shook her head at him. ‘Foolish person! You with your distinguished name. There won’t be any “inner attitude.”’

‘So best. I shall know all right. I chiefly mind because he’s your husband, and I’d like to be friends with him.’

‘You will be,’ she assured him.

But the profile of the ‘four-square man’ told him that it would not lie with her.

Grace decided that it would be at least a week before Sunita Devi could attempt the short train journey to Delhi with her lord. Sinclair decided to wait for her; and take the opportunity of exploring farther afield. He deemed it wiser to avoid Palwahn; but he spent a profitable three days sampling other villages in the district.

He returned confirmed in his belief that the true solvents of the India complex were personal and spiritual; that one could hardly over-estimate the influence for good of every English man or woman who accepted and returned the singular kindness and courtesy of Indians, even the bitterest opponents of British rule. For as a whole they undeniably preferred the British to any other aliens, East or West. It remained for the British to reform their racial attitude; to recognise India as no mere Dependency, but a highly individual group of nations, that must either be fitted to play a more important part within the Empire, or be alienated with disastrous results for all concerned. It remained for Indians to deserve what they desired; to win for themselves, in a closer union with England, the status they claimed as a gift to be given on demand.

The day after his return they drove back to Ramjās College in the princely car. There they found an elated Suráj; his ‘Achilgarh’ written, and approved by the Pundit, who had arranged for a recital of the ballad and a canto of the Udaipur epic to a class of history students the next afternoon. Grace, persuaded to stay for the event, left Delhi by an evening train to join her husband in Meerut.

‘We’ll be in Peshawar by April,’ said Sinclair at parting. ‘Then you shall introduce me to “the strong man of the Border”!’

Alone in her stoking-hot railway carriage, released from concentration on her case, she had leisure to reflect on the swift and satisfying friendship that had come into her life, to relish her own keen pleasure in the natural ease and freedom of their intercourse—a refreshing change from station personalities, mainly hinging on difference of sex or status.

They two, in their ten days together, had been untroubled by status or sex, absorbed in matters outside their personal lives. Spontaneously, as the best things come, they had both taken a holiday from their normal selves, their normal world; a form of holiday that too few have the courage to take or the capacity to enjoy.

And to-night—John. The tales she would have to tell: the rationed crumbs of information she would receive in return. But the things that mattered, their deep undemonstrative joy in each other, would not be rationed. If John’s love-making was not often expressive, it was impressive, like the whole of his difficult, stalwart personality; and in this first year of marriage it was still new to both, the wonder of coming together again after any brief time apart.

He would make for her carriage in his purposeful, unhurried fashion. He would greet her, as man to man, with his, ‘Hullo! There you are.’ But his strange pale eyes would follow her movements, his fingers close hard on her arm, as if he feared she might inadvertently slip away again. He would be proud of her success in a form of work he could appraise and understand. And she hoped he would properly appreciate her very unusual friend when they met in Peshawar.

Chapter 10

Here land and air wide and worthy of giants, carry, in some mysterious fashion, memories of another life.
—F. Yeats-Brown

‘Lord! It’s a stark ferocious country! What creed could flourish here but Islam, the religion of the Sword. Once we’re over the Indus, Bhai-ji, you can say you’ve been out of India. More education for you!’

‘All the same, it is India,’ argued Suráj, very busy preparing a stick of sugar-cane.

‘Technically—yes. Actually the tribes are a people apart.

‘Let them stay apart. I don’t like Moslems.’

‘You’ll like some of them up here, if you pocket your prejudice. Many of the Khans and Sirdars are quite as fine gentlemen as any Udaipuri.’

But Suráj was only half attending. He was chewing and sucking and spitting with frank relish. Sinclair watched him, for a moment, with affectionate amusement; then his eyes reverted to the spectacle of India rushing past the rushing train.

Since early morning he had been watching it, on and off, with unwearied interest: big stations at long intervals, a succession of familiar names: tragic Amritsar, its Golden Temple glinting in the early light: Jhelum, and the rugged desolation of the Salt Range, a fertile patchwork of ripening crops, the first far glimpse of silver peaks melting into the sky. Rawal Pindi, the great military station of the north: an ordered mass of bungalows, barracks and aerodromes set against the distant bulwark of the Himalayas—their twofold supremacy of strength and beauty lifted high above India, above Kashmir.

And between those landmarks of British dominion the train went thundering through endless miles of actual unrealised India: a dust-coloured, sun-smitten landscape fearsome in its lack of vitality, its impression of timelessness, of an embodied fate.

Only when the train clanked into a station the dead land came violently to life.

At every stoppage an excited crowd gushed out—bundles on sticks, babies on hips; another excited crowd jostled and tumbled into the blazing third-class carriages. Bhistis, with swollen goat-skins slung across their shoulders, passed up and down chanting ‘Water for Moslems—water for Hindus.’ Cupped hands and brass vessels were thrust out for the precious fluid. And, when time was up, always the same vociferous departure; clanging of bells, shrilling of whistles, and slamming of doors. Then peace descended—till the next station.

Where were they all going to—and why? Sinclair wondered, with his incurable interest in even stray human beings.

Suráj, unheeding, chewed sugar-cane, ate loose-skinned oranges and drank bottles of iced lemonade, only to sweat it all out and crave for more. There was ice and iced food in their big tiffin basket. For an opportune cheque from the London Editor had tempted Sinclair to the extravagance of a reserved first-class compartment. He was wearing Indian dress for coolness and comfort; and he wanted no international incidents on this occasion. He also wanted to utilise his day-long journey in sorting out rough notes and impressions for his next article on ‘The Punjab and the Pact.’ He possessed the rare faculty of concentrating in a train. The vibration and the thunderous beat of its mighty heart formed a rhythmic under-current to the march of his thoughts; and thanks to his share of the East, he had early learnt to detach himself, at need from actual surroundings.

Work apart, his mind was beset with the impressions and very mixed sensations that had crowded in on him during his three weeks sojourn in Lahore, one of the most inflammable danger-spots of the Punjab. For there Sikhs added the fervours of a warlike creed to the eternal rivalry of Moslems and Hindus, so intensified by political fears and jealousies that it was becoming frankly a race for power.

They had not lodged, this time, in the city. Nilkant Rāo had passed them on, in hospitable Indian fashion, to a fellow Pundit and lecturer at Dyál Singh College—an able man, of advanced ideas, whose large airy bungalow was furnished mainly with fine carpets, floor-bolsters and cushions, a few small tables and the inevitable spittoons. One had to live with Indians to realise their complete independence of furniture, even the well-to-do. But the Pundit had honoured his distinguished guest with a room to himself, and a cheap bazaar writing-table—never used. There the novel had flourished and three lyrical poems had arrived, that would at least have the merit of fetching thirty guineas or so for Tara to spend on some personal need.

Every morning the sun had returned with greater power. And the rising thermometer played strange tricks with men’s brains and bodies. It loosened all bonds of self-control. It made the disciplined life harder to live than in England. Tempers flared on trivial provocation: and it no longer surprised Sinclair that Indian quarrels often ended in murder, if knives or hatchets were about. From an English professor in the College he had learnt something of Indian students—perhaps the least satisfactory products of the country: quick, eager learners, lovable and tiresome as children, their curious copy-book minds making them, too often, mere mental echoes of each other or the latest lecturer; their too common destiny the making of bombs or the writing of bombast in extremist papers.

To Sinclair, the unadulterated peasant seemed the better man: a question he would like to discuss with Grace. He had missed the stimulus of her companionship that relieved the monotonous flavour of Indian India. She belonged to his mental family. Purposeful herself, she understood—without tiresome crossing of ‘t’s’—the hidden unsleeping purpose that had constrained him to leave home and comfort and heart’s desire.

Of late he had suffered a sharp reaction, had felt drained of energy, weary of seeing and smelling the actual East, that was neither——‘mystical’ nor ‘gorgeous’ in its everyday aspects; weary of Indians and their irresponsible slovenly ways; no sense of time, and only a fitful sense of humour. He frankly looked forward to the ease and freedom of his English self, to thoughtful stimulating talk with men who knew every last thing about their own line of work, and did it supremely well: men like Thea Leigh’s remarkable husband, earning fresh laurels as Chief Commissioner of the North-West Frontier Province. He was to stay with them till he went on to Kashmir; and Thea had also invited Suráj. One could count on her for that. She wrote of April in Peshawar, with rose hedges and every kind of fruit tree in bloom, as a sensation not to be missed.

Meantime Lahore, in March, had provided him with sensations of a curiously mixed character.

For there he was back again in the very month of his own brief passionate wooing of Rose: his tragic belated knowledge that Lance had been first in the field, and he—with his coming title and property—an unwitting rival to his closest friend. Strange how vividly it had all rushed back on him in the first few days of his return: the ardours of his headlong passion, the anguish of losing Lance.

As Thákur Prithvi Raj, in embroidered choga and yellow turban, he had wandered through the cool green Lawrence Gardens: the same noble trees and riot of roses; flying figures on the tennis courts, strolling couples and snatches of talk—much the same talk though in a different jargon. And he, feeling leagues removed from those comfortable, one-natured fellow-beings, who would neither understand nor approve his unorthodox adventure.

But over the surface sameness there had brooded a changed atmosphere partly due to that hideous murder in January and the abortive attack on the Governor. Sentries outside the Lawrence Hall, a guard for every bungalow, Government House grounds bristling with them. And no doubt the next senseless murder would happen elsewhere.

Not so could terrorism be evaded or suppressed. Not so did the British Raj win and maintain sovereignty in the land. Other alien nations had built their forts and walled cities—and had builded in vain. The English—in open, almost unguarded, stations—had lived careless and secure, in the respect and loyalty that the East accords to ikbāl. The valiant need no forts. The mentality of the besieged—though not necessarily fearful—suggests fear. And he who fears an Indian will soon find him formidable enough.

Against these discomfortable thoughts he could not conveniently close his mind; nor had it been reassured by the atmosphere of the Punjab after the Delhi pact. Hence his outspoken article, charged with the unrealised truth that, since the War, India’s great provinces had broken up into separate nations, yearly drifting farther apart. In spite of railways and a unifying language, Bengal was almost a foreign country to official Delhi; and Madras knew little of the Punjab, whose sturdy people needed to be decently ruled, not agitated or propitiated according to each turn of the wheel.

In this land of fierce loyalties and fierce hatreds was no sign of the sweet reasonableness that had prevailed in Delhi between two Mahatmas temperamentally out of touch with the turbulent North. Responsible men in Peshawar had been dismayed by the untimely release of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, stormy petrel of the Border in the generous gesture that had freed, at a stroke, fourteen thousand so-called political prisoners—first-fruits of the pact, viewed by the tribes as the twilight of the British Raj. For Peshawar, the return of Abdul Ghaffar boded more trouble with Red Shirts, who proclaimed allegiance to Gandhi, and waged—in their own violent fashion—his non-violent campaign.

But the North was in wise and competent hands; and official Delhi was suffering from reaction after strain. Indians—by nature excitable unrealists—had looked for a prompt spectacular announcement of fresh Round Table plans. Someone would press a button: delegates would appear. But a change of Viceroys was imminent. In England, British politicians—deliberate and disunited—talked and talked. In Delhi, as the thermometer rose, enthusiasm cooled. Possibly the chance of a decade was lost——

And in the last week of that eventful March all eyes had been turned from the North to Cawnpore, where fires of unsleeping race-hatred had been set aflare by Hindu methods of honouring a Sikh murderer, condemned for shooting a young Police Officer and flinging a bomb into the Delhi Assembly two years earlier. The crime was admitted; the sentence justified. But Bhagat Singh was the idol of young Congress; and half India had become hysterical over one condemned criminal. Rightly and duly hanged in Lahore prison, he had been hailed as a martyr by the extremist press. Protests, processions, hartals had dislocated the business of big cities; and from Cawnpore came news of a Hindu-Moslem riot that had flared up into wholesale massacre—not entirely due to the death of Bhagat Singh.

Hindus, everywhere, had hailed the pact as a step towards their ratified supremacy. Moslems—proud believers in one God, rulers for six hundred years—had long been in a prickly mood. And all over India a spirit of lawlessness had been fostered by Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign. So it happened that, in Cawnpore news of the death sentence had fallen like a lit match into a powder magazine.

In vain Congress had ordered a general hartal to mourn for the martyr. Moslems—sick of lost trade and ‘peaceful’ picketing—had refused to close down. One of their constables had been chased by a Hindu mob—and the lit match had done its deadly work. Shops had been forcibly closed, temples fired, trams held up, Europeans attacked. In the suburbs a pitched battle had raged unhindered, till the place was a shambles. For those few terrible days British rule had virtually ceased to function. The mixed local police force—hampered by strict orders to deal leniently with Congress activities—had been slow to take strong measures. Officers had been reluctant to proclaim martial law—clamoured for in the hour of danger; censured when danger was past.

Only, as detailed news came through, had the full horror been revealed: Moslems and Hindus burning, slaughtering and outraging one another, in circumstances of ruthless ferocity that read like a chapter from the Old Testament: bodies cut up and flung down drains, women outraged and bludgeoned to death, young children ripped in two. And, when troops at last arrived, they were forced to stand inactive, witnessing atrocities they could have prevented by a mere threat.

The whole bloody affair had shaken the people’s confidence, everywhere, in Government power to protect them from each other; had left a legacy of bitter ill-feeling on both sides. It left Sinclair, dismayed and repelled, asking himself—what hope of a working harmony in a land cleft with fissures centuries deep?

These thoughts, and the bare events of that terrible week, he had roughly flung down on paper. But it was a hard matter to write with balanced judgment of the men and the policy indirectly responsible for it all. Impossible to calculate the harm done by Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign, his ambidextrous juggling with phrases, when none knew better than he the tendency of Indians to get drunk on words. That kind of thing could not be thought out in the stifling darkened carriage of a train rushing through space.

As he sat absorbed, tapping his teeth with the end of his pencil, an orange hurtled through the air and struck him in the chest with a soft thud.

‘Damn you, Suráj,’ he said automatically—and laughed at his friend’s reproachful face. ‘What’s the grievance, old man?’

‘Oh, put away your everlasting papers, Pundit-ji. For industry—beyond bounds—Englishmen are the limit. Let’s have a taste of Prithvi Raj. He’s a fine fellow. Would he not be admitted to Government House?’

‘Yes, he would. But it’s Sinclair’s turn for a look in. I’ll manage my transformation at the station hotel and get rid of all this.’

Vainly he brushed from his face, and shook out of his dress, a portion of India’s all-pervading, all-penetrating dust. Defying electric fans and windows thrice protected—blue glass, mosquito-screens, Venetians—it persistently filtered in. Everything in the carriage was powdered with it. Eyes, nostrils, mouths were full of India.

‘A Turkish bath or a garden hose—that’s what I’ll need on arrival.’

‘Will they give Turkish baths?’ asked Suráj, interested now.

‘No hope. But Lady Leigh might lend us her garden hose!’

He scrunched across the gritty floor to the lavatory, for his tenth wash since breakfast. Then he came back and opened up his window; for the worst of the heat was over. Not so the flies, or the dust. In five minutes it had smothered him again.

But they were nearing the Border now; and, dust or no, he must watch the changing face of the land; the increasing ferocity in aspect, costume and country, as they sped towards the untamed, untameable wildness of the Frontier hills, gashed with ravines, peppered with forts and fortified villages, peopled with fanatical worshippers of Allah, the rifle and the sword; a region where man counted as man, not as a mere unit of the proletariat. Even among the British it was said that the best men got taken to the top of the map. And here, in the North, one became increasingly aware of the Army, British and Indian, hardly realised in the South. For whatever fresh experiments might emerge from conferences and reports, ‘the North safeguarded’ must remain a categorical imperative, for decades to come.

Near sunset they approached Attock Fort; massive walls and towers banked against a glowing sky; lights flickering here and there; the roar of the Indus, swollen by torrents of spring, challenging the roar of the train. Now they were nearing the great steel bridge, sole railway link between the Punjab and the Border, that is India—yet not India.

Sinclair let down another window, took Suráj by the arm and pulled him over to it.

‘Stop your eternal sucking,’ he said. ‘Take a good look at Attock Fort and the Suleiman hills, wilder and grander than our lovely Aravális.’

Suráj looked—and was properly impressed. For a better view, he thrust out his head, and Sinclair followed suit. All along the train, from every third-class window heads were thrust out, bunches of puggaris and lungis, yellow and pink, orange and green and drab.

It was dusk now, but not yet dark. And, as the train slackened before crossing the bridge, three shadowy figures sprang out from a clump of trees on the low embankment. There was a rapid swish of two long branches and a bamboo pole, aimed at those crowded windows; a score or so of gay puggaris falling like ripe fruit; yells of rage from bald-headed owners—top-knots exposed and shaven skulls.

Suráj jerked backwards—just not soon enough. The bamboo pole caught him a sharp rap on the head; and his favourite shell-pink turban joined the fallen trophies that vanished as they fell.

Sinclair’s turban shared the same fate.

‘Damn that devil!’ he flashed out; and the next moment sank on to his seat in an uncontrollable fit of laughter at the swiftness and skill of the whole affair.

Suráj stared at him blankly uncomprehending. ‘What are you laughing for—like a lunatic?’

Sinclair checked his unseemly mirth.

‘It’s the slickest thing I’ve ever seen.’

‘Oh, it’s awfully funny for you.’ Suráj was still fuming. ‘Why the devil did you make me look out of that blasted window—only to lose my best puggari?’

And Sinclair, with quick compunction, laid a hand on his knee. ‘Sorry, old man. It was my fault. Never mind. In Peshawar city, you’ll see lungis that will make your mouth water. You shall pick a beauty, as my gift, before we pay our respects to Aruna.’

Suráj impulsively caught at his hand.

‘By Indra, you are the best fellow, Roy, in such friendly ways that I have ever met. Perhaps it is—the English blood?’

‘Perhaps it is,’ Sinclair agreed more lightly than he felt. ‘Anyhow, you deserve a new one.—Now then, let’s rummage for fresh puggaris and haul out the food. We’ll be roaring into Peshawar station just before nine.’

They were roaring across the great bridge now—pomper, pomper; the train and the river and the echoing nullah blended into a weird orchestration of deafening sound.

Two hours later they clanked and jolted to a standstill in Peshawar station, where a crowd gushed out, but none scrambled in. For here was journey’s end as regards the Frontier Mail; though a venturesome railway line—a triumph of engineering—ran on, through the Khyber, to the back gate of Afghanistan. Here was the fierce masculine region that Gandhi talked naively of taming through the gospel of the spinning-wheel. It would take more than the gift of a thousand spinning-wheels, thought Sinclair, to evolve a flock of sheep from these wolves of the Abazai and Zakka Khel.

In Peshawar station they and their kind—back from filling their pockets in great cities—jostled one another and exchanged rough jests: large, eagle-faced men in loose baggy trousers, peaked caps and untidy turbans. Suráj looked a dandy beside them. He also looked a gentleman.

A pitched battle of porters and coolies, bearers and Sahibs shouting orders, raged round the luggage-van; and Sinclair, resigned to delay, looked about him, taking mental notes. Less variety up here; the soldier type prevailed; a type that owed its quality to its very limitations. There stood one: a square, blunt-featured man in a cloth cap, shouting no orders, looking about him with an air of being above the battle.

‘A tank sort of man,’ Sinclair summed him up. ‘He’d drive straight over every obstacle. Where on earth have I seen him before?’

And while he was still wondering, he charged blindly into an Englishwoman, walking so briskly that the impact unsteadied her.

His dismayed, ‘My fault. I beg your pardon’—in a cultured English voice—was out before he remembered his Indian dress; and the mental jerk gave him his clue.

‘Lynch, of course—that photograph,’ he thought—and found himself apologising to Lynch’s wife.

She was laughing and holding out her hand.

‘You were all astray. You nearly knocked me down! What was the attraction?’

‘Your husband’s profile,’ he said.

And she laughed again.

‘John——? I must tell him!’ She looked him up and down. ‘Are you Prithvi Raj up here too?’

‘Not at Government House. Though it wouldn’t be the first time Thea and Vincent have seen me so.’

‘We two are meeting you two there at lunch tomorrow.’

‘Good.’

She shook hands warmly with Suráj, but went on talking to Roy.

‘We’ve come to meet a friend—a police officer from Cawnpore. Wasn’t it hideous? Did it rouse much bad feeling in Lahore?’

‘Well—yes. They’re on the qui vive. It’s a changed place. Precautions everywhere——’

‘And what use are they?’ We heard of bombs discovered in the Club compound——’

‘Hullo, here you are!’

The owner of the profile had come up unnoticed, and his hand closed on his wife’s arm.

‘I was waiting—— Who are your Indian friends?’

His strange pale eyes took stock of the two Rajputs, one of whom talked like an Englishman.

‘This one,’ said Grace, indicating Sinclair, ‘is my Delhi and Palwahn friend—Sir Roy Sinclair. And this’—with a gracious gesture—‘is my Udaipur friend, Suráj Mul.’

Lynch bowed gravely to each in turn.

To Sinclair he said, ‘I’ve heard from my wife of the valuable help you gave her.’

His tone was polite rather than cordial; and Sinclair had a sense of jarring contact with the man behind those unrevealing eyes.

He thought, ‘I’ve dished myself—appearing like this.’ But he said with formal courtesy, ‘I was very glad to be of use.’

Lynch, with friendlier interest, was looking at Suráj: but he addressed his wife.

‘I heard you talking of Lahore,’ he said. ‘That Club affair isn’t public news, you know. Not advisable to talk of it in a crowded station. Lots of these fellows know English.’

She had a light flash of impatience.

‘Don’t be aggressively official, John. They’re all far too busy shouting about their own affairs to heed my unofficial remarks!’

He smiled at her indulgently; and quite another man looked out of his eyes. Again he took her by the arm.

‘No time for talk, anyhow. M’Ewan’s not down this end. Come on, or we’ll miss him.’

He nodded to the two men, but his remark was for Sinclair.

‘Things are pretty lively up here—I don’t mean in the social sense. You’ll hear all that from the Chief. See you to-morrow.’

Grace waved a hand, and they vanished in the crowd.

The brief contact left Sinclair feeling prickly, for no definite reason.

‘Certainly a four-square man,’ he thought, ‘corners well developed. Will he improve on acquaintance—or the reverse?’

It had not been a propitious encounter: and he had wanted so much to like the man, to be liked by him. Well—he might have better luck, in his English avatar, to-morrow.

Chapter 11

Everybody has a nature; and I have mine—bedam to it!
—St John Ervine

They met again next day, correct and polite, in the lofty drawing-room of Government House; Sinclair translated from a travel-weary Rajput into a well-bred Englishman, very much at home with his old friends, Vincent and Thea Leigh. Though the sun flamed outside, electric fans and lowered ‘chicks’ kept the room moderately cool. Vases full of roses, sweet-peas and mignonette brought clean whiffs of England.

Twelve years had wrought little change in Thea—sister of Lance and saviour of a driven Aruna: a few fine lines where none had been, a few grey threads in her mass of squirrel-brown hair that had never been sheared to suit the fashion. No reminder of Lance in the short straight nose and fine wide brow; only, at moments, his spirit seemed to live again in her hazel-grey eyes. Vincent, remote and thoughtful, his dark hair definitely grey, looked nearer his fifty-two years. Responsibility, hard work and the Indian climate take heavy toll of the man who puts in his twelve or fifteen hours a day, with only an occasional respite from work and India.

They were lucky, in this land of separation, to have a son and daughter with them, for the time being: Theo, the eldest, Political Officer out at Malakand, married to his career; Mary—a grave, good-looking, young woman—married to Vincent’s Political Assistant, Captain Arden. There was also his Private Secretary, Captain Creagh, carrot-headed and plain, with easy Irish manners and a gift for languages.

That was the household. And the guests were five only: Aruna, the Lynches, himself and Suráj very smart in his ochre-yellow coat and the new turban, a coppery pink fringed with gold. Sinclair had been hurried off early in search of it. Then they had called on Aruna, in the small bungalow she shared with two Indian women, converted like herself to the Western gospel of work. She had a room of her own, very simply furnished; low chairs and table, a long low bookcase and her musical instruments, binar, sitar, sarangi and cottage piano. Walls, curtains and cushions were all yellow, a few shades paler than her amber draperies; the single colour very restful to eyes and mind.

And now here they were sitting at Thea’s luncheon table, two Indians among eight English men and women; a new experience for Suráj, who ate with an exciting sense of adventure, careless of caste-forbidden items that might lurk in food so cunningly disguised. Aruna, sitting next to him, could save him from errors in using his mixed array of glasses, knives and forks.

What a show they made of eating! How they all talked and laughed! Pressed by his hostess, he recklessly drank pale golden wine, called cider-cup, full of strange flavours—a drink fit for gods. Another golden wine, in a small glass, lit up his brain; and when that gracious Lady Leigh began to talk of his ballad, his epic, he responded with all his natural fluency and ease.

At the other end of the table, Sinclair was enjoying himself vastly, with Mary Arden on his left, Grace and Vincent on his right, capping each other over his exploit at Palwahn and his earlier adventure at Delhi. Now and then he was aware of Lynch leaning forward, listening to it all; for Thea was giving a good deal of attention to Suráj.

When the ladies departed, Lynch moved into Mary’s empty chair. Vincent had bidden Tony make way for Suráj; and the young attachés settled down, at the other end, to wine and cigars and the coming gymkhana.

Roy—fairly button-holed—thought, ‘Now the “strong man” will examine the hybrid specimen under his mental microscope.’

But the strong man’s first remark put him to shame.

‘I’ve heard so much of you, Sir Roy, that we’re not exactly strangers. Sorry I mistook you in the station. But it amounted to a compliment—eh? Ever tried it on before?’

‘Once—long ago,’ Sinclair admitted, ‘for a purpose.’

‘And you pulled it off? Living with them?’

‘I was known as an Englishman to my host and his family.’

‘Ah—that makes a difference. You see, I’ve done a good bit in that line myself—also for a purpose. I know what a tricky job it is trying to pass as an Indian among Indians.’

Then of course he began to talk of Bhagat Singh and Cawnpore, and the aftermath of police criticism.

And while he talked it was Sinclair who applied the mental microscope to an impressive specimen of his kind: a man who would remain continuously himself in all circumstances; the forehead broad and bumpy, the eyebrows like thick smudges above those vague pale eyes. Nothing vague, Sinclair guessed, about the brain behind them. He would know what he wanted and make for it unerringly—perhaps unscrupulously—even if it were to another’s hindrance. There was a robustness about him, mind and body, an air of authority, even in trivial things: the very opposite of Vincent, who was never authoritative; yet, wherever he was, the values of the whole company seemed to be doubled by his presence. Both were men of knowledge; Vincent wise, profound and unassuming; Lynch, an avowed materialist, self-poised, practical; one that would accept religion, as man’s necessity, and in practice ignore God, while possibly serving his ends better than the conscious Pharisee, How a man like that could blend with a woman like Grace was one of the many unfathomable mysteries of marriage.

And there was no mistaking the ‘inner attitude’ towards his own double strain that touched up his sensitive pride. This man would be aware of it always, would judge him always with that at the back of his mind. Not mere colour prejudice. He probably liked and understood Indians; but he would instinctively mistrust the mixed breed; a mistrust that Sinclair would resent from the depth of his soul.

No basis was here for friendship, for that profound good understanding, the best that life can offer. There could only be the curious fascination of antagonism, and the tribute of respect, more readily paid by genius to character than by character to genius. Not that he so expressed it. He merely felt that his own estimate of Lynch was likely to be fairer than the other’s estimate of him.

But, personalities apart, his knowledge and experience of India made him worth listening to. On the subject of police persecution and their orders to ‘go soft’ with Congress activities, he spoke with contained heat.

‘They’ve had to stand out against an aggressive campaign to break their morale; taunts on duty, social boycott—and you know what that means out here. “Peaceful” picketers—in Surát last month—using the mild persuasion of swords, lathis and arson. A handful of police, trying to protect harmless citizens, stoned and struck and violently abused. But they mustn’t hit back, for their lives. That they and the Army have remained loyal, in spite of everything, is a credit to both races. And now, more mud-slinging for them over Cawnpore—the direct result of that saintly duet at Delhi. Not the first time in history that a peace pact has led to war.’

Sinclair was silent a moment. But aware of the other’s gaze, he looked up and spoke his thought.

‘The British Raj in its might brought peace,’ he said. ‘In its decline, it is bringing a sword.’

‘And this is a picnic,’ said Lynch bluntly, ‘to what will happen if we remove our steadying hand. Congress has yet to realise the full significance of Cawnpore. My police friend from there says the Moslems have vowed vengeance on the Hindus; and they aren’t the sort who leave vengeance to Jehovah. I don’t blame them. I’m for Islam, hands down. It’s often the more aggressive but it’s a creed. Hinduism is a social disease—a tangle of magic and metaphysics——’ He checked his sweeping indictment, and said in a changed tone, ‘Am I being indiscreet, Sir Roy? Perhaps you favour Hinduism?’

It was simply spoken, but it was the kind of remark he would never be able to take simply from this particular man. And he said with a touch of formality: ‘I naturally have a strong feeling for Rajputs.’

‘Naturally—the aristocrats of India.’ Lynch righted himself and glanced sidelong at Suráj, deeply engaged with Sir Vincent Leigh. ‘Rabid—is he?’

‘Well, personally, he wouldn’t be keen to embrace a Moslem—unless it were to knife him.’

Lynch chuckled, and helped himself to a cigar.

‘Queer thing, religion. Out here, it’s the root of all evil. Creeds and sects stinging each other, like a swarm of angry wasps. And now there’s Communism—denying God, but using the religious impulse for its own ends.’

‘Is that going to count for much out here—d’you think?’ Sinclair ventured, and an odd light gleamed in those sea-green eyes.

‘Ask some of the rosy optimists here what I think? They say I’m Communist crazy. Well, I know more about that octopus—with tentacles all over India—than I’m likely to talk about at any luncheon table. There was Moscow money behind that Meerut case. They know it now. I’ve guessed it all along. I know a deal of rot is talked about it for political ends. But you’ll get no comfortable doctrine from me, Sir Roy.’

‘I want no comfortable doctrine,’ said Sinclair stoutly.

‘Then you may catch a few gleams of the uncomfortable truth. The “unchanging East” is a rumbling volcano. Literally anything may happen before our generation passes. Bengal’s ripe for a flare up. As for Gandhi——’ he snapped a very square finger and thumb.

‘Have you met him?’ Sinclair asked.

‘No. Don’t want to. Hope they never let him come up here—though it might teach him a thing or two. The man who talks of arming the tribes with spinning-wheels and creating the Kingdom of Heaven in politics, who says we’ve given nothing to India but sanitation and discipline (important items, both!), is obviously unfit to establish any kingdom on earth.’

Sinclair laughed. ‘Hard hitting!’

‘Straight from the horse’s mouth. I could hit harder.’

‘But there is a changed spirit in India, that we can’t fight or legislate.’

‘No. But we could utilise it, if either Government, here or at Home, had the sense to give her people a lift along the sound lines of their own village system. Instead, we ring the changes on iron hands and velvet gloves. We neither govern nor misgovern. We hang on like a lot of Micawbers, waiting for something to turn up——’ He encountered Sir Vincent’s eyes and chuckled softly. ‘Caught out in broadcasting heresy! The Chief thinks you’ll be safer with the ladies.’

As they stood up, he added casually, ‘I’ll be seeing you again soon. She’s asking you to dinner one evening. No party affair.’

‘Thanks. That’ll suit me to a T,’ said Sinclair, smiling at the pronoun and mentally summing up the man as they filed out of the room:—— ‘Work, with a capital; few friends and one woman. Or, more probably, many women—and one “She”!’ And he had never mentioned Desmond: their one point in common.

Not till the party was nearly over did the name crop up between them.

Sinclair and Grace were standing over by the long French window. She was telling him of Rāmanand and his Sunita, laughing over her station——‘indiscretion’ when Lynch loomed up and unobtrusively edged them apart. If the action half-annoyed Sinclair, the intruder’s first remark changed his train of thought.

‘Sir Vincent,’ he said, ‘was talking of young Lance Desmond in Chitral. She tells me’—indicating Grace with a glance—’you knew his uncle very well, that you’re keen to meet the nephew.’

And Sinclair said honestly, ‘There’s no one in India I’m keener to meet than that young man.’

‘He’s worth it,’ Lynch stated in his unemphatic voice. ‘India will know more about him some day. He’s made his mark in Chitral. They’ll remember him.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Come on, Grace. Palaver done set.’

His hand closed on her arm in a quietly possessive fashion; and as he led her off, she smiled at Sinclair over her shoulder; not self-consciously, as woman to man; simply telling him they would meet again at Aruna’s and finish the many things they had to say.

Her friendliness warmed his heart and dispelled his fanciful sense of her husband’s lurking antagonism. Was it mere distrust of ‘the tar-brush’? Or had Grace—over-anxious for them to like each other—spoken a shade too warmly, in advance, of him and his doings at Palwahn, instead of giving him the chance to make his own impression? He had wanted to make a good one, to feel in accord with her husband and the friend of young Lance. As it was, he felt doubtful of the first and still more doubtful of the second, in spite of a lurking admiration for the very qualities that made them unmixable as oil and water.

For himself, up here among extremely pukka Anglo-Indians, he must steel his sensitiveness against the slings and arrows of an incurable prejudice, not rooted in unreason, but harder to endure from some people than from others.

Chapter 12

To every man his own fanaticism—as long as he’s got one.
—Charles Morgan

Peshawar in April was definitely a sensation not to be missed: gardens and orchards and cornfields alive with the urge of that rushing season; as if earth, in her deep heart, already heard the whispered threat of June. Already the tide had turned. Blossoms were falling. The ripe corn was being reaped by whole families. Tall muscular Pathan women, wearing the dull blue of the Border, worked in the open with their men, yet were none the less watchfully guarded by the most jealous and passionate of all Eastern races.

Only the harsh and jagged hills, beyond Jamrud, remained unresponsive to spring fervours of mating and becoming. Their seeds were stones. Their fruit the chain of armour-plated forts that topped every ridge and crag. Northward towered the black outline of Mount Tartara; eastward, the Throne of Solomon—Takt-i-Suleiman. Below them tumbled naked peaks and ridges and ravines of lesser hills, whither the tribes would return, when the valley crops were garnered.

Their spring fervours mainly took the form of raiding cattle, looting bazaars and making things lively for the ‘army of occupation’ on Kajuri plain. British officers—wresting a joke from any turn of the wheel—christened this spring madness the ‘Frontier Silly Season’; a livelier season than usual this year, because the Afridis—having enjoyed their bold coup last summer—resented the ‘retort courteous’ of Indian troops encamped on their sacred plain.

Sinclair, who had served with those troops through the War, was glad to be in touch with them again; to confirm his belief that if ever this British-officered Indian Army were disintegrated, India would lose a corner-stone of more than defence. She would lose a unique form of comradeship between East and West that could never be builded again.

Already its British element looked like being taxed and ‘axed’ out of existence by cuts in pay and higher cost of living. Yet, undismayed, they carried on as if no such pleasing prospect threatened them and their kind. For Peshawar was enjoying a final fling of gaiety before the leave season released half the young men of the garrison, and more than half the wives, to seek sport or the same forms of pleasure elsewhere.

In the social round Sinclair took little active part. For the friendly world of Anglo-India lives a life of its own, talks a language of its own—personal, official, alphabetical—that almost amounts to a code. In that world Suráj, inevitably, was a complete outsider; and Sinclair, unobtrusively, stood by his Rajput friend.

It was good to discover that Thea and Vincent respected his point of view. Thea would even arrange informal parties with an eye to Suráj, her latest devotee. And it taxed her skill, at times, to find just the right people. For Peshawar was little concerned with the——‘better understanding’ cult, genuinely attempted at Delhi. Up here, East and West seemed completely, even dangerously, apart; though the actual distance was negligible between the swarming, unclean, mediaeval city on the ridge, and the clean, controlled, mechanised cantonment, set with barbed wire entanglements, its many gates guarded all day and closed all night.

In the city, Mohmands, Shinwaris and Afridis went armed—not for show. In cantonments—soldiers everywhere; day and night the ceaseless tramp of sentries, bugle and trumpet calls, jingling harness and the tramp of marching men; guns down the Commissioner Road—also not for show. Yet life and limb had probably been safer in the old open Peshawar, guarded by a mobile Frontier Force that now existed only in name.

Never, even in ’Fifty-seven, had it been attacked, at close range, as this barb-wired Cantonment had been attacked last August when a thousand Afridis—creeping down empty nullahs and hiding in orchards near the city—had fired night after night into that sacred stronghold of the British lion, who had responded by laying a formidable paw on their grazing grounds. Since then there had been trouble. And there would be more trouble now that the Red Shirts were heartened by the release of their leader-in-chief, Khan Abdul Ghaffer Khan, familiarly known in that land of initials as A.G.K. To the British Tommy he was briefly ‘The Gaffer’; to Sir Vincent Leigh a considerable thorn in the flesh.

Sinclair—as a former cavalry officer—admired unreservedly the prevailing spirit of cantonments; the habit of living dangerously, the gaiety and ready humour; the women fussing over trifles yet cheerfully facing up to big demands; the genuine spirit of comradeship that sprang from entire dependence on each other for work or play or a helping hand at need. But as writer and semi-Rajput, he found more to interest and intrigue his mind within the high ochre-tinted walls of the city.

Thither one evening he again took Suráj, in pursuit of more education; and with some difficulty, they made their way through squalid, swarming streets, playgrounds of endless children, dirty and diseased beyond belief; everywhere the stench from open drains used for every purpose; the hot smell from houses plastered with cow-dung, the all-pervasive odour of onions and hing:⁵⁴ vultures for scavengers, and a blistering sun for disinfectant.

But if Peshawar had her repellent aspect, her peculiar charm prevailed in the brilliant orchestration of colour down wider thoroughfares; muslins, silks and carpets silver and brass-work; stalls of burnished wares in the Street of Coppersmiths, where the clang of metal on metal ceased not all day long; in the little open fronts along the Street of Story-tellers, where men sat sipping green tea, telling tales of Red tyranny and torture. Towards evening kite-flying contests, from streets and roof-tops, filled the sky with soaring dancing patches of colour. Then came the whirring and wheeling of a thousand pigeons; and, from towers above the main gateways, the long musical call to prayer.

Among the crowd that jostled and shouted, in this mart of Central Asia, were clerks and students, beggars and dancing boys. But the Pathan was lord of Peshawar, his City of a Thousand and one Sins. Here came Afridis, Shinwaris, Mohmands and Zakka Khels, crudely armed and adorned; men who accepted life, or challenged it; questioned it, never. No elephants among the tongas and ekkas and trotting bullocks; but there swung past a line of camels from Bokhara, great shaggy beasts in silver-studded trappings set with turquoise, necklaces of sky-blue beads and tinkling bells, Persian saddle-bags and high swaying loads. Nose to tail, nose to tail, they tinkled and padded through the dust; and between the humps of their leader sat a hardly less shaggy Pathan, in straggling turban, colourless shirt and green waistcoat, gold-embroidered. Those terribly strong brown hands of his would murder a fellow-man with every refinement of cruelty for any of the three main causes of murder in the East—Zan, Zar, Zameen, lust, loot, land; nor would any lesser reasons come amiss.

To Sinclair, he seemed an embodiment of the city’s strange unbridled personality, that intractable camel driver, who salaamed to none but Allah, and spat when he had need without regard for those below him.

‘Dirty, ill-mannered Moslem,’ remarked Suráj, carefully avoiding the shaggy pair.

‘Yes, he’s that all right,’ agreed Sinclair, ‘but he has his own rough rules of courtesy. And you must respect him, Bhai-ji. He shoots at sight.’

But even the stalwart tribesmen had tragic tales to tell of lost livelihoods in these changing days: lorries and cheap cars damaging the horse trade; and other trades ruined by the cruel Soviet grip on Central Asia.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Sinclair heard a good deal about that on the night they dined with Lynch, who had specialised, since the War, in trans-Border activities and Soviet doings in Central Asia. Begun as a hobby, it had become almost a second profession to which he devoted most of his spare time.

The dinner was no formal affair. Grace merely wanted Sinclair to have another talk with Lynch in his home surroundings; and Sinclair welcomed the chance to take stock of this oddly matched pair in a relation for which neither seemed fitted by nature. He could not yet see Grace as other than the free lance, the born worker of Udaipur, Delhi and Palwahn; nor Lynch, the ‘tank sort of man,’ as one of any intimately personal human bond.

Yet there they were installed at either end of their own dinner-table, well worth watching and talking to. The only other guests were Aruna and a big, cheerful Irish woman, Miss O’Moore, sister of the station Padre, who was over at Kohat. Sinclair liked her rough, irregular features, china-blue eyes, and short reddish hair, brushed back from a dead white forehead. Over a bright blue frock, she wore a mandarin coat of many colours; an effective foil to Aruna’s unrelieved yellow and Grace’s shimmering gown of Punjabi shot silk, all azure, fire and copper. She was heart and soul in the Mahila Samiti work; and she kept the table lively with her racy talk. After dinner, she sang Irish ballads, to her own accompaniment on Grace’s cottage piano. Then Aruna was persuaded to sing; and Lynch, with a significant look, drew Sinclair away into his study.

‘Once they begin on that,’ he said, pulling back a heavy Bokhara curtain, ‘I fade out. Don’t know why Grace started the woman off. A good sort—away from the piano.’

And neither of them guessed that Grace had her own designs.

‘You don’t like music?’ Sinclair asked.

‘No, I don’t,’ Lynch stated unashamed. ‘To me it’s sound without sense. And here’s Grace saddled with this musical Aruna, and my chief pal, Desmond, saddled with a wife who’s music mad; also a good sort—away from her damned violin. Hope I’m not depriving you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Sinclair, who preferred, on the whole, to hear his host talk of the Border—and beyond. For this strong man was not of the silent order; though no doubt he could be secret as an oyster in respect of professional or personal affairs.

It was a plain masculine room; not the usual den smelling of leather and tobacco, where a man loafs and smokes and wades religiously through the daily paper; but a room designed for work and its owner’s few engrossing side interests—coins, maps, ethnology. The tall bookcase was stocked with bulky volumes on India, crime and coins, shabby police manuals, books of reference and a few detective stories. Not an ornament, not a picture, except the full-length photograph of Grace on the writing-table, presiding over an ordered array of papers and wire trays. But the carpet was pure old Persian, mellowed with age. The saddle-bags were genuine Bokhara, the regal hangings covetable to a degree. Sinclair’s gaze lingered on them, and Lynch passed a hand down the curtain he had pulled aside, a slow movement like a caress.

‘Yes,’ he said, as if answering the other’s thought, ‘these and the rest of my loot from Bokhara are literally treasures beyond seeking and beyond price. The chances are their like will never be made again.’

With a gesture he consigned Sinclair to the biggest arm-chair, while he remained standing.

‘Of course it’s all those damned Bolsheviks. Wholesale massacre of craftsmen, who had inherited the tradition of their fine crafts for centuries. I tell you, Sir Roy, in less than three years thirty big Peshawari merchants, with interests in Bokhara, were clean ruined. No farcical trade agreement could save their goods or money. They were lucky to get off alive. There’s a carpet-seller now, in Kabul bazaar, who was once Amir of Bokhara. Sic transit——’

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Sinclair, ‘he enjoys life better in that humble capacity.’

‘Perhaps he does. Perhaps he wasn’t an angelic specimen. But still——’ He flung his guest a questioning look—’ D’you favour levelling?’

‘No. I believe in aristocracy.’

Lynch nodded. ‘ It’s underdog now. But who knows? The wheel may turn. Democracy’s on the down grade. And they’re thrusting it on aristocratic India. I can’t see it working out here—on our lines. They talk Ireland and think Ireland, on both sides, though there’s no real parallel. Congress is in close touch. And our friend A.G.K. gets flattering, sympathetic screeds from Americans.’

‘What the devil do they know about the Border?’ Sinclair demanded, and Lynch laughed.

‘Ask ’em yourself! There are plenty knocking round. Wonder if any of ‘em have given a serious thought to the mighty problem we’re tackling? Mind you, I like plenty of them individually; but we don’t want India bitten with their trade microbe. Bad enough to have their films. It’s Hollywood that has knocked the bottom out of the white man’s reputation—and the woman’s. A perfectly decent Moslem asked me the other day, “Is there really a chaste woman in the West?” I saw red. But it wasn’t his fault. So I merely handed him the required information—and cursed America. You ask any thinking Indian why we’ve lost face since the War; and you’ll get one answer from all—Hollywood.’

He paused; and Sinclair could feel those queer eyes searching his face.

‘Do you propose to prowl round the Border as a Rajput?’

It was casually asked, but he felt as a sensitive plant might feel when brushed by a careless hand.

‘No,’ he said briefly, ‘I think not.’

‘You’re wise. Might be a dangerous game up here.’ Another pause. ‘ It’s a book you’re after, she tells me.’

‘Is that a fatal admission?’

Lynch looked amused.

‘To be brutally frank, I should say—For God’s sake don’t write another book about India.’

‘Precisely my own feeling!’ said Sinclair, taking the wind out of his sails, ‘especially since I came out here. These newspaper men are all on to it. Surface impressions served hot and hot. Mostly politics. And they’re not my line.’

‘We all hate ’em out here; but can’t escape them, any more than the East can escape the corrosive acids of the West, eating into its rotten theocracy. Of course’—he hesitated—‘you have special qualifications——’

‘Yes.’ On that head Sinclair was not to be drawn out.

‘And I——’ Lynch added, undeterred, ‘have a fair amount of special knowledge. It’s at your service.’

‘Thanks very much.’

This time his brevity sprang from sheer surprise, sheer inability to respond. Lynch was the last man to whom he could talk freely of his book.

But Lynch, himself inexpressive, seemed unaware of brevity or reluctance. For all his subtlety of mind, he could be obtuse on occasion; and undeviatingly he pursued his theme.

‘You’re not taking the line, I hope, that we’ve lost India, or are likely to do so—yet awhile?’

Sinclair hesitated. ‘At present,’ he said, ‘I’m taking the line that India has got to find herself, either in our way or her way—preferably her own.’

‘Quite.’ Lynch considered that cautious general statement, puffing at his pipe.

Sinclair said no more. He had no wish to say any more.

But Lynch, with practised skill, could lead a man on to talk of the things he wanted to hear; and he wanted more than a general statement from this man who had managed to impress Grace, and who was clearly a friend of Sir Vincent Leigh.

For the next half-hour, Sinclair was subjected to an inner process of which he was scarcely aware: a comment here, a casual question there; his inner mind relentlessly drawn out, analysed, scrutinised. And so mysterious is the power of personality that, even while he resisted that subtle pressure, he found himself talking to this comparative stranger on lines that he would have deemed impossible an hour ago.

In a sense it was a relief when Grace pulled aside the regal curtain and stood looking from one to the other—a question in her eyes.

‘Time you two showed up again,’ she said.

‘Music hogya?’ asked Lynch with a guilty grin. ‘Why did you start it? You knew I’d bolt.’

‘That was why!’ She glanced at Roy, drawing him into it. ‘I knew you’d rather have a talk with Roy in your den. And I knew they’d enjoy making melody.’

‘Clever woman.’ He said it gravely. His eyes dwelt upon her as they had done in the station. Then he turned to his guest. ‘Come on, Sinclair. Back to society. Hukm hai.’

Over the final drinks, plans were made for Grace and Aruna to show Sinclair something of their work in a village twenty miles out; and at parting he offered to give Aruna a lift home.

It was Suráj who handed her out on arrival, with a deferential air that set Sinclair wondering how much was simple Rajput courtesy, how much a sincere homage of the heart. Either way, it would do him good to associate with a woman who commanded his respect, and whom he could not use for his pleasure.

But whether or no any state of life was ‘good’ for him never occurred to Suráj. He only knew that here—in spite of checked impulses—he was happy. There were horses to ride; chances of polo practice with Roy and Creagh and two young Rajputs from Jodhpur, subalterns in a Cavalry regiment. There was the cinema and occasionally the city. Better than all, there was Aruna, friendly, unpossessable, ardently desired. Spoilt all his life, given most things he coveted on demand, he was a stranger to these new pangs of a craving unfulfilled. Incapable of seeing value in the discipline they involved, the leaven was at work in him none the less.

Meantime he enjoyed to the full his Baisakhi festival of the Hindu New Year—more appropriate in mid-April than in the zero hour of January. Creagh had been invited by one of his Sikh officers to be present at the early morning ceremony in their temple. With him went Suráj and Sinclair and Lady Leigh. Outside the temple they were greeted by other Indian officers, Punjabis, Mussulmans, Dogras and Pathans. All removed their shoes; and within the dusky shrine they sat together; men of four creeds honouring the spirit behind the observance; even fanatical Pathans admitted into the sanctuary of their sworn foes the Sikhs, because they were fellow soldiers in one regiment.

Sinclair saw that unforced community of worship as more than a tribute to the unifying effect of British rule; as a seed of the spirit that might grow into a tree. Suráj, the exclusive Sisodia—impressed by the presence of his friend and Lady Leigh—wrought his confused sensations into a poem, the first that he had ever felt constrained to keep hidden in his heart.

These inner stirrings were half revealed in surface changes, very welcome to Sinclair, whatever the cause. Here the city at night was——‘out of bounds’; and if Suráj ever went to the bazaar, he managed it strictly under the rose. There were no signs of opium indulgence; and he was kept happily occupied in coaching Aruna’s English and Urdu recital of his ballad; very punctilious in never going to her house alone. So on the whole, Sinclair felt easier in his mind about him.’

For himself, Tara’s letters revived the ache of spring in his blood, the longing for sight and touch of her that no pen-magic could still. She wrote of early leaf buds yellow gleams of crocuses, heavenly blue of chionodoxia starring the brown earth under bare azalea bushes a delicate discord lovelier than all the over-blown glories of high summer. Alone in his strip of verandah, at the end of a glowing day, a wandering thought would carry him back to his cool green garden; birds nesting and calling; voices of children—clear English voices, not the shrill nasal tones of the East; himself and Tara together at the end of a so-different day. On that thought he dared not dwell; for, under her resolute cheerfulness, he could feel the answering ache, which intensified his own beyond bearing. Yet bear it he must: and things present made constant demands on his attention, his interest, his incessantly active brain.

On the day assigned, he drove out with Grace and Aruna to the village of Bundiani, some twenty-five miles from Peshawar, leaving Suráj to play tennis with his Indian subaltern friends. Aruna or no, he was not interested in schools.

In a small two-roomed house, decently built, Aruna’s seedling effort flourished in the quaint fashion of village India. There was the teacher, a mild young woman, who earned sixpence a month; there were the children, whose parents paid in halfpennies, squatting on their mats—boys one side, girls the other—listening to her talk with intent brown eyes and eager faces; singing, in thin, shrill voices, while she clapped to mark the time. Aruna’s pride and delight in them, and their love for her, seemed proof that—in spite of early passion and pain—she had not missed her true vocation. And Sinclair seeing her thus, felt his affection enriched by a glow of admiration for the woman she now was, the finer woman she might live to be.

Returning by a longer round, to see more of the country, he reached Government House just in time to change for dinner. But first he looked in on Suráj. Opening the door hastily, he received a shock that recalled the evening in Delhi at Krishna Lal’s.

For there sat Suráj, incongruously huddled in his civilised arm-chair; shirt open, puggari discarded, his small hands clenched as if in anger or pain, the fatal dazed look of opium in his eyes.

At sight of him Sinclair’s temper flamed. That he should so disgrace himself in Sir Vincent’s house, should go back on his given word.

‘What the devil does this mean?’ he asked sharply, with small hope of rousing the stupefied figure in the chair.

But Suráj—not so steeped in opium as he looked—sat upright and struck at the empty air.

‘Don’t you start cursing me,’ he said in a shaken voice. ‘I have had a bad knock. Just after you left came a wire—from Udaipur . . . my wife. She has died suddenly. I must go back at once, for funeral ceremonies . . .’ His voice broke, and he struck the chair with his fist. ‘Oh, it is damn—damnation! All those weeks you kept me wandering, kicking my heels. Now at last we get here—and they snatch me away.’

Checked and pained, Sinclair stood motionless, realising that his friend’s grief and rage had small concern with the loss of his wife. Then he laid a hand on the bowed shoulder. For Suráj had covered his face. The emotional East thinks no shame of tears; and the relief of them cleared his brain.

‘Suráj, old man, I’m terribly sorry.’ He could only proffer the futile formula that can annul no stroke of fate. ‘But the opium won’t mend matters. It only unmakes your manhood.’

Suráj looked up with drowned eyes and distorted mouth.

‘I took a stiff dose to help me forget. Sent word I couldn’t play tennis because of private calamity.’

The quaint phrase moved Sinclair to a smile.

‘Did you wire,’ he asked, ‘to Udaipur?’

‘No.’

His blank tone suggested that he had not thought of it even.

‘Then I must send an “urgent” that you’re leaving to-morrow.’ He glanced at his wrist. ‘Good Lord nearly dinner-time. And you in this state.’

‘Don’t trouble. No dinner for me. Say to them what is proper. I have bad news.’

He had pulled himself together; stifled, for the moment, his vain rebellion against those unseen Powers that smite and spare not. He was a man again.

‘Go now, Roy. Till to-morrow let me sleep—forget——’

And as Sinclair went out he was shaken by the awful sense of life’s insecurity that springs from sudden disaster, the staggering knowledge that at any hour the lightning stroke may fall or the ground open under one’s feet. Suppose the wire had been for him—Tara—Lilāmani—Nevil?

Not daring to look that way, he carefully held his mind on Suráj, who had, after all, only suffered an unwelcome recall at a distracting moment. When rage and rebellion died down, knowledge of his freedom would creep in to cheer him. But would he return? And if so, when . . .?

Chapter 13

So let him journey through his earthly day:
’Mid hustling spirits go his self-found way;
Find torture, bliss, at every forward stride:
He every moment, still unsatisfied.
—Goethe

Evening after evening, Sinclair sat at work in a long chair in his private strip of verandah, that could not now be used till the full glare of day was past. A succession of storms had sent the thermometer down with a run; but it was creeping up again relentlessly. The dry air quivered with heat. If a door was opened, it surged in like the breath from an oven; and as he sat writing, the paper curled under his hands, perspiration trickled and fell on it like tears from his protesting body.

All through the day doves kooroo-kooed in amorous rapture, the coppersmith hit the same note with maddening persistence; and, in the blazing desolation of the sky, solitary kites hung on quivering wings, keening, keening, as though they were lost souls banished from heaven, not birds of prey taking a practical interest in earth. Along the verandah grey squirrels chased each other with thin cries. In the garden the magnolia on the lawn drenched the air with sweetness; and hoopoes stepped sedately, lifting their crests, uttering their soft low note.

Morning rides must be earlier than ever to catch the brief exquisite freshness—gone before the sun was an hour high. And at night he would drag his bed out on to the verandah, to catch the wandering breeze from nowhere, that stirred in the small hours and charmed him to sleep.

There were times when he missed Suráj, who had written twice, saying little, except there was no prospect of return at present. Already his mind reached forward to the desired encounter with that young Lance Desmond whose photograph gave him a queer pang, and made twelve years seem like yesterday.

But that was weeks away. For the present he was absorbed in his advancing novel that more powerfully intrigued him, since he perceived how instinctively he was using his small group of characters to throw light on the various mind of India, thus linking the lesser work with the larger design.

When life receded, and imagination lit up his brain, he surrendered to the spell of words; flung down and flung away; taut phrases chiselled and chiselled again, as a lapidary cuts stone. The heat that tired his body quickened his brain. And the endurance of that brief discomfort increased his respect for the men who were facing another three or four months of the fiery furnace that would be seven times heated in June and July.

Throughout the whole flaming land the yearly exodus had begun. On the 15th, the leave season emptied Peshawar of half its young men. And on the 16th, all Bombay assembled in the stately Gateway of India to welcome the new Viceroy: a glittering sea, leagues of red cloth, an impromptu aerial escort from the Flying Club, and massed bands crashing out the National Anthem, as he and his Vicereine stepped ashore. If the Sun of Empire were setting, its glory was not yet dimmed.

But beneath the ‘tumult and the shouting’ lurked an unspoken wonder—What now? For progressive India was undeniably losing a friend, a man of rare simplicity, sympathy and integrity; fallible in judgment, but untiring in service; such an one as India might never see in high office again.

‘Exit the idealist; enter the realist,’ had been Sir Vincent’s comment at breakfast that morning. And the idealist—as often happens—had left the realist a hard row to hoe: a Round Table Conference in the air, an over-exalted Gandhi, a Congress in whom lenience had bred licence, and the lengthening shadow of Cawnpore. What the change might bode for India hung only in part on the newcomer’s personality and convictions. The lines were cast, the issues confused. India was no clean slate on which one exalted man could write what he chose. He could only hasten or delay the land’s eventual destiny.

Peshawar, on the whole, welcomed a Viceroy who was not likely to overlook the Moslems or carry on government by conversations. For the Border needed a realist to cope with a race of freebooters, who would take even the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. And the idealist had proved—in Lynch’s dry phrase—‘a very expensive man to educate.’

Two talks with Lynch, since the dinner, had confirmed Sinclair’s impression that they could meet only as minds, not as men. It was partly temperament, partly some inner obstruction; either his own Indian blood, or the Indian woman basis of his friendship with Grace. But, failings and all, he was a man to be admired—from a respectful distance. He was still rumbling over Cawnpore: the inevitable official enquiry, evidence of secret agents fomenting trouble, the District Magistrate censured for delaying to take strong measures.

‘Censure, either way, for the pampered British official of modern India,’ he raged as the enquiry wended its interminable way.

If Vincent Leigh spoke less strongly, he was at one, on that score, with his Police Chief, whom he, too, admired—from a respectful distance.

‘I fancy Lynch aims at splendid isolation—and achieves it!’ he said with his expressive twitch of one eyebrow. ‘You should have heard him inveigh against marriage all these years. “Work and whisky” Were good enough for him. Thea says he and Grace are like two fine soloists, who have agreed to collaborate, each playing their own part superbly; but she doubts if they’ll ever achieve a duet. Grace might admit it. Lynch wouldn’t understand what she was driving at.’

And Sinclair had mentally used Thea’s simile as a tribute to her own marital duet between natures almost as diverse. But Thea had had the twofold discipline—in spirit and conduct—of the musician and the soldier’s daughter. Grace—apart from inner discipline—had been practically a law to herself. And Lynch, by nature and habit, was zubberdust.⁵⁵ Hard to tell whether, at a crisis, love of her or the habit of command would prevail.

Not least among his own pleasures, during these peaceful days, was his deepening friendship with Thea and Vincent, whose outlook and character recalled Bápu in ripe middle age. By temperament and experience, he understood—as few could do—Sinclair’s need to sink himself in India, to see with her eyes and hear with her ears. The same necessity had impelled his own brief breakaway from the beaten track. And now, for the first time, he spoke to Roy of a subaltern out of love with Army life, whose unorthodox adventure, on a Himalayan pilgrimage, had so nearly tempted him to turn his back on the West, that only his undeclared love for Thea, and the wise counsel of his Hindu companion, had saved that other Vincent from himself.

‘But the other Vincent,’ he added, with his slow grave smile, ‘never dies. He is always liable to become a nuisance on occasion! One can only keep him under lock and key—You know.’

‘Yes,’ said Sinclair, ‘I know.’ And by that mutual admission each gave the other the freedom of his inner city. ‘The Hindus say,’ he added,——‘that there is a Sannyasi hidden in every man’s heart. I wonder——? I can’t see one hidden in Lynch.’

‘Nor I. Yet he, too, has the wander-craving—for a practical purpose, being Lynch. It “gets” him, though, more powerfully than he’d ever admit.’

After that, it was an easy matter for Sinclair to speak freely of his ambitious book; a surprise to discover that for years Vincent himself had been working at a comprehensive treatise on the tribes and Border problems. He was saturated in the history and character of these fierce, ungoverned Moslems, who lived mainly by their passionate loves and hates and feuds. The local Khans and Maliks, who sat for hours in his dufter, called him ‘The Wise One’; and prayed for an extra two years of his just firm hand on the Frontier.

Very often, now, he and Sinclair sat in his study talking till all hours; and Thea rejoiced that it was so. Too seldom her Vincent found a fellow-man to whom he could or would unlock his wise and wary mind. He spoke of the Red Shirts with far less asperity than Lynch of the high hand.

‘Like all Indian movements,’ he said, ‘it’s religious at the core, though it has taken on a political colour. The leaders firmly believe that Islam will never flourish till the English in India are annihilated.’

‘A tall order!’ smiled Sinclair.

‘India doesn’t boggle at tall orders. There’s Moscow behind: possibly Kabul. The ‘Youth League’ is frankly Communist. But we’ll be fools if we treat the Red Shirt trouble as a mere stirring of political unrest. What’s happening up here is more significant than all the London or Delhi conversations. In Peshawar and in Kabul, two autocracies—the Sahib and the Amir—are making their last stand for individual rule; Kabul keeping a sharp eye on our dangerous experiment of Easternised democracy. And between them the Red Shirts, hostile and fanatical, are dreaming of a northern Moslem block, to include Kashmir. They’re poor and hungry; and they’ve been bitten with new ideas. Twenty years on, they may count for more than they—or ourselves—would be likely to believe. Put that in your pipe an, smoke it, Roy. And I’m not going to grant you a personal interview with A.G.K.!’

‘Don’t want one, thanks very much,’ Sinclair retorted honestly, though his interest had been awakened in a new direction.

At present he was taking a holiday from Indian intercourse, enjoying the more varied and vigorous mental atmosphere of his own people. But he had felt constrained to visit the Islamia College. He had sampled a few of Vincent’s local Khans, and relished their robust realism, their rough humour, that made them more comradely with Englishmen than most Asiatics, except the stocky little Gurkhas, who would have none but British officers in their regiments, by contract with Nepal. And he had been persuaded by Vincent to call on the District Judge, a thoughtful, melancholy Brahmin, who had read This India and wished to meet the——‘distinguished author.’ There were moments when Sinclair wished he could hide the distinguished author under a bushel.

But, to please Vincent, he went; and was solemnly entertained with strong tea, chocolate biscuits and macaroons. They talked politics inevitably—‘after compliments.’ The Judge, zealous for fuller responsibility, praised Congress for past good work, but deplored its recent tactics as obstructive and intolerant, more hindrance than help towards the budding Federal idea. With likeable honesty he regretted that his country and people must seem, to efficient-minded Englishmen, so disunited, so difficult to help.

‘Frankly, sir, is it surprising,’ he asked, with a turn of his languid hands, ‘that we Indians sometimes feel smothered in a cloud of black despair? We see Government—an immovable mountain; the Civil Service partly Indianised, but stronger than ever in its system, after ten years of reforms. We see Congress caring little for real social improvement. More exciting to lie down in front of trams or shout ‘boycott British,’ than to wash up dispensary bottles or teach in school. Many of us know our own limits and faults, our incapacity for just administration. We see our best men not joining the Services. Our best brains keeping away from politics. And without her best men, how can India go forward?’

It was a cry from the depths; and it saddened Sinclair, who saw too clearly how slender were the chances of peaceful progress through the jungle of difficulties that loomed ahead. There was work here for the triune functions of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma⁵⁶ to destroy the bad, to preserve the good, to create the greater good. But few Western minds understood the mystery of that Eastern trinity; fewer still could find a hopeful word for honest, bewildered Indians ‘smothered in a cloud of black despair.’

After that, it was pure joy to spend an hour with Aruna in her restful yellow room. On the primrose walls hung only one picture—a dreamlike water-colour of the Island Palace bathed in the golden light of early evening. On the wide mantel-board a bowl of yellow roses and one photograph—his own mother: the long low shelves were filled with books. There were soft chairs, iced coffee and a plate of special metai such as his mother used to make for him in the holidays.

He had seen more of Aruna since Suráj left; and his brotherly attitude made him less punctilious about going there alone. Sometimes Grace would drop in, whether by arrangement or no, he had never troubled to ask. But on the whole he preferred having her to himself. And lately he had begun reading to her what was written of his novel. As a rule he could never read fresh work to anyone but Tara. He was too easily checked and disheartened by a critical atmosphere. But Aruna would not listen critically to any work of his. And she alone would know if he had truthfully rendered the hidden workings of an Indian woman’s mind and heart, a task as delicate as painting a butterfly’s wing. The identity of his two Indian women had been skilfully disguised. But if he had caught their inner semblance, she would know; and he would never distrust her praise, as he was apt to distrust that of facile admirers.

She listened, as a rule, lying back against her big yellow cushion, her eyes veiled. Only when some poetic thought or description deeply stirred her, she would draw a slow breath, or tighten her clasped hands. Not yet had she shown a sign of recognising herself in his Nalini; but at the third reading she had known his mother.

Without moving, she had said, as if thinking aloud, ‘Yes, yes, it is herself—finest flower of our Indian spirit, blended of fire and dew, scent of jasmin and sandalwood, moonlight on dark rivers and dance of fireflies; laughter of fife and love for her husband and children; yet hidden ache of tears for a long While, because of separation from her country and people.’

She gave him the full eloquence of her dark eyes.

‘All that loveliness you have shown in those few sentences. May I—please—hear them again, to remember them?’

And he had hardly known how to read them again, so delicate a bloom had her lovely phrases laid upon his own; phrases fresh-coined from her poetic Eastern mind, that could express itself unhampered by the critical mind of the West.

When he had finished his second reading he said, ‘I shall always think of your words, Aruna-bai, when I read that passage. I shall write them in the margin of my own copy.’

At that she pressed her hands together.

‘I did love her so much, that time in England,’ was all she said.——‘I’m glad I have made a small wreath of words for her, that you think not unworthy.’

And this evening, while she listened to the thoughts of Nalini after an impassioned scene with one who loved her, he saw her lips part and close again.

He thought, ‘She has seen herself.’ And his thought was answered by a quick-drawn breath.

‘But Roy—how could you know—all that? Can you read like a book the thoughts of our minds, even our hearts?’

There was fear in her tone; but he checked a natural impulse to lay his hand on hers. He could only say, ‘Are your thoughts afraid of the light?’

‘Not afraid—no. But many are—purdah; only to be shown if I choose.’

‘Whatever is purdah, my sister,’ he said with a significant change of tone, ‘you can be sure I would never try to see. Have I been too bold trying to create this inner portrait of you? Honestly’—you don’t mind? If you do——?’

He paused. Could he bring himself to cut her out of his picture? Should he have spoken sooner——?

Her low swift answer came to him like a reprieve.

‘Do I mind——? Can you ask that? I am proud.

But don’t talk any more, please. I only want to hear. Go on—go on.’

Elated by her tribute, he read on willingly enough; unaware of the commotion he wrought in the quiet, controlled woman, seeing herself so sensitively understood and portrayed by the man who was more than man to her dedicated Eastern heart.

Before leaving, he spoke of Suráj, for whom she was full of friendly concern, because his father and elder brothers could see no reason for his unnatural desire to leave home again as soon as he could be spared.

‘Will they be wanting another wife for him,’ she asked, ‘because there is no son?’

‘Suráj won’t want to be tied up again,’ said Roy bluntly. ‘He’d like a son, no doubt. But he’s over the traces, in this matter, like so many of your young men now.’

‘He would like—to choose——?’ she queried. ‘And now of course it is possible he might see a woman——’

She felt shy of that theme.

‘Yes—he might,’ Roy briefly agreed.

‘I hope a brother’s wife will be kind to those small girls. He doesn’t trouble much about them. I would like to steal them—make them women of the new India.’

‘Would you——? He’d gladly hand them over.’

She shook her head. ‘There are others. It is a family affair. I hope he will write more poetry. It’s not—like yours. But it’s fine and stirring; and he is so pleased that I love reciting his glories of Rajasthán. Such a new pleasure for me—through you and Grace—making a friend like this with a man of my own people. I meet them now in my work, of course. But never in such a personal friendly spirit. Do you think—will he come back?’

‘He’s death on coming back.’

She smiled. ‘That sounds like Suráj!’

‘Has he written to you?’

‘Yes—once.’

That, it seemed, was all she had to say; and if her thoughts were——‘purdah,’ he was not to intrude. He glanced at his watch. ‘Getting late,’ he said, and reluctantly rose to go.

‘Will you be leaving very soon now?’

‘In a week or ten days.’

‘Srinagar—those wonderful lakes?’

‘Yes—and beyond. I won’t be troubling polite society much, till young Desmond comes on the scene. I’ve a plan, fostered by Vincent, to take what he calls the River Road by doonga⁵⁷ to the higher reaches, as far as I can get above Khanbāl. Then Gulmarg. But even Desmond won’t be keeping me there very long. I’m a bird of passage. I see and hear—and pass on.

To what end, I may know—some day. I’m possessed by India. She’s my true heroine.’

‘Yes. I can see that. And among those eternal snows you will find her pure thought and spirit undefiled by grossness of cities or tyranny of priests. That spirit already shines in your book.—When will I hear some more?’

‘Come to Gulmarg,’ he urged. ‘A lot more will be written by then. Don’t you ever——?’

‘Not often. My work is hard to leave. But for that special pleasure, I might—perhaps——?’

‘Perhaps is half way there! As a boy it used to be one of my favourite words. It suggested such vast, vague possibilities. We’ll leave it at that, Aruna-bai.’

Chapter 14

As the dew is dried up by the sun, so are the sins of mankind dispersed by the glories of Himalchān.
—Hindu Saying

The second week in May found him far up the higher reaches of the River Road, far from the plague of houseboats, chattering servants and pedlars afloat; his primitive doonga paddled and punted and towed at the easy rate of two miles an hour. What he lacked in civilised comfort he gained in a luxury of peace and personal freedom.——‘Bounded in a nutshell,’ he was king of the awakening world, through which he sauntered in his flat-bottomed craft with matting roof and walls—mere curtains, chronically rolled up and tied with ragged lengths of string. Only when a storm threatened they must be fastened down; and he imprisoned in a stuffy twilight till the fury abated.

But in May the spring rains were virtually over, the Great Rains still far off. Only twice the curtains had been lowered. All day and all night he virtually lived in the landscape. And what a landscape! Hill, valley and woodland changing their aspect with every bend of the river, every passing cloud and passing hour; now framed in silver-grey poplar stems, now in broken ridges of rock and pine; crowned, as with a tiara, by the Shining Ones—pale gold and rose in the last of the sun, or silver and grey-purple under an outstretched wing of storm darkly sweeping the river.

Sinclair—lover of solitude, and of Nature as a living mysterious entity—had known no experience comparable to this majestic procession of solitary days and nights in the ‘Temple of the Undistracted Mind’; alone, yet never lonely, in the conscious sense of craving human companionship; enjoying to the full his passing freedom from men and cities and the tyranny of time.

Here on the murmuring river, overlooked by the dreaming snows—whose dream will only end when Brahm awakes—all sense of time went from him, all sense of conflict between East and West in him, between the natural man and the man his enlightened self desired to be. At present he was smoking little and drinking less, living mainly on the fruits of the earth; finding it easier, in these heights, to discipline the natural man, who responded creditably to the most illuminating of all experiences—abstinence willed, not enforced; so that he fell to wondering if the fasts of Hindu and Catholic saints aimed only at subjecting the body—or at quickening every sense?

Spoilt all his days by two beloved women, it was time he took a hand in the sterner process. For by the calendar he was incredibly nearing forty; and some signs of the adult he did begin to perceive in himself: a sharpened brain, a mind less flexible and intuitive but carrying more gear of all kinds. Yet he still retained his love of perilous adventure—the essence of youth.

A man could never age in spirit while he remained alive to the lure of sudden opportunity, deaf to the prudent dictates of worldly wisdom, yet profoundly aware of the end to which he was born.

For him this brief escape from problem-ridden India was a discovery of more than Kashmir. But, as a mere matter of enjoyment, it was a continual wonder to be travelling—in this raucous, speed-crazed, mechanised century—without haste or dust or noise, except the ripple of water under the prow; overhead the jubilation of larks; from some passing coppice the liquid note of a golden oriole; in the stern the meaningless babble of Kashmiri boatmen, or the long-drawn invocation to Allah, as they towed him round some difficult corner where the current ran like a mill-race.

Hari Lāl, the invaluable, also had his quarters in the stern. Beneath his surface friendliness with those simple boatmen lurked his Hindu scorn of ‘dirty Moslems’ with whom he could not share a morsel of food. All tiresome practical arrangements were in his hands. The Sahib paid: he did the rest—the supreme luxury of life and travel in the East.

For himself, steeped in the illusion of being beyond the world, beyond time, he had even left off the senseless formality of winding his watch. Having no fixed hours for meals, no traffic with clock-ridden men, the travelling sun sufficed for the first meal and the last, and the one that came in between, at the pleasure of the Moslem who cooked it, after a fashion. For bathing, there was the river. For exercise, he could usurp the punt pole, or walk on the bank more briskly than the boat could be paddled alongside. For work or fruitful meditation, he sat unmolested on the front deck, his few needs scattered round him, menaced by no threat of having to collect them hurriedly and stow them away.

So they passed, those unmeasured days and nights, marked off from each other only by the recurring rhythm of sunrise and sunset, ‘the woven shadow and shine of the high moon,’ the inscrutable mystery of star-patterned skies. And still the river narrowed, till it broke up into many streams interlacing fairy islands; running clear over sand and pebbles; dark, where rocks flung their shadows, pure cobalt where it caught a strip of unclouded sky. And beyond the grey-green of willows, the wall of Lombardy poplars, rose the sweeping curves and changing lights of the high snows, that seemed more nearly allied to heaven than to earth.

Here a green backwater curved into a natural harbour, just large enough for his doonga to be moored, to remain at his pleasure. And his pleasure, on that evening of arrival, seemed unbounded by any earthly horizon; time stretched both ways to infinity. The scene and the hour steeped him in the easeful peace of the poet alive to his mysterious kinship with earth.

But easeful peace was not the end for him, nor ever could be. This magical river, he learnt, had many sources; and for him the source of things had a magnetic attraction. By short, easy marches he could reach several famous springs, where the old Moghuls had built temples and pleasure grounds. But he wanted no temple, no intrusion of creed and sect upon the presence of these shining witnesses to the Truth that transcends all creeds. For him the steeper track towards the snows.

Taking only Hari Lāl and his fewest needs, he wandered on by devious ways of unimagined beauty, following the stream through high pasture-land sheeted with wild flowers, through the green gloom of forest-belts and out again into open glades, where the water leaped and dashed into jade-green pools; and over fallen tree-trunks broke waves of wild forget-me-nots, palest blue.

Higher still it lured him into the land of silver-birches—of all trees, most spiritual, most adventurous; and again higher; till at last, one evening, he encamped in the white silence of a region still completely under snow. Above and around him rose serene, inaccessible heights, birthplace of India’s sacred rivers, Home of the Gods. And in the sky beyond them a vast effulgence spread and spread, spilling over on to the transfigured earth; till the snows gave out a light of their own, that melted into colour, and lingered on long after the sun, that wrought those splendours, had gone from earth.

As the glow ebbed, and stars pricked out their eternal patterns in the deepening dusk, he remained sitting there near his tiny tent, not heeding the meal that Hari Lāl had silently set beside him. In this cathedral of God, even definite thought was resolved to a stilling of the soul within the mind, as the axle of a revolving wheel is still, though the wheel moves on.

For this hour, it seemed, he had been born. Towards it he had moved—destiny-led—all the days of his years. These very hills, the greatest on earth, had, in some sense been companions of his spirit since time began. It was as if he had seen them created, had lived with them always—in other lives—perhaps . . .? How else could he love them at sight, intimately know their unknown splendours? Even so a man seems to recognise the woman he suddenly, passionately loves?

And again time stretched infinitely both ways . . .

The deepening darkness held a Presence the more intimately felt because it was unseen. In that hour his freed spirit reached the outer rim of Something, apprehended, not yet fully known, that must remain for ever a secret between himself and this ‘glory of Himalchān.’

Here indeed was the spirit of India purged from the dross of creeds. Yet these were neither India nor not-India—these sublime, impersonal abodes of snow and cloud and a rushing mighty wind. Remote from man and his insect activities, they created a world of their own between earth and heaven. If a man could learn to breathe in that rarefied air, he might find it a hard matter to leave it for the levels of earth.

Here, if anywhere, he might catch the vision of a new star in the East to lighten the darkness of a world distraught. Born with a dream in his soul, he might yet, in all humility, receive from these white regions of silence gifts that they alone could give; that so he might fulfil the hope of his mother’s heart, the urge of that fine old man, to light ‘a little candle in the darkness. . . .’

Book Four — Double Gifts

Chapter 1

If the past were simply the past.—But it lives and energises still.
—F. O. Ward

The Residency garden at Gulmarg—where Sir Havelock and Lady Thorne spent the summer months—was at high-tide of its June blossoming: roses, blue spires of delphiniums, lawns and flowering shrubs that spoke feelingly of England, for all its Himalayan setting of blue pine, maple and fir.

Under the walnut-tree on the lawn, rugs and chairs and small tables had been set out for tea. But as yet only two of the chairs were occupied. In one of them—a canvas lounge—sat Sinclair, lately arrived from other heights that had seemed as if they would never let him go. Facing him sat young Lance Desmond, also lately arrived from the stark and terrible mountain region of Chitral, where, for two years, he had been isolated with half a dozen British officers as Political Agent in a mediaeval atmosphere of autocracy, murder and intrigue.

In the familiar polo kit, he bestrode a small chair, arms folded on the back of it. Beside him lay an Afghan greyhound, a curly mane round the strong shoulders, nose on his master’s boot. The devoted creature had not been with him in Chitral, Desmond explained, stooping to caress him, and giving Sinclair a profile view of his vanished friend. In the full face aspect there were differences that blurred the likeness; but the whole effect was Lance to the life: the same blend of lightness and strength, the same friendliness and unconsciousness of himself, or of the impression he made on others. Most of all he was Lance in the way he flung up his head and laughed—the laughter of a man who had challenged life and found it good. Something lived in him, looked out of his eyes, that was more than mere content. It was the hunger of a man who lives intensely in the present, yet is always looking ‘beyond the ranges’ for some greater good: a man born to achieve.

And here was no ‘inner attitude’ to chill his own friendly impulse towards one who was known to him in essence, though a stranger in the flesh.

Lance had just given him a vivid account of hawking in Chitral. Now he was speaking of Lynch, who would be passing through Gulmarg in July, for his yearly ‘prowl’ in the wilds of the Hindu Kush.

‘Lucky he’s married a woman who can stick it. She’d have to—or be left behind. I haven’t yet grasped him as one of a pair. You should have heard the way he rated me when I dared to take a wife. And all the time the secretive beggar had been loving Grace for eight years.’

‘Eight years?’ Sinclair echoed, incredulous.

‘Fact. And he the sworn bachelor all his days. But he met his match in Grace. She wouldn’t look at marriage with a man who crabbed religion. But the pull was too strong. So—there they, unbelievably, are: living proofs that we’re all pretty well capable of anything, as Eve says—speaking for herself; hoping the rest are no better!—Hark at her now——’

Strange fragments of music wandered out to them through two open doors of the glazed-in verandah: a queer tuneless wailing that broke off in mid-air.

‘Indian music,’ said Sinclair; and Lance nodded.

‘She and Lady Thorne have been studying it in my absence. She gets it all out of one reed-pipe and her fiddle. She can do almost anything with the blessed fiddle, except make it talk. She’s composing some sort of accompaniment for Aruna’s Achilgarh recitation.’

The wailing ceased; and he lifted his head.

‘Something’s checked her. Perhaps she’s remembered our existence!’

As he spoke, she appeared at the verandah door, with another woman, and they stood together, on the strip of gravel, talking: Eve Desmond thin and tall in her flowered summer gown; the shorter woman in tilted green hat and long coat.

Lance grimaced.

‘No luck. People for tea. They will drop in.’ He added charitably: ‘She’s a nice little woman, Mrs Hyder Ali; and I’m sorry for her. She got married at Home to a Moslem doctor. A clever chap and a good sort. But of course she’s up against it out here. She has a friend with her, married to a Brahmin lawyer in Lahore. Social Gulmarg won’t look at them. But Eve’s rather taken them up. So they come here now and then—at their own risk. The Doctor feels it badly. But, of course’—he seemed suddenly aware of thin ice—‘it is a bit unwise—don’t you think?’

The pause, the friendly smile, dispelled any personal awkwardness.

‘I do,’ Sinclair gravely agreed. ‘My father and mother made a success of it. But then—it was the other way about. And they were a very unusual pair.’

He could say no more. The women were coming towards them.

Mrs Hyder Ali Khan’s broadly modelled face had the vitality of the fair-skinned red-haired type.

Eve Desmond’s vitality was of another order—a well-spring from deep sources. She gave Sinclair an impression of high lights and dark shadows: the kinked eyebrows above grey-green eyes, now lit with intelligence and humour, now brooding as if she saw what was not there; the expressive mouth, the dusky brown hair, with one big natural wave, curled in the nape of her neck. There was an air of freshness and fineness about her that pleased his critical eye. The inner Eve, with her genius and her moods, would probably make things difficult for Lance, on and off, all through their married days and years. But Lance—if he knew the man—would hold his own; and would certainly prefer a life of ups and downs with Eve to peace and easy mastery with a smooth-running wifely machine. One might often want to shake her but one could forgive her a good deal. For she was wise as well as young, friendly and charming as well as combative. She had fundamental sense, streaked with the divine folly of genius.

‘Here’s a friend of mine, Mrs Hyder Ali—Sir Roy Sinclair,’ she casually introduced the unwise one, whose clear skin too readily betrayed the fact that she was still shy of her Indian name.

Sinclair’s too keen sympathy embarrassed him a trifle; but Lance, in the very manner of his uncle, talked nonsense to her as if he had known her for years; leaving Sinclair free to amuse himself with Eve.

They were already on the easy terms of those who recognise in each other the artist’s values and outlook on life, who share a lively speculative interest in the vagaries of their fellow-beings. And when he asked her, as a point of psychology, whether she really believed that ‘anyone was capable of almost anything,’ she shot a wicked look at her husband.

‘Has that Lance been giving me away—because he was capable of marrying me, when he knew he didn’t ought?’

‘No: because Grace married Lynch, when she knew she didn’t ought!’

Eve laughed. ‘Those two are a case in point. I know I’m capable of almost anything. And I rather suspect’—she twinkled at him—‘that you are too.’

‘I more than suspect!’ he confirmed her impertinent sally. ‘If I were to reveal my full capacity in that line you might never speak to me again.’

‘Don’t be too sure. If I happen to like any one, I’m a burr—not easily shocked or shaken off. Ask poor Lance! He never meant to marry——’ She looked quickly towards the house. Two more women had come out of the verandah.—‘Heavens! Here’s “Rose of all the World.” She doesn’t “meet” Mrs H.A.—Awkward.’

Lance, looking also, said in the same breath, ‘My word! She’s a beauty.’

‘She knows all there is to know about that,’ Eve said crisply; while Sinclair realised, with mixed feelings, that the beauty was Rose of Udaipur. ‘You needn’t burn your best brand of incense under her faultless nose!’

Mrs Hyder Ali made a swift, startled move; but Lance touched her arm.

‘Why run away?’ he said under his breath.

Sinclair, looking from him to the beauty, was troubled by the memory of another Lance, another Rose. To banish ghosts, he said lightly, ‘The best brand of incense is daily bread to Mrs Penryth.’

Eve eyed him in dismay.

‘A friend of yours? I’m awfully sorry—I didn’t mean——’

Sinclair laughed.

‘Don’t worry. She does know all there is to know! The men see to that.’

‘She’s also got a fine pair of eyes—and a mirror,’ remarked sapient Lance.

Eve shot him a look; but could say no more; for the women were almost upon them, followed by the big genial Resident and Dr Hyder Ali Khan, a thick-set man in long dark coat and buff turban.

Sinclair liked Lady Thorne’s colourful personality; her critical smiling eyes; her intriguing blend of the musician and woman of the world. Mentally, he compared her with Rose: the one, still water that might be shallow or deep; the other, a river with strong tides running below the rippled surface. There was some close, unrelated bond between her and Eve, who might perhaps tell him more about it presently.

Rose was now being introduced to Mis Hyder Ali Khan; and Sinclair did not fail to note the faint lift of her eyebrows, that stirred the blood under the other woman’s fair skin.

She herself was aware of nothing but the goodly young man in polo-kit, presented by Lady Thorne as ‘Captain Desmond. My Eve’s errant husband.’

He bowed with smiling eyes. Rose held out her hand. For a second it hung, unclaimed; and as she let it fall his shot out.

Lady Thorne laughed. ‘Where are your manners Lance?’

But Rose had given him her hand.

‘My fault,’ she said, in her cool, caressing tone. ‘To me, you hardly seem a stranger. I knew your uncle so well—long ago. And you have more of him than his name.’

She included, with a glance, the wife, who was of no account; took the chair nearest him and began asking about Chitral. Only Sinclair could detect certain slight revealing movements of her hands and lips; while young Desmond sat there admiring her in all innocence—as it might be the risen ghost of the man she had genuinely loved, in her own queer fashion, and had used so ill.

The nephew proved his lineage by a tacit refusal to be detached from Mrs Hyder Ali, for all the skill with which Rose sought to monopolise his attention. Lady Thorne began talking to the doctor, and Sinclair sat down by Eve. His look indicated Lance; and she gave her quaint double nod.

‘He wouldn’t let her down for any beguiling beauty,’ she said very low. ‘But that woman’s making her feel uncomfortable. I’ll rescue her when it doesn’t look too pointed.’

They talked of Suráj and Aruna and her own Indian music. Then she sprang up, as if on impulse, and slipped a hand through Mrs Hyder Ali’s arm.

‘My little Ian ought to be awake now. He’s flaunting a delicious yellow jacket I’ve made him. Come and see.’

The woman’s eager pleasure had its touch of pathos.

A yellow jacket—for a baby?’ Queried conventional Rose.

‘Why not?’ There was light challenge in her tone. ‘If I like yellow, he probably does. Why should the poor dears be rationed to perpetual pinks and blues?’

It was the kind of question that would never occur to Rose. But no doubt she blessed that unrationed infant for removing the tiresome woman.

Eve touched her husband’s shoulder. He looked sideways up at her; and the smile that passed between them pricked Sinclair with a needle-point of envy. He knew the precise pleasure, the mute assurance of those light contacts; more significant, often, than the impersonal fervours of passion.

‘Coming back for tea?’ Lance queried.

‘Rather—strawberries!’ And Eve went off, still with her hand through Mrs Hyder All’s arm.

Sinclair glanced at Rose securely in possession; her shapely shoulders turned to the rest, as if she would shut out all but the illusion of Lance regained. He thought, ‘Let her have her moment. It’s not unmixed pleasure.’ And he joined the other group.

Lady Thorne greeted him with an amused smile at her husband and the doctor.

‘They’re off!’ she said, under her breath; and he asked nothing better, since Rose had captured Lance. An Oriental talking of India drew him irresistibly; and he liked the man’s thoughtful face, in spite of heavy-lidded eyes. They were talking of Gandhi; Dr Hyder All commending the new Viceroy’s refusal to carry on the Mahatma’s unorthodox method of ‘government by conversations.’

‘I don’t blame him, either,’ agreed the Resident—a fair, heavily built man with a large experience of the North. ‘It’s no catch arguing with a saint who whips out a revolver, or a threat of civil disobedience, whenever the argument goes against him.’

The doctor caressed his close-cut beard.

‘Gandhi is a man of many faces. They say he is frank and truthful. Yet he declares the British Army is unnecessary, and there is no Frontier danger. We Moslems know him capable of infinite duplicity, of course you can give it a more polite name——

He turned out his thick strong hands.

‘Elusive, evasive,’ suggested Sinclair. ‘The sort of mind that always has a back-door open for retreat.’

The Moslem’s white teeth flashed in his beard.

‘Gandhi to the life. He will go—and he will not go—to this new London Conference till the boat is sailing. He now says he will go to Buckingham Palace—if invited!’

‘He won’t be,’ said Thorne bluntly.

‘I am glad that is your opinion, Sir Havelock. He doubtless expects to carry on in London the same kind of one-man talks as in Delhi. But, in spite of all his limelight, nothing he says can mean a real settlement. Our Princes will not break the British connection. And we Moslems will have no Brahmin Rāj. These Hindus have lost their heads through Government preference. Let them wait. . . . Trouble is now brewing in Kashmir——’

‘You’re sure of it?’ asked the Resident sharply.

‘I am not concerned in it, sir. But I know the sacred flame of Islam is ablaze in the North. And if the power of the King Emperor be weakened, God help the humble folk in those regions——’

His tone revealed the Moslem under the civilised man of medicine. But he did not name Cawnpore.

Sinclair leaned forward, keenly interested.

‘Tell me, Dr Hyder Ali—I’m not a newspaper man—has Gandhi got the Red Shirts in his pocket?’

Again that flashing smile lit up the dark face.

‘He might say “yes.” But I say “no.” Each may be using the other for political ends; but that movement, Sir Roy, is not Indian Nationalist. It is—Puktunwali⁵⁸—born of Islam. Though Pathans hate the infidel, they could respect the British Administration—when it was strong. But now——’

‘Now?’ queried Thorne, with a direct look.

‘Now they have one aim: an Islamic kingdom, with a Moslem ruler, perhaps including Afghanistan—and Kashmir. There is an army beyond the Border bigger, perhaps, than your people know. Much will depend on what happens this summer—and on the English themselves. Their ikbāl is still great. But they seldom trouble to put forth their full powers.’

He smiled at the large, slow-moving man, who looked the very embodiment of his race. And the large man smiled back at him in complete accord.

‘You won’t get the Englishman to take off his coat till the bloody mess is a good deal bloodier than it is at present,’ he said with a glance of apology at his amused wife. ‘And when he does take it off, his one idea will be to slip it on again, the first possible moment! We really want to be friends with India, as much in our own interests as in hers.’

‘Sir, you are honest,’ the doctor admitted. ‘And your people have the genius to be friends. But you often show it more clearly in your own country than in ours——’

Lance was listening now; and Rose also—perforce; palpably bored by the dark plain man who had withdrawn Desmond’s attention from herself.

And the Moslem, pleased with his audience, addressed them all through his host.

‘It is this kind of friendly give and take,’ he said, ‘that we need for closer understanding. You English, when you choose, mix more easily with other races than we do. But you have too little patience with the kind of talk that seems to lead nowhere. And you too often expect to see round corners by looking straight ahead. India is full of queer corners; but the English keep on looking straight ahead. With them it is always “playing the game.” They must make runs, kick a goal!’

Lance threw back his head and laughed. He had been living in a land of queer corners; and had seen more than the cunning Chitralis supposed by seeming only to look straight ahead.

‘It’s our dastúr, Doctor Sahib,’ he said, ‘to get all the fun in life out of hitting and kicking things—even ourselves!’

Doctor Hyder Ali beamed on the handsome young man who had been so friendly with his wife.

‘The last is sometimes a dangerous pastime,’ he said gravely. ‘It will be a pity for us all if the English kick themselves out of India, on account of high-minded political ideals. Just now they are in danger, everywhere, of reaching a state of altruism so exalted that even they may not survive it; forgetting that it is their sacred mission to lead the world. Tell them that, Sir Roy,’—he turned to the interested stranger—‘if you are writing another book about India.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Sinclair, ‘out political Pundits wouldn’t be converted though one rose from the dead.’

‘Pity we can’t try the experiment!’ rumbled Thorne.

The doctor would have spoken, but his hostess had made a move. Tea was arriving: a solemn procession of white-robed figures—teapot, piled plates and a large dish of strawberries. But Doctor Hyder Ali looked past all that.

Mrs Desmond was crossing the lawn alone.

‘Where’s your friend?’ queried Lance, with a just perceptible stress; but it was to the doctor she spoke, as the procession retreated.

‘Mrs Hyder Ali wants nursery tea with the babies. So I’ve come for our share of strawberries.’

Sinclair believed not a word of her plausible tale; and if the doctor doubted, his face gave no sign.

Lady Thorne handed Eve a small jug of cream; and as she piled two plates with fruit, Lance came forward.

‘I’ll take them,’ he said. ‘Time I was off.’

‘No tea?’ Rose held him with her deliberate gaze.

‘Not before polo. I’ll get my share of strawberries to-night.’ He turned from her to the Moslem. ‘I’m going to hit a goal, Doctor Sahib! Long live the game.’

‘And the players,’ Doctor Hyder Ali agreed with grave courtesy.

‘Amen to that,’ said Lance; smiled his adieus and strolled away beside Eve, trying to nudge her elbow and make her spill the precious cream.

Rose, deserted, promptly annexed Roy: and when tea was over she stood up, with a glance that drew him to his feet. Impossible to remain annoyed with her for long. Beauty has its unfair privileges.

‘Let’s go and watch the polo,’ she said, with admirable unconcern.

And Lady Thorne innocently remarked, ‘Lance at polo is worth watching.’

They said nothing; but their eyes met for a moment. That anyone should need to tell them so.

Then they went off together, still saying nothing. They were not thinking of each other.

Sinclair had room for only one thought in his mind. He was going to see Lance play polo again—after twelve years. . . .

Chapter 2

The drums will not be beaten—and none will know.
—Rabindranath Tagore

There were not many people at the polo match; tennis and golf had drawn most of them elsewhere. A small shamianah gave shade and seclusion to the privileged: a score of men interested in the match, a group of smartly dressed women more interested in the men; all betting and drinking freely. On the far side, under the trees, clustered a mixed crowd of the non-privileged—English nurses, Eurasians and Indians.

To Sinclair, the privileged were all strangers: a handful of that curious race apart—the English in India, who are of one blood, after all, with the English in England. Rose was greeted by hotel acquaintances and pressed to have a cocktail, which she refused.

‘Let’s get away from them,’ she said very low; and Sinclair, willingly enough, shifted two chairs to a peaceful spot under some trees, where they could talk or look on undisturbed. It was all part of the dream sensation, to be detaching her thus, for quite another reason.

As she took his proffered cigarette, her eyes lingered in his: a serious troubled look. For that brief moment, she was not thinking of Rose Penryth; and she had no idea how the values of her beauty were heightened by that passing eclipse of herself. Once, in Lahore, he had seen her so—that terrible night of the riots, when she had watched Lance on duty with his men, knowing that any moment a hurtling brick might knock him out of the saddle.

And now there was Lance galloping by them; his polo-stick swung high to catch the soaring ball in mid-air: a Lance who cared not a rap if she spent the whole afternoon and evening in the pocket of Roy.

With a clean smack, he sent the ball spinning through the goal-posts.

Cheers from the shamianah, yells from the unofficial crowd.

Rose stood there, tense and silent, swept by a wave of genuine emotion; her beautiful face more revealing than she knew. Then she turned from Roy, her soft lips not quite steady, and sank into her chair.

‘It’s past believing,’ she said, to herself rather than to him.

He had no answer ready; and she wanted none. The illusion of Lance dashing past, in the fulness of life and youth, created within her so strange a confusion of pain and pleasure, dream and reality, that in her mind the same pronoun covered them both—the man who was dead, yet palpably alive, whose laugh and look and touch had wrought a stir in her heart and senses to which she had been a stranger for many years. To feel and hear and see her dead lover again, absorbed in his wife and son, was a strangely disturbing emotional experience for a woman little given to emotional indulgence of any kind. And, in her shaken moment, she was grateful to Roy for leaving her in peace.

The chukkur was over; the players changed sides. The game thundered on again; and she became once more Rose Penryth, wife of Leonard, whom she placidly loved and honoured, and never obeyed. Then she turned and smiled at Roy, who seemed lost in some dream of his own.

‘Did you know,’ she asked, ‘that there was a nephew so astonishingly like him?’

‘I knew of a godson, Lance, to whom he often sent presents. This boy was only fifteen when our Lance died. Sir Vincent sees a brilliant career for him, if the British Rāj—in some sort—survives the plague of Conferences and Commissions.’

‘It will survive,’ said Rose; not from conviction but from the comfort-loving tendency of her kind. And she added, in her worldly vein, ‘If he’s so promising, it’s a pity he has saddled himself with a wife and child.’

‘I don’t agree. I believe in marriage. But of course it largely depends—on the woman.’

She gave him the full light of her hazel eyes.

‘You’d have missed your mark,’ she said, ‘if you’d had—the luck to marry Rose Arden.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, looking straight at her. ‘And all my worldly gear would never have reconciled Rose Arden to my Rajput mother.’

‘No.’ She capped his frankness. ‘Which proves my contention that it is a peculiar risk for a promising man. I think young Lance Desmond’—her voice caressed the name—‘would fare farther and better without that possessive young wife of his. A man like that won’t stand a tight rein.’

‘He won’t need one. He’s a damned lucky fellow—and he knows it. Eve has humour and pluck and a spark of genius.’

‘Poor Lance! Genius doesn’t domesticate.’

Her mind was furnished with such neat ready-made phrases; and her attention was distracted afresh by Eve’s husband cleverly dribbling the ball towards another goal.

‘I must see him again soon,’ she said, as if thinking aloud. ‘I’ll ask them to dinner at the hotel. You must come too, as you’re so keen on the girl.’

The light hit jarred.

‘I’ll dine with pleasure. But I refuse to detach Eve so that you may monopolise her husband. That kind of thing would infuriate—Lance. And if he’s not alive—somewhere—for you, he is for me.’

By her withdrawn lower lip he saw that he had hit too hard. But it was Rose all over—moving a man to genuine sympathy, and killing it dead by some casual remark.

‘Unkind of you, Roy,’ she reproached him, so gently that, at once, he was penitent. ‘I haven’t your faith. For me, the dead—are dead. All the same—if I have had a shock, I’m not likely to make a fool of myself over a man twelve years my junior. So you needn’t fret about your “Eve,” or hurl half-bricks at me!’

She leaned forward looking across the ground at a rider who came trotting up on the far side.

‘That looks like Mrs Desmond, coming down to take over charge!’

Eve it was, on her grey pony; a gallant figure in coat and breeches. Avoiding the shamianah, she halted on the fringe of the unofficial crowd, where she seemed to have found a friend. She would be apt to find unofficial friends, he judged; and the sight of her reminded them both of Mrs Hyder All Khan. Sinclair had instinctively avoided the subject. Rose, absorbed in Lance, had not thought of it till this moment.

Now she remarked, ‘I don’t understand Lady Thorne taking up that woman, Mrs—What’s-her-name? And the Desmond girl was all over her.’

Sinclair suppressed a futile prick of irritation.

‘Eve’s an unconventional young woman. And she has the courage of her convictions.’

Rose smiled at his championship of the girl he hardly knew.

‘In plain English—she’s headstrong. But her husband might have more sense.’

‘Lance isn’t the sort who would be likely to check Eve’s friendly impulse towards those two stray women. There’s another one here, married to a Hindu barrister.’

‘So I’ve heard. Lady Thorne must know that people are not calling, not taking any notice——’

‘Damned kind and considerate of them,’ he flung out, angered by her complacence.

But his masculine explosion only moved her to a smile.

‘Don’t get touchy about it, Roy. Your father’s case was exceptional, though you’ve often had to pay for it. You know it’s a mistake; especially when Indian men marry our women, and never tell them what they’ll be up against out here. The only way to put any sort of check on it is to bar the delinquents.’

And Roy, unimpressed by her plausible argument said suavely, ‘My dear Rose, you talk like a book. But those marriages seldom happen out here. And anyway I’d bet a fiver that the idea of putting a check on them hasn’t occurred to one of those good ladies, who are taking no notice. I doubt if it even occurred to you—till this moment.’

A faint colour stained her cheeks.

‘You’re insufferable. And I was looking forward to a talk with you—after all these months.’

Again he felt penitent; though less concerned to soothe her injured vanity than to impress on her the main point of his argument—that, for the English in India, a complacent assumption of superiority was the unforgivable sin; that, in these particular cases, the Pharisee attitude only inflicted pain without preventing a single ‘regrettable incident.’

‘It’s a matter of common-sense,’ he appealed to her intelligence, rather than her limited sympathy, ‘that if we want to stay on, in this changing India, we must be friends with Indians. The racial “superiority complex” only hurts harmless people and shames us in their esteem. Can’t you see——?”

He left his sentence in the air. She was simply not attending, perhaps not hearing a word he said.

Lance had just galloped past. Instinctively her eyes and mind followed him, deserting Roy and his futile, chivalrous concern for those misguided women, who had made their own beds and must lie on them with their undesirable brown husbands.

When his voice ceased, she had no idea where he had got to. But she snatched hopefully at the last three words.

‘I can see—if you can’t,’ she turned on him her serenest smile,——‘that the Desmond girl, over there, is waving at you. It might be polite to wave back.’

She had saved her face so neatly that he laughed, and waved to Eve; noting, with amusement, that she did not ride round and join them. Ungallantly, he wished her by him in place of Rose, mistress of platitudes, absorbed now in the excitement of a final scrimmage; back in Lahore perhaps watching that other Lance, whose last two months of life she had made a torment of jealousy and pain. . . .

Smack! There went the ball; scampering, thudding hoofs after it; clean through the goal-posts—and the match was over. Cheers and yells from the unofficial audience: thirsty men crowding into the shamianah.

Desmond—mopping his forehead, his pony in a lather—halted in passing.

‘Well played, indeed!’ Rose greeted him gaily.

He saluted and smiled at her. His eyes seemed to say again, ‘My word, she’s a beauty.’ But his remark was for Sinclair.

‘Jolly good game. If they did win, it’s honours easy. I’ve got a thirst on me that won’t wait.’

He trotted off to the tent. Eve was there to greet him; and they went in together.

His thirst, it seemed, was soon quenched. For when Rose stood up, with a casual remark about a cocktail, that engaging pair came out again, mounted and rode away—young and comely, content with each other.

‘They’re still at the idyllic stage,’ remarked Rose.

‘How long will it last?’

‘Why should it not last?’

She twitched an eyebrow at him.

‘My dear Roy! You’ve been married twelve years—you can ask that?’

‘I can ask it because I’ve been married twelve years. And I know it can last. You talk that damn cheap stuff from habit, Rose. But there’s a part of you that feels differently. If not’—he hesitated—‘how can young Desmond affect you, as he evidently does?’

She frowned and drew in her lip.

‘Our Lance was a man in a thousand,’ she said very low. ‘Besides—he’s dead. And the dead don’t change. Perhaps that’s why one can go on—loving them the same. If you can go on loving, in the same way, a living woman, who does change, you’ve better luck than most of us.’

‘If I have,’ he said, ‘the credit is hers. I back young Eve to keep what she has won.’

But young Eve, he suspected, was capable of unreasoning jealousies and dislikes that might cause futile friction; nor did he quite trust Rose in the matter of Lance, seeing how deeply the likeness had affected her. The pull of human sympathy and interest was stronger, just then, than the knowledge that he should by rights be moving on into the higher hills, seeking out the guru, to whom Grace had given him an introduction, and finishing his novel, to make way for the larger work.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

That evening, when dinner was over, he strolled up and down the long lawn under a sky flushed with afterglow, patterned with high dark heads of maple and blue pine. Among the quiet branches birds called softly. And beside him walked the semblance of his dead friend, Bijli trotting solemnly to heel. Voice and build and the profile view disturbed his heart with the queerest blend of pleasure and pain.

Lance was talking of Chitral and Peshawar—especially Peshawar; and his talk revealed a remarkable knowledge of Border affairs. He was elated by a letter from Sir Vincent, telling him he was to be posted there as Assistant Commissioner in September.

‘Will you be there too?’ he asked. And the simple question was like the snap of a shutter in Sinclair’s mind; revealing how nearly his time was up, how hard it would be to leave India—for good; how much remained undone of all he had set out to do.

‘I’m due to be home for Christmas,’ he said slowly. ‘But I’d like a month or so in Peshawar.’

‘Good. You must do a bit of camping with us. See how we carry on round there; and will carry on as long as the British-India Combine will allow.—Hark! Eve and Vanessa playing. It’s a treat to hear them after months of my hoary old gramophone.’

Sounds of violin and piano drew them back towards the house; and a vigorous, chromatic passage, con fuoco, moved Sinclair to exclaim:——‘That’s a fine stirring thing. What composer?’

‘Mrs Lance Desmond!’ the young man told him, a naive ring of pride in his tone.

‘Your Eve—wrote that?’

‘Rather. It’s her precious sonata in E minor. The first thing she published.—She’s fishing for you to come in and hear it.’

‘Come on then. I’m no musician: but I place music highest of the arts, though it has the most primitive appeal.’

Outside the glazed verandah they halted. The open drawing-room door framed the slim pale figure lit by a shaded lamp; supple fingers plucking out the main theme; the bare arm raised as the bow crashed into the soft scurry of single notes—a gesture of inimitable grace. The whole look of her, while she played, had the brooding composure of an enchantment, as if all her vitality were withdrawn into her fingers.

‘I’ll stay outside. I like hearing it this way,’ said Sinclair; and Lance stepped quietly into the verandah. There he sat down, away from the open door, yet so placed that eyes and heart could take their fill of Eve, and marvel afresh at her command of that ‘mad and glorious abstraction,’ music, at the subtle change it wrought in her.

Seen thus she seemed more like an embodiment of her own music than the dear and desired woman, regained at last. . . .

Sinclair—left alone in the dusk that was almost darkness—flung away a half-smoked cigarette, and sat down on the steps, yielding sense and spirit to the magical influences of music and the summer night.

The players unseen, their music seemed to flow from no human origin, to be one with the deep and living darkness into which it poured its mingled stream of sound; violin and piano soaring in unison as if reaching after new ecstasies; soaring and falling again like the changing rhythms of life; opening up vistas of Reality beyond the real. . . .

Then—through the woven spell of music and darkness—there came to him an illusion, faint yet clear, of Tara sitting close to him, sharing it with him. The sense of her ran like delicate fire through his veins, renewed the ache of incompleteness evoked by watching these two together in the quickened joy of reunion after absence.

And yet—and yet . . .

In those rare moments of absolute honesty, that every true artist knows, he recognised his passing detachment from human claims as a vital element in his present work and way of living. Undeniably the writer and artist gained by an inner state of tension unacceptable to the man. Passion unsatisfied, and the very ache of his severed contact with Tara, awakened in him a more vigorous and spontaneous creative impulse than he had known for years.

But to-night, enspelled by the heart-searching beauty of Eve’s Largo, and the illusion of Tara sitting close beside him, a sharp temptation assailed him to surprise her with a wire out of the blue, bidding her leave all and come to him directly the weather was cool enough to permit the long Indian journey.

For a few exquisite moments, he surrendered his imagination to the idea of her actual coming—her laugh, the light in her eyes. . . .

Then the Largo ceased. Piano and violin together crashed into a stirring vehement Presto; brave music that faced the best and worst, and encouraged no vain dreams. Changing the current of his mood, it carried him along, as if he were in a small boat being swept towards unseen rapids. It culminated in two abrupt chords, followed by one deep, long-drawn note on the violin. . . .

Released from the twofold spell, he awoke as if from an actual dream; and knew that temptation would not prevail. His wire would not be sent. Even if it were, she would never leave those three children on her mother’s hands. Nor could he leave India till his novel was written, his greater book in a large measure compiled. Something within him, that knew destiny, told him he had yet a long way to travel before he could hope to see her again.

With a slow, unaccustomed heaviness of limb and of heart, he rose and went into the house.

Chapter 3

What they have they still desire; eager, and yet satisfied.
—St Peter Damian

Eve Desmond glanced at her small square wrist-watch set in brilliants on a fine flexible chain; her gift from Lance when the new son arrived, three months ago—and he snow-bound in the wilds of Chitral.

‘Thirty-five minutes late. What’s he up to?’ she said half aloud, addressing her question to the familiar garden, where Lance had proposed to her and scolded her, almost in one breath, because she had unwisely seized the tails of two fighting dogs; because, in effect, she was Eve—doomed, by her difficult nature, to be alternately scolded and loved.

She was sitting alone this afternoon, with her music manuscript and her sleeping son, in the summer-house above the lawn, in full view of Nanga Parbat; snowfield, glacier and throne-like summit rising a clear nine thousand feet above the highest peaks within a hundred and twenty miles of her. Déomir, Home of the Gods, Kashmiris called her, with their Asiatic instinct for sound and meaning in names; so completely apart she was from the lesser peaks, her fellows.

Eve’s half pagan spirit worshipped her, not only as Déomir, but as the mountain that surpassed all others for her lost father, whose spirit still lived in her, as a light lives in a shrine. There were twin lights now in her shrine, since her first little son, who bore his name, had been snatched from her by a cruel mishap—more her fatality than her fault—that had darkened the early radiance of her marriage, and intensified her too keen sense of life’s insecurity. But this first halcyon week together.—Lance safe back, after a year away—seemed to set her, almost, beyond earthly harms.

It was still a new wonder being with him again in such effortless, happy understanding. He had the key to all her hidden doors. And only from such depths of sorrow shared could so fine a quality of happiness be distilled. In those dark months each had given something, yielded something: a yielding and a giving that had proved not loss but gain. It was as if they had hardly reached the full climax of their married love till now. No doubt they would suffer again and quarrel again, over those urgent trifles that breed more discord than really important affairs. But never again would they be ‘afraid with any amazement.’

The child, asleep in its hammock cot, made a faint sucking sound and flung out a minute waxen fist that still seemed a wonder past belief. She put out a hand and lightly swayed the hammock, loving the Atom with a physical ache, with an abiding sense of awe at the unconsidered mystery of creation that had once more given a son into her unsafe keeping.

She had called him Ian again, because her father’s name must be carried on by a living son, also because of an eerie fancy that the poor little soul she had hustled out of life had given his careless mother, unwittingly, a chance to atone. He was her ‘little heaven-returned’—doubly precious; and if Lance guessed, he gave no sign. He never trespassed on private ground. He respected her need still to live at times in her own secret world. For the artist can never completely marry; and lovers can share every possession on earth—except themselves. Yet it is precisely in striving to conquer the doom of isolation that they keep love alight by the stimulant of unsatisfied desire.

And she—with quickened faculties—was learning Lance all over again: an older Lance, who had tasted responsibility, had suffered and adventured and known the fear of losing her for good. His letters had revealed to her insatiate heart, a fidelity that sprang from his abundant energy in loving, as in all else; the ‘something more’ that never stales. Freshly, after long absence, she rejoiced in his swift perception, his sure understanding way with her. Even to quarrel was part of the excitement of being with him again—in closest touch; perhaps never more profoundly in love than now.

For that very reason, her little dark imp had been teasing her with malign whispers about this tiresome Mrs Penryth, who seemed unable to keep her beautiful eyes off Lance, while she treated the superfluous wife to ‘smiles and soap.’ In this last fortnight she had twice asked them to dinner, with that delightful Roy person, had positively haunted the polo ground, and had once been asked to lunch—by Vanessa. Each time they met, Eve’s quick perceptions told her that the cool, assured creature was aware of Lance in a way that she had no business to be aware of Eve Desmond’s husband. And Lance, in quite another fashion, was very much aware of her. He owned natural weakness for a beautiful woman, though he had been wise enough not to marry one; and if this Mrs Penryth persistently tried to put a paw on him after polo, she might become a nuisance. Life went so deliciously of itself sometimes, if only tiresome grabbing people would let it alone.

Again the child stirred; and again Eve glanced at her watch. She was tired of wanting Lance; and a trifle nervy this afternoon, because the morning had been almost blotted out by one of her shattering headaches; and this difficult, fascinating Indian music was taxing her brain to the utmost. But for that, and having to feed the Roy, she would have been at the polo herself.

Now here was ayah, coming for the creature. She herself lifted him from his out-door cot and handed him over to the comely Kashmiri, for whom he was one of the lesser gods.

‘There’s your godling, ay - wy. And there’s the Captain Sahib. I’ll come later.’

Lance it was, at last, bareheaded, in his riding gear; stopping, as he passed the woman, to greet his son. Polo must have been over nearly an hour. Had he been ensnared by the beauty? Would she be an idiot to ask? Would she be able to refrain?

When he sprang up the steps and kissed her in his quick, fervent fashion, their eyes met; and at once he saw the lurking question in hers.

‘Oh yes, the beauty was there all right,’ he told her in his level tone. ‘And of course she collared me for cocktails, and lured me back to Nedou’s for a confab in her pet corner of the verandah——’

‘Hateful creature!’—Between the headache and the music, her nerves were on edge.—‘And there was I waiting—wanting you——’

‘Eve—you sweet little fool——’ He took her by the shoulders and gave her a gentle shake. ‘Can’t you see I’m only pulling your leg? You do ask for it, sometimes—you of little faith.’ And because of the look in her eyes, he caught her close and kissed them. ‘Now you’ve had your scare, you shall have the unromantic truth.’

He drew her down into a chair beside him.

‘The charmer was there all right, with some man in attendance. When he sloped off, she sat on alone watching the game.’

As to that Eve had her own opinion, but she wisely said nothing.

‘My team won. Then I went off with Maguire about a pony I’m after. Hence these tears!—‘She was talking to a little dark woman. Looked like your Mrs Battacharya.’

‘Not likely! The Penryth wouldn’t deign to fling a crumb. She was probably waiting to ensnare you.’

He tweaked the lock of hair over her ear.

‘If you don’t look out, madam, I’ll give you something to grumble at. Libelling a harmless woman, and fussing about nothing, when you’ve got all you want in life.’

‘Yes—that’s why. You see—I care so terribly. And happiness frightens me. It makes me feel—what right have I to all this, when heaps of better people are eating their hearts out?’ Impulsively she shed a kiss on the brown hand that caressed her.——‘You’ve the right, anyhow, to every ounce of it. You’re my shield-buckler!’

‘I’d as soon be that as anything else in life,’ he said gravely; but as she pressed closer he hurriedly detached himself. ‘There she is again. Damn——’

No need to ask who: there she, intrusively, was, crossing the lawn, a book in her hand; but that low, fierce ‘damn’ so satisfied Eve that she almost forgave the intruder for provoking it.

Below the summer-house Mrs Penryth halted, smiling up at Lance.

‘I hope I’m not in the way! They said the others were out, but you two were at home. So I ventured.’ Her amused eyes took in Eve’s air of a ruffled bird startled off its nest. ‘I came over to return a book Roy lent me, as I haven’t seen him for days.’

‘He’s been soused in work,’ Lance explained without inviting her into their sanctum. ‘Gone off on a whole-day trek up to the Frozen Lakes, for a breather. He may be back any minute now. Won’t you wait?’

He indicated chairs under the walnut tree.

‘I’d love to—if I may. This garden is delicious. Quite like Home. But don’t let me interrupt.’ A glance at Eve’s scattered papers. ‘Are you very busy, Mrs Desmond?’

‘Fearfully busy! But the worst is over.’

Eve collected her loose papers and thrust them into her portfolio. If the beauty hoped for a tête-à-tête, she would suffer a wholesome disappointment.

Under the walnut tree they sat, very correct and polite. A cocktail was offered and refused. No sign of Roy. Mrs Penryth, intent on Lance, said all the right things; and Eve, in return, said all the wrong ones; too happy over that heartfelt ‘damn’ to worry about correct behaviour.

Lance—smoking peacefully after his violent game—left the burden of keeping it up to her; and Eve only forgave him because that was not what the beauty had stayed for at all, at all.

Presently, with a glance under her lashes, she proffered him a sugar-plum about his play.

‘I discovered an admirer of yours this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen her there before. Really keen on the game. To-day she came up and asked me the time, having forgotten her watch. So we talked of polo: and when you brought off that smart back-handed goal, she said, “Isn’t he splendid? I chiefly come to see him play.” I told her my reason was much the same. There’s glory for you!’

Lance laughed and covered his face. ‘Spare my blushes!’

‘You haven’t got any of those,’ said Eve severely; and he gave her a warning glance, which she was too happy to heed.

At the sound of barking dogs, he rose briskly.

‘There they are. I must see Sir Havelock about some Chitral business. I’ll be back later.’

With a friendly nod to the baffled beauty, he strolled away. Eve, guessing he was bored, frolicked in her mind, and hoped to hear more about that unlikely encounter. It must have been Mrs Battacharya. But did the beauty know?

Mrs Penryth—her eyes following Lance—had arrived at asking her fellow-admirer where she was staying: and at that Eve pricked up her ears.

‘To my surprise, she said she was with that mixed couple, Dr and Mrs Hyder Ali. No harm in the woman, of course—I know you like her; but she’s dished herself by marrying an Indian, as I pointed out to her friend who seemed new to this country. She said it was hard on an English girl, who didn’t know how strong the feeling was out here. Of course I agreed; but I hoped they’d be sensible enough to avoid having children. If people choose to play the fool with their own lives, it’s their affair. But they’ve no right to inflict the curse of mixed blood on wretched infants——’

Eve gasped. ‘You said that—to her——?’

‘I put it tactfully. But it’s the truth.’

‘The truth can be cruel,’ Eve said hotly. ‘Though of course you didn’t know. Mrs Battacharya——’

‘Mrs—What?’

The other’s aghast look and tone would have amused Eve at a cooler moment.

‘Battacharya,’ she repeated, emphasising every syllable. ‘Her husband’s a Hindu; and she’s going to have a child this winter. She’s rather worried as it is—— Oh, how could you?’

‘My dear girl, I didn’t know,’ Mrs Penryth protested with a touch of asperity. ‘I’m sorry if I upset her. But as she didn’t tell me her name.’

‘Naturally not. She’s sensitive about it. Very bitter over the way she and her friend are being treated by all you Gulmarg people.’

‘We have our reasons. And as she thrust herself in under false pretences, she got what she deserved.’

‘You’re hard and unkind.’—Eve hurled the wrong things at her with gusto. ‘She probably loved to have a talk without feeling she was despised. And then you say that sort of thing about her friends.’

‘Well, it ought to be said by someone, in the interests of the race——’

‘Oh, damn the race——’ Eve flashed out, maddened by the note of complacence. ‘I must go and see her at once.’

Rose shrugged. ‘You’re making too much o£ the whole thing.’

‘I’m not. You don’t understand.’ She rose on impulse, longing to be off. ‘I’m afraid I must go. I can’t stay here being polite——’

‘Not conspicuously polite,’ Rose murmured: and the truth of it moved Eve to an attempt at apology.

‘I’m sorry. But I’m fond of those two. I think it’s hateful the way you all ignore them. Especially you—such friends with Roy.’

‘Oh, Roy’s quite another affair.’

But the mention of him seemed to disturb her; and Eve shamelessly hoped it was a pin-prick.

‘Well, he feels as strongly as Lance and I do about those two,’ she retorted, hoping that might be another pin-prick.

‘And I suppose you’ll pour it all out to him—with embellishments?’

Eve jerked up her decided chin. ‘I don’t embellish. But I may have to tell him.—I don’t know when he’ll be in. Good-bye.’

Mrs Penryth inclined her head without rising; and Eve thought furiously, ‘She’ll sit there—and sit there, waiting for Lance, more than Roy.’

She arrived breathless at the doctor’s bungalow; and was checked, in the verandah, by the sound of men’s voices: the doctor—and Roy. Here he was, talking to this Indian, while the beauty waited in vain. Nice man.

The women, it seemed, were not in. Mrs Hyder Ali, the doctor said, had just gone off towards the polo ground to see why her friend had not come back. A thorn of anxiety pricked Eve. People in that state sometimes did queer things——

‘If your wife’s only just gone,’ she said, trying to sound cool, ‘I’ll run and catch her up. I want to see her rather specially.’

And she hurried out again, her mind in a turmoil.

Almost at once she heard quick steps following her. Roy——? She waited; and he took her gently by the arm.

‘What’s wrong, Eve? You look tired—upset.’

‘I am upset. It’s that Penryth woman—— Outside the gate, I’ll explain. We must hurry.’

But outside the gate he stopped deliberately.

‘Eve, what is it? I can go twice your pace, if you’ll only tell me.’

In one swift rush, she told him. He was the kind of man to whom one could say anything without awkwardness; and when he swore at the Penryth, she positively loved him.

‘You go home,’ he said kindly. ‘I’ll find the women. Don’t go fancying wild things. If the poor lady was feeling a bit worried, she probably wandered off for a walk; and, having no watch, forgot the time. Go and play with Lance. I’ll come and report.’

She thanked him fervently.

‘I ought to rush back. I quite forgot my poor little Ian.’

But when they had parted, she could not rush. In her tired state, it was bad for her, bad for the precious infant, who needed a placid cow of a mother. For his benefit, and her own, she calmed herself by walking quietly, looking at the changeful loveliness of the evening sky—all pearl and pale gold, and flakes of light; trees darkening, a sultry wind stirring; the north massed with Himalayan peaks and cloud ranges. If one could only know what was behind all that beauty. There must be some hidden meaning. Perhaps one knew the secret long ago—and lost it through having been born. Roy might make a poem from that idea. She felt calmer. The thought of Lance irradiated her; and she ran indoors to her neglected son.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Dinner was nearly over before Roy appeared, hungry and tired after his all-day tramp; a sad, clouded look in his eyes. The problem of these marriages would touch him more nearly than it could touch any of them.

After dinner he told her how they had walked and walked—he and Mrs Hyder Ali—following the path where someone had seen a small lonely figure hurrying along. And at last they had found her, just below the road; crumpled up; her ankle twisted under her; white and silent and in pain. It was only a slight twist, but she could never have got home. Mrs Hyder Ali sent grateful thanks to Eve for throwing a light on her unaccountable behaviour. She herself—ashamed, perhaps relieved—had offered no word of explanation. The doctor—to whom his wife told all—had little doubt as to her secret impulse; and he was furious with Mrs Penryth.

‘I’m afraid I was rude to her over it,’ Eve confessed, remembering that she was Roy’s friend.

‘Nothing to what I would have been,’ he retorted. ‘She and her kind brew ill-feeling that it takes the world’s work to heal.’ He sighed. ‘A queer end to a wonderful day. I’m dead beat. I’m for bed.’

She watched him go, saddened by his pain, by her own vivid sense of the struggle that poor wife must have endured before nerving herself to such drastic action. And here was she—blest beyond desert—wandering in the scented summer dusk, with Lance safe back again, loving her, soothing her, as he alone could do. The perfect accord between them in that hour was more than love. It was a kind of heavenly health; a deep sense of rightness, in the simple astounding fact they two should be satisfied, beyond measure, to spend a whole lifetime with one another.

Chapter 4

The flame is in every heart; but it cannot shine amidst confusion of desire.
—Bhagawan Sri

Next morning they heard with relief that all was well as regards the coming child. Whether all was well, in a different sense, with the unwilling mother, none would ever know. It was that which chiefly troubled Eve and Roy, though neither of them spoke of it to the other. As for Rose—in the circumstances, Roy did not feel like going over to see her, as he might otherwise have done.

He was still under the spell of his long solitary day beside the Frozen Lakes on Apharwat, thirteen thousand feet up: a day of direct communing with Nature that lifted his mind—if only for a space—‘above the battle.’ At dawn he had set out upon his four-hour tramp up the Poonch road—up and up, till the whole vast view was unrolled: lake and river and wooded hills crowned by the long unbroken range of snows from Baramullah to Islamabad; and across the valley, eighty miles off, the gleaming head and shoulders of Nanga Parbat—remote, serene, in her blue-white haze of air.

On the summit, by the lakes, refreshed in body and mind, he had reached a decision to have done with pleasant idling and leave Gulmarg—no longer true to its name, Meadow of Flowers, but a warren of huts dominated by palace and hotel, laid out to meet the tireless white man’s demand for polo and golf. He had returned, straight down the mountain—straight into the pitiful, jarring complication of Mrs Battacharya and Rose Penryth.

To-day—as if to clinch his decision—came a letter from Grace’s guru, Sri Samádhi—Lord of Bliss—suggesting a pilgrimage to the sacred cave of Amarnáth, in the higher hills behind Kashmir, an invitation wholly in tune with his altered mood. His hope of finishing the novel in Gulmarg had been frustrated by the usual obstacle—engrossing human entanglements. Time to be moving on. The young Desmonds, who chiefly beguiled him, he would meet again in Peshawar, where he would enjoy a taste of camp life, and stay with them till England claimed him.

To-morrow he must bid good-bye to Rose. He would rather not see her till his vexation had cooled. Let her hold what opinions she pleased, human consideration was due to the victims—her fellows, though she would probably disown the connection. That she might now be suffering a twinge of remorse, he did not for a moment believe. If she regretted anything so remote from herself, it would be the failure to avert that coming child. Her own failure in tact and courtesy, she would brush from her thoughts as lightly as she would flick an insect from her hand. So he imagined—knowing his Rose.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

But, as to the last, he was mistaken, in spite of knowing his Rose. The trivial event stuck in her mind and ruffled her serenity—not on account of her own slip, but because she felt uncertain as to what that ill-mannered, aggressive young woman might have said about it to Roy or to her husband. For although the Roy, himself, was virtually a stranger, that other Lance, who was no stranger, looked at her out of his gold-flecked eyes, spoke to her in familiar tones that kindled an emotion of finer quality than any she had known. To let it flare up, at her age, would be stupid and undignified, besides being a sort of disloyalty to Leonard, whom she loved well enough, in quite another fashion. That men should still fall in love with her was a natural and pleasing reaffirmation of her power to charm. To let her own feelings become involved would be quite out of order. She had suffered genuinely and deeply after the death of Lance the break with Roy. Thereafter she had steeled herself against risk of repetition. Yet it hurt her unreasonably to see this counterpart of Lance, aware of her only as a good-looking woman, palpably in love with his possessive young wife, who had also ensnared Roy.

Thinking over it all, on the morning after her ‘indiscretion,’ she decided that Simla would be a good move. Roy would soon be wandering into the wilds; and it would be tiresome if the Residency people cooled off for so trivial a reason. Better, in any case, to fade gracefully away. The transfer could be arranged in no time: a wire to her favourite hotel, a letter to Leonard, a few words with Roy, and one more glimpse of the Lance, who was no stranger, before she tidied him away at the back of her mind—unforgettable, but never again permitted to intrude.

If she called at the Residency in the early afternoon, he might be idling round; and kind enquiries about that misguided little woman would be in order.

Becomingly arrayed, she decided to take her chance: and the Fates were kind.

As she strolled up from the entrance gate, she caught sight of Lance, alone with his Bijli dog in front of the house. He was looking up into a tree talking to a small monkey, who gibbered in response. With the light on his profile, he was her own Lance to the life: and instinctively she stood still, letting herself go for once, because it was the last time.

So standing, she was transformed to Rose Arden of six-and-twenty; and he, to the actual man who had desired her more than any other earthly good. Had he turned and seen her, had he come forward and taken her in his arms, she would hardly have been surprised, so vivid was the illusion for that moment of time.

He did turn and see her. But it was she who came forward—a casual caller. He smiled and saluted, a little stiffly she fancied.

‘You want to see Lady Thorne?’ he asked.

The slight yet perceptible coolness—following on her brief illusion—hurt something deeper than her self-esteem; but to all appearance she was cool as he.

‘I came to see Roy, as I missed him yesterday; and I’m leaving soon for Simla: also to ask about the little woman with the unpronounceable name. Someone met him and Mrs Hyder Ali half carrying her home. Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘No—mercifully not. She twisted her ankle. It was a lucky thing they went after her.’—His tone was pleasant but impersonal. He ignored the allusion to Simla.—‘Roy knows more than I do. He’s in the garden. Shall I?’

‘Don’t trouble. I’ll go round and find him.’

‘Right. I’m waiting for Eve.’

His A.D.C. manner made her suddenly want to shake him; suddenly realise how completely the whole man was out of her reach, armoured in his serene indifference.

As she moved on, his voice arrested her, changed and friendly.

‘Down, Bijli, old man. She’s coming soon,’ he soothed the impatient dog; and instinctively Rose turned for one more glimpse of the man he was not, for those familiar lines of face and figure that she might never see in the flesh again.

He was bending down caressing the creature’s head and ears. She caught the profile view; and so sharply it hurt her that she turned quickly away, deriding that experienced egoist, Rose Penryth, for a sentimental fool.

Annoyed and perturbed, as she seldom allowed herself to be, she was in no mood for a homily from Roy. There he sat alone under the walnut, so absorbed in his book that she was close to him before he looked up with the little twitching frown she remembered, when his mind was recalled from far away. That he was not pleased to see her his eyes revealed before he slipped on the imperceptible mask of normal human intercourse.

He forestalled her own announcement by remarking that he had intended coming over after tea to say goodbye. He would be off on Thursday into the higher hills.

‘A mutual impulse!’ she capped him. ‘I’m off too. Probably Friday.’ She sat down—uninvited. ‘Am I interrupting abstruse studies?’

He laid his book down on the cane table.

‘It can wait.’

‘India?’ She glanced at the cover—and he smiled.

‘A Hindu view of life, by one of their foremost thinkers.’

She considered him a moment, glad to have skipped her bogus ‘kind enquiries.’

‘Is it taking very serious hold of you—all that?’

Surprised at her concern, he gave her a truthful answer.

‘Unless it did, my book wouldn’t be worth the paper it will be printed on.’

‘But it’s a risk—for you. If I were your wife, I’d be afraid the East might “get” you.’

Thinking of Tara, he smiled at Rose, who had so nearly stolen him from her: an alluring creature, finished, beautiful, as far removed from all his realities as Tara was one with them.

And he said slowly, ‘My dear Rose, if you’d cared just enough to marry me, you’d have had a hell of a time.’—A pause charged with significance.—‘And so would I!’

‘How wise we were,’ she mused, ‘when we fancied ourselves so unhappy.’

‘It was our unhappiness that made us wise. “The Sword that pierces the heart often brings Wisdom.”’

‘Does it?’ she queried, thinking of Lance.

From the look in her eyes he guessed her thought.

‘Are you sorry you came up here—and saw him again?’

‘No—no. The strangest experience in my humdrum life. Of course it has hurt a bit. But there are just a few pains one would rather endure than miss.’

The fervour in her low tone made him half reluctant to put the pointed question, ‘Are there any you would rather endure than inflict?’

Stung by the implication she looked full at him.

‘I didn’t inflict—and I didn’t come here to be lectured. I’ve already had a display of fireworks yesterday from Mrs Desmond. And I met him out there just now—cool as an iceberg. You’re all making too much of an unlucky muddle. She chose to keep her name dark; and I couldn’t know the state she was in.’

‘You needn’t have spoken so about her friends—especially after what I had said.’

‘As you know, my opinions are not yours. And I thought she ought to realise—that she might be unmarried——’

‘I—see——’ he said slowly, taking it in. ‘That hadn’t occurred to me.’

And she saw she had scored a point—impromptu. That also would not occur to him.

‘Well, you can tell the others, if it interests them. I’m glad nothing worse came of it than a twisted ankle. But I don’t want to hear any more about her.—Here’s Lady Thorne—charming person. But in the circumstances, I’m urgently engaged elsewhere.—You might come over to-morrow and say good-bye.’ Her eyes softened on him. ‘I’m glad we met. I’m glad to have seen—Lance again. But I couldn’t stand much of it. I need a whiff of Simla to banish ghosts.’

In her graceful deliberate fashion she sauntered away, and made her excuses to Lady Thorne, who walked back with her into the house.

Sinclair, watching them go, was divided, as usual, between attraction, understanding and innate distrust of those few words with which she had deftly righted herself in his eyes. On the whole, understanding prevailed. She should have the benefit of the doubt. He would mention it casually to Lance, whose few hard words—had she heard them—would have hurt more than her vanity.

Thinking, half absently, of her, of that secretly unwilling mother and those thrice-blest young Desmonds—less absently of himself and Tara, with half the world thrust between them, yet more united in essence than many pedestrian bed-fellows who never slept apart—his mind was flooded, as with a light, by the artist’s heightened awareness of ordinary people and things, of those common mysteries, love and hate, doubt and desire, birth and death—mysteries unresolved by custom and repetition. To see fresh aspects of beauty and significance in things commonly taken for granted—that was the gift of gifts. It atoned for much stumbling by the way on the long dusty road between high beginnings and inadequate ends.

They had interrupted his novel, these few ordinary people: yet they had perhaps enriched it by opening corners of their minds to him—Rose in particular; and he was eternally interested in what he saw there, in the hidden springs of thought and feeling. The urge to understand pervaded, unconsciously, all light or serious traffic with his kind. Fodder for his art? In a sense that might be said of everything. He grew easily impatient of artist jargon. Before all else, he was a man. And among many ways of being man, this was not the least: to reveal life, to make others more alive to its rhythm, form and colour; to catch on the wing those revealing moments that reconcile the human spirit to many bewildering pains and penalties. Since lack of understanding was the root of much evil, to seek and promote it was a task worth all he could bring to it of insight, sympathy and the not altogether futile gift of words.

Meantime his final chapters remained to be written. For that he must be alone; and a curious familiar sense of detachment told him that his real self had already cut loose from these moorings. Already in spirit he was away in the higher Himalayas—source of India’s sacred rivers, of her wisdom, and her ancient faith.

Chapter 5

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it with a song? . . .
No. It is bought with the price of all that a man hath.
—William Blake

Mountains, mountains and again more mountains peaks and rugged masses, crags and chasms, sinister blue-green of glaciers, ghostly heights of perpetual snow: in every direction—as far as the eye could travel and leagues beyond—that vast crumpling of the earth’s crust that created her great main ranges: none loftier, none more majestic than these Titanic masses of Himalchān. From friendly foothills to unconquered Everest, they rise and fall and rise again, an entire world lifted up between earth and heaven; at once a challenge and a lure to the seeking, adventuring spirit of man.

If Roy Sinclair could not climb the highest, he had arrived, at last, within reach of the holiest, among many holy places, in this realm of the gods—Shiva’s cave-temple at Amarnáth.

Outside his small bell-tent, at the foot of a sprawling glacier, he sat cross-legged, in poshteen and turban, awaiting the dawn; the first glint of the hidden sun on some distant snow-peak that never lost its peculiar thrill. It was not far off now, and he was content to wait, hardly aware of cold, so windless was the mountain air.

Outside the second tent sat his fellow traveller—aloof, impressive, all life withdrawn from his body, centred in one point of his brain: the innermost self withdrawn farther still, beyond the realm of conscious thought. That darkly carved, motionless figure seemed one with this hour of hushed expectancy—the whole waiting earth still as a glacier lake.

Beside one of these they had encamped for the last two nights, had built themselves a roaring fire from broken stools and boxes left by the army of August pilgrims, returning from their yearly visit to Shiva’s mansion. These they had met and passed at Palghám: men, women and children from every corner of Hindu-India, hoping for grace or craving some boon; childless women, genuine seekers after wisdom, professional sadhus, smeared and distorted, playing on the Hindu’s queer reverence for the grotesque: all intent on the personal need or the path of merit, wholly indifferent to the beauty and majesty of their surroundings.

They had no waste energies, this god-ridden people, for the side-issues that intrigue Western man; though many, till now, had never seen mountains or snow or ice. Scorched by the mid-day sun, frozen by the breath of glaciers, unsheltered from monsoon torrents, compelled to bathe daily in some icy stream or tarn, they died in hundreds of cholera, dysentery and pneumonia. And watchful vultures, scarcely waiting for death, gorged till they could not fly.

It was impressive, unforgettable, that brief contact with pilgrim-India on the march; but twenty-four hours had sufficed. The pilgrims were not savoury neighbours; and his desire was for virtual solitude among these splendours: a blend of solitude and companionship with this unusual man, whom he had recognised at sight as guru and master. For guru⁵⁹ and chela⁶⁰ are not chosen. They meet—and are known to each other by some flash of intuition. It had been a strange sensation, that simple certainty: This is he whom I came out to meet. And the whole man gave an impression of inner spaciousness and stillness that drew his own thoughts irresistibly out of their secret crannies.

In brain and body, he seemed ageless, tireless. Living chiefly on milk, dates and fruit, he yet looked no starveling. Tall, spare and muscular, he strode with unhurried elastic tread up the steepest paths; no flagging, no shortness of breath. Nothing could now disturb his suavity and pose, his unfailing mental freshness, even after a hard day’s march, when Sinclair himself felt only fit for food and sleep.

Never—since the War years in Mesopotamia—had he lived so sparely and so strenuously. Never, till now had he seen the mountaineer of the West as a pilgrim also, in his different fashion; seeking no god in rock or cave, but rejoicing in the triumph of spirit over flesh. For himself, this sequence of climbing and camping and climbing again—watching new worlds unfold—was more than a journey to Amarnáth. Mysterious changes were at work in him; an increasing desire to understand these mountains, that so repel certain natures and so magnetically attract others; an exhilaration of spirit that outsoared his frequent weariness, the alternate discomforts of strong sun and sharp cold.

It was two weeks to-day since they had left his solitary camping ground above Sonamarg, where he had spent more than a month finishing his novel, and had laid it aside to mellow, leaving the way clear for the work that would make large demands on his mind, judgment and imagination, if he were ever to evolve a concrete book out of the mass of notes that grew and grew——

In this inimitable air, straight from snowfield and glacier, a man’s brain sparkled like snow crystals in sunlight. No achievement seemed beyond his powers. And beneath all physical discomforts, beneath the ache of separation, he felt within him the quiet pressure of deep tides that heralds great fruitfulness. All problems were in abeyance; not solved, but awaiting for some future—near or remote. All life elsewhere—even the best—seemed relative to life in this majestic world apart, midway between earth and heaven. It was almost as if he had slipped out of his named personality; so that he could hardly see himself settling down again in any restricted corner of earth, however beloved.

And there were, now, no letters to remind him that danger lurked in his long step aside from the ways of comfortable men. At Sonamarg he had received them regularly by runner; and had hoped for some arrangement on the march. But Sri Samádhi had decreed otherwise.

‘On this short pilgrimage, not even letters. To climb God’s mountains, all the time looking back, would be only a gesture of the body. Here we shall enter His earthly temple, remember the words of your own holy book. Not only “put the shoes from off your feet,” but cleanse the thoughts of your hearts.’

Against that apt reminder there could be no appeal. Letters must wait at Srinagar till they could be sent to Lake Vishn Sar, where Sri Samádhi had proposed a week’s halt on their downward journey, below the sacred lake of Gangabāl.

By now, the ache of deprivation had been stilled to an unearthly, yet not inhuman calm. He had received, from these magnetic mountains, so large a portion of their enduring quietness, that he could even think of Tara with tranquillity. Their very austerity and aloofness awoke in him a deeper self, that was at home with them, that swept him on an invisible tide to ‘shores where things are not lost . . .’

Trained by now, to a measure of physical endurance and mental calm, he sat there wrapt in thought, not heeding the chill breath from the glacier, but glad of his sheepskin. The Guru, impervious to heat or cold, wore only the yellow robe of holiness. When the sun’s first ray touched him, he would slip out of his semi-trance as a normal man wakes from sleep, would murmur the ancient Gayatri, breakfast on a bowl of goat’s milk and fall to discussing India’s future with his blend of worldly knowledge and unworldly wisdom, his ripe experience and shrewd judgment of men and events. For he had not lost touch with the world when he discarded the fruits of achievement. His sanity emphasised the intrinsic difference between keeping some contact with it, and letting one’s mind become imbued with its false values. Sinclair could have found no fitter companion with whom to visit the cave of Amarnáth—the most impressive natural temple in Northern India.

They would reach it to-day, by a short-cut—steeply up, steeply down. And to-day was at hand.

Already the invisible sun was draining darkness out of the sky, draining light from the primrose-pale moon that hung above the western heights. Star after star flickered out. Mountain peaks and rugged shoulders emerged from the night; giants of earth, pale and clear as alabaster against the awakening sky. Banked mist and long drifts of cloud took on the nameless hue, ‘between a blush and a flame,’ the hue of light reborn.

Colour vanished, swift as a flitting thought. The whole east palpitated with radiance rushing upward, as from a fountain unsealed. Peak after peak caught the living ray. Dissolving mists unveiled hidden splendours. And yet all was not revealed. Higher still, incredibly high, one solitary peak looked out from a bank of cloud to greet the risen sun—now appearing in a blaze of glory, raking the valley from end to end.

In that blaze, a phantom world leaped from mystery of dawn to reality of morning. Warmth ran through Sinclair’s chilled veins. Light without awakened light within. And at its touch the carved, clean-shaven face of the holy one was transfigured. His lips murmured soundlessly, greeting the risen sun, as all devout Hindus had greeted him from age to age.

Sinclair, closing his eyes, murmured the same greeting, fit prayer for any faith: ‘O Thou Sun, now hidden by a disc of gold, may we know Thy Reality and do our whole duty on our journey to Thy Light’ . . .

The short-cut proved long enough and steep enough to test even practised muscles. Without haste, without rest, those two unconsidered atoms went zigzagging up to the snow cornice whence they would drop sheer to Amarnáth. Distorted pinnacles of rocky crag, squat turrets, scored into queer natural lingams, might well seem an approach to Shiva’s mansion designed by the gods themselves. And in that savage wildness they two were alone.

From the gleaming snow cornice on the summit they looked straight down into Shiva’s cave, a natural fissure in the great barren mountain that thrust a rugged flank into Ladakh. None passed beyond it, except the few birds of the region, favoured spirits of the wild, who alone have the freedom of earth and sea and sky.

Nothing was here of the dawn’s exhilaration; no beauty but the naked strength of Himalchān—bleak, ominous, forbidding, as it were the end of things created. Clouds had engulfed the sun. A rush of wind swept across the gully, raw and cold. As often, in life, the expected climax was tinged with vague disappointment.

The holy one, seemingly aware, said in his even tone, ‘To me, this lonely, priestless shrine is greater than all the much-carved temples of Benares and the South, where Brahmins rob half-starved worshippers and clean fumes of incense mingle with the smell of blood. There is nothing like it in all these hills. When we enter the cave, you will feel the power and the presence not of Shiva only but of the God beyond all gods.—Is your breathing controlled again, my friend? Shall we go down?’

An hour’s rough scramble and the crossing of a snow bridge brought them to the entrance of that Himalayan cathedral. Instinctively they paused on the threshold—and knew that they were not alone.

From a lower slab of rock a thin drift of smoke trailed upward; and stepping aside they beheld the squatting form of a yogi, cadaverous, repulsive and stark naked, except for the orthodox rag of protest against decency. Crossed-legged he sat, beside a fire of half-dead ashes rhythmically swaying and bowing, from side to side, backwards and forwards; his ashen locks, like strands of rope, falling limply this way and that. No sound came from him of chant or prayer; and at sight of an intruder on his sacred contortions, hatred burned in his sunken eyes.

Sinclair, disgusted and repelled, turned away to find Sri Samádhi standing close beside him—tall and statuesque in his simple yellow robe, the finely modelled face smooth and firm as if wrought in bronze. Incredible it seemed, that they two could be disciples of one creed.

And again, as before, the other answered his thought.

‘I see what is in your mind, my friend,’ he said, his grave eyes softened to a smile. ‘No magic! Only Indians are often skilful in reading faces; and just now I saw your thought of that yogi. Unsightly, I admit; yet a man of faith—perhaps of vision. It needs great faith to remain alone and naked, in these high cold solitudes, on the threshold of divine mysteries. He is doubtless practising some severe form of yoga A strange presence might cause frustration——’

‘“It is easier to condemn than understand,”’ quoted Sinclair.——‘Yes—I was repelled. But I salute the faith and courage of any man who remains here alone and unsheltered. Forgive my thought, Guru-ji,’ he added simply, and stepped back, startled, as two pigeons flew past, almost brushing his face, rising and circling overhead.

The holy one gravely saluted them. ‘They are the only living things,’ he said, ‘that dwell in this temple. The saddhus call them Shiva and Parbutti, believing them to be spirits of the Great God and his wife. It is said that they never change or multiply or die—who knows? They are there always. They have given us an auspicious greeting. Now we will go in.’

The dusky cave was cold as its frozen mysteries; and Sinclair followed his yellow-robed Master, not without a perceptible reluctance, as if some unknown, irresistible power were drawing him into the depths of this fathomless creed. He preferred the morning’s baptism of Surya, the Sun, to the lurking god within those tentacles of unnatural-looking green ice—phallic symbols of Shiva’s creative energy. No spark of created life in this his dwelling-place. Two hundred feet down slept a frozen torrent; and high overhead swooped a vast arch; no mere cave roof but a natural inner curve of the mountain, that suggested a roughly hewn mansion, only fit for a god.

Sri Samádhi had paused beside the twin lingams. With a gesture of salutation he said very low, ‘“In my heart’s temple doth the silence fall, worshipping thee, thou silent Majestic.”’

On the ice he laid a few flowers picked for that purpose on the march—potentilla, blue geraniums and the mauve wild onion. Then he passed on; and Sinclair, following, also saluted the Reality behind the symbol. But he had no offering. It hurt him to see those lovely living things left to shrivel on the green ice of that sinister-looking altar. Yet, in Shiva’s vaulted temple, he was inly aware of a Something known to some ancient part of him, though rejected by his conscious civilised brain——

It was a relief to stand once more in the entrance, where pale sunlight greeted them, and the mountain dropped steeply down to the stream—escaped from the clutch of ice, making a cheerful noise in that bleak solitude.

No sound of prayer or chanting from the yogi, who continued his silent swayings, heedless now of two passing shadows: perhaps unaware. To Sinclair he still seemed repulsive, unimpressive, for all his sanctity, for all his faith . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

After Shiva’s stark temple, even Spartan bell tents had a friendly air. The freshly lit fire of juniper crackled and spurted flames that flung strange shadows on the ground and on the faces of the two men, who basked in the warmth after their evening meal. Ragged clouds had rolled up and made the sunset a smoky blaze, as if the hill-tops were on fire. Now the sky was burnt clear of them and stars rushed out, quivering points of flame that boded a night of frost.

This was the hour when talk flourished between them, their faces only half revealed in the uncertain light. Sometimes they spoke of world problems—the prevailing spirit of chaos and disillusion. For Sri Samádhi had spent several years in Europe, had travelled all over India, seeking to open eyes that refused to see, and ears that refused to hear, those things which alone could promote understanding between East and West.

‘Most educated Indians now,’ he said, ‘have lost faith in the spiritual future of their country. They think of nothing but politics or revolution. They follow Gandhi because he mixes politics with holiness; but few heed the wisdom of Tagore, because he tells them that only by work and service for their fellows can they hope to gain true Swaráj. When I spoke so, they told me I was offering a heavenly stone to those who needed earthly bread. Perhaps they will find the bread turn to ashes when they have thrown away the heavenly stone.’

But to-night Sri Samádhi dwelt chiefly on the puzzle that Hinduism presents to Western thinkers by accepting all the ‘pairs of opposites,’ ugly and beautiful, gross and spiritual, seeing in its three thousand gods and goddesses various aspects of the One Supreme Reality.

‘But do the masses see them that way?’ Sinclair ventured.

‘Very few, I fear. Because everywhere, ignorance and credulity are profitable to priests. Everywhere the divine is dispensed through human vessels; and the higher Hinduism must not be judged by the low. If it has fallen from its ideals, the same can be said of other creeds. It stands for what you call spiritual values; believing that the soul of man can—if it will—triumph over those automatic forces that everywhere threaten it in this machine-ruled age. It perceives the threefold Divine in endless forms. It sees room in the world for everything. How can a faith so all-embracing make terms with fanatical Islam, or narrow, church-bound forms of Christianity?’

The direct question, the holy one’s honest defence of his faith, moved Sinclair to speak of his own dream that India might yet be renewed through the harmonising of those very creeds—diverse in formula, yet rising from one source; that so she might achieve a unity more real and lasting than political dreams of federation.

Instinctive reluctance to let himself go was charmed away by some answering echo in the mind of his Master, who listened attentively and nodded slowly.

‘It is the East in you,’ he said, ‘that gives you so remarkable a vision. Doubtless our hope lies in evolving some over-soul of this vast land. But India must first reform herself from within, instead of always blaming the gods or the Government for her faults as well as their own. She must learn to blame her own social system, her extravagant princes, and communal hatreds. Capacity for self-blame—sure mark of creative ability—is found in only a few of our finest minds. Most Hindus would rather make sacrifices to gods, and have all worked out from above, than sacrifice time and leisure to working out their own salvation. There is a lesson you can teach them in this book of yours—that strength without can only come from strength within. India must gain for herself what her politicians are demanding as a right.’

For a long moment he gazed searchingly at the man in whom East and West contended for mastery.

‘Are you yet able to tell me more about this book, my friend?’

Again it needed the direct question to open that particular door in Sinclair’s mind; so that he found himself able to speak—almost with relief—of things brooded on and roughly jotted down; of his own twofold understanding, that could feel with India’s natural desire for a larger share of governing responsibility, yet could see with the eyes of a man like John Lynch how slow the process must be, how dangerous the attempt to hasten it unduly. Drawn on by the other’s stillness of attention, he spoke also of the pregnant phrase, in one small book, that had lit up his brain and fired his own ambition to quicken the ‘precarious residue of hope that India’s foremost thinkers might combine with the saving remnant of idealism in Europe to preserve creative values and renew the Western world.’

Precisely because he saw both sides too clearly, he could offer no quack prophecies on the outcome of India’s stormy transit through formlessness to new and higher forms of federation. But he could conceive out of age-long conflict, the blossoming of a profound religious harmony. And in that day, it might be India’s privilege to prove that the practical scientific triumphs of Europe were not ends in themselves—as reckoned by the West—but passports to realms of new knowledge; heralding a change of values, a spiritual revolution comparable to the mental and physical revolution of the nineteenth century.

‘But it must remain,’ he insisted, ‘for one of India’s own Rishis⁶¹ to give her the mantram of that God who belongs alike to Hindu, Moslem, Christian and Brahmo; not only God of India, but of the whole Universe. Then may the great Akbar’s Din-i-Iláhi⁶² prove to be no vain dream after all.’

In the silence that fell, Sinclair was acutely aware of the rushing stream, of a servant coughing, and of the other’s dark eyes brooding on his shadowy face.

When at last that other spoke he seemed to draw his words from as deep a source as he drew his breath.

‘It will remain also, my friend, for you to convince your own people—at these dangerous cross-roads—that their true allies are the thinkers of India—not the talkers. For centuries her wise men have had their eagle’s nest in the Himalayas, have kept alive the supreme Hindu faith in the unity of all men living. Not equality, by any means; but unity of being, under every degree of difference. It was your own Warren Hastings who said that the writers of Indian philosophy would survive when British Dominion in India had long passed away. You—English and Rajput—may help to defer the passing of that Dominion, to which we owe more than many will admit; and also hasten the birth of India renewed.’

Again the compelling eyes searched his face. ‘This is a great work to which you have set your hand and brain.’

‘Too great, I sometimes fear, for my limited powers and knowledge.’

It was no mere modest disclaimer. It sprang from deeper fears that he neither could nor would reveal.

‘Not if you are willing to dedicate yourself to all the thinking and writing it will require of you. Too many men waste half their powers nibbling at this and that. As for knowledge—it has been wisely said that “we all know more than we think is knowable.” In the strength of that unknown knowledge go forward. Live for your driving idea, as a good mother lives for her child. In a few short months you have gathered much. But, for clear vision, you must detach yourself, for a time, from everything, even from your usual way of life.’

While Sinclair’s mind confirmed that sage counsel, fear knocked at his heart: fear of the way wherein he was being led by this magnetic teacher and the too-responsive Eastern blood in his veins.

‘But I have a home and lands to preserve for my son,’ he said, feeling vexatiously like one of those who were called and began to make excuse. ‘I have a wife and children. I leave India in a couple of months.’

Another long pause; and again the words came slowly as if drawn from the depths.

‘In that case—you can have no true message. You can only make a book of experiences, as too many have done. I had supposed that you aimed higher; that for you this journey was a pilgrimage of the spirit.’

The words, the tone, gave Sinclair a chill sensation of being gently set aside—weighed and found wanting. For the first time, in these days of unique companionship, he found speech difficult. But he could not accept, unchallenged, an implication of falling from grace.

‘You would have me turn my back on wife and home on the duties of my English heritage?’ he asked, a note of rebellion in his low tone.

‘Turn your back——? No. That is your karma. What said Kabir, the inspired weaver——? “In home is the true union; in home is the abiding place.” I had neither wife nor home when I turned my back on the world of striving and getting and spending. But in you there are two men; therefore a double demand on your unusual powers. To me it seems that India asks of you a work not only of the mind but of the spirit. To achieve it, you must put all things else behind—for a time.’

‘How long a time?’ The question seemed forced from him; and he dreaded the answer.

To the man who lived virtually outside time, it may have seemed irrelevant.

‘Impossible to measure such things by weeks or days. When you have achieved clear seeing, you will know. Living alone, in the silence of these mountains, you will acquire new perceptions. I would not prescribe solitude for all. It might prove as fatal to some as yoga practice often proves to men of the West. Also there is a profound distinction between the inner quiet of balanced faculties and the mere turning away from life because a man fears to face its demands. But you are a poet. You have the imagination, the temperament for lonely communing with Nature——’

‘Half of me has,’ Sinclair honestly admitted. ‘The other half needs home and love and quiet life.’

‘Yes. I see that the conflict of your two selves is at once your difficulty and the source of your genius. From that very conflict there may yet arise an Over-Self, who can use both for his purpose. But to reach those heights of inner certitude you must be prepared to sacrifice—for a time—all lesser desires and joys to the greater end. In our belief, renunciation is the first step to clear seeing.’

It was as if the point of a dagger pricked Sinclair’s heart. He had been reared to discipline, not to renunciation; and he could not accept without protest a dictum that evoked no genuine response.

‘But how if that involves sacrificing, to uncertain ends, others who are dearer to me than life? How could I make them understand what has come to me up here?’

The grave face lightened to a friendly smile.

‘From experience I know that is the hardest thing of all—to convince another of one’s true need and motive. But that you will achieve through your sincerity and gift of words; and those others who love you will respect your need. Of this you can rest assured: that, when you reach the heights of certainty I spoke of, you will experience an inner change of attitude more vital than any austerities. Once that has come to pass, you can return to live your normal life, to write your great book and move through the world—a sadhu in your heart. Because of that, India will recognise your voice; and you will not speak in vain.——’

In the quiet flow of words there was no urgency, no attempt at persuasion. The man simply stated that which he knew. It was for Sinclair, who had recognised him as guru, to accept the consequence of his own act—or to disown the East in his blood.

Perceiving that, he could say nothing. Too potently he felt within him the surge of a deep calm river bearing him on its quiet tide to unseen shores

The fire had flickered low; here a ruby red spark there an impish flame. But when the shadowy figure emerged with more fuel, Sri Samádhi waved him away.

‘Time to sleep,’ he said, ‘if we start at dawn.’

And as they stood up Sinclair made an instinctive salutation to the man who had attained; the man who had no shadow of doubt that he, too, within his measure, would attain.

Alone again in his cramped tent, bodily weariness and the warmth of his sleeping bag discouraged clear thinking. But clearer than thought lurked the foreknowledge of an ultimate inescapable challenge—the challenge of his warring selves.

Then, like a whisper—far, far at the back of his brain—there returned to him that half-forgotten pointed phrase, ‘Double gifts, fourfold sacrifice—’

And again it was as if the tip of a dagger pricked his heart——

Chapter 6

Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of so strange nature—that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth.
—Shakspere

Early evening, on the shores of Lake Vishn Sar, was a scene to refresh the eye and lift the heart: streams and peaty meadow-land starred with flowers and alive with birds: the jade-green lake itself, set in avalanche cliffs, and mighty ramparts of the Vishna Mountains; their naked crags and buttresses striking a peculiar thrill of discord with the gracious foreground.

On a flat rock, overlooking a mass of tumbled moraine, Sinclair sat alone in the Indian dress that he had worn these many weeks, for ease and comfort, not for disguise. To their small retinue, he was known as a Sahib—the most unaccountable of God’s creatures—and respected accordingly.

Four days earlier their tramp through high and wild regions had culminated in his first vision of Lake Gangabāl, loveliest and loneliest of glacier lakes, lying in the rough embrace of Haramokh: a wall of scarred ice-cliffs, beneath a rugged crown of peaks—the most impressive rock-face in all Kashmir. Less remote and austere than Amarnáth, it was far more beautiful—a ghostly spiritual beauty all its own: fit climax to a pilgrimage that left him with a haunting sense of having been caught up into heaven and dropped back to earth. It was as if he had tasted a strange new wine, and the flavour of it would not soon pass away. Never again, after all that, could he quite slip back into his normal shell.

And now here he sat alone on this sun-flooded rock, letters and papers strewn around him, the world crashing in upon his solitude, evoking a confusion of feeling dominated by the pleasure of renewed contact with Tara and his personal world, with an India—increasingly perturbed.

Tara’s three long letters absorbed him, for a while, to the exclusion of the rest. But all the other human threads he had dropped were tugging afresh at his heart: Aruna, Lance, Vincent, Bápu, Suráj—escaped from joint-family toils and the threat of a second wife. First Delhi and the Nilkant Rāos; then—Peshawar.

And there were threads other than personal pulling him back to earth; news of startling changes near and far. News of the near changes had met him on the road: tales of a local insurrection; Moslem Kashmiris in open rebellion against a Hindu Maharajah and state officials; even the ‘Happy Valley’ invaded by the prevailing spirit of strife.

It was the common case of a spark blown to a flame. A Hindu police sergeant, rating a Moslem for some minor delinquency, had flung down his sacred Koran with his bedding. For that grave offence he had been solemnly tried and forced to retire on a pension. Irate Moslems had declared the sentence inadequate. Before he left the prison, it had been raided, the police called out, harmless men and women killed, shops wrecked, the whole of Srinagar panic-stricken—all to avenge one insulted Koran. Swift measures had restored a surface calm. But the cry had gone up that the officials of a Hindu Maharajah were treating Moslems unfairly; and his people were four-fifths Moslem. All over Kashmir—and beyond—agitation had been fanned into more than communal hatred; Punjab and Border Moslems, forming themselves in jathas,⁶³ had threatened to invade Kashmir. And in British India the political situation was sliding rapidly downhill: Government badly hampered by the Delhi pact, in dealing with revolutionary activities; Bhagat Singh-worship—deplored by the Mahatma—still very much the fashion; British officers and loyal Indians paying the price of Government lenience with their lives.

July alone had a black record: a Calcutta doctor shot point-blank by three young Bengalis; two officers asleep in the mail train, murderously attacked, one killed, the other wounded. And only a week later public indignation had flared up over the murder of a distinguished Calcutta judge. Against these point-blank shootings, by men who courted ‘martyrdom,’ no effective protection was possible. Loyal Government servants—British and Indian—went quietly about——‘the day’s employ,’ taking their lives in their hands. Meetings of protest—calling for sterner measures—had been convened in Calcutta by men of all professions, British and Indian. Net result: an epidemic of special ordinances, that spread a deceptive calm over the surface, but left the hidden canker untouched.

And there was Gandhi, in a recent paper, seated on a table, abject and half-naked, before a group of Congress leaders, tearfully admitting that his Nationalist movement had produced a state of Hindu-Moslem friction more acute than it had ever been since the advent of British rule.

‘At war with each other, torn from within, how can we attain Swaráj?’ he sagely queried, at that late hour. ‘When Hindus and Moslems fight, I feel I am a sinner, because I am responsible for this political awakening. . . . I am losing faith, I am unnerved. When I see this state of affairs, I feel that my place is not in London——’

It was a sound conclusion for the man of many faces. But not for one moment did Sinclair believe that the homeward boat would sail without Mahatma Gandhi, havering to the last. Neither, it seemed, did Vincent Leigh.

‘We shall see Gandhi in London yet,’ he wrote from his summer quarters up at Nathia Gully. headlines for the press, and embarrassing the the Round Table!

‘India can well do without him for a few months. A.G.K. and our Red Shirts will amply fill the bill. The Frontier situation is more dangerous than the Home people realise—or possibly care to realise. They’ve enough else to worry them, with our credit falling all over the world, our currency sinking, and most of our Labour leaders discredited.

‘But the Tribes are watching keenly for the first signs of weakening in the hands that hold the keys of India. A mysterious whisper has been allowed to creep in and spread through this Province: “The British are going. Afghans and Afridis are coming.” They’ve seen the Afridis come once, not without effect; and they know very well that all the young bloods—Youth League and Red Shirts—are spoiling for a fight. Now Kashmir blazes up, of all kingdoms on earth! The Maharajah is a sound man and broad-minded; but the whole machinery of State wants overhauling. I’ve written my views at some length to Thorne, so I won’t empty any more of my official bilge water over you!

‘Lucky fellow you are to be outside it all. Wish I could be with you among those noble mountains. I know your companion. He’s one of their best. And the higher Hinduism would have an even stronger pull for you than it has for me. Kubberdar!⁶⁴ You would do well to get out of Kashmir in September. I don’t think the trouble is over, and you’ll be very welcome in Peshawar. I’ll be glad to have Lance back there again. Delighted to hear you two have struck up a friendship. He has many of his uncle’s fine qualities with a wider range of mind. And he has a way with these people.

‘Thea joins me in love.—Yours ever,

‘V. L.’

Sinclair’s eyes and mind travelled again over the last half-sheet. He did not miss the hidden note of warning in that brief allusion to the higher Hinduism, that light Kubberdar! Vincent, a born contemplative, knew how potent, how insidious, was the call to turn aside from life’s warring complexities, to seek ‘the Reality concealed by the unrealities of the visible world.’ He himself, poet and scholar—troubled by the sceptical modern spirit—could be neither true sádhu nor true man of the world. But, in a week of marching from Amarnáth to Gangabāl, he had given much thought to the words of his Guru, ‘You must put all things else behind you—for a time’: had virtually decided to follow his counsel, and remain at present apart from his kind in the interests of one commanding purpose; enjoy the flaming autumn glories of Kashmir, and only visit Peshawar for a few brief farewells.

It was a counsel of perfection, easier to follow in the abstract than to act on, when it came to realising all he must forego. As usual, he was up against the familiar counter-pull. His ascendant self having reached a decision, the suppressed self must needs begin to insinuate its own point of view. Even the self of one-natured men was a Protean thing. His own twin-self was a very chameleon, changing colour as it caught the light from East or West. After weeks of response to the Eastern light—a clear, compelling radiance—it was now responding irresistibly to the more familiar warmer glow of the West; to concerted assaults upon his very human sympathies, interest and affection.

Here was Vincent advising him to get out of Kashmir in September. Here was Aruna—who had seized a chance of three weeks in Gulmarg, only to find him gone—beset by a human problem, hard to handle without help from the practical wisdom of Grace and the sympathetic insight of Roy.

It was the case of a Hindu trader’s daughter, in her own special village, a girl just turned fifteen, of unusual talent and character, cramped by the normal Hindu home atmosphere and marriage arrangements; early betrothed to a man of forty, whose first wife had given him no son. She was now at the critical stage between the first wedding ceremony, which left her still in her father’s house, and the final consummation that would remove her from mother to mother-in-law and purdah for the rest of her days.

‘Against those iron bars of fate,’ wrote Aruna with her instinct for poetic imagery, ‘she is beating her wings like a newly caged bird; longing to break from purdah and work for the new India, that can only come through releasing her women from the fetters put on their minds and their lives.

‘After the final ceremony they will take her to a village far from here, to a very orthodox mother-in-law, and her wings will be cut beyond hope of flight. Her only chance is in the short time that remains before leaving her own home and entering his. But she needs help from outside. And of course she is begging for mine. She has a spirit and brain beyond her years. Not at all the ordinary shy Indian girl. She has managed to learn some Urdu and English. Also to get hold of cheap English books full of advanced ideas. She has even written two articles in the vernacular about freedom for women—and they were published by a Lahore Indian paper! She is pressing me constantly for help; and it is a big responsibility, Roy. I know there is a price to be paid even for freedom, which the young don’t realise.

‘I have begged Rajini to have patience till Grace returns. She is so strong and sure. With her it is always straight “Yes” or “No”—and clear reasons given. I am Indian. I judge too much perhaps through my heart.

‘I haven’t liked to trouble dear Lady Leigh, who is still away, always busy with many duties and kindnesses to English and Indians. It will be twilight in Peshawar when she leaves us. And it will be clear sunlight, Roy, on the day you return, after so many months, to help, with wise counsel and understanding—Your

‘Aruna.’

‘Suráj is here too in high spirits. We both impatiently await your coming. Write soon to say when it will be.’

Suráj in high spirits, heading for disappointment, tugged more sharply at his heart-strings than the problem of that unknown Indian girl, though she might be a famous pioneer in embryo. Grace, with her fine blend of sympathy and common-sense, was the woman for such a case; and Aruna’s dependence on Grace and himself, for all her fervent convictions, was typical East. Her plea, following on Vincent’s advice, gave the scales a definite tilt towards Peshawar. And deep down, behind all that, lurked the vague, unformulated fear of what these mountains and the higher Hinduism might do to him if he yielded to their spell.

With the letter from Suráj in his hand, he looked up at the evening loveliness of lake and mountain, smitten to new splendours by a low sun that would vanish some time before it set. Above the dragon’s teeth of the Vishna Mountains long lines of broken cloud revealed a strip of clear green sky—a pale inland sea between silver shores. And there, beside the lake, the tall yellow-robed holy one moved with his measured step, his air of perfect poise in body and mind. Though he made no appeal to the heart, he had won, in this short time, more than Roy Sinclair’s allegiance and esteem. What would he think of his companion’s inner wrestlings between mind and spirit, West and East? He, too, had his batch of newspapers and his few letters; but these created no eddies in the quiet waters of his soul.

In weeks of close companionship, silent or speaking, Sinclair had arrived at a clearer understanding of the call to discard achievements, possessions and personal relations; a shedding of the outer man, towards which the latent yogi in him leaned instinctively, while the Sinclair in him saw it as a lofty form of spiritual self-indulgence. Here, in these high solitudes, all complexities would be resolved. Here thought could seem one’s natural companion; thought illumined by a clearer perceptiveness, a stilling of the soul, such as he had briefly experienced in the white silence of his camp beyond Khanbāl.

Down there in Peshawar—problems and responsibilities, the fever and the fret, the beauty and goodness, the bewildering muddle and pain of things as they are. But down there also, the warmth and friendship of human fellowship; those who could give much and those who needed much that he could give. If he could help any one of them, surely his place was there. And he, himself, had still so much to see and learn about this rapidly changing India. Impossible to tell in which direction lurked the seductive voice of special pleading——

The letter from Suráj forced his wandering mind back to practical concerns. It was dated a week earlier than Aruna’s, written from Delhi, full of kind messages from the Nilkant Rāos, of his own prowess in the football field and success in reciting the new cantos of his epic. Happy, one-natured Suráj; concerned not at all with the mysteries of Hinduism or the glories of Himalchān. There was a good deal, in an excitable strain, about Communist activities—increasing everywhere since the pact, especially among students—and the Pundit’s concern that Government made no move to check the epidemic of pamphlets now being sold openly, or scattered abroad among villages and schools.

‘Look what I have lately received, and several other students who may be budding poets. This fine competition is sent by some ‘comrade’ calling himself ‘Director,’ heading his slip of paper “Long live the Indian Revolution!”’

A printed cutting was pinned to the yellow sheet; and Sinclair read:

‘All poets are invited to take part in the revolutionary symposium. Poems should be written in an independent strain and convert the people to Bolshevism wholly. They should deal with extreme nationalism, with wretched conditions of peasants and labourers, encouraging organisation; with Bolshevism and open Jehad against Imperialist and Capitalist.’

And Suráj added by way of comment:

‘We are also told that the Goddess of Liberty is crying out to all young patriots: “The sacrifices made for me are insufficient.

‘“I live by plundering whole families.

‘“I drink the blood of children.

‘“See how the Russian workmen have preserved their dignity.” (Is that true? S. M.) “Throw headlong those who strut about as august persons.”

‘Do you dare to strut as an august person, Roy? If that is your habit, your fate is sealed!

‘But putting aside nonsense, this is dangerous stuff for some inflammable youths. Not for me. I am Rajput, aristocrat in blood and bone. We caste Hindus know that all men are not equally fit to govern, to lead armies, to sell or to plough. The Pundit is very pleased with my strong views about this Communist stuff. He encourages me to have talks with his students, because I express true Indian feeling.

‘So your lazy Suráj is doing some sort of work besides polishing up Urdu and the fun of playing with words. I expect you to write and say Shahbash! I wonder how it is in Moslem Peshawar? For them, these clever devils have a different bait. I long to be there, and I go soon. Write to me—Aruna’s address. She will know where I lodge. Without you, I am casual Indian. I make no plans. Come soon, and cheer the heart of your friend,

‘Suráj Mul.’

‘Come soon.’ That was the burden of them all. Only Tara, whose need was the deepest, left it to be read between the lines. What would be the verdict of Sri Samádhi if he were allowed to see these letters?

And here—last of the batch, by no means the least welcome—was a short letter from Lance, telling how they had deserted ‘suburbia’ for an idyllic camping ground above Sonamarg—the first stage on their adventurous honeymoon trek, three years ago.

‘We decided,’ he wrote, ‘that another honeymoon was our due, after that long spell of judicial separation! Only faint echoes reach us of the Srinagar eruption. Fancy the Kashmiri Moslem in revolt! But revolt is the fashion from sweepers upward. Only the patient Sahib can be trusted to carry on somehow, whichever end up he finds himself!

‘Local grievances may be the cause of this flare up; but Hindu-Moslem ill-feeling has been terribly intensified everywhere by the brutalities of Cawnpore. You can’t mop up a mess like that by running an official enquiry and counting the fragments that remain. It’ll be jam for the Red Shirts, but not for poor Uncle Vines and the Peshawar authorities.

‘By the way, I’ve got my marching orders. Middle of September. A bit early for Eve, but she refuses to be shelved any more. She says she signed on for “better or worse”—and it might be worse! Isn’t she smart? We may leave the Atom to follow when Vanessa comes down for a visit to Aunt Thea. Give me a chance of having my wife on my own for a bit. She’s been bothered again with those shattering headaches—sinus trouble, I’m afraid. She may have to see the specialist at Pindi hospital. My faith in these chaps isn’t even as a grain of mustard seed. Bet she’ll find he has never met the complaint before!

‘And look here—when do you leave this earthly paradise? We’ve a plan to try the Banihal Pass route. The chief’s lending his tourer. Can’t you fix your date to fit ours and join the adventure——?

‘Eve’s looking over my shoulder now to see if I am maligning her! She says it’s hukm. So just resign yourself to the inevitable and send in your official resignation ek dum!

‘Hope this finds you somewhere, somewhen. Profound salaams from—Yours ever,

‘L. D.’

(‘Also equally yours, E. D.’ in Eve’s handwriting.)

That spontaneous letter and tempting invitation knocked the last brick out of his high resolve to forego Peshawar and play the hermit in Kashmir. It was good to feel how pleased they would all be when he gave them a definite date for his return: Grace not least, though in absence one lost her completely; some masculine strain in her, or years of being too busy for the luxury of letter-writing. Decidedly he would drive down with that engaging pair; and to-morrow he would send in his official resignation to the inevitable. There would still remain nearly a month for concentration on his evolving book. When he parted company with Sri Samádhi, he would choose an apt spot for a lonely encampment, where he would work and work——

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

That evening, over the camp fire, while they talked of the Kashmir upheaval, Sinclair took an opportunity to mention Sir Vincent’s advice and his own decision. He spoke of Suráj and Aruna, of the many human tangles and threads that bound him to the world of action.

And the other—watching his fire-lit face—said gravely: ‘To each his own destiny, which he must either follow or command. There are some, it is true, who best attain to realisation through action. You know our threefold path to the threefold Godhead: Gnana, the way of knowledge; Bhakti, the way of devotion; Karma, the way of service. For highest development, there is need of all three. You have within you forces not yet developed, or even divined. You have a word to say for India, perhaps for the world—also not yet divined. You are of those who can reach the eternal snows of the spirit; and the way thither lies here, among the eternal snows of Himalchān.’

Sinclair, as he listened, felt again the cold clutch of fear on his heart, so that he could not answer at once. Then; ‘If that is indeed my karma,’ he said in a contained voice, ‘it’s possible, when this trouble quiets down, that I may return.’

‘You will return.’

The unshakeable certainty of those three words startled Sinclair with a sudden reminder of Tara’s: ‘You will go.’

As then, so now, he heard in them the voice of Destiny.

Chapter 7

Neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men.
— Kipling

Under two fine old shisham trees—still in full summer leafage, though October had arrived—young Lance Desmond, Assistant Commissioner of Peshawar District, was holding his daily camp kutcherri, sitting at a table, in khaki coat, breeches and sun-helmet; the case of the moment confronting him; men of local importance ranged apart on Windsor chairs. Coming cases, and a mixed audience, formed an outer ring, squatting on their haunches, long arms hanging over scrawny knees. And beside Lance, in an easy canvas chair, sat the one privileged intruder—Roy Sinclair, very completely returned to earth.

Writing-tablet on knee, helmet pulled half over his eyes, he appeared to be taking no special interest in the proceedings. Actually he missed little of what was relevant to the record he was flinging down in shorthand: an attempt at giving his own people a glimpse into the real administration of India, as it still prevailed on the Frontier: one young Englishman and his senior officer responsible for law and order, for the adjustment of ceaseless quarrels, the upholding of common human decency, in districts often the size of an English county.

There sat one of them, a boy of twenty-seven—who had, for two years, been representing his country in a mediaeval State of wildest northern India—putting every ounce of himself into his daily quota of frauds, thievings, adulteries; punishing some, admonishing others, or bringing into violent quarrels some telling joke, that raised a laugh and banished anger. In the unspectacular fashion of his kind, he was truly and indifferently administering justice to a race of men who, by temperament, would rather accept any arbitration than make the necessary effort to solve their own troubles: a weakness that was laying heavy burdens on Round Table politicians at home.

Since rural India had need of lesser gods for daily use its people might do worse—Sinclair reflected—than put their faith in a Lance Desmond, or others of his quality who could be trusted to carry on till the Deluge, doing things that no one in England knew of, or troubled about; content to do them because their chosen work was their religion—to scamp it or desert it the unforgivable sin. Vincent was right; Lance had a ‘way’ with these people. He could chaff them and argue with them without losing his inner apartness, his command of the situation. This was personal Government as India understood it. And until the North had changed out of recognition, not all the conferences in creation could devise a sounder, more indigenous form of administration.

Thoughts along these lines Sinclair was jotting down on his tablet, while Lance—the impatient one—dealt patiently with a virulent duet between two peasant landowners; the lean peasant accusing his plump neighbour of tampering with the tiny runnel of canal water that ran between their fields; creeping out night by night, and secretly widening the little tributary, so that a larger share of water might visit his own crops. The neighbour’s denial went for nothing; so common was the device among men for whom the little more or less, of life-giving water, meant just the difference between stomachs fairly well filled or semi-starvation.

And while they were at it, crescendo, da capo, Sinclair scribbled on his tablet a half-forgotten verse of early Kipling:

“He eats and he hath indigestion,
He toils and he may not stop,
His life is a long-drawn question
Between a crop—and a crop.”

Peasant India in a nutshell.

Lance was summing up now in his best humorous vein; detailing one of his men to go with the voluble pair, examine the rivulet and bring a report. As they went off together, he caught Sinclair’s eye and grinned.

‘Of course the plump beggar did it,’ he said. ‘So would the other, if he got the chance. They’ll bribe my man, turn about, for all they’re worth.—And the next thing, please?’

He pulled out and lit a cigarette.

The ‘next thing’ was a gaunt, dishevelled woman, probably years younger than she looked. Naked to the waist, wailing and beating her fallen breasts, she accused two marriage-brokers of having caused the death of her young nephew, the support of her declining years.

She had wished him to take a wife, who would be to her as a daughter-in-law, and help in household ways. He had greatly desired a girl of his own caste; but he had little money to offer; and her parents, because of his eagerness, increased their demands.

‘Such a good, gentle boy,’ she moaned. ‘And no parents to bargain for him. Only his poor old Auntie. They had cunning marriage-brokers, who kept him waiting many weeks, taking all he could earn for “expenses,” telling tales of a richer bridegroom, offering more. But he would not give up hope; till three days ago, when they came demanding ek dum a hundred and twenty rupees—or the rich man would have her. At that his heart was broken. He had borrowed till he could borrow no more. So they left him to his despair. And when I went in to comfort him, he was dead—from poison. I beg the honourable Sirkar to arrest those men. But who will give me back my Gulab?’

To that pitiful question there could be no answer; and for her loss, no redress. Nothing would convince her that the Sahib—all powerful—could not hang those two money-grabbers for indirect murder. Though Lance reasoned with her gently and kindly, she railed at him, in her bitter grief, and was led away broken with weeping.

Again he turned to Sinclair, no laughter now in his eyes.

The case that followed was a mere squabble between rival factions; and Sinclair reverted to a half-read letter from his grandfather—an infrequent pleasure. The old man’s hand tired too easily now; and this letter lacked his usual atmosphere of serenity.

Those recent murders and the picketing methods of Congress so angered and disturbed him that he had travelled down to Calcutta for the great general meeting—Hindu and Moslem, Parsees and Europeans: a protest against the glorification of murderers and inadequate Government measures to crush the spirit of anarchy, everywhere rearing its head.

‘Each time Government is roused to take special powers, these terrorists go to earth,’ he wrote. ‘Then comes a fit of uneasy conscience. Prison doors are opened—and fresh crimes ensue. All British acts of benevolence are used (like this Delhi pact) to collect more men and money for their secret plans. India’s path to Swaráj is not blocked by the British, but by those who fail to remove the true obstacles social and religious.

‘A week in modern Calcutta—where English and cultured Indians live close together, yet never meet—made me not sorry to return to Rajput Udaipur——’

A scurry of squirrels, a low ‘woof’ from Bijli brought Sinclair back from his far journey.

Lance was winding up his final case between the village bunnia and two medicine-men, who had beaten his young son with sticks and seared him with hot irons, to drive out a ‘disease-spirit’ lodged in his frail body, and had nearly driven out his human spirit along with it.

The accused vowed they would have done the same to their own sons, which was probably the truth; but Lance had fined them both heavily to discourage these hideous practices in the name of medicine. And the bunnia departed in triumph, shaking his fat fist at two small boys in the crowd who shouted after him the refrain of a popular village song: ‘“Oh, Bunnia-ji! Oh, Bunnia-ji! Your face shall be blackened in the Courts of God.”’

A few bold spirits applauded the sentiment. Lance pushed back his chair with a pious, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ And the villagers drifted away to enjoy their evening hour of gossip and hookah and frugal meal.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

‘Hope the dāk’s in,’ said Lance, as they walked briskly back to their tents; ‘I want news of my Eve.’

For that headstrong young woman, after refusing to be dropped at Pindi, had been forced, by constant headaches and nasal trouble, to go down there after all, and face the local E.N.T.⁶⁵ specialist.

‘Mail ought to be in too,’ remarked Sinclair, who wanted news of his——‘Eve.’

And English papers were more of an event, in these uncertain days, since the Cabinet crisis—that split the Labour Government—had produced a Triple Alliance of all the talents. As usual, in the day of trouble, it was Conservatives to the rescue, and compromise for the issue, while ‘the foremost architects of disaster’ were held up to admiration for their courage in clinging to office and power and a possible peerage. Now there was England off the gold standard, a fateful General Election imminent and an epidemic of world depression afflicting even prosperous America.

The people at Home seemed to be keeping their heads, as the English could be trusted to do in any serious emergency, while Indians in England were privileged to see British character at its best, with its back to the wall. Gandhi—strutting his little hour on the London stage—was effectually pricking the bubble of his own reputation with his tiresome days of silence, his obstructive tactics and myopic point of view. It was just like India’s luck. Now, as in the War, changes of the first magnitude were being pressed to an issue by politicians while the bulk of English people were looking another way——

Here they were back in the little world of camp and Lance was shouting, ‘Hai Ramazān! Peg lāo⁶⁶ . . .’

In a warm, comfortable tent, smelling of canvas and kerosene, tobacco and leather, they absorbed, in great peace, their letters and papers. The mail was in; and Tara had treated Roy to three close-written sheets of lordly paper stamped with the Avonleigh crest. For she and Lilāmani were spending a week with Derek and Gabrielle and the two youngest of their four.

‘Derek’s fearfully busy,’ she wrote, ‘doing spade work for the Election. He says of course you ought to be here. But who could foresee this merciful catastrophe! All the same he patted me on the back (and kissed the top of my head!) for not “hampering your sword arm” over the India venture: though it happens to be a pen arm in this sword-less age! But you know—my vanished one—that it’s not a case of credit, simply what happens to be one’s idea of love. I’ve wanted ours always to be a beacon fire lighting up the dark places, not a timid indoor shelter from the cold. You had to go out, to know and understand, not just live at home softly with comfortable theories. And I’m fearfully keen to share the results——’

At this point he was switched from one world to another by Lance, who threw back his head and laughed aloud.

‘What’s biting you?’ he asked.

‘Eve’s experience of a model military hospital. If I’m not grossly butting in—care to hear?’

‘Delighted,’ Sinclair agreed. He had read half his letter, and he preferred having Tara to himself alone.

Lance, looking at his own letter, chuckled again.

‘Sometimes these people are past believing. Mind you, several wires were sent about her case to the Northern command. And see what she says:

‘I got to the hospital about 10.30 that night, deadly tired and nervy, half hoping to find the E.N.T. man on the doorstep! Instead I was collared by the night sister as the “appendix case for Major Godden.” She invited me to “come along” and be prepared for the operation. In sheer terror, I clung to my chair and told her firmly that as I hadn’t possessed an appendix since I was fifteen, I’d rather they didn’t start looking for it. I said I’d come, by arrangement, to see the E.N.T. man because of my blinking nose.*

‘She was fearfully sorry, but I couldn’t possibly see him. He was in Bombay. But she fetched an Assistant Surgeon who wanted to know my age, my religion, my disease and a few other trifles. In a jaded voice, I asked again for my E.N.T. friend; and heard, with mild surprise, that he was in Bangalore! I began to wonder if I’d strayed into the local lunatic asylum; specially when another bright young Nurse appeared and believed he’d gone to Karachi!

‘After that, I meekly said I was tired—would they show me my room? Crowning blow. No room, no bed, no orders—in spite of all those wires. And in place of the Man who Wasn’t, they offered me an R.A.M.C. subaltern, his under-study. Nurse said he was quite capable, had done an operation for mastoid on an Indian patient. I asked warily if the patient was still alive. She didn’t think so. And you bet I turned down the sub. But I firmly insisted on a bed—and got it. Next morning I raised hell in that hospital. Reported everyone to everyone else, till they wished I’d never been born; though it was really the fault of those perishing officials.

‘It’s lonely here and I’m longing to bolt back to you. But as my “special” will be back on Wednesday from Bombay-Bangalore-Karachi, and as we’ve spent precious money on this gay adventure, I’d better stick it out “with smiling courage,” though I’m quaking in my shoes.’

Lance looked up; twin sparks in his eyes.

‘It’s the limit. She’s not fit, and jumpy with nerves. I ought to be with her—— Hallo! Who cum dar?’⁶⁷

He raised his head, listening to the sound of wheels. A car halted outside, a deep voice shouted an order—and Lance sprang up.

‘Damned if it isn’t old Lynch. He’s been routling round after Youth League factions. I hoped we might collide.’

Sinclair said nothing, for he wished Lynch elsewhere. His evenings with Lance were few; and he valued them for the twofold reason now known to Lance himself. Lynch would bring with him quite another atmosphere. However, he had not yet seen this incongruous pair together. He saw them now——

There was Lance chaffing the older man as few of his juniors would venture to do: and Lynch reproving his impertinence with a heavy hand on his shoulder as he turned a questioning glance on the unexpected third.

‘Hullo, Sinclair. Didn’t know you were camping round the district. Learning the ropes, in the interests of the book?’

‘Enjoying the life,’ translated Sinclair, over-ready to detect a hint of contempt in the Man of Action’s allusions to his work.

Lynch accepted the correction and side-tracked the book, with a mental note that authors were kittle kattle. Some of them couldn’t be happy unless one kept dragging it in.

‘It’s a good life still,’ he said, ‘in the cold weather—playing Providence, or Nemesis, to these silent milling they write of in the Home papers. Some of us could tell another story.’—He reverted to Lance.—‘Playing at bachelor again, old man? The girl thrown you over?’

He sank deliberately into the nearest chair.

‘The girl is stuck down in Pindi,’ Lance told him, ‘having a hell of a time and making a lively tale of her troubles for my diversion. I was just reading the cream of it to Roy.’

Lynch’s thick eyebrows lifted at the Christian name. But Lance was full of Eve’s tale, which must be retold, when Lynch had been supplied with peg and cheroot. Over her spontaneous witticisms he laughed aloud; but he roundly damned the official muddling at the back of it all. And his genuine concern for her revealed the man of feeling under his rough surface.

‘You’ll report, of course?’

‘Rather. But it won’t mend matters. She’s lonely there, and I’m sick at the delay. We’ve been overdosed with separations.’

‘Never do to make a habit of it,’ said Lynch gravely. ‘Though the cynics do say that’s what makes India a land of happy marriages.’

‘And think themselves fearfully smart.’ Lance, half sitting on the table, faced his friend—the sometime cynic—with a combative air. ‘They deserve all the separations that Government and the climate serve out to the married in this country. But Aunt Thea says it’s true about the happy marriages. She swears there are more to the acre out here than anywhere else on earth.’

‘In spite of Kipling’s terribly Plain Tales and cynical ditties?’

‘Oh, you have to pick out the wrong ’uns to make a snappy story. But I’d back Aunt Thea’s inside knowledge—even against the scepticism of a Police Burra Sahib! You’ve just added one to India’s long list. So kuberdar!’

‘Who’s being smart now?’ Lynch checked him with a glance. They exchanged a smile of the friendliest intimacy and began to talk of the day’s doings.

Sinclair—listening and saying little—saw how closely they were linked by a bedrock unity of purpose and devotion, solidly underlying those surface differences of character, thought and feeling that promote friendship, especially between men. And here was a more likeable Lynch, warmer in tone, less guarded in manner, not greatly heeding the unobtrusive outsider. If he mainly talked shop with Lance, it was not the arid shop of his kind, departmental jealousies and the three p’s—pay, precedence and promotion. It was the shop of underground C.I.D. and intelligence work; his own private researches in that line, beyond what he was paid to do; the something more that is the true work of a man’s life.

He was apt to take charge of the conversation when he had ‘things to say’; and his ‘things’ were usually worth hearing. He told them of his summer wanderings in the Hindu Khush; of how Grace had stuck it like a man; of how he had received, up there, secret, immediate news of the great August raid in Shanghai. A master-stroke of surprise tactics, it had broken up a nest of Communists whose activities covered all Asia and the Pacific, whose books revealed the trifling sum of £80,000 distributed for revolutionary purposes within six months.

‘A haul of the first magnitude,’ he warmed up with the telling.——‘They’ve scotched a concerted plan of revolution and massacre throughout the East. And I wonder how many of our people even saw that little para in the corner of an Indian paper. A sharp setback to the forces of evil. But——’ he added, more gravely, ‘our Indian organisation is serious enough, and nearer home——’

He glanced towards Sinclair, who sat apart silent and attentive; listening to Lynch, watching Lance. Without shifting his own gaze, he felt the scrutiny of those vague pale eyes; and sudden anger flared in him.

He thought, ‘Does the fellow fancy that because I’m not pukka I can’t hold my tongue?’

‘State secrets?’ he asked with a touch of stiffness and moved as if to rise. ‘Would you sooner I cleared out?’

‘Rather not,’ Lance flashed; and Lynch gravely confirmed him.

‘No need for that,’ he said, unaware of the inner storm he had raised, ‘so long as you earmark my talk “confidential.” Lance knows nearly as much as I do of this dark background to peace talks and conferences. And I told you, in Peshawar, that my special knowledge is at your service, if you want to understand India’s twofold approach to Swaráj better than some of these smart young writers who splash ink about it. We’ve clear proof, now, of a secret understanding between Terrorism and Congress. It puts up a saintly figurehead, who talks non-violence, while it signs a Three-Year-Pact with the “United Republican Party.” When I heard that, I was reminded of Kipling’s ballad on the Parnell Commission.’—He turned to Sinclair—‘You remember?

‘“One hand stuck out behind the back to signal strike again;
The other on your dress-shirt front to show your heart is clane—”

‘That the shirt-front, in this case, happens to be a bare breast-bone doesn’t upset the analogy.’

Lance laughed, but Sinclair wanted to hear more.

‘Do they know,’ he asked, ‘what the pact amounts to?’

‘It amounts to a Gandhi-led Congress in charge of organised disruption, working for a smash-down of law and order, for mass killings and mass freedom on Russian lines. If they can’t manage the smash-down in three years—eighteen months from now—the Terrorists take over. And we shall see—what we shall see. Meantime they’re netting in the whole country, plastering every province with “advance action.” Of course our Red Shirts are in it and the Punjab Communists. Over two hundred young hopefuls back in the country now, after training at Moscow in Soviet methods. And here we are, on the surface, reeling out platitudes, conferring and committing. But’—he brought his right hand smartly down on Desmond’s knee—‘you can bet your last dib, young ’un, we’re tunnelling too, making hauls in every province—dynamite, live bombs and other harmless diversions.’

He dived into his breast pocket, produced a horn-handled jack knife and a long slim fountain pen. He laid them on the table.

‘A snappy pair of pistols,’ he said, ‘warranted to kill a man at short range before the poor devil has a chance to suspect that there’s danger about. Though I say it’—he addressed himself to Sinclair—‘the police have done wonders in this nasty business of rounding up their own people; though they know very well their zeal will be ruthlessly remembered against them by those who are making a bid for power. If the constitution-wallahs ever hand over my service to Indian political control they’ll deserve hell. But it’s harmless folk out here who’ll get it. Our conscientious bunglers, hitching their wagon to an ideal, are simply inviting disasters that need never happen if they had a keener eye for realities.—Wah! Wah!’

But for all his half humorous gesture of contempt, Sinclair knew that the real Lynch had for once spoken from his heart.

‘Perhaps,’ remarked sapient Lance, ‘there’s some mysterious virtue in the way we never really understand our problems, or go all out for a policy——’

‘The valour of our ignorance,’ cut in Lynch, ‘amounts to genius! It has carried us over many an impossible fence. It may carry us over this one. God knows—Phew-ew——’ He picked up his tumbler and emptied it. ‘I’ve had a dusty day, nosing out Youth League activities round Charsadda. They’ve honoured me with another violent post-card, threatening my life trying to make my flesh creep. I’m getting quite an interesting collection.’

‘They’d damn well better not touch you,’ Lance said with smothered fury; and Lynch laughed, not ill-pleased.

‘They damn well won’t. I’m probably reserved for a worse fate! I’d sooner stop a bullet than live on after a stroke.’ He exchanged a look with Lance and laid a finger against his nose. ‘Here’s your old Ramazān. He’s a linguist. We must mind our p’s and q’s.’

They dined early in camp; and if most of their five-course meal came out of tins, if the mutton was nearly allied to goat, Lance owned a cook who could rise to the occasion of a Burra Sahib notoriously hard to please.

The Burra Sahib paid him the compliment of absorbing most of the food, though Lance fought him squarely over the chicken fricassée. He also still absorbed most of the talk. Interesting material; but there were expressions and opinions, occasional sweeping statements that Sinclair could have countered effectively, but for a temperamental inability to resist the impact of a mind at once so able and unimaginative, so impervious to the finer shades and values of human intercourse.

Last night, when he and Lance had sat up till twelve, discussing the profounder problems of India’s destiny, it was he who had held the field. But in the wrong atmosphere he became mute. It was vexatious. It often gave a wrong impression. But with this man he would never succeed in giving a right one. And, agree with him or no, his talk was sane and vigorous, brim full of first-hand knowledge.

In the course of it, he advanced an idea that was new to Sinclair.

‘Has it ever struck you,’ he asked, ‘that, if we let ourselves be squeezed out of India, our possible successors may be—the French?’

‘Never,’ Sinclair admitted, intrigued and surprised. ‘On what grounds?’

‘That’s for them to say. But there are many distinguished French names in Indian history. I believe some of ’em think they’d have a claim to step in, if we stepped out. And though they are democrats, they’re neither defeatists nor sentimental idealists. Under them India would get her full citizenship, rights and duties. Conscription and all that. French law, not the laws of Manu. Obstruction and rebellion wouldn’t be treated as amiable weaknesses, but as crimes.’

Something in his cool tone angered Sinclair. ‘You think that would be to India’s advantage?’ he asked with a touch of heat; and Lynch gave him one of those looks that said too plainly he had remembered.

‘It might be to her advantage—and ours, if they could be inserted, say for a year, then painlessly extracted. But you can’t experiment with half a continent as you can with a guinea-pig; though God knows we’re doing something like it. “The unparalleled experiment to which we are pledged” is the press jargon. I query the pledge; and I deplore the experiment. It’s beyond me why the Tories don’t repudiate this Labour-Liberal policy and give India honest administration. They’re sowing the wind: they’ll reap the whirlwind.—Wah! Wah!’

Again he dismissed the subject nearest his heart with a lightness that was only skin-deep; and the talk drifted into other channels. Over coffee and cigars, he told broad stories; Lance talked of a fine novel he and Eve had read together at Sonamarg. Sinclair said not a word of how he had spent his summer. It would damn him past redemption in the eyes of Lynch, hard-boiled realist, unbelievably husband of Grace, and a devoted one at that.

Having finished his coffee and smoked a cheroot, he made his excuses—the mail in, letters to write—that the friends might have their evening to themselves.

And he was aware of lurking relief under Lynch’s hearty, ‘Good-night. Don’t dream! We’re not handing over India yet, to Congress—or the French.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

His small tent, with its camp bed, table and chair was warm and welcoming. Hari Lāl had lit the oil stove and the lamp. On the table stood three photos—Tara, Lilāmani and Nevil. There were books on an upturned case by his bed. It was luxury compared with the bell tent on his Himalayan pilgrimage. Yet here was no exhilaration of mind or spirit. Back again in contact with British India and his fellows, he was aware of a changed angle in his relation to it and them; more tolerant and clear seeing, yet more inwardly aloof.

He had enjoyed without stint this time of camping and working with Lance; finding him, under his soldierly surface, more of a mental companion than the Lance he so vividly recalled. But to-night his spirits had suffered a sharp reaction, which he could only attribute to the invasion of Lynch—his mentality and inner attitude in more ways than one. It was a two-edged gift this ability to see oneself through another’s eyes—in particular through the eyes of a John Lynch. At heart, he envied the man his active share in fighting the forces of evil; and in the dry light of that vigorous practical brain, he saw his own dreams of a distant religious unity and social cleansing as an ineffectual contribution to an immediate problem of the first magnitude.

At Home, short-sighted politicians, British and Indian,——‘hitching their wagon to an ideal,’ in Lynch’s telling phrase.—that might or might not have been aimed at himself; out here, illiterate millions, tied and bound by an inflexible social system; secret forces at work; contending powers of light and darkness that might well dismay a mind more hopeful and assured than his own. From one point of view a settlement seemed possible; from another, revolution seemed inevitable. Nor could he close his mind against the dark whisper that perhaps only through the horrors of bloodshed could India’s cleansing be achieved.

No work of any value could be achieved if moods were allowed to prevail. Yet, dismayingly—and often unaccountably—these waves of black depression and dislocation overwhelmed him in defiance of sanity and judgment, inescapable and devastating as an attack of malaria. In those dark moods, Tara was his talisman; Tara, whose faith in him neither faults nor failure could undermine. And Tara—by his own doing—was seven thousand miles away. Yet at times so close she pressed upon his thought that she seemed to be in the air he breathed. Between them, they had created a perdurable essence higher than themselves—the fruit of any genuine human mingling. And yet—and yet—— As husband and lover, his need of her actual self could not be so assuaged.

Sitting down by the table, he drew out her letter and re-read it all. Written in her happiest vein, it awakened sharply his repressed yet urgent need of her—here, in India, to complete his life and work and keep black devils at bay.

He did not, in honesty, want to go home yet, to break prematurely the thread of an experience that he would never be able to recapture or repeat. His longing was for Tara, detached from home and children—if only for a few months. Could she bear to leave them all and come to him here? He knew the answer—or fancied he knew it—so far as a man can gauge the divided allegiance that at once enriches and complicates marriage for the woman. He knew also how deeply it would pain her to refuse his point-blank request. But at least he might give her the satisfaction of knowing herself essential to his work, no less than to his life.

Fired by her letter and his own emotional stress, he took pen and paper and wrote straight from his heart; till the half-filled lamp showed signs of petering out and forced him to a finish.

‘See how your dear letter has set me alight,’ he began the last sheet, ‘with thoughts that kindle and burn, so that I can almost feel you with me in this tent. Oh my darling, if you were here—the actual you—to sleep in my arms and wake to a good day’s work with me, on this big formless thing, how it would fill me to the brim with happiness and zest renewed. You know how I need your clear eye for essentials, when I’m befogged with much thinking; the light within me a kind of twilight—in the true sense, two lights contending. For the making of this book I want you and I want India. It’s the irony of fate that my two most urgent needs are set as far apart as the East is from the West. It seems decreed by my unseen Taskmaster that I shall prepare it all, as best I can, without you: then to go home and finish, as best I can, without India.

‘But then I shall be with you at last, in the flesh; never—I vow—to leave you in this way again. So much more than we conceive lies in the passionate romantic love of man and woman, rooted in the body, yet transcending it. All it stands for must ultimately triumph over the dark forces that threaten it.

‘Your love, my Tara, is a beacon fire, giving joy and warmth to those who are with you, and lighting up the dark places of your difficult but devoted husband,

‘Roy.’

As he wrote the last words his lamp flickered out; and he—who had been so intimately near to her—felt suddenly desolately alone. It was as if the lamp had turned traitor and jeered at his illusion.

With an oath he picked up the offender, reeking of kerosene, and set it outside. Then, by the impish red gleam of his oil stove, he undressed and lay down to sleep, the letter locked away in his despatch case.

He had not asked her to come; but short of that he had revealed his longing and his heart as never since they parted. It had been a very real relief. But could he—should he—send her all that? Invariably, on the heels of decisive action, a question—a doubt: the curse of being two men in one.

But to-night doubt was a flash in the pan. The spontaneous impulse had meant much to him. It might mean even more to her.

Right or wrong, he would post it to-morrow.

Chapter 8

I know it is not for me to win—or to leave the game.
— Tagore

The early morning sun made lovely shadow patterns, of walnut and mulberry leaves and ragged feathers of the ferāsh, on paths and borders and an unkempt lawn behind the greenish-tinted bungalow shared by Aruna and her two fellow-workers in the cause of India’s women. As usual, she was up and out soon after seven, a long cloak over her yellow dress, tending her flower borders and picking vegetables to be prepared for her simple meals, cooked by herself with help from a young pupil, who gave her services in return for lessons in music and singing.

The three fine old trees, the birds and squirrels who haunted them, were friends and companions of a fanciful, carefully hidden Aruna, heir to a treasure-house of myths and symbols that enriched her thought and gave her speech its quaint poetic turns. For her, in each tree, there dwelt a deva or djinn worshipped by devout Hindus, but only smiled at by a Theist of the Brahmo Samáj. From the fruits they abundantly gave her, came the preserves and chutneys and sugared sweets for which she was famous. Some she sold to English friends. Some she gave to Indian women; hoping to encourage emulation—with small result. She herself lived sparely, curbing her Indian taste for rich, sweet foods that beget early grossness and age the Eastern woman before her time.

To-day it was to be vegetable curry; and, having chosen her ingredients, she put them aside. Then she gathered chrysanthemums, pansies and pink roses for the daily ‘flowers of her worship,’ and set them in two glass troughs; one before her closed carved frame, one before her image of Sarasvati, playing on her bina, and dancing on a full-blown golden lotus.

The little figure was a relic of the days before she had discarded orthodox Hinduism for the greater mental freedom of the Samáj. Yet a part of her still found satisfaction in these daily offerings to the symbol of the true Sarasvati—spirit of wisdom and harmony and creative power: in the murmured prayer, ‘May the Goddess of Wisdom remember the puzzling need of the tangled hours; remember—and forgive. She who sets far all ignorance, she who abides with the Creator, may she abide with me.’

Refreshed in body and mind, she was ready for her hour of meditation and serious reading. Then there were letters to women workers whom she met in her brief holidays. On certain days, there was the Mahili Samiti; on other days her special pupils for music and singing, or lessons to purdah women in their homes. A richness of interest and of doing filled her day with activity, her mind with content, her heart with a sense of service—the woman’s need.

But far below the surface of daily joys and duties flowed a deep still river—her devotion and dedication to Roy. The knowledge that he was here, in Peshawar, created a high-tide within her. Now he was back from camp, they were to have more readings of the completed novel; even to talk of the greater book. That he should admit her thus into the supreme work of his life, set a crown on her, as nothing else could have done, short of the crown—denied her by an inscrutable Fate—of becoming his wife and the mother of his sons. She had noticed a change in him since Kashmir; as if he were inwardly illumined, sometimes inwardly withdrawn. He had said little about it; but perhaps he would presently say more.

Both he and Grace were actively in favour of helping young Rajini to make her brave plunge for personal freedom; and she had found a willing confederate on the spot in her chief fellow-worker at Bundiani; one of those individual characters that blossom here and there in the unpromising soil of custom-ridden village life. Charbutti she was called—Four Candles. She hoped they awaited her in the Next Door House. She had had few candles in this one. Betrothed in babyhood to a boy of five, she had lost her husband-to-be when she was barely seven; had shamelessly clapped her hands and cried, ‘Now he will never come to take me away!’ But at fourteen—bound to his people, husband or no—she had wept bitter tears at exchanging a kindly mother for a harsh mother-in-law. Now, at forty-five, she had forsaken orthodox Hinduism for a simple kindly religion of her own—half-Christian, though she would not be baptised; had so won a measure of freedom to mother stray children and help the younger women of her village in many unorthodox ways. Her devotion to Aruna was of the practical order. Whatever might be required of her, she would unfailingly carry through; and Rajini would soon be wanting local help.

She was coming to-day to meet Grace in Aruna’s room, after an early mid-day meal, that she might get back by sunset. Much planning and many ruses would enable her to slip away and drive to Peshawar in a bund gharri⁶⁸ while she was supposed to be spending the day with Charbutti. In a grove outside the village the gharri would be in waiting; and there Charbutti would meet her again at the appointed hour. To-day the bolder move was to be discussed with Grace, who had her missionary scruples about interfering in a matter of marriage.

Meantime Aruna must drive early to a house on the outskirts of the bazaar, and reason with a lively obstinate grandmother, who was arranging a wealthy marriage for her own most promising pupil at a scandalously early age. The child, in fear and misery, had confided to Aruna the plans that were on foot. She loved her lessons and games. She wanted some freedom of girlhood before the curtain fell between her and the outer world; and Aruna had promised to tackle the home autocrat, with small hope of success. These Indian grandmothers were not only slaves to custom but to their own greed for children and more children. For them the young had no other raison d’être, no right to cherish unseemly ambitions of books or school.

In this fight for India’s awakening women, it was grandmothers, marriages and babies all the way. Men chiefly existed as aids to more babies. And she who longed for children, was driven by an ironic destiny to combat the obsession that so seriously hampered India’s chances of social economic renewal.

In a chill windowless room she confronted the tyrant, a small shrivelled woman in scarlet sari, looking nearer seventy than fifty, with a hard mouth, a beaked nose and a flow of language that swept away arguments as rushing water sweeps away sticks and stones. Her sister had three great-grandchildren; she, as yet, had none. And it was written that the woman who had looked on the face of a great-grandchild, before passing into the Next Door House of Life, would find there an extra candle burning in her honour. More great-grandchildren—more candles.

‘And simply for the pride of those candles,’ Aruna pressed her point,——‘you would run the risk of damaging Miāni’s health, or condemning her to child-widowhood through the early death of her husband.’

The old tyrant impatiently snapped her fingers. Such things were the commonplaces of a woman’s life.

‘Miāni must take her chance,’ said she, ‘of her karma being good or bad. If there is more schooling, she may refuse marriage, like many shameless girls I hear of now.’

And Aruna—being apparently one of the shameless—was checked for the moment; dismayed and angered at the insensibility of these older women, who must have travelled the same hard road. Undefeated, she would persevere in her crusade against this lust of reproductiveness, the curse of her people. What happened to the children of their girl-mothers was for them of less account than the categorical imperative that children and more children should continue to be born. She would enlist Grace, who could do wonders with her people, in the kindly, humorous, commanding fashion that came from much hospital experience.

But to-day Rajini’s problem held her mind.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Grace—invited to the mid-day meal—arrived punctually: not so Rajini. The East knows many forms of slavery, but it knows not the enslavement of the West to clocks and time. Grace found it hard to believe in those accepted articles, but the girl would bring her cuttings; her passports into the wider life she craved.

So late she was that they had time to grow anxious before the sound of wheels reassured them. Aruna went quickly out, gave the driver his orders, and returned with her uncaged bird—a bird of brilliant plumage, sapphire blue and palest green, the sari bordered with a hand-wrought leaf design in deeper green. She moved with swiftness and ease, not with the shy hesitancy of the young girl fresh from purdah. Sari pulled forward, she greeted Grace with the formal salutation, joined fingertips to forehead.

Only then she pushed back the sari, revealing a face of unusual beauty, intelligence and fire: great dark eyes finely spaced and lined with surma, a chiselled mouth and olive-brown skin, fairer than Aruna’s that had long been unsheltered from wind and sun. Her blue-black hair, oiled and parted, was laid in two soft curves on either side of the broad forehead. She wore no jewels, but a heavy gold necklet, long gold earrings and one small pearl hung from her nostril by a thread of gold. Nails, palms and soles of her feet were henna-tinted; and a thumb-ring, set with a mirror, seemed too heavy for her delicate hand.

Aruna thought with a stab of sympathy, ‘She is dressed almost as a bride for this great event of her life. May we not fail her.’

She left most of the talking to Grace, who must be convinced as to the girl before she would bind herself to the backing of their perilous plan.

Rajini spoke English with an attractive touch of hesitation; but in her own tongue she talked eagerly, rapidly, with expressive gestures and glowing eyes. Here was no timid, mute adolescent; but a vivid creature with a quick brain and tongue, probably a quick temper, surprisingly well-informed as to the march of events in the outer unknown world. She talked with intelligence of the books she had read; and related with pride her ruses in procuring them, secretly, through a male student-cousin in Lahore, who had evidently imbued her with Congress ideas. She confidently believed that the British were on the verge of being forced out of India; and she opened her fine eyes wider when Grace politely informed her that the British Raj was still in being, and likely to remain so for many years to come.

Undismayed, she accepted the correction. She would tell her cousin when she sent him her third article. It was he who had placed them for her; and the Indian editor had sent her compliments and many rupees. She pulled out of her embroidered bag the new article, beautifully written.

‘See what I have said to them for all to read.’

She read it aloud, with an excited catch in her breath: ‘You Nationalists, clamouring for freedom from the British, why do you not give the women of India full freedom to live their own lives? Do you think they would fear to come out of purdah? Or fear to soil their delicate feet on the dusty road of Life? You are wrong. It is the men of India who are timid. When Mahatma Gandhi gave the call, see how many scores of shy hidden women crossed the ancient barriers of caste and purdah, as if they were low mud walls, not waiting to ask leave from their men-folk, who wondered at their courage. To you I say that India will never be truly revealed through her men. It is her women—when all have the courage of the few—who will show her full glory to the world.’

She looked up, flushed, sparkling.

‘Isn’t that true talk, Lady Sahib?’

And the Lady Sahib answered that those last few words amounted to a confession of her own faith, in which she had worked and preached for many years.

‘Aruna knew that,’ she said, covering one restless hand with her own, ‘when she asked me to meet you and help you.’

‘Then you will help—you will take me out of this cage of purdah and half marriage with one who should be my father, not my bridegroom?’

She was a different being now; a trapped thing desperately determined to escape from the prison that was closing in on her.

But Grace—though charmed and deeply moved—was still the cautious woman of the West. Rajini, she said, must be quite sure that she could stand alone in a strange unsheltered world.

At that the dark eyes flashed. She was troubled by no doubts, this eager resolute creature.

‘Somehow I can—and will.’ She clenched her small hands. ‘If you and Aruna won’t help me, I will run away by my self one dark night, and take my chance of whatever may happen. If too bad—I will kill myself. I am not afraid.’

She looked from one to the other; no appeal in her glance but a passion of resolve: and Aruna, watching her friend’s face, saw that Grace knew the girl spoke truth. With no outside help, no sheltered niche to receive her, she would be driven, inevitably, to prostitution or suicide. And she would run her risk with open eyes. For no zenana-reared girl is innocent in the western sense of the word.

But Rajini, still doubtful of the cautious Lady Sahib launched a fresh appeal to stir her pity. From a sister, two years married, lately at home for a visit, she had managed to extract the tale of a young wife’s first year with her husband’s people: a tale that might daunt the bravest.

Shut away from all play, all outsiders, especially men, the girl-wife—she told them—became virtually a slave to the women of her husband’s house, slave-in-chief to his mother; not allowed to speak unless they spoke to her; every action spied upon and criticised; everyone’s interest centred in her sex life, her capacity to bear sons. No escape from them; no privacy; not an hour to herself, even for rest—or for tears. She must rise first in the morning and go last to bed, let her be never so tired, or even ill. On rising, she would ‘take the dust’ of her husband’s feet; and would not be allowed to see him again all day. A jealous mother fulfilled his every need; even to the young wife’s rightful privilege of cooking and serving his food. Only at night she came face to face with him—a revered stranger who treated her kindly, but seemed unable or unwilling to protect her from the petty tyranny of the inside. Homesick, bewildered and unhappy, she could call neither soul nor body her own.

After all that—if she were so blest—came the weary months of pregnancy, the agony of child-birth; rough handling by a low-caste midwife, while the other women kept aloof, as if she were an unclean thing, though she was only fulfilling the supreme duty expected of her.

Over this climax of senseless cruelty and indignity, Rajini’s smouldering wrath broke into a flame.

‘And these are the mothers of our race!’ She flung out appealing hands to the free and all-powerful English woman. ‘How can they bear strong sons to make the new India? Bina, my sister, was fed only on scraps that were left over. Not from unkindness, but because it is custom. If there came a visitor, she would have none. But she must not complain. Lucky for her that her first-born was a son. Through pride in him and her husband’s reverence to motherhood she came into a happier way of life, though still under rule of husband’s mother; and so narrow—narrow——’ She set her two slim hands within an inch of each other, hands that shook with pent-up feeling.——‘How would it be for one like I am. What chance to read or write? I would starve in my body and my mind.’ Again she clenched her hands with one of her swift dramatic gestures. ‘Oh, I will not—I will not bear such things. If you can give me no help, Lady Sahib, I go—no matter where. Some day I will rouse my people, make them pay respect to their women, not only with fine words but in their lives.’

Tears stood in her eyes; and all Aruna’s heart went out to her in a passion of sympathy.

Grace herself was moved to indignation against a state of things known to her in the abstract, never so fully revealed at first-hand.

‘They have dug a deep pit for themselves—these mother-shackled men of yours,’ she declared with her devastating frankness. ‘Worshipping goddesses and despising women; making idols of their mothers and slaves of their wives. Through their excessive mother-adoration and dependence they lose half their manhood. And now, when they want all of it, their priest-made system will recoil on themselves. It is the women—deepened and purified by long suppression—who have gained power to endure and courage to act.’

Rajini softly clapped her hands. ‘True talk. It is the women who will make our new India. And I must be one.’

‘Yes,’ said Grace, looking straight at her vivid intelligent face, ‘I think you will be one. But how to compass your freedom is no easy matter. It amounts to stealing a young woman!’

‘No. It is only giving the door-key to a prisoner,’ the girl countered aptly; and Grace smiled.

‘Well, I must talk it over with Aruna before we can settle anything. You must go back and have patience, also have faith. Because if I put my hand to a thing, I never remove it till all is done.’

‘I will wait, Lady Sahib. I will believe,’ the girl said, more gravely and quietly than she had spoken yet.

Grace laid a firm enclosing hand on hers. ‘Now we understand each other,’ she said.

For Rajini time passed too quickly while they talked of possible plans, of her ambition to work with Aruna, to give purdah lectures and to act. It was intoxicating, as some new wine, this lively talk of books and outside affairs; and the thought that one day this might be her own way of life.

In the midst of happy laughter they were arrested by the sound of a car outside; and Aruna’s heart gave a double beat—Roy! She had told him when she would probably be free from what he called ‘the International Committee’; but Rajini’s late arrival had delayed their meal and upset her time-table.

‘It’s Roy,’ she said, looking at Grace. ‘Can he——?’

And Grace answered briskly, ‘Yes. Why not?’ The girl lifted her head like a startled wild thing.

‘Is it a man?’ she asked between excitement and alarm.

‘Yes; a great friend of mine. An Englishman.’

‘Oh, I have never been so bold——’

‘Well, you must make a beginning. Here’s your chance. This Sahib is all for the progress of Indian women. He is a writer and Aruna’s cousin. His mother was a Rajputni, who broke purdah to go and study medicine in England; and there she married a white man of high family.’

The dark eyes glowed at so inspiring a tale of courage and its reward. Aruna touched her shoulder, to give her confidence; then she hurried out to explain matters Roy must not be allowed to feel that his coming was inopportune.

There he was, springing out of the car, in his familiar grey-green suit and cap. There also, unexpected—and at the moment, undesired—was Suráj, very handsome and glowing as she came forward to greet them.

When she spoke of Rajini, both offered to return later; but she would not have it.

‘You must see her,’ she said. ‘Such a beautiful girl; and quite ready for the adventure of meeting a Sahib. If you don’t come in, she will think she has frightened you away! I’m not so sure’—she glanced at Suráj—‘about a man of her own people.’

But he clearly did not mean to be out of it, if there was a beautiful girl to be seen; and she smiled at him, fully aware.

‘I must go in first and see if you can be admitted.’

That gentle reproof waked his natural courtesy.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t come in without leave. Say I am a man of advanced views.’

‘Very advanced!’ She laughed, and ran back to administer a second shock.

At first Rajini was for instant flight; but Grace, in her imperative vein, decreed otherwise.

‘You can’t leave this room without running into them; and Suráj Mul is also Aruna’s bhai,’ she urged, as Aruna pulled back her gold curtain for the men to come in.

Sinclair entered first; and at sight of a living Sahib the bold one instinctively pulled the sari more than half over her face. Very gently Grace withdrew it; and Rajini, overwhelmed with embarrassment, faced the first unrelated men she had ever seen. But if her cheeks tingled, there was laughter in her eyes. If she found these men good to look at, they might think the same of her. She might perhaps marry the English one; and he would teach her to write books. He sat down near her and talked in a gentle voice, smiling with his curious-coloured eyes.

When he spoke of her articles, she was again overwhelmed. But he knew how to charm away shyness; and soon he was reading them, making her talk of them, as if she had been used to meeting strange Sahibs every day of her life.

Grace put in a humorous word here and there, countering the intoxicant of too much new wine at a draught.

Aruna, sitting near Suráj, drifted into memories of an earlier Roy who had dispelled her own secret troubles and fears with the same effortless ease. For some people it was the greatest good fortune in life simply to be themselves.

So watching and thinking, she forgot about talking to Suráj, who sat courteously a little apart, that Rajini need not be aware of him without turning her head, while his position gave him an alluring profile view of the half-uncaged bird. Aruna noted the fact with an inward smile; and a swift thought leapt out of her deeper musings, as a fish leaps out of water. Suráj, a caste Hindu and sonless, was bound to marry again. He would want no ignorant purdah wife, but an intelligent companion. And here, uninvited, he had seen Rajini. If he chose, after her escape, he could see more of her.

She stole a glance at him, intent on that profile view, unaware how his eyes revealed his thoughts.

And he, turning suddenly, encountered her clear gaze. The swift change, the mute homage in his eyes, awoke in her a troubled feeling of alarm. Without a word, she rose and moved over to Grace, who had clearly decided that Rajini had tasted enough new wine for one afternoon.

She was arranging to pay off the driver and take the girl back in her own car. It would ensure her safe return, and give them a chance for further talk. Rajini made her salutations; and, when Sinclair encouraged her to write more articles, she rippled with pleasure like an aspen in a breeze.

Then they went out, leaving Aruna with the two men instead of with the one man—as planned.

This was to have been her quiet hour with Roy. Unashamedly she wished Suráj elsewhere; and she believed Roy was wishing it too, which was comfort of a sort. But courtesy forbade even a hint. So, to enliven his interest, she told him the tale of Rajini. Most of it Roy already knew; and when small pauses fell, he was not helpful. He rose and stood on her leopard hearth-rug with his back to the fire, as if waiting for Suráj to feel the pressure of their unspoken thoughts.

But Suráj seemed dense this evening; or perhaps obstinate? And Roy, grown impatient, said, half in joke, with a dramatic gesture:

‘Rookshut⁶⁹——! You have leave to depart!’

It was the official form of ending an interview. But Suráj was not inclined to see the joke, or to be so handled.

‘Why have I leave, if I don’t wish?’ he demanded, unsmiling.

‘Since you ask,’ Roy told him, ‘I’ve an arrangement to do some reading with Aruna.’

‘And why can’t I hear it also?’

‘For two good reasons. You can’t catch on to a book three parts through. And I don’t read my stuff to a mixed audience!’

‘Very mixed audience—two Rajputs.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I thought you were going to the pictures with me. Can’t Aruna come too? Read another time?’

Roy exchanged a look with her that said plainly the reading must wait. Suráj, in certain moods, was impervious to persuasion. And she—in spite of keen disappointment—wanted no friction between them on her account. So she said, in a controlled voice, ‘Very well, Suráj-bhai, if you counted on Roy, we will read another time. But I can’t come with you.’

He looked crestfallen; but refrained from pressing the point. So they took their leave; and the firm pressure of Roy’s fingers approved her swift response to the change of plan.

Alone, she remained standing by the fire, combating an inner confusion of sensations and emotions that must be set in order before she could regain her normal serenity.

It was foolish to feel this ache of disappointment. It was tiresome of Suráj to behave so. Since he had returned, wifeless, there was a change in him that she was slow to rate at its full significance. On account of her own age—almost middle-age in Eastern eyes—it did not readily occur to her that his affection could be other than cousinly. But his look this afternoon threw fresh light on his recent foolishness over not liking her to be too much with Roy, ignorant as he was of the clear understanding between them. He was such a fine fellow, she could not bear to cause him pain. Yet she longed to mother his small daughters, if it would not cause other complications. How difficult it was to be a woman, yet a not-woman, even when youth and youth’s desires were past.

Only music could bring back harmony to her mind, resolve the confusion of thought, feeling and memories.

Taking her sarangi, she sat down by the fire, holding it lovingly as if it were a child. Closing her eyes she repeated, by way of invocation, certain lines of Tagore that seemed—like so many of his poems—almost to have been written for her:

‘“The pain was great when the strings were being tuned, my Master.
Begin your music and let me forget the pain; let me feel in beauty what you had in your mind through those pitiless days. . . .
Pour your heart into my life strings, my Master, in tunes that descend from your stars.”’

Then very softly—in the blended light of one lamp and her wood fire—she began to play. . . .

Chapter 9

Of many things thou art steward; and many witnesses there are to thy deeds in either kind.
— Pindar

November in Peshawar, if it lacked the spring fervours of April, had its own exhilarating atmosphere: frosty mornings, when the hunt was up; glowing noontides and the sharp drop at sunset that caught unseasoned newcomers unawares. It was the time of maximum social and military activity; Air Force and Brigade manoeuvres; all the cheerful, purposeful stir of a big cantonment in Northern India. For Sinclair it was a vivid reminder of his first Frontier days with Lance after the War. The life, on a surface view, looked much the same; but for increasing cars and aeroplanes, the effect of ‘cuts’ on all services, and a deeper cleavage between the two races. Only the Indian Army revealed no appreciable change in the old friendly relation between British officers and their men: the one enduring bond between East and West.

Finding his old regiment again stationed at Kohat, he had gone over there to see them all. Those who had been youngsters in his squadron were now responsible Indian officers; and the welcome they gave him had moved him as he had only been moved by his meeting with Lance. In the exaltation of the moment, he had talked to them in their own tongue like a man possessed. He had spoken of Lance: and the shout they raised, the memories they recalled of ‘Desmin Sahib Bahadur,’ had brought tears to his eyes. Many of them, stalwart bearded men, had wept unashamed; pressing forward to shake hands with him, till his finger-bones ached from their powerful grip; and he had been thankful to escape with tears unshed and dignity intact.

That unforgettable half-hour made any serious break between England and India seem unthinkable. So much, after all, of the prevailing bitterness could be dispelled by a simple will-to-friendliness on both sides. But, to take effect, it must be on both sides. And he, with his twofold kinship, his deep understanding, was thwarted by the old galling knowledge that, in the eyes of both—who knew—he was fundamentally neither one nor the other. The recognition of it increased his sense of apartness from these kindly, or cynical, overworked civilians, these tanned, assured, well-mannered officers, engrossed in their soldierly round of work and play, firmly embedded in their clan.

Indian station life seemed scored deeper than ever with cliques and grooves; no room on its social chessboard for a peg without a hole. And he had, now, not even the cachet of staying at Government House with his old friends. Pressed by the young Desmonds, genuinely fond of both, he had accepted two rooms in their bungalow, on the condition that he came as sharer, not as a guest. He knew the other two well enough to give them his real reasons; and they knew his sincere distaste for social functions, for the rôle of distinguished guest.

But if he felt himself an alien in the social life of Peshawar, in his own small circle of intimates he was welcomed, honoured, loved. Suráj—escaped from the joint family net—was excellent company; less ‘out of water’ now than in April. He played polo with two Rajput officers, tennis with the younger masters of Islamia College, who modified his anti-Moslem bias. His high spirits clearly inferred a high hope that Sinclair had not the heart to quench. Besides—there was no knowing how the appeal of Indian to Indian might affect Aruna, in the fulness of her womanhood, abetted by her feeling for those undesired daughters. He had finished his Udaipur epic; and was working on it, in Urdu, with a sustained zeal that surprised Sinclair who sharpened it by telling him that it was worth being a poet in India, where saint and poet and prophet still had the pre-eminence that Europe gave to the statesman and America to ‘big business.’

He himself was helping Aruna to translate a volume of verse by the great Moslem poet, Sir Mahomed Iqbal. To be with her again, in this brother-and-sisterly fashion, was pure refreshment. Unconsciously she quickened in him all that was India, all that had been awakened in Kashmir; and he needed a woman, mentally, as some men do more than others. She pervaded sense and spirit with a fragrance dear and familiar to him—the subtle fragrance of a cultured Indian woman’s personality; and through her alone he could get much inside knowledge vital to his work. She had a wisdom of the heart that made it possible to say deep things to her; and between them, by reason of the blood-link, they had achieved a unique relation that had scarcely been possible with a woman of his father’s race.

Whether or no it satisfied her, in equal measure, was a question he preferred not to ask himself, though he genuinely believed his earlier fears for her were groundless. Her life was so amply filled with active interests and her work for Indian women.

At present there were plans for young Rajini; and her final practices, with Eve, of the ‘Achilgarh’ recital, to a weird, impressive accompaniment of sitar, sarangi and small drums. Eve coaxed from her violin the long sighing notes of the sarangi; and Suráj, on the tabla, provided a threatening undercurrent to the feverish pizzicato of the sitar, and the wail of the sarangi, when the barbaric tragedy reached its climax.

The recital was fixed for next week at a Samiti non-purdah concert; to be followed by a ‘command performance’ at Government House—a jewelled feather in the cap of Suráj.

Sinclair found himself happily at home with the young Desmonds, a home in which life flowed strong and deep. Its atmosphere of serenity and stability was clearly the man’s gift to the woman, for all his energy temper and ready wit. Trained, sensitive and no fool, he was capable of passing judgment on men and things, yet seldom passed them. Close work with Sir Vincent Leigh and close friendship with Lynch had given him, in many ways, the outlook of an older man; and neither husband nor wife affected the fashionable modern detachment from India and things Indian. Though here—like the rest of their kind—they had no continuing city, India, while they lived in it, was veritably their city: a high merit, in Sinclair’s esteem.

Eve, at last free from the plague of headaches, was enjoying to the full a home of her own again, with husband and son. She and Vincent were obviously close friends. There was her Vanessa staying at Government House; and the distinguished author under her roof. What more could an exacting young woman desire?

The only fly in her honey-pot was the patronising, official-minded wife of Desmond’s D.C.: a ‘demi-semi Burra Mem,’ who must be treated with due respect on account of her husband—an able, modest man, with a subdued air, as if he had learnt from long practice to suffer and be still. They were lately back from Home leave; and Sinclair had only once met the wife: a plump woman with beaked nose and restless eyes, that justified Eve’s impertinent nickname—the Parrot; one who would be all suavity to those above her, all beak and claws to those below. He had evaded her effusions, had felt extremely sorry for her husband and had no desire to meet her again.

But this afternoon—riding with Suráj to Aruna’s bungalow—the undesired was thrust upon him.

Outside one of the many gate-posts innocent of gates, she stood, in tightly fitting coat and tilted hat, volubly irate over some difficulty with an Austin car that looked the worse for wear; hurling epithets at her Eurasian chauffeur that she would never have used to an English one.

To Sinclair she seemed purely detestable. He had no wish to help her, and little machine sense. But courtesy constrained him, and sympathy for the brow-beaten, coffee-coloured man.

‘Can I be any use?’ he asked, lifting his hat.

She looked up quickly, recognised him, and smiled all over her face.

‘Sir Roy Sinclair!’ she exclaimed in high delight. ‘How kind of you to trouble.’

‘What’s gone wrong?’

‘Don’t ask me. It’s that fool’s business to know.’

She jerked a tightly gloved thumb towards the unfortunate, who had scurried round to the far side and buried his head in the entrails of the car. Sinclair briefly bade Suráj ride on and tell Aruna he would follow. The woman made him feel ashamed of his father’s race.

As he dismounted and slipped a hand through Kāla Nāg’s bridle, she flung her grievance at him without appreciably lowering her tone.

‘It’s a fool-proof car. But they’re all the same, these coffee-coloured impossibles. Half baked creatures; no earthly use at anything. The vices of both races and the virtues of neither——’ She rattled off the stock disparagement so glibly that Sinclair could have struck her. ‘My husband says we ought to give them a chance. But I’d sooner have a pukka native any day. These kachha ones have no backbone, no notion of real work. And so touchy—you can’t say a word——’

Sinclair, infuriated, checked her in a pointedly lowered tone.

‘You’re saying a good many, in that fellow’s hearing, that would pierce the thickest British hide. Sorry I can’t help. I’m a fool about cars also. Good-afternoon.’

She stared a moment, puzzled but uncrushed. And, as he mounted, a dapper young man came rattling up on a motor-cycle.

‘Cheerio, Mrs Perrant! The good old bus on strike again? Let me——’

Yes—let him, the untainted Englishman, thought Sinclair, riding off in a tingle of futile anger and hurt pride. Not that the scorn of that parrot-faced woman mattered a bent pin to him or any other unfortunate of neither race; but that she had probably voiced, in vulgar terms, the unspeakable thoughts of all pukka Peshawar. It was not the first time he had been jarred by terms of disparagement spoken in ignorance of his link with India: and vexation increased when he found himself unreasonably disinclined for tea with Aruna and Suráj. He would ride home and send his sais on with a message of regrets.

Turning in between the squat blue gate-posts, he was cheered by the sight of Eve, slim and tall in her green frock and garden apron, lecturing her máli,⁷⁰ a bow-legged, broken-nosed oddity, so zealous in doing the wrong thing, through his humble desire to please, that she veered between loving him and cursing him in picturesque terms.

Roy, watching them, thought suddenly, ‘I can tell her. She’ll be angry and amused and sympathetic in just the right proportions.’ And right proportion was the tonic for his complaint.

She waved to him with her trowel as he trotted up.

‘Nice man. Come to share my lone tea? That Lance simply wallows in kutcherri.’

‘That Lance,’ he said dismounting, ‘is one of India’s real administrators; and he puts his back into the job.’

‘Yes. It’s his way with every job he touches.’

She dismissed the máli, who salaamed with old-fashioned reverence, picked up his flat basket and twig-broom and meekly waddled away.

Eve blew a kiss after him.

‘Rather a gem. But as a máli he’s the limit. Look at that! He’s sown parsley with my pansies. I suppose because they both begin with P! And I haven’t the heart to make him pull it all up. I’ll never be a pukka memsahib, even if Lance ends up as Viceroy—which he threatens to do!’

Roy laughed. The word pukka gave him his cue.

‘You can thank your stars for that. I’ve just had an exhilarating encounter with a second-rate specimen—your friend, the Parrot.’

‘Encounter? Oh, do tell!’

Over tea and cigarettes, in her simply furnished drawing-room, he told——

She was angry and amused in the right proportions: tonic in her scorn of the woman’s crude generalities, yet quick enough to be aware that they might carry a sting; as he knew from her hand on his arm.

‘You don’t care two hoots what a creature like that says or thinks about it, Roy?’

He frowned into space, wishing he could give her an honest ‘No.’

‘“They’re so touchy—you can’t say a word,”’ he quoted; and she turned on him, half angry again. ‘Don’t dare quote that Parrot to me—against yourself. Oh, Roy, think how she’d tingle—if she knew. Do let me tell her—accidentally on purpose. I’d love to administer pins and needles.’

‘I don’t mind if you do,’ he said, overcoming an instinctive reluctance, rather than deprive the Parrot of a salutary tingling. ‘But don’t let it seem pointed.’

She laughed.

‘The points would come afterwards! Though I have to be cautious, because of him. He’s such a dear. But I’d respect him more if he’d only put his foot down sometimes—on her face for choice!’

They were both laughing at her spiteful nonsense when the voice of Lance was heard outside. She sprang up to greet him and tell him the joke: but it seemed he had a joke of his own up his sleeve.

‘I’ve been summonsed,’ he announced, ‘the first time in my life.’

Eve’s eyes widened. ‘But you’re the arm of the law. Who dares——?’

‘It’s our old Congress-wallah landlord at Kohat. Because he didn’t manage to let the bungalow that cold weather, after I left, he’s trying to squeeze rent out of me under false pretences. Every white man now is fair game for these Indian landlords and lawyers. However—as he’s brought this damned suit, I must run over and fight it, on Thursday. You’d better come too. We’ll make a day of it; tiffin with Neil.—You too, Roy?’

For a moment Roy hesitated. ‘ I’d like to, but I’m booked on Thursday. Taking Aruna out to Bundiani.’

‘Can’t you put her off to another afternoon?’

Again Roy hesitated. He would rather go to Kohat, but not at the price of disappointing Aruna, after failing her to-day.

‘In the circumstances—I can’t,’ he said slowly; and Lance remarked in a tentative manner unusual to him, ‘Aruna gets a good deal of your company these days.’

‘Why not? We’ve a lot of joint work on hand. Any reason against it?’

‘None at all. But it’s noticed a bit——’

‘Noticed——? Good Lord!’

It had simply not occurred to him; and a quick look from Eve warned Lance to go warily. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he dismissed the thorny subject. ‘Sorry you can’t change the day. Good luck to the adventure.’

He ended, unwittingly, on the right note. At that time, Rajini’s adventure and Aruna’s share in it were more actively on Sinclair’s mind than any business of his own. At heart he was serving Aruna, in this ticklish affair, rather than Rajini; and both relied implicitly on the moral support of Grace, on her readiness to keep Rajini—very much in purdah—till her parents showed their hands. But even Indian parents were now discovering that daughters had wills of their own.

The actual rescue was to be Aruna’s affair, with practical help from the faithful Charbutti; and on Thursday Aruna was to see her—perhaps also Rajini—to make the final arrangements. For that reason, if for no other, Roy could not let her down, even for the peculiar pleasure of a day in Kohat with Lance.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

He called for her early with the picnic lunch they were to share at Bundiani, so as to be back in Peshawar before those inexorable gates were closed against them.

At an easy pace they rolled through open country, away from the hills: field and desert, with outcrops of rocky hillocks, an occasional squat fort or dust-coloured village.

Aruna, watching the miles of India roll past, held her mind on Rajini, because her heart was troubled by the nearness of Roy—the pleasure and pain of it so strangely mingled.

And he—as if aware—turned and smiled at her.

‘Not content, Aruna-bai?’

She gazed at him in surprise.

‘How could I not be content—driving like this? But sometimes thoughts of all those other purdah women—not thousands but millions—beat upon my mind like waves when a river is in flood. Then I feel as if releasing one clever girl, to think and work in freedom, is only like taking a thimbleful of water from the sea.’

‘You mustn’t feel that,’ he commanded, the more imperatively because the same crippling thought troubled him too often. ‘We may be releasing a Sarój Nalini Dutt—and she was no thimbleful. Or perhaps another Aruna, daughter of the Dawn?’

The last so moved her that, to hide its effect, she answered quickly,——‘I’m not sure if Rajini will be one of that kind. It isn’t so easy, when you are clever and beautiful, to think of others more than yourself. And that Congress-minded cousin would not be a good influence. We are all so keen for education now. But sometimes the first fruits fill one’s mind with dismay. Too much talking of vague ideals. Too little done. In the villages, especially, it is often a big problem how to strike a balance between the Old Light and the New; how to lift the peasants from deadening poverty, and give them enough for their simple needs, without waking the town spirit of greed and killing the village spirit of neighbourly service, which they so well understand.’

‘To show them, in fact,’ suggested Roy, ‘that only in the gospel of sufficiency and service there is perfect freedom.’

‘Not exactly to show them. They are simple people, but not so easily led. We have to drop seeds in their minds, so that they fancy the wish for improvement has come from themselves. If it wasn’t “Hukm,” they might more actively favour banks and Better Living Societies and better schooling.’

‘But again, if it wasn’t “Hukm,”’ Roy reminded her, ‘wouldn’t most of them sooner put up with any conditions than make the effort needed to change their ways? It’s the great god Climate you’re up against, Aruna.’

She smiled and sighed. ‘Always some kind of god to bind them in chains. But if you work among them, Roy, you find it isn’t all laziness or callousness that makes them say, “It is our fate. What can we do?” It is hopelessness. The scales always so heavily weighted against them. I am trying to sow a few seeds in Bundiani with the help of Charbutti, who is one of themselves. But there are too few like her. Without her help, I doubt if we could rescue Rajini.—Now we must take this turning. We’re nearly there.’

Few Indian villages are on the main road; and two miles of kachha track brought them to Bundiani. They left the locked car in an open space; and Aruna led the way to Charbutti’s humble mud house.

A rickety wooden door opened into her small courtyard. It contained only two corn-bins and a charpoy covered with a red resai—the seat of honour for her guests. For her own use there was a string stool with red lacquered legs. She herself, not yet forty-five, looked nearer seventy: short and spare, with the waddling walk of bowed legs, a high-bridged nose, and a loose, expressive lower lip; kindly humorous wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and short-sighted eyes. Her hair, strained tightly back from a wide forehead, was twisted into a jug-handle from which her red cotton chuddah fell in folds. Her short jacket and a faded red skirt were patched and worn, but clean.

After greetings, she begged them to sit while she helped her neighbour to a few measures of corn. The neighbour—plump and comely—pulled at her sari and salaamed; a gesture echoed by the oddest little figure of a girl-child, who clutched her skirt. Its few garments looked as if they had come out of a rag bag: a long, discoloured flannel petticoat, half covered by the semblance of a child’s cast-off chemise, and a tiny red chuddah of coarsest homespun.

Unaware of its oddity, it sucked a thumb and stared at them with startled eyes, while Charbutti filled two measures of winnowed grain from her bin of baked mud, raised on piles and roughly painted with travesties of peacocks and elephants.

Presently a sharp barking of dogs attracted the child’s attention. With one quick glance at the gossiping women it trotted off, sturdily independent, through the open door.

‘Even your girl-babies are coming on!’ remarked Roy, as the mother looked round and said sharply, ‘Where has she gone now, that little forward blackamoor?’

Aruna—surprised at the tone—sprang up.

‘Dogs are fighting out there,’ she said. ‘Shall I run and fetch her? She might get bitten.’

A startled look flitted across the young woman’s eyes; but she said in an odd forced voice, ‘A good thing if the little wretch does get bitten. She’ll never come to any harm.’

‘What a way to talk about your own child,’ Aruna reproached her; and at once she changed her tone.

‘Have you no baba-lōg? Don’t you know we must talk so to deceive the gods?’

In her haste to be gone she spilt half her grain; and lest the gods should suspect her fear, she said aloud, ‘I hope that blackamoor has been well punished—little devil.’

Aruna, smiling at the pathos of it, turned to Charbutti, who held up a bony finger. ‘I will tell you a secret, Aruna-devi——’

She checked herself and glanced at Roy with the oddest contortion of her expressive lower lip. ‘The Sahib might be shocked!’

‘The Sahib understands Indians,’ Aruna told her.

And coming closer, she said in a dramatic whisper, ‘Little blackamoor is not a girl. He is the one son she has been able to rear, after two sons and a daughter had all been taken by the ill-will of the goddess, Káli. Every few months she went to the shrine of Káli, eight miles out, eight miles back—to propitiate. Then came this boy—who only lived because she is deceiving the goddess, giving him girl’s clothes, girl’s names, loudly pretending she would not care if he died. And she still goes to the shrine.’

‘But, Charbutti,’ Aruna protested, ‘you know it isn’t Káli—or the shrine. If you told her the truth, she would believe. It is a sinful shame that a man-child should be so dishonoured through fear.’

Charbutti screwed up her quaint face and said with a shrewd look, ‘Do I know—do you know—what is true truth? It is God who gives everything. But some help, perhaps, one also gets from Káli.’

‘Charbutti, that’s treason,’ Aruna rebuked her; and she, taking her devi’s hand, pressed it to her lips.

‘This goddess we never deceive. And Káli-mai shall not blacken the fate of our beautiful Rajini. I fear she will not get out to-day. Great caution is needed. But whatever I arrange with Aruna-devi, she will do.’

While they arranged, at some length, Sinclair strolled back through the village to collect the lunch they were to eat on Charbutti’s scarlet quilt. A pity there were not more like her in this deeply rutted world of peasant India: so shrewd, yet so simple; so full of practical kindliness, seasoned with humour. Yet even she could not combat the dark influence of Káli on that benighted young mother and her surreptitious son. What chance had a Roy reared in the shadow of deception and fear? What chance had the greater part of Hindu manhood, born of immature mothers, sex-stimulated, mentally starved?

If Roy himself had felt any private qualms as to the right or wrong of their adventure, a brief stroll through this typical village would have sufficed to set them at rest. In these warrens of windowless houses, these filth-littered lanes, mud was not restricted to matter; it permeated mind. Thanks to many zealous workers, improvements were creeping in; but over the whole dust-coated, custom-coated place hung the fateful legend, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.’ The same flea-haunted pariahs; the same cast bullocks, galled and starved, patiently awaiting the end; the same crows and thieving monkeys and naked children, beginning betimes their natural link with dust and mud. Outside, on the kachha road, unoiled wheels of bullock-carts chanted their drowsy litany; a file of camels went shuffling and tinkling past—automata of fate.

Near the chowpāl a cocksure town-bred youth, in Gandhi cap, was talking politics, airing his borrowed catchwords chiefly to attract attention. At sight of a wandering Sahib, he launched a few sentences in English to show what he was at.

‘See how the beloathed and dastardly British Government snatches saints and noble patriots from our middles to rot in chains, or hang on ropes for crows to peck out their eyes.’

But the Sahib, feigning deafness, turned down a narrow lane, to escape the too familiar infliction.

‘What the devil can one do with or for these people?’ was his impatient thought, in a sudden access of disgust and weariness of the half-baked modern Indian and all his ways, of the falsely beglamoured East; an acute nostalgia for the clean, wet smell of English earth and the autumn splendour of English trees; for the beauty and comfort and dear companionship he had put away from him—to what practical end? Must he soon go back to Kashmir, in pursuit of clearer seeing? Must he give up, for himself and them, the homely joys of Christmas? If Tara would but come out to him, he could surrender—for a time—everything else in life that his English blood craved and his English heart desired.

And in his mind he heard the very tone of his Guru’s voice, ‘You will return.’

Stifling it, thrusting it aside, he walked briskly back to Charbutti’s courtyard.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

As they drove home, Aruna revealed the plan of campaign. Charbutti, it seemed, was G.O.C. operations. Aruna—on the appointed day—was not to go near Bundiani. Being well known there, her presence might suggest a flight to Peshawar. Instead, she must drive to the small village of Khandu, eight miles off; and Rajini—who often crept out to see Charbutti—would, on that occasion, not return. She would be brought to Khandu an hour before sunset; and Charbutti would be back in her home corner next morning, full of surprise when news of the flown bird convulsed the village. Grace—to confuse the trail—would meet Aruna at a certain ziarat,⁷¹ some miles outside the station, and take the girl to her bungalow, that Aruna might not, by any chance, be seen driving with her in Peshawar.

The serene Aruna—aquiver between anxiety and excitement—was longing to share it all with Grace, who had been spending a week in Kohat among hospital friends while Lynch was away. She might be returning with the Desmonds, dining with them, and coming on afterwards to talk——‘conspiracy.’

As they entered cantonments, there drove past them a Colonel’s wife of Sinclair’s acquaintance, who bowed to him with something less than her normal effusion. The stare she turned on his companion recalled Desmond’s tentative hint two days earlier; and Roy hoped, furiously, that Aruna had not noticed—sitting there silent, absorbed in her thoughts.

Again, as he slowed round between her gate-posts, he became aware of a shabby Austin car—the Parrot, bowing stiffly, looking hard at Aruna, who could not fail to notice, this time.

Before he spoke, she turned to him and said simply, ‘It is a great pity some of these English ladies—good caste I suppose?—have such very bad manners.’

Roy agreed with fervour, mentally contrasting those lapses from ladyhood with the fine breeding of her unruffled serenity.

Driving on to the Desmonds’ bungalow, he hoped they might be back. Eve, in good form, could charm away all the ills that his mixed blood was heir to.

The car outside reassured him; and in the drawing-room he found them at tea, Grace with them, Eve unmistakably in good form; Lance inclined to fume over a wasted day.

‘You’re an ungrateful wretch,’ Eve reproved him. ‘It’s been a priceless day.’—She turned to welcome Roy.—‘Desmonds through the Looking-Glass! You really should have been there.’

‘Let’s have your version,’ Roy encouraged her.

‘Tea first,’ she decreed. ‘And there’s your chair.’

When he had greeted Grace and received his tea, she gave him her version, making her points with a strip of buttered toast, which she forgot to eat.

‘We arrived at eleven, as commanded, picking up Neil for co-defendant, because he was in Kohat at the time. The court wasn’t in its usual place. But we ran it to earth in the garden: one lonely judge—a most unsavoury-looking specimen—gloomily paring his nails. He greeted us as if we’d blown in uninvited, waved us to three empty chairs, and went on with his beastly nails. We heard afterwards that he’s a limb of Congress, which explained his manners, but didn’t excuse.

‘Well, we smoked and waited; and waited and smoked. Nothing happened. No landlord or his pleader. And by twelve o’clock my notoriously patient husband became simply rampant; suspecting they’d hauled him there under false pretences. So the judge—by way of soothing him—said he might as well hear the defence first! We could hardly keep straight faces. But Lance—rather vague as to the prosecution—slanged the absentee landlord in caustic terms. And if you please, while he was in full blast, the judge—his only audience—got up and strolled away. You should have seen his face——’

‘A piece of damned calculated insolence!’ Lance flung out, raging at the recollection. ‘I sent Neil off to investigate; and he found the beggar coolly signing cheques in the treasury—one of his side jobs. So Neil took us off to feed at his chummery. Primed with food and drink, we extracted the judge from the treasury and dumped him back in court, telling him that we must leave soon after three to get through the Kohat Pass. That didn’t seem to worry him. He probably thought time was made for slaves—and Englishmen! Just about three, the enemy’s pleader strolled in, plump and smiling. But our time was up. So we left him to entertain the judge, with accusations already refuted, and went off to fetch Grace. Four damned hours we’d been there. I’d launched an able defence—and never heard a word of the prosecution! It’s my belief the fellow dragged me there to make a fool of me—and I’ll hear no more of Narayan Das.’

‘I suppose,’ remarked Eve, in more serious vein, ‘it’s a tale you’d hardly get anyone to believe who hadn’t experienced it. Would you call it’—-she turned to Roy—‘a fair sample of the way they’d carry on if they were running the country more or less on their own?’

‘Not a fair sample,’ he said cautiously. ‘But no doubt a good deal of so-called justice would be run on those lines without the tiresome white man at the helm. Things are sliding downhill already.’

‘I could cap incredible tales with the best,’ remarked Grace, ‘on the fruits of Indianising the medical service. And they wouldn’t be funny: chalk given for quinine; operations with rusty instruments; cases allowed to become hopeless for lack of prompt attention. But who would heed now? Pink spectacles are the only wear.’

‘The sale of ’em ought to be made illegal!’ said Lance, rising and yawning, without ceremony. ‘Oh, gooroo! After that wasted day’—he winked at Eve—‘I must go and tackle my dāk.’

‘And I,’ she said, ‘must fly to my neglected son.’

When they were gone, the other two sat on by the fire, with a pleasant sense of companionship that took them back to the wandering days of Delhi and Gurgáon.

Grace, sure of his interest, talked of the hospital and the trials of her successor. Then she spoke of their friend Saroláta Rāo, who had also been at Kohat, touring the Schools and Samitis of Northern India with an American educationist from a big woman’s College—a firm believer in the blessings of culture.

‘They’re in Peshawar now,’ she said, ‘eager to see the first girls’ school started across the Border.’

‘A girls’ school?’ he opened his eyes. ‘A few of those over there would he more to the point than Gandhi’s spinning-wheels!’

She laughed. ‘The first chink in their masculine armour! Forty pupils already. It’s run by a remarkable woman—widow and grandmother. Once she was a clever, beautiful dancing girl. Now she wields a more far-reaching influence over the lives of men. I’d like to see her meeting with Mrs Gatton—Gwendolen M. Gatton, calls herself Wendy. She’s full of zeal, genuine and intelligent—if she does favour pink spectacles. I’ve caught her for lunch on Saturday—not Saroláta, worse luck. You must come—you and Eve. John will curse—so soon after he gets back. And the pink spectacles will make him combative. I shall have to curb him.’

‘Not a very curbable specimen!’ Sinclair remarked.

She smiled, a curious thinking smile.

‘And not very keen on wholesale education, or advancing women.’ She looked at him—remembering Rajini. ‘Was the outing a success? All fixed up?’

‘Yes. I hope there’ll be no hitch. Aruna’s heart is deeply in it.’

‘I can see that. She loves the girl. I’ll hear everything to-night. Then—John.’

Their eyes met; and he saw his own thought in hers.

‘Isn’t Lynch in it?’ he asked.

‘Not yet. He’s been so much away, and had such a worrying time this cold weather, that I haven’t bothered him with our trivial plans.’

For a second Roy hesitated; but curiosity and the ease of their whole relation prevailed.

‘I should think he might be dead against it.’

‘That’s quite likely.’

‘If he is—will it upset the whole apple-cart——’

‘No. I’ve given my word.’ She said it in the same even tone, looked across at him with her sudden smile, and tacitly dismissed the subject. ‘You haven’t told me much about my Guru and Kashmir.’

‘Kashmir?’ The word sent a curious breeze along his nerves. ‘We’ve not had much chance, have we? I’ve been in camp and you don’t correspond! But I’ve been wanting to thank you for one of the most profound and real experiences of my life.’

She said quietly, ‘I knew it would be that. Can you tell me—some of it?’

‘Yes—some.’

There by the friendly wood fire he sat and talked of Amarnáth, of Sri Samádhi, as he had not supposed he could talk of them, even to Tara. And only in the process he discovered why the normal barriers of reserve were down. He was speaking of a far-off Roy, other than the one who sat with her by Lance Desmond’s fire: a Roy mysteriously linked with the man who had wakened him to conscious life. And with that eerie thought came a prick of fear lest the other Roy might suddenly reach out a ghostly hand and snatch him away from this comfortable, congenial world——

When at last he went off to change for dinner, he caught himself wishing that Grace had not mentioned Kashmir.

Chapter 10

Bound for ever to his opposite;
Divided thus, for ever; thus for ever whole.
— Humbert Wolfe

John Lynch, at home for a spell—after a drastic tour of inspection along the Border—sat alone in his sanctum by a freshly fed log fire, crackling and blazing with an exuberance of life and light that makes a wood fire the most companionable of all inanimate things.

At the moment, he was not actively aware of the fire except as a pleasant warmth against his legs. He was studying, with contracted brows, a report just received from one of his most energetic A.S.P.’s down at Attock. It recorded a successful hold-up, on suspicion, of two Pathans driving six donkey loads of unrefined sugar towards Attock bridge.

Police Constable Khudar Bux had insisted on examining those harmless-looking sacks; and, in the process, he had unearthed ten live bombs, five bags of gunpowder, a thousand cartridges, twenty rifles and ten revolvers. The arms were found to be mostly of Russian make; and at that significant statement Lynch swore under his breath. It was not new to him, by any means, this significant form of gun-running from Central Asia; but each fresh discovery brought home to him the amount of undiscovered material that must be seeping through, in spite of the keenest police vigilance, to arm the Punjab against the day of mass killing. While high-minded men, round a table, talked All-India Federation, the ‘United Republican Party’ worked unceasingly for All-India Devolution. And there were disconcerting moments when he asked himself which of them would first reach the goal?

For himself, as head watch-dog of a turbulent province, it had been a difficult year. Little leisure to enjoy his changed status, as husband of Grace, except during those two good months in the Hindu Khush. Thanks to the Gandhi pact, and wholesale releases, tails were up all along the Border. The hostile Red Shirt and Youth League movements were spreading, and stirring up Afridi malcontents. A.G.K. was replenishing his army and openly preaching war against the British. There would be no quiet on the Border till he and his leaders were in jail again: and the present Viceroy could, at least, be trusted to keep them there.

Delhi, as usual, wanted to ‘go slow.’ But the Chief had asked for special powers. He was laying his plans for a big move round about Christmas. And this time Lynch vowed, by all the gods in whom he did not believe, that he would bring it off to some purpose. Not the British, but their lucky star, would probably save India from revolution—if only at the fifty-ninth minute.

He pocketed Stirling’s letter, pensively refilled his pipe; then he leaned back, in a passing mood of idleness, relishing the peace and comfort of his familiar room.

On this one room in the big bungalow he had set the stamp of his personality; books, maps, coin-cabinets and a spacious writing-table, for the practical worker; rich hangings and carpets and deep arm-chairs for the man at ease. He had his full share of the masculine idea of comfort: the things one ate and drank, the things on which one sat and slept. But if that were all, he would never have persuaded Grace to change her chosen work of healing for the difficult state of marriage to a man who had made her his wife with eyes fully open to the knowledge that marriage was not his métier, nor hers either.

It had not taken him long to discover that, even at best, it was a difficult relation; but the profound satisfaction remained of having made permanently his own the one woman whom he not only desired, but sincerely admired and loved. Sisterless, and the son of a dominant mother—with whom he had quarrelled fatally in early manhood—he had known much of women as women little or nothing of woman as an individual fellow-being. Girls he had sedulously avoided. A few semi-detached wives had briefly entangled him. Grace was the first woman whose actual mind and character he had seriously attempted to study and—if possible—understand. But he lacked the disinterested imagination needed to enter the foreign region of another’s personality; and the fact that this foreign region was the mind of his own wife did not make things easier.

Not that he was snared by sentiment. Though a man of strong passions, he preferred his brimstone without treacle. But he could not think dispassionately of one who had so steadfastly refused him, so irresistibly held him, even in absence, and in his own despite. For marriage had not entered into his scheme of life. Like many of his kind, he had tended to regard it as a form of slavery, because it empowered one woman to monopolise the whole man, while it robbed him of his masculine right to take what he would, when and where he would. To himself—after more than a year of it—he could honestly admit that the right marriage, with the right woman, was the only true form of sex freedom—passion constrained by love.

For the rest, he had found her his equal in the need for a personal freedom—within the bond—that neither asserted nor admitted claims, beyond a specified limit. They had married on that clear understanding. Could they keep it up?

She probably could: but he had soon recognised that his male possessive instinct grew on him with the habit of possession; and he recognised also that a too clear revealing of it irked Grace, knowing herself as dependable as she was independent. For so long she had lived her own life; spending it for others, yet free, as he, from entangling personal contacts. For him she had given up her precious hospital, but had refused to give up her work for Indian women. He had undertaken not to stand in her light; though he was sceptical of indiscriminate education as a cure for all ills; and he knew he would feel restive if she let the movement absorb too much of her mind and time.

The week in Kohat had renewed all her old interests. The hospital people had evidently made a great fuss over her—and no wonder, seeing all she had done there. She was a splendid creature. He liked her independent spirit, even when it clashed with his own; and, for all his enjoyment of these cold weather tours, he was glad to be back in the ‘household clime’ she created by her presence. She ran his home as competently as her hospital. She kept singularly clear of the domestic undergrowth created by marriage; and she didn’t clutter up the house with indiscriminate women. She put her intelligence into all she did; knew how to be there whenever he wanted her, yet not overmuch there—an excellent thing in woman.

His attitude in these respects did not spring merely from his bachelor habits. He came of a hard self-reliant stock; men whose rigidity of mind and masterful ways were defects of a quality without which their race would never have won so much power for good or broken so many powers of evil; men capable of cutting out even desirable distractions, as a gardener cuts out weeds, so that their field of action might be ordered and fruitful.

The responsible overseeing of an imperial service, the satisfying exercise of authority, these were his bread and meat. Love and the woman were his wine of life; and he himself too strong in mind and body, too actively absorbed in work, to have much need for companionship—except on brief holidays—or for the softer responses that most men expect from women. The man’s job—as he saw it—was precisely to hold his own against the enervating contacts incidental to marriage, and their insidious assaults on his masculinity.

Lance seemed to be succeeding uncommonly well; but there had been much separation. Happily, there was nothing to enervate a man in living with Grace. Yet, in this one year, she had entered his life more deeply than he had anticipated when he married her.

At the back of his mind she was always there. He noticed everything that concerned her, whether she knew it or not. And if at times he returned, with a sense of relief, to the company of his fellows, he scarcely recognised it as relief. A man liked, now and then, to let himself go, to forget his manners and use any language that came to his unchaste lips. With her, to some extent, he must be on his guard. There was a crystal quality about her that constrained him. He supposed it was her religion. Though she seldom spoke of it, she clearly lived by its code of moral values; and her mind moved in mysterious ways to which his own gave no clue. But he could, and did, respect the faith that was in her, as in Lance.

To think of her was to want her, and she had not been near him since breakfast.

Ah—there she was! He sat upright as she drew back the curtain.

‘Busy, John?’

‘Vastly busy—waiting for an absentee wife.’

‘Nonsense. I saw you had a big dāk. I was being tactful!’

She came forward, very distinguished-looking in her green coat and small hat, a fresh colour in her cheeks.

‘Tactful—eh?’ He looked her up and down, appraising her. ‘You were gadding round?’

‘Not precisely. I went to the Mahila Samiti with Aruna and Roy, about a show she’s getting up. I’ve not been back half an hour.’

He flung out a hand and pulled her down so that she kneeled beside him; laid an arm round her shoulders and kissed her—a slow, hard kiss. Then he looked her straight in the eyes.

‘Damn your luncheon party,’ was his husbandly remark. ‘When I do take a slack day I like having you to myself.’

She leaned her shoulder to his. ‘I like it, too. But Mrs Gatton’s a bird of passage. I couldn’t fit her in any other time. She lives by schedule! She and Saroláta are touring together.’

‘If you asked Mrs Ráo—she’s worth talking to.’

‘But she’s wanted to-day at Government House. I’m having her alone one evening, which we both prefer. And Mrs Gatton is really very pleasant, very intelligent——’

‘Oh, I know these brainy American women, panting after uplift. She’ll get no sugar-coated India from me. If she wants facts, I’ll serve them out to her. But their minds are so blurred with idealism, that half the time they can’t see facts even if they want to. Your semi-Rajput friend also has a tilt that way. Why didn’t you make a bid for Lance instead of the perpetual Sinclair?’

‘He’s not perpetual,’ she retorted with more warmth than wisdom.——‘I’ve seen too little of him since he came in from camp.’

‘Hard luck,’ he said drily. ‘Thought you saw him this morning.’

‘Oh, he drove us to the Samiti. He’s very good in that way. But lately he has been camping with Lance.’

‘Yes. I ran into him when I was after business with Lance. They seemed thick as thieves. He’s put the boy in his pocket also. But he won’t open out to me: a case of oil and water. He’s a bit of a Johnny Head in Air—your Roy. Silly fancy name. Suggests Bengal. The Indian mother, I suppose?’ A pause. ‘It gets me, how the devil a man of good family came to take such a fatal step——’

‘If you saw her portrait, even you might understand. Roy’s name is Leroy Sinclair—pure Norman. I wish you wouldn’t be so prejudiced, John.’

‘Prejudiced? You know I like Indians, and understand them—pretty well. But I jib at the mixed breed—even a good specimen. Sinclair’s got brains; and he’s got points——’ He looked hard at her, and added with a short laugh, ‘If you were less obviously alive to them, I might be more so.’

‘John—my dear!’ Her shoulder pressed his. ‘I didn’t credit you with such foolishness. He and I are both firmly anchored. But we’re very real friends; and I did hope you two would hit it off in spite of—the mixture. You’re working on one side of the medal, he on the other. He admires your work and envies you the doing of it. Can’t you be equally generous to him?’

‘I’ll be just, if I can’t be generous,’ he said honestly; for a hard knot within him could not be loosed at will. ‘And we’ll drop him, for a bit.—Tell me more about Kohat. Did you feel a kind of hankering to stay there and carry on—your own mistress and all?’

‘No—no.’

It was quietly said, but it came from her heart; and his understanding of the possibility encouraged her to tell him much that had not gone into her brief letters: of the women she used to scold and reason with, who had missed her visits and even tried—here and there—to follow her precepts; confessing their sins of omission with folded hands. She smiled, remembering—

‘They’ll flop back again after I’m gone. But the few exceptions make all one’s efforts worth while. Indian women, at best, really are dears.’

‘Oh, they are,’ he agreed in an odd voice, as of one who had reason to know.

And she—edging away from the inference—told him of her visit to a Moslem family, where she had friends in three generations. Keenly interested in her belated marriage, they had given her a true Indian welcome——

‘And a lovely thing it is,’ she commented. ‘They’re as apt at simply and naturally showing their hearts as we are in hiding them. I was only puzzled by the complete absence of baba-lōg, with two young mothers in the party. When I ventured to ask the reason, they looked shy and self-conscious. Then the older one found courage to say: We heard that out kind Lady Sahib has been overlooked by the gods in this matter of children; and we thought the sight of our baba-lōg* might hurt her heart. So we sent them to play in a friend’s house.”’

She looked round at him, her eyes suspiciously bright. ‘Could one match that for kindness and delicacy of feeling?’

Again his arm went round her shoulders, his hand pressed it hard.

‘Not permanently overlooked by the gods—I hope,’ he said in a contained voice.

‘I hope not,’ she echoed fervently.

‘You shouldn’t have held me off all those years.’

His arm pressed her closer. With his right hand he removed her hat and caressed her hair, his singular lightness of touch seeming oddly unrelated to his square, solid hand. But he did not kiss her; and obscurely she was glad. Her own inner response told her that this was not mere love-making. The John who could only express deep feeling in this mute fashion was telling her the things she most cared to know.

In these moods she loved him with a depth and fervour beyond expression. Nor would she disturb their quiet happy intimacy by talking of Rajini, as she had meant to do. Roy was very much in it, and, in spite of her appeal, John might fizzle again; say the kind of things that would provoke her to unwise retort. It was their moment. She wanted no intrusion of outside things. Words could so easily break a spell of content. While they were silent, much that was inconvenient slept. Mind and heart were in full surrender to the flood-tide of contentment that carries a woman along beside the man she has married.

Reluctantly she stirred at last and looked up at the clock.

‘My damned luncheon party!’ she demurely reminded him. ‘Can I trust you to behave?’

‘It depends,’ he said darkly, ‘on the behaviour of the woman. Great is information—and shall prevail!’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

The woman proved to be plump and fair and an easy fifty, her smooth skin well creamed and massaged, her intelligent blue eyes undisfigured by horn spectacles, her figure skilfully persuaded into a trim tailor-made. Untiring zest to see all that could be seen, and a sincere desire to understand, were linked with an engaging readiness to admit that the British in India might conceivably know a shade more than her own people about ‘this mysterious country.’

But if horn spectacles were absent, the rose-tinted ones kept Grace on the alert as to John’s behaviour, while giving her full attention to Roy, who had spent a long evening with Vincent, and had a good deal to say about it.

Eve—in a becoming hat and yellow flowered frock—was inclined to monopolise John; and would certainly abet him in any wickedness.

Mr Collins, Professor of English to Islamia College, talked blandly to no one in particular, and was chiefly heeded by Mrs Gatton.

She had spent a fruitful morning at the College; and was inclined to effervesce over the ‘fine civilising influence’ set right down on the doorstep—so to speak—of these wild mountains.

John was polite but cautious. ‘Time to assess the influence when they have been dispensing it for two generations.’

Mrs Gatton shook a manicured finger at him.

‘Mr Lynch, I suspect you’re a pessimist! Look at the splendid material; the fine handsome boys I saw this morning. These Pathans have such European faces. Not like ordinary Indians down south.’

‘They don’t consider themselves ordinary Indians. They’ve a strong Semitic strain. Claim to be descended from the Lost Tribe of Israel. They’ve all the Jewish names: Ibrahim, Yakub, Yusuf——’

‘Jacob, Joseph,’ she translated eagerly, the mental note-book expression coming into play. (And Grace, watching them, thought—‘Great is information! He’s making himself useful.’) ‘Now that’s most interesting. One senses a different sort of reaction to these people. One’s more than ever in the Old Testament atmosphere: so picturesque and unhygienic. Some of your fine old patriarchs might have stepped straight from the Book of Kings. Under their rough exterior they must be full of noble impulses.’

‘I can vouch for the noble impulses,’ Lynch said drily: and Grace pricked up her ears. ‘Very conspicuous, for instance, in their matrimonial affairs. No fuss about self-expression. No sordid, civilised divorce proceedings. If a husband suspects that his wife has “stepped out”—as you say over there—he expresses himself by biting off her nose: a simple and practical precaution that wouldn’t occur to the ignoble West.’

Eve, at his elbow, burst out laughing; and he eyed her sternly.

‘What’s the joke, young woman? You know it’s Bible truth.’

‘Yes, I know.’

She also knew that he knew she had laughed at Wendy’s horrified face.

‘You ask Grace’—he reverted to his astonished guest—‘how many new noses she has supplied to erring wives, that they might go—and sin again. An immoral act from the husband’s point of view—which is mine.’

‘But you wouldn’t justify——?’

She looked from one to the other, unable to complete the indelicate question.

Lynch had no qualms on that head.

‘It simplifies things,’ he said gravely. ‘And gives you the Border atmosphere all right. Not so bloodthirsty is the case of a Mahsud mother christening her son. But if you like local colour——?’

‘I just love it,’ she breathed; eager for more, yet fearful of further disconcerting revelations.

‘Well, she pops the precious infant through a hole in the wall, with the pious aspiration—“May you rise to man’s estate. May you be a famous thief; and may Allah assist you in all your unlawful occasions.” That again’—he turned to Eve, who was twinkling unlawfully at Roy—‘is gospel truth. I’m a walking encyclopedia of undesirable knowledge! I’ve been studying these people and policing them, off and on, for a matter of twenty years.’

‘Well, you ought to know a thing or two about them!’ she rallied him gaily. ‘But it doesn’t prove that they won’t ever be amenable to the blessing of culture.’

‘My dear lady’—he refrained from asking what didn’t prove which—‘the blessing these wild tribes want, isn’t culture, it’s agriculture.’

The distinction drew a murmur of applause from the rest. He smiled his acknowledgments; and continued the steam-roller process with a quiet relish of which Grace alone was fully aware.

‘Our roads have done wonders in Waziristan. But our colleges mainly convert real men into Scribes and Pharisees. Some years ago I asked one of my most intelligent clerks what he supposed were the uses of that fine new college outside Peshawar; and he answered pat, “To soften and weaken turbulent tribesmen and bring cultured blessing of peace on benighted Frontier.” But, being a Hindu, he didn’t half relish that undue fostering of Islam. Personally I think it’s no good, for them or ourselves, to hybridise the Pathan. Most of us who know the Border (but you must not listen to a man who “knows”!) would sooner have on our flank a horde of freebooters, men we can fight and understand, than a hybrid, intriguing people, talking political catchwords, sucking cheap wisdom from lawyers and demagogues. Corner Mr Collins in a truthful mood, and he’ll back me—up to a point. Judged by mass results, it’s a futile and dangerous thing, this veneer of book learning that Indians call education.’

But it was to Sinclair that the dismayed optimist appealed for support of her own unshaken conviction.

‘Do you agree with him, Sir Roy? You write books on India. You know the one talisman up and down this country is—education. Do you believe all these fine schools and colleges are either just useless—or more harm than good?’

Sinclair met the unexpected attack with his small twitching frown. His personal ideas on that subject were the last thing he could serve up on demand at a luncheon table, especially under the eye of Lynch. But, caught in a fatal pause, and impaled by a direct question, he felt constrained to attempt an honest answer.

‘No—I don’t believe that. But I do think they should be run on different lines. I think Tagore’s famous school at Shanti-niketán is more to the point than our well-meaning attempts to conjure mock Englishmen out of Orientals. The few good specimens make little show in the main crop of sceptics, malcontents and revolutionaries. India wants individual renewal; and that can only come through her women. Bear them on the right lines—and they can be trusted to create a finer race of Indian men, to whom England can hand over real responsibility. It may be the hidden purpose of our long, difficult link with India—the freeing and educating of her women, not only for their good, but for the good of the world. You agree with that, I know——’

He turned to Grace, suddenly afraid he had said too much, hoping he need say no more.

‘I absolutely agree’—her smile commended him—‘if their freeing and educating is tackled more from an Indian than an English standpoint. At present, most of them are putting a drag on the wheel. But the best are wonderful material. All they want is the full chance of becoming superlatively themselves.’

And having managed to cheer the optimist, without running counter to her husband, she gave the signal to rise.

They passed through the drawing-room, into the wide verandah, flooded with winter sunshine: and Mrs Gatton—elated by the blessing pronounced on women’s education—assailed her clever hostess with searching questions about the first girls’ school across the Border, which she and Saroláta had leave to visit on Monday.

When the men joined them for coffee, Grace guarded her from John, who asked nothing better than freedom to fool with Eve. Her fooling, with its spice of wit, was often so much more intelligent than the seriousness of other women. But before the party broke up, Fate—in the form of his Sikh orderly—once more delivered the hopeful lady into his hands.

The Sikh—an imposing figure in belted tunic and badged turban—came up and saluted, at the foot of the steps, keeping a respectful distance from the white ‘Mems.’ He had a message for the Sahib. Lynch went down to hear it; and they stood talking, watched by an observant stranger collecting impressions.

The two were on very good terms. Sher Singh liked and respected his Sahib, who never overlooked an error or failed to give credit where credit was due; and Lynch was at his most genial with a trusted subordinate. There was a good deal of chaff and laughter between them. The orderly grinned as he saluted and walked away, conscious of his fine appearance, that must surely impress the white women.

It so notably impressed the interested stranger that she commented on it when Lynch rejoined the group.

‘What a splendid fellow!’ she greeted him. ‘Is that one of your Jewish tribesmen?’

Lynch politely suppressed a smile.

‘No. He’s a Sikh of the Punjab. He wouldn’t appreciate being mistaken for a Pathan, his traditional enemy! He’s a rare good specimen of his kind. We understand each other—up to a point.’

‘That’s just what I thought. I was watching you!’ she confided archly. ‘Such a pleasure to see one of you Britishers treating an Indian as an equal—a man and a brother.’

‘I assure you I wasn’t treating him as a brother,’ Lynch protested with an abrupt laugh, as he sat down again by Eve. ‘He wouldn’t appreciate it, if I did. He’s my orderly; not my equal. And he knows it. But he gets more courtesy and consideration from me than I’m apt to bestow on either of my brothers. He’d run from here to Jamrud for me, if I wanted a bit of news in a hurry; and he knows I’d stand by him at a pinch. We both know we’re not of one blood, or of one status. There’s no damned sentiment about it. But it works.’

‘It seems to—in some cases,’ Mrs Gatton murmured, interested, pained and faintly overawed.

‘I give you my word it does.’ And he proceeded to drive home the faint impression he had made on her malleable mind. ‘It’s not my sort, it’s you sentimental people who do most of the damage. You run round over-idealising everyone and everything. And—believe me—what you over-idealise, you never really know. You’d have a wholesome eye-opener if you could see just a few of the gentle Hindus and noble Moslems that we of the police are called on to deal with every day of our dusty lives.’

He spoke with a conviction that atoned, in part, for his lapse from courtesy; and the good-natured lady with a small gasp, turned her fine blue eyes on Grace.’

‘Nice agreeable sort of husband you’ve got, my dear.’

‘Yes, haven’t I?’ Grace twinkled at the offender. ‘No damned sentiment about him—but he works!’

The neat retort raised a general laugh: and Lynch, well pleased, behaved himself till the party broke up.

By way of olive branch, he offered Mrs Gatton a morning in the local police court—with interpreter.

‘Now that’s just too kind of you,’ she thanked him charmingly. ‘But we’re chock-full every minute of our short stay. And it’s not crime we’re studying, its education.’

‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other in this country,’ he fired his parting shot. ‘If half our colleges could be closed down, India might be a safer, more peaceful land for all concerned.’

‘Oh, you’re a most disheartening man!’ she cried only half in joke. ‘I’ll ask Sir Vincent Leigh about that.’

‘Yes—ask Sir Vincent,’ he said: and she fluttered a hand at him through the car window as she drove off with Mr Collins for tea at Government House.

‘A most disheartened man sometimes,’ he amended gravely, with a straight look at his wife that saved him from a reprimand for firing broadsides into a ball of cotton-wool. From harsh experience she knew, as well as he did, the futility and the intermittent urge to lighten the darkness of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not——

Chapter 11

Thou shall be nearest him when thou withstandest him.
—Nietzsche

Left alone again, they settled down to finish letters for the afternoon post-bag, and ordered tea in the study. Lynch loved the room, with his work and his hobbies about him; and he liked the quiet time with her after the effort not to be outrageous.

When the tea-table had been removed, he fetched a favourite pipe, lit it and stood with his back to the fire looking down at Grace, who seemed lost in her own thoughts. Not choosing to have her thus withdrawn from him, he recaptured her attention in practical fashion.

Leaning down, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her upturned face.

‘No damned sentiment about him—but he works!’—His eyes looked deep into hers.—‘Nice respectful epitome of your husband.’

She laughed at the recollection. ‘I couldn’t resist it. But I like the little woman. You jumped on her rather too hard; and she took it better than I would have taken it.’

‘Well, you shoved her at me, and I’ve done my duty by her. Given her something for a “write up” in her diary. If you will have these parties——’

She smiled pensively, remembering. . . .

‘Not a bad little party. It gave you a chance to make several good points.’

‘And it gave your “Roy” friend an opportunity to testify.’

‘Yes. I was glad of that.’ She looked full at him a moment, as he subsided into his chair, thinking ‘Here’s my opportunity.’

‘He’s right,’ she said, ‘about the women. Change them; and they’ll change the race. They themselves don’t quite realise the significance of all they are quietly and persistently achieving to-day.’

‘M—m—— quietly? The police could tell another story. What price frenzied females, kicking and screaming, to invite violence—and report it? Or the unnatural alliance of bazaar women, purdah ladies, girls between six and ten, flinging themselves in front of trains and cloth shops, and students going to lectures——’

‘Oh, you’ll always have that side to a movement,’ she said with a touch of impatience, ‘like our militant suffragettes. They get the limelight, and discredit the others. Those who will lift the race are the hundreds of intelligent girls flocking to our colleges; cultured women—like my Saroláta—living beautiful lives and doing good work in their homes; women like Aruna. I am proud to work for and with them——’

She turned to him now, the flame of enthusiasm alight; and saw, from the look in his eyes, that he was thinking of her, not of them. It gave her a small shock—the fatal shock of looking for response, and finding little or none. It moved her to prod him with a straight question.

‘Aren’t you with them at all, John? You care for India?’

‘Yes. I care very much for India,’ he said in his unemphatic voice,——‘on my own masculine lines. I know many of the best women are very fine creatures. But I’m not too keen on seeing India saddled with a Woman Question, woman run and ruled——’

‘You can’t play Canute to the rising tide! She’s woman-ruled now, and always has been. Better have it above board, than in dark, unwholesome ways behind the screen. I know purdah isn’t altogether an evil, among high-class women, or less rigidly observed. But I would feel bound to help any intelligent girl or woman out of its deadening influence. We’re helping one now—Aruna and I: a really clever girl of fifteen, who has managed to educate herself and is eager to get free, to work for women——’

Instinctively she paused at thought of the undesired bridegroom. He might consider that side of their venture as unlawful as restoring bitten noses. But there could be no reservations now. So she told her tale, undesired bridegroom, unfulfilled marriage and all.

She spoke quietly, looking into the fire; but she could feel, with dismay, the changed and chilling atmosphere that emanated from him, when all had been revealed.

As a rule, when he had anything to say, he made no bones about saying it; and a prick of anxiety spurred her to query his enigmatic silence.

‘John, my dear—aren’t you interested? Won’t you wish us luck?’

At that he fixed on her his hard lucid look.

‘My chief interest,’ he said slowly, ‘is to know why you’ve mixed yourself up with a sort of high-class kidnapping affair—and never a word of it to me till all’s cut and dried?’

‘For the simple reason,’ she retorted, chilled by his look and tone, ‘that you’ve been away most of the time, and absorbed in more important matters. How you’re home again, and it’s fixed up, I’m telling you, because I’m in it——’

‘I don’t choose that you should be in it,’ he said with decision. ‘So you’d better unfix your share in the exploit.’

The note of command startled and angered her. She had been prepared for disapproval, for caustic comment, not for active opposition; and at the first hint of it she stiffened inwardly, to meet the impact of a will stronger than her own. In both man and wife there was a streak of adamant that had not yet come into serious collision. On a matter of will, he was immovable; she, on a matter of principle. It hurt her keenly to oppose him; but the thought of failing those who relied on her never entered her head.

‘I’m sorry you feel like that about it. John,’ she said in a controlled voice, ‘but I can’t back out at this stage. They’re all depending on me. Rajini, Aruna and Roy.’

Angry already, Sinclair’s name acted as an irritant.

‘He’s in it, too, is he ‘—your amateur lieutenant. . . . Can’t run anything without him? If Aruna has his backing, she can dispense with yours.’

‘I’m afraid not.’—She ignored the unfair thrust at Roy.—‘He can’t do what I’ve agreed to do—take the girl over outside Peshawar and bring her here. Anyhow, John, I’ve given Rajini my word—and I can’t go back on it. So it’s no use asking me.’

‘I’m not asking you. I insist on it.’

His tone had the level note of authority that took obedience for granted; but because she was Grace—beloved and admired—he made the effort to put before her his natural masculine point of view.

‘The other two are outsiders here. They can do what they damn well please. A woman in your position—and my wife—can’t go antagonising a respectable Jāt family, meddling with their daughter, when she’s practically married——’

‘She’s not fully married yet—and she doesn’t wish to be.’

‘A girl’s wishes don’t count with them—you know that.’

‘The wide difference in age counts now, with many of them, thank goodness. Besides——’ she urged, her resentment rising as she felt his opposition harden. ‘Here am I, a free woman—behoving in reasonable freedom for women—if I’m not allowed to help one, who has good stuff in her, what am I out here for at all? Rajini has courage and character and brains. She may become a fine social worker under Aruna——’

‘Well, leave it to Aruna. She’s no infant. Who mixed you up with it? Sinclair, I suppose?’

‘No, it was not Roy,’ she flung out, furious. ‘It’s Aruna’s case. But he’s keen over it, because he knows—and cares—a great deal about Indian women.’

‘Thinks he knows a lot more than he does’—her championship roused his smouldering temper—‘on the strength of an expatriated mother and a cultured specimen like Aruna. I probably have a far sounder working knowledge of the average Indian woman—on a lower level, of course.’

The blunt statement, so spoken, infuriated her. Not that she was unenlightened as to his way of life before marriage; but the off-hand allusion to it, in her present mood, struck, like a whiplash, at something fine and fastidious in her.

She sprang up, quivering with a sensation that was almost hatred.

‘If you talk like that, I’ve no more to say. I wish I’d never told you.’

But as she turned to leave the room, he rose also and quietly took her by the arm.

‘Sorry, Grace,’ he said: and, if curt, it sounded genuine. ‘You’re too sensible to take a plain statement the wrong way. And we’ve got to settle this business.’

She submitted to be drawn back to the hearth-rug. For she knew his blunt remark had jarred unduly because of the reference to Roy; but it stiffened her inner resistance to his unshaken will.

‘It is settled, John.’ She detached herself, and one hand closed firmly on the mantelpiece. ‘Do, please, accept the fact. Rajini must and will get away.’

‘Well, let her get away on her own. Plenty of ’em do.’

She stared at him, too angry to choose her words.

‘John, you’re heartless. You know perfectly well it would mean kidnapping or prostitution.’

‘That’s not my affair. My point is, you’re purloining a man’s wife among you. I’m a policeman—Damn it all I won’t allow it.’—He suddenly and completely lost his temper, an event rare enough to startle her.—‘if you don’t call it off, I’ll warn the girl’s people.’

His brutal counter-stroke took her breath away. But she mastered herself, and flung back at him, ‘You don’t know who they are.’

‘I know the village. I know her name. My men can find out almost anything in that line. I can put police on to the ziarat——’

His temper did not blaze; it was cold and hard. The obscure masculine will in him was resolute to resist her. But she faced him with raised head, controlling her quickened breath.

‘If you do that, John,’ she said, ‘you break everything between us. I would never speak to you again.’

He stared at her blankly. Her eyes told him that she meant what she said; and he had repented his counter-stroke the moment it was out. His very anger was the measure of his unshakeable love for her. But obstinate pride would not let him say so—now.

To Grace the strained silence between them seemed a menacing presence. Through it she could feel him withdrawn from her—antagonistic. Dreading the effect of her words, yet unable—in her bewildered pain—to unsay them, she drew a difficult breath and turned again to leave him.

Before she reached the door, he said in a sheathed voice, ‘Grace—you’re not going on with it.’

She paused and faced him, half the room between them.

‘I must go on with it. I’ve given my word. And you’—again that difficult breath—‘are not going to take police measures.’

For a full ten seconds they confronted each other; and Grace had an eerie sensation of looking into the eyes of a stranger.

He gave her neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘No.’ But, as her hand closed on the curtain, he said in a voice of muffled fury, ‘You don’t bring your purloined young woman into my house. That’s flat.’

She went quickly out, not heeding. She did not dare to heed, lest her own suppressed anger should flare out in words that might hurt him past forgiveness.

She went straight to the drawing-room, her limbs shaking. With both hands she gripped the high, broad mantelpiece and bowed her forehead on them. Dry sobs shivered through her; but no tears came. She felt stunned by her intensity of bewildered pain, by anger with herself and him; but chiefly—yes chiefly—with him. Utterly unused to a tone, an attitude, which she instinctively despised in a man, she saw him suddenly with terrible clearness as a stranger in her heart and life: selfish, prejudiced, zubberdust—as he admitted—with a gross strain that only came out on provocation.

And this was the man for whom she had given up work that was dearer to her than he could realise; the man she unalterably loved—with a love that was drawn from every well of her being. Useless to deny it, even in her access of anger and scorn. But she would not fail Aruna, at whatever cost to herself. Nor would he dare——

The memory of all that came to her as if from another life: the cause of the quarrel—as so often—dwarfed and submerged by the storm it had raised.

The mere thought of Aruna—most lovable of women—imperceptibly softened her mood. With a shivering sigh she sank into her fireside chair, held out chilled hands to the blaze—and tried not to think of John, as she had seen and felt him in the last ten minutes; tried, rather, to think of the John who had held her so closely and tenderly, when he hoped they had not been permanently overlooked by the gods.

To calm herself, she honestly faced the fact that—as wife of the D.I.G.—she ought to have been more chary of giving her countenance to the escape. She was, at least, bound to respect his flat refusal to have stolen property under his roof. Seasoned and self-contained, lacking her feminine sympathy, his official view of a human dilemma seemed hard and unfeeling. She ought perhaps to have spoken earlier. But she had acted, instinctively, on the lifetime habit of making her own decisions without consulting others. They had married on the understanding that each would retain, in the region of work, independence and a measure of freedom. If she kept her part of the bargain, he must keep his; though he might need holding to it. He had taken her into his life, drawbacks and all, as she had taken him; and, she confidently knew, he could no more regret it—even in his angriest mood—than she could herself. It was strange, this mysterious link with one human being of all others, hardly to be broken even at will: the old fatality of flesh to flesh, proving itself one of the strongest things on earth.

As anger subsided, the familial glow at thought of him stole through her veins. Difficult, even maddening, in his obstinacy and his hardness, his lack of imagination, she knew him for the one man she had been created to love and understand: a fine, if earthly man, holding in control of his will something primitive and powerful that it were unwise to arouse; a man as essential to the world and its making—if not its lifting—as men of finer quality, like Roy. Men of Roy’s type—at best, poets; at worst, mere dreamers—were more allied to God; those, like her John, more allied to man: a bulwark, a support to his fellows, to the limit of his large and practical capacity. . . .

And now her cooler thoughts reverted to Rajini. Where could she take the child? Failing herself, she saw only one possibility—Eve. One could rely on her quick sympathies: trust her to win permission from Lance. But Eve could not be expected to drive out and take over Rajini. That part of her bargain she must fulfil, taking her charge to the Desmonds’ bungalow if they had an available room. Lance, she felt sure, would not be obstructive. In the exercise of an easy mastery, that was never high-handed, he could give points to John——

At thought of him, anxiety stirred. After all that . . . what was he doing—thinking—feeling? Acutely she longed to know; and she had been tacitly expecting him to make the first move. But would he? If she waited till Doomsday, would he lift a finger? Though he had been the aggressor, he would see her as the sinner. But her own pride urged that he owed her an apology for his harsh and wounding words.

She looked up at the clock and discovered, with alarm, that it was near dinner-time. She had no experience of him roused to white-hot anger. With his slow obstinate nature, he might keep the fire smouldering for days. He might conceivably go off into camp, leaving her in a hideous blank of not knowing. In a conflict of hearts the advantage rested with the one who had most power to hurt, and least capacity to understand. But whether or no they ever understood each other, they were necessary to each other. They had proved it by the futility of trying to keep apart.

Heedless of injured pride, she sprang up and hurried to the study. With an unsteady hand she pulled aside the curtain, just as he was in the act of leaving it by the verandah door.

He turned and looked at her; no expression in his sea-green eyes.

Since he would not speak, she must.

‘John—where were you going?’

‘I am going to the Club.’

The different tense did not escape her.

‘Why? It’s nearly dinner-time. And I’m waiting.’ She saw hesitation in his eyes, and his lips moved, but no sound came from them.

‘John!’ she repeated—all her pent-up emotion in the cry. And he came deliberately towards her.

‘Grace,’ he said, ‘will you give it up?’

The persistence of him! But, in look and tone, it was a different John—asking, not commanding.

‘Darling—I can’t,’ said a different Grace. ‘But of course I won’t bring her here. You shan’t know anything about where she goes, or whether it’s even Peshawar. It’s not fair that you should be implicated.’

‘I don’t like you implicated,’ he insisted obstinately; but she could smile at it now.

‘Dear, Aruna’s doing most of it. But what I’ve said I’ll do, I must do. I wouldn’t have withstood you so fiercely if you hadn’t made me angry and—hurt me, in ways you can’t realise——’

Tears started.

The reaction was too sharp on her tempest of anger and pain.

‘Did I hurt you so?’ he asked. ‘Can’t I realise?’—His eyes searched hers, recalling her threat. ‘Grace—would you leave me? Would you ever leave me?’

And she answered with strange intensity, ‘I never could leave you.’

He was beside her now; his arms were round her, holding her as if he would draw her into himself, show her the hidden things that could not be uttered. And the sheer relief of it more nearly unsteadied her than any of his hard words.

As he pressed closer the atmosphere of the whole man seemed to envelop her.

And once more—as on the distant day when they came together after long estrangement—he said, in his odd grave voice of discovery, ‘You’re a wonderful woman.’

But again—as this morning—he did not kiss her. And again she was glad——

Chapter 12

The flag still flies, and the city has not fallen.
— Humbert Wolfe

It was a golden morning of November. Sinclair, in his open car, with Aruna beside him, had left cantonments far behind. They were nearing, now, the small village of Khandu, where Charbutti was to hand over her precious charge. For the time was at hand.

After many delays, the auspicious moment had arrived for the release of an impatient Rajini: the ‘abduction’ Lance persisted in calling it, since Grace had persuaded Eve to house the girl. Unlike Lynch he had taken up no attitude of opposition. He had faith in Grace, and sympathy for any girl so placed. But he must needs try to alarm Eve by dark hints about ‘receiving stolen goods’ and ‘implicating the Civil Power.’

Eve had refused to be overawed; had declared herself proud to help Grace and Aruna, whatever supposed sins they might commit. The Civil Power could look the other way. He need not know the least detail of their unorthodox proceedings. And although he had laughed that off, she had flatly refused to enlighten him.

Aruna—’kidnapper-in-chief’—had arranged to go out alone in a hired car; but neither Sinclair nor Suráj would hear of it. One or other must accompany her. Suráj—as her countryman and a family connection—had claimed the right. Roy had pressed the stronger claim of first-cousinship—and had prevailed. The clash between them had almost amounted to a quarrel; but Suráj, still smouldering, must perforce accept her decision.

During the drive neither she nor Roy spoke of it. Aruna wanted simply to enjoy her unexpected good fortune; and for him, in all Peshawar, there was no companionship equal to hers.

They had reached an intimacy which seemed the closer because they simply took it for granted; a magic excluding circle, that had its peculiar danger in the sense of a secret shared. He could speak or not, as he felt inclined. Either way she would be content.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

On reaching Khandu, they halted well outside the village, under a shisham and a ragged ferash, for their picnic tea in the car. If all went well they would not have long to wait. Aruna had impressed on Charbutti and her charge the importance of reaching Peshawar before sunset, if they were not to find all its gates closed against them till dawn. It was hard to make them understand time, but the threat of closed gates she hoped would take effect.

She had served out cups of thermos tea, sandwiches and her own special cakes, when there came from the road behind them a confused sound of shouting, chanting and shuffling of feet.

‘Hullo!’ said Sinclair, ‘Red Shirts, on the move. Probably a local játha, hoping to take Kashmir by storm!’

For a moment Aruna looked startled. In the course of her village work she had met these disturbers of the peace, singly and in groups; but had never yet seen them in mass formation, drunk with fervour.

A colourful crowd, in red shirts and turbans, waving green banners, they came swinging and shuffling along in their own private dust storm—boys, young men and elders; their front ranks chanting in unison, ‘Bismillah, the Korán has been desecrated’; the rear ranks shouting in reply, ‘That desecration has awakened Islam. Allah-o-Akbar.’

Strophe and anti-strophe, deep voices, marching feet and the genuine wave of religious fervour had an inspiring effect, quite apart from faith in the cause.

‘With their broad vowels and their sense of rhythm,’ said Sinclair,——‘they do know how to make the mere sound of words as stirring as a trumpet call. Don’t be alarmed. They won’t worry about us.’

But at the sight of a car and a helmeted Sahib, they ceased their chant to shout ‘Inguiláb zindabād!’⁷²

Sinclair saluted, by way of ironical acknowledgment. Someone raised a laugh. A few—who may have been soldiers—saluted in return; and they shuffled on, singing and shouting with renewed vigour.

‘“To every man his own fanaticism—as long as he’s got one,”’ Sinclair quoted, washing the dust out of his throat with hot tea. ‘But it’s a curse that this Kashmir trouble has flared up again. Big játhas trying to force their way in; Government retaliating with another special ordinance. Fourteen hundred arrested the other day—did you see it?’

‘No. I read the paper very seldom,’ she confessed.

‘Well, the arrested were tumbling over each other to be in the round-up. Every man gave his name as “Sarfirōsh,” he who offers his head. All for an insult that happened in July, and was probably accidental! It’s pathetic. But no joke for a Government, already overburdened, having to send British troops up on demand. What price our superfluous British Army?’

She smiled and sighed. ‘We do say some very foolish things, we Indians. But I liked the way those men saw the friendly fun of your salute, when some might have taken it for insult.’

‘Yes, down country it might have been a risky gesture. The Border Moslem has a sense of humour more akin to our own.’

She smiled with her thoughtful air.

‘Perhaps that’s why the English are more successful in the North. They better understand the Moslem. And I think they like him better than the Hindu.’

‘Well—take him all round he does come nearer to us in outlook, religion and physique. Certainly the Frontier and the Punjab have been our chief triumphs of administration.’

‘Bápu said lately, in a letter, that he fears we will lose just that fine art of administration, if our politicians press for self-government at the centre.’

‘Bápu as usual is right. We can hand over the reins of Government, if nothing else will satisfy India. But we can’t hand over, with it, a gift for sound and just administration. It’s a talent only certain races possess; and even so, it’s the fruit of long experience. We’ve built it up, out here, on a scale that no other race could have attempted or achieved. Most Indians know that, in their hearts. They know how hampered they are in trying to deal out justice, with interested parties swarming round like bees, and a man’s natural bias—Moslem or Hindu, Jāt or bunnia—tripping him up at every turn. . . .’

He held out an empty cup.

‘More tea, please. I’m talking like one of my own pestilential articles! Where are these people of yours? No notion of time. And why are we talking politics, Aruna?’ he demanded, with smiling eyes. ‘You began it. Why?—For a smoke screen?’

‘Yes, perhaps—a smoke screen.’

She smiled at the simile, avoiding his eyes.

‘But what are you screening—from me?’

Cornered, she fingered the edge of her sari—she who rarely showed any sign of nervousness.

‘It’s something I must tell you . . . something rather hard to say. It will sound like foolishness—a woman of my age——’

Even as she spoke—he knew; and the knowledge threw a floodlight on his clash with Suráj, on the undercurrent of strain between them, since his return from camp.

‘No foolishness for a woman of your quality,’ he answered, without a hint of gallantry in his tone. ‘Is it—Suráj?’

‘Yes, it is—poor Suráj!’ Her voice broke in tenderness on his name. ‘He so very much wishes—to marry me.’

‘It’s the wisest wish that ever entered his heart.’

Roy said it quickly, with emphasis, because he was aware of a faint inner shock at thought of her possible acceptance, if Suráj pressed his suit. It startled him to discover that lurking possessive sense, the natural man’s feeling of ownership. Yet, in more ways than one, she was peculiarly his. By all that had been between them, by the subtle inweaving of their lives, and by all he saw in her that others were not allowed to see, she had become for him a being set apart, not to be desired of men. He knew that it would hurt him, in some obscure way, to see her absorbed in another man; and the male selfishness of it shamed him into speaking a word for his friend.

‘It would be a fine thing for him,’ he urged, not without an effort. ‘With his gifts and his fiery nature, he wants ballast. And you could mother those small daughters. Of course you’d lose your independence. But—if you could find it in your heart?’

Her raised hand checked the rest of his sentence.

‘I? You think it possible? Roy——!’

There was pain in her low vehement protest.

She looked up now—a look that unveiled more than her eloquent eyes—and, for the first time, stirred the blood in his veins. He saw now, too clearly, what he had been trying not to see, because he had genuine need of her friendship. And she, all the while,—accepting his brotherly ways,—was still the passionately loving Aruna of their Jaipur idyll.

In a rush of enlightenment and self-reproach, he realised the disconcerting truth.

‘Aruna—forgive me. Honestly I thought——’

Again she checked him with a slighter gesture.

‘But Roy, you could not forget what I said that night—’ (Her ‘could not’ had the ring of a royal command.) ‘For me it was no form of words when I told you, “I am swami-bakht, a widow in my heart.”’—She steadied herself and went on more calmly: ‘It is becoming the fashion for widows to remarry; and I am thankful it is so. But not—not a widow to a living man.’

He listened to her low voice, watched her bowed head—only half covered by the yellow sari—with a surge of emotion such as he had not imagined he could feel again for any woman but one.

Irresistibly his hand covered both hers and pressed them hard.

‘Aruna—Aruna——’

She sat motionless; but a tear fell on his hand.

Moved beyond speech, he became suddenly, furiously aware that an impish boy of twelve or fourteen had hopped out of a passing ekka and was trying, with ludicrous gestures, to force himself on their notice.

He succeeded—and was cursed for his pains.

‘Jehannum ko jáo,⁷³ you young devil,’ Sinclair imperiously waved him away. But he stood his ground.

‘Sahib—from Peshawar?’

Sinclair, taken aback, admitted as much; adding, ‘What’s your business?’

‘I have a message.’ He came nearer and spoke in a confidential whisper. ‘Mai Charbutti says I must tell a Sahib from Peshawar, with Indian lady, there is unfortunate delay. That which should be brought now to Khandu cannot come—for reasons to be explained. That will be brought surely in the morning, one hour before dawn.’

He spoke as if ‘that’ were a parcel: clever Charbutti. And again Roy swore comprehensively—not at the boy—but at all that the situation involved.

‘There you are.’ He pulled out an eight-anna piece; and the boy skipped off—a millionaire, clutching a morsel of silver in his thin palm.

Sinclair sat silent, raging at the unreliability of Indians where time was concerned; raging at the awkwardness, for himself and Aruna, of more than twelve hours delay. But the unwelcome interruption had the merit of clearing the air.

He turned to her briskly.

‘We’re neatly let down. What the devil are we to do? Drive straight to Bundiani and get old Charbutti to give you a bed for the night?’

‘No——not that,’ she said with decision. ‘If the car should be seen near there, it might rouse suspicion—afterwards. No use coming out to help if we only make things more difficult?’

‘Well, she’s making difficulties enough for you, this casual young woman.’

‘Don’t blame her, till you know,’ she reproved him with look and tone. ‘It’s much more likely they have been prevented. And the night will be safer for getting away. There is a moon till morning. It’s not like you, Roy, judging so hastily.’

He accepted her reproof in silence. He was not feeling like himself just then; vexed at the contretemps, dismayed at the prospect of spending the night somewhere, somehow, in this strange small village. There was only one other alternative. He glanced hopefully at his watch.

‘How about making a dash for home? Full speed ahead, we might just nip through the gates before dark. We can get hold of that imp, and send word to Charbutti that it’s all off till to-morrow afternoon——’

‘We can’t do any such thing.’ Aruna was almost angry; a changed Aruna, completely in command of affairs. ‘To-morrow is not possible for me; and, for Rajini, it might kill everything; it might not be auspicious. But if this delay is too uncomfortable for you, please go back—quickly, while there is time to get there. I would be quite safe here; and perhaps we could find some country conveyance in the morning——’

‘Aruna—stop that, for God’s sake. What d’you take me for?’—She had only got so far because astonishment dumbfounded him.—‘It’s you I’m vexed over. If you stay, I stay. But—good Lord! What about Grace? We’ve got to let her know somehow. An ekka might make it just in time; and a note might be smuggled in after closing. The names of Lynch and Desmond would push it through. Not a minute to lose. You stay here while I unearth an ekka and bribe that boy, or another, to take the note. Payment on return. Heaven knows if we can squeeze the car into this god-forsaken village.’

The demand for rapid action was a relief.

In record time he had secured an ekka and an older boy. Then both were despatched in a jingle of bells and a cloud of dust, leaving him and Aruna free to consider their own problems—food, sleep and the car.

Since it could not, by any means, be coaxed through lanes that recalled Palwahn, Sinclair explored the far side of the village in search of the usual No Man’s Land, huts and camping ground and deserted shrines. Here they found a family of nomads squatting round a bonfire, and a cooking-pot that hung over it, gypsy fashion. A low mud hut, with a doorless opening, offered shelter at least. Cushions and rugs from the car would serve, for a broken night’s rest. The village would supply food of sorts; and Roy insisted that they must beg or borrow a lantern and a small angithi⁷³ for warmth. His strong electric torch, that lived in the car, would complete their furnishing arrangements.

‘Wish I’d had the prophetic foresight to bring my brandy flask!’ he remarked, when they had locked the car and were passing through the gateless gap in the village wall.

‘We still have some tea in one thermos.’ Aruna was her capable self again. ‘Also some sandwiches. I’ll get what else I can. You see about a lantern and angithi. Leave the food to me. That is the woman’s affair.’

He thrust his hands into his pockets for loose cash to pay for it, but she waved him away.

‘You do your share. I am hostess at this feast!’

And he thought, ‘She’s actually enjoying it,’ as he watched her go from him with her fine carriage and elastic tread. Precisely so would his mother have enjoyed any little contretemps of the kind.

His own share in their unplanned picnic was over sooner than hers: a boy sent off with lantern and brazier to their hut near the car. Then he pulled out a pipe and leaned against the scarred trunk of an old sirus in the only open space, where village life centred about its shrine, its chowpāl and its well.

Idly smoking, he watched the local water-works, carried on above ground, in this region innocent of drains: two men and two blindfolded bullocks to haul up one modest bucket. Over and over, from dawn to sunset, with brief intervals for rest, they plied their leisurely task. Watching them at work, for ten minutes, was enough to convert even a Sinclair to the merits of the god-in-the-machine. And while he watched, came the village women to fill their lotahs for the evening meal. Some old, some young, lotahs or pitchers set on a flat pad that crowned their superbly carried heads. They walked in line, with their unconscious aristocracy of movement; every muscle flexible and controlled; coarse chuddahs falling in undesigned curves, bangled arms and hoops of silver round their ankles above the supple flat-spread feet.

A low sun, striking through the sirus boughs, touched the colourful group, the colourless scene, with a brief glory.

Among the half-bare branches, pigeons were kuroo-kooing, crows cawing, monkeys harshly chattering, pelting him with sticks or sirus pods, as if they knew him for an illegitimate intruder. Naked children—with bloated, empty stomachs on sticks of legs—tottered up whining for backshish.

Bored by their aggressive attentions, he flung them a handful of change to scramble for, and strolled away towards the gap in the mud wall, where Aruna would be sure to seek him if she found him gone from the well. She must be after more than shopping. She would lose no chance of talking to the people, shedding a seed of knowledge here, a word of encouragement there. To that end was she born.

But instinctively he sheered off definite thought of her. He wanted simply to absorb the Indian scene in this last hour of daylight; ‘cow-dust hour’ they called it, with an instinctive touch of poetic symbolism.

There came the cows, lean and ill tended, haloed in radiant dust; two men beside them in blankets and big untidy puggarees: a bold design, like a living frieze, against the light-filled sky.

In the field beyond, another frieze-like figure was driving home two buffaloes, yoked in a wooden plough such as Jacob may have used when he worked for Laban. Behind the plough came two women in the dull reds-and-yellows of India, their queenly gait a contrast to the shuffling walk of the men; flat baskets on their heads, full skirts swinging from their hips. Slowly, slowly they all moved as if they had all eternity at their disposal; and it struck him suddenly as impossible, beyond belief, that in less than two months he would be leaving it all, never to see or hear or smell it again.

The sun dipped and vanished. They were frieze figures no longer, but living shadows in the peculiar ghostliness of India’s brief dusk, that held for him still, as in childhood, a nameless thrill of fear. The dusk and the slow-moving figures—a soundless adagio—stirred the Eastern blood in his veins . . . till it seemed as if some barrier broke within him; as if India had absorbed him into the vast rhythmic movement of her centuries. . . .

Standing there, wide awake, everything was gone from him, but India——

And suddenly, behind him, there was a scuffling and barking, that woke him, literally, as if from sleep. Two pariahs dashed past. He cursed them mechanically; wondered how long he had stood there: and, turning, saw Aruna coming towards him—a woman of India, who so truly loved him that, of her own will, she had dedicated herself to his unworthiness.

He had known, of course, that she must still care for him, in a temperate fashion, as befitted his marriage and their advancing age. But to find—after twelve frustrated years—the unclaimed, unclaimable treasure still hid in its secret shrine, was to feel honoured beyond the deserts of any masculine man. What power, working through a stray Indian girl, had flung them together in these strange circumstances; had flung him this knowledge that subtly altered their brother-and-sisterly relation? The chance conjunction awoke his instinctive sense of fatalism; a disquiet rising from some lower level of being. No, on all counts, she could not marry Suráj—she, who deemed herself ‘a widow to a living man.’ That strange and poignant phrase pricked his heart with a perilous stab of tenderness. In her constancy and courage, she was true Rajputni. No higher praise could he give her.

She waved to him; and they greeted as if he had been upon no far journey since she left him to go on her practical errand.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Their hut was none too clean; but darkness hid its imperfections. Roy’s lantern emitted a fitful gleam. The brazier gave warmth and a red glow of light. Beside it, near the opening, they ate the simple food Aruna had collected—grapes and raisins and Indian sweets, a few fresh chupattis, eggs and milk, and a two-pronged fork with which she beat them into egg-flip. There was a hot drink from the thermos, served as ‘after-dinner coffee.’

Seated on car cushions, they made fun over the ‘feast’; Aruna blessing the unknown cause of delay; Roy permitting himself to enjoy her companionship now that their emotional moment was safely past.

But still, instinctively, he kept clear of personal themes; drew her out over the talks that had delayed her shopping, over her large ambition to open in every fair-sized village, every town in the North, a centre for the vocational training of young widows that they might earn a living without being driven to prostitution.

To-night she seemed to shed the outer sheath of her normal self, to reveal some inner petal of her personality so that he saw her with new eyes. She had no beauty and had long ago put aside all feminine wiles; yet there remained a charm of the spirit, not less potent because the real Aruna was woman to the core.

‘Our men and priests,’ she was saying, ‘have made such a mess of things, that now the women must show if they can’t do better for themselves and their country. It is Grace who says that about “such a mess”——’ she corrected herself smiling. ‘Grace is more critical of all men than I am.’

‘She has a streak of the feminist in her,’ he said.

And she asked in a different tone, ‘Do you like that—in a woman?’

‘No.’

He heard her softly drawn breath, and knew the pleasure he had given her, though he denied himself the pleasure of seeing it in her eyes.

She said, after a moment, ‘I am glad. I want our women to keep their womanly tradition, to remember the words of that most devoted wife and worker, Sarój Nalini Dutt—“We belong to the land of Sita and Savitri, perfect wives. We should strive to be examples to our sisters elsewhere.”’

But even while he listened—admiring her blend of humility, courage and wisdom—the thought of Suráj kept nagging at his mind; the question—how much did he know?

And when their uncivilised meal was over, when they had both lit civilised cigarettes, he asked outright.

‘Aruna, there’s one thing I want to know about you and Suráj. Have you told him plainly it is impossible?’

‘Yes—oh yes.’ She drew her eyebrows together in a distracted frown. She wanted no more intrusion of poor Suráj—his anger and pain.

But Roy—though perceiving her reluctance—persisted.

‘Did you tell him—why?’

She drew in her lip and spoke, looking out at a full moon blossoming among curded clouds.

‘I told him—I was dedicated. No more able to marry than a sannyasin, who has taken vows. He spoke of you, because he can see how close we are—in certain ways. So I had to tell him that, long ago, there had been—something between us; but you could not marry an Indian girl. That was all.’

And Roy, watching her face in the glow of the brazier, said with feeling, ‘Poor Suráj! No luck for him in the way of marriage.’

She hesitated—then spoke her thought.

‘Too soon to say. He is still young, and very warm-hearted. Our men must marry, for social and religious reasons. I think it is possible—if he sees more of Rajini——’

‘After you—never——’

That emphatic ‘Never’ sent a glow through her. But she was no girl now; a woman nearly thirty-five; and she knew her race.

So she repeated, ‘I think it is possible, not only for orthodox reasons, but because she is beautiful. Men are like that.’

Her simple, statement flashed on Roy the remembrance that he himself, after Aruna, had succumbed to Rose—and she knew it. Men were like that—East or West.

He could only say, ‘I hope, for his sake, it is possible. He might do worse. But you’ve yet to see how she shapes.’

‘Yes. She will be my special care. She might be almost—my daughter.’

He could only accept in silence those moving words. And she went on quietly smoking, watching the moon among those broken clouds, dark and bright, that were like flaked mother of pearl.

And there beside the brazier sat Roy looking straight before him, entirely abstracted from himself and her, his head raised a little as if he were listening to some unheard sound. It gave him, to her fancy, an air so remote and god-like that she believed herself forgotten.

Darkness had descended like a black cap on Khandu. The gypsy bonfire had sunk to a ruby-red glow, revealing huddled shadows of sleeping forms. One or two of the men were still hawking and clearing their throats—an ugly habit from over much smoking.

It penetrated her heart and disturbed her blood, this aching night beauty, this isolation with Roy, as if their world had passed them by, gone on its way and forgotten them. It recalled that magical evening in the Island Palace at Udaipur. But here was no ethereal loveliness of lake and sky to lift or sublimate emotion. Here was a rough shed, and they alone in it together—a different Aruna, a different Roy. She had scarcely realised him, then, as a man returned into her life. Now, since Kashmir, their minds—yes, and their hearts—had become linked afresh through the novel and the book and the great end towards which they were both moving along different paths. He was still, more than ever, the beloved object of her worship; but he was also man. His touch, his voice, his look—as when he met her eyes in the car—reawakened the natural woman in her, the passionate woman of the East.

So quiet she sat, outwardly so calm, watching that ghostly moon, those curded clouds, slowly drifting across her radiance, now hiding it, now releasing it, with a curiously sinister effect.

And all the while delicate fire tingled in her veins. . . .

Roy—watching her dimly seen face—was affected, unconsciously, by the mysterious emanation of her mood and her desire. Once again he was emotionally aware of her, as he had been in the car; disturbingly aware of her whole attractive personality, quivering, quick, passionately responsive: yet—by every law they both respected—unapproachable, set apart.

So they remained, for an unmeasured time; drawn perilously near together, guarding the smothered fire of their thoughts; while the moon—free at last from pursuing clouds poured a flood of silver and pools of shadow over the village and the sleeping nomads and the desolate emptiness of India. . . .

For Roy the strain of their long silence became barely endurable; yet to break it with some commonplace remark seemed the last impossibility. Nor were matters eased for him by the lurking belief that if he took her in his arms she would not resist, nor feel herself wronged. She would feel honoured in yielding; in serving him to the utmost. And the belief worked potently in his veins.

The Indian in him said: ‘Take—in the spirit that she will give.’ The Englishman said: ‘Refrain—or you will kill the thing you value most.’

Knowledge of himself and her told him that their unique relation would never again be as it had been. Yet, for a few heavy heart-throbs, his mind seemed to beat itself against the unknown ‘next moment’; against a longing to risk the first move: a longing curbed, less by his own will, than by the power of her intrinsic self to withhold him from that which a part of her longed to give——

With a barely audible sigh, she held out one hand to the glowing brazier: and that slight natural movement turned some tide in him that swept him from the danger point of indecision—curse of his double nature—on to firm ground.

Then—like an arrow of light let into a darkened room—flashed a mental image of Tara. Was she aware—with half a world between them—of something vital hanging in the balance? Mere imagination on his part; but imagination is the angel of the flaming sword. Thoughts of her, inner sight of her, could not co-exist with the baser impulse of a few moments earlier. And the end of indecision seemed rather a response to her demand on him than his own deliberate mental act——

With a sense of vast relief, he stood up and stretched himself, as though his limbs had shared the tension of his mind. And, in a sense, it was so.

Aruna rose too, holding both hands over the flameless charcoal; and they smiled at one another in the dim light, each aware of a crisis past.

Then he said in his normal manner, ‘As we’ve got to be up and doing long before dawn, you’d better turn in early, get what sleep you can. I’ll go out for a brisk walk in this dazzling moonlight. Then I’ll keep guard by the door. Sleep with one eye open!’

‘Oh Roy—if you must walk, be careful,’ she pleaded. ‘There are so many budmashes about the country now.’

‘I’ll be careful, Aruna-bai. And I won’t be away long. I must stretch my legs for a bit. With two cushions and your cape, you’ll get snatches of sleep here—in this corner.’

He scoured it with his torch, found nothing worse than bird droppings, and arranged the two cushions, which she accepted under protest.

In the moonlit opening they stood silent. And, for that memorable moment, they held each other’s gaze—not smiling. A strange and lovely solemnity seemed to fall on them, like a fine, soft rain. Now he could have dared to take her in his arms, to thank her for being her incomparable self. But instead he took both her hands between his own. They were ice-cold.

‘I shall never forget to-night, Aruna,’ he said; and his look conveyed more than those bald words.

Then he gently released her hands, and went out into the moonlight——

For some time she stood and watched him, a moving shadow among pools of light and blotches of darkness. Then she lay down on her cushions, with a smaller cushion for pillow, eyes religiously closed, ears alert—listening, listening for his return; exhausted with suppressed emotion; wondering what he had felt and thought, during their long silence, that made him say he would never forget to-night.

When at last she heard his step in the shed, she lay rigid and feigned the regular breathing of sleep. When she felt him come and stand near her, it needed all her practised self mastery not to open her eyes—and chance the result. Fearful of her own desire, she would be ready to meet his demand on her, without any sense of wrong to the absent wife; because in her was no clamour for possession, only a passionate will to give.

At last he moved away; and she watched him quietly coax up the fire to warm himself. Then he lay down with an abandoned air, as if he were very tired; and soon the rhythm of his breathing told her he was sound asleep.

For her, uplifted in heart and spirit, sleep was impossible. The remaining hours were her own to spend with him—the most wonderful night of her life. She could not bear to waste an hour of it in oblivion.

Rising, she wrapped herself in her cloak, took the smaller cushion, and sat close to him, leaning against the wall. Intently she gazed at his dim, familiar face. Sleep, that robbed it of life, intensified the beauty of line and curve.

So sitting and so watching—while moon and stars wandered on their pathless way—she smiled to think that, after all, it was she who kept guard and slept with both eyes open. She could hardly remember yesterday. This hour seemed to reach backwards for ever; and any future must be less than the blended joy and pain of this present. As the earth was drenched with moonlight, so her whole being was drenched with an aching yet exalted happiness, that was one with the peace of the quiet earth. Permitted to hold his sleeping spirit in her hands, she was content as few are content to whom all is given of earthly bliss. Her life seemed epitomised in the words of the Sikh poet, ‘Enough for me these eternal desires and their eternal unfulfilment.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Only as the earth turned over towards morning, her thoughts flowed together; her head dropped sideways against her cushion, and she fell asleep. In her drowsiness she forgot that, when he woke, he would find her thus, instead of correctly asleep in her corner. But the thought would not have troubled her. He knew her heart——

Chapter 13

Perfect gain is best of all . . . the next best gain, is perfect losing.
— Tagore

It was a little after nine when they drove back into Peshawar through the Bannu gate and made for Aruna’s bungalow. Grace had met them at the ziarat, and had taken over the uncaged bird—all aflutter with excitement at the first taste of freedom, though it must be freedom in captivity, till the danger of discovery was past. In the chill dusk of very early morning, she had been safely handed over to her deliverers; and it was not she, but good old Charbutti who had apologised for the upsetting of yesterday’s plan.

At the last hour, she said, Rajini’s heart had quailed. For the village had news of those marching Red Shirts, who made trouble if red flags were not flying. The place was all astir, and her mother very much on the alert. So, in despair, she had sent written word by a young nephew that she dared not venture out till all were asleep. Then they could secretly slip away in the small hours.

Her excuse had been accepted; Charbutti fitly rewarded, and given a lift to Bundiani—a great event in her uneventful life. So the first move in their good deed had been accomplished; and in the minds of both it would for ever be linked with that night in an open shed, the glow of a charcoal brazier, and a full moon breaking through curded clouds.

Roy, waking early from unrestful sleep, had found her there, huddled against the wall; and poignantly he had understood. He, who talked of keeping vigil, had left it to her.

Noiselessly he had coaxed the half-extinct fire to a show of life; and had gone out into the frosty cold of incipient morning, lit by a wan moon, to spare her the embarrassment of waking in his presence—knowing he must have guessed.

He had returned to find her up and doing; the fire kindled into fuller warmth, water heating in a copper vessel. She had kept back a little milk—like the provident creature she was; had secured some more from the gypsies and a vessel full of water. So there had been a hot drink, of sorts, and a few sweet biscuits to put a little comfort into them for the long cold drive. She had sat behind with Rajini, till they handed her over to Grace; and had then needed some pressing to come and sit in front. Her new touch of shyness hurt him obscurely, yet enhanced her charm.

Now, driving down the Mall, he became suddenly aware that it was not quite in order for him to be out with her at this early hour. Recalling those comments dropped by Lance, he cursed the lynx-eyed, parrot-tongued women—irrelevant, except for their capacity to spoil, as only outsiders of no consequence can spoil, harmless and beautiful things.

By good fortune, the few they met were unknown to him, though he might be known to them. But Lynch drove past in his open tourer, with a straight look, a formal nod, and heaven knew what suspicions in his heart.

They were swerving between Aruna’s gate-posts, when she cried, ‘Here comes Suráj! Riding early; learning English habits!’

But as Sinclair turned to welcome him, he stared hard from one to the other, pulled his horse roughly round, and cantered off in the opposite direction.

Aruna looked faintly startled.

‘How strange! Not like Suráj.’

Sinclair—puzzled and vexed—dismissed it lightly.

‘Oh, he’s a moody devil. Can’t forgive me, perhaps, for stealing the honour he had set his heart upon.’

At that she gave him one of her caressing smiles—and forgot all about Suráj.

It was Roy who remained puzzled and vexed. He wanted no further friction with his friend on her account. But if Suráj took that line, he must be clearly given to understand that his own unique relation to Aruna was no one else’s affair. He hoped the moody devil would keep away till his temper had cooled; or he might find—not for the first time—that other men had tempers too.

He was in no mood, himself, to cope with an angry man. He felt suddenly tired and cold. Shoots of neuralgia corkscrewed through his temple; and a premonitory shiver suggested fever. That plunge into the frosty dawn had chilled him all through. Early mornings had never been his speciality; but that he should feel a rag after so mild a dose of discomfort, and a broken night’s rest on the ground, hinted unpleasantly at incipient middle age—and he not yet forty. He would sleep it all off this afternoon.

He had stopped the car; and Aruna sprang out, while he ferreted at the back for her tea-basket.

‘Won’t you come in for a few minutes—warm yourself?’ she asked with the engaging tilt of her head that recalled the young Aruna. ‘Or are you terribly wanting your breakfast?’

He laughed. ‘I’d only just begun to realise it! But, of course I’ll come in.’

She had refused breakfast at the Desmonds’, having a busy day ahead of her. She would run round later for a secret visit to her ‘buried treasure,’ who might feel lost even among kind strangers.

He stayed only a few moments, warming his hands, relishing the restful atmosphere of her yellow room, its simplicity that was faintly monastic without being austere. Everything in it would have reproached him, had temptation prevailed last night. She had slipped off her cloak and stood near him; but neither spoke. And at last, reluctantly, he turned to leave her.

‘I feel we’re justified, Lynch or no,’ he said ‘of our “unlawful occasion.” I hope you make a fine woman of that girl——’

‘For poor Suráj?’ she said softly; and he raised his eyebrows, remembering the look Suráj had given him.

‘Yes—if you can bring him to it. I meant—for India.’

‘Yes, India also, I hope. And I am so—so——’ again that new touch of hesitancy—‘grateful from my heart to you, Roy, taking all this trouble, just to make things easier for me.’

‘I’d do a lot more than that to make things easier for you, Aruna-bai,’ he said with sudden fervour. ‘Think if you’d gone off alone in a hired car?’

‘I thought of it, when the message came. You made me feel safe. Kind people would have given me a bed, but the night would have been very anxious and lonely——’

What it actually had been she could not say; but, in part, he knew. And his mind was flooded with a vivid memory of her crumpled up against the wall, sound asleep. He had made her feel safe——

Moved by a sudden impulse of affection unalloyed, he put an arm round her yielding softness; stooped and kissed her forehead, where, on his account, the vermilion mark of marriage could never be set. It was all he could give her; and, since she valued his kiss, he had no right to withhold it.

A shiver of ecstasy ran through her under his touch; and through him ran a shiver of foreboding. Mentally he was bidding her good-bye, as if they would never meet again.

Did she know? Did she feel it too?

Neither of them spoke; but she came out with him into the verandah. As he started the car, he raised his hand and saluted her. Standing there in her yellow draperies, in the full sunlight of early morning, she looked the very symbol of her name—a daughter of the Dawn.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

At breakfast he heard news of Grace, who had installed Rajini in Eve’s one small spare room off the nursery. She was full of lively interest; Lance—the flouted Civil Power—very keen to see ‘the beauty’ who was causing all this unorthodox commotion.

‘You probably will,’ Roy told him, ‘in a few days’ time, if there’s no hue and cry in this direction. The clever old lady who spirited her away intends to trail a red herring towards a probable Youth League lover at Charsadda!’

‘Lucky young woman to be so well served!’

‘She’s damned lucky; and she takes it all very much for granted.’

He held out his big cup for the third time: and Eve scanned his tired face with motherly concern.

‘Feverish, are you?’ she asked.

‘A bit chippy after your night out?’ suggested Lance.

Roy responded gratefully to the lighter note.

‘It was more “out” than “in”! Our form of central heating was an angithi and the door was missing. Lucky Aruna had a fur cape and the car cushions. I’ll slack off till tiffin; and be a new man after.’

A glance at three letters beside his plate had shown him a thin envelope addressed in the fine clear script of his Guru: the first sign he had made since they parted. And again Roy was troubled with a vague sense of foreboding.

When Lance had gone off to kutcherri and Eve to her son, he carried the letters to his own sitting-room.

A log fire blazed high, but the room was cool and dim; the morning light just creeping round into his strip of verandah. Two doors opened on to it and the chicks were down. Normally he would have raised them, but weariness pervaded his limbs, his brain. When he had read his letter—the others were bills—he would lie down as he was and take his fill of sleep. But first—the Lord of Bliss—

His letter opened without formal prefix.

‘When are you coming up here, my friend? I have been waiting for news of you. The time is short before autumn changes to winter——’

At that point, his attention was distracted by horses’ hoofs and a man’s quick step in his verandah.

Next moment, the chick was roughly thrust aside, and there stood Suráj, his clear brown eyes so dark with anger that Sinclair rose instinctively as if on the defensive. No less instinctively, he struck the light note of the Englishman who refuses to make mountains out of molehills.

‘What’s the grievance, Bhai-ji?’ he asked. ‘Very early hour for a call.’

But coolness is apt to infuriate an angry man.

‘You can’t talk——’ Suráj retorted, his small hand clenched on his riding-whip. ‘What kind of early hour did you come sneaking back into Peshawar—with her——?’

‘I’ll trouble you to drop that hectoring tone,’ Sinclair checked him sharply; not yet angry, because the man’s jealousy was natural, and because the full implication of those significant words had hardly dawned on him. ‘There’s nothing to blaze up about.’

‘Nothing? You think I believe that? You say you must go with her, to take care of her, and you keep her away all night—where——?’

‘God damn you—hold your tongue!’ Sinclair flung the words at him in a sudden flare of rage.

But Suráj was no more to be checked than a flame in dry grass.

‘I will not hold my tongue. I am true Rajput, of her family. I know now why you must go with her. You talk English standards to me, when it is only bazaar women. But you can take her—Aruna—you—you damned half-caste——’

As the other’s fist came at him, he caught it by the wrist and struck out in a blind fury. His whip-handle grazed Sinclair’s right cheek-bone and came sharply down on his shoulder, making him see red.

With a swift turn, he freed his arm; wrenched the whip from the other’s grasp; flung it across the room; dodged the small strong fist—and closed with Suráj in deadly earnest.

For a few moments they wrestled, with more violence than skill; the flame of anger burning up coherent thought—

But if the Rajput’s muscles were like whipcord, Sinclair was the taller, stronger man. By a skilful manoeuvre he managed to grasp the other’s arms between shoulder and elbow; and so held him in a vice.

‘Now then,’ he said, in a hard, strange voice; and they glared at each other, breathing unevenly—they who had gone far together and had known one another ‘long before.’

Sinclair had the mastery; and it was he who spoke.

‘Every single word you’ve uttered is a damned bloody lie.’

He ignored the one true word; and Suráj, in blank amazement, ignored it also.

‘You sit down there,’ Sinclair went on. With a tightened grip, he almost flung Suráj into the long cane chair by the fire. ‘And you stay there, till you’ve heard—the facts. I’m not troubling to clear myself in the eyes of a man who can think that of me. But, on her account, you’ve got to listen. And remember, I speak the truth. I’m an Englishman—my father’s son.’

He stood there by the mantelpiece, erect and commanding, braced for the ordeal of using plain language, thankful that he could honestly prove, to this passionate Rajput, the controlling power of English standards that he had upheld in Delhi.

Though his own anger would take time to cool, the relief of blows had shamed him, and brought it under normal control.

Tired and shaken, he sat down on the nearest chair; and put up a hand to his grazed, aching cheek.

Suráj, waiting, watching, noticed that the hand was not quite steady. His own swifter flame was more swiftly quenched. And now, between shame and bewilderment, he realised that, if indeed he was mistaken, he had said unpardonable things.

‘I am sorry—I am sorry——’ he said, in a changed voice. ‘Does it hurt much, Roy?’

Sinclair dismissed the trivial damage with a gesture.

‘Not nearly as much as your evil thought of me.’

And Suráj, overcome, said simply, ‘How could I help? It is natural, between men and women——’

‘It depends, as I said before, on the man; still more—on the woman.’

‘But to her——’ Suráj dared greatly, ‘it would not seem like a wrong—because of that in her heart which is stealing her from me.’

‘It can’t steal from you,’ Roy gently pointed out, ‘what has never been yours.’ And to escape unobtrusively from a difficult subject, he added, ‘You haven’t yet heard the facts.’

‘That is no matter—now,’ Suráj surprisingly assured him. He believed his friend; and, in his emotional scale of values, feelings counted for more than facts. ‘I suppose you have rescued that beautiful girl—Rajput style?’

‘Yes. We’ve got her all right,’ Sinclair answered; not sorry to skip details, that were nothing to Suráj, once he had accepted the reason for delay. But his eyes lit up when he discovered that the lovely Rajini was actually in Desmond’s house.

‘She’s here—quite out of purdah?’ he asked; and Sinclair smiled at the altered tone.

‘Not quite,’ he said, leaning forward to warm his hands. ‘But she soon will be. And I hope Aruna will make a fine woman of her.’

‘Yes—I hope.’ But his thoughts were running along other lines. ‘I can meet her there. I would like to see her again. Such beauty and fire. Almost worthy to be Rajput.’

And Sinclair, recalling Aruna’s cherished hope, ventured a word in that direction, even at the risk of being premature.

‘Yes—see her again. You’ll be wanting another wife; and you might do worse. Though she isn’t Rajput, she’s good caste—if she doesn’t think you too old!’

‘Wife—marriage?’ Suráj echoed. The girl’s youth and beauty had stirred passion, but he had clearly not travelled so fast. ‘Perhaps you don’t know?’

‘Yes, I do know—that you have spoken to Aruna,’ Sinclair eased his awkwardness. ‘She’s unhappy about it, Suráj. It’s a shame to make her unhappy—a woman like that. She is dedicated to other things. She is for God—not for man. You must try to think of her as Sannyasin. Worship—yes. Passion—no. You mustn’t approach her so—even in thought.’

‘That I had already felt—in Udaipur,’ Suráj admitted with a touch of constraint that Sinclair had not expected of him. One could never tell with Indians, so curiously compounded as they were of the sensuous and the spiritual. ‘But for me, she is—woman. And to marry another—I can’t——’

‘Not yet, of course,’ said Sinclair kindly. ‘But sometimes the mind can sway the heart. Think of the pleasure it would give to Aruna, who would gladly mother your small daughters, but will never consent to be your wife.’

That would hurt; but it was a salutary hurt. And it might be of service to Aruna.

A zig-zag of neuralgia made him put up his hand again; and Suráj, seeing the movement, said quickly, ‘She must never know I struck you—for any reason——’

‘She never will, though my cheek will soon be a lovely sight! You’re too handy with the end of your whip, Suráj.’

At the reminder, Suráj looked sheepish. ‘I had forgotten. . . . By Indra, I am a sinner; owing you so much, and repaying my debt in such bad coin.’

‘Very good coin—some of it,’ said Sinclair, moved by his genuine penitence. ‘And you’ve left your mark on me. More than I’ve done on you, if I did rough-handle you a bit.’

‘You have left your mark here,’ Suráj touched the region of his heart. His fine eyes glowed with feeling. ‘And it won’t pass quickly like your bruise. You have roused my manhood in the right fashion. You have made, out of an idle, discontented Suráj, one who may yet become a true poet, who can see more of India now in his head than the glory of Rajasthán. You have given me Aruna—Devi—for worship. The men of India can only realise their goddesses through such noble women. All that mark you have left on me, Roy. And Indians do not forget.—If I blazed out too quickly, I am sorry. But, better a fire that blazes than a fire that smoulders.’

Cheered by the refutation of his evil thought and his recovered self-esteem, his sudden smile lit his olive-brown face with a gleam of white teeth.

‘But why do we talk so, as if we were parting, now the sun is out again and clouds are lifted?’

‘Heaven knows,’ said Sinclair, to whom the same thought had occurred—why this unbidden sense of farewell in the air? Then he remembered his Guru’s letter, forgotten in his blaze of wrath.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘we may be parting quite soon. I’ve other work on hand that can’t be done in Peshawar. I have to see my Guru in Kashmir—then England.’

‘Never again—India?’ cried Suráj in blank dismay—Suráj who had so lately struck at him with murder in his heart.

‘“Never” is an iron word. I might one day return—with my wife. Anyhow, I’ll write to you. I’ll translate your epic and make your name known on both sides of the ocean. But that will be—not yet.’

He rose and stretched his aching limbs. ‘Now I think—rookshut! I’m dead beat and half my brain’s asleep.’

Suráj rose also, reluctantly obedient.

‘It’s a shame—that I made you feel worse.’

‘No, you’ve made me feel a lot better.’ He held out his hand.——’Friends?’

It was less a question than a statement.

‘Friends—from long before we can remember,’ Suráj reminded him, ‘though I didn’t behave so just now.’

They clasped hands with un-English warmth. Then Suráj picked up the offending whip from a far corner; and turned, as he went out, to lift it in a smart salute.

Chapter 14

My hands shall be utterly emptied to take up thy trumpet.
— Rabindranath Tagore

For a full minute Sinclair stood staring at the lowered ‘chick.’ Then he mechanically picked up Sri Samádhi’s letter, and sank into the chair where he had flung Suráj, not twenty minutes ago.

His head buzzed, his eyeballs burned; the letter lay unread, unregarded, in his half-closed hand. For, in spite of that friendly parting, his ingrained fastidiousness recoiled from the indignity of their violent encounter. That Suráj should take his lapse for granted, that there should be even a grain of justification for such an insult, sharply smote the acute sensibility of one who looked well below surface manifestations of character and events.

But sharper than hurt pride was his compunction at thought of the strain he must have been putting on Aruna, by refusing to let himself see her true state of heart, by claiming so much from her when he could give so little in return. And yet—if one could ask her, would she have had it otherwise? From herself he knew he had given her deep and lasting pleasure by making her one with his book. And if the pleasure intensified the pain of parting—that was life.

Instinctively discarding plausible excuses, he forced himself to make his thinking as honest as he could; refused to exaggerate the strain, or blame himself unduly for a natural impulse to which he had not succumbed. It was the tincture of genuine emotion, at the back of things, that more seriously troubled him; an outcrop of his cursed duality in its most distracting form—the two men in him diversely drawn to the two women.

In love with Aruna——? Definitely—no. The English Roy was Tara’s unfalteringly, with the fervent consent of his whole being. Yet Aruna had awakened the Indian Roy, by unconsciously meeting his more obscure needs on a mental and spiritual plane. She was the fine flower of India in its loveliest form, the soul of a cultured Indian woman. Because of what he had felt for her in that critical half-hour, because of what she permanently felt for him, their unique relation had become subtly changed. And the discovery renewed the lurking fear of all that India was insidiously doing to him, of all it might do to him if he did not soon break away. But at that rate——?

He looked up at the mantelpiece; at Tara, smilingly sure of him, by virtue of earth’s strongest link—marriage rooted in love. If only, in the flick of an eyelid, he could be safe beside her—safe from dangers and indecisions and the great task laid on him by one who probably over-rated his powers. In that fevered and distracted moment, he came near to throwing up everything—in a great wave of relief—for Tara and home, and the profound heart’s ease that they alone could give.

This Indian problem was complex beyond belief. It bristled with questions: and never a workable answer. His heart said—Go. His mind said—Stay. His detached self, above the conflict, saw his dilemma as no clear issue between a right and a wrong; but as the clash and counter-clash of claims, each intrinsically right—the essence of tragedy. Away in England the claims of Tara and home: here, in India, most of his material to hand; only the time apart needed for concentration and clearer seeing. To throw it all up at this stage would amount to flat denial of his faith; would justify the worst that prejudice could affirm of the evils arising from mixed blood.

At that thought, the word ‘half-caste’ flung out by Suráj—ignored afterwards by both—stung him afresh and spurred him to disprove its implications. Had it only been hurled at him in rage and contempt? Or did there lurk behind it thoughts that had never been uttered till that fierce unguarded moment? When anger cooled down, he had felt unable to ask outright; unsure if he did so, of getting a truthful answer.

Now he must pay, the price of his disability. He would never know.

His fingers tightened on Sri Samádhi’s forgotten letter. He could guess its contents. He could hear the deep voice, the note of command: ‘You will return.’

With an odd mingling of reluctance and anticipation, he spread out the crumpled sheet, and read on, beyond the two lines he had glanced at in a so-different frame of mind—-

‘As soon as you receive this, send me word when you can start. I am encamped not very far from the ancient ruins of Martand, Temple of the Sun. You could find no place better fitted for looking within and without at wide horizons.

‘There I will meet you: and there I will leave you to go your own way and find your own truth, for India and yourself. For the moment comes when each individual soul, striving after self-creation, must be alone. The morning star rises for one alone. The unheard music sounds for one alone. The truth of that remains for you to discover.

‘You see, I do not ask—will you come? I am sure of it, as I am sure the sun will rise to-morrow. You left England because of India’s claim on your double vision. You will not leave India till you have all things complete for the work she demands of you. That work may be written in England; but it can only be conceived—in fullness and truth among India’s holy Himalayas. I am waiting. Come.

‘Your Guru.’

‘Come’—The pull of that one word, from that one man, was almost physical. And the two words that followed—‘Your Guru’—held a hint of command that stirred in his Rajput blood the age-old worship of the teacher—gurubakt—he who must be obeyed. And beyond both he could feel the mysterious pull of some power outside himself, outside even the higher self of his Master. It was not the voice of a man. It was the voice of Fate.

A commanding sense of destiny overwhelmed him in that hour; and the idea of leaving India for good, in a few weeks’ time, so wrought in him that only now he perceived how insidiously her grasp had tightened on him in these last few months.

With a stifled sound he leaned forward and pressed his tormented head between his hands, facing the foreseen challenge of his warring selves.

One or other must prevail. As man and artist, he must come to terms with himself and India, before he could write of her future with a driving force of conviction that would alone make the writing more than an eloquent, desperate beating of the air. . . .

In the midst of these whirling thoughts lurked the fated conviction that ultimate decision was no longer in his hands.

For his aching, burning body there was relief in surrender to the ghostly word of command. And the mountains drew him—drew him, as they can only draw those who have come under the spell. There he would prove his own soul, to Tara and himself. Then he would return to go through the world a sadhu in his heart . . .

From that far flight he dropped to earth, to full realising of all his decision would involve in the domain of action: a wire to Tara that would darken all their happy Christmas preparations; followed by a letter— Could he bring himself to write it? Could he succeed in making even Tara understand his prolonged absence, without seeming to overrate his unproven powers?

With an effort he forced himself to face one step at a time. And the next immediate step was a wire to Kashmir: then—the wire to Tara.

Pulling himself out of his chair, he went to the table, and wrote on a telegram form—

‘Starting to-morrow or Tuesday. Sinclair.’

On the second form he wrote his own code address; paused, for a long tormented moment; then forced himself to add:

‘Return for Christmas impossible. Leaving for Kashmir. Bitter disappointment. Writing. Roy.’

Mechanically he re-read that brief, hateful message; mechanically shouted for Hari Lāl and handed him the two telegrams.

‘Tar ghur.⁷⁴ Ek dum,’ he said: a burning of his boats that would cut out retreat, except for urgent reasons.

But there still remained—the letter. The sword-thrust of a decisive telegram was, by comparison, a simple matter. To-morrow his head would feel fitter for the mental effort of explaining the unexplainable. And suddenly it came upon him that this was mail day. His half-written letter, locked away, was to have been finished last night. And he had spent last night with Aruna——

That settled the question. He must write at once, while the fated feeling was strong upon him—a fresh letter; send the other as a fragment; and catch an air mail.

He pulled out a large sheet of paper, set an elbow on the table, and leaned his head on his hand, gazing, gazing at her picture—till it almost lived. If he could only show her his heart——

But the heart can never be shown. It can only be revealed in deeds or words: and when a man s deed seemed to contradict his word, it was a hard matter to make the lesser coin ring true.

That his letter from camp had not brought her out to him deepened his sense of fatality; but he had understood. He must trust her to do the same by him, in a state of stress far removed from her ken.

Bracing himself for the ordeal, he took up his pen and wrote:

‘My Beloved.

‘This is going to be the hardest letter that ever a man was driven to write. Driven is the word. So forgive me in advance—if you can—for anything in it that may hurt you almost past forgiveness.

‘It’s a case of tout comprendre. . . . And you alone can make allowances for your double-caste husband—fated, so often, to be pulled two ways at once. But no two ways, my Tara, where you are concerned. One half is yours; the other half—yours.

‘I have this minute sent off the hateful wire that blots out our hope of Christmas together at Home: a crushing disappointment for us all. I scarcely dare let myself think of Lilāmani. For a child there are no larger issues. The immediate grief is all.

‘Give her, for Christmas, one of Mother’s saris and the wrist-watch she longs for. To you, my darling, I will send the loveliest jewel I can find in Kashmir.

‘For myself, the plain truth is that this big work I arrogantly took in hand has virtually taken me in hand. You know, I have always felt it as a charge laid on me by Mother. And it has now been more urgently laid on me by my Guru, the man I wrote about in August. He probably has a far too exalted idea of my gifts and my two-fold understanding. He believes I have a word to say for India. I believe it is he who has the vision; and sees me as an instrument through which he can convey it to his people—and mine. Of course, I can’t tell him so; nor can I convey, in mere words, the compelling power of the man on one who has Eastern blood in his veins. His letter which I enclose, may give you some faint idea of him.

‘I see now—too late—that I ought to have stayed on in Kashmir after the pilgrimage. But there was much to draw me back here, where I have not made the progress I hoped for. But at least I’ve finished revising “Out of the Dust.” It will go with this. Read it critically. Make any changes you see fit, and pass it on to Jessop. You can sign his agreement, having my power of attorney.

‘As for my larger work—the whole complex theme grows and grows as one’s mind dwells on it, so that I can’t yet say clearly, “Lo here” or “Lo there.”

‘Sri Samádhi insists on complete detachment—for a time—from all human distractions and delights, till I can catch some inkling of a “forward view” that alone can give my work any deep significance for thoughtful minds, East or West, and justify my over-long absence from all I love best on earth.

‘You see, it is the core of their belief that renunciation is the first step to clear-seeing. For me, that is a statement only the event can prove. To give it proof, I am renouncing more than he will ever realise—more perhaps than even you can realise; and I’m asking of you the hardest thing a man can ask of his wife—simply to stand aside and wait.

‘I start to-morrow for Kashmir. When I shall be able to return—God knows. . . .

‘Darling—darling, can you understand that my inhuman behaviour implies no lack of love for you or the children? I know you will say—the work must come first; but I can’t bear having to put this further strain on you, just when you will be hoping to get me home again; and I so longing to be with you all.

‘Take this letter—if you can—Tara, as proof of my certainty that what is vital to me is no less vital to you: a state of things not too common, I imagine, between man and wife, however well-matched. It is not a case of what I desire, but of what I must—you know that. One’s life, it seems, is not always one’s own to live.

‘To put oneself in the second place—that is the categorical imperative. What to put in the first place, every thinking man must decide for himself. In an age of clear faith—it was God. For many of us, in this age of spiritual bewilderment, it is the possible re-discovery of God: not the God of Churches—a divine Formula to be affirmed or denied; but “THAT”—as Indians express it—which IS the meaning and mystery of life, which can be apprehended and revealed—yet never uttered. Many of her wisest men say “THAT” is flaming up again in India; and not only in India. Once more a word may come out of the East to steady our reeling world.

‘As for me, if I can do no more than catch or pass on the vision of a true seer, I may be privileged, at least, to light a little candle in the darkness—You remember the wise word of Radha Krishnan that Bápu gave me in Udaipur. It is the gleam that lightens my own darkness when I feel, as now, that the task laid on me is beyond my powers. To you alone, Tara, I can confess that one part of me (the Indian part perhaps) would be thankful to throw it all up and leave India’s insoluble problem to the wiser men who know—or the cock-sure men, who think they know. Cursed with the lack of clear conviction, I must contrive to make a clear decision, right or wrong.

‘Re-read my August letters with this last from my Guru, and you will, I know, realise why the sense of Fate is so strong upon me—step-son of India as I am.

‘“Most often a man’s mission is against his personal inclination. Seldom is anything considerable achieved unless there is this tension between desire and duty.” That sentence of Keyserling enshrines a deep truth. I am not sure that it applies to art. But, in my case, God knows, the tension is there: at this moment, stretched almost to breaking-point. Will the outcome be worth the price we are paying for it—you and I? For you are in it, Tara, as you are in all I think or say or do.

‘So I end, as usual, with a question. How I envy, at times, the unshakable certainties of the Moslem and Puritan type. Yet the world, after all, is moved and renewed by the seekers, by minds open to doubt—“the secret questioner, who forbids stillness in the midst of life.” Only those who are hot for certainties can accept ready-made answers to the unanswerable.

‘And for me the writing of this book will involve a coming to terms with my twin selves. From that process an overself may emerge worthier of England, of you, and of all you have been to me, my beloved, these twelve years. In you and in England are the roots of my personal being. At present, I admit, I am possessed by India. If it were not so, I might as well give up my ambitious attempt at interpreting the one country to the other.

‘Think of me, Tara, as an explorer—that is the word—an explorer of inner regions not marked on any map. Men who scale Everests or seeks the Poles are constrained, for a time, to leave wife and children—the happy household clime that satisfies the heart. So it is with me. I may discover no Pole, reach no shining peak. But I have set my foot upon a strange track, and must follow where it leads—to what end? The title of my book will be a question, as to India’s destiny. Where it may lead her, I do not yet know. The man who says he knows deceives himself and others. One can only hope to shed a gleam on the difficult path ahead.

‘And afterwards——? We must live for afterwards, you and I.

‘Whenever I can, I will write; but not often. And do you write also, to Srinagar. There I will apply when I am within reach of it. Say the best you can of me to that small and dear Lilāmani. I want no letters from anyone except her and you. It must be a clean cut with all personal links—for a time. But you are my very self—and the better part of it. That, even now, you will understand and forgive is my one certainty in the midst of uncertainties.

‘I must end now, my best and dearest; but let it never be good-bye between us. I am yours in life or death, and whatever place is destined to hold my body, my soul will surely find its rest with you.

He sat staring at those last words, his head buzzing his heart in a turmoil. The thing was done—adequately or no. It did not satisfy him. But, in his present state, he could no more. It must serve.

Mechanically he folded the sheets, sealed the addressed envelope, and thrust it from him, with the queerest blend of fatality, foreboding and relief that he had known in all his days.

Mechanically he stood up; and remained so standing, not seeing what he looked at, like a man stunned——

He had no recollection, afterwards, of going back to his chair by the fire. Those few moments had been blotted out of his life. . . .

Book Five — A Little Candle

Chapter 1

Greatness is to be one with the vision, and ensue it . . .
Greatness is to hear the bugles, and not to doubt.
— Humbert Wolfe

For three radiant days and three crisp nights of frost Sinclair had been alone on the wide green plateau of Martand, sloping outward from the great main ranges, lifted high above the bold curves of Jhelum River: a fit pedestal for the Temple of the Sun, noblest ruin in all Kashmir.

Bold, simple and impressive, it suggested ancient Greece or Egypt rather than India. Its massive gateway and graceful colonnades were informed with a fine dignity and restraint alien to the symbolical exuberance of Hindu architecture. Built by a little known race of men, more than a thousand years ago, it stood alone on the grassy upland facing the whole length of the Kashmir valley, ringed with distant snow peaks of the Pir Panjāl and Hindu Khush.

On the plateau itself were no trees, except a few old apricots north of the ruin: nothing to mar the clean lines of its ruined gateway, its trefoil arches and columns rising from tumbled blocks of limestone so immense that to hoist them aloft seemed beyond the power of uncivilised man. Nor was there any sign of man’s presence except one Moslem ziarat, with the humble dwelling of its fakir, and Sinclair’s few tents on the camping ground.

But below in the valley and along the river reaches, all the trees of Kashmir flaunted their dying glory: great elms and walnuts powdered with gold as if sunlight caught them; poplars—wrought in clear amber—striking their note of aspiration; chenars, aflame from base to summit, outshining, outnumbering them all. For the chenar—unrivalled in girth, in shade and autumn splendour—is to Kashmir, what the oak is to England; the pine to Scotland; each tree expressing, with singular felicity, the spirit of the land that breeds it.

Sinclair, who most delighted in the russet and gold of autumn, had yielded unreservedly to the spell of those three glowing days, steeped in the pervasive peace of holy Himalayas. All around him space, rhythm, design; and within himself a sense of being transported in time, raised high above India’s dusty levels; a changed focus of his inner vision that showed him the map of life from a new perspective. Only the aching sense of all he had put aside—wife and children and the dear delights of home—was not yet deadened within him, nor ever would be.

Having answered the summons, under a commanding sense of destiny, he had not stayed to consider ways and means of spending even a brief time on a Kashmir upland in November. But Lance knew all about that. With him alone had Sinclair felt able to speak of his deep compulsion; for he possessed, like his uncle, the essential gift of accepting a friend as the man he was, not judging him by the man he might or should have been.

As to practical possibilities of late autumn camping on Martand plateau, he had declared that any seasoned ‘campist’ would find it feasible and delightful, at least till the end of the month: and he spoke as one who had travelled in autumn among the bleak hills of Chitral. For cold nights he had advised a simple bed on the ground; half a foot of bhusa,⁷⁵ overlaid with a resai and sleeping-bag—a veritable nest; warm, elastic, draught proof. He had also lent his Canadian fold-up stove that could be simply fed with chips and charcoal till the iron glowed; a grateful companion these frosty nights.

To Lance he had entrusted the partial explanation of his own abrupt departure. Only to Aruna he had written briefly of a call from his Guru, and work on the larger book, that involved a time apart, trusting her Eastern mind to understand. His brief letter had been accompanied by all his notes, that would only cumber him at this stage. He bade her go through them with Vincent, adding any comments she pleased from her own larger store of knowledge; and later on they should be forwarded to his wife.

With the despatch of his novel to Tara, the decks had been cleared, the sails unfurled for his voyage into the unknown: that was the sensation at the back of his mind, when the train steamed away from Peshawar. With him went only Hari Lāl, who loved neither the cold nor the Kashmiri Moslem, but had refused to leave his Sahib, who must in no respect be harassed by the mosquitoes of life. Privately Sinclair suspected that, by now, the faithful one saw his unaccountable Master as some Western form of holy man, whom it was his own peculiar privilege to serve.

And here, on arrival—by chance or design—he had found no Guru to greet him; only a missive delivered by the local fakir.

‘Welcome, friend,’ wrote Sri Samádhi. ‘After three days I will join you and we will speak of many things, before you go apart for your work into a lower valley, where the winter will be less severe. A young Moslem, of my acquaintance, may also wish to come and meet you, with a friend, who knows your name.

‘Meantime, my chela, possess your mind in solitude; open it to the age-old influences of that which was once a Temple of the Sun, to the ageless influences of these sacred hills. Only when all doors of physical busy-ness are closed, inner windows may open revealing new vistas of knowledge and wisdom. Remember, the wind of God is always blowing. Vessels whose sails are unfurled catch it and are carried forward on their way. If your sails are not unfurled—is that the fault of God’s wind? Ponder in stillness the words of Kabir: “It is the spirit of the quest which helps. I am the slave of the spirit of the guest.” Put away doubt. Put away regret and vain desire. Await my coming.

‘Your Guru.’

Doubt, regret, vain longing—the mingled wisdom and understanding of the man could realise how those three still hovered at the back of his chela’s mind, disturbing the ghost of his other self that must be laid before he could fully concentrate on the appointed task.

During that first solitary day—snatched from one world, not yet attuned to the other—there had come upon him a great loneliness, a driving restlessness that had compelled him to walk and walk, for mental relief of changing scenes; for the rhythmic movement, comparable only to riding in its sane invigorating effect on body and mind; above all for the inexpressible sense of companionship with Nature that hints at some living spirit in the Universe at one with man’s secret self.

Down through the village of Bawán he had walked, to the sacred tanks with their guardian elms and giant chenars. There he had spent an hour with the local Pundit, adding his signature to the famous parchment book in which names of travellers had been recorded since 1827. Thence he had wandered along stray paths away from the beaten route of yearly invaders.

Only by walking and walking would he get his soul into shape, as it were, for the solitary life required of him; in essence, a life of yoga, all his faculties converged on one central purpose, that so he might reap the first fruits of yoga—increase of vitality, a lordship of soul over body, not through ascetic practices, but through a working harmony in man’s two-fold being.

Yet, more than ever in his loneliness, he was aware of Tara—not only as the desired woman, but as the origin of much in him that was greater than both. The flame she kindled in him was not all of her, nor of himself; and his present need was for that which sanctified the flame by transcending it. So he must school himself to let her pervade his thoughts and irradiate them with the light of her clear spirit.

Quietly and unbidden, as he walked, a vision of her had stolen upon his mind and senses, like music heard at night: vivid, yet all too brief, it had vanished even while he tried to hold it, leaving him—not bereft, but enriched, by the hidden imprint of her grace, by a measure of her courage and authentic spirit that were the true sources of his love for her.

So, all through that day-long walk, she had been with him in a quiet communing such as with her alone he could achieve; a sense of companionship that fell like dew upon his tranquillised heart.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Next morning—after dreamless sleep—he had waked early, refreshed and renewed: his ‘inhuman’ self alive to the peculiar form of release that solitude with Nature alone can give to those for whom she is ‘spirit in her clods.’

He was up and out before the late-rising sun had lifted the mists from field and river; only the silver frieze of snow-peaks alight and aware. A brisk walk towards Kanbál, a chapter of his favourite Keyserling, till the sun gained power; then—suffused by light and warmth, he had settled down on the tussocky grass for a spell of quiet thought: his back against a block of limestone, eyes and mind enthralled by the massive ruined gateway, by fragments of linked pillars and arches that framed the lower hills.

There and thus, he had sat absorbed in thought, while the sun climbed a sky of Italian blue and slipped down again towards the south-western peaks: all the stress and strain of those last days in Peshawar slowly draining out of him; his mind, freed from mists of uncertainty, sensitive to every breath of beauty without and within; his heart, sinking back upon itself, at peace—for a time.

Once Hari Lāl set food beside him; and he ate a brief meal, that disturbed only the surface of his deeply abstracted mood.

In those six hours, that passed like one, his mind had travelled farther, dived deeper, than in months of normal active life. He had seen himself and his purpose in a clearer light than ever before; had affirmed his mental surrender to the demands of this big work, that lived in him like an independent being; this impersonal creative process, compelling his responsive mind to be its instrument; over-riding all personal desires, insisting only that he should live it and think it and become one with it, as the man of wisdom had said. It took no account of him as a normal human being, subject to human passions, craving happiness and security. It reminded him that, for every gift given, the gods exact a price; and the artist pays, perhaps, more heavily than most.

Even now, he could see his apparent flight from life through the eyes of his father’s race: a race of men temperamentally unable to conceive that a man might be living for his kind, in a larger sense, while seeming to turn from them, to be pursuing other-worldly ends: men who could seldom, if ever, bring themselves to seek the unfamiliar climate of mental and physical isolation. From them sprang the world’s great believers, its kings and crusaders, rarely the dreamers, seekers and world renewers.

Lynch, the four-square, would certainly condemn his desperate decision as a weak-willed surrender to alien influence; a flagrant desertion of his obvious duties. Even Lance, perhaps . . .?

But, no: Lance had given proof of a gleam within him that lit up the truth behind all semblances. If he could not see thro’ another man’s eyes, he would at least suspend judgment. Vincent—of them all—might conceivably understand. He should have a letter presently, to dispel any fear that the higher Hinduism might have fatally prevailed. He alone would know, from experience, that thought must shape itself in words before the mind could reach beyond it; that a man’s very imperfections were the rungs of his ladder to the stars.

His own race-conflict appeared to him as a symbol of India’s present state: her soul and her soil the battleground of rival influences—to what end? Between her drum roll of Fate and England’s bugle blast of Freedom—what issue?

As at first, so now. he still looked confidently to her women, working on lines at once practical and exalted, that alone could create a new spirit within her. Human and fallible, crushed between the millstones of priest and custom, they yet remained, at best, the core of her stability and strength. To them he would primarily appeal; to them he paid tribute—in Eastern metaphor—for the gold of their hearts, the ivory of their wifely self-dedication, the frankincense of their singular spiritual charm.

For himself, when he had achieved the work that stirred in him—as a quickened child stirs in its mother’s womb—he might veritably find his duality resolved through fruition; might return to go through the world a sadhu in his heart.

But a man must go solitary to find his belief; to see beyond himself, and discover the hiding places of his power. Without that lonely communing had no great thinker or teacher been given to the world. It was the right and natural instinct of poet, prophet and saint; each in his own kind, or degree, concerned with the need to experience, to see and understand.

Leaning back against the rock, he closed his eyes and let the low sun beat upon his lids with gentle warmth——

How long he so remained he had no idea. Possibly he fell asleep. He knew nothing till he became aware of a light breeze across his face, a shadow between him and the sun.

And before his eyes were open, he knew.

There stood his Master, tall and statuesque; one hand stretched out as if in blessing. And he said in a low tone, his lips scarcely moving, ‘May the shadow of the thought of God rest upon you and give you peace.’

‘Guru-ji!’ Sinclair greeted him, as he rose, with his gesture of salutation and a glow at his heart. ‘I thought it was to be to-morrow.’

‘It was to be to-morrow: but it is to-day. I had reason to visit the Pundit of Bawán, who proudly showed me your name in his book. When he spoke of you, it came upon me that you were ready for my advent sooner than I had supposed.’

‘Yes,’ said Sinclair, ‘I am ready.’

The grave eyes searched his face.

‘How long have you been sitting in the silence?’

‘Since early morning.’

‘At noon I saw you thus in my mind. And I can see now that you are on the threshold of self-knowing: the true path to God-knowing. We will talk of that to-night.—I have heard that those others, I wrote of, will be coming up before noon to-morrow. One, Syed Aziz Khan, a young Moslem, has been several years studying and travelling in the West. He is full of doubts over the way things are moving in the East. His companion, a man of the West, is concerned about effects of the machine-devil on his own people. Deciding to live in India, he has joined the Brahmo Samáj.’

‘An interesting couple,’ said Sinclair. ‘The West swinging East, while the East swings West.’

‘It is in the dawn of a new spirituality for both that light may be expected to break. Only in that supreme sphere there is hope for some higher form of federation than out politicians dream of; through lifting the minds of men to those heavenly mountains, where streams meet in their source. That is the God-given work for writers and teachers.’

‘More than all,’ said Sinclair, ‘for the women—the mothers. Only by changing the atoms, can you affect a chemical substance: and only by changing its human atoms can you renew a race. Women bring to birth more than children. They create nations and re-create the men they love——’

With that undesigned intrusion of the personal note, shyness came upon him; and in the silence, a new-lit bonfire outside his tent crackled like fairy musketry.

‘Come,’ he said, and led the way to his small encampment. ‘Not a bell tent now! I’m well equipped. I found it quite pleasant sitting out last night, by my bonfire, while the moon wove her magic over the hills and these mighty ruins. How long can I stay among them?’

‘A matter of taste and fitness to resist cold. By the end of the month, I think you will be glad to seek some lower valley. Over the Haji Pir Pass you can reach the little hill State of Poonch. I know the Raja. You would find it not too cold there in the winter, either for wandering or for settled life and work, till you return higher in the spring.’

‘The spring——?’ Sinclair echoed in a dazed voice: and said no more.

Before spring came, he would surely be seeking Bramleigh Breeches, not Kashmir. If yesterday seemed years away, what of all those uncounted to-morrows? In view of his recently-gained serenity, it was a shock to discover that he could not face them in the mass. Mercifully they would come single file, not in battalions. For him, in this time of detachment, there must be neither to-morrow nor yesterday: only to-day——

And if his companion guessed the meaning of his silence, he gave no sign.

As in those August evenings on the march, so now, they sat by the great bonfire, Sinclair in his poshteen, while a moon nearing the full slipped up behind rugged peaks of the Hindu Khush, and a sea of darkness filled the valley. Once more, too, they talked of the ‘Big Little Things’; of Maya in its true sense—not seeing life as an illusion, but as a visible revealing of that which is beyond life; of how the truth-seeker’s battle goes on all his days, since man, by searching, cannot find out God, yet no other search can satisfy his deepest needs: of how life is rhythm, in man and in his world, like the rising and falling of waves.

‘It is not the end of life that has most significance,’ Sri Samádhi stated in his deep level tones, ‘but each climax as it comes. The waves of life rise and subside and rise again; every upward curve throwing new light on the whole. In the universe itself, no end, no beginning; only a larger rhythm of waxing and waning: worlds beyond worlds: each human soul, in its own degree, manifesting the Holy Spirit of Him who abides within the least and the greatest: Creator of so many colours and creeds, yet forever above them all——’

By the time they left the bonfire for the stove-warmed tent the moon rode high in a violet-grey heaven powdered with dim stars. Where she silvered the snows, they gleamed dead white on dead black; and the austere lines of the ruined temple were repeated in shadow on the open plain.

As they turned away from the lavish night beauty, against which men close their eyes in sleep, Sri Samádhi said in the words of Kabir: ‘“Look within, my friend, and see how the moonbeams of that Hidden One shine in you”’——

Chapter 2

Above the hills, the front of morn
We see, whose eyes to heights are raised;
And the world’s wise may deem us crazed.
— George Meredith

In the tingling frosty air of morning, they walked up towards Kanbál; and returning, they saw from afar two men standing in the unroofed gateway of Martand. As they drew nearer, it became obvious, from voice and gesture, that the shorter man was the Westerner.

‘He is, I believe, American,’ remarked Sri Samádhi.

And that one word flashed on Sinclair the astounding truth—Buck Edom, captured by the potent spell to which he had paid tribute in Delhi? Since then he had not written a line; and Sinclair had supposed he was back in America.

‘Oddly enough,’ he said, ‘I know the man. A moneymaker, who has studied Indian books and thought, in his spare time, for years. We shall have much to talk of. It would be a kindness, Guru-ji, if you would take over the Moslem for a while, and give me the chance to hear how this came about.’

They had been seen, and welcomed with salutations. The other two came quickly forward, and Sinclair—still half incredulous—found himself shaking hands with a transformed Edom, in camel’s hair choga, green waistcoat and turban of palest green; his grey eyes more deeply sunken under their rough brows.

‘This is fine, Sinclair,’ he said; and the grip of his bony fingers said a good deal more. ‘The gods are in it. We don’t have to engineer our meetings. When I heard of a Sinclair Sahib camping up here, I knew it could be no other. Have I given you the surprise of your life?’

Sinclair looked him up and down with smiling eyes.

‘I can’t recall a bigger one off-hand. And yet—there were things you said in Delhi—Had you any idea then . . .?’

‘If a part of me had, the other part didn’t know it——’ Their companions had moved aside, talking earnestly. ‘Even before that, no doubt, the seeds of it were there.’

‘When you first met me, and saw my father’s pictures?’

‘Even earlier, some power, not myself, was edging me away from our machine-run civilisation. They say whatever a man studies young, for sheer love of it, is likely to prove the very thing he was born for. And it does begin to look as if all I pursued—by way of a rich man’s hobby—was leading me blindfold towards this incredible issue. Is it possible——’ he surveyed a transformed Sinclair—‘that you have taken the same turning?’

‘No—no.’ Sinclair denied the implication with suppressed vehemence; and the other regarded him curiously.

‘Then I suppose you’re for England pretty soon?’

‘I wish I was. My work is keeping me out here longer than I reckoned for.’

‘The great book?’

‘Great or no, remains to be proved. That very remarkable man——’ he indicated the tall figure strolling with a modern young Moslem, between graceful colonnades built fifteen hundred years ago—‘has an exaggerated opinion of my gifts. He believes I have a vital word to say for India——’

‘I’m with him there. Your heart’s racing back, of course, to that very lovely lady and the noble old home. But the magnet of India hasn’t pulled you all this way and held you all these months, to no purpose. Something will come of it; something bigger, perhaps, than you can yet conceive. It’ll be a great book, all right. Give it a chance.’

Sinclair’s gaze shifted to the shining peak of Kolahoi, blue-white against the passionate blue of noon.

‘Oh, I’m giving it every chance,’ he said in a curious tone. ‘It will have to exceed my Guru’s highest expectations, if it’s to be worth all it is demanding of me—and mine.’

With a gesture he dismissed the personal theme.

‘It’s your turn of the wheel I want to hear about—if you can tell me.’

Edom’s eyes looked gravely into his.

‘I could sooner tell you than any other man of your race——’ He glanced towards their companions, who had moved farther away. ‘Our friends seem interested.—Shall we sit?’

They sat on a fallen pillar; and Edom produced from some inner recess the familiar tortoise-shell cigarette case rimmed with gold.

Sinclair helped himself.

‘Is it—no more America, for good?’ he asked.

‘Well——’ Edom pensively tilted his head—‘I wouldn’t vouch for that. It depends as much on America as on Buck Edom. This big landslide may chasten her “some,” and she may come out the finer for it. I’m not “looking too far into time at all,” as Edward Carpenter says. But I’ve reached the meridian age, when it’s well for a man to take stock of things—himself included—and question if he’s content to slide down the western slope in a machine-made groove; or if he’ll have a try for fresh developments, fresh points of view.’

‘According to Marcus Aurelius,’ said Sinclair, ‘simply to look at things on the opposite side from which you’ve always seen them is to begin a fresh life.’

‘He knew a thing or two. That’s about what I’m after. I’ve done my share of “getting and spending,” and I’ve come to feel that over there, things are in the saddle. The machine drives the man. He gets conditioned by it and by his own possessions. I’m not preaching any hot gospel to those who would feel naked without their worldly gear. I only know that I—for one—feel healthier and happier without it——’

‘But what the devil have you done with it all?’ Sinclair asked, puzzled and intrigued; moved by a new fellow feeling for the man he had so liked at sight.

Edom smiled. ‘It’s an easier matter, by a long way, getting quit of money than piling it up. I’ve a young nephew—business-crazed—who jumped at the chance of taking over my little concern. Thinks I’m touched in the head of course. And I leave it at that. As our wise man, Emerson, said long ago, “I must write Whim over my door. One can’t spend the day in explanation.” Young Buck’s mother has my place in California. So I’ve a foothold there, if I hanker for God’s own country, when I’ve done a bit more reading and thinking—found my centre——’

‘But look here, man,’ Sinclair cut in—reminded, by the place in California, of his father’s pictures, paid for and not yet removed. ‘What about our affair? If you’ve no use, now, for possessions, we’d better call it “off.” I’ll refund the money.’

His heart sank at the thought of Tara and home expenses, but the position was impossible.

Edom stared at him a moment, grasping the situation in all its bearings.

‘You don’t refund me a dollar,’ he said—and Sinclair breathed more easily. ‘Just now I’ve no use for money or the pictures either. So you’re in the unique position of a man who can eat his cake and have it.’

‘That’s a position I refuse to accept. Can’t they go to your sister?’

Edom laughed aloud. ‘Rene? They’d give her the scare of her life.’

‘Then you’ve got to take my cheque.’

‘Damned if I will.’

They faced each other, resolutely opposed. But Edom’s quick brain—respecting Sinclair’s integrity—saw a way out of the impasse.

‘I can say this much. I may have a use for them some day. They mean a lot to me. You keep ’em for me, Sinclair. They’re mine—to claim when I’m ready for them. That’s a square deal.’

‘I’ll keep them on trust for you,’ said Sinclair. ‘Not on any other basis. And I’m grateful to you.’

‘No call to be.’—They were completely at ease again.—‘Those pictures are more than possessions to me. But just now I’m clearing the decks.’

‘Leaving nothing over for yourself?’

‘Sure!’ His shrewd look revealed Buck Edom of Wall Street under the turban of the Punjab. ‘With my usual luck, I sold out a bunch of shares just before the slump. I’ve sunk the money in Indian concerns, and it brings enough for my simplified needs. It’s queer—’ he mused aloud—‘how you never know the full beauty of things till you quit wanting them. I suppose only poets and artists ever become fully acquainted with the deep-laid joy of the unpossessable?’

‘In a sense, through our peculiar joy in it, we make it our own.—But I also belong to a class that sets great store by its possessions.’

‘That’s so. But yours aren’t merely personal, or mixed up with the scramble for money and power. They enshrine a tradition, an ideal, one of the world’s finest.’

Sinclair shrugged. ‘Tradition and ideals are out of fashion just now; but no doubt they’ll come in again. Man can’t live by dynamos alone. Ideals are as necessary to one part of him as bread and meat to the other.’

‘Such bhāt,’⁷⁶ said Edom. ‘But, over there, we’ve discredited the word, and a good many others of fine quality, mixing ’em up with the jargon of commerce. We talk ideals; and we harness them to salesmanship. We reduce even the soul to a machine for coining money. It’s high time for our clever-crazy, money-mad world to get a fresh hold on things of the spirit; shift the emphasis from dollars and machines to man—his real desires and needs. As it is, the wheels drag you in willy-nilly—unless you get half a world away. So—here I am; and here I’m glad to be. As I hinted in Delhi—India’s got me.’

‘How long, I wonder,’ Sinclair ventured, ‘will she hold you?’

‘How long?’—Edom faced the man who was half Indian—an exalted look in his eyes. ‘She’ll never lose hold of me. Whether I live here, or no—I’m Brahmo Samáj. It’s sad to see that fine influence on the wane, after a century of moral and social power——’

‘As an aristocracy of the spirit, it must not be allowed to wane,’ Sinclair quietly insisted. ‘The new India must revive the power of her Brahmo Samáj, in a new form. Now, more than ever, she will need its wise, imaginative freedom of thought, its strong and stable Theism, to check the rising tide of Bolshevist nation-worship. Because man must worship something, when they take away God, they give him the State— If India’s got you to that extent, Edom, I’m glad it’s Brahmo Samáj. Not yoga practice?’

Edom smiled. ‘No more than I’ve always done in that line—concentration and intuition, essential to big business. Most of our money magnates are yogis, after their kind. But yoga practice—Indian style—is a dangerous game for Western man. I’ve never known it lift a single American an inch higher. But it’s helped scores into hospitals and lunatic asylums. My practice will be along other lines.’

‘What lines? You’re used to active occupation. What’s to be your outlet—If I may ask?’

‘You may. At present I’m still mooning around talking, thinking, reading a’good hit. When I’m ready, I’ll perhaps have a word for my own West—as you have for the East. I know more than one editor who’d print my stuff over an Indian name; and I know my people would sooner heed words written by an Indian, than even the wisest babblings of a Buck Edom. Queer thing, human nature. America’s been damned as material, just as India’s been over-glorified as spiritual. But I tell you, Sinclair, more than half our women are religious at heart. It’s only lack of discernment makes ’em fall for anything marked Swami or Mahatma; for any strange philosophy or religion that may occupy their minds and ease their kindly hearts. I might take a hint from old Marcus Aurelius: show them things from another side, and perhaps start a few on a new way of life. Also—as you’re interested—I might try to acquire a bit of land in the north; settle down for a time, as a Zemindar. Try and persuade the Punjab peasant to see a thing or two from a new angle.’

Sinclair opened his eyes. ‘That’s something like a notion. The peasant’s good material; and he’s moving. It’s all-important that he shall move in the right direction. The New Light’s creeping in—if slowly: each for all, instead of their eternal factions, a practical gospel of sufficiency and service, to limit the natural greed of man and the grip of the strong on the weak. Along those lines, there’s real work—uphill work—to be done.’

‘Uphill work won’t frighten me. I’m not after disturbing his pathetic contentment—like Mr Secretary Montagu! I’m keen to give him better grounds for it. Oh, I’d be the model landowner!’

‘A bachelor Zemindar?’ Sinclair twitched an eyebrow. ‘What would they make of that? Have you reckoned with the chance that you might want to marry?’

Edom gave him an odd look.

‘One of them——? To you I can say—it has crossed my mind. These Kashmiris are a treat to look at; and their women are women. But, for a life-bond, I’d sooner look to my own kind. So far—I’m not considering marriage. They say, when a man gets the taste of God in his mouth, he loses his taste for a good many other things.’

‘That’s inevitable. But don’t turn ascetic and cut out the better half of creation. A man’s desire for a woman mayn’t be a very high impulse; but it can lift him to the highest of which he’s capable.’

Edom nodded gravely.

‘A fine tribute from a believer in woman. I’ll bear it in mind. But my life’s quite full enough at present, without the dear encumbrance. India fills my horizon. She has given me a clear faith. And I’ll be proud to do a hand’s turn for any of her people. Ascetic? Not much. I’m a practical man. I won’t be found sitting under a bo tree, mixing myself up with the landscape.’

Sinclair laughed, recalling his own regrettable tendency in that line. Edom was watching the other pair.

‘Here come our friends,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have you and Aziz become acquainted. He’s a thoughtful fellow, up against a real problem—just how much of Europe dares the East accept, without becoming a purely artificial product. He swears he’d sooner be stranded in the desert with any white man than a fellow Asian, and that most of his race would say the same! They find our neutrality reassuring. Yet he’s dead against our form of democracy for India; and believes Asia is better off without mechanised industry. It’s all a biggish puzzle. No doubt it’ll work itself out, while we keep on wondering and havering——’

He rose to welcome the approaching pair.

‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘talking our heads off, as usual!’

After greetings, they moved on towards Sinclair’s camp, where the mid-day meal had been laid in the open under the benign warmth of a November sun.

Syed Aziz Khan, a plain young man, with fine expressive eyes, spoke honestly and intelligently of his problem, personal and racial, the paradox that everywhere confuses the emerging East. From England his people had derived the craving for national independence, only to find opposition to its fulfilment coming from that very source.

‘All our roots, he said, ‘lie in national traditions and feudal ideas. But the roots have flowered under a European sun. Hard to separate the two. Myself—having studied in the other countries and experienced the colour feeling in America—I would say India may thank God that she has the British to guard her destinies. We can always trust their sense of justice and fair play.’

‘But can we so surely trust their deeper wisdom?’ queried the holy one, with a significant glance at his friend. ‘Western man,’ he added dryly, ‘has let the many-headed trample too freely on his fine traditions. He is in danger of being overwhelmed by the powers he has blindly unloosed; and he generously desires that we—who distrust the many-headed—should share in his good fortune!’

Edom chuckled at the shrewd thrust, pleased to have discovered, in that grave and dominant man, the saving grace of an ironic humour. When their talk drifted into lighter channels, Sri Samádhi still easily held his own; revealing, even to his chela, fresh facets of his complex, balanced personality.

Sinclair himself, in a brooding vein, listened and observed more than he talked; impressed by the fact that there sat the four of them, in Indian dress, all speaking English, eating English fashion, crowning their meal—the holy one excepted—with the sacred British rite of coffee and cigars.

And as the talk veered back, inevitably, to India and her Fate-ordained link with England—to the stimulating conclusion that East and West could, if they would, combine to create a new epoch of wider, freer thought, an aristocracy of mind and spirit, not in India alone—there came over him a dreamlike sensation, as if they were four beings from some other sphere; lifted, for that brief hour, above the stir and ferment of the modern world; catching glimpses of the surge and direction of its tides. . . .

Too soon the westering sun brought them back to earth, to the practical consideration that Edom and Aziz had six miles to walk, and wished to reach Islamabad before dark.

The Guru was meeting another holy one who must pass the night at Bawán. In a day or two he would return for further talk with his chela. He was never precise in matters of time. And Edom also wished to return; to join Sinclair for a while on the plateau, till November nights became too keen even for their taste.

‘It’s a sublime setting,’ he said. ‘I’d like to fill my mind with it. Steadies a man’s outlook, taking a backward step—so to speak—of more than a thousand years.’

And Sinclair welcomed the suggestion; asking for at least a few more days alone to fill his own mind, in his own way, with the splendour of the valley, the peace and majesty of Pir Panjāl and Hindu Khush.

With laughter and friendly talk, they parted. The two went one way. The tall, solitary figure went another way. And in the complete silence that followed their departure, Sinclair felt suddenly, acutely alone.

Chapter 3

Full lasting is the song; tho’ he,
The singer, passes; lasting too,
To souls not lent in usury,
The rapture of the forward view.
— George Meredith

They were gone, all three of them—two seekers and the man who had attained—leaving him to the austere companionship of these mighty ruins, this wide waste plateau and gleaming guardian heights. It had been a welcome and stimulating interlude; and his first acute sense of solitude was mainly physical. Mentally, their presences were with him still. More especially his mind was full of Edom’s courageous adoption of a new faith, a new way of life. Pure West, he reflected, could swing clean over to the East; while he, the hybrid, was doomed to hover eternally between them. Through marriage also he was two, not one: nor would he have it otherwise.

Brushing aside hampering thoughts, that troubled his heart and led no whither, he rose and strolled again along the upward path that commanded an impressive view of Martand’s magnificent desolation. Walking and walking, without haste, without aim, he recaptured by degrees the morning mood of serenity; found himself returning, with singular pleasure, to the silent companionship of the mountains, and the inner world of his ceaselessly interested mind; pondering on the strange adventure to which he was pledged, admitting—in spite of himself—that there was virtue in the hard decree of isolation from all that he most urgently desired and loved. Only so could the ear of his spirit be attuned to catch the ‘unstruck bells and drums’ of Kabir, ‘the music that transcends all coming in and going forth.’

To that end he had at last been given the freedom of these majestic Himalayas—sacred India, as distinct from religious India, whose many faces had at once fascinated and repelled him in Benares. Here, freed from attachment, he might in time achieve clear inner vision—at once a remembering and a foreseeing: vision vouchsafed only to him who seeks no personal ends and tells no comfortable lies, who knows that a purpose out-soaring human aims is the life-giving secret for man.

It was as if India—by virtue of her blood in his veins, and of some unworldly strain in him—opened her heart to him and yielded up a measure of her secret, that he might reveal it to others less favoured. Whether they would heed or no—if the truth were unpalatable—it behoved all men of either race, who possessed convictions, to make themselves heard above the clamour of theory-mongers and political strife.

For, in this troubled, evolving India, there were fine and hopeful elements, worthy of all encouragement, countered by dark forces, and blind antagonisms, that might well make the bravest despair.

Throughout the whole country some power was astir; a wind of the spirit, like a breeze rustling through long grass. India was moving—not towards the West, but towards a reassertion of all that was most Indian, transformed inevitably by much that her best men had imbibed of Western culture and outlook.

The profounder issues were hid from those who could see her only in terms of politics. If talk of ‘betraying the real India’ could too easily seem a catchword of disguised British self-interest, there remained an appreciable danger of something very like betrayal in the guise of a political boon, that might convert a conflict of ideas———‘movers and shakers of the world’—into a fatal, embittering conflict of action. To avert that calamity were worth any personal sacrifice: if one could—if one only could. . .?

And, as he turned to walk down again, with thought for his unseen companion, his eyes noted instinctively every change of light and shade in this hour of early evening that showed Martand and the whole far scene in their loveliest aspect: still in full sunshine, yet mysteriously aware of coming change.

Shadows of the higher hills were already creeping over the valley and river. Patches of gold and crimson—poplar and chenar—vanished one by one, like lights blown out. Village after village, woods and low hills were drowned in the slow, soft flood of oncoming dusk, while the sun-gilded ruins, in bold relief, flung long shadows on the empty plain.

And away, near his own small encampment, lights of earth began to gleam; the first flicker of his bonfire, that would enable him to sit on till the sun vanished and the full moon came into her own.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

There he found his poshteen and canvas chair awaiting him. Slipping on his coat, he sank into the chair with a sense of pleasant bodily fatigue, and yielded his mind to the spell of loneliness; the dim, disquieting joy of intimations from a region just beyond the verge of consciousness, ‘the outer noiseless heavens of the soul . . .’

*  *  *

By now, the sun was nearing the great peaks that would hide him before his time. Waves of darkness rolled up from the valley and invaded the plateau, till the ruins stood in silhouette—a bold, sombre design; and a nip of frost sharpened the windless air. But the bonfire sent out a grateful warmth; and still he sat on, loath to move before he must.

Two pale streamers of cloud, that had dimmed the low sun, were slowly dissolving. Through the rift shot a golden flare, like light breaking in from another world: a light that released in him some hidden well-spring of conviction—a fore-knowledge of the goal attained. Not yet, perhaps not soon, as men reckon time, the word would be given him to quicken that ‘precarious residue of hope. . . .’

Mentally he hurled defiance at all uncertainties; grasped his will, as if it were the sword of the spirit, given into his hands, because at last he had inwardly accepted the task assigned; had subdued the Roy who doubted and demanded and desired, who knew impatience and fear. In that hour Something greater than his own soul laid hold of him. Even his twin selves seemed one, in the faith that, from their very conflict, might yet be born the over-self, predicted by his Guru, to use both for the work in hand.

Slowly but surely, during these months of disciplined seeking, he had won that which none could take from him, that which would enable him, even in the world’s mart, to hold in quietness his land of the spirit.

And with that sense of inner release, that decisive mental gesture, a flood of liberating peace flowed in upon him from unknown reservoirs, obliterating all but the luxury of obliteration: till his soul seemed to slip out of his quiet body and journey in blue fields of air, washed clean of hampering doubts and desires, imbued with strength to follow the gleam and fulfil the task assigned. . . .

Chapter 4

Guardians in heaven of the source of love,
Lean down from your high sanctuary, and tell us,
While still upon our souls the shadows move,
We shall not starve
In heaven, on earth who only stand and serve.
— Humbert Wolfe

And in fog-bound England, half a world away, Tara too sat solitary by the open hearth of their High Tower room—his mother’s House of Gods—reading over again the novel of which she had heard so much, and seen not a line, till it reached her with the letter that had gone near to break her heart.

During his long absence, she had made this room, with its whiff of India, her own retreat. It was sanctuary. Here she could read and re-read his letters, and weep—without damage to dignity—when tears would spill over in spite of herself. Only this room—though the library was full of him—could give her, at times, a sharpened sense of his presence. Raise comfort: but the joy, while it lasted, was worth the after pang.

Outwardly serene and untiring, she had gone about her business of home and children and the estate, carrying one thought like a lamp in her heart: before Christmas he would be with her again. Then, out of the blue, came that letter, written in camp: his need of her running through every line of it; his confession that she, no less than India, was essential to his work. And between the lines she had read the implicit question never asked outright. Tempted beyond measure, her longing and his had prevailed over every pull and counter-pull. Only a lurking dread that he might, at last, say ‘No,’ had moved her to act on her own initiative. A letter the week before she sailed would give him due warning, while giving him no chance to cancel her departure.

The letter had actually been half written, when Lilāmani—the apple of his eye—had been suddenly struck down with congestion of the lungs; and her own carefully laid plans had come crashing to the ground. For two weeks the child was seriously ill; but the doctor had been hopeful throughout, and she had refrained from needlessly alarming Roy. She had simply written of her longing to come, of the many things conspiring against it, of a hope that perhaps—when the coast was clearer . . .?

And Lilāmani, with the quenchless vitality of youth, had survived an illness that would have killed a woman. But even so, to leave her was difficult; and, before Tara could write definitely, Roy’s wire had shattered her dearest hopes.

The bald statement had seemed a fatal affirmation of India’s potent spell; and for once her practised self-control had given way. She had cried like a child in her mother’s arms; healing tears, that had probably saved her from a more serious collapse.

What that mother may have thought, while she soothed her shaken daughter, she wisely kept to herself. This was the price women paid for marriage with men of genius: and Tara was of those who would pay any price, gladly, for love of her man. The eager impatient girl, of Helen’s recollection—who must have all she desired at once, if not sooner—had blossomed into a woman controlled and inspired by a wise selflessness that found its natural outlet in service—a new-old spirit reviving among the younger women of to-day.

But if she said little, her enfolding arms had conveyed much. And Tara, when all the tears were out of her, felt like one in whom pain had killed itself; she had broken the news to Lilāmani, had soothed and calmed—dry-eyed—the child’s passion of weeping. She could only cling to her faith in Roy; her basic certainty that, without good reason, he would never put this extra strain on her—and on himself.

His letter, when it came, had atoned for much, if not for all. It was the essence of Roy; minted gold of his heart. Yet it had not quite allayed her fear of India’s hold on him through the person of that compelling Guru. Only fragments could be read to Helen, whose troubled queries she had met with the reminder that Roy, because of his difficult duality—added to the unstable flame of genius—could not be judged by clear-cut standards, British or Indian.

In the novel, which they had read together, that flame burned clearer than ever yet, except in a few of his finest poems; so atmospheric, so profound was its revealing of India and her peoples. And for Tara, it threw fresh light on the inner Roy, known only to her and his mother: the Knight of their beech wood game, who had left his High Tower Princess in order to ‘quest’ the Elephant with the Golden Tusks.

As in the beginning, so now—for ever chasing the impossible. That was his way—the way of Rajput and Englishman. For the men of his father’s island race were, at heart, poets and adventurers, pursuing the unknown and courting disappointment: even in the midst of disillusion, hugging their dreams. He was true to his fine and fateful heritage; nor would she have him otherwise.

Thought of the Golden Tusks carried her back to a strangely prophetic day of spring, when a dark, slender Roy—not yet nine—had gone forth into the beech wood after those coveted Tusks, leaving her perched aloft in their favourite tree, impatiently awaiting his return. Lost in one of his queer waking dreams, he had forgotten the Tusks, forgotten her; had stayed away so long that impatience dissolved in terror lest any harm had befallen him. But in the end he had remembered her, and he had come back—there was a foolish thrill of comfort in the thought—just in time to save her from falling out of the tree.

And now here was their game turned into actuality—the boy’s dream foreshadowing the man’s purpose: he still chasing an Indian solution, almost as mythical as the Golden Tusked Elephant; she waiting and waiting for his delayed return. In this his first novel, she found and claimed him, as it were, all over again: the Roy who had commanded her unswerving allegiance from the day of his first stand-up fight with an older boy, on account of an unwitting insult to his mother; the day she had sent him, Rajput-fashion, a bracelet, woven from her petticoat ribbon and strands of her golden hair. That bracelet—still in his letter case—bound him, as Rajput, to fulfil, at any price, any service she might ask of him.

Only once she had used its unfailing appeal, to bring him home to his bereft father. And, sudden as lightning, the thought leaped in her mind—if she were to use it now, she could bring him back to her from the ends of the earth. Bracelet-bound, he would never deny the Rajput claim, for all that his Guru might do to prevent him.

When the thought sprang, she was sitting alone in their tower room, by the open Indian hearth, on the low cushioned chair she had sat in when he told her he must go. Outside the half open window, November’s last day was weeping itself to death. A dank, drifting mist drowned the garden; and high above it her tower room was lifted, like a lighthouse, casting its pale beam over a ghostly sea, where taller trees loomed like half-drowned giants. And above them a sickly sun peered through, only to be blotted out by the soft shroud of mist, that seemed to invade her very mind, to drown the resolute hope that made wintry sunshine in her heart.

She was reading his book for the second time, trying to hold a more critical attitude. At once she had known his mother, and—presumably—Aruna; and now too clearly she perceived how his mind and imagination were captivated by India, his true heroine. Since his mother’s death, that side of him had been so much in abeyance that its full revealing smote her afresh; set her longing for him with an intensity that hurt almost beyond bearing. At times it was a terrifying thing to be a woman, and so deeply in love: a love not less, but more creative now, than in the passionate ferment of youth; an emotion of greater depth and stillness, ‘too full for sound or foam.’

Shaken by her intolerable longing for him, she leaned forward and covered her eyes, wrestling in spirit with the sudden temptation, the insidious assault on her most sacred resolve, her own first commandment; reminding herself that he remained away for no trivial reason, that her recall might obtrude human demands and desires on him at a distracting moment, and spoil half the pleasure of his return.

It hurt—terribly it hurt—to push aside the tempting impulse; but it was a case of ‘mine own soul forbiddeth me.’ And—some day, some distant, golden day—she would be glad with a gladness that could never come from snatching at heart’s desire out of due time. For the sake of that after-joy, she must accept much present pain. The two were linked in this difficult life: pain the seed, joy and courage the fruit. But the seed in order to bear fruit must fall on good ground, not among thorns or stones. She would accept her own hard decree. She would not dishonour the child Tara’s bangle by turning it to selfish account. One day she would tell him—and reap her reward. Meantime, Derek was a rock to lean on, in all practical matters, in his obvious understanding of Roy; and to Gabrielle she could speak her inmost mind more nearly than to any living woman.

When at last she uncovered her face, the strain was over. She had conquered. Yet conquest brought no elation; only a dim sense of relief. For she was tired—tired all through . . .

The invisible sun had set. The windows were two darkened oblongs reflecting fragments of the room. With a small shiver, she rose and pulled the gold-embroidered curtains. Then she sat down and went on reading Roy’s novel; wondering, at the back of her mind, if he could feel—in far-away Kashmir—how close she had drawn him to her in spirit during that fateful half-hour.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

That was the turning point: and it brought at least a measure of peace. In the familiar round of duties, in the small joys that so largely help to make life livable, the days and weeks slipped by. And Christmas brought another letter, after long silence. It brought the jewel he had promised her: a heart-shaped sapphire, rimmed, with brilliants, on a chain of seed pearls. The beauty of it—and all it stood for—drowned her eyes in tears, that must be swiftly blinked away: for Lilāmani—pulling at her hand—was ecstatic over real Indian bangles and her wrist-watch, from the vanished Daddy, who was always coming, yet never came.

There were gifts for them all—and letters; a heartwarming assurance that he was with them in spirit. Yet, perversely, that very feeling intensified her human ache for the fuller assurance of touch. His letter told her he had left the splendid plateau, and was wandering in the lower valley of Poonch, writing at last to some purpose. Not a word about the chances of coming home.

And again the days took up their tale of duties and pleasures and the underlying pain of hope deferred. . . .

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

Late in January she was cheered by a surprise undreamed-of—a letter from Aruna, bearing a London postmark and address: Aruna, whom she knew only as a girl-student, in far-off, happy Oxford days.

She had come to England, for six weeks or two months, with a friend who had persuaded her to attend a conference on women’s education. She had brought with her Roy’s notes for the big Indian book, and a letter about them from Sir Vincent Leigh. And, of course, she wanted very much to see Tara again, and Bramleigh Beeches and the last portrait of her dear Lilāmani. At the very end she asked for news of Roy; and was there any hope that she might see him, safe at home again, before she must return?

But if Tara could hold out no hope, she could and did ask Aruna down for a week-end. Roy had said she was doing good work for India; and he had seen much of her in Peshawar. It would bring him closer, if only in fancy, to talk of him with her and to go through those precious notes. Even to have a visitor coming on his account lifted the hidden cloud that now permanently shadowed her heart.

On a spring-like morning of January she came; and Tara met her at Cherton, the little station for Bramleigh, with the car, for which she had blessed that odd American—who stole Roy—many times over. Since the Little Mother left them she had not seen an Indian woman; and the yellow sari, the dark hair laid in curves on the olive-tinted forehead, gave her a small shock of pleasure that came too rarely now. The pansy-shaped face was fuller, the eyes more thoughtful under their straight brows; but at sight of Tara, they lit up with the sudden smile she remembered in the girl of long ago.

‘Tara—this is wonderful, that we meet again,’ she said softly, as they clasped hands. Yet they smiled at one another from a distance, across a gulf of seventeen years.

During the drive they spoke little. There was much to be said—afterwards. For the moment Tara felt unaccountably shy of this new, unknown Aruna; almost as if some third presence hovered between them. And she caught herself wondering—‘Can it be Roy?’

It was not till after lunch.—when Helen had taken Lilāmani to play with a friend, and Nell, the small Helen, had been collected by Anna—that they once more found themselves alone, finishing their cigarettes by the library fire. So standing, they smiled at one another with a new friendliness—twin emblems, as it were, of the English and Indian Roy.

Impetuously Tara flung away her cigarette end, put both arms round Aruna and kissed her cool cheeks.

‘Welcome back,’ she said, ‘to Roy’s home. It’s lovely to see an Indian dress and sari here again.’

Aruna said nothing; but her fingers closed hard on the arms that held her, and her eyes revealed a gleam of tears.

As if to distract attention from them, she shifted her gaze to the Antibes portrait of Lilāmani.

‘I did so love her,’ she said, a catch in her breath. ‘I have never known a woman like her. No wonder she gave genius to her son.’ And she added in a different tone: ‘Isn’t it exquisitely true—his portrait of her in “Out of the Dust.”

‘It’s the most perfect thing he has ever done,’ said Tara, hiding her surprise, and holding a chilled hand to the fire. ‘Have you read—some of the book?’

‘Yes—all. It’s wonderful. He used to come and read it to me in Peshawar.’

The low fervent tone, the picture flashed on Tara’s brain, inflicted a small stab of jealousy. Roy never read his books to anyone but her.

‘He reads his work aloud very well,’ she said in a careful voice. ‘I thought—if you hadn’t seen it—you might like to see proofs in advance. They’re nearly all in.’

‘Proofs? Oh, may I? Are they here?’

‘No—upstairs, in her House of Gods——’ She glanced at the portrait. ‘It’s our sanctuary. If you don’t mind the many stairs——’

‘Stairs are nothing. But would I be allowed?’

The humility of it, and her restrained eagerness, softened the foolish pang.

‘Of course you are allowed,’ she said, taking the hand that rested on Roy’s chair. ‘The Sita panels are all up there and the sad last portrait.’

Together they climbed to the tower room, where no outsider was admitted except Gabrielle. But Aruna had her own right of entrance to the shrine.

As Tara closed the door and moved to the fire, she remained standing in the middle of the room, hands laid on her breast—a pose of unconscious grace. Here was India; here was Roy and his lovely mother—as herself and as Sita; here was Bápu and the familiar brass angithi and the whiff of sandalwood. Though not the least like a real Indian room, it kept enshrined, as in a casket, the impalpable atmosphere of India.

After ten days of London fog and slush, after endless empty weeks, aching for news of Roy, the welcoming warmth and beauty, the very scent of India so unsteadied her that it made breathing difficult, and speech impossible, till she had regained her inner control.

‘Oh, it is lovely,’ she murmured at last, letting her hands fall and drawing an easier breath. ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’

‘I thought it would give you a home feeling,’ said Tara, sitting on the low stool, leaving the chair for her.

But still her gaze travelled round the room, till it rested on two photographs of Roy, alone on a high carved stand near the mantelpiece: a profile head and shoulders, revealing the shapely lines of forehead, nose and chin; the other on horseback, bare-headed, very much at ease, a light in his eyes, as if next moment he would smile.

Instinctively she moved towards them; everything else—even Tara—forgotten for the moment. . . .

She simply stood there looking and looking, learning them by heart; troubled with a small ache of envy because his wife could have them thus, not shut away behind closed doors. And between them she had set a slim vase of very early snowdrops. ‘Flowers of her worship,’ thought Aruna. No English wife would call them so; but the hidden idea was not so different.

Tears welled up. She compressed her lips, lest they should tremble. . . .

And there sat Tara watching her; first in simple fellow-feeling, then in faint bewilderment. Then, as the silence lasted, in a rush of certainty—she knew. . . .

When the first faint shock subsided, there seemed no room for surprise, still less room for so trivial a feeling as jealousy: only a deep and genuine sympathy for one who so loved him, yet could never be his wife. How long? she wondered, inevitably: and again—how could she talk of Roy and his books, knowing, yet not seeming to know? Dared she let Aruna even guess she had surprised the secret of all others that every normal woman keeps proudly hid?

Being still, in her bones, a creature of impulse, she simply rose and stood close beside that gracious primrose-coloured figure.

‘Aruna——’ she said, putting all her troubled heart into the word; letting it depend on the other whether or no she said any more.

And Aruna, coming out of her brief abstraction, looked in a dazed way at Roy’s wife. Tears were quietly stealing down her cheeks.

That decided matters for Tara. With a quick gesture her arm went round Aruna.

‘My dear—my dear——’ she said—and could get no further. How did one say such things?

She felt Aruna stiffen slightly even under the hint her words and gesture implied.

‘Don’t be troubled over my foolishness, Tara,’ she said, ignoring her own tears, with a simple dignity that recalled Roy’s mother. ‘We Indians are like that; our full hearts too readily spill over. And that picture on the horse is so very alive.’

But Tara had come too near, now, to leave it so. She drew her new found friend closer: and there was no resistance any more.

‘Dear Aruna, do you mind that I can guess why your heart spilled over?’

Aruna looked at her in mute surprise.

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you would mind, because—you are his wife——’

‘For that very reason,’ Tara told her, ‘I only too well understand. The heart doesn’t ask about right or wrong——’

And suddenly she remembered something Roy told her years ago, when he came home, about Aruna and Jaipur.

‘Has it been,’ she ventured, ‘for a long time?’

‘Yes. A long time.’

‘When he was out there before?’

‘Yes—even longer.’

And Tara, looking backward, remembered little fierce spurts of jealousy because Roy had seemed more than friendly with his Indian cousin.

‘Oxford? Both of us——’ she murmured. ‘Oh, Aruna—can’t you talk of it, now, to me?’

‘Yes. I think it would ease my heart; so quickly you have made me love you.—But I would not like . . . your mother to know.’

‘Of course she won’t ever know.—Sit.’

She herself sat down again on the low stool and picked up her cherished proofs. But Aruna, ignoring the chair, sank on the floor beside her, in supple Indian fashion. With Tara’a arm round her, their shoulders touching, she told how it had been with her at Oxford. But the tale of Jaipur she told with reservations. There were abysses of pride and reserve beneath her gentleness; inner sanctities, to which she could not admit even so privileged a being as Roy’s wife.

And Tara—listening, absorbed—forgot her own pain in that personal revealing of the barriers and restrictions that cramp the average Indian woman’s life. To read of it, in Roy’s book, was less moving than to hear of it at first hand.

So it happened that a discovery, which might have alienated a lesser woman and thrust the two apart, had instead linked them with a magical swiftness. For the generous nature carries within itself the well-spring of its own reward. She could now share with Aruna parts of her Christmas letter; and together they read scenes from his novel that carried them far from their tower room, their carefully hidden anxieties.

Since the shock of that telegram, Tara had not known such happy hours. She forgot about Nell’s bed-time; forgot all but Roy and India; till Helen’s voice at the door reminded them that there was such a meal as dinner: an abrupt descent to earth——

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

From those few hours in Lilāmani Sinclair’s House of Gods there sprang a friendship that neither woman would have deemed possible six months earlier. Roy, with his talent for loving and being loved, had, in a sense, given them to each other.

Though the thought came to Tara, it was Aruna who uttered it in her fanciful, poetic fashion:

‘I believe this friendship is his present to us. So that we can give comfort to each other, while he is wandering outside human ken.’

‘I shall tell him that,’ said Tara, ‘in my next letter.’

‘So will I—hoping it may reach him some day.’

Together they went through his notes and written fragments, with the slip attached—that both ignored because it too keenly hurt: ‘If any harm should come to me, and I do not return, put all these into the hands of Vincent Leigh.’

Together they read Sir Vincent’s short letter, that swelled Tara’s heart with pride and strengthened it to endure.

‘My dear Lady Sinclair,’ he wrote: ‘(*To Roy’s wife may I say Tara?)

‘The mass of raw material, that Aruna is taking home, appears to me a very remarkable document; fuller in scope, more profound in understanding, than anything I have so far read about India. And I’ve sampled the best that has been written in the last few years.

‘Thea and I deeply feel for you in the long separation his work has required, and still requires of him. But it may lift your heart to know that, in our opinion, the outcome—for himself and for India—will be well worth the personal sacrifice involved. You must feel proud of your share in it; doing his home work for him so capably—as he has told us; and setting him free to carry on a task for which he is peculiarly fitted by his gifts and his heritage.

‘My time here is up in April. Even if I accept another Indian appointment, we shall be Home for a time, and greatly look forward to seeing you. Let us hope it may be both of you.

‘With kindest regards,

‘Yours very sincerely,

‘Vincent Leigh.’

That letter revealed the man; and Aruna had much to tell her of them both; of her own work; of Grace and Rajini, who was presently to marry Suráj. Tara knew about that; but, of what lay behind it, she knew nothing; nor did Aruna enlighten her. They talked of Roy’s conviction that the women of all nations—if they would but use their potent influence for good-will—might change the spirit of the world, in one generation, more effectively than any vain attempt at abolishing armaments. They talked of the last inconclusive Round Table Conference, of Aruna’s fear that politicians, eager for some practical result, might dangerously force the pace.

‘India,’ she said, ‘has a right to her own slow way of moving. And among the folds of that slowness there lies so much hidden beauty that the West can never know of—or perhaps understand.’

She spoke of religion, also, with Indian naturalness and ease: of how Christ’s personality was capturing India’s imagination; how the widening influence of his spirit seemed to many the one real hope of Indian union, paving the way to a true Swaráj.

‘It is Christ I speak of, not Christianity,’ she frankly emphasised the difference. ‘So many of our people, interested in Christianity, are puzzled when they find too little of Christ in his own Church. So they lift him out of it, trying to follow his precepts, making a Christ-religion of their own. Many Hindus—not outwardly Christian—are leaning that way, in their own fashion. We believe, after all, that each soul stands alone, and must find its own truth. Offering God in the same form to every soul and every race, seems to us like prescribing the same medicine for every disease.’

To Tara that was a fresh point of view. Her long talks with Aruna opened windows on to many new vistas of thought; deepened appreciably her own understanding of Roy; lessened appreciably her lurking fear of India. Verily this gift of Aruna was not least of the many he had given her.

Between their long talks, Aruna made friends with the children, especially Lilāmani; and the way she had with them—a mingled dignity and playfulness—pricked Tara’s sensitive heart.

Too soon, for both, it was Tuesday. But Aruna was to come again; bring her sitar and sarangi; introduce Tara to the queer Indian music of which Roy had written so intriguingly in his novel. For both it was as if the sun had broken through a bank of cloud on a grey day, making new arabesques of light and shadow in their hearts.

Chapter 5

Earth wants, and patient Heaven. . .
And power is man’s,
With that great word of ‘Wait,’
To still the sea of tears,
And shake the iron heart of Fate. . .
— Francis Thompson

January melted into a serene February; the month of secret stirrings, when the earth seems to turn in her sleep, half roused by the upthrusting of her million leaves. Little crocus flames lit the dark earth and old flagstones of the terrace. Roy’s favourite Iris Stylosa bloomed as bravely as if he were there to enjoy its delicate colour and scent—he for whom beauty was almost a religion.

And Tara discovered—not for the first time—how beauty, that irradiates joy, sharpens the point of pain. Resolutely she closed her eyes and mind against the persuasive power of lovely things to enter in and trouble the deep waters of the heart. She lived actively in the present; holding her attention on the daily demands of her children, her mother, her home. Letters from Aruna gave her a new and sincere pleasure; but she wanted no stirring of the deeps till he came, who could stir them to joy—not to pain.

And still the spring relentlessly, exquisitely unfolded leaf and flower; and still earth renewed her ancient rapture; and still she looked in vain for a word from Roy. She, who had ached for news of his coming, would be grateful now for three bald words of assurance that he still lived. That he should be alive and not write, was, to her knowledge, the last impossibility. But he did not write; and instinctively she shut her heart against the logical inference. People, who had not known acute anxiety, talked glibly about facing the worst; as though that were not the one thing that even the bravest could never face, till it was thrust upon them . . .

Twice Aruna came down that month; and each visit strengthened their friendship. But always the same question hovered in her dark, caressing eyes; the question that repeated itself, with futile iteration, in Tara’s heart: ‘Where is he now? Why doesn’t he write?’

At night, when sleep failed her, imagination—the two-edged gift—tormented her with vivid pictures of all the ills that might befall him, living or wandering alone among Indians in the wilds of Kashmir; and she unable to reach him, however desperately he might be needing her. There were times when it seemed as if the very heart had been taken out of her body; and none could tell her if it would ever be put back again——

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

A glowing March set every leaf bud uncurling, daffodils breaking their delicate sheaths, birds calling and mating. Then the blue stars of chyonodoxia came alight under the azalea boughs, the ‘delicate discord’ he so delighted in. And still hope lifted a wing at the coming of each post; and still it fell back to earth again—till the next knock sounded.

Outwardly—above all with the children—she was her practical, cheerful self; and she blessed her mother, who said not a word. Only Lilāmani kept asking at intervals, ‘Mummy, when will Daddy come? Do tell him to hurry. I’m tired of wanting him.’

And she must post, with her own, the pitiful little letters, to which no answer ever came.

That which she could just manage to endure for herself, seemed almost beyond bearing when it came to the child, for whom tragedy was no black cloud that must pass, but a darkness that would endure. Though a child hoped readily, it despaired utterly: and no word of false comfort could she bring herself to speak.

Now all the daffodils were out, ‘Making a light about the place,’ Lilāmani remarked, with one of her apt poetic fancies, that proved her daughter of Roy.

And still Aruna lingered, though her business in Town was ended: and Tara knew why. She, too, hoped from week to week; though she said no word. By a mutual instinct, they talked less about him now: and Helen Despard followed suit. Only, as she noticed her brave daughter looking more fragile and ethereal, she said in her heart, ‘If he doesn’t come soon, he’ll find a lovely ghost in place of a woman.’

Once Aruna stayed for a week: and once she lured Tara up to Town. But, although the change gave her a surface fillip, she was a country creature by taste and habit; thankful to be back in her home and blossoming garden, for all the ache at her heart.

She was battling now with a fear that returned at intervals—the old fear of India, in the guise of that compelling holy one’s possible influence. So sharply it beset her that, at last, she could not choose but speak of it, tentatively, to Aruna, who smiled and shook her head, clasping one thin hand in hers.

‘Never that,’ she said: and her tone, her hand-clasp carried more conviction than a score of fervent words.

This was her last visit; a heart-break to them both. But March was drawing to an end; and she had already far outstayed the limit set to her absence.

‘We will keep alive, between us, the sacred flame of hope,’ was all she could say at parting. ‘When divers plunge into the ocean to find deep-sea pearls they are often lost, for a long while, to the sight of man. We must believe he will return—bringing those deep-sea pearls.’

They kissed and clung together. Then Tara forced herself to utter the faith that alone saved her from black despair.

‘When he can write—he will. When he can come—he will. You have work to do for him in India. I have his work to do in England. He counts on us for that. Somehow—we’ve got to carry on——’

Yet under her brave words there lurked an intermittent sense of rebellion that would never trouble the stillness of Aruna’s ingrained submission to the good or ill of fate, like that of a flower to sun or rain.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

And Aruna being gone, and April laughing in her face—indifferent to one mere woman’s misery—she could only tighten the belt round her heart, as marching men tighten their belts when they are hungry and have a long way to go without hope of relief. By virtue of that within every soul which survives, even in the face of disaster, she schooled herself to the composure of an accepted ordeal; braced her mind against crippling thoughts and fears: till the gesture of courage brought its own unfailing reward.

Faint at first, then clearer—like the herald gleam of dawn in the east—conviction grew, and prevailed, that, in spite of the long silence, he was not gone from her. Both, for this weary time, had their work to do apart; he for India, perhaps for the world: she, privileged to guard his earthly treasures, and to wait, in the firm belief that—as surely as the sun rose and spring returned to earth—she would one day see him again. . . .

Parkstone, November 9, 1931.
Parkstone, January 18, 1934.