back to catch the train to Town, there were many people in it crying.
But the one who wept most, and most openly was Miss Agnes Laiter. She
had reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved--or ever could
love, so she said--was going out to India; and India, as every one
knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and
sepoys.
Phil Garron, leaning over the side of the steamer in the rain, felt very
unhappy too; but he did not cry. He was sent out to “tea.” What “tea”
meant he had not the vaguest idea, but fancied that he would have to
ride on a prancing horse over hills covered with tea-vines, and draw a
sumptuous salary for doing so; and he was very grateful to his uncle
for getting him the berth. He was really going to reform all his slack,
shiftless ways, save a large proportion of his magnificent salary
yearly, and, in a very short time, return to marry Agnes Laiter. Phil
Garron had been lying loose on his friends' hands for three years, and,
as he had nothing to do, he naturally fell in love. He was very nice;
but he was not strong in his views and opinions and principles, and
though he never came to actual grief his friends were thankful when
he said good-bye, and went out to this mysterious “tea” business near
Darjiling. They said:--“God bless you, dear boy! Let us never see your
face again,”--or at least that was what Phil was given to understand.
When he sailed, he was very full of a great plan to prove himself
several hundred times better than any one had given him credit for--to
work like a horse, and triumphantly marry Agnes Laiter. He had many good
points besides his good looks; his only fault being that he was weak,
the least little bit in the world weak. He had as much notion of economy
as the Morning Sun; and yet you could not lay your hand on any one item,
and say: “Herein Phil Garron is extravagant or reckless.” Nor could
you point out any particular vice in his character; but he was
“unsatisfactory” and as workable as putty.
Agnes Laiter went about her duties at home--her family objected to the
engagement--with red eyes, while Phil was sailing to Darjiling--“a port
on the Bengal Ocean,” as his mother used to tell her friends. He was
popular enough on board ship, made many acquaintances and a moderately
large liquor bill, and sent off huge letters to Agnes Laiter at each
port. Then he fell to work on this plantation, somewhere between
Darjiling and Kangra, and, though the salary and the horse and the work
were not quite all he had fancied, he succeeded fairly well, and gave
himself much unnecessary credit for his perseverance.
In the course of time, as he settled more into collar, and his work grew
fixed before him, the face of Agnes Laiter went out of his mind and only
came when he was at leisure, which was not often. He would forget
all about her for a fortnight, and remember her with a start, like a
school-boy who has forgotten to learn his lesson. She did not forget
Phil, because she was of the kind that never forgets. Only, another
man--a really desirable young man--presented himself before Mrs. Laiter;
and the chance of a marriage with Phil was as far off as ever; and
his letters were so unsatisfactory; and there was a certain amount of
domestic pressure brought to bear on the girl; and the young man really
was an eligible person as incomes go; and the end of all things was that
Agnes married him, and wrote a tempestuous whirlwind of a letter to Phil
in the wilds of Darjiling, and said she should never know a happy moment
all the rest of her life. Which was a true prophecy.
Phil got that letter, and held himself ill-treated. This was two years
after he had come out; but by dint of thinking fixedly of Agnes Laiter,
and looking at her photograph, and patting himself on the back for being
one of the most constant lovers in history, and warming to the work as
he went on, he really fancied that he had been very hardly used. He sat
down and wrote one final letter--a really pathetic “world without end,
amen,” epistle; explaining how he would be true to Eternity, and that
all women were very much alike, and he would hide his broken heart,
etc., etc.; but if, at any future time, etc., etc., he could afford to
wait, etc., etc., unchanged affections, etc., etc., return to her old
love, etc., etc., for eight closely-written pages. From an artistic
point of view, it was very neat work, but an ordinary Philistine, who
knew the state of Phil's real feelings--not the ones he rose to as he
went on writing--would have called it the thoroughly mean and selfish
work of a thoroughly mean and selfish, weak man. But this verdict would
have been incorrect. Phil paid for the postage, and felt every word he
had written for at least two days and a half. It was the last flicker
before the light went out.
That letter made Agnes Laiter very unhappy, and she cried and put it
away in her desk, and became Mrs. Somebody Else for the good of her
family. Which is the first duty of every Christian maid.
Phil went his ways, and thought no more of his letter, except as an
artist thinks of a neatly touched-in sketch. His ways were not bad, but
they were not altogether good until they brought him across Dunmaya, the
daughter of a Rajput ex-Subadar-Major of our Native Army. The girl had a
strain of Hill blood in her, and, like the Hill women, was not a purdah
nashin. Where Phil met her, or how he heard of her, does not matter. She
was a good girl and handsome, and, in her way, very clever and shrewd;
though, of course, a little hard. It is to be remembered that Phil was
living very comfortably, denying himself no small luxury, never putting
by an anna, very satisfied with himself and his good intentions, was
dropping all his English correspondents one by one, and beginning more
and more to look upon this land as his home. Some men fall this way; and
they are of no use afterwards. The climate where he was stationed was
good, and it really did not seem to him that there was anything to go
Home for.
He did what many planters have done before him--that is to say, he
made up his mind to marry a Hill girl and settle down. He was seven and
twenty then, with a long life before him, but no spirit to go through
with it. So he married Dunmaya by the forms of the English Church, and
some fellow-planters said he was a fool, and some said he was a
wise man. Dunmaya was a thoroughly honest girl, and, in spite of her
reverence for an Englishman, had a reasonable estimate of her husband's
weaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and became, in less than a year, a
very passable imitation of an English lady in dress and carriage. [It
is curious to think that a Hill man, after a lifetime's education, is
a Hill man still; but a Hill woman can in six months master most of the
ways of her English sisters. There was a coolie woman once. But that is
another story.] Dunmaya dressed by preference in black and yellow, and
looked well.
Meantime the letter lay in Agnes's desk, and now and again she would
think of poor resolute hard-working Phil among the cobras and tigers of
Darjiling, toiling in the vain hope that she might come back to him. Her
husband was worth ten Phils, except that he had rheumatism of the
heart. Three years after he was married--and after he had tried Nice
and Algeria for his complaint--he went to Bombay, where he died, and set
Agnes free. Being a devout woman, she looked on his death and the
place of it, as a direct interposition of Providence, and when she had
recovered from the shock, she took out and reread Phil's letter with the
“etc., etc.,” and the big dashes, and the little dashes, and kissed it
several times. No one knew her in Bombay; she had her husband's income,
which was a large one, and Phil was close at hand. It was wrong and
improper, of course, but she decided, as heroines do in novels, to find
her old lover, to offer him her hand and her gold, and with him spend
the rest of her life in some spot far from unsympathetic souls. She sat
for two months, alone in Watson's Hotel, elaborating this decision, and
the picture was a pretty one. Then she set out in search of Phil Garron,
Assistant on a tea plantation with a more than usually unpronounceable
name.
. . . . . . . . .
She found him. She spent a month over it, for his plantation was not in
the Darjiling district at all, but nearer Kangra. Phil was very little
altered, and Dunmaya was very nice to her.
Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil, who
really is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by Dunmaya,
and more than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he seems to have
spoilt.
Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him; and he will be
ultimately saved from perdition through her training.
Which is manifestly unfair.
FALSE DAWN.
To-night God knows what thing shall tide,
The Earth is racked and faint--
Expectant, sleepless, open-eyed;
And we, who from the Earth were made,
Thrill with our Mother's pain.
In Durance.
No man will ever know the exact truth of this story; though women may
sometimes whisper it to one another after a dance, when they are putting
up their hair for the night and comparing lists of victims. A man, of
course, cannot assist at these functions. So the tale must be told from
the outside--in the dark--all wrong.
Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments
reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on.
Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that
you do yourself harm.
Saumarez knew this when he made up his mind to propose to the elder Miss
Copleigh. Saumarez was a strange man, with few merits, so far as men
could see, though he was popular with women, and carried enough
conceit to stock a Viceroy's Council and leave a little over for the
Commander-in-Chief's Staff. He was a Civilian. Very many women took an
interest in Saumarez, perhaps, because his manner to them was offensive.
If you hit a pony over the nose at the outset of your acquaintance, he
may not love you, but he will take a deep interest in your movements
ever afterwards. The elder Miss Copleigh was nice, plump, winning and
pretty. The younger was not so pretty, and, from men disregarding the
hint set forth above, her style was repellant and unattractive. Both
girls had, practically, the same figure, and there was a strong likeness
between them in look and voice; though no one could doubt for an instant
which was the nicer of the two.
Saumarez made up his mind, as soon as they came into the station from
Behar, to marry the elder one. At least, we all made sure that he
would, which comes to the same thing. She was two and twenty, and he was
thirty-three, with pay and allowances of nearly fourteen hundred rupees
a month. So the match, as we arranged it, was in every way a good one.
Saumarez was his name, and summary was his nature, as a man once said.
Having drafted his Resolution, he formed a Select Committee of One to
sit upon it, and resolved to take his time. In our unpleasant slang, the
Copleigh girls “hunted in couples.” That is to say, you could do nothing
with one without the other. They were very loving sisters; but
their mutual affection was sometimes inconvenient. Saumarez held the
balance-hair true between them, and none but himself could have said to
which side his heart inclined; though every one guessed. He rode
with them a good deal and danced with them, but he never succeeded in
detaching them from each other for any length of time.
Women said that the two girls kept together through deep mistrust, each
fearing that the other would steal a march on her. But that has
nothing to do with a man. Saumarez was silent for good or bad, and as
business-likely attentive as he could be, having due regard to his work
and his polo. Beyond doubt both girls were fond of him.
As the hot weather drew nearer, and Saumarez made no sign, women said
that you could see their trouble in the eyes of the girls--that they
were looking strained, anxious, and irritable. Men are quite blind in
these matters unless they have more of the woman than the man in their
composition, in which case it does not matter what they say or think.
I maintain it was the hot April days that took the color out of the
Copleigh girls' cheeks. They should have been sent to the Hills
early. No one--man or woman--feels an angel when the hot weather is
approaching. The younger sister grew more cynical--not to say acid--in
her ways; and the winningness of the elder wore thin. There was more
effort in it.
Now the Station wherein all these things happened was, though not
a little one, off the line of rail, and suffered through want of
attention. There were no gardens or bands or amusements worth speaking
of, and it was nearly a day's journey to come into Lahore for a dance.
People were grateful for small things to interest them.
About the beginning of May, and just before the final exodus of
Hill-goers, when the weather was very hot and there were not more than
twenty people in the Station, Saumarez gave a moonlight riding-picnic at
an old tomb, six miles away, near the bed of the river. It was a “Noah's
Ark” picnic; and there was to be the usual arrangement of quarter-mile
intervals between each couple, on account of the dust. Six couples came
altogether, including chaperons. Moonlight picnics are useful just at
the very end of the season, before all the girls go away to the Hills.
They lead to understandings, and should be encouraged by chaperones;
especially those whose girls look sweetish in riding habits. I knew a
case once. But that is another story. That picnic was called the “Great
Pop Picnic,” because every one knew Saumarez would propose then to the
eldest Miss Copleigh; and, beside his affair, there was another which
might possibly come to happiness. The social atmosphere was heavily
charged and wanted clearing.
We met at the parade-ground at ten: the night was fearfully hot. The
horses sweated even at walking-pace, but anything was better than
sitting still in our own dark houses. When we moved off under the full
moon we were four couples, one triplet, and Mr. Saumarez rode with the
Copleigh girls, and I loitered at the tail of the procession, wondering
with whom Saumarez would ride home. Every one was happy and contented;
but we all felt that things were going to happen. We rode slowly: and
it was nearly midnight before we reached the old tomb, facing the ruined
tank, in the decayed gardens where we were going to eat and drink. I
was late in coming up; and before I went into the garden, I saw that the
horizon to the north carried a faint, dun-colored feather. But no one
would have thanked me for spoiling so well-managed an entertainment as
this picnic--and a dust-storm, more or less, does no great harm.
We gathered by the tank. Some one had brought out a banjo--which is a
most sentimental instrument--and three or four of us sang. You must not
laugh at this. Our amusements in out-of-the-way Stations are very few
indeed. Then we talked in groups or together, lying under the trees,
with the sun-baked roses dropping their petals on our feet, until supper
was ready. It was a beautiful supper, as cold and as iced as you could
wish; and we stayed long over it.
I had felt that the air was growing hotter and hotter; but nobody
seemed to notice it until the moon went out and a burning hot wind began
lashing the orange-trees with a sound like the noise of the sea. Before
we knew where we were, the dust-storm was on us, and everything was
roaring, whirling darkness. The supper-table was blown bodily into the
tank. We were afraid of staying anywhere near the old tomb for fear it
might be blown down. So we felt our way to the orange-trees where the
horses were picketed and waited for the storm to blow over. Then the
little light that was left vanished, and you could not see your hand
before your face. The air was heavy with dust and sand from the bed
of the river, that filled boots and pockets and drifted down necks and
coated eyebrows and moustaches. It was one of the worst dust-storms of
the year. We were all huddled together close to the trembling horses,
with the thunder clattering overhead, and the lightning spurting like
water from a sluice, all ways at once. There was no danger, of course,
unless the horses broke loose. I was standing with my head downward and
my hands over my mouth, hearing the trees thrashing each other. I could
not see who was next me till the flashes came. Then I found that I was
packed near Saumarez and the eldest Miss Copleigh, with my own horse
just in front of me. I recognized the eldest Miss Copleigh, because
she had a pagri round her helmet, and the younger had not. All the
electricity in the air had gone into my body and I was quivering and
tingling from head to foot--exactly as a corn shoots and tingles before
rain. It was a grand storm. The wind seemed to be picking up the earth
and pitching it to leeward in great heaps; and the heat beat up from the
ground like the heat of the Day of Judgment.
The storm lulled slightly after the first half-hour, and I heard a
despairing little voice close to my ear, saying to itself, quietly and
softly, as if some lost soul were flying about with the wind: “O my
God!” Then the younger Miss Copleigh stumbled into my arms, saying:
“Where is my horse? Get my horse. I want to go home. I WANT to go home.
Take me home.”
I thought that the lightning and the black darkness had frightened her;
so I said there was no danger, but she must wait till the storm blew
over. She answered: “It is not THAT! It is not THAT! I want to go home!
O take me away from here!”
I said that she could not go till the light came; but I felt her brush
past me and go away. It was too dark to see where. Then the whole sky
was split open with one tremendous flash, as if the end of the world
were coming, and all the women shrieked.
Almost directly after this, I felt a man's hand on my shoulder and heard
Saumarez bellowing in my ear. Through the rattling of the trees and
howling of the wind, I did not catch his words at once, but at last
I heard him say: “I've proposed to the wrong one! What shall I do?”
Saumarez had no occasion to make this confidence to me. I was never a
friend of his, nor am I now; but I fancy neither of us were ourselves
just then. He was shaking as he stood with excitement, and I was feeling
queer all over with the electricity. I could not think of anything to
say except:--“More fool you for proposing in a dust-storm.” But I did
not see how that would improve the mistake.
Then he shouted: “Where's Edith--Edith Copleigh?” Edith was the youngest
sister. I answered out of my astonishment:--“What do you want with HER?”
Would you believe it, for the next two minutes, he and I were shouting
at each other like maniacs--he vowing that it was the youngest sister he
had meant to propose to all along, and I telling him till my throat
was hoarse that he must have made a mistake! I can't account for
this except, again, by the fact that we were neither of us ourselves.
Everything seemed to me like a bad dream--from the stamping of the
horses in the darkness to Saumarez telling me the story of his loving
Edith Copleigh since the first. He was still clawing my shoulder and
begging me to tell him where Edith Copleigh was, when another lull came
and brought light with it, and we saw the dust-cloud forming on the
plain in front of us. So we knew the worst was over. The moon was low
down, and there was just the glimmer of the false dawn that comes about
an hour before the real one. But the light was very faint, and the dun
cloud roared like a bull. I wondered where Edith Copleigh had gone; and
as I was wondering I saw three things together: First Maud Copleigh's
face come smiling out of the darkness and move towards Saumarez, who was
standing by me. I heard the girl whisper, “George,” and slide her arm
through the arm that was not clawing my shoulder, and I saw that look
on her face which only comes once or twice in a lifetime-when a woman
is perfectly happy and the air is full of trumpets and gorgeous-colored
fire and the Earth turns into cloud because she loves and is loved. At
the same time, I saw Saumarez's face as he heard Maud Copleigh's voice,
and fifty yards away from the clump of orange-trees I saw a brown
holland habit getting upon a horse.
It must have been my state of over-excitement that made me so quick
to meddle with what did not concern me. Saumarez was moving off to the
habit; but I pushed him back and said:--“Stop here and explain. I'll
fetch her back!” and I ran out to get at my own horse. I had a perfectly
unnecessary notion that everything must be done decently and in order,
and that Saumarez's first care was to wipe the happy look out of Maud
Copleigh's face. All the time I was linking up the curb-chain I wondered
how he would do it.
I cantered after Edith Copleigh, thinking to bring her back slowly on
some pretence or another. But she galloped away as soon as she saw me,
and I was forced to ride after her in earnest. She called back over her
shoulder--“Go away! I'm going home. Oh, go away!” two or three times;
but my business was to catch her first, and argue later. The ride just
fitted in with the rest of the evil dream. The ground was very bad, and
now and again we rushed through the whirling, choking “dust-devils” in
the skirts of the flying storm. There was a burning hot wind blowing
that brought up a stench of stale brick-kilns with it; and through the
half light and through the dust-devils, across that desolate plain,
flickered the brown holland habit on the gray horse. She headed for
the Station at first. Then she wheeled round and set off for the river
through beds of burnt down jungle-grass, bad even to ride a pig over. In
cold blood I should never have dreamed of going over such a country
at night, but it seemed quite right and natural with the lightning
crackling overhead, and a reek like the smell of the Pit in my nostrils.
I rode and shouted, and she bent forward and lashed her horse, and the
aftermath of the dust-storm came up and caught us both, and drove us
downwind like pieces of paper.
I don't know how far we rode; but the drumming of the horse-hoofs and
the roar of the wind and the race of the faint blood-red moon through
the yellow mist seemed to have gone on for years and years, and I was
literally drenched with sweat from my helmet to my gaiters when the gray
stumbled, recovered himself, and pulled up dead lame. My brute was used
up altogether. Edith Copleigh was in a sad state, plastered with dust,
her helmet off, and crying bitterly. “Why can't you let me alone?” she
said. “I only wanted to get away and go home. Oh, PLEASE let me go!”
“You have got to come back with me, Miss Copleigh. Saumarez has
something to say to you.”
It was a foolish way of putting it; but I hardly knew Miss Copleigh;
and, though I was playing Providence at the cost of my horse, I could
not tell her in as many words what Saumarez had told me. I thought he
could do that better himself. All her pretence about being tired and
wanting to go home broke down, and she rocked herself to and fro in the
saddle as she sobbed, and the hot wind blew her black hair to leeward. I
am not going to repeat what she said, because she was utterly unstrung.
This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost
an utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her
and she was to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself
understood, for she gathered the gray together and made him hobble
somehow, and we set off for the tomb, while the storm went thundering
down to Umballa and a few big drops of warm rain fell. I found out that
she had been standing close to Saumarez when he proposed to her sister
and had wanted to go home and cry in peace, as an English girl should.
She dabbled her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we went along, and
babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria. That was
perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in the
place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I,
ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this
misguided world seemed to lie in my hands.