I
There are strange things in this story, but, so far as I understand
them, I tell the truth. If you measure the East with a Western foot-rule
you will say, “Impossible.” I should have said it myself.
Of myself I will say as little as I can, for this story is of Vanna
Loring. I am an incident only, though I did not know that at first.
My name is Stephen Clifden, and I was eight-and-thirty; plenty of money,
sound in wind and limb. I had been by way of being a writer before the
war, the hobby of a rich man; but if I picked up anything in the welter
in France, it was that real work is the only salvation this mad world
has to offer; so I meant to begin at the beginning, and learn my trade
like a journeyman labourer. I had come to the right place. A very
wonderful city is Peshawar--rather let us say, two cities--the
compounds, the fortifications where Europeans dwell in such peace as
their strong right arms can secure them; and the native city and bazaar
humming and buzzing like a hive of angry bees with the rumours that
come up from Lower India or down the Khyber Pass with the camel caravans
loaded with merchandise from Afghanistan, Bokhara, and farther. And
it is because of this that Peshawar is the Key of India, and a city
of Romance that stands at every corner, and cries aloud in the
market--place. For at Peshawar every able-bodied man sleeps with his
revolver under his pillow, and the old Fort is always ready in case it
should be necessary at brief and sharp notice to hurry the women and
children into it, and possibly, to die in their defense. So enlivening
is the neighbourhood of the frontier tribes that haunt the famous Khyber
Pass and the menacing hills where danger is always lurking.
But there was society here, and I was swept into it--there was chatter,
and it galled me.
I was beginning to feel that I had missed my mark, and must go farther
afield, perhaps up into Central Asia, when I met Vanna Loring. If I say
that her hair was soft and dark; that she had the deepest hazel eyes
I have ever seen, and a sensitive, tender mouth; that she moved with a
flowing grace like “a wave of the sea”--it sounds like the portrait of a
beauty, and she was never that. Also, incidentally, it gives none of her
charm. I never heard any one get any further than that she was “oddly
attractive”--let us leave it at that. She was certainly attractive to
me.
She was the governess of little Winifred Meryon, whose father held
the august position of General Commanding the Frontier Forces, and her
mother the more commanding position of the reigning beauty of Northern
India, generally speaking. No one disputed that. She was as pretty as
a picture, and her charming photograph had graced as many illustrated
papers as there were illustrated papers to grace.
But Vanna--I gleaned her story by bits when I came across her with the
child in the gardens. I was beginning to piece it together now.
Her love of the strange and beautiful she had inherited from a young
Italian mother, daughter of a political refugee; her childhood had
been spent in a remote little village in the West of England; half
reluctantly she told me how she had brought herself up after her
mother’s death and her father’s second marriage. Little was said of
that, but I gathered that it had been a grief to her, a factor in her
flight to the East.
We were walking in the Circular Road then with Winifred in front leading
her Pekingese by its blue ribbon, and we had it almost to ourselves
except for a few natives passing slow and dignified on their own
occasions, for fashionable Peshawar was finishing its last rubber of
bridge, before separating to dress for dinner, and had no time to spare
for trivialities and sunsets.
“So when I came to three-and-twenty,” she said slowly, “I felt I must
break away from our narrow life. I had a call to India stronger than
anything on earth. You would not understand but that was so, and I had
spent every spare moment in teaching myself India--its history, legends,
religions, everything! And I was not wanted at home, and I had grown
afraid.”
I could divine years of patience and repression under this plain tale,
but also a power that would be dynamic when the authentic voice called.
That was her charm--gentleness in strength--a sweet serenity.
“What were you afraid of?”
“Of growing old and missing what was waiting for me out here. But I
could not get away like other people. No money, you see. So I thought I
would come out here and teach. Dare I? Would they let me? I knew I was
fighting life and chances and risks if I did it; but it was death if I
stayed there. And then--Do you really care to hear?”
“Of course. Tell me how you broke your chain.”
“I spare you the family quarrels. I can never go back. But I was
spurred--spurred to take some wild leap; and I took it. Six years ago I
came out. First I went to a doctor and his wife at Cawnpore. They had
a wonderful knowledge of the Indian peoples, and there I learned
Hindustani and much else. Then he died. But an aunt had left me two
hundred pounds, and I could wait a little and choose; and so I came
here.”
It interested me. The courage that pale elastic type of woman has!
“Have you ever regretted it? Would they take you back if you failed?”
“Never, to both questions,” she said, smiling. “Life is glorious. I’ve
drunk of a cup I never thought to taste; and if I died tomorrow I should
know I had done right. I rejoice in every moment I live--even when
Winifred and I are wrestling with arithmetic.”
“I shouldn’t have thought life was very easy with Lady Meryon.”
“Oh, she is kind enough in an indifferent sort of way. I am not the
persecuted Jane Eyre sort of governess at all. But that is all on the
surface and does not matter. It is India I care for-the people, the sun,
the infinite beauty. It was coming home. You would laugh if I told you
I knew Peshawar long before I came here. Knew it--walked here, lived.
Before there were English in India at all.” She broke off. “You won’t
understand.”
“Oh, I have had that feeling, too,” I said patronizingly. “If one has
read very much about a place-”
“That was not quite what I meant. Never mind. The people, the
place--that is the real thing to me. All this is the dream.” The sweep
of her hand took in not only Winifred and myself, but the general’s
stately residence, which to blaspheme in Peshawar is rank infidelity.
“By George, I would give thousands to feel that! I can’t get out of
Europe here. I want to write, Miss Loring,” I found myself saying. “I’d
done a bit, and then the war came and blew my life to pieces. Now I want
to get inside the skin of the East, and I can’t do it. I see it from
outside, with a pane of glass between. No life in it. If you feel as you
say, for God’s sake be my interpreter!”
I really meant what I said. I knew she was a harp that any breeze would
sweep into music. I divined that temperament in her and proposed to use
it for my own ends. She had and I had not, the power to be a part of all
she saw, to feel kindred blood running in her own veins. To the average
European the native life of India is scarcely interesting, so far is it
removed from all comprehension. To me it was interesting, but I could
not tell why. I stood outside and had not the fairy gold to pay for my
entrance. Here at all events she could buy her way where I could not.
Without cruelty, which honestly was not my besetting sin--especially
where women were concerned, the egoist in me felt I would use her, would
extract the last drop of the enchantment of her knowledge before I went
on my way. What more natural than that Vanna or any other woman should
minister to my thirst for information? Men are like that. I pretend
to be no better than the rest. She pleased my fastidiousness--that
fastidiousness which is the only austerity in men not otherwise austere.
“Interpret?” she said, looking at me with clear hazel eyes; “how could
I? You were in the native city yesterday. What did you miss?”
“Everything! I saw masses of colour, light, movement. Brilliantly
picturesque people. Children like Asiatic angels. Magnificently scowling
ruffians in sheepskin coats. In fact, a movie staged for my benefit. I
was afraid they would ring down the curtain before I had had enough. It
had no meaning. When I got back to my diggings I tried to put down
what I had just seen, and I swear there’s more inspiration in the
guide-book.”
“Did you go alone?”
“Yes, I certainly would not go sight-seeing with the Meryon crowd. Tell
me what you felt when you saw it first.”
“I went with Sir John’s uncle. He was a great traveler. The colour
struck me dumb. It flames--it sings. Think of the grey pinched life in
the West! I saw a grave dark potter turning his wheel, while his little
girl stood by, glad at our pleasure, her head veiled like a miniature
woman, tiny baggy trousers, and a silver nose-stud, like a star, in one
delicate nostril. In her thin arms she held a heavy baby in a gilt cap,
like a monkey. And the wheel turned and whirled until it seemed to be
spinning dreams, thick as motes in the sun. The clay rose in smooth
spirals under his hand, and the wheel sang, ‘Shall the vessel reprove
him who made one to honour and one to dishonour?’ And I saw the potter
thumping his wet clay, and the clay, plastic as dream-stuff, shaped
swift as light, and the three Fates stood at his shoulder. Dreams,
dreams, and all in the spinning of the wheel, and the rich shadows of
the old broken courtyard where he sat. And the wheel stopped and the
thread broke, and the little new shapes he had made stood all about him,
and he was only a potter in Peshawar.”
Her voice was like a song. She had utterly forgotten my existence. I
did not dislike it at the moment, for I wanted to hear more, and the
impersonal is the rarest gift a woman can give a man.
“Did you buy anything?”
“He gave me a gift--a flawed jar of turquoise blue, faint turquoise
green round the lip. He saw I understood. And then I bought a little
gold cap and a wooden box of jade-green Kabul grapes. About a rupee, all
told. But it was Eastern merchandise, and I was trading from Balsora and
Baghdad, and Eleazar’s camels were swaying down from Damascus along the
Khyber Pass, and coming in at the great Darwazah, and friends’ eyes met
me everywhere. I am profoundly happy here.”
The sinking sun lit an almost ecstatic face.
I envied her more deeply than I had ever envied any one. She had the
secret of immortal youth, and I felt old as I looked at her. One might
be eighty and share that passionate impersonal joy. Age could not wither
nor custom stale the infinite variety of her world’s joys. She had a
child’s dewy youth in her eyes.
There are great sunsets at Peshawar, flaming over the plain, dying in
melancholy splendour over the dangerous hills. They too were hers, in
a sense in which they could never be mine. But what a companion! To
my astonishment a wild thought of marriage flashed across me, to be
instantly rebuffed with a shrug. Marriage--that one’s wife might talk
poetry to one about the East! Absurd! But what was it these people felt
and I could not feel? Almost, shut up in the prison of self, I knew what
Vanna had felt in her village--a maddening desire to escape, to be a
part of the loveliness that lay beyond me. So might a man love a king’s
daughter in her hopeless heights.
“It may be very beautiful on the surface,” I said morosely; “but there’s
a lot of misery below--hateful, they tell me.”
“Of course. We shall get to work one day. But look at the sunset. It
opens like a mysterious flower. I must take Winifred home now.”
“One moment,” I pleaded; “I can only see it through your eyes. I feel it
while you speak, and then the good minute goes.”
She laughed.
“And so must I. Come, Winifred. Look, there’s an owl; not like the owls
in the summer dark in England--
“Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping, Wavy in the
dark, lit by one low star.”
Suddenly she turned again and looked at me half wistfully.
“It is good to talk to you. You want to know. You are so near it all. I
wish I could help you; I am so exquisitely happy myself.”
My writing was at a standstill. It seemed the groping of a blind man
in a radiant world. Once perhaps I had felt that life was good in
itself--when the guns came thundering toward the Vimy Ridge in a mad
gallop of horses, and men shouting and swearing and frantically urging
them on. Then, riding for more than life, I had tasted life for an
instant. Not before or since. But this woman had the secret.
Lady Meryon, with her escort of girls and subalterns, came daintily past
the hotel compound, and startled me from my brooding with her pretty
silvery voice.
“Dreaming, Mr. Clifden? It isn’t at all wholesome to dream in the East.
Come and dine with us tomorrow. A tiny dance afterwards, you know; or
bridge for those who like it.”
I had not the faintest notion whether governesses dined with the family
or came in afterward with the coffee; but it was a sporting chance, and
I took it.
Then Sir John came up and joined us.
“You can’t well dance tomorrow, Kitty,” he said to his wife. “There’s
been an outpost affair in the Swat Hills, and young Fitzgerald has
been shot. Come to dinner of course, Clifden. Glad to see you. But no
dancing, I think.”
Kitty Meryon’s mouth drooped like a pouting child’s. Was it for the lost
dance, or the lost soldier lying out on the hills in the dying sunset.
Who could tell? In either case it was pretty enough for the illustrated
papers.
“How sad! Such a dear boy. We shall miss him at tennis.” Then brightly;
“Well, we’ll have to put the dance off for a week, but come tomorrow
anyhow.”