I went of course to Calcutta for the four winter months. Harris and I
were together at the Club. It was the year, I remember, of the great
shindy as to whether foreign consuls should continue to be made
honourary members, in view of the sentiments some of them were freely
reflecting from Europe upon the subject of a war in South Africa which
was none of theirs. Certainly, feeling as they did, it would have been
better if they had swaggered less about a club that stood for British
Government; but I did not vote to withdraw the invitation. We can not,
after all, take notice of every idle word that drops from Latin or
Teutonic tongues; it isn’t our way; but it was a liverish cold weather
on various accounts, and the public temper was short. I heard from Dora
oftener, Harris declared, than he did. She was spending the winter
with friends in Agra, and Armour, of course, was there too, living at
Laurie’s Hotel, and painting, Dora assured me, with immense energy.
It was just the place for Armour, a sumptuous dynasty wrecked in white
marble and buried in desert sands for three hundred years; and I was
glad to hear that he was making the most of it. It was quite by the way,
but I had lent him the money to go there--somebody had to lend it to
him--and when he asked me to decide whether he should take his passage
for Marseilles or use it for this other purpose I could hardly hesitate,
believing in him, as I did, to urge him to paint a little more of India
before he went. I frankly despaired of his ever being able to pay his
way in Simla without Kauffer, but that was no reason why he should not
make a few more notes for further use at home, where I sometimes saw
for him, when his desultory and experimental days were over and some
definiteness and order had come into his work, a Bond Street exhibition.
I have not said all this time what I thought of Ingersoll Armour and
Dora Harris together, because their connection seemed too vague and
fantastic and impossible to hold for an instant before a steady gaze. I
have no wish to justify myself when I write that I preferred to keep my
eyes averted, enjoying perhaps just such a measure of vision as would
enter at a corner of them. This may or may not have been immoral under
the circumstances--the event did not prove it so--but for urgent private
reasons I could not be the person to destroy the idyll, if indeed its
destruction were possible, that flourished there in the corner of
my eye. Besides, had not I myself planted and watered it? But it was
foolish to expect other people, people who are forever on the lookout
for trousseaux and wedding-bells, and who considered these two as mere
man and maid, and had no sight of them as engaging young spirits in
happy conjunction--it was foolish to expect such people to show equal
consideration. Christmas was barely over before the lady with whom Miss
Harris was staying found it her duty to communicate to Edward Harris the
fact that dear Dora’s charming friendship--she was sure it was nothing
more--with the young artist--Mrs. Poulton believed Mr. Harris would
understand who was meant--was exciting a good deal of comment in the
station, and WOULD dear Mr. Harris please write to Dora himself, as Mrs.
Poulton was beginning to feel so responsible?
I saw the letter; Harris showed it to me when he sat down to breakfast
with the long face of a man in a domestic difficulty, and we settled
together whom we should ask to put his daughter up in Calcutta. It
should be the wife of a man in his own department of course; it is to
one’s Deputy Secretary that one looks for succour at times like this;
and naturally one never looks in vain. Mrs. Symons would be delighted.
I conjured up Dora’s rage on receipt of the telegram. She loathed the
Symonses.
She came, but not at the jerk of a wire; she arrived a week later, with
a face of great propriety and a smile of great unconcern. Harris, having
got her effectually out of harm’s way, shirked further insistence, and
I have reason to believe that Armour was never even mentioned between
them.
Dora applied herself to the gaieties of the season with the zest of
a debutante; she seemed really refreshed, revitalized. She had never
looked better, happier. I met her again for the first time at one of
the Thursday dances at Government House. In the glance she gave me I was
glad to detect no suspicion of collusion. She plainly could not dream
that Edward Harris in his nefarious exercise of parental authority had
acted upon any hint from me. It was rather sweet.
Out in the veranda, away from the blare of the Viceroy’s band, she told
me very delicately and with the most charming ellipses how Armour had
been filling her life in Agra, how it had all been, for these two, a
dream and a vision. There is a place below the bridge there, where the
cattle come down from the waste pastures across the yellow sands to
drink and stand in the low water of the Jumna, to stand and switch their
tails while their herdsmen on the bank coax them back with ‘Ari!’ ‘Ari!’
‘Ari!’ long and high, faint and musical; and the minarets of Akbar’s
fort rise beyond against the throbbing sky and the sun fills it all.
This place I shall never see more distinctly than I saw it that night on
the veranda at Government House, Calcutta, with the conviction, like a
margin for the picture, that its foreground had been very often occupied
by the woman I profoundly worshiped and Ingersoll Armour. She told me
that he had sent me a sketch of it, and I very much wished he hadn’t.
One felt that the gift would carry a trifle of irony.
‘He has told me,’ she said once brusquely, ‘how good you have been to
him.’
‘Is he coming to Simla again?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes! And please take it from me that this time he will conquer the
place. He has undertaken to do it.’
‘At your request?’
‘At my persuasion--at my long entreaty. They must recognize him--they
must be taught. I have set my heart on it.’
‘Does he himself very much care?’ I asked remembering the night of the
thirty-first of October.
‘Yes, he does care. He despises it, of course, but in a way he cares.
I’ve been trying to make him care more. A human being isn’t an orchid;
he must draw something from the soil he grows in.’
‘If he were stable,’ I mused; ‘if he had a fixed ambition somewhere in
the firmament. But his purpose is a will-o’-the-wisp.’
‘I think he has an ambition,’ said Miss Harris, into the dark.
‘Ah! Then we must continue,’ I said--‘continue to push from behind.’
Dora did not reply. She is a person of energy and determination, and
might have been expected to offer to cooperate gladly. But she didn’t.
‘He is painting a large picture for next season’s exhibition,’ she
informed me. ‘I was not allowed to see it or to know anything about it,
but he declares it will bring Simla down.’
‘I hope not,’ I said, piously.
‘Oh, I hope so. I have told him,’ Dora continued, slowly, ‘that a great
deal depends on it.’
‘Here is Mrs. Symons,’ I was able to return, ‘and I am afraid she is
looking for you.’
March came, and the city lay white under its own dust. The electric fans
began to purr in the Club, and Lent brought the flagging season to a
full stop. I had to go that year on tour through the famine district
with the Member, and we escaped, gasping, from the Plains about the
middle of April. Simla was crimson with rhododendron blossoms, and
seemed a spur of Arcady. There had been the usual number of flittings
from one house to another, and among them I heard with satisfaction
that Armour no longer occupied Amy Villa. I would not for the world have
blurred my recollections of that last evening--I could not have gone
there again.
‘He is staying with Sir William Lamb,’ said Dora, handing me my cup of
tea. ‘And I am quite jealous. Sir William, only Sir William, has been
allowed to see the exhibition picture.’
‘What does that portend?’ I said, thoughtfully.
‘I don’t know. Sir William was here yesterday simply swelling with his
impression of it. He says it’s the finest thing that has been done in
India. I told you he would conquer them.’
‘You did,’ and without thinking I added, ‘I hope you won’t be sorry that
you asked him to.’ It must have been an inspiration.
Armour, those weeks before the exhibition, seemed invisible. Dora
reported him torn with the incapacity of the bazaar frame-maker to
follow a design, and otherwise excessively occupied, and there was no
lack of demands upon my own time. Besides, my ardour to be of assistance
to the young man found a slight damper in the fact that he was staying
with Sir William Lamb. What competence had I to be of use to the guest
of Sir William Lamb?
‘I do not for a moment think he will be there,’ said Dora, on the day
of the private view as we went along the Mall towards the Town Hall
together. ‘He will not run with an open mouth to his success. He will
take it from us later.’
But he was there. We entered precisely at the dramatic moment of his
presentation by Sir William Lamb to the Viceroy. He stood embarrassed
and smiling in a little circle of compliments and congratulation. Behind
him and a little to the left hung his picture, large and predominant,
and in the corner of the frame was stuck the red ticket that signified
the Viceroy’s gold medal. We saw that, I think, before we saw anything
else. Then with as little haste as was decent, considering His
Excellency’s proximity, we walked within range of the picture.
I am not particularly pleased, even now, to have the task of describing
the thing. Its subject was an old Mahomedan priest with a green turban
and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers. I heard myself saying
to Dora that it was very well painted indeed, very conscientiously
painted, and that is certainly what struck me. The expression of the
fire-eater’s face was extremely characteristic; his arm was flung
out with a gesture that perfectly matched. The group of listeners was
carefully composed and most ‘naturally’; that is the only word that
would come to me.
I glanced almost timidly at Dora. She was regarding it with a deep
vertical line between her handsome brows.
‘What--on earth--has he done with himself?’ she demanded, but before I
could reply Armour was by our side.
‘Well?’ he said, looking at Dora.
‘It--it’s very nice,’ she stammered, ‘but I miss YOU.’
‘She only means, you know,’ I rushed in, ‘that you’ve put in everything
that was never there before. Accuracy of detail, you know, and so forth.
‘Pon my word, there’s some drawing in that!’
‘No,’ said Dora, calmly, ‘what I complain of is that he has left out
everything that was there before. But he has won the gold medal, and I
congratulate him.’
‘Well,’ I said, uneasily, ‘don’t congratulate me. I didn’t do it.
Positively I am not to blame.’
‘His Excellency says that it reminds him of an incident in one of Mrs.
Steel’s novels,’ said Armour, just turning his head to ascertain His
Excellency’s whereabouts.
‘Dear me, so it does,’ I exclaimed, eagerly, ‘one couldn’t name the
chapter--it’s the general feeling.’ I went on to discourse of the
general feeling. Words came generously, questions with point, comments
with intelligence. I swamped the situation and so carried it off.
‘The Viceroy has bought the thing,’ Armour went on, looking at Dora,
‘and has commissioned me to paint another. The only restriction he makes
is--’
‘That it shall be of the same size?’ asked Dora.
‘That it must deal with some phase of native life.’
Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her eyes
fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was steady, but
perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck into the stream of
my volubility.
‘I am delighted,’ she said, pleasantly, to Armour. ‘You have done
exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy’s medal, and
all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine
tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn’t it--for you--a little
difficult?’
He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it
from his lips; but the occasion was not one, of course, for crying out.
‘Oh no,’ he said, putting on an excellent face. ‘But it took a hideous
time.’