Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive
from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance
with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I had
arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most honest
impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of departure,
but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay, and that in
order to effect his final shipment to other shores I should be compelled
to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous
and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me
to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped
and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that
anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them
unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out
better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that
your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general
grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your
conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt.
The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a
possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the
stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a
taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the
signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited
an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous
artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small
degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation
with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.
Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than
a week later, when I read in the ‘Pioneer’ the announcement of the death
of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta.
The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was
not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should
include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the substitution of
something rather more up to date. It remarked that the Bengali student
had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared
that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea. I
remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to
awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.
I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an
hour my brain revolved with little else. The billet was an excellent
one, with very decent pay and charming quarters. It carried a pension,
it was the completest sort of provision. There was a long vacation, with
opportunities for original effort, and I had heard Fry call the work
interesting. Fry was the kind of man to be interested in anything that
gave him a living, but there was no reason why a more captious spirit,
in view of the great advantages, should not accommodate itself to the
routine that might present itself. The post was in the gift of the
Government of Bengal, but that was no reason why the Government of
Bengal should not be grateful in the difficulty of making a choice for a
hint from us. The difficulty was really great. They would have to
write home and advertise in the ‘Athenaeum’--for some reason
Indian Governments always advertise educational appointments in
the ‘Athenaeum’; it is a habit which dates from the days of John
Company--and that would mean delay. And then the result might be a
disappointment. Might Armour not also be a disappointment? That I really
could not say. A new man is always a speculation, and departments, like
individuals, have got to take their luck.
The Viceroy was so delighted--everybody was so delighted--with the medal
picture that the merest breath blown among them would secure Armour’s
nomination. Should I blow that breath? These happy thoughts must always
occur to somebody. This one had occurred to me. Ten to one it
would occur to nobody else, and last of all to Armour himself. The
advertisement might already be on its way home to the ‘Athenaeum’.
It would make everything possible. It would throw a very different
complexion over the idyll. It would turn that interlacing wreath of
laurels and of poppies into the strongest bond in the world.
I would simply have nothing to do with it.
But there was no harm I asking Armour to dine with me; I sent the note
off by messenger after breakfast and told the steward to put a magnum
of Pommery to cool at seven precisely. I had some idea, I suppose, of
drinking with Armour to his eternal discomfiture. Then I went to the
office with a mind cleared of responsibility and comfortably pervaded
with the glow of good intentions.
The moment I saw the young man, punctual and immediate and a little
uncomfortable about the cuffs, I regretted not having asked one or two
more fellows. It might have spoiled the occasion, but it would have
saved the situation. That single glance of my accustomed eye--alas!
that it was so well accustomed--revealed him anxious and screwed up,
as nervous as a cat, but determined, revealed--how well I knew the
signs!--that he had something confidential and important and highly
personal to communicate, a matter in which I could, if I only would, be
of the greatest possible assistance. From these appearances twenty years
had taught me to fly to any burrow, but your dinner-table offers no
retreat; you are hoist, so to speak, on your own carving-fork. There are
men, of course, and even women, who have scruples about taking advantage
of so intimate and unguarded an opportunity, but Armour, I rapidly
decided, was not one of these. His sophistication was progressing, but
it had not reached that point. He wanted something--I flew instantly to
the mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why
he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently proper
that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The application was
impossible, but applications nearly always were impossible. Nobody knew
that better than the Secretary to the Government of India in the Home
Department.
I squared my shoulders and we got through the soup. It was necessary to
apologize for the fish. ‘I suppose one must remember,’ I said, ‘that it
has to climb six thousand feet,’ when suddenly he burst out.
‘Sir William Lamb tells me,’ he said, and stopped to swallow some wine,
‘that there is something very good going in Calcutta and that I should
ask you to help me to get it. May I?’
So the miserable idea--the happy thought--had occurred to somebody else.
‘Is there?’ I said, with interest and attention.
‘It’s something in the School of Art. A man named Fry has died.’
‘Ah!’ I said, ‘a man named Fry. He, I think was Director of that
institution.’ I looked at Armour in the considering, measuring way with
which we suggest to candidates for posts that their fitness to fill them
is not to be absolutely taken for granted. ‘Fry was a man of fifty-six,’
I said.
‘I am thirty.’ He certainly did not look it, but years often fall
lightly upon a temperament.
‘It’s a vile climate.’
‘I know. Is it too vile, do you think,’ he said anxiously, ‘to ask a
lady to share?’
‘Lots of ladies do share it,’ I replied, with amazing calmness; ‘but I
must decline absolutely to enter into that.’
My frown was so forbidding that he couldn’t and didn’t dare to go on.
He looked dashed and disappointed; he was really a fool of an applicant,
quite ready to retire from the siege on the first intimation that the
gates were not to be thrown open at his approach.
‘Do you think you would like teaching?’ I asked.
‘I can teach. Miss--my only pupil here has made capital progress.’
‘I am afraid you must not measure the Bengali art student by the
standard of Miss Harris,’ I replied coldly. He WAS a fool. We talked of
other things. I led him on to betray his ludicrous lack of knowledge
of the world in various directions. At other times it had irritated
me, that night it gave me purest pleasure. I agreed with him about
everything.
As he selected his smoke to go home with I said, ‘Send your application
in to the Director of Public Instruction, Bengal--Lamb will tell you
how--and I’ll see what I can do.’
They were only too thankful to get him. As a student it seemed he had
been diligent both in London and Paris; he possessed diplomas or
some such things bearing names which were bound to have weight with a
Department of Public Instruction anywhere. I felt particularly thankful
for this, for I was committed to him if he had not a rag to show.
The matter was settled in three weeks, during which Armour became
more and more the fashion in Simla. He was given every opportunity of
experiment in the society of which he was about to become a permanent
item. He dined out four or five times a week, and learned exactly what
to talk about. He surprised me one day with a piece of news of my own
department, which was a liberty of a very serious kind, but I forgave
him upon finding that it was not true. He rode Lamb’s weight-carriers,
to cross which his short legs were barely adequate, and apart from
this disadvantage he did not ride them badly. Only one thing marred the
completeness of the transformation--he didn’t dismiss the dog. The dog,
fundamentally, was still and ever his companion. It was a suspicious
circumstance if we had known; but we saw in it only a kind heart, and
ignored it.
I saw little of Dora Harris at this time. Making no doubt that she was
enjoying her triumph as she deserved, I took the liberty of
supposing that she would hardly wish to share so intimate a source of
satisfaction. I met them both several times at people’s houses--certain
things had apparently been taken for granted--but I was only one of
the little circle that wondered how soon it might venture upon open
congratulations. The rest of us knew as much, it seemed, as Edward
Harris did. Lady Pilkey asked him point-blank, and he said what his
daughter found to like in the fellow the Lord only knew, and he was glad
to say that at present he had no announcement to make. Lady Pilkey
told me she thought it very romantic--like marrying a newspaper
correspondent--but I pointed to a lifelong task, with a pension
attached, of teaching fat young Bengalis to draw, and asked her if she
saw extravagant romance in that.
They wrote up from Calcutta that they would like to have a look at
Armour before making the final recommendation, and he left us, I
remember, by the mail tonga of the third of June. He dropped into my
office to say goodbye, but I was busy with the Member and could see
nobody, so he left a card with ‘P.P.C.’ on it. I kept the card
by accident, and I keep it still by design, for the sake of that
inscription.
Strobo had given up his hotel in Simla to start one in Calcutta. It
never occurred to me that Armour might go to Strobo’s; but it was, of
course, the natural thing for him to do, especially as Strobo happened
to be in Calcutta himself at the time. He went and stayed with Strobo,
and every day he and the Signor, clad in bath-towels, lay in closed
rooms under punkahs and had iced drinks in the long tumblers of the
East, and smoked and talked away the burden of the hours.
Strobo was in Calcutta to meet a friend, an Austrian, who was shortly
leaving India in the Messagerie Maritimes steamer Dupleix after
agreeable wanderings disguised as a fakir in Tibet; and to this friend
was attached, in what capacity I never thought well to inquire, a lady
who was a Pole, and played and sang as well as Strobo fiddled. I believe
they dined together every night, this precious quartet, and exchanged
in various tongues their impressions of India under British control.
‘A houri in stays,’ the lady who was a Pole described it. I believe she
herself was a houri without them. And at midnight, when the south wind
was cool and strong from the river, Strobo and Armour would walk up
Chowringhee Road and look at the red brick School of Art from the
outside in the light of the street lamps, as a preliminary to our
friend’s final acceptance of the task of superintending it from within.
We in Simla, of course, knew nothing of all this at the time; the
details leaked out later when Strobo came up again. I began to feel some
joyful anxiety when in a letter dated a week after Armour’s arrival in
Calcutta, the Director of Public Instruction wrote to inquire whether he
had yet left Simla; but the sweet blow did not fall with any precision
or certainty until the newspaper arrived containing his name immediately
under that of Herr Vanrig and Mme. Dansky in the list of passengers who
had sailed per S.S. Dupleix on the fifteenth of June for Colombo. There
it was, ‘I. Armour,’ as significant as ever to two persons intimately
concerned with it, but no longer a wrapping of mystery, rather a
radiating centre of light. Its power of illumination was such that it
tried my eyes. I closed them to recall the outlines of the School of
Art--it had been built in a fit of economy--and the headings of the last
Director’s report, which I had kindly sent after Armour to Calcutta.
Perhaps that had been the last straw.
The real meaning of the task of implanting Western ideals in the Eastern
mind rose before me when I thought of Armour’s doing it--how they would
dwindle in the process, and how he must go on handling them and looking
at them withered and shrunken for twenty-odd years. I understood--there
was enough left in me to understand--Armour’s terrified escape. I was
happy in the thought of him, sailing down the Bay. The possibilities
of marriage, social position, assured income, support in old age, the
strands in the bond that held him, the bond that holds us all, had been
untwisting, untwisting, from the third of June to the fifteenth. The
strand that stood for Dora doubtless was the last to break, but it did
not detract from my beatitude to know that even this consideration,
before the Dupleix and liberty, failed to hold.
I kept out of Miss Harris’s way so studiously for the next week or two
that she was kind enough in the end to feel compelled to send for me. I
went with misgivings--I expected, as may be imagined, to be very deeply
distressed. She met me with a storm of gay reproaches. I had never seen
her in better health or spirits. My surprise must have been more evident
than I supposed or intended, for before I went away she told me the
whole story. By that time she had heard from Ceylon, a delicious letter
with a pen-and-ink sketch at the top. I have it still; it infallibly
brought the man back to me. But it was all over; she assured me
with shining eyes that it was. The reason of her plainly boundless
thankfulness that Armour had run away from the School of Art did not
come to the surface until I was just going. Then I gathered that if he
had taken the post she would have felt compelled, compelled by all she
had done for him, to share its honours with him; and this, ever since
at her bidding he had begun to gather such things up, was precisely what
she had lost all inclination to do.
We were married the following October. We had a big, gorgeous official
wedding, which we both enjoyed enormously. I took furlough, and we went
home, but we found London very expensive and the country very slow; and
with my K.C.S.I. came the offer of the Membership, so we went back to
Simla for three perfectly unnecessary years, which we now look back upon
with pleasure and regret. I fear that we, no more than Ingersoll Armour,
were quite whole-hearted Bohemians; but I don’t know that we really ever
pretended to be.
3. The Hesitation of Miss Anderson.