It was Madeline’s fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East
in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for
Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes’s
ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more
bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense
of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to
week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at
Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after
the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her
baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures.
The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie,
ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where
she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.
Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to
Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is
room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by
Brookes.
‘It’s the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most
delightful,’ Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, ‘this microcosm of
Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at
being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can’t imagine
its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I
explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric
communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently
every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing letters of
admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the
assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the Calcutta
hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a
LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond
them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment ‘The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray’. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and
the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other
climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more
ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young
and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a
staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going
to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy’s the other evening in a
perambulator--rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is
typical of the place. All the honours and dignities--and a perambulator
to put them in--or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud
and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They
haven’t a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they
slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun
coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.
‘Yet--never forget--the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I
suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.
‘...This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am very tired
of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have no “official
position.” Something of the kind was offered me, by the way, the other
day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the Ordnance Department,
named McDermott--Captain McDermott. He took my declining very
cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn’t like Englishmen, who hadn’t
been taught to pronounce their “g’s,” but hoped I would change my mind
before the rains, when he was goin’ down. Of course I sha’n’t. The red
eyelids alone...I am living in a boarding-house precisely under the
deodars, and have “tiffin” with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither
of us are having it anywhere else. And I’ve been told the original of
“General Bangs,” “that most immoral man.” You remember, don’t you, the
heliograph incident--I needn’t quote it. It really happened! and the
General still lives, none the worse--perhaps rather greater. Quite half
the people seem materializations of Kipling, and it’s very interesting;
but one mustn’t say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of
materializations, I saw the original of Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs, too, the
other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native princes when
Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning off his collection
of curios and things. These types of novelists look wonderfully little
impaired; I suppose it’s the dry air.
‘P.S.--Brookes is also quite happy. She was much struck, on arriving, by
an apparent anomaly in nature. “Have you noticed, ma’am,” said she, “how
at this height all the birds are crows and monkeys?”’
Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New
York. She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs. Mickie and Mrs.
Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and nobody
telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies interested in
the work of the Young Women’s Christian Association; from the ‘type’ of
the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of Ali Buksh, who sold raw
turquoises in a little carved shop in the bazaar. I should like to quote
more of her letters, but if I did I should find nothing about Colonel
Horace Innes, who represented--she often acknowledged to herself--her
only serious interest. Miss Anderson took the world at its own
light valuation as it came; but she had a scale of recognitions and
acceptances, which she kept apart for the very few, and Innes had
claimed a place in it the first time they met. It seems a trifle
ungrateful that she should have left him out, since it was he who gave
her a standard by which to measure the frivolity of Simla. He went to
gymkhanas--if he knew she was going--but he towered almost pictorially
above them; and when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a
resentment of possible interruptions that isolated him still further.
I would not suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only
intent, whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused,
and discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically
coextensive with Government House list. Neither, for his part, would he
admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as I have implied.
They often talked about it; he recognized it as a feature likely to
compel the attention of people from other parts of the world; and
one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if she could see no
tragedies underneath.
‘Tragedies of the heart?’ she asked. ‘Oh, I can not take them seriously.
The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with me three days
ago, and made me her confessor. It was unexpected; if it hadn’t been, I
wouldn’t have asked her to tea. She was so unhappy that she forgot about
the rouge, and it all came off on her handkerchief when she cried. The
man likes somebody else better this season. Well, I gave her nougat and
cheap cynicisms, and she allowed herself to be comforted! Why, the loves
of kitchen-maids are more dignified.’
They were riding on the broad four-mile road, blasted out of the rock,
that winds round Jakko. The deodars stood thick above them, with the
sunlight filtering through; a thousand feet below lay the little
square fields, yellow and green, of the King of Koti. The purple-brown
Himalayas shouldered the eye out to the horizon, and there the Snows
lifted themselves, hardly more palpable than the drifted clouds, except
for a gleam of ice in their whiteness. A low stone wall ran along the
verge of the precipice, and, looking down, they saw tangled patches
of the white wild rose of the Himalayas, waving and drooping over the
abyss.
‘I am afraid,’ said Innes, ‘you are not even upon the fringe of the
situation.’
‘It’s the situation as I see it.’
‘Then--excuse me--you do not see deep enough. That poor lady suffered,
I suppose, to the extent of her capacity. You would not have have
increased it.’
‘I don’t know, I should have preferred not to measure it.’
‘Besides, that was not quite the sort of thing I had in mind. I was
thinking more of the--separations.’
‘Ah!’ said Madeline.
‘It’s not fair to ask women to live much in India. Sometimes it’s the
children, sometimes it’s ill health, sometimes it’s natural antipathy to
the place; there’s always a reason to take them away.’
‘Yes,’ said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him. His face was
impassive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a teasing
green spider-fly.
‘That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of. Time does the
rest, time and the aridity of separations. How many men and women
can hold themselves together with letters? I don’t mean aging or any
physical change. I don’t mean change at all.’
‘No,’ said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was greater,
she did not look at him.
‘No. The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so forestall
the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt. For myself, I’m
pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have much effect upon one’s
feeling, if it were the real thing.’ He spoke practically to himself, as
if he had reasoned this out many times.
‘Oh, no!’ said Madeline.
‘But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can REINTRODUCE
people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they
married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I suppose, but
custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar. There never would be
that awful revelation of indifference.’
He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline’s mind that her
face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small red stain
in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added,
‘I’ve known--in Bombay--one or two bad cases of that. But, of course, it
is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter on?’
‘In a minute,’ said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.
She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she
had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal
situation that gave them to him.
‘Of course,’ she said, thoughtfully, ‘you know the Anglo-Indian world
and I don’t. You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds
only too probable. And I confess it makes my little impression very
vulgar and superficial.’ She turned her head and a candid smile to him.
‘All the same, I fancy that the people who are capable of suffering much
that way are the exceptions. And--I don’t care--I believe there is more
cheap sentiment in this place than the other kind. What do you think I
heard a woman say the other day at a tiffin-party? “No man has touched
my heart since I’ve been married,” she proclaimed, “except my husband!”
AT A TIFFIN-party!’
She heard the relief in Innes’s laugh and was satisfied.
‘How does it happen,’ he said, ‘that women nowadays are critical of the
world so young?’
‘I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society
through a tambour-frame,’ she said, hardily.
‘And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it to
produce nothing like you,’ he returned, and if there was ambiguity in
his phrase there was none in his face.
Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture--Simla
called it very American--which expressed that all chivalrous speech was
to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they turned
into the Ladies’ Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a chance
for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening before
her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it intently.
She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she might have been
listening to a telephonic reproduction.
It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself, and
it brought her an excitement which she did not think of analyzing. She
wrung from every sentence its last possibility of unconscious meaning,
and she found when she had finished that it was eleven o’clock.
Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the somewhat
foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening. Her last
reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in definite words.
‘There are no children,’ it ran, ‘and her health has always been good,
he says. She must have left him after that first six months in Lucknow,
because of a natural antipathy to the country--and when she condescended
to come out again for a winter he met the different lady he thinks
about. With little hard lines around the mouth and common conventional
habits of thought, full of subservience to his official superiors, and
perfectly uninterested in him except as the source of supplies. But I
don’t know why I should WANT her to be so disagreeable.
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the
mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss Anderson
features astonishingly different.