A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for the
snow-line by what is facetiously known as ‘the carriage road to Tibet.’
Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the rains to
break. Another day had come without them. To write and tell Innes, to
write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the situation as she
found it; she had lived and moved and slept and awakened to these
alternatives. At the moment she slept.
It was early, very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed
still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent,
immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of the
oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted itself
unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line,
very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town clinging steeply
roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the saddle and slipping over
on the other side, cut the dawn with innumerable little lines and angles
all in one tone like a pencil drawing.
There was no feeling in it, no expression. It had a temporary air in
that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat buildings
that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked
trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning.
A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to
disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature. It
announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more. In the
little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure
moved, groping among last night’s tools, or an old woman in a red sari
washed a brass dish over the shallow open drain that ran past her door.
At the tonga terminus, below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces,
muffled in their blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the
shed. They pushed it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else
stirred or spoke at all in Simla. Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep
in her hotel.
A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the road
turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several following. They
were coolies, and they carried luggage.
The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he
brought, which slipped from his back to the ground. The syces looked at
him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against the wall of the
hillside, also in silence. It was too early for conversation. Thus did
all the others.
When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap on
the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and walked
round the luggage, looking at it.
‘And you, owls’ brethren,’ he said, with sarcasm, addressing the first
coolie, ‘you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight kos to
Kalka, have you?’
‘Na,’ replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.
‘How else, then, is it to be taken?’ the driver cried, with anger in
his argument. ‘Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a
fool-thing of an ekka. Here is work for six tongas! What reason is there
in this?’
The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an
unconcerned toe.
‘I, what can I do?’ he said, ‘It is the order of the memsahib.’
Ram Singh grunted and said no more. A rickshaw was coming down from the
Mall, and the memsahib was in it.
Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under the iron bar,
and the lady sat in the tonga behind Ram Singh. Her runners, in uniform,
waited beside the empty rickshaw with a puzzled look, at which she
laughed, and threw a rupee to the head man.
The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their
cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.
‘Chellao!’ she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted the
reins. The little procession clanked and jingled along the hillside,
always tending down, and broke upon the early grey melancholy with a
forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like everything else. As
it passed the last of Simla’s little gardens, spread like a
pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady leaned forward and
looked back as if she wished to impress the place upon her memory. Her
expression was that of a person going forth without demur into the
day’s hazards, ready to cope with them, yet there was some regret in the
backward look.
‘It’s a place,’ she said aloud, ‘where EVERYBODY has a good time!’
Then the Amusement Club went out of sight behind a curve; and she
settled herself more comfortably among her cushions, and drew a wrap
round her to meet the chill wind of the valley. It was all behind
her. The lady looked out as the ponies galloped up to the first
changing-place, and, seeing a saddled horse held by a syce, cramped
herself a little into one corner to make room. The seat would just hold
two.
Ram Singh salaamed, getting down to harness the fresh pair, and a man
put his face in at the side of the tonga and took off his hat.
‘Are you all right?’ he said. His smile was as conscious as his words
were casual.
‘Quite right. The ayah was silly about coming--didn’t want to leave her
babies or something--so I had to leave her behind. Everything else is
either here or in the ekkas.’
‘The brute! Never mind--they’re not much use in a railway journey. You
can pick up another at Bombay. Then I suppose I’d better get in.’
‘I suppose you better had. Unless you think of walking,’ she laughed,
and he took the place beside her.
Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.
‘Nobody else going down?’
‘Not another soul. We might just as well have started together.’
‘Oh, well, we couldn’t tell. Beastly awkward if there had been anybody.’
‘Yes,’ she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.
Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent her
eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to something
that had not been mentioned. ‘It’s goodbye Simla, isn’t it?’ she
said. He smiled in response and put his hand upon her firm, round arm,
possessively, and they began to talk.
Ram Singh, all unaware, kept his horses at their steady clanking
downward gallop, and Simla, clinging to the hilltops, was brushed by the
first rays of the sun.
It came a gloriously clear morning; early riders round Jakko saw the
real India lying beyond the outer ranges, flat and blue and pictured
with forests and rivers like a map. The plains were pretty and
interesting in this aspect, but nobody found them attractive. Sensitive
people liked it better when the heat mist veiled them and it was
possible to look abroad without a sudden painful thought of contrasting
temperatures. We may suppose that the inhabitants of Paradise sometimes
grieve over their luck. Even Madeline Anderson, whose heart knew no
constriction at the remembrance of brother or husband at some cruel
point in the blue expanse, had come to turn her head more willingly the
other way, towards the hills rolling up to the snows, being a woman who
suffered by proxy, and by observation, and by Rudyard Kipling.
On this particular morning, however, she had not elected to do either.
She slept late instead, and was glad to sleep. I might as well say at
once that on the night before she had made up her mind, had brought
herself to the point, and had written to Mrs. Innes, at ‘Two Gables’,
all the facts, in so far as she was acquainted with them, connected with
Frederick Prendergast’s death. She was very much ashamed of herself,
poor girl; she was aware that, through her postponement, Horace Innes
would now see his problem in all its bitterness, make his choice with
his eyes wide open. If it had only happened before he knew--anything
about her!
She charged herself with having deliberately waited, and then spent an
exhausting hour trying to believe that she had drifted unconsciously to
the point of their mutual confession. Whatever the truth was, she did
not hesitate to recognize a new voice in her private counsels from that
hour, urging her in one way or another to bring matters to an end.
It was a strong instinct; looking at the facts, she saw it was the
gambler’s. When she tried to think of the ethical considerations
involved she saw only the chances. The air seemed to throb with them all
night; she had to count them finally to get rid of them.
Brookes was up betimes, however, and sent off the letter. It went duly,
by Surnoo, to Mrs. Innes at ‘Two Gables’. Madeline woke at seven with a
start, and asked if it had gone, then slept again contentedly. So far
as she was concerned the thing was finished. The breakfast gong had
sounded, and the English mail had arrived before she opened her
eyes again upon the day’s issues; she gave it her somewhat desultory
attention while Brookes did her hair. There was only one scrap of news.
Adele mentioned in a postscript that poor Mr. Prendergast’s money was
likely to go to a distant relative, it having transpired that he died
without leaving a will.
‘She is sure, absolutely sure,’ Madeline mused, ‘to answer my letter in
person. She will be here within an hour. I shall have this to tell her,
too. How pleased she will be! She will come into it all, I suppose--if
she is allowed. Though she won’t be allowed, that is if--’ But there
speculation began, and Madeline had forbidden herself speculation, if
not once and for all, at least many times and for fifteen minutes.
No reasonable purpose would be served by Mrs. Innes’s visit, Madeline
reflected, as she sat waiting in the little room opening on the veranda;
but she would come, of course she would come. She would require the
satisfaction of the verbal assurance; she would hope to extract more
details; she would want the objectionable gratification of talking if
over.
In spite of any assurance, she would believe that Madeline had not told
her before in order to make her miserable a little longer than she
need be; but, after all, her impression about that did not particularly
matter. It couldn’t possibly be a pleasant interview, yet Madeline found
herself impatient for it.
‘Surnoo,’ she said of her messenger, ‘must be idling on his way back
in the bazaar. I must try to remember to fine him two pice. Surnoo is
incorrigible.’
She forgot, however, to fine Surnoo. The pad of his bare feet sounded
along the veranda almost immediately, and the look in his Pahari eyes
was that of expected reproach, and ability to defend himself against it.
He held out two letters at arm’s-length, for as he was expected to bring
only one there was a fault in this; and all his domestic traditions told
him that he might be chastened. One was addressed to Madeline in Mrs.
Innes’s handwriting; the other, she saw with astonishment, was her own
communication to that lady, her own letter returned. Surnoo explained
volubly all the way along the veranda, and in the flood of his unknown
tongue Madeline caught a sentence or two.
‘The memsahib was not,’ said Surnoo. Clearly he could not deliver a
letter to a memsahib who was not. ‘Therefore,’ Surnoo continued, ‘I have
brought back your honour’s letter, and the other I had from the hand of
the memsahib’s runner, the runner with one eye, who was on the road to
bring it here. More I do not know, but it appears that the memsahib has
gone to her father and mother in Belaat, being very sorrowful because
the Colonel-sahib has left her to shoot.’
‘The letter will tell me,’ said Madeline to herself, fingering it.
‘Enough, Surnoo.’
The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her
sitting-room. The letter would tell her--what? She glanced about her
with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her bedroom,
where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain across the
window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and kept her eyes upon
it while she unfastened, with trembling hands, the brooch at her neck
and the belt at her waist. She did one or two other meaningless things,
as if she wanted to gain time, to fortify her nerves even against an
exhibition before herself.
Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the letter.
It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating suspense
Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she unfolded it, and
it ran:
‘Dear Miss Anderson--What will you say, I wonder, and what will Simla
say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to DISREGARD
CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one another! I am all
packed up, and long before this meets your eye we shall have taken
the step which society condemns, but which I have a feeling that
you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-minded enough
to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is the reason I am
writing to you rather than to any of my own chums, and also of course to
have the satisfaction of telling you that I no longer care what you do
about letting out the secret of my marriage to Frederick Prendergast. I
am now ABOVE AND BEYOND IT. Any way you look at it, I do not see that I
am much to blame. As I never have been Colonel Innes’s wife there can
be no harm in leaving him, though if he had ever been sympathetic, or
understood me the LEAST LITTLE BIT, I might have felt bound to him. But
he has never been able to evoke the finer parts of my nature, and when
this is the case marriage is a mere miserable fleshly failure. You
may say, “Why try it a third time?”--but my union with Val will be
different. I have never been fond of the opposite sex--so far as that
goes I should have made a very good nun--but for a long time Valentine
Drake has been the only man I cared to have come within a mile of me,
and lately we have discovered that we are absolutely necessary to each
other’s existence on the higher plane. I don’t care much what
Simla thinks, but if you happen to be talking about it to dear Lady
Bloomfield, you might just mention this. Val has eight hundred a year of
his own, so it is perfectly practicable. Of course, he will send in his
papers. WHATEVER HAPPENS, Val and I will never bind ourselves in any
way. We both think it wrong and enslaving. I have nothing more to add,
except that I am depending on you to explain to Simla that I never was
Mrs. Innes.
‘Yours sincerely,
‘Violet Prendergast.
‘P.S.--I have written to Horace, telling him everything about
everything, and sent my letter off to him in the wilds by a runner. If
you see him you might try and smooth him down. I don’t want him coming
after Val with a revolver.’
Madeline read this communication through twice. Then quietly and
deliberately she lay down upon the bed, and drew herself out of the
control of her heart by the hard labour of thought. When she rose, she
had decided that there were only two things for her to do, and she
began at once to do them, continuing her refuge in action. She threw her
little rooms open again, and walked methodically round the outer one,
collecting the odds and ends of Indian fabrics with which she had
garnished it.
As the maid came in, she looked up from folding them.
‘I have news, Brookes,’ she said, ‘that necessitates my going home at
once. No, it is not bad news, but--important. I will go now and see
about the tonga. We must start tomorrow morning.’
Brookes called Surnoo, and the rickshaw came round.
Madeline looked at her watch.
‘The telegraph office,’ she said; ‘and as quickly as may be.’
As the runners panted over the Mall, up and down and on, Madeline said
to herself, ‘She shall have her chance. She shall choose.’
The four reeking Paharis pulled up at the telegraph office, and Madeline
sped up the steps. There was a table, with forms printed ‘Indian
Telegraphs,’ and the usual bottle of thickened ink and pair of rusty
pens. She sat down to her intention as if she dared not let it cool; she
wrote her message swiftly, she had worded it on the way.
‘To Mrs. Innes, Dak Bungalow, Solon.
‘From M. Anderson, Simla.
‘Frederick Prendergast died on January 7th, at Sing Sing. Your letter
considered confidential if you return. Prendergast left no will.
‘M. Anderson.’
‘Send this “urgent,” Babu,’ she said to the clerk, ‘and repeat it to the
railway station, Kalka. Shall I fill up another form? No? Very well.’
At the door she turned and came back.
‘It is now eleven o’clock,’ she said. ‘The person I am telegraphing to
is on her way down to get tonight’s train at Kalka. I am hoping to catch
her half-way at Solon. Do you think I can?’
‘I think so, madam. Oyess! It is the custom to stop at Solon for tiffin.
The telegram can arrive there. All urgent telegram going very quick.’
‘And in any case,’ said Madeline, ‘it can not fail to reach her at
Kalka?’
‘Not possible to fail, madam.’
‘She will have her chance,’ she said to herself, on her way to the post
office to order her tonga. And with a little nauseated shudder at the
thought of the letter in her pocket, she added, ‘It is amazing. I
should have thought her too good a woman of business!’ After which she
concentrated her whole attention upon the necessities of departure. Her
single immediate apprehension was that Horace Innes might, by some magic
of circumstances, be transported back into Simla before she could get
out of it. That such a contingency was physically impossible made no
difference to her nerves, and to the last Brookes was the hurrying
victim of unnecessary promptings.
The little rambling hotel of Kalka, where the railway spreads out over
the plains, raises its white-washed shelter under the very walls of the
Himalayas. Madeline, just arrived, lay back in a long wicker chair on
the veranda, and looked up at them as they mounted green and grey and
silent under the beating of the first of the rains. Everywhere was a
luxury of silence, the place was steeped in it, drowned in it. A feeding
cow flicked an automatic tail under a tree. Near the low mud wall that
strolled irresolutely between the house and the hills leaned a bush
with a few single pink roses; their petals were floating down under
the battering drops. A draggled bee tried to climb to a dry place on a
pillar of the veranda. Above all, the hills, immediate, towering, all
grey and green, solidly ideal, with phantasies of mist. Everything
drippingly soft and silent. Suddenly the venetian blind that hung before
the door of a bedroom farther on swayed out before a hand variously
ringed to emit a lady in a pink lawn dress with apt embroideries.
Madeline’s half-closed eyes opened very wide, and for an instant she and
the lady, to whom I must once more refer as Mrs. Innes, confronted each
other. Then Mrs. Innes’s countenance expanded, and she took three or
four light steps forward.
‘Oh, you dear thing!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought you were in Simla!
Imagine you being here! Do you know you have SAVED me!’
Madeline regarded her in silence, while a pallor spread over her face
and lips, and her features grew sharp with a presage of pain.
‘Have I?’ she stammered. She could not think.
‘Indeed you have. I don’t know how to be grateful enough to you. Your
telegram of yesterday reached me at Solon. We had just sat down to
tiffin. Nothing will ever shake my faith in providence again! My dear,
THINK of it--after all I’ve been through, my darling Val--and one
hundred thousand pounds!’
‘Well?’
‘Well--I stayed behind there last night, and Val came on here and made
the necessary arrangement, and--’
‘Yes?’
‘And we were married this morning. Good heavens! What’s the matter with
you! Here--oh, Brookes! Water, salts--anything!’
Brookes, I know, would think that I should dwell at greater length upon
Miss Anderson’s attack of faintness in Kalka, and the various measures
which were resorted to for her succour, but perhaps the feelings and
expedients of any really capable lady’s-maid under the circumstances may
be taken for granted. I feel more seriously called upon to explain that
Colonel Horace Innes, shortly after these last events, took two years’
furlough to England, during which he made a very interesting tour in
the United States with the lady with now bears his name by inalienable
right. Captain and Mrs. Valentine Drake are getting the most that is to
be had out of Frederick Prendergast’s fortune with courage in London and
the European capitals, where Mrs. Drake is sometimes mentioned as a
lady with a romantic past. They have not returned to Simla, where the
situation has never been properly understood. People always supposed
that Mrs. Drake ran away that June morning with her present husband, who
must have been tremendously fond of her to have married her ‘after the
divorce.’ She is also occasionally mentioned in undertones as ‘the
first Mrs. Innes.’ All of which we know to be quite erroneous, like most
scandal.
Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, in retirement, are superintending the
education of their children in Bedford, where it is cheap and practical.
They converse when they meet about the iniquitous prices of dressmakers
and the degeneracy of the kind of cook obtainable in England at
eighteen pounds a year. Mrs. Gammidge has grown rather portly and
very ritualistic. They seldom speak of Simla, and when they do, if too
reminiscent a spark appears in Mrs. Mickie’s eye, Mrs. Gammidge changes
the subject. Kitty Vesey still fills her dance cards at Viceregal
functions, though people do not quote her as they used to, and
subalterns imagine themselves vastly witty about her colour, which is
unimpaired. People often commend her, however, for her good nature to
debutantes, and it is admitted that she may still ride with credit in
‘affinity stakes’--and occasionally win them.
4. The Pool in the Desert.
I knew Anna Chichele and Judy Harbottle so well, and they figured so
vividly at one time against the rather empty landscape of life in a
frontier station, that my affection for one of them used to seem little
more, or less, than a variant upon my affection for the other. That
recollection, however, bears examination badly; Judy was much the better
sort, and it is Judy’s part in it that draws me into telling the story.
Conveying Judy is what I tremble at: her part was simple. Looking
back--and not so very far--her part has the relief of high comedy with
the proximity of tears; but looking closely, I find that it is mostly
Judy, and what she did is entirely second, in my untarnished picture, to
what she was. Still I do not think I can dissuade myself from putting it
down.
They would, of course, inevitably have found each other sooner or later,
Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele, but it was I who actually introduced
them; my palmy veranda in Rawul Pindi; where the teacups used to
assemble, was the scene of it. I presided behind my samovar over
the early formalities that were almost at once to drop from their
friendship, like the sheath of some bursting flower. I deliberately
brought them together, so the birth was not accidental, and my interest
in it quite legitimately maternal. We always had tea in the veranda in
Rawul Pindi, the drawing-room was painted blue, blue for thirty feet up
to the whitewashed cotton ceiling; nothing of any value in the way of a
human relation, I am sure, could have originated there. The veranda
was spacious and open, their mutual observation had room and freedom;
I watched it to and fro. I had not long to wait for my reward; the
beautiful candour I expected between them was not ten minutes in coming.
For the sake of it I had taken some trouble, but when I perceived it
revealing I went and sat down beside Judy’s husband, Robert Harbottle,
and talked about Pharaoh’s split hoof. It was only fair; and when next
day I got their impressions of one another, I felt single-minded and
deserving.
I knew it would be a satisfactory sort of thing to do, but perhaps it
was rather more for Judy’s sake than for Anna’s that I did it. Mrs.
Harbottle was only twenty-seven then and Robert a major, but he had
brought her to India out of an episode too colour-flushed to tone with
English hedges; their marriage had come, in short, of his divorce, and
as too natural a consequence. In India it is well known that the eye
becomes accustomed to primitive pigments and high lights; the aesthetic
consideration, if nothing else, demanded Robert’s exchange. He was lucky
to get a Piffer regiment, and the Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were
all lucky, I thought, to get Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a good
deal challenged, even in Rawul Pindi, where it was thought, especially
in the beginning, that acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could
hope for. That is not enough in India; cordiality is the common right.
I could not have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and
gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about ‘the case’; it
was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some points of
view deplorable. I chose to reserve my point of view, from which I saw
it, on Judy’s behalf, merely quixotic, preferring on Robert’s just to
close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first wife was odious to a
degree which it is simply pleasanter not to recount, but her malignity
must almost have amounted to a sense of humour. Her detestation of her
cousin Judy Thynne dated much further back than Robert’s attachment.
That began in Paris, where Judy, a young widow, was developing a real
vein at Julian’s. I am entirely convinced that there was nothing, as
people say, ‘in it,’ Judy had not a thought at that time that was not
based on Chinese white and permeated with good-fellowship; but there was
a good deal of it, and no doubt the turgid imagination of the first
Mrs. Harbottle dealt with it honestly enough. At all events, she saw
her opportunity, and the depths of her indifference to Robert bubbled
up venomously into the suit. That it was undefended was the senseless
mystery; decency ordained that he and Judy should have made a fight,
even in the hope that it would be a losing one. The reason it had to
be a losing one--the reason so immensely criticized--was that the
petitioning lady obstinately refused to bring her action against any
other set of circumstances than those to which, I have no doubt, Judy
contributed every indiscretion. It is hard to imagine Robert Harbottle
refusing her any sort of justification that the law demands short of
beating her, but her malice would accept nothing of which the account
did not go for final settlement to Judy Thynne. If her husband wanted
his liberty, he should have it, she declared, at that price and no
other. Major Harbottle did indeed deeply long for his liberty, and his
interesting friend, Mrs. Thynne, had, one can only say, the most vivid
commiseration for his bondage. Whatever chance they had of winning, to
win would be, for the end they had at heart, to lose, so they simply
abstained, as it were, from comment upon the detestable procedure which
terminated in the rule absolute. I have often wondered whether the whole
business would not have been more defensible if there had been on Judy’s
part any emotional spring for the leap they made. I offer my conviction
that there was none, that she was only extravagantly affected by the
ideals of the Quarter--it is a transporting atmosphere--and held a view
of comradeship which permitted the reversal of the modern situation
filled by a blameless correspondent. Robert, of course, was tremendously
in love with her; but my theory is that she married him as the logical
outcome of her sacrifice and by no means the smallest part of it.
It was all quite unimaginable, as so many things are, but the upshot of
it brought Judy to Rawul Pindi, as I have said, where I for one thought
her mistake insignificant compared with her value. It would have
been great, her value, anywhere; in the middle of the Punjab it was
incalculable. To explain why would be to explain British India, but
I hope it will appear; and I am quite willing, remember, to take the
responsibility if it does not.
Somers Chichele, Anna’s son, it is absurd to think, must have been about
fifteen then, reflecting at Winchester with the other ‘men’ upon the
comparative merits of tinned sardines and jam roll, and whether a packet
of real Egyptians was not worth the sacrifice of either. His father was
colonel of the Twelfth; his mother was still charming. It was the year
before Dick Forsyth came down from the neighbourhood of Sheikhbudin with
a brevet and a good deal of personal damage. I mention him because he
proved Anna’s charm in the only conclusive way before the eyes of us
all; and the station, I remember, was edified to observe that if Mrs.
Chichele came out of the matter ‘straight’--one relapses so easily into
the simple definitions of those parts--which she undoubtedly did, she
owed it in no small degree to Judy Harbottle. This one feels to be
hardly a legitimate reference, but it is something tangible to lay hold
upon in trying to describe the web of volitions which began to weave
itself between the two that afternoon on my veranda and which afterward
became so strong a bond. I was delighted with the thing; its simplicity
and sincerity stood out among our conventional little compromises at
friendship like an ideal. She and Judy had the assurance of one another;
they made upon one another the finest and often the most unconscionable
demands. One met them walking at odd hours in queer places, of which I
imagine they were not much aware. They would turn deliberately off the
Maidan and away from the bandstand to be rid of our irrelevant bows;
they did their duty by the rest of us, but the most egregious among us,
the Deputy-Commissioner for selection, could see that he hardly counted.
I thought I understood, but that may have been my fatuity; certainly
when their husbands inquired what on earth they had been talking of, it
usually transpired that they had found an infinite amount to say about
nothing. It was a little worrying to hear Colonel Chichele and Major
Harbottle describe their wives as ‘pals,’ but the fact could not be
denied, and after all we were in the Punjab. They were pals too, but the
terms were different.
People discussed it according to their lights, and girls said in pretty
wonderment that Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele were like men, they
never kissed each other. I think Judy prescribed these conditions. Anna
was far more a person who did as the world told her. But it was a poor
negation to describe all that they never did; there was no common little
convention of attachment that did not seem to be tacitly omitted between
them. I hope one did not too cynically observe that they offered these
to their husbands instead; the redeeming observation was their husbands’
complete satisfaction. This they maintained to the end. In the
natural order of things Robert Harbottle should have paid heavily for
interfering as he did in Paris between a woman and what she was entitled
to live for. As a matter of fact he never paid anything at all; I doubt
whether he ever knew himself a debtor. Judy kept her temperament under
like a current and swam with the tides of the surface, taking refreshing
dips only now and then which one traced in her eyes and her hair when
she and Robert came back from leave. That sort of thing is lost in the
sands of India, but it makes an oasis as it travels, and it sometimes
seemed to me a curious pity that she and Anna should sit in the shade of
it together, while Robert and Peter Chichele, their titular companions,
blundered on in the desert. But after all, if you are born blind--and
the men were both immensely liked, and the shooting was good.
Ten years later Somers joined. The Twelfth were at Peshawur. Robert
Harbottle was Lieutenant-Colonel by that time and had the regiment.
Distinction had incrusted, in the Indian way, upon Peter Chichele, its
former colonel; he was General Commanding the District and K.C.B. So
we were all still together in Peshawur. It was great luck for the
Chicheles, Sir Peter’s having the district, though his father’s old
regiment would have made it pleasant enough for the boy in any case. He
came to us, I mean, of course, to two or three of us, with the interest
that hangs about a victim of circumstances; we understood that he
wasn’t a ‘born soldier.’ Anna had told me on the contrary that he was
a sacrifice to family tradition made inevitable by the General’s
unfortunate investments. Bellona’s bridegroom was not a role he fancied,
though he would make a kind of compromise as best man; he would agree,
she said, to be a war correspondent and write picturesque specials
for the London halfpenny press. There was the humour of the poor boy’s
despair in it, but she conveyed it, I remember, in exactly the same tone
with which she had said to me years before that he wanted to drive a
milk-cart. She carried quite her half of the family tradition, though
she could talk of sacrifice and make her eyes wistful, contemplating
for Somers the limitations of the drill-book and the camp of exercise,
proclaiming and insisting upon what she would have done if she could
only have chosen for him. Anna Chichele saw things that way. With more
than a passable sense of all that was involved, if she could have made
her son an artist in life or a commander-in-chief, if she could have
given him the seeing eye or Order of the Star of India, she would not
have hesitated for an instant. Judy, with her single mind, cried out,
almost at sight of him, upon them both, I mean both Anna and Sir Peter.
Not that the boy carried his condemnation badly, or even obviously; I
venture that no one noticed it in the mess; but it was naturally plain
to those of us who were under the same. He had put in his two years with
a British regiment at Meerut--they nurse subalterns that way for the
Indian army--and his eyes no longer played with the tinsel vision
of India; they looked instead into the arid stretch beyond. This
preoccupation conveyed to the Surgeon-Major’s wife the suggestion that
Mr. Chichele was the victim of a hopeless attachment. Mrs. Harbottle
made no such mistake; she saw simply, I imagine, the beginnings of
her own hunger and thirst in him, looking back as she told us across a
decade of dusty sunsets to remember them. The decade was there, close to
the memory of all of us; we put, from Judy herself downward, an absurd
amount of confidence in it.
She looked so well the night she met him. It was English mail day;
she depended a great deal upon her letters, and I suppose somebody had
written her a word that brought her that happy, still excitement that
is the inner mystery of words. He went straight to her with some speech
about his mother having given him leave, and for twenty minutes she
patronized him on a sofa as his mother would not have dreamed of doing.
Anna Chichele, from the other side of the room, smiled on the pair.
‘I depend on you and Judy to be good to him while we are away,’ she
said. She and Sir Peter were going on leave at the end of the week to
Scotland, as usual, for the shooting.
Following her glance I felt incapable of the proportion she assigned me.
‘I will see after his socks with pleasure,’ I said. ‘I think, don’t you,
we may leave the rest to Judy?’
Her eyes remained upon the boy, and I saw the passion rise in them,
at which I turned mine elsewhere. Who can look unperturbed upon such a
privacy of nature as that?
‘Poor old Judy!’ she went on. ‘She never would be bothered with him
in all his dear hobble-dehoy time; she resented his claims, the
unreasonable creature, used to limit me to three anecdotes a week;
and now she has him on her hands, if you like. See the pretty air
of deference in the way he listens to her! He has nice manners, the
villain, if he is a Chichele!’
‘Oh, you have improved Sir Peter’s,’ I said kindly.
‘I do hope Judy will think him worth while. I can’t quite expect that he
will be up to her, bless him, she is so much cleverer, isn’t she, than
any of us? But if she will just be herself with him it will make such a
difference.’
The other two crossed the room to us at that, and Judy gaily made Somers
over to his mother, trailing off to find Robert in the billiard-room.
‘Well, what has Mrs. Harbottle been telling you?’ Anna asked him.
The young man’s eye followed Judy, his hand went musingly to his
moustache.
‘She was telling me,’ he said, ‘that people in India were sepulchers of
themselves, but that now and then one came who could roll away another’s
stone.’
‘It sounds promising,’ said Lady Chichele to me.
‘It sounds cryptic,’ I laughed to Somers, but I saw that he had the key.
I can not say that I attended diligently to Mr. Chichele’s socks, but
the part corresponding was freely assigned me. After his people went I
saw him often. He pretended to find qualities in my tea, implied that he
found them in my talk. As a matter of fact it was my inquiring attitude
that he loved, the knowledge that there was no detail that he could give
me about himself, his impressions and experiences, that was unlikely to
interest me. I would not for the world imply that he was egotistical or
complacent, absolutely the reverse, but he possessed an articulate soul
which found its happiness in expression, and I liked to listen. I feel
that these are complicated words to explain a very simple relation,
and I pause to wonder what is left to me if I wished to describe his
commerce with Mrs. Harbottle. Luckily there is an alternative; one
needn’t do it. I wish I had somewhere on paper Judy’s own account of it
at this period, however. It is a thing she would have enjoyed writing
and more enjoyed communicating, at this period.
There was a grave reticence in his talk about her which amused me in the
beginning. Mrs. Harbottle had been for ten years important enough to us
all, but her serious significance, the light and the beauty in her,
had plainly been reserved for the discovery of this sensitive and
intelligent person not very long from Sandhurst and exactly twenty-six.
I was barely allowed a familiar reference, and anything approaching a
flippancy was met with penetrating silence. I was almost rebuked for
lightly suggesting that she must occasionally find herself bored in
Peshawur.
‘I think not anywhere,’ said Mr. Chichele; ‘Mrs. Harbottle is one of the
few people who sound the privilege of living.’
This to me, who had counted Mrs. Harbottle’s yawns on so many occasions!
It became presently necessary to be careful, tactful, in one’s
implications about Mrs. Harbottle, and to recognize a certain
distinction in the fact that one was the only person with whom Mr.
Chichele discussed her at all.
The day came when we talked of Robert; it was bound to come in the
progress of any understanding and affectionate colloquy which had his
wife for inspiration. I was familiar, of course, with Somers’s opinion
that the Colonel was an awfully good sort; that had been among the
preliminaries and become understood as the base of all references. And I
liked Robert Harbottle very well myself. When his adjutant called him a
born leader of men, however, I felt compelled to look at the statement
consideringly.
‘In a tight place,’ I said--dear me, what expressions had the freedom of
our little frontier drawing-rooms!--‘I would as soon depend on him as on
anybody. But as for leadership--’
‘He is such a good fellow that nobody here does justice to his soldierly
qualities,’ said Mr. Chichele, ‘except Mrs. Harbottle.’
‘Has she been telling you about them?’ I inquired.
‘Well,’ he hesitated, ‘she told me about the Mulla Nulla affair. She is
rather proud of that. Any woman would be.’
‘Poor dear Judy!’ I mused.
Somers said nothing, but looked at me, removing his cigarette, as if my
words would be the better of explanation.
‘She has taken refuge in them--in Bob Harbottle’s soldierly
qualities--ever since she married him,’ I continued.
‘Taken refuge,’ he repeated, coldly, but at my uncompromising glance his
eyes fell.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You mean--’
‘Oh, I mean what I say,’ I laughed. ‘Your cigarette has gone out--have
another.’
‘I think her devotion to him splendid.’
‘Quite splendid. Have you seen the things he brought her from the Simla
Art Exhibition? He said they were nice bits of colour, and she has hung
them in the drawing-room, where she will have to look at them every day.
Let us admire her--dear Judy.’
‘Oh,’ he said, with a fine air of detachment, ‘do you think they are so
necessary, those agreements?’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘we see that they are not indispensable. More sugar?
I have only given you one lump. And we know, at all events,’ I added,
unguardedly, ‘that she could never have had an illusion about him.’
The young man looked up quickly. ‘Is that story true?’ he asked.
‘There was a story, but most of us have forgotten it. Who told you?’
‘The doctor.’
‘The Surgeon-Major,’ I said, ‘has an accurate memory and a sense of
proportion. As I suppose you were bound to get it from somebody, I am
glad you got it from him.’
I was not prepared to go on, and saw with some relief that Somers was
not either. His silence, as he smoked, seemed to me deliberate; and I
had oddly enough at this moment for the first time the impression that
he was a man and not a boy. Then the Harbottles themselves joined us,
very cheery after a gallop from the Wazir-Bagh. We talked of old times,
old friendships, good swords that were broken, names that had carried
far, and Somers effaced himself in the perfect manner of the British
subaltern. It was a long, pleasant gossip, and I thought Judy seemed
rather glad to let her husband dictate its level, which, of course, he
did. I noticed when the three rode away together that the Colonel was
beginning to sit down rather solidly on his big New Zealander; and I
watched the dusk come over from the foothills for a long time thinking
more kindly than I had spoken of Robert Harbottle.
I have often wondered how far happiness is contributed to a temperament
like Judy Harbottle’s, and how far it creates its own; but I doubt
whether, on either count, she found as much in any other winter of her
life except perhaps the remote ones by the Seine. Those ardent hours
of hers, when everything she said was touched with the flame of her
individuality, came oftener; she suddenly cleaned up her palate and
began to translate in one study after another the language of the
frontier country, that spoke only in stones and in shadows under the
stones and in sunlight over them. There is nothing in the Academy of
this year, at all events, that I would exchange for the one she gave me.
She lived her physical life at a pace which carried us all along
with her; she hunted and drove and danced and dined with such sincere
intention as convinced us all that in hunting and driving and dancing
and dining there were satisfactions that had been somehow overlooked.
The Surgeon-Major’s wife said it was delightful to meet Mrs. Harbottle,
she seemed to enjoy everything so thoroughly; the Surgeon-Major looked
at her critically and asked her if she were quite sure she hadn’t a
night temperature. He was a Scotchman. One night Colonel Harbottle,
hearing her give away the last extra, charged her with renewing her
youth.
‘No, Bob,’ she said, ‘only imitating it.’
Ah, that question of her youth. It was so near her--still, she told
me once, she heard the beat of its flying, and the pulse in her veins
answered the false signal. That was afterward, when she told the truth.
She was not so happy when she indulged herself otherwise. As when she
asked one to remember that she was a middle-aged woman, with middle-aged
thoughts and satisfactions.
‘I am now really happiest,’ she declared, ‘when the Commissioner takes
me in to dinner, when the General Commanding leads me to the dance.’
She did her best to make it an honest conviction. I offered her a recent
success not crowned by the Academy, and she put it down on the table.
‘By and by,’ she said. ‘At present I am reading Pascal and Bossuet.’
Well, she was reading Pascal and Bossuet. She grieved aloud that most
of our activities in India were so indomitably youthful, owing to the
accident that most of us were always so young. ‘There is no dignified
distraction in this country,’ she complained, ‘for respectable ladies
nearing forty.’ She seemed to like to make these declarations in the
presence of Somers Chichele, who would look at her with a little queer
smile--a bad translation, I imagine, of what he felt.
She gave herself so generously to her seniors that somebody said Mrs.
Harbottle’s girdle was hung with brass hats. It seems flippant to add
that her complexion was as honest as the day, but the fact is that the
year before Judy had felt compelled, like the rest of us, to repair just
a little the ravages of the climate. If she had never done it one would
not have looked twice at the absurdity when she said of the powder-puff
in the dressing-room, ‘I have raised that thing to the level of an
immorality,’ and sailed in to dance with an uncompromising expression
and a face uncompromised. I have not spoken of her beauty; for one
thing it was not always there, and there were people who would deny
it altogether, or whose considered comment was, ‘I wouldn’t call
her plain.’ They, of course, were people in whom she declined to be
interested, but even for those of us who could evoke some demonstration
of her vivid self her face would not always light in correspondence.
When it did there was none that I liked better to look at; and I envied
Somers Chichele his way to make it the pale, shining thing that would
hold him lifted, in return, for hours together, with I know not what
mystic power of a moon upon the tide. And he? Oh, he was dark and
delicate, by nature simple, sincere, delightfully intelligent. His
common title to charm was the rather sweet seriousness that rested on
his upper lip, and a certain winning gratification in his attention;
but he had a subtler one in his eyes, which must be always seeking and
smiling over what they found; those eyes of perpetual inquiry for the
exquisite which ask so little help to create it. A personality to button
up in a uniform, good heavens!
As I begin to think of them together I remember how the maternal note
appeared in her talk about him.
‘His youth is pathetic,’ she told me, ‘but there is nothing that he does
not understand.’
‘Don’t apologize, Judy,’ I said. We were so brusque on the frontier.
Besides, the matter still suffered a jocular presentment. Mrs. Harbottle
and Mr. Chichele were still ‘great friends’; we could still put them
next each other at our dinner-parties without the feeling that it would
be ‘marked.’ There was still nothing unusual in the fact that when Mrs.
Harbottle was there Mr. Chichele might be taken for granted. We were so
broad-minded also, on the frontier.
It grew more obvious, the maternal note. I began positively to dread it,
almost as much, I imagine, as Somers did. She took her privileges all in
Anna’s name, she exercised her authority quite as Lady Chichele’s proxy.
She went to the very limit. ‘Anna Chichele,’ she said actually in his
presence, ‘is a fortunate woman. She has all kinds of cleverness, and
she has her tall son. I have only one little talent, and I have no tall
son.’ Now it was not in nature that she could have had a son as tall as
Somers, nor was that desire in her eyes. All civilization implies a good
deal of farce, but this was a poor refuge, a cheap device; I was glad
when it fell away from her sincerity, when the day came on which she
looked into my fire and said simply, ‘An attachment like ours has no
terms.’
‘I wonder,’ I said.
‘For what comes and goes,’ she went on dreamily, ‘how could there be a
formula?’
‘Look here, Judy,’ I said, ‘you know me very well. What if the flesh
leaps with the spirit?’
She looked at me, very white. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘no.’
I waited, but there seemed nothing more that she could say; and in the
silence the futile negative seemed to wander round the room repeating
itself like an echo, ‘Oh no, no.’ I poked the fire presently to drown
the sound of it. Judy sat still, with her feet crossed and her hands
thrust into the pockets of her coat, staring into the coals.
‘Can you live independently, satisfied with your interests and
occupations?’ she demanded at last. ‘Yes, I know you can. I can’t. I
must exist more than half in other people. It is what they think and
feel that matters to me, just as much as what I think and feel. The best
of life is in that communication.’
‘It has always been a passion with you, Judy,’ I replied. ‘I can imagine
how much you must miss--’
‘Whom?’
‘Anna Chichele,’ I said softly.
She got up and walked about the room, fixing here and there an intent
regard upon things which she did not see. ‘Oh, I do,’ she said at one
point, with the effect of pulling herself together. She took another
turn or two, and then finding herself near the door she went out. I felt
as profoundly humiliated for her as if she had staggered.
The next night was one of those that stand out so vividly, for no
reason that one can identify, in one’s memory. We were dining with the
Harbottles, a small party, for a tourist they had with them. Judy and I
and Somers and the traveller had drifted out into the veranda, where the
scent of Japanese lilies came and went on the spring wind to trouble the
souls of any taken unawares. There was a brightness beyond the foothills
where the moon was coming, and I remember how one tall clump swayed
out against it, and seemed in passionate perfume to lay a burden on the
breast. Judy moved away from it and sat clasping her knees on the edge
of the veranda. Somers, when his eyes were not upon her, looked always
at the lily.
Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, ‘I think
you Anglo-Indians live in a kind of little paradise.’
There was an instant’s silence, and then Judy turned her face into the
lamplight from the drawing-room. ‘With everything but the essentials,’
she said.
We stayed late; Mr. Chichele and ourselves were the last to go.
Judy walked with us along the moonlit drive to the gate, which is so
unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it open.
She swung the stiff halves together.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘it is shut.’
‘And I,’ said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, ‘am on the other
side.’
Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. ‘It is the business of
my life,’ she gave him in return, ‘to keep this gate shut.’ I felt as
if they had forgotten us. Somers mounted and rode off without a word. We
were walking in a different direction. Looking back, I saw Judy leaning
immovable on the gate, while Somers turned in his saddle, apparently
to repeat the form of lifting his hat. And all about them stretched
the stones of Kabul valley, vague and formless in the tide of the
moonlight...
Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to
Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, ‘I shall wait for the
Chicheles there, and come back with them.’ I remember reflecting that
if she could not induce herself to take a passage to England in the ship
that brought them, it seemed the right thing to do.
She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I knew
Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did disaster
loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a covering
movement or a flank support wherever it might be most needed. And among
all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the cold premonition of it.
We were all perfect, but Somers’s lip trembled. Deprived for a fortnight
he was eager for the draft, and he was only twenty-six. His lip
trembled, and there, under the flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood
that of which there never could be again any denial, for those of us who
saw.
Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the consternation
that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to kill any further
suggestion of the truth? I don’t know. Anna Chichele’s unfinished
sentence dropped as if someone had given her a blow upon the mouth.
Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired carriage at the edge of the
platform. She walked mechanically after them, and would have stepped in
with it but for the sight of her own gleaming landau drawn up within a
yard or two, and the General waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it
with us, and I gave Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me
with her face all one question and her heart all one fear. She came in
twelve.
‘Have you seen it--long?’ Prepared as I was her directness was
demoralizing.
‘It isn’t a mortal disease.’
‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake--’
‘Well, not with certainty, for more than a month.’
She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped them
pitifully. ‘Couldn’t you do ANYthing?’
I looked at her, and she said at once, ‘No, of course you couldn’t.’
For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my trivial
share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting. ‘I am afraid
it will have to be faced,’ I said.
‘What will happen?’ Anna cried. ‘Oh, what will happen?’
‘Why not the usual thing?’ Lady Chichele looked up quickly as if at a
reminder. ‘The ambiguous attachment of the country,’ I went on, limping
but courageous, ‘half declared, half admitted, that leads vaguely
nowhere, and finally perishes as the man’s life enriches itself--the
thing we have seen so often.’
‘Whatever Judy is capable of it won’t be the usual thing. You know
that.’
I had to confess in silence that I did.
‘It flashed at me--the difference in her--in Bombay.’ She pressed her
lips together and then went on unsteadily. ‘In her eyes, her voice. She
was mannered, extravagant, elaborate. With me! All the way up I wondered
and worried. But I never thought--’ She stopped; her voice simply shook
itself into silence. I called a servant.
‘I am going to give you a good stiff peg,’ I said. I apologize for
the ‘peg,’ but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage on the
frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was
coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently
in the pauses.
‘Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and she
was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don’t know whether she
tried, but anyway, she failed. The covenant between them was written
on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom. She
dared not look at him. And the little conversation that they had--you
would have laughed--it was a comedy of stutters. The facile Mrs.
Harbottle!’
‘You do well to be angry, naturally,’ I said; ‘but it would be fatal to
let yourself go, Anna.’
‘Angry?’ Oh, I am SICK. The misery of it! The terror of it! If it were
anybody but Judy! Can’t you imagine the passion of a temperament like
that in a woman who has all these years been feeding on herself? I tell
you she will take him from my very arms. And he will go--to I dare not
imagine what catastrophe! Who can prevent it? Who can prevent it?’
‘There is you,’ I said.
Lady Chichele laughed hysterically. ‘I think you ought to say, “There
are you.” I--what can I do? Do you realize that it’s JUDY? My friend--my
other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of it? Do you think a
tie like that can be broken by an accident--by a misfortune? With it
all I ADORE Judy Harbottle. I love her, as I have always loved her,
and--it’s damnable, but I don’t know whether, whatever happened, I
wouldn’t go on loving her.’
‘Finish your peg,’ I said. She was sobbing.
‘Where I blame myself most,’ she went on, ‘is for not seeing in him
all that makes him mature to her--that makes her forget the absurd
difference between them, and take him simply and sincerely as I know she
does, as the contemporary of her soul if not of her body. I saw none of
that. Could I, as his mother? Would he show it to me? I thought him just
a charming boy, clever, too, of course, with nice instincts and well
plucked; we were always proud of that, with his delicate physique. Just
a boy! I haven’t yet stopped thinking how different he looks without his
curls. And I thought she would be just kind and gracious and delightful
to him because he was my son.’
‘There, of course,’ I said, ‘is the only chance.’
‘Where--what?’
‘He is your son.’
‘Would you have me appeal to her? Do you know I don’t think I could?’
‘Dear me, no. Your case must present itself. It must spring upon her
and grow before her out of your silence, and if you can manage it, your
confidence. There is a great deal, after all, remember, to hold her in
that. I can’t somehow imagine her failing you. Otherwise--’
Lady Chichele and I exchanged a glance of candid admission.
‘Otherwise she would be capable of sacrificing everything--everything.
Of gathering her life into an hour. I know. And do you know if the thing
were less impossible, less grotesque, I should not be so much afraid?
I mean that the ABSOLUTE indefensibility of it might bring her a
recklessness and a momentum which might--’
‘Send her over the verge,’ I said. ‘Well, go home and ask her to
dinner.’
There was a good deal more to say, of course, than I have thought proper
to put down here, but before Anna went I saw that she was keyed up to
the heroic part. This was none the less to her credit because it was the
only part, the dictation of a sense of expediency that despaired while
it dictated. The noble thing was her capacity to take it, and, amid
all that warred in her, to carry it out on the brave high lines of her
inspiration. It seemed a literal inspiration, so perfectly calculated
that it was hard not to think sometimes, when one saw them together,
that Anna had been lulled into a simple resumption of the old relation.
Then from the least thing possible--the lift of an eyelid--it flashed
upon one that between these two every moment was dramatic, and one took
up the word with a curious sense of detachment and futility, but with
one’s heart beating like a trip-hammer with the mad excitement of it.
The acute thing was the splendid sincerity of Judy Harbottle’s response.
For days she was profoundly on her guard, then suddenly she seemed to
become practically, vividly aware of what I must go on calling the great
chance, and passionately to fling herself upon it. It was the strangest
cooperation without a word or a sign to show it conscious--a playing
together for stakes that could not be admitted, a thing to hang upon
breathless. It was there between them--the tenable ground of what they
were to each other: they occupied it with almost an equal eye upon
the tide that threatened, while I from my mainland tower also made an
anguished calculation of the chances. I think in spite of the menace,
they found real beatitudes; so keenly did they set about the business
that it brought them moments finer than any they could count in the
years that were behind them, the flat and colourless years that were
gone. Once or twice the wild idea even visited me that it was, after
all, the projection of his mother in Somers that had so seized Judy
Harbottle, and that the original was all that was needed to help the
happy process of detachment. Somers himself at the time was a good deal
away on escort duty: they had a clear field.
I can not tell exactly when--between Mrs. Harbottle and myself--it
became a matter for reference more or less overt, I mean her defined
problem, the thing that went about between her and the sun. It will be
imagined that it did not come up like the weather; indeed, it was hardly
ever to be envisaged and never to be held; but it was always there, and
out of our joint consciousness it would sometimes leap and pass, without
shape or face. It might slip between two sentences, or it might remain,
a dogging shadow, for an hour. Or a week would go by while, with
a strong hand, she held it out of sight altogether and talked of
Anna--always of Anna. Her eyes shone with the things she told me then:
she seemed to keep herself under the influence of them as if they had
the power of narcotics. At the end of a time like this she turned to me
in the door as she was going and stood silent, as if she could neither
go nor stay. I had been able to make nothing of her that afternoon: she
had seemed preoccupied with the pattern of the carpet which she traced
continually with her riding crop, and finally I, too, had relapsed. She
sat haggard, with the fight forever in her eyes, and the day seemed to
sombre about her in her corner. When she turned in the door, I looked up
with sudden prescience of a crisis.
‘Don’t jump,’ she said, ‘it was only to tell you that I have persuaded
Robert to apply for furlough. Eighteen months. From the first of April.
Don’t touch me.’ I suppose I made a movement towards her. Certainly
I wanted to throw my arms about her; with the instinct, I suppose, to
steady her in her great resolution.
‘At the end of that time, as you know, he will be retired. I had some
trouble, he is so keen on the regiment, but I think--I have succeeded.
You might mention it to Anna.’
‘Haven’t you?’ sprang past my lips.
‘I can’t. It would be like taking an oath to tell her, and--I can’t take
an oath to go. But I mean to.’
‘There is nothing to be said,’ I brought out, feeling indeed that there
was not. ‘But I congratulate you, Judy.’
‘No, there is nothing to be said. And you congratulate me, no doubt!’
She stood for a moment quivering in the isolation she made for herself;
and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate trafficking
of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster. The price was too
heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of all that had led
her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine shoulders like fifty
other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps, because I held myself silent and
remote and she had no emotion of fear from me, she did not immediately
go.
‘It will beat itself away, I suppose, like the rest of the unreasonable
pain of the world,’ she said at last; and that, of course, brought me to
her side. ‘Things will go back to their proportions. This,’ she
touched an open rose, ‘will claim its beauty again. And life will
become--perhaps--what it was before.’ Still I found nothing to say,
I could only put my arm in hers and walk with her to the edge of the
veranda where the syce was holding her horse. She stroked the animal’s
neck. ‘Everything in me answered him,’ she informed me, with the grave
intelligence of a patient who relates a symptom past. As she took the
reins she turned to me again. ‘His spirit came to mine like a homing
bird,’ she said, and in her smile even the pale reflection of happiness
was sweet and stirring. It left me hanging in imagination over the
source and the stream, a little blessed in the mere understanding.
Too much blessed for confidence, or any safe feeling that the source
was bound. Rather I saw it leaping over every obstacle, flashing to its
destiny. As I drove to the Club next day I decided that I would not
tell Anna Chichele of Colonel Harbottle’s projected furlough. If to Judy
telling her would be like taking an oath that they would go, to me it
would at least be like assuming sponsorship for their intention. That
would be heavy indeed. From the first of April--we were then in March.
Anna would hear it soon enough from the General, would see it soon
enough, almost, in the ‘Gazette’, when it would have passed into
irrecoverable fact. So I went by her with locked lips, kept out of the
way of those eyes of the mother that asked and asked, and would have
seen clear to any depth, any hiding-place of knowledge like that. As I
pulled up at the Club I saw Colonel Harbottle talking concernedly to the
wife of our Second-in-Command, and was reminded that I had not heard
for some days how Major Watkins was going on. So I, too, approached Mrs.
Watkins in her victoria to ask. Robert Harbottle kindly forestalled her
reply. ‘Hard luck, isn’t it? Watkins has been ordered home at once. Just
settled into their new house, too--last of the kit came up from Calcutta
yesterday, didn’t it, Mrs. Watkins? But it’s sound to go--Peshawur is
the worst hole in Asia to shake off dysentery in.’
We agreed upon this and discussed the sale-list of her new furniture
that Mrs. Watkins would have to send round the station, and considered
the chances of a trooper--to the Watkinses with two children and not
a penny but his pay it did make it easier not to have to go by a
liner--and Colonel Harbottle and I were halfway to the reading-room
before the significance of Major Watkins’s sick-leave flashed upon me.
‘But this,’ I cried, ‘will make a difference to your plans. You won’t--’
‘Be able to ask for that furlough Judy wants. Rather not. I’m afraid
she’s disappointed--she was tremendously set on going--but it doesn’t
matter tuppence to me.’
I sought out Mrs. Harbottle, at the end of the room. She looked radiant;
she sat on the edge of the table and swung a light-hearted heel. She
was talking to people who in themselves were a witness to high spirits,
Captain the Hon. Freddy Gisborne, Mrs. Flamboys.
At sight of me her face clouded, fell suddenly into the old weary lines.
It made me feel somehow a little sick; I went back to my cart and drove
home.
For more than a week I did not see her except when I met her riding
with Somers Chichele along the peach-bordered road that leads to the
Wazir-Bagh. The trees were all in blossom and made a picture that might
well catch dreaming hearts into a beatitude that would correspond.
The air was full of spring and the scent of violets, those wonderful
Peshawur violets that grow in great clumps, tall and double. Gracious
clouds came and trailed across the frontier barrier; blue as an idyll it
rose about us; the city smiled in her gardens.
She had it all in her face, poor Judy, all the spring softness and more,
the morning she came, intensely controlled, to announce her defeat. I
was in the drawing-room doing the flowers; I put them down to look at
her. The wonderful telegram from Simla arrived--that was the wonderful
part--at the same time; I remembered how the red, white, and blue turban
of the telegraph peon bobbed up behind her shoulder in the veranda. I
signed and laid it on the table; I suppose it seemed hardly likely that
anything could be important enough to interfere at the moment with my
impression of what love, unbound and victorious, could do with a face I
thought I knew. Love sat there careless of the issue, full of delight.
Love proclaimed that between him and Judith Harbottle it was all
over--she had met him, alas, in too narrow a place--and I marvelled
at the paradox with which he softened every curve and underlined every
vivid note of personality in token that it had just begun. He sat there
in great serenity, and though I knew that somewhere behind lurked a
vanquished woman, I saw her through such a radiance that I could not be
sure of seeing her at all...
She went back to the very first of it; she seemed herself intensely
interested in the facts; and there is no use in pretending that, while
she talked, the moral consideration was at all present with me either;
it wasn’t. Her extremity was the thing that absorbed us; she even,
in tender thoughtfulness, diagnosed it from its definite beautiful
beginning.
‘It was there, in my heart, when I woke one morning, exquisite and
strange, the assurance of a gift. How had it come there, while I slept?
I assure you when I closed my eyes it did not exist for me... Yes, of
course, I had seen him, but only somewhere at dinner... As the day went
on it changed--it turned into a clear pool, into a flower. And I--think
of my not understanding! I was pleased with it! For a long time, for
days, I never dreamed that it could be anything but a little secret joy.
Then, suddenly--oh, I had not been perceiving enough!--it was in all my
veins, a tide, an efflorescence, a thing of my very life.
‘Then--it was a little late--I understood, and since--
‘I began by hating it--being furious, furious--and afraid, too.
Sometimes it was like a low cloud, hovering and travelling always with
me, sometimes like a beast of prey that went a little way off and sat
looking at me....
‘I have--done my best. But there is nothing to do, to kill, to abolish.
How can I say, “I will not let you in,” when it is already there? How
can I assume indifference when this thing is imposed upon every moment
of my day? And it has grown so sweet--the longing--that--isn’t it
strange?--I could more willingly give him up than the desire of him.
That seems as impossible to part with as life itself.’
She sat reflective for a moment, and I saw her eyes slowly fill.
Don’t--don’t CRY, Judy,’ I faltered, wanting to horribly, myself.
She smiled them dry.
‘Not now. But I am giving myself, I suppose, to many tears.’
‘God help you,’ I said. What else was there to say?
‘There is no such person,’ she replied, gaily. ‘There is only a blessed
devil.’
‘Then you go all the way--to the logical conclusion?’
She hardly hesitated. ‘To the logical conclusion. What poor words!’
‘May I ask--when?’
‘I should like to tell you that quite definitely, and I think I can. The
English mail leaves tonight.’
‘And you have arranged to take it?’
‘We have arranged nothing. Do you know’--she smiled as if at the fresh
colours of an idyll--‘we have not even come to the admission? There has
been between us no word, no vision. Ah, we have gone in bonds, and dumb!
Hours we have had, exquisite hours of the spirit, but never a moment of
the heart, a moment confessed. It was mine to give--that moment, and he
has waited--I know--wondering whether perhaps it would ever come. And
today--we are going for a ride today, and I do not think we shall come
back.’
‘O Judy,’ I cried, catching at her sleeve, ‘he is only a boy!’
‘There were times when I thought that conclusive. Now the misery of it
has gone to sleep; don’t waken it. It pleases me to believe that the
years are a convention. I never had any dignity, you know, and I seem
to have missed the moral deliverance. I only want--oh, you know what I
want. Why don’t you open your telegram?’
I had been folding and fingering the brown envelope as if it had been a
scrap of waste paper.
‘It is probably from Mrs. Watkins about the victoria,’ I said,
feeling its profound irrelevance. ‘I wired an offer to her in Bombay.
However’--and I read the telegram, the little solving telegram from
Army Headquarters. I turned my back on her to read it again, and then I
replaced it very carefully and put it in my pocket. It was a moment to
take hold of with both hands, crying on all one’s gods for steadiness.
‘How white you look!’ said Mrs. Harbottle, with concern. ‘Not bad news?’
‘On the contrary, excellent news. Judy, will you stay to lunch?’
She looked at me, hesitating. ‘Won’t it seem rather a compromise on your
part? When you ought to be rousing the city--’
‘I don’t intend to rouse the city,’ I said.
‘I have given you the chance.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, grimly, ‘but the only real favour you can do me is
to stay to lunch.’ It was then just on one.
‘I’ll stay,’ she said, ‘if you will promise not to make any sort of
effort. I shouldn’t mind, but it would distress you.’
‘I promise absolutely,’ I said, and ironical joy rose up in me, and the
telegram burned in my pocket.
She would talk of it, though I found it hard to let her go on, knowing
and knowing and knowing as I did that for that day at least it could not
be. There was very little about herself that she wanted to tell me; she
was there confessed a woman whom joy had overcome; it was understood
that we both accepted that situation. But in the details which she asked
me to take charge of it was plain that she also kept a watchful eye upon
fate--matters of business.
We were in the drawing-room. The little round clock in its Armritsar
case marked half-past three. Judy put down her coffee cup and rose to
go. As she glanced at the clock the light deepened in her eyes, and I,
with her hand in mine, felt like an agent of the Destroyer--for it was
half-past three--consumed myself with fear lest the blow had miscarried.
Then as we stood, suddenly, the sound of hoofs at a gallop on the drive,
and my husband threw himself off at the door and tore through the hall
to his room; and in the certainty that overwhelmed me even Judy, for an
instant, stood dim and remote.
‘Major Jim seems to be in a hurry,’ said Mrs. Harbottle, lightly. ‘I
have always liked your husband. I wonder whether he will say tomorrow
that he always liked me.’
‘Dear Judy, I don’t think he will be occupied with you tomorrow.’
‘Oh, surely, just a little, if I go tonight.’
‘You won’t go tonight.’
She looked at me helplessly. I felt as if I were insisting upon her
abasement instead of her salvation. ‘I wish--’
‘You’re not going--you’re not! You can’t! Look!’
I pulled it out of my pocket and thrust it at her--the telegram.
It came, against every regulation, from my good friend the Deputy
Adjutant-General, in Simla, and it read, ‘Row Khurram 12th probably
ordered front three hours’ time.’
Her face changed--how my heart leaped to see it change!--and that took
command there which will command trampling, even in the women of the
camp, at news like this.
‘What luck that Bob couldn’t take his furlough!’ she exclaimed,
single-thoughted. ‘But you have known this for hours’--there was even
something of the Colonel’s wife, authority, incisiveness. ‘Why didn’t
you tell me? Ah--I see.’
I stood before her abashed, and that was ridiculous, while she measured
me as if I presented in myself the woman I took her to be. ‘It wasn’t
like that,’ she said. I had to defend myself. ‘Judy,’ I said, ‘if you
weren’t in honour bound to Anna, how could I know that you would be in
honour bound to the regiment? There was a train at three.’
‘I beg to assure you that you have overcalculated,’ said Mrs. Harbottle.
Her eyes were hard and proud. ‘And I am not sure’--a deep red swept over
her face, a man’s blush--‘in the light of this I am not sure that I am
not in honour bound to Anna.’
We had reached the veranda, and at her signal her coachman drove quickly
up. ‘You have kept me here three hours when there was the whole of
Bob’s kit to see to,’ she said, as she flung herself in; ‘you might have
thought of that.’
It was a more than usually tedious campaign, and Colonel Robert
Harbottle was ambushed and shot in a place where one must believe pure
boredom induced him to take his men. The incident was relieved, the
newspapers said--and they are seldom so clever in finding relief for
such incidents--by the dash and courage shown by Lieutenant Chichele,
who, in one of those feats which it has lately been the fashion to
criticize, carried the mortally wounded body of his Colonel out of range
at conspicuous risk of depriving the Queen of another officer. I helped
Judy with her silent packing; she had forgiven me long before that; and
she settled almost at once into the flat in Chelsea which has since been
credited with so delightful an atmosphere, went back straight into her
own world. I have always kept her first letters about it, always shall.
For months after, while the expedition still raged after snipers and
rifle-thieves, I discussed with Lady Chichele the probable outcome of it
all. I have sometimes felt ashamed of leaping as straight as I did with
Anna to what we thought the inevitable. I based no calculation on all
Mrs. Harbottle had gone back to, just as I had based no calculation
on her ten years’ companionship in arms when I kept her from the three
o’clock train. This last was a retrospection in which Anna naturally
could not join me; she never knew, poor dear, how fortunate as to its
moment was the campaign she deplored, and nothing to this day can have
disturbed her conviction that the bond she was at such magnificent pains
to strengthen, held against the strain, as long, happily, as the supreme
need existed. ‘How right you were!’ she often said. ‘She did, after
all, love me best, dear, wonderful Judy!’ Her distress about poor
Robert Harbottle was genuine enough, but one could not be surprised at
a certain ambiguity; one tear for Robert, so to speak, and two for her
boy. It could hardly be, for him, a marriage after his mother’s heart.
And she laid down with some emphasis that Somers was brilliantly
entitled to all he was likely to get--which was natural, too...
I had been from the beginning so much ‘in it’ that Anna showed me, a
year later, though I don’t believe she liked doing it, the letter in
part of which Mrs. Harbottle shall finally excuse herself.
‘Somers will give you this,’ I read, ‘and with it take back your son.
You will not find, I know, anything grotesque in the charming enthusiasm
with which he has offered his life to me; you understand too well, you
are too kind. And if you wonder that I can so render up a dear thing
which I might keep and would once have taken, think how sweet in the
desert is the pool, and how barren was the prospect from Balclutha.’
It was like her to abandon in pride a happiness that asked so much less
humiliation; I don’t know why, but it was like her. And of course, when
one thought of it, she had consulted all sorts of high expediencies. But
I sat silent with remembrance, quieting a pang in my heart, trying not
to calculate how much it had cost Judy Harbottle to take her second
chance.
End of Project Gutenberg’s The Pool in the Desert, by Sara Jeanette Duncan