The new hath come, and now the old retires:--
And now the soul stands in a vague, intense
Expectancy and anguish of suspense,
On the dim chamber threshold....--SAROJINI NAIDU.
"Tired of studying, my pale lotus-bud? No need yet to do too much.
We are here for rest!"
Sir Lakshman Singh put out a welcoming hand and drew his daughter
towards him. A creature of infinite grace she seemed in her
primrose-pale dress and _sari_, that clashed oddly with the setting
of a modern hotel sitting-room. Not tall; though her slenderness and
uprightness, as of a young palm, gave an illusion of height, and her
movements had the leisured, rhythmic quality that comes to fullest
flower in the East.
Now she crouched kneeling, with a small, glad sigh, by the great
arm-chair in which her father sat; his own light English suit and
jade-green turban aptly symbolic of the dissonance within. At the
meeting of their eyes soul spoke plainly to soul: too plainly for the
man's peace of mind. He, like Sinclair, had his doubts about the
scheme, accepted by him as the one way out of an _impasse_, typical
of India as she is to-day.
His wife, orthodox to the bone, had rebelled fiercely against the
Anglicizing of even one daughter out of three. But for a time the
will of her husband had prevailed. The child had been his own, to
make or mar, till the question of betrothal could no longer be
deferred. Then did outraged orthodoxy assert itself with power. For
there be two autocrats in the Hindu home: the mother and the family
Guru; the holy man, who carries good or ill in the hollow of his
hand. These, between them, had discovered a bridegroom, elderly and
dissolute but wealthy and of unimpeachable caste; a sinner rigidly
conservative, whose eagle-nosed mother might be trusted to reclaim a
spoilt daughter-in-law and cure her of new-fangled follies. Reports
of Lilamani's beauty fired the bridegroom to impatience; and the
matter was formally set on foot.
But they reckoned without the daughter of new India, and the blood of
Rajput fighters in her veins. Lilamani--proud, wilful, and lightly
disciplined--would have none of him; and her father, after
heart-searchings and vain pleading with the autocrats, had refused
his consent. Followed a slow, implacable battle of wills, till the
girl's health gave way under the strain, and Lakshman Singh,
distraught with anxiety, had insisted upon calling in Miss
Hammond--caste or no. It was then that Audrey had seen her chance of
enlisting an Eastern recruit. Why should the girl marry at all? Why
not complete her unorthodox education by studying medicine at home,
and returning, in due time, to help those who were so pitifully
unable to help themselves? It was a daring suggestion: but Sir
Lakshman had caught at it, as a drowning man at a straw. To
Lilamani--bruised and broken from the storm--it seemed as if a gate
had been opened into Paradise. And Audrey Hammond had her way.
Thus it had come about that at last--in the teeth of stormy
reproaches and bitter opposition--the three peaceful-looking rebels
had set sail for France and the sun-smitten headland where Audrey
herself had recruited after hospital training. Such heroic snapping
of chains is still comparatively rare among high-caste Hindu women;
and Lakshman Singh--for all his admiration of the best in English
thought and life--felt not a little anxious as to the ultimate fate
of this daughter, who was in truth as well as in name his Jewel of
Delight. In the beginning it was much that health and gladness once
more had their home in her cheeks and eyes. For the rest, he was
content to wait, and watch the confluence of her clear spirit with
the complex spirit of the West. And at least they were together
without let or hindrance: which sufficed.
He slipped an arm round her crouching form; and she, with the light
laugh of a child, leaned nearer, one tapering finger at her lips.
"Breathe it not to Audrey, father mine. But all thought of study has
been far from me. The book she lent me had ugly words in it; and in
all this loveliness they seemed to hurt my mind, even as an ink-blot
on my _sari_ would hurt my eyes." Slipping her fingers beneath a
gold-flecked corner, she regarded it with grave tenderness, then
turned to him again, her sensitive face alight. "Oh, father--how it
is beautiful, the way of the sun upon the sea! As if for very love,
he had flung himself into the deep blue heart of it; and the sea
godlings had bewitched him into a million golden butterflies with
tireless wings that yet cannot bear them aloft----"
"And was that the sum total of your studies, child of learning?" the
man asked, smiling at the quaint conceit. "Was there not a book
also? Twice I passed under your balcony. But you never looked up,
nor even turned the leaf; and I thought I would speak to Miss Hammond
that until you were stronger she should not press you too hard."
"Kindest! It is true there was a book. But not hers. The way of
the brain had wearied me. So I followed instead the way of my own
heart--and I was happy."
"That is always good hearing," spoke the father, whose idolatry stood
in Audrey Hammond's light. "Yet, remember, Light of my Life, the way
of the heart too seldom winds up the hill of achievement."
"It is the way of all true women, none the less," answered she of
seventeen summers with a low-toned passion of conviction, that was in
itself a tragedy, seeing that her own feet were set upon a stonier
path.
Words and tones smote the father's heart. Bending his head to hers,
he spoke softly in his own tongue. "Lilamani, dost repent?"
And she, in the same tongue, while sudden tears pricked her eyeballs:
"Nay. I chose the lesser of two evils, and--I look not back. That
is for weaklings: not for the daughter of Lakshman Singh. But--if
there might have been talk of another bridegroom----"
"Child, child--that I feared. I spoke of it to thy mother. But thou
knowest how it is. When a woman and a priest are agreed not even
Durga the Ten-handed can prevail against them. Moreover----"
"Yes--I know--I know----" And now it was upon his lips that her
light hand was laid. "Of what avail to speak? There was no help but
this; and I have peace and freedom and _thee_. Enough of
trouble----" She waved it aside as if an actual presence shadowed
her, and her sudden relapse into English had the effect of a snapped
thread. "Better a hundred times to talk of the sun and the sea and
of my deep, deep studies! Look!" She drew from under her drapery a
small volume bound in fawn and gold. "What would Audrey say? No
dusty book about cobwebs in the House of Life and how to brush them
away. But my wonder-woman of India--Cornelia Sorabji! Her words are
never ugly. Even upon the hard way of the brains she makes flowers
peep between the stones. And why I did not turn the leaf was because
I was reading--no, dreaming--over and over, the words of her 'Wise
Man, Truth-Named,' when he tried to make 'a clearing in the jungle'
where they two might sit and speak of 'the big-little things.'"
He smiled at her young enthusiasm, her musical flow of speech.
"What words, child? I have forgot. There are too many words in
these days, when the wayside fountains run ink; and the mills grind
out books for flour, so that a man's brain cannot hold a tithe of all
that passes through it. But the big-little things are always good to
remember. Show me----"
"No need to show. I have it all here," touching her forehead, "in
letters of gold upon a scroll of blue." And closing her eyes, "the
better to read," she spoke, half in recitative, with the grave
simplicity of a child praying at its mother's knee.
"'God! By what sign shall we know him? How conceive? Imagine only
light and light and light, everywhere pulsing, throbbing. From the
beginning was that and only that; and that was God. But with God
exists the power and mercy of God; not separate; but as closely
allied as ... the scent of the rose to the rose, as the colour of a
flower to the flower. Men talk of one God, as if there could be two
or three. There is just God--the All-pervading, the heart of the
heart of Beauty, the great first Flame which lights every flame that
leaps into life. Light and light and light; brilliance at the soul
of brilliance ... the God-spark in every soul, in everything created
... only by recognizing this shall we recognize God. There is no
other way!'" Then, lifting her gaze to his, she added, still softly,
but in the tone of every day: "And the Wise Man says also: if we do
not keep our windows clean, and the light cannot get through--is that
the fault of the flame? Was he not rightly 'Truth-Named'?"
Her father's answer showed in his eyes, while his hand caressed her
brow.
"So small a casket to hold such great thoughts," said he. For being
a man--even though of the religion-breathing East--he could not
readily speak of such things.
Then they started, almost as if they had been lovers. For there was
a hand upon the door.
It proved to be Kali Das--faithful through all vicissitudes, even
unto loss of caste; and he brought the Indian mail, the second since
their coming. It was a day early, and Lilamani caught her breath at
sight of the thin envelopes. A little ache of home-sickness
contracted her heart, not for the first time. Lakshman Singh, being
a man of note in Hyderabad, had much official correspondence. But
there was only one envelope out of half a dozen that really
mattered--to them both.
In a silence eager, yet anxious, they explored its contents--a long
letter from Ram Singh, eldest son and brother, and a short one in
laboured English from fourteen-year-old Vimala, smuggled doubtless
without her mother's knowledge. A quaint, childish effusion it was.
The small writer hovered incoherently between envy at her sister's
daring, a pretty self-importance at her own recent betrothal to an
unknown fairy prince; in her case, happily, a young one. Lilamani
smiled as she read, and was glad, though a needle-pointed arrow
pricked her heart. She also envied. It is the way of life.
Then she glanced at her father, who was scanning his son's letter
hungrily, yet with clouded brow. Feeling her gaze upon him, he
looked up, and there was a moment of silent communing before the girl
said wistfully: "No message from Mataji*--even yet?" For Mataji,
obdurate to the last, had refused to bestow her blessing on the
impious quest.
* Honoured Mother.
"It will come in time, little one--in time----" he answered,
enclosing her hand in his. "Ram Singh writes that she is well. For
the rest--quarrels and worries the minute my back is turned." And he
held out the sheet for her to see.
While they pored over it, head close to head, Audrey Hammond softly
opened the door; shutting it again yet more softly, even as Lilamani
stirred, and her father glanced at the clock.
"Lucky these came so early," said he. "By writing to-night, I may
just catch the out-going mail. You can send a few words to Vimala
also. The child is happy?"
"As a young green parrot in love-time," Lilamani answered lightly.
"I will speak my few words to her out there on the balcony, that I
may watch the great sea fall asleep at the passing of the sun."
"Little idolater!" he chided, as she went; and she shook her head,
smiling back at him over her shoulder.
The sun's passing was near at hand now. Lilamani's "butterflies" no
longer flittered on the waters. The faultlessly-carven coast line of
the Esterelles--so close and varied an hour earlier--seemed to have
stepped backward miles upon miles into a wonderland of golden mist,
that translated them from solid rock and stone into dream-hills of a
strangely thin, clean outline that enhanced their delicacy of shape
and hue. At their feet the great sea dozed already. The fine light
wind of the Riviera scarce stirred it to a responsive ripple. Truly
a sea of seas for colour! It was as if amethyst, jade, and sapphire
had been melted in the crucible of some giant alchemyst, now one
prevailing, now the other, as the sun slowly gathered up his gift of
light. To Lilamani, whose passion for colour made it almost a form
of self-expression, the ever-varying beauty of it all seemed each
evening fraught with some new meaning; and with an indrawn breath of
content she sank into her chair. Her few words must be swiftly writ
before the coming of that supreme moment when--in poetic Eastern
speech--"the Sun drops into the Sea and splashes up stars for spray,"
and silence passes over the earth like a presence, unseen yet
piercingly felt.
From the folds of her bodice she drew out her father's latest gift, a
gold fountain pen, set with one flashing diamond--her name-stone, the
"jewel of delight"; and for a while it sped over the paper, keeping
pace with her thoughts, that transported her, as she wrote, back into
the sun-splashed courtyard whose four walls had been, for seventeen
years, the boundary lines of her actual world.
So essentially is an Indian woman the product of that hidden
sanctuary of home, and all it stands for, that a sudden uprooting
involves the snapping of a hundred delicate fibres, the entire
readjustment of thought, feeling, and conduct to the complex,
unstable elements of the outer world. And at seventeen a child of
the fulgent East is already a woman; which complicates matters not a
little, in more ways than one. So it was with Lilamani, a creature
saturate with the poetic symbolism, the passion and religious fervour
of her race, reared on age-old traditions and ideals not to be
eradicated by a change of continents and a few years at college.
Details, these last, too often overlooked by the fervent
progressivist, who "reforms" in haste and is tripped up by them at
leisure.
The first ecstasy of escape, the first bewildering revelation of the
fullness and beauty of earth, the marvel of riding upon the limitless
ocean, "as it were upon an horse," had left no space in the theatre
of her sensations for the ache of uprooted fibres, the sense of a
familiar foothold gone. Like a child in its first crowd, she clung
to the two hands she knew, and at night put herself to sleep with
tales of the wonders she would achieve when she fared back as
torch-bearer to the land she loved. Audrey Hammond had turned her
racial idealism to good account.
But now in the quieter life of the hotel, where as yet they kept
mainly to themselves, there was leisure to feel the pain of those
severed fibres, the vague, insistent yearning for the lost things of
home; leisure to wonder if her venture were foredoomed to failure by
a mother's blessing withheld. And the beginnings of higher study
proved less inspiring than she had hoped. The natural poet in her
recoiled from dry facts set forth in Latinized English, with neither
glow of colour nor gleam of fancy to lighten the grey page. Studies
with her father, who had trained her ear to the music of written
speech had set a halo about the mere word. She discovered now how
much hung upon the subject--and the teacher. For all her fine
qualities, Audrey lacked the peculiar sympathy and insight that can
make all learning a delight. For her a fact was a fact. Its utility
sufficed. With Lilamani it was otherwise. Hence the beginning of
disillusion. But because she had good grit in her, and the Indian
woman's heritage of self-repression she kept silence about these
small troubles; nor dreamed that any guessed at their existence.
And while she sat writing, the sun slipped out of sight unheeded. A
small shiver, like the breeze of a passing spirit, chilled earth and
sea, where amethyst and jade had given place to sapphire, and that in
turn to indigo and grey. The girl, who had begun the last page of
her letter, looked up expectant. But to-night the sun's passing was
a tender thing. No fairy islands in a lake of gold; no "crimson
blaring of his shawms." The sky, emptied of his presence, flushed
delicately, like a maid under her first kiss. A trailing banner of
cloud that hovered near, caught the wild rose tint and held it, while
light and colour ebbed slowly, till all was grey--sea and sky and the
Esterelles between--a cool, delicate grey, as of a dove's wing; not
one tone, but a harmony of half-tones, a nocturne in a minor key. In
the upper grey a memory of palest blue; in the lower grey shimmerings
of jade and indigo, changing near the skyline to a luminous pallor,
neither silver nor white; the hills themselves pearl-grey
transparencies, as if washed in by the brush of a master.
Then, as she sat gazing, her round chin cradled in her hand, behold a
change--an aftermath of life before day's ultimate end. Grey above
and grey below were slowly transfused with rose, so faint, yet
all-pervading that it was as if air and water blushed. No lines of
light, no hint of the sun's presence, only this ghost of a blush that
faded softly as it came, leaving, at last, one grey; and across it
the twin islands of the gulf lay like a smudge of Indian ink.
Lilamani sat on, still as any Yogi of her own land, the gates of her
receptive soul flung wide to the inflowing message of this strange
grey sunset; a message of peace shot through with the rose of hope.
Such, at least, was her fanciful belief; and there is much virtue in
belief, however fanciful. In her case, it quieted a new, unreasoning
ache that she had vainly willed to disregard, healed the arrow-pricks
dealt her by Vimala's childish chatter of new bangles and the
betrothed. With a deep breath of relief she looked down at the blank
sheet upon her knee, vaguely wishful to crystallize the music of the
spheres into the halting music of her own verse. But the ancestral
spirit of meditation was still strong upon her. The white emptiness
of the paper held her gaze, shutting out the sense of things actual;
and in place of verse living memory-pictures, real and clear as
crystal visions, moved before her eyes.
The familiar, white-walled courtyard with its central tank and
deep-pillared verandah glowed beneath its turquoise dome. In the
blue-grey shadow of an arch sat Vimala and little Radha chattering
like a pair of minas, and outside in full sunshine the grey crane
walked delicately, and her own peacock sunned his jewelled tail with
the self-conscious airs and graces that she loved. Along the flagged
pathway by the tank, scarlet of poinsettia, and blood-red hibiscus
flowers made splashes of passionate colour, while over against the
house itself a gold mohur tree flung out cedar-like branches ablaze
with orange-golden bloom.
From without came the sound of hoofs and wheels and the voices of
passing men. Then a small shiver ran through her, for to the ears of
her soul came clearly the heart-stirring wail of conches from the
temple hard by; and a figure that she knew for her own, in its simple
home draperies, came out to listen, to bask in the fragrance of
champak and neem.
But now all sense of illusion was lost. She was there, feeling,
seeing, hearing; all else forgotten as though it were not. Next it
was Mataji herself who came forth--plump, practical, and a trifle
sharp of tongue; but yet--Mataji, guardian spirit of the home,
honoured and beloved by all. She had come out to scold her dreamy
daughter--no infrequent happening--for careless rendering of her
morning duties, and worse than all, for having insufficiently watered
the sacred _tulsi_ that languished already from the heat. She felt
the compelling hand on her shoulder, felt it so forcibly that she
started and turned with an actual shiver, a feeling as of a light
blown out.
And lo--it was Audrey's hand that held her shoulder, Audrey's voice
that reproved her in kindly practical tones.
"My dear child--are you crazy, sitting out again alone in the dark?
You know it made you feverish the other night."
"But I love it so," the culprit murmured lamely, as the other with
gentle professional deftness touched her wrist and brow.
"Of course you do, dear. But health must stand first. Besides, it's
nearly dinner-time. Come to my room. I'll give you some quinine."
Lilamani gathered up her unfinished letter and obeyed.
There were moments when Audrey's tone and opinions faintly recalled
Mataji herself. Both were capable and decisive; both slaves of a
fetish. As the last word of Mataji was _dastur_, so the last word of
Audrey was health; and to-night, jerked abruptly out of her vision,
only to be confronted with quinine, this gentle-mannered girl (who
had bought freedom from _dastur_ at a heavier price than she guessed)
came near to wondering whether, in truth, she had but exchanged one
form of tyranny for another, after all.