“Shall I like India, Captain Bruce?”
“Sure to—all women do. But you’ll jolly well hate Sumnee. It’s the
jumping-off place.”
“Shall I?” Mrs. Crespin repeated, turning a little to Crossland.
“Like India, Mrs. Crespin? Most women do, more than like it. Bruce is
right there. But I’m not sure about you.”
“Why?”
“You are different,” he said simply.
“Why shall I dislike Sumnee?” she asked them both.
“Good Lord!” Bruce answered.
“My hat!” Crossland said.
“As bad as all that?” Lucilla said gayly.
“Worse,” they both answered her instantly.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Tony?” Mrs. Crespin asked severely.
“You mightn’t have come,” her husband told her, “and I rather wanted you
to.”
Lucilla blushed.
“Don’t mind us,” Bruce said encouragingly.
Dr. Crossland looked out over the water.
But it was to him that she said, “Please tell me about Sumnee.”
“Well,” he began, “it’s hot.”
“Of course,” Lucilla interrupted him scornfully, “it’s India. Even I
know that. Even in Surrey we have heard that it is warm in the Punjab.”
“You have heard no lie,” Bruce said stoutly. “Surrey! Good Lord—to be
in Surrey when the marrow’s in bloom and the cabbage in fruit, and the
starch stands to its collar! Hot! Hot isn’t the word.”
“It is not,” Crespin agreed.
“Is Sumnee so _very_ hot, Dr. Crossland?”
“Scorching!”
“Go on,” she prompted.
“Well—there’s nothing to tell—really there isn’t. There’s nothing to
describe, because there’s nothing there. There’s scarcely a tree.”
“I shall make a garden at once, if we haven’t one.”
“You will not,” Bruce murmured.
“Go on, Dr. Crossland. There must be something to tell me.”
“And there isn’t a decent house.”
“But there must be. We don’t live in tents, do we?”
“We live in mud huts,” Bruce said softly, “and live on goat.”
“But roast kid is perfect. Daddy and I particularly like it.”
“In Sumnee it is—imperfect,” Bruce remarked grimly.
But though they railed, Lucilla Crespin caught a warm undercurrent of
affection, of pleasant memories and zesty anticipations in the raillery.
Every woman owns to liking India greatly; most men pose as disliking
it—while they are there; but ask the Anglo-Indian “home now for good,”
when you run across him in the Strand, just there at Charing Cross where
we all meet each other sooner or later—and he’ll tell you, if he’s
English-honest, that he is _homesick_ for India, rains, droughts,
natives and all; and watch the face of the long-service Anglo-Indian
going home for the last time, going home to inheritance, increased
fortune and ease perhaps—watch his face and his eyes as the P. and O.
or troop-ship pulls off from Bombay or Madras or down the Hugli, and he
takes his long last look at the sweltering East! You will not need to
ask him.
They were having afternoon tea on deck, Malta two days behind them—the
sun-awnings were up now, and ices were served at eleven and three—and
Crespin said as he held his cup up for her to fill it again, “Never
mind, Lu, you _shall_ have a garden of sorts, and these blighters shall
dig it, while you and I sit under the veranda punkah and eat mango-ices
and stone-cold pumelos. You shall have all the comfy home things, every
one of them. And perhaps you won’t quite hate poor old rotten Sumnee. I
shall like Sumnee _now_.”
“You, you lucky beggar—of course you will. Who wouldn’t, in your
shoes?” Bruce grumbled. “But perhaps we’ll like it better too—now—” he
added more cheerfully. “And we’ll teach you how to play parlor polo, and
how to make toothsome _chupatties_ out of mud and cocoanut fat, and how
to eat mangoes without a bib on, and, if you’ll let us, come to tea
every day, and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner quite often, we’ll give you
curly daggers and beetle-work lace curtains and bunches of cactus
dahlias and crushed torquoise things from the Vale of Kashmir, Lucknow
enamels—fish-pattern ones, Bokhara cloths, Poona trays, Benares
brass-work, Deccan snakes (tin, not live ones) and peacock-feather fans,
thousands and thousands of peacock feathers, painted leather Bikanir
vases and glass bangles, and tin toe-rings to make your drawing-room
beautiful.”
“But, you mustn’t,” Lucilla Crespin told him firmly. “I intend our home
to be absolutely English. There shall not be even one thing in it that
isn’t quite English, not one that hasn’t come from home.”
“Right-o!” Bruce consented. “We’ll forgive you, so long as you ask us to
tea every day and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner very often. And you and
I will sit on the veranda under the punkah, and eat mango-ices and
chilled pumelos, while Crespin and Crossland dig your garden and swear
at each other.”
“I shall not have a punkah,” Mrs. Crespin said severely. “I shall have
nothing, I tell you, that we do not have at home. Our home is going to
be an English home.”
“You’ll have a punkah, dear,” said Crespin softly. “You’ll have
several.”
“My hat, you will!” Bruce exclaimed. “And you’ll have a few other things
that are not strictly English—what. White ants in the sugar,
silver-fish and lizards—single spies and whole battalions of them—on
your walls and out for a ride on the train of your dinner-gown, and
centipedes, and cheetahs grinning in at the windows, jackals serenading
you every night, and goat to eat, I repeat, which will _not_ taste like
infant Southdown, _and_ native servants. You may like the native
servants, and you may not. It’s a matter of taste.”
But Lucilla only laughed. “I’m not afraid, Captain Bruce,” she said.
“You can’t frighten me.”
Crossland said nothing, but he studied the waves gravely as they foamed
and beat at each other in ocean play, and his eyes were cloudy. So
another English woman was coming to India to live in it apart from its
peoples and beauties and wisdoms—to hold her skirts aside from India.
He thought it a pity. He’d seen it so often—and he believed it the most
dangerous of the several rocks upon which the ship of Empire might some
day split and go down.