Lucilla Crespin did not like Sumnee. She liked her life there fairly
well. She loved her home there. She loved Antony. She liked some of his
friends. She loved her happiness, and nourished and cherished it. She
liked the English Club measurably; she liked the tennis court palely—it
was better than none, but it was a poor imitation of tennis courts in
Surrey. She did make a garden, verbenas in flower-pots mostly, and she
tried to like it; and when they came she worshiped her babies. But she
did not like Sumnee. She did not even like India.
But she was happy in Sumnee. Not every one can be happy in a place they
dislike; but there are some so equipped for happiness that they can
find, or, not finding, make it, almost anywhere, and it requires far
less personal balance and natural joyousness than Lucilla had, to be
happy in London (or even in Berlin) when one would far rather live in
New York, if one is young, radiantly well, comfortably pursed (one _can_
buy a deal of happiness) and loves and is loved. Mrs. Crespin was happy
in Sumnee—at first. And the years passed. But her years taught her much
that “her days never knew”—for a while.
It is said that all English women like India, and very much like living
there. Most of them do—but there are exceptions.
Two classes of European women like and enjoy India very much: the first
and greatly preponderant class are the have-a-good-time ones, by no
means bad sorts, as a rule, but brave, gay things who like to wear
frilly white gowns, and give much time and care to dressing their hair,
tree their boots and slippers and shoes, read “The Queen” and “La Monde”
(if they can, and if they can’t, study its plates), and are particularly
proud of their afternoon tea-table pretties of silver and lace. They
like the punkahs, the abundance of servants—servants who rarely “give
notice,” and never sulk—mango-ices and picnics by moonlight. They even
enjoy making both ends meet—no one too much minds being poor in the
East; at least, if one has some sort of entrée to Government House, and
one’s man’s in the Army. Viceroys are not poor, as a rule—they would
find it inconvenient, for big as their “screw” is, it isn’t enough; but
Commanders-in-Chief have been poor enough before now, and, if one has to
skimp, one has the satisfaction of doing it in the best of company, and
in the best good-fellowship in the world. But there are women—the
have-a-good-time-and-take-care-of-your-man ones—who like India but
never know or sense it. Young Mrs. Crespin was not one of these, but she
had several of their insular traits, and lived no little of their life.
The other class (it is very small) are caught by the lure of the real
India. Its story appeals to them, its peoples and its myriad wonders and
beauties. They feel her marvel. And they catch the throb of her heart
beneath the impenetrable mask, and respond and are grateful. Mrs.
Crespin was not one of these.
There is a third class—a very powerful and beautiful class, which
includes some of the other two: women who follow the drum, sometimes to
Simla and other pleasant, cool hill places, sometimes to desolate,
sun-baked spots where the ice often gives out, and nothing ever happens,
and who take it all, and the make-shifts of outlandish frontier stations
with quiet good humor; women whose courage and unselfishness are very
fine, and very womanly. They are a great racial asset, the strength and
the solace of their men folk; and, if they spared of the devotion they
lavish on those same British soldier-men one tithe to the brown human
peoples that live about them, and minister to them so loyally, they
would be a greater asset of permanent and successful Empire than any in
Whitehall.
One of these Lucilla might have been—she shaped towards it at
first—but circumstances (fate, if you like) balked it.
India, great gold and rose India, marbled, carved, mosaicked, caravaned,
with its bazaars and temples and its lonely peasant huts, its seas of
quivering bamboo and its music of glass and silver bangles and anklets,
its beautiful naked, plump _butchas_, its sacred _purdahs_, its mingled
perfumes of lotus and wild yellow hyacinths, of pink jasmine and red,
red roses, its dark-eyed, wrinkled, patient cattle with ropes of
marigold slung between their snow-white and cream-colored humps, its
storied rivers—and the Himalayas, might have appealed to her as the
Vicar had thought it would, could she have seen it with him, or in other
guidance as cordial and fit. But she saw it through the dry choking dust
of a hot, arid, flat Punjabi station, sensed it through the chatter of
an English Club—and, so, neither saw nor sensed it at all. She never
touched its people. Her syce was merely a servant, so impersonal that
she never knew or asked his name, her house servants were nothing to her
but “boys,” and even the ayah who tended upon her deftly and faithfully,
and saved her baby’s life when croup and convulsions nearly killed it,
was only an ayah. Mrs. Crespin, as sweet at heart as the roses in the
Surrey vicarage garden, never knew her ayah’s name, never thought of her
as having one, never knew where she lived, what she ate, or thought, or
believed; never wondered what were her joys and sorrows, never wondered
if she ever had ache or pain; never knew, or cared to know, whether the
native woman was married or not, or widowed, or whether she had a child
of her own.
But she was happy at Sumnee—at first. She had Antony, and Antony was
enough.
Her homesickness never quite ceased to ache, and she missed riding and
games. She had both at Sumnee, but both were poor substitutes for those
she had at “home.” Always athletic, she was not fully satisfied at
playing at sports, and gymkanas bored her almost as much as church
bazaars had, and the Vicar of Oxlea always had rather discouraged church
bazaars. Womanly, yet she was not a woman’s woman—and life in an
out-of-the-way one-regiment station in the plains is apt to be hard on a
woman who does not greatly care for feminine society, but has no
coquetry in her. But she had Antony, and she was happy, and when the
promise of motherhood pulsed she was more than happy. And, if many of
her hours were alone ones, she had many books, and she read hour after
hour almost every day.
Twice the Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth—great chunks of
fragrant deodar that Lucilla garlanded with ribbons; the heat they made
in December in the plains was appalling, but Lucilla Crespin would not
keep Christmas without them. And they ate their plum-pudding hot and
flaming; and there’s no dearth of holly in India, if you know where to
send for it. Twice her Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth. And then
the crash came.