“Here you are at last!” remarked Mrs. Daye with vivacity, taking the
three long, pronounced and rustling steps which she took so very well,
toward the last comer to her dinner party, who made his leisurely
entrance between the _portières_, pocketing his handkerchief. “Don’t say
you have been to church,” she went on, holding out a condoning hand,
“for none of us will believe you.”
Although Mr. Ancram’s lips curved back over his rather prominent teeth
in a narrow smile as he put up his eyeglass and looked down at his
hostess, Mrs. Daye felt the levity fade out of her expression: she had
to put compulsion on herself to keep it in her face. It was as if she,
his prospective mother-in-law, had taken the least of liberties with Mr.
Ancram.
“Does the only road to forgiveness lie through the church gate?” he
asked. His voice was high and agreeable; it expressed discrimination;
his tone implied that, if the occasion had required it, he could have
said something much cleverer easily—an implication no one who knew him
would have found unwarrantable.
“The padres say it does, as a rule, Ancram,” put in Colonel Daye. “In
this case it lies through the dining-room door. Will you take my wife
in?”
In a corner of the room, which she might have chosen for its warm
obscurity, Rhoda Daye watched with curious scrutiny the lightest detail
of Mr. Lewis Ancram’s behaviour. An elderly gentleman, with pulpy red
cheeks and an amplitude of white waistcoat, stood beside her chair,
swaying out of the perpendicular with well-bred rigidity now and then,
in tentative efforts at conversation; to which she replied, “Really?”
and “Yes, I know,” while her eyes fixed themselves upon Ancram’s face,
and her little white features gleamed immobile under the halo which the
tall lamp behind her made with her fuzz of light-brown hair. “Mother’s
respect for him is simply outrageous,” she reflected, as she assured the
elderly gentleman that even for Calcutta the heat was really
extraordinary, considering that they were in December. “I
wonder—supposing he had not made love to me—if I could have had as
much!” She did not answer herself definitely—not from any lack of
candour, but because the question presented difficulties. She slipped
past him presently on the arm of the elderly gentleman, as Ancram still
stood with bent head talking to her mother. His eyes sought hers with a
significance that flattered her—there was no time for further
greeting—and the bow with which he returned her enigmatic little nod
singled her out for consideration. As she went in to dinner the nape of
Mr. Lewis Ancram’s neck and the parting of his hair remained with her as
pictorial facts.
Mrs. Daye always gave composite dinner-parties, and this was one of
them. “If you ask nobody but military people to meet each other,” she
was in the habit of saying, “you hear nothing but the price of chargers
and the prospects of the Staff Corps. If you make your list up of
civilians, the conversation consists of abuse of their official
superiors and the infamous conduct of the Secretary of State about the
rupee.” On this occasion Mrs. Daye had reason to anticipate that the
price of chargers would be varied by the grievances of the Civil
Service, and that a touring Member of Parliament would participate in
the discussion who knew nothing about either; and she felt that her
blend would be successful. She could give herself up to the somewhat
fearful enjoyment she experienced in Mr. Ancram’s society. Mrs. Daye was
convinced that nobody appreciated Mr. Ancram more subtly than she did.
She saw a great deal of jealousy of him in Calcutta society, whereas she
was wont to declare that, for her part, she found nothing extraordinary
in the way he had got in—a man of his brains, you know! And if Calcutta
resented this imputation upon its own brains in ever so slight a degree,
Mrs. Daye saw therein more jealousy of the fact that her family circle
was about to receive him. When it had once opened for that purpose and
closed again, Mrs. Daye hoped vaguely that she would be sustained for
the new and exacting duty of living up to Mr. Ancram.
[Illustration: “She seems to be sufficiently entertained.”]
“_Please_ look at Rhoda,” she begged, in a conversational buzz that her
blend had induced.
Mr. Ancram looked, deliberately, but with appreciation. “She seems to be
sufficiently entertained,” he said.
“Oh, she is! She’s got a globe-trotter. Haven’t you found out that Rhoda
simply loves globe-trotters? She declares that she renews her youth in
them.”
“Her first impressions, I suppose she means?”
“Oh, as to what she _means_——”
Mrs. Daye broke off irresolutely, and thoughtfully conveyed a minute
piece of roll to her lips. The minute piece of roll was Mr. Ancram’s
opportunity to complete Mrs. Daye’s suggestion of a certain interesting
ambiguity in her daughter; but he did not take it. He continued to look
attentively at Miss Daye, who appeared, as he said, to be sufficiently
entertained, under circumstances which seemed to him inadequate. Her
traveller was talking emphatically, with gestures of elderly dogmatism,
and she was deferentially listening, an amusement behind her eyes with
which the Chief Secretary to the Government at Bengal was not altogether
unfamiliar. He had seen it there before, on occasions when there was
apparently nothing to explain it.
“It would be satisfactory to see her eating her dinner,” he remarked,
with what Mrs. Daye felt to be too slight a degree of solicitude. She
was obliged to remind herself that at thirty-seven a man was apt to take
these things more as matters of fact, especially—and there was a double
comfort in this reflection—a man already well up in the Secretariat and
known to be ambitious. “Is it possible,” Mr. Ancram went on, somewhat
absently, “that these are Calcutta roses? You must have a very clever
gardener.”
“No”—and Mrs. Daye pitched her voice with a gentle definiteness that
made what she was saying interesting all round the table—“they came from
the Viceroy’s place at Barrackpore. Lady Emily sent them to me: so sweet
of her, I thought! I always think it particularly kind when people in
that position trouble themselves about one; they must have so _many_
demands upon their time.”
The effect could not have been better. Everybody looked at the roses
with an interest that might almost be described as respectful; and Mrs.
Delaine, whose husband was Captain Delaine of the Durham Rifles, said
that she would have known them for Their Excellencies’ roses
anywhere—they always did the table with that kind for the Thursday
dinners at Government House—she had never known them to use any other.
Mrs. St. George, whose husband was the Presidency Magistrate, found this
interesting. “Do they really?” she exclaimed. “I’ve often wondered what
those big Thursday affairs were like. Fancy—we’ve been in Calcutta
through three cold weathers now, and have never been asked to anything
but little private dinners at Government House—not more than eight or
ten, you know!”
“Don’t you prefer that?” asked Mrs. Delaine, taking her quenching with
noble equanimity.
“Well, of course one sees more _of_ them,” Mrs. St. George admitted.
“The last time we were there, about a fortnight ago, I had a long chat
with Lady Emily. She is a sweet thing, and perfectly wild at being out
of the school-room!” Mrs. St. George added that it was a charming
family, so well brought up; and this seemed to be a matter of special
congratulation as affecting the domestic arrangements of a Viceroy.
There was a warmth and an emphasis in the corroboration that arose which
almost established relations of intimacy between Their Excellencies and
Mrs. Daye’s dinner-party. Mrs. Daye’s daughter listened in her absorbed,
noting manner; and when the elderly gentleman remarked with a certain
solemnity that they were talking of the Scansleighs, he supposed, the
smile with which she said “Evidently” was more pronounced than he could
have had any right to expect.
“They seem to be delightful people,” continued the elderly gentleman,
earnestly.
“I daresay,” Miss Daye replied, with grave deliberation. “They’re very
decorative,” she added absently. “That’s a purely Indian vegetable, Mr.
Pond. Rather sticky, and without the ghost of a flavour; but you ought
to try it, as an experience, don’t you think?”
It occurred to Mrs. Daye sometimes that Mr. Ancram was unreasonably
difficult to entertain, even for a Chief Secretary. It occurred to her
more forcibly than usual on this particular evening, and it was almost
with trepidation that she produced the trump card on which she had been
relying to provoke a lively suit of amiabilities. She produced it
awkwardly too; there was always a slight awkwardness, irritating to so
_habile_ a lady, in her manner of addressing Mr. Ancram, owing to her
confessed and painful inability to call him “Lewis”—yet. “Oh,” she said
finally, “I haven’t congratulated you on your ‘Modern Influence of the
Vedic Books.’ I assure you, in spite of its being in blue paper covers
and printed by Government I went through it with the greatest interest.
And there were no pictures either,” Mrs. Daye added, with the
ingenuousness which often clings to Anglo-Indian ladies somewhat late in
life.
Mr. Ancram was occupied for the moment in scrutinising the contents of a
dish which a servant patiently presented to his left elbow. It was an
ornate and mottled conception visible through a mass of brown jelly, and
the man looked disappointed when so important a guest, after perceptible
deliberation, decisively removed his eyeglass and shook his head. Mrs.
Daye was in the act of reminding herself of the probably impaired
digestion of a Chief Secretary, when he seemed suddenly recalled to the
fact that she had spoken.
“Really?” he said, looking fully at her, with a smile that had many
qualities of compensation. “My dear Mrs. Daye, that was doing a good
deal for friendship, wasn’t it?”
His eyes were certainly blue and expressive when he allowed them to be,
his hostess thought, and he had the straight, thin, well-indicated nose
which she liked, and a sensitive mouth for a man. His work as part of
the great intelligent managing machine of the Government of India
overimpressed itself upon the stamp of scholarship Oxford had left on
his face, which had the pallor of Bengal, with fatigued lines about the
eyes, lines that suggested to Mr. Ancram’s friends the constant reproach
of over-exertion. A light moustache, sufficiently well-curled and
worldly, effectually prevented any tinge of asceticism which might
otherwise have been characteristic, and placed Mr. Ancram among those
who discussed Meredith, had an expensive taste in handicrafts, and
subscribed to the _Figaro Salon_. His secretary’s stoop was not a
pronounced and local curve, rather a general thrusting forward of his
personality which was fitting enough in a scientific investigator; and
his long, nervous, white hands spoke of a multitude of well-phrased
Resolutions. It was ridiculous, Mrs. Daye thought, that with so
agreeable a manner he should still convey the impression that one’s
interest in the Vedic Books was not of the least importance. It must be
that she was over-sensitive. But she would be piqued notwithstanding.
Pique, when one is plump and knows how to hold oneself, is more
effective than almost any other attitude.
“You are exactly like all the rest! You think that no woman can possibly
care to read anything but novels! Now, as a matter of fact I am
_devoted_ to things like Vedic Books. If I had nothing else to do I
should dig and delve in the archaic from morning till night.”
“The implication being,” returned Mr. Ancram sweetly, “that I have
nothing else to do.”
Mrs. Daye compressed her lips in the manner of one whose patience is at
an end. “It would serve you perfectly right,” she exclaimed, “if I
didn’t tell you what a long review of it I saw the other day in one of
the home papers.”
Ancram looked up with an almost imperceptible accession of interest.
“How nice!” he said lightly. “A fellow out here always feels himself in
luck when his odds and ends get taken up at home. You don’t happen to
remember the paper—or the date?”
“I’m almost sure it was the _Times_,” Mrs. Daye replied, with rather an
accentuation of rejoiceful zeal; “but Richard can tell you. It was he
who drew my attention to the notice.”
Mr. Ancram’s eyebrows underwent a slight contraction. “Notice” did not
seem to be a felicitous word.
“Oh, thanks,” he said. “Never mind; one generally comes across those
things sooner or later.”
“I say, Ancram,” put in Mr. St. George, who had been listening on Mrs.
Daye’s left, “you Asiatic Society fellows won’t get as much out of
Church for your investigations as you did out of Spence.”
Ancram looked fixedly at a porcelain cherub that moored a boatful of
pink-and-white confectionery to the nearest bank of the Viceregal roses.
“Sir Griffiths was certainly generous,” he said. “He gave Pierson a
quarter of a lakh, for instance, to get his ethnological statistics
together. It was easy to persuade him to recognise the value of these
things.”
“It won’t be easy to get this man to recognise it,” persisted St.
George. “He’s the sort of fellow who likes sanitation better than
Sanscrit. He’s got a great scheme on for improving the village
water-supply for Bengal, and I hear he wants to reorganise the
vaccination business. Great man for the people!”
“Wants to spend every blessed pice on the bloomin’ ryot,” remarked
Captain Delaine, with humorous resentment.
“Let us hope the people will be grateful,” said Ancram vaguely.
“They won’t, you know,” remarked Rhoda Daye to Mr. Pond. “They’ll never
know. They are like the cattle—they plough and eat and sleep; and if a
tenth of them die of cholera from bad water, they say it was written
upon their foreheads; and if Government cleans the tanks and the tenth
are spared, they say it is a good year and the gods are favourable.”
“Dear me!” said Mr. Pond: “that’s very interesting.”
“Isn’t it? And there’s lots more of it—all in the Calcutta newspapers,
Mr. Pond: you should read them if you wish to be informed.” And Mr. Pond
thought that an excellent idea.
When a Lieutenant-Governor drops into the conversational vortex of a
Calcutta dinner-party he circles on indefinitely. The measure of his
hospitality, the nature of his tastes, the direction of his policy, his
quality as a master, and the measure of his popularity, are only a few
of the heads under which he is discussed; while his wife is made the
most of separately, with equal thoroughness and precision. Just before
Mrs. Daye looked smilingly at Mrs. St. George, and the ladies flocked
away, some one asked who Mrs. Church’s friends were in Calcutta, anyway:
she seemed to know hardly any one person more than another—a delightful
impartiality, the lady added, of course, after Lady Spence’s
favouritism. The remark fell lightly enough upon the air, but Lewis
Ancram did not let it pass. He looked at nobody in particular, but into
space: it was a way he had when he let fall anything definite.
“Well,” he said, “I hope I may claim to be one. My pretension dates back
five years—I used to know them in Kaligurh. I fancy Mrs. Church will be
appreciated in Calcutta. She is that combination which is so much less
rare than it used to be—a woman who is as fine as she is clever, and as
clever as she is charming.”
“With all due deference to Mr. Ancram’s opinion,” remarked Mrs. Daye
publicly, with one hand upon the banister, as the ladies went up to the
drawing-room, “I should _not_ call Mrs. Church a fine woman. She’s much
too slender—really almost thin!”
“My dear mummie,” exclaimed Rhoda, as Mrs. St. George expressed her
entire concurrence, “don’t be stupid! He didn’t mean that.”
Later Ancram stepped out of one of the open French windows and found her
alone on the broad verandah, where orchids hung from the roof and big
plants in pots made a spiky gloom in the corners. A tank in the garden
glistened motionless below; the heavy fronds of a clump of sago palms
waved up and down uncertainly in the moonlight. Now and then in the
moist, soft air the scent of some hidden temple tree made itself felt. A
cluster of huts to the right in the street they looked down upon stood
half-concealed in a hanging blue cloud of smoke and fog. Far away in the
suburbs the wailing cry of the jackals rose and fell and recommenced;
nearer the drub-drubbing of a tom-tom announced that somewhere in the
bazar they kept a marriage festival. But for themselves and the
moonlight and the shadow of the creeper round the pillars, the verandah
was quite empty, and through the windows came a song of Mrs. Delaine’s
about love’s little hour. The situation made its voiceless demand, and
neither of them were unconscious of it. Nevertheless he, lighting a
cigarette, asked her if she would not come in and hear the music; and
she said no—she liked it better there; whereat they both kept the
silence that was necessary for the appreciation of Mrs. Delaine’s song.
When it was over, Rhoda’s terrier, Buzz, came out with inquiring
cordiality, and they talked of the growth of his accomplishments since
Ancram had given him to her; and then, as if it were a development of
the subject, Rhoda said:
“Mrs. Church has a very interesting face, don’t you think?”
“Very,” Ancram replied unhesitatingly.
“She looks as if she cared for beautiful things. Not only pictures and
things, but beautiful conceptions—ideas, characteristics.”
“I understand,” Ancram returned: “she does.”
There was a pause, while they listened to the wail of the jackals, which
had grown wild and high and tumultuous. As it died away, Rhoda looked up
with a little smile.
“I like that,” she said; “it is about the only thing out here that is
quite irrepressible. And—you knew her well at Kaligurh?”
“I think I may say I did,” Ancram replied, tossing the end of his
cigarette down among the hibiscus bushes. “My dear girl, you must come
in. There is nothing like a seductive moonlight night in India to give
one fever.”
“I congratulate you,” said Miss Daye—and her tone had a defiance which
she did not intend, though one could not say that she was unaware of its
cynicism—“I congratulate you upon knowing her well. It is always an
advantage to know the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor well. The most
delightful things come of it—Commissionerships, and all sorts of things.
I hope you will make her understand the importance of the Vedic Books in
their bearing upon the modern problems of government.”
“You are always asking me to make acknowledgments—you want almost too
many; but since it amuses you, I don’t mind.” Rhoda noted the little
gleam in his eyes that contradicted this. “Sanscrit is to me now exactly
what Greek was at Oxford—a stepping-stone, and nothing more. One must do
something to distinguish oneself from the herd; and in India, thank
fortune, it’s easy enough. There’s an enormous field, and next to nobody
to beat. Bless you, a Commissariat Colonel can give himself an aureole
of scientific discovery out here if he cares to try! If I hadn’t taken
up Sanscrit and Hinduism, I should have gone in for palæontology, or
conchology, or folk-lore, or ferns. Anything does: only the less other
people know about it the better; so I took Sanscrit.” A combined
suggestion of humour and candour gradually accumulated in Mr. Ancram’s
sentences, which came to a climax when he added, “You don’t think it
very original to discover that!”
“And the result of being distinguished from the herd?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, they don’t send one to administer the
Andamans or Lower Burmah,” he said. “They conserve one’s intellectual
achievements to adorn social centres of some importance, which is more
agreeable. And then, if a valuable post falls vacant, one is not
considered disqualified for it by being a little wiser than other
people. Come now—there’s a very big confession for you! But you mustn’t
tell. We scientists must take ourselves with awful seriousness if we
want to be impressive. That’s the part that bores one.”
Mr. Ancram smiled down at his betrothed with distinct good-humour. He
was under the impression that he had spontaneously given his soul an
airing—an impression he was fond of. She listened, amused that she could
evoke so much, and returned to the thing he had evaded.
“Between the Vedic Books and Mrs. Church,” she said, “our future seems
assured.”
Ancram’s soul retired again, and shut the door with a click.
“That is quite a false note,” he said coolly: “Mrs. Church will have
nothing to do with it.”