Philip Doyle did not know at all how it was that he found himself at the
Maharajah of Pattore’s garden-party. He had not the honour of knowing
the Maharajah of Pattore—his invitation was one of the many amiabilities
which he declared he owed to his distinguished connection with the
Bengal Secretariat in the person of Lewis Ancram. Certainly Ancram had
asked him to accept, and take his, Ancram’s, apologies to the Maharajah;
but that seemed no particular reason why he should be there. The fact
was, Doyle assured himself, as he bowled along through the rice-fields
of the suburbs to His Highness’s garden-house—the fact was, he was
restless, he needed change supremely, and anything out of the common
round had its value. Things in Calcutta had begun to wear an unusually
hard and irritating look; he felt his eye for the delinquencies of human
nature growing keener and more critical. This state of things, taken in
connection with the possession of an undoubted sense of humour, Doyle
recognised to be grave. He told himself that, although he was unaware of
anything actually physically wrong, the effects of the climate were most
insidious, and he made it a subject of congratulation that his passage
was taken in the _Oriental_.
There was a festival arch over the gate when he reached it, and a
multitude of little flags, and “WELLCOME” pendent in yellow marigolds.
Doyle was pleased that he had come. It was a long time since he had
attended a Maharajah’s garden party; its features would be fresh and in
some ways soothing. He shook hands gravely with the Maharajah’s eldest
son, a slender, subdued, cross-eyed young man in an embroidered
smoking-cap and a purple silk frock-coat, and said “Thank you—thank
you!” for a programme of the afternoon’s diversions. The programme was
printed in gold letters, and he was glad to learn from it that His
Highness’s country residence was called “Floral Bower.” This was
entirely as it should be. He noticed that the Maharajah had provided
wrestling and dancing and theatricals for the amusement of his guests,
and resolved to see them all. He had a pleasant sense of a strain
momentarily removed, and he did not importune himself to explain it.
There were very few English people in the crowd that flocked about the
grounds, following with docile admiration the movements of the principal
guests; it was easy to keep away from them. He had only to stroll about,
and look at the curiously futile arrangement of ponds and grottoes and
fountains and summer-houses, and observe how pretty a rose-bush could be
in spite of everything and how appropriately brilliant the clothes of
the Maharajah’s friends were. Some of the younger ones were playing
football, with much laughter and screaming and wonderfully high kicks.
He stood and watched them, smilingly reflecting that he would back a
couple of Harrovians against the lot. His eyes were still on the boys
and the smile was still on his lips when he found himself considering
that he would reach England just about the day of Ancram’s wedding. Then
he realised that Ancram’s wedding had for him some of the
characteristics of a physical ailment which one tries, by forgetting, to
conjure out of existence. The football became less amusing, and he was
conscious that much of its significance had faded out of the Maharajah’s
garden-party. Nevertheless he followed the feebly curved path which led
to His Highness’s private menagerie, and it was while he was returning
the unsympathetic gaze of a very mangy tiger in a very ramshackle cage,
that the reflection came between them, as forcibly as if it were a new
one, that he would come back next cold weather to an empty house. Ancram
would be married. He acknowledged, still carefully examining the tiger,
that he would regret the man less if his departure were due to any other
reason; and he tried to determine, without much success, to what extent
he could blame himself in that his liking for Ancram had dwindled so
considerably during the last few months. By the time he turned his back
upon the zoölogical attraction of the afternoon he had fallen into the
reverie from which he hoped to escape in the _Oriental_—the
recollection, perfect in every detail, of the five times he had met
Rhoda Daye before her engagement, and a little topaz necklace she had
worn three times out of the five, and the several things that he wished
he had said, and especially the agreeable exaltation of spirit in which
he had called himself, after every one of these interviews, an elderly
fool.
His first thought when he saw her, a moment after, walking towards him
with her father, was of escape—the second quickened his steps in her
direction, for she had bowed, and after that there could be no idea of
going. He concluded later, with definiteness, that it would have been
distinctly rude when there were not more than twenty Europeans in the
place. Colonel Daye’s solid white-whiskered countenance broke into a
square smile as Doyle approached—a smile which expressed that it was
rather a joke to meet a friend at a maharajah’s garden party.
“You’re a singular being,” he said, as they shook hands; “one never
comes across you in the haunts of civilisation. Here’s _my_ excuse.”
Colonel Daye indicated his daughter. “Would come. Offered to take her to
the races instead—wouldn’t look at it!”
“If I had no reason for coming before, I’ve found one,” said Doyle, with
an inclination towards Rhoda that laid the compliment at her feet. There
were some points about Philip Doyle that no emotional experience could
altogether subdue. He would have said precisely the same thing, with
precisely the same twinkle, to any woman he liked.
Rhoda looked at him gravely, having no response ready. If the in-drawing
of her under-lip betrayed anything it was that she felt the least bit
hurt—which, in Rhoda Daye, was ridiculous. If she had been asked she
might have explained it by the fact that there were people whom she
preferred to take her seriously, and in the ten seconds during which her
eyes questioned this politeness she grew gradually delicately pink under
his.
“Rum business, isn’t it?” Colonel Daye went on, tapping the backs of his
legs with his stick. “Hallo! there’s Grigg. I must see Grigg—do you
mind? Don’t wait, you know—just walk on. I’ll catch you up in ten
minutes.”
Without further delay Colonel Daye joined Grigg.
“That’s like my father,” said the girl, with a trace of embarrassment:
“he never can resist the temptation of disposing of me, if it’s only for
ten minutes. We ought to feel better acquainted than we do. I’ve been
out seven months now, but it is still only before people that we dare to
chaff each other. I think,” she added, turning her grey eyes seriously
upon Doyle, “that he finds it awkward to have so much of the society of
a young lady who requires to be entertained.”
“What a pity that is!” Doyle said involuntarily.
She was going to reply with one of her bright, easy cynicisms, and then
for some reason changed her mind. “I don’t know about the advantage of
very deep affections,” she said involuntarily, and there was no
flippancy in her tone. Doyle fancied that he detected a note of pathos
instead, but perhaps he was looking for it.
They were walking with a straggling company of baboos in white muslin
down a double row of plantains towards the wrestling ring. Involuntarily
he made their pace slower.
“You can’t be touched by that ignoble spirit of the age—already.”
Miss Daye felt her moral temperature fall several degrees from the
buoyant condition in which she contrived to keep it as a rule. To say
she experienced a chill in the region of her conscience is perhaps to
put it grotesquely, but she certainly felt inclined to ask Philip Doyle
with some astonishment what difference it made to him.
“The spirit of the age is an annoying thing. It robs one of all
originality.”
“Pray,” he said, “be original in some other direction. You have a very
considerable choice.”
His manner disarmed his words. It was grave, almost pleading. She
wondered why she was not angry, but the fact remained that she was only
vaguely touched, and rather unhappy. Then he spoiled it.
“In my trade we get into dogmatic ways,” he apologised. “You won’t mind
the carpings of an elderly lawyer who has won a bad eminence for himself
by living for twenty years in Calcutta. By the way, I had Ancram’s
apologies to deliver to the Maharajah. If he had known he would perhaps
have entrusted me with more important ones.” Doyle made this speech in
general compensation, to any one who wanted it, for being near her—with
her. If he expected blushing confusion he failed to find it.
“He didn’t know,” she said indifferently; “and if he had——Oh, there are
the wrestlers.” She looked at them for a moment with disfavour. “Do you
like them? I think they are like performing animals.”
The men separated for a moment and rubbed their shining brown bodies
with earth. Somewhere near the gate the Maharajah’s band struck up “God
Save the Queen,” four prancing pennons appeared over the tops of the
bushes, and with one accord the crowd moved off in that direction. A
moment later His Highness was doubling up in appreciation of His
Excellency’s condescension in arriving. His Excellency himself was
surrounded ten feet deep by his awe-struck and delighted fellow-guests,
and the wrestlers, bereft of an audience, sat down and spat.
What Doyle always told himself that he must do with regard to Miss Daye
was to approach her in the vein of polished commonplace—polished because
he owed it to himself, commonplace because its after effect on the
nerves he found to be simpler. Realising his departure from this
prescribed course, he fervently set himself down a hectoring idiot, and
looked round for Colonel Daye. Colonel Daye radiated the commonplace; he
was a most usual person. In his society there was not the slightest
danger of saying anything embarrassing. But he was not even remotely
visible.
“Believe me,” said Rhoda, with sudden divination, “we shall be lucky if
we see my father again in half an hour. I am very sorry, but he really
is a most unnatural parent.” There was a touch of defiance in her laugh.
He should not lecture her again. “Where shall we go?”
“Have you seen the acting?”
“Yes. It’s a conversation between Rama and Shiva. Rama wears a red wig
and Shiva wears a yellow one; the rest is tinsel and pink muslin. They
sit on the floor and argue—that is the play. While one argues the other
chews betel and looks at the audience. I’ve seen better acting,” she
added demurely, “at the Corinthian Theatre.”
Doyle laughed irresistibly. Calcutta’s theatrical resources, even in the
season, lend themselves to frivolous suggestion.
“I could show you the Maharajah’s private chapel, if you like,” she
said.
Doyle replied that nothing could be more amusing than a Maharajah’s
private chapel; and as they walked together among the rose bushes he
felt every consideration, every scruple almost, slip away from him in
the one desire her nearness always brought him—the desire for that kind
of talk with her which should seal the right he vaguely knew was his to
be acknowledged in a privacy of her soul that was barred against other
people. Once or twice before he had seemed almost to win it, and by some
gay little saying which rang false upon his sincerity she had driven him
back. She assuredly did not seem inclined to give him an opportunity
this afternoon. It must be confessed that she chattered, in that wilful,
light, irrelevant way that so stimulated his desire to be upon tenderly
serious terms with her, by no means as her mentor, but for his own
satisfaction and delight. She chattered, with her sensitiveness alive at
every point to what he should say and to what she thought she could
guess he was thinking. She believed him critical, which was distressing
in view of her conviction that he could never understand her—never! He
belonged to an older school, to another world; his feminine ideal was
probably some sister or mother, with many virtues and no opinions. He
was a person to respect and admire—she did respect and she did admire
him—but to expect any degree of fellowship from him was absurd. The
incomprehensible thing was that this conclusion should have any soreness
about it. For the moment she was not aware that this was so; her
perception of it had a way of coming afterwards, when she was alone.
“Here it is,” she said, at the entrance of a little grotto made of
stucco and painted to look like rock, serving no particular purpose, by
the edge of an artificial lake. “And here is the shrine and the
divinity!”
As a matter of fact, there was a niche in the wall, and the niche held
Hanuman with his monkey face and his stolen pineapple, coy in painted
plaster.
Miss Daye looked at the figure with a crisp assumption of interest.
“Isn’t he amusing!” she remarked: “‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud’!”
“And so this is where you think His Highness comes to say his prayers?”
Doyle said, smiling.
“Perhaps he has a baboo to say them for him,” she returned, as they
strolled out. “That would be an ideal occupation for a baboo—to make
representations on behalf of one exalted personage to another. I wonder
what he asks Hanuman for! To be protected from all the evils of this
life, and to wake up in the next another maharajah!”
He was so engaged with the airiness of her whimsicality and the tilt of
the feather in her hat that he found no answer ready for this, and to
her imagination he took the liberty of disapproving her flippancy.
Afterwards she told herself that it was not a liberty—that the
difference in their ages made it a right if he chose to take it—but at
the moment the idea incited her to deepen his impression. She cast about
her for the wherewithal to make the completest revelation of her cheaper
qualities. In a crisis of candour she would show him just how audacious
and superficial and trivial she could be. Women have some curious
instincts.
“I am dying,” she said, with vivacity, “to see how His Highness keeps
house. They say he has a golden chandelier and the prettiest harem in
Bengal. And I confide to you, Mr. Doyle, that I should like a glass of
simpkin—immensely. It goes to my head in the most amusing way in the
middle of the afternoon.”
“His ideal young woman,” she declared to herself, “would have said
‘champagne’—no, she would have preferred tea; and she would have died
rather than mention the harem.”
But it must be confessed that Philip Doyle was more occupied for the
moment with the curve of her lips than with anything that came out of
them, except in so far that everything she said seemed to place him more
definitely at a distance.
“I’m afraid,” he returned, “that the ladies are all under double lock
and key for the occasion, but there ought to be no difficulty about the
champagne and the chandelier.”
At that moment Colonel Daye’s tall grey hat came into view, threading
the turbaned crowd in obvious quest. Rhoda did not see it, and Doyle
immediately found a short cut to the house which avoided the encounter.
He had suddenly remembered several things that he wanted to say. They
climbed a flight of marble stairs covered with some dirty yards of
matting, and found themselves almost alone in the Maharajah’s
drawing-room. The Viceroy had partaken of an ice and gone down again,
taking the occasion with him; and the long table at the end of the room
was almost as heavily laden as when the confectioner had set it forth.
“A little pink cake in a paper boat, please,” she commanded, “with jam
inside”; and then, as Doyle went for it, she sat down on one of
Pattore’s big brocaded sofas, and crossed her pretty feet, and looked at
the chromolithographs of the Prince and Princess of Wales askew upon the
wall, and wondered why she was making a fool of herself.
“I’ve brought you a cup of coffee: do you mind?” he asked, coming back
with it. “His Highness’ intentions are excellent, but the source of his
supplies is obscure. I tried the champagne,” he added apologetically:
“it’s unspeakable!”
No, Miss Daye did not mind. Doyle sat down at the other end of the sofa,
and reflected that another quarter of an hour was all he could possibly
expect, and then——
“I am going home, Miss Daye,” he said.
Since there was no other way of introducing himself to her
consideration, he would do it with a pitchfork.
“I knew you were. Soon?”
“The day after to-morrow, in the _Oriental_. I suppose Ancram told you?”
“I believe he did. You and he are great friends, aren’t you?”
“We live together. Men must be able to tolerate each other pretty fairly
to do that.”
“How long shall you be in England?”
“Six months, I hope.”
She was silent, and he fancied she was thinking, with natural
resentment, that he might have postponed his departure until after the
wedding. Doyle hated a lie more than most people, but he felt the
situation required that he should say something.
“The exigency of my going is unkind,” he blundered. “It will deprive me
of the pleasure of offering Ancram my congratulations.”
There was only the faintest flavour of mendacity about this; but she
detected it, and fitted it, with that unerring feminine instinct we hear
so much about, to her thought. For an instant she seemed lost in
buttoning her glove; then she looked up, with a little added colour.
“Don’t tamper with your sincerity for me,” she said quickly: “I’m not
worth it. It’s very kind of you to consider my feelings, but I would
much rather have the plain truth between us—that you don’t approve of me
or of the—the marriage. I jar upon you—oh! I see it! a dozen times in
half an hour—and you are sorry for your friend. For his sake you even
try to like me: I’ve seen you doing it. Please don’t: it distresses me
to know that you take that trouble——”
“Here you are!” exclaimed Colonel Daye, in the doorway. “Much obliged to
you, Doyle, really, for taking care of this little girl. Most difficult
man to get hold of, Grigg.”