Come, My Beloved

I

THE DESK AT THE Grand Hotel in Bombay was crowded with incoming guests. A ship had arrived in harbor that morning and the big lobby was noisy with many tongues, the chief of which was English. It was the English, it was clear to see, who got the first attention. Even a maharajah, encircled by his entourage, was sitting in jealous impatience in one of the big reed chairs. His brilliant headdress, his glittering costume and the fluttering many-colored garments of his entourage made his group look foreign, though this was India. The English, calm and patient, were unconscious of the jealousy of anyone and they stared straight ahead as they stood in line.

Among them was an American, a tall heavily built man of middle age, dressed in a dark grey business suit and a black felt hat. He gazed about him with interested curiosity, as calm in his way as the English, but not afraid to show his enjoyment of the scene. Only America bred men so assured, so naive and so humorous. He surveyed even the Englishmen with eyes amused and tolerant, and he did not hesitate to hold his place in the line, in spite of English pressure, secret but unmistakable, to shove him aside. His broad shoulders retaliated by being immovable as slowly he approached the desk. Once he turned to speak to the tall slender young man behind him, obviously his son. They had the same bold profile, though the son had dark eyes instead of grey and smooth dark hair instead of a red-grey shock. His face was smooth, too, olive skinned, but the father had a close-cut beard and mustache, grizzled red, and his eyes were deepset under fierce eyebrows of the same hue.

“Hold hard, son,” he said.

“I will,” his son replied.

The English clerk at the desk threw them a shrewd look as the father wrote his name in the register, David Hardworth MacArd and Son.

“You’re from America, sir?”

“Yes,” MacArd said. “New York.”

He looked thoughtfully at his name for a second and then with a strong stroke he crossed off “and Son” and turning again he said half humorously,

“I guess it is time for you to stop being ‘and Son.’”

“I don’t mind, Father,” his son said in a mild voice.

“No, no,” MacArd said, with a touch of insistence, “I remember very well your mother not liking to be merely ‘and Wife.’”

His son smiled and without reply he wrote down his own name, David MacArd. His handwriting was youthful and flowing in contrast to his father’s angular thick letters.

“We have your rooms reserved, sir,” the clerk said. “You wanted them for a week, I believe. And we have made your train reservations for Poona. It is a fairly short journey. I am glad you have come to us in the best season. There’s no mail. Are those your bags? They will follow you at once to your rooms.”

“I expect no mail,” MacArd said, “and they are our bags.”

The pile was not formidable, his own English leather bags were worn, but he had bought David new pigskin ones. Leila’s bags of alligator skin, mounted with silver, were certainly not suitable for a young man. Besides, he had ordered them put away with all the rest of her things when she died three months ago.

Only three months! He turned to his son with the faint tightening of the muscles of his face which meant that it would not do to think about her. “Shall we go upstairs now or have dinner — tiffin, I suppose I’ll have to call it here.”

“I’d like to change,” David said. “It’s hotter than I thought it would be.”

The clerk, busy with another guest, overheard him.

“Keep a topcoat handy, sir,” he advised. “Bombay is hot at midday and very cool at night in this season. Delightful, really, once one gets used to keeping a topcoat about.”

“Thank you,” David said.

They turned, father and son, toward the wide marble stairs, and mounted them side by side. Their rooms were on the first floor and down a marble corridor wider than the stairs. Ahead of them the two Indian bellboys who were carrying their bags stopped at a door which stood open to reveal an inner jalousied half door that was locked. On the floor and leaning against the wall a Muslim man sat half asleep, his head on his arms folded on his knees and his fez askew. One of the bellboys kicked him gently.

“Awake, your master is here!”

The Muslim sprang to his feet, vividly awake, his emaciated body quivering with eagerness.

“Sahib sir!” he cried. “I know you, sir! I am waiting this long time. I have my cards, sir, my letters, I am waiting to serve Sahib and Son. Grand Hotel recommends me, please!”

The bellboys were already in the rooms but the Muslim had interposed himself skillfully so that the two Americans could not enter. His hands were full of cards and dirty envelopes which he had drawn from within the bosom of his white cotton garment.

“Let me pass,” MacArd said abruptly. He pushed the man aside, or rather the man seemed to melt away at his touch, and he went in. David threw the man a half smile of apology as he followed and instantly with renewed zeal the Muslim urged himself upon them, standing upon the threshold and holding open with his left hand the jalousied door, while he extended the right one, filled with the envelopes and cards.

“Please, Sahib and Son!” he cried in his high urgent voice. “Without bearer you can do nothing. You will be cheated everywhere by Hindus. As for me, I know them. With me at your side, none will dare to come near. I am Wahdi.”

“The guidebook did say we’d have to have a bearer, Father,” David said.

“Allow me to think of one thing at a time,” his father replied. “I must pay off these fellows.”

“The head boy,” David suggested. “The guidebook said that, too.”

“Me, please. Sahib,” the head boy said. “I give to both.”

MacArd took out a note from his wallet. “Be sure you do.”

The man made the Hindu gesture of thanks. “Americans always give kindly,” he murmured. “And I, Sahib, will tell you something. This man, Wahdi, is good, though he is Muslim. You may trust him. He will not cheat you if you are also kind to him.”

He put his hands together again, the note fluttering between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand, and thus he went away, the other boy following.

“Well,” MacArd said, fingering his beard. “I suppose we do have to have someone. It might as well be this fellow. I can always fire him if he turns out badly.”

“I rather like his looks,” David said.

To the son Wahdi addressed himself, still trembling with anxiety. “I am very good, little Sahib. It is true that some bearers cheat, but never I.”

“Your English is good,” David remarked.

“I studied in Christian school many years.”

MacArd, who had been opening one of his bags, turned at this. “Are you a Christian?” he demanded with sudden interest.

Wahdi was abashed. He looked from one face to the other and decided to laugh.

“It is too difficult for me, Sahib,” he declared. “Christianity is good, but I have no time. I have my parents to support, also my wife and eleven children. When I am old and can work no more, I will be Christian.”

David laughed. “He’s honest, Father.”

MacArd grunted and returned to his unpacking.

“Then I am your bearer, Sahib?” Wahdi pleaded.

“Oh, I guess so,” MacArd grunted, not lifting his head.

“Thank you, thank you, Sahib and Son.” Wahdi was in an ecstasy of gratitude. “I will do everything — you will see, Sahib, let me — I unpack. I will do all. Please now take tiffin. I will finish.”

Without knowing how it happened they found themselves outside the huge room in the marble corridor again and on their way to the dining room. Behind them Wahdi was bustling about the rooms, opening the vast teak wardrobes, one after another, and deciding where his masters’ garments should hang.

“So and so and so,” he was humming like a zealous bee.

“I can see we have a manager,” David said. “I didn’t even get to change my clothes.”

“Ha!” MacArd said. He had already forgotten Wahdi, and with his pocket guidebook in his hand he was studying a map as he walked. Between him and the map came a sudden memory of his dead wife’s face as she had looked on their last trip together. Wait, it was in London, and he had taken out a map then as now, and had begun to plan the hours ahead, but aloud and to her.

“Oh dear,” she had sighed, pouting her pretty mouth, “I must have some time for doing nothing, you monster!”

He had been amused.

“How can one do nothing?” he had demanded. “Something but not nothing you are compelled to do by the very nature of time. There is no such thing as nothing.”

“Oh, but there is,” she had insisted, and he could see her lovely wilful face, the eyes so dark under the dark soft hair.

Well, she was right. There could be a nothing, and it was death, her death. He was tortured day and night by the need to believe that somehow and somewhere she still lived. While she had lived he had not needed faith but now he must find it again as once he had found it in his father’s manse. His father had been a country preacher, a simple powerful man, who had turned evangelist after he had come home from the war. In MacArd’s childhood faith was as plain as poverty, as simple as bread, as inevitable as birth and death. He had grown impatient in his adolescence, but his father was a severe man, and he had struck off for himself after a quarrel, and early in the struggle for what he had decided was success, he had lost what his father called religion. He was already a successful young businessman when he married Leila Gilchrist, the daughter of his senior partner, and with her he began to go to church again on Sunday, a very different church from the country church where his father preached of heaven and hell and the immortality of the soul.

The night after Leila’s funeral, in his sleepless need to know that she lived though her beloved body lay where he had seen it placed that day in the earth, he had called up Paul Barton, the rector.

“Barton,” he had said hoarsely over the telephone. “It’s MacArd.”

“Yes, Mr. MacArd. What can I do for you?”

“Can you assure me that my wife is really still alive somewhere?”

“I believe that she is, sir.”

“Have you proof?”

“I have faith.”

“Why don’t I have it? I’m a member of your church.”

“A very generous one,” Dr. Barton had said in his rich pulpit voice.

“Then why can’t I believe she is alive?”

“You must simply affirm that you believe,” the minister replied. “Affirm it and faith will follow.”

Well, he had affirmed it over and over again. Leila could not be dead. Still, he was a practical man and there was the matter of the body. No one could deny decay. So what would she look like as a spirit and would it be the same? He wanted everything to be the same. Either Leila existed or she did not, and his willing her alive had nothing to do with the facts, as far as he could see. He had not thought of his father and mother for years, for they had died before he and Leila were married, but now he almost wished his fierce old father was alive again. His father had always seemed to know what he believed and why.

He put the map away and they went downstairs, he and his son, in silence. The boy was always silent these days, missing his mother, doubtless, though he never mentioned her.

“Let’s go out right after we eat,” he said abruptly.

“Very well, Father,” David said.

The lobby was almost empty now. Only the maharajah remained, surrounded by his bright flock, while his business manager, a Eurasian, argued at the desk with the clerk.

They went into the vast dining room and sat down at a table by the window and an Indian servant in a white uniform and a red sash appeared at once. Over their heads an immense punkah moved to and fro, and stirred the idle air.

The sun burned in a blue-white sky as they stepped out of the hotel. MacArd had bought sun helmets in London for them both and David had fetched them from upstairs after their meal but nothing protected their faces from the upward glare of the streets, crowded though they were with people in every variety of costume and color. No white people were to be seen except an occasional carriage of English ladies going out to make their noon calls, a strange custom which had its sense, as the guidebook had told them, only because everyone later in the day went to the parks and the clubhouses to enjoy the coolness before night fell.

“Can you tell one native from another?” MacArd inquired of his son, to make talk. One of his most difficult tasks now was this burden of conversation. While Leila had been alive they had not known that it was she who kept communication constant among the three of them. Her laughing comment on all they saw and did had provided the articulate meaning of their life together. Now without her translation of life into words there were times when MacArd felt his son almost a stranger, or would have except that David, trying to be friendly, answered his slightest effort.

“I suppose you know what every one of them is,” David replied.

His father’s persevering study of the small library of books on India which they had brought along had moved him at times to secret shame and so to mild teasing. But he could not fix his mind on reading. His mother’s death had left him in apathy.

“That’s a Pathan, I’ll guess,” MacArd announced, nodding in the direction of a handsome aging man, his dark skin set off by a snow-white cotton garment, his head wrapped in a small turban. “That one,” he went on, “is Marathi.” The Marathi wore loose white trousers and a coatlike tunic, and his turban, entwined with a golden cord, spread wide over some sort of hidden shape.

“We see only men,” David said idly. “I suppose the women are in purdah or something.”

Nevertheless at this moment they saw a group of Marathi women emerging from a doorway, wrapped in vivid saris and wearing jewels in their left nostrils, a strange and pretty sight. The Marathi man shielded them and herded them into a carriage and they drove toward the crowded native city.

Toward this city MacArd now abruptly turned, away from the sea and the pleasant parkways of the English. It was hot and he summoned a small vehicle, a gherry, drawn by a brisk white bullock.

“We can postpone Malabar Point,” he said to David. “I’d like to see where the people live.”

They sat in silence in the rocking uncomfortable vehicle, facing each other upon hard wooden seats, and the parks and the wide streets gave way to narrow alleys, the handsome English buildings to small two-story houses of brick or stone, whose carved and painted fronts made them look like toys. The hot air steamed with scents and reeks, pepper and acid mingled with the bland fragrance of flowers and fruits. People crowded the streets, walking, standing, leaning against the walls, or lying on the pavement, curled in sleep. They were dark, and yet not all of the same darkness. Sometimes a child had a creamy skin, sometimes a young boy’s cheek was almost white. Faces turned to gaze at them with eyes large and liquid and soft, except occasionally those deep set in the hawk-like bead of a Pathan or a Sikh. They saw no white man in the mingling crowds of Hindus, Muslims, Malays, Parsees wearing tall hats of horsehair, Afghans, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetans and even black men from the southern coasts. The colors were vivid and random, a pink turban and a green scarf, a purple robe and a tunic of crimson velvet and gold, orange and scarlet mingled with blue and yellow and rose, and now in the native city, the common women came and went, draped in bright and graceful saris. Their brown faces were decorated with necklaces, earrings and tiny jewels in the nostrils and their bare arms and ankles tinkled with bracelets and anklets. To the Americans, they were a pageant to look at and to pass.

The cross streets were narrow even for the gherry, but the driver, muttering something over his shoulder, drove the bullock toward a row of shops, jewelers and dealers in precious stones, and then as though this were the ultimate destination, he stopped and motioned that they were to descend.

“Well,” MacArd said with a faint smile all but lost in his beard, “he seems to know what he wants us to do.”

“We may as well obey,” David replied.

They got out and the driver tucked his head into his dirty cotton robe and prepared to sleep.

The shops, or bazaars, whatever one chose to call them, were crowded with people examining jewels and ornaments, arguing and exclaiming and comparing. A few women turned their backs as they saw the white men but the beggars swarmed around them. Jewels were in rich display, rubies and pink Indian pearls, amethysts and diamonds, turquoise and Chinese jade set in elaborate gold, decorations for women’s necks and wrists and ankles, or to set in the turban of a man. Seeing the Americans, the shopkeepers called to them from every side. MacArd hesitated, struck suddenly by a pang at the heart. There was no one now for whom he cared to buy jewels. Had Leila been with him, as once they had planned she would be, for she had a curiosity about the East, and especially India, fostered, perhaps, by missionaries who came to her church, why then he would have delighted to buy for her the necklace of pearls, the emeralds set in a heavy bracelet of yellow gold. Indian emeralds were the most beautiful in the world, and how well her dark hair and eyes would have set off that vivid green, and how dearly he would have enjoyed her wearing them at home, sitting at the far end of his vast table. He would have boasted to his guests, “Yes, we bought Leila’s emeralds in India, in the Street of Jewels. There are thousands of shops, six thousand, they told us, and we thought these the finest gems we saw.”

Leila was dead. That he must repeat to himself. He looked at David, standing quietly beside him, gazing not at the jewels but at the people.

“Shall we go?” he asked.

“Whenever you say,” David replied.

They climbed back into the vehicle to the disappointment of jewelers and beggars alike, and prodding the driver awake with his cane, MacArd pointed him back again to the English city, to the wide streets, the great houses of green and grey stone. There MacArd dismissed the wretched conveyance and they got into the horsedrawn streetcar for Malabar Point.

“An American named Kittredge built this streetcar system,” he informed his son, making conversation again.

“Did he?” David murmured.

They were passing the Cathedral and near it stood the statue of Lord Cornwallis, the Governor-General of India after England lost the American colonies, a statue raised, the guidebook said, by funds from the merchants of Bombay.

“Cornwallis,” MacArd said briefly, nodding at the haughty figure.

David looked and did not reply.

North of the bay stood the Towers of Silence. They had been told at the hotel that surely they must see the Towers. “A very interesting sight,” the clerk had informed them with condescension.

“Are you tired?” MacArd asked in sudden anxiety. His son’s cheeks were pale.

“I feel odd,” David said with some effort. “I feel smothered. It’s only the heat, I think.”

“We’ll get off and go back to the hotel,” MacArd said firmly. Again they descended, and catching a car returning from Malabar Point, they were within the half hour back in their rooms. Wahdi, asleep at the door, leaped to his feet. MacArd ignored him.

“You are not ill?” he insisted, gazing anxiously at his son.

“Oh no,” David protested. “Perhaps, again, it’s the ship. I seem to feel the sea still rising and falling. I will lie down.”

“I fetch you tea, Sahib.” Wahdi, hovering about them, increased the oppression of the atmosphere.

“Fetch it then,” MacArd commanded. “And David, take a cool sponge. It will refresh you.”

“Thanks, Father,” David said. “Don’t bother. I’ll drink the tea and be better.”

He longed to shut the door between the rooms but he did not wish to wound his father. He had never before been alone with his father for days and weeks. There had always been his mother between them, and now she was no more. He must learn to live without feeling oppressed by this powerful personality. He smiled at his father and then taking courage he shut the door between them.

In his bathroom MacArd poured water over himself in the fashion that the guidebook had suggested to them. He stood on the sloping stone floor and with the metal dipper he dipped up water from a large porcelain jar and poured it over his head and shoulders. It was refreshing, he had to admit, feeling the rills of water running down his white body, the dead white of the red-haired, so much less beautiful than Leila’s lovely cream color. That abundant joy was his no more. He strove to be stern with himself, to repress the vitality of his vigorous frame. He must shape all his time now to other ends, undertake new work, busy himself — but with what? While she lived, his life was full every hour of the day and night, and now, suddenly it all had come to an end and so quickly that still he could scarcely believe it. Her heart, which none had suspected, had in the night, a night like any other, simply ceased to beat, without reason, without will, a mystery except that in her pretty, wilful way she never went to doctors. Not since David’s birth and the painful operation after it, which had made it evident that there would be no more children, never after those weeks in the hospital had she been willing to have a doctor. She treated herself in secret ways and he knew it only because he found bottles of medicine sometimes on her table. Then, terrified, he demanded to know if she suffered pain or felt ill and she never would tell him. She had laughed at him and had showed him her lovely round arms and had bade him look at the color of her cheeks.

“Do I look like an invalid?” she had demanded.

What could he say but the truth that she looked like health itself? Afterwards the bright eyes and the quick vivid color were, the doctor said, the very signs of death.

MacArd gave a groaning sigh as he remembered, and then wrapping his linen bathrobe about him, he sat down in a deep wicker chair in his bedroom. Immediately the weight of his loneliness, his distance from home, the knowledge that even though he returned to his house it would be empty for him, overcame him, and he closed his eyes and leaned back his head. He had not for years really prayed to God, although it was his nightly habit, because it had been Leila’s, to kneel at his bedside for a few minutes. Sometimes he had prayed during those minutes, but usually it had been sheer pretense, the wish not to hurt his wife, who had the habit of devoutness natural to her generation and his. Since her death he had put aside pretense, but suddenly now here in this distant room in India, prayer burst articulate from his frantic heart.

“Oh God, show me what to do with my life and my money that in the end I may rejoin my beloved wife in heaven!”

He did not doubt for one moment that Leila was in heaven, if there were such a place, for she had been a tender woman of such goodness and purity that she had already been an angel on earth. That she was ever petty or that she had ever made him impatient seemed impossible to him, and he thought now of such moments as entirely his own fault, although he had not always recognized it so when she was alive. She had sometimes complained against him because, she said, he was only interested in making money. It was true. His life had been absorbed in establishing the vast network of his interests. He had founded his fortune in railroads, and he was still the president of that, his oldest corporation, but railroads, as half a dozen men in his country knew, were merely arteries for trade, and now, with the nineteenth century in its last decade, the young and hungry country in which he had grown up yearned for more railroads and more trade. To pursue his golden way had been his business, but it had been his excitement and achievement, too. It had been fun as well as glory, and he did not care how much of his money Leila gave away. He liked to see his wife’s name heading a charity, “Mrs. David Hardworth MacArd, five thousand dollars.”

What did Leila want him to do now?

He held his eyes tightly shut, surprised at the cry from within himself and even a little frightened. Were there secrets that he did not know? He was a practical man, he had no time to read books, although he used to enjoy listening to Leila tell him about the books she read, and since her death he had opened some of them, seeking to recover the sound of her voice and the vision of her tender face. But without her the pages were dead. Where then could he find out about her now?

“Oh, Leila, honey,” he muttered, teeth clenched, “can’t you break through to me somehow?”

He sat rigid and listening, and he heard unrecognized sounds rising from the streets, high wailing voices speaking unknown tongues, voices as mournful as a dirge, mingled with the sharp cry of the beggars. His loneliness became agony and something as near terror as he could feel lent energy to his soul, searching for lost love. Certain words that had haunted his childhood in the country manse sprang alive in his memory, and he heard his father’s big voice declaiming scriptures from the pulpit.

“It is easier for a camel to pass through The Eye Of The Needle than it is for a rich man to enter The Kingdom of Heaven.”

Why, this was a monstrous thing to remember, for he was a very rich man, and it was not like Leila to remind him of it, but maybe she was doing it because it was the only way she could do it, through his memory. He used to hear those words when he was a small boy, bitterly poor with his family, and none of them had ever seen a rich man and he used to wonder what a rich man did and what he had to eat and to wear, and when he was a rebellious adolescent, he wanted to be a rich man because that was the kind of man his father had hated, a man who could never go to heaven. So maybe this was Leila’s way of telling him that those old words were true and if he wanted to get to heaven where she was he had to do something good now with his money.

He was distracted here by the door opening slowly, inch by inch and he saw Wahdi, smiling at him. He came in on tiptoe, bearing a tea tray, and from his right hand hung an immense basket of white flowers.

“From Govmint, Sahib,” Wahdi said proudly. “A chit, Sahib, telling all.” He set the tray on the table, put down the basket and took from his bosom a large square envelope and gave it to MacArd. Then he stepped back and stood proudly while he waited.

MacArd tore open the heavy paper and drew forth a single sheet embossed with the insignia of the English crown. There was nothing formal, however, in the handwritten message, signed by the Governor-General himself.

Dear Mr. MacArd,

We shall be delighted if you care to have tiffin with us privately either Tuesday or Thursday without other guests, and shall quite understand if you don’t. I have given instructions that you are to see what you like in the city and that reservations are to be made on whatever railroad you choose to travel. We understand the tragic circumstances of your visit and shall await your inclination.

Yours, etc.

MacArd was not deceived. He was not a conceited man, but he was proud. He was invited to the Governor-General’s mansion because he was rich, and wealth was his pedestal.

The incident restored MacArd to himself. He had been shaken, but he must wait. He must think things over, he told himself. Meanwhile here was this invitation.

He pondered it while Wahdi waited majestically, sharing the glory of a master who received flowers from Malabar Point. MacArd’s Scotch blood, inherited two hundred years ago from Scottish ancestors who did not wish to be vassals of Englishmen, tempted him to toy with the idea of refusing the invitation. Courteously as it was worded, it was nevertheless a summons. His prudence conquered. Some time or other he might want to do business in India. It seemed unlikely, but it was within the imagination that railroads might make some day a network around the world, connecting with vast steamship companies. It was an age of expansion. He went to the teakwood desk and wrote a brief note of acceptance. Wahdi received it as an honor and bestowed it upon the waiting messenger outside the door with the air of one conferring gifts.

“We have given the Indian people an extraordinary freedom,” the Governor-General was saying. “In the old days they wouldn’t have thought of criticizing Government. Now, however, British tradition has taken the young Indian intellectuals by storm. We’ve taught them English and they have read our English newspapers and have learned our ways. They read our vigorous and independent editorials, not understanding that in England criticism does not mean disloyalty, and so they criticize us and are disloyal. It began in the time of my predecessor, but it crystallized at the first meeting of the Indian National Congress some few years ago. I hope it may not lead to final rebellion. Lord Lytton felt it very wrong and he passed an Act for controlling the native press, but it was repealed four years later. We English are incurably conscientious and Indians are not used to that.”

A turbaned manservant in a bright scarlet tunic, white trousers and gold belt, waited at his elbow and he helped himself to curry and rice, a pheasant curry delicately seasoned for the English palate.

“Who are the leaders?” MacArd inquired.

There were only the four of them at the long table, and although he faced David, his host and hostess were so distant that he repressed an inclination to raise his voice.

“The young intellectuals, the leftists, as remote from the peasants and the small town and country people as you and I are,” the Governor-General declared.

“Will they be able to persuade the peasants to follow their lead?” MacArd inquired. He disliked curry and took only a little of the dish which the gorgeously garbed Indian servant now held at his left.

“If we keep on educating the Indians in English schools there’s no telling what will become of the Empire,” the Governor-General said frankly. He went on, his disarming smile belying his words and the stiffness of his tall thin frame encased in a white linen suit. “We destroy ourselves, we English. We can’t be proper tyrants. We insist upon our conscience and it makes tyranny impossible.”

David listened, his dark eyes calm. MacArd was proud of his son, sitting there at the vast table at ease, yet with suitable deference in the presence of his elders and of dignity. The Marquess was looking at him, too, and he saw her rather cold blue eyes soften.

“My two sons are in England,” she said suddenly to David. “The elder is only sixteen. They left India when they were five and eight. We kept Ronald later than usual so that Bertie could go with him. I haven’t seen them now for three years.”

“You are going home again in May, my dear,” her husband reminded her.

“I only hope they still remember me, as I am, I mean, and not as a sort of maternal figure,” she said.

“It’s one of the many prices of Empire,” he remarked.

“Ah, but the women pay for it,” she said rather sharply.

MacArd turned to the Governor. “I guess you, too, have missed your sons, though.”

“Yes, certainly,” the Governor-General replied, “yet I yield to my wife. It’s quite true that she misses them more than I do, and also that I have rewards that she has not. English women have a difficult time of it in India, I’m afraid.”

The long elaborate meal drew to its close, and they rose, the Governor-General saying that since his wife was the only woman, they would not linger at table while she sat alone in the drawing room, and so they left the dining room with her.

The palace at Malabar Point was a series of bungalows, the many rooms were large and cool, and the doors opened upon deep verandas shaded by great trees and flowering vines. MacArd had been in the White House, summoned to Washington by the President before he set out for India, but this palace was far more magnificent and nothing was more magnificent than the Governor-General’s own bodyguard. The tall Sikhs, their faces dark under huge and intricate turbans, were splendidly handsome above their scarlet uniforms. MacArd had seen them at the gatehouse, where they stood with their long spears, watchful and waiting. They had none of the servile humility of the crowds on the streets. They were soldiers of Empire, and rejoiced in what they were.

He was compelled to acknowledge, as they reached the blue and gold drawing room, that the Englishman and his wife were worthy enough of their position. Titled in their own right, both tall and equally blond, they carried themselves with a simple and powerful dignity which he could not but admire, and could not but acknowledge, too, was not to be found in his own country. Only men and women who had lived for generations above competition could maintain such serene confidence in what they were. In his own country all were subject to competition. He himself had fought and struggled to reach his present height, and it would be impossible for him to pretend either to dignity or serenity. Such dignity as he had was the result of sheer physical mass, his six feet three now the more imposing because he was no longer the slight fellow he had been when he was young, although he had kept his figure well enough. He wore his London suit of tropical pongee with sufficient ease, and David was handsome in white linen. He saw the Marquess look at his son again and again and at last she forgot her remoteness and motioned to him with a wave of her long narrow jeweled hand to come and sit on the sofa beside her, which David did, without appearing absurd. His mother’s sense of humor, that dark sparkling laughter which MacArd had so loved to see in his wife’s eyes, had kept their son from self-consciousness or conceit.

“Never forget that your grandfather was a country preacher,” Leila used to tell the boy, “but a very good one because he was your father’s father,” she had always added, dimpling.

“Tell me what you have chosen for your career,” the Marquess was saying to David in a sweet coaxing voice.

“I don’t know yet, ma’am,” David said. “I have just finished college.”

“College?” she repeated.

“Harvard.”

“Is it the same as Oxford and Cambridge?”

“I think so.”

She smiled at him with a distant tenderness. “And so you have no inclination?”

“Not yet, ma’am,” David acknowledged. “Perhaps this journey with my father will reveal something.”

“He can always come into my offices,” MacArd said.

“Oh, but you won’t make him?” she asked almost pleadingly.

“Certainly not,” MacArd replied. “He needn’t do anything, so far as I am concerned, although I think he’ll want to make some sort of place for himself.”

“No interests?” she asked, looking at David again.

“Too many,” he said frankly.

She refrained from more questions, her delicate reserve descended upon her again, but she rose and went to the rosewood piano and brought two large gold framed photographs.

“These are my sons,” she said.

David took the photographs, one and then the other, and looked into two thin serious faces. The photographs were finely colored and both boys were blond, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked.

“Look at those cheeks,” their mother murmured. “They couldn’t have had them here in India.”

“Oh, it’s quite impossible to keep English children here,” the Governor-General said.

His rather sharp voice served some sort of notice upon his lady and she said no more. She put the photographs quietly down on the couch beside her and motioned to a resplendent man servant to fill her small gilt cup again with coffee.

The Governor-General was talking now, explaining to MacArd the difficulties of his position, and indeed of all Englishmen in India.

“The Indians educated in English schools simply do not know the history of their own country,” he declared. “They fancy that all was peace and joy here before the British took over. As a matter of fact, the whole country was embroiled in tyranny and disunity and the common people were at the mercy of every local bully. Yet if any sensible elder Indian mentions this fact he is at once attacked on the grounds of toadying to Empire. They are determined to hate us.”

David spoke unexpectedly. “My mother would have said that they should be Christianized.”

The Governor-General was frankly surprised. “Quite the contrary,” he said coldly. “An Indian is infinitely worse when he becomes a Christian. When he forsakes his own gods he usually ends by being a scoundrel. Never trust an Indian when he says he’s a Christian — it’s become an axiom. Besides, only the lowest castes will change their religion.”

MacArd interrupted. He felt in some way that Leila was belittled by what the Governor had said. “My wife was a truly religious woman. If there were more like her in the world, we’d all be better for it, I guess.”

Nothing could be said to this and nothing was said. The Governor-General could be silent with ease, and the Marquess looked thoughtful. She said, after a moment, “Christianity is so different, isn’t it, in different people.”

MacArd got to his feet. He felt his skin hot, his hair bristle, and he restrained his impulse to defend his wife’s religion. He did not want to talk about her and he was surprised that David had mentioned her. He said to his host, “I think we ought to get on our way. My son and I want to visit the Towers of Silence. We hear it is one of the sights.”

The Governor-General rose promptly. “You should see it, by all means. Have you got your permission?”

“Is it needed?” MacArd asked.

“You must get permission from the Parsee Secretary to the Parsee Panchayat. Wait — I’ll send a man and get it for you. It will be waiting for you at the Towers.”

“Thank you,” MacArd said.

They made their farewells, he touched the lady’s hand quickly, withdrawing his own at once. Since Leila died he had found it unpleasant to touch a woman’s hand, even so coldly. But with a sudden compulsive movement, the Marquess took David’s hand in both her own. “Thank you,” she said, “thank you for reminding me of my boys.”

The Towers of Silence stood upon the top of a high hill. No roofs could be seen as they approached, for the encircling wall was high, but as they drew near, the gate of the outer temple opened, and a priest, grave and dignified in his robes, stood to receive them.

They came down from the carriage and the priest addressed them in English.

“We have received the message from Government House, Mr. MacArd, and we are happy to receive you and your son here in our sacred temples of the dead. Will you rest a while before going on?”

“Thanks, no,” MacArd said. “We will proceed, if you please.”

David looked into the tall palm trees inside the gate. Dark and sullen shapes roosted among the fronds.

“What are those?” he demanded.

“They are the vultures,” the Parsee said tranquilly. “They are very well trained. They do not come down unless the time is suitable. Even when the corpse is ready, they will not come down until the bearers are gone and they are alone with the dead. Some of the vultures are very old and they teach the young ones.”

David knew the process well enough, he had read of it, but MacArd saw his face whiten.

“Want to go on?” he asked.

“Of course,” David said briefly.

The priest described the services as he led them, moving before them with a singular grace and stillness. “The funeral services are performed at the home of the dead. The body is then put into a hearse, not in a coffin as with you of the West, but simply laid there as upon a bed, and covered with beautiful robes and shawls. In great solemnity, our priests lead the way hither and after them come the male members of the family and the friends. The dead is brought first to the outer gates, where the priests take charge. They place the dead in that temple, which you see yonder, sirs, but where I cannot lead you, for it is open only to members of our faith. I can tell you that it is very simple, and that the sacred fire burns there eternally.”

“Why not burn the body?” David asked in a low voice.

The priest looked shocked. “Fire is pure,” he declared. “It must not be polluted by the bodies of the dead. Water is also pure, and neither should the earth be polluted for it is the source of food and strength.”

As though this could not be contradicted, he did not speak while he led them along the path through the beautiful and utterly silent grounds where not a bird sang or any sound penetrated from the city below. There were five towers, and into one of them the priest led them, and then he spoke again.

“It is not usual to come into one of the towers, but you are guests of the Governor-General and I will go beyond what is usual.”

The tower was roofless, the walls about forty feet high, spotlessly clean with whitewash. The gate to this tower was high and they had to climb steps to reach it. At the gate they stood, for the priest forbade them to enter. “You can see what it is,” he said. “You need not to enter, if you please.”

What they saw was a series of paths, running like the spokes of a wheel to a depressed pit at the bottom. Between the paths were rows of small compartments for the dead.

“For the men, the women, the children,” the priest explained.

“There are most for the children and then for the women,” David said.

“Most children must die,” the priest said calmly, “and more women than men, as is their fate.”

They gazed about the place, and as though their presence were a portent, vultures rose from the trees and, moving their heavy wings, they flew slowly over the tower.

“Into these compartments the dead are placed,” the priest intoned. “First, they are taken into the anteroom and the vestments and coverings are taken away, these are purified and returned to the family. Then the corpse, naked as it was born, is laid into its roofless cell and the bearers withdraw. It is now that the vultures do their sacred work. They descend and strip away the flesh, and the bones are left clean. No human comes near. Then the elements do their work. The sun shines down and bleaches the bones and the rain falls and washes them clean until they are pure and white. When the cell is needed for yet another of the dead, the attendant priests, the Nasr Salars, enter with gloves and tongs and take up the bones and cast them into the central pit, where they turn to dust. All the water that falls into this tower and into each of the other towers is gathered by drains and runs down into the pit, which is perforated so that the water carries away the dust of the dead. Below are charcoal filters through which the water must pass and then it flows into a great conduit and so to the bay and from thence to the eternal sea.”

“Does the pit never fill?” David asked in a voice infused with horror.

“Never,” the priest replied. “In hundreds of years it has never filled. The elements do their work well.”

MacArd was stricken in silence, troubled and moved at the same time, revolted and impressed. The priest continued to speak in the same reverent voice.

“It is our faith that before God all men are equal, and here there is no difference between the rich and the poor. All the cells are alike and all the dead alike are given over to the sun and the rain and the sea. All alike find the same rest.”

“But to have no grave from which to arise!” David exclaimed.

“Nevertheless we do believe in the resurrection of the dead,” the priest declared. “It is our faith that our bodies will rise again from the elements, glorified by a new life which as yet we cannot comprehend.”

For MacArd the scene changed, the honor disappeared, and he grasped at the immortal faith. “You believe that, too!” he exclaimed.

“All those who are truly religious believe in the eternity of the soul,” the priest replied.

“That’s very important,” MacArd cried.

David was surprised at the sudden excitement in his voice and still more surprised when at the gate MacArd put into the priest’s hand a roll of rupees.

“It’s been interesting,” MacArd said. “It’s been very interesting. I’ll never forget this.”

The compartment on the train to Poona was large and Wahdi had provided comforts. He had rented bedding from the hotel and had filled a high wicker basket with tinned foods, enough for a journey many times longer than the one to Poona. The windows were closed against the dust, but ventilators were open in the ceilings and dust drifted in as fine and dry as powder. David lay on a couch of quilts spread upon one of the wide benches, sleeping. He wore only his underdrawers, but the smooth skin of his youthful body was damp with sweat.

MacArd glanced at him now and again, recognizing in his son with love and pain the grace of Leila, his mother. His own heavy frame had none of this shapely slenderness, this delicacy of ankle and wrist. Yet David was not feminine. His shoulders were broad and his hips were narrow, and his height MacArd himself had bestowed. But the boy’s face was not at all his, and the dark coloring was contrast enough when they were seen together, so that strangers remarked upon it. He was glad that David could sleep for there was little enough to see from the dusty windows, plains as barren as winter, though it was already so hot that one could scarcely endure the windy heat. Upon the plains the earthen villages were pitilessly bare under the blazing sun. The villages were scarcely more clear upon the landscape than molehills heaped up, and out of them crawled the most dreary creatures he could imagine upon the earth. Yet they were human, though they seemed scarcely different from the pitiful skeleton shapes of the cattle which roamed restlessly over the barren ground, searching for food that did not exist. Men and women and cattle alike were waiting for the rains, still months away. A few days of rain, Wahdi explained, and these dry barrens would spring into instant green. The seed was there, waiting for the life-giving water.

“There is always life,” Wahdi declared.

MacArd recalled the words now as he sat staring out of the window. Wahdi was a Muslim and so the Muslims must believe in it, too. It was a queer thing if he, a Christian, as he supposed he was, should find in a heathen country the faith to believe that Leila still lived. Yet these were very ancient people and they had been religious for a long time and maybe they knew more about such things than fellows like Barton did. He ruminated awhile, and feelings of warm pity stirred about his heart. It was too bad that people so religious, so good, should live half-starved, their land as bare as a desert under a summer sun and all for the want of water and railroads and trade, which was what had made Americans comfortable and rich.

He slapped a fly from his cheek. In spite of the spraying that Wahdi had performed before they left Bombay, there were flies inside the closed car. Flies crawled through the solid wood, he was ready to swear. They were starving, too, and ravenous, teasing any object in repose, if this racking shaking travel could leave anything in repose. The railroads were a disgrace. Something ought to be done about India. The people had no chance. The English were a curious lot, so proud when there wasn’t much to be proud about. A few Americans now, young fellows, trained to develop the people themselves, could accomplish a lot in a few years. Only how would they get in here? The only Americans were a few missionaries. Well, maybe missionaries—

He forgot the flies and the dust and fell into one of those intense reveries which Leila used to call his darkness before dawn, his precreative mood. He was feeling about for the big idea. It would not come down out of the sky or alone. It grew as a twister grows out of a tornado, drawing winds and earth into its shape until it rises to the force of explosion. Then perfectly clearly he saw his big idea.

Why shouldn’t he make his own missionaries and send them to India?

At Poona Wahdi settled them in a good hotel, but MacArd was restless, and he set out to see the city at once, though the afternoon was late. David did not come with him. He had met in London at Claridge’s a young Indian, Darya Sapru, and this young man had invited David to his home if he came to Poona, and there David decided to go. Meanwhile MacArd wandered about the streets at his usual swift pace, startling the people who fell back before him, fearful of his size and good garments. The big idea was with him now day and night and everything he saw was subject to it and became part of it. Here in Poona he found two rivers joining to wind themselves like sluggish serpents among the houses. Behind the city the hills rose to a high tableland and upon one of those hills, his guidebook told him, was an ancient aqueduct, built long ago by a Marathi family. Its source was in a well. Water there was close to the surface of the earth. It would be easy to send it over the whole region, and the land need not lie barren until the monsoons brought rain.

He went back to the hotel at nightfall, and his idea was beginning to grow like a tree. It stretched down roots and sent out branches. He would train his young men and send them here to do his work. There must be a place to train them, a great school, an institution endowed — why not in the name of his beloved wife? That would be an immortality in itself, the Leila MacArd Memorial—

He opened the door of their rooms and found his son waiting and excited by his own afternoon.

“It was a wonderful house, Father,” he exclaimed, “the most extraordinary gardens along the river. I’ve never seen such a place — marble floors in all the main rooms and a huge separate dining room connected with the house by a long passageway, lovely in itself. There’s another huge room — open, too, the sides all carved in wood — where Darya says the family really lives. The drawing room had the handsomest ceiling I’ve ever seen, all done by Poona artists.”

MacArd said absently, “A contrast to the rest of India, I should say.”

His son looked at him with a peculiar humor in his mild dark eyes, but he did not notice it. The conversation died, nor was it resumed for the next few days while they came and went.

Poona was more easily traveled than Bombay, a large city divided into parts like wards, and spotted by the usual monuments and bridges erected by rich Indians. By the fifth day MacArd was ready to go beyond into the surrounding countryside. He was thinking furiously now about water, and how it alone might change the face of India. He saw a country threaded by silver canals, a network of irrigation, independent of rains or even of rivers. Let them use the Mutha and the Mula rivers here in Poona and the Ganges itself in the northeast for electric power, but irrigation canals, the water drawn deep from the earth, alone could provide the steady lifegiving stream to the plains.

Yet who could do it except the Indians themselves? The resignation of the poor and the selfishness of the rich must be blasted by new force. The merchants, the wealthy princes, were willing enough to make vast buildings and public monuments, but they did nothing to relieve the poverty of the hopeless peasants. What they needed was a new religion, a practical religion, that built irrigation systems and railroads as well as churches. He would send a new kind of Christian here, a man who worked while he preached.

On that fifth day he made his decision, and it came from a peasant, a Hindu, naked except for the white turban about his head and the scrap of white cotton about his loins, a thin dried man of about fifty, but one could never tell the ages of men and women here, and probably he was only twenty or twenty-five. The man was a potter, such a potter as any Indian village may have and MacArd was walking with only Wahdi, for David was again with Darya. He came upon the potter as he crouched upon the dusty floor of earth, running with his foot his potter’s wheel while his narrow graceful hands, the fingers supple and swift, shaped a mass of whirling clay. He had looked up to smile fearfully at MacArd, a foreigner and a white man, and to Wahdi he made his excuse that at this moment he dared not rise to give proper greeting, lest the vessel be spoiled.

“Tell him I want to see what he is making,” MacArd ordered, and Wahdi translated with the distaste he always showed when he spoke to a Hindu.

The vessel was finished in a few minutes, a common bowl of clay made from the dry dust of the fields mingled with a little precious water, and the potter set it to dry in the burning sun.

“Ask him if he will take time to show me the village and the fields,” MacArd said to Wahdi. “Tell him I will pay him.”

This in turn was translated, the man nodded, his face lit with a bright good humor, and stepping carefully ahead of MacArd he led him about the small collection of mud huts from which men stood and stared and in which the women hid. The children ran everywhere naked and grey with the dust.

But it was in the fields that MacArd saw the strange sight which persuaded him, like a vision, to the determination which was thereafter to shape his life. The potter was some twenty feet ahead of him upon the narrow path between the fields when suddenly a serpent lay across the path, a cobra, as MacArd instantly recognized. He had not seen one before, except in the pictures of this guidebook, but there could be no mistaking the raised and hideous head flattening and spreading out with fright and rage. Wahdi leaped away but MacArd cried out, “Let me get him!”

He raised his cane, a heavy malacca stick tipped with metal.

The potter shook his head and would not let him pass. He had stopped only a few feet from the cobra and now he stood motionless. He raised his hands and placed them palm to palm, touching his forehead with the tips of his fingers. The cobra swayed back and forth in ever diminishing waves of motion, his sickening head resumed its natural shape and while the potter waited in the attitude of prayer, the cobra gradually subsided, uncoiled its stubborn length, and crawled away.

The potter waited until it had disappeared into a wide crack in the field and then he turned to MacArd. Wahdi was creeping back again, seeing safety, and the potter spoke to him.

“He tells, Sahib,” Wahdi said in some scorn, “he tells that the snake is a god. It is sin to kill a god.”

MacArd was repelled to the soul. This, then, was why poisonous snakes abounded in the vile soil, and this was why they could not be destroyed!

He turned abruptly from the potter. “I will go back to Poona now,” he said to Wahdi. “Pay this man something.”

All the way back to Poona he kept seeing the flattened devilish head of the snake, and between him and it the slender graceful figure of the potter, a good man as even he could see, but one who did not dare to kill the snake, the curse, the menace even to his own life, because of his religion.

MacArd strode into his hotel bedroom and forbade Wahdi to come in.

“I want to rest,” he told Wahdi. “Go away, amuse yourself, eat a meal, anything you wish.”

“Yes, Sahib,” Wahdi said. He was used now to this harsh American who was foolishly liberal with his money. He went away complacent over his own superior common sense and MacArd sat down in a wicker chair. David was not back and he was alone in the room.

Religion! Was that religion, being willing to wait for a snake to strike, passive and waiting, no protest, no self-defense? No wonder the people sat upon the barren land, waiting for the rains.

He struck his big clenched fist on the bamboo arm of the chair. He would put an end to it.

The vision rose before his eyes. The dry land would grow green, the hungry would be fed, the poor would be rich. And he would go to heaven, at last.

II

HE ENTERED HIS OWN house with a firm step a few weeks later, and he gave his hat and stick and his gloves and overcoat to Enderby, the butler.

“Well, Enderby,” he said in his usual brusque greeting.

“Mr. MacArd, sir,” Enderby replied, bowing his head slightly. “I hope you had a good trip.”

“Excellent,” MacArd said. He turned to David, waiting just behind him. “Well, son?”

“Yes, Father?” David said. He understood his father well, he knew that the grizzled head held high and the blue eyes fierce with resolution simply meant that there was to be no mention of his mother. The house was empty in spite of its warmth and the many flowers arranged in the magnificence of the vistas. He felt very tenderly toward his father.

“What are your plans?” MacArd asked.

“I have none, Father,” David said in his equable voice. “I think I shall just go to my rooms and take my time, unless there is something you want me to do.”

“Not at present,” his father replied. “If you have nothing on your mind, I shall go on to my office and be home for dinner tonight.”

“Yes, Father,” David said again.

It was still early, they had breakfasted on the ship, and there was nothing he wished for so much as to be alone for reflection and meditation. Above all, he needed relief from his father, that dominating and oppressive presence which he knew was also powerfully loving. He had shared its weight with his mother all the years of his life, she had taught him to value his father and yet to know that he was unchangeable, and David could bear the knowledge while he had her with him, her gaiety, her humor, her life-giving vitality. The talent she had for absorbing herself in him and in his father, quite separately and yet always keeping the three of them together, had made the atmosphere of this immense house. Now that she was gone he was resolved to maintain it so far as he could do so alone, for her sake, and yet he had a quiet independence, his father’s thought filtered through the gentle blood of his mother, and he was determined also to find the life he wanted for himself and to live it.

“Will you have your luncheon served in your own sitting room, sir?” Enderby was asking, in a slightly raised tone.

“I’m sorry! Yes, if you please, Enderby, I shall spend the day there, I think, until my father comes home. I want to put my photographs away myself. I brought back a lot of them from India.”

“Very well, sir,” said Enderby, for whom India did not exist.

He went away and David mounted the wide marble stairs. There was an elevator at the end of the hall, but he liked the steps. His mother had descended them often while he stood at the bottom, his face uplifted to watch her come down, beautifully dressed, perhaps for the theater or a dinner party. When he was small he had raced down to be ahead of her so that he could see her descend, her train trailing behind her, and her arms and bosom bare except for her jewels.

His rooms were on the second floor, in the east wing, and a wide carpeted corridor led to the door. The house was completely quiet, and this was strange to him, for when his mother had been alive it seemed full of pleasant sounds, music somewhere, the piano or her lovely voice, an almost brilliant voice, or if not such music yet the house had been full of the sounds of living, her friends, the bark and whines of her pet dogs.

He entered the outer door to the rooms he knew so well and there they were before him, the doors open between, his bedroom and dressing room and bath, and here where he stood in his sitting room, and beyond it his study and library combined. The colors were crimson and cream; his mother had chosen them for him while he was in college, and the rooms looked fresh and yet familiar. He sat down in his favorite chair, and leaning back he closed his eyes.

India had made a profound impression upon him or perhaps it was not India but Darya. He had not been able to explain to his father how he felt about Darya. He had been drawn to the slender young Indian when he met him in London but there had been no time to talk with him. Darya was reserved then, he had seemed even cynical, at least dangerously humorous, his dark eyes quick and haunted, as though he saw everything and told nothing. He had wished that Darya was taking the same ship to Bombay for then he could have satisfied his curiosity about a man who attracted him so much and yet who seemed beyond the reach of understanding, but Darya had passage on a French ship a few days later and did not seem inclined to change. “I never travel on English ships,” he had said briefly. Yet he had no rancor toward the English there in Claridge’s where he had the best suite of rooms.

All the days they were in Bombay and when he was alone in Agra, wherever they stopped until they reached Poona, David had kept thinking of Darya. He had written to him before they left Bombay, reminding him of their agreement to see each other and Darya had replied courteously that he was at home, that he hoped that David would spend at least an afternoon with him.

That afternoon was, in a way he could not explain, the first comfort, the first assuaging, since his mother’s death. Until then he had simply followed his father, trying to be pleasant, as his mother would have said, but he had not been able to think at all, even about what he was seeing. He guessed that his numbness had made his father anxious, and that perhaps his father had felt him a burden, too. But Darya had lifted his heart or stirred his mind, he could not yet tell which, though Darya had said very little actually that he could remember. There was no entertainment beyond some cakes and honeyed milk, brought in by servants. None of the family appeared. They had simply wandered about the beautiful house and the flowering gardens, and Darya had pointed out one thing and another, the ivory carving set in a stone wall, the marble lattices brought from an ancient palace. It was not exhibited in pride or vanity, for many handsome objects Darya had ignored. He showed David the particular things that he loved, sharing with him the reason for his pleasure in them. The lotus, blooming in the vast central pool in the garden, their rose pink petals open under the sun, had moved Darya one day to suggest that they sit down on a marble bench and look at them.

“When the sun begins to sink,” he had said, “you will see the petals quiver and if you are patient, you can watch them close. You cannot actually see them move, you understand, but while you wait they close over the golden centers.”

And while they had sat in that garden of beauty where they seemed to be completely alone, although Darya told him that his two brothers and their wives and children lived here also, and that his married sister was visiting his parents with her children, Darya asked him a question which would have seemed strange except that they were in India and an Indian asked it.

“David, what is your religion?” This was the question Darya had asked.

He asked it as one might ask about an ancestor, a nationality or race, or a destination.

David had hesitated for an instant. “I suppose I am a Christian,” he said at last. “At least I am a member of a church.”

“Of Christianity I know nothing,” Darya said almost indifferently. He stooped and plucked a small purple flower that grew between the marble stones of the terrace encircling the pool. He wore his Hindu dress, and this made him less a stranger, David reflected, than he had been in the London hotel, dressed as an Englishman. There was an air of informality about the white silk robes that left Darya’s arms and legs bare, and he wore sandals instead of leather shoes.

“I know too little, myself,” David said honestly. “But my mother believed in God and in prayer. She taught me to believe, I suppose.”

Darya interrupted him. In London he had spoken like an Englishman, but here, though he used English perfectly, he spoke as an Indian, dulling the consonants and rounding the vowels.

“Your religion is not a part of your life?”

“In a way it is,” David said. He wanted to be wholly honest with Darya. He yearned for friendship, a peculiar friendship where they could speak to each other from the heart, because they were strangers to each other. He could not so speak to those whom he had always known, who knew his family and especially his father. To Darya the name MacArd seemed to mean nothing and he took wealth for granted. It was doubtful, David reflected, that all his father’s fortune could match the riches that Darya would inherit.

“How?” Darya persisted. “Tell me more, David, for I wish to know you, and to know a man’s religion is the best way to know him.”

David said, somewhat astonished, “I am afraid that it is not true of me — or of most of us. Perhaps we mean different things by religion.”

“Explain yourself,” Darya commanded with an imperious air. He had a handsome head, smoothly waved dark hair cut short about his oval beautiful face. His large brown eyes, very dark, were fixed on David’s face, and it was impossible to resist their magnetic power.

“With us,” David said diffidently, “religion is or should be expressed in practical works. It would be impossible, for us, I think, to endure or allow such poverty as you have here in your country, Darya. We would try to do something about it and that would be part of our religion.”

“What else?” Darya demanded again, his gaze not wavering.

“What else? Well, I suppose the church, its worship and so on.”

“But what of the soul?” Darya pressed. “What of the mind, the heart, the communion with God?”

“It is individual,” David said.

“You,” Darya said relentlessly, “what is it to you?”

“Not very much, I am afraid,” David acknowledged. “I have gone to church with my parents, I take communion, the bread and wine, you know. I used as a child to pray, I do not do so now. Since my mother died, I have thought about such things more than before, but I do not know how to begin to pray again. I cannot pray as a child and I do not know how to pray as a man. Indeed, I am not convinced of the reality of prayer, though certainly I believe in God, or I cannot say I do not. I have no explanation, otherwise, for the universe.”

“All this is not religion,” Darya had said thoughtfully.

It was true that one could see the lotus closing. David noticed at this moment when Darya spoke that the heavy flowers were lifting their petals slowly from the water, their movement imperceptible, yet positive, as the sun sank down behind the walls of the garden.

“Then what is religion?” he asked and turning his head he looked full into Darya’s wonderful face, so living and lighted a face, so young, so confident.

“I cannot tell you,” Darya said. “You cannot see it and yet it is everywhere. Shall you go to Benares?”

“I don’t know,” David had answered. “My father is somewhat unpredictable since my mother’s death. We are not yet accustomed to being alone.”

“You must not say she is dead,” Darya said. “I read of it in the newspapers in London and that is why I was friendly with you at once when we met. But she is not dead, she is born again.”

“We also are told that the dead live,” David said.

“Ah, but I mean really alive,” Darya said with enthusiasm, “and you need not grieve for her. You may even meet her and you should be watchful.”

“You Spoke of Benares,” David reminded him. He did not care to think of his mother living again in an unknown shape which he could not recognize, and he supposed that was what Darya meant.

“Ah yes,” Darya said, “it was only to say that there you could realize what religion is. Oh, it is a filthy city, you know, but you must remember that it is as old as Egypt, already great when Rome was founded, and that all India hopes to go there, Buddhist and Brahmin alike, to die beside the Ganges. I doubt a western city could be clean if for thousands of years millions of people had gone there to die. It is a repulsive city, I acknowledge it, it is full of beggars and fakirs, but it is also full of pilgrims and it is full of people who most earnestly seek God and with every breath and every act, so that all their life is religion. It is a place where rich men build palaces, where there are wide streets and costly clothes, this silk of my tunic was made there, and Benares is famous for its tapestries of silver and gold. In the old and narrow streets there are beggars and mangy dogs and naked children and unkempt women and peddlers of cheap stuffs and lazy sacred cows and bulls, and lepers — all the dregs of India, if you like, and yet people are driven there by the need for God. Unless you can understand — but how can you? Promise me not to go to Benares, David. I wish you to understand India, and it is there that you will or will not, and I feel your understanding is necessary to me.”

“I promise not to go without you,” David said.

The evening air, the massive lotus flowers closing their petals over their hearts, the heavy fragrance that flowed from them in the dusk, the magic silent garden spread about David an atmosphere which he had never breathed before. He had never felt so close to any human being as he now did to Darya, not even to his mother, for Darya was a man and young, his own age, and life was before them both, a different life for each, in what different worlds he well knew, and yet their need was the same.

He had longed then to be able to speak profoundly to Darya of Christianity, but he could not. He did not know enough, all that he had learned had been from others and he had nothing of his own to give. And Darya, perhaps, was feeling the same way, longing to give him, an American, the richness he believed was in Hinduism.

“Our religion,” Darya said suddenly, “does not spring from one source. Into it many religions have poured their streams, it is great enough to comprehend all and yet it has distilled something unique and individual. Some day I shall be able to explain it to you, but not yet.”

They rose, for the dusk was suddenly chill.

“The lotus flowers have closed, just as you said they would, and it is a sight that I have never seen,” David said.

“You will see it often,” Darya said. “You will come back again and again to India.”

“And you will come to America,” David replied with young warmth. “When you do, you must always stay with me.”

“When I come, if I do,” Darya said, “I will stay with you, and meanwhile we will sometimes write to each other.”

It was a promise. They walked side by side through the garden and he felt his hand taken by Darya’s hand, not closely or even warmly but delicately, kindly, as a token and only of friendship. It would have been a strange act in an American and even repulsive, but somehow it was not so here. He had often seen young Indians walking hand in hand and the act was one of brotherhood. This young Indian accepted him as a brother, and he had never had a brother. His heart stirred but he did not know what to say, and at the gate he still did not know what to say. While the gateman waited, the gate opened, he turned to Darya and put his other hand over their interlocked hands.

“I shall never forget you,” he said.

“Nor I you,” Darya said.

They had planned to meet again but there had been no other meeting and no visit to Benares. Instead his father had decided abruptly to leave India. Long ago his mother had told him never to interfere when such moments came.

“Your father is a sort of genius and you and I are not. We must be humble about it, Davie.”

That was what she used to say, and so he had learned to be quiet in the house, not to ask questions, not even to insist on saying good-night when he went to bed and good-by in the morning when his father went to the office — not for a while, at least, until his father’s fearful energy was fulfilled in some new explosion of creation. Thus the MacArd railroads had drawn into their iron grasp vast industries of oil and steel, coal and ore mines, ships and bridges, and these in time produced immense industrial plants and business buildings.

Was it over? He wondered where his father’s powerful imagination would lead him now. He sighed, helpless before the dynamo, and then he drew from the bookshelf near his chair a small leather-bound book. It was the New Testament his mother had kept on her table. When he left her for the last time, she was lying dead upon her bed. He had not been allowed to stay. Strangers tiptoed in and waited for him to be gone so that they could begin their work. He had turned away, distracted, and at that moment he saw the little book and took it and alone in his room he had tried to read it and could not and so had thrust it into this shelf.

Now he could take it again, no longer fresh from her hand, and yet her touch was upon it and upon him. He let the pages fall open and his eyes fell upon a passage she had marked. She was given to marking lines in books and especially here: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”

He read the words slowly. Rebirth, the words that Darya had used, but what did they mean, not in India, but here and now, for him?

MacArd was back in his office. Here he was used to being without Leila, and he plunged into the affairs which had accumulated during his absence, the large affairs which no one but himself could settle. He had trained his men to bring to him nothing except the crucial and the fundamental, and MacArd men knew better than to bring a problem to him unsolved. He expected them to present their problems with their own solutions for his approval or disapproval.

“I pay a man to solve problems, not to bring them to me,” was his favorite retort.

Everywhere through the immense MacArd Building one came upon placards whereon was printed a sentence in capital letters, EVERY PROBLEM HAS A SOLUTION — FIND IT, and MacArd men were hired and fired upon the basis of whether they took the slogan seriously. He allowed no ribaldry, no mockery, not even mild joking about it. A young man had once been making merry with a parody and MacArd had come stalking in to dismiss him as he stood.

“There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh,” he had thundered.

He knew his Bible and he was fond of speaking in Biblical language. He liked to think, and sometimes to say, that he had been blessed with gold and possessions; with thousands of acres of land in the west, wherein sat mines of iron and silver; with networks of steel in railroads; with merchant ships upon all the oceans of the globe; with vaults in many banks, hiding their treasure of stocks and bonds in a score of vast interlocking industries. The numbers of men who served MacArd were thousands, men whose faces he never saw, men who spent their lives in mines under the earth, who drove his great engines, who manned his machines in factories, who captained his ships, and busied themselves upon the intricate matters of accounting and accumulating the figures which presented to him daily exactly what he was worth. He spent his days in this big office overlooking the harbor and the Statue of Liberty, a room as big as a house, furnished in velvet carpets and hangings and great mahogany tables and chairs, and his desk was his fortress.

While his wife lived, she had made his sole alternative to this life. When he came home at night she was there, a figure of sweet gaiety and mild ironic humor, a woman who loved him and who was never afraid of him. He knew she was not afraid, and it was good for him to know that there was one person who did not walk softly before him, and before whom indeed he must not assume even his rightful air of conquest. For he had never wholly conquered her, she had remained her wilful independent self, taking refuge in wilfulness and refusing logic if she chose emotion.

“But why—” how many of his sentences to her had begun thus while they talked.

She never allowed him to go on. “Oh why, why, and I don’t care why, that’s why!” Thus she had chanted until at last after years of stubborn persistence he had given up and then somehow when he had given up and she knew that he had, their relationship became sweeter and deeper than ever, and he had fallen in love with her again. He was a man passionate and faithful, a righteous man, secretly romantic at the core, and she knew it. She held him by the heart.

There were times now, since he came home from India, when he starved for her, when, in the midst of his day’s work, absorbed as he was with the space and the speed of all he did, he stopped for a moment, for ten minutes or for an hour, to battle with desperate loneliness. While she was alive he could forget her all day, but now that she was dead her spirit came dancing into this room where actually she had been but a few times while she was alive.

“I dislike that castle of yours,” she had said. “You sit there like a king on a throne. King David, King David, but I am not your subject, just the same!”

He could almost hear her laugh. This morning near midday, here in his office he could have sworn that he heard the echo of her laughter, and he lifted his head sharply. He was alone, studying the pages of a proposal for the purchase of new mines in South America, and he heard in the silence of the great room her distant laughter. She was not here, of course, not even the presence of her spirit was here, yet who could tell? He had always rejected the dreamful wishing of men who sought mediums and tried to raise the spirits of their dead, and yet he believed at last that somewhere she lived, cut off from him by an impenetrable wall. Who knew the thickness of the wall?

Since that day in the hotel in Bombay when he had been reminded, or had reminded himself, he was not prepared to say which, but at any rate, when inexplicably he had remembered the words concerning the narrow Judean gate called The Eye of the Needle, through which a camel could hardly pass, as hardly as the rich man could pass into the Kingdom of Heaven, since that day he had not once felt near to Leila. He had tried to imagine what she might want him to do, but she was afar off, and he had rushed, away abruptly from India without finishing the journey. Now here in the midst of his day’s work, he felt her near again.

He sat tense, his fists clenched upon the desk, concentrating upon the thought that she might actually be nearer than he knew, and sweat burst from his skin. He all but saw her, he felt her presence surely for an instant. Then he could not persuade himself that it was anything beyond the longing of his own heart and he turned cold, his sweat chilled, and he collapsed and bent his head upon his folded arms. In the depths of his disappointment he felt impelled to prayer.

“God,” he groaned aloud, “God, show me what she means. What is it I am meant to do?”

He waited in the silence and no voice spoke, until he heard his own voice lifted up, continuing, or so it seemed, in prayer.

“Thou knowest that all I have is Thine.”

These were the words he stammered, they came from within him, they spoke themselves, as though someone else spoke through his lips, someone voiceless using his voice.

It was a strange experience quickly over, he was himself again almost immediately and yet he felt changed. He was bewildered, he was almost sure that more than his imagination had been here, yet he would have been ashamed to confess it, and had the door opened and one of his employees come in he would have been more brusque than usual. Had Leila somehow managed, not quite to break through the wall, but still to touch his memory again and so impel him to the words he had just spoken? Did she want him to know that if they were to be united beyond the wall there were things that he must do which he had not yet done, a consecration of his wealth which he never made? There was the chance. He was a practical man, but like all incredibly successful men who made their own miracles, he had regions past belief, imaginations which were possible realities. Much that had once been only imagination had indeed become real, and so why not anything?

“All that I have is Thine—”

The echoes lingered, and after an instant he struck the bell on the desk harshly. A middle-aged man came in, his secretary. He had never taken to the fad of having a woman in his office, he did not think women should be in business, certainly he did not want a strange woman near him now.

“Thomas, see if Dr. Barton is at home and ask him if he will lunch with me today at one o’clock?”

“Yes, sir,” the man replied.

He went away and returned in a few minutes, noticing no difference in the grizzled figure at the desk. “Dr. Barton will be delighted, Mr. MacArd. Shall I give orders for the small dining room?”

“Yes,” MacArd said. When he was alone he had a tray brought him from the kitchen suite on the top floor. When he had a business conference he ordered luncheon in the paneled dining room, but there was also a small glass-enclosed room on the roof, from where one could look out over the river and see the ocean far beyond. Only a most intimate associate ever lunched with him there, and sometimes Leila had come to dine with him on days when he could not leave the office at night. Together they had eaten and drank, and then for a few minutes, before he went back to his desk and she went home, he always turned off the lights so that she could see the dazzling city spread before her.

“All yours, my sweet, my queen,” he used to say. “Yours, if you want it, to play with or to weave in a necklace or in your hair.”

He had not used the room since she died. Now, when Thomas was gone, he threw down his pen and whirled his desk chair to face the wide window at his back. There gazing over the roof tops into the mild blue sky he reflected upon what it might cost him to acknowledge the full meaning of the words that an hour ago had been torn from his own lips.

Dr. Barton listened respectfully to this richest man in his congregation. He was not a coward and had he felt it his duty he could have spoken plainly even to the great MacArd. Fortunately it was not likely that such would ever be his duty. MacArd was a man rigidly respectable, without grace, perhaps, but good, and if there were rumors of his ruthlessness in business, Dr. Barton supposed that a certain amount of that harsh quality was necessary for success. Caesar had qualities which did not belong to Christ, but which nevertheless were entirely suitable to Caesar.

“It is a stupendous idea, Mr. MacArd,” Dr. Barton said with profound feeling.

He had enjoyed the luncheon, the dishes were prepared with perfection, and he had tried to check his appetite. MacArd ate with careless speed, accustomed doubtless to such food, but it was a feast even for a minister as well placed as Dr. Barton. He knew that gluttony was the vice into which many men like himself fell, and he struggled continually against it. A fat man of God, a voluptuous priest, was repulsive if not actually sinful, and he did not deceive himself. Gluttony was also a sensual vice.

“You like it?” MacArd demanded. “You see the need?”

“It is an idea worthy of your managerial genius,” Dr. Barton replied.

“It is the fruit of my trip to India,” MacArd replied. “The Indians need a decent religion, a creed that will make men of them instead of supine animals. Practical Christianity is the answer, Barton, a vital, missionary creed that will destroy their idols, clean out their vile temples, and give them energy. I say India, but I mean the world. I want to establish a center of virile Christian training from which men will go out into all the world, preaching a gospel of faith and works. I shall make it a memorial to my beloved wife. I want it called the Leila MacArd School of Theology. I want the standards to be the highest and the men to be of the best. I want you to help me find the right place for it and then choose the best men in the country for the faculty. When a man says he is a graduate of MacArd, it must mean that he is a man of natural technical ability trained to the highest degree to spread the gospel of Christianity.”

A waiter came in noiselessly to remove the plates and the butler served the dessert, a creamy ice and small cakes and hot coffee. MacArd pushed his dish away.

“Bring me apple pie and cheese,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir,” the butler replied, and taking the dish away he was back again with a quarter of apple pie, while the waiter presented a tray of various cheeses.

MacArd pointed to a sharp Norwegian cheese and talked on rapidly while the waiter served him.

“First the place,” he proclaimed, “then architects to design the finest possible buildings.”

Dr. Barton was overcome. “Do you have any financial figure in mind, Mr. MacArd?”

“I am not thinking in figures,” MacArd replied. “I am thinking only of achievement.”

“Admirable,” Dr. Barton murmured. “It is quite possible that the world will be changed as a result of what you do.”

He ate his cream ice thoughtfully and nibbled a cake. He hoped that he was not thinking of himself, he earnestly strove not to do so, but it was quite possible that Mr. MacArd would offer him the position as the first President of the MacArd School of Theology. It was of course to be a memorial to Mrs. MacArd, but inevitably it would be known as the MacArd School. She would have been the first to recognize that necessity. He remembered her as a slender tall woman, always gracious, and disturbing only because one was not quite sure whether she was about to laugh. Sometimes when he was preaching with the utmost sincerity he had chanced to look down upon her in the MacArd pew, the central front pew, and he met her eyes fixed upon him and he had caught in them the brightness of laughter. He had learned not to look at her in church.

MacArd tapped the tablecloth with his large fingers. Bunches of red hair shone between the knuckles.

“Well,” he said briskly. “I guess that’s all, Barton. You have your job cut out for you. You can have any help you need here at the office, leg men and so on.”

“Thank you,” Dr. Barton said. “I prefer to do some preliminary reconnoitering myself, if you don’t mind. We don’t want to duplicate existing conditions.”

“There doesn’t exist such an institution as I plan,” MacArd said heartily. “It is something unique, something great, a center of missionary force, MacArd men must know it is their duty to go into all the world, not settle down in some comfortable pulpit here at home.”

Dr. Barton tried to be humorous. “I trust you are not speaking of me.”

“Of course not,” MacArd replied. “Our churches have to be supplied. Besides, you are not a young man. It is the young who must undertake the sort of thing I have in mind.”

Dr. Barton was relieved. He rose, conscious of an atmosphere thickening with impatience.

“I shall let you bear from me in a very few days, Mr. MacArd,” he said. He rose, a pleasantly rotund figure, and shook hands warmly with his chief parishioner and went away.

Summer crept over the city in a mist of heat. Great houses along the Avenue were closed and the families went away to Bar Harbor, to Newport and the coasts of New England. In other years David had gone with his mother to a quiet beach in Maine that faced the south because of the curving bay. This year as a matter of course he stayed on in the city, breakfasting each morning with his father and he was there at night to dine with him when he came home. He knew that his father worried about him intermittently between bouts of work, and he endeavored freshly every day to be cheerful and sympathetic, ready to listen to whatever his father chose to tell him. It did not occur to him to share his own thoughts or feelings, not only because he had never done so, but because there was nothing, he would have said, to share. He was not unhappy, the loneliness for his mother had settled into a dreamy melancholy and he spent his days in a continuing peace which he knew was only an interval. Some time soon he must make up his mind about what he wanted to be. One thing he knew, that he would not go into his father’s offices, but this was not expected of him. So much his mother had done for him during the years she had made it quite plain that David was not like his father and must not be expected to follow in those immense footsteps.

“David will do something quite different from you, King David,” she had said. The name his mother used for his father suited him and yet she had taught the son to perceive that however autocratic his father might be there was always the core of romance in him. “It’s romance that makes your father want to conquer the world,” his mother had once told him. “Long ago I tried to make him stop, we had enough money, more than we could ever spend, and then I saw that it wasn’t more money he wanted but greater dreams. Each dream leads to another as it becomes reality. The world is his theater and he is playwright, designer, producer, director, and star actor.”

She had laughed that day and then was suddenly grave. “And never forget, David, that he is really a king, a man among men. Your father could never do a small or petty deed. Oh, he can be cruel in a big way, but I’ve always known that if he saw the human beings he was cruel to, he would stop everything to rescue them, even from himself. The trouble is he doesn’t see them unless someone shows them to him. That is my business. Only I don’t always find them.”

She had made it her business to keep his father human and sometimes in the long quiet days David wondered if now it were his business, too, to keep his father aware of men, the average men, the little men, above whom he towered so high that he seldom stooped to see them. Yet he had seen them clearly enough in India, not individually, perhaps, but the mass of them, swarming in misery upon the starving earth, and he had been angry at their misery.

“What are you doing with yourself, David?” his father asked abruptly one morning at breakfast.

“Nothing at all for a few months,” David replied. “I hope by then I shall know what I want to do. Something, of course.”

“Want to go to Maine?” his father demanded.

“No, thank you,” David said. “I had rather be here with you.”

MacArd did not answer this. The words gave him comfort, his son’s presence made this still a home, but he must not grow to lean on the boy. He had said nothing of his big plan, and now he felt moved to share it. David might think it absurd, one never knew what the young felt, and there was a good deal of atheism in the colleges. He had never asked David anything about his religious beliefs. He said,

“You might like to help Dr. Barton in a job I have just put up to him.”

“What is that?” David asked half idly. He liked the family minister, though without profound feeling. He was an adherent, like the family doctor or dentist, better than Enderby, of course, but he had not liked the sermon Dr. Barton had preached at his mother’s funeral. Barton did not understand his mother or appreciate her depth and charm.

“I am planning a great memorial to your mother’s memory,” MacArd said. “It is to be a school of theology, a comprehensive institution dedicated to a practical missionary purpose. Barton is looking for suitable sites and we shall engage the best architects. I told him that he could have men from my office if he wanted them, but it occurs to me now that you might enjoy helping him yourself. Perhaps enjoy is not the word. I mean, it might interest you, give you some comfort, to help him. Then you and I could work together, too. I shall appreciate that.”

David was too surprised to speak. A theological seminary with a missionary purpose? He was not at all sure that his mother would have chosen such a memorial. But then she would have chosen no memorial at all. She had a gay humility, she disparaged her own gifts merrily and constantly, she rejected the monumental as pompous. Yet he knew her well enough to know, too, that if his father had wished to present her even with a monument, she would have accepted it with tender charm. “How fascinating!” He could hear her say the words again, as he had once heard her say them when his father had given her a preposterous showy necklace of square diamonds from his South African mines.

“Why a school of theology, Father?” he asked.

MacArd undertook earnestly the task of explaining himself to his son.

“It came to me after India. I saw the enormous contrast between the English and the Indian, or between ourselves and those wretched natives, for that matter. There must be some reason why the western world has risen in wealth and power. Call it the favor of God, if you like to use religious terms, which may be as true as any other. But the fact is that the people over there are oppressed by the weight of an evil and superstitious religion, whereas our religion has made us free men. We have overthrown our tyrants, we have been inspired by our faith. Surely men are not so different that what inspires and strengthens some cannot also and likewise strengthen and inspire others. If this is true, and I believe it to be so, then it is my Christian duty to share with the whole world what I myself have, and I am sure your mother would have agreed with me, if she had been with us in India. This is the logical conclusion. The only way to put a big idea into big action is to train plenty of men to carry it out. I propose to do it at the MacArd School of Theology.”

“I see,” David said. He had listened attentively, his quick mind, accustomed to his father’s concise speech, seizing and enriching every word. He had expected to be repelled but he was not. In spite of the unconscious arrogance of his father’s voice and bearing, the words themselves had not conveyed arrogance. His father did not, then, despise those dark and hopeless people clinging to their barren land. On the contrary, he implied that had they inspiration like his own there was no reason why they should not have all that he had.

“I’d like to think about what you have told me,” he said “It is interesting. I can see that it might be important.”

“It is very important,” his father said with emphasis. “I intend to make MacArd Memorial the greatest center in the world for a practical progressive Christianity that will improve the world.”

He got up. There was no need for answer. It was time for him to be downtown.

“Good-by, son,” he said in his heartiest manner. “Think it over and come with me if you can. It would mean a lot to me.”

David said nothing but he gave his mother’s smile and MacArd saw the smile and felt the old pang at his heart. So much Leila had left him when she died, and yet it would never be enough, because she had taken herself away. He must so live and so conduct himself that the hope of meeting her again in some eternity might be realized, if such hope was a possibility, as he now believed it was. Indeed, he must believe it was. He tried to return his son’s smile, raised his hand in silent gesture and went away.

David poured himself a second cup of coffee. His mother had made it a family habit that they be left alone at this meal, and Enderby did not intrude after he had brought in bacon, eggs, rolls and toast and coffee. Unless someone pressed the bell he would not return until he was sure that no one remained at the table, and David sat drinking his coffee and gazing reflectively into the formal garden upon which the French windows opened. Flowers were blooming in neat beds and at the far end a figure of Italian marble, a slender girl pouring water into a pool from a jar on her shoulder, made a focus for his eyes. His mother had been fond of the figure, a symbol, she had once said to him while they sat together at this table, of life-giving water, flowing from a deathless source. Once when they had been driving through the mountains north of the city they had come upon a vast overflowing lake, one of the reservoirs which supplied the city water, and she had pointed it out to him saying, “The water in our fountain comes from here, and it is the gathered waters of all these hills and valleys, pouring together.”

He remembered the way she had looked that summer’s day in her duster and veil, her face vivid, her eyes dark and alive, and he felt again the symbolism of her words. Was there indeed an eternal source for man’s life, a primal cause, a true reason for the little span of years? He had passed through his first phase of grief, the vivid moment of return had passed and his melancholy now was expressed in vague and thoughtful questions to which he could find no answer. He was lonely and he had begun to long for the companionship of others who were like himself as he now was, and not as he used to be in college. It was impossible to return to the childishness of sports and games and routined lessons. He must penetrate far more deeply into learning, but where and how should he begin? He turned over in his mind the plan his father had put before him. For a moment it seemed preposterous and he doubted his father understood fully what he himself had conceived. A school for religion could grow far beyond the confines of expressed theology. If a body of young and inquiring minds gathered into such a center, who knew what together they might discover? He allowed his imagination to play about the school, developing a place very different from that which his father planned, a place fulfilling a deeper concept, providing an energy not yet in motion, establishing a channel between man and God, such as had never yet been found, discovering if indeed God did exist. When he faced his primary question he could almost hear his mother cry out to him across the space between. She, who had never read theology or cared to hear the reasoning of logicians, accepted the being of God as the simplest explanation of created form and beauty. From whence had come the earth and its flowering if not from Someone?

“It is so much easier to believe than to doubt,” she had said to him.

He finished his coffee and went to the telephone and called Dr. Barton.

“This is David MacArd, Dr. Barton.”

“Oh yes, David, what can I do for you?”

“My father has just told me of his great idea. He suggests that I might be useful to you.”

“Yes, indeed.” The ministerial voice was professionally cheerful. “I have just been looking at some sites. That’s the first thing, isn’t it? The place is important, the repose, the proper isolation and yet not too remote from railroad stations. The practical combined with the spiritual, eh, David? Come along to my study, my dear boy. You’ll find me in a fog of confusion. I shall be glad of your listening ear.”

“Very well, I’ll be there soon.”

He hung up and then climbed the wide stairs slowly. The house was as still as a tomb and on a sunny morning like this he was glad to be out of it.

The air in Dr. Barton’s office was warm and slightly fragrant, as though a fire had been lit, sprinkled with incense and allowed to go out again. The dying smell of old leather-bound books and the mildly acid taint of printer’s ink mingled with the scent of an immense bowl of roses on a table under the window.

“My wife’s contribution to the day’s work,” Dr. Barton said when he saw David’s eyes straying again and again to the roses.

“They make me think of my mother,” he said.

“Ah, we miss her,” Dr. Barton replied, with emotion that just escaped being unctuous. “But it doesn’t do to think of the past, dear boy.”

“She doesn’t belong to the past,” David said.

“Ah no, of course not,” Dr. Barton agreed quickly. “Shall we proceed, David? I don’t want to hurry you, if you feel you would like to talk a while of your dear mother—”

“No, it was only the roses.” He drew his chair to the desk and took up the sheets of paper that Dr. Barton had put down.

“You will see,” the minister said, “that I have nothing conclusive. A fine tract of land lies over here northwest of the city. It can be had for ten thousand dollars. There are good building sites on it. What would you say to running up there today and seeing it for yourself? Then you could corroborate what I am planning to tell your father on Friday at noon, when he has kindly invited me to come and have luncheon with him again, a report of progress, so to speak. It is a great responsibility.”

“I would like to go and may I take this map?”

“By all means,” Dr. Barton said. He was secretly a little glad to be rid of so grave a young man to whom nevertheless he must be cordial, since he was the son of a benefactor. Why, he wondered, had MacArd decided to offer his own son as an aide? Did he distrust, possibly, the minister’s practical judgment? He took out his watch. “There is a train in just three quarters of an hour which will get you there nicely before noon. It is only an hour’s run. At the station you can ask for the livery stable, it is not too far, and half an hour’s drive with horse and buggy will get you to the spot. There’s an old farmhouse near by. Just ask for Miller’s Creek. There’s a train back at five o’clock.”

David took the map and studied it a moment. The dismissal was a trifle too swift.

“What do you make out of my father’s plan, Dr. Barton?” he asked after a moment. He folded the map and put it into his pocket.

The minister looked surprised. “A very noble idea,” he replied. “A center of the best training for young leaders of the church.”

“My father emphasized to me the practical missionary aspect,” David said.

“Ah yes,” Dr. Barton replied in his swift smooth agreement. “Quite rightly. The church militant is a missionary one. ‘Go ye into all the world,’ and so forth. A civilizing uplifting influence, proclaiming the gospel, teaching men the right, revealing the true faith. This is an age of expansion, and if our country can carry aloft the banner of God, we cannot fail.”

David leaned back in the comfortable chair, his hands in his pockets, his eyes intense and thoughtful upon Dr. Barton’s smooth-shaven, well-fed face. It would be unwise, if not useless, to argue at this point when there was not even a piece of land for the school. Later he would talk with his father. He was astute enough to divine by instinct that Dr. Barton looked upon him as a potential enemy, wanting no son between himself and the father.

He rose. “I had better move on if I am to catch that train.”

Dr. Barton was still anxious. “Will you report direct to me, dear boy? I feel responsible to your father.”

“Certainly,” David said. “I realize that I am supposed to be helping you, sir.”

They shook hands and he left the close sweet air of the study and went into the outer freshness. It was one of the city’s rare days, the winds blew in from the sea and cleansed the streets of smoke and mist. He headed for the station, reaching it early enough to buy a couple of sandwiches for his luncheon later on in the hills. In the train the car was almost empty at this hour of the day, and he sat by a window and gazed at fleeting tenements and dirty streets, comparing them in his mind with the crowded sidewalks in Bombay and the dusty squalor of Indian villages. Why should his father dream of sending missionaries to India and China or to any part of the foreign world when here not five miles from his own door were heathen as valid as any to be found? He knew very well the answer to this. His father would declare again, as he had often declared before, that idleness, the fruit of laziness, was the sole cause for poverty in a rich country, and he would give himself as proof. Had he not been poor, the son of a country parson, and had he not raised himself without help until today he was one of the richest men in the world? What he had done others could do in any free and Christian country.

“But could I?” David inquired of himself. He did not believe that he could, if he had been born in a filthy room level with the track. He looked into one sordid cell after another as the train rolled by and he saw dirty children, frowsy women, unshaven men, broken furniture. Had he been born there he could not have pulled himself out of ft. Crushed, by such fate, who would have delivered him? No one, for no one came to deliver such people.

He turned his troubled mind away from a problem he could not solve, and was grateful that the tenements gave way to scattered streets and then to the pleasant countryside. Here was something better to be seen, indeed, than the countryside of India. Instead of dry and barren fields, dust beneath the heat of a burning sun, here were green crops, trees and grass and comfortable farmhouses, barns to store harvests and place for children’s play. Why should not a practical religion destroy the tenements? But he knew that his father would say that tenements could not be destroyed. If they were, others would spring up to take their place. In their separate ways Darya and his father were alike. Darya would say that tenements did not matter. They were man’s fate, but man’s abodes were transient, and there was no reason why a tenement could not be as suitable as a mansion, a habitation for a saint.

Nor would Darya consider the obvious retort. “But you, Darya, live in a mansion and it is easy for you to talk of a tenement as suitable. You will never live in a tenement.”

And Darya would say in his laughing fashion, “Ah, but I was born in a mansion, and I live only where I was born. Had I been born in a tenement, then I would live there. It is meaningless, this difference between mansion and tenement, so long as I am one with God.”

His father, David knew very well, did not dream of destroying poverty, which was the result of what he would call shiftlessness. Poverty was a very proper punishment for such behavior. His father believed that through the right religion civilization could develop which would provide opportunity for all, and then men like himself would rise as he had risen, and those who did not make use of opportunity were the surplus, the scum, useless except as they provided labor. That, in a few words, David thought grimly, was his father’s gospel. God was on the side of the strong.

And perhaps his father was right, and who could say he was not? Perhaps the battle was to the strong and the race to the swift.

III

AT MIDAFTERNOON DAVID LEFT the hilltop and walked down toward the river, the Hudson, at this distance from the city a wide and placid stream. He was hot, for he had chosen to walk instead of hiring a rig, and the coolness of the morning had changed to a still white heat under the blazing sun, and the thought of a swim in the river had become a necessity. He had found the site suggested by Dr. Barton, it was a beautiful place, he agreed, a low hilltop surrounded by higher mountains, facing the distant vista of the river. Yet it was strangely remote and silent, far from human life. He had eaten his sandwiches on the grassy flat, his back against a grey rock, his feet outstretched, and he had tried to imagine buildings, people, young men and their teachers, living here. It was too much like a monastery, he decided, too different from the crowded streets of Bombay and the tenements of New York, and he began to be troubled by the whole idea of the school which was to be a memorial to his mother.

How did men learn of God? How be born again? It would be easy to absorb the message of earth and sky, and creation might seem divine at this height, but would the lessons learned in such idyllic schooldays serve when the days were over? He searched thoughtfully his own experience of religion, nothing very valid, he feared, the usual business of Sunday School and church, and then when he was at prep school and college the required chapel. He could not say that he had ever had an experience of God, although he had joined the church of his parents when he was sixteen or so because it was the right thing to do, or perhaps only the proper thing, and for normal human beings that might be the same thing. He knew that he was not a natural rebel, there had been nothing in his life against which to rebel, and he had found life good until his mother died. He lay back on the grass after he had eaten and lying with his arms under his head and his eyes closed, he thought about his mother. It was impossible to believe that she was not alive in whatever form she might be. She had been too vivid a creature, too positive, too gay to be dead. It was easier to believe that she lived, and that from somewhere at this very moment she looked upon him and knew what he was thinking. She had always an instinct so aware of him that she had often been able to divine his thinking. People were talking a lot about mental telepathy these days, but it might be something more. Nobody knew, and perhaps faith was the easiest way when the alternative was ignorance. It was as wise to assert as to deny when there was no way of knowing anything. Even science was limited. Thus far, it could only deal with chemicals and physical forces. One had to choose.

The sun beat upon him and the wind died down and he slept for an hour and awoke thirsty and hot. Yet he was conscientious and he roamed about the hilltop before he decided that the place was good enough, beautiful if one wanted that, and that he might as well agree with Dr. Barton. The wide silvery band of the river shining through a valley between the low mountains tempted him. It could not be more than a mile or two away straight downhill, and the railroad ran near enough so that he had only to follow it southward to come to a station. He found a small path and by following it or leaving it to crash through trees, he reached a level height on a mild cliff which he had not noticed from above.

The level was that of a spacious lawn where the grass had not been clipped and in the midst of the lawn he saw a large and even splendid house. It was occupied, there were chairs on the porch behind the massive pillars which reached from the roof in the style of the Greek Renaissance in the South. Yet, despite the splendor, the house looked untended. Terraces led down to sunken gardens on either side and there the rose bushes grew too high. A solitary peacock walked slowly on the edge of the upper terrace, its tail folded and dragging.

He drew near and saw that the wide front door was open, although no one was about. A magnificent site this, he thought, only a few hundred feet above the river, which made a sweeping westward curve as though to add more magnificence. Then the peacock saw him and began to screech and bridle. It stretched its small foolish head and lifted its tail and almost immediately he heard a girl’s voice from the garden.

“Oh, Pilate, do be quiet!”

She stood up and David saw her a dark pretty girl, too slender for her height. She saw him and walked toward him, a trowel in her earthy hand, and there was mud on her forehead where she had brushed aside her hair.

“Hello,” she said, “what do you want?”

“I am looking for the river,” David said. “I want a swim.”

“Well, the path goes there.” She pointed with the trowel. “You’ll find some decrepit wooden steps and at the bottom of them is the river. If you don’t trust the steps you’ll have to slide down the cliff. It’s not too steep.”

“Thanks,” David said and lingered. She stirred his imagination. “What a beautiful house,” he said.

The girl came toward him and stood a little distance from him. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she agreed. “It’s my home. We don’t live here in the winter since my father died, but we come as early as we can in the spring, my mother and I, so that I can get the flower beds into shape. Still, it’s July before I get it anything like the way I want it.”

He restrained his curiosity. Why had she no help? “It’s a job,” he said. “I shouldn’t like to have to do it all myself. Haven’t you any neighbors?”

“No,” she said rather shortly. She was not thinking of him, that was clear, she was biting the edge of her crimson lower lip. Her mouth was very pretty, almost perfect in its bow, but it was too small. Her smooth olive skin was flawless, and her dark brown eyes were clear. Her hair was straight and she wore it pulled back tightly from her face and knotted rather high from her nape. The hand that held the trowel was small, too, and just now badly scratched and very dirty.

“The place is for sale,” she said abruptly.

So that was what she had been trying to say, he thought, she had been trying to decide whether she could bear to say it. He could see that she loved the house.

“I am sorry to hear that, since it is your home,” he said gravely.

“Oh, it’s no use!” She made the words a sudden cry and she threw down the trowel. “I know we can’t keep it up. Mother tries to do the housework and I try to do the gardening, and we can’t. We used to have six servants here and they were always busy.”

“I can imagine that,” he said, wanting to help her not to weep. “We have a place in Maine something like it. My mother is dead, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back there.”

At this moment his own inspiration came to him. If the house was for sale, why should not his father buy it and make it the center of the school? There could not be a better site, the trees were old and handsome, the gardens ready to cultivate again, and the house had the air of life about it, in spite of its present state. It did not seem remote, it was not a piece of wilderness, it was a place where people had lived and could still live.

“Look here,” he said to the girl, “this seems very brash, perhaps, but it happens that my father is looking for a place to found a theological seminary as a memorial to my mother, and it occurs to me that this might be the place — if you really must sell, that is.”

The girl looked at him, her dark eyes penetrating.

“No?” he asked, half smiling.

“I am frightened,” she replied. “I was almost daring God to help me, hating him, really, because I am so desperate. I know this is our last summer. My mother can’t go on, and I couldn’t possibly manage alone. But what does one do? I haven’t been taught how to earn my living. And I was just saying, God, if you don’t help me now, I’ll never say another prayer, or I’ll never believe in you again. Then Pilate screeched.”

“I suppose many a prayer has been answered by coincidence,” David said, hesitating for the right words. The girl was so intense, so vivid in her darkness. “I might say that God answered my prayer, too, that I find the place I wanted to find for my father.”

His native prudence touched him at this point. The matter of price was not his concern and he must not discuss it, or seem too eager.

“Come inside,” the girl said. “You’ll want to see the rooms. There are twenty of them, quite large.”

“I ought to introduce myself — David MacArd.”

“I am Olivia Dessard.” She put out an earth-soiled right hand and he clasped it for a second. “Mother will be glad to see you. We don’t have guests any more.”

She led the way along the brick path and up the stately steps to the wide porch beneath the pillars, and then into an immense hall which ran straight through the house and opened upon a wide terrace and the vista of the curving river. “Please wait in the drawing room,” she commanded him with a gesture. “I will find my mother.”

He went into a room of fading magnificence, a museum of mahogany pieces of French furniture and tapestries. It was clean, the furniture dusted, and upon the center table was a bowl of small white lilies. He sat down in a highback chair and waited. Great windows stretched from ceiling to floor, and at the end of the room a marble mantelpiece supported a group of Watteau figurines. The place was well beloved, he could see that, and the more he looked about him, the more enamored he was of his idea.

He heard footsteps but no voices, and then Olivia came, holding by the hand a small grey-haired woman with a tired imperious face. “This is my mother, Mr. MacArd.”

“Mrs. Dessard,” David said. He put out his hand and took a hot swollen little hand, still soapy from dishwashing, he supposed, or scrubbing of some sort.

“Olivia is so impetuous,” Mrs. Dessard said in a high voice. “I hadn’t time to dry my hands properly. You must excuse the dampness.”

He decided to come to the point. “Your daughter has told me of your courage, Mrs. Dessard. I admire it immensely.”

Mrs. Dessard sank down on a satin covered chair. “Olivia says you are interested in buying the house for a religious purpose. That would make me be very happy. I have always been religious, although our faith has been sorely tried in late years. But God works in mysterious ways and maybe this was all planned.” She broke off, her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she shook her head. “You mustn’t mind me. The loss of my dear husband—” her voice broke on the words.

“Miss Dessard told me,” David said gently.

Olivia interrupted. “Is your father David Hardworth MacArd? Mother asked me.”

David turned to her. “Yes, he is,” he said unwillingly.

“We read about your mother’s death,” Mrs. Dessard said. She had got the better of her tears. “We met once or twice, I think, at Mrs. Astor’s parties. But we have lived very much abroad. My dear husband was French, not Catholic, however. His family was Huguenot, but they did not emigrate further than Holland, and then they went back again. Mr. Dessard had business in New York and Paris. Olivia is our only child, though we lost an infant son—”

“Mother, Mr. MacArd is not interested in our family history,” Olivia said.

Mrs. Dessard bridled. “I am sure he is, Olivia. It is important to know with whom one deals and he will want to tell his father. Mr. Dessard lost his fortune in the panic, Mr. MacArd; else we would never have been left as we are now. We could live in Paris, of course, and indeed we own a small house there, inherited from Olivia’s grandfather Dessard, but she loves America. She will not live in France.”

“I love this house,” Olivia said wilfully.

Mrs. Dessard turned to her with the impatience of old unended argument. “I know, my dear, and so do I, but what can we do?”

Olivia turned to David impetuously. “Will you let us come and visit you sometimes?”

He laughed. “Of course, but the house is still yours. My father will want to make up his own mind.”

It was time to go. The two ladies, each wilful after her own fashion as he could see, must not take for granted that the house was sold. He got up and put out his hand to each in turn.

“Good-by, Mrs. Dessard, good-by, Miss Dessard.”

“Oh, but you must see the rooms,” Olivia cried.

He had forgotten. “Ah yes, though perhaps we could wait until my father—”

“No, now,” Olivia declared, “then we will feel we cannot change our minds.”

She began to walk away as she spoke, and he was compelled to follow while Mrs. Dessard looked after them.

“This is the living room,” Olivia said, throwing open a closed door, “and here is the dining room. The other side of the house is taken by the library and behind that the ballroom. The kitchens are connected but they are in separate buildings above which are the servants’ quarters.”

He looked at one vast room after another.

“The man who built this house had a perfect sense of proportion,” he observed.

“You notice that?” Olivia asked eagerly. “It was my father. He built the house for my mother when they were married. He thought then that they would move to America altogether and he sold his possessions in France and built this house for her and furnished it with heirlooms from his family. Mother was an orphan and she lived with her grandmother. Do you know—?” She named a famous old name of New York.

“Indeed I do,” he said respectfully.

“She is the last of that family,” Olivia said. “I of course am a Dessard. Now come upstairs.”

The staircase was double, winding spirally from each side of the hall, seemingly unsupported, and he followed her up the right side and into a circular upper hall, from whence heavy doors gave into bedrooms.

“There are eight bedrooms on this floor,” she said, “and six on the floor above. My father wanted a big family and he loved to have guests. You cannot imagine what this house was when I was a child. We lived here the year around, and my father had his own road built to the railroad station. It would have to be repaired, but the roadbed is still good.”

She was a competent and clever girl, he could see, besides being handsome. She had a proud carriage in spite of a manner almost unsophisticated, but she was not in the least like the girls he knew in New York, the daughters of Fifth Avenue families, and the children of his mother’s friends. She had perhaps been educated abroad, and yet he did not believe so. Perhaps she had simply grown up with her parents here. He could not remember her name among the debutantes of any recent years, but then he had been much away from home.

“This is my own room,” she said throwing open a door. “I like it better than any place in the world.”

He looked about half shyly; he had never looked into a girl’s room before, and this was one strangely feminine for so strong a young girl. The color was rose, the canopied bed was draped in rosy curtains and rose and net were at the windows. The carpet was a bed of flowers.

“It is very pretty,” he said.

“I love — I love — I love it,” she said passionately.

“I wish you could stay here,” he said.

“But I can’t,” she rejoined, pressing her lips together.

She shut the door abruptly. “I won’t show you Mother’s room — she wouldn’t like it because she hasn’t made her bed. She doesn’t like me to make it. I make mine before I go outdoors. You see how neat my room is? I am like that.”

“Beautifully neat,” he agreed with a glint of laughter.

She suspected the laughter and frowned quickly. “There is no need to show you the kitchens. Everything is done well and you would not need to make changes, unless you had many people here.”

“Such changes could be made later,” he agreed.

They went downstairs, and Mrs. Dessard was still sitting in the chair. She had gone to sleep, however, her head leaning against the cushioned back.

“Poor petite Mama,” Olivia whispered. “She is always tired. Yes, we must sell this house. I see it, and I thank God you came today. It makes up my mind.”

They tiptoed out of the house and he stood on the terrace overlooking the river.

“Are you religious?” Olivia asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

“I also do not know,” she said. “Before my father died, I was not religious, but somehow his death has made me wish to be so, if I know how. That is, I feel now that I would like to believe in God, I mean, really to believe.”

“I know,” David said.

He turned to her and saw in her dark eyes an honest yearning. He had never met a girl like this, someone so naive and yet so adult.

“I wish we might be friends.” He spoke these words with an eagerness not usual to him.

“I would like that also,” she said frankly. “I have never had a friend. When Papa was alive we were always coming and going, there was no time.”

They clasped hands suddenly and strongly. “I will come back,” he promised and he left her standing there on the terrace gazing after him.

He reached home late and tired. “Where’s my father?” he asked Enderby as the door opened.

“In the liberry, sir,” Enderby answered. Reproach was heavy in his voice. “He’s fit to be tied.”

“I’ll go to him first,” David said.

So he went straight to the library and there found his father waiting in motionless anxiety. He knew very well that still terror. He had seen his father waiting like that when his mother died.

MacArd looked up grimly. “Well,” he grunted. He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. “You’re late.”

“Terribly,” David said, “I should have telephoned, but there was a train waiting when I reached the station, the last, they said, until ten o’clock. I jumped on and thought to explain when I got here.”

“You had better get washed and come into the dining room,” MacArd said. “The dinner must be dried up.”

“You shouldn’t have waited, Father.”

To this MacArd did not reply. He walked away slowly. He felt weak, exhausted by fright. His quick imagination, so valuable when he was making a plan, could be a curse when it came to someone close to him, the only one close to him since Leila died. He had not imagined it possible for her to die, and since she had, the existence of his son seemed fragile. Yet he must not protect David, it would ruin him. He ought to have had a dozen children. It was impossible to substitute for one’s own flesh and blood, but the sooner he got on with his project the better, it would take his mind off himself and his vulnerability.

In the dining room Enderby pulled out the heavy oak chair at the head of the table and rang for the soup to be brought in. He stood looking solemn and thinking that Mr. MacArd should not wait longer for his meal. He was not as young as he once was and the death of his wife had aged him too fast. The second man brought in the tray with the soup tureen and Enderby took up the silver ladle, and filled a plate and put it before his master. At the same moment David came into the room, his face red from quick scrubbing and his hair wet.

“I didn’t take time to change, Father,” he said in apology.

“Doesn’t matter for once,” MacArd replied gruffly. He began to eat his soup, an excellent beef broth laced with a dry sherry — very comforting. The plate was empty before he spoke again.

“Well?” he inquired.

David smiled at his father. “What have I been doing all day, I suppose? I think I’ve found the spot. Of course you have to see it.”

“Barton said something about it,” MacArd said in the same gruff voice.

David hastened on. “Yes — well, I saw the spot he meant, it’s very fine, but I found another nearer the river and it seems to me even better. There’s already a road to the railroad station, only about two miles, I walked it and it wasn’t bad. There’s a house on the spot already, it’s for sale, a mansion I ought to call it, twenty rooms, pillared porch, you know the sort of thing—”

“Come, come, catch your breath,” MacArd commanded.

Enderby took the soup plates away and the second man brought in a fish filet and steamed potatoes. Enderby put down fresh plates and served the second course.

“Now,” MacArd said, “go back and tell me exactly what you found.”

David, between bites, told him, dwelling upon the magnificence of the house set upon a leveled hill above the sweeping curve of the Hudson. He described the rooms, the plenteous lands about it, space enough to build a dozen dormitories and halls, the great oak trees and maples, the view across the river for a hundred miles.

“And who did you say owns the house?” MacArd asked.

He had eaten his fish in silence and now Enderby took the plates away and the second man brought in roast beef and vegetables in covered silver dishes.

“A Mrs. Dessard and her daughter,” David said. “Mrs. Dessard said she had met Mother at Mrs. Astor’s house.”

“Dessard — Dessard,” MacArd said, reflecting. “Where have I heard that name?” But he could not remember.

“The family was originally French, though of course now they are American,” David said. “Mr. Dessard failed in the panic, and then he died, and they have struggled along ever since. They have a small house in Paris but Olivia—”

MacArd frowned. “Olivia?”

“I should have said Miss Dessard,” David said hastily.

MacArd ate for a while without speaking and David devoted himself to his plate. He ate slowly and fastidiously and his father ate quickly, and disliked to be kept waiting.

“I suppose,” MacArd said at last, “I had better have Barton go and see the place.”

“Perhaps I should have told Dr. Barton about it first,” David said.

“Nonsense,” MacArd retorted. “He can come over tonight.”

Enderby took away the dinner plates, replaced them with service plates and then sent for the dessert. It was strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and he served it tenderly.

“Will you have coffee now or later, sir?” he asked MacArd.

“Later,” MacArd ordered. “Serve it in the library. I shall ask Dr. Barton to join us.”

“Yes, sir,” Enderby murmured.

David did not speak. They ate their dessert and then MacArd got up abruptly and David followed. They had not taken coffee in the drawing room since his mother died. The doors of the room were closed, and they passed it and went on into the library. The second man had already put the tray on the table and Enderby served the coffee. MacArd took up the telephone and in a few minutes had reached Dr. Barton.

“Come along over now if you can,” he suggested in so forcible a tone that it was a command.

Dr. Barton agreed, David supposed, for in a moment his father replied, “Good — we aren’t waiting, but there will be a cup of hot coffee for you.” He hung up.

“Did you say anything about the price of this place?” he inquired.

“No,” David said, “I didn’t think that was proper. You may not like the idea at all, or Dr. Barton may not.”

“Dessard,” MacArd murmured, “Dessard? I have heard it somewhere.”

They sipped their coffee in silence. Whatever MacArd was thinking he did not tell his son, and David sat relaxed, his mind roving over the day. He felt rested and weary together, weary in body and rested in spirit from the day of sunshine and air and widespread views. He had not been in the country since they left India, and this was different country indeed. He had a comforting sense of richness and plenty, of confidence and security. It was good to be American, he was glad to be born what he was. And then he thought of Olivia and her lovely troubled face. She had such a pretty mouth, though too small, and magnificent hair. Very likely such hair would come far below her waist if she allowed it to hang. His mother’s hair had been long like that, dark, too, but not coal black as Olivia’s was. They were not alike, except that both of them had an intrepid air, a natural daring. Olivia had no laughter, and laughter had been his mother’s golden gift. Olivia had not once laughed while he was there, though it was not to be expected perhaps, when they had talked of so somber a matter as selling the house she loved.

“Dr. Barton, sir,” Enderby said.

The handsome grey-haired minister came in, smiling and cordial. David sprang to his feet, but MacArd did not rise as they shook hands.

“Good of you to come on a moment’s notice, Barton.”

“I always come if I can when you send for me, Mr. MacArd.”

Enderby poured fresh coffee and MacArd turned his head.

“Leave us now, Enderby. Nobody need stay. David can let Dr. Barton out.”

“Yes, sir, good night sir.”

“Good night,” David said because his father did not answer, and the door closed.

“Well, dear boy,” Dr. Barton said cheerfully to David, “you are quite sunburned.”

David smiled agreeably and looked at his father and MacArd began to talk.

“David has found an interesting place—”

David watched Dr. Barton’s neatly bearded face. It was impossible to tell whether he was displeased. The light blue eyes did not flicker, the ministerial calm did not change.

“Splendid — splendid,” Dr. Barton murmured now and then.

He was pleased, David decided, perhaps because if the School opened earlier, so much earlier would his place be set in it. Then he despised himself for his readiness to suspect a man perhaps innocent and when his father finished he said somewhat impatiently,

“Father, shall I write Miss Dessard that we will come next week?”

“If you wish,” MacArd said, surprised. “I was going to have Barton write to the mother.”

“On the contrary,” the minister said gracefully, “it will make it more informal if we allow the young people to be in charge.”

David changed the subject abruptly. “There are the most awful tenements on the way. One expects them in India but not here.”

“Not at all,” MacArd said. “That is where men like Parkhurst make such a mistake.”

Dr. Barton did not speak. Parkhurst, the minister of a fashionable uptown Presbyterian church, had chosen to ruin himself by attempting to clean up New York. Other ministers observing his predicament had prudently refused to endorse his accusations.

MacArd went on, “It is impractical idealism to think that we can do away with the weaknesses in human nature which produce misery. Nothing is further from my purpose. I intend to bring to the MacArd School of Theology the finest and strongest young men we can find and fit them to go out and preach and practice a virile gospel that will attract men like themselves. I purpose to offer an opportunity to all alike, but I know perfectly well, whether this be done in our own country or in India or anywhere in the world, that only a few will respond.”

“Many will be called, but few chosen,” Dr. Barton murmured.

“Exactly,” MacArd said, “but those are the few who count. They are the men who change the world.”

David lifted his bead sharply, but his father’s eyes were not upon him.

A week later MacArd stood on the terrace of the Dessard house overlooking the river. He was pleased with his son’s imagination. The place was beautiful, the house was sound. He liked having a great mansion at the heart of his memorial to Leila. New buildings could be grouped about it, but the center would be here in these lofty rooms.

He turned to Olivia Dessard. “I will buy the house,” he said abruptly. “If your mother cares to sell some of her larger pieces of furniture, I will include those. My lawyers will visit her here or in the city, as you please. By the way, the name, Dessard — it seems to be familiar to me and yet I cannot place it. What was your father’s business?”

Olivia looked into the deep-set grey eyes under the thick grizzled red eyebrows. “He owned land in the West, Mr. MacArd, much land, and he raised beef. But he was ruined because the railroad on which he depended for shipping his steers increased its rates until he could no longer ship.”

MacArd remembered suddenly. A small railroad, ending in Chicago, served at its farthest reach an area in Wyoming on the eastern side of the Rockies. It was only one of the small railroads which he had absorbed into his own great central system and he had done it by lowering freight rates until competition ceased. He had then bought the small railroad cheaply. Dessard was not directly connected with him, but that was how he had heard the name. A Dessard had been one of several owners who had brought suit against his main company and they had lost. He wondered if this girl standing here so trim in her white shirtwaist and black skirt, knew that story. If she did, she gave no sign of it and he did not make a test of her memory. A fate brought him here to Dessard’s house, God’s leading, if one wanted to call it that, something more at least than coincidence. He resolved to be generous to Dessard’s widow and daughter, not because of obligations, for he had won the suit honestly in the courts, but merely because he liked to be generous when he could.

“I believe your mother suggested tea,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, please, in the drawing room,” Olivia said.

She led the way and he found Mrs. Dessard and Barton already seated and waiting for him. The girl, he noticed, left them at once, and a few seconds later he saw David walking with her away from the terrace. They were off together, then. He pondered for a moment the possible meaning in this and then decided against its distraction. He had come here to make a bargain.

“With your permission, Madam,” he said to Mrs. Dessard, “I will make an appointment for my lawyers to call up yours.”

“Very well, Mr. MacArd.” Her slightly withered cheeks were very pink but she gave him a cup of tea with a hand that did not tremble.

He had accepted Mrs. Dessard’s invitation to drink a cup of tea in the drawing room, but he could not forget that while he and Barton sat with her over the fragile china she had set out on the tea table, David was wandering away somewhere with the girl. He listened to Mrs. Dessard’s random talk and to Barton’s ceremonious answers and waited.

“Will you show me the path to the river?” David asked. He was confused by his own pleasure in being alone with Olivia again.

“It is easy to find,” she said carelessly, but she led the way while he followed.

She was used to the path, he could see, and she guided him down, sure of foot, touching his hand now and then when he offered it to support her over a rock. She was handsomer than he remembered, but still not beautiful, he decided, so much as unusual in her looks. The severity of her white shirtwaist and the black of her skirt and the short waist-length jacket suited her black hair and olive skin. He longed inexplicably to know her better, and it was easy to talk with her for she was frank and not at all shy. He had known many girls casually, girls whom he had met at birthday parties when they were children and later at dances and Christmas cotillions and college proms, pretty fluffy merry girls of whom he was wary because he was the son of his father. His mother had laughed at him often for his wariness, pretending distress lest he never present her with the delightful daughter-in-law she pretended she wanted. She made David’s wife into a figure at once imaginary and real, and had done so since he was out of knickerbockers. Perhaps had she been less mocking he would have found earlier someone who could attract him.

He was not quite sure that Olivia did attract him so much as interest him. She was a grave sort of girl, unchanging, or so he imagined, who if she gave her word, would stand by it, whether or not it made her happy to do so. But today she almost smiled at him a few times and once when he made a joke she gave a quick laugh, broken off as though it surprised her. They sat down on a log and he talked about India and Darya, and she listened with so remote a look upon her face that he did not know whether she was interested.

“Curiously enough, it was India that gave my father the inspiration for all these plans,” he said.

“How strange!” she said. “My grandfather Dessard was once in India. He went there to study Hinduism when he was young. I remember he said that India changed everybody who set foot upon her soil.”

David laughed. “It didn’t change my father — it merely inspired him to want to change India.”

At this moment he heard his father’s voice and looking up he saw that tall and grizzled figure standing at the top of the cliff shouting for him.

“David! I am ready to leave!”

“Coming!” he shouted upward. He turned to Olivia. “I must go, as you see. But may I come back alone? Then I shall stay as long as you will let me.”

“Do come back,” Olivia said. Her eyes were fixed upon his face, eyes black, intense, veiled with doubt and question. He smiled, but her look did not change.

IV

HE DID NOT SEE her again for many weeks, partly because of a strange cowardice when he remembered the last look she had given him, partly because he did not want to be present or near while his father took possession of the house.

For MacArd moved with his usual resolution and speed once his attorneys had settled upon a price and he had paid it. He summoned architects to plan three new buildings and design necessary changes in the mansion. For the present the upstairs was to be made into an apartment for the president of the seminary, Barton he supposed, since it was obvious that he wanted the job, and Barton would be obedient to his wishes. He ordered the architects to please the minister and his wife, he ordered Barton himself to call together a suitable number of men to form a Board of Trustees of whom he himself would be chairman, and he directed that the seminary open in the autumn of the next year, with suitable installation services and an imposing catalogue. He designated men from his own offices to carry out his plans, distrusting Barton’s practical ability.

“You put your time in on getting the best men you can find for the faculty,” he ordered. “I don’t know anything about that. Pay them whatever is needed to take them away from their present jobs.”

“Historical Theology,” Dr. Barton murmured. “Hebrew and Greek, Systematic Theology, Classical Languages, Church History, Exegetical—”

“Yes, yes,” MacArd broke in, “that’s all your business. What I want is a certain kind of man, you understand, a sound pioneer type.”

“We shall have to approach the colleges and universities for their best graduates,” Dr. Barton said solemnly.

“Of course, of course,” MacArd agreed, his eyes restless with impatience. “I am simply telling you what I want. If there is any difficulty about money we can arrange scholarships, though I don’t see why we can’t get other men in the church to contribute scholarships as their part in it.”

“Or chairs of theology, for that matter,” Dr. Barton said, anxious to be practical.

MacArd nodded and drummed his fingers on his desk. The interview was taking place in his office, and he was anxious to be done with it, though determined to carry through his plans without delay.

He had an overwhelming anxiety which he could not explain to so simple-minded a man as Barton, who had nothing to do with business. The production of gold this year was evidently going to be the lowest in the history of the country. His figures had arrived from Washington only this morning and they showed an incredible lag in the production of the precious metal. At this hour of the country’s magnificent growth, when everything else was expanding with glorious speed, wheat pouring out of the new lands in the west, oil wells spouting fountains of eternal wealth, manufacturing soaring, the total number of miles of his railroads more than three times what they were a quarter of a century ago, even the population rising to a new height, only gold was short, its increase far behind the demand. Gold simply could not be mined at sufficient speed to meet the need for basic money. He had long toyed with the idea of a process whereby gold could be extracted from low grade ore. Only by such a miracle could prosperity be saved and he saw the miracle like a mirage upon a desert, the glory of a new era, an era when the mountebank, William Jennings Bryan, would be defeated, when all the wild socialistic ideas of Populists and Greenbacks and the Silver Party would be deflated by plentiful gold, when the angry farmers ready to join the ranks of the long-haired Bryan would be appeased. A sound government based on gold would be the foundation for such an expansion in business as the country had never yet seen.

“Now, Barton,” MacArd said firmly, “I shall have to ask you to get about your business so that I can get about mine. I have to make the money for you, you know.”

“Be assured that I take the task as a sacred duty,” the minister replied.

His back was not turned before MacArd was roaring into his office telephone, banging a great outspread hand palm down upon his desk. “Get the lawyers here, and tell them to come now!”

Through the days of his father’s absorption in a business he did not explain nor David try to understand, the year moved on. There were no parties and no dances, for MacArd had decreed a full year of mourning, and David was left idle, and yet he was not discontented. He had finished college, he had not lived at home for eight years, and while he still missed his mother, there was a pleasant sense of growing freedom in the vast quiet house on Fifth Avenue. A letter from Darya had reached him in the late autumn, and he was moved to write back inviting the young Indian to come for a visit. He had broached the idea to his father today, who, absorbed and abstracted, was nevertheless willing.

“I suppose you are lonely,” he said abruptly to David. The morning was grey with approaching November and the house looked somber. Even he could see that a young man alone for the day, and day after day, might find it grim, in spite of luxury and warmth.

“I am not lonely,” David said, with his usual good humor. “But I would like to know Darya better.”

“Well, have him come, by all means,” MacArd said, and then fell into his abstraction again. There was no use in trying to explain the labyrinth of his thoughts. He was going through a creative period during which he could have explained nothing to anybody. He watched the charts of the production of gold as they were prepared for him weekly. As yet very little had happened. The necessary machinery had to be designed and produced, and there had been delay and mistakes. It would be a matter of five years, he began to fear, before gold would become plentiful enough to make the currency of the country sound. Meanwhile the National Treasury was being robbed by anyone who could produce a silver dollar and get its equivalent in gold. The gold thus got did not go into banks but was hidden under mattresses and in chimney nooks and tied up in old stockings. Gold was actually disappearing from circulation, and if this went on long enough a new panic was inevitable. Nothing could stop it. The currency was being debased to a point where it would soon begin to affect the prestige of the nation abroad.

He got up from the breakfast table where he had been grinding out these gloomy thoughts. “Yes, yes,” he muttered. “Go ahead and invite the fellow. Tell him to stay the winter if he likes. You could take a trip somewhere, you two. I shan’t be able to get away for I don’t know how long.”

“I wish I could help you,” David said, troubled by the greyness of his father’s face.

“Nobody can help me,” MacArd said.

“It isn’t money, is it, Father?” David asked.

“Not my money,” MacArd retorted. “But the nation is going bankrupt unless this robbing of gold can be stopped. That long-haired fellow Bryan will be president one of these days if we aren’t careful.”

David was the usual young college graduate. He did not understand business, finance or politics. If he made up his mind to go with his father he would have to understand them some day, but he was not sure now that he wanted to work with his father. He longed for another life, a different world, where mind and spirit were more important than making money and shaping politics. Why was his father so terrified of William Bryan? Perhaps he would make a good president. It was all in the muddle, the puzzle, the scintillating changefulness of life ahead, and he did not want to face it yet.

“Give me a year, Father,” he said with his boyish smile. “A year, and then I shall settle down and try to understand these things, and be of some use to you.”

“Take as long as you like,” MacArd grunted. Nothing would be solved in a year. He wiped his grizzled mustache with his napkin and left for his office.

It would be a pity, Darya thought, folding David’s ardent letter, to leave Poona now just when the weather was at its best and coolest. A few months hence, in February or March, the dry heat would be suffocating and then it would be pleasant to take ship at Bombay and cross the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, saunter through Europe and England and reach America perhaps in June. He had never seen America, although he knew England well. His father was one of the Indians who admired England and who had brought up his children to be half English. Darya spoke English as well as he did his native Marathi, and he had finished at Cambridge with first honors. So that his children could be thoroughly at ease in England his father had built an English house within the compound here at Poona and had employed an English tutor, a Cambridge man, to live there with his sons. All during his youth Darya had been compelled during the week to eat lamb chops, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, boiled cabbage and potatoes and sweet puddings for dessert. This, his father declared, would fit him for life among the best Englishmen when he went to Cambridge. Only on Sundays were he and his younger brothers allowed to join the family in the big Indian house and eat the delicious spiced Indian foods.

The years in England had passed easily and quickly, he liked English life, although he was often troubled because of the difference between English people in England and in India. In England they were kindly and they did not show airs of superiority, yet once they came to India as rulers they changed and became arrogant and proud. Even the Eurasians, who were only half white, took over these airs. Some day, his father said, it must stop, but no one knew yet how to stop it.

Darya had been attracted to David MacArd in London, and it was natural enough that there should be equality between them, but he had hesitated long before the meeting in India. Yet in Poona David had still been charming and unaffected and different from any white man that Darya had ever known. He was curious now to see the young American in his own country, his own home. The singular attraction held and drew him westward, for what purpose he did not know. He was fond of his pretty Indian wife but his marriage had been arranged by his parents and he did not expect to find companionship of mind and spirit with her. Nor was it easy to find anywhere, for he was repelled by the Anglicized young Indian men, and dismayed by the softness of those who had never crossed the “black waters” to England. In his somewhat singular loneliness he saw the young American as friend and brother.

In May, for it was against his instinct to show haste in spite of his wish, he left India and many weeks later, his ship drew near to the dock in New York. It was his first visit but he had heard of the city, fabulous and new, rising high from its island base. He stood on the deck among the other passengers, ignoring their curious stares, and gazed at the buildings massed against the sky, and he wondered at the skill of the hands that had built them and fixed them there, in spite of storm and earthquake. A foreboding of future power in this white man’s land crept over him. There was nothing to stop such men, and he wondered again, as he had so often before, what spirit of restlessness filled the white men of the West, driving them to greater distances, vaster wealth, more abundant power until some day they might conquer the world. As the ship edged nearer to the shore, he half wished that he had not come lest David might not be the modest and gentle young man he remembered.

But his fears were soon forgot. When he came down the gangway, dressed in his best London suit and topcoat and carrying a gold headed cane, he heard David’s voice.

“Darya, how glad I am!”

It was the same David, Darya’s swift Indian instinct assured him, and then he was shaking hands, both hands, his cane under his arm, and the two young men were gazing at each other with delight, not seeing the glances that were cast at them from other eyes.

“Come along, the automobile is waiting,” David urged. He pulled Darya along by the arm.

“I say,” Darya protested, “what about my luggage?”

“Oh, that will be attended to,” David said. He was ruddy with exhilaration and good spirits, the day was one of soaring wind and bright sunshine and he was proud of the city glittering under the brilliant sky.

“Come along,” he cried, “luncheon is ready at home and we shall be alone. Ah, I’m glad to see you, Darya!”

Darya had never been so greeted before by a white man and he felt his heart glow in his bosom with love and excitement. A wonderful country where white men could be like this, where he was urged to come to a white man’s home as though he belonged to the family!

“I can’t tell you how happy I am,” he stammered.

David laughed and then saw the glimmer of tears in Darya’s dark eyes. “Why, dear fellow,” he exclaimed, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Darya said. “I thought perhaps you had changed.”

“I change?” David demanded. “Why should I?”

“I don’t know,” Darya said. But he did know. He had seen too many white men change when they saw an Indian face.

“My friend,” Darya said, “you should marry.” He had been in the luxurious American house for three weeks, he had seen the city, he had visited the shops and bought gifts for his mother, his young wife and the two children, his three sisters, his aunts and cousins, his father and uncles and nephews. He had gone with David to the theaters, had heard the new music and on Sundays he had even gone to church with David and his father and had listened in some amazement to Dr. Barton, whom he professed not to understand.

David smiled and then blushed faintly. “What makes you say that?”

The two young men had come to a point of intimacy where anything could be said.

“This vast house,” Darya said, waving a dark and graceful hand to signify endless empty rooms. “Your father, who has only you. There is a great deal to be said for many sons. I am glad I have two already.”

“I keep seeing my mother here,” David said. “It would be hard to find anyone to fill her place.”

Darya looked horrified. “You don’t want to fill your mother’s place, surely,” he exclaimed. “You want to find a wife.”

“I would like to find a wife who is as much like my mother as possible,” David said.

Darya shook his head. “No, no — a man’s wife and his mother should be totally different persons. Anything else is incestuous in concept.”

David was innocent enough to look bewildered. “I should say that it was a tribute to one’s mother.”

“Not at all,” Darya maintained. “Any mother in India would choose for her son a wife very different from herself, of equal caste and so on, but that’s all.”

David did not answer. He thought suddenly of Olivia to whom he had never returned. He had felt a curious and perhaps unnecessary delicacy about pursuing his friendship while his father was buying her home. Nevertheless, he had not forgotten her, as he now realized.

“A relationship between mother and son cannot be continued between husband and wife,” Darya was saying with authority. They were in David’s sitting room in the late afternoon of a crowded day. They had spent the morning, at Darya’s wish, in art museums, had lunched at Delmonico’s and afterwards had gone to a matinee. Now, they were smoking cigarettes, a new taste for Darya, and idling before they dressed for dinner. Darya was meticulous about dressing before dining with David’s father, whom he admired and professed to fear.

“A man begins something entirely new when he takes a wife,” he went on. “Moreover, a real woman does not wish to be also her husband’s mother. If she is compelled to this unnatural position she will resent the burden and despise the man. Keep your mother in your memory, my friend, and open your eyes. It is time. It is not well for a man to live celibate when he is young. Afterwards, yes, when he thinks of becoming a sadhu, a saint, it is then becoming enough.”

The fluent melodious stream of words poured over David’s sensitive ear. If Darya had a fault it was this pouring golden stream of talk, the overflow of his restless and active mind, a penetrating mind, David had to acknowledge, a scintillating searchlight cast upon every person and every object and scene which presented itself. Only today he had grumbled half humorously, and yet with seriousness,

“Darya, I feel that you are showing me New York, rather than the other way around.”

For surrounding every experience had been the enveloping glow of Darya’s incessant comment, question, conclusion, criticism, humor, and instant understanding appraisal. His was a mind too acute for comfort, and yet in spite of this he was always at ease with himself. In these three weeks David had come not to understand the young Indian but to the knowledge that here was the most complex person he had ever met, and one whom perhaps he could never fully understand.

He took a daring step. “You advise me to marry, and yet you did not introduce me to your own wife.”

Darya opened his immense dark eyes, handsome eyes with heavy curling lashes. “I do not see the connection!”

“In the western mind there is some relevance,” David said.

“In the eastern mind, none,” Darya declared with dignity. “My wife is shy as most Indian women still are, and she would have been in consternation had I brought her out of her rooms to meet you, and even more embarrassed had I taken you to her. It is not our custom, as yet.”

For the first time David was aware of a barrier between them. “I’m sorry if I have offended you, Darya.”

“Not at all,” Darya rejoined. “It is difficult for people outside to understand the relationships in our country between men and women. Yet they are very profound. Indeed, we find your celibate Christian gods difficult to believe in. Our society is based upon the pure connubial relationship between Rama and Sita. Marriage is lifted to an ideal plane because of them and therefore it is a religious duty.”

“Now you are being very Indian, my dear Darya!”

Darya wavered between dignity and capitulation and chose the latter. He smiled his slow delightful smile.

“Tell me,” he said in a coaxing voice. “According to your abominable western customs, is there no woman in your dreams?”

It was impossible to lie to Darya. He could detect the slightest deviation between thought and word. David said, “Not quite in my dreams, Darya, but hovering perhaps on the edge.” And then he told Darya of Olivia, and why he had not gone back to see her. “Yet I suppose,” he said, “that I have known all along that I would go back.”

“So,” Darya said, “why not now? Take me with you. I shall take advantage of your western customs and judge her for myself and see whether she is worthy of you.”

He ignored the memorial mansion pointedly, but David did not notice the omission. He would have liked to have laughed off Darya’s suggestion, but the young Indian was not easily put aside, as he had learned by now. Darya had an amiable persistence, an affectionate stubbornness, which would not be denied. And then it might be a good thing. He would see Olivia through other eyes, and he would know through his own whether her presence, hovering on the edge of his dreams, was something more than fancy.

“So be it,” he replied. He had infused his voice with gaiety to which Darya did not respond. Instead his face was grave while his eyes sparkled dangerously bright.

“What is your father’s idea in regard to my country?” he demanded suddenly.

Their eyes met and David drew upon his will not to turn his away first. He was astonished to see that Darya was angry.

“I shall ask my father to explain it to you,” he said, still gazing quietly into Darya’s eyes. “I fear I have been clumsy.”

Darya rose. “It is time to dress, in any event. Therefore I will wait.”

They parted for the time, and David waited until dinner was over and the coffee was served as usual in the library. Then he attacked his father with courage.

“Darya has asked to meet Miss Dessard, Father, and I have promised to introduce him. But first he wants to know about the memorial. I think if my father tells you, Darya, you will grasp it as he conceives it.”

MacArd put down his cup. “The memorial to my dear wife is to be a school of applied Christianity. That is, it will train young men to be Christian in the highest and most practical sense. They will go into all the world and preach the gospel. Take your own country, as an example. I felt there the lack of a dynamic, an energy, a purpose. Your people are slack, they are listless, they allow circumstances to overcome them. A real religion, a vital faith in the true God, will inspire them to better themselves.”

Darya listened to this, his eyes glittering again. “Is there more truth in your god than in ours?” he inquired with dangerous quiet.

MacArd faced him with massive power in his look. “Your temples are full of superstitious litter,” he said bluntly. “Your people are confused by the legends of ancient history. A clean wind, a sweeping change, will give you fresh strength. I believe that our own prosperity proves the validity of our religion. God has been with us.”

“I grant you the right to believe in your own religion,” Darya said in the same intense quiet. “I have sometimes even thought that I, too, would like to be a Christian if I could become one without giving up my own religion.”

“That,” MacArd said decisively, “would be impossible. When a man becomes a Christian, he must forsake all other gods, and believe only in the One.”

“Thus you exclude most of the world,” Darya said.

“Not at all,” MacArd retorted. “Any man can repent and accept the Christian faith.”

“You remind me of a certain American millionaire whose name I will not speak, because you know it well, Mr. MacArd. He says he does not believe in competition but in cooperation. Therefore he proceeds to absorb into his own business the livelihood of other men, especially those in smaller corporations than his own. They co-operate by becoming his property — a trust, I believe it is strangely called.”

MacArd was hurt. “I assure you I have no purpose except to benefit your people. I see my own country rich and prosperous, the people well-fed and happy. I see your country poor and the people wretched. I am compelled to deduce reasons for this difference.”

“Can it be because your people are free and mine are not?” Darya suggested, glints of light playing in his eyes.

“In spite of the benefits of Empire,” MacArd said, not comprehending, “your people continue in this poor state. Therefore they must be taught to help themselves. For this I say they need a new faith, an inspired and inspiring religion, which I did not find, young man, although I went into many temples.” These last words he spoke very sternly indeed and David was alarmed.

Darya rose, a guest too courteous to quarrel with his elder and his host. “I shall be interested to see the memorial,” he said. “And now will you excuse me, sir, if I say I have some letters to write? David has been giving me such a good time that I have not yet written to my brothers.”

He bowed to MacArd, smiled at David and walked gracefully from the room, shutting the door soundlessly after him.

David did not speak. MacArd poured himself another cup of coffee. “A well-educated young man but still a heathen,” he said drily.

David did not reply to this. Instead he said,

“I never heard you say the things you have just said, Father. I didn’t know you could.”

“Nor I,” his father replied. He drank the coffee and put down the cup and looked at his son with humorous eyes in which there was also something of apology. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m no theologian. But I guess that young Indian sitting so smug and rich, while I know the condition his country is in, just roused the American in me, and mixed up with that is my father’s old-fashioned religion. Maybe it was good, after all. I know it scared me enough to keep me out of a lot of tomfoolery when I was growing up. I never could be sure he wasn’t right about hellfire, and I didn’t dare take the chance. I guess I still don’t dare.”

He leaned forward on his elbows and his voice quieted. “Son, do you know what your mother really believed? There were so many things I never asked her. I always thought we’d have a lot of time together when we got old.”

A humble yearning crept over his big face, he was embarrassed and tried to smile and felt his lips too stiff for it, and he waited, his thick reddish eyebrows hanging far over his sad grey eyes.

“I never asked her, either, Father,” David replied. It was repulsive to see his father soft and actually quivering with inexplicable anxiety. Then, seeing his shadowed eyes, he felt sorry for him, growing old alone, and pity illumined his understanding. He had a momentary vision of what it might mean to a man to lose a woman like his mother while love was still alive between them. Out of his pity he spoke, “But I know that she believed in the things Dr. Barton talks about — in immortality, for instance.”

“You think so!” his father exclaimed. “Well, that relieves my mind. I’ve been worrying about things, putting so much money into the memorial when maybe she—”

David did not reply and they sat in silence, neither knowing what to say, for MacArd would not face the possibility that his son agreed with the Indian. When he did speak it was to say mildly, “I shall be glad if you will go up there and see how things are getting on. I am very much engaged now.”

“I wish I could be more useful to you, Father,” David said when he paused.

“No one can help me,” MacArd replied. “The country itself is on skids. Unless someone with common sense comes along we are headed for ruin. One of these days our creditors in Europe and even in Asia are going to get scared and insist on being paid in gold, and we haven’t enough gold in the national treasury to meet our debts, that is the plain truth of it. If the Silverites win the battle and we go into bimetallism, we’re done for. If only I could find some fellow, a chemist, who could work gold out of low grade ore—”

David listened without understanding. He was ashamed to confess to his father that all his years of school had not prepared him to comprehend what he meant by bimetallism. He had been an exceptional Greek scholar, and he had taken high honors in English literature and philosophy, but he had no notion of what the threat in his father’s words could mean, even though it might reach disastrously into his own life, and he shrank from knowing. Life was beautiful and graceful as it was, touched with sadness, to be sure, since his mother died, but beauty must contain sadness, and Shelley and Keats and Browning had so taught him.

“If I can ever be of real use to you, Father,” he said, “you have only to let me know.” He hesitated a moment, “I suppose I ought to go upstairs now.”

“Good night,” MacArd said shortly. He lifted his head and watched his son leave the room and then he sat for a long time in lonely thought.

It was the first really hot day of summer, and the two young men got out of the dusty train gratefully enough, although the ride had been so short. Darya looked about him with lively appreciation.

“These wooded hills, these empty valleys,” he exclaimed. “It’s a wilderness, and only an hour away from a vast city! I say, you know, David, some day it may seem to the rest of the world that you Americans haven’t any right to all this emptiness. Think how people are crowded together where I come from!”

“We don’t have such big families as you do,” David said. He was distressed to find that his relationship with Darya was changing subtly this morning. Darya was criticizing everything he saw, always gaily, to be sure, and surrounding his criticism with an embroidery of rapid flowing talk, simile and metaphor enriching every devastating word, but he felt that inwardly Darya was sitting as a judge upon him. He was puzzled and irritated, the more because Darya never went beyond the actual bounds of courtesy as a guest. Yet he presumed upon their affectionate relationship.

“Ah,” Darya exclaimed, “the old Anglo-Saxon argument, the reason given by every viceroy for not making an empire a benefit to my people, for what is the use of feeding the people when they simply increase their numbers? Starvation is inevitable, and indeed desirable, so the rulers say. It keeps the people obedient.”

“You cannot deny overpopulation,” David said.

“The argument of vicious and wilful ignorance,” Darya declared. “Have you ever observed a dying tree? When it knows that life is over, it blossoms in one frantic outburst of flower and seed, producing far more than normal, because, my friend, the law of nature, as you would call it, or Karma, as we call it with the same fateful meaning, is that though the individual dies, the species must not. Only when the species cannot reproduce, does it die. Our strength is that we can still reproduce, and so we have not perished from the face of the earth. We are still taught to respect our parents, to subdue our individual wills to the family good, else long before now would we have died as other peoples have died! ‘Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land’—that is also Christian, isn’t it?”

“You know I cannot argue against you, Darya,” David complained. “You are much too quick for me.”

“But you do not agree with me,” Darya exclaimed.

“Not always,” David admitted.

“Therefore you will never be convinced,” Darya persisted.

“Not against my will,” David replied.

“But your reason, your reason,” Darya cried with passion, “is there no way of reaching your reason, you white man?”

They stood on the platform of the little railroad station, forgetting where they were. The country station master passing by looked at them astonished, a white man and a Negro, he thought, getting mad at each other. He had better break it up. He spat tobacco juice.

“Anything I can do for you folks?”

David started. “Oh no, thanks. Come along, Darya. We are making a spectacle of ourselves.”

They turned their backs abruptly on the man, he spat again, and then chewed his cud, ruminating and shaking his head.

“We’ll walk,” David said. “It’s only two miles.”

They struck off up the river, mutually agreeing each in himself to give over their argument and enjoy the day. David was surprised to find how eagerly he wanted to see Olivia. He had thought of her a good deal in the night, seeing her dark handsome face clear against the curtains of his memory.

“This river makes me think of our Ganges,” Darya said in his usual amiable voice. “My father goes every year and brings back jars of its sacred water for us.”

“Now that I don’t understand,” David said. “Your father, yes, but you, Darya, no. Cambridge and the sacred Ganges — it doesn’t go together.”

Darya stopped. “Look at me,” he demanded. “Do you see my forehead? There is an invisible line here.” He drew his forefinger down from his hair to the bridge of his high and handsome nose. “On this side, the left side, the heart side, is my religion. On the other side, Cambridge, the modern world, science.”

“You keep them separate?”

“Separate and inviolate.”

“I can’t understand that—” David began.

“Do not try to understand,” Darya said. “Simply accept. Some long day hence the line may fade away. But science is far behind the intuitions of religion and until it overtakes faith, the line remains immovable.”

“You are content with this?” David asked.

“I must be content,” Darya declared, “for I can do nothing about it. If I were a scientist I would devote myself to removing the division, but I have no vocation for science. I am merely a man who waits.”

David did not reply. There was indeed no reply possible, for as usual Darya had led him beyond himself. He realized that his own mind until now had been wholly uncreative, absorbing what he had been taught, receiving what he was given. He had no valid opinions of his own, he was far less thoughtful than Darya, though they were so nearly the same age, and he was beginning to be made uncomfortable by his very presence. It was time the visit ended. In spite of pleasant companionship, Darya’s presence was becoming a reproach and a burden. He was not ready yet to ponder the large matters of the world and the universe, and perhaps not even of love. He wanted to live each day as it was given him, and he might like to remain as he was, simple-minded and not subtle. As an American, he distrusted subtlety, and he was beginning, he feared, to dislike it, even in Darya. Perhaps they had passed the point of understanding each other.

They walked along in silence, the sun was growing hot and near its zenith. They had breakfasted late and heartily and Darya had declared that he would not eat again until they reached home in the evening. American food, he said, he found too heavy, it remained too long in the intestines, and sometimes he fasted for a whole day. Now he walked more quickly than David, swinging along lightly and steadily, seeming not to notice heat or dust, until the river curved and the house was before them on the hill.

“There it is,” David said.

They stopped and looked up at it. “A fine place,” Darya observed. “So that is to be the cradle of the teachers who are to be sent to my people. Very American!”

David was suddenly angry. “I suppose the best that any people can give to another people is its own chosen men.”

“Is it to be reciprocal?” Darya demanded. “Would your people accept our men? If so, I offer myself. I will come here and preach our gospel, David, the gospel of the faith of our people. Will your father accept me, do you think?”

David turned on him. “Are you jesting?”

“Not at all,” Darya said. “I am in bitter earnest. Would it not be good sense to engage a man of India to prepare your young teachers for their pupils? Would it not be well for them to know the country to which they are sent? Seriously, seriously! Would I be welcome?”

The dart pricked its target. Darya knew his man, David was just and he could not lie.

Darya had flung the demand like a javelin and he stood, fists clenched, his jaw upthrust. David stepped back. Before either could speak they heard a girl’s voice.

“David MacArd! What a surprise!”

It was Olivia. She was coming up from the river, where she had been swimming. Her skirted bathing suit was wet and her long hair, dripping with river water, hung down her back. Because she was alone she had not put on bathing stockings and she wore only sandals. The sun shone on her wet arms and neck, on her wet face and eyelashes, glistening and lovely.

The two young men forgot themselves and David spoke first, “Olivia, this is Darya, my friend from India. Darya, this is Miss Dessard.”

“Olivia,” Darya said. “You will allow me to use the name, since David is my brother.”

Olivia put out her hand. “I am glad to see you. My grandfather has told me about India many times. He visited there once. Come to the house.”

They walked together, Olivia between, until the path up the hill separated them, and then she led the way, Darya followed and David was last. It was easy to see that Darya was impressed by the dark self-possessed girl, and that Olivia was enlivened by Darya. At the top of the hill David came forward and she was between them again, Darya and Olivia talking rapidly and constantly, and he had never heard her talk like this nor seen her so free. He was suddenly intensely jealous. Darya was able to make her so free, while with him she had been shy and almost silent. His heart throbbed and love crystallized with a shock. He wished that he had not brought Darya here to see her wakened like this, aware and eager and outgoing, laughing and talking as though she had always known the Indian. He walked along, helpless, and she led the way into the house. “Go into the drawing room, please,” she said in her clear imperious voice, though amazingly gay. “Mother will be down, and I must go and change. We don’t have tea every day as we used to, but there are wine and biscuits on the table, please help yourselves.”

She ran up the stairs as lithely as a young tigress. Darya led the way into the drawing room and poured the wine, as much at home as if this were his house. He handed the goblet to David and then the plate of biscuits.

“My friend,” he said in a low intense voice, “if you do not marry this girl, you are a fool! She is not only handsome, she is a free spirit and an intelligence. I envy you!”

David took the wine and broke a biscuit in his hand. Then he put up his shield of defense against Darya and his magnetic charm. “I have every intention of marrying her,” he said, and was astonished at his own coolness as he made the spectacular decision.

That night when they reached home he continued in a daze, a mood vague and immense. He had been almost silent when Olivia came downstairs, he had not listened to the renewed and ardent talk of Darya, who devoted himself to the beautiful girl. He had talked desultorily with Mrs. Dessard, listening to her complaints of moving and storage and he had not heard anything that Darya said all the way home. The golden stream of enthusiastic words went on and on, Darya unceasing in his praise of the wonderful girl, her grace, the pride of her noble head, her long thin hands, the strength in her, the incomparable latent power.

“It will take courage to be her husband, you understand,” he said ardently, “but a task how enticing! You must be strong, too, David, you must find a source of power for yourself—”

“Well,” MacArd said at the dinner table, “how are the buildings getting on?”

The two young men looked at each other, stricken, and Darya began to laugh.

David flushed scarlet. “Father, we forgot to look at them.”

“Forgot to look at them!” MacArd echoed, astounded.

“Yes — we got to talking with—”

“With Olivia,” Darya said.

“Miss Dessard,” David said under his breath.

MacArd stared at them from under heavy brows.

“Well,” he said, “well, well, well!”

David did not explain, and Darya hastened to protect him.

“The setting, Mr. MacArd, is divine in itself, a place inevitably to turn the thoughts of men to the Infinity, a site for the soul—”

“That is what it is for,” MacArd agreed. “I am glad you understand my idea.”

Darya’s instinct told him that it was time for him to leave David and continue his westward way. He had curiosity to see some of the sights of America, he wished also to see the black people of the South, and he planned to sail from California. No more was said about Olivia for he divined that David did not wish to talk about her and this reserve settled like a fog over their whole relationship.

“My friend, I must return to India,” Darya said one morning. “It has been weeks since I came, how many I have forgotten, the year is passing and there is much I wish to do. My father asked me to be home again by mid-autumn and so I must not delay, however happy I have been.”

“You must come again,” David said.

“You must come to India,” Darya replied. He wished to add, “Perhaps on your wedding journey,” but he did not. To force a confidence was as unrewarding as pulling open a lotus flower. Neither scent nor beauty was the reward.

David smiled without answering and he stayed near Darya all day while he packed. Darya, who could be as lazy as a beautiful woman when he chose, became a man of action when he had made up his mind. He put his belongings in order, the few gifts he had chosen for his family, small but expensive, a gold bracelet set with diamonds for his wife, a diamond sunburst brooch for his mother, for his father a set of Audubon prints of American birds, so different from those in the countryside about Poona, and for his sons small strong mechanical toys. For brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles and aunts he bought watches.

By night of the next day he was ready, his bags packed, and David went with him to the train. Darya would not allow any atmosphere of farewell. “There is neither beginning nor end to our friendship,” he declared. “It was before we were born, and it will never end, unless we choose to separate ourselves, which I will not do.”

“Nor I,” David said.

As cheerfully as though they were to meet the next morning Darya stepped into the train, settled himself and waved his hand from the window. They had stayed to talk until the last minute, idle talk, friendly and not profound, as though both agreed that at this late hour there must be no new revelations between them, and the train left almost immediately, and David was driven away again. His father had not come home to dinner that night, he had telephoned that he would be late, and David climbed the stairs to his own rooms. The house was now very empty, the silence oppressive. He had scarcely thought of his mother for so many weeks that he could no longer summon her presence and he had no desire to do so. The rooms were filled with the echoes of Darya’s lively presence, his modulated voice, his rapid talk, and yet he did not wish Darya back.

He went into his own rooms and closed the door. He would go to see Olivia, he would simply go, on the pretext of looking at the buildings, and then he would make the opportunity to ask her to marry him. He felt an immense hunger, a hollowness of the heart and only the one name sounded its echoes, Olivia.

She was not easily found. He wandered about the roofless buildings, his eyes meanwhile searching for her and not finding her. The walls were rising above foundations and six new buildings were set in the woods about the pillared house, skilfully placed so that each seemed alone and yet part of the whole.

The famous New York architect his father had engaged was treading the raw upturned earth with dainty feet, a blue print stretched between his hands. He greeted David gaily, beckoned to him and led him to a spot where the buildings were revealed in a magnificent perspective about the central mansion.

“The approach,” the architect said proudly. “I have had exactly the proper trees cut away. The effect is good, don’t you think? Spiritual, and yet solid! I have kept in mind the purpose your father has in the memorial. The house is the memorial center, the source let us say, the altar, so to speak. Around it the young men group themselves with their teachers. The inspiration comes from the center.”

He was a finicking little man, precise in speech, his black-ribboned pince-nez dangling from his buttonhole, but he was enthusiastic and David was compelled to admit that there was an effect and the new buildings were subdued to the lofty nobility of the main house.

“Very beautiful,” he said, knowing it was expected of him.

The little man was gratified. “Please tell your distinguished father,” he begged. “Mr. MacArd is a man difficult to please, but so worthy of being pleased. I wish to make every effort.”

David said, “I’ll tell him I like it very much.”

“Thank you, thank you—” the little man said.

David nodded and walked away. It was now nearly noon and he had not seen Olivia. He must find her, since she had not allowed herself to be found. He went to the house. The door as usual was open and the vista of wide rooms lay before him with no sign of Olivia. Fresh flowers were in the vases and she must be near, but he did not see her. He lifted the heavy knocker, struck it three times, and Mrs. Dessard’s voice floated out from the kitchen.

“Who is it?”

He stepped inside and went toward the voice. “It is I, Mrs. Dessard. I came to see the buildings for my father, and before I go back I thought I’d—” He opened the kitchen door. “What a heavenly fragrance!”

“Grapes,” Mrs. Dessard said. She stood by the stove, a tiny dignified figure, stirring a long spoon in a large pot. “Olivia is picking them and I am making jelly. It’s hot work.”

The weight lifted itself from his heart. “I wish I could help you,” he said with sudden gaiety, “but since I can’t make jelly perhaps I had better pick grapes.”

Mrs. Dessard did not answer for a few seconds, then she said without looking at him, “Olivia will be glad of help. At least, I suppose she will. You can’t always tell about her.”

“I’ll try, anyway,” he said.

He hastened into the hall again and out the back door which stood open to the small formal garden. Olivia had made a wonder here, the box trees were clipped, the flower beds weeded, and early chrysanthemums were beginning to blossom in red and white and yellow. He followed the paths and turned to the left through a yew gateway into the kitchen garden, and there he saw Olivia among the grapevines and shielded against the sun by a wide leghorn hat. Pilate the peacock walked beside her, his tail in full display. She did not see David, or hear him, and he stood for a minute, enjoying the picture of her beside the gorgeous bird. She had on a yellow cotton frock and the full skirt flowed about her on the ground. He could see her profile, earnest above her task, the dark hair escaping to her neck and her fingers nimble among the vines. She plucked a large purple grape and put it in her mouth.

“Is it good?” he called.

Pilate screeched, she gave a start and turned her head. “How long have you stood there watching me?” she demanded.

“Only a moment, I swear,” he said laughing. He came near to her and stood looking down upon her. “I wouldn’t have missed the sight for a world.” Her face was upturned to him, her eyes huge and reproachful. “Do you mind?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I thought I was alone.”

“It isn’t wicked to eat a grape,” he teased.

“I thought I was alone,” she repeated.

He divined a small anger in her, and he tried to dispel it, wanting no clouds upon this cloudless day. “Shall I help you? There are far more grapes here than you can ever pick in a day.”

“You have on your fine clothes,” she said, giving him a quick glance, up and down.

“I don’t care for clothes.” He stood beside her and spread searching fingers among the vines.

“The best ones grow underneath,” she directed.

“May I eat the biggest ones?” he asked.

“Only one every five minutes,” she said.

He met her eyes and rejoiced to see them only mischievous.

“Is your Indian friend gone?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes,” David said briefly. He did not want to talk about Darya.

“Will he come again?” she demanded.

“Not soon,” he said, and then impelled by some hidden motive he went on. “It is more likely that I shall visit him in India.”

“When?” she demanded.

“Not soon,” he said again.

They picked the fruit in silence for a few minutes.

“You pick ten times as fast as I do,” he said.

“I daresay this is the first time you have ever picked grapes,” she replied.

“It is,” he confessed. “I scarcely knew how they grew.”

“I thought so.”

“Is that despicable?” he asked.

“It depends on what else you can do,” she said.

“Not much, I am afraid,” he confessed and then he went on, urging the opportunity. “I am one of those men who need an inspiration before I work.”

He stopped to turn his head toward her but she went on picking.

“Olivia!”

She looked up at him, very grave.

“Olivia, I came here today to see you, only you.”

She did not reply or move, and he looked deep into the dark eyes under the black and finely etched brows.

“We haven’t known each other very long,” he faltered, “but long enough for me to know I — love you!” His breath forsook him and the last words were a whisper.

Her answer was instant and composed. “Oh David, I’m so sorry!”

He heard the words from afar off and her voice rang in his ears like the toll of a bell.

“Sorry?” he repeated, half stupidly.

“Oh, so sorry,” she said remorsefully, “I didn’t know, David, not until just now, a few minutes ago. I wouldn’t have let you go so far if I had known. I’d have stopped you at the very beginning.”

He could not speak a word, he could not make a sound. He stood still, looking down upon her grieving face.

“You haven’t loved me very long, I’m sure of that, and so it can’t be deep. You’ll get over it quickly.”

“It is deep!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I have never loved anybody before, I never will again.”

“Oh don’t say that, David!”

“Why can’t you love me?” he demanded.

She let her eyelids flutter downward and saw his clenched fists. “I ought to be able to love you,” she said in a small voice. “Almost any girl would. But I can’t.”

“I ask you why,” he insisted.

She threw out her hands and let them fall in a wide and graceful gesture. “How can I tell? Maybe because you’re not strong enough. I don’t want to be the strong one. I want to look up to a man.”

“And you can’t look up to me,” he said in a dreadful voice. She was looking up at him, nevertheless, her eyes dark and pleading.

“I can’t,” she said in sorrow. “You’re just MacArd’s son, aren’t you? The great MacArd!”

He looked down upon her upturned face and felt bitterness acrid in his breast, dry upon his tongue. Then to his horror he felt that he must weep and he turned and walked quickly away. After such words he could not, must not weep. He hurried from the house, and down the little path to the river, and in a hidden spot he threw himself upon a bed of dying ferns. Among their curling fronds and fresh green, he buried his face and wept, it seemed to him for hours, and then weeping turned into prayer, the first real prayer of his life. “Oh God, what am I going to do? What use am I now?”

The words burst from his wounded heart, he heard them as though they were spoken by someone else, a voice other than his own, and under the awful cry, he trembled. Was there no answer? He did not hear a reply. The sounds of the wood he could hear, the crackle of twigs, the flutter of leaves in the breeze, the distant call of a quail. The sun beat down upon him in the stillness and he lay there with his eyes closed, the smell of the warm earth in his nostrils mingled with the scent of crushed fern. Then slowly he felt a strange quiet steal over him. He began to think.

Darya had come between him and Olivia. Had she not seen him in his strange Indian beauty, his dark brilliance, she might have spoken differently, for she would not have known that such a man existed. It was not mere charm. He could not accuse Darya of wilfully casting that net over Olivia. No, Darya had simply been himself, though inspired, perhaps, by the directness of her eyes and the fearlessness of her mind. She, too, had her charm over him, doubtless, accustomed as he was to the shy silence of Indian women in his presence.

He sat up suddenly, and wrapped his arms about his knees and stared out over the glittering river. She had said that she must be able to look up to him, and she said it because she had seen Darya. How rash he had been to propose to her so abruptly this morning, without waiting to discover her feelings! He felt himself a boy humbly young and yet wounded, wanting in wisdom, foolishly impetuous. He had gone to her and asked for her love as though it were a toy or a sweet instead of his whole life.

In the midst of the bright morning he was overwhelmed with gloom and bewilderment. Vague aches pervaded even his body, he was shot through with little lightnings of pain. He thought with anguish of his dead mother, to whom had she been alive he would have turned for comfort and laughter.

“Silly—” he could hear her tender voice always underlaid with laughter—“if she wants to look up to you, why don’t you start climbing?”

He bowed his head on his knees and closed his eyes that he might hear that clear voice he remembered. It was exactly as though she had spoken to him. Perhaps she had, perhaps it was the only way she could reach him, now, through his memory of her voice and his imagination of what she would say, were she here.

All his being melted, and from the fusion a pure desire distilled and shaped itself through longing into prayer.

“Oh God,” for now there must be God, “tell me how to begin.”

He felt his heart quiver in his breast. He dared invite such leadership only if he dared to follow. He sat motionless above the cliff. The air was still and hot and the sun blazed upon him. Far off he heard the scream of a hawk whirling into the sky. He waited, his mind empty, his consciousness stayed, and suddenly he saw India, a crowded street. Dark faces turned toward him, startled and surprised, as though they had been summoned against their will.

He was frightened at their clarity and he lifted his head and saw only the river, the blue shores beyond, and the soaring hawk. What did it mean that he had seen India here except that he had asked direction and had been given answer? He had stepped over the divide between this visible world and beyond, and the way had been made plain. The prospect was too vast to comprehend and he tried to encompass it in the words of his age. He thought of dedication, consecration, mission, and the passionate words were wine to his soul. No one needed him here, but in India the human need was boundless. He did not know what he would do there but God — he spoke the name with new reverence — God would show him. This, he supposed, was what it meant to be born again. As naturally and unexpectedly as his first birth from his mother’s body, rebirth had come. What had been his world ceased. He had been driven out of it first by his mother’s death and now by Olivia’s refusal and in his helplessness a new life was revealed. He drew his breath deeply and got to his feet.

“When did you get this notion?” MacArd said harshly.

He had seen for several days that his son was silent and absent-minded and tonight at the dinner table the boy had scarcely touched his food. Then here in the library after dinner he had blurted out that he wanted to go to India as a missionary.

“It is not a notion, it is a conviction,” David said.

MacArd lifted his shaggy head and caught Leila’s eyes looking down upon them from her portrait above the mantelpiece. He looked away from her. “You can just get over it. I’m building MacArd Memorial, but not for my only son. Who’s to take over after me?”

“I intend to live my own life, under divine direction,” David said.

A man could not be rough with his only son. MacArd had learned that long ago when once he had whipped David for disobedience and he then had gone into convulsions of crying. Leila had flown at him, she had sobbed and declared that she would leave his house if he ever whipped their son again. Well, he had never whipped him again, nor could he now. He flung out his arms. “A fine joke on me! A fine, nice joke! I spread a net and caught my own son! I gambled on God and my son is the stakes and I’ve lost! Ha!”

He snorted and sighed and descended to self-pity.

“Look, son, I’m getting old. Can’t you just stay with me for a few years longer?”

“I have decided, Father,” David said.

MacArd got to his feet and stamped about the room, weaving his way around the vast table and between the heavy chairs of English oak.

“I guess I’ve wasted a lot of money building that memorial. I’d have given up the whole business if I’d thought it would give you the idea you were going to leave me. That miserable country! What would your mother say to me if I let you go? Snakes, heathen, filth — well, there’s plenty of other men to go. Not my son! I’ll set fire to the memorial and let India go to hell. Can’t be worse than the way it is over there, anyway.”

David did not reply, and MacArd after a moment stole a look at him sidewise from under his rough brows. His son was sitting quietly watching him, exactly as Leila used to do when he rampaged about something before her. The resemblance tore at his heart and he collapsed into a chair. He sank his head upon his chest.

“All right, all right,” he grunted. “I don’t count. I know that. I give up. But you’ve spoiled any pleasure I can take in the memorial. I’d finish it but I won’t take any joy in it. You’ve ruined it for me.”

“I must do what I think is right,” his son said.

“Then I’ll turn the memorial into a factory!” MacArd shouted.

They glared at each other, father and son, and neither moved.