Come, My Beloved

V

THE SUN WAS CREEPING up beyond the grey ghats and over the walls and cupolas of Poona, above the minarets and through the white colonnades and tall green palms. The streets were already astir, the bullock carts creaked and water carriers splashed the dust with small liquid spheres that rolled along like dark quicksilver.

In his bare quiet study in the mission house David sat with his teacher. This part of his work he enjoyed, the early hours of thoughtful pondering over the lacelike script of Marathi text. At first it had seemed impossible to decipher one symbol from the other but slowly he was able to read and the graceful design was beginning to be a language. He had begun by studying Sanskrit, at Darya’s suggestion. The roots of Indian thought were to be found in the ancient Sanskrit texts, Darya said, but David had discovered in them amazing parallels to Christian thought. Upon the whitewashed wall, opposite the table at which he now sat, he had a text that he had carefully copied upon heavy cream-colored paper, a prayer from the earliest scriptures of Hinduism.

From the unreal lead me to the real.

From the darkness lead me to light.

From death lead me to immortality.

His teacher was a tall ascetic Marathi, who was not a Christian. He sat immobile upon a low bamboo chair, wearing garments of cotton cloth, a hatlike turban on his head, his legs apart, his feet turned out and his dark hands resting exactly upon his white-clad knees. His wrinkled face was grave, his little black eyes were narrowed as he listened.

David looked up from a long passage he had been reading aloud from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, translated into Marathi. He smiled faintly at the dark attentive face.

“Forgive me that I read so long from the scriptures of my own religion.”

The Marathi shook his head. “And why should you say this, Sahib?” he replied. “It is a religion, it is good, you do not demand that I eat your bread and drink your wine, and while I listen I can fix my mind yonder.”

He nodded toward the Sanskrit prayer, framed upon the wall.

“All religions are good,” he declared.

At what point, David inquired of himself, should he challenge this frequent declaration, to which he had thus far replied only with silence? Silence implied acceptance, and he could not and must not accept the easy Indian attitude toward all religions. Any religion was better than none, so far he could agree with the Marathi teacher, but he longed to explain to this kind and proud man that the fruits of western Christianity were surely better than others. He had become convinced of it during this year in India, although when he left home, last year, he would have denied it because it was what his father said.

They had remained unreconciled, although as his duty and because his mother was dead he wrote to his father twice a month and received in return a monthly letter. But in spirit they were far apart. For his father had persisted in his monstrous wrath, and he had made the place he had planned as a memorial into a factory. Instead of young men learning of God, men and women, ignorant and uncouth, crowded into the big rooms at machines and made precision instruments for the MacArd industries. At the foot of the hill along the railroad hundreds of small houses were built, and there was a railroad stop for shipping. Dr. Barton, bitterly disappointed, had ignored the whole change after two stormy hours of argument with MacArd himself. The climax had come, as he told David, when with courage given him, he believed, from God, he had told the old tycoon the truth.

“You thought you were serving God by building a monument, Mr. MacArd. When He asked not for a monument but for your son, you grew angry. Do you think even you can be angry with God, Mr. MacArd?”

To which MacArd had replied, his eyebrows and beard bristling red, “I always make my own terms, Barton, and I’ll do it with God himself — if there is a God!”

For whatever impulse toward religion had risen in his father’s heart after his mother’s death, David knew had died down. Stony soil, perhaps, wherein the seed could not grow! He himself refused to feel guilty, or to believe that had he obeyed his father the seed would have grown. Sooner or later the MacArd Memorial would have become something else, anyway, if not a factory then some sort of a tool for the MacArd interests.

And as he had separated himself from his father his own growth had been hastened — that, too, he knew. The powerful shadow was thousands of miles away, and he was honest enough to wonder sometimes if his call to India, which had seemed to come so simply and clearly from God that day on the hillside above the Hudson River, had been partly because even then he wanted to go far away. If so, the call was no less valid, for God worked in mysterious ways. His faith had grown deeper while it became more reasonable, and the very atmosphere of India made faith reasonable. Religion was vital in the air, and sometimes, he thought, the only vitality. His task and his challenge was to make his own religion the most vital of all.

Meanwhile, life was pleasant. The mission house was large and cool, and white-clad servants flitted through the shadows of the drawn bamboo curtains, bringing hot tea and small English sweet biscuits just at the hours when he began to feel fatigue. There was even an English society and the Governor gave parties to which he was always invited, and there was English service on Sunday in the Cathedral. His senior missionary, Robert Fordham, did not encourage his joining too often in the festivities of the English people in Poona, but it was necessary to remain on good terms with the Governor, for sometimes favors must be asked. Missionaries must be loyal to Government, Mr. Fordham said solemnly, for only the protection of Empire made it possible for them to come and go as they wished about the countryside. Indeed, Robert Fordham often disagreed with young and rebellious Indians when they complained that India should be free, and at times he rebuked them with real severity, declaring that India was infinitely better off under the British than it had been when it was torn between the regional rulers who in the old days had oppressed the people while they destroyed each other with Oriental savagery.

It was true, David supposed, and yet something in the dark and passionate eyes of young Indians made him doubt the wisdom of the older missionary, under whose direction he was.

The morning hours passed, the sun rose high, and the compound which had looked so cool and green in the early morning, now glistened with heat.

He was aware suddenly of being hungry and he closed the book. “I must not keep you beyond your hour,” he said to his teacher. “I forget how the time passes.”

“For me time is nothing,” the Marathi replied. “I have sat here watching you. You do not tell me what your thoughts are.”

David gave his ready smile. “They are scarcely thoughts, not worth telling. I put off real thinking, perhaps because I do not know yet what I ought to think. I feel I know India less and not more as time goes on.”

The Marathi laughed. “When you can think in our language, you will know us. Give yourself another year.”

He rose, and David rose with him. They parted as usual, and the Marathi went away, his full white trousers swinging about him.

David put his books together and went to his room, next to his study, to prepare for the noon meal. The mission house was a large square bungalow, encircled with a deep arched veranda to keep the heat of the sun from penetrating into the rooms. A wide hall divided the house, and at one end was his study and next it his bedroom. Both rooms were big and the bare floors, the bamboo furniture and the high ceilings gave them an air of coolness.

When he had washed he went down the hall to the dining room, where Mrs. Fordham was already seated at one end of the oval dining table, ladling soup into flat English soup plates.

“Sit down, Mr. MacArd,” she said with brisk good humor. “We won’t wait for Mr. Fordham.” She bent her head, her mouse-brown hair always disheveled, and gabbled a swift grace.

“For what we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful. Amen. Shall you get over to Bible Class this afternoon, Mr. MacArd?”

“I think not,” David replied.

“It’s a bad example, you know,” she said with her cheerful sharpness.

“I am sorry for that,” he said.

He was accustomed to these fencing bouts with Mrs. Fordham and he carried them through with humor. As soon as Mr. Fordham came she would stop, and the meal would proceed kindly. Mr. Fordham was a large man, shrewd and tolerant from long living in a hot climate. He came in now, his heavy body bulging in a suit of wrinkled white linen, and sat down at the opposite end of the table from his wife.

“Sorry to be late as usual,” he said, “the gateman found a snake in the store room. It was one of the old cobras.”

“Did you kill it?” Mrs. Fordham demanded.

“I sent the gateman for a dish of milk to draw it away,” Mr. Fordham said. He began drinking his soup in gulps, opening his big mouth to receive the entire spoon with each gulp.

“Oh, Robert,” his wife cried. “Why will you encourage them in their superstitions?”

“It’s a very old snake,” Mr. Fordham said mildly. “It’s been here for years, and it only wants a dish of milk each day.”

“Nasty creature,” Mrs. Fordham declared. She banged a small table bell with the flat of her hand and a white-clad Indian boy scurried in and removed the soup plates. Another boy brought in a dish of goat-meat curry and some boiled rice. She ladled these viands upon plates and the boys placed them before the two men.

“Well, David,” Mr. Fordham said. “How’s the language coming on? You should be preaching a sermon soon, you know.”

David put down his fork. The time had come to tell them that he would never preach a sermon. The long quiet months alone with his books and his solitary walks about the city had been fruitful and decisive. He intended to be a missionary of a new sort. He was not content to preach in a small chapel, or to teach a few Bible classes and circle through a hundred miles of villages, admonishing half-starved people to worship a god they could not see. Instead he planned an attack upon India itself, through Indians, and those Indians would be young men, carefully chosen and highly trained, leaders of their own people. Upon them he would exert the utmost of his influence.

“I shan’t be preaching sermons, Mr. Fordham,” he said pleasantly.

“Not preaching?” Mrs. Fordham cried. “Why, how else will the gospel be heard?”

“Be quiet, Becky,” Mr. Fordham said. “Now David, just tell us what you have in mind.”

He told them in a few words, making it simple, making it plain. “I want my life to count for something. The only way it can count in a huge country like this is to search for a few people, a few hundred, if I live long enough a few thousand, and train them to teach others. I propose—”

He let the goat-meat curry grow tepid as he painted for them in simple words the picture he had been creating of his own life. A school of the highest caliber, the sternest standards, working closely with English Government schools, a college and then a university, certainly eventually a medical college and a hospital, each unit opening as quickly as possible, and the most rigid exclusion of all except the best and brightest boys and later perhaps even girls, chosen not according to caste or wealth but ability, and free scholarships for those who were poor.

“But where is God in all this?” Mrs. Fordham demanded.

David gave her his sweet and stubborn smile. “I believe that wherever man does his best, God is there.”

“I don’t call that Christian,” Mrs. Fordham cried.

“Be quiet, Becky,” Mr. Fordham said. “Where will you get the funds for all this, David? It will take millions.”

“My mother left me money,” David said quietly.

There could be no reply. The Fordhams had grown up in poverty, they had lived in little midwestern towns and had struggled through small midwestern colleges. They lived now on a salary too small for luxuries, and had they been at home instead of in India, Mrs. Fordham would have been the servant and Mr. Fordham the breadwinner. They were stunned by this young man with a gentle handsome face who possessed a fortune to do with as he liked. Let him serve God as he would.

“Well, it sounds very fine,” Mr. Fordham said at last.

Mrs. Fordham could not speak. She was thinking of her three sons. Poor things, they had nothing. At home in Ohio they had to work on her father’s farm and when they got to college they would have to work their way through to diplomas, while here in the mission compound Indian boys and girls would be having scholarships and every sort of luxury. It was not fair and God was not just.

The meal was over, and after it, as usual, David made ready for his walk outside the compound into the early twilight to breathe what coolness was there. Tonight he enjoyed it in a profound, stimulating, troubled sort of way. The streets of Poona were crowded when he stepped from the gate. They were always crowded, a solid flowing mass of men, dark faces, bare dark legs, white turbans, moving, crowding, eager, pushing, the dust rising, stirred by their feet and settling in the open shops and markets. The sun had set but the straining anxious life went on in the winding crowded streets, drivers shouting from the carts that threatened to crush the people and yet they never did, the hot hairy shoulders of bullocks pressing against human beings, and the beggars, the fakirs, the sellers of small wares, shrieking above the din. It was Friday, the day the lepers came in from the villages to beg, and they were going home again, their decayed flesh, their stumps of arms and legs uncovered for all to see, while the ones most crippled rode in little pushcarts. When they saw David, a white man, they howled at him for alms, but he went his way.

He was not overwhelmed by it now as he had been at first. Now that he had made his plans and had set a routine for his life, he found it good to join this stream of life at sunset, or in the morning before sunrise when the air was cool. The Indian night was beautiful, the stars hung enormous in the sultry sky, and he turned away from the street into the Poona theater, a great, dusty, flimsy hall, lit by candles hung high in big glass bowls. Two balconies, supported by hand-hewn wooden pillars, were filled with white-turbaned men and the pit was nearly filled. Large holes, not repaired, gaped in the roof and let in the night air and starlight, but the air was still hot and the sweet rank odor of humanity was close. David hesitated, and then found a seat and sat down. Some sort of meeting was going on, students, he supposed, were making the usual outcry against Government. He watched their faces, so mobile, so intent to hear what the man said. These, he told himself, would someday be his men, his material.

A week later he was alone in the mission house for the summer. Poona was cooler than Bombay, though farther south, but even here the currents of air that prevailed usually between the two cities had died away. The heat of summer had fallen and the people waited for the monsoons, the winds which alone keep India from being a desert, uninhabitable for man. The winds begin in north India, born of the intense heat of Delhi and Agra, where, more than two thousand feet above the sea, the dry air and the hot sands draw down the rays of a sunshine fatal and intense. That heat attracts the moist winds from the surrounding sea, and for two months the winds blow toward the northwest and travel southward, circling until opposite winds blow northeast, making two monsoons, during which seed can be sown in the earth, and harvests can be reaped. If the monsoons fail, the people starve.

As yet, not a drop of moisture had fallen this year upon the glittering landscape. The streets were dust, except where the water carriers filled their jars at the rivers, and at the rivers the people gathered to slake their thirst and wash their dried bodies. Women hid in the shadows of their homes, and only the desperate women of the poor wrapped themselves in their Poona saris, nine yards long, and went down to the river’s edge.

For this season the church was closed and the Fordhams had gone to the hills. David had refused to go with them.

“I want to see what it’s like,” he told them. “The Indians have to live through it, and I suppose I can.”

Mrs. Fordham was inexplicably angry with him. “Natives are fitted for the climate and white people aren’t. You had better follow the example of the British. They’ve been here a long time, and it’s only by being sensible that we can stay here. You’ll break down, you’ll get ill, you’ll see!”

She did not quite say that it would then be their duty to leave the pleasant hill station and come back and fetch him, but David caught the overtones.

“You have no idea how the snakes and poisonous insects abound once the rains begin,” she went on.

“I have no idea,” he agreed, “and that is why I shall stay and see what it’s like.”

They had gone at last, unwillingly, with servants and mounds of baggage and bedding, and he had seen them off and had returned to the empty house, where only the cook’s son was left to care for him. He had expected to find it lonely, and instead had found it pleasantly filled with peace. Here he had pursued his solitary life, spending the hours of morning and evening in study with his tall Marathi, and in the hot hours alone, he stayed with his books. On one of these days Darya had come to see him.

“David,” he said, impetuous with the purpose of his visit, “I have never received you into the inner part of my own house. Come with me today, my friend, and let me show you my children and my wife. You are such a gentle fellow that you won’t frighten her. She has never seen a white man or woman, though I don’t keep her in purdah, as her parents did. Still, she has the habit of shyness.”

“If you wish it, I shall be happy,” David said. Here was God’s leading, plain! He knew that if he did not go away, if he stayed here waiting, he would be shown reason for obedience.

“Come with me now,” Darya commanded him. “The day is still early. I think my house is cooler than yours.”

David obeyed, his feet guided, or so he thought, and soon the two young men walked together down the blazing street. “I envy you your garments, Darya.”

“Then why not wear them?” Darya asked in his lively fashion.

“I suppose I had better keep my pale skin covered,” David said. “At least that is what I am told. Am I wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Darya replied. “How can I know? I am brown.”

It was a small thing, an interchange almost childish, and yet David, sensitive to his friend, felt it a slight barrier between them. The truth, which he had not spoken, was that he could not feel at ease were he to uncover himself, to make bare his arms and legs and feet, to wear a twist of white cloth about his loins and a length of white cloth over his shoulder, and walk in sandals as Darya did. And would not the people stare to see a white man in this dress? Darya’s dark skin did not look bare, but white skin would be naked indeed.

They had reached the great carved stone gate, and with a careless gesture to the watchman Darya entered, David following. Inside the gardens were beautiful and green.

“How have you managed this?” David exclaimed.

“My father employs many water carriers,” Darya said with the same carelessness. “And more than that, we have a stream of water flowing through the house, a natural fountain.”

Darya led the way through one gate and another and then by winding paths to a part of the house which belonged to him and his wife and children. There he opened the door into a large pillared hall, through which flowed a quiet stream, lined with green tiles. Potted palms and trees were set against the walls and low couches stood here and there.

As they entered two small naked boys climbed out of the water to run away and a young woman drew her sari over her head.

“Leilamani!” Darya called in his own Marathi tongue. “Please do not go away.”

She stopped, the silken garment held across her face.

David stood waiting while Darya went to his wife and said in a manner most gentle and coaxing, “Leilamani, here is my dear friend, in whose house I stayed while I was in America. I was in his house and now I have asked him to come to mine. Is this not what I should do?”

His little naked sons came back and clung to their mother’s flowing skirts, sucking their wet forefingers while they stared at the stranger their father had brought into their house.

She did not reply, and at last, very gently and as though she, too, were a child, Darya pulled at the silk across her face and drew it away. He held her hand as in a caress and he put his arm about her shoulders and coaxed her to walk with him, though she was very unwilling, until they came within ten feet or so of David, who stood waiting and smiling, and there Darya stopped, while his young wife drooped her head and let her long black lashes curl against her cheek.

“David, this is Leilamani, the mother of my children, and this, Leilamani, is David. He is my brother and you must not think he is like any other white man, but only my brother.”

“Do not make her stay,” David said in Marathi. It was pleasant to be able to speak that language which she could understand.

“Hear him,” Darya said in delight, “he speaks as we do, Leilamani, and have you ever heard a white man speak so well like us before?”

She raised her head at this and gave him a shy lovely look and now she let the silk stuff fall and she put her hands on the shoulders of her sons, but still she was speechless.

“Another day,” Darya said for her, “another day, David, she will speak to you. It is enough today that she did not run with the children. Go now, my dove, and bid the servants bring us limes and lemons and cold boiled water and honey. The children may stay and play in the stream. It is too hot elsewhere.”

She leaned and spoke to the boys then in a low voice, bidding them, as David could hear, to be obedient to their father, and she raised her hands to David in greeting and farewell and drew the silk over her head again and went away, her sandaled feet noiseless upon the polished tiles of the floor.

“Sit down on this couch,” Darya commanded.

David sank on the low couch. The children, silent and graceful, slipped into the water again and played with small stones. Servants came in soon with trays of sweetmeats arranged on fresh green leaves. The sudden coolness, the soft sibilance of the water slipping over the stones created an atmosphere so new, so restful after the intense heat and the anxiety of the continued dryness, that he felt sleep creep over him as he relaxed. He had not slept well for many nights, even upon the thin straw mat which for coolness had replaced the sheet over his mattress.

“Rest,” Darya said in his caressing voice. “I can see you are weary. You have grown very thin, David. Eat, my friend, and drink this fruit juice. It is sweetened with honey and that too will restore you.” And while they ate and drank Darya fixed his shrewdly seeing eyes upon David and he said, “David, you do wrong to try to be a saint. Why do you not marry? Where is Olivia? Have you forgotten her? It is not necessary for a Christian to be a sadhu. In our religion, yes, the priests must be holy and they do not marry, but it is better for you to marry. You do not look well. Now you know, David, some men can be celibate, they carry life within themselves, but you, my friend, must find a source of life outside yourself. You are a transmitter, and from Olivia you would draw strength.”

“I have not forgotten her,” David said. The dainty morsel of sweet in his mouth, the fluff of sugared pastry, went suddenly dry. Even Darya had no right to pierce the secret of his heart.

“Have you asked her to marry you?” Darya inquired with fond and pressing interest.

“Yes,” David said abruptly.

“And she refused you?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, that was foolish of her,” Darya said warmly, “She should have seen not only that you need her but that she needs you. Her only hope of peace as a woman is to marry a man who is gentle like you, David. You could teach her to be mild, and she would teach you to be strong, through love. It is the other way in my marriage, I acknowledge it. It is necessary for me to have a gentle wife, one who is obedient, who is silent when I am angry. Well, then, the foolish Olivia! But try again, David. You must not continue alone, it is the mistake Englishmen make when they allow their wives to go and live in England. The climate here is more than hot, it is fecund, our weakness and our strength. Ask her again to be your wife, David.”

“It is not as easy as you think,” David said. He could not explain to Darya the nature of western love between man and woman. In some ways Darya was very alien and Indian.

“I cannot speak of her,” he said abruptly.

Darya pressed his hand, smiled, and shook his head. “Then we will not speak of her. Eat this cool melon, it is good for the kidneys in summer.”

He ate and drank as Darya bade him do. He had not been hungry for weeks and the boiled water in the mission house was tepid and flat.

Then, grateful that Darya had not been his usual insistent self, he made talk. “Are there many houses like this in India?”

“Not many,” Darya confessed, “but there are a few. You are asking why we do not renounce our riches when so many are poor. I have asked myself also and it troubles me, and yet I do not accept the renunciation. My parents are old, I am the eldest son, I have my wife and children and the family depends upon me — this, though I know that renunciation is the highest form of spiritual joy. My father says nevertheless that we who are rich perform a useful function. It is well, he says, for the people to know that there can be houses like ours, so that they too may have hope of fortune. Whether he merely comforts himself, I do not know. But you are the son of a rich man, David, and your Scriptures say, too, that it is hard for rich men to enter the kingdom of heaven. Our Scriptures say the same thing in other words.”

This was the moment to tell Darya of his plans for his life and so he began, and he drew for Darya the future that he would make and how to his great school he would draw the best of India’s youth and inspire them with strength and knowledge, and he would gather the finest of teachers and the strongest of faith from everywhere. What his father had not done, he would do.

Darya listened, his eyes flashing, humorous, sceptical, tender, but David talked stubbornly on.

“And shall you make all these young Indians into Christians?” Darya demanded at last.

“Not against their will,” David said.

“Ah, you will charm them,” Darya protested. “I know your western ways! You will surround them with comforts and you will make them believe that your running water and your clean rooms and soft beds, your great libraries and your vast rooms and healthy food are all the result of your religion and so you will make Christians out of them. And then the young doctors will all want great hospitals and electrical machines and they will not want to live in the villages and the teachers will not want to teach in village schools and the girls will want to marry men who can give them houses like yours and that is what they will think is Christianity.”

“Is there any reason why a man cannot be Christian and live in a clean house lighted by electricity instead of by smoky oil?” David demanded.

“He must walk the way, my friend,” Darya said. “He cannot come out of the village directly into your Christian America. He has to go back to his village that he left and make it over with his own hands, my friend.”

“As you do, doubtless,” David said with un-Christian malice.

“Ah, but I am not a villager,” Darya retorted. “It would be false for me to pretend that I must do what I am not born to do.”

“Nevertheless, I too must do what I think I am born to do,” David insisted, “under God’s guidance,” he added.

“By all means,” Darya agreed. “Let us not quarrel. Build your school and I will send my sons to it. But do not expect them to go into villages. They will come back here and ask me to put in electricity and I will refuse because I do not like electricity.”

“Who said you must have electricity?” David demanded.

“It is the inevitable result of your Christianity,” Darya said. His mood changed suddenly and he was all coaxing again. “Be happy, David. It is all I ask.”

The two young men fell silent and after a while, David slept. When he woke the children were gone, but Darya was there reclining upon cushions and reading a book by the light of a small lamp of brass bung on the wall behind his shoulder;

“Do not go home,” Darya said coaxingly, “stay here with me, David. My house is your house. You are too lonely.”

“I have had a wonderful sleep,” David said, “a restful cool sleep. But I must go back, Darya.”

Darya teased him. “You are determined to be a saint, are you?”

“Not that,” David replied.

It was dark, and when they came out a servant was waiting with a lantern to see that no snakes lay in the path to the gate, and when they reached the gate Darya bade the servant light the way for David to the mission house.

“Serpents come out in the summer darkness, and you must be safe,” he said.

They parted and David walked behind the man and the dust rose and stung his nostrils. The night was black and stifling and the light of the lantern shone through a golden haze. At the gate he gave the man some money and the gate-man lit a torch and went before him into the house, again to guard him from the creeping serpents of the night. The house was still and hot and David went upstairs alone by the light of a lamp he had lit and now carried in his hand, and his footsteps echoed upon the bare floors. He entered his room and looked about him as a habit to see whether scorpions or centipedes were anywhere near. Lizards were harmless, they clung to the walls and the ceiling and ate the mosquitoes and therefore were friendly and sometimes in the night he heard them fall with a soft plop upon the cotton roof of his mosquito net. He undressed and poured water over himself in his bathroom and then went naked to bed.

For some reason, against his controlled will, in that night he dreamed a hot and throbbing dream of Olivia. He dreamed that she had come, that she was here, and that he held her in his arms. He dreamed that when morning came she did not go away, that she stayed here, she lived here, and they were happy together. It was the first time he had dreamed of her since he came to India and when he woke in the darkness before dawn he knew that what had set him dreaming was Darya’s wife. Darya loved her, and how strange that her name was Leila — Leilamani! He had been astonished to hear it spoken, and he had not wanted to tell Darya that Leila had been his mother’s name. And thinking of his mother he fell into memories of his home and of his boyhood, and then of Olivia again and she came near to him and her eyes were as dark as Leilamani’s eyes.

Try again, Darya had said, try again, David! He lay stretched upon the dry mat, in the blackness, listening to the almost noiseless scuff of lizards, the dry almost silent rustle of their feet. Far off somewhere now, just before the dawn, when, if ever, the Indian night was still, he heard the wiry wailing of a human voice chanting to the subdued beat of a drum. A timid woman might be afraid of India in the night but Olivia was not timid. Yes, he would try again. Darya was right. It was not good for a man to be alone in India. He rose from his bed in the night and lit the candle on his table, he pulled up a bamboo chair, and wrote the first love letter of his life.

Across the city Darya was also writing to Olivia, and Leilamani was leaning on his shoulder, her hair flowing loose down her back. She watched each curve of the English letters, admiring his skill and adoring his strong brown hand. Only a little while before that hand had caressed her yielding body with yet another skill. They had made sweet love together and when their hearts were quiet again Darya had lain thinking of David, who had no such joy, and then Leilamani had pouted and wanted to know what he was thinking about. So he told her how David, his brother, had no wife, and he told her about the proud tall girl who would not marry him, and then he had to explain that in the strange country across the black waters the young women were wilful and would marry only as they chose.

Leilamani had listened, still warm in the curve of Darya’s bare arm, and she grew grave.

“It is very wicked,” she said and then out of pity for the young American whom Darya loved she went on with gentle decision, “And you, beloved, should help your soul’s brother.”

“I?” Darya said, very sleepy.

“You should,” she repeated. “You must write a letter to this Olivia and tell her she is wrong to refuse to marry. Tell her how thin he is and how he is alone in that house. Make her heart soft — you know how to do such things, Darya.”

He laughed at her mildly, too happy to move, but Leilamani would not let him rest. She pushed him with her soft hands and when he would not move, she got out of bed and walked about the room, her long black hair swinging about her, and she sang so that he could not sleep, a song she made up as she went and that told him she would not come into his bed again, though he called her many times, unless he did his brotherly duty now, for tomorrow he would be here and there and she would not be able to catch him and compel, but now he was hers. So between laughing and singing and then being a little angry until she coaxed him with reasonable words, reminding him that he did often say he would do something and then forgot it or delayed until the cause was lost, at last he got up and began to write the letter. When it was done he read it aloud, translating it into their own tongue as he read.

Miss Olivia Dessard:

Dear Sister;

You will consider it strange to receive a letter from me, but I write you for my friend-brother, David MacArd, and I think you have not forgotten him. He is here in Poona, if you do not know it, living alone in the mission house, all other missionaries having departed to the cool hills during the hot season we are now enduring. He is a strong saintly fellow and he wishes to endure as our people are doing. Nevertheless, he is very thin and he suffers from want of wifely care. As his friend and brother, I beg you to reconsider his question and join him. In case he does not ask you again, as I have advised him to do, kindly let me know and I will beg him to take courage. I am sure that you will not find so good a husband wherever you look. I await your reply eagerly.

Your friend and brother,

Darya.

This letter Leilamani approved and when it was sealed and stamped she called for a servant and bade him to take it instantly to the postoffice and put it into the nightbox.

Then she went back into Darya’s bed, where he had already placed himself, and they slept deeply.

VI

BY THE CHANCE OF Leilamani’s insistence, Darya’s letter caught a ship at the last moment, whereas David’s letter was delayed until the next ship, and this made a matter of two weeks and more between the two letters as they reached Olivia’s hands. She had therefore these weeks in which to laugh first at Darya’s efforts, and then to grow thoughtful and then to wonder if David would write to her or not, and if he did what she would say.

When his letter did come, her heart was already prepared, and this was thanks to Leilamani, who she did not know was alive. She took up David’s letter and read it again.

“You may say to yourself, Olivia, that you have no call to the mission field. Well, dearest, do not worry about that. It is not required that a wife must also be a missionary. She will help him, she will strengthen and comfort him, she will be his companion. When I say these words, thinking of you, I grow giddy with love for you. Can such things be — for me?”

She let the pages fall into her lap and looked out of the open window beside which she sat, into the park across the street. It was a small park, she and her mother lived in an unfashionable part of New York, and on the benches old men sat drowsing in the shade of a few grimy trees. She shivered, fascinated again as she often was by their misery, their age, their loneliness, their poverty. Once they had all been young and now they were old and that was the tale of their life. It might be the tale of hers, as the years passed. Oh, she was busy enough, she had friends for the present, family friends, but she had nothing of her own except her mother, and her mother could go with her to India. David had enclosed to her a small snapshot of the mission house, it looked comfortable, set in the big compound and encircled with arched verandas. The air of romance was about it.

She rose with decision, and the letter fell from her lap to the floor. She opened the mahogany desk against the wall and began to write quickly and with resolution.

Dear David—

Well, that was the best she could do. She had never learned to use the words of easy love and she could not pretend.

I have been sitting here at the window for hours, with your letter in my hands, reading it over and over again, wondering what I really want to do, and now when I know what I have decided, wondering whether it is entirely fair to you. For I shall say yes, David. I will be your wife. I don’t know if I am in love with you. If I had to decide that, it might be to say I am not, at least not yet. I don’t know you as you are now. But somehow I feel that I shall love you once we are together, and I will come to India soon—”

She was not easily articulate, words did not flow from her, she had never talked to any one, for example, as easily as she had talked to Darya, but that was because he talked as he breathed, the light from his extraordinary eyes illuminating speech. She had never forgotten him and he made India easier to imagine.

She paused and sat thinking again for a long time. Then she wrote one more sentence. “At least, dear David, I am willing to try it, if you are, and having given my word, I will not take it back.”

When she had written the letter, she sealed it, stamped it, and she put on her hat and jacket and walked to the corner and put the letter in the mail box.

She kept her engagement to herself for days, for she supposed that now she was engaged. The question was should she or should she not tell Mr. MacArd. David had said nothing in his letter to guide her. Perhaps she ought to wait for another letter, or perhaps she ought to write and ask him. But a wilful delicacy had made her determine not to write to David again until she had his letter and that might mean months of waiting before she knew. Moreover, she was not sure that she wanted his decision. Perhaps she should make her own. At any rate, she would not tell her mother until she knew whether she was going to tell Mr. MacArd.

The empty days of summer slipped by. Her friends had left the city and she knew that she and her mother would go nowhere. She had been born too late in her mother’s life, she now realized. Her mother had reached an age where nothing mattered except the quiet of being left alone. When they had moved out of the house finally, the last of her mother’s energy seemed drained away. She had made sure that the money they had received from MacArd was invested so that they could live on it and then she had ceased to think. Olivia had found an apartment they could afford and had settled their furniture into it and had hired an Irish maid to take care of them. Her mother now simply agreed to anything. The old days of battle were over, time and youth had made Olivia the victor and to her surprise she did not enjoy victory. It meant that childhood was past and whatever she did now was her own fault.

She decided, after more days of restless thought, that she should go and see Mr. MacArd herself. That much would be done, and her future would be more clear. It seemed nebulous enough sometimes, in spite of David’s letter which she read over and over, for she was impatient by nature and the long silence after she had written David became unbearable. She knew that distance was the cause, she could see in imagination the ocean and that crossed then the miles upon miles of terrain of many countries and then the sea again. But the hours dragged, nevertheless, and she wanted life to begin.

One morning she woke to changed air and brilliant sunshine. A hurricane had burst over southern waters the week before and the fresh winds had blown northward against the heat and stagnation of the city. She felt every nerve quicken, her muscles were eager to move, and her body urged her will. She would go downtown today and simply announce at the MacArd Building that she wished to see Mr. MacArd. Dress was suddenly important, although for days she had not cared what she wore, and she chose a grey silk skirt and jacket and a soft yellow blouse. She put on one hat after another and settled at last upon a yellow felt, broad-brimmed and soft, too. This was the day and the time, she decided, to look her feminine best, and she put on her yellow kid gloves.

Thus arrayed after her breakfast she tiptoed into her mother’s room, found her asleep and tiptoed out again. Irene, the maid, was in the kitchen and she left a message that she was going for a long walk and then she was free. She walked the streets with feet made swift by health and excitement. It was a long walk, but the cool wind was a delight, her cheeks grew pink and her black eyes bright. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass doors of the entrance to the MacArd Building, and the handsome face she saw was the last assurance she needed.

“Mr. MacArd, please,” she said at the desk. “Miss Olivia Dessard.”

The tired blonde at the desk glanced at her. “Have you an appointment?”

“Tell him, please, that I have a letter from his son.”

She sat down on a red leather chair and waited for a very few minutes when a man came in.

“Mr. MacArd will see you, Miss Dessard. Please come with me.”

She rose and followed him through corridors and rooms filled with men and women and typewriters and machines and then through corridors again until heavy mahogany double doors made a barrier. The man opened the doors and there were corridors again and offices but carpeted and quiet now, and then another heavy mahogany door confronted her. This the man opened and there, behind an enormous desk, mahogany again, she saw MacArd sitting reading a letter. He wore pince-nez and a heavy black ribbon and his suit was of black broadcloth, his stiff wing collar was whiter than any snow and his black cravat was of satin. She saw all this quickly as a frame for his grim grey face and the red-grey beard and eyebrows. Underneath the brows, deep set, his small grey eyes stared at her. The pince-nez dropped the length of its ribbon.

“Well, Miss Dessard! Sit down.”

The man went away and shut the door softly and she sat down in the upright red leather chair across the desk.

“Good morning, Mr. MacArd.”

“Good morning, Miss. What can I do for you?”

She did not take off her yellow kid gloves but she stretched her right hand across the desk. He seemed to be surprised to see it but he shook it formally without getting up.

She smiled and leaned her elbows on the desk. “I don’t wonder you are surprised to see me, Mr. MacArd, but I felt I ought to come, although I know you are busy. I have had a letter from your son.”

“Indeed!” He put down a letter he was still holding in his left hand and stared at her, his eyebrows twitching.

She went on. “He has asked me to marry him, Mr. MacArd, and I have said I would. I thought you ought to know.”

She waited motionless, her eyes unwavering as he stared at her. Points of light shone in the deep eyes, and suddenly MacArd laughed.

“So he’s come to his senses!” he shouted. His hairy face creased in thick wrinkles.

Her eyes questioned the laughter. “You mean—?”

He banged the desk with his outspread hands. “I mean he’s coming home, ain’t he? He’ll have to come home to marry you, won’t he?”

“Certainly not,” she retorted, amazed. “It didn’t occur to him — nor to me. He asks me to come to India.”

MacArd got up and leaned on his clenched fists toward her. “What? You ain’t going! Why, I didn’t think you’d be such a fool.”

She tilted her head to look back at him. “Of course I am going!”

“Ever been there?”

“No, but I’m not afraid.”

“Wait till you get there! Snakes, heat, beggars, filth, naked men strutting around pretending to be saints—”

“I thought you built MacArd Memorial to change—”

“There’s no MacArd Memorial!” he roared.

He sat down abruptly and his great body seemed to crumple.

“Why, Mr. MacArd—”

“I gave it all up as foolishness,” he said heavily. “I’ve got a precision works there now instead.”

“A factory!” she gasped. “In our house—”

“Not in the house exactly — that’s administration and so on. Other buildings.”

“I didn’t know,” she said.

She looked away from him then, to the big window. Far beyond the city she saw the river swelling into the Sound. The sun shone down upon the water, metal-bright.

“I suppose I should’ve told you,” MacArd said heavily. “Still, I’d bought the place. I daresay if David had stayed here I would have carried out the idea. But when he was set on leaving me and going to India as a goddamned missionary himself, I couldn’t go on with it. My feelings changed.”

“Did David know before he went?”

“Yes, but it made no difference. I guess nothing made any difference. He was set.”

“I see,” she said. What she saw, gazing out to the river as it rushed to the ocean, was a man different indeed from the boy she had known. He had dared to defy his father and choose his own path! She could not have believed it possible but he had done it. He took on stature before her eyes, the son of his father.

She brought her eyes back to MacArd. “So now?”

He shrugged his thick shoulders. “I keep busy, all right. I have a lot of things to interest me. Look here, this letter—” he took up the letter he had put down and fastened his pince-nez upon his nose with hideous grimaces. “You may not know anything about it, young woman, but the country is saved. That fellow Bryan is out now for good and all. He’ll never be President. Know why? Cyanide, potassium cyanide! Two young Scotchmen have found the trick, and here’s their letter. I’ll back them to any tune. Gold in Australia, gold in South Africa, gold in the Klondike, it’s all helped, but this is the real savior.” He thumped the flapping pages of the letter. “You remember that name — potassium cyanide! It will get the gold out of low grade ore. At last I can do it. Bryan’s free silver doesn’t matter any more. We have gold — all the gold we want.”

“What does gold mean, Mr. MacArd?” Olivia insisted.

“It means that people are going to be able to pay their debts, it means business is going up, it means people can go to shows and spend money and have a good time! The country is solid again on gold.” He was thumping the letter with every sentence.

“But what does it mean to you, Mr. MacArd?” Olivia insisted again.

The grizzled red eyebrows lowered. MacArd frowned at her. “Why, young woman, it will mean millions to me, that’s what it’ll mean!”

“I see.” But what she saw was that suddenly she loathed this big red-haired man and she wanted to get away from him quickly.

She got up and put her gloved hand across the desk. “Good-by, Mr. MacArd. I’ll be going now. I can see you are very busy.”

“Good-by, Miss Dessard! And, say, I thank you for coming. I’m glad that my fool son is going to marry you, and I’ll send you a wedding present. No, look here! I’ll put money in the bank for you every year. A woman likes some money of her own.”

“Please don’t, Mr. MacArd,” she begged in instant distress.

“Yes, I will, too. Now don’t you say a word. I shall do it anyway. Why not? I want to do it.”

She felt tears come to her eyes, to her own dismay. She could not change him. He was so big, so stubborn, so hateful and so pitiful. He would never see anything as it really was, and he could not be changed. Oh, that was the most terrible, pitiful thing, that he could never be changed! She tried to smile and then turned and hurried from the room, for of course she could never make him understand why she had to weep for him, but she had to, because she could not help it.

The monsoon winds came late, but they came at last and for days the thirsty land soaked up the falling rain. In the homes of rich and poor alike the people slept night and day to the sound of the soft thunder. The terrible tension of heat and dryness had exhausted them, for even though they sat waiting for the rains they had not been able to sleep. The animals had wandered restlessly to and fro over the countryside and through the streets, looking for food and water, and men were idle because there was no use in scratching the dry surface of the fields with their shallow plows. In Poona business was at a standstill. Money was gone and all but the rich were living on borrowed cash until the rains came. Now that the winds had risen, had driven the clouds over the sea and mountains, now that the rains fell, the weary people slept through the hours without waking. As soon as there were a few days between rains, they must get out into the fields, but for the present it was no sin to sleep.

In the mission house David, too, could scarcely keep awake. His Marathi teacher did not come for a week, and alone he struggled with the books he was learning to read. On such a day the postman arrived drenched and late and handed him letters wrapped in oiled paper. One, he saw instantly, was from Olivia, and moved by excitement he gave the postman a coin. The man smiled, white teeth flashing and dark skin gleaming in the rain. He was shivering, the heat of the summer had changed to a damp coolness and his cotton garments, scanty enough, clung like wet paper to his thin frame.

“May the letter bring you good news, Sahib,” he cried, and trudged away as pleased as though the good news were his own.

David went into the house, touched, as he so often was, by the warmth and humanity of an Indian. There was no distance to overcome, the least kindness overwhelmed these people, the most habitual gentleness was enough to win their adoration. They were ready to love. Yet they were not childish. It was simply that they had lived so long and in such misery that their hearts were worn bare and the nerves quivered.

He opened the envelope, eager and fearful at once. If the news were good, if Olivia were willing to marry him, what joy! And if she were not? In the weeks that he had waited for this letter he had steadfastly calmed his impatience, he had refused to be restless. He had consciously used the means of prayer to subdue his own longings, earnestly desiring more than anything else that the will of God be done. If she refused him he would never marry. He would devote himself to India. Living alone, studying the ancient tests, Hebrew, Greek, and Marathi, had sharpened his spiritual senses and defined the reality of God.

He looked down at the open pages and his eyes took in Olivia’s letter whole. Then his heart filled. He had not believed that she would accept him, but here were her own words. She did accept him, she would come to be with him, his wife, his own. He read the letter word by word, while the rain fell hard upon the roof over his head and dripped from the eaves of the verandas in the flower beds. It was a short letter, written in her firm clear black handwriting, so plain against the dull blue of the paper. There was no sound but the fall of the rain and the beat of his blood in his ears while the tremendous certainty flooded his being. His life was changed, his difficulties were gone, his loneliness was over.

He fell upon his knees and lifted his face, he held up the letter as though to show it to all-seeing eyes. Then he tried to pray and could not because his heart was running over. India had shaped him already more than he knew. He had been worn down by loneliness and heat and the pressing misery about him. His body was thin, his nerves were taut and his heart was naked to every blow. Happiness, too sudden, had undone him, and he felt hot and uncontrollable tears under his closed eyelids.

He wanted to tell Darya later in the day when he was calm again, and he clothed himself in his English mackintosh and took a big English umbrella that belonged to Mr. Fordham and splashed his way across the city to the compound. Then he pounded on the locked gate. A sleepy watchman stirred himself at last and peered through slanting lines of rain, scratching his belly as he stood barefoot.

“My master is sleeping, Sahib,” he remonstrated. “We are all asleep. I dare not wake my master.”

“Will you go and see if he sleeps?” David urged.

He stood in the gateman’s house and waited, and after a long time, the man came back again.

“He was sleeping, Sahib, but he turned in his bed, and so I told him that you were here and he bids you enter. But everyone else is asleep.”

“I shall not stay long,” David promised.

He followed the man through the drenched gardens and into the part of the house where Darya lived and there he found his friend, lying, it was true, on a cushioned couch, a silk afghan drawn over him against the sudden coolness.

Darya put out a languid hand. “David! Has something happened?”

“I had to come,” David said. He stood looking down on Darya and their hands clasped. “I have a letter from Olivia. She has agreed to marry me.”

Darya sprang from the couch and flung his arms about David. “My dearest friend! There is nothing I had rather hear. Now you are going to have a wife.”

“I shall be married here,” David said, “I want you to be my best man — you know our customs.”

“I will be whatever you say,” Darya cried ardently. “You are my brother and she will be my sister. Come here, we will sit side by side, and now tell me everything.”

“There is only that to tell,” David said, but he sat down, and Darya seized his hand again and held it between both his own in his warm Indian fashion, and while David was speechless he began to pour out his talk, the fluid eloquent silvery flow, describing Olivia as he remembered her and as she would look when she came. David listened, half entranced, half embarrassed. It was all very Indian but he was alone with Darya and since it did not matter, it was even pleasant.

Suddenly Darya paused and looked at David with mischief in his dark expressive eyes. “Dare I tell you?” he asked.

“Tell me what?” David demanded.

Darya drew up his long legs and wrapped his arms about his knees. “Will you promise not to be angry with me?”

“Why should I be angry?”

“One never knows with you western men. You get angry suddenly and oddly.”

David laughed. “I feel that nothing can make me angry at the moment.”

“Well, then, I had better tell you quickly. Another day you might not be so mellow. I wrote to Olivia!”

“You wrote to her?”

“Before you did, perhaps—”

“But why?”

“I told her you needed her and that she must marry you.” And making haste before the consternation of David’s look, he described the midnight scene when Leilamani had compelled him to work a kindness for his brother, his friend, and so he had written a letter and she had hastened to send it.

He was somewhat dashed at the gravity of David’s look. “That little Leilamani urged me in kindness, David, and it seemed to me, too, a good thing to do. Were you an Indian, David, it would be a matter of course, a tenderness, a proof of love between us. Is not your happiness my own?”

He put out his arms and embraced David by the shoulders, coaxing him with his eyes and his voice. This was Darya at his real self, his Indian self, always the deepest self and the self so near the surface that the English veneer disappeared completely. He was even speaking in Marathi, his native tongue.

“Ah, my brother, art thou angry with me? And what is it our Tukārām says?

‘Can my heart unmoved be,

When before my eyes I see

Drowning men?’

So I, beholding thee drowned in thy loneliness, did put out my hand on thy behalf and wilt thou hate me for this?”

It was impossible to be angry with him, and Darya, searching David’s face, caught the softening. Instantly he was lively again. He sprang up from the couch and confronted him, bending over with laughter, snapping his fingers while he laughed.

“And consider Olivia!” he cried in English. “Can you believe that anything I wrote would change her mind in the least? No, no, David, she is not like my gentle Leilamani. She will not come when you bid her come and go when you tell her to go. A noble woman, and beautiful, a wife to be proud of, but I warn you, she will always make up her own mind.”

David yielded. “Darya, you conquer by incessant talk. My mind whirls like a kaleidoscope. Let’s agree — you are always kind and though it is our western habit for a man to attend to his own love affair, I grant that you meant to help me.”

“And perhaps I did help you,” Darya declared triumphantly.

“We shall see,” David said, yielding again, because argument was futile. Darya would argue with relish and endlessly, recognizing no defeat. And he wanted to be in his own rooms alone, and read Olivia’s letter again. He wanted to make sure it was there where he had left it, locked in his desk.

Above all, he wanted to answer it immediately. He wanted to tell her to come at once, as quickly as she could. The words framed themselves aloud in his mind as he splashed his way through the rain and mud again to the mission house.

“Come, Olivia. Take the next boat, darling. I didn’t know it, but I have been waiting for you ever since I saw you last. I can wait no longer.”

The monsoons died away, the sun shone between the rains. The waiting earth sprang into instant growth and seeds that had lain in the dry soil waiting sprouted into the fresh green of fields and gardens. Time sped, the seasons telescoped, spring, summer and harvest rushed together and the surrounding beauty of the countryside beyond the city, and the mountains still beyond, brought an exaltation David had never known before. The Fordhams came back again, and with a generosity upon which they insisted, when he told them he was to be married, they moved out of the big mission house into a smaller one, long empty.

“You will be having a family and there’s only the two of us, now,” Mrs. Fordham said mournfully.

She helped him to furnish the house again for Olivia, but he would not allow anything beyond necessities.

“Olivia has a mind of her own,” he told Mrs. Fordham. “When I go to meet her in Bombay, she will want to buy things herself, I am sure.”

The Fordhams took away their modest bamboo and rattan furniture and he got along, furnishing only a few rooms from the Poona shops. Some of the Indian things were beautiful, he had not known how beautiful they were, for now Darya went with him and demanded that the best be shown him. He bought a few beautiful rugs, some inlaid silver, a low couch, and brocades so heavy with gold that insects could not destroy them! He bought also a huge English bed of teak with a hair mattress and a canopy of fine Indian muslin instead of a mosquito net, and he bought some teak chairs with woven seats. Teak was too hard for the termites to chew. Darya swept through the shops, arguing with the shopkeepers, and insisting upon Indian goods.

“Take these, David,” he commanded. “If Olivia doesn’t like them, she can return them. But I think she will like them.”

The house was changed, Darya arranged an opulence, and this without the furniture that he conceded Olivia should buy for herself. There was only the one English bedroom, but Darya declared the English shops in Bombay were better than these in Poona, they were the best in India, in fact, nearly as good as London shops, and much better than those in Calcutta.

Alone at night David knelt at the high new bed to say his evening prayers. He knelt upon a footstool because the rains had brought a host of insects into the house, and he did not like to be disturbed by spiders running along his legs or by a curious-minded lizard nibbling at his toes. There was also the horror of centipedes or scorpions to distract his mind from God. He felt earnest and anxious and he tried to prepare himself for the life ahead and he had two concerns. Olivia must be happy and he must take time to make her happy insofar as he was able. But, and this was the graver concern, she must not divide his mind or even his heart. She must join him in the divine direction under which he lived, she must deepen the consecration. Man and wife, they must work together for God. He would, he decided, firmly continue his way of life and his habits of prayer. He would be as he was, from the very moment they met, so that she would not see him only as her bridegroom, but also as the missionary.

And he prayed, “Teach me that I may teach, Oh God! Take Thou this mighty love I feel for her and keep it, lest it become my greatest treasure and separate me from Thee.”

His prayer went up and then he lay and dreamed of her and of how she would look when he waited on the dock in Bombay and the ship drew near, and he could see her face at last.

VII

OLIVIA STOOD AT EARLY dawn and gazed upon the shores of India. The sky was flushing pink over Bombay, the many lights were growing dim in the light of the rising sun and the sinking moon changed to a dead silver. A faint mist rose from the harbor and softened the outlines of the distant buildings. From it rose the massed outline of an old fort or castle, she could not tell which. The rosy mists, the pallid moon, the glow of new sunlight mingled to cast an atmosphere of mystery over the land.

The ship had anchored some two miles off shore, for the waters of the harbor were shallow, the captain had told her, and launches were coming to take the baggage and the passengers ashore.

She heard a man’s voice call as he passed. It was a young officer. “Ready, Miss Dessard?” He was an Englishman, and he yearned vaguely over the handsome American girl who was going out to marry a missionary. In intervals of a ball one night he had tried to probe as delicately as he could the mystery of this young woman. “I can only hope you will persuade your fiancé to leave that tragic country,” he had said. He was an Oxonian, a young man who hoped to better himself, one of England’s innumerable younger sons who were sent to India to find fortune if not fame.

“But you don’t leave India,” Olivia had said rather too astutely.

“Ah, but India’s our job,” the young Englishman had declared. “Besides,” he had added after a half moment’s thought, “it’s so hopeless being a missionary, you know, really it is. And only the worst Indians turn Christian.”

To this Olivia had said nothing, the music had begun again and she rose. She loved to dance and she knew that in Poona there would be no more of it. It had been lovely dancing on the ship, the rise and fall of the sea made one feel lighter than air….

“Quite ready,” she said calmly.

“Well, good-by and good luck,” the young officer said, and he put out his hand.

It was a final farewell to more than himself and Olivia had felt it so.

“Good-by,” she said, just touching his hand.

She stepped aboard the launch an hour later, her mother following, and they left the ship behind. The launch churned the water into foam and the small Indian craft rocked on the waves.

“Sit down, Mamma,” she commanded, and Mrs. Dessard sat down, a quiet grey-clad figure, her withered face anxious under her white straw hat. After insisting that she could not possibly go to India, at the last agitated moment she had decided that neither could she possibly allow Olivia to come so far to marry a man she scarcely knew. She had not enjoyed a moment of the journey, and she was not cheerful even yet. She had heard that India was hot and she hated heat and was afraid of snakes. When Olivia was properly married, she would go home at once.

Olivia did not sit down. She stood at the rail and stared at the dock, coming nearer so quickly, and the glare of the sun stung her eyeballs.

She had risen at dawn, but how quickly the sun had driven away the mysterious beauty of the early morning! The island, upon which Bombay was built, rose gleaming across the water and its outlines quivered in a haze of heat. Around the launch plunging now toward the land, a brisk hot wind dashed the water into small blue waves, white-lipped.

Mrs. Dessard sat on a deck chair in silence, gazing doubtfully shoreward, and Olivia, too, was silent. A few minutes more and she would see David. The first sight was important, but she must not let it be all-important, for it was too late now for change or return. Indeed, there was nothing to which she cared to return.

Then she saw him on the dock. He stood, tall and singular, motionless, rigid, shining white in his linen suit and sun helmet among the vivid swarming people. She leaned over the rail, waving her green silk scarf, and he saw her and lifted his helmet.

They stood looking at each other across the moving multitude and the narrowing water, searching for what they could not yet see. Had he changed? She thought he had, he looked much taller or had she only forgotten, or was it the strange white suit? He had grown a brown beard and though it was trimmed closely to a point, it made him look very different from the young man she remembered. He was much older, his face looked dark, but that was the beard. He stood motionless now, his hands clasped in front of him while the launch edged against the dock. But the moment the gangplank was fixed he came forward and she stood waiting, and for the first time her heart began to beat suddenly and quickly. She had really committed herself and her life, not only to David but to India, a man and a country she did not know. She turned her back to the shore and leaned against the rail. It was hot, the wind had died suddenly. The green linen of her traveling dress hugged her body too close and the narrow brim of her straw hat did not shield her face against the sun. But if she moved away he might not find her in the crowd and so she waited although it was only for a few minutes, and almost too soon, before she had time to still her heart, she saw his white figure threading its way among the people who pushed on the deck, the porters, the hotel agents, the English come to meet friends.

He came up to her simply and it seemed to her not shyly, and he bent and kissed her cheek. She felt the brush of his soft beard on her face, she saw the kindling of his dark eyes. He took her hand and held it hard.

“Olivia — darling—”

“David!”

It was impossible to say more in the midst of the crowd, they stood holding hands, looking at each other but not quite fully, for Mrs. Dessard came toward them.

“David, I’m very glad to see you. It’s been a fearfully long trip. Heavens, so this is India!”

She shook hands with him, and waved her hand toward the shore. “What a lot of people!”

“There are a lot of people wherever you go in India,” David agreed. “One gets used to it. They are very good, actually, very friendly, that is. Where are the bags, Olivia? We’ll have to get them through customs.”

He motioned to a man from the Grand Hotel where he had taken rooms, the man came forward and David directed him calmly. Yes, Olivia thought watching him, David was changed. He was self-assured, almost a little too superior in manner, she thought, the old diffidence was gone, and with it something of the touching charm. He was more of a man and that, perhaps, she would like. Did she love him? It was hard to tell all in a moment, now that he was changed. Perhaps she could love him easily. It was exciting, this marrying someone she did not quite know.

“We had better get out of this sun,” David said with quiet authority. “I have a carriage waiting just outside the dock. We can go to the hotel and when you are settled, Mrs. Dessard, we can discuss plans. I hope you will want to get to Poona as soon as possible, Olivia. Everybody is expecting you, and for me the waiting has seemed very long.”

“You young people must decide,” Mrs. Dessard said. The sun was hot indeed and she felt little rills of perspiration running down the sides of her face.

They followed David. He had given their keys to the agent and the bags, he told them, were safe enough, “Indians are not more honest than other men,” he observed as they walked along, “but once you have entrusted something to an Indian, he will be honest at least until the job is done.”

Olivia was a stranger, he thought she had changed and she was more beautiful and she was older. Would he have the courage the moment they were alone to kiss her as he had dreamed of doing? The kiss as he had dreamed it was to be exchanged when they met, but it had been impossible either to give or to receive in the midst of the crowd, and certainly too, he would not give Olivia his first kiss before Mrs. Dessard. Nevertheless, he was not going to wait either until they reached Poona. Mrs. Fordham had been very stern with him about love.

“Indians are not used to our freedom between the sexes,” she had declared. “It is extremely important that you are never seen alone with your fiancée. For that reason I do think the wedding should take place as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, please, no demonstrations — no fondling or — or kisses!”

The carriage was waiting and he helped Mrs. Dessard into it, and then Olivia and then he took his place, and he found her firm small hand and held it under the covering of her full green skirt. She was cool and beautiful in green, the heat did not change her lovely pallor, and her straw hat shaded her dark eyes. He felt a suffocation about his heart as they sat side by side, her slender thigh pressed delicately against him, and to restrain his love, which must not be spoken or shown, not yet, he began to talk about the streets through which they passed, the people they saw in their many costumes, Hindus, Moslems, Parsees, black Jews. But all the time he was talking for Mrs. Dessard he was passionately caressing Olivia’s hand, his fingers, searching the palm, pressing its softness, and she sat motionless, not hearing what he said, gazing about and seeing nothing for all her attention, all her consciousness were fixed upon their joined hands and his searching fingers, and she did not know whether she liked it. Still, she did not draw her hand away.

He found his moment, he seized it upstairs in the hotel, when Mrs. Dessard was in her room, directing the disposal of the bags. He threw open the door into the next room.

“This is your room, Olivia, and mine is on the next floor.”

Then he pushed the door though not quite shut, and behind it he took her in his arms at last and kissed her on the mouth, a kiss as long and deep as his dreams, his first true kiss.

“Olivia!” Mrs. Dessard called. “Where are you? The man wants to bring in your bags.”

She tore herself away. “Here, Mamma!”

But there was time for them to exchange a look so ardent, so rich with promise, that her head swam. She was always quick to decide, quick to know. Yes, she was going to fall in love. Everything was all right, and India was glorious.

Upstairs in his own room, the porter paid off, and the door locked, David fell upon his knees in wordless worship. There was no sin in loving Olivia and God would understand. He who had created them male and female, husband and wife. Yet such happiness must not absorb his heart and his mind. At first it would be hard, but he would learn to control even love, for Christ’s sake. The dream had been terrifying in its sweet power, but the reality was more sweet and strong. Olivia was lovelier than he had remembered her. He sent up his wordless plea for strength, he forced his mind to dwell upon Christ, and then this occurred to him, which he had never thought of before: Christ, that member of the triple godhead, the only One of Three who had ever once been man, and so to whom he most naturally made his prayer, had died, had returned again to heaven, but never had He known the love of woman. His prayer wavered, lost its wings, and fell to earth again. No, he could not ask for help to love Olivia less. He must love God more until the greater love would rule his being. This was his task — not less love, but more.

He tried to tell her something like this in the evening of that day. She wanted to walk, she was eager to see the streets, and so they left the hotel and he led their way to the shores of Back Bay. The sun had already set but there was a bar of red across the sea horizon, and the grey tide was thundering in upon the shore. The green heights of Malabar Hill were still clear, though fading into the quick twilight. The great city clock struck the hour of seven and people were leaving the sands. Parsee priests in long white robes stood gazing toward the last light of the sun, not heeding the people about them, and Englishmen and women walked homeward along the shore, while the white children played, reluctant to let the day go.

“If I seem aloof sometimes,” David told Olivia while they stood hand in hand upon the shore, their faces toward the sunset, “it isn’t that my love fails. It is simply that there are tasks of consecration which demand my whole attention and my heart.”

“I shan’t mind,” Olivia said with composure.

Across the rolling seas the evening star shone out suddenly, golden, soft, and clear.

A week later they were married. The little Poona church was filled with whispering, staring Indian Christians sitting as usual on the floor, but packed so closely together that the path to the altar was narrow indeed. Olivia walked up the aisle and if she saw the faces at her feet, or the faces at the windows, she gave no sign. Her mother walked beside her, and David waited at the altar, Darya standing beside him, and Mr. Fordham stood in his robe of service.

Olivia was very pale, she moved with dignity, and David, mindful of the Indians, did not look at her after one swift glance as she entered. She, also warned, held her head bent slightly beneath her short veil. Mrs. Fordham played the little organ softly until she heard Olivia’s step upon the chancel and then she let the reedy music die away and Mr. Fordham’s solemn nasal voice began the sacred words. Mrs. Dessard wept a little, her handkerchief to her lips.

“Who giveth this woman—” Mr. Fordham was intoning.

“I do,” Mrs. Dessard sobbed.

Well, it was Olivia’s business. The Fordhams were common people and it did not matter what they did, but David MacArd and her own daughter certainly did not have to be missionaries. Old Mr. MacArd was right. Olivia had told her angrily of that scene, but when she got back to New York she would write him a letter and tell him he was right. India was a horrid country. When she squeezed her sponge in the bath this morning a centipede ran out, and she had nearly fainted, although luckily the dangerous insect had dropped from her right shoulder to the floor without stinging her and had disappeared down the drain. She mulled rebellion in her heart until suddenly the little organ was playing again joyfully and David and Olivia moved together to walk down the aisle and she had to walk behind them. A week from now, maybe only a couple of days from now, she would be on a ship and going back to a Christian country.

“Poor Mamma,” Olivia said suddenly. They had been married four days.

“Why?” David inquired, not caring.

“All this,” Olivia said, her hand sweeping the panorama of the hills around Poona. “I do really wish she could have seen it. Now she will never believe that India isn’t what she thinks it is.”

“Much of it is,” David observed.

“Yes, but there’s this,” Olivia insisted. She was happy, utterly, wholly happy, she was in love, she had been so afraid that she could not be, but now she was in love with this strange man, her husband. When she remembered the slender boy who had once thrown himself at her feet and whom she had swiftly rejected because he had been so childish, so fond, so silly, she could not believe that he had become this calm, quietly arrogant man who told her plainly when he wanted to be alone, who withdrew morning and evening for his private prayers, who was absolute in his determination to be his own master and whom therefore she could worship. She subdued herself to him, delighting in subjection. She obeyed him, astonished that she enjoyed obedience. She had been alone so long, and so long had she been wilful and her mother helpless before her that it was exciting to understand that while David did love her with beautiful passion, she was not to be his whole life. She was his beloved, that she knew, but love was not everything to this man. What was beyond she did not know and her imagination stirred. She liked even the beard, for that boy long ago had had a profile marred perhaps by the delicate chin. The delicacy in eyelid and nostril still remained, but his mouth was firm and the chin was hidden.

“Oh, I love you,” she cried, suddenly ardent.

They were sitting on a veranda, from whence the mountains rolled away into the horizon, falling so steeply from the house that the tops of the trees brushed the railing.

She dropped to her knees before him, and he saw unexpected worship in her eyes. This was Olivia, astonishing him with her love, a woman who might easily never have loved him, but who by some grace of God did now love him utterly. He knew that she loved altogether or not at all, that was his Olivia, and if he trembled sometimes before her ardor, he was reassured. Had she not given herself completely, he might have found it impossible to refrain from pursuit, and in that pursuit he might have put even God aside. But now she was securely his, there need be no pursuit, and he was free. He loved her with passion but not sinfully because she did not consume him. The center of his heart was calm, and there God dwelled and not Olivia. He felt that all was right, that the balance was maintained.

“Thank God, you do love me,” he said gazing down into the dark worshipping eyes.

“And why thank God?” she demanded.

“Because otherwise I might have destroyed myself. I might have lost my soul.”

She did not understand what he meant, but she listened. It did not occur to her that she had a rival, or that her place had already been set. She was second and not first, she was his heart but not his soul, but she did not know the difference.

“Take me in your arms,” she whispered.

He took her in his arms, safe in the soft Indian night. It was dark, the swift twilight was gone, and the dense black fine of the mountains could scarcely be seen against the sky, except that at the horizon the stars stopped. Happiness flowed between the man and the woman, and for her it was enough. It was everything. But for him it was human, and though sweet, it was contentment, not more. For him the divine miracle was not here upon the earth, not even in his arms. He held her close, but his eyes searched the sky, beyond the stars. He was committed to God, he knew it now, and he felt secure.

To her surprise, Olivia liked India, or perhaps her particular bit of India. In the morning the well-trained servants brought her tea and toast. Today she lay in bed and waited for the noiseless footsteps and she feigned sleep.

“Memsahib!”

She heard the apologetic whisper and opened her eyes upon the fragile figure of the boy, a dark-skinned half-grown man, the son of the cook. He set the tray on the table.

“Thank you,” she said sleepily.

He stole away upon bare feet and she bestirred herself indolently and alone. An hour earlier David had left the enormous bed. The coolness of the morning held the best hours for his study and prayer. She got out of bed and examined her slippers lest some homing noxious insect had sheltered there in the night. They were safe and she drew them on. The sun had risen perhaps half an hour ago but the room was already hot. She combed back her hair and braided it freshly, and going into the bathroom, she brushed her teeth from the carafe of boiled water. All water taken into the mouth must be boiled, that she had learned. Then she took off her muslin nightgown and poured water over herself from the jar of tepid water. It ran down her slender body to the tiled floor which sloped to a drain. She liked this sort of bath, it was quick and refreshing, and she dried herself on a soft towel and drew on a chemise. She had already learned to dress for comfort. Mrs. Fordham wore corsets but Olivia had put hers away into the trunk of garments that she had decided would never do for India. A chemise and a petticoat and then her muslin dress, bare feet in sandals, because her skirts were long, and while she dressed she sipped the strong Indian tea and nibbled dry toast. No butter — the butter came in tin cans from Australia and it was a soft yellow oil by the time one opened the can. She would have none of it, not even in the vegetables. But the dry toast, the dark almost bitter tea with condensed milk and lumpy sugar, were good food after a hot night. She would not eat again until noon, they had English tea at four and did not dine until dark. One needed to eat often but never much in this climate. She left the room as it was, her garments thrown where she had taken them off. There were servants enough, some paid, some unpaid except for eating the scraps from the kitchen, and she never asked how many there were. Mrs. Fordham might not approve of her, Mrs. Fordham who had to live rigorously on a missionary’s salary, but Olivia did not care. Old Mr. MacArd put the checks unannounced into her private account in an English bank in Bombay. She found it pleasant, after all, and David asked no questions. He let her do as she liked, and when Mrs. Fordham suggested one day that she was not a proper missionary he had agreed.

“I asked Olivia to be my wife.” He had learned to be very firm with the Fordhams. “I didn’t ask her to be a missionary. That is not within my power.”

Still, Olivia tried at times to please the stout Christians. She was fond of Mrs. Fordham in an easy way, and she liked Mr. Fordham warmly. They were good. But it did seem a waste for them to spend so much time on poor and low caste people and why, she asked David, when there were Indians like Darya, did not he and the Fordhams make them into Christians?

Even Mr. and Mrs. Fordham had cast longing looks from afar at the proud and wealthy young Indian.

“If you could only win him for Christ,” they said wistfully to David.

But Darya evaded Christ with his usual careless and half humorous grace.

“One’s religion is as personal as one’s marriage,” he declared. “I would not dream, dear David, of persuading you to my Hindu faith, and you, my friend, are too delicately attuned to me to try to change me. Is it not so with us?”

Who could deny such charm? Olivia felt it as delicious as ever, and it must not be distrusted.

“Do leave Darya his own religion,” she had then told David, to which he had made no reply.

Meanwhile she had not yet met Leilamani, nor even had more than a glimpse of Darya and the exchange of greetings and a few questions. He had seemed almost shy in her presence.

“After you are settled, and after your honeymoon,” he said. “When you are quite at home here in Poona, I will invite you to my house, and you shall meet Leilamani.”

He had not yet invited them and when only yesterday she had wondered aloud at the delay, David had said, “Darya always does exactly as he pleases, Olivia. You’ll have to wait.”

His manner was remote, his voice firm and a glance showed her that he was the other David, the missionary and not the lover. But she was too happy to be wounded, content perhaps being the more exact word for her state of mind, for content was large and all embracing, and happiness was sharp and particular and must be reserved for special moments.

She finished her tea and toast and wandered out of her room. In the house the shades were drawn against the sun and the house was shadowy if not with coolness at least with its semblance. The bare floors were polished, the furniture dustless and a servant had filled the vases with fresh flowers. Olivia did not try to grow flowers but the servants found green branches and blossoms strange to her, or sometimes only huge fern leaves and small palms. She drifted across the big bare rooms for which she had never bought furniture, after all, in Bombay. She had not wanted to buy for a house she had not yet seen and so they had come straight to Poona, and she had left the house as it was. The few pieces of furniture of exquisite workmanship, some Chinese tables and cabinets, and Indian brocades thrown across their dark and shining surfaces were enough. She had not hung curtains in the heat, the jalousies were enough, too, and she did not like paintings on the walls. She was contemptuous of the English interiors, rooms as stuffy as any in London, and even less did she like the inexpensive but similar effects that Mrs. Fordham made with rattan and wicker. No cushions, not in this heat, and the insects lurking!

“The house is a bit bare though, dearie,” Mrs. Fordham said.

“I like bareness,” Olivia said.

She went to find David without much hope, for at this hour he might be anywhere, sitting with some thoughtful visitor, or working with the architect on his boundless plans for a vast school.

He took his own way as ruthlessly as his father did for purposes entirely different, and she knew that he planned an enormous compound, a center of education and health and religion. Some day this center would be known all over India, thanks to the MacArd millions. What, she often wondered, would David have been as the son of a poor man?

She found him in his study at the huge table he had ordered made for his plans. A young Anglo-Indian architect was with him and they were earnestly poring over the plans for another dormitory, an addition to the proposed college for men.

The Anglo-Indian saw her first. He was a slender graceful young man, his olive skin, his blue brown eyes, his straight hair dark but not black, revealing his mixed race. He was English, and his presence passionately proclaimed him the son of an English father. He had purposely forgot his mother, whose inherited features he had, for she was Indian.

“Good morning, Mrs. MacArd,” he exclaimed with his slight exaggeration of Oxford accent, the little extravagance of manner which revealed his Indian blood. “I have been so hoping you would come in, you know, you have such an extrornary sense of design, such a quick eye for balance, it’s always such a relief to be shown one’s faults but so delightfully.”

Olivia smiled and put out her hand, aware of looking charming in her soft white muslin frock. India had made her feminine, she had relaxed, her lips were no longer taut or her body tense. But that perhaps was partly marriage and the certainty at last that she could and did love the man to whom she was married. Religion, dedication, whatever one wanted to call it, had made David strong and dominant, and love had taught her the joy of submission. In her way she supposed she had longed to submit and now she could submit without loss of herself. The young Anglo-Indian’s eyes were unpleasantly moist as he gazed at her and she withdrew her hand.

“Good morning, Olivia,” David said. He was careful to show no marital fondness before Indians or Anglo-Indians who were always, he thought, more Indian than English. “Sit down and give us your advice, as Ramsay suggests. I’ll just outline my idea first. I want a vast quadrangle here,” he put his finger upon a space, “centered upon a fountain, something really beautiful. I want to tempt young men to come here.”

“And when you have caught them in your net?” she asked, leaning over him and feeling with exquisite delight her breast against his shoulder.

“Once they are here I shall assault their souls,” he declared with vigor. “I shall not, for example, give them any excuse for caste.”

Ramsay shook his head doubtfully and pulled at a minute black mustache. “There will be trouble. These people are all for caste, you know, Mr. MacArd. And the Marathi are a very strong people, very forceful and all that. They will be as liberal as you please and then suddenly they’re frightfully superstitious. Look at the present cult of that dreadful old woman, the sect of Baba Jan! Actually, sir, there are well-educated Indian Indians among her followers. It’s discouraging.”

The dreadful old woman was a half-witted beggar who wandered about Poona. People said she was a hundred and fifty years old and that she could raise the dead to life again. It was true that there were young Indians, even some educated in Oxford and Cambridge, who believed or half believed in her, just as Darya, laughing but still troubled, had fetched a swami to exorcise his house when the servants were terrified because they said an evil spirit was caught in the lofty rafters.

“It’s all nonsense about the Indians being spiritual, of course,” Ramsay went on with the bravado, the pitiful contempt of the man who fears that in his ancestry there is concealed shame. “Indians aren’t spiritual — they’re merely superstitious. And lots of them don’t believe in any gods at all nowadays. I know a chap, a very rich chap, too, who has had it carved above his gate, ‘God is nowhere.’”

David listened in his usual intent fashion. “Perhaps it is best for the false gods to be cast out, so that the spirit of the true God may enter,” he observed.

“Oh, the old yogis won’t let that happen,” Ramsay exclaimed with strange passion. “They pretend to be so saintly, but they are very wicked and cruel, actually.”

“That depends upon the nature of the man,” David replied. “There are yogis who are so kind, so winning, so good, that I fear them because they resemble Christ. They are our real enemies. The Marathi poet-saint said — you remember Tukārām? I was reading his poems the other day;

‘On all alike he mercy shows,

On all an equal love bestows.’

“That’s the man I fear, a saint who does not acknowledge Christ. The cruel harsh self-sufficient yogis — ah, I don’t fear them! Human hearts turn to love as plants to the sun. ‘Lead us from the darkness into light’—that’s from the Hindu Scriptures, too, and desire is still passionate in the hearts of these people. But I want to show them the true light.”

He was preaching and he knew it, but Ramsay and Olivia listened, compelled by his strong sincerity. She marveled at the attractive power in this man whom she now loved. Where had it come from except from the inner source of his own faith? She was Christian, she supposed, but not as he was. Her religion was not a force so much as an atmosphere in which she lived, and in the atmosphere there were many things, her increasing interest in life, her pleasure in her friendship with English people here, her pity for the massive poverty she saw everywhere, her delight in the hills where she and David went for brief holidays, her amused affection for the Fordhams and the other missionaries like them before whom she walked carefully because she had benefits which they could not share — poor little Miss Parker, for example, the evangelist, so snub-nosed and stubby, who must look upon the marriage of the two young MacArds as something too close to heaven for her own comfort. Oh, she, Olivia, was rich in many benefits, and so she must be humble.

“What is this scrawl?” she asked putting her finger on a corner of the blue print, but really she asked that she might lean against David’s shoulder again.

“I want Ramsay to design a women’s dormitory there,” he said.

Ramsay broke in with his too impetuous voice. “I don’t like to criticize, I’m sure, but that, I feel, is really going too fast, Mr. MacArd. I cannot see the Indians willing to let their girls enter a compound where there are male students.”

David was decisive. “If I am to cope with the new Ramkrishna revival of Hinduism, I must dare to break down old customs. The Ramkrishna people are perfectly aware of the dangers of the old Sannyasa ideas, which taught that men should be indifferent to the sorrows of the world, because all was illusion anyway. Ramkrishna believes that God takes innumerable forms and colors, appearing everywhere. It’s a tempting idea in these times of rising nationalism. ‘Be gods and make gods’—I’ve heard them say that myself. They will revive Hinduism with such slogans, and that is what I must oppose, for India would be taken out of the modern world for centuries. It’s the women who cling to the superstitions and it’s the women I mean to educate as the men are educated.”

Ramsay sneered slightly behind his little mustache. “If you are afraid of the new gods, why not be afraid of nationalism? That’s where the old religious force is really being drained off.”

“I am not afraid of nationalism,” David argued. “I am afraid of something much greater that nationalism might misuse — the force of the masses of these people, and people like them anywhere in the world, men and women who cannot read and write, the peasants, the ones down under, that man who in India goes out to plough his miserable field with no better plow than his ancestors had a thousand years ago, he half starved as they were, while his wife stays home, subject, as women were in ancient times, ‘to the three crooked things, the quern, the mortar, and her crook-backed lord.’”

“Oh, you two,” Olivia murmured. “Where will you agree?”

Ramsay laughed. “Fortunately we need not agree. It is impossible to agree about India, you know. Two Indians, even, can never get together anywhere. They argue all over the place. But I am only an English architect, and so no one minds me. I am very ill-informed about India, actually. Most of my life has been spent in England.”

He said this carelessly, not looking at them but preparing to roll up the great sheets of blue prints, tapping the ends with his narrow hands, the strange dark hands, much darker than his face and so obviously Indian.

“Well, good day, sir, and madam,” he said, “I’m glad you approve the fountain, Mr. MacArd, sir.”

He bowed a trifle too deeply for an Englishman and went away.

“Poor fellow,” Olivia said. “He tries so hard to be English.”

“Foolish of him,” David said. “It only makes the Indians hate him because they know he isn’t English.”

“Oh, let him be what he wants to be,” Olivia said robustly.

She lingered, too proud to ask for his morning kiss and then he remembered.

He rose, smiled and held out his arms and she came into them. These first months of marriage were dangerously sweet, almost too precious. They were both passionate and they had found in themselves needs, desires, responses of which they had never dreamed. They were innocently sensual, believing that the blessing of God upon their union relieved them of the responsibility of self-control. Nothing was forbidden to them, since their marriage itself was sacred.

He held her in a long close embrace and bent to put his lips to hers. Their lips opened, their tongues sought each other and curled together like two coral red serpents and their bodies quivered again, in unison, though only in the night past they had met complete. Olivia drew away at last, breathless, sighing, and laid her head upon his shoulder.

At this moment they heard a cough at the door. They sprang apart, and Olivia muttered under her breath,

“How do they always seem to know?”

The interruption was innocent, the half-grown boy servant brought in a letter upon a small brass tray and David took it.

“From Darya,” he said, smiling. “I think it is your invitation.”

It was, and they were invited to come to the evening meal that day, entirely Indian, and Leilamani awaited Olivia, while Darya was their loving brother and friend.

Darya was at the door to greet them and Olivia saw at once that tonight he was all Indian. It was more than dress, though the rich Indian garments and the turban of brocade wound about his head enhanced his always unusual beauty. The static poise of his tall figure standing in the carved doorway, the remoteness of his large dark eyes, the dignity of the noble head made him Indian and strange. He put his palms together in the graceful gesture of his people, the symbol, as he had once told her, of their recognition of the divine in every human creature, but tonight the gesture made him seem afar off. She felt shy and ill at ease, and tried not to show what she felt, and failed. For once Darya did not help her.

“Come in,” he said gravely. “Welcome to my house.” He led them into a large formal room hung with brocades. On the floor soft thick rugs were spread under cushions, and he invited them to be seated, and he sat down near them and clapped his hands. Servants came in with trays of fruit juices and honeyed water and sweetmeats, and they set the trays before David and Olivia but not before Darya. He spoke to a servant in a low voice and then motioned to his guests to eat.

David obeyed, quite at ease, Olivia was surprised to see, and she followed his example. She had never tasted such food before and she found it delicious, small tartlets, hot marble-sized balls of vegetable paste, highly seasoned, honey cakes, delicate as rose petals, arranged gracefully upon fresh green leaves.

“This is all for your education, Olivia,” David said after a few moments. “I have never been shown such honor before.”

He glanced at Darya with mild amused eyes, to which Darya responded with a sudden burst of laughter. He removed the turban from his head, set it on the floor beside him and took a tartlet from David’s tray.

“It is quite authentic,” he declared. “If you were an Indian lady, Olivia — and a modern one, for if you were old-fashioned we could not meet at all — you would be received thus.”

“Ah, now, Darya,” David protested.

Darya acceded. “Well, let us say, my father would so receive you. I grant you that I have been spoiled. Also I am lazy. It is so much trouble to observe the old formalities. All that I can do is to try to observe the decencies. What my sons will do when they are grown I cannot tell. By that time—”

He looked toward the door, interrupted by the sound of children’s voices, and he rose to his feet. “Ah, here they come.”

The curtain was parted as he spoke and Leilamani stood there with her children, one on either side. Forever after when David thought of her, he saw her as she was at this moment, a beautiful shy woman, a tall girl as many of the Marathi were tall, her slender figure wrapped in a long Poona sari of palest yellow silk with a brocaded border of heavy gold. She had drawn the end over her soft curling black hair, and her great black eyes glowed in the golden shadows. Her small full lips she had painted scarlet, and in the middle of her forehead was the tiny circle of scarlet that was the sign of her high birth.

He rose to his feet and then Olivia rose and involuntarily she put out her hand to the beautiful Indian girl.

“Come,” Darya commanded his wife, “these are our friends. This is Olivia.”

Leilamani walked forward slowly, her bare feet in gold sandals, and the children clung to her as she came.

“You must shake hands with Olivia, but you need not with David,” Darya commanded. His voice was imperious but his eyes were tender, and she put out a soft narrow hand to Olivia, the nails painted as scarlet as her mouth.

“Say Olivia,” Darya bade her.

“O-livia,” Leilamani said below her breath, accenting the first letter.

“Leilamani,” Olivia replied. She pressed the pretty hand slightly and then released it.

“These are my two naughty boys,” Darya said carelessly. He tumbled the curly dark heads, “This one is five and this one is four. We shall have another one, boy or girl, six months from now.”

The children released their tight hold on their mother’s sari. The elder leaned toward Olivia’s tray and she gave him a tartlet. The small one immediately put out a minute brown palm and in it also she laid a tartlet.

“Enough,” Darya said with authority. “Go away now and play.”

They were obedient immediately, and walked away hand in hand, tartlets at their mouths.

Leilamani seated herself beside Darya, careful not to touch him in public, and Darya watched her with a loving and solicitous pride. “She does very well, eh? This wife of mine, Olivia, was in purdah until she married. Never did she see a strange man. When she went out with other women in the family it was always in a curtained carriage. I remember that when her father ordered an English carriage enclosed in glass, he had the glass painted so that no one could see in and no one could see out. Eh, Leilamani?”

Leilamani nodded, smiling, and did not speak.

Darya coaxed her. “Now Leilamani, you must speak some English. I have been teaching her, Olivia. I have told her that she must learn to speak English as fast as you learn Marathi. That is fair, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure that it is,” Olivia said, smiling at Leilamani. “I think English is easier.”

“Now, now,” Darya cried.

It was all banter and small talk, and David sat listening and taking no part but enjoying it and understanding very well that Darya was gently and patiently helping his wife to forget her shyness and show them her delicately gay self. Slowly she did what he wished, first by gentle movements, then by eating a favorite sweetmeat, then by smiling and then by a soft laugh, until when Darya grew too bold, she gave him a little push with both hands against his cheek.

Olivia was enchanted. She had never seen such a woman as Leilamani, a creature so young, so childish, and yet so profoundly feminine, so sophisticated in her femaleness. Leilamani was all woman and unconscious of any other possible being. She patted her little round abdomen and then touched Olivia’s flat waist with tentative fingers.

“Yes?” she asked softly.

“No,” Olivia said, shaking her head.

“Soon?” Leilamani asked with pretty hopefulness.

“Perhaps,” Olivia said, very uncomfortable.

Darya burst into laughter again. “You mustn’t mind, Olivia! Like all Indian women who have not been spoiled by western life, Leilamani feels her first pride is in being able to have children. It is a proof of her quality as a woman. Indian women had rather be dead than be barren. Is that too hard for you to understand?”

“I think it is,” Olivia said.

She was aware now that Leilamani was watching her with enormous and reflective eyes. She was fearlessly examining Olivia’s face and hair and figure. She put out her hand and felt the stuff of her thin blue silk dress, then she took Olivia’s hand in her left one and stroked it gently with her right one. She smiled frankly and sweetly at Olivia, coaxing her to friendliness.

It was an enchanting sight and the two men looked on enjoying it.

“She is telling you that she is going to love you as her sister,” Darya said. “You must not be shy, Olivia. We believe that love is the best gift of all and never to be withheld when it exists. I can tell you that Leilamani does not often give it so freely. She is a proud little thing, this wife of mine!”

“Tell her I am happy that I came and I hope she will let me come often,” Olivia said. It was too little to say, when Leilamani poured over her this warmth of affection and trust, but she was confused. She was aware of strange feelings within her, a melting of inner hardness that she did not know she had, a softening of her heart, a new perception of woman, something that Leilamani was which she was not and which she was not sure she wanted to be, and yet which attracted her strongly. Leilamani was a mixture of witchery and wisdom, youth and age, simplicity and complexity, emotion and shrewd common sense. She felt crude and bigboned and harsh, she wanted to go away and she wanted to stay and gaze at Leilamani. She was repelled by her and yet she longed to embrace her. She was jealous of her beauty and delighted by it. It was an overwhelming, inexplicably exciting hour and when it ended and they came away, she was exhausted. She was not at all sure that she was going to like India entire or even that she could bear it always.

That night in his bed when he was drowsing off to sleep in the darkness and the whining of the mosquitoes was dying away in his ears, David was astonished to hear the patter of Olivia’s bare feet on the floor. He woke up at once for never had she dared to walk at night in the dark or without her shoes.

“Olivia, is that you?” He sat up and felt for the matches and the candle always inside the net.

“Yes, don’t light the candle.”

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Oh, David, love me!”

“But darling, I do love you!”

“Oh, but more, more, more!”

She was half sobbing and he did not know what to make of it. He lifted the net and pulled her inside. “Come in, dearest. Why are you crying? Are you ill?”

To none of his questions did she reply. Here was an Olivia he had never seen before, melted in weeping and clinging to him, passionate and demanding and insistent.

“Oh love me — love me—” she was crying, and at last he abandoned himself to her, passion rising and then rising again to climax and finally to exhaustion. Never, never had he allowed himself to be absorbed like this, never had he been compelled beyond his own control.

When it was over and she was asleep he could not sleep. For the first time since their marriage he had a sense of sin. What he had done, what she had compelled him to do, was not good. He had never seen this demand in her before but it was not right for him. He lay deeply troubled and after a time he rose and went into the bathing room and washed his body clean from head to foot. Then he put on clean garments and went into his study and closed the door. He fit the lamp and tried to read some scriptures but the words were empty, and would be empty until he had acknowledged his sin. He had been overcome. She had tempted him, yes, but he would not use that excuse as old as Adam. His soul was his own, and he had not kept it undefiled.

He turned the lamp low and got down on his knees by his desk and bowed his head and sent up his prayer in shame and contrition.

“God, forgive me—”

After a long while he felt comfort pervade him slowly, like light rising over a mountain, but his prayer was not finished. He lifted his head and prayed again, “God, give me strength.”

And while he prayed, Olivia slept.

VIII

THE WEATHER TURNED AND grew cool, as cool as Poona weather ever was, but Olivia was languid. Her days were spent in a routine, pleasant enough but unchanging, and she marvelled that she did not mind. She was getting very lazy, she told herself, and it was an effort to return the dinners to which she and David had been invited, most important of which was a dinner due the Governor and his wife. She made the effort, because David insisted that he must be friendly with Government or he could not do his work. It was difficult, nationalism was rising, Government was irritable and irritated. Americans were suspected of being sympathetic with the nationalist movement and ultimately with independence for India. History was against them.

“I am very glad to find that you are sound, Mr. MacArd,” the Governor said somewhat patronizingly at the dinner table.

Olivia, at the opposite end of the oval table, listened for David’s reply.

“I am against revolution, Your Excellency,” David replied calmly. “That is not to say I am against change. I am doing my best to educate young Indians who will wish eventually to rule their own country, doubtless, but it will be within the scheme of evolutionary order and not in my time or yours, probably.”

“Oh, well, as to that,” the Governor said tolerantly, “we shall of course give them a gradual independence as they are fit for it. Certainly they are not fit for it now, with four fifths of the people illiterate and ignorant.”

Olivia spoke too quickly. “Your Excellency, I’ve wondered so much why they are like this after hundreds of years of enlightened rule under the British Empire.”

She dared not look at David. Instead she fastened her eyes brightly and defiantly upon the Governor’s dignified square face. His voice sharpened. “Oh, come now, Mrs. MacArd, don’t you go saying such things. It will take more than a few hundred years to change India completely. Consider her condition when we came in, and how long it took us merely to establish order. A hundred years passed before we could begin really to govern. As it is, we are still not responsible for the entire country. There are the Native Princes. We are not tyrants, you know. We don’t force things down Indian throats.”

A general movement swayed the guests into conversation, as though by common impulse they moved to cover Olivia’s question. Nothing more must be said, and Olivia’s brief emergence was drowned. She yielded, as she yielded in everything nowadays. She sat quietly smiling, eating with good appetite for she was always hungry, to her own surprise, and yet food gave her no energy.

The evening passed, and when the guests were gone she waited for David to reprove her for the question, but he did not. He was aloof, but he was always aloof now, and she supposed it was because he was so busy. The buildings were going up rapidly, and he was already receiving students. Ramsay was with him every day and on some days all day long, and she saw very little of her husband.

The servants put out the lights, and they went to their rooms. She clung to his arm as they walked down the hall.

“Are you tired?” David asked.

“A little,” she confessed. Tomorrow she would tell him that she was always tired and perhaps something was wrong with her. But she did not want to tell him tonight, she was too tired for explanation. He stood aside for her to enter their room and she swept past him, holding up her long silken skirts with both hands.

In the doorway she paused. “Did I look pretty tonight?” she asked.

He hesitated and she saw his eyes grow wary. “Very pretty,” he said calmly.

Why don’t you kiss me? That was what she had been about to say. When she saw the withdrawal in his eyes she leaned and kissed his cheek.

“Good night, David.”

“Good night, Olivia. But why now, my dear?”

“I think I shall sleep in the guest room tonight. I am tired.”

He waited a second, two seconds, before he replied. “A good idea, perhaps. You look a little pale.”

She turned and left him then and for the first time since their marriage she went to bed alone.

He did not care, then! That was what she began to think. He did not call to her and tell her to come back. He did not love her, actually, as she loved him. She began to cry softly and it occurred to her that these days she was crying too easily.

The next afternoon, beset by this strange new loneliness, she thought of one friend after another whom she might go to see. Not Mrs. Fordham, certainly, who was always voluble with disapproving advice because Olivia never went to prayer meeting and seldom to church, and not little Miss Parker who made her sad, and none of the formal English ladies, because they did not like Americans. Who then but Leilamani? At the thought of Leilamani she felt her heart relax, and she called her carriage and without telling anyone, for David was nowhere to be seen, she bade the driver go across the city to Darya’s house.

There she found Darya not at home and the gatekeeper very hesitant about allowing her to enter his master’s gate. He conferred long with the driver in Marathi, of which Olivia could only gather enough to understand that Leilamani never received English ladies.

“But I am not English,” Olivia said and then found that when she spoke Marathi it was enough. No English ladies spoke Marathi, and the gatekeeper admitted her at once, and she bade a servant inside the gate to tell his mistress that she was there.

She stood waiting in the beautiful garden, where birds cunningly tied to branches of trees sang as sweetly as though they were free and a pet gazelle, brought perhaps from the foothills of the Himalayas, came dancing to her to sniff at her hand for cakes. She touched its wet dark nose and it sprang back, staring at her innocently and fearfully.

The servant came back and invited her to come in and when she had entered three doors, she saw Leilamani herself walking toward her, hands outstretched to grasp her hands and hold them.

“Sister, you have come alone,” Leilamani said. “Now we can talk, I am so glad you have come.”

“Speak very slowly, please,” Olivia said. “My Marathi is still very bad.”

“It is good,” Leilamani exclaimed, “and I still do not know any English. I am too stupid. He tries to teach me but it makes me laugh and then—” she broke into rippling laughter and shook her head. “Come in, come, sister.”

Still clinging to Olivia’s hand, she led her into the room where the children played and each child must come forward and greet Olivia with his hands together and she kissed each one on the cheek while Leilamani watched, and then she obeyed Leilamani’s inviting gesture and sank down on the cushions.

It was pleasant here and she felt relaxed and at ease. The afternoon sun shone in the open door and the little boys played quietly at the far end of the long room. Tall brass vases held fragrant lilies and the air was faintly perfumed and very still.

“It is so quiet,” Olivia said. “How is it your house is always quiet even with children?”

“It is not quiet when he is here or our relatives come,” Leilamani said. “It is only that I am quiet, because I like to be so. Others talk but I listen. Sleep, sister — you look weary.”

Olivia smiled and leaning against the cushions, she closed her eyes. “I mustn’t sleep,” she murmured. “I’ll just rest a few minutes.”

But she could not rest and opening her eyes, she found that Leilamani was watching her with an intense gaze. She caught it and moved away, turning her head to look at a hanging on the wall and then to speak to the children. Servants brought in the usual fruit juices and sweetmeats, she ate and drank concealing her inordinate hunger and thirst, she thought, and then Leilamani’s watching eyes were not to be avoided. She met them fully and suddenly Leilamani broke into laughter and clapped her hands.

“You, too, sister!” she cried. She leaned over and patted Olivia’s waist with both hands. Olivia stared at her, not comprehending.

“Yes, I know it is so,” Leilamani said half singing. She patted her own swelling abdomen. “Feel me, sister — another boy! Yes, feel how high he is, just like the other two, and so it is a boy. I will tell you in a few months whether yours also is a boy—”

A hot blush rushed over Olivia’s whole body. She understood. Yes, perhaps — and if it was so, that was why she was so languid, so hungry, so careless of what happened in the house.

“I did not know it myself,” she faltered.

“Ah, it is good for me to be the first to tell you,” Leilamani said joyfully. “I am the bearer of good news. It is certain that I am right. I shall tell him, my sons’ father. He will be very happy and he will tell his brother in your house and we will all be happy.”

She sat up listening. “Ah, is that he? I hear him. I will tell him now!”

“No, no, please,” Olivia begged. “I must tell my own husband first. I must go home now.”

She did not question Leilamani’s certainty. Instinctively she felt it true, it explained all that she had not understood.

“Go then,” Leilamani said, excited, “go, and come back soon. I shall pray to Sita that it is a son.”

When she reached home David was waiting for her, a letter in his hand. She stopped in the door at sight of his grave face.

“I have been to see Leilamani—”

“So the gateman told me. I have received a letter from the Governor, Olivia. He is displeased at what you asked him last night and he takes great pains to explain—”

She burst into wild inexplicable tears. “Don’t scold me, David — not now! I am going to have a baby.”

She threw herself on his breast and felt his arms close about her and the letter dropped to the floor.

He had come with her to the hills for a week, that they might be alone together. A week entire from his life he gave her as a gift, because she was with child. It was true, the British doctor in Poona confirmed it to him. Then he had added advice.

“She’s a bit nervy, though, Mr. MacArd. Get her away for a short holiday.”

Up from the shallow valley in the hills they heard at evening the thin wailing song which was the song of India, the human music of the villages.

Till my heart, O Beloved,

As I am tilling this land.

And make me Thine,

As I am making this land my own,

Till my heart, O Beloved!

Somewhere in the swiftly fading dusk a man worked late upon his land and he sang while he worked. They heard his voice, and David felt the quick grip of his wife’s hand.

“What are you feeling, Olivia?”

They were sitting in the enclosed veranda of the hill house, safe against the night insects, and the cool high air was refreshing. Though he had decided upon this week alone with her, he could not leave his thoughts behind in Poona, nor his spreading plans, nor, above all, his doubts. His life, he sometimes thought, was a series of strong steps forward, and then long pauses of doubt. Thus, was it wise to set up these great buildings, to erect vast edifices for the future? Was he building in God-driven faith, or was he simply the son of MacArd, compelled by his inherited perspectives to create huge shapes of brick and stone? And yet India herself compelled large thinking, immense plans. Millions waited and he could not consider in terms of one and one and one and one—

“That music makes me fearfully lonely,” Olivia said suddenly.

“Why?”

“Even here with you I am lonely, a sort of world loneliness I cannot define.”

“Perhaps it is only that you can’t see the face of the man who sings,” he suggested.

“Perhaps.”

They fell silent, it was too much effort, she thought, to explain herself to him. For if she did, or could, his mind would not stay upon what she said. The voice of the lonely man had sent him far off. He was dreaming his vast dreams and though he loved her and she was sure of that, she knew now that she was not his only love. She must share him with millions of people, with these singers in the night, whose faces he did not see, though they were continually with him, the stuff of his thoughts and dreams. She had lost him for herself alone. These few days in the hills had shown her clearly enough that she could never possess him because he was already possessed and her hold upon him, whatever it was, could grow only if she became a part of all that he loved. That is, she, too, must give herself to India. Even the child could not make David wholly her own.

For a wild solitary moment she was desperately homesick for her own country, for home, even for her mother, and certainly for the streets of New York. What was she doing here in this lonely countryside, lifted upon these tiger-haunted hills above the valleys of India? She gripped his hand, clinging to it for all she had. There was no response, though no repulse. He let his hand be held.

And if she had been able to love David when he was the young boy who had thrown himself at her feet, begging her to love him, the boy who had seemed spoiled and childish, not a man worth loving for a strong girl like her, but if she had foreseen this man he now was and could have loved the boy in patience, would he then have loved her only and with his whole heart? Ah, but had she loved him, and let him so love her, he would never have grown into this man whom she adored because he did not bend to her. She had what she wanted, a strong self-contained man, intent upon his work, and perhaps such a man could never love only a woman, not even her, not at least when her rival was India.

“The air is getting damp,” she said.

“Shall we go in?” he asked.

“Yes, I am tired.”

They walked together into the big central room, a lamp was turned low and the light was dim. He put his arm about her and she leaned upon him.

“David, I am glad we are going to have the baby.”

“Tell me why.” He was suddenly tender. “I know, my darling, I feel it’s God’s blessing, but tell me why.”

She could not tell him the truth as suddenly it appeared to her. If she had a baby, if there were children whom she must tend, then she would not be free to give herself to India. She would not have time, she must put their children first as her duty.

“I want four children, at least,” she said, her face against his breast. “And while you do your work, I will take care of them. I won’t make demands of you, David. I will let you be free to do your work.”

“My perfect wife,” he murmured.

She felt his hand smoothing her hair, and she closed her eyes and pressed herself to him fiercely. Oh, she would live her life around him, her love would be his atmosphere, and though he might not know the air he breathed, he would never know, either, that his God was not hers, or that she needed no other god than love.

At the end of the week they went back to Poona and the mission house. She dismissed the Marathi teacher. Let the communication with India cease. She would be only David’s wife.

She sent word to Leilamani that she was not well and could not visit her, and when Darya came up on their return from the hills, she was distant with him and he did not reproach her because Leilamani had told him, and he knew that pregnant women were wilful and changeable.

“It tires me,” she told David when she found that he was displeased that she had sent away her teacher.

It was to be her weapon, this easy fatigue in a climate unnaturally hot, and he did not protest. How could a man protest? The woman carried the burden of the child as well as herself. She needed double energy, twice the amount of sleep, and her appetite had failed. He would not harass her, he would be more considerate of her, more tender toward her, remembering the immensity of the task that was only hers. He kissed her gently, and forgave her for the quick retort she made.

“I’m not made of glass, David! Don’t kiss me as if I were something breakable.”

She flung this at him and he was startled by the anger in her dark eyes. Then he laughed.

“You temptress,” he muttered and taking a step toward her he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard and long.

“That better?”

“Yes — but again—” she whispered.

In the midst of their long embrace, standing in the middle of the floor, their bodies pressed together, the door opened and the ayah looked in, saw them and shut the door, horror upon her astonished face. They turned their heads, they saw the look, and he drew away from her.

“Oh, that ayah!” Olivia cried under her breath.

“After all, Olivia, it’s the middle of the afternoon and I ought to be at work.”

“You haven’t really kissed me for days, not since we came back from Poona.”

He laughed, embarrassed. “Ah, we’re married, my love. We’re together, aren’t we? And I must be off, now.”

“Oh well—”

He saw her pouting look, he caught her face in his two hands and tipping her chin upward, kissed her heartily, but without passion, smiled down into her rebellious eyes and went quickly away.

And she stood there alone in the middle of the room, and made a symbol out of what had happened. It was India that had interrupted them and would always disturb them and separate him from her. What could one woman do against that stealthy and eternal figure?

This was the year the monsoons failed. At first the anxious people told each other that the sacred winds were only late. Sometimes they delayed for a week or even a month. Delay was grave enough, for delayed monsoons meant a meager rainy season, and so much the less water for the fields and the year’s needs.

Week passed after week and hope gave way at last to certainty. The warm currents of air had swept aside, they had curved to other regions. The north had abundant rain and even the east had short but heavy rains. On the west of India, beyond the high central plateaus, no rains fell, and David foresaw inevitable famine and the people yielded themselves to hopelessness. Yes, there would be a famine. There was no possibility of avoiding it now. Food supplies, already at the lowest ebb, were hoarded still further and the poor prepared to die.

In the midst of this distress Olivia was delivered of her child. She had refused to go to Bombay and the English hospital for her confinement, and the local British doctor had tended her, and a pleasant Eurasian nurse had come in to stay for a month.

The child was a boy. He was born late in the afternoon while the dry heat shimmered over the city of his birth. The air was so dry, the doctor grumbled, that he could not sweat. He was grateful that his patient was young and strong. He disliked delivering white women and he always advised them to go to Bombay, but this one was stubborn against all advice. Had there been complications he would not have felt responsibility. But there were none. The mother was strong and controlled. She had asked that her husband be summoned and when it was found that he had gone into the native city, she had accepted the situation and had set herself to her task. He did not believe in using the fashionable modern anesthetics in childbirth and he had let her proceed, watching her constantly and encouraging her.

“Brave doing, Mrs. MacArd,” he murmured. “You’ll have a good baby.”

A few hours later, when it was over she lay gasping for a moment and then she drew a deep breath.

“Is it a good baby?” she asked.

“A fine son,” the doctor replied. “I congratulate you.”

The plump little nurse, eternally smiling, held up the tiny newborn boy, wrapped in a square of blue flannel, and Olivia looked at her son for a long instant. Then she laughed.

“Why, he’s the image of his old grandfather!” she said cheerfully, “He’ll have red hair and red eyebrows and a bad temper.”

They laughed with her, and the doctor twisted his dyed mustache. A pity the husband wasn’t here, he thought. Such courage was rare. White women usually went soft in this climate. He went away feeling proud of himself, and was very stern with the nurse lest she bungle the case, after all. One could never trust these half-Indians as one trusted a real British nurse.

When David came in at nightfall, every light was lit in the house and servants waited with gleaming eyes and hushed voices.

“Sahib—”

“Sahib — your son—”

“Sahib—”

They chattered together, each trying to be the bearer of the royal news, and then the nurse heard them and came out with the blue bundle in her arms, and David, as dazed as though he had not known for months that this must happen, stared down into the round firm face of his son.

“Mrs. MacArd says he looks like your father, sir,” the nurse chirped.

“So he does,” David exclaimed. He was not at all sure that he liked the idea. Nevertheless, the resemblance was plain. The boy looked back at his father with astonishing calm.

“I don’t believe he likes me,” David said.

The nurse laughed. “He cawn’t see you, sir. They never do at this age.”

“That’s a relief.”

He felt suddenly gay in spite of a most depressing day. In the native city the streets were already lined with refugees from the country. He had gone to see for himself what was happening, and he had listened to their stories of empty granaries and cracked fields. Their cattle were dead skeletons and their wells were dried. Only in the city were there still stores of food and to the city they had come to beg. He had made up his mind as he walked homeward that he would appeal to the local Governor for help tomorrow, but he knew that the remote and pessimistic Englishman would probably only shrug his shoulders and refer him to the Governor-general in Bombay. Well, then to Bombay he would go if he must. Meanwhile, ironically, his school was as full as ever. The sons of the rich were his pupils.

All this was now forgot. He smiled down at his son, and then passed to enter the room where Olivia lay.

“She’s sleeping, sir,” the nurse exclaimed.

But he went in nevertheless and tiptoed to the bed, beside which a candle burned. Through the misty white of the mosquito net he saw Olivia lying straight and still. She had been tidied, he supposed, by the nurse, for her dark hair was carefully brushed and braided into two long black braids over her shoulders and her hands were folded on her breast. The sheet was drawn up tightly and doubled back under her arms, and the lace-edged ruffles of her white linen nightgown framed her unconscious face. She was breathing deeply and softly, and he noticed now as he never had before how long her dark lashes were as they lay upon her white cheeks.

Standing there, seeing her without being seen, he felt a rash of new and unutterable love for her. How beautiful she was, how faithful, and how strong! Another woman would have complained that she was left so much alone, even alone at the hour of birth, but she never complained and would not now. He had not treasured her enough, he thought with remorse, and from now on he would show his love more plainly while they shared the child. But he longed to show her now how he loved her, and lifting the net he crept inside and sat upon the edge of the bed and put his hand gently over her hands.

She opened her eyes slowly, as though she came back from some far place, and then she saw it was he.

“Darling David,” she murmured, still asleep.

He leaned to whisper to her. “I saw him, dearest. I saw our lovely son!”

A smile flickered at her lips. “All MacArd!”

“Isn’t it funny? But perhaps he is like you inside.”

“I want him to be like you.”

“We’ll wait and see.”

“Oh, but I’m sleepy—” Her voice trailed away in sleep and her eyelids trembled downward.

“Sleep, dearest,” he said. “I shouldn’t have waked you.”

The eyelids quivered upward at that, and she gave him a look of heavenly happiness and slept again.

He stole away, closing the door noiselessly behind him, and went to his study to be alone that he might give thanks to God.

IX

“FAMINE IS CHRONIC IN India, Mr. MacArd,” the Governor-general said in Bombay.

He was a tall handsome Englishman, a man of pride and dignity, a righteous man.

“Does it have to be so?” David demanded.

“It always has been,” the Governor-general replied. “We have reduced the incidence, we have built railroads, irrigation works, even reservoirs and tanks to catch the Himalayan waters. We are feeding millions of people, we are giving employment to millions more so that they can afford to buy imported food, and yet in spite of that I estimate that Bombay presidency alone will lose fifteen percent of its population in the next three months. In some provinces it may be as high as twenty-five percent. Statistics can never be accurate in India.”

David listened with proper respect. The Governor-general was always courteous to him, first perhaps as the son of the great American financier, but now also, as the years passed, he was courteous to him in his own right. He had been scrupulous in his relations with Government and he was building up a school of such caliber that his graduates would be going into the Indian civil service. MacArd men must be well trained and loyal, for in these days loyalty alone was beyond price.

“My father would say that India needs more railroads,” he suggested. “I understand that there is food in the north. It is a matter of distribution.”

The Governor-general was irritated at this and tried not to show it. “Ah, there is no such easy way to solution! The real problem is overpopulation. Indians are obsessed with fears for their fertility. The native newspapers are filled with advertisements for remedies for sterility, yet to my knowledge I have never seen an infertile Indian, man or woman. No, Mr. MacArd, all the resources of the Empire can never catch up with the increase in population among this people. Some are doomed to starve.”

David pondered reply. He knew well enough what Darya would say for he had dared once to quote this Judgment of Government and Darya had leaped to passionate resentment.

“Ah, how that sickens me, David! It has been made the excuse of every delay by Government. And did we not propagate too rapidly to please these Englishmen, India would have ceased to exist. Consider our life span — twenty-seven years! Is this our fault? Consider our death rate — half our children die before they are a year old! Can we afford not to have many children? We are helpless before the worst climate in the world and an indifferent government.”

These words could not be repeated here. David was prudent, he had occasional favors to ask and it would not do to anger this good Englishman. Besides, Darya might be wrong. He was often wrong.

He rose. “Well, Your Excellency, I suppose we shall just have to weather through this famine. It doesn’t touch me personally, my school is fuller than usual.”

“Ah, I suppose the families want to get their sons into a safe place where sickness can’t reach them. That is the worst of famines, I think. Starvation breeds disease. We are preparing for epidemics, of course.”

“I am sure you are. I’ll say good-by, Your Excellency.”

“Good-by, Mr. MacArd. I am sure you know I appreciate very much all that you are doing for India.”

“Thank you.”

The two men shook hands, and the Governor-general allowed his approval to express itself in a warm smile. This tall grave young American was no common missionary. He had given up a world of wealth and pleasure to become a missionary schoolmaster, a very Christian act. “Except ye leave all and follow me—” and so on. One did not often see it.

Outside the palace gates where the tall Sikh guards stood in scarlet uniforms, David got into his hired carriage and was driven back to the hotel. He was sad and troubled, and the dusty dry air that hung over the city seemed a miasma of ill omen. He wished that he had not brought Olivia and the child to Bombay with him, but in Poona it had seemed a good thing to do. She needed a change and there had seemed to be no good reason against it. So they had come with an entourage of the ayah and a manservant to hold an umbrella over the child whom the ayah carried, and the few days in Bombay had done Olivia good.

This evening when he entered their rooms she was in gay spirits, dressed for dinner in a soft white muslin frock and her cheeks were even a little pink. The rooms were quiet.

“Ted is asleep?” he inquired.

She made a little face at him. “Theodore is asleep.”

They had named the baby Theodore, Gift of God, and she would not hear to a contraction.

“Wait until he gets into college on the football team,” he teased.

“I shall always call him Theodore,” she said decisively.

She put up her face for his kiss, but he warned her off. “Wait, dearest, until I have washed. We must always wash when we come in from the streets. Never forget, Olivia — promise me?”

“But I do,” she protested.

“That’s right.”

He soaped hands and face thoroughly at the china basin in the bathing room and then came back rubbing his face with a towel, She stood at the mirror, fastening a necklace about her neck.

“Pretty?” she inquired of his image in the mirror.

“Very pretty,” he replied. “What are they?”

“Crystals,” she said. “I got them today in the native city.”

He dropped the towel. “The native city, Olivia?”

“Yes, the clerk said the shops there were wonderful and they are.”

He checked the protest upon his lips. She should not have gone. He ought to have warned her. She was still new in India and she did not know the dangers of famine time. Then he decided not to frighten her. Epidemics came afterwards, and it was early in the season.

“Don’t go any more, Olivia,” he bade her, nevertheless. “It is better to stay away from crowds in famine time.”

“Very well, David. Certainly I will do as you say.”

“That’s right.”

He went to her then and gave her his usual kiss, and was glad that he had not frightened her. Her dark eyes were bright, and he saw as he had never seen before that she was more beautiful now than she had ever been.

“The crystals are very becoming,” he said. “Let’s go down to dinner.”

The plague crept into the great city of Bombay, unseen by the white men, for in the native quarters people bid the deaths of their own people. The city seemed as beautiful as ever, for the white men had learned long ago to look beyond the dying and the hungry whom they could not save. They looked to the mountain and the palm groves, to the many ships in the splendid harbor, to the great shops where the rich of every nation and people came and went. They looked to the past and to the future for they did not want to see the present. Hundreds of years before when a few English traders pushed into the harbor, Bombay had been a handful of islands with the sea racing between them, a small port, a cluster of houses and fishermen drying their half-decaying fish, but Englishmen had clung to it because the sands had silted into the harbor of Tapti, Surat had declined, and only the great natural harbor of Bombay remained. And during the hundreds of years between the day when the few Englishmen had come ashore and the day when the Governor-general sat in his palace on Malabar Point, the town grew into a place of mansions and towers, colleges and temples, a city of magnificence.

Yet India possessed it, in spite of the English, and in that year when the monsoons failed and famine fell, plague crept into the streets where no white men lived, and servants in the vast hotel who slept at night in the plague-ridden hovels of the native city came in by day to serve the white men, and they told no white men of the night.

When they had returned to Poona, Olivia one morning felt a headache, an intolerable pain and dizziness. She woke out of sleep and was surprised by an amazing weakness. David had already left his bed, and she tried to get up to go and see whether the baby was awake in the nest room. She could not lift the curtain of the mosquito netting and she fell back upon the pillows.

In his study upon his knees, David was suddenly aware of an urgent command within himself, wordless and yet too strong for refusal. He rose, compelled and unwilling, and found himself walking along the wide hall, still cool from the night, and into the room where an hour before he had left his wife sleeping. She was not sleeping now. Through the mist of the white netting she lay upon the pillows, her dark eyes wide and listless.

“Olivia,” he cried. “What is the matter?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’m suddenly — weak. My head — it hurts terribly.”

He dashed aside the net and reached for her hands. They were hot and limp.

“I’ll get the doctor immediately — lie still, dearest.” She tried to smile, it was quite plain that she could do nothing but lie still. The lids drooped over her eyes and her face was white. He strode down the hall again to his study, jerked the bell rope for a servant and scribbled a note for the British doctor resident in the English hospital. “Take this chit,” he commanded the servant already waiting. “Take it to the hospital and fetch the doctor now.”

The man slipped out of the room like a swift shadow and was gone, and in less than an hour the doctor was there. David sat at Olivia’s side, waiting. She could not drink her tea, nor could she lift her head to swallow even water.

“Let me alone,” she begged in a gasping whisper.

So he sat there, holding her lifeless burning hand and when the doctor came in David beckoned, his lips pressed together.

The tall lean Englishman in his fresh white linen suit came to the bedside and made his examination. Olivia did not speak. When he asked her a question, she nodded, very slightly, the effort immense. Yes, the pain was unbearable, very hard to breathe because of this weakness, the giddiness so severe that she could not see his face.

The doctor straightened at last and drew the sheet over her, and she was too indifferent to care what he thought. He motioned to David to come into the hall.

“Have you been recently in Bombay?” he asked in his gravest voice.

“Last week,” David said.

“Was she in the native city?” the doctor demanded.

“Once,” David said.

“I fear it is bubonic plague. I heard only yesterday that it has broken out in Bombay — hundreds dying every day.”

David could not speak. Plague, the dreadful companion of famine, almost certain death, to reach for his beloved!

“What shall I do?” he cried.

“There is nothing to do, alas,” the doctor said. “We can only wait. I will send an English nurse. We shall know within forty-eight hours.”

Within forty-eight hours, while David neither slept nor ate, the chills of death descended. In Olivia’s slender body the inguinal buboes swelled. The doctor, feeling her soft groins, knew the fearful signs.

“You must prepare yourself,” he told David sternly.

David stood waiting by the bedside, where Olivia lay unconscious.

“She will not live through tomorrow,” the doctor said. “Nothing can save her.”

“I shall pray all night,” David said with dry lips.

“Do so, by all means,” the doctor said. He was too kind to tell the Christian that prayer might comfort the soul of the living but he did not believe that it could save the one doomed to die. He gave a few directions to the faithful middle-aged English nurse. The younger nurses would not take a case of plague but good Mrs. Fortescue went where she was sent.

“Oh, it’s sad, her being so young, and the little baby,” she was moaning.

“The child may escape,” the doctor replied. “Nature is careful of the newly born.” He turned to David again. “Mr. MacArd, you must live now for the child. Go away and rest — or pray.”

David hesitated, and obeyed. He left the room and went down the hall to his study, and when he had closed the door, he fell on his knees to pray not with words but with all the agony his heart could hold that his beloved might live.

In the little compound church the Fordhams gathered the few Indian Christians, and he heard the wailing of their prayers through the hot December day and all through the night. …

Sometime near dawn the nurse touched his shoulder.

“She’s gone, Mr. MacArd.”

He lifted his head. While he prayed that she might live, Olivia had died! He rose to his feet, his mind dazed, his heartbeats shattering his body.

“There’s nothing more you can do now,” the nurse said. “Try to think of your little boy.”

But he could only think of Olivia. He gasped a few words, staring down at the nurse.

“I must see her again—”

“No, no — think of the boy, sir—”

She held his arm, and before he could reply, they heard the sound of sad singing. Someone had already run across the compound and told the Christians that death had come and they lifted their voices in the Christian hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

It was foreign music to them, the tune was uncertain, and suddenly it was drowned in a wild wailing throughout the compound. Every servant and every neighbor was crying aloud until the instinctive human sorrow of India, always brimming and ready to run over, broke into the old music of the centuries.

“Ram — Ram is true—”

The cry of desperate faith in the presence of death rang like a shriek through the dawn, the old heathen words welled up out of the heart of India and David heard them and did not lift his head.

The plague swept through Poona and one out of every ten of Poona’s people died. Among them were Darya’s two sons, and when they were dead Leilamani and her baby daughter followed them, and Darya was left alone in the beautiful house built over the fountain of living water.

But David had his son.