Come, My Beloved

XVI

“LIVY, I’M SCARED TO tell your father,” Ruth said. She looked at the dark and beautiful girl who was their eldest child. They should have sent Livy home to school in Ohio long ago, but they had let her stay on even after the three boys went, who were younger. She had begged to stay because she said she had no friends in America.

“You’ll soon make friends,” her father had said.

“But here I have them already,” Livy had replied too quickly.

They should have sent her anyway, Ruth thought, gazing at Livy with quiet troubled eyes. Ten was the oldest you ought to keep them and Livy was sixteen. They had sent her to an English boarding school last year, and she was back in Vhai again for her long vacation. She had changed too much in the year, or maybe they had not noticed before how much she had grown. Girls grew up fast in this hot climate. Livy was a woman, slender but full-breasted, and her face had lost its childish curves. She looked like the picture of Ted’s mother.

“I’m not frightened of Father,” Livy said. She spoke with a soft English accent which she had learned from her schoolmates, and which she chose to speak.

She was a quiet girl, self-repressed, torn by rebellion against the deep caste feelings of English girls. She believed passionately in her mother’s literal acceptance of all Indians as human beings. Her father accepted too, but Livy was shrewd and intelligent and years ago she had observed that her father and mother were two different people. Her father believed as a Christian that Indians should be treated exactly as white people and he was careful to do this, but here was the difference, he was too careful, while her mother was entirely careless because she could not help treating everybody the same and Livy knew that of the two her mother was the more powerful. Her father could never belong wholly to Vhai, but her mother could and she did belong here as much as the banyan tree with its hundred roots.

She had counted upon her mother’s understanding now and it must not fail. For in her heart she was terrified at what had happened to her. She had fallen in love with Jatin. It was inexplicable, she did not know how it had happened, for she had known Jatin for years, at least three, and she had not thought of loving him. He came from Poona, and he had been graduated with highest honors from the medical college of MacArd University and so her father had invited him to come to Vhai and set up a rural clinic and a small hospital. She had heard her father praise him and declare that he was someone to depend upon, someone who could take over the whole of Vhai’s village improvement work and the widening effect it had in the whole province, and perhaps on India too, since independence. The new Indian government was talking of pilot centers of village education and public health and local government, such as her father had built up in Vhai. The village was beautiful now, and she never tired of hearing how different it had once been. But it had not occurred to her that she could fall in love here. She loved it with her whole heart, but still that had nothing to do with falling in love with Jatin.

Nevertheless, it had happened. When she came back from school only a month ago, she had fallen in love with Jatin at first sight, but of course it was not first sight, for she had seen him hundreds of times. But this time it had been different, only not different really, for when she got home she had to go and see everybody she knew and so she had run over to the clinic one bright morning to speak to the two Indian nurses, and to Jatin, too, of course, and she had stood in the doorway looking about and he was the only one in the little entrance hall where he was slipping into his white coat, and he looked at her as though he saw an angel. That was the way she felt. No one had ever looked at her like that before, and she had felt hot all over.

“Livy, how beautiful you have grown.” That was what he said. Then he had come straight to her and had taken her hands and looked down into her face, so tenderly and kindly that her heart crumbled.

“I’m just the same,” she had stammered.

He dropped her hands and stood looking at her and then the nurses came in and the moment was over. But of course they had seen each other almost at once and alone. She could not keep away from him, and she pretended that she wanted to help in the clinic and she did want to help, but because he was there. And after a few days of that, it was natural to stay late to wash up, because he always stayed late. And then it was only two weeks and a day until they were alone every day, or nearly every day, because he was very fearful about gossip and so sometimes he sent her away as soon as they kissed. Yesterday he had been troubled because he was sure that the sweeper saw them.

“I don’t care,” she had retorted. “Of course we have to be married, Jatin. That’s what people do when they are in love.”

He had been very troubled at this, his handsome eyes immediately sad. “I think it is not possible for us, my Livy.”

“It is, it is,” she had insisted. “My father and mother are not like other white people.”

“Ah,” he said in his quiet way, “they are not, indeed, but will they be willing for marriage between us? I think not.”

“Then I shan’t believe they are Christian,” she cried.

“Don’t speak so, Livy,” he had begged her in his gentlest voice. “You know they are Christian. But—”

“What?” she demanded.

“It is very difficult to reach the ultimate of one’s religion.”

She did not understand what he meant and so she had simply repeated herself. “If they are willing, Jatin, then will you let us be married?”

“My darling, we will hope.”

“I’ll make them,” she had declared confidently.

Now she sat with her mother over the mending basket, a task she detested, but which could not be done by a servant because Indian women did not know how to sew well enough. Saris needed no sewing, and the children wore no clothes when they were small, beyond a shawl wrapped about them if the night was cold. Still, this morning she had welcomed being alone with her mother, for her mother must know first and then talk with her father. There was a strategy to be followed.

She said, “Father ought to be willing for me to marry Jatin. He’s always saying that Jatin is wonderful.”

“So he is,” Ruth replied. “But that’s different.”

She sat gazing at her daughter, her pansy brown eyes dark with anxiety. The monsoons had come early this year, and though she was grateful as everybody was, still there was melancholy in the long ceaseless rains. They must expect another week of it before clouds parted to show the darkly purple summer sides. Meanwhile she sewed, and this was her relaxation. Livy had flung down the pillowcase she was mending and was walking around, her underlip pouting.

“Sit down, Livy, do, and don’t pout at me. Here, you can turn this hem. Sara grows faster than I can keep her dresses let out. I’ll finish the pillow slip.”

Livy sat down, again fitted her thimble to her middle finger. She was a tall girl and she moved with an indolent yet active grace she had learned from Indian girls who were her closest friends, not only the girls in the village, but the daughters, too, of the men whom her father had gathered around him. Long ago, as she knew, he had come here alone, determined to live as the villagers lived, and then her mother came as his wife, and the next year she herself was born in one of the two little rooms which were the first part of the house. The house was still earthen and its roof thatched, but ten rooms had been added and under the thatch was stretched heavy blue cotton homespun cloth for ceilings, so that lizards and insects and snakes could not drop out of the thatch to the floor and bite their bare feet, although as children they had felt no fear. They were used to searching their slippers and shoes in the mornings, instinctively they looked before they stepped, and Vhai was their home. Around the low and sprawling house her mother had planted grass and flowers, so that it no longer looked the house it had been when she came to it as a bride.

Vhai itself was changed. When her father first came here to live, as a young man, so bitterly against her grandfather’s will, as she knew, the village of Vhai was as barren as a desert, as all villages were. But her father and mother, while they shared the life of the people, had improved it in small ways, and then in big ones. Her father had even engaged an artesian well digger to come all the way from Bombay and put in more than twenty wells. Other villages had seen the benefit of the irrigated fields and they had dug wells, so that the whole region of Vhai had become beautiful and productive. It was a low region, over-sheltered by the distant Himalayas, and in the season of monsoons the land became a lake. But her father had taught the people how to dig ditches and lay village-made pottery tile, so that around Vhai, at least, floods no longer rotted the earth. Far beyond Vhai he did not go, declaring that people would hear of Vhai and come and see for themselves. This they had, but not as much as he felt they should, which made him gloomy at times. But Jatin had said, “How can half-starved people walk hundreds of miles to see something which they will never have the strength to do? First they must eat and grow strong enough to work for themselves. Alas, they have no food, so they must first be given food, and there you have the worst problem.”

Jatin was clever and strong and handsome and she loved him because he could say things like that even to her father. Only why was he so timid now? They could be married and live in Vhai forever, because she loved Vhai almost as much as he did.

Ah, but she could never explain Vhai to the English and American girls at school. “Do you live in a nasty village?” That was how they put it.

“A village, but not nasty,” she always said.

Yet she did not try to explain more than that for they could not understand. How could they? When they thought of India it was of great houses encircled with verandas, set in vast compounds, of uniformed Indian servants and dinner parties where the guests were always white people. None of them spoke any Indian language, except perhaps a servant dialect half pidgin, which they had picked up from their ayahs. How could they understand the depth of love she had for Vhai, this village full of people, all of whom loved her, because she was not only herself, but also the daughter of her parents? And she could never explain to them how she loved this house, reaching far enough to make rooms for herself and her brothers and her sister, but whose floor was brushed every morning with cow dung. That she could never explain, because the girls would give little screams of horror and they would never believe her if she told them how cool and smooth the earthen floors felt under bare feet, the earthen floors beaten as hard as marble and then brushed with the water from a pail in which had been flung a handful of cow dung, and the two mixed until the mixture was complete and clean. When the floor was dry, it was like old mahogany, polished as satin. But how could the English girls believe it was so?

She learned to live two entirely separate lives, one the life with the English girls where, because she was a MacArd, they did not treat her as they might a common missionary’s daughter, those persons who were only a little better indeed than Anglo-Indians, and the other when she came home to Vhai. Oh, the deep and solid comfort of coming home to Vhai, where she could walk with no more on her feet than sandals, where often after her morning bath, she simply put on a cotton sari with a little short-sleeved blouse, pleating and knotting the long ends as skilfully about her narrow waist as though she were an Indian girl! And indeed she was much an Indian, for it is not only blood that makes the human being but the air breathed, the water drunk, the food eaten, the sounds heard, the language spoken and those with whom communication is made most deeply, and for her these were all Indian. She was closer to her mother than to her father because her mother, too, was much of an Indian woman, though her blood was American white. That was not quite the same as English white.

Yet, now, her mother could not understand her love for Jatin. She had thought she would, because she had been so sure that the India she and her mother loved were the same. They loved the little things in Vhai, the way the monkeys fought in the trees even when their quarrelsome chatter woke them in the mornings, the hum of the grindstone, the tinkle of silver bracelets and anklets as the women came and went with their water jars on their heads, the clatter and rattle of spinning wheels, for everybody these days tried to spin, at least an hour a day because Gandhiji was the Mahatma, the leader of all the souls of India.

“And I don’t want you to think that I approve, either,” her mother was saying. “For I don’t, Livy. I can’t go so far as to think it right that a white American girl should marry an Indian. Jatin isn’t even an Anglo-Indian.”

“You act as though he were an Untouchable,” Livy said with anger.

Her mother refused this insinuation. “Livy, I won’t have you say that, after all your father has done for Untouchables. Why, when Gandhiji took an untouchable girl into his household to be an adopted daughter to him, your father said that it was the final proof of his sincerity and he has believed in him ever since. And have I ever shown in this house that I cared about caste?”

Livy said, “Jatin and I want to be married.”

Ruth sighed. Oh, the terrible stubbornness of Livy! She was all MacArd and had been since the day she was born, and, thank God, the others were not. Sara was like her, and the boys were more Fordham, too, than MacArd, but Livy had not a drop of Fordham in her. She was glad now that they had sent the boys home early! They were safely in a church school in mid-Ohio, and so she should have done with Livy, except that the child would not go, and year by year they had let her keep on growing up here in India until now this had happened.

“Don’t make me have to tell your father, Livy,” she pleaded. She had never been able to discipline the children, and she used their love for her shamelessly for her own protection when she feared Ted’s reproach.

“I won’t,” Livy said. “Jatin and I will tell him ourselves.”

“Oh, dear,” her mother groaned. “It will kill him. He loves you more than all the others put together, I do believe.”

“What else can we do?” Livy asked.

She had finished the hem and she folded the small dress carefully and put away the thimble and needle.

“I don’t know,” her mother sighed. “I couldn’t have believed such a thing could happen. Much as I love India—”

Livy took the sentence away from her. “Much as you love India, you could never have loved an Indian.”

“Not in that way,” her mother amended. “You don’t understand.”

“You are right, and I don’t understand.” Livy got up and began walking about the room again with her peculiar smooth grace. “Jatin is a wonderful doctor, you and Father have said so. He gave up a fine practice with his father in Bombay and came here because he believes in what Father is doing. And Bapu Darya says he will be one of the great men in India. So I don’t understand. And I counted on you, Mother.”

“Oh, dear,” Ruth sighed. She shook her head and bit off the thread from the pillowcase. How could one explain anything to Livy when she already knew everything one was going to say?

There was no need to speak. Livy went out of the room and probably to meet Jatin somewhere. She supposed that in a way she had failed her child, but indeed she could not face what it would mean. She was still a white woman and she could not see her daughter dragged down into the mass of the dark people. Jatin himself could not prevent it and Livy could not lift Jatin up. She, in spite of her love for him, and he, in spite of his love for her, could not keep from sinking. She wished it were not true, it was hard enough to be a Christian among the Indians, who were literal-minded, but it was true and not all the saints could make it different.

She sighed again and let her mind subside gently until at last she was not thinking at all, simply sewing, and breathing to the rhythm of the stitches.

Livy walked down to the banyan tree where the shadows were deepest, her eyes instinctively watchful for snakes, although she was not afraid. The rain had abated in the last half hour until now there were only drifts of mist. She had put on her heaviest cotton sari and drawn the end over her head and Jatin, waiting for her, thought how exactly like an Indian girl she looked as she came toward their usual meeting place. That was something they must face, too, that this meeting place had been discovered and so they must abandon it. But where could they meet? In the clinic they saw each other now always in the presence of others. If her parents approved their marriage, of course they need not hide their meetings, but he had not succeeded in overcoming his natural and secret despondency. He was an Indian, however high he rose in his profession, and only because her father was so sincere a Christian could he find the conviction of human equality for which his pride hungered more than ever he had hungered for food. To Mr. MacArd he owed everything, and he felt guilty of ingratitude, because now he had fallen in love with Livy. Yet how could he help it when he discovered that she could love him? He had taken it as play, as nonsense, the young girl home from boarding school, and he was already twenty-six years old, a graduate doctor at the Vhai hospital. But he had begun to dream nevertheless, and when her eyes met his with increased meaning and wonder, how could he keep from loving her?

“How dark it is,” she said, coming into the shadow where he stood. “It must be later than I thought.”

“We must not stay long,” he agreed.

His painful sensitivity, aware at once that something was amiss, kept him from going to meet her, or from touching her when she stood beside him.

“Did you speak to your mother?” he asked.

“Yes. She is not willing,” Livy said.

“Even she!” he whispered.

“She does not dare to tell my father.” They spoke in Vhai dialect, her childhood language, which he had learned in the years that he had been here.

“What shall we do?” Instinctively he gave her the leadership.

“We shall have to go to my father and tell him,” she said.

“Both of us?”

“Do you not wish to be with me?”

“Of course — but suppose he sends me away.”

“Then I will go with you.”

She saw the shadow of despair on his too intelligent face. “Ah, Livy—” he was speaking English now, which he spoke perfectly, although he had never left India. All MacArd graduates spoke English perfectly. “Nothing is so easy as you think it is.”

“Why should we wait?” she demanded with a wilful stoicism in her voice and look. “Perhaps he will be kinder than we think. He has always been kind to us.”

“Separately,” he reminded her.

“Oh, Jatin,” she said in quick young anger, “why will you be so easily defeated? Come with me!”

She seized his hand and led him out of the shadows with her.

Ted was alone in his study. It was a small quiet room, the last in the chain of rooms opening into the common court which was also back garden, walled with earth. One side of the room was windowless and against it he had hung, years ago, the portrait of his mother, which his grandfather had willed to him, instead of to his father. Years ago he had been reconciled to thinking of Agnes as his father’s wife. He had never regretted his own marriage to Ruth. She had helped him to plunge deep into India, so deep that he had had no furloughs in the seventeen years since their marriage. Neither he nor Ruth had wanted to break the continuity of the days and the years.

And where would he go if he did go to America again? Such shallow roots as schooldays had given him were withered away and his grandfather was long dead. Let him be honest with himself. The thought of his father and Agnes living in the old Fifth Avenue house made return impossible to that only home he had known in his own country. It was one thing to be reconciled to his father’s marriage, it was another to enter into the house which now belonged to Agnes. It was absurd to think of her as a stepmother, and certainly her influence must pervade the house since it was she who had made his father decide not to return to India. Explain it as he would, his father had never been able to explain that withdrawal.

“I have finished with India,” his father had written after his grandfather’s death. “Younger men must carry on my work. I had dreamed once that you, my son, would have taken up my mantle, but since that was not to be, the springs have dried in me. I should have been lonely, indeed, were it not for Agnes, my sweet young wife. She has a right to live the life which suits her so happily here in New York.”

He had blushed when he read the fatuous phrase, “my sweet young wife,” and even now as he thought of it a dry heat spread under his skin. He supposed, unwillingly, he was to blame for that marriage. If he had stayed on at MacArd as his father had wished him to do, perhaps he would have married Agnes and all these years would never have been. Had he not done what Darya had bade him do, had he not come to Vhai and lived among the lowly people of the earth, how different his life would be now!

Yet he had followed the light that shone for him, and if he needed comfort, Darya gave it to him. They did not meet often, for Darya was absorbed in his office in the new government, but once he had come to Vhai. That had been a great day. The villagers had gathered for miles around and fifty thousand people sat on the dry fields and listened to Darya tell them what the new India would be. He had stood above them like an aging king, his lean figure still tall and straight, his white hair flying, his thin face still unlined, and the wind had carried his powerful voice over the multitude.

“Here in Vhai you have lighted a lamp for the nation. What you have done, every other village in India can do. I love you, people of Vhai, and first of all I love you because the man who has lit the lamp for you, as you will light it for others, is the man who is like my own son.”

That day was his reward, and thinking of it now, as he thought of it so often, Ted straightened himself and lifted his head. Yes, he had his reward. When independence was declared, many white men left India and no Indian spoke against their going. But he, Ted MacArd, had been invited and urged to stay, not only by the new Prime Minister and by Darya, but by Vhai itself. The people would not let him go. Ah, he had his rewards! Jehar, travelling to and fro over India, came sometimes to this quiet room, and then at early morning or as now at twilight, the Christian sadhu taught him that faith comes from many sources. It was Jehar who had explained to him the spiritual ties between all the greatest of the leaders of men and to the same God, whatever His name. Thus Moses and the Hebrew prophets, thus David and Paul, were brothers to Tukārām, the Sudra grainseller, who sixteen centuries later had lived in Dehu, a village some eighteen miles northwest of Poona itself. Tukārām had gone through his own Gethsemane, and famine, white over the land, and the dying voice of his young wife crying for food while he had no food, had driven him into the complete service of God.

This evening, for his devotions, Ted had been reading again the story of Tukārām, so strangely like the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He read of the birds that perched on Tukārām’s shoulders in the temple, knowing him to be “a friend of the world.” As Pharisees and Sadducees had persecuted Jesus, so the Brahmans had persecuted Tukārām. They would have none of him because of his lowly birth and because he could not believe, as they did, that Nirvana was the highest state of the human soul. He did not wish, he said, “to be a dewdrop in the silent sea,” and he shared in the lives of men, and thus he sang:

“The mother knows her child — his secret heart,

His joy or woe.

Who holds the blind man’s heart alone can tell

Where he desires to go.”

As always when he was moved by the Hindu poet-saints, Ted returned again to the Christian New Testament, sometimes frightened, as he himself knew, lest the seat of his heart be shaken by those who had never known Christ, and he read again, “Except ye become as little children—”

Then he heard footsteps, a double rhythm, the soft sandalled footsteps of a girl and then the slower steps of a man. At the curtain they paused, and he heard his daughter’s voice, “Bapu, may we come in?”

Livy spoke in the Vhai version of Hindustani, but he answered in English, “Come in, my dear.”

She was indeed his dear daughter, his best-loved child, and he looked up from the sacred books on the table before him to see Jatin Das with her. His heart chilled and he put down his Testament. Nothing is secret in a village, and he had heard whispers, half hesitating and reluctant murmurs, that Livy had been seen alone with Jatin. He had not heeded talk. Livy was an American, and though she had grown up in Vhai until she went to the boarding school in Simla, he could not believe that she would forget her origin. Jatin, too, belonged to no ordinary Hindu family. He had been reared in Bombay, where the English were proud and he would not reach for what must remain beyond him.

“Come in, Livy,” he said in his usual kindly manner. “And you, too, Jatin. Seat yourselves, please. Has the rain stopped?”

“Yes, but there are mists,” Livy said.

She sat down quietly and folded her hands in the manner, he suddenly perceived, of the Indian girls among whom she had lived. He saw, too, that she wore a sari as she often did, but now it seemed to him that he had seen her in no other garb since she came home from school.

“What will you do when you go to America to college and cannot wear a sari?” he asked lightly.

“Father,” Livy said, “I do not wish to go to America.”

Now he was really disturbed. “Of course you must go, Livy. Your grandfather would be very angry if you did not go. And your great-grandfather put money in trust expressly for you, before you were born.”

Livy looked at Jatin from the corners of her long, dark eyes, asking him to speak for her.

“Sir,” Jatin said and cleared his throat. “Sir, we are in great distress. She and I — we have fallen into the wish to marry one another.”

“We have fallen in love,” Livy said distinctly.

“Yes, it is so,” Jatin said, and taking courage now that the difficult word was spoken, his words came in a rush, liquid and fluent, overwhelming his diffidence. “It cannot be helped, Mr. MacArd, sir. It is the logical sequence, the inevitable outcome of the teachings of our childhoods. You have taught us to love one another, she has learned at your feet, sir, to regard all human beings as equal, alike children of God. And I, sir, taught in MacArd Memorial school in Poona, there took courage to cease to be a Hindu as my own father was, and I was converted by the great Jehar and nourished by Daryaji toward independence. I do not fear to love her. I glory in our courage. We are the fruit of all that has gone in the past, we are the flower of our ancestry, the proof of our faith!”

His fervid eyes, his glowing words, the impetuous grace of his outstretched hands, the long fingers bending backward, the thumbs apart and tense, the white palms contrasted against the dark skin, all were too Indian, and in one of the rare moments of revulsion which Ted considered his secret sin, he was now revolted and sick. What — his Livy, his darling daughter? None of his other children had her beauty or her grace, or her brilliant comprehending mind. She alone was all MacArd, and was she to give up everything for this alien man? For a moment his soul swam in darkness. No, and forever no! He had given his life to India in Vhai, but Livy he would not give. It was not to be asked of him. This was a cup which even the saints had not to drink, and Jesus, the celibate, who had never a child, could make no such demand.

“No!” The word burst from him. “I cannot allow it.”

Jatin’s hands dropped. He turned to Livy and they exchanged a long look, his despairing, hers hardening to anger.

“Livy,” her father demanded. “Have you told your mother?”

“Yes,” Livy said, “and she said she did not dare to tell you. But I dare.”

He got to his feet. “Where is your mother?”

“In the sewing room,” Livy said.

He went away, the door curtain swinging behind him, and Livy stretched out her arms to Jatin.

“I shall never give you up,” she cried under her breath, “Jatin, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love—”

He turned away his head. “Not our love.”

“Yes, our love,” she insisted. She went to him, she put her arms about him and held his head against her breast.

Under his cheek, he felt the quickening beat of her heart.

XVII

“YOU SEE FOR YOURSELF that it is impossible,” Ted insisted.

“Oh, yes, I see,” Ruth agreed indistinctly. She had not stopped her sewing, though she knew as soon as he came in that Livy had told him. Well, he had to know.

She lifted her eyes from the seam. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What are we going to do about it,” he corrected her. Without waiting for her reply, he went on, inconsistently, “I shall buy steamship tickets for the first boat that sails from Bombay. We are all going to America. I shall put Livy in a girls’ college.”

“Livy isn’t really a girl any more,” Ruth said. “She’s grown a woman, the way they do here, so fast.”

“She’s a girl in years and in mind,” he said. “When she gets to America, she will take her place among other girls.”

He got up from the bamboo chair where he had flung himself, walked up and down the room and sat down again, waiting for Ruth to agree with him. But she sat silently sewing, as he had seen her do hundreds of times through the years of their marriage. She found a spiritual calm in sewing, he supposed. A good wife, he knew, and he had learned to love her without ever being in love with her.

Yet what was love? One could not plant a palm tree in the courtyard with another person without in a sense feeling a sort of love, and he and Ruth had done everything together, building the house and rearing the children, teaching and preaching and carrying on the clinic, isolated by what they were, two white people in a world of darkness. They had believed in the goodness of what they did, they were sure of their faith, and absorbed in their purpose, he did not stop to ask if he loved Ruth as once he had dreamed of loving a woman. All men dream, he told himself, and the reality was best, for reality alone was unselfish in love. Exhausted often in the parched climate, fatigued often beyond endurance by the desperate demands of the people, he and Ruth clung to one another, and each maintained the other in steadfastness. And this, too, was love, a love which bore visible fruit in hundreds of human lives.

Oh, she could sit silent like this forever while she sewed!

“Well,” he said impatiently, “have you any other plan?”

“No,” she said slowly, “I don’t know that I have. It’s just that I hate to leave Vhai. I guess you’re right, Ted. We had better take her away from India.”

“Will you tell her or shall I?”

“You had better do it,” she said, and did not lift her head.

So he told Livy the next evening, his heart soft and hard together. He sat on the veranda, in the swiftly passing twilight, watching her toss a ball with Sara, the only one of his children who was still a child. Sara was like his great-grandfather, a fiery, bone-thin child who passionately loved her elder sister. He kept his eyes on Livy, graceful in her soft rose-pink sari, moving here and there with gliding steps to catch the rag ball Sara threw wilfully here and there.

“Livy!” he called through the dusk.

“Coming,” she replied.

She seemed in good mood, her soft oval face was cheerful and she came at once. India was her climate, the heat did not depress her, she looked fresh and cool, though the night was humid.

“Sit down, daughter,” he said.

She sank on the bamboo couch near him and Sara, deserted, cried in a high childish voice that wound itself into the singing rhythm of Indian speech, “It will soon be dark, come and play, Livy.”

“This is for you, too,” the father said.

She came and squeezed herself between them. “What have I done?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” the father said.

“It is I who have done something,” Livy said smoothly. “It is I who have been naughty and now Father is going to punish me.”

“Livy is not naughty,” Sara insisted. “Never she is naughty.”

“Sometimes I am,” Livy said. Her dark eyes hardened and glowed, and she turned them sidewise upon her father, but he refused the challenge.

“It can scarcely be called a punishment to go to America, and that is what we shall do. I have written for the tickets and the gateman has posted the letter already. Perhaps we must go even in a very few days.”

Sara clung to Livy’s waist and tightened her arms. To go to America was at once a dream and a dread. She had asked hundreds of questions about America and sometimes she lay awake in the night to think about that beautiful and even imaginary place, but now that her father said so coolly, “I have written for the tickets,” Vhai was immediately too dear to leave, even though in America snakes did not crawl in the garden, nor scorpions hide in the shoes at night.

“Isn’t that good news, Sara?” her father asked.

“Perhaps the children there won’t like me,” Sara said.

“It is not good news, Father,” Livy said. Entire awareness was implicit in her voice and her furious dark eyes were fixed upon his face.

“It isn’t good news, Father,” Sara echoed, clinging to Livy’s waist. “If Livy doesn’t think so, I don’t think so.”

“Nevertheless, we are going,” the father said, “and we shall stay for a year, except Livy, who will stay four whole years, because she is going to college. She will go to college and learn to be an American girl, and grow into an American woman. And maybe she will marry an American man and stay in America.”

“Oh, no, no,” Sara cried, “for then how can she live with us in Vhai?”

“Perhaps then she will not want to live in Vhai,” the father said. “America is a wonderful country, there are wide roads and cars and great trains, even airplanes flying everywhere. Livy will have pretty clothes, and she will learn to sing and play the piano, and in the summer she may go to England and to France.”

“Let me get up, please, Sara,” Livy said. She tugged at the arms about her waist.

Ted did not stop her or ask her where she was going. He had dealt the blow and he must let her take it as she could.

“Come and sit on my lap, Sara,” he said, ignoring Livy. “I will tell you more about America.”

The little girl loosened her clutch upon her sister’s waist, and diverted by the invitation, she went to her father. In the darkness, lit only by the glow falling through the open doors and windows as servants went about lighting the lamps in the house, he told her about America, the endless mountains and the long rivers, the great cities and the house where her grandfather lived, and before that her great-grandfather, whom she had never seen, who now was dead.

“America is your country, you know,” he told her. “India is not your real country, and Vhai is not your own place, not really, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” Sara said in wonder, “I always thought it was.”

He fell silent when she said this, smitten like Peter of old, by conviction of betrayal at night, while his heart reproached him and he heard the wailing music of Vhai winding up from the streets now hidden by darkness.

In the dark Livy was walking with swift and reckless steps, heedless of the snakes and the night insects, the folds of her sari gathered in her hand and over her head the scarf which hid her bent profile. At this hour Jatin would be in his room next to the clinic, the little lean-to which her father had built for him when he came to be the resident doctor for the Vhai hospital. She had never been in his rooms except the day they were finished, before he moved in, when with her parents they had inspected the place for his coming. There were four rooms, enough for his family when he married, for, of course, he would marry, her father said, and four rooms would be spacious here in Vhai. And four rooms would be spacious for her, too, she could have made a home there with Jatin, she had dreamed of it, she had even talked of it, though he would never listen.

“It will never happen — never can it be so,” Jatin had said again and again.

“Jatin, you are always discouraged,” she had cried. “You must be bold, you must insist! If I want something very much I always insist.”

To this Jatin had replied only with dark sad looks. His eyes, tragic in their shape and color, large and liquid, the lashes long and thick, carried in their shadows the memory of unknown sorrows, a deep racial grief which he had inherited and now possessed as his own nature. He was always sure that the worst would happen, he would not lift a hand against fate for he could not believe in happiness and he accepted disappointment before it fell.

Oh, tonight, she told herself, he must be made to understand, tonight he must be made to see clearly that a man seizes his own, he holds it fast, and she was his. Her feet scarcely touched the grass as she ran, winged with fear as well as love, fear of death and fear of life. What if a snake bit her, and what if Jatin did not have the courage? He loved her, that she knew, for he was deep-hearted and passionate, yet even love might not make him strong enough. He gave up too easily, small wishes and great longings alike he surrendered quickly if he were opposed. Tonight she would insist, yes, she was the one to insist.

She ran up the three steps of the small veranda outside the four rooms. The light burned within, the mellow light of his oil lamp, and she knocked at the open door. He sat in his study and she could not see him, but the light fell in a bar upon the floor of the little entrance hall. He heard the knock and came out at once, barefoot, wearing a sleeveless singlet and dhoti, expecting no one at this hour, unless a call from the hospital.

“Livy,” he cried softly in a voice of horror. “Why are you here?”

“Let me in, Jatin,” she said. The screen door was hooked and she shook it slightly.

He unhooked it and she slipped inside.

“I must put out the light,” he whispered. His face was anxious. “They will see you — perhaps someone has already seen you.”

“For that I don’t care,” she said in her natural voice. “Don’t whisper, Jatin — what does it matter who knows, now that my parents know?”

Yet he was uneasy and he stood, hesitating.

“Very well, then,” she said. “We will just sit here in the hall in the shadow. I will not stay, Jatin, since you are so afraid. But I had to tell you. Father has sent for steamship tickets. We are going to America and he will not allow me to come back. A year, Jatin — they will stay a year, but I must stay four! And how could I come back to Vhai if he will not let me? So you must demand me in marriage, Jatin — or we must be married secretly if they will not let us marry openly.”

“How is it possible for us to be married secretly?” he asked, his voice agitated by his distress. “We would have to go to the American Consulate in Poona, and there your father and your grandfather are well known. The Consul would tell them before he gave us the permission. There is no way. We must give each other up.”

She bit her lips and turned away her face. “I knew you would say that. I knew you would not have the courage. I don’t know why I love you.”

“Nor I,” he said humbly.

In misery they sat side by side on a stiff little rattan settle, the bar of light falling like a curtain between them and the open door. They faced the door and he stared into the shadowy night, piercing the darkness to search for hidden figures, for eavesdroppers and prowlers. Nothing was hidden in Vhai, nothing was secret. Of course the people knew, but never before had she come to his rooms. Yet his easily roused blood quickened and grew warm. She was sitting close to him, her slender thigh pressed against his leg, bare under the cotton dhoti. She was silent, a graceful drooping shape beside him, and he reached for her hand and took it between his and stroked it gently in long soft movements, palm against his palm, his fingers stroking between hers. She drooped toward him, and he put his arm about her waist. Love could be denied, yes, but sometimes it was uncontrollable. Here in the night, with everything forbidden them, love itself was uncontrollable. Nobody had seen her come and none need see her go. The night was growing late. He could put out the light and the house would be dark. No servant slept in the house, and if a message came from the hospital, he would have to go to the door, but there was also the back door, the one that led from his bathing room, where the gardener carried the water in and out, and she could slip away from there. The gods of Vhai would protect her from serpents and insects, and she could flee across the lawn again.

He rose and hooked the door and then he went into the other room and put out the lamp and in the darkness he came back to her and sat down again. Stroking her hands he stroked up her arms and about her neck, down her cheeks and into her little ears. Then, still in the same desperate silence, he opened the tiny buttons of her short-sleeved vest and he stroked her bare skin, her shoulders, her back, and then at last her breasts. When his hand smoothed the rounded curve of her breasts, she gave a great sigh.

“What now,” he whispered, “what now, Livy?”

She trembled, she put her arms about his neck and leaned her head upon his shoulder, and did not speak a word. He took her silence for reply and he lifted her in his strong dark arms and carried her into the house.

Once he halted at the threshold of his sleeping room. She was murmuring against his breast. “What do you say, Livy?”

“I said I want it to happen — whatever will happen, I want it.”

“But we must keep it secret.”

“I want it!”

This once, he was thinking, he was promising himself, only the once and it was not likely that anyone need know. It was very seldom that anything happened the first time, a virgin carries her own protection, and some risk love must take, only the once, and then, of course, they must part.

He had known it from the first, he had never had any hope, none at all. But hopeless love was the worst, the most terrible, the most enduring, and this would be the end.

Yet whose fault but hers that it was not the end? For it was she who went silent-footed through the darkness again and yet again, the mischievous gods protecting her bare feet from serpents and noxious creatures and there was no end to their love.

She was frightened at her own wickedness but she did not cease it. Here was she, the child of Christian parents, she who knew the Commandments and knew too the meaning of goodness and purity and righteousness, those great swelling words which shone like suns above her and in whose light she had supposed she walked, and yet she came and went by night like any magdalen. She did not for one moment confuse the God of her father and her grandfather, and only less intimately her mother’s God, with those local gods she had seen in the temple, not only here in Vhai, but in the great temples of Poona, Ganesh the elephant-headed and Kali, the evil one who lured human creatures to worship wilfulness and crime. She was no longer a child and she knew what the women in the temples did, and how the priests played god to their virginity. She had been repelled from the dark confusion of such worship, she had been glad of the clear simplicity of her own faith, borrowed from her parents, and yet here she was, no better than any temple virgin and with no excuse for sin.

Night after night she went to Jatin, and now, he too, lost his fear in desperation. Let the villagers whisper and cross their eyes and pretend not to see. His love grew monstrous, possessing him like a disease, inflamed by the certainty that any day would decide the hour that Livy must leave him forever. He did not doubt the end, but he seized each day as it came, and waited for each night.

Eleven days and eleven nights thus passed and her father did not suspect, for had he imagined what happened in the night when he slept behind his mosquito net, could it be imagined that he would not speak? He would snatch Livy away and take her at least as far as Poona, and that would be the end, too.

And Jatin did not know how Livy behaved during the day, how quiet she was, how obedient, how sweet-voiced and yielding to her father’s least wish, and how candidly her gaze met her mother’s doubting eyes.

She played with Sara, she mended and sewed and helped her mother pack the trunks for the journey, she served her father’s guests with little cakes, with slices of melon and with sweetmeats and the guests, looking at her, kept their peace. Some knew and some did not, but soon all would know, and Livy felt their knowing, she saw it in their dark speaking eyes, she heard it in their words, for they greeted her intimately, as one of them, or they greeted her with hostility, but now not only as the daughter of her father. She bore their greetings, however they came, for she could not have drawn herself out of the net into which she had thrown herself, and she knew as well as Jatin did, that there was no hope. There was no hope in him, she knew that now, and so she must accept him as he was and snatch what she could in the shortening hours.

At night she went early to her room, the little room at the end of the house, and she let the ayah wait upon her and see her undressed and bathed and upon her bed. Sometimes she was sure that the ayah knew the pretense, but she did not prove it. Unspoken, the ayah was not responsible, but were the words spoken, she would be compelled to tell Livy’s parents, and so she would not know. So far the secret was clear between them, and neither wanted it more clear. Sometimes actually she went to sleep, and once or twice she slept through until dawn and then it was too late. But seven out of the eleven nights she woke, or she did not sleep, and then she slipped across the grassy paths, feeling beneath her feet the dreadful chance of the night-roaming cobra, but none came near, and then she tapped softly at the door, the back door of Jatin’s house, and instantly he let her in, knowing desperately that he destroyed himself by what he did. And yet he received her, he took her into his arms and there was no delay or dallying. They came together quickly and deeply and they clung to one another briefly, their words strangling with love. Then she went away again.

XVIII

MEANWHILE TED STROVE TO put his domain in order so that when he returned to Vhai there might be no loss. He was grateful for the task which kept him busy day and night, so that he need not face himself in the mirror of his own soul. He could not now decide right from wrong. He must have time to consider, to ponder and to meditate. More here was concerned than that Livy had fallen in love with the nearest young man, who happened to be Jatin. This fact, an experience common, he supposed, to every father, had strange deep roots inside himself. Why did his flesh and his mind rise up against the knowledge that Livy wanted to marry Jatin? He could not answer his own question but he was so disturbed by it that he found himself repelled by the very sight of Livy moving about the house in graceful silence, even while his heart yearned over her. When he had time, on the ship and in America, he would look into the hidden mirror and face himself. Not now, however, not on this soil could it be done. He had to get away but first he must get Livy away so that he could be free from the nagging necessity to know where she was every moment of the day. Only when the ayah came out of her room at night and he knew her safely in bed, could he rest and even then it was no rest, for there was Ruth, his wife, watching him thoughtfully and asking no questions. Oh, she had them, he knew, but she would not ask them now, and he could not risk them. They were pent up in her and he dared not release them, nor did he wish to know what she thought, if she were thinking, as perhaps she was not, for she had an Indian trick of simply allowing a matter to rest inside her mind until in silent growth it took on shape of its own, and then she was voluble and persistent. Let that come on the ship, or in America, when he had Livy safely away.

And he did not know, how could he, that every Indian in the compound watched over Livy and that they shielded her from him by complete silence. When he was gone, they would talk endlessly, but now it was the child they protected, the little Livy who had grown up among them and who was part of them while he was not and never could be. He belonged to the white men, but she had come, a solitary little figure, toward them. Whenever she came to Jatin, she came to them. They longed to stretch out their arms and draw her into themselves, but they waited in silence, to see whether he would take her away. Not a hint did they give of the secret, and part of the shield and the covering was their obedience to Ted, their quick willingness to help him prepare everything for the departure.

Nevertheless Jehar, the Christian sadhu, walking southward, was met by rumor, a seemingly unspoken communication which spread from mouth to ear, village to village, until it was brought to his ears. He heard and hastened to Vhai, knowing what must be going on in the earth-walled house. He arrived there one evening when the sun was setting over green fields. The monsoons were ended, the fields had not yet dried to dust, and the sun fell behind the horizon in clear color as he stood before the gate door of the house.

Ted looked through the open window of his study, aware that someone had passed, and seeing the familiar and well-loved figure he rose and went to the door himself.

“Jehar!” Ted exclaimed. “There is no one whom I had rather see at this moment.”

He put out his hand and clasped Jehar’s large smooth hand, and drew him into the house and thence into the study. There he closed the door and the two stood gazing at each other. Jehar was taller, a mighty figure, his height emphasized by the small, closely wound turban on his head and by the sweeping folds of his saffron robe.

“Sit down,” Ted said. “Are you hungry or thirsty?”

“Neither,” Jehar replied. His voice was deep and peaceful, his great eyes, intensely dark, were mild and affectionate, and his black beard and brows made his olive skin pale but not colorless. His feet were bare. Barefoot he had walked over much of the world, even in the snows of Tibet. He had been to Europe and to England, and at last to America, but everywhere he was the same.

Ted sat down near him and putting his hands on his knees, he continued to look at his old friend. “I had no idea that you were near Vhai.”

“I was not,” Jehar replied. “I have been preaching among the Sikhs. While I was there, word came to me that you were planning to return soon to your own country, and so I came to inquire if it is true and if it is, when you will come back to us.”

“It is true,” Ted said. He hesitated and then suddenly the need to confide his trouble overcame him. There was no one to whom he could speak so freely as he could to Jehar, no one who would understand so well why he felt that Livy must not marry Jatin, even though Jatin was good. So he told Jehar exactly what had happened and why he was taking Livy away quickly.

Jehar listened, nodding his head now and again. “I can see,” he said, “I understand. I could not have understood, perhaps, had I not seen your home. Ted, my brother, I have never told you that I saw your father in New York.”

“My father told me,” Ted replied with some diffidence. His father had written him almost angrily that Jehar had behaved in New York exactly as though he were in India, and while he had made an impression, it was not as a Christian, but as a swami, a fakir, someone strange and even false. “He has not been asked to speak in any of the important pulpits,” his father wrote. “There is something distasteful to the true Christian in this parading of Indian robes, bare feet, and so on. It was distressing to us all.”

“Perhaps he did not tell you that he felt it his duty to rebuke me,” Jehar said with a smile. “I accepted his rebuke for I knew that he must make it, but I went on as I was. I was not a swami, I told him, for that name means ‘Lord,’ and I am no lord. I am only a sadhu, that is, a religious man, and being an Indian I may use that name even though I see God through Jesus Christ.”

“Did my father understand?” Ted asked.

“I do not know how nearly his heart and mind are one,” Jehar replied. He sat thoughtful for a little while, and Ted, accustomed to such silences, waited.

When Jehar spoke, it was not to mention Livy’s name. “You will remember,” he said, “that verse from the Mahabharata which Gandhiji likes so well to quote.”

He paused, drew in his breath, closed his eyes and then began to chant with a deep pulsing rhythm,

“The individual may be sacrificed for the family;

The family may be sacrificed for the sake of the village;

The village may be sacrificed for the sake of the province;

The province may be sacrificed for the sake of the country;

For the sake of conscience, however, sacrifice all.”

He opened his eyes and looked earnestly at Ted, his dark and penetrating gaze seeming to cast an actual physical warmth upon Ted’s flesh, or so Ted imagined.

“What does your conscience say?” Jehar inquired.

“I do not know,” Ted replied. “I have only acted as I felt I must.”

Jehar listened to this, his gaze still affectionately upon his friend. “You have been busy, but when all is done, then you will have time to listen. Each conscience is different from every other, and mine must not speak for yours. What is the conscience? It is the most highly developed part of the human being, the core of the spirit, the most sensitive, the most tender. It is shaped by the mores of a given society, it is developed toward wisdom by individual experience, it is maintained by the strength of the will. Your conscience is different from mine — as mine is different from every other. For me it has been right to live the life of a sadhu in the old Hindu sense, while preaching only Christ. As I told your father, love and home and wealth are wrong for me, while right for others, and I have my rewards. Here in Vhai you have done a great thing, and you have made a renunciation far beyond that of most men of your kind, and you have your rewards as I have mine. Your father cannot understand this, any more than he can understand me. No matter — you have your reward, as I have mine. But now—”

He shook his head, and Ted recognized the old light of ecstasy in the fathomless Indian eyes.

“But now,” Jehar went on, “a new opportunity has come to you. It is not for me to counsel you. The opportunity comes to you from God as all things come to us from God. What does it mean? You may ask yourself, is what you have done not enough? If you feel it is enough, if your conscience says it is enough, then it is enough and you will have your reward. But, if in the quiet of the ship upon the sea, your conscience tells you that what you have done is not enough, that God offers to you the opportunity for more, then listen to your conscience. The ladder to Heaven is made of steps. With each step we think we have reached the goal. But there is another step, and the final one before the gates of God is the one when all of self is given.”

Ted fought the old magic of the dark eyes and the powerful gentle voice. He tried to laugh.

“Jehar, you will never make an Indian of me! I am hopelessly American, though I trust I am as good a Christian as you are.”

Jehar smiled. “Why should I wish to make you what you are not born? It is because you are an American that I delight to call you my brother, and I have seen for myself how much you have renounced in order to be a Christian in India. What I have given up is nothing in comparison to the riches, the pleasures, the honors you might have had in your own country. But you have chosen to live your life here in an Indian village, in an earth-walled house covered with thatch, I am humble before you. You have even brought up your children here, and I have had no children. I do not know what it is to have a child demanded in sacrifice. But what I see, in my humility, is that you have lived so fully the life of a Christian in my country that you are now given the final invitation to accept an Indian for your own son, and his children as your grandchildren. It is possible now for you to take the step of complete brotherhood, in flesh as in the spirit. God has made this possible for you that your life may complete the whole meaning of Christ.”

The very air was trembling with intensity. Jehar’s grave voice quivered, he lifted his magnificent head, he closed his eyes, and went into silent prayer.

And Ted, too, was compelled to silence. He could not pray, but he sat immobile, not thinking, not feeling. With his whole will he resisted the magnetism of Jehar. He refused to be compelled.

It was over in a moment. Jehar opened his eyes and gave his natural vivid smile. He rose. “I am glad that you told me yourself. Others will tell me and I shall tell them that I know all, and that whatever you do is according to your conscience. And now, Ted, dear brother, I shall go on my way.”

“Stay with us tonight, Jehar.” He made the invitation, but he did not urge it. He felt suddenly very weary and for some reason depressed. Usually Jehar lifted up his spirit but tonight Jehar could not reach his heart.

“I cannot, Ted,” Jehar replied. “I am expected tomorrow morning some thirty miles south of Vhai and I shall walk through the night.”

They clasped hands again and Jehar put his left hand over their clasped hands.

“Come back,” he said. “At least come back to India.”

“Of course,” Ted said.

Jehar said no more. He stepped back, and looking into Ted’s eyes, held his upraised hands together, palm to palm, in the old Indian greeting and farewell. “I see God in you,” the gesture said.

Ted bowed his head and stood watching half-wistfully the tall figure walking barefoot toward the south.

And after Jehar had gone, he remembered. Why had Jehar said India and not Vhai?

On the last day, Ted called Jatin to him.

“Jatin,” he said, “I leave you in charge of the compound.

You will keep the medical work going and I have sent for a young man from Poona for the schools. Jehar will pass by now and again and hold the church together. You will not miss me too much.”

“We shall miss you,” Jatin said.

He stood before Ted wearing his hospital gown, tall and steadfast, his arms folded.

“Sit down,” Ted said.

Jatin sat down. Whatever his duty was he would not tell of the seven nights. They would be hidden in his memory, deep as jewels in a cave beneath the sea. Life would flow over them, but no one would know.

“I wish to thank you,” Ted said. “You have been very faithful to me. Livy is young and you might have stirred her emotions to the point of no control. Instead you have been kind and strong. You have made her feel that her childish preference for you is to be forgotten. I am grateful for this and yet I feel I should make some sort of apology, for I discern in the whole matter a fault in myself. I say that Livy is too young, and indeed she is, but if I am honest with myself as I wish to be, I know that I — that there is more than this reason for parting you.” So much Jehar had worked in him.

“Please go no further, Mr. MacArd,” Jatin said. “I understand. It is natural for parents to feel that their children should marry within their own kind. Indeed, it may be this is right. At any rate, it is not my wish to insist against you. It is karma between your daughter and me. We were fated to love one another. We are fated by our birth never to marry. I know this and I accept it.”

“I must say more,” Ted insisted. “I am a Christian, Jatin, and it may be that as a Christian I should not have such feelings. I thought I had yielded my life to my God, and yet, perhaps, I have not.”

Jatin smiled. “I would not wish to accept Livy as a sacrifice to your religion.”

Ted could not smile. “It is not Livy, it is I myself. I should perhaps be willing to carry the meaning of love to its ultimate. The very essence of Christian love leads us to the ultimate. I feel a failure in myself. I am not ready to face the ultimate nor to accept it.”

He was surprised by the warmth in Jatin’s face. “Dear sir,” Jatin said impulsively. “Please do not feel you are at fault. The love of which you speak is not only Christian, it is human, and it cannot be forced. Livy is able to feel it, but then she has been born a generation after you. I feel it, though I am not a Christian, but then I have been born a generation after my father. I shall not marry Livy. Sir, I promise you that — it is not within my fate. Livy knows this also. But some day when Livy is married to a man of her own kind, if her child wishes to do what we have wished, then she will allow it. Time and the generations work together with fate, sir, and this is true. This is what I believe.”

“You make me feel small,” Ted said, and he was much troubled.

“Then I do wrong,” Jatin replied.

He rose to his feet. “Let us speak no more and think no more of this matter. What has been cannot be changed, and what is to be has been decided upon.”

That night Livy came to him for the last time and that night he did not take her to his bed. Instead they talked long, in whispers, clinging to one another and at last he spoke his fear.

“If there should be a child, Livy?”

“Oh, I hope there is a child!” she cried.

“No, Livy, I hope there is not. But if there is, you must not keep him.”

“I will keep him, Jatin.”

“No, I forbid it. I cannot live in peace if you are burdened with a child and I cannot share the burden with you.”

“But what should I do?”

“Give him away to someone else. He would be dark, like me. The darkness of our people stains the blood, Livy. Give him to the dark people in your country.”

“But our child would not be a Negro, Jatin,” she cried, shocked at his command.

“Hush—” he put his hand on her mouth. “Let him grow up belonging to them, since he could not belong to us. But perhaps he will never be born and that would be best, for you must be free of me, and I must be free of you, and our burden must not be laid upon a child. This is our fate and so it must be. Yet all that there can be we have had.”

He held her at the last, knowing that only minutes remained, and then he let her go. She clung to him but he pushed her gently from him toward the door.

“Now is the end,” he whispered. “It is over, and we have had everything and it shall not be taken from us. Good-by, Livy, good-by!”

He locked the door and stood, hearing her lean against it and sob. He wept then, but he did not yield and at last he heard her go away.

XIX

THE SHIP PULLED AWAY from the dock and Ted watched the receding shores of Bombay. The last light of sunset was falling from the west upon the green heights of Malabar Hill. A tall clock tower caught the final ray and shone out the hour, and upon the street nearest the shore the colors of the garments that people wore flashed into sudden brightness, amid which the robes of Parsee priests were shining white.

He had a sense of leave-taking that was foreboding in its finality. Would he never see those shores again? Was he leaving India as his father had done, without knowing it? Was something changed in him, some virtue gone? He did not know.

He felt a touch upon his arm and turning his head he saw Ruth at his side. Again, as so often, he saw her apart from himself, a sturdy apple-cheeked woman, neat always and now unfamiliar in a blue serge tailored suit.

“Where is Livy?” he asked involuntarily.

“Downstairs unpacking,” she said. She slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow.

“Well, we have got her safely away from India,” he said. The strip of water between ship and shore was widening. Twenty feet, twenty-five and soon fifty, and then the miles would mount.

“I suppose so,” Ruth said.

He would not inquire what her doubt might be. He felt tired and dislocated, and perhaps he had lived in Vhai too long. For years he had poured himself out, and now he felt empty and weak. It occurred to him that he had not eaten much in the past weeks, worried and pressed as he had been by his distress about Livy and the hurried leave-taking. It would be good to sink back into the comfortable life in the old mansion, where his father and Agnes were expecting them. He needed rest.

The dinner gong rang through the corridors of the ship and upon the decks.

“I believe I am hungry,” he said.

“Then let’s go down to the dining saloon now,” Ruth said. But they lingered a moment. The sun was slipping behind the horizon of Bombay and the shadow of night stole swiftly over the city and the sea.

“I hope Livy will not wear her saris,” Ted said suddenly.

“I told her not to wear them any more,” Ruth replied quietly.

“Did she mind?”

“No, she said she had already decided that she would not.”

So often, he thought, his conversations with his wife were commonplace, the merest question and answer, and yet he knew again that she had thoughts which she did not speak, and so there were overtones to her words. He seldom inquired what these were, and he did not do so now. A sudden breeze had arisen damp and chill.

“Come,” he said. “There is nothing more here. Let us go below.”

Livy, on the high upper deck, continued to gaze alone into the night. The lights of the ship fell upon the smooth and oily water of the bay and upon the long lines of the prow of the ship. But Livy did not see the near waters, nor even the sparkling lights of Bombay in the receding distance. Her mind’s eye drove its straight beam northward upon Vhai, and she saw Jatin in his little house alone. She knew that he would be busy as he always was, reading his books, eating his plain evening meal, and then reading again. In an hour from now he would be at the hospital making his last rounds of the sick as they lay upon their pallets on the floor, or on low wooden beds, rope-bottomed, just as they would have lain had they been in their own homes. Her father had always insisted that everything was to be Indian, he would not have anything in Vhai that was like the beautiful colleges and the hospital at MacArd in Poona, and yet she was no longer deceived. She had thought, oh, she had truly believed, that her father had meant what he said when he taught them to behave courteously toward the people of Vhai and of all India, and she had believed that he meant what he said when he bade them learn the language of Vhai, and when he encouraged her to wear a sari as easily as she did a frock, until a sari now seemed more natural to her and certainly more comfortable than a buttoned frock, for to tuck the pleated material into the folds at her waist so that it hung a graceful skirt and then to throw the other end about her shoulders was much easier than getting into sleeves and belts and buttons down the back. He had encouraged them to play with the children of Vhai and to look upon them as brothers and sisters, telling them that God was their Father in Heaven, and they were one great family. She had believed he meant all that and now she knew he did not. For if he had truly believed what he preached, then he would have been willing and even glad for her to marry Jatin, for that was the whole acceptance, wasn’t it, and if one could not accept the ultimate, then there was no real acceptance. Perhaps there was no truth in God, either.

She shivered, unutterably sad as her mind fixed itself upon Jatin. It was not his fault, surely, for he had never been deceived by her father, and that had been their first great argument.

“Jatin, I tell you, my father will be happy. He likes you, and he will welcome you as his son.”

This she had insisted upon, and Jatin had only smiled his dark sad smile.

“Then you don’t believe in my father!” She had accused him thus.

“I do believe in him,” Jatin had replied. “Yet I know his soul reaches beyond the rest of him. His faith is far up yonder—” he pointed to the zenith. “But his flesh is more prudent than his soul and it remains upon the earth. And his mind is uncertain between the two. He believes in his ideals, and he considers them necessary, but he says that it will take time to fulfill them, much time. What he does not know, is that if one does not immediately practice ideals, they are lost. They die unless they come quickly to reality.”

So much that Jatin had said she had not understood when he spoke because his presence agitated her. She had not often been able to fix her mind upon his words because her eyes were fastened upon his lips. Remembering those lips, her heart hung in her bosom, a weight of hot and leaden pain. She would never see his face again, of that she was now sure. Her father could not have kept them apart, she thought rebelliously, but Jatin himself had sent her away. If Jatin had been in the least willing to defy her father, it could have been done, but he was not willing, not through fear, but through his belief that to part was their fate, the world being what it was.

“You must go back to your own country,” he had told her, “and after you have finished school, then you must marry a good man.”

“I will not,” she had cried passionately, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“But I say you must,” he had insisted in his grave voice. “And Livy, one more command I give you. Do not tell him about me. This is for your own protection, for if your father, who is so good a man, cannot bear the thought of our love, then that one who is to be your husband cannot bear it, either. He will draw away from you because once you loved me.”

“I shall love you forever,” she had declared, “and I shall never marry.”

To this he had not replied. He had simply stroked her cheeks with his delicate powerful palms. In the hottest weather his palms were cool and dry, and yet they were never cold. There was healing in his hands. She would never see anyone like him, never meet a man who could compare to him, but because the smooth skin that covered his handsome body was dark, they must never be man and wife, a coating so thin though dark, that it could be pierced by a pin and underneath the flesh was as pale as her own and the blood as red. Yet it was the paper thin darkness of the skin that forced them on their separate ways, on opposite sides of the world.

She did not agree, nevertheless, with all that he had decreed. There was still her hope in the child. The child, if there was a child, she would not put away as he had commanded her to do. If there was to be a child then she would go back to India somehow and insist that Jatin marry her and recognize his own son. She would not be as her father was. What she believed in she would do. Love one another, the Scriptures said, and so she had loved all that was India. She had loved Vhai and the people of Vhai and she had loved the children and the women, and her ayah’s flesh was real to her as her own mother’s. Then, finally, she had loved Jatin.

She clung to the rail and closed her eyes in profound entreaty. “Oh, God, if You are there, then please, give me what I want most! Give me a baby, so that I can go back to Jatin!”

The intensity of her prayer was so great that instantly she felt sure her prayer had been heard. A soft night wind blew over her. A moment before there was no wind, and now suddenly there came the wind, a sign and promise! She opened her eyes in an ecstasy of hope, and felt the ship rise and fall beneath her feet. They were beyond the bay and out upon the sea, but she would come back, for God had heard her and He had given her the sign. She toyed with the idea, just for a moment, of telling her mother that there would be a child and then she decided against it. No, not yet — she might be wrong about God. It would be days before she could know.

She shivered, suddenly cold with the chill of the sea wind. She must not lose Jatin in the dark. Vhai was there and it would always be there. Though she was being carried far away, she would come back — if she was right about God.

Yet she was young and while she waited, there were hours when she almost forgot. The ship’s company was gay, young men and women pressed her into their games, and when they persuaded her, she sang for them the Indian songs she knew, the sweet twisting melodies of Vhai, her voice lifted high and never dropping low, but winding in and out like a brook in a valley between the mountains.

They were charmed by her and she could not but respond, for it was pleasant to be told that she was pretty, that she had a lovely voice which should be trained, that she was a natural dancer, and had she ever thought of Hollywood? She was shy, she answered their pressing coaxing compliments in a shy little voice, her brown lashes on her cheeks and now lifted in unconscious enjoyment. No, she had not thought of Hollywood, she did not believe her father would like it, and certainly her grandfather would not. Yes, they were going straight to New York where they would stay in the house that had belonged to her great-grandfather, and yes, he was David Hardworth MacArd, and yes, she supposed he was the MacArd, though her grandfather’s name was David, too. She was so young that it pleased her to observe the slight pause that followed the speaking of this famous name, and when she got up to go away, it was with dignity added to her grace. She was the great-granddaughter of the MacArd.

Yet her heart was faithful and night and morning she said her prayers and thought of Jatin, and many times during the day his face came before her. She would glance at her little gold wrist watch which her father had given her last Christmas and then she would ask herself where he was now, and wherever it was, she would see him, at work or alone. She was still not parted from him, nor could be, so long as there was the possibility of their child.

The days passed, the ship was in midocean and one morning the certainty was there. The answer was clear, there was to be no child. Nature announced it, she saw the rose-red stain, and knew that love had borne no fruit. She had risen early that morning, and the wind was white upon the water and the sun shining over the horizon. She had waked uncontrollably gay, for she was too young for constant sadness, and now suddenly she knew and the day stopped abruptly at dawn. She went back to bed and drew the covers about her and cried silently into the blankets so that Sara might not hear from the other berth. But Sara heard, that sharp child, and she went and called their mother, upon pretense of visiting the bathroom, and Ruth came wrapped in her pink cotton dressing gown and so suddenly that Livy had no time to wipe her cheeks dry or to insist that she was not crying.

“It is just that I don’t feel well,” she murmured, trying not to turn her face toward her mother. But Ruth’s strong hand seized her daughter’s dimpled chin and pressed it toward her.

“You don’t feel well? Where?”

“It’s just the old curse—”

“Oh—” Ruth’s hand relaxed. “But why cry? It’s nothing.”

“People do cry for nothing, sometimes,” Livy said.

“Not you,” Ruth retorted.

She looked down into her daughter’s face and saw the eyes closed, the lips quivering. The girl was pale, she had gone through more than they knew, maybe. She remembered that as a child she, too, had always cried when they left India. And now there was Jatin, besides, and she did not know how far that had gone, but anyway Livy was safe. Love had not gone too far except perhaps in the heart, and that would heal.

“Cover yourself up real warm,” she said briskly. “I’ll have your breakfast brought in.”

She bent and kissed her daughter’s forehead, and was glad enough not to know what she had not been told. No use knowing, since nothing could be helped and whatever had been was ended.