Far to Seek Part 32

"No, I'm sorry. I didn't suppose his whereabouts mattered a d.a.m.n to any one."

The stern old Rajput smiled. It did his heart good to hear the familiar slang phrases again. "Whether it matters a d.a.m.n--as you say--depends on whether he is the undesirable I have in mind. Quite young; but much influence, and a bad record. Mixed up with German agents, before the War, and the Ghadr party in California; arrested for seditious activity and deported: but of course, on appeal, allowed to return. Always the same tale. Always the same result. Worse mischief done. And India--the true India--must be grateful for these mercies! Sometimes I think the irony is too sharp between the true gifts given, unnoticed, by Englishmen working sincerely for the good of our people, and the false gifts proclaimed from the house-tops, filling loyal Indians with bewilderment and fear. I have had letters from scores of these, because I am known to believe that loyal allegiance to British government gives India the best chance for peaceful progress she is likely to have for many generations. And from every one comes the same cry, begging to be saved from this crazy nightmare of Home Rule, not understood and not desired except by those who invented it. But what appeal is possible to those who stop their ears? And all the time, by stealthy and open means, the poison of race-hatred is being poured into India's veins----"

"But, Grandfather--what about the War--and pulling together--and all that?"

Sir Lakshman's smile struck Roy as one of the saddest he had ever seen.

"Four years ago, my dear Boy, we all had many radiant illusions. But this War has dragged on too long. It is too far away. For our Princes and warlike races it has had some reality. For the rest it means mostly news in the papers and rumours in bazaars, high prices, and trouble about food. No better soil for sowing evil seeds. And friends of Germany are still working in India--remember that! While the loyal were fighting, these were talking, plotting, hindering: and now they are waving, like a flag, the services of others, to gain their own ends, from which the loyal pray to be delivered! Could irony be more complete?

Indian Princes can keep some cheek on these gentlemen. But it is not always easy. If this Chandranath should be the same man--he is here, no doubt, for Dewali. At sacred feasts they do most of their devil's work.

Did you speak of connection with me?"

"No. But he seemed to know about Aruna: said you were English mad."

Sir Lakshman frowned. "English mad! That is their jargon. Too narrow to understand how I can deeply love both countries, while remaining as jealous for all true rights of my Motherland as any hot-head who swallows their fairy-tale of a Golden Age, and England as Raksha--destroying demon! By help of such inventions, they have deluded many fine young men, like my poor Dyan, who should be already married and working to all my place. Such was my hope in sending him to Oxford.

And now--see the result ..."

On that topic he could not yet trust himself; and Roy, leaning forward impulsively, laid a hand on his knee.

"Grandfather, I have promised Aruna--and I promise you--that somehow, I _will_ get hold of him; and bring him back to his senses."

Sir Lakshman covered the hand with his own. "True son of Lilamani! But I fear he may have joined some secret society; and India is a large haystack in which to seek one human needle!"

"But Aruna has written again. She is convinced he will answer."

Sir Lakshman sighed. "Poor Aruna! I am not sure if I was altogether wise letting her go to the Residency. But I am deeply grateful to Mrs Leigh.

India needs many more such English women. By making friends with high-born Indian women, it is hardly too much to say they might, together, mend more than half the blunders made by men on both sides."

Thus, skilfully, he steered clear of Aruna's problem that was linked with matters too intimately painful for discussion with a grandson, however dear.

So absorbed was Roy in the delight of reunion, that not till he rose to go did he take in the details of the lofty room. Everywhere Indian workmanship was in evidence. The pictures were old Rajput paintings; fine examples of Vaishnava art--pure Hindu, in its mingling of restraint and exuberance, of tenderness and fury; its hallowing of all life and idealising of all love. Only the writing-table and swivel-chair were frankly of the West, and certain shelves full of English books and reviews.

"I _like_ your room," Roy announced after leisurely inspection. "But I don't seem to remember----"

"You would be a miracle if you did! The room _you_ saw had plush curtains, gilt mirrors and gilt furniture; in fact, the correct 'English-fashion' guest-room of the educated Indian gentleman. But of late years I have seen how greatly we were mistaken, making imitation England to honour our English friends. Some frankly told me how they were disappointed to find in our houses only caricatures of middle-cla.s.s England or France. Such rooms are silent barriers to friendship: proclaiming that East may go to the West but West cannot come to the East."

"In a way that's true, isn't it?"

"Yes--in a way. This room, of course, is not like my inner apartments.

It is like myself, however; cultivated--but still Indian. It is my way of preaching true Swadeshi:--Be your own self, even with English guests.

But so far I have few followers. Some are too foolishly fond of their mirrors and chandeliers and gramophones. Some will not believe such trifles can affect friendliness. Yet--strange, but true--too much Anglicising of India instead of drawing us nearer, seems rather to widen the gulf."

Roy nodded. "I've heard that. Yet most of us are so keen to be friends.

Queer, perverse things--human beings, aren't they?"

"And for that reason, more interesting than all the wonders of Earth!"

Setting both hands on Roy's shoulders he looked deeply into his eyes.

"Come and see me often, Dilkusha. It lifts my tired heart to have this very human being so near me again."

Ten minutes later, Roy was riding homeward through a changed city; streets and hills and sky wrapped in the mystery of encroaching dusk.

South and west the sky flamed, like the heart of a fire opal, through a veil fine as gauze--dust no longer; but the aura of Jaipur. Seen afar, through the coloured gloom, familiar shapes took on strange outlines; moved and swayed, mysteriously detached, in a sea of shadows, scattered, here and there, by flames of little dinner fires along the pavements.

The brilliant shifting crowd of two hours ago seemed to have sunk into the earth. For there is no night life in the streets of Jaipur.

Travellers had pa.s.sed on and out. Merchants had stowed away their muslins and embroideries, their vessels of bra.s.s and copper and priceless enamels. Only the starving lay in huddled heaps as before--ominously still; while above them vultures and eagles circled, expectant, ink-black against the immense radiance beyond. Grey, deepening to black, were flat roofs, cornices, minarets and ma.s.sed foliage, and the flitting shadows, with lifted tails, that careered along the house-tops; or perched on some jutting angle, skinny elbows crooked, absorbed in the pursuit of fleas. For sunset is the monkey's hour, and the eerie jibbering of these imps of darkness struck a bizarre note in the hush that shrouded the city.

Roy knew, now, why Thea had stayed his impatience; and he blessed her sympathetic understanding. But just then--steeped in India at her most magical hour--it was hard to believe in the Residency household; in English dinner-tables and English detachment from the mediaeval medley of splendour and squalor, of courage and cruelty and dumb endurance, of arts and crafts and all the paraphernalia of enlightened knowledge that was Jaipur. It seemed more like a week than a few hours since he had turned in the saddle to salute Aruna and ridden out into another world:--her world, which was also in a measure his own....

On and on he rode, at a foot's pace, followed by his twin shadows; past the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still rumbling and throbbing with m.u.f.fled music; past wayside shrines, mere alcoves for grotesque images--Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the Elephant G.o.d--each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh; past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal: on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road, his whole being drenched in the silence and the deepening dusk.

Here, outside the city, emptiness loomed almost like a presence. Only the trees were alive; each with its colony of peac.o.c.ks and parrots and birds of prey noisily settling to rest. The peac.o.c.ks' unearthly cry, and the far, ghostly laugh of jackals--authentic voice of India at sundown--sent a chill down Roy's spine. For he, who had scarcely known fear on the battlefield, was ignominiously at the mercy of imagination and the eerie spirit of the hour.

At a flick of the reins, Suraj broke into a smart canter, willingly enough. What were sunsets or local devils to him compared with stables and gram?

And as they sped on, as trees on either side slid by like stealthy ghosts, the sunset splendour died, only to rise again in a volcanic afterglow, on which trunks and twigs and battlemented hills were printed in daguerreotype; and desert voices were drowned in the clamour of cicadas, grinding their knives in foolish ecstasy; and, at last, he swerved between the friendly gate-posts of the Residency--the richer for a spiritual adventure that could neither be imparted, nor repeated, nor forgotten while he lived.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: Joy of my heart.]

CHAPTER VII.

"The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart, where we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and our fears."--WILLIAM JAMES.

Not least among the joys of Aruna's return to the freer life of the Residency was her very own verandah balcony. Here, secure from intrusion, she could devote the first and last hours of her day to meditation or prayer. Oxford studies had confused a little, but not killed, the faith of her fathers. The real trouble was that too often, nowadays, that exigent heart of hers would intrude upon her sacred devotions, transforming them into day-dreams, haloed with a hope the more frankly formulated because she was of the East.

For Thea had guessed aright. Roy was the key to her waverings, her refusals, her eager acceptance of the emergency plan:--welcome in itself; still more welcome because it permitted her simply to await his coming.

They had been very wonderful, those five years in England; in spite of anxieties and disappointed hopes. But when Dyan departed and Mesopotamia engulfed Roy, India had won the day.

How unforgettable that exalted moment of decision, one drenched and dismal winter evening; the sudden craving for sights and sounds and smells of her own land. How slow the swiftest steamer to the speed of her racing thoughts! How bitter, beyond belief, the--how first faint chill of disappointment; the pang of realising reluctantly--that, within herself, she belonged whole-heartedly to neither world.

She had returned qualified for medical work, by experience in a College hospital at Oxford; yet hampered by innate shrinking from the sick and maimed, who had been too much with her in those years of war. Not less innate was the urge of her whole being to fulfil her womanhood through marriage rather than through work. And in the light of that discovery, she saw her dilemma plain. Either she must hope to marry an Englishman and break with India, like Aunt Lilamani; or accept, at the hands of the matchmaker, an enlightened bridegroom, unseen, unknown, whose family would overlook--at a price--her advanced age and English adventures.

Against the last, all that England and Oxford had given her rose up in revolt ... But the discarded, subconscious Aruna was centuries older than the half-fledged being who hovered on the rim of the nest, distrustful of her untried wings and the pathless sky. That Aruna had, for ally, the spirit of the ages; more formidable, if less a.s.sertive, than the transient spirit of the age. And the fledgling Aruna knew perfectly well that the Englishman of her alternative was, confessedly--Roy. His mother being Indian, she innocently supposed there would be no trouble of prejudice; no stupid talk of the gulf that she and Dyan had set out to bridge. The fact that Dyan had failed only made her the more anxious to succeed....

Soon after arriving, she had taken up hospital work in the women's ward, because Miss Hammond was kind; and her educated self had need of occupation. Her other self--deeply loving her grandfather--had urged her to try and live at home,--so far as her unregenerate state would permit.

As out-of-caste, she had been exempt from kitchen work; debarred from touching any food except the portion set aside for her meals, that were eaten apart in Sir Lakshman's room--her haven of refuge. In the Inside, she was at the mercy of women's tongues and the petty tyranny of Mataji; antagonistic as ever; sharpened and narrowed with age, even as her grandfather had mellowed and grown beautiful, with the unearthly beauty of the old, whose spirit shines visibly through the attenuated veil of flesh. Aruna, watching him, with clearer understanding, marvelled how he had preserved his serenity of soul through a lifetime of Mataji's dominion.

And the other women--relations in various degrees--took their tone from her, if only for the sake of peace:--the widowed sister-in-law, suavely satirical; a great-aunt, whose tongue clacked like a rice-husker; two cousins, correctly betrothed to unseen bridegrooms, ent.i.tled to look askance at the abandoned one, who was neither wife nor mother; and two children of a poor relation--embryo women, who echoed the jeers of their elders at her English friends, her obstinacy in the matter of caste and the inevitable husband. _Hai! hai!_ At her age, what did she fear? Had the English bewitched her with lies? Thus Peru, aged nine, jocosely proceeding to enlighten her; egged on by giggles and high-pitched laughter from the prospective brides. For in the zenana reticence is not, even before children. Aruna herself had heard such talk; but for years her early knowledge had lain dormant; while fastidiousness had been engendered by English studies and contact with English youth.

Useless to answer. It simply meant tears or losing her temper; in which case, Mataji would retaliate by doctoring her food with red pepper to sweeten her tongue.

Meanwhile, sharpened pressure in the matter of caste rites and rumours of an actually maturing husband, had brought her very near the end of her tether. Again Thea was right. Her brave impulse of the heart had only been just in time. And hard upon that unbelievable good fortune followed the news that Roy was coming.