The Mercy of the Lord Part 38

Having done my best to set her wifely anxiety at rest, I advanced fifty rupees to my bearer.

In consequence of which we started next day for my new district, bag and baggage. Though the most part of the journey was by train, the bearer insisted on buckling a big sword he had picked up somewhere round his capacious middle. It decidedly had an effect on the railway coolies.

About three a.m. we turned out at a roadside station, where, thanks to that fifty rupees, a dak gharri was waiting to convey me the remaining twenty miles. I was very sleepy, and as I tumbled into my new conveyance I got a vague impression of a howling wilderness of sand, tufted with tiger gra.s.s, desolate utterly; so falling asleep again, and not waking until, in the darkness, I tumbled out--this time into a large empty room, with a tiny camp bed set in its midst--I carried on, as it were, the impression of desert surrounding me. But not for long.

The next day would, I suspected, be a trifle trying, since my unfortunate predecessor's methods of business would scarcely be conducive to a mechanical taking over charge of his office. So I was soon asleep, without even realising that probably I was sleeping where he had lain dead but a day or two before.

When I opened my eyes next morning I felt a curious content and surprise. The room was bare in the extreme. The camp bed on which I lay, a deck chair, the cover of a travelling chest-of-drawers doing duty as a wardrobe, the top of a travelling bath doing ditto as a table, a bit of looking-gla.s.s hung above it by a string--these were its furniture. The furniture of the light-hearted boy who had come out in the same year as I had. With an odd, guilty remorse, I remembered that I had long since exchanged these simple satisfactions of youth for more luxurious methods. An unpaid bill of Maple's, indeed, flashed to my mind, as, looking round the walls, which were hung with full-sized photographs and copies of the great masters, I realised that my predecessor had spent his spare cash in a different fashion to what I had.

Very different, indeed. My remorse vanished in contempt, as, opening one of the drawers, a very strong scent of sandal wood made itself perceptible, and in one corner I saw a trumpery piece of native jewellery.

A certain anger took possession of me then, as I looked up into the eyes of the Sistine Madonna, which hung in a conspicuous place, and I felt virtuous in realising that, after all, it was a natural refinement and pure love of order and beauty which lay at the bottom of our civilised cult of comfortableness.

So thinking, I pa.s.sed out on to the verandah, still with last night's impression on me that I was in a howling desert.

What I saw, therefore, gave me a shock. For here was a garden such as I had never seen. Neither English nor Indian, yet reminiscent of both in its wide sweeps of well-kept lawns, its dense thickets of flowering shrubs, both, at this break in the rainy season, looking their best. It took me a moment, however, to realise what it was which gave this garden its curious distinction from other gardens. There was no path in it. Though where I stood must once have been the front door, since a huge pillared porch jutted beyond the verandah, the gra.s.s swept right up to the very house. It had a curious untrodden look. A huge-leaved, waxen-flowered Beaumontia almost covered the porch with its cold, white scentless blossoms, and between the pillars Eucharis lilies rose above a marvellous ma.s.s of maidenhair.

The delicate greenery, the chill whiteness made me think involuntarily of the newly dead, and had I had on my hat I felt as if I should have removed it.

As it was, I stepped, with a slight shiver, beyond the porch into the sunlight.

The chilliness was gone in a moment, though the cloistered air remained, due to the great tamarind trees, which on all sides shut out the world, shut in the flowers. The birds, too. I never saw so many. A golden oriole was challenging the sun with its full-throated call from the bronze rain-shoots of the huge banyan tree, which filled up one corner, and there were at least a dozen ruby-throated humming-birds among the hibiscus flowers--those strangely mutable flowers, white in the dawn, which blush into a crimson death before sunset.

The banyan tree, promising a well in its shade, and the well promising the possibility of a gardener whom I could question--for I was beset by curiosity--I strolled over to it, and found what I wanted--a very old, wizened man, pretending to weed an offensive patch of yellow African marigolds, which was carefully hidden away behind a henna hedge.

"Yes!" he replied, with the tearless regret one often hears in native voices, the dead Huzoor had been very fond of his garden--in a way.

(Here the regret became personal and aggrieved.) He had never sent for European seeds, so, of course, it had been impossible even for the most skilful of malas to make it into a real garden. But if the new Huzoor would employ this slave--who had many certificates--here the usual bundle was drawn out from some mysterious hiding-place--mysterious because he was more than half-naked--he would make proper paths and "rippin' beds," and set them ablaze with "floccus" and "soot-ullians"

and "gerabians and----"

He was beginning to reel off a seedsman's catalogue when I pulled him up by pointing to the marigolds. He pursed up his lips in pious horror.

Oh, no, there would be no more "gooljafari" or "genda" grown in that garden. They had been for the other folk, who, of course, would no longer---- The mixture of cunning question and scandalised propriety on the old humbug's face made me mentally resolve that he should "no longer" either. In fact, before my wife and the bairns came down I must have the whole place cleared and fumigated. But the garden? No, it must not be touched.

I had my breakfast in a huge dark, central room, which was absolutely bare save for a ricketty table and two chairs. There were not even any photographs on the walls. It was so dark that they could not have been seen.

"They found the Huzoor lying there, at the door," said my bearer calmly, after apologising profusely for an oversight in the matter of marmalade, which, he trusted, might be forgotten, and not reported to the memsahib. "He had been dead a long time, for he had paid off all the servants and sent away the other people and the children on the evening before, saying he was going on a journey. His bearer waited for him at the station with his baggage, only he never came, nor his horse, either.

"It was the office which found him, when it came for signature of papers next day, and there was nothing disturbed, only the Huzoor lying where they could see him easily from the front door, and the horse comfortable in its stall, with plenty of gra.s.s. He was always thoughtful to the poor was the sahib, and never gave trouble to others.

At least, so his servants say--but what can they know--poor, mean creatures, who do not even know when a kettle boils!"

I let him talk, for somehow I did not wish to think. In much the same mood I went doggedly through my day's work in taking over charge and reducing chaos to order--or, rather, conventional order, for through all the disgraceful neglect of ordinary routine ran the unmistakable thread of one man's control, and of a strong man at that, even in its favouritism, its flagrant derelictions from the ordinary conception of a magistrate's duty.

As I got into my dogcart to come home, an orderly came forward, with a doubtful air, carrying a small bag, such as natives use as a purse.

"It was the custom," he began; but by this time I felt that I must return to a right judgment of things, so I purposely lost my temper, and let it be known that all old customs were to be abolished. "It was only the pennies for the children on Fridays," stuttered the orderly.

"The Huzoor used always to give them----"

I drove off, thinking that, perhaps, my predecessor might have been wise in choosing a higher tribunal.

My bearer, however, who, as usual, stood in the verandah to receive my hat, had no doubts in the totality of his blame. He was full of virtuous activities. Order, in some measure, had been restored. Certain screens of gra.s.s, which had been removed against a time when the mem might find them useful in the poultry yard, and the outhouses having been finally cleared--by the aid of the police--of various pensioners and idle folk, who wept profusely, had been duly distributed among the servants, he himself having taken one with a women's enclosure, which would be the cause of great comfort.

I bid him take what he liked, and for the first time went into the drawing-room, where he said my tea awaited me.

I shall never forget my first look at that room, with its five straight, undraped windows, set in a row round one slightly curved wall. The others bare, save for the shadows, which were fast creeping to obliterate even the bareness. The windows were mere oblongs of dim light, stretching up into the lofty roof, and that shadow looming in one shadowy corner, across a vast expanse of shadowy matting, must be the Bechstein piano. I made a move towards it, and stumbled against my own tea-table, a highly ornate, sham Oriental, carved thing, which the bearer, by my wife's orders, carried about with him religiously, and at the same time the bearer himself entered with the reading lamp, without which, so I am told, I cannot exist.

I gave up the Bechstein, therefore, for a time, and had caviare sandwiches with my tea instead.

I do not know why--my wife would have said because the water was not boiling--but I did not enjoy my tea. The pity of all things in this incomprehensible world struck me with a vague anger. I sat wondering if, after all, a higher tribunal----

Good heavens! What was that? Someone was playing on the Bechstein. I did not turn. I sat staring at those five solemn oblongs of the glimmering windows, showing lighter and lighter as the shadows deepened in the big bare room.

It was Walther's song out of "Tannhauser"--the song of divine love....

The bearer said I was asleep when he came to tell me it was time to dress for dinner. Perhaps I was, for sound sleep brings perfect peace and rest, and that had come to me with the music which had come out of the windows.

I have a dim recollection that the khansaman apologised because the soup was not clear, and that the bearer explained that a wire mattress had not arrived owing to the breaking down of a bullock cart. But I know that I sat up till all hours of the night in the dark, hoping to hear the Bechstein again, but it was silent as the grave.

Perhaps at dusk I might hear it once more. I raced off to the office early, in order to be home in time, and was almost glad of a few flagrant derelictions of duty cropping up to keep my moral nature from too much sympathy.

Yet even so, as I drove home, I put my hand in my pocket and drew out a handful of coppers for a group of children I pa.s.sed on the road. I could not help it when I remembered a certain paper I had sent up to the Administrator-General that day, showing the way in which a certain sinner had spent his last pay.

"Tea is ready in the drawing-room," said the bearer; and even in my preoccupation I thought there was something odd in his voice.

But a look into the big bare room was sufficient. I shouldn't have known it, women have such a way of altering the whole character of a house by a yellow silk bow. She had taken the little camp bed and made a couch out of it with cushions and phulkarees. The five fateful windows, like the five senses looking out on the garden of the soul, were tucked and festooned, and through one of them came the familiar sound of a pair of bellows, and then a still more familiar exclamation:

"There! That's really boiling at last."

The next instant my wife was in my arms, tearful, tender, triumphant.

Cheerful letters were all very well, but she knew; so she had just left the babies in charge of some super-excellent creature, and run away down to see I was really comfortable.

"And, after all," she said, nodding her head as she poured out the tea, "it is as well I did come, for really there seems to be nothing in the house except the Bechstein."

I looked over to it dully, and noticed that it was now ornamented by my photograph in a filigree frame.

"Yes," I said--I hope I kept some of the regret out of my voice--"only the Bechstein."

And as we sat and talked of the children, and our own happiness, and the seeds we were going to sow in the garden, the five windows grew lighter as the shadows deepened.

But the spirit of the room was silent.

SEGREGATION

"I've got the plague, sir, upon my sam, I 'ave. I'll show yer the spot, sir, same as they 'ad in 1666 w'en the Tower o' London was burnt down, an' Sir Christopher Wren built St. Paul's--so 'elp me Gawd."

The speaker was a plausible loafer of the usual type. He was dressed in white, or what had once been white raiment. A gilt b.u.t.ton or two hung round the coat; mute testimony to its having once belonged to a man who did some work of some kind for the Government. He was not a Eurasian, that you could see by the line of white on his forehead above the tan, as he stood apologetically in the court room holding his helmet before him with both hands as if he meant to offer it up as a bribe. It was certainly the most valuable thing about him, for it had a wadded quilted cover and looked, what the rest of him did not--respectable.