Come, My Beloved

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ever been there?”

  “No, but I’m not afraid.”

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

  “I thought you built MacArd Memorial to change—”

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

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

  “Why, Mr. MacArd—”

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

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

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

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

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

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

  “Did David know before he went?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I shall not stay long,” David promised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Tell me what?” David demanded.

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

  “Why should I be angry?”

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

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

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

  “You wrote to her?”

  “Before you did, perhaps—”

  “But why?”

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

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

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

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

  ‘Can my heart unmoved be,

  When before my eyes I see

  Drowning men?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  VII

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

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

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