“Don’t go any more, Olivia,” he bade her, nevertheless. “It is better to stay away from crowds in famine time.”
“Very well, David. Certainly I will do as you say.”
“That’s right.”
He went to her then and gave her his usual kiss, and was glad that he had not frightened her. Her dark eyes were bright, and he saw as he had never seen before that she was more beautiful now than she had ever been.
“The crystals are very becoming,” he said. “Let’s go down to dinner.”
The plague crept into the great city of Bombay, unseen by the white men, for in the native quarters people bid the deaths of their own people. The city seemed as beautiful as ever, for the white men had learned long ago to look beyond the dying and the hungry whom they could not save. They looked to the mountain and the palm groves, to the many ships in the splendid harbor, to the great shops where the rich of every nation and people came and went. They looked to the past and to the future for they did not want to see the present. Hundreds of years before when a few English traders pushed into the harbor, Bombay had been a handful of islands with the sea racing between them, a small port, a cluster of houses and fishermen drying their half-decaying fish, but Englishmen had clung to it because the sands had silted into the harbor of Tapti, Surat had declined, and only the great natural harbor of Bombay remained. And during the hundreds of years between the day when the few Englishmen had come ashore and the day when the Governor-general sat in his palace on Malabar Point, the town grew into a place of mansions and towers, colleges and temples, a city of magnificence.
Yet India possessed it, in spite of the English, and in that year when the monsoons failed and famine fell, plague crept into the streets where no white men lived, and servants in the vast hotel who slept at night in the plague-ridden hovels of the native city came in by day to serve the white men, and they told no white men of the night.
When they had returned to Poona, Olivia one morning felt a headache, an intolerable pain and dizziness. She woke out of sleep and was surprised by an amazing weakness. David had already left his bed, and she tried to get up to go and see whether the baby was awake in the nest room. She could not lift the curtain of the mosquito netting and she fell back upon the pillows.
In his study upon his knees, David was suddenly aware of an urgent command within himself, wordless and yet too strong for refusal. He rose, compelled and unwilling, and found himself walking along the wide hall, still cool from the night, and into the room where an hour before he had left his wife sleeping. She was not sleeping now. Through the mist of the white netting she lay upon the pillows, her dark eyes wide and listless.
“Olivia,” he cried. “What is the matter?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’m suddenly—weak. My head—it hurts terribly.”
He dashed aside the net and reached for her hands. They were hot and limp.
“I’ll get the doctor immediately—lie still, dearest.” She tried to smile, it was quite plain that she could do nothing but lie still. The lids drooped over her eyes and her face was white. He strode down the hall again to his study, jerked the bell rope for a servant and scribbled a note for the British doctor resident in the English hospital. “Take this chit,” he commanded the servant already waiting. “Take it to the hospital and fetch the doctor now.”
The man slipped out of the room like a swift shadow and was gone, and in less than an hour the doctor was there. David sat at Olivia’s side, waiting. She could not drink her tea, nor could she lift her head to swallow even water.
“Let me alone,” she begged in a gasping whisper.
So he sat there, holding her lifeless burning hand and when the doctor came in David beckoned, his lips pressed together.
The tall lean Englishman in his fresh white linen suit came to the bedside and made his examination. Olivia did not speak. When he asked her a question, she nodded, very slightly, the effort immense. Yes, the pain was unbearable, very hard to breathe because of this weakness, the giddiness so severe that she could not see his face.
The doctor straightened at last and drew the sheet over her, and she was too indifferent to care what he thought. He motioned to David to come into the hall.
“Have you been recently in Bombay?” he asked in his gravest voice.
“Last week,” David said.
“Was she in the native city?” the doctor demanded.
“Once,” David said.
“I fear it is bubonic plague. I heard only yesterday that it has broken out in Bombay—hundreds dying every day.”
David could not speak. Plague, the dreadful companion of famine, almost certain death, to reach for his beloved!
“What shall I do?” he cried.
“There is nothing to do, alas,” the doctor said. “We can only wait. I will send an English nurse. We shall know within forty-eight hours.”
Within forty-eight hours, while David neither slept nor ate, the chills of death descended. In Olivia’s slender body the inguinal buboes swelled. The doctor, feeling her soft groins, knew the fearful signs.
“You must prepare yourself,” he told David sternly.
David stood waiting by the bedside, where Olivia lay unconscious.
“She will not live through tomorrow,” the doctor said. “Nothing can save her.”
“I shall pray all night,” David said with dry lips.
“Do so, by all means,” the doctor said. He was too kind to tell the Christian that prayer might comfort the soul of the living but he did not believe that it could save the one doomed to die. He gave a few directions to the faithful middle-aged English nurse. The younger nurses would not take a case of plague but good Mrs. Fortescue went where she was sent.
“Oh, it’s sad, her being so young, and the little baby,” she was moaning.
“The child may escape,” the doctor replied. “Nature is careful of the newly born.” He turned to David again. “Mr. MacArd, you must live now for the child. Go away and rest—or pray.”
David hesitated, and obeyed. He left the room and went down the hall to his study, and when he had closed the door, he fell on his knees to pray not with words but with all the agony his heart could hold that his beloved might live.
In the little compound church the Fordhams gathered the few Indian Christians, and he heard the wailing of their prayers through the hot December day and all through the night. …
Sometime near dawn the nurse touched his shoulder.
“She’s gone, Mr. MacArd.”
He lifted his head. While he prayed that she might live, Olivia had died! He rose to his feet, his mind dazed, his heartbeats shattering his body.
“There’s nothing more you can do now,” the nurse said. “Try to think of your little boy.”
But he could only think of Olivia. He gasped a few words, staring down at the nurse.
“I must see her again—”
“No, no—think of the boy, sir—”
She held his arm, and before he could reply, they heard the sound of sad singing. Someone had already run across the compound and told the Christians that death had come and they lifted their voices in the Christian hymn, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”
It was foreign music to them, the tune was uncertain, and suddenly it was drowned in a wild wailing throughout the compound. Every servant and every neighbor was crying aloud until the instinctive human sorrow of India, always brimming and ready to run over, broke into the old music of the centuries.
“Ram—Ram is true—”
The cry of desperate faith in the presence of death rang like a shriek through the dawn, the old heathen words welled up out of the heart of India and David heard them and did not lift his head.
The plague swept through Poona and one out of every ten of Poona’s people died. Among them were Darya’s two sons, and when they were dead Leilamani and her baby daughter followed them, and Darya was left alone in the beautiful house built over the fountain of living water.
br /> But David had his son.
Part III
X
THE SUN WAS SINKING into the Red Sea in a fury of dying color. Heat smouldered along the horizon, it inflamed the half clouded sky and as the sun touched the water the hot light ran across the smooth sullen water like liquid metal.
“I haven’t seen such a sunset since I left India,” he said.
“It is terrifying,” the girl said thoughtfully.
She was slim and white clad, English, her fair hair drawn back from the pale oval of her face. He was tall and slender of shoulder, his hair was a bright auburn, and his eyes were grey and deepset. Both of them, Ted MacArd and Agnes Linlay, were going home. They had met in ship fashion, attracted to each other because they had come from India and were going back again. Her father was Governor-general in an eastern province, and had his father been an ordinary missionary she might not have allowed herself to continue the casual friendship begun soon after she came aboard. Everybody in India knew David MacArd, the famous missionary, who was Ted’s father. Besides, he was the grandson of the great MacArd, the American financier. Nevertheless, though he was pleasant, equally at ease with the dancing set as with the missionaries who clung to him, she did not know how far she wanted the friendship to go; neither, she felt, did he. He did not pursue her and yet when she appeared on deck after tea he was there as though he had been waiting for her. Yet she was not sure that he had been.
“How do you think of India?” he asked rather abruptly.
She lifted her accurate brown eyebrows. “Meaning?”
“Is it home or isn’t it?”
She gave honest thought to the answer. “I don’t know. I want to see my parents again, of course, and in a way where they are is home. I am not sure that I really want to see India, and yet bits of memories fly into my mind, and did, all the time I was away. You know, early morning when the air is still cool and I hear the bulbul singing in the garden, or evening and the dusty sunset, and the ayah folding my clean clothes.”
“And the wailing music in the night,” he added.
“I wonder why there is always music in the night,” she agreed.
“So many people—”
“I know.”
They were silent, gazing into the flaming sky from which the sun had suddenly disappeared. The fiery stream faded from the oily sea and the curves of the ship’s wake caught long lines of crimson afterglow.
“Perhaps we are never quite at home anywhere,” she said. “When we’re in India, we talk of going home somewhere else, England for me, America for you. When we’re there—at least when I was in England, I was always thinking of India.”
“So was I when I was in America.”
Back of the sunset was the country he had left, his own and peculiarly dear because he had been so much in exile. Once during the ten years he had been there he had gone back to spend a vacation with his father in India, and twice his father had come to visit him. He had had a good time at school, first at prep and then at college, although he could still remember how he had cried secretly when he left Poona, at twelve. But he had soon forgotten that, and his old grandfather had been fond of him and had bought him anything he wanted. He had spent his vacations with his grandfather in the old Fifth Avenue house, now so out of fashion and yet so comfortable. He had not been lonely, because he had brought friends home with him, and besides, he had always felt the life of the house and the family and been proud of it. When his father came back there were the three generations of MacArds together, although the two women who had been the links between them were dead. He had studied their portraits often, both women beautiful and aristocratic, his grandmother gentle and his mother proud.
“Though your mother changed,” his father had said once when they stood together before Olivia’s portrait. “She was a proud young girl but after our marriage the pride disappeared, for some reason, and she was often very humble and sweet.”
“Did she change or you, Father?” Ted had asked.
“I don’t know,” his father replied. “India doesn’t leave a man unchanged, certainly.”
That summer, only two years ago, his grandfather had exerted himself, feeble as his massive frame had become. There had been a reconciliation of some sort between his father and his grandfather and he was glad for it. Then he had been half afraid to tell his grandfather that he, too, wanted to go back to India. But his grandfather had not protested.
“I don’t know what you see in that damned country, but do as you please.” That was what he had said in his grumbling way and then he had said in a voice suddenly strong, “The second time it doesn’t hurt. Children don’t pay for their keep and I’ve learned to manage alone.”
Nevertheless it had been a happy summer. His grandfather had even talked of opening the long closed Maine house but in the end they had simply stayed together in town, and he enjoyed being with his father. The two older men had talked and he had listened, as usual. He was not a great talker except in that superficial chatter of his own generation. Perhaps that was India again. He held a world of memories within himself which other young men knew nothing about, and which he could not explain to them for they had nothing wherewith to understand, memories of the close black nights in his childhood when he woke to see the tiny oil lamp at his ayah’s bed burning in a flicker scarcely larger than a lit match and yet which made him feel safe, memories of the endless slow moving stream of white-garbed people in the streets outside the mission compound, or of the students at his father’s school, stopping to fondle him and practice their English upon him. He could still remember the smell of clean brown skin when they wrapped him in their arms, a smell as fresh as new cut grass on the lawns because being Hindu they ate no meat and he could remember, too, how dark were their eyes, and how the whites were tinged with blue. He remembered above all the endless kindness toward him. He had not missed his mother’s love, no, nor his busy father, so often absent, because there had been many people everywhere to love him and caress him and hold him in their arms. That was his first memory now when he thought of India, the boundless outgoing love, not because of what he was but simply because he was a child and perhaps because he was motherless. Women in the streets, old grandmotherly women, and younger mother women going to the well to fetch water, jars on their heads as they walked, and sister girls all knew him and paused to speak to him, to give him a bit of fruit or an Indian sweet, and he accepted all and he ate foods which would have frightened his father had he known, but there was much Ted never told his father or anyone and that he shared alone with India. He understood early that his India and his father’s India were two different countries, and for him there was only one, his own.
He had never known any girl well until now he was beginning to know Agnes. In his childhood he had no girl playmates. Mrs. Fordham, it was true, had given birth to a belated girl child to her astonishment and even embarrassment, but Ruthie, as they called her, was three years younger than he, a round-faced, round-eyed child with whom he would have been ashamed to play. When he visited his father, she had already been sent back to some church school in Ohio, and Mrs. Fordham was as briskly childless as ever. And it always seemed too much trouble to explain to any of the girls in America why he was going to India and, since they did not know and probably could not understand, they had remained far from him even while he carried on the gay conversations that were suitable. But this remoteness had made him shy of falling in love, and now he did not want to be more than friends even with Agnes. Some day, of course, he must marry and have children. His grandfather had been plain about that.
“You are the only scion of the family, Ted,” his grandfather had said the night before he left. The old man was lying in his bed, very straight and thin and only his big bones made him still look big. He was easily tired and he went to bed early, but he liked Ted to come in and talk, and he had gone on, “Your father never married again though I wish he had, but I couldn’t say anything because a second marriage would
have been impossible for me too. We MacArd men are faithful to our women.”
He had champed his jaws under his big snow-white beard which he never bothered to cut nowadays and he had turned his eyes away from Ted to the portrait on the chimney-piece opposite his bed. He could not see it very clearly any more but memory lit the dim outlines of the beloved face.
“Marry a good woman,” he commanded in a loud voice, “marry and have a lot of children. She always wanted many children and we had one. Your mother ought to have had a dozen children, she had as lithe and strong a frame as could be found, but India killed her.”
He closed his eyes, overcome by the fitful sleep which fell upon him now at any moment, and Ted waited. In a moment his grandfather had suddenly opened his eyes. “What the devil are you going to India for?” he demanded.
“I don’t know yet,” Ted had said. “I want to go and I may not stay.”
But he knew that he would stay. He had found no place for himself in America—pleasant, oh yes, that indeed, and everybody waiting to be his friend. He had missed the war by his youth, spending those years cloistered in boys’ schools, and now, college over, he had come out into a world he did not know, glittering, laughing, corrupt, and reaching for him. The heir to the MacArd millions could scarcely escape the reaching hands and he had retired quickly to the old house where his grandfather lived, emerging shyly to accept invitations, moving with a gay poise that puzzled the mothers and the daughters to whom he was so eligible a young male.
Even his father had not urged him to come back to India. “Don’t feel you must come back to India,” David had written. “There is always a place for you here, of course, and there are times when I sorely hope you will come at least for a few years, that we may learn to know each other again. But I did not follow my father, and you must not follow me.”
It was not his father, it was India. He was going back to something he knew, an old world, a gentle world, often poor and starving and always kind. Nobody and nothing in America needed him, so he had felt. But perhaps his India did.