“At least you wouldn’t mind my going to visit Uncle Darya in prison?”
David hesitated. “I suppose not, though he won’t be there long. Government simply wants to make an example. The Viceroy has talked at length with me about the strategy.”
“Rather a pity that they had the Durbar at this moment, don’t you think? A sort of display of power?”
His father corrected him. “A display of strength, not power, and strength is essential.”
Now or never, Ted thought, and from the very beginning he must have courage to disagree with his father.
“I wonder, even so, if it is wise,” he said pleasantly. “The people here have such a profound recklessness of themselves. They have so little to lose, I suppose, a mud hut, two lengths of cotton cloth, a handful of pulse or wheat. They don’t mind death, it comes so soon anyway—twenty-seven years is the life span, isn’t it? And I suppose for most of them prison is a good deal better than everyday life for at least they get fed.”
“I agree that they have too little,” his father replied. “And it has been the whole purpose of my life to create better leadership for them, so that conditions can be improved. I think I am making the greatest possible contribution toward their independence in providing educated Indian leaders, Christian if possible. The sooner, then, can independence became a reality. England would welcome responsible Indian leaders but not a fanatic who insists upon wearing a dhoti and spends half his time spinning on a primitive wheel, so that the people won’t buy good English cloth.”
“I know too little to agree or disagree,” Ted said honestly. “But I shall go to see Uncle Darya.”
His father did not answer. The plates were removed and the servant brought on what Miss Parker, Ted remembered, used to call a shape. It was a trembling block of blancmange, surrounded by a circle of thick yellow custard. He helped himself to the accustomed dish and ate it without too much difficulty.
“Go to the villages,” Darya said.
The guard had allowed the tall red-haired young American a special favor. He need not talk with the prisoner through the barricade. Instead the wooden gate was unlocked and Ted had come into the bare room opening upon a grey dusty patch of ground. Here he had found Darya alone, writing at a table made of two boards supported on posts driven into the earthen floor. He had looked up startled and for a full second he did not recognize his visitor. Then he saw who it was and he sprang to his feet and threw his arms about him.
“Ted, my friend, my son—”
“Uncle Darya, I had to come as soon as I knew you were here.”
“Your father did not object?”
“No.”
So they had begun their talk. Ted sat down cross-legged on the earth, refusing the stool Darya tried to give him, and one question was enough, “Uncle Darya, how came you here?”
“You must know,” Darya began, and he took up the story of his life from the moment when he saw his little younger son die and after him the older son, and then Leilamani had died and the baby girl and at last Darya was left alone.
“I said I would become a sadhu,” Darya declared. His great eyes darkened, his mobile face grew tragic. “I divided my property between my brothers, I put on common clothes and sandals, I set forth by foot to travel everywhere through the villages, not begging as true sadhus must do, for I knew myself still richer than the people in the villages, and I fed myself and even gave to them when they starved. Oh Ted, if you would know India, go to the villages!”
Ted did not speak. Across his clasped knees he listened, watching the handsome weary face of his father’s friend.
“North and south I went,” Darya was saying, “east and west I traveled, alone and always on foot, and I slept at night with the peasants, I ate with them, I listened to their talk, staying sometimes for days and weeks in a single place until I knew the people as my own. I buried my sorrow in their sorrows, I forgot the death in my house because they died by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. I saw my India, a wretched starving suffering people, living upon a rich soil never their own, oppressed by greedy landlords and driven by debt and taxation. The whole country moves to and fro with the restlessness of the misery of the people and I forgot all that I had ever been. I am become another man, a single flame burns here—”
He knotted his hands on his breast, “And then I found Gandhiji.”
His hands dropped. “Mind you, I am not a blind worshiper of this man. No, indeed, I can see him as he is, but still I will follow him because he is not working for himself. Ted, I tell you, renunciation is the test. If a man renounces all that he has for the sake of others, then that man can be trusted. Without renunciation, trust none.”
The heat in the small room was like a weight of lead. The high wall kept away the hope of any wind, and the dusty patch of earth outside the door where not a weed could grow, reflected an intenser sun. There was no shield.
“What will you do here?” Ted asked in actual distress. “It will grow hotter until the monsoons come and that is many months away.”
“I look at the clouds,” Darya said. “Morning and evening the clouds float across my bit of sky and I stand in that patch of dust and gaze at them, and I imagine them as they go. They come from the north, the Himalayas, and of the snow-covered mountains I dream, and of the valleys between. Did you know? Those valleys are full of flowers, fed by the melting snow.”
His voice, so harsh and impassioned a moment before, was suddenly tender, rich, a wonderful flexible voice, slow and soft, swift and powerful, responding to every mood and thought. Ted heard it, but he must not allow the beautiful voice to catch his emotions, no, nor the beautiful face and the spirit of this man, the enchantment of renunciation, the enchantment of righteousness. It was there, he could feel it, the sweetness of yielding one’s whole self. He had been tempted even by the teachings of Jesus. There was a delight of surrender which he tasted but which he had resisted, fearing the distances to which it might lead him. He searched Darya’s face and found in it no bitterness, no anger and no sorrow, only content and joy and exaltation.
“Uncle Darya, what is your hope?”
“To see my people free,” Darya said, “to see them able to help themselves, to see them owning their own land, choosing their own government, living in decency and self-respect and mutual co-operation.” He lifted his face to the square of sultry white sky, where the light was metal hot. “And one day, I shall see them so. I shall see flesh on their bones, and the children will not wail with hunger any more, because they will be fed and not one will be hungry.”
“By the grace of God?”
Darya’s face changed, he opened his eyes and stared at the young white man. “No! By the grace of man! That is what you Christians always say. God, God! How dare you speak his name? Look into your own holy books—‘Not every one that crieth Lord, Lord—’ can you not remember?”
The gentle voice was a roar and Ted was silenced. It was true—and how had he mentioned the name in the presence of such renunciation? He had no right to speak the name of God.
“Uncle Darya, I must go.” He got to his feet and held out his hand. “You have shaken me, I confess it, not by what you have said, but by what you have done. You are right. I am not worthy to speak the name of God. I ask you to forgive me.”
Darya grasped his hand in both his own. “No, no, I let myself be angry and that is not good. You are not guilty, you are like a child. I must keep my anger for those who are guilty. Come again, my son—come and give me joy.”
“I will come, Uncle Darya, though not often, alas, because Poona is too far from here. But my father says the Viceroy will not allow you to be in jail very long. It is only a symbol, my father says.”
“A symbol of power,” Darya cried, “and I will resist it. If I am released, I shall make them arrest me again and again and again, until they see that it is no use. I, too, have power, and no one can take it away from me. Ted, you will see Gandhiji himself in jail before long, r
emember my words, I tell you it will be so.”
“I hope you are wrong.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No.”
“When you see him you will understand why we must follow him. He is the only one who gives us a road to walk upon. And who are we?” Darya spread out his beautiful dark hands. “Men without guns!”
“Uncle Darya, I must go.”
“Go, then, but come back.”
He went home wondering that Darya had joined his life with Gandhi’s. For if he had understood his Uncle Darya aright in all the years of childhood, it was to know that the beautiful and intelligent man loved life, he enjoyed physical pleasure, he was fastidious and thoughtful. And all this rich humanity was yielded up now to the ugly spare little man who did not care what he ate except that it must not be better than a peasant’s food, who chose a length of white cotton homespun as his garment, a little dark ascetic who lived by choice in a mud hut and walked barefoot. Renunciation, honesty, purity, whatever one chose to call it, whatever the charm, there it was, and Darya was not a man to be easily won. He knew the best as well as the worst even of England, he could wear an Englishman’s morning coat, striped trousers and silk top hat not only with enjoyment but with exceeding grace. He belonged by birth in a palace, his father’s mansion. Now he had chosen jail, now he had chosen poverty, and the renunciation was precious to him, not for God’s sake but for man’s.
Something trembled in Ted’s heart, a flickering flame, a marveling light, but he turned from it. He did not wish at this moment to examine his soul. He was young, his life was pleasant, the future bung bright over the horizon. For Agnes Linlay was constantly in his mind. He must hear her voice and see her in her own surroundings and know for himself what was between them, and what could be, before he examined his soul.
And by day the other country where his grandfather lived receded from his living thought and feeling. The old habits of childhood returned, they rose out of the shadows where they had waited during the years that he had spent in America and again the old half-Indian ways of the mission house became his ways, the hot nights, the shadowy days behind the dropped bamboo curtains and under the slowly waving punkahs, the foods peppered to sting the palate, the cooled melons, the flowering vines in the garden, the dark white-clad servants hastening to meet his possible need. And even in the schoolrooms, the eager, the too eager faces of the young Indian men, the half shy and always charming faces of the girls, their slender hands hovering ready to draw their saris over their heads, a gesture modest and enticing, coquettish and severe. There was much more here than Gandhi’s India.
And every week or two Agnes wrote in answer to his almost daily letters, the letters he sent in his need for companionship, for though he loved and revered his father, there was no possibility of companionship with a man who was now altogether missionary, and more than that, a missionary prince, a man upon whom the Viceroy called for advice when Church must come to the aid of Government. And Mr. and Mrs. Fordham were old and ridiculous and touching. Of all their children, only Ruthie was coming back. They talked a great deal about her and even showed him her picture, a roundfaced, simple pretty girl, whose small lips were too full for prettiness in the pleasant common face.
Besides these, there was only poor old Miss Parker in the compound, and her he avoided and knew himself cruel. He could not help it. She had grown moldy and unhealthy, and even religion had not kept her flesh sweet. She did not dry and wither, instead she grew stale and in the heat an odor, sour and rank, betrayed her presence in any room. It was hard, he supposed in his fastidious youth, for the old to keep clean, anyway in tropic heat.
In his loneliness he read and reread the letters from Agnes, always with vague disappointment at the end. She came no closer for the interchange. Though he poured his thoughts and feelings into his own letters, his increasing warmth brought only her kindly cool regard, her mild gaiety. Twice he had asked to see her, and twice she had put him off. The first time when he visited Darya he had wanted to continue eastward to her, but she put him off because she had planned a holiday with her parents into Kashmir, where her father liked to hunt, and again when he asked, she replied that everyone was too busy with plans for the visit of the Prince of Wales, who was to arrive on Christmas Eve.
Riots were expected, she wrote him, for there were rumors that nationalists were sending in malcontents from the jute mills, paying them each six annas a day to stir up the people against the Prince. But Government was rounding them up before the royal visit, and more than three thousand rebels were in jail. As for hartal—
“Actually complete hartal will be helpful,” she wrote, “for the people will stay at home. Otherwise many might be crushed to death in the crowds on the streets.”
Her letters rose to enthusiasm when the Prince of Wales arrived, and Ted read them thoughtfully, remembering Darya lonely in his prison cell. “It has all been a great success,” she wrote in January. “Most satisfying to us, of course, was the vast entertainment on the second day after Christmas, given entirely by the Indians. It was in the open, on the maidan, and thousands came to see him. How they cheered when the Prince drove slowly around—and it was so very comforting to us. Then he mounted the magnificent dais, and sat down, although he rose as soon as the program began, to receive the sacred offerings—silver coconuts, sweet rice, flowers—all on silver platters. He was finally garlanded and could sit again. Then three great processions came slowly toward him, the first one of priests in their saffron robes, chanting Sanskrit hymns to the most beautiful music, soft and yet wild and sad. Then came thirteen bullock carts, each with a spectacle, a tableau of Indian life, the figures so motionless and poised one could have sworn them of bronze instead of flesh and blood. Then there was the Thibetan dance procession. Of course there was everything else—Manipur dancers, very pretty and so young in their stiff golden skirts and dark bodices, and finally a tremendous historical pageant of the Mogul era. Oh, but the best was when it was all over and the crowd surged forward toward the Prince simply to show their love! And even on the twenty-ninth when he left, the cheering crowds gathered along the river to see him off, although the Pansy was moored by Outram Ghat and his departure was supposed to be private. They were all middle class and working people, too. A great triumph for the British Empire! My father is delighted and so are we all.”
Ted put this letter down. She had never been so warm, so excited, but none of this emotion was for him. It was time indeed to go and see her face to face.
XII
HE REACHED CALCUTTA ON a day already growing hot and went at once to the hotel after the dusty journey. His bearer had fetched his bags and bedding and now hastened ahead to prepare his bath and tea. In the lobby he lingered at the desk, hoping for a letter from Agnes. There was a chit, an invitation not for immediate luncheon, but for tea this afternoon and tennis, a cool little note, not unfriendly perhaps but wary, or did he so imagine? The pale grey paper was thick, and it was embossed with the crest of Government House. But Government House, he reminded himself, was home for her. He must not expect her to be as she had been on the ship, simple and single and free to be herself. She was the Governor’s daughter, and an English woman in India. He stood fingering the note, remembering with a sudden blush the frankness of his letters. He had all but made love to her, for love was very easy. He was still lonely, the nights were hot and long and he dreamed of companionship.
Well, then, he would sleep and rest and read, perhaps even study his language lessons, for he was determined to master not only the literate Marathi but Hindustani and vernacular Gujerati, and after that if possible the other chief languages of India so that wherever he went he could speak to people. Poona, he was beginning to feel, was not to be his final home, but the future was not clear until he had seen Agnes. He mounted the marble steps then and went to his room. There his bearer had already let down the mosquito net, had drawn the shutters and the punkah was in motion.
“English b
ath, sahib,” the faithful one said, grinning white teeth in a dark face, meaning that here was a vast porcelain tub and cumbrous plumbing and running hot and cold water.
“That is good,” Ted replied. “Now bring me some food, and then you go and sleep, too. I shall sleep all morning.”
“Yes, Sahib.”
The man drifted away, closing the door silently. The room was suddenly quiet, the thick walls shut away the sounds of the street and there was only the faint squeak of the punkah, moving to and fro.
The gardens at Government House were a display of imperial splendor. The heat had not been allowed to scorch the flowers, English larkspur mingled with the luscious Indian blooms and roses, and orchids grew in the shadow of huge lath houses. Lawns spread in acres of green and in the center the dignified mansion rose like an immense English country house. The hired carriage rolled along the driveway and stopped at the entrance steps, his bearer leaped nimbly down from beside the driver and Ted got out.
“You may come back in two hours, or wait,” he directed.
“I wait, Sahib,” the bearer said with dignity. He was handsome in fresh white garments, and he was aware that he did honor to his master, even here.
“Very well,” Ted said.
He mounted the steps and at the open door behind the mosquito screens a servant, a Sikh, tall and bearded, splendid in a blue and gold livery, waited for him.
“Miss Linlay,” Ted said.
“Expecting you, Sahib,” the Sikh said suavely and ushered him into the reception room to the left of the huge square entrance hall.
There he waited, but only a moment for almost at once she came, looking cool and beautiful in her white linen tennis frock, as he saw immediately, her fair hair drawn back into a large knot on her neck, and her face pale, though touched with a faint sudden blush. At her throat she had fastened a yellow rose.
“Agnes!” He took both her hands and looked down into her smiling face, and how blue her eyes were, he thought, more blue even than he remembered and her lips even more sweet. He was overcome with a sudden impulse to bend and kiss those lips, an impulse so strong that he could resist it only by the utmost will. But he knew that she could be deeply and delicately offended, and he would not risk it.