Come, My Beloved

  “Then we certainly ought to wait,” Mrs. Fordham said in some alarm.

  “Why?” Ruthie said in innocence. “We had better get it over with before he comes.”

  Mr. Fordham, when the question was put to him, agreed with his daughter, not in order to escape MacArd wrath, but because he was indignant that his daughter might be considered not good enough for anybody.

  “We are plain Christian people,” he said, “and we are good enough even for the MacArds.”

  Thus it was settled. Ruthie wrote to Ted that she would just as lief get married now, if he were willing, and then they could have a Christmas together in Vhai. The wedding would be small, she said, and she would just as lief not have many white people come to it, and she would ask only her best Indian friends. If he wanted to wait until his father came home, she would wait, but she would just as lief not.

  This letter Ted received at the end of a day of unusual exhaustion after his clinic, and doubts beset him. He was probably doing the wrong thing, but the affair had gone too far now to stop. He divined that even in this a subtle India had influenced him, so that marriage seemed not so much a matter of romantic love for two individuals as a convenience in his life. It would be very convenient as well as pleasant to have a sweet-tempered girl busy about his house and managing the details of housekeeping for his comfort. A girl from America, or England, or even from the levels of white society in India, would never live in Vhai, even for love. After all, Ruthie was unique.

  These thoughts occupied several hours of the breathless night, when the burning darkness sat on his chest like a hot and furry beast. He slept at last, convinced that Ruthie was his fate.

  A pleasant fate, he decided, in the midst of the marriage ceremony, when she stood up beside him in a short white linen dress. She had cut her hair very short and it curled in flat ends close to her head. He looked down on this feathery mass of gold, and saw upon her sunbrowned cheek a soft fruity down. Her lips were red and her brown eyes serious. Mr. Fordham was performing the rites and the university chapel was crowded with staring, lively Indians. None of the English were there, and only a few white missionaries of other sects in Poona. He knew them all from childhood but of their children not many had grown up and come back.

  “Do you, Theodore, take this woman—” Mr. Fordham’s voice trembled slightly. He questioned now the wisdom of his performing the ceremony in Dr. MacArd’s absence. But Ruthie had persisted and as usual he had yielded.

  “I do,” Ted said almost gaily.

  “Do you, Ruth, take this man—” he spoke each word clearly and almost sternly for Ruthie’s ears and she replied with unconcern, “Yes, indeed I do, Father.”

  It was over, they walked down the aisle to the wedding march which Mrs. Fordham forced out of the wheezy baby organ, and there was no nonsense about rice. Rice was much too precious to throw about and the Indians would not have understood it. They did not have a reception or any food because castes were too complicating. Ruthie went back to the mission house and put on a thin brown cotton frock for traveling, she bade her parents good-by, pursing her full soft lips to kiss them heartily on each cheek and to hug her ayah, and then she turned to Ted, who was waiting.

  “I’m ready, Ted, let’s go.”

  They got into a tonga, the driver suggested to his horse that he begin his duty, and thus they left the mission house. Mr. and Mrs. Fordham stood side by side on the porch and watched them out of the gate. When the gate shut they turned to each other.

  “Well?” Mr. Fordham asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, hesitating. “I never saw a couple just like them.”

  “I guess there isn’t a couple just like them,” he replied. “But I believe they will suit each other. Anyway, they know India and what they have to cope with.”

  “What they have to cope with,” Mrs. Fordham said with some spirit, “is each other.”

  Mr. Fordham avoided this and looked at his watch. “It’s time for me to get out to the west chapel. I have to preach there this afternoon, wedding or no wedding, and I am taking a load of tracts.”

  “Ruthie, I want to say something to you.”

  It was the middle of the afternoon of their wedding day and the train was rocking along in the hot dust.

  “Do,” Ruthie replied. She opened her eyes and yawned. “I’m ashamed that I went to sleep, but I usually do sleep in the afternoon.”

  They had lunched on the train, a poor imitation of a wretched English meal. After it they had returned to their own compartment and she had placed herself compactly upon one of the wooden benches, her cloth handbag under her head for a pillow, and had slept for two hours. He was amazed, and when she woke he remarked that had he known she wished to sleep he would have told his servant, Baj, now their servant, to open the bedding for her so that she might have been comfortable. To this she had made no reply but he saw her cheeks flush a very pretty dark pink, and he knew the time had come to say what he had to say.

  “We haven’t had much time for talk,” he went on. “But there is plenty of time ahead, and so we needn’t hurry things.”

  He had done much thinking in the days before his marriage and he had prayed more than usual for wisdom and self-control and the fruit of prayer was that he had made up his mind he would not take Ruthie in a hasty carnal fashion. They must be friends before they became lovers. Only thus could he respect himself and her, but mostly himself, because it was necessary for him, and he feared that she was so soft, so yielding, so childish, that she would do whatever he said, without knowing his deepest necessity, which was not of the flesh, but the spirit.

  “Tell me what you mean,” she said. “You needn’t be afraid of me. I’m not a bit shy. Heavens, I guess I couldn’t grow up in India and see all I’ve seen and hear all I’ve heard and still be the least shy.”

  He felt relieved by her frankness.

  “I will say what I have in mind,” he replied, “and yet I want you to understand at the same time why I have made the decision.”

  “Decision?” she repeated, her pansy eyes opening wide at him.

  “I am a normal man, I suppose,” he said with plenty of his own shyness now. “It would be easy enough for me just to—”

  “I know,” she said, “go on, please.”

  “I would like to—to wait until it means something more to us than just the—flesh,” he said. “I can put it in a verse of the Scripture, perhaps. ‘That good thing which was committed unto thee, keep by the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.’ I think our marriage is going to be a good thing, Ruthie, but I want to keep it in the Holy Spirit, and spirit must come first.”

  She pondered. “Hasn’t it come in you?”

  “Not yet,” he replied. This was very hard. “I feel the flesh, but not the spirit.”

  “I feel the flesh, too,” she said rather sadly. “And I wouldn’t like to wait too long, because, honestly, I want a baby, Ted, just as soon as possible. I would like to have a lot of children.”

  He stared at her. He had not thought of a baby, but of course she had. His motherless life had not taught him to think of children, and so he had thought only of himself, and his soul.

  But she was not thinking of herself, she simply wanted a baby, and that, after all, was the purpose of marriage. The people of Vhai were right. They married their sons and daughters to each other so that there might be children born, but he had been making of marriage a complexity entirely his own, of spirit and sinful flesh.

  He laughed suddenly. Ruthie was right and he was wrong and there was no reason why she should not have children as soon as she wanted them. Why should he prudishly deny her children because he wanted to test the quality of his soul?

  “What is making you laugh?” she inquired.

  The heat of the train had forced little rills of sweat down the sides of her cheeks and her curls were damp about her forehead. The shaking car had scattered dust from its cracks and this mingled with her sweat to make delicate lines of mud.
/>
  “I wonder if my face is as dirty as yours,” he said gaily. “Come here and let me wipe it off.”

  So she came to his side where he sat, and he blessed the solitude of English trains which locked them alone in a compartment together until they reached the next station, three hours away.

  “It’s not dirt,” she protested, “just earth blown off the fields.”

  He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the stains away, tenderness mounting in him. Her brown eyes were lovely, deep and soft, the lashes thick and dark, and her face was really like a pansy, just as he had thought when he first saw her. His heart began to beat hard and his breath quickened. This was not love, of course, but love would come. He could not possibly feel all this without its ending in love. She had small richly convoluted ears set close to her head, and a pretty neck. He glanced down and saw the rise of her breasts, where her frock opened, then hastily looked upward and caught the full pleading look of her eyes.

  She said in her honest fashion, “You haven’t kissed me—did you mean not to do that, too?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered helplessly, “I don’t know just what I do mean.”

  He looked at her lips now, parted and fresh, her small teeth white between, and suddenly he bent his head.

  Part IV

  XVI

  “LIVY, I’M SCARED TO tell your father,” Ruth said. She looked at the dark and beautiful girl who was their eldest child. They should have sent Livy home to school in Ohio long ago, but they had let her stay on even after the three boys went, who were younger. She had begged to stay because she said she had no friends in America.

  “You’ll soon make friends,” her father had said.

  “But here I have them already,” Livy had replied too quickly.

  They should have sent her anyway, Ruth thought, gazing at Livy with quiet troubled eyes. Ten was the oldest you ought to keep them and Livy was sixteen. They had sent her to an English boarding school last year, and she was back in Vhai again for her long vacation. She had changed too much in the year, or maybe they had not noticed before how much she had grown. Girls grew up fast in this hot climate. Livy was a woman, slender but full-breasted, and her face had lost its childish curves. She looked like the picture of Ted’s mother.

  “I’m not frightened of Father,” Livy said. She spoke with a soft English accent which she had learned from her schoolmates, and which she chose to speak.

  She was a quiet girl, self-repressed, torn by rebellion against the deep caste feelings of English girls. She believed passionately in her mother’s literal acceptance of all Indians as human beings. Her father accepted too, but Livy was shrewd and intelligent and years ago she had observed that her father and mother were two different people. Her father believed as a Christian that Indians should be treated exactly as white people and he was careful to do this, but here was the difference, he was too careful, while her mother was entirely careless because she could not help treating everybody the same and Livy knew that of the two her mother was the more powerful. Her father could never belong wholly to Vhai, but her mother could and she did belong here as much as the banyan tree with its hundred roots.

  She had counted upon her mother’s understanding now and it must not fail. For in her heart she was terrified at what had happened to her. She had fallen in love with Jatin. It was inexplicable, she did not know how it had happened, for she had known Jatin for years, at least three, and she had not thought of loving him. He came from Poona, and he had been graduated with highest honors from the medical college of MacArd University and so her father had invited him to come to Vhai and set up a rural clinic and a small hospital. She had heard her father praise him and declare that he was someone to depend upon, someone who could take over the whole of Vhai’s village improvement work and the widening effect it had in the whole province, and perhaps on India too, since independence. The new Indian government was talking of pilot centers of village education and public health and local government, such as her father had built up in Vhai. The village was beautiful now, and she never tired of hearing how different it had once been. But it had not occurred to her that she could fall in love here. She loved it with her whole heart, but still that had nothing to do with falling in love with Jatin.

  Nevertheless, it had happened. When she came back from school only a month ago, she had fallen in love with Jatin at first sight, but of course it was not first sight, for she had seen him hundreds of times. But this time it had been different, only not different really, for when she got home she had to go and see everybody she knew and so she had run over to the clinic one bright morning to speak to the two Indian nurses, and to Jatin, too, of course, and she had stood in the doorway looking about and he was the only one in the little entrance hall where he was slipping into his white coat, and he looked at her as though he saw an angel. That was the way she felt. No one had ever looked at her like that before, and she had felt hot all over.

  “Livy, how beautiful you have grown.” That was what he said. Then he had come straight to her and had taken her hands and looked down into her face, so tenderly and kindly that her heart crumbled.

  “I’m just the same,” she had stammered.

  He dropped her hands and stood looking at her and then the nurses came in and the moment was over. But of course they had seen each other almost at once and alone. She could not keep away from him, and she pretended that she wanted to help in the clinic and she did want to help, but because he was there. And after a few days of that, it was natural to stay late to wash up, because he always stayed late. And then it was only two weeks and a day until they were alone every day, or nearly every day, because he was very fearful about gossip and so sometimes he sent her away as soon as they kissed. Yesterday he had been troubled because he was sure that the sweeper saw them.

  “I don’t care,” she had retorted. “Of course we have to be married, Jatin. That’s what people do when they are in love.”

  He had been very troubled at this, his handsome eyes immediately sad. “I think it is not possible for us, my Livy.”

  “It is, it is,” she had insisted. “My father and mother are not like other white people.”

  “Ah,” he said in his quiet way, “they are not, indeed, but will they be willing for marriage between us? I think not.”

  “Then I shan’t believe they are Christian,” she cried.

  “Don’t speak so, Livy,” he had begged her in his gentlest voice. “You know they are Christian. But—”

  “What?” she demanded.

  “It is very difficult to reach the ultimate of one’s religion.”

  She did not understand what he meant and so she had simply repeated herself. “If they are willing, Jatin, then will you let us be married?”

  “My darling, we will hope.”

  “I’ll make them,” she had declared confidently.

  Now she sat with her mother over the mending basket, a task she detested, but which could not be done by a servant because Indian women did not know how to sew well enough. Saris needed no sewing, and the children wore no clothes when they were small, beyond a shawl wrapped about them if the night was cold. Still, this morning she had welcomed being alone with her mother, for her mother must know first and then talk with her father. There was a strategy to be followed.

  She said, “Father ought to be willing for me to marry Jatin. He’s always saying that Jatin is wonderful.”

  “So he is,” Ruth replied. “But that’s different.”

  She sat gazing at her daughter, her pansy brown eyes dark with anxiety. The monsoons had come early this year, and though she was grateful as everybody was, still there was melancholy in the long ceaseless rains. They must expect another week of it before clouds parted to show the darkly purple summer sides. Meanwhile she sewed, and this was her relaxation. Livy had flung down the pillowcase she was mending and was walking around, her underlip pouting.

  “Sit down, Livy, do, and don’t pout at me. Here, you can tu
rn this hem. Sara grows faster than I can keep her dresses let out. I’ll finish the pillow slip.”

  Livy sat down, again fitted her thimble to her middle finger. She was a tall girl and she moved with an indolent yet active grace she had learned from Indian girls who were her closest friends, not only the girls in the village, but the daughters, too, of the men whom her father had gathered around him. Long ago, as she knew, he had come here alone, determined to live as the villagers lived, and then her mother came as his wife, and the next year she herself was born in one of the two little rooms which were the first part of the house. The house was still earthen and its roof thatched, but ten rooms had been added and under the thatch was stretched heavy blue cotton homespun cloth for ceilings, so that lizards and insects and snakes could not drop out of the thatch to the floor and bite their bare feet, although as children they had felt no fear. They were used to searching their slippers and shoes in the mornings, instinctively they looked before they stepped, and Vhai was their home. Around the low and sprawling house her mother had planted grass and flowers, so that it no longer looked the house it had been when she came to it as a bride.

  Vhai itself was changed. When her father first came here to live, as a young man, so bitterly against her grandfather’s will, as she knew, the village of Vhai was as barren as a desert, as all villages were. But her father and mother, while they shared the life of the people, had improved it in small ways, and then in big ones. Her father had even engaged an artesian well digger to come all the way from Bombay and put in more than twenty wells. Other villages had seen the benefit of the irrigated fields and they had dug wells, so that the whole region of Vhai had become beautiful and productive. It was a low region, over-sheltered by the distant Himalayas, and in the season of monsoons the land became a lake. But her father had taught the people how to dig ditches and lay village-made pottery tile, so that around Vhai, at least, floods no longer rotted the earth. Far beyond Vhai he did not go, declaring that people would hear of Vhai and come and see for themselves. This they had, but not as much as he felt they should, which made him gloomy at times. But Jatin had said, “How can half-starved people walk hundreds of miles to see something which they will never have the strength to do? First they must eat and grow strong enough to work for themselves. Alas, they have no food, so they must first be given food, and there you have the worst problem.”