Jatin was clever and strong and handsome and she loved him because he could say things like that even to her father. Only why was he so timid now? They could be married and live in Vhai forever, because she loved Vhai almost as much as he did.
Ah, but she could never explain Vhai to the English and American girls at school. “Do you live in a nasty village?” That was how they put it.
“A village, but not nasty,” she always said.
Yet she did not try to explain more than that for they could not understand. How could they? When they thought of India it was of great houses encircled with verandas, set in vast compounds, of uniformed Indian servants and dinner parties where the guests were always white people. None of them spoke any Indian language, except perhaps a servant dialect half pidgin, which they had picked up from their ayahs. How could they understand the depth of love she had for Vhai, this village full of people, all of whom loved her, because she was not only herself, but also the daughter of her parents? And she could never explain to them how she loved this house, reaching far enough to make rooms for herself and her brothers and her sister, but whose floor was brushed every morning with cow dung. That she could never explain, because the girls would give little screams of horror and they would never believe her if she told them how cool and smooth the earthen floors felt under bare feet, the earthen floors beaten as hard as marble and then brushed with the water from a pail in which had been flung a handful of cow dung, and the two mixed until the mixture was complete and clean. When the floor was dry, it was like old mahogany, polished as satin. But how could the English girls believe it was so?
She learned to live two entirely separate lives, one the life with the English girls where, because she was a MacArd, they did not treat her as they might a common missionary’s daughter, those persons who were only a little better indeed than Anglo-Indians, and the other when she came home to Vhai. Oh, the deep and solid comfort of coming home to Vhai, where she could walk with no more on her feet than sandals, where often after her morning bath, she simply put on a cotton sari with a little short-sleeved blouse, pleating and knotting the long ends as skilfully about her narrow waist as though she were an Indian girl! And indeed she was much an Indian, for it is not only blood that makes the human being but the air breathed, the water drunk, the food eaten, the sounds heard, the language spoken and those with whom communication is made most deeply, and for her these were all Indian. She was closer to her mother than to her father because her mother, too, was much of an Indian woman, though her blood was American white. That was not quite the same as English white.
Yet, now, her mother could not understand her love for Jatin. She had thought she would, because she had been so sure that the India she and her mother loved were the same. They loved the little things in Vhai, the way the monkeys fought in the trees even when their quarrelsome chatter woke them in the mornings, the hum of the grindstone, the tinkle of silver bracelets and anklets as the women came and went with their water jars on their heads, the clatter and rattle of spinning wheels, for everybody these days tried to spin, at least an hour a day because Gandhiji was the Mahatma, the leader of all the souls of India.
“And I don’t want you to think that I approve, either,” her mother was saying. “For I don’t, Livy. I can’t go so far as to think it right that a white American girl should marry an Indian. Jatin isn’t even an Anglo-Indian.”
“You act as though he were an Untouchable,” Livy said with anger.
Her mother refused this insinuation. “Livy, I won’t have you say that, after all your father has done for Untouchables. Why, when Gandhiji took an untouchable girl into his household to be an adopted daughter to him, your father said that it was the final proof of his sincerity and he has believed in him ever since. And have I ever shown in this house that I cared about caste?”
Livy said, “Jatin and I want to be married.”
Ruth sighed. Oh, the terrible stubbornness of Livy! She was all MacArd and had been since the day she was born, and, thank God, the others were not. Sara was like her, and the boys were more Fordham, too, than MacArd, but Livy had not a drop of Fordham in her. She was glad now that they had sent the boys home early! They were safely in a church school in mid-Ohio, and so she should have done with Livy, except that the child would not go, and year by year they had let her keep on growing up here in India until now this had happened.
“Don’t make me have to tell your father, Livy,” she pleaded. She had never been able to discipline the children, and she used their love for her shamelessly for her own protection when she feared Ted’s reproach.
“I won’t,” Livy said. “Jatin and I will tell him ourselves.”
“Oh, dear,” her mother groaned. “It will kill him. He loves you more than all the others put together, I do believe.”
“What else can we do?” Livy asked.
She had finished the hem and she folded the small dress carefully and put away the thimble and needle.
“I don’t know,” her mother sighed. “I couldn’t have believed such a thing could happen. Much as I love India—”
Livy took the sentence away from her. “Much as you love India, you could never have loved an Indian.”
“Not in that way,” her mother amended. “You don’t understand.”
“You are right, and I don’t understand.” Livy got up and began walking about the room again with her peculiar smooth grace. “Jatin is a wonderful doctor, you and Father have said so. He gave up a fine practice with his father in Bombay and came here because he believes in what Father is doing. And Bapu Darya says he will be one of the great men in India. So I don’t understand. And I counted on you, Mother.”
“Oh, dear,” Ruth sighed. She shook her head and bit off the thread from the pillowcase. How could one explain anything to Livy when she already knew everything one was going to say?
There was no need to speak. Livy went out of the room and probably to meet Jatin somewhere. She supposed that in a way she had failed her child, but indeed she could not face what it would mean. She was still a white woman and she could not see her daughter dragged down into the mass of the dark people. Jatin himself could not prevent it and Livy could not lift Jatin up. She, in spite of her love for him, and he, in spite of his love for her, could not keep from sinking. She wished it were not true, it was hard enough to be a Christian among the Indians, who were literal-minded, but it was true and not all the saints could make it different.
She sighed again and let her mind subside gently until at last she was not thinking at all, simply sewing, and breathing to the rhythm of the stitches.
Livy walked down to the banyan tree where the shadows were deepest, her eyes instinctively watchful for snakes, although she was not afraid. The rain had abated in the last half hour until now there were only drifts of mist. She had put on her heaviest cotton sari and drawn the end over her head and Jatin, waiting for her, thought how exactly like an Indian girl she looked as she came toward their usual meeting place. That was something they must face, too, that this meeting place had been discovered and so they must abandon it. But where could they meet? In the clinic they saw each other now always in the presence of others. If her parents approved their marriage, of course they need not hide their meetings, but he had not succeeded in overcoming his natural and secret despondency. He was an Indian, however high he rose in his profession, and only because her father was so sincere a Christian could he find the conviction of human equality for which his pride hungered more than ever he had hungered for food. To Mr. MacArd he owed everything, and he felt guilty of ingratitude, because now he had fallen in love with Livy. Yet how could he help it when he discovered that she could love him? He had taken it as play, as nonsense, the young girl home from boarding school, and he was already twenty-six years old, a graduate doctor at the Vhai hospital. But he had begun to dream nevertheless, and when her eyes met his with increased meaning and wonder, how could he keep from loving her?
“How d
ark it is,” she said, coming into the shadow where he stood. “It must be later than I thought.”
“We must not stay long,” he agreed.
His painful sensitivity, aware at once that something was amiss, kept him from going to meet her, or from touching her when she stood beside him.
“Did you speak to your mother?” he asked.
“Yes. She is not willing,” Livy said.
“Even she!” he whispered.
“She does not dare to tell my father.” They spoke in Vhai dialect, her childhood language, which he had learned in the years that he had been here.
“What shall we do?” Instinctively he gave her the leadership.
“We shall have to go to my father and tell him,” she said.
“Both of us?”
“Do you not wish to be with me?”
“Of course—but suppose he sends me away.”
“Then I will go with you.”
She saw the shadow of despair on his too intelligent face. “Ah, Livy—” he was speaking English now, which he spoke perfectly, although he had never left India. All MacArd graduates spoke English perfectly. “Nothing is so easy as you think it is.”
“Why should we wait?” she demanded with a wilful stoicism in her voice and look. “Perhaps he will be kinder than we think. He has always been kind to us.”
“Separately,” he reminded her.
“Oh, Jatin,” she said in quick young anger, “why will you be so easily defeated? Come with me!”
She seized his hand and led him out of the shadows with her.
Ted was alone in his study. It was a small quiet room, the last in the chain of rooms opening into the common court which was also back garden, walled with earth. One side of the room was windowless and against it he had hung, years ago, the portrait of his mother, which his grandfather had willed to him, instead of to his father. Years ago he had been reconciled to thinking of Agnes as his father’s wife. He had never regretted his own marriage to Ruth. She had helped him to plunge deep into India, so deep that he had had no furloughs in the seventeen years since their marriage. Neither he nor Ruth had wanted to break the continuity of the days and the years.
And where would he go if he did go to America again? Such shallow roots as schooldays had given him were withered away and his grandfather was long dead. Let him be honest with himself. The thought of his father and Agnes living in the old Fifth Avenue house made return impossible to that only home he had known in his own country. It was one thing to be reconciled to his father’s marriage, it was another to enter into the house which now belonged to Agnes. It was absurd to think of her as a stepmother, and certainly her influence must pervade the house since it was she who had made his father decide not to return to India. Explain it as he would, his father had never been able to explain that withdrawal.
“I have finished with India,” his father had written after his grandfather’s death. “Younger men must carry on my work. I had dreamed once that you, my son, would have taken up my mantle, but since that was not to be, the springs have dried in me. I should have been lonely, indeed, were it not for Agnes, my sweet young wife. She has a right to live the life which suits her so happily here in New York.”
He had blushed when he read the fatuous phrase, “my sweet young wife,” and even now as he thought of it a dry heat spread under his skin. He supposed, unwillingly, he was to blame for that marriage. If he had stayed on at MacArd as his father had wished him to do, perhaps he would have married Agnes and all these years would never have been. Had he not done what Darya had bade him do, had he not come to Vhai and lived among the lowly people of the earth, how different his life would be now!
Yet he had followed the light that shone for him, and if he needed comfort, Darya gave it to him. They did not meet often, for Darya was absorbed in his office in the new government, but once he had come to Vhai. That had been a great day. The villagers had gathered for miles around and fifty thousand people sat on the dry fields and listened to Darya tell them what the new India would be. He had stood above them like an aging king, his lean figure still tall and straight, his white hair flying, his thin face still unlined, and the wind had carried his powerful voice over the multitude.
“Here in Vhai you have lighted a lamp for the nation. What you have done, every other village in India can do. I love you, people of Vhai, and first of all I love you because the man who has lit the lamp for you, as you will light it for others, is the man who is like my own son.”
That day was his reward, and thinking of it now, as he thought of it so often, Ted straightened himself and lifted his head. Yes, he had his reward. When independence was declared, many white men left India and no Indian spoke against their going. But he, Ted MacArd, had been invited and urged to stay, not only by the new Prime Minister and by Darya, but by Vhai itself. The people would not let him go. Ah, he had his rewards! Jehar, travelling to and fro over India, came sometimes to this quiet room, and then at early morning or as now at twilight, the Christian sadhu taught him that faith comes from many sources. It was Jehar who had explained to him the spiritual ties between all the greatest of the leaders of men and to the same God, whatever His name. Thus Moses and the Hebrew prophets, thus David and Paul, were brothers to Tukārām, the Sudra grainseller, who sixteen centuries later had lived in Dehu, a village some eighteen miles northwest of Poona itself. Tukārām had gone through his own Gethsemane, and famine, white over the land, and the dying voice of his young wife crying for food while he had no food, had driven him into the complete service of God.
This evening, for his devotions, Ted had been reading again the story of Tukārām, so strangely like the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He read of the birds that perched on Tukārām’s shoulders in the temple, knowing him to be “a friend of the world.” As Pharisees and Sadducees had persecuted Jesus, so the Brahmans had persecuted Tukārām. They would have none of him because of his lowly birth and because he could not believe, as they did, that Nirvana was the highest state of the human soul. He did not wish, he said, “to be a dewdrop in the silent sea,” and he shared in the lives of men, and thus he sang:
“The mother knows her child—his secret heart,
His joy or woe.
Who holds the blind man’s heart alone can tell
Where he desires to go.”
As always when he was moved by the Hindu poet-saints, Ted returned again to the Christian New Testament, sometimes frightened, as he himself knew, lest the seat of his heart be shaken by those who had never known Christ, and he read again, “Except ye become as little children—”
Then he heard footsteps, a double rhythm, the soft sandalled footsteps of a girl and then the slower steps of a man. At the curtain they paused, and he heard his daughter’s voice, “Bapu, may we come in?”
Livy spoke in the Vhai version of Hindustani, but he answered in English, “Come in, my dear.”
She was indeed his dear daughter, his best-loved child, and he looked up from the sacred books on the table before him to see Jatin Das with her. His heart chilled and he put down his Testament. Nothing is secret in a village, and he had heard whispers, half hesitating and reluctant murmurs, that Livy had been seen alone with Jatin. He had not heeded talk. Livy was an American, and though she had grown up in Vhai until she went to the boarding school in Simla, he could not believe that she would forget her origin. Jatin, too, belonged to no ordinary Hindu family. He had been reared in Bombay, where the English were proud and he would not reach for what must remain beyond him.
“Come in, Livy,” he said in his usual kindly manner. “And you, too, Jatin. Seat yourselves, please. Has the rain stopped?”
“Yes, but there are mists,” Livy said.
She sat down quietly and folded her hands in the manner, he suddenly perceived, of the Indian girls among whom she had lived. He saw, too, that she wore a sari as she often did, but now it seemed to him that he had seen her in no other garb since she came home from school.
&nb
sp; “What will you do when you go to America to college and cannot wear a sari?” he asked lightly.
“Father,” Livy said, “I do not wish to go to America.”
Now he was really disturbed. “Of course you must go, Livy. Your grandfather would be very angry if you did not go. And your great-grandfather put money in trust expressly for you, before you were born.”
Livy looked at Jatin from the corners of her long, dark eyes, asking him to speak for her.
“Sir,” Jatin said and cleared his throat. “Sir, we are in great distress. She and I—we have fallen into the wish to marry one another.”
“We have fallen in love,” Livy said distinctly.
“Yes, it is so,” Jatin said, and taking courage now that the difficult word was spoken, his words came in a rush, liquid and fluent, overwhelming his diffidence. “It cannot be helped, Mr. MacArd, sir. It is the logical sequence, the inevitable outcome of the teachings of our childhoods. You have taught us to love one another, she has learned at your feet, sir, to regard all human beings as equal, alike children of God. And I, sir, taught in MacArd Memorial school in Poona, there took courage to cease to be a Hindu as my own father was, and I was converted by the great Jehar and nourished by Daryaji toward independence. I do not fear to love her. I glory in our courage. We are the fruit of all that has gone in the past, we are the flower of our ancestry, the proof of our faith!”
His fervid eyes, his glowing words, the impetuous grace of his outstretched hands, the long fingers bending backward, the thumbs apart and tense, the white palms contrasted against the dark skin, all were too Indian, and in one of the rare moments of revulsion which Ted considered his secret sin, he was now revolted and sick. What—his Livy, his darling daughter? None of his other children had her beauty or her grace, or her brilliant comprehending mind. She alone was all MacArd, and was she to give up everything for this alien man? For a moment his soul swam in darkness. No, and forever no! He had given his life to India in Vhai, but Livy he would not give. It was not to be asked of him. This was a cup which even the saints had not to drink, and Jesus, the celibate, who had never a child, could make no such demand.