“No!” The word burst from him. “I cannot allow it.”
Jatin’s hands dropped. He turned to Livy and they exchanged a long look, his despairing, hers hardening to anger.
“Livy,” her father demanded. “Have you told your mother?”
“Yes,” Livy said, “and she said she did not dare to tell you. But I dare.”
He got to his feet. “Where is your mother?”
“In the sewing room,” Livy said.
He went away, the door curtain swinging behind him, and Livy stretched out her arms to Jatin.
“I shall never give you up,” she cried under her breath, “Jatin, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love—”
He turned away his head. “Not our love.”
“Yes, our love,” she insisted. She went to him, she put her arms about him and held his head against her breast.
Under his cheek, he felt the quickening beat of her heart.
XVII
“YOU SEE FOR YOURSELF that it is impossible,” Ted insisted.
“Oh, yes, I see,” Ruth agreed indistinctly. She had not stopped her sewing, though she knew as soon as he came in that Livy had told him. Well, he had to know.
She lifted her eyes from the seam. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What are we going to do about it,” he corrected her. Without waiting for her reply, he went on, inconsistently, “I shall buy steamship tickets for the first boat that sails from Bombay. We are all going to America. I shall put Livy in a girls’ college.”
“Livy isn’t really a girl any more,” Ruth said. “She’s grown a woman, the way they do here, so fast.”
“She’s a girl in years and in mind,” he said. “When she gets to America, she will take her place among other girls.”
He got up from the bamboo chair where he had flung himself, walked up and down the room and sat down again, waiting for Ruth to agree with him. But she sat silently sewing, as he had seen her do hundreds of times through the years of their marriage. She found a spiritual calm in sewing, he supposed. A good wife, he knew, and he had learned to love her without ever being in love with her.
Yet what was love? One could not plant a palm tree in the courtyard with another person without in a sense feeling a sort of love, and he and Ruth had done everything together, building the house and rearing the children, teaching and preaching and carrying on the clinic, isolated by what they were, two white people in a world of darkness. They had believed in the goodness of what they did, they were sure of their faith, and absorbed in their purpose, he did not stop to ask if he loved Ruth as once he had dreamed of loving a woman. All men dream, he told himself, and the reality was best, for reality alone was unselfish in love. Exhausted often in the parched climate, fatigued often beyond endurance by the desperate demands of the people, he and Ruth clung to one another, and each maintained the other in steadfastness. And this, too, was love, a love which bore visible fruit in hundreds of human lives.
Oh, she could sit silent like this forever while she sewed!
“Well,” he said impatiently, “have you any other plan?”
“No,” she said slowly, “I don’t know that I have. It’s just that I hate to leave Vhai. I guess you’re right, Ted. We had better take her away from India.”
“Will you tell her or shall I?”
“You had better do it,” she said, and did not lift her head.
So he told Livy the next evening, his heart soft and hard together. He sat on the veranda, in the swiftly passing twilight, watching her toss a ball with Sara, the only one of his children who was still a child. Sara was like his great-grandfather, a fiery, bone-thin child who passionately loved her elder sister. He kept his eyes on Livy, graceful in her soft rose-pink sari, moving here and there with gliding steps to catch the rag ball Sara threw wilfully here and there.
“Livy!” he called through the dusk.
“Coming,” she replied.
She seemed in good mood, her soft oval face was cheerful and she came at once. India was her climate, the heat did not depress her, she looked fresh and cool, though the night was humid.
“Sit down, daughter,” he said.
She sank on the bamboo couch near him and Sara, deserted, cried in a high childish voice that wound itself into the singing rhythm of Indian speech, “It will soon be dark, come and play, Livy.”
“This is for you, too,” the father said.
She came and squeezed herself between them. “What have I done?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” the father said.
“It is I who have done something,” Livy said smoothly. “It is I who have been naughty and now Father is going to punish me.”
“Livy is not naughty,” Sara insisted. “Never she is naughty.”
“Sometimes I am,” Livy said. Her dark eyes hardened and glowed, and she turned them sidewise upon her father, but he refused the challenge.
“It can scarcely be called a punishment to go to America, and that is what we shall do. I have written for the tickets and the gateman has posted the letter already. Perhaps we must go even in a very few days.”
Sara clung to Livy’s waist and tightened her arms. To go to America was at once a dream and a dread. She had asked hundreds of questions about America and sometimes she lay awake in the night to think about that beautiful and even imaginary place, but now that her father said so coolly, “I have written for the tickets,” Vhai was immediately too dear to leave, even though in America snakes did not crawl in the garden, nor scorpions hide in the shoes at night.
“Isn’t that good news, Sara?” her father asked.
“Perhaps the children there won’t like me,” Sara said.
“It is not good news, Father,” Livy said. Entire awareness was implicit in her voice and her furious dark eyes were fixed upon his face.
“It isn’t good news, Father,” Sara echoed, clinging to Livy’s waist. “If Livy doesn’t think so, I don’t think so.”
“Nevertheless, we are going,” the father said, “and we shall stay for a year, except Livy, who will stay four whole years, because she is going to college. She will go to college and learn to be an American girl, and grow into an American woman. And maybe she will marry an American man and stay in America.”
“Oh, no, no,” Sara cried, “for then how can she live with us in Vhai?”
“Perhaps then she will not want to live in Vhai,” the father said. “America is a wonderful country, there are wide roads and cars and great trains, even airplanes flying everywhere. Livy will have pretty clothes, and she will learn to sing and play the piano, and in the summer she may go to England and to France.”
“Let me get up, please, Sara,” Livy said. She tugged at the arms about her waist.
Ted did not stop her or ask her where she was going. He had dealt the blow and he must let her take it as she could.
“Come and sit on my lap, Sara,” he said, ignoring Livy. “I will tell you more about America.”
The little girl loosened her clutch upon her sister’s waist, and diverted by the invitation, she went to her father. In the darkness, lit only by the glow falling through the open doors and windows as servants went about lighting the lamps in the house, he told her about America, the endless mountains and the long rivers, the great cities and the house where her grandfather lived, and before that her great-grandfather, whom she had never seen, who now was dead.
“America is your country, you know,” he told her. “India is not your real country, and Vhai is not your own place, not really, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Sara said in wonder, “I always thought it was.”
He fell silent when she said this, smitten like Peter of old, by conviction of betrayal at night, while his heart reproached him and he heard the wailing music of Vhai winding up from the streets now hidden by darkness.
In the dark Livy was walking with swift and reckless steps, heedless of the snakes and the night insects, the folds of her
sari gathered in her hand and over her head the scarf which hid her bent profile. At this hour Jatin would be in his room next to the clinic, the little lean-to which her father had built for him when he came to be the resident doctor for the Vhai hospital. She had never been in his rooms except the day they were finished, before he moved in, when with her parents they had inspected the place for his coming. There were four rooms, enough for his family when he married, for, of course, he would marry, her father said, and four rooms would be spacious here in Vhai. And four rooms would be spacious for her, too, she could have made a home there with Jatin, she had dreamed of it, she had even talked of it, though he would never listen.
“It will never happen—never can it be so,” Jatin had said again and again.
“Jatin, you are always discouraged,” she had cried. “You must be bold, you must insist! If I want something very much I always insist.”
To this Jatin had replied only with dark sad looks. His eyes, tragic in their shape and color, large and liquid, the lashes long and thick, carried in their shadows the memory of unknown sorrows, a deep racial grief which he had inherited and now possessed as his own nature. He was always sure that the worst would happen, he would not lift a hand against fate for he could not believe in happiness and he accepted disappointment before it fell.
Oh, tonight, she told herself, he must be made to understand, tonight he must be made to see clearly that a man seizes his own, he holds it fast, and she was his. Her feet scarcely touched the grass as she ran, winged with fear as well as love, fear of death and fear of life. What if a snake bit her, and what if Jatin did not have the courage? He loved her, that she knew, for he was deep-hearted and passionate, yet even love might not make him strong enough. He gave up too easily, small wishes and great longings alike he surrendered quickly if he were opposed. Tonight she would insist, yes, she was the one to insist.
She ran up the three steps of the small veranda outside the four rooms. The light burned within, the mellow light of his oil lamp, and she knocked at the open door. He sat in his study and she could not see him, but the light fell in a bar upon the floor of the little entrance hall. He heard the knock and came out at once, barefoot, wearing a sleeveless singlet and dhoti, expecting no one at this hour, unless a call from the hospital.
“Livy,” he cried softly in a voice of horror. “Why are you here?”
“Let me in, Jatin,” she said. The screen door was hooked and she shook it slightly.
He unhooked it and she slipped inside.
“I must put out the light,” he whispered. His face was anxious. “They will see you—perhaps someone has already seen you.”
“For that I don’t care,” she said in her natural voice. “Don’t whisper, Jatin—what does it matter who knows, now that my parents know?”
Yet he was uneasy and he stood, hesitating.
“Very well, then,” she said. “We will just sit here in the hall in the shadow. I will not stay, Jatin, since you are so afraid. But I had to tell you. Father has sent for steamship tickets. We are going to America and he will not allow me to come back. A year, Jatin—they will stay a year, but I must stay four! And how could I come back to Vhai if he will not let me? So you must demand me in marriage, Jatin—or we must be married secretly if they will not let us marry openly.”
“How is it possible for us to be married secretly?” he asked, his voice agitated by his distress. “We would have to go to the American Consulate in Poona, and there your father and your grandfather are well known. The Consul would tell them before he gave us the permission. There is no way. We must give each other up.”
She bit her lips and turned away her face. “I knew you would say that. I knew you would not have the courage. I don’t know why I love you.”
“Nor I,” he said humbly.
In misery they sat side by side on a stiff little rattan settle, the bar of light falling like a curtain between them and the open door. They faced the door and he stared into the shadowy night, piercing the darkness to search for hidden figures, for eavesdroppers and prowlers. Nothing was hidden in Vhai, nothing was secret. Of course the people knew, but never before had she come to his rooms. Yet his easily roused blood quickened and grew warm. She was sitting close to him, her slender thigh pressed against his leg, bare under the cotton dhoti. She was silent, a graceful drooping shape beside him, and he reached for her hand and took it between his and stroked it gently in long soft movements, palm against his palm, his fingers stroking between hers. She drooped toward him, and he put his arm about her waist. Love could be denied, yes, but sometimes it was uncontrollable. Here in the night, with everything forbidden them, love itself was uncontrollable. Nobody had seen her come and none need see her go. The night was growing late. He could put out the light and the house would be dark. No servant slept in the house, and if a message came from the hospital, he would have to go to the door, but there was also the back door, the one that led from his bathing room, where the gardener carried the water in and out, and she could slip away from there. The gods of Vhai would protect her from serpents and insects, and she could flee across the lawn again.
He rose and hooked the door and then he went into the other room and put out the lamp and in the darkness he came back to her and sat down again. Stroking her hands he stroked up her arms and about her neck, down her cheeks and into her little ears. Then, still in the same desperate silence, he opened the tiny buttons of her short-sleeved vest and he stroked her bare skin, her shoulders, her back, and then at last her breasts. When his hand smoothed the rounded curve of her breasts, she gave a great sigh.
“What now,” he whispered, “what now, Livy?”
She trembled, she put her arms about his neck and leaned her head upon his shoulder, and did not speak a word. He took her silence for reply and he lifted her in his strong dark arms and carried her into the house.
Once he halted at the threshold of his sleeping room. She was murmuring against his breast. “What do you say, Livy?”
“I said I want it to happen—whatever will happen, I want it.”
“But we must keep it secret.”
“I want it!”
This once, he was thinking, he was promising himself, only the once and it was not likely that anyone need know. It was very seldom that anything happened the first time, a virgin carries her own protection, and some risk love must take, only the once, and then, of course, they must part.
He had known it from the first, he had never had any hope, none at all. But hopeless love was the worst, the most terrible, the most enduring, and this would be the end.
Yet whose fault but hers that it was not the end? For it was she who went silent-footed through the darkness again and yet again, the mischievous gods protecting her bare feet from serpents and noxious creatures and there was no end to their love.
She was frightened at her own wickedness but she did not cease it. Here was she, the child of Christian parents, she who knew the Commandments and knew too the meaning of goodness and purity and righteousness, those great swelling words which shone like suns above her and in whose light she had supposed she walked, and yet she came and went by night like any magdalen. She did not for one moment confuse the God of her father and her grandfather, and only less intimately her mother’s God, with those local gods she had seen in the temple, not only here in Vhai, but in the great temples of Poona, Ganesh the elephant-headed and Kali, the evil one who lured human creatures to worship wilfulness and crime. She was no longer a child and she knew what the women in the temples did, and how the priests played god to their virginity. She had been repelled from the dark confusion of such worship, she had been glad of the clear simplicity of her own faith, borrowed from her parents, and yet here she was, no better than any temple virgin and with no excuse for sin.
Night after night she went to Jatin, and now, he too, lost his fear in desperation. Let the villagers whisper and cross their eyes and pretend not to see. His love grew monstrous, possessing him like
a disease, inflamed by the certainty that any day would decide the hour that Livy must leave him forever. He did not doubt the end, but he seized each day as it came, and waited for each night.
Eleven days and eleven nights thus passed and her father did not suspect, for had he imagined what happened in the night when he slept behind his mosquito net, could it be imagined that he would not speak? He would snatch Livy away and take her at least as far as Poona, and that would be the end, too.
And Jatin did not know how Livy behaved during the day, how quiet she was, how obedient, how sweet-voiced and yielding to her father’s least wish, and how candidly her gaze met her mother’s doubting eyes.
She played with Sara, she mended and sewed and helped her mother pack the trunks for the journey, she served her father’s guests with little cakes, with slices of melon and with sweetmeats and the guests, looking at her, kept their peace. Some knew and some did not, but soon all would know, and Livy felt their knowing, she saw it in their dark speaking eyes, she heard it in their words, for they greeted her intimately, as one of them, or they greeted her with hostility, but now not only as the daughter of her father. She bore their greetings, however they came, for she could not have drawn herself out of the net into which she had thrown herself, and she knew as well as Jatin did, that there was no hope. There was no hope in him, she knew that now, and so she must accept him as he was and snatch what she could in the shortening hours.
At night she went early to her room, the little room at the end of the house, and she let the ayah wait upon her and see her undressed and bathed and upon her bed. Sometimes she was sure that the ayah knew the pretense, but she did not prove it. Unspoken, the ayah was not responsible, but were the words spoken, she would be compelled to tell Livy’s parents, and so she would not know. So far the secret was clear between them, and neither wanted it more clear. Sometimes actually she went to sleep, and once or twice she slept through until dawn and then it was too late. But seven out of the eleven nights she woke, or she did not sleep, and then she slipped across the grassy paths, feeling beneath her feet the dreadful chance of the night-roaming cobra, but none came near, and then she tapped softly at the door, the back door of Jatin’s house, and instantly he let her in, knowing desperately that he destroyed himself by what he did. And yet he received her, he took her into his arms and there was no delay or dallying. They came together quickly and deeply and they clung to one another briefly, their words strangling with love. Then she went away again.