The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeannette Duncan (ebook reader browser txt) 📖

means of knowing; but if offers were made they never transpired, and Mrs. Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty that they never were made. Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected. It depended upon Mrs. Harris's humour whether this was Dora's misfortune or her crime. She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust to be paralyzed. On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there. It hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young man in Harris's department. I had a department of my own; and Dora, though she frisked with me gloriously and bullied continually, must ever have been aware of the formidable fact that I joined the Service two years before Edward Harris did. The daughter of three generations of bureaucrats was not likely to forget that at one time her father had been junior to me in the same office, though in the course of time and the march of opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodded to each other on the Mall with an equal sense of the divine right of secretaries. It may seem irrelevant, but I feel compelled to explain here that I had remained a bachelor while Harris had married twice, and that I had kept up my cricket, while Harris had let his figure take all the soft curves of middle age. Nevertheless the fact remained. Sometimes I fancied it gave a certain piquancy to my relations with his daughter, but I could never believe that the laugh was on my side.

If we met at dinner-parties, it would be sometimes Edward Harris and sometimes myself who would take the dullest and stoutest woman down. If she fell to him, the next in precedence was bestowed upon me, and there might not be a pin to choose between them for phlegm and inflation. It is a preposterous mistake to suppose that the married ladies of Simla are in the majority brilliant and fascinating creatures, who say things in French for greater convenience, and lead a man on. After fifteen years I am ready to swear that I have been led on to nothing more compromising than a subscription to the Young Women's Christian Association, though no one could have been more docile or more intelligent. During one viceroyalty of happy memory half a dozen clever and amusing men and women came together in Simla--it was a mere fortuitous occurrence, aided by a joyous ruler who hated being bored as none before or ever since have hated it--and the place has lived socially upon the reputation of that meteoric term ever since. Whereas the domestic virtues are no more deeply rooted anywhere than under the deodars; nor could any one, I hasten to add, chronicle the fact with more profound satisfaction than myself. A dinner-party, however, is not a favourable setting for the domestic virtues; it does them so little justice that one could sometimes almost wish them left at home, and I was talking of Simla dinner-parties, where I have encountered so many. How often have I been consulted as to the best school for boys in England, or instructed as to how much I should let my man charge me for shoe-blacking, or advised as to the most effectual way of preventing the butler from stealing my cheroots, while Dora Harris, remote as a star, talked to a cavalry subaltern about wind-galls and splints! At these moments I felt my seniority bitterly; to give Dora to a cavalry subaltern was such plain waste.

It was an infinite pleasure to know any one as well as I seemed to know Dora Harris. She, I believe, held no one else upon the same terms of intimacy, though she found women, of course, with whom she fluttered and embraced; and while there were, naturally, men with whom I exchanged the time o'day in terms more or less cordial, I am certain that I kept all my closest thoughts for her. It is necessary again to know Simla to understand how our friendship was gilded by the consideration that it was on both sides perfectly spontaneous. Social life in the poor little place is almost a pure farce with the number of its dictated, prompted intimacies, not controlled by general laws of expediency as at home, but each on its own basis of hope and expectancy, broadly and ludicrously obvious as a case by itself. There is a conspiracy of stupidity about it, for we are all in the same hat, every one of us; there is none so exalted that he does not urgently want a post that somebody else can give him. So we continue to exchange our depreciated smiles, and only privately admit that the person who most desires to be agreeable to us is the person whom we regard with the greatest suspicion. As between Dora Harris and myself there could be, naturally, no ax to grind. We amused ourselves by looking on penetratingly but tolerantly at the grinding of other people's.

That was a very principal bond between us, that uncompromising clearness with which we looked at the place we lived in, and on the testimony of which we were so certain that we didn't like it. The women were nearly all so much in heaven in Simla, the men so well satisfied to be there too, at the top of the tree, that our dissatisfaction gave us to one another the merit of originality, almost proved in one another a superior mind. It was not that either of us would have preferred to grill out our days in the plains; we always had a saving clause for the climate, the altitude, the scenery; it was Simla intrinsic, Simla as its other conditions made it, with which we found such liberal fault. Again I should have to explain Simla, at the length of an essay at least, to justify our condemnation. This difficulty confronts me everywhere. I must ask you instead to imagine a small colony of superior--very superior--officials, of British origin and traditions, set on the top of a hill, years and miles away from literature, music, pictures, politics, existing like a harem on the gossip of the Viceroy's intentions, and depending for amusement on tennis and bumble-puppy, and then consider, you yourself, whether you are the sort of person to be unquestionably happy there. If you see no reason to the contrary, pray do not go on. There were times when Dora declared that she couldn't breathe for want of an atmosphere, and times when I looked round and groaned at the cheerful congratulatory aridity in every man's eye--men who had done things at Oxford in my own year, and come out like me to be mummified into a last state like this. Thank Heaven, there was never any cheerful congratulation in my eye; one could always put there, when the thought inspired it, a saving spark of rank ingratitude instead.

It was as if we had the most desirable things--roses, cool airs, far snowy ranges--to build what we like with, and we built Simla--altitude, 7,000, population 2,500, headquarters of the Government of India during the summer months. An ark it was, of course; an ark of refuge from the horrible heat that surged below, and I wondered as I climbed the steeps of Summer Hill in search of I. Armour's inaccessible address, whether he was to be the dove bearing beautiful testimony of a world coming nearer. I rejected the simile, however, as over-sanguine; we had been too long abandoned on our Ararat.


Chapter 2.III.

A dog of no sort of caste stood in the veranda and barked at me offensively. I picked up a stone, and he vanished like the dog of a dream into the house. It was such a small house that it wasn't on the municipal map at all: it looked as if someone had built it for amusement with anything that was lying about. Nevertheless, it had a name, it was called Amy Villa, freshly painted in white letters on a shiny black board, and nailed against the nearest tree in the orthodox Simla fashion. It looked as if the owner of the place had named it as a duty towards his tenant, the board was so new, and in that case the reflection presented itself that the tenant might have cooperated to call it something else. It was disconcerting somehow to find that our dove had perched, even temporarily, in Amy Villa. Nor was it soothing to discover that the small white object stuck in the corner of the board was Mr. Ingersoll Armour's card.

In Simla we do not stick our cards about in that way at the mercy of the wind and the weather; we paint our names neatly under the names of our houses with 'I.C.S.' for Indian Civil Service, or 'P.W.D.' for Public Works Department, or whatever designation we are entitled to immediately after, so that there can be no mistake. This strikes newcomers sometimes as a little professional, especially when a hand accompanies, pointing; but it is the only possible way where there are no streets and no numbers, but where houses are dropped about a hilltop as if they had fallen from a pepper-pot. In sticking his card out like that Mr. Armour seemed to imagine himself au quatrieme or au cinquieme somewhere on the south side of the Seine; it betrayed rather a ridiculous lack of conformity. He was high enough up, however, to give any illusion; I had to stop to find the wind to announce myself. There was nobody else to do it if I except the dog.

I walked into the veranda and shouted. Then I saw that one end of it was partly glazed off, and inside sat a young man in his shirt-sleeves with his back to the door.

In reply he called out, 'That you, Rosario?' and I stood silent, taken somewhat aback.

There was only one Rosario in Simla, and he was a subordinate in my own office. Again the hateful need to explain. Between subordinate clerks and officials in Simla there is a greater gulf fixed than was ever imagined in parable. Besides, Rosario had a plain strain of what we call 'the country' in him, a plain strain, that is, of the colour of the country. It was certainly the first time in my official career that I had been mistaken for Rosario.

Armour turned round and saw me--that I was a stranger.

He got up at once. 'Oh,' he said, 'I thought it was Rosario.

'It isn't,' I replied, 'my name is Philips. May I ask whether you were expecting Mr. Rosario? I can come again, you know.'

'Oh, it doesn't matter. Sit down. He may drop in or he may not--I rather thought he would today. It's a pull up, isn't it, from the Mall? Have a whisky and soda.'

I stood on the threshold spellbound. It was just the smell that bound me, the good old smell of oil paints and turpentine and mediums and varnish and new canvas that you never by any chance put your nose into in any part of Asia. It carried me back twenty years to old haunts, old friends, old joys, ideals, theories. Ah, to be young and have a temperament! For I had one then--that instant in Armour's veranda proved it to me forever.

'No thanks,' I said. 'If you don't mind I'll just have the smell.'

The young fellow knew at once