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

and naturally one never looks in vain. Mrs. Symons would be delighted. I conjured up Dora's rage on receipt of the telegram. She loathed the Symonses.

She came, but not at the jerk of a wire; she arrived a week later, with a face of great propriety and a smile of great unconcern. Harris, having got her effectually out of harm's way, shirked further insistence, and I have reason to believe that Armour was never even mentioned between them.

Dora applied herself to the gaieties of the season with the zest of a debutante; she seemed really refreshed, revitalized. She had never looked better, happier. I met her again for the first time at one of the Thursday dances at Government House. In the glance she gave me I was glad to detect no suspicion of collusion. She plainly could not dream that Edward Harris in his nefarious exercise of parental authority had acted upon any hint from me. It was rather sweet.

Out in the veranda, away from the blare of the Viceroy's band, she told me very delicately and with the most charming ellipses how Armour had been filling her life in Agra, how it had all been, for these two, a dream and a vision. There is a place below the bridge there, where the cattle come down from the waste pastures across the yellow sands to drink and stand in the low water of the Jumna, to stand and switch their tails while their herdsmen on the bank coax them back with 'Ari!' 'Ari!' 'Ari!' long and high, faint and musical; and the minarets of Akbar's fort rise beyond against the throbbing sky and the sun fills it all. This place I shall never see more distinctly than I saw it that night on the veranda at Government House, Calcutta, with the conviction, like a margin for the picture, that its foreground had been very often occupied by the woman I profoundly worshiped and Ingersoll Armour. She told me that he had sent me a sketch of it, and I very much wished he hadn't. One felt that the gift would carry a trifle of irony.

'He has told me,' she said once brusquely, 'how good you have been to him.'

'Is he coming to Simla again?' I asked.

'Oh yes! And please take it from me that this time he will conquer the place. He has undertaken to do it.'

'At your request?'

'At my persuasion--at my long entreaty. They must recognize him--they must be taught. I have set my heart on it.'

'Does he himself very much care?' I asked remembering the night of the thirty-first of October.

'Yes, he does care. He despises it, of course, but in a way he cares. I've been trying to make him care more. A human being isn't an orchid; he must draw something from the soil he grows in.'

'If he were stable,' I mused; 'if he had a fixed ambition somewhere in the firmament. But his purpose is a will-o'-the-wisp.'

'I think he has an ambition,' said Miss Harris, into the dark.

'Ah! Then we must continue,' I said--'continue to push from behind.'

Dora did not reply. She is a person of energy and determination, and might have been expected to offer to cooperate gladly. But she didn't.

'He is painting a large picture for next season's exhibition,' she informed me. 'I was not allowed to see it or to know anything about it, but he declares it will bring Simla down.'

'I hope not,' I said, piously.

'Oh, I hope so. I have told him,' Dora continued, slowly, 'that a great deal depends on it.'

'Here is Mrs. Symons,' I was able to return, 'and I am afraid she is looking for you.'

March came, and the city lay white under its own dust. The electric fans began to purr in the Club, and Lent brought the flagging season to a full stop. I had to go that year on tour through the famine district with the Member, and we escaped, gasping, from the Plains about the middle of April. Simla was crimson with rhododendron blossoms, and seemed a spur of Arcady. There had been the usual number of flittings from one house to another, and among them I heard with satisfaction that Armour no longer occupied Amy Villa. I would not for the world have blurred my recollections of that last evening--I could not have gone there again.

'He is staying with Sir William Lamb,' said Dora, handing me my cup of tea. 'And I am quite jealous. Sir William, only Sir William, has been allowed to see the exhibition picture.'

'What does that portend?' I said, thoughtfully.

'I don't know. Sir William was here yesterday simply swelling with his impression of it. He says it's the finest thing that has been done in India. I told you he would conquer them.'

'You did,' and without thinking I added, 'I hope you won't be sorry that you asked him to.' It must have been an inspiration.

Armour, those weeks before the exhibition, seemed invisible. Dora reported him torn with the incapacity of the bazaar frame-maker to follow a design, and otherwise excessively occupied, and there was no lack of demands upon my own time. Besides, my ardour to be of assistance to the young man found a slight damper in the fact that he was staying with Sir William Lamb. What competence had I to be of use to the guest of Sir William Lamb?

'I do not for a moment think he will be there,' said Dora, on the day of the private view as we went along the Mall towards the Town Hall together. 'He will not run with an open mouth to his success. He will take it from us later.'

But he was there. We entered precisely at the dramatic moment of his presentation by Sir William Lamb to the Viceroy. He stood embarrassed and smiling in a little circle of compliments and congratulation. Behind him and a little to the left hung his picture, large and predominant, and in the corner of the frame was stuck the red ticket that signified the Viceroy's gold medal. We saw that, I think, before we saw anything else. Then with as little haste as was decent, considering His Excellency's proximity, we walked within range of the picture.

I am not particularly pleased, even now, to have the task of describing the thing. Its subject was an old Mahomedan priest with a green turban and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers. I heard myself saying to Dora that it was very well painted indeed, very conscientiously painted, and that is certainly what struck me. The expression of the fire-eater's face was extremely characteristic; his arm was flung out with a gesture that perfectly matched. The group of listeners was carefully composed and most 'naturally'; that is the only word that would come to me.

I glanced almost timidly at Dora. She was regarding it with a deep vertical line between her handsome brows.

'What--on earth--has he done with himself?' she demanded, but before I could reply Armour was by our side.

'Well?' he said, looking at Dora.

'It--it's very nice,' she stammered, 'but I miss YOU.'

'She only means, you know,' I rushed in, 'that you've put in everything that was never there before. Accuracy of detail, you know, and so forth. 'Pon my word, there's some drawing in that!'

'No,' said Dora, calmly, 'what I complain of is that he has left out everything that was there before. But he has won the gold medal, and I congratulate him.'

'Well,' I said, uneasily, 'don't congratulate me. I didn't do it. Positively I am not to blame.'

'His Excellency says that it reminds him of an incident in one of Mrs. Steel's novels,' said Armour, just turning his head to ascertain His Excellency's whereabouts.

'Dear me, so it does,' I exclaimed, eagerly, 'one couldn't name the chapter--it's the general feeling.' I went on to discourse of the general feeling. Words came generously, questions with point, comments with intelligence. I swamped the situation and so carried it off.

'The Viceroy has bought the thing,' Armour went on, looking at Dora, 'and has commissioned me to paint another. The only restriction he makes is--'

'That it shall be of the same size?' asked Dora.

'That it must deal with some phase of native life.'

Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her eyes fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was steady, but perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck into the stream of my volubility.

'I am delighted,' she said, pleasantly, to Armour. 'You have done exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy's medal, and all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn't it--for you--a little difficult?'

He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it from his lips; but the occasion was not one, of course, for crying out.

'Oh no,' he said, putting on an excellent face. 'But it took a hideous time.'


Chapter 2.X.

Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I had arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most honest impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of departure, but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay, and that in order to effect his final shipment to other shores I should be compelled to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta. The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods,