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

because there was no one but herself to brighten the long day in the prison hospital for him, because she had thrown him into the arms of the woman who had deserted him, because he represented in her fancy her life's only budding towards the sun. Her patience lasted through six years, which was four years longer than any doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see what else there might be in the world.

She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would help her, they said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one another. They were not aware--and it would have spoiled an ideal for them if they had been--that she had shaken it off, quite completely, into Prendergast's grave.

This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson's travels were so long postponed.


Chapter 3.II.

It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of Brookes's ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March; and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had no intention of going, and where this story really begins.

Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be anticipated by Brookes.

'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise. How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening, with the assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the Calcutta hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor dears, only a LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum? Nothing is beyond them. I assure you they are contemplating at the moment 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray'. The effect of remoteness from the world, I suppose, and the enormous mutual appreciation of people who have watched each other climb. For to arrive officially at Simla they have had to climb in more ways than one...It is all so hilarious, so high-spirited, so young and yet, my word! what a cult of official dignity underlying! I saw a staff-officer in full uniform, red and white feathers and all, going to the birthday dinner at the Viceroy's the other evening in a perambulator--rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is typical of the place. All the honours and dignities--and a perambulator to put them in--or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They haven't a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.

'Yet--never forget--the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.

'...This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am very tired of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have no "official position." Something of the kind was offered me, by the way, the other day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the Ordnance Department, named McDermott--Captain McDermott. He took my declining very cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn't like Englishmen, who hadn't been taught to pronounce their "g's," but hoped I would change my mind before the rains, when he was goin' down. Of course I sha'n't. The red eyelids alone...I am living in a boarding-house precisely under the deodars, and have "tiffin" with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither of us are having it anywhere else. And I've been told the original of "General Bangs," "that most immoral man." You remember, don't you, the heliograph incident--I needn't quote it. It really happened! and the General still lives, none the worse--perhaps rather greater. Quite half the people seem materializations of Kipling, and it's very interesting; but one mustn't say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of materializations, I saw the original of Crawford's Mr. Isaacs, too, the other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native princes when Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning off his collection of curios and things. These types of novelists look wonderfully little impaired; I suppose it's the dry air.

'P.S.--Brookes is also quite happy. She was much struck, on arriving, by an apparent anomaly in nature. "Have you noticed, ma'am," said she, "how at this height all the birds are crows and monkeys?"'

Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New York. She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and nobody telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies interested in the work of the Young Women's Christian Association; from the 'type' of the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of Ali Buksh, who sold raw turquoises in a little carved shop in the bazaar. I should like to quote more of her letters, but if I did I should find nothing about Colonel Horace Innes, who represented--she often acknowledged to herself--her only serious interest. Miss Anderson took the world at its own light valuation as it came; but she had a scale of recognitions and acceptances, which she kept apart for the very few, and Innes had claimed a place in it the first time they met. It seems a trifle ungrateful that she should have left him out, since it was he who gave her a standard by which to measure the frivolity of Simla. He went to gymkhanas--if he knew she was going--but he towered almost pictorially above them; and when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a resentment of possible interruptions that isolated him still further. I would not suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only intent, whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused, and discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically coextensive with Government House list. Neither, for his part, would he admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as I have implied. They often talked about it; he recognized it as a feature likely to compel the attention of people from other parts of the world; and one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if she could see no tragedies underneath.

'Tragedies of the heart?' she asked. 'Oh, I can not take them seriously. The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with me three days ago, and made me her confessor. It was unexpected; if it hadn't been, I wouldn't have asked her to tea. She was so unhappy that she forgot about the rouge, and it all came off on her handkerchief when she cried. The man likes somebody else better this season. Well, I gave her nougat and cheap cynicisms, and she allowed herself to be comforted! Why, the loves of kitchen-maids are more dignified.'

They were riding on the broad four-mile road, blasted out of the rock, that winds round Jakko. The deodars stood thick above them, with the sunlight filtering through; a thousand feet below lay the little square fields, yellow and green, of the King of Koti. The purple-brown Himalayas shouldered the eye out to the horizon, and there the Snows lifted themselves, hardly more palpable than the drifted clouds, except for a gleam of ice in their whiteness. A low stone wall ran along the verge of the precipice, and, looking down, they saw tangled patches of the white wild rose of the Himalayas, waving and drooping over the abyss.

'I am afraid,' said Innes, 'you are not even upon the fringe of the situation.'

'It's the situation as I see it.'

'Then--excuse me--you do not see deep enough. That poor lady suffered, I suppose, to the extent of her capacity. You would not have have increased it.'

'I don't know, I should have preferred not to measure it.'

'Besides, that was not quite the sort of thing I had in mind. I was thinking more of the--separations.'

'Ah!' said Madeline.

'It's not fair to ask women to live much in India. Sometimes it's the children, sometimes it's ill health, sometimes it's natural antipathy to the place; there's always a reason to take them away.'

'Yes,' said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him. His face was impassive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a teasing green spider-fly.

'That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of. Time does the rest, time and the aridity of separations. How many men and women can hold themselves together with letters? I don't mean aging or any physical change. I don't mean change at all.'

'No,' said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was greater, she did not look at him.

'No. The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so forestall the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt. For myself, I'm pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have much effect upon one's feeling, if it were the real thing.' He spoke practically to himself, as if he had reasoned this out many times.

'Oh, no!' said Madeline.

'But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can REINTRODUCE people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which they married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I suppose, but custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar. There never would be that awful revelation of indifference.'

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline's mind that her face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small red stain in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out, and he added, 'I've known--in Bombay--one or two bad cases of that. But, of course, it is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter on?'

'In a minute,' said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that she had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the personal situation that gave them to him.

'Of course,' she said, thoughtfully, 'you know the Anglo-Indian world and I don't. You must have observed this that you speak of it; it sounds only too probable.