The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
Boucicault."
"Ah, Anne Boucicault!" She echoed the name with an amused inflection of
her quiet voice. "An odd little person who detests me. And she is so
touchingly conscientious about it. Not in the least spiteful, only very
religious and full of doubts and scruples----" She made a little
gesture which seemed to brush Anne Boucicault into nothingness. "Go on
with your menagerie, Major Tristram. Introduce that terrifying little
growl-box."
He picked up the yellow ball by the scruff of its neck and offered up
his fist to the ineffectual first teeth as a sacrifice.
"A cheetah cub. I found him on the edge of the forest with his paw
broken. He's nearly all right now, and will be able to go home."
"And start his criminal career," she suggested.
He laughed.
"Oh well, that's the risk the world runs every time a new infant is
brought into it," he retorted. But he had become suddenly embarrassed,
almost guilty-looking, and, after one glance at him from quizzical
brows, she changed the subject.
"Am I at liberty to inspect, Major Tristram?"
"You must do whatever you wish." He stood at the entrance to the hut
and watched her as she crossed straightway to the writing-table. His
face, now in shadow, was set in grim resolution. There were two large
photographs on the table, and one of these she picked up and held to the
light.
"A fine old face--your mother, Major Tristram?"
"Yes," he assented briefly.
"She must be very beautiful."
"I think she is," he answered, with a sudden relaxing of his strained
features.
"Not a bit like you."
He feigned a rueful discontent.
"Not a bit. I always tell her that she was jealous, and wouldn't spare
me so much as one good feature."
"Whereat, I hope, she boxes your ears for your ingratitude, you mortal
with the perfect body!" She replaced the picture regretfully. "And
this----"
She broke off. It became very still in the low-roofed room. Even the
cheetah had ceased its infant growlings as though it felt the tension in
the quiet about him. Tristram threw back his head, his chin thrust out,
and did not speak. Suddenly she turned to him. Her lips were parted,
in a wide, eager smile that was like a child's. Impulsively,
ingenuously, she held out her ungloved hand to him, palm downwards.
"Is that your confession, Tristram Tristram!"
For one instant he wavered, the next he was at her side, had taken her
hand and bowed over it and kissed it. Then he stood back, defiant,
trembling, like a man who has committed a world-staggering enormity.
But to her, it seemed, nothing had happened, nothing that she had not
willed and desired. Still smiling, she turned away from him and,
seating herself in the high-backed chair, placed the photograph where
she could see it best. Then she became intent, absorbed. The brief
incident and the man who watched her waveringly seemed to have been
swallowed up in something greater, some passionate feeling. Without a
word he left her and she did not hear him go. It was only when he
returned presently and placed a cup and saucer before her that she
looked up, colouring faintly.
"A poet in the wilderness and now Worcester! Major Tristram, I begin to
think you are a rather strange and wonderful doctor!"
He smiled with frank pleasure in her pleasure.
"I love beautiful things," he said. "I fancy they are to me what wine
is to some men. I'm like my mother in that. She understands. She
saved and saved to buy me that cup. There's a teapot--not to match--I
hate sets--but equally lovely. You shall see it when the water boils."
"And the chair--and these rugs! I know a Park Lane plutocrat who would
sell his greasy soul for them. Was that your mother too?"
"No, the rugs are a gift from Lalloo the money-lender. His baby son had
a bout of something or other, but got over it, and Lalloo wanted to
shower blessings on somebody. He knows the markets for rare things and
I have a shrewd, painful suspicion that he used unholy forces of
financial coercion to get hold of these. Ayeshi carved the chair for
me."
"Is Ayeshi a wood-pecker, or what?" she asked gaily.
He laughed with her.
"No--my aide-de-camp, orderly, servant, friend, all in one. Rather a
wonderful sort of person. Heaven alone knows where he came from. He
was brought to me by the man who 'owned' him, he was suffering from
snakebite, and after the cure he stuck to me. Nobody minded. The people
he lived with were afraid of him."
"Why?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know--he wasn't of their caste--any one could see that. He
is a Brahmin of the Brahmins, and believes in his gods. There isn't
anything so disconcerting to conventional religionists as genuine
belief." Tristram was on his way to the door of the inner room. He
stopped a moment and looked back at her. "And he can tell the most
wonderful stories," he went on slowly, as though overtaken by some
memory. "One day you must listen to him as I do--by the firelight, with
night overhead."
"I shall come," she answered deliberately. "And I shall see the
snake-bite on his arm and think of the story of the man who saved him."
Tristram had gone. She laughed a little and then fell to her old
brooding contemplation of the picture at her elbow. But when he returned
with the promised teapot and a plate of sandwiches she pushed it
impatiently from her.
"Tell me, Major Tristram, are you glad I've broken into your sanctuary?"
she asked abruptly.
He poured her tea out for her with a hand that shook a little.
"I don't know----"
"That's ungracious, Major Tristram. But you're altogether unexpected.
Even this room-it's not a man's room. Where are your guns, your skins,
your trophies?"
He looked about him, flushing to the roots of his fair, untidy hair.
"I haven't got any--I never had a gun of my own. I've got an Army pistol
somewhere in the kitchen, but it's got rusty and I don't know what would
happen if I fired it." He put the sandwiches near to her and then
stalked across to the doorway and sat down cross-legged on the rug, his
irregular profile cut sharply against the light. "I can't kill things,"
he said doggedly.
"Go on, Major Tristram. I am getting almost excited. A man who can't
kill things!"
He heard the irony in her voice and winced, but did not look at her.
"Oh--I know it's ridiculous--laughable. Compton says I'm a
sentimentalist--a freak. I can't help it."
"Is it a theory--Tolstoyism, Jainism----?"
He shook his head.
"I haven't any theories--it's just instinct--perhaps a kind of
revulsion. My father was the finest shot in the Indian Army. Once when
I was in Scotland I killed a stag. I felt--beastly--like a sort of
cowardly criminal who couldn't be punished and knew it."
"Still go on. Tell me more. I came here to get to know you, Major
Tristram, and I am a spoilt woman. Yes, you are a freak. I want to know
how freaks originate. Tell me--no, not about your father--I have a fancy
he was not freakish--but your mother----"
He stiffened, averting his head, his brows stern.
"My mother is different----" he began proudly.
"You have known me so long," she interrupted, "did you think I meant to
joke at her? Haven't you understood better than that?"
He turned. Twilight had begun to invest them both. In the great carved
chair among the shadows she looked almost luminous, a white spirit
neither of heaven nor earth, aloof and radiant in fairy immortality and
serene with a wisdom high above the man's painful plodding. Seeing her,
he caught his breath; the anger passed from his face, leaving it with a
curious look of bewilderment and pain.
"I'm sorry----" he said unevenly. "Of course I ought to have known.
But I am a heavy, unpresentable fellow--rather ridiculous too--and I
didn't want you to think I was like her." He turned away again, his
eyes intent on the dark strong hands clasped about his knees. "As to my
antecedents, there isn't much to tell. My father was a Captain in the
Indian Army. He was killed out here in Gaya when I was a baby. No one
ever found out how it happened. My mother was in England at the time.
She had nothing but her pension. She starved herself to keep me fit and
give me my chance." He broke off sharply. "I'd rather not talk about
that. It means a responsibility that would be intolerable if I wasn't
so proud of it--it would be awful to fail a woman who had starved for
you."
"I can understand that, Major Tristram."
He seemed to listen a moment as though to an echo of her low voice.
"All my people had been in the Indian Army," he went on. "I knew I
should make a dismal failure of soldiering. It seemed to me--it's my
nearest approach to a theory--that it's a man's business to make life
more tolerable--not to destroy it. So I compromised with the I.M.S.
And here I am."
"A hermit!" She leant forward, with her chin resting in the palm of her
hand. "Is that also part of your law of life, Major Tristram?"
"I have my work," he answered. "It's a huge district, and I've got to
be at it all the time. It is my life. But I'm a queer cuss--I have
other thoughts too--absurd daydreams. I'm alone so much that it's
natural enough--and if I came much among men and women I should be
afraid----"
"--that the vision might become concrete." She waited a moment--"or
fail you."
He shook his head.
"No--not that. But since I have got to be alone always I mustn't want
anything too badly."
She got up suddenly.
"It is getting late," she said. "I promised to be at the bridge-head by
nine. Mr. Radcliffe, who is in the adventure, meets me there and
escorts me back to safety. We should be home by midnight, and tomorrow
Gaya will have a new scandal. Mr. Radcliffe is very young. He will be
so pleased."
"I will come with you as far as the bridge-head," Tristram returned
gravely.
"I had expected nothing less."
For all her change of tone the suspense which had crept in upon them
with the twilight remained unbroken. It lay upon the man like a
quivering hand. As he led her horse through the black streets it
vibrated on the hot obscurity. They came out on to the plain and it was
there also, at his throat, suffocating him.
The full moon hung low on the horizon like a silver lamp. There was
nothing hid from it. It revealed and transfigured fantastically; the
very blades of the high-standing grass were drawn in separate delicate
lines of shadow, but they did not look like grass. The great river
flooded through the darkness--an endless winding army of ghosts whose
murmur was never still.
Sigrid Fersen looked down at the man beside her. As distance brings out
the significance of a rough sketch, so now the grey half-light threw
into relief lines and hollows of his face which she had not seen before.
They were as vigorous and ugly as they had ever been, yet their
silhouette under the helmet rim conveyed to her a new impression--the
thought of something chivalresque and simple, mystic and
single-hearted--a Pure Fool on the Threshold of his Quest. She bent
towards him, stroking her horse's neck with a gentle hand.
"And I too have a theory, Tristram Tristram," she said, as though there
had been no silence between them. "It is this--that there can be no
going back for any of us. We climb from experience to experience, and
grow or shrivel as our experience is a high or low one. There was a man
sleeping by the backwater. He is gone, and in his place you walk beside
me."
"Why should I not be the man by the backwater?" he asked. "He knew you
also."
"Since when?"
"Since two years ago."
"Tell me how he met me--I have forgotten."
"You never knew," he answered. "It was his last night in England. He
had said good-bye to all he cared for, and he felt pretty bad. He knew