The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
are athirst in the desert----"
He seemed to meditate and to have forgotten her. He rose stiffly and
painfully to his feet.
"I go to seek Tristram Sahib," he muttered.
She also had risen with an effortless slowness which made even of the
simple movement a kind of wonder.
"Tristram Sahib? Is Tristram Sahib here?"
He pointed vaguely out into the darkness.
"There--in an hour I am to meet him with the Colonel Sahib's answer. He
would not come himself, for he is hard pressed, and if he met the
Colonel Sahib----"
"There would be an end to his theories," she interposed with a little
laugh.
"And to you also he sent a message, Mem-Sahib."
She turned to him. Mrs. Smithers, to whom the darkness was in the
nature of an impropriety, had lit the high lamp in the room behind them,
and the dim gold which flooded Sigrid Fersen's face seemed more the dawn
of an expression than a reflected light.
"Give it me!" she said.
His back was to the light. He looked at her for a moment, his face a
blank, featureless shadow.
"It is here, Mem-Sahib." From his tunic he drew out a little bundle
wrapped in a thick silk cummerbund, and gave it tenderly into her hands.
"It was that which made me most afraid," he added.
"That!" she said, scarcely above her breath. She held the fragile china
cup in both hands, her head bent. "I can't accept it," she said
hurriedly. "You must tell him so, Ayeshi. It was his mother's gift--he
valued it--he loves beautiful things--I couldn't take it----"
"Mem-Sahib"--the young Hindu's voice sounded rough and uneven--"the
Dakktar Sahib goes to Bjura tonight. There is much terrible sickness in
Bjura, and the Dakktar Sahib goes weary and single-handed. The cup was
precious to him--most precious--and that was why he sent it to the
Mem-Sahib who loves the beautiful as he does. He believed that his
mother would have wished it." He waited and then asked: "What message
shall I take to the Dakktar Sahib?"
"Wait--you must give me time to think, Ayeshi--or, no, why should I
think?" Her laugh sounded low and unsteady. "Come, you must sit there
in the shadow again. It is not yet time for Tristram Sahib. Wait--I
will give him my message--sit there----"
She was gone noiselessly. Mrs. Smithers, who hovered gloomily about the
drawing-room in search of the absconded Wickie, saw her go to the piano
and throw it open. For many minutes she sat before it motionless,
seeming to listen, then her left hand touched the keys, and almost
inaudibly, like the stir of a newly awakened wind, there sounded the
first notes of the Andante Appassionata.
Mrs. Smithers no longer fidgeted. She stood in the shadow of the
curtained window, her old, hard-set face to the darkness. Only her
mouth had lost something of its grim severity, and had become tender.
She did not see Ayeshi, though barely the breadth of the verandah
separated them. She looked past him as sightlessly as he looked past
her. Evidently he had turned to go. One foot rested on the lower step
and his body was thrown back against the balustrade as though he had
been arrested in the very act of flight. The dim light on his face
revealed its look of wonder--almost panic-stricken wonder.
Mrs. Smithers continued to disregard him. But presently she turned and
went across to the piano. Whatever momentary weakness had overcome her
had gone and she was again her ruthless, uncompromising self.
"Sigrid--there's some one out there in the compound--under the trees--a
man. Who is he?"
"Major Tristram--the Dakktar Sahib--a very poor and gallant
gentleman--who is perhaps going out to die and now trembles on the brink
of Paradise." She broke off and passed joyously into the next phrase
and through its glowing crescendo her voice sounded with a light
distinctness. "I can play too, Smithy! And dance. I could dance to
this and Beethoven would say I knew more of his soul than half the fools
who gape in stuffy concert-halls. Think, Smithy, that man out there has
never heard such music--only Meyerbeer's pompous little ballet--and
after that he went and stood by the river until the daybreak--because of
me----"
Mrs. Smithers shook her head sternly.
"You mustn't, Sigrid--you mustn't. It's not fair--you've always been
fair. You know nothing can't come of it. You know yourself. You can't
change your course----"
"I do know. But sometimes the wind shall blow me whither it listeth.
Haven't I the right to that much?"
"Not at some one else's cost, Sigrid."
There was no answer. Sigrid Fersen lifted her right hand and touched
her lips with her forefinger. It was as though she called the very
garden without to a deeper stillness. Her left hand passed swiftly from
chord to chord, from major to a wistful minor, resting at last on one
deep lingering note of suspense.
"Hush, Smithy! Don't talk! What does anything matter? Now listen! Do
you remember--the D minor valse--do you remember that last night--the
grand-dukes and the princesses, what were they all?--was there anything
but God and Chopin and I----"
Her fair small head was thrown back, her eyes were bright, but not now
with gaiety. Her mouth was slightly open, and she was breathing deeply
and quickly with the glory of divine movement.
Mrs. Smithers turned away again and went back to the window. She was
crying, her mouth stiff as though it could not yield, even to grief.
The man under the trees had taken a step forward and now stood still
again. Between them Ayeshi lay huddled together on the top step of the
verandah, his face hidden in his arms.
*CHAPTER IX*
*LALLOO, THE MONEY-LENDER*
It had come to be an accepted fact in Gaya that the old bungalow lying
on the outskirts was haunted and therefore undesirable. Not that Gaya
feared ghosts or anything else in heaven or earth. The average
Anglo-Indian's nerve, strained by the subtle but immediate juxtaposition
of frivolity and danger which shade so imperceptibly into each other,
that the border-line can be crossed unconsciously and in an instant,
cannot indulge in emotionalism or fancies. He has to close his mind
both to the fascination and the veiled menace of Indian life, or be
lost. It is for that reason that he is always the last to admit the
fascination, except in regard to the social conditions, or the danger,
beyond the obvious ones of ill health and consequent retirement on a
beggarly half-pay.
So Gaya's inhabitants locked up fear, and hid the key where it could not
be found even by the most unbaked, fluttered newcomer, and the old
bungalow with its ugly secret left them unmoved. But they never denied
the existence of the blight which rested on the gloomy, tumbled-down
building, and they avoided the place as unpleasant and depressing, and
took care that innocent newly appointed officers and their wives, for
whom so large and spacious a dwelling seemed eminently suited, should
house elsewhere. It was owing to this circumstance that James Barclay
had been able to obtain possession and a consequent but dubious foothold
on the outskirts of Gaya's sternly fortified social life. The bungalow
had been built in the dim ages before the Mutiny, and had been patched
and patched till little was left of the original. James Barclay
promptly renovated it from end to end, and added various bizarre
additions of his own which, however, did not alter the place's
fundamental characteristic of mouldering gloom and depression.
In the room in which he sat talking to Lalloo, the money-lender,
everything of native origin had been rigorously excluded. The chairs
were covered with English chintzes, the curtains were futurist in design
and colour; there were copies of European masterpieces in heavy gilded
frames on the walls, and a new art bronze lamp suspended from the hand
of a marble Venus cast a bright, garish reflection on the upturned,
contemplative face of its owner.
It was curious, therefore, that, as little as he had been able to
eradicate the gloom, as little had he been able to oust the indigenous
element. The objects might be Western, but the atmosphere remained
obstinately Oriental. Perhaps it was the irrepressible outbursts of
colour-love betrayed by the chintzes, or perhaps Lalloo supplied the
cause of this phenomena. He sat cross-legged on the carpet and stroked
his grizzled beard with a dark hand, that seemed all the darker for the
scrupulous whiteness of his _puggri_ and loose tunic. Compared with
him, Barclay looked almost blond, almost English. Yet Lalloo also
accentuated what was un-English in him. There were lines about the old
usurer's mouth and nostrils which were already dimly suggested in
Barclay's face. There was a gulf between them, but there was also a
bridge across.
"There is Seetul, who says he cannot pay," Lalloo detailed monotonously,
and as though he were reading from an account-book. "He has owed us ten
rupees these last six months, and still he says he cannot pay. But he
has had many fine stuffs in his loom--and his daughter's hands have been
busy with rich embroideries on which the Sahibs' wives have cast longing
eyes. It would be well to claim your due, Meester Barclay, before it is
too late."
Barclay nodded absently.
"Good. I can leave that to you, Lalloo," he said.
"It is well. Then Heera Singh--we lent him five rupees a year ago when
the harvest failed. Twenty-five rupees is what I claimed from him two
days ago, and he has nothing--that is to say, he has some fine cattle
and this year the rabi has done well. Your claim would be a just one,
Meester Barclay."
"You'd better make it quick, then, before the beggar sells out.
Afterwards he'll come whining with some infernal lie. He's had rope
enough."
"It is well." The old man continued to stroke his beard for a moment in
silence, watching the face under the light with a blank intentness which
revealed nothing. "Nehal Pal has paid in full," he resumed at length.
"His daughter was given in marriage to Meer Ali a week since. Meer Ali
is a very old man, and there was some difficulty, for in these
degenerate days the tongues of the women wag to some purpose--but the
marriage contract was very favourable to Nehal Pal. And he has paid in
full." Lalloo patted his waistband and drew out a small jangling bag,
which he set with an almost religious gravity at his patron's feet.
"These and the other moneys of which I have already rendered account are
now before you, Meester Barclay."
Barclay picked up the bag and weighed it negligently in his lean, brown
hand.
"You've got an amazing head for figures, Lalloo," he commended. "And
you're some business man, as our American friends would say. We shall
want both qualities badly in the future. I want money--as much as I can
get. I mean to rope in all the industries of every village within three
hundred miles and make them paying concerns. At present, they're just
in a state of straggling, unprofitable hugger-mugger, out of which
nobody gets anything."
"I have done my best," Lalloo insinuated deprecatingly.
Barclay tossed the bag on to the polished oak table beside him.
"One man's best isn't enough. Nothing's of any good without
organization, and to organize one must have the power to make others do
what they're told. So far we've got most of the grain-dealers into the
net, and by the next harvest they'll have to sell me their grain at my
own price. But that's a drop in the ocean. The weaving--that's the
thing. That's what's going to count. There are three hundred thousand
weavers round and about Gaya, swamped by rotten fakes from Manchester.
I'm going to change all that. It's Manchester that's going to be
swamped. One of these days, I shall be a power in Gaya, Lalloo."