The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
annoyance--and I apologize. I wish you both good-night."
Tristram blocked his way.
"Your name's Barclay?" he asked quietly.
"It is."
"I've heard of you."
"I daresay." The Eurasian's eyes narrowed. He looked into his
opponent's face with a sudden curiosity. "I daresay we have met before,
Major Tristram."
"I don't think so."
"Perhaps in a third person."
"I don't understand," Tristram returned simply. "But I have heard of
you. Some time I'd like to have a little talk--about various things,
which concern us both--notably about some friends of mine who have been
hard pressed.----"
"I shall be delighted to meet you any time, Major Tristram," Barclay
retorted. "I, too, may have matters of interest to discuss with you."
Tristram stood on one side.
"Shall we go together now?" he suggested. "Since we are both
intruding----"
"Not you, Major Tristram," Sigrid interposed quietly.
There was a moment's silence. The way was now open to Barclay, and the
three implacable watchers gave him no choice. He tried to insinuate
into his bearing, into his exaggerated bow, a mocking ease, a cynical
suggestiveness which might give him even a semblance of advantage. But
he failed, and knew it. He stumbled out, blind and sick with the
consciousness of defeat, of a hideous, self-inflicted humiliation.
Mrs. Smithers saw him to the verandah steps as a policeman sees a
doubtful intruder off premises specially recommended to his care. She
adjusted her neat wig with dignity and a touch of wrathful defiance.
"In a brace of shakes, I'd have boxed his ears," she muttered
ferociously. "Not but what my heart was beating about inside me like a
fly in a bottle. The impudent blackguard! Called himself an
acquaintance! What next! We shall have the sweep dropping in for tea
and the butcher leaving his card----" She caught herself up. "There, in
another minute, I'd have forgotten I was a lady and said things. Shall
I see about coffee for you, Sigrid?"
"Please, Smithy."
Sigrid Fersen stood near the middle of the room, looking out on to the
dark garden, her hand raised to her small face in the familiar attitude
of half-whimsical, half-sad reflection. Tristram glanced at her and
then hurriedly away.
"I was dancing," she said suddenly, with a catch in her breath. "I
don't think I'd ever danced like that before. And then he came. It was
as though something vital in me had been snapped--a bird brought down in
full flight----"
"Ayeshi came out and told me you were in difficulties," he said. "I was
eavesdropping. I suppose I behaved like a cad, too."
She shook her head.
"I was playing to you--and dancing. I knew you would see me dancing."
"Then you knew----?"
"Ayeshi told me you were coming. I knew if I played you would come into
the garden and listen. I wanted you to come. And you came."
He tried to laugh, and the laugh failed him.
"I am almost afraid of you," he said.
She considered him quaintly.
"Smithy would say you were quite right to be afraid. And Smithy would be
right, too. I am dangerous."
"And I am a believer in the theory which bids us 'live dangerously,'" he
retorted more lightly.
"But with you the theory would work out as self-sacrifice--with me it
would mean the sacrifice of others." She drew a lounge chair out on to
the verandah and sat down with a little sigh of relief. "How tired I
am! The D minor valse always tired me--not my body--that doesn't
matter--but the invisible spirit which makes a single step a divine
thing. Mr. Meredith would call it the soul, if he could connect his
speciality with anything so vulgar and mundane." She laughed and
snuggled herself back among the cushions. "Anyhow, my soul has danced
and my soul is tired," she announced contentedly.
Tristram remained standing. He was looking down at her profile with a
puzzled intentness.
"Yes," he admitted, "very tired."
"That means--I'm looking ugly?" she suggested.
"No," he answered, abruptly.
At that moment, seated there with her back to the light, she looked
elfish, something aerial and inhuman. Her fair hair, smoothed down with
a delicious primness on either side of her small head, made an aureole
in which her face gleamed white and transparent. Beauty and ugliness
were terms inapplicable to her. As well have measured air and fire by
the standards of a Venus de Milo. "Still, you're not well tonight,"
Tristram persisted obstinately.
"Feel that, then, Dakktar Sahib!"
He took her outstretched hand. For a second it lay in his, small, cool,
amazingly soft and supple, then clasped itself round his fingers like a
steel band made living by electric forces, and he looked up wincing and
laughing, and their eyes met. She was smiling at him with a childlike
satisfaction.
"You see, I am stronger than you, Dakktar Sahib!" she said gaily.
"That wouldn't be saying much tonight," he answered.
She still held his hand, but her hold had changed its character.
"I had forgotten--Ayeshi told us--you are ill----"
"It is nothing," he muttered.
She became thoughtful in her silence. Wickie made a scrambling rush up
the verandah steps and flung himself, with an hysterical yell of
triumph, against Tristram's legs. By what cunning he had eluded Mrs.
Smithers's methodical but unpractised search cannot be told--but he was
there, a wriggling, writhing, panting mass of delirious happiness.
Tristram caught him up and hugged him.
"And how in the name of the Creator of Mongrel Puppies did you get
here?" he asked.
"I commandeered him," Sigrid Fersen answered.
"I left him with Miss Boucicault."
"And Colonel Boucicault threatened to knock his brains out, so I
commandeered him."
Tristram glanced down at her wonderingly.
"You bearded the Colonel? That was plucky of you. Anne must have been
frightened, poor little soul."
A faint, malicious smile quivered at the corner of Sigrid's lips.
"A little, I think. But she had no time to interfere. I was nearest to
the scene of action."
"I am awfully grateful. Wickie and I are old pals."
"I know. If I deserve reward, let him stay with me. What will you do
with small dogs out there?"
"I don't know--would he stay with you?"
"Try him!"
He set Wickie on his short bandy legs and she called the dog by name.
He came and sat in front of her, beating the ground with his lengthy
tail, his ears flat in an ingratiating humility. She bent and patted
him. "You see!"
Tristram nodded. His silence became tense and painful, as though he
laboured under a physical weakness, kept only at bay by a sheer effort
of will. She looked at him critically, and saw that he was trembling.
"You are ill, Major Tristram. Sit down and rest. Smithy will bring us
coffee--it will do you good to sit with me here in the darkness and
quiet."
"I ought to be on my way," he answered unevenly.
"Well, then, if not for yourself--for me. I will admit that I am ill
and that I need the Dakktar Sahib's ministrations. It comforts me to
have you here. It is your duty, therefore, to remain."
"You are stronger than I," he answered, with an unsteady laugh. But he
sat down opposite her, his body bent forward, his hands clasped between
his knees. She could see nothing of his face, but the outline of his
fine head, distorted a little by its mass of thick hair, trimmed by an
amateur hand, lent his shadow a look of way-worn distress and physical
disintegration. Yet it remained an indomitable shadow. She remembered
him as she had seen him once before. Since then the Quixote had had his
tussle with the windmill and now, bruised and broken, prepared himself
for a fresh onslaught.
"Why do you do it?" she flung at him, almost angrily.
He looked up at her, as though waking from a dream.
"Do what?" he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh, I know. Ayeshi has told me. You're going into that hell
single-handed and crippled. Boucicault has refused to get you help.
Why do you let him trample on you? He is not in your service. Are you
afraid of him, too?"
He met her taunt with a grave simplicity.
"No, I am not afraid. Up till now, Colonel Boucicault has blocked my
line of communication with the authorities. That's over. There's going
to be a tussle to the death between us, and he knows it. That's why I
didn't come myself tonight."
"Then why need you go? Any one would exonerate you. Ayeshi said it
might mean----" She recoiled from her own thought. "It's almost your
duty not to go," she exclaimed.
"Do you want me to remain?" he asked.
She beat her clenched fist irritably on the arm of her chair.
"No--because it wouldn't be you then--because you are a fool, Major
Tristram--a sublime fool whom one wouldn't have changed even to save him
from destruction. Go, by all means, and sacrifice yourself to your
duty. For that you were born."
He sank back in his chair, his face lifted to where the jungle of the
neglected compound thinned before the night's luminous sapphire.
"I don't believe in duty and sacrifices," he said, "but in happiness."
"And isn't your happiness here?" she demanded, imperiously; "isn't this
happiness--the thing you dreamed of?"
She saw his hands clench themselves.
"Yes--but a dream that can't be fulfilled--a secret corner of
fancy--that isn't enough. In the end--if one lived on it, set it before
one as the end-all--one would sicken and starve. The dream itself would
die. I've figured it out--happiness is the consciousness of
purpose----"
"What purpose can any one of us have?" she retorted scornfully, "we who
are ourselves purposeless creations?"
He waited a moment. When he answered, his voice sounded clear and
steady, though his words were faltering, groping efforts of expression.
"I don't know--I mean rather that I can't explain. I'm an inarticulate
sort of fellow. It seems to me--ninety-nine days out of a hundred we
don't worry as to where we're going or why. We do what we've got to do
blindly. But the hundredth day is a day of reckoning. You were going to
say just now that I might die if I went out there. Well, that doesn't
seem to me so important. Death is the only visible goal we have. What
matters, what is vital, what is happiness is that we should reach that
goal splendidly--as splendidly as we can. Surely happiness is this,
that in our moments of reckoning, when we have to face ourselves, or
when we reach the goal, perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly, we can look
back on our course with the knowledge that, whether punishment or reward
or nothing awaits us, we ran straight according to our lights."
"And 'running straight' for you means plunging into the sickness and
suffering of others?" she asked moodily.
She saw him throw back his tired shoulders.
"What other 'running straight' is there that matters?" he returned,
ardently. "Those poor folk out in Bjura--I'm the only hope they've got.
Supposing I fail them? No one would blame me---no one would say I hadn't
run straight--but I should have broken the only law I recognize--I
should have denied the only god I know. And more than that--I'm
English. When I go out there, I carry my colours with me. It depends
on me whether those colours signify to these people suffering or
happiness, and whether, in the end, they signify happiness or suffering
to us----" He paused, and then went on quietly. "And they must be held
higher and steadier because others have forgotten."
"As Colonel Boucicault has forgotten," she put in.
"And is he happy?" he asked quickly. She was silent, and he made a
little gesture of apology. "I'm sorry--I'm like all lonely men--I've
grown preachy and prosy. I've tired you----"
But she turned to him, her head high, her eyes brilliant with a suddenly
revealed feeling.