The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
is to be where and when I want it. Do you promise?"
He did not answer. He was still looking away from her--down the white
line of dusty road which wound past the clustered barracks. A far-off,
long-drawn-out bugle-call fluttered out on to the hot stillness. She
looked down and saw his hand clenched on the splashboard, and the
impatient mockery faded from her lips.
"I won't make any stipulation. You are too ill to be bargained with.
And, after all, it lies in my power to seek you out when I choose--as I
have done before"--her eyes became veiled and intent--"in and out of the
ship's ghosts over the water--dancing over the grey roofs of the
world----"
He frowned perplexedly, following her words through a labyrinth of
memory and fancy and finding no end.
"Is that a quotation?"
"A sort of one----"
"It seems to express something----" He paused, meditating. The bugle
sounded again, louder and more metallic and now in answer came the
subdued hurrying of feet, the jangle of steel. Suddenly he faced her,
fiercely, almost violently, like a man throwing off an obsessing
weakness. There was a fire of energy in the throw-back of his great
shoulders, in the clear passionate desire of his regard. She faltered
under it. It swept her from her light fantastic dominion over him into
deep, fast-flowing waters which engulfed her, stupefied her, shook her
calm supremacy to its foundations. She did not know what had
happened--what had wrought the change in him. He who had fought grimly
and knowingly with the realism in the lives of others had somehow come
to grips with reality in his own. He had ceased to weave dreams. It
was not as a vision and a visionary that they faced each other, but as a
man and a woman. A flash of lightning had burst through the
unsubstantial mists of their relationship. And behind the figure of the
dreaming Stoic there loomed the stark, primeval human being, vital,
virile, armed with all the white, burning power of unsoiled, sternly
guarded passions. They flared in his blue eyes which held hers for the
first time with full recognition, with a daring, reckless revelation of
their own existence. And though inwardly she faltered, her gaze was as
steady as his own. She dared not turn from him. She felt that if she
did she would come face to face with herself--as fiercely, as terribly
awakened.
They spoke very quietly, very naturally to one another.
"I'll promise," he said. "A last day--no one could grudge it me?"
"No one." She held out her hand to him and it did not tremble. "Come,
now I will drive you to Heerut."
*CHAPTER XV*
*THE WEAVERS*
Barclay rode past the Boucicaults' bungalow on the afternoon when Mrs.
Boucicault gave her garden party in honour of the regiment's new
commander and his wife. It was a very grand function, and rather
gruesome if one stopped to think what lay inert and listening in a room
somewhere at the back, but to stop and think was a mental pastime in
which no one in Gaya indulged willingly. Mrs. Boucicault had been right.
Gaya was not in the least outraged. It was not even very upset when it
found that without a word of farewell Anne had gone south to Trichy to
pay her father's people a long visit. In its casual, easy-going way,
Gaya understood both points of view and sympathized.
The regimental band was playing a waltz and Barclay drew in his
slender-limbed thoroughbred to listen. A little band of natives with a
saffron-robed Sadhu in their midst coming round a bend of the white
road, he drew out a gold case from his pocket and selected and lit a
cigarette with an exaggerated deliberation. The procession drew on one
side and the leader saluted the Sahib respectfully. Barclay took the
salute with a curt, indifferent nod, but something in the episode must
have changed the nature of his thoughts. He threw a glance towards the
garden, walled from his view by a circle of high palms, and his black
eyes were alight with a childish satisfaction. He heard voices
intermingle with the music and two young men in immaculate
tennis-clothes lounged out of the compound gates. They looked after the
procession, and one of them laughed.
"It's nothing--you'll soon get fed up with that native stuff. When
you've seen the festival at Heerut next week you won't want another dose
for years--these sort of fellows with their humbugging old fakir will be
pouring in till the place is like an ant-heap. Talk about
self-governing India--oh, Lord!"
Barclay, a notable figure enough on his beautiful mare stood not three
yards away from the speaker, yet he appeared to pass unnoticed. Neither
of the two looked at him. He drove his spurs into the animal's silken
sides, curbing her at the same instant with an iron hand, and set her at
a nervous, tortured canter down the road. His tight mouth under the
black moustache was curved with a deliberate pleasure as he felt her
sweat and tremble under his mastery. He kept her at the pace for a mile
through the blaze of sun which poured down upon the unsheltered plain
and then, satiated, allowed her to drop to a quivering, resentful walk.
He reached the bridge-head half an hour before sunset. A D.P.W. man with
a party of assistants was taking soundings for the new traffic bridge
which was to link up Gaya and the administrative centre three hundred
miles away with the never-ending chain of villages of which Heerut was
the first and largest. He had had a bad afternoon of it with Mother
Ganges, and he stared savagely at Barclay, who drew rein.
"Getting on?" the latter asked.
"Damnably. The river's never the same two days running."
Barclay showed his white teeth in a smile.
"That's her speciality. You'll never build that bridge."
"Won't I?"
"The natives have a superstition against it. No white man will ever
bridge the Holy Place. This _is_ the Holy Place, you know--the spot
where the sacred serpents come down from the jungle and take
refreshment." He spoke with much the indolent amusement of the two
young men outside the Boucicaults' compound. He aped it deliberately,
not knowing whence came his smarting satisfaction. The Englishman mopped
a moist and irate forehead.
"No, I didn't know," he snapped. "I'm not a native. I haven't got any
damned superstitions. Perhaps you'd like to have a shot at it."
Barclay made no answer. The smile passed from his lips. He sat his
horse motionlessly, staring at the faintly swaying native bridge in
front of him. The Englishman, unconscious of his own success, stumped
off angrily towards a fresh point of vantage.
Presently Barclay crossed to the farther side of the river, turning his
horse from the path, rode through the long grasses to the temple, and
here, within a few feet of the carved gateway, he dismounted, and,
tossing the reins over the battered post which was all that marked the
old Path of Auspiciousness, he strolled through into the Manderpam. The
place was empty. Its usual inhabitant had vanished. Barclay stood a
moment, looking about him with the detached, unfeeling interest of a
tourist. The attitude was deliberate, as were all his actions. He was
setting the gulf of race and tradition between himself and this
austerely sensuous beauty. He held himself an alien, walking idly, but
with loud steps over the grass-grown stones, humming to himself, and
beating time with his crop against his riding-boots. But the silence,
heavy with old dreams and drowsy, bygone meditations, the stately avenue
of roofless pillars, daunted him. He came to a halt in the entrance to
the _antarila_ and stared round furtively, peering into the
purple-tinted shadows, listening as to a sound which troubled and
escaped him. A little red-cheeked bulbul fluttered from its nest high
overhead on the summit of the crumbling walls, and he watched its flight
through the oblique bars of alternate light and shadow with a curious
anxiety. It was as though he sought to rivet his attention on something
trivial, so that he should not have to face whatever lay beneath the
surface. The bulbul came to rest in some hidden rock among the
deep-cut, fantastic reliefs of the frieze, and the soft, tender beating
of its wings, like the last throb of a dying pulse, passed under the
weight of a brooding, deathlike silence. Barclay turned and went
noisily into the _antarila_. But here his footsteps rang with a
different and startling resonance. They echoed among the broad, stunted
pillars and died sullenly in a gloom which shrouded the place in
unfathomable dimensions. Barclay, raising his hand instinctively,
touched the roof, but its dank solidity could not remove the impression
of a monstrous nightfall, of a sky black and unlit, stretching up into
infinity. On either hand, his knowledge might have told him, were thick
walls, but they too carried no conviction, and the darkness went on and
on in narrow, endless passages leading down into the bowels of an unholy
mystery. The faint gleam of light in front of him, the soft gold of the
courtyard behind, were like ghosts, painted luminously on the solid
blackness, themselves bringing no light, no relief.
Barclay stopped, and, with his insolent deliberation, lit a cigarette,
afterwards holding the match overhead. He saw that his hand shook and
the tiny flame quivered an instant and went out as though a secret
breath had blown against it. Barclay cursed and bit his teeth together
as the echo gibed at him from its invisible lurking-place, and then went
on, hushing his footsteps so that they should not follow him. In the
Holy of Holies there was neither light nor darkness, but a haze which at
once hid and revealed all things. It was like a pall shrouding the sun,
or a gauzy, luminous veil of sunshine thrown over nightfall. It came
filtering down from the great sun-window which, high overhead in the
slender _sikhara_, looked out eastwards whence at daybreak Laksmi,
surrounded with the golden-haired divas of morning, rises up to meet
Vishnu, who watches for her. It fell softly on the gigantic, monstrous
effigy of Vishnu himself, cross-legged on his altar, in either hand a
writhing serpent, his black eyes fixed in cruel, aloof contemplation on
an existence which knew neither joy nor sorrow, neither humanity nor its
desires and prayers. As in the old days when men and women had passed
worshipping through his temple, so now that the worshippers were still
and the courtyard empty and his altar bare of offerings, he remained
indifferent and omnipotent. Men, generations, and religions pass, the
temple crumbles. But so long as death remains, so long are the gods
immortal. The knowledge of its immortality was graven into the image's
mocking mouth, into the sightless, all-seeing eyes.
Barclay stood with one foot on the altar steps, and stared up into the
frigid face and blew rings of smoke into the wide, cruel nostrils.
There was more than a sightseer's insolent disregard in the action. It
was a sneer and a defiance. He spat on the altar-step. But when a hand
striking invisibly out of the darkness sent him staggering to the wall
he screamed like a child whose nerve has snapped suddenly under a long,
agonizing tension. His mouth was open, changing the character of his
whole face. The cigarette had fallen and lay like a tiny burning eye on
the stone flags. Vahana, the Sadhu, ground his heel upon it. Whether
he had been kneeling in the shadow or whether he had crept after the
interloper could not be told. Gaunt and naked, the bones of his chest
and ribs starting out under the straining flesh, the wild grey hair
tossed back from his face, he sprang up before the idol, protecting it
with outstretched arms whose long, attenuated lines flung the shadow of