The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
disaster. "Give me some sign, Boucicault. If you consent, close your
eyes or----"
Slowly, as if weighed down by disuse, the withered arm lying on the
sheet lifted itself from the elbow. It remained upright for an instant,
throwing a sinister shadow on the wall, seeming to point upwards with
menacing significance, then sank slowly to its place. The eyes were mad
with exultation.
Tristram was back to the bedside at one stride. He laid his fingers on
the savagely beating pulse. With rapid, skilful movements, he began to
test the muscles and nerve of the now motionless arm. He was breathing
quickly. The weariness, the painful deliberation had gone from him. He
was himself again--the fighter on the vast field of suffering, the
physician glorying in the greatest of all triumphs.
"By God, Boucicault, you don't know what that may mean! It's what we'd
hoped for. Look here--can you do it again?"
The arm remained inert, the eyes were, momentarily veiled and
insignificant. "How long have you been able to do that?" He was still
busy with his examination and scarcely troubled about an answer. He had
plunged back into a world where there were no passions or conflicts, but
only huge immutable laws, no personal desires or unreal dreams, but only
facts, unending chains of cause and effect, a thousand paths converging
on one great end. It was not till he had made every experiment complete
that he remembered. He looked up. The eyes were turned into their
corners, resting on his face. Their exaggerated expanse of white gave
them a look like that of a vicious dog. They did not move save when
Tristram lifted himself slowly from his half-kneeling position, and then
they followed him with a malicious fixity. The rest of the face was
dead--a crumbling mask--but the life in those eyes was inextinguishable,
titanic in its will to continuation.
He had to escape from them. He went over to the wide-open balcony and
stood there with his back turned, staring out into the darkness. For a
moment, his brain refused to face this reckoning with the future. He
listened to the music which poured through the scented stillness like
the drowsy, delicious murmur of running water. A man and a woman came
down the pathway which led from the front of the bungalow. He could
hear their voices--the man's deep-pitched and earnest, the woman's
silvery and ironic. The light from a Chinese lantern shining softly
among the branches drew a subdued gleam from the gold on the man's
collar, from the woman's white, uncovered shoulders. Suddenly the man
bent down, and they stood together through a tense, suffocating moment
of silence. Then the woman spoke again--breathlessly, the ironic
lightness gone.
Tristram drew back. He felt as though he had been drawn out into the
night's delirious sweetness; as though in defiance of that silent,
menacing figure his pulses had leapt forward, his blood had clamoured
for the fulfilment of its elemental demand on all this wealth of living.
He was young still--young in his purity of feeling--young in the
unsatisfied forces of desire. Youth flung itself on him with its
imperative behests--now when he reeled under the knowledge of its
passing. For it was over. He reasoned clearly enough through this
storm of primitive emotion. Boucicault would live. He might come back
into life--he, Tristram, would bring him back to life. It was the task
which his creed set him--not the creed of his profession but the deeper,
sterner creed of his blood.
And what if his blood lied, what if his creed were a mad, senseless
paradox? Was not the happiness of the majority the only good, its
preservation the only morality? This man had set himself against the
law. In a ghostly, tragic procession, those whom he had hunted out of
their rightful heritage passed before Tristram's memory--young officers,
those six men in the full glory of manhood standing in the barrack yard,
their backs to the wall, their faces to their brothers, and the death
which was to be dealt out to them; Eleanor Boucicault grey-cheeked and
wild-eyed pursuing the phantom promises of life; Anne, cowed and broken,
haunted now by a remorseful treacherous memory; a death-stricken little
mongrel dog, most harmless, most pitiable of all, with glazed eyes,
seeking to understand the black mystery of human cruelty.
Tristram put his hand to the stiff military collar as though it choked
him. The foundations on which he had built his life were crumbling
under his feet. Was he to give this criminal mind the power to act, to
drag his escaped and maimed victims back into the net of his authority,
to add others to that pitiable procession? Tristram recognized the
issues with an appalling clearness. His trained intellect grappled with
them with the same stern impartiality of judgment as he would have used
in tracking the source of a disease. With regard to himself, he
discarded all false sentiment. As men judge, the blow he had struck had
been unfortunate but just. Was he to heap an outrageous punishment upon
himself, upon Anne, upon an old woman who had known no happiness save
her joy in him? Would it not be a strong and logical following out of
his sincere belief if he made no effort to fan this evil flame to life?
As yet he was not conscious of any direct temptation. He was only facing
the issues--weighing one life against another, as it had happened a
hundred times in his professional career.
He turned slowly and came back into the room. The eyes followed him,
but their malicious knowledge no longer reached him. The fight was not
now between himself and this man, but between two fundamental and
opposite conceptions of life. There was a little table at the foot of
the bed, crowded with the paraphernalia of sickness. He stopped before
it, because its interest offered a fresh delay, and idly picked up one
of the glass-stoppered bottles. He opened it and smelt its contents.
The faint, sickly perfume flashed its significance to his brain.
Men were given the power to kill----
He looked up. The eyes burning in that white mask were on his hands.
Their expression had changed--had become more horrible. It was the very
spirit of fear and triumphant evil.
Tristram put the bottle back in its place. He came and stood by the
bed.
"I don't want you to hope too much, Boucicault," he said, coolly and
professionally. "In the best of cases, it will be a long job. I shall
come tomorrow and go over you again and see what's to be done. If Sir
Gilbert is still in the land, we'll have him over. And you must do all
you can to help us. As to me--I quite realize I have landed myself in
an impasse from which there is no possible escape. I don't know what
Anne will feel or think. But she'll be so thankful to get you back, the
cost won't matter. At any rate, I shall not speak of all this again to
you. My business with you is to give you back to life. The afterwards
is my concern. Good night, Boucicault."
As he had spoken, his eyes on the mask of bitterness and hatred,
something rushed over him. It was like the melting of a frozen stream
under the first warm sunshine. It seemed to him that he had looked
straight down through those eyes into the very heart of human misery,
and had understood. He remembered his own words: "There is only one
distinction between men--the unhappy and the happy, the cursed and the
blessed." They blazed now with a real significance. Men were
pitchforked into this world with distorted bodies or distorted
souls--what did it matter which? They deserved neither hatred nor
condemnation--they were the awful mystery of humanity, the visible
symbol of the curse under which humanity totters. "Here, but for a wild
incalculable chance, go I, Tristram."
He bent down and laid his hand on Boucicault's arm. He did not stop to
think whether or not his touch might be repugnant to the other man. He
acted out of an imperative instinct.
"You mustn't worry," he said gently, and almost gaily. "You'll live to
do for me yet, Boucicault! Good night again."
The eyes closed as though they had burnt themselves out. Tristram moved
quietly to the verandah. He had a sudden sense of freedom, of physical
relief, which was like an awakening from a suffocating nightmare. He
went down the steps into the garden. It was then, as he stood there
listening to the music and the distant voices, that he saw Sigrid Fersen
come towards him. His eyes could not have recognized her face, for it
was dark and she was moving quickly, like a pale mysterious light,
through the shadow of the trees. But he knew her. Was it her step--the
lithe, familiar motion of her body--or something deep-hidden within
himself which irresistibly went out to her? He could not have told. He
waited for her. She came on unseeingly to the edge of the faint
reflection from Boucicault's room, and then stood still, staring at him.
Her small, white face had an aghast look. He tried to speak to her and
could not. His throat hurt him.
He knew now that he had never known her, never, even in his dreams of
her, realized her potentialities. He knew that she had deliberately
thrown down her weapons to meet him in the stern simplicity of his life.
She had been too proud, too self-assured perhaps to fear to show herself
to him physically at her least. Now he saw her at her highest--the
priceless, polished stone in a rare and exquisite setting.
A languorous breath of night-wind ruffled the smooth gold of her hair
and lifted the flimsy scarf from her shoulders. It fluttered out behind
her like a pale mist. He saw the single string of pearls at her neck.
He fancied he could see the passionate life beating beneath them. And
through all her brilliancy, her burning vitality, there was a strain of
quaint Victorianism, a demure elfishness--like the inter-weaving of a
minuet with the riot of a bacchanal.
He could not have spoken to her, and at last a smile dawned at the
corners of her mouth. He knew that she had been afraid, and it flashed
upon him that in the bitterest moment she would retain her humour, her
zest of life.
"You quite frightened me, Major Tristram," she said. "I have never seen
you in uniform before."
"Does it become me?" he heard himself ask back.
"No. You look as though you were rather stifled by so much
magnificence. And you've never seen me in full gala either, have you?"
"No."
"It suits me, doesn't it? That's the difference between us. I'm in my
natural element. Will you take me back, Major Tristram? I came out for
a breath of fresh air and to escape Mrs. Boucicault. Mrs. Boucicault
asked me to dance. I think she fancied it would be a good method of
rehabilitating me in the eyes of outraged Gaya. But I didn't want to.
What's the use of marrying if you have to go on working for your
living?"
He walked silently beside her. He did not know this woman with the hard
voice--he felt that she did not want him to know her. Her hand rested
lightly on his arm. He looked at it. It was like alabaster on the red
sleeve. "We're going to be married shortly," she went on. "Mr. Meredith
is trying to refuse his services. He doesn't approve. He wants us to
leave Gaya. It's so absurdly Christian, isn't it? My husband's
business will be in Gaya and I like the place----" They had turned the
curve of the path and came within sight of the softly-lit garden. They
could see shadows of the dancers gliding through Mrs. Boucicault's rooms
to the rhythm of the latest American distortion. Little groups had
gathered round the tables on the verandah and there was much laughter
and the subdued clinking of glasses. The Chinese lanterns shone like
bright warm eyes amid the trees.
Sigrid stood still an instant. He heard her draw a deep, unsteady