The Hermit Doctor of Gaya: A Love Story of Modern India
we love to air our borrowed souls and talk largely and pompously about
the ideals we've cribbed out of a novel? There is nothing in
it--nothing. I just sold myself for an easy life in a mud hut in the
valley. Let that comfort you."
He threw back his head, looking her full in the face.
"That's a lie," he said. "You must have loved greatly."
For a full minute they remained staring at each other in defiant
silence. And under his unhappy eyes her expression changed and grew
careless and indifferent.
"Well--perhaps you're right, perhaps I did love with all my heart." She
held out her hand. "But I am very, very tired now. The heat is
appalling. I wish you God speed, Major Tristram."
He scarcely touched her. He swung himself up into the saddle with a
suddenness which startled Arabella into a youthful curvet. The tabbies
mewed protest, and Tristram laid his hand soothingly on their basket.
Then he looked down and saw Sigrid standing at his knee. The change in
her held him motionless for all that every nerve in him ached for motion
and action. Her small, pale face lifted itself to his in breathless
eagerness; her parted lips quivered, the eyes were fiery with the
glitter of sternly mastered tears.
"Tristram--tell me--are all the old dreams gone?" she asked huskily.
His mouth under the short ruddy moustache hardened.
"I am going back to find them."
"That's well--go back, Tristram. They may be all that are left any of
us at the end. Our dreams are real--reality is nothing. See--!" She
laid her hand on her breast with a curious gesture of self-accusation.
"I am all your wife would call me--just a mean, soulless fortune-hunter.
You've found me out. There is not one fine or noble or high thing in
me--and yet your vision of the woman who danced that night, who has
played to you the finest music in the world is no illusion, but the
truth. Keep it--remember it. Perhaps"--she smiled faintly--"your memory
of her may bring Undine to her soul."
He looked away from her.
"I can't help myself----" he said roughly.
"Don't try. Let us keep all the beauty that we can."
She laid her hand on Arabella's long neck and stroked it caressingly.
And now something elfish and illusive dawned under her expression of
intense earnestness. "Do you remember--you used to go down to the
temple when the moon rose and dream you saw me dance among the
ruins----"
"I was a romantic boy--half crazed with loneliness----" he broke in with
repressed vehemence.
"The moon rises tonight," she said, so gently that he scarcely heard
her. Yet something insistent, patient in her forced him to meet her
eyes. He saw that they were dry and brilliant, tragically exultant.
They betrayed her careless smile, the affectation of demure mockery with
which she once more gave him her hand. "Major Tristram, I have a
foolish presentiment that we shall meet just once again--and after that
no more. Good-bye till then."
He did not answer. She turned lightly away from him. And he rode on
down towards the valley.
*CHAPTER IX*
*FOR THE LAST TIME*
Memory has many merciless weapons, but none keener, crueller than a room
which has belonged to our dead. Who amongst us has escaped that moment
of return after what seems the culmination of all agonies when the mere
position of a chair, a glove thrown down idly and forgotten, a little
touch of familiar disorder tears open the freshly closed grave and shows
us on our way to a new, seemingly endless road of pain?
Something of that impotent grief laid hands on Tristram as he stood on
the threshold of his old home. The barely furnished room was as he had
left it that night of Meredith's visit. An instinct had forbidden his
return. Shortly afterwards he had gone to Trichinopoly to be married,
and since then the place had stood deserted.
The camp-bed had been tidied by Meredith's conscientious hand, and the
few breakfast things washed and replaced, but there was cigarette ash on
the table and the lamp stood where it had burnt between them. It had a
grey, dead look, as though it had burnt itself out. The chair where he
had sat in that final hour of reckoning expressed vividly the movement
with which he had risen. There were small, regular fragments of torn
cardboard beneath the table, and the dust lay thick and white over them
like a shroud. The dust was everywhere. It veiled the photograph of
his mother so that he could not see her face.
And the dead man whose personality the place expressed so poignantly was
himself. He felt towards it as a spirit may do, looking down on the
body which it has quitted for ever. Not years, but a deep, narrow gulf
of experience separated him from the grown boy who had lived out his
joyous, romantic creed between these wooden walls, who had striven and
dreamed in their cool solitude, and gone thence day after day to fight
the bitterest of all realities, human suffering, himself living in a
world of his own imagining.
Looking back, he saw that those had been winged days of inspiration. He
saw that in his dreams he had stood close to the inner life of men which
is greater than reality and had seen visions and been dimly, gloriously
aware of great truths. These things had gone from him. He stood with
his feet planted on firm earth and knew nothing but the dust and the
turmoil and the darkness.
But because there was stern stuff in him, he went about his work
patiently. With the help of the servant who accompanied him, he dusted
and tidied like a woman, unpacked his medicine-chest and set out his
instruments in their glass cases. The two tabbies which he had set at
liberty prowled disconsolately about their old home, seeming to miss
something. He called to them and fed them, but they did not respond,
and presently they slipped out into the street and vanished. He let
them go. He felt that they would not return. They had forgotten him
and had grown wild in their captivity.
The brief dusk which precedes the Indian night shrouded the village
street, when at last, his work done, he came out and closed the door of
the hut behind him. The street was empty. That fact did not as yet
appear strange to him, for the murderous heat of the day, far from
relaxing, seemed to have become intensified and hung thick and sullen in
the tainted air. Overhead the sky threw off its brazen robes and came
out in a luminous purple, whose darker brilliancy was no less sinister.
As yet there was no sign of the break for which the land waited in
gasping agony.
Tristram went on his way towards the cross-roads. He passed a little
group of old men returning from the river and would have spoken to them,
but they salaamed and there was something in that ceremonious greeting,
in their stony, expressionless faces which chilled the blood and forced
him to go on wordless.
It was dark by the time he reached the council-tree. As he approached he
had heard a murmur of voices, which were hushed as his shadow loomed up
over the circle of squatting figures. In the brightening starlight, he
recognized Lalloo in the place of honour at the foot of the battered
idol. Other forms he recognized, and for the first time he became aware
that he had seen only old men since his return.
The circle greeted him gravely. He sat down at Lalloo's side and filled
his pipe. He talked of the drought and of the coming famine and asked
after those he knew. The glowing bowl of his pipe threw a dull
reflection on his face, and he felt that their eyes were fixed on him.
They answered his questions with a measured slowness as though each word
had to be chosen and weighed, and when his questions ceased they too
became silent. One after another a shadow rose from the circle and
glided out into the darkness.
Presently only Lalloo remained.
Tristram got up.
"Tell me," he said, "what is happening here?"
Lalloo lifted himself slowly and stood deferentially bowed, his hand
caressing his beard.
"Nothing, Sahib."
Tristram smoked placidly.
"That is a lie, Lalloo. Once you were my friend."
"It is long since the Dakktar Sahib lived amongst us."
"Is friendship forgotten from one day to another?"
"There is a saying, Sahib, that it must be won every day afresh."
Tristram was silent for a moment, hiding from the other's eyes how sure
and deadly the thrust had been. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
"I'm afraid fate means to give me another chance to serve you and win
your friendship, Lalloo."
"The wheel turns but once in a life-time," was the enigmatic answer.
"That may be. Well, I don't intend to cadge for your good-will. I
shall stay here and see you through whatever is coming. In the
meantime, tell me where can I find Ayeshi?"
Lalloo gave no sign.
"Ayeshi comes no more----" he said.
"Doesn't he?" Tristram laughed grimly. "Well, the next time he doesn't
come, will you tell him that I must see him. Perhaps his friendship
will have worn better. Tell him that he may return to us in safety and
honour."
"There is no return for Ayeshi, Sahib."
"Dead----?"
Lalloo glanced up through the darkness into the Englishman's face. For
a minute his own manner changed, losing something of its impassive
reticence.
"Sahib, there are things which no man may forget and prosper. For the
sake of one memory--leave here, leave Gaya--there is an illness coming
which even the cunning hand of the Dakktar Sahib cannot stay----"
"Is that a threat, Lalloo? Do you know me so little that you think I
should turn tail----"
The old money-lender lifted his hand almost with authority.
"No man can change the course of his fate, Sahib. But I have paid my
debt."
He salaamed and slipped away into the irregular silhouette which the
tumble-down huts threw into the palely-lit street.
Tristram lingered a moment. His pipe had gone out, and he lit it again
with an affectionate care, which covered tension. An instinct, more
delicate than a seismograph, inherited from men who had learnt at bitter
cost the significance of a glance, had warned him. It fed itself on the
unbroken silence, on the fevered, palpitating heat. The bo-tree, whose
leaves quivered to the faintest breath, was still as though it, too, was
aware of an approaching change and listened for its footfall. The very
light which filtered down from the stars and poured in a pale stream
between the black banks of the street carried with it a suggestion of a
near and brooding menace.
Tristram walked slowly up towards the northern entrance of the village.
In the past he would not have walked alone. There would have been
Ayeshi on one side of him and some woe-begone villager on the other,
with Wickie scampering in and out among the shadows, pursuing, with the
uncrushable optimism of his kind, the elusive mouse. And Tristram,
listening in memory to those past sounds and voices, was overwhelmed,
not with a sense of an invisible danger, but with a bitter loneliness.
He had now only one desire, and that to get away from these silent,
watching walls, out into the open.
He walked fast, but by the time he had reached the narrow road along the
river the first bar of moonlight had struck across the valley. He stood
still again, for beneath the sullen muttering of the water he had heard
other sounds.
Two horsemen rode out of the shadow. He made way for them, and as they
came abreast the man nearest to him turned his head, so that the light
fell full on to his face.
Tristram sprang to the horse's head, forcing the startled animal to its
haunches. The rider made no sound, but his companion turned about
instantly and bore down upon Tristram as though to force him back into