The Pool in the Desert

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This etext was prepared by Sue Asscher

THE POOL IN THE DESERT

By Sara Jeanette Duncan

Contents

1. A Mother in India.

2. An Impossible Ideal.

3. The Hesitation of Miss Anderson.

4. The Pool in the Desert.

1. A Mother in India

Chapter 1.I

There were times when we had to go without puddings to pay John's
uniform bills, and always I did the facings myself with a cloth-ball
to save getting new ones. I would have polished his sword, too, if
I had been allowed; I adored his sword. And once, I remember, we
painted and varnished our own dog-cart, and very smart it looked, to
save fifty rupees. We had nothing but our pay--John had his company
when we were married, but what is that?--and life was made up of
small knowing economies, much more amusing in recollection than in
practise. We were sodden poor, and that is a fact, poor and
conscientious, which was worse. A big fat spider of a money-lender
came one day into the veranda and tempted us--we lived in a hut, but
it had a veranda--and John threatened to report him to the police.
Poor when everybody else had enough to live in the open-handed
Indian fashion, that was what made it so hard; we were alone in our
sordid little ways. When the expectation of Cecily came to us we
made out to be delighted, knowing that the whole station pitied us,
and when Cecily came herself, with a swamping burst of expense, we
kept up the pretense splendidly. She was peevish, poor little
thing, and she threatened convulsions from the beginning, but we
both knew that it was abnormal not to love her a great deal, more
than life, immediately and increasingly; and we applied ourselves
honestly to do it, with the thermometer at a hundred and two, and
the nurse leaving at the end of a fortnight because she discovered
that I had only six of everything for the table. To find out a
husband's virtues, you must marry a poor man. The regiment was
under-officered as usual, and John had to take parade at daylight
quite three times a week; but he walked up and down the veranda with
Cecily constantly till two in the morning, when a little coolness
came. I usually lay awake the rest of the night in fear that a
scorpion would drop from the ceiling on her. Nevertheless, we were
of excellent mind towards Cecily; we were in such terror, not so
much of failing in our duty towards her as towards the ideal
standard of mankind. We were very anxious indeed not to come short.
To be found too small for one's place in nature would have been
odious. We would talk about her for an hour at a time, even when
John's charger was threatening glanders and I could see his mind
perpetually wandering to the stable. I would say to John that she
had brought a new element into our lives--she had indeed!--and John
would reply, 'I know what you mean,' and go on to prophesy that she
would 'bind us together.' We didn't need binding together; we were
more to each other, there in the desolation of that arid frontier
outpost, than most husbands and wives; but it seemed a proper and
hopeful thing to believe, so we believed it. Of course, the real
experience would have come, we weren't monsters; but fate curtailed
the opportunity. She was just five weeks old when the doctor told
us that we must either pack her home immediately or lose her, and
the very next day John went down with enteric. So Cecily was sent
to England with a sergeant's wife who had lost her twins, and I
settled down under the direction of a native doctor, to fight for my
husband's life, without ice or proper food, or sickroom comforts of
any sort. Ah! Fort Samila, with the sun glaring up from the sand!--
however, it is a long time ago now. I trusted the baby willingly to
Mrs. Berry and to Providence, and did not fret; my capacity for
worry, I suppose, was completely absorbed. Mrs. Berry's letter,
describing the child's improvement on the voyage and safe arrival
came, I remember, the day on which John was allowed his first solid
mouthful; it had been a long siege. 'Poor little wretch!' he said
when I read it aloud; and after that Cecily became an episode.

She had gone to my husband's people; it was the best arrangement.
We were lucky that it was possible; so many children had to be sent
to strangers and hirelings. Since an unfortunate infant must be
brought into the world and set adrift, the haven of its grandmother
and its Aunt Emma and its Aunt Alice certainly seemed providential.
I had absolutely no cause for anxiety, as I often told people,
wondering that I did not feel a little all the same. Nothing, I
knew, could exceed the conscientious devotion of all three Farnham
ladies to the child. She would appear upon their somewhat barren
horizon as a new and interesting duty, and the small additional
income she also represented would be almost nominal compensation for
the care she would receive. They were excellent persons of the kind
that talk about matins and vespers, and attend both. They helped
little charities and gave little teas, and wrote little notes, and
made deprecating allowance for the eccentricities of their titled or
moneyed acquaintances. They were the subdued, smiling,
unimaginatively dressed women on a small definite income that you
meet at every rectory garden-party in the country, a little
snobbish, a little priggish, wholly conventional, but apart from
these weaknesses, sound and simple and dignified, managing their two
small servants with a display of the most exact traditions, and
keeping a somewhat vague and belated but constant eye upon the
doings of their country as chronicled in a bi-weekly paper. They
were all immensely interested in royalty, and would read paragraphs
aloud to each other about how the Princess Beatrice or the Princess
Maud had opened a fancy bazaar, looking remarkably well in plain
grey poplin trimmed with Irish lace--an industry which, as is well
known, the Royal Family has set its heart on rehabilitating. Upon
which Mrs. Farnham's comment invariably would be, 'How thoughtful of
them, dear!' and Alice would usually say, 'Well, if I were a
princess, I should like something nicer than plain grey poplin.'
Alice, being the youngest, was not always expected to think before
she spoke. Alice painted in water-colours, but Emma was supposed to
have the most common sense.

They took turns in writing to us with the greatest regularity about
Cecily; only once, I think, did they miss the weekly mail, and that
was when she threatened diphtheria and they thought we had better be
kept in ignorance. The kind and affectionate terms of these letters
never altered except with the facts they described--teething,
creeping, measles, cheeks growing round and rosy, all were conveyed
in the same smooth, pat, and proper phrases, so absolutely empty of
any glimpse of the child's personality that after the first few
months it was like reading about a somewhat uninteresting infant in
a book. I was sure Cecily was not uninteresting, but her
chroniclers were. We used to wade through the long, thin sheets and
saw how much more satisfactory it would be when Cecily could write
to us herself. Meanwhile we noted her weekly progress with much the
feeling one would have about a far-away little bit of property that
was giving no trouble and coming on exceedingly well. We would take
possession of Cecily at our convenience; till then, it was
gratifying to hear of our unearned increment in dear little dimples
and sweet little curls.

She was nearly four when I saw her again. We were home on three
months' leave; John had just got his first brevet for doing
something which he does not allow me to talk about in the Black
Mountain country; and we were fearfully pleased with ourselves. I
remember that excitement lasted well up to Port Said. As far as the
Canal, Cecily was only one of the pleasures and interests we were
going home to: John's majority was the thing that really gave
savour to life. But the first faint line of Europe brought my child
to my horizon; and all the rest of the way she kept her place,
holding out her little arms to me, beckoning me on. Her four
motherless years brought compunction to my heart and tears to my
eyes; she should have all the compensation that could be. I
suddenly realized how ready I was--how ready!--to have her back. I
rebelled fiercely against John's decision that we must not take her
with us on our return to the frontier; privately, I resolved to
dispute it, and, if necessary, I saw myself abducting the child--my
own child. My days and nights as the ship crept on were full of a
long ache to possess her; the defrauded tenderness of the last four
years rose up in me and sometimes caught at my throat. I could
think and talk and dream of nothing else. John indulged me as much
as was reasonable, and only once betrayed by a yawn that the subject
was not for him endlessly absorbing. Then I cried and he
apologized. 'You know,' he said, 'it isn't exactly the same thing.
I'm not her mother.' At which I dried my tears and expanded, proud
and pacified. I was her mother!

Then the rainy little station and Alice, all-embracing in a damp
waterproof, and the drive in the fly, and John's mother at the gate
and a necessary pause while I kissed John's mother. Dear thing, she
wanted to hold our hands and look into our faces and tell us how
little we had changed for all our hardships; and on the way to the
house she actually stopped to point out some alterations in the
flower-borders. At last the drawing-room door and the smiling
housemaid turning the handle and the unforgettable picture of a
little girl, a little girl unlike anything we had imagined, starting
bravely to trot across the room with the little speech that had been
taught her. Half-way she came; I suppose our regards were too
fixed, too absorbed, for there she stopped with a wail of terror at
the strange faces, and ran straight back to the outstretched arms of
her Aunt Emma. The most natural thing in the world, no doubt. I
walked over to a chair opposite with my hand-bag and umbrella and
sat down--a spectator, aloof and silent. Aunt Emma fondled and
quieted the child, apologizing for her to me, coaxing her to look
up, but the little figure still shook with sobs, hiding its face in
the bosom that it knew. I smiled politely, like any other stranger,
at Emma's deprecations, and sat impassive, looking at my alleged
baby breaking her heart at the sight of her mother. It is not
amusing even now to remember the anger that I felt. I did not touch
her or speak to her; I simply sat observing my alien possession, in
the frock I had not made and the sash I had not chosen, being coaxed
and kissed and protected and petted by its Aunt Emma. Presently I
asked to be taken to my room, and there I locked myself in for two
atrocious hours. Just once my heart beat high, when a tiny knock
came and a timid, docile little voice said that tea was ready. But
I heard the rustle of a skirt, and guessed the directing angel in
Aunt Emma, and responded, 'Thank you, dear, run away and say that I
am coming,' with a pleasant visitor's inflection which I was able to
sustain for the rest of afternoon.

'She goes to bed at seven,' said Emma.

'Oh, does she?' said I. 'A very good hour, I should think.'

'She sleeps in my room,' said Mrs. Farnham.

'We give her mutton broth very often, but seldom stock soup,' said
Aunt Emma. 'Mamma thinks it is too stimulating.'

'Indeed?' said I, to all of it.

They took me up to see her in her crib, and pointed out, as she lay
asleep, that though she had 'a general look' of me, her features
were distinctively Farnham.

'Won't you kiss her?' asked Alice. 'You haven't kissed her yet, and
she is used to so much affection.'

'I don't think I could take such an advantage of her,' I said.

They looked at each other, and Mrs. Farnham said that I was plainly
worn out. I mustn't sit up to prayers.

If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made
a fight for it, but four weeks--it took a month each way in those
days--was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not
stay at mamma's. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily
disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long.

I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character,
bridling my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty
phrases; and then I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the
summer sales. I took John with me. I may have been Cecily's mother
in theory, but I was John's wife in fact.

We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service.
That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety
for me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line
as any woman.

Once the Colonel's wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually
heard the rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side
of the river--that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen
hours' fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with
his knife and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands
besides those on your wife's nerves. We had saved two thousand
rupees, I remember, against another run home, and it all went like
powder, in the Mirzai expedition; and the run home diminished to a
month in a boarding-house in the hills.

Meanwhile, however, we had begun to correspond with our daughter, in
large round words of one syllable, behind which, of course, was
plain the patient guiding hand of Aunt Emma. One could hear Aunt
Emma suggesting what would be nice to say, trying to instil a little
pale affection for the far-off papa and mamma. There was so little
Cecily and so much Emma--of course, it could not be otherwise--that
I used to take, I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters.
When we went home again I stipulated absolutely that she was to
write to us without any sort of supervision--the child was ten.

'But the spelling!' cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows.

'Her letters aren't exercises,' I was obliged to retort; 'she will
do the best she can.'

We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly
unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I could not have
brought her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied
that Cecily, contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what
my bringing up could have been like. With this reserve of criticism
on Cecily's part, however, we got on very tolerably, largely because
I found it impossible to assume any responsibility towards her, and
in moments of doubt or discipline referred her to her aunts. We
spent a pleasant summer with a little girl in the house whose
interest in us was amusing, and whose outings it was gratifying to
arrange; but when we went back, I had no desire to take her with us.
I thought her very much better where she was.

Then came the period which is filled, in a subordinate degree, with
Cecily's letters. I do not wish to claim more than I ought; they
were not my only or even my principal interest in life. It was a
long period; it lasted till she was twenty-one. John had had
promotion in the meantime, and there was rather more money, but he
had earned his second brevet with a bullet through one lung, and the
doctors ordered our leave to be spent in South Africa. We had
photographs, we knew she had grown tall and athletic and comely, and
the letters were always very creditable. I had the unusual and
qualified privilege of watching my daughter's development from ten
to twenty-one, at a distance of four thousand miles, by means of the
written word. I wrote myself as provocatively as possible; I sought
for every string, but the vibration that came back across the seas
to me was always other than the one I looked for, and sometimes
there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham wrote me that Cecily
very much valued my communications. Once when I had described an
unusual excursion in a native state, I learned that she had read my
letter aloud to the sewing circle. After that I abandoned
description, and confined myself to such intimate personal details
as no sewing circle could find amusing. The child's own letters
were simply a mirror of the ideas of the Farnham ladies; that must
have been so, it was not altogether my jaundiced eye. Alice and
Emma and grandmamma paraded the pages in turn. I very early gave up
hope of discoveries in my daughter, though as much of the original
as I could detect was satisfactorily simple and sturdy. I found
little things to criticize, of course, tendencies to correct; and by
return post I criticized and corrected, but the distance and the
deliberation seemed to touch my maxims with a kind of arid
frivolity, and sometimes I tore them up. One quick, warm-blooded
scolding would have been worth a sheaf of them. My studied little
phrases could only inoculate her with a dislike for me without
protecting her from anything under the sun.

However, I found she didn't dislike me, when John and I went home at
last to bring her out. She received me with just a hint of
kindness, perhaps, but on the whole very well.

Chapter 1.II

John was recalled, of course, before the end of our furlough, which
knocked various things on the head; but that is the sort of thing
one learned to take with philosophy in any lengthened term of Her
Majesty's service. Besides, there is usually sugar for the pill;
and in this case it was a Staff command bigger than anything we
expected for at least five years to come. The excitement of it when
it was explained to her gave Cecily a charming colour. She took a
good deal of interest in the General, her papa; I think she had an
idea that his distinction would alleviate the situation in India,
however it might present itself. She accepted that prospective
situation calmly; it had been placed before her all her life. There
would always be a time when she should go and live with papa and
mamma in India, and so long as she was of an age to receive the idea
with rebel tears she was assured that papa and mamma would give her
a pony. The pony was no longer added to the prospect; it was
absorbed no doubt in the general list of attractions calculated to
reconcile a young lady to a parental roof with which she had no
practical acquaintance. At all events, when I feared the
embarrassment and dismay of a pathetic parting with darling
grandmamma and the aunties, and the sweet cat and the dear vicar and
all the other objects of affection, I found an agreeable unexpected
philosophy.

I may add that while I anticipated such broken-hearted farewells I
was quite prepared to take them easily. Time, I imagined, had
brought philosophy to me also, equally agreeable and equally
unexpected.

It was a Bombay ship, full of returning Anglo-Indians. I looked up
and down the long saloon tables with a sense of relief and of
solace; I was again among my own people. They belonged to Bengal
and to Burma, to Madras and to the Punjab, but they were all my
people. I could pick out a score that I knew in fact, and there
were none that in imagination I didn't know. The look of wider seas
and skies, the casual experienced glance, the touch of irony and of
tolerance, how well I knew it and how well I liked it! Dear old
England, sitting in our wake, seemed to hold by comparison a great
many soft, unsophisticated people, immensely occupied about very
particular trifles. How difficult it had been, all the summer, to
be interested! These of my long acquaintance belonged to my
country's Executive, acute, alert, with the marks of travail on
them. Gladly I went in and out of the women's cabins and listened
to the argot of the men; my own ruling, administering, soldiering
little lot.

Cecily looked at them askance. To her the atmosphere was alien, and
I perceived that gently and privately she registered objections.
She cast a disapproving eye upon the wife of a Conservator of
Forests, who scanned with interest a distant funnel and laid a small
wager that it belonged to the Messageries Maritimes. She looked
with a straightened lip at the crisply stepping women who walked the
deck in short and rather shabby skirts with their hands in their
jacket-pockets talking transfers and promotions; and having got up
at six to make a water-colour sketch of the sunrise, she came to me
in profound indignation to say that she had met a man in his
pyjamas; no doubt; poor wretch, on his way to be shaved. I was
unable to convince her he was not expected to visit the barber in
all his clothes.

At the end of the third day she told me that she wished these people
wouldn't talk to her; she didn't like them. I had turned in the
hour we left the Channel and had not left my berth since, so
possibly I was not in the most amiable mood to receive a douche of
cold water. 'I must try to remember, dear,' I said, ' that you have
been brought up altogether in the society of pussies and vicars and
elderly ladies, and of course you miss them. But you must have a
little patience. I shall be up tomorrow, if this beastly sea
continues to go down; and then we will try to find somebody suitable
to introduce to you.'

'Thank you, mamma,' said my daughter, without a ray of suspicion.
Then she added consideringly, 'Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice do seem
quite elderly ladies beside you, and yet you are older than either
of them aren't you? I wonder how that is.'

It was so innocent, so admirable, that I laughed at my own expense;
while Cecily, doing her hair, considered me gravely. 'I wish you
would tell me why you laugh, mamma,' quoth she; 'you laugh so
often.'

We had not to wait after all for my good offices of the next
morning. Cecily came down at ten o'clock that night quite happy and
excited; she had been talking to a bishop, such a dear bishop. The
bishop had been showing her his collection of photographs, and she
had promised to play the harmonium for him at the eleven-o'clock
service in the morning. 'Bless me!' said I, 'is it Sunday?' It
seemed she had got on very well indeed with the bishop, who knew the
married sister, at Tunbridge, of her very greatest friend. Cecily
herself did not know the married sister, but that didn't matter--it
was a link. The bishop was charming. 'Well, my love,' said I--I
was teaching myself to use these forms of address for fear she would
feel an unkind lack of them, but it was difficult--'I am glad that
somebody from my part of the world has impressed you favourably at
last. I wish we had more bishops.'

'Oh, but my bishop doesn't belong to your part of the world,'
responded my daughter sleepily. 'He is travelling for his health.'

It was the most unexpected and delightful thing to be packed into
one's chair next morning by Dacres Tottenham. As I emerged from the
music saloon after breakfast--Cecily had stayed below to look over
her hymns and consider with her bishop the possibility of an anthem-
-Dacres's face was the first I saw; it simply illuminated, for me,
that portion of the deck. I noticed with pleasure the quick toss of
the cigar overboard as he recognized and bore down upon me. We were
immense friends; John liked him too. He was one of those people who
make a tremendous difference; in all our three hundred passengers
there could be no one like him, certainly no one whom I could be
more glad to see. We plunged at once into immediate personal
affairs, we would get at the heart of them later. He gave his vivid
word to everything he had seen and done; we laughed and exclaimed
and were silent in a concert of admirable understanding. We were
still unravelling, still demanding and explaining when the ship's
bell began to ring for church, and almost simultaneously Cecily
advanced towards us. She had a proper Sunday hat on, with flowers
under the brim, and a church-going frock; she wore gloves and
clasped a prayer-book. Most of the women who filed past to the
summons of the bell were going down as they were, in cotton blouses
and serge skirts, in tweed caps or anything, as to a kind of family
prayers. I knew exactly how they would lean against the pillars of
the saloon during the psalms. This young lady would be little less
than a rebuke to them. I surveyed her approach; she positively
walked as if it were Sunday.

'My dear,' I said, 'how endimanchee you look! The bishop will be
very pleased with you. This gentleman is Mr. Tottenham, who
administers Her Majesty's pleasure in parts of India about
Allahabad. My daughter, Dacres.' She was certainly looking very
fresh, and her calm grey eyes had the repose in them that has never
known itself to be disturbed about anything. I wondered whether she
bowed so distantly also because it was Sunday, and then I remembered
that Dacres was a young man, and that the Farnham ladies had
probably taught her that it was right to be very distant with young
men.

'It is almost eleven, mamma.'

'Yes, dear. I see you are going to church.'

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