The Pool in the Desert
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Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
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So they stood for a little time in silence while she resisted her
great opportunity. She resisted it to the end, and presently
beckoned to the syce, who came up leading the pony. Innes mounted
her mechanically and said, 'Is that all right?' as she put her foot
in the stirrup, without knowing that he had spoken.
'Goodbye,' she said; 'I am going away--immediately. It will be
better. And listen--I have known this for weeks--and I have gone on
seeing you. And I hope I am not any more wicked than I feel.
Goodbye.'
'Goodbye,' he said, taking his hand from the pony's neck, and she
rode buoyantly away. He, turning to breast the road again, saw
darkness gathering over the end of it, and drawing nearer.
At eleven o'clock next morning Brookes rose from her packing to take
a note addressed to her mistress from the hand of a messenger in the
Imperial red and gold. It ran:
'Dear Miss Anderson--I write to tell you that I have obtained three
weeks' leave, and I am going into the interior to shoot, starting
this afternoon. You spoke yesterday of leaving Simla almost
immediately. I trust you will not do this, as it would be extremely
risky to venture down to the Plains just now. In ten days the rains
will have broken, when it will be safe. Pray wait till then.
'Yours sincerely,
'Horace Innes.'
Involuntarily the letter found its way to Madeline's lips, and
remained there until she saw the maid observing her with
intelligence.
'Brookes,' she said, 'I am strongly advised not to start until the
rains break. I think, on the whole, that we won't.'
'Indeed, miss,' returned Brookes, 'Mrs. Sergeant Simmons told me
that it was courting cholera to go--and nothing short of it. I must
say I'm thankful.'
Chapter 3.X.
A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for
the snow-line by what is facetiously known as 'the carriage road to
Tibet.' Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the
rains to break. Another day had come without them. To write and
tell Innes, to write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the
situation as she found it; she had lived and moved and slept and
awakened to these alternatives. At the moment she slept.
It was early, very early in the morning. The hills all about seemed
still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent,
immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open. Nothing spoke of
the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised. The hill world lifted
itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the
sky-line, very far away, it rippled into a cloud. The flimsy town
clinging steeply roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the
saddle and slipping over on the other side, cut the dawn with
innumerable little lines and angles all in one tone like a pencil
drawing.
There was no feeling in it, no expression. It had a temporary air
in that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat
buildings that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling
bazaar looked trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation
of the morning. A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and
then vainly tried to disturb with a note of tentative enterprise,
forced, premature. It announced that the sun would probably rise,
but nothing more. In the little dark shops of the wood-carvers an
occasional indefinite figure moved, groping among last night's
tools, or an old woman in a red sari washed a brass dish over the
shallow open drain that ran past her door. At the tonga terminus,
below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces, muffled in their
blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the shed. They pushed
it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else stirred or
spoke at all in Simla. Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep in
her hotel.
A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the
road turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several
following. They were coolies, and they carried luggage.
The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he
brought, which slipped from his back to the ground. The syces
looked at him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against
the wall of the hillside, also in silence. It was too early for
conversation. Thus did all the others.
When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap
on the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and
walked round the luggage, looking at it.
'And you, owls' brethren,' he said, with sarcasm, addressing the
first coolie, 'you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight
kos to Kalka, have you?'
'Na,' replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.
'How else, then, is it to be taken?' the driver cried, with anger in
his argument. 'Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a
fool-thing of an ekka. Here is work for six tongas! What reason is
there in this?'
The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an
unconcerned toe.
'I, what can I do?' he said, 'It is the order of the memsahib.'
Ram Singh grunted and said no more. A rickshaw was coming down from
the Mall, and the memsahib was in it.
Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under the iron
bar, and the lady sat in the tonga behind Ram Singh. Her runners,
in uniform, waited beside the empty rickshaw with a puzzled look, at
which she laughed, and threw a rupee to the head man.
The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their
cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.
'Chellao!' she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted
the reins. The little procession clanked and jingled along the
hillside, always tending down, and broke upon the early grey
melancholy with a forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like
everything else. As it passed the last of Simla's little gardens,
spread like a pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady
leaned forward and looked back as if she wished to impress the place
upon her memory. Her expression was that of a person going forth
without demur into the day's hazards, ready to cope with them, yet
there was some regret in the backward look.
'It's a place,' she said aloud, 'where EVERYBODY has a good time!'
Then the Amusement Club went out of sight behind a curve; and she
settled herself more comfortably among her cushions, and drew a wrap
round her to meet the chill wind of the valley. It was all behind
her. The lady looked out as the ponies galloped up to the first
changing-place, and, seeing a saddled horse held by a syce, cramped
herself a little into one corner to make room. The seat would just
hold two.
Ram Singh salaamed, getting down to harness the fresh pair, and a
man put his face in at the side of the tonga and took off his hat.
'Are you all right?' he said. His smile was as conscious as his
words were casual.
'Quite right. The ayah was silly about coming--didn't want to leave
her babies or something--so I had to leave her behind. Everything
else is either here or in the ekkas.'
'The brute! Never mind--they're not much use in a railway journey.
You can pick up another at Bombay. Then I suppose I'd better get
in.'
'I suppose you better had. Unless you think of walking,' she
laughed, and he took the place beside her.
Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.
'Nobody else going down?'
'Not another soul. We might just as well have started together.'
'Oh, well, we couldn't tell. Beastly awkward if there had been
anybody.'
'Yes,' she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.
Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent
her eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to
something that had not been mentioned. 'It's goodbye Simla, isn't
it?' she said. He smiled in response and put his hand upon her
firm, round arm, possessively, and they began to talk.
Ram Singh, all unaware, kept his horses at their steady clanking
downward gallop, and Simla, clinging to the hilltops, was brushed by
the first rays of the sun.
It came a gloriously clear morning; early riders round Jakko saw the
real India lying beyond the outer ranges, flat and blue and pictured
with forests and rivers like a map. The plains were pretty and
interesting in this aspect, but nobody found them attractive.
Sensitive people liked it better when the heat mist veiled them and
it was possible to look abroad without a sudden painful thought of
contrasting temperatures. We may suppose that the inhabitants of
Paradise sometimes grieve over their luck. Even Madeline Anderson,
whose heart knew no constriction at the remembrance of brother or
husband at some cruel point in the blue expanse, had come to turn
her head more willingly the other way, towards the hills rolling up
to the snows, being a woman who suffered by proxy, and by
observation, and by Rudyard Kipling.
On this particular morning, however, she had not elected to do
either. She slept late instead, and was glad to sleep. I might as
well say at once that on the night before she had made up her mind,
had brought herself to the point, and had written to Mrs. Innes, at
'Two Gables', all the facts, in so far as she was acquainted with
them, connected with Frederick Prendergast's death. She was very
much ashamed of herself, poor girl; she was aware that, through her
postponement, Horace Innes would now see his problem in all its
bitterness, make his choice with his eyes wide open. If it had only
happened before he knew--anything about her!
She charged herself with having deliberately waited, and then spent
an exhausting hour trying to believe that she had drifted
unconsciously to the point of their mutual confession. Whatever the
truth was, she did not hesitate to recognize a new voice in her
private counsels from that hour, urging her in one way or another to
bring matters to an end. It was a strong instinct; looking at the
facts, she saw it was the gambler's. When she tried to think of the
ethical considerations involved she saw only the chances. The air
seemed to throb with them all night; she had to count them finally
to get rid of them.
Brookes was up betimes, however, and sent off the letter. It went
duly, by Surnoo, to Mrs. Innes at 'Two Gables'. Madeline woke at
seven with a start, and asked if it had gone, then slept again
contentedly. So far as she was concerned the thing was finished.
The breakfast gong had sounded, and the English mail had arrived
before she opened her eyes again upon the day's issues; she gave it
her somewhat desultory attention while Brookes did her hair. There
was only one scrap of news. Adele mentioned in a postscript that
poor Mr. Prendergast's money was likely to go to a distant relative,
it having transpired that he died without leaving a will.
'She is sure, absolutely sure,' Madeline mused, 'to answer my letter
in person. She will be here within an hour. I shall have this to
tell her, too. How pleased she will be! She will come into it all,
I suppose--if she is allowed. Though she won't be allowed, that is
if--' But there speculation began, and Madeline had forbidden
herself speculation, if not once and for all, at least many times
and for fifteen minutes.
No reasonable purpose would be served by Mrs. Innes's visit,
Madeline reflected, as she sat waiting in the little room opening on
the veranda; but she would come, of course she would come. She
would require the satisfaction of the verbal assurance; she would
hope to extract more details; she would want the objectionable
gratification of talking if over.
In spite of any assurance, she would believe that Madeline had not
told her before in order to make her miserable a little longer than
she need be; but, after all, her impression about that did not
particularly matter. It couldn't possibly be a pleasant interview,
yet Madeline found herself impatient for it.
'Surnoo,' she said of her messenger, 'must be idling on his way back
in the bazaar. I must try to remember to fine him two pice. Surnoo
is incorrigible.'
She forgot, however, to fine Surnoo. The pad of his bare feet
sounded along the veranda almost immediately, and the look in his
Pahari eyes was that of expected reproach, and ability to defend
himself against it.
He held out two letters at arm's-length, for as he was expected to
bring only one there was a fault in this; and all his domestic
traditions told him that he might be chastened. One was addressed
to Madeline in Mrs. Innes's handwriting; the other, she saw with
astonishment, was her own communication to that lady, her own letter
returned. Surnoo explained volubly all the way along the veranda,
and in the flood of his unknown tongue Madeline caught a sentence or
two.
'The memsahib was not,' said Surnoo. Clearly he could not deliver a
letter to a memsahib who was not. 'Therefore,' Surnoo continued, 'I
have brought back your honour's letter, and the other I had from the
hand of the memsahib's runner, the runner with one eye, who was on
the road to bring it here. More I do not know, but it appears that
the memsahib has gone to her father and mother in Belaat, being very
sorrowful because the Colonel-sahib has left her to shoot.'
'The letter will tell me,' said Madeline to herself, fingering it.
'Enough, Surnoo.'
The man went away, and Madeline closed and locked the door of her
sitting-room. The letter would tell her--what? She glanced about
her with dissatisfaction, and sought the greater privacy of her
bedroom, where also she locked the door and drew the muslin curtain
across the window. She laid the letter on the dressing-table and
kept her eyes upon it while she unfastened, with trembling hands,
the brooch at her neck and the belt at her waist. She did one or
two other meaningless things, as if she wanted to gain time, to
fortify her nerves even against an exhibition before herself.
Then she sat down with her back towards the light and opened the
letter. It had a pink look and a scented air. Even in her beating
suspense Madeline held it a little farther away from her, as she
unfolded it, and it ran:
'Dear Miss Anderson--What will you say, I wonder, and what will
Simla say, when you know that Captain Drake and I have determined to
DISREGARD CONVENTIONALITIES, and live henceforward only for one
another! I am all packed up, and long before this meets your eye we
shall have taken the step which society condemns, but which I have a
feeling that you, knowing my storm-tossed history, will be broad-
minded enough to sympathize with, at least to some extent. That is
the reason I am writing to you rather than to any of my own chums,
and also of course to have the satisfaction of telling you that I no
longer care what you do about letting out the secret of my marriage
to Frederick Prendergast. I am now ABOVE AND BEYOND IT. Any way
you look at it, I do not see that I am much to blame. As I never
have been Colonel Innes's wife there can be no harm in leaving him,
though if he had ever been sympathetic, or understood me the LEAST
LITTLE BIT, I might have felt bound to him. But he has never been
able to evoke the finer parts of my nature, and when this is the
case marriage is a mere miserable fleshly failure. You may say,
"Why try it a third time?"--but my union with Val will be different.
I have never been fond of the opposite sex--so far as that goes I
should have made a very good nun--but for a long time Valentine
Drake has been the only man I cared to have come within a mile of
me, and lately we have discovered that we are absolutely necessary
to each other's existence on the higher plane. I don't care much
what Simla thinks, but if you happen to be talking about it to dear
Lady Bloomfield, you might just mention this. Val has eight hundred
a year of his own, so it is perfectly practicable. Of course, he
will send in his papers. WHATEVER HAPPENS, Val and I will never
bind ourselves in any way. We both think it wrong and enslaving. I
have nothing more to add, except that I am depending on you to
explain to Simla that I never was Mrs. Innes.
'Yours sincerely,
'Violet Prendergast.
'P.S.--I have written to Horace, telling him everything about
everything, and sent my letter off to him in the wilds by a runner.
If you see him you might try and smooth him down. I don't want him
coming after Val with a revolver.'
Madeline read this communication through twice. Then quietly and
deliberately she lay down upon the bed, and drew herself out of the
control of her heart by the hard labour of thought. When she rose,
she had decided that there were only two things for her to do, and
she began at once to do them, continuing her refuge in action. She
threw her little rooms open again, and walked methodically round the
outer one, collecting the odds and ends of Indian fabrics with which
she had garnished it.
As the maid came in, she looked up from folding them.
'I have news, Brookes,' she said, 'that necessitates my going home
at once. No, it is not bad news, but--important. I will go now and
see about the tonga. We must start tomorrow morning.'
Brookes called Surnoo, and the rickshaw came round.
Madeline looked at her watch.
'The telegraph office,' she said; 'and as quickly as may be.'
As the runners panted over the Mall, up and down and on, Madeline
said to herself, 'She shall have her chance. She shall choose.'
The four reeking Paharis pulled up at the telegraph office, and
Madeline sped up the steps. There was a table, with forms printed
'Indian Telegraphs,' and the usual bottle of thickened ink and pair
of rusty pens. She sat down to her intention as if she dared not
let it cool; she wrote her message swiftly, she had worded it on the
way.
'To Mrs. Innes, Dak Bungalow, Solon.
'From M. Anderson, Simla.
'Frederick Prendergast died on January 7th, at Sing Sing. Your
letter considered confidential if you return. Prendergast left no
will.
'M. Anderson.'
'Send this "urgent," Babu,' she said to the clerk, 'and repeat it to
the railway station, Kalka. Shall I fill up another form? No?
Very well.'
At the door she turned and came back.
'It is now eleven o'clock,' she said. 'The person I am telegraphing
to is on her way down to get tonight's train at Kalka. I am hoping
to catch her half-way at Solon. Do you think I can?'
'I think so, madam. Oyess! It is the custom to stop at Solon for
tiffin. The telegram can arrive there. All urgent telegram going
very quick.'
'And in any case,' said Madeline, 'it can not fail to reach her at
Kalka?'
'Not possible to fail, madam.'
'She will have her chance,' she said to herself, on her way to the
post office to order her tonga. And with a little nauseated shudder
at the thought of the letter in her pocket, she added, 'It is
amazing. I should have thought her too good a woman of business!'
After which she concentrated her whole attention upon the
necessities of departure. Her single immediate apprehension was
that Horace Innes might, by some magic of circumstances, be
transported back into Simla before she could get out of it. That
such a contingency was physically impossible made no difference to
her nerves, and to the last Brookes was the hurrying victim of
unnecessary promptings.
The little rambling hotel of Kalka, where the railway spreads out
over the plains, raises its white-washed shelter under the very
walls of the Himalayas. Madeline, just arrived, lay back in a long
wicker chair on the veranda, and looked up at them as they mounted
green and grey and silent under the beating of the first of the
rains. Everywhere was a luxury of silence, the place was steeped in
it, drowned in it. A feeding cow flicked an automatic tail under a
tree. Near the low mud wall that strolled irresolutely between the
house and the hills leaned a bush with a few single pink roses;
their petals were floating down under the battering drops. A
draggled bee tried to climb to a dry place on a pillar of the
veranda. Above all, the hills, immediate, towering, all grey and
green, solidly ideal, with phantasies of mist. Everything
drippingly soft and silent. Suddenly the venetian blind that hung
before the door of a bedroom farther on swayed out before a hand
variously ringed to emit a lady in a pink lawn dress with apt
embroideries. Madeline's half-closed eyes opened very wide, and for
an instant she and the lady, to whom I must once more refer as Mrs.
Innes, confronted each other. Then Mrs. Innes's countenance
expanded, and she took three or four light steps forward.
'Oh, you dear thing!' she exclaimed. 'I thought you were in Simla!
Imagine you being here! Do you know you have SAVED me!'
Madeline regarded her in silence, while a pallor spread over her
face and lips, and her features grew sharp with a presage of pain.
'Have I?' she stammered. She could not think.
'Indeed you have. I don't know how to be grateful enough to you.
Your telegram of yesterday reached me at Solon. We had just sat
down to tiffin. Nothing will ever shake my faith in providence
again! My dear, THINK of it--after all I've been through, my
darling Val--and one hundred thousand pounds!'
'Well?'
'Well--I stayed behind there last night, and Val came on here and
made the necessary arrangement, and--'
'Yes?'
'And we were married this morning. Good heavens! What's the matter
with you! Here--oh, Brookes! Water, salts--anything!'
Brookes, I know, would think that I should dwell at greater length
upon Miss Anderson's attack of faintness in Kalka, and the various
measures which were resorted to for her succour, but perhaps the
feelings and expedients of any really capable lady's-maid under the
circumstances may be taken for granted. I feel more seriously
called upon to explain that Colonel Horace Innes, shortly after
these last events, took two years' furlough to England, during which
he made a very interesting tour in the United States with the lady
with now bears his name by inalienable right. Captain and Mrs.
Valentine Drake are getting the most that is to be had out of
Frederick Prendergast's fortune with courage in London and the
European capitals, where Mrs. Drake is sometimes mentioned as a lady
with a romantic past. They have not returned to Simla, where the
situation has never been properly understood. People always
supposed that Mrs. Drake ran away that June morning with her present
husband, who must have been tremendously fond of her to have married
her 'after the divorce.' She is also occasionally mentioned in
undertones as 'the first Mrs. Innes.' All of which we know to be
quite erroneous, like most scandal.
Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, in retirement, are superintending the
education of their children in Bedford, where it is cheap and
practical. They converse when they meet about the iniquitous prices
of dressmakers and the degeneracy of the kind of cook obtainable in
England at eighteen pounds a year. Mrs. Gammidge has grown rather
portly and very ritualistic. They seldom speak of Simla, and when
they do, if too reminiscent a spark appears in Mrs. Mickie's eye,
Mrs. Gammidge changes the subject. Kitty Vesey still fills her
dance cards at Viceregal functions, though people do not quote her
as they used to, and subalterns imagine themselves vastly witty
about her colour, which is unimpaired. People often commend her,
however, for her good nature to debutantes, and it is admitted that
she may still ride with credit in 'affinity stakes'--and
occasionally win them.
4. The Pool in the Desert.
I knew Anna Chichele and Judy Harbottle so well, and they figured so
vividly at one time against the rather empty landscape of life in a
frontier station, that my affection for one of them used to seem
little more, or less, than a variant upon my affection for the
other. That recollection, however, bears examination badly; Judy
was much the better sort, and it is Judy's part in it that draws me
into telling the story. Conveying Judy is what I tremble at: her
part was simple. Looking back--and not so very far--her part has
the relief of high comedy with the proximity of tears; but looking
closely, I find that it is mostly Judy, and what she did is entirely
second, in my untarnished picture, to what she was. Still I do not
think I can dissuade myself from putting it down.
They would, of course, inevitably have found each other sooner or
later, Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele, but it was I who actually
introduced them; my palmy veranda in Rawul Pindi; where the teacups
used to assemble, was the scene of it. I presided behind my samovar
over the early formalities that were almost at once to drop from
their friendship, like the sheath of some bursting flower. I
deliberately brought them together, so the birth was not accidental,
and my interest in it quite legitimately maternal. We always had
tea in the veranda in Rawul Pindi, the drawing-room was painted
blue, blue for thirty feet up to the whitewashed cotton ceiling;
nothing of any value in the way of a human relation, I am sure,
could have originated there. The veranda was spacious and open,
their mutual observation had room and freedom; I watched it to and
fro. I had not long to wait for my reward; the beautiful candour I
expected between them was not ten minutes in coming. For the sake
of it I had taken some trouble, but when I perceived it revealing I
went and sat down beside Judy's husband, Robert Harbottle, and
talked about Pharaoh's split hoof. It was only fair; and when next
day I got their impressions of one another, I felt single-minded and
deserving.
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