The Pool in the Desert

S >> Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert

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I knew it would be a satisfactory sort of thing to do, but perhaps
it was rather more for Judy's sake than for Anna's that I did it.
Mrs. Harbottle was only twenty-seven then and Robert a major, but he
had brought her to India out of an episode too colour-flushed to
tone with English hedges; their marriage had come, in short, of his
divorce, and as too natural a consequence. In India it is well
known that the eye becomes accustomed to primitive pigments and high
lights; the aesthetic consideration, if nothing else, demanded
Robert's exchange. He was lucky to get a Piffer regiment, and the
Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were all lucky, I thought, to get
Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a good deal challenged, even in
Rawul Pindi, where it was thought, especially in the beginning, that
acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could hope for. That is
not enough in India; cordiality is the common right. I could not
have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and
gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about 'the case';
it was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some
points of view deplorable. I chose to reserve my point of view,
from which I saw it, on Judy's behalf, merely quixotic, preferring
on Robert's just to close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first
wife was odious to a degree which it is simply pleasanter not to
recount, but her malignity must almost have amounted to a sense of
humour. Her detestation of her cousin Judy Thynne dated much
further back than Robert's attachment. That began in Paris, where
Judy, a young widow, was developing a real vein at Julian's. I am
entirely convinced that there was nothing, as people say, 'in it,'
Judy had not a thought at that time that was not based on Chinese
white and permeated with good-fellowship; but there was a good deal
of it, and no doubt the turgid imagination of the first Mrs.
Harbottle dealt with it honestly enough. At all events, she saw her
opportunity, and the depths of her indifference to Robert bubbled up
venomously into the suit. That it was undefended was the senseless
mystery; decency ordained that he and Judy should have made a fight,
even in the hope that it would be a losing one. The reason it had
to be a losing one--the reason so immensely criticized--was that the
petitioning lady obstinately refused to bring her action against any
other set of circumstances than those to which, I have no doubt,
Judy contributed every indiscretion. It is hard to imagine Robert
Harbottle refusing her any sort of justification that the law
demands short of beating her, but her malice would accept nothing of
which the account did not go for final settlement to Judy Thynne.
If her husband wanted his liberty, he should have it, she declared,
at that price and no other. Major Harbottle did indeed deeply long
for his liberty, and his interesting friend, Mrs. Thynne, had, one
can only say, the most vivid commiseration for his bondage.
Whatever chance they had of winning, to win would be, for the end
they had at heart, to lose, so they simply abstained, as it were,
from comment upon the detestable procedure which terminated in the
rule absolute. I have often wondered whether the whole business
would not have been more defensible if there had been on Judy's part
any emotional spring for the leap they made. I offer my conviction
that there was none, that she was only extravagantly affected by the
ideals of the Quarter--it is a transporting atmosphere--and held a
view of comradeship which permitted the reversal of the modern
situation filled by a blameless correspondent. Robert, of course,
was tremendously in love with her; but my theory is that she married
him as the logical outcome of her sacrifice and by no means the
smallest part of it.

It was all quite unimaginable, as so many things are, but the upshot
of it brought Judy to Rawul Pindi, as I have said, where I for one
thought her mistake insignificant compared with her value. It would
have been great, her value, anywhere; in the middle of the Punjab it
was incalculable. To explain why would be to explain British India,
but I hope it will appear; and I am quite willing, remember, to take
the responsibility if it does not.

Somers Chichele, Anna's son, it is absurd to think, must have been
about fifteen then, reflecting at Winchester with the other 'men'
upon the comparative merits of tinned sardines and jam roll, and
whether a packet of real Egyptians was not worth the sacrifice of
either. His father was colonel of the Twelfth; his mother was still
charming. It was the year before Dick Forsyth came down from the
neighbourhood of Sheikhbudin with a brevet and a good deal of
personal damage. I mention him because he proved Anna's charm in
the only conclusive way before the eyes of us all; and the station,
I remember, was edified to observe that if Mrs. Chichele came out of
the matter 'straight'--one relapses so easily into the simple
definitions of those parts--which she undoubtedly did, she owed it
in no small degree to Judy Harbottle. This one feels to be hardly a
legitimate reference, but it is something tangible to lay hold upon
in trying to describe the web of volitions which began to weave
itself between the two that afternoon on my veranda and which
afterward became so strong a bond. I was delighted with the thing;
its simplicity and sincerity stood out among our conventional little
compromises at friendship like an ideal. She and Judy had the
assurance of one another; they made upon one another the finest and
often the most unconscionable demands. One met them walking at odd
hours in queer places, of which I imagine they were not much aware.
They would turn deliberately off the Maidan and away from the
bandstand to be rid of our irrelevant bows; they did their duty by
the rest of us, but the most egregious among us, the Deputy-
Commissioner for selection, could see that he hardly counted. I
thought I understood, but that may have been my fatuity; certainly
when their husbands inquired what on earth they had been talking of,
it usually transpired that they had found an infinite amount to say
about nothing. It was a little worrying to hear Colonel Chichele
and Major Harbottle describe their wives as 'pals,' but the fact
could not be denied, and after all we were in the Punjab. They were
pals too, but the terms were different.

People discussed it according to their lights, and girls said in
pretty wonderment that Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele were like
men, they never kissed each other. I think Judy prescribed these
conditions. Anna was far more a person who did as the world told
her. But it was a poor negation to describe all that they never
did; there was no common little convention of attachment that did
not seem to be tacitly omitted between them. I hope one did not too
cynically observe that they offered these to their husbands instead;
the redeeming observation was their husbands' complete satisfaction.
This they maintained to the end. In the natural order of things
Robert Harbottle should have paid heavily for interfering as he did
in Paris between a woman and what she was entitled to live for. As
a matter of fact he never paid anything at all; I doubt whether he
ever knew himself a debtor. Judy kept her temperament under like a
current and swam with the tides of the surface, taking refreshing
dips only now and then which one traced in her eyes and her hair
when she and Robert came back from leave. That sort of thing is
lost in the sands of India, but it makes an oasis as it travels, and
it sometimes seemed to me a curious pity that she and Anna should
sit in the shade of it together, while Robert and Peter Chichele,
their titular companions, blundered on in the desert. But after
all, if you are born blind--and the men were both immensely liked,
and the shooting was good.

Ten years later Somers joined. The Twelfth were at Peshawur.
Robert Harbottle was Lieutenant-Colonel by that time and had the
regiment. Distinction had incrusted, in the Indian way, upon Peter
Chichele, its former colonel; he was General Commanding the District
and K.C.B. So we were all still together in Peshawur. It was great
luck for the Chicheles, Sir Peter's having the district, though his
father's old regiment would have made it pleasant enough for the boy
in any case. He came to us, I mean, of course, to two or three of
us, with the interest that hangs about a victim of circumstances; we
understood that he wasn't a 'born soldier.' Anna had told me on the
contrary that he was a sacrifice to family tradition made inevitable
by the General's unfortunate investments. Bellona's bridegroom was
not a role he fancied, though he would make a kind of compromise as
best man; he would agree, she said, to be a war correspondent and
write picturesque specials for the London halfpenny press. There
was the humour of the poor boy's despair in it, but she conveyed it,
I remember, in exactly the same tone with which she had said to me
years before that he wanted to drive a milk-cart. She carried quite
her half of the family tradition, though she could talk of sacrifice
and make her eyes wistful, contemplating for Somers the limitations
of the drill-book and the camp of exercise, proclaiming and
insisting upon what she would have done if she could only have
chosen for him. Anna Chichele saw things that way. With more than
a passable sense of all that was involved, if she could have made
her son an artist in life or a commander-in-chief, if she could have
given him the seeing eye or Order of the Star of India, she would
not have hesitated for an instant. Judy, with her single mind,
cried out, almost at sight of him, upon them both, I mean both Anna
and Sir Peter. Not that the boy carried his condemnation badly, or
even obviously; I venture that no one noticed it in the mess; but it
was naturally plain to those of us who were under the same. He had
put in his two years with a British regiment at Meerut--they nurse
subalterns that way for the Indian army--and his eyes no longer
played with the tinsel vision of India; they looked instead into the
arid stretch beyond. This preoccupation conveyed to the Surgeon-
Major's wife the suggestion that Mr. Chichele was the victim of a
hopeless attachment. Mrs. Harbottle made no such mistake; she saw
simply, I imagine, the beginnings of her own hunger and thirst in
him, looking back as she told us across a decade of dusty sunsets to
remember them. The decade was there, close to the memory of all of
us; we put, from Judy herself downward, an absurd amount of
confidence in it.

She looked so well the night she met him. It was English mail day;
she depended a great deal upon her letters, and I suppose somebody
had written her a word that brought her that happy, still excitement
that is the inner mystery of words. He went straight to her with
some speech about his mother having given him leave, and for twenty
minutes she patronized him on a sofa as his mother would not have
dreamed of doing.

Anna Chichele, from the other side of the room, smiled on the pair.

'I depend on you and Judy to be good to him while we are away,' she
said. She and Sir Peter were going on leave at the end of the week
to Scotland, as usual, for the shooting.

Following her glance I felt incapable of the proportion she assigned
me. 'I will see after his socks with pleasure,' I said. 'I think,
don't you, we may leave the rest to Judy?'

Her eyes remained upon the boy, and I saw the passion rise in them,
at which I turned mine elsewhere. Who can look unperturbed upon
such a privacy of nature as that?

'Poor old Judy!' she went on. 'She never would be bothered with him
in all his dear hobble-dehoy time; she resented his claims, the
unreasonable creature, used to limit me to three anecdotes a week;
and now she has him on her hands, if you like. See the pretty air
of deference in the way he listens to her! He has nice manners, the
villain, if he is a Chichele!'

'Oh, you have improved Sir Peter's,' I said kindly.

'I do hope Judy will think him worth while. I can't quite expect
that he will be up to her, bless him, she is so much cleverer, isn't
she, than any of us? But if she will just be herself with him it
will make such a difference.'

The other two crossed the room to us at that, and Judy gaily made
Somers over to his mother, trailing off to find Robert in the
billiard-room.

'Well, what has Mrs. Harbottle been telling you?' Anna asked him.

The young man's eye followed Judy, his hand went musingly to his
moustache.

'She was telling me,' he said, 'that people in India were sepulchers
of themselves, but that now and then one came who could roll away
another's stone.'

'It sounds promising,' said Lady Chichele to me.

'It sounds cryptic,' I laughed to Somers, but I saw that he had the
key.

I can not say that I attended diligently to Mr. Chichele's socks,
but the part corresponding was freely assigned me. After his people
went I saw him often. He pretended to find qualities in my tea,
implied that he found them in my talk. As a matter of fact it was
my inquiring attitude that he loved, the knowledge that there was no
detail that he could give me about himself, his impressions and
experiences, that was unlikely to interest me. I would not for the
world imply that he was egotistical or complacent, absolutely the
reverse, but he possessed an articulate soul which found its
happiness in expression, and I liked to listen. I feel that these
are complicated words to explain a very simple relation, and I pause
to wonder what is left to me if I wished to describe his commerce
with Mrs. Harbottle. Luckily there is an alternative; one needn't
do it. I wish I had somewhere on paper Judy's own account of it at
this period, however. It is a thing she would have enjoyed writing
and more enjoyed communicating, at this period.

There was a grave reticence in his talk about her which amused me in
the beginning. Mrs. Harbottle had been for ten years important
enough to us all, but her serious significance, the light and the
beauty in her, had plainly been reserved for the discovery of this
sensitive and intelligent person not very long from Sandhurst and
exactly twenty-six. I was barely allowed a familiar reference, and
anything approaching a flippancy was met with penetrating silence.
I was almost rebuked for lightly suggesting that she must
occasionally find herself bored in Peshawur.

'I think not anywhere,' said Mr. Chichele; 'Mrs. Harbottle is one of
the few people who sound the privilege of living.'

This to me, who had counted Mrs. Harbottle's yawns on so many
occasions! It became presently necessary to be careful, tactful, in
one's implications about Mrs. Harbottle, and to recognize a certain
distinction in the fact that one was the only person with whom Mr.
Chichele discussed her at all.

The day came when we talked of Robert; it was bound to come in the
progress of any understanding and affectionate colloquy which had
his wife for inspiration. I was familiar, of course, with Somers's
opinion that the Colonel was an awfully good sort; that had been
among the preliminaries and become understood as the base of all
references. And I liked Robert Harbottle very well myself. When
his adjutant called him a born leader of men, however, I felt
compelled to look at the statement consideringly.

'In a tight place,' I said--dear me, what expressions had the
freedom of our little frontier drawing-rooms!--'I would as soon
depend on him as on anybody. But as for leadership--'

'He is such a good fellow that nobody here does justice to his
soldierly qualities,' said Mr. Chichele, 'except Mrs. Harbottle.'

'Has she been telling you about them?' I inquired.

'Well,' he hesitated, 'she told me about the Mulla Nulla affair.
She is rather proud of that. Any woman would be.'

'Poor dear Judy!' I mused.

Somers said nothing, but looked at me, removing his cigarette, as if
my words would be the better of explanation.

'She has taken refuge in them--in Bob Harbottle's soldierly
qualities--ever since she married him,' I continued.

'Taken refuge,' he repeated, coldly, but at my uncompromising glance
his eyes fell.

'Well?' I said.

'You mean--'

'Oh, I mean what I say,' I laughed. 'Your cigarette has gone out--
have another.'

'I think her devotion to him splendid.'

'Quite splendid. Have you seen the things he brought her from the
Simla Art Exhibition? He said they were nice bits of colour, and
she has hung them in the drawing-room, where she will have to look
at them every day. Let us admire her--dear Judy.'

'Oh,' he said, with a fine air of detachment, 'do you think they are
so necessary, those agreements?'

'Well,' I replied, 'we see that they are not indispensable. More
sugar? I have only given you one lump. And we know, at all
events,' I added, unguardedly, 'that she could never have had an
illusion about him.'

The young man looked up quickly. 'Is that story true?' he asked.

'There was a story, but most of us have forgotten it. Who told
you?'

'The doctor.'

'The Surgeon-Major,' I said, 'has an accurate memory and a sense of
proportion. As I suppose you were bound to get it from somebody, I
am glad you got it from him.'

I was not prepared to go on, and saw with some relief that Somers
was not either. His silence, as he smoked, seemed to me deliberate;
and I had oddly enough at this moment for the first time the
impression that he was a man and not a boy. Then the Harbottles
themselves joined us, very cheery after a gallop from the Wazir-
Bagh. We talked of old times, old friendships, good swords that
were broken, names that had carried far, and Somers effaced himself
in the perfect manner of the British subaltern. It was a long,
pleasant gossip, and I thought Judy seemed rather glad to let her
husband dictate its level, which, of course, he did. I noticed when
the three rode away together that the Colonel was beginning to sit
down rather solidly on his big New Zealander; and I watched the dusk
come over from the foothills for a long time thinking more kindly
than I had spoken of Robert Harbottle.

I have often wondered how far happiness is contributed to a
temperament like Judy Harbottle's, and how far it creates its own;
but I doubt whether, on either count, she found as much in any other
winter of her life except perhaps the remote ones by the Seine.
Those ardent hours of hers, when everything she said was touched
with the flame of her individuality, came oftener; she suddenly
cleaned up her palate and began to translate in one study after
another the language of the frontier country, that spoke only in
stones and in shadows under the stones and in sunlight over them.
There is nothing in the Academy of this year, at all events, that I
would exchange for the one she gave me. She lived her physical life
at a pace which carried us all along with her; she hunted and drove
and danced and dined with such sincere intention as convinced us all
that in hunting and driving and dancing and dining there were
satisfactions that had been somehow overlooked. The Surgeon-Major's
wife said it was delightful to meet Mrs. Harbottle, she seemed to
enjoy everything so thoroughly; the Surgeon-Major looked at her
critically and asked her if she were quite sure she hadn't a night
temperature. He was a Scotchman. One night Colonel Harbottle,
hearing her give away the last extra, charged her with renewing her
youth.

'No, Bob,' she said, 'only imitating it.'

Ah, that question of her youth. It was so near her--still, she told
me once, she heard the beat of its flying, and the pulse in her
veins answered the false signal. That was afterward, when she told
the truth. She was not so happy when she indulged herself
otherwise. As when she asked one to remember that she was a middle-
aged woman, with middle-aged thoughts and satisfactions.

'I am now really happiest,' she declared, 'when the Commissioner
takes me in to dinner, when the General Commanding leads me to the
dance.'

She did her best to make it an honest conviction. I offered her a
recent success not crowned by the Academy, and she put it down on
the table. 'By and by,' she said. 'At present I am reading Pascal
and Bossuet.' Well, she was reading Pascal and Bossuet. She
grieved aloud that most of our activities in India were so
indomitably youthful, owing to the accident that most of us were
always so young. 'There is no dignified distraction in this
country,' she complained, 'for respectable ladies nearing forty.'
She seemed to like to make these declarations in the presence of
Somers Chichele, who would look at her with a little queer smile--a
bad translation, I imagine, of what he felt.

She gave herself so generously to her seniors that somebody said
Mrs. Harbottle's girdle was hung with brass hats. It seems flippant
to add that her complexion was as honest as the day, but the fact is
that the year before Judy had felt compelled, like the rest of us,
to repair just a little the ravages of the climate. If she had
never done it one would not have looked twice at the absurdity when
she said of the powder-puff in the dressing-room, 'I have raised
that thing to the level of an immorality,' and sailed in to dance
with an uncompromising expression and a face uncompromised. I have
not spoken of her beauty; for one thing it was not always there, and
there were people who would deny it altogether, or whose considered
comment was, 'I wouldn't call her plain.' They, of course, were
people in whom she declined to be interested, but even for those of
us who could evoke some demonstration of her vivid self her face
would not always light in correspondence. When it did there was
none that I liked better to look at; and I envied Somers Chichele
his way to make it the pale, shining thing that would hold him
lifted, in return, for hours together, with I know not what mystic
power of a moon upon the tide. And he? Oh, he was dark and
delicate, by nature simple, sincere, delightfully intelligent. His
common title to charm was the rather sweet seriousness that rested
on his upper lip, and a certain winning gratification in his
attention; but he had a subtler one in his eyes, which must be
always seeking and smiling over what they found; those eyes of
perpetual inquiry for the exquisite which ask so little help to
create it. A personality to button up in a uniform, good heavens!

As I begin to think of them together I remember how the maternal
note appeared in her talk about him.

'His youth is pathetic,' she told me, 'but there is nothing that he
does not understand.'

'Don't apologize, Judy,' I said. We were so brusque on the
frontier. Besides, the matter still suffered a jocular presentment.
Mrs. Harbottle and Mr. Chichele were still 'great friends'; we could
still put them next each other at our dinner-parties without the
feeling that it would be 'marked.' There was still nothing unusual
in the fact that when Mrs. Harbottle was there Mr. Chichele might be
taken for granted. We were so broad-minded also, on the frontier.

It grew more obvious, the maternal note. I began positively to
dread it, almost as much, I imagine, as Somers did. She took her
privileges all in Anna's name, she exercised her authority quite as
Lady Chichele's proxy. She went to the very limit. 'Anna
Chichele,' she said actually in his presence, 'is a fortunate woman.
She has all kinds of cleverness, and she has her tall son. I have
only one little talent, and I have no tall son.' Now it was not in
nature that she could have had a son as tall as Somers, nor was that
desire in her eyes. All civilization implies a good deal of farce,
but this was a poor refuge, a cheap device; I was glad when it fell
away from her sincerity, when the day came on which she looked into
my fire and said simply, 'An attachment like ours has no terms.'

'I wonder,' I said.

'For what comes and goes,' she went on dreamily, 'how could there be
a formula?'

'Look here, Judy,' I said, 'you know me very well. What if the
flesh leaps with the spirit?'

She looked at me, very white. 'Oh no,' she said, 'no.'

I waited, but there seemed nothing more that she could say; and in
the silence the futile negative seemed to wander round the room
repeating itself like an echo, 'Oh no, no.' I poked the fire
presently to drown the sound of it. Judy sat still, with her feet
crossed and her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, staring
into the coals.

'Can you live independently, satisfied with your interests and
occupations?' she demanded at last. 'Yes, I know you can. I can't.
I must exist more than half in other people. It is what they think
and feel that matters to me, just as much as what I think and feel.
The best of life is in that communication.'

'It has always been a passion with you, Judy,' I replied. 'I can
imagine how much you must miss--'

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