The Pool in the Desert
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Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
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'Whom?'
'Anna Chichele,' I said softly.
She got up and walked about the room, fixing here and there an
intent regard upon things which she did not see. 'Oh, I do,' she
said at one point, with the effect of pulling herself together. She
took another turn or two, and then finding herself near the door she
went out. I felt as profoundly humiliated for her as if she had
staggered.
The next night was one of those that stand out so vividly, for no
reason that one can identify, in one's memory. We were dining with
the Harbottles, a small party, for a tourist they had with them.
Judy and I and Somers and the traveller had drifted out into the
veranda, where the scent of Japanese lilies came and went on the
spring wind to trouble the souls of any taken unawares. There was a
brightness beyond the foothills where the moon was coming, and I
remember how one tall clump swayed out against it, and seemed in
passionate perfume to lay a burden on the breast. Judy moved away
from it and sat clasping her knees on the edge of the veranda.
Somers, when his eyes were not upon her, looked always at the lily.
Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, 'I
think you Anglo-Indians live in a kind of little paradise.'
There was an instant's silence, and then Judy turned her face into
the lamplight from the drawing-room. 'With everything but the
essentials,' she said.
We stayed late; Mr. Chichele and ourselves were the last to go.
Judy walked with us along the moonlit drive to the gate, which is so
unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it
open. She swung the stiff halves together.
'Now,' she said, 'it is shut.'
'And I,' said Somers Chichele, softly and quickly, 'am on the other
side.'
Even over that depth she could flash him a smile. 'It is the
business of my life,' she gave him in return, 'to keep this gate
shut.' I felt as if they had forgotten us. Somers mounted and rode
off without a word. We were walking in a different direction.
Looking back, I saw Judy leaning immovable on the gate, while Somers
turned in his saddle, apparently to repeat the form of lifting his
hat. And all about them stretched the stones of Kabul valley, vague
and formless in the tide of the moonlight. . .
Next day a note from Mrs. Harbottle informed me that she had gone to
Bombay for a fortnight. In a postscript she wrote, 'I shall wait
for the Chicheles there, and come back with them.' I remember
reflecting that if she could not induce herself to take a passage to
England in the ship that brought them, it seemed the right thing to
do.
She did come back with them. I met the party at the station. I
knew Somers would meet them, and it seemed to me, so imminent did
disaster loom, that someone else should be there, someone to offer a
covering movement or a flank support wherever it might be most
needed. And among all our smiling faces disaster did come, or the
cold premonition of it. We were all perfect, but Somers's lip
trembled. Deprived for a fortnight he was eager for the draft, and
he was only twenty-six. His lip trembled, and there, under the
flickering station-lamps, suddenly stood that of which there never
could be again any denial, for those of us who saw.
Did we make, I wonder, even a pretense of disguising the
consternation that sprang up among us, like an armed thing, ready to
kill any further suggestion of the truth? I don't know. Anna
Chichele's unfinished sentence dropped as if someone had given her a
blow upon the mouth. Coolies were piling the luggage into a hired
carriage at the edge of the platform. She walked mechanically after
them, and would have stepped in with it but for the sight of her own
gleaming landau drawn up within a yard or two, and the General
waiting. We all got home somehow, taking it with us, and I gave
Lady Chichele twenty-four hours to come to me with her face all one
question and her heart all one fear. She came in twelve.
'Have you seen it--long?' Prepared as I was her directness was
demoralizing.
'It isn't a mortal disease.'
'Oh, for Heaven's sake--'
'Well, not with certainty, for more than a month.'
She made a little spasmodic movement with her hands, then dropped
them pitifully. 'Couldn't you do ANYthing?'
I looked at her, and she said at once, 'No, of course you couldn't.'
For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my
trivial share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting.
'I am afraid it will have to be faced,' I said.
'What will happen?' Anna cried. 'Oh, what will happen?'
'Why not the usual thing?' Lady Chichele looked up quickly as if at
a reminder. 'The ambiguous attachment of the country,' I went on,
limping but courageous, 'half declared, half admitted, that leads
vaguely nowhere, and finally perishes as the man's life enriches
itself--the thing we have seen so often.'
'Whatever Judy is capable of it won't be the usual thing. You know
that.'
I had to confess in silence that I did.
'It flashed at me--the difference in her--in Bombay.' She pressed
her lips together and then went on unsteadily. 'In her eyes, her
voice. She was mannered, extravagant, elaborate. With me! All the
way up I wondered and worried. But I never thought--' She stopped;
her voice simply shook itself into silence. I called a servant.
'I am going to give you a good stiff peg,' I said. I apologize for
the 'peg,' but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage on the
frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was
coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod
absently in the pauses.
'Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and
she was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don't know
whether she tried, but anyway, she failed. The covenant between
them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though
that was seldom. She dared not look at him. And the little
conversation that they had--you would have laughed--it was a comedy
of stutters. The facile Mrs. Harbottle!'
'You do well to be angry, naturally,' I said; 'but it would be fatal
to let yourself go, Anna.'
'Angry?' Oh, I am SICK. The misery of it! The terror of it! If
it were anybody but Judy! Can't you imagine the passion of a
temperament like that in a woman who has all these years been
feeding on herself? I tell you she will take him from my very arms.
And he will go--to I dare not imagine what catastrophe! Who can
prevent it? Who can prevent it?'
'There is you,' I said.
Lady Chichele laughed hysterically. 'I think you ought to say,
"There are you." I--what can I do? Do you realize that it's JUDY?
My friend--my other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of
it? Do you think a tie like that can be broken by an accident--by a
misfortune? With it all I ADORE Judy Harbottle. I love her, as I
have always loved her, and--it's damnable, but I don't know whether,
whatever happened, I wouldn't go on loving her.'
'Finish your peg,' I said. She was sobbing.
'Where I blame myself most,' she went on, 'is for not seeing in him
all that makes him mature to her--that makes her forget the absurd
difference between them, and take him simply and sincerely as I know
she does, as the contemporary of her soul if not of her body. I saw
none of that. Could I, as his mother? Would he show it to me? I
thought him just a charming boy, clever, too, of course, with nice
instincts and well plucked; we were always proud of that, with his
delicate physique. Just a boy! I haven't yet stopped thinking how
different he looks without his curls. And I thought she would be
just kind and gracious and delightful to him because he was my son.'
'There, of course,' I said, 'is the only chance.'
'Where--what?'
'He is your son.'
'Would you have me appeal to her? Do you know I don't think I
could?'
'Dear me, no. Your case must present itself. It must spring upon
her and grow before her out of your silence, and if you can manage
it, your confidence. There is a great deal, after all, remember, to
hold her in that. I can't somehow imagine her failing you.
Otherwise--'
Lady Chichele and I exchanged a glance of candid admission.
'Otherwise she would be capable of sacrificing everything--
everything. Of gathering her life into an hour. I know. And do
you know if the thing were less impossible, less grotesque, I should
not be so much afraid? I mean that the ABSOLUTE indefensibility of
it might bring her a recklessness and a momentum which might--'
'Send her over the verge,' I said. 'Well, go home and ask her to
dinner.'
There was a good deal more to say, of course, than I have thought
proper to put down here, but before Anna went I saw that she was
keyed up to the heroic part. This was none the less to her credit
because it was the only part, the dictation of a sense of expediency
that despaired while it dictated. The noble thing was her capacity
to take it, and, amid all that warred in her, to carry it out on the
brave high lines of her inspiration. It seemed a literal
inspiration, so perfectly calculated that it was hard not to think
sometimes, when one saw them together, that Anna had been lulled
into a simple resumption of the old relation. Then from the least
thing possible--the lift of an eyelid--it flashed upon one that
between these two every moment was dramatic, and one took up the
word with a curious sense of detachment and futility, but with one's
heart beating like a trip-hammer with the mad excitement of it. The
acute thing was the splendid sincerity of Judy Harbottle's response.
For days she was profoundly on her guard, then suddenly she seemed
to become practically, vividly aware of what I must go on calling
the great chance, and passionately to fling herself upon it. It was
the strangest cooperation without a word or a sign to show it
conscious--a playing together for stakes that could not be admitted,
a thing to hang upon breathless. It was there between them--the
tenable ground of what they were to each other: they occupied it
with almost an equal eye upon the tide that threatened, while I from
my mainland tower also made an anguished calculation of the chances.
I think in spite of the menace, they found real beatitudes; so
keenly did they set about the business that it brought them moments
finer than any they could count in the years that were behind them,
the flat and colourless years that were gone. Once or twice the
wild idea even visited me that it was, after all, the projection of
his mother in Somers that had so seized Judy Harbottle, and that the
original was all that was needed to help the happy process of
detachment. Somers himself at the time was a good deal away on
escort duty: they had a clear field.
I can not tell exactly when--between Mrs. Harbottle and myself--it
became a matter for reference more or less overt, I mean her defined
problem, the thing that went about between her and the sun. It will
be imagined that it did not come up like the weather; indeed, it was
hardly ever to be envisaged and never to be held; but it was always
there, and out of our joint consciousness it would sometimes leap
and pass, without shape or face. It might slip between two
sentences, or it might remain, a dogging shadow, for an hour. Or a
week would go by while, with a strong hand, she held it out of sight
altogether and talked of Anna--always of Anna. Her eyes shone with
the things she told me then: she seemed to keep herself under the
influence of them as if they had the power of narcotics. At the end
of a time like this she turned to me in the door as she was going
and stood silent, as if she could neither go nor stay. I had been
able to make nothing of her that afternoon: she had seemed
preoccupied with the pattern of the carpet which she traced
continually with her riding crop, and finally I, too, had relapsed.
She sat haggard, with the fight forever in her eyes, and the day
seemed to sombre about her in her corner. When she turned in the
door, I looked up with sudden prescience of a crisis.
'Don't jump,' she said, 'it was only to tell you that I have
persuaded Robert to apply for furlough. Eighteen months. From the
first of April. Don't touch me.' I suppose I made a movement
towards her. Certainly I wanted to throw my arms about her; with
the instinct, I suppose, to steady her in her great resolution.
'At the end of that time, as you know, he will be retired. I had
some trouble, he is so keen on the regiment, but I think--I have
succeeded. You might mention it to Anna.'
'Haven't you?' sprang past my lips.
'I can't. It would be like taking an oath to tell her, and--I can't
take an oath to go. But I mean to.'
'There is nothing to be said,' I brought out, feeling indeed that
there was not. 'But I congratulate you, Judy.'
'No, there is nothing to be said. And you congratulate me, no
doubt!'
She stood for a moment quivering in the isolation she made for
herself; and I felt a primitive angry revolt against the delicate
trafficking of souls that could end in such ravage and disaster.
The price was too heavy; I would have denuded her, at the moment, of
all that had led her into this, and turned her out a clod with fine
shoulders like fifty other women in Peshawur. Then, perhaps,
because I held myself silent and remote and she had no emotion of
fear from me, she did not immediately go.
'It will beat itself away, I suppose, like the rest of the
unreasonable pain of the world,' she said at last; and that, of
course, brought me to her side. 'Things will go back to their
proportions. This,' she touched an open rose, 'will claim its
beauty again. And life will become--perhaps--what it was before.'
Still I found nothing to say, I could only put my arm in hers and
walk with her to the edge of the veranda where the syce was holding
her horse. She stroked the animal's neck. 'Everything in me
answered him,' she informed me, with the grave intelligence of a
patient who relates a symptom past. As she took the reins she
turned to me again. 'His spirit came to mine like a homing bird,'
she said, and in her smile even the pale reflection of happiness was
sweet and stirring. It left me hanging in imagination over the
source and the stream, a little blessed in the mere understanding.
Too much blessed for confidence, or any safe feeling that the source
was bound. Rather I saw it leaping over every obstacle, flashing to
its destiny. As I drove to the Club next day I decided that I would
not tell Anna Chichele of Colonel Harbottle's projected furlough.
If to Judy telling her would be like taking an oath that they would
go, to me it would at least be like assuming sponsorship for their
intention. That would be heavy indeed. From the first of April--we
were then in March. Anna would hear it soon enough from the
General, would see it soon enough, almost, in the 'Gazette', when it
would have passed into irrecoverable fact. So I went by her with
locked lips, kept out of the way of those eyes of the mother that
asked and asked, and would have seen clear to any depth, any hiding-
place of knowledge like that. As I pulled up at the Club I saw
Colonel Harbottle talking concernedly to the wife of our Second-in-
Command, and was reminded that I had not heard for some days how
Major Watkins was going on. So I, too, approached Mrs. Watkins in
her victoria to ask. Robert Harbottle kindly forestalled her reply.
'Hard luck, isn't it? Watkins has been ordered home at once. Just
settled into their new house, too--last of the kit came up from
Calcutta yesterday, didn't it, Mrs. Watkins? But it's sound to go--
Peshawur is the worst hole in Asia to shake off dysentery in.'
We agreed upon this and discussed the sale-list of her new furniture
that Mrs. Watkins would have to send round the station, and
considered the chances of a trooper--to the Watkinses with two
children and not a penny but his pay it did make it easier not to
have to go by a liner--and Colonel Harbottle and I were halfway to
the reading-room before the significance of Major Watkins's sick-
leave flashed upon me.
'But this,' I cried, 'will make a difference to your plans. You
won't--'
'Be able to ask for that furlough Judy wants. Rather not. I'm
afraid she's disappointed--she was tremendously set on going--but it
doesn't matter tuppence to me.'
I sought out Mrs. Harbottle, at the end of the room. She looked
radiant; she sat on the edge of the table and swung a light-hearted
heel. She was talking to people who in themselves were a witness to
high spirits, Captain the Hon. Freddy Gisborne, Mrs. Flamboys.
At sight of me her face clouded, fell suddenly into the old weary
lines. It made me feel somehow a little sick; I went back to my
cart and drove home.
For more than a week I did not see her except when I met her riding
with Somers Chichele along the peach-bordered road that leads to the
Wazir-Bagh. The trees were all in blossom and made a picture that
might well catch dreaming hearts into a beatitude that would
correspond. The air was full of spring and the scent of violets,
those wonderful Peshawur violets that grow in great clumps, tall and
double. Gracious clouds came and trailed across the frontier
barrier; blue as an idyll it rose about us; the city smiled in her
gardens.
She had it all in her face, poor Judy, all the spring softness and
more, the morning she came, intensely controlled, to announce her
defeat. I was in the drawing-room doing the flowers; I put them
down to look at her. The wonderful telegram from Simla arrived--
that was the wonderful part--at the same time; I remembered how the
red, white, and blue turban of the telegraph peon bobbed up behind
her shoulder in the veranda. I signed and laid it on the table; I
suppose it seemed hardly likely that anything could be important
enough to interfere at the moment with my impression of what love,
unbound and victorious, could do with a face I thought I knew. Love
sat there careless of the issue, full of delight. Love proclaimed
that between him and Judith Harbottle it was all over--she had met
him, alas, in too narrow a place--and I marvelled at the paradox
with which he softened every curve and underlined every vivid note
of personality in token that it had just begun. He sat there in
great serenity, and though I knew that somewhere behind lurked a
vanquished woman, I saw her through such a radiance that I could not
be sure of seeing her at all. . .
She went back to the very first of it; she seemed herself intensely
interested in the facts; and there is no use in pretending that,
while she talked, the moral consideration was at all present with me
either; it wasn't. Her extremity was the thing that absorbed us;
she even, in tender thoughtfulness, diagnosed it from its definite
beautiful beginning.
'It was there, in my heart, when I woke one morning, exquisite and
strange, the assurance of a gift. How had it come there, while I
slept? I assure you when I closed my eyes it did not exist for me.
. .Yes, of course, I had seen him, but only somewhere at dinner. .
.As the day went on it changed--it turned into a clear pool, into a
flower. And I--think of my not understanding! I was pleased with
it! For a long time, for days, I never dreamed that it could be
anything but a little secret joy. Then, suddenly--oh, I had not
been perceiving enough!--it was in all my veins, a tide, an
efflorescence, a thing of my very life.
'Then--it was a little late--I understood, and since--
'I began by hating it--being furious, furious--and afraid, too.
Sometimes it was like a low cloud, hovering and travelling always
with me, sometimes like a beast of prey that went a little way off
and sat looking at me. . ..
'I have--done my best. But there is nothing to do, to kill, to
abolish. How can I say, "I will not let you in," when it is already
there? How can I assume indifference when this thing is imposed
upon every moment of my day? And it has grown so sweet--the
longing--that--isn't it strange?--I could more willingly give him up
than the desire of him. That seems as impossible to part with as
life itself.'
She sat reflective for a moment, and I saw her eyes slowly fill.
Don't--don't CRY, Judy,' I faltered, wanting to horribly, myself.
She smiled them dry.
'Not now. But I am giving myself, I suppose, to many tears.'
'God help you,' I said. What else was there to say?
'There is no such person,' she replied, gaily. 'There is only a
blessed devil.'
'Then you go all the way--to the logical conclusion?'
She hardly hesitated. 'To the logical conclusion. What poor
words!'
'May I ask--when?'
'I should like to tell you that quite definitely, and I think I can.
The English mail leaves tonight.'
'And you have arranged to take it?'
'We have arranged nothing. Do you know'--she smiled as if at the
fresh colours of an idyll--'we have not even come to the admission?
There has been between us no word, no vision. Ah, we have gone in
bonds, and dumb! Hours we have had, exquisite hours of the spirit,
but never a moment of the heart, a moment confessed. It was mine to
give--that moment, and he has waited--I know--wondering whether
perhaps it would ever come. And today--we are going for a ride
today, and I do not think we shall come back.'
'O Judy,' I cried, catching at her sleeve, 'he is only a boy!'
'There were times when I thought that conclusive. Now the misery of
it has gone to sleep; don't waken it. It pleases me to believe that
the years are a convention. I never had any dignity, you know, and
I seem to have missed the moral deliverance. I only want--oh, you
know what I want. Why don't you open your telegram?'
I had been folding and fingering the brown envelope as if it had
been a scrap of waste paper.
'It is probably from Mrs. Watkins about the victoria,' I said,
feeling its profound irrelevance. 'I wired an offer to her in
Bombay. However'--and I read the telegram, the little solving
telegram from Army Headquarters. I turned my back on her to read it
again, and then I replaced it very carefully and put it in my
pocket. It was a moment to take hold of with both hands, crying on
all one's gods for steadiness.
'How white you look!' said Mrs. Harbottle, with concern. 'Not bad
news?'
'On the contrary, excellent news. Judy, will you stay to lunch?'
She looked at me, hesitating. 'Won't it seem rather a compromise on
your part? When you ought to be rousing the city--'
'I don't intend to rouse the city,' I said.
'I have given you the chance.'
'Thank you,' I said, grimly, 'but the only real favour you can do me
is to stay to lunch.' It was then just on one.
'I'll stay,' she said, 'if you will promise not to make any sort of
effort. I shouldn't mind, but it would distress you.'
'I promise absolutely,' I said, and ironical joy rose up in me, and
the telegram burned in my pocket.
She would talk of it, though I found it hard to let her go on,
knowing and knowing and knowing as I did that for that day at least
it could not be. There was very little about herself that she
wanted to tell me; she was there confessed a woman whom joy had
overcome; it was understood that we both accepted that situation.
But in the details which she asked me to take charge of it was plain
that she also kept a watchful eye upon fate--matters of business.
We were in the drawing-room. The little round clock in its
Armritsar case marked half-past three. Judy put down her coffee cup
and rose to go. As she glanced at the clock the light deepened in
her eyes, and I, with her hand in mine, felt like an agent of the
Destroyer--for it was half-past three--consumed myself with fear
lest the blow had miscarried. Then as we stood, suddenly, the sound
of hoofs at a gallop on the drive, and my husband threw himself off
at the door and tore through the hall to his room; and in the
certainty that overwhelmed me even Judy, for an instant, stood dim
and remote.
'Major Jim seems to be in a hurry,' said Mrs. Harbottle, lightly.
'I have always liked your husband. I wonder whether he will say
tomorrow that he always liked me.'
'Dear Judy, I don't think he will be occupied with you tomorrow.'
'Oh, surely, just a little, if I go tonight.'
'You won't go tonight.'
She looked at me helplessly. I felt as if I were insisting upon her
abasement instead of her salvation. 'I wish--'
'You're not going--you're not! You can't! Look!'
I pulled it out of my pocket and thrust it at her--the telegram. It
came, against every regulation, from my good friend the Deputy
Adjutant-General, in Simla, and it read, 'Row Khurram 12th probably
ordered front three hours' time.'
Her face changed--how my heart leaped to see it change!--and that
took command there which will command trampling, even in the women
of the camp, at news like this.
'What luck that Bob couldn't take his furlough!' she exclaimed,
single-thoughted. 'But you have known this for hours'--there was
even something of the Colonel's wife, authority, incisiveness. 'Why
didn't you tell me? Ah--I see.'
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