The Pool in the Desert
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Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
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'Perhaps it should, but, you see, it isn't. Cecily would be happy
with anybody who made her comfortable. You would ask a good deal
more than that, you know.'
Dacres, at this, took me up promptly. Life, he said, the heart of
life, had particularly little to say to temperament. By the heart
of life I suppose he meant married love. He explained that its
roots asked other sustenance, and that it throve best of all on
simple elemental goodness. So long as a man sought in women mere
casual companionship, perhaps the most exquisite thing to be
experienced was the stimulus of some spiritual feminine counterpart;
but when he desired of one woman that she should be always and
intimately with him, the background of his life, the mother of his
children, he was better advised to avoid nerves and sensibilities,
and try for the repose of the common--the uncommon--domestic
virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender. (Already, I
told him, he smelled the housekeeper's linen-chest.) But I did not
interrupt him much; I couldn't, he was too absorbed. To
temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of
decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he
retorted that if he hadn't he didn't wish to make a beginning in his
own family. In a quarter of an hour he repudiated the theories of a
lifetime, a gratifying triumph for simple elemental goodness.
Having denied the value of the subtler pretensions to charm in woman
as you marry her, he went artlessly on to endow Cecily with as many
of them as could possibly be desirable. He actually persuaded
himself to say that it was lovely to see the reflections of life in
her tranquil spirit; and when I looked at him incredulously he grew
angry, and hinted that Cecily's sensitiveness to reflections and
other things might be a trifle beyond her mother's ken. 'She
responds instantly, intimately, to the beautiful everywhere,' he
declared.
'Aren't the opportunities of life on board ship rather limited to
demonstrate that?' I inquired. 'I know--you mean sunsets. Cecily
is very fond of sunsets. She is always asking me to come and look
at them.'
'I was thinking of last night's sunset,' he confessed. 'We looked
at it together.'
'What did she say?' I asked idly.
'Nothing very much. That's just the point. Another girl would have
raved and gushed.'
'Oh, well, Cecily never does that,' I responded. 'Nevertheless she
is a very ordinary human instrument. I hope I shall have no
temptation ten years hence to remind you that I warned you of her
quality.'
'I wish, not in the least for my own profit, for I am well convinced
already, but simply to win your cordiality and your approval--never
did an unexceptional wooer receive such niggard encouragement!--I
wish there were some sort of test for her quality. I would be proud
to stand by it, and you would be convinced. I can't find words to
describe my objection to your state of mind.'
The thing seemed to me to be a foregone conclusion. I saw it
accomplished, with all its possibilities of disastrous commonplace.
I saw all that I have here taken the trouble to foreshadow. So far
as I was concerned, Dacres's burden would add itself to my
philosophies, voila tout. I should always be a little uncomfortable
about it, because it had been taken from my back; but it would not
be a matter for the wringing of hands. And yet--the hatefulness of
the mistake! Dacres's bold talk of a test made no suggestion.
Should my invention be more fertile? I thought of something.
'You have said nothing to her yet?' I asked.
'Nothing. I don't think she suspects for a moment. She treats me
as if no such fell design were possible. I'm none too confident,
you know,' he added, with longer face.
'We go straight to Agra. Could you come to Agra?'
'Ideal!' he cried. 'The memory of Mumtaz! The garden of the Taj!
I've always wanted to love under the same moon as Shah Jehan. How
thoughtful of you!'
'You must spend a few days with us in Agra,' I continued. 'And as
you say, it is the very place to shrine your happiness, if it comes
to pass there.'
'Well, I am glad to have extracted a word of kindness from you at
last,' said Dacres, as the stewards came to lay the table. 'But I
wish,' he added regretfully, 'you could have thought of a test.'
Chapter 1.V.
Four days later we were in Agra. A time there was when the name
would have been the key of dreams to me; now it stood for John's
headquarters. I was rejoiced to think I would look again upon the
Taj; and the prospect of living with it was a real enchantment; but
I pondered most the kind of house that would be provided for the
General Commanding the District, how many the dining-room would
seat, and whether it would have a roof of thatch or of corrugated
iron--I prayed against corrugated iron. I confess these my
preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the practical
considerations of life hold their own even against domes of marble,
world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul sings to
the rose. I smiled across the years at the raptures of my first
vision of the place at twenty-one, just Cecily's age. Would I now
sit under Arjamand's cypresses till two o'clock in the morning to
see the wonder of her tomb at a particular angle of the moon? Would
I climb one of her tall white ministering minarets to see anything
whatever? I very greatly feared that I would not. Alas for the
aging of sentiment, of interest! Keep your touch with life and your
seat in the saddle as long as you will, the world is no new toy at
forty. But Cecily was twenty-one, Cecily who sat stolidly finishing
her lunch while Dacres Tottenham talked about Akbar and his
philosophy. 'The sort of man,' he said, 'that Carlyle might have
smoked a pipe with.'
'But surely,' said Cecily reflectively, 'tobacco was not discovered
in England then. Akbar came to the throne in 1526.'
'Nor Carlyle either for that matter,' I hastened to observe.
'Nevertheless, I think Mr. Tottenham's proposition must stand.'
'Thanks, Mrs. Farnham,' said Dacres. 'But imagine Miss Farnham's
remembering Akbar's date! I'm sure you didn't!'
'Let us hope she doesn't know too much about him,' I cried gaily,
'or there will be nothing to tell!'
'Oh, really and truly very little!' said Cecily, 'but as soon as we
heard papa would be stationed here Aunt Emma made me read up about
those old Moguls and people. I think I remember the dynasty.
Baber, wasn't he the first? And then Humayon, and after him Akbar,
and then Jehangir, and then Shah Jehan. But I've forgotten every
date but Akbar's.'
She smiled her smile of brilliant health and even spirits as she
made the damaging admission, and she was so good to look at, sitting
there simple and wholesome and fresh, peeling her banana with her
well-shaped fingers, that we swallowed the dynasty as it were whole,
and smiled back upon her. John, I may say, was extremely pleased
with Cecily; he said she was a very satisfactory human
accomplishment. One would have thought, positively, the way he
plumed himself over his handsome daughter, that he alone was
responsible for her. But John, having received his family,
straightway set off with his Staff on a tour of inspection, and
thereby takes himself out of this history. I sometimes think that
if he had stayed--but there has never been the lightest
recrimination between us about it, and I am not going to hint one
now.
'Did you read,' asked Dacres, 'what he and the Court poet wrote over
the entrance gate to the big mosque at Fattehpur-Sikri? It's rather
nice. "The world is a looking-glass, wherein the image has come and
is gone--take as thine own nothing more than what thou lookest
upon."'
My daughter's thoughtful gaze was, of course, fixed upon the
speaker, and in his own glance I saw a sudden ray of consciousness;
but Cecily transferred her eyes to the opposite wall, deeply
considering, and while Dacres and I smiled across the table, I saw
that she had perceived no reason for blushing. It was a singularly
narrow escape.
'No,' she said, 'I didn't; what a curious proverb for an emperor to
make! He couldn't possibly have been able to see all his
possessions at once.'
'If you have finished,' Dacres addressed her, 'do let me show you
what your plain and immediate duty is to the garden. The garden
waits for you--all the roses expectant--'
'Why, there isn't one!' cried Cecily, pinning on her hat. It was
pleasing, and just a trifle pathetic, the way he hurried her out of
the scope of any little dart; he would not have her even within
range of amused observation. Would he continue, I wondered vaguely,
as, with my elbows on the table, I tore into strips the lemon-leaf
that floated in my finger-bowl--would he continue, through life, to
shelter her from his other clever friends as now he attempted to
shelter her from her mother? In that case he would have to domicile
her, poor dear, behind the curtain, like the native ladies--a good
price to pay for a protection of which, bless her heart! she would
be all unaware. I had quite stopped bemoaning the affair; perhaps
the comments of my husband, who treated it with broad approval and
satisfaction, did something to soothe my sensibilities. At all
events, I had gradually come to occupy a high fatalistic ground
towards the pair. If it was written upon their foreheads that they
should marry, the inscription was none of mine; and, of course, it
was true, as John had indignantly stated, that Dacres might do very
much worse. One's interest in Dacres Tottenham's problematical
future had in no way diminished; but the young man was so positive,
so full of intention, so disinclined to discussion--he had not
reopened the subject since that morning in the saloon of the
Caledonia--that one's feeling about it rather took the attenuated
form of a shrug. I am afraid, too, that the pleasurable excitement
of such an impending event had a little supervened; even at forty
there is no disallowing the natural interests of one's sex. As I
sat there pulling my lemon-leaf to pieces, I should not have been
surprised or in the least put about if the two had returned radiant
from the lawn to demand my blessing. As to the test of quality that
I had obligingly invented for Dacres on the spur of the moment
without his knowledge or connivance, it had some time ago faded into
what he apprehended it to be--a mere idyllic opportunity, a charming
background, a frame for his project, of prettier sentiment than the
funnels and the hand-rails of a ship.
Mr. Tottenham had ten days to spend with us. He knew the place
well; it belonged to the province to whose service he was dedicated,
and he claimed with impressive authority the privilege of showing it
to Cecily by degrees--the Hall of Audience today, the Jessamine
Tower tomorrow, the tomb of Akbar another, and the Deserted City yet
another day. We arranged the expeditions in conference, Dacres
insisting only upon the order of them, which I saw was to be
cumulative, with the Taj at the very end, on the night precisely of
the full of the moon, with a better chance of roses. I had no
special views, but Cecily contributed some; that we should do the
Hall of Audience in the morning, so as not to interfere with the
club tennis in the afternoon, that we should bicycle to Akbar's tomb
and take a cold luncheon--if we were sure there would be no snakes--
to the Deserted City, to all of which Dacres gave loyal assent. I
endorsed everything; I was the encouraging chorus, only stipulating
that my number should be swelled from day to day by the addition of
such persons as I should approve. Cecily, for instance, wanted to
invite the Bakewells because we had come out in the same ship with
them; but I could not endure the Bakewells, and it seemed to me that
our having made the voyage with them was the best possible reason
for declining to lay eyes on them for the rest of our natural lives.
'Mamma has such strong prejudices,' Cecily remarked, as she
reluctantly gave up the idea; and I waited to see whether the
graceless Tottenham would unmurmuringly take down the Bakewells.
How strong must be the sentiment that turns a man into a boa-
constrictor without a pang of transmigration! But no, this time he
was faithful to the principles of his pre-Cecilian existence. 'They
are rather Boojums,' he declared. 'You would think so, too, if you
knew them better. It is that kind of excellent person that makes
the real burden of India.' I could have patted him on the back.
Thanks to the rest of the chorus, which proved abundantly available,
I was no immediate witness to Cecily's introduction to the glorious
fragments which sustain in Agra the memory of the moguls. I may as
well say that I arranged with care that if anybody must be standing
by when Dacres disclosed them, it should not be I. If Cecily had
squinted, I should have been sorry, but I would have found in it no
personal humiliation. There were other imperfections of vision,
however, for which I felt responsible and ashamed; and with Dacres,
though the situation, Heaven knows, was none of my seeking, I had a
little the feeling of a dealer who offers a defective bibelot to a
connoisseur. My charming daughter--I was fifty times congratulated
upon her appearance and her manners--had many excellent qualities
and capacities which she never inherited from me; but she could see
no more than the bulk, no further than the perspective; she could
register exactly as much as a camera.
This was a curious thing, perhaps, to displease my maternal vanity,
but it did; I had really rather she squinted; and when there was
anything to look at I kept out of the way. I can not tell
precisely, therefore, what the incidents were that contributed to
make Mr. Tottenham, on our return from these expeditions, so
thoughtful, with a thoughtfulness which increased, towards the end
of them, to a positive gravity. This would disappear during dinner
under the influence of food and drink. He would talk nightly with
new enthusiasm and fresh hope--or did I imagine it?--of the
loveliness he had arranged to reveal on the following day. If again
my imagination did not lead me astray, I fancied this occurred later
and later in the course of the meal as the week went on; as if his
state required more stimulus as time progressed. One evening, when
I expected it to flag altogether, I had a whim to order champagne
and observe the effect; but I am glad to say that I reproved myself,
and refrained.
Cecily, meanwhile, was conducting herself in a manner which left
nothing to be desired. If, as I sometimes thought, she took Dacres
very much for granted, she took him calmly for granted; she seemed a
prey to none of those fluttering uncertainties, those suspended
judgments and elaborate indifferences which translate themselves so
plainly in a young lady receiving addresses. She turned herself out
very freshly and very well; she was always ready for everything, and
I am sure that no glance of Dacres Tottenham's found aught but
direct and decorous response. His society on these occasions gave
her solid pleasure; so did the drive and the lunch; the
satisfactions were apparently upon the same plane. She was aware of
the plum, if I may be permitted a brusque but irresistible simile;
and with her mouth open, her eyes modestly closed, and her head in a
convenient position, she waited, placidly, until it should fall in.
The Farnham ladies would have been delighted with the result of
their labours in the sweet reason and eminent propriety of this
attitude. Thinking of my idiotic sufferings when John began to fix
himself upon my horizon, I pondered profoundly the power of nature
in differentiation.
One evening, the last, I think, but one, I had occasion to go to my
daughter's room, and found her writing in her commonplace-book. She
had a commonplace-book, as well as a Where Is It? an engagement-
book, an account-book, a diary, a Daily Sunshine, and others with
purposes too various to remember. 'Dearest mamma,' she said, as I
was departing, 'there is only one "p" in "opulence", isn't there?'
'Yes,' I replied, with my hand on the door-handle, and added
curiously, for it was an odd word in Cecily's mouth, 'Why?'
She hardly hesitated. 'Oh,' she said, 'I am just writing down one
or two things Mr. Tottenham said about Agra before I forget them.
They seemed so true.'
'He has a descriptive touch,' I remarked.
'I think he describes beautifully. Would you like to hear what he
said today?'
'I would,' I replied, sincerely.
'"Agra,"' read this astonishing young lady, '"is India's one pure
idyll. Elsewhere she offers other things, foolish opulence, tawdry
pageant, treachery of eunuchs and jealousies of harems, thefts of
kings' jewels and barbaric retributions; but they are all actual,
visualized, or part of a past that shows to the backward glance
hardly more relief and vitality than a Persian painting"--I should
like to see a Persian painting--"but here the immortal tombs and
pleasure-houses rise out of colour delicate and subtle; the vision
holds across three hundred years; the print of the court is still in
the dust of the city."'
'Did you really let him go on like that?' I exclaimed. 'It has the
license of a lecture!'
'I encouraged him to. Of course he didn't say it straight off. He
said it naturally; he stopped now and then to cough. I didn't
understand it all; but I think I have remembered every word.'
'You have a remarkable memory. I'm glad he stopped to cough. Is
there any more?'
'One little bit. "Here the moguls wrought their passions into
marble, and held them up with great refrains from their religion,
and set them about with gardens; and here they stand in the twilight
of the glory of those kings and the noonday splendour of their
own."'
'How clever of you!' I exclaimed. 'How wonderfully clever of you to
remember!'
'I had to ask him to repeat one or two sentences. He didn't like
that. But this is nothing. I used to learn pages letter-perfect
for Aunt Emma. She was very particular. I think it is worth
preserving, don't you?'
'Dear Cecily,' I responded, 'you have a frugal mind.'
There was nothing else to respond. I could not tell her just how
practical I thought her, or how pathetic her little book.
Chapter 1.VI.
We drove together, after dinner, to the Taj. The moonlight lay in
an empty splendour over the broad sandy road, with the acacias
pricking up on each side of it and the gardens of the station
bungalows stretching back into clusters of crisp shadows. It was an
exquisite February night, very still. Nothing seemed abroad but two
or three pariah dogs, upon vague and errant business, and the
Executive Engineer going swiftly home from the club on his bicycle.
Even the little shops of the bazaar were dark and empty; only here
and there a light showed barred behind the carved balconies of the
upper rooms, and there was hardly any tom-tomming. The last long
slope of the road showed us the river curving to the left, through a
silent white waste that stretched indefinitely into the moonlight on
one side, and was crowned by Akbar's fort on the other. His long
high line of turrets and battlements still guarded a hint of their
evening rose, and dim and exquisite above them hovered the three
dome-bubbles of the Pearl Mosque. It was a night of perfect
illusion, and the illusion was mysterious, delicate, and faint. I
sat silent as we rolled along, twenty years nearer to the original
joy of things when John and I drove through the same old dream.
Dacres, too, seemed preoccupied; only Cecily was, as they say,
herself. Cecily was really more than herself, she exhibited an
unusual flow of spirits. She talked continually, she pointed out
this and that, she asked who lived here and who lived there. At
regular intervals of about four minutes she demanded if it wasn't
simply too lovely. She sat straight up with her vigorous profile
and her smart hat; and the silhouette of her personality sharply
refused to mingle with the dust of any dynasty. She was a contrast,
a protest; positively she was an indignity. 'Do lean back, dear
child,' I exclaimed at last. 'You interfere with the landscape.'
She leaned back, but she went on interfering with it in terms of
sincerest enthusiasm.
When we stopped at the great archway of entrance I begged to be left
in the carriage. What else could one do, when the golden moment had
come, but sit in the carriage and measure it? They climbed the
broad stone steps together and passed under the lofty gravures into
the garden, and I waited. I waited and remembered. I am not, as
perhaps by this time is evident, a person of overwhelming sentiment,
but I think the smile upon my lips was gentle. So plainly I could
see, beyond the massive archway and across a score of years, all
that they saw at that moment--Arjamand's garden, and the long
straight tank of marble cleaving it full of sleeping water and the
shadows of the marshaling cypresses; her wide dark garden of roses
and of pomegranates, and at the end the Vision, marvellous, aerial,
the soul of something--is it beauty? is it sorrow?--that great white
pride of love in mourning such as only here in all the round of our
little world lifts itself to the stars, the unpaintable,
indescribable Taj Mahal. A gentle breath stole out with a scent of
jessamine and such a memory! I closed my eyes and felt the warm
luxury of a tear.
Thinking of the two in the garden, my mood was very kind, very
conniving. How foolish after all were my cherry-stone theories of
taste and temperament before that uncalculating thing which sways a
world and builds a Taj Mahal! Was it probable that Arjamand and her
Emperor had loved fastidiously, and yet how they had loved! I
wandered away into consideration of the blind forces which move the
world, in which comely young persons like my daughter Cecily had
such a place; I speculated vaguely upon the value of the subtler
gifts of sympathy and insight which seemed indeed, at that
enveloping moment, to be mere flowers strewn upon the tide of deeper
emotions. The garden sent me a fragrance of roses; the moon sailed
higher and picked out the little kiosks set along the wall. It was
a charming, charming thing to wait, there at the portal of the
silvered, scented garden, for an idyll to come forth.
When they reappeared, Dacres and my daughter, they came with casual
steps and cheerful voices. They might have been a couple of
tourists. The moonlight fell full upon them on the platform under
the arch. It showed Dacres measuring with his stick the length of
the Sanskrit letters which declared the stately texts, and Cecily's
expression of polite, perfunctory interest. They looked up at the
height above them; they looked back at the vision behind. Then they
sauntered towards the carriage, he offering a formal hand to help
her down the uncertain steps, she gracefully accepting it.
'You--you have not been long,' said I. 'I hope you didn't hurry on
my account.'
'Miss Farnham found the marble a little cold under foot,' replied
Dacres, putting Miss Farnham in.
'You see,' explained Cecily, 'I stupidly forgot to change into
thicker soles. I have only my slippers. But, mamma, how lovely it
is! Do let us come again in the daytime. I am dying to make a
sketch of it.'
Mr. Tottenham was to leave us on the following day. In the morning,
after 'little breakfast,' as we say in India, he sought me in the
room I had set aside to be particularly my own.
Again I was writing to John, but this time I waited for precisely
his interruption. I had got no further than 'My dearest husband,'
and my pen-handle was a fringe.
'Another fine day,' I said, as if the old, old Indian joke could
give him ease, poor man!
'Yes,' said he, 'we are having lovely weather.'
He had forgotten that it was a joke. Then he lapsed into silence
while I renewed my attentions to my pen.
'I say,' he said at last, with so strained a look about his mouth
that it was almost a contortion, 'I haven't done it, you know.'
'No,' I responded, cheerfully, 'and you're not going to. Is that
it? Well!'
'Frankly--' said he.
'Dear me, yes! Anything else between you and me would be
grotesque,' I interrupted, 'after all these years.'
'I don't think it would be a success,' he said, looking at me
resolutely with his clear blue eyes, in which still lay, alas! the
possibility of many delusions.
'No,' I said, 'I never did, you know. But the prospect had begun to
impose upon me.'
'To say how right you were would seem, under the circumstances, the
most hateful form of flattery.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I think I can dispense with your verbal
endorsement.' I felt a little bitter. It was, of course, better
that the connoisseur should have discovered the flaw before
concluding the transaction; but although I had pointed it out myself
I was not entirely pleased to have the article returned.
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