The Pool in the Desert
S >>
Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16
'I am infinitely ashamed that it should have taken me all these
days--day after day and each contributory--to discover what you saw
so easily and so completely.'
'You forget that I am her mother,' I could not resist the temptation
of saying.
'Oh, for God's sake don't jeer! Please be absolutely direct, and
tell me if you have reason to believe that to the extent of a
thought, of a breath--to any extent at all--she cares.'
He was, I could see, very deeply moved; he had not arrived at this
point without trouble and disorder not lightly to be put on or off.
Yet I did not hurry to his relief, I was still possessed by a vague
feeling of offense. I reflected that any mother would be, and I
quite plumed myself upon my annoyance. It was so satisfactory, when
one had a daughter, to know the sensations of even any mother. Nor
was it soothing to remember that the young man's whole attitude
towards Cecily had been based upon criticism of me, even though he
sat before me whipped with his own lash. His temerity had been
stupid and obstinate; I could not regret his punishment.
I kept him waiting long enough to think all this, and then I
replied, 'I have not the least means of knowing.'
I can not say what he expected, but he squared his shoulders as if
he had received a blow and might receive another. Then he looked at
me with a flash of the old indignation. 'You are not near enough to
her for that!' he exclaimed.
'I am not near enough to her for that.'
Silence fell between us. A crow perched upon an opened venetian and
cawed lustily. For years afterward I never heard a crow caw without
a sense of vain, distressing experiment. Dacres got up and began to
walk about the room. I very soon put a stop to that. 'I can't talk
to a pendulum,' I said, but I could not persuade him to sit down
again.
'Candidly,' he said at length, 'do you think she would have me?'
'I regret to say that I think she would. But you would not dream of
asking her.'
'Why not? She is a dear girl,' he responded inconsequently.
'You could not possibly stand it.'
Then Mr. Tottenham delivered himself of this remarkable phrase: 'I
could stand it,' he said, 'as well as you can.'
There was far from being any joy in the irony with which I regarded
him and under which I saw him gather up his resolution to go;
nevertheless I did nothing to make it easy for him. I refrained
from imparting my private conviction that Cecily would accept the
first presentable substitute that appeared, although it was strong.
I made no reference to my daughter's large fund of philosophy and
small balance of sentiment. I did not even--though this was
reprehensible--confess the test, the test of quality in these ten
days with the marble archives of the Moguls, which I had almost
wantonly suggested, which he had so unconsciously accepted, so
disastrously applied. I gave him quite fifteen minutes of his bad
quarter of an hour, and when it was over I wrote truthfully but
furiously to John. . ..
That was ten years ago. We have since attained the shades of
retirement, and our daughter is still with us when she is not with
Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice--grandmamma has passed away. Mr.
Tottenham's dumb departure that day in February--it was the year
John got his C.B.--was followed, I am thankful to say, by none of
the symptoms of unrequited affection on Cecily's part. Not for ten
minutes, so far as I was aware, was she the maid forlorn. I think
her self-respect was of too robust a character, thanks to the Misses
Farnham. Still less, of course, had she any reproaches to serve
upon her mother, although for a long time I thought I detected--or
was it my guilty conscience?--a spark of shrewdness in the glance
she bent upon me when the talk was of Mr. Tottenham and the
probabilities of his return to Agra. So well did she sustain her
experience, or so little did she feel it, that I believe the
impression went abroad that Dacres had been sent disconsolate away.
One astonishing conversation I had with her some six months later,
which turned upon the point of a particularly desirable offer. She
told me something then, without any sort of embarrassment, but quite
lucidly and directly, that edified me much to hear. She said that
while she was quite sure that Mr. Tottenham thought of her only as a
friend--she had never had the least reason for any other impression-
-he had done her a service for which she could not thank him enough-
-in showing her what a husband might be. He had given her a
standard; it might be high, but it was unalterable. She didn't know
whether she could describe it, but Mr. Tottenham was different from
the kind of man you seemed to meet in India. He had his own ways of
looking at things, and he talked so well. He had given her an
ideal, and she intended to profit by it. To know that men like Mr.
Tottenham existed, and to marry any other kind would be an act of
folly which she did not intend to commit. No, Major the Hon. Hugh
Taverel did not come near it--very far short, indeed! He had talked
to her during the whole of dinner the night before about jackal-
hunting with a bobbery pack--not at all an elevated mind. Yes, he
might be a very good fellow, but as a companion for life she was
sure he would not be at all suitable. She would wait.
And she has waited. I never thought she would, but she has. From
time to time men have wished to take her from us, but the standard
has been inexorable, and none of them have reached it. When Dacres
married the charming American whom he caught like a butterfly upon
her Eastern tour, Cecily sent them as a wedding present an alabaster
model of the Taj, and I let her do it--the gift was so exquisitely
appropriate. I suppose he never looks at it without being reminded
that he didn't marry Miss Farnham, and I hope that he remembers that
he owes it to Miss Farnham's mother. So much I think I might claim;
it is really very little considering what it stands for. Cecily is
permanently with us--I believe she considers herself an intimate. I
am very reasonable about lending her to her aunts, but she takes no
sort of advantage of my liberality; she says she knows her duty is
at home. She is growing into a firm and solid English maiden lady,
with a good colour and great decision of character. That she always
had.
I point out to John, when she takes our crumpets away from us, that
she gets it from him. I could never take away anybody's crumpets,
merely because they were indigestible, least of all my own parents'.
She has acquired a distinct affection for us, by some means best
known to herself; but I should have no objection to that if she
would not rearrange my bonnet-strings. That is a fond liberty to
which I take exception; but it is one thing to take exception and
another to express it.
Our daughter is with us, permanently with us. She declares that she
intends to be the prop of our declining years; she makes the
statement often, and always as if it were humorous. Nevertheless I
sometimes notice a spirit of inquiry, a note of investigation in her
encounters with the opposite sex that suggests an expectation not
yet extinct that another and perhaps a more appreciative Dacres
Tottenham may flash across her field of vision--alas, how
improbable! Myself I can not imagine why she should wish it; I have
grown in my old age into a perfect horror of cultivated young men;
but if such a person should by a miracle at any time appear, I think
it is extremely improbable that I will interfere on his behalf.
2. An Impossible Ideal.
Chapter 2.I.
To understand how we prized him, Dora Harris and I, it is necessary
to know Simla. I suppose people think of that place, if they ever
do think of it, as an agreeable retreat in the wilds of the
Himalayas where deodars and scandals grow, and where the Viceroy if
he likes may take off his decorations and go about in flannels. I
know how useless it would be to try to give a more faithful
impression, and I will hold back from the attempt as far as I can.
Besides, my little story is itself an explanation of Simla.
Ingersoll Armour might have appeared almost anywhere else without
making social history. He came and bloomed among us in the
wilderness, and such and such things happened. It sounds too rude a
generalization to say that Simla is a wilderness; I hasten to add
that it is a waste as highly cultivated as you like, producing many
things more admirable than Ingersoll Armour. Still he bloomed there
conspicuously alone. Perhaps there would have been nothing to tell
if we had not tried to gather him. That was wrong; Nature in Simla
expects you to be content with cocked hats.
There are artists almost everywhere and people who paint even in the
Himalayas, though Miss Harris and I in our superior way went yearly
to the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition chiefly to amuse ourselves by
scoffing. It was easy to say clever things about the poor little
exhibits; and one was grateful to the show on this account, for
nothing is more depressing east of Suez than the absence of
provocation to say clever things. There one afternoon in May as we
marched about enjoying ourselves, we came upon Ingersoll Armour, not
in the flesh, but in half a dozen studies hanging in the least
conspicuous corner and quite the worst light in the room.
'Eh, what?' said I, and Dora exclaimed:
'I SAY!'
'Sent out from home,' I said, ever the oracle.
'Not at all,' replied Dora. 'Look, they are Indian subjects. SIMLA
subjects,' she went on, with excitement.
I turned up the catalogue. 'Ninety-seven, "Kasumti Bazaar"; ninety-
eight, "Clouds on the Chor"; ninety-nine, "The House of a Friend"--
Lord, what apricot blossoms! Yes, they're all Simla.'
'For goodness' sake,' said Dora, 'who painted them? You've got the
catalogue!'
'"I. Armour,"' I read.
'"I. Armour,"' she repeated, and we looked at each other, saying in
plain silence that to the small world of Simla I. Armour was
unknown.
'Not on Government House list, I venture to believe,' said Dora.
That in itself may show to what depths we sink. Yet it was a
trenchant and a reasonable speculation.
'It may be a newcomer,' I suggested, but she shook her head. 'All
newcomers call upon us,' she said. 'There in the middle of the Mall
we escape none of them. He isn't a calling person.'
'Why do you say "he"? You are very confident with your pronouns.
There's a delicacy of feeling--'
'Which exactly does not suggest a women. We are undermined by
delicacy of feeling; we're not strong enough to express it with
brushes. A man can make it a quality, a decorative characteristic,
and so we see it. With a woman it's everything--all over the place-
-and of no effect. Oh, I assure you, I. Armour is a man.'
'Who shall stand against you! Let him be a man. He has taste.'
'Taste!' exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of
her mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she
would store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my
pretensions, a person of the truest feeling. 'He sees things.'
'There's an intensity,' I ventured.
'That's better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour.
Look at that.' She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six
inches by four, in which the light seemed to come and go as it does
in a sapphire.
We stood and gazed. It was a tremendous thing; only half a dozen
studies with feeling and knowledge in them, but there in that remote
fastness thrice barred against the arts a tremendous thing, a
banquet for our famished eyes. What they would have said to us in
London is a different matter, and how good they really were I do not
find the courage to pronounce, but they had merit enough to prick
our sense of beauty delightfully where we found them--oh, they were
good!
'Heaven send it isn't a Tommy,' said Dora, with a falling
countenance. 'There is something absolutely inaccessible about a
Tommy.'
'How could it be?' I asked.
'Oh, there are some inspired ones. But it isn't--that's French
technique. It's an Englishman or an American who has worked in
Paris. What in the name of fortune is he doing here?'
'Oh,' I said, 'we have had them, you know. Val Prinsep came out at
the time of the Prince of Wales's visit.'
'Do you remember that?'
'It's a matter of history,' I said, evasively, 'and Edwin Weeks
travelled through India not so many years ago. I saw his studio in
Paris afterward. Between his own canvases and Ahmedabad balconies
and Delhi embroideries and Burmese Buddhas and other things he
seemed to have carried off the whole place.'
'But they don't come up here ever. They come in the cold weather,
and as they can get plenty of snow and ice at home, they stay down
in the plains with the palm-trees.'
'Precisely; they do,' I said.
'And besides,' Dora went on, with increasing excitement, 'this isn't
a master. You see, he doesn't send a single picture--only these
tiny things. And there's a certain tentativeness'--Miss Harris, her
parasol handle pressed against her lips, looked at me with an
eagerness that was a pleasure to look at in itself.
'A certain weakness, almost a lack of confidence, in the drawing,' I
said.
'What does that signify?'
'Why, immaturity, of course--not enough discipline.'
'He's a student. Not that it amounts to a defect, you know'--she
was as jealous already as if she possessed the things--'only a sign
to read by. I should be grateful for more signs. Why should a
student come to Simla?'
'To teach, perhaps,' I suggested. Naturally one sought only among
reasons of utility.
'It's the Kensington person who teaches. When they have worked in
the ateliers and learned as much as this they never do. They paint
fans and menu cards, and starve, but they don't teach.'
Sir William Lamb, Member of Council for the Department of Finance,
was borne by the stream to our sides. The simile will hardly stand
conscientious examination, for the stream was a thin one and did no
more than trickle past, while Sir William weighed fifteen stone, and
was so eminent that it could never inconvenience him at its deepest.
Dora detached her gaze from the pictures and turned her back upon
them; I saw the measure of precaution. It was unavailing, however.
'What have we here?' said Sir William. Dora removed her person from
his line of vision, and he saw what we had there.
'The work of a friend of yours?' Sir William was spoken of as a
'cautious' man. He had risen to his present distinction on
stepping-stones of mistakes he conspicuously had not made.
'No,' said Dora, 'we were wondering who the artist could be.'
Sir William looked at the studies, and had a happy thought. 'If you
ask me, I should say a child of ten,' he said. He was also known as
a man of humour.
'Miss Harris had just remarked a certain immaturity,' I ventured.
'Oh, well,' said Sir William, 'this isn't the Royal Academy, is it?
I always say it's very good of people to send their things here at
all. And some of them are not half bad--I should call this year's
average very high indeed.'
'Are you pleased with the picture that has taken your prize, Sir
William?' asked Dora.
'I have bought it.' Sir William's chest underwent before our eyes
an expansion of conscious virtue. Living is so expensive in Simla;
the purchase of a merely decorative object takes almost the
proportion of an act of religion, even by a Member of Council
drawing four hundred pounds a month.
'First-rate it is, first-rate. Have you seen it? "Our Camp in
Tirah." Natives cooking in the foreground, fellows standing about
smoking, and a whole pile of tinned stores dumped down in one
corner, exactly as they would be, don't you know! Oh, I think the
Committee made a very good choice indeed, a very good choice.'
Sir William moved on, and Dora was free to send me an expressive
glance. 'Isn't that just LIKE this place?' she demanded. 'Let me
see, the Viceroy's medal, the Society's silver medal, five prizes
from Members of Council. Highly Commended's as thick as
blackberries, and these perfectly fresh, original, admirable things
completely ignored. What an absurd, impossible corner of the earth
it is!'
'You look very cross, you two,' said Mrs. Sinclair, trailing past.
'Come and see the crazy china exhibit, all made of little bits, you
know. They say the photograph frames are simply lovely.'
Mrs. Sinclair's invitation was not sincere. Miss Harris was able to
answer it with a laugh and a wave. We remained beside the serious
fact of exhibits 97-103.
'Who are the judges this year?' I asked, not that I did not know
precisely who they were likely to be. There is a custom in these
matters, and I had been part of Simla for eleven years.
Dora took the catalogue from my hand and turned its pages over.
'Mr. Cathcart, of course; the Private Secretary to the Viceroy would
be on the Committee almost ex officio, wouldn't he? Impossible to
conceive a Private Secretary to the Viceroy whose opinion would not
be valuable upon any head. The member for Public Works--I suppose
he can build bridges, or could once, therefore he can draw, or could
once; besides, look at his precedence and his pay! General Haycock-
-isn't he head of the Ordnance Department? I can't think of any
other reason for putting him on. Oh yes--he's a K.C.B., and he is
inventing a way of taking coloured photographs. Mr. Tilley, the old
gentleman that teaches elementary drawing to the little girls in the
diocesan school, that's all right. And Mr. Jay, of course, because
Mr. Jay's water-colours are the mainstay of the exhibition, and he
must be given a chance of expressing his opinion of them.' She
handed me back the catalogue. 'I have never been really angry with
them before,' she said.
'Are you really angry now?' I asked.
'Furious,' Dora replied, and indeed her face expressed indignation.
Its lines were quite tense, and a spark shone oddly in the middle of
the eyes. One could not credit her with beauty, but as her lady
friends were fond of saying, there was something 'more' in her face.
I saw a good deal more at this moment, and it gave me pleasure, as
all her feelings did when they came out like that. I hasten to add
that she was not unpleasing; her features had a symmetry and a
mobility, and her eyes could take any transient charm they chose to
endow themselves with; though there were moments when she compared
very badly with the other young ladies of Simla with their high
spirits and their pretty complexions, very badly indeed. Those were
occasions when the gay monotony of the place pressed, I imagine, a
little heavily upon her, and the dullness she felt translated itself
in her expression. But she was by no means unpleasing.
'I must go and see Lady Pilkey's picture,' I said.
'What is the use?' said Dora. 'It's a landscape in oils--a view of
the Himalayas, near Narkanda. There are the snows in the
background, very thin and visionary through a gap in the trees, and
two hills, one hill on each side. Dark green trees, pine-trees,
with a dead one in the left foreground covered with a brilliant red
creeper. Right foreground occupied by a mountain path and a
solitary native figure with its back turned. Society's silver
medal'
'When did you see it?' I asked.
'I haven't seen it--this year. But I saw the one she sent last, and
the one the year before that. You can trust my memory, really.'
'No,' I said, 'I can't. I'm dining there tonight. I must have an
original impression.'
'Congratulate her on the warm blaze of colour in the foreground.
It's perfectly safe,' urged Miss Harris, but I felt compelled to go
myself to see lady Pilkey's landscape. When I returned I found her
still sitting in grave absorption before the studies that had taken
us so by surprise. Her face was full of a soft new light; I had
never before seen the spring touched in her that could flood it like
that.
'You were very nearly right,' I announced; 'but the blaze of colour
was in the middle distance, and there was a torrent in the
foreground that quite put it out. And the picture does take the
Society's silver medal.'
'I can not decide,' she replied without looking at me, 'between the
Kattiawar fair thing and those hills in the rain. I can only have
one--father won't hear of more than one.'
'You can have two,' I said bluntly, so deeply interested I was in
the effect the things had on her. 'And I will have a third for
myself. I can't withstand those apricot-trees.'
I thought there was moisture in the eyes she turned upon me, an
unusual thing--a most unusual thing--in Dora Harris; but she winked
it back, if it was there, too quickly for any certainty.
'You are a dear,' she said. Once or twice before she had called me
a dear. It reminded me, as nothing else ever did, that I was a
contemporary of her father's. It is a feeble confession, but I have
known myself refrain from doing occasional agreeable things
apprehending that she might call me a dear.
Chapter 2.II.
Dora had been out three seasons when these things happened. I
remember sharing Edward Harris's anxiety in no slight degree as to
how the situation would resolve itself when she came, the situation
consisting so considerably in his eyes of the second Mrs. Harris,
who had complicated it further with three little red-cheeked boys,
all of the age to be led about the station on very small ponies, and
not under any circumstances to be allowed in the drawing-room when
one went to tea with their mother. No one, except perhaps poor Ted
himself, was more interested than I to observe how the situation did
resolve itself, in the decision of Mrs. Harris that the boys, the
two eldest at least, must positively begin the race for the
competitive examinations of the future without further delay, and
that she must as positively be domiciled in England 'to be near'
them, at all events until they had well made the start. I should
have been glad to see them ride their ponies up and down the Mall a
bit longer, poor little chaps; they were still very cherubic to be
invited to take a view of competitive examinations, however distant;
but Mrs. Harris's conviction was not to be overcome. So they went
home to begin, and she went with them, leaving Dora in possession of
her father, her father's house, his pay, his precedence, and all
that was his. Not that I would suggest any friction; I am convinced
that there was nothing like that--at least, nothing that met the
eye, or the ear. Dora adored the three little boys and was
extremely kind to their mother. She regarded this lady, I have
reason to believe, with the greatest indulgence, and behaved towards
her with the greatest consideration; I mean she had unerring
intuitions as to just when, on afternoons when Mrs. Harris was at
home from dusk till dinner, she should be dying for a walk. One
could imagine her looking with her grey eyes at dear mamma's horizon
and deciding that papa was certainly not enough to fill it by
himself, deciding at the same time that he was never likely to be
ousted there, only accompanied, in a less important and entirely
innocent degree. It may be surprising that any one should fly from
so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party lasted a
bare three months. I think Mrs. Harris had a perception--she was
the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct conclusions-
-that she was contributing to her step-daughter's amusement in a
manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated,
and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that
indefinitely, perhaps increasingly. Besides, it was in the natural
order of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs. Harris doubtless
foresaw a comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or
two, when the usual promising junior in 'the Department' should gild
his own prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring
its head for a father-in-law. Things always worked out if you gave
them time. How much time you ought to give them was doubtless by
now a pretty constant query with the little lady in her foggy exile;
for two years had already passed and Dora had found no connection
with any young man of the Department more permanent than those
prescribed at dinners and at dances. It is doubtful, indeed, if she
had had the opportunity. There was no absolute means of knowing;
but if offers were made they never transpired, and Mrs. Harris, far
away in England, nourished a certainty that they never were made.
Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the sex she declared that
Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was of a kind to
paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected. It
depended upon Mrs. Harris's humour whether this was Dora's
misfortune or her crime. She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the
time her cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had
become too robust to be paralyzed. On the contrary, the agreeable
stimulus it gave me was one of the things I counted most valuable in
my life out there. It hardly mattered, however, that I should
confess this; I was not a young man in Harris's department. I had a
department of my own; and Dora, though she frisked with me
gloriously and bullied continually, must ever have been aware of the
formidable fact that I joined the Service two years before Edward
Harris did. The daughter of three generations of bureaucrats was
not likely to forget that at one time her father had been junior to
me in the same office, though in the course of time and the march of
opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodded to each other on
the Mall with an equal sense of the divine right of secretaries. It
may seem irrelevant, but I feel compelled to explain here that I had
remained a bachelor while Harris had married twice, and that I had
kept up my cricket, while Harris had let his figure take all the
soft curves of middle age. Nevertheless the fact remained.
Sometimes I fancied it gave a certain piquancy to my relations with
his daughter, but I could never believe that the laugh was on my
side.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16