The Pool in the Desert
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Sara Jeanette Duncan >> The Pool in the Desert
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'Oh, well,' she said when I uttered it, 'you know I made the
experiment! I found out in South Kensington--you can learn that
much there--that I never would be able to paint well enough to make
it worth while. So I dropped it and took a more general line
towards life. But I find it very easy to imagine myself dedicated
to that particular one again.'
'You never told me,' I said. Why had I been shut out of that
experience?
'I tell you now,' Dora replied, absently, 'when I am able to offer
you the fact with illustrations.' She laughed and dropped a still
illuminated face in the palm of her hand. 'He has wonderfully
revived me,' she declared. 'I could throw, honestly, the whole of
Simla overboard for this.'
'Don't,' I urged, feeling, suddenly, an integral part of Simla.
'Oh, no--what end would be served? But I don't care who knows,' she
went on with a rush, 'that in all life this is what I like best, and
people like Mr. Armour are the people I value most. Heavens, how
few of them there are! And wherever they go how the air clears up
round them! It makes me quite ill to think of the life we lead
here--the poverty of it, the preposterous dullness of it. . ..'
'For goodness' sake,' I said, obscurely irritated, 'don't quote the
bishop. The life holds whatever we put into it.'
'For other people it does, and for us it holds what other people put
into it,' she retorted. 'I don't know whether you think it's
adequately filled with gold lace and truffles.'
'Why should I defend it?' I asked, not knowing indeed why. 'But it
has perhaps a dignity, you know. Ah, you are too fresh from your
baptism,' I continued, as she shook her head and went to the piano.
The quality, whatever it was, that the last fortnight had generated
in her, leaped from her fingers; she played with triumph, elation,
intention. The notes seemed an outlet for the sense of beauty and
for power to make it. I had never heard her play like that before.
It occurred to me to ask when she had done, how far, after a
fortnight, she could throw light on Armour's aims and history, where
he had come from, and the great query with which we first received
him, what he could be doing in Simla. I gathered that she had
learned practically nothing, and had hardly concerned herself to
learn anything. What difference did it make? she asked me. Why
should we inquire? Why tack a theory of origin to a phenomenon of
joy? Let us say the wind brought him, and build him a temple. She
was very whimsical up to the furthest stretch of what could possibly
be considered tea-time. When I went away I saw her go again and sit
down at the piano. In the veranda I remembered something, stopped,
and went back. I had to go back. 'You did not tell me,' I said,
'when he was coming again.'
'Oh, tomorrow--tomorrow, of course,' Dora paused to reply.
I resented, as I made my way to the Club, the weight of official
duties that made it so impossible for me to keep at all closely in
touch with this young man.
Chapter 2.V.
The art of the photographer usually arouses in me all that is
splenetic, and I had not submitted myself to him for years before
Dora made such a preposterous point of it--years in which, as I
sadly explained to her, I might have submitted to the ordeal with
much more 'pleasing' results. She had often insisted before, but I
could never see that she made out a particularly good case for the
operation until one afternoon when she showed me the bold
counterfeit presentment of an Assistant Adjutant-General or some
such person, much flattered as to features but singularly faithful
in its reproduction of the straps and buttons attached. To my post
also there belongs a uniform and a cocked hat sufficiently dramatic,
but persons who serve the State primarily with the intelligence are
supposed to have a mind above buttons; and when I decided that my
photograph should compete with the Assistant Adjutant-General's, I
gave him every sartorial advantage. I gathered that the offer,
cabinet size, of this gentleman had been a spontaneous one; that
certainly could not be said of mine. Most unwillingly I turned one
morning into Kauffer's; and I can not now imagine why I did it, for
emulation of the Assistant Adjutant-General was really not motive
enough, unless it was with an instinct prepared to stumble upon
matter germane in an absurd degree to this little history.
I had the honour to be subjected to the searching analysis of Mr.
Kauffer himself. It was he who placed the chair and arranged the
screw, he who fixed the angle of my chin and gently disposed my
fingers on my knee. He gave me, I remember, a recent portrait of
the Viceroy to fix my eye upon, doubtless with the purpose of
inspiring my countenance with the devotion which would sit suitably
upon one of His Excellency's slaves, and when it was all over he
conducted me into another apartment in order that I might see the
very latest viceregal group--a domestic one, including the Staff.
The walls of the room contained what is usually there, the enlarged
photograph, the coloured photograph, the amateur theatrical group,
the group of His Excellency's Executive Council, the native
dignitary with a diamond-tipped aigrette in the front of his turban.
The copy in oils of some old Italian landscape, very black and
yellow, also held its invariable place, and above it, very near the
ceiling, a line of canvases which, had I not been led past them to
inspect our ruler and his family, who sat transfixed on an easel in
a resplendent frame, would probably have escaped my attention. I
did proper homage to the easel, and then turned to those pictures.
It was plain enough who had painted them. Armour's broad brush
stood out all over them. They were mostly Indian sporting subjects,
the incident a trifle elliptical, the drawing unequal, but the verve
and feeling unmistakeable, and colour to send a quiver of glorious
acquiescence through you like a pang. What astonished me was the
number of them; there must have been at least a dozen, all the same
size and shape, all hanging in a line of dazzling repetition. Here
then was the explanation of Armour's seeming curious lack of output,
and plain denial of the supposition that he spent the whole of his
time in doing the little wooden 'pochade' things whose sweetness and
delicacy had so feasted our eyes elsewhere. It was part, no doubt,
of his absolutely uncommercial nature--we had experienced together
passages of the keenest embarrassment over my purchase of some of
his studies--that he had not mentioned these more serious things
exposed at Kauffer's; one had the feeling of coming unexpectedly on
treasure left upon the wayside and forgotten.
'Hullo!' I said, at a standstill, 'I see you've got some of Mr.
Armour's work there.'
Mr. Kauffer, with his hands behind him, made the sound which has its
counterpart in a shrug. 'Yass,' he said, 'I haf some of Mr.
Armour's work there. This one, that one, all those remaining
pictures--they are all the work of Mr. Armour.'
'I didn't know that any of his things were to be seen outside his
studio,' I observed.
'So? They are to be seen here. There is no objection.'
'Why should there be any objection?' I demanded, slightly nettled.
'People must see them before they buy them.'
'Buy them!' Kauffer's tone was distinctly exasperated. 'Who will
buy these pictures? Nobody. They are all, every one of them to
REfuse.'
'If you know Mr. Armour well enough,' I said, 'you should advise him
to exhibit some of his local studies and sketches here. They might
sell better.'
My words seemed unfortunately chosen. Mr. Kauffer turned an honest
angry red.
'Do I not know Mr. Armour well enough--und better!' he exclaimed.
'What this man wass doing when I in Paris find him oudt? Shtarving,
mein Gott! I see his work. I see he paint a very goot horse, very
goot animal subject. I bring him oudt on contract, five hundred
rupees the monnth to paint for me, for my firm. Sir, it is now nine
monnth. I am yoost four tousand five hundred rupees out of my
pocket by this gentleman!'
To enable me to cope with this astonishing tale I asked Mr. Kauffer
for a chair, which he obligingly gave me, and begged that he also
would be seated. The files at my office were my business, and this
was not, but no matter of Imperial concern seemed at the moment half
so urgently to require probing. 'Surely,' I said, 'that is an
unusual piece of enterprise for a photographic firm to employ an
artist to paint on a salary. I don't know even a regular dealer who
does it.'
Mr. Kauffer at once and frankly explained. It was unusual and
entirely out of the regular line of business. It was, in fact, one
of the exceptional forms of enterprise inspired in this country by
the native prince. We who had to treat with the native prince
solely on lofty political lines were hardly likely to remember how
largely he bulked in the humbler relations of trade; but there was
more than one Calcutta establishment, Mr. Kauffer declared, that
would be obliged to put up its shutters without this inconstant and
difficult, but liberal customer. I waited with impatience. I could
not for the life of me see Armour's connection with the native
prince, who is seldom a patron of the arts for their own sakes.
'Surely,' I said, 'you could not depend on the Indian nobility to
buy landscapes. They never do. I know of only one distinguished
exception, and he lives a thousand miles from here, in Bengal.'
'No, not landscape,' returned Mr. Kauffer; 'but that Indian nobleman
will buy his portrait. We send our own man--photographic artist--to
his State, and he photograph the Chief and his arab, the Chief and
his Prime Minister, the Chief in his durbar, palace, gardens,
stables--everything. Presently the Chief goes on a big shoot. He
says he will not have a plain photograph--besides, it is difficult.
He will have a painting, and he will pay.'
'Ah,' I said, 'I begin to see.'
'You see? Then I send this Armour. Look!' Mr. Kauffer continued
with rising excitement, baited apparently by the unfortunate canvas
to which he pointed, 'when Armour go to make that I say you go paint
ze Maharajah of Gridigurh spearing ze wild pig. You see what he
make?'
'Well,' I said, 'it is a wonderfully spirited, dashing thing, and
the treatment of all that cane-brake and jungle grass is superb.'
'Ze treatment--pardon me, sir, I overboil--do you know which is ze
Maharajah?'
'I can't say I do.'
'Neider does he. Ze Maharajah refuse zat picture; he is a good
fellow, too. He says it is a portrait of ze pig.'
'But it is so good,' I protested, 'of the pig.'
'But that does not interest the Maharajah, you onderstand, no. You
see this one? Nawab of Kandore on his State elephant.'
No doubt about it,' I said. 'I know the Nawab well, the young
scoundrel. How dignified he looks!'
There was a note of real sorrow in Kauffer's voice. 'Dignified?
Oh, yes; dignified, but, you observe, also black. The Nawab will
not be painted black. At once it is on my hands.'
'But he is black,' I remonstrated. 'He's the darkest native I've
ever seen among the nobility.'
'No matter for that. He will not be black. When I photograph that
Nawab--any nawab--I do not him black make. But ziss ass of Armour--
ach!'
It was a fascinating subject, and I could have pursued it all along
the line of poor Armour's rejected canvases, but the need to get
away from Kauffer with his equal claim upon my sympathy was too
great. To have cracked my solemn mask by a single smile would have
been to break down irrepressibly, and never since I set foot in
India had I felt a parallel desire to laugh and to weep. There was
a pang in it which I recognize as impossible to convey, arising from
the point of contact, almost unimaginable yet so clear before me, of
the uncompromising ideals of the atelier and the naive demands of
the Oriental, with an unhappy photographer caught between and
wriggling. The situation was really monstrous, the fatuous
rejection of all that fine scheming and exquisite manipulation, and
it did not grow less so as Mr. Kauffer continued to unfold it.
Armour had not, apparently, proceeded to the scene of his labours
without instructions. In the pig-sticking delineation he had been
specially told that the Maharajah and the pig were to be in the
middle, with the rest nowhere and nothing between. Other
injunctions were as clear, and as clearly disregarded. Armour, like
the Maharajahs, had simply 'REfuse' to abandon his premeditated
conceptions of how the thing should be done. And here was the
result, for the laughter of the gods and anybody else that might
see. I asked Kauffer unguardedly if no sort of pressure could be
brought to bear upon these chaps to make them pay up. His face
beaming with hope and intelligence, he suggested that I should
approach the Foreign Office in his behalf; but this I could not
quite see my way to. The coercion of native rulers, I explained,
was a difficult and a dangerous art, and to insist, for example,
that one of them should recognize his own complexion might be to run
up a disproportionate little bill of our own. I did, however,
compound something with Kauffer; I hope it wasn't a felony. 'Look
here,' I said to Kauffer, 'this isn't official, you know, in any
way, but how would it do to write that scamp Kandore a formal letter
regretting that the portrait does not suit him, and asking his
permission to dispose of it to me? Of course it is yours to do as
you like with already, but that is no reason why you shouldn't ask.
I should like it, but the Porcha tiger beat will do as well.'
Kauffer nearly fell upon my neck.
'That Kandore will buy it to put in one bonfire first,' he assured
me, and I sincerely hoped for his sake that it would be the case.
'Of course it's understood,' I bethought me to say, 'that I get it,
if I do get it, at Mr. Armour's price. I'm not a Maharajah, you
know, and it isn't a portrait of me.'
'Of course!' said Kauffer, 'but I sink I sell you that Porcha; it is
ze best of ze two.'
Chapter 2.VI.
I ventured for a few days to keep the light which chance had shed
for me upon Armour's affairs to myself. The whole thing considered
in connection with his rare and delicate talent, seemed too
derogatory and disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him
some kind of injury in the mere statement. But there came a point
when I could no longer listen to Dora Harris's theories to account
for him, wild idealizations as most of them were of any man's
circumstances and intentions. 'Why don't you ask him point-blank?'
I said, and she replied, frowning slightly, 'Oh, I couldn't do that.
It would destroy something--I don't know what, but something
valuable--between us.' This struck me as an exaggeration,
considering how far, by that time, they must have progressed towards
intimacy, and my mouth was opened. She heard me without the
exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she was
sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished. The
touch of comedy I gave the whole thing--surely I was justified in
that!--fell flat, and I extracted from her muteness a sense of
rebuke; one would think I had been taking advantage of the poor
devil.
At last, having broken the lead of her pencil three times, she
turned a calm, considering eye upon me.
'You have known this for a fortnight?' she asked. 'That doesn't
seem somehow quite fair.'
'To whom?' I asked, and her answer startled me.
'To either of us,' she said.
How she advised herself to that effect is more than I can imagine,
but the print of her words is indelible, that is what she said.
'Oh, confound it!' I exclaimed. 'I couldn't help finding out, you
know.'
'But you could help keeping it to yourself in that--in that base
way,' she replied, and almost--the evening light was beginning to
glimmer uncertainly through the deodars--I could swear I saw the
flash of a tear on her eyelid.
'I beg your pardon,' she went on a moment later, 'but I do hate
having to pity him. It's intolerable--that.'
I picked up a dainty edition of Aucassin and Nicolette with the
intention of getting upon ground less emotional, and observed on the
flyleaf 'D.H. from I.A. In memory of the Hill of Stars.' I looked
appreciatively at the binding, and as soon as possible put it down.
'He was not bound to tell me,' Dora asserted presently, in reply to
my statement that the mare had somehow picked up a nail in the
stable, and was laid up.
'You have been very good to him,' I said. 'I think he was.'
'His reticence was due,' she continued, as if defying contradiction,
'to a simple dislike to bore one with his personal affairs.'
'Was it?' I assented. My tone acknowledged with all humility that
she was likely to know, and I did not deserve her doubtful glance.
'He could not certainly,' she went on, with firmer decision, 'have
been in the least ashamed of his connection with Kauffer.'
'He comes from a country where social distinctions are less sharp
than they are in this idiotic place,' I observed.
'Oh, if you think it is from any lack of recognition! His
sensitiveness is beyond reason. He has met two or three men in the
Military Department here--he was aware of the nicest shade of their
patronage. But he does not care. To him life is more than a
clerkship. He sees all round people like that. They are only
figures in the landscape.'
'Then,' I said, 'he is not at all concerned that nobody in this
Capua of ours knows him, or cares anything about him, or has bought
a scrap of his work, except our two selves.'
'That's a different matter. I have tried to rouse in him the
feeling that it would be as well to be appreciated, even in Simla,
and I think I've succeeded. He said, after those two men had gone
away on Sunday, that he thought a certain reputation in the place
where he lived would help anybody in his work.'
'On Sunday? Do you mean between twelve and two?'
'Yes, he came and made a formal call. There was no reason why he
shouldn't.'
'Now that I think of it,' I rejoined, 'he shot a card on me too, at
the Club. I was a little surprised. We didn't seem somehow to be
on those terms. One doesn't readily associate him with any
conventionality.'
'There's no reason why he shouldn't,' said Dora again, and with this
vague comment we spoke of something else, both of us, I think, a
little disquieted and dissatisfied that he had.
'I think,' Dora said as I went away, 'that you had better go up to
the studio and tell him what you have told me. Perhaps it doesn't
matter much, but I can't bear the thought of his not knowing.'
'Come to Kauffer's in the morning and see the pictures,' I urged;
but she turned away, 'Oh, not with you.'
I found my way almost at once to Amy Villa, not only because I had
been told to go there. I wanted, myself, certain satisfactions.
Armour was alone and smoking, but I had come prepared against the
contingency of one of his cigars. They were the cigars of the man
who doesn't know what he eats. With sociable promptness I lighted
one of my own. The little enclosed veranda testified to a wave of
fresh activity. The north light streamed in upon two or three fresh
canvases, the place seemed full of enthusiasm, and you could see its
source, at present quiescent under the influence of tobacco, in
Armour's face.
'You have taken a new line,' I said, pointing to a file of camels,
still half obscured by the dust of the day, coming along a mountain
road under a dim moon. They might have been walking through time
and through history. It was a queer, simple thing, with a world of
early Aryanism in it.
'Does that say anything? I'm glad. It was to me articulate, but I
didn't know. Oh, things have been going well with me lately. Those
two studies over there simply did themselves. That camp scene on
the left is almost a picture. I think I'll put a little more work
on it and give it a chance in Paris. I got in once, you know.
Champ de Mars. With some horses.'
'Did you, indeed?' I said. 'Capital.' I asked him if he didn't
atrociously miss the life of the Quarter, and he surprised me by
saying that he never had lived it. He had been en pension instead
with a dear old professor of chemistry and his family at Puteaux,
and used to go in and out. A smile came into his eyes at the
rememberance, and he told me one after the other idyllic little
stories of the old professor and madame. Madame and the omelet--
madame and the melon--M. Vibois and the maire; I sat charmed. So
long as we remained in France his humour was like this, delicate and
expansive, but an accidental allusion led us across the Channel when
he changed. He had no little stories of the time he spent in
England. Instead he let himself go in generalizations, aimed, for
they had a distinct animus, at English institutions and character,
particularly as these appear in English society. I could not
believe, from the little I had seen of him, that his experience of
English society of any degree had been intimate; what he said had
the flavour of Radical Sunday papers. The only original element was
the feeling behind, which was plainly part of him; speculation
instantly clamoured as to how far this was purely temperamental and
how far the result of painful contact. He himself, he said, though
later of the Western States, had been born under the British flag of
British parents--though his mother was an Irishwoman she came from
loyal Ulster--and he repeated the statement as if it in some way
justified his attitude towards his fellow countrymen and excused his
truculence in the ear of a servant of the empire which he had the
humour to abuse. I heard him, I confess, with impatience, it was
all so shabby and shallow, but I heard him out, and I was rewarded;
he came for an illustration in the end to Simla. 'Look,' he said,
'at what they call their "Government House list"; and look at
Strobo, Signor Strobo. Isn't Strobo a man of intelligence, isn't he
a man of benevolence? He gave ten thousand rupees last week to the
famine fund. Is Strobo on Government House list? Is he ever
invited to dine with the Viceroy? No, because Strobo keeps a hotel!
Look at Rosario--where does Rosario come in? Nowhere, because
Rosario is a clerk, and a subordinate. Yet Rosario is a man of wide
reading and a very accomplished fellow!'
It became more or less necessary to argue then, and the commonplaces
with which I opposed him called forth a wealth of detail bearing
most picturesquely upon his stay among us. I began to think he had
never hated English rigidity and English snobbery until he came to
Simla, and that he and Strobo and Rosario had mingled their
experiences in one bitter cup. I gathered this by inference only,
he was curiously watchful and reticent as to anything that had
happened to him personally; indeed, he was careful to aver
preferences for the society of 'sincere' people like Strobo and
Rosario, that seemed to declare him more than indifferent to circles
in which he would not meet them. In the end our argument left me
ridiculously irritated--it was simply distressing to see the
platform from which he obtained so wide and exquisite a view of the
world upheld by such flimsy pillars--and my nerves were not soothed
by his proposal to walk with me to the Club. I could hardly refuse
it, however, and he came along in excellent spirits, having effected
the demolition of British social ideals, root and branch. His
mongrel dog accompanied, keeping offensively near our heels. It was
not even an honest pi, but a dog of tawdry pretensions with a
banner-like tail dishonestly got from a spaniel. On one occasion I
very nearly kicked the dog.
Chapter 2.VII.
'The fact is,' I said to Dora as we rode down to the gymkhana, 'his
personality takes possession of one. I constantly go to that little
hut of his with intentions, benevolent or otherwise, which I never
carry out.'
'You mean,' she answered, 'that you completely forgot to reveal to
him your hateful knowledge about Kauffer.'
'On the contrary, I didn't forget it for a moment. But the
conversation took a turn that made it quite impossible to mention.'
'I can understand,' Miss Harris replied softly, 'how that might be.
And it doesn't in the least matter,' she went on triumphantly,
'because I've told him myself.'
My nerves must have been a trifle strung up at the time, for this
struck me as a matter for offense. 'You thought I would trample
upon him,' I exclaimed.
'No, no really. I disliked his not knowing it was known--rien de
plus,' she said lightly.
'What did he say?'
'Oh, not much. What should he say?'
'He might have expressed a decent regret on poor Kauffer's account,'
I growled. Dora did not reply, and a glance showed her frowning.
'I believe he apologized!' I cried, pushing, as it were, my
advantage.
'He explained.'
'Oh!'
'Of course he hasn't relished the position, and of course he didn't
realize it before he came. Shall we trot?'
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