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

Out in the veranda, away from the blare of the Viceroy's band, she
told me very delicately and with the most charming ellipses how
Armour had been filling her life in Agra, how it had all been, for
these two, a dream and a vision. There is a place below the bridge
there, where the cattle come down from the waste pastures across the
yellow sands to drink and stand in the low water of the Jumna, to
stand and switch their tails while their herdsmen on the bank coax
them back with 'Ari!' 'Ari!' 'Ari!' long and high, faint and
musical; and the minarets of Akbar's fort rise beyond against the
throbbing sky and the sun fills it all. This place I shall never
see more distinctly than I saw it that night on the veranda at
Government House, Calcutta, with the conviction, like a margin for
the picture, that its foreground had been very often occupied by the
woman I profoundly worshiped and Ingersoll Armour. She told me that
he had sent me a sketch of it, and I very much wished he hadn't.
One felt that the gift would carry a trifle of irony.

'He has told me,' she said once brusquely, 'how good you have been
to him.'

'Is he coming to Simla again?' I asked.

'Oh yes! And please take it from me that this time he will conquer
the place. He has undertaken to do it.'

'At your request?'

'At my persuasion--at my long entreaty. They must recognize him--
they must be taught. I have set my heart on it.'

'Does he himself very much care?' I asked remembering the night of
the thirty-first of October.

'Yes, he does care. He despises it, of course, but in a way he
cares. I've been trying to make him care more. A human being isn't
an orchid; he must draw something from the soil he grows in.'

'If he were stable,' I mused; 'if he had a fixed ambition somewhere
in the firmament. But his purpose is a will-o'-the-wisp.'

'I think he has an ambition,' said Miss Harris, into the dark.

'Ah! Then we must continue,' I said--'continue to push from
behind.'

Dora did not reply. She is a person of energy and determination,
and might have been expected to offer to cooperate gladly. But she
didn't.

'He is painting a large picture for next season's exhibition,' she
informed me. 'I was not allowed to see it or to know anything about
it, but he declares it will bring Simla down.'

'I hope not,' I said, piously.

'Oh, I hope so. I have told him,' Dora continued, slowly, 'that a
great deal depends on it.'

'Here is Mrs. Symons,' I was able to return, 'and I am afraid she is
looking for you.'

March came, and the city lay white under its own dust. The electric
fans began to purr in the Club, and Lent brought the flagging season
to a full stop. I had to go that year on tour through the famine
district with the Member, and we escaped, gasping, from the Plains
about the middle of April. Simla was crimson with rhododendron
blossoms, and seemed a spur of Arcady. There had been the usual
number of flittings from one house to another, and among them I
heard with satisfaction that Armour no longer occupied Amy Villa. I
would not for the world have blurred my recollections of that last
evening--I could not have gone there again.

'He is staying with Sir William Lamb,' said Dora, handing me my cup
of tea. 'And I am quite jealous. Sir William, only Sir William,
has been allowed to see the exhibition picture.'

'What does that portend?' I said, thoughtfully.

'I don't know. Sir William was here yesterday simply swelling with
his impression of it. He says it's the finest thing that has been
done in India. I told you he would conquer them.'

'You did,' and without thinking I added, 'I hope you won't be sorry
that you asked him to.' It must have been an inspiration.

Armour, those weeks before the exhibition, seemed invisible. Dora
reported him torn with the incapacity of the bazaar frame-maker to
follow a design, and otherwise excessively occupied, and there was
no lack of demands upon my own time. Besides, my ardour to be of
assistance to the young man found a slight damper in the fact that
he was staying with Sir William Lamb. What competence had I to be
of use to the guest of Sir William Lamb?

'I do not for a moment think he will be there,' said Dora, on the
day of the private view as we went along the Mall towards the Town
Hall together. 'He will not run with an open mouth to his success.
He will take it from us later.'

But he was there. We entered precisely at the dramatic moment of
his presentation by Sir William Lamb to the Viceroy. He stood
embarrassed and smiling in a little circle of compliments and
congratulation. Behind him and a little to the left hung his
picture, large and predominant, and in the corner of the frame was
stuck the red ticket that signified the Viceroy's gold medal. We
saw that, I think, before we saw anything else. Then with as little
haste as was decent, considering His Excellency's proximity, we
walked within range of the picture.

I am not particularly pleased, even now, to have the task of
describing the thing. Its subject was an old Mahomedan priest with
a green turban and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers. I
heard myself saying to Dora that it was very well painted indeed,
very conscientiously painted, and that is certainly what struck me.
The expression of the fire-eater's face was extremely
characteristic; his arm was flung out with a gesture that perfectly
matched. The group of listeners was carefully composed and most
'naturally'; that is the only word that would come to me.

I glanced almost timidly at Dora. She was regarding it with a deep
vertical line between her handsome brows.

'What--on earth--has he done with himself?' she demanded, but before
I could reply Armour was by our side.

'Well?' he said, looking at Dora.

'It--it's very nice,' she stammered, 'but I miss YOU.'

'She only means, you know,' I rushed in, 'that you've put in
everything that was never there before. Accuracy of detail, you
know, and so forth. 'Pon my word, there's some drawing in that!'

'No,' said Dora, calmly, 'what I complain of is that he has left out
everything that was there before. But he has won the gold medal,
and I congratulate him.'

'Well,' I said, uneasily, 'don't congratulate me. I didn't do it.
Positively I am not to blame.'

'His Excellency says that it reminds him of an incident in one of
Mrs. Steel's novels,' said Armour, just turning his head to
ascertain His Excellency's whereabouts.

'Dear me, so it does,' I exclaimed, eagerly, 'one couldn't name the
chapter--it's the general feeling.' I went on to discourse of the
general feeling. Words came generously, questions with point,
comments with intelligence. I swamped the situation and so carried
it off.

'The Viceroy has bought the thing,' Armour went on, looking at Dora,
'and has commissioned me to paint another. The only restriction he
makes is--'

'That it shall be of the same size?' asked Dora.

'That it must deal with some phase of native life.'

Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her
eyes fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was
steady, but perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck
into the stream of my volubility.

'I am delighted,' she said, pleasantly, to Armour. 'You have done
exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy's medal,
and all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine
tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn't it--for you--a
little difficult?'

He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it
from his lips; but the occasion was not one, of course, for crying
out.

'Oh no,' he said, putting on an excellent face. 'But it took a
hideous time.'

Chapter 2.X.

Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive
from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance
with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I
had arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most
honest impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of
departure, but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay,
and that in order to effect his final shipment to other shores I
should be compelled to lend him some more money. In the far future,
when he should be famous and I an obscure pauper on pension, my
generous imagination permitted me to see the loan repaid; but not
till then. These are perhaps stereotyped and conventional lines to
conceive him on, but I hardly think that anybody who has followed my
little account to this point will think them unjustifiable. I
looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out better than
you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that your
conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general
grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when
your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way
I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood
for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place
in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to
become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I
gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes
who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that
of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I
have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the
possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed
the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so
than a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of
the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art
in Calcutta. The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry
to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the
removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods,
and the substitution of something rather more up to date. It
remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough
to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done
to awake within him the creative idea. I remember the phrase, it
seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be
Ingersoll Armour.

I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an
hour my brain revolved with little else. The billet was an
excellent one, with very decent pay and charming quarters. It
carried a pension, it was the completest sort of provision. There
was a long vacation, with opportunities for original effort, and I
had heard Fry call the work interesting. Fry was the kind of man to
be interested in anything that gave him a living, but there was no
reason why a more captious spirit, in view of the great advantages,
should not accommodate itself to the routine that might present
itself. The post was in the gift of the Government of Bengal, but
that was no reason why the Government of Bengal should not be
grateful in the difficulty of making a choice for a hint from us.
The difficulty was really great. They would have to write home and
advertise in the 'Athenaeum'--for some reason Indian Governments
always advertise educational appointments in the 'Athenaeum'; it is
a habit which dates from the days of John Company--and that would
mean delay. And then the result might be a disappointment. Might
Armour not also be a disappointment? That I really could not say.
A new man is always a speculation, and departments, like
individuals, have got to take their luck.

The Viceroy was so delighted--everybody was so delighted--with the
medal picture that the merest breath blown among them would secure
Armour's nomination. Should I blow that breath? These happy
thoughts must always occur to somebody. This one had occurred to
me. Ten to one it would occur to nobody else, and last of all to
Armour himself. The advertisement might already be on its way home
to the 'Athenaeum'.

It would make everything possible. It would throw a very different
complexion over the idyll. It would turn that interlacing wreath of
laurels and of poppies into the strongest bond in the world.

I would simply have nothing to do with it.

But there was no harm I asking Armour to dine with me; I sent the
note off by messenger after breakfast and told the steward to put a
magnum of Pommery to cool at seven precisely. I had some idea, I
suppose, of drinking with Armour to his eternal discomfiture. Then
I went to the office with a mind cleared of responsibility and
comfortably pervaded with the glow of good intentions.

The moment I saw the young man, punctual and immediate and a little
uncomfortable about the cuffs, I regretted not having asked one or
two more fellows. It might have spoiled the occasion, but it would
have saved the situation. That single glance of my accustomed eye--
alas! that it was so well accustomed--revealed him anxious and
screwed up, as nervous as a cat, but determined, revealed--how well
I knew the signs!--that he had something confidential and important
and highly personal to communicate, a matter in which I could, if I
only would, be of the greatest possible assistance. From these
appearances twenty years had taught me to fly to any burrow, but
your dinner-table offers no retreat; you are hoist, so to speak, on
your own carving-fork. There are men, of course, and even women,
who have scruples about taking advantage of so intimate and
unguarded an opportunity, but Armour, I rapidly decided, was not one
of these. His sophistication was progressing, but it had not
reached that point. He wanted something--I flew instantly to the
mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why
he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently
proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The
application was impossible, but applications nearly always were
impossible. Nobody knew that better than the Secretary to the
Government of India in the Home Department.

I squared my shoulders and we got through the soup. It was
necessary to apologize for the fish. 'I suppose one must remember,'
I said, 'that it has to climb six thousand feet,' when suddenly he
burst out.

'Sir William Lamb tells me,' he said, and stopped to swallow some
wine, 'that there is something very good going in Calcutta and that
I should ask you to help me to get it. May I?'

So the miserable idea--the happy thought--had occurred to somebody
else.

'Is there?' I said, with interest and attention.

'It's something in the School of Art. A man named Fry has died.'

'Ah!' I said, 'a man named Fry. He, I think was Director of that
institution.' I looked at Armour in the considering, measuring way
with which we suggest to candidates for posts that their fitness to
fill them is not to be absolutely taken for granted. 'Fry was a man
of fifty-six,' I said.

'I am thirty.' He certainly did not look it, but years often fall
lightly upon a temperament.

'It's a vile climate.'

'I know. Is it too vile, do you think,' he said anxiously, 'to ask
a lady to share?'

'Lots of ladies do share it,' I replied, with amazing calmness; 'but
I must decline absolutely to enter into that.'

My frown was so forbidding that he couldn't and didn't dare to go
on. He looked dashed and disappointed; he was really a fool of an
applicant, quite ready to retire from the siege on the first
intimation that the gates were not to be thrown open at his
approach.

'Do you think you would like teaching?' I asked.

'I can teach. Miss--my only pupil here has made capital progress.'

'I am afraid you must not measure the Bengali art student by the
standard of Miss Harris,' I replied coldly. He WAS a fool. We
talked of other things. I led him on to betray his ludicrous lack
of knowledge of the world in various directions. At other times it
had irritated me, that night it gave me purest pleasure. I agreed
with him about everything.

As he selected his smoke to go home with I said, 'Send your
application in to the Director of Public Instruction, Bengal--Lamb
will tell you how--and I'll see what I can do.'

They were only too thankful to get him. As a student it seemed he
had been diligent both in London and Paris; he possessed diplomas or
some such things bearing names which were bound to have weight with
a Department of Public Instruction anywhere. I felt particularly
thankful for this, for I was committed to him if he had not a rag to
show.

The matter was settled in three weeks, during which Armour became
more and more the fashion in Simla. He was given every opportunity
of experiment in the society of which he was about to become a
permanent item. He dined out four or five times a week, and learned
exactly what to talk about. He surprised me one day with a piece of
news of my own department, which was a liberty of a very serious
kind, but I forgave him upon finding that it was not true. He rode
Lamb's weight-carriers, to cross which his short legs were barely
adequate, and apart from this disadvantage he did not ride them
badly. Only one thing marred the completeness of the
transformation--he didn't dismiss the dog. The dog, fundamentally,
was still and ever his companion. It was a suspicious circumstance
if we had known; but we saw in it only a kind heart, and ignored it.

I saw little of Dora Harris at this time. Making no doubt that she
was enjoying her triumph as she deserved, I took the liberty of
supposing that she would hardly wish to share so intimate a source
of satisfaction. I met them both several times at people's houses--
certain things had apparently been taken for granted--but I was only
one of the little circle that wondered how soon it might venture
upon open congratulations. The rest of us knew as much, it seemed,
as Edward Harris did. Lady Pilkey asked him point-blank, and he
said what his daughter found to like in the fellow the Lord only
knew, and he was glad to say that at present he had no announcement
to make. Lady Pilkey told me she thought it very romantic--like
marrying a newspaper correspondent--but I pointed to a lifelong
task, with a pension attached, of teaching fat young Bengalis to
draw, and asked her if she saw extravagant romance in that.

They wrote up from Calcutta that they would like to have a look at
Armour before making the final recommendation, and he left us, I
remember, by the mail tonga of the third of June. He dropped into
my office to say goodbye, but I was busy with the Member and could
see nobody, so he left a card with 'P.P.C.' on it. I kept the card
by accident, and I keep it still by design, for the sake of that
inscription.

Strobo had given up his hotel in Simla to start one in Calcutta. It
never occurred to me that Armour might go to Strobo's; but it was,
of course, the natural thing for him to do, especially as Strobo
happened to be in Calcutta himself at the time. He went and stayed
with Strobo, and every day he and the Signor, clad in bath-towels,
lay in closed rooms under punkahs and had iced drinks in the long
tumblers of the East, and smoked and talked away the burden of the
hours.

Strobo was in Calcutta to meet a friend, an Austrian, who was
shortly leaving India in the Messagerie Maritimes steamer Dupleix
after agreeable wanderings disguised as a fakir in Tibet; and to
this friend was attached, in what capacity I never thought well to
inquire, a lady who was a Pole, and played and sang as well as
Strobo fiddled. I believe they dined together every night, this
precious quartet, and exchanged in various tongues their impressions
of India under British control. 'A houri in stays,' the lady who
was a Pole described it. I believe she herself was a houri without
them. And at midnight, when the south wind was cool and strong from
the river, Strobo and Armour would walk up Chowringhee Road and look
at the red brick School of Art from the outside in the light of the
street lamps, as a preliminary to our friend's final acceptance of
the task of superintending it from within.

We in Simla, of course, knew nothing of all this at the time; the
details leaked out later when Strobo came up again. I began to feel
some joyful anxiety when in a letter dated a week after Armour's
arrival in Calcutta, the Director of Public Instruction wrote to
inquire whether he had yet left Simla; but the sweet blow did not
fall with any precision or certainty until the newspaper arrived
containing his name immediately under that of Herr Vanrig and Mme.
Dansky in the list of passengers who had sailed per S.S. Dupleix on
the fifteenth of June for Colombo. There it was, 'I. Armour,' as
significant as ever to two persons intimately concerned with it, but
no longer a wrapping of mystery, rather a radiating centre of light.
Its power of illumination was such that it tried my eyes. I closed
them to recall the outlines of the School of Art--it had been built
in a fit of economy--and the headings of the last Director's report,
which I had kindly sent after Armour to Calcutta. Perhaps that had
been the last straw.

The real meaning of the task of implanting Western ideals in the
Eastern mind rose before me when I thought of Armour's doing it--how
they would dwindle in the process, and how he must go on handling
them and looking at them withered and shrunken for twenty-odd years.
I understood--there was enough left in me to understand--Armour's
terrified escape. I was happy in the thought of him, sailing down
the Bay. The possibilities of marriage, social position, assured
income, support in old age, the strands in the bond that held him,
the bond that holds us all, had been untwisting, untwisting, from
the third of June to the fifteenth. The strand that stood for Dora
doubtless was the last to break, but it did not detract from my
beatitude to know that even this consideration, before the Dupleix
and liberty, failed to hold.

I kept out of Miss Harris's way so studiously for the next week or
two that she was kind enough in the end to feel compelled to send
for me. I went with misgivings--I expected, as may be imagined, to
be very deeply distressed. She met me with a storm of gay
reproaches. I had never seen her in better health or spirits. My
surprise must have been more evident than I supposed or intended,
for before I went away she told me the whole story. By that time
she had heard from Ceylon, a delicious letter with a pen-and-ink
sketch at the top. I have it still; it infallibly brought the man
back to me. But it was all over; she assured me with shining eyes
that it was. The reason of her plainly boundless thankfulness that
Armour had run away from the School of Art did not come to the
surface until I was just going. Then I gathered that if he had
taken the post she would have felt compelled, compelled by all she
had done for him, to share its honours with him; and this, ever
since at her bidding he had begun to gather such things up, was
precisely what she had lost all inclination to do.

We were married the following October. We had a big, gorgeous
official wedding, which we both enjoyed enormously. I took
furlough, and we went home, but we found London very expensive and
the country very slow; and with my K.C.S.I. came the offer of the
Membership, so we went back to Simla for three perfectly unnecessary
years, which we now look back upon with pleasure and regret. I fear
that we, no more than Ingersoll Armour, were quite whole-hearted
Bohemians; but I don't know that we really ever pretended to be.

3. The Hesitation of Miss Anderson.

Chapter 3.I.

When it became known that Madeline Anderson had finally decided to
go abroad for two years, her little circle in New York naturally
talked a good deal, in review, about her curious reason for never
having gone before. So much that happened afterward, so much that I
am going to tell, depends upon this reason for not going before,
that I also must talk about it and explain it; I could never bring
it out just as we went along. It would have been a curious reason
in connection with anybody, but doubly so as explaining the
behaviour of Miss Anderson, whose profile gave you the impression
that she was anything but the shuttlecock of her emotions. Shortly,
her reason was a convict, Number 1596, who, up to February in that
year, had been working, or rather waiting, out his sentence in the
State penitentiary. So long as he worked or waited, Madeline
remained in New York, but when in February death gave him his
quittance, she took her freedom too, with wide intentions and many
coupons.

Earlier in his career Number 1596 had been known in New York society
as Mr. Frederick Prendergast, and for a little while he was
disapproved there on the score of having engaged himself to a Miss
Anderson, Madeline Anderson, whom nobody knew anything about. There
was her own little circle, as I have said, and it lacked neither
dignity nor refinement, but I doubt whether any member of it was
valeted from London, or could imply, in conversation, a personal
acquaintance with Yvette Guilbert. There is no need, however, to
insist that there are many persons of comfortable income and much
cultivation in New York, who would not be met by strangers having
what are called the 'best' introductions there. The best so often
fails to include the better. It may be accepted that Madeline
Anderson and her people were of these, and that she wondered
sometimes during the brief days of her engagement what it would be
like to belong to the brilliant little world about her that had its
visiting list in London, Paris, or St. Petersburg, and was immensely
entertained by the gaucheries of the great ones of the earth.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16