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

Then came, with the most unexceptionable introductions, Miss Violet
Forde, from a Sloane Square address, London. She came leaning on
the arm of a brother, the only relative she had in the world, and so
brilliant was the form of these young people that it occurred to
nobody to imagine that it had the most precarious pecuniary
foundation, must have faded and shrivelled indeed, after another
year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New
York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them
admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and
not the bracing climate or the desire to see the fascinating
Americans of London and Paris at home. New York found them
agreeable specimens of high-spirited young English people, and
played with them indefinitely. Miss Forde, when she sat
imperturbably on a cushion in the middle of the floor after dinner
and sang to a guitar the songs of Albert Chevalier, was an anomaly
in English decorum that was as pleasing to observe as it was amusing
to criticize.

The Americans she met delighted in drawing her out--it was a pastime
that took the lead at dinner-parties, to an extent which her hostess
often thought preposterous--and she responded with naivete and
vigour, perfectly aware that she was scoring all along the line.
Upon many charming people she made the impression that she was a
type of the most finished class of what they called 'English society
girls,' that she represented the best they could do over there in
this direction. As a matter of fact she might have sat to any of
those 'black and white' artists, who draw townish young women of
London, saying cynical things to young men in the weekly papers.
That was her type, and if you look for her picture there, you will
see that her face was very accurately oval, with eyes that knew
their value, and other features that didn't very much matter, except
in so far as they expressed a very full conception of the
satisfactions of this life, and a wide philosophy as to methods of
obtaining them.

Frederick Prendergast was unacquainted with the popular pictures I
have mentioned, having a very reasonable preference for the
illustrated papers of his own country; otherwise--there is no
telling--he might have observed the resemblance and escaped the
State prison, whither he assuredly never would have gone had he
married Madeline Anderson--as he fully intended to do when Miss
Forde came over. He was worth at that time a great deal of money,
besides being more personable than any one would have believed who
knew him as '1596.' His fiancee was never too obtrusively in
evidence, and if Miss Forde thought of Miss Anderson with any
scruple, it was probably to reflect that if she could not take care
of these things she did not deserve to have them. This at all
events was how her attitude expressed itself practically; and the
upshot was that Miss Anderson lost them. There came a day when
Frederick Prendergast, in much discomfort of mind, took to Violet
the news that Madeline had brought their engagement to an end. She,
Violet, gave him some tea, and they talked frankly of the absurd
misconception of the relations between them upon which his dismissal
was founded; and Prendergast went away much comforted and wholly
disposed to respect Miss Anderson's startling wishes. She, with
what both the others thought excellent taste, persuaded her mother
and sister to move to Brooklyn; and so far as the thoroughfares and
social theatres of New York were concerned, the city over the river
might have been a nunnery which had closed its gates upon her. It
was only in imagination that she heard Frederick Prendergast's
wedding-bells when, two months later, he was united to Miss Forde in
Grace Church, and that after the fact, their melody being brought to
her inner sense next day by the marriage notice in the 'Tribune'.

It would be painful, in view of what we know of Frederick
Prendergast, to dwell upon what Madeline Anderson undeniably felt.
Besides her emotions were not destructively acute, they only lasted
longer than any one could have either expected or approved. She
suffered for him as well; she saw as plainly as he did the first
sordid consequences of his mistake the afternoon he came to solicit
her friendship, having lost other claims; and it was then perhaps,
that her responsibility in allowing Violet Forde to spoil his life
for him began to suggest itself to her. Up to that time she had
thought of the matter differently, as she would have said,
selfishly. He was not permitted to come again; but he went away
lightened, inasmuch as he had added his burden to hers.

When a year later the national credit involved that of Prendergast's
firm, Madeline read financial articles in the newspapers with heavy
concern, surprising her family with views on 'sound money'; and
when, shortly afterward, his partners brought that unhappy young man
before the criminal courts for an irregular use of the firm's
signature, which further involved it beyond hope of extrication,
there was no moment of the day which did not find her, in spirit,
beside him there.

The case dragged on through appeal, and the decision of the lower
courts was not reversed. The day this became known the fact also
transpired that poor Prendergast would never live to complete his
ten years' term of imprisonment. He went to prison with hardly more
than one lung, and in the most favourable physical condition to get
rid of the other. Mrs. Prendergast wept a little over the
installation, and assured Frederick that it was perfectly absurd;
they were certain to get him out again; people always got people out
again in America. She took him grapes and flowers once a week for
about a month, and then she sailed for Europe. She put it about
that her stay was to be as brief as was consistent with the
transaction of certain necessary business in London; but she never
came back, and Madeline Anderson had taken her place, in so far as
the grapes and flowers were concerned, for many months, when the
announcement of his wife's death reached Prendergast in an English
paper published in Paris. About a year after that it began to be
thought singular how he picked up in health, and Madeline's mother
and sister occasionally romanced about the possibility of his
recovering and marrying her after all--they had an enormous opinion
of the artistic virtue of forgiveness--but it was not a contingency
ever seriously contemplated by Miss Anderson herself. Her
affection, pricked on by remorse, had long satisfied itself with the
duties of her ministry. If she would not leave him until he died,
it was because there was no one but herself to brighten the long day
in the prison hospital for him, because she had thrown him into the
arms of the woman who had deserted him, because he represented in
her fancy her life's only budding towards the sun. Her patience
lasted through six years, which was four years longer than any
doctor had given Frederick Prendergast to live; but when one last
morning she found an empty bed, and learned that Number 1596 had
been discharged in his coffin, she rose from the shock with the
sense of a task fully performed and a well-developed desire to see
what else there might be in the world.

She announced her intention of travelling for a year or two with a
maid, and her family expressed the usual acquiescence. It would
help her, they said, to 'shake it off'; but they said that to one
another. They were not aware--and it would have spoiled an ideal
for them if they had been--that she had shaken it off, quite
completely, into Prendergast's grave.

This was the curious reason why Miss Anderson's travels were so long
postponed.

Chapter 3.II.

It was Madeline's fancy to enjoy the contrast between West and East
in all its sharpness, so she and Brookes embarked at San Francisco
for Yokohama. Their wanderings in Japan were ideal, in spite of
Brookes's ungrateful statement that she could have done with fewer
eggs and more bacon; and Madeline prolonged the appeal of the
country to her sense of humour and fantasy, putting off her
departure for India from week to week. She went at last in March;
and found herself down with fever at Benares in the middle of one
particularly hot April, two months after the last of her fellow
travellers had sailed from Bombay, haunted on her baking pillow by
pictorial views of the burning ghat and the vultures. The station
doctor, using appalling language to her punkah-coolie, ordered her
to the hills; and thus it was that she went to Simla, where she had
no intention of going, and where this story really begins.

Brookes has always declared that Providence in sending Miss Anderson
to Simla had it in mind to prevent a tragedy; but as to that there
is room for a difference of opinion: besides I can not be
anticipated by Brookes.

'It's the oddest place imaginable, and in many ways the most
delightful,' Madeline wrote to her sister Adele, 'this microcosm of
Indian official society withdrawn from all the world, and playing at
being a municipality on three Himalayan mountaintops. You can't
imagine its individuality, its airy, unsubstantial, superior poise.
How can I explain to you elderly gentlemen, whose faces express
daily electric communications with the Secretary of State, playing
tennis violently every single afternoon in striped flannels--writing
letters of admonition to the Amir all day long, and in the evening,
with the assistance of yellow wigs and make-up sticks from the
Calcutta hair-dresser, imagining that they produce things, poor
dears, only a LITTLE less well done than is done at the Lyceum?
Nothing is beyond them. I assure you they are contemplating at the
moment 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray'. The effect of remoteness from
the world, I suppose, and the enormous mutual appreciation of people
who have watched each other climb. For to arrive officially at
Simla they have had to climb in more ways than one. . .It is all so
hilarious, so high-spirited, so young and yet, my word! what a cult
of official dignity underlying! I saw a staff-officer in full
uniform, red and white feathers and all, going to the birthday
dinner at the Viceroy's the other evening in a perambulator--
rickshaw, you know, such as they have in Japan. That is typical of
the place. All the honours and dignities--and a perambulator to put
them in--or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and
tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They
haven't a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they
slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad
pun coming) are never any more out of drawing than they were before.

'Yet--never forget--the queer little place has a nobility, drawn I
suppose from high standards of conduct in essentials.

'. . .This matter of precedence is a bore for an outsider. I am
very tired of being taken in to dinner by subalterns, because I have
no "official position." Something of the kind was offered me, by
the way, the other day, by a little gunner with red eyelids, in the
Ordnance Department, named McDermott--Captain McDermott. He took my
declining very cheerfully, said he knew Americans didn't like
Englishmen, who hadn't been taught to pronounce their "g's," but
hoped I would change my mind before the rains, when he was goin'
down. Of course I sha'n't. The red eyelids alone. . .I am living
in a boarding-house precisely under the deodars, and have "tiffin"
with Mrs. Hauksbee every day when neither of us are having it
anywhere else. And I've been told the original of "General Bangs,"
"that most immoral man." You remember, don't you, the heliograph
incident--I needn't quote it. It really happened! and the General
still lives, none the worse--perhaps rather greater. Quite half the
people seem materializations of Kipling, and it's very interesting;
but one mustn't say so if one wants to be popular. Talking of
materializations, I saw the original of Crawford's Mr. Isaacs, too,
the other day. He used to be a diamond agent among the native
princes when Crawford knew him. When I saw him he was auctioning
off his collection of curios and things. These types of novelists
look wonderfully little impaired; I suppose it's the dry air.

'P.S.--Brookes is also quite happy. She was much struck, on
arriving, by an apparent anomaly in nature. "Have you noticed,
ma'am," said she, "how at this height all the birds are crows and
monkeys?"'

Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New
York. She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs. Mickie and
Mrs. Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and
nobody telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies
interested in the work of the Young Women's Christian Association;
from the 'type' of the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of
Ali Buksh, who sold raw turquoises in a little carved shop in the
bazaar. I should like to quote more of her letters, but if I did I
should find nothing about Colonel Horace Innes, who represented--she
often acknowledged to herself--her only serious interest. Miss
Anderson took the world at its own light valuation as it came; but
she had a scale of recognitions and acceptances, which she kept
apart for the very few, and Innes had claimed a place in it the
first time they met. It seems a trifle ungrateful that she should
have left him out, since it was he who gave her a standard by which
to measure the frivolity of Simla. He went to gymkhanas--if he knew
she was going--but he towered almost pictorially above them; and
when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a resentment of
possible interruptions that isolated him still further. I would not
suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only intent,
whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused, and
discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically
coextensive with Government House list. Neither, for his part,
would he admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as I
have implied. They often talked about it; he recognized it as a
feature likely to compel the attention of people from other parts of
the world; and one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if
she could see no tragedies underneath.

'Tragedies of the heart?' she asked. 'Oh, I can not take them
seriously. The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with
me three days ago, and made me her confessor. It was unexpected; if
it hadn't been, I wouldn't have asked her to tea. She was so
unhappy that she forgot about the rouge, and it all came off on her
handkerchief when she cried. The man likes somebody else better
this season. Well, I gave her nougat and cheap cynicisms, and she
allowed herself to be comforted! Why, the loves of kitchen-maids
are more dignified.'

They were riding on the broad four-mile road, blasted out of the
rock, that winds round Jakko. The deodars stood thick above them,
with the sunlight filtering through; a thousand feet below lay the
little square fields, yellow and green, of the King of Koti. The
purple-brown Himalayas shouldered the eye out to the horizon, and
there the Snows lifted themselves, hardly more palpable than the
drifted clouds, except for a gleam of ice in their whiteness. A low
stone wall ran along the verge of the precipice, and, looking down,
they saw tangled patches of the white wild rose of the Himalayas,
waving and drooping over the abyss.

'I am afraid,' said Innes, 'you are not even upon the fringe of the
situation.'

'It's the situation as I see it.'

'Then--excuse me--you do not see deep enough. That poor lady
suffered, I suppose, to the extent of her capacity. You would not
have have increased it.'

'I don't know, I should have preferred not to measure it.'

'Besides, that was not quite the sort of thing I had in mind. I was
thinking more of the--separations.'

'Ah!' said Madeline.

'It's not fair to ask women to live much in India. Sometimes it's
the children, sometimes it's ill health, sometimes it's natural
antipathy to the place; there's always a reason to take them away.'

'Yes,' said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him. His face
was impassive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a
teasing green spider-fly.

'That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of. Time does
the rest, time and the aridity of separations. How many men and
women can hold themselves together with letters? I don't mean aging
or any physical change. I don't mean change at all.'

'No,' said Madeline, and this time, though her curiosity was
greater, she did not look at him.

'No. The mind could accustom itself to expect that, and so
forestall the blow, if it really would be a blow, which I doubt.
For myself, I'm pretty sure that nothing of that kind could have
much effect upon one's feeling, if it were the real thing.' He
spoke practically to himself, as if he had reasoned this out many
times.

'Oh, no!' said Madeline.

'But separation can do a worse thing than that. It can REINTRODUCE
people, having deprived them of their mutual illusion under which
they married. If they lived together the illusion would go, I
suppose, but custom and comfort would step in to prevent a jar.
There never would be that awful revelation of indifference.'

He stopped sharply, and the hope went through Madeline's mind that
her face expressed no personal concern for him. There was a small
red stain in the brown of his cheek as he looked at her to find out,
and he added, 'I've known--in Bombay--one or two bad cases of that.
But, of course, it is the wife who suffers most. Shall we canter
on?'

'In a minute,' said Madeline, and he drew his rein again.

She could not let this be the last word; he must not imagine that
she had seen, through the simple crystal of his convictions, the
personal situation that gave them to him.

'Of course,' she said, thoughtfully, 'you know the Anglo-Indian
world and I don't. You must have observed this that you speak of
it; it sounds only too probable. And I confess it makes my little
impression very vulgar and superficial.' She turned her head and a
candid smile to him. 'All the same, I fancy that the people who are
capable of suffering much that way are the exceptions. And--I don't
care--I believe there is more cheap sentiment in this place than the
other kind. What do you think I heard a woman say the other day at
a tiffin-party? "No man has touched my heart since I've been
married," she proclaimed, "except my husband!" AT A TIFFIN-party!'

She heard the relief in Innes's laugh and was satisfied.

'How does it happen,' he said, 'that women nowadays are critical of
the world so young?'

'I shall be thirty in September, and we no longer look at society
through a tambour-frame,' she said, hardily.

'And I shall be forty-three next month, but hitherto I have known it
to produce nothing like you,' he returned, and if there was
ambiguity in his phrase there was none in his face.

Miss Anderson made with her head her little smiling gesture--Simla
called it very American--which expressed that all chivalrous speech
was to be taken for granted and meant nothing whatever; and as they
turned into the Ladies' Mile gave her horse his head, and herself a
chance for meditation. She thought of the matter again that evening
before her little fire of snapping deodar twigs, thought of it
intently. She remembered it all with perfect distinctness; she
might have been listening to a telephonic reproduction.

It was the almost intimate glimpse Innes had given her of himself,
and it brought her an excitement which she did not think of
analyzing. She wrung from every sentence its last possibility of
unconscious meaning, and she found when she had finished that it was
eleven o'clock.

Then she went to bed, preferring not to call Brookes, with the
somewhat foolish feeling of being unable to account for her evening.
Her last reflection before she slept shaped itself in her mind in
definite words.

'There are no children,' it ran, 'and her health has always been
good, he says. She must have left him after that first six months
in Lucknow, because of a natural antipathy to the country--and when
she condescended to come out again for a winter he met the different
lady he thinks about. With little hard lines around the mouth and
common conventional habits of thought, full of subservience to his
official superiors, and perfectly uninterested in him except as the
source of supplies. But I don't know why I should WANT her to be so
disagreeable.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Innes, travelling at the moment with the
mails from London to Bombay, was hastening to present to Miss
Anderson features astonishingly different.

Chapter 3.III.

The lady guests at Peliti's--Mrs. Jack Owen and the rest--were
giving a tea in the hotel pavilion. They had the band, the wife of
the Commander-in-Chief, the governess from Viceregal Lodge and one
little Viceregal girl, three A.D.C.'s, one member of council, and
the Archdeacon. These were the main features, moving among a
hundred or so of people more miscellaneous, who, like the ladies at
Peliti's, had come up out of the seething Plains to the Paradise of
the summer capital. The Pavilion overhung the Mall; looking down
one could see the coming and going of leisurely Government peons in
scarlet and gold, Cashmiri vendors of great bales of embroideries
and skins, big-turbaned Pahari horse-dealers, chaffering in groups,
and here and there a mounted Secretary-sahib trotting to the Club.
Beyond, the hills dipped blue and bluer to the plains, and against
them hung a single waving yellow laburnum, a note of imagination.
Madeline Anderson was looking at it when Mrs. Mickie and Mrs.
Gammidge came up with an affectionate observation upon the cut of
her skirt, after which Mrs. Mickie harked back to what they had been
talking about before.

'She's straight enough now, I suppose,' this lady said.

'She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for
speculation.'

'Who is this?' asked Madeline. 'I ask for information, to keep out
of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I
must be in a position to check it.'

The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge
said, 'Mrs. Innes,' and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate,
she would withhold further judgment.

'But you mustn't avoid the poor lady,' put in Mrs. Mickie, 'simply
because of her past. It wouldn't be fair. Besides--'

'Her past?' Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and
then let the question leap up in her.

'My dear,' said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, 'he married
her in Cairo, and she was--dancing there. Case of chivalry, I
believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the
regiment--he had to take a year's leave. Then he succeeded to the
command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with
him to Lucknow--and made slaves of every one of them. They'll swear
to you now that she was staying at Shepheard's with an invalid
mother when he met her. And now she's accepted like everybody else;
and that's all there is about it.'

'There's nothing in that,' said Madeline, determinedly, 'to prove
that she wasn't--respectable.'

'N--no. Of course not,' and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that
of Mrs. Mickie.

'Though, you see love,' added the latter lady, 'it would have been
nicer for his people--they've never spoken to him since--if she had
been making her living otherwise in Cairo.'

'As a barmaid, for instance,' said Madeline, sarcastically.

'As a barmaid, for instance,' repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.

'But Simla isn't related to him--Simla doesn't care!' Mrs. Mickie
exclaimed. 'Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns
up. You'll see. You knew, didn't you, that she was coming out in
the Caledonia?'

'No,' said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to
put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum
hanging over the plains. 'I--I am glad to hear it. These
separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.'

The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss
Anderson's change of tone was too marked for comment which she might
have detected.

'Colonel Innes got the telegram this morning. She wired from
Brindisi,' Mrs. Gammidge said.

'Does he seem pleased?' asked Mrs. Mickie, demurely.

'He said he was afraid she would find it very hot coming up here
from Bombay. And, of course, he is worried about a house. When a
man has been living for months at the Club--'

'Of course, poor fellow! I do love that dear old Colonel Innes,
though I can't say I know him a bit. He won't take the trouble to
be nice to me, but I am perfectly certain he must be the dearest old
thing inside of him. Worth any dozen of these little bow-wows that
run round after rickshaws,' said Mrs. Mickie, with candour.

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