XI
“HERE WE ARE,” HIS father said.
The train journey had been long and hot, the dust grey and fine seeping in through closed windows, creeping up out of the shaking floors of the cars, sifting from the cracks of the wooden walls and ceilings. The green grass, the hanging vines, the spreading trees, and the big brick buildings made the compound heaven by contrast.
“How much you have done!” Ted exclaimed.
“I have finished the plans I made before you were born,” his father said gravely. “The chemistry building yonder was the last unit. The dormitories are all built and occupied. Over the whole presidency there is a network of lower schools, headed by our graduates, and these feed into the university.” He nodded toward a low beautiful building at the south end of the compound, a graceful compromise with Indian architecture. “That is the girls’ home-industry college. I have named it The Olivia MacArd Memorial, in memory of your mother.”
A bell rang at this moment and a stream of girls in soft-hued saris poured out of the doors, laughing and chattering as they came. When they saw the two men, they pulled the flying scarf-like ends of the saris over their heads. They all knew that the Head’s son was coming to teach, and they stole quick looks at the tall fair young man who did not look at all like his father, and turned their faces away before he could see them, curious, half fascinated because in a way he belonged to them and they to him. He would, they supposed, succeed his father some day as India’s great Christian educator. Yet there was a hint of hostility in their looks. Gandhi and Dr. MacArd were not friends, and the students were all secret followers of Gandhi, or nearly all, but because of Dr. MacArd there had been no open attempt to join the nonviolent resistance movement. The fair young man might or might not follow in his father’s path. They hurried on, young and hungry for their night meal.
“Was my mother interested in all this?” Ted asked.
His father hesitated as always when he asked a direct question about his mother. Then he said, overcoming silence with effort, “Your mother died so young, she had not time to fulfill herself. We were married and the next year you were born. She had the task of adjusting to India and to marriage. I tell myself that she would have been interested, had she lived. She was full of energy, vitality, spirit — many gifts.”
“And beauty besides,” Ted mused.
“Yes,” his father said abruptly. He turned toward the house. “We must go in and get washed for dinner.”
On the wide veranda the servants had gathered to greet the son of the house come home. They held garlands of flowers, and one by one now they came forward smiling, humble, tender, as they looped the garlands over his neck. Then they stooped to take the dust from his feet and escorted him into the house like a prince.
His father was patient with all this, but abstracted, and in the hall he picked two notes from the table. “The Fordhams,” he said, and opening it he read aloud.
“Welcome home, dear Ted. We’ll leave you to yourselves this first evening. We look forward to tomorrow—”
The sealed pink note addressed to Ted was from Miss Parker. He opened it and read her underscored lines, remembering Auntie May, as she had made him call her all the time he was a little boy. He had been fond of her but distantly, because even then he had known that she loved him because of his father, and he had divined even in childhood that she had her dreams, the highest one that some day David MacArd would ask her to be his second wife. The years had faded this dream, his father had never thought of such replacement, and Ted knew it and had learned to pity the aging lonely woman.
“Dear Ted, my special welcome to you. It is almost like a son coming home — my own son, I mean, but I just cannot put it into words. I have so many memories of you, and now you are a young man and come back to be your noble father’s strength and help. With fondest love from Auntie May.”
His father did not ask about the pink note, there was no need. They went upstairs together into the rooms he knew so well, where he had grown up lonely and yet never alone, loved and adored by the dark people and spoiled, as he knew very well now, by every one of them, guarded and shielded even from the stern father, and yet he had loved his father best, always.
“I shall be down in about half an hour,” his father said, almost formally.
He knew his father felt strange with him, that he was searching for the new relationship, father and son, yes, but man and man, teacher and superior, comrades in Christ. Ted’s heart softened suddenly, its old trick. He was always too easily touched and moved.
“By the way,” his father paused. “I have had your room changed. The old one was small, I thought. I have put you in the front room, it used to be the guest room, you remember.”
“Thanks,” Ted said. But he was startled. His old room had been small, but it was next to his father’s room. Now perhaps the older man did not want to be so near to the young one.
“I shall miss you,” his father was saying with a shy smile, half hidden in the grey beard. “But you must have room to grow.”
“Thank you, Dad,” he said.
And then he was glad he was not in the small room after all. This front room was wide and pleasant, just now almost cool, the shadows from the veranda dimming the sunshine. There were no flowers, there had never been flowers in this house that he could remember, only green things, ferns, palms, that the servants arranged.
A punkah above his head began to sway slowly and a strange loneliness, a homesickness of the spirit crept over him like a mist from the past, when this world was the only one he knew. It had crept over him often in America, even while he knew that was his own land and he an American. There it was India that he missed. Here, standing in the midst of the familiar past, he felt a pang of longing for his grandfather’s house, the clean avenue, the taxicabs, the well-dressed people, his own people, the cool brisk air. Perhaps if he were in New York at this moment there would even be snow, it was only two weeks until Thanksgiving! He had not spoken to his father while they were driving homeward in the old bullock cart, the bullock bandy, from the train an hour ago, he had not spoken of the streets he remembered so well. They were unchanged in all these years, the straining dark faces, too eager, too tired with heat and hunger, the thin dark bodies, that life of the streets all open to the passerby, the unpainted houses, the unfurnished rooms of the common people, the narrow streets crowded with vehicles and bullocks and people, the priests and beggars, and pressed against the walls the vendors of spice and grain, crosslegged in the dust, and women carrying water from the wells, the jars on their heads, and dyers stretching bright green and orange and yellow lengths of cloth in everyone’s way and the twang of a weaver’s loom somewhere behind a thin wall. In the streets all India swarmed about him again, and though he stood in this oasis of quiet, it was there, it was there.
He reached into his hip pocket and brought out the small Testament. Its leather covers were wet with his sweat and he opened it and read.
“For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.”
It was extraordinary, he was not superstitious, but there it was. India was not to be condemned, it was simply to be saved. His fear lifted suddenly, he was even light-hearted. He had come here to work, and there was work to do. The vast old house on Fifth Avenue was thousands of miles away, and years would pass before he entered it again.
“Where is Uncle Darya?” Ted asked.
They sat at the English mahogany dining table, he and his father alone as they had always sat during the meals of his childhood, but now his place was set at one end of the oval instead of at his father’s right hand where when he was small his father could lean toward him and cut his meat. His father, he supposed, had given such orders. The servant, in snow-white cotton garb, was passing chicken curry and rice, tinted bright yellow with saffron.