“If it were only that,” she said, “I would not hesitate, because you are still yourself, Ted, though you choose to be a missionary. There are all sorts of missionaries, and some are repulsive, I grant you — ignorant and pushing and all that. But your father is a great gentleman and you are his son. No, no, it’s not that.”
“Then what, my darling?” He was tender with her, being grateful to her because it was plain that she wanted honesty.
She said unexpectedly, “I suppose the easiest way to put it is this — if you were English, I shouldn’t hesitate. But you’re American.”
Now he was taken aback. “What has that to do with it? You do amaze me, Agnes. I shouldn’t have thought you guilty of prejudice!”
“It’s not prejudice, Ted. It’s simply that being American you can’t easily understand the English point of view. You don’t see our responsibility here. You might be angry with me, even if I were your wife, if you saw me standing by my father, for example, when you might think him very wrong. If there is ever a crisis, Ted, I should have to stand by my own people. I think they are right.”
“I see.”
He did see. She could never marry him simply for himself, by herself. She was like all other English of her class, she assumed their burden, she recognized their cause. He had to confess a certain nobility here, however mistaken he felt it might be.
“I wish I could take you in my arms, darling. Will you let me do that?”
She shook her head. “Please not, Ted. It’s too soon. Please! I shouldn’t like to make a decision against you, and I think I would if I were … swept off my feet.”
“Very well, then.” He rose, but he allowed himself to take her narrow hand, and she did not withdraw it. “Shall we go on as we are for the present, darling? Or do you want to stop that, too?”
“No, I don’t want to stop, Ted. It’s just that I don’t want to go further — not until everything is more clear.”
“Everything being—?” he inquired.
“You and me — and India,” she replied.
XIII
SO HE TRAVELED HOME again to Poona, but not by the way he had come. He did not take a swift transcontinental train, he did not leap from city to city. Instead he remembered what Darya had said in jail. “Go to the villages,” Darya had said.
He took a train westward for a few hundred miles and then getting off he wound his way uncomfortably through a network of villages accompanied only by his indignant bearer, to whom such conduct in a sahib was dangerous and absurd. Midway through the United Provinces the bearer left him, and Ted continued his way alone and for the first time in his life no one stood between him and India, not even an Indian.
He knew now why Darya had not tried to persuade him, and why he had simply said, “Go to the villages.” For the villages spoke to him, in their mute misery, the scores he saw with his own eyes and the tens of thousands he did not see. They clung to the hillsides of north India, they rose out of the central plateaus, and on the low-lying southern plains, they were mounds scooped by human hands from the dust and the mud of the Indian earth, hollowed into hovels for the barest shelter from torrential rains and bitter burning sun, and from the chill of frost and cold winds upon the hills. Generations had lived in them, without memory of more or hope for better. He looked into the faces of a starved people, the faces of the too many born, because too many must die, for Nature herself urged birth because she foresaw death too soon. Starvation was the culprit, not swift or instant, nor alone the starvation of flood or overwhelming famine, but the slow starvation of those who never have had enough to eat and never will. It was an India as far from the mission house as it was from the palace and his father was as guilty as the governor.
He returned weeks overdue to Poona, and his heart was a burning fire in his breast, and he had made up his mind, independent even of love.
His father welcomed him in his spare half-silent fashion, without reproach. “I have distributed your classes among the assistants. Now you will want to gather them back again.”
“Yes, Father,” Ted replied.
He knew it would not be for long, but of this he would not speak now. After a few minutes he excused himself to his father and went to his own room. He had not written to Agnes during the weeks of travel, nor did he expect letters from her and there were none among the letters on his desk. The long solitary journey, crowded with men, women and children among whom he moved, had cut him off from every one he knew and even Agnes was far from him. Alone he had gone and now alone he set himself to discover what he was, where he had arrived, and whither must he go. Like Saul of Tarsus, he had been converted by the roadside.
In the stillness of the mission house he came and went and did his daily work, while the months passed into summer. He read his scriptures constantly, over and over again the cries of St. John, and then the spare sweet words of Jesus. He read, too, the psalms of the Marathi saints and again and again this one:
How can I know the right,
I, helpless one!
Of pride of knowledge, lo, O God,
I now have none.
In June the heat reached its height and the city waited from hour to hour for news of the breaking of the monsoons, first upon the eastern shore of the country where the plateaus sloped most easily to the sea. It was during this most tense and breathless month when even the punkahs scarcely stirred the burning air, that he quarreled at last with his father. Out of the controlled calm of their days, their quarrel rose as suddenly as a typhoon rises out of a quiet tropic sea.
The cause was a young Sikh, Jehar Singh, whose father, a man of great wealth and ambition, had sent him to MacArd University, where he might receive the most advanced western education in India. Sirdar Singh did not wish his son to be trained in the English tradition and therefore he had not sent him to England. He foresaw, while taking no part in the nonviolent revolution of Gandhi, that Empire in the old English sense was finished, and whether Gandhi was successful or not, Empire would be compelled to its end because of the enormous pressure of Russian communism. He feared and abhorred all that he heard in these days from Russia, and casting his mind shrewdly about the world, he fixed upon the United States as the one power and nation likely to be able to face the New Russia when the day of crisis came, as he feared it would. Therefore, he decided, he would have Jehar, his only and beloved son, taught by Americans, who could be trusted to cling to the principles of individual property of which he owned so vast a share. He was uneasy, it is true, because MacArd University was a missionary institution, but he had been reassured by Dr. MacArd, the president, so obviously a gentleman and a man of culture and wealth, though a Christian. Moreover, he was the son of one of America’s great capitalists, and by his father’s bounty he had built up a magnificent compound, replete with luxury and American ways. Were Jehar trained here, it was not likely that he would graduate with any ancient notion of renunciation or poverty, such as the emaciated Gandhi was putting forth as a net to catch the idealistic young. Sirdar Singh was vastly pleased with what he saw at MacArd, and especially with Dr. MacArd, with whom he talked, stressing with him that his son was the heir to one of India’s great fortunes, as well as the only scion of a very famous, powerful and old family. The president had accepted the responsibility and had welcomed the tall dreamy poetic-looking youth who appeared at the beginning of the next semester.
Young Jehar had been at MacArd for the required four years and now was among those to graduate with first honors. What then was Sirdar Singh’s horror when he arrived in magnificence this June to be present when his son received his honors, to discover that the young man wished to be a Christian! He heard this in the evening after the important day, Jehar having been reticent until the graduation was over. Then when his father talked with him ardently concerning marriage, business, foreign travel, and all those important matters always upon a father’s mind when he thinks of his son, Jehar lifted his handsome head and said,