“I have read the books,” he went on. “I knew the Bhagavad Gita by heart before my mother died. She taught me that to be a saint is the best that man can know, but I did not think I could be a saint, and so I was unhappy. When I first came to this university how unhappy I was, and I did not like to hear of the new religion. It seemed not so good to me as our own more ancient faith. Once I even tore to pieces the Bible Mr. Fordham said we must use in the class room. I was so unhappy to read it. I did not wish to be compelled by him. And then suddenly I saw Christ, there in my lonely room.”
Ted sighed. “I hope you have not changed your whole life because of this — vision, as you say it is.”
“I have changed my life,” Jehar replied.
What more could be said? Jehar was simple and pure and quiet and he could not be changed. The sun tipped the edge of the horizon red gold, and coolness faded quickly from the air. The day had begun. The two young men rose and walked together across the lawn and parted with a handclasp and no spoken word.
Thus harmlessly begun, the day developed into a strange storm, not between Sirdar Singh and Jehar but between Ted and his father, who had never quarreled before. He had half expected to be called into the conference between his father and Jehar. At seven o’clock the first light meal of the day was served, the chota hari which was eaten wherever they happened to be. His father was already in his study. Ted accepted the tray on one of the small veranda tables and ate there, seated in a wicker armchair. Jehar passed him and lifted his hands in greeting, palm to palm, and went on into the hall and the study. The door to his father’s study closed and Ted waited, finishing his tea and toast and ripe mango and then he sat, still expecting to hear his father’s voice.
The call did not come. After more than an hour the door opened again, and Jehar came out, looking pale and almost weary. Again he passed with the silent greeting and without speech he descended the steps and went away. Then Ted got up and went to the study. His father sat at the desk reading some papers, his face stern.
“Father?”
His father looked up. “Yes, Ted?”
“How did it go?”
“You mean the conference? I am convinced that Jehar is out of his mind. He talked of visions.”
Courage, Ted thought, courage to speak, to take Jehar’s side, to declare that visions are possible.
“There is plenty of evidence for visions in the Scriptures, Father.”
His father stared at him. “Surely you are not going to justify Jehar?”
“Only to say that there is scriptural justification for visions.”
“Ignorant men wrote the Scriptures, as you very well know,” his father retorted. “They put into concrete form the feelings of their hearts. I do not expect that sort of thing from the graduates of my university.”
“I wonder if Jehar has not decided upon a rather brilliant act, nevertheless?”
“What do you mean?” his father demanded.
“I mean, we have tried our way of preaching Christianity for some hundreds of years, churches and hospitals and universities, all this you have here, but it doesn’t make Christians.”
“It does make Christians,” his father said harshly. “There is a statistical gain every year in Indian church membership.”
“No real gain,” Ted said doggedly, “The villages are as they have been for all these hundreds of years. I saw no sign of Christianity there, Father. The same old poverty, the same old misery, the same greed of the zamindars and the landowners, the same ruthlessness of the rich over the poor, the evil over the good—”
“These things have always been and always will be,” his father said.
“Then of what good is Christianity?” Ted cried passionately.
He met his father’s astonished eyes, he saw his father’s concern, and he leaped to deny his father’s faith.
“Jehar is right,” he cried. “I wish I had the guts to be like him! I wish I could give up all and follow Christ!”
There was a look of real terror in his father’s eyes and this at last he could not face. He turned and strode away.
What had he said? He had said that he wished he could give up all and follow Christ. But what did that mean? He stopped in the big empty drawing room. As clearly as Jehar had said he saw the face of Christ, he saw the face before his eyes. It was the face of a peasant, a nameless face, a face he had seen in one of the scores of villages through which he had passed, had seen and had forgotten, but it had hidden itself in the folds of his brain, a face twisted with pain and labor and starvation, a hopeless face except for the deathless burning eager eyes, and the eyes demanded of him, “Is there no hope for me?”
He stared at this face, and while the eyes made their demand upon him, he heard the door to his father’s study suddenly close.
Alone in his study David fell to his knees. He had turned the key in the lock, ashamed, or perhaps only shy, lest he be discovered in prayer at this hour. But he was driven to prayer, for now he was afraid for his beloved and only son. All the year since Ted first came back to him he had waited for the time when he could speak freely to Ted, when he could tell his son his problems and the fearful weight of his task, and he had not spoken. He had been confused with memories. When he looked at Ted, he saw his own father, as he might have been when young, and yet Ted was like Olivia, he had Olivia’s ways, her quick feelings. And thus confused and accustomed to loneliness, he had not spoken to his son even of his fears and burdens.
And now Jehar!
If the Indian people were touched enough with unreality so that they could follow a fanatic, their ignorance was still appalling and he had begun to see that all he did would not be soon enough to save the country, because Gandhi had lighted such a flame.
And now Jehar!
With Empire his work, too, would collapse. The millions of ignorant peasants in the villages could not soon enough be taught or their poverty relieved to save the day for Empire. The task should have been begun three hundred years ago, if Empire was to hold. He knew now that his own student body was rotten with disloyalty. He tried not to know it, but the secret meetings, the private slogans, the Gandhi caps and the homespun cloth were conspicuous. If Gandhi won, then the Christianity upon which he had built his life was only shifting sand. And Ted had today defied him, as yesterday Jehar had defied his own father. Oh, the cruelty of sons to their fathers!
There on his knees while his thoughts prevented his prayers, he suddenly remembered his own youth. So had he defied his father, and his whole life had been a defiance and still was. That aged man lying bedridden now in the old mansion, he had deserted, too, in his own fashion. The tears rushed to his eyes.
“God, let me go back to my father and explain to him—”
It was not at all the prayer he had planned to make.
“Have I been wrong, O God? Should I have obeyed my earthly father instead of Thee? Am I punished now in my own son? Give me wisdom that I may know what to do.”
He knelt there for a long time, waiting, but no answer came, and he got up from his knees. It had been long since he had been aware of any answer to his prayers. Somehow without knowing it he had lost the sense of the presence of God, even while he spent his whole life in that service. Loneliness descended upon him again, the awful loneliness of the spirit. When Olivia died he had known loneliness and in a sense he had never learned to live without her. But the loneliness then was not absolute, as this was. He had not given himself to Olivia as he had to God. Involuntarily he groaned aloud the cry that once Christ had made, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
But why, but why?
Ted strode from the drawing room down the hall to his own room and closed the door silently and then stood motionless. His heart was beating with joy! Wave after wave of joy, astounding joy, whose source he did not know except that it came from outside himself, infused his being. It filled him like an atmosphere, cooling and invigorating. He laughed aloud, he felt the hair prickle on his head and his fingers tingled. He wanted to run and leap and dance. Yet why except that there alone in the drawing room when he had seen his vision, he had reached a decision so clear that it was absurd not to have known before that it was inevitable. He must leave Poona and go and live in a village. How simple a resolution, but he had been struggling toward it all these months since he had seen Darya, and only Jehar’s directness and childlike purity had led him to the end.