“We must not stay long,” he agreed.
His painful sensitivity, aware at once that something was amiss, kept him from going to meet her, or from touching her when she stood beside him.
“Did you speak to your mother?” he asked.
“Yes. She is not willing,” Livy said.
“Even she!” he whispered.
“She does not dare to tell my father.” They spoke in Vhai dialect, her childhood language, which he had learned in the years that he had been here.
“What shall we do?” Instinctively he gave her the leadership.
“We shall have to go to my father and tell him,” she said.
“Both of us?”
“Do you not wish to be with me?”
“Of course — but suppose he sends me away.”
“Then I will go with you.”
She saw the shadow of despair on his too intelligent face. “Ah, Livy—” he was speaking English now, which he spoke perfectly, although he had never left India. All MacArd graduates spoke English perfectly. “Nothing is so easy as you think it is.”
“Why should we wait?” she demanded with a wilful stoicism in her voice and look. “Perhaps he will be kinder than we think. He has always been kind to us.”
“Separately,” he reminded her.
“Oh, Jatin,” she said in quick young anger, “why will you be so easily defeated? Come with me!”
She seized his hand and led him out of the shadows with her.
Ted was alone in his study. It was a small quiet room, the last in the chain of rooms opening into the common court which was also back garden, walled with earth. One side of the room was windowless and against it he had hung, years ago, the portrait of his mother, which his grandfather had willed to him, instead of to his father. Years ago he had been reconciled to thinking of Agnes as his father’s wife. He had never regretted his own marriage to Ruth. She had helped him to plunge deep into India, so deep that he had had no furloughs in the seventeen years since their marriage. Neither he nor Ruth had wanted to break the continuity of the days and the years.
And where would he go if he did go to America again? Such shallow roots as schooldays had given him were withered away and his grandfather was long dead. Let him be honest with himself. The thought of his father and Agnes living in the old Fifth Avenue house made return impossible to that only home he had known in his own country. It was one thing to be reconciled to his father’s marriage, it was another to enter into the house which now belonged to Agnes. It was absurd to think of her as a stepmother, and certainly her influence must pervade the house since it was she who had made his father decide not to return to India. Explain it as he would, his father had never been able to explain that withdrawal.
“I have finished with India,” his father had written after his grandfather’s death. “Younger men must carry on my work. I had dreamed once that you, my son, would have taken up my mantle, but since that was not to be, the springs have dried in me. I should have been lonely, indeed, were it not for Agnes, my sweet young wife. She has a right to live the life which suits her so happily here in New York.”
He had blushed when he read the fatuous phrase, “my sweet young wife,” and even now as he thought of it a dry heat spread under his skin. He supposed, unwillingly, he was to blame for that marriage. If he had stayed on at MacArd as his father had wished him to do, perhaps he would have married Agnes and all these years would never have been. Had he not done what Darya had bade him do, had he not come to Vhai and lived among the lowly people of the earth, how different his life would be now!
Yet he had followed the light that shone for him, and if he needed comfort, Darya gave it to him. They did not meet often, for Darya was absorbed in his office in the new government, but once he had come to Vhai. That had been a great day. The villagers had gathered for miles around and fifty thousand people sat on the dry fields and listened to Darya tell them what the new India would be. He had stood above them like an aging king, his lean figure still tall and straight, his white hair flying, his thin face still unlined, and the wind had carried his powerful voice over the multitude.
“Here in Vhai you have lighted a lamp for the nation. What you have done, every other village in India can do. I love you, people of Vhai, and first of all I love you because the man who has lit the lamp for you, as you will light it for others, is the man who is like my own son.”
That day was his reward, and thinking of it now, as he thought of it so often, Ted straightened himself and lifted his head. Yes, he had his reward. When independence was declared, many white men left India and no Indian spoke against their going. But he, Ted MacArd, had been invited and urged to stay, not only by the new Prime Minister and by Darya, but by Vhai itself. The people would not let him go. Ah, he had his rewards! Jehar, travelling to and fro over India, came sometimes to this quiet room, and then at early morning or as now at twilight, the Christian sadhu taught him that faith comes from many sources. It was Jehar who had explained to him the spiritual ties between all the greatest of the leaders of men and to the same God, whatever His name. Thus Moses and the Hebrew prophets, thus David and Paul, were brothers to Tukārām, the Sudra grainseller, who sixteen centuries later had lived in Dehu, a village some eighteen miles northwest of Poona itself. Tukārām had gone through his own Gethsemane, and famine, white over the land, and the dying voice of his young wife crying for food while he had no food, had driven him into the complete service of God.
This evening, for his devotions, Ted had been reading again the story of Tukārām, so strangely like the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He read of the birds that perched on Tukārām’s shoulders in the temple, knowing him to be “a friend of the world.” As Pharisees and Sadducees had persecuted Jesus, so the Brahmans had persecuted Tukārām. They would have none of him because of his lowly birth and because he could not believe, as they did, that Nirvana was the highest state of the human soul. He did not wish, he said, “to be a dewdrop in the silent sea,” and he shared in the lives of men, and thus he sang:
“The mother knows her child — his secret heart,
His joy or woe.
Who holds the blind man’s heart alone can tell
Where he desires to go.”
As always when he was moved by the Hindu poet-saints, Ted returned again to the Christian New Testament, sometimes frightened, as he himself knew, lest the seat of his heart be shaken by those who had never known Christ, and he read again, “Except ye become as little children—”
Then he heard footsteps, a double rhythm, the soft sandalled footsteps of a girl and then the slower steps of a man. At the curtain they paused, and he heard his daughter’s voice, “Bapu, may we come in?”
Livy spoke in the Vhai version of Hindustani, but he answered in English, “Come in, my dear.”
She was indeed his dear daughter, his best-loved child, and he looked up from the sacred books on the table before him to see Jatin Das with her. His heart chilled and he put down his Testament. Nothing is secret in a village, and he had heard whispers, half hesitating and reluctant murmurs, that Livy had been seen alone with Jatin. He had not heeded talk. Livy was an American, and though she had grown up in Vhai until she went to the boarding school in Simla, he could not believe that she would forget her origin. Jatin, too, belonged to no ordinary Hindu family. He had been reared in Bombay, where the English were proud and he would not reach for what must remain beyond him.
“Come in, Livy,” he said in his usual kindly manner. “And you, too, Jatin. Seat yourselves, please. Has the rain stopped?”
“Yes, but there are mists,” Livy said.