He would not inquire what her doubt might be. He felt tired and dislocated, and perhaps he had lived in Vhai too long. For years he had poured himself out, and now he felt empty and weak. It occurred to him that he had not eaten much in the past weeks, worried and pressed as he had been by his distress about Livy and the hurried leave-taking. It would be good to sink back into the comfortable life in the old mansion, where his father and Agnes were expecting them. He needed rest.
The dinner gong rang through the corridors of the ship and upon the decks.
“I believe I am hungry,” he said.
“Then let’s go down to the dining saloon now,” Ruth said. But they lingered a moment. The sun was slipping behind the horizon of Bombay and the shadow of night stole swiftly over the city and the sea.
“I hope Livy will not wear her saris,” Ted said suddenly.
“I told her not to wear them any more,” Ruth replied quietly.
“Did she mind?”
“No, she said she had already decided that she would not.”
So often, he thought, his conversations with his wife were commonplace, the merest question and answer, and yet he knew again that she had thoughts which she did not speak, and so there were overtones to her words. He seldom inquired what these were, and he did not do so now. A sudden breeze had arisen damp and chill.
“Come,” he said. “There is nothing more here. Let us go below.”
Livy, on the high upper deck, continued to gaze alone into the night. The lights of the ship fell upon the smooth and oily water of the bay and upon the long lines of the prow of the ship. But Livy did not see the near waters, nor even the sparkling lights of Bombay in the receding distance. Her mind’s eye drove its straight beam northward upon Vhai, and she saw Jatin in his little house alone. She knew that he would be busy as he always was, reading his books, eating his plain evening meal, and then reading again. In an hour from now he would be at the hospital making his last rounds of the sick as they lay upon their pallets on the floor, or on low wooden beds, rope-bottomed, just as they would have lain had they been in their own homes. Her father had always insisted that everything was to be Indian, he would not have anything in Vhai that was like the beautiful colleges and the hospital at MacArd in Poona, and yet she was no longer deceived. She had thought, oh, she had truly believed, that her father had meant what he said when he taught them to behave courteously toward the people of Vhai and of all India, and she had believed that he meant what he said when he bade them learn the language of Vhai, and when he encouraged her to wear a sari as easily as she did a frock, until a sari now seemed more natural to her and certainly more comfortable than a buttoned frock, for to tuck the pleated material into the folds at her waist so that it hung a graceful skirt and then to throw the other end about her shoulders was much easier than getting into sleeves and belts and buttons down the back. He had encouraged them to play with the children of Vhai and to look upon them as brothers and sisters, telling them that God was their Father in Heaven, and they were one great family. She had believed he meant all that and now she knew he did not. For if he had truly believed what he preached, then he would have been willing and even glad for her to marry Jatin, for that was the whole acceptance, wasn’t it, and if one could not accept the ultimate, then there was no real acceptance. Perhaps there was no truth in God, either.
She shivered, unutterably sad as her mind fixed itself upon Jatin. It was not his fault, surely, for he had never been deceived by her father, and that had been their first great argument.
“Jatin, I tell you, my father will be happy. He likes you, and he will welcome you as his son.”
This she had insisted upon, and Jatin had only smiled his dark sad smile.
“Then you don’t believe in my father!” She had accused him thus.
“I do believe in him,” Jatin had replied. “Yet I know his soul reaches beyond the rest of him. His faith is far up yonder—” he pointed to the zenith. “But his flesh is more prudent than his soul and it remains upon the earth. And his mind is uncertain between the two. He believes in his ideals, and he considers them necessary, but he says that it will take time to fulfill them, much time. What he does not know, is that if one does not immediately practice ideals, they are lost. They die unless they come quickly to reality.”
So much that Jatin had said she had not understood when he spoke because his presence agitated her. She had not often been able to fix her mind upon his words because her eyes were fastened upon his lips. Remembering those lips, her heart hung in her bosom, a weight of hot and leaden pain. She would never see his face again, of that she was now sure. Her father could not have kept them apart, she thought rebelliously, but Jatin himself had sent her away. If Jatin had been in the least willing to defy her father, it could have been done, but he was not willing, not through fear, but through his belief that to part was their fate, the world being what it was.
“You must go back to your own country,” he had told her, “and after you have finished school, then you must marry a good man.”
“I will not,” she had cried passionately, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“But I say you must,” he had insisted in his grave voice. “And Livy, one more command I give you. Do not tell him about me. This is for your own protection, for if your father, who is so good a man, cannot bear the thought of our love, then that one who is to be your husband cannot bear it, either. He will draw away from you because once you loved me.”
“I shall love you forever,” she had declared, “and I shall never marry.”
To this he had not replied. He had simply stroked her cheeks with his delicate powerful palms. In the hottest weather his palms were cool and dry, and yet they were never cold. There was healing in his hands. She would never see anyone like him, never meet a man who could compare to him, but because the smooth skin that covered his handsome body was dark, they must never be man and wife, a coating so thin though dark, that it could be pierced by a pin and underneath the flesh was as pale as her own and the blood as red. Yet it was the paper thin darkness of the skin that forced them on their separate ways, on opposite sides of the world.
She did not agree, nevertheless, with all that he had decreed. There was still her hope in the child. The child, if there was a child, she would not put away as he had commanded her to do. If there was to be a child then she would go back to India somehow and insist that Jatin marry her and recognize his own son. She would not be as her father was. What she believed in she would do. Love one another, the Scriptures said, and so she had loved all that was India. She had loved Vhai and the people of Vhai and she had loved the children and the women, and her ayah’s flesh was real to her as her own mother’s. Then, finally, she had loved Jatin.
She clung to the rail and closed her eyes in profound entreaty. “Oh, God, if You are there, then please, give me what I want most! Give me a baby, so that I can go back to Jatin!”
The intensity of her prayer was so great that instantly she felt sure her prayer had been heard. A soft night wind blew over her. A moment before there was no wind, and now suddenly there came the wind, a sign and promise! She opened her eyes in an ecstasy of hope, and felt the ship rise and fall beneath her feet. They were beyond the bay and out upon the sea, but she would come back, for God had heard her and He had given her the sign. She toyed with the idea, just for a moment, of telling her mother that there would be a child and then she decided against it. No, not yet — she might be wrong about God. It would be days before she could know.
She shivered, suddenly cold with the chill of the sea wind. She must not lose Jatin in the dark. Vhai was there and it would always be there. Though she was being carried far away, she would come back — if she was right about God.