Come, My Beloved

by Pearl S. Buck

  The Governor-General was talking now, explaining to MacArd the difficulties of his position, and indeed of all Englishmen in India.

  “The Indians educated in English schools simply do not know the history of their own country,” he declared. “They fancy that all was peace and joy here before the British took over. As a matter of fact, the whole country was embroiled in tyranny and disunity and the common people were at the mercy of every local bully. Yet if any sensible elder Indian mentions this fact he is at once attacked on the grounds of toadying to Empire. They are determined to hate us.”

  David spoke unexpectedly. “My mother would have said that they should be Christianized.”

  The Governor-General was frankly surprised. “Quite the contrary,” he said coldly. “An Indian is infinitely worse when he becomes a Christian. When he forsakes his own gods he usually ends by being a scoundrel. Never trust an Indian when he says he’s a Christian—it’s become an axiom. Besides, only the lowest castes will change their religion.”

  MacArd interrupted. He felt in some way that Leila was belittled by what the Governor had said. “My wife was a truly religious woman. If there were more like her in the world, we’d all be better for it, I guess.”

  Nothing could be said to this and nothing was said. The Governor-General could be silent with ease, and the Marquess looked thoughtful. She said, after a moment, “Christianity is so different, isn’t it, in different people.”

  MacArd got to his feet. He felt his skin hot, his hair bristle, and he restrained his impulse to defend his wife’s religion. He did not want to talk about her and he was surprised that David had mentioned her. He said to his host, “I think we ought to get on our way. My son and I want to visit the Towers of Silence. We hear it is one of the sights.”

  The Governor-General rose promptly. “You should see it, by all means. Have you got your permission?”

  “Is it needed?” MacArd asked.

  “You must get permission from the Parsee Secretary to the Parsee Panchayat. Wait—I’ll send a man and get it for you. It will be waiting for you at the Towers.”

  “Thank you,” MacArd said.

  They made their farewells, he touched the lady’s hand quickly, withdrawing his own at once. Since Leila died he had found it unpleasant to touch a woman’s hand, even so coldly. But with a sudden compulsive movement, the Marquess took David’s hand in both her own. “Thank you,” she said, “thank you for reminding me of my boys.”

  The Towers of Silence stood upon the top of a high hill. No roofs could be seen as they approached, for the encircling wall was high, but as they drew near, the gate of the outer temple opened, and a priest, grave and dignified in his robes, stood to receive them.

  They came down from the carriage and the priest addressed them in English.

  “We have received the message from Government House, Mr. MacArd, and we are happy to receive you and your son here in our sacred temples of the dead. Will you rest a while before going on?”

  “Thanks, no,” MacArd said. “We will proceed, if you please.”

  David looked into the tall palm trees inside the gate. Dark and sullen shapes roosted among the fronds.

  “What are those?” he demanded.

  “They are the vultures,” the Parsee said tranquilly. “They are very well trained. They do not come down unless the time is suitable. Even when the corpse is ready, they will not come down until the bearers are gone and they are alone with the dead. Some of the vultures are very old and they teach the young ones.”

  David knew the process well enough, he had read of it, but MacArd saw his face whiten.

  “Want to go on?” he asked.

  “Of course,” David said briefly.

  The priest described the services as he led them, moving before them with a singular grace and stillness. “The funeral services are performed at the home of the dead. The body is then put into a hearse, not in a coffin as with you of the West, but simply laid there as upon a bed, and covered with beautiful robes and shawls. In great solemnity, our priests lead the way hither and after them come the male members of the family and the friends. The dead is brought first to the outer gates, where the priests take charge. They place the dead in that temple, which you see yonder, sirs, but where I cannot lead you, for it is open only to members of our faith. I can tell you that it is very simple, and that the sacred fire burns there eternally.”

  “Why not burn the body?” David asked in a low voice.

  The priest looked shocked. “Fire is pure,” he declared. “It must not be polluted by the bodies of the dead. Water is also pure, and neither should the earth be polluted for it is the source of food and strength.”

  As though this could not be contradicted, he did not speak while he led them along the path through the beautiful and utterly silent grounds where not a bird sang or any sound penetrated from the city below. There were five towers, and into one of them the priest led them, and then he spoke again.

  “It is not usual to come into one of the towers, but you are guests of the Governor-General and I will go beyond what is usual.”

  The tower was roofless, the walls about forty feet high, spotlessly clean with whitewash. The gate to this tower was high and they had to climb steps to reach it. At the gate they stood, for the priest forbade them to enter. “You can see what it is,” he said. “You need not to enter, if you please.”

  What they saw was a series of paths, running like the spokes of a wheel to a depressed pit at the bottom. Between the paths were rows of small compartments for the dead.

  “For the men, the women, the children,” the priest explained.

  “There are most for the children and then for the women,” David said.

  “Most children must die,” the priest said calmly, “and more women than men, as is their fate.”

  They gazed about the place, and as though their presence were a portent, vultures rose from the trees and, moving their heavy wings, they flew slowly over the tower.

  “Into these compartments the dead are placed,” the priest intoned. “First, they are taken into the anteroom and the vestments and coverings are taken away, these are purified and returned to the family. Then the corpse, naked as it was born, is laid into its roofless cell and the bearers withdraw. It is now that the vultures do their sacred work. They descend and strip away the flesh, and the bones are left clean. No human comes near. Then the elements do their work. The sun shines down and bleaches the bones and the rain falls and washes them clean until they are pure and white. When the cell is needed for yet another of the dead, the attendant priests, the Nasr Salars, enter with gloves and tongs and take up the bones and cast them into the central pit, where they turn to dust. All the water that falls into this tower and into each of the other towers is gathered by drains and runs down into the pit, which is perforated so that the water carries away the dust of the dead. Below are charcoal filters through which the water must pass and then it flows into a great conduit and so to the bay and from thence to the eternal sea.”

  “Does the pit never fill?” David asked in a voice infused with horror.

  “Never,” the priest replied. “In hundreds of years it has never filled. The elements do their work well.”

  MacArd was stricken in silence, troubled and moved at the same time, revolted and impressed. The priest continued to speak in the same reverent voice.

  “It is our faith that before God all men are equal, and here there is no difference between the rich and the poor. All the cells are alike and all the dead alike are given over to the sun and the rain and the sea. All alike find the same rest.”

  “But to have no grave from which to arise!” David exclaimed.

  “Nevertheless we do believe in the resurrection of the dead,” the priest declared. “It is our faith that our bodies will rise again from the elements, glorified by a new life which as yet we cannot comprehend.”

  For MacArd the scene changed, the honor disappeared, and he grasped at the immo
rtal faith. “You believe that, too!” he exclaimed.

  “All those who are truly religious believe in the eternity of the soul,” the priest replied.

  “That’s very important,” MacArd cried.

  David was surprised at the sudden excitement in his voice and still more surprised when at the gate MacArd put into the priest’s hand a roll of rupees.

  “It’s been interesting,” MacArd said. “It’s been very interesting. I’ll never forget this.”

  The compartment on the train to Poona was large and Wahdi had provided comforts. He had rented bedding from the hotel and had filled a high wicker basket with tinned foods, enough for a journey many times longer than the one to Poona. The windows were closed against the dust, but ventilators were open in the ceilings and dust drifted in as fine and dry as powder. David lay on a couch of quilts spread upon one of the wide benches, sleeping. He wore only his underdrawers, but the smooth skin of his youthful body was damp with sweat.

  MacArd glanced at him now and again, recognizing in his son with love and pain the grace of Leila, his mother. His own heavy frame had none of this shapely slenderness, this delicacy of ankle and wrist. Yet David was not feminine. His shoulders were broad and his hips were narrow, and his height MacArd himself had bestowed. But the boy’s face was not at all his, and the dark coloring was contrast enough when they were seen together, so that strangers remarked upon it. He was glad that David could sleep for there was little enough to see from the dusty windows, plains as barren as winter, though it was already so hot that one could scarcely endure the windy heat. Upon the plains the earthen villages were pitilessly bare under the blazing sun. The villages were scarcely more clear upon the landscape than molehills heaped up, and out of them crawled the most dreary creatures he could imagine upon the earth. Yet they were human, though they seemed scarcely different from the pitiful skeleton shapes of the cattle which roamed restlessly over the barren ground, searching for food that did not exist. Men and women and cattle alike were waiting for the rains, still months away. A few days of rain, Wahdi explained, and these dry barrens would spring into instant green. The seed was there, waiting for the life-giving water.

  “There is always life,” Wahdi declared.

  MacArd recalled the words now as he sat staring out of the window. Wahdi was a Muslim and so the Muslims must believe in it, too. It was a queer thing if he, a Christian, as he supposed he was, should find in a heathen country the faith to believe that Leila still lived. Yet these were very ancient people and they had been religious for a long time and maybe they knew more about such things than fellows like Barton did. He ruminated awhile, and feelings of warm pity stirred about his heart. It was too bad that people so religious, so good, should live half-starved, their land as bare as a desert under a summer sun and all for the want of water and railroads and trade, which was what had made Americans comfortable and rich.

  He slapped a fly from his cheek. In spite of the spraying that Wahdi had performed before they left Bombay, there were flies inside the closed car. Flies crawled through the solid wood, he was ready to swear. They were starving, too, and ravenous, teasing any object in repose, if this racking shaking travel could leave anything in repose. The railroads were a disgrace. Something ought to be done about India. The people had no chance. The English were a curious lot, so proud when there wasn’t much to be proud about. A few Americans now, young fellows, trained to develop the people themselves, could accomplish a lot in a few years. Only how would they get in here? The only Americans were a few missionaries. Well, maybe missionaries—

  He forgot the flies and the dust and fell into one of those intense reveries which Leila used to call his darkness before dawn, his precreative mood. He was feeling about for the big idea. It would not come down out of the sky or alone. It grew as a twister grows out of a tornado, drawing winds and earth into its shape until it rises to the force of explosion. Then perfectly clearly he saw his big idea.

  Why shouldn’t he make his own missionaries and send them to India?

  At Poona Wahdi settled them in a good hotel, but MacArd was restless, and he set out to see the city at once, though the afternoon was late. David did not come with him. He had met in London at Claridge’s a young Indian, Darya Sapru, and this young man had invited David to his home if he came to Poona, and there David decided to go. Meanwhile MacArd wandered about the streets at his usual swift pace, startling the people who fell back before him, fearful of his size and good garments. The big idea was with him now day and night and everything he saw was subject to it and became part of it. Here in Poona he found two rivers joining to wind themselves like sluggish serpents among the houses. Behind the city the hills rose to a high tableland and upon one of those hills, his guidebook told him, was an ancient aqueduct, built long ago by a Marathi family. Its source was in a well. Water there was close to the surface of the earth. It would be easy to send it over the whole region, and the land need not lie barren until the monsoons brought rain.

  He went back to the hotel at nightfall, and his idea was beginning to grow like a tree. It stretched down roots and sent out branches. He would train his young men and send them here to do his work. There must be a place to train them, a great school, an institution endowed—why not in the name of his beloved wife? That would be an immortality in itself, the Leila MacArd Memorial—

  He opened the door of their rooms and found his son waiting and excited by his own afternoon.

  “It was a wonderful house, Father,” he exclaimed, “the most extraordinary gardens along the river. I’ve never seen such a place—marble floors in all the main rooms and a huge separate dining room connected with the house by a long passageway, lovely in itself. There’s another huge room—open, too, the sides all carved in wood—where Darya says the family really lives. The drawing room had the handsomest ceiling I’ve ever seen, all done by Poona artists.”

  MacArd said absently, “A contrast to the rest of India, I should say.”

  His son looked at him with a peculiar humor in his mild dark eyes, but he did not notice it. The conversation died, nor was it resumed for the next few days while they came and went.

  Poona was more easily traveled than Bombay, a large city divided into parts like wards, and spotted by the usual monuments and bridges erected by rich Indians. By the fifth day MacArd was ready to go beyond into the surrounding countryside. He was thinking furiously now about water, and how it alone might change the face of India. He saw a country threaded by silver canals, a network of irrigation, independent of rains or even of rivers. Let them use the Mutha and the Mula rivers here in Poona and the Ganges itself in the northeast for electric power, but irrigation canals, the water drawn deep from the earth, alone could provide the steady lifegiving stream to the plains.

  Yet who could do it except the Indians themselves? The resignation of the poor and the selfishness of the rich must be blasted by new force. The merchants, the wealthy princes, were willing enough to make vast buildings and public monuments, but they did nothing to relieve the poverty of the hopeless peasants. What they needed was a new religion, a practical religion, that built irrigation systems and railroads as well as churches. He would send a new kind of Christian here, a man who worked while he preached.

  On that fifth day he made his decision, and it came from a peasant, a Hindu, naked except for the white turban about his head and the scrap of white cotton about his loins, a thin dried man of about fifty, but one could never tell the ages of men and women here, and probably he was only twenty or twenty-five. The man was a potter, such a potter as any Indian village may have and MacArd was walking with only Wahdi, for David was again with Darya. He came upon the potter as he crouched upon the dusty floor of earth, running with his foot his potter’s wheel while his narrow graceful hands, the fingers supple and swift, shaped a mass of whirling clay. He had looked up to smile fearfully at MacArd, a foreigner and a white man, and to Wahdi he made his excuse that at this moment he dared not rise to give prop
er greeting, lest the vessel be spoiled.

  “Tell him I want to see what he is making,” MacArd ordered, and Wahdi translated with the distaste he always showed when he spoke to a Hindu.

  The vessel was finished in a few minutes, a common bowl of clay made from the dry dust of the fields mingled with a little precious water, and the potter set it to dry in the burning sun.

  “Ask him if he will take time to show me the village and the fields,” MacArd said to Wahdi. “Tell him I will pay him.”

  This in turn was translated, the man nodded, his face lit with a bright good humor, and stepping carefully ahead of MacArd he led him about the small collection of mud huts from which men stood and stared and in which the women hid. The children ran everywhere naked and grey with the dust.

  But it was in the fields that MacArd saw the strange sight which persuaded him, like a vision, to the determination which was thereafter to shape his life. The potter was some twenty feet ahead of him upon the narrow path between the fields when suddenly a serpent lay across the path, a cobra, as MacArd instantly recognized. He had not seen one before, except in the pictures of this guidebook, but there could be no mistaking the raised and hideous head flattening and spreading out with fright and rage. Wahdi leaped away but MacArd cried out, “Let me get him!”

  He raised his cane, a heavy malacca stick tipped with metal.

  The potter shook his head and would not let him pass. He had stopped only a few feet from the cobra and now he stood motionless. He raised his hands and placed them palm to palm, touching his forehead with the tips of his fingers. The cobra swayed back and forth in ever diminishing waves of motion, his sickening head resumed its natural shape and while the potter waited in the attitude of prayer, the cobra gradually subsided, uncoiled its stubborn length, and crawled away.

  The potter waited until it had disappeared into a wide crack in the field and then he turned to MacArd. Wahdi was creeping back again, seeing safety, and the potter spoke to him.

  “He tells, Sahib,” Wahdi said in some scorn, “he tells that the snake is a god. It is sin to kill a god.”