Come, My Beloved

by Pearl S. Buck

  The years in England had passed easily and quickly, he liked English life, although he was often troubled because of the difference between English people in England and in India. In England they were kindly and they did not show airs of superiority, yet once they came to India as rulers they changed and became arrogant and proud. Even the Eurasians, who were only half white, took over these airs. Some day, his father said, it must stop, but no one knew yet how to stop it.

  Darya had been attracted to David MacArd in London, and it was natural enough that there should be equality between them, but he had hesitated long before the meeting in India. Yet in Poona David had still been charming and unaffected and different from any white man that Darya had ever known. He was curious now to see the young American in his own country, his own home. The singular attraction held and drew him westward, for what purpose he did not know. He was fond of his pretty Indian wife but his marriage had been arranged by his parents and he did not expect to find companionship of mind and spirit with her. Nor was it easy to find anywhere, for he was repelled by the Anglicized young Indian men, and dismayed by the softness of those who had never crossed the “black waters” to England. In his somewhat singular loneliness he saw the young American as friend and brother.

  In May, for it was against his instinct to show haste in spite of his wish, he left India and many weeks later, his ship drew near to the dock in New York. It was his first visit but he had heard of the city, fabulous and new, rising high from its island base. He stood on the deck among the other passengers, ignoring their curious stares, and gazed at the buildings massed against the sky, and he wondered at the skill of the hands that had built them and fixed them there, in spite of storm and earthquake. A foreboding of future power in this white man’s land crept over him. There was nothing to stop such men, and he wondered again, as he had so often before, what spirit of restlessness filled the white men of the West, driving them to greater distances, vaster wealth, more abundant power until some day they might conquer the world. As the ship edged nearer to the shore, he half wished that he had not come lest David might not be the modest and gentle young man he remembered.

  But his fears were soon forgot. When he came down the gangway, dressed in his best London suit and topcoat and carrying a gold headed cane, he heard David’s voice.

  “Darya, how glad I am!”

  It was the same David, Darya’s swift Indian instinct assured him, and then he was shaking hands, both hands, his cane under his arm, and the two young men were gazing at each other with delight, not seeing the glances that were cast at them from other eyes.

  “Come along, the automobile is waiting,” David urged. He pulled Darya along by the arm.

  “I say,” Darya protested, “what about my luggage?”

  “Oh, that will be attended to,” David said. He was ruddy with exhilaration and good spirits, the day was one of soaring wind and bright sunshine and he was proud of the city glittering under the brilliant sky.

  “Come along,” he cried, “luncheon is ready at home and we shall be alone. Ah, I’m glad to see you, Darya!”

  Darya had never been so greeted before by a white man and he felt his heart glow in his bosom with love and excitement. A wonderful country where white men could be like this, where he was urged to come to a white man’s home as though he belonged to the family!

  “I can’t tell you how happy I am,” he stammered.

  David laughed and then saw the glimmer of tears in Darya’s dark eyes. “Why, dear fellow,” he exclaimed, “what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” Darya said. “I thought perhaps you had changed.”

  “I change?” David demanded. “Why should I?”

  “I don’t know,” Darya said. But he did know. He had seen too many white men change when they saw an Indian face.

  “My friend,” Darya said, “you should marry.” He had been in the luxurious American house for three weeks, he had seen the city, he had visited the shops and bought gifts for his mother, his young wife and the two children, his three sisters, his aunts and cousins, his father and uncles and nephews. He had gone with David to the theaters, had heard the new music and on Sundays he had even gone to church with David and his father and had listened in some amazement to Dr. Barton, whom he professed not to understand.

  David smiled and then blushed faintly. “What makes you say that?”

  The two young men had come to a point of intimacy where anything could be said.

  “This vast house,” Darya said, waving a dark and graceful hand to signify endless empty rooms. “Your father, who has only you. There is a great deal to be said for many sons. I am glad I have two already.”

  “I keep seeing my mother here,” David said. “It would be hard to find anyone to fill her place.”

  Darya looked horrified. “You don’t want to fill your mother’s place, surely,” he exclaimed. “You want to find a wife.”

  “I would like to find a wife who is as much like my mother as possible,” David said.

  Darya shook his head. “No, no—a man’s wife and his mother should be totally different persons. Anything else is incestuous in concept.”

  David was innocent enough to look bewildered. “I should say that it was a tribute to one’s mother.”

  “Not at all,” Darya maintained. “Any mother in India would choose for her son a wife very different from herself, of equal caste and so on, but that’s all.”

  David did not answer. He thought suddenly of Olivia to whom he had never returned. He had felt a curious and perhaps unnecessary delicacy about pursuing his friendship while his father was buying her home. Nevertheless, he had not forgotten her, as he now realized.

  “A relationship between mother and son cannot be continued between husband and wife,” Darya was saying with authority. They were in David’s sitting room in the late afternoon of a crowded day. They had spent the morning, at Darya’s wish, in art museums, had lunched at Delmonico’s and afterwards had gone to a matinee. Now, they were smoking cigarettes, a new taste for Darya, and idling before they dressed for dinner. Darya was meticulous about dressing before dining with David’s father, whom he admired and professed to fear.

  “A man begins something entirely new when he takes a wife,” he went on. “Moreover, a real woman does not wish to be also her husband’s mother. If she is compelled to this unnatural position she will resent the burden and despise the man. Keep your mother in your memory, my friend, and open your eyes. It is time. It is not well for a man to live celibate when he is young. Afterwards, yes, when he thinks of becoming a sadhu, a saint, it is then becoming enough.”

  The fluent melodious stream of words poured over David’s sensitive ear. If Darya had a fault it was this pouring golden stream of talk, the overflow of his restless and active mind, a penetrating mind, David had to acknowledge, a scintillating searchlight cast upon every person and every object and scene which presented itself. Only today he had grumbled half humorously, and yet with seriousness,

  “Darya, I feel that you are showing me New York, rather than the other way around.”

  For surrounding every experience had been the enveloping glow of Darya’s incessant comment, question, conclusion, criticism, humor, and instant understanding appraisal. His was a mind too acute for comfort, and yet in spite of this he was always at ease with himself. In these three weeks David had come not to understand the young Indian but to the knowledge that here was the most complex person he had ever met, and one whom perhaps he could never fully understand.

  He took a daring step. “You advise me to marry, and yet you did not introduce me to your own wife.”

  Darya opened his immense dark eyes, handsome eyes with heavy curling lashes. “I do not see the connection!”

  “In the western mind there is some relevance,” David said.

  “In the eastern mind, none,” Darya declared with dignity. “My wife is shy as most Indian women still are, and she would have been in consternation had I brought h
er out of her rooms to meet you, and even more embarrassed had I taken you to her. It is not our custom, as yet.”

  For the first time David was aware of a barrier between them. “I’m sorry if I have offended you, Darya.”

  “Not at all,” Darya rejoined. “It is difficult for people outside to understand the relationships in our country between men and women. Yet they are very profound. Indeed, we find your celibate Christian gods difficult to believe in. Our society is based upon the pure connubial relationship between Rama and Sita. Marriage is lifted to an ideal plane because of them and therefore it is a religious duty.”

  “Now you are being very Indian, my dear Darya!”

  Darya wavered between dignity and capitulation and chose the latter. He smiled his slow delightful smile.

  “Tell me,” he said in a coaxing voice. “According to your abominable western customs, is there no woman in your dreams?”

  It was impossible to lie to Darya. He could detect the slightest deviation between thought and word. David said, “Not quite in my dreams, Darya, but hovering perhaps on the edge.” And then he told Darya of Olivia, and why he had not gone back to see her. “Yet I suppose,” he said, “that I have known all along that I would go back.”

  “So,” Darya said, “why not now? Take me with you. I shall take advantage of your western customs and judge her for myself and see whether she is worthy of you.”

  He ignored the memorial mansion pointedly, but David did not notice the omission. He would have liked to have laughed off Darya’s suggestion, but the young Indian was not easily put aside, as he had learned by now. Darya had an amiable persistence, an affectionate stubbornness, which would not be denied. And then it might be a good thing. He would see Olivia through other eyes, and he would know through his own whether her presence, hovering on the edge of his dreams, was something more than fancy.

  “So be it,” he replied. He had infused his voice with gaiety to which Darya did not respond. Instead his face was grave while his eyes sparkled dangerously bright.

  “What is your father’s idea in regard to my country?” he demanded suddenly.

  Their eyes met and David drew upon his will not to turn his away first. He was astonished to see that Darya was angry.

  “I shall ask my father to explain it to you,” he said, still gazing quietly into Darya’s eyes. “I fear I have been clumsy.”

  Darya rose. “It is time to dress, in any event. Therefore I will wait.”

  They parted for the time, and David waited until dinner was over and the coffee was served as usual in the library. Then he attacked his father with courage.

  “Darya has asked to meet Miss Dessard, Father, and I have promised to introduce him. But first he wants to know about the memorial. I think if my father tells you, Darya, you will grasp it as he conceives it.”

  MacArd put down his cup. “The memorial to my dear wife is to be a school of applied Christianity. That is, it will train young men to be Christian in the highest and most practical sense. They will go into all the world and preach the gospel. Take your own country, as an example. I felt there the lack of a dynamic, an energy, a purpose. Your people are slack, they are listless, they allow circumstances to overcome them. A real religion, a vital faith in the true God, will inspire them to better themselves.”

  Darya listened to this, his eyes glittering again. “Is there more truth in your god than in ours?” he inquired with dangerous quiet.

  MacArd faced him with massive power in his look. “Your temples are full of superstitious litter,” he said bluntly. “Your people are confused by the legends of ancient history. A clean wind, a sweeping change, will give you fresh strength. I believe that our own prosperity proves the validity of our religion. God has been with us.”

  “I grant you the right to believe in your own religion,” Darya said in the same intense quiet. “I have sometimes even thought that I, too, would like to be a Christian if I could become one without giving up my own religion.”

  “That,” MacArd said decisively, “would be impossible. When a man becomes a Christian, he must forsake all other gods, and believe only in the One.”

  “Thus you exclude most of the world,” Darya said.

  “Not at all,” MacArd retorted. “Any man can repent and accept the Christian faith.”

  “You remind me of a certain American millionaire whose name I will not speak, because you know it well, Mr. MacArd. He says he does not believe in competition but in cooperation. Therefore he proceeds to absorb into his own business the livelihood of other men, especially those in smaller corporations than his own. They co-operate by becoming his property—a trust, I believe it is strangely called.”

  MacArd was hurt. “I assure you I have no purpose except to benefit your people. I see my own country rich and prosperous, the people well-fed and happy. I see your country poor and the people wretched. I am compelled to deduce reasons for this difference.”

  “Can it be because your people are free and mine are not?” Darya suggested, glints of light playing in his eyes.

  “In spite of the benefits of Empire,” MacArd said, not comprehending, “your people continue in this poor state. Therefore they must be taught to help themselves. For this I say they need a new faith, an inspired and inspiring religion, which I did not find, young man, although I went into many temples.” These last words he spoke very sternly indeed and David was alarmed.

  Darya rose, a guest too courteous to quarrel with his elder and his host. “I shall be interested to see the memorial,” he said. “And now will you excuse me, sir, if I say I have some letters to write? David has been giving me such a good time that I have not yet written to my brothers.”

  He bowed to MacArd, smiled at David and walked gracefully from the room, shutting the door soundlessly after him.

  David did not speak. MacArd poured himself another cup of coffee. “A well-educated young man but still a heathen,” he said drily.

  David did not reply to this. Instead he said,

  “I never heard you say the things you have just said, Father. I didn’t know you could.”

  “Nor I,” his father replied. He drank the coffee and put down the cup and looked at his son with humorous eyes in which there was also something of apology. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m no theologian. But I guess that young Indian sitting so smug and rich, while I know the condition his country is in, just roused the American in me, and mixed up with that is my father’s old-fashioned religion. Maybe it was good, after all. I know it scared me enough to keep me out of a lot of tomfoolery when I was growing up. I never could be sure he wasn’t right about hellfire, and I didn’t dare take the chance. I guess I still don’t dare.”

  He leaned forward on his elbows and his voice quieted. “Son, do you know what your mother really believed? There were so many things I never asked her. I always thought we’d have a lot of time together when we got old.”

  A humble yearning crept over his big face, he was embarrassed and tried to smile and felt his lips too stiff for it, and he waited, his thick reddish eyebrows hanging far over his sad grey eyes.

  “I never asked her, either, Father,” David replied. It was repulsive to see his father soft and actually quivering with inexplicable anxiety. Then, seeing his shadowed eyes, he felt sorry for him, growing old alone, and pity illumined his understanding. He had a momentary vision of what it might mean to a man to lose a woman like his mother while love was still alive between them. Out of his pity he spoke, “But I know that she believed in the things Dr. Barton talks about—in immortality, for instance.”

  “You think so!” his father exclaimed. “Well, that relieves my mind. I’ve been worrying about things, putting so much money into the memorial when maybe she—”

  David did not reply and they sat in silence, neither knowing what to say, for MacArd would not face the possibility that his son agreed with the Indian. When he did speak it was to say mildly, “I shall be glad if you will go up there and see h
ow things are getting on. I am very much engaged now.”

  “I wish I could be more useful to you, Father,” David said when he paused.

  “No one can help me,” MacArd replied. “The country itself is on skids. Unless someone with common sense comes along we are headed for ruin. One of these days our creditors in Europe and even in Asia are going to get scared and insist on being paid in gold, and we haven’t enough gold in the national treasury to meet our debts, that is the plain truth of it. If the Silverites win the battle and we go into bimetallism, we’re done for. If only I could find some fellow, a chemist, who could work gold out of low grade ore—”

  David listened without understanding. He was ashamed to confess to his father that all his years of school had not prepared him to comprehend what he meant by bimetallism. He had been an exceptional Greek scholar, and he had taken high honors in English literature and philosophy, but he had no notion of what the threat in his father’s words could mean, even though it might reach disastrously into his own life, and he shrank from knowing. Life was beautiful and graceful as it was, touched with sadness, to be sure, since his mother died, but beauty must contain sadness, and Shelley and Keats and Browning had so taught him.

  “If I can ever be of real use to you, Father,” he said, “you have only to let me know.” He hesitated a moment, “I suppose I ought to go upstairs now.”