Pilate screeched, she gave a start and turned her head. “How long have you stood there watching me?” she demanded.
“Only a moment, I swear,” he said laughing. He came near to her and stood looking down upon her. “I wouldn’t have missed the sight for a world.” Her face was upturned to him, her eyes huge and reproachful. “Do you mind?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I thought I was alone.”
“It isn’t wicked to eat a grape,” he teased.
“I thought I was alone,” she repeated.
He divined a small anger in her, and he tried to dispel it, wanting no clouds upon this cloudless day. “Shall I help you? There are far more grapes here than you can ever pick in a day.”
“You have on your fine clothes,” she said, giving him a quick glance, up and down.
“I don’t care for clothes.” He stood beside her and spread searching fingers among the vines.
“The best ones grow underneath,” she directed.
“May I eat the biggest ones?” he asked.
“Only one every five minutes,” she said.
He met her eyes and rejoiced to see them only mischievous.
“Is your Indian friend gone?” she asked suddenly.
“Yes,” David said briefly. He did not want to talk about Darya.
“Will he come again?” she demanded.
“Not soon,” he said, and then impelled by some hidden motive he went on. “It is more likely that I shall visit him in India.”
“When?” she demanded.
“Not soon,” he said again.
They picked the fruit in silence for a few minutes.
“You pick ten times as fast as I do,” he said.
“I daresay this is the first time you have ever picked grapes,” she replied.
“It is,” he confessed. “I scarcely knew how they grew.”
“I thought so.”
“Is that despicable?” he asked.
“It depends on what else you can do,” she said.
“Not much, I am afraid,” he confessed and then he went on, urging the opportunity. “I am one of those men who need an inspiration before I work.”
He stopped to turn his head toward her but she went on picking.
“Olivia!”
She looked up at him, very grave.
“Olivia, I came here today to see you, only you.”
She did not reply or move, and he looked deep into the dark eyes under the black and finely etched brows.
“We haven’t known each other very long,” he faltered, “but long enough for me to know I—love you!” His breath forsook him and the last words were a whisper.
Her answer was instant and composed. “Oh David, I’m so sorry!”
He heard the words from afar off and her voice rang in his ears like the toll of a bell.
“Sorry?” he repeated, half stupidly.
“Oh, so sorry,” she said remorsefully, “I didn’t know, David, not until just now, a few minutes ago. I wouldn’t have let you go so far if I had known. I’d have stopped you at the very beginning.”
He could not speak a word, he could not make a sound. He stood still, looking down upon her grieving face.
“You haven’t loved me very long, I’m sure of that, and so it can’t be deep. You’ll get over it quickly.”
“It is deep!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I have never loved anybody before, I never will again.”
“Oh don’t say that, David!”
“Why can’t you love me?” he demanded.
She let her eyelids flutter downward and saw his clenched fists. “I ought to be able to love you,” she said in a small voice. “Almost any girl would. But I can’t.”
“I ask you why,” he insisted.
She threw out her hands and let them fall in a wide and graceful gesture. “How can I tell? Maybe because you’re not strong enough. I don’t want to be the strong one. I want to look up to a man.”
“And you can’t look up to me,” he said in a dreadful voice. She was looking up at him, nevertheless, her eyes dark and pleading.
“I can’t,” she said in sorrow. “You’re just MacArd’s son, aren’t you? The great MacArd!”
He looked down upon her upturned face and felt bitterness acrid in his breast, dry upon his tongue. Then to his horror he felt that he must weep and he turned and walked quickly away. After such words he could not, must not weep. He hurried from the house, and down the little path to the river, and in a hidden spot he threw himself upon a bed of dying ferns. Among their curling fronds and fresh green, he buried his face and wept, it seemed to him for hours, and then weeping turned into prayer, the first real prayer of his life. “Oh God, what am I going to do? What use am I now?”
The words burst from his wounded heart, he heard them as though they were spoken by someone else, a voice other than his own, and under the awful cry, he trembled. Was there no answer? He did not hear a reply. The sounds of the wood he could hear, the crackle of twigs, the flutter of leaves in the breeze, the distant call of a quail. The sun beat down upon him in the stillness and he lay there with his eyes closed, the smell of the warm earth in his nostrils mingled with the scent of crushed fern. Then slowly he felt a strange quiet steal over him. He began to think.
Darya had come between him and Olivia. Had she not seen him in his strange Indian beauty, his dark brilliance, she might have spoken differently, for she would not have known that such a man existed. It was not mere charm. He could not accuse Darya of wilfully casting that net over Olivia. No, Darya had simply been himself, though inspired, perhaps, by the directness of her eyes and the fearlessness of her mind. She, too, had her charm over him, doubtless, accustomed as he was to the shy silence of Indian women in his presence.
He sat up suddenly, and wrapped his arms about his knees and stared out over the glittering river. She had said that she must be able to look up to him, and she said it because she had seen Darya. How rash he had been to propose to her so abruptly this morning, without waiting to discover her feelings! He felt himself a boy humbly young and yet wounded, wanting in wisdom, foolishly impetuous. He had gone to her and asked for her love as though it were a toy or a sweet instead of his whole life.
In the midst of the bright morning he was overwhelmed with gloom and bewilderment. Vague aches pervaded even his body, he was shot through with little lightnings of pain. He thought with anguish of his dead mother, to whom had she been alive he would have turned for comfort and laughter.
“Silly—” he could hear her tender voice always underlaid with laughter—“if she wants to look up to you, why don’t you start climbing?”
He bowed his head on his knees and closed his eyes that he might hear that clear voice he remembered. It was exactly as though she had spoken to him. Perhaps she had, perhaps it was the only way she could reach him, now, through his memory of her voice and his imagination of what she would say, were she here.
All his being melted, and from the fusion a pure desire distilled and shaped itself through longing into prayer.
“Oh God,” for now there must be God, “tell me how to begin.”
He felt his heart quiver in his breast. He dared invite such leadership only if he dared to follow. He sat motionless above the cliff. The air was still and hot and the sun blazed upon him. Far off he heard the scream of a hawk whirling into the sky. He waited, his mind empty, his consciousness stayed, and suddenly he saw India, a crowded street. Dark faces turned toward him, startled and surprised, as though they had been summoned against their will.
He was frightened at their clarity and he lifted his head and saw only the river, the blue shores beyond, and the soaring hawk. What did it mean that he had seen India here except that he had asked direction and had been given answer? He had stepped over the divide between this visible world and beyond, and the way had been made plain. The prospect was too vast to comprehend and he tried to encompass it in the words of his age. He thought of ded
ication, consecration, mission, and the passionate words were wine to his soul. No one needed him here, but in India the human need was boundless. He did not know what he would do there but God—he spoke the name with new reverence—God would show him. This, he supposed, was what it meant to be born again. As naturally and unexpectedly as his first birth from his mother’s body, rebirth had come. What had been his world ceased. He had been driven out of it first by his mother’s death and now by Olivia’s refusal and in his helplessness a new life was revealed. He drew his breath deeply and got to his feet.
“When did you get this notion?” MacArd said harshly.
He had seen for several days that his son was silent and absent-minded and tonight at the dinner table the boy had scarcely touched his food. Then here in the library after dinner he had blurted out that he wanted to go to India as a missionary.
“It is not a notion, it is a conviction,” David said.
MacArd lifted his shaggy head and caught Leila’s eyes looking down upon them from her portrait above the mantelpiece. He looked away from her. “You can just get over it. I’m building MacArd Memorial, but not for my only son. Who’s to take over after me?”
“I intend to live my own life, under divine direction,” David said.
A man could not be rough with his only son. MacArd had learned that long ago when once he had whipped David for disobedience and he then had gone into convulsions of crying. Leila had flown at him, she had sobbed and declared that she would leave his house if he ever whipped their son again. Well, he had never whipped him again, nor could he now. He flung out his arms. “A fine joke on me! A fine, nice joke! I spread a net and caught my own son! I gambled on God and my son is the stakes and I’ve lost! Ha!”
He snorted and sighed and descended to self-pity.
“Look, son, I’m getting old. Can’t you just stay with me for a few years longer?”
“I have decided, Father,” David said.
MacArd got to his feet and stamped about the room, weaving his way around the vast table and between the heavy chairs of English oak.
“I guess I’ve wasted a lot of money building that memorial. I’d have given up the whole business if I’d thought it would give you the idea you were going to leave me. That miserable country! What would your mother say to me if I let you go? Snakes, heathen, filth—well, there’s plenty of other men to go. Not my son! I’ll set fire to the memorial and let India go to hell. Can’t be worse than the way it is over there, anyway.”
David did not reply, and MacArd after a moment stole a look at him sidewise from under his rough brows. His son was sitting quietly watching him, exactly as Leila used to do when he rampaged about something before her. The resemblance tore at his heart and he collapsed into a chair. He sank his head upon his chest.
“All right, all right,” he grunted. “I don’t count. I know that. I give up. But you’ve spoiled any pleasure I can take in the memorial. I’d finish it but I won’t take any joy in it. You’ve ruined it for me.”
“I must do what I think is right,” his son said.
“Then I’ll turn the memorial into a factory!” MacArd shouted.
They glared at each other, father and son, and neither moved.
Part II
V
THE SUN WAS CREEPING up beyond the grey ghats and over the walls and cupolas of Poona, above the minarets and through the white colonnades and tall green palms. The streets were already astir, the bullock carts creaked and water carriers splashed the dust with small liquid spheres that rolled along like dark quicksilver.
In his bare quiet study in the mission house David sat with his teacher. This part of his work he enjoyed, the early hours of thoughtful pondering over the lacelike script of Marathi text. At first it had seemed impossible to decipher one symbol from the other but slowly he was able to read and the graceful design was beginning to be a language. He had begun by studying Sanskrit, at Darya’s suggestion. The roots of Indian thought were to be found in the ancient Sanskrit texts, Darya said, but David had discovered in them amazing parallels to Christian thought. Upon the whitewashed wall, opposite the table at which he now sat, he had a text that he had carefully copied upon heavy cream-colored paper, a prayer from the earliest scriptures of Hinduism.
From the unreal lead me to the real.
From the darkness lead me to light.
From death lead me to immortality.
His teacher was a tall ascetic Marathi, who was not a Christian. He sat immobile upon a low bamboo chair, wearing garments of cotton cloth, a hatlike turban on his head, his legs apart, his feet turned out and his dark hands resting exactly upon his white-clad knees. His wrinkled face was grave, his little black eyes were narrowed as he listened.
David looked up from a long passage he had been reading aloud from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, translated into Marathi. He smiled faintly at the dark attentive face.
“Forgive me that I read so long from the scriptures of my own religion.”
The Marathi shook his head. “And why should you say this, Sahib?” he replied. “It is a religion, it is good, you do not demand that I eat your bread and drink your wine, and while I listen I can fix my mind yonder.”
He nodded toward the Sanskrit prayer, framed upon the wall.
“All religions are good,” he declared.
At what point, David inquired of himself, should he challenge this frequent declaration, to which he had thus far replied only with silence? Silence implied acceptance, and he could not and must not accept the easy Indian attitude toward all religions. Any religion was better than none, so far he could agree with the Marathi teacher, but he longed to explain to this kind and proud man that the fruits of western Christianity were surely better than others. He had become convinced of it during this year in India, although when he left home, last year, he would have denied it because it was what his father said.
They had remained unreconciled, although as his duty and because his mother was dead he wrote to his father twice a month and received in return a monthly letter. But in spirit they were far apart. For his father had persisted in his monstrous wrath, and he had made the place he had planned as a memorial into a factory. Instead of young men learning of God, men and women, ignorant and uncouth, crowded into the big rooms at machines and made precision instruments for the MacArd industries. At the foot of the hill along the railroad hundreds of small houses were built, and there was a railroad stop for shipping. Dr. Barton, bitterly disappointed, had ignored the whole change after two stormy hours of argument with MacArd himself. The climax had come, as he told David, when with courage given him, he believed, from God, he had told the old tycoon the truth.
“You thought you were serving God by building a monument, Mr. MacArd. When He asked not for a monument but for your son, you grew angry. Do you think even you can be angry with God, Mr. MacArd?”
To which MacArd had replied, his eyebrows and beard bristling red, “I always make my own terms, Barton, and I’ll do it with God himself—if there is a God!”
For whatever impulse toward religion had risen in his father’s heart after his mother’s death, David knew had died down. Stony soil, perhaps, wherein the seed could not grow! He himself refused to feel guilty, or to believe that had he obeyed his father the seed would have grown. Sooner or later the MacArd Memorial would have become something else, anyway, if not a factory then some sort of a tool for the MacArd interests.
And as he had separated himself from his father his own growth had been hastened—that, too, he knew. The powerful shadow was thousands of miles away, and he was honest enough to wonder sometimes if his call to India, which had seemed to come so simply and clearly from God that day on the hillside above the Hudson River, had been partly because even then he wanted to go far away. If so, the call was no less valid, for God worked in mysterious ways. His faith had grown deeper while it became more reasonable, and the very atmosphere of India made faith reasonable. Religion was vital in the air, and
sometimes, he thought, the only vitality. His task and his challenge was to make his own religion the most vital of all.
Meanwhile, life was pleasant. The mission house was large and cool, and white-clad servants flitted through the shadows of the drawn bamboo curtains, bringing hot tea and small English sweet biscuits just at the hours when he began to feel fatigue. There was even an English society and the Governor gave parties to which he was always invited, and there was English service on Sunday in the Cathedral. His senior missionary, Robert Fordham, did not encourage his joining too often in the festivities of the English people in Poona, but it was necessary to remain on good terms with the Governor, for sometimes favors must be asked. Missionaries must be loyal to Government, Mr. Fordham said solemnly, for only the protection of Empire made it possible for them to come and go as they wished about the countryside. Indeed, Robert Fordham often disagreed with young and rebellious Indians when they complained that India should be free, and at times he rebuked them with real severity, declaring that India was infinitely better off under the British than it had been when it was torn between the regional rulers who in the old days had oppressed the people while they destroyed each other with Oriental savagery.
It was true, David supposed, and yet something in the dark and passionate eyes of young Indians made him doubt the wisdom of the older missionary, under whose direction he was.
The morning hours passed, the sun rose high, and the compound which had looked so cool and green in the early morning, now glistened with heat.
He was aware suddenly of being hungry and he closed the book. “I must not keep you beyond your hour,” he said to his teacher. “I forget how the time passes.”
“For me time is nothing,” the Marathi replied. “I have sat here watching you. You do not tell me what your thoughts are.”
David gave his ready smile. “They are scarcely thoughts, not worth telling. I put off real thinking, perhaps because I do not know yet what I ought to think. I feel I know India less and not more as time goes on.”
The Marathi laughed. “When you can think in our language, you will know us. Give yourself another year.”
Come, My Beloved Page 11
