The Return of the Prodigal Part 62

As if to show how little he cared he left off working hard and bestirred himself for news of Frida Tancred.

It came at last--from Poona of all places. Frida wrote in high spirits and at length. "I like writing to you," she said, "because I can say what I like, because you always know--you've been there.

Where? Oh, everywhere where I've been, except Whithorn-in-Arden.

And, now I come to think of it, you were there, too--for a fortnight" ("three weeks--three long weeks--and for your sake, Frida!"). "No, I'm not 'coming home.' Why _must_ I 'stop somewhere'?

I can't stop, didn't I tell you? I can only strike down where it's deepest.

"It seems to be pretty deep here. If I could only understand these people--but what European can? They mean something we don't mean....

You should see my Muns.h.i.+, a terrifically high-caste fellow with a diminutive figure and unfathomable eyes. I am trying to learn Sanscrit. He is trying to teach me. We sit opposite each other at a bamboo table with an immense Sanscrit dictionary between us. He smiles in his sleeve at my attempt to bridge the gulf between Europe and Asia with a Sanscrit dictionary. He is always smiling at me in his sleeve. I know it, and he knows that I know it, which endears me to him very much.

"My Muns.h.i.+ is a bottomless well of Western wisdom. He takes anything that Europe can give him--art, literature, science, metaphysics. He absorbs it all, and Heaven only knows what he is going to do with it, or it with him. He swallows it as a juggler swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of a.s.similating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters--neither will nor conscience, nor pain nor pa.s.sion, nor man nor woman, nor life nor death. There's an att.i.tude for you!

"That att.i.tude is my Muns.h.i.+, and my Muns.h.i.+ is Asia."

He smiled. He had seen Frida in many att.i.tudes, Frida in love with nothing, Frida in love with a person, Frida in love with a thing.

Here was Frida in love with an idea. It was just like her. She was seeing Asia from the Asiatic point of view.

"Meanwhile," she went on, "there's a greater gulf fixed between my Muns.h.i.+ and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my 'rickshaw coolie, or my Muns.h.i.+ and me."

He wondered if she meant to remind him that there was a still greater gulf between him and her.

"To-morrow I and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the coolie is merely a photographic freak--his grin is the broadest part of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met you, and your bad puns."

The snapshot was an unflattering likeness of Frida in a 'rickshaw.

The foreground was filled by the figure of the grinning coolie.

Behind him Frida's face showed dim and small and far-off; she was smiling with the sun in her eyes.

Such as it was he treasured it as his dearest possession. He had been painting pictures all his life, but he had none of Frida.

Silence again. "In the autumn," she had said, "I go down to Bombay."

But the autumn pa.s.sed and there was no news of her. Durant provided himself with an Indian outfit. He was going out to look for her; he was ready to go to the ends of the world to find her. "The day after to-morrow," he said, "I shall start for Bombay."

That night he dreamed of her; or, rather, not of her, but of a coolie who stood before the door of a wayside bungalow, and held in his hands shafts that were not the shafts of a 'rickshaw. And the coolie's face was all one broad grin.

Two days later--the day he was to have sailed for India--hurriedly skimming a column of the _Times_ he came upon the news he was looking for.

"It is with much regret that we record the death from bubonic plague of Miss Frida Tancred. It was quite recently that this lady gave up a large part of her fortune to founding the Bacteriological Laboratory in Bombay, more recently still that she distinguished herself by her services to the famine-stricken population of Gujerat. Miss Tancred has added to the immense debt our Indian Empire owes her by this final example of heroic self-sacrifice. It is said that she contracted plague while nursing one of her coolies, who has since recovered."

He bowed his head.

It was not grief he felt, but a savage exultant joy. The world could have no more of her. She was his, in some inviolable, irrevocable way. He knew. He understood her now, clearly and completely.

His joy deepened to a pa.s.sionless spiritual content; as if in the fulness of his knowledge he had embraced the immortal part of her.

Why had he not understood her long ago? She had never changed. As he had first seen her, playing cards with her father in the drawing-room at Coton Manor, as he had last seen her, pacing the deck of the _Windward_, intoxicated with her freedom, as he saw her now, bending her head over the plague-poisoned body of the coolie, she was the same tender, resolute, pa.s.sionate Frida, who ruined her life and glorified it, laid it down and took it up again at her will. And as he saw--would always see her, in this new light of her death, she was smiling, as if she defied him to see anything pathetic in it.

She had loved the world, the mystic maddening beauty of it, the divine darkness and glory of it. She had taken to her heart the rapture and the pain of it. She had stretched out her hands to the unexplored, to the unchanged and changing, the many-faced, incomprehensible, finite, infinite Whole.

And she had flung it all up; for what?

For a 'rickshaw coolie's life?--Or for something--yet--beyond?