Far to Seek Part 29

"Yes, I wrote at the time. He didn't answer. I haven't heard since."

She nodded. Sudden tears filled her eyes. "Always now ... no answer.

Like trying to speak with some one dead. So Grandfather fears he was not only studying art. You know how he is too quick to catch fire. And too easily, he might believe those men who spin words like spider's webs.

Also he was very sore losing his arm, by some small stupid chance; and there was bitterness for that trouble ... of Tara...."

Roy started. "Lord--was it _Tara_?" Instantly there flashed a vision of the walled lane leading to New College; Dyan's embittered mood and bewildering change of front.... Looking back now, the thing seemed glaringly obvious; but, through the opalescent mist of his own dreams, he had seen Dyan in one relation only. Just as well perhaps. Even at this distance, the idea amazed and angered him. Tara! The arrogance of it...!

"You didn't know--never thought?... Poor Dyan!" One finger-tip furtively intercepted a tear that was stealing down the side of her nose.

"I am _too_ silly just now," she apologised meekly. "To me, he only spoke of it long after, when coming wounded from France. Then I saw how the bitterness was still there, changing the n.o.ble thoughts of his heart. That is the trouble with Dyan. First--nothing good enough for England. But too fierce love may bring too fierce hate--if they poison his mind with cunning words dressed up in high talk of religion----"

"How long since you heard? Have you any address?" Roy dared not encourage her melting mood.

"Six months now." She stoically blinked back her tears. "Not any word.

Not any address, since he left Calcutta. Last week, I wrote, addressing to the office of a paper there, because once he said that editor gave him work. I told him all the pain in my heart. If that letter finds him--some answer _must_ come."

"Well, if it does, I promise you this much;--I'll unearth him--somehow, wherever he is----"

"Oh, Roy! I hoped--I knew----!" She clasped her hands to hide their tremor, and the look in her eyes came perilously near adoration.

Roy had spoken with the cool a.s.surance of his father's race, and without a glimmering idea how his rash promise was going to be fulfilled. "I'll do my level utmost, anyhow," he added more soberly. "But there's you--your home complications----"

She turned her hands outward with the expressive gesture of her race.

"That foolish sadness we _can_ push away. What matter for anything--now?

I rest--I breathe--I am here----!" Her smile shone out, sudden and brilliant. "Almost like England--this big green garden and children and sound of playing tennis. Let us be young again. Let us, for a small time, not remember that all outside is Jaipur and the desert--dusty and hot and cruel; and dark places full of secret and terrible things. Here we are safe. Here it is almost England!"

Her gallant appeal so moved him, and the lighter vein so charmingly became her, that Roy humoured her mood willingly enough....

When his tea arrived, she played hostess with an alluring mixture of shyness and happy importance, capping his lively sallies with the quick wit of old days. And when Suraj was announced--"Oh, please--may I see him?" she begged eagerly as a child.

Suraj graciously permitted his velvet nose to be stroked by alien fingers, light as rose petals. Then Roy sprang into the saddle; and Aruna stood watching him as he went--_sais_ and dog trotting to heel--a graceful lonely figure, shadowed by her semi-transparent parasol.

At a bend in the drive, where a sentry sprang to attention, he turned for a parting salute. Her answering gesture might or might not have been intended for him. She at least knew all about the need for being discreet. For, on leaving the tea-table, they had pa.s.sed from the dream of 'almost England' into the dusty actuality of Jaipur.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: Instantly.]

CHAPTER V.

"Broadly speaking, there are two blocks of people--East and West; people who interfere and people who don't interfere; ... East is a fatalist, West is an idealist, of a clumsy sort."--STACY AUMONIER.

A mile, or less, of tree-bordered road sloped gently from the Residency gate-posts to the walled City of Victory, backed by craggy, red-grey spurs of the Aravalli range, hidden almost in feathery heads of banyan, acacia, and neem--a dusty, well-ordered oasis, holding its own against the stealthy oncoming of the desert.

North and east ran the screen of low hills with their creeping lines of masonry; but from south and west the softly encroaching thing crept up to the city walls, in through the gates, powdering every twig and leaf and lattice with the fine white dust of death. Shadeless and colourless, to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the _ak_ plant and gaunt cactus bushes--their limbs petrified in weird gesticulation.

But on the road itself was a sufficiency of life and colour--parrokeets flas.h.i.+ng from tree to tree, like emeralds made visible and vocable; village women swathed in red and yellow veils; prancing Rajput cavaliers, straight from the Middle Ages; ox-carts and camels--unlimited camels, with flapping lip and scornful eye; a sluggish stream of life, rising out of the landscape and flowing, from dawn to dusk, through the seven Gates of Jaipur. And there, on the low spurs, beyond the walls, he sighted the famous Tiger Fort, and the marble tomb of Jai Sing--he that built the rose-red City; challenging the desert, as Canute the sea; saying, in terms of stone and mortar, 'Here shall thy proud waves be stayed!' Nearing the fortified gateway, Roy noted how every inch of flat surface was silkily powdered, every opening silted with sand. Would it rest with desert or city, he wondered, the ultimate victory of the last word...?

Close against the ramparts, sand and dust were blown into a deep drift; or was it a deserted pile of rags----? Suddenly, with a sick sensation, he saw the rags heave and stir. Arms emerged--if you could call them arms--belonging to pinched, shadowy faces. And from that human dust-heap came a quavering wail, "Maharaj! Maharaj!"

"What _is_ it, Bishun Singh?" he asked sharply of the _sais_, trotting at his stirrup.

"Only the famine, Hazur. Not a big trouble this year, they say. But from the villages these come crawling to the city, believing the Maharaj has plenty, and will give."

"Does he give?"

Bishun Singh's gesture seemed to deprecate undue curiosity. "The Maharaj is great, but the people are like flies. If their Karma is good, they find a few handfuls; if evil--they die."

Roy said no more. That simple statement was conclusive as a dropped stone. But, on reaching the gateway, he scattered a handful of loose corns.

Instantly a cry went up: "He gives money for food! _Jai dea Maharaj!_"[7] Not merely arms, but entire skeletons emerged, seething, scrambling, with hands wasted to mere claws. A few of the boldest caught at Roy's stirrup; whereat Bishun Singh brushed them off, as if they were flies indeed.

Unresisting, they tottered and fell one against another, like ninepins: and Roy, hating the man, turned sharply away. But rebuke was futile. One could _do_ nothing. It was that which galled him. One could only pa.s.s on; mentally brus.h.i.+ng them aside--like Bishun Singh.

Spectres vanished, however, once he and Suraj were absorbed into the human kaleidoscope of the vast main street, paved with wide strips of hewn stone; one half of it sun-flooded; one half in shadow. The colour and movement; the vista of pink-washed houses speckled with white florets; the gay muslins, the small turbans and inimitable swagger of the Rajput-Sun-descended, re-awakened in him those gleams of ancestral memory that had so vividly beset him at Chitor. Sights and sounds and smells--the pungent mingling of spices and dust and animals--a.s.sailed his senses with a vague yet poignant familiarity: fruit and corn-shops with their pyramids of yellow and red and ochre, and the fat brown bunnia in the midst; shops bright with bra.s.s-work and Jaipur enamel; lattice windows, low-browed arches, glimpses into shadowed courts; flitting figures of veiled women; humbler women, unveiled, winnowing grain, or crowned with baskets of sacred cow-dung, stepping like queens....

And the animals----! Extinct, almost, in modern machine-ridden cities, here they visibly and audibly prevailed. For Asia lives intimately--if not always mercifully--with her animals; and Roy's catholic affection embraced them all. Horses first--a long way first. But bullocks had their charm: the graceful trotting zebus, horns painted red and green.

And the ponderous swaying of elephants--sensitive creatures, nervous of their own bulk, resplendently caparisoned. And there--a flash of the jungle, among casual goats, fowls, and pariahs--went the royal cheetahs, led on slips; walking delicately, between scarlet peons, looking for all the world like amiable maiden ladies with blue-hooded caps tied under their chins. In the wake of their magnificence two distended donkeys, on parodies of legs, staggered under loads more distended still, plump dhobies perched callously on the cruppers. Above all, Roy's eye delighted in the jewelled sheen of peac.o.c.ks, rivalling in sanct.i.ty the real lords of Jaipur--s.h.i.+va's sacred bulls. Some milk-white and onyx-eyed, some black and insolent, they sauntered among the open shop fronts, levying toll and obstructing traffic--a.s.sured, arrogant, immune....

And, at stated intervals, like wrong notes in a succession of harmonies, there sprang wrought-iron gas-lamps fitted with electric bulbs!

So riding, he came to the heart of the city--a vast open s.p.a.ce, where the shops seemed brighter, the crowds gayer; and, by contrast, the human rag and bone heaps, beggars and cripples, more terrible to behold.

Here the first ray of actual recognition flashed through the haze of familiar sensations. For here architectural exuberance culminated in the vast bewildering facade of the Hall of the Winds and the Palace flaunting its royal standard--five colours blazoned on cloth of gold.

But it was not these that held Roy's gaze. It was the group of Brahmin temples, elaborately carven, rose-red from plinth to summit, rising through flights of crows and iridescent pigeons; their monolithic forms clean cut against the dusty haze; their shallow steps flanked with marble elephants, splashed with orange-yellow robes of holy men and groups of brightly-veiled women.

At sight of them Roy instinctively drew rein;--and there, in the midst of the s.h.i.+fting, drifting crowd, he sat motionless, letting the vision sink deep into his mind, while Terry investigated a promising smell, and Bishun Singh, wholly incurious, gossiped with a potter, from whose wheel emerged an endless succession of _chiraghs_--primitive clay lamps, with a lip for the cotton wick. His neighbour, with equal zest, was creating very ill-shapen clay animals, birds and fishes.

"Look, Hazur--for the Dewali," Bishun Singh thrust upon Roy's attention the one matter of real moment, just then, to all right-minded Hindus.

"Only two more weeks. So they are making lamps, without number, for houses and shops and the palace of the Maharaja. Very big tamasha, Hazur."

He enlarged volubly on the coming festival, to this Sahib, who took such unusual interest in the ways of India; while Roy sat silent, watching, remembering....

Nearly nineteen years ago he had seen the Dewali--Feast of Lights; had been driven, sitting on his mother's knee, through a fairy city outlined in tremulous points of flame, down to the sh.o.r.e of the Man Sagar Lake, where the lights quavered and ran together and the dead ruins came alive with them. All night they had seemed to flicker in his fanciful brain; and next morning-unable to think or talk of anything else--he had been moved to dictate his very first attempt at a poem....

Suddenly, sharply, there rose above the chatter of the crowd and the tireless clamour of crows, a scream of mingled rage and anguish that tore at his nerves and sent a chill down his spine.

Swinging round in the saddle, he saw a spectral figure of a woman--detached from a group of spectres, huddled ironically against bulging sacks of grain. One shrivelled arm was lifted in denunciation; the other pressed a shapeless bundle to her empty b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Obviously little more than a girl--yet with no trace of youth in her ravaged face--she stood erect, every bone visible, before the stall of a bangle-seller, fat and well liking, exuding rolls of flesh above his _dhoti_,[8] and enjoying his savoury chupattis hot and hot; entirely impervious to unseemly ravings; entirely occupied in pursuing trickles of _ghi_[9] with his agile tongue that none might be lost.

"That shameless one was begging a morsel of food," the toymaker explained conversationally. "Doubtless her stomach is empty. _Wah! Wah!_ But she has no pice. And a man's food is his own...."

As he spoke a milk-white bull ambled by, plundering at will; his privileged nose adventuring near and nearer to the savoury smell.

Promptly, with reverential eagerness, the man proffered half a fresh chupatti to the sacred intruder.