The Pool in the Desert Part 13

'What does that portend?' I said, thoughtfully.

'I don't know. Sir William was here yesterday simply swelling with his impression of it. He says it's the finest thing that has been done in India. I told you he would conquer them.'

'You did,' and without thinking I added, 'I hope you won't be sorry that you asked him to.' It must have been an inspiration.

Armour, those weeks before the exhibition, seemed invisible. Dora reported him torn with the incapacity of the bazaar frame-maker to follow a design, and otherwise excessively occupied, and there was no lack of demands upon my own time. Besides, my ardour to be of a.s.sistance to the young man found a slight damper in the fact that he was staying with Sir William Lamb. What competence had I to be of use to the guest of Sir William Lamb?

'I do not for a moment think he will be there,' said Dora, on the day of the private view as we went along the Mall towards the Town Hall together. 'He will not run with an open mouth to his success. He will take it from us later.'

But he was there. We entered precisely at the dramatic moment of his presentation by Sir William Lamb to the Viceroy. He stood embarra.s.sed and smiling in a little circle of compliments and congratulation. Behind him and a little to the left hung his picture, large and predominant, and in the corner of the frame was stuck the red ticket that signified the Viceroy's gold medal. We saw that, I think, before we saw anything else. Then with as little haste as was decent, considering His Excellency's proximity, we walked within range of the picture.

I am not particularly pleased, even now, to have the task of describing the thing. Its subject was an old Mahomedan priest with a green turban and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers. I heard myself saying to Dora that it was very well painted indeed, very conscientiously painted, and that is certainly what struck me. The expression of the fire-eater's face was extremely characteristic; his arm was flung out with a gesture that perfectly matched. The group of listeners was carefully composed and most 'naturally'; that is the only word that would come to me.

I glanced almost timidly at Dora. She was regarding it with a deep vertical line between her handsome brows.

'What--on earth--has he done with himself?' she demanded, but before I could reply Armour was by our side.

'Well?' he said, looking at Dora.

'It--it's very nice,' she stammered, 'but I miss YOU.'

'She only means, you know,' I rushed in, 'that you've put in everything that was never there before. Accuracy of detail, you know, and so forth.

'Pon my word, there's some drawing in that!'

'No,' said Dora, calmly, 'what I complain of is that he has left out everything that was there before. But he has won the gold medal, and I congratulate him.'

'Well,' I said, uneasily, 'don't congratulate me. I didn't do it.

Positively I am not to blame.'

'His Excellency says that it reminds him of an incident in one of Mrs.

Steel's novels,' said Armour, just turning his head to ascertain His Excellency's whereabouts.

'Dear me, so it does,' I exclaimed, eagerly, 'one couldn't name the chapter--it's the general feeling.' I went on to discourse of the general feeling. Words came generously, questions with point, comments with intelligence. I swamped the situation and so carried it off.

'The Viceroy has bought the thing,' Armour went on, looking at Dora, 'and has commissioned me to paint another. The only restriction he makes is--'

'That it shall be of the same size?' asked Dora.

'That it must deal with some phase of native life.'

Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her eyes fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was steady, but perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck into the stream of my volubility.

'I am delighted,' she said, pleasantly, to Armour. 'You have done exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy's medal, and all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn't it--for you--a little difficult?'

He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it from his lips; but the occasion was not one, of course, for crying out.

'Oh no,' he said, putting on an excellent face. 'But it took a hideous time.'

Chapter 2.X.

Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I had arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most honest impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of departure, but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay, and that in order to effect his final s.h.i.+pment to other sh.o.r.es I should be compelled to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta.

The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the subst.i.tution of something rather more up to date. It remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea. I remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.

I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an hour my brain revolved with little else. The billet was an excellent one, with very decent pay and charming quarters. It carried a pension, it was the completest sort of provision. There was a long vacation, with opportunities for original effort, and I had heard Fry call the work interesting. Fry was the kind of man to be interested in anything that gave him a living, but there was no reason why a more captious spirit, in view of the great advantages, should not accommodate itself to the routine that might present itself. The post was in the gift of the Government of Bengal, but that was no reason why the Government of Bengal should not be grateful in the difficulty of making a choice for a hint from us. The difficulty was really great. They would have to write home and advertise in the 'Athenaeum'--for some reason Indian Governments always advertise educational appointments in the 'Athenaeum'; it is a habit which dates from the days of John Company--and that would mean delay. And then the result might be a disappointment. Might Armour not also be a disappointment? That I really could not say. A new man is always a speculation, and departments, like individuals, have got to take their luck.

The Viceroy was so delighted--everybody was so delighted--with the medal picture that the merest breath blown among them would secure Armour's nomination. Should I blow that breath? These happy thoughts must always occur to somebody. This one had occurred to me. Ten to one it would occur to n.o.body else, and last of all to Armour himself. The advertis.e.m.e.nt might already be on its way home to the 'Athenaeum'.

It would make everything possible. It would throw a very different complexion over the idyll. It would turn that interlacing wreath of laurels and of poppies into the strongest bond in the world.

I would simply have nothing to do with it.

But there was no harm I asking Armour to dine with me; I sent the note off by messenger after breakfast and told the steward to put a magnum of Pommery to cool at seven precisely. I had some idea, I suppose, of drinking with Armour to his eternal discomfiture. Then I went to the office with a mind cleared of responsibility and comfortably pervaded with the glow of good intentions.

The moment I saw the young man, punctual and immediate and a little uncomfortable about the cuffs, I regretted not having asked one or two more fellows. It might have spoiled the occasion, but it would have saved the situation. That single glance of my accustomed eye--alas!

that it was so well accustomed--revealed him anxious and screwed up, as nervous as a cat, but determined, revealed--how well I knew the signs!--that he had something confidential and important and highly personal to communicate, a matter in which I could, if I only would, be of the greatest possible a.s.sistance. From these appearances twenty years had taught me to fly to any burrow, but your dinner-table offers no retreat; you are hoist, so to speak, on your own carving-fork. There are men, of course, and even women, who have scruples about taking advantage of so intimate and unguarded an opportunity, but Armour, I rapidly decided, was not one of these. His sophistication was progressing, but it had not reached that point. He wanted something--I flew instantly to the mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The application was impossible, but applications nearly always were impossible. n.o.body knew that better than the Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department.

I squared my shoulders and we got through the soup. It was necessary to apologize for the fish. 'I suppose one must remember,' I said, 'that it has to climb six thousand feet,' when suddenly he burst out.

'Sir William Lamb tells me,' he said, and stopped to swallow some wine, 'that there is something very good going in Calcutta and that I should ask you to help me to get it. May I?'

So the miserable idea--the happy thought--had occurred to somebody else.

'Is there?' I said, with interest and attention.

'It's something in the School of Art. A man named Fry has died.'

'Ah!' I said, 'a man named Fry. He, I think was Director of that inst.i.tution.' I looked at Armour in the considering, measuring way with which we suggest to candidates for posts that their fitness to fill them is not to be absolutely taken for granted. 'Fry was a man of fifty-six,'

I said.

'I am thirty.' He certainly did not look it, but years often fall lightly upon a temperament.

'It's a vile climate.'

'I know. Is it too vile, do you think,' he said anxiously, 'to ask a lady to share?'

'Lots of ladies do share it,' I replied, with amazing calmness; 'but I must decline absolutely to enter into that.'

My frown was so forbidding that he couldn't and didn't dare to go on.

He looked dashed and disappointed; he was really a fool of an applicant, quite ready to retire from the siege on the first intimation that the gates were not to be thrown open at his approach.

'Do you think you would like teaching?' I asked.

'I can teach. Miss--my only pupil here has made capital progress.'