_ PHASE V. A STAR IN DARKNESS
CHAPTER I
"Thou art with life
Too closely woven, nerve with nerve intwined;
Service still craving service, love for love ...
Nor yet thy human task is done."
--R.L.S.
In the verandah of Narkhanda dak bungalow Roy lay alone, languidly at ease, assisted by rugs and pillows and a Madeira cane lounge at an invalid angle; walls and arches splashed with sunshine; and a table beside him littered with convalescent accessories. There were home papers; there were books; there was fruit and a syphon, cut lemons and crushed ice--everything thoughtfulness could suggest set within easy reach. But the nameless depression of convalescence hung heavy on his spirit and his limbs.
He was thirsty; he was lonely; he was mentally hungry in a negative kind of way. Yet it simply did not seem worth the trivial effort of will to decide whether he wanted to pick up a book or an orange or to press the syphon handle. So he lay there, inert, impassive, staring across the valley at the snows--peak beyond soaring peak, ethereal in the level light.
The beauty of them, the pellucid clearness and stillness of early evening, stirred no answering echo within him. His brain was travelling back over a timeless interval; wandering uncertainly among sensations, apparitions, and dreams, presumably of semi-delirium: for Lance was in them and his mother and Rose and Dyan, saying and doing impossible things....
And in clearer intervals, there hovered the bearded face of Azim Khan, pressing upon his refractory Sahib this infallible medicine, that 'chikken brath' or jelly. And occasionally there was another bearded face: vaguely familiar, though he could not put a name to it.
Between them the two had brought out a doctor from Simla. He remembered a sharp altercation over that. He wanted no confounded doctor messing round. But Azim Khan, for love of his master, had flatly defied orders: and the forbidden doctor had appeared--involving further exhausting argument. For on no account would Roy be moved back to Simla. Azim Khan understood his ways and his needs. He was damned if he would have any one else near him.
And this time he had prevailed. For the doctor, who happened to be a wise man, knew when acquiescence was medically sounder than insistence. There had, however, been a brief intrusion of a strange woman, in cap and apron, who had made a nuisance of herself over food and washing, and was infernally in the way. When the fever abated, she melted into the landscape; and Roy had just enough of his old spirit left in him to murmur, '
Shahbash!' in a husky voice: and Azim Khan, inflated with pride, became more autocratic than ever.
The other bearded face had resolved itself into the Delhi Sikh, Jiwan Singh. He had been on a tramp among the Hills, combating insidious Home-Rule fairy-tales among the villagers: and finding the Sahib very ill, had stayed on to help.
This morning they had told him it was the third of June:--barely three weeks since that strange, poignant parting with Rose. Not seven weeks since the infinitely more poignant and terrible parting with Lance. Yet, as his mind stirred unwillingly, picking up threads, he seemed to be looking back across a measureless gulf into another life....
"The Sahib has slept? His countenance has been more favourable since these few days?"
It was the voice of Jiwan Singh; and the man himself followed it--taut and wiry, instinct with a degree of energy and purpose almost irritating to one who was feeling emptied of both; aimless as a jelly-fish stranded by the tide.
"Not smoking,
Hazur? Has that scoundrel Azim Khan forgotten the cigarettes?"
Roy unearthed his case, and held it up, smiling.
"The scoundrel forgets nothing," said he, knowing very well how the two of them had vied with one another in forestalling his needs. "Sit down, my friend--and tell me news. I am too lazy to read." He touched an unopened 'Civil and Military Gazette.' "Too lazy even to cast out the devil of laziness. But very ready to listen. Are things all quiet now? Any more tamashas?"
"Only a very little one across the frontier," said the Sikh with his grim smile: and proceeded to explain that the Indian Government had lately become entangled in a sort of a war with Afghanistan; a rather '
kutcha bandobast'[37] in Jiwan Singh's estimation; and not quite up to time; but a war, for all that.
"You mean----" asked Roy, his numbed interest faintly astir, "that it was to have been part of the same game as the trouble down there?"
"God has given me ears--and wits,
Hazur," was the cautious answer. "
That would be
pukka bundobast,[38] for war and trouble to come at one stroke in the hot season, when so many of the white soldier-
log are in the Hills. Does your Honour suppose that merely by
chance the Amir read in his paper of riots in India, and said in his heart, 'Wah! Now is the time for lighting little fires along the Border'?"
"N-no--I don't suppose----"
"Does your Honour suppose Hindus and Moslems--outside a highly educated few--are truly falling on each other's necks, without one thought of political motive?"
"No, my friend--I do not suppose."
"Yet these things are said openly among our people: and too few, now, have courage to speak their thought. For it is the loyal who suffer--
shurrum ki bhat![39] Is it surprising,
Hazur, if we, who distrust this new madness, begin to ask ourselves, 'Has the British Raj lost the will--or the power--of former days to protect friends and smite enemies'? If the noisy few clamouring for
Swaraj make India once more a battlefield,
your people can go. We Sikhs must remain, with Pathans and Afghans--as of old--hammering at our doors----"
At sight of the young Englishman's pained frown, he checked his expansive mood. "To the Sahib I can freely speak the thoughts of my heart; but this is not talk to make a sick man well. God is merciful. Before all is lost--the British Raj may yet arise with power, as in the great days...."
But his talk, if unpalatable, was more tonic than he knew; because Roy's love for India went deeper than he knew. The justice of Jiwan Singh's reproach; the hint at tragic severance of the two countries mingled within him, waked him effectually from semi-torpor; and the process was as painful as the tingling renewal of life in a frozen limb. By timely courage, on the spot, the threat to India had been staved off: but it was there still--sinister, unsleeping, virtually unchecked.
'Scotched--not killed.' The voice of Lance sounded too clearly in Roy's brain; and the more intimate pain, deadened a little by illness, struck at his heart like a sword....
* * * * *
Within a week, care and feeding and inimitable air, straight from the snowfields, had made him, physically, a new man. Mentally, it had brought him face to face with actualities, and the staggering question, 'What next'?
At the back of his mind he had been dreading it, evading it, because it would force him to look deep into his own heart; and to make decisions, when the effort of making them was anathema, beclouded as he was by the depression that still brooded over him like a fog. The doctor had prescribed a tonic and a whiff of Simla frivolity; but Roy paid no heed. He knew his malady was mainly of the heart and the spirit. The true curative touch could only come from some arrowy shaft that would pierce to the core of one or the other.
This morning, by way of reasserting his normal self, he had risen very early with intent to walk out and spend the day at Baghi dak bungalow, ten miles on. Taking things easily, he believed it could be done. He would look through his manuscript; try and pick up threads. Suraj could follow later; and he would ride home over the pass in the cool of the evening.
He set out under a clear heaven, misted with the promise of heat: the air rather ominously still. But the thread of a path winding through the dimness and vastness of Narkhanda Forest was ice-cool with the breath of night. Pines, ilex, and deodars clung miraculously to a hillside of massive rock, that jutted above him at intervals--threatening, immense; and often, on the
khud side, dropped abruptly into nothingness. When the road curved outward, splashes of sunlight patterned it; and intermittent gaps revealed the flash of snow-peaks, incredibly serene and far.
Normally the scene--the desolate grandeur of it--would have intoxicated Roy. But the stranger he was carrying about with him, and called by his own name, reacted in quite another fashion to the shadowed majesty of looming rocks and forest aisles. The immensity of it dwarfed one mere suffering man to the dimensions of a pebble on the path. And the pebble had the advantage of insensibility. The stillness and chillness made him feel overwhelmingly alone. A sudden craving for Lance grew almost intolerable....
But Lance was gone. Paul, with his bride, had vanished from human ken; Rose, a shattered illusion, gone too. Better so--of course; though, intermittently, the man she had roused in him still ached for the sight and feel of her. She gave a distinct thrill to life: and, if he could not forgive her, neither could he instantly forget her.
Still less could he forget the significance of the shock she had dealt him on their day of parting. Patently she loved him, in her passionate, egotistical fashion--as he had never loved her; patently she had combated her shrinking in defiance of her mother: and yet...!
Rage as he might, his Rajput pride, and pride in his Rajput heritage, were wounded to the quick. If all English girls felt that way, he would see them further, before he would propose to another one, or 'confess' to his adored Mother, as if she were a family skeleton or a secret vice. Instantly there sprang the thought of Aruna--her adoration, her exalted passion; Aruna, whom he might have loved, yet was constrained to put aside because of his English heritage; only to find himself put aside by an English girl on account of his Indian blood. A pleasant predicament for a man who must needs marry in common duty to his father and himself.
And what of Tara? Was it possible...? Could that be the meaning of her final desperate, 'I
can't do it, Roy--even for you'! Was it conceivable--she who loved his mother to the point of worship? Still smarting from his recent rebuff, he simply could not tell. Thea and Lance loved her too; yet, in Lance especially, he had been aware of a tacit tendency to ignore the Indian connection.
The whole complication touched him too nearly, hurt and bewildered him too bitterly, for cool consideration. He only saw that which had been his pride converted into a reproach, a two-edged sword barring the way to marriage: and in the bitterness of his heart he found it hard to forgive his parents--mainly his father--for putting him in so cruel a position, with no word of warning to soften the blow.
Perhaps people felt differently in England. If so, India was no place for him. How blatantly juvenile--to his clouded, tormented brain--seemed his arrogant dreams of Oxford days! What could such as he do for her, in this time of tragic upheaval. And how could all the Indias he had seen--not to mention the many he had not seen--be jumbled together under that one misleading name? That was the root fallacy of dreamers and 'reformers.' They spoke of her as one, when in truth she was many--bewilderingly many. The semblance of unity sprang mainly from England's unparalleled achievement--her Pax Britannica, that held the scales even between rival chiefs and races and creeds; that had wrought, in miniature, the very inter-racial stability which Europe had vainly fought and striven to achieve. Yet now, some malign power seemed constraining her, in the name of progress, to undo the work of her own hands....
All his thronging thoughts were tinged with the gloom of his unhopeful mood; and his body sagged with his sagging spirit. Before he had walked four miles, his legs refused to carry him any farther.
He had emerged into the open, into full view of the vastness beyond. Naked rock and stone, jewelled with moss and young green, fell straight from the path's edge; and one ragged pine, springing from a group of boulders, was roughly stencilled on blue distances empurpled with shadows of thunderous cloud.
A flattened boulder proved irresistible; and Roy sat down, leaning his head against the trunk, sniffing luxuriously--whiffs of resin and sun-warmed pine-needles. Oh, to be at home, in his own beech-wood! But the journey in this weather would be purgatorial. Meantime, there was his walk; and he decided, prosaically, to fortify himself with a slab of chocolate. Instead--still more prosaically, he fell sound asleep....
But sleep, in an unnatural position, begets dreams. And Roy dreamed of Lance; of that last awful day when he raved incessantly of Rose. But in the dream he was conscious; and before his distracted gaze Roy held Rose in his arms; craving her, yet hating her; because she clung to him, heedless of entreaties from Lance, and would not be shaken off....
In a frantic effort to free himself, he woke--with the anguish of his loss fresh upon him--to find the sky heavily overcast, the breathlessness of imminent storm in the air. Away to the North there were blue spaces, sun-splashed leagues of snow. But from the South and West rolled up the big battalions--heralds of the monsoon.
He concluded apathetically that Baghi was 'off.' He was in for a drenching. Lucky he had brought his burberry....
Yet he did not stir. A ton weight seemed to hang on his limbs, his spirit, his heart. He simply sat there, in a carven stillness, staring down, down, into abysmal depths....
And startlingly, sharply, the temptation assailed him. The tug of it was almost physical.... How simple to yield--to cut his many tangles at one stroke!
In that jaundiced moment he saw himself a failure foreordained; debarred from marriage by evils supposed to spring from the dual strain in him; his cherished hopes of closer union between the two countries he loved threatened with shipwreck by an England complacently experimental, an India at war with the British connection and with her many selves. He seemed fated to bring unhappiness on those he cared for--Aruna, Lance, even Rose. And what of his father--if he failed to marry? He hadn't even the grit to finish his wretched novel....
He rose at last, mechanically, and moved forward to the unrailed edge of all things. The magnetism of the depths drew him. The fatalistic strain in his blood drew him....
He stood--though he did not know it--as his mother had once stood, hovering on the verge; his own life--that she bore within her--hanging in the balance. From the fatal tilt, she had been saved by the voice of her husband--the voice of the West. And now, at Roy's critical moment, it was the voice of the West--of Lance--that sounded in his brain: "Don't fret your heart out, Roy. Carry on."
Having carried on, somehow, through four years of war, he knew precisely how much of casual, dogged pluck was enshrined in that soldierly phrase. It struck the note of courage and command. It was Lance incarnate. It steadied him, automatically, at a crisis when his shaken nerves might not have responded to any abstract ethical appeal. He closed his eyes a moment to collect himself; swayed, the merest fraction--then deliberately stepped back a pace....
The danger had passed.
Through his lids he felt the glare of lightning: the first flash of the storm.
And as the heel of his retreating boot came firmly down on the path behind, there rose an injured yelp that jerked him very completely out of the clouds.
"Poor Terry--poor old man!" he murmured, caressing the faithful creature; always too close by, always getting trodden on--the common guerdon of the faithful. And the whimsical thought intruded, "If I'd gone over, the good little beggar would have jumped after me. Not fair play."
The fact that Terry had been saved from involuntary suicide seemed somehow the more important consideration of the two.
A rumbling growl overhead reminded him that there were other considerations--urgent ones.
"You're not hurt, you little hypocrite. Come on. We must leg it."
And they legged it to some purpose; Terry--idiotically vociferous--leaping on before....
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 37: Crude arrangement.]
[Footnote 38: Sound arrangement.]
[Footnote 39: Shameful talk.] _