The Rains Came/Part III - 1

On the frail wooden balcony which ran round the second floor of Mr. Bannerjee's house Edwina and Ransome awaited the swift Indian sunrise. From there, through openings in the masses of peepul and banyan trees, they had a view of that part of the flooded burning town which lay in the low ground between them and the Great Palace. Most of the fires had been drowned quickly by the torrents of rain or by the flood itself, but three or four of the more important buildings what Ransome judged to be Great Market, the Courts of Justice and the Central Administration offices still burned stubbornly, throwing up sudden jets of fire which cast on the thick clouds overhead the sullen menacing reflection of flames. The strange sound of a whole city wailing with a single voice was gone presently, and there was only silence save for an occasional distant solitary cry of anguish and chill terror, like the howls of the jackals when they came out of the jungle in the evening to hunt.

Once he said, "I'll fetch you a shawl. It's silly standing there dressed as you are. You'll be soaked. You don't know what this monsoon rain is like. Roofs mean nothing. The dampness penetrates everywhere." He spoke quite simply as if, instead of watching the death of a great city, they were watching a cinema, but the sound of his own voice startled him a little, as if there was something of bad taste in his speaking at all.

He found a Kashmiri shawl that was used as a covering for one of the Indian beds, and when he had wrapped it round her shoulders, over the white dress and all the jewels, they were silent again, watching. At moments when the flames of one building or another leapt high in the air, the reflected light from the clouds illumined the water, revealing there all sorts of nasty things floating just beneath the surface.

Tom thought, "Tomorrow it will begin to stink. Tomorrow will be horrible, and the day after, and the day after... with all this heat and rain." But the jackals would feed well and the vultures and the crocodiles, risen now in the flood out of the thick smelly mud of the river. They could swim anywhere now, into the very heart of the town.

Then the wind, rising, tore apart the clouds for a little while, and in the velvety blackness of the open sky the stars appeared again, the Indian stars that were different from stars elsewhere, more brilliant than ever now in the clean-washed air. But in a little while the stars disappeared again and there was only the low roof of blood-red clouds. Inside the house the wailing of Mr. Banner jee began once more, a wailing in which there was the terror of a hurt animal.

Edwina said, "I wish that nasty little man would stop making such a noise. That's worse than everything else."

She had come to India wanting something to happen to her, and now as she stood on the balcony the realization came to her that it was happening to her and happening with a vengeance, something which surpassed anything within the scope of her imagination. She was not dead, but she might be dead before many days passed, or hours or even minutes, for that matter. She had never thought much about houses before, but now the house of Mr. Banner jee, even though it withstood the double shock of flood and quake, seemed to her a fragile, puny thing, ridiculous in the face of the catastrophe which had surrounded them; and when she thought of the house, it made her think suddenly of herself and her own utter fragility and uselessness. There was something ridiculous in facing a spasm of Nature, clad in a single garment of white crepe, wearing half of one's jewels. A little amused, her mind began to wander, thinking how one should dress properly for such an occasion. "Shorts, I suppose," she thought, "and a silk shirt. That would be smart as well as sensible."

A great many times in Hill Street, in Cannes, in country houses at moments when she had lain in bed, bored with reading, half-asleep, she had speculated lazily and voluptuously on what it would be like to find oneself suddenly faced by death with the knowledge that one had a few hours to live. Pushing the idea further, she had wondered what she would do, bored and cold-blooded as she was, if she found herself facing death alone with an attractive man. She had thought then,

"There would be only one thing to do to kill the time. Anything else would be a bore."

She had thought, too, that making love under such circumstances would have a kind of fierce added zest, springing from some primitive atavistic necessity deep in one's nature. Now, slyly, she looked at Tom, who was leaning on his elbows on the fragile wooden rail, his profile silhouetted against the red clouds, and she thought, as she had thought many times before, "He is an attractive man ... in that way surely one of the most attractive of men." But now, strangely, the sight of him left her without emotion. There was nothing on earth to prevent them making love. Three nights ago, on sight, in the palace they had not hesitated, but now the idea did not even interest her. It was not at all as she had imagined it.

Quite logically she thought, "What if he had been any one of the others?" But she could think of no man out of her past who could have aroused her interest in the same circumstances. In any case, none of them any longer interested her. She was fonder of Tom than she had ever been of any of them, and the affection for Tom persisted somehow, surviving boredom and surfeit, luxury, idleness, everything. And again she thought, "Perhaps I ought to get rid of Albert and marry him. Perhaps it would bring stability into both our lives," But almost at once she knew that she was not ready to marry yet, not, at any rate, in the sense which meant a settled, tranquil life. There were still adventures to be had. She did not love Tom. She was only fond of him.

And suddenly she found herself wishing that it was Tom who had gone off into the flood and darkness with Miss MacDaid, leaving behind the Major, and almost at once, a little startled, she thought, "So that's the way the land lies. That's what has happened to me." And in a kind o decadent voluptuousness she gave herself over to thinking of the young doctor, seeing him again, greedily, as she had seen him during the hours of restless boredom before the fantastic Miss Hodge had come to call. He was the one! And she thought, "If I do come out of this alive, I will be free for a little time; there will only be confusion so terrible that no one will notice me or what I do. I will no longer be Lord Esketh's wife, but nobody at all. I'll be, for a little while, no more than the wife of one of those little clerks."

She saw the Major very clearly now carrying the hysterical, screaming Miss Murgatroyd up the stairs like a bag of meal. She saw him with his great shoulders and fine dark face and blue eyes and the funny half-grin that was born, she divined suddenly, out of an odd mixture of animal vitality and high spirits, with the sadness of melancholy and tragedy just beneath. It was Tom, in his drunkenness, who had been useless.

The Major couldn't be dead now, swept away by the flood like all the screaming, terrified people in the compound, because the thing wasn't finished yet. It was for that, she told herself with a half-hysterical mysticism, that she had come to India against her will, against the advice of everyone; it was for that she had come here in the wrong season, drawn here by this thing which had to happen. Two days ago, even an hour ago, she would not have cared whether she lived or died, but now she had desperately to live, because this thing had to come to an end in fulfillment, this thing for which she had been searching always, which she had dreamt of in a wild nightmare only a few nights ago. No, he couldn't be dead, because it was he who would save her. In him she was going to find the thing she had been searching for; and suddenly she was aware that it was not simply his good looks which attracted her, but something else his coolness, his defiance, his fearlessness in setting out into the flood with that rather grim old maid, Miss MacDaid, and by something that was in his face, shining there like a light, something which was goodness and pity and understanding and strength which she had never encountered in any man she had known before.

But then she thought, "I have never known any decent men except perhaps Tom, and he's eaten up by defeat and bitterness. All the men I've known have been cheap and common or bounders or weaklings or men like Albert." And again she was aware of a whole world which existed, which had always existed, outside the realm of her experience and understanding. The realization was like a brilliant light which made her blind suddenly to Tom, to the flood, to the disaster, to all the horrors. And then the sudden revelation faded quickly, so quickly that she. had not time to seize and hold it, and again she was simply Edwina Esketh, bored, intelligent, cold, cynical, and sensual Edwina Esketh, a rich and fashionable slut.

When she could bear the unnatural stillness no longer, she said to Tom in a whisper, "Do you think they got through?'*

For a moment he did not answer, and she thought, "He is contemptuous of me and shocked. He thinks I'm shameless, but it isn't like that. It's different, only I could never make him believe that it isn't simply the other thing all over again."

Tom was saying, "If they managed to reach the hospital and it's still standing, they're all right." And then, after a moment, he added, "But I should think the chances were one in a thousand."

A little before dawn, after the rain had begun again, Mrs. Banner jee, calm and beautiful and still steel-bright with excitement, came quietly up behind them and said, "My father-in-law has had an attack. I think he is dying."

When Ransome offered his aid, she refused it, saying: "No, there is nothing you can do. The excitement was too much for him. He's aa old man. It's just as well. If Major Safti had been here he could have done something, but it was meant to be like this. In his horoscope it is written that he should die in a disaster." For a moment she was silent, and in the darkness Ransome felt that she was smiling. "My husband's wailing," she said, "you must not take too seriously. It relieves him."

Then she was gone, and after she had gone it seemed to Ransome that there had been in her voice something of pride and triumph, as if she had said: "You have not conquered India. Nothing has ever conquered her... you pale, puny Europeans least of all." And he thought again of the Major's long speeches about the cruelty of India.

As the rim of sky beneath the clouds began to turn pink and gray in the east he turned and said to Edwina, "Perhaps it would be better if you had a little sleep. I don't suppose there'll be much rest or comfort for a long time to come."

"No, I couldn't sleep now ... I want to see what it looks like when the light comes up. I want to see if the Summer Palace is still standing." She did not look at him, for fear that he would divine her deceit and make her ashamed, for ia her heart she did not care a fig whether the Summer Palace was gone; it was the hospital she must know about.

Again the sense of freedom returned to her, the same extraordinary sense of having come to the end of something, neatly and cleanly, and she thought, "If only this place would remain isolated forever. If only I would never have to go back to Europe again."

Once more she glanced at Ransome, and now in the rising light she could see the unhappy face quite clearly and it seemed to her that she found in it a kind of bitterness and tragedy she had not seen there before, not the trivial bitterness which made him speak so often with mockery and scorn, but something deeper, as if a fine spirit and a great intelligence had been wasted and that he was aware of the waste and the folly. Perhaps he was suffering even now, not for himself, but for the people in the drowned city whom he did not know and perhaps had never seen. And it occurred to her that perhaps that new look was not new, but only strange to her because until now she had never before been able to see it. She thought, "It is the Major, whom I scarcely know, who has made me see." And with shame she remembered that Tom had never talked with her save in a trivial way, as if he thought her unworthy of anything better. She had never known him at all. She did not know anything about him. And suddenly she felt a quick wave of affection for him, an emotion that was clear and clean and uncomplicated and different from any feeling she had ever had for him before, and at the same time she was swept by an emotion of terrifying loneliness, as if both Tom and the Major existed on a plane far above her, which she could not reach, which neither of them would permit her to reach, and that between the two men there was a kind of understanding which forever shut her out. For the first time in all her life, there was no arrogance in her, but only humbleness and fear, a greater fear, a far greater fear, than any terror she had experienced during the earthquake and the flood because it was a fear of something unknown, of some vague thing which lay before her.

Tom turned to her and said, "Look, the towers of the Great Palace are gone."

It was light enough now to see the silhouette of the great structure on the heights on the other side of the river. The light was gray and murky, for the low heavy clouds had come back again and stifled the beams of the rising sun, and as it increased it became clear that nothing

remained of the town save here and there the half-wrecked mass of some important building. From the balcony of Mr. Bannerjee's house they could make out distandy the ruins of the Music School, the shattered mass of the Maharani's Girls' High School, the Engineering School. As it grew lighter, Edwina pointed into the gray rain and asked, "Is that the Summer Palace?"

"Yes."

"It has fallen in."

"Not all of it. He might still be alive there." And at the same time he remembered what he had forgotten until this moment that the Major had said that Esketh had the plague, and he thought, "Better that the whole palace fell on him." And then he thought about poor Miss Dirks, old Dacy Dirk's daughter, and for a moment he doubted whether all this had not been a kind of nightmare. The memory came back to him hazily and he thought, "That is because I was so drunk." It was not possible that a man like Esketh could catch the plague. It was not possible that there could be such cruelty as the lonely suffering of poor dutiful Miss Dirks.

Then he heard Edwina saying, "The hospital... where is the hospital?" and he answered, "You can't see it from here. It's behind the trees." And when he looked at her he saw that she had turned away her face so that he could not see it.

Then for a long time they watched the desolation in silence, fascinated by the spectacle of bodies and trees and snakes, and in the shock and unreality of what had happened to them, calloused to the full horror of what they saw, Tom thought, "It was that way in the war. In the normal person something must happen to deaden the sensibilities when a catastrophe occurs." The war had never upset him in that way; he had simply grown sick, horribly sick, at the endless idiotic killing.

Behind him some one was saying, "Goodness! there's nothing left at all," and turning he saw Miss Murgatroyd, her sallow face swollen with sleep, her gown of blue taffeta with its garknds of pale-pink rosebuds, all bedraggled and soiled to the knees with muddy water. It struck him as odd that her terror was all gone. The dull, muddy face betrayed no emotion of any kind.

"You're not frightened now?" he asked.

"Oh dear, no! I'm sure we'll be rescued," and she smiled at him that silly bright smile of admiration which always made the pit of his stomach contract with boredom. She was play-acting now, in front of himself and Edwina; she was being British, the daughter of that mythical magistrate in Madras, and as he watched her he understood the full depths of her loneliness and her morbid egotism. She was not frightened now; she was even insensible to the whole tragedy because she was safe and Mrs. Banner jee, who was so cruel to her, was safe, and perhaps himself who had been kind to her. That was all she had in the world, the only friends she had known for years, and here they were, the three of them, isolated together by the flood in Mr. Bannerjee's house.

"Old Mr. Bannerjee is dying," she said, brightly, as if the news made her, in some way, more interesting.

"I know," said Ransome. "Perhaps there's something that we could do to help Mrs. Bannerjee."

"Oh no," said Miss Murgatroyd. "She sent me away. She said I'd only be in the way."

Very likely Mrs. Bannerjee had not put it as kindly as that. He thought, "O Lord! that means she's going to stay with us.' 5

Edwina said, suddenly, "Do you think there's any way of making a cup of tea? It would help our spirits."

Ransome looked at Miss Murgatroyd as the intimate of the household.

"I expect so/' she said, "Mrs. Bannerjee keeps a primus stove in her room just for making tea at night. I'll go and see." And suddenly important and useful, she turned and re-entered the upper hallway.

"I hope the old gentleman doesn't die," said Ransome.

"Yes, I suppose it would add to the complications."

"It's worse than that. Bannerjee will want to burn the body before sundown so that he can throw the ashes into the river. The old man meant to die in Benares. He was going there next month to sit on the bank and wait for death. It was a piece of bad luck, the flood. . ."

Edwina smiled.

"What are you smiling about?"

"I know it's not in the best of taste, but I can't help seeing you and myself here on this balcony, worrying over such things as what is to become of old Mr. Bannerjee's body."

The wailing of Mr. Banner jee, the son, was less violent now, as if the exertions of the night had worn him out. It had sunk away into a kind of low, monotonous keening, rising and falling now into a moan, now becoming distant like the buzzing of the bees at night in the great chandeliers of the palace.

"I'd like to have a picture of Bannerjee just now to frame and send to the Oxford Union." As he spoke he knew that Edwina's smile and her remark had been born of the weariness and hysteria which had followed the excitement of the night before, an excitement to which neither of them had yielded at the moment. Now he felt it in himself, the sudden desire to laugh and make flippant remarks in the very face of death and tragedy. Now that all the brandy and cocktails had wora off, his head ached and he began to think longingly of the brandy bottle he had salvaged from the flooded dining room. At the same moment Miss Murgatroyd returned.

"The stove is all right and there's tea, but there isn't any water."

Flippantly he said, "What, no water?" and Miss Murgatroyd answered, "You know what I mean, no drinking-water." She pointed to the flood and said, "If we used that water we might get cholera or typhus or something."

"Fetch me the kettle," he said, and when she returned, he went to the pipe which carried the water from the roof to the ground and kicked loose a section of it. The clean rain water poured out from the broken pipe and the kettle was filled in a moment.

"There," he said, "there's plenty o water. Do you suppose there's anything to eat?"

"The cookhouse is under water. There's part of a tin of biscuits in Mrs. Bannerjee's room."

"Well, fetch them when the tea's ready, and tell Mrs. Bannerjee. Perhaps the old man would like a cup of tea."

"He's beyond that," said Miss Murgatroyd.

She went away happy, bustling now with importance and content to be serving these two members of a conquering race, whose blood, diluted, mixed in her veins with that of a low-caste Indian woman.

Edwina said, suddenly, "Has the house got a tin roof?"

"No, it's slabs o stone."

"Then it's all right. He could burn the body up there."

"That wouldn't stop him. He's so scared by now, he'd set the house on fire and burn us all out if there wasn't any other way."

Then from inside the house the wailing of Mr. Bannerjee suddenly took on a new energy, hysterical, louder even than it had been at the onset of the flood. For a moment Ransome listened, and then said, "The old man must be gone."

In the doorway Miss Murgatroyd appeared, looking like a dreary A.B.C. waitress in fancy dress. She carried a tray with the teapot and two cups, and a plate of biscuits. She said, "Will you hold this a moment while I fetch a table?" Obediently Ransome took the tray, thinking, "Perhaps, after all, the poor thing is good for something."

In a moment she returned with a cheap bamboo table, and after placing the tray on it she asked, as if there was nothing whatever unusual in the scene about them, "How does your ladyship like it?"

"As it comes," said Edwina.

"Old Mr. Bannerjee is dead," said Miss Murgatroyd, brightly.

All that day they did not see Mr. or Mrs. Bannerjee, but Miss Murgatroyd, bright with the delight of finding some one to worship, came and went, reporting the progress of the ceremonies of mourning. Toward noon Lady Esketh retired to one of the bedrooms to sleep for a time, and Ransome, after he had finished what remained of the brandy, went to another room to sleep. There was no use in thinking of lunch, because there was nothing to eat When he wakened he went out again to the balcony, but nothing in the scene of desolation had changed save that two or three of the fires had burned themselves out. The water still moved sluggishly, its surface clotted with wreckage. Still in all the wide landscape not one human figure was visible, not one sign of life save for the passing of an occasional python wrapped round a floating beam or the branch of a tree, and the distant chatter of the sacred monkeys in the trees somewhere in the direction of Ransome's own house.

A little while later Edwina joined him, and presendy she said, "Aren't there any boats in Ranchipur?"

"Not many, and those were along the river. They must have been swept away."

"It doesn't seem to trouble you."

"There isn't anything we can do about it. You're not in Europe now, you know.'*

"Won't anybody do anything about it?"

"I think it unlikely. It depends on who has been left alive. I should think everyone is pretty badly disorganized. Raschid we could count on, and the officers of the Indian regiment, and some of the Mahrattas. I wouldn't trust the Gujerati at a time like this. Very likely they're all behaving like Bannerjee or trying to save their own property."

"I was only thinking that it's beginning to be a bore."

Then Ransome, who was himself beginning to feel restless, remembered the playing-cards Mrs. Bannerjee had rescued before everything was covered with water. "We might play patience," he said, grinning.

"I consider that a bad joke."

"No, I really mean it." So he fetched the cards, and for a time they tried playing patience on the top of the bamboo table which Miss Murgatroyd had furnished with the tea. It was too small to allow them a double game, too small even to play a single game in comfort, and they both had to stand because there were no chairs. After a time in which Edwina kept repeating, "Red jack on black queen" and "Black eight on red nine" she said, suddenly, pushing the cards from the table, "I'm sick of being British."

"What do you mean?"

"Taking it like this, coldly, as if nothing had happened. I'd like to know what's happened to the maids and Albert and even Bates and the Major and that nurse."

"Of course I could swim to the Summer Palace and stop by at the hospital on the way back."

"Don't be a bloody fool!"

"Patience, my dear girl, is a great game in more senses than one."

"I must say I wish Indian houses had a little more furniture. I'm sick of standing up or lying down. Don't they ever do anything else?"

"They sit on the floor. There are plenty of chairs downstairs for entertaining people like us."

The afternoon wore on and Edwina's temper grew a little worse. Presently she said, "Are you inhuman? Don't you care what has happened to your friends?"

And quickly his face grew white and he said, "Don't talk like a Goddamned fool!" And she was ashamed again.

Then Miss Murgatroyd reappeared, carrying fresh tea, and they knew that it must be four o'clock. There were only four soggy biscuits on the tray.

"That's all there are," said Miss Murgatroyd.

"Perhaps we'd better go on rations," said Ransome.

"Oh, the water will go down or some one will turn up," said Miss Murgatroyd, and suddenly Ransome understood another reason why she was neither frightened nor bored. Something was happening to her. For the first time in her dreary librarian's life something was happening.

"Won't you join us?" he asked, politely.

"No. I've had tea with Mrs. Bannerjee." She handed him his cup and then said, "They're going to burn old Mr. Bannerjee on the roof.' 1 There was a hint of a giggle in her voice and she added, "These Hindus certainly do the most extraordinary things." And Ransome felt his stomach contract again with dislike. At the same time, from the inside of the house came a sound of wood being smashed, and Ransome turned toward the door, listening.

"It's Mr. Bannerjee and the house servant tearing up the floors to get wood."

"The servant?" said Ransome, "Did he have a family?"

"Yes, a wife and four children."

"What happened to them?"

"They were in the houses in the compound."

After Miss Murgatroyd had gone, the sound of hammering and smashing continued for a long time. Then as the darkness began to close in, it died away, and in its place came the dim, ghostly sound of bare feet ascending and descending the stairway to the roof. The sound continued until it was quite dark outside, and then presently from the roof above their heads the sound of Mr. Banner jee's wailing began again, louder now, for his voice was rested, and then after a moment from the roof above them appeared a glow which illumined the leaves of the trees all about, a glow which grew and grew, accompanied by a crackling sound. Ransome thought, "I suppose I should stand by with water in case the house takes fire," but he did nothing. He was aware now of a kind of apathy which had transformed everything, changed all values, made nothing seem worth while. Edwina disappeared again to try to sleep, and, alone, he waited on the balcony.

While he watched there he saw that the body of old Mr. Bannerjee was not the only one being burned. Here and there all about the rim of the flood little fires leapt up against the stormy sky, puny, feeble flames of superstition, perhaps of faith, wherever the bodies of friends, of mothers, of children, of wives and husbands, had been found. The Major and Mrs. Bannerjee were right No one would ever conquer India.

While he listened to the sounds from overhead he became aware presently that a flame had sprung up on the roof of the shattered palace, tiny at first, no more than a pinpoint of light, growing and growing until Ransome understood that there, too, a body was being burned. The wind blowing toward Mr. Banner jee's house carried the smoke across the water and presently Ransome fancied that he divined the ghost of sandalwood scent in the deep air. He thought, "Perhaps it is the old gentleman. Perhaps he was killed by one of the falling towers. That would be the worst calamity of all." Now, more than ever Ranchipur would have need of the old Maharajah's simplicity and courage.

About ten o'clock Ransome did not know exactly the time, for in the excitement his watch had stopped the glow from the roof overhead began to die away. The house had not caught fire, perhaps because there was some magical quality in the slabs of stone which had been brought long ago from the sacred mountain of Abana to roof the house built by the dissolute Lady Streetingham to house her wastrel guests. The wailing, too, had ceased, perhaps because the voice of Mr. Bannerjee had failed at last. When it was quite dark he went into the house and called as softly as possible the name of Edwina. She was awake and answered him from one of the rooms along the hallway.

"Come in," she said. "I'm not asleep. I couldn't stand on my feet any longer. But I think a light would help, and some tea."

From the doorway of the roof he called to Miss Murgatroyd as softly

as possible, and in a moment Miss Murgatroyd appeared out of the thick blackness, feeling her way along the wall.

"Do you think we could have some tea?"

"There isn't any more alcohol."

"What about a light?"

"The parafine is all gone, too. Mr. Bannerjee used them both to start the fire."

"Blast and damn!" said Ransome, and out of the darkness from the bed behind them he heard the sound of Edwina's stifled laugh.

All through the night they spent their time sleeping, talking, and watching. Outside, the last of the great fires burned itself out, so that .there was no longer a tragic but magnificent spectacle beneath their eyes, but only velvety darkness and the sound of the horrible, monotonous rain. When dawn came there was nothing to see save the unchanged panorama of water and rubbish and bodies and shattered and burned buildings. And then about eight o'clock Edwina cried out, "Look! Look! What is that?" And Ransome, turning, saw one of the Maharani's tiny pleasure boats, all gold and gilt, coming through the lower branches of a great banyan tree. It was driven by some one whose figure was not yet visible, for the canopy of the little boat had become jammed in the branches of the tree and the oarsman was struggling, half-concealed by the leaves, to free it.

Then suddenly it shot free of the branches and the figure they saw was that of a white boy clad in shorts and a shirt. For a moment it nearly lost its balance and fell into the muddy water, but as it regained its feet and took up the oars once more they saw that it was not a boy at all.

Ransome said, "My God! It's Fern!"

"Who is Fern?"

The question puzzled Ransome for a second because, without thinking of it, it seemed to him that Edwina had been in Ranchipur for weeks, even for months, and that she must know quite well who Fern was. Then, with a shock, he remembered that only five days had passed since her arrival, and he said, "She's the daughter of the American missionaries."

The boat was quite near now, near enough for them to see that one of the oars was painted scarlet and gold and clearly belonged to the boat, but that the other was an improvised affair, made of a pole and a bit of wood. And Ransome now recognized the clothes he had loaned her to wear home on the night she had run away. She did not shout to them. She did not even stop rowing to raise her arm and wave. Instead she kept rowing steadily, awkwardly, her progress crippled by the makeshift oar, driving the fragile silly little boat against the sluggish current nearer and nearer to them.

"She's very pretty," said Edwina, "and very young."

Ransome did not answer her.

Fern had left Ransome's house, meaning to go straight home. Angry, she went away, out of the house to the forte cochere^ where she had left her bicycle, and then when she mounted it she discovered that even the bicycle had let her down* One of the tires was flat and the discovery made her burst into tears. It meant that she had two miles ahead of her on foot through the rain, unless she went back and asked Ransome's boy to repair the damage, and she could not go back now for fear she might see Ransome again, and as she left the house she told herself that she would never see him again, no matter what happened.

Walking beside the bicycle, wheeling it, she got as far as the end of the drive, and there she discovered that she was no longer angry, but only defeated and tired, more tired than she had ever been in all her life, not only of Ranchipur, of her mother and father and Hazel, everyone she knew, but tired even of Ransome. Because she was very young she thought, "If only I could die now. It would be so easy. There isn't anything to live for. If only I could lie down here on the racecourse road and die of exposure." But she know that in the warm, sticky air of Ranchipur in monsoon time, she might lie there for days without any ill effects, and then at night at this season there was always the question of snakes, and snakes terrified her. They were everywhere now. At night one might encounter them anywhere crossing the road . . * pythons or Russell's vipers or kraits or cobras.

The failure of the tire changed her mood suddenly, so that she was no longer angry at Ransome, but only sorry for herself. It seemed now to her, as she trudged along through the sticky mud, that he had never

done anything but let her down. He had never treated her seriously, and tonight, worst of all, when she had come to warn him, he had been drunk and behaved as if she were a child or an idiot. She had never seen a man really drunk before (once or twice she had seen one of The Boys when they had had too much, but it seemed to make them only gay and rather silly) and the sight of Ransome frightened her and made her feel ill. It seemed to her that he might have been less drunk than mad, laughing as he did at the things which frightened her and made her so miserable, laughing even at the prospect of scandal and scenes and trouble in which he himself was certain to be involved.

Why had she ever told that horrible lie? Why had she ever said that she had lived with him? It wasn't only that she had played directly into her mother's hand; it made her seem, when she tried to deny it, nothing better than a silly fool.

As she passed the garden of Raschid AH Khan she thought, wildly, "I will go in and stay there. That will fix them all. Then they'll all be sorry." But almost at once she saw that such a course was impossible because the one it hurt most was certain to be Raschid Ali Khan, wha had never done her any harm. She scarcely knew him by sight and she. did not know whether she would like him or not. She did not even know whether or not she liked Indians, because she had never really known any except the converted half-savage Bhils who worked about the Mission. And they were aborigines and not really Indians at all. But she told herself that they must be all right if Ransome liked them so much, for even in her anger and disappointment she did not accuse him of being a fool. To her he still seemed, in spite of drunkenness, in spite of everything, the wisest person she knew. Then the thought that she would never see him again made her weep once more, so that she was blinded now not only by the driving rain but by her own tears; but at the same time that curious warm feeling which she had experienced in the darkness after she had gone to bed at the Smileys' returned to her, and even in her youth and inexperience she knew in her heart that she loved him and that she would always remember him and think of him with a catch at the heart even when she was an old woman.

Then, plodding along in the mud, she reached the corner by the Distillery and as she turned toward the Mission she noticed the lights of a motor coming along the road over which she had just passed. At once she thought, "That is momma coming home from town," and without hesitation she switched off the light of the bike and plunged into the nullah alongside the road. She knew now that she dreaded the snakes less than she dreaded seeing her mother. Very likely her mother was returning from Ransome's. Very likely she had seen Ransome and told him that he had to marry her. Terrified, she waited in the nullah until the car had passed above her, showering her with mud. She recognized the old Ford, and then, out of terror, anguish, and sheer misery, she was suddenly sick.

Once on her way again she saw that every step was bringing her nearer home, nearer to her mother, who by now had perhaps told her father and Hazel the whole story. She still walked, automatically, almost without conscious effort, in the same direction, because there seemed to be no other direction in which to go. Sobbing, she stumbled along until ahead of her the lights of the Mission appeared through the wall of rain, and at sight of them a new idea came to her. She would not go home at all. She would go to the Smileys' after all and ask them to hide her. The harm she had done them was already accomplished. The awful letter filled with disgusting accusations had already been sent. Nothing worse could happen. And the decision brought her a sense of peace. The Smileys would understand. At least they would shelter her for a little time until she got over the shock of the call on Ransome.

But the Smileys weren't at home. As she reached the door she saw only Aunt Phoebe alone in the sitting-room, and remembered that of course the Smileys at this hour would be at the night school. For a moment she hesitated again, for Aunt Phoebe frightened her a little, not because she would be hard and unsympathetic, but because in the wisdom of her great age she seemed to know everything. Her eye was too sharp, and her common sense frightened and shamed what little there remained of Blythe Summerfield, the Pearl of the Orient.

But again, as in the nullah, the thought came to her that she would rather face anyone or anything now, than her mother, and she understood that it was quite impossible to go all night walking round and round Ranchipur in the rain. So resting her bike against the rail of the verandah she knocked, and Aunt Phoebe, looking up from her tatting, said, "Come in."

At sight of Fern a dim expression of surprise came into the bright eyes of the old lady, but she suppressed it quickly, perhaps moved by the swollen eyes and the look of despair on Fern's face.

Then Fern was embarrassed, so embarrassed that without any prelude she said, abruptly, "I can't go home. Will you let me stay here for a while?" and overcome with self-pity and the image of herself as a homeless orphan, she burst into tears.

"Heavens on earth!" said Aunt Phoebe, springing up from her rocking-chair. "What's the matter?" She put her arm around Fern's shoulders and said, "But you're soaking wet. I'll get you some dry things and then you can tell me all about it." Left alone for a moment, Fern flung herself down on the settee and sobbed loudly and without restraint.

When Aunt Phoebe returned she was carrying a complete costume belonging to Mrs. Smiley, as well as a large towel. Gently she touched Fern's shoulder and said, "Come now. Rub yourself dry and put on these things of Bertha's, and then you can tell me what's the matter."

Fern had no desire to dry herself and change her clothes. She wanted only to weep, to keep the soaked clothing on her until she caught pneumonia and died, but there was something in the dry manner of the old lady which made her feel a fool and compelled her to obey.

Then by the time she had changed, the hysterical sobbing had stopped and once more she felt on the defensive. But again it was no good against the determination of Aunt Phoebe, who said, "Now, listen to me, child. You've got something on your mind and you're going to tell me about it. I can kind of guess what some of it is, but you can tell me the rest. I don't say I'll be of any use, but it'll take the load off your mind."

Then Fern heard herself saying, "Could I tell you? Will you let me?*' And she realized all at once that in all Ranchipur it was only the Smileys who could possibly understand why she had been such a fool. It was only the Smileys, too, who would not judge her or give her advice or laugh at her. She did not like the plain gingham dress belonging to Bertha Smiley because it was ugly and too long, but it gave her a kind of confidence as if it were invested with the quality of Bertha Smiley herself, and suddenly she found herself telling Aunt Phoebe everything, just as it had happened to her, why she had done this and that, why she hated her mother (she admitted even that), why she had gone to Ransome's a second time, and throughout the recital Aunt Phoebe was silent, save that now and then she made a clucking sound to indicate her concern and her disapproval of certain foolish incidents.

When Fern had finished with the account of her second visit to Ransome, Aunt Phoebe said, "I must say he didn't behave much like a gentleman. It doesn't sound like him. Maybe it was because he was drunk."

"That's it," said Fern, herself suddenly seeking excuses for him. "I'm sure that's it. I shouldn't have come to you at all ... not after all the trouble I caused you the last time, not after my mother wrote that letter to the Mission Board."

"Never mind about that," said Aunt Phoebe. "It ain't the first letter like that she's written. And, anyway, evil never triumphs over good. I'm an old woman, and in the end I know that's true. The trouble is your mother wasn't raised right. Southern women never are. All they're taught is to get a husband for themselves. They can't even think of anything else."

"I don't know what to do now," said Fern. "I don't know where to go."

Aunt Phoebe stood up. "I guess," she said, "the best thing for us to do is get a bite to eat. We've all had supper and I guess maybe the cook-boy has gone out, but I can rake up something. I'd kind of like a bite myself. I'm used to scratching up odds and ends when I get hungry. We'll make up a good cup of coffee and some eggs and maybe some fried yams."

She took Fern's hand and led her toward the kitchen. Aunt Phoebe's hand was old and thin and gnarled and worn by the hard work of nearly seventy years, but Fern found it soft and comforting. It was an experience she had never had before in all her nineteen years, and it made her want to begin crying all over again.

The old lady kept on chattering, perhaps to spare the frightened girl the effort of saying anything. "The trouble is," she said, "that you don't belong in a place like Ranchipur. It's bad enough for grown-up people with all the heat and filth and mud and dust. I like it, but sometimes it gets on my nerves and makes me cantankerous so that I get sharp even with Bertha and Homer. It ain't natural, this climate, but it's awful interesting."

While Aunt Phoebe bustled about, she set Fern to helping her as if she knew that the best thing for the girl was to have something for her hands to do. As Fern worked, the sense of hysterical tension began to leave her and presently she knew that there was still something she wanted to tell the old woman, the one thing she hadn't told her, the most important thing of all, that she was in love for the first time in her life. Again when she tried to think of some one to whom she might tell her secret, there was, after all, no one in Ranchipur except Aunt Phoebe and perhaps Bertha Smiley, and she was not sure even that Bertha Smiley would have understood. Of Aunt Phoebe, who was so old, she felt more confident. It was as if Aunt Phoebe had lived so long that she had completed a cycle and become young again.

She wanted desperately to talk about Ransome with someone. Even her attempt to confide in her cousin by letter in far-off Biloxi had been a failure because with every word she put on paper she knew more surely that her cousin would not understand, or that if she had even a hint of understanding, she would somehow make the whole thing cheap and trivial. She remembered Aunt Phoebe's sudden contemptuous speech about her mother that Southern women were never taught anything but to get a husband for themselves, and she thought, "Now when we sit down to eat I will begin to talk about him." Again the warm feeling came over her, and she felt her own heart expand again with goodness and a desire to help to save him from drunkenness and despair.

When at last they sat down to a snack of eggs and yams, toast and tea and gingerbread, Aunt Phoebe, as if she understood everything, said, "It's such a pity about Mr. Ransome. He's such a nice man. It's awful when drink gets a hold on a man like that. Most drunks don't matter, because they were never any good, anyway. I had a brother like that... like Ransome I mean he died of drink when he was fifty."

Fern's heart warmed again, and she was about to tell the old woman everything, when suddenly her tongue was checked, with the very words at her lips, by something physical outside o her, a kind of menacing stillness in the hot damp air. It was as if she had started to speak and then suddenly became aware that she was interrupting some more important speech, some communication being made to herself and old Aunt Phoebe by all of Nature. She saw that Aunt Phoebe was aware of the same intrusion; it was as if a ghost had entered the room and commanded the attention of both of them. The old lady looked at her and started to speak, and then the world about them seemed to come to an end. The dies beneath their feet crinkled and broke apart. The table rocked and the tea was spilled on the fresh cloth. There was the sound of stone and mortar crackling and crumbling, and the lights went out as the distant power-house was buried by the wall of water from the broken dam.

Then in the darkness Fern heard Aunt Phoebe saying in a funny flat voice, "I guess that must have been an earthquake."

Fern, paralyzed, did not move or speak, and the old lady said, "Stay where you are. I think there's a flashlight in the cupboard," and Fern heard her, rustling like a mouse, across the broken tiles somewhere in the darkness and then the sound of a cupboard door being opened and then there was a light again in the room, the dim light of an electric torch with a battery which was almost exhausted. Then she found candles of which there were an abundance because Aunt Phoebe had never in her heart trusted lights which might go on and off without warning at the touch of the hand of some Indian filled with curiosity in a power-house ten miles away.

"I suppose we ought to go outside at once," said Aunt Phoebe. "That's what my sister Doris said she always did at Long Beach when they had earthquakes. But I don't hanker after going out in that rain. I suppose it would make more sense if we went to see what had happened to the house. From all the dust and smell you'd think the whole place had come down."

The calmness of the old lady, which wasn't perhaps so much calmness as indifference, brought Fern back to her senses, and she thought, "What has happened to our house? And to Ransome? Where was he?" And then she remembered that he had gone out to dine with the Bannerjees, and thought quickly: "Anyway, that's not a stone house. Maybe a wooden house is better in an earthquake."

Half o the Smileys' house the front half looking on to the Distillery Road had collapsed, but there remained intact three bedrooms and a vast empty storeroom which had not been made over when the rest of the house was converted from barracks into mission. In some freakish fashion the earthquake had demolished the one end and left the other shaken but still standing. The old lady, followed by Fern, regarded the wreckage, making a clucking sound at the sight of the ruins of a house which she had always kept in such fine order.

To Fern she said, "I guess it was lucky we were in the kitchen instead of the sitting-room." And at the same moment they were both aware of a strange sound coming toward them distantly from the direction of the town, a sound vague and distant, compounded of the rushing of water and the wailing of people which filled the emptiness of the silence that succeeded the quake. Each with a candle in her hand, they stood, the old woman and the girl, listening, frightened now by the new sounds which were less sudden and, being mysterious and less immediate, were more terrifying.

Aunt Phoebe, pulling herself together, was the first to speak. "What on earth do you suppose that could be?" and then: "I guess Bertha and Homer will be all right. The night school is a new building and good and strong."

"It sounds like yelling," said Fern. "I want to go and see what's happened to our house."

She was afraid now, deeply, sickeningly afraid, because from the house in the other garden there had come no sound. If her mother was there, or Hazel, they would have screamed because that was their nature. One of them would have come across the drive, no matter how much they hated the Smileys. From the window she could make out nothing in the thick darkness... nothing but rain and the great branches of the banyan trees reaching up and up toward the black sky.

The house of the Simons had gone down, like the regimental barracks, into a mass of beams and mortar and broken stone. By the time Fern and Aunt Phoebe reached it the cloud o dust raised by the collapse had been stifled by the downpour, and feebly, in silence, by the aid of the worn-out electric torch, the girl and the old woman circled the wrecked house, calling out in faint, shaken voices, searching for some sign of life. Now Fern felt a sudden terrible calmness come over her the calmness that follows a horrible shock. It left her mind unnaturally cold and clear. There was no reality in the scene. Her consciousness rejected it as something nightmarish and impossible that she and Aunt Phoebe should be here in the rain, searching the ruins of the shattered house for some sign of her father, her mother, and her sister. The weird sound of wailing which came toward them from the distant town had nothing to do with life; it too belonged in a nightmare.

Then suddenly it seemed to her that if she called their names loudly enough they might appear, safe and alive, out of the rain-drenched darkness, perhaps from the tennis-courts or along the road, and she began to call in a wavering hysterical voice, "Poppa! Momma! Hazel!" but her voice was muted by the flood of rain and no sound came back to her save the ghostly wailing from the stricken town.

She heard Aunt Phoebe saying, "Maybe they weren't at home. Maybe they're safe somewhere else."

A wild and dreadful thought crossed her brain, "Perhaps they're all dead! Perhaps I'm free!" and she felt suddenly sick with shame. Again, for the last time, she called into the blackness, "Hazel! Hazel!" For plain, stupid Hazel couldn't be dead. The earth seemed suddenly to rise beneath her feet and the blackness closed in on her, swallowing her up as the sound of the wailing grew fainter and fainter, until it died away.

When she became conscious again she was lying wrapped in a sheet on the broken floor of the kitchen. There was a taste of brandy in her mouth which made her think at once of Ransome and that first visit to his house, and over her was standing Aunt Phoebe who said, "It's all right, my child. You fainted and I dragged you in here. That was alL Here, take a little more of this. I always have it around for a time like this."

She drank the strong, cheap brandy, choking a little, and then slowly the memory of what had happened came back to her. Now it had a kind of dull, sickening reality. The nightmarish quality was gone and she knew that the earthquake had happened and that very likely her mother and father and Hazel were dead. Tears came to her eyes and began to trickle down her cheeks, and in spite of herself she began to whimper.

The old lady took her hand. "You mustn't do that," she said. "It doesn't do any good. You'd better put on some dry clothes. I couldn't get you dressed. It was about all I could do to get you in here and get the wet clothes off you."

"I won't do it again. I promise. I don't know what was the matter with me."

And then from out of the darkness they heard faintly a voice calling. For a moment the wall of rain made the sound blurred and weak. Sitting up. Fern listened. A second time the voice came to them, shrill, wavering, hysterical, but clearer this time, so clear that Fern recognized it as her mother's, and holding the sheet about her scrambled to her feet. The third time the voice became clear. In the darkness and rain her mother was calling, "Elmer! Elmer! Hazel! Fern!"

"I'll go and fetch her," said Aunt Phoebe.

"I'll go with you. I'll go! I'll go!" And with the sheet wrapped about her, she followed the old lady out into the rain.

By the weak light of the torch they found their way toward the sound o Mrs. Simon's voice. She discovered her on the drive, a little distance from the house, and when they came near they saw that she was not alone. Leaning on her, being dragged along, was the overblown figure of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry.

At sight of the light, Mrs. Simon called out, hysterically, "Who is it? Is it you, Elmer?" and Fern answered, "It's me, Momma."

"Where are they? Where's your father? Where's Hazel? O my God! what has happened?"

Then Mrs. Simon flung her arms about Fern and, sobbing, cried out: "Oh, my darling! I know they're dead! I know they're dead!" and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, unsupported now, slipped to the muddy driveway and remained sitting there, upright, murmurous and complaining, in the drenched peignoir of lace and baby-blue satin.

Left alone with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry on the verandah of the deserted bungalow, Mrs. Simon had waited for a long time, listening to the moans of her stricken friend and the sounds from the town. She did not at first know what she was waiting for, but presently it was borne in upon her intelligence that they might stay there until doomsday without anyone coming to help them. Slowly, too, it dawned upon her that her friend was drunk and therefore useless. It was rare that she ever saw Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry so late in the evening, and never before had she seen her helpless. That part of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry which had always remained sober enough to permit an illusion of dignity had now, it seemed, succumbed to the added intoxication of terror; and for a moment Mrs. Simon hated her profoundly because in such a crisis she was silly and useless, because she was only a burden, because she was stupid and soft and idiotic. Her instinct told her to go off, leaving her friend there alone on the floor of the verandah, but experience told her that this was impossible. Twice she slapped her, with no effect save to increase the volume of the moans. Then taking one arm and placing it over her shoulder as if she were saving a drowning woman, she got her to her feet.

She cried, "Pull yourself together, Lily. We've got to get out of here." But Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry only moaned and remained sagging and heavy and inert. Now, in the midst of catastrophe, Mrs. Simon was no longer impressed. In some mysterious way the importance of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had melted away. She was no longer afraid to call her Lily to her face, as she called her behind her back; she called her even worse things. Now she made no effort to conceal her hardness. She cried, "Come on, you damned drunken fool. I've got to get home!"

Just as Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry seemed to collapse, so the small female figure of Mrs. Simon seemed to gain strength. The coquetry, the exaggerated femininity were nowhere in evidence now. She became suddenly a woman of iron. Half carrying, half dragging her friend, she negotiated the steps and thrust her, still moaning, into the back of the old Ford. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry fell on the floor and lay there with one plump leg hanging out of the car, but Mrs. Simon savagely thrust the leg inside and banged the door shut. Then, without a backward glance, she climbed into the front and drove off.

By now the fires had begun in the town and the reflected glow lighted up the road all the way to the Distillery. At the Distillery corner, which was on lower ground, the Ford plunged in a jet of spray into a foot or

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more of water. The road itself was invisible but she was able to discover where it lay by the lines of Java fig trees on each side. Steering by these, she made another half-mile, sometimes on the bare road, sometimes driving through water which nearly covered the wheels. She kept thinking, "If only I can get to the racecourse milepost we'll be on higher ground," and then just as she had almost reached it, the water entered the carburetor and the old Ford died.

Again and again she tried to start the engine, swearing now, using words which she had heard long ago as a girl on hot nights, used by drummers on the verandah of her father's hotel in Unity Point, Mississippi, words which she did not even know that she knew. And at the same time she began to cry, more out of exasperation than from fear. She thought, "We can't stay here all night. The water might rise. I've got to get back to the Mission and I've got to drag that drunken fool with me. After this she can never again put on airs with me."

When at last she gave up all hope of starting the Ford, she climbed down, filled with terror of snakes, into the tepid water. It rose above her knees, muddy, smelly, and uncomfortable. Pulling open the door, she cried, "Get up out of there, you fool!"

By the glow of the reflected fire, she saw that Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry lay exactly as she had fallen, and at once she divined that there was no way of getting her out of the car save by pulling her out feet first. Bracing herself, she managed this by a series of tugs and jerks, so that presently the bank manager's wife was able to sit up on the floor with her feet outside. This position was better, Mrs. Simon realized, and with one more effort, she said in a wheedling voice, as if she were addressing a child, "Now, Lily, help yourself a little. Put your feet down and stand up." Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, moaning, obeyed her hazily, but the heel of one ostrich-feathered mule caught on the fender and she plunged face forward into the water.

The shock of the water and perhaps the terror of death by drowning sobered her a little and gave back something of the will which she had cast away a little time before in a kind of drunken feminine voluptuousness. After a struggle she managed to scramble to her feet, and cried out, vaguely, "Where am I? Where am I? How did I get here?"

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"You're on the Distillery Road, you fool! And we've got to walk. The Ford won't run."

With a little help from Mrs. Simon she managed to walk, whimpering and unsteady, until they were on higher ground and were free of the flood. Then, almost at once, she began to moan again and to collapse every thirty or forty feet. At last they passed the racecourse milestone and presently came to the foot of the Mission drive. Here, exhausted and in despair, Mrs. Simon had begun the screams which presently Fern and old Aunt Phoebe heard in the kitchen of the Smileys' half-wrecked house.

All the way from the banyan tree as far as the Bannerjee house, Fern continued rowing across the submerged gardens without once looking up. From the moment she had nearly capsized in trying to free the boat from the limbs of the tree, she had seen him there on the balcony, standing beside a strange woman, and now she was shy, not only on account of Ransome, but of the stranger. She thought, "It must seem to him that I am always running after him," and he might not want to be rescued. He might want to stay on there. The single glance at the stranger told her that the woman was very pretty. In her directness, she did not think or care about rescuing the stranger or the whole of the Bannerjee family. It was only of Ransome she had thought when she found the little boat drifting on the flood near the Distillery. It was only of him she had been thinking when she waded out to it up to her waist in water to drag it ashore; only of him when she patched together the crazy oar out of two pieces of wood Aunt Phobe had found for her. Her mother had become violent at the idea of the rescue, screaming and crying and wringing her hands and saying, "I forbid you to go out in that crazy boat. Haven't I suffered enough? Haven't I lost enough without losing you, too?" And Fern had paid no attention, but had gone on hammering away, and when she had made the contrived oar she stalked out of the house dressed in the clothes of Ransome which had been left behind on the night she spent with the Smileys.

She wasn't free, after all. Her mother was still alive and in her heart she knew that she would rather have lost her mother than her father and Hazel. But something had happened to her during the night of terror

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and tragedy. She knew now that, even if her mother was alive, she was none the less free of her forever. Slowly, another discovery about life dawned on her . . . that distance, that escape, had nothing to do with freedom. Freedom was something which existed inside of you, no matter where you were. She had not escaped and run away, she was still in Ranchipur, yet she was free, freer, perhaps, than if she had succeeded in escaping to Hollywood without having lived through the tragedy of the last few hours. She had proven stronger than her mother, for although she was sick and miserable and terrified, she had kept her head. She had found dignity, and her mother, in the crisis, had lost whatever dignity she had ever had behind the silly pink-and-white fagade of the perpetual ingenue.

Even when she appeared dressed in Ransome's shorts and tennis shirt and her mother, at sight of them, gave a low cry as if she had been mortally hurt, she was not impressed. Setting out on such an expedition, it would, Fern knew, have been silly to wear any other clothes. Even in the midst of tragedy her mother had managed to cry out, "What will people say if they see you dressed like that? What will the natives say? They won't have any respect for us."

She did not, Fern noticed, say, "What will Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry say?"

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was still lying on her back, plump and inert, naked, beneath the sheets in the Smileys' double bed. The peignoir of pale-blue silk and lace, covered with mud, hung over the back of a chair in the kitchen to dry before the fire, and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, collapsed and ridiculous, was snoring. No, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and the threat of what she would say was finished forever.

And then, just as she was about to set off. on the expedition, Raschid Ali Khan and Harry Loder appeared out of nowhere. The big Muslim was dressed in bits of officers' kit which they had found while searching the ruins for the bodies of The Boys. The jodhpurs he wore were too tight for him and the great muscular wrists protruded from the sleeves of a tunic which was meant for a man of half his size. And Harry Loder no longer looked the spick-and-span polo-playing dandy of the Indian army. The ruddy color was gone from his face and he was shaking a little as if he had a chill.

At sight of him Mrs. Simon, frightened, began to cry again, but Aunt Phoebe said, "You'd better have some brandy."

"A nip wouldn't be bad," he answered, in a voice that seemed like the voice of another person, and while Aunt Phoebe went for the brandy, he told them that all the Boys except himself were dead and already buried by the soldiers of the regiment. Then Mrs. Simon, hysterically began to scream and say that they must help her to find the bodies of her husband and Hazel, and Raschid AH Khan, in a brusque voice (a voice, she thought afterward, he should never have dared to use to her as a European) told her that there was no time for the dead while there were living to be saved.

Then Aunt Phoebe returned, having found the brandy bottle empty among the sheets of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's bed, to say that she had made a mistake and there wasn't any brandy, after all. Almost eagerly but with a curious coldness, they exchanged grim bits of news. Not even the hysterics of Mrs. Simon checked them. Raschid's wife and seven children were safe because the house was built on an American plan and had stood up against the quake, but they were isolated by the flood, with only a little food. As soon as it was light, Raschid, naked, had plunged into the water and swum through the flood to dry land. He could, he said, rescue the family later. He had arrived at the Barracks as naked as any sweeper, but clothed still in the boundless dignity of a true believer.

They had, he said, to find boats or build rafts; they had also to discover what it was that blocked the canyon far off near Mount Abana and held back the waters.

To Fern, Harry Loder seemed a person she had never seen before not the boisterous, beefy fellow who had tried to get her alone in corners where he might try to kiss and maul her, but a man who was ill and frightened. She listened to them, never speaking, and she said nothing of the frail little boat hidden in the half-drowned guava orchard near the Distillery, for fear that they would take it from her; and she had to have it to find out if Tom Ransome was still alive. After that they could have the boat. After that they could take anything they wanted from her. Now she was not afraid of Harry; she did not even dislike him and he did not seem to be aware of her at ail. She was afraid that one of the others might betray her secret, but Aunt Phoebe was busy with the Untouchable cook-boy, who had come back at daylight, cooking eggs and toast for the two men. Mrs. Simon only moaned hysterically, hypnotized by her own loss.

Raschid, he said, was going to the Philkana to bring out the elephants. Harry's motor had run out of petrol halfway from the Barracks. They had tried Mrs. Simon's old Ford, stalled near the Distillery, but there wasn't enough petrol in it to be worth salvaging. The tanks at the Barracks had collapsed and the great petrol tanks in the town, if they still stood, were under water. Mechanical civilization had failed them. There remained only the elephants, rocking back and forth in the dubious shelter of the Philkana. The elephants could go anywhere, even swimming the flood, if necessary. Only some one it was Raschid who meant to do it would have to swim the mile or more of flood to give the jobedar orders to fetch them out. With the elephants they could go down the valley to Mount Abana to discover what it was that dammed the waters. Harry thought it was a barrier of debris and bodies. While the police minister swam to the Philkana, Harry meant to go to the army warehouses for dynamite.

Then the eggs were ready and Raschid and Harry Loder sat down to them, scarcely talking at all, save to answer a question now and then from Aunt Phoebe about the hospital or the Maharani's Girls' High School But about the part of the town which lay on the other side of the river they knew very little more than she herself.

Fern, still terrified lest her mother come to her senses and betray the existence of the pleasure-boat, watched and listened, and as she watched, she grew fascinated by the spectacle of Harry Loder, tired and white, his tunic all stained by mud and plaster. He had not looked at her directly, and as she watched him it seemed to her that although there was something dead in him, something which she had never seen before had come to life. What it was she could not define because she had been taught nothing and had so little experience and knew so little, but it seemed to her that the new look in his face was a little like the look of grimness she had seen now and then in the face of that strange woman, Miss Dirks, when she had encountered her by accident in the bazaar or in the great square * . . the Miss Dirks who seemed always intent upon some urgent errand, who in passing her might have been passing no more than a tree or a rock.

Suddenly they had finished their eggs and coffee and Raschid stood up, absurd but rather magnificent in his ill-fitting tunic and jodhpurs, Raschid, of all people (thought Aunt Phoebe) wearing the uniform of the conquerors. Harry said, "I'll be back with news as soon as I have any," and to Aunt Phoebe, "How are you for food?"

"We can get along for two or three days. I was never one to have a house empty of food. Ill get up a regular meal for you next time."

Then Harry Loder looked at Fern for the first time, with an odd unseeing look. "You'd better not run about," he said. "There aren't any police. You don't know what might happen. The Bhils may even come down from the mountains to do a bit of plundering." To Aunt Phoebe, as the one in authority, he said, "Have you got a gun?"

"No," said Aunt Phoebe. "Who needs a gun?"

"There's nothing to eat in Ranchipur. You can't tell what may happen." He unstrapped the revolver he wore beneath his tunic and said, "Here, keep this. I'll send around a guard." He was silent for a second, looking down at the big muscular hands scarred and still bloody from

the struggle with the stones and broken beams. Then he said, "But I oo

can't even be sure of my own troops... what's left of them."

At that Mrs. Simon began to weep noisily, crying out, "What do you mean? Don't go away and leave us. Don't leave us alone. We may be killed or anything. . . ."

It wasn't Harry, but Raschid, who answered her brusquely, with scorn. "You'll be all right, madame. You can be thankful we've got nothing worse than Gujerati to deal with."

Then they went away, and when they had gone Aunt Phoebe strapped the revolver to her waist over her apron and set about clearing up the dishes and taking stock of the supply of food. She'd lived through this sort of thing before, twice through prairie fires as a girl, and she'd heard stories of red-Indian raids and massacres in her father's day, and she didn't expect to be left in peace with only Fern and Mrs. Simon and poor drunken Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry in the house. In her tired tough old heart she was troubled about Bertha and Homer Smiley, but there wasn't any use in speaking of that, what with Mrs. Simon, hysterical and useless, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry drunk in Bertha's bed, and poor Fern eating her heart out about a man whom nothing could save from drink. The best thing she knew was to keep as busy as possible.

But now as the silly boat sidled to a position just beneath the balcony on which Ransome stood, Fern wasn't thinking of Harry Loder, but only that perhaps for a second time she had made a fool of herself. She could not bring herself to look up at him as he called out directions, leaning over to hold out the cord of one of Mr. Banner jee's Jermyn Street dressing-gowns. Now that she was here, now that she had achieved the rescue, she did not know what to do. She only wanted to leave the boat and go away again. And as she caught the cord and fastened it to one of the fluted gilt columns of the boat's canopy, she knew that she was miserable, not so much because of Ransome as because of the woman with him... that lovely woman dressed all in white and wearing a great many diamonds and emeralds, a woman out of another world of which Fern knew nothing save the specious shadow of the reality as Hollywood saw it.

This woman belonged to his world. When they talked to each other each would understand almost without words what the other meant. There wouldn't be the awkward pauses and misunderstandings that made him grin suddenly in a way which caused herself to blush and made her love him at the same time because he was so kind and tried so hard to be elderly and wise in order to help her. It was the woman who troubled her... that woman whose very clothes and jewels were insolent and assured, that woman who to Fern seemed not bored and on the verge of middle-age, but incomparably perfect and lovely. She did not see or even suspect that she herself, in Ransomed old shorts and tennis shirt, had a freshness and charm for which the woman would have exchanged all her fine clothes, all her jewels, everything she possessed.

Then for the first time she was forced to look up because Ransome was calling out to her, now that the pleasure boat had been made fast, to take his hand so that he might draw her up to the second-floor balcony. She saw his face and her heart leaped because she saw by the look in it that, after all, he was glad she had come; she saw that he was pleased to see her, even proud of her, and that at the same time he was amused by the preposterousness of the whole scene. For the first time it occurred to her, who had never analyzed any emotion or thought, what it was that made her love him so much. It was the kindness and the grin, that grin which came and went so easily and quickly, like a light turned on and off, a light illuminating depths which she might divine but not yet understand.

The hand and arm were strong, with more strength than she had believed possible in the body of a man so slim. He drew her up to the edge of the balcony and there she let go of his hand quickly and climbed over the railing, feeling helpless and awkward.

Ransome said, "You're a very clever girl," and she was suddenly angry because he was treating her again as if she were a child, and humiliated because the other woman was there to watch them. The tears were just beneath her eyelids, waiting to rush forth, but with a great effort, an effort worthy of the iron control of poor Miss Dirks, she checked them. In a sudden wave of self-pity the death of her father and Hazel became for the first time a reality. Until now it had been like something seen in the cinema, but now it was true. She knew now that whatever happened she would never see either of them again. And Ransome dared to grin and call her a "very clever girl."

Then he said, "This is Lady Esketh" and Lady Esketh said, in the most charming way possible, "We owe you a lot. It was very courageous of you. We might have died here of starvation and boredom."

"Where on earth did you get the boat?" asked Ransome.

"I found it near the Distillery. Aunt Phoebe helped me make the oar. It only had one." And suddenly she felt proud again and almost happy. Then poor Miss Murgatroyd appeared in the doorway in her bedraggled robe de style of blue taffeta, and at the sight of her Fern felt assured and confident, for the appearance of Miss Murgatroyd at that moment would have brought confidence to any woman.

Miss Murgatroyd cried out, eagerly, "For Heaven's sake, how did you get here?" And when Fern answered, "I've got a boat," Miss Murgatroyd turned and ran into the house, crying, "Mrs. Banner jee! Mrs. Banner jee! We've been rescued!"

While Miss Murgatroyd was bearing the tidings to the Bannerjees, Ransome and Lady Esketh asked for news. Fern told them of the death of her father and Hazel and the wiping out of The Boys when the barracks collapsed on them, and the grin died out of Ransome's face. He took her hand and said, "I'm sorry, my dear" and again her heart warmed and again she felt a little stab of shame that she should be so happy when her father and sister were lying dead beneath the ruins of the Mission.

Lady Esketh asked, "The Summer Palace? What has happened to it?"

"I don't know."

"And the hospital?"

"The hospital is standing. Raschid Ali Khan said so."

Then Ransome said, "Where is Raschid?"

"He swam out from his house. He's gone to get the elephants."

"And his family?"

"They're all right. They're still at his house."

"And the Smileys?"

"I don't know. Aunt Phoebe is safe."

Suddenly Lady Esketh asked, "Are the people in the hospital alive?"

"I don't know."

And Ransome, divining what lay beneath Edwina's question, asked, "The Doctor and Miss MacDaid?"

"I don't know."

"They tried to get from here to the hospital when the flood happened."

Then an odd silence occurred again, and the sense of excitement died away. Fern, awkward and shy, was again aware for a moment of the horrible reality of the tragedy. She thought, "Tomorrow it will be real and the day after that and the day after that, but it isn't real now. It never happened."

Ransome said, "I suppose we ought to get away from here on to dry land, at any rate. If there was another quake, the whole place might come down." He turned to Fern. "My house? You must have passed it."

"The verandah and the cookhouse have fallen in. It's half under water like this, but it's still standing. Your boy was sitting on the roof." (So John the Baptist hadn't run away. He'd been hiding there in the house all the time.) "You'd better go to the Smileys'. Aunt Phoebe said to tell you. She's awfully good at looking after people. Momma is there with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry."

"I'll take the boat," said Ransome. "We'll only be able to go off one at a time. There isn't room for more. Have you had any sleep?"

"Not much."

"You ought to lie dowa for a bit and I'll come for you after I've taken off the other women."

"I couldn't sleep."

"No, but ju^t lying down for a bit would be a help." He took her arm and said, "Come along. Do as I say. It isn't over yet it's only begun. s>

She did not want to lie down. She didn't feel tired now. She only felt bewildered, and so excited that it seemed to her that very likely she would never be able to sleep again; but it was nice having him care whether she was tired or not. It was nice to have the chance of being alone with him, if only for a moment. It was nice to have him away from that Lady Esketh and her superiority, for even in the crudeness of her instinct she had divined that the speech and manner of Lady Esketh were not sincere, but the casual products of long habit and breeding. Lady Esketh had seemed unconcerned about the whole thing, except the hospital. Fern couldn't help being interested in the way she cared so much about what had happened at the hospital.

In one of the rooms she lay down on the hard Indian bed, and Ransome said, "Your clothes are wet. You ought to take them off."

"Not much. The canopy kept off the rain."

"I'll fetch a couple of shawls."

He went away, leaving her happy and full of peace, and when he returned he was carrying two Kashmiri shawls which he wrapped about her, carefully and gently. Then casually he laid a hand on her forehead and said, "You've had a tough time, my dear. Try and sleep a little." Without knowing what she was doing, without willing it, her hand reached up and touched his, but he drew it away quickly as if the touch hurt him and said, "Now go to sleep like a good girl" as if she were a child.

On the balcony Edwina was still waiting. First she said, "I wish we could get more news."

The speech angered him because it seemed to him to illuminate shamelessly the profundity of her selfishness and egotism. So he said sourly, "We'll get more news as soon as we get out of here, but I don't imagine we'll find out what's happened to the Major."

"I didn't mean that. It's bitchy of you to think it."

"You did mean it and you ought to be ashamed o yourself, if not for the fact, at least for betraying it. Do you want to go ashore first?"

"It doesn't make a damned bit of difference when I go unless you want to be left behind with your little bit."

"What do you mean by that?"

She laughed, "You're not going to tell me that there isn't something up between you?"

"I'm not going to tell you anything. Because you behave like a Piccadilly whore, don't believe all other women do the same."

"All right. Have it your own way. But if ever I saw a girl suffering from calf-love, it's that one. When you speak her face lights up like fireworks. But I suppose you like being treated as if you were God." Then she put her hand on his arm, gently and disarmingly, so that he had again the feeling that with him, and perhaps before all the world, she always made herself appear far worse than she was. She said, "I you remember, that's what broke it up between us a long time ago... because I never treated you as if you were God, but just as bad as myself."

"My God! the things you can think up. 1 *

But he was ashamed now and his shame went back to the thought he had had two days ago of how amusing Edwina would find the story of Fern's determination to seduce him, how amused she would be by the idea that she had saved Fern's virtue, because a little while before they had experienced a bored and passionless embrace in that forgotten room of the palace. It did not seem funny now. The idea of repeating the story to Edwina was disgusting and made him feel a little sick. He thought, "I must be worse even than I believed." He told himself that it was not because he was in love with Fern. Such an idea was preposterous, and if she were in love with him, something must be done to put an end to that. Whatever else was true, Fern deserved someone better than himself, at any rate someone fresher and younger and cleaner. But he was troubled now for the first time because he no longer knew what he felt.

Then it occurred to him that it was he whom Fern had come to rescue. It was for his sake she and Aunt Phoebe had contrived the clumsy necessary oar. It couldn't have been the others, whom she scarcely knew. And he thought, "It must have been that! I'm a bloody fool! I've been a bloody fool all along."

The rest of the day was spent in journeys back and forth between Mr. Banner jee's house and the Distillery corner. It was not an easy task in the frail boat with the sluggish currents moving now this way, now that, and he had to go in a roundabout way to avoid the clumps of trees in the Maharajah's Park and the long row of Java figs that lined the Distillery Road. From the landing-place the wrecked Mission was distantly visible in its dark clump of banyan trees, and one by one as the refugees landed from the little boat they made their way along the road and across the muddy fields to the haven presided over by Aunt Phoebe. First went Miss Murgatroyd, then Mrs. Bannerjee carrying with her three Pekinese, some jewels, and the inevitable gold box in which she kept her pan, then Lady Esketh still in the white gown from Paris, a Kashmiri shawl wrapped round her shoulders.

The rain came and died away, sluicing down suddenly from the low overburdened clouds, and there were moments when the silly boat was threatened by the violence of the wind as well as by the water. It had been built long ago to drift at fetes over the surface of a shallow pond littered with flower petals and illuminated by Bengal lights, and now each shift of the current, each clutch of the passing branches at the silly gilt canopy threatened it with disaster.

Miss Murgatroyd, during her voyage, squealed a great deal and giggled when Ransome, with that old feeling of illness at the pit of his stomach, grimly told her to sit very still unless she wished to join the corpses that floated past them. Mrs. Bannerjee was still and dignified and silent, chewing her wilted betel leaves with the calm and indifference of a sacred cow; chewing with assurance and confidence as if this India, torn, shattering, and dying, was the true India to which she belonged, as if only now, with the famed modernity of Ranchipur destroyed, she had come into her own. Only the Pekinese made a nuisance of themselves, squealing and barking at the corpses and wreckage and snakes that drifted slowly past.

Ransome, sitting opposite her, no longer felt any desire to conquer or humiliate her. As he watched her, chewing indifferently, it seemed to him strange that he should ever have found her exciting. Now he admired her in a kind of abstract fashion for her calmness, her indifference, even for the humor she had shown over the wailing of her husband, but he no longer thought of her as a desirable woman; she had become, somehow, a kind of inhuman and sexless curiosity. Her peculiar fine- drawn beauty, the great glowing eyes, the exquisiteness of the pale hands with their lacquered nails none of these had changed, save perhaps that their quality had been augmented by excitement. Only yesterday he had desired her out of boredom and perversity. Today she was strange, even a little repulsive, because she seemed inhuman.

At the landing-place near the Distillery they found the faithful Miss Murgatroyd, her pale-blue taffeta drenched now, the hem of the skirt stained with the red mud of the fields. She wore a shawl over her head. She had pretended, when Ransome put her ashore, to set out toward the Mission, but the moment he was gone she had turned back to wait for her beloved and precious Mrs. Bannerjee.

Edwina, throughout her rescue, was ill-tempered. Now that the excitement was over, she was bored, dismally and profoundly, the victim of a kind of gnawing impatience. As the little boat made its way through the dripping trees, she talked now and then, irritably. She was aware only of the mud, and that she was soaked through, and that there was no way of discovering what had happened at the hospital, and that this was something that she could no longer discuss with Ransome because somehow he had slipped away from her overnight; the Tom she had met on that first night was gone. It seemed to her, as she watched him slyly (because she did not want to meet his eye) that even his face had changed, that it had grown mysteriously thinner and that the angle of the stubborn jaw had grown a little sharper. The change made her angry and she thought, sullenly, "Now, if the Major is still alive, I will have him in spite of every one. Nobody can really care. I shall have him, and after that we shall see. After that 111 have to go back to that bloody awful life at home." She had to have him now after all those hours of thinking of him, of trying to imagine what it would be like. Even though he proved to be a poor thing, simply another changeable, intriguing Indian, only another lover like all the long procession before him she had to have him, because that was the only cure for the malady which she herself had perversely created. She had to be crushed by him > to be humiliated and subdued. It would be, she thought cynically, like a purge, and afterward she would be free. But all at once she was ashamed, thinking, "I never dreamed this could happen to me."

Ransome was saying, "You should have accepted one of Mrs. Bannerjee's saris"

"No. Even this dress is better than a sari. What would I do with all that stuff hanging about me ? What I want is a bath and some practical clothes ... a shirt and some shorts like that girl was wearing."

Quietly Ransome said, "Oh, you mean Fern Simon?"

"Yes, if that's her name."

"You know it is."

"Let's not begin all over again."

He grinned and said, "You can't be jealous of her. You haven't any right to be. I never pretended anything... not even that night at the palace."

"Neither did I."

"All this seems pretty trivial and silly considering the circumstances.* 1 He allowed one oar to drift and pointed to a naked corpse wedged head downward in the low branches of a neam tree. "It wouldn't matter very much to him."

And then he saw that he had been silly himself and melodramatic and priggish. With all Edwina's upbringing, with all that had happened to her, the body of a low-caste Hindu could mean no more to her than the corpse of a goat or a cow. With all the feeling of caste behind her in England, she would be no more impressed by the spectacle than an orthodox Brahmin. Once the sight would have left him unmoved because it was beyond his comprehension; in certain aspects it still was. Even now in his heart he could not believe that this man, whoever he had been, was not better off dead than alive. His death could not have made much difference to anyone, least of all to the man himself.

She said, "The trouble with you is that you're a bloody sentimentalist..." Then after a moment's vague thought, "The kind that gets sentimental over cities and armies and history. If you were a little more personal you wouldn't always be in a mess."

She had spoken, he knew, out of instinct, because although she was intelligent, intellect was a quality unknown to her, and yet what she had said was true, so true that it threw a great light suddenly upon him and all his life. She was right. He had always been a Universalist He had fallen from the beginning into the error of Descartes. He had separated humanity from the individual and that made you at once sentimental and a litde less than human.

They passed the blank wall of the Distillery and the litde boat thrust its nose into the red mud of the shore. He stepped out, took her hand and then began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Just the picture of the two of us. The world is a more wonderful place than I thought."

"Yes, it's pretty funny. I'm not sure it's our proper role."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure we can live up to it."

He turned and pointed toward the Mission. "That's it, over there," he said. "Tell Aunt Phoebe that I recommend you to her care. Ill be along when I fetch the others ashore."

Then he put off in the boat again, and when he had gone a litde way he let the oars rest and turned to look after her. She had thrown away her slippers and was walking barefoot through the mud. The trailing skirt of soiled white crepe-de-chine she had hitched up and fastened about her waist with the girdle of rhinestones. Her legs were bare to the thighs. The Kashmiri shawl she had thrown over her head.

Grinning, he thought, "Maybe it wasn't necessary to recommend her to Aunt Phoebe. Maybe the old lady will understand her quality of indefatigability," And again he thought, "She's personal. . . , God knows, she's personal."

When he came once more in sight of the house he discovered the figure of Mr. Bannerjee already waiting for him on the balcony. It was clear at once that he had reverted with a vengeance. Gone now was every vestige of Bond Street He was wearing a white dhoti Bengali fashion, draped over his shoulder, and the black hair which usually shone with brilliantine was covered with a paste of ashes. In the crook of one plump arm he carried a big lacquered box which Ransome divined at once must contain all that remained on earth of the elder Mr. Banner jee.

"The old gentleman/' he thought, "is going to the Ganges, after all." The flooded Ranchipur wasn't holy enough to receive the ashes of the retired insurance broker.

As the boat drew nearer, Mr. Banner jee suddenly caught sight of it and immediately he began to moan once more and beat his breast with the free hand. The costume did not become him and he had lost, somewhere between Calcutta and Oxford, the knack of wearing it properly, for the dhoti kept slipping from his fat shoulder, so that now and then in the midst of his breast-beating, he was forced to give it a hasty tug in order to keep it in place. Bond Street had managed better than the Howrah bazaar to conceal the soft rotundity of Mr. Banner jee's figure and now Ransome discovered that he had the great kimono arms of a prima donna past her prime.

But the moment the canopy of the little boat touched the balcony the wailing and the breast-beating ceased and Mr. Bannerjee, as if still pursued by the vengeance of Kali, plumped over the side, lacquered box and all

"Easy!" cried Ransome. "You'll sink the boat"

He was angry suddenly, so angry that if it would not have capsized the boat he would have given Mr. Bannerjee a good kick in the behind. His anger illuminated the distaste he had long felt for him; he disliked Mr. Bannerjee because he was a fool and had no dignity, because he was at the same time a coward and a humbug. And he was angry, too, at the obvious arrogant conviction of Mr. Bannerjee that he himself at that moment had no importance to the world save as ferryman for Mr. Bannerjee and the ashes of Mr. Banner jee's father. Dressed in Bond Street clothes, Mr. Bannerjee had been obsequious and, at times, groveling. Now he had taken a leaf from the book of his wife. He was still frightened, so frightened that the yellow white of his eyes showed in the ash-colored face. A person so terrified could not at the same time afford to be arrogant.

1357]

"Sit tight," said Ransome. "If you capsize the boat I shan't try to save you. There's too much work to be done."

Mr. Bannerjee did not answer him. It seemed to Ransome that in his terror he must have lost the power of speech. With one hand he clung to the edge of the pleasure-boat; with the other he clutched the lacquered box containing the ashes. Once clear of the balcony, he closed his eyes and seemed to go into a trance, and Ransome, watching him, remembered what the Major had once said that the Bengalis were the Irish of India. It was odd that the same race could produce two people as unlike as Mr. and Mrs. Bannerjee.

As he passed the house of Raschid All Khan, the figure of Mrs. Raschid surrounded by children of all ages appeared in a broad upper window. In Urdu she called out to him that she and the children were all safe and could hold out for another day, and in Hindustani he called back that he would come to fetch them either tonight or early the next morning. Then as they passed the drowned world of his own compound, he caught sight of John the Baptist, naked, perched on the cracked roof in the rain. Through the downpour, John the Baptist shouted to him in his soft French. "All the plate is safe. It's on the first floor with all Sahib's clothes."

"Better go inside. I'll come for you later."

"Tres bien, Sahib," and the boy slithered down the drain-pipe like one of the monkeys and swung into an upper window.

At the Distillery, Mr. Bannerjee, still meditating, opened his eyes long enough to step ashore without a word either of thanks or of recognition. Ransome pulled in the oars and sat staring after him as he plodded bare- foot, still carrying the ashes, through the mud toward Aunt Phoebe and the distant Mission.

When he returned to the house, the servant whom he had not seen since he had appeared with the hurricane lantern was waiting on the balcony. The man was standing, looking out over the drowned city, turned away a little so that he did not see the boat approaching. He was a thin, ugly little man, very black, and now in the midst of the devastated landscape he was the only living thing, for even the birds and the sacred monkeys had deserted the flooded area as if they had divined that it was accursed by nature.

The servant did not move, and in the tranced immobility of the figure Ransome found something vaguely disturbing. Here was a man who had lost everything his wife, his children, perhaps his father and his mother and even his grandparents (for the compound had been a whole village in which there were shrines to Kali and Shiva and Rama). This man created a kind of awe. He was, one might have said, a fragile monument of patience and endurance, tiny and ugly and childish against the menace of the darkening monsoon sky. This man was India, more than any of the others, more than Mr. Bannerjee, or the Major, or Raschid Ali Khan or even the Old Maharajah himself, the India which went on, breeding and breeding, indestructible, like those swarms of bees clinging to the marble eaves of the great palace. This was life, a principle, ripening from a starved childhood into a maturity in which there were only animal pleasures and superstitions scarcely different from those of the swarming, noisy, sacred monkeys.

For a time, as if enchanted, Ransome sat in the drifting boat, trying to discover what this man #w -what was his need, his soul, his spirit, his essence. What significance could he himself have to that skinny, dark, motionless figure on the balcony, that figure to whom the British Empire meant nothing, whose imagination did not extend beyond the limits of the wrecked city, not even so far as the solitude of El-Kautara or the sacred mountain of Abana. He was not quite an animal, for he was made in human shape. What could it mean to him to be left in a second, utterly alone in a world which until a little time before had been solid and secure? Of what was he thinking now as he stood, still as the stubby statute of the Good Old Queen, looking out over the dead city? For him what was reality and what spirit? How was it possible to reach the spirit of that dark, half-real image?

And wearily there came to Ransome a slow impulse toward self-abnegation, rising up in him like that strange feeling he had had long ago as he sat against the mud-stained wall of a shattered house in Belgium. It was an odd desire, faindy sensuous in its implications, to lose himself that self which was the Honorable Thomas Ransome, unhappy, at times drunken, egotistical, intelligent, disappointed, neurotic, despairing. It was a desire to merge himself whatever there was of soul, of intelligence, of personality, known as Thomas Ransome into the mixture of what was known as humanity, a desire as strong as that of thirst, to know this man standing there against the sky, and his brothers, whether black or white, yellow or brown, a desire to fathom the endless, inexplicable patience and resignation of all his kind. For a second he was aware, as if the low-hanging clouds had lifted suddenly to reveal the blazing sun they hid, of having had a glimpse of salvation and peace.

And then suddenly, eluding him., the sensation and the vision were gone.

At the same time, at the second the experience ceased, the black maa on the balcony turned and looked toward him into the light which came from below the rim of clouds. For Ransome the trees about him were no longer luminous and glorified, but only the familiar banyans and peepul trees beneath whose branches he had sat so many times drinking the bad cocktails at Mr. Banner] ee's badminton parties. And the ugly black man was no longer some one very near to him, so near that he had been on the verge of discovering his secret, but simply Mr. Bannerjee's Gujerati servant, dirty, inefficient, groveling when abused by his master.

As the boat came again beneath the balcony, he called out to the man in Hindustani, "Where is Memsahib?"

The man answered him in Gujerati, "Memsahib sleeping" and made pantomimed sleep with a sudden gesture of singular beauty.

Ransome thought, "Let the child sleep. She probably hasn't slept for two days," and pantomiming his meaning, told the man to come into the boat.

The man at first refused, and only came reluctantly when Ransome ordered him abruptly.

In a mixture of pidgin tongues, he asked the man if he had nothing to bring with him, but the man replied, "No, Sahib, nothing"... nothing but the ragged bit of cloth he wore about his skinny waist between his skinny thighs.

They set out and on the way he tried with all the Gujerati he could muster to talk with the man, but the servant seemed either dazed or stupid. Nothing could be got from him save an occasional animal gesture of pantomime which meant nothing to Ransome.

At the Distillery the man stepped out and, falling on his knees pressed his forehead into the red mud in an exaggerated salaam.

Ransome asked, "Where will you go?" But the man did not understand and, aware that the sun was sinking, he turned away and took up the oars. The man waited as if out of respect until the boat was a hundred yards from the shore and then, turning, he set out across the vast muddy plain, straight away into the sulphurous yellow light that rimmed the sky beyond. Until the boat lost itself among the half-drowned trees, the crooked tiny black figure was still visible, growing smaller and smaller in the terrifying vastness of the Indian landscape.

He had passed his own house and the house of Raschid Ali Khan when the darkness came down suddenly. It was as if in a few moments the trees, the houses, the familiar landmarks melted into blackness, or as if the waters themselves had risen and enveloped everything. For a second, alarmed, he stopped rowing and thought, "I must not get lost. If she should waken and find herself alone in the house she might be frightened," and again, as he had done so many times during the war, he sought to take command of himself in a new way, to force his body to exert an extra sense to guide him straight to the house. There were no stars to steer by, and now suddenly no trees or houses, for even if he could have seen them the neam and peepul and banyan trees had been planted long ago without order or system. Calculating that the lag of Fern's one contrived and limping oar would pull him always toward the left, he set out once more, glancing over his shoulder in a vain effort to discover some evidence that he had not already lost his way.

The rain which just before sunset had stopped for a little while began again now, descending in ropes of water with such violence that it beat up a fine mist above the flood. For ten minutes he rowed with a terrifying feeling of blind helplessness, for the evocation of that sixth sense which long ago had been real, had now failed. Again and again he ran the little boat blindly among the branches of trees and then suddenly he became aware that, despite his efforts, it had taken a direction of its own and that the oars were making no impression any longer. He had blundered and now he was no longer in the backwaters, but in a part of the flood where the force of the river's rushing current made itself felt. For a second he thought, "Now I am lost. I will be swept away like all the others." He did not want to die and he struggled for a time until he saw that rowing was of no avail, especially when he did not know whither he was bound and whether each stroke of the oars might not be bringing him nearer to death. So he ceased all effort presently and let himself drift, thinking quietly, "Well, if it is over, it is over and maybe it's better that way."

He could not tell, now in the darkness, whether the boat was drifting rapidly or merely swinging about in the eddies of? the main current, but presently a cluster of leaves brushed his face and reaching out, he seized a branch and held fast. Now the worst was over. At least he could spend the night here, wet and miserable as he was, and with the coming of daylight he could discover where he was. Then he remembered the cord of Mr. Bannerjee's Bond Street dressing-gown, and groping he found it on the bottom of the boat and fastened one end to a stout branch of the tree. Now he might even sleep with safety in the midst of the murmurous threatening darkness*

For a long time he waited, wakeful despite the weariness of two days without sleep. He was hungry, and even in the damp heat he had begun to shiver. He thought again, "I must get back to her somehow." If she wakened she might be frightened in that strange house with its ancient evil legends and the spirit of old Mr. Bannerjee still haunting its dark corridors. And then slowly he began to experience a sensation which he had not known since the war, a feeling of the presence there all about him in the darkness among the rustling trees of all those dead who had vanished in the catastrophe. Long ago the same feeling terrified him far more than any shells or bullets; long ago that same feeling had crept over him slowly like the rising of icy water, against his will, defeating his intelligence and his reason. Long ago he had felt the invisible, intangible, presence of the thousands of those whose bodies lay shattered and torn above and in the ferule Flemish mud all about him. Then the terror chilled his blood and made the hair rise on his body; long ago the fear had been all the worse because it was beyond reason and his own boyish rejection of immortality. It was as if those unseen and unseeable spirits had stood there in the gray fog which hung above the mud, accusing him, saying, "We are not dead. There is no death."

But now there was no terror. Sitting alone in the little boat in all that blackness, he knew that the spirits were there, not born of his imagination as he had tried long ago to make himself believe, but real, possessing perhaps even a substance which could be neither seen nor felt with the poor senses he possessed. It was not terror which he experienced now, but a sense of peace and understanding.

How long he remained, shaking and exhausted, in the tugging boat he did not know, for in the blackness all sense of time seemed to vanish, but presently he became aware that a kind of light had entered the darkness, gradually more and more apparent, suffusing dimly the whole air and bringing a vague black form to the trees all about him. It was a light that came downward from the clouds, the reflection of some fire which had broken out again in the town. Slowly the light increased until at last only a little way off he was able to make out the complicated, richly carved phallic roof of the Shiva temple, and then quite near at hand all that was visible of the stubby cast-iron Queen Victoria. Only the head remained above the water and about the short thick neck there had collected a garland of grasses and rotting flowers brought down by the current of the river. Half-drowned, she had remained somehow, stubborn and undefeatable, on the central buttress of the shattered bridge.

As the rosy light increased he discovered against the sky not far away in a filigree of black the great fan of the ancient Java fig tree that stood near the badminton court, and knew that if he could reach the tree itself the rest would be easy. There was no use in attempting to propel the boat with the oars, so at last he untied the cord, and drawing it and himself from branch to branch clotted with rubbish, he made his way along the row of banyan trees which bordered the Racecourse Road. It was a slow business because the gilded canopy kept being caught by the branches. After what seemed hours he arrived beneath the tree and there, dripping with sweat, he waited for a moment to rest. The chill was gone now. Rowing the boat for the last hundred yards, he arrived quickly at the balcony of the dead house, and climbing over the rail he made the boat fast once more with the cord of Mr. Bannerjee's dressing-gown.

The house was still, more quiet even than the desolation outside, and for a moment he thought, "Perhaps she has gone away. Perhaps some one has come for her," and felt suddenly the sickness of disappointment. By the dim, reflected glow of the light outside he made his way slowly along the hallway until he came at last to the room where he had left ber.

She had not gone away. She was still asleep beneath the netting on the bed, stretched out like a child with one arm thrown over her head, the short blonde hair curly and towsled in the damp.

Exhausted now and puzzled, he stood there for a long time, looking down at her in the dim light that came through the window. All at once, for some reason, she seemed very remote from him and no longer childish. In her very youth there was something which was ageless, which touched him profoundly, and in his own weariness, in his thirst and hunger, brought a lump into his throat. He experienced both shame and envy for the youth, the very youngness, which surrounded her like an aura, envy too for a kind of romance which he felt in her and which he had never known. For a fleeting moment he divined how wonderful it would be to have been young once as she was young, to have believed in the world as she believed in it. That was something he had never known and would never know now, because it was too late. But he was aware too of the tragedy which lay in her very youngness, of what lay before her, thinking how litde she knew of the world, how little there was of truth between the reality and the tissue of that false world she had created out of her own imagination. What would happen to her when she passed from the one world into the other?

But the chills began to return, and going into Mr. Banner jee's room he rummaged about in the dim light until he found a dhoti. After stripping himself and rubbing himself down with a bed cover, he put on the dhoti and returned to the room where Fern lay sleeping. At the same moment there was an explosion coming from a great distance which rocked the shattered wooden house. And then another and another. Bits of plaster fell from the ceiling about him, and he thought, "That would be Raschid and Harry Loder blowing up the wreckage/' In the morning the flood would be gone.

On the hard bed beneath the netting the girl stirred but did not waken, and he thought, "How tired she must have been."

The fire in the town was burning itself out and the light was fading. With cushions he made himself a bed, and wrapping the dhoti about his head after the fashion of the millions who slept each night in the streets over all India, he lay down on the floor beside her, so that when she wakened she would not be afraid.

It did not occur to him that what he did, staying there all the night with her, might create a fresh scandal That old world, that world of gossip and petty jealousies and ambitions, that world of the Club and the Boys, of Pukka Lil and the Simon tennis parties had been swept away, leaving in its place a world that would be for a time at least savage and primitive and desperate.

At the Mission Aunt Phoebe went about her work.

There was no boy now to help her, for in the early morning she had sent away the only boy who had returned to seek news of the Smileys. He had gone unwillingly and had not returned. And among the refugees she found no help. When she looked over her guests without passion now in the midst of disaster, she saw that Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was not only an inebriate but a fool, and that Mrs. Simon was only another kind of fool. She would be useless in a crisis, only sobbing and wringing her hands (when she was not asleep) and talking of "her loss" the loss. Aunt Phoebe thought sourly, of a husband and a daughter whom she had always bullied and made unhappy, to whom death itself must have come as a relief. Mrs. Bannerjee had never done any work and knew nothing about it, and merely sat chewing her pan with the indifferent calm of a yogi. To Aunt Phoebe, Mrs. Bannerjee was no beauty. To Aunt Phoebe she was simply a lazy woman without feelings. Miss Murgatroyd, when she was not bringing down upon her head the snubs and petty cruelties of Mrs. Bannerjee, fluttered about, making an effort to be useful; but she too was a fool, perhaps the biggest of the lot.

So Aunt Phoebe thought, "The best thing I can do is to keep them all out of the way." But they would not be kept out of the way in either the huge storeroom or the bedrooms. As if they were aware that security lay only in the presence of the old woman, they kept coming and going to and from the kitchen. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry wanted aspirin and Mrs. Simon something to make her sleep.

Yet, despite all the irritations, the old lady was enjoying herself as she had not enjoyed herself since the days of prairie fires and tornadoes. The absence of news about the Smileys disturbed her, but not very profoundry, because she had faith, a peculiarly potent faith which believed not only that God would protect her nephew and his wife, but that if He failed to protect them, it would be because He had His own reasons. And because she was old and had lived all her life in simplicity close to the earth, she possessed at eighty-two a wisdom and a knowledge which none of the others, even the Hindus, were able to share. She knew that in the course of nature it would not matter very much what happened to the Smileys or to herself. The one thing that mattered was that they had lived honorably and that in death there could be no reproaches; such knowledge was wonderful for putting the mind at ease. It did seem to her a pity that if people must die, the Lord had not taken away the fools and the useless ones like Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon and the Banner jees.

And she was at peace because her mind was occupied with a thousand details and because her hands were busy. No one knew better than herself the solace which work might bring. In all her life she had never had time either to think of herself or to "enjoy" grief. There had been moments since she came to Ranchipur when she had been idle, moments when she was threatened by a temptation to work mischief as she had done in letting out the poor comfortable old hyena, moments when she tormented Mrs. Simon deliberately by appearing on the verandah with her rocking chair and lemonade and palm leaf fan. The only flaw she had found in the life of Ranchipur was that there was, at moments > not enough to do. And now she was busy, with making an invoice of the storeroom to see how long the food there would hold out, with, cooking and making certain that none of the refugees received more than his proper ration, with finding aspirin for Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and brewing neam tea for Mrs. Simon's nerves.

She went about her work with the revolver Harry Loder had givem her still strapped about her waist over her apron, partly because she did not know what to do with it and partly because it was exciting to- think that it might be useful. She had not much faith in the necessity* for it until late in the afternoon when she saw coming across the- muddy fields the tall, thin, black figures of three Bhils. They came straight toward the house and in silence she watched their approach, as she might have watched the approach of three redskins across the prairies of her childhood. She saw no use in alarming the others, and she determined first to discover what it was they wanted.

They had come down from the hills to plunder and appeared astonished when they found the door of a house they had supposed empty barred by an old woman with a revolver (which Aunt Phoebe took out of its holster as they drew near). She could not speak their language, but when they made signs that they wanted to come into the house and wanted something to eat, she in her turn made vigorous pantomimes showing them that they could not enter and that there was nothing to eat. They were black and menacing enough in appearance, with rags and goatskins for coverings and long, black, greasy hair which fell to their shoulders. They had no firearms but each of them carried a long spear.

For a moment they gibbered and chattered among themselves and they might have attempted to force their way in save that in the midst of their conference Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry came into the kitchen and, seeing them, uttered a shrill scream which attracted all the other refugees. The sight of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, wrapped like a mummy in sheets (for both Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Smiley were small thin women and their clothes of no use to her) put them to rout. Sullenly they turned and walked through the red mud in the direction of the town.

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, threatening again to faint, cried for brandy, but there was none. Miss Murgatroyd and Mrs. Simon both began talking at once; Miss Murgatroyd predicting the direst horrors of rape and torture, and Mrs. Simon crying out, "What is going to happen to us now? I know what they're like ... the Bhils. I know what they're like around the Mission. They've been waiting for years just to cut our throats." And then suddenly she thought of Fern and cried out, "Where is Fern? What have they done to her? Why hasn't she come back?"

Aunt Phoebe looked at her sourly and said, "Fern is all right. Don't you worry. From what I know about Fern, she's got a head on her shoulders."

Then in the doorway appeared a new sight, more strange and more exotic than the Bhils. It was Lady Esketh, with her white evening gown hitched about her waist, her arms covered with jewels, her legs spattered to the knees with red mud. With a dignity which was suddenly comic, she said, "I am Lady Esketh," and then to Aunt Phoebe, "I suppose you are Aunt Phoebe. Tom Ransome told me to come straight to you."

"Yes," said Aunt Phoebe, feeling suddenly shy, "that's right. That was right. Come right in." Then remembering her manners, she said, "This is Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry."

"How d'you do?" said Lady Esketh, at the same time pulling the tucked up dress from the rhinestone belt and letting it fall to the -floor.

Upon Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry the effect of the introduction was far greater than any brandy could have been; she was meeting Lady Esketh at last, in spite of everything; she recovered herself at once and stood up as if in the presence of royalty. She was the first to find her tongue. She said, with her China-blue eyes wide open, "Didn't you meet them? Didn't they attack you?"

"Who?" asked Lady Esketh.

"The Bhils."

"What are Bills?"

"Those savages , . . black men with spears."

"Oh, them! Yes, I saw them."

Then Mrs. Simon spoke breathlessly, "Didn't they attack you . , . with all those jewels?"

"No. They didn't see me."

"What did your ... I mean, what did you do?" Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had very nearly stumbled. Under the stress of emotion she had slipped back across the years of officialdom and had very nearly said, "Your Ladyship."

"I didn't like their looks. I hid in a ditch till they went past."

"Oh," said Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, "a nullah. How very clever of you!"

Aunt Phoebe knew suddenly that she was going to like the newcomer. She did not suffer fools gladly; she was always astonished by the number of people who reached middle-age still remaining fools. Clearly, Lady Esketh was no fool.

"You'd better have some dry clothes," said Aunt Phoebe.

"Yes, thanks. And some kind of a bath."

"There's a chattee... ' began Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry.

"There's a stone crock full of water and a dipper. I'll heat up some water," said Aunt Phoebe. "Come on with me."

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry giggled, aware suddenly of her mummy-like attire. "We haven't any clothes, any of us," she said, "I was caught in my neglijay. It's drying now, but it's so hard to dry things in monsoon weather."

As for Mrs. Simon, she appeared to have become mute. She stood quite still, staring at Lady Esketh and the fortune in jewels she wore on one wrist. This was her dream of what a duchess should be. She for' got even the bodies of Mr. Simon and poor, stupid Hazel crushed beneath tons of stone and plaster. While she stared Lady Esketh began to unfasten the bracelets, saying, "What can I do with these?"

"Give them to me," said Aunt Phoebe. "I'll keep them in my stocking." Then a wicked gleam came into her eyes that same look of devilment which Ransome had caught in her wrinkled face on the day the hyena drove Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry up the arbor. "I guess no matter what hap' pens," she said, "they won't be looking under my skirts."

When she had gone, taking Lady Esketh with her, Mrs. Simon said, "What a way to talk! Now you can see!"

"In front of Lady Esketh, too!"

"How can she talk like that... when anything might happen?"

And then Mr. Bannerjee appeared in the doorway, his head covered with ashes, carrying his lacquer box. At sight of him both women screamed, and then recognizing him beneath the ashes, they turned their backs and occupied themselves with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's peignoir, which was nearly dry. Mr. Bannerjee in European clothes was bad enough. In a dhoti, covered with ashes, Mr. Bannerjee, the elegant, the cosmopolitan, looked like any filthy sadhu.

Almost at once he became a nuisance, for in an accession of orthodoxy he demanded a corner of the stove and a set of kitchen utensils where he might prepare food for himself and Mrs. Bannerjee uncontaminated by the hand of the untouchable Aunt Phoebe.

In the bathroom by the chattee^ Aunt Phoebe and Lady Esketh began to understand each other. Aunt Phoebe brought cotton underwear (which Lady Esketh had not seen since the pinched days long ago whea she had lived in a Florentine pension with a bankrupt father) and a dress of calico which she had never seen in all her life, a dress which was simply two pieces of cloth sewn together with sleeves by a Gujerati dress- maker who had squatted on the verandah floor while he made it.

Aunt Phoebe felt a sudden shyness, not because Lady Esketh was fashionable or because she was rich or because she was the god-daughter of a queen, but because she was called "Lady" Esketh. Aunt Phoebe had never called anyone "Lady" in her life, and in spite of a knowledge remote and somewhat vague, that there were such things as tides, it seemed to her that it was a silly thing to call anyone "Lady" Esketh or Lady Smith or Lady Jones. Her shyness was born of the unwillingness of her tongue to pronounce the word "Lady/' so in all their conversations she simply addressed Lady Esketh as "you/*

Almost at once Lady Esketh had asked, "Who are the two women in the kitchen?" And Aunt Phoebe had responded, "The one in sheets is Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry. She's the wife of the bank manager. The other is Mrs. Simon, the wife of the other missionary."

"The one who has a daughter called Fern?"

"Yes," said Aunt Phoebe. "The poor thing has lost her other daughter and her husband. They were killed."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

For a moment the unreal horror of the reality returned, making them both mute.

There was a long silence, and then Lady Esketh, who had quite shamelessly taken off all her clothes and was standing quite naked beside the chattee^ said, "Have you heard of what has happened to the hospital?"

"No. Nobody knows anything. I sent one of the boys to find out, but he never came back."

"I don't know whether my own husband is alive or dead. He was ill , . . in the old Summer Palace."

Aunt Phoebe thought, "Poor thing" and then knew at once that her thought was merely conventional Whatever happened to this strange woman standing there naked, dousing herself with cold water from the chattee, she would never be a poor thing. So she said, "I expect that tomorrow things will be better."

Then Aunt Phoebe left Lady Esketh with the clothes, and in a little

while, dressed in the calico frock, she came in the kitchen and Aunt Phoebe thought, "It's wonderful what a difference there is in the way people wear clothes. 5 * In the calico dress which fitted her no better than it had fitted Mrs. Smiley, for whom it had