The Rains Came/Part III - 2

So that was what was the matter with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry. That was why she was so strange and muddled at times. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry drank secretly. At the moment it struck her as incredible how innocent she herself had been up to that night she went to Ransome's house to wait for him. She had been an idiot. No wonder he had always thought of her as a child. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's drunkenness was only one detail in a world which, she saw now, had been fantastic in its unreality. Her mother must have known all along and pretended not to know, because she was a snob.

Her mother was saying, "You'll never know what I went through on the night of the flood. I did everything for her. I saved her life and she wasn't even grateful."

Then there was a knock on the door, and when Fern went to open it Aunt Phoebe was there with the note from Ransome. She closed the door again, opened it and read it on the far side of the room away from her mother, but the ruse did no good, for one of the marble-blue eyes, she knew, was watching her from beneath the damp cloth.

It was short. It simply told her what he was doing and that he could not return to the Smileys' all day and perhaps for several days. She must, he wrote, remain there at the Mission. The town was already full of cholera and typhoid and the stench was horrible. "You must not thin\ of coming her el' he wrote. "Not now, my dear. Nothing must happen to you And when she read that, happiness engulfed her again, shutting out all else, all anxiety and sorrow and misery.

From across the room Mrs. Simon said, "What is it, Fern? Don't stand there saying nothing."

"It's a note for me," she said.

"What's it about? Who's it from?"

And then suddenly Fern thought, "I'll tell her. Ill tell her everything. I am free now. My life is my own." So aloud she said, "It's from Mr. Ransome."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Simon. "What does he want?"

"He wants me to stay here at the Mission and not go into the town."

"Of course, and quite right he is."

Fern thought, "She beats anything. She's already accepted him as a son-in-law." Crossing to the bed, she said, "I'm not going to stay here. I'm going into the town."

"You must be crazy. You can't leave me here alone with the Smileys. You can't let anything happen to you now. You're all I've got. Where on earth did you get such an idea?"

Quite calmly Fern said, "I'm going because I can be of use at the hospital or some place. And I'm going so that I can be near him."

Mrs. Simon for the first time sat up on the cot. "Am I nothing to you? Haven't you a thought for your own mother?"

With a sudden feeling of triumph Fern thought, "She can't touch me any longer. I'm not afraid of her or her scenes. She can't touch me." It was true. She was free. She said, "Of course I'm thinking of you, but I'm going just the same* That's where I belong. No matter what happens, I have to be near him. He doesn't know how to take care of himself."

"Fern, do you realize what you are doing? Do you want everybody to think you no better than a street-walker?"

"It doesn't matter what people think the few of them that are left.

What happened has changed all that. It doesn't matter about marriage licenses or anything just now. Maybe it will again some day, but it doesn't now."

Her mother started to speak, but in the onrush of new confidence she stopped her and said, "I was lying that day when I told you I had lived with him. I was lying because I was unhappy and frightened. But it isn't a lie now. It has happened. It happened this morning. I love him more than anybody or anything in the world. I'd do anything for him anything at all!"

Her mother covered her face with her hands. She was too tired now, too old, to make one of her melodramatic scenes. She only covered her face with her hands and said, "Fern, my child! My little girl!"

What she meant by the action and the speech was not clear to Fern. She did not know whether it was a gesture of tragedy and reproach or one of satisfaction. But knowing her mother, she understood that she saw what had happened as only a prelude to marriage., and such a marriage would, of course, solve her mother's problems. She would be provided for; she would have a future, more brilliant than anything she had ever known.

Now she said, "Come here. Sit by me." And when grudgingly Fern sat on the edge of the cot, Mrs. Simon took her hand again, and said, "It isn't the way I would have wanted it to happen, but I hope you are going to be happy."

And then Fern knew that never again would her mother trouble her. She was, Fern saw as from a great height, childish and futile. From now on she would have to be cared for, told what to do. The capitulation, the whole collapse, was too sudden; it left Fern undecided and a little frightened. And suddenly Mrs. Simon was crying, whether out of relief or sadness or satisfaction Fern could not divine.

At that moment Mrs. Simon was not thinking of Fern or Ransome or anything that had to do with them. She was seeing suddenly a dead oak tree hung with Spanish moss, and in the moonlight beyond, the silvery sheen of the Mississippi. The revival meeting was over and on their way home she and Elmer had climbed a fence of rails and lain down beneath the tree. It had happened there in silence without a word spoken. They had even turned aside and climbed the fence as if they were a

single person. It had happened quickly in a burst of adolescent passion stirred by the singing and the hysteria of the meeting. They had been drawn by something stronger than either of them, stronger even than the Baptist church and the teachings of the little freshwater college. And afterward she had not been stricken down by the wrath of God; she had gone on living, terrified of having a baby, and so they were married quietly, much sooner than they had planned. No one save Elmer and herself had ever known of it, and never again had it been like that.

Suddenly she took her hands from her face and looked at Fern. "What if you should have a baby?"

"I hadn't thought about that. I might have."

"You had better be married right away."

She did not make any answer, seeing that it was useless to expect her mother to see the thing as she saw it. Whatever happened, even if she had a baby, she would never ask Ransome to marry her. She did not want it to be like that. She would not have it spoiled. So to her mother she said, "You'd better lie down again and rest. Sleep if you can."

"I couldn't sleep. I couldn't close an eye." But her mother lay down again and began to moan, and presently the moaning ceased and Fern saw that she had fallen asleep. Oddly, mysteriously, she had become older and wiser than her mother. In a little while she rose quietly from the edge of the cot and sat in a rocking-chair, and presently she too, out of sheer exhaustion, closed her eyes and slept.

A long time afterward she was wakened by a gentle touch on the shoulder, and waking saw Mr. Smiley standing in front of her.

"I'm sorry to wake you, my child," he said, "but well have to read the burial service now. I must go to the school and I may not be able to come back tonight or tomorrow or the day after. Will your mother want to be present?"

"No," said Fern. "Let her sleep."

So with Bertha Smiley and Aunt Phoebe carrying the glass jars with the ashes, they had gone out and buried them beneath the banyan tree. It was over very quickly. It was, Fern thought, no more than a symbol, and Mr. Smiley had done it so nicely, so gently, that there was some-

thing beautiful in it. And she thought now,, "Only three days ago they were both alive. Only three days ago I talked to them both."

It was Homer Smiley who guided them across the plain past the Sikh barracks and across the half -ruined bridge into the town; for they went together. Fern Simon and Lady Esketh, stubbornly, against the protests of all the little party at the Mission, against the protests even of the gentle Mr. Smiley, who could not see how either Fern or Lady Esketh could be anything more than a nuisance in the desolation of the city. He knew the will of Aunt Phoebe and the firmness of his own wife, but with these he was seldom forced to deal; he had never encountered anything like the stubborn wilfulness of these two women, and he yielded at once.

Mrs. Simon, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion and grief, was told nothing. Aunt Phoebe volunteered to deal with her hysterics when she wakened and found that her Fern had gone away into the pest hole of a city.

Mr. Smiley led the way through the red mud, with the two women following silently at his heels, and on their way to the bridge they had their first of two encounters. It was with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, who appeared suddenly from behind the ruined Sikh barracks. She was walking unsteadily, attended by her bodyguard of Untouchable schoolboys. She had changed her costume and was wearing a short dress of flowered cretonne and carrying a purple silk umbrella and a workbag, and had the air of just having opened a county horticultural show in the pouring rain. The umbrella did little good, for it leaned now this way, now that, permitting the monsoon rain to soak the flowered dress. From the workbag protruded the neck of a brandy-botde.

At sight of her Mr. Smiley frowned, but with the firmness of a martyr continued straight on his course. She did not see them at first, but when she recognized them she began to cry, and as they came near she cried out, "They've stolen everything, even the sewing-machine and my hats and my enlarged portraits."

They stood there in the rain, polite and falsely sympathetic, while she recounted all the Benares brass, the bric-a-brac, the embroidered sofa cush- ions which had been looted by the Bhils.

"I shall make a claim against the state/' she cried, tipsily. "All the things I've collected for years. No protection. It's an outrage! An outrage! My enlarged portrait! Wait until Herbert hears of it."

The little group of Untouchable boys stood about, watching her with fascination. One of them giggled now and then. In the midst of her recital Mr. Smiley managed to whisper fiercely in Gujerati to the oldest. "If she falls down, you're to carry her. You must get her safely to the Mission."

Mr. Smiley tried to reassure her, but Lady Esketh grew impatient and said in a low, fierce voice, "We have things to do. We can't stand here all day talking to that bloody fool," and so they left her, looking after them, a little bewildered and startled when she recognized the fashionable Lady Esketh of whom she had taken no notice. To make up for the error, she made a great effort and waved her hand at the retreating backs of the little party.

The second encounter occurred just as they had made the dizzy, perilous crossing of the railway bridge. On the way over they had held hands, making a chain to steady each other in case the roaring, rushing water made any one of them giddy, and when they had reached solid land and looked up once more, there right in front of them was standing Miss Hodge surrounded by a group of villagers, all chattering at her.

In her confusion and bewilderment she heard and understood nothing that they said, that they were asking her for food, for news of their children, for security. They were low-caste people with whom she had little contact, and they spoke in a variety of jargons, but even if they had spoken Gujerati or Hindustani, she would not have understood them because she was paralyzed by fear and horror, by all the sights she had witnessed after her escape from the hospital and now by the spectacle of the narrow, tottering bridge over the rushing water which she must cross if she was to reach her adored Lady Esketh.

She did not understand that the dirty low-caste people clustered about her had confused her character and personality with that of Miss Dirks. They knew that if they asked Miss Dirks for help she would not refuse them, and Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge had been together for so long that the little group had come to think of them as a single manifestation, a single phenomenon. So they went on appealing to her, throwing

themselves on their faces, grasping her knees again and again, as often as she managed to shake herself free. To them Miss Hodge was the only visible remaining vestige of the great British Empire. But Miss Hodge alone, without Miss Dirks, was as confused and useless as a fluttering sparrow trapped in a room.

For forty-eight hours she had scarcely slept at all, and for twenty of the forty-eight hours she had sat perched on the roof of the one-story bungalow in the rain, watching the rising waters carry past her debris, dead cattle, snakes, and corpses. Now and then in the darkness she had cried out in a voice which steadily grew more hoarse and feeble, the name of Sarah, but there had been no answer out of the rain. And at last in the early morning light she had seen one of the pleasure-boats from the palace lake coming toward her, and in it one of the lovely Sikhs; which one she could not make certain for they all looked so much alike. Despite the fact that he rowed straight toward her, she tried to call out to him, but when she opened her mouth no sound came out of it. Even in her weakness and terror she felt a wave of excitement sweep over her, one of those waves which turned her into another creature and deranged all the monotonous peace of her life with Sarah.

He spoke to her in Hindustani and when she tried to rise she only sat down again suddenly on the low sloping roof. So the tall Sikh had bent down and gathered her up easily in his arms and placed her in the gaudy little boat. For a moment she had nearly fainted from the combination of weakness and excitement, for when her soft middle-aged body became aware of the great chest of the Sikh and the powerful biceps of the two arms which grasped her, she was like a woman ravished. Her heart stopped beating. She closed her eyes and the world, the flood, the ruined town spun round her. When she opened her eyes she was lying in the bottom of the little boat, and the Sikh, his black eyes looking straight before him over her head, was rowing toward the ruin of the Great Palace.

Then an extraordinary thing happened to her. She was seized suddenly by all the craft of a prostitute. She pretended, with consciousness of what she was doing, that she was still fainting and watched him between half-closed lids. She saw him as she had never seen a man before; she looked greedily at the shiny black beard, the fiery black eyes, the red

sensual lips, the great shoulders, the breast and the powerful arms, outlined now, as if he had been naked, by the rain-soaked tunic of cotton. Her eyes in a kind of wild insanity, swept his body from the jaunty turban to the naked powerful foot, and what she did not see she imagined with a terrifying lewdness. Shame touched her for a moment faintly, but was swept away by a powerful wave of -voluptuous abandon. It was as if she felt her whole plump, pudgy body changing, as if it had become a stranger to her, glorified and frightening. And in the midst of the sickening emotion a sudden wild and vicious thought came into her head, "It's Sarah's fault," she thought, bitterly. "It's her fault I have never known anything. She would never let me know."

She wanted the rescue to go on and on forever in this orgy of wild emotion. The Sikh never looked at her at all, but straight before him, except when he turned his head to make certain that he was steering in the proper direction, and then she saw the muscles of the powerful throat and felt again that she was going to faint. But so far as he was concerned, she might have been no more than a bag of meal. Waves swept over her, shutting out the world in a hot glow of ecstasy. And suddenly the little boat bumped slightly and ceased to move and the Sikh in Hindustani told her that they had arrived at the Great Palace. She tried to rise and could not, and once again the Sikh gathered her up in his powerful arms against the powerful chest, and once again the ruined world whirled about her in a chaos which was like the beginning of creation.

When the world about her grew real once more, she had opened her eyes at the sound of Mr. Smiley's mild voice and saw him standing over her, surrounded by a cloud of dark faces, and she felt a faint shock of disappointment that it was not the Sikh or at least Lady Esketh, but only meager Mr. Smiley. He gave her a drink of toddy and water (which he had found in the ruins of the palace kitchen) and then he said> "The water is going down. In a litde while you can get to the hospital."

But the shock of the toddy cleared her head a little, and she said, "I don't want to go to the hospital. Where is Sarah Dirks? I want to go back to the bungalow."

Mr. Smiley said he did not know where Miss Dirks was, and then slowly, haltingly, with an effort she related how Miss Dirks had run off into the rain and flood like a mad woman to save a few school books newly arrived from England. In her poor muddled brain it seemed to her that the flight of Sarah had happened years ago, as long ago as their flight from England, but Mr. Smiley kept assuring her that the earth- quake had happened only day before yesterday.

Mr. Smiley, on his side, listened, trying patiently to make clear to her all that had happened, but thinking ruefully all the time, and shamefully, too, that it was a pity it was not Miss Dirks who had been saved instead of this poor, pudding-faced, addle-pated creature. For he did not doubt now that Miss Dirks had perished; as nearly as he could make out she had gone from the bungalow to the Girl's High School at about the moment he and Bertha and the boys reached the wall which surrounded the Park of the Great Palace. They themselves had escaped the rising waters by some miracle in the very nick of time. Miss Dirks, going back into the very center of the town, could not possibly have escaped.

But he said nothing of this to Miss Hodge. He only reflected that it was always the weak, the incompetent, who escaped because somehow they were always taken care of; it was people like Miss Dirks who were dutiful and took risks who were lost.

When the water had receded he told his wife that he would take Miss Hodge to the hospital, discover what news he could and return as quickly as possible.

Then Miss Hodge, sitting up, asked, "Where is Lady Esketh?"

"I don't know. She went to dinner with Mr. Bannerjee."

And Miss Hodge began to cry, saying, "She was coming to tea with us. Now I suppose she won't be able to come." And that made her remember the quarrel with Sarah over the conflicting tea parties, and she ^rew all muddled again, and was seized suddenly with an obsession that she must return to the bungalow because Lady Esketh was already there waiting for her.

It was that which gave Mr. Smiley his cue as to how he might deal with her. Patiendy he explained all over again the circumstances of the 3ood and how it was impossible for Lady Esketh to have reached the Bungalow. Very likely they would find her at the hospital, along with Miss Dirks.

It was not that Mr. Smiley meant to escape the responsibility of poor Miss Hodge, but only that he knew well enough how much work there would be for him to do, and that he could not possibly drag Miss Hodge with him wherever he went. At the hospital they would at least have means of caring for her.

He gave her another drink of toddy, and when she was able to stand up she consented to go with him as far as the hospital and they set out down the drive among the shrubs and flowers which overnight had become a jungle.

At the hospital they found Miss MacDaid, somehow fresh and neat in her nurse's costume, and the Major, his head bandaged, a rueful grin on his face. Although the water had scarcely left the first floor of the main building, they were already at work, putting things in order with the aid of the hospital servants who had not perished. In the center of the town the hospital alone remained, shaken, but at least a shelter and a refuge. Everywhere about it there was only desolation, the ancient earth swept clear of any vestige of the swarming life which had once been.

But at the hospital it was no better with Miss Hodge. When she heard that there was no news either of Lady Esketh or Miss Dirks, she wanted to go away again and search for them. She began to cry, repeating over and over again, "But Lady Esketh was coming to tea"; and then suddenly she changed the refrain and said, "No, we were going to Mr. Ransome's. That was it. We were going to Mr. Ransome's. It's such a pity, too, just when I'd gotten Sarah to the point of going out and seeing people."

It was Miss MacDaid who lost patience, and taking Miss Hodge by her plump shoulders, shook her violently in an effort to bring her back to her senses. Miss MacDaid had no cosmetics on now. Her face was gray and formidable. She looked old, but fierce and vigorous.

"You fool!" she cried, "We've got other things to think of besides tea parties," and to the Major she said, "Give her something to quiet her and I'll take her up to my room."

So the Major gave her something, and they managed, after a time, to get her up the stairs where they made her a bed on the floor of the room which Miss MacDaid occupied on the nights when her presence was needed at the hospital. In Miss MacDaid's own bed lay a low-caste woman they had managed to snatch from the maternity ward just in time to save her from the rising waters. She lay now, with the baby born in the midst of the disaster lying in the crook of her arm, watching the scene with dark untroubled eyes. The baby was a boy, strong and well, and that was enough for her.

Miss Hodge slept for a little while, but about noon she wakened, her head more muddled than ever from the effects of the drug. She did not know where she was or how she had come there or what had happened, and when she tried to speak to the woman in the bed in Hindustani and Gujerati, the woman only looked at her with frightened eyes, for she spoke only the dialect of her own people and understood nothing Miss Hodge said.

Then slowly things grew a little clearer to her and she knew that there were two things she must do: escape from this place and find Lady Esketh. Lady Esketh would need her help; she would not know where to go in Ranchipur and she could speak nothing but English. So after a time she rose from the bed on the floor, and opening the door, made her way along the corridor. It was empty; the stairway was empty; and presently she was in the compound, and then among the ruined houses and shops of the bazaar, and presently she reached the bridge on Race- course Road with its statue of Queen Victoria and the Shiva temple. The bridge was broken and the turgid river rushed through the break, but the statue of the Queen and the jewel-box temple still remained standing.

She went to the bridge that led from. the Great Palace to the Sikh barracks, but that too was shattered, and so she continued on her way, not knowing very clearly what she meant to do, along the course of the river. In the town, no one noticed her. People were beginning to come in from the villages and the districts, but she knew none of them and they only stared at her. It was only when she reached the outskirts of the town, on higher ground, that people recognized her and wailed and cried out to her and seized her about the knees. Again and again she managed to shake herself free and continue on her way. She scarcely saw the prostrate bodies or heard their cries of misery and despair. She had to find Lady Esketh, and if only she kept on, she would find a place where the terrible roaring river might be crossed. Her clothes were soaked and she was spotted with red mud and filth to the waist, but she kept on, and after an hour of struggling she arrived at the railway bridge which she had not the courage to cross. There she was surrounded at once by a score of people all crying out to her for help; and then suddenly she was aware that Lady Esketh was there beside her, speaking to her, only it was not the Lady Esketh she had called upon at the Summer Palace, smart and worldly, the way she looked in the pictures in the weekly pictorials, but a strange woman in a calico dress, looking much older, weary, and untidy. Miss Hodge stared for a moment into her face, and in her mixed brain occurred the thought, "It is the same woman, but it isn't. Something has happened to her." Then suddenly she felt shy with the agony of shyness which had swept over her that afternoon at the Summer Palace when she had taken a cigarette and had not known what to do with it.

She was aware that Mr. Smiley was saying something to Lady Esketh, and the shyness vanished in a wave of anger and she cried out, "Don't you believe anything he's saying. I know what he's saying. He's saying we couldn't have you to tea because we had to go to Mr. Ransome's. It's not true. He's lying. He's only a missionary. And, anyway, Sarah is dead; she can't bully me any more."

Then Lady Esketh put a hand round her shoulder and said, "I know he's lying. You come along with me. I'm going to the hospital. I'll take care of you. Don't you worry."

The crowding, dark faces all about them, grown silent for a moment at the spectacle of Miss Hodge's outburst, began again, to wail, even drowning out Mr. Smiley's assurance that they would be helped, and the little procession started off again along the road through the mud and filth, between the shattered houses, the fie dogs and the vultures.

In the gatehouse, Ransome and young Gopal Rao labored on and on, pausing only to eat the rice and curry sent them from the Maharani's pavilion. Even this they had to eat, one at a time, apart, because there seemed to be no end to the growing line of the homeless and hungry beyond the Great Gate, And the repast of Gopal Rao was interrupted again and again when Ransome, who knew only Hindustani and a little Gujarati, had to summon him to interpret. They ate in a small, dark room of the jobedar's lodge because Ransome was unwilling to torment the long line of hungry by the sight of food; yet he and Gopal Rao must eat, as Miss MacDaid and the Major, the Maharani and Raschid and Colonel Ranjit Singh and the Smileys must eat, because this ruined world depended upon them.

The line of refugees filed past the little table, on and on, eternally it seemed to Ransome. There were Kathis and Kolas, Nagas and Modhs, Mochis and Pomlas, Dhodhias and Vasawas and Naikas and even three or four Bhils who slyly came in the hope of free rice. Each one was required by Gopal Rao to give his name and his caste; these Ransome wrote down in a little book, why he did not know, save that it seemed to bring order from chaos and would, he knew, give satisfaction to Doctor Mukda, the recorder, with his passion for statistics. But he was learning things he never knew before, small details out of the lives of these people who bred like swarming maggots differences in caste and the incredible variety of castes and sub-castes, of odd religious beliefs, from degenerate Hinduism to the witchcraft of the Bhils. And slowly, as the day wore on, he saw how incredibly complicated, how hopelessly tangled, were the problems of people like the old Maharajah and the Major and Miss MacDaid who were fighting to bring light to these people.

They were, most of them, diseased and rickety, with a kind of dumb, animal despair and resignation about them, and slowly, as he listened to Gopal Rao talking with them, he discovered that they had not come here to the Great Gate driven by any definite hope or plan, but because the Great Saracen Gate represented to them everything that was the Maharajah. The news had got about that their Father had sent men to the Great Gate to care for them, and so they had come swarming from all parts of the ruined city, even from the nearer villages, like frightened children. They did not know what it was they wanted except that they clamored for food. Few of them yet knew that the good old Maharajah was dead.

As the day passed in damp heat like a steam bath into the afternoon, Ransome grew more and more fascinated, forgetting for long periods of time Edwina and the Major and Miss MacDaid and even Fern. For five years he had lived in Ranchipur and for five years these people had

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not existed for him, or if they had existed, it was only as strange figures which stepped aside when his motor passed, looking up at him through the cloud of red dust with black eyes burning with hunger and privation. His Ranchipur, he began to understand, had been incredibly small and limited the palace and Mr. Banner jee's set, and the tiny group which had dedicated their lives to the rebirth of India. Now, slowly, he began to see beneath the surface, and to divine the misery which lay beneath layer after layer of ignorance and hunger and superstition. The miserable people passing the little table, one by one, quarreling and reviling each other in their haste and terror, became human to him.

Beside him Gopal Rao, the young Mahratta, went on with his work efficiently and with a kind of contempt hovering in his black eyes and about the red, full lips. Gopal Rao was a warrior. A hundred years earlier he would have led a band of Mahratta horsemen charging down from their barren plain to raid the riches of the rest of India.

Ransome thought, "I must learn to speak better Gujerati and learn Mahratta and one or two other tongues." But what were one or two other tongues or four or five or a dozen in the swarming, bewildering complexity of India. Even the clever Gopal Rao with a half-dozen languages at his command was stumped again and again by some obscure dialect. Light was what they needed, all these miserable creatures, light and one or two common languages, and he thought of the boys and girls educated by the Smileys and the transformation which learning achieved in them how the eyes brightened, how the bodies grew straight and strong, how the whole world became changed for them. But what was that all the work of the Smileys and the Major and Miss MacDaid, Raschid and the dead, tired old Maharajah? No more in the vastness of swarming India than a pebble dropped into the sea.

Suddenly he understood what he had not thought of until now, that in the back of his mind, in his soul, there had always been the quiet knowledge that he would live on and on in India, that he was caught now by the East as Miss MacDaid had been caught long ago in childhood. Europe seemed a remote thing, half-dead, dying at least, slowly. Europe he might never see or feel again. And in his heart there was no regret.

Mechanically he kept writing on and on in the litde book, the long list of low-caste names, phonetically because he had not the slightest idea how they were written in European script. Now and then Gopal Rao turned a sharp black eye toward him to ask in English some bit of information. Tomorrow he could leave this work to the young Mahratta and find something at which he would be more useful. By tomorrow, the clever Gopal Rao would know all the answers. By tomorrow it could only be worse instead of better, more starving people and less food unless they could clear a road over the mountains by which lorries could pass. A hundred ox carts had gone already and a few of the elephants were on their way, but ox carts and elephants were slow. Hundreds might starve and die of cholera before they returned.

Then slowly he became aware that even his wiry body, which had withstood so much dissipation, was beginning to feel the misery and hard- ship of the past three days, the lack of food and sleep, the horror and the strain. His head ached and the inside of his mouth was dry and he felt an overwhelming desire to lie down there on the floor of the jobedar's lodge, to sleep on and on forever. He had never known weariness like this which seemed to enter the very marrow of his bones.

Dully he thought, "Perhaps it is cholera or typhus or plague. Perhaps I shall die." And he knew that he did not want to die and the thought of death made him think again of Fern. Now, weary, all the exhilaration gone from him, he was ashamed of what had happened. What was he to do with her? What right had he to change all her life? Supposing she had a baby. Neither of them had given a thought to that.

"Pomla," Gopal Rao was saying. "They make brooms and baskets."

Through the doorway Ransome saw a strange group beneath- the Great Arch with its huge pierced copper lantern Smiley and Fern, Edwina and Miss Hodge. They looked as dirty, as bedraggled as any of the low- caste people in the line. Their fine clothes, their jewels, their background, their superiority where was it now? Prestige! Prestige was of the heart and not something which could be imposed. Mr. Smiley had it by good works and perhaps Miss Hodge; but Fern and Edwina Edwina looked haggard and weary.

Then he noticed the strangest of things that Edwina was holding Miss Hodge's hand as if she were a child. Edwina and Miss Hodge! Of all people in the world.

He rose and went to the door, saying to Gopal Rao, "Go on. I'll take

care of these." The young Mahratta glanced at him. It was a question o a second, but in the black eyes he divined a queer look of hostility as if he were saying, "Yes, they're your people, Europeans. They do not have to wait in line like the others." The look astonished Ransome. He had looked on Gopal Rao as a friend as he looked on all Indians like him as friends. He wanted to say, "It isn't like that! Believe me, it isn't like that!" but there was no time. In the line a quarrel had broken out again, but now there was a Mahratta policeman to keep them in order. Up and down the line he went, barking his orders like an aggressive terrier. This was the sort of thing he liked.

They were, they told him, on the way to the hospital and had passed by the gate to ask him for news and to tell him theirs. To Fern and Edwina he said, "You shouldn't have come. You should have stayed at the Mission."

"We've come to work," said Fern. "There's nothing for us to do out there."

It surprised him that she had said "we," for there had never been anything but hostility between her and Edwina. He allowed it to pass without comment, only saying, "It's not safe here. You would have been safer at the Mission." He was troubled suddenly about the Major and Miss MacDaid. The Major might not mind having them at the hospital, but Miss MacDaid would not want Edwina; that knowledge he had read in the eyes of the head nurse on the night of Mr. Banner jee's party,

He looked at Edwina. She was still holding Miss Hodge's hand, and the gaze she returned had in it something almost of defiance. It was a loolc he had never seen in her eyes before and it startled him. Like Miss Hodge, he thought, "Something has happened to her," but the look didn't alter his suspicion that she was going to the hospital because of the Major. He said to Miss Hodge, "Is there any news of Miss Dirks?" but Miss Hodge only stared at him and then turned again to Edwina with a look of adoration.

Mr. Smiley said, "She must have been lost. She went to the school just as the water began to rise a second time."

Edwina, indicating Miss Hodge by a nod, said in a whisper, "She's potty."

So that was it. Miss Dirks had gone off into the flood, meaning perhaps to die, knowing that Miss Hodge would go potty. And now he had Miss Hodge on his hands.

"Will you look after her," he asked Edwina, "until I have time to do something about it?"

"I suppose I'll have to," said Edwina. "She won't leave me."

Then they went away again, but before she left, Edwina said they had better burn Esketh's body rather than bury it. As they left, Fern suddenly seized his hand and pressed it. She had not spoken again. It was a curious, barren visit which left nothing accomplished. It might just as well never have been made. For a moment he stood in the doorway, looking after the bedraggled little procession. As he turned to enter the gatehouse once more he saw an elephant picking its way among the wreckage that littered Engineering School Road. It was the dead Maharajah's great beast. He carried a mourning howdah and in it sat the old Maharani, swaying as the elephant moved. She was returning from a visit to the ruined city.

Suddenly he wanted a drink more than anything in the world. A good stiE brandy would set everything right and kill the weariness and the aching head. But there was no brandy. Very likely there was no brandy in all Ranchipur except in his own house, and perhaps even those bottles had been destroyed.

When the Major and Miss MacDaid left Mr. Bannerjee's house, they .struggled through the flood toward the Racecourse bridge, the Major holding high the hurricane lantern with one hand, while with the other he held firmly to that of Miss MacDaid. As they neared the bridge the current grew so strong that he was forced to let go of her hand in order .that both of them might cling to the rail of the bridge itself. Above the roaring of the water and the wailing that rose from the stricken city they had to shout to each other in order to be heard. Step by step they worked their way across, past the statue of Queen Victoria toward the Shiva temple, and then just as they had reached the other side the tall Major stepped into a hole in the road, lost his balance, and, springing iorward, found only water beneath him. The hurricane lantern went out and Miss MacDaid was left standing alone up to her waist in the rushing current.

"Major!" she cried out. "Major! Where are you?" but the only answer was the roaring of the water and the distant wailing. Again she called out and again there was no answer. It was as if with darkness and beating rain the Major had stepped off the edge of the earth itself into infinity.

For a second she was terrified, so terrified that she was sick, and then all at once she was cold again and clear-headed. Clinging to the balustrade of the bridge she thought, coldly, "He is gone! He is dead!" and for a second she thought, "Why should I not join him?" What was not possible in life would be possible in death. She was old and she was very tired, weary not from the exertions of the perilous journey as far as the bridge but weary from all the long years of work, from bouts of malaria, from the despair which had seized her at the moment of the earthquake when she knew that all they had worked for had been destroyed in a single spasm of nature. Standing there, with her eyes closed, the water swirling about her, she thought, "Why should I not join him? Why should I not have rest and peace?" In the face of death she knew in an instant many things which she had never had time to consider that she was tired, that she was too old to begin again all the struggle of the past twenty-five years. But most of all she knew that for the last few years she had worked day and night, never sparing herself, not any longer driven by that dream which was born on the day the old Maharajah came to her in Bombay, but because of the Major, in order to be with him, to see his face with the grin that began at the eyes and then seemed to spread from them until his whole body, his great shoulders, his fine hands, his straight legs, were all laughing. It was for him she had gone on and on beyond her strength, wearing her body thin, bringing new lines of weariness into her face. And now all she had accomplished was swept away and the Major was dead.

"Why should I not die? Why should I not have peace?"

It all happened quickly, in the space of a second. If she had been a sentimentalist she would have let go the balustrade and allowed the rushing water to sweep her away. But she was not like that. She had always known that she was plain and powerful; she had always known that while her love for the Major was in itself fine and true, the spectacle of it was ridiculous. And now, once the moment of temptation had passed^ she knew well enough that easy death (for death by drowning was easy) was not her destiny. It was work, eternal, endless work. And there came into her mind the vision of what the city would be when the flood subsided, of the misery and sickness and death. With the Major gone there would be no one but herself to stand between the people of Ranchipur and the cruelty that was India. For that she was stronger even than the Major himself. She knew all the tricks^ for she had played the game all her life.

And so after a little time she let go the balustrade and struggled on into the street which led toward the hospital. Away from the bridge itself, the current grew weaker, but even so she was swept again and again 1 across the road against the stone wall of the Zoological Gardens. Inch by inch she fought her way along, aware presently that the water was rising again and that she must hurry. There was no time now to think of the Major. And presently she felt the earth rising beneath her feet and the water growing more shallow. She knew every inch of the way, every tree, every stone. In the darkness and the rain, she made her way from landmark to landmark until presently out of the darkness rose the opaque mass of the hospital itself most of it still standing.

Aloud she said, "Thank God!" and made her way up the shallow stairs into the familiar hallway. There she found a chair and sat down, the rising water still about her ankles, and when she had recovered a little she called out the name of Mrs. Gupta, and presently from the stairs she saw the faint glow of a candle and heard her voice.

Quickly her assistant came down the stairs, and when she reached the hallway she told Miss MacDaid that the hospital had escaped destruction by some miracle. Most of it still stood, but there were no lights. The patients had been taken to the upper floor. One of them was having a baby at this moment

"Where's the Major?" asked Mrs. Gupta.

Miss MacDaid wanted to say, "He was swept away. He was delayed/' but her honesty made her say, "He disappeared on the Racecourse bridge. He is dead." Then quickly she said, "Where have you put the woman?" There was no time now, no time even to think of the Major. For the harness was about her once more and in some way she knew that work would make it easier. Wearily but quickly she rose and followed Mrs. Gupta up the wide shallow stairs.

It was a difficult delivery and this time there was no Major to be called upon for advice and skill. With Mrs. Gupta at her side, they labored until the first gray light began to appear over the city, and at last the child was brought into the world. But almost at once the mother began having hemorrhages, so that the work, instead of being finished, became more desperate. And there were the other patients, more than fifty of them, clamoring for food and water, for bandages, and most of all for the presence of Miss MacDaid or one of the nurses to reassure them and ease their terror. It was always Miss MacDaid they wanted, no more than the sight of her, to calm them; for they seemed to have no confidence or faith in their own people. The sight of the girls who were being trained or even Mrs. Gupta did not silence their terror and wailing. So twice Miss MacDaid had to leave her bleeding patient to walk through the rooms to* show herself to the terror-stricken patients.

As she walked through the wards a pool of silence created itself about her as she moved. It extended as far as the beam of the candle she carried in one hand. As she passed the hot, disheveled beds the patients grew still and followed her with their great dark eyes, only sobbing or whispering a little; but when she had gone and the light of her candle had disappeared into the corridor, the terror and the wailing began again.

Now as she moved among them, touched by their simple faith in her presence, she was ashamed, ashamed to the point of sickness, that she had ever, in that moment of weakness on the bridge, thought of abandoning them for a rest which would have gone on forever and ever in unbroken peace. She was ashamed now before the memory of the Major, and she was afraid, too, that he or his spirit or whatever remained of him might know the weakness which had seized her and would find her unworthy. Such weakness would have been beyond his understanding. No, whatever happened now, she must go on and on until at last she dropped into the grave.

When she returned the hemorrhages had stopped at last, but the woman, already anaemic from malnutrition, had turned a ghastly yellow color. She saw at once that there remained but little life in the patient. She sent Mrs. Gupta for brandy and for an injection, and seated herself by the side of the bed, and taking the damp, cold hand in her own, she began to chafe it. The woman shook so violently that the whole bed trembled and creaked.

While she held the poor thin hand she began to talk to the woman in a low voice, speaking Gujerati slowly and carefully, so that the woman who spoke only her own caste dialect would be able to understand her. Always she had fought like this even for patients doomed by cholera and plague, but now she was driven by some special inner compulsion. This woman must live. Somehow by force of her own will and vitality she had to overcome the woman's apathy, her utter willingness to die. She had to live in order to wipe out that moment of weakness on the bridge by the statue of the old Queen. If she brought this woman, who was already dead, back to life, then she would never again need to feel ashamed.

Leaning down to the woman, she said in Gujerati, "You have a fine son, as beautiful as the moon, as strong as the panthers which roam the hills beyond the mountain called Abana, as quick as the leopards and as clever as the Maharajah's great elephant. Forget not the joy of your husband in so fine a son, that he will make much of you, and when the period of purification is finished he will lay garlands upon your shoulders and thrust the scarlet flowers of the silk-cotton tree in the black of your hair. And among all Gandhies you will be the most honored and honorable of wives. Come, open your black eyes and look upon your son who will bring you honor and glories and riches."

It did not matter that the child was a skinny thing, uglier than any sacred monkey, or that the husband might mistrust and abuse her a month or two afterward. It did not matter that the feast would be no more than the rice and saffron and a few fly-specked, sweetened ricr cakes. It did not matter that the garlands would be of withered marigold and withered jasmine, and the flowers of the silk-cotton tree limp in the damp heat. It did not matter that this skinny child, grown to manhood, would force her, like all the others, to shave her widow's head and cover it with ashes and work as slave to his own wife. The woman had to live. It was for this that Miss MacDaid had given up all the joys and pleasures and horrors that other women knew; it was for this she had come back again into the huge swarming East. The woman had to live!

"Know you/' she said, "what it means to have a fine son? To have your people bow down as you pass along the street, to go honored by the father of your husband. The drums will be beaten and the zither played and there will be dancing and rejoicing in the village."

Nearer and nearer she leaned over the dying woman, willing her back to life, willing into the drained, undernourished body something of that terrible vitality which had driven her on and on through heat and intrigue, disaster and strife and disease.

Presently the woman slowly opened the immense sunken eyes and looked at Miss MacDaid as from a great distance, and for a moment the lips twitched and Miss MacDaid knew that she was trying to smile, to smile perhaps for the first time in a life which had known only misery and starvation. Then the tired lips of the woman moved, and although no sound came from them, Miss MacDaid knew that she was saying in her ugly dialect, "My son," and gently she released the hand of the woman and lifted the baby against her sallow drooping breast. The eyes closed again wearily, but about the blue lips there still hovered that wan ghost of a smile, and Miss MacDaid thought in triumph, "I have won. Now she will fight to live."

And turning to take from Mrs. Gupta the syringe and the brandy, she found that it was not Mrs. Gupta who was standing beside her, but the Major, naked save only for a breech-clout and a clumsy bandage on his head. He had been standing there for a long time, listening while she bent over the low-caste woman, willing her back to life, talking to her in the poetry which she would understand. In his blue eyes there was an odd look of wonder, as if for the first time he had really divined the greatness of poor Miss MacDaid.

She had never before seen him like this, naked, and the sight at first shocked her and then brought a lump into her throat. The smooth body, the fine chest, the beautiful muscles of the shoulders, the abdomen, the arms, gleamed now, golden in the dim candle-light. She saw now how beautiful a thing a body might be, the body which until now had only been something that one poked or cut open or dosed. It was of a beauty beyond anything she had ever seen. There could be nothing evil, nothing ridiculous, in loving anything so beautiful. But it was too late now for love, for what she saw, she knew, was not the flesh, but a ghost, for the Major was dead, swept away in the flood from off the Racecourse bridge.

Even when he touched her, gently laying one hand on her shoulder, she could not believe in what she saw, but went dizzy and for a moment thought that she, Miss MacDaid the war horse, was going to faint.

He began to talk, telling her what had happened, and as she listened she came, slowly, to believe that he was living, and as she listened she felt for the first time in her busy life a mystic sense of belief, for surely what had happened was a miracle.

He was saying, "I must 'have been swept against the wall of the zoo. I don't remember anything more until I waked in the limb of a tree."

He had bandaged the wound in his head with his shirt, and when he had regained a little of his strength, he had started for the hospital, naked, now swimming, now fighting his way breast deep in water among the snakes and corpses and debris, until he had come against the ruins of the Music School beside the great tank and knew where he was.

"I met Mrs. Gupta in the hall and I came straight here. I was afraid that something had happened to you. I knew if you were alive I should find you here." Then he said, quietly, "You'd better go and visit the wards. It will quiet them to see you. I'll take care of this woman,"

"You'd better let me bandage your head properly."

"When I've finished here."

So she went again into the wards, this time stopping at each bed where there was a whimper or a moan, calming the terror and easing the pain, but all the time she scarcely knew what she was doing. It seemed to her that she was moving in a pool of glory. That was it a pool of glory. There were those two miracles the miracle which saved his life and the miracle of the young and golden body. She knew now what that beauty could mean. Somehow it changed everything. It was a mad, crazy feeling full of worship without desire. It made up for all she had missed in life, for all' her self-consciousness and humiliation, That she was old now did not matter, because she was no longer ridiculous. Now she had something definite to worship; the love, vague, yearning and absurd, had been transmitted into something as hard and definite as if the lovely body had been made of gold instead of flesh. As she bent over the beds in turn, stilling the terror of the ill, she saw him as she had seen him when she turned expecting to find plain, pimply, faithful Mrs. Gupta at her shoulder. She saw him all naked and shining in the light of the candle looking down at her with an odd, soft expression in the blue Brahmin's eyes. It was a look which told her what she had wanted to hear for so long, that he trusted and honored her, that although the years and her plainness made love between them a ridiculous thing, he worshiped and loved her none the less. And surrounded by the pool of glory there was in her soul the deep peace of a woman who turns away at last from her lover, satisfied and at peace, with a body reborn.

In the late afternoon the Major saw the little procession from the upper window, arriving by the main driveway between the rows of mud- soaked hibiscus first Fern and Smiley, and then Miss Hodge clinging like a child to the hand of a woman whom he did not at first recognize. All his interest concentrated upon the figure in the calico, dress, and as it came nearer he saw that it was Lady Esketh, whom he had never seen before save immaculate, smooth as porcelain, and covered with jewels. For a moment he was annoyed that they were coming here to the hospital to add their burdens to the complications which kept piling up as patient after patient was brought in and fresh reports of typhus and cholera cases outside in the town appeared on the records. There were sick lying everywhere now, even in the hallways and in the X-ray rooms, people with shattered heads and broken limbs and torn bodies. Most of them would die because they had been neglected too long, but until they died they would have to be cared for. And none of these people would be of any use, neither that silly missionary girl nor poor addle-pated Miss Hodge nor Lady Esketh, spoiled and accustomed only to luxury. Only Smiley could possibly be of any help, and he would have problems, end- less problems, of his own.

But he thought it was better that he should receive them than Mi& MacDaid, so he turned and walked down the stairs as they came through the doorway.

It was an odd meeting. Little Smiley quite unexpectedly put his arms about the big Major and embraced him as if he had been a little boy found after having been thought dead. The Major hugged him suddenly, lifting him quite off the floor. Smiley had no weight at all. It was like lifting a cloud, so poor and meager was the flesh on his bones.

Then he said, "Lady Esketh has come to see about the burial of her husband. And Fern thought she might be of use."

"I can work, too," said Lady Esketh. "I'm perfectly strong."

"I too," echoed Miss Hodge, still holding Lady Esketh's hand. "I'm strong as an ox."

For a second the Major looked sharply at Lady Esketh. His eyes met hers and he saw that she was looking at him defiantly, boldly, as if she were saying, "You think I'm a fool. You think I'm a spoiled, luxurious ass. Well, I'm not. I've got as fine and strong a body as your own. And when I choose to be I'm as clever as you are."

The look, its meaning so clear, astonished him so that he didn't speak for a moment. He had not expected to find this bold confidence in her, of all people. It was all right for her to believe that she was beautiful, luxurious, and lecherous, because that was true, but for her to assert that she was also clever and strong and capable The color appeared in his tired face and he said, "I'll go and find Miss MacDaid. She's the one to talk to. I can't offer you chairs because there aren't any. They've all been taken away to make room."

He left them standing among the sick, and at last found Miss MacDaid at the far end of the maternity ward, where she had gone for a second to direct two Untouchable women in the task of sweeping out the mud and making it once more habitable. With her eyes on the two women she listened to him, and when he had told his news, she turned to him, as he had suspected she would, and said, abruptly, "They'll be more trouble than they're worth. What do any of them know about anything? Better send them back to the Mission."

He too had thought that on sight of them, but now he was not quite certain.

"They don't know anything any of them," Miss MacDaid continued. "None of them can speak Hindustani but Miss Hodge, and now that Miss Dirks is gone she'll be nothing but a nuisance."

He didn't yield entirely. "We might give them a try. If they can do anything, even scrub the floor or carry water to the wards... We need them desperately."

She softened a little. "Maybe you're right. I'll come along in a minute." She spoke in Gujerati to the two women and then turned and went with him out of the room. "But that Englishwoman is no good to me. That sort of woman is the most useless thing on earth." And slyly she glanced sidewise at him. His face betrayed nothing at all

At sundown Ransome and Smiley, who, in the meanwhile, had been to the horrible desolation of the Untouchable quarter, appeared at the hospital to fetch Lady Esketh for the funeral of the great Lord Esketh. They found her bathing a Bunya child of ten whom the Major had operated upon for a tumor two days before the flood. When she saw them she looked up and said, Tm nearly finished. Two minutes more."

At the sight and the sound of her voice, Ransome felt a wild, illogical desire to laugh. Without turning, she said, "Is it absolutely necessary for me to go?"

"It's only an affair of a minute," said Mr. Smiley. "Just the reading of the service."

"Very well."

She pushed the black hair back out of the eyes of the child and passed a damp cloth over his face. Then she rose, and taking up the basin and towels, she said, "Shall we go?"

Together they walked past the great tank through the ruined streets of the bazaar, until they came to the Park of the shattered old Summer Palace. The city appeared empty now. Here and there, men who had somehow escaped from the disaster poked and prodded among the ruins of their shops, searching for trinkets and silver bells and cloth that had not been pilfered by the looting Bhils. But there were no longer sick and dying to wail at them from the shattered doorways. Here and there among the ruins flames and smoke leaped up from great funeral pyres where a dozen, twenty, fifty bodies were being burned at once. About each pyre there was a little guard of Colonel Ranjit Singh's Sikhs stationed to keep the wailing relatives from throwing themselves into the flames. There was, thought Ransome, something hellish about the scene with the corpses, the flames, the writhing, wailing bodies. It was like a picture out of Dore's Inferno. The odor which filled the air now was not of decaying bodies, but of burning flesh.

Raschid and Ranjit Singh had worked quickly. There had been trouble with Raschid's own people, the Muslims, who found the burning of bodies against their faith. Because there were not many of them the old Maharani gave permission for the burial of all Muslim dead in a piece of ground near the Parsee Tower of Silence. The Tower itself was black now with the figures of gorged vultures, fluttering and preening their filthy wings, for the Parsees, too, had been allowed burial according to their faith so long as the bodies were carried at once to the Tower.

Beneath what remained of the porte-cochere at the Summer Palace they had built a pyre for Lord Esketh from shattered beams wrested out of the ruins, and as the little party advanced up the drive the coolies waited for Lady Esketh to set fire to the heap. On the top lay the body, wrapped now, like the bodies at the burning-ghats, in a shroud. Ransome had made certain of that because what remained of Lord Esketh was not a pretty sight. As they came nearer Edwina saw that the shroud was made of the pink sheets of crepe-de-chine with which she always traveled. The great embroidered monogram, E. E., showed plainly on the sides. Grimly she thought, "He would have liked that to be wrapped in the pink sheets from my bed."

The whole thing had a makeshift air, with no mourners save the coolies who stood about staring at the widow with an animal curiosity. In London, thought Edwina, there would have been a great funeral, with a service perhaps in St. Margaret's or St. George's, attended by all those who had profited from contact with the deceased during life, by all those who for the sake of a maggot-eaten, hypocritical society would have to go to keep up the pretense that the late Lord Esketh was, even in death an important, an honorable man and a pillar of the British system. They would sit in the pews, knowing in their hearts that he had been a madman and a criminal, but never by so much as a breath or a glance would they betray the knowledge to their neighbors, because each of them was in his own way up to the game which Esketh had played in life far more shrewdly and successfully than themselves. She saw suddenly that this giant hypocrisy was a kind of system, a major contribution by Anglo-Saxon society to the civilization of the West, a contribution peculiarly English. They all pretended not to see the vices, the abuses, the shortcomings of others, so that their own would not be discovered. So long as you played their game you could do as you pleased and get away with it. Even Albert had not minded how many lovers she had so long as the world did not know it. Beneath the surface there was layer upon layer o rotting corruption, only you ignored it or turned away your head. And when you didn't play the game and were honest they tore you to pieces the way they tore to pieces Byron and Oscar Wilde, Shelley and Hastings and so many others.

"That's how I got away with it for so long," she thought. "I couldn't have elsewhere in any other country.*'

It was a strength born of a cynicism far more profound than anything ever conceived or devised by the clear-headed, cynical French. There would be eulogies and fantastic obituaries in all the newspapers in England, even in those which had fought him in life and hated him. And the Esketh press would have columns and black borders and pictures and tributes by men he had cheated and abused in life, who hated him as she and Bates hated him. Only they didn't even know yet that he was dead. There would be streamers about "Lord and Lady Esketh missing, Ranchipur disaster, etc." But they couldn't know yet. The men and women who worked for him wouldn't yet be able to rejoice in their hearts that he was dead. They could only hope.

For a second her lips crooked into a half-smile when she thought again, "What a biography Bates and I could write together!" And then she thought, "I have come here even now to keep up appearances, to keep the facade from crumbling," beqause in her heart she did not care what they did with that mass of putrefaction wrapped in her expensive pink sheets.

Ashes to ashes all right. When the heap was gone they would scrape up what was left and put it in a Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin and send it back to that brother of his she had never been allowed to see because she was fashionable Edwina Esketh and he did not want her even to suspect the sordid commonplaceness of his lower middle-class origin.

While Mr. Smiley read on, she felt Ransome's hand reach out and take her own. It was a nice gesture, she thought, a symbol of that odd bitter understanding which had always existed between them. He was trying to give her sympathy and strength, not because Lord Esketh was dead and she was a widow (she knew he had no illusions about that), but for all the wasted years she had spent with him, for all the follies she had committed, for all the recklessness and hypocrisy of her life. And suddenly she saw that Tom had run away out of that old life long ago because he could not fit in, because he would not play the game of hypocrisy. He might be weak and neurotic, a drunkard and a defeatist, but he had honesty and he saw clearly. He had refused to play their nasty game.

Then Mr. Smiley was finished and Tom said, "Do you want to light the pyre? It's the usual thing here for the nearest relative." And dumbly she said., "Yes/* and one of the coolies who stood expectantly by gave her a copy of the Times of India twisted into a torch which Tom lighted with his briquet and she thrust it into the pyre. The flames hesitated for a moment and then leaped up and up greedily toward the body wrapped in sheets of pale pink crepe-de-chine.

For a little time she watched, fascinated, and then turning to Tom she asked, like a child, "May I go now?" and Mr. Smiley said, "There's nothing to be gained by staying."

She liked Mr. Smiley. She glanced at him quickly with a half-smile. There was something so simple and uncomplicated and sure about him.

"One of my boys," said Mr. Smiley, "will look after the ashes."

And so the great Lord Esketh was left alone with the coolies and the all-devouring, purifying fire.

Halfway through the bazaar they met Miss Hodge. She came running toward them, her pudgy face filled with a look of childish terror.

"Why did you leave me behind?" she cried. Then she took Lady Esketh's hand once more, and whimpering, she said, "I looked everywhere for you."

Ransome saw Edwina put her arm through that of Miss Hodge and heard her say, gently, "We didn't mean to leave you. We didn't think you would care to go."

Poor Miss Hodge's lips trembled as though she were going to cry, and then she smiled, happily, because she was walking arm in arm with her friend Lady Esketh as if they were two schoolgirls.

When they reached the hospital, Ransome and Mr. Smiley left them to go to the Maharani's tent. Miss MacDaid was waiting grimly, with fresh tasks bathing patients and taking temperatures, carrying bedpans. She said, abruptly, "I've fixed up a room for you and Miss Hodge and Fern Simon in the out-patient ward. It isn't very big and there are only Indian beds. You'd better clean it thoroughly before you try to sleep in it."

It was the airplane which precipitated the crisis. It came the next morning from the direction of Mount Abana, appearing suddenly, glistening in a moment of sunlight above the white temples which crowned the summit. People in the streets coolies and sweeper women, soldiers and policemen, the hungry, the sick and dying looked toward the sky and watched it approach. Some cried out; some were silent; but in the heart of each one was the thought, "The world outside has not forgotten us."

Quickly it arrived above the ruined city, circling twice before the flyer chose a millet-field beyond the Parsee's Tower of Silence as a landing-place. Then it roared lower and lower until at last the wheels of the undercarriage struck the red mud and sank deeper and deeper. For a moment in the suddenness of checked flight, the plane threatened to stand upon its nose, but quickly it recovered itself and settled down as the crowd, running painfully through the mud, arrived. The flyer was a Muslim. When he climbed out, he asked in Hindustani for Lord and Lady Esketh. He had, he said, been sent by Delhi to rescue them.

It was a clerk from the Revenue Office who answered him. The others were small, dark people, Untouchables and low-caste, who knew nothing of such great personages. He was a sallow little man, gossipy and self- important, who knew everything that happened in Ranchipur.

"The great sahib is dead," he said. "The mem-sahib is at the hospital, but the man you should see is Sahib Ransome." And he led the flyer to the jobedar's house in the Great Gate.

From the moment Gopal Rao came in, excited, to tell him that the plane had been sighted, Ransome knew why it had come , . . perhaps for news, but certainly to fetch Edwina. He had thought of horsemen, bullocks, even of messengers on elephants, but the coming of an airplane had not occurred to him. Even now the idea had no reality; it was as

if some monstrous Wellsean invention o the future had appeared suddenly in the skies above the tent of an ancient Mahratta queen. In the jobedars house, in the luxurious striped pavilion of the Maharani, he had, he saw suddenly, been living in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth. And then when the trim Muslim flyer stood there before him, saying that he had come to fetch Lady Esketh, he suspected suddenly that Edwina would not return with him, and he remembered the Maharani's hostility and contempt and her hint that Lady Esketh must be gotten out as soon as possible because the old lady wanted her no longer in Ranchipur. If the old Maharani willed it, Edwina would have to go. As Regent she was an absolute despot. She could, if necessary, order Edwina to be trussed like a partridge and carried aboard the plane. He did not know why he thought Edwina would choose to stay behind in this pest hole of Ranchipur; it was no more than a feeling, a bit of instinct. Since she had come back from the Mission she seemed a little strange to him, withdrawn and almost hostile. Only in that moment when his hand touched hers as they stood beside the funeral pyre had there been a flash of the old sympathy and understanding.

So when he spoke to the flyer and told him that he would go at once to fetch Lady Esketh, his brow was furrowed by a deep frown. He gave orders that the man should have something to eat and drink and then set out for the hospital.

He found her, dressed now in the blue costume worn by student nurses, putting in order the room which she shared with Miss Hodge and Fern, and the sight of her sweeping beneath the crude cord-laced Indian bed filled him again with a desire to laugh. Miss Hodge was with her, puttering about.

Thinking that if he attacked abruptly he might win his point, he said, "An airplane has been sent for you. You can go as soon as you collect whatever you take with you."

She stood up and leaned the broom against the wall. "Who sent it?" she asked.

"The Viceroy, I suppose. A person of your importance can't get lost so easily."

"No, I suppose not. I don't know whether I want to go."

"You'd better. You're a fool to think of staying here."

Then Miss Hodge cried out hysterically, "You won't go. You won't leave me here alone!" and when Ransome looked at her he saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were red and swollen and she looked pudgier, madder,, and uglier than she had ever looked.

Edwina turned and, speaking as if she were addressing a child, said, "No, I won't desert you. I'll take care of you." To Ransome she said, "I've got to have a little time to think it over."

"You're crazy to stay," he repeated. "You look like the devil already."

"Thanks. I know how I look. I saw my face this morning in the mirror. Why do you want to be rid of me?"

"You make more complications than you're worth."

"That's not very clear. What do you mean... him?"

"Perhaps other things, too."

"I'm not bothering him. I've scarcely seen him. He couldn't find me very attractive like this."

"There are other things, too."

"What?"

"The Maharani wants to get rid of you as soon as possible."

"Why?"

He gave a faint grin. "She doesn't like you."

"I know that."

"She always knows everything. She probably even knows why you want to stay.' 3

"He's got nothing to do with it ... at least not very much."

"You know she can order you to go."

For a moment she considered this. Then she said, "And if I refuse she could bundle me off. She couldn't put me in prison."

"I wouldn't be too sure. She's got absolute power now. She's been wanting it for years. She hates Europeans... especially European women. She could say it was for your own safety. She's an extraordinary old lady." And he saw suddenly that he had taken the wrong track. Her face had grown stubborn, almost hard.

"I suppose even you think I'm useless."

"No. I think it would be better if you got back to your old life. That's where you belong. It's too late to change now, even if you wanted to."

"You are a bastard."

"You may even get cholera or typhus and die. They're even more deadly with Europeans."

"If I stay it'll be for reasons you don't understand."

"Perhaps."

They had quite forgotten Miss Hodge. She stood there, all ears, fascinated. Even in her madness she was aware that she had never before heard people talking like this, so bluntly, so bitterly. It was not at all like the conversations she had imagined between people in fashionable society. None of her heroines had ever used the word "bastard." The poor, pudgy face was a mask of bewilderment.

"Can't you put in a word for me with the Maharani?"

"I might."

"Go and see her. When you come back I'll have reached a decision. If she won't have me, I'll go." Then she put her hand on his arm and said, "But be square with me, Tom. I don't want to go back... I'm afraid to go back. I want to stay here." And into the blue eyes came that look of childishness, almost of innocence, which he had, in his drunkenness, seen there on the night of Mr. Bannerjee's dinner. "Fight for me, Tom... this once."

He knew what he should have said that he knew why it was that she wanted to stay, that her reasons were muddled and sentimental, that she was behaving like the heroine of a cheap novel, and that he meant to ship her back at once into the cheap, bloody life where she belonged. But he had, he knew, neither the heart nor the right to say that to her, so gently he said, "I'll try. I swear it. But it's against all common sense."

"Thank you," she said, and kissed him suddenly on the cheek.

As he turned to go, Miss Hodge suddenly regained her speech, "Tell him," she said, with sudden excitement, "tell him now..."

"Tell him what?"

"About the Sikh soldier:"

"What about the Sikh soldier?" asked Ransome.

"It's nothing," said Edwina. "I'll tell you when you come back. Go on now. Do what you promised."

"I don't promise anything," said Ransome. "Only remember that being the widow of the great Lord Esketh doesn't mean a damned thing now, least of all to the old lady."

He found the Maharani in the tent, and she received him not in the audience-hall with its carpets and paintings, but in her own chamber, where she sat on the floor alone with the old Princess of Bewanagar. She looked tired with great dark circles under the brilliant eyes, and she wore no jewels save two drops of diamonds in her ears. There was a fierceness in her aspect, a kind of grimness which he had seen only once or twice before in all the years he had known her, at moments when she had lost her temper and become suddenly a tigress.

She looked at him and said, "Well?"

"It's about Lady Esketh, Your Highness."

There was no need to tell her about the plane. As always, she knew everything, almost as soon as it happened. She knew about the plane, whence it had come, by whom it was sent, even that the flyer was a Muslim called Captain Yussef Baig. And she said, with a certain bitterness, "It came empty no food, no bandages, no anaesthetics, nothing but two empty seats for that Englishman and his wife.'*

"It is returning with all those things, Your Highness. The Major and Miss MacDaid are making a list for the pilot."

"What is it about Lady Esketh?"

"She doesn't want to go. She wants to stay here."

The black eyes contracted a little, so that they seemed concentrated points of fire. "And why doesn't she want to go?"

He shrugged his shoulders. Then a faint grin came over the handsome, tired, old face and he divined that she knew that, too how Edwina had looked at the Major that night at Mrs. Bannerjee's. Or perhaps she had noticed it even on that first night during the state dinner in the palace. There was so little that escaped her.

She said, "So that's it?"

"I don't think that's it, altogether." He knew now that his chances were better. The grin, the sudden human flash of humor. She was, Jie knew, above all else profoundly human.

"I don't want her here," she said. "She's a ..." For a moment she hesitated and then said, "a slut."

Ransome did not deny this. Knowing what he knew, he understood that it was no use trying to change her belief.

"She's working at the hospital now," he said, "being very useful."

"What sort of work?"

"The hardest the filthiest."

Again the faint shadow of humor and understanding came into the eyes. "I suppose Miss MacDaid saw to that. Well, any girl from the High School could be as useful."

He saw that she meant to yield nothing; but the look in the black eyes softened a little and an inspiration came to him. He knew how she had fought for the women of India to educate them, to make them free, to raise them from the dust. If he could make her see Edwina as a fellow woman...

"She's really doing a man's work," he said, and suddenly added, "She hated her husband. She's glad he's dead. She's been through a good deal since she came here."

He saw that she was considering all this, but was unwilling to let him know that she was considering it. She asked, "Why do you want her to stay?" And he thought again, "She knows all that, too." But he said, "I don't want her to stay. I did my best to persuade her to leave."

"Then why are you asking me to yield?"

That, he knew, was a poser. For a moment he was silent. Then he said, "That is a very long story, Your Highness. It began a very long time ago. There's nothing between us now... nothing at all save old friendship. I suppose it's because of that and because she has a lot of character."

"Character!" the old lady snorted.

He did not give way. "Yes, Your Highness, character. Sometimes it's been used in the wrong way, but it's character just the same."

She liked that. He felt suddenly that by some miracle he would end even by making her like Edwina.

She said, "How does the Major feel about it?"

"I don't know. I only saw him for a moment. We talked about the supplies he needed."

She looked away from him thoughtfully and then said, "Ask the Major. If he agrees, I will let it pass. She can stay. But I won't be responsible for anything that happens to her. I will send a letter to the Viceroy saying so that I could not force her to go."

"Then I can count on that?"

"Haven't I just told you?'*

"Thank you. Your Highness."

He bowed and made as to leave, but she said, "I want to thank you, Ransome, for all you're doing, Raschid and Colonel Singh told me that you'd worked all night. When did you sleep?"

"Two days ago."

"Settle this and then go to bed. We need you and you look very tired."

"Thank you, Your Highness."

"Tell the Major I'm sending Mr. Bauer to help him. He's a nurse. He'll be of use."

"Very good. Your Highness."

Then he made an Indian bow, pressing his fingertips together, and left her, excited even in his weariness that he had won half the battle. In the anteroom he passed the Russian woman, bowed, and said, "Bon jour" to her. He had never met her, but formality seemed idiotic in such times as these. She seemed agitated, and giving him a half-smile and a penetrating look out of her green cat's eyes, she went past him into the Maharani's chamber.

She was angry and disappointed that she had not been with the Maharani to hear what Ransome and Her Highness had been talking of. Now she would have to discover from the Maharani herself, drawing it out bit by bit, with subtle questions and hints, slowly and painfully, because the old fox would know what she was up to and make it as difficult as possible and perhaps never let her know at all.

The whole world had gone wrong for Maria Lishinskaia from the very moment she had seen the old Maharajah fall dead in Harry's arms. She had seen him only once since then and only for a second. She couldn't tell him now to come to her room, and there were times when her desire became so great that her whole body became feverish and her brain grew dizzy, when every sound, every smell, shattered her nerves the beating of the rain on the triple-roofed tent, the horrible faint odor of death that drifted through the great Park from the town, the cries of jackals and hyenas and the distant isolated wailing that never stopped day or night. And they became, all these sounds, a part of her desire.

She had never suffered like this, never in Russia before she escaped, or afterward wandering through Germany, selling herself here and there for enough to eat and to keep her body clothed. It was, she told herself, this damned country, this hellish climate, this world of mad voluptuousness and cruelty with its lingams everywhere, in temples, in village huts, in palaces, by the dusty roadside. Wherever you turned it was always there before you, the lingam, symbol of creation, of volupte and strange desires and pleasures. Shiva, always Shiva, and Kali, the Destroyer.

When she pushed aside the curtains and came into the presence, the Maharani looked at her and said, "News?"

"No news."

The old lady opened her box of betel-nuts and said, casually, "I'm sending Harry Bauer to the hospital," and Maria Lishinskaia's heart stopped beating. "They can use him there. They are overwhelmed with work."

"Now," thought Maria Lishinskaia, "I will never see him. Or maybe it will be easier. Maybe I can go to him there."

The Maharani watched her and then said, "The old barracks and what's left of the Music School are filled with cholera patients. The Major can put him in charge of one of them. He knows about disinfectants and protecting himself. He'll be of great use."

The sallow face of Maria Lishinskaia turned a greenish white, and before her there rose the picture of her own town in the Ukraine long ago when people died like flies of cholera, dropping in the streets, in the shops, writhing, black in the face. She thought, "I never have luck. I have never had any luck. Even when I fight it is no good. There is nothing... nothing." And aloud she said, "If anything happens to him I will keel myself."

It was the first time that she had even hinted to Her Highness that she loved Harry Bauer.

"Nothing will happen to him. He is young. He is strong. He is vigorous." She chose her words carefully, knowing the image they would raise in the tormented mind of poor Maria Lishinskaia, knowing, too, that often enough it was the young and the strong who were stricken first by cholera.

The Russian woman felt suddenly that she was suffocating. The walls of the tent whirled about her. She managed to say, "May I go and lie down, Your Highness? I feel very faint."

"Of course/' And she went away, blind with fear and desire, not knowing that she was being tortured again because the Maharani was in a bad humor. The old lady was furious now with herself, because she had yielded about Lady Esketh, because the sight of Ransome had made her weak. She liked men and she liked Ransome, and in her heart she hated all women, even those whom she had spent her life trying to help. She was old now. She could only pry and peep and watch the affairs of women like Lady Esketh and Maria Lishinskaia. It was all the worse because in her aging body the spirit was young.

At the hospital, the Major lay trying to sleep on a bed in the tiny room off the hall which served him as a private sanctum. He had been sent there by Miss MacDaid, who said to him, sharply, "You're behaving like a fool. Doctor Pindar and I can manage things for five or six hours. God saved your life once. He may not do it twice. You've got to have some rest."

For forty-eight hours he had not stopped working. There was the hospital itself and the old barracks, and the Music School with their cholera patients, and the disinfecting and guarding of wells, and conferences with Raschid and Ranjit Singh and the Maharani, and there had been what seemed an endless amount of operating by the feeble light of two candles. They could not use more than two because there was only a box or two left and no one knew when there would be more candles or any oil at all. But even all the operating had failed to save most of the patients from infections and gangrene.

He was beyond sleep now. His still bandaged head ached unmercifully and one worry after another chased through his tired brain. Now and then the figure of Lady Esketh appeared before his tired closed eyes, not as she had been on that night at the palace or at the Banner jee's dinner, but as he had seen her coming up the drive in Mrs. Smiley 's calico dress, tired, bedraggled, and untidy, as she had looked at him defiantly in the hallway. The woman he had seen at the palace and at the Bannerjee's had possessed no power of stirring him. He had lived in Europe. He had had European women, not only whores, but women of position. It had always been easy enough, too easy for his fastidious taste. And never once had he slept with a European woman free from misgiving or without being shocked by something hard and callous in her, something which upset him and put his nerves on edge. Because love or even the counterfeit of love should not be like that, but something which had in it a gaiety and a voluptuous beauty such as Natara Devi had given it.

That was something European women never understood that an Oriental, however male, had painfully acute nerves and sensibilities. A male Englishman was stupid and insensitive and sometimes bestial. Perhaps that was why English prostitutes were so shocking, that and because Christianity in the West had made of love even in marriage a shameful, dirty thing.

When he had shared the cup of tea with her in the Summer Palace after Miss Hodge had gone her flustered way she had behaved like a prostitute. Because in spite of all her fine speeches, he had been aware of what it was she wanted. He had known that he could have had her there on the sofa with her husband dying in the next room, and for a moment he had been tempted because it would have been easy. But he had not wanted her very much and two things held him back, one that she was an important European woman and might attach herself to him permanently, making a scandal because he had no desire to go on with the thing, and the other that he had known it was worth nothing; it would have been no more enjoyable than a bout with a Jermyn Street whore who liked her trade.

No, that woman in the Summer Palace, with the smooth, shining face, the elaborate make-up, and the Paris clothes had not interested him. She had been too perfect, too artificial for his warm, direct nature. He had known that there would have been no laughter in their love- making, no playfulness, but only a kind of vicious hunger that came over people who were taught that love-making was sin but could none

the less save themselves from it. It was a subtle thing, that strange mixture of hypocrisy and hardness he had found in the West. It was as if their hatred of the very act gave them an inverted and vicious pleasure in it which frightened him and revolted him. It was something he would never know. Even vice and perversion in the East had not that terrifying quality of bitterness and corruption and shame.

The woman with the smooth hair and the jewels had left him unmoved, but the tired woman in Mrs. Smiley's old dress had roused his interest. The one in the calico dress looked infinitely older, but there was a quality of humanness about her. When she looked at him scornfully for a second, he had almost doubted that she was the same woman he had seen at the Bannerjee's. Perhaps, his tired brain thought, there was more in split personalities than the psychologists knew. Perhaps she was two women or three or more. Perhaps the shock of the disaster and of her husband's horrible death had set one of them free.

And since her coming to the hospital her behavior had been that of a woman who was a stranger to the woman who in the Summer Palace had put her hands behind her to keep him from seeing that they were trembling. Oh, he saw things like that. It was in his nature to see them, and training as a doctor and a surgeon had sharpened the talent. She should have divined that, for even the woman of the Summer Palace was not a stupid woman. This other one, since she came to the hospital, had scarcely noticed him at all. There was about her something dead, save in the moments when a certain fire came into the blue eyes; not dead, perhaps, but like something submerged, deadened for the moment. He felt a desire, partly scientific, to talk with her in order to discover what lay at the roots of the mystery, but with this woman he felt shy. The other one he had not feared at all, because he had felt contempt and even a little pity for her. He knew that she had been given the worst and most revolting of tasks by Miss MacDaid in the hope that she would not have the strength or will to go through with them, but she had accepted the tasks without complaint, although he was certain that last night when Miss MacDaid had handed her the dressings from a gangrenous wound, she had gone away for a moment in order to vomit. It was as if Miss MacDaid, in her hardness, had challenged her, and she had taken up the challenge with every handicap, with everything against her. Fern Simon, for whom Miss MacDaid also professed contempt, had gotten off much more easily.

Then he forgot her again and began to worry, thinking in despair how hard it was to help his own people at a time like this, because there seemed to be in them no will to fight. They gave up and died so easily without a struggle, perhaps because they were always undernourished and life meant litde enough to them in any case. Perhaps they were like that in the West, in the horrible mill and mining towns which had shocked him and Miss MacDaid. And the cholera ... it was hard enough to check when conditions were normal, but now with the dead about and the wells polluted and the mangoes ripe and being sold on the streets... they had to eat mangoes, for there was little else. The mangoes grew everywhere. They passed from hand to hand, half of them through the hands of men and women already polluted who would fall down in a litde while, turn black, and die. You could not make every ignorant sweeper wash the mangoes in permanganate before he ate them. And there was typhoid, too, which would grow worse and worse, for already they were stealing water from the wells after nightfall and taking it from puddles in the street.

Then all at once he felt drowsy, and just as he was falling asleep to the sound of the beating rain he heard the sound of voices in the corridor Ransome's and Miss MacDaid's. She was saying, "He's asleep and can't be disturbed."

"How long will he sleep?"

"I don't know. I certainly shan't disturb him till he wakes."

"I suppose you're right. He is the most valuable man."

Drowsily he rose and went to the door. When he opened it, he said, "I wasn't asleep yet. What is it?"

Miss MacDaid looked at Ransome furiously and gave an indignant snort. The nerves of everyone, even those of the old war-horse, Miss MacDaid, were beginning to give way.

Ransome told him what the Maharani had said about Lady Esketh staying in Ranchipur. "It's up to you," he said.

The Major, struggling with his drowsiness, did not answer at once, and Miss MacDaid said, "I can think of nothing more unwise than letting her stay,"

[453]

The Major looked at her. "She's worked well, hasn't she? She's been a genuine help."

And the honest Miss MacDaid replied, "Yes, I must say she's worked hard and well, but that's not the point."

He was feeling confused. All at once he felt that he was going to sleep on his feet, standing there in the doorway. He was drowning in sleep. He said, "Let her stay. She can always leave when she's had enough." But it was the woman in Mrs, Smiley's calico dress he was thinking of. The other one he would have sent away at once.

Ransome found Edwina in her room. When he told her the news she said, "That's good. I wanted to stay. Now some one else can go in the extra seat. I'm going to send Bates in my place."

"There may be a row about that. . , * I mean about sending a servant when there are important people who will want to go."

"What sort of important people?"

"The Maharani will want to send a courier."

"That still leaves a place for Bates." The old arrogant look came into her face. "Anyway, it's my plane. It was sent for me. I shall send whom I like in it. Bates is ill. It isn't fair not to send him. He never wanted to come to India. He hated it."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't care who goes in the extra place."

"You'd better send word to him at once. The man who brought the plane will want to pass the Surat marshes before dark."

"I don't know whom to send. I haven't any servant."

"I'll send for him. Are you certain he's willing to go?"

"Certain."

"Where's Fern?" he asked, suddenly.

"I don't know. She's been helping Miss MacDaid check up on supplies and making a list of things she needs." She looked up at him directly and asked, "It's all right now, isn't it? I mean between you and her."

"Yes."

"I thought it must be. You look different." Then abruptly she asked, "Why don't you marry her?"

"No, that's no good. Even after what's happened."

"That's what you need ... a girl like that."

"She's too young. Anyway, you don't know anything about her."

She did not answer this. Instead she said, with a funny grimace, "It's too bad there's nobody for me. Too bad a woman can't marry a man much younger than herself." Then she told him to go, saying that she must be back at her work and that he must send for Bates.

"I suppose I should thank the old girl."

"Yes, it's the least you can do and she'd like it."

He went away, puzzled. He still could not make her out. He still could not imagine why she wanted to stay behind, unless it was some new and subtle game for bringing the Major to bed with her. She was, he knew, capable of anything, and she had had a vast amount of experience.

But the departure of the plane was far less simple than Ransome had imagined. He sent for Bates, and then went to see the Maharani, who chose to send Gopal Rao as her messenger, just at the moment when the young Mahratta was needed most in the organization Ransome had built up. And then Miss MacDaid had put a veto on the departure of Bates without a proper examination by Doctor Pindar, the Major's assistant.

"It's no use sending him unless we know his illness is harmless. They wouldn't let him land."

And then returning to the jobedars rooms he discovered that the news that Lady Esketh was staying behind had traveled swiftly over the whole city. The first room was filled by a dozen men, all screaming at Gopal Rao and clamoring to be put aboard the plane and sent to Bombay. There were two Parsee bankers and a Pathan money-lender, the superintendent of the cotton mills and Chandra Lai, the richest merchant in Ranchipur. And among them was Mr. Bannerjee, who had turned up carrying the lacquered box with the ashes of his father. All of them save Mr. Bannerjee had to leave, they said, because of business. They all talked at once and mentioned sums so vast that there was not in all the world enough gold to cover their mythical transactions. Three of them in turn drew him aside into a corner on the pretense of giving him confidential reasons for having to leave, but in each case the confidences proved only to be the offers of huge bribes. It was not business with Mr. Banner jee; it was his father's ashes which must be got to the Ganges as soon as possible. When the bribes were refused, they were puzzled and hurt.

It was odd, Ransome thought wryly, that only the merchants and money-lenders and one religious maniac were so desperately anxious to leave. Money and religion, he thought, were likely to go hand in hand.

But it wasn't only money. It was fear too. There was terror in every face. In the face of the plump Mr. Banner jee terror revealed the yellowish whites of his eyes. Ransome hated him now. He had hated him since the moment he had plumped officiously into the little pleasure- boat off his own balcony. He had contempt for the man's superstitious terror. Mr. Banner jee was afraid of cholera, afraid of Ranchipur, of the rains, of Kali, of India itself. Suddenly Ransome yielded to his desire to terrify him even more. He found himself saying, rudely, "If you think you can escape Kali by leaving Ranchipur, you are mad. Kali, the Destroyer, is everywhere." And he had the satisfaction of seeing even a wilder look of terror come into the eyes of the one-time leader of Ranchipur 's cosmopolitan set.

Then when they heard that Bates was to have the one seat left over, they began to mutter about favoritism, saying that this was India and Indians should have first chance. It was always the Europeans who got everything. The Indian was always pushed into the background. They ' muttered about revolt and gave him fierce looks of impotent anger, until Ransome, in exhaustion and half-hysterical rage, shouted, "Get out! All of you! Get out or I'll have the Sikhs throw you out! You're the last to want us to go. You fought Gandhi. You fought poor Jobnekar. If we went, then there would be revolution and you might lose a few rupees. Get out! All of you!"

Cowed, they went outside, but they did not go away. They remained mumbling and chattering to each other in the shelter of the Great Gateway.

While he had shouted at them, the Muslim pilot, descendant of Baber and Genghis Khan and Akbar, stood in the corner of the room, a cigarette hanging from his mouth beneath the jaunty little mustache.

There was a grin on his face, a grin that was immensely eloquent. When only Gopal Rao and the pilot and Ransome were left in the room, the pilot, still grinning, said, "When one Muslim shouts, ten Hindus tremble."

And Gopal Rao rose from the table, his eyes burning and black. The Muslim still grinned, but he said, "Except Mahrattas and maybe Sikhs and Rajputs."

Rao sat down again, but he said, "There have been times when one Mahratta war cry crumbled a whole empire."

"It is always there," thought Ransome, "just beneath the surface."

Gopal Rao said, "Anyway, they're only Bunyas, those dogs out there... Bunyas and Gujerati and Parsees."

The black eyes of the Muslim flyer narrowed to slits and he said, "Yes, the future rests with you and me, my friend."

But the Bunyas were not the only ones who tried to flee in terror from the stricken city. While they waited for Bates to arrive from the Mission, Colonel Ranjit Singh appeared with fresh stories. The citizens of Ranchipur City had begun to flee into the districts and the villages. What remained of his Sikhs had not only the wells to guard; they had to surround the city as well, because the Maharani would not have disease carried into the villages and the districts and down to the sea. It was enough that the city itself should be stricken. There was no need to decimate a whole state and carry disease beyond its borders into the rest of India. The panic had seized the whole city, sweeping over it like a flame. Whole families tried to migrate, with all their belongings. There had been rioting and seven men had been shot when they tried to break through and run for it.

"It was the Maharani's orders," he said, and added, grimly, "They are all dead. They'll make no more work for the Major at the hospital."

Ransome said nothing, but he had suddenly a bitter vision of Ranjit Singh's men making sure with an extra bullet that the rioters were dead. But life was cheap in India. Living millions sprang somehow from the dead millions, like fungus from rotten wood.

Food was on its way. Millet and wheat and rice were being brought In from the villages and the sea. Raschid had seen to that. The bullock carts came to within five miles of the city over the mired roads. There, at depots, they deposited the grain, where it was picked up again by coolies and bullock carts from the city. The Major had said that the pest hole must be kept isolated, and Raschid with his Mahratta police and Ranjit Singh with his Sikhs were carrying out his orders. It was the new India fighting against the old, the India which had taken the best from the West, battling the old swarming India which migrated in panic before famine and disease. It was a new idea for India that the few must suffer for the good of many. It was a lesson that even the cowering, muttering merchants and the superstitious Mr. Banner jee and the other merchants and the priests of all India would have to learn.

Then Colonel Ranjit Singh went away and a messenger appeared with a note from Miss MacDaid. They needed stimulants desperately at the hospital. She called upon him, she wrote, because he probably had the only brandy and whisky still available in Ranchipur. Could he send her what he had?

Quickly he wrote a note to John the Baptist in French, telling him to send everything in the cellar to Miss MacDaid. There were perhaps a couple of dozen bottles. Then he took a key from his pocket and gave it to the messenger along with the note, and sped him on his way. He saw him go not without regret. For four days he had had nothing to drink and now and then there had been moments when his whole body had cried out for a drink, just one small drink. Well, it was gone now, all of it, his good French brandy, to be poured down the throats of sweepers and low-caste Gujerati who would never know the joy, the peace, the blind contentment it could bring. They would only cough and choke when it burned their palates and, if they had strength enough, spit it out in protest.

Bates arrived when the afternoon was well along, carried on a shutter from the Mission by four coolies. He was feverish and dressed again in his valet's clothes. They looked a little more respectable now. Part of the delay had been caused by Aunt Phoebe, who insisted on cleaning them as far as was possible. He could not, she said, arrive in Bombay looking as if he had come from a pig-sty. Doctor Pindar examined him. He had pleurisy and he was feverish, but he could make the journey well wrapped in blankets. If they permitted him to land in Bombay they would no doubt place him in an isolation hospital until it was certain that he was not suffering from cholera or plague. Doctor Pindar had thought it foolish to send him away under the circumstances, but Bates was set on going and Lady Esketh kept insisting almost hysterically that he should go, and so little Doctor Pindar had yielded.

They were ready to leave now and set out for the plane in the millet field beyond the Tower of Silence the pilot, Ransome, Bates and the doctor. Bringing up the end of the procession came the Parsees, the Bunyas, and Mr. Bannerjee with his father's ashes, all still hopeful, perhaps, that Bates would die on the way and that there would be a place in the plane for one of them. They still grumbled and muttered as they walked through the mud. On the shutter Bates lay feverish, scarcely seeing the ruined houses and the great heaps of ashes where the dead had been burned. He was going home, back to Manchester, to the semi- detached villa where his spinster sister would keep house for him. He was going to leave this bloody awful country forever. He was going home to greens and boiled mutton and the racing-sheets and cricket scores, to the corner pub and the Evening News. He did not think at all of Her Ladyship left behind in a desolate, pest-ridden city. Her Ladyship, he knew from long years of experience, was capable of looking out for herself, more capable even than His Lordship had ever been. And at the hospital she had leaned over him and said in a fierce whisper, "It's all right, Bates. I want you to go. Don't let them keep you here. I want you to go. I've Mr. Ransome to look out for me." Not that he cared a damn what happened to her with all her money and everything! Except that she was a sport in her way. Probably she never suspected that the old bastard had known all along about her lovers. Now she'd know when she opened the box and found the list written in the old bastard's handwriting. But she'd never know how much His Lordship paid for each name. She'd never know how much he, Bates, had made out of her and her love-affairs. He was lucky that she wanted to get him out of the way so she could have a free hand with this fellow Ransome walking there beside him. Anyway, Ransome was better than some of the others she'd had. He might be a cad, but at least he had the manners of a gentleman.

He was lucky because he was going to Paradise back to Manchester among decent, moral people who weren't rich and powerful. He closed his eyes and set his teeth against the jolting of the shutter. Each time the coolies took a step, a knife stabbed him in the chest.

But when they came to the field there was no hope of starting the plane. The pilot turned the motors, but the wheels were sunk deep in the mud; so Gopal Rao took charge and commandeered men out of the curious crowd which had gathered, and they dragged it as far as the metaled road which ran straight as an arrow toward where the great dam had once been. Then as they were about to start, a messenger came running up with a letter which he delivered to the pilot. It was from Lady Esketh, addressed to Lord Esketh's secretary in Bombay, telling him she meant to stay in Ranchipur and commending Bates to his care. There were also instructions to cable to the relatives of the two maids, Harris and Elsie to Harris' brother in Nottingham and Elsie's sister in Putney. Their bodies had been burned like His Lordship's, but she would see to it that the ashes reached them as soon as possible, so that Harris and Elsie might sleep among their families at home.

Then the plane started, roaring up the straight, long road and shortly vanished into the low clouds that hung above the white temples of Mount Abana. The Bunyas, the Parsees, and Mr. Bannerjee, still carrying the ashes, looked after it until it disappeared and then turned back grumbling, toward the city, past the rim of black vultures on the Tower of Silence. There was no way now to escape, save by bullock cart and the bribery of the Sikh sentinels.

At the bazaar Ransome left the little procession to go to the hospital. He was exhausted now. Sleep dogged his eyes and as he walked he stumbled where there were no obstacles at all. But before he slept he had to see Fern, to discover if everything was going well with her, for in his tired brain there was born the obsession that he must care for her now until she could escape from this dying city and return to America and the easy, healthy life which was her birthright. In the two days since she had wakened him there on the floor of Mr. Bannerjee's bedroom he had managed somehow to think it all out. He knew now what had to be done. She would go home to America, and he would stay

behind here in Ranchipur, perhaps to die at last in the old yellow Georgian house covered with scarlet creepers.

On the doorstep he met the Major, restored by his few hours of sleep, and the dead Maharajah's nurse, setting out for the half-ruined Music School where Harry Bauer was to be put in charge of the sick who lay in long rows on the floor. And in the hallway he met Edwina and told her that the plane had gone, carrying Bates on the first step of his long journey homeward.

She seemed excited. There was a new light in the blue eyes, and she said, "Now I can tell you about Miss Hodge."

Wearily he asked, "What about Miss Hodge?"

"What she wanted me to tell you. She thinks she was raped by the Sikh who rescued her."

Anger thrust back the weariness which dragged at him. "Ridiculous! The old fool!"

"She's afraid she's going to have a baby." There was a twinkle in the blue eyes. "Sometimes she cried about it like a young girl. But most of the time she sits groaning to herself. I think on the whole she's pleased with the idea."

"Where is she now?"

"In there, holding a slop-pail for me."

Wearily he pressed his hand to his eyes, "Don't let her tell that story about everywhere. It could make trouble."

"I'll tell her it's to be a secret just between us two."

"That's right." After a moment he asked, "What are we going to do about her?"

"I'll take care of her. Don't worry about that She'll do anything I say."

"She must be a nuisance."

"No, I get a lot of work out of her. And her stomach is stronger than mine. She holds the pail and soap while I go out to be sick." She took both of his hands and said, "This is a hell of a country. Everybody in it is potty, but I'm beginning to understand about it. I'm beginning to understand about Shiva and his little dingus. It's even got Miss Hodge."

Then she went back into the ward where Miss Hodge sat patiently with a silly grin on her face, holding the basin and soap and cotton towels.

He stood for a moment, bewildered, rocking on his feet. Edwina, the fragile, the porcelain, was becoming a war-horse like Miss MacDaid.

He found Fern in the room she shared with Edwina and Miss Hodge. She had just changed her blue cotton uniform and was running a brush through her short blonde hair before a broken bit of mirror she had found somewhere. At the sound of his footsteps at the doorway she turned, and then came quickly toward him, but when she neared the doorway she turned shy and blushed so that he had to put out his arms and hold her to him. For a long time they stood there in silence, her head on his shoulder. Then looking up at him she said, "You look awfully tired."

"I am. Let's sit down."

So together they sat on one of the rope beds. She still held one of his hands and asked, "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Why?"

Then suddenly she couldn't tell him why that she had felt a difference in him, as if he had withdrawn somehow to a distance, as if a shadow had come across the intimacy between them. In her simplicity she was aware of how complicated he was, and she could think of no words to make him understand.

He asked, smiling at her, "Are you all right ?"

"Yes, I'm fine."

"Have you had some sleep?"

"Yes."

"Don't you think you'd better go back to the Mission?"

"No... I'm perfectly happy." Her face brightened. "Even Miss Mac- Daid says I'm a help." Then she looked at him and saw that his eyes were closed. "You could sleep here," she said.

"No, 111 go back." But the world was swinging away from him. The walls of the room retreated, grew hazy, and then vanished. From a great distance he heard Fern's voice saying, "There. That's right. Now go to sleep." And then the voice was gone and the room, the city, everything, and there was only silence and oblivion and peace.

For a long time, until she knew that she must leave him and go to Miss MacDaid, she sat on the end of the bed, looking down on him, a litde frightened because his sleep was so profound that it was as if he were dead. And her heart was sad because it seemed to her that he had in some way slipped away from her back into that world which had existed before the disaster, the world which had made her miserable with its cliques and snobbery and smallness and the complications which were beyond her understanding. This new world,, even with its misery and horror, she liked much better because it was direct and simple and she could see and understand and get on with the business of living.

As she sat there one thing became clear to her that she had above all else to save him, not from that old wretched world which one day was certain to return, nor even from people like Lady Esketh, but from himself. It was that perverse, puzzling self which was his enemy. For a little while, after the waking in Mr. Banner jee's house, she had been able to drive it off. If she were to save him, she must drive it off again and again.

At last, afraid that Miss MacDaid would think her a slacker and send her back to the Mission and her mother, she left him.

She found Miss MacDaid in her office. The tyrant looked at her sharply and asked, "Have you had enough?"

But Fern was not to be terrified or bullied. Boldly she asked, "Enough of what? "

"Enough of scrubbing and filth and hard work?"

"No," said Fern. "I hadn't even thought about it."

"You're willing to go on?"

"Yes."

"And you know the risks?"

"Yes."

"That you may get cholera or typhus or typhoid?"

"Yes."

"You know you'll be able to go away one of these days to Bombay. You might as well go to the Mission and be safe till then."

"The Mission is the last place I want to go. I want to be of use. I'm going to stay till the end, till things are in order again."

She said this so stubbornly and with such a will that for a moment Miss MacDaid was reduced to silence, her worn leathery face filled with astonishment. She had thought this girl a silly adolescent fool; that she had been apparently wrong in her judgment upset her.

Abruptly she asked, "Why?"

But Fern was not caught. She would not say, "Because I will not go away so long as Ransome stays here." She said, "I don't know why. I just want to stay." And in Miss MacDaid's mind an idea was born. Greedily she thought, "Maybe she will make a good recruit. Maybe she'll take to the work and stay on. Maybe shell carry it on."

Aloud she said, "I've a job for you. Have you ever cleaned house?"

"Yes."

"Properly, I mean. Scrubbing in corners, disinfecting, seeing that everything is spotless."

"Yes," said Fern. It wasn't quite true. Her mother had always been a bad housekeeper. With a dozen Mission Bhils to work for her, house- cleaning had been as often as not no more than a lick and a promise. And she had taught her daughters nothing save that they must marry one of The Boys.

Miss MacDaid, thinking of Mrs. Simon, looked at her dubiously. "I mean hospital cleanliness."

"Yes, I could do it."

"I'm sending Harry Bauer to take over what's left of the Music School. You can superintend cleaning it up and keeping it clean. You'll have a half-dozen sweeper women if they don't run away. Can you speak Gujerati?"

"A few words. I can learn. I can show them if they don't understand

me.

"It's a pity you've never learned. You've lived here all your life."

Fern did not answer because there was no answer to make. She only had a quick vision of herself as she had been long ago, centuries ago, The Pearl of the Orient, reading cinema magazines and sulking. A slow flush crept over her face partly in rising anger at the flat-footed Miss MacDaid, partly in shame for herself.

Til go over there with you and get you started," said Miss MacDaid. "You'd better fetch whatever you have to take with you. You'll be staying there from now on." She looked sharply at the girl, "You understand, I'm showing great confidence in you?"

"Yes," said Fern, "I understand." But she wanted to cry out, "Let me stay here until he wakes and I can talk to him. I must bring him back. I must save him." But that, she knew, would be to Miss MacDaid the silliest of reasons.

Quickly she left Miss MacDaid and went to the room where Ransome lay asleep. He lay as she had left him, with one arm thrown over his head His paleness shocked and frightened her. She thought, wildly, "I might never see him again. One of us might die." You could die like that of cholera, suddenly dropping on the street. Then she was ashamed of herself for being melodramatic, and set about collecting the few things she had to take with her his shorts and tennis shirt, an extra student nurse's costume, a bit of candle, some damp matches, the toothbrush Miss Mac- Daid had given her, and the roll of gauze she had for bathing and disinfecting. Last of all she took down from the shelf over Lady Esketh's bed the piece of broken mirror which they had shared. Striking it sharply against the sill of the window, she broke it in two and took the smaller piece, thinking, "That will be enough for her."

The sound of breaking glass had no effect on Ransome. Wickedly she had hoped that the sound would waken him so that she might say good-by, but he still lay as if dead, breathing slowly and heavily. And she thought, "When he wakes she will be here instead of me" Lady Esketh who would drag him back, back into his old self, remote from her and strange, into that distant world which she had never known, from which she was shut out.

She wanted to cry, but managed to check the tears and, bending dow^ she kissed him on the forehead. But the touch of her lips had no more effect than the breaking of the mirror; she had hoped, too, that the kiss might waken him.

So, gathering up her belongings, she left the room and went back to Miss MacDaid to say, "I am ready now."

Together they set out along the Great Tank. It was evening now, near to that moment when the darkness came down suddenly. Part of the wall of the ancient tank had fallen in, and beyond it, on the wide, shallow steps, low-caste women were gathering together their washing. The great bats from the dead city of El-Kautara had returned and were sweeping back and forth above the water. There was no longer any din from the Music School nor any lights before the cinema to confuse them. At that hour, in the quick twilight, everything was still, with the stillness of death.

As she walked beside Miss MacDaid, neither of them spoke. She had to hurry to keep up with the tireless stride of the Scotswoman. And then just as they neared the end of the tank, a terrifying thought came to her.

She had broken a mirror, and that would bring bad luck. Quickly she told herself that she had broken it deliberately and not by accident, and that therefore the curse would not hold, but just as quickly she thought, "That might make it worse, to have done it on purpose." And the bit of broken glass became an unbearable thing. It seemed to burn her hand. Slyly she slipped a little behind Miss MacDaid, and making sure that her companion was not looking, she threw the bit of mirror into the Tank. Somewhere she had heard it said, "You must throw the pieces into water."

In the stillness the mirror striking the water made a faint "plop" and quickly Miss MacDaid turned and asked, "What was that?"

"I don't know," said Fern. "Perhaps a fish."

For a couple of hours Ransome slept like a dead man. Then, troubled by fits of returning consciousness, he dreamt wildly, even struggling in his heavy sleep like a man in delirium. One part of his mind kept dragging at him, crying out, "Wake up! There is work to do! People are depending on you!" Another kept pulling him backward into the pit of oblivion where he had been immersed for a little time in peace and nothingness. And the struggle was confused by strange visions and nightmares of Shiva and his "dingus," of swarming things, of dead people, of pestilence and death. Once Esketh himself appeared wrapped in the "bloody cerements of the dead," only the cerements were the pink sheets of his wife with her monogram interwoven with the symbol of Shiva across the stomach of the dead man.

Then at last the conscious mind won the victory and he wakened, slowly, bewildered. It was dark, and outside the awful rain was coming down in torrents, and by the dim light of a stub of a candle he made out the figures of Miss Hodge and Edwina. Edwina had placed the candle near the piece of broken mirror and was doing something with her hair. Slowly he discovered that she was winding the ends of her short blonde hair about bits of the Times of India which lay beside her on the bed. As he lay, bathed in sweat, he watched her with his eyes half closed, fascinated by the precision and skill with which she went about the task. She would

tear oflf a bit of paper, twist it into the proper shape, and then wind the blonde hair about it and fasten it with a hairpin. He thought: "Where on earth did she get hair pins? Perhaps from Miss MacDaid. She must then be on better terms with the old girl" And he thought, too, "It is not for me she is taking this trouble." With each new curl paper adjusted, her head, once so smooth and shiny and perfect, grew more and more grotesque, like the head of a charwoman on Saturday night. Very likely she had learned the trick long ago when she was poor, when even the price of metal hair-curlers had been a debatable item in the budget of her father. And then he thought suddenly, for the first time, that with Esketh dead, she must be one of the richest women in the world.

By the dim light of the candle stub he could make out the reflection of her face in the discolored mirror. It was weary and there were blue circles in the delicate skin beneath the blue eyes. She worked with extraordinary concentration, bending down a little so that she could obtain a full view of her head in the mirror.

Opposite her Miss Hodge sat on the edge of her bed, her hands folded in her lap, staring into space, with a happy expression of utter vacancy in her pudgy face. There was something peaceful, almost domestic, in the little scene. He thought, "It's better for poor Miss Hodge that she's gone potty. She's happy now." It was extraordinary that she could have forgotten so quickly and completely the existence of Miss Dirks at whose side she had spent her whole life. Drowsily, watching her out of the shadows, he thought, "Perhaps all those years she was oppressed. Perhaps during all those years she had to pretend that she was somebody else." You couldn't live near poor Miss Dirks with her granite face written over with Duty. You would have to be suppressed or run away. Perhaps all those years poor Miss Hodge had wanted another kind of life.

As he watched her her lips began to move and she began to talk, "So the Bishop said to me, “My dear Miss Hodge. That must have been an extraordinary experience. And you made yourself a martyr. I've no doubt that you'll be decorated.” And he said, “A second Florence Nightingale, that's what you are.” And I said, “But what I did during the disaster was nothing compared to my friend Edwina Esketh. I held the slop-basin while she went outside to vomit.” Then the Duchess came up and said, “Vomit! Oh dear, that reminds me of when I was carrying Penelope that's my youngest daughter.” And I said, “I know about that! That time the Sikh attacked me... against my will, mind you, but afterwards I didn't mind so much.” And the Bishop said, “My dear woman, what experiences you have had. Certainly I shall speak to the Archbishop, who no doubt will speak to the King about a decoration. Attacked by a Sikh! Think of that, Duchess!” And the Duchess said, “Well, as I've always told the Duke, I'm one for taking everything in my stride.” "

Then Miss Hodge looked up and smiled at some figure she alone could see, and said, "Wasn't that wonderful of the Duchess, Sarah... putting me at my ease like that?"

Ransome listened, fascinated, but the monologue came to an end as Miss Hodge's voice fell into nothing. She looked down at her folded hands again, smiling her crazy smile, and Ransome thought, "Perhaps she doesn't know Miss Dirks is dead. Perhaps her mind won't accept the fact."

Edwina went on with the business of her curls, never even glancing over her shoulder at poor Miss Hodge. For a second Ransome thought, "Maybe I've gone potty, too. Maybe Miss Hodge isn't talking at all. Maybe I'm only imagining it. A drink is what I need. A drink will pull me together. That's why I slept so badly because I needed a drink." You couldn't cut oil alcohol just like that, sharply, especially when you'd been used to a bottle or more a day.

Then Edwina finished her task and as she turned, he swung himself upward in a single movement, and sat on the edge of the bed.

He said, "Well?"

And Edwina, as if there was nothing extraordinary about the appearance of her head, asked, "Do you want a drink? I know where it is. I could steal it for you."

"No." For a second his whole body cried out against his will. He began to tremble. Then he said, "No, one drink wouldn't be any good. It would only make it worse."

"Fern stole half the mirror. It's bad luck to break a mirror."

"Where is she?"

"Gone to the Music School to help that Swiss nurse."

"They shouldn't have sent her there. That's where the cholera is."

"She wanted to go. I must say your girl friend has guts."

"It's funny how many people have when there's need of guts." He indicated Miss Hodge with a nod of his head. "Did you hear all that?"

"Yes. She talks like that part of the time."

"Does she think Miss Dirks is still alive?"

Edwina nodded, but the name had penetrated the reverie into which Miss Hodge had fallen. Looking up, Miss Hodge said, "Miss Dirks! She's gone to the High School to look after the new books that came from home. She'll be back before long. You can always count on her." Then for the first time she recognized Ransome and said, "We were so sorry about the tea party on Friday, but we had to entertain Lady Esketh. You see, she's a great friend of mine. I couldn't well put her off like."

"That's all right. I understood," said Ransome. "We'll have it another time . . . next week, perhaps."

Then smiling, with the look of a hostess who had successfully rearranged her engagements, Miss Hodge returned to her reverie.

"Have you got a comb?" Ransome asked Edwina. "I feel that my hair is standing on end."

"It is," said Edwina, and gave him the piece of broken comb that lay beside the mirror.

"The plane is coming back tomorrow or day after," he said as he regarded himself in the mirror. "You've made up your mind about staying on?" Through the speech he felt a sudden shock at his appearance. The dark eyes seemed twice their usual size. The face was yellow.

"I'm going to stay," she smiled. "I'm being a success. Even with Miss MacDaid. She loaned me her hairpins." Then she said, "Why does she hate me so much?"

"One reason is that she hates everything you represent. The other reason you might guess."

"I have, but I haven't bothered him. I haven't even seen him."

"Better not. He's the white-headed boy of the old girl." He put down the comb and set his jacket straight, as if he were going out to dinner. "Now III be off."

"Where are you going?"

"What time is it?"

"I don't know, exactly. About nine o'clock not far off it."

"I'll go to the Maharani's pavilion and stop at the Music School on the way."

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "I was too tired to sleep last night. I lay awake for a long time thinking, and an idea came to me."

"What?"

"That you and I might get married."

He grinned, "Well, that is an idea. It's occurred to me once or twice."

"I'm a very rich woman now."

"He might have left his money elsewhere."

"He didn't. I've got the will It's at the Mission. I've got at least a couple of million pounds."

"So what?"

"So what! I don't know what in hell to do with it."

"Ill think over your offer."

"Well, funnier things could happen." She looked up at him. "I suppose you're wondering if I'd behave myself."

"The thought did occur to me. I suppose it's only natural."

"Well, I would. At least, I think I would."

"You could do worse than marry me."

"Oh, I know that. I've thought it all out."

Then he saw that she was regarding him too sharply. She was watching him. She wanted to find out about Fern.

"Anyway, we can decide when we're out of this mess. It isn't as if we were twenty and burning to climb into bed."

She smiled, a little sadly he thought. "No," she said, "it certainly isn't"

Then he went away, saying that he would see her when he found time to come to the hospital.

When he had gone she had to persuade Miss Hodge to undress and lie down on the bed, for Miss Hodge had become attached to the idea that she would sit up and wait for Miss Dirks to return from the High School.

"I always sit up for her. We always sit up for each other," she said.

"She'd understand your going to bed tonight after all the work you've done today. Shell be very cross with me i she finds I've let you stay up."

"All right," said Miss Hodge. "I wouldn't want her to be cross with you. She's terrible Sarah when she's cross." She began to take off the blue uniform. "She was cross with me on account of the tea party. Do you know what she called me?"

"No," said Edwina. "What?"

"A boot-licker. And it was all on account of you."

She was started now and she went on talking. She talked and talked,, telling Edwina bits of her own history and the history of Sarah Dirks. After Edwina had extinguished the precious candle and lay on the hard bed, she went on talking in the darkness. The history wasn't very interesting, a mass of tiny details, of petty quarrels and incidents. But presently > in the darkness against the sound of the monsoon rain, Edwina heard her telling the story of what had happened at Heathedge School, long ago. She told it simply, the jealousy of other teachers, the gossip, the stories, 'ihe unhappiness, not even now, nearly thirty years afterward, understanding what it was that had happened or why they had been asked to Leave. She had simply followed Miss Dirks, here to Ranchipur, to the ends }f the earth.

And Edwina, too weary to fall asleep, found herself listening, as if it were a child instead of poor old crazy Miss Hodge who was talking, a :hild telling her not the story of the wickedness born of stifled, unnatural emotions in the breasts of a dozen middle-aged spinsters in a Non-Conformist school in England, but the story of some barbaric cruelty practised by children in a schoolyard.

She listened with a kind of wonder, and presently she heard Miss Hfodge, in a child-like voice, asking, "Do you understand, Lady Esketh? What was it we did that was wrong? Why did they send us away? Sarah would never talk of it. She always said I wouldn't understand."

From the other bed Edwina answered, "Yes, I understand. Those other women were wicked. They persecuted you both. But it wasn't their fault, [t was because their lives were so mean and small and they had been :aught evil by people who professed to be Christian. You mustn't blame Miss Dirks. She was quite right in going away and coming out here.'*

"Oh, I'm sure Sarah was right. She always is. Only she is so dreadfully proud too proud I sometimes think. When she comes in I'll talk to her about it all I'm sure she wouldn't mind now."

"But you'd better go to sleep now," said Edwina. "And when she comes in I'll wake you and you can talk to her."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

Then she was still and Edwina presently heard the sound of her heavy breathing, but she herself lay awake, considering the story and the character of Miss Dirks, who had been created again in poor Miss Hodge's rambling narrative. For a little time she had risen from the dead, so that Edwina saw her almost as if she were alive, grim and dutiful and in her heart sentimental, shouldering the misery of others without any glory, without even a conscious sense of martyrdom, because that was the way she was born. She understood, too, the long exile and the homesickness for the green land of England, and the pride that was in Miss Dirks, forbidding her to fight back, and the meanness and perverted malice in that little group of Non-Conformist old maids at Heathedge School.

She felt a quick astonishment and pity for the bleak lives of the two old maids, and a wonder at their devotion, but most of all a wonder at how dreadful and cramped the lives of people could be. Herself, she had always been free, a child of light who had been given everything, above and aloof from the meager false teachings of priests and evangelists. They had never touched her because they had never had the power, but they had perverted the lives of poor Miss Hodge and Miss Dirks, and the lives of the poor barren virgins who had taught at Heathedge School, shunning men, never rolling in the shadow of a hedge on a moonlight night with some clerk or plow-boy, never being what God meant them to be women to love and be loved.

"No," she thought, "even my own slut's life is more normal, is better than that. Even Shiva and his dingus is better than the chastity and barrenness of the Christian Church."

The story of poor Miss Hodge made her feel faintly sick. The only things was that it did not matter now to Miss Hodge. The poor, crazy old thing was happy, and somehow she must be kept happy, even if she herself had to care for her, to have her tagging around after her for the rest of her life. Miss Hodge had a little happiness coming to her, even if it was born of madness which had no reality.

As Ransome passed the little office of the Major the door was open and light shone out from it. Thinking he would say good-night to his friend, he thrust his head in the door; but once the Major had seen him he would not let him go. Considering that he had had scarcely any sleep and had been working without rest for days, he looked strong and well, with an air of satisfaction about him.

He said, "Sit down and talk to me for a moment."

So Ransome sat down, and the first thing the Major asked was, "Do you want a drink? Because if you do I can get it for you. It's your own stuff."

"No, thanks."

"You mustn't be a bloody fool about it. I know how you must feel to have it shut of? like that, suddenly. You're shaking right now."

"I don't need it," said Ransome. "I don't want it."

"Very well," said the Major. "If you want it let me know."

"I will."

He was ashamed for the first time of his drinking, for it was only now, during the last twenty-four hours, that he had come to understand how bad it had been, that he had really been a drunkard and that the Major knew it and Miss MacDaid and perhaps even Raschid and the Smileys and even Fern. The knowledge made him ashamed because he saw that all along for months, perhaps ever since they had known him, they had been humoring him, as they might a child, because they were fond of him. They had been generous and kindly even at moments when he must have been a bore and quarrelsome. And he thought, "The only way I can stop is stop suddenly like that. God or somebody has given me the chance. It's up to me to take it."

"Things are better," the Major said.

"How?"

"The organizing has worked. Everybody has done his job. Everybody has worked side by side now to the last of the Sikhs and policemen. I never thought it would happen."

"And the cholera?"

"That'll go on till it wears itself out. All we can do is fight, but that doesn't matter. It's the other thing that matters the spirit." He clapped a hand on Ransome's shaking knee. "It's the spirit," he said, "the new spirit. It works! Do you realize, man, what we're going through? Do you realize that Muslim and Hindu, European and Mahratta and Sikh, Gujerati and Sweeper, have all been working together for the common good?"

"It's true," said Ransome. "I hadn't thought of it."

"It's because you're not an Indian. It's because you couldn't understand what's to be overcome. You can't imagine what a disaster like this would have been twenty-five years ago in Ranchipur. Then it would have been the Banner) ees and the Bunyas and the priests who would have won, defeating us. It's the old gentleman we have to thank first of all. He fought for fifty years, until he died."

He went on talking, a little wildly in his satisfaction. They had succeeded in sealing the wells. They had brought food from the districts. They had kept the terrified from escaping to spread cholera into the remote villages, perhaps even into the rest of India. There were already men working to restore the tracks of the railway, working even now in the monsoon rains by the light of great fires.

Then Miss MacDaid came in, and in her tired horse-like face he discovered the same light of victory. Moved profoundly at sight of her, he thought, "It's only fair that she should have such a reward."

This was her East which she loved, being born again. It was true. They had helped to prove it no one could say again that Indians quarreled among themselves, that they had grown panicky and hopeless in the face of disaster. He felt suddenly that he must go away quickly, leaving the two of them alone, that there was something indecent about his presence, because he had done nothing at all. Yet the same joy brushed him closely, as it had for a moment two days before when he stood before the Maharani and the Major pressed his hand.

"But it's not over yet," the realistic Scotswoman said. "It's only just begun."

As Ransome rose to go the Major said, "Have you seen Lady Esketh?"

"Yes."

"Does she still want to stay?"

"Yes. She's determined to stay."

The Major was silent for a moment, looking at Ransome as if there was something he wanted to say but was not sure that their friendship was intimate enough to bear the strain. It was Miss MacDaid who plunged. "Why?" she asked. "I mean, really why."

For a second he hesitated, considering, and then said, "I really don't know." He might have a great many ideas, among them even the idea that she wanted to stay in the wild hope of having a love-affair with the Major himself. But he was no longer certain of that, even if he had dared to say it. "I don't know. She's a very extraordinary woman. Quite honestly, has she been useful?"

It was Miss MacDaid who answered him. "Yes," she said, "she has. She's not stupid."

"No, she's never been stupid."

Then he went away, out into the rain, feeling lonely and oddly envious of the two of them, left behind in their satisfaction in the Major's office.

Twice on his way to the Music School he was challenged by tall Sikhs guarding wells. Twice, as they recognized him, they presented arms as if he were an important functionary. Half-way along the Tank the faint hot breeze which sprang up as the rain stopped for a time, brought toward him from the ruined silhouette of the School, a faint, sweet, sickish odor, not the smell of death now, but the odor of cholera. It was a smell he had never known before, and now it seemed more horrible to him than the smell even of burning flesh; this new smell was the odor of life in death. Near the end of the Great Tank he came suddenly upon a troop of Sweepers. They were carrying out of the School the bodies of those who had died during the day and heaping them in the fitful moonlight on a great pyre near the Rama Temple. Turning away his head, he passed quickly through the cracked arch of the main entrance to the School.

It was dark inside, and the hallway which had once resounded to the clamor of a hundred drums and zithers and melodeons was silent, but there was still the horrible smell of cholera. Beyond the doorway the dead lay in rows on the floor, waiting to be carried out and burned. There were no longer any protests from priests or mullahs or relatives. It had got beyond all that; bodies were burned now, willy-nilly, Parsees, Muslims, Hindus, Sweepers, all in one great heap.

As he walked along the main corridor toward the little theater where Jemnaz Singh, in his turban and atchl^an of purple and candy pink and poison green, had once sung for him, he wondered that with all these dead and dying about, the Major and Miss MacDaid could feel triumr phant, and then he understood that to them these bodies were nothing; it was the spirit of these people they were trying to save, for it was their spirits which made up the spirit of India and of all the East.

Then just before him he saw a faint light in a doorway, and turning, he came upon Harry Bauer. The ex-swimming-teacher had taken this little room for his own and contrived a hard bed from the school benches. He was dressed all in white, and as he turned toward the door the sight of him with his pale skin and blue eyes and blond hair gave Ransome a sudden shock. In the midst of all the misery and filth, among all the dark people, in the confusion and cruelty of India, he seemed, in the dim light of the candle, incredibly clean and young and pure. He thought, suddenly, "Like the victim made ready for the sacrifice."

"Bon jour" he said in his Swiss French. "Entrez"

Ransome had seen the nurse before, distantly, but had never spoken to him. The Swiss produced a miraculous packet of cigarettes and said, "Will you have one?"

Next to a drink, it was the thing Ransome had wanted most for days. He said, "You're lucky to have them."

"I've a lot of them. You can have a packet if you like." And from under the bed he produced a neat square box containing shaving-things, a tooth- brush, a towel, a pack of soiled cards, textbooks on gymnastics, and a dozen packages of cheap cigarettes. He held the candle for Ransome to get a light. Then Ransome said, "Is there anything you want?"

Harry Bauer grinned. "Everything. There isn't anything."

"We'll do our best for you. The plane is supposed to be bringing supplies tomorrow."

"There isn't much you need or much you can do for cholera..."

"No." Suddenly he was seized by a panic. He wanted to ask where Fern was, and did not dare. She might be stricken herself. She might be dead. He began to shake, ashamed that the Swiss should see him thus, hoping that he would not notice it. But Harry Bauer said, "Have you got a fever?"

"No. It's nothing."

"I can give you a gin and tonic. It's good for that sort of thing.

His whole body cried out, but he managed to say, "No, I'll be all right." And then, swiftly, "Where is Miss Simon?"

"She's down the hall, at the very end. She's in charge for the moment."

"I'll go and see her," said Ransome. "Thanks for the cigarettes and the offer of a drink."

"Rien de tout" said Harry Bauer.

As Ransome walked along the hall he thought, "That Swiss knows how to take care of himself." Of them all, he seemed the best organized, with his cigarettes and gin and tonic and books and soiled playing-cards. He no longer appeared the poor victim arrayed for sacrifice, clean and antiseptic and immune, but a wise and sturdy peasant looking out for his own comfort.

Halfway down the hall, he stepped aside while coolies carried the body of a woman out of a classroom. The awful smell had got to him now, through every resistance. Suddenly he leaned against the wall and was sick. When he had recovered he reached the room at the end of the hall, where he found Fern sitting bolt upright on a bed made of benches. She looked white and tired, and at sight of him she began to cry, quite silently, the tears running down her face. Sitting down beside her he put his arm about her and drew her close to him.

"Go on," he said, "cry. It'll make you feel better."

"It's not because I'm afraid," she said. "It's because it's so awful. It's so awful because you can't do anything. They go on dying and dying. I don't mind the work or the smell; I don't mind anything but that. Honestly I don't. I'm not afraid."

He pressed her cheek against him, thinking, "No, I must never leave her never." And said, "You're a swell kid. You shouldn't be here. You ought to go back to the Mission."

"No, I can't do that. I don't want to do that. I couldn't sit there doing nothing." She had stopped crying and lay now in his arms quite still, like a child. "I'll be all right now," she said. "Only I get so lonely sometimes. It's so good to have you back for a moment." Then she was silent, and presently she said, in a low soft voice, "Don't leave me, Tom. Don't go away and leave me."

"Ill stay as long as I can, my dear."

"I don't mean that. I mean to go away from me in your spirit, the way you did last night."

He knew what she meant, and he divined what it cost her to speak the words, but he was silent.

"I can stand anything if you won't do that." She fumbled for words, for which she had no genius, and presently he helped her, saying, "I know what you mean. I won't leave you again."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

And then she knew that he had come back to her. He was with her as he had been that morning in the Bannerjee's house, as he had been until he said good-by to her at the Mission. She thought, "Now I can talk to him," and she sat up and asked, "Is Lady Esketh all right?"

"Yes. I just left her."

"I like her, you know. It's funny, but I like her."

"I knew you would."

Then the doorway was partly filled by the wan thin figure of Mr. Smiley. Behind him appeared the dark faces of a half-dozen Untouchable boys.

"Hello, Smiley!" said Ransome. "Come in."

"I brought Fern some help," he said. "I've got six of my boys with me. I'm going to leave them. You can use them, can't you?"

Fern stood up and an extraordinary change came over her. "Thanks, Mr. Smiley. We can use them. You know how filthy cholera is. Maybe they won't want to do what has to be done."

"They'll do it. They come of Sweeper families." Then he turned and said, "Come in," in English and the boys trooped awkwardly into the room. They stood staring, a little frightened, with great dark eyes. Mr. Smiley in Gujerati gave instructions to them.

"You're to do whatever the Memsahib asks you to do, no matter what. We have all got to work to clean up the city. I'm trusting you and Memsahib Smiley is trusting you."

One of the boys said, in English, "Yes, Mr, Smiley," and the five others nodded their heads.

"Ill come back tomorrow/ 4 said Mr. Smiley. To Fern and Ransome he said, "Good-night. I have to get a bag of rice from Raschid and go back to the Orphanage."

And he went quickly away. Almost like a phantom he seemed, so pale and thin and tired.

Then Ransome said, "I'll go now. I'll come back tomorrow when there's time."

He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her good-by, but that was impossible with the six Sweeper boys standing there staring at them with their big frightened doe's eyes. So he pressed her hand and said in a low voice, "I won't go away again. I promise."

Outside they had lighted the pyre and in the light of the fire he discovered the straight spare figure and black beard of Colonel Ranjit Singh talking to the Sikh in charge. When he spoke to him Ranjit Singh said, "The worst is past." He looked at the cobalt sky and said, "It's cooler tonight. Maybe the bloody rain will stop for a time."

"I'm on my way to Her Highness. Are you going there?"

"Yes. Well go together."

When the Colonel had made certain that the fire was well started he turned and said, "Come. Her Highness does not like to wait."

Then as they neared the Tank Ransome noticed a shadow slipping from one to another of the peepul trees that stood by the water. Watching, he saw the shadow turn into the figure of a woman dressed in European clothes.

"Look," he said softly. "Who is that?"

Ranjit Singh stopped, and turning looked after the figure of the woman. She slipped from tree to tree and as she neared the burning pyre she ran quickly across the open space and up the steps of the half-ruined School.

Ranjit Singh said, abrupdy, "It's the Russian woman."

"Why should she be going into that pest-house?"

When Ranjit Singh answered there was the echo of grim mirth in his voice: "The nurse is there His Highness* nurse the Swiss."

"Oh!" So that was it, thought Ransome. Very likely every Indian in Ranchipur knew of it.

For a little time they walked in silence. Then Ransome said, "Better not speak o it to Her Highness."

"No. Surely not."

But Ransome had a sudden vision of Harry Bauer white and clean, standing in the middle of the candle-lit room. There was something corrupt about the figure of Maria Lishinskaia slipping from tree to tree, shadow to shadow, and in the last hysterical dash into the building by the light of the funeral pyre.

When Ransome had gone, Miss MacDaid and the Major set to work once more organizing supplies and making lists of stuff to be sent for in Bombay when the plane returned with Gopal Rao, And as they worked, the sense of victory faded and slowly fear and despair began to threaten them again, for now, for the first time since the disaster, there was time to succumb to these things. As they checked supplies they discovered that there was little of anything, and of some things, nothing at all. To treat each case of cholera, each case of typhoid, of the ever-present smallpox, was beyond human possibility.

"Doctor Pindar must have sleep," said the Major, suddenly. "He fainted this afternoon at the Music School."

There was no more sodium bicarbonate, no more calcium chloride, only a hundred or so permanganate pills (what were a hundred when they would be needed for a single patient in forty-eight hours?). No more Kaolin. No more aspirin. Not even any more chlorine compound for the infected wells. The plane would bring a supply of most of those things tomorrow but what the plane could bring would be nothing. And even if the supply was sufficient, there was only the Major and Miss MacDaid and Dr. Pindar to administer the palliatives.

"Tomorrow we shall have to teach Fern Simon, Lady Esketh, Mrs. Gupta, and Bauer how to give the necessary treatment. Miss Hodge won't be of any use."

These were small means of helping all those who were already stricken. The only hope was to sterilize and prevent, and for that Ransome and Raschid and Colonel Ranjit Singh were the ones. They themselves had no time.

The plague, luckily, had kept its distance. Since Esketh and the syces

at the royal stables there were no new cases, perhaps, thought the Major, because the rats had been drowned out.

While they sat there, each bending over his paper, without looking at each other because they dared not risk it, terror began to take possession o them, not the fear and horror which had afflicted them in the midst of the disaster that was a simple, primitive, natural fear but a slow horror which Miss MacDaid had not known since the cholera year when poor Miss Eldridge, who came with her from Bombay, had died. This thing they were fighting was insidious and horrible, stronger than themselves, or their once splendid hospital, or the organization they had built up. It crept up behind your back; it attacked you from the side, from ambush. It struck everywhere.

Miss MacDaid said, suddenly, "Her Highness should have gone away in the plane."

"There was never any question of it. I suggested it and was turned down. It was the first time the old lady ever lost her temper with me. She said, 'These are my people. This is where I belong!' "

"Perhaps they'll send other planes with supplies the Indian Government, I mean."

"Yes, I should think it likely. Raschid thinks the railroad will be passable in two or three days." The Major opened a drawer in his desk and thrust his pile of papers into it. "You'd better go and sleep for a time now. Whose turn is it to watch?"

"Lady Esketh's."

She looked away from him, but she heard him say, Til make a round before turning in, to make sure everything is all right."

She started to speak, and then, as if thinking better of it, was silent. Gathering up her papers, she rose and asked, "What time do you think the plane will return?"

"Not much before noon. They can't risk flying by night in monsoon weather."

"Have you seen Homer Smiley?"

"He came in a little after dark. Everything is all right at the Mission, except that Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had hysterics when she heard that Lady Esketh's servant had a place in the plane and she, the wife of an Imperial

Bank manager, had been left behind. Smiley wants to send both her and Mrs. Simon to Bombay."

"It would be better for everybody."

He knew that the morsel of gossip had brought her relief, pushing away a little for an instant the sense of horror and fear. He felt as he knew she did the terror of failure. The subject of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon was always comic to both of them.

"It's poor Aunt Phoebe who has to put up with them."

Miss MacDaid rose, gathered up her papers, and said, "111 go now and wake Lady Esketh, so that Mrs. Gupta can get some rest. If anything comes up, don't hesitate to call me."

Miss MacDaid was happy again, not triumphant, as she had been for a moment there in the office with the Major and Ransome, but happy in a quiet way, because there was work to do, mountains of it, and because everything depended upon herself and the Major and because she left his litde office knowing that she shared with him a kind of intimacy that neither of them gave to anyone else. Even poor fragile Natara Devi, dead now, the bells on her litde red tonga silenced forever, had never possessed the Major as Miss MacDaid possessed him.

"Natara Devi," thought Miss MacDaid, primly and with satisfaction, "was never more than a body, a piece of flesh beautifully molded and colored, but a machine which gave him satisfaction." Natara Devi, she kept telling herself, had never known him at all. All the way down the dark corridor she kept telling herself that women like Natara Devi and Lady Esketh did not count. They were merely flesh and in them there was no spirit. They were only prostitutes. A wife would have been different. A wife might have known with him the kind of intimacy which she herself knew.

The more she kept telling herself these things the more she was able to stifle the terrifying envy of the poor dead Natara Devi; the more she was able to forget the awful bitter regret that she was not younger and beautiful like the dancing-girl or Lady Esketh.

And she thought, "Now that she has had to come out into the open without all her maids and beauty creams and fine clothes and jewels, he can see that she's just like any other woman. He can see that her good looks were made up out of pots and jars." And with a kind of mental cackle she thought, "He doesn't notice her now. Her goose is cooked.'*

But poor Miss MacDaid, for all her experience with suffering and disease and hardship, knew very little about what went on in the minds and hearts of men and women. She had never had time to read novels- she had not read more than three or four in all her life but in a way she was by nature a romantic novelist, never seeing nor appraising the greater strangeness of reality; and so she conceived love in the same fashion as cinema producers, that it was an emotion possible only between people who were young and beautiful and served by camera men who understood their planes and profiles. As she walked along the corridor to waken Lady Esketh, she was able to convince herself that the English- woman was no longer a danger. A Lady Esketh with a pallid face and stringy hair and looking her age and more, dressed in a nurse's costume like any Untouchable girl, could not possibly attract a male like the Major. "No" Miss MacDaid kept telling herself, the set of her jaw relaxing "No, the slut is finished. She can't ruin him now.""

She pushed open the door, and in the light that entered the window from the great pyre outside the Music School, she found Lady Esketh's bed, and bending over her, she shook her abruptly. Lady Esketh wakened almost at once and sat up on the edge of the bed.

"It's time to relieve Mrs. Gupta," she said. "I'll come myself to take your place at five." And then in the red glare she saw the curl papers that covered the head of Lady Esketh, and the sight of them was like the effect of a black stormcloud appearing above the horizon on a brilliant day.

"You'd better take those things off your hair," she said. "They might frighten the patients."

"Of course," said Lady Esketh, and began unwrapping the bits of paper. It took quite a long time to unfasten them all, but Miss MacDaid waited, grimly watching like a headmistress, a little alarmed as one by one they disappeared and left the blonde hair no longer lank and stringy, but curled into neat waves. The effect was even more alarming when Lady Esketh ran her fingers lightly through her hair and let it fall golden and shining in a kind of halo about the small pale face. It was as if she had taken ten years and cast them from her.

The sharp lines appeared again, at the corners of Miss MacDaid's jaw .d she said, sharply, "Come along now. Poor Mrs. Gupta has got have some rest. She isn't very strong."

So Lady Esketh threw the coarse blue uniform about her and followed Iss MacDaid, still fastening the buttons that held it together as she went. When Miss MacDaid took her to the main ward they found Mrs. upta, yellow and exhausted, keeping watch. After Miss MacDaid had at her away, she led Lady Esketh from room to room filled with dead id dying.

It was miraculous how in the dim light from the wick and bowl of oil e carried, Miss MacDaid knew every patient, his or her history, and the ite of the illness. Again and again Lady Esketh found herself staring at e big, leathery, plain face in a kind of wonder. The Scotswoman, she ought, must be a kind of witch, to keep all that knowledge in her head. Here and there Miss MacDaid paused by the side of a bed to jot a >te on a block of paper she carried. Twice at the bed of a patient who as groaning with misery she stopped to thrust a hypodermic needle to an arm or a thigh. Then they passed on, followed by the mute ances of a hundred dark eyes. Most of the sick were typhoid patients, me had black malaria, and nearly half of them were victims of the )od and earthquake with shattered limbs and fractured skulls and hor- }le internal injuries. So that she might leave minute instructions for ose who kept watch while she had snatches of sleep, Miss MacDaid id numbers to all the patients, crude numbers marked with pencil on ts of cardboard or paper pinned to the cheap cotton dhotis and saris. When they had returned to the main ward she said, "You must not [1 asleep. You must go through the wards every fifteen minutes. It is iportant that they see you, so that they know they are not forgotten abandoned. When they think that, they simply turn over and die." icn she gave Lady Esketh a paper on which were written five numbers. "If any of these wakes or cries out, you are to call me. Don't trouble i Major. If it's necessary, I'll wake him." And then she gave her anxer paper with four numbers written on it, "All of these are going die," she said. "You must watch the beds because none of them will r out. I have seen to it that they will not wake again. If they die you ist call the porters to carry out the bodies. The others won't notice so

much in the dark." Suddenly she looked sharply at Lady Esketh. "Have you ever seen a dead person? Do you know when they are dead?"

"I never saw one until I came here. I'm not sure if I would know."

For a moment Miss MacDaid was silent, then she said, "You'll know. There's something that tells you. The main thing is not to fall asleep and to call me if there's any trouble. I'm counting on you. It's more responsibility than I should give to any greenhorn, but there's nothing else to do. I've got to have some rest if I'm to keep going. I can't afford to break down. I'll come at five o'clock." She turned to leave, and then stopped to say, "Do you want Miss Hodge to help you?"

"No."

"Not even for company?"

"No. Let the poor old thing sleep."

"Good-night."

"Good-night."

When Miss MacDaid had gone, Lady Esketh sat down at the table with the oil and wick on it. It was empty save for a pitcher of boiled water covered by a filter paper, a glass, an alarm clock, a roll of cotton gauze, a block of paper with a pencil, and the two bits of paper with the numbers which Miss MacDaid had given her. She was awake now, and yet her mind felt numb and entranced. She read the numbers on the first paper 7, 114, 83, 28, 51. Those were the ones who were deathly ill but might be saved. If they cried out or wakened, she was to fetch Miss MacDaid. On the other were written the numbers 211, 72, 13, 96. Those were the ones who were to die, for whom there was no hope, who lay already stupefied by Miss MacDaid's needle, so that they should not moan or cry out and alarm the others. These she must watch, wait" ing for them to die, so that they might be carried out and their bodies burned.

"I must keep all this straight," she thought, "I must keep my head clear. I must not make any mistakes." To make certain she took up the pencil and at the top of the one list she wrote the word "dead" and at the top of the other the word "dying," and as she wrote, she thought, "That is how it must feel to be God."

Until three days ago she had never encountered death. Once or twice in her life death had crossed her path, but each time she had avoided it. There were the deaths of friends during the War, long ago, the boys and older men she had known, but all that had been far away and there were so many deaths then, and they happened so far away in the mud of Belgium or before Amiens or on the Chemin des Dames, that in the hysteria and numbness of war time they had had litde reality. Their deaths had been little more than a telegram "The War Office regrets..." like the refusal of an invitation. R.S.V.P. Repondez sil vous plait. Repondez a la morte. Ecrive si vous pourrez gar d ere rendezvous. And there was her father dead suddenly of a stroke in Vienna. When they had asked her if she wished to see the corpse she had refused. What was dead was dead. What you loved was gone. What remained was only clay. And Albert. She had not seen him dead, but only as a bloated object mercifully concealed in her own pink silk sheets. He must have hated dying, if he knew it. Albert would never want to die. The animal in him would want to go on and on; that vast, bullying vitality would keep dragging him back from death. Even if he were drugged, the body would fight. He hadn't been like these poor Indians whose undernourished bodies put up no fight, who simply closed their eyes and died as if, willing it, they were only going to sleep.

Now for three days she had seen death all about her. She had seen the corpses drifting past the balcony where she stood with Tom Ransome, waiting for the flood to abate, and the body of that skinny Hindu hanging from the branches of a tree held only by his own poor cotton dhoti, and Albert's shapeless corpse wrapped in her sheets, and the bodies lying in the streets, some shattered and broken by the flood and others contorted and purple with the awful death by cholera. And she had seen not only the dead, but death itself, slipping in down the long untidy rooms to steal creature after creature away from the Major and Miss MacDaid.

The sight of so much death had made her numb, and she began to understand how it was that people like Miss MacDaid, who had seen hundreds and perhaps thousands of dying people, were no longer afraid of anything on this earth; and how it was that they could go on leading lives of their own, as if there was a part of them detached, as if at times they shut themselves away in a compartment which belonged to them alone. That was why Miss MacDaid, who was so brave and good, could

still find a place in her heart for contempt and scorn and even hardness. I they had been soft people like Miss MacDaid and the Major they would have failed and been cast aside, broken and useless, long ago. She thought, with pride, "I too must have something of that in me. I've stood everything filth and smells, misery and death. I am not even tired."

For there was, strangely enough, no weariness in her, now that she was awake, but only a kind of peace such as she had never felt before or even suspected, and a curious satisfaction the satisfaction, she knew suddenly, for which she had been looking all her life. She had won their respect. She no longer vomited at the sight of a filthy bed or at the awful smell of gangrene. Unless she thought of it, she did not even notice the odor of burning flesh or the sickly-sweet smell of the cholera in the Music School which the damp lazy breeze sometimes carried in through the screened windows of the hospital. A shell had grown about her, quickly, in little more than seventy-two hours, protecting her as it protected Miss MacDaid and the Major. Nothing could touch her now, not even the disease and decay all about them. Miss MacDaid and the Major had been safe for so long, for so many years. Perhaps there was something, some mystical quality, which protected people like them the nuns, the doctors, the nurses who fought epidemics and lived among lepers and in places stricken with typhus and cholera.

Then suddenly she remembered her duty, that she must make a round of the whole hospital once every fifteen minutes until Miss MacDaid came to relieve her. She glanced at the battered old alarm clock and saw that there was still four minutes to pass before she must go, carrying the enameled pitcher of cold water from bed to bed. And at the same time she was aware that she was being watched and her eyes met in the light from the fire outside the window those of a typhoid patient in the narrow bed nearest the table.

At first, because the figure in the bed was so small and thin, she thought the patient was a child. The eyes were enormous and black and ageless, but they were sunk in the head of the woman who looked old and shrunken. The dark skin, yellowed now by illness, was drawn like paper over the fine bones of the skull. For a second she stared fascinated by the delicacy of the face, and then, shuddering a little, it seemed to her that the face and head seemed dead. Without hair it would have been a bleached skull. It was the face of a woman who since she was born had never had enough to eat. She thought, "Death is coming for her. R.S.V.P. Repondez s'il vous plait!" How many times, in that remote and immensely distant world of London, she had written those initials...

Then she was aware that the purple lips were moving. She could not hear what the woman was trying to say, for no voice came from the lips, but only a dry whispering sound like the rustling of dead leaves. Then feebly a skinny hand, immensely old, stole up, shaking as if with palsy, to the purple lips in the gesture which all peasants and workmen make the world over to indicate hunger and thirst, and she thought, "The poor woman wants water," and rising quickly she lifted the filter paper from the pitcher and poured the glass on the table before her full to the brim.

At the bedside she had to lift the woman up with one hand while she held the glass with the other. The creature had no weight at all, not even the solid weight of a child. Through the sweat-dampened white cotton sari she could feel the burning heat of the fever. The woman drank greedily, and when she had drained the glass she lay back with her full weight on Lady Esketh's arm. Opening her eyes, she looked up at the Englishwoman and tried to smile. Even in her illness there was something deprecating and humble about the look in the eyes which made Lady Esketh want to cry suddenly, to say, "You must not look at me like that. I am your sister. We are both women. God made us both." But she could not, she knew, make the woman understand. All she could do was to smile at her. Again the sound of rustling leaves came from the woman's lips and she closed her eyes again and lay back on the damp pillow, in peace.

Lady Esketh thought, "The four minutes must have passed," and placing the glass back on the table, she lifted one of the stone jars to the edge of the table and held one of the enameled pitchers beneath it. The jar was heavy and it took all her strength to manage it, to tilt it gently so that she could control the flow of the water. She was struggling with the jar when she heard a voice say, "Wait. I'll do that for you/' and turning, she saw the figure of the Major. He was beside her and one of his hands touched hers as he lifted the jar from her grasp. For

a second she felt a dizzy sensation of happiness, and then., leaning against the table, she recovered herself and said, "Thank you. It is heavy."

For a moment she had trembled as she had trembled when Miss Hodge had gone away, leaving them alone in that dreary sitting-room in the old Summer Palace, but the feeling went away quickly, and quietly she moved a little away from him and stood very straight, as if she were no more than the poor, pimply Mrs. Gupta.

Then he said, smiling at her, "It must be time to make your first round. I'll go with you." He filled the other pitcher and picked them both up.

"No," she said. "Let me carry one of them. I'd like to."

He looked at her for a second and the shadow of a grin appeared on his face. She divined that it was not a grin of mockery, but of something simpler and warmer; it was almost as if he saw her as a child playing "hospital."

Angrily she said, "You needn't look like that."

He understood, because he did not even answer her. She said, "In any case you'll need these lists," and she handed him the papers with the numbers written on them by Miss MacDaid. Then she took one of the pitchers from him and they set out.

The sudden anger vanished and she followed him with docility as if she might have been Mrs. Gupta, practised, experienced, almost to the point of boredom. And he paid her no more attention than if she had been plain, kindly Mrs. Gupta. He went from bed to bed, stopping at each one while she filled the enameled cup that stood on the little shelf beside it. A few of the sick were asleep, and a dozen or more were delirious, but most of them lay with their great black eyes wide open, looking up patiently as she and the Major passed each bed.

At each of the beds on the list marked "dying" he stopped for a moment, to feel the pulse, to lay a hand on a burning head. But all the time he took no notice of her at all, save once when he said, as if in apology, "Laying a hand on their heads does no good except to give them courage. You see they know I am a Brahmin, and for centuries they have been made to step aside lest their shadow fall on us and pollute us."

Of the list marked "dead" three were still alive, but the fourth who had gangrenous wounds, lay still and rigid and she saw at once that there was no need to fill the cup at his side. He was a very black, skinny man and his eyes were half-closed as they had been during the coma produced by Miss MacDaid's merciful needle. It was odd how you knew, as if by some extra sense, that the man was dead. There was perhaps something in the peculiar tilt of the head, like a flower wilted on its stem, and, in the way the feet stuck up at a rigid angle beneath the soiled dhoti. She had known at once. Now she would always know.

Then she saw the Major place the crude lamp on the little shelf and bend down over the man from his great height. With one finger he pulled back an eyelid and snapped a nail against the yellow eyeball. There was no reaction at all, and turning to her, he said, "Go and tell the porter to carry him away."

When she returned with two sleepy Sweepers carrying a stretcher between them, they went on with the journey, past bed after bed, past pair after pair of dark eyes that were like the eyes of sick animals filled with weariness and a kind of dumb faith and trust. And when they had reached the end and were returning the Major stopped suddenly and said, "Listen!" and in the night stillness, above the faint moans which arose from a bed here and there, she heard the fine thread of music from a flute and the dull distant thumping of brown fingers on a drum.

The Major said, "That is a good sign."

"Yes?"

"It means that life is going on again.*'

When they returned to the table in the corner of the main ward, he said, "May I sit with you for a moment?"

"Of course, if you like, but you'd better get some sleep."

"I slept early in the evening. I couldn't sleep now. What I need is not sleep, but something to make me feel normal and human again. For three days I've been a machine."

She knew what he meant, and she was touched in the strangest way. For what he really said was, "I should like to talk for a “little time” or just sit and not talk at all with a woman not a woman like Miss MacDaid or Mrs. Gupta but a woman like yourself." And again she thought of how he must have his life arranged in compartments.

He sat down on the end of the table, crossing one leg over the other, and smiled at her. Then in a low voice, so that he would not disturb the sick, he said, "I have to tell you that I think you've been a brick! It isn't easy, what you're doing, not for somebody who has never done it before."

"I'm not so wonderful," she said. "Two or three times I almost gave in and quit. But that's over now. I don't mind anything. I don't even get sick any more. It's funny how quickly you get used to things."

"We'll have nurses from Bombay before long and some of our own Ranchipur women. Then you can quit and go away."

She thought, "No, I don't want to go away... ever. I want to stay! I want to stay!" And aloud, "I'll stay as long as I'm needed. ... I mean as long as I'm of any use."

He was silent for a moment and then taking up the bottle of alcohol, he soaked a bit of cotton and carefully rubbed the finger which had touched the dead man. He looked tired and much thinner, but the weariness gave him a new beauty. He had a kind of maleness she had never before encountered not the clumsy maleness of a European, nor even the cruel maleness of that boxer she had known long ago in another life, but a maleness that was finely drawn and delicate, like that of a coiled steel spring.

Without looking up, he went on swabbing his hands delicately and carefully with the alcohol, and said, "You are an astonishing woman." And when he did not go on, she could think of nothing better to say than, "English people are very often eccentric."

"I don't mean anything so banal as that." Then he looked at her and said, "Please don't think I'm being personal for any silly reason. It's so difficult for people to get together, to understand each other. Neither of us is a child."

"No."

"It has occurred to me that you are intelligent."

"Perhaps."

"I didn't think so."

She had a sudden image of herself as she had been that night at the palace beneath the bee-filled chandeliers, hurrying away in boredom to throw herself into Tom's arms in that stuffy room belowstairs. Quietly she said, "There wasn't any reason for you to think so."

Suddenly he shook his head as if he would clear his mind of weariness.

"What I'm trying to say is difficult especially to you. I know you have had plenty of experience."

"Yes, that's true."

"Do I seem naif?"

"No." It occurred to her that he could never have been naif, even as a child. But now he was making himself vulnerable. He was giving her, whole-heartedly, openly, his friendship and admiration. She might hurt him by trampling on it, by disillusioning him. The woman she had been that dreary afternoon in the Summer Palace would have hurt him, not in his intelligence, which was great, but in his human sensibility the human sensibility which she was beginning to believe was so great a part of Indians. It was even in these poor, suffering, dying, low- caste people a kind of sensibility which only the finest of Europeans ever had. She thought, "I'm beginning to know about India and Indians."

He was saying, "You remember that afternoon when you offered me tea at the old Summer Palace?" She looked away from him at the list marked "dead" and "dying," and he went on, "I found you attractive then and exciting. And I knew what you wanted. I knew I could have it for the taking. That's why I stayed and had a cup of tepid tea ... because I was tempted. And you were trying all the time to make me believe that you were inexperienced and" for a moment he hesitated "and respectable, because you thought that was the best way to deceive me and get what you wanted."

She looked up quickly from the lists, filled with shame and a wild impulse to protest that what he was saying was not true, but almost at once she thought, "No, that would be a lie. That would spoil everything. That would bring back the woman who offered him the tepid tea into this place. And she does not belong here. She has nothing to do with this." And she saw that he was holding up his hand as if to check her words.

"Wait," he was saying. "I don't think much of respectability. I think a great deal more of truth. I was tempted that afternoon to take what would have been very agreeable to take once or twice. But I didn't because of something I knew lay behind the flushed cheeks and trembling hands I saw. And I was right. I know now I was right.. It was the difference between taking a counterfeit and waiting for the real coin. Do you see what I mean? If I had taken what you offered me then we should not have what we have found now. I would have thought you a cheap woman. I would have given you nothing but my body, which for a doctor and a surgeon is all too easy to give because it is only a machine and means nothing. But if I had done that then, nothing better could have happened. We would never have known each other at all."

She was looking again at the table with an odd turmoil of shame and triumph in her heart. No man had ever talked to her like this, and for a moment she experienced again that feeling of confusion and terror that had come to her in the nightmare after she had quarreled with Esketh when wildly she had been searching in the jungle and across endless plains and through great cities for something only what it was she did not know. Now, for a second, she knew what it was. Then the knowledge eluded her and she was lost again.

"Don't think I'm being complicated and latin," he was saying. "Only human relations are such strange things, and I like to have things straight. Most people go through life and die without ever 'knowing what life may be, and the glory that there can be in human relationship. But the glory only comes when one can rise above the pettiness of daily life. You see, that is the end of all religion. That is what all of them try to attain. That's what I meant when I said respectability was of no importance. Respectability is for the stupid, the weak, and the hypocritical."

He shifted his position, suddenly slipping off the table to lean against it, his arms folded on his big chest. "I wanted you to know what I felt... because I think so much of you that I believe it worth while to risk making an ass of myself. And now, whenever we meet, whenever we see each other, whenever we think of each other, we will know that we are friends, that we \now each other. It is a great thing to %now even one person in a lifetime." Then he unfolded his arms and took one of her hands in his. "Maybe you are mocking me in your heart."

"No... no."

"Maybe you are thinking me a cheap fortune-teller like the ones that fill the bazaars. I can tell you that you have discovered a secret. You know what it is." Then he let her hand go free and said, "I must go now. Now I can sleep." One hand slipped about her shoulder. "It's time to make the rounds ten minutes past the time, but that's my fault. Good-night."

In a whisper she answered his good-night and then he was gone. For a little time she sat quite still, bewildered, and then, remembering that the rounds had to be made, she rose and lifting one of the stone jars filled the two pitchers with the precious boiled water, and set out.

This time she scarcely saw the figures of the sick. Only at the beds of the dying did she stop for a moment, seeking some sign that there was still life in the worn bodies. Number 72 had died. When she held the lamp high above the bed, she was sure of it. Now she knew what death was like. There was not even a need to flick the eyeball with her finger nail as the Major had done. Quietly she went down the stairs and wakened the sleeping porters.

When they had gone away, she went to the window and looked out over the town. The huge fire with its burden of corpses had almost died away; it was only a great heap of embers now which gave out a white heat but very little light. The rain had stopped and an old moon had! come up beyond the Great Tank, and between her and the old wooden* palace there was a path of golden light, crossed back and forth, endlessly by the flight of the huge bats from the dead city of the Moghuls beneathx the sacred mountain. The faint distant sound of the flute and the drums; still came to her from the opposite side of the river.

The beauty and the cruelty of the scene went deep within her like the: dirust of a knife cauterizing a wound. It was out of this he had 4 beem born!

As she watched, the black figures of the porters carrying the deatf woman crept out across the ruined garden in the direction of the Music- School to leave their burden there beside all the other dead who would be burned as soon as a fresh pyre was built.

The heat was dreadful and as she turned from the window she wiped the sweat from her face with a bit of cotton gauze and then sitting down, again at the table, she poured herself a glass of water and drank it. She then took up the list marked "dead/' and with her pencil she drew a line through two numbers 72 and 13, and again the feeling o being God returned to her for an instant.

She thought, "It is happening. The thing which brought me to India is working out. I must stay here until it is finished, even if I never see England again." If she were to go now, tomorrow, on one of the planes which would come out of the world beyond Mount Abana, what remained to her of life would be without meaning. It was here that she belonged, here in all this death and filth and misery and beauty. "Perhaps," she thought, "I have always belonged here."

Then there came to her again that faint sound like the whispering of dead leaves stirred by a breeze, and raising her eyes they met again the patient, doe-eyes of the dying woman in the bed. The purple lips moved, framing the Gujerati word for water. Again the skinny fingers appeared from beneath the sari and were thrust into the gaping mouth.

Quietly she rose and took up the glass pitcher. But immediately she put it down again with a faint quick sense of horror. She had given this woman to drink from the glass on the table instead of from the woman's own cup and afterward she had drunk from the same glass.

The whispering sound went on and, taking up one of the enameled pitchers, she crossed to the side of the bed, filled the woman's own cup with water and held it to her lips, thinking, "What is done is done!" wondering, too, if there was some way of disinfecting one's insides.

Then as she turned away from the bed she heard a groan from one of the beds at the far end of the ward, and following the sound she found an old man who had wakened out of Miss MacDaid's merciful sleep. His body shook with the convulsions of pain. Quickly she brought the light and looked at the number. It was number 83 on the list of "dying." She hurried away down the stairs to find Miss MacDaid.

When they returned, Miss MacDaid thrust the needle again into the skinny black thigh of the old man, and as she turned away she said, "He is finished. Transfer his number to the other list."

She said nothing to Miss MacDaid about the incident of the glass because she would not have the nurse think that she had been such an absent-minded fool. Now she experienced a faint sense of disgust but no longer any fear, for it seemed to her that what happened to her was no longer in her hands.

In the hunting-tent the Maharani sat cross-legged on a little dais with the old Princess of Bewanagar, facing the circle of men Raschid Ali Khan, Colonel Ran] it Singh, Homer Smiley, Nil Kant Rao, and Ransome. One by one, the Muslim, the Sikh, the American, the Mahratta and the Englishman were telling her what they had to tell of the progress of the fight; and what each one had to say brought new courage and new life to the heart of the handsome old woman seated on the cushion of Benares brocade. She looked tired now and worn, but the old untamable beauty was still here, accentuated by the deep shadows from the flame of the wick burning in oil.

She had fought all her life she had fought against superstition and intrigue and prejudice. She had fought by the side of the dead Maharajah, without the strength which he found in his simplicity and faith. She had fought, too, for the love of fighting, doubting always in her heart that they would ever win the struggle for integrity and grace, and the salvation and rebirth of her own state and of all of India. She had never, like the old Maharajah, believed either in the goodness or strength of her people, or even in the ultimate victory. And she had fought, a little like the immensely old Dewan, without scruple, sometimes with cruelty, often with hatred, and always with the toughness and bravery of her own Mahratta people. She had hated Europeans as invaders, as vulgar and stupid and insensible, admitting despite her own unwillingness such things as the friendship of the great Viceroy and the sensibility and intelligence of men like Ransome, and the goodness of people like the Smileys. There had been times when she grew weary, and moments when she had been tempted to turn evil and bitter, like so many of the princes of India. There had even been a moment, one terrible moment, a little while before these men, sitting before her, had come into the tent, when she had been tempted to give up the battle and flee, to leave by airplane for the security of Bombay; perhaps of Europe. In her weariness, it had seemed to her that everything for which they had fought, her dead husband and herself, had been swept away forever. For a little time she had felt too old and too ill to begin the battle all over again.

But that terrible moment of temptation was gone now. As she had watched these men and listened to them, she felt shame that the mo ment of weakness had ever come to her. They were fine men and beauti ful men, all perhaps save Mr. Smiley, who was a noble man but not very beautiful; and she knew a fine man when she saw one. And she could not doubt their devotion to her. What they gave her was not the devotion of lovers, but something beyond that, something which had less reason and was able to withstand greater tests. But she knew, too, that if the devotion had come from men less strong and beautiful, it would have pleased her less. The devotion was a thing apart, unimpeachable, shining and splendid, but she liked it the more because it came from men like the brawny Raschid, the lean, silken Ranjit Singh, the fierce Nil Kant Rao and the morbid, good-looking Ransome. It pleased her savage sense of beauty and splendor. A queen should be served by men like these.

They had worked for her and for India, without sleep and without complaint, in filth and misery and danger, a danger worse and more insidious than the danger of battle. The task had seemed impossible, yet victory was in sight. When she was gone they would be here to carry on the fight. They would be here to rebuild the schools, the bridges, the railroad, even the great dam itself. She would sell all her jewels and give her money to the state because the thing for which she and the dead Maharajah had worked was only emerging from the womb of Indian time, but it must go on and on, gaining force from the light and faith brought by such men as these. India, vast, cruel, rich India, was stirring and waking.

And as she sat there, she saw among the faces, that of a man who had died more than twenty years ago in the house where Ransome now lived. She saw him as she had seen him when she came down from her village, timid and proud, a child of thirteen, but already a woman, to marry the young Maharajah of Ranchipur. Now as an old woman she could still see the intelligent, kindly face, full of gentleness and a wisdom which was more like the wisdom of the East than of Europe in its calm and understanding. Yes, he was there, too, in this council of strong men who served and admired her; in the end it was because of him that they were all assembled here in the hunting- tent. It was because of him that the Maharajah had fought for so long to free his people and lift them up. It was because of him that she was seated here now, ruling wisely and with understanding and courage. He had loved her ancient, splendid India so much that in the end he had come back to die in Ranchipur in the evening in his garden at the hour when the cows came homeward beneath a trailing cloud of red dust, when the air smelled of jasmine and cow dung, smoke and spices, and the jackals came out of hiding to cry at the rising moon, and the flutes and tomtoms began in the villages. Long ago there had been many Britishers like him John Lawrence, the scholar, the tutor who \neus India. They were rarer now. Here and there you might find one.

The men were talking now among themselves and she did not trouble to listen, for their own business they knew far better than she could know it. Her thoughts drifted away to Europe, to the casinos and the great jewelers' shops and the state dinners, the expositions made to help commerce, the great hotels and watering-places. It seemed all at once a distant world, more distant than it had been long ago when as a young woman she had defied the Vedic law and crossed the Black Water. Then Europe had fascinated her as a glittering pageant might fascinate a child, but now, she knew, she was wearied of it. Long ago she had come to understand its greed, its falseness, and its tragic materialism, its desperate snatching at any. small hope, its dictators and its degeneracy. Let it alone; soon enough it would destroy itself. Men like that Lord Esketh were destroying it. To save it was a more terrible task than to bring together in one pride and honor poor torn, divided India. For Europe was tired and the East was wakening refreshed and vigorous from a long sleep.

No, she would never go to Europe again. She would die without even visiting the spectacle another time. And she would not go away even to Poona or Ootacamund. She would stay behind, all through the terrible life-bringing monsoon, all through the winter when the red dust rose in clouds off the plains that stretched away on one side to the sea, on the other to the sacred mountain of Abana. There was much to be done, so much to be built up, so much to be left behind when she died, that others might have a foundation on which to build.

Then through the cloud of reverie she was aware that the curtains had been thrust aside at the far end of the tent and that the young Major had come in hurriedly. He advanced straight toward her and bending low, with his fingertips pressed together, he excused himself for being late by saying that he could not escape from the hospital.

She frowned at him in a pantomime of displeasure, as it was her duty as a queen to do, but the frown passed quickly when he smiled with a bold glance which told her that he knew the frown was false. With him she could never be bad-tempered because he was young and good-looking and affectionate. Her own sons were tragically dead, slain by the West, but the Major had in a way taken their place.

He brought her news of the epidemic, news which he made a little better than the fact because he understood that she was tired. Then he talked with the other men for a time, and when at last they went away, she asked him to stay behind, partly because his presence always cheered her and made her feel young, and partly because there were things which she wished to discuss with him and gossip which she wished to hear.

When the others had gone, she awakened her friend, the old Princess, who sat nodding, asleep bolt upright on her cushion, and said, "Go put yourself to bed, Sita."

When the old Princess had gone sleepily away, they talked together in Mahratta, which was her own language and his by adoption. She said, "There are a great many things to discuss non-official things. First, before His Highness died he told me that you thought of marrying."

"Yes, Your Highness."

"Are you still of the same mind?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-six."

She grunted thoughtfully, and said, "If you are to breed strong children you must begin."

The Major grinned. "Age makes no difference so long as the stock is strong and one can still breed. Each one of us is but the receptacle of seed. We merely pass it on."

"Humph! Your science has a great many theories that any Ryot can disprove by example." She opened the gold-and-ruby box at her side and took out cardamon seeds to chew. "When things are more setded I'll send for the girl and her parents." She regarded him shrewdly. "It does not matter to you that she is only half Indian that the other half is European ... or American?"

"No, Your Highness. It is not the cross of races that makes the Eurasian a problem. It's the crossing of bad stock the remittance man and the low-caste woman. His Highness told me about the girl."

Again she looked at him shrewdly. "You have no nonsense about a love match?"

"No, Your Highness... that is, within limits. I should want to know my wife before I married her. That is only fair to both of us."

"There is a good deal of nonsense in the West about love marriage. There is nothing more miserable than a marriage in which passion has been satisfied and is dead. She is a nice girl. If I had sons I would choose her for a wife for one of them."

"I am sure Your Highness is a good judge."

"And then there is the question of Ransome," she said. "He has worked well?"

"Yes, Your Highness, he could not have done his job better. It's not an easy one. He has scarcely slept."

"And his drinking?"

"So far as I know he has not had a drink for nearly four days."

"That proves nothing when whisky is so difficult to get."

"It is not difficult, Your Highness. He had brandy in his own cellar. He gave it all to the hospital. I myself offered him a drink and he refused it. I offered it to him whenever he wanted it and still he refused."

She considered the statement for a moment, sitting still and thoughtful as a Buddha in the yellow lamplight. Then she said, "I am fond of him. Something could be made of him."

"He is a defeatist, Your Highness, but a nice fellow. He is sick. I think he has always been sick."

"I should like to help him if I could... There are times when he makes me think of His Highness' old tutor. He was dead before you were born, so you wouldn't know what he was like. He lived in a different age. I think it is the times which have made Ransome sick." She opened the gold box studded with rubies once more. "Do you think he would work for the state?"

"I don't know, Your Highness."

"It might help him. What is this story of his violating the Missionary's daughter?"

"I don't know. Your Highness. Knowing him, I cannot believe it. It is not in his nature."

Her black eyes narrowed a little and she said, "On the night of the Palace dinner, something happened between him and Lady Esketh."

"Yes, Your Highness."

"What did that mean?"

"Nothing, I should say."

"A pity. Pleasures such as that are barren."

"They are both unhappy. They are both sick."

"Why does she want to stay here? It makes no sense."

"I don't know, Your Highness, but I think she is trying to find something there is no name for what she is trying to find unless you call it reality and that is a poor name."

"It is you who permitted her to stay. You admire her?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

She frowned with displeasure. "Why?"

For a moment he hesitated. Then he said, "Forgive me, Masaheb 3 but she has many of your qualities."

The frown deepened. "How?"

"She is without fear. There is a quality of indefeatability about her. She likes good-looking men. She has independence and character. For the past two days she was made sick twenty times a day by the hospital work, but she went on working. That is as good a test as I know. She does not deceive herself and she does not run away from things. Long ago, I think, she took a wrong path."

As he spoke, he watched her, shrewdly aware that the frown softened, that the fierce old lady was pleased. Shrewdly he knew, because he knew her so well, that deep inside her there was a silent chuckle of pleasure, because he understood her so well, because he had divined qualities in her which she fancied she had managed to keep hidden from most others, because he dared to be bold with her, even at times scolding her.

"Was it because of her that you were late tonight?"

With a humility which he knew she divined as false, he said in a low voice, "Yes, Your Highness."

"Will this interfere with your marriage?"

"No, Your Highness, Lady Esketh was not made for breeding. Marriage is an affair of the state. It should be made for the good of the community."

"I am glad that you are not a fool. When will she go away?"

"That I cannot answer, Your Highness."

"She must go before the other one comes."

"Of course."

"I will leave that to you. Otherwise it will be very troublesome for everyone."

"I understand, Your Highness."

"And one more thing. I hear stories of an old lady who lives with the Smileys."

"Yes, Mrs. Smiley's aunt."

"It seems that she has done great work in spite of being old. She has cooked at the Orphanage and taken in refugees."

"She is an extraordinary woman."

"I should like to see her."

"I can send her to you, if you will fix the time."

"Tomorrow at three. What is her name?"

"Mrs. Bascomb... Mrs. Phoebe Bascomb."

"Write that for me. I can't remember names like that."

He took out a bit of paper, wrote the name and gave it to her.

"Is the railway bridge passable?"

"Yes, they have laid planks over the rails."

"When you go out, tell the aide-de-camp to send His Highness' bullock carriage for her."

"She could come alone, Your Highness. She is very spry."

"No, I prefer to send the carriage. I will use it myself from now on. The motion of elephants is bad for my digestion. And Miss Dirks... they have not found her body?"

"No, Your Highness."

"Was it true that she was dying?"

"Yes, Your Highness.' 5

The Maharani was silent for a moment. "She was a good woman. I never understood her, but she was a good woman. We must erect a monument to her when times are settled again. And the other one... Miss Hodge?"

"She is quite mad, Your Highness."

"Where is she? Who is caring for her?"

"Lady Esketh."

"Lady Esketh!"

"Yes, the poor thing won't be separated from her."

She shook her head and made a clucking sound, very like the sounds Aunt Phoebe made when moved or astonished. "The English are very odd people... very unexpected."

"They are a sentimental people, Your Highness, and very ashamed of it."

"We must arrange for Miss Hodge to have a pension."

She collected the boxes and belongings about her. "You had better go now. You must need rest."

"Thank you."

Then she rose and went slowly out into another part of the tent.

While the serving-women undressed her and massaged her and rubbed her face and head with scented oils, she asked the head woman, "Where is the Russian? Has she returned yet?"

"No, Masaheb."

The Maharani was suddenly angry. She wanted to be read to, so that she would be able for a little time to forget the misery of the city. She wanted even to torture Maria Lishinskaia a little so that she would be able to sleep. She thought, "I'll send Maria Lishinskaia away. I'll give her a pension and send her back to Europe." The Russian woman grew more and more tiresome with her hysterics and her obsessions. There wasn't even much satisfaction any longer in tormenting her. And she was the last bond which bound the old lady to the Europe of casinos and gala dinners and jewelers' shops. She would send Maria Lishinskaia away, out of her life. Then she would be free of Europe. She would be Indian again, pure Indian, as she had been long ago as a young woman when she had thought she might learn things from Europe,

But there was no need to send away Maria Lishinskaia. She had already gone, of her own will, for she was already dead, hanging in the light of the dying moon by her own scarf from one of the iron hooks in the Great Gateway which the Sikhs used to support their lances. It was there that Ransome found her when he returned from the hunting-pavilion.