The Rains Came/Part IV

In the morning, a little before noon, not one plane appeared, but three > coming out of the steaming rain above the mist-hidden sacred mountain. And in them were bales and bundles of supplies and three nurses one a Parsee woman, one an Anglo-Indian, and one a British nurse. Gopal Rao was with them, black-eyed, content, swaggering a little with importance because he had seen the Governor of the Bombay Presidency and told him the details of the disaster. He went at once to the Maharani to tell her that more supplies were being sent by plane and that as soon as the railroad was restored, food and more medical supplies would be rushed into the city. Colonel Ranjit Singh and Raschid Ali Khan, lean and grim as a falcon and more than ever like one of Baber's horsemen, were there. They had been as far as Mount Abana on the elephants and the news had come through that men were already at work on the other side of the mountain beyond the canyon. The restoration of railroad service was now only a matter of hours. Gopal Rao reported that the government of Bombay was sending the head of the Institute for Tropical Diseases and two trained workers the next day by plane. The news was all good and for a moment the light of victory came again into the weary faces of the Maharani, the Colonel, and Raschid Ali Khan.

Gopal Rao and Colonel Ranjit Singh went away, but -Raschid All Khan as Police Minister stayed behind for the dreary business of the inquest into the suicide of Maria Lishinskaia. Ransome came for it, and the Major, and last of all Harry Bauer.

The Swiss no longer looked cool and fresh and clean as Ransome had seen him the night before. The white drill suit was crumpled and soiled and there was a dullness about him, as if the radiant health had been dimmed, as if a shadow had fallen upon him. On one side of his face there were two long scratches.

The Major testified that Maria Lishinskaia had undoubtedly died by her own hand. She had fastened one end o the scarf about her throat, attached it to the hook, and then kicked away the chair on which she had been standing. Undoubtedly she had meant to die, for the scarf had stretched and when she was found her dead feet were touching the ground. She could, he thought, have saved herself. When Ransome found her the body was still warm. She could not, the Major thought, have been dead for more than a few minutes. The jobedar had been asleep in his room and had heard nothing.

Then Ransome told of having seen her earlier in the evening while he was walking along the edge of the Great Tank with Colonel Ran jit Singh. He described how she had slipped from tree to tree, shadow to shadow until the final mad dash past the corpses into the pest-house of the Music School. Colonel Ranjit Singh had recognized her too and they had agreed to say nothing.

When it was Harry Bauer's turn he was secretive and difficult and told his story sullenly and grudgingly. Looking at the floor of the tent, he said in a low voice, "I did not know she was coming. She came to see me and talked for a time and went away."

But this did not satisfy Raschid. The Police Minister asked, "She was your mistress, wasn't she?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"For nearly two years. It began at Carlsbad. I never loved her, but here it was a convenience. I tried to stop it. She wanted to marry me. I never wanted to marry her. I am going to marry a girl from Vevey when I go home. I told her that, but it didn't do any good. She was always threatening to kill herself, but I didn't believe she would do it. She was a little crazy, I think. I would have broken it off, but she pestered me. She was always coming into my room. She even got into bed with me sometimes." He still stared at the floor, but his drooping shoulders shrugged, "What could I do? I am healthy and this is a hot country and one eats lots of spices. I said, 'Oh, all right. Why not?'"

"Is that all? Did you talk quietly?"

"Yes."

"Miss Simon said she came for you and heard you quarreling and the deceased shouting, Til kill you and myself.' "

"Yes, that was true."

"You quarreled?"

"No. She attacked me."

"Is that how your face was scratched?"

"Yes."

"What did you quarrel about?"

He was silent for a moment, and then in a low voice he said, "She wanted me to sleep with her. She did awful things and said horrible things."

"Because you refused?"

"Yes. It was ugly and indecent. It wasn't the place for ... that. With all those dead and dying around us. I didn't want to. I couldn't have done it. She was disgusting to me."

So that was it, thought Ransome. His Swiss respectability was offended.

"She was disgusting to me. I told her so. And then she tried to kill me. She came at me like a panther . . . and I hit her."

"Yes?"

"I think that was what did it. When I hit her, she stopped her screaming. She went into a corner of the room and covered her face with her hands."

"Did she say anything?"

"She was quiet for a long time and then she began to cry ... not wildly or hysterically the way she usually did, but quietly. Afterward when she was gone and I was alone, that was the only thing that alarmed me. She was so quiet."

"What did she say?"

The smooth, handsome, stupid face looked puzzled for a moment. Then he said, "She talked in a very low voice. I don't know that I can remember exactly. I think she covered her face with her hands and then she said, 'What has happened to me? I am crazy.' Then she said, 'I am sorry I hit you. Forgive me. I cannot die if you do not forgive me.' And I said, 'It's all right. I forgive you, but I'm finished. I never want to see you again. You are horrible.' Then she took her hands from in front of her face and said, It's all right. You'll never see me again. I won't trouble you. I won't trouble anybody ever again, not even myself. I should have done it long ago long ago even before Leipsic and Dresden. 5 Then she said, 'Good-by. I hope that some day that wonderful body which is the only thing you love will suffer as I have.' "

His voice grew lower and lower as he finished the story. He said, "All the time it was as if she were talking to herself. I never thought she'd do it. She was always saying she would kill herself, but she never did."

Even when he had finished he did not look at them. He said, "All I want is to go away in peace. I want to leave this place. I want to go back to Switzerland and marry and have peace. I should never have come here."

For a moment there was silence, and then Raschid asked, "Is there anyone to be notified, Your Highness? Had she any relatives or friends?"

"None that I know of. You might look among her papers. She always said that all her family and friends were lost or dead."

Raschid turned to the Swiss, "That's all. You may go now. As soon as there is a way of leaving, I will send you. Perhaps you can go on one of the returning planes."

"That's all I want," Harry Bauer repeated, dully. "To go away. To go home out of this cursed country." He was frightened now as an animal is frightened because his body was sick. On the way to the door of the tent he stumbled and nearly fell, and for a moment he stood clinging to the curtains of the doorway. Ransome's eye met that of the Major and a look of horror passed between them.

Then the Major whispered to him, "You had better go with him to make certain he gets as far as the Music School."

On the way from the hunting-tent to the Music School Ransome gave the Swiss his arm to keep him from falling, and as they reached the Great Tank Harry Bauer leaned suddenly against the wall and began to vomit, and then Ransome knew that it was finished with him. With the aid of a passing coolie, he got him as far as the School and into the room which the Swiss had arranged with the efficiency of a soldier. He was apathetic now and sat on the edge of the bed, staring before him while Ransome stripped off the white jacket and loosened the collar of the shirt. He did not speak for a while and then only with a great effort.

Looking up at Ransome, with dilated, unseeing pupils, he said, haltingly in French, "I want to go back. I must go< back. Send me away from this awful country." And then he began again to vomit terribly, the attack shaking his body from head to foot.

When he was quiet again Ransome said, "I'll go to fetch the doctor."

In the hallway he met the Major. "I came as soon as I could," he said. "The old lady wanted to talk to me."

"Do you think there's any chance?"

"I should say not. At any rate, the planes brought stuff to treat him."

"Who is to take his place?"

"I don't know."

"I will."

"You're needed elsewhere."

"They can get on without me. Gopal Rao can do my job." He looked at the Major searchingly. "I want to do it."

"You know the danger?"

"Yes."

"The old lady won't like it."

"I want to do it. I must do it."

"I see. Very well, then. But go now and have a bath and throw away those clothes and wash your hands in alcohol. The Swiss was as clean as any man could be, but it didn't save him."

It had come to him in the moment when he stood supporting Harry Bauer at the edge of the Great Tank. By the vomiting he knew that it was all finished with Harry Bauer and that by tomorrow he would be dead; and his spirit, deadened again as it had been long ago by the presence of death all about him, accepted the fact of death coldly and without emotion. His arms supported the body of a man who was already dead, but who would live on for a few hours mercifully numbed and confused by the disease which destroyed him. He was one more out of the thousands, one more ant in the hill which God had wantonly kicked apart four days before one more ant whose death would make little difference to anyone now that the Russian woman had hanged herself to the hook in the Great Gate. The fact of death would make little difference to anyone save the Swiss himself with his peasant selfishness and materialism, with his plans for returning home, for marrying and breeding a family and acquiring property and leaving behind a son to carry on the common name of Bauer, to carry on the ego that had been Harry Bauer, the ego that was crushed out by the foot of God far away from the terraced vineyards above Vevey.

And if this were Tom Ransome instead of Harry Bauer who stood there, supported by a stranger, vomiting away his life by the edge of the Great Tank . . . just one more ant, a stranger ant from another colony, who had run away to escape, to lose himself in that vast ant heap of India. And so that was that. Today, tomorrow, or next day it might be Tom Ransome who was trampled carelessly out of existence. And suddenly by the edge of the tank, as Harry Bauer ceased vomiting and leaned against him in the crumpled soiled white clothes, retching painfully, he saw himself clearly perhaps for the first time and his spirit turned away revolted from what he saw of uselessness, of egotism, of selfishness, of cant. He knew then what it was he had to do. He had to destroy himself with all the past, with all the questionings and doubts and all the haze of useless thought which had paralyzed him since he was born. He must destroy that which was Tom Ransome; he must annihilate it, crushing the very ego into the red soil of Ranchipur. He must tear down and humiliate that muddled thinker, that liberal, that quixotic, self-questioning egotist. In this world in which he found himself, in that old tired world which he had left, there was no place for such men as Tom Ransome. One ounce of action was worth a ton of thought. Philosophy was a luxury for the weak detachment the vice of the idle. He must destroy all that to emerge at last as simple, as naked, as the servant of Mr. Banner jee standing there on the balcony in the fading light, looking out over the ruined city of Ranchipur.

This time the vision did not leave him, fading away into an obscurity where it was lost from faith or understanding. It stayed with him while he carried the dying Swiss into the Music School, while he undressed him and went in search of the Major.

And now while he stood by the chattee, pouring tepid water over his naked body, scrubbing himself sparingly with the precious bit of tired soap, the vision was still with him, and when he thought of the Major he knew that the Major must have seen something, some new look, in

the eyes, and understood, and once again he experienced a warm surging wave of friendliness toward the Major and Raschid and the Smileys and even the old Maharani. He had been their friend but he had always been apart from them, separated by some vague barrier which left him isolated and turned the friendship sterile. Now it was different. He l^new them. He divined what it was they were, in its very essence. He must cling to this new understanding; he must not let this vision escape as it had done so many times before. By his very bootstraps he must pull himself up, and once he was secure, he must turn his back forever on that old barren, querulous self.

When he had dressed again he went to find Fern, and discovered her in the office where timid Mr. Das, the director of the Music School, had once sat trying to keep his muddled accounts in European fashion; and when he came in the door he saw her in a new way, as if before she had existed in a shadow where she remained indistinct and endowed with qualities and a character built up out of the imagination which fed the ego of the old Tom Ransome. He saw in her what Aunt Phoebe, with her simplicity and age had seen long ago on the night when he brought Fern from his own house to the Smileys.

He said, "Harry Bauer is dying. 5 '

"I know."

"I've come to take his place."

For a second she regarded him in dismay. "No, you mustn't do that. You're too valuable."

"I'm not valuable at all. I have to do it,"

Then he saw, with a quickening of life itself, that she was glad.

"It's all arranged," he said. "You'll have to show me the ropes. I want some alcohol first to wash my hands."

She gave him the alcohol and stood watching him.

She said, "There are fewer cases today. The Major thinks it may mean the epidemic is under control."

"And deaths "

"As many as ever. Most of them die ... nine out of ten." The tired young face had a kind of gravity in it which he had seen sometimes in the face of Aunt Phoebe. "Luckily they die quickly. It leaves place for the others."

Then suddenly he put his arms about her and hugged her close to him, passionately; this new Fern was somehow a woman and new to him and precious in a way no woman had ever been before.

He said, "It will be better working together."

In a voice so low that he could scarcely hear her, she said, "I'm frightened."

"It'll be all right now. I know it will be all right." It would be all right if he kept that vision, if he destroyed what he had been before. Then he would never "go away" again, leaving her alone and frightened.

She said, "You must not sleep in Harry Bauer's room."

He looked at her for a moment in silence and then said, "I'll make up a bed here in the office."

Then she smiled for the first time he had seen her smile since the earthquake, and said, "That is what I wanted. I want you near me. It'll be so much easier that way, if you're near me."

"Nobody will gossip now."

"It wouldn't matter much if they did." She pressed her face close to him and said, "I'm ashamed."

"Why?"

"Because I am happy."

For a moment he did not answer her, and then he said, "You mustn't be ashamed. It was meant to be like that, else the world wouldn't go on."

"We must make the rounds now. I'll show you what has to be done. Some of them will be dead."

At five o'clock Harry Bauer was dead. All through the afternoon Ransome came and went to and from the little room where the Swiss had installed himself so neatly, giving him the Kaolin solution and the chloride of sodium and calcium. That the Swiss should live became a kind of obsession with him. Harry Bauer had to recover and go back again to Switzerland and that life to which he had always belonged. Ransome even understood for a time the will to life which Miss MacDaid exerted over the ill and the dying. When he bent over the half-dead body of Bauer and wiped the froth away from the purple lips, he kept thinking, "You must live! You must not die!" But Harry Bauer only

lay still without response, save when now and then the agonizing cramps drew his legs up beneath his chin. The Major knew that there was never any chance because the cholera asked nothing better as a feeding-ground than a fresh, young, and healthy body from the West. A little before five, when Ransome came into the room, he was aware that a change had come over the Swiss. He lay very still with the head drawn back, the mouth open. There was no sign of breathing and no pulse, and he thought, "He is dead. Now he will never go home."

He went to fetch Fern who knew better than he the signs of death by cholera. Bending over him, she said, "It's no use." They went away, leaving the body until the Major came back; and a little after six he arrived and went with Ransome to Bauer's room. When Ransome touched the wrist there was still the heat of fever in it. The Major took the surer way; drawing back the sheet, he said, "Look!" The muscular body the beautiful body which Maria Lishinskaia had said was the only thing in the world which Harry Bauer loved was no longed white. The muscles were turning dark brown, so that they lay outlined like the muscles of an anatomist's chart against the gray of other tissues* Then as they stood there one leg moved slowly upward and then outward like the leg of a dancer in a ballet.

"But he moved," said Ransome.

"That is cholera," said the Major, drawing back the sheet. "You see, the body is only a machine. The spirit has fled, but the muscles go on working, like a fly-wheel that is running down."

At noon the Major sent a message to Aunt Phoebe to say that the bullock carriage was coming to take her to the Maharani. In his note he asked for no answer, and the assumption that the message was a command annoyed the old lady for a moment. Then when the messenger had left she was annoyed because such a visit would, she knew, kill four or five hours out of a day in which every minute was precious. When Bertha Smiley came in from the orphanage she told her the news and asked, "What do you suppose it means?"

"It means, I suppose, that she has heard about you and wants to see you. She is full of curiosity."

"I suppose I ought to dress up."

"Yes ... of course."

"My new foulard?" suggested Aunt Phoebe. "With the collar of Battenberg lace."

"Yes and your corals."

"Do you suppose well get on?"

"I should think so. She'll either be very stiff and grand or . . ." She searched for a simile and found it "or just like one of your old friends in Cedar Falls. There's nothing to be afraid of."

"I'm not afraid," said Aunt Phoebe, "only maybe I won't know how to behave."

"It's easy. I'll show you. Suppose you're the Maharani. I'll be you. Now I'll come in the door with my hands like this, and then I bow and say, 'Good-afternoon, Your Highness.' And then she'll talk. She likes to talk, so don't interrupt her too much. She'll probably ask you a lot of questions."

"I wish she'd given me more time to get ready."

"You'll be all right. She doesn't care much how you're dressed or if your hair is curled. All you must remember is to keep calling her, 'Your Highness.' She likes that."

"I'll remember." She started for the kitchen, but Bertha stopped her. "I can manage the noon meal. Homer's at the Orphanage. I can stay here till you go. Go and get yourself ready. In all the damp your foulard will need pressing."

Aunt Phoebe protested for a moment and then gave in, grumbling a little as she disappeared in the direction of her own room.

Now that the shock of the invitation had passed she began to feel a little excited, so excited that she even allowed that Bertha, with the help of one boy, could manage the lunch. Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry were still with them, because neither of them was willing to sleep alone in Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's bungalow. They were there during most of the day, putting the place in order, but they returned for their meals and slept in the storeroom at the Mission. While Aunt Phoebe took the foulard out of the eucalyptus chest, she thanked Heaven that they had made up their quarrel, whatever it had been about, and were again as thick as thieves. She did not mind the Mississippi laziness of Mrs. Simon or the Cockney sluttishness of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, but

she did mind their foolishness and their mutual habit of talking all the time, whether they had anything to say or not. And she was contemptuous of them for their terror, for since the disaster and the epidemic neither of them would venture near an Indian. They had even proposed to Aunt Phoebe to send away the one Untouchable boy who helped her in the kitchen, saying that he would bring cholera from the city.

But Aunt Phoebe had only said, maliciously, "That wouldn't do any good. Europeans can carry cholera just as well . . . better, the Major says, because cholera likes fresh European blood. Europeans just die like flies of it."

In Aunt Phoebe's mind there was no need to take precautions beyond those of the simplest cleanliness. If you got cholera, you got it. Maybe the Lord intended it or maybe it just happened by accident but you couldn't do anything about it.

In the beginning the terror of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had been worse than that of Mrs. Simon, but gradually the infection had spread, until now both of them lived in a perpetual state of hysteria, heightened in the case of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry by the brandy which she had found in her house untouched by the raiding Bhils.

Aunt Phoebe was running an iron over the foulard dress when she saw the two figures through the window coming back to the Mission for lunch along the road from the direction of the Distillery. It was raining again and both of them carried umbrellas and bags slung over their shoulders bags, Aunt Phoebe knew, filled with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's magpie collection of bric-a-brac. For two days they had been carrying it from the bungalow into the Mission storeroom. One corner of the room was filled with brassware and cheap shawls and saris f inlaid taborets and embroidered cushions. The police had recovered the sewing-machine, the alarm clock and three brass trays, and the Bhils who took them were shut up now in a big barred room in the elephant Phil\ana. But the enlarged and tinted photograph of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry in her prime was still missing.

Now, as Aunt Phoebe watched them, she discerned the figure of a coolie coming along the road toward them, and putting down her iron she waited to see what would happen. When the coolie came within twenty yards of the two burdened women, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and

Mrs. Simon took to the muddy fields, never stopping until they were fifty yards from the road. From that distance they called out to him in bad Hindustani not to come any nearer. The man gave them a single glance and continued on his way toward the town. And when he passed, they returned to the road on their way to the Mission.

Aunt Phoebe gave a chuckle and returned to pressing the damp wrinkles out of the foulard.

"Like a couple of orthodox Brahmins," she thought.

In a little while she heard them in the storeroom, talking together and unloading their cargo of treasure, and then through the window she saw coming up the Mission drive one of the Mahratta policemen.

He had come from Gopal Rao, bringing a note addressed to Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry. It was to say that Mr. Hoggett-Egburry had arranged for one of the planes to bring his wife to the safety of Bombay. There were two places in the plane besides that of the pilot. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry could bring with her whom she liked. When she finished reading the note she sank into a kitchen chair and said, "Thank God! We're saved!"

"What? What is it?" Mrs. Simon asked. "How are we saved?"

" 'Erbert has sent a plane for us. I knew he wouldn't abandon me."

"You can go. I can't . . . and leave Fern."

But Aunt Phoebe, who was taking no chances, came in just in time to hear what she said, and before Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry could answer she said, "Fern won't go. I'll look after her. You don't need to worry."

"I couldn't do that."

"It's the only thing to do. Supose you got cholera and died here and left Fern an orphan. That would be nice, wouldn't it? With nobody at all to look after her."

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry said, "She's right, Mary Lou. Think of it, especially now that she's going to be married. You must think of yourself as well as Fern."

"I'd have to think it over."

But Aunt Phoebe said, "You better get together what you're goin' to take with you. These planes'll have to get out of here before dark. Don't you worry. I understand Fern. Bertha and I can keep an eye on her."

"I'd have to see her before I left."

But Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry intervened tipsily, "And go to that pesthouse? I forbid you. You might bring infection along with you. They wouldn't let you land in Bombay. You can't do that. And think of it, Fern engaged, and such a good match, too. It's a time for common sense now."

"You'd better get your things together," repeated Aunt Phoebe, quietly.

"I'll think about it," said Mrs. Simon, and began to cry suddenly. "I've never flown before," she said.

"Neither have I," said Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, "but I'd rather fly than die here like a rat in a hole. The Smileys can keep my brassware, can't you? It won't be any trouble."

"No," said Bertha Smiley.

"Well take good care of it," said Aunt Phoebe.

"It's all so awful," said Mrs. Simon, still sobbing. "I don't see why Fern has to make everything worse by staying in that awful town. She never thought of anything but herself since she was born."

"Come along now," said Aunt Phoebe. "If you're ready by three o'clock you can go into town with me."

"We can't walk all that way," said Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry.

"You won't have to," said Aunt Phoebe. "The Maharani is sending her bullock carriage for me. You can ride with me." And then as if what she had said was no Parthian shot, but only a simple observation she left them.

When she had gone, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon, her tears suddenly dried, -went into the storeroom to make ready for their flight. When the door was closed Mrs. Simon spoke the thought which was in both their minds: "How do you suppose she got invited to the Maharani's?"

There was no answer. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry rolled her eyes and turned to select out of the heap of her belongings those things which she meant to take with her.

"I must say, nothing here makes sense. When I get to Bombay I'm going to make Herbert resign from the bank and take me back to England. A man with his talents can find a good place there. And if he can't we'll just go down and live quietly in Shropshire. I've got a lot of relatives there . . . county people, you know. I won't go on spending

the best years of my life in a place like Ranchipur." She gave a tipsy snort of indignation. "Imagine! That old trout being sent for by the Maharani!"

For Mrs. Simon the preparations were simple enough, since everything she possessed in the world lay buried beneath the heap of stones which had once been her house. Between her and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry there had been a reconciliation, and now that the first hysteria and terror were past, they got on a little better, partly because they had, in a sense, been forced into each other's arms, since no one in Ranchipur save the Smileys who fed them, took the least notice of them. But the reconciliation was not accompanied by a restoration of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's prestige. Mrs. Simon held the secret of her drinking over her like a club, and now that the secret was out, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry no longer confined herself to drinking secretly and to getting drunk only in the evenings in the privacy of her own house. Now she drank when and where it suited her fancy. In a way it recompensed her for her loss of prestige. Now Mrs. Simon called her openly by her Christian name, and she, in turn, called Mrs. Simon "Mary Lou." And since Mrs. Simon had given it out as a fact that she was to be the mother-in-law of the brother of an earl, she was sure of her superiority. Yet in their hearts they hated each other, with the hatred of two females who have always disliked and distrusted each other.

While Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry sat unsteadily on a stool rummaging among all her bazaar finery, Mrs. Simon lay on the bed, weeping, and saying over and over again, "I can't go. I can't leave Fern. She's all I've got in the world." She was aware now, more than ever, of the loss of her husband and her daughter Hazel, for she felt an attack coming on with no audience, no one to be concerned over her, no one to comfort her and make soft speeches.

Mrs, Hoggett-Egburry went on selecting things out of the heap and placing them in piles on either side of the stool. There was a semblance of order, but no fact. She would place things now in one pile, now in the other, now back again in the general heap, until at last, in desperate confusion, she sat up, looked toward the bed, and said, "God-damn it, Mary Lou, lend me a hand with this stuff."

But Mrs. Simon only moaned and said, "Don't ask me to do anything now."

Then Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry sat up, looked at the bed again, and measuring her words with a deadly drunken accuracy, said, "You're alone, all right! You haven't got anybody. You'd better pack up and go back to Unity Point and all your old mammies, because if you ever think you're going to get Fern back again, you're crazy. That girl's got too much sense."

Mrs. Simon gave a low scream and covered her face with her hands as if she had been struck, but there was no audience. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry simply turned her back and lost herself in the interminable confusion of her "sorting."

The bullock carriage was half an hour late in arriving, and until it appeared Aunt Phoebe, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon sat on stiff kitchen chairs, waiting, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry surrounded by bundles and parcels containing her treasures. The two "friends" were not speaking to each other, and between them Aunt Phoebe sat in serene malice, aware that the confusion of one's enemies so complete was seldom delivered into one's hands in this world. Now and then Mrs. Simon sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. She wore one of Mrs. Smiley's topees and one of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's pongee suits which she had borrowed before the latest insults. It was too large for her and gave her at once a mournful and a ridiculous appearance.

When the carriage at last arrived, drawn by the white Mysore bullocks with gilded horns, it was not at all what Aunt Phoebe had expected. Never having seen a royal bullock carriage, she had imagined it to be rather like the horse cabs which had met the trains in Cedar Falls, with ample room for both passengers and baggage. Instead, it turned out to be a kind of throne, mounted upon four wheels with a seat for the bullock-driver at the front. It was an ample throne but not ample enough to cope with the bottoms of the three ladies. If Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs, Simon were to reach the plane in time there was nothing to be done except for all three to adjust themselves somehow. It ended with Aunt Phoebe sitting in the middle of the throne, her narrow seat wedged between the ample ones of the two other travelers. On top of them were heaped Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's bundles and parcels.

The whole performance was regarded by the bullock-driver with distrust. Never before had he seen the royal carriage used as an omnibus, and being already late, he was fearful of the Maharani's anger. And he was bewildered, too, by the strange jargon which the ladies in turn and sometimes together directed at him. Meanwhile the rain descended in torrents so that by the time the three women were settled beneath the collapsible top of the carriage, all Aunt Phoebe's care in pressing her new foailard had come to naught.

But at last they were settled and the driver climbing up on the seat, poked the two disgruntled bullocks in the behind, and the party set off down the Mission drive.

The bullocks were luxurious animals, aware that their ancestors had been bred long ago in Mysore to draw the cannon of the Tippoo Sahib. They were fed and washed and their horns gilded afresh every morning and they were accustomed only to drawing the old Maharajah on his evening drives. Never before had they drawn a cargo so common as that composed of Aunt Phoebe, Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry with all her parcels, and now they were being prodded by a driver who was terrified of delivering his passenger behind schedule at the tent of the Maharani. They broke into the trot for which they were famous, grunting and moaning as they moved along the metaled road. The gait was bumpy and uncomfortable, drawing the light carriage forward in a series of jerks which terrified Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry. They were at last riding in a conveyance belonging to the Maharani, but they were doing so only on the sufferance of Aunt Phoebe and on their way out of Ranchipur perhaps forever.

The trotting accompanied by the terrifying moaning and grunting of the bullocks, continued as far as the railroad bridge, and then the bullocks were forced to go slowly lest one of the loose planks spring up and wreck the carriage. The river was a little lower now, but it still roared only a foot or two beneath the bridge. The sight of the rushing water made Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry dizzy and she closed her eyes and leaned back, thinking hazily, with Cockney common sense, "If I'm going to die, I might as well not see it coming on." Mrs. Simon closed her eyes and added her groans to the protesting noises made by the sulking bullocks. As for Aunt Phoebe, she sat bolt upright, clutching two of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's bundles, staring toward the city. For four days she had been devoured by a desire to see what had happened to the town and there had never been an instant free in which she might have satisfied her curiosity. The driver shouted imprecations at the bullocks, the loose planks jiggled and banged beneath the carriage, and at last they reached solid ground again. Opening her eyes, Mrs. Simon said, "Thank God!" and covered her face up to the eyes with an Indian scarf. At once Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry imitated her action.

By the roadside there were no bodies now, but here and there the bones of a donkey or a cow or a fie dog picked white and clean by the vultures. In the mud, among the ruins of the houses, the townspeople had built ramshackle shelters and as the carriage passed, faces peered out in wonder at the spectacle of the Maharajah's grunting bullocks with gilded horns drawing three Europeans buried beneath parcels, two of them apparently veiled like Muslim women. Here and there troops of coolies were at work clearing away the rubbish strewn among the ruins by the flood. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry forgot her terror and stared tipsily at the sights about her, thinking dimly that all these details would make a wonderful story once Herbert had retired and they were home again in England.

They passed near the Music School where the coolies were burning a score of bodies, and at last came to the Great Gate where the three women, speaking bad Hindustani to the driver, whose only language was Mahratta, persuaded him to stop. But no sooner had the carriage ceased to move and the bullocks to grunt and groan, than Mrs. Simon began again to cry. The sight of the Music School and the burning of the bodies had upset her and filled her with a fresh surge of love and devotion for Fern, and now she insisted that before she left she must say good-by to her. But this time Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was having no nonsense. She said, "If you go near that Music School, you can't go in the plane with me."

Then Gopal Rao appeared, a glint of amusement in his young Mahratta eyes, and began to take out the bundles which buried them. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon went on quarreling, a muffled quarrel conducted entirely through the scarfs which they held to their faces.

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry said, "If you think I'm going to sit here inhaling cholera germs while you go off to see Fern in that pest-house, you're crazy." And with tipsy haughtiness she addressed Gopal Rao. "Boy/ 5 she said, "where is the plane?"

For a second anger flashed in the black eyes, but it died away quickly and Gopal Rao giggled, "It's in a field beyond the Parsee Tower."

"But how are we to get there?"

"I'm afraid you must walk." He was polite now, ironically, mockingly polite, his temper recovered, his Mahratta humor restored. With his Indian intuition he knew that these two middle-aged women were ridiculous and of no importance in the European scale of values. He was a Mahratta, a descendant of raiding warriors. Their bad manners could not touch him.

"I can't walk all that way," she said. "Look at my feet." And she exhibited a tiny foot shod with the highest and most frivolous of heels. She had dressed herself, it was clear, not for the escape, but for the arrival in Bombay.

"Madame," said Gopal Rao, "there is no other way. We cannot bring the plane here. A plane must have space to raise itself into the air."

"There is the bullock cart." But when she turned the bullock carriage was already moving off at top speed, the bullocks moaning and grunting more loudly than ever beneath the prods of a driver, goaded in his turn by terror of the Maharani. Aunt Phoebe was enjoying the scene and would have preferred to remain for a little time, but the driver carried her away willy-nilly to deliver her to the Maharani.

At the same moment two figures appeared in the gateway. They were Lady Esketh, dressed in a nurse's costume, and Miss Hodge. They were walking hand in hand like two schoolgirls. At sight of them Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry turned and said, "Good-afternoon, Lady Esketh."

Edwina said, "Good-afternoon."

Mrs. Simon, still hysterical, said, "Good-afternoon," and then Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry saw her chance. She said, "We're just going to Bombay by plane. I have an extra place. I could take you with me if you care to Mrs. Simon's mouth opened and closed behind the scarf, but no sound came out. She was so astonished by the treachery of her friend that she could not speak. There was no need, for Lady Esketh said, "Thanks for the offer, but I'm staying here. I hope you have a pleasant trip," and then she and Miss Hodge went on their way.

Meanwhile Gopal Rao had burdened three coolies with the bundles and said, "We must go along now. The plane must leave to arrive in Bombay before dark. I will show you the way." And without further ado he led the way, followed by the three coolies carrying the bundles. For a moment the two women stood looking after the procession and then their terror of Ranchipur, of cholera, of death, claimed them again and as docile as two calves they turned and followed the little procession through the mud and the filth in the direction of the Tower of Silence, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry wobbly on her high heels, her breasts and behind quivering and shaking with each step.

The Maharani, it appeared, was not astonished by the lateness of Aunt Phoebe's arrival. She came into the tent and upset all Bertha Smiley's instructions by coming forward and shaking hands with Aunt Phoebe. From somewhere the servants had produced a rocking-chair and the Maharani invited Aunt Phoebe to sit in it. Then she introduced the Princess of Bewanagar who also took Aunt Phoebe's hand. The Maharani herself did not sit on a cushion, but on an Empire chair salvaged from the Palace. The old Princess seated herself in a folding camp chair, and the Maharani said, "It is very good of you to come and see me. I have been wanting to know you for a long time, but my life here is so filled with things."

"Your Highness," said Aunt Phoebe, "it was very kind of Your Highness to send for me."

"They tell me you have done a great deal for my people during the disaster."

"I did what had to be done, Your Highness," said Aunt Phoebe, simply. "I'm very sorry to be late, but the driver was late and then there was those two women. I had to bring them into town."

"What two women?"

"Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon."

The Maharani frowned. "Couldn't they walk?"

"Yes, Your Highness, but I wanted to make sure that they got off."

The frown relaxed into the ghost of a smile. "Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry/' she said. "That's the bank manager's wife, isn't it?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

"And the other one is the missionary's wife."

"That's right, Your Highness."

"Yes, she's been to the Palace. I remember her."

Then there was a silence in which Aunt Phoebe, waiting nervously, began to rock herself gently.

A servant appeared bringing tea, and the Maharani said, "I am very grateful to you and the Smileys for all you have done."

The old Princess began pouring the tea, and with a teacup in her hand Aunt Phoebe began to feel a little more at home. She had seen the Maharani a half-dozen times in the distance, driving in the hot evenings in her Rolls-Royce, staring in front of her, seeing no one as she passed among her people, and to Aunt Phoebe she had always seemed remote and unreal and inhuman, like a goddess carved out of stone. Now she saw that the Maharani was real, made of flesh and blood; from the way she sat down carefully in the Empire chair it was evident that she even perhaps had a touch of sciatica.

"They are two very silly women," said Her Highness, suddenly*

Knowing whom the Maharani meant, Aunt Phoebe said, "Yes, Your Highness, women like that are only a nuisance in such times."

"Very common," said the Maharani. And then, unable to contain her curiosity any longer, she asked, "Why did you leave America to come here?"

"I wanted to see India, Your Highness, and once I got here I liked it."

"Do you still like it even now?"

"Yes, Your Highness, even now. There's nothing to be afraid of at my age."

"How old are you?"

"I'll be eighty-two in September."

They were beginning to get on. Aunt Phoebe liked frankness and detested nonsense. The Maharani did not mince about. She asked direct questions.

"Tell me about yourself . . . about your life in America." "I don't know what there is to tell, Your Highness." "About your family and what kind of a house you lived in and what it was like when you were young."

Aunt Phoebe knew what it was she wanted. She wanted to know about America and people like herself exactly the way Aunt Phoebe had wanted to know about India and people like the Maharani. So she began to tell about Iowa and her girlhood and her parents and grandparents and described the farm and the fierce winters and summers that were as hot in good corn weather as Ranchipur during the monsoon rains. And as she talked, the nervousness left her, and as the Maharani went on asking questions, she saw that in this old lady, talking shyly while she gently rocked herself, there was wisdom and simplicity and dignity and humor and goodness and understanding, and that there was, too, impatience and even a little malice where the foolish and the vain were concerned. They began to understand each other and to "get on," and presently Aunt Phoebe forgot Bertha Smiley's instructions to use "Your Highness" with every sentence and sometimes merely said "You."

After a time the Maharani began to talk of her own youth and childhood and of the harshness of life in that distant, wild, dusty red plateau where she had been born and which she had not seen since she was a child of thirteen. She felt herself at ease with the old lady from the Middle West of America. She was neither obsequious nor presumptuous and it was clear that she had come simply for a cup of tea and a chat, wanting neither favors nor bringing an ax to grind. She was both comfortable and by her very age comforting. The Maharani, while Aunt Phoebe rocked and gossiped, felt toward her as Raschid felt and Ransome and the Major and poor dead Mr. Jobnekar. Sometimes the old Princess, chuckling, interrupted her friend the Maharani to say, "No, it was not like that," or, "You are wrong, Masaheb, it was the year of the great drought."

Aunt Phoebe, rocking and listening, would sometimes say, "Well, what an interesting story," or, "It doesn't seem possible." She felt presendy that she might be outstaying her welcome and she began to feel worried about getting back to the Orphanage in order to give Bertha a little rest, but she kept reminding herself what Bertha had told her that she must stay until the Maharani dismissed her.

It was nearly six o'clock when the Maharani rose at last, shook her hand, and said, "You must come again very soon. 111 send the bullock carnage for you,"

"Thank you," said Aunt Phoebe. "I'd like to come. I've enjoyed my afternoon."

Then she shook hands with the plump old Princess and when they had gone, an A.D.C. led her to the bullock carriage and, climbing onto the throne, she set out for home behind the white Mysore bullocks with gilded horns thinking what an interesting letter she would have to write home to her sons. She could not imagine what people meant when they said Indians were different, and about her heart there was a sudden warmth because, even as old as she was, she had discovered two new friends. She had been very lucky of late with new friends there was also Lady Esketh and Fern. She thought, "The next time I come in I must go to the hospital and call on them."

Since Lady Esketh had come to the hospital it was her first opportunity to leave it. When the new nurses arrived Miss MacDaid, meeting her in the corridor, had said, "You're looking seedy. You'd better go for some air." And so she had gone out, pleased to escape from the hospital if only into the desolation of the city. She had meant to go alone, for there were many things which she wished to consider in peace, but as she left, Miss Hodge came running to her in a panic, crying out, "Where are you going? You're not going to leave me?" so there was nothing for it but to take Miss Hodge with her, leading her by the hand as if she were a child.

It was not that poor Miss Hodge was a trouble she was perfectly happy to walk in silence by her side it was only that she wanted to be alone for a little while. For four days she had never been alone for a moment save in the still hours of the morning when she kept watch over more than two hundred ill and dying people. For the first time in her life she divined that privacy, which she had always taken for granted, was a great and precious luxury. To be alone in one's room seemed suddenly a kind of paradise. In her heart she did not like

women, and sharing a room with a woman, even silly, harmless Miss Hodge, was for her an ordeal against which her instinct, her nerves, her whole being, cried out. Then in more reasonable moments while she sat in the ward, keeping watch, she thought, "There must be people in the world who in all their lives have never had a room to themselves. I suppose most people have to live like that." However that made it no easier for her. But she managed somehow to keep her temper when Fern Simon stole half the precious bit of mirror; she kept it even when Miss Hodge became tiresome, staring at her while she did her nails and her hair, following her even when she went outside to the temporary privy, standing patiently outside like a dog awaiting his master. She kept her temper lest she should give Miss MacDaid some reason for sending her away. But that made the loss of privacy no better, but only worse. Now that the three nurses had come, she was more frightened than ever of being dismissed. She could not go away now. She could not be where she could not see him, however casually, now and then during the day and the night. Sometimes he passed by her on the stairway or in the ward, taking no more notice of her than if she had been a chair or a table, but twice since he had talked to her by the light from the funeral pyre outside the windows, he had looked at her for a second, and in the meeting of their eyes she knew that he had forgotten nothing of what he had said. Each time her whole body had grown warm for a second and she had turned away in confusion, the whole room reeling about her; and for the rest of the day she had gone about the filthiest of tasks, unaware of her surroundings, moving in a kind of haze.

Now as she walked through the ruined streets into the Park of the Maharajah with Miss Hodge trotting happily at her side, she was filled with wonder at the thing which had happened to her that at thirtyseven she was in love for the first time. That it happened after so much experience only increased the sense of wonder; despairing sometimes, she had believed that she would never find the thing for which she had been searching without knowing what it was. And now she knew.

It was different from anything she had ever experienced or imagined. It was, she thought, like some manifestation of nature, like the opening of a flower, petal by petal, before the warmth of the sun. It was as if inside her the spirit was growing, expanding, as if all her sensibilities were

acutely aware of the process. As she walked her body no longer seemed to have weight; it was as if she floated over the muddy earth. She thought: "I am young. It is the first time I have ever been young." For long ago at seventeen she had been thrust into a harsh realistic world full of death and despair and the need for haste, a world in which there was no time or place for youth save to be slaughtered.

And it was extraordinary how different was this feeling she knew now, how little of the body there was in it, how little of curiosity or even desire, how little of that terrible boredom and thirst for satisfaction she had known in all her other adventures, even in that first one long ago with Tom Ransome. For the first time she was filled with a desire to discipline herself,' to dominate and even to humiliate her body. Desire no longer seemed of importance; it was enough now to serve, enough that she might be near him forever as she was near him now, working, satisfied, made happy by a glance or a word. She remembered what he had said that to a doctor and a surgeon the body was a machine, no more, no less. The senses brought both pleasure and pain, but that was not important. The important thing was that which lay above and beyond the body, without which no perfect ecstasy was possible.

Above the annoying chatter of Miss Hodge, dragging like a weight at her hand, a strange thought came to her that this new knowledge, this new ecstasy was possible to her because in all her experience, in all her promiscuousness, her body had been no more than a machine which she had used in cold blood; and so the part that was herself had been saved. She had never slept with a man for whom she had not felt contempt, Ransome for his weakness and paralyzing self-questioning, Esketh because he had been a brute, Andre Simon, the boxer, because in spite of the pleasure his animalness gave her, she hated him for his stupidity. Now in this new world, the others scarcely existed any longer; she found it difficult to recall them, to remember their voices, the way they made love or even their appearances. The Major was the first man for whom she had respect. She wanted to be like him, to lose her own identity in his, to work as he worked, to make herself seem worthy of his respect. The weariness, the boredom, were gone now; they were, she believed, gone forever. She had escaped that terror which had haunted her during the past few years, of growing old and ugly and lecherous like the women in distant Europe who haunted night clubs and watering-places and kept young men. Now she was free; she asked no more than the privilege of being near him, of working for him, of talking to him now and then.

And as she walked with Miss Hodge she saw nothing of the desolation of the ruined city nor felt the awful heat or the drenching rain that kept falling in sudden showers. She was aware only of a kind of rosy glow that seemed to fill all the sky.

She thought, "The thing is working out. That is why I came to India. . . . Something had to happen to me here."

Then she was aware of the bullock carriage and of the hubbub about it, and the figures of Gopal Rao and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon and Aunt Phoebe, the coolies, the multitude of bundles, and the complaining bullocks. They appeared dimly to her. She heard Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry addressing her and she was aware of answering, but stronger than anything in that moment was the sudden sense of the richness of life, of the comic quality of the scene beneath the arch of the Great Gateway. It was all exciting, now as if she were a child who was seeing the great world for the first time.

Then as they quickly passed the little group, she felt Miss Hodge tugging at her hand and saying, "Why, there's our bungalow. Let's go in and see if Sarah has come back."

So, moved a little by curiosity and indifferent to where she went, she pushed open the gate. On the way up the path Miss Hodge said, "I wanted you to see how nice we've fixed up the bungalow. You'd never believe it was in India. It's just like a house at home."

The door stood ajar and as she pushed it open Miss Hodge called out, "Sarah! Sarah!" and when there was no answer she said, "I can't understand it. She wouldn't go out leaving the door open."

And then Edwina saw that in Miss Hodge's crazy mind the flood had never touched the bungalow. She had returned to it expecting to find it exactly as it was before the disaster, the cushions, the doilies, the nostalgic photographs all in their places.

But the sitting-room was stained with mud. Some of the photographs had fallen from the wall and lay shattered on the floor. There was a sickly smell of mildew and drying mud. Once again Miss Hodge called,

"Sarah! Sarah!" and then from somewhere in the deep recesses of her mad brain knowledge and truth and sanity appeared for an instant. She let go of Edwina's hand and leaned against the door, a look of horror in her eyes.

Edwina said, "It'll be all right. We'll come around one of these days and put the place in order."

Miss Hodge didn't answer her. She only said in a low voice, "I know now. Sarah is dead. She is never coming back. I know now. She went out into the flood to see after the school books. Poor Sarah! Why didn't you tell me she was dead?" Then she slipped down the edge of the doorway to the floor in a faint.

Because the bungalow was opposite the Gateway where there were always sentinels, it had not been looted. Everything was as it had been when Miss Hodge had taken refuge on the roof, even the brandy bottle which Sarah Dirks had left on the table after she had tried to make Miss Hodge drunk so that she might escape and die. Now Edwina smelled the bottle and poured a glass of brandy between the lips of Miss Hodge. When at last she opened her eyes, the moment of sanity had mercifully gone.

Weakly she said, "Where am I?"

"You're in your own bungalow. We came to see what state it was in.

Miss Hodge sat up and said, "I'm sorry. I used to have fainting-fits like this when I was a girl." Then the odd shadow of a smile appeared at the corners of her fleshy mouth, a shadow of satisfaction even of complacency, "I suppose it's my condition that made me faint," she said. "Perhaps I'd better speak of it to the Major." A shadow crossed her face. "Do you think Sarah will understand that it wasn't really my fault?"

"Of course she'll understand. We'll have to go back to the hospital now." She wanted to take Miss Hodge away quickly. She was afraid that a terrible moment of sanity might return to her. It would be a pity, for she was very happy as she was.

As they passed the Music School, Edwina said, "I'm going in here for a moment. You wait for me here under this tree."

But Miss Hodge said, "Do let me come with you. I'd like to."

"It's a pest-house. It's full of cholera patients."

"I don't mind that. I'm not afraid. I'm very lucky."

"Do it to please me."

"All right," said Miss Hodge; "i you ask me that way." So she sat down on the edge of the wall surrounding the Great Tank, beneath a peepul tree, looking down at her hands, smiling peacefully.

Inside the unfamiliar hallway Edwina found herself alone save for the bodies of three men dead of cholera, wrapped in their dhotis, the legs drawn up part way to the chin. Near them there was a great pool of water where the rain had come through the damaged roof. For a second, sharply aware of the desolation of the scene, she stood still thinking, almost with jealousy: "This is more horrible than the hospital! Fern was sent here. It must have been because they trusted her more than me."

She had meant to speak to Fern, to give her a friendly "hello" in passing, but now she did not know how to find her in this strange, desolate place. A Sweeper passed carrying a brush and an iron pail. He looked at her curiously, and when she attempted to speak to him in English he only shook his head and passed her like a deaf mute, without changing his expression.

The smell was everywhere, the dreadful smell of cholera patients. She thought, "Fern might be in that room," but when she pushed open the door she saw in the dim rainy light only two rows o cholera patients lying on the floor of a long room. The awful stench flowed past her into the hallway and suddenly she was overcome by nausea and fear. Then as she turned to close the door she saw Ransome dimly coming down the corridor beyond the pool of water.

As he came nearer he recognized her and said, "What are you doing here?"

"I had an hour off. I dropped in to see Fern."

"She's asleep. Since the new nurse came it's easier for her. The Swiss is dead."

"Cholera?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you are here?"

"No. I've come to stay. I'm in charge here now with Fern and the new nurse."

"I don't envy you."

"It isn't very pleasant. You oughtn't to come here and you oughtn't to stay. There are too many mysterious ways of getting cholera."

"What about yourself?"

"My luck always holds for this sort of thing. And I believe in disinfectant." He took her arm. "Come along. If you want to talk, let's go out into the air."

She went with him, thinking that somehow he had changed. How, she could not discover, but he was different, less cynical, less negative. "Perhaps," she thought, "it's only because he's sober now."

Outside he told her that he had asked for the job. He didn't suppose he'd have it for long, or that they would need her much longer at the hospital.

"The railroad will be open in a day or two and then they'll have experts. They won't need amateurs any longer."

"It's a pity. ... I mean as far as we're concerned. It's very satisfactory to feel useful." He didn't answer her and she said, "I've got to be back at the hospital in ten minutes. Drop in and see me when you have time."

"The Major doesn't want us to go near the hospital. You should have better sense than to come here."

"I'll take a whole bath in alcohol when I return."

She went away to pick up Miss Hodge under the peepul tree, leaving him to go back into the stench. The coolies began carrying out the bodies to pile them on a freshly built pyre.

"Did you see Fern?" asked Miss Hodge.

"No; she was asleep."

"I always liked Mr. Ransome. He's so kind and polite. He invited Sarah and me to tea on Friday."

As they neared the hospital two figures went up the drive a little ahead of them. One was Mrs. Banner jee and the other Miss Murgatroyd, no longer wearing the tired pale blue with the rosettes, but clad in a tennis dress. They disappeared into Miss MacDaid's little office closing the door behind them.

In their little room, Lady Esketh and Miss Hodge lay down on their Indian beds. In monsoon weather any effort was exhausting and the walk through the rain left them both limp and bereft of all vitality. Edwina's head ached with a slow, dull ache as if there was a weight inside it, pressing against her eyeballs. They lay there in silence, Miss Hodge so exhausted that for a little time she did not talk.

When Miss MacDaid came to summon Edwina, she said, "Mr. Bannerjee has cholera. He had meant to leave on one of the planes to take his father's ashes to Benares, but he fell down as he was leaving the house. He's in a coma now. There's probably no chance for him."

Edwina rose and, washing her face in tepid water, pressed her hands against her aching head, thinking, "Miss MacDaid has gone on year after year in this filthy climate. She must be strong as an ox." And at the same time, "Poor silly Mr. Bannerjee!" It seemed to her that one by one they were all dying, the whole population of Ranchipur.

It was worse than Ransome had believed possible. It was not the work he minded, but the stench and the filth of vomit and excrement which accompanied cholera, and the horrible grotesqueness of the death which seemed to go on long after the spirit had left the body. For a man less fastidious it would have been easier.

The new nurse was a help. She was a gaunt Ulster woman called Miss Cameron, and she was rather like Miss MacDaid. She settled efficiendy and with quickness into the room where Harry Bauer had died, a half-hour after the body of the Swiss had been carried out, and she went about her work in a matter-of-fact way as she had been born and spent her whole life in the midst of epidemics. And she brought with her a curious feeling of confidence. Where Fern and Harry Bauer had worked valiantly but without knowledge, she stepped in, organizing, planning, wasting neither time nor energy.

The first three hours Ransome spent with her while Fern slept. Then she dismissed him and told him to sleep for a time while she took Fern with her on the grim rounds. Until she came, the Music School had been only a place where cholera patients were isolated until they died, a kind of waiting-room for the funeral pyre which burned day and night near the western steps of the Great Tank. But now it was different there were medicines and a nurse who knew how to administer them, so for some of those who lay in quiet misery in rows on the floor, there was hope. There were candles now, too, so that the rooms of the Music School were no longer in darkness. It was odd, thought Ransome, how much difference light made in the midst of disaster. The old Maharajah had said that light and fire were the most civilizing of all things discovered by man. It was for light that he had long ago constructed the tragic, broken barrage, light which might be carried even into the remote villages of the districts.

When he had eaten a little cold rice and curry, he lay on the bed made of the Music School benches, and almost at once he fell into a sleep which was not like sleep at all, but like a coma in which all sensibility, all nerves were utterly deadened.

And while he slept Fern made the rounds with Miss Cameron, learning about solutions of Kaolin and the saving chloride of calcium and sodium. The supply was small but it would last until the planes brought more, until the railroad was open again.

She was tired with the weariness which comes with lack of sleep and under-nourishment, but now the stench no longer troubled her; the groans she scarcely heard. It was in a way as if she had become a machine, driven by an inward strength and vitality which she had never known before. The sense of reserve force brought her a feeling of exhilaration almost of triumph. She thought, "I am tough and strong. There is nothing I cannot do." And she no longer thought of Blythe Summer-field, the Pearl of the Orient, with shame; all that was too far away now, as if the girl who had come languidly and sullenly down the stairway at her mother's farewell garden party had existed years ago instead of less than a week before. And she thought again how odd it was that the movement of life could not be measured by the hands of a clock, but by what happened to you. These last few days had been longer, fuller, more important than all the rest of her life taken together.

When they had made the rounds the big Ulster woman said, "You'd better go and rest now. I can take a long watch. I'm fresh. I'll wake your husband at midnight."

Her impulse was to say, "But he's not my husband!" She checked herself, thinking, "It's too much trouble to explain now. I am too tired." And besides, there was no explanation to be made. The new nurse had been over all that remained of the wrecked building; she knew now that she was sharing the room with Tom. And in any case it didn't matter very much.

She went back to the room which Mr. Das had once used as an office, and closing the door behind her she walked to the bed where Tom lay asleep. Quietly, so as not to waken him, she sat on the edge of it, looking down at him. She knew now what it was she wanted to do. She wanted to stay on in Ranchipur perhaps forever. Miss MacDaid could teach her everything. She could work among the villages and be friends with the Smileys and Miss MacDaid and the Major and Raschid Ali Khan. Then she would be some one in a world which was real as the world of Miss MacDaid and Miss Cameron was real. And she would have Tom with her. She could take care of him forever. And in her heart, wickedly, she was grateful to God for the disaster because it had changed all her life. Gently, almost shyly, she reached out and touched his hand, and for a moment she knew that same feeling of ecstasy that had come so- late to Lady Esketh.

For a long time she sat thus, happily, unaware now of the smell of death which filled all the building, thinking of what Tom had said, "It was meant to be like this, else life would not go on." And presently she thought, "I must get some sleep or I shan't be able to work," and lying down on the floor beside the benches she fell asleep, thinking, "I am older than he is, really. In a way IVe always been older, the way Aunt Phoebe is older. Perhaps women are always older."

In those few moments which he had alone, the Major found himself troubled by the thought of Lady Esketh. She troubled him more than he desired or had thought possible, and the feeling he had for her was a puzzling one, in which curiosity, pity, and physical attraction all played their parts. It was the first time that a woman had ever been to him more than a pleasant convenience, and why this was so he could not say save that he had never before encountered a woman so experienced, so honest, and so contradictory. She left his realistic mind perplexed and unsatisfied. And so he found himself thinking of her again and again, as he was falling asleep, on his journeys to and from the Maharani, and the Music School and about the city. It was, in a way, as if she were a kind of monstrosity which, in order to understand and to satisfy his inquiring mind, he must dissect.

He did not deceive himself. He found her attractive in a way he had found no other woman, yet there were moments when by a gesture, the turn of the head, or the expression in the eyes he found himself a little awed by her, by her sureness, by her very air of race and breeding. He admired her for the honesty, the disillusionment that was always there in the blue eyes, like a shadow of despair. He liked her because there were moments when she seemed to be utterly sceptical, believing in nothing, not even in the pleasures her own body must have brought her. Not many women and only a few men were like that. Because of these qualities, he knew that he had been able to talk to her in the way he had done there in the ward a litde before daybreak. You could not talk like that even to Miss MacDaid, because at the core of Miss MacDaid there was a soft spot of sentimentality. He knew, too, because he was experienced in such things, that he could have her now as easily as he could have had her that late afternoon at the Summer Palace, only now the possessing of her would be an infinitely richer experience. Love he was inclined to regard scientifically, anatomically, and in his heart he knew that such an affair would be a richer experience than he had ever known before; but it was that very element the quality of richness which alarmed him. It was there that the element of the unpredictable, the undissectible made its appearance. In the West they called the thing love, making from it novels and romances and plays and poems and cinemas, few of them understanding that it was, when dissected, a mixture of chemicals, of glands, of instinct, of man's fear of loneliness and the compulsion upon him to breed as he ate and slept and breathed. It was all that, but something more as well, for there was the unpredictable element which one might call quantity X which could not be pinned down and analyzed, that element which had made its appearance at the moment he had looked up and seen her coming up the drive of die hospital, clad in one of Mrs. Smiley's calico dresses,

It was this unpredictable, unfamiliar element which put him on his guard. It might lead him into the most absurd follies; it might blind him to his knowledge that she was too old and too experienced, that her very position in that world of the West made any sort of lasting liaison impossible. It might blind him even to the fact of what he was and what he must go on being, until he died a worker, a scientist, a man without emotions who must guard his body and keep it free, as a perfect machine, for the work he had to do in Ranchipur, in India, perhaps one day through all the East. That was why the Maharani had kept him behind to talk to him, to urge him to marry. In her wisdom she divined the danger, and she would fight to save him from folly when he could no longer save himself. In an odd fashion, his life did not belong to himself, any more than the Maharani's had ever belonged to her. There was a side of her which was for all the world like a dancing-girl. But she had remained a Queen, beyond folly, all her life.

But he asked himself, too, what was so easy to ask, what Edwina, he divined, had asked herself many times. "It is my life. I am alive but once. Why should I not do with it as I please? Why should I not have that satisfaction which fate has placed in my path? Why should I turn away and deny it?" But another voice answered, "And destroy yourself." In spite of her gallantry, in spite of her honesty, in spite even of the curious, childlike quality which he, like Ransome, had divined in her, there was something corrupt about her, something wrong and old, born more of blood that was too old than of experience.

And resistance was made the more difficult because he knew that it lay in his hands to keep and preserve for her the discovery she had made which in the end might save and even redeem her. If he turned away from her, if he sent her away back again into the world from which she had come, she was lost forever.

Then in the midst of his thoughts he would suddenly be tempted to laugh and standing outside himself, would think, "You are being a God-damned fool! A sentimentalist! An idiot! What has she to do with you or you with her? Forget it! You have other more important things. You are a man and not a calf-eyed young bull."

It was extraordinary how the unpredictable element could destroy his reason and common sense. It was that which seized upon him a little before midnight, that and not his own intelligence, which made him set the battered alarm clock to waken him a little before four in the morning, so that he might go and talk to her while she sat there at her table, waiting upon the dead and the dying. It was only to her that he could talk, as he had never talked to anyone, knowing that she would understand everything he said and much that he did not say. The ward with the typhoid patients was the only place where they might be alone, away from Miss MacDaid and crazy Miss Hodge, Mrs. Gupta, Dr. Pindar, and all the others, all the hundreds and thousands who were always coming to him, looking to him for help. That hour they had spent together had been the most precious hour of all his life, not because she was beautiful or desirable but because they had understood each other, because for a little while human loneliness had ceased to exist. She had asked nothing of him and he nothing of her. For a little time they had shared a single spirit*

At three o'clock, little Dr. Pindar came to wake Edwina. It had stopped raining and the night was still, the air washed clear, no breeze stirring the leaves of the burgeoning trees. She wakened slowly, woolly-headed from the medicine she had taken to stop the ache at the back of her eyes. The ache was still there and her body felt hot, not with the damp heat of the monsoon, but with a dry burning heat which came from inside herself. For a moment she did not know where she was; it was not until her mind had focused itself on the absurd figure of the little doctor standing there holding a candle stub that she remembered.

Wearily she rose and lighted her own stub of candle from his.

"Go along to bed, Doctor. Ill be there in a moment."

He gave her the lists, and as she glanced at them she thought, "There are fewer tonight." There were only two on the list of those who were hopeless, and three on the dangerous list. Nearly all the gangrene patients were dead now.

"Miss MacDaid will relieve you at six," he said, and went away.

The ward was unchanged save that here and there against the wall candles burned to give the patients cheer and courage. The air was so still that the tiny flames burned without a flicker as if in a vacuum. Taking up the pencil, she wrote again on one of the lists "dead" and on the other "dying." Tonight it was more than ever necessary that she did not make a mistake. She looked up from the table at the bed nearest her. The woman who had asked her mutely for water was no longer there. The bed was empty. She thought, "That is the first empty bed. Things must be better now." And then she realized that the bed was empty only because so many patients had died and been carried away.

When she lifted the stone jar to empty the cool water into the pitchers she staggered and let it fall. Luckily it fell upright so that only a little of the precious boiled water was spilled over her feet. But she was frightened, childishly, by her clumsiness, and afraid lest Miss MacDaid might appear suddenly and discover the accident.

At a second try she succeeded in lifting the jar to the edge of the table and from that support she filled one of the pitchers and set out to replenish the enameled cups on the little shelves. But as she moved she was aware of the aching of her body; the pitcher dragged at her arm, pulling the joints at the elbow, the shoulder, the wrist. Terror suddenly struck her, not terror of death or illness, but a fear that she might not be able to go on working, that she might fail him and give Miss MacDaid an excuse for sending her away.

She thought wildly, "I will not be ill. I will conquer it by force of will. I will not admit it." And the memory of the folly she had committed two nights ago when she had drunk from the same cup as the woman who died, returned to her. "Only it couldn't be that," she thought. "Typhoid couldn't come on so quickly as that." It must only be weariness seizing her now that the excitement had gone. "I've been living on nerves and false energy for days."

She made the rounds, dragging one foot after the other, and when she returned to the table the awful still heat seemed intolerable. It was as if her body were a furnace; her skin was dry and she thought, wildly, "I'll take some aspirin. That will make me sweat," and she took three of the precious tablets kept in the drawer of the table, and thought again, "I will not be ill. I've never been ill in all my life, I am not ill. It is all imagination." And for a little time she felt miraculously better.

Then the hands of the cheap alarm clock began to fascinate her. She watched them moving, slowly, inexorably, jumping slightly each time a minute passed, bringing her nearer to the time when she must again drag the awful weight of the pitcher from bed to bed. She thought, "Perhaps he will come in again and help me. If only he would come tonight. If only I could see him sitting there on the table it would give me strength. Then I could forget the God-damned thing." And she began to cry suddenly, not out of self-pity but out of rage because this body, this machine, had betrayed her. She looked away from the awful hypnotizing clock with its metal hands moving slowly round the stained ugly face. There was no way of stopping it. Framed in the window there was a distant view of the Great Tank with a path of golden light from the waning moon. The sight of the water made her feel less stifled, and suddenly she found herself saying over and over again, "Dear God, do bring him here tonight, dear God, do make him come to me," for it seemed to her suddenly that if she did not see him, she would be lost. It was odd how weak she felt, how little self-sufficient. She knew suddenly for the first time in all her life how profound and devastating loneliness might be.

Dimly she heard a faint groan, and rising she went from bed to bed, until at length she came to one in which lay a girl who was too weak to reach out for her cup of water. Bending over her, Edwina lifted the girl up and held the cup to her lips. When she had finished drinking, she lay back again very still, and as Edwina turned away from her she saw the Major standing at the end of the bed, smiling at her in the soft candle- light.

He said, "I couldn't sleep. I thought I'd come in and talk to you."

Even in her weariness she knew that he was lying. She knew all at once with a wave of returning vitality that he had come because he needed to see her as she had needed to see him, and she thought, "I mustn't let him know that I am ill." So she smiled at him and said, simply, "I'm glad."

They went to the end of the room where he sat on the table as he had done two nights ago.

"You're not tired?" he asked.

"No."

"It's the only time when we can be alone. It wasn't true what I said. The alarm clock wakened me. I set it to wake me."

"You shouldn't have done it. You get little enough rest."

"There are all sorts of rest. This is better than sleep. . . . What I said the other night was true."

"I've been happy since then."

She no longer felt ill. The terrible heat seemed miraculously to abate. Her bones no longer ached. It was true what she had thought that if he came to her, she wouldn't be ill any longer. She looked up at him without shame or shyness, watching the face that seemed to her now to encompass the beauty of the earth. It was a tired face, much thinner than it had been on the night she saw him first at the Palace, but the thinness gave it a new beauty. The gray eyes were smiling, and the full sensuous lips curved a little at the corners of his mouth. She thought, "I am happy. I have never known what happiness was before. I shall never want more than this."

"You can have more rest now," he said. "There are two doctors and three more nurses coming tomorrow. You had better go back to the Mission."

Desperately she said, "But I want to stay here. I must work. I must go on working."

"You could still work. You could come here in the mornings. You'd be more comfortable there. You could have a room of your own."

"It wouldn't do any good. I couldn't send away Miss Hodge."

At the flame of the candle he lighted one of the precious cigarettes from, the supply which Harry Bauer had kept in the box beneath his bed. For a moment he looked at the flame of the candle. Then he gave it to her and lighted another for himself.

"You see," he said, "I don't want anything to happen to you. I'm selfish. I want you to be safe."

The unpredictable element had returned. Deep in the recesses of his complicated mind a small voice was saying, "You should never have come here," but against the other voices which cried out, "Take this pleasure. Only evil comes of casting away what the gods have given into your hands," it went unheard. This woman was the other half of himself.

She held the cigarette in her hands, away from her lips because she could not bear the taste of it. She thought, "I mustn't let him notice. I must let it burn itself out." Aloud she said, "What is to happen to us? What is there to do?"

"We need not worry about that. It was meant to be so. It is out of our hands."

She wanted to cry out, "It is too late," but she kept silent because she had to crush back the tears of happiness and weakness.

"It doesn't matter," she thought. "Nothing matters."

In the distance, from across the Great Tank, came the sound of drums, the male and the female drum, played by devout hands, and then slowly the music of a flute joined the sound of the drums, and looking away from him, she saw that the path of moonlight on the surface of the Tank was dimmed by the first faint glow of morning.

He too was listening. Presently he said, "It is the Temple of Vishnu welcoming another dawn." Then he reached out and took her hand, and her heart cried out, "Thank you, God. Thank you for the beauty of the dawn, of life, of everything," and for a moment she felt that she was fainting. When she looked at him she saw that the smile had gone out of the gray-blue eyes and there was fear in the face she loved so much.

He said, "You are ill. You have fever."

"No."

"You shouldn't be here."

"I'm only tired, that's all."

"Being tired doesn't give you a fever like that. I'll keep watch. You must go to bed."

"No. It's nothing. Really, it's nothing."

He had grown strangely excited. He stood up, still holding her hand. "You must do as I say. Nothing must happen to you now."

"Nothing will happen to me. I'm strong as an ox and I've always been lucky."

He did not answer her. He only bent down from his great height and lifted her from the chair. "I'm going to take you to your bed."

She didn't resist. She didn't struggle any longer. She felt his arms about her and let her head rest on his shoulder. She heard the beating of the strong heart and presently the touch of his lips on her hair. He was carrying her out of the room, down the stairs, along the corridor to the little room she shared with Miss Hodge. It was a short journey but she wanted it to go on forever while she lay there in his arms, his heart beating against her ear. And her spirit and her tired brain cried out, "Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Now nothing matters. Now I have found it. Now I know."

In the little room he laid her gently on the hard bench and loosened the buttons of the cheap blue nurse's uniform. Then he said, "I'll go and waken Miss MacDaid. It will only mean an hour more for her."

"Come back. Don't stay away."

"No, I'll come right back."

Then he went away, and as she lay back on the bed she began to shiver. Her whole body trembled so violently that the bed shook and the cording creaked. In the bed on the opposite side of the room, Miss Hodge stirred, groaned in her sleep, but mercifully did not waken.

Miss MacDaid, aware that her shoulder was being gently shaken, opened her eyes in the first thin light of morning and saw the Major standing over her.

"Yes," she said at once out of long habit. "What is it?"

"Lady Esketh is ill. I've sent her to bed."

She sat up, gathering the cotton sheet modestly up to her throat. She had never been beautiful, but now in the early morning light, her eyes swollen with sleep, the strong, tired face sagging with unsatisfied weariness, there was something frightening in her ugliness. Duty bade her ask, "What is it?"

"I don't know yet. Fever . . . high fever. Malaria, I should think, or probably typhoid."

Vanity struck through Miss MacDaid's sense of duty and she said, "Go back to her. I'll come as soon as I'm dressed."

She did not trouble to light a candle. By the rising light of the dawn she dressed herself and washed her face in tepid water and plastered down her thin hair. Hazily she felt a sense of satisfaction that Lady Esketh was beaten. She had resisted hard work and filth and every sort of disgusting task, but in the end she was not tough enough. She had been brought down by millions of tiny microbes. Miss MacDaid thought, "Now she'll be out of the running. When she recovers there will be an excuse to send her to Bombay, and once there she will be near the West again and forget all those crazy ideas about staying here forever." Abstractly she admired the woman for the fashion in which she had taken up the challenge of work, but in a less objective way she hated her as she had never hated anyone, not even poor Natara Devi, whom she had never seen except distantly when she drove out in her little red tonga. Because Natara Devi had never been a menace. Natara Devi had never been anything more than a beautiful body.

For she was afraid again of Lady Esketh. Twice in the last two days she had seen a glance pass between her and the Major, a glance which lasted no longer than the fraction of a second, but was terrible to her because in it she had divined a kind of intimacy which she herself had never shared. In the glance she had perceived the shadow of something for which she herself had been searching all her life; and for a second she had felt herself transformed from a good, hard-working woman of strong character and principles into a demon, a witch, a potential murderess; and each time the experience had left her shaken and ill and a little terrified. "Why should she have him?" her old virgin's heart cried out in bitterness. "Why should she ruin him . . . she of all people to whom God gave everything." For a second she thought in anguish, "No, I will kill her first. It will never happen. I would be right in God's eyes if I killed her."

And then, with returning sanity, she had seen how near to madness she had come, how terrible could be the animal revolt and violence of the organism in which dwelt the thing that was Miss MacDaid; and plunging into work, she had tried to forget both Lady Esketh and the Major, thinking, "Neither of them is of importance; neither of them matters/ 5 but at once the voice of her wisdom denied her, saying, "They are both important because they are among the blessed. Wherever they go, whatever they do, it will matter to you and to all the others about them. There will always be people to love and admire them. All your work, all your devotion, has not given you that right, that power. They have it because they were born with it." But it was unfair, her heart cried out. And then in moments more calm, she thought, "Perhaps there is something in the nonsense of reincarnation or why should some people be born with everything and others be given so little?" Then she would suddenly, in the midst of her work, find herself thinking of them in a new and different way, as if they were god and goddess and herself but a savage, regarding the spectacle with awe, and with a strange humbleness she would find herself admiring Lady Esketh with a kind of maternal envy. And then there were moments of half-wakefulness on the verge of sleep when she seemed to identify herself with Lady Esketh and experience the delights of being among the blessed.

But now in the gray light she felt only sullen and rebellious and filled with contempt, thinking, "She can't be so ill that she couldn't finish out her watch. If it had been me, I should have stayed at my post. I've done it before, many times. There must be softness in her." Or perhaps it was the Major who had ordered her to go to bed. Who could tell what had happened between them when they were alone? How had he known she was ill? How had he come to be in the ward at an hour when he was supposed to be snatching a little rest?

She clapped her hands for a porter and told him to bring her tea, and then she went to the table in the ward where Edwina and the Major had been a little while before. Then she found the two papers with the numbers on them and discovered the words "dead" and "dying" which Lady Esketh had written on them so that she would not become confused. The porter brought her tea presently, and while she sat drinking it her eyes never left the two papers. Presently when she had finished her tea and before she made her first round of the hospital, she took a pencil from the pocket in the immaculate bosom of her shirtwaist and wrote at the end of the list marked "dying" the notation, "Lady Esketh, wife of the first Baron Esketh." Then she took the paper and held it in the flame of the dying candle until nothing remained but ashes. The witch-like expression left her eyes. She took up the heavy stone jar of water in her strong, capable, kindly hands, filled the two pitchers and set out on her rounds. At bed No, 7 she halted, a little astonished because the old man who lay in it, listed not among the dead, but only among the dying had slipped away, unnoticed. He lay with his head on one side, peacefully, his mouth open a little way like a sleeper who snored. But he was dead, She knew the look of death. No one could know it better. His death meant nothing to her- it was only one more of the swarming millions who were, she knew in her heart, better off dead but the fact that he had been on the list she burned she took as an omen.

Three planes came that day from beyond Mount Abana, bearing Colonel Moti from the institute of Tropical Diseases and two trained workers, and new supplies of permanganates and chlorides and all the other medicines which were needed so desperately. The Colonel was a thin, wiry man of forty, with fierce black eyes, intense, capable, fierce and radical, a Sikh who had been accused of communism and even of being an anarchist; but India and the East could not do without him, for he knew more of tropical diseases and their prevention than any man in the world. He was a cynic, too, who spent his life fighting disease, searching for serums to prevent death, wondering all the while whether it was not better to let men die. He was an old friend of the Major and together they went at once to the tent of the Maharani to hold a conference with Raschid Ali Khan and Col. Ran] it Singh, whose Sikhs would be needed to enforce the measures that were to stamp out the cholera and typhoid.

A little after two o'clock, without lunch, Colonel Mod and his assistants, a young Bengali and a Malabari from Trivandrum, were at work, each in a different part of the ruined city. With each of them went a meager detachment of Sikhs and a troup of sweepers, and in a little while ditches were opened to carry off the stagnant water, wrecked houses were set alight, and for a time it was as if the fire had broken out again. In the burned central market, where market gardeners had returned to set up their stands of mangoes and melons, limes and guavas and radishes, everything was sprayed or dipped in permanganate. Well after well was disinfected with chloride. And wherever the little bands of workers appeared there were wails and outcries at the sight of property destroyed and superstitions ignored or violated. Everywhere there were clusters of Hindus muttering together, threatening mutiny, but of these neither Colonel Moti nor his assistants took any notice. He had orders from the Maharani to do as he wished, and the lean Sikhs who surrounded him with bayonets drawn asked nothing better than the prospect of violence and perhaps death.

A kind of God-like frenzy took possession of the Colonel himself. Now, for the first time, he found an utterly free hand to destroy, to annihilate refuges for rats and mosquitoes and fleas, to tear down and burn filthy houses, to destroy the microbes which clung to the fruits and vegetables and sweetmeats. Behind his frenzy lay a vague knowledge that he was destroying, too, as if symbolically, the old ignorance, the superstitions, the decayed faith which had inclosed his people for so many thousands of years. He hated worst of all, worse than the rats, the fleas and the microbes, the Brahmin priests, and whenever one of them approached him and his circle to protest, he spat at them and bade them in fierce Hindustani to be gone. For thirty years he had cherished a suppressed desire to destroy an old world, that a new one might be born. And now he had his chance and he enjoyed it fiercely.

It was thus that the second fire began and swept Ranchipur City. He fired the ruins of the bazaar in a dozen places and in a little while the whole wrecked area was a blazing furnace. From there the unmanageable flames spread to the ruins of the old Summer Palace and the wrecked cinema and, fanned by the monsoon winds, to the old wooden palace, consuming it with all its dark history of tyranny and poison and garrotings. It spread as far as the river, sparing only the hospital which stood in its own wide grounds, and the Music School which lay beyond the Great Tank.

By six o'clock little was left of the wrecked city but heaps of glowing ashes, and here and there on the outskirts, where a few wrecked houses and sheds remained, the Colonel, drenched by rain and sweat, still worked furiously, covering things with oil and setting them alight. The Girls' High School with the precious books Miss Dirks had gone to save, and the bungalow of Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge, with all its cushions and photographs and lace and the precious East Indian china, went up in flames.

From the doorway of the striped hunting-tent on the hill by the Great Palace, the old Maharani watched the destruction, a little terrified at first, but as she began to divine the purpose of all the destruction, satisfied and grateful to the fanatic Colonel Mod. She saw that the utter destruction of the city was a blessing and one which she herself would never have had the courage to order, because daily she was still dragged back by old traditions, old customs, even old superstitions that still lived in her blood. While she sat there by the old Princess of Bewanagar, she understood slowly that even the earthquake and the flood had, in their way, been a blessing. The old Maharajah had fought slowly, compromising always out of necessity with the vast imponderable past. Now all that was swept away and a new city would rise from earth that was purged and clean, a new city in which there would be temples built of concrete and steel, where there would be no Untouchable quarter and none of the dark hovels where cholera and plague and typhus lurked eternally, only waiting to strike out with the venomous swiftness of the thrust of the Russell's Viper. And when the dam was rebuilt at the Reservoir, the wells in the city from which infection spread would be closed forever and there would be only the fresh clean water of the hills.

The spectacle of destruction brought a kind of wild pure satisfaction to her heart. It was thus her Mahratta people had destroyed cities and villages in their wild raids. That was why Bengalis frightened their children by saying, "If you are not good the Mahrattas will get you."

A little after the swift darkness had come down Colonel Moti came to her tent to make a formal and hollow apology for having, by mistake, burned the city. She received him with severity, but after a little time she let him know that she understood the falseness of his apologies, and presently that she was pleased he had destroyed what remained of the city "by mistake." She liked him for his ruthlessness and the magnificence of the idea which lay behind it, and in his turn he liked her for the light in her black eyes which grew and grew while he talked to her.

When the Major came in a little after nine o'clock he found the two of them seated on the floor of the tent, bending over a sheet of blank rice paper on which Colonel Moti was drawing the plans of a new city that was to be built of bricks and concrete reinforced with steel in the American fashion, like Raschid's house and the night school for the low-caste boys which had withstood the earthquake, the flood and the fire. There would be a system of drainage that would leave no refuge for the insidious anopheles, the worst of all the enemies, the Colonel said, because malaria went on and on, seldom killing, but sapping the vitality of a whole great people.

His black eyes glittered with the enthusiasm of his dreams. "We will build a new city like none that exists or has ever existed in India a city which can withstand the siege of disease. And you will find in a generation or two that its people are a new people, a new kind of Indian. The Americans have done it in awful places like Cuba and Panama and the Philippines. You will see!"

While the city still burned below the tent where they sat, the Maharani kindled slowly to his enthusiasm, so that all the weariness and disillusionment left her and she wanted to live on and on forever to carry out the dream of this destructive madman. It would take much money and she would have to fight the orthodox Hindus and even the old Dewan with his traditional antiquated ideas, but Raschid would be on her side and the Major and the little Smileys working away without trouble or fuss.

And while he watched and listened, the Major too caught the enthusiasm so that he forgot for a time the despair which had touched him on his way to the tent. For a little time he forgot everything, even that Edwina was very likely dying. Again, for a little time, he became the fanatic, impersonal and inhuman, concerned only with politics and with science, which he had been before the flood and the earthquake.

For as he rode his bicycle in the darkness, slowly following the line of the metalled road from the Mission by the reflected light of the burning city, he knew suddenly that there was no hope for her. Why he believed this he could not say, and he made no attempt to analyze the feeling. It was simply that he seemed to know it, as if the trees along the road had told him, and as if the wrecked houses and the spirits of the dead had spoken. Throughout the day he had wrestled with the angels of the spirit, now winning, now losing, 'but -always divided and confused in his mind. Most of the day she had slept, quietly as a child, the fever consuming her. A half-dozen times he went into the little room where pudgy Miss Hodge sat on a stiff uncomfortable chair, staring for hours on end at the figure on the bed.

Once when Miss Hodge looked up as he came in, he thought wickedly, "Why could it not have been her they attacked. It would be better if she died." God, it seemed to him, was always bungling things. He had bungled it over Edwina and poor Mr. Jobnekar and Miss Dirks, taking them and leaving Miss Hodge and the merchants and Brahmin priests. If he or Moti could be God for a litde time, either of them could do a better job.

At four o'clock when he went into see her, she was awake, her eyes dull with fever, her cheeks burning. The faint pinkish spots had begun to appear, so that he knew now what the illness was. At sight of them he thought, "She must have been ill for two or three days. She must have caught the infection even before the earthquake happened." She had perhaps brought it with her from the north across the burning dusty plains. When she saw him, she smiled and said, "I was waiting for you," and held out her hand. He took it and sat on the edge of the bed. Neither of them took any notice of poor Miss Hodge, who rose from her chair and began fluttering about the room, changing the position of the water-pitcher, giving the bed cover a tug and a pat. The Major did not even see her. The poor, crazy thing did not matter. No one mattered now. Nothing save that she should recover.

She said, "I know now what it came from. It was that glass.'*

"What glass?"

Then she told how she had, without thinking, given the woman dying of typhoid water from the pitcher on the table and how afterward she herself had drunk from the same glass. "It was that first night you came to help me. What you said made me so happy that afterward I forgot everything."

He tried to reassure her, telling her that the infection must have occurred long before, but she clung tenaciously to the idea, thinking to herself, "It was right. It was just that it should have happened like that . . . that I should at last be betrayed by my own happiness."

He asked, "Did you have a typhoid inoculation before coming out here?"

"No," she said. "To satisfy my husband I pretended that I had it, but I didn't bother. It was such a nuisance and I never really believe in those things."

His scientific mind was shocked. He said, "That was very wicked of you . . . and very stupid."

"I always thought that if one thing didn't get you another would in the end."

He didn't answer her. He only pressed her hand a little more tightly. It was wicked of her and it was stupid of her to believe all that fatalistic nonsense. Yet he loved her because she was like that, because of her recklessness, because she was a gambler who did not whine when she lost. That was the odd thing about it all, that in the end he had been caught by a woman who was everything of which he disapproved.

He said, "You should have told Miss MacDaid at once. You didn't get the infection from the glass. Perhaps it made it more acute."

"I didn't tell her because I was ashamed of doing such a stupid thing. And I was afraid she would send me away. And after the way you talked to me, I couldn't go away and not see you again."

She turned toward the narrow window and said, "What has happened? What is burning?"

"The whole town. It's on fire all over again."

"It's a little bit like hell, this place."

"The burning of the town is probably a good thing."

After a long time she turned to him again. "How long will I be ill?"

"I don't know. It depends on how much of a fight you put up. Typhoid

is a long business." For a moment she was thoughtful. Then she said, "I'm being a nuisance

here." "No."

"Wouldn't it be better if they took me to the Mission?" "Perhaps . . . only there's no one there to care for you properly." Again she was silent, thinking. Then she said, "Miss Hodge could go

with me. She could do all the nasty work. She doesn't seem to mind it." And Miss Hodge, who had been listening, said, "Yes, let me. I would

love it."

"It's so dreary here," said Edwina. "It isn't as if I were of any use." "I'd have to ask Aunt Phoebe. The burden will fall on her." "I shouldn't be much of a burden. I'll be a very good patient. You could

explain to Miss Hodge what had to be done." It was a nonsensical idea. Even with all the work, it was easier to care

for her here at the hospital. At the Mission, it would be more difficult for

him to see her. He would have to take time from his rest to cover the

three miles on a bicycle. But on the other hand he wanted her to be happy.

He wanted her to get well againi, It would be a pity for her to die, now

when she had just begun to live. She said again, "I would be so much happier there." "I'll go and see Aunt Phoebe and ask her." He enveloped her small

perfect hand in both his. "Ill go now, at once. You had better go back to

sleep now. That's the best thing. The more sleep you have the better." "Thanks, my dear." She closed her eyes and lay still, and presently, when he thought she

was asleep, he freed his hand gently and rose to go. She opened her eyes

and said, "I would like to see Tom Ransome." "No. You'd better not. He shouldn't come here from the Music School*

It's too dangerous." "All right." "I'll go now."

She closed her eyes again, and when he had gone away Miss Hodge came and sat beside her.

It was the first time in all her life she had really been ill, and even in her weariness her whole body and spirit revolted. The still heat lay like a blanket over the hospital, and slowly the flames of the burning ruins filled the air with smoke. The fever came and went in waves of violence. There was no ice, not even water which was cool. Sometimes she drifted away into a blur of numbness and misery, and when her mind became clear again she thought, "Purgatory must be like this." Heat, heat, heat everywhere, but never enough of it to kill. Then the drugs brought on an attack of sweating and the bed and the coarse nightdress became soaked and Miss Hodge went to fetch fresh ones, and when she returned a chill began which shook Edwina's body with terrifying violence, and when it had passed she lay still again while the fever crept slowly back.

It did not occur to her that she might die, for death had never existed in her mind in relation to herself. Death might take those all about her, but herself it would pass by. Dimly she knew that her illness was a long affair, that it might go on for weeks and even months, but that seemed no longer to be of any importance. Only one thing existed in her dim brain and that was the determination not to sleep, lest while she was sleeping he might return and sit by her without her knowing it. She dared not to sleep lest a few minutes of happiness escape her.

The Major had to go the long way about on account of the fire which made the streets beyond the Tank impassable, and on the far side of the Central Market he had to dismount from the porter's bicycle and walk through the red mud of the fields until he came to the railroad bridge.

As he walked he knew that the fire was no accident. He was certain that Colonel Moti had arranged it deliberately, and it struck him as odd that a man capable of such self -discipline in science should at the same time be so utterly lawless in relation to society. He had not seen the fiery Sikh doctor for more than two years and he was aware that there was something dangerous about the man, some quality, too, that was exciting. la the moment or two they had spent together after Moti arrived he had felt the fire which lay behind the black eyes of his fellow scientist. In that brief interview, consisting of little more than a greeting and a few questions about the epidemic and the ways of fighting it, the Major had felt a vague sense of shame, as if he had been a slacker and had let down Moti since they last met. Now, examining himself, he saw that he shared Moti's passion for India, but he was less political-minded and above all else less ruthless. In Moti there was a kind of desperate necessity to act, a sense of life being too short for all that had to be done. There was about him the quality of a fanatic.

As he rode the porter's bicycle along the Distillery Road in the rain, he kept seeing the face of his friend the hard mouth, the bony forehead, the hairiness that marked him as a Sikh even though he shaved three times a day, but above all the black eyes burning with impatience and intolerance for the folly and weakness of his fellow men. Mod would never have suffered such weakness as that of which he himself was now guilty. For Moti women did not exist at all, even as machines for sensual pleasure. All his energy, all his creative force, was gathered and concentrated into the fine pin point of blue flame which was like the obligation of the bloody Kali the necessity of destroying the old that something finer and better might be created in its place. In Moti there was no unpredictable element. Moti would never commit the folly of which he himself was guilty.

Yet he could not find it in his heart to envy his friend. For a time when he thought of the brief moments of satisfaction he himself had known in the last two or three days, moments when loneliness no longer existed, when the ego died and with it all passion, all fanaticism, he felt a kind of pity that the life of Moti should be so meager.

He found Aunt Phoebe and Homer Smiley in the kitchen, feeding a small black child which Smiley had found wandering about, starved and terrified, on the outskirts of the burning ruins, one of the Daji caste whose parents and brothers and sisters had all disappeared. The child ate like a small animal, never looking up save obliquely, as if she expected a blow.

They were astonished to see him. He told them of Edwina's illness, and then, almost shyly, he repeated to them her wish to come to the Mission.

Homer Smiley said, "But she is better off at the hospital. There is so little here to make her comfortable."

"Miss Hodge will come with her. She is quite mad but harmless, and she can be useful. Her devotion makes her useful."

Aunt Phoebe, putting more rice in the plate of the hungry child, said, "I shouldn't mind. It might not be comfortable for her, but if she wants to come we can arrange it. I could put her in my room and sleep in the storeroom, now the others have gone."

"It isn't that we don't want her," said Homer Smiley. "I was thinking about what was best for her. You see what I mean?"

The Major was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Yes, of course, I see. When I first thought of it, I said the same thing, but I'm not sure that I was right. It isn't as if she were an ordinary patient. It isn't just a question of medical treatment. You see, she wants to come here because she'd feel happier here, and in her case happiness is of great importance."

"It's up to you, Major."

"Then I'll send her along as soon as I can arrange for it. Thank you. I know I'm asking a great deal, but I knew you would understand."

The child finished eating suddenly, as if she could not possibly stuff one more grain of rice into her big ugly mouth. Surprisingly, she put her two skinny hands together and salaamed.

Homer Smiley said, "I've got to leave you and get back to the Orphanage now. We'll have a lot more people to shelter after this fire."

He went away, taking the child with him, pushing his bicycle while she trudged along beside him. The Major watched them until they finally disappeared into the rain beyond the circle of dim light from the doorway. When he turned, Aunt Phoebe said, "I will take care of her myself. It's better now at the Orphanage. There's not so much work to do. And I like her."

They had a cup of tea, chatting together, for the first time since the disaster, of small homely things, and presently with reluctance, he rose and bade her good-by until tomorrow. As he left she said, suddenly, "You mustn't worry. I'll take good care of her. I know about typhoid. We had an epidemic in Cedar Falls in 'ninety-eight. Two of my brothers and a nephew were down with it at the same time."

He rode away refreshed and calmed by the few minutes in the company of Aunt Phoebe. Her serenity interested him because it was born not out of the resignation of the East, but of the action of the West. She had at last achieved serenity, not like Bannerjee's father, out of negation and contemplation, but out of an activity which was objective and selfless. It was odd but true that there could be no peace or wisdom so long as the ego existed. One had to live like Aunt Phoebe to the full extent of one's powers during long waking hours, or to deny, like old Mr. Bannerjee, the existence of everything physical and material. Of the two approaches to peace, it seemed to him that Aunt Phoebe's was the wiser. Certainly it was the more human.

Presently he thought, "We could go away into some other place to Malaysia or Indo-China or even China, and begin all over again. I could be useful. I could go on with my work and she would have peace," but immediately he knew that this was all nonsense, like the nonsense of Western novels and cinemas. He could never run away without destroying himself, and her as well. He could never leave this cruel, magnificent India because it was a part of his blood. All Cambridge, all the Medical School, all the new ideas, even the women he had slept with in the West, had not changed him. He was not of the West. He belonged here in this vast country of burning droughts and sudden terrible floods, of famine and earthquakes, of temples and jungles which pressed in close to the gates of the great cities. And remembering the nostalgia of all those years spent in the West, he could not imagine ever again leaving India.

In the reflected light from the burning town, a jackal ran delicately across the road just in front of him, and then the leaves of the Java fig trees whispering in the rain began to say, "She will die. She will die." The whispering he divined with sudden fear, was only the manifestation of some voice within himself, of some wisdom as old as India which knew that she must die because it had been so planned, because that was her destiny and his. He had known from the very beginning, from the moment he first saw her beneath the glittering, bee-filled chandelier at the Palace, that it was wrong. He understood now why, after the first glance when he found her exciting, serene and a little vicious, he had turned away quickly and avoided looking at her for the rest of the evening. It was wrong; it should never have been. But this knowledge did not deaden the pain and the desire which now had become physical again.

But the trees overhead kept whispering, "She will die. She will die. She will die!"

As he neared the railway bridge more knowledge came to him out of the depths of his own soul. He knew that she would die because she was too tired to make the effort to go on living. He had felt it while he sat on the edge of the bed talking to her. That was why she had asked to see Ransome. She was like those poor half-starved low-caste people who made no effort to live because it was easier to die.

In the morning the first train came through the gorge, tottering cautiously along the hastily rebuilt track. It brought food and supplies and more nurses and doctors, and on it was the old Dewan, somehow still immaculate with his white beard and his costume of fine, sheer, Bengali linen. He was accompanied now only by a son, a nephew, and a grandson, and he was welcomed by his old enemy-in-council Raschid Ali Khan, worn haggard by seventy-two hours of work. The two went at once to the Maharani's tent.

The old lady greeted him with mingled pleasure and apprehension. She was glad that he had come down from the hills to return in the midst of the awful heat of the monsoon, because his shrewdness and wisdom were of immense value, but she was sorry, too, because she knew that he would begin at once to talk of money and the cost of things, and to place a check on all her impatience to rebuild the city of Ranchipur before she died. For she had been utterly seduced by the ruthlessness and enthusiasm of Colonel Moti while they sat together making crude plans for the new city. The Dewan was an old Indian, the finest of old India, which looked backward to the sources of Indian faith and culture. In his immaculate white linen, he would sit obstinate and wily in every council, blocking every attempt at innovations from the West. He wanted India to belong to Herself, to return as he himself had done, to the sources of her great power. And Colonel Moti was the new Indian, eager to take what of good the West had to offer, eager to destroy the old, utterly, willy-nilly, good and bad together in order to make a fresh start. Her own feeling was simpler than that of either of them because it was feminine, intuitive, and impatient. She wanted a new Ranchipur to spring into being tomorrow, a city which would be a shining model to all India, and above all to the Europeans who said that India could not solve her own problem. She had immense pride which must be vindicated, and a recklessness that came to her in her very blood.

The bearded old man was shocked by the spectacle of the city, reduced now in the second great conflagration to a smoking heap of ashes. The temples were blackened, the evil wooden palace destroyed, the ancient landmarks which meant so much to his spirit were gone. All that remained were ugly modern buildings, built from Western plans, rising triumphant above the smoldering ruins of ancient India the Night School for Untouchable Boys, the house of his enemy Raschid Ali Khan, the Engineering School, the plain, unornamented, efficient hospital The rest was gone.

When he asked how it came about that the destruction was so complete the Maharani explained to him about the second fire, which, she said, had occurred by accident and was spread by the monsoon wind. But she saw at once that the old man was not deceived; his black, gimlet eyes contracted a little at the mention of Colonel Mod's name, and she saw him tremble ever so slightly. Moti, more than the British, was his enemy and the enemy of India. He had always been able to manage the British by cajoling and wiliness; he had found them stupid, stubborn, and tenacious, but easily tricked if one went slowly enough.

For more than sixty years he had worked in his own way, in the ancient Indian way, to lead them gently, as he had led Lord Esketh into a trap that night at the Palace, unknowingly, step by step, to their own ruin while he saved everything that he loved of India herself. And the plan had succeeded. Given another century of life he would see India free and intact, an India of tradition and dignity and honor. The British would destroy themselves; they would in the end be swallowed up as India had always swallowed invaders. And now Moti and men like him, hotheads and fools, had risen to destroy all that he and true Indians like himself had worked so patiently and slowly to accomplish. It was Moti and the radicals who were his enemies and the enemies of India herself far more than the British. The British had been content to regard India as an investment, the richest investment the world had ever known; the spirit and soul of India they had left intact, not troubling themselves about it. But Moti and the hotheads meant to destroy the soul of India as Moti had destroyed the ruins of Ranchipur City.

The Maharani, watching the old man, knew what he was thinking.

She had come to understand years ago his wily plans and his success; sometimes she had even helped him, but never once had either of them shown by the faintest sign that he or she knew what lay in the mind of the other. Now she thought, "He is very old, perhaps ninety, which for an Indian is older than Brahma. He cannot live much longer. Coming back in the heat to fight Raschid and Moti and me will kill him. It is a pity. He was a good fighter, only he is blind."

She knew it now. She knew since she had talked with Moti. In the end the absolute power was hers. She could even dismiss him if he became troublesome. At last she was what she had longed all her life to be an all-powerful Mahratta Queen. She thought, "But he will die. I will not need to dismiss him." The heat and the shock of the destruction of old Ranchipur would dismiss him for her. She knew, too, that in the end Moti and his hotheads meant to destroy her and all the other princes from the powerful Nizam and the rich Baroda to the meanest proprietary princeling. But before that she could accomplish much that the hotheads would find difficult to accomplish once they came to power, because her power was absolute within the borders of Ranchipur, a power which they could never possess. And suddenly she remembered the name which the Major said Ransome had given her "The Last Queen."

The old Dewan made no protestations against Moti. Save for the second in which he trembled and the black eyes narrowed, he gave no sign that he did not approve of what had been done, even of the fantastic plan for a new city. It was not by fighting openly that he achieved his ends; he would work silently in his silky fashion, blocking every plan, every change, every scheme until at last it was slain as so many things were slain in India by weariness and inertia.

He went away presently to poke in the ashes of his own house, saying that he would return again in the cool of the evening. The Maharani ordered a tent to be put up for him near her own, where she might be kept informed by her own spies of his goings and comings, of what he said, even perhaps of what he thought. She knew, too, that no matter what precaution she might take, he would know when she saw Moti and Raschid Ali Khan and what they said. She had need of him for one thing to sell the jewels. No one in the world could wring so good a price for them from the markets of the West. Cocottes would buy them and the

rich, vulgar wives of arrivistes and speculators fattening upon the decay of western civilization. They would find their way back into the shops of the Place Vendome and Bond Street and Fifth Avenue. But she was an old woman now and the passion for jewels was dead; it was not even of great importance what became of them. What mattered was that there would be millions of rupees to rebuild Ranchipur, to make of the city,, the villages, the districts a model laboratory which might serve all the rest of India and the East.

For that she needed young men, strong men, clever men like Raschid and the Major and Colonel Moti. And she did not forget what Homer Smiley had already done and what he might still do, and that there was a place too for Ransome in her scheme of things. When the Dewan had gone she sent for both of them, ignoring the Major's warning against Ransome coming to her directly from the pest-house of the Music School; and when they arrived she proposed that Mr. Smiley quit the Mission and accept the post of Minister of Public Welfare, and that Ransome work with him. It was a post which had never before existed; it was Colonel Moti who suggested its necessity and importance, and he knew Mr. Smiley and his record and proposed him as the one man in Ranchipur, perhaps in all of India, for the job. She would have to find a new leader to take the place of poor Mr. Jobnekar, but that was not difficult now, not as it had been long ago when the Sweepers were confined to their own quarters and kept at the level of animals. They were clever people and they profited quickly by the advantages of education. And she had still to find a woman to replace poor Miss Dirks, to take over the education of the women; but that was easier now than it had been twenty-five years earlier, infinitely easier. There were Indian women, trained and capable and energetic, .women like Mrs. Naidu, the friend of hotheaded Colonel Moti.

When she was alone again, the old Maharani sent for Gopal Rao and told him that he was to be her secretary and work with her. He suited her perfectly; he was good-looking and young and clever, and he had the same toughness and humor that was in her own Mahratta blood. He was to find some one at once, that very day, to take his place so that he might return to her to work. Dismissing him, she returned to her own apartment in the tent, feeling young again and strong as a tigress. The old

Dewan no longer troubled her. Surrounded by her phalanx of young men, she could defeat him. She would have their force behind her and in wiliness, she thought, chuckling, she was a match for him. If she was to be "The Last Queen" she would be a great one, to be remembered forever in the history of Ranchipur and of India.

When Mr. Smiley left the Maharani, he hurried on foot, burdened with the medicines and supplies delivered to him by Colonel Moti's assistant, directly to the Mission, where he overtook, on the drive a procession consisting of Lady Esketh borne on a litter by four coolies, with Miss Hodge plodding along beside, holding an umbrella over the sick woman. As he greeted them Lady Esketh opened her eyes and said, "It was very good of you to let me come to the Mission," and Mr. Smiley assured her that it was no trouble at all and that she would be much happier than she would have been at the hospital. Then she closed her eyes wearily again and gave herself up to the motion of the conveyance. Her bones ached and her head throbbed with fever, and she kept drifting into an unconsciousness which was not like sleep, but nearer to death.

As Mr. Smiley walked beside the procession, his heart sang in his worn body. Now he would be free of all the pettiness, the mean economy, the backbiting of the Mission Board and people like Mrs. Simon. Now her tiresome letters, her intrigues, would no longer matter. He could go on with his work, aided instead of hindered; he would have the wealth of Ranchipur behind him. It was the one gift from Heaven that he would have asked.

And he was happy, too, for other reasons; because of the pleasure it would give his wife and Aunt Phoebe and because he would have Ransome to work with him. Now he could help Ransome as for years he had been helping the low-caste people. As the two of them sat together with the Maharani while she told them her plan, he had believed that Ransome would refuse the task as he had always refused everything. But he had accepted quickly, with a decision which startled Mr. Srniley.

And when they left the tent together and turned in the direction of the Music School Ransome had said to him, "I hope you didn't mind my accepting." And Mr. Smiley had answered, "Why should I, my dear fellow?"

"I've never done anything to merit confidence. There are probably a dozen other fellows you'd prefer to have work with you."

"No, I can't think of one I'd rather have."

Then they had walked for a long time in silence, and as they came to the Great Tank where their ways parted, Ransome had said, suddenly, "Fern Simon is going to stay here. She wants to be a nurse. She's got some idea in her head about working in the districts."

"I'm glad," said Mr. Smiley. "She's a nice girl"

"There are one or two things I'd like to tell you and then we won't have to mention them again."

They stopped at the top of the wide shallow steps leading down to the water. For a moment Ransome looked away from him down at a woman pounding soiled linen on the rocks below. Mr. Smiley divined that he was making a great effort. Twice he swallowed hard before speaking, then he said, "I think I understand now what you and the Major and Raschid and the old girl are after. I didn't understand before not fully. I want to help."

"Good," said Mr. Smiley, feeling something of Ransome's embarrassment. "That's fine."

"And there's another thing."

"Yes."

"Fern and I want to be married."

"Well," said Mr. Smiley, "I must say that's a surprise. It's fine; that is, I'm glad to hear it. Congratulations. My, what a surprise that will be to my wife and Aunt Phoebe!"

Ransome didn't say that he thought the news would be no great surprise to Aunt Phoebe. He said, "I'm not sure that it's the right thing. I wanted to talk to some one about it and I thought you were the best per^ son. It isn't as if I were a young man. I'm years older than Fern,"

"If you care for each other, that's not important."

"I know my own mind," said Ransome, "but it seems that I'm getting all the advantages."

"Fern is a mighty fine girl. She has the makings of a good woman."

"There's something else I have to say it's really a confession."

"Yes?"

"It's that Fern and I have lived together already."

Mr. Smiley gave him a sudden glance o astonishment. He was not shocked, but he felt suddenly upset by his own innocence and lack of. experience before a man like Ransome, who must know so much about women. The expression of astonishment changed to one of perplexity. The thin, homely face grew pink, and weakly he said, "I didn't know that. . . ." Then he coughed apologetically and added, "But of course I couldn't. How could I?" For a second he had an odd feeling that it was himself who had sinned and was in the wrong, because he knew nothing more exciting than the comfortable, homely love of Bertha Smiley. A look of wistfulness came into the eyes behind the spectacles.

"I'm not making excuses for myself," said Ransome. "I think Fern wanted it as much as I did. And it happened in an odd way . . . almost, you might say, an inevitable way. I don't think either of us could have done anything about it."

"I shouldn't think of setting myself up as a judge," said Mr. Smiley. "I've had too little experience in such matters. But if you get married, it's all right and no harm done to anyone."

"Sometimes, under such circumstances, marriage is a greater wrong than the original sin."

A smile crossed the wrinkled face of the missionary. Ransome was being complicated again, seeing too many sides of the question. Mr. Smiley said, "I don't think it's as complicated as that. There's a good deal in letting things work themselves out." The emotion which Mr. Smiley now felt was a little like that of an elderly aunt pleased at the news that two young people were in love. He loved Ransome and he liked Fern and wanted to help her to escape from all the unhappiness she had known, and he wanted to keep them both near him, and if they married they would go to live in Ransome's big yellow house and come to lunch on Saturdays with Raschid and the Major and Miss MacDaid and the other friends. He felt, wistfully, that the marriage would make life much pleasanter in Ranchipur.

"Can you marry us?" asked Ransome.

"Of course. You could be married at the Mission."

"Perhaps we'd better be married as quickly as possible." He started to say, "because we didn't take any precautions," but he checked himself, thinking that this would be beyond the understanding of Mr. Smiley.

"Yes, perhaps it would be better."

"We'll be through at the Music School in a day or two. They won't need amateurs any longer. Then we could be married."

"Whenever you say," said Mr. Smiley. He took Ransome's lean hand and said, "I'm glad. I think it's fine news." Then he smiled and said, "IVe only one piece of advice."

"Yes?"

"Don't let Mrs, Simon set foot in the house."

Ransome laughed and said, "No danger."

"May I tell Mrs. Smiley and Aunt Phoebe?"

"Of course. They ought to know, considering that in a way they were in on the whole thing." After a second, he added, "Only I don't want you to think it happened the night I brought her to the Mission. I wasn't deceiving you then. It happened afterward during the flood the night I got lost in the little boat. It happened in Banner jee's house."

"I see," said Mr. Smiley, and again there was a note of wistfulness in his voice.

"I must go now," said Ransome. "We're still short-handed. Tomorrow the train is bringing more people to help trained people."

Mr. Smiley patted his back in a suppressed friendly way and set out on his way to the Mission, and as Ransome turned toward the Music School, he thought, "How odd it is that, although I thought of Smiley as my friend, I never really knew him at all." It was as if before, despite all the apparent friendliness, despite the closeness of their association, despite the gay Saturday lunches, there had been a wall separating the two of them. It was different now, too, with Raschid and the Major and most of all with Fern. Some demon had gone out of him. Something, perhaps it was simplicity, born of the death and the filth and the misery, had come to take the demon's place. The world and even the familiar peepul trees and the Great Tank and the heat and the rain were different and new to him. His body was weary and cried out for a drink, but in his spirit there was no desire now to create out of brandy a false world that was better than the real one. The world about, tragic as it was, remained a good world. It had not seemed like this to him shining and full of adventure since he was a little boy setting out to visit his grandmother in Ohio.

Then as he walked along the wall of the Tank he saw Miss Murgatroyd coming toward him and he was tempted to turn toward the hospital so that he might avoid her, but she had seen him and so it was too late, for Miss Murgatroyd was too uncivilized to aid one in such a deception. She came toward him with the old hysterical eagerness, holding out her hand. She said, "I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Ransome, after all our adventures. I hear you've been doing valiant duty at the hospital."

"Yes," he said, forcing himself. "I've been working." Somehow she made the horrors of the hospital and the Music School seem fantastic and false. "Where have you been?" he asked.

"With poor Mrs. Bannerjee," and added, eagerly, "You heard about Mr. Bannerjee? "

"I only just heard that he was dead."

"He only lasted a few hours."

"And Mrs. Bannerjee?"

"She's all right. She's going away back to Calcutta to live."

"And the old gentleman's ashes?"

For a moment Miss Murgatroyd hesitated. Then she giggled, "Mrs. Bannerjee threw them into the Ranchipur River after dark. She said that was good enough for the old humbug. She says now she won't have to be bored any longer in a dull place like Ranchipur. Calcutta is much more gay and exciting."

So that was it. There had been nothing splendid and icy about Mrs. Bannerjee. She had merely been dull. There had been no mysterious depths, but only the empty abyss of boredom. All the glamour, all the attraction, he had created out of his own boredom and restlessness and desire in a desperate effort to make the world about him an interesting place.

He said, "And what do you mean to do?"

She sighed, "Stay here on the job, I suppose. But it will be awfully boring without the Bannerjees' parties. There won't be any life at all."

She giggled again hysterically, but there was a catch in her voice and he thought, "Poor thing won't have anything now. She won't have Mrs. Bannerjee to torment her." She knew it and she was giggling to keep from crying. She was trying to make the Bannerjees seem ridiculous

because; she wanted to amuse and ingratiate herself. It was the beaten puppy again wagging its tail.

He said, "I must get back to my job now. When things are settled again we must have some more parties somehow. Perhaps we can organize a badminton club."

The muddy, pimply face of Miss Murgatroyd suddenly flushed with pleasure. "That would be wonderful," she said, and then, coyly shaking her finger at him, "I won't let you forget about it."

"No, you mustn't," and Ransome thought, grimly, "I'm sure you won't."

As he turned to go, she asked, "How is Lady Esketh?"

"She's ill."

"Yes, I heard that. Remember me to her when you see her. She was so sporting all through the flood." And in a gesture of tribute to that mythical progenitor, the Madras magistrate, she added, "You can always count on the English in a crisis."

Then she was gone and he went on toward the School, the old feeling 'of nausea at the pit of his stomach.

At the Mission, Mr. Smiley had to keep his news to himself until Aunt Phoebe had settled Lady Esketh into her own room on a bed placed near the window where there would be a current of air and where, while she was awake, she might look out into the hanging garden of Aunt Phoebe's petunias and orchids. When Aunt Phoebe, aided by Miss Hodge, had given her a bath of cool water from the chattee, she looked out of the window and said, "It is much pleasanter here. I don't feel so stifled." And then fell asleep almost at once.

When Aunt Phoebe returned to the kitchen, leaving Miss Hodge to keep watch, Mr. Smiley, bursting by now, said, "Well, I've some news for you."

"Good news?" she asked, doubtfully.

"I'm an Excellency now. I'm a Minister. His Excellency, Homer Smiley!"

She looked at him as if he had made a bad joke. "What in Heaven's name are you talking about? You've always been a minister ever since I've known you."

"Not that kind of Minister. I'm not even a missionary any more."

"If you aren't a missionary, then what are you? You talk like Mrs. Simon."

"I'm Minister of Public Welfare. The Maharani has just told me so." And then he explained all that this meant, and Aunt Phoebe, impressed, sat down and gave him an attention and a respect she had never given before to a man whom she had always regarded as one of her own children.

"And that's not all," he said, "Ransome has been made Assistant Minister"; and when that had sunk in he said, "And there's still more. Ransome and Fern are going to be married."

It seemed that this bit of news impressed her most. She said, "I'm glad of that. It's all right now, but I was worried."

"What's all right?"

"Nothing," said Aunt Phoebe, with an air of triumph. "It's a secret only I know about."

Heroically Mr. Smiley kept silent. "Let her have her fun," he thought. "Let her think she's the only one who knows."

"And now," said Aunt Phoebe, "you'd better run along to the Orphanage and tell Bertha." She chuckled, "That damned Missionary Board can't bother you any more."

"Now I'll have all the money I want for schools and libraries and laboratories. Ransome and I together can accomplish miracles."

"It's going to be all right with Ransome now. What he needed was a regular woman and some home life. He was the loneliest man I ever knew. And it'll be good for Fern, too. I guess they both must have got a little common sense. I'll bet he won't even drink any more. When are they going to be married?"

"Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after."

While he gathered up his burden of supplies, she was silent. As he left, she said, "I can't help thinking what a lot has gone on these past few days." And with that under-statement she returned calmly to the business of preparing supper and the broth the Major had prescribed for Lady Esketh. And as she worked, she thought, "It's terrible what has happened to that poor woman in a few days. Miss MacDaid must have worked her to the bone." For it seemed to her that Lady Esketh

was a different person from the one who had hid in the ditch while the Bhils passed on their way to loot Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's bungalow, different too from the woman who had stood shamelessly naked by the chattee pouring cold water on herself. She was thin as a rail and there didn't seem to be any spunk left in her. She poked the fire in the Indian stove and thought, "There'll be white flour by the train tomorrow and then we can have some decent bread."

Two days passed, and there was no longer anything for Fern and Ransome to do at the Music School. Their work was finished with the arrival of more doctors and more nurses and they were sent away to the hospital, Fern to help Miss MacDaid with the supplies, and Ransome to do whatever there was to be done. When Miss MacDaid saw the girl, she said at once, "The first thing for you to do> is to go to bed and sleep . . . sleep until you wake up. Then you'll be of some use. You're no good for anything the way you are."

At the moment she left the Music School, the accumulated weariness descended on her like a cloud. Now that it was over, fatigue dragged at her eyelids and weighted her aching back. She was so tired that as she walked beside Ransome along the Tank toward the hospital she could not speak; but behind the veil of exhaustion there was a dull sense of happiness because it was over now and she had not been whipped. And when Miss MacDaid brusquely said, "You did a good job for a girl who didn't know anything," she burst into tears, sobbing helplessly until at last Miss MacDaid gave her an injection to quiet her and make her sleep. The veteran knew what such fatigue could be; she knew, too, that it was worse when one was young. At fifty she herself bore it more easily than she had done long ago in that other epidemic which had carried off poor Miss Eldridge.

As for Ransome, he collapsed on a chair in the Major's office, his long legs sticking out in front of him, his head resting against. the back of the chair. For a moment or two he closed his eyes. Then he heard the Major saying, "You look finished."

"I'm not, but I could do with a spot of sleep."

"I was coming to see you. It's about Lady Esketh. She wants you to come to the Mission. I didn't tell you before. I thought it was too dangerous for you to go straight to her from the Music School. If you could manage it, I'd like to have you go with me to the Mission as soon as you can get yourself cleaned up."

The Major's voice sounded odd and for a moment he thought, "It is only because I'm so tired that it sounds that way." Then as he sat up in the chair and looked at his friend, seeing him for the first time since he came into the room, he understood that the illusion was not born of his own weariness. The voice of the Major was tired and he spoke with a kind of gentleness which was unlike him. And in the eyes there was a look of misery and "defeat. It was not only that he looked thin and worn. It was as if a light that light which seemed always to be shining inside him giving strength to all those about him had been dimmed or extinguished. Until now he had always been radiant and confident and sure, as if he had been set aside by the gods as one beyond human frailty and unhappiness.

For himself, he was haunted by the vision of his own bed the great comfortable old bed which John the Baptist no doubt had in readiness, a bed into which he might sink, swallowed up in oblivion and peace for the first time in days, in one sense for the first time in all his life. And he did not want to see Edwina. He was a little afraid of her mockery and hardness and sense of reality.

So he asked, "Is it absolutely necessary to go now?"

The Major looked at the papers in front of him for a moment and then said, "Yes, I think it is. We can go out to the Mission the short way on bicycles. The Racecourse Abridge is mended."

Wearily Ransome said, "Okay," and then asked, "How is she?"

"Not too well."

"What does that mean?"

The Major answered him in a low voice, as if he were speaking to himself. "It means just that."

Dully Ransome thought, "It can't be true. Edwina couldn't be dying. Not Edwina, of all people." Then suddenly, looking at the Major, he understood everything, the whole complex story.

It had happened ... the thing he was afraid of. It had happened in spite of everything. He understood now the misery in the gray-blue eyes of his friend, the misery of a man who had saved so many lives and felt himself powerless to save this one, the most important of all. He had been caught, after all, like any other man. The gods hadn't given him a special dispensation. They had only been malicious, saving him to be caught at last by Edwina, Edwina, of all people.

All at once he experienced a great wave of wonder and of tenderness, and to let the Major know that he understood he rose and, crossing the room, placed one hand on his shoulder and said, "She's an extraordinary woman. She won't die. She can't die. She's indestructible. She won't die, because she doesn't want to."

Without looking at him, the Major said, "I'm afraid that she does. That's the trouble. She isn't putting up any fight."

What had happened to her? What could have changed her so profoundly the Edwina he had known for so long with all her toughness and perversity. Edwina would fight to cheat death, out of perversity alone.

The Major rose and said, "We'd better be off. Take a shower and wash your hands with alcohol. I'll take Miss MacDaid's bicycle and you can take the porter's."

All the way to the Mission they rode in silence, past the stubby statue of Queen Victoria, standing there unshaken by the whole disaster, past the drowned Zoological Gardens, past the Bannerjees' house, empty now save for the figure of the thin black man whom Ransome had rescued from the balcony, past Ransome's own house and the house of Raschid Ali Khan, where four of the seven children were playing beneath the big banyan tree.

Aunt Phoebe met them saying, "She's awake. I tried to make her sleep, but she said she wouldn't until you came. She seems brighter."

"Her temperature?" asked the Major.

"The same. It hasn't gone down."

"It can't stay like that." Then he turned to Ransome and said, "You go in and see her first. She's been waiting for you."

She was sitting propped up in Aunt Phoebe's bed, with the metal dispatch-case which Bates had saved, on her knees. She looked very thin and the only color in her face were the patches of red on each cheek made by the fever. She wore one of Bertha Smiley's cheap cotton night-gowns and along the parting of her hair there was a streak that was darker than the rest. In the heat it hung straight and limp, close to her face. Her appearance shocked him and he thought, "I must not let her see how I feel," so with an imbecilic false cheerfulness he said, "Well, you have got yourself into a pretty mess."

At the sound of his voice Miss Hodge sprang out of her chair and came to greet him, saying, "I'm so glad you've come, Mr. Ransome. We've both been waiting for you for days. Here, take my chair by the bed."

Edwina said, "Remember, Miss Hodge, you were going to help Aunt Phoebe while Mr. Ransome was here."

"That's right! That's right!" said Miss Hodge, brightly. "I'm so forgetful lately. Our invalid is much better today, Mr. Ransome. She'll be up and about by the time Miss Dirks comes back."

Then like a flustered hen she went out, closing the door behind her. Ransome crossed the room and sat by the bed. He reached out and took Edwina's hand and said, "I've been wanting to see you for days."

"You look tired. Was it pretty awful at the Music School?"

"Pretty awful."

"How's it getting on with Fern?"

"Okay. We're going to be married."

"Aunt Phoebe told me that . . . said it was a great secret." She sighed, "You're a lucky bastard."

"Yes. I think I am. But it took a long time for the luck to change."

"To have a pretty girl fall in love with you at your age."

He thought, "It will amuse her if I tell her the whole story. It may cheer her up." So he said, grinning, "It was a fantastic courtship. I can tell you now. You played a part in it. Without ever knowing it, you saved Fern from being ravished."

A look of interest came into the tired eyes. "How?" she asked.

So he told her how he, on that first night, had come home from the hurried and savorless embrace in the Elinor Glyn room with the panther skin on the floor to find Fern waiting for him, determined to spend the night in his bed. And he told her how he had been tempted and how, because of his satiation and disgust, he resisted with very little effort and induced Fern to go to the Smileys' for the night. As she Ustened (?), she frowned and once, as if she were thinking of herself and did not hear him, she said, "We were a couple of bloody fools!" When he had finished, she said, "Something happened the night you were left alone with her at the Bannerjees' house. What was it?" and he told her that part of the story as well, feeling a little shy, but believing that now she would understand and see it as he had seen it. He said, "The most unlikely things can happen here. It was the very last thing I ever thought would happen to a sonofabitch like me."

The story did not appear to cheer her. Indeed, it seemed to him that she had scarcely listened to it. He remembered how once, only a night or two before the earthquake, he had thought drunkenly that it would make her laugh to know that by her own abandoned perversity she had saved the virginity of a woman she had never seen. Now he saw that the story wasn't like that, at all. It wasn't funny. This Edwina lying here in the bed beside him didn't think it funny. It had become something different, like lead transmuted into gold, because something had happened to both of them. It must be, he thought, that they had become human, and he saw now that as far back as he could remember there had been an inhuman quality about them both.

Suddenly, looking away from him, she said, "I've got something to tell you, too. It's a kind of confession. Don't mind if I don't look at you while I tell it. It makes me feel such a bloody fool."

He divined what was coming, and he said, "Tell it in your own way, my dear."

"It's so silly, Tom, to reach my age, to be such a slut all my life and look as I do now and then to fall in love for the first time. I feel such a fool "

"I suspected what happened."

"It's so idiotic to feel the way I do. There's something ridiculous and shameful . . . that it should mean so much to me just to have him come and sit in that chair for five minutes. It means more to me than everything that happened to me before. . . ."

He said nothing, but pressed her hand gently, thinking, "It's because you look as you do ... with no color in your face, in a cheap nightgown with the dye coming out of your hair. It's because of all that he loves you. You're more beautiful now than you were before." For that quality of innocence and childishness was very clear now, no longer obscured behind a fagade of falseness and disillusionment. The emaciation revealed the fineness of the bones in her face. There was about it now the delicacy o decadence and overbreeding. The blue eyes seemed enormous. Again he thought, as he had thought that night in the midst of Mr. Banner jee's awful dinner, "Shining and free . . . and now she is no longer free."

She was talking again, slowly, almost with effort, as if she were very tired. "It makes you have the oddest ideas . , . almost as if you felt religious. I have a feeling that it was all meant to be ... the strangest feeling that it began long ago when I was a child, and it had to go through to the very end. I had to come to India. I had to stay in Ranchipur. Even the earthquake was a part of it." She looked at him for the first time since she had begun to talk. "But it's a very satisfactory feeling ... a kind of completeness, as if I had lived my life and what happened afterward would never matter very much. It's the way a painter must feel when he's completed a picture which satisfies him." She pressed his hand and then said, "I had to tell some one . . . and we always understood each other from the very beginning. We always understood each other, but neither of us could help the other out of the ditch. It had to be some one else."

"Yes, I think we've always understood each other too damned welL" He stood up, still holding her hand, and said, "I'll go now and come back later. Now that I'm no longer at the Music School I can come and go as I like."

Quickly, almost as i she were frightened by the idea of his going, she said, "Don't go. I'm not tired. What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to stay on here in Ranchipur, perhaps forever."

"Will Fern like that? She's awfully young."

"It's her own idea. She wants to be a nurse."

"Is Miss MacDaid pleased?"

"I suppose so, It's a little difficult to tell when Miss MacDaid is pleased or when she isn't."

"The old trout did her best to fix me." Again she smiled and added, "I don't blame her. She was quite right."

Then he told her about his new job and she said again, "You're full o luck. The old Maharani must be a wonderful old lady. It's a pity she disliked me. She never gave me a chance."

"The impression you made that first night wasn't exactly what one would call endearing. I doubt if she dislikes you specially. She doesn't like any women except one or two over seventy. She always asks after you."

"I really wanted to talk business. Can you open that box for me?"

He opened it and she took out a few papers and then a small box which she opened. Inside the box there was a ring consisting of a single enormous sapphire mounted in platinum, "I don't suppose you have any ring for Fern. Give her this one. I'd like you both to have it."

"That's sweet of you, my dear. It's what you might call a rich gift.'*

"Does she like sapphires?"

"I don't know. I don't suppose she knows one jewel from another."

"I wish she'd come and see me. I'd like to talk to her."

"Ill tell her. I'm sure she'd like to come."

"I've never had any sort of will, even for my own settlement. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Now that I've got all this money, I suppose I should do something about it."

"You needn't do it now. You can wait till you're well again."

She smiled. "No. I've made up my mind to alter my character. I've always been careless about things that bored me. I wouldn't be ill now if I'd taken the trouble to have a typhoid inoculation. I've always hated the details and shoved them off on some one else." She leaned back on the pillow as if the long speech had wearied her, and he asked, "What do you want to do?"

Without attempting to sit up, she answered him. "I'd like to make provision to dispose of some of the money if anything should happen to me. I couldn't possibly dispose of it all. There's so much I couldn't think up places to leave it. I don't know anything about the legal side, but if I wrote down two or three bequests and signed the paper and had it witnessed, I should think it would hold good . . . especially in the circumstances,"

"I'm not a solicitor. Raschid is a lawyer. Probably he'd know." He took her hand. "But the whole thing is a lot of nonsense. There's no hurry about it."

She ignored the remark, saying, "Could you write it out for me if I told you what I wanted?'*

"Yes."

"I can't think what's become of Elsworth . , . that's Albert's secretary. I don't see why I haven't heard from him. He's in Bombay."

"He was responsible for sending the plane. I suppose he's been busy. All hell must have broken loose for him when the news of Esketh's death reached England. The news would upset a lot of people . , . newspapers, companies, shareholders things like that."

She looked out of the window for a time in silence. "It's funny/' she said, presently, "that Albert matters so much. He was really so unimportant."

"I think you'd better tell me now what it is you want, and then, while the Major is having a look at you, I'll write it down in the best legal fashion. You've talked enough, I should think."

"There's Miss Hodge," she said, "I'd like to make sure she's safe and well cared for for the rest of her life. The poor old thing has had an awful life. I'd like to leave her twenty or thirty thousand pounds."

He took a pencil stub from his pocket and a paper on which was written a report of the actual supplies at the Music School. "Twenty thousand pounds is a great deal of money . . . more than enough to care for her. Besides, Miss Dirks left everything she had to her. She told me so. And she'll have a pension from the Maharani."

"Don't be tiresome, Tom. It's my money and there's such a lot of it."

So thinking it was better not to argue, he wrote on the back of the paper, "Miss Hodge, Twenty Thousand."

"I suppose when life becomes civilized again the poor thing will have to have some sort of nurse or guardian. It would be too awful to shut her up." For a time she was thoughtful, and presently she said, "Why couldn't you apply to be her guardian? She says she can't go to England until Miss Dirks comes back, and I don't suppose it would be any good for her to go home now, anyway. She says there's hardly anybody left there except some cousins who wouldn't want to be burdened with her. The truth is that if she was sent back there she'd very likely be shut up. Out here nobody will take any notice of her. And some day she'll that Miss Dirks is dead."

"Yes, all that could be arranged."

"And I'd like to leave a hundred thousand pounds to the hospital as a kind of endowment fund to do with as they like."

"Yes."

"And fifty thousand pounds to the Smileys." She looked at him. "Do you think that is enough?"

"I should think so. Money doesn't mean very much to them one way or another. They won't spend it on themselves."

"And I've an old aunt, and a young cousin in the navy I haven't seen for two years. I'd like to leave them each fifty thousand. Their names are Lady Sylvia Welldon and Lieutenant Arthur Welldon. She lives in a house called Parmely Vicarage near Salisbury. That address will do for both."

Closing her eyes, she turned away from him and said, "It's funny, sitting here like God, changing people's lives just because a long time ago when I was poor I gave in and married Albert." She sighed, "I've given away a fortune already and I haven't even disposed of a fraction of what there is. It must be tiresome to be so very rich. I'd never thought about it before. For a long time now I've always had what I wanted just for the asking. I'd like to leave you fifty thousand or so if you want it ... as much as you like." She laughed. "Name your figure, Tom. Not many men have such a chance . . . and Albert would hate it so to think all that money for which he cheated and stole to raise himself in the world was going to a gentleman. He wanted so much to be a gentleman, but you couldn't make a silk purse from a sow's ear."

"I've got plenty for myself. My grandmother saw to that. Anyway, if I'm drawing up the will it wouldn't be legal for me to be in it. M Then an idea came to him and he said, "But so long as you're scattering it about, you could leave it to the Ranchipur Ministry of Public Welfare. Then Smiley and I would have the use of it."

"Good. Put down a hundred thousand for that. If you want more, say so."

"No, I think that will do."

She sat up again and said, "That's all I can think of now. I'm too tired to think any more and my head aches like the devil. They can do what they like with the rest. Albert has a brother he never let me see.

He lives in a villa in the Liverpool suburbs. It would be fun to see how a windfall of a million pounds would change his life. I suppose there'd be no end of people fighting over the money,"

He stood up and thrust the paper into his pocket. "I'll go and write it out. Forget it now and try to rest." He took the tin box off her knees, and bending over he held her up with one arm while he laid the pillows fiat again. She seemed to weigh nothing at all, and as she lay down she said, "That box is full of jewelry. You might as well give it to Fern."

"Don't talk nonsense."

"I'm not. Has your brother an heir?"

"No."

"Well, if you and Fern have children, your son might be Earl of Nolham. He'd have a wife and some day she might like the magnificent jewels left her by an English trollope called Lady Esketh who died in Ranchipur during the great disaster of 1936. She'd always have a story to tell about them. It would help when she had to make conversation at boring dinners. We're such snobs at home. We like stories like that." She sighed and added, "Don't argue with me. I'm too tired. Put that in the will, too ... that the jewels are to go to Fern." She opened her eyes, smiled, and looked up at him. "I suppose," she said, "this is the way it feels to repent and get religion. . . ." Her voice grew weaker. . . . "Giving away my worldly goods." In a whisper she said, "Anyway, it's a nice feeling."

Then he went out of the room, and as he entered the kitchen the Major rose quickly and looked at him with an expression of anxiety, as if he, the physician, were seeking reassurance from Ransome.

Ransome said, "I think the visit did her good. She wants me to draw up a kind of will for her. I told her it was nonsense, but she seemed set on it and I don't suppose it will do any good to cross her. She doesn't seem as ill as I thought she would be."

But it wasn't, he knew, the actual illness. It was the apathy he felt in her, the strange certainty she seemed to have that it was all finished; and her willingness, almost her eagerness, to accept the fact. The Major had believed that the visit would help her. He had been brought by the Major as if he were some miraculous medicine, which might help where all else had failed. This man, his friend, loved her; you could not look at him and doubt it. From the beginning he, Ransome, had been afraid of what might happen between the two of them, and half-heartedly he had tried to prevent it. And now it had happened; only what happened wasn't at all what he had feared; in a way it was worse. He had been afraid that she would seduce and fascinate the Major and then when she had had enough,, she would run away, back to England and the cynical security of her own world. But it hadn't happened like that. He saw suddenly that there was no solution, no way out, and he understood that she knew it better than any of them. In a decent climate, in a less savage world, the strength and vitality of her own healthy body might have carried her through against her own will, but here in India everything was ranged against that machine which was called the body.

The Major knew all that. It was written in the suffering gray-blue eyes. Ransome knew now why the Major had said, "That's the trouble. She isn't putting up any fight." For the first time death touched Ransome as a reality. The abstract quality of death during the war and during the earthquake had meant nothing. The death of that shadowy unhappy mother had been of no importance, nor that of his own father whom he had disliked. Even the death of his grandmother had never brought its reality close to him, for although he had loved her, she was already an old woman and death had been as natural as going to sleep. Now he saw it clearly. Edwina was dying and no one could help her, no one could save her. "It is a waste," he thought, "so terrible a waste." Yet he understood why it was that she was dying. A month ago he might have been in the same place.

Aunt Phoebe went to the cupboard and returned with ink and pen and letter paper on which was printed AMERICAN MISSION. EDUCATIONAL BRANCH. RANCHIPUR STATE, and he seated himself and went to work, trying desperately to remember the legal phraseology of the wills of his father and his grandmother . . . / do devise and bequeath. ... It sounded silly, but almost all legal phraseology sounded silly and archaic and confused.

Aunt Phoebe, as she passed him, said, in a low voice with exaggerated casualness, "I wouldn't have believed it possible."

He knew what she meant. It touched him that there still remained in the spare, hard-worked old body such a capacity for wonder and romance, and then he saw that this was part of her strength, one of the reasons why she had never grown old, why she was forever young. The wonder and delight were something neither he nor Edwina had ever known. It was perhaps given only to a chosen few. It might perhaps be learned. He might even now be approaching a comprehension of it.

Aunt Phoebe, mixing bread now at the far end of the kitchen table, said, "I'm eighty-two years old and I'm still finding out things."

From her corner where she sat peeling yams, Miss Hodge said, suddenly, "She's so nice. Lady Esketh. She's such a lady."

As the Major came through the door, Edwina opened her eyes and smiled at him. Briefly, almost stiffly, he asked her a few questions. He was being professional as he had been that afternoon at the Palace when she had done her best to change him into a lover. He said, "You're much better today," although it was a lie and "You have the most extraordinary vitality."

"I've always been tough as nails."

"We expect an ice-machine tomorrow. That'll make a great difference."

"I'd like to feel ice again. I'd like to sleep on ice. I feel as if I could never again be cold enough to suit me."

The stiffness seemed to grow upon him. It was as if the man who had talked to her in the early morning while she sat keeping watch in the ward, had withdrawn, leaving a stranger in his place. While he sat there talking to her, he was fighting the growing terror inside him, not now a terror of her dying, but a terror which was worse. It was a kind of terror he had never before experienced even dimly, but he recognized what it was as if it had been an old and recurring sickness, and the recognition terrified him the more. He kept thinking, "I must keep a tight hold on myself. If I let go, I will go to pieces. I shall weep and howl and behave like that ass Banner jee. I'm not like that. I'm the new kind of Indian, I'm not like that. I won't let it claim me." He dug the nails into the palms of his hands. His whole strong body began to tremble. It was as if it cried out for relief, to be allowed to roll on the floor,

to moan and cry, to beat its breast and tear its hair, to roll in the dust and cover its head with ashes and cow dung.

Wildly he thought, "It has never happened before. I did not know it was there hiding away 55 . . . that awful treacherous emotional thing which had so many times wrecked India, which had begot so much cruelty and so much masochism, so much defeat and despair. The nails dug deeper into the palms and he thought, "I cannot betray them . . . not I of all Indians. Not I who have proven that there is no such thing. I cannot betray myself. If I am betrayed once, I am lost. Then it will not matter what happens. I will be like Bannerjee and all the others who howl hysterically. 55 Inwardly he cursed his race and his Brahmin caste, his heritage and the horrible cruel climate which turned men neurotic and unstable. He cursed the very soul of India.

And fearing himself he began to speak again, not emotionally but in a flat, dead, matter-of-fact voice which seemed to come not from that treacherous, hostile machine, his own body, but from a great distance. Through the mechanism of that weak and terrified body he heard himself, whatever it was that was the essence of him, saying, flatly, as if he were only planning a trip to Bombay or Delhi, "You are past the worst now. I have it all planned. When you are well again we will go away together. Tve thought it all out. We shall go further east ... to the Malay states or to some part of India where nobody knows us (only there was no part of India where they were not known), and we shall have a new life. I will go on with my work. We will build up a new world. Yes, it will be satisfactory and not too difficult. 55

Then he felt the touch of her hand on his. He heard her saying, "Yes, that will be fine. That will be wonderful, 55 and the treacherous body began again to shake, striving to throw itself on the floor, to cast away honor or courage, defiance and strength, in one wild gesture of despair and defeat.

He heard her asking, "What is it, my dear? Are you ill? Why are you trembling so? 55 And shame swept over him, shame for himself, for the finely bred Brahmin machine that was his body. He could never tell her what it was that made him tremble. He dared never let her even suspect ... she of all people, who had gone through a furnace of torment, who was dying now, without one hint of complaint. In that moment he hated all India, and most of all the body which was betraying him.

Again he heard the distant flat voice coming from a great distance, saying: "It is nothing at all. No more than physical tiredness. It will go away. Everything will be all right." But the thing did not go away; it clung to his spirit as a vicious panther clung by its claws to the naked flesh of its victim. It came out of his past, out of the past of his parents and grandparents and their remote ancestors. It was something she would never be able to understand; not even Ransome, his friend, would understand it, nor Raschid, who wasn't Indian, but burly Arab-Turk, not even the old Maharani with her wild, proud Mahratta blood. It was more ancient, more corrupt than anything in their blood. Beside himself, they were newcomers to India.

He heard the distant voice saying, "You mustn't talk any more. You'll tire yourself," and then the door opened and Ransome came in with the paper and pen and ink, and after him Aunt Phoebe, dusting the flour off her hands, and again his spirit cried out against the treacherous body, "Not now! O God! O Rama! O Vishnu! Not now! Not before them! They believe in me! Not before them!" And in the depths of his spirit he heard again the awful terrified howling of the dead Mr. Bannerjee.

He heard Ransome saying, "Well, my dear, I've done the best job I could. I've brought Aunt Phoebe to witness it. The Major can be the other witness* I'm afraid Miss Hodge wouldn't be recognized as a legal witness."

There was a note of weariness and falseness in Ransome's voice, but the very timbre of it illuminated in a sudden flash the Major's understanding. His friend Ransome was suffering, too; he was exhausted; he was near to defeat, but something in him made him carry on, pretending to believe what he could not believe, fighting somehow to the very end. The despair which had corroded Ransome was less terrible than this abysmal terror and despair that threatened to engulf himself. And the spectacle of Ransome's casualness, as if nothing tragic was happening, as if he were merely asking Edwina to sign her name to something of no importance whatever, brought to his spirit a sudden strength. He rose and turned away from them, pretending to look out of the window, but he covered his face with his hands and pressed his fingers against his temples until the pain brought him relief.

He was still shaking when Ransome seated himself to read the will, asking at the end, "Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes. I wouldn't know in any case."

Then Ransome held the will while she signed it, and when she had finished he gave the pen to Aunt Phoebe and then to the Major. The signature of Aunt Phoebe was scratchy but firm. The Major's was uncertain and trembling, like that of an old man.

Then Edwina said to the Major, "When will you be coming back?"

"This evening again . . . after dark." The treacherous body was not yet subdued, and he spoke in a choked voice, with difficulty.

Edwina said, "I'd like to speak to Tom for a moment alone."

The Major turned to Ransome and said, "I'll wait for you. We'll ride back together." For he was afraid again, this time of the wide red flat plain, of the roaring river, of the banyans and Java fig trees that lined the road, of the ruined temples. They would drag him back into the abyss of time, back into that nightmarish world in which Mr. Banner jee had passed the whole of his terrified existence. For the moment, until he became himself again, he had to stay close to Ransome. He had to shake off the hysteria before he again encountered the hard Scottish eye of Miss MacDaid, who knew the East and India better than any of them. She would look at him, and later in the evening she would say, in contempt, "So you too have turned Hindu . . . you of all people!" And now that she had resumed her afternoon exercise she would want to bicycle back.

Aunt Phoebe followed him out of the room, and when Edwina and Ransome were alone, Edwina looked at him and said, "What is the matter with him?"

"He's tired. He has right to be. Otherwise I noticed no difference.**

"It's more than that."

He shrugged his shoulders, pretending not to understand, and she asked, "You don't think he might do something violent?"

"No. He's not that kind." Yet his heart, his instinct, denied his words. He did not know. It seemed to him that the man who had just left the room was a man he did not know at all.

"Will you help him all you can?"

"I'll help him as much as I can." But it wouldn't be easy. He was aware lately that the Major had been slipping away from him. He thought, "Perhaps in grief and emotion the difference comes out. Perhaps there is something Indian in him which can never accept or understand the European in me." But that way, he knew, lay nonsense . . . the nonsense of the mystics, and of the doggerel, "East is East," of all Kipling who knew only the India of cantonments and clubs and provincial newspapers.

Edwina was saying, "I've thought of another thing. I'd like to leave some money for something that would help the East and the West to understand each other. I don't know how to- work it out. Could you think it over? I don't know how it's to be done. I'm too tired to think it out."

Bitterly Ransome answered her. "There's only one way, and that's to leave a fund for rat poison ... to destroy ignorance and prejudice and greed and provinciality. It dies hard. . . . You'd have to kill off people like the Boys and the old Dewan, the merchants and the Lord Eskeths, the bank managers, the priests and people like Pukka Lil and Mrs. Simon and the old General."

She smiled. "Even that might be done if we went about it cleverly enough. I've never had many prejudices, myself. I suppose middle-class society would call that depraved, but I've an idea that God might list it under the head of Virtue."

She turned away from him to look out of the window, and in a moment she said, "Look!" and following her gaze, he saw the carriage of the Maharani drawn by the white bullocks with gilded horns, coming up the Mission drive.

"Aren't they pretty?" she said,

"It's the Maharani, probably come to ask after you."

"Thank her for me,"

"I will."

He stood up and said, "It's all right now. You're going to get well . . . in spite of everything."

She turned back to him, regarding him for a moment with the blue eyes which looked so enormous in the thin pale face. Then she said, "And if I get well ... so what."

Then he knew for certain that she understood more than any of them that there was no way out.

But he said, "I wouldn't worry about that. Let things take care of themselves."

"That's what I've always done/' she said, "and now look at the God- damned thing."

As he turned away from her he became aware of the presence of Miss Hodge in the partly open doorway, and he said, "Come in, Miss Hodge. I'm going away now."

He left them there, Miss Hodge sitting by the bed, Edwina, her back toward the door, her eyes closed. Miss Hodge was telling her about the conversation she had just had with the Bishop and Lady So-and-so.

The Maharani did not get down from her carriage. She had come, she said, for two things to ask after the health of Lady Esketh and to ask Aunt Phoebe if she would come again to tea on the following day. They all stood by the carriage while the bullocks groaned and snorted with indignation. Then the Maharani said, "I should like to speak to the Major for a moment," and the others withdrew to a little distance while the Major stepped nearer to the carriage.

She leaned down toward him and said, "I've had an answer from the parents of the girl. She's in Poona. They're bringing her here as soon as the rains stop."

"Very good, Your Highness."

"She's very pretty and intelligent and charming and educated."

"I'm sure she is, Your Highness."

"I think you'll find her a good wife. What you need, Major, is a home and some children."

Then abruptly she bowed to the others and bade them good-by and ordered the driver to be off. He prodded the bullocks. They began again their snorting complaints and set off down the drive at a quick trot. For a moment the Major stood looking after them. His body was no longer trembling. The spirit had won. He was quiet now. He behaved like Ransome and Edwina. Strength flowed through him and self-respect. He turned to Ransome and in an even, calm voice said, "Shall we go?" He had conquered the old terror, the old fears, the ancient claims of his ancestors. He knew suddenly that they would never return again to claim him.

"Wait a moment," said Ransome. "I want to see what's coming up the drive."

He pointed toward two Mahratta policemen who were advancing toward them, carrying a heavy flat object between them. As they came nearer Ransome divined that the object was a large picture framed in teakwood. As the policemen came up to them, one of them placed his end of the burden on the ground, while the other lifted it to an upright position, supporting it with one hand and regarding it at the same time with the air of a connoisseur displaying a masterpiece.

It was the enlarged and tinted photograph of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry taken in her prime while playing in "Puss~in-Boots" ... a large blonde, voluptuous picture well calculated to rouse the passion of dark-skinned savages like the Bhils. The glass was missing and the picture was stained her and there by water and grease and smoke.

One of the policemen spoke rapidly in Mahratta to the Major, who turned when he had finished and translated his story. The picture had been discovered by policemen searching for loot in one of the ruined mosques of the dead city of El-Kautara. There where no images had ever been permitted, where no woman had ever penetrated, the savage Bhils had set up the enlarged photograph of Pukka Lil as a goddess, and were worshiping her when the policemen broke in.

For Ransome the strain of the last hour was suddenly broken and he felt a wild impulse toward laughter mad, soul-tearing laughter, soul satisfying, mocking, belly laughter over Pukka Lil and the Bhils, the General, India, the West, the dictators, the great bankers and politicians, over the whole idiotic human race, but most of all over himself.

Both policemen now stood, gazing like moon calves at the enlarged photograph, their terrier pugnacity wilted in their admiration for the blonde and buxom beauty of the bank manager's wife. Pretending to wipe the perspiration from his face, Ransome managed to hide behind the piece of surgical gauze which served him as a handkerchief until mercifully Aunt Phoebe said, "Tell them to take it into the storeroom

with Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's other things. I fiave to sleep there but I guess I can stand it."

At the gate of his own house he said, "I'm stopping here. Ill send the bike back with my boy. I'm going to get some sleep."

The Major stopped, too, took his hand, and said, "Thanks." The gray- blue eyes searched Ransome's face for a moment and he made as if to speak. Then quickly he looked away and said, "See you in the morning. Have a good sleep. You deserve it." And abruptly he pedaled away down the wet, shining road.

Ransome, troubled by the sudden change in his friend, stood looking after him until he had disappeared round the turn by the Banner] ees' house. The Major had meant to say something . . . something which at that moment might perhaps have explained a great deal which Ransome had not understood before, something which might have made their friendship closer and more profound. What it was he could not imagine, but his instinct told him that for a second they had come very near to each other, nearer than they had ever been before, and that if he himself had been an Indian the Major would not have checked himself. He wanted to leap on the porter's bicycle to ride after the Major and call out, "What was it you meant to say? Don't be afraid. Man is a lonely shut-in creature. Speak! Say what you must say to some one!" But he remained standing there beneath the great banyan tree because all his life he had been taught that such an action would be sentimental and even ridiculous. It was the sort of thing that one didn't do, and so he remained there as if paralyzed.

As the rain began again he turned and entered his own compound. He had not seen his house for more than a week, not since the flood abated, and now it looked strange to him, a little, he thought, because the man who entered the gate now was not the same one who had gone oft drunkenly through the sulphur-yellow twilight to dine at Mr. Bannerjee's. But it was different, too, for physical reasons; the garden house lay shattered all about the old Buick which John the Baptist had covered with a piece of tarpaulin salvaged from somewhere, and part of the roof of the house had fallen in. But it was the trees and plants and vines which made the greatest difference. The leaves of the trees were a deep brilliant green and the flower-beds had become jungles where marigold and hollyhock, hibiscus and nasturtium, fuchsia and calendula ran riot. On the house and the walls of the compound the jasmine, the bignonia, the bougainvillaea, the convolvulus and the scarlet creeper had sent out greedy tendrils which spread everywhere, climbing across windows and doors, stifling the waterspouts, hiding the cornices and climbing across the low sloping roof.

He stopped for a moment, moved and filled with wonder as he always was by the miracle which the rains accomplished. While he stood there the lean, shining black figure of John the Baptist appeared in the shaken porte-cochere and came toward him to take the bicycle.

Ransome said, "Are you all right? Have you had enough to eat?" and in his soft Pondicherry French John the Baptist said, "Yes, I'm all right, Saheb. I am glad the Saheb has come back."

"I've come back to sleep. Is my bed ready?"

"Yes, Saheb, your bed has always been kept ready."

For a second Ransome thought the boy regarded him stiffly and with curiosity, almost as if he were a stranger. Then John the Baptist looked away quickly, as he had done that night when Ransome caught his eyes in the mirror.

"Will Saheb eat?" asked John the Baptist.

"Not now. I only want to sleep."

"Very good, Saheb."

"And you must send for the gardener tomorrow to come and cut away the vines. They're shutting out all the light and the air."

"The gardener is dead, Saheb."

For a second he was overcome again by a sickening weariness. He said. "Very well. Find another."

"Yes, Saheb."

Then he went into his own room and took of? his clothes and went out again to stand in the compound with the warm rain beating against his naked body. At last when he felt clean again he returned to the room and threw himself onto the bed, to fall almost at once into a clean sound sleep, the first he had known for what seemed to him half his life.

At the end of the week the abnormal volume of the rains diminished

a little. Showers fell every half-hour, brief and sudden showers during which the water fell in torrents, but no longer did the rain continue day and night unbroken, flooding the fields and swelling the river. Between the showers there were moments when the sun appeared, no longer the dusty, brazen, red sun of the dry season, but a sun which raised the steam from the metaled roads and stone courtyards, so that all the countryside was like one vast steam bath. Through all the heat the fanatic-eyed Colonel Moti and his two assistants worked like demons, disinfecting, destroying, clearing away, and at the end of ten days the Colonel, arrogant, satisfied, triumphant, reported to the Maharani and her Council that he and his assistants had defied and vanquished the evil power of India herself; there was no longer any danger of a fresh outbreak if those in authority followed the instructions left by him. Before he left he told the Maharani and the Council that when the definite plans for the new city were made, it was their duty to call upon him for directions. Then he went away, defiant, burning with the passion of his purpose, as wiry, as fiery-eyed as ever, untouched either by disease or by the dreadful heat or the unceasing work.

The struggle of the Maharani and the old Dewan came to naught, for the morning after the Council meeting the old man, desiccated by the heat, corroded by his hatred and contempt for Colonel Moti, failed to waken. His son said that he was ninety-two years old, but no one really knew. They only knew that he was the last of his kind.

Two days later Lady Esketh died in the room at the American Mission. She died in the state of coma into which she had fallen a little while after Ransome and the Major had left her. In the days that followed, Fern had come three times to see her, but the visits were useless; once she was delirious, and on the other two occasions she was unconscious. A little time before she died she regained her senses again and the Major came and sat by her, holding tightly to her hand. She smiled at him, but she was too weak to speak, and while he sat beside her he talked to her as he had talked on the morning he found her alone in the ward, comforting her, easing her weariness, enveloping her in the great warmth of his spirit. It was like having him again pick her up and carry her away. He no longer pleaded with her to live nor did he try to deceive her into believing that she was not going to die. He knew now what it was that she desired, and he understood why she desired it, and in his own loneliness he knew that she was wiser than himself. His own flesh left him in peace now and the hysterical terror did not return, and during that moment of light in all the darkness which engulfed her, she knew that he was safe again, as safe as if she had never come into his life to bring ruin and hopelessness with her. A little while before she slipped back again into the darkness she managed to press his hand and whisper, "Don't send Miss Hodge away. I told her I would make you promise." He promised, and then for a moment bent over her and laid his face against hers, but she slipped away from him again back into the darkness.

Miss Hodge and Aunt Phoebe were with her when she died. Aunt Phoebe, who had sat by so many deathbeds, felt her hands turning cold and sent the Sweeper boy on his bicycle to fetch Ransome and the Major, but when they arrived she was already dead and they found Aunt Phoebe trying to calm Miss Hodge, who had thrown herself across the bed and was weeping hysterically.

The poor old thing had never before witnessed death. For her Miss Dirks had gone away on some long trip connected with the business of the school; perhaps she would never be dead. But she had seen her friend Lady Esketh die; she had felt the hands turning cold . . . Lady Esketh, her great friend whom she talked about so much to the Bishops and the aristocracy. Now she screamed, terrified and shaken, calling upon Lady Esketh not to go away leaving her behind, alone, with not a friend in the world. There was no means of quieting her until Ransome said, "You are not alone. I am your friend and Aunt Phoebe and the Major. None of us will leave you until Miss Dirks comes back."

She looked up at them then in a dazed way, still sobbing, her pudgy face swollen, and Ransome said, "Lady Esketh asked me to look after you, and Miss Dirks, too. I promised them both. You can live in my house if you like."

For a moment the disordered mind groped to understand the miracle which had happened . . . that she should be invited to live in the house of a man of the world like Ransome. The sobbing stopped and she said, timidly, "Would it be proper?"

Ransome patted her shoulder and said, "That doesn't matter. Of course it is." And then, quite sanely, she said, "Thank you. That's very kind of you. I'll come with you."

When he left the Mission she went with him back to his own house, where John the Baptist prepared a room for her on the first floor. She began to cry again, saying, "You're so good to me. I've been through so much. I didn't know people could be so good. When Sarah comes back she'll thank you properly. I'm so bad at such things."

Then she seemed happy, and that night she had dinner with him, telling him eagerly about the Bishops and the aristocracy. She had, it appeared, forgotten entirely the rape and the ensuing pregnancy.

But a little after ten o'clock John the Baptist appeared in Ransome's bedroom to say that the strange Memsaheb was going away again. He stopped her on the drive. She told him that she was going to Lady Esketh, who wouldn't know what to do without her. Gently, patiently, he persuaded her that Lady Esketh was dead and that there was nothing more to be done for her.

At the end of the week Aunt Phoebe and the Smileys gave the first of their Saturday lunch parties since the disaster. Confidentially Aunt Phoebe said to Ransome, "I don't suppose it will be as gay as the old parties were, but I'm a great believer in habit and routine. There's nothing so good for making you forget things as carrying on in the same old rut."

So about twelve o'clock there gathered about the long table in the Smileys' kitchen the old members of the Saturday Lunch Club. Poor Mr. Jobnekar was gone forever, but in his place there were two new members Fern and Miss Hodge. For Miss Hodge was one of them now. She had a whole committee of guardians Ransome and Aunt Phoebe, the Smileys and Fern, the Major and Raschid Ali Khan and even Miss MacDaid. She had, it seemed, forgotten the unfortunate episode with the Sikh and the ensuing worries; she spoke less of Miss Dirks and she seemed to have reconciled herself to the death of Lady Esketh. She moved between Ransome's house and the Mission, sometimes straying as far as the hospital, wandering along the road holding conversations with imaginary people. In Europe this behavior would have aroused mockery and perhaps even resentment, but in Ranchipur everybody knew about her and no one took the least notice. She forgot the tragedies of Miss Dirks and Lady Esketh perhaps because she had a childlike mind, but also she was pleased now and satisfied and free. Poor Miss Hodge who for twenty-five years had wanted to go about and know interesting people, found in her madness a kind of prestige which life had always denied her.

Ransome and Homer Smiley came directly to lunch from the Orphanage, where the Ministry of Public Welfare had already set up a temporary office from which they distributed rice and gram and millet and set about a survey of contaminated wells. Miss MacDaid for the sake of exercise came on a bicycle instead of a tonga, accompanied by Fern.

On the way out from town, while they pedaled along side by side, Miss MacDaid conducted an examination of Fern, shouting at her whenever the bicycles drew a little apart. She began by calling out, "You're absolutely sure you want to be a nurse?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"What makes you think so?"

Then for a time Fern pedaled in silence and at last she said, "Well, I do. I could give you a lot of reasons, but they'd all add up to the same thing. I want to stay here and I want to be a nurse."

"I always heard that you said you hated Ranchipur and talked against it."

Fern blushed. "I did, I guess, but it was different then." Her bicycle ran into a hole in the road, and to right herself she described a large arc which took her far away from Miss MacDaid.

"Well, it's worse now than it was before," shouted Miss MacDaid.

"No," Fern called back over her shoulder. "It's different now. I want to live and work here in Ranchipur and I don't know anything. I've never been educated properly. I think learning to be a nurse is the best way to make myself of some use."

Then until they reached Distillery Corner Miss MacDaid pedaled in silence, ruminating upon the strangeness of people and of Fern Simon in particular. She thought she knew why the girl had changed in such an extraordinary fashion, but her common sense told her that such a reason for change was not to be trusted. Love, Miss MacDaid supposed, was all right in its place, but a girl shouldn't let it dominate the whole of her life. You couldn't depend on it. After the first transports, everything depended upon how much wear and tear you could endure without changing your mind and breaking up. And in Ranchipur there was plenty of wear and tear, what with the vile climate and Hindu intrigues and shiftlessness and gossip and one thing and another. Besides the girl was much too pretty to be a good nurse. A nurse should never be too pretty; it made other women hostile and upset men patients. "A good nurse/' thought Miss MacDaid, pedaling rapidly, "ought to look like an old Shire mare, the way I do."

"I want you to be sure in your own mind," she called across to Fern.

"I am sure."

She felt shy with Miss MacDaid Miss MacDaid, who could be so gentle in dressing a wound, could be rough and agonizing in dealing with human frailty. But even if Fern had not been shy, she could not have told the reasons why she was so sure; she could not tell Miss Mac- Daid that she had changed not because she was in love with Tom, but because since that first night when he had taken her back and deposited her at the Smileys' she had been discovering many things, among them something known as common sense. She couldn't, for fear that Miss MacDaid would think her potty, tell the old war horse that since that night everything in the world had changed for her because something had been happening inside herself. She couldn't explain to Miss MacDaid that all the silliness, the sloppiness, the nonsense, had gone out of her forever in the misery she had seen in the hospital and at the Music School, or that the Ranchipur where she and Miss MacDaid were now cycling, was an utterly different Ranchipur from the one in which she had spent nearly the whole of her life. It wasn't the earthquake and the flood which had changed her, but something inside herself and something she had found in Tom and the Smileys and Aunt Phoebe and Miss MacDaid herself, and even in poor Lady Esketh an honesty, a simplicity, a friendliness. Miss MacDaid would certainly think her crazy if she were to say that the very stones of the road, the leaves on the trees, the houses, the bullock carts, were new to her and charged with excitement and interest, It was exciting now to be pedaling along the Racecourse road, exciting to be talking to Miss MacDaid, exciting to think that in a few minutes she would see Tom and have him grin at her and press her hand beneath the table. It wasn't necessary to invent a character known as Blythe Summerfield, "The Pearl of the Orient." She even minded less the death of her father and poor Hazel. That was something which seemed to have happened years and years ago in another life.

Beside her, Miss MacDaid's stout legs pedaled faster and faster as her matter-of-fact brain worked faster and faster. She had now reached that stage where she was selling Fern to herself, because she wanted so much against her own common sense and experience to believe in the girl. She wanted desperately some one to carry on at the hospital when she herself became tired and old, some one who was young and strong as an ox, as she herself had always been, and Fern, if her strength and stubbornness held out, might be just the one. Certainly the girl was healthy to have gone through what she had been through and still look fresh, with color in her cheeks. Miss MacDaid tried to find reasons against Fern's plan, but always she found herself brought up sharply before one fact . . . that at the hospital and in the shambles of the Music School the girl had taken on and carried through without complaint a task which would have floored many a trained and veteran nurse. Talking to herself, she said: "You can't deny that. The girl has guts."

For the heart of Miss MacDaid was happy again, even when she looked at the gray suffering face of the Major; he would, she knew, one day recover from his suffering. There was no time now for suffering. Work would cure him, work would cauterize the wounds. In her flat-footed honesty she did not pretend to regret the death of Lady Esketh but regarded it rather as an intercession on the part of the gods; in a way it had been Lady Esketh's own fault, the result of her shallow life with its vanity and luxury and idleness and folly. If she had troubled to have had a typhoid inoculation she would not now be dead; but all things considered, for the good of the hospital and their work and the Major himself and the thousands who depended upon him, perhaps even for Lady Esketh herself, it was better that she was dead. Only one thing troubled her conscience, and that was the memory of having written down the name of Lady Esketh on the list of dying before she burned it.

"But that kind of thing," she kept telling herself, "is pure nonsense. That couldn't have had anything to do with it." Nevertheless the memory filled her with shame . . . that she, Miss MacDaid, the head of the Ranchipur Hospital, could sink to the level of indulging in witchcraft and hocus-pocus. But sometimes, in the night, she wondered about it; perhaps there was some sinister power in such goings-on which science had not yet explained.

The party, as Aunt Phoebe had foreseen, was not gay; it was friendly and it recaptured a little of that spirit of unity which had kept the little group together for so many years. None of them, save Miss Hodge, was able to shake off the presence of Edwina and poor Miss Dirks, Mr. Jobnekar and his family, Elmer and Hazel Simon, and all the others.

They were all there somehow, all the dead, in the Smiley's big cool kitchen, even when for a little time the group, talking of the plans for the new city, grew enthusiastic, and the old fire appeared for an instant in the eyes of the Major. They would always be there, for they were a part of the change, but their presence would grow a little less real with each week, each month, each year, because, as Aunt Phoebe said, the dead were gone and the living had such a poor time of it that there would be plenty to do besides mope.

At four o'clock the Major and Miss MacDaid rose to return to the hospital, Miss MacDaid with something of the old flustered, happy look in her eyes which had been there before Edwina came to Ranchipur. The Major belonged to her again, at least for a little time, and since that sudden mystical vision on the night she thought him dead, she possessed him in a new and more satisfactory way.

As Ransome and Homer Smiley left to return to the office of the Ministry of Public Welfare they encountered at the very doorway the figure of a plump little man with a pot belly, the pallid skin of the Englishman who has been too long in India, and the pomposity of an Eastern bank manager. It was Mr. Hoggett-Egburry who had come, he said, to thank the Smileys for all their kindness to his wife and to recover the magpie collection of bric-a-brac which she had left in Aunt Phoebe's care* Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was, he said, well enough, but a little tired and very upset by all the sufferings she had been through. He was sending her back to England to her own people on a holiday. As he told this bit of news a sigh escaped him, the faintest ghost of a sigh, but one charged with relief, for he knew as well as the others that she would never return to India. It wasn't the first time such a thing had happened. She would go home and be lost at once in the swamp of mediocrity, in a whole society of people like herself who had been pinched and blanched and made bilious by the awfulness of India.

Ransome thought, "Anyway she's better off than most. She drinks, and when she's drunk she can still think she's important."

As Mr. Hoggett-Egburry entered the house, Ransome said to Homer Smiley, "I shall miss Pukka Lil, She'll leave a hole. Every Indian state should have at least one Pukka Lil. It's part of the scenery like the snakes and the temples."

Homer Smiley grinned, "I shouldn't worry," he said. "There'll be another along at any minute. There's probably one on tomorrow's train."

At sundown Ransome sat on his verandah on the side of the house overlooking the racecourse and the flat red muddy plain that extended as far as Mount Abana and the dead Moghul city of El-Kautara. There was no more brandy and whisky in Ranchipur, but there was gin brought in one of the first trains by Mr. Bottlewallah, an enterprising Parsee merchant, and so he drank gin and tonic water which he did not like but was the only thing available.

At the gateway beneath the great banyan John the Baptist squatted with two friends, making music with a flute and two drums. Beyond, across the flat expanse of the racecourse, a long procession of cows and water buffaloes moved toward the sunset, goaded from the rear by a black little urchin who carried a long bamboo pole. It was the hour of all the day which Ransome loved best, when the scent of jasmine came out strongly from the vine which covered half the house, to mingle with the odor of wood and cow dung smoke and spices. The rain had stopped for a time and the sun, setting, had turned the scudding clouds overhead a magnificent red and gold. Across the red plain violet light lay flatly like a fog, blurring the silhouettes of the returning cattle.

He was tired now by the long day of work in steam-bath heat, by the clamoring and quarreling of the swarming hordes at the storehouse, but most of all by the accumulated weariness of days. He thought, sipping comfortably his gin and tonic, "Fern will be along presently."

But it was the thought of Edwina which kept returning to him. All the way home from the Orphanage he had thought of her, wondering at her story and the odd destiny that finished her off in a place like Ranchipur. Now he thought, suddenly, "It's a pity she couldn't have come to the Saturday party. She would have liked it so much." And he saw with astonishment how well she would have fitted in with the others. She had belonged to them always, but the discovery of the fact had come too late.

The rest of her life had all been wasted. The thought threw a new light upon her curious, perverse character.

Then as he lighted a cigar he saw coming down the road from the direction of the town the bullock carriage of the Maharani. It was moving at a quick trot, the gait which the old lady liked and the bullocks detested, but as the carriage approached his own house the driver checked the bullocks to a walk, and as they passed his own gateway two heads were thrust out from beneath the gilded leather hood and looked toward his house. At sight of him seated on the veranda they were withdrawn again quickly but not before he had recognized one of them as the Maharani and the other as Aunt Phoebe. Chuckling, he thought, "The last Queen and the last democrat riding out together," and there swept over him a profound wave of love for this preposterous and beautiful and terrible country, this India where tragedy and farce lay so near to each other just beneath the surface of life.

In the gateway John the Baptist and his friends, recovering from the salaams into which they had thrown themselves at sight of the royal bullocks, resumed their music, the sound drifting over the plain to lose itself in the growing violet light. For a long time he sat with his eyes closed, listening lazily with half his mind, thinking of nothing in particular, but filled with wonder at the intricacy and the improbable beauty and cruelty of man's existence. Beyond the racecourse there rose suddenly at the moment the sun slipped below the horizon, the long-drawn, solitary cry of a jackal and his whole body contracted for a second because the sound was so like that of the wails which had risen from the dying city as the flood swept down upon it. Then another jackal howled, and another, and suddenly, swifdy, the darkness came down as if a black curtain had fallen, and between the wildly drifting clouds the stars came out, glittering in the clean-washed air like the diamonds of the Maharani. In the gateway beneath the ancient banyan the black figures of John the Baptist and his friends dissolved into the darkness, but the music of the flute and drums went on and on in the hot damp stillness.

THE END