The Rains Came/Part I - 1

Between two worlds, one dead

One powerless to be born

MATTHEW ARNOLD

It was the hour of the day that Ransome loved best and he sat on the verandah now, drinking brandy and watching the golden light flood all the banyan trees and the yellow-gray house and the scarlet creeper for one brilliant moment before the sun, with a sudden plunge, dropped below the horizon and left the whole countryside in darkness. It was a magical business which for his northern blood, accustomed to long still blue twilights of Northern England, never lost its strangeness as if suddenly the whole world stood still for a second and then slipped swiftly into an abyss of darkness. For Ransome there was always a shadow of primitive terror in the Indian sunset.

And here in Ranchipur there were other things besides the beauty of the golden light. It was the hour when the air grew still and laden with a heavy scent compounded of the smoke of burning wood and cow dung and of jasmine and marigold and the yellow dust raised by the cattle being driven home from the burnt pasture of the race course on the opposite side of the road, the hour too when distantly one heard the faint thumping of the drums from the burning ghats down by the river beyond the Maharajah's zoological gardens, when the screaming of the jackals began as they crept to the edge of the jungle waiting for the sudden darkness to bring to their cowardly yellow bodies the courage to start out and seek on the plains what had died during the day. At dawn the greedy vultures would succeed them, coming out of caverns and dung-covered thorn trees, for the beasts which had died during the night. And always at this hour too came the fine thread of sound from John the Baptist's flute, as he squatted at the gate welcoming the cool of the evening.

John the Baptist sat there now, under the vast greedy banyan which each year sent down branches that bit into the earth, struck root and claimed another square yard or two of garden. Up north, near Peshawar,

there was an enormous banyan tree which covered acres, a whole forest which was at the same time a single living tree. "If the world went on long enough," thought Ransome, "that tree might take possession of all of it, like the evil and stupidity of man slowly, relentlessly, thrusting down branch after branch with all the greediness and tough vigor of life in India."

Even the jackals and the vultures had to be out early to fall upon the dead, upon man and donkey, sacred cow and pariah dog alike, if they were to survive. If you rose early in the morning to ride out of the city into the open country you would see here and there, over the whole brown plain, small writhing quarreling black masses of life devouring the dead. They were vultures. If you set out even half an hour later they would be gone and in their places you would find only little piles of white bones picked clean, all that was left of a cow or a donkey or sometimes of a man.

Beyond the maze of his lazy thought he listened to John the Baptist's simple melody. It was an improvisation which went on endlessly, and to Ransome's Western ear it was always the same. So far as he could discover it was the sole means of release for John's soul the music and the arranging of the marigolds and the blue lilies which were all that was left of the garden so late in the year. John had no girl, or if he had one he saw her in secret dubious ways. His whole life was his master's life his master's tea when he wakened, his master's breakfast, luncheon and dinner, his master's shirts and socks, his jodhpurs and his shorts, his brandy and his cigars. He was a Christian boy, a Catholic from Pondicherry who spoke French more easily than Hindustani or the Gujerati native to Ranchipur a curious French which, softened and rounded by his tongue, he made somehow into an Indian language, unfitting it for use in salons, dressmaking establishments and diplomacy. His proper name was Jean Batiste, but to Ransome he was always John the Baptist* The Prophet, he sometimes thought, with his skinny body nourished on wild locusts and honey, must have looked like this skinny miniature servant.

In the fading light, surrounding John, squatted three or four of his friends, one of whom accompanied him with malarial listlessness by thumping a drum. They were all, like himself, gentlemen's "boys" probably the Colonel's and Mr. Bannerjee's and Major Safti's and one or two perhaps from the Maharajah's guesthouse. It was very difficult to tell one from the other.

They would thump and play on the flute for a time and then the music would cease, but Ransome, on the verandah, knew they were not silent; they were simply gossiping. They knew everything which happened in Ranchipur. Not one of them could really read and none of them ever dreamed of looking at a newspaper, but they knew everything, not only about things like wars and earthquakes and calamities which happened in remote parts of the world, but thefts, adulteries, betrayals, and a great deal more in Ranchipur which never reached the papers in Bombay or Delhi or Calcutta or even the ears of those whom they served. John the Baptist had been with him ever since he had come to Ranchipur; he l^new his master and now and then modestly he would bring forth a stupendous bit of news and lay it on the table at mealtime as if he were serving tea or putting down a bowl of rice, Mrs. Talmadge's scandalous elopement with Captain Sergeant, for example; John the Baptist had predicted it and so Ransome knew it three days before it happened. He could have warned Talmadge and prevented it, if it had been worth the effort of interfering.

The group beneath the banyan tree presently stopped playing altogether and, in silhouette against the fading light, Ransome saw their heads together. And then in the tree above them there broke out a fearful rowa wild cacophony of chattering and screaming, and along the dusty tops of the great mango trees raced a whole procession of monkeys, the sacred monkeys of Ranchipur noisy gray black handsome insolent comic and confident in their age-old knowledge that no one dared to kill one of them, neither the Indians because long ago they had fought in battle by the side of Rama, nor the Europeans because of the awful row the assassination of a single monkey would raise. Ransome hated them and was amused by them all at once. He hated them now for shattering the stillness of the evening with their infernal row, and he hated them because they pulled the flowers off plants in the garden and stripped the tiles periodically from the roof of the potting shed. John the Baptist and his friends, deep in their gossip, never so much as glanced at the trees overhead.

The spell broken by the monkey's row, Ransome finished the last of his brandy, put down his fan and rose from his chair to walk to the back of the house and have a look at the weather.

The garden was a big square enclosure surrounded by a high wall made of yellow mud and wattle which gave it a soft mottled appearance wherever it was not covered by trailing bougainvillea and bignonia. It was dry now, the very earth bitten deep by the brazen heat of a sun which went on and on, day after day, unrelieved by any cloud. Here and there a tired marigold or a despairing hollyhock, its roots soaked by the gardener with water carried from the great bottomless well in the corner, still stood, raddled and spindling and exhausted by the glare. For days, for weeks, the whole countryside the farmers, the shopkeepers, the army, the ministers of state had waited for the weather to break and the rains to begin, those rich flooding rains which overnight turned the gardens, the fields, the jungle, from a parched and burning desert into a mass of green which seemed to live, to writhe, to devour the walls and trees and the houses. Even the old Maharajah had waited through long weeks of burning heat, unwilling to quit Ranchipur for the delights of Paris and Marienbad until he knew that the rains had come and his people were safe from famine.

And with the passing of each week the tension grew. It was not only the awful heat that wore nerves finer and finer, but terror as well, the terror of famine and disease and the horror of that burning sun which nerves could bear no longer; for no one pretended that even the good old Maharajah, with all his grain depots and his food reserves, could save twelve million people from misery and death if Rama and Vishnu and Krishna saw fit to send no rain. The terror spread through the whole people; one was aware of it even in the shaded gardens of the rich merchants and on the verandahs of the fortunate Europeans who could escape to the hill stations. It was like an infection which unknowingly one caught from one's neighbor. It touched even Ransome himself who need not stay in Ranchipur. For weeks now it had been an actual presence. You could feel it all about you. There were times when it seemed that you could almost touch it.

The flute and drum began again, a plaintive, almost wistful sound, drifting through the trees across the garden from the gate, The house was big and plain, built long ago to shelter some British official in the days of the wicked Maharajah when there were two whole regiments stationed in Ranchipur a house many times too big for Ransome, with vast high-ceilinged rooms beneath a roof made of tiles with a thick thatch of reeds and grass just beneath to keep out the heat. In the thatch the mongooses and lizards and mice rattled about all night and even disturbed dinner parties with their squeaks and rustlings. There was a quality of fantasy about a big square Georgian house which had a roof made of reeds that sheltered a whole menagerie of small beasts. On the outside it looked like any house in Belgravia, and inside it was full of mongooses and lizards. Ransome was equally fond of both the shy, nervous mongooses for themselves and the lizards because they devoured mosquitoes. You would see them during dinner scuttling from behind one Mogul miniature to another, snapping up a mosquito or two on the way.

Then the sun sank suddenly and darkness closed over the garden as if a curtain had come down and the stars came out all at once, glittering like the famous diamonds of the fierce old Maharani. Quietly Ransome made his way along the garden path past the well surrounded by bamboo which was rustling now in the faint breeze that always came up for a moment when the sun fell. A mongoose slipped along the far path, scarcely more than a shadow, on his evening hunt for mice and snakes and snakes' eggs. Ransome hated snakes and it was beginning now to be the season for them. Already John the Baptist had killed a cobra in the Maharajah's park just beyond the gate. With the first splattering drop of rain they would come swarming out of old roots and crannies in the wall the cobras, the Russell's vipers, the fierce little kraits, the giant pythons. The garden was walled, but mysteriously they always managed to invade it. Every season the servants killed a half dozen. Last year Togo, the pet wild pig, had died from the bite of a krait hardly longer than a foot rule.

In the windows of the house a light appeared and Ransome knew that John the Baptist had put away his flute and finished his gossip and was preparing supper. Ransome could see him moving about, clad only in a breech clout, softly, like a ghost. He was small, almost a miniature of a man, not like a midget, but complete and perfectly formed like a bronze statue of an athlete under life size, lean with the leanness of a man who as a child has worked hard without ever having had enough to eat. During the heat Ransome gave him permission to go about the house naked to do his work. It was more reasonable and much cleaner, for John the Baptist naked was clean; the moment he put on white European clothes he became dirty. In five minutes the immaculate white was soiled with smudges of ashes and dust, with stains of soup and coffee. He had no gift for wearing European clothes. Naked he was clean, for somehow out of his Hindu past and ancestry had persisted the habit of bathing every day. Each morning he went to the well at the end of the garden and in the hot sun bathed from head to foot.

He only used a part of the big house the dining room, a small sitting room and a bedroom on the ground floor. The drawing room, a vast empty room facing north for the cool, he used as a studio. Here he dabbled in painting. The rest was shut up and empty save for the lizards and mice.

When he had changed he came from his own room into the dining room. In the far corner of the room were electric fans which kept the air stirring, less picturesque than the old-fashioned punkahs but more efficient. Ransome thanked God that Ranchipur was a progressive state with an electric plant an undependable and eccentric one to be sure but better than none at all. After the waterworks it was the first thing that visitors were taken to see. Then came in order the narrow-gauge railway, the hospital, the zoo and the asylum for the insane.

The bare table had an enormous platter piled high with fruit pome- granates, melons, mangoes, guavas and papaias. It was not only decorative but it looked delicious and cool and it pleased the painter sense in Ransome. The jackals had stopped screaming now. In the darkness they were silent on their nervous hunt for carrion. The breeze died suddenly and the night was still again and sprinkled with stars. Just before the monsoon arrived they seemed to come very close. Even the fans could give no illusion of cool.

When John the Baptist appeared with cold consomme he was no longer naked but dressed in a suit of white drill, fresh from the dhobi, but already there was a smudge of ashes at the elbow and a spot of consomme on the front of the jacket. He put down the soup and waited and after a moment Ransome spoke:

"What gossip did you hear tonight, John?"

The boy wriggled a little before speaking, pleased that his master should show curiosity. Retailing gossip, telling the master things he did not know made him feel important and valuable and sure of his place. He said, "Not much, Sahib. Only about Miss MacDaid."

They had a queer way of conversation. Ransome addressed the boy in English and the boy replied in his strange soft Pondicherry French. Each understood the other's language but each preferred to speak his own.

"What about Miss MacDaid?"

"Anthony says she likes Major Safti."

"Oh! How likes?"

"Too much," said John, with a shy grin.

"Oh! And what else?"

"A big sahib is coming on a visit to His Highness. And his wife is coming with him."

"Who's that?"

"He's called Lord Esketh." John the Baptist called it "Eskitt" but Ransome knew what he meant. "Anthony said she is very beautiful. He saw her in Delhi. But he says she is a devil, sahib, a she-devil a sorciere?

Ransome finished his consomme and John the Baptist carried away the dish without saying another word. He never spoke unless spoken to and never volunteered information which was not requested, so he went no further with the subject of Lord Esketh and the she-devil and left Ransome wondering why an English peeress, and a rich one at that, should be coming to Ranchipur by choice at a season when everyone who could escape would flee to the mountains. He knew who Lord Esketh was and frowned at the thought of his coming to disturb the peace of Ranchipur- The name "Lady Esketh" stirred something in his memory, but he could not quite remember who she was and he found the heat too great to make any great effort. The news about Miss MacDaid stirred him more profoundly because it seemed so unlikely and, in a comic fashion, so tragic.

He could have gone away. He was not kept here like the old Maharajah by a sense of duty to his people, nor like Major Safti and Miss MacDaid because to them had been entrusted the health of twelve million people, nor like the Smileys on whom the children of the Untouchables and the lower castes depended, nor like Mr. Bannerjee whose handsome wife chose to stay because she was an Indian and passionately nationalist and did not like the idea of hill stations. Ransome remained, almost, it might have been said, out of perversity. He had plenty of money and not a tie in the world, yet he stayed on and on through the burning heat, waiting for that day, if it ever came, when the skies would open and the floods descend and the fields and jungle would steam and writhe and grow in the incredible wet heat which was worse than the hot dusty dryness of the winter season. Something in the sight of the dead burnt earth springing into an incredible orgy of life stirred him as no other manifestation of nature had ever stirred him. With the coming of the monsoon a frenzy of energy would seize him and he would paint day after day as long as there was light, standing naked and dripping in the damp heat, sometimes in the vast empty drawing room with it's mildewed walls, sometimes on the verandah, tormented by insects, painting the garden which seemed to grow into life before his eyes, trying to capture the feeling of the miracle, until at last, knowing he had failed, he would destroy everything he had done and go back again to his brandy.

There was no temptation to leave for he had no desire to go to Simla or Darjeeling or Ootacamund to be with the small people with their small ambitions, the army officers and the civil servants with their wives and brats, their precedence and their snobbery, their clubs and their surburban British manners. He had tried that twice and found that it was intolerable far more intolerable than the monsoon.

When he had finished his supper and had his coffee, well iced (thank God for the Maharajah's ice factory), he lighted his pipe, took a stick and went out for an evening walk. By the time he passed through his own gateway John the Baptist had returned to his friends beneath the banyan tree and was playing on his flute. As Ransome passed John and the three other musician-gossips rose, salaamed in the thick darkness and murmured, "Good-evening, Sahib."

He turned toward the town, walking along the road from the race course toward the old wooden palace. Here beneath the mango trees it was a little cooler for the water sprinklers had passed just at sunset and the roadway was still damp. He passed the house of Raschid Ali Khan, the police minister, whom he looked upon as his friend, and then the house of Mr. Banner jee. It was dark now and the eternal badminton which Mr. Bannerjee thought fashionable was at an end. There was a light in the drawing room but no sign of anyone in the house. Without thinking he paused for a moment at the gateway, in the indifferent hope that he might catch a glimpse of Mrs. Bannerjee, but there was no sign of her. She fascinated him, not so much as a woman but as a work of art cold, classical, detached, like a figure out of one of the frescoes at Ajunta. The character of Mr. Bannerjee always aroused in Ransome a curious mixture of feelings of liking, of amusement, of pity and of contempt. Mr. Bannerjee was like a feeble reed blown and battered by the winds which blew now from the East, now from the West.

Turning away from the gateway, he continued down the slope to the bridge over the river. It lay now, in the heat, an inert sleeping serpent, beneath the respectable cast-iron statue of Queen Victoria dubiously ornamenting the summit of the center buttress. It no longer had any current but was still, a long green canal clotted with algae and reflecting the brilliance of the stars. With the rains it would become a yellow torrent, flowing through the middle of the town, between temples and bazaars, hiding the great flights of flat steps which now led, naked and dusty, from the temple of Krishna down to the stagnant water.

Beyond the bridge he turned left along the dusty road which followed the river through the zoological gardens past the burning ghats. It was very dark here save for the faint light of the stars, and the unlighted path led away from all habitations, but Ransome felt no alarm, partly because in Ranchipur, unlike most Indian states, there was very little danger, and partly because he was a strong man, lean and tall, who, save in the war, had never found any necessity for physical fear. Besides, he was not really afraid of death. For a long time now it had been a matter of indifference to him whether he lived or died.

A little further along the dark path he became aware o a dim glow from the level ground just below him. As he drew nearer he made out the embers of three fires, two of them almost extinguished, the third, a little way off, still flaming. It was this one which illuminated the mango trees and painted the surface of the stagnant river with a phosphorescent glow. Gathered about it could be distinguished the silhouettes of three men, all of them naked in the heat save for breech clouts. At the barrier he stopped for a moment, watching.

One of the men, the nearest relative of the dead person, poked the pile of burning wood now and then and beat it impatiently. The corpse, only half-consumed, still had not yet lost its shape, but it was clear that all three mourners had had enough and were ready to go home. Amused, Ransome leaned against the barrier watching, and then one of the men noticed him and moved toward him. He was a thin middle-aged fellow and he addressed Ransome with a grin, inviting him to corne in. Ransome declined saying in Hindustani that he found no novelty in the sight, and the man told him that they were burning up their grandmother and that she was taking an unconscionable time about it. He laughed and made a joke as Ransome, turning away, started up the path toward the town.

He came frequently along these paths to the ghats after nightfall. There was a kind of macabre beauty about the place, and in the spectacle of the cremation itself there was a kind of faith and certainty which gave him peace and pleasure. It seemed to him that by the very act of burning they denied the importance of the body. It was as if they said, "What is dead is dead," and hurriedly made of? with the body to turn it back once more as quickly as possible before the sun set, into earth, simply, without show, without barbarism, without long speeches. The most they did was to go through a formal pattern of grief, sometimes sincere, more often simply conventional like the archaic dances from Tanjore. From the moment of death there was no longer left for them anything of that essence which they had loved, or possibly hated. The body was only a machine which sometimes gave them pleasure and quite as often brought them pain. In their detachment there was a kind of reality never attained by any Christian. Here they believed that the body was nothing and refused to honor it. In the West they only pretended to believe that the body was dust. In the West the clodlike body held people forever in subjection.

He came at last to the square. It was enormous, bordered on the one side by the facade of the old wooden palace, long since abandoned and desolate, a structure with countless balconies and grilled windows which kept behind its walls the memory of dark and sinister stories of death by poison, by garroting, by the dagger. In the days before the mutiny the Maharajahs had lived there, but now for fifty years it had been a dead place, abandoned and haunted, kept as a kind of empty, dusty museum that was forever closed. The place always fascinated him as a monument to the darkness and evil which had been in Ranchipur before the old Maharajah came, sent by the gods and the English to change all that. There were no lights in the abandoned old palace but its white fac ade was illumined by the reflected glare of the cinema opposite where they were showing an ancient cracked film of Charlie Chaplin. It was the hour of the opening and a strident electric gong kept ringing above the noise of the crowd and the cries of vendors of eskimo pies and fan and vile-colored sweets. Now and then a man of low caste recognized him as he went past and salaamed a greeting. It pleased him that they had come to accept him as a fixture in Ranchipur.

On the far side of the square lay the tank, a great rectangular expanse of water entirely surrounded by steps, which for two thousand years had been the center of life in that dusty world burnt by the sun for eight months of the year. Here the poor came to bathe, the dhobies and washer- women to beat their clothes, the old women to gossip and the children to play. Once the sacred cows and water buffaloes had wandered up and down spattering the wide shallow steps with dung, but now for a long time they had not been allowed to wander about, starving. It was part of the duties of the police to keep them from the square and the center of the town.

At this moment of the evening the whole surface o the tank reflected the lights of the square the lights from the garish cinema, from the fires of the vendors who made rice cakes, from the kerosene lamps in the shops of the silversmiths who sat cross-legged tapping the metal into shape with little hammers.

As Ransome crossed the square the din of the cinema and the vendors

grew less and he became aware o a new sound, equally confused and equally strident. This was the noise of the music school which stood on the far side of the tank, a great monstrous structure of brick built in the style of Bombay Albert Memorial Gothic. There were lights in every window and in every room there was a class at work. He knew how each room looked, with its rows of bare wooden benches lined with men of all ages, from ninety down to little boys of ten and twelve, all earnest, all enchanted, learning to make music because something in their souls demanded it and would not be satisfied without it. He went again and again to the music school, partly because the music and the students fascinated him, and partly because of the beauty of the spectacle itself.

For a long time he stood with his back to the incredible din, watching the lights of the distant square on the opposite side of the tank. Thousands of flying foxes, as large as falcons, drawn by the lights of the cinema, circled and wheeled above the polished surface of the water, only to turn back again, confused and baffled, in their aimless journey round and round above the tank.

Presently Ransome knocked the ashes from his pipe? turned and went into the music school. On the way he noticed that the whole of the maternity ward of the hospital just beyond was flooded with light. Inside, no doubt, another Indian was coming into the world, or perhaps two or three, to add the burden of their existence to the three hundred and seventy millions that spread over the vast mass of desert and jungle and city. Miss MacDaid would be there and perhaps, if the case were difficult., Major Safti. And then he remembered suddenly John the Baptist's bit of gossip Miss MacDaid and Major Safti. And now, quite as quickly, he dismissed it. Miss MacDaid was sober, plain, efficient, tough more of a man than a woman and Safti was certainly ten years younger than she and could have what he wanted from the ladies. No, it was an absurd and impossible bit of gossip. Yet when he thought of it he knew that John the Baptist and his friends were never wrong.

Inside the music school, he went to the office of his friend, Mr. Das, the director. Mr. Das was in, going over a ledger in which he kept all sorts of figures in the European fashion and so remained forever hopelessly muddled as to his expenses and accounts. He was a shy sensitive little man with gray hair and a great many wrinkles, insignificant save for the inward fire which now and then would rise and illumine his great dark eyes. He had but one passion in life, and that was Indian music, and no one in the world knew more of it than hethe stylized unworldly ancient music of the Temples in the South, the music of the Rajputs, of the Bengali, even of the Muslim descendants of Akbar which he held a little in contempt as "modern" and patternless, corrupted by Western jazz and forever changing. Save for the few hours when he slept Mr. Das lived in a perpetual din, since the school went on all day from early morning until midnight. The school was free, for the Maharani loved music and the Maharajah, like Akbar, sought to bring his people everything which could give them pleasure and make brighter their lives. They taught all kinds of music in the school. They had musicians from every part of India. As one passed through the great halls one heard the music of every caste and every people Muslims and Bengalis, Rajputs, Mahrattas and Cingalese, and even that of the dark ancient peoples of the south, and of the strange wild Bhils who lived among their goats in the panther-infested foothills beyond Mount Abana.

At sight of Ransome Mr. Das sprang up and crossed the room to shake hands. He loved Ransome because Ransome loved music. He was the only European in all the state who was interested enough in the school to have come twice to visit it. It flattered the vanity of Mr. Das whose driving force in life was a constantly rebuffed desire to please. He expressed no surprise at the presence of Ransome in Ranchipur so late in the season and he knew that Ransome had come to hear music.

"What is it you want to hear tonight?" he asked with an actual air of anxiety.

Ransome said he would like to hear the Rajput singer.

"Ah, Jemnaz Singh!" and with many remarks about the heat and the weather and the delay of the monsoon he clapped his hands for a boy to summon Jemnaz Singh and then led the way along the big bare corridor to the little auditorium. But when he spoke of the weather even the voice of Mr. Das, absorbed perpetually by his passion for his school, took on a little the color of fear. The rains should have begun a month ago. It was an ancestral fear rising in the blood, born of ten thousand years of drought and famine.

The little auditorium was decorated in the style of a provincial British

railroad station, but in the midst of it, on the tiny stage, there was already assembled a miniature of extraordinary beauty which caught the eye at once and somehow annihilated like a blaze of light the Victorian tastelessness of the room itself. In the center sat Jemnaz Singh himself, crosslegged, holding his lute, and on either side of him sat a boy, one with a large drum between his knees and the other holding a flute. The singer was a small man of delicate build with a lean face of extraordinary beauty. He wore an enormous Rajput turban in shades of poison green and violet and candy pink and an atchcan of brocaded silk in which the same colors were blended with silver and a deeper violet in a pattern of extravagant flowers. He was rachitic and beneath the pale golden skin of the cheek- bones there were flushes of dull red. At the sight of Ransome he inclined his head and smiled, and when Ransome was seated and Mr. Das had gone back to his accounts the singer began.

The long pale fingers with the nails tinted and polished and lacquered felt their way along the strings of the lute, tentatively, for Jemnaz Singh was seeking an inspiration, a theme. On either side of him, their large dark eyes watching the movements of the beautiful hands, the boys waited. One phrase after another was tried and abandoned until at last the singer found the pattern he sought, and began to sing, establishing his theme. The boys still waited, listening and watching. It was a pure lovely pattern which he had found, an ordered filigree of sound. Once he sang it through, and then again with a slight variation, and then the boys, having understood, began to play, one on his drum and the other on his flute, each improvising an accompaniment. And so it went, on and on, over and over, like a Bach theme with variations, strangely pure, yet intricate and complicated, like the carvings of the white marble temples at Mount Abu. And Ransome, enchanted, closed his eyes to listen, for Jemnaz Singh was a great musician. Only now and then did he open them and then only because the beauty of the spectacle was as great as the beauty of the music; the body, the face, the pose of the singer made a design as exquisite as the music itself. For Ransome the world, the whole futility of his own past, the dull planlessness of his future, faded in the ecstasy of his appreciation. In his tired soul he was happy.

He had no idea of the passing of time but he was aware suddenly of a gigantic clap of thunder which roused him and blotted out the beauty of

the music. The singer went on until he had finished the latest of his varia- tions and then put down his lute and said a prayer of thanks to Kali. At last the rains had come!

The storm, accompanied by a sudden fierce wind from the Arabian Gulf, came up quickly, covering all the stars that were like the diamonds of the Maharani as if a thick curtain had been drawn across them, and the thunder and wild flashes of lightning drove the gigantic bats into new and wilder fluttering above the tanks. By the time Ransome had gone round the square, great drops had begun to splatter in the thick dust. The lights of the cinema went out suddenly, and with a great clatter and much screaming the vendors of rice cakes and eskimo pies began gathering their wares and scuttling like terrified chickens in all directions. The wind increased and the trees bent and swayed. There was no way for Ransome to reach his house save on foot, for even the bright little tongas which usually stood waiting outside the old palace had disappeared. He took the short way, across the bridge and along the road to the race course, but he did not hurry for the beauty of the music and the sudden violence of the storm had left him enchanted.

The lightning came brilliant and white, flash after flash, so that his whole way was illuminated as if by gigantic flares. Then the first big drops were followed, faster and faster, by others until the whole sky seemed to pour forth water in one enormous cataract.

By the time he reached Mr. Banner jee's house he was as wet as if he had been swimming in the river with all his clothes on. A little farther on in a sudden flash of lightning he caught sight of a small figure on a bicycle, pedaling head down, into the full force of the storm. In a second flash of lightning he recognized the figure as that of his friend, Mr. Smiley, from the American Mission. On the handlebar of the bicycle was hanging a great basket of fruit. Out of the darkness Ransome shouted a greeting to the shabby little figure, but the sound of his words was lost in the storm. He wondered where he could be going at this hour of the night. It must be a good three miles to the Mission.

By the time he went through his own gate his linen clothes clung to him as if they had been molded to his lean body. Once inside the house he went through the long hallway to the verandah overlooking the garden and there he slipped off his clothes and stood naked, watching the violence o the storm. The branches of the mango trees whipped black against the wild glare of lightning, and the water fell in torrents on to the parched thirsty earth. Tomorrow it would be green again, miraculously green with the miracle of the monsoon. Presently he went down the steps into the garden and stood there, the warm rain beating against his bare skin. It was like being reborn. The weariness went suddenly out of his soul.

In the maternity ward of the hospital Miss MacDaid kept running back and forth between the two wards. She was a big woman, .not fat, but heavy, and in the dull burning heat she became slowly drenched with perspiration until it was as if she had just come in out of the storm. Vainly she sought to find a moment when she could return to the little office long enough to change and feel once more, not cool perhaps, but at least fresh as a good nurse should feel It would have been easier if the women had all been in one ward, but since one of them was a sweeper, one of them a Bunya, the wife of a small merchant, and one the wife of a mason, they had to be separated, as the Maharajah, who was usually adamant in his attitude in behalf of the Untouchables, had made a concession here in the maternity ward and kept the Untouchables apart.

It was the Bunya woman and the mason's wife who were giving all the trouble, for the Untouchable woman went about her labor quickly and easily, like a healthy animal. The Bunya woman, as if she felt she owed it to the superiority of her caste, groaned and screamed and complained; and the case of the mason's wife was difficult since she had a deformed pelvis and the labor went on and on with little result save exhaustion. She was patient, with the hopeless resignation of the very poor. She belonged, Miss MacDaid knew, to the millions who were born and die in India without ever having had enough to eat. The pelvis was deformed because the woman had had rickets as a child. She was only sixteen years old and it was her first baby, but vaguely, in an animal way, she knew that something was wrong. She did not cry out but lay ash-colored and terrified, her great dark eyes sunk far back in her head.

Miss MacDaid might have trusted her two assistants at least with the Untouchable woman whose case was easy and natural. The two nurses were competent enough. One of them, a woman of twenty-six, was a niece of the Maharajah who had never married, and for five years she had worked side by side with Miss MacDaid. The other, Mrs. Gupta, was a widow, the sister of one of the Maharani's aides-de-camp. In both of them there was a sense of fate, a sense of dedication, which Miss MacDaid had discovered long ago existed in many Indians. They were patient, intelligent and thorough, but it was this very sense of resignation which Miss MacDaid mistrusted. In her Church of Scotland blood there remained few traces of a belief in predestination. She was bound to fight to the very end, to leave no stone unturned, and then if fate defeated her Scottish doggedness it deserved to win.

The two nurses did all that she permitted them to do and nothing more, for like all self-reliant people she dominated those near to her and destroyed their initiative. She cast a kind of blight over all those who worked with her, all save Major Safti to whose authority and intelligence she alone made obeisance. When things got beyond her she sent for Major Safti.

Presently, in the Untouchable ward, the baby was born and Miss MacDaid was there to see that all went well at the end. The woman lay back on her narrow iron bed, relieved and silent, watching Miss Mac- Daid with eyes which were bright with gratitude. She was, now that the labor was finished, like a wild gazelle which had been caught and become resigned to captivity. Miss MacDaid was struck, as she always was, by the wild, animal beauty of the Untouchables. They were a different race from the others, their origin lost in some remote unrecorded past. In Ranchipur they were well enough off and the old barriers were almost gone save among the benighted orthodox Hindus. Miss MacDaid liked them better than most who came to the hospital. Her Scottish heart liked their toughness and their defiance and their vitality. They had enough to eat; it was rare that they went hungry like the people of the poor castes. For five thousand years they had been simple scavengers, unhampered by the rites and ceremonies and taboos of a decaying faith, and so they were never starved and deformed like the mason's wife or even like the Bunya woman whose diet was all one thing. The Untouchable women ate meat too, and one saw it in the fire in their eyes and the tough strength of their bodies.

The baby was bathed now and lay beside the mother, a small purple- black monkey of a creature, wrinkled but plump, squalling so lustily that it managed to drown out even the bedlam of the distant noise from the music school. It was the Princess, the niece of the Maharajah, who had bathed the Untouchable baby. That was something which Miss Mac- Daid never ceased to find unbelievable that in one generation this young woman of the proud warrior caste had quietly put aside all the prejudices of five thousand years to work calmly among the pariahs.

She smiled at the Princess, for she really loved her, and said, "It's a fine baby," and then spoke to the mother in Gujerati, praising her infant. And then she had a queer flash of Gaelic intuition which was like a vision. She saw this niece of a warrior Maharajah and this new-born little monkey of an Untouchable as symbols of the future of all vast India. From them would come help and salvation. Out of them was rising that strange current of hope, of confidence and faith which Miss MacDaid felt all about her in this country which she loved and which somehow, strangely, had become her own. It was out of the intelligence and tolerance of this young nurse and out of the vigor of this pariah babe that a great nation might rise again, that a whole civilization might be reborn.

Miss MacDaid, not through intelligence but through the canny instinct of her people, knew perhaps better than philosophers and economists and historians who sat in locked rooms on the other side of the world and spun theories.

But the cries of the Bunya woman summoned her and she went back again into the other ward where Mrs. Gupta, the aide-de-camp's sister, told her that the child was being born. Energetically Miss MacDaid brushed her aside to see that all was going as it should. There were no complications here, but a moan from the iron bed where the mason's wife lay told her that the extremity had been reached. There was no hope of the child being born normally and the woman was sinking. That awful thing happened which Miss MacDaid always dreaded with Hindu patients the woman had given up and lay now resigned, unwilling to make the faintest effort. She meant to die; but Miss MacDaid meant that she should live despite herself.

She turned to the nurse and said, "One of you will have to fetch Major Safti. The other can prepare the operating room. Which ever one goes will have to take one of the boys with you. You can't go alone."

It was the Maharajah's niece who volunteered, because she had her bicycle at the hospital and because she would have less to fear from the fierce old Maharani. Besides she knew the vast rambling palace and could find her way straight to the Maharani without delay. So she threw on a cloak and called the porter and the two set out on their bicycles. It was about the same moment that the colossal crash of thunder shattered the fine thread of music spun out for Ransome by the Rajput singer.

Miss MacDaid had waited before sending for Major Safti until all hope was gone, because this was the one evening of the week which she tried to keep inviolate for him. It was the only time he had rest from work which was enough for three men, and he spent it nearly always at the palace. It was a kind of sacred engagement, a royal command. On Friday nights he played poker with the Maharani. He did it through no sense of duty nor even in deference to the will of the arrogant and handsome old lady but because like her, of all things in life, he liked gambling best.

Accompanied by the porter the nurse pedaled through the fast scattering drops of rain as far as the engineering school, and there the storm began in earnest. Soaked to the skin within two or three minutes, sometimes blinded by the flood of water and the wild flashes of lightning, the two turned in at the side gate of the grounds and rode beneath the tossing trees along the winding drive until the palace with all its turrets and spires and balconies showed black against the sky. They went to a back entrance, for she had been there before to summon the surgeon on Friday nights and she knew how to go about it. The old Maharani played poker in secret without the Maharajah's knowledge. He made no objection to her gambling in Monte Carlo or Deauville or Baden-Baden but at home here in her own palace among her own people he forbade it. But he had for- bade her many things in their long life together only to have her follow her own will.

At that moment she sat in her own sitting room at the mahogany table, surrounded by Major Safti, two nephews, an aide-de-camp and

Major General Agate. The nephews had learned poker at Cambridge and played rather a stolid conservative game. General Agate played according to his temperament, which was explosive, and so he always lost. What he lost he would put down to the expense of his journey, for he counted this visit one of diplomacy. It was not an official visit, arranged by the Viceroy, but an informal one and therefore all the more important and valuable. He had simply broken his journey to Poona by stopping off for a few days to see his old friends, the rulers of Ranchipur.

He was a stocky gentleman of about sixty, with a red turkeycock face and a large white mustache. He had been in India half his life and was in a way a case of nature imitating art, for he was a perfect Kipling general not alone in appearance but in temperament as well. On his own solid shoulders he still carried the burden of all the dark races and he could outshout all comers on the subject of The Realm. It was a kind of game he was playing now with the rulers of Ranchipur, a game far more important and far more difficult than poker, which irritated him because his wits were slow and his temper choleric. Beneath his temper he remained smug in the belief that he was serving the British Empire in the grand tradition; that is to say, not only by force of arms (as indicated by his countless medals) but by the guile of foreign policy as well.

These Indians were important because they were rich, they were powerful, and they knew the game of politics in Europe as well as they knew it in India. This was no obscure state ruled by a doddering depraved prince. Ranchipur, even the General was able to understand, was important and not only important but dangerous because it had exploded the whole theory of the White Man's burden. In the fifty years that the old gentleman, asleep a good quarter of a mile away in another part of the palace, had been reigning, it had lifted itself out of the malarial apathy and superstition of ancient India into the position of a modern state, admirably staffed and administered. It had proved that Indians could be good administrators, that they could be good economists, that they could solve such complicated problems as that of the Depressed Classes. It was a state more civilized and more advanced than many parts o England and America- the Midlands or Pittsburgh (although to the General nothing in America mattered or even existed).

He would have preferred entering Ranchipur on an elephant at the head of a column of troops, with the populace flat on their faces lining both sides of the avenue from the old palace to the race course. That was how a British general should make an entrance, not like any bloody civil servant in a railway coach, to be met with condescension (of this he could never quite be sure and it troubled him) by a Rolls-Royce and a nephew of the Maharajah who explained that his uncle sent profound regrets but was kept at home by gout. (Why should a Maharajah have gout, which was a disease of retired generals?) If he had had the say he would have treated all India differently. If he had had the say there would be no Indian problem. He'd soon fix that. But the India Office was always getting in his way. Those civilian louts back in Whitehall thought they knew more of the situation than he himself, Major-General Agate, who had spent half his life on the Northwest Frontier.

He even fancied himself as a diplomat, convinced that the handsome black-eyed old lady opposite him believed him to be as gentle as a lamb and the most devoted of her friends. He had no suspicion that behind her poker hand she knew exactly what he was thinking and exactly how much he was her friend. To her he was simply a rather tiresome old boaster whom she on her account must entertain because it was all a game anyway, an interminable game of waiting which must be played with a poker face until Europe destroyed itself or fell into decay. It was easier to entertain him by playing poker than by listening to him talk about the necessity of enclosing British wives and mothers on the North- west Frontier behind defenses of barbed wire in order to save them from rape at the hands of those wild handsome Muslim tribesmen (an experience, the old Maharani thought, which might have its own richness) .

The room was a modern copy of a room the Maharani had seen at Malmaison, complete down to the smallest detail. The Aubusson carpet was covered now with white cotton that was taken up each morning before Her Highness arose and replaced by cotton which had been freshly washed. Beneath the table there were no shoes save the boots of the General. Nephews, aide-de-camp and Major Safti wore only socks and the Maharani and her companions wore nothing to cover the lacquered nails of their naked toes ornamented with emeralds and diamonds and rubies.

At sixty-seven she was handsome, for her beauty was o that indestructible sort which lies in the bones of the face and not in the flesh or the coloring. The large fierce black eyes were set in a perfectly lineless face the soft color of pale cafe au lent. Her lips were painted scarlet like the tiny mark of royalty that she wore just above the proud arch of her fiercely sculptured nose. It was a vivid mobile face, not only beautiful but extraordinary. It was the face of a woman who at thirteen had been a half-savage hill princess who could neither read nor write. Ransome always thought of her as "The Last Queen."

At the very moment that her niece, the nurse, came in through a back corridor of the palace, stepping over the guards who lay sleeping there, the Maharani had picked up her five cards. Four of them were spades, the two, the three, five and six. At sight of them her expression did not change. It was Major Safti, the surgeon, who dealt, sitting big and handsome and pleasant with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. The General picked up his hand and saw three aces. The two nephews found nothing and Major Safti discovered two pairs, kings and eights.

The Maharani's hand was one after her own heart, for her wild nature asked nothing so tame as three of a kind or even a flush, dealt and ready to play without drawing. It was in her temperament to welcome obstacles.

The two nephews dropped their hands, and their aunt with a face of stone opened. The General, puffing a little and very red, raised and in turn was raised by Major Safti. Her Highness was content to draw one card. The General drew two and Major Safti one. Before they looked at their hands both the Maharani and the General regarded the Major, the one still with an expression of stone, the other with agitation and fury. The General was the first to look at his hand and when he found there his fourth ace his face grew perceptibly pinker. When the Maharani looked she found in its place, as if it had been sent there by fate, the four of spades. For an instant the black eyes lighted up but not long enough for the General to notice. But Major Safti saw it as he saw almost everything. She loved playing with the Major because he was a match for her. The General was too easy.

And so the betting began, tentatively at first, with Safti staying in for two rounds to discover if the others were bluffing. When he that they were not he dropped his cards, and with a glint in his blue eyes waited for the struggle. They raised each other again and again and again and the Major, watching, knew that this was not simply a struggle over a winning hand at poker. It went far deeper than that. It was an Indian Maharani, the proudest and most beautiful of them all, pitted 'against the whole British army. Beneath the betting there was an electric current of hatred, of pride pitted against arrogance. The expression of the old lady changed not at all save that the black eyes grew a trifle harder. It was the General with his four aces who showed the first signs of weakening. At the fourth raise his face went from pink to red; at the fifth it grew purple and he compromised his honor by hesitating for a second. Then a glance of mockery from the Maharani goaded him on. Again they raised each other and again, and then graciously, but with condescension, she said, "General, I don't want to bankrupt you. I have a straight flush," and laid her hand on the table.

It was a bitter moment, as if the General had been defeated in the field by a force outrageously smaller than his own. Angrily he threw down his cards. For a moment he came very near to doing what she had meant him to do lose his temper and show himself a bad sport. But in time he remembered cricket and the playing fields, of Eton and saved himself from the worst. Nevertheless the gesture with which he flung down his cards was enough. She did not ask for more. She was satisfied. And she knew that his expense account would be enormous this month.

At that moment her niece appeared in the doorway, the water dripping from her clothing onto the clean white cotton. It was Major Safti, the surgeon, who saw her first and rose from his chair. Then the Maharani turned, all her jewels flashing against the black and silver of her sari. The girl bowed to her and talked rapidly, first in Mahratta to the Maharani and then in Hindustani to the Major.

"Excuse me, Your Highness," he said in English. "I'll come back." He bowed to the General and accompanied the Princess through the doorway.

In the moment while the nurse stood dripping on the threshold, the emotion of the General had transferred itself, conveniently, from one cause to another. It is possible that her arrival prevented him from making an ass of himself, and so took the edge off the full triumph of the regal old lady. And now suddenly he was no longer irritated by the defeat of his four aces but by the interruption of the game.

To the Maharani he said, "Why does he have to go away?" He did not say "Major Safti" but simply "he/' for thus he accomplished two things; he avoided using the tide of "Major" conferred not by the British Government but by a Maharajah,, and he managed to imply his feeling that as a person the surgeon was utterly insignificant. The Maharani understood him.

With an impassive face she answered, "He has gone to make an operation. There is a low-caste woman at the hospital having a baby and she cannot have it."

The General snorted and said, "Well, whose deal is it? Let's be on with it."

The Bunya woman had her baby safely, in spite of all the disturbance she made. It was a boy and thin and undernourished, a shriveled little thing. While the nurse bathed it Miss MacDaid looked on in scorn. "Another good Hindu," she said, "who will grow up and marry and produce a lot more skinny children who will never have a proper diet."

That was what ailed India more than anything else, this "Hindu sickness." She knew it was not because its mother could not afford proper food that the child was skinny and feeble. The woman was a Bunya and her husband, like all merchants, had managed to wring money enough, honestly and probably dishonestly, to feed his family properly. The trouble was the religion and the priests and their silly superstitions. She had seen children and even grown men and women who, when rescued and fed properly, turn from rickety, spindle-legged, malarial creatures with swollen abdomens into healthy ones filled with vigor. There were moments when Miss MacDaid, in exasperation, would have liked to slay all the priests and rip their religion from suffering India as if it were a diseased organ which must be removed.

To the nurse she said, "You never see Muslim or Untouchable babies as sickly as that. These caste Hindus never have a chance from the start That's what is the matter with Gandhi besides being a Gujcrati by race and a Bunya by caste. He's puny and tricky."

But, as always, she was unable to stay and make a speech. There were

too many other things on her mind. There was the mason's wife, already half-conscious in her bed, and the worry of whether Major Safti would arrive in time to save both mother and child. If the mother died she knew that very likely it would make little difference to the husband, but if the baby was a son and was lost there would be hysterical wailing. Alone in her ward the sweeper woman had gone quietly to sleep with the child at her side.

Outside, the storm still howled and the rain came down in floods. The din of the music school was drowned out now and, perversely, with the coming of the storm, it seemed to have grown hotter rather than cooler. A rich damp steaming heat enveloped all the world of Ranchipur.

And inside the prim efficient bosom of Miss MacDaid there was another storm, scarcely less violent than the one outside. For she was going to see the Major, a bit of luck she had not hoped for on a Friday night. For that she had to thank the deformed pelvis of the mason's wife.

It was like an illness. She did not know when it had begun. It had come imperceptibly, without symptoms, unless you could call symptoms the joking that had gone on between them from the very first. In a way it had happened the moment she saw him four years before when he arrived straight from a London hospital to become surgeon-in-chief of Ranchipur. She always remembered him as he arrived at the hospital in His Highness' own Rolls-Royce with His Highness beside him looking pleased, in his simplicity, at having picked a young man who was so clever and intelligent and vigorous. Miss MacDaid always thought of the Major as he stepped from the car and came up the steps, with a friendly grin, to greet her. He was dressed all in white tall, muscular, with a pale skin and blue eyes. "He must be a Poona Brahmin," she thought, and she was terribly pleased when she found that she was right. It always annoyed her when Europeans said that all Indians were alike, because they were far less alike than Europeans, far less mongrelized. The remark always implied stupidity. How was it possible to say that the fierce maleness of a Northwest Frontier tribesman resembled in any way the delicate, chiseled beauty of a man from Rajputana, or that the volatile faintly mongoloid Bengali looked like a warlike Mahratta who was a tough muscular little terrier.

In the beginning., at that first glance, Miss MacDaid had fallen in love, not with the man himself, but with the idea of him. As he stepped from the Maharajah's Rolls she thought, without thinking, "This is what India might be" her India which was a part of her very soul.

And then she had discovered as the weeks went on that he was as clever, indeed as brilliant, a surgeon as the Maharajah had said, that his big muscular hands were as delicate as a woman's and in their work as sure as the progress of a cat. Bit by bit, usually in those moments when they had a snack together at night at the hospital, when she made tea and they talked intimately, she learned other things about him that his mother had been a leader in the movement to purge the Hindu faith of its superstitions, its degeneracy, its defeatism, and bring it back to its original purity; that he had gone to Cambridge where he had rowed In his college boat, that he had been a famous cricketer. And in letters from England she learned that what the old Maharajah had said was true. He was a fine surgeon, which she already knew. Even as an Indian he could have made a great career for himself, but he had chosen to come back here to Ranchipur because this was his country and these were his people, and in Ranchipur he could have what he liked with the old Maharajah to help them.

In the beginning she had thought of him as a boy, although he was already thirty-three when he arrived that day in the Rolls. She had never thought of men as men because all her life had been so full there were never enough hours in the day; and because she was, in her way, a great woman, few men had ever come her way to whom she did not feel superior, not only as a woman but even at times as a man* In the beginning he had seemed more like the embodiment, a very attractive embodiment to be sure, of an idea, something to which she herself had devoted her whole life and her immense energies.

Her own story had begun long ago as the child of an eccentric Scotch doctor who chose to settle in Sourabaya, practicing his profession when someone needed him, but far more interested in his laboratory, in tropical fevers, in curious diseases. He had journeyed far and wide, peering into the lives and bodies of the whole swarming East, for he had in him that strange urge some Scotsmen have to wander, to settle in some far-off place, to colonize, to create for himself a whole new world rather than

to take his old world with him like the Englishman. Something in the East had claimed his soul and he never went back to Europe until he died at last of one of the strange diseases which he was always striving to understand.

And so his daughter had been brought up in the East, not like the child of a merchant or a civil servant, raised in a compound or in the foreign settlement and sent to England to school. She had lived at times almost like a native, knowing the sons and daughters of the local merchants and the half-caste children of Dutch planters. She could speak Dutch and Malay perfectly by the time she was ten and by the age of thirty she had learned Hindustani and Gujerati as well When she was twenty she went to England.

It was the first time in her life she had ever been out of the Orient, and although she loved the misty beauty of the Scottish hills and the quiet green of English gardens, they were always strange to her. And everything she saw seemed small and rather drab, for in her heart and in her soul were all the violence, the magnificence and the squalor of the East. Even the climate of England and Scotland seemed to her dull, and its foggy coldness infinitely more uncomfortable than the burning heat of the East. In England there were no magnificent sunrises, no violent floods, no earthquakes, no great burgeoning into life, none of that savage splendor which filled the whole world in which she had spent her childhood. And the squalor which she saw in the Midlands and the suburbs of London during her years of training as a nurse, was no better, no less horrible, than the squalor she knew during her wanderings through the Orient with that eccentric man, Doctor MacDaid. In Sourabaya itself there had been no squalor approaching it. And the Eastern squalor seemed better to her because it was not shut up, inside damp overcrowded houses, in dark narrow streets, but flooded outward into the air and the light. And she was puzzled too by the prejudices of the people she met, even intelligent doctors, on the subject of race and color, and by their belief in their own physical and economic superiority; for in her heart, out of her strange life, she had no prejudices. Miss MacDaid was one of The Blessed to whom human creatures were human creatures, without regard to nationality or creed, color or race, and so her life had always had a richness which most others had never known.

Then after four years she had come back without regrets to the East where she felt at home, happy in the grandeur and violence and the color which Europe never knew. She got as far as Bombay, and after she had been there a little less than a year there came an opportunity such as warmed the heart of a woman like Miss MacDaid. In all Bombay there was not another woman who would consider it, but Miss MacDaid had said yes immediately on one late December afternoon when she found herself in the office of the hospital superintendent, talking to the rather stocky little Indian in European clothes who was the great Maharajah of Ranchipur.

He wanted to found a hospital and a training school for nurses. He wanted to educate his people in the care of children. He wanted to stamp out plague and cholera and the terrible malaria which dissipated the energies of his people. A kind of makeshift hospital already existed, but he wanted to establish one of the very best and most modern o hospitals, like the ones he had seen in Germany. If he could find a nurse who was willing to face a hard life for a time, to find herself blocked and sometimes baffled by the intrigues of ministers and officers of state, to battle with ignorance and prejudice, not only of the Indians but of the Europeans in Ranchipur, with filth and disease, he would see that she had all the money she needed, half from the state, half from his own private purse.

For a moment she stood completely overcome by the extraordinary chance which had come her way, so bewildered that she could not speak at all. To be able to give orders and not take them, to escape from the backbiting, the gossip, the prejudices of that narrow world in which she found herself, a little fragment of provincial Europe engulfed in the East; to have all that power and authority! To be able to work, to build, to organize, to create! There was in her something that was David Livingstone and Mungo Park, which was in thousands of Scottish colonists the world over a passion for adventure and a stern Calvinist desire to help the poor human race.

While she stood listening to the stocky little Indian all that was Gaelic and Scottish in her was appraising him. She saw that he was a simple man and a good man, because all that was written in his face. She knew that he was rich, fabulously rich, one o the richest men in the world; but o the rest she knew nothing. She did not know then that he was one of the great men in the East, one of the greatest men of his time (although she had already divined his simplicity and his goodness), for he had no genius for attracting notice and the great things which he achieved remained somehow muffled and veiled and unknown, either by accident or by design. What he did was dangerous. He was fighting to bring respect and dignity to a conquered people. He was one of those thousands only just beginning to awaken over all of India and all the Orient, to stir with faith and pride and valor.

They looked at each other for a full minute the squat little Maharajah and plain vigorous young Miss MacDaid and in that moment there

passed between them an understanding and a sympathy which from then on was never to be broken either by intrigue or prejudice or despair.

The Scotswoman said simply, "Yes, Your Highness, I'll go." The Maharajah said, "It won't be easy, you know, Miss MacDaid." "I've lived in the East all my life, Your Highness. I know the difficulties. All I ask is this opportunity."

"I'd prefer it if you could find another sister to bring with you." "I'll try, sir. Perhaps I can persuade Miss Eldridge." In the end she persuaded Miss Eldridge, who was the daughter of an importer in the Madras Presidency, a pale tall thin girl who adored Miss MacDaid and would have followed her anywhere.

So the two of them set out for Ranchipur. It was in April, a little while before the monsoon.

In those days the work of the Maharajah was only just begun and the town presented a strange spectacle of chaos, not alone the physical chaos of roads and streets under construction, of new buildings going up, of old rookeries being torn down, but what was much more important, of the spiritual and psychological confusion of a whole people in the process of having their lives remade by their ruler and a handful of educated subjects. The parasite priests had been forced to work or to leave the state, so that there were only priests enough left to serve the temples adequately. The Maharani had just finished her book urging the women to come out of purdah, to learn to read and to write, to undertake professions. Her high school for girls had just been opened and the daughters of ministers and princes and Brahmins had been ordered to attend it willy-nilly, side by side with any Untouchable girl who wanted to learn. It was only a year or two since the banquet and festival given by the Maharajah for the Untouchables of the City of Ranchipur, at which he himself sat down with them to give an example to other Hindus. His own servants in the vast palace were Untouchables. And in Ranchipur all these things made for riots and assassinations, intrigues and plots.

Into the midst of this came Miss MacDaid and her thin pale satellite, Miss Eldridge, to find a hospital with earthen floors, a leaking roof, and a native pharmacopoeia, staffed by a half-educated surgeon more concerned with the cut of his European clothes than with the welfare of his patients, and a couple of doctors whose equipment was a strange mixture of midwife's superstitions and old-fashioned science. There was puerperal fever and recurrent typhus, the ever-present smallpox and malaria and the last traces of an outbreak of plague. There were no attendants save low-caste servant girls. Miss MacDaid with her own hands went to work with yellow soap and carbolic acid, and at the end of the first week even her tough body and spirit were discouraged.

But something in her was undef eatable; it had always been so and it always would be, to the very end; and so she went on. But worse than the filth and ignorance and inefficiency which lay before her was the quiet stubborn resistance of half the population of Ranchipur, the lying and intrigue of the Orthodox Hindus, the resentment of the officials at the presence of a European and of the authority given her. The Maharajah was on her side, with all his wealth and all his power, but there were times when it was impossible to call on him for help, times when an appeal only reached him distorted and made trivial by Oriental lies and intrigues. There were moments when, in despair, Miss MacDaid would ask herself what could motivate these devils who lied and intrigued and blocked every effort to bring the people education and health and decency, and always the answer was religion, or superstition, which passed under the name of religion. The worst enemies of herself and the Maharajah were always the most religious. He was patient with them. The fierce and beautiful Maharani had no patience. She had officers of state dismissed. She ordered men to keep to their houses as if they were prisoners. At last, through the influence of the Maharani and Miss MacDaid, the Dewan himself, an Orthodox Hindu with a pigtail and a wife in blackest purdah, was dismissed; and fresh troubles began because the Dewan, a capable if superstitious man, appealed to the Viceroy and there was an investigation of all the rumors of disorder in Ranchipur which for a long time had disturbed the peace of the Government in Calcutta.

It was all rather a farce and nothing much was accomplished, because Ranchipur was a rich and powerful state and the Viceroy was content to let well enough alone. Nevertheless the clash accomplished two things. It humiliated the proud Maharani and made her forever an enemy of British officialdom, and it made Miss MacDaid's position with the British in Ranchipur perfectly clear, once and for all. From that moment on she looked no longer to the people who were hers by race for help and understanding. During the investigation she came to suspect that Government House and all the vast machine connected with it were cold toward this mission to which she was giving her whole life. She suspected that they did not want either the Maharajah or herself to succeed and that they even disapproved of her association with Indians in such a movement of enlightenment and reform.

Until the Maharajah had come to power, with his passion for the dignity and pride of his people, Ranchipur had been a peaceful state, plunged in filth and ignorance, and it had been an excellent market for cotton goods from Manchester and hardware from Leeds and Hull, and now there was talk of the Maharajah establishing mills in his own state where his people might manufacture their own cloth. And somehow Ranchipur seemed to attract radicals and reformers and agitators. When life became difficult elsewhere they fled to Ranchipur.

It was all very disturbing and unpleasant, this feeble attempt of the East to waken and find faith and hope in the future. During the investigation there were one or two small government clerks who treated Miss MacDaid as if she were a mixture of charwoman and traitress, and one impotent little man from Clapham, who was insolent to the Maharani, received for his pains a dismissal from the Civil Service for having made an "incident." And when Miss MacDaid returned to Ranchipur after a loss of ten precious days from her work, she learned

what it was to feel like an Untouchable among her own people. After that she went her way alone, fighting, determined and undefeatable. She meant to make her mission a success. No longer had she any doubts. Her role had been chosen for her. When she returned typhus broke out again and Miss Eldridge was one of the first victims. She did not try to find a new companion to replace her.

Year after year, without even a holiday, through the hot dusty winter and the monsoon summer she worked, through famine and plague, intrigue and despair; and miraculously the hospital slowly became a reality. Building after building arose, made of brick, neat, bright and sanitary. Of the servant girls she managed to make crude nurses. The surgeon and the doctors were dismissed one by one and new men came to take their place, not experts or geniuses but better than the men before them. There were rarely days when Miss MacDaid could find an hour or two for herself which she did not have to use for sleeping. And presently a better class of women, led by the few who belonged

to the educated group, came to be trained as nurses widows and

women who through choice or by accident were not married. The hospital came to heal not only damaged bodies but hurt and wounded souls as well. That was how the Princess and the aide-de-camp's sister had come to her.

By the time young Major Safti arrived the hospital was a reality, a fine reality which Miss MacDaid knew was better by far than many hospitals in Europe. Alone, aided by Indians, she had created it, but it had cost her something, and at forty-nine her tough body was worn by the long battle against heat and superstition and intrigue; her hair was thin and brittle and dry, and the plain, good face, with skin the texture of leather, was lined. But she had won, and in her heart she knew a secret which few from the West ever suspected it was that her East, with its splendor and violence and vitality, was not crushed and dead, slain by the shopkeepers of the West. It had only been sleeping.

She waited for the Major in the little hallway overlooking the garden and presently through the flood of rain she saw his Ford turn in at the gate. Watching the lights sweep along the drive, picking out the hedge

of hibiscus stripped bare of every flower only that afternoon by a wandering troop of monkeys, she thought, "If only I were young and handsome. If only everything had not been wrong." And for a moment she almost divined what it would be like to be reckless, chucking everything for someone you loved.

Then the car drew up and he sprang out, followed by the Maharajah's niece and the porter. And after him came a drenched and miserable figure whom Miss MacDaid recognized as Mr. Smiley, the American missionary. He dragged out after him a great basket of melons and plantains.

"Is she ready?" the Major asked.

"Yes, Major. Your overall and gloves are laid out."

Forgetting Mr. Smiley, Major Safti hurried off to the operating room and Miss MacDaid, with the Princess, went to the ward with the wheeled table to fetch the mason's wife. It all worked quickly, efficiently and well, and in twelve minutes the first son of the mason was born as Caesar is said to have been. In half an hour his wife had slipped from anaesthesia into sleep and the baby was bathed. Major Safti, Miss MacDaid and Mr. Smiley were gathered round a table in Miss MacDaid's office having tea and biscuits. The Major had already eaten one of the Maharani's vast dinners and swallowed one or two of the sandwiches which always stood beside the poker table, but he pretended that he was hungry and stayed to eat because he knew that Miss MacDaid would feel hurt and disappointed if he went away directly.

Mr. Smiley was a small man who wore very large spectacles which made him seem even smaller and thinner than he was. He was only forty-two but he had the air of a tired man ten years older. It was the sun which had done that, the sun and the heat and occasional bouts with malaria, and his own devotion to the cause which the Major and Miss MacDaid had espoused. He rarely left Ranchipur even during the rainy season. In the mornings he taught until one o'clock at his school for Untouchables and low-caste boys in the middle of the town, and in the afternoon he taught at the girls' orphanage near the Mission. But that did not end his duties for he had an immense and complicated amount of bookkeeping to do in order to satisfy his Mission Board in the States; and he knew the families of all the boys who came to his school and there was always something going wrong with them, deaths or births, or illnesses or trouble with the police, so that he was always having to make visits at all hours of the night; and now and then he had to help Miss MacDaid because some of the Untouchables, in their ignorance, were terrified of the hospital and would not allow themselves to be treated until he had reassured them. And in addition to all this he had his troubles with the Reverend Elmer Simon who was in charge of the spiritual side of the Mission and complained that Mr. Smiley did not have enough faith and did not strive hard enough to convert his pupils to the Baptist variety of Christianity.

It was true that Mr. Smiley in his heart did not care two figs whether his pupils were Christians or Hindus or Mohammedans or just plain heathens like the wild Bhils who inhabited the rocky hills, nor that the Reverend Mr. Simon was an Evangelist by upbringing and an imitator of the Anglican missionaries through snobbery. Mr. Simon thought only of souls while Mr. Smiley leaned more toward hygiene, mathematics, the history of India and the rules for decent behavior toward one's fellow men. Like Miss MacDaid and the Major he knew that neither India nor her people were to be saved by conversion to Christianity or any other religion, but through education and the healing of all the terrible hatreds which separated them. But Mr. Smiley had learned long ago to dis- simulate because that was the only way by which he could accomplish good for these people he loved, and so for the sake of the missionary board at home and the sake of the Reverend Mr. Simon, who he had discovered was sending home pious and insinuating reports behind his back, Mr. Smiley had to turn Jesuitical and pretend that he was a devout Baptist.

In his heart, when he reviewed the progress, history and actual state of Christianity in the West he was not convinced that conversion would do anyone much good, not even a low-caste Hindu. But he had never spoken of this save to his wife, who agreed with him, and to Miss MacDaid and the Major. It was as if they had all been in a plot together, striving to do good despite the superstitions of the Hindu faith in India and those of the Fundamentalists in the far-off Middle West. If you could have gotten the truth from Mr. Smiley concerning his faith he would probably have told you that, if he was anything at all, he was a good Mussulman.

And now Mr. Smiley was here in the hospital with his basket of fruit and a couple of jars of cold jelly on account of the Untouchable woman. She was the mother of one of his pupils, a boy of sixteen in whom he was interested. If the boy kept up his good record at the school the Maharajah would send him all the way to America to Columbia University. Mrs, Smiley herself had made the jelly.

"Three in one night," observed Mr. Smiley. "That's pretty good. It must be almost a record."

"Oh, no," said Miss MacDaid. "We've had as many as seven. You remember, Major?"

The Major remembered. The two of them had not had a wink of sleep all that night. They had had to leave in the very middle of one o Mr. Banner jee's fashionable dinners.

Watching Mr. Smiley drink his tea, Miss MacDaid thought, "He is like a mouse. I don't see where he gets the vitality," never thinking that, like herself, he had an inner strength.

While the Bunya woman's child was being born Mr. Smiley had changed his dripping clothes for a white hospital suit of the Major's in which he looked completely lost. The clothes in which the Major looked so smart hung on Mr. Smiley like a tent, the sleeves and trousers rolled up, the jacket unbuttoned. They made jokes about it and Miss MacDaid went for a fresh pot of tea, thinking that thus she might hold the Major a little longer.

When she returned he was telling the story of the General's defeat at the hands of the Maharani in the poker game.

"The old gentleman nearly blew up," he said. "I wish you could have seen him. Poker is no game for an Englishman. He's always too simple when it comes to a thing like that." Then he looked at his watch and Miss MacDaid's heart sank.

"I have to be back," he said. "Her Highness will be in a bad humor if I stay longer than she thinks necessary to deliver a child. She is probably watching the clock now, and pulling the General's game leg." He turned to the missionary, "What about you, Smiley? You're not planning to cycle back in this flood?"

"I'd swim home willingly," said Mr. Smiley, "if only the flood would keep up. I don't want to see another lean year like we had eleven years ago."

"That was nothing," said Miss MacDaid. "You should have been here twenty-five years ago. Then we had a real first-class famine with plague thrown in for good measure. Now the railroad is working all right and that can never happen again. You should have seen them dying of cholera like flies, lying in rows on a mud floor. That was the year Miss Eldridge died."

"Well, I suppose those years will never come back."

The Major stirred and Miss MacDaid '$ heart sank again. He started to speak but a wild clap of thunder cut him short and he waited for it to pass. Then he stood up, looking very handsome in his white jodphurs with the black atchcan buttoned with diamond buttons and the neat smart red Ranchipur turban. It was the most beautiful of costumes for a man like him. It showed the breadth of his wrestler's shoulders, the narrowness of the hips, the muscles of his arms. Miss MacDaid thought again, "Indians are the most beautiful of races." There was something fine about them. When one had lived long among them even the most beautiful Western face seemed like a boneless anemic pudding.

"I'll drive you and your bike home, Smiley," he said, "and then go back to the palace." Smiley protested politely but the Major said, "It's only three or four miles out of the way. I wouldn't ask a pie dog to go out on a night like this."

Despite anything Miss MacDaid might do, they were off. She went as far as the door with them and there Mr. Smiley, his small figure enveloped in the big doctor's white linens, turned and raised his arms and winked. The sleeves hung from his thin arms like the wings of a strange bird.

"Mebbe I'd better call on the Reverend Simon like this," he said. "That would give him something more to write home about."

Then they climbed into the motor and waved to her and were off into a wall of water. They were friends, these three, Miss MacDaid, the Scotswoman born in Sourabaya, Mr. Smiley, the son of a clergyman in a small Iowa town, and Major Safti who came of the proudest of all Brahmins.

When they had gone Miss MacDaid went and looked at herself in the mirror of the washroom, but the image, even with the rouge which she thought no one would notice and the wash that killed the gray in her hair, gave her no encouragement. She said, half aloud, "I'm a fool. I'm a middle-aged woman who should know better. But I can't help it." And in her heart she was glad because it made her feel warm inside, and even young. Turning, she picked up Mr. Smiley's basket, put the jelly in the icebox and the fruit where the daughter of the aide-de-camp could find it so that the Untouchable woman might have melons when she wakened in the morning.

The Major dropped Mr. Smiley at the vast barrack of a house which he and Mrs. Smiley occupied opposite that of the Reverend Simon, his wife and their daughters, Fern and Hazel. Then he drove back to the palace and stepped over the bodies of the guards all in scarlet and gold who lay asleep in the back hall, and made his way to the Maharani's sitting room. Her lady-in-waiting, the old Princess of Bewanagar, was sound asleep sitting upright in all her jewels, but the game went on furiously. It was already two o'clock in the morning and it was dawn when the Maharani rose and dismissed them, seven hundred and eighty rupees richer than when she sat down. Nearly six hundred of them came from the General.

The first storm to break the drought in Ranchipur did not reach as far east as Delhi and Agra. In spite of its violence and the floods of water which fell, in spite of the fact that it covered an area almost as big as France and would have drowned Holland and Belgium, it was lost in the vastness of India and ended in a spatter of drops in the red dust somewhere on the borders of Udaipur. And so on the Bombay Mail there was not even the faint psychological relief from the dry burning heat which comes with the sight and sound of water. '

In their private car Lord and Lady Esketh, in separate compartments, lay sleepless, for one might as well have tried sleeping in an oven. Even the cakes of ice which lay wrapped in towels in front of each electric fan made no difference, and at moments the dampness which the melting ice created seemed only to make it worse. When you touched metal it was still hot, even in the middle of the night. The yellow-red dust swept beneath and over the train, blowing about it in great blinding clouds. It crept in even through the special fine copper screening which Lord Esketh himself had ordered for the car. It lay over everything, turning the towel-wrapped blocks of ice into cakes of mud, covering the floor in a fine layer which stirred and rose again whenever the current from the electric fan touched it.

In his compartment Lord Esketh smoked cigars and drank whisky and rang for his valet, now to open a window and now to close one, now to change the adjustment of the fan or to send in another cake of ice. Sleepless, he tried in vain to work to compose telegrams or to bring order out of the chaos of figures on the sheet of paper before him.

He was a big man of forty-eight/ big of frame and heavy with weight despite riding and massage and exercise. He had a large, rather round face, which was an anomaly, an ill-natured fat face. It was the thrust of the jaw and the almost lipless mouth which made it so, for they gave him a look of brutality and ruthlessness. On his nose and on the cheekbones there was a network of fine purple veins, for Lord Esketh was a great drinker and for a long time now his braia only functioned at all when he was filled with brandy or whisky.

The drinking had begun long ago in the East when as plain Mr. Albert Simpson, selling cutlery from Leeds and Hull, he drank to fight off the heat. And then afterward at home in England he had drunk to fight off the damp cold and to push his brain when it grew tired and confused, and finally, as he grew rich and his future became complicated, he drank because that was the only way he could save himself from the feeling that he was being crushed by the very monster of success which he had created. And so alcohol had become a part of his very blood; he was so used to it that now it sharpened instead of blurring his brain. He could not work without it. It was not whisky which confused his brain now; it was the suffocating heat.

He was one of the lords of the West, not a great warrior and ruler as Akbar or Napoleon had been, nor a great philosopher like Plato or Mohammed, but simply a shopkeeper with all the shrewdness and craft o a small shopkeeper magnified a thousand times. Instead of dealing in peas or nuts and bolts he had rubber plantations in the Indies, jute plantations in India, cotton in Egypt, newspapers in London and the Midlands, steamship lines which plied between the East and the West, steel and iron (not too profitable now) in England, oil (over which there was trouble in these times) in Persia and Afghanistan, and factories, perhaps the best investment of all, which made cannon and shells. Long ago he had sold out of cotton in England because that was finished forever. It belonged to the Japanese and the Indians (damn their low standard of living!). All those things had to do with the confused jumble of figures from which, in the heat, he could make nothing. The foundations of all this he had laid long ago as plain Mr. Simpson, the son of a building contractor in Liverpool, for he was no hereditary peer; he had bought the peerage shrewdly at a time, not many years before, when it was made cheap and easy by a cynical and demagogic prime minister.

He hated heat for it sent up his blood pressure and made his head feel as if it were bursting, and now although there was little else he could have done he cursed the very idea of ever having come to this hellish country. When people had warned him of the folly of going out to India in April he had laughed, saying, "Listen, my fellow, Esketh has been to Somaliland and Java and New Guinea. Heat isn't anything new to me."

But the man who had gone to Somaliland was a young fellow in his twenties called Albert Simpson, with the strength of an ox and the nerves of an athlete, and not the great Lord fesketh, a swollen, prematurely aged man who was being destroyed by the complicated precarious fortune he had built up shrewdly and not too scrupulously. He had come to India because the Government had requested it and because if he wanted further honors and recognition of services (which he did want) he could not well refuse; but the trip coincided too with his own needs and plans, for it was true that he needed to study the question of jute at the very source, and he knew there was a chance, a quite good chance, of snatching cotton mills in Bombay from their Indian owners for a price that was next to nothing. Cotton was finished in England but in India there was still a chance, even against the Japanese. In his heart he did not care about the East or the West, or Europe or England. He cared only about Lord Esketh and the power which shrewdness and money brought him and perhaps a little bit about his wife and about horses.

If the Indian Government could be induced to put the tariffs high enough to keep out Japanese goods there would be money again in cotton mills, not in England but in India itself. Now he knew was the moment to buy. He had planned his schedule closely. A week in Ranchipur, which would at least be cooler than Bombay, twenty-four hours in Bombay, with everything planned by telegram beforehand so that there would be no delay, and then the Lloyd-Triestino boat to Genoa and ten days or two weeks on the Mediterranean on the yacht, if he did not have to go direct to London because of the trouble the bloody Bolsheviks were making over oil. He did not travel by the line in which he owned a great interest because the boats were slower than the Italian boats and Lord Esketh had a mania for speed. The damned "dagoes" had been cutting into his business lately! The Government, he said to himself, owed it to him to blackmail the Italians, by controlling port privileges, into running their boats on a slower schedule.

The Government, he thought, had no guts any more since these labor party bastards had had a hand in it. It no longer dared to threaten other nations and bully subject peoples. There were moments when the great Lord Esketh regretted not having been born fifty years earlier when the Empire tvas an empire. It would have made his career in many ways much easier. During one of his eternal moments of "juggling figures" he estimated that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British capital had taken out of India five hundred thousand pounds for every pound invested. Colossal! Why, a man of his ability would have cornered the world in a time like that!

It was his strange passion for horses which led him to Ranchipur. In Simla, talking after dinner with a couple of cavalry officers, he learned about a breed of which he had heard but never seen the tough little Kathiawar horses, bred in the dry wild peninsula on the edge of the Indian Ocean. They were, he heard, rather like Arabs but more heavily built and tougher. They not only had speed but they were weight carriers (which he always had to consider). They had always been the favorite mounts of the warlike Mahrattas and Rajputs. Esketh, having heard of them, had to have them, and he had to have no ordinary stock but the best. The best, the cavalry officers said, were to be found in the fabulous stables of the Maharajah of Ranchipur. So the Viceroy arranged it. He would go to Ranchipur and be received by the Maharajah; he would be housed, not in the guesthouse, but in one of the smaller palaces, as befitted a great lord of the West. And at the same time he could see, persuade and perhaps bribe the shrewd old Dewan of Ranchipur to help in the deal for the Bombay Mills. The old Dewan was a power in Indian politics. Thus he might kill two birds with one stone, and he was a great one for doing that.

The Viceroy was certain that his friend the Maharajah would sell him a stallion and a half-dozen mares to ship back to England. That was the only bright spot before him, because even the prospect of putting over a sharp deal in Bombay on the Khojas and Parsees who needed money did not excite him much. If he had been a man given to examining himself he would have known that this was the first sign of failing strength.

Suddenly he felt hot again and rang the bell at the side of his bed. No one came and he rang again angrily, and then a third time in fury, and then the door opened and Bates, his man, came in, looking sleepy- eyed and pale with the heat.

Lord Esketh raised himself ponderously on one elbow and shouted, "God-damn it! What have you been doing? I've been ringing for ten minutes."

The valet was a lean cold man but detached and extremely efficient, the kind of person Esketh liked to have around him. Bates never asked favors and never gave any outward sign of affection or devotion. He did not tremble now. He simply said, "Sorry, sir. I must have fallen asleep."

This appeared to enrage His Lordship further. "I don't see why in hell you should sleep if I can't. Tell that black bastard to bring in some ice. There's nothing left of what's here."

"Very good, sir," and Bates retired, still outwardly unmoved. Nor was he much moved inwardly. He had put up with this sort of thing for twelve years and it did not disturb him very profoundly. The one emotion he felt toward His Lordship was that of a cold dispassionate hatred which never varied. But it was a good post with excellent wages, a great deal of prestige, quite a lot of time off and all sorts of perquisites most of which Lord Esketh knew nothing about. When he felt that he had enough in the bank he would simply quit, like that, one night. The

time, he knew, was not far off, and then to hell with His Lordship. He would retire then to a semi-detached villa in his native town of Manchester, join the Communist Party for good and put at its disposal all the knowledge he had of the chicanery and treason and ruthlessness of Esketh and men like him.

The odd thing was that Bates had succeeded where far more clever and successful and brilliant men than he had failed. By his very indifference he had managed to keep a rich post for twelve years, and during that time he had seen partners, secretaries and clerks, chauffeurs and butlers, come and go, sometimes dismissed, sometimes driven away because life had been made unendurable for them, but always broken and humiliated. There were two people, Bates knew, whom His Lordship had never succeeded in breaking or even in humiliating. One was himself and the other was Lady Esketh. That was why they were both still with him. If the day ever came when either of them showed signs of weakening, they too would go the way of all the others.

In the next compartment Lady Esketh heard her husband's shouts. The sound of his voice, rising even above the monotonous beat of the wheels over the uneven track, roused her out of the stupor into which she had fallen, and she thought, "If he can't sleep, he'll be coming in here to annoy me," but almost at once she knew that it really did not matter. She had grown used to all that long ago. One more time could not matter. She would think of something else, pretend that it was not Albert but another man, almost any man, a train guard or even a coolie. That at least would be exciting. Anyway she could not be more misera- ble than she already was.

Languidly she sat up, holding her pink crepe-de-Chine pillow over the edge of the bed, to shake from it the coating of yellow dust. That hellish dust was in her mouth, in her hair. She switched on the light and looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was yellow with dust and on the temples the perspiration had mixed with it and turned it to mud, which ran in a little stream down the famous complexion which had cost a fortune in beauty specialists. She gave a little cry of horror and then lay back again languidly among the lace and silk, thinking that the misery was only begun. At four in the morning they would have to rise and dress and wait on a platform to change to the narrow-gauge train for Ranchipur. So far as she could see Indian trains never left or arrived at any hour save between midnight and dawn. For weeks now, it seemed to her, she had been sitting up to take a train which left at two in the morning or rising to change from one to another at four. The private car was all very well on the main line but it was of no use on the narrow gauge railways.

She took more sleeping medicine, thinking, "Then I won't notice it so much," and she had nearly fallen into a stupor again when the door opened and Lord Esketh came in.

In the morning when John the Baptist brought Ransome his tea the storm was over and the sun was shining once more as if there had been no rain and the drought had never been broken. That, Ransome knew, was the worst of signs. When the monsoon began thus, coquettishly, it sometimes meant that the rains would be violent but spasmodic and insufficient, no more than enough to startle the whole earth into a forward rush of green, leaving it tender and fresh, to be cooked almost at once by the vicious, hateful sun. Its rays brought anxiety to every eye which opened that morning in Ranchipur, but Ransome's ill ease had in it the special quality of one who had spent most of his life between wet green England and the fertile rolling green country of Middle Western America. His body, his whole soul, ached for the r.ain, not because it meant food but because it ended the terrible drought. For him the spectacle of a burnt dusty land had always the quality of unreality.

When he had had his tea and a shower of tepid water he went out on to the verandah to have his fruit and his first drink of the day.

The garden had been transformed by the rain. In the few hours of the night fresh shoots had sprung from the withered plants and the vines that covered the ancient walls, and underneath them the earth, instead of being burnt and dusty, was a rich dark color; but he knew that by evening it would be yellow again, baked hard by the sun. Nevertheless, when he had finished his drink he went down and, taking a hoe from the summer house, set to work to break up the soil. That, at least, would help it to hold the moisture for a few hours longer in case there was no more rain.

At the far end of the garden near the well he set to work with his hoe, but he had only worked for a little time when he heard his pie dog barking and found that the end of the garden near the house had been invaded by an army of monkeys. He called off the dog, retired into the shade of the trees and watched.

He knew the whole troupe, for they lived in the trees in the palace gardens on the opposite side of the river. Usually they stayed there,, feeding on the bananas and mangoes and the stray bits of food put out for them in the evening by the servants of the palace. But sometimes they went wandering, not in search o food but bent upon mischief, adventure and destruction. Usually Ransome made relentless war on them and left orders with John the Baptist to drive them out if they arrived while he was absent, and John, being a converted Christian, had no scruples about putting the sacred monkeys to rout. Once or twice when there had been no one in the house save the Hindu servants they had arrived without warning and, as if aware of Ransome's enmity, had stripped the garden of every flower. Systematically they would go from plant to plant and vine to vine, tearing off every bright-colored object which caught their attention. They did not eat the blossoms but only threw them in the dust, looking over their shoulder from time to time to make certain that vengeance was not at hand. They were, thought Ransome, exactly like an invading army of men in wartime. The spectacle of desolation which they left behind reminded him of whole villages he had seen in the war, each house with windows and doors broken open and half the contents scattered in the mud of the road outside.

Now they impudently took no notice of his presence. They climbed over the verandah and swarmed up the waterspout. There must have been thirty or forty of them, all female save for the big monkey who sat solemnly on top of the high wall watching for danger. And there were a dozen baby monkeys of all sizes from half-grown ones to babies just born and still clinging to their mothers' necks. One, perhaps five or six days old, was being taught to walk. Its mother sat on her haunches while another female monkey, perhaps an aunt, squatted a couple of yards away holding out her arms. Then the mother shook the baby from herself and gave him a push. He returned to her at once, and a second time she pushed him from her. He returned to her again and this time, irritated, she gave him a sharp slap. He squealed and managed somehow to totter a few steps. Again she slapped him and again he managed a few tottering steps until now he was nearer the aunt than the mother. Halting, the baby turned from one to the other with a comical, terrified expression on his tiny face and then, in perhaps his first moment of decision, he perceived that the aunt was the nearer of the two and tottered uncertainly toward her. Here on her breast he was permitted a moment's rest, and then she too, with firmness, set him on his feet and gave him a push. When he returned for reassurance she too slapped him, and he was forced toward his mother, until presently she was comforting him with caresses and a fine flow of monkey chatter.

From the shade Ransome watched the lesson in silence, his whole face warmed by an unconscious grin, but after the third adventure he became aware of a hubbub on the verandah above the baby and turned to find a raid in progress. His breakfast table was covered with monkeys, chattering and eating the bread, the mangoes, the bananas. One of them, holding his teacup, turned it from side to side speculatively as if trying to make out its use. A third, a mother with a baby clinging to her, sat in the window investigating the stuff of the curtains.

The spectacle made him laugh but at the same time he felt that the moment for decision had come and he drew from his pocket a catapult made from a fork of mango tree and strips cut from an old tire. Cautiously he picked up a round pebble and fitted it into the pocket of the sling and took careful aim. It was the only way to keep sacred monkeys in check. Driving them of? did no good, for they only came back when your back was turned and began tearing the tiles from the roof to hurl them at you. He knew that by now he had succeeded in establishing in their clever brains the fact of a hidden special menace that lingered inside the enclosure of his garden a sudden burning painful sensation in the behind caused by something which came mysteriously out of the air itself.

At last he let fly the pebble. It struck the rump of one of the females clu& tered on the table. She gave a wild scream and fell on her nearest neighbor, .scratching and screaming and biting like a fury. And then pandemonium >roke loose. The food was scattered over the verandah, the teacup fell with a crash. Suddenly there was a stream of monkeys flying up the jasmine vine to the top of the wall and then by the lower branches into the mango tree. The last of them carried with her a bright cotton napkin which caught her fancy. Only the big male stood his ground on top of the wall, jabbering and swearing. Once more Ransome selected a pebble, but he was not quick enough. The old male was no fool, and before Ransome could hit him he was gone, still screeching, into the trees. The last he saw of them was in a wild procession along the tops of the mangoes, making their way in jabbering excitement back to the security of the Maharajah's park.

"I suppose," he thought, "Jehovah must sometimes feel as I do now."

For a little while more he worked, but this morning his mind, instead of becoming absorbed and lost in the very earth, conjuring up new wonders of flowers and vegetables which would spring from every stroke of his hoe, wandered away into strange paths of speculation. He wondered why it was that America, a new, a young, a rich country should have fallen into the same decadence as Europe, why it was there were no longer any men great enough to lead the way, no leaders but only mediocrities and political opportunists and dictators who ruled by brutality and hysteria.

"Perhaps," he thought, "the times, the age, economics, the very passions of mankind have grown beyond the control of man in the West. Perhaps the tottering structure has become so great, so complex, so unmanageable that there could be no one man great enough to cope with it or even a part of it. Perhaps that was what happened when the Roman world tottered and fell. Perhaps that was how some universal law operated, a law as exact, as immutable as the Mendelian theory. Perhaps man was allowed to build and build until at last, in his pride, he was crushed by the very thing he had built."

The thought brought to him a sudden humbling sense of his own insignificance and at the same time a feeling of contempt and pity for the arrogance of man himself that he should be so presumptuous, that a few men should conquer and control disease and pestilence while a few others, like Esketh and his sort, could arrange a wholesale slaughter in which not germs or pestilence killed men by millions but men themselves. Nature, it seemed, was not to be gotten round. She simply found, through the agency of man himself, new means of killing him off, of bringing him once more to his knees, as she had done long ago with Egypt, with Rome, indeed with the very Indians living all about him who had fallen from their state of magnificence to that of subject people, preyed upon by ignorance, defeatism, superstition and disease.

It seemed to him that he had never seen his own world clearly until he had come to India. Now he saw it in all its parts.

And presently he began to think again of Esketh, wondering why he should be coming to Ranchipur to disturb its peace with his boisterous pitiless brutal presence. Vaguely he remembered him in the days after the War when he had crossed his path in Whitehall, and he had no liking or admiration for the man, neither for his shrewdness nor his ill-spent energy, nor for his talk of empire. If Esketh were coming to Ranchipur it would mean no good to anyone there, least of all the old Maharajah who in his goodness and simplicity could only be a victim. The thought of Lady Esketh troubled him because the name was so familiar to him and yet so lost. For a long time now, for nearly fifteen years, he had been out of the important, worldly life of London. It had been lost to him, like most of the other once bright important names which no longer meant very much even when he saw them with faces attached in the "Sketch" and the "Tatler" and the "Bystander."

He knew that he was not the only man who was sick nor the only one who sought escape and peace. There were millions of others like him, in factories and offices, in schools and shops, who could not escape like himself because their grandfathers had not dug a vast fortune from the mountains of Nevada. As he hoed more and more vigorously, it struck him that it was only in the earth that men could find peace and hope in these times, for there was little peace to be found in the world which man had made, a world which in his own sickness, appeared to him dull and tired and apathetic, going from makeshift to makeshift and compromise to compromise, and arriving in the end at the same old evils which had destroyed peoples and nations and civilizations since the beginning of time.

In the East he had found nothing save perhaps a druglike peace, and that was not what he had come searching for because he knew that in that very peace lay the seeds of death. He had run away, he thought, from the spectacle of his own world, faithless and without hope, slowly and wearily destroying itself.

Hoeing and thinking he became excited so that he forgot the hour and even the boiling heat until John the Baptist appeared looking alarmed and comic in his breech clout, to ask whether after all he meant to lunch at home. It was one o'clock and the day was Saturday and he should have been, long before now, on his way to the Mission to lunch with the Smileys. Throwing down his hoe, he hurried into the house to bathe and change his clothes. Then he went to the potting shed to take out his motor, one of the seven motors in Ranchipur, not counting the Rolls-and-Packard-filled garage of the Maharajah. He rarely used it save during the monsoon, for there were only two roads in all Ranchipur outside the town, one to the vast artificial lake above the town that served as a reservoir and the other built three hundred years ago by the Moguls to the -ruined city of El-Kautara at the foot of Mount Abana.

He found the old Buick standing in the shed, naked and open to the burning sun, for the monkeys had been there before him, perhaps early in the morning before they paid him a visit in the back garden. They had entertained themselves by throwing all the tiles off the roof on to the ground. He grinned, thinking that in the end it was the monkeys who had won.

The American Mission occupied two big barracklike houses a mile or two beyond the race course. In the beginning, long ago, just after the mutiny, they had served as buildings to house the officers of the British troops stationed in Ranchipur. Square ugly buildings, age had given them character and time had provided beauty in climbing vines and creepers clematis and trumpet vines and bougainvillea. They stood, shaded by mango and eucalyptus and pepper trees, a little way from the dusty road. In one lived the Reverend Mr. Elmer Simon, with his wife and two daughters, Fern and Hazel. In the other dwelt Mr. Smiley with his wife and Mrs. Smiley 's great-aunt Phoebe.

In the care and the appearance of the two gardens one could read the characters of the two families. Mr. Simon's garden had no flowers at all save those hardy shrubs and vines which in India needed no care and were impossible to kill, either by drought, flood or blight. Alone, apart, it would have looked like a garden moderately well furnished and well tended, but beside the Smiley house it had a barren, rather shaggy look, for the Smiley garden was filled with flowers which even during the long drought seemed more vigorous than any flowers in all Ranchipur. There were salvias and petunias and geraniums and marigolds and zinnias, mostly sturdy old-fashioned flowers such as Aunt Phoebe had grown in her garden back in Iowa fifty years before. Begonias and pansies stood in pots along the edge of the verandah, and suspended here and there from the lower limbs of the trees hung receptacles of one sort or another tin cans painted green, cracked bowls held together with wire, bamboo baskets. These too were the work of Aunt Phoebe who from nostalgia had decorated the branches of the mango trees in Ranchipur exactly as she had done the branches of Iowa's cottonwoods as a farmer's wife, half a century earlier. The suspended receptacles held ferns and petunia plants and lilies, but Aunt Phoebe's greatest pride were the orchids which grew in the bamboo receptacles. They were a tribute to her from the Untouchable boys of Mr. Smiley's school. They brought them to her out of the jungle and in their workshop they made her the little bamboo baskets in which they grew. It was one of the reasons (she wrote to the folks back in Iowa) why she liked India. You could have orchids growing all the year round, right in the front yard.

The effort which, with the Smileys, had gone into this garden was expended by their neighbors, the Simons, on a double tennis court and a large arbor covered with trumpet vines which stood at one end of it. This was the work of Mrs. Simon, a powerful, pretty and tenacious woman on the verge of middle age. To look at her you would never have suspected her power. She was forty-one, small and plump, with curly blond hair which had faded only a little. At the age of twenty she had met Mr. Simon at the Baptist college at Cordova, Indiana, and married him while still in the throes of adolescent experience, under the misapprehension that her feelings for Mr. Simon were spiritual and unassociated with the body. Later, because in spite of everything she was a shrewd woman, she recognized the difference but admitted it to none but herself. By that time Fern and Hazel were born, and although she knew that she had made a bad bargain she knew too that she would have to make the best of it for the rest of her life, and so she did, and sometimes "the best of it" was extremely trying for the Reverend Mr. Simon and her daughters, Fern and Hazel

The fault had been her upbringing and background, for she came from a Baptist family in a small Mississippi town and so her ideas of life in the great world had been somewhat false and warped from the very start. At twenty she was filled with zeal for the faith and regarded the prospect of life as a missionary with enthusiasm. It was only slowly, after she had left forever the backwoods Mississippi family and the hysterical atmosphere of the little sectarian university, that she began to see life in terms of the character with which nature had endowed her. She realized presently that in spite of all the calls she had had from God, she was not meant to be a missionary but for greater things. But it was too late and so she had to compromise. At heart she had been from the beginning an ambitious Southern belle with a will of iron concealed beneath a coy mid-Victorian facade.

Without ever suspecting it Mrs. Simon was at times heroic and, like many American women, undefeatable, because the world about her her husband, her two daughters, Mr. and Mrs. Smiley and Aunt Phoebe, even the Maharajah and Maharani themselves existed only in relation to her own ego. All her existence was concentrated into a struggle against the world in which she found herself, to raise it somehow, to alter it, to transmute it into something which it was not. She was the wife of a missionary, but neither those early vapors which had deceived her into throwing herself away upon Mr. Simon, nor the miserable state of the people among whom she found herself, nor even the words of Christ himself, made any difference to her. She was determined to be a person of importance and of distinction, a creature much more than the mere wife of a missionary; and to accomplish this she found it necessary to dominate her husband and her daughters, to assume strange affectations, to spend all of the little income she had inherited from the hotel block back in the small Mississippi town as well as all of her husband's meager salary. There were moments when she succeeded, moments of triumph when some acquaintance or new friend made during the summer months in Poona would say, "The last thing I would have thought you were was a missionary's wife."

She disliked very nearly everyone the Smileys most of all because they were always there before her, just across the drive, a living reproach, a nasty irritant to her own conscience, remaining in Ranchipur all through the terrible months of the monsoon while she was enjoying the cool high air of Poona, working night and day, spending their money not on automobiles and tennis courts but on the people they had ^come to help. They were always there, recalling to her the disappointment of her own now distant dreams when for an instant she had known an intimation of the delights of self-sacrifice.

In moments of wild exasperation she would sometimes say to her husband, "They don't make all those sacrifices just because they're good. They do it to spite you and me and make us feel miserable." Mr. Simon would reply, "No, my dear. You mustn't exaggerate. They're good hard- working people, even if they are not quite up to date." For Mr. Simon had the great gift of self -deceivers he managed to transmute his weakness and even his petty vices into virtues. He persuaded himself that with his automobile and tennis courts he was a "modern" missionary and that he was better able to do the work of the Lord if he did not wear himself out riding a bicycle and if he kept up his health by having regular exercise at tennis. He was the only person in the world before whom Mrs. Simon did not put on airs, and sometimes the spectacle o her nakedness was terrifying to him. The worldliness of his wife was the one thing he could not quite explain away, either to himself or to the Lord.

He was really a harmless man, quite stupid and good-looking. (There were moments in the night when Mrs. Simon found that a consolation, together with the fact that the tennis courts and her regimen of good food and holidays kept him young and vigorous despite the climate.) His smooth good looks were those of a man who somehow has remained forever a little boy, unaware of the currents of the lives about him, unaware of disaster or of suffering, whose motto was "Everything will turn out for the best." Even when he wrote home complaining of his colleague it was not himself who was responsible; it was Mrs. Simon who forced him into it. In the beginning he had written complaining letters and neglected deliberately to post them, but when no replies came from the home Mission Board his wife divined the reason and afterward she posted them with her own hand. What she hoped to accomplish was

the recall of the Smileys so that she might have in the house across the drive a couple who were impressed by her, by her clothes, by her tea parties, by the provincial Englishmen she picked up in Poona, and most of all by the English subalterns in Ranchipur whom she corralled with difficulty by means of the tennis courts and the delicacies which they never tasted save at her house. She wanted too someone in the house opposite who would not be reminding her perpetually, day in and day out, that she was after all only the wife of a missionary.

She had designs. She did not mean to have her daughters Fern and Hazel waste their lives as mates to missionaries. In romantic moments she saw them both, or Fern at least, married into county families, living in England in an atmosphere and background of which she had read in novels but had never yet seen. There were times when she had designs on Ransome himself as the son of an earl and the grandson of old "Ten Percent" MacPherson, the millionaire. There were even moments when, behind locked doors, she experienced in her desperation a renaissance of faith, and kneeling, prayed, "Oh, God, help me to get Mr. Ransome to come to tea. Oh, Lord, make him come to tea just once."

In her heart she thought of him with irritation and at times with genuine hatred, but these feelings she never allowed to interfere with her campaign. She hated him because of his indifference to her fading prettiness and to her tea parties. He had a way of being perfectly polite but of making her feel at the same time with a disconcerting suddenness that she was wriggling her shoulders, tossing her head and rolling her eyes like a pie dog bitch. She hated him for the prestige which he achieved without effort because he was what he was, when she worked so hard without ever achieving it at all. She hated him because everyone in Ranchipur was always asking him to lunch or to dine or to come to tea, and because she knew that there were only two places he never refused to go to the palace and to the Smileys. And she hated him because he would go to tea and dinner with Mr. Bannerjee, an Indian, and was a great friend of Raschid Ali Khan who was not only an Indian but a Mohammedan. Somewhere in the back of her baffled, muddled brain Mrs. Simon had two profound prejudices, one against people of darker complexion than herself, and the other a conviction that all Mohammedans were demons who had large harems guarded by eunuchs

where the most lascivious orgies went on incessantly. In her ignorance of history, race, geography and all culture she lumped together Indians and negroes in one large sacrifice to her early "poor-white'* prejudices.

She hated the Maharajah and the Maharani because in spite of their dark complexions they were supreme in Ranchipur, of greater importance, despite any arguments she could bring up in her frequent interior dialogues, than anyone, even Lily Hoggett-Egburry and the Resident himself. And she hated them because she and Mr. Simon were invited to the palace only once a year to dine in splendor with the Smileys and a few insignificant minor officials. She would complain to her husband, "I don't see why we should be treated the same as those 'hicks' across the drive. We aren't the same."

"My dear, we are the same to His Highness. We are foreigners and missionaries."

"You ought to explain the difference to the old man."

"He wouldn't understand. You must remember he is an Indian and an Oriental."

"It's humiliating."

"It'll come out all right."

"I'm sick of hearing that."

"What would you suggest that I do?"

"Make His Highness appreciate all you do for him. Demand an audience."

And then Mr. Simon would manage to put her off by saying, "We'll think about it. We'll find some way out." And she would say, "If you don't, Fll go to hifn myself. You ought to do it for the sake of Fern and Hazel. It's humiliating for us to be treated as if we were the same as the Smileys." And then Mr. Simon, rather desperate, would say, "We are the same in the eyes of the Lord," and Mrs. Simon would shout, "The eyes of the Lord, rubbish!"

But nothing was done although Mrs. Simon kept her husband in a perpetual state of terror lest she make good her threat and create a scandal at the palace. He knew that it was not beyond her, if she were exasperated sufficiently, to storm the palace gates and, knocking down the Sikhs, force her way into the royal presence.

He was at once weakened and strengthened by the knowledge that much o what she said was true, and being a muddled man who valued peace and the good will of others more than action or clear thinking, he remained in a perpetual state of compromise and unhappy confusion. He was meant by nature to have been a good citizen with a small shop in a Middle Western town where he could belong to innumerable lodges and be a moving spirit of the Rotary Club. Instead of that he found himself, bewildered and often hurt, in the depths of the Orient where the virtues of his simple nature were completely lost. Before the intrigues of the Maharajah's entourage, made simply out of love for intrigue and through no feeling against Mr. Simon himself, before the suburban snobbery of the tiny English colony and the rudeness of the subalterns who came to his wife's teas, he was simply lost. Both his wife and the Smileys were stronger than himself, his wife because, in her energy and singleness of purpose, she simply overrode all those things, and the Smileys because for them none of these things existed; they were simply unaware of them.

He knew how much the Mission had done for Ranchipur, not only by bringing the Maharajah's subjects into the Kingdom of Heaven, but in ways far less heavenly and far more real. In his heart he knew that the conversions meant nothing in a spiritual sense, because somehow in a fashion beyond his understanding, the Hindu religion, with a devastating indifference, managed mysteriously to swallow up Christianity and absorb its gods and prophets and saints. In Jaipur he had heard a holy man saying his rosary, calling out the names of Hindu gods, saying rapidly, "Krishna, Vishnu, Rama, Jeesu Kreest!" and in the court of the big temple in Ranchipur there was a cast-iron statue of the Virgin Mary. Although he always talked otherwise he knew that the whole problem o conversion was a hopeless one. The real benefits which the missionaries brought to Ranchipur were not heavenly but material. The intelligent among the Untouchables rushed into Christianity because, once converted, they ceased to be Untouchables in the true sense, exchanging this for the blasphemous and low state which all Europeans, even the Viceroy himself and the Emperor of India, held in the eyes of orthodox Hindus. Nevertheless the gates o conversion held rewards, and if the Untouchables were indifferent to heavenly ones they appreciated the rewards of a new economic and social status and the opportunity to go as converted Christians where they chose and make their living as they saw fit. And conversion among the wild nomadic hill tribes meant that they embraced not only Christianity which they promptly turned back into a kind of witch-doctor religion, but they embraced agriculture and weaving and settled down in villages, ceasing to make the disturbance and trouble they had created constantly in their more primitive wandering days.

Ah, it was all very disturbing and discouraging and if Mr. Simon had not been an extremely easy-going healthy man, all of whose glands functioned perfectly, the whole thing would have thrown him either into an even deeper self-deception or a state of suicidal depression. As it was, he found his life pleasant enough despite his wife's ambitions and the problems created by the future of Fern and Hazel. One thing weakened all his half-realized decisions, and that was the knowledge that he himself and Mrs. Simon were really of very little value to the Maharajah or to India because their side of the mission was devoted entirely to spiritual conquest. It was the Smileys in the schools and workshops who did all the work and achieved the lasting good, and he was perfectly aware that the Maharajah knew it.

On the Saturday Ransome came to lunch with the Smileys Mrs. Simon had one of her moments of prayer. Kneeling beside the bed in her locked room, she implored God to send a call to Ransome to come to tea. Not trusting the question entirely to the Lord, she kept both eyes and ears well open in order to attack Ransome in person when he arrived at the Smileys. She knew that he was almost certain to come because on Saturdays he always lunched there at what, in moments of exasperation, she had referred to as Mrs. Smiley's "treasonable lunches" because the people who came there were interested only in India. Those "black traitors," Doctor Ansari and Mrs. Naidu, had both been there on the occasion of their visits to Ranchipur, and Raschid Ali Khan and Mr. Jobnekar who both lived in Ranchipur came there nearly every Saturday. Mrs. Simon wanted Ransome especially on this Saturday because it was a kind of farewell party before she left with Fern and Hazel for the hill station.

So when he drove up to the door in his battered Buick, before he had set foot to the still steaming earth, Mrs. Simon came out of the house and across her untidy lawn toward him, her blond hair freshly curled, her new silk dress crisp and as yet not dampened by perspiration. He knew what she was coming for, and after the first wave of weariness at sight of her (after all, he had come all the way to Ranchipur to escape people like her) he thought, "Hell, make it Thursday." He knew that they would be leaving soon and that there would be a respite of at least three months during which he would not be invited by Mrs. Simon to a tennis party. Besides, very faintly somewhere in the depths of him there had been stirring lately a desire to see people again, to see them indiscriminately, and be amused by them.

Mrs. Simon was holding out her hand, tossing her freshly made curls. Abstractly he recognized that she was a pretty woman of a certain age and he thought it a pity that she was unwilling to let it rest at that. She kept imposing her prettiness upon you, as if otherwise you might overlook it. And the eyes were perpetually giving her away. Far down in the depths of their blueness there was something as hard and cold as marble.

"I was thinking about you only this morning," she said. "We're having a farewell tea party and I said to my husband, 'we must ask Mr. Ransome.' He was going to stop by your house to ask you. Did he turn up?"

All this about stopping by the house was, Ransome knew, pure fabrication and he found himself suddenly in a position in which many people found themselves when dealing with Mrs. Simon. He was aware that he must help her with her lies. He began to play the game. He did not know why except that he felt a terrible necessity to save her from the shame of being caught.

"I suppose something has kept him in town. I just left the house. I couldn't well have missed him."

Mrs. Simon gurgled, "Well, anyway, I've caught you on the fly. You will come, I hope?" And she cast one of her most persuasive glances at him, a glance which, if she had been a more sophisticated woman, she would have understood could mean only one thing.

Ransome wanted to laugh, first at such a display of sex in the interests of so trivial a matter; and then at all the effort she was making when, if she only knew it, her game was already won. And suddenly in the midst of it he heard from the Smileys' house the angry voice of Raschid AH Khan, booming and violent in a broken phrase.

"... only got second raters now men who don't come to India to make a career of India, but just to pass the time."

And something about the juxtaposition of Mrs. Simon and Raschid All Khan struck him not only as fantastic but as absurdly funny.

"Surely. I'd like to come," he said.

"Oh, I'm so glad! I'm so glad! It's always so hard to get you."

He smiled and put his topee back on his thick dark hair. The sun o the monsoon was like a furnace.

"Please give my best to Mr. Simon."

"He'll be delighted. I can't see how he came to miss you."

She showed signs of lingering, and he began to feel that old uneasiness which always crept over him after two minutes of her company. It was an uneasiness mingled with exhaustion. What did you say to a woman like this, who made gestures of invitation unaware of what she was doing? What did you say to a woman who made conversation in which there was no sincerity whatever? Always when he found himself trapped by her his mind began to wander so that he made wrong answers. He was aware that when she spoke to him her Southern accent grew doubly rich, so that sometimes he had difficulty in understanding her. And with him she referred a great deal to plantations and old "mammies," which he felt was not only laying it on a bit thick, but insulting to his experience and power of discernment.

"You'd better not stand about in this sun. It's ferocious."

"Well, good-by," she said. "See you this afternoon. It isn't large. Just some of the boys dropping in." She always referred to the subalterns as "the boys."

As he walked up the path beneath Aunt Phoebe's orchids and petunias he heard Raschid Ali Khan booming out again, from the kitchen this time:

"The trouble is that they know they're only coming out here temporarily and they do their job offhand, between times, just waiting for the day they can go home on leave. If they've got any money they go by the Italian line and get there quickly. If they haven't they go by P. & O. They haven't any interest in India or Indians."

And then as Ransome entered the house he heard Raschid saying, "England has lost India because men like them won't sit down with an Indian to have a cup of tea." And he knew that Raschid was talking about civil servants.

There was no one in the drawing room so he went through the passage- way into the big cool kitchen where he knew he would find them. In the center of the room the big Mohammedan was striding up and down, shouting in his excitement and pointing each gesture with the long radish he held in one hand. By the stove stood Mrs. Smiley in a clean apron, stirring something in a pot. In one corner sat Mr. Jobnekar, leader of the Depressed Classes, and in the other, seated in an authentic American rocking chair, was Aunt Phoebe, fanning herself with a large palm-leaf fan across which was printed in large black letters, "GO TO FREUNDLICH THE CLOTHIER, IF YOU WANT GOOD VALUE. 19 MAIN STREET, CEDAR FALLS, IOWA." She was a small thin old lady of eighty, with a body bent and worn by fifty years of life as a farmer's wife, but in the blue eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles glowed the light of youth. She was enjoying herself. She liked big, handsome virile men and Raschid Ali Khan was giving one of his best performances.

He was, like many Mohammedan Indians, well over six feet with a big muscular body through which flowed blood that was a mixture of Arab and Turk, Afghan and Persian, with perhaps a dash of Hungarian and a soupgon of Tartar. There was really nothing of the Hindu Indian about him. Beside a man like Major Safti, big and handsome as he was, one recognized at once the difference. In the Mohammedan there was a wildness and violence while in the Brahmin there was suavity and good nature. In Raschid there was a frankness and a positive quality which in the Hindu was supplanted by tact and a taste for intrigue. The Mohammedan was all for getting things done. He was a romantic and a visionary. The Hindu was passive and mystic. "Perhaps," Ransome thought, "that is why a few million Mohammedans can hold their own against three hundred million Hindus."

With fair hair Raschid would have been blond, for his skin was fair and his eyes a blue-gray, but the hair was blue black and curly. The sharp Arab profile gave him a proud fierce look. "The horsemen of Baber/' thought Ransome, "must have looked like Raschid." There was no accounting in his appearance for the few drops of English blood that flowed in his veins. It was true, although Raschid never spoke of it, that his great-grandmother was an Englishwoman, the daughter of an East Indian merchant in Calcutta long before the mutiny.

Raschid did not remember her at all although she had lived to be nearly a hundred years old and stories of her at least must have come to him from his father and grandfather. He never spoke of her and did not, Ransome discovered, like to be questioned about her. It was as if he tried to forget that drop of blood come to him from the destroyers of the rotting Mogul Empire.

Ransome tried to imagine her, a young middle-class Englishwoman in the tiny world of Calcutta, eloping with the young prime minister of an obscure Muslim State. She must have been, he thought, one of those strange exotics which England in her middle-class respectability throws off now and then, exotics more fantastic than those produced by other nations people like Byron and Lady Hester Stanhope and Doughty and Lawrence and Gertrude Bell and hundreds of others less well known who had found relief and spiritual peace in the midst of peoples as far removed from their own as night is from day. A portrait of her which Ransome had seen existed in Raschid's possession, but from it one could discover nothing. It was done in the deliberate decadent style of Persian miniatures at the end of the eighteenth century, stylized and artificial She sat cross-legged, like a Muslim woman, on a cushion. Through the archway behind her there was a lovely blue sky diapered with mannered stars. From the portrait he gathered that she was dark, but the most important fact was that she, a Mohammedan woman, had been painted at all and that she was without a veil. When he spoke of this to Raschid, his friend, a little annoyed, said, "No, she was never in purdah, nor my grandmother, nor my mother, nor my wife. Mohammed said nothing about purdah. My great-grandmother always received her husband's friends and went about freely. She ruled not only him but his people. She knew all about his affairs and sometimes she gave him good advice. Pure Islam does not recognize purdah. It was a corruption which grew up out of war."

She must indeed have been a remarkable old lady. In her old age her husband had been knighted for his services in helping to bring peace to India after the mutiny, so in the end she died honored by her own people whom she had scarcely seen since she was a girl of twenty. Her own romantic blood, it seemed, had brought neither British balance nor a shop- keeper's calculation to the blood of her children. It was as if God had meant her all along to be a Muslim princess, and in the end she had found her place.

Raschid was a devout Mohammedan, less from tradition than from conviction, because the religion in its purity seemed to him the most honest and practical of all the religious systems devised for mankind. Islam included Christ among its prophets together with Moses and Isaiah, but Christ (thought Raschid) had been too impractical, too visionary, and all that he taught, which like the Islamic faith had been simplicity itself in its origin, had been corrupted ever since by priests and the church. He did not deny the corruption and the heretical sects of Islam, but he found them less mischievous and less productive of evil than the corresponding complex corruptions in Christianity. Priests had never had the same powers in Islam, nor the same worldliness nor the same hypocrisies.

He knew the history of Christendom far more profoundly and in detail than Ransome or any man Ransome had ever met knew the history o Islam.

"Neither one," Raschid would say, "is anything but a sorry spectacle. Perhaps the Russians are right to make a religion of the state and the brotherhood of man."

But somehow in Islam the idea of the brotherhood of man had been preserved. Raschid himself like any good Muslim, looked upon the blackest Moroccan or the yellowest Malayan as his brother in Islam. In this, he said, Christianity had failed since clots and clusters assorted themselves according to races and according to nations; that, he would say, has been the undoing of the West: "It is that which will destroy the West in the end. While Islam is still intact from the Pillars of Hercules to the China Sea, Christendom will be a howling wilderness once more preyed upon by marauding bands."

He would issue these statements in a thundering voice, his blue eyes flashing these and others like, "Islam forbids any good Muslim to be a money changer or to loan money for interest. Did Christ ever speak of that?"

He spoke perfect English in a poetic and occasionally pompous manner, for he was Asiatic enough to enjoy long, pompous phrases and European enough to be excellent in the field of polemics. At moments, when he got thoroughly going, even his vitality could not save him from being a bore. He would have made, with his handsome physique and his huge booming voice, an excellent politician in the West, but his great fault as a politician and as a leader in India was his sincerity. Not only did the tactlessness which sometimes accompanies sincerity paralyze his own efforts but it confounded alike the intrigues of the West and the East, so that both elements refused to deal with him because he slashed through any intrigue straight to the heart of things. He would have been a leader in time of war or of revolution, but in times of bargaining and compromise he was of no value to any party. His tragedy was that he had risen in his prime too late and too soon, and that in his heart he was aware of this.

Now, at forty, he was head of the police in Ranchipur, a Muslim police official in a Hindu state. It was a less impossible situation than one might have imagined for there had been no religious riots, nor even any unpleasantness in the State of Ranchipur for twenty-five years. That peace which was almost unknown in the rest of India had come about through the work and the will and the absolute power of the old Maharajah. In Ranchipur religion was kept inside the temple and the mosque. There were no fanatics or agitators allowed neither Mohammedan nor Hindu, nor those who sometimes appeared mysteriously from the world outside, armed with political rather than theological heresies. And Raschid himself was the soul of justice. No one, not even the most orthodox Hindu, had ever accused him of partiality toward his fellow believers in Islam. However profound his own belief, once he had stepped into the role of minister of police he became a fanatic for justice.

Across his forehead, cutting deep into his thick, blue-black hair, there was a scar which had been given him by bandits in the middle of the Arabian desert long ago, a year after the greatest war in Christendom. Alone, with one fellow Muslim, he had made the journey on camel back across the freezing desert from Haifa to Mecca to report on the damage done in the Christian war to the Holy City of Islam. It was a long romantic tale, that journey through the dust and burning heat and cold.

He had made it not because in his heart he believed there was any special holiness attached to the city or even to the shrine itself, but because he knew that the shrine was a symbol which held all Islam together from Morocco to Macassar, and when the great day came Islam would need such a symbol. It would need a consciousness of brotherhood. He had two loyalties, one to Islam and one to India, and sometimes they were difficult to reconcile.

On Saturdays Mrs. Smiley sent her cook into the city to enjoy himself, and herself took over the kitchen. It was the one half day of the week which she had to herself, and sometimes even that was snatched from her if there was illness or disaster among the families of the girls she taught all through the week. She liked cooking and she was a good cook, and there were times when she grew very weary of Indian cooking, excellent but always too highly seasoned when the cook undertook Indian dishes, and mysteriously pallid, pastelike and monotonous when he made the European dishes she had taught him. When she took over the kitchen she was able to cook the things which she and Mr. Smiley and Aunt Phoebe liked things like candied yams (which grew in Ranchipur in abun- dance), lemon meringue pie and beaten biscuit. Saturday afternoon was a gala day and, as it was also the only time when the Smileys might see their friends, their kitchen on that day had long since become a kind of lunch club. The members included Raschid Ali Khan, Aunt Phoebe, Mr. and Mrs. Smiley, Ransome, Miss MacDaid when she could get away from the hospital, Mr. Jobnekar when he was not traveling, and sometimes Major Safti. After a few meetings Raschid, who liked good food and was an excellent cook, could no longer resist the temptation of the kitchen and himself took a hand, and from then on the Saturday lunches became a mixture of Mohammedan and lowan cooking. Raschid made dishes of which pancakes were a principal ingredient, and hodles and croquettes of fish and meat. Mrs. Smiley undertook the desserts and the principal dishes. In all that odd assembly there was little trouble over the diet, for the Christians had no restrictions, nor had Mr. Jobnekar as an Untouchable, and Major Safti, the Brahmin had long ago forgotten that the cow was still sacred to millions of Indians. Only Raschid, the Mohammedan, drew a line, and that was at pork. He believed that the pig was a dirty animal and that in any case pork was impossible in so hot a place as Ranchipur.

Mrs. Smiley was a small woman with a thin body and a face, which although it had never been pretty was agreeable and had in it the light which is in the faces of good simple people. Both her body and her face, worn by the heat and the hard work of twenty-five years spent in Ranchipur, save for one year of leave in Cedar Falls, were those of a woman ten years older. But somehow this made very little difference, no more difference than her lack of interest in clothes. It was something else which you found in Mrs. Smiley, something which lay deeper than prettiness or fashionable frocks, something which you could not quite define but which made you notice her a moment or two after she had come into a room notice her and think, "This is no ordinary woman." Mrs. Smiley had no consciousness of the effect she made; there was never any time for such things, any more than there was time for cosmetics and clothes. There were never enough hours in any day for all that she had to accomplish, for all that must be done until she was old like Aunt Phoebe and at last in her grave, never having had time in all her life to think for a moment of herself.

The friendship between Ransome and the Smileys was a subject of much muddled speculation, not only in the mind of Mrs. Simon but in the conversation of the whole European colony, who could not see what it was "a man like him" saw in "that dreary little woman" and her husband. What he saw in her was much simpler than anything they supposed. He liked her common sense, her simplicity, her contentment in life. He liked her toughness which, more through the spirit than through the body, had resisted the burning heat for twenty-five years as well as attacks of malaria and once a bout with typhus. He liked her lack of pretense and her integrity that on Saturday afternoons she allowed all India to slither away from her and became for a few hours what she had always been at heart, a good Iowa housewife. He liked her because she was undefeatable, because deep in her soul there was a profound and solid philosophy which never permitted her, even in India, to turn cynical. Above the disillusionment, the disappointment, the betrayal, the pettiness, that was all about her in the vast country, in the state, in her own church, among the very Untouchable boys and girls to whom she

gave her life, she arose resilient and humorous, always saying, "Well, that's how things are" a phrase which with her covered everything from a burned pancake to the paralyzing intrigues of Mr. and Mrs. Simon.

She was no professional cheer-giver like the Reverend Mr. Simon, yet from her presence you were somehow able to gather strength. That was why they all came to sit in her big kitchen on Saturday afternoons Mr. Jobnekar, Ransome, Miss MacDaid, even the great dynamo of vitality Raschid Ali Khan all those who sometimes grew low-spirited and fearful and discouraged. And he was certain that she had never once thought of why they came. She was only glad that they were there.

To Raschid Ali Khan Mrs. Smiley was always something of a mystery, but Mr. Jobnekar, the Untouchable, sitting on a stool in one corner, listening, understood her a little, because he had been to America, He was a small dark man, wiry and compact like a panther, with the tough smoldering vitality special to Untouchables.

"It is my theory," Mr. Jobnekar would say in his odd, thick accent, "that the Untouchables were a special race living in India since the beginning of time, who were enslaved when they were conquered by invaders. That's why they have greater powers of resistance. The others are newcomers. We have always been here. We are immune to most of the evils of India because we belong here."

Unlike Raschid who had been to school in Oxford and Berlin and Paris, Mr. Jobnekar spoke English awkwardly and with difficulty. He had learned it first in the mission schools from the predecessor of Mr. Smiley, and although four years in America had helped him it did not give him an easy command of the tongue. Now and then in the midst of an impassioned speech he would say, "You bet!" or "By Golly!"

It was the Maharajah himself who had paid for Mr. Jobnekar's education in America and now Mr. Jobnekar was the leader of the Depressed Classes and the only organizer they had in all the turmoil of people and races and faiths that was India. He traveled from one end of India to another, up and down and crosswise, into the great cities of British India, into obscure barbaric little states where a Hindu might kill an Untouchable and go unpunished on the plea that he had been defiled by contact with his shadow. He knew them all, from his own people living in comparative peace and freedom in Ranchipur, to those who lived like vultures off the garbage and the donkeys and cows and goats which died each night of starvation and old age in the streets and lanes and byways of their towns.

It was not so long ago that this had been true in Ranchipur. Mr. Jobnekar at forty could remember when he had played near a great pile of animals, dead of starvation and disease, which always ornamented the dirty little square in the center of the Untouchable quarter. In famine time the Untouchables suffered less than the other poor inhabitants, for there were always the beasts which fell each night to be collected before the vultures got them. There were still places like that, plenty of them, throughout India.

Mr. Jobnekar was patient and crafty. He was also intelligent and educated and an excellent speaker in spite of his odd accent. In a way Mr. Jobnekar was a kind of symbol the Untouchable Awakened! The Maharajah was proud of him as a father might be proud of a gifted son. Before Mr. Jobnekar there had been no leader and so his people had been a football for the politicians and the sentimentalists. But that was changing now, and it was Mr. Jobnekar, passionate, filled with the feeling of a crusader, who wore himself out to bring about the change. Aunt Phoebe liked little Mr. Jobnekar immensely. He always reminded her of Job Simmons back in Wesaukee County as a young man.

At seventy Aunt Phoebe had discovered India, and at eighty-one she was still discovering it, finding each day something new and fascinating and unbelievable. She had come to Ranchipur when the Smileys returned from the only leave they had ever taken, when twelve months of Iowa seemed to them dull and unexciting after the first reception and the first speeches of Cedar Falls were finished.

Mrs. Smiley explained to Ransome: "You see, we'd been away for years and somehow we'd struck root in India just as if that was the place to which we had always belonged. And in Cedar Falls we hadn't anything to do except visit friends and relatives, and they didn't like it because we were so fond of India. After they got their curiosity satisfied they got angry because, you see, they thought America and Cedar Falls were the finest places on earth, and they wouldn't believe that there was anything wonderful or exciting anywhere else. When we left India to go home we thought it would be wonderful to be back in Iowa again, seeing everybody and everything, but it wasn't. After a couple of weeks we both wished we were back here, and we kept worrying about the school and the people we'd left behind. It's funny, when we first came out here we both hated it the dirt and the dust and the heat and even the people, and then slowly we got to like it, I don t think I'd ever want to live anywhere else. I missed it when we went home. Life back there seemed too easy and Cedar Falls seemed to have shrunk somehow. The houses, the streets, even the river were all so much smaller than we re- membered them. And they seemed kind of dull and drab."

When the time came for them to return to India and they were packing their trunks, Aunt Phoebe drove in from the farm dressed in her best clothes. She sat about almost the whole of one afternoon and after much backing and filling she came at last to the point. She said, "You know. Bertha, I'd kind of like to go back to India with you."

"That kind of knocked me out," Mrs. Smiley told Ransome. "She was sixty-nine, but she was strong and full of life, and she was full of arguments."

"Being here is dull," said the old lady, "and I can leave my farm with the boys. I guess they'd kind of like to have me out of the way anyway and not meddling around and making suggestions. I'm going to die anyway some day and I might just as well die out in India. I'd like to have a little excitement before I die. I've never had any, like Pa had when he came out here and took up land and it was a wild country full of Indians. Iowa's always been kind of tame all my life. I've never been further away than Chicago. I'm good and strong and I've got a little money laid aside. I could help around the house. I'm sound as a nut and can work right alongside any middle-aged woman. It would be kind of a rest and recreation for me."

When her niece told her about the heat and dust and disease she was unimpressed. She said, "I guess I could stand the heat all right. I guess India's no hotter than Iowa in good corn weather. And old people don't catch diseases very easy, not nearly as easy as young people. As for dust, I'm not afraid of that. I'll pay all my expenses and I won't trouble you. Mebbe I'd be a help."

Nobody was able to stop her, not her sisters, nor her sons nor the Con- gregational minister. She had got the idea in her head and nothing was going to change her.

"It'll be," she said, "like beginning life all over again."

And so it was. She resisted everything heat, dirt, disease. Instead o being aged or weakened by it, she seemed to take a new hold on life. She was ageless because she liked people and she was full of curiosity and so, as she said, she could begin life "all fresh in a new country with a lot of new people." She managed the household while the Smileys were at the Mission School. She even learned enough Hindustani to converse with Indians, and enough Gujerati to give orders to the servants. She managed them even better than her niece had done because they respected her on account of her great age and indestructibility.

Her humanity and her simplicity they distrusted at first, as they distrusted the humanity of the Smileys in the beginning. All the servants were Christians and they had been told about Christ's doctrine of the brotherhood of man, but none of them had ever experienced any manifestation of it, least of all from white people from the West. Presently their suspicions were quieted and they came to understand that the Smileys and Aunt Phoebe had no desire to exploit them.

What they never quite understood was Aunt Phoebe herself and all the background which had determined her character and her beliefs and her peculiar un-European behavior. Only Mr. Jobnekar, who was intelligent and had been to America and traveled there a great deal, had intimations of it, and even for him the intimations never passed beyond the state of rather vague emotional impressions which he could not reason out because he had always been a little confused by a life which was so different from anything he had ever known. He was aware that the simplicity and honesty and friendliness of Aunt Phoebe existed in the center of America, because for two summers, partly to earn money and partly in order to know America better, he had worked in the harvest fields of Iowa and Kansas and there he had discovered these qualities. He knew too that one never found them in the Eastern states. The Eastern states were, Mr. Jobnekar thought, rather like a false Europe. He did not know, as Aunt Phoebe knew, more by instinct than by reason, that what lay behind Aunt Phoebe was a vanishing thing. She knew it. That was

one of the reasons for wanting to come to India. In her heart she couldn't bear to stay on there in Iowa watching the old life she had loved drooping and dying.

And so here she was at eighty-one sitting in the kitchen of a vast cool barrack of a house in Ranchipur surrounded by a whole new world, by a whole new set of friends made after she was seventy years old Raschid AH Khan, a descendant of Baber's conquerors, and Mr. Jobnekar, the Untouchable, and Ransome who was half English and half American, and Miss MacDaid, a Scotswoman born in Sourabaya. Here she was rocking and fanning herself and chuckling at the sight of Raschid pacing up and down, making a thundering political speech while he turned his pancakes.

Once she interrupted him in the middle of a great flood of orating to say, "Don't make the meat balls so hot, Mr. Raschid. Last week they burnt the lining right out of my stomach. You Muslims must have stomachs made of leather."

She was perfectly happy. There was only one fly in the ointment and that was the Simons. She thought the Reverend Mr. Simon was a humbug, which was not quite true, and she hated the snobbery and the airs of that "poor-white" woman, Mrs. Simon.

Presently they all sat down to lunch at one end of the big kitchen over- looking the enclosed part of the garden where the Smileys kept their little menagerie. They had no children and so they had all sorts of animals. In the enclosure there were two wild pigs, a gazelle, and a hyena which was tame as a lap dog and did not smell at all. The animals, all but two mongooses which keep running in and out in a dither of curiosity and excitement over the Saturday lunch, all lay now in the shade of the mangoes away from the scalding heat of the sun.

At the table there were two empty places. Mr. Smiley said, "I expect Miss MacDaid has been kept at the hospital. We won't take away her place. And I can't imagine what's happened to the Major."

And then they all fell to talking of the weather and whether more rain would come. Mr. Jobnekar reassured them. He knew. In him there was ten thousand years of India. Beside him Raschid and even Major Safti and their people were newcomers.

"You see the breeze," he said. "Look at the trees. The leaves are turning inside out. Look how the dust swirls. The breeze will rise. You'll see. Well have rain, plenty of it before midnight."

The breeze was rising but it brought no relief. Instead it only carried the dust and the dreadful heat into the very heart of the cool thick- walled house.

Mrs. Smiley rose to take her lemon meringue pie out of the Indian oven. It was perfect, the beaten eggs lay bisque-colored across the top.

"These old-fashioned ovens are better than any new fangled ones/' said Aunt Phoebe. "You can even get an even heat. I never made bread as good as when we used to bake it in an outdoor oven when I was a girl."

Outside a motor drove up under the trees and from it stepped Miss MacDaid and the Major. She looked crisp and cool even in the heat, but she had put too much rouge on her worn face. The Major was in high spirits.

"I can't stay," he said. "I've got to go and see Bannerjee's father. The old gentleman is having an attack of angina. I'll be back."

"It's a shame," said Miss MacDaid. "He never gets a moment to himself."

She watched him go out, climb into the motor and drive off. Ransome at the far end of the table looked at her and remembered suddenly what John the Baptist had told him.

"It's awful the way the Major has to work," said Miss MacDaid. "He should have an assistant or two who know about angina and things like that. I try to save him all I can, but that isn't very much. Oh, lemon pie! I forgot it was lemon-pie day. We're going to have rain tonight. The porter says so and he's never wrong. I hear Mrs. Simon is giving one of her routs this afternoon."

Ransome thought, "If she would only stop talking. She's trying to hide it and she can't. It's horrible."

"There were three cases of cholera in the lower town," she said. "We had to go down there this morning. Two of the patients died and the third was brought to the hospital."

"I hope that's not going to spread about," said Aunt Phoebe.

"It won't nowadays, at least not under normal conditions. We've got everything pretty well under control."

"I'll never forget nineteen twelve," said Mr. Smiley.

"It isn't the same now. It's lice that spread typhus and Ranchipur is eighty-five percent cleaner now than it was then."

"The monsoon's a bad time for it," said Raschid, "The plague dies out and typhus comes in."

"Well, there's not much use to worry about it. Ranchipur's a pretty modern state. Men like the Major manage to keep diseases pretty well under control. Mankind isn't the victim now that it once was."

She went on talking, leaping from one subject to another before any of them were exhausted, and all the time she was really thinking of the Major and seeing him, far more clearly than she saw any of those about her, probably at this moment bending over the heart of that old humbug, Mr. Bannerj ee's father. And she was talking now, on and on endlessly, because in her heart she knew that her love for him was a little ridiculous and always she was haunted by the fear that anyone, himself most of all, would ever discover her secret. She never knew, as she should have known out of her long experience with the East, that it had been divined long ago, even by the little black Untouchable boy who ran errands for her.

And now one by one the Europeans would discover it. Ransome, watching her across the table, knew that what John the Baptist had said was true, and for a moment he was a little startled and frightened by the thought of how blind and cruel nature might be. For a moment, for the first time since the war, he felt a lump in his throat.

Across the drive Mrs. Simon took a short nap after lunch and arose feeling soggy and discouraged and worried. There were moments in her life, rare but terrifying, when suddenly she would ask herself, "Why do I make all this struggle? What's it all for? Why don't I simply quit and be lazy and enjoy myself?" But she couldn't be lazy no matter how hard she tried. Something drove her on and on until at times she worked as hard and got as little sleep as the Smileys.

Lying on the bed, dripping with perspiration, she worried about the cakes and the tea, about Fern's and Hazel's frocks, and about the weather. She too, like Mr. Jobnekar, knew that it was going to rain, although she knew for a different reason. Her bunion always told her. Half aloud, she was saying, "Oh, Lord, don't let it rain until after all the guests have gone home!" If it rained before then it meant that she would have to move the tea party indoors, and that in turn meant it would be a failure. On the lawn where there was plenty of room, with tennis and badminton in progress, things seemed to take care of themselves, but inside the house she became a nervous harried hostess aware that her guests were bored and desperately unable to do anything about it.

She hoped too that Aunt Phoebe wouldn't come and sit on the Smiley's front porch looking on. She had not asked the Smileys. She had given up asking them long ago, telling herself that it was because they always felt nervous and ill at ease among the distinguished people she entertained. To the Smileys their fall from the upper circle of society in Ranchipur had come as a relief, for they no longer had to put on their best clothes and stand about pretending they were enjoying themselves. In their simplicity they had always made a great effort to go to Mrs. Simon's teas, feeling that she would be hurt if they did not appear.

Mrs. Simon, lying on the bed, thanked God that a year or two earlier she had taken the bull by the horns and announced to Mr. Simon that she no longer intended to invite the Smileys.

"I won't have them standing around," she said, "stiff as pokers with their awful Middle Western accents. They hate it too. They'll be glad not to come. It's as if they just stood there reminding us that we're missionaries."

"Well, we are, aren't we?" suggested Mr. Simon.

"Yes, we are, but not their kind of missionary. We're modern missionaries."

So the Smileys had not bothered them any more. It was only Aunt Phoebe who annoyed her now. Aunt Phoebe did it after a fashion which was at once subtle and ostentatious. As soon as the subalterns and the small officials and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry arrived she would drag her American rocking chair out on to the verandah and sit there, rocking and drinking lemonade and fanning herself with her palm-leaf fan. She rarely bowed to any of the Simon's guests because she knew very few of them, but she sat there, grim and grotesque, reminding them all that they were coming to a missionary's tea party. It was as if she made up for the role by wearing her dowdiest calico dress and dragging in all the most vulgar properties the lemonade, the rocking chair and the palm-leaf fan from Cedar Falls, Iowa. Mrs. Simon could not order her off her own verandah and she suspected that Aunt Phoebe behaved thus out of malice.

Prostrate in the heat, Mrs. Simon fell to thinking of the rumored visit of Lord and Lady Esketh, wondering whether Ransome knew them and how long they meant to stay in Ranchipur and whether she would ever meet them. The last she admitted was unlikely unless she could induce Ransome to arrange a meeting. She knew Ranchipur, shrewdly and well, and she knew there was very little chance that anyone at her tea party except Ransome would ever see the Eskeths save as they rolled majestically along the streets in one of the Maharajah's Rolls-Royces. They would stay in the old summer palace and meet no one but the ministers and the General, Ransome and a few important Indians, Not even Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry or Mr, Burrage, the railroad manager, would be invited. All the really distinguished people, she told herself, would be ignored. In British India, she thought, it would have been different, and almost at once she began considering again how to induce Mr. Simon to ask for a change of post to a more civilized world. By civilization Mrs. Simon did not mean culture, sensibility, intellect, art, architecture or science. She had very definite ideas on the subject; she meant a world in which middle-class suburban society reigned supreme.

The hot breeze, rising, stirred the window shades, and with a groan she rose to pull them up and regard the sky. It was still cloudless, with the same scalding sun overhead. "So far," she thought, "so good," but she knew that the burning cloudless sky meant nothing. During the monsoon a violent storm might come up in two minutes.

Putting on a wrapper she crossed and opening the door called, "Fern! Hazel!" and a voice answered her from far down the huge hallway of the ancient barrack. It was Hazel's voice, of course. Fern, she knew, would not take the trouble to answer her.

"Put on your old tennis dresses and go down and see that everything is ready... not your new frocks or you'll be all sweaty before the boys arrive."

Her daughters were at once Mrs. Simon's pride and cross. Neither of them was perfect and neither of them was the instrument she would have chosen to help her carry out her ambitious plans. Fern, who was nearly twenty, was the prettier of the two. She looked rather like her mother, and she had a good deal of Mrs. Simon's wilfulness, and a great deal more petulance than her mother had ever had. In spite of her upbringing, in spite of the fact that she had spent nearly the whole of her life in India, in spite of her mother's ambitious plans for her, she remained stubbornly what she was an extremely pretty small-town American girl. Designed by God and nature to lie in a hammock and strum a ukelele, circumstance had put her down in the middle of India, in an Indian state, where the only young men she ever saw were the young middle-class Englishmen with a fondness for "ragging," and to Fern "ragging" made all "the boys" in Ranchipur simply seem not quite bright.

Her happiest moments were spent in the fastnesses of her own room with the motion-picture magazines which her cousin sent her regularly from America in exchange for occasional exotic gifts from India cheap shawls and bits of brocade for slippers; and when she was not reading the "Secrets of the Stars" she was turning over in her mind vast, misty plans for escape. It was not very clear in her mind where she meant to escape to but Hollywood seemed a likely place. Out of the movie magazines and the cheap novels she read she had evolved a philosophy of life which she revealed to no one, least of all to her mother. She knew that she was pretty and she knew that for her anything was better than Ranchipur. What she wanted was furs and jewels and lovers and mechanical civilization. In the solitude of her own room she came presently to develop a highly organized dream life in which she spent at least half of every day. To herself it came gradually to attain the proportions of reality, but by her mother it was referred to simply as "the sulks."

Her sister Hazel, with whom she had nothing whatever in common, was plump and rather moon-faced, and like her father she had that rather good-natured corn-fed look which many Americans from the Middle West possess. Unlike her sister, she was docile and never complained and never had "the sulks," but alas, so long as Fern was about, "the boys" were unable to see the more homely virtues of Hazel.

Mrs. Simon would think, "Oh, if only Fern had Hazel's disposition and Hazel had Fern's looks." She never gave either of the girls any peace. Fern she was always scolding for her ill humor and her attitude of superiority toward the eligible young men of Ranchipur. Hazel she was forever poking and prodding, ordering her to stand up straight and not to giggle so much, forbidding her to eat because her figure was already lumpy, forbidding her even to perspire. By this method she managed to destroy entirely whatever confidence poor Hazel had ever had. And before both of them she forever dangled the prospect of matrimony as the one goal of existence.

When she came downstairs at last, dressed in a flowered silk dress and with one eye still on the weather, it was after five o'clock and all the preparations for tea were complete. She found Fern alone in the laving room and said, casually, "Mr. Ransome is coming for tea." To which Fern replied sulkily, "Is he?"

"I hope you'll be nice to him."

"He probably won't even look at me."

"What makes you say that?"

"I'm nothing to him. He never even notices me on the street."

"You've never known him very well. You should be nicer to him."

Fern was silent for a moment, engaged in putting powder on her face. In the heat the powder seemed to melt away. Her mother watching her wondered how best to get round her, and all the time Fern was aware of her plans.

She said, "If you're thinking that I might marry him, you're on the wrong track."

"Why not? He's rich and comes from one of the best families in England."

"That's just the reason why he wouldn't look at me."

"You've got a lot to offer him too."

"Anyway that's not the kind of husband I want."

"What is it then?"

"I want to be something on my own. I don't want to be anybody's wife."

"That's the best thing for a woman."

"Not any more. Not in America. Whoever marries me is going to be my husband."

Inwardly she was constantly giving interviews which one day would appear in the movie magazines: "Blythe Summerfield Adored by Her Husband", "Blythe Summerfield, the Languorous Child of the Orient"

"Blythe Summerfield, the Screen's Best-Dressed Woman." For she had already picked her name.

"Well, anyway, try to be polite to him. Try to be pleasant for once, like Hazel."

"If I looked like Hazel I'd have to be pleasant."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"Well, I'm not and I don't see why you have to give these awful parties anyway. I'd rather sit upstairs in my room. I hate everybody in Ranchipur.

"Now, Fern. Don't work yourself up."

Through the doorway Mrs. Simon caught sight of the first guests arriving. They were Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and one of "the boys." Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was, by virtue of many things, most of all by her own assumption of importance, the acknowledged leader of the only society in Ranchipur which Mrs. Simon recognized. The "boy" was Harry Loder who, Mrs. Simon knew, had a liking for Fern despite her evil disposition. He was thirty-three, and scarcely a boy either in years or appearance, but Mrs. Simon lumped him in with the others. He was good-looking in a rather beefy fashion and had a maleness which approached brutality and never failed to arouse in Mrs. Simon a little quiver of excitement. Sometimes during those long hot hours in the early afternoons when she was off guard against her own imagination, she found herself wondering what it would be like with Harry Loder instead of the Reverend Mr. Simon.

Now at sight of him she felt the old quiver of excitement, and said to Fern, "Here come Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Harry. Do try and look agreeable."

"Oh, to hell with Mrs. H.!" cried Fern. "To hell with everybody and everything! " Suddenly she burst into tears and ran up the stairs, telling herself that her parents had no right to bring her up in a place like Ranchipur where there was nobody and nothing. "I didn't ask to be born," she sobbed, "I didn't ask to be born!"

Flinging herself down on the bed she cried for a long time, and then rising she bathed her face in water which was tepid from the heat, made up her lips again and came downstairs. She moved slowly, with one slender hand resting on the stair rail, then passed through the little group of women in the living room and out across the lawn to the tennis courts and the pavilion covered with the brilliant flowers o the Indian bignonia. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs she had recovered herself and slipped into the one state of mind which made her mother's parties bearable. It was not Fern Simon who greeted "the boys" but Blythe Summerfield, "Languorous Daughter of the Orient."

The people at Mrs. Simon's parties always seemed to Ransome extraordinarily like the flocks of silly sheep among which he had lived for a time in the high mountains of Nevada. Long ago, watching the flocks at sight of a coyote, he had suddenly thought, "Sheep are the middle- class animal. They should live in suburbs, always belong to the conservative party and be perpetually swindled by stockbrokers."

At the first sign of danger, of menace, even of change, the sheep would begin milling about, each one pushing and thrusting to reach the security of the very center of the herd. Like sheep, the people at Mrs. Simon's parties were without originality and without initiative. At sight of them he always began by feeling ashamed of the human race and ended by feeling ashamed of himself for feeling so damned superior. That was one of the reasons he refused the invitations nine times out of ten.

Like sheep they sought only security and enough grazing to keep them alive. The world of ideas, like the world of action, alarmed them. And he was sick to death of having heard all his life that this class, this whole society, evolved in litde more than a century out of industry, mechanical inventions, shopkeeping and moneylending, was the ultimate in human aspiration and achievement. There were moments when it seemed to him that the middle class and the middle class alone was responsible, with its toadying and sentimentality and nationalism and muddleheadedness, for the sickness and decay that afflicted the West.

Here in Mrs. Simon's dusty shaggy garden, a little colony isolated in the imperturbable and terrifying vastness of the East, they seemed at their worst, like a culture of specimens set apart for examination under the microscope.

Filled with boredom simply at the prospect of the party, Ransome crossed the drive from the Smiley's house a little after six. The heat was still stifling and the sun was like hot brass in the sky, but the breeze had begun to assume the proportions of a real monsoon wind born far off somewhere in the Arabian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. It was as cool now beneath the Simon's trees as anywhere in Ranchipur, save perhaps the icehouse or the inner courtyards of the great palace.

On the Simon's lawn he found exactly what he had expected to find. There were no Indians, and grouped about the tables and in the arbor covered with trumpet vines he found exactly the same world he would have found at the same sort of party in England or America, save that here, against this hot Eastern background, all the qualities both of class and individual seemed to have become exaggerated to the point of fantasy. Voices were pitched a little higher, snobberies were pushed a little further, and the accents, a queer mixture of Cockney and Middle-Western and something earnesdy believed to be Oxford, together with Mrs. Simon's "mammy talk," made speech at times very nearly unintelligible, and all communication, especially for Ransome who had not frequented the set sufficiently to have discovered the key of tongues, almost impossible. Here in this remote isolated world there were no dukes and duchesses, no millionaire bankers, no prime ministers, no chamber of commerce presidents, and so each individual, unawed by the constant presence of these phenomena, expanded and sought to fill the places of the missing giants and giantesses.

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, a large florid woman who had created an accent entirely special to herself, stepped into the role of duchess and referred constantly to her relatives as county people in Shropshire (here in Ranchipur it was easy to refer to them thus for no one could possibly discover that they were simply honest dairy farmers). Mr. Burrage, who had something to do with the state railway, became the local Lord Esketh and Mr. Burgess, who was a kind of head accountant in the Ranchipur Bank became something which was a blend of chancellor of the exchequer and head of the Bank of England. And "the boys," with their polo and pigsticking, became Lord Lonsdales and Lord Derbys. Lost and hidden away in a powerful Indian state, far from the pomp and gold braid and rococco splendors of Delhi, they abandoned manners on the assumption that rudeness showed breeding, ignored civilization and allowed their souls to expand into a middle-class idea of what was aristocratic.

Only Mrs. Simon, as wife of a missionary, was left with no great role to play. The only missionary she could think of who had ever been renowned was Livingstone, and there was nothing very smart or worldly in pretending that she was Mrs. Livingstone.

Moving among them, watching them, it always astounded Ransome that this tight little world existed, day after day, in utter ignorance of the splendorous world which engulfed it, unaware of its beauties, its magnificence, its tragedy, its squalor. Yet, like sheep, they were aware of the terror. It was always with them, the fear of being swallowed up and forgotten; and so to give themselves courage they became arrogant and comic. Among themselves they referred to this process as "keeping a stiff upper lip." Like sheep in their fright they huddled together, all save Miss MacDaid and the Smileys and Aunt Phoebe and those two strange spinsters, Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge, who ran the Maharani's High School for Girls and were never seen by anyone. And so all these were outcasts among the sheep, mavericks who wandered alone. The spectacle of the tea party, Ransome knew in his heart, was more pitiful than annoying. The bleating, the arrogance, the odd affected accents were like the whistling in the dark of a small and frightened boy. Yet there were compensations. Here in Ranchipur all these people experienced a certain prestige and importance; when they returned home they would be lost in a vast swamp of suburban mediocrity.

Ransome was aware that he was not popular with any of them but he was aware too that every one of them, save perhaps one or two of the more cocky subalterns, was impressed by him. The sight of him crossing the lawn created a sudden stir in the little party. The men turned to look and the women became more animated, and Mrs. Simon swept forward to greet him, clinging with one hand to the picture hat which kept rising from her head at each gust of the rising monsoon wind. He thought, "If I were simply myself, a man, unknown to them, poor and without relatives who have titles, they would not look twice in my direction."

There was a tennis match in progress with the Reverend Mr. Simon, his big amiable face dripping and red, and Mrs. Burrage on one side, playing Hazel, obliging, clumsy and perspiring freely despite her mother's orders, and a dapper little subaltern called Hallett. At one end of the courts in the arbor sat most of the others grouped about Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry who, seated in a large wicker chair, was playing graciously the role of the local duchess who had just opened the bazaar. She was a large woman, not fat but with a large blond milkmaid body which seemed not to have faded but simply to have spread. Thirty years ago she had been a beauty and she still dressed in the Edwardian tradition, in flowing chiffon and an enormous bazaar-opening hat with which the monsoon wind kept playing tricks.

For nearly thirty years she had lived in India as the wife of an official of the Imperial Bank, and in those thirty years she had come to use a language which was an odd jargon of English and Hindustani and East of Suez slang. With her a whisky and soda was always a chota pieg, a letter was always a Mt\ rupees were chips. Her husband she always referred to as the burran sahib and people were classified in her simple mind simply as pul$a or not puffia. Her capacity for brandy was the highest in Ranchipur, higher even than that of Ransome himself. Her husband saw her infrequently: a good part of the time he was occupied with business in Calcutta or Madras or Bombay, and when he was in Ranchipur his own engagements nearly always failed to coincide with hers. She had no children and nothing whatever to do with her time save to drink quietly and go calling or coquette with "the boys." Ransome and Miss MacDaid and the Major always called her "Pukka Lil."

After a certain point at Mrs. Simon's parties a spirit of unrest began to manifest itself among the men because nothing stronger than lemonade and ginger beer ever made its appearance, and after an hour or two of the same games and the same gossip their spirits began to flag. In her heart Mrs. Simon felt that serving only lemonade and ginger beer implied loss of caste, but the shadow of the Board of Foreign Missions was always there forcing her, like Aunt Phoebe, to remember that she was only the wife of a missionary.

She was a nervous hostess, unwilling to let well enough alone and forever stirring up her parties and separating people the very moment they began to get on, in order to make new and unsympathetic corru binations. She suffered profoundly and the only pleasure she got from these occasions was the illusion, after everyone had gone home, that she had come a long way from Unity Point, Mississippi. Now she kept circling round Ransome like a sheep dog, conducting him from group to group as if, now that she had got him to come, she must distribute his favors without partiality. Meanwhile she kept one eye on the storm and the other on the verandah o the Smileys' house, praying that Aunt Phoebe, for once, would not appear with her lemonade, her fan and her rocking chair to sit there watching like an angel of judgment.

When Ransome was thrust at last into the group surrounding Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, they were all talking of the Eskeths, and Mrs. Hog- gett-Egburry, the Edwardian, was explaining about Lady Esketh.

"She was Edwina Doncaster," she said, "Ronald Doncaster's daughter, you remember. He was a great friend of the King. King Edward of course. The family comes from my part of the world from Shropshire, that is, Mr. Ransome must know her."

And graciously she reached out one large soft unsteady white hand as if to draw him physically within the circle. A little startled, he said, "No, I'm afraid not."

He had lied, partly out of a desire for security, partly because he was startled by the announcement of Lady Esketh's identity, for he did know perfectly. The moment Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, out of her "Court and Society" knowledge, used the name "Edwina," he knew at once. He had known somewhere in the back of his consciousness all the time, but in all that had happened to him in fifteen years he had forgotten. When he had turned his back long ago on people like Edwina he had managed to forget what had become of a good many of them. Now suddenly he saw her again not at Mrs. Simon's tennis party but against the background of after-war London, surrounded by crowds of people all smartly

dressed, with a jazz band playing somewhere in the background

young, pretty, smart in handsome clothes which were probably not paid for, with a reputation already tarnished.

Once he had fancied himself in love with her and now the memory of her brought him a sudden wave of warmth and sympathy, because once he had belonged in her world and in a way her sickness had been his own an illness which journalists had a way of fastening upon one generation and one small group. But it was an illness more widespread and profound, of which Edwina and himself were only the exaggerated symptoms. The old, living in the illusion of a security which was gone forever, could neither understand nor divine it and the young, being born to it, accepted it as the normal state of affairs.

With a fixed polite smile on his face he slipped away from the conversation of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and her friends to thinking about Edwina, wondering what she would be like now. He was quite certain that he knew; she would have followed the pattern of the women of her class and time.

Then Mrs. Simon left him to occupy herself with the refreshments, and suddenly out of nowhere he saw her daughter Fern standing in front of him. She was saying, "Mr. Ransome, could I speak to you for a moment?"

He had never really noticed her before and now he saw that she was very pretty and that her prettiness had been augmented by her blushing and confusion. His thoughts still entangled with memories of Edwina, he found himself comparing the two; Edwina was never fresh and young like this girl. There was never anything feverish and excited about her, and he found himself wondering whether in all her life she had ever blushed.

He managed to say, "Of course. Whenever you like."

Hesitating, blushing, she said, "Do you mind coming on to the verandah? It's rather private... what I want to ask you."

As they crossed the burnt seedy lawn the wind suddenly increased, stirring up little swirls of dust which had already formed since the downpour of the night before. He noticed as they passed the Smileys' that Aunt Phoebe had taken up her position on the verandah and was staring at the party, and that Mr. Jobnekar was waving to him as he sailed down the drive on his bicycle through the very midst of the party. From the direction of the tennis courts he received no greetings nor even an acknowledgment of his existence either as an Untouchable or as the leader of millions of people.

At the far end of the verandah there was a corner hidden by moon- flower vines and a swinging seat, and it was here that Fern led him.

He saw that she was making a great effort. She said, "Of course, I know I'm nothing to you. You don't even know I exist."

He interrupted her to assure her that he was aware of her existence and had been ever since he came to Ranchipur. He could not say that to him she had always been a child; indeed until this very moment he had not thought of her as a woman at all.

"Maybe you'll think I'm crazy," she said, "but there isn't anyone else I can talk to. If I even mentioned it to any of those people, everybody in Ranchipur would know in half an hour." And then she plunged: "You see, I've got to get away from Ranchipur. I'm going crazy." She wasn't Blythe Summerfield, Pearl of the Orient, now. She was just Fern Simon, a bored unhappy restless girl who in her spirit had never left her own country. "I'd rather be any place than here. I can't stand these awful people. There isn't anything to do or any place to go. I've got to get away."

Ransome's eyes opened a little wider and he thought, "Maybe she's better than I believed." And not knowing what to say he waited, aware that she made him, with her enthusiasm and unhappiness, feel immeasurably old. "I'm only thirty-eight," he thought, "about twenty years older than she is." But he knew the difference was much greater than twenty years.

She said, "I want to find out about boats and things. I've got some money saved up and I want to take a boat from Bombay, and by the time they find out it'll be too late to stop me."

"Where will you go?"

For a moment she hesitated and then she said, "Hollywood."

He laughed because he could not help himself and then, a little ashamed, said seriously, "That's not so easy."

"If you want a thing badly enough you'll always get a break. I'm still young and I'm prettier than most of them."

Silently he appraised her. It was true that she was prettier than most of them. Perhaps if she had her chance who could tell ? He was aware that he felt vaguely miserable, for as he grew older and more solitary he resented the confidences of people. He hated the responsibility of decision which they always thrust upon him, why he did not know, unless there was something special about him which he did not understand that encouraged them. Now he found himself trying to discourage her, again without knowing why, for he did not believe in meddling in the lives of other people, and even while he was talking he kept thinking, "I must be growing old and respectable. Once I'd have encouraged her to run

away and find as much adventure as she could squeeze into a life which is far too short."

Instead of being persuaded by him, she began suddenly to cry, not quietly but with great hysterical sobs, pouring out all her troubles and the persecution she suffered from her mother.

"She's determined to make me marry one of those pipsqueaks. She doesn't even see that the lousy litde snobs will never ask me. I can't stand them any longer. I can't! You've got to help me. There's no one else in Ranchipur."

"Be quiet first and then tell me what you want to do. It'll make a fine piece of gossip for Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry if she should come up here and find us like this."

Gulping, she said, "I want you to lend me some money. I only need about fifty pounds more."

He laughed, "Well, that's something. But it isn't the money I mind."

"I'd pay you back. I promise I would."

"It isn't that, my dear child. Don't you see? It's the position it puts me in."

She gave him a sharp hard glance. "I didn't think you were going to be respectable like all of them out there," and she began to cry again, more noisily than ever. "I won't go to Poona with her! I won't... and have to see all those awful people again!"

Despite anything he could do he began to laugh, until he was shaking in his efforts to suppress his mirth. He was aware that something must be done quickly. The wind was rising and the sky was suddenly black with clouds and at any moment the entire tea party might be forced inside.

He said, "If you'll be quiet and go upstairs and wash your face, I'll promise to help. I'll do what I can."

At once her sobbing ceased and again she gave him a sharp, appraising look from her clear blue eyes.

"You promise?"

"I promise. If you'll only be good now and go upstairs."

"I won't forget." And he thought, "No, she won't," and again he began to laugh at the spectacle of himself, a man who certainly knew his way

about the world, being quietly blackmailed by Fern Simon in whom lie had not the least interest.

And then he was aware that beyond her, by the tennis courts, some disaster had overtaken the tea party. Most of the women, clinging to their hats, were running toward the house. Two or three had climbed on to the tables at the side of the tennis court and somehow Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had managed to scramble unsteadily up one side of the arbor. "The boys," armed with chairs and tennis racquets, had formed themselves into a circle to cover the retreat of the women against a menace which was not yet visible to Ransome. Leaving Fern he ran to the end of the verandah and discovered the cause of the panic. There in the middle of the lawn, ambling genially toward the tea party in quest of a biscuit, was the Smileys' tame hyena.

Shaking inwardly and making strange suppressed noises he leapt off the verandah to the rescue. The big brute recognized him and ran at once in his direction, making small, affectionate noises. Siezing him by the scruff of the neck he led the hyena away from the tennis party, across the drive to the Smiley's, Between gulps and chuckles he managed to call back over his shoulder, "He's harmless. He wouldn't hurt a baby," and then almost at once he realized that with "the boys" still in formation, armed with chairs and tennis rackets, and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry still clinging in all her Edwardian finery to the lower end of the arbor, he had been tactless. "Like sheep," he thought, chuckling. "Exactly like sheep."

As he passed the Smileys' verandah Aunt Phoebe leaned forward in her rocking chair and said tartly, "I might have gone and fetched him home myself only I wasn't invited to the party."

Looking up at her Ransome caught the shadow of a twinkle in her bright blue eyes, and then he Itncw. Aunt Phoebe had left the gate of the enclosure open deliberately, so that the amiable hyena might escape and go to the party, and all at once he knew why she had always seemed familiar to him, even on their first meeting. She was very like his grand- mother MacPherson who had forced "Ten percent" MacPherson to marry her at the point of a six-shooter.

As he turned the hyena into the enclosure and fastened the gate, the rain began again in big splattering drops. It seemed to him that each

drop must contain half a teacup of water. The Simons' tennis court was empty now and the Untouchable servants were scurrying to rescue the refreshments while Mrs. Simon, who had given up the struggle with the monsoon wind for the possession of her picture hat, shouted directions against the howling of the rising storm.

The rain caught Mr. Jobnekar on his way home from the Smileys' and Ransome found him standing under a mango tree outside the alcohol distillery. When he had taken him and his bicycle into his car he told him the story of the hyena and his suspicion of Aunt Phoebe's guilt.

"That's what I mean about Aunt Phoebe," Mr. Jobnekar said. "That's how she's different. She makes big fat vigorous jokes. She loves people but she can't bear to see them making fools of themselves. I used to know old men and women like that in the West in America. I could always be sure they'd be kind and friendly to me. Most o them had never seen an Indian before any kind but a redskin but it didn't make any difference."

They drove across the bridge by the zoological gardens, past the statue of Queen Victoria with an inscription written by Disraeli, down to the part of the town where most of the Untouchables still lived. The quarter was an irregular network of streets and alleys grown up without plan over a period of a thousand years and all centered about a square which contained the tank and the wells of the Untouchables. Once not so many years before it had been a filthy place with a great heap of dead animals the bounty and communal property of the quarter at one end; but all that was changed now and the quarter was clean and well ordered, cleaner indeed than the quarters occupied by most of the caste Hindus. For part of the change, Mr. Jobnekar explained, the Maharajah himself was responsible, but a great part of it came from the energies and the teaching of Mr. and Mrs. Smiley. As they crossed the square toward Mr. Jobnekar 's house the steaming rain cascaded in a waterfall down the steps of the tank.

Mr. Jobnekar said sentimentally, "Look at it. What is more beautiful than water ? The nourishment of the earth."

Mr. Jobnekar's house was very like the other houses which surrounded the square save that it had a second floor and had been painted a bright pink that was already discolored by spots of damp. At the windows there were cheap curtains of lace which together with the pink plaster gave it a curious bedizened likeness to the villa of some small shopkeeper in Nice or Toulon. At the house next door an old woman, drenched by the rain, was hastily removing pats of cow dung from the house wall before they became wet and unfit for use as fuel.

Mr. Jobnekar refused to let Ransome go without a cup of tea and so they got down and walked through a narrow passage and up the stairs to the main room of the house. There they found that Mrs. Jobnekar was entertaining Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge, the mistresses of the High School for girls.

Mrs. Jobnekar came out of the shadows at the far end of the room to welcome them, a tiny woman with enormous black eyes and skin the color of copper, clad in a sari of pale blue cotton stuff. Although she had never been out of India her English was very nearly perfect, and for that she had to thank the conscience and devotion of the two spinsters who now sat on stiff chairs at the far end of the room. Behind Mrs. Jobnekar trailed three small children aged four, three and two. It would have been difficult to judge their ages exactly for there was something miniature and ageless about them, like Persian dolls or midgets of extraordinary beauty and perfection.

Tea was already under way and Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge, sitting like two strange birds beside the sewing machine, were having theirs. In this house, where by habit everyone sat on the floor and there were no tables, there was something grotesque not only in the sight of the two spinsters but in the very cheap chairs upon which they sat.

Jobnekar said to Ransome, "I'll fetch a chair for you directly. They're kept downstairs except when we entertain visitors," and Ransome went forward to speak to the two schoolmistresses.

He scarcely knew them, for in all the years he had lived in Ranchipur he had seen them only twice and then only on occasions when he went to visit the school. They led a life apart, without contact of any sort either with Indians or Europeans; they never entertained and they only went out on occasions like this when their duty toward the school seemed to demand it. One never saw them at the palace nor in Mrs. Simon's set, nor at Mr. Banner jee's nor even at the Smileys'. They lived in a neat bungalow opposite the great gate of the palace on the Engineering School Road.

At sight of them Ransome thought, "They belong in some village in the north of England living in a house made of granite where the sun only shines ten times a year." And here they were living in India beneath a sun which blazed day in and day out from morning until night from October to June.

Miss Dirks was tall and thin with iron-gray hair, and she wore a topee with a scarf which fell down the back and a suit of white linen as practical and as uncompromising as one of Major Safti's operating costumes. Her face, the texture of leather, was seamed and lined and utterly plain save for the fineness of the eyes in which there was a dark expression of suffering. Miss Hodge was less hard-bitten in appearance. She had rejected the topee and veil and the grim practical costume of Miss Dirks and wore a hat of white felt ornamented by a single artificial rose and a frock of pink gingham ornamented with little frills at the throat and wrists. But her face was as plain as that of her companion. It differed only in the fact that instead of being rough hewn from granite it was lumpily molded from clay. The pair of them filled Ransome, who was not a shy man, with shyness. When he shook hands with Miss Dirks he felt rather like a friendly dog being greeted politely by a woman who has the conviction that all dogs are unpleasant and smelly animals.

They affected Mr. Jobnekar in the same fashion but instead of throwing him into an awkward silence they forced him, as an Eastern host, into an exaggerated display of friendliness and hospitality which rang all the more false for the effort he put into it. As Mr. Jobnekar returned with the chairs a sudden silence fell upon the room and poor Mr. Jobnekar redoubled his efforts at conversation. Mrs. Jobnekar went to fetch more tea and for a few moments they all talked of the weather, of the school, of the typhus and cholera cases which had broken out alarmingly in the poorer quarters stiff stilted conversation during which Ransome discovered that Miss Dirks seemed to have lost all capacity for contact with her fellow creatures. Miss Hodge, although rusty and shy, had moments when conversation would gush forth like a spring freshet and then suddenly dry at the source, and immediately beneath the pallid skin there would appear something which might have passed for the ghost of a blush.

The conversation could not have lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes, and during all that time Ransome was aware that the grim Miss Dirks was eager to be up and away. It was as if both Mr. Jobnekar and himself were infected with plague. He thought, "We've spoiled their call." And wanting to make some kindly gesture, he said, "111 drive you both home. You can't possibly walk through this flood."

Miss Dirks said primly, "Thank you very much but we like walking. We came prepared. We have galoshes and umbrellas and mackintoshes downstairs."

Ransome laughed, "Well, even all those things aren't any good against the monsoon," and then he was sorry because she looked at him sharply and he divined that she thought he was poking fun at her.

Miss Hodge started to speak and then suddenly, with her mouth already open, thought better of it and was silent. Mrs. Jobnekar came forward bearing garlands of jasmine and marigold which she sprinkled with rose water and put over the heads of the two spinsters when they stood up to go. Then she gave them each a fragment of coconut and a bit of brocade sari cloth, and Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge in turn shook their hands together Indian fashion, and bowing to the two gentlemen Miss Dirks led the way out of the room. But in the doorway Miss Hodge turned and addressed Ransome with sudden boldness across the whole length of the room.

"Thank you for your offer, Mr. Ransome," she said. "Perhaps some other time. You see, we came prepared to walk. We get so little exercise." She lingered a moment longer, shy, awkward and uncertain, until the voice of Miss Dirks came up the well of the stairway:

"Elizabeth, what are you doing?"

"Coming... coming," cried Miss Hodge and hurried down the stairs. Ransome, watching her, had the feeling that she would have liked to have stayed behind.

From the window overlooking the flooded square he watched them picking their way between pools of water around the tank and into the mouth of the street which led toward the old abandoned palace facing the cinema. Miss Dirks walked a little ahead as if she were a trapper guide, erect and rigid, the end of her scarf hanging from the topee like the tail of a racoon cap, with Miss Hodge scurrying along at her heels. They wore the garlands over their mackintoshes and each carried the bit of coconut and brocade in her free hand.

There was something sad in the sight of the two lonely women which filled Ransome with a sudden impulse to do something to brighten up their lives, but what it was he could do and how he could do it he had not the faintest idea. Long ago when he had spoken of them to Miss MacDaid she had shaken her head rather solemnly and said, "There isn't anything to be done. You see they're like that. They might just as well be in Birmingham as in Ranchipur. They're doing their duty. They'd have the same life anywhere. I tried to be friendly but it wasn't any good. It just made them suspicious of me. They disapprove of me I think, because I feel quite as much at home with Indians as with anybody else. You see, they do their duty, but they never feel at home."

Standing at the window Ransome saw beyond their two drab figures into the background from which they had come. He \new what it was because there was nothing rare and unusual in it. The West was filled with just such tiny worlds narrow, nonconformist, respectable, with just enough money to carry them through from one year to another, worlds in which there was never any color nor any fire, worlds in which the father went to an office at eight in the morning and returned at eight at night, hardworking, innocent, loyal to the employer who kept him and his family forever on the edge o starvation. Suddenly he fyietv all about the tragedy of the two lonely women. They had never lived. They had scarcely even breathed. Even India meant nothing to them. By the time they were old enough to have loved a man all love and all men had been made ugly and forbidding by the little world out of which they came.

Behind him, the three children clinging to her sari, Mrs. Jobnekar was pouring him another cup of tea. He turned to her thinking how pretty she looked and how well the pale blue sari suited her copper skin. Beyond her through the high window stretched the open countrythe mango orchard and the burning ghats and then the fields of maize and millet, all the way to the fabulous mountain, Abana, rising out of the dead flat plain, its summit crowned by a cloud of white Jain temples.

"They're very odd," he said, meaning Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge.

"But they're very kind," said Mrs. Jobnekar. "If you were in trouble Miss Dirks would do anything for you and hate it if you spoke of her kindness. They're like lots of Englishwomen. They can't show what they feel. Believe me," she added as she passed him his tea, "I know how good they are."

Mrs. Jobnekar was smiling and he wondered how she, who had never been out of India, could understand the souls of two women who in their hearts had never left their own country. The very idea of Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge having tea in the house of an Untouchable seemed too preposterous to be believed. For a long time afterward he kept seeing them, plodding flat-footed through the monsoon flood in mackintoshes garlanded with jasmine and marigold that had been sprinkled with rose water.

Still in silence, Miss Dirks always walking a pace or two in front, the two schoolmistresses crossed the square before the old palace where so much evil had taken place, continuing past the tank and the music school, beginning now to be clamorous as the day's work ended and one by one the students began to arrive, past the great gate of the palace where the Maharajah's military band was giving its evening concert, until at last they came to the gate of their little bungalow. Here Miss Dirks took out a key, opened the gate and held it open for Miss Hodge to enter.

The bungalow was no longer new and its nondescript architecture was entirely lost beneath the creepers and passion vine which made it damp in monsoon time and bad for Miss Dirk's rheumatism. It had been built especially for the two schoolmistresses when they had come to Ranchipur twenty-five years before, by an Indian contractor who admired Liverpool suburban architecture. It was not well adapted to so hot a place as Ranchipur and, if the vines which covered it had been ampelopsis and Virginia creeper instead of trumpet vines and passion flower, it could have been transported intact to any English suburb and worn the name "The Nook" without startling anyone. Inside it had grown with time to become a perfect shell for the two women. Like caddis worms they had surrounded themselves gradually through the years with bits and pieces, until at last the inside of the little house had the air of a charity bazaar. There were innumerable cushions, and every available spot was covered with doilies and covers of the lace which Miss Hodge worked in moments of leisure during the hot still evenings. And there were bits of Indian embroidery and cheap brasses from Benares and a great many nostalgic framed photographs of places like the Grampians and Cheddar Gorge and Windemere.

Once inside the house the two ladies put down their umbrellas and shook the water from their mackintoshes, hanging them carefully on the golden oak hall rack where they or their predecessors had hung for twenty-five years. Despite umbrellas and mackintoshes they were both thoroughly soaked, partly from the rain itself and partly from the effect of the mackintoshes which, designed for the chilly climate of Scotland, simply became walking steam baths during an Indian monsoon.

Miss Dirks, shaking out her mackintosh, said, "Go at once and have a bath, Elizabeth. I'll see to the supper."

But Miss Hodge protested, "No, I'll do it. You take the first bath."

"Please, Elizabeth, do as I say."

And then began one of those interminable pointless arguments which occurred between them, day after day, arguments which were subtly selfish because each of them sought the fruits of martyrdom for herself. Once long ago the arguments, less frequent then, had been sincere and filled on both sides with genuine solicitude, but as the years passed they had become perverted somehow and twisted into mockeries of sincerity. It was as if each of them sought to martyrize herself in order to hurt the other by exhibiting the scars, with the implication, "Look how I have suffered for your sake. Look how many times I've given in."

They wrangled over the subject of the bath for nearly ten minutes and in the end it was Miss Dirks, the more grim and powerful of the two, who won.

From the great Persian gateway across the road the music of the Indian band drifted in through the open windows wild, barbaric, strident and monotonous to the Western ears of the two schoolmistresses, now rising in volume, now fading away, a cacophonic clamor to which Miss Dirks

had never grown accustomed. When she was exhausted by the heat and the damp the magnificent sounds became almost unbearable, especially when in her heart she was homesick for a good band concert on Bourne- mouth pier.

Now she burst out, saying, "I can't stand that music any longer! It's driving me crazy! I'm going to demand another bungalow."

Miss Hodge said, "We could escape it for the summer. It's not too late to take a P. and O. boat and have two months in England. We've plenty of money saved up."

Tm not going back! Fm never going back! I've told you that, a thousand times."

For a moment the outburst silenced Miss Hodge and then wistfully she said, "I think you're wrong, Sarah. The change would do you good. We've both been away for such a long time."

Then Miss Dirks went alarmingly white and looked fiercely at Miss Hodge: "Do you want to go back there, ever again? After what happened? You must be crazy! I never want to see England again." The angry tears came into her eyes and Miss Hodge was suddenly frightened, not only by the sudden burst of feeling on the part of her companion but by old memories of injustice, of shame, of lies, of deceit which still, after twenty-five years, had the power to frighten and confuse her. In a low conciliatory voice she said, "That was twenty-five years ago."

"I don't care whether it was a hundred years ago. I'm never going back." And turning, she ran from the room, slamming the door to lock herself in with her loneliness and nostalgia and shut out from her mind the picture of a soft green country with lovely gardens where there were never any snakes or monsoons or earthquakes and no wild horrible barbaric music.

Miss Hodge made no effort to follow her and presently she went quietly to her bath.

For a long time now she had been dimly aware of a strange restlessness which had invaded her worn middle-aged body, raising a curious intangible barrier between herself and Sarah. It was a sensation which made her feel strong and miserable at the same time, and the odd thing was that in her heart there were times when she cherished it. la its weakest manifestations it was a desire to cross Sarah, to irritate her

by disagreeing upon every subject, to turn even the smallest incident into a "situation. 5 * At its worst it showed itself as a wild craving for some excitement or adventure to break the narrow monotony of her existence, a fierce desire for freedom from the intricate web of habit and duty and devotion which had grown about her, more binding and more bitter with the passing of each year. At such times it was as if she became another person, forgetting the loyalty between herself and Sarah, forgetting that all either of them had in the world was each other. The feeling came over her at times in great waves against which she found herself powerless, and as each wave passed she would be overcome with remorse for having hurt Sarah and be filled with a desire to make amends. She would try to apologize to Sarah without apologizing, to explain without speaking, by the tone of her voice when they discussed simple things like the weather or the evening meal, by little gestures of solicitude and attention; but each time she was swept by a wave of feeling she was aware that like a wave breaking up on a beach, when it had passed, it left her a little further removed from Sarah. Never was she quite able to recover exactly the old feeling of devotion and understanding. Each time a little ground was lost and each of them became a little more solitary. Lately it had made her feel more and more miserable and muddled and confused until there were moments of terror when she thought she was going crazy.

Now lying in her bath, listening to the wild music from the gateway, one of the greater waves swept over her. With Sarah locked in her room weeping, it was as if she had won a great victory which left her feeling independent and strong. It was as if in some way she was enjoying vengeance, how or for what she could not say, because during these waves she did not trouble indeed it was impossible for her to be reasonable. In all their years together she had never seen Sarah weep, but she knew that there were times when Sarah wept because she had heard the sobbing through locked doors.

More and more as the music, played each evening at sunset, had affected Sarah's nerves, she herself had come to like it. Now it made her feel almost savage so that she really found pleasure in the knowledge that Sarah was growing old and ill while she herself was still strong. It brought her a strange excitement in which she imagined all sorts of things which might have happened to her if her life had been different. There were moments at that hour when the daylight, fading, lingered and then quickly vanished, when, listening to the wild music, she seemed to escape from her plain rather plump body and soar to great romantic heights, when she became a woman like the heroines of Flora Annie Steel.

When she got out of the bath and dried herself she regarded her face for a long time in the mirror, studying its lines and bumps, trying her thin hair in new ways, now this way, now that, attempting to imagine how she would have looked as a girl if she had done herself with a little more dash and had not had a nose that was too snub and too fleshy at the bridge, and if her chin had been firm instead of weak and her skin lovely and white instead of blotched and oily. And then as she dressed she allowed her mind to wander about the subject of Mr. Ransome, thinking that he was very good-looking and that she would have liked to have stayed behind at Mr. Jobnekar's to talk to him. She liked his Scottish darkness and blue eyes, the leanness of his face and his nice manners. And the fact that he had a reputation for loose living and dissipation only made him the more exciting and opened up exciting vistas of mysterious things which she was unable even to imagine.

And then she tried to think what it would have been like if she had never met Sarah and had perhaps married a nice dull little clerk (she could not have hoped for more) and had a family and a semi-detached villa with a back garden in Birmingham. Sarah had taken her away from all chance of that; she had enveloped her in a web of devotion and protection, and then given her nothing in return, nothing that the hypothetical clerk could have given her.

And then all at once the music across the road stopped and outside it became swiftly dark, and the wave of independence and romance and bitterness left her as if she were a child's toy balloon pricked by a pin. It was too late, too late! There was nothing to do but go on and on with Sarah until the end of things. She would die and be buried here in this dreadful country where the earth was never cool and damp as at home but always hot and dusty. Remorse took possession of her and suddenly she began to hurry with her dressing so that she could have supper ready and on the table before Sarah could recover herself and see to it.

When she had dressed she went into the kitchen to look in upon th two Untouchable girls who worked for them after school hours, anc when, fussily, she had seen to it that each dish was made to look ai attractive as possible, she put on her mackintosh and went into the garden to gather a few sprigs of bougainvillea. Then she returned and going to the cupboard took out the best lace tablecloth she had worked the one they only used once a year when the Maharani and her women came to tea. When she had reset the table she went to Miss Dirks' door and knocked to let her know that supper was ready.

When at last Miss Dirks came out her eyes were swollen and she looked tired and old, and for a moment terror struck at the vacillating heart of Miss Hodge. Only a moment earlier in the bathroom her mind, beyond her control, had been hovering about the idea of Sarah's death and the freedom it would bring her, and now frightened she could only think, "What would I do if anything happened to Sarah? What would become of me?"

The spectacle of Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge and the contemplation of all that had gone into the making of their tragedy threw Ransome into one of the periods of melancholic reflection which attacked him from time to time like an illness; and then on top of that he had been upset by the talk of Mr. Jobnekar about the work he was doing among his people. The little man, seated uncomfortably on a stiff chair out of politeness for his European guest, had talked long and eloquently after the departure of the schoolmistresses, his black eyes glittering all the while with excitement and hope. He had found a new man in Bombay, like most of the Untouchable leaders, a Christian. Each time he found a new worker it was, he said, like waking on a bright cool morning with the sun shining brilliantly. The new man was called Mr. Bikaru and he came from the United Provinces.

"It's spreading," Mr. Jobnekar said with excitement. "It's spreading all over India, much more quickly than anyone could hope. By Jesus! we're beginning to get somewhere. You see, we're organized now. That's one of the things we've learned from the Westorganization, banking, even things like engineering. By golly! Well have all our own engineers before very long, to make steel and cotton mills and build dams. The British have taught us a great deal and lately we've been learning from the Americans. We're waking up. It has a huge body Indiaand it takes a long time for it to waken."

"Don't learn too much/' Ransome wanted to say, "or you'll only destroy yourselves the way the Japanese are doing," but he held his tongue in the face of Mr. Jobnekar's faith and enthusiasm. It was the faith of men like Mr. Jobnekar and Raschid which he envied. They believed in something, in a marvelous, almost mystical future for which they might give their souls and their bodies. What was there to work for in England or France or America? Where was there to go? You could make money and pick up worldly honors but that wasn't living. You couldn't live without faith. You merely existed in a dull squalid fashion.

Suddenly he took his pipe from his mouth and interrupted Mr. Jobnekar: "That's what the enemies of Russia won't see. Faith! They don't see, or perhaps it's beyond their understanding, that faith is more exciting than silk stockings and the mass production of pins... that It's the most exciting thing on earth, the only thing which makes life worth living."

What man or what people had faith in Europe? Who was there that desired anything beyond middle-class security and a chance to make money? No, the West was tired. There was no one, no man, no people, strong enough and young enough to make the effort.

Feeling the old depression stealing over him, he rose and said, "I must go now." For when he felt thus he was not only impossible company but he found anything save solitude unendurable.

Mrs. Jobnekar came in with a garland of marigold and jasmine and put it over his head. The gesture touched him because he knew that he had been an unexpected guest and there had been no garland prepared. It pleased him too that Mrs. Jobnekar and her sisters made no attempt to become imitation Europeans. They had the integrity which must accompany faith.

Ransome knew exactly the moment when he had been aware of the illness for the first time. It had come over him one evening in Flanders a little after his twentieth birthday and two days before he was wounded for the second time. It was evening, a still blue evening in summer with a long fading twilight so different from the quick nightfall in Ranchipur, and he had been sitting on the ground with his back to the wall of a house which had been hit the night before, listening, with half his mind, as one always did, to the distant roar and crackle of the German shells that were reducing to dust, with systematic thoroughness, the villages among the low hills beyond Boschaepe. He was full of thin Flemish beer and cheese and his whole body was relaxed and peaceful in the knowledge that he would have one more night of respite from the lines, for it had long since ceased to be exciting. Even to a boy of twenty it was only a dull horror.

He had been ^thinking about the quiet green village of Nolham and what his father and mother were doing, and wondering whether when the war was finished, if it ever was, he would go> back there and take over one of the farms, or go up to Oxford for a while, or simply clear out for Canada or South Africa and find a new world where he could build up a life of his own, free of all the things he hated at home. And slowly through his daydreaming he became aware of the shrill sound of a fife, a perky, gallant sound, and turning his head, he saw coming down the street from the direction of Ypres a dozen companies of soldiers from the Midland regiment which had been hustled in to take over the Belgian lines. They had been there for ten days or more and there was nothing strange about them; he had seen them again and again. Only this time he seemed to see them with a kind of second sight, not as men, but as monkeys, a whole regiment of monkeys, but tragic without the grotesquerie and humor of monkeys.

They marched toward him and then past him, half a regiment of men, none of them much over five feet tall, gnarled, hard, brave little fellows, but all rickety and twisted and deformed. Past him they went swinging along to the sound of the fife, rank after rank, and presently he was aware of a profound feeling of pity and affection for them. It seemed to him that he saw beneath the drab ill-fitting uniforms, beneath even the tough skins of the twisted undernourished little bodies, bleached by years of mines and factories, into the hearts and beyond even that, into the womb of time and what it was that had made this whole regiment of gnomes. He saw them born out of the smoke and filth of factories, out of the damp and blackness of mines, out of starvation and misery and strikes, the greed of mankind and the black sanctimonious hypocrisy of the nineteenth century. None of them had ever had a chance at life, nor their fathers and mothers for generation after generation before them, until at last they had emerged from the womb of time, whole regiments of men, small and wretched and deformed. In his half-dreaming state their numbers seemed multiplied vaguely into thousands and millions coming not only out of the Black Midlands but out of France and Germany and America and Italy, from all the Western world, marching and marching, a cloud of men. For a moment in a kind of vision the whole dreary Flemish landscape, the low hills in the distance, the very sky itself seemed filled with marching men.

And then as the sound of the fife died away he wakened, feeling sick and depressed, thinking, "I must be going balmy," but oddly enough he knew in his heart that what he had dreamed was truth. All that night that one precious night of peace he had not slept at all, and the next morning he went back again to the lines filled with a sense of numbness and despair which made the discomfort and danger and misery seem no longer anything at all. And then two days later he had thrown himself forward at the head of his men to attempt a desperate thing and received a bullet in the thigh. And for that, months later, they gave him a decoration, never knowing that he had charged forward not because he was valiant and brave and full of faith in his action, but because he had hoped to be killed in order that he would no longer have to suffer that sense of shame for being a man, one billionth part of what was called "the Civilized West."

During convalescence the sense of depression clung to him, and when his father came to him proposing that he be transferred to a "cushy" job to which he had a right as a man who had been twice wounded and given the V. C., he surprised everyone by accepting. He was finished with the indiscriminate killing of men. He knew then that if ever he killed again he would know the man he killed and it would be for a reason.

And then when the War had finished the neurasthenia did not go away. It remained, growing a little stronger each time it returned, so that there was no way for him to return to normal life and to find for himself a place in the civilization that was England. He tried a dozen things but each time he abandoned them in the end business, a chance to go into the Foreign Office, a farm in Sussex, Each time it was the same story; there would come a moment when he was overcome by apathy and disgust, a moment when it was no longer possible to apply himself or even to have any interest any longer in what he had undertaken. Always he was aware of the world outside himself, of the sickness which was not his alone but the sickness of a whole nation and a whole civilization; and then he would plunge himself into dissipation and debauchery as if by doing so he could emerge once more, clean and fresh. For a little time it was effective, but he came presently to have the name of being vicious and undependable, a rake and waster, and then one day when he had wakened from a long bout with drink and women he sailed for America, from which his mother had come; and since that time he had not seen England again.

What he sought in America was a vague thing, which became clear to him only after he had married and spent years there. It was, he thought, something which came down to him in his blood, a heritage from his grandparents. He had run away from England partly because Europe had become insufferable and partly because he had hoped to find in America a country and a people that were less tired. Dimly he was aware of an impulse to return to the source of something he had once known very well, which went back to his youth; and always in his mind, what he sought was associated with the small energetic figure of his grandmother, not the Countess of Nolham but Mrs. "Ten percent" Mac- Pherson; and so he came at last to Grand River which was the only town that he really knew in America.

She had left Grand River as a girl of seventeen to accompany her father to California to find gold and she had come back to Grand River after she had married MacPherson and was fabulously rich, to build herself a huge turreted house overlooking the Ohio River. There Ransome's mother had been born and her brother, and there his grand- mother had always returned, no matter what glamorous adventures or what brilliant people she had encountered in New York and London and Paris. There she returned after her husband had served as Ambassador to the Court of St. James', for Grand River and the huge turreted house she loved better than any place in the world.

Long after she was dead Ransome thought of her a great deal, seeing her with a clarity he had never known during her lifetime, for she had died on the day he was wounded the second time in Flanders when he was still only a boy of twenty. And the older he grew, the more he suffered, the more he came to understand her. He understood that she had had a simplicity and an integrity such as he had never encountered in any other person. It was her integrity that forced her always to return to Grand River where she knew everyone. That was her country. The people of Grand River were the people she knew and understood and loved. That was the world in which she felt at home, where she could barter with the tradesmen and call half the population by their Christian names, where she could, when the spirit moved her, take off her famous pearls, go down into her own vast kitchen and bake a cake or make pancakes which were better than the most expensive chef could create.

Of all her grandchildren he had been her favorite, and because he was the youngest son his parents made no objection to his spending summer after summer with her in the turreted house in Grand River, summers which were a mingling of delight and misery because he had there a freedom which he had never known in England and because he earned in the beginning the mockery of the other boys for his neat and elegant Eton accent. Long afterward he came to understand that his childhood had been extraordinary, divided as it was between an English public school and a thriving town in the Middle West. There were moments when it seemed to him (during those bitter, clinical examinations which he made of himself) that this experience lay at the root of all his later misery and defeatism and neurasthenia. It was in a way simply one shock and change after another, a kind of perpetual read- justment which was too much for the stability of any child. It was like a childhood divided between a Manchu family and a Scottish Presbyterian household.

Because she had loved him she had spoiled him, and when old Mac- Pherson died she took him over as her own, talking to him sometimes

as if he were a grown man, confiding in him, telling him in the evenings when they dined alone in the huge ugly paneled dining room stories out of her extraordinary life. Sometimes they were stories of the Nevada mining town where she had run a boarding house for miners at the age of twenty, sleeping always with a revolver beneath her pillow; and sometimes they were stories of the King or of ambassadors and prime ministers. She was eighty-two when she died and during the last summer he spent with her, the very year the war began, she told him things she had not told him before, things which perhaps she had never told anyone. It was as if she was aware that she was dying and felt the necessity of confiding to him many things which otherwise might have been lost forever. Among them was the story of her marriage.

When she was nineteen she had found herself alone in a small Nevada mining camp, her father dead in an accident, with no money at all and so, because she was a good cook, she had opened a boarding house for the miners and made it pay. And among the miners there was a young fellow of Scottish descent from Pennsylvania, a big brawny good-looking young man who fell in love with her, and presently she fell in love with him too, so much in love that there was never any other man in her life.

"It was a little place," she said, "just fifty or sixty shacks on the side of a rocky canyon and there were only seven other women in the camp and none of them better than they should have been. If you're lucky, my boy, you'll fall in love in the same way with a girl who will be just as lucky if it happens to her, but it doesn't happen very often... not to one person in ten thousand, so don't hope for too much. There wasn't any church in the place and there wasn't any preacher nearer than Sacramento and that was a good three hundred miles away, so we didn't wait for the preacher. It would have been foolish. You never saw your grandfather as a young man, but no woman in her right senses would have sat about waiting. She'd have been a fool if she had..."

And then she discovered that she was going to have a baby and suggested that after all they had better leave the mine for a month and go to Sacramento to be married.

"He didn't want to go very much," she said. "He had a strange feeling that if he kept on digging he was going to strike it rich* I guess he felt in his bones all the time that the gold was there. He kept putting me off and saying he'd go next week or the week after but I was determined I was going to be married before the baby was born. He was always like that. When he had something big on his mind, he let everything else slide until he got it done. That's how he was successful in whatever he undertook. He wouldn't give in till he got the thing done. That was the way he courted me. Well, a month passed and then another month and then a third and then I decided that the time had come to take affairs into my own hands, and so one morning I packed up everything and took my pistol and went to the mine. He was working there, finding traces of gold and excited because he knew there was more where it had come from. So I pointed the pistol at him and said, 'Jamie Mac- Pherson, we're going to go to Sacramento to be married!' At first he just looked at me as if he couldn't believe what he saw was true, and then he sat down and began to laugh. I never saw a man laugh harder. He shook and shook and went on laughing until I said, 'Hurry up and get through with it and come down the hill and pack.' So he came, still laughing, and packed up his things and we set out for Sacramento on two mules. It took us about two weeks to get there because the going was awful, with hardly any trail at all. And all the time I kept posses- sion of the gun and most of the time he kept laughing. Afterward he told me that he'd never loved me so much as when I stood there pointing the pistol at him. He'd never had any intention of not marrying me, and I knew that too, but I knew how he put things off.

"Well, we got married and went back to the mine and pretty soon I had a son who was your Uncle Edward. He's always been pretty tough and tenacious. He had to be, I guess, to stand all the jolting on that trip to Sacramento and back. And two days after he was born your grand- father struck the lode, and with a son and a million-dollar gold mine he was something to watch. I thought for a couple of days he was going to burst.

"I guess your grandfather never regretted the marriage. It brought him luck and sometimes when he was in a tight hole I was able to help him out. Anyway I was in love with him all my life, just as much as I was in the beginning and I still am now. Sometimes in the night I wake up and think about him and me and the days back there, and it's almost as good as living them all over again."

As Ransome grew older, she became to him the most vivid figure in all his memory, far more vivid than his own mother, her daughter, for with the daughter's generation the softening process had already begun. Ransome's mother liked Europe better than Grand River. She married an Englishman, against the will of her mother, and slowly she lost what character she had and became merely the appendage of a tradition. She was dead now and there were moments when Ransome found it difficult to remember her very clearly a pale woman who grew a little more sad each year, lost and rootless. In the end, just before her death, she drank secretly.

In a way he went back to America and to Grand River after the War to find his grandmother or to find what she had been and what she had stood for, but he never found her nor did he find any of the things she had been. He discovered that in a powerful fashion she had given her own color to the town; his impression of the place had really always been an impression of the old lady herself. When he returned he found neither her simplicity, nor her sense of equality, nor her integrity and her downrightness. He found instead a town that was an imitation of Europe, a place in which there was no longer any simplicity and people were valued not for their character and their eccentricities, as they had been in her time, but for their money. And he found the same sickness that he found in Europe, the same weariness and recklessness, the same despair stifled by drink, the same misery among the working people. In a city a little over a hundred years old he discovered the maladies of cities which had been in existence for a thousand years. In some ways it seemed to him worse than the old cities, for it was senility imposed upon adolescence and so it became grotesque and exaggerated and sometimes terrifying. He found no faith here either save in the automobile factory and the stock market.

And insanely he married.

Now in Ranchipur, years afterward, there were moments when it seemed to him that his marriage had never happened at all, so dim and so unimportant had it become. But he knew that he had married partly because Mary Carstairs had caught his fancy for a little time and partly because he had wanted to settle himself into Grand River to rediscover that lost world which had been his grandmother's. He took his wife to live in the old turreted house, closed and empty since the death of old Mrs. MacPherson. He did his best but it did not work. He knew afterward that it could never have succeeded and that the fault was his, because he remained forever a stray and an outcast in the community to which his wife belonged. And once he had had enough of her physically, he saw her clearly in all her superficiality, her cultural shallowness, her snobbery, her trivial ambitions, her reckless barbarity. He had deceived himself for a little time but the deception could not have lasted; and she in the end found him a tedious prig who would not take her to England, to the world that was his by right and which she found, from a great distance, so glamorous. And so one day he had quietly gone away and she divorced him. It was all as if it had never happened. And almost at once she married the son of the president of the automobile factory, and now she lived, not in the old turreted house which was pulled down, but in an imitation French chateau furnished by decorators from New York.

From Grand River he had gone into the Far West to the country where his grandparents had been married. He had expected to find a new country but he found that it was already old and not very different from the thing he had run away from. People talked big of frontiers and democracy but these things, he discovered, no longer existed in reality. In two or three generations the things they boasted of were gone forever, as if they had never existed; and a little way from the town where his grandmother had kept a boarding house he found coal mines where starving miners and their wives and children were shot down by gangsters imported from the East and paid by a pious Baptist who had so many millions that he gave them away wholesale, not to the starving miners who did an honest day's work, but to charities and good works which might gloss over the greed and hypocrisy and dishonesty upon which the vast fortune was built.

Now and then, here and there, Ransome had found a single old man or old woman who had known that vanished world which had existed for so short a time, never in Europe but only in the West of America.

But their point of view, their very manners were regarded as obsolete and eccentric and even comic. It seemed to him that out of the simplicity he found in them might have grown something splendid and wonderful. That was why he had loved Aunt Phoebe Smiley the moment he saw her in Ranchipur, that and because she made him think of his grandmother.

In his heart he knew that he was more American than English and that in spite of everything he had always been a stranger in England, rebelling against rigid formulas of living, economic inequalities and the system of caste which at moments seemed to him as uncompromising as the system he found in India. He was not European at all but neither was he a good American, accepting the American faith in panaceas, or deceiving himself as Americans did. Nor did he accept its worship and awe of success and wealth.

He was neither one thing nor the other but only, as he knew bitterly in his heart, a dated and useless liberal in a sick world which demanded violence and ruthlessness and revolution to set it right a disappointed idealist, solitary and bitter toward his fellow men because they were greedy and hypocritical and predatory. Bitterest of all he had come at last, slowly and grudgingly, to the knowledge that he himself was useless, paralyzed by his own dark pessimism, as useless even as the holy sadus sitting naked on the steps at Benares.

In Ranchipur he had found peace for a little time. In Ranchipur he had come dangerouly near to accepting that death in life which the Hindus offered, but in time that temptation had passed and now the danger was gone. He had been saved, he knew, because out of his own bitterness and despair he had discovered what it was to hate; and out of that, he was aware, strength might come, for in his time hate and violence were the only means by which the great sickness might be cured.

It was Raschid's capacity for hate which attracted Ransome to him in the beginning, for the big Muslim came of a race and a faith which had never placed faith in gentleness and nonresistance. Its hate, its zeal for reform had never degenerated like that of Christianity into a preoccupation with theology and private morals. Raschid in his Islamic faith looked upon greed and hypocrisy and knavery as infinitely greater crimes

than adultery or polygamy or perversion. The Christian church, thought Ransome, having profited again and again by crimes against humanity, now overlooked them in its morbid concern over sex. Raschid had faith, he had power. He was the new Islam, yet he was as old as Mohammed. He himself had no faith, for there was none in the Christian world. But he was beginning to know hate, and through hate he might be saved.

On his way home he went around by the music school. Once he was rid of Mr. Das he would listen to the music alone, for the singers never addressed him. It was Jemnaz Singh and his two apprentices who again played and sang for him, and this time there was no lightning and no thunder. Outside the rain fell with a faint steady roar, destroying at last even the violence of the wind, and against the accompaniment of the rain Jemnaz Singh, exquisite, cross-legged and beautiful in his brilliant Rajput turban and atchcan, sang a song of thanksgiving to Krishna for the deliverance from drought and famine. It was an ancient song, thousands of years old, of which Ransome understood scarcely a word since Jemnaz Singh sang in the tongue of the Rajput warriors, but while he listened peace began to come once more into his spirit, for there was something eternal in the song which said, "Nations come and go. Kings rise and fall. Millionaires come into being and are destroyed overnight, but we, the Earth and the people, go on forever."

It was dark when he left the music school still wearing the garland of marigold and jasmine. The spectacle of a European man garlanded with flowers driving a five-year-old Buick through the monsoon rains did not strike him as ridiculous. Once the newness wore off, once you had ceased to be merely a tourist, there was nothing ridiculous in all of India. It was so ancient, so vast, it sheltered grudgingly so many peoples, so many faiths, so many customs that all of them were mixed together and swallowed up in an indiscriminate fashion, as the Hindu faith quietly swallowed up Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha.

At the smaller bridge near the zoo he was forced to stop and wait while one of the Maharajah's great Rolls-Royces, spattered with red mud, rolled heavily across it. Inside, sitting rather like wax works beneath the top light, sat two people, a pretty blonde woman of no age at all and a heavy blond man with a purple face. The woman stared at the old Buick as they passed without even changing her expression. The man took no notice but kept on making notes on a folded bit of paper.

Ransome thought, "It's the Eskeths. They've been taken to visit the waterworks."

He would not have recognized her if he had not known that it could have been no one else. It was not that she had changed greatly but that the face he saw was a dead face, like a mask made with great realistic skill. The perfectly done hair was like a wig, and the costume of white silk was too perfect and too unspoiled to be worn by any woman in the midst of an Indian monsoon. Not knowing that he was in Ranchipur, she could scarcely have recognized him in the man driving the sunburnt old Buick with a garland of marigolds round his neck. Perhaps she would not even remember him. A good deal had happened to them both since they last saw each other.

"She is," he thought, "exactly as I knew she would be."

Thinking of her, he stalled the old car when he attempted to start it, and once it was stopped he made no effort to restart the motor but stayed there for a long time near the cast-iron statue of Queen Victoria carrying an umbrella and a reticule. The river was no longer a still green canal, r-eflecting a mosaic of stars; it was moving now, yellow and turbulent, lapping higher and higher against the low flat steps which led from the water up to the jewel-box shrine of Krishna, and its wild coming-to-life fascinated him as it always did. Presently, step by step, it would rise to the level of the road and of Krishna's temple, until you could hear its roaring all through the damp hot nights. There was a story that once, long ago, during the rule of the wicked Maharajahs, the river had not stopped at the level of the road but had risen and risen until the temple of Krishna was drowned, and the roaring water, bearing trees and dead beasts and men, had swept over the whole city of Ranchi- pur. It must have been, he thought, a splendid and savage spectacle that of an angry Nature destroying what the puny hands of man had raised. And afterward there had been famine and pestilence and death. He regarded the dumpy statue of the Queen and thought, "If that happened again the good Queen, the housekeeper of a whole empire, would be drowned like the temple of Krishna."

But it couldn't happen again, for the Maharajah, fearing such a dis-

aster, had taken the most violent and writhing curves from the river and left it moving quietly through the center of the town, like a cobra crossing the garden path.

Dreamily he fell to thinking of Edwina and of himself as they had been long ago, just after the War, and the thought of them as they were then made him feel suddenly sad and immensely old. He had always liked her and for a time he had been in love with her, and looking back now from a great distance it seemed to him that perhaps if their lives and their ancestry and the time in which they lived had been different, they might have loved each other profoundly and been married and found the stability which neither of them had ever found. But he knew that with his strange spells of melancholia and debauchery he would have made a wretched husband, and that she with her upbringing and giddiness and lack of any moral sense would have made any man a dreadful wife. How could they have been faithful to each other when there was nothing in life in which they believed? They had snatched at pleasure on two week-ends, without scruple or remorse, and then 'suddenly they had become bored and the whole thing had come to an end, leaving them the best of friends, with so little interest in the adventure that, so far as he could remember, they had never spoken of it again. And now, thinking of it, it seemed to him that they had scarcely ever been alone. Always they had gone about in crowds as if solitude held some terror for them. It was Edwina and her sort his own sort for that matter who had driven him in the end from England and from Europe. The sick ones... but no sicker than all the rest, the millionaires, the politicians, the bankers. . . .

"We were the bright young people," he thought. "We were the first of Modern Youth. And now look at the God-damned thing."

Gradually the sound and the sight of the yellow rushing water in the wet twilight seemed to hypnotize him, and he thought that it would be quite easy to slip from the bridge into the wild stream and never be seen again. No one would ever find your body; the crocodiles would see to that. This was the time to do it; in a day or two, if the rains held, it would be full of snakes and floating- debris and even the bodies of those animals who had escaped the vultures and the jackals only to be devoured by the crocodiles. It was the first time for months that the idea of suicide, once continually with him, had returned. It would be easy and rather magnificent to slip over the edge and disappear. Certainly no one at home would miss him neither Mary safe in the security of her Grand River French chateau, his brothers nor his father. Very few would miss him here in Ranchipur. Perhaps Raschid and the Smileys and Mr. Jobnekar, perhaps even the Maharajah. But after a week or two his death would make very little difference even to them, for he was in no way a part of their lives, in no way necessary to them as Raschid and Mr. Jobnekar were necessary to the future of India and the Smileys, whose death would leave half the poor and wretched of Ranchipur bereft and lost. No, logically, there was no reason why he should not destroy himself, save that he no> longer wanted to do it.

Through the mist of his thoughts and the roar of the river he was aware of the sound of little silver bells and the clop-clop of horses' hoofs, and then a tonga passed him and a hearty voice shouted a greeting. Still at a trot, the tonga rattled across the bridge into the gathering darkness and rain, but by its lights he could see that it was a gay little tonga painted bright red and decorated with bits of looking glass. And the voice and the great figure huddled beneath the too low roof he recognized as that of Raschid Raschid the Saracen, the Warrior, born too late and too soon, driving home from his office to his wife and his seven handsome children. He pressed his foot to the starter and drove off past Queen Victoria, feeling suddenly cheerful again.

At home he found that John the Baptist and his friends had replaced the tiles the monkeys had thrown from the roof of the shed and were huddled inside, gossiping and playing the flute.

In the house he found two notes. One was from Mr. Bannerjee asking him to dinner on Thursday to meet Lord and Lady Esketh. The other bore the Maharajah's turban, star and scimitar and was a summons to the palace to dine there with the same distinguished visitors. As he finished reading them darkness came down outside in the garden, suddenly, like a curtain. Switching on the lights he noticed that mildew had already formed on the wall of the dining room. For a moment he fancied that the river had already begun to roar and that he could hear it. Against the faint sound came the thread of music from John the Baptist's flute. For a long time he stood quite still listening, as if to catch still another sound, fainter than the others, so faint that it scarcely existed outside his imagination. It was the sound of things growing, of roots thrusting, of buds bursting, of vines writhing with vitality the sound of a whole vast continent come to life with the rains.

It was the last dinner of ceremony at the palace until the monsoon was over and important people began once more to circulate back and forth in dusty trains across the burnt red plains of India, not humble people like the Smileys and Aunt Phoebe and "Dirks and Hodge," or even people like Mr. Jobnekar and Raschid Ali Khan for they never went to hill stations where it was cool, high above the clouds which flooded the plains

but viceroys and millionaires, and generals and maharajahs, and people

like Lord and Lady Esketh. No dinner of ceremony would have been held so late in the year save for the untimely visit of the Eskeths and the request of His Highness 5 friend, the Viceroy, that they be entertained splendidly.

No one expected to find much enjoyment in it, neither the Maharajah, nor Ransome, nor Esketh himself, nor even Raschid whose own vitality made almost everything seem enjoyable, but least of all the old Maharani and Lady Esketh. For Her Highness it meant that she would have to be magnificent and a little pompous and polite all evening, and long ago she had ceased to find pleasure in any of these things. For Lady Esketh it meant nothing at all, for even that first faint curiosity about the bizarre- magnificence of India was satiated now. The person to whom it brought the greatest enjoyment was one who was not invited at all.

This was Miss Hodge. At seven-thirty she was already seated on the' verandah of the bungalow opposite the great palace gateway, her face a, little flushed with excitement, embroidering and waiting for the first- vehicle to arrive. A little earlier in the evening she had been upset again: by the sound of the wild military music and there had been another stifled incoherent scene with Miss Dirks over leaving the gate of the front garden open so that she might see the guests as they arrived. It was quite true, as Miss Dirks had pointed out, that it would be too dark to recognize any of the guests, but this argument had no weight with Miss-' Hodge; she knew every vehicle from the tonga which Mr. Jobnekar hired by the month to the purple Rolls-Royce which was used by important guests like the Eskeths, and she could imagine the people inside. This time the strange unsatisfactory quarrel had ended without a climax, without tears or reconciliations, leaving behind it a sense of incompleteness and misery.

Seated on the verandah, Miss Hodge was taking a superior attitude and trying to forget it all, but somehow she could not and in her heart there was a sense of shamed triumph. Again she had won a victory; the garden gate was open so that she had a clear view of the palace driveway. She kept talking to herself about Miss Dirks, not audibly, for Miss Dirks sat just inside the window, but with such fervor that her lips moved to form the words without her knowing it. She kept telling her* self that it was absurd of Sarah to want the gate closed so that no passerby could look into the garden.

It was an exaggerated neurotic feeling. You'd think, instead of asking simply to have the gate open, you'd asked her to walk naked across the great square by the cinema. It was perfectly ridiculous, Miss Hodge told herself, and morbid and showed no sense of proportion. If there had been any reasonable objection she would have yielded without a word, Sarah certainly knew that she scarcely ever disagreed with her. But this time surely she was in the right. That was why, after they had quarreled, she simply walked out of the house down the path and opened the gate. Sarah could have gone out and closed it again, but she would only have opened it once more. She could not allow herself to be forever brow- beaten by Sarah. Now and then she had to assert herself.

But Sarah hadn't closed it. She had simply looked at Elizabeth as she re-entered the house and taken up her book without a word. And now she was taking her revenge by being tired and dignified, perfectly polite but cold, so that if Elizabeth attempted to begin a conversation it would die almost at once, chilled and frostbitten by the tone of Sarah's voice. Nevertheless Miss Hodge was glad she had asserted herself. It brought her a sense of excitement and palpitation. Ever since she had walked down the path and opened the gate her heart had been beating too rapidly and her cheeks had been hot.

Opposite her beyond the gateway the huge mass of the palace, glittering now with lights, rose black against the stormy sky. For a moment

the rain had ceased and the wind fallen and here and there you could see little patches spangled with stars between the broken flying clouds. In the covered gateway two of the Maharajah's horse guards, turbaned and dressed in scarlet and gold, sat their black horses silent, immobile, their lances, carrying the purple and gold pennons of His Highness, pointing straight upward, as motionless as the men themselves. They were Sikhs, professional fighters, who never shaved, and now on duty they wore their long black beards neady folded into little nets beneath their chins.

For twenty-five years Miss Hodge had seen them there, day in and day out, and she never quite come to take for granted their lean straight bodies, the proud narrow-nosed faces, the handsome tunics of scarlet and gold. They were men, beautiful men, fierce and bearded, who lived on horses, and all that was too much for Miss Hodge's romantic nature. She had no idea why they fascinated her, and because she was a little ashamed of the stormy feelings they roused in her she never attempted to discover what or why it was. It was a muddled emotion, partly literary by way of Flora Annie Steel and partly mere glandular reaction. Sometimes, when Miss Dirks was out of the room, she would stand at an upper window, push back the curtains and look at the Sikhs. Each time she peeped she felt faintly excited, her heart beat a little faster and she felt gay. It was exactly like taking a drug, and like taking drugs the peeping had become a habit and a necessity. Slowly she had come to know the Sikhs apart, although they were all of a type lean, hawk- faced and tall. She had never even heard their names, but as time went on she invented names for them herself, good English names because she had never heard any Sikh names. She had her favorites. They were called John, Geoffrey, William, Herbert and Cecil. Some of them she had seen grow from boys into middle-aged men. Now and then one would fail to appear and never be seen again. Occasionally there were new ones, whom she would study carefully each time they came on duty, giving them each a fair chance until she had rejected them or listed them among her favorites. Cecil had been the favorite of favorites, and when he left the regiment to go back again to the North she experienced for weeks afterward a sense of depression each time she looked at the gate.

She kept hoping that he was ill or on a holiday and would return, but he never did. She had not even any way of discovering what had become of him.

While she watched the two horsemen standing beneath the great lanterns of pierced copper, the guests began to arrive. She recognized the great form of Raschid Ali Khan huddled in the gay little tonga ornamerited with bits of looking-glass, and Mrs. Raschid all in white, sitting beside him; and she knew the Dewan's old-fashioned French motor, and Ransome's five-year-old Buick which had belonged to Monsieui Descans, the Swiss engineer, and Major Safti's mud-spattered Ford, and the Packard which she thought must contain the General, and the baby Austin driven by Mr. Banner jee with his handsome wife at his side, and presently, with a sudden excitement, the lumbering purple Rolls- Royce with Lord and Lady Esketh inside. The light inside the car was turned on and so she had a glimpse of them, the famous millionaire peer and his fashionable wife. She knew all about them. She knew that Lady Esketh had been Edwina Doncaster, one of the "bright young people," and at one time a great friend of the Prince of Wales, for she kept up on her news of Court and Society. She knew every birth and death in the "Morning Post" which arrived in Ranchipur a month or two after it had been printed, in a world which 1 she had never seen and among people she would never know.

Last of all came Mr. and Mrs. Jobnekar clopping along in their hired tonga. Then after waiting a long time she turned and said, "That seems to be all the party, Sarah the Eskeths, Mr. Ransome, the Raschids, the Bannerjees and the Jobnekars."

There was no answer from Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge thought, "Oh, so she's not going to speak to me? That's carrying things a bit far."

When she turned to look she saw that Miss Dirks was sitting with her eyes closed. Her book on new methods of teaching algebra had fallen into her lap and one thin hand was pressed against her stomach.

Frightened, Miss Hodge jumped up and called out, "Sarah! Sarah!" Miss Dirks opened her eyes and seemed to come back from a great distance.

"Yes, Elizabeth, I'm sorry. I was thinking"

"You're not feeling well?"

"Yes, I'm all right. Just tired, that's all." She sat up straight and picked up her book.

"I'll make you a cup o tea," said Miss Hodge.

"Don't bother."

"Yes, I will. You can't stop me." And she went off to the kitchen to heat the water, trembling and filled with remorse, ashamed o her petty victory over the open gate, wanting to make amends, to apologize, to regain the ground which had been lost between them.

Miss Dirks had not been sleeping. She had been thinking, with her eyes closed, fighting pain.

It had grown worse of late and now for a long time she knew that there was no use any longer in combating it by power of will or in pretending that it did not exist. It was there all the time, now withdrawing a little way, now returning to attack her with savagery. She no longer believed, even in moments when it withdrew a little, that it would pass away presently and leave her well again and strong. She had known perfectly well for weeks now that she should have gone to a doctor long ago, but in all Ranchipur there was not a doctor who would understand such things save Major Safti, and she could not face the ordeal of undressing and being pawed over by a doctor who was not only a man but an Indian and young and good-looking. She might have gone to Bombay but in Bombay there were only men doctors, and after all, in the whole of India and the East, there was no surgeon as fine as the Major. But she could not face it. The very thought of it made her feel ill. She would rather die first.

The pain was bad enough but she could have borne that alone, as $he had borne many things in her life which were worse, but she was tired too and troubled and frightened and there was no one that she could go to, no one she could tell about it, least of all Elizabeth, who would grow silly and hysterical and make it all the worse by fussing and showering her with unwanted little attentions that would never allow her to forget the pain, even when it went away for a little time.

In a little while Miss Hodge returned with the tea. It did nothing to ease the awful gnawing pain but it made Miss Dirks a little happier because the gesture wiped out a little her shame for the childishness of her friend.

The palace was an immense structure set down in the midst of a vast park laid out long ago in an attempt to imitate the lushness and the well-ordered disarray of a great English estate. Turrets and domes and spires rose without restraint or balance from a great mass of galleries, arches and balconies in a style which included something of North Africa, something of Persia and something of India. If you saw it first by daylight it struck you, if you were a European, as a kind of architectural nightmare; if you saw it by night with the stars overhead in the blue Indian sky and all the lights glittering in the hundreds of windows, it was a fabulous and enchanted structure out of the Arabian Nights. With all the hardness of brick and stone melted away into shadows, its huge bulk rose above the trees on moonlit nights like the magical city in the "Tale of the Fisherman."

The park itself, with banyans and mangoes and eucalyptus trees and palms taking the place of the elms and oaks and cedars of an English park, was no less fantastic than the palace. In the beginning the Scotch gardener employed by the Maharani had tried, stubbornly and with heroism, to make English plants and shrubs and trees grow in the reddish heavy soil, but in the end India would have none of them and one by one they shriveled and died beneath the burning sun.

Even the little lake had a bottom of cement so that the precious water would not seep away during the dry season, and it raised toward the brazen sky, not the cool pellucid surface of an English pond bordered by sedges and flags, but a face that was pallid and dead and green and faintly streaked by the oil spread on it to keep down the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In a year like this one, when the monsoon came late and water became more precious than wine, the little pond was allowed to evaporate altogether, leaving a shallow shell of cement, the ugliest travesty of a lake, with the gawdy little pleasure boats stranded here and there beneath the blazing sun.

Ransome had never become reconciled to the park, where the sense of travesty was heightened by the presence of galloping troupes of sacred monkeys, but slowly, as he ceased to be a tourist and began a little to

India, he came to understand that the fantastic palace was not only exactly right but that it was a triumph of architecture. It had none of that distressing, lonely, barren look which his own Belgrave Square house had had until he managed to conceal its classic Georgian facade beneath a tangle of flowering shrubs and vines; nor did it give the effect of the government buildings in Delhi, constructed in the hope of impressing India and succeeding only in looking like Regent Street set down amid the magnificent ruins of the Mogul Empire. The palace belonged there, in India, with all its fantasy and extravagance and disorder, as if it had been born of India herself out of an excess of vitality. It was as right as if, like the mango and banyan trees that replaced the dead oaks and elms, it had grown out of the very soil of the country. If you had planted a bit of the seed from which Indian palaces grow in the reddish heavy soil, surely this fantastic structure would have sprung up, a giant among palaces, Presently Ransome discovered that not only was it right; it was beautiful.

It had been built against the heat and so the doors and windows were enormous and the ceilings high, and distributed through the center of it there were seven great courtyards in which plants and trees grew and water trickled in fountains all day and all night. Arica palms pushed their way upward through orchids and hanging vines toward the light that fell from above the open marble galleries, and in the center of each there was a marble basin where goldfish swam above flowers made of jade and chrysoprase and other semi-precious stones in designs taken from the old Mogul palaces at Agra and Fatepur-Sikri. High up, in gilt cages, hanging from the arica palms there were myriads of birds, the extravagantly colored birds of India, and above them suspended from the marble eaves there were great nests of Indian bees, living perpetually in one gigantic swarm, crawling over and over one another, until presently one by one they died and were replaced by those which had hatched in the center of the swarm. In all Ranchipur there was no refuge so cool as these damp shaded gardens, open at night to the sky, where the brazen sun never entered.

All about the open courts clustered the rooms of the palace on the second and third floors the apartments of the royal family and their entourage, below stairs big rooms which were useless and empty save for a strange conglomeration of furniture and objett d'art. They were like vast warehouses in which furniture had been thrust away without plan or discrimination, and so cabinets and embroideries and vases of marvelous and lovely workmanship, brought long ago out of the old deserted palace of the wicked Maharajah, found themselves standing side by side with atrocious bits of art moderne. Paintings of the Munich school hung above priceless bowls and vases of jade and agate and pink quartz collected by the Maharani; Persian tapestries from the time of Abkar ornamented walls opposite windows adorned with Nottingham lace.

Some of the horrors the Maharani had bought herself long ago when she first went to Europe to the great expositions which were held to exploit the horrors turned out by machines; the complicated slickness of the objects had impressed her, but later when she grew used to Europe and her own taste came to assert itself she knew that nearly everything she had bought was a horror, and so she had stuffed them away helter- skelter, together with the overflow of palace treasures, in these big deserted rooms where no one ever came.

Some of them had come to her as gifts from Edwardian visitors and from Indian societies whose causes either she or the Maharajah had helped at one time or another. In the far end of the great hallway, which ran the whole length of the palace, there was a room where the gentlemen who came to dinner left their hats and in the corner of it was a group of objects which never failed to arouse Ransome's mirth. It contained a Landseer of two bloodhounds and a terrier, a magnificent Chinese god in bronze, an elaborate modern statue of Psyche in alabaster probably purchased from a peddler in the street in Naples, and a Mogul prayer rug of the most exquisite design and color.

One by one the guests arrived, coming up the great staircase of white marble into a room that was all blue, the color of Indian night, with the Maharani's famous collection of Mogul paintings set into the walls among the silver stars. It was a high room with windows which overlooked the park with a view of Mount Abana in the distance, and across the great windows were hung nettings of white cord to keep out the giant bats and defeat the curiosity of the sacred monkeys. From the center of the room hung a huge chandelier of crystal, blazing with light and filled with thousands of bees. Just beneath it the rulers of Ranchipur stood to receive their guests.

The Maharani wore a sari of white bordered with silver, Mahratta fashion, with a giant fish-tail train which passed between her tiny feet and swept behind her as she walked. And she wore no jewels but emeraldsemeralds in her ears and about her throat, on her wrists and fingers and even on her toes, emeralds collected here and there throughout the world to satisfy her passion for jewels, from Fifth Avenue and Bond Street and the Place Vendome, from Moscow and Jaipur and Peking. Tonight she was not the spirited old lady who played poker like a professional gambler in a mining camp shrewd, witty, malicious and sometimes Rabelaisian but a woman intelligent and, in the depths of her nature, still half-savage, who was a great queen. She was a small person, made with the delicacy and perfection of a Tanagra, yet now she gave the illusion of stature and majesty. She carried herself erect with the sureness and poise of a woman who has never known the tottering heels of fashionable Parisian bootmakers.

Ransome, regarding her from the doorway as she stood in the blaze of light from the bee-filled chandelier, thought again, "The last queen." In the West it was the fashion of queens to be as nearly as possible like middle-class housewives. In that lay their last security.

The ancient Dewan was already there and Raschid and his dark modest little wife and Mr. Bannerjee and the cold and beautiful Mrs. Bannerjee, and the Maharajah himself, looking old and tired and full of dignity, all in white with a single great diamond, set round with emeralds, blazing in his scarlet Ranchipur turban. And there were staff officers and aides-de-camp and the two old Princesses of Bewanagar, intimates of the Maharani. Out of all the group it was Mrs. Bannerjee who caught his attention. She was standing against the wall beside one of the great windows netted against the giant bats, very still and aloof and beautiful like a woman out of one of the miniatures which adorned the wall. She was tall for an Indian woman and very fair-skinned and there was an air of insolence and contempt about her which was at once provocative and irritating, and an air of stillness and indifference which permitted her to dominate any room.

For a long time she had fascinated Ransome far more than any woman he had encountered in India, and it had happened without the faintest effort on her part. To his weariness it was not only her beauty which held an appeal; her aloofness, her air of detachment, as if she endured life without enjoying it, stirred his curiosity. It was as if she were always just beyond his reach, mocking him, a new adventure, something he had never before experienced. Falling in love with her was out of the question, for they were too strange to one another and would, he knew, always remain so no matter how profound a physical intimacy they might know. One might as well have hoped to fall in love with a beautiful statue made of ice, yet the sight of her always excited him, raising a kind of perverse passion to conquer her, to humiliate her, to violate her and bring her pride to earth. He knew well enough that this would be an exciting thing but how it could be accomplished he had not the slightest idea. Again and again he had tried to discover some approach to that glacial summit upon which she appeared to have her existence. He had talked of the Su/adeshi movement in which she displayed an interest; he had tried talking of philosophy and love and of the animals the Pekinese dogs, the parrots, the ibises, the cranes and the honey bear which she kept in her garden, searching for something which might interest this childless beautiful woman; but it never led to anything more than polite rather absent-minded answers which left him with the conviction that in everything in thought, in feeling, in background and in emotion there was no way of reaching her. Sometimes he thought, "She is India. One day when India is reborn she will come alive"; but that awakening was, he knew, something which neither of them would ever see because they would both be dead before it happened. And sometimes when he was alone and had been drinking he would think, "She is really nothing at all. She is simply beautiful and lazy and stupid."

She never spoke save to answer a question and she was never made uneasy by long silences as Western women were. She would sit watching and listening or drifting off into some realm of meditation beyond the comprehension of the others, indifferent, outwardly bored and yet somehow more complete than anyone else in the room. There were moments when the steady level gaze of the black eyes grew disconcerting, as if, by her mere presence, she had the power to paralyze the conversation.

Even the human contacts all about her, and render them trivial and idiotic.

Tonight when she found Ransome staring at her she looked at him for a moment beneath her long lashes, inclined her head in an arrogant gesture of recognition, and seating herself on a divan took out a neatly rolled fan of lime and betel leaf from a box of jade and began to chew. In most Indian women there was for Ransome something cowlike in their taste for fan, but with Mrs. Bannerjee it was quite different. Watching her he was aware again of the old excitement which always made him feel hot and a little suffocated. He thought, "She hates me because I am not an Indian."

And then across the room, among all the brilliant clothes, he saw the Eskeths come in. His Lordship, stifling in a swallow-tailed coat, looked bleary and purple and rather like a peevish bull. Beside him his wife appeared incredibly fragile and pale. Then for the first time in nearly fifteen years Ransome really saw her. She was dressed like the Maharani, all in white, but instead of emeralds she wore against the white of her gown a mixture of diamonds and emeralds and rubies, very nearly as magnificent as the jewels of the Indian queen.

Against the deep blue of the wall, beneath the blaze of brilliant uncom- promising light from the crystal chandelier, she was all white and pale gold, as beautiful as Mrs. Bannerjee but in a fashion as different as it was possible to be. With the Indian woman one had intimations of fire, sullen and smoldering somewhere beneath the ice, but with Edwina Esketh one divined almost at once that if there had ever been any fire it was extinguished now forever. It was her boredom which struck you almost immediately a certain deadness of reaction to everything and everyone about her, as if she had experienced too much so that nothing, save perhaps jewels and clothes, had any longer any power to stir her. When she smiled at the Maharani it was a tired smile full of sadness, but without self-pity. It was a smile as old as time.

She said, 'Tour Highness has been so kind to us. I don't know what we should have done otherwise"; and the voice was curiously tired and flat.

The Maharani laughed, a full throaty laugh: "It's nothing. We're pleased to do anything we can for a friend of the Viceroy." There was fire in her dark eyes and vitality in her voice, and Ransome thought, "She's twice Edwina's age but she's the younger o the two."

Even when Edwina spoke it was as if she spoke automatically, with a perfect grace and politeness and even a charm that was a litde thread- bare and worn because it had been used so many times, for so many centuries. There were moments when the weariness became almost an insult.

Then she turned and saw Ransome, regarding him for a moment blankly and then with growing interest as slowly she understood that this was a face out of her past which she had once known very well. For a moment she came almost alive.

"So, it's you, Tom? Somebody told me about a person called Ransome who was living in Ranchipur but I never dreamed it was you."

"I wondered if you were going to remember me."

"It's been a long time seven or eight years."

"A good many more than ten."

She laughed, "And now we're all middle-aged."

"Not quite, but very nearly."

For a moment she seemed to brighten, as if suddenly the sight of someone out of her old world had set her heart to beating more rapidly. It had been a small and intimate world, gay and wild and sometimes, despairing, but small at least and friendly, without these hordes of strange and boring and important people whom she had seen since she married Esketh, day after day, for a moment or two and then never again.

"What are you doing here?"

For a moment he hesitated. No one had ever asked him that question before and now in a moment he found it difficult to answer. He said, "Nothing in particular; a little painting, a little drinking, a little messing about."

"It doesn't sound very exciting."

"It isn't."

"You must meet Albert."

"I met him once or twice long ago when I thought I was going to become a great business man. He probably doesn't remember me."

Lord Esketh did not remember him, but then it was his habit to remember only the people whom he might use or from whom he might

gain something, a little group which each year grew smaller until now it contained only a handful of bankers, the royal family, a quite large group of unscrupulous politicians and two or three men more powerful than himself, whom he respected because they had made greater fortunes than his own. To anyone save those few, he no longer troubled even to be civil. If you were not among them you felt that he gave even the time to say "How d'you do?" grudgingly and with annoyance.

Then the General arrived, followed too closely for his dignity and comfort by Mr. and Mrs. Jobnekar, the Untouchables, looking rather like a pair of bright-eyed mice. He had met Lord Esketh before and they did not care for each other, since neither yielded anything to the vanity and egotism of the other.

"They're both preposterous," thought Ransome. "But the one is evil and dangerous. The General is a little like the Great Auk. The Empire is built. They don't need him any more, and now they're leaving it to Esketh to destroy it.

The "small" white dining room to which the guests were led was an immense room with great arched windows on two sides like the window of the blue room, covered with nettings in which a great bat entangled itself now and then to struggle and squeak until it was freed by one of the servants. On one side the windows opened into one of the courtyards from which the sound of falling water rose among the betel palms. Through the other windows there was a view of the park and distantly of the great tank and the square with the cinema on one side and the sinister old palace on the other. The rain had stopped now for a time and the lights of the square were swimming in the tank.

The dinner was Indian because Esketh had requested it, a dinner typical of Ranchipur, with its famous curry of crayfish, sugared guavas and hearts of palm; in the distance on the roof of another wing of the palace there was an orchestra, organized by the Maharani herself in defiance of the tradition which allowed musicians to play only in groups of two or three. There were thirty musicians in it playing lutes and drums, Indian violins and flutes, even bowls of soapstone tuned by lowering and raising the level of the water in them, and the lowly melodeon which had come to India long ago with the missionaries to accompany the singing of hymns and had long since become the traditional Indian instrument for dancing girls and for playing hymns to Shiva and Krishna. The sound of the music drifted across the endless turreted roofs of the palace, distantly, into the white marble dining room.

Ransome found himself between Mrs. Bannerjee and Mrs. Jobnekar so that he sat diagonally across from Edwina Esketh and the old Maharajah. The nearness of Mrs. Bannerjee stirred him faintly but he had no more success with her than he had ever had. She was silent, eating elegantly and rather greedily, taking no notice of the party, her lovely hands dipped now into the rice, now into the sauce of the curried crayfish, now into a sweetish dish made of coconut. Mrs. Jobnekar was pleasant and chatty but with Mrs. Bannerjee beside him and Edwina across the table he found his mind wandering away from her, so that sometimes when she asked him a question he had to rouse himself violently to give an intelligent answer. About the middle of the dinner he became aware that Edwina was watching him now and then, stealthily, speculatively, and that when he glanced in her direction she turned back at once to the Maharajah.

Remembering back a long way, he kept seeing her as she had been when she came down to the farm in Sussex. Then she had had the same porcelain white and gold beauty, but she had been alive, with a wild, hysterical kind of life, as if she felt that there was not enough time to encompass all the excitement, the adventure, the love there was to be had. And he thought again, "She is just what I imagined she would be." That was her tragedy and his own that they had both burned the candle at both ends for too long. Now on the verge of middle age, there was nothing left to burn.

They had been greedy for experience and cold-blooded, and at the same time (an odd combination) they had been both disillusioned and foolish. There had never been any romance in anything they did, and he was aware now, when it was much too late, that neither of them had ever known what love was like because without romance, without sentiment, there could be no such thing as love, but only curiosity and sensual desire too quickly satisfied. To love, to make love endure, one had to be a little drugged by something which perhaps had no existence in reality. Either by nature you took willingly to the drug or you used it deliberately, hypnotizing yourself, the way you might work yourself up on a

night like this with the wild barbaric music in the distance and the sound of the water falling among the arica palms and the squeaking of the bats which entangled themselves in the nettings. He thought, bitterly, "We've had no luck, Edwina and I. We had all the romance, all the sentimentality knocked the hell out of us before we ever began."

He had never thought of it before but now he saw himself from a great distance as he had come back from the War, bitter and unhappy, greedy for women and pleasure and experience, as if somehow he had had to make up for what he had lost during the three best and most romantic years of his life. Nobody could give that back to you; nobody could blame you for trying to get back what belonged to you, snatching pleasure and experience wherever you found it, in whatever form, with that old hysteria always inside of you, that feeling that life was too short and that you might have only another hour or two to live. The old ones had never known what it was and the young ones would never know. But he knew and Edwina knew. The wounds in his thigh and in his back were nothing; the flesh grew again somehow making itself whole. But the spirit was different; somewhere in some book he had read long ago something which came back to him now:

Dans la damnation le fet/ est la moindre chose; le supplice prof re au damne est le progres infini dans le vice et dans le crime, I' ami s'endurcissant, se depravant toujours, senjon$ant nccessairement dans le mal de minute en progression geometrique vers I'eternite.

That was it that was Edwina's case and his own.

Suddenly he heard the voice of Esketh above the murmur of talk and the sound of the distant music, even above the amiable chatter of little Mrs. Jobnekar to which he listened with only half an ear. Esketh was shouting at the Maharani and it occurred to Ransome that perhaps she had been baiting him, as she baited the General.

"It's a damned outrage!" Esketh bellowed, and Ransome, seeing the twinkle in the black eyes of the old lady, thought, "It's no use his trying to bully her." The methods he used in the West would come to nothing here, save that they would amuse Her Highness.

Esketh's face looked swollen, and Ransome thought, "He's ill. There is something the matter with him. No man who wasn't ill would shout like that." In the protruding blue eyes there was a dull look as if they were covered by a film. And he wondered if Esketh made scenes like this with Edwina.

Then the dinner was suddenly at an end and the Maharani in her white and emeralds was leading the way from the room, the long train of her Mahratta sari trailing far behind her between the tiny feet covered with emeralds from the four parts of the earth.

In the room with the blue walls the entertainment had already begun, and seated on a small dais with her back to one of the huge arched windows sat Lakshmi Bai, one of the great singers of India. She sat cross-legged and wore a sari of blue and silver. She was neither a beautiful woman nor a plain one and she was no longer young, but neither her age nor her appearance were of importance in her performance. It was not a woman that one saw and listened to but a work of art, in which every tiny detail contributed a little part toward the whole the scarlet lips, the lacquered nails, the glimpse of jeweled foot from beneath the blue and silver sari, the exquisite style with which the beautiful hands, more delicate and more sensitive than the hands of any European, picked the strings of the lute. It was the hands which fascinated Ransome, and even Edwina, sitting beside him now, was interested, it seemed to him, for the first time, in something, a creation, which was very like herself, possessing the same half-decadent perfection.

They alone in the room were silent, watching, and listening, for the Indians looked upon the music merely as a background for conversation and talked among themselves, and the General and Esketh had no interest in such goings-on; and sitting beside her, Ransome was acutely aware of her perfection, of her breeding and poise, of her clothes, her jewels, her hair, her grace of manner and the way she sat, leaning back a little, listening and watching. It seemed to him suddenly that he had discovered the very essence of her existence. He thought, "She is the last example of something which will soon be gone from the world because there is no longer any time or place for it." She was not, like Esketh, a kind of crude fungus growth, sprung up overnight out of the confused ordure of his time; she was the product of hundreds of years

of leisure, of privilege and responsibility won and carried on by generation after generation. And now even the civilization, the epoch to which she belonged, was nearly at an end and there was no longer any place for her, or for himself for that matter, and both of them were touched by the decay of something which was too old, from which even his grandmother in the vast turreted house back in Grand River had not been able to save him. They were, he knew, both rotten at the core, and suddenly it occurred to him that it was Esketh and his crude gods that were destroying them.

Presently Lakshmi Bai finished singing, and as she left the room a little band came in and seated itself in front of the dais, and then the two dancing girls appeared. Like the singer they were not young, and one of them was definitely old. They were mother and daughter who had come long ago from the temples of Tanjore into the service of the old Maharajah, but neither their age nor their plumpness had anything to do with the beauty of their dancing. If they had been young and beautiful, thought Ransome, their beauty would have distracted you; you would have been aware of bodies rather than of the archaic patterns, thousands of years old, refined now to the point of decadence, which their bodies made as they danced. Again none save Ransome and Edwina paid any attention to the performance, and in a little while first one and then the other of the two dancers discovered their interest and put a certain fire into their dancing. They danced the legends of Krishna and the Gopis and the story of Rama and Sita, but there was no longer any realism in their dancing, for each incident, each action, had become thousands of years ago merely a pattern, a filigree, exquisite in itself and related to nothing. It was a pure art beyond which there was nothing save decadence, destruction, and a new beginning.