The Rains Came/Part I - 2

When they had finished and gone away again with the little band Edwina sat for a moment leaning back, with her eyes closed, and presently Ransome asked, "When are you leaving?"

"The end of the week. We're taking the Victoria from Bombay." "It's a pity to meet again and then separate almost at once." She gave a little laugh that was at the same time a sigh: "Well, that's the way the world is nowadays." She told him about the visit to India, about coming to Ranchipur

because of the Kathiawar horses, about the heat, the dust, the misery and the boredom of the long official dinners.

"I don't see how you emerge from it all, looking as if you'd come out of your own house in London in the middle of the season."

Again she laughed: "It's simple enough. It's nothing but a question of money. I have two maids with me and one of them is an excellent hairdresser. It's different from the old days when I did my own hair and could only afford the hairdresser once in three weeks*"

"You looked just as well then."

"I was younger then. It didn't matter so much."

"It doesn't matter now."

She looked at him slyly and then laughed: "Just the same I like it better this way. I'm luxurious by nature. I like all the things money brings."

He wanted to ask, "All the things?" but had not the courage. They had not recovered enough lost ground to risk a question so intimate. All the same he knew that she was talking to him as she would have talked to no other person in the room. There was a kind of bond between them after all, an odd feeling that they belonged to a small and dying world which together they would defend to the very end, even though there was no end save defeat and decay. The others in the room could not know what it was. Slowly he became excited at seeing her again, at having someone beside him to whom it was unnecessary to explain, to analyze, to justify, someone who understood exactly how desperate you were, how useless, how rotten.

"You must come round to me and have tea some afternoon," he said. "I live in a damp mildewy old Georgian house and mess around with paints. It's very untidy but it might amuse you."

"Why do you stay here through the monsoon?"

He grinned: "I don't know. I might as well be here as anywhere else."

"I'll try to come. I'll have to squeeze it in somehow. There's so much arranged for us"; and she looked at him almost as if she were appraising him and thinking, "Could it be worth while for us to begin all over again? Could we ever recapture what is lost?"

He did not say, "Bring your husband," because he did not want Esketh there, impatient and bored, destroying this feeling between them.

"Make it Thursday," he said.

"Thursday." She lighted a cigarette. "Are you by any chance going to Mr. Bannerjee's to dinner?"

"Day after tomorrow?"

"Yes," and with a sensation of satisfaction he saw that she was pleased.

"What's he like Mr. Bannerjee?" she asked; "I mean inside. I can see from the outside a rather fussy little man who looks Chinese."

"It would need a whole book to describe him a kind of symbolic book. He's the Indian who is lost between the East and the West."

She was silent for a moment and then she said, "Who is that man over there. The one who looks like a pale copper Apollo?"

He knew without looking whom she meant, for the description was inspired. It was the Major. He was talking to the Maharani, by command, Ransome knew, so that she would not be bored.

He told her about the surgeon and she listened, distracted,, almost as if she were Mrs. Bannerjee, without taking her glance off the Major. He praised the Major's qualities, but after a moment he was aware that what he was saying did not hold her interest. He saw that it was not the Major's virtues which interested her. Her blue eyes had a fixed expression in them as if she were speculating, appraising the clean good- looking young Brahmin doctor. And Ransome felt suddenly angry and jealous because somehow she had slipped away from him, and he thought, "I didn't know she was as bad as that."

"He looks very romantic," she said.

"Well, he isn't. He's a surgeon and a scientist. No one could be more cold-blooded." And then growing brutal he added, "Love to him is just copulation something to be studied with scientific detachment." And almost at once he knew that he had said exactly the wrong thing to kill her interest in the Major, and he thought, "Slut!"

He did not hear her reply for her words suddenly were drowned in the roar of falling water. It was as if a gigantic waterfall had struck the palace. The rains had begun again.

She laughed and raised her voice against the downpour: "It's not much like the good old English drizzle. Isn't there another room we might go to? I hate sitting here, shouting, with everybody listening. 5 '

"We might take a look at some of the other rooms. It might amuse you. Her Highness wouldn't mind. I'll ask her permission."

The Maharani was talking now to the Dewan about the new wing that was to be built at the Girls' High School, and when Ransome asked her permission to take Lady Esketh through the lower rooms she gave a little laugh: "Of course. Go where you like"; and as he turned away she said, "Good luck/' and then returned to her conversation with the Dewan.

He found himself suddenly confused by the remark. It was as if she said, "I know your Englishwomen of that sort sensual, decadent, cold- blooded, promiscuous." It annoyed him as insulting to Edwina, and then it occurred to him that the old lady was right and that it might be agreeable to have happen what the old Maharani had hinted at, not only agreeable but a necessity. It had to happen.

So he told the aide-de-camp that he knew his own way and that they needed no one to accompany them.

They went from one to another of the deserted empty rooms below- stairs, to the great Durbar Hall, all done in gold leaf and sandalwood, to the courtyards drenched now in the downpour, and presently into the smaller rooms where treasures and monstrosities stood side by side. At first he felt nervous and excited, as if instead of being experienced and jaded he were a boy again, aware of desire for the first time, timid and ignorant. Presently they talked less and less of the things about them as if the conversation were too artificial and in the heat talking against the roar of the rain, too great an effort; and after a while they walked in silence save when he spoke absent-mindedly and without interest or conviction, to point out some special treasure or some incredible horror. At last they came to a small room at the far end of one wing of the palace just beneath the room where a little while before the Maharani's band had been playing.

Edwina said, "Let's sit here for a moment and have a cigarette. I'm exhausted by the heat."

So they both sat on the divan and after the cigarettes were lighted they both fell silent until at last the silence became unendurable, when Ransome said, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

She laughed, "Of course I am, you ninny."

For the first time in many years he was aware of a romantic feeling. He said, "You're looking very beautiful more beautiful than you were then."

"It's a long way from Tipton Farm. We've both come a long way since then."

"It's as if it were meant to be, you know, the two of us meeting again like this in a Maharajah's palace. Something about the whole evening the music, the dancers, the rain. It's set me going."

She laughed. "It's all very Elinor Glyn."

"Don't do that/'

"Even to the tiger skin," she said, kicking the skin on the floor with her toe.

"You're a perverse bitch. Anyway it's a panther skin." But inside him the excitement kept on mounting.

She laughed again: "In the middle of the monsoon with the heat and the rain. It's all very provocative and savage."

He rose then and closed the door and pushed a chest against it and put out the light. Then he made his way toward her in the darkness.

"Wait," she said. "Don't be in such a hurry. Mind my cigarette."

Upstairs, in one of the smaller rooms, Esketh was trying to bargain with the old Maharajah for a Kathiawar stallion and three mares, and the bargaining was not going too well.

His passion for horses had begun long ago when as a boy he had never missed a running of the Grand National. As a boy he had stood in the crowd watching the arrival of the rich, the powerful, the fashionable. As a boy, when he had a holiday, he would cycle for miles across country simply to catch a distant glimpse of pink coats flying over a hedge. And later on as a young man, selling cutlery and cotton goods in the Far East, he was driven always by the knowledge that one day he must have horses, because horses were a kind of label, a label which no Simpson had worn since the race of Simpsons had existed. One day he meant to have a racing stable and a half-dozen hunters and the prettiest and most fashionable woman in England for a wife. And to have these things one had to have a great fortune.

He had them now, his horses, and a wife who was the peer of any woman in the British Empire for position, for sporting qualities, for smartness. He had come a long way, Albert Simpson of Liverpool. He had bought his hunters and his racing stable and his wife and his tide^ and now he meant to buy the four most beautiful Kathiawar horses in existence.

But it seemed that the old Maharajah did not understand bargaining, at least not the methods Lord Esketh had learned long ago selling cutlery to Chinese merchants in the Malay States. He was willing to sell Esketh three mares and a stallion of the Kathiawar breed but not the ones the great Lord had picked out after three or four visits to the stables. He was a shrewd judge of horses and he had chosen the finest stallion and three of the best mares that existed in the world. He was angry now because he could not have his way and baffled and furious because for once he had set his mind on something which he could not buy simply by offering more money, and while he talked to the Maharajah his irritation increased, stimulated by one discovery after another.

It was always humiliating for him to encounter someone richer than himself, and doubly humiliating when he was forced to bargain with the person. He knew well enough that the gende old man sitting opposite him could have bought him up his jute and rubber and munitions and newspapers and steamship lines for cash and still have a great fortune left. It was annoying too that the wealth of the old gentleman existed in concrete form, in reality, and not as credits and papers in a complex tangled system which even Esketh himself did not at times understand. His own wealth might be increased a million pounds one day and de- creased a million pounds the next, without much rhyme or reason. But the old gendeman sitting opposite was not troubled by depressions, disasters and financial blunders for he was quite independent of that gigantic clumsy fallible structure which the West called big business. It was like dealing with a tough old peasant who owned his land and had a sock full of money under the mattress. The Maharajah, like the peasant, was down to brass tacks and the realization of the fact made Esketh feel shaky and insecure. He was a man who could not gracefully accept a sense of inferiority, and he was ill.

And His Highness did not pound the table and shout. He did not

grow angry nor did he talk of his horses being worth four times their real value. He did not lose his composure. He was suave and smiling and dignified. He did not even talk o the value of his horses at all, because to him they were above price.

"I cannot sell you the stallion and the mares," he said, "because I am very attached to them. I bred them myself. If I sold them to you I would be throwing away the product of fifty years of work and selection. They are the most beautiful Kathiawar horses in the world, perhaps the most beautiful horses in the world. To me they are, and so they are to my friend Mohammed Begg who has managed my stables for thirty years. If I let them go it would break his heart. You see, quite aside from anything else, I am unwilling to do that."

Esketh crushed out his cigar with a vicious gesture which said, "To hell with your friend Mohammed Begg! To hell with all of you!" Aloud he said, "I will pay you anything you like. I will build you a school or a whole railroad system. I will feed your starving poor."

"We have no starving poor, you see,"

"I'll pay you what you like." It was as if his passion for horses had slowly centered itself in the beautiful stallion, Asoka, and the mares, as if he could not live if he did not have them.

"It is not a question of money. You, Lord Esketh, who have a stable should understand what I mean."

"I don't want to take back to England a string of second-rate stock."

The Maharajah did not lose his temper: "There is no second-rate stock in my stables. You need have no fear of that. If you take back to England the horses I am willing to sell you, they will be as good as the best horses in England."

Esketh started to answer him angrily and then thought better of it for with this old man he felt strangely unsure of his ground. In his shrewdness he knew the Maharajah was sure of his, and slowly he was beginning to feel that the old gentleman knew all about him, everything there was to know, more perhaps than Edwina knew or even himself, things which he would have preferred to keep hidden.

He said, "Then I must take the mares and stallion Your Highness will sell me and be satisfied."

"I'm quite sure that you'll be satisfied with them. You'll find them

wonderful and beautiful creatures intelligent, capable of any endurance* It would be interesting to cross their breed with some of your best racing stock. Let me know when and how you want them shipped and Mohammed will see to it. I only ask you not to ship them now, during the heat. It would be very hard on them."

"Then, there isn't anything more to be said?"

"No, I should like to please you. I'm sorry about Asoka but I could not break Mohammed's heart." And then very quiedy he said, "Please let me make you a gift of the other stallion and the mares. It would give me great pleasure."

The blood rushed into Esketh's face and he felt a wild insane desire to shout, "Keep your horses and be damned! I'm not accepting gifts from any bloody Indian!" But he was uncertain whether the Maharajah had spoken from sincere generosity or whether he had meant the speech as an insult, the condescending gesture of a king to a tradesman. His anger, confused and impotent, was roused not only by the suavity of the old Maharajah but also by the memory of a man dead now for many years. Edwina's father, a bankrupt, had always treated him thus, courteously and condescendingly; and sometimes Edwina herself treated him in the same fashion Edwina, who owed him everything, whose bills he had paid when he married her.

"Thank you," he said, "I couldn't accept that. You have been too kind already."

"As you like," said the Maharajah gently. "But I meant the offer sincerely."

And suddenly Esketh felt, from the manner of the Maharajah and the tone of his voice, that he had been made to seem boorish by his refusal. The little scene had put him somehow, mysteriously, into the position of a small shopkeeper or a moneylender who valued everything in life in terms of shillings and pence. And it made him seem an awkward, bumptious boy.

In his other mission Esketh had no greater success.

The Dewan was an immensely old man, with a long and beautiful white beard, who dressed always in white and looked rather like one of the more fabulous patriarchs of the Old Testament. No one knew ex-

actly how old he was but he had been important and powerful in Indian politics for fifty years, and he was still shrewd and vigorous. For twenty- four o the fifty years, ever since the Maharani had driven out the Brahmin Dewan and caused a scandal he had been prime minister to the Maharajah of Ranchipur, helping him to build and reform and bring peace and order and prosperity to his people. The old Maharajah accomplished things by simplicity and directness, but the Dewan was Machiavellian. Believing that the end justified any means, he succeeded by craft and intrigue where the Maharajah in his simplicity often failed. In his pride as an Indian he desired to accomplish the same good ends as his master, but he lacked his master's faith in the goodness of men and he had a mischievous delight in intrigue for intrigue's sake, and so for fifty years, while he had accomplished great things, he had had fun. In his faith he was a devout Hindu, not what might have been called an orthodox one, but a Hindu purist, for he went far back for his faith to the very beginnings of the religion when it had been simple and strong and good, uncluttered by superstitions and defeatism and innumerable gods, ranging from Vishnu to the phallic symbol set in a mud shrine at the crossroads. He ate no meat and lived a simple life, apportioning his day like the Greeks, into periods of action and repose, of intellectual and physical exercise. He had been known to rise and leave political conferences because everyone had talked too long and the hour had come for him to be alone and reflect. And so, whatever immense age he may have reached, he was still wiry and spry and brilliant.

To him Esketh was simply another game. As soon as the Englishman mentioned Bombay mills he knew what it was he wanted. But he pretended that he did not understand, forcing Esketh to put aside all delicacy and crudely show his hand. The old Dewan knew all about the mills, more even than Esketh had discovered in all his investigations, but he pretended that he knew nothing at all and was astonished to hear that the Japanese competition was cutting into their markets. He forced Esketh to come into the open and say that he would like him to use his influence with the Khojas and Parsees in Bombay to make them reasonable in their demands.

The old patriarch listened to him quietly with a gentle smile while he

explained that i he took over the mills and put in the latest methods of action and organization they would pay.

"It would mean work for thousands of starving Indian mill workers," said Esketh. "But I cannot undertake it unless I can buy into the mills at a reasonable price."

He agreed with all Esketh's arguments, even with his threats, but he committed himself to nothing and gave him no encouragement until at last Esketh, after much roundabout talk, said, "Perhaps you'd be interested in working together with me. I should see that you would not go unrewarded."

"How?" asked the Dewan.

"Perhaps a share in the profits of the mills or some such thing."

Now the old gendeman had gotten what he wanted. He had forced this powerful millionaire from the West to propose bribery like any shabby merchant in the bazaar. With a twinkle in his black eyes, he said, "No, you see, in my position it is impossible to meddle in business." And his smile seemed to say, "I should not mind meddling in business but what you propose is unsound. I know a thousand better investments."

"Then you are unwilling to help me?"

"If the opportunity comes to put in a word for you, I shall not overlook it."

But Esketh was aware that he had accomplished nothing whatever, no more than he had accomplished with the old Maharajah. For the second time he had been unable to buy what he wanted. He had come to Ranchipur to swelter, traveling five hundred miles through heat and dust, and nothing had come of it.

He was in a furious humor when he returned to the blue room and found the Maharani dismissing her guests. Edwina and Ransome came into the room at almost the same moment and, noticing them, he thought, "Ah, she's found one of her own kind. Now there'll be hell to payl She'll be grand again for days!"

He walked over to her and without a word to Ransome, he said, "We're going home now."

"I'm quite ready whenever you are."

Before they left Ransome managed to say to her, "You'll be coming to tea with me on Thursday."

She smiled, "If I can manage it. It'll be difficult."

She was smooth and serene, all white and gold porcelain again, as if nothing whatever had happened.

As he said good night to the Maharani she looked at him for a second, her eyes dancing with amusement, just long enough to say without saying it. "I know what you were up to below stairs." And quite suddenly he was ashamed of himself, for something in her look made him feel cheap and clownish. To her, what had happened below stairs was funny, like a cheap dirty story.

When the guests had gone Her Highness dismissed all the aides-de- camp, the ladies-in-waiting and her friends, the two old Princesses of Bewanagar, and stayed for a moment alone with her husband. It was one of those moments, so rare when, alone, they needed no longer to be King and Queen but simply husband and wife, humble people who might have lived in the quarter of the Untouchables. The proud old lady seemed to shed all the majesty, all the pride she had shown a little while before. Instead of speaking English or French or Hindustani they spoke together in Mahratta, the language they had both spoken as children long ago in the dusty sunburnt villages of the Deccan.

"How is your gout?" she asked.

"A little better tonight." But he sat down all the same, to ease the pain in his knees and feet.

"We must go to Carlsbad at the end of next week. You shouldn't stay any longer in this heat."

"If the rains keep on we can go."

"You didn't give in to him about the horses?"

"No. I didn't give in."

"The Viceroy sends us some odd packages now and then."

"He's obliged to. He can't help himself."

"This Esketh is the worst in a long time."

The old man was silent for a moment, reflecting: "He's not a very happy man,"

The Maharani chuckled: "And while he was bargaining with you like a Bunya, his wife was downstairs behaving like a bitch in heat."

The Maharajah looked amused: "With whom?" he asked.

"With Ransome."

"Ransome! He's not a very happy man either. I it made him happy..."

The Maharani chuckled again : "It didn't."

Then they went away, each to his own apartment, and the blue room was left empty and silent save for the wild sound of the rain and the buzzing of the wild bees in the great crystal chandelier, until an Untouchable boy, coming in to free a giant bat entangled in the netting, put out the lights.

In the hallway outside the old gentleman's nurse, Mr. Bauer, was waiting with his wheeled chair. Mr. Bauer was a big blonde fellow about thirty- four or five who had been with the Maharajah since the day, five years before, when His Highness found him teaching people to swim on the beach at Ouchy. His Highness had the Indian liking for beauty and he preferred to have near him a nurse who was pleasant and handsome to one who was dull and scrawny. Bauer was placid and conscientious and amiable and he possessed the same beauty as Asoka, the stallion. It had worked well since the beginning, but the Maharajah was troubled sometimes lest his nurse become bored in Ranchipur, for he could not see how Mr. Bauer fitted in any possible way into the small, special life of the place.

Together, Mr. Bauer pushing the chair, they went along corridor after corridor until they came at last to the wing of the palace which overlooked the town. Here in the antechamber were waiting Major Safti and Raschid Ali Khan, the Muslim and the Brahmin sitting side by side, smoking cigars and exchanging stories. His Highness greeted them, saying, "Gentlemen, if you will wait for a moment, I will have Mr. Bauer put me to bed and then I'll talk. You see I am a little tired."

The silver bed was placed near one of the windows where the Maharajah might look out over the park and the town. When the Swiss had

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put him into it and arranged the nettings at the windows and over the bed, he said, "Is that all, Your Highness?"

"Yes, Bauer. I you'll tell the doctor he may come in now."

"Good night, Your Highness."

"Good night."

In a moment Doctor Safti came in: "Well, Your Highness, the gout seems better tonight."

"Yes, my knees are better."

"You shouldn't have stood up all the evening."

"I only stood when it was necessary. There are certain politenesses one has to observe."

"Quite right. Still Your Highness can do as he pleases."

The old gentleman laughed: "It's not as easy as that. You'd soon find out, Doctor, i ever you'd like to change places..." He made a little gesture: "But that wouldn't work. You could do my job but I could never do yours."

"What Your Highness needs is a change. You should get off to Carlsbad."

"I shall as soon as I'm able."

When the Major had finished examining him and saw that his medicines were arrayed properly on the lacquer table beside him, he bowed and turned to go.

"Wait, Doctor!"

"Yes, sir."

"Sit down. I want to talk to you for a moment."*

"Yes, Your Highness."

"It's about something serious,"

"Yes, Your Highness."

"Why haven't you ever married, doctor?"

Major Safti grinned: "I don't know." He seemed to reflect for a moment, as if he had never thought about it before: "When I was in England there was nobody suitable and then when I came here I was so busy at first it never occurred to me, and now I've got used to not being married."

"But what do you do about it? Light your cigar, you'll feel more comfortable."

Major Safti grinned again: "Thank you, sir." He lighted the cigar and then said, "Well, at first it was difficult, but I've had it fixed up now for a long time. At first it got in the way of my work and then I found a girl. That was three years ago. Everything's been fine since then."

His Highness waited and Major Safti divined that he was full of curiosity. "It's Natara Devi," he said, "one of the dancers from the school. You know, Your Highness, the little one from the North with blue eyes and very black hair."

The Maharajah smiled: "Very pretty too, but dancers are expensive. They have to lay aside money for their old age."

Major Safti grinned again, a little sheepishly; "She doesn't ask much a trinket now and then. I think, sir, she's in love with me."

"Are you in love with her?"

The Major thought for a moment: "I've never considered it before. No ... I don't suppose so. She's a nice little thing."

"Then it wouldn't make much difference if you gave her up?"

"No, she isn't necessary... not Natara Devi herself. Any pretty, good- natured woman would do."

"Then if I found the proper wife for you, you wouldn't object to being married? "

"No... not if I liked her. But you see it's difficult. I'm a Brahmin and not orthodox. I'm not religious at all. My mother has talked to me about getting married but she's never been able to find anyone. There was always something wrong. You see, I couldn't properly get on with an orthodox woman and I wouldn't ask her to try to get on with me. I've got a lot of ideas that most Indian women and their families wouldn't put up with."

"Yes, that's true," said the Maharajah. "But I know a girl who might suit. Her father is a friend of mine. He's a great scholar, in Bombay, and her mother is an American woman from San Francisco. They met when he was working in the museum there. It's difficult for the girl too to find a proper husband because she's not one thing or the other."

"Is she pretty?" asked the Major.

"Very pretty. She'd make exactly the right wife."

"All right, sir. I see no objection unless she takes a dislike to me. I'm very easy to please."

"I'll write to her father then. In the autumn when I come back I'll invite them all to visit me."

"Very good, sir." Major Safti rose from his chair: "You may count on me."

"You understand why I am interested?"

"I think so, Your Highness."

"It's because we need more Indians like yourself. I hope that you will iiave plenty of children."

The Major grinned: "I hope so too, sir. I see no reason why I shouldn't have."

"Will you ask Raschid to come in ? Good night, Doctor, and thank you for all you've done for me."

The Major's face grew serious for the first time. "It's my duty, sir. It's the thing which is the most important of all ... to keep you well for all our sakes, for the sake of Ranchipur ... for the sake of India."

"Good night. I know you aren't rich and neither is the girl I've spoken of, but 111 see to that."

Then Major Safti left, and as he walked along the endless corridors it was not of Natara Devi, oddly enough, that he kept thinking, but of plain middle-aged Miss MacDaid. His getting married would hurt her and he was fond of her. She knew about Natara Devi and didn't seem to mind, perhaps because she knew the East so well and understood it; but getting married was another thing. The poor old girl would be jealous and annoyed and she would try not to show it, but it would make their work together more and more difficult; and their work was more important than anything, good or bad, which might happen to either of them. Presently an odd thought occurred to him, almost without his thinking that he had been putting aside the thought of marriage for a long time on account of Miss MacDaid. Perhaps if she would understand that he was only marrying in order to have children, lots of them, in order to help along their plan, she would not mind; and as he drove off through the rain he decided that he would explain it all to her when the proper moment arrived.

At his bungalow he found Natara Devi already there, waiting for him,

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small and slim, the color o pale cafe au lait, with a body that was like a lovely poem; and for an hour or two the Major forgot India and Miss MacDaid, the Maharajah and the Untouchables. That hour or two belonged to him, not Major Safti, the surgeon or the political leader, but to a man who was young and strong and loved life and all the sensual pleasures he might wring from it in the few short years there were, who knew that for the pain a man suffered from his body it owed him in return a great debt of pleasure. In Natara Devi he lost himself as he was not able to lose himself otherwise even in sleep.

And at daylight she went away again back through the rain in a little red tonga ornamented with bedraggled plumes and tiny bits of looking-glass, to her house near the old wooden palace.

For a long time the Maharajah and his police minister talked in Hindustani of affairs of state, of changes to be made at the jail farm, of plans for settling the wild hill people on state land, because the old gentleman had come long ago to trust the honesty of Raschid Ali Khan and to seek his advice, sometimes so violent and headstrong, but always

intelligent. He knew that Raschid would never understand because

he was Arab and Afghan and Turk that in India one had to go

slowly, sometimes with heartbreaking slowness. But where his Hindu advisers, however enlightened, sometimes retarded progress by the very intricacy of their plans, Raschid always saw a way of accomplishing a reform efficiently and energetically. It was this balance between Muslim impetuosity and Hindu intricacy which the Maharajah had sought all through the fifty years of his reign. It was not a new formula. Akbar, who had ruled India, wisely and well, had discovered it three hundred years earlier.

And presently while Raschid sat, big and powerful and heavy on a frail gilt chair, setting forth his plans for the hill people, the Maharajah came to the point.

"You see," he said, "I am very ill, more ill than anyone knows but the Major and unless things get better I must make plans for when I die."

"No, Your Highness. There's no danger."

"All the same, Raschid. One has to think of these things and there is

no one to succeed me but a boy of fifteen. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Her Highness will be regent. I suppose she'll live for a long time yet. She's luckier than I am. She has always known how to amuse herself. In some ways she is just as young as when I married her. I mean to leave the state to her. She has worked with me for fifty years* She knows better than anyone what I've tried to do and she wants the same thing. But the job is too much for her alone, vigorous as she is. She'll need someone to help her, and so I've arranged for two persons. One is the Dewan..."

His Highness saw the shadow of an expression of distaste cross the honest countenance of the big Muslim. He and the Dewan did not like each other. That much the old gentleman knew and out of that dislike he saw the hope of a fine balance of judgment and energy and method. Her Highness could manage the two of them. He meant to give her sufficient power to cope with them and their dislikes and their quarrels, with the Dewan's intrigues and Raschid's fiery tactless honesty.

". . . the other is you," he continued. "With the three of you, Ranchipur ought to be safe and well governed. Do you think you can manage it?"

Raschid Ali Khan frowned. "I don't care for the methods of the Dewan," he said.

The Maharajah smiled: "Neither does Her Highness. In that you'll have her on your side."

"And Her Highness is very quick-tempered."

"And so are you, Raschid. The Dewan can pour the oil."

"I accept, of course, Your Highness, but I have to think of the difficul- ties."

The old gentleman laughed: "There will be plenty of difficulties. My grandson won't be difficult. I think already that he wants for Ranchipur what Her Highness and I have always wanted. I suppose he'll come into his powers at twenty-one, and before that I want him sent round the world to see what it is like. I want him to have a sense of proportion, to know how unimportant Ranchipur is and how important. And I want him to know all kinds and colors and races of people. Perhaps you would go with him?"

"If Your Highness asks it."

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The Maharajah was silent for a moment, fighting the pain in his legs. Then he said, "Very good. We'll talk of all this later in detail, perhaps tomorrow . . . say at three o'clock, if you're free."

"I shall be free, Your Highness."

Painfully the old gentleman pulled himself up in bed. Then he said, "Come here and take my hand"; and when Raschid All Khan came to the bed and lifted the mosquito netting, the Maharajah took his hand and said, "Thank you, Raschid, for what you've done for Ranchipur." It was not a Hindu gesture. In his simple heart the old man had no thought of caste, or creed or race. He and Raschid were working for the same thing and so Raschid was his brother. To him it did not matter whether Raschid was Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Jew, Buddhist or savage.

In the vast hallway below stairs Raschid Ali Khan found his wife sitting upright in a huge imitation renaissance chair, waiting for him. She was a quiet little woman, shy and always a little startled at being the wife of so important and so fiery a person as her husband. To her he was God, mankind, everything in the world, save her seven children. As they drove home through the pouring rain in the little red tonga he told her that His Highness meant to make him coregent with the Maharani and the Dewan, and when he had finished talking she said, "You will be a great man yet, Raschid." And then they fell to discussing the party and the Eskeths, whom both of them found puzzling, and presently as they turned in at the gate of their own house Mrs. Raschid said, "While I was waiting I saw that Russian maid of Her Highness going through all the rooms downstairs. She didn't know I was there. She was going from room to room as if she were looking for something. What do you suppose it could mean? "

Raschid laughed: "I don't know. With the old lady, it might mean anything."

The Maharajah, left alone, did not sleep. Sitting propped up in bed, he struggled against the pain until presently the morphine left his mind free but weary and a little confused.

Alone now in the vast bedroom overlooking the town, he was not

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alarmed at the prospect of death. In his weariness he rather welcomed it, as a tired man welcomes sleep. And examining his heart and his conscience he found there little with which to reproach himself. He was a, good man and a simple one and in his simplicity he saw himself exactly as he was, without brilliance, without extraordinary gifts, a man who had tried as long as he could remember to do what was best for his people. Lying there, he knew well enough that all his vast wealth, all his absolute power, all his prestige had come to him long ago simply by circumstance and not through any achievement of his own. Without them he might now have been a simple and beneficent old villager, somewhere in the vast dusty stretches of the Deccan.

But given all the wealth and the power and the prestige, he had abused none of them. He had used his wealth to bring schools and libraries and hospitals to Ranchipur, to put an end forever to floods and famines, to erect factories and workshops which would bring his people wealth, and his power he had used to battle the ancient prejudices which were like festering sores on the huge body of India, to drive into exile scoundrelly priests and parasite Brahmins, to release the Untouchables from the filthy square where superstition had imprisoned them. He had never been bigoted or tyrannical or depraved although fate had given him opportunity for all the tricks of tyranny and bigotry and depravity. And all this he had done not as the friend but the enemy of religions, taught long ago by an Englishman to abandon the pettiness, the cor- ruption, the superstitions which were a part of every sect, for a higher faith, to be found not in idols or invisible incredible gods but, like that of the great Akbar, in mankind itself.

And he had had staunch friends and known many fine and noble people. There was Raschid and Miss MacDaid and young Doctor Safti and the Smileys and Mr. Jobnekar, who had all rewarded his faith and trust many times over. And there were those two strange Englishwomen, Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge, always beyond his understanding, so cold, so devoted to duty, so lonely and lost and unwomanly, who had given their whole lives in a strange singleness of purpose to help him and the women of Ranchipur. Although he had never said more than a few words to them in all the twenty-five years they had been in Ranchipur, they somehow understood his plan and shared it with him.

And there was always Her Highness who, he had known from the beginning, was more brilliant and more gifted than himself, but he had known too that she was more passionate and more erratic, and that beneath all her suavity, all her dignity, all her beauty, a part of her had always remained savage and untamed. They had quarreled, again and again, for she was wild and headstrong, but never had they been able to do without each other. For nearly fifty years they had been together, through disappointment and humiliation, through satisfaction and triumph, through the deaths of their sons, one by one, tragically un- setded and corrupted by their education in the West. Always they had worked for the same thing, with a strange united singleness of purpose, himself because long ago John Lawrence had taught him to be a good ruler, she because in her arrogance and pride of race she meant that India should waken and live again as it had lived in the times of Asoka and Akbar. For that she had fought to free the women of Ranchipur from ignorance and superstition. For that, although she was a religious woman, she had put aside her faith to free the Untouchables. He knew that now, as an old woman, she had found a faith greater than the faith in gods and rituals and superstitions.

Now, looking back over fifty years, her whole life and character seemed incredible to him. He saw her again as she had been at thirteen when she came down from the 'hills to marry him, still a child who could speak only Mahratta and could not even read or write, haughty and fierce and shy and savage like a sleek panther cub. There were times still when she was haughty and savage but there was no longer any shyness about her. He loved her now, not for her beauty nor for her greatness, but for her humanity that she was so filled with curiosity and mischief and malice, that she made him chuckle at times when otherwise it would have been impossible for him to smile, that she had re- mained forever young. He was glad that he would die before her because without her there would no longer be any savor in life.

Lying in the dark, listening to the rain which brought fertility and salvation to Ranchipur, face after face returned to him out of the past, without relation or discrimination, more clearly now than they had come to him since his boyhood faces of men who had served him, good and evil, stupid or clever, trustworthy and treacherous; the face

o the Maharani who was the widow of the evil Maharajah he had succeeded, a strange, clever woman, robbed of a power and a wealth she might have used better than himself; the faces of ministers he had had from time to time over fifty years; of his dead sons, so wild and brilliant, slain by the civilization of the West. But clearest of all he saw the face of his old tutor, of John Lawrence who had been sent to him long ago by the British when he was a boy of twelve who could neither read nor write and knew only the tongue of the warlike Mahrattas.

It was a long gende face with very clear blue eyes and large shaggy blond mustaches, a face which had given him confidence when he saw it for the first time as a child, fresh from the mountains where he had been herding cows. Now in his old age he remembered exactly how it felt, how shy and terrified and defiant he had been, his ragged cowherd's clothing replaced by the most magnificent silks and brocades, his mud-walled room exchanged for the splendor of the old wooden palace that now stood deserted on the square opposite the cinema. Beneath his shyness and defiance he had thought, "I am a warrior of warrior people. I must bear myself well before these pale-skinned men from beyond the sea." For then he had never heard of Europe and he only knew vaguely that beyond the borders of India there was a vast sea, so vast as to be beyond the imagination. And he had been sullen too and suspicious, watching the pale men, how they ate, how they spoke, even how they walked, thinking, "I am a King and a Warrior. I must not be shamed by them." And then there were too moments of dull misery when he had wished to be back again in the barren dusty hills watching the cows and goats. It was John Lawrence who had saved him from bitterness and defiance and evil, for he knew now that without Lawrence he might have become one of those evil princes, depraved, extravagant, tyrannical and mad, of whom there were all too many in India. When the face of John Lawrence had appeared among all the other strange faces which surrounded him, the boy of twelve had known at once that he might trust him forever.

It was John Lawrence who had taught him to read and write, not only English and Hindustani but French as well. It was John Lawrence who had opened up for him the whole world, not only of the East but the West. The Englishman, he knew now, had seen the world with

detachment and without passion, not as an Englishman or as anything else, but as a man, pointing out to the Indian boy, whose whole world had begun and ended with the borders of the half-savage Deccan, the virtues and vices alike of governments and vast empires and peoples, so that it became clear and simple for him to recognize what was just and good. It was John Lawrence who taught him that he was simply a man like all other men, to whom fate had brought a vast responsibility. Out of his own intelligence and goodness John Lawrence had planted goodness and humanity in the boy who one day would become the ab- solute ruler of twelve million people. It was John Lawrence who had made him see that religions were compounded largely of superstition, born of a common human impulse out of the fear of mankind and out of its helplessness, and it was John Lawrence who had chosen the great Akbar, a Muslim, as the model for the boy to follow, a ruler who was wise and just and who dreamed, for his people, things that were forever beyond their reach because they were not worthy of them.

He could see his tutor very plainly now, sitting across the big table from him in a room in the old wooden palace or in the garden of the house where Ransome lived now and where John Lawrence had lived then with his plump wife and their eight children. It seemed to him that there were no longer any men like John Lawrence come out of the West. Now they were all like Esketh, greedy and ruthless and evil or like Ransome, warped and barren and tired. Ransome, he knew, was an ill man and his illness was the illness of Europe. Esketh was evil and had another kind of illness, but it too came from the West.

Lawrence, he saw now, had had a dream that was the same as the dream of Miss MacDaid and Mr. Jobnekar and Major Safti and the Smileys a dream which the tutor had passed on to himself. For John Lawrence had loved India. He had gone back to England but, like Miss MacDaid, his heart had stayed in the East and in the end he had returned to die in the house where Ransome now lived. The old gentleman saw it all clearly now. John Lawrence had seen that half-savage boy of twelve as an instrument, and he had molded and sharpened him out of his love for India into a man and a ruler who would cherish the dream and carry it a little way further along the way to fulfillment. For a moment he was tempted to chuckle. The British who were, like Esketh,

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interested in India only for the profits to be got from it, had made a mistake in sending him a tutor like John Lawrence.

Sighing, he reflected that the English no longer sent men like John Lawrence out to India, but perhaps, he thought, there were no longer any men like him. If only there had been more of them, so much bitterness, so many conflicts, so much evil might have been avoided. India, on the day she awakened, might have been England's greatest friend. But that part of the dream was lost now, forever, through the pettiness of mankind.

The morphine stole over him, filling him with sleep. He had only one reason for wanting to live, and that was to see India, united and proud, freed from poverty and superstition and ignorance, a great nation. But for that one would have to live the lifetimes of many men, and he was old and tired and sometimes discouraged.

Half asleep, he put his hand out to ring the bell for Mr. Bauer and then remembered that very likely the Swiss nurse had been asleep for hours and he had not the heart to waken him.

But Mr. Bauer was not asleep. He was not even in his room. A little while later, still dressed at three in the morning, he opened the door softly to see that all was well with the old gentleman and then went away.

"That Russian woman" whom Mrs. Raschid had seen going through the lower rooms of the palace was the daughter of a Moscow professor, and near to the Maharani she occupied an unofficial position as confidante, companion, gossip, guardian of the fabulous jewels and the vast wardrobe, interpreter and bargainer. Penniless and adrift and discouraged, she had been found by the Maharani a little while after the Revolution in the Kurhaus Park in Carlsbad. It was the curiosity and humanity of the old lady which brought them together. Her Highness wanted to have an intimate personal account of what the Revolution had been like and how it was to live under Soviet rule. So for a magnificent dinner and a bottle of champagne Maria Lishinskaia had given her an account, somewhat superficial because that was Maria's nature, and very

bitter because she had lost everything in the debacle father, fiance,

home and money. But the bitterness did not last. Long before the end of the dinner Maria was aware of her opportunity, and the bitterness

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became transmuted into charm and gayety which, Maria being a Russian, was, strangely enough, genuine.

It was her gayety that made the Maharani take a liking to herher gayety and her philosophy of indifference (if she hadn't a meal today, one would turn up tomorrow and it always did), her independence and her cynical humor. Also she had understanding. When it was necessary, for show, she would address Her Highness in the most groveling fashion, creating the illusion of abjectness; but the moment they were alone she became simply a friend, full of humor and a sense of the spectacle of life, with a liking for intrigue and a mocking cynicism. Here, Her Highness, discovered at last, was a European whom she could understand.

Maria Lishinskaia wasn't just one or two things like most Europeans, clean cut and blunt. She was not simply Ambition, or Lust, or Sentimentality, or Fidelity, or even just a combination of two or three of these things. She was a mixture of all of them, and a great deal more thrown in, and so she was changeable and contradictory and amused Her Highness. She could be savage one moment and overcivilized the next, straightforward at times and incredibly devious at others, now trustworthy, now completely false, now cynically humorous, now sentimentally and romantically melancholy, for she was an Asiatic at heart and not a European at all; and so Her Highness understood her and found the companion she had been seeking for thirty years, to accompany her to theaters and casinos and night clubs when she was in the West and share her magnificent isolation when she lived in the huge palace in Ranchipur. When she was in the East she had someone with whom she might gossip in the royal bedroom, someone who understood alike the idiosyncrasies of Indians and Europeans. In the West she had someone who would explain to her why Europeans sometimes behaved as they did, and someone to bargain for her with hotels and jewelers and dressmakers. Maria Lishinskaia understood the Oriental pleasure that was to be had in bargaining and she went into the game with zest. Al- though she knew that the Maharani could have bought the best palace hotels in which she spent a few weeks now and then and not have missed the money, she knew too that it gave Her Highness far more pleasure to bargain for rooms or discover an error in the bill. In a

jeweler's shop in the Place Vendome the Maharani would plan the campaign and Maria Lishinskaia would carry it out, occasionally contributing brilliant touches of her own, so that the jeweler confronted by the two of them Maria Lishinskaia prompted by Her Highnesswould find himself, before he quite understood what had happened, selling his finest jewels to one of the richest women in the world at bargain prices. And Maria had too that incredible smoldering vitality of the East. Like the Maharani she could stay up gambling in the casino until daylight and be out shopping at noon without the slightest sign of dullness or fatigue.

And sometimes it was convenient for the old lady to have Maria Lishinskaia at hand when her nerves were on edge and she felt the need of torturing someone.

When the Maharani returned to her own rooms Maria Lishinskaia was lying on the chaise longue reading a novel by Mauriac. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-five or six, neither plain nor handsome but with a fine voluptuous figure and greenish eyes that slanted a little in Tartar fashion. There were moments when the Maharani thought she looked very like Raschid Ali Khan and that the likeness was not only one of physique but of indefatigable vitality. The Maharani said, "Your ancestors must have gone down one side of the Himalayas into Russia when Raschid's came down the other side into India." But there the likeness ended, for Maria Lishinskaia had none of Raschid's faith or purpose in life. She believed in nothing. She was an opportunist without faith, without any longer even a country.

As the Maharani came in the Russian woman put down her book, stood up, yawned and said, "Well?"

"It was terrible... terrible," said Her Highness in French.

"And the Eskeths?"

"Terrible... terrible."

The Untouchable maids began undressing the Maharani, massaging her face, rubbing oil into her fine black hair. The old lady opened a small gold box and began chewing betel nuts.

Maria Lishinskaia helped her to take off the heavy emeralds, and one by one laid them into their boxes.

"Comment, terrible?" she asked.

"He Is a big money king and a bully and a brute and she is ... one of those fashionable English sluts. She disappeared with Ransome. She was gone most of the evening. They said they were going to look at the rooms downstairs."

"Yes?" said Maria encouragingly. "What happened?"

"What do you suppose?" asked the Maharani. "But I never heard it called looking at rooms before."

"I had an idea Mr. Ransome didn't care about women," said Maria.

"What do you mean by that?" And the Maharani looked at her sharply. She was fond of Ransome and Maria Lishinskaia was jealous of him as she was jealous of everyone to whom Her Highness showed favor.

"Oh, nothing... anything." And then aware that the feeler she had put out was received with displeasure, she became noncommittal. It was a kind of game that went on between them when they gossiped.

"He is tired," said the Maharani.

"That's what I meant," said Maria brightly. "He's tried everything."

"Perhaps."

The old lady was aware shrewdly that the bit of gossip had excited Maria and that the mind of the Russian woman, stimulated, was now rushing this way and that, speculating, imagining things, gloating.

"Do you like Ransome?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Maria. "I scarcely know him. He's good-looking ... in a special kind of way. Does Your Highness know it happened?"

"How can I know? You can only %now about those things when you are under the bed."

"But couldn't you tell when they came back?"

"Not with the English. You can't even tell the moment afterward any more than you can tell if a man has had a glass of water. Why don't you go down and see for yourself? If it happened, it was in one of the rooms downstairs."

"Oh, no, I couldn't do that!"

But Her Highness knew that very likely after she herself was in bed Maria Lishinskaia would go from room to room downstairs trying to find out. Suddenly the old lady saw that Maria was like the other two, like Lady Esketh and Ransome. Weary, faithless, bored, sceptical, she

had come, like them, to the last resort the body. When everything else failed there was always lust and sensuality. She thought, "What will she do if Mr. Bauer should go away?"

Maria was asking, "Does Your Highness know when we shall be leaving for Carlsbad?"

The old lady knew that very likely they would be leaving at the end of the week, but she had no desire to give Maria Lishinskaia the pleasure of knowing it. The shadow of the Eskeths still hung over her, creating a curious sense of irritation, so she said, "It depends on the rains. If they keep on like this we shall be able to leave soon. His Highness won't leave until he knows the rains have settled in for good."

Maria was thinking, "Once I can get Harry to Europe I can get him to marry me. Then he won't be able to get away, and our future will be safe with Their Highnesses. They'll fix us for life." For there were moments when she grew weary of her own rootlessness and the uncertainty of her future. Aloud she said, "I suppose Your Highness will want to sleep early tonight?"

"I'm not tired," said the Maharani; and at the same time she was thinking, "This must be one of Bauer's nights." And the temptation came to her to keep Maria Lishinskaia by her side for a time, restless and full of desire, to read to her.

"You might read to me for a little while." And she saw the disappointment in Maria's face and her heart softened a little. She thought, "I'll ask her to read and then after a little while pretend I'm sleepy and let her of!." So she said, "You might read out of that French book that classic one."

"Les Liaisons Dangereuses?"

"Yes, that's it. I'm always interested in knowing how the French go about such things. They're very like the Chinese, the French. I've been thinking about it. They've got a form and an attitude for everything."

So when the Maharani was in bed with all her creams and oils well applied, Maria Lishinskaia sat down beside her and began to read out of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" against the faint dull roar of the rain. She read on and on, passage after passage analyzing love and desire, describing intrigues and jealousies and reconciliations, all written with a minute and passionate skill, each word,, an aphrodisiac, each comma

a stimulant to desire. And beneath her long eyelashes the Maharani watched with satisfaction and entertainment. She observed that Maria Lishinskaia began presently to breathe with difficulty. She blundered over passages as if the words danced before her eyes. Little beads of sweat came out on the wide olive-skinned forehead. And she knew that Maria scarcely knew the sense of what she was reading. It was all confused with her passion for the white athlete's body of Mr. Bauer. He was good-looking, thought the Maharani, and had a beautiful body, but he was stupid. Scarcely listening to the words which were torturing Maria, she wondered how it was possible to have so stupid and servile a man for a lover, no matter how beautiful he was. And she speculated for a time upon the horrors of being a slave to one's body, so that you suffered as Maria Lishinskaia was now suffering from her desire for the Swiss swimming instructor.

Scarcely listening to the words which were torturing Maria Lishinskaia, she watched her with a curious detachment and satisfaction. There were moments when out of the bitterness of her life, out of the exasperations and the humiliations and the bafflement, there came a need of cruelty to quiet her stormy soul. Once long ago such a queen as herself could have sent for a slave or a criminal and inflicted pain upon him until her exasperated nerves were appeased, but that no longer was possible, and so she had to think of intricate and devious ways. She knew that if she had not thus tortured Maria $he herself could not have slept. Presently, after Maria had been reading for an hour or more, she felt sleep stealing over her, and turning on her pillow, she said, "That will be enough, Maria. There's just one thing more."

"Yes, Your Highness." Her voice was weak now and exhausted and as she spoke she passed a handkerchief over her face.

"Go downstairs and see if you can find the room, and discover if it really happened."

"Yes, Your Highness."

"And come back and tell me. If I'm asleep, don't trouble to waken me."

"Yes, Your Highness."

The Russian woman looked pale and limp like a cloth which has been dampened and then wrung dry.

With her eyes half-closed, the Maharani watched her leave the room. On the poor lost Maria Lishinskaia she had taken a little, a tiny fragment of the vengeance which her pride and spirit demanded of Europe for the humiliations she had suffered for nearly half a century.

Dizzy and nearly fainting, Maria Lishinskaia stumbled down the stairs and along the corridor, visiting room after room without finding anything in disarray. She kept saying to herself, "It will be the next room and then I can go to Harry. Oh, God, make it the next so that I may go to him!"

And presently, when she had visited room after room in vain, she grew cold with terror at the thought that if she did not return soon he might grow tired of waiting and go back again to his own room next to the Maharajah, where she dared not follow him. "Oh God, keep him there!" she kept saying aloud, "God-damn all these empty useless rooms. Oh God, keep him there till I can go to him." And at last she came to the room. She did not remain long, for no more than a glance was necessary the divan, rumpled and in disorder, the panther skin kicked aside, the burnt cigarette ends crushed out in haste on the floor. She saw them all in one swift glance. She thought, "The bitch! the bastard! To make me all this trouble! They didn't even trouble to put the room in order."

Running, she went back through all the rooms and along the interminable corridor past Mrs. Raschid, without even seeing her, until she reached the apartments of the Maharani. When she safely pushed open the door of the bedroom she heard the old lady breathing easily and closed it again in the belief that she was asleep. From behind her dark lashes the Maharani watched her, and when the door closed she fell asleep, her spirit at peace.

Mr. Bauer was still waiting, angry and impatient and ill-tempered, but, thank God, still waiting. Nevertheless she was unaware of his anger, and when peace came to her again she forgot herself so far as to begin to nag him again about marriage. Lying by his side, she told him that she would kill herself if he did not make her his wife, but Mr. Bauer,

also at peace now and no longer angry but only filled with a desire for sleep, yawned and was unmoved by her threats.

He had no intention o ever marrying her because the last thing he wanted as a wife was an hysterical Russian woman who was always threatening suicide and complaining because she hadn't enough of him. He had other plans. When he returned to Europe this year he meant to marry Lina Storrel. She was the proper kind, solid and reliable and economical. And while he was in Europe he'd start their first child and then come back to India with His Highness. One more year and he'd have enough money to buy the vineyard above Montreux. Now that he was at peace again he felt full of contempt for Maria Lishinskaia. Why couldn't she understand that this was good now and then for the health of both of them, especially in a hot country like this? Why did she keep trying to make it into something else romance, marriage, etc.?

Mr. Bauer knew what he wanted. He was a peasant and primitive. There was nothing ill about him, very little indeed that was civilized.

While he dressed, Maria Lishinskaia kept sobbing and saying she would throw herself out of the window, but he took no notice of her and only went on stolidly putting on his clothes, for he knew well enough that she would do nothing at all that would cause a scandal and make her lose the soft place into which luck had landed her. And he knew too that she would always be there, waiting for him whenever he sent word.

Driving away from the palace, slowly, along the winding avenue, Ransome kept losing his way continually in the blinding rain. The lights of the old Buick were of no use save when now and then they revealed directly in front of him the trunk of a tree or a withered bed of flowers beaten flat by the downpour. By the bridge he narrowly escaped driving into the little lake with the bottom of concrete. It was filling now slowly with water, and the tiny pleasure boats, canopied and gilded, and ornamented with fretwork, no longer tilted on their sides but were beginning to stir and float and come to life. The rain was like a thick wall against which he could feel the car pressing its way.

It was slow going and until he got the feel of the thing he had no time to think of anything save whether in the next moment he would

hit something, or slip into the lake. It was like driving a motor again at the front without lights. Then, slowly, as his lean hands got the "feel" of the thing, he became aware of a profound feeling of depression, the feeling that came when he had dissipated all his strength and gone without sleep for days at a time. It was a curious lost feeling, heavy with a sense of futility and despair; not only was his body weary but his spirit as well.

He had no feeling of shame save at his own foolishness in believing that by embracing Edwina for a few short moments he, and she with him for that matter, might recapture something of the feelings they had known long ago. He knew now that such raptures were forever beyond recapture because both of them were too old and too experienced and neither of them had anything left of fire or recklessness. It was not recklessness when you risked nothing, when what you did made no difference to anyone, not even to yourself. The only excitement they had won from the experience lay in those few precious moments of almost animal excitement, filled with anticipation. The rest was flat and dull and routine. He could not even find satisfaction in the knowledge that he had fed a little his hatred for Esketh by taking Esketh's wife. There was no satisfaction in it unless Esketh discovered it, and he was certain that Edwina would see to "it that he never did. Pushing the idea still further he felt , doubtful suddenly whether Esketh would care, because the quick cold viciousness of her embrace and ease and shamelessness of her whole behavior argued a hundred such casual affairs, "love" snatched here and there in haste in corners, on yachts and beaches, in motors. He had known from the moment she came into the room, into the glare of the bee-haunted chandelier that she was "dead" but he had never believed her to be as dead as that. Esketh must have found her out long before now.

Alone, driving through the rain, he felt a sense of disgust and repulsion, as if Edwina had been more guilty than himself of what had been a trivial and callous folly, but he thought, "That's an illusion. That's the old double standard coming up again." But he was unable to argue himself out of the feeling, for his instinct was more true and more profound than any argument he might bring against it. What had happened was worse in her than in himself. It should not have been so and

yet it was, because he knew that somehow sooner or later, if it were not akeady true, she was certain to be the victim of her own viciousness. There was something terrifying in the glance he had had for a moment of that abyss. He saw now that in what they had done there was nothing of sentiment, nothing perhaps more than curiosity, perhaps nothing but an animal gesture, like the accouflement of two fie dogs, but without its realistic necessity.

Out of the adventure the figure of the Maharani appeared to him now more clearly than that of Edwina. Thinking of her it seemed to him that she always knew everything about everyone, not merely the gossip and the intrigue which came to her naturally in a million different underground ways, but hidden things in the very characters and thoughts of people. There was the Maharani he knew across the poker table and the Maharani who was a great queen, doing her duty magnificently; these two he understood, but beyond them there was someone whom he never saw at all, at once complex and secret, savage and overcivilized, full of astounding intuition. There were times when he had seen her change before his eyes, while he was talking to her, from a woman who was everything that was European and understandable, into a savage hill princess, unfathomable and capable of the utmost cruelty and lack of scruple. At such times she both fascinated and alarmed him, and he was afraid of her now, for what reason he did not quite know. She alone knew what had happened belowstairs. At this very moment she was probably discussing it with that tiresome, arrogant Russian woman. It did not matter to him who discovered it, and he knew that very likely it mattered even less to Edwina, and yet the thought of the Maharani's knowledge made him uneasy, with a dull sense of dread and shame. It was a puerile, silly feeling, like that of a child fearful and shamed at having been caught in a nasty act.

Again he thought, "Perhaps I am ill. Perhaps I ask too much of every experience, too much of every person... more than anyone is able to give."

From the sound of the river he knew that he' was near the bridge, and in a moment the lights of the old Buick suddenly revealed the stubby figure of Queen Victoria, still standing staunchly on her pedestal, her umbrella and reticule grasped firmly in her chubby iron hands, solid, im-

perturbable in the midst of the wild storm. Then he passed Mr. Bannerjee's house and caught a glimpse of a light in Raschid's house and at last came to the gateway of his own garden, thinking how dreary it was to come home alone to this damp empty Georgian mausoleum. If his marriage had been a success he wouldn't be coming home now to an empty house in Ranchipur; indeed he would not be coming back to a house in Ranchipur at all, but to that great turreted castle of his grand- mother in Grand River.

He drove the old car under the forte cochere^ and then for the first time he noticed that, although he had given stern orders to John the Baptist about keeping the house dark on account of mosquitoes, there was a light in his bedroom, and instead of going in by the door that led from the carriage drive he walked in the dark along the verandah until he reached the window of his own room.

There in his own easy chair he saw the figure of a woman, wearing a cheap raincoat and soaked and shapeless hat. She was sitting with her back to the window, for having heard the sound of the motor she had put down the "Tatler" which she had been reading and was watching the door.

At the old summer palace Lord and Lady Esketh got down from the purple Rolls-Royce and in silence climbed the red carpet which covered the marble stairs. At the top they separated to go to their own rooms, and casually Lady Esketh turned and said, "Good night," adding, "Are you all right? You're not feeling ill?"

He answered, "It's all right. There's nothing the matter with me but this damned heat and these damned Indians. I want to get out of here tomorrow. Bombay won't be any worse than this. At least it'll be a little more like Europe. This is like living in a madhouse."

"Whenever you like," she said. "I've had enough of India. I never want to see it again."

It was true that she had had enough of India* While she was undressing she thought about it indolently, allowing her mind to wander where it would, and presently she came to the conclusion that she might just as well never have come out at all. The only memories she would take back with her were unpleasant ones of heat and dust and smells, of tire-

some official dinners, of boring civil servants and their more boring wives and plain daughters. There must be, she thought, an India which could arouse even her languid interests, but where it was she did not know. There must be something in India to have held an intelligent restless man like Tom Ransome for nearly five years. Now and then, for a moment, she had been dimly aware of such an India, but whenever she attempted to approach it, it seemed to withdraw from her. When she talked with Indians something which she had avoided whenever possible because of the effort it was always with Indians who had been at Oxford, who seemed to hide from her everything that was Indian; they became simply European and talked about cricket and night clubs and horses, as European as any men she might have met at dinner in London. And then it occurred to her for the first time in her life that not only India but almost everything in life had always been hidden from her. It was as if she had always been protected, sheltered and hedged round by luxury, by convention, by manners, by the very privilege which went with being Edwina Esketh, and before that Edwina Doncaster. In spite of having been for half her life without a penny she had been robbed by her very position of a knowledge of what poverty was like, because there were always people to give her credit and do things for her, even to providing her with money which they never expected to be paid back.

For a moment she had an envy of the dullness of the lives of all those little people who carried on the work of governing India, envy even of the lives of the families of little clerks in suburbs everywhere in the world. Their lives could scarcely be duller than heir own, but it was in any case a different dullness. And she suddenly experienced an extraordinary feeling of loneliness, as if she were a sort of spirit living in the world but without any contact with it, a shadow without substance or reality. The only real thing, she suddenly saw, was her body and the pleasure she found in adorning it, in keeping it young, in using it to make love.

Thinking of making love, she began to think about Tom Ransome again, admiring him because long ago in the very midst of it he had turned his back on the life to which he had been born and made an effort to find something else. What he had found or whether he had

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found anything at all she did not know, but at least he had tried and that was something. It was too late now for her to make an attempt to escape, even if the desire persisted until morning. She had no illusions about herself; she would rather go on putting up with Esketh than make the effort it required to escape. And then she remembered something Tom had said to her in the room belowstairs, something in American slang which she had not at first understood, so that it had been necessary for him to explain it to her,

"My God!" he observed, "but you're cold turkey."

When she had gotten into her peignoir she gave all the bracelets to her maid and said, "Good night, Parker. That's all."

"Me lady looks tired."

"I am a bit. It's the heat and the dampness. Ill be glad to go to Cannes."

Then when Parker had gone, suddenly and for no reason at all, she was overcome by a sense of loneliness and terror. She was frightened of India, of its vastness, its violence, of the heat and the dust and the millions of people and animals, of the jackals arid the vultures and the hostility which she felt about her, a hostility shared by the animals, the people, the climate, by nature itself. She was terrified by the sound of the incredible rain beating upon the roof of the old palace and pouring in torrents from the flooded eaves. What if anything happened to prevent her escape? What if she had to stay on here forever in this vicious abominable country? For a moment it seemed to her that her nerves could not stand it any longer. She wanted to scream, to cry out, to throw herself on the floor. She wanted to run out of the palace and go to Bombay now, tonight, to a city which would be a little more like Europe, a weary and boring Europe, but at least unlike this malevolent India which terrified her.

Then she set her jaw and pulled herself together, thinking, "I must be breaking up. I've never been like that. It must be the heat." And going over to her traveling case, she opened it and took out stuff to make her sleep. When she had taken twice the ordinary dose and was in bed with the mosquito netting drawn about her, she felt more calm, and presently the medicine made her feel drowsy and voluptuous and she no longer wanted to go away the next day. She wanted to stay at least until the end of the week as they had planned so that she might

go to have tea on Thursday with Tom. Lying back in the bed she gave herself up voluptuously to thinking of him.

She liked his lean hardness and his vigorous dark hair and the lean ridges at the back of his neck. She liked his straight nose and his full lips and she thought, "He's practically unique. He has intelligence and a fine physique as well. Why is it that most athletes are so stupid and most intelligent men have pot-bellies?" But when she tried to think o what Tom was like inside, she did not know; she had not the faintest idea. The Tom Ransome she had seen tonight was simply the Tom she had known long ago in London. When they talked at all, they had talked of the old days and what had become of the people they knew then. If he was as pleasant, as gentle, as lovable as he seemed, then it might be worth while going on with the affair, for presently she might discover in him the thing which in spite of everything, she thought, must exist, although she had never found it nor even come upon its tracks. "Perhaps it's my fault," she thought. "Maybe I've never found it because I've never been able to get beneath the surface."

She did not think, "Perhaps I could be happy with Tom," because the question of happiness or unhappiness had not occurred to her for a great many years in any sense save a physical one. She did not deceive herself. If happiness ever existed for her, it was at such moments as she had experienced tonight when she had gone to the palace expecting one more dreadful official dinner and then found Tom Ransome and the quick hurried adventure in the little room belowstairs. In a way the only excitement which any longer existed for her lay in such adventures, in the unexpectedness of finding an attractive man, in the perverse pleasure she found again and again in betraying Esketh. Coldly, she thought, "I am a promiscuous, abandoned bitch! So what! There isn't anything I can do about it."

Rarely after such an adventure did she want to see the man again and when she saw him again she managed to freeze at once the slightest attempt at continuing the intimacy. It was luck if the man were attractive enough to give her any desire to continue. Now she wanted to see Tom again, not merely for the pleasure it gave her or because he was a good lover, but because she had been left with a sense of incompleteness. She did not know how he felt about her. Perhaps at this very moment

he was thinking of her with disgust, as a slut; because he was, she knew, complex and given to attacks of virtue and remorse, and that, she found, was attractive. She even experienced a faint sense of shame, which astounded her, and a desire to see him again in order to justify herself in some way, or at least to charm him out of the idea.

And then she was aware that the door leading to Esketh's apartment had been opened and the light was shining in, and Esketh himself came in wearing the dressing gown she hated. She had given it to him at Christmas four years before, thinking that it would please him, and she had succeeded only too well. It had been cleaned countless times and was worn and shabby, but he would not be separated from it. Whenever she suggested chucking it away he always told her that it brought him luck. It was covered with a design of horses horses racing, horses clearing hedges and ditches, horses rearing, horses in full stride at the finishing post.

Without speaking he came over to the bed and, lifting the mosquito netting, sat on the end of it. She meant to say, "Go away, please go away just tonight," but in the next moment she saw that he did not mean to stay. He looked ill and sullen. At the corners of his heavy jaw there were little knots of hard muscle which always came there when he meant to make a scene.

He said, "Edwina, who is this fellow Ransome?"

"You know him perfectly well. He's Nolham's brother. You've even met him yourself, years ago."

It never occurred to her that he might suspect the whole truth for he was always making scenes like this, nearly always about men like Ransome who gave him a sense of inferiority; he did not mind her friendship with sporting men. It was that eternal, inverted snobbery of his, that hatred of anyone born with the things he had never achieved and would never be able to achieve. "That," she thought, "is how the caste system works at home."

"You seem very friendly with him."

"I used to know him very well. We were friends in London just after the War. I hadn't seen him for nearly fifteen years."

He set his jaw a little harder: "Where has he been since then?"

"I don't know. Wandering about the world. He's living here now.*'

"By choice?"

"By desire."

"He must be a damned fool."

"I don't think so. He's been trying to straighten himself out."

"What's the matter with him? What has he got to straighten out?"

"It's not a very interesting story. You'd find it boring."

He took out a cigar and lighted it. She wanted to say, "Please don't smoke in here"; but again she thought. "If I let him do as he pleases he'll go away that much sooner." She was suddenly feeling very sleepy.

"One of those damned radicals, I suppose."

"You might call it that."

"Well, he ought to be at home working to help out his government Why do you always pick out asses like that?"

She laughed and the laugh was a secret one, against his stupidity. She hadn't any particular taste for radicals and intellectuals or anything else. She wasn't attracted to men by their ideas and their brains. It was so much simpler than that. "It's comic," she thought, "how a husband is always the last to understand the truth."

She was tired, not physically, but in the spirit, because she had been through these scenes so many times. She knew all the questions and answers, and at this sort of thing she was much the quicker-witted of the two.

He went on bitterly and abusively and having heard it all so many times before she did not trouble to listen but continued with her own thoughts: "What if I took up with an Indian? That would fix him"; and while he talked she began thinking about the Indians she had met, and the one she remembered most Nearly was that Major Somebody-or- other who Ransome told her was the chief surgeon in Ranchipur. She began to see him, quite clearly, with his big shoulders and fair skin and blue eyes. Yes, that might be fun. She began to wonder what making love with an Indian would be like, and presently she noticed Esketh again and saw that his big face had become lobster-colored and that his eyes seemed to be covered by a film. For a moment she thought that perhaps he had been drinking more than usual but almost at once she realized that he never looked like this when he was drunk. At moments he seemed to be making a great effort to speak. Then she was aware of

the loathed dressing-gown again, and in her boredom it seemed to her that the horses had come to life. They were all in dizzy motion, jumping, striding, rearing, so that the sight of them put her teeth on edge.

Because it did no good she never lost her temper and never answered back during the scenes of jealousy and now it was not Esketh who made her angry but the dressing-gown and the awful rearing and prancing horses. She heard herself saying, "Why do you always pick on men like Tom Ransome? Is it because you hate all gentlemen? Because you know they're better than you?"

For a moment he stared at her, his heavy mouth half -open, so astounded that he seemed unable to find words with which to speak. Then he asked, "What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing in particular." .

"Well, don't get any silly ideas. I'm proud of being Albert Simpson. Fm proud of having made my way. I'm proud of everything I've built up. It's more than any of your sickly down-at-the-heel gentlemen could do.' 5

And again she astonished him by saying, "Yes, that's quite true if that's what you value most." And before he could speak she said, "What is it you want of me, Albert? If you don't like men to speak to your wife then you should have married a plain respectable middle-class woman and not me. Sometimes I think you didn't marry me for any reason save that I was Edwina Doncaster and what I am. You wanted to show people that you could take what you wanted from the world, away from anyone. I was a kind of prize who had had a lot of cheap publicity in the illustrated weeklies and you wanted to show me oflf. You didn't really want me* We've never had the least understanding or sympathy. You just wanted the idea of me. A gentleman by the time you married me wouldn't have wanted me at any price."

For a time he regarded the end of his cigar without speaking. She knew what he was doing. He was pulling himself together, counting ten before he spoke, so that he would say nothing which he need ever take back. He was being a shrewd business man. She had caught him at it now and then when he was talking to other business men. But in truth it was that and much more too, for suddenly in his tired muddled brain he saw that for the first time since he had married her he had a

chance to learn the truth, and he was afraid. For a moment he hesitated, wondering whether it was not better to continue in ignorance and doubt, and then like a man hesitating to dive into icy water he set his teeth and plunged. "Why did you marry me?" he asked.

"Because my father and I were stony and had a lot of debts. Because you offered me a big setdement, because I thought it would be nice to be colossally rich, and because I really didn't much care who I married." For a moment she was silent, thinking, and then she added, "I think it was the settlement that did it. That meant that whatever happened I'd always be independent."

He looked at her for a moment, understanding for the first time the fathomless hardness of the woman he had married. Then silently he rose and crushed out the end of his half-smoked cigar on the marble top of the old-fashioned Victorian dressing table. It was a concentrated brutal gesture and she thought, "That is what he would like to do to me but he's afraid. He's not the great bullying Lord Esketh now. He's poor, bumptious, awkward Albert Simpson scared of the gentry."

He started to speak and then merely said, "Good night," and went out of the room, closing the door behind him, leaving her aware that she had hurt him who she thought could not be hurt. She had found the vulnerable spot in the great Lord Esketh, born plain Albert Simpson, and she was not sorry. It avenged her for many things, for his brutality and arrogance, for his vulgarity and lack of all sensibility, for his brutal cold-blooded love-making, taking her as if she were a glass of brandy to be downed quickly without finesse or technique or understanding. Perhaps now he would leave her in peace forever. Anyway with f the settlement she would always have enough money.

The effect of the sleeping medicine had worn off now and she switched on the light and tried for a time to read a book called, India Distraught, which the jacket said explained everything about India, but which seemed to her to explain nothing at all and bored her so profoundly that she found herself reading whole pages without having the slightest idea of what she was reading, and through the printed words she kept seeing the big figure of the Indian surgeon with his blue eyes and perfect white teeth, a wholly beautiful and attractive man. That would fix Albert!

At last, giving it up, she rose and took some more sleeping medicine

and a final cigarette, and as she regained the bed there was a knock on the door and she called out, "Who is it?"

A voice answered, "It's Bates, me lady."

"Come in."

In the heat the damp skin of the valet looked whiter than ever. He came in, respectful and rather cadaverous. The climate was getting him too. "What is it? " she asked.

"Sorry to disturb Your Ladyship, but I think there's something wrong with His Lordship. He's not well."

"What is it, Bates?"

"I've no idea, me lady, but he most certainly has a fever. I wanted to take his temperature but he wouldn't hear of it. You know how he is? Hell never admit it when he's feeling seedy."

"What about a doctor?"

"He wouldn't hear of that, either. He said there wouldn't be any good doctors among these Indians." The ghost of a smile appeared on Bates' face and he added, "He used much stronger language than that, but that was what he meant."

That was what she disliked about Bates. It was as if the grin said, "You and I understand the old bastard," and that wasn't playing the game. They both might hate Esketh, but so long as they were with him neither of them should give any sign of it to the other.

For a moment she was silent, thinking of many things. Then she said, "Thank you, Bates. If he's not better in the morning I'll find a doctor. I can persuade him, I think."

"Thank you, me lady. Good night."

"Good night, Bates."

When he was gone, thinking about Bates, she decided that he was a bad servant, not because he was inefficient or stupid but because he was less interested in the welfare of those he served than his own. "Secredy," she thought, "he is probably a communist. He is the kind of servant who is involved in detective mysteries and lodging-house murders." He gave a professional impression of utter discretion but her instinct told her that she could not trust him for a moment. The interview left her with a curious sense of distaste as if somehow Bates had managed to make her his accomplice. He had betrayed himself in no way whatever, neither by

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glance nor word, nor even by the intonation of his voice, but she

that he was thinking of Esketh's death and finding pleasure in the

thought and that he knew she too had been thinking of it.

She did not want him to die; she did not wish it, yet she could not keep herself from thinking how much simpler life would be with him dead and how pleasant the freedom would be with all the money which he would certainly leave to her in addition to the settlement, no matter what she said to him or how she treated him.

Presently she put out the light again but even then she did not sleep for a long time. The sound of the flooding rain and the buzzing of the insects which blackened the surface of the white nettings annoyed her and for a moment, while she lay between sleep and wakefulness, the hysterical terror of India seized her a second time. And then again just as she was falling asleep she had a strange dream in which she was searching desperately for something, but what it was she did not know. She was aware of a terrible anxiety and of wandering through great dusty fields and ill-smelling streets and at last through a jungle in which she seemed to hear the plants, the trees, the ferns, the vines, growing all about her, closing her in. And then, just as she knew that she would find what she was searching for beyond the next hill, she wakened screaming.

For a moment while Ransome stood on the verandah looking in through the window a whole procession of women went through his mind, women of every sort and description out of a despairing and reckless past when indiscriminately he had made love here and there, as the occasion arose, throughout half the Orient. Which one, he asked himself, had come all the way to Ranchipur now in the midst of the monsoon to run him to earth? Which one had cared enough? Which one had thought him worth it? Uneasily he remembered the planter's wife in Malaya who had grown hysterical when he left, the Russian tart in Shanghai who had said she would never abandon him, the English girl in Colombo who might have heard that he had stopped wandering at last and settled in Ranchipur. It might be any of them or any of a half- dozen others, perhaps even one of those whom he could no longer remember without effort, and he could not think what he would do with any one of them in a tight little world like that of Ranchipur, save to

marry her, a thing which he had no intention of doing. It all happened

in the space of a second the speculation, the rush of memories, even

the certainty that out of the lot he would have liked seeing the Russian woman again but not here, not in Ranchipur.

Then he stepped through the doorway and at the sound of his foot- steps the woman turned and he saw with sudden relief that it was only Fern Simon,

She was dripping wet. The old tennis dress she wore clung to her tightly, and for the first time he was aware that Fern not only had a pretty face but the loveliest of bodies. She looked at him with a shamed smile and said, "Hello," very casually, like a woman of the world, as if she had come to meet him at a rendezvous, but her voice was a little unsteady like that of an actress uncertain of her role who is in terror of forgetting her lines.

"Hello," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"I've run away from home. I'm never going back."

He grinned, thinking, "Well, this is a nice mess," and then said, "You can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't take the responsibility." And then he saw that the unsteadiness of her voice and the uncertainty of her manner came from the fact that in spite of the damp heat she was shivering and trying to keep her teeth from chattering. The old terror of fever came over him, not for himself but for her.

"You're going straight home," he said. "I'll take you back right off."

But she was unmoved. She even planted her feet more firmly, a litde apart, as if she meant to resist him physically in case the necessity arose. Her defiance and determination amused him and for a second it occurred to him that perhaps she was not such a silly fool as he thought. Looking at her, he knew that if he attempted to force her to leave in her present mood she might fling herself on the floor and scream and cry like a child, and that would never do.

"You'd better put on some dry clothes first," he said. "You can't stay any longer like that. You're shivering."

"What will I put on?"

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"It'll have to be something of mine. I haven't any women's clothes here."

She offered no objection, for now her shyness was melting away a little and she felt herself well into the role of Blythe Summerfield, the Pearl of the Orient. Changing her clothes would give her a little more time to gain control of herself; and it was really a brilliant idea for a

scenario that she should put on the clothes of the man she loved and

appear in the next sequence dressed as a boy. She waited while Ransome brought a towel and a pair of shorts and a shirt.

"Now/' he said, as if he were talking to a child, "go Into the bathroom and dry yourself thoroughly rub hard and put these on and then I'll take you home." He looked at her closely: "You've never had malaria, have you? You haven't a fever now?"

"No... I don't know why I'm shivering. I'm not really cold." And he thought, "Good Lord, a child like that can't be trembling for any other reason."

While she was gone he went and fetched a bottle of brandy and two glasses and hung up the old raincoat and the battered hat she had left behind. And all the time he was chuckling deep inside himself at the spectacle of the Roue and the Virgin and feeling a sudden perverse desire to have Edwina know what was happening. It would amuse her; and she would see how funny it was. And then he remembered John the Baptist and the sense of mirth went out of him. If John the Baptist knew she was here he would certainly not keep the news to himself, and his- gossipy flute-playing friends would tell it in turn to their friends and sooner or later everyone in Ranchipur would come to hear of it.

Putting down the bottle and glasses he went out on to the verandah and looked toward the garden house where John the Baptist slept. In the darkness there was no sign of life, and he thought, "He sleeps like an animal. He doesn't know anything about it." For a moment he considered crossing the garden in the rain to make certain, but he knew that he could not run those few feet and back without becoming soaked and so he abandoned the idea and went back into the house, thinking, "To hell with it!"

When she came out of the bathroom she was no longer shivering. The tennis shirt was too large for her but the shorts, because he was slim

about the waist, fitted her perf ectly, and she had gained from the costume a kind of smartness, a perkiness which she had not had in her own dowdy clothes. She was no longer the rather frumpy daughter of a missionary in a little middle-class community. She had, he saw, possibilities; and for a moment, in his enthusiasm, he thought, "Almost limitless ones." Then drawing back, he said to himself, "Steady now... steady."

Aloud he said, "Here take these pills and drink this, and when you get home take two more, and two in the morning. Put the box in the pocket of your shirt."

She took the glass of brandy and water and said again, "There's nothing the matter with me. And I hate the taste of quinine."

"Nevertheless, do as I say." She looked at him for a second with an expression of astonishment in her clear blue eyes. Then, like an obedient child, she swallowed the two pills, washing them down with brandy and water and making a little face.

"I'm not a child," she said.

"Nobody said you were, but you can't meddle with fever."

"I haven't got any fever. I was just shaking from excitement."

He picked up the mackintosh and hat and said, "And now you're going home." But she sat down suddenly and repeated, "I'm not going home. I can't... I'm never going home again."

"Why not?"

"Because I left a note saying I was going away forever. I can't go home now. I couldn't face my mother after that."

He grinned and said, "You ought never to leave notes in case you change your mind."

"Don't make fun of me."

"I'm not. Anyway the note doesn't make any difference. Nobody will find it until morning. You can tear it up before anybody sees it."

Suddenly she began to cry, the way she had done on the afternoon of the tennis party. "I can't," she sobbed, "I can't go back, I'm through with all that lousy life."

The sound of her sobbing alarmed him until he realized that it could not possibly reach the house where John the Baptist slept through all the downpour. Weeping women always made him helpless and filled him with a desire to run away. He had run away before, again and

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again, when women became emotional and refused to accept the limits of the thing he was willing to give. But this time he was innocent; he wasn't giving anything at all but advice, and anyway it would do no good. He didn't want to run away from Ranchipur. He didn't mean to be driven away by a girl who meant absolutely nothing to him.

"My mother says I have to marry Harry Loder," she sobbed, "and I won't!"

Vaguely Ransome sounded his mind to remember which of "the boys" was Harry Loder, and then the picture came to him. Harry Loder was the big beefy one whom, in the rare moments when he thought of "the boys" at all, he disliked the most. He was a bully and drank too much.

So Harry Loder wanted to marry her? The news astonished him that

Harry Loder with his slick army snobbery should be willing to marry the daughter of a missionary; and then he saw, he thought, why it was. She was the prettiest European woman anywhere in Ranchipur, one of the prettiest in India, and Harry Loder wanted her and must have discovered that that was the only way he could have her. When he'd had enough he'd neglect her and carry on with any woman he found at hand, and all the time he would never forget nor allow her to forget that he had done her a great favor by marrying her, the daughter of a missionary. That was a story he had seen played out in India before* No, she couldn't marry Harry Loder. That was out of the question.

Then for the first time in a long while his youthful sense of chivalry came alive. Once it had been exaggerated and fantastic and got him into all sorts of trouble, but for a long time now he had been on his guard against it because it always paralyzed his common sense and made an ass of him. There wasn't any longer any place for chivalry in the world. It only made you look a fool.

"No," he said, "obviously you can't marry Harry Loden Did he ask you?... properly, I mean."

"Yes, he asked me and he told my mother too. That's how she knows. Everything will be worse than ever now."

Then growing cautious again, he said, "There isn't anything I can do about it. It's none of my business."

She stopped crying and looked at him with that expression of determination which had impressed him before. "Yes, there is," she said, and

then looking away from him, "If you were only big enough. I thought you were when I came here."

He wanted to laugh but he only asked, "What do you mean by that?"

"If you'd let me stay here tonight ... if they found me here in the morning so that everybody knew it, then Harry Loder wouldn't want to marry me, and my mother would have to send me away from Ranchipur with everybody talking and gossiping. Don't you see? Then I'd be able to get away and have a life of my own. I'd never come back." Then after a moment she said, "I don't care what people here say about me."

It was clear that she knew what she wanted. The desire to laugh turned into a sudden admiration for her strength of will. "What about me?" he asked.

She answered him so quickly that he knew at once she had already thought of all the questions and answers. "It wouldn't matter to you," she said. "You've lived. You've been through so much. It wouldn't hurt your reputation. I don't see why you should care."

What she said and the patness with which it came out made him suddenly see with a sense of swift intuition how that small world which he held in contempt regarded him. In their hearts, beneath their snobbery and toadying, they saw him as a roue, a waster, a cad, a remittance man, capable of any low act; they must have talked of him thus, sometimes before Fern. Yet they were willing to accept him, even to run after him if he so much as smiled in their direction.

Suddenly he was violently angry, not at the girl, but at the world out of which she had come. "Those God-damned bootlickers!" he thought. "They have a nerve to judge me I"

"What makes you think that?" he asked. "Where did you get such an idea?"

Her answer was disconcerting and took the force out of his anger: "Well, I mean you don't care anything about nasty things like respectability. You don't care what people think or say about you. You're not like them. Don't you see, you'd be doing a noble act?"

"Did you read all that some place?"

"No, I thought it all out." Suddenly she forgot her tears in her eagerness: "Don't you see, I understand. I know what you're like, really like. You hate the kind of life they lead, and so do I. I want to be myself.

I want to get everything there is to be had out of life. I don't care about being respectable or any of those things."

So she thought of him like that. Well, once he was like that, a long time ago, and suddenly he felt ashamed that he was weary and bored.

"That's all very well," he said, "but it isn't easy. You have to be strong . . . stronger than I am to get away with it. Maybe nobody is strong enough."

"I'm not looking for things to be easy."

"Why did you come to me? If that's what you wanted you could have gone to almost anyone... one of 'the boys,' say?"

She leaned forward and took a cigarette off the table and lighted it. The match was damp and she blundered and missed, and her face grew red with confusion. But she persisted and the second time she succeeded and began to puff in an inexpert fashion, like a spinster smoking for the first time. While he waited for her to answer he watched her, rather touched and charmed because she was so young.

"You're the only one I could go to because you're the only one who would understand and not take advantage of me." Then after a silence she said, "And because I like you. Sometimes I think you're the only person in the whole place I don't hate." Then he knew she had picked .up the cigarette in order to make herself feel worldly and give herself courage.

"But you don't know me."

"Yes, I do."

He grinned: "The big strong silent man... mysterious and cold and different."

"Don't tease me. Don't act as if I'm a child. I'm not a child, I don't want to be. I want to be a woman."

For a moment he felt himself wavering. He said, "You never let me know that you liked me. You hardly ever spoke to me." And then he checked himself, aware that in that direction lay danger*

Her hair ha"d begun to dry now and stood up in blond ringlets all over her small head. In spite of anything he could do it was impossible for him not to be aware o her body, of her virgin slimness and the long slender legs and small ankles. The clothes certainly suited her. But the situation began to seem grotesque that he, of all men, should be re-

sisting so much loveliness, so much freshness thrown at his head, his for the taking. He poured himself another drink and felt suddenly dizzy. "Perhaps, after all," he thought, "what happened with Edwina was a good thing. Perhaps it has kept me from making a fool of myself with this girl. Funny how things work out." He told himself that he should force her to leave at once, but he was not strong enough; the temptation, even though he meant not to yield to it, was enjoyable and exciting. It made him feel as he had not felt in a long while, young and interested in something beyond the sensual satisfaction of the moment.

Then he saw that she had finished the whole glass of brandy and water he had given her and he thought, "I shouldn't have given her so much. Probably that's the first drink she's ever had in her life."

She was saying, "I've liked you for a long time. I've watched you on the street. I've waited at the window every Saturday when you went to the Smiley's, to see you. I've always liked you, only you always treated me as if I were a child. You never even bothered to speak to me."

No, he thought, she's not three years old. She knows what she wants and nothing will stop her. The second drink made him think, "Why not? What difference would it make? Life is so short and so lousy."

But aloud he said, "Now, you're going home before it's too late." He had been leaning against the table and he stood up suddenly and put down his glass to give his words force.

"Don't make me go. Please let me stay."

He leaned against the table once more. "If you stayed, what would you do afterward? I won't ever marry you."

"I wouldn't want that. I don't want to be tied down myself."

"Then how do you think it could possibly work out?"

Again she had her answer ready with amazing quickness: "I'd have to leave Ranchipur whether my mother liked it or not. I'd get away to America where I'd have a chance. I could go to Hollywood. I know I would make good."

"That's not easy. It's tough to get a good break."

"I'd do anything."

He looked at her sharply without speaking, and avoiding his eyes she went on: "Yes, anything. I mean anything. What is anything if it can give you your freedom ... to do what you want to do? A thing like

that doesn't matter. It's all over in a minute. Anyway the body doesn't matter. It isn't you, really."

Again he felt suddenly dizzy and thought, "It's impossible. I'm not really hearing all this. It's funny that once I too thought that."

"It can be awful," he said. "You haven't the least idea how awful men can be."

"That's why I came here." She hesitated as if gathering her courage, and then plunged: "That's why I wanted it to be you, for the first time. I knew you wouldn't be like that and I wanted the first time to be with somebody I liked. Don't you see? Don't you understand? Afterward what happened wouldn't matter so much, I'm not asking so very much of you."

Trembling a little, he thought, "Good God, there are things Saint Anthony never dreamed of!" Aloud he said, "Yes, I understand ... all too well. That's why you're going home now. If you don't I shall have to go and fetch your mother." He went over to her and held out the damp mackintosh. "Come," he said.

But she did not stir. She only began to cry again. "No, please keep me here. Don't make me go home."

Then suddenly he felt tired. He felt himself slipping back into his old weakness. He knew that he would begin soon to compromise, to procrastinate, to make promises that he never meant to keep. That was what he had done on the verandah the day of the tennis party and it had only gotten him in more deeply. "You'll have to give me time to think over a thing like this." And hearing himself say this, he began to laugh.

"I can't go back now. My mother would wake up and ask me where I'd been. She'd hear the motor."

But he was prepared for that: "No, we won't go near enough to the house for that. I'll stop the motor down the road and take you to the Smileys*. You can spend the night there and slip across the drive to your own house early in the morning. You can tear up the note before anybody finds it."

"I won't go to the Smileys'. Mrs. Smiley hates me."

"You don't know Mrs. Smiley. She doesn't hate anyone. She hasn't time for that.*'

She had risen from xhe chair, still crying and saying, "Don't make me

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go! I don't want to go! I won't go unless you'll promise to see me again and be kind to me."

"I promise."

"And you've got to help me."

'Til help you."

"Because it isn't true what I said. I don't like you. It's more than that." She began to put on the mackintosh: "I guess I love you. If I didn't I wouldn't be going home now."

"Oh, my God!"

Along the road the water streamed in the ditches and in one place it lay spread across the road in a small lake into which the old Buick, its lights veiled by the wall of rain, bucked head on, splattering them both with water. They rode side by side in silence, for since the moment of her confession an odd barrier had come up between them, pardy of shyness and partly a kind of paralysis which made it impossible to speak. It wasn't fun any longer; it ceased to be a farce in which he was playing the role of wise guy, and he was aware that Fern wasn't play-acting any more but in dead earnest. He didn't know what role she had been playing because he knew nothing about Blythe Summerfield, Pearl of the Orient, but he knew well enough that she had slipped out of the part which obviously she had written for herself before she ever came to the house.

For a time he tried earnestly to find something to say, in the belief that by casual conversation he could pull their relationship back into the realm of common sense, but he could think of nothing whatever to say that would not sound banal and ridiculous and betray his intentions, for he understood now that the girl was not stupid. There was something in her directness which made small talk quite impossible at the moment. She sat a little away from him huddled sullenly in her seat, and although he did not look at her he was aware of her nearness and knew exactly

how she looked in his old tennis shirt and shorts trim and appealing

and a little wild. It was odd how clearly he saw her now, when a couple of hours earlier he could not have told what she looked like if anyone had asked him.

A little beyond the alcohol distillery he stopped the car and said, "We'd

better walk from here and then the sound of the car won't waken anyone."

"I can go alone/' she said. "You'll get soaked." "It doesn't matter. I'll be going straight home. How is the chill?" "It wasn't a chill. There wasn't anything the matter with me." "So she is like that/' he thought. "Maybe I am a fool." And as he splashed along beside her through the rain he had a moment of clear vision as if suddenly a light had been turned upon himself, and he was a little shocked because he found that all the while, all through the hour or two they had been together, a part of him had been appraising her bit by bit, in cold blood her throat, her breasts, her thighs, her blond hair- speculating upon what the experience would be like. "I'm senile," he thought, "a broken-down old lecher," because while he had been appraising her he hadn't thought at all what she was like inside. "I shouldn't be like that. I'm only thirty-eight. Maybe that's all there is left. Maybe that's the only thing remaining which can rouse me."

The Smileys' house was in darkness but they had no trouble in finding the door and entering, save that he received a glancing blow on the side of the head from one of Aunt Phoebe's swinging pots of petunias. The door was never locked, the windows never closed. Day or night one could walk directly into the heart of the house. In the beginning it had been entered two or three times, but after a while the story got about that the Smileys' possessed nothing which was worth stealing and after that there had been no trouble.

Ransome knew his way in the darkness. He left Fern standing in a corner of the hallway and made his way along the passage with the aid of his cigarette lighter until he came to the door of the Smileys' bedroom. There he knocked. He had no fear of startling the Smileys because they were accustomed to being wakened at any hour of the night when there was sudden illness or death among the Untouchables and low-caste people. Twice he knocked, and then the sleepy voice of Mr. Smiley said, "Hello! What is it?"

"It's Ransome," he said. "Could I see you for a moment?" Then the voice came back, awake and alert, "Sure. Just a minute." When the door opened Mr. Smiley came out, clad in a cotton dressing

gown ? with Mrs. Smiley following him in a kimono, her hair done in a screw on the top of her head.

Mrs. Smiley switched on the light and Ransome, grinning, said, "I'm sorry to disturb you, but the circumstances are a bit extraordinary."

Then he explained to them about Fern running away from home and why she would not return but was willing to spend the night in the Smileys 5 house. He told only enough of the story to make it believable, giving them to understand that he had not found her in his bedroom but walking along the road in the rain. The Smileys did not appear to be astonished. Even when they turned and saw Fern standing sheepishly at the end of the hallway, dressed in Ransome's clothing, they gave no sign of surprise.

Mrs. Smiley said, "Oh, hello, Fern!" as if they were the best of friends, and went forward to welcome her. It wasn't easy for Fern, who had always held the Smileys in scorn as pious, hard-working fools, but somehow Mrs. Smiley, who perhaps had never noticed Fern's high-and- mightiness, made it all seem easy and natural, as if Fern had just run across the drive to borrow a teaspoonful of baking powder,

"I'll put you in the room next to us," she said "Then you won't need to be afraid."

"I'm not afraid," said Fern, and Ransome saw suddenly that she was still a child.

The Smileys begged him to stay and have something to eat. It was, he thought, exactly as if he had been a stranger caught in a wild storm and the Smiley 's house was a cabin on the frontier. They displayed no astonishment and asked no questions and were full of hospitality. And then a door opened a little way down the hallway and the head of Aunt Phoebe appeared.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "Anything I can do?" "No," said Mrs. Smiley, "it's nothing."

But Aunt Phoebe had caught a glimpse of Ransome and of the daughter of "that poor-white" Mrs. Simon, clad in man's clothing, and she came out dressed as she was, in a nightgown with a high collar and long sleeves and her thin white hair all in curl papers, to find out what was going on. And Ransome, knowing that she would not hesitate to ask pointed questions, fled. But before he went he said good night to

Fern. She looked at him directly, so directly that for a moment he felt uneasy, and said, "Thanks." But he divined that she was making an effort to convey to him the knowledge that it was not finished between them and that putting her off with promises was no good.

When, drenched and miserable, he left the car under the forte cochfre it occurred to him for the first time quite clearly how near he had come to doing something which would have made Ranchipur forever impossible for him. When he had rubbed himself down and finished what was left in the brandy bottle, he saw it all even more clearly, knowing the very moments when he had felt himself growing reckless and dizzy, thinking, "The hell with it! It's the only thing that matters in life. If I don't do it, some day when I'm an old man 111 regret."

He knew already that very nearly the only regrets he had in life were for the things, both good and evil, which he had not done; they were there in the fabric of his existence like holes left by a careless weaver, spoiling the rich effect of the stuff. And one could never go back and repair the holes. When a thing was done it was done. And the awful part of it was that the elements which seemed so important now honor, the fear of gossip, the responsibility would one day be of no weight whatever. "Perhaps," he thought, "the strong people are those who know all that, who are aware and still act ruthlessly," for he did not feel that he was strong, or that he had been strong a little while before, with Fern sitting opposite him provocative and eager. All those things would one day have faded away, leaving him with only a dull sense of regret that he had turned away from an experience which might have been glowing and wonderful. And that thought brought him sharply to the philosophy of Major Safti that the body which caused so much pain owed in return a great debt of sensual pleasure.

"Damn it!" he thought, drunkenly. "It's always the moralist and the gentleman in me which paralyzes me and makes a mess of everything." Not even all the wilful cold-blooded debauchery, into which he had thrown himself again and again to kill that thing in him, had succeeded in killing it. It was still there, lying asleep for long periods to waken suddenly when he least desired it, throwing him, despite everything, into

a role which long ago, in disgust, he had consciously, by a deliberate effort of will, chosen to reject.

And as he put out the light and climbed into bed beneath the mosquito netting, he thought, "I've never once made love, enjoying it directly, brutally, like most men. I've never lost consciousness. I've always been a little outside, watching myself, aware that I am futile, shameful and ridiculous." Perhaps the day would come when at last he had beaten down all these things and found the direct way, but that day, he knew, even in his drunkenness, would mean not only the liberation of his body but the death of everything which was himself.

Lying sleepless and restless in the heat, annoyed by the buzzing of the thousands of insects attracted by the light, 'he had not even the solace of feeling noble to dull the edge of his regret, because in honesty he knew that it was not himself but Edwina who was responsible for the departure of Fern still in the role of v irgo intacta. If it had not been for what happened with Edwina he might have been driven by boredom and demands of his own body to have done what that strange girl asked. Yes, strange she was, and even fascinating. There was something there, deep within her, under all the naivete and nonsense and revolt against her parents and their world, that was worth discovering.

"Funny," he thought again, "that it should have been Edwina cold- blooded, poisonous Edwina who saved Fern without ever knowing it." Saved her from what? echoed in his brain from something which was certain one day, before very long, to happen to her, something which might after all release her. "I, at least," he thought, "could have made it pleasant for her."

And then he was aware that someone was crossing the verandah outside his window. In reality he neither saw the dark figure nor heard the step of the naked feet. In the heat and restlessness he felt a presence. Springing out of bed, he took up the electric torch and stumbled on to the verandah. The light fell against the wall of rain, blunted and dissipated by the falling water, but even so it was strong enough for him to distinguish a dim brown figure like a ghost, quite naked, running across the garden into the garden house.

Aloud he said, "God-damn it!" And returning to his bed he laughedj

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thinking, "I might just as well have done it. Now I'll have the credit for it sooner or later."

There was no use in trying to threaten John the Baptist or in offering to bribe him, for neither reward nor punishment, he knew, would make any difference when so juicy a morsel as this could be dropped into the circle of John's gossipping musician friends. The story would grow and grow in repetition like the ripples made by a stone thrown into a quiet pond, until presently, having passed from servant to servant, it would reach the ears of someone like Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and then the jig would be up. He knew Ranchipur. By the time it reached the ears o "Pukka Lil" he would have first gotten Fern thoroughly drunk and then raped her.

"I might just as well have done it, God-damn it! It just goes to show..." But what it went to show he could not make out, because he was beginning to feel profoundly muddled and weary and drunk. It seemed to him that the night which had begun with Edwina entering the room at the palace, white and cool, all pale and gold, .had gone on forever.

Just before he fell asleep he raised his head and listened for a moment. This time it was not his imagination; it was unmistakable. He could hear it even above the sound of the torrential rain. The river had begun to roar.

Then he remembered Edwina again and thought, "Yes, I suppose that's what whores are for."

At the Smileys 1 Fern stood waiting sheepishly while Mrs. Smiley and Aunt Phoebe fetched bedclothes and a cotton nightgown and made her comfortable. They talked about the rains and about the difficulty of keeping the bedclothes dry in such weather, but never about Ransome or the way Fern was dressed or how she came to be walking along the road in the rain after midnight. Aunt Phoebe looked at her once or twice with sharp penetrating looks which, oddly enough, were neither hostile nor condemnatory, but only curious and rather appraising. There was in them something of admiration, a little astonishment, and a great deal of curiosity. It was as if the old lady said, "Well, I never thought you had that much spunk in you."

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Awkwardly, paralyzed by embarrassment and shyness, the girl watched the two older women working to make her feel at home. Aunt Phoebe fetched a bottle of water and placed it on the table beside her bed. Mrs. Smiley draped the mosquito netting over the frame, chattering all the time about the way the netting rotted almost before you had it sewed together properly and sending Aunt Phoebe for a bit of thread and a needle to darn the holes which had appeared since she had last used it.

Now and then Fern said, "Oh, thank you, Mrs. Smiley!" or "I'll be all right, don't take too much trouble," or "I can do that. Let me!" And all the while she was beginning to understand for the first time what Mrs. Smiley was.

For the first time Mrs. Smiley ceased to exist for her as a drab sort of shadow which was simply a symbol of all dreary missionaries living perpetually like a menace in the house across the drive, the ever-present proof that after all, whatever dreams she had, she was only the child of missionaries condemned forever to live in a "missionary" atmosphere. She saw Mrs. Smiley quite suddenly as a person who was alive and had reality and perhaps knew the same passions and weaknesses and despair as herself. And dimly, without quite understanding it, because she was so young and so innocent of experience, she divined that in Mrs. Smiley the passions and disappointments had long ago been subdued and put into order. Vaguely too she was aware that Mrs. Smiley had in some way disentangled the messiness of living and clarified its muddledness. "It must be nice," the girl thought, "to be so easy and sure," for you did not have to \nour Mrs. Smiley to discover the calm and sureness that was in her; it was apparent in the way she moved and smiled at you, in the brisk efficient way she whisked the sheets on to the bed, the ease and skill with which she mended the holes in the mosquito netting.

Something in the presence of Mrs. Smiley, at just this moment when the senses of the girl were excited and acute, made her know exactly what it was that had driven her out of her own home into Ransome's bedroom. It was not that she had gone because she was bad or vicious, nor because she was driven by curiosity, nor because she was really in love with Ransome outside the realms of her romantic imagination, but because she had had to escape from that muddling false world which her mother and her father had created and kept in existence all about her,

shutting her in and making her miserable. She had wanted to straighten things out and there had seemed only one way to do it by running away and leaving Ransome to do for her what must be done for every woman before she is able to understand the full depths and the full richness o living.

When Mrs. Smiley and Aunt Phoebe had gone away and she lay in the darkness, clad in one of Mrs. Smiley's cotton nightgowns, she did not fall asleep. The brandy and the excitement had sent her mind to working, swiftly and clearly, as it had never worked before, and presently, thinking about it all, she came to understand that, although she had gone to Ransome driven by all sorts of reasons save that she was in love with him, what had been merely a romantic idea was now all at once a reality. Sitting up in bed, she thought, "I am in love. So that's what it feels like." It wasn't a bit like the things she read about in the picture magazines nor the way they showed it in the cinema.

She knew she was in love because she felt "different." Not only toward him but toward herself. She saw that he was not, as she had believed him, a romantic hero, silent and melancholy and mysterious, who made speeches such as men made in novels and in the films. He had talked to her simply, with perfect honesty, and had shown himself so much easier and so much "nicer" than she had pictured him during the scenes she had invented while walking through the rain to his house. She saw now that nobody had ever talked to her in quite that way before, as if she were grown up and a real person. She could not think of anybody in the world about her who had ever talked like that, because all the others were always pretending this or that so that everything they said or did was false and complicated and maddening. It seemed to her now that the others were afraid of everything of poverty, of gossip, of respectability, of snobbery, of a million things, so that everything they did or thought became cramped and distorted and unhealthy. And she saw that she herself in the role of Blythe Summerfield had invented a world which wasn't true any more than her mother's world was true, or her father's or Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's or that of "the boys." She had even written a part for Ransome in which she made him hard and mysterious and cynical and a little violent, and that wasn't true either. And now, alone in the dark, she felt herself blushing at the things she had done and said while

she was with him because so many of them were false and ridiculous; and she knew suddenly how kind he had been to her.

She knew too that even if the thing had happened which she had wanted to happen she would now be suffering no remorse or sense of sin, because it would have been right in a way which she could not quite explain to herself. "I'm in love," she kept thinking; "so this is what it's like." It was so much nicer, so much warmer, so much more exciting than any of the silly things she had imagined.

He did not exist for her now as a shadowy mystery, because he came out of a world and out of a life of which she knew nothing at all, but as a reality. She wasn't afraid of him. She l^new him. Without knowing it until this moment she had discovered all sorts of things about him the way the thick dark hair grew on his sunburnt forehead, the little rueful almost sad grin that came over his face sometimes in the very middle of a speech, the exact sound of his voice, a nice pleasant caressing sort of voice which she could hear now perfectly clearly while she was alone in the solitary darkness of a strange house, and the shape of his hands which were beautiful, and the way they shook slightly when he raised his glass.

For a moment Blythe Summerfield returned and she found herself saying half aloud, "His hands, his dear hands," and then again in the darkness she blushed and was ashamed of herself because she had betrayed her new-found reality.

But most of all the thing which made her love him most of all

was the knowledge, of which she had not dreamed before, that he was as unhappy as herself.

Oh, she began to see now how it was that he was so friendly with the Smileys, and came so often to their house, and why it was that he came so rarely to her mother's; and she knew that even when he did come to her mother's house he was not really there at all. He simply sent someone else in his place who was kind and polite and pretended to believe in that crazy world which existed there. She thought, "He and Mrs. Smiley know something that we don't know on the other side of the drive," and suddenly she had intimations of another kind of world which was the one, she was vaguely aware, where she belonged a world

in which there was a richness, in which suffering had depth, ambition, grandeur, and pleasure substance.

She was no longer a little girl. When at last she fell asleep it seemed to her that the night which had begun with her stealing out of the house into the rain had gone on and on forever. For the first time something had happened to her. For the first time she discovered that life was not simply a thing ticked off by the clock in seconds, minutes and hours. Sometimes it did not move at all for days, perhaps for years, and then all at once one could live years in an hour or two. It was a funny idea...

When Mrs. Smiley went back to her own room the light was still burnling but Mr. Smiley, on his side of the double bed where they slept winter and summer, was already dozing, and she did not waken him because she knew that he needed every minute of his sleep. Carefully she climbed under the netting so that the worn springs would not creak and disturb him. She had no great desire to waken him and talk about Fern because she already knew all about Fern and what she had been up to and she was quite sure that Mr. Smiley also knew. There was neither need nor time to hash over the whole story, picking it to bits, speculating and inventing things. She knew well enough that Fern was unhappy and she knew why; she had known for a long time. And she understood why Fern had run away to Ransome of all people in Ranchipur, and she knew too that nothing had happened, because Ransome, whatever his low opinion of himself, was like that.

She knew all these things because, although very little that was exciting had ever happened to herself, she could divine what it was like, and because in an odd way she had been born understanding human folly and suffering.

This was perhaps because Mrs. Smiley had no ego whatever; she had no idea of her own of what she was like; she scarcely knew her own appearance because there had never been any time to study it. She used a mirror just long enough to arrange her hair in the morning so that it would not fall down, and even while she was using a mirror she did not see her own face but only her hands and her hair as if her hair was something detached from her like a pie or a loaf of bread. She had

never had any ego even as a child, for she was born, it seemed, with a kind of innate humility which had been preserved rather than corrupted by being one of nine children. It had never occurred to her that she had been neglected, or abused, or insulted by anyone. As a young girl back in Cedar Falls she had been perfectly content to be thrust into the background by others more handsome, more clever or more assertive than herself. Indeed she had found a kind of pleasure and satisfaction in watching and listening, and she always felt happier herself when others were enjoying themselves. So it was inevitable that she should be the confidante of everyone who came near her, and that while she was still young she had ceased to be shocked or astonished by anything at all, t and presently that she came to have more wisdom about living than most of those who lived passionately and violently, committing over and over again the same sins, the same blunders, the same errors. And although she rarely attracted admirers she never pitied herself because she was always so busy and so interested in the spectacle of others; indeed there were moments when she felt an honest simple pity for people more brilliant and attractive than herself, because it seemed to her that all their beauty and all their gifts only drew upon them unhappiness and suffering. Quiet, mouselike, in her own corner, she had never known jealousy or envy, bitterness or disappointment, and so she felt that she was luckier than the others.

And then Mr. Smiley happened along, unworthy, humble and frowned upon by her family because he was only a Baptist, and dared in Cedar Falls to court the daughter of a Congregationalist family. Mr. Smiley with his innocence and correctness and his shy warmth, the only person who saw people and things the way she saw them. But she married him in spite of everything and became a Baptist and a missionary and went to India with him, not through faith or hysteria, or exaltation, but because it was the most natural thing for both of them to have done and because it was a career which was a perfect expression of her own nature. They lived always in other people and never in themselves, without possessions which might be stolen, or pride which might be hurt, or pretensions that might be vanquished, or ambitions that might fail. That was the secret of which Ransome had become slowly aware.

After Mr. Smiley came along she was never lonely, nor was he. She

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never pretended to herself that they had married out of a passionate love for one another, and she knew that neither of them had any aptitude for such raptures. They had married because both of them possessed humility and understood each other and saw people in the same way and because both of them found the profoundest happiness in serving others. She knew nothing of the raptures of the flesh and made no attempt to imagine them, but she found Mr. Smiley gently and warmly comfortable.

For a little while she lay awake wondering how she might be able to help Fern Simon. She had known for a long time that the girl was lonely and unhappy but she had known too that it was no use in going to her. Now that Fern had come to her, or rather been delivered to her by Ransome, it might be easier.

She fell asleep at last, but she was awakened a little after dawn by a knock and found outside the door one of the boys from Mr. Smiley's classes. He was from the potter's caste and he came to tell her that his mother and his brother were both ill with typhus. There were four other new cases in the quarter where the potters lived.

She dressed herself and went with him, thinking a little wearily, "They are slipping back again. Where there is typhus there must be lice." She and Mr. Smiley would have to begin one of their campaigns, and they had done it already so many times that for a moment she was tempted to think that it was all hopeless, all their work and their efforts. And she was worried too. Four new cases in one quarter in a single night was too many.

Before she went out, she wakened Fern and sent her across the drive to her own house.

Quickly, miraculously, the rains had changed the whole landscape and the whole life of Ranchipur. In a few hours the vines in Ransome's garden sent forth long tender shoots of a lettuce-green color which crept everywhere with a strength and a persistence out of all proportion to their fragile appearance. Into crevices in the walls of stone and mud, into drainpipes and even through open windows they pushed their way. Round pillars and garden chairs and the ancient banyan trees and even the pump that served the vast deep well, they writhed and thrust, attaching themselves in a kind of vegetable ecstasy and voluptuousness to whatever they

found at hand. In the borders and in the midst of the barren paths tender seedlings sprang up, nourished only by the downpour of warm rain. Even the tired and dusty marigolds and hollyhocks became young again with leaves and buds no longer cooked by the sun before they were well open. And now the old banyan and the huge mango trees appeared in the full dignity and splendor of their deep green, for the dust was washed away and the leaves no longer turned yellow and wilting beneath the scalding sun.

And in the palace garden the dusty little lake filled with water and on its surface the frivolous little pleasure boats, no longer stranded on a sea of cement, came to life and rocked gently in all the gayety of their scarlet and gold. The vast borders of flowers, only a week earlier dusty and dying, grew suddenly more extravagant and vigorous than flowers in any garden in damp England. Beyond the windows of Mr. Jobnekar's house the wide bare fields of maize and millet changed from golden brown to emerald green as if a vast cloak had been flung over the countryside from the edge of the Untouchable quarter as far as the magical mountain of Abana and the dead city of El-Kautara. And in the garden of the American Mission Aunt Phoebe's petunias and geraniums and orchids, hanging beneath the dripping trees in their old tin cans and boxes of bamboo, began to grow and to blossom with such exaggerated strength that the old lady, in a mackintosh, went out into the monsoon with a tape measure to mark the growth between one morning and the next, so that she might include the statistics in her annual description of the monsoon when she wrote to Cedar Falls, adding as she did each year, "I am not exaggerating. I measured the growth myself. Four inches in twenty-four hours," which was always two or three inches more than the truth. At the cottage where Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge lived, opposite the palace gates, the vines, gorged by rain, grew across the very windows, turning the light that came through to a pale green color so that the two spinsters seemed to eat and sleep and embroider and correct school papers under water like a pair of virginal middle-aged mermaids.

And the snakes came out the pythons and the cobras, the kraits and the Russell's vipers, languidly at first and then with quickening appetites, swarming in fields and gardens and along the edge of the river, and at the hospital the burdens of Miss MacDaid were increased by the cases of

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snakebite which they treated by cutting away the flesh and giving injections of serum. They could save the people bitten by cobras and vipers if they had good hearts, but for those bitten by the ugly little krait there was nothing to be done.

In the houses and in the vast palace mildew came in great spots on the walls, and fires were kept burning all day to dry the bedclothes which grew heavy with moisture during the night. The insects increased by billions until there were times when, wakening in the night to put on the light, you would find the netting so black with their bodies that it was as if a stifling cloak of black stuff had been thrown over the bed, shutting you in. In the daytime they lurked in clouds behind pictures and under cushions and beneath furniture, providing a feast for the squeaking little lizards which dwelt in the reed-filled roofs.

In the bazaar and in the square before the old wooden palace the vendors of sweets and eskimo pies vanished along with the crowd. Business was no longer done in the open under a blazing sun but in dark small rooms like caverns, heavy with damp. The steps of the great tank were empty save when, for an hour or two, the rains ceased, and then the square would be filled suddenly by whole processions of dhobies coming to the tank to beat their clothes.

The rains had come, with a force and extravagance which swelled the river and filled the tanks to overflowing in four or five days. Within the memory of the oldest living man in Ranchipur there had never been rains like these. So violent were they that, once the hysterical rejoicing at their arrival was over, people began to feel a vague sense of alarm and to talk of the legendary great flood which had happened in the days of the evil Maharajah.

But the straightening of the river channel was effective and the stream held its course, torrential and unhampered, through the very midst of the city and across the green plains to the hills beyond Mount Abana. The steps below the temple of Krishna disappeared beneath the yellow flood and the base of the temple itself was littered with the broken branches of trees, the bodies of animals and all manner of rubbish, so that Raschid Ali Khan, noticing the wreckage on his way home from work, ordered a sweeper posted there day and night with a long pole to push away the debris. It was odd that the Hindus themselves did not

mind, but to Raschid's Muslim soul it seemed indecent that the steps of a temple should be littered with garbage and rubbish and dead animals.

One by one whole families of importance left for the hill stations

where there was no mildew nor any snakes and insects the General,

the Commanding Officer and his family, Mr. Burgess from the bank with Mrs. Burgess, her aunt and her sister, the Dewan with his whole patriarchal household including his sister and his two nephews, his two sons and four grandsons and their wives and seven great-grand-children. At the palace Maria Lishinskaia and the Maharani planned what jewels and what saris Her Highness would need in Carlsbad and in London and Paris, and the Maharajah himself at last gave orders for departure by the Victoria frorii Bombay on Saturday. But he had no interest in the voyage for he felt no desire to leave. He was tired and ill and he wanted to die in Ranchipur among his own people. It was the Maharani and the Major who persuaded him. They were persistent and laughed when he told them that in his horoscope it was written that he would not last out the year. They laughed but he foeus.

In the dampish old house Ransome stayed behind, willingly, filled with the excitement which the spectacle of the monsoon always brought him. On the day after the dinner at the palace he wakened feeling ill and depressed, and it needed a long time for him to reconstruct all that had happened the night before. He knew that he wanted to see no one neither Edwina nor Fern nor even John the Baptist. When the boy brought his tea he showed no sign of knowing what happened the night before. He was silent as usual and Ransome asked him no questions, thinking it better to make nothing of the incident in the hope that John the Baptist would not find it extraordinary and believe that all European women behaved like Fern Simon.

When he had finished tea and shaved and dressed he decided what he meant to do for the day. He would drive alone far out into the country to the dead city of El-Kautara. That was, he knew, the only way to avoid society, for in spite of his solitary habits there was no such thing as privacy in Ranchipur. People were always coming and going. In the streets it was impossible to avoid friends and acquaintances. Door and

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windows were always open. There was no way during the monsoon of locking oneself in to be alone.

Lord Esketh failed to carry out his threat of leaving Ranchipur in the morning, for when morning came he was far too ill.

At eight o'clock his wife was wakened, with difficulty, by Bates, who told her that now there was no mistake and that his Lordship was so ill that he could no longer pretend that the illness was nothing. Wearily, her brain still dulled by all the medicines she had taken the night before in order to sleep, she listened to him, trying to remember that she was in Ranchipur and not in the house in Hill Street.

His Lordship, so Bates said, had not wakened properly. He appeared to be in what Bates called "a comber," and now that he was no longer able to resist Bates had managed to take his temperature, and found that it was seven degrees above normal.

"I'm afraid, me lady," said Bates, "that he has one of these Eastern fevers."

She wanted to say, "You're not afraid at all. You hope he has." But pulling herself together with a great effort she said, "I suppose we should send for a doctor, but I don't know whom to send for or where to send for him."

"Perhaps if me lady wrote a note to Her Highness, I could send it round by one of the boys."

"I'll go in and see him first and then write a note. Go along, Bates. I'll be in in a moment."

When she had made up her face and set her hair in order and put on a peignoir she felt a little better, although her brain still seemed as if it were encased in cotton wool, and when she raised her hand it was leaden and strange as if it did not belong to her.

It was the first time she had gone into his room, and for a moment the sight of Esketh in the vast red-carpeted Victorian bedroom tempted her to laugh. He lay, grotesquely, in a vast bed of teakwood ornamented with bits of mother-of-pearl, and the sight of him filled her with a sudden sense of shock and distaste. It was as if she had never seen him properly before how gross, how heavy he was for now, lying there half-conscious, the spark, the vitality, the energy which had always ani-

mated all his great bulk and turned mere weight into strength was gone, and he appeared dull, inert and heavy, the hard line vanished from his jaw, the muscles of his big face all flaccid. He had suddenly become simply a repulsive mass of flesh.

And then she remembered a little vaguely what had happened the night before in the palace and the quarrel that had taken place in her bedroom, and she was filled suddenly with shame and a loathing for herself, not because of Ransome or even because she was promiscuous she felt no shame for any of the adventures she had had outside marriage but because she had lived for nearly ten years with this gross mass of flesh which lay in the bed of teakwood and mother-of-pearl, that she had yielded herself again and again to him with indifference. All the other men, all of them had at least been beautiful in one way or another, and she thought at once of Ransome and how different his body was, how slim and hard in spite of all his drinking and dissipation. Looking down at Esketh she thought, "Whether he lives or dies I'll never sleep with him again." But she wished shamelessly that he would die, for she knew that as long as she lived she would always see him thus, betrayed by his illness, heavy, gross, purple-faced, with his mouth hanging open a little; and each time that she saw him she would remember that she had prostituted her fine slim body to him again and again. Only with him, her husband, had she ever been a prostitute. With all the others there had been pleasure and even sometimes love. Esketh alone had ever paid her.

Leaning over the bed, she knew that Bates was watching her, dankly curious to see how she would behave, and she knew that she must put on some sort of show which, although it would probably not deceive Bates, would make him believe in her good intentions. She was aware that in his servant's way he already knew too much about her.

She said, as if she were a devoted wife, "Albert! Albert! It's Edwina." The dull pale blue eyes opened a little way but they only looked into space, far beyond her, without focusing. He made a faint grunting sound and the eyes closed again. A second time she tried with no more result, and then she said, "I'll write a note, Bates. We'd better send it off at once. I'll bring it to you. You'd better stay here to watch."

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In her own room she took out her writing case and a bottle of smelling salts and began to write, but she got no further than "Your Highness" when she understood that it was not to the Maharani but to Ransome that she must send the note, for she knew suddenly that she was afraid of the old lady why it was she could not say but there was something about her, something in her presence, her manner, her dignity, yes, and her shrewdness which made her feel uneasy and a little ashamed. She saw her again as she had seen her the night before, standing beneath the blazing chandelier filled with bees, a look of mockery in her eyes. "She knew what we were up to," thought Edwina. And she felt too the scorn of the old lady as if she said, without saying it, "You were born to position and to responsibility. You have a place in life to hold up, even a little corner of the civilization which your ancestors helped to create; and you let it down every time. You let down yourself and the others about you. You had a job and you funked it."

She understood now, suddenly, how the Maharani felt about her, an Englishwoman, of the race of conquerors and merchants. No, she could not write to the Maharani and ask her to send the attractive Major Something-or-other. Her Highness would see through it. Smiling, she would read the note and think of Lady Esketh as if she were the dirt beneath her feet. To Ransome she could write asking him anything she liked. He would see through her too, but with him it did not matter because he, like herself, had let everyone down and so he would understand. And he was not an Indian,

She had no conscious prejudice about Indians because she was at once intelligent and abandoned, but all of them seemed quite strange and incomprehensible to her. When she thought of it at all it seemed to her that this feeling must be the vestigial remains of that legend of British superiority which Esketh was always trying to pound into her. It was all that was left, like the joints and bones in the fins of a whale. "Perhaps," she thought, "some day all English will be like me, with only fins instead of arms and legs, fingers and wrists'*; and seeking to justify herself, she thought, "Maybe through Major Something-or-other I could begin to discover India. Maybe he would be able to kill that last vestige of prejudice."

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To Ransome she wrote:

Dear Tom,

Albert is really ill this morning and needs a good doctor. I don't know what's the matter with him. There was an attractive fellow at the Palace last night, a Major Something-or-other who, I hear (all this had to be very casual) is an excellent physician. Could you send him a note and ask him to come round?

It's all a bloody bore when we were planning to get off today to Bombay. I forgot you didn't know that. I wasn't lying to you last night. We only decided it after we came home. It may make us miss the Victoria and then God knows when we'll be able to get away.

If you have a moment to spare, drop in and see me. I need cheering up. You'll probably find me in bed. In weather like this there doesn't seem to be anything else to do and I've seen the waterworks, the jail, the asylum, etc. Better still, come and have lunch with me. The cook isn't bad. Anyway I'll see you tomorrow night, at Mr. Banner jee's dinner. I mean to go if Albert isn't too ill. It's better than sitting here reading books about India. And anyway now I can come to you on Thursday.

Edwina.

When she had finished the letter she put it without rereading it into an envelope and sealed it with special care, not only against the prying eyes of Bates but, remembering sinister stories she had heard in Simla, against the curious eyes of any Indian into whose possession it might come.

A boy from the palace came with the note at the very moment Ransome was stepping into the car to go to El-Kautara, and when he had read it through he tipped the boy and sent him away telling him to say that he would come over at once. But he had no intention of changing his plan; he would not pay a call on Edwina and he would certainly not lunch with her. Last night he had welcomed her presence and slipped willingly back into the feeling of his youth, but now this was the last thing he desired. All the brandy he had drunk the night before made him feel physically ill and there still lingered with him a confused feeling, made up of equal parts of remorse and satisfaction, over the way

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he had behaved with Fern; and this, he felt, must be resolved into terms of common sense before he would have any peace. And something in the adventure with Fern made Edwina seem much less desirable to him, as if she were an old story, told too many times.

As Edwina suspected he saw through the letter at once, through the elaborately casual reference to Major Safti and the hint about knowing India instead of reading about it; and the note made him suddenly angry, not at her shamelessness which left him as indifferent as if she had been a machine instead of a woman, but because he did not want her muddling up the life of the Major. He trusted his friend but he could not forget that all too often an Indian lost his head completely when a European woman showed him attention, especially a pretty woman like Edwina who would clear out when she had had enough. And he thought too of poor Miss MacDaid; if the Major took up Edwina's challenge it would not only upset his work but make poor Miss MacDaid frantic.

And then he remembered the monkeys in the garden and grinned and thought, "No! Hands off! I mustn't take to playing Jehovah with a catapult."

In any case there was nothing that he could do. In all Ranchipur, in all India, there was no doctor as clever as the Major and it would, he knew, be quite impossible to keep him from so important a fellow as Esketh. You couldn't leave the health of a great industrial king like Esketh to a poor little fellow like the Major's assistant, Doctor Pindar. While he tore up the letter he thought, "She should never have come out to India. She doesn't fit into the picture. She's nothing but a disturbance. It's bound to end in some sort of a mess. It's like bringing the wrong chemicals into contact."

Neither the Major nor Miss MacDaid was at the hospital. They had gone to the old barracks near the jail to see about putting it into order to receive the cholera and typhus cases. There he found the two of them on the second floor walking along the echoing hall, giving instructions to a whole procession of servants who followed them about cleaning and disinfecting and installing beds. He saw at once that they were both in high spirits and he divined the reason. They were both excited at the prospect of a task which would keep them working day and night; nothing like this had happened in years. And Miss MacDaid knew that

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as long as the epidemic continued the Major would belong to her alone, sleeping at the hospital, forgetting even Natara Devi. The Major had a big cigar in his mouth and was laughing and talking loudly. The sight of them aroused a sudden pang of envy in Ransome.

When he told them his mission the Major said, "I'll come right along. Miss MacDaid can finish up here. We can't let a big bug like Esketh get ill and die in Ranchipur. His Highness and the Viceroy would never forgive us, not to mention all the shareholders."

"I didn't know the epidemic was so bad," said Ransome.

"It isn't bad really," said Miss MacDaid, "but there were eleven new cases this morning and the only way to stop it is to step right up and take it by the throat." She turned to the Major: "I suppose he'll want a nurse."

"He'll probably want two or three."

Miss MacDaid frowned: "Under the circumstances he'll have to get on with one. I suppose you'd better send Miss de Souza. She speaks the best English."

"I'll tell her to pack up and go over."

"Anyway," said Miss MacDaid, "it's a nuisance. We've enough work without that. He might have gone to Bombay to be ill."

At the old summer palace the Major announced himself to Bates, and Ransome waited in the hallway, seating himself on a horsehair sofa opposite a dreadful mildewed portrait of the Maharajah done by a student o the Bombay Art School. He had no desire to see Edwina for he knew perfectly well that she had no need for comfort or consolation, save perhaps for the fact that she would undoubtedly miss her boat back to Europe. Twenty minutes passed and then a half-hour, and he thought, "Well, she must have met her young doctor!" And then the portrait opposite him began to get on his nerves. It was an absurd production in which the Indian instinct for style had been mingled in an extraordinary way with what the artist believed to be modern painting in the West. Beneath the mildew the picture had not one virtue save that of quaintness, for the marriage of the two styles had "succeeded only in creating an effect that was grotesque and childish. The picture, he thought, was like Mr. Bannerjee, not quite certain what it believed or \vhither it was bound.

He was still studying it when the door opened and Edwina came out, looking cool and lovely in a peignoir of lettuce green. She said, "Why didn't you come in? I only just found out that you were here."

"I thought it was none of my business. Is he very ill?"

"Yes. Major Safti doesn't know what it is."

(So she had found out his name? Progress! He wasn't Major Something-or-other any longer. The bitch!)

After a moment he said, "Well, that is a mess. I suppose now you won't be able to leave."

"Not for two or three weeks at the best."

He grinned: "Well, you'll find out in earnest what a monsoon can be."

"Are you going to have lunch with me?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't feel in the mood." (Why wasn't the Major enough to occupy her for the moment?)

"It would be a help. I need cheering up."

"No. I can't."

"Is there any special reason? I promise to behave myself."

(Why in God's name couldn't she leave him in peace? Why did she keep stirring him up, prodding the past into life again? Why in hell had she ever come to Ranchipur?)

"No, there's no special reason except that I'm a bloody neurotic and I've got to be alone. I've got the jitters."

"I can give you a drink."

He looked at her with sudden fury: "Did you understand what I said? I'm ill I'm a damned bloody useless fool and I've got to be alone. I don't see why you ever came here."

"I'm sure I don't know. I never wanted to. I won't bother you any more. When you're in a better humor and think you can stand me, let me know. I'm going to be awfully bored."

He almost said, "Oh, you're not going to be so bored with that fine specimen of manhood, Major Safti, coming in and out every day. I know what you're up to." But he held his tongue, lighted a cigarette and said, "I'll let you know. I'll probably be all right tomorrow."

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"Have you any books I can borrow?"

"Send around and take anything you like."

"Thanks."

And then she was gone, leaving him to consider the extraordinary quality o the brief conversation, how it consisted mostly of one hiatus after another. What they had said was of no importance. It was what they had not said: "We understand each other too damned well. We understand each other because we're both bastards."

A moment after she had disappeared the Major came out, and like a voyeur Ransome regarded him sharply to discover, if it were possible, whether she had made any progress. But the Major gave no sign. Ransome said, "Well?"

"I don't know what it is. It's too early to tell. It might be any one of three or four things."

"Serious?"

"Well, bad malaria or typhoid or typhus or even plague."

"How could he have got any of those things?"

The Major grinned: "Even great English Lords have been known to have been bitten by fleas." He took out a fresh cigar and said, "Do you know anything about him?"

"No, nothing."

"I should say he was an alcoholic. That isn't going to make it any better."

The rain had stopped for a moment and as he drove across the square by the cinema the whole place came suddenly to life, with people rushing out of shops and houses to take advantage of the respite servants on errands, women bound for the bazaar, merchants bartering, washer- women hurrying to the great tank. From the square he turned past the music school into the Engineering School Road. It was actually called Beaconsfield Avenue but nobody ever used that name. It was always spoken of as Engineering School Road. And then as if God had pulled the chain of a gigantic shower bath the rain began again in a flood, and a little ahead of him on the right he spied the figure of Miss Dirks trudging along in a mackintosh and a man's felt hat. He thought, "I'll

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stop and ask the poor old thing if she wants a lift. If she refuses then I'll never have to ask her again."

She must have been thinking of something very far away as she trudged along through the rain, for when he drew up beside her and called out she looked at him in a startled way, almost without recognition, as if she had come back from a great distance,

"Can I give you a lift?" he asked.

She did not smile. She said, "Good morning. No thank you. I like walking. I get so little exercise."

(All right then, walk! Ill be damned if I ever ask you again!)

As she spoke her face grew suddenly flushed in the most extraordinary way so that Ransome wondered if speech with a man always affected her thus. He had put his foot on the clutch to start on his way to El- Kautara when she spoke again.

"It's funny," she said, "I was just thinking of you." Then she coughed and said, "Could I come and see you this afternoon?"

His first impulse was to make an excuse, but pity for her and curiosity checked him. Something about her made him feel suddenly very English. He was aware of the closeness of his blood to that of the grim spinster and he felt suddenly their loneliness in this rain-drenched town where nothing was what it seemed to be. He saw that both of them were in a way exiles from everything that touched them closely.

He said, "Of course. But I could save you the trouble. I could come to you."

But she objected quickly: "No. It had better be at your house. At home we wouldn't be alone..." Again she coughed: "You see, it's rather personal."

"All right ... as you like. What time? Will you come for tea?'*

"Yes. That will be fine. I couldn't get away from school before then."

"I'll expect you about five."

The flush went suddenly out of her face, leaving it the color of death. She said, "It's very kind of you. Good day," and awkwardly, abruptly she turned and went on her way.

The road toward Mount Abana was thick with mud, and beneath the new bridges built by the Swiss engineer the yellow water slid past with

only an inch or two of clearance. He thought, 'They should have been built with higher arches. If there was a flood they would only act as dams to the water."

Slowly as he drove along the road the great mountain appeared out of the rain, taking form above the flat plain like a gigantic pyramid. There were few pilgrims now that the rains had come, and the great stairway which led from the plain to the summit crowned with temples was no longer crowded with worshiping Jains from every part of India, going up and coming down in an endless pageant of color. At the top of the mountain in this season the priests were living a damp solitary existence a good life, thought Ransome, if it were not for all the other priests.

He was forced to drive slowly because of the thick mud and the danger of slipping off the road, but after two hours he arrived at the huge ruined gateway of El-Kautara. It was made of red sandstone and the elaborate Mogul carvings were half-hidden by the tangle of vines and small thrusting plants. It stood at the very base of the mountain, this dead and silent city, its thick walls surrounded by a wide ruined moat which had filled with water, so that for a moment he had an illusion of what the city must have been like in the days when its squares and mosques were filled with merchants and soldiers, courtesans and dancing girls, horses and elephants. But the illusion passed quickly. It was a dead and ruined place which the earth had begun to claim again as its own.

Among the ruins in the streets and squares a path had been cleared just wide enough for a motor to pass and along this Ransome drove slowly, avoiding the deep pools of water that stood here and there. In the courtyards and sometimes within the walls of palaces and houses wild fig trees and banyans had sprung up, cracking and thrusting aside the tiles that had been brought long ago from the north, from Delhi and Agra and Lahore.

As history went in India it was not an ancient city; it could not have been more than a hundred and fifty years since the last Mogul subject looked back for the last time at its deserted walls. But already it was lost, its history swallowed up. No one knew why it had been abandoned and allowed to die. India was like that, thought Ransome. It swallowed up everything, human ambition and faith, cities and conquerors, fame and glory. Only Akbar survived and his successors who, as time went in the

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East, had lived only yesterday. Asoka and the great Alexander and the rest were already legendary, half-man, half-god, like Rama and Krishna. In the empty courtyards the trees were hung with flying foxes waiting for nightfall to sweep in clouds across the plains toward Ranchipur. Again and again, where the fragment of a roof still remained, he caught a swift and sinister glimpse of a wild face framed with long greasy black hair peering at him from behind a ruined arch, and presently he came to have the feeling that as he drove along the empty streets he was being watched. They were the Bhils, the wild aboriginal people from the hills beyond Abana, who when the rains came sought the shelter of the ruined mosques and temples for their children and their goats.

At last in the great square before a huge ruined mosque he stopped the car and sat there for a long time, filled at last with a sense of peace, the sickness gone from him. In the solitude there was bitterness and a kind of sinister pleasure, for the spectacle said to him, "See! Here was once a rich and powerful city. It is gone now as all the others which followed it must go." It seemed to say to all the world the dictators, the politicians, the bankers, the "great men" of the world "See! This is what you must come to through greed and folly and evil! See! One day what you have built will fall and its ruins will be the haunt of bats and panthers and savages."

When she was dressed and everyone had gone away, even Bates, Edwina went into Esketh's room and sat for a long time, watching and thinking. She did not sit beside the bed but in a chair across the room, from which he appeared to her objectively, free from any bond of any kind. He did not stir when she came in and gave no sign of knowing that she was there. He simply lay bloated and heavy, his face swollen and more purple than it had been three hours earlier. Major Safti had told her that she should not enter the room until Esketh's illness had been properly diagnosed. If it were plague, he said, it would be dangerous for her. But she had no feeling about the danger because deep within her there was a consciousness, like the belief which some soldiers have in battle, that nothing would touch her. And she was by nature a gambler. If she was to have the plague, she would have it anyway.

She had been driven to return to the room by a kind of horrid f ascina-

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tion which Esketh, ill and unconscious, seemed to have for her. And because it gave her a perverse pleasure to look at him, helpless, downed, beaten for the first time. And while she sat there she thought: "There you are not the great swaggering Lord Esketh, boasting and bullying and buying what you want, but just plain, vulgar Albert Simpson, the son of a small building contractor in Liverpool, who got beyond himself. You've never done a good deed for anyone unless it brought you profit and glory. And you've ruined men and women who trusted you for the sake of power and money. Oh, you've given money to charities in large lumps well advertised in your newspapers, but it never cost you anything. You never missed it and it made people who didn't know you say you were generous, and it served to whitewash your character and cover up a lot of sculduggery and stifle the criticism of your enemies. You'd betray your own country if it would bring in another shilling or another ounce of power. Long ago you sold rifles and shells to Turks to kill at Gallipoli boys who came from your own country, men better than yourself who went off to their death while you stayed at home and made money out of the tragic needs of your own people and wrote wild leaders in your own papers to keep the war going. And now, only a fortnight ago in Delhi, you wrote a leader to be printed in all the Esketh papers that was certain to make ill feeling and bitterness and lead to more wars. It cost you a nice lot to cable it all the way from Delhi but that didn't matter because if there was a war you'd get back the money a billion times over. You didn't know that I read it first, but I did. There are so many things you don't know about me and what I know of you. Bates and I together could write a biography of you that would put you in jail or in an asylum for mad men. Oh, you're very shrewd , . . using your newspapers, your mines, your factories, your steamships, round and round in an endless chain, turning out profit for yourself at the expense of workman, of shareholders, of humanity itself. You've never had a friend that you didn't buy. You even bought your own wife and a bad bargain she was probably the worst bargain you ever made. What was it that happened long ago, perhaps when you were a small child, that made you want all those things for which you sacrificed everything decent? Were you thinking about all this long ago when you were selling cheap knives and watches in Malaya ? Who

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hurt you? Who put into your head the idea that all this power and all this money were the only things worth having in life? What made you think that you could buy things in life things like love and fidelity and respect and breeding? What are you like inside? What must it be like to be you ? What does it feel like to be so ruthless, so bitter, so alone, hating everybody who does not lick your boots? You'll never tell anyone because you don't know yourself how it feels. You've never known. You can't know, because you're like a man born with a horrible physical deformity who can never know what it is like to be fine and straight and young and beautiful. Your brain, your soul must have some horrible deformity which is all the worse because it cannot be seen. You must have been a horrible child grasping and calculating how to make money even out of your mother. But it's all destroyed you too. Because you're a finished man, Albert Simpson. The world is finished with you and you are sick of yourself and tired and worn down by the thing you built up with so much trickery and ambition. You're going to die in the India which you hate, of a loathsome disease; and no one will ever care, not one person in the world, not even your wife or your servant or the secretary you sent ahead to Bombay. That wonderful private railway carriage which you thought made you seem greater than other men will go back without you. Maybe your ashes will go home on that swift beautiful boat and maybe they won't. But you're finished. God-damn you! You'll never get out of that horrible bed alive, to sleep with me again like an animal. You'll never again shout at servants as if they were dogs. You'll never again make me ashamed in public that I ever knew you. You did something horrible to me, to my very soul. Oh, I let you do it because I was tired and didn't care, but you could have helped me a little. You might have seen what I needed oh, so little to have saved me, but you didn't see. You never had time. All you did was shove money at me. Well, you're finished. You're going to die and rot and in a few years nobody will remember who you were. You haven't even an heir to leave behind you. I'm glad that vile blood of yours won't go on living because I bore you a child. I'm glad I saw to that. You're finished and nobody cares. Go on, slobber and snore, like the gross animal you are. There were times when you thought you could break my pride and make me as coarse as yourself, but you never did. In the end I've won. Even last night I won

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when I sent you skulking out of my room. You hadn't any kindness or any morals or any ethics, so nobody could touch you but me. I knew you well enough to know where it would hurt, and you made me use my knowledge. You forced me to do it. I'm not sorry. I wish it had been more cruel. Oh, if you only knew how many times I'd betrayed you, and never once with a man who wasn't better than yourself kinder, warmer, more decent, more beautiful. Yes, and every one of them was a better lover than you. People grow to look like what they are, Albert. You were a hog and you've grown to look like a hog, lying there, snoring and slobbering in your own spittle. Well, you're going to die. This is the end of you; and the whole world even little 'brats in the streets of India and China will be happier and have a better life because you are dead."

And presently she felt a wild desire to cross the room and spit on him, but she did not do it because it occurred to her almost immediately that such a spectacle would only be extremely funny. "What's happened to me?" she thought. "Perhaps I'm going to be ill too. I shouldn't be here in this room. But even if I caught something, what difference would it make? I shouldn't care. Why should I suddenly care so profoundly about Albert's nastiness? Why should I be hysterical?"

Leaving him, she went back to her own room and threw herself down pn the bed, and in a moment she found that she was crying without making a sound. The tears streamed down her face and made a nasty little puddle on the pillow of pink crepe de Chine. She could not think why she was weeping; certainly it was neither for Esketh nor from fear of death. She had never been afraid of that, not half so afraid as she had been of growing old and losing the white smoothness of her skin and the shine of her blond hair. She could not remember having wept since she was a schoolgirl and now this was the same sort of weeping, from nerves, over nothing at all, a relaxing, satisfactory performance, touched by the same voluptuousness and melancholy.

"But I've never had nerves," she thought. "It must be this damned country and this damned climate the bloody rain and heat and boredom."

After a time she felt better and, sitting up, she took her mirror and looked at herself, a little shocked that her hair was in such disarray and her eyes so red and swollen. Looking at her reflection she thought,

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"Is that really me? It can't be/' for what she saw was a woman who was no longer elegant and smooth and beautiful, but a rather plain disheveled creature on the verge of middle age. And then in fright she put down the mirror.

"What if I should never escape? What if I should have to stay in this awful country forever? If my looks go what will I have to offer a man?" "No," she thought, "I must be quick. I must snatch everything while I can," And she wondered whether she looked to Major Safti as she had looked just now in the mirror. She had wanted to look her best because he was more attractive than she had remembered. But for him she would pack up and leave now. To hell with Albert! To hell even with the Major! She leaned across the little table to push the bell for the maid, to tell her to begin packing at once, but in the middle of the gesture she stopped herself. You couldn't do that, even to Albert.

Miss Dirks was late for tea, not because she had failed to leave the high school in plenty of time but because she had stopped a great deal on the way in shops, at the library and even at the museum where she pretended to be looking for some new Persian designs which the younger girls might use in their embroidery and water-color work. When she had first come to Ranchipur, people even Indians who are rarely astonished by anything had turned and looked after her in the street, not only because of her strange sexless appearance but because there was something about her which set her apart from other people, something direct and determined; duty was a master little known and scarcely recognized among Indians. But now they no longer noticed her because she had become a kind of fixture, like the statue of Queen Victoria on the middle buttress of the Zoological Gardens bridge.

It was not an easy thing for her to do this going to have tea with Ransome. A half-dozen times she very nearly lost her courage and would have turned back save that her sense of obligation amounted to an obsession. She had engaged herself for tea and Mr. Ransome was waiting for her to arrive and in order not to fail him she would have passed through fire and water, battle and plague.

For the first time in twenty-five years she was calling on a European and for the first time in her life she was calling on a man. A year or

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two earlier, when she felt strong as a horse, it would have been easier for her, but now when she was weak and tired there were moments as she walked through the rain when she felt a strange animal desire to crawl into a thicket of bamboo and quietly die, alone, leaving the world to deal with all the troubles which tormented her, to lie down and quit like a faithful old horse who could not go one step further. As she trudged along in her heavy boots the temptation became an obsession, the kind of luxury which one would encounter only in heaven. And her weariness seemed too to drag her back and back across all the years of isolation into her childhood as if she were already a very old woman, so ancient that she forgot what happened yesterday and remembered only those things which had occurred when she was very young. She wasn't any longer Miss Sarah Dirks, distinguished and able head-mistress of the Maharani's High School for Girls who had done an extraordinary job under the most discouraging circumstances, but plain awkward Sally Dirks, daughter of the Nolham draper, going to the castle to help at the annual bazaar for the benefit of the orphanage.

At the prospect of having tea with Ransome the same vague awe and confusion filled the heart of this tired woman of fifty which had filled the same heart at the age of seventeen. It all returned to her with remarkable clearness, the whole picture of the castle, the great lawn with the little booths all about it and the showers which always interrupted the gayeties, and in the midst of the scene Ransome's mother, Lady Nolham, all in lace with a big picture hat, moving about fussily and aimlessly, always in spite of everything a stranger, greeting the townspeople. She could remember too the figure of the child of three or four who clung to her hand, a good-looking child with dark curly hair, the youngest of the family, who had grown up into Tom Ransome.

It was absurd, she told herself, that she should be upset at the prospect of calling upon a man who was young enough to be her son. She tried to argue herself out of the feeling but in spite of every argument she still felt herself to be what she had been at seventeen, pale, unattractive and shy, the daughter of the village draper permitted inside the grounds of the Castle on the occasion of the annual bazaar and horticultural show. For three hundred years the people of the Castle had looked after the people of the village conscientiously and well.

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At five-thirty she arrived at last, her heart beating wildly to find Ransome waiting for her on the verandah, drinking brandy. "He looks like his father," she thought. "But his drinking is beginning to tell." She thought he looked tired and middle-aged. The drinking probably came from his mother. In the last letter she ever had from Nolham her sister had written that Lady Nolham (so she had heard) was unhappy and drank secretly.

For a moment it seemed to her that she had not the strength to climb the five steps to the verandah, not only because she felt tired and ill but because she was bearing the weight of a whole flood of new memories, which had come rushing back to her at sight of him.

He was very kind to her and put an extra cushion into the deep chair when he had taken her mackintosh. He did it gracefully and with sincerity of feeling. "They were always great gentlemen/' she thought. He did it just as his father would have done. She could remember old Lord Nolham well, coming into her father's shop to pass the time of day. He too had had that same quiet look of desperation. He was, she remembered, a very handsome man who wore side-whiskers like Lord Lonsdale.

She said, "I hope I haven't been a nuisance, coming in like this?" and at the sound of her own voice she felt her confidence returning a little.

He laughed pleasantly, showing very white teeth, and it struck her that it was a pity so handsome a young man should apparently be set upon destroying himself by dissipation.

"I've nothing to do," he said; "I never have. After all, life in Ranchipur is very simple, especially when you have nothing to do like me."

John the Baptist appeared with the tea, silent, but observing everything out of his large dark ox-eyes, and Miss Dirks said, "Shall I pour it?'*

"Please. No, I won't have any."

She poured her own tea, her big bony hands shaking with weakness and excitement. "I heard that you painted," she said; and again he laughed: "No, not really. I haven't any talent. I do it to kill time."

It was not easy at first. There were little halts and pauses, and he discovered that in her shyness Miss Dirks had developed a stammer which made it difficult sometimes to understand what she was saying. It was awkward because they were both waiting for something Miss Dirks

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to tell the reason for her visit, and Ransome to discover what it was. They talked of the rains and the cholera, of the school and the Maharajah's impending departure, and after a time Ransome began to feel that weariness which came over him when he talked with people who were not frank but held back a part of themselves. It always gave him a sense of fencing with a shadowy opponent, of trying to find something which he knew was there but could not find. All the while Miss Dirks sat bolt upright, with an air of authority, as if she were conducting a class. He noticed that now and then the muscles of her face would contract with sudden harshness and she would grow deathly pale.

John the Baptist returned presently to take away the tea things and then Miss Dirks plunged.

She said, "How long has it been since you last saw Nolham?"

At the mention of the name he put down his brandy glass suddenly:

"Nolham? Oh, ten years at least. What do you know about Nolham?"

"Do you remember Mr. Dirks, the draper?"

"Old 'Dacy' Dirks? Of course I do. Oh, I see. You're some relation?"

"I'm his daughter. He only had two children. My sister still lives in Nolham and keeps the shop."

The thing was done now, the barrier broken down and she felt suddenly free. All at once it was as if they were old friends, and Miss Dirks felt a wild desire to cry.

"Why didn't you ever tell me before?"

"Well, you see, I scarcely knew you. I couldn't think that it mattered very much, really. I thought it would be ..." She hesitated miserably and then said, "I thought it would seem presumptuous."

"You should have told me. I never connected the names yours and Nolham, I mean. I never thought of it. You see, your father died when I was still a boy and I haven't been back to Nolham since my brother succeeded."

"My father has been dead twenty-one years this autumn."

"That's right. I must have been about eighteen. I remember the funeral. I went to it with my father. I was home on leave."

"Yes, he died after I came out here."

"What do you hear from Nolham?"

A shadow crossed the grim face of Miss Dirks. "I don't hear much,"

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she said. "You see, I've rather gotten out of the habit of writing home. I haven't had a letter for a good many years." After twenty-five years, she still thought of Nolham, with its green common and the little river full of reeds alongside, as home. India was still "out here."

"I know," he said. "One does lose contact. It's been three or four years since I've had any news from there. The last was from Banks, the estate agent, about some things my father left me."

"Not old Morgan Banks? He's not still alive?"

"No, his nephew... you remember, the red-headed one."

They were getting on now. Miraculously, suddenly, they had slipped back into the ancient relationship from which they had both broken away so long ago. Nothing had really changed that feeling between Castle and Village. It was exactly the same as if neither of them had ever left Nolham and they had met now by chance in the Peacock Tea Room instead of on the verandah of a house in Ranchipur.

They talked about characters in the town, about the changes which had taken place since they both had left. There was something in her eagerness which made him feel inexpressibly sad. She flushed and grew excited and at last she confessed, "You don't know how I sometimes longed to talk with you about Nolham, but I couldn't get up my courage. You see Elizabeth that's Miss Hodge had never seen Nolham. She comes from Birmingham. She's city bred. She'd never understand what Nolham was like."

He had quite forgotten that she had come to see him about a matter which was "personal" until she grew suddenly rather stern again and said, "But that wasn't really what I came for. It was to talk about something else to talk about Major Safti, to be exact."

"He's a great friend of mine."

"Well. That's just it. You see I've been ill for several months." She flushed and added, "I may have to have an operation. I wanted to know about him."

"There's no better surgeon in India."

Again a wave of color came over her face: "I didn't mean that. I know that. I meant what kind of a man is he?"

Then slowly the preposterousness of what she was seeking struck him-

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He felt a ribald desire to laugh and managed to translate it into a re- assuring smile.

"Oh, he's a fine gentleman," he said, "one of the finest I've ever known. Charming and human too." And in order to make it clear he added, "He's immensely understanding and his attitude toward things like that is absolutely scientific and professional."

"Then you'd advise me to go to him?"

"I should think he was the one man in all India to go to. You needn't feel shy with him. He won't make you feel shy."

(My God! Now I'm becoming adviser to old maids with female complaints.)

"Well," said Miss Dirks, "I must say I've never heard anything against him. It was only that he was Indian. I've never gotten over feeling that Indians are a little strange."

"He's the same race as you and I. Even his eyes are blue."

"I know ... I know," said Miss Dirks, "but they always seem different."

He had thought that she meant to leave but she remained, slipping off again, temporizing, talking about his garden and John the Baptist. At last she said, "That wasn't all I wanted to ask you. There was another thing... about Miss Hodge."

"If I can help in any way, I'll be delighted."

The color rushed back again into Miss Dirks' face: "You see, we've been friends for a great many years and she has come to be dependent upon me rather too dependent. She doesn't even think for herself any more except" she hesitated for a moment and then plunged "except in moments of rebellion; and at such times she hasn't any judgment or balance. She's like someone who tries to get up and walk for the first time after having been in bed for years." She fumbled with the worn handbag in her lap and looked away from him: "Lately she's been getting worse. You see at times it seems almost as if she were a little... well, unbalanced." She hurried on as if she were forcing herself: "You see, I've lost touch with all my friends and relations at home and the same thing has happened to her. What I'm worried about is if I should have to have an operation and anything should happen to me."

Tears rose suddenly to her eyes, but they did not fall. It was the

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gnawing pain and the weakness which made her cry. With a terrible effort she stopped the tears almost before they had begun to flow. Ransome, listening, thought, "If only she could say all that is in her heart. If only once she could let herself go." But it was too late now. She, like Miss Hodge, was paralyzed, but in a different way.

"You see," she went on, "if anything did happen to me, Elizabeth would be left all alone in the world. Whatever money I have, I'm leaving to her. It isn't much but it's enough to make her comfortable a little I've saved and what my sister paid me for my share of the shop in Nolham. You see, there were only two of us and my father left it to us jointly. My sister . . , she married Tom Atwood, son of the chemist. Maybe you remember."

"Of course. Perfectly."

"Well, she wanted to buy my share, so I sold it to her. But to get back to the point ... I can't think of Elizabeth being left out here all alone. She's so nervous and flighty. You see, what I wanted to ask you about was finding someone who might act as a kind of trustee for her to look after the money and see that she didn't get into some scrape or other. I came to you because you were the only possible person. It isn't only that we really don't know anyone out here, but you were the only one I could think of who might understand. If anything happened to me, I'd prefer to have Elizabeth go back to England. I hope it's not too presumptuous ... I hope..."

Ransome said, "I couldn't do it myself. I'm not what you'd call a responsible person. And I might clear out and leave Ranchipur for good at any time, but I could ask the family solicitor to take the responsibility. He'd do it for me and then you could be sure that her income would always be safe."

Again the tears rose for an instant in the clear blue eyes: "That's so good of you. You don't know what a relief it is. You see, I feel responsible for Elizabeth. I feel as if it were my fault, as if I'd brought her out here where she's lost touch with everyone at home. I was always the strongest and I've always had wonderful health. I never thought that something would happen to me first. I never thought that anything like this would happen. It's very kind of you. It makes everything much easier."

"You can trust him. He'll know exactly what to do."

"Some of the money is at Lloyd's in Bombay and the rest is at home in England. There's enough here to get her safely back." Again she hesitated for a moment: "Of course it's not all as simple as that. If anything did happen to me, it's quite possible that it would throw Elizabeth completely off her balance, for a time anyway. I was wondering if you could look out for her and see that she was treated kindly and got back to England all right I know I'm asking a great deal, but I didn't know who to turn to. I worried about it for a long time and then I thought of Nolham..."

He said, "I'm sure that there's no need to think about anything happening to you. I'm sure everything will be all right, especially with the Major. You can trust him."

He divined what it was she thought although she never quite said it, perhaps because she did not understand it quite clearly and had not the words to express it. In her extremity she had gone back to her roots, to a system, a civilization which had almost vanished, from which both of them had cut loose long ago; she had come up from the Village to find help at the Castle, and ironically she had come to him, the one member of the family who had revolted and refused to accept the responsibility. He was pleased that she had come to him and at the same time he was ashamed of the half-feudal pleasure he found in it. It was at once warming and deceptive to be thrust suddenly into the patriarchal position of the Lord of the Manor. And he thought suddenly of his grandmother at home in her great turreted house in Grand River, seeing her in the same circumstances, accepting the responsibility of Miss Hodge and of helping poor Miss Dirks, not as something medieval but as something simple and human. If she were only here now there was so much that she could do to help these two poor lonely old maids which he could never do because he was a man and because, in spite of everything, neither he nor they could ever quite forget the relationship of the Castle to the Village.

"I think now," she was saying, "that perhaps we were wrong in living so much apart. Sometimes Elizabeth did want to call on people and ask people to tea, but in the end, somehow, we never did it and so now we really don't know anyone /'

While she was speaking his mind slipped quickly and naturally from his grandmother to Aunt Phoebe and from Aunt Phoebe to the Smileys, and then he saw exactly the course to take. The Smileys were precisely the ones to care for Miss Hodge if anything happened to Miss Dirks. One more burden he knew, would scarcely be noticed by them. And they would do it simply and kindly, as if Miss Hodge were a neighbor just across the street who had fallen ill. He found himself saying, "Maybe it's not too late. Maybe it would be a good idea to have Miss Hodge come to know some of the nice people." He saw that she winced a little as he said "nice people," but he went on: "I'm sure nothing is going to happen to you, but if it did, then she wouldn't find herself quite alone. Maybe it would be a good idea if I gave a tea party. Would you come and bring Miss Hodge?"

She did not answer him at once, for she was struggling again with the terror and paralysis which attacked her whenever the question of human contacts arose. At last she said, "That would be very nice of you." And then the seamed harsh face went white: "But I'm afraid it's impossible. You see there are so many people who wouldn't come if they knew we were going to be there."

"Oh, I'm sure that you imagine that."

She looked at him direcdy, searchingly, as if judging whether he would understand what she had to say and then, like Fern Simon, she found in his face something which gave her courage and she plunged: "You see, some of the people here have spread nasty stories about Miss Hodge and me."

He smiled, "Oh, I hadn't meant to ask those people. I never see them myself. I had meant to ask friends of mine the Smileys and Mrs. Smiley's aunt and Miss MacDaid and Major Safti and maybe Raschid AH Khan and his wife. Raschid might be very useful to Miss Hodge."

The whiteness left her face and she hesitated for a moment on account, he knew, of the Indians. Then she said, "Yes, that would be very nice. And then perhaps we could give a party too at home. I think that would make Elizabeth quite happy. For years she's wanted people to see the house and how very attractive she's made it."

"Very well, then. I'll do it. I'll let you know what day I can get them all together."

She rose now and took up the mackintosh, and when he helped her with it he saw that she was trembling from head to foot with the effort the visit had cost her:

"And I'll speak to my friend the Major about an examination. I know hell see you whenever you like. You needn't be afraid of him. He's a kind man and very understanding."

"That would be very good of you. You've helped me so much today."

"It wasn't much I've done. We must have another talk soon about Nolham. It's made me homesick." And he knew at once that he had said the wrong thing because he had raised up for her a picture of the little town which her spirit had never left and her body would never see again. She choked and said, "Yes, sometimes I get very homesick for the common and the river and my father's shop."

She would not let him drive her home but went alone down the drive into the rain, leaving him with his brandy and soda; and when she had gone out of sight he himself returned to Nolham which had come back to him with extraordinary vividness. Talking about old "Dacy" Dirks and Morgan Bates and Tom Atwood, the chemist, had suddenly peopled the common, the square, the "pub," with figures, alive and moving about within that frame which none of them had ever left. It was far enough away now for him to forget the things he had hated the awful patronizing Victorian qualities of his father, the arrogance and snobbery of his older brother, the bewildered unhappiness of his ineffectual mother whose money it was that kept Nolham intact, the quality of lifeless, paralyzing artificiality which he always felt on his return from the easy freedom of Grand River all that rigid feeling of caste which he found even in the scullery. All these things seemed unimportant now and, sentimentally, he saw only the virtues of a system into which he had never fitted the stability, the peace, the sense of obligation accepted alike by Castle and Village. But even that was already going. They were represented by a Socialist M. P. and bit by bit the land had been sold until there remained only one or two farms and the vast useless park which surrounded the castle. Even his mother's American fortune, dug long ago by his grandfather out of the hills of Nevada, was not enough to preserve it.

Out of all the figures from his boyhood old "Dacy" Dirks the draper

emerged the clearest of all, perhaps because there had always been about him a sinister quality almost of menace, standing in the doorway of his shop, clad in the unchanging long-skirted coat and white tie, looking angrily across the little square toward the "Hare and the Jug" where so many fine young men were being ruined. "It was extraordinary," Ransome thought, "how well I divined, on that day at Mr. Jobnekar's, the background out of which Miss Dirks had come divined it without even so much as a hint."

Old "Dacy" belonged to the Plymouth Brethren and in his household there was never any fun. The rooms back of the shop where "Dacy" and his family lived must have been as dreary and sunless as the shop itself. On the Sabbath there was never anything but the Bible. His daughters never saw any boys their own age and they were taught that all men save "Dacy" were predatory creatures and that love was an unfortunate necessity like going to the privy in the back garden. Out of that Miss Dirks had stumbled only a little way, crippled and hampered, to die at last in India on the other side of the world from green quiet Nolham, having never known any pleasure save the grim tyrannical satisfaction of having done her duty.

For she was going to die. He knew while she sat there talking to him that he had entertained at tea a woman who was already dead. He was wrong only in the supposition that she herself did not know it.

As Miss Hodge hurried through the rain across the square by the cinema it struck her as extraordinary that Sarah had made no comment on the fact that she had worn her new foulard to teach in all the afternoon. It was quite possible that she had not noticed, for there were so many things that escaped her lately; still, the new foulard which she had bought two years ago at the Army and Navy store in Bombay and worn only three times, once to the Maharani's Durbar and twice on school prize- days... No, it was extraordinary and very lucky.

When Miss Dirks left her on the square before the cinema, saying she had some errands to do and would not be home before six. Miss Hodge had continued craftily on her way past the tank in the direction of the Engineering School until her friend was out of sight. Then abruptly,

like a redskin, she had doubled back on her tracks and turned into the street which led through the bazaar.

She was having one o her "waves" when she was filled with defiance of Sarah, a "wave" so violent that she had even dared to put on the new foulard which might have betrayed her. But really, she told herself, she did not care. If it had come to a show-down she would have faced Sarah down and gone anyway. She was not a child and she was certainly not Sarah's slave. And she was sick of never seeing anyone but Sarah when Ranchipur was so full of interesting people.

From the bazaar she turned through the street by the mosque and presently she came to the gate of the old Summer Palace which she entered, passing between two beautiful Sikhs in red and gold whom she had never seen before, and walked up the streaming drive to the palace. Halfway to the portico she forgot her excitement in a wave of shyness and confusion, confronted by a problem which she had never faced before. How did you call on someone who was living in a palace? At the Durbar it was simple enough. You just found your place in line and walked in. But an informal visit like this, just a dropping-in... drop- ping in on a palace was not easy. Did you knock or ring? Or were you announced? For a moment she was tempted to turn and run but, knowing that if she stood much longer making up her mind she would be soaked through, she went as far as the shelter of the forte cochere, and there a decision was thrust upon her when a servant, wearing the purple and gold livery of the Maharajah, spied her and salaaming deeply asked what he could do for the memsahib.

Flushing and trembling she advanced up the steps, and opening her bag to find her cards her hands shook so violently that she dropped the bag and its contents spilled over the floor. When the servant returned the bag to her she found the cards, and gathering her courage gave them to him and said, "Lady Esketh, please!"

She had not used a card in twenty-five years, and when the idea of "branching out" came to her she thought of the cards she had had printed long ago at Stebbins' in Birmingham, and remembered exactly where she had put them in the teakwood chest along with her diaries and some essays about the Dominions for which she had won a prize at the age of seventeen. But when she opened the chest she discovered to her

dismay that the cards were yellowed and mildewed by the damp of twenty-five Indian monsoons. Luckily they had been placed neatly in layers in a cardboard box so that the ones near the center were fresher than those on the outside and from among those, when she had gone through the lot, she found two that were quite presentable, free from mildew and only a little yellowed around the edges. They looked almost as if they had been made that way "Ivory white," she thought, "shading into white." They read, "Miss Elizabeth Hodge, Heathedge School," but neatly crossing off Heathedge School she wrote instead, "Assistant Principal, The Maharani's High School for Girls, Ranchipur."

She hadn't seen Heathedge School since that awful time when she and Sarah were asked mysteriously to resign, and the sight of the name brought back to her the shadow of that faint, sickish feeling she had known after Miss Hillyer, the principal, dismissed them both from her study. Even now she was not quite sure why they had been asked to go and Sarah had never really explained it to her, telling her not to ask silly questions but to keep her dignity and not try to stay where she was not wanted. The sickish feeling passed off quickly because all that had happened long ago and was finished and the exciting thing was that she meant to call upon Lady Esketh.

Even as she sat in the big reception room near the door of the palace it did not occur to her that Lady Esketh might be out or that she might not receive her, because Miss Hodge, from long years of solitary existence imposed by circumstance upon a naturally sociable nature, had come to live a large part of the time in an imaginary world in which she had the most extraordinary adventures. There were, for example, occasions when she hobnobbed with duchesses and bishops, when she constructed scenes and conversations in which she was charming and made a vivid impression upon the most distinguished and fashionable personages. After she left, the bishop would turn to the duchess and say, "Who was that intelligent and well-informed woman who knew so much about India?" and there were long dialogues full of "I said" and "then the Duchess said to me." So that now, sitting there while the servant took up her cards, she had no misgivings. She had lived through the whole call from beginning to end and knew exactly how it would be. And the room itself gave her confidence, with its turkey red carpet and its plush upholstered furniture,

the mildewed invisible landscapes in huge gilded frames, the palms on stands of teakwood. It was all, she thought, exactly like St. Mary's Assembly Rooms in Birmingham.

Lady Esketh had had lunch in bed curried lamb and rather soggy potatoes and wooden carrots in cream sauce, a very pallid and pasty pudding, fapaia that tasted like a rather poor cantaloup, and weak coffee. Since she left her husband's room nothing whatever had happened save the arrival of the nurse, a plain dark Goanese woman with Portuguese blood who spoke a kind of curious phonetic English with a lisping accent a woman, she felt sure, who was a suffocating bore, and was called Miss de Souza which sounded like the name of an American show-girl at the Palladium. The boy whom she sent to Ransome's house to fetch books had simply vanished into the rain, and in desperation she had tried reading in turn India Revealed, The Problem of the Empire and The Indian Muddle which Bates brought her from Esketh's room, but in the end she abandoned each of them because none of them seemed to tell what she wanted to know. They did not tell her what Indians were really like but only what some Anglo-Saxon professor thought they should be; and there was an incredible amount of statistics which to her detached and uncomplicated mind seemed to prove nothing at all except that India wasn't such a good investment any longer. And each writer, so far as she could see, seemed to contradict all the others. Each had his own theory of what was the trouble with India.

When in turn she had thrown the books on the floor in disgust, she tried for a time to sleep simply in order to kill the dragging hours; but that was no good either and after an hour she rose and began to walk up and down the room, thinking, "Now I understand why animals in the zoo pace back and forth." From the window one had a monotonous view of the small park which surrounded the palace, simply a vista of trees, vines and shrubs beaten down by the rain, nothing save greedy vegetation without even a glimpse of a coolie or a dhobi to provide animation and distraction. And suddenly she was aware that the mere effort of walking up and down the room had filled her with a feeling of suffocation. She, who never perspired and always appeared cool and elegant, was dripping with sweat.

At about five o'clock she called her maid and dressed, filled with a desire to do something, no matter what, if only to go out and walk up and down the streets of Ranchipur in the rain. And she could spend money, which was always what she did when bored, only she could remember having seen nothing in the bazaars of Ranchipur which she wanted to buy. When she tried to remember what was there she could only think of things made of imitation silk and bolts of cotton cloth and cheap silver ornaments, and jade of no value. And anyway she had no proper clothes. What she needed in such a downpour was oilskins and men's boots and all she had was a fragile raincoat of oiled silk and sports shoes from Greco. The maid fetched them, protesting, but Lady Esketh remained firm in her decision. Even if she had to go naked into the streets, something which she would not much have minded doing, she had to escape the throbbing monotony of these dull Victorian rooms. She was so bored that it seemed to her she could feel every nerve in the complicated network which ran through her body.

And then just as she was ready to go out a servant brought in two cards, both of which read, "Miss Elizabeth Hodge, Assistant Principal, The Maharani's High School for Girls." For a moment she stared at the cards in indecision and then she thought, "Why not? It might be funny. Anyway it's better than nothing." And she asked the servant to bring Miss Hodge up to her sitting room, and when he had gone she felt a faint sense of excitement. "If Tom is going to behave like a bore," she thought, "then I'll launch out for myself."

She told her maid to ask for tea.

When she entered the room Miss Hodge was sitting on the edge of a plush sofa, plump and dowdy in her Army and Navy Stores foulard, examining with her near-sighted eyes the furniture, the pictures, the fantastic collection of bric-a-brac which had found its way somehow from the four quarters of the earth into the old summer palace. At the sound of the opening door she got up quickly and came forward, blushing and trembling.

"I'm Miss Hodge," she said, "from the Girl's High School." Edwina answered, "How d'you do? I'm Lady Esketh. Do sit down." "Yes," said Miss Hodge, sitting down, well forward on the sofa, "Fve

seen you once or twice in your motor. I'd have recognized you anywhere from your pictures." She coughed, and then: "I hope I haven't been a nuisance, dropping in this way, informally. But it occurred to me as I was walking home from the school this afternoon that you might want to meet some English people. I know the guests of His Highness don't often see any of the English colony and I said to myself, 'Perhaps Lady Esketh would like to see the other side of Ranchipur.' " It was a speech which she had rehearsed again and again walking through the rain and now it came out with astonishing glibness, all in one breath, like a poem recited by a small child.

"That's very kind of you," said Edwina. "As a matter of fact I was just dressed to go out..." Miss Hodge started up as if to leave at once. "Oh, don't think you kept me in. I was only going out because I was dreadfully bored and there wasn't anything else to do."

"Perhaps I should have written you a note."

"I think it's very kind of you to have thought of me at all."

Miss Hodge fumbled with her bag, uncertain of what to say next, and then the weather occurred to her. "I suppose," she said, "that this is the first time you've ever seen a monsoon."

"Yes, you see it's the first time I've ever been to India."

"I suppose you find it very interesting?"

Edwina was about to say, "No, I think it's deadly," when she understood that she must not say this to Miss Hodge. You might say it to people at dinner in London or to Indian generals or even to the Viceroy himself, but not to Miss Hodge, to whom India must be everything in life everything. So she said, "Yes, but I've seen too little of it. It might be interesting if I knew it better. But that seems to be very difficult."

"I suppose," interrupted Miss Hodge, "you've seea the waterworks. They're the finest in India. They..."

"Yes, and the asylum and the jail and the distillery... but that isn't quite what I mean. I'd really like to see Indians and know how they live and what they think and what they're like inside." And as she spoke she was thinking of Major Safti. In the boredom of the long afternoon she had thought a great deal about him. And in the middle of the speech she felt a desire to laugh at the spectacle of Miss Hodge and herself,

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thinking, "It's a good thing she can't see into my inside and discover that she's calling upon Messalina."

The first impulse of Miss Hodge was to say, "Well, I must say I've never been able to fathom Indians myself. I don't know any more about them than on the first day I came here twenty-five years ago"; but from somewhere out of the shadows appeared an unsuspected Miss Hodge who was an opportunist, one of those unsuspected Miss Hodges which were always stealing up on her to take possession of her body and make her say things which astonished her. The unsuspected Miss Hodge said, "Well, perhaps I could be able to help you. You see, we see a good deal of the families of the girls at the school Miss Dirks and I, she's the principal and a great friend of mine. We've been here for twenty-five years, so naturally we've come to know a good deal about Indians how they live and what they think and what they're like inside."

"Twenty-five years? How interesting! I suppose you do go home now and then."

"No, we've never been home." And Miss Hodge slipped from reality into one of those conversations which she was perpetually having with the duchesses and bishops in the bathtub and in bed at night. "We've meant to go home several times, but at the last moment we never seem able to manage it. It seems impossible to tear yourself away, once the Orient gets into your blood. It's very fascinating ... so strange and different and colorful."

(And then the bishop would turn to the duchess and say, "Who is that interesting woman who seems to know so much about India?")

"I think you're very lucky," said Lady Esketh, "to know it the way you do. All I've seen is official dinners and waterworks. I've met a few Indians... your Mr. Raschid and a doctor . , . Major Safti."

"Oh, yes, of course," said Miss Hodge, "a charming man and a wonderful surgeon. We're very lucky to have him here in Ranchipur."

"He came to see my husband this morning. He's ill, you know."

"Since last night?" asked Miss Hodge, for all Ranchipur knew already that the Eskeths had dined at the palace and what had been said and what hour they left. "Since you dined at the palace?"

"Yes, it's some sort of fever."

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"Dear me, I hope it's nothing serious. There are so many awful diseases out here... horrible diseases we never dream of at home."

Edwina thought, "I hope it's as serious and horrible as possible. I hope he has the most loathsome of the lot," And again she felt an almost hysterical desire to laugh.

Aloud she said, "Major Safti doesn't know just yet quite what it is. We'd planned to go to Bombay tonight but now no one seems to know when we'll be able to leave."

In her plump breast Miss Hodge's heart leapt. Perhaps Lady Esketh wouldn't be able to leave for weeks. Perhaps they would come to know each other very well. She was so charming and made you feel so at home. Perhaps... anything might happen...

"Yes," she said, "sometimes they last for months."

"In that case I should certainly leave and go back to England," thought Edwina. Aloud she said, "It would be very kind of you to show me about. Fd love to see your house and go to the school and meet some of the Indians you know."

"Of course a good many of them don't speak English at all."

"Then you speak their language?"

"Yes," said Miss Hodge modesdy, "I speak Hindustani, of course, and a little Gujerati. You see, Hindustani is a sort of universal language in India and Gujerati is the language of the people of Ranchipur."

"How very clever of you."

Then a sudden silence fell between them and Miss Hodge felt all at once like a whale stranded on a beach, struggling and wallowing helplessly, and even Edwina felt that the possibilities of conversation were somewhat limited. She had not been on her good behavior like this for years and the effort was a little exhausting. It was like opening a bazaar at Barbury House. She was aware that her caller had a way of running into conversational blind alleys and bumping her head against a wall. Yet she was interested, far more interested than she could have believed possible. Sitting opposite the dowdy little figure in foulard, it seemed to her suddenly that Miss Hodge was quite as strange to her as an Indian. She had not the faintest idea how Miss Hodge lived or what she thought or what she was like inside under the badly made-up face. And, watching her, the envy of small serene orderly lives, which she had felt for

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a moment on the night before, returned to her now more strongly than ever. Miss Hodge probably lived in a house like a bird's nest and every day for her had a wonderful monotony of peace. Out of the vast and spectacular disorder of her own existence it occurred to her that it might be very pleasant to be Miss Hodge for a little while.

A boy brought tea which fell like rain upon the conversational desert.

"Won't you have a cigarette?" asked Lady Esketh, holding out a case of ribbed platinum and gold, and Miss Hodge who had never smoked in her life took a cigarette because she could not do otherwise. It was as if she were under a compulsion. The sober Miss Hodge of the class room was dead and vanished. But when she took the cigarette she felt suddenly confused and helpless and laid it on the table, saying, "I'll have it when I've finished."

"I like to smoke with my tea," said Lady Esketh. "I love the taste of smoke with bread and butter," and she apologized for the tea, saying, "I suppose one really only has good tea in an English household."

"I'd love to make you a good cup of tea," said Miss Hodge, "with very thin bread and butter. We have lovely bread. It's baked for us by one of the girls. She learned how from Mrs. Smiley... that's the wife of one of the American missionaries."

"Perhaps you'd let me come to tea with you some day," said Lady Esketh; "I haven't had a bit of decent bread since I've been in India."

Miss Hodge heard herself saying, "Oh, would you come? Fd be delighted."

It all happened without her knowing how it had come about and before the words were well out of her mouth she remembered Miss Dirks and was terrified. But beneath the spell of Lady Esketh the terror slipped away quickly. It was like something out of a fairy tale. After all those years of wanting people to see how nice and cozy she had made the bungalow, of wanting them to see what a lovely tea she could serve, it happened at last, and with Lady Esketh! Suddenly nothing mattered, not even facing Sarah.

"And I hope you'll let me come one day very soon," Lady Esketh was saying; and Miss Hodge, still enchanted, found herself saying, "Any day you like, Lady Esketh."

"I could come tomorrow or Friday."

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Cornered now and in desperation Miss Hodge said, "Perhaps Friday would be best. You see Thursday is prize day at the school and we shouldn't be home until quite late," Anyway Friday would be one day further off. It would give her one more day to appease Sarah.

"Yes. Friday would be fine."

The tea was finished now and it was clear to Miss Hodge that it was time for her to leave, but in her excitement and her fear of Miss Dirks she could not seem to pull herself together and think how to bring the conversation to an end and make a graceful exit. Edwina, aware that her caller was uncertain of how to make a getaway, made more effort and asked questions about the school, about the English colony, about the Maharani, so that the conversation became a kind of cross-examination of Miss Hodge. Presently as Lady Esketh began to feel completely exhausted, there was a knock at the door and her maid appeared to say, "The doctor is here again, me lady"; and Miss Hodge, seizing the in- terruption with a sudden relief, rose and said, "Well, I think I had better leave now. I must be getting home."

Edwina, a gracious mechanical Edwina, said, "It was very kind of you to think of me."

"Then we'll expect you on Friday, about five."

"That's right," said Edwina. "And we must arrange to meet some Indians... real Indians I mean, not the kind who have been to Oxford."

"Yes... yes," said Miss Hodge; "I'll arrange that," But how she would arrange it, she had no idea.

"Good-by."

"Good-by." And Miss Hodge, trembling and blushing, backed out of thje door. There wasn't any way out now. She would have to face Sarah. Anyway she had escaped having to smoke the cigarette. It still lay on the table. Lady Esketh, it seemed, had not even noticed it.

Despite the rain Miss Hodge took the long way home, going all the way round by the Untouchable quarter instead of through the bazaars, It did not matter to her now whether her foulard was ruined. She had seen Lady Esketh and talked to her in the flesh and she was coming to tea at the bungalow Lady Esketh of whom she had read week after week in "Court and Society" since Lady Esketh was a little girl going

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to Windsor to stay with her godmother, the good old queen. She had been kind and friendly and talked to her just the same as if she had been one of the neighbors back in Agatha Terrace in Birmingham. "No/ 5 Miss Hodge kept assuring herself, "there's nothing in the world quite so splendid as an English gentlewoman.'*

She was no longer sick of Ranchipur. She no longer minded the heat and the rain and the monotony. At last something had happened to her, something that was like the wild dreams she had at the sight of the Sikhs and the sound of their music. Now that she had "branched out" everything would be changed. The lives of Miss Dirks and herself would become interesting and the bungalow would always be filled with distinguished and fascinating people. In the end Sarah would thank her for having shown so much initiative. Anyway what Sarah really needed was a change. That was all that was the matter with her she'd been queer and solitary for too long. Think of it, having Lady Esketh come to tea just like anyone.

And as she walked she began to live out the whole tea party, seeing herself pouring tea while Sarah sat by, charmed with the graciousness of Lady Esketh. And Sarah would be able to talk in a much more interesting fashion than herself. She would simply sit by as the hostess. And cigarettes... she must not forget to buy cigarettes tomorrow in the bazaar. She would put on the best lace tablecloth and have the thinnest bread with fresh buffalo butter, and serve the whole thing on the East India Company china. Sarah would say it was too precious but she would get round Sarah. She'd wash it herself afterward instead of leaving it to the girls.

Then as she turned into Engineering School Road something of the first excitement deserted her suddenly, leaving her cold and a little alarmed. Perhaps it was the sight of the familiar rows of pepper trees, the walls, the bungalows, the Indian Club, all saying to her as she passed them, "You're going home. You are going to have to face Sarah. Every step is bringing you a little nearer. How are you going to tell her?"

As she stepped on to the verandah she saw that Sarah was already home. Through the doorway she saw her seated at her worktable, reading and marking the prize-day essays on "What I like about Ranchipur." When she had hung up her mackintosh and her hat in the entry she

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walked into the room, trying to behave as if nothing had happened. Sarah, looking up from her work, said, "Where on earth have you been?"

She had meant to say, 'Tve been calling on Lady Esketh," and take the wind out of Sarah's sails at once, but she found herself saying, "Just for a walk"; and then a little defiantly, "I get so tired being shut up here all the time."

"But you're soaked through."

"Oh, that's nothing."

"Just the same, go at once and have a bath and put on some dry things."

"I mean to presently."

She tried to be easy and full of assurance the way Lady Esketh had been, but in her heart she had a sick feeling that Sarah saw through her. She could tell by the way Sarah looked at her. And, wet as she was, she seated herself and took up the "Morning Post" and began looking through it. It was already a month old, but time in India was merely relative. Sheltered behind it she knew that Sarah was pretending to go on marking the essays written by the senior-class girls, and that her mind was not on her work. She knew that Sarah was looking up now and then, trying to see her face, trying to discover what she had been up to. It made her feel brilliant and triumphant. And she began to imagine what it would be like to read her own name in "Court and Society," something like... "Miss Elizabeth Hodge of Ranchipur City, India, is the guest of Lord and Lady Esketh at Barbury House."

But in the midst of her dreaming the voice of Sarah interrupted her: "Elizabeth, do as I say. Go and put on some dry clothes and stop in the kitchen and see if the girls are getting on with supper. I must finish these papers."

The color rose in Miss Hodge's face, and flinging down the "Morning Post" she rose and flounced out of the door into the kitchen. Really, Sarah might have left her in peace for a moment instead of ordering her about as if she were a child or only a school teacher who had to keep an eye on the cooking. Very well, she'd keep on her wet clothes and catch malaria and then Sarah would be sorry.

In the kitchen she found everything going well, and as she unlocked the cupboard where the supplies were kept and took out the sugar and tea and the mustard and chutney bottle she decided that she would break

the news to Sarah at supper when she was in a mood of relaxation; and as she locked the cupboard she saw through the window a boy coming up the path, a boy whom she recognized at once as Mr. Ransome's servant, and her heart began to beat a little faster. What could he want? What if it was an invitation from Mr. Ransome? So many things had happened today. If it was an invitation she meant to defy Sarah and go without her.

Hurrying, trembling with excitement, she left the kitchen in time to encounter the servant on the verandah. Salaaming, he gave her a note addressed to Miss Sarah Dirks, saying that he would wait for the answer. It was maddening not to be able to open the note, but Sarah was so funny about things like that. When she gave it to Sarah, Sarah spitefully held it in such a way that she could not read it over her shoulder. Then she rose and taking the note with her went to the door and said to the servant, "Yes, tell Mr. Ransome that everything will be all right."

She returned from the door looking rather white, and she said to Miss Hodge, "Mr. Ransome has asked us to tea"; and Miss Hodge, like a child, said, "Oh, Sarah, I want to go."

"Of course," said Miss Dirks, "we'll both go," and for a moment Miss Hodge was left speechless, unable to believe her ears. Sarah had spoken exactly as if there was nothing strange about the invitation, as if they had been in the habit of going out to tea two or three times a week every week for twenty-five years. She seated herself and went back to work on her papers, saying without looking up, "He's asked the Smileys and Miss MacDaid, Mr. and Mrs. Raschid and the Jobnekars."

"What day is it?"

"Friday," said Sarah without looking up.

"Friday... this Friday?"

"Yes, day after tomorrow."

For a moment Miss Hodge felt dizzy and confused. She did not speak and presently Miss Dirks looked up from her work and said, "What's the matter? Why are you standing there gaping at me?"

"I can't go on Friday," said Miss Hodge.

"Why on earth can't you?" Then Miss Dirks' long patience suddenly gave way and, sitting up, she said, "What on earth have you got to do?

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And what on earth is the matter with you? Why are you running about in soaked clothes looking as if you'd swallowed a canary?" Miss Hodge simply looked at her, paralyzed, with her mouth open. "Why can't you? Have you become a deaf mute?"

"Because I've asked Lady Esketh to come to tea."

"How is she coming to tea? You must be out of your mind, Elizabeth. You don't even know her."

"I do know her. I called on her this afternoon. She's so nice." And suddenly Miss Hodge began to cry, partly from vexation and disappointment and partly from shame because in Sarah's uncompromising blue eyes she received an intimation that she had been ridiculous. She had made a fool of herself.

"What on earth ever possessed you to do such a thing?"

"I wanted to see her. You don't know how nice she was and how kind."

"Well, you'll have to put her off."

"I can't put off Lady Esketh."

"And why not?"

"Because I can't. It's impossible."

"Well, you'll have to."

"Tell Mr. Ransome you'll come another day."

"I can't do that."

"Why can't you? He's always been so polite and kind. He wouldn't mind."

"I can't because I really asked him to have the party."

"You asked him ... ?" In her astonishment Miss Hodge stopped crying for a moment.

"Yes, I thought we should see more people."

The shock of this second announcement again made Miss Hodge mute. Miss Dirks said, "Just sit down and write Lady Esketh a note explaining. She'll understand. Tell her to come another day... any day. She won't mind. Two old maids can't be very exciting to her

"You needn't cast slurs at her. Anyway I can't do that."

"Why not, pray?"

Miss Hodge saw that her friend was losing her temper, and she grew

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terrified. Sarah very rarely lost her temper; it had happened only two or three times in all their life together, but when it happened she could be terrible and cruel because she was so much the cleverer o the two-

"Because she's so lonely and bored."

Sarah laughed, wickedly, cruelly: "Lady Esketh lonely and bored? You must be losing your mind, Elizabeth. I suppose you think it's going to be exciting for her to come here to tea ... with two dreary old maids? Really, I don't know what's come over you lately."

"I won't put off Lady Esketh for a lot of Indians and missionaries.'*

In perfect silence Sarah regarded her for a moment, with a look so cold and so terrible that for a moment Miss Hodge felt like fainting. It was the terrible look of a sensible intelligent woman who had put up for years with triviality and silliness, with stupidity and shallowness, out of an affection born in a weak moment of loneliness twenty-five years before, a look rich with contempt revealed for the first time in a cold fury. For twenty-five years, ever since the scandal, she had been kind to Elizabeth Hodge and protected her and covered all her blunders and silliness, and now suddenly she could bear it no longer.

In a terrible voice she said, "Go to the writing desk this minute and write a note to Lady Esketh. I knew you were stupid and silly and a fool but I never thought you were a snob and a bootlicker."

Miss Hodge went suddenly mad. For a moment she stared at Miss Dirks as if hynotized, her blue eyes wide with horror, her mouth hanging open. Then she cried, "A snob! A bootlicker!" I'm not a snob! I'm not a bootlicker! I won't put her off! Now I know! You hate me! You hate me! You've always hated me!" and she ran from the room screaming to lock her door. She did not sob quietly, from nerves, as Miss Dirks did. She screamed. She wanted everyone to know how she was treated, how she suffered, how cruel Miss Dirks could be. She wanted the Untouchable girls in the kitchen to know and the Sikhs in the great gateway on the other side of the road and the passers-by outside the garden.

When she had gone Miss Dirks rose and closed the door and the windows lest passers-by should hear her screaming. Then she sat down again and covered her face with her hands. Her whole body was trembling and she wanted to die> now, at once, for it seemed to her that she no longer

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had strength to go on. And tomorrow she would have to go to the hospital and undress and have Major Safti see her and touch her.

From the moment her maid announced the doctor Edwina forgot all about Miss Hodge and her envy o small lives and the invitation to tea. Even the last few words of farewell were spoken mechanically with a graciousness which did not come from the heart but from long-established habit. It was the kind of absent-minded graciousness bestowed upon servants and inferiors. She was thinking only of Major Safti and seeing him in her imagination, clean and good-looking, gentle and intelligent, good-humored and vigorous; and Miss Hodge, like a dream, simply faded out of the picture. All afternoon, tossing in the heat on her bed, she had thought of him with a kind of vicious abandon born of her boredom, until in her fancy he had become more tempting, more mys- terious, more exciting than any man could possibly be in reality. While the rain beat monotonously on the roof and the bamboo screens before the windows, she had endowed him with all the qualities which could arouse a grande passion, for that, she knew now, was the thing she had dreamed of searching for and had never found without ever knowing what it was. She made of him a lover so great of spirit as well as of body that in her daydreams she was no longer Edwina Esketh, possessing a body which was simply an instrument and a spirit which was detached and sensual and calculating and quickly bored with every new adventure, but a woman in whom body and spirit had been welded together in a blaze of radiance and ecstasy.

And so when the door opened and the Major came in she felt a sudden twinge of disappointment, that he lacked somehow the magnificence with which she had endowed him, that he looked at her not as the lover who had been with her all the afternoon, but simply as the family doctor calling upon the wife of a man who was ill, that he was unaware of all that had happened between them during the long hours when she lay on her bed on the misty borders of sleep. She, like Ransome, spoiled, felt suddenly greedy, thinking, "If I do not have him I shall spend the rest of my life regretting it,"

He did not sit down. "I can only stay a moment," he said; "I still don't know what your husband is suffering from, but whatever it is, it is

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serious. You must not go near him. It is so serious that even the nurse must keep her face covered until we know. I've sent a specimen of blood to the Institute in Bombay. It will go by the Bombay Mail and we should know the result by tomorrow evening. I have asked them to telegraph me."

"What do you think it might be. Major?" she asked him, making an effort, as she did in front of Bates, to give the illusion of concern where there was none, because she knew that this man was an idealist. She knew it from his face, from his voice, his humanity and kindliness and from the look in his eyes. She knew that if she was to seduce him he must not think badly of her. While she talked to him a strange wild hysterical thought came to her out of nowhere: "Perhaps he is the one. Perhaps he could save me."

He did not say what it might be: "There is no use in alarming you needlessly. In any case it's certain that your husband won't be able to leave for weeks."

"How many weeks?" She, who had been bored and eager to leave only a little while before, now wished that he had said months instead of weeks. The heat, the rain, the monotony no longer existed. She felt herself trembling and put her hands behind her.

"Four or five at the least." He looked at her direcdy, saying, "I'm very sorry on your account. For you Ranchipur must be deadly." And suddenly she felt very young and very happy, "No, it really isn't."

"I must go now, Miss MacDaid is waiting for me at the barracks/*

Quickly she said, "Won't you have a drink or at least a cup of tea?" He could not go now, as quickly as this, still in the cold professional role of doctor. Somehow she must change that. Somehow she must lead the thing onto a different plane.

Then he smiled for the first time, and the charm and simplicity in his smile made her feel suddenly ill. "If it's all ready you might give me a cup."

"It's cold now. I'll send for some fresh."

"It doesn't matter. I'll take it as it is. I haven't time to wait." And out of her instinct and a long experience she knew by the way he smiled and looked at her that he had forgotten for a moment that he was the doctor. For a moment he had seen her as a woman. And she said to

herself, "You must not go too fast. You are not in Europe and this is a kind of man you have never met before. You must not give your hand away. He must think you are something which you are not ... he must think you are a decent woman."

So she kept her voice and eyes in control and poured him a cup of tepid tea and even drank a cup herself, although there was nothing she loathed so much. And for five brief minutes they talked, pleasantly and easily, for the great vitality of the Major made him easy company; and as they talked she watched him greedily, seeing his big sensitive hands, his great muscular shoulders, his fine head and the perfectly sculptured nose and full lips, studying them so that she might see him clearly after he had gone away, finding in him through her intelligence and her experience infallible signs of all the things she had hoped to find.

And then he finished his tea and took up the cigarette left behind by Miss Hodge and said, "Now I must be off. I'll drop in again in the morning. I've done what I could to keep down your husband's temperature. There's nothing to do but wait until the symptoms become clearer."

And he went away without telling her what he had discovered that morning, that at the royal stables the rats were dying like flies and that one of the stableboys would be dead by tomorrow morning, all his glands horribly swollen, his tongue dry and burnt by the terrible fever.

When Fern crossed the drive from the Smileys a little after daylight she found her room undisturbed and the note exactly where she had left it, pinned to the pillow the way people pinned notes in the cinema; but now the note, like so many other things, seemed to have changed. The sight of it filled her with shame as if she, were another Fern from the one who had left it there a few hours before. It seemed to her that a silly child had pinned it there and run out into the rain, a child whom she saw quite clearly now as if she were another person. But the Fern who stole into the house through a window in the wet light of the early dawn she could not see at all. She did not know her, what she was like or whither she was bound. It was not that she had changed so much as that she was changing, and that an odd thing had happened to her. Before she "ran away forever" she had always been inside herself. Her-

self had been the beginning and end of existence. Nothing happened save inside herself; all else was vague and unreal unless it happened to touch her momentarily. And now, for a moment or two, she had somehow got outside and saw herself from a distance. It gave her a strange feeling of excitement and made her feel grown-up and strong. It seemed to her that she was aware of other people for the first time and that until now she had been quite blind, not seeing them at all in reality, but only as shadows which did not touch her. She had "seen" Ransome and Mrs. Smiley for the first time, and now she might go on "seeing" other people.

Almost at once she fell asleep again and when she wakened it was to the sound of her mother's voice calling her to breakfast. She answered and then, throwing one arm over her head, buried her face in the pillow and slept again.

Belowstairs where Mr. and Mrs. Simon and Hazel, still rather blear- eyed because she always wakened slowly, sat at breakfast, Mrs. Simon announced that Fern again had "the sulks" and that she supposed it was "over this Harry Loder business." But when Fern did appear at last, a little before lunch, she was neither ill-tempered nor sulky, and when her mother announced that Mr. Simon had found it possible to get away to Poona on Saturday Fern said perfectly quietly, "Then I suppose we should get started with the packing."

All through the afternoon and the evening until she went to bed she appeared astonishingly sweet-tempered, so gentle and so agreeable that Mrs. Simon, while they all sat together like a united happy family in the sitting room after dinner, began to consider plans for the wedding; but she did not yet dare to speak of it lest it set Fern off again. It was only after Mrs. Simon had gone to bed and Mr. Simon was asleep at last that she began to grow suspicious. A Fern who was too sweet-tempered might be up to something. And then the following morning, while Fern was helping her put away the woolens and linens, she discovered that her suspicions were correct, when Fern suddenly stopped in the midst of the work and said, "Mama, I don't want to go to Poona."

"You don't want to go to Poona? What on earth do you mean?"

"I mean that I want to stay here. I hate Poona."

"Stay here all through this awful weather? Why, nobody stays in Ranchipur during the monsoon."

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Fern wanted to say that some twelve million people stayed behind in Ranchipur, among them quite a few Europeans like Ransome and Miss MacDaid and the Smileys, but she held her tongue because she was determined to have her way and give her mother no opportunity for starting a quarrel about something which had nothing to do with the main issue. That was what always happened; somehow in every argument which concerned Mrs. Simon the subject of the original discussion always managed to be lost.

"Why, pray, don't you want to go to Poona? Don't you meet lovely people there? Isn't everyone nice to you? Why, Hazel loves it."

"I'd like to stay here. Everybody in Poona is 'phoney.' Everything is 'phoney/ Everything they do is 'phoney.' "

Mrs. Simon, perplexed, regarded her with astonishment. Then she said, still having no idea what Fern meant, "I wish you wouldn't use words like that. People here don't know what you mean, and it makes you sound common. I don't know where you pick up all this American slang."

For a moment Fern came very near to losing her temper. There was something maddening in her mother talking of "commonness," as if she knew what it was. That was one of the things which mysteriously Fern had learned over night what commonness was. In a way she had always known, but now she saw quite clearly. She knew what was common and what was not, and the knowledge made her feel sick and ashamed for some of the things she had done before she knew. Her mother, she knew, thought Harry Loder and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry the very apotheosis of everything that was refined and distinguished, and nothing would change her conviction.

She only said, "I don't care whether people think I'm common or not."

"Well, I do and so does your father. We've both tried to give you a refined bringing-up. Anyway the whole idea is preposterous. Why can't you be pleasant and agreeable like Hazel?"

"Because I'm not like Hazel." What she meant was, "I'm not a bora slattern. I'm not sloppy and good-natured."

"Hazel," continued her mother, "never tried to destroy the happiness of our family life."

The happiness where was it? Fern knew now that it had never existed. Certainly she was not happy, nor her foolish bewildered father,

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bullied and tormented by his wife, nor even Hazel, unless one could say that cows were happy. And her mother with her envy and hatreds and baffled ambitions was the least happy o any of them.

"I won't even think of your staying behind, 1 * her mother went on. "A girl of your age alone in Ranchipur. What would Harry think?"

"I know what Harry would think," said Fern.

"What?"

"He'd try right oil to get me to do what he wants me to do if he married me/'

"Harry Loder is a gentleman."

"Well, don't drag him into it. I told you I wouldn't marry him if he was the last man on earth." And she kept seeing him and Ransome side by side in her mind as if they were put up on exhibition the one smug, contented, bullying, the other gentle, defeated, despairing. She thought, "He needs me. I could do so much for him.'*

"Besides," she said, "I wouldn't be alone."

"Why wouldn't you be? Everyone we know is going away."

"Because there would be the Smileys. I could stay with them."

"The Smileys!" Her mother dropped the blanket she had been folding and sank back on her knees as if she had been struck. "The Smileys! You must be crazy! I thought there must be something the matter with you to go a whole day without the sulks."

"I'm not crazy. The Smileys wouldn't mind looking after me."

"They hate us ... the Smileys."

And into Fern's mouth came the words of Ransome, "The Smileys don't hate anyone. They haven't time to hate."

A dull flush came over Mrs. Simon's face. It was an evil sign and Fern knew them all; once she had been confused and even frightened by these displays of her mother, but now she didn't care. Deep inside her she felt strong in the certainty that Ransome would understand her if no one else did. Moisture began to appear in Mrs. Simon's marble blue eyes. Presently she would begin to cry, and at last she would fling herself on the nearest sofa screaming that no one loved her, that her husband was a fool and her children ungrateful. She would cease to be a plump mature woman of forty-one and become a nasty spoiled child.

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"You taking the side of the Smileys... against your own mother," she cried, "siding with that woman against the mother who bore you!"

"I'm not siding with anyone. Anyway there aren't any sides. The Smileys haven't got any feud."

Her mother stopped moaning and looked at her with suspicion: "How do you know so much about the Smileys?"

"I've been thinking about them. It's easy to see."

"Yes. You're very clever. Smarter than your mother or your father or anyone. Let me tell you, my girl, I could tell you things about the Smileys."

"What?" asked Fern.

"Don't be impudent. But plenty of things... about letters they've written home behind our backs. They're jealous of us because we know nice people." She began to cry again: "Siding with them after all the humiliation they've heaped upon us!"

"They've never heaped any humiliations on us. They've never paid any attention to us."

"Don't talk like your fool of a father. What would Mrs. Hoggett- Egburry think of your staying with the Smileys? After all I've tried to do for you..."

This time Fern was silent. She went on folding linen and woolens, placing them in the teakwood chest, knowing that there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say now that would stop this outburst because her mother meant to go through with it to the end. It was never any use. You could never get the smallest thing settled. Somehow you always became mired in emotions and tears, and the muddled victory went to Mrs. Simon. For a moment she thought that she had been a fool not to have stayed at Ransome's, not to have gotten into his bed and screamed if he threatened to put her out. She knew now, more than ever, that there was no other way out; and anything was better than this. It would almost be better being married to Harry Loder, and she was frightened at the thought that if she had not run off to Ransome and come to know the Smileys she might one day have weakened out of weariness and said "yes )J to Harry Loder. Now, that was impossible!

She did not look at her mother because she knew that if she looked at the faded swollen face and the eyes red with weeping she would

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be sick, but she could not help hearing the sobs and the sniffles and the blowing of the nose. She knew now that she hated her mother and that she had always hated her, even as a child, without knowing it. When she had said to herself as a little girl, "I don't want to be like mama/' it was because she knew all the time in her childish mind that her mother was a fool and unscrupulous and selfish and common. It was awful to hate your own mother but more horrible still to be ashamed of her. Even if she did escape one day, even if she did marry somebody like Ransome, her mother would always be there, forcing her way in, shameless and common.

When Fern remained silent Mrs. Simon took to the sofa as if she were overcome, but Fern went on working as if she were alone in the room because she knew that that gave her power; and presently her mother rose and left the room, slamming the door so violently that bits of mildewed plaster fell from the ceiling just above it.

Fern knew where she would go. It was a simple matter of routine. She would go to her bedroom and lock the door and pull down the shades and have what Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry called a "migraine," which was refined for headache. She would not come down to lunch and no one would see her all day until late that night she would unlock the door and admit the consolation of her husband.

Bending over the chest Fern thought, Anyway, we shan't have to see her for the rest of the day;" and she began to cry, quiedy without a sound, not out of self-pity like her mother, but simply because her mother made the world so ugly a place, and because she was tired, not physically for she was young and strong, but weary of her mother and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Harry Loder and all the rest. Big tears rolled down her face and fell on the linen as she packed it away.

Lunch was a dreadful meal, with the rain falling outside and the heat steaming under the windows. Fern did not speak at all and Hazel was tearful as she always was when her mother had one of her spells, and Mr. Simon pretending that nothing had happened because his wife's spells always filled him with shame read the "Missionary News." The meal was no less friendly than it was day after day, year in and year out, but the absence of Mrs. Simon made a difference. She had a way of holding the family together, of keeping up the illusion of friendliness

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and sympathy where in reality there was none. She "made" conversation which was sometimes more tiresome than silence. She pressed food upon her husband and daughters. Sometime, somehow, in her Mississippi past she had been taught that one should be "elegant" at meals because they were ceremonies not distantly related to weddings and funerals, at which there were certain formulas of speech and set conventions to be employed. Being indifferent toward food herself, she had no special interest in the quality of the food set on the table, but she believed that it was refined to behave as if all of it were delicious and that conversation was necessary whether one had anything to say or not. Chatter at meals was to Mrs. Simon as necessary as salt and pepper. And so they missed her clatter and felt lost because none of them was able to create the same effect.

When the meal was finished Fern went to her own room and after a while she fell asleep from the exhaustion and excitement of the last twenty-four hours, to be wakened about six o'clock by the sound of a motor outside the window. Because you could count the motors of Ranchipur on the fingers of one hand she rose and went to the window, thinking that it might be Ransome calling on the Smileys and that she might at least have a distant glimpse of him, but she found only the motor of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry herself descending from it. It was a tiny motor, so tiny that a stranger seeing Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry standing beside it might have thought that she was meant to contain the motor rather than the motor Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, but because motors were rare in Ranchipur it contributed to her prestige, and she always descended from it (while it rocked and swayed under her weight) as if she were a duchess descending from a Rolls-Royce to lunch at Claridge's.

Fern, watching her from the upper window, thought, "Someone has told her."

Belowstairs Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, after a moment's wait, was summoned to the bedroom of Mrs. Simon. In all Ranchipur she was the only person ever admitted to the presence of Mrs. Simon during one of her spells.

For a little time Fern sat on the edge of the bed trying to plan what she would do if Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had been "told." She was not fright-

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ened now but cold and felt rather calm and superior, and presently she forgot Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry altogether and decided to write a letter to her cousin back in Biloxi, feeling that for once she had something to write, something as exciting as the things her cousin wrote to her... about picnics and swimming parties and young men, the kind of young men Fern longed to know, not like "the boys," but young men of her own kind who had never heard of "rags" and "ragging."

She began the letter "Dear Esther," but before she had written two pages she understood that something had gone wrong and that what she had put on paper failed somehow to convey the quality of her adventure with Ransome. When she reread it she saw that it sounded trivial and schoolgirlish and rather silly and it had not been at all like that. Even her description of Ransome and of her feelings for him became something different. Ransome emerged simply as a kind of romantic cinema adventurer and her feeling for him seemed no different from the palpitating descriptions which Esther wrote to her each time she met an attractive young man. It was a feeling for which she could find in her small vocabulary no words a feeling, a secret feeling, which seemed to make over the whole world, to bring to her a sense of freedom and independence. Now she could see her mother exactly as she was, and that gave her a secret power of which she was aware each time she came into the room where her mother was. Nothing of this could she write to her cousin because on paper it seemed idiotic and complicated. She suddenly felt older and wiser than Esther and superior to hen Esther who only knew boys her own age who were "swell" or "attractive" or "marvelous." It was extraordinary how many young men she seemed to know who fitted these three, her only, adjectives. None of these words suited Ransome, and Fern, considering the problem for the first time, doubted that Esther would understand any others. She saw now that in a good many ways she was really older than Esther. For that she could thank this strange isolated unnatural life which she led in Ranchipur. And Ransome was a man, not a boy like the young men Esther wrote about.

After a fourth attempt she gave up the idea of writing to Esther about falling in love. Three days ago it would have been exciting to write

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to Esther that she had had a proposal, even though it was only from Harry Loder, but now it scarcely seemed worth while. The drafts of the letter she carefully tore into tiny bits so that it would be impossible for her mother to piece them together. Then there was a knock at the door and one of the servants said that the memsahib would like to see her in her bedroom.

The moment she entered the darkened room Fern knew that her mother had been "told. J ' Mrs. Simon lay propped up in bed with a wet cloth on her forehead, moaning faintly. Fern did not speak. Trembling a little she sat down and waited.

Her mother said, "I want you to tell me the truth, Fern."

"Yes."

"Is it true what Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry has just told me?"

"I don't know what she told you.*'

"That you've been going to Mr. Ransome's house at night... after dark!"

For a moment Fern hesitated. She saw at once that the story had grown rampantly, luxuriandy, the way stories grew in Ranchipur, and she saw that it was quite useless to deny it. It was no good even to say that she had been there only once and that nothing had happened, because in her mother's present mood that would not be bad enough to satisfy her. So she said, quietly, "Yes, it's true."

Mrs. Simon said, "Oh, my God!" and began to moan again. "How could you do such a thing? With a man of his reputation! Everybody in Ranchipur will know it."

Fern thought, "She's not thinking of me at all. She's only thinking of how she'll suffer." Aloud she said, "Yes, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry will see to that."

"Don't you dare to say anything against Lily Hoggett-Egburry. She was right to come and tell me."

"How did she find out?"

"She found out from the servants, but it doesn't matter how she found out."

It was the first time Mrs. Simon had ever called Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry "Lily" and the sound of it infuriated Fern. The word "Lily" seemed to throw into relief all her mother's groveling snobbery. And it made

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Fern suddenly see the two women, bound together in a common cause in a way she had never thought of them before two fading belles, aware of their waning power, jealous of her because she was pretty and years younger than either of them. For a moment she had a quick picture of her mother talking to Ransome, shaking her "touched-up" curls, ogling him, talking very "Southern," and she saw now that all along her mother had wanted his admiration for herself. She had a horrible vision of what her mother would have been if she had not been the wife of a missionary forced into the mold of respectability, frustrated and bitter, hedged round by conventions and hypocrisies. She could see Mrs. Hoggett- Egburry and her mother, their heads together, excited, morbid, angry, talking about her and Ransome. It was all horrible and made her feel sick; and then she knew that she was going to strike back. She would hurt them both, for suddenly she knew how it could be done.

She heard herself saying, "Yes, it's true! It's all true! I've lived with Tom Ransome and I'm in love with him and he loves me!"

That did it! When she saw the effect upon her mother she wished suddenly that Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was there too.

Her mother screamed and then threw off the damp cloth and sat on the edge of the bed looking, in her pale pink nightgown trimmed with lace, her hair bedraggled and still damp from the cloth, strangely like the fading "kept" women Fern had seen in the cinema.

"Now we'll have to leave Ranchipur ... all of us. You've ruined and disgraced your father and Hazel and the mother who bore you, who's given up her whole life to you, who wanted to see you married respectably to a good husband!"

Fern did not speak. She simply sat, shaking and terrified, thinking, "Now I've done it. How am I going to get out of it?"

Her mother sobbed for a time and then stopping suddenly she asked, "How did you get in and out of the house?"

"I went out after you were in bed and..." Recklessness swept over her, "I stayed with the Smileys and came across the drive early in the morning before anyone was awake."

As she spoke she saw the faded pretty face of her mother grow hard, the jaws set, the lips part a little over the too small teeth.

"The Smileys," she said. "So that's it? Mrs. Smiley is a procuress, is

she? I've always known it. God knows what orgies go on over there with all those dirty Indians coming and going. Oh, I've heard about Indians and what they do. ... You're mother's not the simpleton you may think!"

The long-suffering Mrs. Simon became suddenly the Mrs. Simon of action. She began to walk up and down the room in her nightgown and then, stopping abruptly, she pulled it off over her head and for a moment stood naked and unashamed, while she snatched up her stockings and underwear.

"I kiaow what I'll do. I'll go and see Ransome myself. There's only one way of putting everything right. He'll have to marry you."

Fern sprang up: "No! No! I won't marry him. He doesn't want to marry me. He said so. You mustn't go and see him. You mustn't!"

Mrs. Simon, clad now in a chemise and one stocking, stopped dressing and looked at her: "You won't marry him, won't you? Well, we'll see about that. What kind of a daughter have I anyway ... a ... ?"

"Yes," said Fern, "a whore!" She pronounced the letter "W" because she had never heard the word spoken and it was a word that was not common in the cinema. Mrs. Simon resumed her dressing. "I'm going straight to Ransome," she cried; "and as for the Smileys, I'll fix them!" Her mouth grew hard and the blue eyes more than ever like marble at the thought of the Smileys delivered thus into her hands.

Fern began to cry: "Please don't! Please! It isn't true any of it. I was lying."

"Oh, don't try to get out of it now, young lady. He's going to marry you, all right. Just leave it to me."

The girl fell on her knees and tried to hold her mother's legs to stop her but Mrs. Simon kicked herself free.

"Don't!" cried Fern. "I'll do anything. I'll promise anything."

"Don't even speak to me. I ought to put you out of the house. But I won't. Oh, no! That's what you'd like ... to go on the streets."

Fern was lying on her face now, moaning, and Mrs. Simon, pulling her dress over her head with fury, thrust one arm through the lining instead of into the sleeve and was trapped, so that her words came out through the cloth, muted and confused.

Then Fern sat up quietly on the floor watching her as she sat before

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the dressing-table mirror prettifying herself with cold deliberate fury. There was something horrible in the scene which brought to Fern a sudden calmness and even dignity, as if this woman putting powder on her nose before the mirror existed at a great distance, a stranger having nothing to do with her. A kind of cold relief came to her. It was all over now, they need never again pretend even to like each other.

She rose and said quietly, "All right. Do what you want. You'll be sorry. I'm through. I hate you!*' But in her terrified heart she knew that nothing, no threat, would stop her mother, and all at once she saw that without knowing it she had played into her mother's hands. Her mother thought, "Now Ransome will have to marry her. Beside him Harry Loder is nothing at all. His brother might die and he might be an earl and then I'd have a fine place to spend my old age. . . . The mother of a countess! I never dreamed of anything as good as that." Fern understood suddenly why in all her mother's fury there had been a note of triumph.

Without another word she left the room, thinking only that she must go at once to Ransome to warn him. She had learned one more bitterness that maternal love could be a delusion, that it could serve as a cloak to hide selfishness and egotism and evil. She knew that she had been deceived by a fraud for twenty years, since the day she was born.

Mrs. Simon scarcely noticed her going. Before she put on her hat she sat down and wrote a letter to the Mission Board about the Smileys, a letter which surely now would mean their ruin and recall. When it was finished she took the motor and, swollen with triumph and evil, she drove to the station where she posted the letter so that it would catch the Bombay Express and the Saturday boat to Genoa, not knowing that it would be the last time for weeks that any mail would leave Ranchipur.

While he dressed for dinner Ransome had two more drinks. It was difficult for others, especially strangers, to know when he was drunk; one had to know him very well in order to recognize the point at which he became a trifle too polite, a bit too ironic, a soufqon too considerate and too interested in what you were saying; but Ransome knew. It was the point at which that eterrial feeling of melancholy and depression left him, the moment when he no longer felt paralyzed and incapable

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of action or decision because in the back of his mind there was always a consciousness that no decision and no action was of any importance. It was not that drinking brought him either strength of will or faith, but that drinking made the lack of these things seem unimportant and trivial. Drinking made the world become a bright and careless place in which nothing mattered and one was no longer troubled and tortured because it did not matter. The change came slowly. The faint surliness, the irony, the sarcasm, the bitterness which afflicted him sober, vanished to be replaced by a good-natured recklessness which was infectious because of his charm and so extremely dangerous to others. Drunk he was happy and that was the only reason for his drinking.

Now as he fastened his tie he knew that he was drunk and was glad, because whatever happened at Mr. Banner jee's dinner he would neither be bored nor restless nor disagreeable. One was offered cocktails at Mr. Bannerjee's because it was smart and European, but Mr. Bannerjee himself did not drink because of religious scruples, and so he never knew that his cocktails tasted rather like mouthwash and there were never enough of them. He had never before been bored at the thought of going to Mr. Bannerjee's because the whole household was preposterous and because in the midst of it there was always Mrs. Bannerjee and her frigid beauty to lend interest to the evening. He dreaded it now only be- cause Edwina was going. "Edwina," he thought, "with her bored weary European point of view." Edwina was certain to afflict the whole party with a kind of social paralysis in which the very air itself would seem charged with weariness and boredom.

For two days, avoiding her, he had not seen her at all save for that moment or two in the hallway of the palace before he drove to El- Kautara. Now, drunk, he knew perfectly well why he had avoided her; she upset him. He detested her because her very nearness filled him with weariness, but if he had only detested her she would not have troubled him. At the same time he found her attractive, with her cold- blooded abandon, her lovely viciousness and her perfection as a woman of elegance. All these things attracted him because once a long time ago, with her humor, her beauty and her wildness, she had been able to save him for a time from his own morbid nature. That she could no longer do; for that she had less power than the brandy he drank; but her

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presence, her voice, her tired smile did serve to excite him. He knew now that he hated her because she made him feel sordid, because she was in a way a mirror of himself. And she made him feel frightened too. He had been a little frightened ever since the snatched mechanical delight of that weary adventure at the palace, because in the depression which followed it he had looked for a moment into such an abyss of emptiness and negation and despair that drunkenness, drugs, death itself seemed far better than the desolation he divined; anything was better that would blunt the edge of the consciousness so that it was no longer possible to regard the ruin of oneself.

Now, even drunk, he regretted that he had not made some excuse to stay away from the dinner. John the Baptist hovered about naked in the heat, handing him his clothes, brushing off bits of invisible dust, watching him stealthily, vaguely fascinated, he knew, at the spectacle of his master slowly making himself drunk.

John the Baptist was very good at watching. Never once did Ransome, even when he turned quickly, ever catch him staring directly, but all the time he knew that the servant was studying everything he did, every change of expression in his face. He could feel the boy's eyes on his back, and he became fascinated by the speculation of what it was that John the Baptist saw and what it was that went on inside his round black head. And at last as he turned from the mirror he said suddenly, "What is it you see? What are you looking at?"

But John the Baptist was not to be caught. His face went cold and opaque. In his soft Pondicherry French, he said, "]e ne comprends pas. Je ne vois que vous, Sahib."

"But what do you see? Am I different? Why are you staring?"

"Rien de different" said John the Baptist. And then he understood that it was impossible ever to discover what was going on inside the head of his servant. Perhaps John the Baptist was only interested in the process of a man's getting drunk. Perhaps he was glad or maybe he was sorry. Or it might be that John the Baptist saw him as he did not see himself even in moments of self-reproach, as a broken, useless, dissipated man to whom it was worth while to be devoted because the place was good and easy and there was money in it. Perhaps he was thinking, "One more European going the way of the others. One more European

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who soon will be finished." For five years they had been together but he had not the faintest idea of what his servant thought of him . , . and suddenly he was filled with shame.

At last he was dressed and as he turned to put on his jacket he saw Fern standing in the doorway. She wore the same old raincoat and felt hat, and she had been running, yet she did not look flushed but pale and frightened. He knew at once that he was glad to see her and the thought went swiftly through his muddled brain that it would be much more agreeable to stay here all the evening with Fern, but he knew too that such a thing was impossible in Ranchipur.

"Hello !" he said. "Come in." And to John the Baptist he said, "That's all"; and the servant passed Fern on the verandah and ran across the garden to his quarters.

"Something awful has happened," she said. She did not cry as she had always done before.

"What?"

"My mother has found out."

He laughed. In his present mood, it did not matter. It was merely funny. "I thought she would," he said, "but not so soon."

"It was Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry who told her. She got it out of her servants."

"The black bastard!" thought Ransome. "He didn't waste much time."

Even through the pleasant haze of drunkenness he was aware that Fern had changed. She seemed older. Even the faint pudginess which made her pretty instead of beautiful seemed to have gone from her face, and she was not hysterical now.

"That's not the worst. We had an awful quarrel and I lost my temper and told my mother that it was true and that I'd been coming here all the time and living with you."

Again he wanted to laugh, because at once he understood the quarrel and knew why it was that Fern had confessed to something which had never happened. His mind leapt quickly.

"Has your father a shotgun?" he asked.

She looked at him, puzzled, and then said, "He's not like that. He'd never do anything."

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"Oh, it's your mother who keeps the shotgun." And this time he laughed aloud.

"It isn't funny," Fern said. "It's awful"

"I was only laughing at the picture of your mother arriving with a shotgun. Anyway we know it isn't true."

"That doesn't make any difference. Don't you see, she wants it to be true?"

"Why?"

"So you'll have to marry me. Don't you see?"

He did see. She did not have to humiliate herself by explaining what her mother was that she would like nothing better than having her daughter ruined as long as it was accomplished by the brother of an earl.

"She's forgotten already all about Harry Loder."

"Yes," he said soberly, "I see the difference in the candidates and I think she's quite right."

"You'd better get out right away. She's on her way here."

Then he sat down and began to laugh and he was tipsy enough so that it was difficult to control himself. Fern watched him for a moment and the tears came into her eyes.

"Don't laugh . * . please don't... please!" A kind of pleading came into her voice, so evident that it sobered him. "It isn't funny," she said in a very quiet voice. "Don't you see it isn't funny? You're making it so awful."

"No," he said, "it isn't funny. I'm sorry. I've been..."

"I know," she said. "But please go. Please go tonight to Bombay.'*

"What about you?"

"It doesn't matter. I don't care any more. I can take care of myself."

He was aware of a faint note of reproach in what she said.

"What will you do?"

"I'll face the music. I don't mind."

For a moment he was silent, wishing that he was sober; and then he said, "What if we did get married?"

"I wouldn't marry you for a million dollars."

"Well, that's that!" But he was, she suddenly saw, too drunk to understand what she meant. There was a look of hurt in his face and she

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knew that he thought she would not marry him because he was a drunkard and no good. She wanted to explain that it was her pride that made her say it, but the same pride held her back. She could not do it.

"Look here," he said, "you mustn't go home. You can't do that. You can't put up with another row."

"If only I had a little money I could do as I please."

"That's right. It's a pity. No, you can't go home. Go to the Smileys."

"I can't do that either. I've already made enough trouble for them. I told her about them too."

He grinned again, "That wasn't very wise."

"I didn't know what I was doing,"

"I can't ask you to stay here. That would only make it worse." And an idea came to him: "You could go and stay with Raschid."

"I couldn't do that. I don't know him."

"I do. He is minister of police and he has a wife and seven children. Nothing could be more respectable."

"But he's an Indian."

"What difference does that make? He's a fine fellow."

She remembered what her mother had said about "the dirty Indians" who went to the Smileys. "It doesn't make any difference to me, but it might give her an excuse to make trouble... you don't know what she's like. She might take it to Delhi even to the Viceroy. She might do anything."

Yes, he saw what she meant, and again he wanted to laugh. It was preposterous the way the perfectly harmless escapade of a romantic schoolgirl had become an extraordinary affair, and now it was threatening to become an "incident" which might unsettle the peace of India, a scandal of international proportions which might become historic. And for the first time he saw inside the thing that was the Indian question, all the infinite complications which could be made by small people, the hopeless tangle of meanness and jealousy and fear and pettiness and prejudice. He was aware, even through his drunkenness, for the first time of how Indians must feel. He understood the subtle and sinister quality of the humiliations and the insults compounded by second-rate people like Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Mrs. Simon. A girl of European

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origin could not seek refuge from a sluttish mother in the house of the most honorable and upright of men, because he was an Indian.

"Yes," he said gloomily, "it's a sick world ... a lousy world."

But Fern was direct, without interest in politics or philosophy or mankind. She said, "No, there's only one thing to do. I'll go back home now. I'm not afraid of her any longer. I think maybe she's afraid of me now. I know she is. But you've got to go away. You've got to! See?"

He saw that she was no longer trusting him. She had come to him thinking that he might be able to help her and he had been able to do nothing because he was drunk and muddled and useless, because in his heart at this moment he did not care what happened, because he was unwilling as always to accept responsibility, because it all seemed no longer serious at all but only funny, inexpressibly funny.

"I don't know," he said feebly. "You go back. Tomorrow . . , when things are different..."

"It's all right. Don't worry about it too much. It's all my fault anyway. I don't know how any of it happened, except that I must have been crazy. I'm sorry I was such a fool!"

He looked at her for a long time, seeing even through the haze of drunkenness how young she was and how charming and earnest, and he saw too that now she was no longer looking to him to help her. It was the other way round. Then he said, "No, you weren't crazy. You aren't crazy at all." He thought, "I wish I had you with me always, forever"; but it was too late now.

Abruptly she said "good by" and went out of the house into the rain. He sat for a long time in the chair opposite the door and at last he remembered Mr. Banner jee's dinner and rose and took another drink to drown the somber thoughts which had taken possession of him and to give him the strength to go to the garden house and send John the Baptist away because he had gossiped and betrayed his master. It was a disagreeable task and although he had no idea what John the Baptist was like inside, he knew that he was used to him and even fond of him. But when he reached the garden house it was already empty. The servant had not gone away for good because his few belongings and the little wooden chest which contained them was still there. Ransome thought, "He does know me better than I thought. He has disappeared

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because he knows that tomorrow I will not send him away because by then it will have become too much trouble to find a new servant and because tomorrow I will see that his gossiping was, after all, unimportant and only human. He knows that tomorrow I will understand that it was not he who caused the evil but Mrs. Simon and Pukka Lil and all those like them."

Mrs. Simon arrived five minutes after he had left and found the house quite empty. In the anticlimax all the righteous indignation 4 which she had carefully preserved all the way to the station and back oozed out of her and curiosity took its place. For three years she had wanted to see the inside of this house and now she satisfied her desire, going from room to room, even into his bedroom where the sight of his brushes and pipe and bed gave her a certain voluptuous excitement for which Mr. Simon would have to pay later on. It was a disappointment, the house, because it seemed so simple and so bare and not at all like her idea of what the house of an English gentleman should be, not at all the way the houses of such men were in the cinema, not at all like Lily Hoggett- Egburry's house.

When she had examined everything she drove directly to the Smileys' and there made a terrible scene in order to relieve her baffled spirit. The Smileys, bewildered, attempted at first to explain in terms of simple humanity, but after a moment it became evident that simple humanity was something beyond the understanding of Mrs. Simon and they both fell silent. It was Aunt Phoebe who answered her at last in her own language. When she could bear the tirade no longer she called Mrs. Simon "a poor-white slut" and told her to go across the drive and never enter the house again.