“'Sweet thou has trod on a heart—Pass! There's a world full of menAnd women as fair as thou art,Must do such things now and then.“'Thou only hast stepped unaware—Malice not one can impute;And why should a heart have been there,In the way of a fair woman's foot?'
“I didn't—I didn't—I didn't!” said Mrs. Hauksbee, angrily, her eyes filling with tears; “there was no malice at all. Oh, it's too vexatious!”
“You've misunderstood the compliment,” said Mrs. Mallowe. “He clears you completely and—ahem—I should think by this, that he has cleared completely too. My experience of men is that when they begin to quote poetry, they are going to flit. Like swans singing before they die, you know.”
“Polly, you take my sorrows in a most unfeeling way.”
“Do I? Is it so terrible? If he's hurt your vanity, I should say that you've done a certain amount of damage to his heart.”
“Oh, you never can tell about a man!” said Mrs. Hauksbee, with deep scorn.
Reviewing the matter as an impartial outsider, it strikes me that I'm about the only person who has profited by the education of Otis Yeere. It comes to twenty-seven pages and bittock.
Men say it was a stolen tide—The Lord that sent it he knows all,But in mine ear will aye abideThe message that the bells let fall,And awesome bells they were to me,That in the dark rang, “Enderby.”—Jean Ingelow.
Once upon a time there was a man and his Wife and a Tertium Quid.
All three were unwise, but the Wife was the unwisest. The Man should have looked after his Wife, who should have avoided the Tertium Quid, who, again, should have married a wife of his own, after clean and open flirtations, to which nobody can possibly object, round Jakko or Observatory Hill. When you see a young man with his pony in a white lather, and his hat on the back of his head flying down-hill at fifteen miles an hour to meet a girl who will be properly surprised to meet him, you naturally approve of that young man, and wish him Staff Appointments, and take an interest in his welfare, and, as the proper time comes, give them sugar-tongs or side-saddles, according to your means and generosity.
The Tertium Quid flew down-hill on horseback, but it was to meet the Man's Wife; and when he flew up-hill it was for the same end. The Man was in the Plains, earning money for his Wife to spend on dresses and four-hundred-rupee bracelets, and inexpensive luxuries of that kind. He worked very hard, and sent her a letter or a post-card daily. She also wrote to him daily, and said that she was longing for him to come up to Simla. The Tertium Quid used to lean over her shoulder and laugh as she wrote the notes. Then the two would ride to the Post Office together.
Now, Simla is a strange place and its customs are peculiar; nor is any man who has not spent at least ten seasons there qualified to pass judgment on circumstantial evidence, which is the most untrustworthy in the Courts. For these reasons, and for others which need not appear, I decline to state positively whether there was anything irretrievably wrong in the relations between the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid. If there was, and hereon you must form your own opinion, it was the Man's Wife's fault. She was kittenish in her manners, wearing generally an air of soft and fluffy innocence. But she was deadly learned and evil-instructed; and, now and again, when the mask dropped, men saw this, shuddered and almost drew back. Men are occasionally particular, and the least particular men are always the most exacting.
Simla is eccentric in its fashion of tearing friendships. Certain attachments which have set and crystallized through half a dozen seasons acquire almost the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered as such. Again, certain attachments equally old, and, to all appearance, equally venerable, never seem to win any recognized official status; while a chance-sprung acquaintance now two months born, steps into the place which by right belongs to the senior. There is no law reducible to print which regulates these affairs.
Some people have a gift which secures them infinite toleration, and others have not. The Man's Wife had not. If she looked over the garden wall, for instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. She complained pathetically that she was not allowed to choose her own friends. When she put up her big white muff to her lips, and gazed over it and under her eyebrows at you as she said this thing, you felt that she had been infamously misjudged, and that all the other women's instincts were all wrong; which was absurd. She was not allowed to own the Tertium Quid in peace; and was so strangely constructed that she would not have enjoyed peace had she been so permitted. She preferred some semblance of intrigue to cloak even her most commonplace actions.
After two months of riding, first round Jakko, then Elysium, then Summer Hill, then Observatory Hill, then under Jutogh, and lastly up and down the Cart Road as far as the Tara Devi gap in the dusk, she said to the Tertium Quid, “Frank, people say we are too much together, and people are so horrid.”
The Tertium Quid pulled his moustache, and replied that horrid people were unworthy of the consideration of nice people.
“But they have done more than talk—they have written—written to my hubby—I'm sure of it,” said the Man's Wife, and she pulled a letter from her husband out of her saddle-pocket and gave it to the Tertium Quid.
It was an honest letter, written by an honest man, then stewing in the Plains on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife eight hundred and fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers. It is said that, perhaps, she had no thought of the unwisdom of allowing her name to be so generally coupled with the Tertium Quid's; that she was too much of a child to understand the dangers of that sort of thing; that he, her husband, was the last man in the world to interfere jealously with her little amusements and interests, but that it would be better were she to drop the Tertium Quid quietly and for her husband's sake. The letter was sweetened with many pretty little pet names, and it amused the Tertium Quid considerably. He and She laughed over it, so that you, fifty yards away, could see their shoulders shaking while the horses slouched along side by side.
Their conversation was not worth reporting. The upshot of it was that, next day, no one saw the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid together. They had both gone down to the Cemetery, which, as a rule, is only visited officially by the inhabitants of Simla.
A Simla funeral with the clergyman riding, the mourners riding, and the coffin creaking as it swings between the bearers, is one of the most depressing things on this earth, particularly when the procession passes under the wet, dank dip beneath the Rockcliffe Hotel, where the sun is shut out and all the hill streams are wailing and weeping together as they go down the valleys.
Occasionally folk tend the graves, but we in India shift and are transferred so often that, at the end of the second year, the Dead have no friends—only acquaintances who are far too busy amusing themselves up the hill to attend to old partners. The idea of using a Cemetery as a rendezvous is distinctly a feminine one. A man would have said simply “Let people talk. We'll go down the Mall.” A woman is made differently, especially if she be such a woman as the Man's Wife. She and the Tertium Quid enjoyed each other's society among the graves of men and women whom they had known and danced with aforetime.
They used to take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little to the left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground and where the occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are not ready. Each well-regulated India Cemetery keeps half a dozen graves permanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills these are more usually baby's size, because children who come up weakened and sick from the Plains often succumb to the effects of the Rains in the Hills or get pneumonia from their ayahs taking them through damp pine-woods after the sun has set. In Cantonments, of course, the man's size is more in request; these arrangements varying with the climate and population.
One day when the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid had just arrived in the Cemetery, they saw some coolies breaking ground. They had marked out a full-size grave, and the Tertium Quid asked them whether any Sahib was sick. They said that they did not know; but it was an order that they should dig a Sahib's grave.
“Work away,” said the Tertium Quid, “and let's see how it's done.”
The coolies worked away, and the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid watched and talked for a couple of hours while the grave was being deepened Then a coolie, taking the earth in blankets as it was thrown up, jumped over the grave.
“That's queer,” said the Tertium Quid. “Where's my ulster?”
“What's queer?” said the Man's Wife.
“I have got a chill down my back just as if a goose had walked over my grave.”
“Why do you look at the thing, then?” said the Man's Wife. “Let us go.”
The Tertium Quid stood at the head of the grave, and stared without answering for a space. Then he said, dropping a pebble down, “It is nasty and cold; horribly cold. I don't think I shall come to the Cemetery any more. I don't think grave-digging is cheerful.”
The two talked and agreed that the Cemetery was depressing. They also arranged for a ride next day out from the Cemetery through the Mashobra Tunnel up to Fagoo and back, because all the world was going to a garden-party at Viceregal Lodge, and all the people of Mashobra would go too.
Coming up the Cemetery road, the Tertium Quid's horse tried to bolt up hill, being tired with standing so long, and managed to strain a back sinew.
“I shall have to take the mare tomorrow,” said the Tertium Quid, “and she will stand nothing heavier than a snaffle.”
They made their arrangements to meet in the Cemetery, after allowing all the Mashobra people time to pass into Simla. That night it rained heavily, and next day, when the Tertium Quid came to the trysting-place, he saw that the new grave had a foot of water in it, the ground being a tough and sour clay.
“'Jove! That looks beastly,” said the Tertium Quid. “Fancy being boarded up and dropped into that well!”
They then started off to Fagoo, the mare playing with the snaffle and picking her way as though she were shod with satin, and the sun shining divinely. The road below Mashobra to Fagoo is officially styled the Himalayan-Thibet Road; but in spite of its name it is not much more than six feet wide in most places, and the drop into the valley below must be anything between one and two thousand feet.
“Now we're going to Thibet,” said the Man's Wife merrily, as the horses drew near to Fagoo. She was riding on the cliff-side.
“Into Thibet,” said the Tertium Quid, “ever so far from people who say horrid things, and hubbies who write stupid letters. With you—to the end of the world!”
A coolie carrying a log of wood came round a corner, and the mare went wide to avoid him—forefeet in and haunches out, as a sensible mare should go.
“To the world's end,” said the Man's Wife, and looked unspeakable things over her near shoulder at the Tertium Quid.
He was smiling, but, while she looked, the smile froze stiff as it were on his face, and changed to a nervous grin—the sort of grin men wear when they are not quite easy in their saddles. The mare seemed to be sinking by the stem, and her nostrils cracked while she was trying to realize what was happening. The rain of the night before had rotted the drop-side of the Himalayan-Thibet Road, and it was giving way under her. “What are you doing?” said the Man's Wife. The Tertium Quid gave no answer. He grinned nervously and set his spurs into the mare, who rapped with her forefeet on the road, and the struggle began. The Man's Wife screamed, “Oh, Frank, get off!”
But the Tertium Quid was glued to the saddle—his face blue and white—and he looked into the Man's Wife's eyes. Then the Man's Wife clutched at the mare's head and caught her by the nose instead of the bridle. The brute threw up her head and went down with a scream, the Tertium Quid upon her, and the nervous grin still set on his face.
The Man's Wife heard the tinkle-tinkle of little stones and loose earth falling off the roadway, and the sliding roar of the man and horse going down. Then everything was quiet, and she called on Frank to leave his mare and walk up. But Frank did not answer. He was underneath the mare, nine hundred feet below, spoiling a patch of Indian corn.
As the revellers came back from Viceregal Lodge in the mists of the evening, they met a temporarily insane woman, on a temporarily mad horse, swinging round the corners, with her eyes and her mouth open, and her head like the head of the Medusa. She was stopped by a man at the risk of his life, and taken out of the saddle, a limp heap, and put on the bank to explain herself. This wasted twenty minutes, and then she was sent home in a lady's 'rickshaw, still with her mouth open and her hands picking at her riding-gloves.
She was in bed through the following three days, which were rainy; so she missed attending the funeral of the Tertium Quid, who was lowered into eighteen inches of water, instead of the twelve to which he had first objected.
Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, thereforethe misery of man is great upon him.—Eccles. viii. 6.
Fate and the Government of India have turned the Station of Kashima into a prison; and, because there is no help for the poor souls who are now lying there in torment, I write this story, praying that the Government of India may be moved to scatter the European population to the four winds.
Kashima is bound on all sides by the rock-tipped circle of the Dosehri hills. In Spring, it is ablaze with roses; in Summer, the roses die and the hot winds blow from the hills; in Autumn, the white mists from the hills cover the place as with water; and in Winter the frosts nip everything young and tender to earth-level. There is but one view in Kashima—a stretch of perfectly flat pasture and plough-land, running up to the grey-blue scrub of the Dosehri hills.
There are no amusements, except snipe and tiger shooting; but the tigers have been long since hunted from their lairs in the rock-caves, and the snipe only come once a year. Narkarra—one hundred and forty-three miles by road—is the nearest station to Kashima. But Kashima never goes to Narkarra, where there are at least twelve English people. It stays within the circle of the Dosehri hills.
All Kashima acquits Mrs. Vansuythen of any intention to do harm; but all Kashima knows that she, and she alone, brought about their pain.
Boulte, the Engineer, Mrs. Boulte, and Captain Kurrell know this. They are the English population of Kashima, if we except Major Vansuythen, who is of no importance whatever, and Mrs. Vansuythen, who is the most important of all.
You must remember, though you will not understand, that all laws weaken in a small and hidden community where there is no public opinion. When a man is absolutely alone in a Station he runs a certain risk of falling into evil ways. The risk is multiplied by every addition to the population up to twelve—the Jury-number. After that, fear and consequent restraint begin, and human action becomes less grotesquely jerky.
There was deep peace in Kashima till Mrs. Vansuythen arrived. She was a charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every one. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so perverse, she cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had she been plain or stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to Kashima. But she was a fair woman, with very still grey eyes, the color of a lake just before the light of the sun touches it. No man who had seen those eyes, could, later on, explain what fashion of woman she was to look upon. The eyes dazzled him. Her own sex said that she was “not bad looking, but spoiled by pretending to be so grave.” And yet her gravity was natural It was not her habit to smile. She merely went through life, looking at those who passed; and the women objected while the men fell down and worshipped.
She knows and is deeply sorry for the evil she has done to Kashima; but Major Vansuythen cannot understand why Mrs. Boulte does not drop in to afternoon tea at least three times a week. “When there are only two women in one Station, they ought to see a great deal of each other,” says Major Vansuythen.
Long and long before ever Mrs. Vansuythen came out of those far-away places where there is society and amusement, Kurrell had discovered that Mrs. Boulte was the one woman in the world for him and—you dare not blame them. Kashima was as out of the world as Heaven or the Other Place, and the Dosehri hills kept their secret well. Boulte had no concern in the matter. He was in camp for a fortnight at a time. He was a hard, heavy man, and neither Mrs. Boulte nor Kurrell pitied him. They had all Kashima and each other for their very, very own; and Kashima was the Garden of Eden in those days. When Boulte returned from his wanderings he would slap Kurrell between the shoulders and call him “old fellow,” and the three would dine together. Kashima was happy then when the judgment of God seemed almost as distant as Narkarra or the railway that ran down to the sea. But the Government sent Major Vansuythen to Kashima, and with him came his wife.
The etiquette of Kashima is much the same as that of a desert island. When a stranger is cast away there, all hands go down to the shore to make him welcome. Kashima assembled at the masonry platform close to the Narkarra Road, and spread tea for the Vansuythens. That ceremony was reckoned a formal call, and made them free of the Station, its rights and privileges. When the Vansuythens were settled down, they gave a tiny housewarming to all Kashima; and that made Kashima free of their house, according to the immemorial usage of the Station.
Then the Rains came, when no one could go into camp, and the Narkarra Road was washed away by the Kasun River, and in the cup-like pastures of Kashima the cattle waded knee-deep. The clouds dropped down from the Dosehri hills and covered everything.
At the end of the Rains, Boulte's manner toward his wife changed and became demonstratively affectionate. They had been married twelve years, and the change startled Mrs. Boulte, who hated her husband with the hate of a woman who has met with nothing but kindness from her mate, and, in the teeth of this kindness, had done him a great wrong. Moreover, she had her own trouble to fight with—her watch to keep over her own property, Kurrell. For two months the Rains had hidden the Dosehri hills and many other things besides; but when they lifted, they showed Mrs. Boulte that her man among men, her Ted—for she called him Ted in the old days when Boulte was out of earshot—was slipping the links of the allegiance.
“The Vansuythen Woman has taken him,” Mrs. Boulte said to herself; and when Boulte was away, wept over her belief, in the face of the over-vehement blandishments of Ted. Sorrow in Kashima is as fortunate as Love, because there is nothing to weaken it save the flight of Time. Mrs. Boulte had never breathed her suspicion to Kurrell because she was not certain; and her nature led her to be very certain before she took steps in any direction. That is why she behaved as she did.
Boulte came into the house one evening, and leaned against the door-posts of the drawing-room, chewing his moustache. Mrs. Boulte was putting some flowers into a vase. There is a pretence of civilization even in Kashima.
“Little woman,” said Boulte, quietly, “do you care for me?”
“Immensely,” said she, with a laugh. “Can you ask it?”
“But I'm serious,” said Boulte. “Do you care for me?”
Mrs. Boulte dropped the flowers, and turned round quickly. “Do you want an honest answer?”
“Ye-es, I've asked for it.”
Mrs. Boulte spoke in a low, even voice for five minutes, very distinctly, that there might be no misunderstanding her meaning. When Samson broke the pillars of Gaza, he did a little thing, and one not to be compared to the deliberate pulling down of a woman's homestead about her own ears. There was no wise female friend to advise Mrs. Boulte, the singularly cautious wife, to hold her hand. She struck at Boulte's heart, because her own was sick with suspicion of Kurrell, and worn out with the long strain of watching alone through the Rains. There was no plan or purpose in her speaking. The sentences made themselves; and Boulte listened leaning against the door-post with his hands in his pockets. When all was over, and Mrs. Boulte began to breathe through her nose before breaking out into tears, he laughed and stared straight in front of him at the Dosehri hills.
“Is that all?” he said. “Thanks, I only wanted to know, you know.”
“What are you going to do?” said the woman, between her sobs.
“Do! Nothing. What should I do? Kill Kurrell or send you Home, or apply for leave to get a divorce? It's two days' dak into Narkarra.” He laughed again and went on: “I'll tell you what you can do. You can ask Kurrell to dinner tomorrow—no, on Thursday, that will allow you time to pack—and you can bolt with him. I give you my word I won't follow.”
He took up his helmet and went out of the room, and Mrs. Boulte sat till the moonlight streaked the floor, thinking and thinking and thinking. She had done her best upon the spur of the moment to pull the house down; but it would not fall. Moreover, she could not understand her husband, and she was afraid. Then the folly of her useless truthfulness struck her, and she was ashamed to write to Kurrell, saying: “I have gone mad and told everything. My husband says that I am free to elope with you. Get a dak for Thursday, and we will fly after dinner.” There was a cold-bloodedness about that procedure which did not appeal to her. So she sat still in her own house and thought.
At dinner-time Boulte came back from his walk, white and worn and haggard, and the woman was touched at his distress. As the evening wore on, she muttered some expression of sorrow, something approaching to contrition. Boulte came out of a brown study and said, “Oh, that! I wasn't thinking about that. By the way, what does Kurrell say to the elopement?”
“I haven't seen him,” said Mrs. Boulte. “Good God! is that all?”
But Boulte was not listening, and her sentence ended in a gulp.
The next day brought no comfort to Mrs. Boulte, for Kurrell did not appear, and the new life that she, in the five minutes' madness of the previous evening, had hoped to build out of the ruins of the old, seemed to be no nearer.
Boulte ate his breakfast, advised her to see her Arab pony fed in the veranda, and went out. The morning wore through, and at midday the tension became unendurable. Mrs. Boulte could not cry. She had finished her crying in the night, and now she did not want to be left alone. Perhaps the Vansuythen woman would talk to her; and, since talking opens the heart, perhaps there might be some comfort to be found in her company. She was the only other woman in the Station.
In Kashima there are no regular calling-hours. Every one can drop in upon every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying—“But on my Honor! On my Soul and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care for me. She told me so last night. I would have told you then if Vansuythen hadn't been with you. If it is for her sake that you'll have nothing to say to me, you can make your mind easy. It's Kurrell.”
“What?” said Mrs. Vansuythen, with an hysterical little laugh. “Kurrell! Oh, it can't be. You two must have made some horrible mistake. Perhaps you—you lost your temper, or misunderstood, or something. Things can't be as wrong as you say.”
Mrs. Vansuythen had shifted her defence to avoid the man's pleading, and was desperately trying to keep him to a side-issue.
“There must be some mistake,” she insisted, “and it can be all put right again.”
Boulte laughed grimly.
“It can't be Captain Kurrell! He told me that he had never taken the least—the least interest in your wife, Mr. Boulte. Oh, do listen! He said he had not. He swore he had not,” said Mrs. Vansuythen.
The purdah rustled, and the speech was cut short by the entry of a little, thin woman with big rings round her eyes. Mrs. Vansuythen stood up with a gasp.
“What was that you said?” asked Mrs. Boulte. “Never mind that man. What did Ted say to you? What did he say to you? What did he say to you?”
Mrs. Vansuythen sat down helplessly on the sofa, overborne by the trouble of her questioner.
“He said—I can't remember exactly what he said—but I understood him to say—that is—But, really, Mrs. Boulte, isn't it rather a strange question?”
“Will you tell me what he said?” repeated Mrs. Boulte.
Even a tiger will fly before a bear robbed of her whelps, and Mrs. Vansuythen was only an ordinarily good woman. She began in a sort of desperation: “Well, he said that he never cared for you at all, and, of course, there was not the least reason why he should have, and—and—that was all.”
“You said he swore he had not cared for me. Was that true?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Vansuythen, very softly.
Mrs. Boulte wavered for an instant where she stood, and then fell forward fainting.
“What did I tell you?” said Boulte, as though the conversation had been unbroken. “You can see for yourself she cares for him.” The light began to break into his dull mind, and he went on—“And he—what was he saying to you?”
But Mrs. Vansuythen, with no heart for explanations or impassioned protestations, was kneeling over Mrs. Boulte.
“Oh, you brute!” she cried. “Are all men like this? Help me to get her into my room—and her face is cut against the table. Oh, will you be quiet, and help me to carry her? I hate you, and I hate Captain Kurrell. Lift her up carefully and now—go! Go away!”
Boulte carried his wife into Mrs. Vansuythen's bedroom and departed before the storm of that lady's wrath and disgust, impenitent and burning with jealousy. Kurrell had been making love to Mrs. Vansuythen—would do Vansuythen as great a wrong as he had done Boulte, who caught himself considering whether Mrs. Vansuythen would faint if she discovered that the man she loved had foresworn her.
In the middle of these meditations, Kurrell came cantering along the road and pulled up with a cheery, “Good mornin'. 'Been mashing Mrs. Vansuythen as usual, eh? Bad thing for a sober, married man, that. What will Mrs Boulte say?”
Boulte raised his head and said, slowly, “Oh, you liar!”
Kurrell's face changed. “What's that?” he asked, quickly.
“Nothing much,” said Boulte. “Has my wife told you that you two are free to go off whenever you please? She has been good enough to explain the situation to me. You've been a true friend to me, Kurrell—old man—haven't you?”
Kurrell groaned, and tried to frame some sort of idiotic sentence about being willing to give “satisfaction.” But his interest in the woman was dead, had died out in the Rains, and, mentally, he was abusing her for her amazing indiscretion. It would have been so easy to have broken off the thing gently and by degrees, and now he was saddled with—Boulte's voice recalled him.
“I don't think I should get any satisfaction from killing you, and I'm pretty sure you'd get none from killing me.”
Then in a querulous tone, ludicrously disproportioned to his wrongs, Boulte added—“'Seems rather a pity that you haven't the decency to keep to the woman, now you've got her. You've been a true friend to her too, haven't you?”
Kurrell stared long and gravely. The situation was getting beyond him.
“What do you mean?” he said.
Boulte answered, more to himself than the questioner: “My wife came over to Mrs. Vansuythen's just now; and it seems you'd been telling Mrs. Vansuythen that you'd never cared for Emma. I suppose you lied, as usual. What had Mrs. Vansuythen to do with you, or you with her? Try to speak the truth for once in a way.”
Kurrell took the double insult without wincing, and replied by another question: “Go on. What happened?”
“Emma fainted,” said Boulte, simply. “But, look here, what had you been saying to Mrs. Vansuythen?”
Kurrell laughed. Mrs. Boulte had, with unbridled tongue, made havoc of his plans; and he could at least retaliate by hurting the man in whose eyes he was humiliated and shown dishonorable.
“Said to her? What does a man tell a lie like that for? I suppose I said pretty much what you've said, unless I'm a good deal mistaken.”
“I spoke the truth,” said Boulte, again more to himself than Kurrell. “Emma told me she hated me. She has no right in me.”
“No! I suppose not. You're only her husband, y'know. And what did Mrs. Vansuythen say after you had laid your disengaged heart at her feet?”
Kurrell felt almost virtuous as he put the question.
“I don't think that matters,” Boulte replied; “and it doesn't concern you.”
“But it does! I tell you it does” began Kurrell, shamelessly.
The sentence was cut by a roar of laughter from Boulte's lips. Kurrell was silent for an instant, and then he, too, laughed—laughed long and loudly, rocking in his saddle. It was an unpleasant sound—the mirthless mirth of these men on the long, white line of the Narkarra Road. There were no strangers in Kashima, or they might have thought that captivity within the Dosehri hills had driven half the European population mad. The laughter ended abruptly, and Kurrell was the first to speak.
“Well, what are you going to do?”
Boulte looked up the road, and at the hills. “Nothing,” said he, quietly; “what's the use? It's too ghastly for anything. We must let the old life go on. I can only call you a hound and a liar, and I can't go on calling you names forever. Besides which, I don't feel that I'm much better. We can't get out of this place. What is there to do?”
Kurrell looked round the rat-pit of Kashima and made no reply. The injured husband took up the wondrous tale.
“Ride on, and speak to Emma if you want to. God knows I don't care what you do.”
He walked forward and left Kurrell gazing blankly after him. Kurrell did not ride on either to see Mrs. Boulte or Mrs. Vansuythen. He sat in his saddle and thought, while his pony grazed by the roadside.
The whir of approaching wheels roused him. Mrs. Vansuythen was driving home Mrs. Boulte, white and wan, with a cut on her forehead.
“Stop, please,” said Mrs. Boulte “I want to speak to Ted.”
Mrs. Vansuythen obeyed, but as Mrs. Boulte leaned forward, putting her hand upon the splash-board of the dog-cart, Kurrell spoke.
“I've seen your husband, Mrs. Boulte.”
There was no necessity for any further explanation. The man's eyes were fixed, not upon Mrs. Boulte, but her companion. Mrs. Boulte saw the look.
“Speak to him!” she pleaded, turning to the woman at her side. “Oh, speak to him! Tell him what you told me just now. Tell him you hate him. Tell him you hate him!”
She bent forward and wept bitterly, while the sais, impassive, went forward to hold the horse. Mrs. Vansuythen turned scarlet and dropped the reins. She wished to be no party to such unholy explanations.
“I've nothing to do with it,” she began, coldly; but Mrs. Boulte's sobs overcame her, and she addressed herself to the man. “I don't know what I am to say, Captain Kurrell. I don't know what I can call you. I think you've—you've behaved abominably, and she has cut her forehead terribly against the table.”
“It doesn't hurt. It isn't anything,” said Mrs. Boulte feebly. “That doesn't matter. Tell him what you told me. Say you don't care for him. Oh, Ted, won't you believe her?”
“Mrs. Boulte has made me understand that you were—that you were fond of her once upon a time,” went on Mrs. Vansuythen.
“Well!” said Kurrell brutally. “It seems to me that Mrs. Boulte had better be fond of her own husband first.”
“Stop!” said Mrs. Vansuythen. “Hear me first. I don't care—I don't want to know anything about you and Mrs. Boulte; but I want you to know that I hate you, that I think you are a cur, and that I'll never, never speak to you again. Oh, I don't dare to say what I think of you, you—man!Sais,gorahkojanedo.”
“I want to speak to Ted,” moaned Mrs. Boulte, but the dog-cart rattled on, and Kurrell was left on the road, shamed, and boiling with wrath against Mrs. Boulte.
He waited till Mrs. Vansuythen was driving back to her own house, and, she being freed from the embarrassment of Mrs. Boulte's presence, learned for the second time her opinion of himself and his actions.
In the evenings, it was the wont of all Kashima to meet at the platform on the Narkarra Road, to drink tea, and discuss the trivialities of the day. Major Vansuythen and his wife found themselves alone at the gathering-place for almost the first time in their remembrance; and the cheery Major, in the teeth of his wife's remarkably reasonable suggestion that the rest of the Station might be sick, insisted upon driving round to the two bungalows and unearthing the population.
“Sitting in the twilight!” said he, with great indignation to the Boultes. “That'll never do! Hang it all, we're one family here! You must come out, and so must Kurrell. I'll make him bring his banjo.” So great is the power of honest simplicity and a good digestion over guilty consciences that all Kashima did turn out, even down to the banjo; and the Major embraced the company in one expansive grin. As he grinned, Mrs. Vansuythen raised her eyes for an instant and looked at all Kashima. Her meaning was clear. Major Vansuythen would never know anything. He was to be the outsider in that happy family whose cage was the Dosehri hills.
“You're singing villainously out of tune, Kurrell,” said the Major, truthfully. “Pass me that banjo.”
And he sang in excruciating-wise till the stars came out and all Kashima went to dinner.
That was the beginning of the New Life of Kashima—the life that Mrs. Boulte made when her tongue was loosened in the twilight.
Mrs. Vansuythen has never told the Major; and since be insists upon keeping up a burdensome geniality, she has been compelled to break her vow of not speaking to Kurrell. This speech, which must of necessity preserve the semblance of politeness and interest, serves admirably to keep alive the flame of jealousy and dull hatred in Boulte's bosom, as it awakens the same passions in his wife's heart. Mrs. Boulte hates Mrs. Vansuythen because she has taken Ted from her, and, in some curious fashion, hates her because Mrs. Vansuythen—and here the wife's eyes see far more clearly than the husband's—detests Ted. And Ted—that gallant captain and honorable man—knows now that it is possible to hate a woman once loved, to the verge of wishing to silence her forever with blows. Above all, is he shocked that Mrs. Boulte cannot see the error of her ways.
Boulte and he go out tiger-shooting together in all friendship. Boulte has put their relationship on a most satisfactory footing.
“You're a blackguard,” he says to Kurrell, “and I've lost any self-respect I may ever have had; but when you're with me, I can feel certain that you are not with Mrs. Vansuythen, or making Emma miserable.”
Kurrell endures anything that Boulte may say to him. Sometimes they are away for three days together, and then the Major insists upon his wife going over to sit with Mrs. Boulte; although Mrs. Vansuythen has repeatedly declared that she prefers her husband's company to any in the world. From the way in which she clings to him, she would certainly seem to be speaking the truth.
But of course, as the Major says, “in a little Station we must all be friendly.”
What rendered vain their deep desire?A God, a God their severance ruled,And bade between their shores to beThe unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.—Matthew Arnold.
HE. Tell your jhampanis not to hurry so, dear. They forget I'm fresh from the Plains.
SHE. Sure proof that I have not been going out with any one. Yes, they are an untrained crew. Where do we go?
HE. As usual—to the world's end. No, Jakko.
SHE. Have your pony led after you, then. It's a long round.
HE. And for the last time, thank Heaven!
SHE. Do you mean that still? I didn't dare to write to you about it... all these months.
HE. Mean it! I've been shaping my affairs to that end since Autumn. What makes you speak as though it had occurred to you for the first time?
SHE. I! Oh! I don't know. I've had long enough to think, too.
HE. And you've changed your mind?
SHE. No. You ought to know that I am a miracle of constancy. What are your—arrangements?
HE. Ours, Sweetheart, please.
SHE. Ours, be it then. My poor boy, how the prickly heat has marked your forehead! Have you ever tried sulphate of copper in water?
HE. It'll go away in a day or two up here. The arrangements are simple enough. Tonga in the early morning—reach Kalka at twelve—Umballa at seven—down, straight by night train, to Bombay, and then the steamer of the 21st for Rome. That's my idea. The Continent and Sweden—a ten-week honeymoon.
SHE. Ssh! Don't talk of it in that way. It makes me afraid. Guy, how long have we two been insane?
HE. Seven months and fourteen days; I forget the odd hours exactly, but I'll think.
SHE. I only wanted to see if you remembered. Who are those two on the Blessington Road?
HE. Eabrey and the Penner woman. What do they matter to us? Tell me everything that you've been doing and saying and thinking.
SHE. Doing little, saying less, and thinking a great deal. I've hardly been out at all.
Ha. That was wrong of you. You haven't been moping?
SHE. Not very much. Can you wonder that I'm disinclined for amusement?
HE. Frankly, I do. Where was the difficulty?
SHE. In this only. The more people I know and the more I'm known here, the wider spread will be the news of the crash when it comes. I don't like that.
HE. Nonsense. We shall be out of it.
SHE. You think so?
HE. I'm sure of it, if there is any power in steam or horse-flesh to carry us away. Ha! ha!
SHE. And the fun of the situation comes in—where, my Lancelot?
HE. Nowhere, Guinevere. I was only thinking of something.
SHE. They say men have a keener sense of humor than women. NowIwas thinking of the scandal.
HE. Don't think of anything so ugly. We shall be beyond it.
SHE. It will be there all the same in the mouths of Simla—telegraphed over India, and talked of at the dinners—and when He goes out they will stare at Him to see how He takes it. And we shall be dead, Guy dear—dead and cast into the outer darkness where there is—
HE. Love at least. Isn't that enough?
SHE. I have said so.
HE. And you think so still?
SHE. What do you think?
Ha. What have Idone? It means equal ruin to me, as the world reckons it—outcasting, the loss of my appointment, the breaking of my life's work. I pay my price.
SHE. And are you so much above the world that you can afford to pay it? Am I?
Ha. My Divinity—what else?
SHE. A very ordinary woman I'm afraid, but, so far, respectable. How'd you do, Mrs. Middleditch? Your husband? I think he's riding down to Annandale with Colonel Statters. Yes, isn't it divine after the rain?—Guy, how long am I to be allowed to bow to Mrs. Middleditch? Till the 17th?
HE. Frowsy Scotchwoman? What is the use of bringing her into the discussion? You were saying?
SHE. Nothing. Have you ever seen a man hanged?
HE. Yes. Once.
SHE. What was it for?
HE. Murder, of course.
SHE. Murder. Is that so great a sin after all? I wonder how he felt before the drop fell.
HE. I don't think he felt much. What a gruesome little woman it is this evening! You're shivering. Put on your cape, dear.
SHE. I think I will. Oh! Look at the mist coming over Sanjaoli; and I thought we should have sunshine on the Ladies' Mile! Let's turn back.
HE. What's the good? There's a cloud on Elysium Hill, and that means it's foggy all down the Mall. We'll go on. It'll blow away before we get to the Convent, perhaps. 'Jove! It is chilly.
SHE. You feel it, fresh from below. Put on your ulster. What do you think of my cape?
HE. Never ask a man his opinion of a woman's dress when he is desperately and abjectly in love with the wearer. Let me look. Like everything else of yours it's perfect. Where did you get it from?
SHE. He gave it me, on Wednesday... our wedding-day, you know.
HE. The deuce He did! He's growing generous in his old age. D'you like all that frilly, bunchy stuff at the throat? I don't.
SHE. Don't you?