The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeannette Duncan (100 best novels of all time txt) 📕

confidential if you return. Prendergast left no will.

'M. Anderson.'

'Send this "urgent," Babu,' she said to the clerk, 'and repeat it to the railway station, Kalka. Shall I fill up another form? No? Very well.'

At the door she turned and came back.

'It is now eleven o'clock,' she said. 'The person I am telegraphing to is on her way down to get tonight's train at Kalka. I am hoping to catch her half-way at Solon. Do you think I can?'

'I think so, madam. Oyess! It is the custom to stop at Solon for tiffin. The telegram can arrive there. All urgent telegram going very quick.'

'And in any case,' said Madeline, 'it can not fail to reach her at Kalka?'

'Not possible to fail, madam.'

'She will have her chance,' she said to herself, on her way to the post office to order her tonga. And with a little nauseated shudder at the thought of the letter in her pocket, she added, 'It is amazing. I should have thought her too good a woman of business!' After which she concentrated her whole attention upon the necessities of departure. Her single immediate apprehension was that Horace Innes might, by some magic of circumstances, be transported back into Simla before she could get out of it. That such a contingency was physically impossible made no difference to her nerves, and to the last Brookes was the hurrying victim of unnecessary promptings.

The little rambling hotel of Kalka, where the railway spreads out over the plains, raises its white-washed shelter under the very walls of the Himalayas. Madeline, just arrived, lay back in a long wicker chair on the veranda, and looked up at them as they mounted green and grey and silent under the beating of the first of the rains. Everywhere was a luxury of silence, the place was steeped in it, drowned in it. A feeding cow flicked an automatic tail under a tree. Near the low mud wall that strolled irresolutely between the house and the hills leaned a bush with a few single pink roses; their petals were floating down under the battering drops. A draggled bee tried to climb to a dry place on a pillar of the veranda. Above all, the hills, immediate, towering, all grey and green, solidly ideal, with phantasies of mist. Everything drippingly soft and silent. Suddenly the venetian blind that hung before the door of a bedroom farther on swayed out before a hand variously ringed to emit a lady in a pink lawn dress with apt embroideries. Madeline's half-closed eyes opened very wide, and for an instant she and the lady, to whom I must once more refer as Mrs. Innes, confronted each other. Then Mrs. Innes's countenance expanded, and she took three or four light steps forward.

'Oh, you dear thing!' she exclaimed. 'I thought you were in Simla! Imagine you being here! Do you know you have SAVED me!'

Madeline regarded her in silence, while a pallor spread over her face and lips, and her features grew sharp with a presage of pain.

'Have I?' she stammered. She could not think.

'Indeed you have. I don't know how to be grateful enough to you. Your telegram of yesterday reached me at Solon. We had just sat down to tiffin. Nothing will ever shake my faith in providence again! My dear, THINK of it--after all I've been through, my darling Val--and one hundred thousand pounds!'

'Well?'

'Well--I stayed behind there last night, and Val came on here and made the necessary arrangement, and--'

'Yes?'

'And we were married this morning. Good heavens! What's the matter with you! Here--oh, Brookes! Water, salts--anything!'

Brookes, I know, would think that I should dwell at greater length upon Miss Anderson's attack of faintness in Kalka, and the various measures which were resorted to for her succour, but perhaps the feelings and expedients of any really capable lady's-maid under the circumstances may be taken for granted. I feel more seriously called upon to explain that Colonel Horace Innes, shortly after these last events, took two years' furlough to England, during which he made a very interesting tour in the United States with the lady with now bears his name by inalienable right. Captain and Mrs. Valentine Drake are getting the most that is to be had out of Frederick Prendergast's fortune with courage in London and the European capitals, where Mrs. Drake is sometimes mentioned as a lady with a romantic past. They have not returned to Simla, where the situation has never been properly understood. People always supposed that Mrs. Drake ran away that June morning with her present husband, who must have been tremendously fond of her to have married her 'after the divorce.' She is also occasionally mentioned in undertones as 'the first Mrs. Innes.' All of which we know to be quite erroneous, like most scandal.

Mrs. Mickie and Mrs. Gammidge, in retirement, are superintending the education of their children in Bedford, where it is cheap and practical. They converse when they meet about the iniquitous prices of dressmakers and the degeneracy of the kind of cook obtainable in England at eighteen pounds a year. Mrs. Gammidge has grown rather portly and very ritualistic. They seldom speak of Simla, and when they do, if too reminiscent a spark appears in Mrs. Mickie's eye, Mrs. Gammidge changes the subject. Kitty Vesey still fills her dance cards at Viceregal functions, though people do not quote her as they used to, and subalterns imagine themselves vastly witty about her colour, which is unimpaired. People often commend her, however, for her good nature to debutantes, and it is admitted that she may still ride with credit in 'affinity stakes'--and occasionally win them.


4. The Pool in the Desert.

I knew Anna Chichele and Judy Harbottle so well, and they figured so vividly at one time against the rather empty landscape of life in a frontier station, that my affection for one of them used to seem little more, or less, than a variant upon my affection for the other. That recollection, however, bears examination badly; Judy was much the better sort, and it is Judy's part in it that draws me into telling the story. Conveying Judy is what I tremble at: her part was simple. Looking back--and not so very far--her part has the relief of high comedy with the proximity of tears; but looking closely, I find that it is mostly Judy, and what she did is entirely second, in my untarnished picture, to what she was. Still I do not think I can dissuade myself from putting it down.

They would, of course, inevitably have found each other sooner or later, Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele, but it was I who actually introduced them; my palmy veranda in Rawul Pindi; where the teacups used to assemble, was the scene of it. I presided behind my samovar over the early formalities that were almost at once to drop from their friendship, like the sheath of some bursting flower. I deliberately brought them together, so the birth was not accidental, and my interest in it quite legitimately maternal. We always had tea in the veranda in Rawul Pindi, the drawing-room was painted blue, blue for thirty feet up to the whitewashed cotton ceiling; nothing of any value in the way of a human relation, I am sure, could have originated there. The veranda was spacious and open, their mutual observation had room and freedom; I watched it to and fro. I had not long to wait for my reward; the beautiful candour I expected between them was not ten minutes in coming. For the sake of it I had taken some trouble, but when I perceived it revealing I went and sat down beside Judy's husband, Robert Harbottle, and talked about Pharaoh's split hoof. It was only fair; and when next day I got their impressions of one another, I felt single-minded and deserving.

I knew it would be a satisfactory sort of thing to do, but perhaps it was rather more for Judy's sake than for Anna's that I did it. Mrs. Harbottle was only twenty-seven then and Robert a major, but he had brought her to India out of an episode too colour-flushed to tone with English hedges; their marriage had come, in short, of his divorce, and as too natural a consequence. In India it is well known that the eye becomes accustomed to primitive pigments and high lights; the aesthetic consideration, if nothing else, demanded Robert's exchange. He was lucky to get a Piffer regiment, and the Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were all lucky, I thought, to get Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a good deal challenged, even in Rawul Pindi, where it was thought, especially in the beginning, that acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could hope for. That is not enough in India; cordiality is the common right. I could not have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about 'the case'; it was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some points of view deplorable. I chose to reserve my point of view, from which I saw it, on Judy's behalf, merely quixotic, preferring on Robert's just to close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first wife was odious to a degree which it is simply pleasanter not to recount, but her malignity must almost have amounted to a sense of humour. Her detestation of her cousin Judy Thynne dated much further back than Robert's attachment. That began in Paris, where Judy, a young widow, was developing a real vein at Julian's. I am entirely convinced that there was nothing, as people say, 'in it,' Judy had not a thought at that time that was not based on Chinese white and permeated with good-fellowship; but there was a good deal of it, and no doubt the turgid imagination of the first Mrs. Harbottle dealt with it honestly enough. At all events, she saw her opportunity, and the depths of her indifference to Robert bubbled up venomously into the suit. That it was undefended was the senseless mystery; decency ordained that he and Judy should have made a fight, even in the hope that it would be a losing one. The reason it had to be a losing one--the reason so immensely criticized--was that the petitioning lady obstinately refused to bring her action against any other set of circumstances than those to which, I have no doubt, Judy contributed every indiscretion. It is hard to imagine Robert Harbottle refusing her any sort of justification that the law demands short of beating her, but her malice would accept nothing of which the account did not go for final settlement to Judy Thynne. If her husband wanted his liberty, he should have it, she declared, at that price and no other. Major Harbottle did indeed deeply long for his liberty, and his interesting friend, Mrs. Thynne, had, one can only say, the most vivid commiseration for his bondage. Whatever chance they had of winning, to win would be, for the end they had at heart, to lose, so they simply abstained, as it were, from comment upon the detestable procedure which terminated in the rule absolute. I have often wondered whether the whole business would not have been more defensible if there had been on Judy's part any emotional spring for the leap they made. I offer my conviction that there was none, that she was only extravagantly affected by the ideals of the Quarter--it is a transporting atmosphere--and held a view of comradeship which permitted the reversal of the modern situation filled by a blameless correspondent. Robert, of course, was tremendously in love with her; but