“Now, Barton,” MacArd said firmly, “I shall have to ask you to get about your business so that I can get about mine. I have to make the money for you, you know.”
“Be assured that I take the task as a sacred duty,” the minister replied.
His back was not turned before MacArd was roaring into his office telephone, banging a great outspread hand palm down upon his desk. “Get the lawyers here, and tell them to come now!”
Through the days of his father’s absorption in a business he did not explain nor David try to understand, the year moved on. There were no parties and no dances, for MacArd had decreed a full year of mourning, and David was left idle, and yet he was not discontented. He had finished college, he had not lived at home for eight years, and while he still missed his mother, there was a pleasant sense of growing freedom in the vast quiet house on Fifth Avenue. A letter from Darya had reached him in the late autumn, and he was moved to write back inviting the young Indian to come for a visit. He had broached the idea to his father today, who, absorbed and abstracted, was nevertheless willing.
“I suppose you are lonely,” he said abruptly to David. The morning was grey with approaching November and the house looked somber. Even he could see that a young man alone for the day, and day after day, might find it grim, in spite of luxury and warmth.
“I am not lonely,” David said, with his usual good humor. “But I would like to know Darya better.”
“Well, have him come, by all means,” MacArd said, and then fell into his abstraction again. There was no use in trying to explain the labyrinth of his thoughts. He was going through a creative period during which he could have explained nothing to anybody. He watched the charts of the production of gold as they were prepared for him weekly. As yet very little had happened. The necessary machinery had to be designed and produced, and there had been delay and mistakes. It would be a matter of five years, he began to fear, before gold would become plentiful enough to make the currency of the country sound. Meanwhile the National Treasury was being robbed by anyone who could produce a silver dollar and get its equivalent in gold. The gold thus got did not go into banks but was hidden under mattresses and in chimney nooks and tied up in old stockings. Gold was actually disappearing from circulation, and if this went on long enough a new panic was inevitable. Nothing could stop it. The currency was being debased to a point where it would soon begin to affect the prestige of the nation abroad.
He got up from the breakfast table where he had been grinding out these gloomy thoughts. “Yes, yes,” he muttered. “Go ahead and invite the fellow. Tell him to stay the winter if he likes. You could take a trip somewhere, you two. I shan’t be able to get away for I don’t know how long.”
“I wish I could help you,” David said, troubled by the greyness of his father’s face.
“Nobody can help me,” MacArd said.
“It isn’t money, is it, Father?” David asked.
“Not my money,” MacArd retorted. “But the nation is going bankrupt unless this robbing of gold can be stopped. That long-haired fellow Bryan will be president one of these days if we aren’t careful.”
David was the usual young college graduate. He did not understand business, finance or politics. If he made up his mind to go with his father he would have to understand them some day, but he was not sure now that he wanted to work with his father. He longed for another life, a different world, where mind and spirit were more important than making money and shaping politics. Why was his father so terrified of William Bryan? Perhaps he would make a good president. It was all in the muddle, the puzzle, the scintillating changefulness of life ahead, and he did not want to face it yet.
“Give me a year, Father,” he said with his boyish smile. “A year, and then I shall settle down and try to understand these things, and be of some use to you.”
“Take as long as you like,” MacArd grunted. Nothing would be solved in a year. He wiped his grizzled mustache with his napkin and left for his office.
It would be a pity, Darya thought, folding David’s ardent letter, to leave Poona now just when the weather was at its best and coolest. A few months hence, in February or March, the dry heat would be suffocating and then it would be pleasant to take ship at Bombay and cross the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, saunter through Europe and England and reach America perhaps in June. He had never seen America, although he knew England well. His father was one of the Indians who admired England and who had brought up his children to be half English. Darya spoke English as well as he did his native Marathi, and he had finished at Cambridge with first honors. So that his children could be thoroughly at ease in England his father had built an English house within the compound here at Poona and had employed an English tutor, a Cambridge man, to live there with his sons. All during his youth Darya had been compelled during the week to eat lamb chops, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, boiled cabbage and potatoes and sweet puddings for dessert. This, his father declared, would fit him for life among the best Englishmen when he went to Cambridge. Only on Sundays were he and his younger brothers allowed to join the family in the big Indian house and eat the delicious spiced Indian foods.
The years in England had passed easily and quickly, he liked English life, although he was often troubled because of the difference between English people in England and in India. In England they were kindly and they did not show airs of superiority, yet once they came to India as rulers they changed and became arrogant and proud. Even the Eurasians, who were only half white, took over these airs. Some day, his father said, it must stop, but no one knew yet how to stop it.
Darya had been attracted to David MacArd in London, and it was natural enough that there should be equality between them, but he had hesitated long before the meeting in India. Yet in Poona David had still been charming and unaffected and different from any white man that Darya had ever known. He was curious now to see the young American in his own country, his own home. The singular attraction held and drew him westward, for what purpose he did not know. He was fond of his pretty Indian wife but his marriage had been arranged by his parents and he did not expect to find companionship of mind and spirit with her. Nor was it easy to find anywhere, for he was repelled by the Anglicized young Indian men, and dismayed by the softness of those who had never crossed the “black waters” to England. In his somewhat singular loneliness he saw the young American as friend and brother.