The words burst from his wounded heart, he heard them as though they were spoken by someone else, a voice other than his own, and under the awful cry, he trembled. Was there no answer? He did not hear a reply. The sounds of the wood he could hear, the crackle of twigs, the flutter of leaves in the breeze, the distant call of a quail. The sun beat down upon him in the stillness and he lay there with his eyes closed, the smell of the warm earth in his nostrils mingled with the scent of crushed fern. Then slowly he felt a strange quiet steal over him. He began to think.
Darya had come between him and Olivia. Had she not seen him in his strange Indian beauty, his dark brilliance, she might have spoken differently, for she would not have known that such a man existed. It was not mere charm. He could not accuse Darya of wilfully casting that net over Olivia. No, Darya had simply been himself, though inspired, perhaps, by the directness of her eyes and the fearlessness of her mind. She, too, had her charm over him, doubtless, accustomed as he was to the shy silence of Indian women in his presence.
He sat up suddenly, and wrapped his arms about his knees and stared out over the glittering river. She had said that she must be able to look up to him, and she said it because she had seen Darya. How rash he had been to propose to her so abruptly this morning, without waiting to discover her feelings! He felt himself a boy humbly young and yet wounded, wanting in wisdom, foolishly impetuous. He had gone to her and asked for her love as though it were a toy or a sweet instead of his whole life.
In the midst of the bright morning he was overwhelmed with gloom and bewilderment. Vague aches pervaded even his body, he was shot through with little lightnings of pain. He thought with anguish of his dead mother, to whom had she been alive he would have turned for comfort and laughter.
“Silly—” he could hear her tender voice always underlaid with laughter—“if she wants to look up to you, why don’t you start climbing?”
He bowed his head on his knees and closed his eyes that he might hear that clear voice he remembered. It was exactly as though she had spoken to him. Perhaps she had, perhaps it was the only way she could reach him, now, through his memory of her voice and his imagination of what she would say, were she here.
All his being melted, and from the fusion a pure desire distilled and shaped itself through longing into prayer.
“Oh God,” for now there must be God, “tell me how to begin.”
He felt his heart quiver in his breast. He dared invite such leadership only if he dared to follow. He sat motionless above the cliff. The air was still and hot and the sun blazed upon him. Far off he heard the scream of a hawk whirling into the sky. He waited, his mind empty, his consciousness stayed, and suddenly he saw India, a crowded street. Dark faces turned toward him, startled and surprised, as though they had been summoned against their will.
He was frightened at their clarity and he lifted his head and saw only the river, the blue shores beyond, and the soaring hawk. What did it mean that he had seen India here except that he had asked direction and had been given answer? He had stepped over the divide between this visible world and beyond, and the way had been made plain. The prospect was too vast to comprehend and he tried to encompass it in the words of his age. He thought of dedication, consecration, mission, and the passionate words were wine to his soul. No one needed him here, but in India the human need was boundless. He did not know what he would do there but God — he spoke the name with new reverence — God would show him. This, he supposed, was what it meant to be born again. As naturally and unexpectedly as his first birth from his mother’s body, rebirth had come. What had been his world ceased. He had been driven out of it first by his mother’s death and now by Olivia’s refusal and in his helplessness a new life was revealed. He drew his breath deeply and got to his feet.
“When did you get this notion?” MacArd said harshly.
He had seen for several days that his son was silent and absent-minded and tonight at the dinner table the boy had scarcely touched his food. Then here in the library after dinner he had blurted out that he wanted to go to India as a missionary.
“It is not a notion, it is a conviction,” David said.
MacArd lifted his shaggy head and caught Leila’s eyes looking down upon them from her portrait above the mantelpiece. He looked away from her. “You can just get over it. I’m building MacArd Memorial, but not for my only son. Who’s to take over after me?”
“I intend to live my own life, under divine direction,” David said.
A man could not be rough with his only son. MacArd had learned that long ago when once he had whipped David for disobedience and he then had gone into convulsions of crying. Leila had flown at him, she had sobbed and declared that she would leave his house if he ever whipped their son again. Well, he had never whipped him again, nor could he now. He flung out his arms. “A fine joke on me! A fine, nice joke! I spread a net and caught my own son! I gambled on God and my son is the stakes and I’ve lost! Ha!”
He snorted and sighed and descended to self-pity.
“Look, son, I’m getting old. Can’t you just stay with me for a few years longer?”
“I have decided, Father,” David said.
MacArd got to his feet and stamped about the room, weaving his way around the vast table and between the heavy chairs of English oak.
“I guess I’ve wasted a lot of money building that memorial. I’d have given up the whole business if I’d thought it would give you the idea you were going to leave me. That miserable country! What would your mother say to me if I let you go? Snakes, heathen, filth — well, there’s plenty of other men to go. Not my son! I’ll set fire to the memorial and let India go to hell. Can’t be worse than the way it is over there, anyway.”
David did not reply, and MacArd after a moment stole a look at him sidewise from under his rough brows. His son was sitting quietly watching him, exactly as Leila used to do when he rampaged about something before her. The resemblance tore at his heart and he collapsed into a chair. He sank his head upon his chest.
“All right, all right,” he grunted. “I don’t count. I know that. I give up. But you’ve spoiled any pleasure I can take in the memorial. I’d finish it but I won’t take any joy in it. You’ve ruined it for me.”
“I must do what I think is right,” his son said.
“Then I’ll turn the memorial into a factory!” MacArd shouted.
They glared at each other, father and son, and neither moved.
Part II
V
THE SUN WAS CREEPING up beyond the grey ghats and over the walls and cupolas of Poona, above the minarets and through the white colonnades and tall green palms. The streets were already astir, the bullock carts creaked and water carriers splashed the dust with small liquid spheres that rolled along like dark quicksilver.
In his bare quiet study in the mission house David sat with his teacher. This part of his work he enjoyed, the early hours of thoughtful pondering over the lacelike script of Marathi text. At first it had seemed impossible to decipher one symbol from the other but slowly he was able to read and the graceful design was beginning to be a language. He had begun by studying Sanskrit, at Darya’s suggestion. The roots of Indian thought were to be found in the ancient Sanskrit texts, Darya said, but David had discovered in them amazing parallels to Christian thought. Upon the whitewashed wall, opposite the table at which he now sat, he had a text that he had carefully copied upon heavy cream-colored paper, a prayer from the earliest scriptures of Hinduism.