“Sorry to be late as usual,” he said, “the gateman found a snake in the store room. It was one of the old cobras.”
“Did you kill it?” Mrs. Fordham demanded.
“I sent the gateman for a dish of milk to draw it away,” Mr. Fordham said. He began drinking his soup in gulps, opening his big mouth to receive the entire spoon with each gulp.
“Oh, Robert,” his wife cried. “Why will you encourage them in their superstitions?”
“It’s a very old snake,” Mr. Fordham said mildly. “It’s been here for years, and it only wants a dish of milk each day.”
“Nasty creature,” Mrs. Fordham declared. She banged a small table bell with the flat of her hand and a white-clad Indian boy scurried in and removed the soup plates. Another boy brought in a dish of goat-meat curry and some boiled rice. She ladled these viands upon plates and the boys placed them before the two men.
“Well, David,” Mr. Fordham said. “How’s the language coming on? You should be preaching a sermon soon, you know.”
David put down his fork. The time had come to tell them that he would never preach a sermon. The long quiet months alone with his books and his solitary walks about the city had been fruitful and decisive. He intended to be a missionary of a new sort. He was not content to preach in a small chapel, or to teach a few Bible classes and circle through a hundred miles of villages, admonishing half-starved people to worship a god they could not see. Instead he planned an attack upon India itself, through Indians, and those Indians would be young men, carefully chosen and highly trained, leaders of their own people. Upon them he would exert the utmost of his influence.
“I shan’t be preaching sermons, Mr. Fordham,” he said pleasantly.
“Not preaching?” Mrs. Fordham cried. “Why, how else will the gospel be heard?”
“Be quiet, Becky,” Mr. Fordham said. “Now David, just tell us what you have in mind.”
He told them in a few words, making it simple, making it plain. “I want my life to count for something. The only way it can count in a huge country like this is to search for a few people, a few hundred, if I live long enough a few thousand, and train them to teach others. I propose—”
He let the goat-meat curry grow tepid as he painted for them in simple words the picture he had been creating of his own life. A school of the highest caliber, the sternest standards, working closely with English Government schools, a college and then a university, certainly eventually a medical college and a hospital, each unit opening as quickly as possible, and the most rigid exclusion of all except the best and brightest boys and later perhaps even girls, chosen not according to caste or wealth but ability, and free scholarships for those who were poor.
“But where is God in all this?” Mrs. Fordham demanded.
David gave her his sweet and stubborn smile. “I believe that wherever man does his best, God is there.”
“I don’t call that Christian,” Mrs. Fordham cried.
“Be quiet, Becky,” Mr. Fordham said. “Where will you get the funds for all this, David? It will take millions.”
“My mother left me money,” David said quietly.
There could be no reply. The Fordhams had grown up in poverty, they had lived in little midwestern towns and had struggled through small midwestern colleges. They lived now on a salary too small for luxuries, and had they been at home instead of in India, Mrs. Fordham would have been the servant and Mr. Fordham the breadwinner. They were stunned by this young man with a gentle handsome face who possessed a fortune to do with as he liked. Let him serve God as he would.
“Well, it sounds very fine,” Mr. Fordham said at last.
Mrs. Fordham could not speak. She was thinking of her three sons. Poor things, they had nothing. At home in Ohio they had to work on her father’s farm and when they got to college they would have to work their way through to diplomas, while here in the mission compound Indian boys and girls would be having scholarships and every sort of luxury. It was not fair and God was not just.
The meal was over, and after it, as usual, David made ready for his walk outside the compound into the early twilight to breathe what coolness was there. Tonight he enjoyed it in a profound, stimulating, troubled sort of way. The streets of Poona were crowded when he stepped from the gate. They were always crowded, a solid flowing mass of men, dark faces, bare dark legs, white turbans, moving, crowding, eager, pushing, the dust rising, stirred by their feet and settling in the open shops and markets. The sun had set but the straining anxious life went on in the winding crowded streets, drivers shouting from the carts that threatened to crush the people and yet they never did, the hot hairy shoulders of bullocks pressing against human beings, and the beggars, the fakirs, the sellers of small wares, shrieking above the din. It was Friday, the day the lepers came in from the villages to beg, and they were going home again, their decayed flesh, their stumps of arms and legs uncovered for all to see, while the ones most crippled rode in little pushcarts. When they saw David, a white man, they howled at him for alms, but he went his way.
He was not overwhelmed by it now as he had been at first. Now that he had made his plans and had set a routine for his life, he found it good to join this stream of life at sunset, or in the morning before sunrise when the air was cool. The Indian night was beautiful, the stars hung enormous in the sultry sky, and he turned away from the street into the Poona theater, a great, dusty, flimsy hall, lit by candles hung high in big glass bowls. Two balconies, supported by hand-hewn wooden pillars, were filled with white-turbaned men and the pit was nearly filled. Large holes, not repaired, gaped in the roof and let in the night air and starlight, but the air was still hot and the sweet rank odor of humanity was close. David hesitated, and then found a seat and sat down. Some sort of meeting was going on, students, he supposed, were making the usual outcry against Government. He watched their faces, so mobile, so intent to hear what the man said. These, he told himself, would someday be his men, his material.
A week later he was alone in the mission house for the summer. Poona was cooler than Bombay, though farther south, but even here the currents of air that prevailed usually between the two cities had died away. The heat of summer had fallen and the people waited for the monsoons, the winds which alone keep India from being a desert, uninhabitable for man. The winds begin in north India, born of the intense heat of Delhi and Agra, where, more than two thousand feet above the sea, the dry air and the hot sands draw down the rays of a sunshine fatal and intense. That heat attracts the moist winds from the surrounding sea, and for two months the winds blow toward the northwest and travel southward, circling until opposite winds blow northeast, making two monsoons, during which seed can be sown in the earth, and harvests can be reaped. If the monsoons fail, the people starve.
As yet, not a drop of moisture had fallen this year upon the glittering landscape. The streets were dust, except where the water carriers filled their jars at the rivers, and at the rivers the people gathered to slake their thirst and wash their dried bodies. Women hid in the shadows of their homes, and only the desperate women of the poor wrapped themselves in their Poona saris, nine yards long, and went down to the river’s edge.
For this season the church was closed and the Fordhams had gone to the hills. David had refused to go with them.
“I want to see what it’s like,” he told them. “The Indians have to live through it, and I suppose I can.”
Mrs. Fordham was inexplicably angry with him. “Natives are fitted for the climate and white people aren’t. You had better follow the example of the British. They’ve been here a long time, and it’s only by being sensible that we can stay here. You’ll break down, you’ll get ill, you’ll see!”