“It is not as easy as you think,” David said. He could not explain to Darya the nature of western love between man and woman. In some ways Darya was very alien and Indian.
“I cannot speak of her,” he said abruptly.
Darya pressed his hand, smiled, and shook his head. “Then we will not speak of her. Eat this cool melon, it is good for the kidneys in summer.”
He ate and drank as Darya bade him do. He had not been hungry for weeks and the boiled water in the mission house was tepid and flat.
Then, grateful that Darya had not been his usual insistent self, he made talk. “Are there many houses like this in India?”
“Not many,” Darya confessed, “but there are a few. You are asking why we do not renounce our riches when so many are poor. I have asked myself also and it troubles me, and yet I do not accept the renunciation. My parents are old, I am the eldest son, I have my wife and children and the family depends upon me — this, though I know that renunciation is the highest form of spiritual joy. My father says nevertheless that we who are rich perform a useful function. It is well, he says, for the people to know that there can be houses like ours, so that they too may have hope of fortune. Whether he merely comforts himself, I do not know. But you are the son of a rich man, David, and your Scriptures say, too, that it is hard for rich men to enter the kingdom of heaven. Our Scriptures say the same thing in other words.”
This was the moment to tell Darya of his plans for his life and so he began, and he drew for Darya the future that he would make and how to his great school he would draw the best of India’s youth and inspire them with strength and knowledge, and he would gather the finest of teachers and the strongest of faith from everywhere. What his father had not done, he would do.
Darya listened, his eyes flashing, humorous, sceptical, tender, but David talked stubbornly on.
“And shall you make all these young Indians into Christians?” Darya demanded at last.
“Not against their will,” David said.
“Ah, you will charm them,” Darya protested. “I know your western ways! You will surround them with comforts and you will make them believe that your running water and your clean rooms and soft beds, your great libraries and your vast rooms and healthy food are all the result of your religion and so you will make Christians out of them. And then the young doctors will all want great hospitals and electrical machines and they will not want to live in the villages and the teachers will not want to teach in village schools and the girls will want to marry men who can give them houses like yours and that is what they will think is Christianity.”
“Is there any reason why a man cannot be Christian and live in a clean house lighted by electricity instead of by smoky oil?” David demanded.
“He must walk the way, my friend,” Darya said. “He cannot come out of the village directly into your Christian America. He has to go back to his village that he left and make it over with his own hands, my friend.”
“As you do, doubtless,” David said with un-Christian malice.
“Ah, but I am not a villager,” Darya retorted. “It would be false for me to pretend that I must do what I am not born to do.”
“Nevertheless, I too must do what I think I am born to do,” David insisted, “under God’s guidance,” he added.
“By all means,” Darya agreed. “Let us not quarrel. Build your school and I will send my sons to it. But do not expect them to go into villages. They will come back here and ask me to put in electricity and I will refuse because I do not like electricity.”
“Who said you must have electricity?” David demanded.
“It is the inevitable result of your Christianity,” Darya said. His mood changed suddenly and he was all coaxing again. “Be happy, David. It is all I ask.”
The two young men fell silent and after a while, David slept. When he woke the children were gone, but Darya was there reclining upon cushions and reading a book by the light of a small lamp of brass bung on the wall behind his shoulder;
“Do not go home,” Darya said coaxingly, “stay here with me, David. My house is your house. You are too lonely.”
“I have had a wonderful sleep,” David said, “a restful cool sleep. But I must go back, Darya.”
Darya teased him. “You are determined to be a saint, are you?”
“Not that,” David replied.
It was dark, and when they came out a servant was waiting with a lantern to see that no snakes lay in the path to the gate, and when they reached the gate Darya bade the servant light the way for David to the mission house.
“Serpents come out in the summer darkness, and you must be safe,” he said.
They parted and David walked behind the man and the dust rose and stung his nostrils. The night was black and stifling and the light of the lantern shone through a golden haze. At the gate he gave the man some money and the gate-man lit a torch and went before him into the house, again to guard him from the creeping serpents of the night. The house was still and hot and David went upstairs alone by the light of a lamp he had lit and now carried in his hand, and his footsteps echoed upon the bare floors. He entered his room and looked about him as a habit to see whether scorpions or centipedes were anywhere near. Lizards were harmless, they clung to the walls and the ceiling and ate the mosquitoes and therefore were friendly and sometimes in the night he heard them fall with a soft plop upon the cotton roof of his mosquito net. He undressed and poured water over himself in his bathroom and then went naked to bed.
For some reason, against his controlled will, in that night he dreamed a hot and throbbing dream of Olivia. He dreamed that she had come, that she was here, and that he held her in his arms. He dreamed that when morning came she did not go away, that she stayed here, she lived here, and they were happy together. It was the first time he had dreamed of her since he came to India and when he woke in the darkness before dawn he knew that what had set him dreaming was Darya’s wife. Darya loved her, and how strange that her name was Leila — Leilamani! He had been astonished to hear it spoken, and he had not wanted to tell Darya that Leila had been his mother’s name. And thinking of his mother he fell into memories of his home and of his boyhood, and then of Olivia again and she came near to him and her eyes were as dark as Leilamani’s eyes.
Try again, Darya had said, try again, David! He lay stretched upon the dry mat, in the blackness, listening to the almost noiseless scuff of lizards, the dry almost silent rustle of their feet. Far off somewhere now, just before the dawn, when, if ever, the Indian night was still, he heard the wiry wailing of a human voice chanting to the subdued beat of a drum. A timid woman might be afraid of India in the night but Olivia was not timid. Yes, he would try again. Darya was right. It was not good for a man to be alone in India. He rose from his bed in the night and lit the candle on his table, he pulled up a bamboo chair, and wrote the first love letter of his life.
Across the city Darya was also writing to Olivia, and Leilamani was leaning on his shoulder, her hair flowing loose down her back. She watched each curve of the English letters, admiring his skill and adoring his strong brown hand. Only a little while before that hand had caressed her yielding body with yet another skill. They had made sweet love together and when their hearts were quiet again Darya had lain thinking of David, who had no such joy, and then Leilamani had pouted and wanted to know what he was thinking about. So he told her how David, his brother, had no wife, and he told her about the proud tall girl who would not marry him, and then he had to explain that in the strange country across the black waters the young women were wilful and would marry only as they chose.