“Good morning, Olivia,” David said. He was careful to show no marital fondness before Indians or Anglo-Indians who were always, he thought, more Indian than English. “Sit down and give us your advice, as Ramsay suggests. I’ll just outline my idea first. I want a vast quadrangle here,” he put his finger upon a space, “centered upon a fountain, something really beautiful. I want to tempt young men to come here.”
“And when you have caught them in your net?” she asked, leaning over him and feeling with exquisite delight her breast against his shoulder.
“Once they are here I shall assault their souls,” he declared with vigor. “I shall not, for example, give them any excuse for caste.”
Ramsay shook his head doubtfully and pulled at a minute black mustache. “There will be trouble. These people are all for caste, you know, Mr. MacArd. And the Marathi are a very strong people, very forceful and all that. They will be as liberal as you please and then suddenly they’re frightfully superstitious. Look at the present cult of that dreadful old woman, the sect of Baba Jan! Actually, sir, there are well-educated Indian Indians among her followers. It’s discouraging.”
The dreadful old woman was a half-witted beggar who wandered about Poona. People said she was a hundred and fifty years old and that she could raise the dead to life again. It was true that there were young Indians, even some educated in Oxford and Cambridge, who believed or half believed in her, just as Darya, laughing but still troubled, had fetched a swami to exorcise his house when the servants were terrified because they said an evil spirit was caught in the lofty rafters.
“It’s all nonsense about the Indians being spiritual, of course,” Ramsay went on with the bravado, the pitiful contempt of the man who fears that in his ancestry there is concealed shame. “Indians aren’t spiritual — they’re merely superstitious. And lots of them don’t believe in any gods at all nowadays. I know a chap, a very rich chap, too, who has had it carved above his gate, ‘God is nowhere.’”
David listened in his usual intent fashion. “Perhaps it is best for the false gods to be cast out, so that the spirit of the true God may enter,” he observed.
“Oh, the old yogis won’t let that happen,” Ramsay exclaimed with strange passion. “They pretend to be so saintly, but they are very wicked and cruel, actually.”
“That depends upon the nature of the man,” David replied. “There are yogis who are so kind, so winning, so good, that I fear them because they resemble Christ. They are our real enemies. The Marathi poet-saint said — you remember Tukārām? I was reading his poems the other day;
‘On all alike he mercy shows,
On all an equal love bestows.’
“That’s the man I fear, a saint who does not acknowledge Christ. The cruel harsh self-sufficient yogis — ah, I don’t fear them! Human hearts turn to love as plants to the sun. ‘Lead us from the darkness into light’—that’s from the Hindu Scriptures, too, and desire is still passionate in the hearts of these people. But I want to show them the true light.”
He was preaching and he knew it, but Ramsay and Olivia listened, compelled by his strong sincerity. She marveled at the attractive power in this man whom she now loved. Where had it come from except from the inner source of his own faith? She was Christian, she supposed, but not as he was. Her religion was not a force so much as an atmosphere in which she lived, and in the atmosphere there were many things, her increasing interest in life, her pleasure in her friendship with English people here, her pity for the massive poverty she saw everywhere, her delight in the hills where she and David went for brief holidays, her amused affection for the Fordhams and the other missionaries like them before whom she walked carefully because she had benefits which they could not share — poor little Miss Parker, for example, the evangelist, so snub-nosed and stubby, who must look upon the marriage of the two young MacArds as something too close to heaven for her own comfort. Oh, she, Olivia, was rich in many benefits, and so she must be humble.
“What is this scrawl?” she asked putting her finger on a corner of the blue print, but really she asked that she might lean against David’s shoulder again.
“I want Ramsay to design a women’s dormitory there,” he said.
Ramsay broke in with his too impetuous voice. “I don’t like to criticize, I’m sure, but that, I feel, is really going too fast, Mr. MacArd. I cannot see the Indians willing to let their girls enter a compound where there are male students.”
David was decisive. “If I am to cope with the new Ramkrishna revival of Hinduism, I must dare to break down old customs. The Ramkrishna people are perfectly aware of the dangers of the old Sannyasa ideas, which taught that men should be indifferent to the sorrows of the world, because all was illusion anyway. Ramkrishna believes that God takes innumerable forms and colors, appearing everywhere. It’s a tempting idea in these times of rising nationalism. ‘Be gods and make gods’—I’ve heard them say that myself. They will revive Hinduism with such slogans, and that is what I must oppose, for India would be taken out of the modern world for centuries. It’s the women who cling to the superstitions and it’s the women I mean to educate as the men are educated.”
Ramsay sneered slightly behind his little mustache. “If you are afraid of the new gods, why not be afraid of nationalism? That’s where the old religious force is really being drained off.”
“I am not afraid of nationalism,” David argued. “I am afraid of something much greater that nationalism might misuse — the force of the masses of these people, and people like them anywhere in the world, men and women who cannot read and write, the peasants, the ones down under, that man who in India goes out to plough his miserable field with no better plow than his ancestors had a thousand years ago, he half starved as they were, while his wife stays home, subject, as women were in ancient times, ‘to the three crooked things, the quern, the mortar, and her crook-backed lord.’”
“Oh, you two,” Olivia murmured. “Where will you agree?”
Ramsay laughed. “Fortunately we need not agree. It is impossible to agree about India, you know. Two Indians, even, can never get together anywhere. They argue all over the place. But I am only an English architect, and so no one minds me. I am very ill-informed about India, actually. Most of my life has been spent in England.”
He said this carelessly, not looking at them but preparing to roll up the great sheets of blue prints, tapping the ends with his narrow hands, the strange dark hands, much darker than his face and so obviously Indian.
“Well, good day, sir, and madam,” he said, “I’m glad you approve the fountain, Mr. MacArd, sir.”
He bowed a trifle too deeply for an Englishman and went away.
“Poor fellow,” Olivia said. “He tries so hard to be English.”
“Foolish of him,” David said. “It only makes the Indians hate him because they know he isn’t English.”
“Oh, let him be what he wants to be,” Olivia said robustly.
She lingered, too proud to ask for his morning kiss and then he remembered.
He rose, smiled and held out his arms and she came into them. These first months of marriage were dangerously sweet, almost too precious. They were both passionate and they had found in themselves needs, desires, responses of which they had never dreamed. They were innocently sensual, believing that the blessing of God upon their union relieved them of the responsibility of self-control. Nothing was forbidden to them, since their marriage itself was sacred.