He had never known any girl well until now he was beginning to know Agnes. In his childhood he had no girl playmates. Mrs. Fordham, it was true, had given birth to a belated girl child to her astonishment and even embarrassment, but Ruthie, as they called her, was three years younger than he, a round-faced, round-eyed child with whom he would have been ashamed to play. When he visited his father, she had already been sent back to some church school in Ohio, and Mrs. Fordham was as briskly childless as ever. And it always seemed too much trouble to explain to any of the girls in America why he was going to India and, since they did not know and probably could not understand, they had remained far from him even while he carried on the gay conversations that were suitable. But this remoteness had made him shy of falling in love, and now he did not want to be more than friends even with Agnes. Some day, of course, he must marry and have children. His grandfather had been plain about that.
“You are the only scion of the family, Ted,” his grandfather had said the night before he left. The old man was lying in his bed, very straight and thin and only his big bones made him still look big. He was easily tired and he went to bed early, but he liked Ted to come in and talk, and he had gone on, “Your father never married again though I wish he had, but I couldn’t say anything because a second marriage would have been impossible for me too. We MacArd men are faithful to our women.”
He had champed his jaws under his big snow-white beard which he never bothered to cut nowadays and he had turned his eyes away from Ted to the portrait on the chimney-piece opposite his bed. He could not see it very clearly any more but memory lit the dim outlines of the beloved face.
“Marry a good woman,” he commanded in a loud voice, “marry and have a lot of children. She always wanted many children and we had one. Your mother ought to have had a dozen children, she had as lithe and strong a frame as could be found, but India killed her.”
He closed his eyes, overcome by the fitful sleep which fell upon him now at any moment, and Ted waited. In a moment his grandfather had suddenly opened his eyes. “What the devil are you going to India for?” he demanded.
“I don’t know yet,” Ted had said. “I want to go and I may not stay.”
But he knew that he would stay. He had found no place for himself in America — pleasant, oh yes, that indeed, and everybody waiting to be his friend. He had missed the war by his youth, spending those years cloistered in boys’ schools, and now, college over, he had come out into a world he did not know, glittering, laughing, corrupt, and reaching for him. The heir to the MacArd millions could scarcely escape the reaching hands and he had retired quickly to the old house where his grandfather lived, emerging shyly to accept invitations, moving with a gay poise that puzzled the mothers and the daughters to whom he was so eligible a young male.
Even his father had not urged him to come back to India. “Don’t feel you must come back to India,” David had written. “There is always a place for you here, of course, and there are times when I sorely hope you will come at least for a few years, that we may learn to know each other again. But I did not follow my father, and you must not follow me.”
It was not his father, it was India. He was going back to something he knew, an old world, a gentle world, often poor and starving and always kind. Nobody and nothing in America needed him, so he had felt. But perhaps his India did.
He knew already that his was not the India that Agnes knew.
He had found after only a few days at sea that they must not discuss Gandhi or Indian nationalism or any of the matters of which his Uncle Darya had written him. While he was a little boy he had seldom seen Darya, and when he did come to the mission house, he remembered hearing his father and Darya talking together and then almost quarreling. It had seemed to him that it was quarreling, and once, much troubled, he had asked his father, “Is Uncle Darya a bad man?”
His father had replied quickly and firmly, “He is a very good man, and I think he is going to be also a great man.”
“Then why aren’t you friends?”
His father had tried to explain. “Ted, these are strange times in which we live, and nobody can understand them. Many things are wrong and good people are trying to make them right. I believe that my way of doing it is best, but your Uncle Darya has quite a different way and he thinks his is best.”
“But can’t you be friends?” So he had insisted.
“I hope so,” his father had said soberly.
A few months ago, quite unexpectedly, Darya had begun to write to him. “Dear Ted: Your father has written me that you are coming back to India. With his permission I am writing to you. I think you should know the India to which you are returning, for it is not the country you left.”
From then on Darya’s letters had come almost regularly and he had explained to Ted the changes he would see. Of course, Darya told him, there was the old India of the villages, almost untouched. It would take years of independence to improve the villages, and perhaps there would even have to be another world war before India could be free, but the weapons of independence were being forged, and Gandhi was drawing the villages into the struggle as no one else could. They would have to have the help of the peasants, since most of India lived in villages, and only Gandhi could get their help.
None of this was real to Ted, it fitted in nowhere with his memories, but he was curious about it and he had spoken to Agnes of his curiosity. To his surprise, though of course he should have expected it, he told himself afterwards, she had grown suddenly cool toward him. They were dancing that evening, and he felt the coolness pervade her physically. She drew away from him in the middle of the first dance.
“Do you mind if we sit down?” she asked.
They had sat down and watched the dancing and after a moment she turned her lovely pale face toward him.
“I can’t forget what you said after dinner about that wretched little Gandhi! I wonder if you know how wicked he is really and how he is disturbing the peace of India. When I think of my father and all the sacrifices he has made for the Empire, and how kind he is to every Indian, much kinder and more pitying than he is to any of his English staff, it seems to me the grossest ingratitude in these new Indians to be so disloyal to Government.”