He had replied in peaceable fashion, “I can quite understand how you feel. Now shall we dance again?”
She forgave him, and he was careful not to talk about Gandhi or his Uncle Darya again, and in her reserved way she resumed the threatened friendship. And he liked her, in spite of this, because she was simple and direct with the mannerliness of the well-bred English girl. He liked her because she had no coquetry and yet she was so feminine that he wanted to be with her because he had never been friends with a girl before. There was something delicious about her, or perhaps simply about being with a girl. He felt an enticing difference in her, not only physically, but in her way of speaking and thinking. They looked at the same scene and she saw it with other eyes than his. He never knew just what she was feeling, and so there was always surprise. Every morning she was new to him and he waited eagerly until they met, and they had come to watch the sunset together, as they did now.
“There,” she said, “the sun has whirled below the sea. Soon it will be dawn in England.”
“What do you see when you think of dawn in England?”
“The amber light, stealing over the Cotswold hills. I’ve watched it often from the windows of my grandmother’s house. The light comes up like a river running into the valleys. What do you see in America?”
“The towers of the tall buildings in New York, catching the light first, but it is silver, isn’t it? Amber makes me think of evening.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed.
The twilight descended swiftly and the rays of the almost full moon cast a pale glow over the darkening water. The first gong for dinner rang in a series of musical tones and she turned reluctantly from the rail.
“Will you be dancing tonight?” he urged.
“Yes — will you?” she replied.
“Yes. Shall we meet at the usual place?”
“Yes.”
Their eyes clung for an instant, they nodded briefly and she left him.
He lingered, reluctant to leave the peaceful sea and the quieting sky. Life ahead was as familiar as his childhood, and yet it would be new. He was not a child but a man, young, of course, but a man. As a man he must meet his father and establish his own independence. It had not been worthwhile to insist upon it with his grandfather, they were not to live in the same house and he had yielded to the old gentleman’s whims and demands with a mild amusement. It must be different with his father. He was going to India as a teacher in his father’s school and he could not allow his father to dominate him, even by his powerful persuasive courteous presence. He loved his father but he knew that they were different men.
The second bell rang and he went down the stairs to his cabin. The ship was not crowded, he had the small room to himself as he prepared to put on his evening clothes, the formal black trousers, the short white jacket, black tie and wide black cummerbund of the tropics, a garb becoming to a tall and slender young man with grey eyes and auburn hair. He looked like his grandfather, except that the darkness of his mother had tempered the fiery red of the elder’s hair and beard. His own face was smooth-shaven, but his beard was stubborn and he shaved again tonight.
Nevertheless he was ready too early for the final bell, for he had learned to dress quickly in the years at school, and his skill at sports had taught him a compact co-ordination of movement with no waste of action. With the few minutes left him he did what was habitual to him. He pulled a small book from his pocket and opened the pages at a marker. It was a New Testament and he was reading the Gospel according to St. John. His father had never compelled him toward the Christian religion, but when he had left India, a little boy, his father had asked him to read the New Testament every day, and he had made the promise and kept it, inconvenient as it often was. The words of grace had crept into his mind without effort, and while in earlier years they had often been meaningless, now, when his young manhood had sharpened every nerve and feeling, they impressed upon him meanings at once poetic and profound.
“Many believed,” St. John had written, “but Jesus did not commit himself to them, because he knew all, and he needed not that any should testify, for he knew what was in man.”
As usual the seemingly simple, deeply significant words stirred his imagination. He closed the book thoughtfully and put it back into his hip pocket, but the words haunted him as he went downstairs to the dining salon. He was seated at the captain’s table because he was young MacArd, that was inescapable, but he had learned not to mind, and he took his share in the table talk, smiling, provocative, observing, and seeking, in his way, too, to know what was in man.
Meanwhile David MacArd was in Bombay to attend the Durbar for the Prince of Wales and then two days after, to meet the ship that was bringing his son back to him. It was a doubtful time for a Durbar. India was seething with new discontent and Darya had made one of his rare visits to Poona months earlier to protest to David the assertion of Empire and to beg him to advise the Viceroy against it.
Their paths had parted five years ago. Darya had chosen to follow Gandhi, subduing his own powerful personality to the firm little leader whom David did not approve.
The visit had not brought the two nearer. David had seen at once that Darya had become a single force, gathering all his soul and mind into one thrusting purpose, that of independence for India. He had left his father’s house and had given his inheritance to his brothers. Stripped by death of Leilamani, their sons and baby daughter, Darya had for the first years wandered from village to village, a sadhu except that he had no religion, a beggar except that he needed nothing. Thus he had come to know his own people and the bitterness of their life. But he had no talent for common folk, though they were his own. He was an aristocrat, a man of learning and wealth, and they were afraid of him. This he could not bear, that a peasant, starved and nearly naked, should fall to the ground before him and take the dust from his feet, and worse, when he raised the man up and forbade him to grovel, that the man would not believe him, and would run away from him in fear. There was no way in which Darya could make the poor and the ignorant trust him and without trust they would not follow him. Angry at himself and peasants alike, he had left the villages then, to seek Gandhi and in that wry and humorous man he had recognized the necessary leader. With an unselfishness which Gandhi seemed not to notice, Darya subdued himself. He bent his far more subtle mind and complex spirit before the practical little man who was neither aristocrat nor peasant and yet could understand both.
“David,” Darya had said, “you must use your influence with the Viceroy to prevent this visit from the Prince of Wales. It is not the time for a show of Empire. I tell you, the nationalists will not stand for it. They are still furious because we were compelled into the world war without our wish or will, and our dire poverty made still worse. I tell you, there will be mass riots everywhere and the life of the Prince will be in danger. I warn you, Congress will boycott the whole Durbar. We will declare hartal in Bombay when he lands there.”
It was autumn, the heat was subsiding slightly, and the college grounds were filled with swarming students. David had been aware of unrest but he had ignored it. The years of mastery over young men and women had taught him order and command. He saw no order in the unruly shouting mobs that swarmed about Gandhi, and he did not respect Gandhi as commander. He repressed the Gandhian movement in his schools and admired the steadfast calm of Government, while he disliked its use of force. The bombing of Pathan villages, even though the people had been warned to leave, troubled his Christian conscience and he had remonstrated with the Viceroy himself about shooting into mobs. Yet the whole of India was disturbed and this wretched Gandhi had begun it all with his passive resistance, the non-cooperative movement which a year before Congress had adopted as its policy. He was sorely torn, for he could not as a Christian approve the military rule in the Punjab, where thousands of innocent people had been killed by British soldiers, and he shrank to the very soul from the Amritsar massacre, where the dead and dying were left where they fell after that attack by General Dyer and his men. Even the wounded had not been cared for. “That is not my business,” the General had declared.