He broke off and they all looked at him. “I don’t know what the authorities will think of it just now,” he went on, answering their looks. “They may take it to be a bit on the revolutionary side, you know.”
“I shall explain matters to the Viceroy myself,” David said.
“In that case—” Mr. Fordham stopped.
“I think it would be fun,” Ruthie said. “I’ve always liked country Indians. They appreciate you and they’re not proud the way the educated ones are. There was an Indian girl in school at home, she was the daughter of a native Prince, one of the very smallest ones, but she wouldn’t speak to me. She looked down on missionaries.”
Nobody answered this until Mrs. Fordham said piously, “I hope you forgave her, dear.”
“I let her go her way and I went mine,” Ruthie said.
“You should have prayed for her,” Mrs. Fordham said.
“I didn’t bother,” Ruthie replied.
Ted laughed. He suddenly liked Ruthie, without admiring her in the least. She had grown up lazy, he supposed, as so many missionary children did, waited on by ayahs as he himself had been. The thought occurred to him that he might even now be thinking of a village as an escape, a place of no demands, and, as Ruthie said, of gratitude and appreciation. Gratitude was a habit-forming drug, he had seen white men who needed more and more of it to keep them self-satisfied until they became ridiculous and pompous with false righteousness.
“We must go home,” Mr. Fordham said. “The gentlemen want to finish their dinner.”
“Hark,” Ruthie exclaimed. Her eyes widened, listening, and they all listened. Far off they heard the howl of rising wind, it came nearer with a rush, and then they heard the splashes of rain from the purpling sky. The monsoon had come.
“Run for it,” Mr. Fordham shouted. They ran out of the open door, and Ted stood watching them. Mr. Fordham sprinted ahead, Mrs. Fordham lifted her skirt over her head, letting her white petticoat flutter in the wind, but Ruthie did not hurry at all. She walked slowly, her face lifted to catch the full force of the rain, and she spread her plump little hands palms upward. The wind snatched the curly strands of her hair and pulled at the knot at her neck until it fell upon her shoulders and the rain whipped her cheeks. She was not afraid, and that, too, Ted liked.
“I admire Ted,” Agnes Linlay wrote in her upright large handwriting, after a suitable number of weeks had passed. “At the same time I quite see how impossible it is to accomplish anything by what he is doing. Believe me, Dr. MacArd, I feel honored by your confidence in me, but Ted and I did not come to an understanding, I might almost say it was quite the contrary, and that we parted upon disagreement. I have been brought up as an English girl is brought up in India, and I suppose I cannot help my own feelings of proper responsibility. I fear we can only wait for Ted to come to his senses, and meanwhile there is no obligation of any sort between us. If he writes to me, as he says he wishes to do, I shall express my own point of view.”
A dignified young woman, David thought, exactly what he would like to have had for a daughter-in-law, and exactly what Ted needed for a wife. He wrote a careful reply to her, in his own rather fine tight handwriting, expressing the hope, as he put it, that some day they might meet and talk about Ted, and meanwhile he would appreciate anything she could do to keep her point of view before his son. For his own part, he deeply valued what the British Empire was doing to bring the people of India into a position where they could be independent and take their place in the family of modern nations and he deplored the ingratitude of young intellectuals and their leaders, among whom, he was sorry to say, were Indians whom he considered his old friends.
He did not tell her that he was feeling lonely since his son had left. For Ted was gone. He had stayed only a day or two after the monsoon broke and in pouring rains he had set out to the northeast for the village of Vhai. There, his first letter had reported, he found the whole countryside a lake, reflecting the clouds when the sun burst through for an hour or two at a time. But Vhai itself was on a low hill, a small flattened mountain, and the earthen streets were not too muddy. He had found a little house and had set up his housekeeping, although so far he had not been able to do anything except let the villagers stare at him, which they were able to do because they did not need to work while the rains fell. He was glad he had learned their language, for he exchanged jokes with them, and nothing seemed to them more of a joke, though they liked it, than that he declared that he had come to learn of them. The whole village was only a cluster of earth-walled houses and in this handful of minute homes every sort of small industry went on, spinning and weaving, pottery making and carpentry and grinding meal. The people were on the verge of starvation, of course, but cheerful now that the rains were generous. There was even a little temple to Ganesh in the village, the little fat elephant-headed god of whom the people were fond because he was innocent and tried to do his best.
Ted was happy. He was free, the ecstatic gaiety held, and he lived from day to day. The rains would cease in due time, and the lake grow dry and become fields of rice and mustard and beans. He would not visit Poona soon, he wrote his father. He was learning very much, and the people were no longer afraid of him.
He did not write to Agnes for many months, not until the winds blew cool from the foothills of the Himalayas, and not until his life was established in the mud house, and the routine of his days was clear. In the early morning he rose and taught two hours of school for anyone in Vhai who wanted to read and write. Then his pupils went to work and he set up a small dispensary under the overhang of his thatched roof, and there the sick came to him from an ever widening area, and he healed some, persuaded some he could not heal to go to the nearest hospital and agonized over those who went home to die. The afternoon was spent in arbitrating petty quarrels, with which Vhai was seething, and thus in patient talk and shy advice the day passed and night fell. It was a simple routine, accomplishing much less than he dreamed of for the future, but it was established, and so he could write to Agnes at last.
“You and I had no chance really to know these people when we were growing up. I wish I could share with you the stories that happen every day here in Vhai, the extraordinary, the sad, the sweet stories of this everyday village life. It is so much more exciting than the life we lived behind our compound walls. Here in the village street, and in the scraps of gardens behind each house, walled with earth for a tiny privacy, I see human life and see it whole. My darling”—and these were his only words of love—“does it offend you that they have put up an image of Jesus now in the temple? But he looks like Jehar, who is a Christian sadhu. Perhaps Jesus did look like that. He stands beside Ganesh, but they have made him tall.”
Two words in the letter moved her to write to him immediately. “Ted, I cannot let you call me your darling. I do not know how to tell you and so I will just tell you. I have promised to marry your father.”
No news came to Vhai, no gossip from the outer world, and his father’s letters had given him no warning. He understood that deep reserve, or perhaps even delicacy, which made it necessary for Agnes to be the one to speak first. Had he lived in the mission house he might have seen the strange disparate friendship growing between her and the man who was his own father. But he had seen nothing. He had lived his joyous life in the village, the joy isolating him for a time, at least, even from the need of love, so that he had not written her sooner. He had to imagine from her letter and his father’s, which now came promptly, and thus he discovered that it was he who had brought them together. They had written letters about him, and then in September his father had gone to Calcutta to see her, distressed indeed because of his own new feelings. His father made it plain that he was distressed.