Arundel. Benson Edward Frederic
Love, he had said, would teach her. Had love taught Schumann this moon-melody, this star-sown heaven of song?.. Had the thought of Madame Schumann made vocal to him the magic spell?.. This was a thing to smile at. Daddy did not understand, of course, what music was. He did not know how far it transcended in reality all else that can be felt or thought.
But, to do him justice, that was not the sum, the conclusion of his words. The love of a man, he had said, would teach her love, and the dwelling in that would teach her that love had neither end nor beginning, and she would call it by another name.
Instantly and ludicrously an image presented itself, the image of the regimental church, with its pitch-pine pews, its crude windows, its encaustic tiles, its braying harmonium. Yet all these unlovely objects somehow symbolized to her father all and more than all that music symbolized to her. And he was not imaginative; he was not poetical; he was not artistic. But to him, here was the one eternally satisfying answer to all questions that could ever be asked.
Elizabeth's fingers had come to the end of the first Novelette, but her unconscious mind, even as her thinking mind, heeded them no longer. The whole of her mind, conscious and unconscious alike, peered eagerly into this, asking itself what it saw there. And it saw nothing except the coloured glass and the pitch-pine; heard nothing but the wheeze of the harmonium, and the somewhat bucolic merriment of a chant in C major.
She rose from the piano and strolled out into the yellow, honey-coloured moonlight – a moonlight not pale and cold, but partaking of the ardour and the weariness of the Indian day. She recalled all that religion, direct religious worship, that is to say, and adoration of a personal and inner principle, had meant to her life, and, fully honest with herself, she saw how intensely little, how infinitesimally small that had been. There were her childish prayers, first of all, sentences which she could never remember having learned, for they came out of her earliest mists of childhood, and she could no more recollect being taught either them or their meaning than she could recollect being taught to wash her face. They were both on exactly the same plane; they belonged to the ritual of getting up and going to bed. There was washing to be done; there were buttons to be negotiated; there were prayers to be said. She had taken it on trust that these performances had to be gone through; the reason for them had never interested her. Then a further piece of observance had been introduced into the routine of life, and with her best frock and hat she had stood and sat and knelt, sometimes with tedium, sometimes in absorbed attention to interesting members of the congregation, while words were recited, and hymns sung. It was rather pleasant to recognize among the formulas of public worship her own bedside ejaculations, just as it is pleasant to recognize familiar faces in a crowd. It was pleasant also to be encouraged to join her small voice in the more cheerful intervals of singing. Church, in fact, was a not unattractive way of spending an hour on Sunday morning, and was part of Sunday in precisely the same degree and with exactly the same meaninglessness as her prayers were part of the ritual of dressing and undressing. Much of what was recited there was connected with the Jews who had astounding adventures in Egypt and in the wilderness.
She had heard, she had listened, she had been taught, prepared for confirmation, and taken to communion. She supposed that she believed that she was a Christian, but she believed, for that matter, in Australia, and, for that matter, she knew she was English. But neither her belief in Australia nor in the truth of Christianity was coloured with emotion or directed her actions. She would not, as far as she was aware, behave any differently if Australia was suddenly swallowed up in the ocean, or if the historical facts on which Christianity was based were proved to be fallacious. In no way did either fact enter into her life. She was not, for instance, kind and honest and truthful because she was a Christian.
But she knew that in beauty she sought a meaning that she had never yet found, that at times she agonized to discover, and catch hold of, something on which to rest, from which to derive…
She had wandered down the length of the dusky garden alleys between the roses and yellow mimosas until she had come to the low stone wall at the bottom of her father's garden. Here the cantonments ended, and half a mile of dry dusty land lay between her and the native city, which rose a black blot against the blue of the night sky. A few low huts of cattle-tenders were scattered about, and the feather-like plumes of tamarisk, and clear-cut aloes broke the level monotony. One such aloe close at hand flowered a few days before, and now the great stalk, fifteen feet high, with its cluster of blossoms at the end of the horizontal twigs, stood like a telegraph pole across the face of the moon, and Elizabeth wondered at this prodigious force that from the empty air and barren soil raised in so few days this triumphant engine and distributor of life. For years this plant had silently and slowly grown, a barren growth in a barren land; then suddenly it had been caught in the whirlpool of production, of fruition, and with a stupendous output, which should cause its own exhausted death, had erected that beacon flame with that torch of transmitted life. Had it felt a death-bed revelation, as it were? Was it satisfied to bear witness to life and to die? What did it mean? What did it all mean?
A small trodden track lay just below the three-foot wall on which she leaned, and at the moment she heard something stir there close to her. Looking over, she saw that an old man was squatting there. He had a long white beard that fell nearly to his waist; he was naked but for the loin-cloth about his middle, and by his side lay a tall crutch and an empty begging-bowl of wood. But round his shoulders, which glistened in the moonlight, she saw that there was bound the three-fold cord that marks a Brahmin.
Apparently he heard her movement as she leaned over, and turned his head towards her. Deadly weakness and exhaustion were printed there, but more clearly than that there shone from it a quiet indwelling joy, an expression of rapture, of ecstasy.
Elizabeth spoke to him in the vernacular.
"You want food?" she said.
"I want nothing, lady," said he.
Elizabeth suddenly felt that there was something here for her; that this aged, quiet face, so full of joy, so shadowed by weakness, had a message. The feeling was instinctive and unaccountable.
"I will get you food in a moment," she said.
"I do not want food," said he.
Elizabeth put her hand on the top of the low wall and easily vaulted over.
"But you are tired and hungry," she said, "and you must have travelled far from your native place to come up here. Where are you from?"
"From Benares. I have searched all my life, but to-day my search is over."
A sudden wave of uncontrollable emotion seized the girl.
"Oh, tell me what you have searched for?" she said. "What is it?"
"It is the Life itself," he said. "And I have found."
He fell back, and lay quite still, with open eyes and smiling mouth. Even as he said he had found.
CHAPTER II
THE RIDDLE GROWS
In these days of the diffusion of the products of trade and the benefits doubtful and otherwise of civilization, when the Amir of Afghanistan has a piano, and the Grand Llama of Thibet a bicycle, it must not shock the reader to know that Elizabeth travelled up the Khyber Pass in the company of her father and the Commander-in-Chief in a motor-car. That military hero who had danced three-quarters of the night with the young ladies of Peshawar, not singling out any one for his favours, but cutting up his heart into a large number of small pieces, and giving one to each, was delighted to find there was yet another charming maiden whom he had not yet seen, and, rolling his jolly sides with laughter, supposed that there had been a conspiracy among the beauties of Peshawar to keep the fairest of them all out of the ballroom. Gallantry and excessive animal spirits are apt to be rather disgusting in elderly and obese persons, but the vitality of this amiable old warrior was so genuine in its boyishness that the primmest of the sex that he so indiscriminately adored were disarmed by his monstrous flatteries. But when our party had passed the fort of Jamrud that guards the Indian end of the historic road, and entered on the defile which from immemorial days has been the coveted key that has locked and unlocked the treasure of India, each yard of which has been bought and paid for in blood, Sir Henry's gallant loquacity was abated, and the magic of the most historic highway in the world