“I thought I might find you here,” Ted said. “It is good. Let us talk together of what has happened. How is it that you did not tell me?”
“I do not know you well,” Jehar said without diffidence. “I did not think you needed to know about me.”
Ted was hurt. “How have I behaved that any pupil of mine should think I needed not to know him? Come and sit here on this bench.”
Jehar came down the aisle, very graceful in his fresh white cotton garments, and he sat down and waited, the smile still on his lips. His large dark eyes were clear, he showed no sign of sleeplessness or weariness or fear. Peace was in him.
“You are not going home with your father today?” Ted asked.
“I am going home,” Jehar said, “I shall go home with him and I shall live there for a while until he understands my heart.”
“And if he does not understand?”
Jehar’s face was calm and his bearing full of dignity. “Then I must leave my home.”
“You are very young, Jehar.”
“I am not too young to know what I must do. If I had not seen what I must do, I should also be preparing for my life’s work, either to take the management of my father’s estates, or to be a barrister, or some such thing. Now I know what my work is.”
“You cannot really beg for your food as sadhus do. Surely it is not suitable, Jehar. After all, people know who you are.”
“I need not to beg. God will give me what is necessary.”
“To me it sounds dangerous and strange.”
“That is because you come from the West, sir.” Jehar’s voice was courteous but positive. “To us of India there is nothing strange in wishing to become a sadhu. There are many sadhus, as you know. People do not wonder. It is so, and that is all. But I shall be a Christian sadhu and that is all.”
“What church will you join?”
“None, for if I join one then the others will not allow me to belong to them. I have inquired of this of my teacher, Mr. Fordham, who explains Christianity to us every week twice, as you know. From him I understand that church is good for many people but also I see it is not good for me, because I wish to belong everywhere, to everyone, only first to Christ and only to Christ.”
“Does he know you wish to become a sadhu?” Ted asked.
“I have not told him,” Jehar replied.
“And what makes you think that you know best how to follow Christ?”
“I do not know, except for myself,” Jehar said. He laughed unexpectedly, a pleasant boyish laughter. “I am not so stupid as that, surely, so that I think I can decide for others. It is only for myself that I know.”
“So you will take a bowl, a blanket—”
“I will take my bowl, my blanket, and I shall wear my saffron robe, so that men know I am a sadhu, but I shall preach only Christ.”
“Jehar, you make me afraid. It is so absolute.”
“Why are you afraid? I simply do what many have done, except I am of Christ. Siva and Ram I do not condemn, Kali I will not worship, nor Ganesh, for I cannot see them good or beautiful. But Christ I see is beautiful because he committed no crime and he harmed no one, and he spoke of God.”
“This one thing I will say,” Ted replied, after a moment, “you are renouncing the life of a man before you know what it is. I have seen Indians renounce life, Jehar. I saw Darya himself in prison.”
All India knew the name of Darya, and Jehar lifted his head in interest. “Did you see him indeed?”
“Yes, and he, too, has renounced everything except it is for his country, or so he believes. But he is not a young man as you are. He has known marriage and fatherhood, and only after these were taken from him did he accept renunciation.”
“I have no need to wait,” Jehar said confidently. “I have had a vision. Perhaps Darya had no vision until God had taken from him his wife and his children.”
“What vision had you?” Ted asked. It was impossible to be less than gentle with Jehar.
“I saw Christ plain,” Jehar replied. “It was not a vision of the spirit, you understand. There are such visions also, but I saw him with these very eyes.”
He touched his eyes with his two forefingers.
“I have read the books,” he went on. “I knew the Bhagavad Gita by heart before my mother died. She taught me that to be a saint is the best that man can know, but I did not think I could be a saint, and so I was unhappy. When I first came to this university how unhappy I was, and I did not like to hear of the new religion. It seemed not so good to me as our own more ancient faith. Once I even tore to pieces the Bible Mr. Fordham said we must use in the class room. I was so unhappy to read it. I did not wish to be compelled by him. And then suddenly I saw Christ, there in my lonely room.”
Ted sighed. “I hope you have not changed your whole life because of this—vision, as you say it is.”
“I have changed my life,” Jehar replied.
What more could be said? Jehar was simple and pure and quiet and he could not be changed. The sun tipped the edge of the horizon red gold, and coolness faded quickly from the air. The day had begun. The two young men rose and walked together across the lawn and parted with a handclasp and no spoken word.
Thus harmlessly begun, the day developed into a strange storm, not between Sirdar Singh and Jehar but between Ted and his father, who had never quarreled before. He had half expected to be called into the conference between his father and Jehar. At seven o’clock the first light meal of the day was served, the chota hari which was eaten wherever they happened to be. His father was already in his study. Ted accepted the tray on one of the small veranda tables and ate there, seated in a wicker armchair. Jehar passed him and lifted his hands in greeting, palm to palm, and went on into the hall and the study. The door to his father’s study closed and Ted waited, finishing his tea and toast and ripe mango and then he sat, still expecting to hear his father’s voice.
The call did not come. After more than an hour the door opened again, and Jehar came out, looking pale and almost weary. Again he passed with the silent greeting and without speech he descended the steps and went away. Then Ted got up and went to the study. His father sat at the desk reading some papers, his face stern.
“Father?”
His father looked up. “Yes, Ted?”
“How did it go?”
“You mean the conference? I am convinced that Jehar is out of his mind. He talked of visions.”
Courage, Ted thought, courage to speak, to take Jehar’s side, to declare that visions are possible.
“There is plenty of evidence for visions in the Scriptures, Father.”
His father stared at him. “Surely you are not going to justify Jehar?”
“Only to say that there is scriptural justification for visions.”
“Ignorant men wrote the Scriptures, as you very well know,” his father retorted. “They put into concrete form the feelings of their hearts. I do not expect that sort of thing from the graduates of my university.”
“I wonder if Jehar has not decided upon a rather brilliant act, nevertheless?”
“What do you mean?” his father demanded.
“I mean, we have tried our way of preaching Christianity for some hundreds of years, churches and hospitals and universities, all this you have here, but it doesn’t make Christians.”
“It does make Christians,” his father said harshly. “There is a statistical gain every year in Indian church membership.”
“No real gain,” Ted said doggedly, “The villages are as they have been for all these hundreds of years. I saw no sign of Christianity there, Father. The same old poverty, the same old misery, the same greed of the zamindars and the landowners, the same ruthlessness of the rich over the poor, the evil over the good—”
“These things have always been and always will be,” his father said.
“Then of what good is Christianity?” Ted cried passionately.
He met his father’s astonished eyes, he saw hi
s father’s concern, and he leaped to deny his father’s faith.
“Jehar is right,” he cried. “I wish I had the guts to be like him! I wish I could give up all and follow Christ!”
There was a look of real terror in his father’s eyes and this at last he could not face. He turned and strode away.
What had he said? He had said that he wished he could give up all and follow Christ. But what did that mean? He stopped in the big empty drawing room. As clearly as Jehar had said he saw the face of Christ, he saw the face before his eyes. It was the face of a peasant, a nameless face, a face he had seen in one of the scores of villages through which he had passed, had seen and had forgotten, but it had hidden itself in the folds of his brain, a face twisted with pain and labor and starvation, a hopeless face except for the deathless burning eager eyes, and the eyes demanded of him, “Is there no hope for me?”
He stared at this face, and while the eyes made their demand upon him, he heard the door to his father’s study suddenly close.
Alone in his study David fell to his knees. He had turned the key in the lock, ashamed, or perhaps only shy, lest he be discovered in prayer at this hour. But he was driven to prayer, for now he was afraid for his beloved and only son. All the year since Ted first came back to him he had waited for the time when he could speak freely to Ted, when he could tell his son his problems and the fearful weight of his task, and he had not spoken. He had been confused with memories. When he looked at Ted, he saw his own father, as he might have been when young, and yet Ted was like Olivia, he had Olivia’s ways, her quick feelings. And thus confused and accustomed to loneliness, he had not spoken to his son even of his fears and burdens.
And now Jehar!
If the Indian people were touched enough with unreality so that they could follow a fanatic, their ignorance was still appalling and he had begun to see that all he did would not be soon enough to save the country, because Gandhi had lighted such a flame.
And now Jehar!
With Empire his work, too, would collapse. The millions of ignorant peasants in the villages could not soon enough be taught or their poverty relieved to save the day for Empire. The task should have been begun three hundred years ago, if Empire was to hold. He knew now that his own student body was rotten with disloyalty. He tried not to know it, but the secret meetings, the private slogans, the Gandhi caps and the homespun cloth were conspicuous. If Gandhi won, then the Christianity upon which he had built his life was only shifting sand. And Ted had today defied him, as yesterday Jehar had defied his own father. Oh, the cruelty of sons to their fathers!
There on his knees while his thoughts prevented his prayers, he suddenly remembered his own youth. So had he defied his father, and his whole life had been a defiance and still was. That aged man lying bedridden now in the old mansion, he had deserted, too, in his own fashion. The tears rushed to his eyes.
“God, let me go back to my father and explain to him—”
It was not at all the prayer he had planned to make.
“Have I been wrong, O God? Should I have obeyed my earthly father instead of Thee? Am I punished now in my own son? Give me wisdom that I may know what to do.”
He knelt there for a long time, waiting, but no answer came, and he got up from his knees. It had been long since he had been aware of any answer to his prayers. Somehow without knowing it he had lost the sense of the presence of God, even while he spent his whole life in that service. Loneliness descended upon him again, the awful loneliness of the spirit. When Olivia died he had known loneliness and in a sense he had never learned to live without her. But the loneliness then was not absolute, as this was. He had not given himself to Olivia as he had to God. Involuntarily he groaned aloud the cry that once Christ had made, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
But why, but why?
Ted strode from the drawing room down the hall to his own room and closed the door silently and then stood motionless. His heart was beating with joy! Wave after wave of joy, astounding joy, whose source he did not know except that it came from outside himself, infused his being. It filled him like an atmosphere, cooling and invigorating. He laughed aloud, he felt the hair prickle on his head and his fingers tingled. He wanted to run and leap and dance. Yet why except that there alone in the drawing room when he had seen his vision, he had reached a decision so clear that it was absurd not to have known before that it was inevitable. He must leave Poona and go and live in a village. How simple a resolution, but he had been struggling toward it all these months since he had seen Darya, and only Jehar’s directness and childlike purity had led him to the end.
“Why should I follow my father’s footsteps? I must leave him so that I can live alone with India and myself. There was that little village in the north that I liked so well. That is where I shall live.”
He stood enraptured with the thought. Hindu saints, like ancient Christians, were acquainted with the state of ecstasy, and this, he supposed, was what they meant. When a decision was right, because it was the will of God, or perhaps only because it fulfilled the soul’s deepest unspoken desire, then such ecstasy was the confirmation, a powerful happiness, an accord which was complete.
He sat down quiescent, wondering and grateful, and after a time the joy subsided and peace remained. He made plans, he thought of the village, Vhai, and of all that he could do there—yes, and receive. He would go there humbly to learn as well as to teach.
XIV
“I CANNOT UNDERSTAND YOU,” David said.
“I don’t expect you to, Father,” Ted replied.
They sat at dinner together that night in the orderly house. His father looked exhausted. The heat had risen unbearably during the day and the monsoons were due at any hour now, and would probably begin before midnight. Meanwhile the air was fetid. Neither of them could eat and they made no pretense. The languid servant removed their plates and brought in coffee.
“Does this decision mean that you have given up the thought of marriage?” David asked.
“No, not if Agnes will come to the village with me,” Ted said.
“I hope you will not be so inconsiderate as to ask her,” his father replied severely.
Ted laughed. In spite of the heat he had continued singularly lighthearted all day. He had busied himself with packing a few of his things, a change of garments, some books, a cooking kit, an army cot and a mosquito net. When he got to Vhai, he would build one of the mud-walled houses with a thatched roof. There was no reason for delay now that the school year was over.
“Does it seem laughable to you?” his father asked drily. Humor between the generations was perhaps impossible. He remembered the jokes which his father used to tell and laugh at loudly which even in his youth had seemed to him childish and certainly not funny.
“Not at all,” Ted said gaily, “but I suppose Poona was rather remote when my mother came to marry you.”
“It was not the same,” his father retorted. But he did not explain how it was. Instead his mind busied itself suddenly with an inspiration. Why should not he write to Agnes Linlay and beseech her good sense for his foolish son? Let it be a secret between them, let him convey to her delicately how happy he would be if ever she became his daughter-in-law. He could praise his son honestly to several ways, and then hint that though he was extremely young and could benefit the more from a sensible wife, yet he felt he could promise that she need never regret her choice, if now Ted could be kept from an unwise decision to go and live in an Indian village, an act which must somehow be prevented by his family and his friends. There were proper ways for a white man to live in India and she above all young women perhaps must know this and could help to save Ted from folly.
“I shall just drift off in a day or two, Father,” Ted was saying cheerfully.
“I am surprised that you have let Jehar so influence you,” David said.
“It is not Jehar alone,” Ted said. It is even partly Darya. Most of all it is my own wish just to strip off ev
erything that you and Grandfather have given me, though I am grateful to you both and must always be, and yet I want to be only myself at least for a while—not a MacArd, perhaps.”
David did not reply. He was haunted by this morning’s memories of his own youth and he could not speak without seeming to echo his own father twenty-five years ago. He must rely on Agnes Linlay.
Their meal was interrupted by a commotion on the veranda and the announcement that Fordham Sahib and Memsahib were waiting.
“Ask them to come in,” David told the manservant. They came in not two but three, and the third was a young girl, a girl with a face as fresh as a pansy, and indeed very like a pansy, the large soft brown eyes and thick soft brown eyebrows, full red mouth and pointed chin combining the effects of that simple flower. She was extremely pretty and childlike, and Mrs. Fordham introduced her with bursting pride.
“Our daughter Ruthie, Dr. MacArd, and this is young Mr. MacArd, Ruthie. Do forgive us, but we couldn’t wait.”
“She’s come, has she?” David said, essaying a smile. He had forgotten and so, he supposed, had Ted, that Ruthie was to arrive.
“Oh yes, and very lucky it is just before the monsoons, so difficult to travel in those pouring rains, but they’re very near.”
“I went up to Bombay to fetch her,” Mr. Fordham said, staring at Ruthie with eyes shining behind his small steel spectacles. “Ain’t she pretty?” he added with mischief.
“Papa!” Ruthie cried in a sweet, loud, young voice.
“Papa is just the same as he always was, dearie,” Mrs. Fordham said fondly.
“He’s awful,” Ruthie said to everybody. She opened her red lips and laughed, her teeth sparkling white. She was quite at ease, her rather plump young body relaxed and even indolent, and she wore a pink short-sleeved dress, for which Mrs. Fordham now felt it necessary to apologize.
“Ruthie, your sleeves are a mite short, aren’t they? For a missionary, dearie? We have to set an example.”
“Are they?” Ruthie said innocently.
They all gazed at Ruthie’s smooth and pretty arms, and Ted stared at her frankly. It was astonishing to remember her even as vaguely as he was able to do and then see her as she was now. That round-faced, round-eyed troublesome small girl who had tagged him mercilessly as soon as she could walk, and whom he had avoided as completely as he could, had become this fresh and natural flower, a little stupid perhaps, but of a gentle and sweet disposition, as anyone could see. His grandfather had said once, “Marry a good disposition, Ted. Your grandmother had a sweet nature and it is the most important gift for a woman to have. I’ve known men ruined by their wives’ dispositions.”