Come, My Beloved

by Pearl S. Buck

  “I asked Olivia to be my wife.” He had learned to be very firm with the Fordhams. “I didn’t ask her to be a missionary. That is not within my power.”

  Still, Olivia tried at times to please the stout Christians. She was fond of Mrs. Fordham in an easy way, and she liked Mr. Fordham warmly. They were good. But it did seem a waste for them to spend so much time on poor and low caste people and why, she asked David, when there were Indians like Darya, did not he and the Fordhams make them into Christians?

  Even Mr. and Mrs. Fordham had cast longing looks from afar at the proud and wealthy young Indian.

  “If you could only win him for Christ,” they said wistfully to David.

  But Darya evaded Christ with his usual careless and half humorous grace.

  “One’s religion is as personal as one’s marriage,” he declared. “I would not dream, dear David, of persuading you to my Hindu faith, and you, my friend, are too delicately attuned to me to try to change me. Is it not so with us?”

  Who could deny such charm? Olivia felt it as delicious as ever, and it must not be distrusted.

  “Do leave Darya his own religion,” she had then told David, to which he had made no reply.

  Meanwhile she had not yet met Leilamani, nor even had more than a glimpse of Darya and the exchange of greetings and a few questions. He had seemed almost shy in her presence.

  “After you are settled, and after your honeymoon,” he said. “When you are quite at home here in Poona, I will invite you to my house, and you shall meet Leilamani.”

  He had not yet invited them and when only yesterday she had wondered aloud at the delay, David had said, “Darya always does exactly as he pleases, Olivia. You’ll have to wait.”

  His manner was remote, his voice firm and a glance showed her that he was the other David, the missionary and not the lover. But she was too happy to be wounded, content perhaps being the more exact word for her state of mind, for content was large and all embracing, and happiness was sharp and particular and must be reserved for special moments.

  She finished her tea and toast and wandered out of her room. In the house the shades were drawn against the sun and the house was shadowy if not with coolness at least with its semblance. The bare floors were polished, the furniture dustless and a servant had filled the vases with fresh flowers. Olivia did not try to grow flowers but the servants found green branches and blossoms strange to her, or sometimes only huge fern leaves and small palms. She drifted across the big bare rooms for which she had never bought furniture, after all, in Bombay. She had not wanted to buy for a house she had not yet seen and so they had come straight to Poona, and she had left the house as it was. The few pieces of furniture of exquisite workmanship, some Chinese tables and cabinets, and Indian brocades thrown across their dark and shining surfaces were enough. She had not hung curtains in the heat, the jalousies were enough, too, and she did not like paintings on the walls. She was contemptuous of the English interiors, rooms as stuffy as any in London, and even less did she like the inexpensive but similar effects that Mrs. Fordham made with rattan and wicker. No cushions, not in this heat, and the insects lurking!

  “The house is a bit bare though, dearie,” Mrs. Fordham said.

  “I like bareness,” Olivia said.

  She went to find David without much hope, for at this hour he might be anywhere, sitting with some thoughtful visitor, or working with the architect on his boundless plans for a vast school.

  He took his own way as ruthlessly as his father did for purposes entirely different, and she knew that he planned an enormous compound, a center of education and health and religion. Some day this center would be known all over India, thanks to the MacArd millions. What, she often wondered, would David have been as the son of a poor man?

  She found him in his study at the huge table he had ordered made for his plans. A young Anglo-Indian architect was with him and they were earnestly poring over the plans for another dormitory, an addition to the proposed college for men.

  The Anglo-Indian saw her first. He was a slender graceful young man, his olive skin, his blue brown eyes, his straight hair dark but not black, revealing his mixed race. He was English, and his presence passionately proclaimed him the son of an English father. He had purposely forgot his mother, whose inherited features he had, for she was Indian.

  “Good morning, Mrs. MacArd,” he exclaimed with his slight exaggeration of Oxford accent, the little extravagance of manner which revealed his Indian blood. “I have been so hoping you would come in, you know, you have such an extrornary sense of design, such a quick eye for balance, it’s always such a relief to be shown one’s faults but so delightfully.”

  Olivia smiled and put out her hand, aware of looking charming in her soft white muslin frock. India had made her feminine, she had relaxed, her lips were no longer taut or her body tense. But that perhaps was partly marriage and the certainty at last that she could and did love the man to whom she was married. Religion, dedication, whatever one wanted to call it, had made David strong and dominant, and love had taught her the joy of submission. In her way she supposed she had longed to submit and now she could submit without loss of herself. The young Anglo-Indian’s eyes were unpleasantly moist as he gazed at her and she withdrew her hand.

  “Good morning, Olivia,” David said. He was careful to show no marital fondness before Indians or Anglo-Indians who were always, he thought, more Indian than English. “Sit down and give us your advice, as Ramsay suggests. I’ll just outline my idea first. I want a vast quadrangle here,” he put his finger upon a space, “centered upon a fountain, something really beautiful. I want to tempt young men to come here.”

  “And when you have caught them in your net?” she asked, leaning over him and feeling with exquisite delight her breast against his shoulder.

  “Once they are here I shall assault their souls,” he declared with vigor. “I shall not, for example, give them any excuse for caste.”

  Ramsay shook his head doubtfully and pulled at a minute black mustache. “There will be trouble. These people are all for caste, you know, Mr. MacArd. And the Marathi are a very strong people, very forceful and all that. They will be as liberal as you please and then suddenly they’re frightfully superstitious. Look at the present cult of that dreadful old woman, the sect of Baba Jan! Actually, sir, there are well-educated Indian Indians among her followers. It’s discouraging.”

  The dreadful old woman was a half-witted beggar who wandered about Poona. People said she was a hundred and fifty years old and that she could raise the dead to life again. It was true that there were young Indians, even some educated in Oxford and Cambridge, who believed or half believed in her, just as Darya, laughing but still troubled, had fetched a swami to exorcise his house when the servants were terrified because they said an evil spirit was caught in the lofty rafters.

  “It’s all nonsense about the Indians being spiritual, of course,” Ramsay went on with the bravado, the pitiful contempt of the man who fears that in his ancestry there is concealed shame. “Indians aren’t spiritual—they’re merely superstitious. And lots of them don’t believe in any gods at all nowadays. I know a chap, a very rich chap, too, who has had it carved above his gate, ‘God is nowhere.’”

  David listened in his usual intent fashion. “Perhaps it is best for the false gods to be cast out, so that the spirit of the true God may enter,” he observed.

  “Oh, the old yogis won’t let that happen,” Ramsay exclaimed with strange passion. “They pretend to be so saintly, but they are very wicked and cruel, actually.”

  “That depends upon the nature of the man,” David replied. “There are yogis who are so kind, so winning, so good, that I fear them because they resemble Christ. They are our real enemies. The Marathi poet-saint said—you remember Tukārām? I was reading his poems the other day;

  ‘On all alike he mercy shows,

  On all an equal love bestows.’

  “That’s the man I fear, a saint who does n
ot acknowledge Christ. The cruel harsh self-sufficient yogis—ah, I don’t fear them! Human hearts turn to love as plants to the sun. ‘Lead us from the darkness into light’—that’s from the Hindu Scriptures, too, and desire is still passionate in the hearts of these people. But I want to show them the true light.”

  He was preaching and he knew it, but Ramsay and Olivia listened, compelled by his strong sincerity. She marveled at the attractive power in this man whom she now loved. Where had it come from except from the inner source of his own faith? She was Christian, she supposed, but not as he was. Her religion was not a force so much as an atmosphere in which she lived, and in the atmosphere there were many things, her increasing interest in life, her pleasure in her friendship with English people here, her pity for the massive poverty she saw everywhere, her delight in the hills where she and David went for brief holidays, her amused affection for the Fordhams and the other missionaries like them before whom she walked carefully because she had benefits which they could not share—poor little Miss Parker, for example, the evangelist, so snub-nosed and stubby, who must look upon the marriage of the two young MacArds as something too close to heaven for her own comfort. Oh, she, Olivia, was rich in many benefits, and so she must be humble.

  “What is this scrawl?” she asked putting her finger on a corner of the blue print, but really she asked that she might lean against David’s shoulder again.

  “I want Ramsay to design a women’s dormitory there,” he said.

  Ramsay broke in with his too impetuous voice. “I don’t like to criticize, I’m sure, but that, I feel, is really going too fast, Mr. MacArd. I cannot see the Indians willing to let their girls enter a compound where there are male students.”

  David was decisive. “If I am to cope with the new Ramkrishna revival of Hinduism, I must dare to break down old customs. The Ramkrishna people are perfectly aware of the dangers of the old Sannyasa ideas, which taught that men should be indifferent to the sorrows of the world, because all was illusion anyway. Ramkrishna believes that God takes innumerable forms and colors, appearing everywhere. It’s a tempting idea in these times of rising nationalism. ‘Be gods and make gods’—I’ve heard them say that myself. They will revive Hinduism with such slogans, and that is what I must oppose, for India would be taken out of the modern world for centuries. It’s the women who cling to the superstitions and it’s the women I mean to educate as the men are educated.”

  Ramsay sneered slightly behind his little mustache. “If you are afraid of the new gods, why not be afraid of nationalism? That’s where the old religious force is really being drained off.”

  “I am not afraid of nationalism,” David argued. “I am afraid of something much greater that nationalism might misuse—the force of the masses of these people, and people like them anywhere in the world, men and women who cannot read and write, the peasants, the ones down under, that man who in India goes out to plough his miserable field with no better plow than his ancestors had a thousand years ago, he half starved as they were, while his wife stays home, subject, as women were in ancient times, ‘to the three crooked things, the quern, the mortar, and her crook-backed lord.’”

  “Oh, you two,” Olivia murmured. “Where will you agree?”

  Ramsay laughed. “Fortunately we need not agree. It is impossible to agree about India, you know. Two Indians, even, can never get together anywhere. They argue all over the place. But I am only an English architect, and so no one minds me. I am very ill-informed about India, actually. Most of my life has been spent in England.”

  He said this carelessly, not looking at them but preparing to roll up the great sheets of blue prints, tapping the ends with his narrow hands, the strange dark hands, much darker than his face and so obviously Indian.

  “Well, good day, sir, and madam,” he said, “I’m glad you approve the fountain, Mr. MacArd, sir.”

  He bowed a trifle too deeply for an Englishman and went away.

  “Poor fellow,” Olivia said. “He tries so hard to be English.”

  “Foolish of him,” David said. “It only makes the Indians hate him because they know he isn’t English.”

  “Oh, let him be what he wants to be,” Olivia said robustly.

  She lingered, too proud to ask for his morning kiss and then he remembered.

  He rose, smiled and held out his arms and she came into them. These first months of marriage were dangerously sweet, almost too precious. They were both passionate and they had found in themselves needs, desires, responses of which they had never dreamed. They were innocently sensual, believing that the blessing of God upon their union relieved them of the responsibility of self-control. Nothing was forbidden to them, since their marriage itself was sacred.

  He held her in a long close embrace and bent to put his lips to hers. Their lips opened, their tongues sought each other and curled together like two coral red serpents and their bodies quivered again, in unison, though only in the night past they had met complete. Olivia drew away at last, breathless, sighing, and laid her head upon his shoulder.

  At this moment they heard a cough at the door. They sprang apart, and Olivia muttered under her breath,

  “How do they always seem to know?”

  The interruption was innocent, the half-grown boy servant brought in a letter upon a small brass tray and David took it.

  “From Darya,” he said, smiling. “I think it is your invitation.”

  It was, and they were invited to come to the evening meal that day, entirely Indian, and Leilamani awaited Olivia, while Darya was their loving brother and friend.

  Darya was at the door to greet them and Olivia saw at once that tonight he was all Indian. It was more than dress, though the rich Indian garments and the turban of brocade wound about his head enhanced his always unusual beauty. The static poise of his tall figure standing in the carved doorway, the remoteness of his large dark eyes, the dignity of the noble head made him Indian and strange. He put his palms together in the graceful gesture of his people, the symbol, as he had once told her, of their recognition of the divine in every human creature, but tonight the gesture made him seem afar off. She felt shy and ill at ease, and tried not to show what she felt, and failed. For once Darya did not help her.

  “Come in,” he said gravely. “Welcome to my house.” He led them into a large formal room hung with brocades. On the floor soft thick rugs were spread under cushions, and he invited them to be seated, and he sat down near them and clapped his hands. Servants came in with trays of fruit juices and honeyed water and sweetmeats, and they set the trays before David and Olivia but not before Darya. He spoke to a servant in a low voice and then motioned to his guests to eat.

  David obeyed, quite at ease, Olivia was surprised to see, and she followed his example. She had never tasted such food before and she found it delicious, small tartlets, hot marble-sized balls of vegetable paste, highly seasoned, honey cakes, delicate as rose petals, arranged gracefully upon fresh green leaves.

  “This is all for your education, Olivia,” David said after a few moments. “I have never been shown such honor before.”

  He glanced at Darya with mild amused eyes, to which Darya responded with a sudden burst of laughter. He removed the turban from his head, set it on the floor beside him and took a tartlet from David’s tray.

  “It is quite authentic,” he declared. “If you were an Indian lady, Olivia—and a modern one, for if you were old-fashioned we could not meet at all—you would be received thus.”

  “Ah, now, Darya,” David protested.

  Darya acceded. “Well, let us say, my father would so receive you. I grant you that I have been spoiled. Also I am lazy. It is so much trouble to observe the old formalities. All that I can do is to try to observe the decencies. What my sons will do when they are grown I cannot tell. By that time—”

  He looked toward the door, interrupted by the sound of children’s voices, and he rose to his feet. “Ah, here they come.”

  The curtain was p
arted as he spoke and Leilamani stood there with her children, one on either side. Forever after when David thought of her, he saw her as she was at this moment, a beautiful shy woman, a tall girl as many of the Marathi were tall, her slender figure wrapped in a long Poona sari of palest yellow silk with a brocaded border of heavy gold. She had drawn the end over her soft curling black hair, and her great black eyes glowed in the golden shadows. Her small full lips she had painted scarlet, and in the middle of her forehead was the tiny circle of scarlet that was the sign of her high birth.

  He rose to his feet and then Olivia rose and involuntarily she put out her hand to the beautiful Indian girl.

  “Come,” Darya commanded his wife, “these are our friends. This is Olivia.”

  Leilamani walked forward slowly, her bare feet in gold sandals, and the children clung to her as she came.

  “You must shake hands with Olivia, but you need not with David,” Darya commanded. His voice was imperious but his eyes were tender, and she put out a soft narrow hand to Olivia, the nails painted as scarlet as her mouth.

  “Say Olivia,” Darya bade her.