Come, My Beloved

by Pearl S. Buck

  The beauty of order, the strength of control, the power of law, all were here, and surely they would prevail, David told himself.

  The great assembly was over and music burst into the air. The royal company prepared to descend from the dais, and the crowd rose.

  Suddenly at this very moment David heard his name called in a whisper. He turned his head and saw Darya standing among a group of Indians just behind him.

  “Even I,” Darya said, under cover of the music. Then with his invincible smile, he said, leaning forward to be heard, “Look at me, David—you will not see me for a long time.”

  “Ah, Darya,” David said anxiously, “what are you planning now?”

  From whence had Darya come? He must have taken advantage of the crowds and made his way in. Among the vivid silks of the courts of the native princes he was dangerously conspicuous in the whiteness of his cotton garments, his little Gandhi cap stark among the gorgeous turbans of scarlet and blue and gold.

  “In a moment I shall be arrested,” Darya whispered and his look was proud. He stood with his head high, his arms folded. It was not a moment. Almost instantly two British guards stepped forward and clapped their hands on his shoulders.

  “This way, please, sir,” they said with respect; but command.

  Darya turned his head this way and that, he met the eyes of those who gazed at him, he smiled again at David and then walked with dignity down the carpeted aisle between the two tall British guards. For a moment the royal company paused, though without confusion, and then as Darya disappeared, the band struck into new music, and the imperial show went on.

  Ted saw his father first, tall, gaunt, bearded, his eyes shadowed by the oval brim of his sun helmet. He stood near the gang plank ready to be the first to descend from the ship, and while he waited this last instant his father caught sight of him and raised his hand. Ted lifted his hat high and waved it, and then stood smiling, but only in the instant for almost immediately the gang plank was fixed, the quick dark hands of the dock sailors fastening the ropes with skill, and he leaped down the few feet of board and clasped his father’s hand.

  “Dad, this is wonderful—”

  “I’m glad to see you, son.”

  His father was sunburned almost as dark as the Indians themselves, or perhaps heat-burned. His grey beard cut close to his cheeks was a startling contrast to the brown skin and tragic dark eyes. It was not a smiling face, but Ted had never remembered ready smiles upon his father’s face. It was kind and it wore a controlled patience, a stillness almost terrifying. It was a stern face, as he remembered, in repose or prayer.

  “We’d better not stand in this sun,” David said. His son looked so young, so tender, that he felt immediately anxious, the old sickening anxiety of the boy’s childhood in this devilish climate. Twenty-two was too young to begin life here, but it was either here or get rooted in America, and Ted had chosen India.

  “I shall have to get hardened to it again,” Ted said with gaiety. There was gaiety in all he said and did, a sparkling, youthful, springing quality. Tall as he looked, he was not as tall as his father or his grandfather, and the peculiar brightness of his white skin, his grey eyes and the auburn hair enhanced his natural spirit with an electric lightness. He was more slender than father or grandfather had ever been, inheriting from Olivia his narrow wiry build and movements too quick for absolute grace. Mercurial, David thought regretfully, perhaps too fine-drawn, too taut, too sensitive for India! Though Ted did not look like Olivia, she had bequeathed something to him of her inner self.

  “I have taken rooms at the hotel,” David said. “We can leave the luggage with the porter.” They got into a carriage and sat down side by side in the shelter of the hood, and the horses ambled slowly down the street.

  “Do you plan to go straight home to Poona tomorrow?” Ted asked.

  “Unless you have some reason for delay,” David replied.

  Ted hesitated then decided against mentioning Agnes. Did he speak her name it might be too much, his father might think the friendship deeper than it was. She would not be at the hotel, her parents were staying at Government House, and he had not asked to see her there. They had told each other good-by this morning after breakfast.

  “We shall meet again,” he had said with his quick nervous hand clasp.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “And may I write?” he asked.

  “I hope you will,” she had replied.

  He looked deeply for a moment into her charming blue eyes, the sweet steadfast eyes of good and highborn young English women, and impressed upon his memory the gentle oval of her face, the serious mouth and firm chin, the fresh and lovely complexion, the slender elegant figure in white linen, the low beautiful English voice. Something trembled in him for a moment, words rose to his lips, and he restrained them. It was too soon, he did not know what he wanted to make of his life, he could not speak of sharing it in any degree with her until he knew for himself what it was to be.

  “I shall write after I get home,” he said. “And you, too, write me. Tell me what the first hours are.”

  “I fancy we shall be feeling somewhat the same,” she replied.

  So they had parted, she had left him quietly before he met his father, and he had caught a glimpse of her with a tall sallow Englishman and a thin sallow graceful woman in a green frock, her parents, he supposed, come to meet her, and to take part in the Durbar, but she did not introduce him. So he could not speak of her now, and certainly he did not want to call upon her in Government House. It would be far too significant, especially with the Durbar going on.

  “I’d like to get straight home,” he told his father.

  They rode in silence for a few minutes, and he gazed about the scene, so familiar and yet so new, the swarming crowds, the dark, amiable, tense, proud Indian faces, the turbans of every shape and color, the women in their brilliant saris, far more of them on the streets now than there used to be, a few Englishwomen, too, and some Eurasian girls, very beautiful in English garb, and the ever present beggars, wretched, deformed, emaciated, their high voices, pleading for mercy, threading all the noise of the everyday life, and no one paying them any heed.

  “I wonder that something isn’t done to get the beggars fed and off the streets,” he said abruptly.

  “I suppose it is still as it was in the time of Christ,” David said. “The poor we must have always with us.”

  His father spoke, or so Ted thought, almost with indifference, as if India had worn down even pity, or mercy, and certainly the hope of change for such as these. He understood, and rebelled. However long he lived here, he would not allow himself to become indifferent. He would keep his heart alive.

  So they did not stay in Bombay. He had no desire to see the Durbar, and they left on the earliest train. He was very quiet, sitting by the dusty window and watching the familiar landscape slip by. This was more than coming home. It was beginning his own life at last.

  XI

  “HERE WE ARE,” HIS father said.

  The train journey had been long and hot, the dust grey and fine seeping in through closed windows, creeping up out of the shaking floors of the cars, sifting from the cracks of the wooden walls and ceilings. The green grass, the hanging vines, the spreading trees, and the big brick buildings made the compound heaven by contrast.

  “How much you have done!” Ted exclaimed.

  “I have finished the plans I made before you were born,” his father said gravely. “The chemistry building yonder was the last unit. The dormitories are all built and occupied. Over the whole presidency there is a network of lower schools, headed by our graduates, and these feed into the university.” He nodded toward a low beautiful building at the south end of the compound, a graceful compromise with Indian architecture. “That is the girls’ home-industry college. I have named it The Olivia MacArd Memorial, in memory of your mother.”

  A bell rang at this moment and a stream of girls in soft-hued saris poured out of
the doors, laughing and chattering as they came. When they saw the two men, they pulled the flying scarf-like ends of the saris over their heads. They all knew that the Head’s son was coming to teach, and they stole quick looks at the tall fair young man who did not look at all like his father, and turned their faces away before he could see them, curious, half fascinated because in a way he belonged to them and they to him. He would, they supposed, succeed his father some day as India’s great Christian educator. Yet there was a hint of hostility in their looks. Gandhi and Dr. MacArd were not friends, and the students were all secret followers of Gandhi, or nearly all, but because of Dr. MacArd there had been no open attempt to join the nonviolent resistance movement. The fair young man might or might not follow in his father’s path. They hurried on, young and hungry for their night meal.

  “Was my mother interested in all this?” Ted asked.

  His father hesitated as always when he asked a direct question about his mother. Then he said, overcoming silence with effort, “Your mother died so young, she had not time to fulfill herself. We were married and the next year you were born. She had the task of adjusting to India and to marriage. I tell myself that she would have been interested, had she lived. She was full of energy, vitality, spirit—many gifts.”

  “And beauty besides,” Ted mused.

  “Yes,” his father said abruptly. He turned toward the house. “We must go in and get washed for dinner.”

  On the wide veranda the servants had gathered to greet the son of the house come home. They held garlands of flowers, and one by one now they came forward smiling, humble, tender, as they looped the garlands over his neck. Then they stooped to take the dust from his feet and escorted him into the house like a prince.

  His father was patient with all this, but abstracted, and in the hall he picked two notes from the table. “The Fordhams,” he said, and opening it he read aloud.

  “Welcome home, dear Ted. We’ll leave you to yourselves this first evening. We look forward to tomorrow—”

  The sealed pink note addressed to Ted was from Miss Parker. He opened it and read her underscored lines, remembering Auntie May, as she had made him call her all the time he was a little boy. He had been fond of her but distantly, because even then he had known that she loved him because of his father, and he had divined even in childhood that she had her dreams, the highest one that some day David MacArd would ask her to be his second wife. The years had faded this dream, his father had never thought of such replacement, and Ted knew it and had learned to pity the aging lonely woman.

  “Dear Ted, my special welcome to you. It is almost like a son coming home—my own son, I mean, but I just cannot put it into words. I have so many memories of you, and now you are a young man and come back to be your noble father’s strength and help. With fondest love from Auntie May.”

  His father did not ask about the pink note, there was no need. They went upstairs together into the rooms he knew so well, where he had grown up lonely and yet never alone, loved and adored by the dark people and spoiled, as he knew very well now, by every one of them, guarded and shielded even from the stern father, and yet he had loved his father best, always.

  “I shall be down in about half an hour,” his father said, almost formally.

  He knew his father felt strange with him, that he was searching for the new relationship, father and son, yes, but man and man, teacher and superior, comrades in Christ. Ted’s heart softened suddenly, its old trick. He was always too easily touched and moved.

  “By the way,” his father paused. “I have had your room changed. The old one was small, I thought. I have put you in the front room, it used to be the guest room, you remember.”

  “Thanks,” Ted said. But he was startled. His old room had been small, but it was next to his father’s room. Now perhaps the older man did not want to be so near to the young one.

  “I shall miss you,” his father was saying with a shy smile, half hidden in the grey beard. “But you must have room to grow.”

  “Thank you, Dad,” he said.

  And then he was glad he was not in the small room after all. This front room was wide and pleasant, just now almost cool, the shadows from the veranda dimming the sunshine. There were no flowers, there had never been flowers in this house that he could remember, only green things, ferns, palms, that the servants arranged.

  A punkah above his head began to sway slowly and a strange loneliness, a homesickness of the spirit crept over him like a mist from the past, when this world was the only one he knew. It had crept over him often in America, even while he knew that was his own land and he an American. There it was India that he missed. Here, standing in the midst of the familiar past, he felt a pang of longing for his grandfather’s house, the clean avenue, the taxicabs, the well-dressed people, his own people, the cool brisk air. Perhaps if he were in New York at this moment there would even be snow, it was only two weeks until Thanksgiving! He had not spoken to his father while they were driving homeward in the old bullock cart, the bullock bandy, from the train an hour ago, he had not spoken of the streets he remembered so well. They were unchanged in all these years, the straining dark faces, too eager, too tired with heat and hunger, the thin dark bodies, that life of the streets all open to the passerby, the unpainted houses, the unfurnished rooms of the common people, the narrow streets crowded with vehicles and bullocks and people, the priests and beggars, and pressed against the walls the vendors of spice and grain, crosslegged in the dust, and women carrying water from the wells, the jars on their heads, and dyers stretching bright green and orange and yellow lengths of cloth in everyone’s way and the twang of a weaver’s loom somewhere behind a thin wall. In the streets all India swarmed about him again, and though he stood in this oasis of quiet, it was there, it was there.

  He reached into his hip pocket and brought out the small Testament. Its leather covers were wet with his sweat and he opened it and read.

  “For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.”

  It was extraordinary, he was not superstitious, but there it was. India was not to be condemned, it was simply to be saved. His fear lifted suddenly, he was even light-hearted. He had come here to work, and there was work to do. The vast old house on Fifth Avenue was thousands of miles away, and years would pass before he entered it again.

  “Where is Uncle Darya?” Ted asked.

  They sat at the English mahogany dining table, he and his father alone as they had always sat during the meals of his childhood, but now his place was set at one end of the oval instead of at his father’s right hand where when he was small his father could lean toward him and cut his meat. His father, he supposed, had given such orders. The servant, in snow-white cotton garb, was passing chicken curry and rice, tinted bright yellow with saffron.

  “Darya would have been here to greet you,” his father replied, “except he has gone and got himself arrested. He is in jail.”

  “In jail!” Ted exclaimed.

  “Darya has committed himself to that fellow Gandhi.” His father’s voice was calm, but Ted knew his elder well enough to see the signs of concern, if not of agitation in his look, in his lips pressed together in his heard.

  “But jail!” Ted remonstrated.

  “Darya wanted to go to jail. I cannot understand what is going on in India nowadays. There is a perfect madness to get into prison, a passion for martyrdom, a perversity of patriotism. The Viceroy is deeply troubled, because he believes firmly in India’s right to eventual independence. It is simply a matter of when the people can be made ready. But Darya has become almost as fanatical as Gandhi himself. He even protested the Durbar.”

  “I never thought Uncle Darya a fanatic,” Ted said. “He was a little sad—or so I remember him.”

  “He became a different man after he lost his family. I have had you but he has no one nearer than his brothers and their children. He is a very personal sort of man, as Indians are, affec
tionate and so on. It was difficult for him to adjust. An ordinary Indian would simply have married again, but Darya seems really to have loved his wife. Did you know her name was Leilamani? Your grandmother’s name was Leila.”

  “I know. And so now what will happen?”

  The servant was passing spinach cooked until it was grey, and peas black with pepper. He had forgotten about the execrable vegetables, cooked always as Indians ate them. But his father took them as habit and helped himself to both.

  “Sooner or later Gandhi will have to be put down,” his father was saying with sudden vigor. “Government cannot tolerate this sort of thing. Nonviolence sounds mild enough, but it can cause the greatest annoyance and real disruption, the people lying on railroad tracks, for example, with complete disregard for their lives, and of course they can’t be ran over or the country would be in an uproar. I shan’t be surprised if we hear of riots in a day or two about the Prince himself.”

  “Have you ever seen this man Gandhi?” Ted inquired.

  “Only at a distance,” his father replied. “An insignificant ugly little man. I am surprised that Darya finds anything in him.”

  “I’d rather like to talk with Gandhi,” Ted persisted.

  “I advise you to stay away from him and all his works,” his father said rather stiffly.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. At some point, Ted was thinking, he would say to his father that now he was a man, young it was true, but his own master nevertheless, and he must decide for himself what he would do, whom he would see.