Come, My Beloved

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Is Gandhi the absolute leader?” Ted asked.

  “Spiritually, yes,” Darya replied, “and until we know the feelings of his spirit none of us acts. The situation grows more complex every day. The hope of freedom sounds simple, does it not? But hope is a releasing force, and what it releases is not always simple. You would think it is enough to dream of India being free, but no, there are other more petty freedoms also desired. The Muslims cannot only be free Indians, they wish also to be free Muslims, and so it is with the Hindus, and now even with the Sikhs. And it is not enough for these lesser freedoms, but labor is divided, some pulling to the left with Russia and some to the right. Labor wishes to be free of capital. Meanwhile eighty-seven percent of capital in India is British, and Indian capital also wishes to be free of British capital, and above all, there is that for which I will fight with my whole life, and that is the freedom of these land people, the peasants, who are ruled by the landlords and the moneylenders, and now, alas, these two are becoming one great evil, for the land is falling into those grasping hands, and landowners do not even come near the land. They live in the cities and send out their agents to take the land away from the peasants who cannot pay their rents and debts.”

  It was true. Moneylender and landlord were becoming one and because of this the peasant was being pushed off the earth. “Dangerous rumors are creeping over the border from Russia,” Darya went on, “sweet promises to seize the land by force from the landlords and give it again to the people. While Gandhi insists on nonviolence, the people are muttering of force. I have asked Gandhiji what he will do if the peasants break into violence.”

  Ted had no answer. He was still learning of the deep restlessness in the heart of India and he had never seen Gandhi.

  Through the next few days they talked as they could, but Darya must stop often to greet visitors, for when it was known that he was there, men walked for many miles to look at him, to hear his voice and touch his hands, and to ask him, “When shall be we free, punditji, and will the land then be given to us again?”

  Darya made always the same steady answer. “Our only hope is in Gandhiji.”

  At night Ted could speak in English without fear of offending those who could not understand, for he would not speak during the day in a language foreign to the villagers, a delicacy with which Darya was impatient. For, as Ted soon saw, with all his passion and concern for the peasants, Darya was not one of them. He could be impatient with them and speak to them with unconscious arrogance, whereas Ted, the American, did honestly feel no difference between a peasant and any other man. He wondered at Darya’s lack and did not know how to speak of it, for understanding is a gift and Darya did not have it with each man as he was. This was the sin and the fault in the intellectual Indian, and if the revolution failed, Ted thought, it would be because of it. For none was quicker to observe this arrogance than a peasant himself, and after a few days the villagers drew away from Darya and Ted felt them come nearer to him, though he was a foreigner, than they were to Darya. They were courteous and kind, but they withdrew, and Darya did not seem to notice.

  After Darya had gone away, on foot, his imperious head held high and his mind full of plans for the people’s freedom and his heart full of indignation on their behalf, though he was a rich man who had given up all he had for their sake, yet the villagers waited until he was gone before they came crowding into Ted’s little house again, asking their questions about Gandhi and how far freedom was away. They respected Darya and knew him a leader, but they knew, too, that though he would give up his life for them, he could not eat with them or sleep under their thatched roofs.

  The day after Darya was gone, Ted received a letter brought as usual by a carrier on foot. The envelope was square, the paper was cheap and pink, and it was stamped with the name Fordham. The writing was not that of Mr. Fordham, and certainly he would not get a pink letter from Mrs. Fordham. He opened the letter and found inside two double sheets covered with a childish handwriting in purple ink. The name at the end of these lines was Ruthie and now he was embarrassed as well as surprised. She said frankly that she wrote without the knowledge of her parents, and because she was lonely. She had no companions of her own age, she was nineteen, and her parents would not let her meet any of the young Englishmen in business or Government, lest there be talk among the Christians.

  It was plain indeed that she wanted simply to write to a young man and she had chosen him not knowing why she did, an urge of the blood which he must not encourage, although it was touching.

  He had not written to Agnes except for one letter wishing her happiness, but her presence in the mission house would make it impossible for him to be there again. His father had written, however, that he planned to build a house for himself and Agnes in a separate compound when they returned to Poona, releasing the mission house for others. Agnes wanted to live where other English families had homes, he said, and he could see no objection, since he had never accepted funds from the mission and was to that measure independent. The time might even come, his father went on, when he would give up his active presidency of the university and become a liaison between Church and Government. The Viceroy very much wished him to undertake this larger mission, and Agnes would enjoy the travel. Ted could not read that name without pain, but his father used it firmly and with ease, taking for granted that his son would know how to behave and to feel toward his father’s wife.

  “How I envy you,” Ruthie wrote now in large round letters. “I would like to live in a village, too. I love Indian food and the little Indian children. I could bathe the babies and teach the mothers about them. I read quite a lot of books on child care. It is such a pity that one must think of the conventions.”

  Thus began an artless and on his side a half-amused friendship. She sent him her picture, a snapshot taken in the brightest sunshine. Her round arms were bare and her hair was a mass of short curls. She had cut her hair, she told him, because it was so hot, although her mother was angry. But she could not always listen to her mother.

  “Mother keeps wanting to see your letters, for of course she found out, nobody else writes to me except a girl from school in Ohio, but I won’t let her see them. There is no reason why she shouldn’t see them but I must have something all my own.”

  She was teaching in the lower school, she told him, Bible and English, but she did not enjoy teaching older children. It was really the babies she loved.

  “And aren’t you coming to Poona even for Christmas?” she asked.

  “Not even for Christmas,” he wrote back. “Vhai is home to me now.”

  Yes, Vhai was home, the home of his spirit. He knew that his father believed that one day he would come back to Poona but he would never go back to Poona or to the mission. He could not teach or preach Christ there in that comfortable house, far removed from these millions who were the true India, and why only India? These were the people of the world, the world was full of them, and until they were saved, until their sickness was made health, until their starved bodies were fed, their ignorance enlightened, Christ was not preached. And all this must be done without robbing them of their honesty and their loving kindness, for never were people so truly loving as these who had nothing to give but their love. So he could never go back to Poona or Bombay or New York, never to Calcutta or London or Paris. His place was here.

  He began to find a certain simple comfort in Ruthie’s letters, as months went on again, and because he had to fill the pages somehow when he wrote back to her, and he liked to write because she made no demands and she enjoyed whatever he told her, he conjured up small incidents and minute observations. Darya had told him of the companionship of insects and small animals while he was in jail, he had described the secret life in the crannies of the prison walls. So thinking of something that might interest Ruthie’s youthful mind, Ted now began to observe for himself the presence of other lives in his own two-room earthwalled house. The sun drying the earth had made cracks and from the cracks
there came stealing slender lizards, some blue tailed. They moved swiftly, but sometimes they clung motionless for hours to a certain spot upon the wall or ceiling and when a fly or moth came near, out flicked a bright thread of a tongue to lap the unwary insect into a narrow gullet. Centipedes and scorpions provided on a little scale the same terrors that tigers did in the nearby jungle, but the real hazard and excitement of everyday life were thieving monkeys. Some were red-bottomed or blue-bottomed, for spectacle, but the common hordes were small and brown and incessantly noisy. These lives that shared his household and village life were not strange to a girl brought up in a compound in India, and so further to amuse her he created personalities for his most frequent insect and animal guests, none of which he killed unless it made a threat. Old Mossback, the father of the lizards, was his nightly companion, a grey and grisly little reptile, innocent of any guile except toward foraging for food. And he made a wilful pet of a tiny female monkey thrown by its mother to the ground and therefore wounded with a broken leg. She clung to his trousers like a child and wailed if he put her from him, and he named her, for no reason, Louise.

  Thus he described the simple round of his days, and how in the short twilight of each day the villagers gathered around his door and he read to them from the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran, the Christian or the Hebrew sacred books, or he told them stories of other countries across the black waters, as they called the seas. Sometimes he told them tales from their own history books which none of them could read. After he had spoken, they commented or questioned or they drew out of the recesses of memory stories that they themselves knew, experiences and wonders, and after all had spoken who wished, he wove the evening’s talk together in some way to lead toward God, who was One, however worshiped and by whom, and then he prayed the prayers they understood and craved, the prayers for food and health and safety.

  “Even at night,” he wrote, “the village is not quiet. Sometimes I hear voices from the jungle animals, sometimes a child cries because of illness, but when we part at dark we are full of peace.”

  Such letters went between them, until one day when he had been in Vhai for more than a year, and knew that years might pass before he left it, he had a letter from her which he had guessed might come, had dreaded and half expected, and had put off thinking about because he did not know what to think. It came and as soon as he opened it he knew what it was.

  “Let me come to the village,” Ruthie wrote. “Let me come and be your wife. I don’t ask anything, you needn’t even love me. But I love you.”

  What makes a marriage? He did not know. The demands of his young body were strong but subdued by prayer and fatigue. There were times when he was sleepless and then he got up and lit his lamp and read, although this meant that he would hear footfalls in the night, kindly neighbors come to see if he were ill, or perhaps because they were ill themselves or also sleepless.

  India is not a place for long hours of sleep, even in the dense blackness of night. The undying heat, the restlessness of insects and beasts, the frail children crying in their dreams, or wailing because they are hungry, such sounds habitually broke Ted’s rest, unless he was exhausted by the day’s work, which he tried to be. Yet his deepest sleep would be on the edge of waking and when his own restlessness was added, he could not sleep, indeed. Yet did he wake, he could not be alone.

  In Vhai he was everybody’s concern, and upon him they all depended. What they would think if he married he did not know. No one had suggested marriage, they thought of him as part sadhu, part Sahib, although he repudiated both offices.

  He could not imagine any white woman living in Vhai except Ruthie and he did not love her. He had a queer half-amused fondness for her, but he could not even imagine loving her, and he did not want to love any woman. Love would completely disturb the life he chose to live. Jehar came to his mind, of whom he had heard nothing, and he wondered if Jehar had married or would marry—not while he was sadhu, certainly, but had the primary need of a man’s life overcome the saint in him? Or had he made the compromise that fakirs made, impregnating women under the pretense of being gods? But Jehar was nowhere near and there was none to whom he could go for advice or comparison.

  Meanwhile the letter waited. He found he could not reply with whole-hearted repulsion to the thought of Ruthie’s cheerful childish presence in his house, nor could he make the excuse that she could not bear the life here. She could bear it as well and perhaps much better than he did. Her plump little frame was probably immune by now to most of the germs of India, as well as to the heat. He sought relief in prayer and scripture reading, but the pages opened perversely to verses encouraging the natural life of man. So Solomon sang to a woman and he read,

  Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field,

  Let us lodge in the villages.

  And even in the Sanharacharya he read,

  For only where the one is twain

  And where the two are one again

  Will truth no more be sought in vain.

  He searched for guidance and found it finally not in one voice or answer, but in the slow and growing conviction of his own heart. He had chosen where he would build his house and Ruthie was the only woman who wanted to live in it, and he had never lived in the house with any woman who was his own. His grandmother had died long before he was born, his mother had died before he could remember and to his father’s house he could return no more. He wrote the shortest of letters in reply.

  “If you will accept me as I am, Ruthie, then let us be married.”

  “Ted and I might as well be married right away,” Ruthie said to her mother.

  They were living in the mission house again where the young woman had been born and had grown up. David MacArd had not yet returned, and privately Mrs. Fordham considered that he had deserted the ranks of the missionaries, although Mr. Fordham, who was less spiritual than she was, had pointed out the advantage of the new Mrs. MacArd being the daughter of a British Government official.

  They had been amazed at little old Miss Parker, however. She had suddenly screamed at them both.

  “Worshipers of Mammon! That’s what you are! David MacArd never was a missionary and you know he wasn’t! His own glory, that’s all he ever wanted. A humble and a contrite heart, Oh God—”

  She suddenly began to sob in loud hoarse snorts, to the consternation of the good Fordhams.

  “She’s crazy,” Mrs. Fordham gasped.

  “I’m afraid so,” Mr. Fordham agreed.

  But he was kind to the sobbing crazed little soul, and a few days later he took her to Bombay himself and put her on a steamer for home. Somewhere in a quiet small asylum in New Hampshire Miss Parker lived out her life, refusing to speak anything but Marathi to her attendants, and even the Fordhams had forgotten her.

  “I don’t think you ought to be married before Ted’s father comes back,” Mrs. Fordham now said to Ruthie.

  She was conscious of conflict within her heart as she gazed at her pretty daughter whom she did not in the least understand. Ruthie was not at all like herself when she had been young in a small Ohio town. She feared Ruthie was neither religious nor conscientious, and yet Indians loved the girl with adoration, and she could not understand why.

  Ruthie did not care to improve anybody. She was gentle and mild, she was kind because it was the easiest way, not with intention of performing good works. She was careless and she did not mind dust and dirt, she was reckless enough to eat all Indian food however spiced and peppered. She had no sense of shame, and while she understood the slightest nuance of caste and never offended anyone, she mingled with Brahmans and untouchables alike though never at the same time. Children clung to her and she treated them with easy love and let them do what they willed, because she did not want to bother. She was at home anywhere, and Mrs. Fordham knew that the ladies in purdah counted all the days between Ruthie’s visits because she gossiped with everyone and told everything and did not know the meaning of the word secret. She carried ba
ck to her parents unspeakable tales of life behind high walls where she was a beloved visitor and however horrible the tales she told them all in the clear level childish voice with which she asked for a second serving of sliced mango. She feared no insect or beast and went without a hat in the midday sun if she felt inclined, although her routine was that of an Indian, for she rose early, and she spent the four middle hours of the day asleep, refusing the punkah because it was tedious for the punkah boy to pull the rope. She was not a good teacher in the lower school because she let the girls laugh and talk and she had no conscience about their not learning anything. When a girl fell ill in the foreign dormitories and it was too far for her family to come, that girl always cried for Ruthie, who came and sat beside her and held her hand and told her she need not take the medicines unless she wished, speaking in whatever language the girl best understood. With all this Ruthie did not say her prayers at night, and in many ways Mrs. Fordham felt she could not really be called a missionary. So far as Mrs. Fordham knew, Ruthie never even told anyone about Jesus, and when she pointed out to her daughter the opportunity she was missing, Ruthie said she felt she did not know enough herself.

  “But you could learn, Ruthie,” Mrs. Fordham often remonstrated.

  “I suppose I could,” Ruthie always said agreeably.

  “I don’t believe Dr. MacArd will want Ted to marry me,” Ruthie said now without rancor.

  She did not intend to tell anybody that she had first suggested the idea of marriage to that tall and adorable young man with whom she had fallen in love the moment she saw him. There were many things she told to no one, in spite of all she did tell.