Читать книгу The Green Goddess - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 7

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Lucilla Crespin did not like Sumnee. She liked her life there fairly well. She loved her home there. She loved Antony. She liked some of his friends. She loved her happiness, and nourished and cherished it. She liked the English Club measurably; she liked the tennis court palely—it was better than none, but it was a poor imitation of tennis courts in Surrey. She did make a garden, verbenas in flower-pots mostly, and she tried to like it; and when they came she worshiped her babies. But she did not like Sumnee. She did not even like India.

But she was happy in Sumnee. Not every one can be happy in a place they dislike; but there are some so equipped for happiness that they can find, or, not finding, make it, almost anywhere, and it requires far less personal balance and natural joyousness than Lucilla had, to be happy in London (or even in Berlin) when one would far rather live in New York, if one is young, radiantly well, comfortably pursed (one can buy a deal of happiness) and loves and is loved. Mrs. Crespin was happy in Sumnee—at first. And the years passed. But her years taught her much that “her days never knew”—for a while.

It is said that all English women like India, and very much like living there. Most of them do—but there are exceptions.

Two classes of European women like and enjoy India very much: the first and greatly preponderant class are the have-a-good-time ones, by no means bad sorts, as a rule, but brave, gay things who like to wear frilly white gowns, and give much time and care to dressing their hair, tree their boots and slippers and shoes, read “The Queen” and “La Monde” (if they can, and if they can’t, study its plates), and are particularly proud of their afternoon tea-table pretties of silver and lace. They like the punkahs, the abundance of servants—servants who rarely “give notice,” and never sulk—mango-ices and picnics by moonlight. They even enjoy making both ends meet—no one too much minds being poor in the East; at least, if one has some sort of entrée to Government House, and one’s man’s in the Army. Viceroys are not poor, as a rule—they would find it inconvenient, for big as their “screw” is, it isn’t enough; but Commanders-in-Chief have been poor enough before now, and, if one has to skimp, one has the satisfaction of doing it in the best of company, and in the best good-fellowship in the world. But there are women—the have-a-good-time-and-take-care-of-your-man ones—who like India but never know or sense it. Young Mrs. Crespin was not one of these, but she had several of their insular traits, and lived no little of their life. The other class (it is very small) are caught by the lure of the real India. Its story appeals to them, its peoples and its myriad wonders and beauties. They feel her marvel. And they catch the throb of her heart beneath the impenetrable mask, and respond and are grateful. Mrs. Crespin was not one of these.

There is a third class—a very powerful and beautiful class, which includes some of the other two: women who follow the drum, sometimes to Simla and other pleasant, cool hill places, sometimes to desolate, sun-baked spots where the ice often gives out, and nothing ever happens, and who take it all, and the make-shifts of outlandish frontier stations with quiet good humor; women whose courage and unselfishness are very fine, and very womanly. They are a great racial asset, the strength and the solace of their men folk; and, if they spared of the devotion they lavish on those same British soldier-men one tithe to the brown human peoples that live about them, and minister to them so loyally, they would be a greater asset of permanent and successful Empire than any in Whitehall.

One of these Lucilla might have been—she shaped towards it at first—but circumstances (fate, if you like) balked it.

India, great gold and rose India, marbled, carved, mosaicked, caravaned, with its bazaars and temples and its lonely peasant huts, its seas of quivering bamboo and its music of glass and silver bangles and anklets, its beautiful naked, plump butchas, its sacred purdahs, its mingled perfumes of lotus and wild yellow hyacinths, of pink jasmine and red, red roses, its dark-eyed, wrinkled, patient cattle with ropes of marigold slung between their snow-white and cream-colored humps, its storied rivers—and the Himalayas, might have appealed to her as the Vicar had thought it would, could she have seen it with him, or in other guidance as cordial and fit. But she saw it through the dry choking dust of a hot, arid, flat Punjabi station, sensed it through the chatter of an English Club—and, so, neither saw nor sensed it at all. She never touched its people. Her syce was merely a servant, so impersonal that she never knew or asked his name, her house servants were nothing to her but “boys,” and even the ayah who tended upon her deftly and faithfully, and saved her baby’s life when croup and convulsions nearly killed it, was only an ayah. Mrs. Crespin, as sweet at heart as the roses in the Surrey vicarage garden, never knew her ayah’s name, never thought of her as having one, never knew where she lived, what she ate, or thought, or believed; never wondered what were her joys and sorrows, never wondered if she ever had ache or pain; never knew, or cared to know, whether the native woman was married or not, or widowed, or whether she had a child of her own.

But she was happy at Sumnee—at first. She had Antony, and Antony was enough.

Her homesickness never quite ceased to ache, and she missed riding and games. She had both at Sumnee, but both were poor substitutes for those she had at “home.” Always athletic, she was not fully satisfied at playing at sports, and gymkanas bored her almost as much as church bazaars had, and the Vicar of Oxlea always had rather discouraged church bazaars. Womanly, yet she was not a woman’s woman—and life in an out-of-the-way one-regiment station in the plains is apt to be hard on a woman who does not greatly care for feminine society, but has no coquetry in her. But she had Antony, and she was happy, and when the promise of motherhood pulsed she was more than happy. And, if many of her hours were alone ones, she had many books, and she read hour after hour almost every day.

Twice the Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth—great chunks of fragrant deodar that Lucilla garlanded with ribbons; the heat they made in December in the plains was appalling, but Lucilla Crespin would not keep Christmas without them. And they ate their plum-pudding hot and flaming; and there’s no dearth of holly in India, if you know where to send for it. Twice her Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth. And then the crash came.