第42章

Miss Anderson described Simla exhaustively in her letters to New York.She touched upon almost every feature, from Mrs.Mickie and Mrs.Gammidge, whose husbands were perspiring in the Plains, and nobody telling them anything, to the much larger number of ladies interested in the work of the Young Women's Christian Association;from the 'type' of the Military Secretary to the Viceroy to that of Ali Buksh, who sold raw turquoises in a little carved shop in the bazaar.I should like to quote more of her letters, but if I did Ishould find nothing about Colonel Horace Innes, who represented--she often acknowledged to herself--her only serious interest.Miss Anderson took the world at its own light valuation as it came; but she had a scale of recognitions and acceptances, which she kept apart for the very few, and Innes had claimed a place in it the first time they met.It seems a trifle ungrateful that she should have left him out, since it was he who gave her a standard by which to measure the frivolity of Simla.He went to gymkhanas--if he knew she was going--but he towered almost pictorially above them; and when he talked to Madeline his shoulders expressed a resentment of possible interruptions that isolated him still further.I would not suggest that he was superior by conviction; he was only intent, whereas most of the other people were extremely diffused, and discriminating, while the intimacies of the rest were practically coextensive with Government House list.Neither, for his part, would he admit that the tone of Simla was as wholly flippant as Ihave implied.They often talked about it; he recognized it as a feature likely to compel the attention of people from other parts of the world; and one afternoon he asked her, with some directness, if she could see no tragedies underneath.

'Tragedies of the heart?' she asked.'Oh, I can not take them seriously.The emotion is so ephemeral! A woman came to tea with me three days ago, and made me her confessor.It was unexpected; if it hadn't been, I wouldn't have asked her to tea.She was so unhappy that she forgot about the rouge, and it all came off on her handkerchief when she cried.The man likes somebody else better this season.Well, I gave her nougat and cheap cynicisms, and she allowed herself to be comforted! Why, the loves of kitchen-maids are more dignified.'

They were riding on the broad four-mile road, blasted out of the rock, that winds round Jakko.The deodars stood thick above them, with the sunlight filtering through; a thousand feet below lay the little square fields, yellow and green, of the King of Koti.The purple-brown Himalayas shouldered the eye out to the horizon, and there the Snows lifted themselves, hardly more palpable than the drifted clouds, except for a gleam of ice in their whiteness.A low stone wall ran along the verge of the precipice, and, looking down, they saw tangled patches of the white wild rose of the Himalayas, waving and drooping over the abyss.

'I am afraid,' said Innes, 'you are not even upon the fringe of the situation.'

'It's the situation as I see it.'

'Then--excuse me--you do not see deep enough.That poor lady suffered, I suppose, to the extent of her capacity.You would not have have increased it.'

'I don't know, I should have preferred not to measure it.'

'Besides, that was not quite the sort of thing I had in mind.I was thinking more of the--separations.'

'Ah!' said Madeline.

'It's not fair to ask women to live much in India.Sometimes it's the children, sometimes it's ill health, sometimes it's natural antipathy to the place; there's always a reason to take them away.'

'Yes,' said Madeline, turning a glance of scrutiny on him.His face was impassive; he was watching mechanically for a chance to slay a teasing green spider-fly.

'That is the beginning of the tragedy I was thinking of.Time does the rest, time and the aridity of separations.How many men and women can hold themselves together with letters? I don't mean aging or any physical change.I don't mean change at all.'