Part 37 (1/2)
Endless wakeful hours of the night journey were peopled with thoughts and visions of Aruna--her pansy face and velvet-soft eyes, now flas.h.i.+ng delicate raillery, now lifted in troubled appeal. A rainbow creature--that was the charm of her. Not beautiful--he thanked his stars; since his weakness for beauty amounted to a snare, but attractive--perilously so. For, in her case, the very element that drew him was the barrier that held them apart. The irony of it!
Was she lying awake too, poor child--missing him a little? Would she marry an Indian--ever? Would she turn her back on India--even for him?
Unanswerable questions hemmed her in. Could she even answer them herself? Too well he understood how the scales of her nature hung balanced between conflicting influences. As he was, racially, so was she, spiritually, a divided being; yet, in spite of waverings, Rajputni at the core, with all that word implies to those who know. If she lacked his mother's high sustained courage, her flashes of spirit shone out the brighter for her lapses into womanly weakness--as in that poignant moment by the tank, which had so nearly upset his own equilibrium.
Vividly recalling that moment, it hurt him to realise that weeks might pa.s.s before he could see her again. No denying he wanted her; felt lost without her. The coveted Delhi adventure seemed suddenly a very lonely affair; not even a clear inner sense of his mother's presence to bear him company. No dreams lately; no faint mystical intimation of her nearness, since the wonderful hour with his grandfather. Only in the form of that strange and lovely illusion had she seemed vitally near him since he left Chitor.
Graceless ingrat.i.tude--that 'only.' For now, looking back, he clearly saw how the beauty and bewilderment of that early phase--so mysteriously blending Aruna with herself--had held his emotions in cheek, lifted them, purified them; had saved him, for all he knew, from surrender to an overwhelming pa.s.sion that might conceivably have swept everything before it. Pure fantasy--perhaps. But he felt no inclination to argue out the unarguable. He preferred simply unquestioningly to believe that, under G.o.d, he owed his salvation to her. And after all--take it spiritually or psychologically--that was in effect the truth....
Towards morning, utter weariness lulled him into a troubled sleep--not for long. He awoke, chilled and heavy-eyed, to find the unheeded loveliness of a lemon-yellow dawn stealing over the blank immensity of earth and sky.
In a moment he was up, stretching cramped limbs, thanking goodness for a carriage to himself, leaning out and drinking huge draughts of crisp clean air, fragrant with the ghost of a whiff of wood smoke--the inimitable air of a Punjab autumn morning.
CHAPTER X.
”The tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things....
The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”--ST JAMES iii 5-8.
Roy spent ten days in Delhi--lodging with one Krishna Lal, a jewel merchant of high standing, well known to Sir Lakshman--and never a word or a sight of Dyan Singh. The need for constant precautions hampered him not a little; but if the needle he sought was in this particular haystack, he would find it yet.
Meanwhile, at every turn he was imbibing first impressions, a sufficiently enthralling occupation--in Delhi, of all places on earth: Delhi, mistress of many victors; very woman, in that she yields to conquer; and after centuries of romance and tragedy, remains, in essence, unconquered still. The old saying, 'Who holds Delhi, holds India,' has its dark counterpart in the unwritten belief that no alien ruler, enthroned at Delhi, shall endure. Hence the dismay of many loyal Indians when the British Government deserted Calcutta for the Queen of the North. And here, already, were her endless, secretive byways rivalling Calcutta suburbs as hornet-nests of sedition and intrigue.
Roy was to grow painfully familiar with these before his search ended.
But the city's pandemonium of composite noises and composite smells was offset by the splendid remnants of Imperial Delhi:--the Pearl Mosque, a dream in marble, dazzling against the blue: inlaid columns of the Dewan-i-Khas--every leaf wrought in jade or malachite, every petal a precious stone; swelling domes and rose-pink minarets of the Jumna Musjid rising superbly from a network of narrow streets and shabby toppling houses. For, in India, the sordid and stately rub shoulders with sublime disregard for effect. In the cool aloofness of tombs and temples, or among crumbling fragments of them on the plain, or away beyond the battered Kashmir Gate--ground sacred to heroic memories--he could wander at will for hours, isolated in body and spirit, yet strangely content....
And there was yet a third Delhi, hard by these two; yet curiously aloof: official, Anglo-Indian Delhi, of bungalows and clubs and painfully new Government buildings. Little scope here for imaginative excursions, but much scope for thought in the queer sensation, that beset him, of seeing his father's people, as it were, through his mother's eyes.
New as he was to Anglo-Indian life, these glimpses from the outskirts were sufficiently illuminating. Once he was present in the crowd at a big Gymkhana; and more than once he strolled through the Club gardens where social Delhi pursued tennis-b.a.l.l.s and shuttle-c.o.c.ks--gravely, as if life hung on the issue; or gaily, with gusts of laughter and chaff, often noisier than need be. And he saw them all, now, from a new angle of vision. Discreetly aloof, he observed, in pa.s.sing, the complete free-and-easiness of the modern maiden with her modern cavalier; personalities flying; likewise legs and arms; a banter-wrangle interlude over a tennis-racquet; flight and pursuit of the offending maiden, punctuated with shrieks, culminating in collapse and undignified surrender: while a pair of club peons--also discreetly aloof--exchanged remarks whose import would have enraged the unsuspecting pair. Roy knew very well they never gave the matter a thought. They were simply 'rotting' in the approved style of to-day. But, seen from the Eastern standpoint, the trivial incident troubled him. It recalled a chance remark of his grandfather's: ”With only a little more decorum and seriousness in their way of life out here, they could do far more to promote good understanding socially between us all, than by making premature 'reforms' or tilting at barriers arising from opposite kinds of civilisation.”
Here was matter for the novel--or novels--to be born of his errantry:--the 'fruit of his life' that _she_ had so longed to bold in her hands. Were she only at Home now, what letters-without-end he would be pouring out to her! What letters he could have poured out to Aruna--did conscience permit.
He allowed himself two, in the course of ten days; and the spirit moved him, after long abstention, to indulge in a rambling screed to Tara telling of his quest; revealing more than he quite realised of the inner stress he was trying to ignore. The quest, he emphasised, was a private affair, confided to her only, because he knew she would understand. It hurt more than he cared to admit to feel how completely his father would _not_ understand his present turmoil of heart and brain....
Isolated thus, with his hidden thwarted emotion, there resulted a literary blossoming, the most spontaneous and satisfying since his slow struggle up from the depths. Alone at night, and in the clear keen dawns, he wrote and wrote and wrote, as a thirsty man drinks after a desert march:--poems chiefly; sketches and impressions; his dearest theme the troubled spirit of India,--or was it the spirit of Aruna?--poised between crescent light and deepening shadow, looking for sane clear guidance--and finding none. A prose sketch, in this vein, stood out from the rest; a fragment of his soul, too intimately self-revealing for the general gaze: no uncommon dilemma for an artist, precisely when his work is most intrinsically true. Had he followed the natural urge of his heart, he would have sent it to Aruna. As it was, he decided to treasure it a little longer for himself alone.
Meantime Dyan--half forgotten--suddenly emerged. It was at a meeting--exclusively religious and philosophical; but the police had wind of it; and a friendly inspector mentioned it to Krishna Lal. The chief speaker would be a Swami of impeccable sanct.i.ty. ”But if you have a sensitive palate, you will doubtless detect a spice of political powder under the jam of religion!” quoth Krishna Lal, who was a man of humour and no friend of sedition.
”Thanks for the hint,” said Roy--and groaned in spirit. Meetings, at best, were the abomination of desolation; and his soul was sick of the Indian variety. For the 'silent East' is never happier than when it is talking at immense length; denouncing, inaugurating, promoting; and a prolonged dose of it stirred in Roy a positive craving for men who shot remarks at each other in 'straight-flung words and true.' But no stone must be left unturned. So he went;--guided by the friendly policeman, who knew him for a Sahib bent on some personal quest.
Their search ended in a windowless inner room; packed to suffocation; heavy with attar of rose, kerosene, and human bodies; and Roy as usual clung to a doorway that offered occasional respite.
The Swami was already in full flow:--a wraith of a man in a salmon-coloured garment; his eyes, deep in their sockets, gleaming like black diamonds. And he was holding his audience spellbound:--Hindus of every calling; students in abundance; a sprinkling of Sikhs and Dogras from the lines. Some form of hypnotism,--was it? Perhaps. Even Roy could not listen unmoved, when the spirit shook the frail creature like a gust of wind and the hollow chest-notes vibrated with appeal or command. Such men--and India is full of them--are spiritual dynamos. Who can calculate their effect on an emotional race? And they no longer confine their influence to things spiritual. They, too, have caught the modern disease of politics for the million. And the supreme appeal is to youth--plastic and impressionable, aflame with fervours of the blood that can be conjured, by heady words, into fervours infinitely more dangerous to themselves and their country.
In an atmosphere dense with spilled kerosene, with over-breathed air and over-charged emotion, that appeal rang out like a trumpet blast.
”It is to youth the divine message has come in all ages; the call to martyrdom and dedication. 'Suffer little children to come unto me,' said the inspired Founder of Christianity. So also I say in this time of revival, suffer the young to fling themselves into the arms of the Mother. My sons, she cries, go back to the Vedas. You will find all wisdom there. Reject this alien gift--however finely gilded--of a civilisation inferior to your own. Hindu Ris.h.i.+s were old in wisdom when these were still unclothed savages coloured with blue paint. Shall the sacred Motherland be inoculated with Western poison? It is for the young to decide--to act. Nerve your arms with valour. Bring offerings acceptable, to the shrine of Kali Mai. Does she demand a sheep? A buffalo? A cocoanut? Ask yourselves. The answer is written in your hearts----”