Part 38 (2/2)

I drove off, thinking that, perhaps, my predecessor might have been wise in choosing a higher tribunal.

My bearer, however, who, as usual, stood in the verandah to receive my hat, had no doubts in the totality of his blame. He was full of virtuous activities. Order, in some measure, had been restored. Certain screens of gra.s.s, which had been removed against a time when the mem might find them useful in the poultry yard, and the outhouses having been finally cleared--by the aid of the police--of various pensioners and idle folk, who wept profusely, had been duly distributed among the servants, he himself having taken one with a women's enclosure, which would be the cause of great comfort.

I bid him take what he liked, and for the first time went into the drawing-room, where he said my tea awaited me.

I shall never forget my first look at that room, with its five straight, undraped windows, set in a row round one slightly curved wall. The others bare, save for the shadows, which were fast creeping to obliterate even the bareness. The windows were mere oblongs of dim light, stretching up into the lofty roof, and that shadow looming in one shadowy corner, across a vast expanse of shadowy matting, must be the Bechstein piano. I made a move towards it, and stumbled against my own tea-table, a highly ornate, sham Oriental, carved thing, which the bearer, by my wife's orders, carried about with him religiously, and at the same time the bearer himself entered with the reading lamp, without which, so I am told, I cannot exist.

I gave up the Bechstein, therefore, for a time, and had caviare sandwiches with my tea instead.

I do not know why--my wife would have said because the water was not boiling--but I did not enjoy my tea. The pity of all things in this incomprehensible world struck me with a vague anger. I sat wondering if, after all, a higher tribunal----

Good heavens! What was that? Someone was playing on the Bechstein. I did not turn. I sat staring at those five solemn oblongs of the glimmering windows, showing lighter and lighter as the shadows deepened in the big bare room.

It was Walther's song out of ”Tannhauser”--the song of divine love....

The bearer said I was asleep when he came to tell me it was time to dress for dinner. Perhaps I was, for sound sleep brings perfect peace and rest, and that had come to me with the music which had come out of the windows.

I have a dim recollection that the khansaman apologised because the soup was not clear, and that the bearer explained that a wire mattress had not arrived owing to the breaking down of a bullock cart. But I know that I sat up till all hours of the night in the dark, hoping to hear the Bechstein again, but it was silent as the grave.

Perhaps at dusk I might hear it once more. I raced off to the office early, in order to be home in time, and was almost glad of a few flagrant derelictions of duty cropping up to keep my moral nature from too much sympathy.

Yet even so, as I drove home, I put my hand in my pocket and drew out a handful of coppers for a group of children I pa.s.sed on the road. I could not help it when I remembered a certain paper I had sent up to the Administrator-General that day, showing the way in which a certain sinner had spent his last pay.

”Tea is ready in the drawing-room,” said the bearer; and even in my preoccupation I thought there was something odd in his voice.

But a look into the big bare room was sufficient. I shouldn't have known it, women have such a way of altering the whole character of a house by a yellow silk bow. She had taken the little camp bed and made a couch out of it with cus.h.i.+ons and phulkarees. The five fateful windows, like the five senses looking out on the garden of the soul, were tucked and festooned, and through one of them came the familiar sound of a pair of bellows, and then a still more familiar exclamation:

”There! That's really boiling at last.”

The next instant my wife was in my arms, tearful, tender, triumphant.

Cheerful letters were all very well, but she knew; so she had just left the babies in charge of some super-excellent creature, and run away down to see I was really comfortable.

”And, after all,” she said, nodding her head as she poured out the tea, ”it is as well I did come, for really there seems to be nothing in the house except the Bechstein.”

I looked over to it dully, and noticed that it was now ornamented by my photograph in a filigree frame.

”Yes,” I said--I hope I kept some of the regret out of my voice--”only the Bechstein.”

And as we sat and talked of the children, and our own happiness, and the seeds we were going to sow in the garden, the five windows grew lighter as the shadows deepened.

But the spirit of the room was silent.

SEGREGATION

”I've got the plague, sir, upon my sam, I 'ave. I'll show yer the spot, sir, same as they 'ad in 1666 w'en the Tower o' London was burnt down, an' Sir Christopher Wren built St. Paul's--so 'elp me Gawd.”

The speaker was a plausible loafer of the usual type. He was dressed in white, or what had once been white raiment. A gilt b.u.t.ton or two hung round the coat; mute testimony to its having once belonged to a man who did some work of some kind for the Government. He was not a Eurasian, that you could see by the line of white on his forehead above the tan, as he stood apologetically in the court room holding his helmet before him with both hands as if he meant to offer it up as a bribe. It was certainly the most valuable thing about him, for it had a wadded quilted cover and looked, what the rest of him did not--respectable.

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