husband.'
His English, barring a faintly foreign intonation, was perfect; but his wife laughed.
'Don't, Chris! It doesn't suit the part. Besides, we were only married at the registrar's. So if you want a wife of that sort, Lucanaster says you can marry one, if I don't object. I've been thinking about it, and I don't think I should----'
He stood up and threw his hands out passionately ere covering his face with them; and the action, utterly un-English as it was, suited him better than his previous calm.
'It--it's a lie to begin with,' he cried hoarsely. 'And even if it weren't--I wont have it said--it--it makes me lose myself.'
She drew back a bit and looked at him. 'You've done that already, Chris, and so've I,' she said calmly. 'Now don't interrupt, please; I've been fizzling for this talk the last month, for we shall rub along together so much better when we thoroughly understand each other. So, I'm not going to pretend any more, Chris! It doesn't work. I tried it at first because--well! because you mean well, and I like to make things comfy while I can. But I'm sick of Shark Lane. Some of the men wouldn't be bad, if they weren't so awfully high-toned--that's what's the matter with you, Chris!--but the women beat me. I went to see that little fool Hâfiz Ahmad's wife yesterday, because I'm a good-natured fool myself and she said she was dull, and you asked me; and as I say, I like things comfy. Well! she wanted me to play old maid, and the cards were--oh! filthy! That finished me. Of course it was only a trifle, but it did the trick. I've chucked. I won't play the game any more, Chris. I am going my own way; and if you want to see Shark Lane here, I shall be somewhere else. You needn't bother or fuss. I can take care of myself perfectly--I went about London a lot, you know. Besides, doesn't it stand to reason that I'm a better judge of what an English lady can do than you are? Why! I might as well try and teach you the etiquette of those disgusting temples where your precious stay-at-home women worship in--in the altogether!' She giggled modestly, and then, seeing his face, gave him a final pat. 'Cheer up, Chris! I'm sure you could marry one--a cousin or something--if you tried.'
He interrupted her with a listless, nerveless dignity. 'You seem to think it all pretence, but I couldn't go back to the old ways; this--this has meant more to me, than that----' his lips quivered as if with coming tears, he had to pull himself together visibly. 'For the rest,' he went on drearily, 'I am not quite so ignorant as you deem me. One reads of--of this sort of situation, and I can shape my course as other men have shaped theirs; only--only do not try my patience too far.'
He meant the last in all seriousness, but neither the thought nor the words were his own; and the pathos of this despairing clutch on book-knowledge being, of course, lost on her commonplace vulgarity, she laughed once more.
'Why, Chris! you've got that as pat as pat! quite the injured hub in domestic drama. Goody me! to think I might be going down still on the top of the dear old red 'bus to the mouth of the pit on a first night! Well, that's over, so we must just both be as chirpy as we can. Goodbye, Chris! I've got to dress, for Lucanaster 's coming for me in half an hour. And don't expect me till you see me. They did talk of tents out, a dance, and a regular night of it. You really needn't fuss, Chris; you can't understand, you see.'
When she had gone, he sate staring helplessly at the boiled egg, as if he expected something to hatch out of it. Even thought forsook him, for the first to come was that this woman was his wife. Wife! the word conjured up such a different idea in the hereditary experience which inevitably underlay all things in him, that he could go no further in bewilderment.
So, in the effort to escape from the thraldom of the old wisdom, which such as he have to make so often, he took up the newspaper which lay beside him, telling himself passionately that the old order had changed, that life held more than his fathers had dreamt of. Yet even as he told himself this, the burden of doubt which such as he have to bear came upon him, a sense of unreality, even in himself, closed round him.
Unreal! Unreal! Unreal!
The word typed itself on the columns of the Voice of India as he read them. The paper was the recognised organ of his class, the exponent of its desires, its beliefs. Yet here even that word pursued him. Here on the first page was a leader stigmatising the temporary withdrawal of independent powers from the Municipal Committee as an unwarrantable piece of tyranny. Unwarrantable! Was it possible for any sane man to call it so, knowing, as all knew, the grievous tale of neglect and wrongdoing in that Committee? Was it possible, even apart from that, for any wise man not to see that with plague clamouring for an entrance, the good of the many claimed a more energetic sanitary reform than the Committee seemed able or willing to introduce?
And as for the hints thrown out that the newly-published plague regulations were but a sop, a blind, hiding a very different policy; what then? Was it possible for any government to do more than legislate for the present? Who but fools imagined that it could or would bind itself to definite action in conditions which could only be guessed at?
So the tale of unreality went on. Here was a well-written, well-reasoned article on the cow-killing grievance; but Chris, being a wielder of the pen himself, happened to know the writer, and could remember seeing him eating beefsteaks at the Temple dinners.
Again, in a paragraph headed 'Government Greed and Peasant Poverty.' Could any detail overcome the indubitable fact that India had the cheapest civilised government in the world?
He ran his eye down another column, and caught the phrase 'social progress' above a signature which he knew to be that of a man who had just married a child of ten.
And what was this? 'The Government to which is opposed the entire intelligence of the nation!' Brave words these, when the proportion between such intelligence and the general ignorance was withheld! What was it? Ten thousand to one!
'The political training of the mass of the people is still, it is true, somewhat incomplete.' It might well be that when the percentage of mere literates was almost negligible.
'Even the Mohammedan policy was better than the English one. True, it did not allow freedom of the press....'
Ye gods! Freedom of the press when there was not a newspaper in all the length and breadth of the land! Could unreality, bunkum, call it what you will, go further than that?
Chris pushed himself back from the table, back from the boiled egg, back from the newspaper, back, so far as he could, from himself, with an odd sound between a laugh, a sob, and a curse.
Was that all? Was that sort of ungenerous, unreliable, almost unimaginable drivel the only indictment which such as he had to bring against those who had depolarised life? Who had neither given India a creed, nor taken one away? Was that the only arraignment for the tyranny of pain such as his?
No! a thousand times no! There was more to be said than that!
So to him came the fatal facility for words which is the betrayal of his race. He sate down to write, and, heedless of the sound of dogcart wheels and a man's and a woman's laughter which came after a time, did not rise until he stood up with sheets on sheets of scarce-dried manuscript in his hand, feeling for the first time in his intellectual life that he was alone. Hitherto he had always followed the thoughts of the great masters. Hitherto there had always been some one on the road before him. Now the question, a burning one to his enthusiasm, was--'Would any one come after him?'
Hâfiz Ahmad's house, the rallying-point of young India in Nushapore, lay close by. It was a court-holiday, and therefore the chances were great that some meeting or another was being held; since meetings are a recognised holiday amusement with those who, amid all the unreality of their lives, are still terribly in earnest.
