Chapter 2.I.

To understand how we prized him, Dora Harris and I, it is necessary to know Simla. I suppose people think of that place, if they ever do think of it, as an agreeable retreat in the wilds of the Himalayas where deodars and scandals grow, and where the Viceroy if he likes may take off his decorations and go about in flannels. I know how useless it would be to try to give a more faithful impression, and I will hold back from the attempt as far as I can. Besides, my little story is itself an explanation of Simla. Ingersoll Armour might have appeared almost anywhere else without making social history. He came and bloomed among us in the wilderness, and such and such things happened. It sounds too rude a generalization to say that Simla is a wilderness; I hasten to add that it is a waste as highly cultivated as you like, producing many things more admirable than Ingersoll Armour. Still he bloomed there conspicuously alone. Perhaps there would have been nothing to tell if we had not tried to gather him. That was wrong; Nature in Simla expects you to be content with cocked hats.

There are artists almost everywhere and people who paint even in the Himalayas, though Miss Harris and I in our superior way went yearly to the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition chiefly to amuse ourselves by scoffing. It was easy to say clever things about the poor little exhibits; and one was grateful to the show on this account, for nothing is more depressing east of Suez than the absence of provocation to say clever things. There one afternoon in May as we marched about enjoying ourselves, we came upon Ingersoll Armour, not in the flesh, but in half a dozen studies hanging in the least conspicuous corner and quite the worst light in the room.

‘Eh, what?’ said I, and Dora exclaimed:

‘I say!’

‘Sent out from home,’ I said, ever the oracle.

‘Not at all,’ replied Dora. ’Look, they are Indian subjects. Simla subjects,’ she went on, with excitement.

I turned up the catalogue. ’Ninety-seven, “Kasumti Bazaar”; ninety-eight, “Clouds on the Chor”; ninety-nine, “The House of a Friend” Lord, what apricot blossoms! Yes, they’re all Simla.’

‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Dora, ’who painted them? You’ve got the catalogue!’

‘"I. Armour,"’ I read.

‘"I. Armour,"’ she repeated, and we looked at each other, saying in plain silence that to the small world of Simla I. Armour was unknown.

‘Not on Government House list, I venture to believe,’ said Dora. That in itself may show to what depths we sink. Yet it was a trenchant and a reasonable speculation.

‘It may be a newcomer,’ I suggested, but she shook her head. ’All newcomers call upon us,’ she said. ’There in the middle of the Mall we escape none of them. He isn’t a calling person.’

’Why do you say “he”? You are very confident with your pronouns. There’s a delicacy of feeling ’

’Which exactly does not suggest a women. We are undermined by delicacy of feeling; we’re not strong enough to express it with brushes. A man can make it a quality, a decorative characteristic, and so we see it. With a woman it’s everything all over the place and of no effect. Oh, I assure you, I. Armour is a man.’

‘Who shall stand against you! Let him be a man. He has taste.’

‘Taste!’ exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of her mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she would store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my pretensions, a person of the truest feeling. ‘He sees things.’

‘There’s an intensity,’ I ventured.

’That’s better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour. Look at that.’ She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six inches by four, in which the light seemed to come and go as it does in a sapphire.

We stood and gazed. It was a tremendous thing; only half a dozen studies with feeling and knowledge in them, but there in that remote fastness thrice barred against the arts a tremendous thing, a banquet for our famished eyes. What they would have said to us in London is a different matter, and how good they really were I do not find the courage to pronounce, but they had merit enough to prick our sense of beauty delightfully where we found them oh, they were good!

‘Heaven send it isn’t a Tommy,’ said Dora, with a falling countenance. ‘There is something absolutely inaccessible about a Tommy.’

‘How could it be?’ I asked.

’Oh, there are some inspired ones. But it isn’t that’s French technique. It’s an Englishman or an American who has worked in Paris. What in the name of fortune is he doing here?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ’we have had them, you know. Val Prinsep came out at the time of the Prince of Wales’s visit.’

‘Do you remember that?’

‘It’s a matter of history,’ I said, evasively, ’and Edwin Weeks travelled through India not so many years ago. I saw his studio in Paris afterward. Between his own canvases and Ahmedabad balconies and Delhi embroideries and Burmese Buddhas and other things he seemed to have carried off the whole place.’

’But they don’t come up here ever. They come in the cold weather, and as they can get plenty of snow and ice at home, they stay down in the plains with the palm-trees.’

‘Precisely; they do,’ I said.

‘And besides,’ Dora went on, with increasing excitement, ’this isn’t a master. You see, he doesn’t send a single picture only these tiny things. And there’s a certain tentativeness’ Miss Harris, her parasol handle pressed against her lips, looked at me with an eagerness that was a pleasure to look at in itself.

‘A certain weakness, almost a lack of confidence, in the drawing,’ I said.

‘What does that signify?’

‘Why, immaturity, of course not enough discipline.’

’He’s a student. Not that it amounts to a defect, you know’ she was as jealous already as if she possessed the things ’only a sign to read by. I should be grateful for more signs. Why should a student come to Simla?’

‘To teach, perhaps,’ I suggested. Naturally one sought only among reasons of utility.

’It’s the Kensington person who teaches. When they have worked in the ateliers and learned as much as this they never do. They paint fans and menu cards, and starve, but they don’t teach.’

Sir William Lamb, Member of Council for the Department of Finance, was borne by the stream to our sides. The simile will hardly stand conscientious examination, for the stream was a thin one and did no more than trickle past, while Sir William weighed fifteen stone, and was so eminent that it could never inconvenience him at its deepest. Dora detached her gaze from the pictures and turned her back upon them; I saw the measure of precaution. It was unavailing, however. ’What have we here?’ said Sir William. Dora removed her person from his line of vision, and he saw what we had there.

‘The work of a friend of yours?’ Sir William was spoken of as a ‘cautious’ man. He had risen to his present distinction on stepping-stones of mistakes he conspicuously had not made.

‘No,’ said Dora, ‘we were wondering who the artist could be.’

Sir William looked at the studies, and had a happy thought. ’If you ask me, I should say a child of ten,’ he said. He was also known as a man of humour.

‘Miss Harris had just remarked a certain immaturity,’ I ventured.

‘Oh, well,’ said Sir William, ’this isn’t the Royal Academy, is it? I always say it’s very good of people to send their things here at all. And some of them are not half bad I should call this year’s average very high indeed.’

’Are you pleased with the picture that has taken your prize, Sir William?’ asked Dora.

‘I have bought it.’ Sir William’s chest underwent before our eyes an expansion of conscious virtue. Living is so expensive in Simla; the purchase of a merely decorative object takes almost the proportion of an act of religion, even by a Member of Council drawing four hundred pounds a month.

’First-rate it is, first-rate. Have you seen it? “Our Camp in Tirah.” Natives cooking in the foreground, fellows standing about smoking, and a whole pile of tinned stores dumped down in one corner, exactly as they would be, don’t you know! Oh, I think the Committee made a very good choice indeed, a very good choice.’

Sir William moved on, and Dora was free to send me an expressive glance. ‘Isn’t that just like this place?’ she demanded. ’Let me see, the Viceroy’s medal, the Society’s silver medal, five prizes from Members of Council. Highly Commended’s as thick as blackberries, and these perfectly fresh, original, admirable things completely ignored. What an absurd, impossible corner of the earth it is!’

‘You look very cross, you two,’ said Mrs. Sinclair, trailing past. ’Come and see the crazy china exhibit, all made of little bits, you know. They say the photograph frames are simply lovely.’

Mrs. Sinclair’s invitation was not sincere. Miss Harris was able to answer it with a laugh and a wave. We remained beside the serious fact of exhibits 97-103.

‘Who are the judges this year?’ I asked, not that I did not know precisely who they were likely to be. There is a custom in these matters, and I had been part of Simla for eleven years.

Dora took the catalogue from my hand and turned its pages over.

’Mr. Cathcart, of course; the Private Secretary to the Viceroy would be on the Committee almost ex officio, wouldn’t he? Impossible to conceive a Private Secretary to the Viceroy whose opinion would not be valuable upon any head. The member for Public Works I suppose he can build bridges, or could once, therefore he can draw, or could once; besides, look at his precedence and his pay! General Haycock isn’t he head of the Ordnance Department? I can’t think of any other reason for putting him on. Oh yes he’s a K.C.B., and he is inventing a way of taking coloured photographs. Mr. Tilley, the old gentleman that teaches elementary drawing to the little girls in the diocesan school, that’s all right. And Mr. Jay, of course, because Mr. Jay’s water-colours are the mainstay of the exhibition, and he must be given a chance of expressing his opinion of them.’ She handed me back the catalogue. ’I have never been really angry with them before,’ she said.

‘Are you really angry now?’ I asked.

‘Furious,’ Dora replied, and indeed her face expressed indignation. Its lines were quite tense, and a spark shone oddly in the middle of the eyes. One could not credit her with beauty, but as her lady friends were fond of saying, there was something ‘more’ in her face. I saw a good deal more at this moment, and it gave me pleasure, as all her feelings did when they came out like that. I hasten to add that she was not unpleasing; her features had a symmetry and a mobility, and her eyes could take any transient charm they chose to endow themselves with; though there were moments when she compared very badly with the other young ladies of Simla with their high spirits and their pretty complexions, very badly indeed. Those were occasions when the gay monotony of the place pressed, I imagine, a little heavily upon her, and the dullness she felt translated itself in her expression. But she was by no means unpleasing.

‘I must go and see Lady Pilkey’s picture,’ I said.

‘What is the use?’ said Dora. ’It’s a landscape in oils a view of the Himalayas, near Narkanda. There are the snows in the background, very thin and visionary through a gap in the trees, and two hills, one hill on each side. Dark green trees, pine-trees, with a dead one in the left foreground covered with a brilliant red creeper. Right foreground occupied by a mountain path and a solitary native figure with its back turned. Society’s silver medal.’

‘When did you see it?’ I asked.

’I haven’t seen it this year. But I saw the one she sent last, and the one the year before that. You can trust my memory, really.’

‘No,’ I said, ’I can’t. I’m dining there tonight. I must have an original impression.’

’Congratulate her on the warm blaze of colour in the foreground. It’s perfectly safe,’ urged Miss Harris, but I felt compelled to go myself to see lady Pilkey’s landscape. When I returned I found her still sitting in grave absorption before the studies that had taken us so by surprise. Her face was full of a soft new light; I had never before seen the spring touched in her that could flood it like that.

‘You were very nearly right,’ I announced; ’but the blaze of colour was in the middle distance, and there was a torrent in the foreground that quite put it out. And the picture does take the Society’s silver medal.’

‘I can not decide,’ she replied without looking at me, ’between the Kattiawar fair thing and those hills in the rain. I can only have one father won’t hear of more than one.’

‘You can have two,’ I said bluntly, so deeply interested I was in the effect the things had on her. ’And I will have a third for myself. I can’t withstand those apricot-trees.’

I thought there was moisture in the eyes she turned upon me, an unusual thing a most unusual thing in Dora Harris; but she winked it back, if it was there, too quickly for any certainty.

‘You are a dear,’ she said. Once or twice before she had called me a dear. It reminded me, as nothing else ever did, that I was a contemporary of her father’s. It is a feeble confession, but I have known myself refrain from doing occasional agreeable things apprehending that she might call me a dear.

Chapter 2.II.

Dora had been out three seasons when these things happened. I remember sharing Edward Harris’s anxiety in no slight degree as to how the situation would resolve itself when she came, the situation consisting so considerably in his eyes of the second Mrs. Harris, who had complicated it further with three little red-cheeked boys, all of the age to be led about the station on very small ponies, and not under any circumstances to be allowed in the drawing-room when one went to tea with their mother. No one, except perhaps poor Ted himself, was more interested than I to observe how the situation did resolve itself, in the decision of Mrs. Harris that the boys, the two eldest at least, must positively begin the race for the competitive examinations of the future without further delay, and that she must as positively be domiciled in England ‘to be near’ them, at all events until they had well made the start. I should have been glad to see them ride their ponies up and down the Mall a bit longer, poor little chaps; they were still very cherubic to be invited to take a view of competitive examinations, however distant; but Mrs. Harris’s conviction was not to be overcome. So they went home to begin, and she went with them, leaving Dora in possession of her father, her father’s house, his pay, his precedence, and all that was his. Not that I would suggest any friction; I am convinced that there was nothing like that at least, nothing that met the eye, or the ear. Dora adored the three little boys and was extremely kind to their mother. She regarded this lady, I have reason to believe, with the greatest indulgence, and behaved towards her with the greatest consideration; I mean she had unerring intuitions as to just when, on afternoons when Mrs. Harris was at home from dusk till dinner, she should be dying for a walk. One could imagine her looking with her grey eyes at dear mamma’s horizon and deciding that papa was certainly not enough to fill it by himself, deciding at the same time that he was never likely to be ousted there, only accompanied, in a less important and entirely innocent degree. It may be surprising that any one should fly from so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party lasted a bare three months. I think Mrs. Harris had a perception she was the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct conclusions that she was contributing to her step-daughter’s amusement in a manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated, and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that indefinitely, perhaps increasingly. Besides, it was in the natural order of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs. Harris doubtless foresaw a comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or two, when the usual promising junior in ‘the Department’ should gild his own prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring its head for a father-in-law. Things always worked out if you gave them time. How much time you ought to give them was doubtless by now a pretty constant query with the little lady in her foggy exile; for two years had already passed and Dora had found no connection with any young man of the Department more permanent than those prescribed at dinners and at dances. It is doubtful, indeed, if she had had the opportunity. There was no absolute means of knowing; but if offers were made they never transpired, and Mrs. Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty that they never were made. Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected. It depended upon Mrs. Harris’s humour whether this was Dora’s misfortune or her crime. She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust to be paralyzed. On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there. It hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young man in Harris’s department. I had a department of my own; and Dora, though she frisked with me gloriously and bullied continually, must ever have been aware of the formidable fact that I joined the Service two years before Edward Harris did. The daughter of three generations of bureaucrats was not likely to forget that at one time her father had been junior to me in the same office, though in the course of time and the march of opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodded to each other on the Mall with an equal sense of the divine right of secretaries. It may seem irrelevant, but I feel compelled to explain here that I had remained a bachelor while Harris had married twice, and that I had kept up my cricket, while Harris had let his figure take all the soft curves of middle age. Nevertheless the fact remained. Sometimes I fancied it gave a certain piquancy to my relations with his daughter, but I could never believe that the laugh was on my side.

If we met at dinner-parties, it would be sometimes Edward Harris and sometimes myself who would take the dullest and stoutest woman down. If she fell to him, the next in precedence was bestowed upon me, and there might not be a pin to choose between them for phlegm and inflation. It is a preposterous mistake to suppose that the married ladies of Simla are in the majority brilliant and fascinating creatures, who say things in French for greater convenience, and lead a man on. After fifteen years I am ready to swear that I have been led on to nothing more compromising than a subscription to the Young Women’s Christian Association, though no one could have been more docile or more intelligent. During one viceroyalty of happy memory half a dozen clever and amusing men and women came together in Simla it was a mere fortuitous occurrence, aided by a joyous ruler who hated being bored as none before or ever since have hated it and the place has lived socially upon the reputation of that meteoric term ever since. Whereas the domestic virtues are no more deeply rooted anywhere than under the deodars; nor could any one, I hasten to add, chronicle the fact with more profound satisfaction than myself. A dinner-party, however, is not a favourable setting for the domestic virtues; it does them so little justice that one could sometimes almost wish them left at home, and I was talking of Simla dinner-parties, where I have encountered so many. How often have I been consulted as to the best school for boys in England, or instructed as to how much I should let my man charge me for shoe-blacking, or advised as to the most effectual way of preventing the butler from stealing my cheroots, while Dora Harris, remote as a star, talked to a cavalry subaltern about wind-galls and splints! At these moments I felt my seniority bitterly; to give Dora to a cavalry subaltern was such plain waste.

It was an infinite pleasure to know any one as well as I seemed to know Dora Harris. She, I believe, held no one else upon the same terms of intimacy, though she found women, of course, with whom she fluttered and embraced; and while there were, naturally, men with whom I exchanged the time o’day in terms more or less cordial, I am certain that I kept all my closest thoughts for her. It is necessary again to know Simla to understand how our friendship was gilded by the consideration that it was on both sides perfectly spontaneous. Social life in the poor little place is almost a pure farce with the number of its dictated, prompted intimacies, not controlled by general laws of expediency as at home, but each on its own basis of hope and expectancy, broadly and ludicrously obvious as a case by itself. There is a conspiracy of stupidity about it, for we are all in the same hat, every one of us; there is none so exalted that he does not urgently want a post that somebody else can give him. So we continue to exchange our depreciated smiles, and only privately admit that the person who most desires to be agreeable to us is the person whom we regard with the greatest suspicion. As between Dora Harris and myself there could be, naturally, no ax to grind. We amused ourselves by looking on penetratingly but tolerantly at the grinding of other people’s.

That was a very principal bond between us, that uncompromising clearness with which we looked at the place we lived in, and on the testimony of which we were so certain that we didn’t like it. The women were nearly all so much in heaven in Simla, the men so well satisfied to be there too, at the top of the tree, that our dissatisfaction gave us to one another the merit of originality, almost proved in one another a superior mind. It was not that either of us would have preferred to grill out our days in the plains; we always had a saving clause for the climate, the altitude, the scenery; it was Simla intrinsic, Simla as its other conditions made it, with which we found such liberal fault. Again I should have to explain Simla, at the length of an essay at least, to justify our condemnation. This difficulty confronts me everywhere. I must ask you instead to imagine a small colony of superior very superior officials, of British origin and traditions, set on the top of a hill, years and miles away from literature, music, pictures, politics, existing like a harem on the gossip of the Viceroy’s intentions, and depending for amusement on tennis and bumble-puppy, and then consider, you yourself, whether you are the sort of person to be unquestionably happy there. If you see no reason to the contrary, pray do not go on. There were times when Dora declared that she couldn’t breathe for want of an atmosphere, and times when I looked round and groaned at the cheerful congratulatory aridity in every man’s eye men who had done things at Oxford in my own year, and come out like me to be mummified into a last state like this. Thank Heaven, there was never any cheerful congratulation in my eye; one could always put there, when the thought inspired it, a saving spark of rank ingratitude instead.

It was as if we had the most desirable things roses, cool airs, far snowy ranges to build what we like with, and we built Simla altitude, 7,000, population 2,500, headquarters of the Government of India during the summer months. An ark it was, of course; an ark of refuge from the horrible heat that surged below, and I wondered as I climbed the steeps of Summer Hill in search of I. Armour’s inaccessible address, whether he was to be the dove bearing beautiful testimony of a world coming nearer. I rejected the simile, however, as over-sanguine; we had been too long abandoned on our Ararat.

Chapter 2.III.

A dog of no sort of caste stood in the veranda and barked at me offensively. I picked up a stone, and he vanished like the dog of a dream into the house. It was such a small house that it wasn’t on the municipal map at all: it looked as if someone had built it for amusement with anything that was lying about. Nevertheless, it had a name, it was called Amy Villa, freshly painted in white letters on a shiny black board, and nailed against the nearest tree in the orthodox Simla fashion. It looked as if the owner of the place had named it as a duty towards his tenant, the board was so new, and in that case the reflection presented itself that the tenant might have cooperated to call it something else. It was disconcerting somehow to find that our dove had perched, even temporarily, in Amy Villa. Nor was it soothing to discover that the small white object stuck in the corner of the board was Mr. Ingersoll Armour’s card.

In Simla we do not stick our cards about in that way at the mercy of the wind and the weather; we paint our names neatly under the names of our houses with ‘I.C.S.’ for Indian Civil Service, or ‘P.W.D.’ for Public Works Department, or whatever designation we are entitled to immediately after, so that there can be no mistake. This strikes newcomers sometimes as a little professional, especially when a hand accompanies, pointing; but it is the only possible way where there are no streets and no numbers, but where houses are dropped about a hilltop as if they had fallen from a pepper-pot. In sticking his card out like that Mr. Armour seemed to imagine himself au quatrième or au cinquième somewhere on the south side of the Seine; it betrayed rather a ridiculous lack of conformity. He was high enough up, however, to give any illusion; I had to stop to find the wind to announce myself. There was nobody else to do it if I except the dog.

I walked into the veranda and shouted. Then I saw that one end of it was partly glazed off, and inside sat a young man in his shirt-sleeves with his back to the door.

In reply he called out, ‘That you, Rosario?’ and I stood silent, taken somewhat aback.

There was only one Rosario in Simla, and he was a subordinate in my own office. Again the hateful need to explain. Between subordinate clerks and officials in Simla there is a greater gulf fixed than was ever imagined in parable. Besides, Rosario had a plain strain of what we call ‘the country’ in him, a plain strain, that is, of the colour of the country. It was certainly the first time in my official career that I had been mistaken for Rosario.

Armour turned round and saw me that I was a stranger.

He got up at once. ‘Oh,’ he said, ’I thought it was Rosario.

‘It isn’t,’ I replied, ’my name is Philips. May I ask whether you were expecting Mr. Rosario? I can come again, you know.’

’Oh, it doesn’t matter. Sit down. He may drop in or he may not I rather thought he would today. It’s a pull up, isn’t it, from the Mall? Have a whisky and soda.’

I stood on the threshold spellbound. It was just the smell that bound me, the good old smell of oil paints and turpentine and mediums and varnish and new canvas that you never by any chance put your nose into in any part of Asia. It carried me back twenty years to old haunts, old friends, old joys, ideals, theories. Ah, to be young and have a temperament! For I had one then that instant in Armour’s veranda proved it to me forever.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll just have the smell.’

The young fellow knew at once that I liked the smell. ’Well, have a chair, anyhow,’ he said, and took one himself and sat down opposite me, letting his lean brown hands fall between his knees.

‘Do you mind,’ I said, ‘if for a minute I sit still and look round?’

He understood again.

‘I haven’t brought much,’ he said, ’I left pretty near everything in Paris.’

‘You have brought a world.’ Then after a moment, ‘Did you do that?’ I asked, nodding towards a canvas tacked against the wall. It was the head of a half-veiled Arab woman turned away.

The picture was in the turning away, and the shadow the head-covering made over the cheek and lips.

’Lord, no! That’s Dagnan Bouveret. I used to take my things to him, and one day he gave me that. You have an eye,’ he added, but without patronage. ‘It’s the best thing I’ve got.’

I felt the warmth of an old thrill.

‘Once upon a time,’ I said, ‘I was allowed to have an eye.’ The wine, untasted all those years, went to my head. ’That’s a vigorous bit above,’ I continued.

’Oh, well! It isn’t really up to much, you know. It’s Rosario’s. He photographs mostly, but he has a notion of colour.’

‘Really?’ said I, thinking with regard to my eye that the sun of that atrocious country had put it out. ‘I expect I’ve lost it,’ I said aloud.

’Your eye? Oh, you’ll easily get a fresh one. Do you go home for the exhibitions?’

‘I did once,’ I confessed. ’My first leave. A kind of paralysis overtakes one here. Last time I went for the grouse.’

He glanced at me with his light clear eyes as if for the first time he encountered a difficulty.

‘It’s a magnificent country for painting,’ he said.

‘But not for pictures,’ I rejoined. He paid no attention, staring at the ground and twisting one end of his moustache.

‘The sun on those old marble tombs broad sun and sand ’

‘You mean somewhere about Delhi.’

‘I couldn’t get anywhere near it.’ He was not at that moment anywhere near me. ’But I have thought out a trick or two I mean to have another go when it cools off again down there.’ He returned with a smile, and I saw how delicate his face was. The smile turned down with a little gentle mockery in its lines. I had seen that particular smile only on the faces of one or two beautiful women. It had a borrowed air upon a man, like a tiara or an earring.

‘There’s plenty to paint,’ he said, looking at me with an air of friendly speculation.

’Indeed, yes. And it has never been done. We are sure it has never been done.’

‘"We” you mean people generally?’

‘Not at all. I mean Miss Harris, Miss Harris and myself.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘My name is Philips,’ I reminded him pleasantly, remembering that the intelligence of clever people is often limited to a single art. ’Miss Harris is the daughter of Mr. Edward Harris, Secretary of the Government of India in the Legislative Department. She is fond of pictures. We have a good many tastes in common. We have always suspected that India had never been painted, and when we saw your things at the Town Hall we knew it.’

His queer eyes dilated, and he blushed.

‘Oh,’ he said, ’it’s only one interpretation. It all depends on what a fellow sees. No fellow can see everything.’

‘Till you came,’ I insisted, ‘nobody had seen anything.’

He shook his head, but I could read in his face that this was not news to him.

‘That is mainly what I came up to tell you,’ I continued, ’to beg that you will go on and on. To hope that you will stay a long time and do a great deal. It is such an extraordinary chance that any one should turn up who can say what the country really means.’

He stuck his hands in his pockets with a restive movement. ’Oh, don’t make me feel responsible,’ he said, ‘I hate that;’ and then suddenly he remembered his manners. ‘But it’s certainly nice of you to think so,’ he added.

There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me to ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover that he came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way of a few years in London and Paris. This accounted in a way for the effect of freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked him, and perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and experiment which sat so lightly in his unlined face. He came, one realized, out of the fermentation of new conditions; he never could have been the product of our limits and systems and classes in England. His surroundings, his ‘things,’ as he called them, were as old as the sense of beauty, but he seemed simply to have put them where he could see them, there was no pose in their arrangement. They were all good, and his delight in them was plain; but he was evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of natural instinct. Some of those he had picked up in India I could tell him about, but I had no impression that he would remember what I said. There was one Bokhara tapestry I examined with a good deal of interest.

‘Yes,’ he said, ’they told me I shouldn’t get anything as good as that out here, so I brought it,’ but I had to explain to him why it was anomalous that this should be so.

‘It came a good many miles over desert from somewhere,’ he remarked, as I made a note of inquiry as to the present direction of trade in woven goods from Persia, ‘I had to pound it for a week to get the dust out.’

We spent an hour looking over work he had done down in the plains, and then I took my leave. It did not occur to me at the moment to ask Armour to come to the club or to offer to do anything for him; all the hospitality, all that was worth offering seemed so much more at his disposition than at mine. I only asked if I might come again, mentioning somewhat shyly that I must have the opportunity of adding, at my leisure, to those of his pictures that were already mine by transaction with the secretary of the Art Exhibition. I left him so astonished that this had happened, so plainly pleased, that I was certain he had never sold anything before in his life. This impression gave me the uplifted joy of a discoverer to add to the satisfactions I had already drawn from the afternoon; and I almost bounded down the hill to the Mall. I left the pi dog barking in the veranda, and I met Mr. Rosario coming up, but in my unusual elation I hardly paused to consider either of them further.

The mare and her groom were waiting on the Mall, and it was only when I got on her back that the consciousness visited me of something forgotten. It was my mission to propose to take Armour, if he were ‘possible,’ to call upon the Harrises. Oh, well, he was possible enough; I supposed he possessed a coat, though he hadn’t been wearing it; and I could arrange it by letter. Meanwhile, as was only fair, I turned the mare in the direction of the drawing-room where I had reason to believe that Miss Dora Harris was quenching her impatience in tea.

Chapter 2.IV.

The very next morning I met Armour on my way to the office. He was ambling along on the leanest and most ill-groomed of bazaar ponies, and he wore a bowler. In Simla sun hats are admissible, straw hats are presentable, and soft felt hats are superior, but you must not wear a bowler. I might almost say that if one’s glance falls upon a bowler, one hardly looks further; the expectation of finding an acquaintance under it is so vain. In this instance, I did look further, fortunately, though in doing so I was compelled to notice that the bowler was not lifted in answer to my salutation. Of no importance in itself, of course, but betraying in Armour a certain lack of observation. I felt the Departmental Head crumble in me, however, as I recognized him, and I pulled the mare up in a manner which she plainly resented. It was my opportunity to do cautiously and delicately what I had omitted the afternoon before; but my recollection is that I was very clumsy.

I said something about the dust, and he said something about the glare, and then I could think of nothing better than to ask him if he wouldn’t like to meet a few Simla people.

‘Oh, I know lots of people, thanks,’ he said. ’It’s kind of you to think of it, all the same, but I’ve got any amount of friends here.’

I thought of Mr. Rosario, and stood, or sat confounded.

The mare fidgeted; I knocked a beast of a fly off her, and so gained time.

‘This is my second season up here, you know.’

‘Your second season!’ I exclaimed. ’Where on earth have you been hiding?’

’Well, I didn’t exhibit last year, you see. I’d heard it was a kind of a toy show, so I thought I wouldn’t. I think now that was foolish. But I got to know quite a number of families.’

‘But I am sure there are numbers that you haven’t met,’ I urged,’ or I should have heard of it.’

He glanced at me with a slight flush. ‘If you mean society people,’ he said, ’I don’t care about that kind of thing, Mr. Philips. I’m not adapted to it, and I don’t want to be. If any one offered to introduce me to the Viceroy, I would ask to be excused.’

‘Oh, the Viceroy,’ I responded, disrespectfully, ’is neither here nor there. But there are some people, friends of my own, who would like very much to meet you.’

‘By the name of Harris?’ he asked. I was too amazed to do anything but nod. By the name of Harris! The Secretary of the Government of India in the Legislative Department! The expression, not used as an invocation, was inexcusable.

‘I remember you mentioned them yesterday.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ’there’s a father and daughter. Miss Harris is very artistic.’

His face clouded, as well it might, at the word. ‘Does she paint?’ he asked, so apprehensively that I could not forbear a smile at Dora’s expense. I could assure him that she did not paint, that she had not painted, at all events, for years, and presently I found myself in the ridiculous position of using argument to bring a young man to the Harrises. In the end I prevailed, I know, out of sheer good nature on Armour’s part; he was as innocent as a baby of any sense of opportunity.

We arranged it for the following Friday, but as luck would have it, His Excellency sent for me at the very hour; we met the messenger. I felt myself unlucky, but there was nothing for it but that Armour should go alone, which he did, with neither diffidence nor alacrity, but as if it were all in the day’s work, and he had no reason to be disobliging.

The files were very heavy during the succeeding fortnight, and the Viceroy quite importunate in his demand for my valuable suggestions. I was worked off my legs, and two or three times was obliged to deny myself in replying to notes from Dora suggesting Sunday breakfast or afternoon tea. Finally, I shook myself free; it was the day she wrote:

‘You must come I can’t keep it to myself any longer.’

I half thought Armour would be there, but he wasn’t; that is, he was absent corporeally, but the spirit and expression of him littered every convenient part. Some few things lay about that I had seen in the studio, to call it so, but most of the little wooden panels looked fresh, almost wet, and the air held strongly the fragrance of Armour’s north veranda. In one corner there used to be a Madonna on a carved easel; the Madonna stood on the floor, and the easel with working pegs in it held an unfinished canvas. Dora sat in the midst with a distinct flush she was inclined to be sallow and made me welcome in terms touched with extravagance. She did not rush, however, upon the matter that was dyeing her cheeks, and I showed myself as little impetuous. She poured out the tea, and we sat there inhaling, as it were, the aroma of the thing, while keeping it consciously in the background.

I imagine there was no moment in the time I describe when we enjoyed Ingersoll Armour so much as at this one, when he lay in his nimbus half known and wholly suppressed, between us. There were later instances, perhaps, of deeper satisfaction, but they were more or less perplexed, and not unobscured by anxiety. That afternoon it was all to know and to be experienced, with just a delicious foretaste.

I said something presently about Lady Pilkey’s picnic on the morrow, to which we had both been bidden.

‘Shall I call for you?’ I asked. ‘You will ride, of course.’

‘Thanks, but I’ve cried off I’m going sketching.’ Her eyes plainly added, ‘with Ingersoll Armour,’ but she as obviously shrank from the roughness of pitching him in that unconsidered way before us. For some reason I refrained from taking the cue. I would not lug him in either.

‘That is a new accomplishment,’ was as much as I felt I could say with dignity, and she responded:

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

I felt some slight indignation on Lady Pilkey’s account. ’Do you really think you ought to do things like that at the eleventh hour?’ I asked, but Dora smiled at a glance, the hypocrisy out of my face.

‘What does anything matter?’ she demanded.

I knew perfectly well the standard by which nothing mattered, and there was no use, of course, in going on pretending that I did not.

‘I assured him that you didn’t paint,’ I said, accusingly.

’Oh, I had to otherwise what was there to go upon? He would have been found only to be lost again. You did not contemplate that?’ Miss Harris inquired sweetly.

‘I should have thought it was the surest way of losing him.’

‘I can’t think why you should be so rude. He observes progress already.’

‘With a view to claiming and holding him, would it be of any use,’ I asked, ‘for me to start in oils?’

Miss Harris eyed me calmly.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ’but it doesn’t seem the same thing somehow. I think you had better leave it to me.’

‘Indeed, I won’t,’ I said; ‘there is too much in it,’ and we smiled across the gulf of our friendly understanding.

I crossed to the mantelpiece and picked up one of the little wet panels. There was that in it which explained my friend’s exultation much more plainly than words.

‘That is what I am to show him tomorrow,’ she exclaimed; ’I think I have done as he told me. I think it’s pretty right.’

Whether it was pretty right or pretty wrong, she had taken in an extraordinary way an essence out of him. It wasn’t of course good, but his feeling was reflected in it, at once so brilliantly and so profoundly that it was startling to see.

‘Do you think he’ll be pleased?’ she asked, anxiously.

‘I think he’ll be astounded,’ I said, reserving the rest, and she cried in her pleasure, ‘Oh, you dear man!’

‘I see you have taken possession of him,’ I went on.

‘Ah, body and soul,’ Dora rejoined, and it must have been something like that. I could imagine how she did it; with what wiles of simplicity and candid good-fellowship she had drawn him to forgetfulness and response, and how presently his enthusiasm leaped up to answer hers and they had been caught altogether out of the plane of common relations, and he had gone away on that disgraceful bazaar pony with a ratified arrangement to return next day which had been almost taken for granted from the beginning.

I confess, though I had helped to bring it about, the situation didn’t altogether please me. I did not dream of foolish dangers, but it seemed to take a little too much for granted; I found myself inwardly demanding whether, after all, a vivid capacity to make colour conscious was a sufficient basis on which to bring to Edward Harris’s house a young man about whom we knew nothing whatever else. An instant’s regard showed the scruple fraudulent, it fled before the rush of pleasure with which I gazed at the tokens he had left behind him. I fell back on my wonder, which was great, that Dora should have possessed the technique necessary to take him at a point where he could give her so much that was valuable.

‘Oh, well,’ she said when I uttered it, ’you know I made the experiment! I found out in South Kensington you can learn that much there that I never would be able to paint well enough to make it worth while. So I dropped it and took a more general line towards life. But I find it very easy to imagine myself dedicated to that particular one again.’

‘You never told me,’ I said. Why had I been shut out of that experience?

‘I tell you now,’ Dora replied, absently, ’when I am able to offer you the fact with illustrations.’ She laughed and dropped a still illuminated face in the palm of her hand. ’He has wonderfully revived me,’ she declared. ’I could throw, honestly, the whole of Simla overboard for this.’

‘Don’t,’ I urged, feeling, suddenly, an integral part of Simla.

‘Oh, no what end would be served? But I don’t care who knows,’ she went on with a rush, ’that in all life this is what I like best, and people like Mr. Armour are the people I value most. Heavens, how few of them there are! And wherever they go how the air clears up round them! It makes me quite ill to think of the life we lead here the poverty of it, the preposterous dullness of it....’

‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said, obscurely irritated, ’don’t quote the bishop. The life holds whatever we put into it.’

’For other people it does, and for us it holds what other people put into it,’ she retorted. ’I don’t know whether you think it’s adequately filled with gold lace and truffles.’

‘Why should I defend it?’ I asked, not knowing indeed why. ’But it has perhaps a dignity, you know. Ah, you are too fresh from your baptism,’ I continued, as she shook her head and went to the piano. The quality, whatever it was, that the last fortnight had generated in her, leaped from her fingers; she played with triumph, elation, intention. The notes seemed an outlet for the sense of beauty and for power to make it. I had never heard her play like that before.

It occurred to me to ask when she had done, how far, after a fortnight, she could throw light on Armour’s aims and history, where he had come from, and the great query with which we first received him, what he could be doing in Simla. I gathered that she had learned practically nothing, and had hardly concerned herself to learn anything. What difference did it make? she asked me. Why should we inquire? Why tack a theory of origin to a phenomenon of joy? Let us say the wind brought him, and build him a temple. She was very whimsical up to the furthest stretch of what could possibly be considered tea-time. When I went away I saw her go again and sit down at the piano. In the veranda I remembered something, stopped, and went back. I had to go back. ’You did not tell me,’ I said, ‘when he was coming again.’

‘Oh, tomorrow tomorrow, of course,’ Dora paused to reply.

I resented, as I made my way to the Club, the weight of official duties that made it so impossible for me to keep at all closely in touch with this young man.

Chapter 2.V.

The art of the photographer usually arouses in me all that is splenetic, and I had not submitted myself to him for years before Dora made such a preposterous point of it years in which, as I sadly explained to her, I might have submitted to the ordeal with much more ‘pleasing’ results. She had often insisted before, but I could never see that she made out a particularly good case for the operation until one afternoon when she showed me the bold counterfeit presentment of an Assistant Adjutant-General or some such person, much flattered as to features but singularly faithful in its reproduction of the straps and buttons attached. To my post also there belongs a uniform and a cocked hat sufficiently dramatic, but persons who serve the State primarily with the intelligence are supposed to have a mind above buttons; and when I decided that my photograph should compete with the Assistant Adjutant-General’s, I gave him every sartorial advantage. I gathered that the offer, cabinet size, of this gentleman had been a spontaneous one; that certainly could not be said of mine. Most unwillingly I turned one morning into Kauffer’s; and I can not now imagine why I did it, for emulation of the Assistant Adjutant-General was really not motive enough, unless it was with an instinct prepared to stumble upon matter germane in an absurd degree to this little history.

I had the honour to be subjected to the searching analysis of Mr. Kauffer himself. It was he who placed the chair and arranged the screw, he who fixed the angle of my chin and gently disposed my fingers on my knee. He gave me, I remember, a recent portrait of the Viceroy to fix my eye upon, doubtless with the purpose of inspiring my countenance with the devotion which would sit suitably upon one of His Excellency’s slaves, and when it was all over he conducted me into another apartment in order that I might see the very latest viceregal group a domestic one, including the Staff. The walls of the room contained what is usually there, the enlarged photograph, the coloured photograph, the amateur theatrical group, the group of His Excellency’s Executive Council, the native dignitary with a diamond-tipped aigrette in the front of his turban. The copy in oils of some old Italian landscape, very black and yellow, also held its invariable place, and above it, very near the ceiling, a line of canvases which, had I not been led past them to inspect our ruler and his family, who sat transfixed on an easel in a resplendent frame, would probably have escaped my attention. I did proper homage to the easel, and then turned to those pictures. It was plain enough who had painted them. Armour’s broad brush stood out all over them. They were mostly Indian sporting subjects, the incident a trifle elliptical, the drawing unequal, but the verve and feeling unmistakeable, and colour to send a quiver of glorious acquiescence through you like a pang. What astonished me was the number of them; there must have been at least a dozen, all the same size and shape, all hanging in a line of dazzling repetition. Here then was the explanation of Armour’s seeming curious lack of output, and plain denial of the supposition that he spent the whole of his time in doing the little wooden ‘pochade’ things whose sweetness and delicacy had so feasted our eyes elsewhere. It was part, no doubt, of his absolutely uncommercial nature we had experienced together passages of the keenest embarrassment over my purchase of some of his studies that he had not mentioned these more serious things exposed at Kauffer’s; one had the feeling of coming unexpectedly on treasure left upon the wayside and forgotten.

‘Hullo!’ I said, at a standstill, ’I see you’ve got some of Mr. Armour’s work there.’

Mr. Kauffer, with his hands behind him, made the sound which has its counterpart in a shrug. ‘Yass,’ he said, ’I haf some of Mr. Armour’s work there. This one, that one, all those remaining pictures they are all the work of Mr. Armour.’

’I didn’t know that any of his things were to be seen outside his studio,’ I observed.

‘So? They are to be seen here. There is no objection.’

‘Why should there be any objection?’ I demanded, slightly nettled. ‘People must see them before they buy them.’

‘Buy them!’ Kauffer’s tone was distinctly exasperated. ’Who will buy these pictures? Nobody. They are all, every one of them to REfuse.’

‘If you know Mr. Armour well enough,’ I said, ’you should advise him to exhibit some of his local studies and sketches here. They might sell better.’

My words seemed unfortunately chosen. Mr. Kauffer turned an honest angry red.

‘Do I not know Mr. Armour well enough und better!’ he exclaimed. ’What this man wass doing when I in Paris find him oudt? Shtarving, mein Gott! I see his work. I see he paint a very goot horse, very goot animal subject. I bring him oudt on contract, five hundred rupees the monnth to paint for me, for my firm. Sir, it is now nine monnth. I am yoost four tousand five hundred rupees out of my pocket by this gentleman!’

To enable me to cope with this astonishing tale I asked Mr. Kauffer for a chair, which he obligingly gave me, and begged that he also would be seated. The files at my office were my business, and this was not, but no matter of Imperial concern seemed at the moment half so urgently to require probing. ‘Surely,’ I said, ’that is an unusual piece of enterprise for a photographic firm to employ an artist to paint on a salary. I don’t know even a regular dealer who does it.’

Mr. Kauffer at once and frankly explained. It was unusual and entirely out of the regular line of business. It was, in fact, one of the exceptional forms of enterprise inspired in this country by the native prince. We who had to treat with the native prince solely on lofty political lines were hardly likely to remember how largely he bulked in the humbler relations of trade; but there was more than one Calcutta establishment, Mr. Kauffer declared, that would be obliged to put up its shutters without this inconstant and difficult, but liberal customer. I waited with impatience. I could not for the life of me see Armour’s connection with the native prince, who is seldom a patron of the arts for their own sakes.

‘Surely,’ I said, ’you could not depend on the Indian nobility to buy landscapes. They never do. I know of only one distinguished exception, and he lives a thousand miles from here, in Bengal.’

‘No, not landscape,’ returned Mr. Kauffer; ’but that Indian nobleman will buy his portrait. We send our own man photographic artist to his State, and he photograph the Chief and his arab, the Chief and his Prime Minister, the Chief in his durbar, palace, gardens, stables everything. Presently the Chief goes on a big shoot. He says he will not have a plain photograph besides, it is difficult. He will have a painting, and he will pay.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I begin to see.’

‘You see? Then I send this Armour. Look!’ Mr. Kauffer continued with rising excitement, baited apparently by the unfortunate canvas to which he pointed, ’when Armour go to make that I say you go paint ze Maharajah of Gridigurh spearing ze wild pig. You see what he make?’

‘Well,’ I said, ’it is a wonderfully spirited, dashing thing, and the treatment of all that cane-brake and jungle grass is superb.’

’Ze treatment pardon me, sir, I overboil do you know which is ze Maharajah?’

‘I can’t say I do.’

’Neider does he. Ze Maharajah refuse zat picture; he is a good fellow, too. He says it is a portrait of ze pig.’

‘But it is so good,’ I protested, ‘of the pig.’

’But that does not interest the Maharajah, you onderstand, no. You see this one? Nawab of Kandore on his State elephant.’

No doubt about it,’ I said. ’I know the Nawab well, the young scoundrel. How dignified he looks!’

There was a note of real sorrow in Kauffer’s voice. ’Dignified? Oh, yes; dignified, but, you observe, also black. The Nawab will not be painted black. At once it is on my hands.’

‘But he is black,’ I remonstrated. ’He’s the darkest native I’ve ever seen among the nobility.’

’No matter for that. He will not be black. When I photograph that Nawab any nawab I do not him black make. But ziss ass of Armour ach!’

It was a fascinating subject, and I could have pursued it all along the line of poor Armour’s rejected canvases, but the need to get away from Kauffer with his equal claim upon my sympathy was too great. To have cracked my solemn mask by a single smile would have been to break down irrepressibly, and never since I set foot in India had I felt a parallel desire to laugh and to weep. There was a pang in it which I recognize as impossible to convey, arising from the point of contact, almost unimaginable yet so clear before me, of the uncompromising ideals of the atelier and the naïve demands of the Oriental, with an unhappy photographer caught between and wriggling. The situation was really monstrous, the fatuous rejection of all that fine scheming and exquisite manipulation, and it did not grow less so as Mr. Kauffer continued to unfold it. Armour had not, apparently, proceeded to the scene of his labours without instructions. In the pig-sticking delineation he had been specially told that the Maharajah and the pig were to be in the middle, with the rest nowhere and nothing between. Other injunctions were as clear, and as clearly disregarded. Armour, like the Maharajahs, had simply ‘REfuse’ to abandon his premeditated conceptions of how the thing should be done. And here was the result, for the laughter of the gods and anybody else that might see. I asked Kauffer unguardedly if no sort of pressure could be brought to bear upon these chaps to make them pay up. His face beaming with hope and intelligence, he suggested that I should approach the Foreign Office in his behalf; but this I could not quite see my way to. The coercion of native rulers, I explained, was a difficult and a dangerous art, and to insist, for example, that one of them should recognize his own complexion might be to run up a disproportionate little bill of our own. I did, however, compound something with Kauffer; I hope it wasn’t a felony. ‘Look here,’ I said to Kauffer, ’this isn’t official, you know, in any way, but how would it do to write that scamp Kandore a formal letter regretting that the portrait does not suit him, and asking his permission to dispose of it to me? Of course it is yours to do as you like with already, but that is no reason why you shouldn’t ask. I should like it, but the Porcha tiger beat will do as well.’

Kauffer nearly fell upon my neck.

‘That Kandore will buy it to put in one bonfire first,’ he assured me, and I sincerely hoped for his sake that it would be the case.

‘Of course it’s understood,’ I bethought me to say, ’that I get it, if I do get it, at Mr. Armour’s price. I’m not a Maharajah, you know, and it isn’t a portrait of me.’

‘Of course!’ said Kauffer, ’but I sink I sell you that Porcha; it is ze best of ze two.’

Chapter 2.VI.

I ventured for a few days to keep the light which chance had shed for me upon Armour’s affairs to myself. The whole thing considered in connection with his rare and delicate talent, seemed too derogatory and disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him some kind of injury in the mere statement. But there came a point when I could no longer listen to Dora Harris’s theories to account for him, wild idealizations as most of them were of any man’s circumstances and intentions. ’Why don’t you ask him point-blank?’ I said, and she replied, frowning slightly, ’Oh, I couldn’t do that. It would destroy something I don’t know what, but something valuable between us.’ This struck me as an exaggeration, considering how far, by that time, they must have progressed towards intimacy, and my mouth was opened. She heard me without the exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she was sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished. The touch of comedy I gave the whole thing surely I was justified in that! fell flat, and I extracted from her muteness a sense of rebuke; one would think I had been taking advantage of the poor devil.

At last, having broken the lead of her pencil three times, she turned a calm, considering eye upon me.

‘You have known this for a fortnight?’ she asked. ’That doesn’t seem somehow quite fair.’

‘To whom?’ I asked, and her answer startled me.

‘To either of us,’ she said.

How she advised herself to that effect is more than I can imagine, but the print of her words is indelible, that is what she said.

‘Oh, confound it!’ I exclaimed. ‘I couldn’t help finding out, you know.’

‘But you could help keeping it to yourself in that in that base way,’ she replied, and almost the evening light was beginning to glimmer uncertainly through the deodars I could swear I saw the flash of a tear on her eyelid.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she went on a moment later, ’but I do hate having to pity him. It’s intolerable that.’

I picked up a dainty edition of Aucassin and Nicolette with the intention of getting upon ground less emotional, and observed on the flyleaf ‘D.H. from I.A. In memory of the Hill of Stars.’ I looked appreciatively at the binding, and as soon as possible put it down.

‘He was not bound to tell me,’ Dora asserted presently, in reply to my statement that the mare had somehow picked up a nail in the stable, and was laid up.

‘You have been very good to him,’ I said. ‘I think he was.’

‘His reticence was due,’ she continued, as if defying contradiction, ’to a simple dislike to bore one with his personal affairs.’

‘Was it?’ I assented. My tone acknowledged with all humility that she was likely to know, and I did not deserve her doubtful glance.

‘He could not certainly,’ she went on, with firmer decision, ’have been in the least ashamed of his connection with Kauffer.’

’He comes from a country where social distinctions are less sharp than they are in this idiotic place,’ I observed.

’Oh, if you think it is from any lack of recognition! His sensitiveness is beyond reason. He has met two or three men in the Military Department here he was aware of the nicest shade of their patronage. But he does not care. To him life is more than a clerkship. He sees all round people like that. They are only figures in the landscape.’

‘Then,’ I said, ’he is not at all concerned that nobody in this Capua of ours knows him, or cares anything about him, or has bought a scrap of his work, except our two selves.’

’That’s a different matter. I have tried to rouse in him the feeling that it would be as well to be appreciated, even in Simla, and I think I’ve succeeded. He said, after those two men had gone away on Sunday, that he thought a certain reputation in the place where he lived would help anybody in his work.’

‘On Sunday? Do you mean between twelve and two?’

’Yes, he came and made a formal call. There was no reason why he shouldn’t.’

‘Now that I think of it,’ I rejoined, ’he shot a card on me too, at the Club. I was a little surprised. We didn’t seem somehow to be on those terms. One doesn’t readily associate him with any conventionality.’

‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t,’ said Dora again, and with this vague comment we spoke of something else, both of us, I think, a little disquieted and dissatisfied that he had.

‘I think,’ Dora said as I went away, ’that you had better go up to the studio and tell him what you have told me. Perhaps it doesn’t matter much, but I can’t bear the thought of his not knowing.’

‘Come to Kauffer’s in the morning and see the pictures,’ I urged; but she turned away, ‘Oh, not with you.’

I found my way almost at once to Amy Villa, not only because I had been told to go there. I wanted, myself, certain satisfactions. Armour was alone and smoking, but I had come prepared against the contingency of one of his cigars. They were the cigars of the man who doesn’t know what he eats. With sociable promptness I lighted one of my own. The little enclosed veranda testified to a wave of fresh activity. The north light streamed in upon two or three fresh canvases, the place seemed full of enthusiasm, and you could see its source, at present quiescent under the influence of tobacco, in Armour’s face.

‘You have taken a new line,’ I said, pointing to a file of camels, still half obscured by the dust of the day, coming along a mountain road under a dim moon. They might have been walking through time and through history. It was a queer, simple thing, with a world of early Aryanism in it.

’Does that say anything? I’m glad. It was to me articulate, but I didn’t know. Oh, things have been going well with me lately. Those two studies over there simply did themselves. That camp scene on the left is almost a picture. I think I’ll put a little more work on it and give it a chance in Paris. I got in once, you know. Champ de Mars. With some horses.’

‘Did you, indeed?’ I said. ‘Capital.’ I asked him if he didn’t atrociously miss the life of the Quarter, and he surprised me by saying that he never had lived it. He had been en pension instead with a dear old professor of chemistry and his family at Puteaux, and used to go in and out. A smile came into his eyes at the remembrance, and he told me one after the other idyllic little stories of the old professor and madame. Madame and the omelet madame and the melon M. Vibois and the maire; I sat charmed. So long as we remained in France his humour was like this, delicate and expansive, but an accidental allusion led us across the Channel when he changed. He had no little stories of the time he spent in England. Instead he let himself go in generalizations, aimed, for they had a distinct animus, at English institutions and character, particularly as these appear in English society. I could not believe, from the little I had seen of him, that his experience of English society of any degree had been intimate; what he said had the flavour of Radical Sunday papers. The only original element was the feeling behind, which was plainly part of him; speculation instantly clamoured as to how far this was purely temperamental and how far the result of painful contact. He himself, he said, though later of the Western States, had been born under the British flag of British parents though his mother was an Irishwoman she came from loyal Ulster and he repeated the statement as if it in some way justified his attitude towards his fellow countrymen and excused his truculence in the ear of a servant of the empire which he had the humour to abuse. I heard him, I confess, with impatience, it was all so shabby and shallow, but I heard him out, and I was rewarded; he came for an illustration in the end to Simla. ‘Look,’ he said, ’at what they call their “Government House list”; and look at Strobo, Signor Strobo. Isn’t Strobo a man of intelligence, isn’t he a man of benevolence? He gave ten thousand rupees last week to the famine fund. Is Strobo on Government House list? Is he ever invited to dine with the Viceroy? No, because Strobo keeps a hotel! Look at Rosario where does Rosario come in? Nowhere, because Rosario is a clerk, and a subordinate. Yet Rosario is a man of wide reading and a very accomplished fellow!’

It became more or less necessary to argue then, and the commonplaces with which I opposed him called forth a wealth of detail bearing most picturesquely upon his stay among us. I began to think he had never hated English rigidity and English snobbery until he came to Simla, and that he and Strobo and Rosario had mingled their experiences in one bitter cup. I gathered this by inference only, he was curiously watchful and reticent as to anything that had happened to him personally; indeed, he was careful to aver preferences for the society of ‘sincere’ people like Strobo and Rosario, that seemed to declare him more than indifferent to circles in which he would not meet them. In the end our argument left me ridiculously irritated it was simply distressing to see the platform from which he obtained so wide and exquisite a view of the world upheld by such flimsy pillars and my nerves were not soothed by his proposal to walk with me to the Club. I could hardly refuse it, however, and he came along in excellent spirits, having effected the demolition of British social ideals, root and branch. His mongrel dog accompanied, keeping offensively near our heels. It was not even an honest pi, but a dog of tawdry pretensions with a banner-like tail dishonestly got from a spaniel. On one occasion I very nearly kicked the dog.

Chapter 2.VII.

‘The fact is,’ I said to Dora as we rode down to the gymkhana, ’his personality takes possession of one. I constantly go to that little hut of his with intentions, benevolent or otherwise, which I never carry out.’

‘You mean,’ she answered, ’that you completely forgot to reveal to him your hateful knowledge about Kauffer.’

’On the contrary, I didn’t forget it for a moment. But the conversation took a turn that made it quite impossible to mention.’

‘I can understand,’ Miss Harris replied softly, ’how that might be. And it doesn’t in the least matter,’ she went on triumphantly, ’because I’ve told him myself.’

My nerves must have been a trifle strung up at the time, for this struck me as a matter for offense. ‘You thought I would trample upon him,’ I exclaimed.

‘No, no really. I disliked his not knowing it was known rien de plus,’ she said lightly.

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh, not much. What should he say?’

‘He might have expressed a decent regret on poor Kauffer’s account,’ I growled. Dora did not reply, and a glance showed her frowning.

‘I believe he apologized!’ I cried, pushing, as it were, my advantage.

‘He explained.’

‘Oh!’

’Of course he hasn’t relished the position, and of course he didn’t realize it before he came. Shall we trot?’

I was compelled to negative the idea of trotting, since we were descending quite the steepest pitch of the road down to Annandale. We went on at a walk, and it occurred to me, as my contemplative gaze fell on my own pig-skins, that we were, even for Simla, an uncommonly well-turned-out pair. I had helped to pick Dora’s hack, and I allowed myself to reflect that he did my judgment credit. She sat him perfectly in her wrath she was plainly angry not a hair out of place. Why is it that a lady out of temper with her escort always walks away from him? Is her horse sympathetic? Ronald, at all events, was leading by a couple of yards, when suddenly he shied, bounding well across the road.

The mare, whose manners I can always answer for, simply stopped and looked haughtily about for explanations. A path dropped into the road from the hillside; something came scrambling and stumbling down.

‘Oh!’ cried Dora, as it emerged and was Armour on his much enduring white pony, ‘how you frightened us!’

‘Why don’t you stick to the road, man?’ I exclaimed. ’It isn’t usual to put ponies up and down these coolie tracks!’

He took no notice of this rather broad hint that I was annoyed, but fixed his eager, light, luminous eyes upon Dora.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and added, ‘I did not expect to see you today!’

‘Not till tomorrow,’ she returned. ’You remember that we are sketching tomorrow?’

He looked at her and smiled slightly; and then I remember noticing that his full, arched upper lip seldom quite met its counterpart over his teeth. This gave an unpremeditated casual effect to everything he found to say, and made him look a dreamer at his busiest. His smile was at the folly of her reminder.

‘I’ve just been looking for something that you would like,’ he said, ’but it isn’t much good hunting about alone. I see five times as much when we go together.’

He and his pony barred the way; he had an air of leisure and of felicity; one would think we had met at an afternoon party.

‘We are on our way,’ I explained, ’to the gymkhana. Miss Harris is in one of the events. You did enter for the needle-threading race, didn’t you, with Lord Arthur? I think we must get on.’

A slow, dull red mounted to Armour’s face and seemed to put out that curious light in his eyes.

‘Is it far?’ he asked, glancing down over the tree-tops. ’I’ve never been there.’

‘Why,’ cried Dora, suddenly, ‘you’ve been down!’

‘So you have,’ I confirmed her. ‘Your beast is damaged too.’

‘Oh, it was only a stumble,’ Armour replied; ‘I stuck on all right.’

‘Well,’ I said, ’you had better get off now, as you didn’t then, and look at your animal’s near fore. The swelling’s as big as a bun already.’

Again he made me no answer, but looked intently and questioningly at Dora.

‘Get off, Mr. Armour,’ she said, sharply, ’and lead your horse home. It is not fit to be ridden. Goodbye.’

I have no doubt he did it, but neither of us were inclined to look back to see. We pushed on under the deodars, and I was indulgent to a trot. At the end of it Dora remarked that Mr. Armour naturally could not be expected to know anything about riding, it was very plucky of him to get on a horse at all, among these precipices; and I of course agreed.

Lord Arthur was waiting when we arrived, on his chestnut polo pony, but Dora immediately scratched for the brilliant event in which they were paired. Ronald, she said, was simply cooked with the heat. Ronald had come every yard of the way on his toes and was fit for anything, but Lord Arthur did not insist. There were young ladies in Simla, I am glad to say, who appealed more vividly to his imagination than Dora Harris did, and one of them speedily replaced her, a fresh-coloured young Amazon who was staying at the Chief’s. She wandered about restlessly over the dry turf for a few minutes, and then went and sat down in a corner of the little wooden Grand Stand and sent me for a cup of tea.

‘Won’t you come to the tent?’ I asked a little ruefully, eyeing the distance and the possible collisions between, but she shook her head.

‘I simply couldn’t bear it,’ she said, and I went feeling somehow chastened myself by the cloud that was upon her spirit.

I found her on my return regarding the scene with a more than usually critical eye, and a more than usually turned down lip. Yet it was exactly the scene it always was, and always, probably, will be. I sat down beside her and regarded it also, but more charitably than usual. Perhaps it was rather trivial, just a lot of pretty dresses and excited young men in white riding-breeches doing foolish things on ponies in the shortest possible time, with one little crowd about the Club’s refreshment tent and another about the Staff’s, while the hills sat round in an indifferent circle; but it appealed to me with a kind of family feeling that afternoon, and inspired me with tolerance, even benevolence.

‘After all,’ I said, ’it’s mainly youth and high spirits two good things. And one knows them all.’

‘And who are they to know?’ complained Dora.

’Just decent young Englishmen and Englishwomen, out here on their country’s business,’ I replied cheerfully; ’with the marks of Oxford and Cambridge and Sandhurst and Woolwich on the men. Well-set-up youngsters, who know what to do and how to do it. Oh, I like the breed!’

‘I wonder,’ said she, in a tone of preposterous melancholy, ’if eventually I have to marry one of them.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. She looked at me with interest, as if I had contributed importantly to the matter in hand, and resumed tapping her boot with her riding-crop. We talked of indifferent things and had long lapses. At the close of one effort Dora threw herself back with a deep, tumultuous sigh. ’The poverty of this little wretched resort ties up one’s tongue!’ she cried. ’It is the bottom of the cup; here one gets the very dregs of Simla’s commonplace. Let us climb out of it.’

I thought for a moment that Ronald had been too much for her nerves coming down, and offered to change saddles, but she would not. We took it out of the horses all along the first upward slopes, and as we pulled in to breathe them she turned to me paler than ever.

‘I feel better now,’ she said.

For myself I had got rid of Armour for the afternoon. I think my irritation with him about his pony rose and delivered me from the too insistent thought of him. With Dora it was otherwise; she had dismissed him; but he had never left her for a moment the whole long afternoon.

She flung a searching look at me. With a reckless turn of her head, she said, ‘Why didn’t we take him with us?’

‘Did we want him?’ I asked.

‘I think I always want him.’

‘Ah!’ said I, and would have pondered this statement at some length in silence, but that she plainly did not wish me to do so.

’We might perfectly well have sent his pony home with one of our own servants he would have been delighted to walk down.’

‘He wasn’t in proper kit,’ I remonstrated.

’Oh, I wish you would speak to him about that. Make him get some tennis-flannels and riding-things.’

‘Do you propose to get him asked to places?’ I inquired.

She gave me a charmingly unguarded smile. ’I propose to induce you to do so. I have done what I could. He has dined with us several times, and met a few people who would, I thought, be kind to him.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said, ’I have had him at the Club too, with old Lamb and Colonel Hamilton. He made us all miserable with his shyness. Don’t ask me to do it again, please.’

‘I’ve sent him to call on certain people,’ Dora continued, ’and I’ve shown his pictures to everybody, and praised him and talked about him, but I can’t go on doing that indefinitely, can I?’

‘No,’ I said; ‘people might misunderstand.’

‘I don’t think they would MISunderstand,’ replied this astonishing girl, without flinching. She even sought my eyes to show me that hers were clear and full of purpose.

‘Good God!’ I said to myself, but the words that fell from me were, ’He is outside all that life.’

‘What is the use of living a life that he is outside of?’

‘Oh, if you put it that way,’ I said, and set my teeth, ’I will do what I can.’

She held out her hand with an affectionate gesture, and I was reluctantly compelled to press it.

The horses broke into a trot, and we talked no more of Armour, or of anything, until Ted Harris joined us on the Mall.

I have rendered this conversation with Dora in detail because subsequent events depend so closely upon it. Some may not agree that it was basis enough for the action I thought well to take; I can only say that it was all I was ever able to obtain. Dora was always particularly civil and grateful about my efforts, but she gave me only one more glimpse, and that enigmatic, of any special reason why they should be made. Perhaps this was more than compensated for by the abounding views I had of the situation as it lay with Ingersoll Armour, but of that, other persons, approaching the subject without prejudice, will doubtless judge better than I.

Chapter 2.VIII.

It was better not to inquire, so I never knew to what extent Kauffer worked upon the vanity of ancient houses the sinful dodge I suggested to him; but I heard before long that the line of Armour’s rejected efforts had been considerably diminished. Armour told me himself that Kauffer’s attitude had become almost conciliatory, that Kauffer had even hinted at the acceptance of, and adhesion to, certain principles which he would lay down as the basis of another year’s contract. In talking to me about it, Armour dwelt on these absurd stipulations only as the reason why any idea of renewal was impossible. It was his proud theory with me that to work for a photographer was just as dignified as to produce under any other conditions, provided you did not stoop to ideals which for lack of a better word might be called photographic. How he represented it to Dora, or permitted Dora to represent it to him, I am not so certain I imagine there may have been admissions and qualifications. Be that as it may, however, the fact was imperative that only three months of the hated bond remained, and that some working substitute for the hated bond would have to be discovered at their expiration. Simla, in short, must be made to buy Armour’s pictures, to appreciate them, if the days of miracle were not entirely past, but to buy them any way. On one or two occasions I had already made Simla buy things. I had cleared out young Ludlow’s stables for him in a week he had a string of ten when he played polo in a straw hat and had to go home with sunstroke; and I once auctioned off all the property costumes of the Amateur Dramatic Society at astonishing prices. Pictures presented difficulties which I have hinted at in an earlier chapter, but I did not despair. I began by hauling old Lamb, puffing and blowing like a grampus, up to Amy Villa, filling him up all the way with denunciations of Simla’s philistinism and suggestions that he alone redeemed it.

It is a thing I am ashamed to think of, and it deserved its reward.

Lamb criticized and patronized every blessed thing he saw, advised Armour to beware of mannerisms and to be a little less liberal with his colour, and heard absolutely unmoved of the horses Armour had got into the Salon. ‘I understand,’ he said, with a benevolent wink, ’that about four thousand pictures are hung every year at the Salon, and I don’t know how many thousand are rejected. Let Mr. Armour get a picture accepted by the Academy. Then he will have something to talk about.’

Neither did Sir William Lamb buy anything at all.

The experiment with Lady Pilkey was even more distressing. She gushed with fair appropriateness and great liberality, and finally fixed upon one scene to make her own. She winningly asked the price of it. She had never known anybody who did not understand prices. Poor Armour, the colour of a live coal, named one hundred rupees.

’One hundred rupees! Oh, my dear boy, I can never afford that! You must, you must really give it to me for seventy-five. It will break my heart if I can’t have it for seventy-five.’

‘Give me the pleasure,’ said Armour, ’of making you a present of it. You have been so kind about everything, and it’s so seldom one meets anybody who really cares. So let me send it to you.’ It was honest embarrassment; he did not mean to be impertinent.

And she did.

Blum, of the Geological Department Herr Blum in his own country came up and honestly rejoiced, and at end of an interminable pipe did purchase a little Breton bit that I hated to see go it was one of the things that gave the place its air; but Blum had a large family undergoing education at Heidelberg, and exclaimed, to Armour’s keenest anguish, that on this account he could not more do.

Altogether, during the months of August and September, persons resident in Simla drawing their income from Her Majesty, bought from the eccentric young artist from nowhere, living on Summer Hill, canvases and little wooden panels to the extent of two hundred and fifty rupees. Lady Pilkey had asked him to lunch she might well! and he had appeared at three garden-parties and a picnic. It was not enough.

It was not enough, and yet it was, in a manner, too much. Pitiful as it was in substance, it had an extraordinary personal effect. Armour suddenly began to turn himself out well his apparel was of smarter cut than mine, and his neckties in better taste. Little elegances appeared in the studio he offered you Scotch in a Venetian decanter and Melachrinos from a chased silver box. The farouche element faded out of his speech; his ideas remained as fresh and as simple as ever, but he gave them a form, bless me! that might have been used at the Club. He worked as hard as ever, but more variously; he tried his hand at several new things. He said he was feeling about for something that would really make his reputation.

In spite of all this his little measure of success made him more contemptuous than before of its scene and its elements. He declared that he had a poorer idea than ever of society now that he saw the pattern from the smart side. That his convictions on this head survived one of the best Simla tailors shows that they must always have been strong. I think he believed that he was doing all that he did do to make himself socially possible with the purpose of pleasing Dora Harris. I would not now venture to say how far Dora inspired and controlled him in this direction, and how far the impulse was his own. The measure of appreciation that began to seek his pictures, poor and small though it was, gave him, on the other hand, the most unalloyed delight. He talked of the advice of Sir William Lamb as if it were anything but that of a pompous old ass, and he made a feast with champagne for Blum that must have cost him quite as much as Blum paid for the Breton sketch. He confirmed my guess that he had never in his life until he came to Simla sold anything, so that even these small transactions were great things to him, and the earnest of a future upon which he covered his eyes not to gaze too raptly. He mentioned to me that Kauffer had been asked for his address who could it possibly be? and looked so damped by my humourous suggestion that it was a friend of Kauffer’s in some other line who wanted a bill paid, that I felt I had been guilty of brutality. And all the while the quality of his wonderful output never changed or abated. Pure and firm and prismatic it remained. I found him one day at the very end of October, with shining eyes and fingers blue with cold, putting the last of the afternoon light on the snows into one of the most dramatic hill pictures I ever knew him to do. He seemed intoxicated with his skill, and hummed the ‘Marseillaise,’ I remember, all the way to Amy Villa whither I accompanied him.

It was the last day of Kauffer’s contract; and besides, all the world, secretaries, establishments, hill captains, grass widows, shops, and sundries, was trundling down the hill. I came to ask my young friend what he meant to do.

‘Do?’ he cried. ’Why, eat, drink, and be merry! Kauffer has paid up, and his yoke is at the bottom of the sea. Come back and dine with me!’

The hour we spent together in his little inner room before dinner was served stands out among my strangest, loveliest memories of Armour. He was divinely caught up, and absurd as it is to write, he seemed to carry me with him. We drank each a glass of vermouth before dinner sitting over a scented fire of deodar branches, while outside the little window in front of me the lifted lines of the great empty Himalayan landscape faded and fell into a blur. I remembered the solitary scarlet dahlia that stood between us and the vast cold hills and held its colour when all was grey but that. The hill world waited for the winter; down a far valley we could hear a barking deer. Armour talked slowly, often hesitating for a word, of the joy there was in beauty and the divinity in the man who saw it with his own eyes. I have read notable pages that brought conviction pale beside that which stole about the room from what he said. The comment may seem fantastic, but it is a comment I caressed the dog. The servant clattered in with the plates, and at a shout outside Armour left me. He came in radiant with Signor Strobo, also radiant and carrying a violin, for hotel-keeping was not the Signor’s only accomplishment. I knew Strobo well; many a special dish had he ordered for my little parties; and we met at Armour’s fireside like the genial old acquaintances we were. Another voice without and presently I was nodding to Rosario and vaguely wondering why he looked uncomfortable.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Armour, as we sat down, ’I’ve got nothing but beer. If I had known you were all coming, no vintage that crawls up the hill would have been good enough for me.’ He threw the bond of his wonderful smile round us as we swallowed his stuff, and our hearts were lightened. ‘You fellows,’ he went on nodding at the other two, ’might happen any day, but my friend John Philips comes to me across aerial spaces; he is a star I’ve trapped you don’t do that often. Pilsener, John Philips, or Black?’ He was helping his only servant by pouring out the beer himself, and as I declared for Black he slapped me affectionately on the back and said my choice was good.

The last person who had slapped me on the back was Lord Dufferin, and I smiled softly and privately at the remembrance, and what a difference there was. I had resented Dufferin’s slap.

We had spiced hump and jungle-fowl and a Normandy cheese, everybody will understand that; but how shall I make plain with what exultation and simplicity we ate and drank, how the four candid selves of us sat around the table in a cloud of tobacco and cheered each other on, Armour always far in front turning handsprings as he went. Scraps come back to me, but the whole queer night has receded and taken its place among those dreams that insist at times upon having been realities. Rosario told us stories Kipling might have coveted of the under life of Port Said. Strobo talked with glorious gusto of his uncle the brigand. They were liberated men; we were all liberated men. ‘Let the direction go,’ cried Armour, ’and give the senses flight, taking the image as it comes, beating the air with happy pinions.’ He must have been talking of his work, but I can not now remember. And what made Strobo say, of life and art, ’I have waited for ten years and five thousand pounds now my old violin says, “Go, handle the ladle! Go, add up the account!"’ And did we really discuss the chances of ultimate salvation for souls in the Secretariat? I know I lifted my glass once and cried, ‘I, a slave, drink to freedom!’ and Rosario clinked with me. And Strobo played wailing Hungarian airs with sudden little shakes of hopeless laughter in them. I can not even now hear Naches without being filled with the recollection of how certain bare branches in me that night blossomed.

I walked alone down the hill and along the three miles to the Club, and at every step the tide sank in me till it cast me on my threshold at three in the morning, just the middle-aged shell of a Secretary to the Government of India that I was when I set forth. Next day when my head clerk brought me the files we avoided one another’s glances; and it was quite three weeks before I could bring myself to address him with the dignity and distance prescribed for his station as ‘Mr.’ Rosario.

Chapter 2.IX.

I went of course to Calcutta for the four winter months. Harris and I were together at the Club. It was the year, I remember, of the great shindy as to whether foreign consuls should continue to be made honourary members, in view of the sentiments some of them were freely reflecting from Europe upon the subject of a war in South Africa which was none of theirs. Certainly, feeling as they did, it would have been better if they had swaggered less about a club that stood for British Government; but I did not vote to withdraw the invitation. We can not, after all, take notice of every idle word that drops from Latin or Teutonic tongues; it isn’t our way; but it was a liverish cold weather on various accounts, and the public temper was short. I heard from Dora oftener, Harris declared, than he did. She was spending the winter with friends in Agra, and Armour, of course, was there too, living at Laurie’s Hotel, and painting, Dora assured me, with immense energy. It was just the place for Armour, a sumptuous dynasty wrecked in white marble and buried in desert sands for three hundred years; and I was glad to hear that he was making the most of it. It was quite by the way, but I had lent him the money to go there somebody had to lend it to him and when he asked me to decide whether he should take his passage for Marseilles or use it for this other purpose I could hardly hesitate, believing in him, as I did, to urge him to paint a little more of India before he went. I frankly despaired of his ever being able to pay his way in Simla without Kauffer, but that was no reason why he should not make a few more notes for further use at home, where I sometimes saw for him, when his desultory and experimental days were over and some definiteness and order had come into his work, a Bond Street exhibition.

I have not said all this time what I thought of Ingersoll Armour and Dora Harris together, because their connection seemed too vague and fantastic and impossible to hold for an instant before a steady gaze. I have no wish to justify myself when I write that I preferred to keep my eyes averted, enjoying perhaps just such a measure of vision as would enter at a corner of them. This may or may not have been immoral under the circumstances the event did not prove it so but for urgent private reasons I could not be the person to destroy the idyll, if indeed its destruction were possible, that flourished there in the corner of my eye. Besides, had not I myself planted and watered it? But it was foolish to expect other people, people who are forever on the lookout for trousseaux and wedding-bells, and who considered these two as mere man and maid, and had no sight of them as engaging young spirits in happy conjunction it was foolish to expect such people to show equal consideration. Christmas was barely over before the lady with whom Miss Harris was staying found it her duty to communicate to Edward Harris the fact that dear Dora’s charming friendship she was sure it was nothing more with the young artist Mrs. Poulton believed Mr. Harris would understand who was meant was exciting a good deal of comment in the station, and would dear Mr. Harris please write to Dora himself, as Mrs. Poulton was beginning to feel so responsible?

I saw the letter; Harris showed it to me when he sat down to breakfast with the long face of a man in a domestic difficulty, and we settled together whom we should ask to put his daughter up in Calcutta. It should be the wife of a man in his own department of course; it is to one’s Deputy Secretary that one looks for succour at times like this; and naturally one never looks in vain. Mrs. Symons would be delighted. I conjured up Dora’s rage on receipt of the telegram. She loathed the Symonses.

She came, but not at the jerk of a wire; she arrived a week later, with a face of great propriety and a smile of great unconcern. Harris, having got her effectually out of harm’s way, shirked further insistence, and I have reason to believe that Armour was never even mentioned between them.

Dora applied herself to the gaieties of the season with the zest of a debutante; she seemed really refreshed, revitalized. She had never looked better, happier. I met her again for the first time at one of the Thursday dances at Government House. In the glance she gave me I was glad to detect no suspicion of collusion. She plainly could not dream that Edward Harris in his nefarious exercise of parental authority had acted upon any hint from me. It was rather sweet.

Out in the veranda, away from the blare of the Viceroy’s band, she told me very delicately and with the most charming ellipses how Armour had been filling her life in Agra, how it had all been, for these two, a dream and a vision. There is a place below the bridge there, where the cattle come down from the waste pastures across the yellow sands to drink and stand in the low water of the Jumna, to stand and switch their tails while their herdsmen on the bank coax them back with ‘Ari!’ ‘Ari!’ ‘Ari!’ long and high, faint and musical; and the minarets of Akbar’s fort rise beyond against the throbbing sky and the sun fills it all. This place I shall never see more distinctly than I saw it that night on the veranda at Government House, Calcutta, with the conviction, like a margin for the picture, that its foreground had been very often occupied by the woman I profoundly worshiped and Ingersoll Armour. She told me that he had sent me a sketch of it, and I very much wished he hadn’t. One felt that the gift would carry a trifle of irony.

‘He has told me,’ she said once brusquely, ’how good you have been to him.’

‘Is he coming to Simla again?’ I asked.

’Oh yes! And please take it from me that this time he will conquer the place. He has undertaken to do it.’

‘At your request?’

’At my persuasion at my long entreaty. They must recognize him they must be taught. I have set my heart on it.’

‘Does he himself very much care?’ I asked remembering the night of the thirty-first of October.

’Yes, he does care. He despises it, of course, but in a way he cares. I’ve been trying to make him care more. A human being isn’t an orchid; he must draw something from the soil he grows in.’

‘If he were stable,’ I mused; ’if he had a fixed ambition somewhere in the firmament. But his purpose is a will-o’-the-wisp.’

‘I think he has an ambition,’ said Miss Harris, into the dark.

‘Ah! Then we must continue,’ I said ’continue to push from behind.’

Dora did not reply. She is a person of energy and determination, and might have been expected to offer to cooperate gladly. But she didn’t.

‘He is painting a large picture for next season’s exhibition,’ she informed me. ’I was not allowed to see it or to know anything about it, but he declares it will bring Simla down.’

‘I hope not,’ I said, piously.

‘Oh, I hope so. I have told him,’ Dora continued, slowly, ’that a great deal depends on it.’

‘Here is Mrs. Symons,’ I was able to return, ’and I am afraid she is looking for you.’

March came, and the city lay white under its own dust. The electric fans began to purr in the Club, and Lent brought the flagging season to a full stop. I had to go that year on tour through the famine district with the Member, and we escaped, gasping, from the Plains about the middle of April. Simla was crimson with rhododendron blossoms, and seemed a spur of Arcady. There had been the usual number of flittings from one house to another, and among them I heard with satisfaction that Armour no longer occupied Amy Villa. I would not for the world have blurred my recollections of that last evening I could not have gone there again.

‘He is staying with Sir William Lamb,’ said Dora, handing me my cup of tea. ’And I am quite jealous. Sir William, only Sir William, has been allowed to see the exhibition picture.’

‘What does that portend?’ I said, thoughtfully.

’I don’t know. Sir William was here yesterday simply swelling with his impression of it. He says it’s the finest thing that has been done in India. I told you he would conquer them.’

‘You did,’ and without thinking I added, ’I hope you won’t be sorry that you asked him to.’ It must have been an inspiration.

Armour, those weeks before the exhibition, seemed invisible. Dora reported him torn with the incapacity of the bazaar frame-maker to follow a design, and otherwise excessively occupied, and there was no lack of demands upon my own time. Besides, my ardour to be of assistance to the young man found a slight damper in the fact that he was staying with Sir William Lamb. What competence had I to be of use to the guest of Sir William Lamb?

‘I do not for a moment think he will be there,’ said Dora, on the day of the private view as we went along the Mall towards the Town Hall together. ’He will not run with an open mouth to his success. He will take it from us later.’

But he was there. We entered precisely at the dramatic moment of his presentation by Sir William Lamb to the Viceroy. He stood embarrassed and smiling in a little circle of compliments and congratulation. Behind him and a little to the left hung his picture, large and predominant, and in the corner of the frame was stuck the red ticket that signified the Viceroy’s gold medal. We saw that, I think, before we saw anything else. Then with as little haste as was decent, considering His Excellency’s proximity, we walked within range of the picture.

I am not particularly pleased, even now, to have the task of describing the thing. Its subject was an old Mahomedan priest with a green turban and a white beard exhorting a rabble of followers. I heard myself saying to Dora that it was very well painted indeed, very conscientiously painted, and that is certainly what struck me. The expression of the fire-eater’s face was extremely characteristic; his arm was flung out with a gesture that perfectly matched. The group of listeners was carefully composed and most ‘naturally’; that is the only word that would come to me.

I glanced almost timidly at Dora. She was regarding it with a deep vertical line between her handsome brows.

‘What on earth has he done with himself?’ she demanded, but before I could reply Armour was by our side.

‘Well?’ he said, looking at Dora.

‘It it’s very nice,’ she stammered, ‘but I miss you.’

‘She only means, you know,’ I rushed in, ’that you’ve put in everything that was never there before. Accuracy of detail, you know, and so forth. ‘Pon my word, there’s some drawing in that!’

‘No,’ said Dora, calmly, ’what I complain of is that he has left out everything that was there before. But he has won the gold medal, and I congratulate him.’

‘Well,’ I said, uneasily, ’don’t congratulate me. I didn’t do it. Positively I am not to blame.’

’His Excellency says that it reminds him of an incident in one of Mrs. Steel’s novels,’ said Armour, just turning his head to ascertain His Excellency’s whereabouts.

‘Dear me, so it does,’ I exclaimed, eagerly, ’one couldn’t name the chapter it’s the general feeling.’ I went on to discourse of the general feeling. Words came generously, questions with point, comments with intelligence. I swamped the situation and so carried it off.

‘The Viceroy has bought the thing,’ Armour went on, looking at Dora, ’and has commissioned me to paint another. The only restriction he makes is ’

‘That it shall be of the same size?’ asked Dora.

‘That it must deal with some phase of native life.’

Miss Harris walked to a point behind us, and stood there with her eyes fixed upon the picture. I glanced at her once; her gaze was steady, but perfectly blank. Then she joined us again, and struck into the stream of my volubility.

‘I am delighted,’ she said, pleasantly, to Armour. ’You have done exactly what I wanted you to do. You have won the Viceroy’s medal, and all the reputation there is to win in this place. Come and dine tonight, and we will rejoice together. But wasn’t it for you a little difficult?’

He looked at her as if she had offered him a cup, and then dashed it from his lips; but the occasion was not one, of course, for crying out.

‘Oh no,’ he said, putting on an excellent face. ’But it took a hideous time.’

Chapter 2.X.

Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I had arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most honest impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of departure, but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay, and that in order to effect his final shipment to other shores I should be compelled to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt.

The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.

Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than a week later, when I read in the ‘Pioneer’ the announcement of the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta. The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the substitution of something rather more up to date. It remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea. I remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.

I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an hour my brain revolved with little else. The billet was an excellent one, with very decent pay and charming quarters. It carried a pension, it was the completest sort of provision. There was a long vacation, with opportunities for original effort, and I had heard Fry call the work interesting. Fry was the kind of man to be interested in anything that gave him a living, but there was no reason why a more captious spirit, in view of the great advantages, should not accommodate itself to the routine that might present itself. The post was in the gift of the Government of Bengal, but that was no reason why the Government of Bengal should not be grateful in the difficulty of making a choice for a hint from us. The difficulty was really great. They would have to write home and advertise in the ’Athenaeum’ for some reason Indian Governments always advertise educational appointments in the ‘Athenaeum’; it is a habit which dates from the days of John Company and that would mean delay. And then the result might be a disappointment. Might Armour not also be a disappointment? That I really could not say. A new man is always a speculation, and departments, like individuals, have got to take their luck.

The Viceroy was so delighted everybody was so delighted with the medal picture that the merest breath blown among them would secure Armour’s nomination. Should I blow that breath? These happy thoughts must always occur to somebody. This one had occurred to me. Ten to one it would occur to nobody else, and last of all to Armour himself. The advertisement might already be on its way home to the ‘Athenaeum’.

It would make everything possible. It would throw a very different complexion over the idyll. It would turn that interlacing wreath of laurels and of poppies into the strongest bond in the world.

I would simply have nothing to do with it.

But there was no harm I asking Armour to dine with me; I sent the note off by messenger after breakfast and told the steward to put a magnum of Pommery to cool at seven precisely. I had some idea, I suppose, of drinking with Armour to his eternal discomfiture. Then I went to the office with a mind cleared of responsibility and comfortably pervaded with the glow of good intentions.

The moment I saw the young man, punctual and immediate and a little uncomfortable about the cuffs, I regretted not having asked one or two more fellows. It might have spoiled the occasion, but it would have saved the situation. That single glance of my accustomed eye alas! that it was so well accustomed revealed him anxious and screwed up, as nervous as a cat, but determined, revealed how well I knew the signs! that he had something confidential and important and highly personal to communicate, a matter in which I could, if I only would, be of the greatest possible assistance. From these appearances twenty years had taught me to fly to any burrow, but your dinner-table offers no retreat; you are hoist, so to speak, on your own carving-fork. There are men, of course, and even women, who have scruples about taking advantage of so intimate and unguarded an opportunity, but Armour, I rapidly decided, was not one of these. His sophistication was progressing, but it had not reached that point. He wanted something I flew instantly to the mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The application was impossible, but applications nearly always were impossible. Nobody knew that better than the Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department.

I squared my shoulders and we got through the soup. It was necessary to apologize for the fish. ‘I suppose one must remember,’ I said, ’that it has to climb six thousand feet,’ when suddenly he burst out.

‘Sir William Lamb tells me,’ he said, and stopped to swallow some wine, ’that there is something very good going in Calcutta and that I should ask you to help me to get it. May I?’

So the miserable idea the happy thought had occurred to somebody else.

‘Is there?’ I said, with interest and attention.

‘It’s something in the School of Art. A man named Fry has died.’

‘Ah!’ I said, ’a man named Fry. He, I think was Director of that institution.’ I looked at Armour in the considering, measuring way with which we suggest to candidates for posts that their fitness to fill them is not to be absolutely taken for granted. ‘Fry was a man of fifty-six,’ I said.

‘I am thirty.’ He certainly did not look it, but years often fall lightly upon a temperament.

‘It’s a vile climate.’

‘I know. Is it too vile, do you think,’ he said anxiously, ’to ask a lady to share?’

‘Lots of ladies do share it,’ I replied, with amazing calmness; ’but I must decline absolutely to enter into that.’

My frown was so forbidding that he couldn’t and didn’t dare to go on. He looked dashed and disappointed; he was really a fool of an applicant, quite ready to retire from the siege on the first intimation that the gates were not to be thrown open at his approach.

‘Do you think you would like teaching?’ I asked.

‘I can teach. Miss my only pupil here has made capital progress.’

’I am afraid you must not measure the Bengali art student by the standard of Miss Harris,’ I replied coldly. He was a fool. We talked of other things. I led him on to betray his ludicrous lack of knowledge of the world in various directions. At other times it had irritated me, that night it gave me purest pleasure. I agreed with him about everything.

As he selected his smoke to go home with I said, ’Send your application in to the Director of Public Instruction, Bengal Lamb will tell you how and I’ll see what I can do.’

They were only too thankful to get him. As a student it seemed he had been diligent both in London and Paris; he possessed diplomas or some such things bearing names which were bound to have weight with a Department of Public Instruction anywhere. I felt particularly thankful for this, for I was committed to him if he had not a rag to show.

The matter was settled in three weeks, during which Armour became more and more the fashion in Simla. He was given every opportunity of experiment in the society of which he was about to become a permanent item. He dined out four or five times a week, and learned exactly what to talk about. He surprised me one day with a piece of news of my own department, which was a liberty of a very serious kind, but I forgave him upon finding that it was not true. He rode Lamb’s weight-carriers, to cross which his short legs were barely adequate, and apart from this disadvantage he did not ride them badly. Only one thing marred the completeness of the transformation he didn’t dismiss the dog. The dog, fundamentally, was still and ever his companion. It was a suspicious circumstance if we had known; but we saw in it only a kind heart, and ignored it.

I saw little of Dora Harris at this time. Making no doubt that she was enjoying her triumph as she deserved, I took the liberty of supposing that she would hardly wish to share so intimate a source of satisfaction. I met them both several times at people’s houses certain things had apparently been taken for granted but I was only one of the little circle that wondered how soon it might venture upon open congratulations. The rest of us knew as much, it seemed, as Edward Harris did. Lady Pilkey asked him point-blank, and he said what his daughter found to like in the fellow the Lord only knew, and he was glad to say that at present he had no announcement to make. Lady Pilkey told me she thought it very romantic like marrying a newspaper correspondent but I pointed to a lifelong task, with a pension attached, of teaching fat young Bengalis to draw, and asked her if she saw extravagant romance in that.

They wrote up from Calcutta that they would like to have a look at Armour before making the final recommendation, and he left us, I remember, by the mail tonga of the third of June. He dropped into my office to say goodbye, but I was busy with the Member and could see nobody, so he left a card with ‘P.P.C.’ on it. I kept the card by accident, and I keep it still by design, for the sake of that inscription.

Strobo had given up his hotel in Simla to start one in Calcutta. It never occurred to me that Armour might go to Strobo’s; but it was, of course, the natural thing for him to do, especially as Strobo happened to be in Calcutta himself at the time. He went and stayed with Strobo, and every day he and the Signor, clad in bath-towels, lay in closed rooms under punkahs and had iced drinks in the long tumblers of the East, and smoked and talked away the burden of the hours.

Strobo was in Calcutta to meet a friend, an Austrian, who was shortly leaving India in the Messagerie Maritimes steamer Dupleix after agreeable wanderings disguised as a fakir in Tibet; and to this friend was attached, in what capacity I never thought well to inquire, a lady who was a Pole, and played and sang as well as Strobo fiddled. I believe they dined together every night, this precious quartet, and exchanged in various tongues their impressions of India under British control. ‘A houri in stays,’ the lady who was a Pole described it. I believe she herself was a houri without them. And at midnight, when the south wind was cool and strong from the river, Strobo and Armour would walk up Chowringhee Road and look at the red brick School of Art from the outside in the light of the street lamps, as a preliminary to our friend’s final acceptance of the task of superintending it from within.

We in Simla, of course, knew nothing of all this at the time; the details leaked out later when Strobo came up again. I began to feel some joyful anxiety when in a letter dated a week after Armour’s arrival in Calcutta, the Director of Public Instruction wrote to inquire whether he had yet left Simla; but the sweet blow did not fall with any precision or certainty until the newspaper arrived containing his name immediately under that of Herr Vanrig and Mme. Dansky in the list of passengers who had sailed per S.S. Dupleix on the fifteenth of June for Colombo. There it was, ‘I. Armour,’ as significant as ever to two persons intimately concerned with it, but no longer a wrapping of mystery, rather a radiating centre of light. Its power of illumination was such that it tried my eyes. I closed them to recall the outlines of the School of Art it had been built in a fit of economy and the headings of the last Director’s report, which I had kindly sent after Armour to Calcutta. Perhaps that had been the last straw.

The real meaning of the task of implanting Western ideals in the Eastern mind rose before me when I thought of Armour’s doing it how they would dwindle in the process, and how he must go on handling them and looking at them withered and shrunken for twenty-odd years. I understood there was enough left in me to understand Armour’s terrified escape. I was happy in the thought of him, sailing down the Bay. The possibilities of marriage, social position, assured income, support in old age, the strands in the bond that held him, the bond that holds us all, had been untwisting, untwisting, from the third of June to the fifteenth. The strand that stood for Dora doubtless was the last to break, but it did not detract from my beatitude to know that even this consideration, before the Dupleix and liberty, failed to hold.

I kept out of Miss Harris’s way so studiously for the next week or two that she was kind enough in the end to feel compelled to send for me. I went with misgivings I expected, as may be imagined, to be very deeply distressed. She met me with a storm of gay reproaches. I had never seen her in better health or spirits. My surprise must have been more evident than I supposed or intended, for before I went away she told me the whole story. By that time she had heard from Ceylon, a delicious letter with a pen-and-ink sketch at the top. I have it still; it infallibly brought the man back to me. But it was all over; she assured me with shining eyes that it was. The reason of her plainly boundless thankfulness that Armour had run away from the School of Art did not come to the surface until I was just going. Then I gathered that if he had taken the post she would have felt compelled, compelled by all she had done for him, to share its honours with him; and this, ever since at her bidding he had begun to gather such things up, was precisely what she had lost all inclination to do.

We were married the following October. We had a big, gorgeous official wedding, which we both enjoyed enormously. I took furlough, and we went home, but we found London very expensive and the country very slow; and with my K.C.S.I. came the offer of the Membership, so we went back to Simla for three perfectly unnecessary years, which we now look back upon with pleasure and regret. I fear that we, no more than Ingersoll Armour, were quite whole-hearted Bohemians; but I don’t know that we really ever pretended to be.