Pearl Buck - Come, My Beloved

“Oh yes, and very lucky it is just before the monsoons, so difficult to travel in those pouring rains, but they’re very near.”

“I went up to Bombay to fetch her,” Mr. Fordham said, staring at Ruthie with eyes shining behind his small steel spectacles. “Ain’t she pretty?” he added with mischief.

“Papa!” Ruthie cried in a sweet, loud, young voice.

“Papa is just the same as he always was, dearie,” Mrs. Fordham said fondly.

“He’s awful,” Ruthie said to everybody. She opened her red lips and laughed, her teeth sparkling white. She was quite at ease, her rather plump young body relaxed and even indolent, and she wore a pink short-sleeved dress, for which Mrs. Fordham now felt it necessary to apologize.

“Ruthie, your sleeves are a mite short, aren’t they? For a missionary, dearie? We have to set an example.”

“Are they?” Ruthie said innocently.

They all gazed at Ruthie’s smooth and pretty arms, and Ted stared at her frankly. It was astonishing to remember her even as vaguely as he was able to do and then see her as she was now. That round-faced, round-eyed troublesome small girl who had tagged him mercilessly as soon as she could walk, and whom he had avoided as completely as he could, had become this fresh and natural flower, a little stupid perhaps, but of a gentle and sweet disposition, as anyone could see. His grandfather had said once, “Marry a good disposition, Ted. Your grandmother had a sweet nature and it is the most important gift for a woman to have. I’ve known men ruined by their wives’ dispositions.”

When the guests were seated Ted asked his father, “Shall I tell the Fordhams?”

“With one explanation,” David replied. “That is, I do not approve.”

“What is it now?” Mrs. Fordham was as usual lively with curiosity.

“I am going to live in a village,” Ted said.

“For good?” Mrs. Fordham exclaimed.

“I hope so,” Ted said.

“Mama means is it forever,” Ruthie said, laughing.

“I don’t know.”

“But how queer,” Mrs. Fordham exclaimed. “To leave your father, and this lovely house and everything — what for?”

“I daresay the end of the summer will see him back,” Mr. Fordham said.

“I don’t know,” Ted said again.

“A lot of young men think they are going to do something new,” Mr. Fordham said. “I remember when I was young, I had such ideas. But a village can be very uncomfortable.”

He broke off and they all looked at him. “I don’t know what the authorities will think of it just now,” he went on, answering their looks. “They may take it to be a bit on the revolutionary side, you know.”

“I shall explain matters to the Viceroy myself,” David said.

“In that case—” Mr. Fordham stopped.

“I think it would be fun,” Ruthie said. “I’ve always liked country Indians. They appreciate you and they’re not proud the way the educated ones are. There was an Indian girl in school at home, she was the daughter of a native Prince, one of the very smallest ones, but she wouldn’t speak to me. She looked down on missionaries.”

Nobody answered this until Mrs. Fordham said piously, “I hope you forgave her, dear.”

“I let her go her way and I went mine,” Ruthie said.

“You should have prayed for her,” Mrs. Fordham said.

“I didn’t bother,” Ruthie replied.

Ted laughed. He suddenly liked Ruthie, without admiring her in the least. She had grown up lazy, he supposed, as so many missionary children did, waited on by ayahs as he himself had been. The thought occurred to him that he might even now be thinking of a village as an escape, a place of no demands, and, as Ruthie said, of gratitude and appreciation. Gratitude was a habit-forming drug, he had seen white men who needed more and more of it to keep them self-satisfied until they became ridiculous and pompous with false righteousness.

“We must go home,” Mr. Fordham said. “The gentlemen want to finish their dinner.”

“Hark,” Ruthie exclaimed. Her eyes widened, listening, and they all listened. Far off they heard the howl of rising wind, it came nearer with a rush, and then they heard the splashes of rain from the purpling sky. The monsoon had come.

“Run for it,” Mr. Fordham shouted. They ran out of the open door, and Ted stood watching them. Mr. Fordham sprinted ahead, Mrs. Fordham lifted her skirt over her head, letting her white petticoat flutter in the wind, but Ruthie did not hurry at all. She walked slowly, her face lifted to catch the full force of the rain, and she spread her plump little hands palms upward. The wind snatched the curly strands of her hair and pulled at the knot at her neck until it fell upon her shoulders and the rain whipped her cheeks. She was not afraid, and that, too, Ted liked.

“I admire Ted,” Agnes Linlay wrote in her upright large handwriting, after a suitable number of weeks had passed. “At the same time I quite see how impossible it is to accomplish anything by what he is doing. Believe me, Dr. MacArd, I feel honored by your confidence in me, but Ted and I did not come to an understanding, I might almost say it was quite the contrary, and that we parted upon disagreement. I have been brought up as an English girl is brought up in India, and I suppose I cannot help my own feelings of proper responsibility. I fear we can only wait for Ted to come to his senses, and meanwhile there is no obligation of any sort between us. If he writes to me, as he says he wishes to do, I shall express my own point of view.”

A dignified young woman, David thought, exactly what he would like to have had for a daughter-in-law, and exactly what Ted needed for a wife. He wrote a careful reply to her, in his own rather fine tight handwriting, expressing the hope, as he put it, that some day they might meet and talk about Ted, and meanwhile he would appreciate anything she could do to keep her point of view before his son. For his own part, he deeply valued what the British Empire was doing to bring the people of India into a position where they could be independent and take their place in the family of modern nations and he deplored the ingratitude of young intellectuals and their leaders, among whom, he was sorry to say, were Indians whom he considered his old friends.

He did not tell her that he was feeling lonely since his son had left. For Ted was gone. He had stayed only a day or two after the monsoon broke and in pouring rains he had set out to the northeast for the village of Vhai. There, his first letter had reported, he found the whole countryside a lake, reflecting the clouds when the sun burst through for an hour or two at a time. But Vhai itself was on a low hill, a small flattened mountain, and the earthen streets were not too muddy. He had found a little house and had set up his housekeeping, although so far he had not been able to do anything except let the villagers stare at him, which they were able to do because they did not need to work while the rains fell. He was glad he had learned their language, for he exchanged jokes with them, and nothing seemed to them more of a joke, though they liked it, than that he declared that he had come to learn of them. The whole village was only a cluster of earth-walled houses and in this handful of minute homes every sort of small industry went on, spinning and weaving, pottery making and carpentry and grinding meal. The people were on the verge of starvation, of course, but cheerful now that the rains were generous. There was even a little temple to Ganesh in the village, the little fat elephant-headed god of whom the people were fond because he was innocent and tried to do his best.

Ted was happy. He was free, the ecstatic gaiety held, and he lived from day to day. The rains would cease in due time, and the lake grow dry and become fields of rice and mustard and beans. He would not visit Poona soon, he wrote his father. He was learning very much, and the people were no longer afraid of him.