Pearl Buck - Come, My Beloved

“I’m not frightened of Father,” Livy said. She spoke with a soft English accent which she had learned from her schoolmates, and which she chose to speak.

She was a quiet girl, self-repressed, torn by rebellion against the deep caste feelings of English girls. She believed passionately in her mother’s literal acceptance of all Indians as human beings. Her father accepted too, but Livy was shrewd and intelligent and years ago she had observed that her father and mother were two different people. Her father believed as a Christian that Indians should be treated exactly as white people and he was careful to do this, but here was the difference, he was too careful, while her mother was entirely careless because she could not help treating everybody the same and Livy knew that of the two her mother was the more powerful. Her father could never belong wholly to Vhai, but her mother could and she did belong here as much as the banyan tree with its hundred roots.

She had counted upon her mother’s understanding now and it must not fail. For in her heart she was terrified at what had happened to her. She had fallen in love with Jatin. It was inexplicable, she did not know how it had happened, for she had known Jatin for years, at least three, and she had not thought of loving him. He came from Poona, and he had been graduated with highest honors from the medical college of MacArd University and so her father had invited him to come to Vhai and set up a rural clinic and a small hospital. She had heard her father praise him and declare that he was someone to depend upon, someone who could take over the whole of Vhai’s village improvement work and the widening effect it had in the whole province, and perhaps on India too, since independence. The new Indian government was talking of pilot centers of village education and public health and local government, such as her father had built up in Vhai. The village was beautiful now, and she never tired of hearing how different it had once been. But it had not occurred to her that she could fall in love here. She loved it with her whole heart, but still that had nothing to do with falling in love with Jatin.

Nevertheless, it had happened. When she came back from school only a month ago, she had fallen in love with Jatin at first sight, but of course it was not first sight, for she had seen him hundreds of times. But this time it had been different, only not different really, for when she got home she had to go and see everybody she knew and so she had run over to the clinic one bright morning to speak to the two Indian nurses, and to Jatin, too, of course, and she had stood in the doorway looking about and he was the only one in the little entrance hall where he was slipping into his white coat, and he looked at her as though he saw an angel. That was the way she felt. No one had ever looked at her like that before, and she had felt hot all over.

“Livy, how beautiful you have grown.” That was what he said. Then he had come straight to her and had taken her hands and looked down into her face, so tenderly and kindly that her heart crumbled.

“I’m just the same,” she had stammered.

He dropped her hands and stood looking at her and then the nurses came in and the moment was over. But of course they had seen each other almost at once and alone. She could not keep away from him, and she pretended that she wanted to help in the clinic and she did want to help, but because he was there. And after a few days of that, it was natural to stay late to wash up, because he always stayed late. And then it was only two weeks and a day until they were alone every day, or nearly every day, because he was very fearful about gossip and so sometimes he sent her away as soon as they kissed. Yesterday he had been troubled because he was sure that the sweeper saw them.

“I don’t care,” she had retorted. “Of course we have to be married, Jatin. That’s what people do when they are in love.”

He had been very troubled at this, his handsome eyes immediately sad. “I think it is not possible for us, my Livy.”

“It is, it is,” she had insisted. “My father and mother are not like other white people.”

“Ah,” he said in his quiet way, “they are not, indeed, but will they be willing for marriage between us? I think not.”

“Then I shan’t believe they are Christian,” she cried.

“Don’t speak so, Livy,” he had begged her in his gentlest voice. “You know they are Christian. But—”

“What?” she demanded.

“It is very difficult to reach the ultimate of one’s religion.”

She did not understand what he meant and so she had simply repeated herself. “If they are willing, Jatin, then will you let us be married?”

“My darling, we will hope.”

“I’ll make them,” she had declared confidently.

Now she sat with her mother over the mending basket, a task she detested, but which could not be done by a servant because Indian women did not know how to sew well enough. Saris needed no sewing, and the children wore no clothes when they were small, beyond a shawl wrapped about them if the night was cold. Still, this morning she had welcomed being alone with her mother, for her mother must know first and then talk with her father. There was a strategy to be followed.

She said, “Father ought to be willing for me to marry Jatin. He’s always saying that Jatin is wonderful.”

“So he is,” Ruth replied. “But that’s different.”

She sat gazing at her daughter, her pansy brown eyes dark with anxiety. The monsoons had come early this year, and though she was grateful as everybody was, still there was melancholy in the long ceaseless rains. They must expect another week of it before clouds parted to show the darkly purple summer sides. Meanwhile she sewed, and this was her relaxation. Livy had flung down the pillowcase she was mending and was walking around, her underlip pouting.

“Sit down, Livy, do, and don’t pout at me. Here, you can turn this hem. Sara grows faster than I can keep her dresses let out. I’ll finish the pillow slip.”

Livy sat down, again fitted her thimble to her middle finger. She was a tall girl and she moved with an indolent yet active grace she had learned from Indian girls who were her closest friends, not only the girls in the village, but the daughters, too, of the men whom her father had gathered around him. Long ago, as she knew, he had come here alone, determined to live as the villagers lived, and then her mother came as his wife, and the next year she herself was born in one of the two little rooms which were the first part of the house. The house was still earthen and its roof thatched, but ten rooms had been added and under the thatch was stretched heavy blue cotton homespun cloth for ceilings, so that lizards and insects and snakes could not drop out of the thatch to the floor and bite their bare feet, although as children they had felt no fear. They were used to searching their slippers and shoes in the mornings, instinctively they looked before they stepped, and Vhai was their home. Around the low and sprawling house her mother had planted grass and flowers, so that it no longer looked the house it had been when she came to it as a bride.

Vhai itself was changed. When her father first came here to live, as a young man, so bitterly against her grandfather’s will, as she knew, the village of Vhai was as barren as a desert, as all villages were. But her father and mother, while they shared the life of the people, had improved it in small ways, and then in big ones. Her father had even engaged an artesian well digger to come all the way from Bombay and put in more than twenty wells. Other villages had seen the benefit of the irrigated fields and they had dug wells, so that the whole region of Vhai had become beautiful and productive. It was a low region, over-sheltered by the distant Himalayas, and in the season of monsoons the land became a lake. But her father had taught the people how to dig ditches and lay village-made pottery tile, so that around Vhai, at least, floods no longer rotted the earth. Far beyond Vhai he did not go, declaring that people would hear of Vhai and come and see for themselves. This they had, but not as much as he felt they should, which made him gloomy at times. But Jatin had said, “How can half-starved people walk hundreds of miles to see something which they will never have the strength to do? First they must eat and grow strong enough to work for themselves. Alas, they have no food, so they must first be given food, and there you have the worst problem.”