/ P ANNA LOMBARD The most Widely-read Novel of the Day ANNA LOMBARD Some iprcse pinion* Review of Reviews. 'A very remarkable story ; a novel to set people thinking. It it a bold, brilliant, defiant presentation of a phase of the relations of the sexes which I do not remember ever having seen treated with the same freedom, delicacy and audacity. It is difficult to praise the book too highly.' Literature. 'Anna Lombard loves two men at once, and is so entirely non-moral as to think nothing of living with both. The daughter of a general and the heiress of a thousand conventions, she is sometimes mysteriously Greek, sometimes Oriental, and sometimes Machiavelian. She is generally wicked, and always interesting. Her lovers are endowed with an air of romance, and set in scenes of gorgeous Eastern colouring, so that one forgets something of right and wrong as they are understood in the Occident. The reader will not, perhaps, be the better for reading this strange and contradictory book, but he will find in it many a fine passage, many a brilliant picture of life and emotion.' Daily News. 'India forms a vivid background to the story. The writer realises the special quality of the atmosphere. She hat managed to convey to her pages " the perfumed pagaent, the magic, and the mystery of the East." The heroine forms a striking char- acter in the portrait galleries of fiction.' Vanity Fair. 'Anna Lombard remains throughout everything a pure woman good, sincere, clean, fit to be admired and beloved with the faith and passion given to her by Gerald Ethridge, a manly, interesting, very sane, and real person.' Standard. ' A very remarkable and powerful book.' Academy. 'The writer uses India, as recently she used the Klondyke, as the immense theatre of an immense passion.' JOHN LONG, Publisher, London Anna Lombard BY VICTORIA CROSS AUTHOR OF 'THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T,' 'A GIRL OF THE KLONDIKE,' 'SIX CHAPTERS OF A MAN'S LIFE,' ' PAULA,' 'TO-MORROW,' 'EVELYN HASTINGS,' 'THEODORA,' ETC. THIRTY-SEVENTH EDITION London John Long 13 & 14 Norris Street, Haymarket 1905 [All rights reserved] Stack Annex TO MY C ' Verona's summer hath not such a flower.' PREFACE I HAVE been challenged by certain papers to state my intentions in writing Anna Lombard. This is my reply: I endeavoured to draw in Gerald Ethridge a character whose actions should be in accordance with the principles laid down by Christ, one that would display, not in words but in his actual life, that gentleness, humility, patience, charity and self-sacrifice that our Redeemer Him- self enjoined. It is a sad commentary on our religion of to-day that a presumably Christian journal, The Daily Chronicle, should hold this Christ-like conduct up to ridicule and contempt, stigmatise it as ( horrid absurdity,' and declare that for such qualities a man ought to be turned out of the service. I challenge The Daily Chronicle and all who follow its opinion to find one act which does not reflect Christ's own teaching, ill Preface committed by Gerald Ethridge. He forgives the sinner, raises the fallen, comforts the weak. He works and suffers to reclaim the Pagan and almost- lost soul of Anna Lombard. Fearlessly, and with the Gospel of Christ in my hand, I offer this example of His teaching to the great Christian public for its verdict, confident that I shall be justified by it. VICTORIA CROSS IV ANNA LOMBARD CHAPTER I A FLOOD of glaring yellow light fell from the chandeliers overhead, a sheen of light seemed to be flung back from the polished, slippery, glittering floor which mirrored a thousand lights above and a hundred lesser lights fixed to the walls, dazzling in white and gold. There was so much light, so much glitter, that it seemed to hurt the eyes coming directly from the soft dark night outside. It seemed to wound mine as I stepped through the long window open to the marble piazza where I had been sitting, silent, by a pillar, alone with the gorgeous Eastern night. The music, too, was stirring, and martial rather than soothing. It was the splendid band of the Irish Grenadiers, and just then they were playing for all they were worth. It seemed as if someone had bet them they could not make a noise, and they had bet that they could. From end to end the room was one blaze of colour, the scarlet and gold of countless uniforms stand- ing out prominently in the general scheme. There were comparatively few present in plain civilian dress and no undress uniforms were to be found, for it was 5 Anna Lombard an occasion such as might not be known again for two or three years, or more, in that part of the country. It was the ball given by the Commissioner of Kalatu in honour of the Viceroy on the latter passing through that station. I stood leaning against the pillar of the window by which I entered the room, watching idly the brilliant, swaying crowd before me, and wondering how much real joy, pleasure and gaiety there was in the room in proportion to the affected amount of all these. For myself, I felt singularly mentally weary and disheartened, yet I was generally considered a much- to-be - envied person, one of Fortune's particular favourites. I was young not yet thirty, though sometimes, possibly the result of much severe study, my brain and inner being seemed singularly old I had, some five years before, come out head of the list in the Indian Civil Service Examination, and had been granted the coveted position of Assistant Commissioner ; my pay was good, my position excellent, my work light and indeed far beneath the capacity my severe education had endowed me with; girls smiled upon me, mammas were not unkind, and ' lucky fellow that Ethridge' was a comment frequently on the lips of my companions. And yet, in spite of all this, how empty life seemed to that lucky Ethridge himself! As a boy, always given rather to dreams, speculations and ideas, how fair that same life looked to me ; in my cold, hard, chaste youth of study and work, how much there had seemed to be done in it, to be gained, to be enjoyed ! When my work is done ! 6 Anna Lombard I had so often thought, and now, behold ! my worlc was done, and I was free to do, to have, to gain and to enjoy, and suddenly there seemed nothing particular in it all. No such wonderful joy to be enjoyed, and no such marvellous thing to be gained. This arena, that had looked so fair and dazzling while I was still shut behind its gates, seemed rather circumscribed and empty now that I was actually inside, and I, as it were, seemed merely walking aimlessly about in it and kicking up the sand which was to have been the witness of such great achievements, according to my former vague ideas. After a minute or two I was conscious of someone standing close beside me, and I turned slightly, to see 3 young lieutenant in the uniform of the Grenadiers. 'Beastly thin that girl is; just look at her shoulder bones,' was his first remark addressed to me without any preface. My eyes idly followed his, and I noticed the girl passing us, rather a pretty, graceful dibutante, thin with the thinness of extreme youth and immaturity. Her shoulders rose white and smooth from her white gown of conventional one might say, Viceregal lowness (for at balls given to the Viceroy, gowns are cut lower than usual in honour of the occasion) but certainly beneath their delicate surface two little bones stood out rather too prominently. I looked at them absently, thinking it was the quality of the heart that beat beneath them that would exercise and influence me most in my judg- ment of their owner. c She is very young,' I returned. ' In a year or two she will probably be fat enough to please you.' y Anna Lombard 1 Thanks ; then she'll be passte, don't you know. Con- found it, these English girls are all thin when they're young, and when they're fat they're old. There's no getting one just made to suit a fellow.' ' And what about the girls ; are the men made to suit them?' I inquired, turning to look at him more fully. He had a square, white face, with pale blue expression- less eyes, a weak receding chin and forehead, a weaker mouth, and a slight lisp in his voice. In his hand he swung an eyeglass, which he lifted only occasionally when an unusually striking girl went by. He laughed good humouredly a fatuous, conceited laugh. ' Aw, ah I don't really know, upon my word ; but they seem devilish glad to get us, don't you know, when they have a chance.' I did not answer. The conversation did not interest me; but where was I to find any better? I glanced along the line of vacuous faces by the wall to right and left of me. What was the use of moving ? I should only hear something like this from the next man beside whom I should find myself. There was a few moments' silence. Then my com- panion glanced suddenly at his card and affected to start with sudden recollection and contrition. ' By Jove ! I had forgotten that poor Miss Scemler ; she is waiting for me all this time ; promised her this dance, you know damned scrawny girl too, but then she'd be so awfully disappointed, you know. See you again,' and he mingled with the line of idlers passing round the room in his search for the doubtless tremulously-eager and expectant Miss Scemler. Hardly 8 Anna Lombard a moment or two later another acquaintance came up to me. This time it was a handsome young fellow with a dark eager face and high colour. ' Well, Gerald, old man, what makes you look so awfully blue ? Come and have a pick-me-up, a bitter or something is just what you want. Come along to the bar. You ought to be there too ; we're talking the race, you know ; there's a fellow there has got all the tips. Now's the time to lay your money. He says Lemon won't be in it. Lemon was the high up favourite. I don't understand it; they say now Parchment is but you'd better hear it from him. Come along.' I stood still by the pillar and looked at his animated face with a slight smile. Thanks. I don't think I'll come. I do feel rather blue to-night.' ' Why,' he returned rather blankly, ' I think it an awfully jolly ball. I have been having a first-rate time.' 'What have you been doing?' I asked with a faint stirring of interest. Perhaps he could show me how to have a good time too. ' I have been in the bar all the time. The champagne is going just like water. All free, you know, and good stuff too. He's a jolly old Com. He doesn't do things by halves.' The interest died out again. 1 Don't let me keep you. You may lose some of the valuable tips,' I said ; ' I'll stay here. I don't care for the races or the champagne either.' 'You are such a queer fellow,' he replied, eyeing me 9 Anna Lombard askance ; ' what do you care for, I wonder ? But you'd better come ; ' with that he passed on and I was again left alone. A short, stout elderly gentleman scudded up to me next. He was a great talker, and it was a treat for him to find some unoccupied person apparently able to listen to him. ' Good evening, my boy ; I see you're enjoying yourself with the rest of the young folks.' ' Good evening, Colonel,' I replied. 'I've discovered all about that Brentwood affair to- night,' he went on, coming nearer to me and speaking confidentially. ' It's a scandal, a shame ; it's clear that Brentwood accepted a contract for the lumma road and never meant to build it, never meant to, I say ; the service is rotten, rotten through and through, and if the Government don't take some steps about it well, I don't claim any particular brilliance of intellect, I don't suppose my brain is more acute or my vision clearer than the ordinary man's,' here he seemed to pause as if he would like some interruption, and so I gratified him with a murmured, 1 1 don't know about that, Colonel.' When he proceeded happily. ' And, therefore, what I can see, others can see ; if I know these things are going on, why, others know it. Now, I am proud of my country, I am proud of ' I am afraid I lost what else furnished him with a cause of pride, for my attention wandered. Somehow I did not seem to care if the service were rotten or if Brentwood had contracted to build fifty roads and then backed out of it. My former interlocutor was right ; I 10 Anna Lombard was queer, I suppose, since none of these vital matters interested me. I really had an engagement for the coming dance, so when I had listened respectfully to the whole speech, and the Colonel stopped to take breath for a moment, I said, ' You must excuse me, Colonel ; I have to look for my partner for this waltz.' ' Very good, my boy, very good,' he replied genially, having at last, as he hoped, impressed someone with a sense of Brentwood's enormities. ' I don't grudge you the dance or the girl. I like to see boys enjoy them- selves.' With which comforting assurance in my ears I started listlessly to find my partner. That young lady I soon discovered sitting on a fauteuil. ' I thought you had forgotten our dance ! ' she ex- claimed the moment I came up, and she looked at me with an arch expression that told me very clearly she thought such a thing would be an utter impossibility. She was slight and round, very well dressed, with a pretty face, frivolous expression and a mouth that was always laughing. I assured her that the dance was what I had been waiting for all the evening, and we started to- gether. She talked the whole time. She told me how the last man she danced with had held her so tightly the flowers at her breast had all been crushed and broken ; wasn't he a wretch ? not but what she liked to be held tightly, she exclaimed, as, involuntarily, my arm round her loosened, but not, of course, so as to crush her ii Anna Lombard flowers ; but they were all dead now and it didn't matter ; a hateful girl too had trodden on her train ; they (trains) were a bore of course in dancing, but didn't I think they made you look more graceful yes, well, she thought so too, and was glad I thought so, and, fancy, that ugly little Miss Johnson was going to marry Captain Grant of the nth, and wasn't it wonderful what he could see in her, and didn't I think she was ugly ? not know her by sight ? why, of course I must know her. She sat three pews behind me and in the left aisle at church, and when the congregation turned to the east to say the Creed I could certainly see her. While this was being poured into my ear, 1 had to keep my eyes well on the alert to guard against possible collision, as the room was very crowded, and just as we passed a corner my gaze fell suddenly on a figure in white silk sitting alone on a fauteuil. I don't know why, but something in the figure caught and held my eyes ; perhaps it was only, in the first place, that it was alone and therefore possibly disassociated with all this crowd, with which I myself felt so out of tune. ' Do you know the name of that girl in white we have just passed ? ' I asked my companion, breaking in, I am afraid, rather abruptly upon more confidences. ' That ? ' she replied, looking back over my shoulder. 1 Why, you must know her, surely ; she's the General's daughter, Anna Lombard.' ' Anna Lombard,' I repeated. 'It's a curious name ; it sounds somehow to me medieval, a middle-age sort of name.' 'Oh, Anna's not middle-aged,' returned inconse- 12 Anna Lombard quently my rather flighty companion. 'She was twenty-one yesterday and just out from England where she was kept at study and things regular lessons, you know. Don't you think it a shame to keep a girl studying so long? It's made her so serious; she says it made her serious, made her feel and think a lot, and see things in life, I mean more than most people I don't know how to express it exactly but you feel she's different from other people. Of course, sometimes she laughs and is just as gay as the rest of us, but she can be serious, oh, just too dreadful for anything, and she says there's a great deal in life, and you can get a great deal out of it if you choose, and oh ! funny things like that. I don't see much in life, not much that's nice, I mean, except dancing and ices. Could you get me an ice now, do you think, Mr Ethridge? I really should like one Take me out on the terrace and then bring me one, will you?' I took her out on the terrace, found her a chair and then dutifully brought her the ice and sat beside her. The glory of the night had not changed since I sat there alone, only, as it were, deepened and grown richer; the purple sky above was throbbing, beating, palpitating with the light of stars and planets, and a low, large mellow moon was sinking towards the horizon, reddening as it sank. What a night for the registration or the consummation of vows ! One of those true voluptuous tropic nights when the soft, hot air itself seems to breathe of .the passions. It was a night on which, as the Frenchman said, 13 Anna Lombard all women wish to be loved. I glanced at the girl beside me and wondered if she were moved by it, but I thought not ; she sat sipping her ice cheerfully and diligently, for ice, like virtue, does not last long in the tropics, and watching sharply the groups and couples that passed across the lawn and through the trees before us. ' I'm engaged for the next dance, so you'd better take me back to the room,' she said, as she set down the empty glass at last, with a sigh, on the stone. 'And I'll introduce you to Anna, if you like,' she added good-naturedly, 'and you'll see what you think of her. Some men seem to like her awfully and others can't get on with her a bit.' She rose and shook out the folds of her immaculate silk and muslin, and we went back to the ballroom. The figure in white was still seated, calm and motionless, on the fauteuil, and remained so as we approached. I looked at her hard and critically as we came up. She had a tall, strong, beautiful figure and a face that was like an English summer day. Her hair was fair and clustered thickly round her head in its own curls and waves. It was parted in the middle, and was so thick that it rose on each side of the parting as hair is made to do in sculptured heads, and it had the same waving creases in it, a few short, tiny locks came down on the soft, white forehead, and at the back it fell in a doubled-up plait on her neck, her eyes were blue like pieces cut from a summer's sky and her skin like the wild rose in the English hedgerow first opening after a summer shower. 14 Anna Lombard Such was Anna Lombard as I first saw her at the age of twenty-one. ' Anna,' said the girl with me, as we stopped beside the fauteuil, ' Mr Ethridge wants me to introduce him to you. Mr Ethridge Miss Lombard.' The girl addressed looked up and smiled, and 1 was surprised at the effect of the smile on the face; the red lips parted and showed, slightly, perfect white teeth between, and the eyes flashed and seemed to deepen in colour and light up with curious fire. 'I am delighted to make your acquaintance,' she said in the conventional manner and moved just very slightly to one side of the fauteuil, which was large, to indicate I might sit down by her, which I did. ' Now you can amuse yourselves,' said Anna's friend, lightly, as her partner made his way up to her to claim her. 'Good-bye,' and she whirled away at the first bar of the new waltz. It is difficult to say what we talked of or what it was lent such an irresistible charm to that conversa- tion, but looking back I think it was partly the great interest and animation with which the girl both talked and listened. Her face was brilliant, with her deep blue eyes darkening and flashing and her milky, stainless teeth sparkling through her crimson lips as she laughed. Everything was new and fresh to her in this wonderful India of ours, and life itself was just dawning in all its beauty before her mental vision. Her child- hood had been passed in the hardest study and closest intellectual training in a dull, fog-laden old town on the Cornish coast. There, she told me, she had walked 15 Anna Lombard on the sea-beaten sands repeating her lessons in the Classics to the wild, wet winds that were busy blowing the colour into her exquisite skin, while her restless, impatient mind had been wandering far off in the sunny lands and speculating on those strange passions and emotions she was learning of through the lettered pages. And now, suddenly transported to the vivid glowing East, taken from that quiet solitude of study and placed in a whirlpool of human life and gaiety in these gorgeous surroundings of nature for nowhere on earth is there a more dazzling or brilliant arena for life to play itself out than in India she was like an amazed, delighted and clever child watching the curtain rise for the first time on the splendour of a pantomime. We sat and talked through two entire dances, then as the strains of a particularly seductive waltz reached us I asked her if she would not give it to me, and she assented with, I fancied, the slightest possible flush. She confessed to me later that though she had been carefully taught and made to practise dancing at home, this was her first 'real ball.' My heart beat as I put my arm round her and guided her amongst the dancers. I cannot say or divine exactly the attractiveness of her manner, but there was a sort of appealing timidity in it that, united with such an obviously clever and gifted mind and such a sweet face and form, had in it a keen flattery. I held her close to me, and with a perfect unity of step and motion we glided round the room in the great circle of other dancers. The warmth of the slight 16 Anna Lombard white arm on my shoulder and the white breast against my own, the sight of the fair, animated face and a swift glance now and then from those passionate blue eyes, seemed working on me like a subtle charm. I felt happy, contented ; India was no longer a gorgeous but barren desert, life was not full of disappointment after all, and this ball was the greatest, the best, the most interesting function I had ever attended. How sweet she was, this girl, what a soft, gentle voice ; what smiling, caressing eyes and what a low, slim waist that my arm encircled and that seemed to yield so readily as if seeking and desiring protection ! When the music ceased we found ourselves in the outer ring of dancers and just beside the open windows. By a mutual impulse we both passed outside on to the low stone terrace into the soft heat which yet held the freshness of grass and flowers in it of the outer air. It was the same night, the same terrace as it had been when I was there an hour ago, only my companion was changed, and what a change that makes ! Anna sank even into the same chair the other girl had had, and that was still there, but how different everything seemed now from when that hard, frivolous, worldly little doll occupied it. My heart beat more quickly than usual, and where an hour ago I had been silent and quite indifferent how I might appear to my companion, now my whole energy woke up in an effort and desire to please. Perhaps I succeeded, for smiles, blushes and laughter swept by turns over the radiant, expressive face raised to mine in the subdued light of the verandah. She did not talk very much, seeming rather B 17 Anna Lombard to wish to listen, but everything she did say was full of brightness and wit and a sympathetic intelligence that only comes from a really clever brain. With all her knowledge, for I drew by my persistence from her reluctant lips the confession of one study after another with which she was familiar, she seemed full of diffi- dence of herself, and fixed her large eyes upon me, as she asked me questions, with the deference of an inquiring child. For the first time in my life I felt repaid for my hard youth given over to learning, yes, more repaid for those years of toil than when my name appeared heading the examination list. For the first time in my life the knowledge I had acquired seemed inexpressibly dear and valuable to me. She was listening, she was interested, she wanted to know and to hear things that I could tell her things that Lieutenant Jones and Captain Scrubbins could not have told her. She liked me, I was sure of it, she was thinking that I knew something, and she cared for these things that I cared for far more than the last details of the pigeon-shooting match, the latest score of the Gymkhana, the newest development of the growing scandal round the major's wife, in all of which Jones and Scrubbins could easily have surpassed me. These thoughts rushed through my brain as I leaned over her, smiling and exerting myself to the utmost to please her, and the time flew by and we neither of us heeded what was being played or what dances danced in the room behind us till suddenly 4 Home, Sweet Home,' in the guise of a waltz, reached us and we realised suddenly the evening, our evening, 18 Anna Lombard was over. We both looked at each other with a quick glance and both knew that we wanted this dance with each other. How little stiffness, how little formality there seems to be from the first when two people meet who are going to feel a great passion one for the other, even before the passion can be said to be lighted, and certainly is not recognised. Nature's own hand seems to slip loose some band- age which is usually before our eyes, and we act with a certain tenderness, earnestness and simplicity that is foreign to our usual life and other relations. As we heard the first sounds of the waltz Anna looked at me and then slipped that soft, slender white arm through mine with a little happy smile, and I, with a sudden sense of happiness and delight in life that I had never known, pressed it close, and we joined the moving circle within. As we danced, and when at the corners of the room her weight was thrown on me slightly and I caught a breath from her lips that reminded me of the scent of the tea rose, and the same faint tea rose scent came from the laces on her breast, this feeling of happiness merged into an ecstasy. It seemed I had never known life before, and, in fact, I had never known love, not even any of its base counterfeits. The soft waist yielded the more I pressed it, and filled me with an infinitely tender impulse towards her, the gentle arm against my shoulder seemed of delicious weight. I met her soft, half-wondering, innocent eyes with their pleased smile and knew I was really alive at last. Anna Lombard The waltz ended somewhat abruptly. It was three in the morning and the musicians were tired. ' Would you go and try and find my father ? ' Anna asked me. 'He does not dance, and I am afraid he may be getting tired, waiting for me somewhere.' Just as she spoke General Lombard came toward us. We knew each other well, though his daughter, only having just come out, I had not seen before to-night. He greeted me pleasantly, and when I asked if I might call on the following day he assented with a smile. Then in a half-dreamlike state of feeling I escorted them to their carriage, and a murmured 1 Good-night ' and a glance from two beautiful, pas- sionate eyes, out of the darkness of the carriage, closed the evening for me. That night I had a curious and horrible dream horrible because it was filled with that nameless, cause- less, baseless horror and fear that only visits us in dreams. Whatever may happen in our waking life, we never feel that same peculiar dread which seems re- served for our brains to know only in sleep. I felt I was standing in a garden, in the centre of which a large and beautiful white rosebud was unfolding itself before me as I stood and watched it with an increasing sense of delight. It was the only flower in the garden, and dominated the whole scene. At last the final and most lightly-closed petals were opening and spreading, and in an ecstasy I leaned forward to see the heart disclosed, when, suddenly, instead of a heart, a great rent was revealed, a jagged, cruel chasm in the beauty of the flower, and I fell back shuddering, a prey to that 30 Anna Lombard ghastly, groundless, reasonless Fear of dreams. I awoke abruptly, feeling cold in the sultry tropic night, and turned and tossed uneasily, and fell asleep to dream the same dream again. When I awoke the second time I had a confused feeling, such as troubles the half- wakened brain in the darkness of night, that my dream was connected with Anna. Then I damned my own foolishness, and went to sleep for the third time and then into blank silence and rest. The next morning, waking late, with the brilliant sunlight rushing like water through all the cracks of the closed jilmils, I felt in excellent spirits, dressed quickly and descended to the dining-room of my bungalow in the best of humours. My plans for that day and many days to follow were distinctly laid. I would go to Anna, be with her, talk with her, ride with her, and then and then and the rest seemed one bright flame of light and happiness. How strange it was, I thought, how life seemed to have quickened in me, how all the senses seemed tuning themselves to the enjoyment of existence, how the compound seemed to smile before me, the scent from the thousand opening flowers to delight me ; the blood seemed spinning gaily along through my veins, I wanted to laugh, hum or whistle, out of mere light-heartedness, and what was it all ? Surely some electricity had passed out of that soft, fair form I had held in my arms last night, and kindled a fresh life in me. I sat down at the breakfast table, and glanced at the pile of letters waiting my attention, but deferred opening them and giving my thoughts over to business for a few moments longer. After I had sipped my coffee and mused 21 Anna Lombard another ten minutes, I laid my hand on a long official- looking letter, and rather absent-mindedly broke it open and unfolded it. I read the letter through to its last word it was curt enough, for that matter then I crushed it down on the table under my hand. ' Damn ! Damn everything ! ' The two native servants, mute bronze statues, though they understood no other word of English, understood that one of four letters; they both started violently. The kitmargar removed my unfinished cup of coffee tenderly, and inquired softly, 'The sahib has had bad news?' 'Yes,' I groaned, and then added, 'Pack everything, have everything ready. We leave for Burmah by the night train.' ' Protector of the poor ! ' exclaimed the man, clasping his hands. ' The sahib is transferred ? ' ' Yes. To Lihuli, Burmah. You wish to accompany me?' The man hesitated, and great tears filled his large brown eyes and then rolled down his cheeks. They are hysterical, these natives, and my news had startled him. ' That is in my heart. I wish to. But my wives are sick. Yet if I stay I have no money for them.' I knitted my brows ; my own case dictated more sympathy for his wives than I should otherwise have felt. ' Allah forbid that I should take them from you, or that you should want. Stay till they are well, and I will see you get the same pay as now. When they are 22 Anna Lombard recovered, you can follow me, with them, if you wish. Now go. I want to be alone.' For all answer, the man flung himself at my feet, and clasped them and kissed them, and wept over them. All of which is extremely embarrassing to an English- man, and makes him feel somehow that he is not so fine a thing as he generally takes himself to be. Then they withdrew and I was alone in the room full of gold light, reflected from the desert through the jilmils, alone with that letter, my bad news and my feelings. I stared at the open paper, feeling doubtless as many a prisoner may have felt when shown his death warrant; how curious it was, a flimsy sheet of paper, with a few scrawly words the handwriting was execrable, I remember could deal such a blow of deadly pain. Since a few moments ago, the whole situation was changed for me ; my hopes of last night, that pleasant vista of days spent here, that yielding to the intoxication of passion for Anna, that teaching and arousing of her dormant soul and that drinking at last of the one cup that this life holds worth draining, all this that had floated before me, not as certainties indeed, but as delicious possibilities, was stamped out, and a hideous reality rose in its place. I was transferred to Lihuli, a lonely, desolate station in Burmah, at once, and for five years. Lihuli or the place of swamps I read the letter through again. 'This means separation from Anna, and separation means loss.' This is what I thought as I laid it down, and the resentment against it was so great that a hundred means 33 Anna Lombard of rejecting it rose in my brain. ' Go to her, carry her away by the storm of your passion, and take her with you.' Then came the thought, 'Take her with you where ? ' To the place of swamps, to a place where there is always some epidemic raging sometimes it is called the Black Cholera, sometimes the Plague, some- times Smallpox and where there is a never-varying accompaniment of malaria fever and dysentery. Where the air, night and day, is tainted and suffocating, where the evening, that brings cool elsewhere, brings but a sickly white miasma-tainted mist from the swamps and clouds of mosquitoes ; where the face of a white woman is never seen ; where there are no bands, no dinners, no dances ; where there is nothing but desert, disease, death and duty. How could I take her there? And if I could, could I keep her there ? And I shuddered. 'Then make her wait for you,' was the next angry, turbulent thought that came rolling along in the tide of anger and resentment surging through my brain. ' What ! on one evening's acquaintance, ask for a girl's love and faithful waiting for five years, and such a girl as Anna ! ' Conceited fool though passion will make a man, still it had not blinded me so far as that. I sat on like a statue, thinking hard, and a thousand mad plans, all equally impossible, for evading my duty came before me and were dismissed. As far as I myself was concerned, I felt no hesitation. I would have gone to her and spoken freely, gladly, oh, how gladly ! if I had allowed myself to be swayed by my own impulses, though I had but known her a few hours. It is not in the nature of things that a great Anna Lombard passion or even that embryo which is to become a great passion should admit of hesitation. These feelings sweep over the human being resistlessly. They do not permit him to argue or reason with them ; they dictate. And, moreover, they carry with them a conviction to his mind which renders argument unnecessary. Lesser emotions, I admit, allow of reasoning this way and that, and weighing and considering, and doubtless more than half the men in the world have long periods of oscilla- tion before they say those irrevocable words I would have said so willingly now without a tremor; but this vacillation only proves that the woman they are so con- sidering is not the one of all this life for them, and she will never be the object of the intensest passion they are capable of. The case is much the same as that of a man waiting in the street to meet some friend of whose appearance long absence or other causes have made him not quite sure. How anxiously he scans each one of the passers-by, and fifty times imagines he sees a re- semblance about which he debates in his mind is that he or is it not? And only hesitates thus because each of these is not the man. When the friend appears, his glance lights on him, he recognises him. That is the man; there is no question, no doubt, no hesitation. And he walks up to him with outstretched hand. Similarly, my mind instinctively and uncon- sciously had been waiting, as the mind of every man not occupied with passion is practically waiting, for the woman to pass by me in the way of life that was the fulfilment of the indefinite standard in my thoughts. Others who were not such women might come and go, Anna Lombard and, moved by resemblances, I might have hesitated and looked and hesitated again, but Anna had stepped up to me in the stream of human traffic that goes up and down the Way, and my mind had instantly recognised her, and my hand was outstretched, and there was no hesitation and no doubt. Doubtless, if more time had been allowed me, I should have used it, out of a sense of the fitness of things, decorum and, above all, deference to the girl herself, but, even then, it would have been the shortest time I could have set. Indeed, I knew that the impulse to caress her, to clasp her in my arms and know her to be my own would be a difficult one to hold down by the throat for long. So that the prospect of being forced to speak at once would not have been terrifying in the least to me, if only and I groaned out loud. Cir- cumstances seemed so wilfully and needlessly to have arrayed themselves against me. Had I been ordered to a hill station, one with even a moderately-good climate and where white life was not wholly excluded, I might have had courage enough to ask her to occupy a large, cool, rose-covered bungalow, situated somewhere where the breezes came, and to continue her gay, brilliant life of dances and dinners and idle amusements as the wife of an Assistant Commissioner instead of the daughter of a General, but I could not take a girl, straight from England, to share with me a fever and cholera-haunted swamp even if she would come. Some- how I did not feel wholly certain that she would not come, and her smiling eyes, as they had looked at me last night, swam before me. I lifted my head and 26 Anna Lombard glanced involuntarily down the breakfast table to where, at the end, a large and brilliant mirror in my sideboard gave me back a reflection of myself. It recurred to me suddenly, then, that I was usually considered good- looking, and my heart gave a beat of pleasure. I had never thought nor valued the fact before, but just as last night, for the first time, I had felt thankful for my little store of learning, so now for the first time I recalled with genuine pleasure the general verdict of my friends. It is perhaps rather to the credit of the human being in general that he or she thinks invariably little of any personal gift until the question arises of pleasing some other by it. I looked again at the glass. Yes, the features of that face looking back at me were straight and perfectly regular, the skin pale and clear, the eyes large, and eyebrows and hair as black as an Asiatic's, and I remembered delightedly that fair people always incline naturally to and admire those who are dark and vice- wrsd. Nature's craving to return to the type which is neither extreme in all cases has mixed that inviolable instinct with men and women's desire. Then the next instant that little rush of vain egotism and self-content- ment had passed. Though she consented a hundred times I could not take her to that horror of desolation and disease that I was ordered to. It was quite, quite impossible, and I put my head down in my hands, ashamed that for an instant it had seemed so possible. At the end of an hour and a half I rose, put on my solar topee and walked out of my compound towards the Lombards' bungalow to make the promised call, only now it was a farewell one. When I reached the house, Anna Lombard the servants told me the Miss Sahib had had breakfast one hour ago and had gone out, but only into the com- pound, and if I would wish to wait in the drawing- room, they would take my card to her. I gave the man a rupee and told him to go within himself, and that I would seek the Miss Sahib in the compound. With an intelligent smile of perfect comprehension and a salaam of profoundest gratitude the man withdrew into the cool darkness of the hall again, and I re- descended into the wilderness of blooming beauty and glaring light of the compound. I threaded my way quietly through the tangle of blossom-laden and flowering trees, glancing on every side as I parted them, not knowing at what minute I might come upon her. The morning was unusually hot, the sun seemed to have a peculiar intensity and its fiery beams to be distilling the utmost of their perfume from the flowers. As I advanced farther into the compound I became conscious of a damper, cooler air and of a mossy woodland scent; the gurgle of water reached me, and then at the next step forward I stood motionless and spellbound; the girl herself was before me and unconscious of my presence asleep. In the thick cool shade thrown by a luxu- riantly-tangled cluster of bamboo trees stood a low, broad stone couch covered with thick square velvet and satin cushions a Turkish divan, in fact, in the open, and one prepared, evidently, with skill and care, for all round the stone base was hollowed out a groove filled to the rim with water, thus forming an impassable trench to the innumerable tree ants of enormous size 28 Anna Lombard that were crawling in black ribands over the mossy ground. And on this couch, fully extended, with one arm above her head, lay the girl tranquilly asleep. Noiselessly, hardly breathing, I stepped closer and looked down upon her. She was wearing a loose garment of white cambric that was unfastened at the neck and showed the whole of the beautiful, solid white throat to its base, but which, of its own will apparently, closed itself completely over the softly rising and falling bosom, the head was thrown back, and her face, fresh as a flower, was upturned, the cheeks were like the petals of the wild rose, the mouth deep crimson like a pomegranate bud, and her light hair, ruffled and loosened, fell in glistening waves over the arm beneath, white and bare, for the kindly sleeve was loose and wide and had fallen back from it almost to the shoulder. So might have Aurora herself, wearied with tending the flowers, been found sleeping in the Elysian fields. I stood entranced, let- ting my eyes travel reverently over the sleeping form. The cambric was delicate and transparent almost as a cobweb, but its multitudinous folds veiled all but the beautiful outlines ; the hem of the garment seemed lost in the flounces of lace, or perhaps these came from some other under one, and from these issued two bare white insteps, the rest of the feet being cased in little indoor shoes. Beyond those delicate white feet was quite a long space of the divan, covered with a velvet cloth of cashmere work, and on this, mechanically, I took my seat. I had no thought of waking her. Awake, she would become Miss Lombard 29 Anna Lombard and I Mr Ethridge, conventional words would be spoken in conventional tones ; it must be so, and what words could give any idea of the rushing tide of regret and sorrow and disappointment that was rolling through my brain at leaving her. No, this silence, this perfect harmony of beauty suited best our farewells. A deep, unbroken silence lay over all the compound, a heat that seemed of deadly weight fell from the brazen sky, and the transparent air seemed to quiver in it. But here in the deep shade of the feathery bamboo there was coolness and perfect peace. A large tank of water, reflecting the branches overhead, till it looked like liquid emerald, stood bedded in the moss close by, and the tiny trickle and gurgle of water flowing from it round the couch seemed to intensify the sense of surrounding coolness. What a scene it was ! one possible only perhaps in India where the stream of Saxon civilisation, with all its richness, comfort and wealth, flows abruptly into the wonders of native Indian beauty, into that store of gorgeous colouring, of blossoms without name, of scents without definition, of skies and gardens past belief. Beyond the com- pound lay a sea of radiant colour, a wild confusion of pomegranate crimson and rose -pink and syringa white, that seemed swaying under the dazzling efful- gence of golden light. Over it hovered lazily from flower to flower great butterflies large as one's two hands put together, and blue as though they were fallen fragments of the sky itself; and now and then a crimson-headed paroquet or golden oriole would fly silently across from bamboo to palm. Nearer me, 3P Anna Lombard the cool green shadow, the flowing water, the white stone couch, the sleeping girl ; could Milton have seen anywhere a fairer vision for his Eden? Theocritus have dreamt lovelier things for his idyls, or the ancients have imagined more for their Elysian fields ? But such surroundings are everyday and common- place in India, and the birthright of every Briton. My eyes wandered everywhere and then came back to rest upon the sleeping girl. How calmly and deeply she slept ! How unconscious of the excited heart beat- ing so near her ! So this was to be the end of a passion but just lighted, the end to that new life which had rushed through my veins when I held her in the dance. A passing away in silence while she slept. And yet I did not think it would be the end; I had a dim prescience that this tranquil sleep- ing form was bound up inextricably with my future, but I also felt that never again should I behold her as she now was, in the fresh, pure, unsullied morning of her youth and virginity. It is strange how these vague, dim thoughts pass through our brains, as if sometimes our future were vaguely reflected in some dark and misty mirror, and being only stray, idle fancies, as we think, we take no notice of them. It is only afterwards, sometimes, a startling remembrance rebounds upon us from the past and we recollect what we have thought. A great sadness seized upon me and pervaded me, and for a moment the temptation came over me to awaken her by kisses on those ivpry feet so near me, awaken her and make her listen to me. Surely this Anna Lombard enchanting scene, this languorous Nature that seemed everywhere bestowing her caresses, breathing into every- thing her rich fervour of Life, would favour me. How could I not tell that this sensitive, impressionable girl, wakened suddenly by a passionate kiss in the garden where all was glowing, sense-inflaming beauty, would not be inclined towards me. My heart beat violently, for an instant I swayed and had almost clasped that smooth instep. Then I stayed myself, and the grim realities rose before me. What had I to suggest? And again the reasoning of the morning passed through my brain. Five years of waiting for me here waiting, for her ; she ardent, impetuous, just roused to a sense of the joy of life, and eager, impatient to stretch out her hands to its glittering toys; or five years' banish- ment with me to a notoriously dangerous and desolate spot in the Burmah swamps ! No ! I could not be such a selfish fool as to offer either. The decision was the same as I had come to before, and must be the same if I thought of it a hundred times. I sat on there in silence, steeped in a dull sense of pain, and she, wearied and fatigued by the long hours of last night, slept on without a movement or a murmur. My Aurora with the wonderfully smooth, round, delicately-tinted cheeks, and the long black lashes curling upwards so that I thought each moment the lids were just opening ! Well, I would leave her, but it should not be in absolute silence, and I took out my pocket-book and tore two or three leaves from it, and covered them closely with words. First I gave her the text of the command, verbatim, as I had received it. 33 Anna Lombard Then I described Lihuli as I knew it, and then I merely added my farewells. When I had finished it I drew off the amethyst signet ring I always wore, and adding a line to beg her to keep it as a trifling souvenir of me, I rolled the paper round and thrust it through the circle. Then I rose, and leaning over the couch, drew down a flexible spray of bamboo and bent it over in an arch, fastening the end to a niche in the stone side of her resting-place; from this arch I suspended the ring and the little scroll by a tendril. It hung just over her bosom, and she could not rise without first breaking or detaching the bamboo and seeing the ring. Then I looked down upon her with an immense tender- ness and reverence, though that was as nothing to the tenderness I was to feel later, fixing that fresh, pure face in my heart, and then moved away softly as I had come. It was time ; as I retraced my steps through the blazing compound, I heard the wheels of the General's carriage on the gravel. A few moments more and she would awake or be awakened. Those minutes of silent calm and beauty, that glimpse into the Elysian fields was a thing of the past. My face was turned to the practical, everyday life and duties of a Civil Commissioner. U CHAPTER II WHEN my train drew into Lihuli, it was evening, and a refreshing softness filled the heavy, magnolia-scented air. No other European was going to alight at this station, and I saw my solitary carriage waiting for me beyond the platform. It was a golden evening every- thing seemed gold, and not a glaring, but a soft, melting gold. The sky, the air, the motionless palms, even the broad road down which my carriage rolled, for a short tawny moss grew all over it, and caught and gave back the brilliant amber light. We had driven for about fifteen minutes when the first bungalow came into view. It was a low, white stone, flat-roofed building, from the side view almost buried in banana trees, then, as we drove on, I saw it faced on to the road with a great broad, inviting verandah full of long cane chairs. ''Club house gymkhana sahib,' volunteered the driver, slackening his pace, and I saw four or five men, clad in what looked like sleeping suits, troop through the window on to the verandah. They waved their hands and set up a feeble cheer as they caught sight of me. They all had the same blanched, pinched-looking faces, wan eyes and dry white lips. I stopped the carriage, and they came half way down the steps to meet me as I got out 34 Anna Lombard 'Very glad to welcome you to Lihuli,' one of them said. 'Train must have come in early or we'd have met it.' They all looked so sickly and listless, like men one sees hanging round the balconies of public hospitals or convalescent homes, that the idea of their doing any- thing so far requiring an effort as meeting their new Deputy Commissioner seemed rather a joke than any- thing else. I merely laughed and suffered them to guide me up to the verandah, where there was an informal and hazy introduction. 'That's Jones of the Railway Survey, and Knight of the Telegraph here, and this is Dr Kennings you'll probably have a close acquaintance with him pretty soon and Hunter, Engineer, and these two kids Seymore and Robertson. Sit down and we'll have some pegs. What do you take?' They pulled up a small table, and giving me the most prominent chair, they drew their own round me and proceeded to pump me for news. ' It's a perfect Godsend to see a new face,' remarked Knight, after we had been talking pretty briskly for some minutes. 'We've had no Com. since poor old Burke went crazy and shot himself.' I saw one of the other fellows kick the speaker furtively under the little bamboo table. 1 Burke was the last man the Com., I suppose ? ' I queried. 'What sent him mad?' 'Oh, I suppose the the heat, and being alone, you know,' stammered Knight, confused by the kick 35 Anna Lombard on his shins and looking guilty. ' But the bungalow has been renovated, and, in fact, the room where where it happened has been pulled down, and he left a note saying he war glad to go, and the change to the cooler climate of H would do him good. He seemed quite content.' ' You damned fool ! ' muttered his vis-a-m's, glaring at him over the glasses of long straws. 'What do you want to tell him all that for the first night ? ' I laughed. 'I'm not afraid of ghosts,' I said lightly, 'and, so far, it seems as cool here as one could reasonably expect below.' 'Oh, yes, it will be all right until it rains,' chimed in Hunter; 'and a man's all right here if he can only adapt himself. You must settle down, take a wife, and live regularly ; Burke never did. He was always fretting for some girl in England.' ' Take a wife ! ' I echoed in surprise. 'Yes, a Burmese wife. Oh, don't look so con- temptuous. You'll come to it They most of them do. and it saves time and trouble to settle down at once. Now, to-morrow morning you will have an assortment brought to you. Your choice (as the American stores advertise) for one hundred rupees down, and the remainder in instalments later. She will then be contracted to you for five years ; that's your ap- pointment here, isn't it ? Yes, very good. Then you'll have someone at the head of your table and to look after your house for you they're first-rate little house- keepers though they don't look it. Then you'll enjoy 36 Anna Lombard legitimate matrimony for five years, and when your time's up, you pay the bill and say good-bye, and there's no trouble/ The other men listened in listless indifference, and one or two nodded in confirmation of their companion's statement when he had finished. I myself knew enough of the customs of Burmah to know that he was not chaffing or jesting. I had heard of these Anglo- Burmese marriages before, and how the Burmah girl, at the end of the white man's term, goes back to the house of her parents, sometimes with two or three children of mixed blood, and is in no way looked down upon by her own people for the same, and is probably eventually married to one of her own caste. I suppressed a yawn. 'My own company, study and books will be more to my taste,' I answered. Hunter looked at me pityingly. 'This is a country,' he said impressively, 'in which a man can live, but he cannot live alone. But you can try it, of course as Burke and others have.' Then there was a pause, and it seemed as if a chill had come into the lambent, yellow air. Then, as a welcome distraction, the doctor suggested we should go inside and dine, and we all rose with alacrity. The dining-room was a large, lofty, airy room, and they seemed to possess excellent wines, soda water and spirits at least, that kind that can be kept in bottles, and well-hung punkahs swung briskly the whole time. We sat long over our coffee and smoked and gossiped, and my new presence seemed to make them all quite 37 Anna Lombard cheerful. It was late, and the moon had risen, before they put me into my carriage again, and with cordial good-nights watched me drive off to my own bungalow down the steamy road that looked misty in the moon- light, and where the wheels moved without sound over the spongy yellow moss. The next morning, as soon as it was light, I was awakened by the sound of subdued but incessant and eager chattering, apparently just beneath my window. I got up from the charpoy, disentangled myself from my mosquito curtains, pushed open the jilmils of the nearest window and looked out. What a scene it was to meet the eyes ! especially eyes like mine, not yet satiated with, nor even accustomed to, the splendours of the East. The sun had not yet risen, only a golden glow intensifying every instant near the horizon in an otherwise pearly sky heralded its approach. The compound stretching beneath my window and all round the house was one mass of roses of every tint and shape and size ; towards the gate of the compound and all round the walls were clumps of the broad-leaved banana tree swaying in the slight breeze of the dawn, and two or three trees of Bougainvillea bursting through, from between them, stood pouring their torrents of magenta blossoms to the ground; there is no other way to express it, for the parasite grown to a tree yet cannot forget its nature, but trails its branches to the ground, and for yards round the tree roots the earth has a carpet of its pinkish violet flowers. Beyond the walls and broad-leaved banana trees stretched miles of golden sand, like a calm golden sea, broken here Anna Lombard and there by green islands of cocoanut palms that moved languidly against the pale-growing azure of the sky. One glance took in all this beauty, and my curiosity as to the voices returned. I looked through the network of giant convolvulus that completely covered one side of the house, and peering between the great violet and white cups of the flowers, I saw beneath, seated in a circle in a small open space of turf, an old native woman and five other evidently younger women round her. I could only partially see them, but they appeared to be in festive attire, and suddenly the warning at the Club last night came back to me. These were, without doubt, the threatened ' wives.' With mingled disgust and amusement I withdrew from the window and commenced my toilet, the chatter- ing and jabbering continuing unabated the whole time, sometimes rising to a shrill clamour, and then sinking to almost whispers. I went down to my dining- room where breakfast was waiting for me, and which I had perfectly undisturbed, then the servant withdrew and I lapsed into thought, swinging absently on my chair, and staring up to the roof, which was high enough from the floor for the bats to come in and hang there in quiet comfort. Suddenly the lattice door was pushed open, and the old woman I had seen in the compound entered, followed by the five little women, all holding each other's hands, and grinning the whole width of their little painted mouths. They were all dressed in very tight narrow petticoats, so narrow that they produced the effect of a bolster case, or one wide trouser leg, 39 Anna Lombard these were of different gay-coloured silks, and reached just to the little ankles of the wearer, which were loaded with blue china bangles. Above, they each wore a silk zouave, heavily embroidered, which, while it covered each breast, left the space between them exposed ; their throats were quite bare and peculiarly round, smooth and boneless j their arms were bare except for countless glass and china bangles, and they all wore flowers stuck in their straight oily black hair and behind their ears. The old woman flung herself flat on the floor before me, with her forehead pressed to the ground, and the five little creatures went down on their hands and knees, ducking their flower-decked heads, and subjecting the absurdly tight silk petticoat to a terrible strain over the broadest part of their small persons. After her obeisance, the old woman sat up and addressed me in a flow of excellent Hindustani. She had heard that the sahib, who was her father and mother and the protector of the poor, had come to shed the light of his most glorious countenance, which was like the sun rising in majesty upon Lihuli, and she had hastened her aged footsteps to minister to the wants of the sahib, and she brought him five flowers of the morning, and he was to stretch forth his kingly hand and indi- cate which would best suit him for a wife. When she paused, the five little girls also sat up and eyed me somewhat anxiously. Some chalk or white paste had been rubbed over their faces to simulate the Aryan complexion, and a round pink spot painted in the middle of the cheek. Their faces were Mongolian in type, more like the Chinese face than any other, but 40 Anna Lombard the mouths were soft and pretty. Their diminutiveness was the most striking thing about them. They seemed like little children. 'How old are they?' I asked the woman. ' Eleven, twelve and thirteen,' she answered sharply, looking at me suspiciously. 'Surely the sahib doesn't think that too old?' ' Old ! Good God ! no ; they're not old enough,' I returned, speaking of course always in her vernacular. The old woman looked relieved, and pulling forward the biggest one by the arm, she brought her close up to me. 'See here,' she proceeded, 'she's plump and good- sized.' With this she pinched the girl's bosom, and dug her fingers into her neck precisely as poulterers pinch the breasts of their fowls for customers. After that, she went into various details pertaining to the girl with a degree of frankness that makes it impossible to repeat them. I sat back in my chair, surveying the scene with amazement at the strange commingling of ideas these little half-formed things and wifehood, motherhood, and the modest Anglo-Indian Government that will not have the word prostitution printed in the newspapers, and yet countenances such things as these. For all this was perfectly legal, and the girls probably all came from Burmah families of some standing. 'Here, Nanee,' exclaimed the woman to another of them, perhaps the prettiest of them all. ' Go up and make yourself amiable to the gentleman.' At this Nanee approached on little bare velvet feet, 41 Anna Lombard and nestled close to my side, one tiny hand, soft as satin, absurdly flexible at the wrist, and seemingly perfectly boneless, she placed on my knee, and looking up straight at me she lisped softly, ' Ashik karti,' or ' I love you,' to show me she too could speak Hindustani. I looked down on her with a smile. The idea of love seemed to me ludicrous. What could I do with this little atom of doll-like, child-like life? But I smiled upon her as one does on a pretty child asking for a kiss. 'Now which will the sahib, who is lord of all the virtues, decide upon, Nanee or Lalee?' asked the old woman in a business-like tone. I saw it was time to negative the matter at once, and I said decidedly, ' I am not in want of a wife, and I hav$ no intention of taking one.' The old woman fell back, sitting on her heels, and stared at me blankly. 'But, sahib, protector of the poor, you are here for five years, no white woman at all in Lihuli, no woman allowed in bazaar ! What will you do ? ' Five years ! So she knew the exact length of my appointment, probably the amount of my salary and private income to an anna. They know everything, these people. I looked up and saw standing just inside my door, patiently waiting till the market should be concluded, a clerk with a long strip of paper and a bundle of reed pens in his hands. His duty was to make out the agreement between us, and give me a receipt for any money paid on account. 42 'I don't know,' I said abruptly. 'When I want a wife I will send for one. I don't want one now. I have spoken.' ' Let the sahib think once more. He may look from one end of Lihuli to the other and he will not find such buds from the garden of paradise as these again.' I glanced at the buds of paradise and saw that their little faces had grown sad and wistful as they heard my decision. 'They are beautiful beyond comparison,' I said to reassure them, and perhaps save them from the old woman's wrath. ' But I have no need of them ; if I had, there are none I could wish better.' ' Well,' muttered the old woman, somewhat appeased, while the buds looked considerably happier, ' I am but a poor woman, and the sahib is the lord of gold and silver.' I understood this, and it was an appeal to which I could respond. I put my hand into my pocket and drew out a handful of rupees. These I dropped into her outstretched hands, and she fell on her face again, and declared I was more her father and mother than ever, and otherwise very nearly related to her. Then I got up and filled each of the little soft brown hands of the buds with rupees, and their tiny fingers could hardly close over the large coins. ' Now go,' I said, and clasping hands as before they all wriggled in an uneven line to and through the door, followed by the clerk. Then I threw myself into a chair and laughed, yet it was rather a sad laugh and ended soon, leaving me staring thoughtfully into the 43 Anna Lombard sheen of gold sunlight beyond the lattice door, I felt sorry for them, and after a time this impersonal sorrow merged into sorrow for myself. The old woman's words : 1 Five years ! what will the sahib do ? ' rang in my ears. It is a curious fact how, if we are in an unpleasant position, another person's sympathy or pity seems to stamp it into our minds and bring out sharply its most disagreeable points. She saw the position more clearly than I did. She had seen my predecessor come and go. She knew, probably, more of the way in which heat and silence can work on the white man's brain than I did. My thoughts were decidedly unpleasant as I stared up into the great arch above me. There was no ceiling cloth stretched across. The eye could go up far among the great timbers and cross-beams, and watch the black mummy-like bats clinging there in rows, head downwards, with their claws sheathed till the night-time. It was ten when I ordered the carriage and drove down to the city to see the native quarter and find my office. Lihuli is a place with a very large but strag- gling population, and without those grand buildings, tombs, temples and mosques one stumbles over at every turn in the native cities of India. Nothing but piles of irregular, badly-built, badly-kept mud, plaster and stone houses leaning against each other, one on the top of the other, as if an earthquake had shaken them together, met my eyes on the left of the broad road I was traversing. And this was the town. On the other side of it lay a wide flowing stream, doubtless but a dry stony bed for many 44 Anna Lombard months in the year, and between the river and the town rose a high stone wall which intervened to pre- vent the miserable little mud houses slipping into the stream and being whirled away to the great swamps of the plain. Running through the town there was one respectable street, and in this I found the Court House and my office, a two-storied building in stone adjoining. The lower storey one could enter from the street, but to arrive at the second, one had to pass through the ground floor out into the square yard beyond, where great white oxen, reposing on their fore-knees, gazed at one steadily through the blinding glare of the sun, and by picking one's way carefully through piles of green fodder and pools of slime, one reached the airy frail wooden staircase that ran up to the balcony of the second storey. The house was a corner one, and the balcony at the side here overhung a narrow native court. The buildings were not high, and the sun fell richly into it ; glancing across, I saw a little grated window opposite, low down, and white with the dust of the road. Two native women sat behind the bars, and I caught the glint of a red and blue glass bracelet as a tiny brown hand clasped one of the rails. It was fairly cool and shaded in the balcony, because an awning of English manufacture stretched over it made it so. Beneath, in the dust, sat the sellers of sweets and cakes, cross-legged, calling out their wares in a crooning, droning voice I passed on and turned the corner of the balcony, coming round to the front of "the office, where the long windows opened into it. Some white pigeons 45 Anna Lombard had their cote on the grey wall of the Court House adjoining, and they whirled round the balcony, their snow-like wings flashing in the gold sunlight against the blue sky. I watched them for an instant and they seemed looking at me wonderingly. 'Poor Burke,' I thought; 'perhaps these birds were favourites of his and are asking themselves if I am he come back to them.' I shuddered and turned into the office. It was all so neat and in such perfect order. It seemed as if he had just stepped out of it except that the dust lay thick on everything. The jilmils of the windows were closed, and all was black dark- ness to me stepping from the yellow glare outside. I started as a shuffling on the matting came to my ears and the light of a pair of eyes to mine, looking out of the shadow. The next minute I distinguished the figure of a native clerk bearing a bunch of keys. Why, where did you spring from?' I exclaimed, or a near equivalent to that in Hindustani. 'Behold, Heaven born, there is an inner staircase,' replied the clerk, bowing, and then I noticed that a second little staircase, just outside the office door, led below. I took over the keys and went to work ; dry work for the most part ; reading letters, filing and answering them and writing judgments on cases I had not tried; and hot work, for there was no punkah, and ordering one put up for to-morrow did not make it any cooler to-day. The sweat gathered on my face and poured persistently off my nose, blotting and blurring everything I wrote in the most pathetic, approved, tear-stained way. It was 46 Anna Lombard pathetic, I thought; a few tears would not probably have cost me as much. By five in the afternoon I was free, and shutting up the dusty, airless room I strolled out on the balcony and found compensation. The Burmah air was round me, dazzling yellow air like liquid gold and heavy with those strange smells of smoke and rose and incense and spices. Above, the Burmah sky of silver blue ; below, the broad Burmah road with its countless forms in white and blue and yellow passing up and down, and its bullock-carts with their heavy large white bullocks moving slowly in from the teak forests that lie towards the west. I leaned on the rail of the balcony and looked down, realising how truly the East was in my blood. It seemed my home, its air my native air. With all its miseries and its sins I loved it and I knew that I did. The wish of my childhood, boyhood and youth had been accomplished. I had come to the East, and did not think I should ever want to return. It holds one with too many hands. I leaned on one elbow gazing down on the careless, light-hearted stream of Orientals passing below people whose brains are like the brains of a genius, whose daily life is the life of a child, and whose passions are the passions of a beast. A feeling of contentment stole over me, borne on the heated, languid, spice-laden air. Had I only had beside me that yielding form and those speaking eyes I should have been happy, far too happy, and this is doubtless what the gods thought when they arranged things differently. I went down presently by the little rickety outside 47 Anna Lombard staircase and through the courtyard where the bullocks were still wallowing in the blue mud, and through the lower storey of the building, which was the office of a native and full of dusky native clerks, perched on high stools in their straight white garments, with their long black braided hair falling down to the floor. The place was dark, with closed windows and jilmils, but the rolling eyes of the clerks as they turned on me passing through their midst almost lighted it with their gleam- ing whites and jetty pupils. And so at last out into the now cooling, brilliant air and to my carriage. A thought came to me. I was not hungry my lonely dinner in my empty bungalow did not invite me. I would leave it till later and go now and see the notorious swamps, the blue miasma-laden, death-dealing swamps of Lihuli. I would go now while I was fresh and strong, before the place had thinned and weakened my stock of clean blood. I found out from the native coachman that we should have to drive down to the river where at certain places there were landing-stages and boats, the common boats mostly used for mer- chandise, for the river higher up was fair and broad, a good highway for traffic ; here it became but a poor and sluggish stream that lower down, below the town, found difficulty in struggling through the wide morasses in its path. Accordingly, through the balmy, red -gold air we drove down to the riverside, and found by chance an old Burman sitting on his heels beside a still older boat, damp and sticky yet from its recent load of half rotten fruit He was smoking peacefully, watching with 48 Anna Lombard dull, unseeing eyes the pinkish ripples of the stream tumbling along in their muddy bed. The coachman threw his whip at him, by way of attracting his attention, and this catching him full in the middle of his blue-brown naked back, sufficed to arouse him from his reverie, and while I stood on the little quay the following colloquy, as far as it can be approached in English, took place. ' Hi there, you son of an owl, this Heaven-born person of distinction wishes to descend the river. For how many annas shall his nobly-proportioned body confer honour on your stinking old tub of a boat?' ' I am the servant of the Heaven-born ; for fifteen annas we will descend even to the swamps.' ' And return, thou base-born ? ' 1 1 said not return.' 1 For fifteen annas thou shall go and return and see that this king among men returns unharmed, or thou wilt sway in the wind as a leaf of the peepul tree.' ' It is well. I am but a poor man and the sahib's will is my will.' At the end of this I disposed my ' nobly-proportioned body ' in the old fruit-scented craft, and we pushed of? from the bank by the aid of the long pole the old Burman used punting fashion. My sais got off the box and, sitting on his heels beneath the noses of the horses, watched me go down stream, supremely satisfied with the coachman's bargaining. Easily the boat rocked its way down the river like a drunken man, pleased with himself and all the world, rolling home- ward ; pushed by the old Burman now from one bank, D 49 Anna Lombard now from the other, it kept its middle course down stream, and the rank grass and long weeds at the sides stretched out their snares in vain. I sank into a reverie that the warm stillness of the air and the ripple and the lap of the water aided, and it quite startled me when the punter ceased his work suddenly and waved his arms round his head and then towards the landscape in general with a shrill cry to attract my attention. I sat up, raised my eyes and looked about me. The swamps were round me, stretching on every side of me as far as vision could reach, except in the west, where the great teak forests rose in dark masses against the glowing sky, and desolate, tainted, deadly as they were, they yet possessed a peculiar beauty of their own, that same wonderful beauty that rises before one's eyes everywhere in the East and is the consola- tion for all its trials. They lay around me, a wonder- ful plain of varied colour, here the light amber and pale green of lichen and moss growing on fallen timber, there a patch of vivid scarlet from some nameless flowers springing out of the rotting vegeta- tion, there a long dark green band of rushes tipped with gold in the flood of the evening sun, and over them all, faint and indefinable, hung a pale blue mist, a shifting veil of blue vapour. The river had widened out and shallowed, and great tussocks of coarse moss rose out of its straggling bed. Against one of these the boat jarred and finally rested. The old man laid down his pole and squatted on his heels. I gazed long and curiously about me, away over the masses of sodden moss, over the little flat 50 Anna Lombard gleaming pools turning blood red in the evening light, away over steaming patches of decaying vegetation and forming carbon, away into the pale, poisonous mist on every side. It was quite silent but for the sing-sing of the mosquitoes round us. Far off on the edge of a gleaming flat of water, motionless as an ibis carved on an Egyptian wall, stood a long-shanked bird. I could see his profile, all long beak and tufted crest, defined against the amber distance. He was the only sign of life ; all around and between him and me stretched decay, poison and death. I sat for a long time in contemplation as the light sank lower and lower over the dismal swamp and the old Burman began to get uneasy and move about in the boat. At last he raised his arms over his head to attract my attention, and I nodded to him that he might return if he wished. Slowly we pushed and punted back up stream, between the rank and muddy banks, and before we reached the landing stage, darkness had swept over the face of the swamp, it had veiled itself in the night quickly and deftly, as a woman draws her veil across her face with one turn of her hand. It was quite dark when I regained my bungalow, and I ate my solitary dinner by the light of one solitary lamp set in the centre of the table, which threw, owing to its abominable shade, manufactured in Birmingham, a dazzling circle of light just round its foot on the white tablecloth, leaving the whole of the rest of the large and lofty room in complete obscurity. I heard the bats whiz in and out and repair to their haunts in the far-away Anna Lombard ceiling undisturbed, and the lizards and spiders scurrying and clinking about in the shadowy, far-off corners ; they doubtless gave the construction of that Birmingham lamp their unqualified approval. As the sole society of these companions is not very interesting, and I was too tired to seek the club, I went off to bed early. Three weeks passed, and by the end of that time I felt myself settled into an old resident. I found I had Court work to do, and this rather amused me. Needing an interpreter by my side all through the Court business irritated me. I like to hear a native's evidence straight from his lips, and by the coupling of particular looks and glances and motions of the face with certain words, I can tell pretty well which lie he is telling. Therefore in most of my leisure hours I studied the Burmese language, and each day, after dinner, the bats, lizards and spiders listened from their corners to a high-class conversation in the vernacular. I hired an old Munshi to teach me and to talk to me, and often he would bring two or three friends with him. Then, all crouching on their heels in a circle round my chair, they would all talk to me, in turn, by my special request, otherwise they would have all talked together. In addition to this study, which was my form of amusement, I had found time in that three weeks to paint a portrait of Anna. I hardly needed a portrait on canvas, since a very clear and I hoped indelible one was stamped in my brain, but one never knows about these things ; the human brain is one of the crankiest creations, and a Anna Lombard good stiff attack of fever will sometimes wipe away and make a blank of its dearest impressions. So I committed her face to canvas, in view of contingencies, and it was pleasant to see it smiling out upon me from the hot gloom of my dining-room, when I came back sick and weary from a crowded court-room, with my retina weary of photographing infinities of black visages. I really found little time for going to the Club, and the members did not see me there very often, but some of the men would sometimes bring their Burmese wives with them and there was quite a family gathering on my verandah. It was unnecessary generally to bring out extra chairs for the women, as they were so small they could slip in beside their husbands into the same chair without his being cramped, but usually they preferred to sit cross-legged at his feet. Some of them were excellent musicians and occasionally brought their pear-shaped guitars and sang native melodies in perfect time and tune, but for the most part they liked to sit idle, smoking their huge white Burmese cheroots, that are at least four times the size of our cigars, and which, sticking out from their little mouths, stretched quite round to hold them, do anything but improve their appearance. One evening they followed me into my dining-room, and spying Anna's portrait, which I had stood upon a table by itself, they crowded over it with eager curi- osity. Lihuli is not an advanced Burmese community. There was no white woman there then, and perhaps had not been for years, perhaps not in the lives of these little creatures, and the fair, bright countenance looked S3 Anna Lombard into their dusky peering eyes as a thing unseen and unknown. But it was the hair that struck them most. They could not understand that fair, clustering mass, full of waves and golden lights. They gazed at it in awestruck silence, and then I heard them murmur to each other, 1 Peri hai ' ' it is a fairy.' ' No,' I said rather sadly, ' it's not a fairy ; it's a living woman, who will love and be loved and have children some day just like yourselves.' It is only by such images that one can convey the idea of womanhood to the native mind. 'But look at the hair,' they said, pointing out their soft dark fingers at it, and then turning to each other and examining each other's heads. This was all they knew of hair, this mass of coarse, heavy straight threads, each of uniform length, that, when dressed and oiled, lay in a black, solid lump against their heads, or when undone fell in uneven, unwaving lines to the floor. ' That is English hair, and she is an English woman,' I said ; but as I followed them out tm to the verandah, I heard them muttering to themselves, ' Sachbat ne bolta hai, Peri hai ' ' he is not speaking the truth, it is a fairy,' and they looked dubiously on my veracity ever after. During this time I had several letters from Anna, and they were characteristic ones which delighted me. All the social news of the station, and what she had been doing in that way herself, crammed into the first few sentences and put as shortly as possible, and all the rest of the sheet filled up with some idea or theory of 54 Anna Lombard hers, or else a continuation of some argument or theory started in mine. Her first letter, too, had filled me with more hope than I had had since I had left her. It seemed full of a sorrow at my departure, that she did not like to exactly express, but yet managed to indicate very clearly. She thanked me for the ring, and said that she wore it on the middle finger of her right hand and wound up her letter with, ' Why didn't you wake me ? ' Altogether, so far, life in Burmah did not seem absolutely insupportable to me, and I grew deeply interested in my judicial work. I made head-way in the language and watched everything, noted every- thing and stored up all the native lore and know- ledge of native life with which to surprise and please Anna in that far distance when we were to meet again. She was deeply interested in all that I told her of my Burmese friends, and every incident that was unusual or striking of my crowded court-room made the back- bone of a diverting story for her. One instance, however, I forbore to mention, though it was a great deal more to my credit than some others. On a certain Monday morning, when there had been an un- usual number of cases, and I was wearied out in the heavy atmosphere, before the lunch hour arrived, a case come before me of abduction, of which the facts elicited, at length, from a mist of lies were as follows : A low- caste Hindu woman had married a low-caste Burman, and their daughter, a low - caste hybrid, had been married and left a widow before she was eleven years old. Her husband's mother thereupon used her, accord- ing, indeed, to Hindu custom, as a household drudge, 55 * Anna Lombard and endeavoured to add to the cheerfulness of her ex- istence by frequent blows and a scarcity of nourishment. The Burmese father, of the mild, gentle Burmese disposition, unable to bear the pitiful tale of his daughter's woes, summoned up courage, with several of his friends, to effect a forcible abduction of the girl, and had rescued her from the old woman's clutches. Hence the suit, and now the whole four stood before me. The court-room was not very large, with four high narrow windows facing each other, two on each side. These had bars without and shades within to keep out even that much of the pitiless sunlight, the door had a square of open-work grating in it, to let some current move, if possible, the stifling air ; the back of the court- room was crowded with narrow wooden benches, black and polished from the continued contact of oily naked arms, legs and bodies. In the forepart was my chair, a little raised, with a punkah swinging over it, and on this particular morning there were ranged before me the old witch-like mother-in-law, the prosecutrix, the gentle old Burman, the accused, his wife and their daughter, Lulloo, a very beautiful, half - developed woman of eleven. She had very little to say ; she stood with her great eyes under magnificent arching brows fixed upon me the whole time, and her dirty white ragged cotton tunic turned down from her back and shoulders. They were horribly scarred and cut, while her left breast was swollen and had a large circular red patch on it. Now, it is difficult to make a black skin red, and when a patch shows up dusky crim- son on it, it means blood badly extravasated underneath. 56 Anna Lombard I knew what a cruel blow must have been given to cause that mark, and I was not much inclined to patience with the old woman when she explained to me at great length that the girl was her son's property, and her property, and could not, under any circum- stances, go back to live with her own people. All this was perfectly correct as far as Hindu India went, but the law was different in Burmah ; moreover, a right to a person's custody is forfeited by excessive cruelty under any law. 1 The girl is lazy and will not work unless she's beaten,' screamed the old woman. ' Is that true, Lulloo ? ' I asked, curious to have this beautiful, silent, helpless creature speak. ' No, it is not true,' she answered calmly. ' I have worked from dawn till dark for a handful of rice and two dates. Let the sahib take me for a servant in his house and see how I will work ; let me be only meteranni in the house of the Huzoor.' I smiled and shook my head. ' I have no use for women in my house,' I answered. ' Do you wish to return to your father ? ' The girl looked down and fingered a dried and faded circle of clematis on her wrist, and then said in a low voice, 1 Yes, if I may not go to the house of the sahib.' I signalled for the old Burman to approach. 1 Take your daughter and keep her. The Court gives you the right to her.' The girl, instead of joyfully throwing herself into her father's arms, as I anticipated, flung herself at my feet, 57 Anna Lombard kissing and crying over them. The old woman, as soon as she fairly understood the sentence, began screaming and vociferating. ' Take her away,' I said, peremptorily, and two stout Burmans, ushers of my court, dragged and hustled her out between them. We could still hear her shrill clamour outside, through the thick stone walls. Lulloo was still weeping at my feet, and a stray ray of light from the window fell across her bare shoulders and showed up the hideous weals and cuts upon them. I lifted her up. 'Don't you understand, child,' I said, 'you won't be beaten or starved any more ? Go away now with your father.' The girl ceased sobbing and turned away to hei father, muttering to herself, ' I am not a child. I am a woman and a widow.' Then she went away with her parents to the back of the court and other cases came crowding on, through all that long hot after- noon, and I thought no more about her. The next morning, strolling out into my compound to breathe a little cool air before the sun had fairly struggled over the edge of the plain, I saw something white in the centre of one of the big banana leaves of a prominent tree which grew close to the main path of the compound by the gate. I walked up to it and found a note, rolled up and stuck through a hole in the leaf. The writing was that of the pro- fessional bazaar letter-writer, and then, signed at the bottom in large, unsteady, straggling characters, was the word Lulloo. I laughed and read the note. 58 When a native is in love, he or she may not be very constant or faithful, and what he feels may not be the highest class of emotion, but, at least, he is very earnest for the time being, and his language is always remarkably explicit. He loses, in fact, no time what- ever in coming to the point. The present note was no exception to this rule. Lulloo, having apparently lost her heart to me, the previous day in the Court House, wished to draw my attention to that fact in the most emphatic manner. I read and re-read it several times; for it was in Hindustani, both substance and character, and there- fore good practice, for one cannot be too well versed in this sort of literature. Then I tore it in the tiniest fragments and gave them to the now stirring morning breeze and went inside to breakfast. A week passed and I saw nothing of Lulloo, but the notes continued and I found one each morning stuck in the banana leaf. Some reproached me for not having answered the former ones, and some merely begged me to give her some sign of my favour. At the end of the week the notes ceased, and I thought my absolutely ignoring of them had had the desired effect. That evening, however, just as I was leaving the Court, Lulloo sprang up, apparently from nowhere, and stood in front of me. I was quite astonished at the change in the child since I had last seen her, with matted hair, thin cheeks and ragged dirty clothes in the court-room. Now she was clean, plump and radiant, with a brand-new bolster-case petticoat of green silk and a white muslin zouave. 59 Anna Lombard 'Sahib, sahib,' she said joyfully. 'Look at me!' ' Where did you get all these fine clothes ? ' I asked, smiling. 'I buy them. They are all mine. I make much money now by my profession.' ' What is it ? ' I pursued, watching the sun strike the purple lights in her hair. 'Snake charming. All snakes know me. I can charm them all. They never hurt Lulloo. Would the sahib like to see my snakes?' she added in- sinuatingly, coming a little nearer me and throwing back her head at an angle, where her curled lips and arching brows looked most beautiful. ' Shall I come this evening with my snakes and show the sahib?' she repeated. Native like, there was not a word about the notes nor any allusion now to those deeper feelings that had been breathed in them. What is it that some- times sways us to grant, sometimes to refuse, a request that we ourselves have no personal interest in ? I see now that I should have refused this one, but weakness, I suppose, took hold of me and I consented. 'Very good, Lulloo, come up at eight o'clock this evening and bring your snakes. I have some friends coming. You shall show all you do,' and then I got into my carriage and drove away. Lulloo, the instant her request was granted, had disappeared. I had invited four of the fellows to come and dine with me that evening, and it struck me the snake charming would be a good thing to amuse them with afterwards, and 60 Anna Lombard I myself would not be sorry to see the thing done genuinely and watch it at close range. So eight o'clock that evening found myself, the doctor, Knight, Hunter and Jones, seated in a semi- circle facing the verandah, smoking, sipping iced brandies and waiting for Lulloo. With customary unpunctuality, our watches marked the quarter past before Lulloo came on to the verandah and appeared before us, followed by an old wizened Burman who was carrying a wooden box bound with brass that seemed to sway with a movement of its own as he carried it. I saw the men glance at each other with surprise as the girl with her easy steps and Bacchus- like face came into the light. She might have served perfectly for the model of any of those beautiful antiques of the youthful Bacchus. She salaamed composedly to us all, and then sat down, crouching on her heels, opened a small square door in the hutch- like box and gave a shrill whistle ; almost instantly the circular space around her was alive with snakes of all sizes and colours, they came tumbling through the small opening, one over the other, and went writh- ing, wriggling and gliding in all directions over the matting. ' I say,' whispered Knight, in my ear, moving un- easily in his chair. ' This is too bad ; it's like a fellow having D. T. without deserving it, you know.' ' Perhaps you do deserve it,' I retorted, for Knight was a consumer of many pegs. ' Now, I don't mind watch- ing them in the least.' Lulloo was catching up her snakes one by one and squeezing their throats till 61 Anna Lombard their mouths opened, so that we could all see that they were fully fanged. There were more snakes there than I knew the names of, but I recognised two fair-sized rattlers and a small python. She lifted the python with some little exertion of strength, for he was fat and heavy, and tied him round her waist as a girdle. Then she took the two rattlers by their necks, one in each hand and knocked their heads together. They spit and hissed violently. Then she laid one down and slapped the other with her free hand, moving with incredible swiftness to avoid the darting tongue. Then, when the poor beast was worked up into a thorough loss of his temper, she brought out of her zouave a little square tablet of wood, and put it before his jaws. He struck at it viciously and we plainly saw when she drew it away the yellow drops of venom his poison-fangs had left on it. ' I say I don't half like this,' muttered Jones. ' It's just playing with death. Suppose the brute catches her hand instead of the board, she'd be dead in half an hour.' ' He who harbours love in his heart is in more danger than if he held a hundred snakes in his bosom,' crooned Lulloo, as if she had understood or divined what he was saying, and she threw an eloquent glance in my direction that made all the men laugh and nudge each other. ' I say ; you've been going it with this girl ; must have. You'll get into trouble,' remarked the doctor, and Knight added, 'Seems awfully stuck on him; I imagine we're ex- pected to leave early.' 62 Anna Lombard I felt myself flush up with annoyance, but said nothing, and the clematis-crowned head in front of us bent low over the snakes as the girl twined the reptiles round her neck, letting a bunch of squirming heads hang down like a pendant or locket between her firm, round breasts. She had knocked both the rattlers about and let them each strike at the wood tablet several times. 'Now they are tired,' she said. ' See,' and indeed both snakes lay in a heap on the matting apparently quite exhausted. 'You cruel little beast,' said Knight in Hindustani, chaffingly shaking his finger at her. The girl laughed, and picking up one of the dormant rattlers by the middle of the body, flung it full in his face. I have seldom seen a man so abjectly frightened. He turned livid and sprang to his feet, the snake slipped down between his legs and wriggled back towards its mistress. I frowned angrily at Lulloo. 'How dare you, you rude, ill-bred little girl; I am sorry I had you to my house.' The effect of my words on Lulloo was remarkable. She stared at me with wide-open eyes for a moment, sitting back on her heels. Then she burst out crying and flung herself forward, clasping my feet and murmur- ing incoherent words of contrition. Knight sat down again with a forced smile, but he had not altogether recovered his composure. It is not pleasant to have a full-sized rattler flung suddenly in your face, even though it is exhausted. The other men looked on, amused. Lulloo's attitude to me interested them a good deal more, practically, 63 Anna Lombard than her snake charming. I drew my feet away and said, ' You should apologise to my friend, not to me.' Lulloo looked up and gazed resentfully at Knight out of her great star-like, tear-filled eyes, then glanced back at me and finally crept towards Knight, clasped his feet, muttered some apology, and drawing from the bosom of her zouave a tiny long vial of attar of roses, dropped some of it on them. The idea of well-blacked and polished London-manufactured boots being anointed with attar of roses amused the men ; they leaned back in their long chairs and laughed at the scene till the cane creaked. Knight, looking uncomfortable, tucked his feet under his chair, and Jones leant forward, spread- ing out his handkerchief. ' Here, little girl, put some on this.' Lulloo again looked questioningly at me. It was plain she would obey me to any limit, but she had no particular liking for my friends. They were laughing at her and making fun of her, and a native, like an animal, does not forgive this. I nodded gravely, and she accordingly dropped some of the priceless stuff on the outspread handkerchief. Jones covered his face with it. ' Phew, that's nice. I say, how these snakes smell ! Have you noticed it ? They are worse than a tank full of muggers. Come on, you fellows. I think we had better be going.' 'Have you anything else to show us?' I asked Lulloo. 'See me as the snake girl,' she said, and picking up 64 Anna Lombard the smaller snakes, she twisted them together into a wreath and put them on her head ; they hissed a little, but did not attempt to untwine ; the next larger in size she knotted into a collarette and slipped round her throat ; the large python formed her waist belt, smaller snakes her anklets, and smaller ones yet wriggled in twisting rings along her arms from shoulders to wrists. Then she stood upright before us, looking like some wonder- ful little Indian god, her whole body a mass of writhing, twisting snakes, and her perfect, Bacchus-like face look- ing out at us from under her garland of hissing, moving heads and darting forked tongues. She stood still for a second, then gave a shrill whistle, and as if by magic all the snakes dropped from her ; rapidly untwining and un- coiling, they glided down over her face, breasts and body, and in a moment they were all writhing about the floor at her feet again. She sat down and began unceremoniously packing them back in their box. ' Come and have some pegs before you go,' I suggested, and took the men over to the sideboard. They drank them with much appreciation, especially Knight, who declared he had an uncanny feeling yet in his face where the rattler had hit him, and then, with a good deal of laughter and chaff upon my having refused legitimate Burmese marriage ties and then succumbed to the wiles of a snake charmer, they departed, and I walked back to the verandah where Lulloo was sitting. She ordered the old Burman to pick up the box and retire, which he did, and then she and I were left alone. She seemed in no way disposed to hurry, but came E 6$ Anna Lombard closer to me and looked up in my face with parted lips and half-shut eyes. 'Well,' I said, putting my hand in my pocket, 'how much is it to be ? ' ' Let there be no price. Am I not the slave of the sahib ? But let me stay this one night in the house of the sahib.' Then I saw my folly in accepting the snake entertain ment at all. ' I have told you before, Lulloo, it cannot be,' I re- turned, drawing from my pocket enough to amply repay her, and trying to force the money into her hand. ' Go home, my child, and find happiness amongst your own people. I am here but for a time. If I loved you to-day, I must break your heart to-morrow. Go to your own people and forget me.' Lulloo let the money fall and scatter on the floor, as she slipped to her knees and clasped mine, putting both arms round them and commencing to sob pitifully. I ask but to remain this night. Am I then so dis- tasteful to the sahib ? ' Now, to argue with a native is worse than useless ; it does nothing but confirm him in his own view. I b*.nt over her and took hold of her shoulders to raise her up. The skin underneath the thin muslin was soft like satin, and the warmth and electricity of it ran into my palms. But I think the only feeling stirred in me was a rush of wild longing for Anna, and as I raised my head, my eyes went straight over to the picture of her, fair and smiling, looking out at me from the darkness. Lulloo was only a child and had the strength of a child. I 66 Anna Lombard raised her up and almost carried her to the high lattice door, put her outside in silence and closed and locked the door between us. She stared at me for a minute through the yellow lattice woodwork, and then fled away into the darkness with one sobbing cry ' Sahib ! Sahib ! ' It came back to me over the magnolia jungle of the compound in a faint wail and then there was stillness. I went inside and upstairs and threw myself on my bed, but I could not sleep. I felt nervous, excited, supremely dissatisfied with myself without exactly knowing why, and troubled about the girl and her genuine distress. I tossed about till morning, and got up with shaking muscles and aching head. I went round to the Club after breakfast and found there my four companions of last night finishing their coffee and perusing some aged papers. They looked up as I entered and eyed me all over with a sort of sympathetic curiosity that I found very obnoxious. ' You look tired this morning,' observed the doctor, and at this remark a sly smile went round the circle. ' Yes, I got no sleep at all,' I returned, yawning and dropping into a chair. This statement was the signal for a fire of covert and idiotic chaff and innuendo. I listened to it all in silence, balancing a paper-cutter in my fingers and looking through the window. Then, when they had quite ex- hausted their stock of wit and were quiet, I said crossly, ' If you think that girl stayed at my place all night, you're mistaken. She left five minutes after you did.' There was silence in the room. 67 Anna Lombard Something in my look, voice or manner convinced them, I suppose, that I was speaking the truth, for the doctor, after laying down his paper on his knee and look- ing at me over it in silence for quite two minutes, said slowly, ' Ethridge, you'll come to a bad end. You're intem- perate, and intemperance in India no constitution can stand.' 'What on earth are you driving at now?' I asked more crossly still, for I did feel excessively irritable, and, so to speak, unnerved that morning. I wheeled my chair round on its hind legs and stared at him sulkily. 1 I'm not intemperate.' ' Yes, you are,' persisted the doctor, stolidly ; ' you are intemperately virtuous. And it won't do. You won't even have the consolation of that girl of yours weeping over your grave. She won't come down to Burmah to do it. You drive things to extremes, and one can't stand extremes here. You are extremely moderate, and it won't pay. You should be moderately moderate. The moderate man is the only one who lives here. Moderately bad, moderately good, drinks moderately, eats moderately and is moderately virtuous. A man is made apparently for alternate virtue and vice, and this alternation suits his health better than a strict adherence to either. That theory has been threshed out in a novel called The Woman Who Did Not. I would advise you to read it.' 'I think you are talking a damned lot of rot,' I said angrily, and got up and walked out of the Club-house. But in my heart I knew the doctor was right with 68 Anna Lombard limitations. I went as usual to the Court House and then back at noon to my bungalow. I had no heart for billiards or cards or any of the Club diversions. I had hardly got inside my compound gates when a wild figure ran towards me, tearing its yellow tunic and throwing handfuls of dust against its breast. ' My child, sahib, my child, my only child ! Give me back my child,' and then, as it grovelled in the dust at my feet, I recognised Jhuldoo, the old Burman, father of Lulloo. 'I haven't got your child,' I said wearily, for my head was aching, my eyes swollen and life in general was a burden. 'No, sahib, she is dead, dead, hanged in the old stable by the bridge that spans the river, and Jhuldoo is childless, childless,' and he rocked himself backwards and forwards, sitting in the narrow pathway that ran up to the house. I stood motionless, paralysed by his words, and felt myself grow cold in the blighting heat of the full noon- tide sun. Lulloo dead ! hanged ! hanged herself, doubt- less, after her flight from me into the darkness. And so / had added one more to the terrible list of Hindu suicides ! I stood still trying to realise it. The banana tree drooped over us, and the figure in the dust went on swaying and rocking itself and moaning like a wounded animal. 1 What did the sahib do that she should end her life in the stable by the bridge that spans the river? What did the sahib do?' he moaned over and over again, yet without daring to demand or even waiting or seem- ing to expect an answer. 69 Anna Lombard 'I don't know,' I said mechanically at last. 'Come up to the verandah, Jhuldoo; I cannot stand here. Come up and tell me about her.' I walked forward with a sick, sinking heart, and Jhuldoo got up and shambled after me. When we reached the shade of the verandah, he sank down and recommenced his crooning and weeping. I dropped into a chair and gazed blankly into the sunlight. Dead ! choked ! hanged ! with a rope round that pretty, soft, round throat, and that beautiful child's face swollen and livid and distorted. Poor pretty little child, what an end ! and I had brought her to it. 'The sahib could have gone to the city, he could have gone to the bazaar. He could have had a hun- dred wives. He need not have taken Jhuldoo's only child. Jhuldoo is a poor man, poor man, poor man.' The ' poor man, poor man ' rose to a piercing wail and went through the compound and distracted me. 'Jhuldoo,' I said passionately, 'I have done nothing to your daughter, nothing. I am not responsible for her death. She came here and begged me to use her as my toy and my plaything for an hour or so, and I would not. I bade her go back to you. She was here in my house last evening when I and my friends were here, and showed her snake charming. She left here at the hour of ten, unharmed I know nothing more of her than that. I give you the white man's truth.' The old Burman lifted his head and scanned my face with his heavy, reddened eyes. 'How should I not believe the sahib?' he said at length ; ' I know that his word is truth ; nevertheless she 70 Anna Lombard has hanged herself in the stable by the bridge that spans the river, and Jhuldoo is childless and a poor man, a poor man.' He rocked and sobbed again, and I sat still, feeling very cold and sick-hearted. 'It was an evil day when she first saw the sahib's face in the Court House. Yet do I not blame the sahib. He discouraged her, as I well know. Yet it is hard to remain a widow at eleven.' Then he wept afresh. Much has been said about the avarice and greed of the native, but, whether my experience of them has been singularly happy or not, I do not know, I have always found them rather indifferent to money cer- tainly when any of their deeper emotions have been stirred. Now, when I offered the old Burman money, that being, it seemed to me, the only thing I could do, not in any way as consolation for his daughter's loss, but simply to aid in the expenses of her funeral, he put it aside and would not look at it. Although I think he was convinced that I had given him an absolutely truthful version of the matter, he still hated me for the loss I had unwittingly brought upon him, and he would not touch my money, and when he rose to leave, he shook the dust of my verandah from his clothes and shoes with something very like a curse. I watched him shamble away down the sandy path of the compound a queer, bent, twisted figure with his bluish-black skin contrasting oddly with the crude yellow of his ragged garments and then with a hot mist in my eyes I turned into my empty bungalow. It seemed very quiet, awfully quiet, and something crackled under my feet as I passed 7i Anna Lombard from the verandah. I turned to look what it was and saw a little dried and withered garland of white clematis. After this incident, life grew a good deal more in- tolerable to me. The thought of her death depressed and haunted me, and I felt a sort of distaste to black faces, which, considering they were all round me they and nothing else was bad. I felt an aversion for the Court House some other of these narrow-petticoated maidens might hang herself on my account and her father come and sit on my doorstep and reproach me. The weather grew steadily hotter and hotter as we neared the rainy season, and Anna's letters grew less and less frequent. I was evidently and quite naturally slipping out of her existence, slipping out of her thoughts and memory. I had gone down to Burmah that is, I was virtually dead and buried and was now fast being forgotten. And I had only been here not quite one year. At the end of five ! I looked forward with dismay, and I began to feel more and more sympathy with Burke, who had blown his brains out in that tepid stillness of the bungalow, which was beginning to weigh more and more upon me each night. The time seemed to pass slower and slower, so that sometimes I caught myself wondering if it meant to stop altogether and keep me anchored for ever and evei in Lihuli. A day seemed to stretch and stretch out its long, hot, elastic hours, and a week, to look back upon when it had passed, seemed like a year. ' Take a wife and settle down ' yes, that was doubtless one way to kill the oppressive silence and keep a rational head on one's shoulders. Knight had done so and 72 Anna Lombard certainly seemed comfortable enough. He was growing portly, and but for a little trouble with his liver kept his health wonderfully. When I went round to see him in the evening, I used to find him generally smoking peacefully in his dining-room with his wife and family crawling about on the floor round his chair. He had three little round, fat, toddling bundles of babies, the youngest of whom was as white as its father. 'But, Knight, what will you do with all these when your term is up, and you have to leave ? ' I asked him one evening when I came upon the scene of happy domesticity. 'Oh, well, she,' with an airy wave of his hand, 'will go back to her own people, you know, with the kids.' 'But what about that little one, it's a girl, isn't it? and as white as we are. You won't want her to go into the bazaar, surely? and lead a dog's life among these blacks your own daughter with your blood in her veins. It's horrible ! ' 'You're quite right, perfectly right, my dear fellow; it is a horrible thought, and that's why I never encourage it. I never think about disagreeable things. What's the use?' I gazed at him, fat, rubicund, cheerful and comfort- able, as he leant back in his chair, then at the pretty, child-like being who sat on her heels under the table, weaving a garland of clematis and crooning to herself, and then at the three little creatures, tumbling round her, that he had seen fit, for his 73 Anna Lombard own amusement, to bring into the world and to such a miserable heritage. 'How different people are,' I murmured, more to myself than to him. 'To me all love any sort of tie of that kind means responsibility.' 'Does it?' returned Knight, sleepily. 'To me it only means amusement.' There was silence for a minute or two, then he added, 'I'm afraid you will go off your head, like Burke, with all your responsibilities and serious notions. I suppose that's why you didn't have anything to do with the little snake girl?' ' Principally,' I answered. ' Suppose I had consented and at the end of my term what then?' Knight raised his eyebrows. ' Why, you would have been dead sick and tired of her probably long before that.' ' And what about her feelings ? ' 'You've no need to think about them.' 'That depends on how you are made.' 'Exactly; and you are made all wrong for your own comfort,' which was true in the main. I stayed and had their after-dinner coffee with them, a cup of which the little Burmese hostess brought to my side and then sang us a song in her soft, lisping voice to her oblong guitar, while the babies rolled about contentedly on the matting. Burmese babies never cry. They only laugh and croon, and sprawl about and grow fat. It was a soft, heavy night, hot, so that we dripped where we sat in the thinnest 74 Anna Lombard of duck suits, but beautiful with the fireflies whirl- ing in burning circles through the dark and the air laden with the scent of the white swamp lilies, and a great mellow, red-gold moon climbing slowly up over the misty green of the rice fields. As I walked homeward I noticed a pale, tearful ring round it and I thought: the rains are at hand. Next day the heat beat on the walls of the bungalow and came up from the cracked, thirsty earth like the glare of a furnace. Calling round early at the Club for possible letters which I did not find I learned that three of the members were very ill with fever and the doctor himself down with dysentery. I went on to the Court House, and the only incident of the burning, weary hours was that one of the native witnesses for the prosecution in a case was seized with heat apoplexy and dropped dead on the floor in the course of his testimony. This simplified the case for the defence, and I drove home early. Entering the bungalow felt like walking into a limekiln, and eating was an impossibility. After a pretence of taking some dinner I went out, involun- tarily seeking for cooler, fresher air outside. But there was little difference, except that outside one had to forego the slight relief the punkah gave. There was no breeze, not the faintest breath stirred the crystal, gilt air. The sky was calm, there was silence every- where silence and suffocating heat. The trees seemed holding themselves rigid, not a leaf even trembled on them, there was no hum of insects, no rustle of a lizard even in the parched and withered 75 Anna Lombard grass. The earth seemed waiting, tensely expectant, and there was a universal hush as it awaited the coming of the rains. I strolled along very slowly, for each movement meant a fresh burst of drenching sweat pouring down one's skin, and the quiet of expectancy all round one got into my own blood and made me move silently and breathe lightly, so as not to disturb the omnipresent stillness. The sky above me was pale, pure, trans- parent and gleaming, like the inside of an oyster shell. The air seemed like liquid gold to look at, and like a best Whitney blanket to breathe. The tawny moss beneath my feet was so dry it cracked with a little hoarse whisper as I trod on it. I went on with my head down, thinking of Anna and noticing in a vague way how the heat was increas- ing in intensity each moment, just as if I were walking steadily towards a furnace. At last even movement, however slow, seemed overburdening fatigue. I stopped and looked up and round me. The sky had changed a little. I was to witness the thunder and lightning that would usher in the rains. Now, a thunder-storm with black clouds and night - like sky, with forks of lightning rending and splitting the dark curtain that seems drawn between earth and heaven, is an ordinary sight, one common to all men's experience, and that is impressive enough. But here was a roseate sky, luminous and trans- parent as a rose-leaf held before a flame, of itself exceedingly beautiful and clear, save for one enormous cloud that, rising almost from the earth, so low it 76 Anna Lombard seemed, towered into the sky and overspread all the centre, white as the purest snow, delicate, soft and filmy, while all round, to the west and east and north and south, the glorious bell of the sky hung unruffled and glowing with a few shining silver planets showing white in the translucent green and gold, and rose near the horizon. I stood gazing up at the gigantic mass of white vapour, piled up like tossed and drifted snow and apparently hanging so close over me that it almost seemed, by stretching my hands upwards, I could bury them in its soft, fleecy masses. Then, as I watched it, it suddenly changed to gold, light seemed poured forth from it and through it until the whole was one dazzling, burnished, blinding mass of gold towering to the centre of the perfect evening sky. Then suddenly from behind it there came a terrific crash, a splitting, rending roar of thunder like the bursting of a thousand cannon at my side, and the lightning, great, savage, silver forks of it, was thrown out from behind tha glowing golden mass, as if by an unseen hand, plough- ing up furiously the pearl and rose of the tranquil sky. If ever one could believe one was witnessing the wrath of the Immortal Gods, if ever it might seem to a poor ordinary mortal that he was warned to stand aside while the flashing car of Zeus swept upward through the sky, that moment of blinding glory was the time. I flung myself backward on the baked and glowing moss, and leaning upon my elbow I gazed upwards and let my brain interpret the scene in any fanciful way it would. Onward and upward swept 77 Anna Lombard that magnificent cloud of gold. Only for a few seconds had the charioteer of Zeus allowed the wheels of the chariot to graze, as it were, the surface of the earth, but for that moment earth's face had been transfigured. Everything had caught a golden flame, reflecting the celestial fire. Onward now through the clear blue expanse rolled the cloud, and to my eyes it almost assumed the form of a chariot. It seemed really as if Zeus himself was sitting within, his majesty veiled by that whirling nimbus of gold above it, and as if the lightning, which kept falling from it in splitting, jagged rays on every side, were bolts scattered by his hand, and the long, low, threatening roll of thunder, that passed resounding through the listening air, was the thunder of his wheels. I lay and watched and waited. There was no other sound, a tense, breathless, expectant silence was all round me, there was nothing to be seen above but the measureless, glorious track of infinite blue, and the tender green and lambent rose and gold of the west. In this direction the cloud was travelling rapidly, shedding its forked lightning all the way, farther and farther, higher and higher, and the long, low rumbling of the chariot wheels grew fainter and fainter. At last the light in the west grew of an almost intolerable brightness, and before my straining eyes it seemed to open suddenly with light, and into an effulgence that was more than vision could bear passed the chariot of cloud. It was gone ; nothing but a brazen shield of purest light hung in the west. Was it the outside of golden gates that had opened to the coming of Zeus and swung to behind 78 Anna Lombard the Immortal One? There was no lightning now. I listened. There was not the faintest echo of thunder. Not a sound. The sky was once more exquisitely serene, and Nature was waiting silent as before. As yet not one drop of rain had fallen. I rose and walked slowly homeward ; I was convinced the rains would come in a few hours. What had I witnessed just the inaugural thunder-storm, or a sign from the gods to the parched and patient air? I laughed a little, but in a hushed way ; the awful silence that seemed hanging everywhere like a suspended curtain in the pellucid air it seemed profanity to break. Well, if it were but a thunder-storm, it was certainly unique and most beautiful. Wearied out with the intense heat and utterly ex- hausted, I went to bed early that night, leaving every slat in the closed jilmils turned open, and the punkah swinging over me with its musical squeak. Before I went to sleep I noticed the extraordinary amount of animal life that had taken up quarters with me hundreds of the white, transparent lizards that for want of knowledge of the biological name I call glass bodies, since every organ in their sinuous little bodies is visible through their transparent skin, scampered about over my walls and ceiling, devouring the green and gold flies that marched in in perfect armies through every crevice and crack ; dozens of solemn, heavy-bodied spiders too came waddling in from the garden and verandahs, and advanced, clicking their long legs on the matting ; long ribands of black tree ants journeyed steadily over the floor in the direction of my bath- 79 Anna Lombard room, while during the process of undressing I came across no less than six snakes of a harmless kind encased in my slippers, night-shirt and other suitable places. I was too weary to attempt a useless war against my thousands of small invaders. Doubtless a message of the approaching death from the skies had been conveyed to them also and they sought asylum with me. So beyond picking up, by means of a tumbler and a bit of paper, a portly and venomous- looking scorpion, that was making its way up to my bed, and throwing him through the window, I made no attempt to defend myself, but flung myself on the charpoy and was mercifully soon asleep. It may have been midnight or later, at any rate, it was pitch dark when I was again awakened. The punkah had ceased. The heat was so intense that I sprang up, involuntarily fancying, for the moment, someone was trying to smother me with pillow or blanket. But no. It was only the intolerable pressure of the thick, suffocating air. All round me there was a roar in the air like the roar of a flood, and the noise of the rain beating on the roof was like shrapnel firing. I sat up for a moment trying to get my breath. There seemed no air to breathe. It had all become, apparently, pea soup. Then I was startled by the drip, drip of water falling with a tinkle into the matting, and I suddenly put out my hand and found my sheets and pillow were sodden wet. I struck a light and put it to the candle. The wick flared up, and showed me my room. Room ! great Heavens ! it was more like an unfinished aquarium. The roof was leaking in a 80 Anna Lombard dozen or more places, one being directly over my bed, and the animal inmates were scurrying about in the greatest alarm on discovering the frail nature of their shelter. Snakes wriggled uneasily over the floor, the ants came trooping back from the bathroom, the spiders raced desperately up the curtains, and the lizards ran backwards and forwards over the dripping ceiling, sneezing. I got up, kicked aside the snakes, and put on my boots. Then I dragged my bed across the floor to a part of the room above which the ceiling appeared to be dry. The heat was inconceivable ; the exertion of moving the bed made the sweat pour from me, and I sat down gasping with that awful sense of there being nothing to breathe, nothing such as we are accustomed to think of, only this horrible thick mixture that makes one feel one is sinking in quicksand. In that moment, as I sat dripping with perspiration, with limbs that seemed of cotton wool, and with mouth hanging open, gasping, I thought of the unhappy fish I had seen, when with anglers, lying straining and heaving on the dry rocks and I was glad I had never fished. When I had recovered a little, I walked round the room rescuing my most precious possessions books, papers and clothes from the persistent drip, drip that was coming now from every part of the ceiling. As soon as I had done this, I noticed the rain was leaking through the dry corner of the ceiling and my bed was again being dripped upon. I moved it again to shelter and lay down on it. I dozed after a little while, with the roar of the rain in my ears, and I woke again with water, warm, F 81 Anna Lombard tepid water, splashing on my face. I rose again and dragged my bed after me, but only gained a few minutes' respite ; the roof seemed giving way all over, and the few weary hours that remained of darkness I spent chasing my bed round the room and puddling after it in dripping, steaming pyjamas. At the first light I put on a holland suit and went downstairs. The staircase had been transformed into a dashing waterfall. The rain had poured into the verandah rooms upstairs, and rushed out again on to the landings in the house, and from there found its way in a whirling, eddying torrent down the staircase. I picked my way down it, and entered my dining-room to feel the carpet under my feet give like a sponge and go squelch, squelch at each step. On the table I saw no signs of my fine white damask cloth that usually adorned it. All over for one half inch deep lay a mass of struggling, dying ants and fallen ants' wings. Every cup and saucer was full of them, and the bread and butter invisible beneath piles of filmy wings. These creatures, indued with wings for a short time at this season and driven in by the rain outside, enter the room in flying swarms. Their wings drop from them, they shed them everywhere table, floor, sideboard alike are covered while their struggling bodies fall, either to die at once, or crawl away reduced to their ordinary means of locomotion again. I sighed, gazing at this repulsive breakfast table, and then looked through the verandahs. Long, bright, diagonal lines from sky to earth everywhere, so close and merged together that they made a wall between vision and landscape and 82 Anna Lombard a white mist, thick as smoke, rising upward from the steaming, thirsty, drinking earth. I called my servant and breakfasted as well as I could upon ants' bodies and wings flavoured with coffee, and ants spread upon bread and butter, and then ordered my carriage and drove down to the office, with the rain lashing the top of the buggy, and the running water in the road over the axles of the dragging wheels. It rained for one whole month without intermission, and no one can tell what I suffered during that space of time. Every road became first a running stream and then a sort of quicksand, in which foot or horse's hoof or carriage wheel sank hopelessly, so that exercise without became an impossibility, and one was confined to the lifeless, sultry air within the silent bungalow. Existence became a cruel blank, and it so happened that then, when I would have prized them so unspeak- ably, all my letters failed me, and day after day passed and post after post came in, and not a line came to me from that dear outer world, where people were living, any more than news comes to the inmates of the grassy graves. And on the last night of the month I came home, as I remember, from a vain attempt at a walk in the torrents of lukewarm rain, that fell persistently in long straight lines from sky to earth, deadening everything, shutting out sight of everything but itself, shutting out sound of everything but itself. The Court House had been closed a week, owing to the amount of prevailing sickness, so that exercising ground as it were for the thoughts, speech and feelings had 83 Anna Lombard been shut up. I had not spoken one word beyond orders to my servants for the last fortnight. The Club was closed, nearly all the members were sick or had managed on one pretext or other to get away for a little leave. I entered my bungalow that evening, knowing there was nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to see, no one to speak to. I was completely alone in this blank, tepid silence, shut in upon myself on every side by walls of falling rain. I went through the rooms, desperately looking at all the books; I had read them all, and the newspapers all exhausted long ago. Oh, how I longed for a letter how priceless one would have been to me then; it would have seemed like a hand stretched out to me from the real, living world, that was somewhere far off away in the distance. Where was I? I seemed out of the world. Dead, buried and forgotten. I stood still in the centre of my dining-room, staring blankly before me, and listening to the eternal low wish, wish of the water falling on the long since soddened earth. 'Poor Burke, poor Burke,' I thought. 'These were just such moments as he had.' Then I thought I saw Burke himself advance from one of the dark corners, and he seemed to beckon to me and say, ' Come on, come on ; one little shot in the temple does it, and, after all, you are buried, and you may as well be dead.' Then I sat down and hid my face on the table with a smothered groan. I am going mad ! I thought, I certainly am. Oh I God, save me from that. Deliver 84 Anna Lombard me from this place ! Then I sat still and listened to the rain again. It was very quiet, with no sound at all but this and the dull response of the long, rank grass to it. Just exactly as it must sound to the corpses in the graveyard, I thought to myself. Then I wondered why solitude should have such a terrible, disorganising and demoralising effect on the human brain, and I found myself murmuring over and over again, 'They had to destroy Millbank and the solitary confinement system they pulled it down for the same reason. All the prisoners went mad, yes, they went mad ! and they were only confined a fortnight at a time.' And the rain fell outside unceasingly and the hours crept by silently. That night I took a large dose of chloral, pouring it out with an unsparing hand. I would run the risk of sleeping for ever rather than remain awake that night. The next morning there were really letters for me, several letters, and though they were all in long en- velopes and looked horribly business like, I seized upon them as a drowning man upon a life-belt. They were life-belts to me, drowning in this dead sea of solitude and silence, life-belts flung, as it were, from that huge comfortable liner, the World, full of lights and life and companionship, standing far off from me. How I tore open the tough blue envelopes ! I was still really then alive, a human being to be reckoned with. Positively, last night, it seemed as if six feet of good churchyard soil was pressing above my breast. I commenced to read the letters through, and half an hour later I was walking round the room with two or three sheets of blue paper clutched in my hand 5 Anna Lombard and telling myself 'it was impossible,' ' incredible,' the chloral of the night before had affected my brain and I was going cranky like Burke. For one letter informed me curtly but those words seemed to me the sweetest that had ever been written that ' various changes necessitated my immediate recall to Kalatu,' and the other with equal brevity that, by the will of my late cousin, deceased, I was the master of an estate worth nearly two hundred thousand pounds. The liner had indeed thrown out, not only life-belts, but a life-line and was rapidly hauling me on board ! And I felt exactly that sensation. When I grew a little calmer and had read the letters again and assured myself that the words were really written there in good black ink, I took up my own pen and wrote off at once to Anna. Not one second would I delay now that I was free to speak. Her phrase in her very first letter : ' Why didn't you wake me ? ' came before my eyes and en- couraged me, and I wrote all that she should have heard then. I told her my own news, and wound up by saying I should start for Kalatu at once, and that she was not to answer me till my arrival there, when I would, the very first evening, come to see her. Then I began to walk up and down my room, trying not to feel too glad about it all. Had I been a Greek, I should have certainly seen in this unexpected and unusual good fortune the forewarning of some dire calamity, for no mortal is allowed to be equally happy with the gods for long ; but I was only a happy-go- lucky, unsuperstitious Briton, and I did not feel the least uneasiness. H Anna Lombard The next few days, my departure from Lihuli, rain- soaked and steaming, wrapped in a white mist, the long hot journey north, the arrival and the first sight of Kalatu's palms and sparkling sapphire line of sea beyond the desert, is all lost in a bright haze of pleasure, the clearest point being, when tired and dusty and travel-stained, I was back in my old room in the old bungalow on the Kutcherry road, with Anna's housetops just visible across the palms of the inter- vening compounds. I changed my clothes hastily, a perfect fever of joy, hope, expectation and nervous pleasure throbbing in my veins. Then I came down the steps of the bungalow in the glow of the evening and flung myself into the carriage and drove to the Lombards. As I entered the compound, the sky flamed up with orange and saffron light, the broad meidan on every side rolled away like a sea of fire. As the wheels ground on the sandy path, Anna herself stepped out on the low stone terrace. My eyes rushed over her in a second. She was the same, untouched and unaltered. There was the same exquisite freshness of the morning in her face. She came forward with a soft, sparkling smile, and the light in her hair. I sprang from the carriage, which drove rapidly to the back of the bungalow, and up the few steps. We stood on the terrace alone, in the orange sunset, with only great, warm, vital, whispering, indulgent Nature round us. I took her outstretched hands, very slim and white and half-lost in the filmy laces of the sleeve, and so drew her closer to me. I was burning, overflowing with the force of my joy, 87 Anna Lombard relief and suppressed passion. Perhaps the electric force of all these passed through my clasp into her and, for the moment, dominated her ; her figure inclined docilely towards me, and she came one little step nearer. My eyes were fixed on her and blazing with the fires within. She raised hers to them and, for an instant, it seemed to me there was something unutter- ably sad in the depths of those passionate, dark blue eyes, but, perhaps, it was only seriousness as she felt a crisis in her life approaching. The light caught the almost feathery tips of the wonderfully long lashes and made the face indescribably soft and touching. The next instant, reading her permission in that first language of the world the looks I had bent forward and kissed the soft sweet lips. Within the next hour the whole station knew that we were engaged. CHAPTER II THE next morning I woke up, I suppose, perhaps the happiest man in India. The bearer, bringing in the morning coffee, found me with my arms crossed behind my head gazing out through the open jilmils to the compound full of the cool glory of an Indian dawn. Anna belonged to me, the one woman between the ends of the earth that I wanted, that was necessary to me, and not that I wanted this hour or day, in a careless gust of animal passion, but the being, the personality that I should want all my life, without whom existence had been empty before and would be empty again, but with whom it was full, complete, rounded out, padded, stuffed, as it were, with Contentment. Lucky Ethridge ! The title seemed justified at last. It was curious how completely Anna fulfilled every detail of my ideal of girlhood. Ideal ! it is a hackneyed word, but it must stand. It represents that which every mind, consciously or unconsciously, possesses, and mine had been stored away in the recesses of my brain almost unknown to myself and yet sufficiently alive to turn me away from all women I had met until I saw Anna. I looked back through all those long rows of women I had known till now, and there was not one that I had felt the faintest impulse to take with me as my travelling companion 89 Anna Lombard down the road of Life. I recollected some very beautiful how beautiful they had been ! What faces rose before me, with their delicate pencilled eyebrows, perfectly modelled noses and rounded chins to match those of statues. And now, Anna was hardly beautiful at all. She was wonderfully fresh, like the dawn in spring, but all that perfection of feature was wanting. Yet those beautiful faces had been like empty masks hung in a bazaar for me. There had been selfish hardness behind some, stupidity behind others, a sordid commonplaceness of thought and mind, or empty frivolity. And beyond all, to me, cleverness was a necessity. Then there had been clever women how clever and brilliant ! but in this I had never found Anna's superior or equal. Never had I known in man or woman any brain like this, so clever, so logical, so gifted, so full of force of intellect, which seems to make itself felt in even the simplest words and actions of the one who possesses it. And then the other clever, great minds I had known, they had all been coupled with intolerable defects, of which hardness of heart and a cruelty in the moral nature were the most common. Anna's hardness and keenness existed in her brain and intellect alone ; it left a heart, the softest, tenderest, most compassionate possible. Then yet there was another class of women women with beauti- ful faces and soft, lovable natures, sweet voices and tender ways like Anna's, and passionate, sympathetic hearts like hers, and to these I had been drawn most of all, but then, on a little acquaintance, how they wearied one ! There was nothing more than this 90 Anna Lombard There was no brain to be a companion to one's own, there was no comprehension of one's deepest thought, nothing to meet one's own idea, and the sweet mild glances from the beautiful eyes at last wearied one, and disappointed one and left one unsatisfied. There was no mentality to rush forward in a passionate ecstasy to meet one's own through these gates to the soul. They were beautiful gates, it is true, but less to a soul than a desert. And Anna seemed to stand before me this morning arrayed in my mental vision just as I would have her. There was the glory of the morning, of sweet life, and youth and colour to charm and lead captive my senses, and give to all my mental adoration of her that last touch of ecstasy that physical passion alone has the power to bestow; there was the tender, loving heart, on which a dying, bleeding soul might rest and forget its wounds, and think that death was sleep, and there was the bright, sparkling intellect, ready and eager to understand, to respond, the one gift that makes man in this brief life equal to the gods. Yes. To me she was perfect. She was all that I wanted, all that I had ever wanted, and she was mine. I got up and dressed. That evening I did not go to dinner, but called afterwards and found the Lombards and some friends all seated outside on the stone verandah. I joined them and was accorded with a smile the chair next Anna. We all chatted together for some time and then the General suggested somebody should sing. 1 Don't let us go inside,' said Anna, gently. ' It is so much cooler here.' 31 Anna Lombard 'Well, Ethridge plays the guitar,' he returned. ' You'll find a guitar just inside the dining-room,' he added, turning to me. ' Fetch it and start some of these young people.' I went obediently and fetched the guitar, resumed my seat, tuned the instrument and then announced I would accompany anyone who would sing. But no one hastened to accept the offer. Then the General made an individual appeal to each in turn. Most of them made excuses, and the young man next Anna drawled out that he did not know anything to sing. When it came to Anna she said, 'I will sing you a little Greek song if you like. I don't seem to remember anything else just at this minute.' There was general acclaim at this, and everybody declared that a Greek song was what they had been most wishing for and indeed almost expecting, and I thought, as I nervously pulled up the string a little higher, ' Good Heavens, what sort of an accompaniment will that want ? ' Anna, as if divining my fears, lent towards me and hummed the tune in my ear. It was a very quaint but simple one, and I caught it and managed to follow her. Then she sang Anacreon's famous ode to the dove. The tune changed in the second verse and had a most catching ring and swing in it as the soft, expressive voice sent out the words on the still, pearly air : Anna Lombard 4 'Avaxptuv //,