He put his hands to his forehead with a tired gesture:
“I’m always trying. But you could do it.”
She said, “Could I?” in great astonishment.
They stood a moment side by side, looking at each other and then as if from a blurred distance she heard his voice again.
“It was said long ago that if any creatures united their psychic forces they could conquer the world, though singly they could do nothing.”
Temple and palms dissolved into coloured mist; they swam away on another wave of dream and vanished. She floated up to the surface of consciousness again, awake, with the pale morning gold streaming in through the east window.
She knew she had dreamed, for a sense of something lost haunted her all day, yet could not remember anything, and things went on in their usual course.
That evening sitting in a corner of the hotel lounge, with the babble of music and talk about her, she had the irresistible impulse to write,—to write something; she did not in the least know what. It was so urgent that she walked quickly to the elevator and so to her sitting room, and there she snatched pen and paper and wrote the beginning of a story of modern life in India, but strangely influenced by and centring about the Temple of Govindhar. As she wrote the name she remembered that she had seen it among the palm trees in its hideous beauty, and now, like a human personality, it forced itself upon her and compelled her to be its mouthpiece.
How it happened she could not in the least tell. Certainly she had travelled, kept her ears and eyes open and learned as much as any woman can do who keeps on the beaten track in the Orient and consorts with her own kind in preference to the natives. The two worlds are very far apart—so far that nothing from below the surface can pass over the well-defined limits. Moreover she was not a learned woman,—Indian thought of the mystic order had never come her way, and Indian history except at the point where it touches European was a closed book. Therefore this story astonished her very much. She read it over breathlessly when it was finished. If she had had that knowledge when she was there how all the mysteries of the temple would have leaped to light—what drama, what strange suspense would have lurked in its monstrous form and colour! The critic in her brain who, standing aside, watched the posturing and mouthing of the characters, told her austerely that the work was good—excellent. But something behind her brain had told her that already. She read it over ardently, lingeringly, with an astonishing sense of ownership yet of doubt. How had it come? And the writing? No longer did the eight thousand of her vocabulary march in dull squadrons, heavy-footed, languid. They sped, ran, flew, with perfect grace, like the dancers of princes. They were beautiful exceedingly. They bore the tale like a garland. She read it again and again, with bewildered delight.
She tapped it out herself on the keys of her Corona and sent it to the editor of a very famous magazine, with the signature of “V. Lydiat.” As I have said, that matter took long thought, prompted from behind by instincts.