“Did you buy anything?”
“He gave me a gift—a flawed jar of turquoise blue, faint turquoise green round the lip. He saw I understood. And then I bought a little gold cap and a wooden box of jade-green Kabul grapes. About a rupee, all told. But it was Eastern merchandise, and I was trading from Balsora and Baghdad, and Eleazar’s camels were swaying down from Damascus along the Khyber Pass, and coming in at the great Darwazah, and friends’ eyes met me everywhere. I am profoundly happy here.”
The sinking sun lit an almost ecstatic face.
I envied her more deeply than I had ever envied any one. She had the secret of immortal youth, and I felt old as I looked at her. One might be eighty and share that passionate impersonal joy. Age could not wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of her world’s joys. She had a child’s dewy youth in her eyes.
There are great sunsets at Peshawar, flaming over the plain, dying in melancholy splendour over the dangerous hills. They too were hers, in a sense in which they could never be mine. But what a companion! To my astonishment a wild thought of marriage flashed across me, to be instantly rebuffed with a shrug. Marriage—that one’s wife might talk poetry to one about the East! Absurd! But what was it these people felt and I could not feel? Almost, shut up in the prison of self, I knew what Vanna had felt in her village—a maddening desire to escape, to be a part of the loveliness that lay beyond me. So might a man love a king’s daughter in her hopeless heights.
“It may be very beautiful on the surface,” I said morosely; “but there’s a lot of misery below—hateful, they tell me.”
“Of course. We shall get to work one day. But look at the sunset. It opens like a mysterious flower. I must take Winifred home now.”
“One moment,” I pleaded; “I can only see it through your eyes. I feel it while you speak, and then the good minute goes.”
She laughed.
“And so must I. Come, Winifred. Look, there’s an owl; not like the owls
in the summer dark in England—
“Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping, Wavy in the
dark, lit by one low star.”