CHAPTER XXVII.
"Elfin and human, airy and true;
* * * * * *
Your flowers and thorns you bring with you."
—R.L.S.
But the stumbling-block reasserted itself, and prevailed.
The articles on Tibet were solid affairs, for a solid journal; twelve of them, to be paid for on acceptance; and since Lenox needed the money to clear off debts incurred when furnishing and pay for their trip to Kashmir, he decided to get them written as soon as might be, before the stealthy increase of heat made mental effort a burden. Thus, while the Battery absorbed his mornings, Tibet made unlawful inroads upon his afternoons and evenings; and the narrow margin of leisure thus left to him did not by any means satisfy Quita's healthy appetite for companionship. More than once she attempted remonstrance, pitched in the wrong key, only to be routed by the unanswerable argument that the work must be done, and that there was no other time in which to do it. Finally, in a mood between pride and resignation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned elsewhere for companionship; for interests to fill the long hours which Eldred's devotion to work left empty on her hands.
And here, in a virtue pushed to the confines of vice, in the man's blind unintentional neglect of the woman for whom he would wring the last blood-drop out of his heart, you have the nucleus of more than half the pitiful domestic tragedies of India. It is the crucial moment, the genesis of a hundred unsuspected possibilities, this first divergence of the man and woman, along separate paths of interest. Love may be strong enough to stand the strain, but it will be love debarred from that intimate fusion of heart and brain which alone constitutes true marriage. The other kind is at best a permanent 'friendship recognised by the police':—a tacit confession of failure which this high-hearted, if contrarious couple were by no means minded to arrive at, now or ever. But there is no warning sign-post at the turn of the road; and already their feet were nearing it, without knowledge that its easy gradient slips into the Valley of Dry Bones.
Quita, however, was in a better case than many wives so circumstanced; in that her art was no mere distraction for spare hours, but a living reality; though, unhappily, a capricious one. And now when she would have returned to it in earnest after months of philandering with brush and pencil, it stood aloof, unmanageable as Eldred himself! She was too genuinely an artist to attempt the completion of an imaginative picture against the stream; and for fresh work, fresh mental stimulus was needed. This was not readily to be found in the everyday happenings—the riding, tennis, and gatherings at the Club Gardens—that made up the cold-weather life at Dera Ishmael; and she had little taste for small social or domestic amenities, in themselves. The call of the wild was in her blood. One might as well hope to domesticate a sea-gull as a woman of this type. She managed her household on broad lines, ignoring minor details, and Zyarulla, to his secret relief, found himself still the lynx-eyed custodian of the Sahib's Izzat[1] in houses and compound, still the controller of his petty cash. Quita received his monthly account—plus a minute percentage on each item—in perfect good faith. His visions of possible dismissal evaporated. He heartily commended his master's choice of a wife; and, in moments of expansion over the evening hookah, confided to the Khansamah—a friend and ally in the matter of accounts—his conviction that Mem Sahibs who made pictures were of a different jat to those who played tennis, harried their ayahs, and rode rough-shod over the sensibilities of honest bearers like himself! [Transcriber's note: The "a" in "jat" is an a-macron, Unicode U+0101.]
And, in truth, the Bohemian and cosmopolitan elements in Quita made her airily contemptuous of trifles, of the petty point of view, the 'local' attitude of mind often found in isolated Indian stations, more especially among the women. And setting aside Honor and Frank, the half-dozen officers' wives belonging to the Infantry Regiments were for the most part colourless average types of femininity such as Quita was something too ready to despise.
But the woman element had never played a large part in her life; and it was to the men she turned instinctively for mental companionship; for the larger outlook, the saner grasp of things big and small. She drew them by a natural magnetism; and held them by a talent for comradeship which never degenerated into familiarity or freedom. The four Battery subalterns, headed by Richardson, surrendered at discretion. And there were others also; notably George Rivers, Desmond's subaltern, a promising Lothario with a profile, a tenor voice, and an unimpeachable taste in ties and waistcoats. But Quita gave the preference to Eldred's brother officers; and to their open delight made them free of the house. One or more of them dined with her at least three nights a-week; and her instantaneous gravitation to Max Richardson had already resulted in an informal friendship equally delightful for both.
Lenox accepted these developments without comment, yet not without inward regret. For he craved the restfulness of quiet evenings alone with his wife, after a hard day's work: and indeed saw more than enough of his subalterns—always excepting Dick—on the parade-ground and in the orderly room every morning. Very soon he took to excusing himself early, on these convivial evenings, with the result that before long the old habit of working at night had him in its clutches once again, the charm of it heightened by months of abstinence. For a while he held out against it; but the quiet within and without, the certainty of freedom from interruption, the lucidity of thought that brains of a certain order seem only able to arrive at in the small hours, were powerful advocates for surrender; and little by little habit conquered. He smoked more and slept less; and the quality of his work improved in great strides.
But Quita objected strongly to this barefaced revival of 'bachelor habits' within six months of marriage; and more than once—waking in the small hours to find herself alone—she had slipped on her dressing-gown and boldly invaded his study; a disarming vision enough, her face flushed with sleep, looking absurdly young in a halo of tumbled hair, her eyes alight with tenderness and enjoyment of her own daring. On each occasion she was reproved without severity; established herself in the deck-lounge of old days; fell asleep promptly, and was carried protesting back to bed; but not until she had seen the lamp put out and the detestable litter of papers tidied up for the night.