"My Munshi is a bottomless well of Western wisdom. He takes anything that Europe can give him—art, literature, science, metaphysics. He absorbs it all, and Heaven only knows what he is going to do with it, or it with him. He swallows it as a juggler swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of assimilating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters—neither will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor life nor death. There's an attitude for you!
"That attitude is my Munshi, and my Munshi is Asia."
He smiled. He had seen Frida in many attitudes, Frida in love with nothing, Frida in love with a person, Frida in love with a thing. Here was Frida in love with an idea. It was just like her. She was seeing Asia from the Asiatic point of view.
"Meanwhile," she went on, "there's a greater gulf fixed between my Munshi and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my 'rickshaw coolie, or my Munshi and me."
He wondered if she meant to remind him that there was a still greater gulf between him and her.
"To-morrow I and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the coolie is merely a photographic freak—his grin is the broadest part of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met you, and your bad puns."
The snapshot was an unflattering likeness of Frida in a 'rickshaw. The foreground was filled by the figure of the grinning coolie. Behind him Frida's face showed dim and small and far-off; she was smiling with the sun in her eyes.
Such as it was he treasured it as his dearest possession. He had been painting pictures all his life, but he had none of Frida.
Silence again. "In the autumn," she had said, "I go down to Bombay." But the autumn passed and there was no news of her. Durant provided himself with an Indian outfit. He was going out to look for her; he was ready to go to the ends of the world to find her. "The day after to-morrow," he said, "I shall start for Bombay."
That night he dreamed of her; or, rather, not of her, but of a coolie who stood before the door of a wayside bungalow, and held in his hands shafts that were not the shafts of a 'rickshaw. And the coolie's face was all one broad grin.