The Pool in the Desert

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

It would make everything possible. It would throw a very different complexion over the idyll. It would turn that interlacing wreath of laurels and of poppies into the strongest bond in the world.

I would simply have nothing to do with it.

But there was no harm I asking Armour to dine with me; I sent the note off by messenger after breakfast and told the steward to put a magnum of Pommery to cool at seven precisely. I had some idea, I suppose, of drinking with Armour to his eternal discomfiture. Then I went to the office with a mind cleared of responsibility and comfortably pervaded with the glow of good intentions.

The moment I saw the young man, punctual and immediate and a little uncomfortable about the cuffs, I regretted not having asked one or two more fellows. It might have spoiled the occasion, but it would have saved the situation. That single glance of my accustomed eye—alas! that it was so well accustomed—revealed him anxious and screwed up, as nervous as a cat, but determined, revealed—how well I knew the signs!—that he had something confidential and important and highly personal to communicate, a matter in which I could, if I only would, be of the greatest possible assistance. From these appearances twenty years had taught me to fly to any burrow, but your dinner-table offers no retreat; you are hoist, so to speak, on your own carving-fork. There are men, of course, and even women, who have scruples about taking advantage of so intimate and unguarded an opportunity, but Armour, I rapidly decided, was not one of these. His sophistication was progressing, but it had not reached that point. He wanted something—I flew instantly to the mad conclusion that he wanted Dora. I did not pause to inquire why he should ask her of me. It had seemed for a long time eminently proper that anybody who wanted Dora should ask her of me. The application was impossible, but applications nearly always were impossible. Nobody knew that better than the Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department.

I squared my shoulders and we got through the soup. It was necessary to apologize for the fish. ‘I suppose one must remember,’ I said, ‘that it has to climb six thousand feet,’ when suddenly he burst out.

‘Sir William Lamb tells me,’ he said, and stopped to swallow some wine, ‘that there is something very good going in Calcutta and that I should ask you to help me to get it. May I?’

So the miserable idea—the happy thought—had occurred to somebody else.

‘Is there?’ I said, with interest and attention.

‘It’s something in the School of Art. A man named Fry has died.’

‘Ah!’ I said, ‘a man named Fry. He, I think was Director of that institution.’ I looked at Armour in the considering, measuring way with which we suggest to candidates for posts that their fitness to fill them is not to be absolutely taken for granted. ‘Fry was a man of fifty-six,’ I said.