You would laugh if I told you I knew Peshawar long before I came here. Knew it - walked here, lived. Before there were English in India at all." She broke off. "You won't understand.""Oh, I have had that feeling, too," I said patronizingly. "If one has read very much about a place-""That was not quite what I meant. Never mind. The people, the place - that is the real thing to me. All this is the dream." The sweep of her hand took in not only Winifred and myself, but the general's stately residence, which to blaspheme in Peshawar is rank infidelity.
"By George, I would give thousands to feel that! I can't get out of Europe here. I want to write, Miss Loring," I found myself saying. "I'd done a bit, and then the war came and blew my life to pieces. Now I want to get inside the skin of the East, and Ican't do it. I see it from outside, with a pane of glass between.
No life in it. If you feel as you say, for God's sake be my interpreter!"I really meant what I said. I knew she was a harp that any breeze would sweep into music. I divined that temperament in her and proposed to use it for my own ends. She had and I had not, the power to be a part of all she saw, to feel kindred blood running in her own veins. To the average European the native life of India is scarcely interesting, so far is it removed from all comprehension. To me it was interesting, but I could not tell why. I stood outside and had not the fairy gold to pay for my entrance. Here at all events she could buy her way where I could not. Without cruelty, which honestly was not my besetting sin -especially where women were concerned, the egoist in me felt Iwould use her, would extract the last drop of the enchantment of her knowledge before I went on my way. What more natural than that Vanna or any other woman should minister to my thirst for information? Men are like that. I pretend to be no better than the rest. She pleased my fastidiousness - that fastidiousness which is the only austerity in men not otherwise austere.
"Interpret?" she said, looking at me with clear hazel eyes; "how could I? You were in the native city yesterday. What did you miss?""Everything! I saw masses of colour, light, movement. Brilliantly picturesque people. Children like Asiatic angels. Magnificently scowling ruffians in sheepskin coats. In fact, a movie staged for my benefit. I was afraid they would ring down the curtain before I had had enough. It had no meaning. When I got back to my diggings I tried to put down what I had just seen, and I swear there's more inspiration in the guide-book.""Did you go alone?"
"Yes, I certainly would not go sight-seeing with the Meryon crowd. Tell me what you felt when you saw it first.""I went with Sir John's uncle. He was a great traveler. The colour struck me dumb. It flames - it sings. Think of the grey pinched life in the West! I saw a grave dark potter turning his wheel, while his little girl stood by, glad at our pleasure, her head veiled like a miniature woman, tiny baggy trousers, and a silver nose-stud, like a star, in one delicate nostril. In her thin arms she held a heavy baby in a gilt cap, like a monkey. And the wheel turned and whirled until it seemed to be spinning dreams, thick as motes in the sun. The clay rose in smooth spirals under his hand, and the wheel sang, 'Shall the vessel reprove him who made one to honour and one to dishonour?' And Isaw the potter thumping his wet clay, and the clay, plastic as dream-stuff, shaped swift as light, and the three Fates stood at his shoul- der. Dreams, dreams, and all in the spinning of the wheel, and the rich shadows of the old broken courtyard where he sat. And the wheel stopped and the thread broke, and the little new shapes he had made stood all about him, and he was only a potter in Peshawar."Her voice was like a song. She had utterly forgotten my existence. I did not dislike it at the moment, for I wanted to hear more, and the impersonal is the rarest gift a woman can give a man.
"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 Ibought 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. Iam 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. Ifeel 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."Suddenly she turned again and looked at me half wistfully.
