"Mr. John's Miss Best"

IT was in one of those wide glittering towns of Southern India, whose bazaars crawl in a sunny stupor about the base of their great gigantic fantastic temple; one of those low-voiced murmuring Hindu cities that are not at all disturbed by the clamor of the railway train and the meagre fringe of bungalow that mark the watchful presence of the “Heaven-born Sahib,”but seem wrapped in a kind of sun-dream, a hot torpid delirium of a dream. We went to see the temple, and by accident we found her, little Miss Helen Best, from Pennsylvania, hidden away within the apathetic indifference of that Indian community. She was safe there, as safe as a woman of an Indian zeñana is safe from the prying eyes of the world beyond her lattice; and if it had not been for my unwitting falsehood, Mr. John would never have allowed us to hunt her down in her retreat. He guarded his little mistress as jealously as if she were his own child, and he reverenced her solitude as only an Indian can reverence the mute inactivity of the ascetic. When all is said, I am sure that he deemed her a holy woman, a kind of priestess.

We were three weary, bewildered tourists struggling against that indefinable sense of an atmosphere, somehow vindictive and oppressive, that drags at the vitality of aliens in India. We caught sight of him as our train drew in to the station, afar down the platform, rising head and shoulders above the brilliant undulating sea of many-colored turbans; and even at a distance he was a sight to refresh us. His turban, his shirt, and his folded skirt were of spotless white muslin; the uncovered parts of his compact, wellformed body shone like burnished bronze; he smiled broadly as he approached, but with an air of control and self-respect.

He was the one person in all the confused throng.

Calmly he gathered us up and deposited us in the shade of the waitingroom. The Colonel took off his topé, wiped an aristocratic gray mustache with a large silk handkerchief, and looked at him over his glasses.

“ Are you Mr. John, the guide? ” he asked. The Colonel seemed somehow less impressive than usual.

“ Yes, sir,” answered the magnificent Indian quietly.

The afternoon sun struck in an un willing, diminished glare through the green straw screens that hung before the doors. The long dining-room table, laid for some thirty imaginary diners, gave the impression of having been laid thus for interminable, timeless days. A servant lay asleep on the floor by the counter, where bottles of “ Rose’s Lime Juice,” ginger beer, and “ Old Scotch,” stood guard among the flies. A lizard hung motionless on the wall over the clock. The electric fan whirred smoothly overhead. The train had moved on; the crowd had melted away, absorbed into the blazing light outside.

“ Are there any missionaries here? ” Aunt Nora’s chin condemned the long table and all the terrible array of soup and fish and fowl and mutton and brown pudding, that it stood for.

Yes, there was a German Mission. Our hearts sank within us. We had been told there was an American missionary, a lady, and we had made up our minds to cast our tired selves upon her hospitality.

“ I understood there was an American lady here? ” I persisted.

Mr. John hesitated and eyed us all, up and down, with quiet scrutiny. There was about him suddenly an atmosphere of almost mysterious reserve.

“ There is an American lady,” he announced at last with deliberation. “ I care for her. I am her servant.” He drew himself up very straight.

We all brightened at the vision of an American hostess, a cool veranda, a cup of home-brewed tea.

“Oh, that’s all right, then. We’ll call on her,” I announced gayly.

“ She is not a missionary, your ladyship;” Mr. John interrupted my enthusiasm respectfully, but with decision. “ She lives in retirement. She is writing a book.” Then after a short pause, “ a book of religion.” He spoke the last words with awe and seemed defying us to treat them lightly.

“ But we have friends who know her,” I found myself almost pleading.

There was a silence. The Colonel stared, wiping the inside of his hat, and waited for his wife to speak.

“ You might take my card to your mistress and ask her if she will receive us,” said that little lady humbly.

When Mr. John signified his willingness to take the “ ticket ” to her ladyship and disappeared into the white sunlight beyond the straw screen, we realized that it was an act of condescension on his part, and we waited in an attitude of subdued suspense until he returned, beaming.

Miss Helen Best, he spoke her name now with careful emphasis, would be pleased to have the ladies and the gentleman come to her for tea or dinner, whichever suited our convenience. We brazenly chose dinner, and Mr. John smiled approval. Now that he had given his consent he was not going to do the thing by halves. He had a generous, even a grand, oriental idea of what hospitality should mean. Would we not come with him and pay our respects to the lady on our way to the Temple, returning later for dinner? Certainly.

We climbed obediently into the large hooded “ gari,” that stood in waiting, and rolled slowly down the wide monotonous road, Mr. John straight and immaculate beside the ragged driver on the box. Long vistas of dust and sunshine and palm-bordered stone walls opened before us. The air was heavy with heat and the perfume of jasmine and mango flowers. Here and there a bungalow glinted at us from a large drearily sunny garden. We passed two or three Indian women with naked babies poised on swaying hips, and then a bullock cart, the driver nodding sleepily from his seat on the shaft, half-waking to pull the tails of his lumbering team and then dropping his head forward again.

Presently we turned into a narrower road, flanked closely by well-to-do native houses of half-European, half-Indian design, and stopped in front of a small gateway in the middle of a hedge. A vendor of sweets sat on the ground beneath the hedge, his tray of greasy dainties, swarming with flies, in the dust beside him. Through the gateway, about twenty feet back from the road, rose a bright blue house with a narrow balcony across the second story. There were strange Hindu drawings over the door and along the front of blue plaster. At. one end of the long narrow balcony hung a red hammock.

Mr. John was opening the door of our carriage with all the gallantry of a host . The Colonel turned astonished eyes upward to the hammock and seemed about to demur, but Mr. John led the way up the straight gravel path, and we followed. Entering the small front door we found ourselves in a large dim roofed-in courtyard, quite empty except for a table spread with a white cloth that stood in the centre. A balcony like the one outside ran around the second story, and stairs led up at one side. We followed Mr. John again across the stone pavement, up the stairs, and along the little balcony to a low door. There he stopped and knocked.

For some moments we waited, huddled together, talking in whispers. Not a sound broke the stillness. Through the half-open doorway I could see a part of a round table with a heavy plush cover, and on the floor several high piles of books. Beyond, through the open window, showed the railing of the outer balcony and a fringe of the red hammock. Presently Mr. John knocked again and stepped halfway into the room; and at last from an inner distance floated a voice, a little high voice, pitched in the sweet, trustful cadence of a happy child,—

“ Just a minute, Mr. John. I ’m coming.”

It startled us. It was utterly immature, confiding. Mr. John motioned us to come into the small sitting-room and be seated on the three straight chairs that with the round table and a huge wooden chest made up its furniture. On the floor, against the walls, were many piles of books. We waited another five minutes perhaps.

The Colonel was very uncomfortable. He rolled his cane back and forth nervously across his knees and eyed Mr. John with antagonism. That gentleman filled the doorway, placid, immobile. The sound of a distant temple gong beat through the thick hot stillness. And then at last she came, a little figure moving toward us somewhat sideways and holding out a hand shyly.

She was dressed in a white dress that hung quite straight, like a nightgown, from throat to ankles, perfectly plain, with narrow ruffles at neck and wrists. Beneath the hem of this garment appeared white stockings and little black carpet slippers. Her thin soft brown hair hung in a short braid down her back. She was certainly forty years old.

After she had shaken hands with a kind of beaming ingenuous simper, she sat down on a chair which Mr. John produced from somewhere and crossed her hands in timid repose.

“ It was so very kind of you to come and see me, and to send word by Mr. John,” she said, in her light, sweet American voice. “ I was n’t sure that I ought to invite you on account of this sore on ray finger; you may not care to come to dinner; Mr. John has bandaged it for me and thinks it is nothing, but you can’t tell in this country.” She looked at us each in turn, and up at Mr. John happily and trustfully. “I hope you will come,” she added.

We signified with bewildering graciousness, summoned to meet her own, that we would be very glad to come. Her little insignificant features wrinkled into a beaming smile, her small eyes were very bright and looked straight at us, in the most friendly way.

“ Do you see much of the missionaries? ” asked Aunt Nora by way of conversation. There was a touch of compassion in her voice.

“ No, I have n’t yet made their acquaintance,” answered the little person brightly. “Mr. John says it’s the custom for strangers to call on the residents here, but I can’t, and so they haven’t called on me.”

She seemed quite satisfied that this should be so, and went on to explain away the sympathy in our faces. “ I don’t go out of doors much, so I don’t meet any one. Mr. John tries to get me to go out, but I don’t like to. I need lots of time to meditate, and then it’s so — so dreadful. I just walk up and down the veranda a little every day for exercise.”

“ What is so dreadful? ” I asked, now thoroughly bewildered, for surely if she had come to India to write a book on religion she must have come, too, to study the life of the people.

“ Oh, everything; the heathen life,” she said plaintively. “ I could n’t have Mr. John around me if he were n’t a Christian, could I, Mr. John? ”

Mr. John smiled paternally.

“ But you’ve been studying the temples, I suppose.” I was grasping at a last straw of explanation.

“ No, I’ve not seen the Temple. Mr. John tries and tries to get me to go, but I can’t bring myself to.” There was real pain in her voice and on her frail, expressively insignificant face. “ It’s so horrible.” She shuddered a little and then smiled again somewhat piteously.

Aunt Nora came to the rescue. “ Mr. John tolls us that you are very busy writing a book.”

“ Yes,” her eyes became almost beautiful all at once with a deep enthusiasm, “ I am writing on the Universal Religion.”

My incredulity and amazement must have been almost rude by this time, for the Colonel and his wife rose simultaneously.

“ You must tell us about the book at dinner,” said the latter; and then, turning to include me, “ My niece is quite literary herself.”

” How very nice.”

She was a happy child again, not in the least interested in us but instinctively courteous. Indeed it was impossible to explain her cordiality as due to loneliness. She was evidently touched by what she deemed our kindness in coming to see her, and her innate refinement expressed itself in an exquisite cordiality; but the current of her inner life was as undisturbed by our advent as by the tide of forlorn humanity that eddied round her little Indian dwelling.

“ And what time will dinner be, Mr. John? ” she asked sweetly as we went out.

“ At half-after seven, your ladyship,” answered Mr. John.

The Colonel was really worried, and stalked ahead, swinging his cane irritably. There was something uncanny about Miss Helen Best’s situation that worked upon his old-fashioned ideas of the sanity and propriety of things. He was not at all sure that we should go back to dinner, but his wife, who seemed really touched by the pathos of the little woman’s isolation, overruled his vague apprehensions. She wandered by herself wearily through the fantastic courts of the Temple, obviously depressed by what Miss Best called the dreadful heathenism of its grandeur, and so Mr. John was left to the fire of my questions.

He was as genially communicative now as he had been mysterious and reserved. Yes, he told me, she had just stepped off the train one day, as we had done, and he had met her. She had asked him if there was any place where she could stay and he had taken her to the “dak bungalow.” After two days she had said to him, “ Mr. John, I can’t stay here much longer. The travelers are disconcerting. Can you find me a home? ” So he found her a house. That was eight months ago. And how long was she going to stay? He did n’t know, but he had advised her ladyship to leave next month when the fever set in. It would not be safe for her ladyship then.

I looked in astonishment at his open face, unwilling to be convinced of the man’s disinterested faithfulness. “And you are her servant now? ” I asked.

“Yes; she allows me to guide the tourists as is my custom, but I have time to care for her ladyship’s house as well. She is very pleased with me. Sometimes at the end of the month she says, ' Mr. John, I am very pleased with you,’ and gives me a present.” He beamed proudly. His delight in her, and in himself as her trusted servant, and in our interest, increased markedly as the day wore on; and when at last he had us all seated around her dinner-table and had taken up his place behind her chair with a napkin folded carefully over his arm, he seemed ready to burst with proud satisfaction. He kept his two small sons running noiselessly back and forth with a succession of steaming dishes that linger yet in my memory as masterpieces of spicy seasoning. He opened soda bottles with the air of a head-waiter in the Waldorf-Astoria opening champagne, and gazed with bright, alert eyes from one to another as we talked to our little hostess. He looked down upon us, — the Colonel’s handsome white head, Aunt Nora’s slim daintiness, my own fluffy hair, and his little mistress’s happy countenance, — and his benediction covered us all.

And she was exactly as she had been in the afternoon, with no change whatsoever in her costume, but appearing a little smaller perhaps and more helpless as she sat facing the candles, surrounded by the dimness of the great shadowy room. She talked easily and graciously about herself and her work. She had nothing to hide, that was evident, and very little to tell, it seemed, when all was told. She had left America five years before and had stopped first at Singapore. She had stayed there two years, then she had gone to Australia, but after a year had come back to Singapore. Australia was not just the place for a student of religion. A while ago she had come to India. She had read a good many books on Indian philosophy, and so she thought it would be nice to come here for a while.

“ The minister of my church in Pennsylvania writes to me sometimes,” she went on; and it was her only explanation of what seemed to her a perfectly natural mode of life. “ He wonders when I will come home, but I don’t know. It’s hard to travel now with all my books, and so I like to stay in one place. It seems to me the Orient is a nice place to write a book on the Universal Religion. It’s so quiet here.”

After dinner we spent an hour in her little sitting-room among the books that lay heaped against the walls on all sides of us. Noticing my attempts to read the titles of these volumes, she jumped up from her chair and crossed over to the great wooden chest in the corner.

“ I have a lot more here,” she said, smiting and lifting the lid like a child about to show off its favorite toys. She sat down on the floor and began to take out the books that half-filled it, handing them to me to look at. She handled them nicely, with that sure, gentle touch of a real booklover. Some that she chose at random, I knew, such as W. D. Hyde’s Practical Idealism, George Adams Smith’s Minor Prophets, and The Life of D. L. Moody. Then there were Stevens’s New Testament Theology, Hopkins on Hinduism, a History of the Hebrew People, and a great dreary heterogeneous assortment of new and old religious writings.

“ Have you read them all? ” I asked, somewhat awestruck.

“ Oh, no. I just look through them and read the table of contents and kind of find out what’s in them by handling them. I could n’t read them all, but somehow the more I have the more I seem to need. Here’s a list. I’ve sent for five hundred dollars’ worth more.” She thrust a typewritten sheet into my hands, headed by the name of a Philadelphia publisher. “They are on the way now, but it takes a long time. Books are n’t good travelers.”

She laughed a little tremulous laugh. For the first time she seemed a little ridiculous sitting there on the floor surrounded by those ponderous volumes. Then her really charming hospitality drew her to her feet.

“ Would you like to see my manuscript? ” she asked naïvely of the Colonel who was sitting distrait in a corner.

Lifting the lamp from the table, she led the way into the inner room. It was a twofold apartment, bedroom and dressing-room, but she evidently used the small dressing-room to sleep in, for it contained a straight charpoy (string bed) covered with a single cotton sheet, and a wash-stand with an enameled-ware bowl and pitcher. Our hostess opened the farther door of this strange little cell, without a trace of embarrassment, and led us into the front room, which was almost filled by a large oblong table. Covering the entire table were neat piles of manuscript tied with string and placed one close beside the other.

Miss Best held the lamp in one hand and with the other touched the papers gently. Her little face looked old, in the bright light, and pathetically earnest. There was a glint of enthusiasm in her little eyes, like the last glint of the sparks among dead ashes.

“ I thought it would take me a year, maybe, to write my book,” she said, “ but it is five now.”

“ Is it almost finished? ” some one asked.

“Oh, dear, no,” she smiled gravely, “ but I am really beginning.” Then after a silence, “it seems as though the longer one works, the slower it goes.”

We went back through the bare bedroom, silently. There was something noble in the concentrated singleness of her mind, small and unbalanced though it was, that touched and humbled us all. She was too slight and meagre a person, perhaps, to be called a “ passionate pilgrim ”; but her fervent simplicity lifted her for the moment away above and beyond our world.

“ We shall hope to meet again, across the water,” said the Colonel, bowing over her hand in his most courtly manner.

She wriggled like a shy child. “ I don’t know when I shall be in America,” she said, without wistfulness. But her fine courtesy lent her dignity again as she shook hands with Aunt Nora and me, telling us how very kind we were to come.

Then she pattered down the stairs in her little carpet slippers, and out to the front door. As we climbed into the carriage she nodded kindly many times, always smiling, and as we turned down the road I looked back to see her still standing in the doorway in her little white gown, waving her hand, while Mr. John held a lamp high above her head.

An hour later, as the train rushed us northward, the Colonel lifted his eyes from his account-book, pencil poised in mid-air.

“ I gave that fellow ten rupees; I believe he’s honest.” He nodded with grave decision.

“ It’s a bitter shame,” said Aunt Nora tying her head up in a veil. “ Think of all that manuscript.”

“ I wonder if it is,” said I.