Last of the Giants
I
WHITE-HAIRED, thin, and very tall, he stood on the verandah of a high-pillared plaster bungalow. His black alpaca coat was tight across his bony shoulders. Heat hung in a dazzling curtain of light beyond the verandah steps. In the shadow where he stood, it crept across the stone floor and pressed against him, filling in between his fingers like warm water. He was used to it and did not notice it. He was wondering if he had time for a walk before tiffin — if he should take the time.
Behind him the thick walls of the bungalow were cut by arched doorways fitted with folding slatted blinds. The heat flowed through the doors into a large bare hall with a crudely made Georgian staircase, and into a high-ceilinged living room where straw matting covered the floor and a grayish-white ceiling cloth, sagging downward like a full sail toward the middle of the room, trembled with its inner life of tiny lizards. Set about, neatly spaced on the straw matting, were a few pieces of furniture — rattan chairs, a heavily carved black-wood table, a brass tea table, a whatnot.
In the compound before the verandah, smooth-baked earth threw back the glare of the sun. Shadows of enormous trees lay in sharp black circles. A long drive ran through the compound to an entrance gate between high white walls. The bones of an English park, conceived in a strange land by a lonely English trader, lay bare and dry before the tall old man. But he did not see the trader’s efforts consciously. This place was his home. He had been born there, had hunted in the compound as a little boy and learned to speak the native dialects there. He had walked there in the evenings with his bride. He loved the thick walls of the bungalow, gray and peeling for want of a coat of whitewash, the enormous trees, the few small flower beds. To him the place meant a different sort of effort from the trader’s — it had been a mission headquarters for over a hundred years.
He sighed and wiped perspiration from the hollows under his eyes before he fitted on a pair of dark spectacles. He turned back into the bungalow to get a pith helmet and a walking stick from the hatstand, and to call to a servant, far away behind more arched doorways, that he was going out. As he went down the verandah steps he answered the salaam of a rachitic gardener in dingy loin cloth and turban, filling a goatskin at a low wellhead. The gardener advanced with his dripping bag to motion toward the vines climbing heavily over the verandah roof, fierce purple of the Bougainvillæa, pale pink foam of the Antigonum. The tall man echoed the inflections of the gardener’s rasping speech, copied his appreciative gesture, salaamed again, and went on down the drive.
An hour, he thought, should be time enough to think over the news of that morning, half an hour should take him to the cemetery and back. A sudden illusion of being already there took possession of him — the grassy mounds, the big trees, the moss-covered urns, and far away the great dry river bed. In the cemetery he would be able to see with clear vision. He felt momentarily refreshed, as if the river were full and gray and flowing swiftly from heavy rains. The end of the drive at the entrance gates dispelled the illusion. He turned down a white sandy road between hedges of prickly pear.
II
The weekly mail had arrived that morning, a great bundle of letters and papers brought by a half-naked mail runner. As usual, letters on mission business had been the first he opened. His wife, visibly shaking with eagerness, had torn open the ones from their children. She had read the carefully scrawled pages quickly and had left them in a little pile beside him in the big bare room he called his office. Then she had done something unusual. She had gone quietly into the hall, taken her sun helmet and green-lined umbrella, and gone out of the bungalow in the direction of the village. He had noticed this in the midst of his absorption because he knew it was not her morning for visiting the women, or the babies’ home, or the school. He had planned to talk over something with her. He had not called her back because he had supposed that someone had been taken ill or was in trouble. Vaguely he had hoped it was not the Rajah’s wives, petty women, impervious to religious influence. They were always sending for his wife to lighten their cramped imprisonment in the tawdry palace, and she was always ready to go to them, pitying them, he thought, excessively.
He passed a hand across his dry forehead. He had lived in India nearly seventy years — all his life except the years he had spent at school and college in the United States. Heat dried the perspiration as soon as it appeared on his lemon-colored skin, except for the bothersome deep hollows under his eyes.
The first of the children’s letters he had read was from Henry, who was studying medicine, who had been destined to study medicine since he was a baby, because that section of the country had not then had enough medical care. Henry had been dedicated to fill a great need, and although the mission had built a hospital near by and sent doctors, Henry’s place was still there. And now Henry had written that his fife was shaping another way — that of course he would come to India as soon as he got his medical degree, because nowhere was there such an opportunity for a young doctor to get experience, but he would not sign up for life. He would come for five years. He knew he was doing the right thing. His letter was full of respect, reverence, enthusiasm — but he wrote that he had made up his mind.
Quickly, with foreboding, Henry’s father had picked up the letter from Lucy, the daughter who was to come so soon to take up her mother’s work with the women, to go with her father on his journeys into the jungle. He had looked forward to having her with him, teaching the children and accompanying him on a harmonium when he sang hymns with the people congregated to meet him. Now that his wife was too frail for the long days, he had to take an Indian boy with a victrola. But Lucy wrote to say that she was coming for five years only — that she, too, would not sign up for life. She had applied to the Board for an educational position and would be the assistant head of the girls’ school. She hoped they would be proud of her. She was longing to get back to India again — to see the green of the rice fields — to be home. Henry and Lucy had obviously planned to write at the same time, breaking the same news.
Experience . . . rice fields . . . The tall man stopped for a moment to look ahead down the road, blistering white in the sun, hedged by straggling lines of thorny prickly pear. Far ahead was a green hill of foliage topped by a short gray spire. He walked on.
The third letter had seemed a faint, tiny echo of the others, dull warning from a future beyond his control. In a childish round hand it had come from their baby, Mary, now sixteen. He had not seen her for five years — he had not seen any of his children for five years. He found it hard to keep a mental picture of them different from the last time he saw them, when he had taken them away from India to go to school in the United States, as his parents had taken him. Mary had written a cheerful letter full of the painfully obvious subterfuge adolescents practise in letter writing. She was full of joy and excitement — the school was wonderful, the teachers beautiful, her studies absorbing. At the very end came a P.S. carrying the burden of her excitement — she had gone home for the week-end with one of the girls at the school and had been taken to the theatre, to see a musical comedy.
The tall man walked faster. His head ached. He felt that his brain must be boiling under his helmet. The stiff prickly pear seemed to sway and dance like reeds in a breeze. The road lifted and fell before him. He stopped to steady himself. Perhaps he should have taken the car — then he remembered that he was out for a walk, to think. He could not use mission petrol except on mission business. He straightened his shoulders and strode through the white dust.
Five years — as against a lifetime. Five years, as an interesting experience. No dedication, no sacrifice, no feeling that their lives belonged to India and the work there. And little Mary being taken to the theatre, to the theatre in its cheapest aspect, and enjoying it. He thought of his own parents and what they would have done. . . .
III
He saw his father, tall, spare, dignified, with a springing carriage at seventy and piercing blue eyes. His mother, tiny, dry-skinned, and brighteyed, never flinching, never hesitating between right and wrong in the smallest matters. He had been their only child to grow up. Five others had died as babies. His parents’ burden had fallen to him alone — and he had accepted it.
He saw himself as a little boy, going about with his father and mother in the jungle, sleeping in the tent with them, teaching the little native children simple texts and short hymns while his mother played the harmonium that Lucy was to have taken up and his father preached in whatever was the language of the people gathered to listen. He smelled the coconut oil, the jasmine, the hot dust. . . . He saw himself taken to the United States on a sailing ship, because that was still the cheapest way — the long voyage round the Horn, the white-scrubbed decks, the services on board, a flag over a table for the altar. He remembered the storm when the captain had come to their cabin to ask his father to pray and had found them all on their knees.
He saw his first days at school, taller than the other boys, thinner, yellower, knowing already more of life than they would ever know. They had never had their pet dogs eaten by panthers, seen people dying in agony, commanded and instructed brown men in their own tongue. At first he had been popular, but as soon as they had found out that he was never disobedient, never in any way deceitful, when they saw that he looked on their antics with a teacher’s serious and uncompromising eye, they left him alone. And he had been glad to be left alone. His parents had given him an inner spirit impervious to neglect, to temptation, to doubt. He had been forewarned against all sins, forearmed against the world. Smoking, drinking (except for illness), card playing, theatregoing, dancing — he knew them to be wrong and he had no inclination toward them. As he grew older the actions of his contemporaries seemed more and more reprehensible. He prayed for them and tried to talk with them; but his heart was thrown ahead into the time when he should go back to India.
As he had grown older his body had caught up with its tropically overgrown frame and his character had become solidly his own, built upon the foundation his parents had given him. A good scholar, a brilliant one, he had also been good at games — he could still give the young men at the hospital a game of tennis in the evenings. He had a good voice. He had been popular with the young women. There had been so many happy evenings when young people had gone calling in groups and sat on steps to sing, the girls arranging their skirts in crisp masses about, their feet. Everyone had been happy then, he thought. Even the young men had come to respect him and his purpose in life.
One of the faces on the steps came clearly from the background of laughing voices and high-piled hair. The leader of all the girls, the most sought after by all the young men. Her ideals had seemed to coincide exactly with his own. She had listened, with wide admiring eyes, while he talked of India. He had asked her to marry him and she had agreed to wait seven years. He knew that his parents would think he could not begin his work properly if he came back to them with a bride. He remembered her look when she had promised to wait for him.
His seven years had passed like a dream. All he grasped of them now was a sense of complete rightness. He had come home to his work and his people, he was one of a long, strong chain. His parents had been happy and satisfied. He had buried them in the cemetery by the little plaster church where he too would lie with his children — no, not his children. He took his handkerchief to wipe where the bridge of his glasses pressed his nose. Moving his glasses let in the painful glare of the sun. He shut his eyes.
IV
When he had gone back to America on his first furlough he was a man with a world of his own, shaped to his convictions, a world where his word was authority. The girl on the steps had changed very little, — more serious, certainly older, — but he had grown away from her in those years. Bringing her nearer had not been easy. In small matters they still agreed. In more important things there were misunderstandings.
She startled him by her eagerness to be married — she was almost hysterically eager. She had seemed to want to awaken passion. He was even a little afraid that she saw going to India with him as an adventure, not as the dedication of her life to the country and the work. He had told her of the degradation of the natives among whom they would work, of the groups of girls who came to his tent at night when he was on tour in the jungle, girls led by an older woman who woke him by twitching at his mosquito net. Scented, jingling with ornaments, hiding their faces, a strip of bare skin showing between their short bodices and full skirts, they tittered and giggled, shifting on bare feet while the old woman offered him his choice. He had sprung out of bed, turned them away, poured anger mixed with pity on the hag and her troupe, and returned to his cot to pray for them, that he might show them the way. He had told her of these repeated encounters (for they had thought him only temporarily insane) to show her how much the people needed help, how the girls needed her to save them. She had caught hold of him in what seemed a tempest of rage against someone, had claimed him as hers against the world, had cried. . . . She had not at all understood what he was trying to show.
After they were married she had seemed still not to realize what their life was to be, what life should be. There had been painful scenes. But with Henry’s birth she had become a true partner to him. Two more babies had been born and she had seemed willing, even glad, to have their lives planned for them. Only occasionally had she puzzled him — as when she would not talk of being buried in the little cemetery which he could see now across a dry brown field, and when she had suddenly taken the money her father had given her when she was married, which she had never touched, even for the mission, and had gone home on special leave for one rainy season to see her children. Now he wondered how much her visit had to do with all this. The white road rose again and the prickly pear swayed.
She had come back changed inwardly and outwardly. She wanted to wear an almost sleeveless dress for dinner in the evenings, like Englishwomen who did not know or care what the natives thought. Henry had chosen the dress for her, she said. He had asked her to chaperon his college club dance, had wanted her to look nice. Had Henry danced? All the young people did now, she said. He had not mentioned it again. She had been overexcited, strange, preoccupied. She spoke of mail day as the pivot of the week. She seemed lost to him, to her work. And then she had gradually become her old self, only quieter, more determined.
V
Ahead of him he saw the green hill of trees very near, and the cemetery gate beneath it. A sharp-ribbed native cow was gazing through the gate at the comparative richness of the grass inside. He slapped her rump to make her move over, and a tiny Indian girl gathering cow pats for fuel ran up, salaaming, to drive her away. He shut the gate carefully behind him. Crows rose flapping from the shade and flew off over the river bed. He passed the oldest grave in the cemetery, that of the first English trader, and then the family lot of the trader’s successor in the big bungalow, a Captain Macpheadris who lay there with his young wife and three small children, all dead in the same week from smallpox. Their gray moss-covered urns were half hidden by the big branches of the peepul trees which stretched over the graves.
He stopped by his great-grandparents’ graves, where the urns had been copied by Indian hands from the more pretentious ones sent out from England for the English. Then his grandmother and grandfather and their children, so many dead in infancy — the same names over and over again — Lucy, Henry, Mary. He went through the graves to a seat under a big peepul tree behind them. He sat down in the still dusk of the shade. Between the headstones and down the gentle slope past the cemetery wall the dry river seemed flowing in burning yellow sand.
Every seven years since he had officially joined the mission he had left his world in India to find the world outside increasingly chaotic. After a year of study or teaching in the United States he had returned thankfully and gratefully to India. The world outside seemed to him to be going mad. Where he had used to plead impassionedly to churches full of puffed sleeves and wellbrushed Prince Alberts for consideration of the childwives and widows of India, for money to replace lewd and unnamed native customs with Christian ways of living, he stood aghast now before young girls who danced and dressed as provocatively as any Hindu temple girl, in a land where every advertisement, song, and popular novel proclaimed a purpose in life no higher than that showed so persistently in Indian temple carvings. And now that world had taken his children.
VI
He had seen the first inroads of the modern outside world when the young men and women coming to India to give their lives to mission work had begun to shy from the simple word ‘missionary’ and had prefixed ‘medical’ or ‘educational’ to it. It was they who called ‘evangelical’ him who had been all things to all men, who had started the schools in which they were teaching, who had dressed wounds and cured ills for all the countryside before the doctors were born.
They had a different attitude from the missionaries of his day. Some of them had had no experience of divine summons to come to the mission field. They were amused by framed texts on guest-room walls, at being asked if they had conviction of sin. They saw no reason in walking down a Brahmin street and being stoned as pariahs were stoned, as Christ was stoned. The young women would have gone to the club in the nearest large town to dance with the British officials if the mission had allowed it. He had even seen two of them smoking, sitting on a Mohammedan tombstone one bright moonlight night. He had started to speak to them, when he had seen that they were also crying. He had gone quietly away then, knowing that sometimes for young people it is hard to adjust one’s self quickly to a strange land in which one has not been born.
The spirit of the newcomers was restless, wishing for a change in established habits of thought and living. When, planning for Lucy’s arrival, he had told a group of young people that he did not want anyone to speak to her of things outside her work, they had thought him tyrannical. He had been thinking of the tragic case in a family which had done mission work in India for three generations. The daughter, an only child, had come out to the mission, to her parents in their village. After three years of excellent work she had become engaged to marry the British magistrate for that district. Two years of pleading, praying, reasoning, had not changed her, and her resignation had been accepted. She had left her work, married the Englishman, and broken her parents’ hearts. He could not bear to think of Lucy being exposed to ruining her life and work.
He raised his pith helmet for a minute to see if that would make his head stop aching.
Somehow he had thought that being one of a long line devoted to mission work in India would make his children strong enough in their generation to resist the fraying of modern life. He had never doubted that they would come. He had never doubted that they would spend their lives carrying on their family’s work. He had thought of their first years as a firing period, to temper them for long and splendid lives. It had seemed to him that after their first few months in the country they would do better if he and his wife were not there for them to lean upon. Gradually he had felt his way toward a plan which had become his greatest desire. He wanted to break new ground before he died. His life now was too comfortable, his work easy. He and his wife should move on.
Down the coast in the jungle on the shore of a big bay was an abandoned house. A Roman Catholic priest had built it and had died there with the whole of his parish from plague. Now a few fishing villages had sprung up again and the jungle had been claimed by a nomad robber caste. It was fertile and waiting ground.
He had not spoken of it to his wife, but he had felt sure that she would welcome the idea of going to new work before they died. He had meant to talk it over and settle upon it with her that morning. And then she had gone off for a walk by herself, almost as if she had had a part in bringing this upon him and could not bear to see the blow fall.
For, now that his children were to come for so short a time, he could not go. He was an old man, and his active life was done.
Suddenly he found that the cemetery offered no refuge. The crows were too loud, the glare too intense, the air too still. He rose to walk home.