CHAPTER I

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It was in the most unlikely place in the world that I heard of the
Dunbars. When you were in Simla you might go to the Mainguys every day
for a month and hear no other subject mentioned but the scandal of the
place, which at Simla looms large, various and engrossing. Indeed the
aggregated scandal of India—meaning of course all that concerns the
governing race—rises like the smoke of an especially black and acrid
nature to the Simla heights, and hangs thick in the pines on Jakko. It
not infrequently gets into your throat and chokes you. But the Mainguys.

Their bungalow, perched on the steepest cliff that a house could cling
to, teeth and claws, without sliding down the abyss into bottomless
depths beneath, was where all the gup (gossip) centered. People sat in
the veranda looking out level with a blue sky cloudless as ocean itself,
over measureless leagues of country far away below, fading into
phantasmal beauty where it mingled with the horizon edge, and there,
drinking pegs and smoking myriad cigarettes, they hacked reputations to
bits, devouring them with relish and flinging the mangled remnants down
the gorge. A cannibal feast at best and seasoned with much sniggering
and chuckling.

But one went there even if it bored one stiff, for really Mainguy and
his wife were good fellows in their way, and had no prudish scruples
either about the deeds or personalities of the victims they served
up—rather liked them than otherwise for the run they gave them. And
besides, those two had more knowledge of India in its byways, its short
cuts and incidentally its prices than any other two in the Peninsula. So
that if you were planning a trip, shikari or otherwise, anywhere from
Cape Comorin to Kashmir, you went to the Garden of Allah (as they
humorously called their diggings) and got enough knowledge to start a
guidebook.

That was my errand on this particular day. I found Mrs. Mainguy on the
veranda embowered in creepers thrusting magnificent orange trumpets like
a blare of sound in at every crevice of the trellis. I don’t know what
it was but to this day when I smell a scent heavy as yellow honey and as
sweet, a blaze of orange breaks and I see Blanche Mainguy attired in a
violent trousered negligée of orange and purple, lying in her long
chair, propped upon orange cushions to match, an iced “peg” in the
receptive wicker hollow beside her, smoking cigarette after cigarette
and sending a reputation to flutter down the gulf with each one.

That veranda was a difficult place for weak heads to stand. There was
but a plank between you and perdition, so to speak, and the railing so
rotten that a kick would have sent it flying in flinders down the abyss.
But for the Mainguys, who had ridden six-inch paths in the Himalayas
with a blank precipice up on the one hand and down on the other, it was
nothing to hang poised in mid-heaven. They slept there in hot weather.

“And I walk in my sleep. Bad conscience and too many cigarettes, you
know!” she said that day. “And some night Lyle will wake up and find me
hovering on the railing, and then——”

“What? A push?”

“That depends on how I’ve been behaving. But listen, Car. You’re talking
about a painting trip up to the back of beyond in Little Tibet——Well,
I’ve got the very person here to give you all the tips. She’s having tea
with her Excellency and——”

“She?” I ejaculated. “A woman? Never. Not where _I_ want to go!”

She tossed the butt of her cigarette over a foam of orange trumpets, and
I saw it eddy like a white butterfly down—down—down—and disappear.

“She knows more than that! My good man, have you never heard of the
Dunbars? Lucia Dunbar? They go everywhere in Asia! Come now, you
_must_!”

“Never, on my soul! And why on earth should I? And why do they go
everywhere in Asia?”

“Well, considering that she and Lance Dunbar are rolling in riches, and
could have everything the world offers and yet go off and live in a
temple in China and a sort of log house up in the mountains in Kashmir,
one would think you _might_ know something about two such March hares!”

“And still I don’t know!” I retorted. “You’d better give me the points
so that I can place her before she bursts upon me.”

“Bursts! God pity the daft! She’s the most gently flowing, harmonious
thing in all the world, like the gray evening moths that float about
these flowers. She’s——”

“But _who_ is she?” I almost shouted.

“Gowk! Did you never hear of Lord Rostellan—the last earl, a stony
broke Irish peer with an unspeakable reputation with women? She was his
only daughter, and her wicked old aunt Lady Polesden married her at
eighteen to a man as bad as her father—Hubert Sellenger. She endured it
for ten years and then divorced him. Her friends insisted. Come, you
must have heard of him?”

Yes, I had heard of him. Most men had. I remembered very well how his
wife had divorced him after indescribable miseries, and he had died and
she had married—whom?

“Lance Dunbar. He came in for his cousin’s money—that delightful other
Lance Dunbar who wrote a book called ‘Sundering Seas’—a queer highbrow
thing I never could read. Anyhow he went west in the war, and the other
Lance got his money and turned Buddhist——”

“Good Lord, why?” I interjected. To me it gave much the same impression
as hearing he had turned Mormon. I hadn’t the faintest notion of what
was implied. Nor for the matter of that had she.

“Ask me another! How do I know! Anyhow he married Lucia Sellenger and
they live in a Chinese temple and a log house in Kashmir.”

“He in one and she in the other? Well, that’s quite the fashionable
modern marriage.”

She went off in one of her shrill mirthless chuckles.

“Gosh, no! They’re the pattern pair of the universe. She’d seen quite
enough of that sort of thing with Rostellan and Sellenger to give her a
violent liking for propriety. Their life in the wilds is the queerest
romance you ever heard of—all magic and mystery and extraordinary
natives and spooky people. But the loveliest house you ever saw, and
she’s like—a dream.”

She didn’t say this in the conventional way that calls a new hat, a new
cocktail, a dream. Her voice dropped on the word as if she meant it.
Then she chuckled again.

“Don’t I just know——You’re thinking, ‘Isn’t it absolutely creamy that
a woman like that should be putting up with little Blanchie?’ So it
is—and I don’t suppose she’d ever have absolutely rummaged creation for
me, but she’s a kind of cousin. Rostellan was my father’s first cousin,
and I used to stay there long ago. She’s younger than I am. A little
over thirty now. By the way, she’s a cousin of her Ex’s too. The
Rostellans were related to everybody.”

“Still, she sounds a little out of drawing in Simla,” I said cautiously.
“What’s she here for?”

“To meet some Canadian girl that is going up with her to Kashmir. Now if
you really are going up that way yourself, though I should have thought
there was enough in India to keep you in water-colors for the rest of
your life, why not—”

A soft movement in the drawing-room, and the gaudy striped palampores
dividing it from the veranda parted. A woman stood between them, worthy
of a better frame.

She was all in gray, wearing a long chain of gray moonstones, with faint
blue and golden lights swimming in them. Her hair, turned back winglike
from the pale oval of her face, was feathered with silver though she
looked a young woman. This, with features clear-cut as a gem, gave her a
most arresting air of distinction emphasized by a sensitive mouth and
gray eyes in a deep shadowy setting of black lashes. Shadowy—that was
the word that expressed her—twilight, dusk, quiet as a dream. She
brought that atmosphere with her. It was a new note in the gonging of
the red and blue palampores and Blanche Mainguy’s orange cushions and
vociferating costume of orange and violet trousers and coat.

“Come on, Lucia!” she shrilled. “Here’s a case for first aid. This is
Hew Cardonald—Lady Lucia Dunbar—and—oh, but do sit down and be
chummy. He wants to get up somewhere beyond Ladakh into the mountains
for shooting and painting. He’s simply landscape-mad and has made a
success already. I’ve told him you know every inch of the place. Now
don’t you? Doesn’t Lance? Start away by calling him ‘Car’ as I do. Let’s
be friends.”

Her voice—voices interest me—was twilight too, like the running of a
very little stream in darkening woods. After Blanche Mainguy’s it
sounded like a low song and inspired inward delight that can never be
spoken. She settled into a chair at the edge of the veranda, laying an
arm on the railing, and immediately the mountains and azure distance of
earth and sky became a noble background for her slender throat and
finely poised head and the grace of her long folded limbs. It reminded
me of a picture in the Uffizi Gallery—St. Catherine—she of
Siena—dreaming on the red city wall with nothing above or around but
deep measureless blue—the formless infinity of her vision. I had done
some portraits in water-color and pastel, not wholly bad, and at that
moment my whole being resolved itself into a wish to paint her after my
own fashion—as I saw her. The very name of the portrait—for all my
pictures had names that came with them—flashed on me. But I will tell
that later.

Why dwell on these things? I want to get on to what matters—to where
this extraordinary story really begins. But there are preliminaries not
to be passed over.

She was kind and interested at once, offered me her husband’s help,
invited me to break the long trek at their house in the pine woods above
the Sind River where the track goes up from Srinagar to the heart of
Asia. Clearly and concisely she gave me the information I wanted, and
turning to my art talked of the landscape work of the great Chinese and
Japanese artists and of her collection until I forgot time and place in
the fascination of the subject and her own. And Blanche Mainguy smoked
and smoked, her vivid, ugly face twinkling into mischief as she saw me
caught in the strong toil of graciousness which, to people more in the
world than I, had been irresistible from the beginning.

“Lucia, you humbug!” she interposed with a grin. “When you know you hate
shooting beasties as much as you love painting, and think every man a
butcher that kills so much as a bird! Why are you helping him in his
iniquities?”

She beamed into the bright tranquillity of a smile.

“People do what they must at the point where they stand. You know I
never preach, Blanche. And I’m sure when Mr. Cardonald gets up among the
mountains he’ll give nothing else a thought.”

She stopped, the smile deepening in her eyes—how shall I describe
it?—like one holding back a secret of enchantment that must not be
loosed lest misunderstanding should brush the butterfly’s dust off its
feathers. And I began to understand a little. After all, I am an artist
first and the rest nowhere, and this woman had the key of the fields as
well as I. If we could only get rid of Blanche Mainguy, who cared for
none of these things! Providence was good to me.

A grave servant appeared between the palampores with all the dignified
melancholy of the best Indian manners.

“My tailor!” And off went Blanche Mainguy to the conference. I wondered
what on earth the man would think of Englishwomen when those trousers
dazzled his view. Lady Lucia looked after her and caught my thought,
laughing audibly.

“Do you know how kind she is? I wonder how many people do! I could tell
you lovely things about her. But to return—Satshang is the place for
you. The mountains and mountain valleys there are beyond all
description, and in Ladakh the rainbow colors of the lower mountains are
incredible. Nothing I have ever seen does them the least justice, and
Alam Khan is the ruler. We were up camping there and saw a great deal of
him, and afterwards when he fell ill he came down to our guest-house to
be nursed.”

This was heaven’s own luck. I questioned eagerly.

“About twenty-eight, and you’ll like him. He lives in the queerest old
castle-fortress perched in mountains jagged like a lion’s teeth. Pure
romance. Our guest-house? Oh, we have two. One for Hindus. One for
Mohammedans. All sorts of people come and go, and each guest-house has
servants of its own faith. Europeans stay in the house with us. Yes. We
have a little hospital too. I trained as a nurse, and I have a woman who
helps. You can’t think what a blessing it is among these people far away
from all doctors. They come right down to us from all sorts of places. I
think it will amuse you to see it.”

I thought so too. There was something so new about the notion, the
remoteness, and yet people of all nationalities coming and going—an
unrivaled opportunity for seeing below the surface. The curse of Asia is
that a European man travels, gets civility, sees the outside of the
picture, and there is halted. “Thus far and no farther” is on every
Asiatic face about you. Unless—yes, indeed, unless——Suppose one had
this soft graciousness, this exquisiteness of manner, which would appeal
to the inherent Asiatic law of stately behavior—why, then, one might
get through the barred door and into wonderland. Fool I might be, and no
one admitted it more cheerfully than myself, but I knew what I was—and
that’s not a bad step-off into the depths. To be sure that Asia is a
sealed book is an excellent check to hasty opinions and definite
conclusions. But I did not yet know that no man can paint Asia who does
not know her soul as well as her face and love the two in one.

Every minute I watched her more keenly. She had a certain air of
strangeness as of thoughts and goals very different from any I had met
before.

I wanted to understand—they stirred the deep-down something in me which
had always been more or less in the way of my work, something weary and
discontented, touched it with a faint promise of some dim life stirring
in roots that had never grown. Again I say the strangest thing in the
world to meet at the Mainguys’ house in Simla. So I listened but watched
as she talked of the wild woods and rushing mountain rivers, talked like
the very soul of them—a few words only, but to my mind perfect ones.
Her cool sweetness embodied all that the mind of man has dreamed in
sky-cold heights and forests—Dryads, Oreads; and I did not know why,
for neither then nor at an infinitely wiser moment did I know that she
was beautiful as men reckon beauty. But she was what beauty means—she
had the same effect on the something below and beyond feeling. I can
answer for that. One remembered, longed—but not for her.

In my heart I was desperately searching for courage to ask if I might
paint her; but what found its way into speech was a banal supposition
that she was in Simla for a change—to see life again. She shook her
head laughing.

“Life! You little know the life we have at Baltar! We have every sort of
change up there. I have come to meet a girl, Canadian, but of Danish
birth. Her name is Ingmar. She is coming in along the Simla-Tibet Road
from somewhere near the Shipki Pass.”

“A nurse?” I ventured.

“Oh, no! She has been studying”—she stopped as if she had been about to
say more than was allowed, and went on smoothly—“studying with some
people near the Tashigong Monastery. She arrives tomorrow.”

Again I fail in description, but everything she said was like moonlight
hovering on a dark forest. Even the deep clanging name of the monastery
suggested the mysteries within; let us say—lovely, grotesque, terrible
creatures moving in the dark with eyes intent on things we can never
know. It enthralled me—secret as a nest of nightingales, a hidden song.

I summoned up a gleam of courage and ventured a step further.

“Lady Lucia, you interest me enormously. May I ask _what_ you are
working at, at Baltar?”

She looked at me with perfect simplicity.

“For one thing we work at the science of mental concentration. Did you
happen to read Keyserling’s ‘Travel Diary of a Philosopher’? No? It was
really interesting. Well, he was very much struck with the mastery of
concentration in India and said it should be taught in all the schools
of the West. It has wonderful consequences. It——”

Suddenly I had a sense of repulsion as from something pretentious and
insincere. Not in her, Heaven knows. Not the most egregious ass could
look into those limpid eyes and doubt. Her expression was
transparent—clear unwavering truth itself. But one knows the jungles of
charlatanry that attend the modern occult, and she might be a dupe and
the young Canadian a fraud. I saw her in her beautiful house at Baltar
the prey of greedy charlatans hastening from East and West to make their
market of the rich gullible woman. Suddenly she smiled, answering my
doubt. Did she know—could she?

“No—it really is not that kind of thing at all. Come and see. You’ll
like it.”

A hurried entry, Blanche Mainguy, red with anger.

“That brute—that Wali Mohammed! He’s cut my green and gold satin so
tight that I can’t sit down. Could you think men would be such fools?
Lucia, if you sit there looking so calm, I shall scrag you. I smacked
him hard in the face! And serve him right!”

There was no smile then; she spoke as eagerly as a hurt child.

“Blanche, you _shouldn’t_! His people live near us and they are
delightful. You would love them. The father brought me a brick of
Tibetan tea the other day—and his mother is the loveliest old woman. A
great Chinese painter who is with us is painting her. Oh, Blanche!”

I can see her grieved eyes now, but can never describe the oddity of the
incident. She made the people human at once, brimming with interest and
attraction, and Mrs. Mainguy atrocious but instantly disarmed. The worst
of European life in India—in Asia—is that it reduces native life to a
cipher—a mere background, let us say. Now it became terrible that
Blanche Mainguy should have smacked the man in the face. Rather an
incredible sort of happening. She felt it herself, and groaned with
despairing rage.

“Lucia, you’re a damned nuisance. If you get all Asia on our conscience
like that, life will be a pest. What’s one to do with all the fools and
worse about us? And just now when they don’t respect us a bit as they
did and would be at our throats if they dared! Lyle says we _have_ to
assert ourselves.”

“They’re perfectly charming to me—one and all—the most beautiful
manners in the world. Never mind, Blanche dear. If it’s spoiled I have a
wonderful pheran of Bokhariot silk, deep-sea blue and colors playing on
it like a peacock’s breast. You shall have that. It came over the passes
a few months ago from one of the little chiefs beyond Leh.”

“You goose! One can’t help loving you, and yet you’re the greatest idiot
in the universe, and all these natives play upon you like—I don’t know
what.”

She threw her arms about her cousin and gave her a resounding kiss—Lady
Lucia like a sweet child half laughing, half startled in the rough
embrace.

“They know I love them!” she said when she could speak.

I got up to go—ashamed to find how long I had stayed.

“Brynhild Ingmar and I leave the day after tomorrow,” she said. “And we
shall be so glad if you will come to Baltar. No need to write
beforehand. There’s always room and I promise that you’ll find wonderful
things to paint.”

I remember Blanche Mainguy escorted me to the door. “Isn’t she a dear?
There never was anyone who didn’t adore her. But I always think anyone
could take her in, and I have it in my bones that this Ingmar woman is
coming to fatten on them. I never like these foreign adventurers.”

To Blanche Mainguy Canada and India were alike foreign. Indeed you must
be English—and a Londoner, for choice—to be recognized as human. I
laughed, and went slowly along the steep road pondering. That visit had
given me much to think of. It had made things easier for my plans—yes.
But it had also been something entirely fresh, had touched dusty unused
chords which at present gave out a confused jangle of uncomfortable
sound—opened a glimpse into worlds not realized. It was quite clear
that I must see more of the Dunbars. Men said he was a good fellow,
never thrust his queer views upon you, and if I had not been afraid of
being a little at sea in such unusual company I should have felt nothing
but pleasure in the encounter. Well—they could not freeze me to the
bone if I only stayed a week or so, and the whole thing would be a queer
experience.

I dined that night at the Viceregal Lodge, and she was there also. It
was a great occasion—a royal visitor and so forth—and Lady Lucia wore
her diamonds, her hair in a Greek knot bound with a starry fillet. Her
profile against a gold brocade curtain was so exquisite that hiding in
shadow I made a note on my shirt-cuff and prayed for memory when I got
back. She looked a being of another race among the crowd of pretty
bobbed, shingled, marceled women, and a line of poetry came and went in
my head as I watched unweariedly: “She moved a goddess and she smiled a
queen.” Yet with it all, the simplest and happiest of anyone there.

She had known the prince in London, which was perhaps why he divided his
attentions between her and his hostess. But I thought his taste
excellent. Graciously at home with Royal Highnesses she was equally at
home with their Excellencies’ governess, who slipped timidly into the
ballroom afterwards with the pretty flapper of the house—a
golden-haired Lady Lettice. I was quick to notice that she dispatched a
would-be partner of her own to dance with Miss Lyon, and it set me on
dancing with the girl myself and leading the talk in the direction that
interested me most. I had my reward.

“Lady Lucia Dunbar? Oh, no one in the world like her. She had me up at
Baltar and nursed me when I was down and out with malaria—nursed me
herself. But not a dull kind of a saint—no, not a bit. A great lady all
the time. She can freeze the wrong kind of people stiff—you should see
her!—but as simple, as natural——Isn’t she lovely? And yet I suppose
not a bit beautiful—except her hair and eyes. Asked you there, has she?
Then I advise you to go. You’ll see things——hear things——No, I won’t
attempt to describe it. It changed my life. The most beautiful place.
Her Ex loves Lady Lucia but he doesn’t quite understand her. I don’t
know who does.”

She did not dance yet was the center of a laughing group nearly all the
time. I might have thought her one of them, if I had known no more, but
that once a young Indian prince came up to her, and they moved together
to one of the wide flower-filled windows, and stood talking for a few
moments. He raised his hand and pointed to the far-away hills, and her
eyes followed with an expression—how can I define it?—a homing dove
near the end of a long journey—the content of absolute certainty. They
understood each other, and his face, darkly beautiful, for a moment
reflected her expression. They were in the same vibration; I, outside.
If it be said I watched her all the evening, I admit the truth. I did.

* * * * *