第66章

It was all quite unimaginable, as so many things are, but the upshot of it brought Judy to Rawul Pindi, as I have said, where I for one thought her mistake insignificant compared with her value.It would have been great, her value, anywhere; in the middle of the Punjab it was incalculable.To explain why would be to explain British India, but I hope it will appear; and I am quite willing, remember, to take the responsibility if it does not.

Somers Chichele, Anna's son, it is absurd to think, must have been about fifteen then, reflecting at Winchester with the other 'men'

upon the comparative merits of tinned sardines and jam roll, and whether a packet of real Egyptians was not worth the sacrifice of either.His father was colonel of the Twelfth; his mother was still charming.It was the year before Dick Forsyth came down from the neighbourhood of Sheikhbudin with a brevet and a good deal of personal damage.I mention him because he proved Anna's charm in the only conclusive way before the eyes of us all; and the station, I remember, was edified to observe that if Mrs.Chichele came out of the matter 'straight'--one relapses so easily into the simple definitions of those parts--which she undoubtedly did, she owed it in no small degree to Judy Harbottle.This one feels to be hardly a legitimate reference, but it is something tangible to lay hold upon in trying to describe the web of volitions which began to weave itself between the two that afternoon on my veranda and which afterward became so strong a bond.I was delighted with the thing;its simplicity and sincerity stood out among our conventional little compromises at friendship like an ideal.She and Judy had the assurance of one another; they made upon one another the finest and often the most unconscionable demands.One met them walking at odd hours in queer places, of which I imagine they were not much aware.

They would turn deliberately off the Maidan and away from the bandstand to be rid of our irrelevant bows; they did their duty by the rest of us, but the most egregious among us, the Deputy-Commissioner for selection, could see that he hardly counted.Ithought I understood, but that may have been my fatuity; certainly when their husbands inquired what on earth they had been talking of, it usually transpired that they had found an infinite amount to say about nothing.It was a little worrying to hear Colonel Chichele and Major Harbottle describe their wives as 'pals,' but the fact could not be denied, and after all we were in the Punjab.They were pals too, but the terms were different.

People discussed it according to their lights, and girls said in pretty wonderment that Mrs.Harbottle and Mrs.Chichele were like men, they never kissed each other.I think Judy prescribed these conditions.Anna was far more a person who did as the world told her.But it was a poor negation to describe all that they never did; there was no common little convention of attachment that did not seem to be tacitly omitted between them.I hope one did not too cynically observe that they offered these to their husbands instead;the redeeming observation was their husbands' complete satisfaction.

This they maintained to the end.In the natural order of things Robert Harbottle should have paid heavily for interfering as he did in Paris between a woman and what she was entitled to live for.As a matter of fact he never paid anything at all; I doubt whether he ever knew himself a debtor.Judy kept her temperament under like a current and swam with the tides of the surface, taking refreshing dips only now and then which one traced in her eyes and her hair when she and Robert came back from leave.That sort of thing is lost in the sands of India, but it makes an oasis as it travels, and it sometimes seemed to me a curious pity that she and Anna should sit in the shade of it together, while Robert and Peter Chichele, their titular companions, blundered on in the desert.But after all, if you are born blind--and the men were both immensely liked, and the shooting was good.

Ten years later Somers joined.The Twelfth were at Peshawur.