Snow upon the desert

Front matter

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Chapter I

T HE word that year at school was “mush.” It had almost superseded the convenient and allembracing adjective “weird.” The girls leaving by the 4:45 train from Paddington described the crowd on the platform as 4 ‘ mushy, ’ ’ and when urged to take their seats in an overfull saloon carriage they protested on the ground that eight on each side of the compartment was more “ mush ” than they desired. For some unexplained reason the word had ever so slight a flavor of sport about it. Those who used it oftenest and most inappropriately were accounted good sorts at school.

They were a cheerful set of young barbarians in a cheerful state of fuss, and plain with the almost unbelievable plainness of the English girl before she emerges into attractive young womanhood. Their plaited hair and useful school frocks provided a wholesome check to vanity, and their only beauty was neatness. Even a becoming curl must yield to the dominion of order, and the wild civility of a careless shoestring would have found no reciprocal courtesy at the seat of learning whither the girls were bound. The useful school dresses and the blue and white ribbons, collectively known as ‘ ‘ onr school colors, ’ ’ were a suitable equipment for girls who played cricket or hockey on most days of the week, and were uncompromising in their attitude toward affectation. Suitability was the watchword of their era, and ‘ ‘ no nonsense” their war-cry. They were an admirable set of girls, and knew themselves to be so; very British in their sentiments, very honest-hearted and honorable. But in the matter of outward vision the eye was not so immediately satisfied as the mind. And as on a gray day in London, when the streets look dull and dim, one may turn with a sense of refreshment toward some basket of spring flowers, fragrant with its tale of sunshine somewhere, so while admitting how sensible, how honest and how admirable were the schoolgirls with their plaited hair and their little brown traveling bags, a livelier sense of pleasure to the eye was called forth by the sight of a girl somewhat older than the other young students, with her father and a young man on the platform. Her beauty would have been arresting even among lovelier surroundings. To-day it was her air of detachment that rendered her conspicuous among the bustling girls. She stood apart from them, glancing curiously at the scene, while her eyes occasionally turned with a look in them of unspoken question to the two men beside her. Her dress recalled vaguely some “costume piece” of the eighties, and was surmounted by extravagant sables. At her feet was a larger amount of luggage than school disciplinarians usually allow, while a porter was trying to find a place under the seat of the carriage for a sumptuous dressing bag. All the luggage as well as the bag was carefully labeled and inscribed with the unusual legend : “Miss Lascelles, killed 24th September.” And at each corner: “Game, from Sir Hercules Lascelles, Inversnaith. ” The labels dated eighteen years back, and belonged to that summer when Sir Hercules came home, and took a wife back to the East with him, with her trunks and her trousseau and her wedding ring. The wedding ring was worn for a year, and the trousseau for a much shorter time, for the East claimed the health of the bride, and then her life, and the dress her daughter was wearing to-day was part of the bridal outfit of eighteen years ago.

Miss Lascelles appeared to be a newcomer, but without the shyness of a new girl. She looked gravely about her, and then turned to her father.

“I am just a little bit doubtful,” she said, “if this is going to suit us.”

He raised his eyebrows in hopeless perplexity. “I wish you knew someone,” he said. He had no experience of schoolgirls, but perhaps even his unaccustomed eyes could see that the small lady beside him, with her detached and interested air, had not very much in common with the vigorous, bustling, uncompromising young life that surrounded her.

“Are you Miss Lascelles?” said a governess in a tone that left room for immediate apology should she find herself mistaken. “I have been looking for you every where. ’ ’ Her voice gained in assurance as Miss Lascelles’ identity proved itself by a smile and an extended hand, and the apology which was being held in reserve gave place to a little natural irritation such as a tiresome and unnecessary search occasions. “I had no means of knowing you, ’ ’ she remarked, ‘ 1 and you look so much older than most of our girls that I passed you twice, thinking that you must be seeing someone off.”

‘ ‘ I feel very old, ’ ’ said Miss Lascelles gravely. She wore her hair coiled about her head in a manner which, with all its simplicity, had only lately arrived from Paris; her dress, which was long, was made of brown silk with trimmings of green, and her manner was one of naive assurance.

“You will have to learn to get young with our young people,” said the governess a little sharply. In the presence of this girl standing grave and collected beside her large pile of luggage, with her dress of past fashion, and her costly furs, she felt as though she were speaking to a rather distinguished parent who was being kind to her. The realization of this mental attitude in herself annoyed Miss Grove, more particularly as the feeling was induced by a new girl who, if not actually crying, should at least look ill at ease.

“Bustle in, my dear,” she said authoritatively, “or you will be left behind, and I ’ll introduce you to our head-girl.”

“You are most kind,” murmured Miss Lascelles courteously.

She got into the carriage, and Miss Grove, who had a sense of humor, even after fifteen years of teaching, said to herself that the next time this small lady joined them at school the station had better be hung with festoons and laid with a strip of red carpet.

“This is our new pupil, Mary,” she said to a yellow-haired girl with enormous feet and a kind smile, who seemed to be exercising a beneficent rule over some lively spirits in the railway carriage; and the governess almost added as a rider, “You needn’t curtsy or kiss her hand. ”

Mary shook hands in a hearty and painful manner. She was a girl who loved to say, “Feel my muscle,” and then doubling up her fist would fold her arm and keep it rigid, and require an exclamation on the hardness of her biceps. She asked whose pile of luggage that was on the platform. “You will have to get rid of half of it,” she said with frank amusement when she found that it belonged to her companion. “We are only allowed a bag and a box each, and those have to be of certain size. Your boxes are bigger than yourself,” she said, laughing.

The bubbling, chattering, wholesome plain girls in the saloon carriage began to be interested in the luggage, and thus afforded their new schoolmate a quiet moment in which to walk to the farthest window of the compartment and, letting it down, to talk to the two men on the platform.

“I find it impossible to say good-bye to you,” she said in her grave way.

“Say good-bye to me,” said the young man impulsively, “and remember,” he added with difficult cheerfulness, “remember it’s only for a year.”

“I am not sure,” said the composed voice of the girl at the window, “that a year without you and my father will he possible . 5 ’

“It’s unthinkable,” he said with conviction, letting his forced cheerfulness go.

“I cannot quite imagine it yet,” said the steady voice. And then the weakness which has its origin in no worse circumstance than fewness of years showed itself in a trembling lip.

“We’ve always been just we three,” she said with a shaky attempt at an apology.

The young man, feeling brave and out of temper and wholly miserable, would fain have lifted her from the carriage then, and counted himself a lunatic in that he did not yield to this manly impulse, but the train had begun to move and the carriage doors were shut. He walked up the platform with long strides, keeping pace with the slowly departing train, and Sir Hercules did the same. He had his hand upon the window-sash, and his daughter laid hers upon it.

1 ‘Look here,” he said huskily, in all the weakness which last moments bring, “do not try to stick it out if you feel that you cannot. I will arrange something else, or you can come out to me. For God’s sake don’t be unhappy!”

A man ’s tears will make the weakest woman brave. As the motion of the train increased and their two hands were unclasped, Miss Lascelles leaned out of the window and called gaily:

“My love to all the elephants!” And the next moment she turned her face and buried it in the blue cloth of the railway carriage in a very tempest of tears.

“I wonder if we have done right,” Sir Hercules said to the young man beside him, who replied :

“It’s pretty beastly, anyway, sir,” and tried to keep a note of resentment out of his voice.

Mary Newton, with a heart large enough to match her muscles and her useful feet, supplied a sufficiently extensive newspaper to provide a shelter for the weeping girl. “Look here,” she said, “open it out like this, and get behind it, and I will sit beside you so that no one can talk to you.”

Dimly, and in a manner wholly unsentimental, she was wondering whether those left behind can feel more miserable than those who journey on alone.

At the end of some minutes Miss Lascelles emerged from the newspaper, outwardly composed, but with the ravages of tears upon her cheeks.

“What elephants?” asked a pink child with a plain little hat, who sat opposite the newcomer, and who had been waiting for this moment with breathless interest.

“My favorite elephants,” said Miss Lascelles.

“I do not think ladies ought to ride elephants,” said the pink child. She knew what everyone ought and ought not to do.

The other girls felt that the subject of elephants was too big to be pursued for the present ; they must wait till the end of the journey, and then suitable questions would be asked.

1 1 WTiy did you come to school ? ’ ’ asked a girl with round eyes inquisitorially.

“My mind is to be trained,” said the new scholar. “It was an aunt of mine who thought I ought to come to school.”

“Aunts! The cause of half the mischief in the world!” said the child. “If they are not telling you your back is round, they spend their time wondering why you do not do something useful — as if one wanted to be useful! How old are you?”

“I am seventeen and a half, but I believe I know nothing. My aunt thinks I am very backward.”

“Did you never have a governess?”

“No; my father taught me, and I did history and the classics with Captain Bethel.”

‘ * He was Assistant Resident, and now he is my father’s A.D.C.”

“How weird.”

“I learned French from Major Boisragan. He is half French, yon know, and he gives me the most charming romances to read. Is it pleasant to work hard? I do not know. I believe most of my life has been a holiday.”

“Wait till you have tried German verbs,” said the child, “and aunts begin to tell you that you ought to learn to he of use in the world.”

“In some ways I was of use,” the delicate lady in furs made answer, “because I was able to speak the Hill dialects. Also I did most of my father’s maps for him. That is useful, you know, in districts that have not been properly surveyed. But, since you ask me, I fear that he may have made the most of what I was able to do for him. ’ ’

“He liked having you with him,” said Mary encouragingly.

“We have never been apart,” she said.

The round-eyed child, who scented adventure, wriggled herself forward on the broad seat of the railway carriage. “Have you always lived where the foot of no white man has trod, far from human habitation, and where everyone is uncivilized?” she demanded.

“I think they are really much more civilized than are people in England,” said the girl with guileless sarcasm.

“Did you wear skins?”

“To-day,” said Miss Lascelles, in an old-fashioned courtly tone of apology, “I fear I cannot trust myself to speak about the home I have left . 9 9

But such an ending to a recital of adventure was impossible. “What else? What else?” cried the girls, desirous of pushing romance to its furthest limit. The difficulty of obtaining an audience was well known to them; only a few girls will listen at school. Flattery was lavishly and ingenuously min gled with their importunate demands. Two small pupils prepared themselves to bestow worship upon Miss Lascelles, the round-eyed child acted as showman for the present, hut her ambition hounded forward to the day when she might call her her Great Friend.

“Did you dress exactly as we do?”

The useful school-frocks and the plain hats would no doubt have been suitable for the Gilgit district.

Miss Lascelles looked at the stalwart figures of the girls about her, blushed pink, and said with difficulty, “I have been wearing my mother’s trousseau since I grew tall enough to do so. But in Paris my friend, Captain Bethel, has an aunt who bought me many things, for it seems my wardrobe is deficient.”

Paris clothes are too unusual to be approached in the commonplace manner. Either we must despise them and wriggle comfortably in our own of British make, or we must accord them reverence.

“Did you dress every night, even when you were alone ? ’ ’

“We were always alone, except for the Staff.”

“Too weird!”

“I suppose you grew frightfully conceited?”

“I do not know.”

“I love men!”

1 1 Hush, dear ! ’ ’ said the reproving Mary.

“How long were you out there?”

“We were in the Gilgit district for ten years, and then in Nepal for five years, and that accounts for the whole of my life, except when I was a baby at home. Misfortune came to us when my father was made Lieutenant-Governor of the River Provinces, for that meant that my aunt discovered my lamentable ignorance and urged the need of education . 9 1

A girl in spectacles who took prizes said in an elderly manner, “It may interest you to know that one of our lectures this term is to be on Tibet. ’ 1

“I shall excuse myself from that,” said Miss Lascelles sadly; “it would be more than I could bear.”

“There is such a thing at school,” said the head-girl, “as doing as you are told.” She smiled as she spoke, but the little reproof was given with intention.

“I may find that a little difficult at first,” said Miss Lascelles simply.

“You come to school to learn things, not to enjoy yourself/ ’ said Mary vigorously.

“Even a young girl may he a good example, and do a great deal of good/ , said the pink child.

“And you will only be here for a year!” said an envious voice.

“I have not quite decided how long I shall stay,” said Miss Lascelles.

The girls pressed more closely round. Miss Grove in the next compartment thought she had never known them to return to school more quietly.

“I wish to become more civilized,” she went on, “hut I think civilization may cost too much. For instance, it may cost me the breaking of my heart.”

“Too weird!”

The lady raised her eyebrows. “My father, of course, does not wish me to stay in England if I am unhappy,” she said.

“You can’t just walk out of school one fine morning, ’ 9 said the envious voice which had spoken before. “There are such things, you know, as terms, and examinations, and reports.”

“You must not tell me much more on my first day,” said the dethroned princess, smiling a little wanly, “for, indeed, I am already very much alarmed. ’ 9

Chapter 11

T ELL tis what your name is.”

“Hercules.”

“Oh, but it can’t he!”

“I am afraid,” she returned, “I have no other.” “I am certain Miss Ainsworth won’t let you be called that.”

“I am sorry. I believe my ayah, who was a native convert, christened me.”

“I don’t believe that counts.”

“I was christened by a bishop,” said the pink child. “I have heard that when I was born there was some fear that I should not live.”

“Still, it wouldn’t be fair even on a tombstone to pretend that you were a boy.”

“Call her what you like,” a broken-hearted man had cried, bending over his dying wife in a bungalow up in the Hills. And a native Christian ayah, taking a fragile new-born baby away from the gaze of her father who had no attention to bestow upon her, filled a gleaming brass bowl with water and bestowed upon her the only Christian name she knew.

“I not know name for missi-babas, ” she muttered to herself and called the baby Hercules,

Even Miss Grove, who was lax on some subjects, objected. 4 ‘Have you no other name?” she questioned.

“I am afraid not,” said Hercules, as if searching in her own mind for trace of some other and more suitable appellation.

“We must invent some little name for you,” said the governess in a sprightly manner. “What can you suggest?”

“Would you like to call me Omphale? She was the Lydian queen of the Hercules story, you know, so at least she was feminine.”

“Perhaps we shall think of a little pet name for you,” said the governess.

Miss Grove, be it understood, is not our Principal, she is merely the Head of our House — the house of the blue-and-white ribbon — believed by all who know anything about the matter to be infinitely superior to any other at the Priory. Miss Grove is not so effectual as the Principal, before whose august presence we all stand in awe, and who is not even nice to parents, but we believe her to be a perfectly just and unaffected woman, attributes which we are inclined to think do not belong to all governesses. She has passed so many examinations that it has made her hair thin ; otherwise we believe that she might almost be accounted good-looking. Her sense of humor puzzles us sometimes. We come up against it quite suddenly, and in spite of all that we have heard said about humor being a bond of sympathy, it more often seems to us, in the case of Miss Grove, to be a curious sort of brick wall over which she is able to see, but which affords us no possibility of vision. On the whole, we approve of her; some of us adore her, because we must adore something.

It is well that Miss Grove’s sense of justice is fairly established in the school; otherwise her treatment of the new scholar lately arrived from India might have upset our cherished views of her sense of justice. When Hercules Lascelles came in fully half an hour late for breakfast, and apologized in the prettiest grown-up way for her unpunctuality, on the plea that she was really too stupid about dressing herself and doing her own hair, this unheard-of excuse was dismissed with the injunction to eat breakfast as quickly as possible, and to have dresses made without elaborate fastenings !

4 ‘If it had been one of us,” we muttered, “the fuss would have been awful!”

To take another instance, drawn almost haphazard from among several, the ultimate destination of the new girl’s luggage had been a matter of burning curiosity with us all. It had been taken to the box-room on its arrival. What would be done with it? Would it be confiscated and the contents of the boxes burned? Would it be seized as contraband? Would it remain in the lumber-room, or would it be returned to the only Christian address which Miss Lascelles was able to give, and from whence she had arrived with her game labels and her grown-up dressing-case ? Above all, what did the boxes contain?

Miss Grove helped at the unpacking of them herself one Saturday afternoon with the assistance of the bootman, who was called in with hammer and chisel to help open some wooden cases.

“I thought/’ said Miss Lascelles apologetically, ‘‘that I heard my father say I should have a room to myself, and I brought these because I have always had them about me, and I believed they might help to make me feel at home in a strange place.”

“But why tiger-skins?” said Miss Grove. “Did your father give them to you?”

“No; I shot them,” replied the new girl. “That one over there is the best; it measures twelve feet from tip to tail.”

Miss Grove sought in her own mind for a proper reproof. Such words as unfeminine and dangerous occurred to her, and it even flashed across her mind to say, “Don’t mention this in school.” In the end she sat on the edge of a trunk and remarked feebly, “I didn’t know that you shot tigers.”

Miss Lascelles began to stroke the bright-colored skin caressingly, ruffling up the fur with one small hand, pressing the tawny stripes on the animal ’s back, and holding the big paw with its sharp claws and soft white fur almost as though she took some fellowcreature’s hand in her own. She looked very slender, small, and fragile, with heavy coils of hair matching in color the tiger’s skin wound round her head. Her eyes were opened wide under heavy lashes, whose upturned points gave a starry appearance to them, and there were shadows underneath which subscribed an air of pathos to the small face. Among the healthy vigorous girls at the Priory Miss Grove had a half-humorous fear that her new pupil, like some delicate earthen vessel, might get broken among the iron pots and pans in their helter-skelter, joyous hurry downstream, and she had suggested to some of the champion athletes not to insist upon it that she should join in the rougher games of the school.

Miss Lascelles continued to pat the stuffed head of the tiger. “I got this one in the Terai when we least expected it,” she said. (The bootman stole back to the box-room again, and on the pretense of seeking nails lingered a moment.) “It was the most disappointing shoot we had had, for two wild elephants had got into the jungle and disturbed the game. Digby and I were coming home together rather sadly — that is if you can feel sad on an elephant, which I doubt very much. You know, when you’ve got your rifle loaded and the cartridges in the leather bags at the side of the howdah are making a sort of soft marching music, and the mahout in front of you in his bright-colored turban is rocking gently to the swaying of the elephant — well, if you never get a shot in at all you cannot feel sad. ’ ’

“I remember Jumbo quite well at the Zoo,” said Miss Grove, “I was taken there when a child and had a ride on him. I felt rather seasick. ’ ’

“I was taken to the Zoo the other day,” said Miss Lascelles. “It made me cry.”

“We ought to get on with the unpacking,” said Miss Grove.

“If I don’t speak about India sometimes,” said the new girl, “I shall probably die.”

“You may tell me about it,” said Miss Grove, struggling quite ineffectually against the feeling, once experienced by her before, that Miss Lascelles was like one of those kind parents who come down to see their girls sometimes and speak with cordial politeness to the governess.

“I will tell you what it is like to go tiger-shooting in the Terai.” She came closer to the elder woman and sat upon her heels on the tiger-skin in a childish attitude like some little girl.

“You are on the march, perhaps, and you take your game pretty much as you find it; otherwise, you know, generally we shoot from machans and have a kill tied up and everything prepared. But what I love best is when we come down from Katmandu for our Christmas camp and just chance finding a tiger by the way. It is very misty up there in the early morning, and a white fog hangs heavily over everything. When you go out the grass is still frosty and the elephants are standing in a long line waiting for you, swaying their trunks, and probably just as anxious to start as you are.”

“They are full of intelligence, I believe,” said Miss Grove.

“The pad-elephants take you to the edge of the jungle, and as they go along they tear up the grass by the roots, and dust the earth from it with a pleasant swishing sound.” The hootman frankly sat down on the edge of the packing-case and listened openly. “When they come to a stream they stop, and stand knee-deep in water, and then tread their way heavily through the sand and shingle to the other side.”

Miss Grove’s teacher’s conscience (a sensitive one, and not to he confused with the conscience of Miss Grove as a human being) suggested to her that this would be a fitting opportunity for a few kindly words of reproof, and she gave it as her opinion, laboriously and unconvincingly, that all sport was cruel.

“When you see a tiger,” said the young lady earnestly, “it is just one of the perfect moments of your life. You get your rifle to your shoulder, and the next moment someone tells you that that was a jolly good shot. There is nothing like it!”

Two heavy drops hung on her eyelashes. “It is very silly to cry over tigers!” she said.

Miss Grove assented, and shyly, being unused to caress, patted the yellow head which was now laid upon her knee.

* ‘You must try and make friends here/’ said the governess, speaking through the human woman, 1 1 and learn the communal spirit.’ ’

“I believe the trouble is that all are women and girls here,” replied Miss Lascelles. “I have heard, or read, that women are proverbially a little difficult to get on with. Is it so?”

“It is one of the best signs of womanhood,” said the governess, who, to her credit be it said, could hear distinctly the flatness of her own platitudes, 1 1 it is one of the best signs of womanhood to have woman friends.”

“I find,” said the schoolgirl, gravely and in the manner of one who enunciates a piece of far-reaching philosophy, “I find that there is but small advantage in being a woman if one is among women. That is one of the things that I have become convinced of almost against my will since I have been at school.”

“You must have known many women and girls before now,” protested Miss Grove.

“I knew very few. Once Mrs. Antrobus came up to Gilgit, but I was very little and do not remember her.”

“I hope she did not come to shoot,” said Miss Grove.

“I think she wanted to shoot herself. When she had left, I used to hear my father and Major Boisragan talk about her. They said that a woman looking as she did should not be allowed to go out alone with a gun. So they always went with her.”

“Firearms are very dangerous,” said Miss Grove.

“They are dangerous if you do not know how to use them, or if you wish to die,” said the girl.

“Well,” said Miss Grove briskly, “let us talk about more cheerful things, my dear.”

“I think English people try very hard to be cheerful. ’ ’

“ It is their duty to be so, ’ ’ said the governess, who had smiled through many difficulties.

“Is it?”

“At present you are missing your father, to whom, I am sure, you are everything that a little girl ought to be.”

“Yes, but, you see, I ought to have been a boy had not Heaven decreed otherwise. But my father became reconciled to me, I believe, very soon after I was born. Still, you can’t help wanting to be to him all that a pukka Hercules would have been, can you ? ’ ’

In this sensible Priory where Miss Grove was governess she helped to administer a public-school education to girls, and she had watched with interest many excellent games of cricket and hockey played by her pupils in rough blue serge gymnasium dresses. She had often regretted that athletics do not always produce gracefulness, and she had mourned sometimes over the faet that British honesty, as exemplified in healthy maidenhood, is always admirable, but not always attractive.

“If I find you too masculine I will try and overlook it,” said Miss Grove gravely. Inwardly she was saying to herself that the only safe place for a piece of Dresden china is behind the glass doors of a cabinet; but when the Dresden china in its frills and laces steps down from its perch and mingles with its far more serviceable and useful clay brethren, what is to be done to protect it? “Now we must put the skins away,” she said briskly, and the bootman, who had continued to hover near with a piece of string in his mouth, suggested that a few pieces of naphthalene would effectually prevent moth.