The Lily Hand and Other Stories Read Online Free

breathed in him. He was chattering gaily rather about his parents and his little sister, when he set his lantern down on the stone steps, opened the glass door and turned down the wick. He blew out the flame, and a thin curl of grey smoke spiralled upwards for an instant and was gone. Flame and smoke, light and darkness, lived together inside the cage. Was there any need for a greater diversity than that?
    They gave him more money than he expected, and he was pleased.
    He walked with them halfway to the settlement, and talked merrily all the way. His father, he said, was one of Cobb Sahib’s servants, he kept the garden at the school. But their own house was at the edge of the village; he pointed it out as they went, a low clay shape like all the rest. His little sister was learning to be a dancer. When she was bigger she would go to Madras. If the memsahib was staying here, and if she liked, Shantila would dance for her.
    Nothing is rarer than to make a pure human contact; and nothing can happen so simply and naturally when it does happen. By the time he smiled his goodbye to them over his prayerfully-folded hands at the edge of the road, and darted back to his post and his neglected palmyra fruit she knew it was not with her half-rupee that she had won him.
    â€˜I made a friend today,’ she said to Andrew that evening over coffee, on the verandah of the bungalow he was visibly seeing now as small and inadequate. His manner towards her was becoming, she thought, at once more relaxed and more proprietary. He had produced her to his nurses at the clinic and his staff at the school with the air of one displaying something not yet possessed, but possession of which he was certainly contemplating.
    â€˜It’s a lucky person who can ever say that,’ said Andrew cautiously. ‘Who is it?’
    â€˜The light-boy at the temple. He showed us round there this morning.’
    â€˜Ah, Subramanya! He’s not a bad boy. Comes of a Christian family, of course.’
    She was startled chiefly by the instant and dismaying reaction she felt at hearing this, as though her recollection of him shrank; as though he had somehow been belittled.
    â€˜Really? I shouldn’t have guessed that. Not that it arose, actually.’ But hadn’t it? Was not some kind of answer to that speculation comprehended in the answers he had given to a larger question?
    â€˜His father’s my gardener,’ said Andrew. ‘I know the family well. My predecessor here converted the grandfather. Yes, he’s a nice boy, quick and reliable. As Indians go!’
    Why was it, she wondered, watching him steadily in the yellowing twilight, with the sea-wind coming in cool and fresh after the heat of the day, why was it that when he dropped some such phrase as that, quite simply and without malice, she felt herself recoil in such marked revolt? He gave all his energy to his life here, and his life was helping these people. He was right not to be hypocritical about the failings he found in them. He had as much right to his own standards and attitudes as they had to theirs and certainly more control over them. He had adapted more painstakingly to their ways than they did to his. Nor had she any justification for feeling superior.
    She had come here gratefully because he was a refuge to her after too much experience too suddenly swallowed. She had come baffled and irritated by the contradictions of wealth and poverty, by the venality of much that she saw, from the buyable people in high places, through the hotel clerks discreetly black-marketeering in sterling, to the malevolent gangs of children pestering for alms, the servile and insolent room-boys, the predatory priests never content even with the most generous of offerings. From all this she had turned eagerly to an English acquaintance with standards like her own, a feeling for time, a sense of responsibility, and words which meant what they said.
    And yet he had only to say