The Pool in the Desert | Page 3

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THE POOL IN THE DESERT
By Sara Jeanette Duncan

Contents
1. A Mother in India.
2. An Impossible Ideal.

3. The Hesitation of Miss Anderson.
4. The Pool in the Desert.

1. A Mother in India
Chapter 1.
I
There were times when we had to go without puddings to pay John's
uniform bills, and always I did the facings myself with a cloth-ball to
save getting new ones. I would have polished his sword, too, if I had
been allowed; I adored his sword. And once, I remember, we painted
and varnished our own dog-cart, and very smart it looked, to save fifty
rupees. We had nothing but our pay--John had his company when we
were married, but what is that?--and life was made up of small knowing
economies, much more amusing in recollection than in practise. We
were sodden poor, and that is a fact, poor and conscientious, which was
worse. A big fat spider of a money-lender came one day into the
veranda and tempted us--we lived in a hut, but it had a veranda--and
John threatened to report him to the police. Poor when everybody else
had enough to live in the open-handed Indian fashion, that was what
made it so hard; we were alone in our sordid little ways. When the
expectation of Cecily came to us we made out to be delighted, knowing
that the whole station pitied us, and when Cecily came herself, with a
swamping burst of expense, we kept up the pretense splendidly. She
was peevish, poor little thing, and she threatened convulsions from the
beginning, but we both knew that it was abnormal not to love her a
great deal, more than life, immediately and increasingly; and we
applied ourselves honestly to do it, with the thermometer at a hundred
and two, and the nurse leaving at the end of a fortnight because she
discovered that I had only six of everything for the table. To find out a
husband's virtues, you must marry a poor man. The regiment was
under-officered as usual, and John had to take parade at daylight quite
three times a week; but he walked up and down the veranda with Cecily

constantly till two in the morning, when a little coolness came. I
usually lay awake the rest of the night in fear that a scorpion would
drop from the ceiling on her. Nevertheless, we were of excellent mind
towards Cecily; we were in such terror, not so much of failing in our
duty towards her as towards the ideal standard of mankind. We were
very anxious indeed not to come short. To be found too small for one's
place in nature would have been odious. We would talk about her for
an hour at a time, even when John's charger was threatening glanders
and I could see his mind perpetually wandering to the stable. I would
say to John that she had brought a new element into our lives--she had
indeed!--and John would reply, 'I know what you mean,' and go on to
prophesy that she would 'bind us together.' We didn't need binding
together; we were more to each other, there in the desolation of that
arid frontier outpost, than most husbands and wives; but it seemed a
proper and hopeful thing to believe, so we believed it. Of course, the
real experience would have come, we weren't monsters; but fate
curtailed the opportunity. She was just five weeks old when the doctor
told us that we must either pack her home immediately or lose her, and
the very next day John went down with enteric. So Cecily was sent to
England with a sergeant's wife who had lost her twins, and I settled
down under the direction of a native doctor, to