THE POOL IN THE DESERT BY MRS. EVERARD COTES (SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN) Author of "An American Girl in London," etc. I KNEW Anna Chichele and Judy Harbottle so well, and they figured so vividly at one time against the rather empty landscape of life in a frontier station, that my affection for one of them used to seem little more or less than a variant upon my affection for the other. That recollection, however, bears examination badly. Judy was much the better sort, and it is Judy's part in it that draws me into telling the story. Conveying Judy is what I tremble at; her part was simple. Looking back, and not so very far, her part has the relief of high comedy with the proximity of tears; but looking close, I find that it is mostly Judy, and that what she did is entirely second, in my untarnished picture, to what she was. Still, I do not think I can dissuade myself from putting it down. They would, of course, inevitably have found each other sooner or later, Mrs. Harbottle and Mrs. Chichele, but it was I who actually introduced them. My palmy veranda in Rawalpindi, where the tea-cups used to assemble, was the scene of it; I presided behind my samovar over the early formalities that were almost at once to drop from their friendship, like the sheath of some bursting flower. I deliberately brought them together, so the birth was not accidental, and my interest in it was quite legitimately maternal. We always had tea in the veranda in Rawalpindi. The drawing-room was painted blue-blue for thirty feet up to the whitewashed cotton ceiling. Nothing of any value in the way of a human relation, I am sure, could have originated there. The veranda was spaced and open; their mutual observation had room and freedom; I watched it to and fro. I had not long to wait for my reward; the beautiful candor I expected between them was not ten minutes in coming. For the sake of it I had taken some trouble, but when I perceived it revealing, I went and sat down beside Judy's husband, Robert Harbottle, and talked about Pharaoh's split hoof. It was only fair; and when next day I got their impressions of each other, I felt single-minded and deserving. I knew it would be a satisfactory sort of thing to do, but perhaps it was rather more for Judy's sake than for Anna's that I did it. Mrs. Harbottle was only twenty-seven then, and Robert a major; but he had brought her to India out of an episode too color-flushed to tone with English hedges: their marriage had come, in short, of his divorce, and as too natural a consequence. It is well known that in India the eye becomes accustomed to primitive pigments. and high lights; the esthetic consideration, if nothing else, demanded Robert's exchange. He was lucky to get a Piffer1 regiment, and the Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were all lucky, I thought, to get Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a good deal challenged, even in Rawalpindi, where it was thought, especially in the beginning, that acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could hope for. That is not enough in India; cordiality is the common right. I could not have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about the "case"; it was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some points of view deplorable. I chose to make my point of view, on Judy's behalf, merely 1 Punjab frontier force. Quixotic, preferring on Robert's just to close my eyes. There is no doubt that his first wife was odious to a degree that it is simply pleasanter not to recount, but her malignity must almost have amounted to a sense of humor. Her detestation of her cousin Judy Thynne dated much further back than Robert's attachment. That began in Paris, where Judy, a young widow, was developing a real vein at Julian's. I am entirely convinced that there was nothing, as people say, "in it." Judy had not a thought at that time that was not based on Chinese white and permeated with good-fellowship. But there was a good deal of it, and no doubt the turgid imagination of the first Mrs. Harbottle dealt with it honestly enough. was At all events, she saw her opportunity, and the depths of her indifference to Robert bubbled up venomously into the suit. That it was undefended was the senseless mystery; decency ordained that he and Judy should have made a fight, even in the hope that it would be a losing one. The reason it had to be a losing one -the reason so greatly criticizedthat the petitioning lady obstinately refused to bring her action against any other set of circumstances than those to which, I have no doubt, Judy contributed every indiscretion. It is hard to imagine Robert Harbottle refusing her any sort of justification that the law demands short of beating her; but her malice would accept nothing of which the account did not go for final settlement to Judy Thynne. If her husband wanted his liberty, he should have it, she declared, at that price and no other. Major Harbottle did indeed deeply long for his liberty; and his interesting friend Mrs. Thynne had, one can only say, the most vivid commiseration for his bondage. Whatever chance they had of winning, to win would be, for the end they had at heart, to lose; so they simply abstained, as it were, from comment upon the detestable procedure which terminated in the rule absolute. I have often wondered whether the whole business would not have been more defensible if there had been on Judy's part any emotional spring for the leap they made. I offer my conviction that there was none, that she was only extravagantly affected by the ideals of the Quarter, -it is a transporting atmosphere, and held a LXVL-10 view of comradeship which permitted the reversal of the modern situation filled by a blameless co-respondent. Robert, of course, was tremendously in love with her; but my theory is that she married him as the logical outcome of her sacrifice, and by no means the smallest part of it. It was all quite unimaginable, as so many things are, but the upshot of it brought Judy to Rawalpindi, 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 neighborhood of Sheikh-budin 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, I find, into the simple definitions of those parts,-which she undoubtedly did, she owed it in no small degree to Judy Harbottle. One feels this 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. Anna and Judy had the assurance of each other; they made upon each other 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 band-stand 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. I thought 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. 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 waves 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. Ten years later Somers came out. The Twelfth was at Peshawar. Robert Harbottle was lieutenant-colonel, and had the regiment. Distinction had incrusted, in the Indian way, upon Peter Chichele, its former colonel; he was general commanding the district, and K.C.B. So we were all still together in Peshawar. It was great luck for the Chicheles, Sir Peter's having the district, though his father's old regiment would have made it pleasant enough for the boy in any case. He came to us with the interest that hangs about a victim of circumstances. We understood that he was not a "born soldier." Anna had told me, on the contrary, that he was a sacrifice to family tradition, made inevitable by the general's unfortunate investments. Bellona's bridegroom was not a rôle he fancied, though he would make a kind of compromise as best man: he would agree, she said, to be a war correspondent and write picturesque specials for the London half-penny press. She conveyed it, I remember, in exactly the same tone with which she had said to me, years before, that he wanted to drive a milk-cart. She carried quite her half of the family tradition, though she could talk of sacrifice and make her eyes wistful in contemplating for Somers the limitations of the drill-book and the camp of exercise. Anna Chichele saw things that way. With the most delicate sense of all that was involved, if she could have made her son a poet or a commanderin-chief, she would not have hesitated for an instant. Judy, with her single mind, cried out, almost at sight of him, upon them both-I mean both Anna and Sir Peter. Not that the boy carried his condemnation badly or even obviously: I venture that no one noticed it in the mess; but it was naturally plain to those of us who were under the same. He had put in his two years with a British regiment at Meerut, --they nurse subalterns in that way for the staff corps, and his eyes no longer played with the tinsel vision of India; they looked instead into the arid stretch beyond. This preoccupation conveyed to the surgeon-major's wife the suggestion that Mr. Chichele was the victim of a hopeless attachment. Mrs. Harbottle made no such mistake; she saw simply, I imagine, the beginnings of her own hunger and thirst in him, looking back, as she told us, across a decade to remember them. The decade was there, close to the memory of all of us; we put, from Judy herself downward, an absurd amount of confidence in it. She looked well the night she met him. It was English mail day; she depended a great deal upon her letters, and I suppose somebody had' written her a word that brought her that happy, still excitement that is the inner mystery of words. He went straight to her, with some speech about his mother having given him leave, and for twenty minutes she patronized him on a sofa as his mother would not have dreamed of doing. Anna Chichele, from the other side of |