She smiled again and as though Kitty were a child too gently patted her soft cheek.
LIII
Since she had been working at the convent Kitty had seen less of Waddington. Two or three times he had come down to the river bank to meet her and they had walked up the hill together. He came in to drink a whisky and soda, but he would seldom stay to dinner. One Sunday, however, he suggested that they should take their luncheon with them and go in chairs to a Buddhist monastery. It was situated ten miles from the city and had some reputation as a place of pilgrimage. The Mother Superior, insisting that Kitty must have a day’s rest, would not let her work on Sundays and Walter of course was as busy then as usual.
They started early in order to arrive before the heat of the day and were carried along a narrow causeway between the rice fields. Now and then they passed comfortable farmhouses nestling with friendly intimacy in a grove of bamboos. Kitty enjoyed the idleness; it was pleasant after being cooped up in the city to see about her the wide country. They came to the monastery, straggling low buildings by the side of the river, agreeably shaded by trees, and were led by smiling monks through courtyards, empty with a solemn emptiness, and shown temples with grimacing gods. In the sanctuary sat the Buddha, remote and sad, wistful, abstracted and faintly smiling. There was about everything a sense of dejection; the magnificence was shoddy and ruined; the gods were dusty and the faith that had made them was dying. The monks seemed to stay on sufference, as though they awaited a notice to quit; and in the smile of the abbot, with his beautiful politeness, was the irony of resignation. One of these days the monks would wander away from the shady, pleasant wood, and the buildings, crumbling and neglected, would be battered by fierce storms and besieged by the surrounding nature. Wild creepers would twine themselves about the dead images and trees would grow in the courtyards. Then the gods would dwell there no longer, but evil spirits of darkness.
LIV
They sat on the steps of a little building (four lacquered columns and a high, tiled roof under which stood a great bronze bell) and watched the river flow sluggish and with many a bend towards the stricken city. They could see its crenellated walls. The heat hung over it like a pall. But the river, though it flowed so slowly, had still a sense of movement and it gave one a melancholy feeling of the transitoriness of things. Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.
“Do you know Harrington Gardens?” she asked Waddington, with a smile in her beautiful eyes.
“No. Why?”
“Nothing; only it’s a long way from here. It’s where my people live.”
“Are you thinking of going home?”
“No.”
“I suppose you’ll be leaving here in a couple of months. The epidemic seems to be abating and the cool weather should see the end of it.”
“I almost think I shall be sorry to go.”
For a moment she thought of the future. She did not know what plans Walter had in mind. He told her nothing. He was cool, polite, silent and inscrutable. Two little drops in that river that flowed silently towards the unknown; two little drops that to themselves had so much individuality and to the onlooker were but an undistinguishable part of the water.
“Take care the nuns don’t start converting you,” said Waddington, with his malicious little smile.
“They’re much too busy. Nor do they care. They’re wonderful and so kind; and yet—I hardly know how to explain it—there is a wall between them and me. I don’t know what it is. It is as though they possessed a secret which made all the difference in their lives and which I was unworthy to share. It is not faith; it is something deeper and more—more significant: they walk in a different world from ours and we shall always be strangers to them. Each day when the convent door closes behind me I feel that for them I have ceased to exist.”
“I can understand that it is something of a blow to your vanity,” he returned mockingly.
“My vanity.”
Kitty shrugged her shoulders. Then, smiling once more, she turned to him lazily.
“Why did you never tell me that you lived with a Manchu princess?”
“What have those gossiping old women been telling you? I am sure that it is a sin for nuns to discuss the private affairs of the Customs officials.”
“Why should you be so sensitive?”
Waddington glanced down, sideways, so that it gave him an air of shyness. He faintly shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s not a thing to advertise. I do not know that it would greatly add to my chances of promotion in the service.”
“Are you very fond of her?”
He looked up now and his ugly little face had the look of a naughty schoolboy’s.
“She’s abandoned everything for my sake, home, family, security and self-respect. It’s a good many years now since she threw everything to the winds to be with me. I’ve sent her away two or three times, but she’s always come back; I’ve run away from her myself, but she’s always followed me. And now I’ve given it up as a bad job; I think I’ve got to put
