half
of him another way. At this juncture, half of himself felt a confounded
fool for not going back to the Punjab and enjoying a friendly sociable
cold weather among his father's people. The other half felt impelled to
probe deeper into the complexities of changing India, to confirm and
impart his belief that the destinies of England and India were one and
indivisible. After all, India stood where she did to-day by virtue of
what England had made her. He refused to believe that even the insidious
disintegrating process of democracy could dissolve--in a brief fever of
unrest--links forged and welded in the course of a hundred years.

In that case, argued his practical half, why this absurd inner sense of
responsibility for great issues over which he could have no shadow of
control? What was the earthly use of it--this large window in his soul,
opening on to the world's complexities and conflicts; not allowing him
to say comfortably, 'They are not.' His opal-tinted dreams of
interpreting East to West had suffered a change of complexion since
Oxford days. His large vague aspirations of service had narrowed down,
inevitably, to a few definite personal issues. Action involves
limitation--as the picture involves the frame. Dreams must descend to
earth--or remain unfruitful. It might be a little, or a great matter,
that he had managed to set two human fragments of changing India on the
right path--so far as he could discern it. The fruits of that modest
beginning only the years could reveal....

Then there was this precious novel simmering at the back of things; his
increasing desire to get away alone with the ghostly company that
haunted his brain. As the mother-to-be feels the new life mysteriously
moving within her, so he began to feel within him the first stirrings of
his own creative power. Already his poems and essays had raised
expectations and secured attention for other things he wanted to say.
And there seemed no end to them. He had hardly yet begun his mental
adventures. Pressing forward, through sense, to the limitless regions of
mind and spirit, new vistas would open, new paths lure him on....

That first bewildering, intoxicating sense of power is good--while it
lasts; none the less, because, in the nature of things, it is foredoomed
to disillusion--greater or less, according to the authenticity of the
god within.

Whatever the outcome for Roy, that passing exaltation eased appreciably
the pang of parting f