Read Travelers for Free Online

and up in Mussourie and some other hill stations. The mission used to have branches in all these places and she was moved from one to the other, wherever she was needed. I asked her which place she liked best but she said the work was the same in all of them. She looked very cheerful when she said that but my heart sank. I thought of the school room and the dispensary and all those people who come there. Especially I thought of their smell. Poor people in India all have it. It isn’t that they don’t wash but that they don’t have the opportunity to wash well, or change their clothes very often; and they all live and sleep crowded together in airless places and this gives them a sort of dank herd-smell. And sick people have a worse smell. Once I asked Miss Charlotte to let me help in the dispensary, give out aspirins and things like that. But I couldn’t bear it. All those people asking you to feel lumps in their bodies, and there was one old man with the toothache who opened his mouth wide and took my hand and guided it right inside to shake some blackened old molar that was hurting him.
    Miss Charlotte is small and dumpy and wears terrible missionary clothes. Her face is completely round and it shines with happiness, it really shines. She goes to church only on Sundays and then she wears a hat (what a hat). She always says grace before meals but in a sort of businesslike way, the same way I hear her give orders in the kitchen; sort of brisk. I know she says her prayers at night because I’ve seen her. She was kneeling by the side of her bed in a white cotton nightdress; but it didn’t take her long, and then she hopped up on the bed and pushed her nightie up her leg so as to rub ointment into her knee where she suffers from some rheumatic pain.
    Well, I had this long talk with her but I couldn’t get her really to say anything. Oh, she talked plenty but it was all about things I didn’t much want to hear about though they were very interesting really: I mean, sort of anecdotes about incurables that had been cured, and cute little foundlings adopted by Swedishparents, and Christmas Day in Kalimpong with a party for 450 orphans. She also spoke of some other missionary workers. There was one they all admired very much who spent fifty years in India doing marvelous work, though in the end she got very feeble and sick; she was nearly seventy by then. They all tried to get her to retire and go home to England but she kept putting it off, saying next year and then the year after. In the end she never went because she got chronic dysentery and died and was buried in the Christian cemetery at Gorakhpur. When she said that Miss Charlotte’s face became absolutely radiant as if it were the most wonderful thing in the world to be buried in Gorakhpur, the fulfillment of every earthly desire anyone could possibly have. But when she spoke about some other workers who had not been able to stand the climate and had had to be sent home, then she spoke in a pitying way and was sorry for them. I asked were there many like that and she answered reluctantly, well quite a few, poor things. Some of them got sick with the heat and others got various diseases of which the most common were jaundice and amebic dysentery. I asked her had she ever had anything like that, and she said oh, yes, but she had always been very lucky and got over them quite quickly and afterward she was sound as a bell. Then she laughed and she rang like a bell, a very clear one, and obviously she considers herself a very very lucky person indeed.
    So much goodness! Where does it come from? How do people get it?
    I discussed this question with Margaret, the girl I share the room with. Margaret also wants to be good, but not in that way. In fact, she gets rather impatient with Miss Charlotte. She likes her all right but she can’t sympathize with her attitude, which she says is old-fashioned and patronizing. She says people just don’t