Stella…Hey, Stella!
The entire plot is dependent upon Henry Thresk being so bullied by his domineering mother into establishing financial independence (or not) that all the unpleasantness to come could have been avoided merely by letting nature take its course. Henry looks poised to ride off into the sunset of marital bliss with Stella Derrick, but that will not be the case:
“She was then nineteen and accounted lovely by others besides Henry Thresk, who on this morning rode at her side. She was delicately yet healthfully fashioned, with blue eyes under broad brows, raven hair and a face pale and crystal-clear. But her lips were red and the colour came easily into her cheeks…It was a morning rich with sunlight, noisy with blackbirds, and she seemed to him a necessary part of it. She was alive with it and gave rather than took of its gold. For not even that finely chiselled nose of hers could impart to her anything of the look of a statue.”
Hey, Stella’s Husband
Turns out that Stella is not exactly what one would term a necessary part of Henry’s life. He lets her get away and many years later comes face to face with the man she marries instead. His death and the fact that it came at the end of a barrel on a rifle Stella was widely known to use forms the crux of the conflict:
“A single lamp swinging above the round dinner-table from the cross-pole of the roof burnt in the very centre of the tent; and that was all. The corners were shadowy; the lining merely absorbed the rays and gave none back. The round pool of light which spread out beneath the lamp was behind Ballantyne when he turned to the doorway, so Thresk for a moment was only aware of him as a big heavily-built man in a smoking-jacket and a starched white shirt”
The Third Man
That Stella. A husband is dead and an old flame must forever be extinguished because of certain matters of propriety regarding his position and his role in being a witness for her defense. Have no fear, however, of dear Stella winding up all alone. There is a third man in her busy life:
“Dick Hazlewood was at this time thirty-four years old, an officer of hard work and distinction, one of the younger men to whom the generals look to provide the brains in the next great war. He had the religion of his type…In appearance he was a little younger than his years, lithe, long in the leg, with a thin brown face and grey eyes which twinkled with humor…Here was a lovable innocent with the most delightful illusion that he understood the world.”
Why did the Brits want India, Anyway?
This story has as its cultural backdrop—like an astounding number of stories to come out of England during the period—occupied India. Ballantyne seems a typical British Anglo-Indian official in terms of his regard for the foreign places from which the English plucked so much fresh fruit and his imagery of the country is indicative of not just his character specifically. It smacks of a larger and broader character of those English who saddled themselves with the “white man’s burden.”
"There's tourist India all in one: a desert, a railway and a deserted city, hovels and temples, deep sacred pools and forgotten palaces—the whole bag of tricks crumbling slowly to ruin through centuries on the top of a hill. That's what the good people come out for to see in the cold weather—Jarwhal Junction and old Chitipur."
