After the touch of his hand, as he sat on the arm of the chair on the evening when she first came to Mayfair, her body seemed to tingle with a furtive warmth in his presence, like a bird which overcomes the original resentment of being caged and brings forth its song to its captor. And their kissing and cuddling seemed rather uncanny. In the beginning I would come into the room and find them in an embrace, with Victor quite unselfconscious and June absolutely still, her eyes closed as though she was not giving but receiving. Then, perhaps because Victor came to her with a mad, untrammelled passion, delirious with all the pent-up fury of months of frustration, which had suddenly been dissolved in his kisses, she would lie on the divan bed looking at him with open eyes, as though the rosebud was just opening at the touch of the sun. And yet there was a certain dimness in her body, and I could sense that Victor was often deliberately gentle in his approach to her, lest he should shock her with the excessive vitality of his Indian nature and send her away. As their friendship grew quickly, and they began to share the only thing common between them on the ‘intellectual’ plane, the swing music that came from the radiogram, their loving attained a higher intensity, which was mutual though differentiated by her essential frigidity and his ardent, flaming temperament.
I knew, however, that he was not satisfied in his confused soul. ‘Give me an Indian girl for loving-time,’ he let drop the phrase in one of those confidences which he often felt impelled to give me. And I realized that the spell of Gangi’s high-powered sexuality was still on him, as a kind of contrast to the tentative beginnings with June Withers. Perhaps his body was in many ways finally pledged to Gangi and would never in that way belong to another, even if June had been of a hotter nature. Also, even when he wanted to give June all of himself, it was only the passion and the energy but not the flow of the real current of his life. For, in himself he seemed to have got stuck in a huge whirlpool which foamed in a circle on the top while reaching out to remote troubled centres of experience within, where mighty pulls tugged at him, breaking him, destroying him, reducing him to a soft slimy earth, which was corroded and slippery like a mass of disintegrating jelly. Therefore, in spite of his mad burst of loving in which he smothered June with kisses, caresses and soft words, his soul was bitter and ugly, demanding drink and more drink to drown itself, for what he really wanted was, like an illusion, beyond the reach of his arms, a fulfilment that was as impossible now as a bygone dream.
The hangers-on, that is to say Partap Singh and myself, were rather embarrassed when the kisses and embraces started in our presence, as outside witnesses of other people’s loving are always in an invidious position because of the envy it excites in the spectators. Partap Singh went out to the lounge of a hotel in Piccadilly in search of his own prey, while I fixed one moment of shame firmly with the gaze of my mind and, accepting Victor and June as part of the furniture of the suite, began also to accept certain permutations and combinations of this furniture which seemed quite amusing. And I waited, in the unquestioning manner of the doctor, for this part of the cure to show results in Victor’s person.
I found that his face looked increasingly less harrowed and the hot, insane fits of indignation, remorse, love, regret and desire were less frequent.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked him deliberately one afternoon when he got up from a prolonged siesta.
‘As I have been making up for my lost sleep of months by having a nap every day after lunch, I feel I know the difference between life and death,’ he told me.
I knew he was evading my question.
‘Are you happier?’ I asked him more directly, feeling very stupid after I had put the question to him.
‘I don’t know that I am happier, but I am wiser,’ he said. And he paused as though to consider his inner feelings, and then said half embarrassedly, half jocularly, ‘Someone has said that if you have a broken heart, the best cure is to try and get it broken again.’
I smiled understandingly. But I think he noticed a certain remoteness in my manner, and his face became strained with the attempt to touch me, to melt the cynicism he found latent in my expression.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I did not realize how right that yokel Partap Singh was when he said that I must have a substitute for Gangi.’
As I did not want to give him the impression that I approved of the particular substitute he had chosen, I did not say anything about June, but waxed deliberately philosophical:
‘It is silly for me to talk of happiness. I suppose if there is any happiness, it lies mainly in the removal of anxiety.’
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘I still have a gnawing feeling inside me, almost like a toothache in my soul, that I have missed something in life—I feel that with Gangi’s going something in me is dead for ever. Perhaps I shall never love again in the same way. I feel I will take my pleasure wherever it comes from and whenever I feel like it—’
‘I wish you had waited,’ I said rather priggishly. ‘You might have found a nice woman.’
‘I despair of ever finding anyone to suit me as Gangi suited me.’ And he made a wry face.
‘There are plenty of good women in the world,’ I said airily, almost enthusiastically.
He waved his head negatively. And then, tilting it to one side, he looked away from me and whispered:
‘I think you know that I have come to one conclusion about women: that they prefer bad men. When I was a wild young man, I could have had any woman for the asking. . . . I feel that they are fascinated by evil.’
I laughed a wooden laugh, and tried to change the subject.
Victor seemed bored. So I sought to make the discussion interesting.
‘You see, in the old days they negated woman in Europe also. She was not asked. She was just taken. And I suppose this will only alter when woman stands on the same footing as man, and love becomes a reciprocal business, embracing the whole of the man-and-woman relationship, and not being merely mistaken for sex, which is only one part of the relationship. Then men and women might live together more intensely, and their relationships might become more enduring, and non-possessive, and separation might begin to seem to both partners in a marriage a great misfortune. And through this new values would arise, in which it would not be necessary to ask whether a couple lives within or without the marriage tie, but whether the relationship is a creative one, based on shared work and mutual love and respect. At the moment people only pretend to accept this basis in our bourgeois society, but really ignore it, while in a new kind of society—’
‘I don’t like words like “bourgeois”,’ Victor interrupted.
He rose from his chair and taking a cigarette from the tea table lit it. He seemed to want to retort back to me because he found all I said to be the negation of the things he had done in his life. I knew that in his docile moods he accepted most of what I said. But when he was racked by doubts, any attempt on my part to make him question himself produced an evil will in him and he fought back. It was as though he reacted to my priggishness as Gangi was reacting to his self-righteousness. His eyes glittered as though with a malignant desire to deny me. He stood motionless for a moment, withholding his anger against me.
I sat bent-headed and rather hopeless about being able to help him or to be honest with myself.
Suddenly he seemed to see the hurt expression on my face. And he turned towards me in an obvious anguish of kindliness.
‘Don’t despise me too much. Please don’t chastize me!’
And then he tried to hold himself hard, so that the tears should congeal in his eyes and not be seen.
I surmised that Victor was not to be purged of his remorse for the past, the guilt about the present, and anxiety about the future except through the brief moments of forgetfulness he enjoyed in the company of June Withers.
To an extent the moments with June were not really moments of forgetfulness. For one thing June’s parents had begun to object to her late nights, and her young man at Barrots was making things difficult
for her by prowling around Curzon Street. So that though June allowed the chill virginity of her inner life to relax in the enjoyment of the good food Victor gave her in the Spanish, the Hungarian, the French, the Greek and the Indian restaurants, the nice clothes he bought her from the fashionable shops in Bond Street and Berkeley Square, and the amusement with which he provided her in the form of the cheap musicals she liked, she felt inhibited by a certain sense of shame in the sensual voluptuousness which crowned all the entertainment.
And in the slight rigidity of her manner, and in the tension of her nerves, even in the beauty of the violently active intimate life, Victor began to sense a discord and a feeling of the temporary nature of this flirtation.
And yet warming to the excitement of a new romance with June, Victor’s outward life went on, aided by all the courtesies and graces which, through gifts and tokens, bind a poor, frustrated girl to a rich suitor. But, deep inside him, he seemed to be terror-stricken at the phenomenon of his affair with the English girl. I suspected that, apart from the hangover of the heavy beauty of the licentious delight he had had in Gangi, and the comparison which these marigolds and gulmohurs of his sensibility made in view of the delicate pink roses of June’s flushed cheeks, he felt a certain boredom with her vulgarity and dullness, a quite different kind of vulgarity and dullness from that which Gangi exuded. For, in the case of the harlot there were always the violent, quarrelsome words and the impatiences of the moody, dominating, sinister vampire beneath the surface of the routine life; while here, with the English girl, there was the politeness of the first days of the affair as well as reticences. The thought of the hidden resources in June relieved the situation somewhat, and he told me that he hoped he would be able to show her whole vistas of India and fill her life with riches and take her around the world. But she was slightly anaemic, listless and pale and could neither bring the energy which might cope with his ardent nature, nor open up the inner worlds behind the glistening look in her eyes, if, indeed, there were any inner worlds there worth speaking about.
Again and again, in between the moments of stepping out from the car into the suite or into a restaurant or cinema, or while holding hands in the car itself, or at supper late at night, I could sense Victor coming back to the attack. But June was not there, almost as though she was utterly frightened of the world whose powerful, glaring eyes were looking at her, exploring her whole person, like searchlights, for the guilts and the shames of giving herself to a Maharaja.
Then Victor tried a subtler approach. He stopped trying to communicate with her with words in the direct way in which he had probed her views on life; he only multiplied the endearments; and he assailed the dark confusion of her mind by an exaggerated, highly dramatized sentimentality.
The curious thing was that she yielded to this kind of lovemaking and glowed like a fire. The cold passion in her melted and she seemed to relax and open up, ready to be filled up. And although she was too dumb and baffled to understand what was happening to her, she became naked and allowed herself to be overwhelmed. And now, a slow yearning for him began to possess her, so that she would wait upon his words in an anguish of waiting, as though she was willing to receive everything, the whole universe, if he gave it to her. And, impulsively, she would turn to him and pull his cheek or hold his chin in her hands and let her blind soul radiate towards him. And they were bound up in the world of their desire.
And yet, just when they were both coming nearer to each other, Victor seemed to be thrown back into sudden moods of despair and to withdraw from the contest, as it were. And it was obvious that she was only a small part of him, a kind of stopgap before the bigger reality of Ganga Dasi, whose memories were bearing him down, compelling him, encompassing him, murdering him, annihilating him.
June noticed that he was sad, and said so now and then, even caressing him with sensitiveness; but the cold imperturbability of her nature was not really disturbed by his sorrow, and she could never realize how near death he had been. Patiently, she sat there and waited for him to return to her and take the initiative. Meanwhile, she was even glad of the freedom to be herself, detached and withdrawn, for she could devote more time to do pure gold-digging and have her hair done, and nails varnished, and feel less guilty because she was not actually committing sin.
I thought at first that Victor’s moods were mostly due to the contrasts between the souvenirs of his intense pleasures in Gangi and the furtive, hole-and-corner affair with June. Also, I felt that the chill in the autumn air and the increasing absence of the sun was affecting him. But the moods became frequent and I began to see him holding prolonged secret conversations with Partap Singh, with whom I knew he had not much in common and whom he had not trusted overmuch with confidences hitherto. I thought that Victor had perhaps got bored with June and was arranging with Partap Singh to find someone else to whom he could shift his affections. But, soon, I began to suspect that their talks related to some private arrangement about a spy system, to keep surveillance on Gangi in Sham Pur, of which the ADC had been put in charge, apparently before we left the state, and about which I had not been told anything.
I felt rather hurt at not having been taken into confidence by Victor, because I realized, for the first time, that there was an inscrutable element in his nature which had not been revealed to me. And I began to speculate about the possible nature of the conspiracy in which Victor and Partap Singh were involved.
They were pretty discreet about the whole thing, however, and I just gave up nosing, only getting worried when the black fits made Victor burst into raging tempers, especially at the cost of Partap Singh, and when he became, for hours, a kind of demon, hard, overbearingly masterful and stentorian in his utterances.
‘I shall revenge myself on all of you,’ he suddenly burst out one day. ‘I don’t trust any of you! You have destroyed me! You have taken away my state. All of you, all of you, are intriguing against me. What does my life amount to now? You have all trampled upon me. All of you, all of you, all—all of you who professed to be devoted to me, “Highnessing” me! . . . None of you really like me! Strange, isn’t it, that I have so many friends, but not one real friend—when it came to it I found that I hadn’t even one friend who would stand by me!’
I protested, feeling slightly hypocritical as I did so. But, anyhow, neither my protests, nor Partap Singh’s abject confessions of devotion could allay the bitterness which had begun slowly to possess Victor. And he trampled on himself with more words:
‘The fool! The fool! I did not guard myself against you all. Why didn’t I foresee that this would happen to me? What a fool I have been! Oh, if only, if only. . . .’
And he again began to suffer agonies during the nights, waking up in hot sweats and in the grip of nightmares. . . .
After the apathy and listlessness of Victor’s nervous collapse had come the excitement of the affair with June, accompanied by a delirium, which was the outer index of several unresolved conflicts. And then, suddenly, one grey morning, something happened which, though really as inevitable as everything else that had happened to our Maharaja, seemed like the sudden and untoward impact of a cruel and blind fate.
A CID man, who announced himself as Inspector Ward, called on us and asked Captain Partap Singh to come with him to Scotland Yard for a consultation. He also asked to see ‘His Highness the Maraja Ashok Kumar’.
Victor happened to be in the bathroom at the time. So he waited.
Nervous and distraught as I was, not only with the fear of the policeman, which is instinctive with me, but also with the dread that something terrible had happened in Sham Pur, I ventured to ask the officer the reasons for his call.
A huge, burly man with a padded face, Inspector Ward was, like Humpty Dumpty, impenetrability itself.
And this stirred the deeper levels of anxiety in me, the layers of guilt feelings aroused by my complacency in full view of the furtive talk between Victor and the ADC in spite of the sinister forebodings that had arisen in
me at the very first awareness of this kana-phusi.
The atmosphere of waiting for the doom to reveal itself was fraught with the most awful, muffled anguish. The remorse about the weakness and cowardice I had shown in not resolving the contradictions in my own position, and the abject surrender of my ideas and feelings in time-serving compromises, disguised by rationalizations of affection and pity and personal loyalty for a person who was, from the logic of his position, quite unregenerate—all this shrilled out in my confusion.
At last I heard Victor come into the bedroom, and I went in to tell him that an Inspector Ward from Scotland Yard was waiting in the dressing-room.
As soon as he saw my pale face with its grim expression, he said:
‘Why, Hari, is there some bad news from Sham Pur?’
It seemed to me that he had a premonition of disaster.
‘What has Partap Singh done?’ I asked him, breathless.
‘I suppose Bool Chand has been murdered,’ Victor said aloud to himself. And, trembling, he sat down on the bed.
The whole thing revealed itself to me in a flash. All the furtive whisperings seemed to become eloquently clear. Apparently they had been discussing a plot which they had laid out before they left Sham Pur to have Bool Chand murdered. The fact that Victor did not want Munshi Mithan Lal to come with us, and had left him behind, seemed to me to suggest that they had also involved him in their design, and the letters Munshiji wrote to Partap Singh, which were not shown to me, had presumably reported developments back at home. So this was the end, the brutal end. And I felt sad, not because I felt sorry for Bool Chand, who was a crook anyhow, but because I felt involved in a putrescent mess, ashamed at my own weakness in not acknowledging the logic of the world of which I had become a part.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 83
