by John Masters
“Dotty van Steengaard’s is not kicking much. Mr. McCardle says he thinks it will be a breech. He is going to try and turn it in three weeks’ time.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, Mrs. Bell. It is a most distressing and embarrassing experience. I had it done before Billy was born--good! A gold!”
Louisa Bell said, “I can no more hit that gold circle than get gold hair!”
“Archery is not difficult, Mrs. Bell, if one only perseveres.” That was Mrs. Cumming.
Mrs. Atkinson cut in. “It is for some people, Mrs. Cumming, however hard they try. It’s a knack, like--oh, riding for example.”
A murderous silence, and Rodney backed out of earshot. The lawn was the site of two separate competitions, one with wooden, the other with verbal, arrows. The score in the first was easy to reckon up: Mrs. Cumming had shot a flight of three arrows into the target--one black, one red, one gold--nineteen points. To assess the value of the hits in the other, poisoned, competition you had to know Bhowani. Louisa Bell had started it by her remark about gold hair (Mrs. Atkinson was widely believed to dye her hair)--a little cheap; score it a black for Louisa--three points. On the instant, Mrs. Cumming had shot under Louisa’s guard; but to appreciate it you had to know that the leaders of Bhowani society thought the Bells a dilettante and affected couple, too much given to facile enthusiasms--say five points. Recovering herself admirably from Louisa’s original tally, Mrs. Atkinson had promptly struck down Mrs. Cumming in an indirect but none the less effective way. (“Captain Ernest Cumming of the Eighty-eighth B.N.I, is your husband; we all know he just cannot ride a horse with grace, however hard he tries. Riding, however, is an accomplishment--or knack--that all gentlemen are born with; therefore your husband is not a gentleman; therefore you are no lady.”) Excellent, and so quick--and worked off, too, on someone who was attacking her attacker and therefore entitled to gratitude rather than insults--a golden nine points all the way. Mrs. Caversham hadn’t scored yet; but she would, she would!
At the end of the line of targets he caught at the sleeve of a short, hurrying, sandy-haired man and cried, “John McCardle! Stay and talk to me. You never gossip or swear, you’re always serious and careful what you say, and I love you.”
McCardle had a square face and the uneven freckled complexion which often goes with sandy hair and eyebrows. His freckles stood out now like the scabs of a disease against the drawn white skin of his face.
“Let go, Rodney. Ah’ve bad news. Ah can’t find de Forrest. Ah’m luking for Gosse. It’s nae gude trying to keep it secret any more. Julio’s deid.”
Rodney’s hands fell slowly to his sides. “Julio? Dead? John, he can’t be. We were out fishing together a few days ago. I heard he’d gone to visit Father D’Aubriac.”
“It was a lie, man. He’s deid. Hydrophobia.”
“Jesus Christ have mercy!”
“Aye, He’s the one that’s done it--but He had nae mairrcy. Rodney, will ye promise to get hog-stinking-blind drrunk wi’ me tonight? Ah’ve never had a drrop in me life. Stay on here after the competeetion.”
“But, John, how did it happen?”
McCardle stared at him in a kind of stony anger. His blue eyes were frightened. “How the bluidy hell do I know? Julio’s dog is fine. The poison can lie low for six months, a yearr. Any one of us may have it in us now. Any dog in Bhowani may have it. Didna your Jewel have a fight wi’ a jackal in January? It cude ha’ been herr. We don’t know. And there’s nae cure.”
He talked fast, as if he could not stop, hardly moving his lips or teeth. “So Julio’s deid. D’ye remember him as dull and nairrvous when ye went out fushing? And couldna stop talking? Aye, that’s the beginning of it. We brought him into ma little hospital secretly. He didna froth at the mouth, tha’s all balderdash. He lay wi’ a headache, getting worrse and worrse, luking out the window--it’s bare there and hotter than hell. He was mad tae drink but couldna; it choked him, and then he’d go crazy mad for a five-ten minutes. Whiles he’d vomit, black stuff, and whiles he’d have a convulsion, but when he came rround he knew exactly wha’ was happening to him, and it tuke me and Miss Langford and five orrderlies to holt him doon--Christ, tha’ girl was an angel, but there’s not one bluidy thing Ah cude do-- Christ, Rodney, Ah sent a man running for ma pistol, but Ah’ve nae more courage than a snivelling rabbit, and Ah couldna do it. Rodney, he near brroke his back, arrching over more and more each time till--he deed in a parroxysm, and couldna speak. But he knew! Knew! Ah’ni going to get drunk, Ah’d cry on Miss Langford’s shoulders, only that she’s exhausted, near deid.”
McCardle walked, like a man already drunk, over to Captain Gosse. Rodney heard a shivering sob beside him and looked round into Rachel Myers’ agonized face. He caught hold of her and yelled for help. Mrs. Caversham hurried to them; the marker ran to fetch Mrs. Myers from her target. The archery stopped, and a cluster of women gathered round. Sick at his stomach, Rodney pushed his way out. Behind him he heard Rachel’s moans. “He said terrible things--I didn’t understand--oh, how could he?”
He clenched his teeth and walked aimlessly away. McCardle, who never swore; the dour Scot who held his peace. Murderous, torturing India; to gouge out the dregs of his bitterness in filthy words! Lucky Rachel, to be lost in her adolescent visions of the Beatitude. Poor John McCardle! Julio--days in hell, days. Was Christ there? Only the nosy girl Caroline Langford. Why had no one sent for him, Rodney?
Lady Isobel was beside him, her hand on his arm. “It’s happened?”
“Julio’s dead. Hydrophobia.”
“My dear, I know. Caroline’s been nursing him for two days. Julio made Mr. McCardle promise to keep it secret, for all our sakes, so that the archery could go on--so that we wouldn’t have to think about what was happening to him --and for your sake especially, Rodney, because he didn’t want you to know till it was over.”
She crossed herself and stood a minute in silence. He felt her compassion supporting him. But--Caroline Langford had travelled the hardest road with Julio, where it was his place; she hadn’t been out riding with de Forrest, at least not for the last two days. He was jealous of her.
Isobel said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have a bad hot weather. There’s cholera up the Pike already, and a case of smallpox in the Bells’ servants’ quarters, I believe.”
Suddenly anger flooded him so that he trembled. “Smallpox! And Max and Louisa have the nerve to come here today, goddamn their eyes! I’m sorry, Isobel, but what do they mean by it? They might get it, or have it already, and we’d take it back to our children! Robin might get it!”
She faced him directly. “Rodney, I know how you feel, but those are risks we have to take. We would go insane, we would want to commit suicide, if we shut ourselves up in our bungalows whenever any disease was about.”
He slammed his hands into his pockets. “I suppose you’re right, my dear--as usual. Where’s Joanna? I want her to hurry back to the bungalow. It’s silly, I know. There’s nothing we can do. But there it is. I’ve got to look after John McCardle; we’ll both be drunk as beasts tonight. When I think of it, I want to--I don’t know what I want to do-- and he’s a doctor!”
He pressed her hand and hurried through the whispering crowd, avoiding their eyes. He’d get a bottle of brandy into John right away, and another into himself. The women, the backbiting--bestial pettiness. But it did not seem so petty now, somehow. They were armouring their minds against this filthy country, sticking pins into human dummies to exercise the unspeakable things that crouched in every corner of their real lives. They had homes, husbands, babies, servants; and every pet they kept, every green thing they ate, every drop of water--the sun in the sky, the beggar in the road, the air they breathed--might tomorrow destroy it all. God, Caroline Langford had guts.
In his mind he saw Robin, his baby Robin, lying on a cot. The child’s back arched over and over, more and more; his small white teeth ground together; black vomit spilled over his nightgown. Under Rodney’s f
eet a twig snapped; Robin’s spine snapped.
He ran round to the front drive. Joanna, pale and frightened, was getting into the victoria. He seized the coachman by the arm and whispered fiercely, “Mangu, tell Rambir to shoot Jewel--yes, and Harlequin--at once, as soon as you get back. D’you hear? If they’re not dead and buried in half an hour, I’ll shoot you! D’you hear? Joanna, I’m not coming to the Gosses’ for whist tonight--if they’re still having a party. Tell them I’m drunk--again.”
He hurried up into the Club and found McCardle in the bar. A bottle of Exshaw’s No. 1 brandy, already half empty, stood in front of him, and he was stone-cold sober.
10
On Monday morning the officers were already gathered for the officers’ weekly conference by the time Rodney reached the Orderly Room. All Mondays were bad, and this one was going to be very bad after Julio’s funeral yesterday. He saluted, took his place, and glanced round. Lieutenant Colonel Caversham at the head; then--clockwise from him--Major Anderson, the second-in-command; three captains--old Sculley, Geoffrey Hatton-Dunn the adjutant, and himself; two lieutenants--Atkinson, and Sanders the quartermaster; three ensigns--Torrance, Simpkin, and Neville. King, the sergeant-major, and Toombs, the quartermaster-sergeant, completed the circle. Surgeon Hackett was on leave and not due back till the end of July.
That added up to ten infantry officers present, where there should have been twenty-six. While the others chatted, waiting for Caversham to put his notes in order, Rodney quickly ran through the regiment’s roll as it lay open in his mind’s eye. The 13th was grossly understaffed in British Officers; the majority of those on the roll had been assigned by Leadenhall Street to duty elsewhere, and had not been replaced in the regiment. He knew that the 88th and 60th-- every Native regiment in the country, for that matter--were just as badly off.
When in this mood, he wondered how the Army managed to achieve any kind of efficiency. A regiment of Bengal Native Infantry was supposed to have twenty-six British Officers--call it twenty-five, because the colonel was hardly ever present. Of that number not more than seven were supposed to be away from the Colours--so the pack of money-grubbing civilians in Leadenhall Street let it run with ten, misappropriated fifteen, and so saved themselves the expense of paying non-military men to do the non-military jobs. The sepoys became dizzy keeping track of their officers, who should have been as immutable and comforting as the old shade trees in their villages. It seemed impossible to persuade the merchants who ran the Company that an infantry officer must serve with his regiment in peacetime to build the trust between man and officer that makes victory in wartime. They failed to appreciate, or deliberately ignored, another factor peculiar to India--that the Indian sepoy did not care whether his officers were good or bad, but demanded only that they should stay with him a long, long time.
Caversham was droning on--something about band subscriptions. Rodney fiddled with his pencil and drew a circle on the sheet of paper in front of him. Tattered cobweb threads dangled in the corners of the bare whitewashed walls; dirty water filled the cracks between the flagstones. The room had been cleaned but, as usual, not thoroughly cleaned. The grimy windows hung open, and flies buzzed in and out. He could just see a row of sepoys--orderlies, clerks, storemen--squatting on their heels farther along the verandah. A long lath hung from the ceiling on three iron hooks; a cord, attached to the centre of it, led out through a hole high in the wall; a deep strip of cloth was nailed on to the lath and hung down above the table. This was the punkah. Only the punkah-boy’s turban was visible through the window; he would be nine-tenths asleep, squatting with his feet against the wall and rocking slowly on the cord like an oarsman on his oar. Inside, the hooks squeaked, the cord creaked, the cloth swished; these were the sounds that accompanied all hot-weather thought and conversation. He had a headache. . . .
“Are there any objections?”
He’d half heard. The colonel had proposed to increase band subscriptions from officers, because the bandsmen needed new dress uniforms and a few instruments had to be replaced. That sounded all right; he had no objection. He glanced across the table at Simpkin. The ensign’s chubby face was pale, but he wasn’t saying anything, and he kept his eyes down. Rodney wondered if Caversham knew that the boy, who was only twenty-one now, had married a barmaid of thirty-five before he came out to India and sent most of his pay home to her. Rodney had found him one afternoon in his bungalow, looking at a pistol on the table. Then, under promise of secrecy, the boy had blurted it all out: he’d said, of course, that he’d never think of committing suicide; it would be unfair to his wife. “It’s my duty as a gentleman to support Emma.” Caught and plucked before his feet were clear of the shell! Rodney caught his eye, shrugged, and smiled. With an effort Simpkin managed a painful smile in return.
Atkinson, the legalist, coughed importantly. “Has it been decided, sir, what fund should pay for the wood and oil used in burning the corpses of sepoys who die of disease contracted in military service, but not in the field?” Rodney had already given his views to the quartermaster and sank back into another reverie.
Corpses--Julio’s funeral, the worst he’d ever been to. He hadn’t got to bed all Saturday night, and John McCardle hadn’t got drunk. Marching up from the lines at seven a.m., the muffled drums thudding in front, he’d thought he was going to vomit. There was no church in Bhowani, only a large cemetery surrounded by a high wall. All the living English were gathered there, round the hole in the earth, but still they made a lonely cluster among the gravestones. Two troopers of the 60th had ridden forty miles to fetch Father D’Aubriac from his desolate mission hut, and he was there. His home was Saint-Flour in the mountains of the Auvergne; he was short and round, black-bearded and steady-eyed, and Rodney liked him. Two or three times a year he left his dwarf aborigines and rode up out of the southern jungles to drink in the Bhowani Club and complain about the cooking.
John McCardle was there--though Rodney had implored him not to come--and was sick under the wall of the cemetery before the service began, and swore at God and Father D’Aubriac. No one heard what the priest said to him there in the corner, but he staggered home, and Father D’Aubriac smiled after him.
At the graveside Rodney stood between Rachel Myers and old Gosse. A few yards back was one of the many short mounds in the cemetery, and he had seen the headstone’s inscription: Sacred to the memory of Elizabeth Gosse, departed this Vale of Tears on the 9th day of June, 1850, in the ninth year of her age. R.I.P. Of course everyone knew that Gosse’s only child lay here, but the known fact struck him with a new force then. Gosse was bald and fattish, with watery eyes; he kept glancing across Rodney at Rachel and half-smiling. Rachel hated the way he pawed her. The child under the stone would have been fifteen too.
Then Hedges stumbled under the coffin, and the other bearers let it fall. Rodney happened to know that Hedges had summoned the most expensive whore in the city up to his bungalow the night before and was probably cross-eyed from his exertions. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have mattered, but this was the hot weather, and the lascars had worked so hastily that the box broke open. Thank God the winding sheet did not unwind. Joanna and Mrs. Bell fainted, and the long white roll lay there in the flat light, and a troop of mynah birds squabbled cheerfully in a cotton tree.
Rodney carefully drew an equilateral triangle in the circle on his sheet of paper. Riding down to the lines this morning, he had seen a big crowd under the Silver Guru’s peepul. The Guru was intoning threats of ruin and destruction-- something to do with the chupattis, and a need for prayer. A bespectacled merchant was there on the outskirts, his fat legs almost meeting under the belly of his stunted pony. The fellow had caught Rodney’s eye and smiled with immense superiority, as if to say, “These superstitious yokels! You and I know better, do we not, sahib? For we are educated people.” Rodney knew the type well enough, and in general did not like it. This specimen was from Bengal proper, probably Calcutta, and would be here battening on the local moneylenders, w
ho in turn would batten on the villagers and --if the British Officers were not watchful--on the sepoys. However, the man closed his umbrella, scrambled awkwardly off the horse, and salaamed low, politely enough. Rodney had acknowledged him with a nod and a half-smile; somehow he could never ride past such salutes in the cold, unseeing majesty proper to maharajahs and British Officers. He had even said, “Ram ram, babu-ji. You’re a long way from Calcutta, aren’t you?” The fat man’s gestures were no more than those ordinarily volunteered to any minor Indian landowner or illiterate petty squire, and they were certainly due to a commissioned officer of the Company. Yet there had been something discordant about the performance. That sneer on the man’s face, if a shade more pronounced, would have included him, Rodney, with “These yokels.”
Whose voice was that, reedy but loud, and pitched to cause alarm and despondency? He hid a grin: Eustace Caversham, proving who was the commanding officer of the 13th Rifles. Harriet Caversham bullied him into this performance once a week. The effect was that of a rabbit in a leopard skin. The lieutenant colonel thumped the table; the flies buzzed in alarm.
“The days are past when officers in the Company’s service might properly conduct parades, or indeed military business of any kind, while lying in bed on their verandahs. Besides, it is a Madras custom and has never been general in this Presidency. It does not look well, and I will not have it!”
Anderson sniffed loudly; the shot was aimed at him. He dealt with defaulters from his bed, and he would continue to do so. The blare in Caversham’s voice cut out, and when he spoke again it was with his usual unsure politeness-- something about barrack furniture and hutting money. The quartermaster was making an aggrieved denial.
Rodney listened with half an ear. He’d known in his bones that the chupattis would disturb everyone. He’d reported the affair to Geoffrey, and eventually it reached Dellamain, who then sent for him to discuss it. Rodney hadn’t seen the Commissioner since the debacle at Kishan Falls and expected to find him particularly pompous. He’d been wrong, for Dellamain was interested, and his interest overcame his unpleasant mannerisms. He told Rodney that the chupattis might be very important, and he was going to investigate further, meanwhile reporting to the Lieutenant Governor. And that had been that--until this morning.
