by John Masters
October and November were a golden sun and a cool night, wood smoke, fragrant evening; in those days a patina of calm overlaid the routines of barrack and bungalow and lent them grace. The cold weather: December, January, February; English warm clothes, a fire in the grate, and the punkahs stilled; manoeuvres, tents in a mango grove; sunny
afternoons, raw nights, and snapping dawns; duck and snipe, and the leopard in the jungle.
He’d heard a rumour that the regiment was to change stations in January and would go to Dinapore--four hundred miles. They’d take six weeks on the march, and what an upheaval there’d be after five years in Bhowani. The regiment would march; women and children, furniture, pets, and toys would travel in pony traps and bullock carts.
Meanwhile, the embrace of secure monotony. Musketry practice with the new cartridges; his birthday at the end of this month; children’s party at the Club in May--the last outdoor function until September. What was it Sumitra had said to him one long-ago day? “You will die in England as Lieutenant Colonel Savage, B.N.I., retired--dried up and worn out. I have heard what it is like. They will laugh because you eat curry, and laugh when you try and tell them what this means.” She had swept her hand round the shimmering jungles. “They will say you are unhappy because you have no black servants to order about.”
That was right; that was how it went. There’d never be a great thing to do, and if there were his countrymen in England would laugh at it when it was done.
15
The white Club building slept in the dense blue shadow of its thatched roof. As Rodney went in, George Bulstrode’s purple face and congested eyes swam out of the gloom of the centre hall and floated towards him. On Saturdays the old man customarily ate a late tiffin here, after drinking in the bar from ten till two.
“Hullo, Savage. You on duty? H’m, yes--damfool children’s party. Well, bed for me.” He turned and bellowed down the passage, “Koi hail My horse!”
The door slammed behind him. Rodney’s eyes became accustomed to the semi-darkness, and he glanced idly at the papers pinned in overlapping profusion on the notice board. One, on the surface, read:
The Committee of the Bhowani Club has selected Saturday May the 9th (at 4:30 o’clock) as the date of the annual hot-weather children’s party. New members are requested to note that it is not customary for ayahs to accompany children, nor should infants under 2 years of age be brought.
W. O. Ransome-Frome.
Honorary Secretary
February 13th, 1857
He pulled out his watch: two o’clock. He had plenty of time. He called for a servant, shouting “Koi hai!”
Nothing happened. A pulse stirred rhythmically in his temple. The silence caught and imprisoned his shout. Out at the back of the Club the beaten earth of the compound glared like white fire. A lean dog scratched its mange for fleas, got up, and limped away. Rodney tugged at the collar of his tunic, yawned, and went to look for the duty waiter. He found him stretched on the stone flags under the bar, asleep and breathing noisily through his mouth. Rodney leaned over and snarled, “Koi hoi!”
The waiter blinked and struggled to his feet, obviously disliking the taste in his mouth. Rodney felt a sullen sympathy with him--to be on duty at two of a Saturday afternoon in May! He yawned again. “Has the fatigue party from the Thirteenth Rifles come yet?”
It took time for the question to penetrate the heat-fuddle in the man’s brain. “I think they are waiting outside, huzoor. Shall I fetch the jemadar-sahib?”
“No. I’ll go to them.”
He walked down the steps, winced, and plunged into the trembling furnace of the open air. The sepoys stood in a loose group under the trees at the far end of the lawn. Seeing Rodney, the jemadar in charge of them gave a command and strutted across the brown-green grass to meet him.
“Sir! Jemadar Godse, two naiks, nineteen sepoys, one carpenter, reporting for fatigue duty--present and correct, sir!”
Rodney returned the salute with a gesture of his hand and moved in under the shade. The men made way for him.
“Stand easy, if you please.”
Godse repeated the order, and Rodney pulled out a cheroot. “Well, how are we going to arrange things? Have you brought the gear?”
The jemadar pointed to a pile of wooden poles, planks, canvas, and rope.
“Good. Now, what about it?”
They stood side by side, looking at the lawn, the haphazard trees, the beds of dirty marigolds and sickly zinnias. Godse cleared his throat. “Last year we put up the swings under that far tree, and the awning over there. Shall we do it the same way this year?”
The sepoys stood wooden and silent around, and Rodney tried to make them smile. He said lightly, “And what did we do in 1805, Jemadar-sahib?”
It was not a good joke, but ordinarily it might have amused them. He glanced at their faces and wondered what was on their minds. The carpenter Piroo stood apart from the sepoys and bowed low as Rodney caught his eye.
He waved his cheroot. “Very well. Do it like that. I’ll get the Club servants to carry out chairs. Make sure the awning is near the end of the verandah there, so that the conjurer can stand under the tamarind. Perhaps he’ll want to make something appear out of the branches, eh? Is that understood? Oh, and keep the croquet pitch clear--all those little iron hoops.”
The group dissolved as the men dragged the planks out into the glare; Piroo the carpenter trailed after them, carrying a hammer and a bag of nails. For a minute Rodney stood alone in the shade and watched them. Then, feeling impelled to share at least in part their martyrdom to the heat, he followed them across the grass. The nearest men had begun to make the framework for the swings, and were working hard.
They were talking in low voices and did not see him come up. One of them, holding a post upright, said, “Naik, is it true that the Silver Guru has taken a vow to fast in silence?”
The N.C.O. was Naik Parasiya, who had been in the temple at Kishanpur that night of the Holi. He was stooped down, fastening a guy rope, and Rodney heard him answer, “It’s true.”
“How long is he going to do it for? And why?”
“He said ‘Until the destruction promised by the gods overtakes the wicked.’”
The naik stood up as he spoke, saw Rodney, and muttered, “Quiet. Get on with your work.”
Rodney’s brain ticked over idly. The tunic glowed across his shoulders, and the top of his collar burned where it touched his neck. He wriggled uncomfortably, wondering what the Guru meant. One day, a week or so after the Holi, the leper had reappeared in the Little Bazaar, which meant presumably that they had all settled their affairs in Kishanpur without bloodshed. Perhaps the Guru had given up his intrigues altogether. These remarks about destruction and the vow to fast sounded like phrases designed to attract attention and increase his reputation in this other life of his, the one he lived under the peepul tree in the Little Bazaar. Other things pointed the same way--his intervention in the matter of the greased cartridges, for instance. It was no use fretting about it now.
Rodney saw that all was in hand, and turned up into the Club. A quiet glass or two of brandy, with plenty of cold water, would pass the time; the fatigue wouldn’t be finished for a couple of hours, and then the English population of Bhowani would begin to arrive, every last one of them-- except Curry Bulstrode, snoring in his bungalow. Rodney’s own tiffin of crumbed mutton chops, mango food, and beer lay heavy in his stomach.
He stood in the gloom of the bar, holding the brandy in one hand while he cautiously tested the chairs with the other. Sometimes, at this hour and season, the greater comfort of the leather armchairs made up for their greater heat, sometimes not. He shook his head; today it would have to be a cane chair. He sank back, put his glass in the hole in the arm-rest, swung out the pieces which extended into leg-rests, lifted his boots up on to them, and stared at the ceiling.
A minute later he got up and riffled the leaves of the English periodicals, all four months old, littering a
table against the back wall. He did not want to read any of them; he had read them all already, twice each. He sat down again.
A brainfever bird opened up from a tree in the compound: higher, higher, higher, higher--break, pause, begin again; pippeha pippeha pippeha pippeha, ha ha ha, pippeha pippeha --higher, higher. The heat seeped in through the thick walls and tight-shut windows, and the air seemed to glow in the darkened room. He took a long drink and licked his lips. Better be careful of that stuff; he liked it. Better still, find some task that would engage his whole interest and capacity; that was the real answer. A soldier’s trade ought to have adventures enough; it didn’t though, and nowadays an officer couldn’t tie a lady’s glove to his lance point and ride out looking for them.
That wasn’t quite true. Somewhere in a bureau drawer in the bungalow there was a square of paper. A man in peasant clothes had handed it up to Rodney as he was riding through the Little Bazaar a week before. The man had already dissolved in the press when Rodney glanced up from the note. It was in English, a large black script: “Post still open. Please come, at once. S.” Please was underlined three times.
She had a nerve to pretend that the night of the Holi had never been. He was not going to answer it.
There was something the matter with the world. Away off to the east the 19th B.N.I. in Berhampore had refused to receive their percussion caps. They’d been disbanded and gone off peacefully to their homes, even cheering old General Hearsey. He was a fine old warhorse. But that was a terrible end for a fine regiment. It was impossible to persuade the men these Dum-Dum bullets were all right. Damn it, everyone ought to know better what went on inside other people’s heads, muddled or not. Thank God the musketry had gone off all right here. A word from the Silver Guru, and all is well. God in heaven, who commands this regiment--Anderson or the Guru? Not Caversham, anyway.
He moved his head irritably so that a trickle of sweat ran down into his left eye. Of a sudden the buzzing of the flies infuriated him, and he yelled, “Punkah wallah! Wake up and do some work, God damn your eyes!”
He heard the slight noise of the boy awakening; overhead the ramshackle framework began to creak, and the hanging strip of cloth to swing. Dust showered down, with a faint hot draught.
He awoke to the sound of men laughing, and opened his eyes slowly. Abel Geoghegan was leaning back against the bar and laughing at him. Alan Torrance stood beside the veterinarian, a small grin on his face. The two men were dressed so fashionably as to be all but foppish--Torrance in tan trousers, a flowered green waistcoat, a single-breasted tan coat reaching nearly to his knees, and a huge black cravat polka-dotted in green; Geoghegan in black and white dogtooth-check trousers, double-breasted grey frock coat, and thin yellow tie. Torrance’s youth and floridly Byronic handsomeness suited the style to perfection; Geoghegan looked like a prosperous racecourse tout, an impression strongly reinforced by the hoarseness of his voice.
“See there, Torrance, me boy. Behold the Garrison Captain of the Week, on duty! Now there’s the way to success in this Bengal Army--and he with a mouth like a barmaid’s armpits, I’ll wager.”
Rodney sat up. “Be quiet, you noisy bogtrotter. You’re hellish early, aren’t you?”
“It’s nearly half-past four, y’know,” said Torrance. “The ladies will be heah any minute. Mrs. Caversham made us promise to help at the swings.”
“More fools you. Here, let’s all have a drink. Koi hair
The world stretched and began to arouse itself. The building creaked, the leaves shook on the trees, bare feet padded in a distant nowhere. A spurt of energy throbbed in Rodney’s muscles, and he swatted quickly at a fly.
Geoghegan shook his head. “It’s no use, Rodney dear--but we’ve only fifty years here, at the most. Aha! an’ I’m gain’ back on leave next year. You can think of me a-sniffin’ the Liffey smells--ah, the brewery of Mr. Guinness!” He wrinkled his nostrils. “Perhaps I’ll not come back, too; no more dust, no more de Forrest--och, the man’s no better than a snake with the piles the way he looks at me when I’m tellin’ him a horse must be cast-- “
Rodney said, “I’ll wager you do come back.”
“Sure, I’ll have to come back. You know how ‘twill be-- unless me dear old great-aunt passes on. I can’t afford to live at home in the style to which I accustom meself--no horses, no young lady of me own, me boy.”
Rodney thought, I bet you’ll long to be back here from the moment you reach Dublin. But why spoil the fun? In India the secret was to live a year, ten years hence, in some ecstatic future, and when that future came and was no ecstasy, but a dull present, to look forward again. No one lived their “now” properly, except perhaps Caroline Langford, and she was a visitor; certainly Rodney didn’t himself.
Torrance said, continuing Rodney’s line of thought, “For me, ten years, ten solid endless years.”
“Oh, you’re a chicken, me boy, and why should you be worryin’?”
“My flesh creeps when I think that in ten years—in eighteen sixty-seven--I shall still be heah, or in some Club exactleh like this, drinking brandeh on a May afternoon. Why, I shall be---”
“My age,” said Rodney with a grim smile. “You won’t feel quite decrepit, take my word for it. When you’re twenty-one, ten years stretch away for ever in front of you, but when you’re thirty-one they look like nothing at all behind you.”
Geoghegan stroked his thin ginger hair, and his mobile Irish face assumed an exaggerated gravity.
“An’ there’s the Cardinal-Archbishop’s last words.” He grinned cheerfully, showing uneven tobacco-stained teeth. “But listen to this. Have ye heard the latest? ‘Twill be the hot-weather campaign this year in Bhowani for sure.”
He gathered their eyes with the infectious enthusiasm of the born raconteur and launched out. “Ye know old Mother Myers had the colic three, four months gone? Of course! Well perhaps ye didn’t know she borrowed a bedpan, in private ye understand, from the hospital stock of our little assistant-surgeon man, John McCardle. It’s a shamin’ thing for a big fat lady like her to be a-thinkin’, ye see, of everyone else a-thinkin’ of her squattin’ on a bedpan like a great grampus, now isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t dream of imagining the circumstance,” said Torrance, reddening.
“Wouldn’t ye now? But plenty would, I’m tellin’ ye. Well now, she recovers from the colic and forgets all about the blushful bedpan. A month later who should have a small go of the dysentery but Mrs. Nose-in-air Cummin’, no less-- an’ she’s so hoity-toity she doesn’t want even our little John McCardle to know about it. So she sends her bearer over to borrow the bedpan direct from Mother Myers, which he does an’. Mother Myers bein’ out, just takes it, an’ no one tells her it’s gone, only later she hears where it is. Now me boys, d’ye see what a wonderful arrangement we have here to keep the ladies happy through the rest of the hot weather an’ the rains?”
“I’m dashed if I do.” Rodney watched the lizard as it darted six inches up the wall and nicked out its tongue at a fly.
“Well of course John McCardle is verra verra seeerious an’ Scawts, an’ last week he wants his bedpan back so’s he can count it properly in his inventory. An’ Mother Myers says she hasn’t it but she hears Mrs. Nose-in-air Cummin’ has stolen it away. An’ wee John McCardle doesn’t believe her an’ asks, very stiff, who gives her permission to lend his bedpan away. An’ Mrs. Cummin’ hears of this an’ becomes in a tearin’ panic for no reason at all, an’ denies she ever seen the blushful thing, an’ sends her bearer out in a black midnight to bury it under a bush at the bottom of her garden, an’ swears every one of her servants to secrecy with passin’ of money an’ bloodcurdlin’ threats.”
From the gravelled front drive the clop of horses’ hoofs echoed through the Club. Women’s voices rang clear and high on the verandah, and a child’s excited yipping. Torrance shifted his feet uneasily; the set of his rather sulky face and the pout of his full lips showed his resentment of Geoghegan’s earthy gusto.
Geoghegan mopped his brow with a large linen handkerchief. “Here come the petticoats. We’ll have to be goin’ to our duty, Torrance, me boy. Now don’t ask me how I come to hear about the bedpan hurroosh----”
He winked; Rodney remembered with distaste that the brown fifteen-year-old girl who lived in Geoghegan’s compound was said to be the daughter of the Cummings’ butler.
“--but isn’t it perfect? It’s a feud ready-made-to-order, it’ll last for ever, an’ already the ladies are gatherin’ their forces. They’ve even forgotten about Dotty van Steengaard’s breech, an’ the poor filly’s expectin’ any moment now. Ye see, the married women all know about the bedpan but they don’t have to tell their husbands because it’s on the disgustin’ side--and that’s perfect too, because the menfolk might settle it in three minutes. But--an’ this is the cream of it---every man will be in one camp or the other, dependin’ on what invitations he accepts in the next two, three weeks, an’ he’ll not be knowin’ a thing! It’s all perfect! Now don’t breathe a word. I haven’t told a soul but you two, so sit back and watch the ladies get to work. Come on, Torrance, me boy!”
He smacked his lips over the last of his brandy and walked out, chuckling, Torrance smiling self-consciously at his side. Rodney swished the liquor round in his glass and shook his head. It was funny, but it was tragic too, for he knew that Geoghegan was right. The ladies of Bhowani would worry at the ridiculous incident for months, and be secretively happy, like dogs with a hidden bone. It would be the most important event of their year, the candle which would long hence light the memory of 1857.
The fatigue party should have finished their work by now. He put on his shako and narrowed his eyes against the glare. The sepoys were waiting to be dismissed, standing and squatting in the same loose group under the same trees where they had been when he first saw them. Godse called them to attention; they stiffened. Rodney gestured in salute and moved in under the shade.
