by John Masters
“They’re risking death in that village for us--every man and woman, every day. They’ve hardly enough food for themselves, and they feed us. Any one of them could be rich for the rest of his life, by telling the Dewan or the sepoys where we are. Piroo’s left his land and house for us. Sitapara’s risked torture, and you wanted to kill her--I knew it, back there in the cart. Prithvi Chand was your friend. What did he tell you before you killed him? Rodney, Rodney, you are so strong; but nothing’s worth the loss of your humanity. Be stronger still, understand that there is love and charity left in the world, and----“
The teak trees swayed and swooped over him. He’d have to knock her down, take her away by force. He lifted alert eyes to her face, ready to strike. Dark grey--the dark grey granite, the liquid shining eyes, the seas, and under them the stone. He couldn’t touch her while her eyes were open.
Tonight after dark there’d come a time--the cart waiting by the stream and the village stilled with death. She was too near God to see the sinfulness of man; the radiance blinded her. He alone could save her, and he wasn’t fit to touch her.
The rifle lay at his feet, the sun shining on the wooden stock, and the bayonet’s needle point buried in leaves. A sambhur belled in the jungle, and again; the clear tones rang down the aisles of trees. A great stag trotted out and across, head up to sniff the tainted air.
She said, “We must stay in Chalisgon and help them fight the cholera.”
He was going to protest, but decided not to. He did not want to give her an inkling of his plan yet.
She went on urgently, kneading his arm with her fingers. “I know how important it is to reach Gondwara, especially for you. But that’s only military duty--national duty, if you like. The war may drag on, and fifty thousand--two hundred and fifty thousand--people die if we don’t get there in time. But that’s a guess, and there’s no guess about what’s happening here in Chalisgon. At Gondwara, victory is a stake; here it’s understanding, love. They’re more important. They’re more important for England too, in the long run. We’ll be risking our lives here, as many unknown servants in unknown places have before us. It’s not showy. No one will ever hear of it. We may all die. But if we’re to be accepted in India it will be because of things like this--not victories or dams or telegraphs or doctors. Don’t you see that this is the great thing to do, come to our hands? We can leave something here which will live when all the fighting’s done, and our palaces are ruins, and we’ve gone home, as some day we will. We must stay. We must fight for Chalisgon, not because Chalisgon’s risking everything for us--we are not tradesmen--but because it is right.”
He listened wearily. She wasn’t thinking as human beings had to think if they were to live. A great task had come to their hands--to make the fight at Gondwara a victory; to punish evil and show no mercy--not to die here among thieves. He remembered the trust that had linked him to the sepoys, and them to him; that had been lovely and it had been poisoned, and whoever had done it must be punished. The sepoys must be punished for their weakness. The Silver Guru was at large, and only Caroline and he knew of his treason; he must be punished, and he would escape unless they reached Gondwara. Caroline was a saint and he could not argue with her. Saints did not feel human emotions; they didn’t laugh, or care about earthly material things--and so men who weren’t saints crucified them. Tonight he’d have to save her. He said, “All right. We’ll stay.”
He heard distant sounds in the jungle to the south and picked up his rifle. Waiting for the spotted deer, he began to think and plan while Caroline sat silent beside him. Get Piroo to prepare the cart in secret? A risk there, but he’d have to take it and trust to the threat of the rifle. Caroline and Mrs. Hatch--pretend to them that they were being attacked? Set fire to the house? Force or guile, he’d think up something.
In the evening he went early to his room, closed the door behind him, and stood listening in the darkness. They were talking still in the front room but not cheerfully. The cholera hung over them, and each man would soon return to his own house. He heard Caroline and Mrs. Hatch go into their room next to his, and listened to the faint shuffling and slithering as they prepared for sleep. It was burning hot, and he tiptoed to the windows and pushed the wooden shutters a little open--it wouldn’t matter tonight. No fight from moon or stars pierced the low overcast; outside and in, it was black. The thin sawing of mosquitoes swooped in his ear and penetrated the farthest corners of the room. He tiptoed to the door again, stood with his back to the wardrobe, and strained to listen.
He heard Piroo’s voice, muffled but suddenly loud. “I’m off to sleep now.”
The outer door into the courtyard had been open when he left and would remain so all night. Piroo slept out there among the cattle and goats. If he valued his life he’d do what he had promised--lie quiet until an hour after the last visitor had gone, then secretly yoke the bullocks into the cart and steal down to the stream. The axles were greased; that Rodney had seen to himself.
He heard the old twins go. A little later the bannia and the priest left together. Afterward the headman and his wife banged about the house and muttered to each other for a minute. The narrow stairs creaked as they climbed up to the roof where they slept.
The blackness and the heat pressed like fingers into his nostrils, and spiders of fear ran webs over his skin.
Not yet, not yet. Piroo wouldn’t start for an hour yet. It must be half-past nine. He couldn’t go without the cart because of Robin. If Piroo played him false? If a gang waited in the lane with axes and sticks? He couldn’t kill all of them. His hands trembled. He’d better creep down and stand over Piroo with a bayonet. The murderers might not wait that long. They might rush this room, and the women’s next door, and come in through the windows. There’d be too many of them. He’d kill a few, then they’d heave and sweat together in the dark, until an axe edge bit into his skull. That would finish it--all the sunlight, Robin’s eyes, the strength in his hands, the wonder of Caroline. There was a stone inside his left boot, wrinkling the muscles of his instep.
A long time passed and his hands never stopped trembling. He’d had a plan to get Caroline away but he’d forgotten it. He’d trust to luck, be gone before the murderers came. He knew positively that they were coming. When he awakened her, if they had not come by then, she’d smell the murder in the air. If she didn’t, he’d beg her forgiveness and knock her out. If he was holding the doorway and fighting for their lives there’d be no need to explain anything.
The velvet heat embraced him and the sweat soaked through his shirt and trousers. His feet were red-hot inside the boots. The stone grated under his heel. It was the size of a walnut and growing bigger.
He sat on the floor and laid the rifle beside him; it made a small metallic noise as he put it down. He began to untie the lace. He had taken the boots off once in two weeks. The cracked leather was stiff in the shape of his foot, and his heel would not slide free. He crawled into the corner, wedged his back against the wall, and tugged at the heel. The boot came off and he began to feel inside.
Because he had practised many nights to know the tiny sound exactly, he heard the door open. The headman’s wife kept the hinges oiled, and he had found no way to make them more noisy. When he heard the scrape he put the boot down gently and reached out his hand for the rifle. It wasn’t there under his hand. He remembered he had moved into the corner to pull off the boot. The murderer’s feet slithered on the floor. Bare floor, bare feet. Piroo, the black square of silk ready?
Mouth open and all his life in the tips of his fingers, he reached out, farther along the wall. He couldn’t have moved more than three feet. It must be here, close now, close; not yet, not in his reach. He began to edge sideways.
The feet were silent; at the bed; a rustle and a clop; a hiccough of breath. The death above the feet had found the stones. The feet turned and trod firm and quick, hurrying back to the door. He put out his hand, grabbed the rifle, and overbalanced. Sprawled against the wall, he swung it up into his
shoulder--fire when the door opened.
A hinge grated, wood slammed against wood. The trigger crawled under his finger. The door had not moved. He lurched to his feet and lunged the bayonet forward. The point broke against the hard wood of the door, and he jerked it free. A hollow scream, inches away, appalled his ear; death banged and thundered round him. He jumped back and lifted the rifle again, but he didn’t know where to fire. He searched forward, jabbing at the screams, hit wood, jabbed, and struck sparks off the wall. The banging and clattering and screaming rose to a climax of hysteria. His nerves tore apart and he burst for the door, shouting at the top of his voice.
“Caroline, get out! Out! They’re after us! I’m coming to you!”
A huge square thing, black against black, loomed over and crashed at his side, and bounced and sobbed by his feet. The sounds were a woman’s, and he stood in the door searching feverishly for a fuzee. Running feet thudded through the house. They were shouting from the courtyard, from the roof, from the room at the side. In the sputtering glare he saw the wardrobe on the floor. It creaked, and the woman’s cries came from inside. It had fallen front down, and hopped bodily with the efforts of its prisoner to get out. Rigid in panic, he stared down at it. People crowded round him, torches flared, Robin screamed in Mrs. Hatch’s arms. “What is it? What’s happened?” Everyone was shouting.
The distorted noise in the wardrobe was Caroline’s voice; he stepped dazedly forward. Piroo and the headman helped him; between them, hauling and pushing, they stood the wardrobe right way up. Its door swung open. Caroline fell out and lay on the floor, sobbing as though her heart would break. She wore nothing but a sheet, and that had fallen up round her waist. He stared numbly at the bare tight curve of her buttocks. Then he forgot what it was all about, stooped quickly down, wrapped the sheet round her, and picked her up in his arms. She clung round his neck and cried desperately into his shoulder while he muttered softly and foolishly,
“You were in the wardrobe, you were in the wardrobe, it’s all right.”
The knot of watchers in the doorway did not exist. She opened her eyes, looked from him to them, gasped, and slid to the floor, holding the sheet tight with both hands. She stammered, “I--I--I heard a noise, a clink. I was afraid of what you were going to do. I didn’t want to disturb you . . .”
Robin’s eyes were wide and anxious. The headman’s wife-was examining the wardrobe; she shook her head and muttered, “We found it on the Pike ten years ago while we were
coming back from a visit. It must have dropped off a sahib’s cart. It is accursed. I will have it burned.”
The headman was trying to pluck the broken bayonet point out of the door, and Piroo was staring from Rodney to Caroline with suddenly shrewd eyes.
Rodney said gently, “What happened then?”
“There were stones in your bed. I was hurrying out to find what had happened to you, and--and--when I opened the door furry things brushed my face, someone hit me on the nose,--and then, and then----“
For the first time she really saw the wardrobe. Rodney’s soothing anxious babble at last penetrated her mind. Her voice broke, she looked at her feet, then up at him, and began to laugh. She rocked on her heels, holding his arm to keep her balance. A vision of her fighting the pelts inside the wardrobe sprang into his mind, and his drawn face creased. He smiled, and there was an aching in his belly. The inhuman zealot girl of January, the inhuman crusader of February, the superhuman saint of May--she was human, a silly girl who’d frightened herself into a fit, and he’d roused the whole village yelling fire and murder.
He began to laugh, shouting joyfully. Villagers packed the outer room; over their heads he saw the flare of torches in the courtyard and heard the anxious buzz and murmur-- What’ shappenedwhat’shappened? Oh, if they could have seen the wardrobe jumping about the floor! He rocked and pumped Caroline’s arm, and cried, “You made a mistake, you made a mistake!”
A rushing torrent of relief sent his laughter up from the pit of his stomach. They were wonderful, marvellous people to see the joke. Caroline was a silly girl, and the world was laughing. Her face was wet with tears and she couldn’t speak properly. She threw back her head.
“Yes, I m-made a m-mistake--just a little one!”
Piroo’s face cracked mysteriously and the small lines deepened round his sunken eyes. Robin caught the infection and chuckled and reached out his hands to them. The headman smiled in a puzzled way and began to laugh, though he clearly had no exact idea what the joke was. The crowd outside took up the laughter, the torches waved, everybody yelled, the cows mooed. Mrs. Hatch stared from Rodney’s bootless left foot to Caroline’s insecure sheet. She sniffed, tossed her head, and cried, “I’ve never ‘eard of such a thing!”
She carried Robin out, a wink and a broad grin twisting her face. The headman’s wife, following Mrs. Hatch’s glance, went off into a fat paroxysm. Seizing Rodney’s arm, she bawled in his ear, “Sahib, sahib, couldn’t you have been more gentle? Virgins frighten easy.”
The crowd passed back the joke and the laughter doubled. Rodney sat suddenly on the bed, while Caroline leaned back against the door and recovered her breath. He looked at her with friendly eyes. By God, it was the best thing that had ever happened. He was sane. Caroline was a silly girl-- sometimes--and of course they’d stay and help Chalisgan. It would be unpleasant, but he could laugh again, and he’d made Caroline laugh.
He said, “I’m glad you made a mistake, because it’s saved me making one.”
“Or two,” she said, and slipped out of the room, blushing crimson.
22
Or Three, or four. His mistakes had been many and she was not a prig or an angel, but a young woman and very mortal. This day Mrs. Hatch had driven him out of the room where Caroline lay sick of the cholera, and ordered him not to come back till dark.
He walked with head hung, crossed the stream, and climbed slowly towards the plateau where they had waited for the deer one early morning in another life. Two hundred feet up he turned, leaned against a tree at the break of the hill, and looked down on the village in the valley. A greasy column of smoke pillared up from the flat place beside the stream where the burning ghats were. A few men squatted by the pyres; the evening sun still shone and dimmed the flames; it was not difficult to imagine death as a slow wind, crowding down the alleys, becoming visible in the quiver of air over the pyres.
The village huddled, close-knit, on the rise of land beyond the burning ghat. The smoke of its dead drifted across it, and he saw the community of it, not close-knit by chance but as a strength against disease, famine, wild beasts, and the stunned loneliness of the hot weather. It was cleaner than the villages of the plains; most of the houses were distempered in white, with here and there among them a few terra cotta or pink. Its many-coloured roofs were like a quilt thrown over it--pale squares of level mud, dark gables of weather-worn thatch, pink slopes of stone tiles. He picked out the headman’s house by its larger roof and the window openings on this side. Those were the windows he had once tested so carefully to make sure Mrs. Hatch’s bulk could squeeze through when the time came. He had been mad indeed; but even if all his fevered dreams had been true their danger was infinitely greater now. After six days of fighting he knew the nature of the enemy, and knew all weapons were toys.
Mrs. Hatch had refused to stay in Chalisgon unless Robin was sent away, so Piroo took the cart and drove off with him into the jungles upstream. They two would hide there until the pestilence had run its course and the fight was over --or until the three remaining here had died. Rodney wondered whether Robin were asleep at this hour. The jungle would be a lonely world to him; perhaps Piroo could make it familiar by telling him the calls of the birds and whittling animals for him to play with. Piroo could take him to Gondwara by himself if need be.
His son was as safe as anyone could be. The children of the village stayed and played, and died. He could see two small foreshortened figures in a lane between the houses, and knew
they were naked boys drawing patterns in the dust with sticks. Their shrill calls came up the hill to him. A young girl washed clothes on a stone by the stream, rhythmically swinging her body to knead and pound.
On the farther slope secondary jungle crowded the houses, and the tangle of undergrowth proved that the land had once been cultivated. A thin line, marked by the greater density of the shadows, followed the curves of the hill’s contour and traced the ruined water channel. There were foundations of houses in that part of the jungle, and scattered blocks, and square stone-lined pits. It was the same lower down the stream. With the decay of good government a town had surrendered its prosperity to the snakes, the creepers, and the improvident monsoons.
Surrendered? Chalisgon had not surrendered; it had been betrayed, as India had just been betrayed, by men who had power but no love. White or brown, it made no difference here; nothing was “foreign” to India, for India was inimitably varied. A foreigner was a man who did not guard the past and foster the future; above all, a man who did not love. The greater a man’s capacities, the wider he must cast the net of his affection. In this little village men fought drought, disease, the sun. They had not the leisure or the learning to know anything outside the village, whether to love or hate. They became foreigners when they walked ten miles. But he and every Englishman need not be foreigners anywhere. The task was plain--to love, as a father his son, a son his father, a lover his mistress, a priest his flock. Any of love’s patterns could be accepted, and flaws in it forgiven. Here, where the shadow of one brown man defiled another, English pride of race mattered nothing; India accepted it as she accepted the tiger’s perpetual hunger and the ruthless passing splendour of the Moguls.
India had infinite patience, and no meanness. The burden of power here was weighed only by the bearers of it. Without love it was no more than a peacock’s feather, and so it was easier not to love. Leaning against a tree on the knees of the Sindhya Hills, he thought that to men of English blood had been given an opportunity such as God grants but once in a thousand years. After the blind selfishness of two centuries, the hour had come. From here they could ruin themselves with power, or step forward as giants of understanding, forerunners of a new world of service.
