by John Masters
It was the crude matrix of that love in Mrs. Hatch, a supremely English “foreigner,” which gave the village its strength now. She cursed and cuffed them, because she was used to swearing at her husband and cuffing her children. She called them “niggers” because she knew no other word, and shouted at them in English, because her Hindustani was bad and because she believed that English was understood anywhere if yelled sufficiently loudly. The people of Chalisgon knew all this without being told; they also knew that Mrs. Hatch loved life and all who lived. Her way of expressing herself was to them just another of India’s three hundred languages, no more harsh or strange than the glub-glubbing words and abrupt northern gestures of the Pathan horse coper who had passed through the village twelve years before. Mrs. Hatch had risen, not by race but by the force of her tempestuous affections, and they were all under her orders--Caroline too.
When he awoke the morning after the wardrobe fiasco, he lay awake on his bed for a time, chuckling to himself. Then he’d thought of Mrs. Hatch and steeled himself to tell her that the party must stay in Chalisgon. He had expected to see fear in her face, fear of the cholera if she stayed, fear of Piroo and the lonely road if she went on. There would be shrill anger that he should force such a decision on her after what she had been through, and all for the sake of a pack of heathens. So he had dressed slowly and gone with lagging feet to find her.
When the interview was over he had a new humility to set beside his new-warmed charity. He saw the smallness of his understanding, and was a little depressed. If Caroline had been herself, Mrs. Hatch might not have been; Caroline’s exhaustion clearly had something to do with the result. She was there when he braved Mrs. Hatch, and her face was soft but dead white and drained of strength; she had seemed almost to say aloud, “I had one task--to save this man’s mind. By accident I have succeeded. I am spent, and ready to die.” Seeing her, there in the courtyard, Mrs. Hatch swelled up and became an earthy angel of wrath. She roared that she would do nothing unless Robin was sent to safety in the jungle, and shouted at Piroo until the bullocks were yoked in, the food loaded, and the cart out of sight. That took only ten minutes. Then she compressed herself and hurled her force against the resigned melancholy of the village.
Then, when Chalisgon trembled with her activity, Rodney really saw her for the first time. She was not young; here she could get no henna and her hair was more grey than brown. She was a fat Cockney woman, badly jointed, and tiny red liquor veins straggled across the coarse skin of her face. She could neither read nor write her own language. Of all she had been through, he had heard her bewail nothing except the loss of a certain china teapot. He knew now it was no callousness, but the ugly courage of the London gutters; not lack of imagination, but the wisdom of the oppressed, who fight only where fighting will avail them and dare not waste their little strength against a world which breaks whom it cannot bend.
At that time Amelia Hatch had taken command of everybody; on him she had forced so much work that he had no time to worry about Caroline. For six days he worked until he was exhausted, and slept without dreams and got up to face more work. When his thoughts strayed from the job in hand it was only to fret over other jobs ahead, or jobs done insufficiently well to please Mrs. Hatch.
Early on the sixth day, June the third, yesterday, while bathing a dying man’s forehead, he saw Caroline stumble out of the house allotted as a woman’s ward and hurry unsteadily down the lane beside it. He stood in the doorway and watched her return; her face was tightly pinched, the lips compressed and colourless, the great eyes deep-sunk and blazing. He called out to her, but she averted her head and ran into the other house without answering. Behind him the dying man muttered. He had turned back to the smells and sights of the male sickroom.
Up here on the slope he could smell it still. It permeated his shirt, lurked in the curled black hairs of his arm, and clung to his skin. The men lay in tight rows round the walls of each of the three rooms. Smoke drifted in from a bonfire in the lane where the sweepers burned the rags they had used to mop up the stools. When the patients came first they were pale but collected; the helpers stripped them below the waist, and they lay down; a Brahmin would loop up his sacred thread round his ear, so that he might not soil the lower end in his motions. In that early stage they had the strength to go out and squat in the yard, and the diarrhoea was still painless. That did not last long. Hour by hour the flux turned to a bloody paste; their stomachs rumbled; they became too weak to get up, and voided their bowels where they lay. Their faces contorted as the disease took hold and cramped their empty stomachs. They shrank before his eyes as the substance was drawn from every part of the body, turned to paste, and pushed out in those convulsions.
A little later a woman had come running. “The miss-sahiba has it.” He’d dropped the rag from his hand and run to her. She lay on the mud floor and for the first time he saw resignation in her eyes. It frightened him more than anything in his life. He lifted her up to carry her to the headman’s house, so that she could be nursed properly away from the stink, the splutter, and the dying. She whispered, “In here--not to the house.” He took no notice, and she stirred and repeated her words. Behind the faint voice there was still strength, and suddenly the eyes on him were no longer resigned. He had to turn back and put her down in a little soiled space against the wall between a young girl and an old woman. Mrs. Hatch came running, her eyes heavy from snatched sleep, and sent him to his own work.
Through that night, as through the nights before, the procession continued. Some of the faces were familiar to him; most he did not know. They came in, carried or supported by relatives, and lay down. He made them drink, holding his arm under their shoulders; saw them gulp thirstily; saw them, a minute later, vomit up what they had drunk. He watched the cramps spread upwards from the calves, tighten the thin peasant thighs, knot the flaccid bellies. Later, something would constrict the throat, and panic would come into the man’s eyes. Seeing it, Rodney felt panic himself. Was that look in her eyes? He would turn dizzily away and take water to another feeble man.
Karmadass the bannia came. Through the night his strong voice weakened, and the sheen on his face faded, leaving it a dull chop-fallen mask. He breathed hard under an oppression of pain; his protuberant eyes receded into their sockets; his broad nose became pointed; his fat cheeks sank in; his greasy skin wrinkled and became dead. His eyeballs turned up out of sight, and Rodney pinched his face to bring them down. The eyeballs moved, but the skin had no resilience and stayed where it was, the pinchmarks still indented. When those signs came, the bannia, like the others, had neither fear of death nor will to live. His body could not find the strength even to rattle at its dying. He died near four o’clock in the morning and lay where he died until the burning party came after dawn to fetch him. He was on his back, and still warm to the touch--knees up, arms raised beside his head, clenched fists resting against his ears, belly muscles hard contracted, eyelids half-closed and encircled by wide blue rings, nose sharp, lips dark brown. There were more who’d followed him, and in the late afternoon Mrs. Hatch came to find Rodney dumb and trembling in the middle of the ward, and sent him out.
It was getting dark. He had been here long enough amongst the clean trees. A blue haze hung over the village, and fires twinkled out in points of gold. The burning ghat was an orange flower against the neutral brown-green of the slope. He walked down the hill and after a minute broke into a run, leaping sure-footed down the dim path and feeling the spring in his muscles as though he would never feel it again.
In the village they told him there was no change. He took an axe and went to hack down trees for the pyres. The fit men were insufficient for the work, and still the cows had to be milked, the land tended, and food cooked for motherless children. Starvation waited always round the corner here, hungry for those whom disease could spare. He swung the axe in bitter blows and swore unendingly. Long after it was full dark he leaned on the helve to wipe the sweat from his forehead. A lig
ht was wavering up the hill. When it came near, and he saw the priest’s face, he put his hands behind his back and waited, but could not speak.
The priest stopped and held out his hand. “Tell Hatch-memsahib to give her this. It is good.”
Rodney turned the small dirty-white lump slowly over in his palm--opium, the only specific known for cholera, and very rare and expensive in this part of India. There would be no more in the village. He looked at the priest; the lamp shone up and made his ludicrous donkeys’ ears more prominent; he was grey and pale. The priest wanted to live too, and might have the cholera in him now, or might catch it tomorrow.
He was saying, “Cut it in six parts. Give her one part, with a little warm milk, every two hours. Some she will vomit up, but the rest she may keep. It tends to hold the urine, which is dangerous--but usually it helps. My friend, there is no other hope. Be quick.”
Rodney turned without a word and ran down the hill in the darkness. He would have liked to make a speech or let the tears come, but he couldn’t. Perhaps she would die, even after this. Even so the opium would not be wasted. Nothing was wasted in these days in this village; each action and thought illumined dark corners of the past, and would throw light somewhere, in some heart, for the rest of time.
Mrs. Hatch knelt beside Caroline on one side, and the headman’s wife on the other. The women here, like the men in the other house, were naked from the waist down, but neither he nor they cared now. Mrs. Hatch looked at the opium and snorted. “Wot’s that there--dope?”
The headman’s wife snatched it from his hand, whispering, “Who gave you this? I did not know there was any in the village. This could have saved--it doesn’t matter.”
She broke off a piece, called for milk, and crumbled the opium between her fingers into the bowl. Rodney watched Caroline; after these six days he knew exactly where she was on the short steep road. She was more than halfway down, near the edge of the last abyss. From there he had seen a few, a very few, climb slowly back to life; most went over the edge, slithering fast and ending at the burning ghats. Her skin was wrinkled and dead, and her nose pointed; great forces pushed her remorselessly on, great will power struggled to hold her back. The cramps seized her throat and constricted her breathing, but the panic was in Mrs. Hatch’s eyes and in his own. She tried to smile at him when he came in; then a spasm contracted her, and he closed his eyes. When the spluttering stopped he looked again and saw that the headman’s wife was giving her the milk. She did not want it; her throat muscles clenched to refuse it, and when it was down her stomach heaved to reject it. Slowly, while sweat burst out on her forehead and her eyes started, she forced her will to mastery and drank, sip by sip and drop by drop.
A second battle began, to keep it down. His own face and neck contracted with hers, and when, after two minutes, the milk spurted out and splashed over the floor, he could no longer stand. He stumbled into the yard and sat down in the dust, where he could see the shadows moving across the far wall of the sickroom, and waited there till day.
When Mrs. Hatch came out into the glare of mid-morning and said, “I’m going to sleep now, Capting, like ‘er,” and grinned a haggard grin, he fainted.
Caroline was almost the last patient in either ward. Three days later the cholera went on its way. The priest said they had burned seventy-eight of Chalisgon’s population of three hundred; no one could remember how many more had had the disease and recovered. The day it left them the dazed villagers lay down and slept. That night, as after a hurricane, there was an instinctive orgy in which the survivors reassured themselves of their wonderful wild aliveness.
Four faces were absent from the gathering in the headman’s front room--Piroo in the woods, Caroline asleep in her back room, Karmadass and the silent twin dead. Rodney, the headman, and the talkative twin passed round a goatskin of toddy; the priest was in his place but did not drink. Mrs. Hatch and the headman’s wife cackled hilariously together in their corner, and between times drank freely from another container of toddy. In spite of the empty places and the overpowering heat it was a gay and light place.
In radiant moonlight Rodney went down to the stream for water. The people he passed greeted him with their unfailing courtesy. They bowed low and joined their hands, because he was of a ruling class; but this time they smiled with their eyes too, because he had proved himself their equal. Drums were beating at the verge of the jungle and men singing in the huts by the stream. In the alleys women moved with uneasy sexuality, and men’s voices throbbed when they spoke to them. Others, men and women, grovelled drunk in the dirt and sang raucously. They were not throwing coloured powder about, nor were they so riotous as the celebrants of the Holi in Kishanpur, but the atmosphere was the same and for the same reason: the Holi was the spring of the year, this debauch the spring of a new life. A star in the south made him think of Robin, and then of Gondwara. They’d have to move on as soon as Caroline was fit. He would speak about it later.
The headman and the twin broke off a conversation suddenly as he came in with the water. They were both a little drunk; he set down the jar and said, puzzled, “What is it, my friends?”
The headman scratched the skin behind his ear. “Well, it’s like this----“
“Go on!” The twin took a swig of toddy and wiped his lips. “Tell him. It’s all right.”
“Sahib, you have heard us speak of Naital,” the headman said, “the place where there used to be a town and a lake, five miles up our little stream? Well, we think the Rani’s store of rifles, guns, and powder is up there.”
Rodney exclaimed automatically. He remembered what he had overheard at Monkeys’ Well. The Silver Guru said then that the carts were on their way to “the lake.” It might be this one. He said, “What makes you think so?”
“The direct trail from Kishanpur to Gondwara goes through Naital. It passes not far from here, up there in the jungle. One day, weeks ago, one of our boys was out late looking for a lost goat. He saw many carts going south--but they didn’t pass Pipalpani, the next village, twenty miles on, the headman there told me. Then, we’ve been forbidden to go to Naital or graze flocks near it for nearly six months now. The order said something about a new hunting preserve, but old Lalla Ram, who is dead, didn’t believe that and went secretly to see. There are a few soldiers, he said, not many, living in an old temple there.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before, if you knew it all the time?”
The headman shrugged his shoulders and was silent. The twin, Lalla Ram’s brother, answered suddenly, “Captain-sahib, if anything happens to that store the Dewan will burn this village himself, and torture everyone he can catch here. We sheltered you; that was a duty laid on us by the gods, and we would never have given you up. But this was different. We know nothing of war.”
Rodney smiled. Guns had little place in a world ruled by cholera and famine. He said, “Why are you telling me now, then? Don’t be afraid. I won’t touch the cannon. It’s my duty, I suppose, but I can’t--now.”
The headman scratched behind the other ear. “Now--we want you to destroy it. We have seen you and we have had time to think. We have heard news. There is blood all over the face of the land, and lire, and killing. The sepoys hunt like dogs up and down from the Ganges to the Indus. Of the village people, how should we know? We think they will give shelter where they can, like us. We hear this, and we talk, and we are foolish; but we think there will be a great battle at Gondwara. We know that the madness will be crushed quickly there, or will linger on. We will help you, and you must be quick, because the Rani’s army marched from Kishanpur yesterday, and will be here tomorrow. After that it will be hopeless.”
Rodney got up and paced the room, his head stooping under the beams. Turning by the front wall, he saw Caroline in the narrow passage at the back. Pale but smiling, she leaned against the door-jamb, and he crossed the room to her. “Go back to bed, Caroline, and rest. We’ll have to leave here at dawn.”
She replied, “I heard what
they said. I’ve been lying listening to the music and the singing down by the stream. There’s a night bird outside my window, and there’s a big round moon again--the Holi, the mutiny, tonight. It’s a lovely night tonight though.”
“We mustn’t get them into trouble. We must slip off and go quickly to Gondwara. We have a duty there--at least I have. What’s the date, the seventh? It’ll be a close-run thing.”
They had been talking in English, but the others seemed to be able to read the tone of their voices.
The priest rose to his feet. “I gave you the last piece of opium in the village, for the miss-sahiba. You--all of you-- gave us the last of your strength. But we are not merchants, to balance favours. It is our wish that the cannon be destroyed. The headman will go now and arrange for the whole village to live in the jungles for a time. It will be healthier; and besides, the English government will repay us and repair what damage the Dewan does.”
“He may catch some of you, pandit-ji. And we can’t bring the dead back to life, however good the cause they died in.”
The priest shrugged. “No. Our people don’t know much about causes, sahib. Here death is death. But they will not catch many of us. They will be too busy.”
The headman paused by the outer door. “There are twenty fit young men in the village. Perhaps some older ones too can be spared. They will all be drunk, or making more men to replace those we have lost--but I will bring them.” He laughed uproariously and slapped his knee. “Heavens, there are going to be some rough words said to me tonight. They’ll be here in two hours for you to tell them what to do. Say it all many times, for they will be fuddled--like me. We are willing, but we know nothing of war. We can fight, I think. There are quarrels enough, God knows.”
