by John Masters
George pulled a heavy gold watch from his fob, glanced at it, and put it back. ‘I must go, William, and leave you and your bride to connubial bliss. But I’d like to have some word to take back to Mr. Wilson. What I can’t make out is why the woman’s doing it if her husband’s not definitely dead. She doesn’t know whether he is or not. Seems an awful waste.’
‘He has been gone for over a year,’ said Chandra Sen respectfully. He was standing against the wall at William’s side. ‘He went away on a journey and has not come back. Journeys do take a long time—we all know what the road is like—and the woman was not worried until recently. Then she dreamed the same dream three times. In the dream she saw her husband’s dead body in a dark place, with a mark on his neck and another woman looking at him. So she knows that he is dead, and she must go to him.’
‘Is he old? Is she?’ Mary asked in halting Hindustani.
‘No, memsahib. She is young, your age, no more, and beautiful. I have not seen her recently. Gopal her husband was no older than Savage-sahib, in the prime of life.’ He looked thoughtfully down at William. ‘He was very like you, sahib; a broad forehead, short jaw, your height, strongly built. He was rather dark in skin, and not disfigured by smallpox like so many of us. Brown eyes. His hair was blacker, of course—what you could see of it under his turban.’
William listened self-consciously. Every morning he looked in the mirror to shave, but he could not have described himself.
‘Well, old boy,’ George said heartily, ‘what are you going to do? Six hours to lighting-up time? As far as I can see, it ought to be easy enough. Just go down there and tell ’em not to.’
‘You know I have no authority to do that,’ said William uneasily. ‘Besides …’ He did not finish the sentence. Mary was on her feet, walking to the wall, stooping over it to play with a small brown girl in the street. She had gone a little distance away, and left William to fend for himself against George and Mr. Wilson and Chandra Sen and his own indecision.
Chandra Sen said earnestly to George, ‘It is not easy here. Your honour holds office in Sagthali. Here the people are so pleased with the new security, the first there has been in living memory, that they have found time and energy to complain about the things they do not like. Ten years ago they struggled from dawn to dusk, from sowing time to reaping time, just to keep alive, and dodge the freebooters and robbers, and fend off new tax extortions. Do you know the Saugor Pandits made me collect, and pay, twenty-seven different kinds of tax in a good year? Now the people have a little time to think. And no one fills their mouths with gunpowder and explodes it if they make a protest about something. Life has changed under your benevolent government. Much is for the better. But the people want this changed and that left alone. In this matter of suttee they are ready for violence here.’
‘Are you afraid of a riot, patel-ji?’ said George with a small sneer. ‘What about all your power and influence mentioned in the scroll? Look here, William, my horse is saddled, I’ve got to go. What shall I tell the Old Man?’
The little naked girl ran off to recount her bravery to her friends. Mary came back and stood to one side, watching the three men, her face expressionless and strong.
George was on his feet. William rose slowly. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. George waited, and behind George, Mr. Wilson; on the other side, Chandra Sen, all the people who wanted to live their own lives and die their own deaths; the young wife of Gopal the weaver. He stood in unhappy indecision. He said, ‘Tell Mr. Wilson—tell Mr. Wilson…’
Chandra Sen wanted to help but could not; Mary could help but did not want to. He got out some words at last. ‘Tell Mr. Wilson I’ll see to it.’
George hesitated briefly, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘All right. I’ll tell him that. You’ll report in due course, won’t you?’ He turned to Mary with a smile. ‘Your father takes a keen interest in these things.’ Then he was on his horse, and in a minute the clop of hoofs faded away down the street.
When he had gone, and the dust had settled, the three in the courtyard were still standing where they had been. William felt a little sick; Kali, the Destroyer Goddess of the Hindus, was close, pressing down on him, and he did not know whether Kali was lovely or detestable or both, and Mary had deserted him. It was no problem of hers; but she knew, and had known from the time of their first glances, that he needed her. He turned away to go up into the house and be alone. He would have to make his decision by himself, as in the past, before Mary with the bright eyes stood so firm and strong against his uncertainties.
Her voice was soft in his ear. ‘You know what you want to do, William, don’t you, really? You don’t need me. You couldn’t make a mistake if you trusted yourself. But I’m always here.’
It was her voice, gentle-toned, hard-based, of the days when they were discovering each other. Her face had softened and was quite unlike the combative provocation of her attitude while George had been here. A thin gold chain hung round her neck; the little oak cross on it was hidden in her bosom.
He said humbly, ‘I’m not sure, darling, really I’m not.’
‘Don’t let her die, William.’
Yes, he could take the thought and the decision from there. Now that the words had been spoken he knew he could follow no other course. But now—without letting other people die, perhaps, inflamed to riot by their anger? He did not know just how strained things were, down there in Kahari. In George’s presence Chandra Sen had been uncommunicative.
William said, ‘Patel-ji, how do the people feel about this case?’
Chandra Sen’s long thin fingers twisted about as he groped for the words to translate the unquiet of his people. ‘It is a—a test. Without the physical presence of the dead man’s corpse they—we’—he lifted his large eyes, not apologetically—‘we cannot feel that our religion is being deliberately insulted. But this rests on the woman alone, as we feel it always does and always should. She might not have dreamed her dream. There is no earthly power that could make her tell of it if she did not want to. So it is she, by herself, who cries out from her spirit to join her husband. There is no law written anywhere that she should not be allowed to. The people are determined that she shall do as her spirit wishes.’
While George had been here, his very presence, so clearly dedicated to departmental advancement, had deflected William’s thinking into the same channels. He had thought, What will Mr. Wilson do if the wife of Gopal the weaver becomes suttee? How much deeper will this affair load the scale already weighted against me by adverse appeal rulings, mismanaged settlements, long-delayed civil causes? He was not a very good paper official, and he knew it.
But the problem for him, if he was to be himself, was much simpler, and much harder: ‘Do not let her die.’
Chandra Sen said, ‘Sahib, we can save her.’
‘Of course we can.’ He was not afraid of the people. They might kill him, foolishly, but he was not afraid. ‘There’ll be a riot though.’
‘No. There is another way.’ Chandra Sen paused a long time, and when he spoke he picked his words. ‘If she saw her husband alive, or thought she did, her dreams would be false. She would not become suttee. She would not be allowed to. Her relatives, and Gopal’s, who now insist that she must be allowed to, would then insist that she must not.’
William nodded slowly. ‘Yes, that’s true.’
Mary stared at Chandra Sen with a sudden hard, concentrated look. Then she examined William carefully, her eyes narrowed.
William said again, ‘That’s true. But we can’t decide her dreams for her. She won’t be going to sleep again anyway, if she is going to burn herself tonight.’
‘Not in a dream, sahib. You look like Gopal the weaver. With a little care, I do not think you could be told apart in the best light. In the dusk, never.’
William felt for the stool and sat down. It was a strange notion. Mr. Wilson would not approve. He pulled himself up short. He had just decided, or Mary had decided for him, that no im
portant personal problem could be resolved by measuring it against the wishes of Mr. Wilson.
Chandra Sen went on, ‘I have suitable clothes in the house. No one need know but you and I and your memsahib, and the woman of my house perhaps. We can make the stain.’
‘I will be seen leaving here. Someone in the village will run after me and later tell them it was me, and not Gopal.’
‘It can be avoided. I will send you in a covered cart as far as the edge of the jungle. Leave here one hour before dusk. When you reach the jungle, get out and go on foot round the back of Kahari to the burning place down by the river. There will be a few people there. Stand back and call out. Say you have killed a man, or done a robbery—anything—and you will return to her when it is safe to do so. Gopal’s voice was hoarse and easy to imitate. We can practise.’
William walked unhappily across the compound and back. His Hindi was good enough; he spoke three of the languages of India, all well. The sun was high, the time past noon. It was getting hot. He had a lot to do.
He said, ‘Isn’t it cruel to deceive her? Gopal must be dead.’
Chandra Sen shrugged. William saw it was unfair to ask him for arguments when he believed that the woman should be let alone and had made his suggestion only to help William.
He glanced at Mary. She knew what he was thinking. She said, ‘He may not be dead. Don’t let her die. And don’t be afraid. I’m not.’ She added, smiling, ‘Not with any amazement, in fact.’
He laughed shyly, remembering the marriage service and old Matthias’s trumpet-voiced injunction. Being afraid, especially of yourself, was not good.
‘I’ll do it. I’m sure you’re right.’
Chapter Four
He walked through grey woods, neutral-coloured in the brief twilight. A quiet western wind soughed in the branches far above his head. The earth was dark and the trees tall in the river valleys. Behind the wind the afterglow of day warmed the sky, but ahead the light was cold. He used no paths, walking easily and quickly between the trees, swinging round the little village of Kahari and heading directly for the river. The fall of the light gave him direction, and here in his own district he could have felt the lie of the land in an evening darker than this. Often jungle fowl had led him off into the forest, and then it was he, not his gunbearer or the local shikari, who found the way back to the horses.
He wore a white loincloth and a white turban. A dirty grey blanket flung round his shoulders kept off the bite of the approaching night. His chest and legs were bare, and his skin—every square inch of it—had been stained by Mary and ‘the woman of the patel’s house.’ He knew her name but thought of her in that phrase, the ordinary one used by Chandra Sen and every Indian for his wife. No wife ever mentioned her husband’s name either. To do so meant that she had renounced him, or her religion—or her life.
‘The woman of the patel’s house’ was small, middle-aged, and dumpy, suety of complexion from the good living of her husband’s fields. Voluble as a sparrow, she had worked with Mary to apply the stain on him, both of them giggling while he shivered in the loincloth.
Now he grinned sheepishly at the memory. He looked down at his feet, scuffling over the thin jungle dust. He wore high-ankled Bandelkhand slippers. Chandra Sen did not think Gopal the weaver had worn anything on his feet, but William’s soles were soft and European and he could not have walked the distance barefoot. Chandra Sen was sure the slippers would not be noticed, and if they were that no one would think them strange.
Chandra Sen had offered to tie his turban, but he had done that himself. He began to rehearse under his breath what he was going to say when he reached the funeral pyre.
More self-confidence, that’s what he needed, they told him—Mr. Wilson in so many words, George with circuitous mannered politeness. Now that he was alone in the jungle and on his way to do what was right, he was not at all confident that it was right, or that he would succeed. Mary had all the confidence in the world, and more brains than other women thought proper. Why had she accepted him? That was confidence, all right.
He saw a leopard’s pug mark on a crossing game trail and knelt to examine it. That was not in character; a village weaver would not hunt leopards; he would be hunted by them, or would hope not to be. Gopal would have looked briefly, recognized, and hurried on, glancing over his shoulder as if the black rosettes even then padded along behind him. William rose quickly and walked forward. It was absurd; the jungles were empty.
He thought he heard a rustling under the trees to his left and stopped quickly, his mouth dry, but there was no sound, nothing to see in the gathering dark. After a minute he swore aloud softly, to reassure himself, and walked forward.
Farther on, a pile of bloody dove’s feathers littered the earth beside a lonely bijasal; but that had been the work of something smaller than a leopard, perhaps a hawk. He did not stop again.
The sun was altogether gone, and the night upon him. He knew he was near the river. Close ahead the wife of Gopal the weaver waited for death; her pyre would be ready. He hurried forward until he saw the night-polished black of water ahead and the red touch of fire in the treetops. Surely he was not too late?
He sniffed the air uneasily. It was a small fire, dissected by the intervening black trees into vertical bars of light. A dozen men stood around it, and a woman sat on the grass.
He moved to his left, to come into the open between the fire and the Bhadora ferry site downstream. The lights of the village shone on the far bank. They flared dimly in the corners of his mind and eye; he shuffled forward, his attention focused on the square-built pyre on the grass. It was four feet high, made of fine logs cut square and laid longwise and crosswise upon each other. Garlands of red and yellow flowers lay on it.
He stood behind a tree at the outer limit of the reaching light. He dared not go closer because he had never met Gopal and did not know how far he could trust his deception. Some of the men by the pyre had hoes or pointed staves in their hands, and one a rusty matchlock. A group was chanting quietly in ragged, quavering unison. The priest of Kahari stood by the smaller, lighted fire. A fakir had wandered in from somewhere and stood apart, wild-haired, ash-streaked, his total nakedness made obscene by the physical distortion practised by his kind and by the heavy stone which hung suspended from him on a leather thong.
The woman sat on the ground beside her pyre among a cluster of earthenware jars—clarified butter, to make the wood burn furiously. Lonely flowers, dropped from the garlands, littered the grass among fallen leaves, twigs, goat droppings, and refuse of the river’s last flood. She was dressed in white, and her pale brown face was turned toward William. She was young and wide-eyed; her lips curved delicately, and a spot of high colour stood out in either cheek.
He saw with sick dismay that she had torn her clothes. Some of the brightness at her feet was not flowers but firelight reflected from small jewels and gold trinkets. She had broken all her ornaments and cast them off her. She had ripped her bodice from neck to waist so that her young breasts forced out. She had torn down her hair, and it hung about her shoulders. Her large eyes strained up to see something in or above the treetops.
William tightened his fists. By these acts she had cut herself out of society. To the men about her she was already dead.
The chanting stopped. Above the tinkle of the river the voices were clear.
‘My child, he may not be dead…’ That was the priest, speaking solemnly. What did it matter now? The woman on the ground might exist, alone, but she had no place here, except the pyre. She did not seem to hear the priest but looked upward still. Another older, greyer man said, ‘Wait. It is no sin to wait if you do not know.’
The woman shook her head triumphantly. ‘I know. I know! Gopal is dead, Gopal my husband, Gopal is dead, my Gopal!’ She shouted her husband’s name over and over again.
That was the last, unanswerable defiance. She was dead.
Two men shuffled over to the heavy jars. They lifted one and began
to pour, The ghi gurgled out and splashed on the ranked logs; the river murmured, the priest droned a prayer. William found his voice, pitched it hoarse and deep. He took a step forward.
‘Ohé, wait there!’
The men at the pyre held the jar between them and looked round. The jar fell from their hands and broke on the logs. The ghi ran out over their feet. The people fell back, leaning forward but edging back, as though their feet willed them away against the fearful curiosity of their eyes. Their faces were drawn, terrified, expectant. Here in the jungles of India nothing was impossible.
The priest, pressed back with outflung arms against a tree, quavered, ‘Are you man or spirit? Do us no evil!’
‘Man!’ William said.
The woman at the pyre raised her head. She moaned once, but could not find strength to move. A dark blush suffused her face, she grabbed the torn sides of her bodice and held them together in an agony of embarrassment.
William ground his teeth in shame. ‘It is I, indeed. Enemies have laid a plot. They say I killed a merchant in the Deccan. The English are after me. I did not do it. There are proofs, and I must get them.’
The woman at the pyre covered her face with her hands, tried to get up, groaned and fell back. She said, ‘Are you hungry? Ill? Hurt? Let me come with you. I have no place here. See …’ She held out her arms to him, bare of ornaments, and scooped up the scattered bangles and let them fall again. ‘Take me with you. I am dead here. See …’ She tore back her bodice once more.
William spoke huskily; he could not hold his voice steady. ‘It cannot be. I must go. Do not tell anyone—none of you! Await my return, in our house, and live well.’
He turned and ducked into the trees and ran blindly away, away from the shrieks of the woman at the pyre. He heard her screaming form words. ‘I can’t! I’ll wait here for you! Here, here!’ The sound faded, and he heard nothing but the crash of his feet. He ran through the black jungle, seeing with cat’s eyes, sensing the thinly spaced trees before he came to them.
