by John Masters
The little man’s voice was low and far away, not a whisper. William said, ‘I don’t understand. What band? How did Kali order you to kill the girl?’
‘I can’t explain yet. You have to learn to fear our gods—fear Kali.… For a year since then I have lived in fear and have had no place. The servants of Kali think I am dead, and it is better that they should. I was with the Sikhs when they came to the grove. I saw who was there already, so I slipped away. It was not my old band in the grove, and those men would not, perhaps, have recognized me—my home is not near here—but they might have, and I do not take risks. I slipped away. Then I saw the man hurrying through the jungle.’ He looked up intently. ‘I saw him stop and examine a leopard’s pug mark. I followed, and followed, and learned that he too did not want to let a woman die; that he would even do wrong to save her, for lying is wrong; and that he was not Gopal the weaver. He was an Englishman. Watching him, it came to me that only the English have the power to fight the servants of Kali, and put me in a safe place, and protect me. And it came to me that they had the power because they did not fear our gods, but that they could achieve nothing until one of them, at least, learned that fear. I made a plan quickly. I asked the Englishman to promise to say nothing, do nothing, whatever he saw. And I showed him the servants of Kali. And didn’t he break that promise, and spoil my plan, and nearly get me killed, and send me on the run again?’
‘But, Hussein, there were only about six of them. If you had come to me—the Collector—afterward, and told me what you knew, we would have caught the murderers by now and hanged them in Sagthali, and you would have nothing to fear.’
‘Six?’ Hussein laughed shortly. After a long silence he said fretfully, ‘How can I make you understand? None of you understands, yet it’s all round you, always has been. You’re blind, because you have no fear as we have fear.’
He stood up slowly, shaking his head. His hands moved, something soughed in the air and locked round William’s neck. A hard knot pressed under his ear. He could not speak, and opened his mouth to breathe but found no air. Hussein’s eyes were close to his. He hit out with his fist, and Hussein stepped away. The grip on his neck loosened, he sucked in breath and fought down a dizzy nausea.
Hussein squatted on the floor again and said evenly, ‘I’m sorry. I had to show you. I should have been behind you, really, so that you couldn’t have punched or kicked or stabbed.’ He tucked a large square of cloth away in his waistband. ‘That’s how it is done.’
William stopped the trembling in his legs and began to swear, but Hussein cut in, ‘Listen. I have thought of something. We can begin again, as we were at the Bhadora ferry, only this time you’ll know more. I should have told you then, but I hadn’t time. I still can’t explain everything, because you do not fear our gods. You have to move forward, a pace at a time, and come to understand before you can act. Do you remember a group of travellers who passed on the road today while you were arresting me?’
William thought back. The little convoy—the two riders, the five men on foot—which had been behind them, had come up while he was questioning Hussein. He had a vague picture now of an inquisitive, rather self-satisfied face passing behind Hussein’s shoulder. Hadn’t the grooms waved the party curtly on?
He said he thought he recalled them. Hussein sniffed in the darkness. ‘You think! You ought to know. That is a rich man, a thakur from Moradabad. He came through here four seasons back and must now be repeating his journey. He likes the world to know that he is an important fellow. But he is not so rich or so important that his disappearance would cause much remark. He and his party will rest tomorrow here in Madhya. Have them observed, noting carefully the colour and distinguishing points of the horses, the shape of their saddlebags, the pattern on the charm round the thakur’s neck. It is held up by a flashy necklace of gems. They are stones of the fourth grade, I saw, but not everyone will realize that. Observe, note down. When they leave here, follow at a day’s march behind. No closer, or nothing will happen. Do not take a large party, but take your memsahib. She has a sharper eye than you, and a quicker mind. And let me go. Already I can feel the breath in my mouth.’
William said, ‘What’s going to happen?’
‘Murder.’
‘But who’s going to murder, who’s going to be murdered? And how do you know?’
‘The thakur’s going to be murdered by some servants of Kali. I don’t know, but it’s very likely. That will give you a start, and a little understanding. But you’ve got to let me go. I must find out something. I want to know where Gopal the weaver really is. I’ll come back, then we can take the next step.’
William said shortly, ‘I cannot let the thakur be murdered, and I cannot let you go. You don’t seem to realize that you are under suspicion yourself, and everything you say makes it worse.’
For a long time the man on the floor was silent. Twice he began to say something, and twice cut it short with a groan. At last, as if he had found a new line of argument, he said, ‘Why do you think I am doing this?’
William did not answer. He had no idea.
Hussein burst out, ‘You’ve been in a uniform all your life—red coat, fine hat, sword! You’ve been one of a band! All the English here are a band. You’ve had a place in the Company, been sure of friends, sure of help when you wanted it. So was I, until a year ago. Since then I’ve had no company, no friends, no place. I want to be with other people and like other people. I suppose it was that which made me desert the goddess for the girl. I can go back to Kali, but I don’t want to. I am afraid. Please understand. I want a red coat, I want to be safe in it. And I can’t be unless you help. That’s why I followed you in the forest. It was only an idea then, and I wasn’t sure of it. Now I am. Now I have a plan. You must let me go. I’ll come back after the thakur’s been murdered, I promise.’
William paced up and down the narrow floor. He’d have to have time to think about the thakur, and what to do. He’d have to talk to Mary. He’d like to trust this man all the way and let him go. There was something very ordinary, and therefore genuine, about him. The sort of murderers he had mentioned, ‘servants of Kali,’ could not be ordinary.
Then Mr. Wilson’s stern presence looked over his shoulder. ‘Releasing an accessory to murder! Wasting six months chasing moonbeams! Letting slip the one vital witness when he was at last caught!’
He said unhappily, ‘I can’t let you go, Hussein.’
The lopsided man sighed unexpectedly and seemed resigned. He said, ‘Very well, you can’t.… What is the pay of a chuprassi at your courthouse?’
‘A chuprassi? Four-eight a month.’
‘And the red coat and red sash—does he get them provided or does he have to pay for them himself?’
‘The Company provides the first ones. After that the chuprassi has to keep them up for eight years and three months out of his pay, and mend them when necessary. Then they are supposed to have become worn out by fair wear and tear and are replaced free. But what on earth——’
‘Have we not been talking about red coats?’
William had thought before that the man spoke in symbols and wanted any form of security. But he saw now that this was a direct and very literal mind, and that all the great abstractions of security, peace, a place among fellow men, were for him enclosed in a red coat and a red sash.
Oddly moved, he unlocked the door, slipped out, and relocked it, leaving the lopsided man squatting on the floor in the cell. He hurried down the smoke-scented street past the guttering lights in the shops to his bungalow. Mary was in the dining-room.
‘Well,’ she said eagerly, ‘what did he say?’
‘He has a rather frightening story. It isn’t a story, either; it’s just hints, “through a glass, darkly”! It’s difficult to believe him, but somehow it’s more difficult not to. It’s not only his words, it’s an atmosphere or something.’
He ate, and between mouthfuls related what he had been told in the jail. Mary said, ‘S
ervants of Kali … ordered to kill … something we don’t know about and will never understand unless we learn to fear their gods. It is frightening. Or it’s a rigmarole of lies to get him out of jail. That’s what Daddy might say.’
‘I know. I couldn’t write a sensible report on it.’
And yet the lopsided man’s short sentences, spoken under the twilight loom of the gallows, were like a dim lamp suddenly lighted behind a curtain. The light itself showed nothing, but it threw shadows, and the observer could guess at the shape of substance from the shape of shadow.
Mary said, ‘I understand why he wants a red coat, somehow, without understanding anything else. I think you ought to let him go.’
William nodded. That was what he really wanted to do. In Mary’s tone was the unspoken addition, ‘Do what you think is right. It doesn’t matter what Daddy thinks.’
When Mary spoke again she came round the table and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘And, my dear, you’ll have to do what Hussein said about the thakur. Otherwise we will never find out anything.’
‘We will be murdering him.’ William pushed his chair back and stood up, his hands at his sides. Mary did not answer. Her eyes were wet. William saw the young Sikh boy’s face, blackened and dead in the ashes of the fire. He said curtly, ‘All right. I’ll let Hussein out of jail in the morning, but I won’t let him go. We’ll take him with us when we follow the thakur. I’ll put someone to watch that party at once. Sher Dil!’
‘Huzoor?’ Sher Dil ambled in.
‘Send the boy down to fetch Daffadar Ganesha, please.’
Chapter Nine
In the early morning William awoke to the urgency of a man’s voice calling in the compound. He heard the word ‘escaped,’ jumped out of bed, and pulled on his boots and shirt and trousers. He had not slept well, and the thakur had haunted his dreams. Was it the thakur who had escaped from the death lying in wait for him, and from William and Mary Savage, his murderers?
He ran out into the passage. He met Sher Dil coming in at the back of the bungalow, and through the open doors, saw the jail watchman gesticulating on the verandah.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘The prisoner in the jail has escaped, sahib,’ Sher Dil said. ‘The watchman has come with the message. He says the prisoner half strangled him.’
The watchman fell on his knees in an apparent agony of abasement and fear, so that the huge keys at his waist jangled with his trembling. Not so long ago he would have been thrown off a tall building on to a spike for this. Custom still demanded that he crawl and tear pieces out of his ragged beard. If he behaved calmly it would strengthen people’s suspicion that the sight of a little gold had blinded him to the escaper’s intentions. People always distrusted policemen, irregular cavalry, and jail-keepers.
William said quietly, ‘Get up man, and tell me what happened.’ He sensed Mary behind him.
‘Protector of the Poor, at first cockcrow the villain called for a lotah for purposes of nature. I took it to him. I was not going to let him out of the cell, of course. He flipped a handkerchief through the bars and around my neck. Aiih, it was quick, quicker than the eye can see, and as the Presence knows I am nearly blind in the service of—I continue, I continue, Presence. He held me there so that my breath was stopped and all my past rose up before me and the night went black. It was a dark night. He whispered, snarled through the bars, and I pressed up against them with my senses flying and a pain like hammers in my head! He said, “Let me out or you die!” I struggled! The noose tightened! Tightened!’
The watchman, kneeling on the verandah, seized his own neck with both hands and jerked his head in fierce pantomime. He had seen in William’s eye that no severe punishment hung over him. His eyes rolled. The wings of his narrative genius carried him aloft. Sher Dil’s mouth was set in a disbelieving, silent sneer.
‘Look!’ The watchman raised his head, and on the thin old neck William saw a livid circling weal. ‘I was afraid. I opened the door and he came out, and—and I do not know what happened next. I fell to the ground and knew no more until the morning on my eyelids awakened me, and I had a great headache—which I still have.’
William eyed the old man dispassionately. The first part of the story must be true. He felt his own neck and remembered the terror in that square of cloth. The second part? A small jewel had probably changed hands, in consideration of which the old jailer remained senseless till daylight, time enough for Hussein to get well away.
It was good, because Hussein might so easily have kept the cloth taut and saved himself a jewel—and lost a red coat. Now two people had been in that lopsided man’s power, and for the sake of a red coat he had let them both go.
William said to the jailer, ‘Take heart. There’s no great harm done this time. Here’s a rupee. Go and buy some toddy, and be more careful in future.’
Sher Dil did not conceal his surprise at the calmness with which William took the affair, and went away shaking his head. William turned and re-entered the bungalow.
Mary said, ‘Are you going to go after the thakur just the same?’
‘Yes.’ He put his arm around her, needing her warmth, and they went into the bedroom to dress properly.
In the evening Daffadar Ganesha came with his report. Sher Dil let him into the bungalow and slammed the door of the study behind him. Sher Dil knew by now that another journey was in prospect; excitement filled the air, which he was not to share and must not talk about; and once more he would be left behind while the new young woman went with William.
Ganesha shuffled his feet uneasily and kept his arms tight by his sides, as though he feared to knock something over if he moved an inch. He was a dark-brown, heavy man with a wrinkled forehead, much animal courage, and few brains. By question and answer William dug the story from him. Mary listened, took notes, and sometimes asked for translations of phrases she had not understood.
The traveller’s name and title was Thakur Rajun Parsad. On the road he wore a white turban, a blue silk robe embroidered with saffron yellow trimmings, white jodhpurs, and red slippers. He was a thakur and a small landowner. He lived near Moradabad and was on a journey to Nagpur. In Madhya he had bought some provisions, but not a great quantity, not enough to carry his party on to Khapa, which would be the next place of any size in the direction he was going. William heard that item with relief: it would be easier to trace him if he bought food at wayside villages. In his party was an older man, name unknown, whom the thakur always addressed as ‘Hey, you!’; overheard phrases indicated that the other man was a poor relation who depended on the thakur’s generosity for his bread and butter, paying with flattery and the service of minor errands. There were five servants in the party: a bearer, a groom, a sweeper, a cook, and one bodyguard armed with a matchlock. They were going to set off at dawn.
After a long hesitation William decided that the daffadar and one policeman should accompany him and Mary on the trail; and that both police should wear native clothes but carry concealed horse pistols. Many people would think it strange for the Collector to travel in this manner, but to the casual observer it would be less conspicuous. and the policemen might be able to get more information from wayside villages.
Now there was another day to get through, and another night, if he was to obey Hussein’s injunction and keep a day’s march behind the thakur. He could not work, and all day and all night hot and cold ripples moved over his skin. The curtain of the unknown shook in the wind, ready to part for him. The thakur and six innocent men were going to their deaths, and he was cold with the cold of their graves. He wrestled with himself, and in the end, as at the beginning, he knew he had no choice.
On the fourth day they reached the Nerbudda River at Chikhli. The ferrymen were sure that no one of the thakur’s description had crossed the river. The night before, a ploughman on the hillside above Taradehi had been sure that he had seen the thakur. The thakur and his party had vanished between Taradehi and Chikhli.
Willia
m and Mary and the two policemen turned their horses and rode slowly back up the trail. The killing had been done in daylight, and if they looked they must find a trace. There must have been a struggle.
Tall trees closed their branches overhead. They trotted along a dark-green tunnel, damp and hot and loud with the bells of a wayside stream. Three miles up, Ganesha, at the rear, stopped and raised his voice, to be heard above the water.
‘Blood, a spot on a tree—here.’
Low down on the trunk of a sapling a single splash of blood had dried matt black against the shining pale bark. They looped the reins of the horses on a branch and began to search carefully. Casting round from the blood-marked sapling, they forced through springy bushes and into the jungle. Something glittered at the foot of a big tree. William bent, stirred the soggy leaves, and lifted up a small, bright pick-axe, very sharply pointed, well oiled, and apparently little used. A painted pattern of whorls and triangles writhed up the haft. The prints of bare feet showed faintly near the pick-axe, where the leaves did not cover the earth.
Scraping leaves aside with her hand, Mary called out, ‘Here—the earth has been disturbed.’ William’s heart bumped, but it was not a big or deep patch that they found. Ganesha dug quickly, forcing his fingers into the soil. When the hole was a foot deep he fumbled in the dirt and slowly brought out a rupee. Sticky brown stuff mixed with dirt clung to the coin. Ganesha felt it, smelled, and said in astonishment, ‘Sugar!’
