The Venus of Konpara

by John Masters

  Kendrick managed to get through the next half-hour without admitting that he had never seen the painting. Afterwards, when they went to the drawing-room he took Barbara aside and asked fiercely what she meant by it, where was this portrait - but Sir James and Lady Allcard were there, , crying to see it again, and Barbara, very pale, at length said, ‘Wait here. I will fetch it.’

  She brought it into the drawing-room. Kendrick felt that he would suffocate. It was done in oils. It was a monstrosity, a deliberate insult a - a... Even in memory, words failed him. Every angle of his face was distorted, the colours, a garish clashing of daubs. Worst, out of it all, out of the distortion and the daubs and the misdrawings - it was himself - himself, as sometimes in dark, lonely nights he saw himself: weak, ineffectual, suspicious.

  He managed to pull himself together, find a smile, and refuse the baronet’s offer. The portrait was a personal treasure; he could not consider parting with it. The following morning, when the visitors had gone, he burned it before Barbara’s eyes, she standing very stiff and upright in the study the other side of his desk, saying nothing.

  The insult of the portrait was bad enough. The possible consequences were unthinkable. For that she could achieve fame and wealth, while he languished in Deori, a failure. . Letters had come from Sir James, also one from a world-famous painter, and one from another art collector. He had destroyed them all. She did not know that she had only to revert to that horrible style to become famous. A woman! His wife. He’d sooner see her dead first.

  He picked up a pencil. On a sheet of paper he carefully drew the trident sign of Vishnu.

  ‘Rukmini,’ he said, in a low voice. He had seen her three times before the meeting with Smith and Mohan. Mohan, blinded by lust, did not know they had twice passed him near Konpara, on their evening walks, but Rukmini did. She had looked at him, met his eye, passed some message, and gone on. But what message? Availability? Invitation? Comfort? Pity? Every line of her body, every fold in the drapery of her sari swept down into the fold between her thighs and drew the beholder’s eye and thought.

  The third time, seeing them coming, he had hidden himself and watched her through binoculars. She was disgusting. John Knox’s ‘monstrous regiment of women’ in one body. He must study her and find her weaknesses, to turn them against her. Or Mohan’s. The boy had looked jealous that time she met Smith. And now, from the rumours that had reached him,

  Smith was going to stay here in Konpara. There was a possibility in that situation.

  They would come soon - Mohan, Foster, and Smith - to talk to him about the leg that had been round at the site of the cricket pitch. It was already rumoured in Deori that the statue to which the leg belonged was a kind of Golden Fleece, able to work magic; and that, if it were found, Mohan would marry Rukmini. So he should not, really, help or encourage the search. Suppose she had secretly placed the leg where it had been found - and, previously, hidden the statue where it would be found? But that was to credit her with too much cunning. The statue was probably genuinely old, genuinely important He might send the A.G.G. a telegram announcing the important discovery... No, it would be wiser to wait and, see, meanwhile encouraging the excavation.

  The butler’s voice outside the door announced respectfully, ‘Sahib-log a-gye.’ Charles Kendrick rose and walked down the passage to the drawing-room.

  Half an hour later, having heard the story of the stone leg and its possible meaning in full detail, he pretended to spend a few moments weighing his decision. Then he said, ‘Very well, On condition that there is no interference with the work on the irrigation project, you may proceed. When will you begin?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Smith answered.

  Chapter 9

  Nine days later Mohan strode rapidly up the steep zigzags of the cart track from the foot of the dam to the plateau. He had been out since one, after an early lunch, and now it was three. After two hours of aimless, bad-tempered walking he had decided to go to Tiger Pool and have the cool swim he’d suggested to Rukmini in the first place. When she refused, saying she was too interested in the digging, he’d lost his temper and stormed out. They hadn’t found anything, and what was there to see except men digging - and Smith?

  When he saw Barbara Kendrick at her easel he had just reached the head of the final steep slope. From her position, fifty yards off the cart road, she looked along the length of the Kendrick Dam, slightly curved and now almost completed from cliff to cliff across the mouth of the Konpara pit The coolies were still pouring the earth into the dam, and the files of women, each one carrying a basket of earth on her head, strode swing-hipped and flat-footed up the path from the fill pit.

  Barbara Kendrick leaned forward intently and her hand moved in long firm strokes across the paper stretched on the easel She was wearing the lilac dress again. After a time she turned her head slowly, and he was near enough to see that her face wore an expression of intense, calm absorption, quite different from its usual nervous instability. As soon as her eyes focused on him her hand began to move, to unpin the cartridge paper. Then she realised who it was, and she stopped. Mohan came close. Red and black charcoal lines slashed the paper. From them the dam sprang forth, and scurrying humanity, and effort, heat, and sweat.

  The shock of the drawing’s power made him stammer. ‘Mrs Kendrick, it’s. .. it’s tremendous!’

  She said quietly, ‘Please don’t say anything about it. Not to anyone.’ She finished unpinning the drawing, rolled it up, and put it away in the long metal cylinder beside her. She faced him. ‘When are you coming to let me finish the portrait of you?’

  ‘Whenever you wish,’ Mohan said. ‘Tomorrow? About ten o’clock?’

  ‘All right’

  Tomorrow Mr Kendrick was going down to Deori early. This was an assignation. But what would he do when the moment came?

  ‘Don’t forget, this time,’ she said. She laid her hand on his wrist, her fingers closed and moved slowly, caressing the skin.

  Leaves crackled behind him, and he turned. Her hand fell away. Jim Foster was walking towards them from the path, a peculiar expression, half grim, half fearful, on his face. He came closer, staring at Mohan. A yard from them he said abruptly, ‘They’ve found a statue.’

  Mohan recovered himself- ‘At the cricket pitch?’

  ‘No. Beneath the Konpara Cliffs, about half a mile south of the Rainbow Fall’

  That was nearly a mile from the site of the digging, Mohan thought, puzzled. ‘The rest of the Venus?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m going to see what it’s all about. Some villagers found it and came direct to me. Smith doesn’t know yet Or Mr Kendrick. I’ll tell them on the way. Coming?’

  Twenty minutes later, in a single party, they all approached the site of the new find. Here the Deori River ran west in a shallow depression between the Konpara Cliffs on one side and the Konpara Ridge on the other. The Tiger Pool bund blocked the river’s course just below the pool, but water was coming over the spillways and would continue to do so until it was ready to be diverted through the conduit into the pit For half a mile below the pool heavy cultivation made the valley a patchwork quilt, its edges sharply defined by the containing walls of cliff and ridge. The cart track from Konpara wound between low dividing banks, forded the river - but there were also stepping-stones - and died out Here Huttoo Lall, the headman of Konpara, met them and led them forward. He stopped. ‘There.’

  They stood at the edge of a small fallow and looked at a field of stubble. It was larger man most of the fields, and was not flat or evenly sloped, but rose to a hump at the far edge under the cliffs. Foster’s foreman, Shahbaz Khan, and half a dozen villagers were standing in the middle of the field.

  Smith said, ‘Wait a minute. I wonder if that could be a man-made tumulus. It’s difficult to see, but look, there...’

  Mohan saw that the hump had a definite limit, being a rough semicircle, the diameter against the cliff and the circumference reaching out into the valley. The radius w
as about a hundred and twenty feet and the height about sis feet above the ‘normal’ level of the fields.

  ‘It could be,’ Foster said. ‘Come on.’

  They moved forward, and soon stood at the edge of a trench which ran diagonally across the hump from the foot of the cliff towards the river. A stone statue, still half embedded in mud, lay on its back in the trench, Jim Foster walked over to his foreman and the two drew a little apart

  The headman of Konpara was speaking to Smith. ‘When the river is blocked, sahib, these fields will be dry. But we will not be moved to the new land in the Deori valley for three years. So the Resident Sahib gave us permission to take water out of the pool, and we made a channel along the foot of the cliffs from the pool to here. From here we are going to lead it by other channels to all the fields below. These men were digging one of the channels when they came upon this...’ He pointed down.

  Smith stepped into the trench. Jim Foster raised his voice. ‘Nothing more for you here, Shahbaz. Go to the conduit and make sure they’re fairing off the lower lip properly at the exit That’s important’

  The elderly Pathan strode off. Foster rejoined the group, ‘Reward,’ murmured one of the villagers. ‘We are entitled to’ the promised reward.’

  ‘You’ll get it,’ Foster said impatiently.

  Smith was out of the trench again, taking measurements and writing in his field notebook. Then he said, ‘Carefully now, let’s get it out’ Many hands reached down to help. Smith wiped off the clotted mud with his hand, and the statue lay bare before them.

  It was an image of a standing man, a large plate-like halo-rising out of the back of his head. He wore a kind of toga, its sweeping folds carved out of the reddish stone with the utmost delicacy and precision.

  Foster knelt and tapped the statue. ‘It’s made of basaltic traprock,’ he said. ‘Almost as hard as flint, very hard to work. The man who made this knew how to use his tools.’

  ‘And he was an artist,’ Smith said.

  The statue was discoloured in patches. Particularly noticeable was a stripe, two inches wide, that began near the hidden navel and curved across the body and under the left arm.

  Smith said thoughtfully, ‘What, exactly, do we have here?’

  ‘A Buddha,’ Mr Kendrick said.

  Smith said, ‘I agree. Greek influence. Of the Gandhara schooL The carving of the toga, the long straight Greek nose, the curled moustache...’

  ‘By the same fellow who made the Venus?’ Foster interposed.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Rukmini cried. ‘That is Indian, all Indian, before anything came here from Europe ... Where is Gandhara, Mr Smith?’

  ‘It is the old name for the Peshawar District, in Northern India. The Gandhara school flourished about the beginning of our era, and a little earlier. Most examples are in the north, but some have been found elsewhere - farther south than this, even.’

  Rukmini said, ‘Then this is comparatively new, and it is a mile from where the leg of the Venus was found.’

  Smith said, ‘Yes. We’d better take it to the Rest House. It seems to me that it presents us with more problems than it solves.’

  The villagers led up a bullock cart, and carefully the statue was loaded into it. The cart moved off, jolting slowly along the track through the fields, Smith at its tail, the rest following.

  Half an hour later the statue lay on one of the rough tables in a spare bedroom of the Rest House, which Smith had set aside as a Find Room. The afternoon light filtering through the dusty windows shone full on the subtle, carved smile.

  Mr Kendrick asked Smith the question that was in all their minds - ‘What do you propose to do now?’

  Smith said slowly, ‘I think that we should transfer operations to this new site - the tumulus, the Buddha Tumulus, let us call it We have found nothing on the Dobehari Ridge; except traces of partition walls - dry stone, apparently. Further search there would be valuable, but it can be done another year, by other hands. It is an important task, but it is too big for us. We are looking for the Venus and we need to make some spectacular find. I regret it, but it’s true. With a spectacular find, such as the Venus, you will be in a better position to interest the learned societies and the universities and museums which finance these researches and, of course, do a better job than we can.’

  ‘Does this mean you will need more men?’ Mr Kendrick asked.

  Smith said, ‘Yes. The work at the cricket pitch was going very slowly. Now it seems that we have wasted - or, at least, lost - a week . . .‘

  Mr Kendrick said, ‘Remember, Foster, no delay in the completion of the irrigation works.’

  Foster appeared to be calculating, but Mohan thought that he had already made up his mind. At length he said, ‘That’s all right, sir. I can provide another ten men. They can start , work tomorrow’

  The meeting broke up. Mohan and Rukmini walked back to Cheltondale. Mohan was preoccupied. The Buddha worried him. Perhaps it was the calm beauty of the face. Or the unmistakable foreignness of it. Men from Europe had been here two thousand years ago, imposing their ideas on India. Because the ideas were superior?

  They were nearly at the bungalow. Rukmini said, ‘Mr. Smith’s going to swim in Tiger Pool after supper. He says he goes almost every night. It’s a wonderful idea. Shall we go too, tonight?’

  ‘No,’ Mohan snapped. ‘I have work to do.’

  Then I will,’ she said. She seemed to be waiting, as they walked up the steps, for him to forbid her. Then she would say, ‘Yes, lord,’ in her meekest, most obstinate Hindu manner.

  ‘Have a good time,’ he said, in the careless drawl the English used when they were angry.

  Chapter 10

  It was very dark by the pool. The stars glowed in a deep night, but the moon had not risen. Smith stood under the edge of the fall, wearing only a pair of tattered khaki trousers, and let the water pound down on his chest and upturned face. His forehead was set in a slight frown, for he was perturbed. There had been an aura of doubt, almost anxiety, round the Buddha’s grave this afternoon. Why?

  He turned his head as a movement in the starlight caught his eye. A silver ghost approached him round the edge of the pool. Only one. He sighed, with a touch of weariness. The most metaphysical problems were always being clouded by the complexities of human relations. This was what the Buddhists meant when they insisted that freedom from the wheel of. existence was the first necessity in the search for truth.

  She came close, at the edge of the splashing water, and said, ‘You are very thin, and hard. You don’t eat enough…Have you been in swimming yet?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She looked at the water, up at the towering cliff, and began to unwind the blue and silver sari. Then she took off the bodice, and stood naked, one hand out so that he could help her into the water. They went down side by side over the uneven rocks, and into the water. He swam beside her for half an hour, sometimes floating on his back, her hand touching his. When he could see her face it was very solemn in the moonlight, and calm. They did not speak a word until they reached shore and stood again on dry land.

  She looked out at the pool, and said, ‘This has been a place for love. The feeling is still here.’

  Smith said, ‘The pleasure and pride of the senses. Nothing more, here.’

  ‘You recognise it, too?’ she said eagerly. ‘I see, in my mind, a hundred girls, and men, enjoying each other in the water, under the fall, all smiling, none possessed by jealousy, or any mean thought.’

  ‘Like the carved wall of Mamallapurara.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I am part of it’

  ‘One of the girls?’ he asked.

  ‘All of them,’ she said. She stood a little distance away from him, showing him the beauty of her body. After he had admired it for a time, and the generosity of the full eyes that met his, she dressed unhurriedly, and sat down again beside him, staring out across the pool She said, ‘You are in love.’

  He said, ‘I have a woman - yes. A
wife. And children. They gave me all that a man can need. I left them because I could not give them anything in return.’

  ‘So you do follow the path of yoga,’ she said. Though you are not a yogi... This wife, why did you not try the path of bhoga with her? Perhaps that would have enabled you to take her with you, wherever you are going, instead of going alone. Bhoga is my path.’

  Smith smiled, but did not answer. As yoga was the right-hand road, the path of contemplation, and denial of the flesh, bhoga was the left-hand road, the path of action, of acceptance of the flesh. Every Hindu temple showed the choice, and impartially glorified the passivity of those who denied and the activity of those who accepted.

  He said, ‘Why isn’t Mohan here with you?’

  She said, ‘Because he is jealous. And I love him. I love him as a wife, although I am not his wife. Oh, it is not all his fault I become angry, and make up my mind to be just what he expects. When he thinks I am a loose woman, I act like one. When he thinks I do not love him, I do not love him. That is what some men - most men - want a woman to be: a mirror to their own thoughts and wishes ... I have learned many new things since I came to your room that night. Mrs Kendrick desires Mohan. You are wise. What should I do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Smith said.

  She said, ‘I wish Mohan could talk to me about it, though. He looks so worried, almost frightened, and yet expectant.’

  ‘He is only twenty,’ Smith said. ‘And he admires Mr Kendrick.’

  ‘I am twenty-one,’ she said.

  ‘You are older than the rocks among which you sit,’ he said. ‘Like the vampire, you have been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and have been a diver in deep seas, and keep their fallen day about you, and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, were mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to you but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the hanging lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one...’