by John Masters
Mr Jones chattered on happily. He was so delighted to be talking to a lieutenant-colonel. He even joked with Savage and told him be should leave the military department to join the railway department, and Savage said he’d like to be an engine driver. Then Savage said he’d have to ask to be excused, and Mr Jones wrung his band again and told him to be sure and come and visit them at Number 4 Collett Road for a bottle of beer and a good talk. Victoria would show him the way, Mr Jones said.
Victoria kept her face stiff until Savage and Macaulay walked away toward Mrs Williams and the other ladies. Then she turned on her father and said, ‘Pater! Why did you ask Colonel Savage to come to our house? If he does come it will only be to laugh at us.’ But Pater was looking after Savage and smiling in a pleased, happy way. He said to us, just as if Victoria hadn’t spoken, ‘Now there is a real English gentleman for you. No swank, you see, but he will always be treated like a gentleman, because he knows he is one.’
Victoria said again, ‘Why did you go asking him to our house? I don’t want to see him there. He’s very rude. Working with him is going to be bad enough.’
Pater looked at her, and he was surprised and rather hurt. He said, ‘Don’t speak like that about the colonel, Victoria. It is not right. I must go to the running room. Give me a kiss, girl’
She bent forward to be kissed. Pater started to go, but he turned back at once and came close to me. He said, ‘And I can tell you something, Patrick. The colonel thinks Victoria is a good-looking girl.’
I laughed, because of course Pater hadn’t seen how Savage really treated her when a lot of other people weren’t around. I thought, if Pater’s trying to make me jealous he is talking through his hat.
‘Oh, yes, he does,’ Pater said. ‘I am old, but not as old as that. Besides, she is my girl, and I know. The other young fellow thinks the same. But I don’t like him. He is not a real gentleman.’
I agreed with him there. Macaulay gave me the creeps.
Pater stooped slowly under the couplings of a line of goods wagons, looked carefully up and down, and went away. His boots crunched fainter and fainter on the clinkers; then I heard Victoria swearing under her breath close beside me. ‘How does Pater claim to know Lieutenant Macaulay isn’t a real gentleman?’ she said. ‘Macaulay hardly spoke a word. As for Colonel Savage——’
We walked over to Mrs Williams. Just then a lot of our servants came up through the yards, carrying the big tea urn from the Institute, and charcoal, milk jugs, water chatties, cups, saucers, everything. To impress on Colonel Savage that we were all anxious to help him, I said, ‘The urn is lent by permission of the Institute Committee, of course.’ Savage nodded his head thoughtfully. He watched the servants preparing the charcoal fire at the side of the hut. Then he turned to Mrs Williams and said, ‘This is really very kind of all of you, Mrs Williams, very kind indeed.’ He flashed her another of those brilliant hot smiles.
Violet Williams simpered and put her hand up to her back hair. ‘It is nothing, Colonel, a pleasure,’ she said.
Savage said, ‘I can assure you that our sick—and we’re bound to have some—will appreciate it very much.’
I was as astonished as Mrs Williams. She said, ‘Oh, but this is for the British officers, Colonel Savage.’ Savage knew that perfectly well.
But he said, ‘Well, you know, they’ll appreciate your kindness, but I don’t allow them to have any tea at a time like this unless the men are having some too, and you couldn’t possibly cater for five hundred Gurkhas, could you?’
Mrs Williams looked put out, and I don’t blame her. I could see she’d been imagining herself surrounded by captains and majors. And I’d been thinking that Savage would owe us something after this. But now, as the tea was only for the sick men, we would have looked like thoughtless people if we hadn’t provided it, and Savage owed us nothing. He went on talking to Violet until her face cleared. He had kissed the Blarney Stone somewhere, all right.
Near me I heard Macaulay mutter to Victoria, ‘The Sahib’s giving her her money’s worth, isn’t he?’
Macaulay was standing very close to Victoria, touching her, I think, and his hand was somewhere behind her. She muttered, ‘Mrs Williams is easily taken in.’
Macaulay cleared his throat, and I was too close to see what really happened next. What I saw—and Savage saw it too—was Victoria, leaning, falling back against Macaulay, and Macaulay’s arm tight round her and on her bust. What no one knew, except Macaulay and Victoria, was whether she’d moved away from him and caught ber foot in a check rail and stumbled, or whether she’d leaned deliberately against him.
Macaulay said, ‘Careful now. You nearly fell.’ His eyes were dull and his face pinched. That heavy, foolish moustache helped to hide his upper lip. Perhaps it was not so foolish of him to wear it, after all. He took his hand away, and then it was too late for Victoria to say, Take your hands off me—even if she’d wanted to. I didn’t know. I felt very bad then, with the British officers treating my girl that way.
A telegraph peon with a message came through between the wagons and went up to Colonel Savage. Savage took it, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and moved a little aside to read it. Then he looked up and called us. ‘Graham. Miss Jones. Taylor.’ We went over to him. ‘Graham’ was Graham Macaulay.
He said in a low voice, ‘A Wimpy spotted some men on the line near Dabgaon—a Wimpy’s a Wellington bomber, Miss Jones. Oh, you know that? It got back to base a couple of hours ago, and they checked up and found no railwaymen were working in that area. The RAF have been flying rail patrol since yesterday. Taylor, have a motor trolley ready to go out as soon as the first of our trains come in. There’ll have to be a railwayman on board to work it, just this time. Afterwards we’ll learn to do it ourselves. It wouldn’t do any harm if you came yourself,’ he said to me. ‘I’m going. Graham, tell the police here. And get a havildar and four from the first rifle company to come in.’
Macaulay said, ‘Very good, sir.’
Savage snarled, ‘Don’t keep saying, “Very good, sir.” You’re not a bloody butler.’ He hated Macaulay, I was sure, and that cheered me up. He’d seen Macaulay pawing Victoria and despised him for that. I said to myself, He thinks it is degrading for a British officer to play around with an Anglo-Indian girl. His thinking that was degrading for us, I suppose, but I didn’t care. If he thought we and they couldn’t mix, he was on my side.
‘No, sir,’ Macaulay said. He saluted, red in the face, and went away.
Savage watched him go, his face like a wolf’s. When he turned to Victoria he seemed to be in as bad a temper as he had been on Saturday when he first arrived. I thought, That’s because he doesn’t want her fooling around with his officers. He said curtly, ‘When the trains are in, go to the Traffic Office, Taylor’s, and stay there until we get back from our patrol. If I send a message, sort it out between Macaulay and that depilated Sikh assistant of Taylor’s—Kasel—so that what I say is to be done is done. Do you understand?’
‘Very good, sir,’ she said. She said it on purpose, but Savage took no notice. He began to warn me that we might be out most of the night on the motor trolley. I thought he was joking, and anyway I saw the first troop special coming, and I said, ‘Here she comes, sir!’
It was a long train, coming slowly up from the north. It passed through the station and swung curving round, carriage after carriage, under the signals and into the yards. All the windows were open and filled with round brown faces, the dust thick on them.
The engine stopped, hissing. The carriages stopped. One man jumped down from each carriage, ran across the tracks, and knelt down, looking outward, his rifle ready in his hands.
Victoria jumped forward, calling, ‘Look out!’ because one of the Gurkhas had settled in the path of a moving fly-shunted wagon. Savage snapped, ‘Mind your own business, Miss Jones. He is supposed to look after himself.’ The Gurkha moved aside before the wagon reached him, and Victoria muttered, ‘Sorry, sir.’
The other Gur
khas poured out of the carriages, man after man after man in an endless single file from each door. British officers appeared, and Lieutenant Macaulay went over to speak to one of them.
The Gurkhas were dirty and quiet and of course small. They weren’t like the sepoys of the Indian garrison battalion that had been here before, nor like the soldiers I’d seen walking about in clean, starched uniforms in Agra. They all formed up close by us, and they smelled of the train and ammonia and the cardamom seeds a lot of them were chewing. A few were thickset older men, but mostly they were young chaps, almost children. Their faces were round and unlined under the dust and the streaky sweat. They moved with a sort of unhurried bad temper, and almost without noise. In less than ten minutes the first batch crunched away, turned on to the Deccan Pike, and marched north toward cantonments. They had come from the war, lots of wars, but it seemed to me that they had brought their wars with them.
Ten or twelve Gurkhas under the old subadar-major came over to the tea urn. It looked to me as if those men had been ordered that minute to be ‘sick’, but Mrs Williams didn’t notice anything. I was drinking some tea myself when Savage came up to me. He had a short rifle in his hand, and he was buckling his equipment on. He said, ‘Ready? Miss Jones, we’re going now.’
‘Very good, sir,’ she said again, looking him in the eye.
He was swinging away from her. He stopped, whipped round, and said, ‘All right, Miss Jones. Mind you see the chamber pots are clean by the time I come back.’
She was so angry she could not speak, but it was really her fault for goading him. She knew he hated that phrase. He waited a moment, then turned away. A ganger brought the trolley down, and we got on and started off.
On the trolley were Colonel Savage, me, a sergeant (they call them havildars in the Indian Army), and five sepoys—called riflemen in Gurkha regiments. One of the riflemen was Savage’s orderly, a thin Gurkha of about eighteen called Birkhe.
It had been still and hot all afternoon, but when we began to move the wind scorched our faces. The trolley seemed to be running all the time through the open door of a furnace, and we had to screw up our eyes against the hot wind and the dust. I soon put on my dark glasses.
The Gurkhas lost their bad temper when we began to move. They pushed each other and joked, and Savage made jokes with them which I couldn’t understand because he spoke very quickly in Gurkhali, the Gurkhas’ language. We were packed on there like sardines, and I asked him to tell the Gurkhas not to play the fool or someone would fall off.
Dabgaon is twenty-four miles from Bhowani Junction, and we got there in about an hour and a half. Savage got out his map and showed me a pencil mark on it. ‘This is the map reference the Wimpy gave,’ he said, ‘where it spotted those men.’ The place he pointed to was near the Cheetah bridge about half-way between Dabgaon and Malra. So we went there and hauled the trolley off the line.
The line curved there and ran in a cutting. At the north end of the cutting it ran out on to an embankment, and then on to the bridge approach. We began to search the line. A gang from Malra was already on the job, and after an hour they reported to us that nothing was wrong with the line and rails. They thought the bridge was all right too, though it would have been much easier to hide something there.
Savage had been standing on the top of the cutting, looking all round through his binoculars. To the west the country was thick, dry jungle; to the east it was mostly fields. He checked against his map the positions of two villages we could see in the fields. Then he pointed into the jungle to the west and said that another village, which his map said was less than a mile away, must be in there. The Gurkhas were searching in the fields and along the edge of the jungle.
The sun went down. The railway gang walked back together, singing, toward Malra. The Gurkhas trotted in, and we all gathered round the trolley. The Gurkhas began to eat chupattis and drink a little out of their water-bottles. I got hungry, and I wanted to go back to Bhowani. We couldn’t do anything more out there.
But Savage pointed to his map and said, ‘We’ll go to these three villages in turn and ask the headmen if any strangers have been seen since midday. It’s quite possible that the people the Wimpy saw might be hiding in one of the villages.’
I said, ‘But Colonel——’ and he looked at me, his eyes gleaming in the twilight, and I shut my mouth. What the hell good was it for me, the District Superintendent of Traffic, to go crashing round in the dark through the jungles and across the fields, when my job was in the office in Bhowani?
Savage said, ‘Haven’t you got anything to eat?’
I said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘You are a bloody fool. I warned you. Here.’ He gave me some of his. He had a tin of bully beef and a few cold chupattis that looked as if they’d been floating round in his haversack for several days, or perhaps in Birkhe’s. They were gritty and dusty and tasted of tobacco; he didn’t seem to notice but ate them quickly. While we were eating he said, ‘I understand the Collector has told you why my battalion has been sent here in such a hurry.’
I said, ‘Yes. Because of K. P. Roy.’ I had Roy on my mind whenever I thought of the railway.
Savage said, ‘Partly him. Would you know him by sight if we happened to see him in one of these villages?’
I said, ‘No.’
All of a sudden it came over me what we were really up to. I had thought that the men the plane had seen on the line might be K. P. Roy and his followers trying to do something bad. But I had never thought we would go chasing them, and perhaps finish up facing K. P. Roy in a dark corner of a smelly village in the middle of the night. K. P. Roy would fight for his life with everything he had, and he would shoot first.
When it was quite dark we set off. Savage used his compass. There was about half a moon, and the leaves crackled under our feet. It was like some of my shooting expeditions, only we were after a man instead of an animal, and the trees seemed alive and frightening. Dogs began to bark before we got to the first village, and Savage sent two Gurkhas slipping round through the trees to get behind the village before we walked up to it.
We saw the lights, and then, when we went forward, a gun exploded with a tremendous roar. I dropped to my stomach, and slugs of lead and old bits of glass and nails whistled through the branches above us. It was the village watchman, wide awake and very nervous. Savage shouted, ‘Don’t shoot. We’re soldiers.’
We went into the village. No one had gone to sleep there yet, and I could see they were all ill at ease. Savage was suspicious and cross-examined the headman for some time. But if they had seen any strangers they weren’t going to tell us, and we hadn’t got the time or the authority to search every house.
We left there about ten and marched back through the jungle, across the railway, and across the empty fields to the second village. It was the same procedure, only the watchman didn’t shoot at us. I insisted on walking in front that time, because I thought Savage was thinking I was a coward for falling on my face when they fired at us. I had never been fired at before, though I had been in the Auxiliary Force, India, of course, ever since I joined the railway.
I am used to the jungles, but of course I had to trip up two or three times while I was leading the way, just because Savage was expecting me to, and finally he told me to get back and let a Gurkha lead. He was terribly impatient. My shoes were ordinary thin shoes, and my feet hurt, and by then I was hot, thirsty, and tired.
The moon was dull orange when we set out for the last village. It was a clear night, but near the earth in the hot weather there is a layer of hot wavy air packed with dust, and the moon, shining through it, looks orange-coloured. The dogs in that village could hear the dogs barking in the one we were leaving, across a mile and a half of fields. Savage stopped to listen and think, and instead of going the direct way he swung us off to one side. We came up to the last village from the left, where I remembered seeing a low rocky hill.
While we were moving across that hill, going very quietl
y, I got a tickle in my throat and had to cough. At once something went pad-pad a little in front. Savage said in Hindustani, ‘Standstill, or I fire!’
The shuffling noise went on among the thin thorn bushes and the rocks, where I suppose the villagers usually grazed their goats. I saw a shape moving. It might have been a man running, it might have been a deer or a jackal or a pig. It looked like nothing but a change of light between the bushes. Besides me Savage pulled his carbine into his shoulder and fired four times very quickly—bang-bang-bang-bang!
The shape had gone, or the movement had stopped, I don’t know which. I had forgotten how much my feet hurt. The thing might be K. P. Roy with a gun, but what frightened me more was that I was with these people who simply shot at anything that didn’t do at once what they told it to. These people had brought the war to Bhowani, as I said.
We spread out and went forward, searching everywhere. There was no sign of anything or anyone. Finally Savage took us to the village. They’d heard the shooting, and again the watchman fired at us. The headman said there bad been strangers there early in the day. Some of them had left before dusk, and one had just gone. No one knew who he was, but the headman described him, and Savage made a note.
At last we walked back to the railway line. By then my feet were bleeding, but I didn’t complain to Savage. When we reached the trolley he said, ‘If you hadn’t coughed you could have saved us a lot of trouble—and yourself, I expect.’
I said I was sorry, but that I couldn’t help it. He said, ‘Imagine a cough will get you a bullet in the liver. You’ll find you can help it. Come on, hurry up.’ After wasting hours out there in the middle of the night, he was suddenly in a hell of a hurry to get back.
