Bhowani Junction

by John Masters

  I waited. There would be more.

  He said, ‘On the way back I threw the revolver into the Nerbudda so that I wouldn’t be able to do anything silly with it again. Now I have a telegram from the Deputy Chief Traffic Superintendent asking me to explain why I was absent without leave.’

  I counted in my mind: a charge of intimidation, and probably assault as well; a court-martial for losing an Army revolver and six rounds of ammunition; dismissal from the railway; sale of St Thomas’s. What a man. The miracle was that he was still here, subdued but basically unchanged.

  I said, ‘Forget it. We’ll see what we can do later. Meantime, bring a rifle and come along.’

  He didn’t talk any more but got out a rifle and came with me. In ten minutes he was quite cheerful again. He had extraordinary resilience. I drove straight back to my battalion headquarters and found Chris Glass in a state about a report that had just come in from Ranjit, via Govindaswami, on the telephone. Ranjit said he had reason to believe that Roy was trying to escape from Bhowani on a train. That had been about twenty minutes ago. The cordon was in position by then, but I thought I would go out and take a look for myself. I asked Taylor if there was any train regularly scheduled at this time. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Yes. A mixed goods to Allahabad, via Bhanas.’

  The phone rang. It was Sammy. He said, ‘Kartar Singh has just come in to tell me that the night goods to Allahabad stopped on the branch line for a minute, and he saw a woman in white talking to the driver—fifteen minutes ago. Kartar lives near——’

  I am alive to wear my M.C.s because in certain matters my brain goes off like a bomb. I said to Taylor, ‘Who’s the driver of that goods? Quick!’ He thought and said, ‘Dunphy, probably.’ I dropped the telephone and ran for the door. Taylor just managed to get in over the side as I got the jeep moving. Birkhe dived head first into the back seat.

  I don’t know what a jeep’s maximum speed is, but we did it, all the way.

  The goods train had been searched when we reached the cordon, and was just starting off again. I blared on the horn and flicked my lights on and off and yelled, ‘Stop!’ Dunphy saw me and stopped his train. I couldn’t afford to waste time wondering. I had to act as though I knew Roy and Victoria were on the train, not just thought they might be.

  Lilparsad came running, and I told him to get his two vehicles out in the fields, one on each side of the train, with their headlights on. Their lights went on, Victoria said later, just in time to stop Roy from breaking for it. He was on the point of going over the side when he saw my jeep arrive.

  The Gurks spread out, and I got a couple of Bren guns down beside the vehicles where the gunners could see along the lights. The guard of the train left his brake van and started to walk forward to see what was happening.

  That was Roy’s chance, and he saw it much quicker than I did. I went slowly on with the line of Gurkhas, keeping level with the men, who were now breaking into every locked wagon and examining every open wagon inside and out, top and bottom. We were well past the middle of the train when Lilparsad, on the other side of it, shouted, ‘Hinnu lagyo, sahib! Terain hinnu lagyo!’

  By God it was, or rather five wagons and the brake van were. Taylor was beside me, and I shouted, ‘Patrick, the back of the train’s rolling. Stop it!’ Then I realized the guard was nearly up with us, and nobody could stop it. Simultaneously I realized it was no accident. Thank God my jeep was up beside me, with Birkhe at the wheel. The runaway wagons were perhaps fifty or a hundred yards away and gathering speed downhill and disappearing beyond the reach of my headlights.

  Someone fired a shot, and I saw the guard roll over. He’d been nearest to the runaway part and must have run back, but Roy had got him while he was trying to unpin a brake lever and hold down the handbrake on the wagon nearest us. I saw Roy and Victoria scrambling toward the brake van.

  By then Taylor and I and Birkhe and two others were bounding over the field in the jeep. Birkhe ran the jeep alongside the runaway, which wasn’t going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, and we hurled ourselves at the end wagon. Roy began to fire at us from the brake van up front. Ranbahadur ’92 got hit in the arm and fell off. Birkhe was in the jeep, and so three of us were in that back wagon—Taylor, Rifleman Bishansing, and me,

  Victoria had lost a sandal here. Roy must have been here under the coal with her. Obviously he must have been in this wagon to get down, seal and disconnect the vacuum pipe between it and the next one ahead, uncouple, give the disconnected part of the train a push-off down the slope, and jump in.

  The wagon immediately ahead of us in the runaway section was a high closed one. We couldn’t see a damned thing unless we got on top of it. Taylor was wild with excitement. He charged across the gap and went up like a gorilla. Immediately a bullet whanged against it on the other end. Taylor dropped on his stomach as we followed him up. We crawled to the forward edge. From there we could see. Ahead of us, in order, were a wagon full of sacks, one full of wood, one that looked empty, and the brake van. Roy leaned out of the brake van’s right window and fired twice at us. I fired quickly with the carbine but missed. We were doing over twenty then, and the lights of Devra station were close in front.

  I gathered myself to jump down into the well of the wagon in front. Roy couldn’t kill two of us if Bishansing stayed up there and kept his head down with the Sten whenever he tried to poke it out to fire.

  Just as I jumped I saw Victoria’s head and shoulders appear in the moonlight, and an arm with a revolver right beside her ear. Taylor had bunched to jump with me, but he saw Victoria too, and instead of jumping forward his reflexes sent him leaping up, shouting, ‘No! Stop, we——’ and then a shadow like an eagle’s wings flashed over my head, and Patrick disappeared with a clatter and an extraordinary whoomph. We were running through Devra station, and the lights blinked flash-flash-flash on us, faster every second. I looked back and saw Patrick hanging on to the load gauge, his legs dangling and his body draped like a scarecrow’s across it. The whoomph was the air being driven out of his lungs, and the clatter was his rifle falling on to the wagon top and thence to the ground.

  He had jumped up to warn me not to go on, because of Victoria, and the load gauge had swept him off.

  He might have been killed, his ribs crushed in against the steel bar of the gauge. He might have fallen down unconscious fifteen feet and some inches and broken his back. But he wasn’t, and he hadn’t. He was hanging up there like a clown in a circus, with his legs kicking. The Devra platform staff might be rushing with ladders to get him down. But they wouldn’t be. They would be hiding, thinking that he was K. P. Roy, while he groaned and swore and shouted for someone to come and get him down. I couldn’t do anything about getting to Victoria, and I didn’t think Roy would hurt her without cause—if only because it would waste time and ammunition—so I knelt on the sacks and called Patrick every name I could think of.

  I hadn’t had time to give Lilparsad any further orders but, as I’d once pointed out to Victoria, I wasn’t running a kindergarten. The two six-by-sixes were tearing down the road, which ran parallel with the line there about a hundred yards over, and gaining fast, their headlights and the moon churning the dust into gigantic luminous galloping wraiths.

  The map of the country spread out in my head. Where was there cover? Roy had the vacuum brake lever in his van and could stop us any time he chose. I remembered a patch of rocky scrub jungle that faltered off into water channels, ditches, hedges, and two straggly villages—an impossible place in which to catch a single and singularly skilful man.

  It was a sweet taste, like honey and whisky, to see one of Lilu’s trucks jerk off the road and head across the fields at forty miles an hour to get behind that area of dirty country. What the hell did I want another wife for?

  But Lilu ought to have had my crown and pip while I took his three stripes—only three were more than I deserved. For not until then did I realize what an utter fool I’d been. I jumped up, leaned over
the forward edge of the wagon, and shot a hole in the vacuum brake coupling. The brakes jammed hard on, sheets of flame streamed out, the steel screamed under the torture, and I all but went over on to the rail. While I struggled to save my balance the brake-van door opened with a crack like an eighteen-pounder, and Roy stepped off. He hit the right of way, folded, and rolled forward like a ball in a cloud of dust. I got in one shot before he found his feet, then he was running like a hare among the stones and scrub. We had stopped on the very edge of the bad country. Two seconds earlier, and he’d have had thirty yards of open ground to cross; I would have found my balance, and I couldn’t have missed. Bishansing sprayed the trees with his Sten gun, but it was no good. I jumped to the ground and ran after Roy for a minute, but when Lilu’s men arrived I handed over to them and went back to the little line of wagons.

  She was lying on the floor of the brake van, and I got very cold inside. I knelt down, preparing myself to say good-bye to her. I put out my hand, and she stirred and muttered, ‘Are you hurt—hurt—badly hurt, oh, Patrick, ’rick?’ She’d got a bang on the head when the brake van stopped so suddenly. She spoke in a thick muddled way and didn’t know what she was saying, but she was going to be all right.

  Because I had tightened up to say good-bye for ever, what she did say was not terrible. The welling-up of love and relief in me could have absorbed worse than that without a wince. But still I wouldn’t give in.

  I had a hard job keeping my voice steady when she came to properly and asked whether I was all right, and held on to my hand, and then—much later—asked after Patrick.

  Patrick arrived on a bicycle. He was in some pain, but I had decided that the only part I could play was the part of R. Savage, and let the audience file out in good order when they’ve had enough. I said, ‘A hell of a time you choose to practise pull-ups. Take your coat off.’

  He took off his coat and shirt, and I had a look at him. He was badly bruised, but I didn’t think any bones were broken. Chaney would see to him when we got back. But something else had happened to him. I won’t say he actually grinned at my crack, or that he actually answered back, but he somehow shrugged the whole thing off. The bend of his back, in his pain, said, Better luck next time, and showed much more of his true character than he was capable of putting across in words. The eerie thing was that this new ‘feel’ in him had been put there by nobody else but R. Savage. On the way back to Bhowani I gave him another couple of verbal jabs, just to make sure. All he did was nearly pulverize my hand when we left him at his bungalow and said, ‘By God, I wouldn’t have missed that for anything, Colonel. And you saved Victoria. She would have been a goner without you.’

  Then I drove Victoria to her bungalow, and kissed her before I took her in, but gently, and she thought I was the most beautiful tiger she’d ever come across in her walk, as a woman, through the jungle.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The next Thursday I went into her office and asked her if she’d finished. She nodded, and I said, ‘Let’s do something indecent, then. Let’s go over to the Club and have a drink.’

  She looked at her watch. She said, ‘But it’s only half-past four. We can’t have a drink yet.’

  I said, ‘That’s what I meant. I want to prove to one and all that I’ve lost my moral fibre.’ I picked up her handbag and held it out for her.

  She sighed and smiled and came round the desk toward me. I said, ‘Fourteen days’ C.L. for looking fond.’ She was very happy with me, and she loved me, and it was exactly like waking up in the holidays from school—say on September the first, when the sea in the early morning has begun to take on the Chinese-print mistiness that warns of the end of days.

  But this camp in the jungle wasn’t going to be a misty ending. I would make it instead into a pearly beginning. I would, I would, I would.

  While we were walking along the grass beside the road I said, ‘Thinking of to-morrow?’ To-morrow we were going off into the jungle. I hadn’t been thinking of anything else.

  She gathered herself and said, ‘Rodney, I can’t come.’ She went on quickly. ‘Really, I can’t. I haven’t cared for myself, and I don’t now, but this is going to hurt Pater. He’s bound to know. We can’t hide a thing like that. You’re not even going to try, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t.’

  We walked slowly, the sun at our left. Barracks and a line of big trees hid the river. It was another hot still afternoon, and few people were about. I found myself thinking of Ranjit. He’d lost her, but he’d gained something in the process so that now he was calm, contented, and grown-up. I wondered if that would happen to me.

  In the deserted club, with my drink in my hand, I must have looked so troubled that she weakened. She suggested I ask the Dicksons to come too. She thought they wouldn’t mind if she and I shared a tent. But I had it fixed in my mind how it was going to be in the jungle. It was going to be an idyll of exploration. Victoria and I would explore the jungle, the wild birds, the animals, and each other. Birkhe and old man Manbir were going to be there because I saw them in the idyll—but certainly not Molly Dickson, or even Henry. I wanted to isolate Victoria from pressure and show her another world which was a part of me. But it had to be all or nothing.

  Finally I said, ‘If you feel like this about hurting your father, we’ll have to go and speak to him.’

  She said, ‘Rodney, you mustn’t!’ and put down her glass quickly.

  I said, ‘Not me alone. Victoria—we!’ I would have preferred not to bring her father into this yet. So far, it was our own damned busines and nobody else’s. But I thought that it would probably be all right to see him. I didn’t think he would be as hurt or as outraged as Victoria expected.

  She said, ‘I won’t do any such thing, Rodney. How can you expect me to go to my own father and tell him I’m going out there alone with you, and ask him if he minds?’

  I said, ‘We’re not going to ask him if he minds. We’re going to ask him if he approves. I don’t want to hurt him any more than you do. Where will he be now?’

  She said, ‘At home. Just getting up. He usually sleeps all Thursday afternoons. But——’

  I said, ‘Good. Finish that drink, and we’ll get a tonga and go down,’ I called for a khitmatgar and told him to fetch a tonga.

  When we clambered into the tonga our combined weights nearly lifted the miserable pony off the ground. To counterbalance us the driver crept out along the near shaft. He cracked his whip and shouted, ‘Hey! Hey, huh!’

  I said, This is the way the world begins, not with a whimper but a——’ I waited, my hand raised. The pony scrabbled for foothold, touched down, and farted thunderously. I said, ‘Bang!’ The pony trotted down the club drive.

  The tonga was a very suitable vehicle for us on that errand. The tonga abolishes all distinctions of caste, colour, and class. Nothing more undignified could have been thought up if people had spent a thousand years trying. Pater would feel very superior when he saw us.

  As we passed the Silver Guru’s tree she said, ‘What are you going to say, darling? What do you want me to say?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know. This is your father, you know. You like him, don’t you?’

  She said, ‘Yes.’

  I said, ‘You’re not frightened of him?’

  She said, ‘No.’

  I said, ‘Well, I like him too.’

  Then we were there, and I saw Pater peering at us with astonishment through the parlour window. I paid off the driver while Victoria waited for me. She didn’t want to face the walk alone. Pater met us at the front door. He had bedroom slippers on his feet, rimless reading spectacles on the end of his nose, and a crumpled Civil and Military in his hand. He said, ‘Hullo, Colonel. This is a nice surprise.’

  I listened carefully but could hear no other sounds in the house. Mater and Rose Mary were probably out. Pater said, ‘Have a bottle of beer, Colonel?’

  I refused with thanks. Victoria led into the parlour, and Pater and I followed
her. Pater sat down in his big chair, and she balanced on the arm of it. I remained standing, by the window. I said, ‘I’ve come to see you about Victoria, Mr Jones.’

  Pater got up slowly. ‘Victoria?’ he said. For a moment it looked as though he did not believe his ears, then the smile spread across his face, showing all his bad teeth, and he fumbled for his spectacles, took them off, and seemed to be on the point of crying. He said, ‘Victoria. My little girl. You want to talk to me about her?’

  I said, and found my voice going harsh, ‘Yes. I am in love with her. I want to take her out into the jungle for the weekend. I want your approval.’

  Pater sat down. His hand trembled as he put the glasses back on his nose. He said, ‘Oh. I see. For the week-end.’ ‘Week-end’ is a wicked word. ‘Three days’ sounds much more virtuous.

  He was looking up at me, into the light. I towered over him, though I am not tall, because he was all shrunk up in the big chair. I didn’t want to bully him—and I knew it wouldn’t pay, either—so I moved round and sat in a chair on his other side, so that then the hard light was in my eyes and behind his head.

  ‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘Shooting. What do you hope to get, sir?’

  I said, ‘Leopard. Perhaps a jungle fowl or two.’

  He said, ‘Oh,’ and then was silent. He moved his head a little from side to side. Like me, he was listening to know whether Mater and Rose Mary had somehow crept back into the house and could hear what we said.

  He lifted his head and met my eyes. He said falteringly, ‘I am sorry, I must ask—are your intentions honourable, sir?’