by H. E. Bates
‘Oh! I suppose so.’
He took her ticket, looking at it for a moment under the station lights.
‘This isn’t a sleeper ticket. This is just a——’
‘Oh! I know, I know. It’s the wrong ticket. I know. That comes of not getting it yourself! My bearer got it. In this country if you want a thing done, do it yourself. I know.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Darjeeling. On leave.’
‘I’ve a compartment. I’m not sleeping. You can share with me.’
‘That makes me feel pretty small. Getting so excited.’
‘Oh, everybody in India gets excited. It’s nothing. It’s the thing.’
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said.
He called a porter for her luggage; the moth-like dhotis floated away under the station lights; and together they got on the train.
He always had plenty of food and ice-water and beer and fruit packed up in neat travelling baskets, and the rest of the night he and the girl sat opposite each other on the bunks, eating ham and bread and bananas and drinking beer. He was fascinated by her hunger and thirst. They were the hunger and thirst of the very young, and it seemed to him that she talked all night with her mouth full.
‘Ever been to Darjeeling before?’ he said.
‘No. They say it’s wonderful and it stinks,’ she said.
‘You’re lucky. You’ll see Kangchenjunga.’
She had not the faintest idea what Kangchenjunga was, and he talked of it for some time as a man talks of a pet grievance, a pet memory, or an old campaign. He told her several times how wonderful it was, and then he knew that she was bored.
‘Oh! I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The trouble is that I like mountains. I’m rather in love with mountains.’
‘Really?’ She sat cross-legged on the bunk, eating a fourth banana, her shoes off, her knees rounded and smoothly silken, her skirt pulled tightly above.
‘Don’t you care for mountains?’
‘Not terribly.’
‘Then why Darjeeling? That’s why people go there.’
‘You’ve got to go somewhere,’ she said.
He knew suddenly that she was going there simply because it was a place, a thing, a convention; because she had a piece of time to be killed; because she was bored. She was going to a place whose identity did not matter, and suddenly he was aware of wanting to say something to her; to make, as casually as he could, a desperate suggestion.
He began to make it, and then he found himself trembling unexpectedly and with immense diffidence, so that all he could say was:
‘I—I—I——’
She took another banana and began to peel it very slowly, as if indifferently.
‘What were you going to say?’
‘Oh! it was an idea. But then I remembered it wouldn’t—it wasn’t possible.’
‘What was it?’ she said; and when he did not answer she looked at him with delightful black eyes, teasing him a little, mock serious. ‘Please.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well—I was going to suggest you spent the weekend on the estate with me. Oh! you could go on to Darjeeling afterwards.’
She began laughing, her mouth full of banana, so that she hung her head. He saw then that her very black hair was parted in a rigid wonderful white line straight down the middle and he had the first of many impulses to bend down and touch it with his hands.
Just as he felt he could no longer keep himself from doing this she lifted her head sharply and said:
‘I thought you were going to ask me something terribly serious. You know, like——’
He was shocked.
‘Oh! but it is serious. The reason I didn’t ask you the first time was because there’s a murderer running about the place.’
‘What possible difference could that make?’
‘I’ll have to spend most of the weekend trying to catch him,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to you. You’d have to entertain yourself.’
‘Entertain my foot,’ she said. ‘I should come with you.’
He discovered very soon that she accepted everything in that same way: without fuss, offhand but rather bluntly, as if things like riding on night trains with strange men, changing her plans and hunting native murderers in remote places were all things of the most casual account to her.
It troubled and attracted him so much that he forgot, in the morning confusion at the junction, to take his customary look for the snows in the north. He did not remember it until he had been driving for ten or fifteen miles along the road to the estate. And then he remembered another simple and curious thing at the same time. He had stupidly forgotten to ask her name; and he had neglected, still more stupidly, to tell her his own.
The three of them, his Indian driver, himself and the girl, were pressed together in the driving cab of a Ford truck. In the back of the truck were a dozen huddled Indians who wanted to be dropped off at hamlets along the road. It was impossible to speak in the roaring, jolting open-sided cabin, in the trembling glare of dust, and it was only when the truck stopped at last to let four or five villagers alight that he said:
‘You can’t see the snows this morning. Awful pity. It’s the haze. By the way, my name’s Owen.’
She took it indifferently and it struck him that possibly she had known it all the time.
‘Mine’s Blake,’ she said.
‘What else?’
‘Oh! just Blake. I get used to it,’ she said.
All along the road, for the next hour, he watched for the slightest dispersal, northward, of the vaporous glare that hid all of the mountains except the beginnings of forested foothills. These first hills, deceptively distant in the dusty glare of sun, were like vast lines of sleeping elephants, iron-grey and encrusted with broken forest, above tea-gardens that now began to line the road.
And then, thirty miles from the station, they came to the river. He had been looking forward to it as an important event he wanted to show her. He had spoken of it several times at village stopping-places. At bridges over smaller streams he had shouted above the noise of the motor: ‘Not this one. This isn’t it. A bit further yet. You’ll see.’
And then they were there. The sight of the broad, snow-yellow stream running splendidly down with furious and intricate currents between flat banks of sun-whitened sand, of lines of ox-wagons standing on dusty bamboo traverses waiting to be ferried across, of the ferry being madly poled by sweating and singing men against the powerful snow-flood: all of it filled him with a pride and excitement that he wanted somehow to convey to her. He felt in a way that it was his own river; that the water was from his own snows; and that the snows were from his own mountains. This was his country and his pride in it all was parochial and humble. It was inadequate and he could not put it into words.
He simply stood on the deck of the slowly-crossing ferry, crowded now with ox-carts, many peasants, a single car and his own truck, and stared at the wide sweeping waters.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Don’t you think so? Don’t you think it’s a wonderful river?’
‘Reminds me of one I saw in Burma,’ she said.
‘Burma?’ he said. He felt himself once again brought up sharp by the casual bluntness of her way of speaking. ‘Burma? Were you there?’
‘The whole caboodle,’ she said.
He suddenly felt small and crushed. The river and all it meant for him, and had so long meant, shrivelled into insignificance. He stared round for some moments at the scraggy oxen on the ferry. The carts, he noticed, were overloaded, and the oxen, as they always were, underfed, their thighs raw and bloody from struggling against each other and against the ill-balanced pole of the shafts. He felt angry at the stupidity of drivers who drove them with such savage lack of thought. The suffering of the grey moon-eyed creatures standing in the glare of sun, staring at the water, depressed him, and the miserable little songs of the ferrymen, in a dialect he did not understand, might have been, in their primitive whining, the
voices of cattle themselves, whimpering in pain.
And then the girl said:
‘Who are those people?’
‘Oh! just peasants.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The people with the car.’
He looked up to see, on the other side of the ferry, a family of educated Indians, a man in a European suit and soft white hat, a woman in a blue sari, two pigtailed girls in cotton frocks. They belonged, he saw, to the Chevrolet saloon.
‘They’re Indians,’ he said. ‘An educated family.’
‘I want to get myself a sari like that,’ she said. ‘I want to take one home.’
‘Home?’ he said. He felt suddenly and brutally pained. ‘When do you go home?’
‘Soon.’
He looked at the Indians standing by the car. He felt the collective pain of his thoughts about the oxen, the river, and of the girl leaving India abruptly increased by the thought that he himself had not much longer to remain. ‘Quit India,’ the curt and shabby slogan that one had seen for so many years chalked up on walls and bridges and decaying tenements in cities, everywhere, meant him too. In a year, perhaps in a few months, he, too, would have to go.
They reached the estate, with its pleasant two-storey bungalow of white-railed verandahs, its little plantation of pineapples, its papaia trees and its garden of orange and rose and crimson gerbera daisies, purple petunias and now fading sweet peas, about forty minutes later. He showed it her with pride. Its windows faced a view of lawn and flowers, of thousands of tea-bushes in the gardens, neatly shaped under high and slender trees of shade, and beyond it all the line of elephantine mountains, smouldering in morning haze.
‘Over there,’ he said, ‘is Bhutan. This is the frontier.’
‘What is Bhutan?’
‘It’s a state. A closed state. You can’t get in there.’
‘Why not?’
‘You just can’t,’ he said. ‘The mountains are the frontier and they’d keep you out if nothing else did.’
‘Just like Burma,’ she said. ‘Only they didn’t keep us out.’
He did not know what to say.
‘Awfully good place for your murderer,’ she said. ‘Once he’s in there you’ve had it. It’s all over.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
He had hoped she would not mention the murder. She had changed after her bath into a white dress with scarlet candy stripes, sleeveless and fresh, with a simple belt. Diagonal lines of scarlet met down the centre line of her body, continuing the line of her hair. Each time she lowered her head, to bend over her plate, he saw this line with increasingly aggravated impulses, aching to touch it. Then when she stood up from the table, after breakfast, he was aware of the line running down through the whole length of her body. It was the division between her breasts; it went on, in a series of scarlet arrowheads, to the tip of her skirt; it divided her brown sun-warm legs, fascinating him.
‘What would you like to do?’ he said.
‘Hunt the murderer,’ she said, ‘of course. Isn’t that what I came for?’
They drove most of that day about the estate. It was quite hot, but she did not rest in the afternoon. Some of the excitement about the murder had died down, and now there was a stillness of heat about the long avenues of tea-bushes, under the delicate high shade trees, that was enchanting. Bougainvilleas flamed on roofs seen through far sun-washed openings of the gardens. Delicious small winds stirred in the forest of bamboo. He showed her all of it with pride: the good new roads, the tea manufactory, the cool office where he paid his workers, the yellow slant-eyed children solemnly squatting with their tea-bugs spread out like patterns of dominoes, waiting for them to be counted. He let her pluck from the bushes a few leaves of tea.
‘All we needed to make a perfect day of it was a pot at the murderer,’ she said.
After dinner they sat on the north verandah, facing the hills. In the darkness smouldering hill fires seemed at intervals to be fanned by sudden winds. They flared with golden tips and then died for a moment, deep red, before they flamed and ran again.
She was fascinated by these fires, and he explained them to her. They were the fires of itinerant hill-people, clearing sections of forest, burning them and then moving on. They were like beacons on the frontier, far-off and unattainable, mysterious and lovely in the tense night air.
And in the sudden lighter fannings of flame, as he turned to speak to her, he saw the light of them on her face. It accentuated the line of her scalp so vividly that he could hardly bear to sit there, an arm’s length away, and not touch her. He longed to run his fingers down this line and tenderly down its lovely continuations.
Suddenly he knew that she was aware of this. She stirred in her chair, her legs stretched outward. He saw her black eyes turn and fix themselves fully on him, and he felt the beating undercurrent of their dark excitement. He put out his hands. In the hills a furious moment of fire leapt up and flooded her face with crimson light and he saw her lips, wet and soft, parting themselves slowly, ready to accept him.
A moment later he heard the voice of MacFarlane calling across the verandah, in the broad Dundee Scots that he had always faintly loathed:
‘Hi there, Owen, where are you hidin’ ye’self, man?’
For the rest of the evening the fierce parochialism of MacFarlane filled the chair between them. MacFarlane tall and angular and stiff, spoke volubly of other Scots, of Scotland, of Scottish compounds in Calcutta. He bloomed with Scottish pride.
‘Miss Blake, that’s a Scots name, surely?’
‘As English as——’
‘I’d no be so sure o’ that. I’d no be so sure, Miss Blake. I’d no be so sure.’
‘Well——’
‘Better be true Scot than half English,’ MacFarlane said. Something about his discovery of the two of them on the verandah, together with the astonishing fact of Miss Blake being there at all, seemed to fill him with a hostile desire to taunt their secrecy. ‘Ye’re like Owen here. He’s a Welsh name. Ye’ve a Scots name. The pair of ye claim to be English and a’ the damn time neither one of you knows where y’are!’
MacFarlane took ferocious sips of whisky and Owen felt all the delicacy, the tension and the beauty of the day crumble in his hands. The girl lay in her chair, full length, black eyes dreaming, her body quiet and bored, and stared at the hills and their gigantic bursting flowers of fire.
But once, before MacFarlane finally got up and staggered off across the garden down the path hidden from the house by groves of banana, she was moved to taunt him back:
‘And when is Scotland going to capture the murderer?’
‘Ah, he’s about. He’s about yet. We’ll have him yet.’
‘That’ll be a brave day for Scotland.’
‘Not a damn bit braver than any other!’
MacFarlane waved proud, extravagant, tipsy hands and Owen hated him. He looked across at the girl, catching the light of her dark eyes for a second, and felt that she, too, waited for the time when the moment of shattered secrecy between them could be renewed. He felt his body once again ache for the line of her hair, and then MacFarlane said:
‘Ah weel, I’ll bid ye good night, ye damn’ Sassenachs. We’ll be glad to gie ye tea tomorrow if ye care to run over. ‘Phone us up.’
‘Miss Blake hasn’t much time,’ Owen said. ‘She’s leaving India. Going home. To England.’
‘England!’ MacFarlane said. ‘Wha’ever said England was home!’
‘Good night,’ Owen said.
‘Good night,’ MacFarlane said. ‘Sleep well.’ He began to stagger away, across the garden, towards the banana grove, from which he called with final dour triumph: ‘Not that ye will!’
When he had gone there was no sound in the garden except the occasional turning, like the slow page of a book, of banana leaves twisting in soft air. It was a sound that gave the impression, now and then, of being part of the echo of distant fires splintering fresh paths into dark forests along the hills.
On
the still verandah Owen felt his own emotions bursting forward in just such sudden flaring spurts of exploration into the darkness where the girl lay stretched in her chair. He waited for a few moments after MacFarlane had gone and then he went over to her and did what he wanted to do ever since she had ridden with him in the train that morning. He smoothed his hands down the parted flanks of her hair. She did not stir. After dinner she had put on a house-gown of dark blue silk and the metal zip down the front of it ended in a tassel of blue cord. He wanted to pull gently at this cord; he wanted the gown to fall away like the dark shell of a nut, leaving her naked body pale with rounded bowls of shadow underneath it. He wanted to watch the colour of the fire from the hills on her face and see it grow rosy on the pale skin of her breasts, on her shoulders and on the intensely black divisions of her hair. But he did not do anything; he was paralysed suddenly by withering shyness; and suddenly he stood away.
‘I just wanted to say that it was sweet of you to come,’ he said. ‘Awfully sweet, and I’m grateful.’
In the morning they drove across the estate again. He took his rifle in the back of the car. On the hills, above the fresh green gardens, so like orchards of privet, there was nothing to be seen, in the glistening haze of dust, of the fires of the night before: except here and there dead scars of burning, like black scabs, across brown serrations of shale. The great fires were lost, like the smoulderings of matches, in the vaster substance of mountains, and the light of them had become extinguished by sun.
He wanted to drive her out beyond the gardens, through the first fringes of bamboo forest and on to the deep reaches of grass-swamp where, by the river, there were rhinoceros. On the narrow sandy track of the forest, like a white gulley between tall olive stalks of bamboo, they passed a running Indian, naked except for a small loincloth, with his bow and arrows.
‘A Sunday morning hunter,’ he said. ‘It’s the same the world over.’
‘Except here they hunt the murderer,’ she said. ‘They’re probably all murderers, anyway.’
‘I think we can give that up,’ he said. ‘They’re really wonderful people.’
‘Give up nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s what I came for.’
