The Ravi Lancers

by John Masters

  ‘Check guns!‘ the instructor shouted.

  ‘Carry on, dafadar-ji,’ Krishna said, walking away with his swagger cane touched to the peak of his cap.

  He must, he must!

  At the CO’s office he sent for the intelligence reports. Still no threat of enemy movement. The British offensive preparing, but slowly. All quiet on the Western Front, as the London newspapers said. At least on this part of it. Some trouble in the Argonne, in the French sector. And in Italy on the Isonzo. But locally--nothing. Rumours that the 88th Bavarians had been replaced by the 179th Prussians, but no prisoner confirmation. Aircraft report that a heavy battery was gone from the position it had occupied for seven weeks behind Perouges.

  The stalemate was complete. The opposing armies were locked like wrestlers trying to find a decisive hold ... but there was none.

  He looked at the pile of reports on the table. Petty thefts in all squadrons. That was bad, worse in some ways than the rape-murder charge against a lance-dafadar in B. Government equipment deliberately damaged in C; inordinate waste--could that too have been deliberate?--in A. It was hard to credit such reports in an Indian regiment, where it was in the men’s bones to treat their clothing and equipment, and everything belonging to the Sirkar, with a real reverence. Could he leave the regiment even for an hour when it was in this state? He had still nearly two weeks left as CO in which he could try to restore some of the qualities Warren had been steadily ironing out in his demands for military efficiency at all costs.

  Flaherty appeared at the door. ‘The quartermaster would like to see you, sir.’

  He showed Captain Sohan Singh in, then retired, leaving the door open. Captain Sohan Singh waddled in, gave Krishna his version of a military salute and in the same motion managed to close the door behind him without appearing to do so.

  ‘Rations, lord,’ he said. ‘I am thinking that the men need less ghi than they are getting, in this hot weather, but...’ He launched into a long and tedious explanation, his voice droning. Krishna thought, he expects Flaherty to be listening at the door and is boring him off. Sohan Singh droned without a change of tone into saying, ‘And, lord, I think you had better start out now if you are to reach the city at the time you hoped.’

  ‘I can’t go,’ Krishna said miserably.

  The quartermaster said, ‘Oh, lord, all is arranged. Here I have the money for your stay.’

  ‘I tell you, I can’t,’ Krishna said. He stood up and stalked up and down the confined space.

  The quartermaster’s voice was still a soft drone: ‘Nothing will happen here, lord, I know it.’

  ‘The brigadier general...’

  ‘... will not make an inspection. He inspected us last week.’

  ‘He might come round, to see how I’m doing,’ Krishna said.

  ‘Lord, if he does, the doctor-sahib will say you are sick with a mysterious Indian fever. It is like rabies, and lasts four days, and is very infectious during those days. There will be a man wrapped up in bed in a dark room.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Major Bholanath-sahib will give any necessary orders. All will obey them.’

  Krishna Ram stifled a groan. Betrayal of trust ... Diana on her way ... Warren in Shrewford Pennel, confident that the regiment was in good hands. Or was he? Who or what did he have confidence in, really? Was Flaherty listening at the door?

  He made up his mind, and said abruptly, ‘Very well, I shall go sick--now.’

  ‘Very good, lord,’ the quartermaster said. ‘Here is five thousand francs. A ration lorry will be waiting in our transport lines at 9 p.m. It will reach Amiens at midnight. Major Bholanath will tell the adjutant tomorrow morning at dawn that you have gone sick and cannot be seen. My clerk will make out your pass and warrants as soon as the adjutant leaves the office.’

  ‘Who will know, who will be in this ... thing?’ Krishna asked. ‘Myself. The doctor-sahib. Major Bholanath. Hanuman. My clerk. That is all, prince.’

  Krishna grinned suddenly and said in Hindi, ‘Aii, what a jest if the general should insist on seeing the sick man.’

  ‘A jest indeed,’ Sohan Singh said, ‘but alas, such jests are beyond him.’

  He bowed himself out. Captain Flaherty came in at once, frowning slightly. ‘I have that report on the gas training that you asked for, sir...’

  Krishna Ram shook his head and stood up, one hand to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m feeling a little off colour. I think I’ll go and lie down.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ Flaherty said, standing aside. He looked disapproving, Krishna thought. British COs didn’t go sick until they were practically dead, the look seemed to say. British COs carried on until they dropped.

  He went to his dugout, told Hanuman that no one was to disturb him until half past seven, and tried to get to sleep. But sleep would not come, as thoughts of Diana filled his mind. She was in the train to London ... in the tube to Waterloo to catch the train to Southampton, walking the gangplank on to the cross-channel steamer, in the train to Paris, arriving ... the train was steaming into the Gare St. Lazare, he saw her in the carriage, the doors opened, she came out... shyly or running into his arms? ... then a taxi to the hotel, a bellboy to carry her bag, probably snickering behind his pert face, up to the room, and then...

  The bellboy pocketed his tip and gently closed the white and gold door. Krishna Ram turned the key in the lock and faced her. She was wearing a dove grey suit and coat, grey silk stockings and black patent-leather shoes with low, splayed-out heels, and a toque hat with a thin veil. She lifted the veil and he took her in his arms. Her head sank back and her eyes closed. Her face was smooth ... a little tired under the eyes, the teeth big in the wide mouth, a few freckles on her cheek. He kissed her. She smelled of eau-de-cologne and soap and soot. Her lips were opening wide, her tongue slipping into his mouth. He felt no spasm of lust for her. It would come, at night when the light glowed in her creamy skin. Her lips were becoming more insistent, her mouth sucking his tongue from his own mouth into hers, her breath coming deeper in little gasps. She pulled her mouth away from his a moment and muttered, ‘Take me ... take me! ‘

  He held her a moment, a few inches away. He had not thought it would be quite like this. He had imagined night, her waiting, a certain fearfulness. But, broad daylight, and the woman demanding? He felt his desire rising, his penis stiffening. She pulled away from him, carefully but quickly laid her hat on the ormolu dressing-table, her coat over the back of a Louis XV chair. He began to undress. She said, her mouth full of hair pins, ‘That bellboy didn’t believe we were married. I don’t care.’

  Krishna watched her slip the garters off her thighs and unroll her stockings. She was big, strong, open. She stood, naked but for a petticoat, and held out a little package she had got out of her bag. ‘Here, Krishna. One of the girls gave them to me.’

  ‘What are they?’ he asked.

  ‘The girls at the factory call them French Letters--FLs,’ she said. ‘You ... well, you put one on. It prevents the girl getting in the family way.’

  He saw the packet contained a dozen rubber tubes rolled into rings. By unrolling them down his penis they would make sheaths to prevent him impregnating her. He said, ‘I don’t think...’

  ‘Darling, until we’re married--please.’ She was blushing, now holding her arms crossed over her bosom, as though he could see the breasts through the white linen of the petticoat. He looked down at himself and thought, you have to be stiff to be able to put one of those on, and, in a minute I won’t be. Slowly, with naturally lascivious movements she pulled the petticoat over her head. A small brown bush appeared, and a flat belly, then a pair of small high breasts, the areolas large, the nipples small in the centres of them, her face, flushed, large-eyed.

  She fell back on the bed, pulled him down beside her and began to kiss and caress him. He took an FL but she put it aside, whispering, ‘Later ... oh darling, I am frightened ... but then I’m not ...

  I don’t want to
be anywhere else in the world, or doing anything else ... Do you know how long a girl dreams of this? I’m thirty ... thirty-one in December.’

  ‘I didn’t think that ladies like you were supposed to think about such things.’

  ‘Oh Krishna,’ she said, ‘I am a woman ... I live in the country. I can’t help seeing things, dogs, the bull, our cats ... And wondering, when will it be me, what will it feel like.’

  ‘Not who?’ he asked. She had taken his hand and slipped it between her legs. In the cradle of her thighs, deep in the thicket, she bared wet lips that became slippery to his fingers.

  ‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘How can one think of a person when you don’t know who it will be?’

  She was a virgin, he realized. A virgin of thirty. There was something indecent about that, as horrible in its way as the monkey-men in gas masks. She had become a woman fifteen or sixteen years ago, and passed all those years waiting--for what? To be deflowered in a Paris hotel by a brown man. How could they allow women to waste, and wait, like that?

  Not a brown man but a prince, a Son of the Sun. For a moment he felt a desire to whip her as he had whipped the French whore; but that passed, for his penis rode proud and noble. For her sake he’d stifle its pride in this ill-smelling device. He knelt over her, rolled on the FL and said to her in Hindi, ‘Open for your lord. Clasp me! ‘

  She could not have understood what he said, but her thighs opened wide and she raised her pubis. The pink lips parted invitingly and the curly hairs, now wet and glistening, sprang back. He plunged slowly and steadily into her. She cried out sharply as her maidenhead broke with an audible crack, then sighed again, ‘Take me, take me! ‘

  The Son of the Sun mounted fully upon her, and made love until his sweat dripped on to her tear-stained, working face. She moaned continuously in an indissoluble mixture of pain and ecstasy.

  When he finally rolled off her, and her breathing had returned almost to normal, she said in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry I made such a noise. I didn’t know it would feel like that.’

  ‘How could you?’ he said. His arm was under her neck, her head heavy on his upper arm, her breasts pressing into him. ‘Besides, I liked it.’

  She said obstinately, ‘Yes, but I ought to be able to control myself.’

  ‘Why?’ he said, but she leaned up on her elbow, kissed him on the forehead, and said, ‘Thank you, darling. It hurt a bit, but not as much as I was expecting.’ She slipped out from under the sheet and ran to the bathroom. Her buttocks were a little heavy, he noticed, and they did not wiggle as other women’s he had known did, for there was not much fat on them; they moved like a man’s. She disappeared into the bathroom, and the door closed, but the vision of the buttocks remained. How strong they were, and how white. Through the door he heard the sound of running water, and sighed and turned over to lie on his back. She had smelled of sex for a little while then, and sweat, and the sweetness of his seed, but soon she’d come back smelling of soap and water, and everything would be English and proper again. He thought he’d go and watch her washing, and got up. He realized that the obscene FL was still wrinkled and full on his penis. He took it off and went into the bathroom. She gave a little cry: ‘Oh! ... Krishna! I’m...’

  She was sitting on the lavatory and he heard a tinkling below her. He said, ‘I had to get rid of this.’ He looked around and was about to drop it into the waste basket but she said, ‘Here, give it to me.’ She dropped it between her thighs into the toilet bowl. She said reproachfully, ‘You shouldn’t come in here when I’m doing this.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. He bent and kissed her where she sat and cupped her breasts in his hand. ‘Sex doesn’t stop after we have made love--it begins.’

  She was dabbing herself with paper. She said, ‘What’s that thing for? Another lavatory?’

  Krishna looked and laughed, and said, ‘I didn’t know, either, when we first came to France. It’s called a bidet, and it’s for cleaning your behind--and this.’ He cupped her vulva in his hand, pressing a finger gently between her wet lips.

  ‘But how?’ she said, at first making as though to push his hand away and then spreading her legs to give him deeper access.

  ‘You sit on it, run the water--either just into the bowl, or there’s a vertical spray--then use your hand to soap yourself. Your left hand only, if you’re an Indian.’

  ‘The left hand?’ she said, puzzled.

  He nodded. ‘This one’--he held it up--’We use it for wiping ourselves, instead of toilet paper.’

  ‘Instead of toilet paper,’ she gasped, ‘you mean . . . ?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We think that toilet paper is really very insanitary. You can only get clean in running water so when we defecate we take a pot of water called a loti, and when we have finished we run some of the water over our left hand, and then rub the backside and go on doing it until the hand comes away clean.’

  She moved to the basin and began to run hot water. She said, ‘Do you do that?’

  He said, ‘Not now, because the general and Warren ordered us to act like British officers. But I shall again soon ... We also think it’s dirty to bathe in a bath, like that’--he nodded at the elaborately decorated bath tub. ‘We only bathe in running water, usually a river. A woman will go in wearing her clothes.’

  ‘How dirty! ‘ Diana said.

  ‘But it isn’t really. She washes under a layer of cotton. The cotton dries on her, she’s clean, and she hasn’t displayed herself in invitation to men.’

  He held her from behind, again cupping her breasts in his hands. ‘Get dressed, and we’ll go out and see Paris.’

  It was two days later. ‘An orphanage,’ she said dreamily, ‘with a playing field. Two, close to each other--one for boys and one for girls. And two hospitals.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, laughing, ‘you shall have one hospital and one orphanage. Boys and girls who lose their parents don’t need to lose the company of the other sex as well.’

  ‘But there ought to be a special hospital for women,’ she said. ‘Eventually,’ he said, ‘but when there isn’t any hospital at all, the first step is to get one, not to start worrying about specializing in diseases of women, or of the lungs, and so on ... Hey, a little slower, darling. We’re not on a route march.’

  The Seine flowed placid beside them, at their left hand. On the towpath ahead a pair of huge horses towed a long coal barge up towards Fontainebleau. Cattle lay in the heavy green of the water-meadows, the dense yellow of buttercups and dandelions carpeting the fields with what seemed to be a reflection of the golden bowl of the summer sky. This was Krishna’s last afternoon of leave.

  At five o’clock next morning he must catch a train for the front.

  She slowed her pace. A diamond brooch sparkled at her breast. It had cost the equivalent of three hundred pounds, and he had almost had to fight her to make her accept it. Mercenariness was not a fault that she possessed; just the opposite--it was hard to give her anything, from an embrace to a brooch, unless he could somehow persuade her it was good for her ... healthy, proper.

  The barge was far ahead, no one following them, the nearest house a riverside tavern at the lock ahead, which the horses were approaching. He caught her sleeve and said, ‘Let’s make love.’

  ‘Here?’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes ... quick. I’ve got those things in my pocket.’

  ‘Oh, Krishna! ‘ But he had her half down in the long grass, and she was lifting her heavy skirt. He tugged impatiently at her white drawers and got them down. ‘Oh, Krishna,’ she said, again. There it was, the rough triangular copse, the slit he had entered a dozen times, and now was ready for again. With trembling fingers he rolled the FL on to his bursting penis, feeling that it would explode, shooting seed into her face if he had to touch it a moment longer. Then he plunged it into her.

  She held his head, murmuring, ‘There, there! ‘

  The ecstasy came before he had thrust five times, and he cried out, moaning the n
ame of god in Hindi, for surely it was the divinity who squeezed all his being into his loins and sent it squirting out in these long shuddering pulses. ‘There, there!’ She was like a mother now, harbouring his head, his tears, his seed.

  He lay spent on her. A while later, he did not know how long, she said gently, ‘Get up now, darling ... Feel better?’

  He nodded. ‘Better’ was not the right word, but what was? He peeled off the FL and threw it into the river. He watched her pull up her drawers and arrange her dress, then they walked on, towards Fontainebleau.

  Fontainebleau. The most beautiful palace in the world, she would probably say. As Versailles was the biggest. The Louvre the best art gallery. The British Museum the best museum. Let her talk. What use was it to tell her of Shalimar or Fatehpur Sikri or the Red Fort, or that place in Cambodia--Angkor Wat? As well try to persuade her, or Warren, to use a loti instead of toilet paper. Or that boys and girls were better off growing together, discovering each other, than segregated. Or that orphans might be better regarded as wards of the world, children of all, rather than institutionalized, in some sense prisoners.

  After they were married, and he had succeeded to the gaddi, there was so much she was going to do. He must have spent half his leave talking about Ravi, because she wanted to know. She was going to be a loyal and hard working Rani, inspecting hospitals, looking after sick women and orphans, holding functions for charity, presiding at baby clinics and sewing bees.

  They passed the tavern, and the woman at the lock gates curtsied as they went by. The forest of Fontainebleau swept down to the river’s edge and a lone swan glided slowly along under the bank, disdainfully indicating that they might throw him a crumb. A tall black soldier in French uniform passed, his cheeks cicatrized with tribal slash marks, a plump white girl on his arm. The soldier nodded cheerfully, and Krishna nodded back. They were both in uniform, but the man could not be expected to know British rank badges. That was one good thing about the French--they didn’t have the same sense of colour superiority that the British did; though, from what he had seen, they were even more certain of the superiority of their civilization. Diana was learning, too, for the continual sight of French women with Negroes and Arabs and squat little men from Indo-China had made her realize that others did not think the way Warren and most Englishmen did. Once, seeing a particularly black soldier sitting with a French girl at a pavement cafe on the Champs-Elysees, Krishna had said suddenly, ‘Are you glad I am not that black?’