by John Masters
The idea sprang ready-clothed with words into her mind. She said breathlessly, ‘Will you take me to Robin’s bungalow? I’m sure there’s something wrong.’
Hayling still had not answered her when he turned the pony into a side road, nor five minutes later when he said, ‘Here.’ The pony turned again and trotted up a short drive. The glimmering carriage lamps showed a camp bed in the middle of the tiny, unkempt lawn. A canvas canopy sheltered the bed from the weather. Hayling whistled between his teeth. Anne gasped and choked down an exclamation. Two or three other bachelor officers shared the bungalow with Robin, but it must be he who slept out there in the cold of these February nights, in the blast of the winds. The other young officers must have ostracized him, that he did this thing to be away from them. Hayling answered her thoughts with a drawled, ‘Perhaps he likes it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Major Hayling.’
He looked at her thoughtfully. Jagbir ran out of the bungalow, followed by an old Pathan in bearer’s livery. Anne wondered what had happened to the bearer Robin had had in Simla. This was a new man. Why didn’t he keep his servants for any length of time? It wasn’t as though he was cruel or overbearing.
Hayling called, ‘Savage! Hayling here, with a friend of yours.’
Robin came out on to the verandah, dressed in his dark-green parade uniform, which was covered with dust. Hayling said, ‘Aren’t you coming to the ball?’
Robin looked at Anne and said, ‘Ball? Oh, yes, I hadn’t forgotten about it. We’ve had a robbery. We’ve been busy the last hour chasing the robbers and trying to get hold of Mr. Johnson, the policeman.’
‘May I have a look? Perhaps, in the circumstances, if nothing is said about it, Miss Hildreth could come too?’
‘Yes, of course. Why not?’
She examined the barren little room with unconcealed interest. There were a table and two chairs, a stool, a long bookcase, two black japanned metal trunks, one on top of the other, a chest of drawers, and a wardrobe--no mirror. A hurricane lamp stood on top of the trunks, and another on the table. A door led off into the bathroom. No carpets covered the bare stone floor. There was no bed--that was out on the lawn--and she tightened her lips, feeling the unforgiving wind and the unforgiving cruelty. Two pictures hung on the wall, both oils--one of a mountain which she recognized as having seen from Simla on clear days; one of a flat, stony waste under an empty sky. She looked at them more closely while Robin muttered with Hayling. She could find no signatures on them. The light in them was peculiarly powerful and filled them with a radiance unnatural to the subjects. A long jezail hung over the mantelpiece. Presumably that was the gun he had nearly sold in Jellalabad to buy her a ring. The grate was black and empty.
Robin was saying, ‘I don’t think he can have been here more than a few seconds. I heard a noise, breathing, when I came in. I thought it might be Lascelles and Browning and their friends, come to wreck my room. But I grappled with someone, and it was only one man. Then Jagbir came in with a lamp, and I saw that the man had a knife. He was a Pathan.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I went up to hold him, and--’
‘Were you armed?’
‘No. I tried to make him drop the knife. He looked vicious but hungry. Then he kicked the lamp out of Jagbir’s hands and dashed out. We searched all around and couldn’t find him. The chowkidar’s disappeared, too, so he must have been in league with this fellow. We haven’t missed anything, nothing was opened or turned upside down. We found that someone had broken into Jagbir’s quarters. It was just the same there as here--no signs of rummaging, nothing missing. We thought we saw a couple of men lurking around, but couldn’t catch them. The bearer got Mr. Johnson, and he’s just gone. He took notes but didn’t tell us if he had any ideas. It would be simple enough if the man had been after the things they usually come for: money--it’s there on the table, but he didn’t touch it--sheets off the bed outside; clothes in those boxes--they’re not locked.’
Hayling tapped his hook absentmindedly on the mantel. ‘Yes, that’s strange. He may not have had time, as you say, but it sounds as if he or they were looking for one definite thing, and that too large to be kept in a box. You aren’t secreting the Peacock Throne in here, are you?’
‘No, sir,’ said Robin, smiling. ‘Look here, sir, and Anne--I’ve got to change if I’m coming to this ball, and this is my only place, so would you mind waiting outside?’
‘All right.’
In the trap she huddled herself into her wrap and hoped she would not cry. The horrible calm way in which Robin had talked of Lascelles and Browning coming to wreck his room! He had hardly met her eyes throughout her visit. It was the first time she had even been inside a bachelor’s quarters--she did not count going with her mother to see a rich old commissioner who had a whole house. This place of Robin’s was so bleak!
Hayling said quietly, ‘Why isn’t he staying with his mother?’
‘Mrs. Rodney Savage is his stepmother.’
‘I know that. What of it? She has a huge bungalow. He’s allowed to live there. It isn’t as if his regiment was here and he had to live in mess.’
She did not know. She had not thought about it. There had been more important problems on her mind. She thought about it now and came suddenly on the answer. ‘Because he won’t shelter behind her! He doesn’t want these brutes, Lascelles and everyone like him, to think he’s running away from them. Precious few of them have fought in Afghanistan, or ever will!’
‘So you are wondering, even after this evening?’
‘What do you mean? Do you mean I think Robin might be a coward?’
‘No. I hoped you were thinking about cats. Be calm now, miss, here’s your ewe lamb.’
At the club Anne knew better now than to expect trouble over their late arrival, and, sure enough, her mother only raised her eyebrows archly at Major Hayling. Then Robin, limping slightly, followed them at a distance into the lounge, and her mother frowned and said something behind her fan to her father. Anne rested her hand absently on the chair next to her until Robin came out of the cloakroom and sat down. Major Hayling began a conversation with her parents, and she took the opportunity to give Robin her programme and its little white pencil. She said, knowing that her eyes were brighter than they ought to have been, ‘Write down your name on as many lines as you like. Oh, leave number sixteen at least; I’ve promised that one.’
‘To him?’ Robin inclined his head towards Hayling. She wrinkled her nose at him, and he wrote in the little pasteboard folder. When he handed it back she saw that he had taken only two dances, this number five that had already begun, and another much later in the evening. She was disappointed but she could feel the ends of her nerves tingling. To-night was important. People were already staring surreptitiously at her and at Robin. To-night she was going out against them. Robin ought to have taken more dances. She had said ‘I love you,’ and it was like the final decision to embark on a voyage. With the words, she had stepped down out of her parents’ ship into her own little boat. She was in harbour still, but preparing for the sea.
Whirling round in the waltz, cautiously so as not to split her dress, she glanced in the long mirror as she passed. The cream silk looked well against Robin’s near-black green. A looping emerald sash hung down at her waist and kicked up behind over her bustle. A green stone sparkled at her throat. She wondered if there had been an emerald, a real one, in the ring that Robin did not buy.
There was only one officer of Highlanders on the floor, a tall young man with his right arm strapped to his side and a red scar, three-quarters healed, down the left side of his forehead and face. She said to Robin, ‘Is that Mr. Mclain, in the kilt?’ She knew it must be.
He turned his head, looked, and answered plainly, ‘Yes. Alan Mclain.’
She caught the young Highlander’s bright blue eyes then, and lifted her head and looked away. ‘He seems very pleased with himself,’ she said ‘--the Wounded Hero.’
&nbs
p; ‘Oh, no,’ Robin answered quickly. ‘Really he’s modest and as straight as a die. Seeing me here has upset him--made him remember things, places, that he’d like to forget.’
She said softly with a touch of pique, ‘Do you remember what you said the other day on the road?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it true? Without the “must”? Do you really’--she put her head close for a moment of the whirling dance, whispered, and pulled away--’love me?’
Robin said, ‘I think so. We must talk. Not here. There are too many people.’
She was tall for a girl and did not have to look up much above the level of her own eyes. His eyelashes were long, and now the light from the hanging chandeliers shone on them. All the skirts rustled, hissing under the violins. She was alert, wary, and excited. She was waiting for some opportunity, but she did not know what it would look like or exactly where it would lead.
At the table a group had formed around an array of glasses of brandy and soda. Her mother nursed her usual glass of port. Anne was permitted to have one glass of port or sherry on these occasions, but Major Hayling signalled with his finger, and on the instant a bearer trotted forward with a bottle of champagne. Mrs. Hildreth made to protest when the waiter filled Anne’s glass, but checked herself and instead glanced sharply at Anne. In this rather staid circle the breaching of a champagne bottle foreboded certain definite things. Anne wondered what the major was up to now, and saw that her mother was wondering too. Was he, who understood things, trying to give her a little extra courage?
Men kept appearing at her shoulder--young men, old men, fat men--to ask if they might have the honour of a dance. She would write their names in her programme, then listen and talk a little, then sweep out to dance on the arm of some gentleman coming to claim her, return after a while, thank her partner, sit down, listen, and talk--and begin all over again. The champagne sparkled in the glass and in the back of her head. She had only tasted it four or five times in her life. Major Hayling went away once or twice, but she never saw him on the floor. Her father circled sedately from time to time with duty-partners or with the youngest girls he could find. Robin never left his chair.
The fourth or fifth time that she came back the men were talking about Asia. She heard Hayling say, ‘Asia has come to the crossroads. Perhaps the bottom of the hill is a better way to say it. For all practical purposes the continent is split up among three empires, and only one of those three--the Chinese--is truly Asiatic. And in large parts of the Chinese Empire one sort of Asiatic, the Chinese, is ruling other sorts who don’t like it or him--Mongols, Turkis, Kirghiz, some Uzbegs, Tibetans. Now the three empires are beginning to jostle each other because they’ve used up all their room for manoeuvre--the Chinese did long ago.’
Her father said something about the rascality of the amirs of Afghanistan; then a partner was bowing at her side. Just as she left she heard Robin joining in the talk.
On her next return they’d got to Russia. It was Hayling again. ‘. . . It’s fourteen years since the Russians moved against Tashkent, twelve since they took Bukhara and Samarkand. Seven years ago they gobbled up Khiva. Now they have a frontier with us on the Pamirs, where the Chinese Empire meets ours too. Farther west the Russians are down to the Oxus, so in that direction only Afghanistan lies between us and them. They’re getting too close. If they get any closer India will never survive, whether it belongs to us or whether Macaulay’s hope has come true by then and it’s a separate empire.’
She listened perfunctorily, trying to catch Robin’s attention. But, after rising briefly when she sat down, he had leaned forward to ask Hayling a question. ‘But what do they want, sir? Do they want to put all that desert and steppe and pamir under the plough?’
‘They say officially, Savage, that they don’t want it at all, that they are being dragged forward by circumstances. It is a fact of history that no strong power has ever been able to prevent itself from fighting, taking over, and at last absorbing any unruly or turbulent areas or peoples on its borders.
We did it in India--we just had to, though half the time the government at home was trying to force the Governor-General, the man on the spot, to go backwards, not forwards. The Americans did it in the West and in Texas. The Chinese did it in Mongolia and Inner Asia.’
Someone else said, ‘Why haven’t we taken over Afghanistan, then? Heaven knows it’s unruly enough.’
‘We nearly did--perhaps we should have--after the first war, in forty-two. Then the khanates, Samarkand and so on, would have been the buffer between us and the Russians, and we’d have been that much farther forward. Now it’s too late because the Russians have reached Afghanistan’s northern frontier. Afghanistan is therefore the buffer. You know, a buffer state is in a very enviable position. It can do just about anything. Neither great power dares interfere in its affairs, because the other will suspect an offensive move if it does. So Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey are now the three buffer states between us and Russia. And . . .’
Then another young man with long moustaches came for her, and she had to go.... Back again soon, and they were talking about some other part of Asia. For her it was like a showing of lantern slides, lacking continuity. The group around the table had grown. A civilian and a captain were leaning over the backs of chairs and throwing in words of agreement or sage questions. Edith Collett was there. A resplendent major of Madras cavalry stood beside her. He had a royal-blue high-necked jacket with half a hundred gold buttons running up the edges, a crimson waistcoat, and long, tight blue trousers. Anne noticed his eyes; they hovered over Mrs. Collett’s body like hungry, fawning little dogs; his nostrils were pinched in, and his hands moved ceaselessly.
Then Edith Collett leaned over with a friendly smile and whispered behind her fan, ‘Your Mr. Savage is very good looking, Anne. Does your mother approve?’
‘She won’t,’ Anne muttered. ‘And he hasn’t--well, I mean--’
‘I see. If you want him, dear, get compromised. That’s my advice.’ She drew away, her deep violet eyes smiling still into Anne’s. Then she rested her fingers momentarily on the cavalry major’s arm and swept out of the circle. Anne watched the major hurry after her, stumbling over his precious dignity in his haste and not even noticing that he had left it behind him. Anne sighed and turned again to listen.
‘The tribes who live astride this frontier were a problem to Alexander the Great and they’ve been a problem to everyone since then, including us.’ That was the civilian, his thumbs in the lapels of his coat. She wondered when Robin would notice what dance it was.
‘The tribes want to shoot each other. They do not want law and order. They want the blood feud. They want to guard their own idea of honour in their own way. Therefore’--the civilian wagged a forefinger at Hayling, who was seated across the table from him--’are we guilty of oppression when we enforce peace, law, and order on them?’
Robin was on his feet, looking anxiously at his programme. He had noticed at last; but he had something to say. Standing now at the edge of the group, he broke in. ‘But do you think any man, even a Pathan, is born wanting to die in a blood feud? Isn’t it possible that circumstances--poverty, custom--force them to live by this code of killing and violence? I don’t think anyone is actually born with a desire to hurt other people, to fight.’
‘S-some people don’t wanna fight, all right. Some people don’t have the stomach to.’
Anne whipped around. It was Mclain, drunk, his face flushed and his words running together. He was standing at Robin’s shoulder.
A pimply young man of the commissariat, one of her father’s juniors, said loudly from Robin’s other side, ‘No. Some don’t want to fight at all, do they, Alan? I think dirty cowards like that ought to be tarred and feathered.’ She heard another voice raised in agreement, like a yelp. Suddenly they were so many dogs, snarling and snapping at one who had lost his footing among them. She put down her fan and, trembling with a white and senseless rage, reached slowly out for a glas
s from the table, never taking her eyes off Mclain.
Robin turned to Mclain and said steadily, ‘Hullo, Mclain. I’m very glad to see that you’re better.’
Mclain raised his arm and smashed the back of his hand across Robin’s face, then again. The skin of her body shivered, and she could hardly keep her seat, could hardly see. This was what Mclain had done after the tragedy at Tezin Kach. Robin had told her. But then grief and pain had driven him mad; now he was just drunk. The glass shook in her hand.
‘Again?’ Robin said.
Mclain raised his arm, and Anne threw the full champagne glass into his face with all her strength. It splintered above his eye, and the pieces fell tinkling to the floor. The wine ran down his nose and his scarred cheeks. He swung around and met her eyes and started back with a cry.
Major Hayling stood up abruptly. ‘Mr. Mclain, you’re drunk. Leave the club. Captain Golliatt, Mr. Twombly, take him home.’
Anne sank back in her chair. A sickness of excitement rose in her throat. She felt strong, and when she saw her mother staring at her, open-mouthed, she glared her down.
Mclain stood a moment, swaying on his heels, looking belligerently from Robin to Hayling but at all costs not at Anne. Then he bowed slightly and muttered, ‘Very well, sir.’
Major Hayling said, ‘Bearer! Sweep that up. Look here, we all need another bottle of champagne. This band is bad enough to . . .’
At her side Robin said, ‘This is my dance, I think, Anne.’ Her mother was signalling to her to remain seated, to make an excuse. Anne frowned angrily at her, walked to the floor on Robin’s arm, and slid into the dance. His face was white, and all the skin stretched tautly over the fine bones beneath. His eyes flared and snapped, and his hand gripped hers firmly. It seemed to her that the other couples on the floor kept moving away from them, leaving them to dance alone in a widening circle of isolation.
He said, ‘You’ll do that for me?’
‘Anything.’
‘I didn’t buy that ring because I thought, sooner or later, you would be hurt if you accepted. I can stand alone.’
