by Rumer Godden
Why do they go so fast? Why do they all hurry?… One of them seemed to recognize him. A voice cried out of the darkness, ‘Good de luck, good de luck,’ as it went by. Why should it call ‘good luck’? And suddenly he remembered with a jar that tomorrow was Examination Day. For a moment he was startled, but the Examination seemed oddly remote and he discarded the thought of it; but it had given him a small shock …
How quickly time has gone, he said. What have I been doing? I have so much to do … and a nervous tension filled him over the finishing of his poems. On a verandah as he passed, women were working, rolling betel leaves for the festival; one had a tray of round cakes made of coconut and sugar, puja cakes … And soon I must go home, cried Anil in dismay. I cannot go till I have finished my poems …
He walked on and on, out of the town and into it again, thinking, composing, thinking. He sat down on a doorstep under a street light and wrote down his poem with a pencil he had in his pocket and a piece of paper he found in the road, the side of a torn paper bag. It was the best he had done and when it was written, safely caught, fixed on the paper, he was tired, very tired. The tiredness was perfection. He was sure it was the best poem he had written, he felt it was very near the best poems in the world, and it had been as difficult as if he had caught something as wild and terrific as a star and induced it to lie pulsing in his torn piece of paper. Very tired, he stood up to go home.
As he walked a mood of bliss lapped him; he discovered that he was gently drunk with it. The spirit of festival was already in him … I feel excited, full of undercurrents of excitement … And the undercurrents threatened to well up and swamp him … What is the matter with me? I feel – too much … That was the only way he could describe it and for a moment he felt alarmed, but he answered himself … It is the poem. The whole of me is full of my poem. At the moment I am my poem. What a good thing I wrote it down quickly. If I had not written it down it might have choked me. I should have been choked by my own poem. I must be quieter. I must distil – yes, distil my poems – as the moon distils itself, surely and certainly. The moon … And he stumbled in the dark and stubbed his toe.
Slightly chastened, he arrived limping at the gates of the College and gave a gentle double knock and the porter in his sleep let him in and sank on to his bed again.
Anil walked across the grass where the trees made thickets of blackness in the dark. The tank lay dark and opaque with only a faint spread reflection from the stars. Suddenly Anil stopped. At the top of the steps was a figure, sitting with its back towards him. After a moment he went on towards it and now he saw in the uncertain starlight that it was small, very pale in the darkness, with a fall of colourless hair. He had almost believed it was an apparition when it heard him and he saw it jump. It put up its hand and said in a clear imperious English, ‘Hush!’ He saw it was a child of Charlie Chang’s.
If Anil had met Emily or any of her kind in everyday life he would have been nonplussed, but in this mood of exaltation under the darkness, he came up to her and asked, ‘Why hush?’
In her ordinary senses Emily would have been paralysed with meeting a stranger, Indian or English, suddenly and alone in the dark; but she would also have been terrified of going out alone even as far as Shah’s house at the gate, and she was particularly afraid of jackals. She was exalted like Anil but it was an exaltation of ecstatic bravery, almost hysterical, brought on by fear and misery and amazement at herself. Anil’s voice reassured her; she could only see his white clothes blown a little by the night wind that had started in the garden, and the flickering movement of his hand as he held down the tails of his tunic, but she could see he was an Indian.
‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘I suppose you are a student at the College.’
Anil became equally formal. ‘Yes, I am a student, and you must be Miss Pool.’
‘I am Emily Pool.’
‘My name is Anil Krishna Banerjee.’ He began to have the slight joviality of a grown-up speaking to a child and Emily became immediately more distant.
‘How do you do,’ she said, and Anil knew at once that she was displeased, just as he knew at once that he liked her. He could not see more of her than her shape and the fall of her hair but he liked the way her voice came back to him in the darkness like a bell with a clear certain tone. She quieted him; he felt that he was meant to meet her, that she was bound in with his destiny, and he hated to offend her. He wanted to amend what he had said but he did not know how to and there began a stilted social conversation between them.
‘Do you like it here in India?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘I expect that you find it hot.’
‘Very hot.’
‘You came from France in the war, I think.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was the war then bad?’
‘Very bad,’ said Emily briefly; it was plain she did not want to talk about it. Anil could think of nothing more to say though he wanted to say more and the silence grew longer and longer between them. Then Emily, feeling it was her turn, asked the only question she could think of, ‘Do you like being a student?’
‘I have enjoyed it, yes.’
He did not know he had answered in the past until she asked, ‘You are not a student any more then?’
He said suddenly, ‘Miss Pool, I ceased to be a student about three weeks since.’
‘Oh. What are you now?’
He answered at once because he knew exactly, ‘I am a poet.’
‘Oh,’ said Emily again.
‘You think that is a pity?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why? It is very nice to be a poet. Shouldn’t you like it? Shouldn’t you like to be a poet?’
‘No I should not,’ said Emily decidedly. ‘Poets die young.’
Anil laughed. ‘What a funny girl you are.’
‘They do. There was Shelley, and Keats and Chatterton. They all died young.’
‘You learn that in your books. It is not necessarily true. I am happy as a poet. I will sit no more in class. I will not study in books when I can study in the world. All these years I have been glued to work. I wonder that I let them make a fool of me so long.’
Emily objected. ‘When you are young you have to do lessons.’
‘Yes, that is so. When I was a boy, for instance, we had a very disagreeable schoolmaster; besides our lessons we had to wait on him, we even had to press his legs and rub them when he was resting and he had very skinny legs.’
For some reason that soothed Emily and pleased her; she laughed. Anil felt success spreading through him and he said, ‘Now I am wondering what you do here for lessons.’
‘I do lessons with Professor Dutt.’
‘Old Granny Dutt? This is a link between us. He is my tutor too, at least formerly I was with him.’ He was surprised that so small a girl could be so advanced. ‘I thought you would learn with your mother.’
‘No.’ There was an edge to that and he did not miss it. Anil, who did not really listen to any voice but his own, was curiously alive to Emily’s.
‘Miss Pool – no, I shall call you Emily – what would your mother say if she knew you were here tonight?’
There was no answer.
‘I think you should not have come here by yourself. Would she not be angry if you were to be seen?’
‘No one will see me. No one will come here now when it is dark.’
‘I am not surprised,’ said Anil. ‘It is very spooky. When first I saw you I thought you were a ghost.’
‘Did you?’ asked Emily breathlessly. ‘That is – odd.’ And she said as if she was surprised at herself for telling him, ‘I came – to see a ghost.’ And she added quickly, ‘Of course I know it isn’t here.’
‘Then why did you come to see it?’
‘Because—’ reluctantly she said – ‘it is something to do with me.’
‘A ghost and you?’ But they did not seem such odd companions.
‘I heard them talking and I
came to see. It’s my ghost.’ And she said a little defiantly, ‘It is the ghost of my dog.’
‘Then the dog is dead?’ said Anil gently.
‘Perhaps he is dead,’ said Emily in a still flat voice.
That was the best of talking to Indians. They asked you questions without limit but they would never press you for any particular answer; they understood perfectly how to slide from one thing to another. ‘Come – he is, or is not, dead?’ Anil might have asked her, but instead he told her, ‘My father used to keep dogs when I was a boy. They were Great Danes and they were very costly, but he gave them up; my mother used to make him take them and feed them outside the house.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we are of Hindu faith; we are Brahmin; and the dogs of course ate meat. That we do not allow and my mother was extremely orthodox. My father also is orthodox now, more so than my mother. Before I left they asked of me a vow that I would not take anything forbidden, not even eggs – but milk of course I take.’
‘But don’t you like eggs?’
‘I don’t know. I have not tasted them.’
‘But you are grown up,’ said Emily with yearning in her voice, ‘you can do what you like.’
‘No. Still I cannot. I have taken this vow and it would be wicked of me to eat these things.’
‘In France,’ said Emily thoughtfully, ‘it was wicked not to eat,’ and she thought of Madame Souviens and how she would kiss her fingers when she spoke of her onion and cheese cake, and the voice in which she said, ‘une bonne soupe,’ and she remembered the soup at the Nikolides’. ‘Can you eat soup?’ she asked.
‘There are certain soups …’ but Emily had gone from Madame Souviens to the morning with the Nikolides; through the cracks of the jetty the water looked miraculously clear blue, and she saw first Binnie then herself pass inside the house to breakfast and she smelled the champac flowers as she went … And all the time – all the time – while I was away …
‘Your ghost does not come,’ said Anil.
‘I didn’t think he would.’ He heard the same bright-edged break in the words and he tried again to see her face. What kind of child was this that could have such grief and contain it? Anil was profoundly stirred. ‘But you hoped?’ he said gently.
He felt a tremor go through her. Though she was sitting only on the step beside him, even her hand not touching him, he felt the tremor clearly. She gave a little cry like a choke and hid her face in her hands. He could only catch one or two words dropped from the confusion of crying. ‘No one … gone … in the night … tell them … no one … no one … Mother … no one …’
Anil could not bear it. He put his arm round her and drew her close and through the thin muslin of his shirt he could feel the wet heat of her cheeks and eyes, and the movement of her lashes and the shaking of her body; the whole of her was throbbing with sorrow and emotion, trying to escape, beating its way out in a tumult of words and tears. Anil did not know what to do, so he simply held her, and from her an unaccustomed smell rose to his nostrils that made her even more incomprehensible – the mild fresh smell of a well-kept English child – and it disconcerted Anil; he held her and muttered small cajoling words that he did not know he remembered and that he had not heard since he left his nurse; gradually they penetrated to Emily. She could not understand them but she was comforted by them; they were friendly and his shoulder was slight but firm and she too was arrested by the unfamiliar smell of him; she began to cry a little less and sniff a little more.
‘Have you no handkerchief?’
Emily shook her head and wiped her nose on the back of her hand; Anil appeared to think that would do as well. He did not like to ask her any more questions in case she began again, but he tightened his arm and said: ‘Let us talk of this a little more, perhaps to talk may make it better. Truly I am very much concerned in this—’ As he said that, very earnestly, a tremor like Emily’s, but not like Emily’s, seemed to run through him too – not of grief but of something even more solemn. It surprised him. He went on quickly, ‘Suppose you were to see his ghost – now,’ and he pointed dramatically, ‘there—’
She turned sharply and quailed and looked across the tank as if she expected to see a devil, but there was nothing there but the still black tank, the few stars in it, the few fireflies above it.
‘Now, now. You will not see it.’ Anil comforted her. ‘I think you will never see it. Once I heard of the spirit of a tiger, but not of any other animal. See, we watch for him to come. No. No. He does not come.’
There was no answer, only a grateful small rustle.
‘And there is another thing,’ said Anil, ‘and why should you not do this? We, of Hindu religion, when we wish for the repose of a soul – that it shall rest in peace for instance – we make a small puja …’
‘Puja?’ asked Emily.
‘Worship – celebration,’ said Anil. ‘In the month there are two periods, devipaksha when the moon is growing, and Krishnapaksha when the moon is going away; light nights and black nights; and the black nights are the times for ghosts. You will do your puja then. You can take, in some place under the tree for instance, a few good things: some fruit or sweets, some good sugar or rice or cakes, even some vegetables; and you will place them on a little table or platform that you have made look pretty, and if possible you will have flowers and a small light – and you will offer these things with prayers to the spirit for whom you wish to make peace, though by offering to one soul you offer to all, and for one year he will gain rest. It would not be irreverent for this especial dog, I think. Why should you not do that, please, Emily?’
Emily considered it. ‘Soon – not yet.’ But there was a distinct relief in her tone. She gave a sigh that came from the bottom of her heart.
Presently she asked, laying her hand on his knee, ‘You are not a medical student, are you?’
‘No. There are no medical students here. Why? Is there some question you wanted to know?’
‘I wanted,’ said Emily, and her voice was alert again, ‘I wanted to know what diseases there are that people and dogs can get the same.’
‘You should ask Das, my friend.’
‘Dr Das, the vet?’
‘He is a vet, he is also a very nice fellow.’ Anil yawned. It was tiresome of Emily to turn this suddenly into a definite conversation; and then he looked down at her head below his shoulder – in the brightening starlight it looked pale, ruffled and worried; he could see one hand clenched against her cheek, she was thinking, and in front of her the dim spaces of the tank shone empty, and paler now there were more stars.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘you should not be out at this time. Come, you must let me take you back to the house. We will ask for your spirit another night. When the moon is over – though I shall not be there—’ and again that brimming of extraordinary excitement rose in him so that he caught his breath. ‘Come,’ he said when he could speak, and helped her to her feet. They walked across the grass; his stubbed toe hurt him abominably.
‘Why do you limp?’ asked Emily.
‘I hurt my foot.’
‘Lean on my shoulder.’
Anil smiled, and very lightly put his arm across her shoulders. They came in at the gate, past Shah sleeping soundly on his bed, and went up the drive between the dark shapes of the poinsettias to the house, where a light showed a width of railings on the top verandah and the shapes of two mosquito-nets. Anil looked curiously around him, he had not been so near a European house before. ‘Who sleeps on the verandah?’ he asked.
‘That is where I sleep. That is my bed.’
They were pinned and held in a circle of light, they were blinded, their eyelids fluttered like moths’ wings as they stood there fixed. Emily’s shoulders jerked under Anil’s arm and she shrank back against him. ‘It’s Mother,’ she said.
Anil’s stomach made a surprising movement on its own, totally unrelated to him; it gave a sudden terrified rumble; between shame and his premonition of fright he
almost decided to go, but pride ran down his legs and stiffened them. He knew that he ought to go straight to Emily’s mother and speak to her, but he could not bring himself to do quite that. Instead, he shook Emily’s hand and said, ‘Good night. You will be safe now. Someone is coming to find you, I think.’
‘Wait! You are not to go.’
Louise’s voice startled and shocked them, especially Emily. Anil was a visitor, even though it was the middle of the night. She said in rebuke, ‘Mother, Mr – Anil is here.’
Louise brushed her aside and behind her and said to Anil in a suppressed icy voice, ‘I cannot speak to you. You must wait for my husband.’
‘Certainly.’ Anil’s own voice was high with dismay and the beginning of serious fright. ‘Certainly I will wait, Mrs—Mrs—’ He could think of nothing at all to call her but Mrs Chang.
‘Don’t speak to me.’
‘Moth – er.’
‘Emily, go and wait for me in my room. You are not to go near Binnie.’
Emily was really frightened. Louise looked like an apparition of herself, her hair streaming down, her face blenched, and the strong porch light made odd shiny planes and shadows in it; why did her skin look so queer? And then Emily saw with a shock that Louise’s face was wet, and immediately Emily broke out into a cold wetness too. It was a relief, it took some of her fright away.
‘Mother,’ she said boldly, ‘don’t be so angry. Did you think I was lost? I’m sorry – Mother.’
‘Go upstairs. Don’t speak to me. I will deal with you later.’ Emily put out a hand and Louise screamed, ‘Don’t touch me! Get away – upstairs.’ The scream and recoil were so dreadful that Emily was struck dumb.
Anil at last began to speak. ‘I demand explanation,’ said Anil. ‘I am a student at this College and as such am not under your authority, Madam.’ The ‘Madam’ came trippingly to his tongue but his surprise and hurt swamped it. His voice grew shrill with indignation. ‘I was just now returning from an evening’s excursion—’
‘That is a lie,’ said Louise, and her voice was low after his; breathless and rapid. She was beside herself. ‘The College is closed at eleven o’clock.’ Anil, from sheer fright, smiled, and that drove Louise on to dramatic fury. ‘If I were a man I should horsewhip you. That is what they would do to you in England. Flog you so that you should never forget. Don’t try to defend yourself. I saw you. I heard you. How long has this been going on? Emily has been queer for days—’
