Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  They had taken him to Lahore soon after he came back, and there the doctors had kept him in the military hospital for a week, then sent him away because he was fretting to be in Rudwal with Peter. The doctors strongly recommended that he return to England as soon as possible; but Gerry seemed to shrink inside his clothes, the thin cold-weather tweeds he had bought in Lahore, and said, joking (only who laughed? not he, or she), ‘England at this time of year? Fog, rain, cold--not on your life, old girl.’

  He wanted to be here, and she knew that he also feared to go back because of Harry Walsh and Meru.

  The strain had exhausted her. She had thought more than once that she could not stand another moment--the long hours in the drawing-room, his eyes on the book but not in it; hearing him pace the floor of his bedroom at night. The first time she had heard that she whispered to Peter beside her: ‘Gerry’s walking--up, down. What time is it?’

  Peter was awake silently, on the instant. ‘Half-past two,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and chat with him.’

  Their door was open, a thin curtain hung across it to give them privacy and let in the night’s freshness. The sound from the next room had changed. Now it was rhythmic and slow, like something dragging in slow time across the floor.

  It was Peter whom Gerry would be hoping to see. After a talk with Peter he would go to sleep. However tired he was, however high his temperature, he could not rest at night until Peter had finished his work and joined them--or gone to Gerry’s room, if he was confined to bed. Then Gerry’s eyes would light, and he would talk of old times, of Zermatt and Llyn Gared and King’s, until he was at ease. Then his eyelids would droop and he’d go to sleep. He was like a woman waiting for a lover or husband--for a part of her flesh that she knew was missing. Emily understood, because then, at that hour, she herself needed Peter in the same whole way, the physical and spiritual needs being inseparable.

  She had whispered: ‘I’ll go to him. You’ve got to work tomorrow--today.’

  Peter said: ‘All right.’ She slipped into a dressing-gown and left the room. No thought of impropriety would cross Peter’s mind. She was his wife, and Gerry his--what? Slave? No, something deeper, and greater, and worse.

  Gerry was sitting on the edge of his bed in the half-dark, rhythmically scraping his bare feet across the floor, one after the other, like a man shuffling on a long journey, but staying in the same place. He did not seem surprised to see her, asked only in a low whisper if he had disturbed Peter, and she told him the lie. ‘No, he’s fast asleep.’

  This had happened many times, while the child grew in her and the effort of getting out of bed grew greater; but now he was better. She remembered the smell of the August broom on Cader Brith, and the hissing gas mantle in the playroom on winter evenings, and the expression on his face the time she had first, secret and daring, used some of Mally’s perfume. The man who walked beside her through the Rudwal bazaar remembered those things too, but that was all. The rest of him had been burned out by an electric arc, and where his personality had been there was nothing, except in Peter’s presence; then something glowed again, and brightly in the void, but with an induced current only. But there was something else now, something growing slowly, something pushing as cautiously from the soil as snowdrops through the last snow, and this was her own creation, as though from her loins, with Dr Parkash the sunny, unknowing father. Gerry had been a young gentleman, and he was an earl, but he would be a physician.

  Now, nearing the bungalow, Gerry said suddenly: ‘Peter agrees that I ought to go back to England soon. That undersecretaryship is waiting for me--and they’ll have to give it to someone else if I don’t turn up in the next two or three months.’ She said, to gain a minute: ‘Are you sure you’re fit enough?’ There was a time, soon after the return from Meru, when she would have been delighted to hear that Gerry was going to tear himself away; but the new plant needed more strength in its roots. She said: ‘And what about the hospital? Haven’t you got a lot of work to do there?’

  Gerry shook his head. ‘Nearly all done,’ he said. ‘In a month I can give Peter a full report and push off.’ He spoke without any emphasis.

  The baby was unbearably heavy, and she knew that her face was haggard and her lips were bloodless. Should she speak now? Or wait till there was more time, an opportunity not only to say out loud what she had to say but to strengthen Gerry’s own desires? But such a time might not come till too late, till some arrangement had been made, something done or said, that Gerry would regard as binding him irrevocably to return to the India Office and the course that had been marked out for him. She was weak and tired but she could feel a surge of that special kind of strength, in relation to Gerry, which his illness and her role of nurse had given her.

  They were outside the low wall of the bungalow, standing beside the pillars guarding the entrance to the drive. She stopped and looked back over the city, so that Gerry stopped and turned with her. She said: ‘Don’t go back to the India Office, Gerry. You’re not cut out to be a governor--are you?’

  Gerry laughed uneasily. ‘I don’t think so myself, but I expect I could do as good a job as most.’

  ‘Is that enough?’ she asked, pressing him. She nerved herself. ‘Are you sure you might not--find it too much? At a time when a lot depended on it?’

  Gerry was white now, the blood gone from his face, and he stood as brittle as a dead tree beside her. Her heart ached, because she knew the knife had struck home. She did not have to mention Peter’s name. This was Gerry’s secret terror, that he would fail his friend again, in his career as he had on his mountain.

  She went on. ‘There are the people you--no one--can fail, as long as you do your best, because that’s all they ask. People who need you, Gerry.’ She pointed out over the jumbled roofs of the city. ‘All the sick people here.’

  She would have preferred to give him the vision of the sick and needy in England, but that would be too much to expect at one time--that he would doubly desert Peter. Here he might be persuaded, for were not the building of the new hospital and with it the nurses’ school, and a ferocious assault on a people’s way of living in order to improve their health, some of Peter’s most urgent ambitions in Rudwal?

  ‘You should be a doctor,’ she said at last. ‘Here, in Rudwal, in the new hospital with Dr Parkash. You should give Peter the rest of the money he needs--the money you’ve been saving to cover the expenses of being governor of a Presidency.’

  ‘You know, I’ve thought of it,’ Gerry whispered breathlessly. ‘I diagnose every illness I see in the dispensary, to myself, and then listen to Parkash to find out whether I’m right. Only it seemed so impossible.’

  ‘It’s not impossible at all. You could study in England, and come back when you have your degree.’

  Perhaps he wouldn’t come back. That was why the idea of becoming a doctor was so peculiarly right for Gerry. A doctor, in the process of acquiring his skill, also acquired a personal integrity and self-dependence and entered into a new relationship with all men who were not physicians. Only a physician could tell his friend that he was drinking too much; only a physician had to tell him, in obedience to a law stronger than any friendship.

  Gerry said: ‘It was just daydreaming.... I thought I’d go to England later. I thought it would be better to get my first M.B. in Lahore. If I was going to work in India I should at least do some of my studying in Indian conditions.’

  ‘That sounds sensible,’ she said. It was hard to control the jubilation that was filling her. Gerry had gone to the trouble of finding out what steps were necessary for him to become a doctor! He did want to do this! She had been afraid of forcing him, of taking Peter’s place, instead of letting Gerry stand alone.

  ‘The only thing is, it’ll take so long,’ Gerry said. ‘Five or six years--and I’m thirty-three.’

  ‘What does that matter?’ she said. ‘This is what you want to do. You don’t let delays put you off on Meru, do you? It’s been seven years since Peter told you
about it, and you won’t--I mean, it won’t be climbed till--I don’t know when, now.’

  ‘Nineteen-sixteen, Peter’s going again,’ Gerry said. ‘He’d need me.’

  She hesitated. She was sure that Gerry must not go again to that terrible mountain, at least not with Peter; but it was better to say nothing about it now. Two years of medical school would do more than she could. ‘That’s a long way off,’ she said in the end. ‘You can cross that bridge when you come to it. Let’s go in. It’s terribly hot out here. Don’t say anything about the plan just yet. Let me tell Peter, eh? He’ll understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ Gerry said. ‘He’ll agree right away. Only I wish I didn’t feel I was letting him down, somehow.’

  ‘You’re not,’ she said gently. ‘Do you think Peter can’t make his own way?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Gerry said, and then they entered the bungalow, and the bearer was waiting inside the door with a message. ‘There is a lady to see you, memsahib.’

  Chapter 17

  ‘Who?’ Emily asked, putting her parasol carefully into the rack.

  ‘It is the wife of Adam Afzal Khan,’ the bearer said. ‘She is waiting in the drawing-room. She is a purdah lady,’ he added meaningly with a glance at Gerry.

  She walked along the passage, wondering.

  ‘I’ll go to my room,’ Gerry said. ‘See you at lunch.’

  The woman waiting in the drawing-room, huddled uncomfortably in the corner of the sofa, was covered from head to foot in a white burqa, only her dark, wet eyes showing through the netting in front of the face. Emily greeted her in her careful Punjabi and sat down beside her. She had met the woman twice before, but in the Old Captain’s house, when Peter had been there. Adam’s wife had worn a burqa both times, and Emily had no idea what she looked like in face or figure.

  The woman seemed tongue-tied, and Emily said: ‘Won’t you take off your burqa? It is very hot in here. I can lock the door.’

  The woman nodded, and when Emily turned from the door the burqa had been thrown back over her visitor’s head, and she was facing a woman of about her own age, the skin a pale wheat colour and the dark eyes, kohl-rimmed, large as a doe’s in a round, ageless, but childish face.

  The woman had been crying. She said: ‘I am happy that you are going to have a baby. The little boy is beautiful. I see him in the Lawrence Park sometimes, when the ayah takes him there. Your time is near?’

  ‘Three months,’ Emily said. ‘At the end of June. I hope it is a girl this time.’ She smiled encouragingly.

  The woman was picking nervously at the pleats in the top of her wide white pyjamas. ‘I am going to lose my child,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘I didn’t know---‘ Emily began. The woman did not look pregnant, and the son, Baber, was nearly fifteen now.

  ‘It is Baber I mean,’ she said. ‘Our father, the Old Captain, has told us to leave his house--but he is keeping Baber. Baber--Baber wants to stay with him.’ Now the tears were trickling down her face, and Emily found it difficult to understand the sobbed, slurred Punjabi.

  ‘I’ll do anything I can,’ she said. ‘But---‘

  ‘It is politics,’ the woman cried. ‘Men’s cursed politics! The man of my house voted last night for the protest, and his father became very angry. This was the end of his patience, he said, that his son should march in the streets to prevent the hanging of an assassin, a dirty, idolatrous, snivelling Bengali, at that. He raged up and down like a bull. He told me to go--my husband was not there. He laid hands on me and pushed me out, at midnight, and his servants put all our belongings into three bullock carts, and---‘

  Emily’s head ached quietly, in a rhythm that kept time with the clock on the mantelpiece. She said: ‘But where did you go? Where are you living?’

  ‘At the house of Harnarayan, in the city,’ the woman said. ‘But my son--I shall never see him again! He hates his father and loves his grandfather. It is the Old Captain who has taught him to ride and hawk and shoot and fish, while the man of my house has been to meetings, talking, talking. Who is right, I don’t know. But it is he, my husband, who has lost our son for us! The Old Captain is of the old school, like my father. He knew it. Why did he have to go to meetings and talk treason with those lawyers?’

  ‘Would it do any good if I spoke to my husband about it?’ Emily asked. She wanted to pat the woman’s arm, where the two gold bangles chinked heavily together as she wiped her eyes.

  She is like me, Emily thought. We live in and are bounded by woman’s unavoidable practicalness while our husbands, whom we love, are for ever fashioning crystal wings to fly to the rainbow’s end. How deeply, really, had Peter’s apocalyptic visions touched her, Emily? What did Meru really mean to her, though she had loved mountains all her life for the way the air slanted sharp across them and the sunshine made shadows that strode down the valleys? She had gone with Peter up the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn, but what had she discovered, except Peter?

  The woman beside her said: ‘He says it was because the Deputy Commissioner Sahib wanted it that he made his vote the way he did. So if the Deputy Commissioner Sahib can tell the Old Captain that it is so, that it was for his sake, then the Old Captain will---‘

  Emily came abruptly back from her wanderings. ‘What? My husband wanted him--your husband--to vote for the protest?’ The woman stirred uneasily, for Emily was staring at her as though she did not believe her. In truth it was her ears, or her knowledge of Punjab, that she did not trust.

  ‘That is what he said,’ the woman muttered doggedly, ‘when I met him in the city and told him what had happened. I was very angry with him. He may have said it to make me hold my tongue.’

  There was a knock on the door, and Peter’s voice--’Emily?’ The woman gave a little gasp and grabbed for her burqa. ‘The door is locked,’ Emily assured her, ‘but perhaps--I will ask my husband now.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the woman said. ‘Later, when I have gone.’ She was struggling to pull the garment back on her head, and speaking rapidly at the same time. ‘This is man’s business. I should not have told anyone--he made me promise. Let me go out--that way.’ Emily opened the french windows for her, assuring her that she would do what she could. The woman grabbed her hands, squeezed them, and left. Emily went over and unlocked the door, and Peter came in.

  ‘Ahwaz told me Roshani was here--Adam Khan’s wife. What did she want? Tiffin’s ready.’

  She said: ‘Peter, is it true that Adam Khan voted for the protest in the C.G.G. because you wanted him to?’

  ‘I advised it,’ he said. ‘Did Roshani tell you?’

  She said: ‘Yes. I didn’t believe her.’

  Peter said: ‘Adam should not have told her, or anyone else.’

  She felt her voice rising. ‘The Old Captain’s thrown them out of the house because of it! Adam Khan had to tell someone. He couldn’t stand any more. Why did you advise him to vote for the protest? What is the Commissioner going to think when he hears of it?’

  It was a very hot day, and Peter’s shirt was black with sweat and his face pale and damp. He had spent the morning at a meeting of the District Board and was probably hungry, thirsty, and on edge. When he sat down and answered her quietly she remembered that she loved him, and that for all his faults he was a greater man than any of them, including Gerry and Adam Khan.

  He said: ‘The C.G.G. is divided, four to three, in just about everything they do--three who want to tear down, and four who want to build. The three wreckers--two of them really are scoundrels, only Harnarayan is an honest man--have been sheltering behind the four builders. They have been using their position inside the C.G.G. to get kudos, but at the same time they have been preventing the C.G.G. from doing all kinds of things which would help the district. They’re against the new hospital, for instance. They say that it’s a devious scheme whereby only the rich landowners and the British will benefit --but in fact they don’t want it because the more misery there is, the more readily the people will accept extreme re
medies. This group forced a vote on the question of a protest in behalf of that Bengali murderer. They expected to be voted down, three to four, so that they could keep out of trouble but at the same time let it be known that they are for all Indians against all British, regardless of law and order. There’s some sympathy for that point of view, both in and out of the criminal classes. In fact one of the objects of these revolutionary groups is to cause such an increase in crime--by giving support, shelter, and legal aid to anyone who commits a crime, as long as he’s Indian--that the administration of justice will break down and the police be strained to breaking point. But Adam Khan voted for the protest, so it was four to three---

  ‘On your orders?’

  ‘My recommendation. I can’t give Adam Khan orders. Then the other three good men--one of them is the most pompous ass in the Punjab, but he does mean well--said that they would not join such a procession, whatever the vote was. Adam Khan promptly moved that the C.G.G. be dissolved, and it would have been, but the three extremists, by desperate use of parliamentary hocus pocus--they’re great on procedures down there, as long as it’s to prevent anything being done--put off the vote until tomorrow. They also somehow moved that the vote on the protest procession was out of order--so there won’t be any protest, unless Harnarayan leads one himself--and tomorrow the C.G.G. will be dissolved, and those three will be smoked out into the open. A few days later Adam Khan will form a new C.G.G. under another name, so organized that they won’t be able to get in. They’ll have to start a new organization of their own, under their true colours. Let’s go and have tiffin.’