by John Masters
The summer journey to the Northern Tehsils should have been an idyll of pleasure. They had met rather more rain than was usual on that side of the Himalaya, but there had still been plenty of perfect days. Nothing went amiss with the arrangements; no one got hurt or fell sick. Peter was calm, as usual, and apparently absorbed in making notes of the flowers and birds that they saw. He had told her once or twice, when she found him sitting in the garden here, staring seemingly at nothing, that he was watching the birds; and she knew that he had bought some ornithological books a year or two ago-- but she had believed that it was an excuse to be alone with his thoughts, or even a shelter to conceal the fact that he was thinking of nothing at all. She now knew she had been wrong, for on the journey and in their camp twelve miles above Harkamu he had shown a deep understanding of the habits of birds and a wide knowledge of them in their species, subspecies, and families.
Ten, five years ago she would have been delirious with joy to find Peter peacefully watching the lammergeier glide across the face of the precipice, to hear him answer: ‘No, thank you, darling,’ when she asked him whether he wanted to go climbing some high mountain. Now her memories of the journey were sad, because the quiescence which it had once been her aim to induce in him was his only state of mind, and it was a sad thing to see. He had walked up a few hills, but only as far as young Rodney could accompany him, and turned back when a point was reached where Rodney would have to use his hands. Rodney was disappointed then, and once, when Peter would not heed his eager requests that they go forward, called his father a soor, a pig. She had slapped him sharply, but Peter had said nothing.
She should be grateful that somewhere through the listless years Peter had found at least these resources of contemplation. He had never before seen any static beauty in mountains or in the shapes of rocks or in the run of water over stone; now he would stand for minutes on end drinking them in, pointing them out to her or the children with something approaching enthusiasm in his voice. She was grateful, but she could not accept this as an adequate answer to the problems of life and of living that had crowded her and now seemed to be gathering for a final catastrophe.
She did not think they would be able to afford to keep the children at expensive schools for the next fifteen years. Peter was going to resign and would not find other employment easy to come by. His class would reject him, for he had broken its rules. Librarian in a small provincial town seemed to be his mark now. Even if the money problem could be overcome, she could not raise the children to adulthood without a man. Peter was not a man. Indignantly she brushed aside her own reminder that he was indeed impotent. That did not matter except to remove from her reach a means which she sometimes thought God had specially provided to allow human beings to resolve, at least temporarily, and for the sake of a night’s sleep, otherwise overwhelming tensions. No, he was not a man because he was hardly human. Somewhere in history, among the galley slaves perhaps, there may have been men with this quality of emptiness, as though all that made them human had been drained out and nothing put in its place; but she had never met one. Usually hate crept in to take the room of other emotions, or sometimes nostalgia, so that the victim’s feelings were still bright and strong but enclosed in those past times. Peter was nothing--a mirror to reflect the good and bad of the day, a photographer’s plate to record the beauty and sin of the world that passed before him; that was all.
For almost four years she had been fighting, fighting, fighting against a host of enemies, seen and unseen. She had used every particle of her energy and her will to make Peter feel; and then, when she knew that she did not have anything left, there was the house to run, and Rodney and Elizabeth to bring up in love and care, and the training of baby Gerry--but he was four now--and the protection of Peter’s reputation. How many disputes had she solved in his name since that June night of 1917, when, feeling as though she were robbing the Bank of England, she had done it the first time? How many letters had she written and put to him for his signature--explaining, accepting, refusing; brusque, pliant, apologetic; whatever was needed to give him peace?
From the beginning she had felt that she was bleeding slowly to death. For a year she had known that the time approached when she must give up from sheer fatigue. She had put high hopes in the journey to the mountains, and as soon as they returned, the hopes unfulfilled, she knew that the time had come. For the sake of the children she must now leave him. Her mind trembled as an exhausted body trembles, and she could not find a way to care what he did. He must decide.
She had thought, that first week after their return from the north: Suppose he decides to come home with me? She would love him, because she couldn’t help it, but she must not think first of him and his well-being, for both were beyond her help. She must think of the children. She would have to be father and mother to them, and that would make her less of a mother and less of a woman. People would laugh at the matriarch, and the children would notice, but she could not help that. Gentleness at least they could learn from Peter--but they were too sharply intelligent for that; they knew perfectly well, especially Rodney, that their father’s tenderness did not come from strength. Rodney took delight in showing that he could rage and command and fill even grown-ups with alarm at his anger.
It was the thought of Rodney that had made her break her own resolution not to answer Peter’s problem for him {he did not know he had got one). So she had gone in yesterday after tiffin, meaning to tell him that unless he had any good reason to the contrary she thought he’d better stay in the I.C.S. and continue to earn its good salary as long as he could. But, when she was face to face with him and had looked into his eyes and seen the pale unshadowed depths of them, and taken note of the unlined face and the black hair, grey at the temples (the silver streaks in her own hair matched it), she had said instead: ‘Come home with us, Peter.’
He had nodded, while she touched his cheek, and said: ‘I will ask for my furlough.’
Peggy would be in Rudwal by now. The advance party of the expedition had put up a dozen tents in the grounds of the dak bungalow, leaving one of the rooms empty for Harry and Peggy. The train would be in, and soon they would be here. Would Peggy be disappointed to find her too exhausted to feel the daggers of malicious triumph? Or would the sight of the exhaustion itself be an adequate reward for having made such a long journey? When Peggy wrote four months ago Emily had been in no doubt of her motive. There was an apology for things said and done; a statement that time had passed, and remorse and perhaps wisdom come; a wish to meet again and start again; and, between the lines, the unslaked lust of a voyeur of misery. Peggy needed to see with her own eyes what must by now have been spread in gossip through all interested circles of society--the sad end of Peter and Emily Savage.
PS. meant post scriptum. There had been no need to put the news that Peter was resigning from the service in a postscript to the letter to Grandfather, because she had known it before she started to write. She had somehow hoped, though, while writing, that she would not have to say it this time; that she could wait another few weeks, and then write a special letter, clothing the announcement with a kind of furry importance, as the official communiques padded their tales of the arrivals and departures of Viceroys, Proconsuls, and eminent politicians--not ‘The Viceroy is ill and is going home,’ but ‘His Excellency the Most Honourable the Marquess of Kircudbright and Clackmannan, G.M.S.I., G.M.I.E., G.C.M.G., K.C.V.O., Viceroy and Governor-General of India, has intimated to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for India that in view of the state of his health he . . .’
But when she got to the end of the letter she knew that it could not wait and that it did not have the grandeur to support a bulk of circumstance.
Yesterday she had told Peter to come home with the rest of them. Peter had gone as far as the literal meaning of her words. He had said he would ask for furlough. At the end of the furlough he would have returned to Rudwal, or wherever the authorities posted him if they had had enough of him here, and she wo
uld have stayed in England. Until lunch-time today, that was what she had to tell his grandfather, and it could have waited.
But after lunch Baber came. In the letter she had told the old general that he came with the news of his success in the Sandhurst examination. That was true, but not the whole truth. Baber was six feet, two inches high now, fine-boned, handsome as a hawk, with wide-set velvet brown eyes. His teeth were very white, and his hands, clasped nervously together, were strong and sinewy. He told them he had passed into Sandhurst. Twenty, thirty years from now he would command the Guides. Baber was excited, thrilled--and desperate.
It was she who had to bring it out of him by a broad hint that if he had any questions to ask they would be glad to answer them. Then his hands unclasped slowly and fell to his sides, and he sat up straight and looked at her. He said: ‘Mrs Savage--I think I am in love.’
She wanted to smile, feeling the old laugh of happiness to hear these simple words and see the young man so perturbed. But it was not a time to laugh, even with joy, for being in love was as terrible a state for the young man as it had become to her.
She said: ‘And you want to get married?’
He said: ‘Yes, Mrs Savage. Very much.’
Peter said: ‘That’s difficult, isn’t it?’
The young man hardly glanced at him but kept watching Emily with that hungry, nervous look, his hands straight by his sides, his long body stiffly upright. She fenced for time and found out, though it made no difference, that the girl was a student at Punjab University in Lahore, nineteen, the daughter of a well-to-do and sophisticated Moslem family. There could be no objections to the match on any possible grounds, and the quality of Baber’s love reminded her of her own feelings when she had first seen the soaring, ethereal beauty of King’s College Chapel--she could hardly bear to go away from it.
She looked at Peter and prayed that he would say something. The boy would not be accepted for Sandhurst if he was married. He did not know what to do. Love was so strange to him, and perhaps it felt like a new kind of suffocation, so that he could breathe only in his lady’s presence.
Peter said: ‘Which is the more important to you--the Guides or the young lady?’
Baber said: ‘Both.’
Peter shook his head wonderingly. Watching the young man, she felt sure that he wanted an affirmation of his faith in service. His grandfather had brought him up to believe in duty, and his inclination also pointed that way. The army was a desire as strong and clear to him as love--much, much clearer, for he had lived with that desire for many years and knew its dimensions. Now this new thing had sprung upon him, and she thought he wanted strength to hold to his course.
She said: ‘Well. .
But she must not say anything. She was a woman, and it would be cruel to give advice on a problem that was man’s alone. How could she weigh the disruptive forces of marriage when for her marriage was itself a vocation, a need, and the fulfilment of the need? Besides, she had reached the end of her powers of decision. She could not face the responsibility of laying even the lightest of hands on Baber’s destiny.
Peter said nothing more. Almost imperceptibly the young man’s face hardened. He had expected counsel and was too young to understand why it was not given to him. After a few desultory platitudes, during which he sat farther and farther forward on the edge of his chair, he excused himself and went away.
A little later she had made what she knew must be her last decision, for she was spent. Peter had sat quiet for half an hour after the young man had gone. Then he said: ‘I am no use to anyone.’
If he had spoken with the kind of theatrical despair the remark seemed to call for; if he had looked at her and demanded by the very excess of dejection in his tone and words that she deny his statement--she might have done so. But he spoke matter-of-factly, and the words only expressed something that he had believed since the Somme and that she had come painfully, bleedingly, strugglingly to this point of accepting.
She did not speak. The only word was ‘Yes,’ and there seemed no need to say anything so trite.
Very well, she had thought dispassionately. It is true. Then what is the point of his returning to India after a furlough in England? Was it not her duty to take him with her and look after him as best she could, always bearing in mind the predominant importance of the children? But--suppose she said nothing? Then he would return to India, and she would not see him more than once every four years. There would be excitement and movement again in her life. The children, with their careless power and short-lived enthusiasms and reckless doings and changings of mind, would make life new.
She found it hard to think. She was bogged in mud. She was on an unnatural mountain, where it was hard at the bottom and muddy at the top. She was tired and short of breath.
It would be easier to leave him behind, for he made the mud muddier, the darkness darker. Then she looked at him, and for a moment the years dropped away, and he was the young man of ice and fire who had lifted her and Gerry, and even Peggy, and a thousand others, towards heights of emotion and passion they had not had the strength of will or the ordinary courage to face, sometimes not even the imagination to guess the existence of. In those times he would not have left one of them. He had spent his fire for them, and the ashes were cold, but she would remember. She would try to nourish in herself a little of the spark and pray it might rekindle in another generation.
She leaned forward, the tears slowly filling her eyes, until her head rested on his knees and her arms were thrown around his body. After a moment she felt his hand on her hair, quietly stroking it. She muttered: ‘Don’t come back to India, Peter. We’ll find a way to live somehow.’
‘All right,’ he had said after a while.
Now it was six o’clock. This was the day her war had ended. A war of attrition, they had called that other one in France, and at the end the fields lay shattered and bloodless under the watery November sun, and victory meant as little as defeat. She knew the truth of that because in this long struggle she had lost, and it was just the same. All was quiet, and her thoughts moved like sleepwalkers through the wreckage of dreams and hopes. The blood ran slow and tepid in her veins. There were weights on her legs and in her heart. The birds had gone from the garden, and the children were hushed at the other end of the big bungalow, and the footsteps in the passage were slow, quiet, and heavy. This was the place of abandonment, where she gave up.
Chapter 33
The footsteps came to the door and the chuprassi entered. He said: ‘Sahib salaam bolta, daftar-men.’
She got up. Peter would like her to come to the office. Her shorthand pad and pencils were already there. She followed the chuprassi along the passage and went into the office as he held the door open for her.
Adam Khan was there, sitting on the other side of the big table from Peter. The two men rose as she came in. She greeted Adam and sat down. Peter said: ‘Take notes, will you, dear? Now, Adam . . .’
Adam Khan was wearing a long dark grey achkan and a lamb’s-wool cap of the same colour. The only traces of age in his face were in the lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and in the network of fine wrinkles at the side of his eyes. He said: ‘I was going to make some suggestions to Peter about the flood situation, and he thought you’d better be here. Peter, what are your reports?’
Peter said: ‘About as usual. The Maghra is fourteen point three feet above mean level at Naughat, but--’
Adam said: ‘And the danger level is nineteen?’
Peter nodded. Adam said: ‘Have you had any reports from Manohar Singh about the situation up there?’
Emily jotted down: ‘Manohar Singh, Chhandawal.’ Manohar Singh was an amiable old Dogra gentleman who was tehsildar of Chhandawal, the easternmost of the Southern Tehsils. A tributary of the Maghra, called the Harab, rose there under the southern slope of the main chain of the Himalaya. It was a picturesque, dead-end region of huge peaks, hanging villages, and narrow footpaths, all looking down int
o the short steep torrent of the Harab.
Peter said: ‘No ... Wait a minute. Manohar Singh reported a week ago that the level of the Harab was normal for the time of year.’
Adam said: ‘Manohar Singh has been sick for the last two weeks, Peter. Our man up there came down today and told us that the Harab is several feet below normal level.’
She said involuntarily: ‘Below?’
Adam looked at her and said: ‘Yes, Emily--below. He thinks there’s been a landslide, and the main channel’s blocked higher up.’
She said: ‘And you’re afraid that when the river comes over the top of the dam, or whatever’s blocking it, there might be a flash flood?’
He said: ‘Yes. There’s not much danger up there in Chhandawal, because none of the villages are close to the river, but there would be danger here. The Maghra can’t take it. It’s rising an inch an hour here now, and all the sheep-herders who’ve come down from the Lakho La and the Northern Tehsils say it was raining heavily up there when they came through.’
‘I know,’ Peter said. ‘The D.S.P. has been bringing me reports every two days.’
Adam leaned forward. ‘Peter, something’s got to be done, now, to prepare Rudwal for a flood in case it comes--and to give us better warning.’
‘I could send a telegram to Manohar Singh,’ Peter said. ‘He ought to send a man up to find if the Harab is blocked or not.’
Adam said forcefully: ‘That’s not enough!’ He checked himself, and her heart twisted as she saw him gaining control over himself and forcing himself to speak gently. He was like a father, strong-willed and powerful, ready to lose patience with a feckless son, but for the sake of his love holding himself back with tenderness. He went on: ‘We, the local Congress Committee, think you ought to put out a flood warning all along the lower Maghra, especially here in Rudwal. We suggest you call for volunteers to help the police watch the banks. There’s a section below the Naughat road bridge where the bank needs strengthening--now! ‘
