Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  The nurse was talking quickly to Peter, waving her hands--they had run out of anaesthetics, and one of the doctors had fainted from exhaustion. All the beds at the Lady Curzon had been full since an hour after the shock, but now the grounds were full too, and there was not a spare inch of space in which to put the moaning men and women whom the police and the growing army of volunteers kept bringing. Emily waited anxiously when the girl finished with the inevitable, heart- wringing question: ‘What are we to do?’

  Peter stared at the nurse, and Emily thought for a moment that he was going to cry. Then he said: ‘You’ll have to tell them to do the best they can for now. . . . I’ll send a telegram to Manali, Sister. The soldiers are coming, and they will certainly have sent down their doctor and all the anaesthetics they can spare.’

  Emily cut in eagerly. ‘Yes, Sister, and tell Doctor Dhayal to have all new patients sent to the maidan. The Meru expedition’s doctor is working up there.’

  She sat down on a wooden box that someone had placed behind the table where they had been serving tea. Eleven o’clock in the morning. September 14, 1920. Things were getting organized; the wooden box showed it. The news of the disaster ought to have reached Lahore sometime during the night. How? By carrier pigeon? There were none. But bad news always travelled fast. Help could be expected to reach Rudwal during this coming night or the following morning. The hours had passed in a wave-like rhythm: first the huge shock of the earthquake; then a quiescence, and during it the gathering together of individual and collective will, the feeble beat of that little wave expending itself in the stanching of wounds and the rescue of neighbours; then that too dying away in a long suspiration as men and women sank down under walls and in dark fields and went to sleep, and the helpers dozed over their tasks, and no man moved fast, and few moved at all; then again the gathering, in secret places, of man’s power to organize against extinction, and the rising sound of crowbar and shovel and falling stone, and the quickening pace of the refugees, and in the city the single, decisive rifle shots, a looter running, hit, turning, astonished, falling under the feet of the grim policeman --all this gathering towards the dawn, a moment of supreme pause, and crash! the wave burst down, the house fell, Harry ran, Peggy broke, the girl died.

  In the sunlight the city sprawled in front of her, and to the east she could see the gleaming of the sun on the river.

  Adam Khan came on a country pony. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘we’re full up on the maidan. I’m sending everyone I can out into the country.’

  Peter said: ‘All right.’

  Adam said: ‘I heard about Harry. Harnarayan has already sent Purshottam Dass to Lahore with that photograph, among others. I couldn’t prevent him.’

  Peter said: ‘No. I’ve sent Harry to Shamoli.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To blow down the bund there and put the Maghra in the old bed.’

  Adam’s weary eyes lit up, and he said: ‘Great heaven! That’s a stroke of genius. Who thought of that?’

  Emily said: ‘Peter did.’

  Adam said: ‘Wonderful! If it can be done in time you’ll save the Gujarabad sector and everyone trapped in it.’

  ‘It will help Harry,’ Peter said.

  Adam stroked his chin and looked at Emily. After a while he asked: ‘Where’s Baber?’

  Peter said: ‘With Harry. His job is to clear the people out of Shamoli. It should be done by now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They’ve got about half an hour more, according to Yar Khan’s reckoning, but I don’t suppose you can measure things as close as that, really.’

  Adam said: ‘We’re all going to be busy for a good long time. Peter, I want to tell you, before I get swamped with other things, that I’m going to advise Baber to go to Sandhurst. His lady will wait--if she’s as good as he and I think.’

  Peter nodded but did not speak. Emily said: ‘And you? Are you leaving the Congress?’

  Adam shook his head. He said: ‘No. I think Harnarayan and the rest of them made an appalling mistake here. The fact that you British made one in Amritsar doesn’t alter that. I’m going to fight from the inside to make Congress see the way I think they ought to.’

  ‘Why are you encouraging Baber to go to Sandhurst, then?’ she asked. It was getting hot now, and she wanted to lie down in a shady place, but this talk held a febrile interest, for it seemed to prove that there would be a tomorrow in which she would awake and find all this gone and a new world waiting.

  Adam said: ‘This earthquake has altered my set of values a bit--as the war did in its way. Suppose we--the Congress--got everything we were asking for tomorrow, and you all went away on the next boat. Would that mean we didn’t need an army or a police force or engineers or judges? Harnarayan says Baber is a traitor to work for you--but it seems to me that he and people like him are strengthening our legs so that when we are free to walk alone we’ll be able to.’

  Peter nodded again. The street was full of people, and she realized dully that it had been so all night and all morning-- people moving, dragging, dying, eating. There was an incredible litter of blankets, boxes, sacks, beds, scraps of food, firewood, carts, and everywhere the gleam of cooking pots.

  ‘I’ll be getting back,’ Adam said. ‘About half the Congress people here are working with me. A hundred and fifty others came to help during the night.’

  A brown stain rose slowly into the sky above the city, wide and low-spread over the houses to the east. Dully she watched. Adam jerked to a stop in mid-stride. A heavy shudder shook the earth and rattled the skeletal walls of the house across the street. Adam was shouting an urgent question, but nothing could be heard under the continuing roar of the explosion. Peter grabbed her elbow and said exultantly: ‘Harry’s done it!’ Smythe came scrambling down the street towards them. ‘Everyone who can be moved is out of the Gujarabad sector,’ he said. ‘We haven’t been able to check properly into all the fallen houses, but we counted seven hundred and sixty people alive, trapped in the houses. About half of them are going to die anyway--injuries, shock. Was that the Shamboli bund going?’

  ‘I think so,’ Peter said.

  Smythe said: ‘It’ll back up later on. The old course is silted right up about twelve miles down, remember? Christ, they’ve been growing crops on it for thirty years!’

  Peter said: ‘Yes, but it’ll give us at least another twenty-four hours to dig in the Gujarabad sector.’

  ‘The water’s in to a few inches now,’ Smythe said, ‘and it was coming up fast when I left. That was before the bund went, of course. Now what?’

  ‘Why don’t you rest for an hour or two?’ Peter said. ‘This is going to go on for a long time.’

  ‘Rest!’ Smythe snorted. ‘How the hell can I rest? Where’s Lady Margaret?’ He glanced round and lowered his voice. ‘Did you hear about Walsh?’

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said abruptly. ‘And I don’t want you to mention it to anyone, or let it slip into your conversation.’

  Smythe exploded. ‘Christ, Peter, tomorrow it’s going to be all over the front page of the Patriot and every vernacular paper in India! We can’t pretend it didn’t happen.’

  ‘We can pretend it wasn’t Harry Walsh that did it,’ Peter said, ‘because it wasn’t. It was what’s left of him after France. You weren’t in France.’ He looked grimly at the red-faced policeman.

  Smythe mumbled: ‘All right.’

  Peter said: ‘As soon as he comes back I’m going to send him down to work with you in the Gujarabad sector. See that he’s put in charge of something, without supervision.’

  ‘Right,’ Smythe said. ‘I’m off. By the way, we’ve shot nine looters so far. That’s pretty good, that there have been so few, considering.’

  Peter agreed, and after a while the two men began to discuss the disposal of the huge pile of corpses. Emily sat down again, her head rocking dully from right to left, then forward and back. The sun had gone, and it was grey, damp, and hot. Her head ached with a slow, throbbing rhythm. She thought it was g
oing to rain, and she thought it would not be enough to put out the remaining fires. What would happen to the people in the open fields? Were her children all right? Who was looking after them?

  She awoke with a start. She was lying on the ground against the wall, and someone had put a rolled blanket under her head. She heard strange voices and saw Gurkha soldiers and officers. Baber was there, and Smythe, and another English police officer. Down the street, near the pile of corpses, a thick mass of red-and-blue-turbaned policemen was falling into rough lines. The Commissioner was there, a little apart, talking with Peter. Harry Walsh was there.

  How many hours had passed? She struggled to her feet. The rhythm of the disaster was still working, for after the quiet ebb there was gathering now this new wave of effort. Soon the wreckage would be only of material things, like buildings, and the ways of thought would be back in familiar channels. Peggy had returned, her face bloodless, as surely filled with pent emotion as the scene around them was filled with latent movement. The rhythm was working in her too.

  Peter turned to Harry. ‘Are you feeling up to it?’

  Harry muttered: ‘Yes. I’m not tired.’

  The Commissioner said: ‘You look it.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Harry repeated.

  Peter said: ‘Then go ahead.’

  Peggy broke in. ‘Where are you sending him now?’

  Peter said: ‘There’s a big fire in the Hardial sector. It’s been smouldering all day, but now it’s beginning to spread.’

  ‘You can’t send him to a fire,’ Peggy said, her voice high and brittle.

  ‘I must,’ Peter said. ‘He’s the only man who can do it.’ Harry stood hang-shouldered between them. The Commissioner said: ‘I don’t want to interfere, Peter, but I really think Walsh is dead beat.’

  ‘He is not,’ Peter said sharply. ‘Baber, you’ll go with Mr Walsh?’

  Baber nodded. Emily saw that the young man knew exactly what Peter was doing, and why. His look, as he glanced at Peter, was different from anything she remembered since he had been a small hero-worshipping boy. Peter said: ‘Get a move on, Harry.’

  Peggy turned to the Commissioner and said: ‘Don’t let him go. Haven’t you heard? He . . .’

  Peter drew back his arm and with an effortless gesture struck his open hand across her face, so hard that she sprawled back, staggered, slipped, and fell.

  ‘Peter!’ Emily cried, aghast, stooping to help Peggy to her feet.

  ‘Get a move on, Harry,’ Peter said. ‘There’s no human life involved, so I don’t want you to allow any unnecessary risks. The buildings were cleared hours ago. Just get the fire out and, if you can’t, demolish the houses around it so that it won’t spread.’

  Peggy leaned like a sack against Emily, whispering: ‘Oh God! . . . Oh God!’

  ‘Come away,’ Emily whispered. ‘I’ll look after you. Come on.’

  She put her arms under the other’s elbows and half lifted, half dragged her along the street, past the corpses and the carts slowly loading there, over the rubble, and towards the bungalow.

  When they reached it she found Rodney carrying water in tin camp mugs to the refugees on the lawns, and ayah screaming at him to come in or he would catch fever from them. She gave Peggy twenty grains of aspirin and put her to bed in the spare room. Then she sat down on the sofa to wait, and at once fell asleep.

  She had no idea what time it was when Peter came back; only that she struggled awake, and it was almost dark, and the two of them, Peter and Harry, were standing in the middle of the room. Harry’s voice was hard as he said: ‘Yes. Good night.’

  ‘Peggy’s in the spare room, Harry,’ she said, sitting up.

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’ The door closed. She was alone with Peter, but the room was full of the whispering and muttering of two hundred people camped on the lawn and along the veranda.

  ‘It’s begun,’ Peter said. His face was dim, and then a match flared and a strong yellow-red light lit his face and died and flared again, as he pulled on his cheroot.

  ‘What?’ she said dully. ‘What’s begun? Isn’t it nearly over?’

  ‘Oh, the emergency. . . . That’s over, in a way. We’ve got more helpers here now than we know what to do with. The Commissioner’s taken over till the morning, and I’m a hero. The Commissioner says so. Smythe says so. Even Harnarayan says so--because I had the Shamoli bund blown in.’ He sat down beside her. ‘No, I meant that Harry has begun to feel again. Only bitterness so far, but perhaps the rest will come.’

  ‘With you, too,’ she said, putting her hand on his.

  ‘I think so,’ he said after a while. ‘I can only see through Harry’s eyes now, feel what he’s feeling--but there’s something else at the edge. It’s like looking at something--a mountain, for instance--and knowing there’s something else at the borders of vision, but you can’t see it without focusing on it, and when you try it moves farther out and is still at the edge.’

  ‘That always means that the thing, whatever it is, is in your eye and not outside it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He knelt down, and she saw the cigar arc into the empty fireplace. She held up her arms and held him tight, tighter, till she thought her arms would crack, but all her strength was nothing to the gradually increasing heat of his mouth on hers, and the salt taste of her own flowing, released tears.

  Chapter 36

  On this sixth morning after the earthquake the Lieutenant- Governor returned by the early train to Lahore, taking the Commissioner with him. Emily stood by the windows of her drawing-room and looked out at her lawn. The grass was gouged and ridged like a battlefield, for it had rained twice in those five days, and many thousand feet and hoofs had battered the soil. The mali was standing out there in the middle of it, the strong sun beating down on his bowed head as he glowered at the wreckage of his pride. Emily felt a stirring of guilt that she should be worrying about the lawn at a time like this--but the veranda was empty again, and the children were playing in the nursery.

  The rhythm of surge and gather, of break and ebb, that had been so prominent a feature of the hours immediately after the shock, had gradually subsided, like any ocean storm, and instead the effort of re-establishing the city and its life had taken on the sound of a motor car or a railway engine. Men worked day and night in shifts, and there was a steady puttering noise, and the night and its memories and sights were sliding back in the distance.

  The corpses had gone from the empty lot. Men on horseback could move anywhere through the city, and narrow carts almost anywhere. There were few houses in the Gujarabad or other sectors that had not been cleared of their dead. Five hundred Gurkha soldiers guarded the approaches to the city at a distance of two miles. Military engineers had set up emergency water supplies, and the Maghra had sunk to its normal level. The old bed was full, from its beginning by the shattered bund to the silted fields twelve miles down, and now formed a long, dirty lake. Seven people had lost their lives in that sudden flood. The province’s organization for famine relief had been put into action, and had set up half a dozen camps outside the city; hundreds of able-bodied citizens marched in every day from these camps to work at the clearing of the city. Communications had returned to normal, and the story of the Rudwal earthquake and flood had covered the front page of the C. & M. for the past three days.

  Mr Peter Savage was the hero of the hour, partly because the blowing down of the Shamoli bund had caught the public imagination and partly because the English community and the government were desperately anxious to find someone who could be held up as a shining antithesis to General Dyer.

  Peter was sitting in his chair, reading a sheaf of telegrams. She turned when she heard him tell the waiting chuprassi he could take them back to the office. The chuprassi left the room. He said: ‘I think you’ll have to go to England at once.’

  The half-smile, secretive and proud, that had been on her face these five days whenever she looked at Peter, now faded away. On the third day they had mentioned t
his possibility, but she had deliberately put it aside. Now she thought about it again and at once knew that there could be no argument. Life here would be lived on an emergency basis for the whole of the cold weather. There were signs that an outbreak of amoebic dysentery among the refugees might turn into a full-fledged epidemic, and the heavily chlorinated water made Elizabeth sick. The rebuilding of Rudwal would be an exciting thing to watch, even if merely being with Peter had not been all her desire; but she must go.

  ‘I’ll stay a year,’ she said, ‘and then leave Rodney in a prep school and come back with Elizabeth and Gerry.’

  He said: ‘Yes--unless I can get home leave in nineteen-twenty-two. You’ll have a bad time on the ship with Peggy and Harry, I’m afraid.’

  She looked up in surprise. It had never struck her that they too would be returning to England; but of course they would be; and, watching the calmness of his profile as he sucked slowly on the thin black cigar, she knew that this was why he had said: ‘You’ll have to go’--not for the sake of the children or herself, but so that she should accompany Harry Walsh. She said: ‘I’ll do my best, darling--if they’ll let me.’

  ‘Even if they won’t, you must,’ he said. ‘Harry will try and hide in his cabin. Peggy will take part in everything. You can’t drag Harry out and tell Peggy to hide--but if you’re there, showing them and everyone else that they’re our friends, it’ll make a difference. A little ... If only I’d been there!’

  She didn’t have to ask where. Peter, the old Peter, brought back to life by Harry’s tragedy (and how much more suddenly, more explosively, if he had seen the thing himself!), would have caught Purshottam Dass and broken his camera; if necessary he would have shot him. There were other hostile witnesses, and there would still be black headlines in the Indian newspapers, and Harry would still be fighting his own private battle, but nothing could have been as bad as that terrible photograph, because that had brought in ten million strangers as overwrought spectators of a struggle that should have been fought out in Harry’s private soul.