by Paul Scott
‘And the linesmen,’ Miss Crane pointed out.
‘Perhaps it was the linesmen who abducted him. The posts and telegraphs people are sometimes very bolshie.’
‘But there were only three linesmen. And the sub-inspector had a man with him and was probably armed. There must have been other men.’
‘Which is why we should turn back, Miss Crane.’
The sky was clouded over, but there was still no rain. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Yesterday I drove along this road and everything was as quiet as the grave and safe as houses. Now suddenly there are cut telegraph wires, upturned trucks and vanished sub-inspectors of police. It is really very silly.’ She laughed. ‘No, Mr Chaudhuri, if you like I’ll take you back to Tanpur, but I shall press on afterwards to Mayapore because I’ve just seen the funny side. But if I take you back to Tanpur the people will know we’ve gone back for a good reason, and then it will come out about the sub-inspector. And the assistant sub-inspector will probably panic and the funny side might stop being funny.’
Mr Chaudhuri was silent for a while. Presently he sighed and said, ‘I don’t follow your reasoning, Miss Crane. It is an example no doubt of British phlegm. You are mad. And I am mad to let you go, let alone go with you. All I ask is that if we see a crowd of people on the road, you put your foot hard on the accelerator.’
She turned her head and again they looked at each other straight. She had stopped smiling, not because she was annoyed with him for calling her mad or had already stopped seeing the funny side, but because she felt there was between them an unexpected mutual confidence, confidence of the kind that could spring up between two strangers who found themselves thrown together quite fortuitously in difficult circumstances that might turn out to be either frightening or amusing.
And for Miss Crane there was something else besides, a feeling she had often had before, a feeling in the bones of her shoulders and in the base of her skull that she was about to go over the hump thirty-five years of effort and willingness had never really got her over; the hump, however high or low it was, which, however hard you tried, still lay in the path of thoughts you sent flowing out to a man or woman whose skin was a different colour from your own. Were it only the size of a pebble, the hump was always there, disrupting the purity of that flow, the purity of the thoughts.
‘Yes, I will try,’ she said, ‘try to put my foot down and keep it there,’ and then wished that there were words she could use that would convey to him the regard she held him in at that moment, a regard deeper, harder than that she had felt for the ragged singing children years ago; deeper, harder, because her regard for the children had sprung partly from her pity for them – and for Mr Chaudhuri she had no pity; only respect and the kind of affection that came from the confidence one human being could feel in another, however little had been felt before.
‘Then,’ Mr Chaudhuri said, ‘let us proceed.’ His lips looked very dry. He was afraid, and so was she, but now perhaps they both saw the comic side, and she did not have to say anything special to him just because his skin was brown or because she had never understood him. After all, he had never fully understood her either. She set the car in motion again and after a while she began to sing. Presently to her surprise and pleasure he joined in. It was the song she always liked the children to learn. All over India, she thought, there were brown and off-white children and adults who could sing the song or, at least, remember it if they ever heard it again and, perhaps, remember it in connexion with Miss Crane Mem. She sang it now, not sentimentally, but with joy, not piously, but boldly, almost as though it were a jolly march. When they had sung it right through once, they began again.
There’s a Friend for little children
Above the bright blue sky,
A Friend Who never changes,
Whose love will never die;
De da, de da, de da, dum
And change with changing years,
This Friend is always worthy—’
Ahead of them the rioters were spread out across the road.
*
‘I can’t,’ she said, as the car got nearer.
‘You must,’ he said. ‘Blow the horn, keep blowing it and press the accelerator, press.’
He leaned out of the window to show his dark Bengali face, and waved his arm in a motion demanding right of way. ‘Faster,’ he shouted at her. ‘Faster, you’re slowing down, keep pressing and blowing.’
‘I shall kill someone,’ she shouted back. ‘I can’t. I can’t. Why don’t they move away?’
‘Let them be killed. Faster. And blow!’
For a moment, closing on the crowd, she thought she and Mr Chaudhuri had won, that the men were moving to give way, but then they cohered again into a solid mass. They must have seen her white face. A man in front began to wave his arms, commanding them to stop.
‘Keep going!’ Mr Chaudhuri shouted. ‘Close your eyes if you must but keep going!’
She tightened her mouth preparing to obey, but failed. She couldn’t drive into a mass of living creatures. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried, and began to press on the brake pedal. She stopped the car some twenty yards from the man who was waving his arms, but kept the engine running. ‘They weren’t going to move, they’d have died. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t speak,’ Mr Chaudhuri said. ‘Now leave it to me. Don’t speak.’ He put a hand on her wrist. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘I know you never have, but trust me now. Do whatever I say. Whatever I say.’
She nodded. ‘I trust you. I’ll do what you say.’ In her physical panic there was a kind of exhilaration as though she were drunk on the Deputy Commissioner’s brandy. ‘But don’t run risks. I’m not worth risks. I’m old and it’s all gone and I’ve failed.’ She laughed. The men were approaching, swaggering. ‘After all, it’s me they want,’ she said. ‘Not you. So that’s it. If this is where it ends for me, let it end.’
‘Please, Miss Crane,’ he said, ‘don’t be ridiculous.’
The car was surrounded now. She found it difficult to distinguish face from face. They all looked the same, they all smelt the same: of liquor and garlic and sweat-soaked cotton cloth. Most were dressed in white homespun shirts and dhotis. Some wore the white Congress cap. They were chanting the words that the whole of India, it seemed to her, had been chanting since early in the spring. Quit India! Quit India! Mr Chaudhuri was talking to the leader. The leader was asking what he was doing riding in a car with an Englishwoman. Mr Chaudhuri was not answering his questions but trying to shout him down, trying to tell him that Miss Crane was an old friend of India, that only that morning she had saved the lives of many Indian children from drunken power-mad policemen and was on her way to a secret meeting of the Congress Committee in Mayapore whose confidence she enjoyed and whose efforts to overthrow the English she wholeheartedly endorsed.
The leader said he did not believe Mr Chaudhuri. Mr Chaudhuri was a traitor. No self-respecting Indian male would ride with a dried-up virgin memsahib who needed to feel the strength of a man inside her before she could even look like a woman, and what would Mr Chaudhuri do if they decided to take the memsahib out of the car and show her what women were for and what men could do? Not, the leader said, spitting on to the bonnet of the Ford, that he would waste his strength and manhood on such a dried-up old bag of bones. ‘She speaks Hindi,’ Mr Chaudhuri said, ‘and hears these insults. Are you not ashamed to speak so of a guru, a teacher, as great a guru as Mrs Annie Besant, and a follower of the Mahatma? Great evil will come to you and your seed if you so much as lay a finger on her.’
‘Then we will lay one on you, brother,’ the leader said, and dragged open the door, whose lock Miss Crane had failed, month after month, to have repaired. ‘Go,’ Mr Chaudhuri said, as he was taken out. ‘Go now. It’s all right. No harm will come to me.’
‘Pigs!’ she cried in Urdu, trying to hold on to Mr Chaudhuri’s arm, using the words she had used years ago, in Muzzafirabad. ‘Sons of pigs, cow-eaters, impotent idolaters,
fornicators, abhorred of the Lord Shiva …’
‘Go!’ shrieked Mr Chaudhuri, from outside the car, kicking the door shut, his arms held by four men, ‘or do you only take orders from white men? Do you only keep promises you make to your own kind?’
‘No!’ she shouted back. ‘No, no! I don’t!’ and, pressing the accelerator, released the brake, nearly stalling the engine so that the car jerked, paused, and jerked again, throwing the laughing men away from the bonnet, and then it leapt away so that they had to jump out of its path. A couple of hundred yards further on she stopped and looked back. Three of the men were chasing after the car. Behind them Mr Chaudhuri was being pushed from one man to the other. A stick was brought down heavily on his shoulders. She shouted, ‘No! No! Mr Chaudhuri!’ and opened the door, climbed out. The three men held their arms out, laughing, and called, ‘Ah, memsahib, memsahib,’ and came towards her. Remembering, she reached into the car and found the starting handle, stood in the road, threatening them with it. They laughed louder and struck postures of mock defence and defiance, jumped about grinning, like performing monkeys. Mr Chaudhuri had his head covered by his hands. The sticks were coming down, thwack, thwack. Then he was on his knees, and then out of sight, surrounded by the men who were beating him. Miss Crane cried out, ‘Devils! Devils!’ and began to move towards the three men, still waving the starting handle. They moved back, pretending to be alarmed. The youngest of them reached into his dhoti as if about to expose himself, shouted something at her. Suddenly they turned and ran back to their leader who had called out to them. The other rioters were standing over Mr Chaudhuri who lay unmoving in the middle of the road. A couple of them were going through his pockets. The leader was now pointing at the car. Five or six men left the group surrounding Mr Chaudhuri and came towards Miss Crane. Instinctively she backed, but held her ground next to the car. Reaching her they pushed her aside, roughly, angrily, as if ashamed they had not yet summoned up the courage to disobey their leader and attack her. Bending to the task they got their weight under the running-board and the mudguards and began to heave rhythmically, until of a sudden the car turned over. From this display of strength one of them, anyway, got courage. Turning from the car he came at Miss Crane, raised his hand and hit her across the face, once, twice, then pushed her back towards the ditch and, using both arms, tumbled her down the three-foot embankment. Falling, she lost consciousness. When she came to and had collected her senses and strength she scrambled up the bank on her hands and knees and found the Ford burning and the rioters in the distance.
Limping, she walked to where Mr Chaudhuri still lay. Reaching him she knelt and said, ‘Mr Chaudhuri,’ but could not touch him because of his bloody face and open eyes and the awful thing that had happened to the side of his head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, it isn’t true. Oh God. Oh God, forgive me. Oh God, forgive us all,’ and then covered her face and wept, which she had not done for years, and continued weeping for some time.
She dried her eyes by wiping them on the sleeve of her blouse, once, twice, three times. She felt the first heavy drops of rain. Her raincape had been in the back of the car. She said, in anguish, ‘But there’s nothing to cover him with, nothing, nothing,’ and stood up, crouched, got hold of his feet and dragged him to the side of the road.
‘I can’t help it,’ she said, as if to him, when he lay bloody and limp and inhuman in the place she had dragged him to. ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,’ and turned away and began to walk with long unsteady strides through the rain, past the blazing car, towards Mayapore. As she walked she kept saying, ‘Nothing I can do. Nothing. Nothing.’
A hundred yards past the car she stopped. ‘But there is,’ she said, and turned and walked back until she reached Mr Chaudhuri’s body. She sat down in the mud at the side of the road, close to him, reached out and took his hand.
‘It’s taken me a long time,’ she said, meaning not only Mr Chaudhuri, ‘I’m sorry it was too late.’
*
As Mr Poulson said afterwards, the troubles in Mayapore began for him with the sight of old Miss Crane sitting in the pouring rain by the roadside holding the hand of a dead Indian. On that day, the day of the arrests of members of the Congress sub-committees in the district, Mayapore itself had been quiet. The uprising got off to a slow start. Only Dibrapur and the outlying districts appeared to have jumped the gun. Mr Poulson set off from Mayapore in the afternoon, in a car, accompanied by one of Mr Merrick’s inspectors of police, and a truck-load of constables, to investigate rumours of trouble in the sub-divisions that couldn’t be contacted by telephone, and although when he reached the village of Candgarh he found the sub-inspector of police from Tanpur, one constable and three linesmen from posts and telegraphs, locked in the police post, it was not until he proceeded along the road to Tanpur and found first of all Miss Crane’s burnt-out car and then Miss Crane herself that he really began to take the troubles seriously.
The troubles which Mr Poulson and several others began by not taking seriously took until the end of August to put down. Everyone in Mayapore at that time would have a different story to tell, although there were stories of which each individual had common knowledge. There was, to begin with, the story of Miss Crane, although that was almost immediately lost sight of following the rape of the English girl in the Bibighar Gardens on the night of August the 9th, at an hour when Miss Crane was lying in the first delirium of pneumonia in a bed in the Mayapore General Hospital. Later, when Miss Crane found it impossible to identify any of the men arrested that day in Tanpur, for a short while she came again into prominence. People wondered whether she was genuinely at a loss to recognise her own attackers and Mr Chaudhuri’s murderers, or whether she was being obstinate, over-zealous in the business of being fair at all costs to the bloody blacks.
But the Bibighar Gardens affair was not lost sight of. It seemed to the European population to be the key to the whole situation they presently found themselves in, the sharpest warning of the most obvious danger to all of them, but most especially to the women. Afterwards it was never clear whether the steps taken by the authorities following the rape of the English girl in the Bibighar Gardens sparked off worse riots than had been planned or whether the riots would have taken place in any case. There were some who said one thing and some the other. Those who held that there would have been little or no rioting if it hadn’t been for the rape and the steps taken to avenge it believed that the men the Deputy Commissioner had ordered to be arrested on the morning of the 9th August were the right ones to have arrested, and that the action taken in regard to the Bibighar Gardens affair had caused worse disorders than the civil disobedience that was stopped by the arrests. Those who held that there would have been disorders in any event and that the Bibighar Gardens affair was purely symptomatic of general treachery said that the members of the local Congress committees whom Mr White had no alternative but to arrest were simply figureheads, and that the real ringleaders of the intended rebellion had been under cover in places like Tanpur and Dibrapur. But at the time, there was no distinguishing cause from effect and the events of the following three weeks were of the kind that could only be dealt with as and when they arose.
It was not until the first week of September, the first week of quiet, that Miss Crane returned from hospital to her bungalow, and another fortnight was to pass before she felt strong enough to attempt to take up the reins again. It was therefore some six or seven weeks after the beginning of the uprisings in Mayapore district and some three or four weeks after their end, that on a Tuesday afternoon Miss Crane once more opened her home to soldiers from the barracks.
They would be, she knew, changed in some respects from the boys they were before the riots began. In hospital, and since, she had closed her mind to stories of the troubles, but she knew that the military had been called out in aid of the civil power, that for three or four days Mr White was said to have lost his head and handed Mayapore over to the control of the local Brigade Commander
. She had heard Indians say, although she had tried not to listen, that in those few days of Brigadier Reid, things had been almost as bad as in the days of General Dyer in Amritsar in 1919. There had not been any indiscriminate shooting of unarmed civilians, but there had been, apart from controlled shootings and consequent deaths, the forcible feeding with beef – if the story were to be believed – of six Hindu youths who were suspected or guilty of the rape in the Bibighar Gardens. There had been no public whippings, as in General Dyer’s day, when youths were clapped to a triangle in the open street and flogged simply as suspects in an attack on an Englishwoman, but there were rumours that the youths who had been forcibly fed with beef had also been whipped and had now disappeared into the anonymous mass of those imprisoned with or without trial.
In the native town itself, as Mr Francis Narayan repeatedly told her, there had been many charges by mounted police, and firing by the military to disperse crowds and punish looters and fire-raisers. In the district as a whole, as in many other provinces of India, there had been widespread disruption of railways, posts, telegraphs, looting of warehouses, shops, houses and Government grain and seed stores (which the people would be sorry for next year, Mr Narayan pointed out, if the crops failed). Police posts had been attacked, policemen murdered. In one sub-division of the district, so it was rumoured, the Indian magistrate had run the Congress flag up over his courthouse, released prisoners from custody, fined liberals and moderates, illicitly collected revenues and hidden away money that should have been paid into the treasury. Miss Crane suspected that the story was apocryphal, but there did seem to be evidence that one of Mr White’s Indian subordinates was in disgrace and, since order was restored, had spent an hour weeping at the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow.
She was, in fact, too old a hand to believe everything told her as incontrovertible truth, and too old a hand not to know that her simple soldiers who had found themselves fresh out from England, suddenly acting in aid of the civil power to reduce rebellion in a colonial empire they knew little about but must now think badly of (remembering home and the blitz and their comrades dead on the plains around Mandalay), would find it difficult to make sense of what had happened, and why it had happened, and why, now that it was over, the English and the Indians had apparently patched their quarrel and come together once more in a compulsive harmony.