Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

by H. R. F. Keating

  But the judge’s gaze was fixed on the arid gardens again.

  “And the tale they most often told of Farqharson-Wetherby was of what he used to do when he came away from a hanging.”

  Now Sir Asif turned and looked at them all.

  “Did you know,” he asked, “that it was the duty of a magistrate to attend hangings at any gaol within his district? It is a duty I myself in my young days fulfilled on a good many occasions. These affairs always take place at exactly eight o’clock in the morning. And, depending on how far away one is from the gaol, one rises perhaps rather earlier than usual, one breakfasts, one sets off—” “And you ate a good breakfast? You did?”

  Father Adam’s tangled eyebrows were locked together more fiercely than ever.

  Sir Asif sighed.

  “Certainly on the first such occasion I had to attend I found difficulty in swallowing even so much as a cup of coffee,” he said. “But later I found I was able to eat much my usual repast.”

  It seemed that Father Adam was not going to intervene again. “One arrives at the gaol,” Sir Asif resumed. “The superintendent is there to meet one. Generally in one’s anxiety not to be late one has arrived in unduly good time. So the superintendent shows you over his domain. Usually they are particularly proud of the gaol garden, and invariably they have long ceased to notice the pervasive smell which hangs over even that comparatively salubrious area, an odour of strong disinfectant combined with that of uncooked chapatties, since there is a regulation weight for the prison chapatty which is most easily attained by exposing them to the heat for less than the proper time.”

  With a little moment of shock, Ghote recognised the odour the judge had described from the occasions he had had to visit prisons himself. The old man had hit on it exactly.

  “Eventually one is taken to the appropriate condemned cell. One sees the prisoner, often just as he finishes that last meal for which by tradition he can have whatever he requests.”

  A long sigh.

  “It is often a dish of curds.”

  Nobody asked why.

  “One then accompanies the wretched fellow to the place of execution. Sometimes he is resigned, sometimes he is in such a state of abject fear that a sedative of some sort has to be administered. Sometimes a fellow will defiantly sing. But that walk comes to an end for all of them and the hangman carefully places the fellow with one foot on either side of the broad slit that runs down the middle of the trap platform. He is given the opportunity to commend himself to his god. And then a black bag is placed over his head and over that the rope, adjusted so that its knot comes exactly under the angle of the left jaw to ensure the quick snapping of the jugular vein. Then all is ready. But it often happens that the exact hour of eight ack emma has not quite been reached. There may be three, four, or even five minutes still to go. And the hangman does not pull his lever until the magistrate gives the signal.”

  Again the judge paused. The listening circle seemed as intent as if they themselves were that group of onlookers witnessing the execution.

  “It was naturally my own invariable custom at once to give that signal,” Sir Asif resumed. “On the very first occasion that I was faced with this situation I remember that some thoughts did cross my mind as to whether a last-minute reprieve might arrive, as in the storybooks. But I dismissed that then as fantasy, nor did I allow it ever to affect me on any subsequent occasion. One cannot keep a fellow human waiting confined within that thick black bag for five whole minutes before he dies. However . . .”

  He looked directly at Father Adam.

  “However, enforcing such delay was always the custom of Far-qharson-Wetherby. And he boasted of it. It was said of him, too, that he seldom left a gaol in these circumstances without humming that air of Sullivan’s to which William Schwenck Gilbert wrote the words, ‘I heard one day a gentleman say that criminals who are cut in two can hardly feel the fatal steel and so are slain without much pain' Well, I will pass no strictures On him for that. The mind plays curious tricks upon us. But what I cannot forgive him is those three minutes, those four minutes, those five. That man enjoyed inflicting torment. He was not fit to occupy a judicial position.”

  His stone face regarded the American priest unwaveringly.

  “But, note,” he added, “and this is my point: Farqharson-Wetherby was cordially disliked by every single one of his brothers on the Bench.”

  Father Adam bit his lower lip.

  “Well, I don’t have to accept that he was the only one,” he said.

  Sir Asif gave a sharp little grunt.

  “I hardly hoped that I would convince you. But I thought it worth reviving the memory of the man. He was, indeed, once quite abominably rude to me in that same bar common room, to the point of my deciding I had to refrain from using the place while he was still there. But to me he is a singular example of the man who takes up the shield of duty only to exercise a personal power over other human beings, and I felt it proper to put him before you in evidence.”

  “Sir, you were right.”

  Ghote had not meant to speak.

  He knew that it was not for him, a guest in the house, to intervene in what was something not far short of an open quarrel between his host and another guest. But listening to Sir Asif’s account of those prison scenes, seeing them vividly as the old judge had spoken, he had been carried right away. And when the point Sir Asif had been making, at such evident cost to himself, had been so unconsideringly rejected, something in him over which he had no control had broken out.

  The judge had shown himself, without intending it Ghote felt sure, to be a man who had never in fact let duty become for him a garment under which he could let loose whatever strains of cruelty there were in his nature. He had shown himself to be a man who at every case had asked himself what his real duty was and then carried it out.

  And in response Ghote himself had been unable not to declare for him in whatever words first came.

  But, appalled at the tactlessness he had heard issuing from his own lips, he sat now frozen. Awaiting retribution.

  18

  The judge looked at Ghote across the round brass tea table and its plates of curry puffs, heat-curled cucumber sandwiches, and melting pink cakes. The others too had their eyes fixed on him in the aftermath of his sudden declaration of support, Begum Roshan as if she were on the point of bursting out with something herself, Mr. Dhebar beside her as if he was slowly coming to a decision to ask this Doctor of Philosophy for a contribution to the controversial pages of The Sputnik, Father Adam as if yet another enemy of the socialist state had sprung up as might be expected, and the Saint with, once more, that smile, irradiating, penetrating, reassuring yet disturbing. Even Raman, who could not have understood more than a few words of the English conversation, seemed to be regarding him as if he had in an instant taken on a whole new dimension.

  It was the judge who spoke first.

  “Well, Dr. Ghote, I am relieved to have won your approbation, though of course I have hardly waited for that to feel secure in my own conscience.”

  Ghote felt the little sting in the words as if it was a stroke of the pliant twig with which the old schoolmaster of his earliest village days had taught the letters of the Nagari script. He was trying to frame some sort of apology for the outburst when the judge spoke again.

  “But I see that your teacup is empty, Doctor. Raman, what the devil have you been doing? Take the cup. Take it, take it, you fool. Take it to Begum Roshan. Hurry, hurry.”

  Raman ducked at the Urdu onslaught upon him, grinned, wiped the grin off his face at once, grabbed at the cup, and took it, chinking and clinking, over to Begum Roshan to be refilled.

  He saw that when it came back he would have to drink it to the dregs, however stewed the tea might have got.

  He saw something else too.

  He saw what that outburst of his had really meant. It had been an immediate sign, immediate and unthinking, of a whole reversal that had taken place in his min
d. He had come here to the old house warned of one thing; that he would find that the man he had been sent to protect was the biggest obstacle that he would face. He had been sent as the deputy commissioner’s wedge, to force himself in towards the obstinate centre of that man and eventually to split him. He had, of course, failed. The judge was of tougher wood than any brittle wedge up from Bombay could have forced apart. But he had at least pressed forward. The opposition had been there, and he had fought it.

  But now, quite suddenly, with the judge’s account of Farqharson-Wetherby, Ghote had been shown the old man in a new light. It was, certainly, a light that had been there from the beginning, though he had not had eyes to see it. The plain fact of the matter was that the judge was not the figure of sheer unthinking obstinacy that he had thought him. He was, as his account of Farqharson-Wetherby had shown by contrast, a man who asked first what his duty was and only then carried it out. And did not cease from carrying it out while it was still to do.

  So—Raman bent in front of him and deftly removed his plate with its few flaky crumbs of curry puff—the judge’s conduct in the face of the repeated threats made against his life now looked altogether different. The man must have weighed the situation when that first note had mysteriously appeared at his side one day. He might even have come to a definite conclusion about who its author was. He would certainly have decided—it looked now—that the threat was a perfectly serious one, that on the anniversary of the Madurai sentences he would in all probability lose his life. And then he must have come to the conclusion, taking into careful account all the circumstances—“all the evidence” he would have said —that he was simply willing that his life should come to an end. Life, he must have felt, at his age held little for him and, since he had been called on to sacrifice it so as to reassert for one final time his belief in the rightness of his sentences at the Madurai Trial, sacrifice it he would.

  The teacup in Ghote’s hand—the tea in it was fearfully stewed— was less than half empty. He raised it to his lips and swallowed.

  So, if the judge had not acted out of long-standing prejudice but had instead weighed with care the particular circumstances arising from these threats to his life and had decided that he was willing to risk almost certain death—Did that imply anything about the writer of the notes? No matter just at this moment—then was not that a decision which he, Ganesh Ghote, was bound to respect? It was.

  And the consequences of that were clear too. It was now his duty to go to the judge and to tell him that it was he who had been the one with the inflexibly rigid view, not Sir Asif, and he had been wrong. He had come to the old isolated house with a fixed idea, that the judge must be bullied or tricked or somehow prevented from obstructing the protection that he ought to have and the investigation that was necessary. But he should never have allowed himself to have adopted that fixed notion. He should have asked carefully what were the full circumstances and then have acted in accordance with his findings.

  Well, he would do that now.

  But it would not be easy.

  “Judge sahib,” he said, putting down his teacup which he saw now to be, thank goodness, almost empty. “Judge sahib, I hope you will be able to spare me a few minutes before ‘Drinks Before Dinner.’ There is something I have to tell you. Concerning the memoirs, Judge sahib.”

  The judge looked at him.

  “I had thought we had discussed every last point in the matter of the memoirs, Dr. Ghote.”

  “Sir, no. Sir, there is one fresh point which I feel I must bring to your attention.”

  “Very well, Doctor. Since you are so certain. Shall we say in about ten minutes' time?"

  In the library those ten minutes later—dusk was coming rapidly down; it was already a little cooler; a servant was rolling up the pale chick blinds to let in the maximum of evening air—the judge looked as though he felt that once more he was dealing with a young and brash junior pleader, only this time he had him not in open court but in the privacy of his chambers.

  “Inspector, you have discussed this matter with me on several occasions already and taken up more time and more of an old mans fast-fading energies than I can easily spare. I thought I had made it clear that I have said everything on the subject that I wish to. Everything.”

  “Sir, I have not come to ask. I have come to tell.”

  “Indeed, Inspector? Well, I trust that what you have to tell me is something I may hear with propriety.”

  He did not know exactly.

  He summoned up courage.

  “Sir, it is this. I wish to withdraw from your house. I have come to see, sir, that you have every right not to have a police officer upon your premises if it is your considered desire not to do so. I had taken up an altogether wrong position, sir. I wish now to step back from that line.”

  In the gathering gloom of the tall, book-lined room Sir Asif looked at him without speaking. Long slow seconds ticked out. Then at last the old man spoke.

  “I commend you, Inspector. It is not everyone who can resile from an untenable position which they have long held. But, please, do not feel obliged to leave. Stay here as my guest, my welcome guest. Your superiors, after all, would be glad to know that you were still here, I suppose.”

  He thought of the deputy commissioners unwillingness to release any of his officers for this ungrateful task. He thought of the useful things he could do if he were back in Bombay. How much headway would they have made with the outbreak of foreign car stealing at places all over the city? And the Lokmanya Housing Society counterfeit gang, surely a few more days' observation there would produce a trail worth following up. No one else had had time for that, except himself.

  But nevertheless the deputy commissioner would not, in fact, be pleased to see him before the day of the thirtieth anniversary of the Madurai sentences. And here in the house, well, if it turned out that he was actually there when the attempt was made on the judge’s life he would do his best to prevent it. That might not be very logical, but life was not logical.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I would be honoured to stay.”

  “Very well, my dear chap. That’s settled. And there’ll be no more nonsense about your fellow guests and my daughter?”

  “No, sir. That is altogether finished now.”

  So began for Ghote a strange period of time. His long battle with the judge over, he found that the slow life of the household, which previously he had resented, feeling it to be only another weapon of Sir Asif’s in their struggle, seemed quite suddenly altogether satisfying. The meals, with their ceremonious prefaces and aftermaths, which had loomed so tediously unnecessary before, now fell into place marking the steady progress of the long, long days, occupying lengthy stretches of them, passing the time in a fashion that was always more agreeable than not.

  At the start of each day he would wait anxiously for chota hazri to be brought up to his room, that cup of tea and accompanying plantain which he would spend an extraordinarily long time in consuming. And why not? Nothing awaited him. No longer were the stretched-out morning hours as the sun built up a good time in which to prowl the house hoping that he might, say, catch the Saint alone and find it was a day on which he was not vowed to silence.

  The Saint, in fact, on the very first evening of this new period had taken his departure, as abruptly and casually as a dried-up fallen leaf might by the chancest puff of air be whirled out of sight. From Raman next day Ghote had learnt that he was to address a huge meeting on the far side of the town followed by some others in the neighbourhood but that he was expected, probably, to return. By then the news scarcely affected Ghote: he was already too caught up in the meandering fish-tank life of the house.

  After the few coolish hours of the early morning had passed there would come the late breakfast in the big dining room. An English-style breakfast always, though with coffee in place of tea, but there would be fried eggs, toast, marmalade, and for the judge at least, porridge.

  Ghote had been offered that o
n his first morning in the house, but after a long cautious look at the grey glutinous stuff he had declined.

  From its meal-marked start, each day would go slowly by to its meal-marked end, the long drawn-out evening with first “Drinks Before Dinner” and Sir Asif sipping his way through his two whisky-and-sodas while the rest of them sat making desultory conversation and then dinner itself up on the wide flat roof in the heavy velvety night air with the stars hanging in the dark blue sky over them and the candles in their deep-blue tall glasses on the long table burning almost as steadily. There would be more conversation then, little spurts soon to be lost in the dry river bed of passing time. And, now, there would be excellent food, Mughlai dishes with some taste to them in contrast to the invariably awful luncheon, that dark brown, dull, and oily soup, the scrawny roast chicken, and the “second toast,” the same three strips of salty tinned fish, dark on their same small piece of flabby oil-soaked bread.

  Occasionally Ghote found himself recalling the purpose of his stay, the now overtaken purpose. He received a letter from headquarters in Bombay once, an answer both to his deviously delivered inquiry about Mr. Dhebar’s past of which nothing was known, and to the telegram he had sent from the railway station asking about Father Adam. Again nothing to any purpose. Well, nothing mattered until that day came—it would not be long—when it was the thirtieth anniversary of the ending of the Madurai Trial.

  And then one day into the slow calm there came a sudden small discordant sound. It was—he was surprised to have realised—in fact the day before the anniversary of the Madurai sentences. They were at tea, Sir Asif upright as ever in his high-backed peacock chair, Father Adam lounging as he always did, looking as always the most unpriestlike of priests, the Saint, who had returned as unexpectedly as he had gone, cross-legged up on his chair, eating nothing and, again, saying nothing, and Begum Roshan presiding over the silver teapot.

  And there had come then a scratching, loud and persistent.