‘We get ready to go to hunt this very night, boys and girls,’ announced Mr Watkins with much gusto.
‘Oh hurra!’ shouted Kurt, running up to us.
But his was the only enthusiastic response. The rest looked askance at the leader of the hunt in the manner in which one looks at a too energetic master-of-ceremonies on board a ship.
After we had had a hurried meal out of tins which the Americans had brought as their contribution to the house party, both out of consideration for His Highness in the days of food shortage and also to avoid having to eat hot curries, we got ready to go to the hunt.
The flowers around the lawns of the palace sent up exhalations of perfume as the evening thickened into night, the rich scent of the ‘Queen of the Night’ rising to a crescendo of triumph above the more discreet airs. And the trees stirred with a cool breeze that came from the slightly tempestous lake. And I wished that I was resting with my own thoughts and going to bed early rather than rushing out to the machan for a possible all-night wait for the panther to show up.
But Buta came to collect us and we trooped up behind him, by the light of primitive torches carried by the villagers turned shikaris.
Up the mountain-side we went, under the canopy of trees which blotted out the stars, and across a narrow track bordered by wild scrub, pomegranate bushes, cactus and heather, until we got to the scene of operations, the machan, about a quarter of a mile away from the lodge.
The machan was a forty-foot-high structure made of bamboo poles, hollow at the base, with a shooting-box on top, which was open on all sides and from which the hunters could shoot down on the beast below without any danger of retaliation from the hunted prey. The beast was drawn towards the machan by tying a live goat in the middle of a clearing below the shooting-box. The hunters ascended the box by means of a rather precarious bamboo ladder.
Naturally, the ascent to the box caused a lot of amusement and concern to the guests, the ladies shrieking as they went up the dizzy heights, step by anxious step, while the gentlemen laughed and tried chivalrously to help the fair sex towards the box.
The panther must have heard the guffaws of laughter and the hysterics and, therefore, refused to oblige by coming along to offer more joy at his expense. So we sat in the shooting-box on hard, uncomfortable chairs, or stood about, waiting for the beast to appear, and tense because Buta, the shikari, had enjoined strict silence if we were to draw the panther on.
A half moon was shining in one corner of the sky, and the stars seemed to be brighter than our hopes for a successful shoot, and the hum of vegetation, spasmodically interrupted by the drone of the beetles and the croaking of the frogs, all conduced to a restlessness which soon showed signs of eruption.
The ladies were the first to give evidence of this state of nerves.
Gangi had, after a few maudlin complaints, collapsed and was asleep with her head on Victor’s shoulder.
‘My dear, I am for bed,’ drawled Mrs Homer Lane with a husky reminiscence of Greta Garbo.
‘So am I, darling,’ said Mr Lane. ‘I am very tired and sleepy.’
‘It is best to go to bed early,’ put in Srijut Popatlal J. Shah, ‘especially after a long journey.’
‘OK, those who don’t want to wait had better go,’ said Mr Watkins rather gruffly.
‘And not so much noise either,’ said Mr Bell. ‘Otherwise, it’s all up with the hunt.’
‘It’s a shame,’ said Mrs Bell, ‘now the panther will never appear.’
‘You can go too if you like,’ Mr Bell said, turning to her rudely.
‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘I am for staying.’
‘I will conduct the party down,’ said young Kurt Landauer. ‘I shall lift Her Highness on my back if she is too sleepy.’
Victor turned to him, breathless and rather dazed. In a flash he knew that Gangi must have fallen for him and encouraged him during the early part of the evening, though how she could do so with her indifferent English he could not understand. But he knew that sex needed no language but the body. She was at it again, even though she had inclined, seemingly so innocently, on his shoulder until a little while ago.
‘One of the shikaris can carry her,’ said Srijut Popatlal J. Shah, breathing heavily with the uncontrolled jealousy of an old man losing his grip on life.
‘We will look after Her Highness,’ insisted Mr Bool Chand, puffing and blowing with a strange energy.
‘I think after all this talk the panther will never come,’ said Victor with a regal deliberation in his voice. ‘I suggest that we do the easy hunt which I had ordered as a second alternative. This will be over in half an hour. Then we can all go down together.’ And, without waiting for assent or dissent, he asked Captain Partap Singh to see if the cheetahs and the buck were ready.
‘Ji Huzoor,’ said Captain Partap Singh, and rushed down.
Orders passed from mouth to mouth and soon we could see activity down below on the clearing.
About a hundred yards away, the shikaris were leading two bullock carts, on each of which sat a cheetah, docile and well behaved like a domestic cat.
‘Where is the herd of buck?’ His Highness shouted, standing to his full height on the machan.
Gangi woke up with a start from her half-sleep and nearly fell from her chair. Victor did not help to steady her, and she whined:
‘Oh, Vicky, I was having such a sweet sleep.’
Kurt Landauer lunged forward and held her carefully by the shoulders.
‘Where is the buck, I say?’ shouted His Highness.
‘Maharaj, Buta has gone to round it up from the enclosure,’ answered Captain Partap Singh.
‘Are the cheetahs still hooded?’ His Highness shouted in a voice loud enough to wake up the whole sleeping jungle.
‘Yes, Maharaj,’ the assistant shikaris all answered with one voice.
And they got into position to remove the stiff cowls from the eyes of the cheetahs, which were tied ready to be released at a signal from the chief shikari, who had been rounding up the buck and driving them forward.
‘There is Buta coming with the herd,’ Captain Partap Singh shouted to reassure His Highness as he now stood by the bullock carts, on which the cheetahs strained at their chains on smelling their prey, the buck, coming nearer.
‘Silence!’ ordered His Highness as he sighted the black herd of buck come calmly across the clearing. And he turned to Mr Bool Chand and whispered, ‘Go, one of you, and ask Partap Singh whether the cheetahs should go off now!’
Except for Mr and Mrs Bell, the white guests did not know what was happening, but, pretending that they knew, watched the show quietly, though with eyes strained towards the clearing.
Now the cheetahs on the carts were swaying and struggling like dogs on a leash after a rabbit.
‘One cheetah off!’ His Highness cried impetuously without waiting for Mr Bool Chand to deliver the message to Captain Partap Singh.
At once the attendants on the carts took off the hood of one of the cheetahs. The beast spotted the herd of black buck, growled and gnashed its teeth.
‘Release him, son of a swine!’ ordered His Highness with a mounting temper.
The attendants seemed to fidget a little nervously. Then they released the chain. The cheetah sprang forward like an arrow from a hunter’s bow. The buck had a fairly long start, for Buta had not deemed it fit to give the signal for the cheetah’s release yet. But the trained beast had been writhing in a pent-up fury and overtook one of the most delicate-seeming buck, seizing on its tender neck, while the rest of the herd scurried in a panic.
‘Bravo! Bravo!’ His Highness shouted with a gong-like voice. And the guests clapped, while the cheetah sat sucking the life-blood of the buck with the cruellest and most relentless grasp imaginable, pressing down on its prey with fiendish howls and growls. The buck sank back exhausted, almost dead before the cheetah, its horns standing useless but strangely, uncannily angry, with their points thrust against the wrath of its destroyer
.
Buta, the shikari, ran and covered the cheetah’s eyes with a hood again, while the beast had its teeth in the neck of the buck. With deft hands the shikari cut open the buck and, dragging out its entrails, offered the cheetah a meal more suited to its palate than the neck, which was to be reserved for His Highness’s guests. The cheetah had to be forced to transfer its desire from the tender neck to the entrails. But once it tasted the second course it left the neck willingly enough.
At the point when Mrs Homer Lane saw the cheetah fall upon the entrails, she uttered one shrill shriek of pain and fell back in a faint.
Victor ran back towards her, full of rage at the spoiling of his fun, for the second cheetah had yet to go off, and yet chivalrous at the sight of Mrs Lane’s weakness.
Mrs Lane was sinking, helpless, her white face, with its wide nostrils, transfigured with a ghastly green flush, her mouth frothing.
Mr Lane was fanning her with his hands and bending over her so as to prevent Victor from getting too near her.
All the guests stood still as they watched the scene with impatience and alarm.
In a moment, however, her eyes opened with a melting light and saw Victor looking at her and smiled.
As though not to be outdone by any other woman in commanding the attention of the men, Gangi also let out a deliberate shriek and fell limply on the floor in an obviously histrionic faint.
This was Kurt Landauer’s chance to show his gallantry. He lifted her to the chair and fanned her with the lapel of his shirt till she came round.
Srijut Popatlal J. Shah’s face wore a scowl of frustration at his inability to show the necessary chivalry.
Mr and Mrs Bell were angry that the fun of the hunt had been spoiled.
Mr Peter Watkins was in a rage that emotional complications had already begun to spoil all the joy of the shoot, especially as he had left his wife and kids at home just in order to have the pleasures of pure sport.
‘OK, we go home and sleep!’ he said in a disgruntled voice. ‘We have had enough for one night.’
However vivid and beautiful the dawn in the jungle, it had no fascination for the white members of the hunting party in the Dharam Pur Lodge after the previous night’s exploits. So that the chota hazri of tea and toast remained untouched by every bedstead and not all the insistence of Bhagirath, the Maharaja’s cook-bearer, succeeded in persuading the bearers of the sahibs to go near their masters with the request that they come down for breakfast. The Indian members of the party, however, who were unused to sleeping after sunrise, all came down, except for Ganga Dasi, who affected a slight indisposition as usual.
I found Victor very silent at table, with black shadows under his eyes. For, apparently, he had slept badly. After breakfast I drew him away to the shady part of the lawn and, without much ceremony, accosted him with a brief, brutal summing-up of the whole position.
‘The moon is in her blood again,’ I said. ‘And you must cut her out ruthlessly. Otherwise she will deceive you again and again and destroy you.’
‘Will she never change?’ Victor asked almost in a whisper, refusing to believe that he should ever have to give her up.
I moved my head in negation and added, ‘No, I don’t think so.’
Victor hung his head down. ‘Perhaps I am unnecessarily jealous,’ he said. ‘She can’t possibly fall for that hog Popatlal J. Shah. And as for Kurt Landauer, it may be only a passing fancy.’
‘I don’t think she will fall for anyone,’ I said. ‘I rather think that she despises men. Only, she is absolutely unscrupulous and wants to make use of them. Popatlal obviously seems highly useful to her, because she thinks she can secure the gaddi for her son through him and get an estate for herself into the bargain. And Kurt is a young man who pleases her vanity by paying attentions to her.’
‘I have myself rather fallen for Mrs Lane,’ said Victor. ‘And I don’t mind her flirting with Kurt. . . . But do you think—she has already slept with Popatlal?’
He uttered the last sentence with some trepidation, as though he half knew the answer and realized that my confirmation would dishearten him by leaving no element of doubt in his mind, where hope for her return could flourish and luxuriate in an atmosphere of indecision.
‘I think yes,’ I said, putting some deliberation into my voice.
‘When do you think she went to Popatlal? And what makes you say so? What evidence have you?’ Victor asked, his face harrowed, his lips trembling a little.
‘In Sham Pur, on the night when she locked you out,’ I answered.
‘Is there nothing that can cure her? Where have I failed her? What don’t I give her that she finds the need to drift away from me?’
‘It is her wayward temperament,’ I said, ‘a kind of habit now, after she has met and left so many men, a kind of weakness in her which she cannot control.’
Victor’s eyes were fear-haunted and furtive, unable to settle on any particular thing. It seemed as though he would willingly cut himself up and throw the carcass of his love at her feet to trample on if she liked, because at least that would be more dramatic and concrete, and he would then have to believe that she was being cruel to him, really believe it, rather than be racked by the uncertainty that she might still love him in some corner of her soul. And as he put his fingers into his hair and pulled the forelock it seemed to me that his desire to torment himself, to rend himself, seemed to become an overwhelming passion, bigger even than his love for her.
‘I think,’ I said to console him, ‘that she wants ultimately to be on her own, and alone, away from all the men who foul her, taking them and the others she needs, and thus active in life, but not to be absorbed by them. But what you are seeking is absorption with her. And this she resists, because she does not really want to be possessed, even though she wants to possess. It is this conflict in her, between being possessed and dominated, and the will to be free, that makes things different. She wants to run wild like a goat, from mountain to mountain, with a strange ambition to get there, she does not know where.’
Victor seemed to be overcome by the wonder and awe of this revelation about her. And yet he didn’t seem to believe in this ruthless analysis. He had never quite forgotten her prostration of the first days of their life together, the passion she had brought to him and the strange, almost servile, devotion. She had been aware of his status as the Maharaja and she had exalted him as her lord and willingly reduced herself to the position of a slave. She had kissed his feet, and touched his body with reverence and tended him with loving care. And, during the first few years, when she had his two children, she had gone on being his slave, kissing his feet and worshipping him as her lord and master, while he was her king, as well as ruler of the state, with his responsibilities. From having a split mind himself, incapable of any permanent attachments in his youth, he had become rooted in her and hardly ever craved for other emotional relationships, except when she drove him to a frenzy of desperation. Now she had begun to demand her rights and to assert herself with complete licence, and to give herself to his inferiors. That she could leave him, the great Maharaja, hurt his pride. And now how could she revolt against him, especially when he was cornered on all sides? Somewhere in his nature, in spite of a dim awareness of the discord between them, he could not accept this rejection. It would be like accepting failure, the failure of his whole life’s effort at finding a base for his emotions; it would be the death knell of all his hopes of fighting for the independence of his state; and it would leave him utterly destroyed, joyless and dead.
I realized all this on that morning, seated by Victor on the veranda of the hunting lodge, and I knew that His Highness also vaguely surmised that I had come to this awareness. But he felt that I wanted to talk to him and he did not want to listen.
‘Don’t you think she will ever . . .?’ Victor insisted again, but did not finish his sentence.
‘The thing is to cure oneself,’ I said. But realizing how priggish an answer that was, I added: ‘I
know how agonizing it is to be attached to a person, to have lived with her and grown into her and then to have to contemplate rejection by her. I can guess. . . . Only in the casual affair does this pain not arise. But once one is bitten by affection for a person, and this affection has become sex, and passionate sex, capped by the mental habits of marriage, then only the more stupid and insensitive of the partners can destroy it. For, already the joy of such a relationship has become a kind of super reality, an illusion, an infectious illusion.’
‘It is not an illusion to me,’ Victor said desperately.
‘I said “infectious illusion”,’ I answered. ‘It is like a contagious disease: once one catches it one has to suffer it. But you can take it that people like the Queen Bee, who are promiscuous, always suffer each time they go and satisfy their vanity, because age makes an important difference. At thirty a woman becomes richer with giving herself in sex, but at thirty-five or forty infidelity does not really rejuvenate her. It only nourishes the illusion that she is wanted and pleases her vanity. And soon the illusion wears thin. And then either women pursue the illusion again or give up.’
‘So they can give up the illusion, sometimes?’ Victor said, looking for any ray of hope.
‘The pitfall in the psychology of a nymphomaniac is that she will believe that her next victim will be the last,’ I answered. ‘Whereas there is an infinite regress in this business.’
Victor got up with evident disgust and cleared his throat. His eyes were averted from me as though he was too hurt to be able to bear to look at me. I felt tender towards him because I realized how he was harrowed by suspicion. And I sought to console him with a platitude.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 69