Nightrunners of Bengal

by John Masters

  He dozed off, a tall man of thirty with black whiskers curling up on high cheekbones. His right hand, the sinews standing out on it, gripped the arm of the chair; his left hand hung at his side. The same duality, of calm and impulse, was in his face; the jaws were hard, the mouth sensitive; the hair classical-black and long, the nose high-bridged and un-classical. The firelight painted his sunburnt skin with bronze, and blurred the crosshatching of fine wrinkles at the corners of his eye sockets. A log cracked and he opened his eyes quickly; they were blue and frosted, and eager. But there was nothing. The room was quiet and the fire silent. His eyes dulled; the corners of his mouth settled a little downward. Only peasants and beggars travelled the Pike these days; there were no kings, no hunters, and no horsemen on desperate ventures. On this last day of 1856 deep peace lay over India. The Moguls were gone and Clive long dead. Rodney dozed again.

  2

  In the victoria she was a wrapped splendour of pearl and gold, and the immensity of her skirts covered the whole of the seat opposite him. The coachman’s head nodded against the night sky; the carriage mare blew through her nostrils as the raw cold tickled them. The lamps outside the quarter guard of the 88th Bengal Native Infantry were haloed by the damp; the sepoy sentries paced slowly, their red coats and brown faces vaguely seen, their white cross-belts, cuffs, and collars standing out sharp. Opposite, the court buildings and gaol loomed black against the stars. A hundred yards farther on, lights glowed in the dim bulk of the Commissioner’s bungalow, and traced yellow paths across the grass and shrubs of the garden. In the shadows of the gates’ stone pillars two watchmen leaned on iron-tipped staves.

  Colleen, the carriage mare, trotted incuriously past all these symbols of the colossal empire of the Honourable East India Company. Rodney had been born in and of that empire, but still it took his breath away when he considered the power created by those English merchants who had striven here and made themselves the masters of princes. Two hundred and forty-eight years ago their envoys had come to Agra and begged the Great Mogul to let them build a trading post beside the sea. A century ago they bowed and scraped for the favour of the King of Oudh. Today, by luck and aggressive skill, by courage and persevering deceit, their footholds had so expanded that their Presidency of Bengal alone extended seventeen hundred miles from Burma to Afghanistan, and seven hundred miles from the Himalaya to the Nerbudda.

  Their other two Presidencies, Bombay and Madras, had swallowed the rest of India; the heir of the Moguls existed only as their pensioner; the King of Oudh had no kingdom. The map of India was a daub of British red, patched by yellow islands to mark the states of the remaining rajahs. On British sufferance, these states ruled themselves, but were forbidden to treat with each other or with any foreign power.

  The Company had become a weird blend of trading corporation and administrative engine, and the English government in London controlled it. It traded as it wished, and dictated treaties. It minted money, made laws, collected taxes, and executed criminal and civil justice. It kept the peace--and made war from Persia to China. The man who was its chief representative in India, the Governor General, had direct and almost unlimited power over a hundred million people, and indirect power over other millions living in the states. When the Governor General spoke, the largest volunteer standing force in the world moved to compel obedience.

  In fact the Governor General controlled three armies; each of the Presidencies maintained its own, and together they numbered 38,000 British and 348,000 native troops, with 524 field guns. The native soldiers, the sepoys, served under British officers in regiments raised by and belonging to the Honourable East India Company. The Company also maintained in each Presidency a few all-British regiments; but the majority of the white-skinned soldiers in India were in Queen’s regiments, those raised by and belonging to the Queen. The English government hired out the Queen’s regiments to the Company, for a spell of duty in India while they were on their rounds of the other British colonial possessions overseas.

  Rodney smiled a little grimly. Colleen was a symbol herself--a country-bred carriage horse, trotting peacefully down a road made in some dim past by Indian slaves, rebuilt and maintained now by English engineers; trotting on, clip-clop, clip-clop, heedless alike of the Mogul ghosts, the brocaded hunters, the Mahratta horsemen, the centuries of pillage and destruction which had surged up and down this road. No more now though: the land lay quiet under a strong hand. The railways crept west from Calcutta, the telegraph posts strode across the millet fields, the dams rose in the rivers.

  He found it a strange thing to hate his exile, and yet to love the country which was its place. His blood was pure English; could it be that the generations of Savages who worked and made love here had passed on to him this awareness of India? England was over the seas and in the north; he looked up at the blurred stars and sighed.

  Joanna said, “What is it? Have you left something behind?”

  “No. I was remembering the way the snow crackled under the wheels when Mother took me back to Charterhouse after my first Christmas holidays--the same at Addiscombe. The stars in England have a frosty glitter you don’t see here. I wish--I wish I could make a lot of money and retire quickly --perhaps I don’t. I don’t know.”

  She put her hand on his. “Rodney, why don’t you ask for employment under the civil? Mr. Dellamain would recommend you--though you’re not very polite to him. Or go on the staff? They get much better pay.”

  “Perhaps.” So that he would be considered a more important person in Anglo-India!

  Nothing would induce her to give up this life and return to middle-class nonentity in England. For himself, he did not want to leave his regiment and the sepoys. Year by year he waited for some great thing to turn up for him to do. His father had found such a thing: not many people in England would have heard of the man who rooted out the system of religious murder and robbery called thuggee; yet every year ten thousand Indian travellers, who before William Savage’s time would have vanished from the roads, now returned safely to their homes. Something like that might come to his hand, something as big.

  The carriage turned into the Club drive, and he sat forward on the edge of the seat, clapping his white-gloved hands, for it was cold. Chinese lanterns hung along the front verandah, and string music pulsed out through the closed windows.

  He repeated softly, “Perhaps, some day. But tonight let’s dance in this New Year of eighteen fifty-seven. It will be the twentieth of the Queen’s reign; the sixty-ninth of my regiment, the Company’s two hundred and fifty-eighth.”

  They entered the centre hall. The earthy dark of the night was in his nostrils, so that the waft of flowers and scent struck cloying sweet, and the shaded lights seemed harsh. Plants stood in pots on tables in the hall and coloured loops of paper lent the pink-washed walls an air of provisional gaiety. Someone had sewn up the rent in the ceiling cloth where the rat fell through during the monsoon of ‘55. He hung up his greatcoat and shako, stretched his neck, and tugged at the back of his shell jacket. Relaxing, he paced slowly through the lounge towards the ballroom.

  English people eddied about among scattered chairs and couches. Indian servants, white-clothed and red-sashed, slipped hither and thither with trays, the full skirts of their robes swinging. Across the ballroom a Goanese band, hired from Bombay, sat in chairs on a two-foot dais and fiddled energetically at the alien music. The floor shuddered in the rhythm of the dancers, and Rodney’s feet began to tap with the music. Lines of pleasure sprang to crease his face, and his eyes lit up with clash and blend of moving colour. Half mesmerized, he saw the officers of the 60th Bengal Light Cavalry as grey and silver waves, swirling among the scarlet and white ships of the 88th, breaking on the black and silver rocks of his own 13th.

  The women were drifts of foam--and Victoria de Forrest a dull maroon anemone. The girl did look voluptuous. And she was dancing with Eddie Hedges, who had curly fair hair and a hard mouth, and didn’t care a damn about anything except his own
pleasures. Rodney wondered if Joanna’s hints were true.

  Joanna was coming towards him. As she reached his side, a young man in the uniform of the 60th came up, tapped his programme against the cords on Rodney’s jacket, and cried cheerfully, “Number five--mine, sir!”

  Rodney grinned. Cornet Walter Percy Mervuglio, nicknamed Julio, whose family had been settled for three generations in England, thought English but still gesticulated Sicilian.

  Rodney said, “Wait a minute, Julio. Are you coming out after snipe next Thursday--tomorrow week?”

  The dark face smiled in sudden animation, while Joanna moued prettily and swished her fan. “By Jove, yes. Three in the morning at your bungalow, isn’t it? And may I come back to dinner, Mrs. Savage? Captain Savage is going to help me plan my trip after tiger next cold weather.” He turned to Rodney. “You know that double-barrelled sixteen- bore with twenty-six-inch barrels--“

  Rodney interrupted laughingly. “For heaven’s sake, Julio --eleven months hence! That can wait; Joanna won’t.”

  Smiling, he watched them go. Turning away, he found a slim girl of fifteen at his elbow. She watched the dancing with brown, deliberately slumbrous eyes, and pretended to be oblivious of his presence. Rodney caught one pigtail and pulled it gently. “Hullo, Rachel.”

  She gave a realistic start and sighed heavily. “Goodness me, isn’t this boring! Mother’s in the lounge, talking nineteen to the dozen with that awful old stick Captain Gosse. Pa is in the men’s bar, reading the Bible aloud to prove that dancing’s wicked--you can hear him from the hall--and he has taken too much to drink.”

  Rodney gave the pigtail another tweak and said, “When’s your big brother coming out?”

  “William? In a few months--and he’s going to get an ensignship in the Eighty-eighth, our regiment. It’ll be wonderful. He’s so handsome!”

  Rodney listened, and wondered for the hundredth time what frolicsome god had attended the mating when Rachel was conceived. Kindly, stupid Two-Bottle Tom Myers, who wrestled drunkenly with the potentates of Hell, and prayed to God, God his punishing Father, to bend down and strike him with a thunderbolt that all these cynical fools might see how abominable was strong drink in His eyes; “Mother” Myers, twenty years an officer’s wife and still in all her thoughts and ways a Sussex farmer’s daughter--and from their union, this wildly imaginative dark sprite.

  He wanted to laugh, but, looking into the girl’s eyes, he controlled himself, smiled, and left her.

  Joanna had arranged that they should join the Hatton-Dunns. He began to manoeuvre slowly through the crowd, stopping here and there for a word and a greeting, bowing to right and left. Geoffrey Hatton-Dunn was there, he saw, sprawled in an armchair, and Lady Isobel, and of course her cousin the Langford girl. As they sat side by side on a sofa the family resemblance was very noticeable--same grey eyes, same bone structure, same pallid skin; but Isobel was bigger, her face was squarer, and the other’s tautness was in her transmuted to a relaxed assurance; Rodney liked Isobel very much. He saw that she had enticed poor Alan Torrance into the party as escort for Caroline, and that the boy did not look happy.

  While he was still greeting them the music stopped, and Joanna joined them and sat down. The clatter and clink in the lounge grew louder, and Geoffrey poured champagne.

  Alan Torrance ran a hand over his smooth hair. “Miss Langford’s been lec--telling us about the Silver Guru’s crows. Asking how it’s done, what it means. Dashed if I know--do you, by any chance?”

  Rodney shrugged. Why not forget the crows, on this of all nights? Tonight, if they all tried together, and all agreed to pretend that the servants were English footmen, their spirits would not actually be in India; they would be friends and neighbours meeting in an English country house.

  To change the subject, Joanna said something light about the band, but Caroline Langford interrupted as though such small talk had no right to be heard at a moment like this. She leaned forward, tapping the table with her fan.

  “I’ll tell you why I must find out. After these six months at Kishanpur, living in a state, I have decided that we English only inhabit the surface of India. You know I was teaching the Rani our style of deportment, and improving her English? I saw the old Rajah too, and made him talk sense”--she lifted her head and her jaw line tightened--”after he’d tried to fob me off with the nonsense men think will satisfy a woman. Rajahs are so rich and autocratic that I’d expected them to be even more cut off from the common people than we are. It is not so. If something worried his people, the Rajah felt it. I think the crows, and what the Silver Guru said, worried all the Indians who were by the tree--so it ought to worry us, because we’re supposed to be their friends, as well as their rulers.”

  Joanna was annoyed; she said. “Come, Miss Langford, we will begin to think you have quite gone native. It is no use bothering about the natives’ superstitions, my husband says --don’t you, dear?”

  Rodney felt trapped and unhappy; that was not at all what he meant when he said, as he often did, that some things about India were inexplicable. He fumbled for words. “It’s not quite that--it’s a question of proportion . . .”

  He hesitated, and Geoffrey stood up. “Proportion--exactly,” he said. “If we worried about every queeah thing that happened, we’d nevah have time to school our chargers. . . . Theah’s the music--mine, I think, Isobel?”

  Lady Isobel gripped the arm of the sofa and pulled herself upright. She walked forward with a heavy limp, her left foot chunking on the floor and the cripple’s boot on that side showing plainly under her skirt. Someone came to claim Joanna, and Torrance slipped away.

  Rodney hardly noticed them go; he was watching Caroline Langford as she in turn watched her cousin. A sudden and unexpected grace softened her profile, and her lips were slightly parted. Rodney said quietly, “She is a wonderful person.”

  The girl moved her legs as if their true proportions angered her. She said, half aloud, “Her body’s so awkward--her face is so calm.” She turned her eyes on him. “I wish I was that way round.” The words came in a rush, and she stopped short.

  Embarrassed, Rodney struggled to get up, and asked her to dance. The stern lines jumped into place round her wide mouth.

  “Sit down, sir. I will excuse you from your painful duty. And do not bother to explain away Geoffrey’s levity--he ought to have been a poet, and he’s shy. Tell me, where is the next English station?”

  The abrupt change of subject notified him that she was back at her desk, again inquisitorial and impersonal. This game he would not play for long, not tonight, and he answered lightly.

  “Agra to the north, a hundred and thirty miles; Gondwara to the south, a hundred and forty miles. East and west? No, nothing for impossible distances over impossible roads—just the states: Kishanpur to the east, where you’ve been staying; Lalkot to the west. The communications here run mainly north and south, like the rivers.”

  “So India is your palace, but you live shut up with yourselves in little rooms like this Bhowani Cantonment, and the next English room is always away at the other end of the palace somewhere?”

  He looked at her curiously. It was a bizarre idea, and against his will it made him think. After a while he said, “In a way, I suppose we do. But, you know, we visit the other rooms too--the Indian ones. The civil--magistrates, revenue people, administrators, and so on--reach into every village. The Commissioner is the head of that here. You’ve met Mr. Dellamain?”

  “Yes. But do you make these visits? Does your wife, or any woman? And even ‘the civil,’ as you call them, do they not merely visit, instead of live in, the Indian rooms?”

  “Miss Langford, they do their best. We all do. But to feel India in the way you say your Kishanpur friends do, you must become Indian, gain one set of qualities and lose an- other. As a race we don’t do it--we can’t. Women, now--English ladies have to be careful. Indian customs are very different from ours, and we do not want any misunderstandings to spoil things.” He
avoided her eyes. “As for us officers, we know the sepoys, which means we know the classes and castes they are enlisted from. The Bengal sepoy is the salt of the earth, the most wonderful person anyone can have the privilege of knowing--though I suppose there are just as fine men in the other Presidencies--.“

  He caught himself up and looked sharply at her. He always did it, always gave these damned visitors and Queen’s officers their opening to sneer at Anglo-Indian enthusiasm, to say something about “faithful blacks” and “doglike devotion.”

  But her face was interested, and though she said the usual thing she said it to get an answer, not as a barb of condescension. Besides, she accented the question as if it were his own particular faith which interested her. “You love them, don’t you?”

  He hesitated, analysing himself more carefully than he had ever done.

  “Love? That’s a strong word. One man here loves them--Colonel Bulstrode, oddly enough. He loves them--as a father loves a pack of half-witted sons. For most of us it’s a sort of giving: we each give all we have, and we don’t keep accounts. Of course there are things we don’t know about each other--but aren’t there things you don’t know about your father, or your cousin Lady Isobel? Things you don’t want or need to know? It’s only trust that matters, and we do trust each other, we and the native officers and the sepoys--completely, unconditionally.”

  Her expression had softened again as he spoke. She said in a gentle deep voice, “I understand, I think. But don’t you ever feel that you and the sepoys might be pulled in opposite directions--oh, by religion, or politics?”

  He had to raise his voice to answer her, and lean forward in his chair, for the music of a polka crashed and swung, and around them men were laughing.

  “It would have to be something so fundamental that we wouldn’t have sufficient faith--loyalty, trust, whatever you like to call it--to bring it out into the open. Remember that every single native soldier is a volunteer. The people have for centuries been the toads under the harrows of a lot of vicious rajahs. Never again. They can look forward to peace for about the first time in the whole of India’s history. Think what that means to a man who needs all his energy, all his life, to get a living out of this soil.”