by John Masters
In a single moment of inspired vision William saw his district as a living, breathing thing, an angel’s reach of earth, watered, peopled, sucking in this air, sleeping under these stars. The Road, arterial, venous, million-branched, was a living thing which required that men should walk free along it, as the winds blew free across it and the rains fell free upon it. His work lay there. He must find a way.
There had been a long silence. The papers under his hand seemed far off and very small, as though seen through the wrong end of a spyglass. George was looking at him, a little puzzled, a little contemptuous.
George said, ‘Cheer up! I’m going to Khapa. I’ll be in the same boat as you by the middle of next week. Then we can foregather at Chikhli when all is blackest and together throw ourselves into the murky stream.’
‘Are you? You’ll find it’s the only life, far better than that social rot in Sagthali.’ He saw George’s smile and went on, ‘I know you like all that too, and you’re certainly good at it. But you’ll be good at this. You’ll pick it up in no time. Mr. Wilson won’t have any trouble with you. What happened to Griffin?’
George lifted his elbow again, and William nodded. ‘Dead?’
‘Strait-jacket. The day after his talk with the Old Man.’
‘Oh, good. I mean, not so bad!’
They smiled together. William could not dislike George without envying him. And when you envied something, you wanted it. So you’d be disliking yourself. Perhaps you would, if you were George.
William said, ‘Let’s split another bottle of claret. You’ll come out after partridge this evening?’
‘Love to, William. The bride coming too?’
‘Yes. She’s fond of shikar.’
Talking and smiling, William followed his guest to the drawing-room. The worst was over. With Mary in his mind he had faced it and seen it through. It really was no use being afraid.
In the drawing-room Mary stood against the light, her head drawn proudly up and the skin taut about her eyes. She saw his face and relaxed; her eyes smiled at him. He said, ‘All finished. All well.’
She stepped gracefully away from the window and across the room. ‘A drink? A cup of tea?’
In the night William lay still for a long time and listened to Mary’s steady, deep breathing. He could not sleep. He slid out under the mosquito net and walked across the rush-matted floor. Mosquitoes whined in his ears and settled on his bare wrists. His muslin sleeping skirt swished faintly against his legs.
He had made a decision and now faced the problem of executing it. Deciding had been hard; this might be harder. He could not catch the band of murderers unless he went out on the roads after them. He could not go out after them without neglecting his other work. If he did that, he might be dismissed from the service.
The same problem would face his successor. The roads, at this time, required constant observation, and something more—love, perhaps, or understanding. Without a special devotion to the task, effort would go astray.
He looked out of the window on to the starlit grass and the bulky, shadowed trees. They had the same outline as those trees beside the Seonath where the wife of Gopal the weaver sat on the ground beside her unlit pyre.
Mary’s whisper made him start violently. ‘William, please come and talk to me.’
He climbed back into bed, and she curled up against him, lying with one leg between his and one breast pressed softly on his chest. ‘Darling William, can’t I help?’
‘You have. You don’t know how much.… I know what must I do. I must go out on the roads.’ He tried to tell her of the reasons for the decision; but they were in part mystical, and he could not, with his halting tongue, make his vision of the Road shine out in this hushed English bedroom. He tried to tell her of the difficulties facing him.
She said, ‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘William, you are right. You are always right, in yourself. You have only one real task now: the murders. What does it matter if Daddy gets cross?’
‘I’ll be dismissed.’
‘I don’t believe it! And what does that matter? They’ll only send you back to your regiment.’
That they would—send him back, marked ‘Failure.’ It was the loom of failure that made him fail. If a man did not care about failing, he usually succeeded. He had seen that plenty of times.
Mary went on whispering (why did married people whisper in bed in their own houses?), ‘I was thinking, while you were in the study with George.’ (Ah, of course, George was in the next room. He had forgotten: she hadn’t.) ‘Listen, you throw the onus on Daddy. Catch the murderers. If he wants to dismiss you after that, he has to tell the Governor-General that it’s because you were doing something important and he wouldn’t give you any help. That’s not failure!’
He lay without stirring, and muttered, ‘I don’t know where to begin.’
‘We must get more people on our side, see that everyone knows and is on the alert. I’m positive those men murdered Gopal the weaver! It wasn’t just luck that led you to them. We must have lots of police on the roads and give rewards for all and any information. Every village out to be made responsible for the roads and trails past it. Why don’t you put police posts on important roads to check travellers in and out of the district? No, that wouldn’t work.’
She was leaning on one elbow, talking urgently. Her forcefulness flooded through him. His voice in reply was sharp, almost snappish. ‘Of course I can do some of that, but I can’t scratch the surface without more men. They won’t give them to me.’
‘Raise a corps of volunteers! Compel all the important men in the district, Chandra Sen and all the others, to subscribe to a fund for paying more police. Threaten everyone with extra taxes. Hint that you’ll decide cases against anyone who doesn’t give money or spend a day a month patrolling the roads.’ The starlight sparkled in her eyes, and William gulped nervously. She was riding at a gallop through every sacred rule and principle of the Honourable East India Company’s administration.
‘But—but——’
‘I’ve got some money. Quite a lot. Daddy gave it to me as a sort of private dowry. He made me promise never to let you have the handling of it.’ She laughed cheerfully, and so loudly that the bedroom rang. ‘We’ll use it to raise new police, tomorrow!’
Still he was silent. He had been alone too long, too long reliant on his own insecure self. His eyes pricked and hurt in the darkness. Mary’s warmth against him dragged up his loneliness, and he turned to her with a cry. She opened her arms and engulfed him.
‘There, there, my dearest husband … William, there, there…’
Chapter Eight
They rode together down the road, rolled cloaks on their saddle bows. The horses’ hoofs sank deep into the soft surface, throwing up clods of earth as they came free at each pace. Mud splashed the horses’ legs from fetlock to belly and soiled the riders’ clothes. The heavy air deadened all sound, softened all outlines. The sun shone in a deep blue sky among drifting white masses of cloud. The Collector of Madhya, accompanied by his wife, was returning from a tour of his district. The town of Madhya lay ahead among distant trees.
Other things marked the passage of time: a certain ease in the way husband and wife rode together; the manner he had now of turning to her; an unashamed affection in his eyes and voice. It was late in September, 1825.
He said, ‘Nearly home. It was a useful trip.’
She nodded. Every year, as soon as the slackening of the monsoon made travel feasible, the Collector of Madhya went out on a brief tour of his district. This time he had been on the road for two and a half weeks, and Mary had been with him. Through fifty little villages they had discussed crops, taxes, and local disputes with headmen and peasants. In its direct purposes the tour had been successful. But beyond that was their campaign to find the murderers, and in that battle the tour, like all their previous efforts since March, had produced a net result of nothing.
&nb
sp; In March they had begun their campaign. In June the rains broke, the little streams became torrents and the roads deserted ribbons of bog. In September the rains lightened their grip on the land and travellers girded themselves for their journeys. A new season of travel would begin formally with the Dussehra festival in three weeks’ time.
For all their searchings they had found nothing, and no more murders had come to light. William could see no comfort even in that—rather the opposite. Dussehra was close, and he feared he was on the wrong trail.
He looked ahead. Already the travellers whom it was his duty to protect were out on the roads. Half a mile in front, a score of men and women walked toward Madhya behind a big flock of goats. He strained his eyes, saw they had no baggage, and knew they were only going a few miles between villages. Tiny in the softened distance beyond the goats, a solitary man approached from the direction of Madhya. Turning in the saddle, William saw two mounted travellers half a mile back, and with them five servants or followers on foot, all heading for Madhya.
He returned to his thoughts. Early in March he had enrolled four extra squads of mounted police and appointed one man in each squad to be daffadar. Some had come with horses, which he hired as he hired the men. For the rest, he had sent a coper through the bazaars of the north and west to pick up likely animals.
He had stationed one squad permanently by the ferry at Bhadora, and they reported that the woman still sat by her pyre. Unknown hands had built a shelter over her before the rains came. Unknown hands placed food beside her on leaf-plates and every day filled a cracked jar with water. In the dark she moved to the riverside, the police said. She kept alive.
The other four squads William had sent out to patrol the roads and trails of the district, the men working in pairs. They had seen nothing and heard nothing—partly, at least, because travellers were more afraid of them than of any unseen danger. The anarchy of the Pindaris was not far back: armed horsemen were objects of terror still, whatever ragged travesty of British uniform they wore.
All the while the village patels brought in stories of suspicious characters seen, uncanny noises heard. William had spent hundreds of hours investigating. Most of the tales turned out to be rumours and nothing more; a few were by-products of local feuds; the remainder had been thought up out of whole cloth. The patels, eager to please and impressed with the gravity of the situation, seemed to feel that suspicion would fall on them unless reports of strange incidents were occasonally made from their areas.
And while William fought against the murderers, the slow ponderous anger of the government bore down on his back. He had neglected its other business, and it was displeased. In May Mr. Wilson had sent him a formal reprimand. In June, when the monsoon broke, William and Mary and the clerk had worked furiously together and succeeded in clearing some of the arrears of paper work. Mr. Wilson’s fusillade of notes, enquiries, and others slackened as the monsoon strengthened. The rain poured down and beat on the roof. William worked at his desk until his eyes hurt, then found refuge and short hours of peace in his carpenter’s shop. Sometimes he talked with Mary in the drawing-room when the rains made it so dark that the lamps had to be lit at midday.
Once she had said, ‘You know, I think the government doesn’t want this story uncovered.’ It had shocked him at the time. But Reeves, his predecessor here, was now a Commissioner somewhere in Bengal. The Agent before Mr. Wilson had climbed to new heights. The smell would rise high and wrinkle many mighty nostrils.
Mary’s horse shied at a stone, and he grabbed her reins in alarm.
‘It’s all right, William. I’m not made of porcelain.’ She pushed out her lower lip at him, and he shook his head and grinned contentedly. The baby ought to be born in April.
The lone traveller from Madhya drew level with them, almost past. William was looking at his wife, and the affectionate smile lingered on his face. Mary blushed and turned down her eyes.
Without moving her head she said, ‘That man’s neck is bent on one side.’
Five seconds later William realized what she had said. He swung his horse round with a shout. ‘Hey, you! Stop! Come here!’
The man, seemingly lost in the reverie of the longdistance traveller, started back, looked up at the towering horse, and began to run toward a thin line of saj trees bordering the road. Beyond the trees a field of turned red earth showed plain and open. The man saw that he could not escape from a horseman that way. He stopped, turned, and came cringing forward, his hands in front of his face, palms joined.
‘Great lord, great lord, what does your lordship want of a poor man?’
The grooms ran up; Mary spurred forward to cut off his retreat. He was trying to hold his head upright, but he had to bend the upper part of his body in compensation. William looked down between his horse’s ears and felt a grim triumph flood through him. Someone had been bound to pick this fellow up, sooner or later, if he travelled in the district. He was glad the chance had fallen to him—through Mary.
He said, ‘What is your name?’
‘Hussein, great lord.’
‘Profession? No lies, now!’
The man hesitated and looked furtively up and down the road. ‘I dare not tell you, sahib,’ he said, eyeing the grooms meaningly.
‘Where are you going, where have you come from?’
‘I have come from Balaghat, and I go to Agra.’
‘On the twenty-seventh of February you travelled to the Bhadora ferry, westbound, in company with a Sikh and his son?’
The man cringed deeper and moved his shoulders, clasping his fingers together. ‘How should I know, sahib? I travel much. It is my business. I am not an educated man. How should I know the time and place?’
‘You would remember a Sikh. We do not see many here.’
The man screwed up his brow. ‘I think I recall them, perhaps. I am not sure.’
‘That’s enough. You come with me. I want to talk to you.’ He spoke to the grooms. ‘Watch him closely, you two. Here, give me my gun.’
They rode on toward Madhya, Mary’s blue eyes alight, William carrying his loaded fowling-piece across his saddle. Ahead of them the lopsided man trudged through the muddy puddles, a groom at each side.
In Madhya, Mary went to the bungalow and William took their prisoner direct to the tiny mud-walled jail. He called the jail watchman and took from him the keys of the cell used for dangerous criminals. The gallows stood in the courtyard outside the barred window. William did not have the power to award sentences of death; the gallows were a relic of the stern days of martial law eight years ago, when sometimes twenty Pindaris at a time had been hanged here and afterwards displayed in chains on the roadsides.
He pushed the man into the cell, followed, and locked the door from the inside. The watchman protested, but he told him curtly to be quiet and sent him away.
Surveying the lopsided man closely and in a better light, he confirmed his first impression. The man—Hussein, he’d said—was quite nondescript. He had no particular features except that small inclination of the head. On entering the cell William had been triumphant and angry. Those emotions were already evaporating. He remembered something this man had said in the forest near Kahari: ‘There’s nothing in the world more important for you—Gopal.’ It had been the truth. But it implied that Hussein had then expected murder, and that Hussein had then known he was not Gopal but an English official.
Hussein squatted on the floor and kept his eyes down. At last William said quietly, ‘That Sikh and his son were murdered. You left them just before they fell in with their murderers at the grove by Kahari.’ He dared not mention anything about himself yet.
Hussein looked up. ‘There was someone with me that night. After I left the Sikhs I saw a man hurrying through the jungle. I followed him. He did not walk quite right. Later I went close to him. I have sharp nostrils. Weavers cannot afford to smoke expensive cheroots, so that the after-smell lingers around them.’
William thought slowly. Hussein w
as trying to corner him, make him admit that he had been Gopal. Why? He said, ‘That’s very interesting. If you did meet such a man, why did you take him to see murder committed? And afterward, why didn’t you come here and tell me, the Collector, what had been done?’
Hussein half turned his shoulder and seemed to be wrestling with himself.
William continued quietly. ‘You’re a jewel carrier, at least part of your time, aren’t you? Don’t you realize those murderers are still at large? That one day they may rob and kill you. Help me to catch them and bring them to punishment. I will keep your professional secrets, if you are innocent of murder. If you are one of the band, turn informer.’
The gallows stood stark against the gathering darkness. Hussein could not see them from where he squatted on the floor with the window high behind him. But the last of the light threw the shadow of the upright on to the wall opposite him. As darkness swept down the shadow lines of bar and scaffold faded. The man nodded his head slowly.
‘It is an omen. Kali’s? Who knows?’
William did not speak, not being sure what the man was talking about. When Hussein spoke again William jumped, for the voice was not the same. A load of fear weighted it now, and an inner purpose fought against fear to hold it steady, and it was not obsequious.
Hussein said, ‘Do you fear our gods?’
William thought, and shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Then how can you rule us, know us? I must speak in riddles because until you fear our gods you cannot understand me—or believe me. The goddess Kali, who is the Destroyer-Goddess of the Hindus, has given the roads of the world, and all who travel the roads, into the hands of her servants. Her servants must love no other than her. I was one of them, until my band fell in with a girl, the most beautiful I have ever seen or hope to see. Kali gave her omen, which was an order to kill the girl and her companions. All night I struggled with myself, and in the morning I knew I was not a true servant of the goddess, though I had eaten her sugar of communion. I loved the girl more than I loved Kali. I did not want the girl to die. I tried to save her. The band would not agree. Then I fought for the girl’s life, and the band broke my neck, and killed her, and left me for dead.’