by M. M. Kaye
He reached out an unsteady hand and lifted a long tress of the black unbound hair, and Winter struck at his hand in fury and terror.
‘Don’t touch me! Don’t dare to touch me!’
Conway lunged towards her across the bed and she flung aside the sheets and leapt out, in the grip of the same frantic, shuddering panic that she had experienced when Carlyon had looked at her by the door of her room at the dâk-bungalow beyond the ford. But her husband’s clutching hands were on her hair and they gripped it and jerked it brutally, so that she fell back and was caught. And this time there was no escape.
26
Alex was both strong and healthy, and Niaz had sufficient knowledge of such matters as concussion and broken collar-bones to deal more than adequately with the situation. Having assured himself that the injury was not serious he had eased off Alex’s coat and set the collar-bone, binding it securely with his puggari, and having retrieved Shalini had ridden back to a small village they had recently passed, where he had procured a ramshackle palanquin and bearers to carry it. An hour later Alex had been installed in the hut of the village headman and under the care of a wrinkled crone well versed in the use of healing herbs.
He had not recovered consciousness until well after dawn, and all through that day, while Niaz held him down so that he should do no further injury to his arm and shoulder, he had talked; sometimes in English, sometimes in Hindustani or Pushtu, muttering and raving. Exhorting a gang of labourers who built a road through wild and trackless territory; shouting in a cavalry charge; whispering to a havildar eight years dead as they crawled forward under cover of darkness to attack a fort; discussing philosophy with a mullah in the foothills beyond Hoti Mardan, or arguing with the Commissioner of Lunjore - expounding policies, pressing for action, explaining patiently the need for reforms.
Once he spoke in a strange tongue. An odd sentence, twice repeated: ‘Kogo zakhochet Bog pogubit, togo sperva lishit razuma.’ Niaz did not know that he spoke in Russian, or that the words were those that he heard Gregori Sparkov speak in a moonlit garden in Malta: ‘Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.’
Alex tossed and turned and muttered of Khanwai and white goats, of sharks and sacrifices and the stupidity of fools who would neither see nor hear, look nor listen. But towards sunset he became quieter and lay still at last, talking to Winter, his hoarse, exhausted voice barely a whisper.
Niaz slept, stretched on the ground beside the low charpoy on which Alex lay, his shoulder touching it so that he should wake to any urgent movement, while the aged crone crouched at the far side of the bed coaxing occasional strange herbal draughts between Alex’s dry lips and down his parched throat, listening to the endless, incomprehensible murmuring, and aware, through some feminine instinct, that the Sahib spoke of a woman …
Twenty-four hours later the invalid woke to drugged sanity and a splitting headache. He could remember nothing of the past few weeks; his last coherent recollection being of a dâk-ghari overturning on the journey up from Calcutta. He supposed that he must have suffered some injury in the accident and wondered what had happened to his fellow-passenger, the morose Major?
Niaz, discovering this gap in his memory, made no move to repair it, for instinct told him that once Alex remembered what it was that he had set out for, he would start off again long before it was safe for him to do so. But since there had been no driving urgency to reach Lunjore from Calcutta within a given time, as long as Alex imagined himself to be on that journey he might be persuaded to remain where he was and lie quiet. The beldame’s drugs helped in this. Alex was drowsy and stupid and in pain, and he drank them obediently and slept; woke to a smell of dung-fires and sun-baked earth, the aromatic scents of masala and cardamons and all the familiar sounds and smells of an Indian village, grinned at Niaz and swallowed the infusion of herbs and hot milk that he was offered, and slept again.
It was not until the morning of the sixth day when, awaking to the first brilliant rays of the sun and the squeaking of a well-wheel, he remembered Delhi and all that had happened there. It had taken him some time to realize how many days had elapsed since he had ridden in pursuit of Winter and Carlyon, and when he had done so he had propped himself on his unwounded arm and cursed Niaz with a savage, concentrated fury for having let him lie there; for having given him drugs and for not having put him on his horse and taken him on to Lunjore or back to Delhi.
‘Had I done so, it had gone ill with thee,’ said Niaz, unmoved.
‘Saddle the horses. We go now.’
‘To Delhi?’
‘To Lunjore.’
Niaz shook his head. ‘If we go today thou wilt be able to ride two koss. Perchance three, but no more. Wait here yet another day and I will ride to Delhi for Latif and our gear. I sent word to Fraser Sahib in Delhi, and also to Barton Sahib, that thou hadst met with an accident and would be delayed. There is no need for thee to ride to Delhi and back. I will go; and tomorrow, if I return in time, we will go on to Lunjore.’
‘We will go today, and within the hour,’ said Alex.
Niaz observed him with a thoughtful eye and said in a non-committal voice: ‘I sent a man to get news at the ford. The river fell three days back, and the Lord-Sahib returned with the carriage and horses and his nauker-log. They go to Delhi.’
Alex looked at him for a long moment. Then he said: ‘Was the Lady-Sahib with him?’
‘No. But the man spoke with one of the syces, and it was said that she had met with friends upon the road and had gone forward with them to Lunjore.’
Alex lay back slowly on the string bed and stared up at the smoke-blackened ceiling above his head. He was silent for so long that at last Niaz cleared his throat and said carefully: ‘Do we ride today?’
‘No.’ Alex closed his eyes and spoke without looking at him. ‘I will wait here. Fetch the gear from Delhi.’ He turned over on his right side with his face to the wall and did not speak again.
Niaz did not return for two days, and those days had given Alex plenty of time for thought. His shoulder still pained him and his head still ached, but the dizzy stupidity had gone. He would drink no more of the old woman’s drugs and his brain was clear. There had been a moment when he had been tempted to return to Delhi and demand an account of his behaviour from Lord Carlyon, but five minutes’ reflection had convinced him of the uselessness of such a proceeding. He had no shadow of right to take Carlyon to task, and Colonel Abuthnot could be counted upon to say all that was necessary upon that head. As for Winter, if she had indeed met with friends upon the road she would have reached Lunjore days ago, and there was nothing more that he could do about that either. She would have learned by now what sort of a man Conway Barton was, and would probably be staying with these friends until she could arrange to return to England.
Whether he wished her to return there was another matter, and one which he was not in the least desirous of facing. He had kept free of entanglements with women of his own class and kind, largely because of a conviction that work and women in such a country and climate, and under the conditions that prevailed in India, did not mix. One or the other of them were bound to suffer. Those wives who endured the heats and hazards of hot weather in the plains in order to be with their husbands grew old before their time, yet to go to the hills meant months of separation. And children were less a blessing than a continual and terrible anxiety. Hodson had lost his only and beloved child the previous year, and India was strewn with the graves of children.
One day, when conditions improved and such things as railways and good roads had linked up the provinces and states, it might be different. But in the present state of the country, Alex considered that marriage was something to be avoided, while if there should ever be a rising on the scale that he suspected was being plotted, then all women would not only be an anxiety but a deadly handicap. Remembering the capacity for cruelty, the indifference towards suffering, the fanatical hatreds and blood-feuds that obtained in the East, Alex imagined th
at there might well come a time when a man might wish with all his heart that there had never been such a thing as a woman; or that he himself had never known or loved one.
Winter … If he should see her again, would he try and stop her from returning to England, or would he let her go? He did not know. Barely more than a week ago he would have been thankful to see her go. But that had been before he had kissed her. He had kissed other women, lightly or passionately, and had forgotten them. But he could still feel that warm, rounded slenderness in his arms and the way in which, for a long moment, she had seemed to melt against him and become so much a part of him that her every nerve and pulse and breath and heartbeat had been as though it were his own.
Her mind could deceive her with the pretty pictures that it had made up and hugged for comfort during the past six years, and her tongue could talk of her love for Conway: but her body had betrayed her. If she had known anything of love - if her love for Conway Barton had gone deeper than a lonely child’s romantic attachment and hero-worship - Alex’s arms and his kisses would have been unendurable to her. But they had not been. For a long, long moment they had not been …
Behind his closed eyelids Alex saw the young heart-shaped face, and the dark eyes that were so unsure; one moment so brimful of hope and happiness, and the next so still and so wary - and sometimes so frightened. She had learned to school her face. To wear a dignity and calm and composure beyond her years. To hold her chin high and her slim figure erect, and to hide loneliness and hope and hurt. Perhaps in time she would learn to force her eyes to do these things too, unless happiness and security saved her from that sad necessity. But he, Alex, was the last person who could offer her either.
She had better go home, and soon. He would not see her again, and for all he knew she might already have left Lunjore. He should have refused point-blank to have anything to do with bringing her out to this country. Yet if he had quarrelled with the Commissioner … Once again he found himself back in the old, infuriating impasse.
To come into direct conflict with the Commissioner would have meant, without a shadow of doubt, that he would end up being sent to some nonessential post where he could do neither harm nor good, and to Alex, pupil and disciple of Sir Henry Lawrence, the necessity of doing to the best of his ability the work that lay to his hand, no matter how many obstacles officialdom placed in his way, took precedence over every other consideration.
Officialdom, in the person of Lord Dalhousie, had disagreed with Sir Henry’s moderation and humanity, and removed him from the Punjab, leaving it to be settled by the harsher hand of his brother John who preferred force to persuasion. And Alex knew that the Commissioner of Lunjore, left to himself or assisted by someone possessing less understanding and sympathy with the problems of the district than he, Alex, did, would be capable of alienating the local talukdars and small-holders beyond any hope of counting upon their co-operation except under the threat of force.
His mind turned from the problem of Winter to the problems inherent in controlling and administering the one small piece of India whose welfare was his own responsibility: ‘Why in hell’s name,’ thought Alex with impatience, ‘haven’t the Governor’s Council the sense to send Lawrence to Oudh? If anyone could settle it without bitterness and injustice, he could. If he had it in charge for a year he could hold it quiet even if the rest of India rose all round it. Oudh is the plague-spot now, and Lunjore is right on its borders …’
In the evenings, when the cooking-fires were lit, the headman and some of the village elders, finding that he was sufficiently recovered to sit up and eat the first solid meal he had eaten in days, came to squat by the door, smoke their hookahs and converse.
Their talk was a talk that Alex understood and had listened to on many occasions - the all-important problems of village life. Crops and harvesting, the drying up of a well, the damage done by deer and wild pig, the failure of certain crops owing to a poor monsoon, a dispute over a marriage dowry - the half of which had not been paid - and a vexed question of grazing rights. This was the India that he knew and loved, and which, as far as any European may understand the mind of India, he understood.
India, to Alex, was the land. The cultivator and the herdsman and the hundreds of thousands of small, humble village communities whose way of life had not changed in the slow centuries since Alexander of Macedonia and his warriors had poured through the passes to conquer the unknown land that had been old when Greece was young. He had little love for the cities, for to him they seemed to contain all that was worst in the East, and he could never ride through them without experiencing horror and pity and despair.
The sight of filth and disease and the callous indifference towards the suffering of man and beast was something that he could not accept or ignore, as the majority of his fellow-countrymen appeared able to do. The naked, starveling children of the poor with their spindle legs, bloated bellies and eye-sores on which the flies clustered, the diseased deformities who begged their bread in the gutters, and the noseless, eyeless lepers who wandered at large through the narrow streets, seemed to him an offence before God, and, in some way, a thing for which he himself bore a personal responsibility. Scarcely less terrible in his eyes was the sight of dumb animals, starving, diseased or mutilated, who were left to die slowly and in agony because none would take upon themselves the sin of destroying life.
The cities spawned as much evil as filth. Murder and prostitution, theft and trickery, intolerance, hatred and talk: a froth of talk that went in circles and was seldom concerned with essentials … windy poison with which to disturb the hearts and minds of the credulous, and which stirred up bloody riots between sects and the followers of different gods upon holy days. Talk that was never of building up but always of pulling down, and which could whip up hysteria with the speed of a whirlwind. But there were few such talkers in the villages, for the work of the land pressed hard upon the heels of those who took their livelihood from her.
Ploughing, sowing, reaping and irrigation would not wait while men sat in circles and listened to windy and grandiloquent phrase-makers who promised overnight Utopias provided that this or that class or sect, creed or colour were first destroyed or routed. The villages had their own failings. Their methods of cultivation did not change. They never learned better and they did not wish to. What was good enough for their forefathers was good enough for them, and so they lived always with the spectre of starvation grinning at their shoulder. But they toiled hard and they were kindly people, and Alex listened to them now and felt more relaxed and at peace than he had for many days.
They requested his opinions and deferred courteously to them, and he found himself arbitrating, as by right, in a vexed dispute (it concerned the ownership of a cow) that had been dividing the village into opposing camps for some weeks past. His decision was accepted with applause, and the headman hastened to lay before him another and more personal problem. It was not one that would normally have been raised in Western society, but Alex had heard many such and he listened gravely and gave the headman the benefit of his advice. The talk drifted to theology; a long, wandering discussion such as Asiatics love, until the elderly headman, observing that Alex appeared tired, dismissed the assembly, and expressing the hope that his guest would enjoy a good night’s sleep and find himself greatly refreshed the next morning, withdrew into the darkness.
The meeting convened again on the following evening, but this time Alex sat under the night sky and the stars on the baked ground beneath a huge neem tree where the villagers met as men might meet at a club to discuss the day’s doings. His collar-bone, thanks to Niaz’s prompt attention, had set well, and apart from a faint headache the after-effects of concussion were vanishing rapidly. He was impatient to be gone, for there was a land dispute coming up in Lunjore which he particularly wished to settle with the minimum interference from the Commissioner, and Niaz, watching him without appearing to do so, withdrew him tactfully from the assembly at an early hour, saying that the
y would need a good night’s rest as there was a long ride before them on the morrow.
They left in the cool brightness of the early morning after a plentiful meal prepared by the headman’s wife; the headman and some others escorting them a mile upon their way. ‘If it is necessary that the land be governed by feringhis,’ remarked the headman, watching the horsemen ride away between the tall grass and the kikar trees, ‘that is the sort they should send us, and not fools such as that fat sahib who passed this way last year and brought with him an evil rogue from Delhi to speak for him because he had insufficient understanding of our tongue and less still of our ways.’
Alex accomplished the remainder of the journey by easier stages than he would normally have done, for he found the long hours in the saddle more tiring than he would admit; and Winter had been married almost a week by the time he rode down the long dusty road that led past the Residency to his own house.
His lamp-lit bungalow was pleasantly cool after the heat of the dusty roads, and Alam Din, who combined the offices of butler and bearer, had prepared a meal, for Niaz had sent forward word of their arrival. Alex had ridden less than thirty miles that day, but he was intolerably tired and impatient with himself for being so. He had intended to go straight to bed and merely send word of his arrival to the Commissioner, reporting to him on the following morning; but Mr Barton had sent over to say that he wished to see him that same evening.
Alam Din, handing dishes, had mentioned the Commissioner’s marriage - it being a matter of considerable interest in Lunjore - and had expressed approval that there should at last be a Memsahib at the Residency, but Alex had answered at random and had not taken in a word of what had been said. Alam Din was inclined to be talkative and Alex’s mind was on other things.
He walked over to the Residency in the starlight and stopped under the dark arch of the gateway to speak to Akbar Khan, the gatekeeper, who rose up at his approach, the orange glow of a small oil-lamp illuminating his white robes and flowing beard so that he looked like some prophet of the Old Testament. He had been speaking with someone, for Alex’s quick ear had caught the almost inaudible murmur of voices as he approached; but there was no one else visible now. The little stone cell in the thickness of the gateway, where Akbar Khan spent much of his time when on duty, was dark, and he had moved so as to block the doorway.