by M. M. Kaye
‘The Memsahib left but half an hour ago,’ Iman Bux informed him. ‘She has gone to the city.’
Alex whipped round on the speaker with a suddenness that startled him considerably. ‘Where?’
‘To the city,’ faltered Iman Bux. ‘To the shop of Ditta Mull the silk merchant, near the Sudder Bazaar.’
‘Who is with her?’
‘Huzoor, the Memsahib went on horseback. I do not know which syce - I will make inquiry, if the Huzoor—’
But Alex had gone.
It was after nine and the tree shadows were shortening on the white dust, while already the heat danced on the open plain so that the mile-distant city appeared to shimmer and waver in the blinding sunlight as though it were made of molten glass. There was a white foam of lather streaking the Eagle’s neck and flanks, and Alex’s coat was wet with sweat, but his hands and his stomach were cold with fear and rage - a rage that was entirely directed at himself.
‘If I get myself involved in a riot, I may have to shoot,’ thought Alex, ‘and if I do that— They won’t harm her! They know her too well. They know me too, but I represent Authority, and that may set them off … I ought to let her take her chance. If they kill me that fool Barton will lose his head, and I have not given the order about the bridge, and - I can’t risk everything just because of one woman! … Nicholson was right - the safeguarding of women and children in some crises is such a very minor consideration that it ceases to be a consideration at all - I must not go …’ But he went.
He reined to a canter as he neared the city gate, and fought down his fear, for a mob was a purely animal thing and like an animal could sense fear. He rode in under the gate at a walk, sitting loosely in the saddle, and called a greeting to the police havildar who saluted him as he passed.
He could feel the pulse and panic of the city swirling about him from the very dust and beating down upon him in the blinding heat. There was an ominous silence as he passed and a menacing mutter that rose at his back, and the faces that watched him were avid or insolent or uneasy. Those men he knew and spoke to as the Eagle shouldered his way through the crowded bazaar avoided his gaze and shifted unhappily, observing their neighbours with furtive anxiety. Normally, when he rode through the city, they cleared a path for him, but today he found that he must force the Eagle between men who made no attempt to move out of his way, and who jostled and obstructed him with deliberate insolence. His progress became slower and slower; and then a stone hurtled out of the crowd. It missed him and struck a woman, who screamed shrilly.
An indescribable sound rose from the crowd; a sound like the soft, growling snarl of a gigantic cat; and Alex rose in his stirrups, and facing the quarter from whence the stone had been thrown, raised his voice and called a jest across the heads of the crowd. It was a coarse and untranslatable jest relative to the proper treatment of prostitutes, and the crowd, taken by surprise, laughed. The tension snapped and a man called out: ‘Has the Sahib heard the news from Delhi?’
‘Beshak! I hear many lies with every morn, Karter Singh. But I wait for the evening, and when the heat of the day is past the truth becomes known.’
‘Is it then the truth?’ cried another voice.
‘The heat has surely turned thy brain, Sohan Lal,’ said Alex with a laugh. ‘Abide a little, and let it cool!’
The laugh had its effect upon the crowd. Hostility waned and doubt took its place. Perhaps the rumours that had spread like wildfire through the bazaars since dawn were false? for the Sahib, it was plain, had also heard news - yet he laughed. Would he laugh if the news were bad? The crowd drew back and let him pass, their faces sullen and unsure, and twenty yards ahead Alex caught sight of the Maulvi of one of the city mosques making his way along the street. He urged the Eagle to a quicker pace, and drawing level with the man, leaned out and touched him on the shoulder. The Maulvi turned sharply.
‘As Salaam aleikum, Maulvi Sahib,’ said Alex pleasantly. ‘Canst thou spare the time to lead me to the shop of Ditta Mull in the street of the silk merchants? I cannot call to mind the way.’
He saw the anger flash in the man’s eyes, and the cunning replace it as the Maulvi looked up at him and then back at the watching crowd; and knew that he had guessed aright. This was one of Ahmed Ullah of Faizabad’s men, and Gopal Nath, hidden in the culvert by the fig tree, had whispered that the Maulvi of Faizabad’s men were preaching patience. It was no part of their plan to touch off premature riots, and if there was any truth at all in the rumours concerning Delhi and Meerut they must be feeling alarmed for the success of their carefully laid plans. The man who stood at Alex’s stirrup knew quite well that he was familiar with every street and alley and shop in the city and was demanding protection, and he would have given much to refuse it. But it was as much in his interests as in Alex’s own to prevent a premature outbreak in Lunjore, so he smiled sourly and murmured the conventional reply to the greeting:
‘Wa aleikum Salaam. If the Sahib will come with me I will show him.’
Furiante’s impatiently tossing head, and the frightened face of the syce who was endeavouring to control both horses, were visible above the heads of a noisy jostling crowd who packed the narrow street before Ditta Mull’s shop and swayed dangerously to and fro. The panic on the face of the syce did nothing to reassure Alex, and once again he felt fear clutch at his throat, and forced it back. The Maulvi, walking beside him, took the Eagle’s bridle and thrust his way through the crowd, who fell back and cleared a passage to the bottom of the five rickety wooden steps that led up to the shop front.
Winter was not visible, for Ditta Mull had hurriedly dropped the heavy split-cane chiks before the open entrance at his shop. He peered out anxiously on hearing Alex’s voice and grasped feverishly at his sleeve: ‘Take her away, Huzoor!’ begged Ditta Mull. ‘By the back way. I do not know what madness has taken hold on the city this morning. There is a tale that— But no matter. I fear that some may do her harm because she is the wife of the Commissioner Sahib. Already there have been stones flung at my shop. It is not our own people. They know her well. But there are others - budmarshes from Suthragunj and Shahjehanpur and Bareilly who have been stirring up trouble in the city with wild tales. The Memsahib is with my wife and children. She wished to leave, fearing the people might harm my shop on her account, but I would not let her. It is well that thou hast come! I will tell the Memsahib.’
He hurried away through a dark doorway in the back of the shop, wringing his small fat hands and making little moaning noises, and returned a minute or two later with Winter. She was perfectly calm, and quite uninterested, thought Alex furiously - irrationally swinging from the extremes of fear to the limits of exasperation - in the dangers of the situation. She frowned a little at the sight of him, but refused to leave without a large quantity of rose-coloured sari silk that she had previously selected. She watched Ditta Mull wrap it up in a length of muslin, his hands shaking like leaves in a wind, and having accepted and paid for it, said with a touch of impatience: ‘Do not show them that face, Lala-ji. If they see that thou art afraid, then they too may behave foolishly. But not otherwise.’
She handed the package to Alex who received it in grim silence, and went out under the lifted chik into the fierce glare of the sunlight. The crowd had ceased to shout and sway and had become silent, gazing curiously at the split-cane chik that concealed the interior of the shop, and at the impassive Maulvi who stood at the foot of the steps outside it. As Winter stepped out into the sunlight a mutter rose from them and swelled ominously, but she appeared unconscious of it and Alex saw her look up to smile at someone in a second-storey window at the far side of the narrow street, and sketch the Hindu gesture of salutation with one hand.
The crowd, instantly diverted, turned as one to see who it was whom the Memsahib had greeted, and saw a small plump child hanging out over the edge of a fretted window ledge and beckoning. Winter shook her head at it and called out: ‘Have a care, Bappa, or thou wilt surely fall. I cannot come to
day, but I will come soon.’
‘Tomorrow?’ shrilled the child.
‘Not tomorrow. Perhaps next week.’
The brief conversation changed the mood of the crowd as Alex’s jest had changed the mood of the mob in the Sudder Bazaar, but he could feel the dangerous pendulum-swing of their emotions with every nerve in his body, and knew how little it would take to sway them towards senseless savagery. Was Winter unaware of it? She seemed to be. He heard her murmur a polite and conventional greeting to the Maulvi, and then she was in the saddle and moving off down the packed street, controlling the nervous impatience of Furiante with apparent ease.
The next fifteen minutes seemed endless to Alex, riding behind her and frequently separated from her by the shifting, jostling crowds. He heard her speak to a dozen people as they edged their way through the streets, her voice light and gay. He noted as they passed that more than half the shops were closed and shuttered - sure sign of panic. That despite the intense heat, the narrow stifling streets and alleyways were as full of people as though it had been a fair day or a festival, and that the people talked in whispers and muttered in undertones.
The Maulvi left them abruptly at the turn into the wide stretch of the Sudder Bazaar that ended at the Rohilkhand Gate, and vanished down a side street. Three hundred yards to go … Two hundred … One hundred … Fifty. Slowly; keep to a walk … A man was holding forth excitedly to a dense knot of people as thick as a swarm of bees, and scraps of sentences separated themselves from the sullen murmur of the crowd. ‘… with two heads! My cousin’s wife’s brother saw it … it is a sign! What else but a sign? Their days are accomplished …!’ Muttered curses and a man spitting loudly and contemptuously as they passed. A low-caste woman shouting at the frightened, furious syce: ‘Hai, ghora wallah, do they feed thee on bone-dust now that thou hast taken service with the sahib-log?’
And then they were through the gate and out on the open empty glaring road that led across the plain to the cantonments, and Furiante had broken into a canter and then into a gallop. Winter had attempted to slow him after the first hundred yards or so, but Alex had brought his whip down on the horse’s quarters and they had flashed at full gallop under the shadows of the trees that lined the cantonment roads. He reined in at last before the gate of his own bungalow and waited for the syce to come up with them. He had not spoken once since he entered Ditta Mull’s shop, and he did not speak now. He put up a hand and wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and knew that his hand was shaking.
Winter said uncertainly: ‘You’re very angry, aren’t you? But I did not know that there was trouble in the city. I know you told me to keep away from it. I’m sorry. But you should not have come for me. I do not think that they would have done me any harm. They were more likely to harm you.’
This was precisely what Alex himself had thought, and his anger against himself for not having had the moral courage to leave her to take her chance kept him silent.
Winter looked at him doubtfully and added: ‘It was - kind of you to come. Thank you.’
‘You have nothing to thank me for,’ Alex said brusquely. ‘I probably endangered your life, and that of everyone else in the cantonment, by going there.’
The syce cantered up, dusty and sullen but still clutching the package of rose-coloured silk, and Alex observed him tight-lipped, and then turned back to Winter. He said: ‘The city is out of bounds until further notice, and I should be obliged if you would curtail your rides in future, and keep only to the cantonments and the maidan.’
‘But—’
‘That is an order,’ said Alex, and turned into his own gateway.
He had ridden out at sundown that evening to the ruined tomb of Amin-u-din on the far bank of the river, but Gopal Nath had not been there. There had been no one there but the bats and the lizards and a flock of green parrots, for Gopal Nath was lying face downwards among the high grass at the edge of the grazing grounds with his throat cut from ear to ear, and the work that the jackals and the hyenas began that night was completed the next day by the kites and the vultures and the remorseless heat, so that twenty-four hours later no one could be sure who those reddened, scattered bones had once belonged to.
Alex had ridden home in the last of the brief twilight knowing that it was no use to wait any longer, and later that night he had gone out over the back wall of the bungalow compound where the loquat trees made a belt of shadow, and near some tamarisk scrub at the edge of the cantonments had been met by Yusaf and two skinny village ponies.
There had been a party at the Residency that night. The last of the Tuesday parties, although no one there knew that it would be the last. It had been a late one, and Alex, returning at four o’clock in the morning with the sky already greying to the dawn, heard the voices and laughter of the guests as they drove away from the Residency, before he fell into an exhausted sleep.
Lottie was almost thirty miles nearer to Lunjore that night. At Meerut General Hewitt and Brigadier Wilson, with a strong force of British troops at their command, still remained in a state of helpless inaction, and on the Ridge at Delhi only the putrefying bodies of six officers, still piled one upon the other in the abandoned cart that had dragged them from the shambles of the Kashmir Gate, were the only British who remained to tell of all those who, two short days ago, had lived and laughed in the now gutted and empty cantonment.
A dispatch rider from Suthragunj on a lathered horse arrived in Lunjore at noon on Wednesday. He had waited only long enough to deliver the sealed letter he carried to the Commissioner’s head chupprassi, and to water his horse, before setting out on the return journey. Alex had not been told of his arrival, and the Commissioner, handed the letter on a salver by Iman Bux during luncheon, had stuffed it into his pocket, unread, and forgotten about it until the following morning. It had been nearly midday when he read it at last, and then he could not at first take in the baldly worded statement it contained.
His first reaction had been incredulity. The thing was a hoax - a ridiculous practical joke! It must be, because it could not possibly be true. Yet it was written on official paper, and he knew that scrawled signature. The blood seemed to leave his heart and drain out of his body. His pale eyes bulged with shock and the paper dropped from his nerveless hand and slid to the floor, where the draught from the punkah sent it fluttering lazily across the drawing-room carpet like a bird with a broken wing.
It had been Winter who had picked it up and Winter who had sent for Alex. He had arrived to find the Commissioner gulping down his third glass of brandy, and under its influence returning to his first view of the situation. ‘Hoax,’ said Mr Barton thickly. ‘Can’t be anything else.’
‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ said Alex, running his eye down the single sheet of paper. He looked at the quivering bulk that slumped upon the sofa, glass in hand, and said curtly: ‘Where is the man who brought this? When did it arrive?’
The Commissioner swallowed the remainder of the brandy in his glass and poured himself out a fourth peg, slopping the liquid onto the carpet. ‘Can’t be expected to deal with everything!’ he said loudly and defensively. ‘How was I to know it was important? Might have been an invitation to a shoot f’r all one knew. Put it in m’ pocket. Forgot it. Very natural.’
‘It arrived during luncheon yesterday,’ Winter said quietly. ‘I think that the man left almost immediately.’
Alex said nothing. He looked at his chief with a contempt and exasperation which he made no attempt to disguise, and turned and went out of the room.
‘Damned impertinence!’ said Mr Barton querulously, and finished his fourth brandy.
Less than an hour later a hurriedly convened conference of a dozen appalled men met around the Commissioner’s dining-room table to discuss the emergency arising out of the incredible - the impossible news - and to decide what measures, if any, might belatedly be taken to safeguard Lunjore from the mutiny and massacre that had overtaken Meerut and Delhi. Alex had urged the supreme measure of disar
ming the regiments, but the suggestion had been treated as an outrage.
‘If I should ever be ordered by the General to insult my men in such a manner,’ declared Colonel Gardener-Smith roundly, ‘he would first have to disarm me, and after me, every one of my officers!’
‘Your suggestion, Captain Randall,’ said Colonel Moulson, ‘is not only beneath contempt, but one which it is not your place to advance.’
Alex gave a faint shrug of his shoulders. ‘I am sorry, sir. Then may I suggest that we send the women and children to Naini Tal immediately? Today if possible. There may still be time.’
There was an immediate outbreak of protest. If disaffection was rife, travelling would be dangerous and difficult. The women were safer where they were. An adequate escort could not be spared. To send them to the hills now was to run too great a risk.
‘To leave it until it is too late will be a greater one,’ said Alex. ‘The mutinies at Meerut and Delhi were premature. I am sure of that. As I have already told you, I have reason to believe that a date for a general outbreak has been set for the end of this month; and that belief is not only supported by information, but confirmed by the behaviour of the city. There is still time to send the women and children to safety.’
‘We cannot do it,’ said Colonel Gardener-Smith heavily. ‘It is too late.’
‘It is not too late!’ said Alex passionately. ‘At least there is a chance.’
‘Perhaps. But it is a chance that we cannot take. At this stage it is surely a matter of vital importance not to show any sign of panic. You must see that.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Colonel Moulson with a sneer. ‘It is a thing that Captain Randall has never been able to see. And I agree with you, Colonel. It is of course out of the question for any of the women to leave. Their departure at this juncture would be taken as a clear sign that we had lost our nerve, and I am sure that I speak for the majority when I say that this is far from being the case.’