The Faraway Drums

by Jon Cleary

  “I say! Lose any bearers?” Savanna dreamed of being a hero but was glad he was a desk-wallah. Dreams were safer than deeds and he feared the day when he would have to act. “Better put that in your report to me.”

  “To you?”

  Savanna flushed. “Of course. I’m your superior officer, am I not? George Lathrop asked me to stay on here and bring your report down with me when I go.”

  “What I have to report will need to get to him quicker than that. I’ll encode it and you can put it on the telegraph line to him tonight.”

  “I shall want to know what’s in the report before you encode it. I can’t authorize its despatch if I don’t know what’s in it.”

  Farnol sighed, scratched himself through his rags. It was always the same when he came back from the hills: as soon as he was within smell of hot water and soap he began to itch. The same irritation affected him whenever he was within smell of a desk-wallah. “Righto, whatever you say. I’ll put it all down in clear first. The gist of it is that I think there is a plot to assassinate the King.”

  Savanna gave a half-cough, half-laugh. “Oh, I say! You expect me to put something like that on the telegraph to Delhi? They’d laugh their heads off. What proof have you?”

  Farnol sighed again, scratched himself once more: Savanna, more than any of the other desk-wallahs, always did get under his skin more than the dirt and the lice. “None. Just suspicions.” He quickly recounted the story of the ambush. “It ties in with what I heard further up in the hills.”

  “What did you hear? Rumours?” Savanna shook his head. “I’m sorry, old chap. I can’t put that sort of clap-trap on the telegraph. It would be one thing to mention it personally to Lathrop, one can bandy suspicions back and forth all day across a desk. But to put it in code on the telegraph—” He shook his head again, adamantly this time: after all, he was the senior officer, even if their ranks were the same. “Can’t be done. There have been plots and rumours of plots ever since the days of John Company. There’s sure to be one about His Majesty—what better way to create a little mischief? You know what these Indians are. But no one down in Delhi would believe it was anything more than a rumour. They’re all too busy getting spruced up for the Durbar.”

  Farnol knew that plots to kill the British, or their leaders, were not new. Ever since the East India Company, John Company as it was called, built its first trading post in 1640, there had been resistance to the British presence in India and the neighbouring countries. The Indian Mutiny of sixty years ago had not blown up on the spur of the moment; the Afghan Wars had not been riots of sudden bad temper. Conspiracies for independence had been uncovered; one or two princes had rebelled and been firmly put back in their place. But no Viceroy, the King’s representative, had died from an assassin’s bullet or knife. They had died from cholera or malaria or boredom, but that had been only the climate of the country and not the climate of the population demanding its wage or revenge. Savanna was right: now, especially now, no one would take any notice of a rumour that hadn’t a shred of concrete evidence to back it. Farnol had been at the Great Durbar, Curzon’s durbar of 1903, and he remembered how for a month before it no one had had any thought for anything but the social events that accompanied it. With the King and Queen due within the week he could imagine the pushing and jostling, like beggars scrambling for coins in a bazaar, that would be going on down in the new capital.

  “All right, I’ll hold the report till we get down to Delhi.”

  Savanna stiffened with six years’ seniority. “You can still write it in clear and give it to me.”

  “I’ll write it on the train going down.” Farnol straightened up, daring Savanna to command him to write the report immediately. But the other knew his limitations, knew when he sounded petulant rather than commanding. He stayed silent and after a moment Farnol said, “Do I have to dress for dinner? Are there only you and I?”

  “Of course you’ll dress! The Ranee of Serog is coming to dinner and also the Nawab of Kalanpur—you know Bertie, a very decent chap. And there will be Baron von Albern and Lady Westbrook.”

  “Damn! I think I’ll dine in my room.” Then he looked down and saw the girl in bowler hat and riding habit come into the hall below. “Who’s that?”

  “Miss O’Brady. An American gel. Evidently she met His Excellency and Lady Hardinge down in Delhi, told them she was coming up here and they invited her to stay at the Lodge. Can’t understand why. She’s not only American, she’s also one of those damned newspaper reporters.”

  2

  I

  Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:

  I HAVE been to several memorable dinner parties in the course of a long and, forgive my smugness, very rewarding life. Once, when he and his wife had had a falling-out, Richard Harding Davis, that most handsome and dashing of foreign correspondents, took me to dinner at the White House; President Taft himself had to rescue me from the attentions and intentions of the French Ambassador, who had had a falling-out with his wife. On another occasion Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, known to everyone as Honey Fitz, called me up, knowing I was in New York for the night, and asked me to dinner with him at Rector’s with some friends from Tammany Hall. There amidst the cigar smoke, the bubbles of champagne and the giggles of the girls from the Music Hall chorus, I learned more about how a democracy is run than in several months of covering City Hall for the Boston Globe. I sometimes feel that one’s education can be improved more over the right dinner table than anywhere else, with the possible exception of under the counterpane. I speak, of course, as a lady of mature years whose education in both spheres was completed some time ago.

  The most fateful dinner party, in personal terms, that I ever attended was at Viceregal Lodge in Simla in India in December 1911. The guests were as varied as one can only find in outposts of Empire; or could find, since empires, if they still exist, are no longer admitted. The acting host was a dull little man named Savanna, but everyone else at the long table in the huge panelled dining-room seemed to me to be an original, even the Nawab of Kalanpur, who did his best to be an imitation Englishman. But the most striking one there in my eyes, even though he may not have been strikingly original, was Major Clive Farnol.

  He sat next to me as my partner and through most of dinner I saw little more of him than his profile. He told me later he had only that evening shaved off his beard; that accounted for the paler skin of his lower cheeks and jaw against the mahogany of the rest of his face. He had a good nose, deep-set blue eyes; but his face was too bony to be strictly handsome. He also had a nice touch of arrogance, an air I have always admired in the male sex. Humble men usually finish up carrying banners for women’s organizations.

  “You are writing the story of Lola Montez, Miss O’Brady?” The Ranee of Serog was dressed as if for a State dinner or a trade exhibition of jewels. Of the upper part of her body only her elbows and armpits seemed undecorated with sparklers; she looked like Tiffany and Co. gone vulgar. She was a walking fortune, several million dollars on the hoof, as they say in the Chicago stockyards. She was dressed in a rich blue silk sari and once one became accustomed to the glare of her one could see that she was a beautiful woman. She was about forty which, from the youth of my then twenty-five years, seemed rather close to the grave. Now I am rather close to it myself I smile at the myopia of youth.

  “My grandfather knew her when she was Mrs. James, a very young bride here in Simla,” the Ranee said.

  “My father always boasted he was one of her first lovers.” Lady Westbrook was an elderly woman of that rather dowdy elegance that the English achieve absent-mindedly, as if fashion was something that occurred to them only periodically like childbirth or an imperial decoration. But, I learned later, she drank her wine and port with the best of the men and smoked a cheroot in an ivory holder. “But that was only after he learned she finished up as the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria. I suppose all men would like to think they shared a woman with a king.”
>
  “Not with King George,” said the Nawab of Kalanpur and spilled his wine as he laughed. “I understand the Queen sends a company of Coldstream Guards with him every time he goes out alone. She’s rather a battle-axe when it comes to morality.”

  “I say, Bertie, that’s going too far.” Major Savanna was a stuffed shirt such as I had only hitherto seen on Beacon Hill in Boston; I suppose one finds them all over the world, a breed hidebound by what they think is correct behaviour. “I hope you won’t put any of this conversation into your newspaper articles, Miss O’Brady?”

  I had come to India to cover the Great Durbar in Delhi, one of the few women correspondents granted such permission. Females were still considered lesser beings in those days, even in the so-called enlightened offices of newspapers; some of the most bigoted male chauvinists I have met in a lifetime of such encounters have been newspaper editors. But I had been taken on as a cub reporter by the editor of the Boston Globe who owed a favour to someone who owed a favour to Mayor Honey Fitz, for whom my father worked as a ward boss. I had managed not to blot my notebook and gradually had been given assignments that had, after several years and with great reluctance on the part of the paper’s male management, resulted in my being granted a by-line. I had covered stories spread over a great deal of the United States and had attained a certain fame; or in certain circles where anyone who worked for a newspaper, regardless of their sex, was looked upon as a whore, a certain notoriety. Disgusted at the growing cost of Presidential inaugurations, the editor had decided to send me to India to see how the British Empire spent money on crowning an Emperor. It was I who had suggested that I should also do a story on Lola Montez, the Irish-born courtesan who had begun her career in Simla as a 15-year-old bride of a British officer. The editor, thinking of syndication, had readily agreed. There were probably fifty million housewives throughout the United States who were dreaming of being courtesans.

  “Quote every word, Miss O’Brady.” Major Farnol up till then had offered only a few words, the crumbs of politeness that gentlemen offer to ladies in whom they are not particularly interested. But now he looked at me full face and I saw his gaze run quickly up from my bosom, over my shoulders and throat and up to my face and hair. I learned later that he was famous for swift appraisals of the landscape and was known amongst the Pathan tribesmen of Afghanistan as Old Hawkeye. “We must keep on with the good work done by the late King Edward, making our royalty appear human. We have suffered too long from Victorian stuffiness.”

  “Oh, I say!” said the stuffed shirt at the top of the table.

  “Ach, no.” The one-armed German Consul-General, Baron Kurt von Albern, leaned to one side while a servant took away his plate. He leaned stiffly and with his head seemingly cocked to balance the weight of his one arm; he looked rigid and very Prussian, though he was not a Prussian. He had close-cropped grey hair, a thick grey moustache, wore gold-rimmed spectacles with a silk cord running down to his lapel and looked like Teddy Roosevelt without the bombast. “Kings should never appear human. They should always suggest a little mystery.”

  “Is there any mystery about the Kaiser?” said Major Farnol. “Other than whether or not he wants to go to war with us?”

  The Baron shook his great head sadly. “Always talk of war. The English and the Germans will never fight. Your own King is almost more German than he is English.”

  “More’s the pity,” said Lady Westbrook. “Can’t understand why we ever let the Tudors go.”

  “Our King is beloved just as he is.” Major Savanna seemed to have had a little too much to drink. He glared down the table in my direction and for a moment I wondered what America had done recently to bring on this aggression. Then I realized he was looking at Major Farnol. “That correct, Major?”

  “Perhaps in England. Here in India no one knows him.”

  The King, as Prince of Wales, had visited India in 1905, but he had seen, and been seen by, very few more than the British civil and military brass and the Indian princes. Though England had ruled India for almost two centuries, no reigning monarch had ever set foot in the country. The monarch’s surrogates had been the real rulers, the Governors-General and the Viceroys who had had all the trappings of a king and almost as much power, possibly even more. The armorial bearings of all those surrogates hung from the walls above our heads, from the first of them, Warren Hastings, to the present one, Hardinge. Pictures of the monarch might hang in offices and railway stations and jungle bungalows, but everyone knew who was the actual British Raj of the moment.

  “I met him once at Lord’s,” said the Nawab. “Came to see the Second Test against the Australians, looked bored stiff. Bally undiplomatic of him, I thought. That’s the German in him, I suppose.”

  “Being undiplomatic or being bored by cricket?” said the Baron.

  The Nawab laughed, a high giggle that didn’t go at all well with his appearance. He was rather saturnine, a look that went against the mould of the imitation Englishman he tried to be; when his face was in repose he looked slightly sinister, an image the English have washed from their countenances if not from their hearts.

  “Touché, Baron. It’s a pity you didn’t go to Harrow, as I did. With your physique they’d have made a jolly good fast bowler of you.”

  “It sounds a dreadful fate,” said the Baron.

  “I don’t think the King should have come out here.” The Ranee dismissed His Majesty with a wave of her hand, an explosion of diamond lights. “Anything could happen to him. He could be trodden on by an elephant, killed by a tiger. Accidents happen in this country.”

  “Planned accidents?” said Major Farnol.

  Perhaps I was too quick for an outsider; but what should a newspaperwoman be if not quick? “You mean an assassination?”

  I saw Farnol and Savanna exchange glances. The Ranee also saw it: “What’s going on, gentlemen? Have you heard something?”

  There was silence for a moment and it was obvious that the two majors were each waiting for the other to reply. Then Major Farnol said, “No, nothing.”

  “Of course not!” But Savanna’s voice was not so loud from drink alone; he was far too emphatic. “Ridiculous! Their Majesties will be as safe here in India as in Buckingham Palace. Correct, Farnol?”

  I saw Farnol’s jaw stiffen, but he nodded. “Of course.”

  Then dinner was finished and the ladies rose to be banished as we always were. The port and the cigars were already being produced, but as we went out the door Lady Westbrook turned to one of the servants. “I’ll have a large port in the drawing-room. Better bring a small decanter.”

  I sat with Lady Westbrook and the Ranee for half an hour, then I excused myself and went up to bed. I had been riding that afternoon and was genuinely tired. As I reached the gallery that led to the bedrooms I pulled up startled. Major Farnol sat in the shadows, in a large chair against the wall of the corridor.

  “Oh! I thought you were still downstairs with the other gentlemen.”

  “I just wanted to say goodnight, Miss O’Brady.” He stood up, towering over me. He wore a tail- coat, the dinner jacket had not become universal with gentlemen, but the suit looked as if he had had it a long time; it was shiny and tight and he looked, well, caged in it. “Will you be going down with us on the Durbar Train? May I have the pleasure of escorting you?”

  “Only if you will tell me if you think King George is in danger of being assassinated.” I’m afraid I was rather a direct person in those days. Perhaps I still am.

  “I thought you were interested only in Lola Montez?”

  “I have all the material I need on her. I’m a newspaperwoman, Major Farnol. A plot to assassinate a king is a story I’d give my right arm for.”

  “Both arms?”

  We did not use the word corny in those days. “Major Farnol, I expected better than that of you. I’m not some high school girl panting to be taken.”

  He smiled, then abruptly sobered. “All right, no flirting. No, Miss O’Brady,
I know nothing about any assassination plot.”

  “I think you are a liar, Major.” I gave him what I hoped was a sweet smile.

  “All the time.”

  “Goodnight, Major.”

  I left him then, but I knew we were going to be talking to each other a lot over the next few days, whether he was a liar or not. In the course of her life a woman will meet a man, or several men if she is fortunate, with whom she feels an instant current of attraction. I had felt that way about Richard Harding Davis, but he was already married; I had also been strongly attracted to a well-known matinée idol, but he was in love with himself at the time and no woman can compete with that. I didn’t think Major Farnol would ever be in love with himself but he did strike me as being very self-contained, with few doubts about himself or anyone else, which can be just as frustrating for a woman. My trouble was that, being Boston Irish, I had such little mystery about me that might raise a doubt or two in his or any other man’s mind. A woman who loves love as much as I did, and still do, can be too honest for her own good.

  But I was not thinking about love that night. I undressed in the big bedroom I’d been given and was brushing my hair when I heard voices in the corridor outside. Moments earlier I had heard voices down at the front of the house; that would have been the Ranee, Lady Westbrook and the Nawab and the Baron going home. Then the big house had been suddenly silent till I heard the raised voices out in the corridor.

  I opened my door an inch and peered out. It was not a lady-like thing to do, but a newspaperwoman was not expected to be a lady; it was an implied contradiction in terms. Major Savanna, looking very much the worse for drink, was standing arguing with Major Farnol, whom I could not see.

  “You will not mention this ridiculous theory of yours again till we get down to Delhi! There you can do what you damn well please!”

  “Keep your voice down, Savanna. This isn’t a polo field.”

  “Don’t tell me—! You’re absolutely insufferable, Farnol, insufferable! You keep your voice down—not another word about these rumours, you understand! That’s an order!”