A passage to India
“We shall be all Moslems together now, as you promised.”
She was perfect as always, his dear Mrs. Moore. All the love for
her he had felt at the mosque welled up again, the fresher for
forgetfulness. There was nothing he would not do for her. He would
die to make her happy.
“Get in, Dr. Aziz, you make us giddy,” the other lady called. “If
they’re so foolish as to miss the train, that’s their loss, not
ours.”
“I am to blame. I am the host.”
“Nonsense, go to your carriage. We’re going to have a delightful
time without them.”
Not perfect like Mrs. Moore, but very sincere and kind. Wonderful
ladies, both of them, and for one precious morning his guests. He
felt important and competent. Fielding was a loss personally, being
a friend, increasingly dear, yet if Fielding had come, he himself
would have remained in leading-strings. “Indians are incapable of
responsibility,” said the officials, and Hamidullah sometimes said
so too. He would show those pessimists that they were wrong.
Smiling proudly, he glanced outward at the country, which was still
invisible except as a dark movement in the darkness; then upwards
at the sky, where the stars of the sprawling Scorpion had begun to
pale. Then he dived through a window into a second-class carriage.
“Mohammed Latif, by the way, what is in these caves, brother? Why
are we all going to see them?”
Such a question was beyond the poor relative’s scope. He could only
reply that God and the local villagers knew, and that the latter
would gladly act as guides.
CHAPTER XIV
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it,
and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are
obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own
existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the
human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction
between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.
There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing
happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,”
or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything,
it is enjoyment, horror”—it’s no more than that really, and a
perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.
It so happened that Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested had felt nothing
acutely for a fortnight. Ever since Professor Godbole had sung his
queer little song, they had lived more or less inside cocoons, and
the difference between them was that the elder lady accepted her
own apathy, while the younger resented hers. It was Adela’s faith
that the whole stream of events is important and interesting, and
if she grew bored she blamed herself severely and compelled her
lips to utter enthusiasms. This was the only insincerity in a
character otherwise sincere, and it was indeed the intellectual
protest of her youth. She was particularly vexed now because she
was both in India and engaged to be married, which double event
should have made every instant sublime.
India was certainly dim this morning, though seen under the auspices
of Indians. Her wish had been granted, but too late. She could not
get excited over Aziz and his arrangements. She was not the least
unhappy or depressed, and the various odd objects that surrounded
her—the comic “purdah” carriage, the piles of rugs and bolsters,
the rolling melons, the scent of sweet oils, the ladder, the
brass-bound box, the sudden irruption of Mahmoud Ali’s butler from
the lavatory with tea and poached eggs upon a tray—they were all
new and amusing, and led her to comment appropriately, but they
wouldn’t bite into her mind. So she tried to find comfort by
reflecting that her main interest would henceforward be Ronny.
“What a nice cheerful servant! What a relief after Antony!”
“They startle one rather. A strange place to make tea in,” said
Mrs. Moore, who had hoped for a nap.
“I want to sack Antony. His behaviour on the platform has decided
me.”
Mrs. Moore thought that Antony’s better self would come to the
front at Simla. Miss Quested was to be married at Simla; some
cousins, with a house looking straight on to Thibet, had invited
her.
“Anyhow, we must get a second servant, because at Simla you will
be at the hotel, and I don’t think Ronny’s Baldeo . . .” She loved
plans.
“Very well, you get another servant, and I’ll keep Antony with me.
I am used to his unappetizing ways. He will see me through the Hot
Weather.”
“I don’t believe in the Hot Weather. People like Major Callendar
who always talk about it—it’s in the hope of making one feel
inexperienced and small, like their everlasting, ‘I’ve been twenty
years in this country.’”
“I believe in the Hot Weather, but never did I suppose it would
bottle me up as it will.” For owing to the sage leisureliness of
Ronny and Adela, they could not be married till May, and consequently
Mrs. Moore could not return to England immediately after the
wedding, which was what she had hoped to do. By May a barrier of
fire would have fallen across India and the adjoining sea, and she
would have to remain perched up in the Himalayas waiting for the
world to get cooler.
“I won’t be bottled up,” announced the girl. “I’ve no patience with
these women here who leave their husbands grilling in the plains.
Mrs. McBryde hasn’t stopped down once since she married; she leaves
her quite intelligent husband alone half the year, and then’s
surprised she’s out of touch with him.”
“She has children, you see.”
“Oh yes, that’s true,” said Miss Quested, disconcerted.
“It is the children who are the first consideration. Until they
are grown up, and married off. When that happens one has again the
right to live for oneself—in the plains or the hills, as suits.”
“Oh yes, you’re perfectly right. I never thought it out.”
“If one has not become too stupid and old.” She handed her empty
cup to the servant.
“My idea now is that my cousins shall find me a servant in Simla,
at all events to see me through the wedding, after which Ronny
means to reorganize his staff entirely. He does it very well for
a bachelor; still, when he is married no doubt various changes will
have to be made—his old servants won’t want to take their orders
from me, and I don’t blame them.”
Mrs. Moore pushed up the shutters and looked out. She had brought
Ronny and Adela together by their mutual wish, but really she could
not advise them further. She felt increasingly (vision or
nightmare?) that, though people are important, the relations
between them are not, and that in particular too much fuss has been
made over marriage; centuries of carnal embracement, yet man is no
nearer to understanding man. And to-day she felt this with such
force that it seemed itself a relationship, itself a person who
was trying to take hold of her hand.
“Anything to be seen of the hills?”
“Only various shades of the dark.”
“We can’t be far from the place where my hyena was.” She peered
into the timeless twilight. The train crossed a nullah. “Pomper,
pomper, pomper,” was the sound that the wheels made as they trundled
over the bridge, moving very slowly. A hundred yards on came a
second nullah, then a third, suggesting the neighbourhood of higher
ground. “Perhaps this is mine; anyhow, the road runs parallel with
the railway.” Her accident was a pleasant memory; she felt in her
dry, honest way that it had given her a good shake up, and taught
her Ronny’s true worth. Then she went back to her plans; plans had
been a passion with her from girlhood. Now and then she paid
tribute to the present, said how friendly and intelligent Aziz was,
ate a guava, couldn’t eat a fried sweet, practised her Urdu on the
servant; but her thoughts ever veered to the manageable future,
and to the Anglo-Indian life she had decided to endure. And as she
appraised it with its adjuncts of Turtons and Burtons, the train
accompanied her sentences, “pomper, pomper,” the train half asleep,
going nowhere in particular and with no passenger of importance in
any of its carriages, the branch-line train, lost on a low
embankment between dull fields. Its message—for it had one—avoided
her well-equipped mind. Far away behind her, with a shriek that
meant business, rushed the Mail, connecting up important towns such
as Calcutta and Lahore, where interesting events occur and
personalities are developed. She understood that. Unfortunately,
India has few important towns. India is the country, fields,
fields, then hills, jungle, hills, and more fields. The branch line
stops, the road is only practicable for cars to a point, the
bullock-carts lumber down the side tracks, paths fray out into the
cultivation, and disappear near a splash of red paint. How can the
mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have
tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build
are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot
find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of
the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come”
through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august.
But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only
an appeal.
“I will fetch you from Simla when it’s cool enough. I will unbottle
you in fact,” continued the reliable girl. “We then see some of
the Mogul stuff—how appalling if we let you miss the Taj!—and then
I will see you off at Bombay. Your last glimpse of this country
really shall be interesting.” But Mrs. Moore had fallen asleep,
exhausted by the early start. She was in rather low health, and
ought not to have attempted the expedition, but had pulled herself
together in case the pleasure of the others should suffer. Her
dreams were of the same texture, but there it was her other children
who were wanting something, Stella and Ralph, and she was explaining
to them that she could not be in two families at once. When she
awoke, Adela had ceased to plan, and leant out of a window, saying,
“They’re rather wonderful.”
Astonishing even from the rise of the civil station, here the
Marabar were gods to whom earth is a ghost. Kawa Dol was nearest.
It shot up in a single slab, on whose summit one rock was poised—if
a mass so great can be called one rock. Behind it, recumbent, were
the hills that contained the other caves, isolated each from his
neighbour by broad channels of the plain. The assemblage, ten in
all, shifted a little as the train crept past them, as if observing
its arrival.
“I’ld not have missed this for anything,” said the girl, exaggerating
her enthusiasm. “Look, the sun’s rising—this’ll be absolutely
magnificent—come quickly—look. I wouldn’t have missed this for
anything. We should never have seen it if we’d stuck to the Turtons
and their eternal elephants.”
As she spoke, the sky to the left turned angry orange. Colour
throbbed and mounted behind a pattern of trees, grew in intensity,
was yet brighter, incredibly brighter, strained from without
against the globe of the air. They awaited the miracle. But at the
supreme moment, when night should have died and day lived, nothing
occurred. It was as if virtue had failed in the celestial fount.
The hues in the east decayed, the hills seemed dimmer though in
fact better lit, and a profound disappointment entered with the
morning breeze. Why, when the chamber was prepared, did the
bridegroom not enter with trumpets and shawms, as humanity expects?
The sun rose without splendour. He was presently observed trailing
yellowish behind the trees, or against insipid sky, and touching
the bodies already at work in the fields.
“Ah, that must be the false dawn—isn’t it caused by dust in the
upper layers of the atmosphere that couldn’t fall down during the
night? I think Mr. McBryde said so. Well, I must admit that England