A passage to India
to the surface of the water, then touched her ear.
“My echo’s better.”
“That’s good. You’ll be perfectly well in a few days, but you must
save yourself up for the trial. Das is a very good fellow, we shall
all be with you.”
“But Ronny, dear Ronny, perhaps there oughtn’t to be any trial.”
“I don’t quite know what you’re saying, and I don’t think you do.”
“If Dr. Aziz never did it he ought to be let out.”
A shiver like impending death passed over Ronny. He said hurriedly,
“He was let out—until the Mohurram riot, when he had to be put in
again.” To divert her, he told her the story, which was held to be
amusing. Nureddin had stolen the Nawab Bahadur’s car and driven
Aziz into a ditch in the dark. Both of them had fallen out, and
Nureddin had cut his face open. Their wailing had been drowned by
the cries of the faithful, and it was quite a time before they were
rescued by the police. Nureddin was taken to the Minto Hospital,
Aziz restored to prison, with an additional charge against him of
disturbing the public peace. “Half a minute,” he remarked when the
anecdote was over, and went to the telephone to ask Callendar to
look in as soon as he found it convenient, because she hadn’t borne
the journey well.
When he returned, she was in a nervous crisis, but it took a
different form—she clung to him, and sobbed, “Help me to do what
I ought. Aziz is good. You heard your mother say so.”
“Heard what?”
“He’s good; I’ve been so wrong to accuse him.”
“Mother never said so.”
“Didn’t she?” she asked, quite reasonable, open to every suggestion
anyway.
“She never mentioned that name once.”
“But, Ronny, I heard her.”
“Pure illusion. You can’t be quite well, can you, to make up a
thing like that.”
“I suppose I can’t. How amazing of me!”
“I was listening to all she said, as far as it could be listened
to; she gets very incoherent.”
“When her voice dropped she said it—towards the end, when she
talked about love—love—I couldn’t follow, but just then she said:
‘Doctor Aziz never did it.’”
“Those words?”
“The idea more than the words.”
“Never, never, my dear girl. Complete illusion. His name was not
mentioned by anyone. Look here—you are confusing this with
Fielding’s letter.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” she cried, greatly relieved. “I knew I’d
heard his name somewhere. I am so grateful to you for clearing this
up—it’s the sort of mistake that worries me, and proves I’m
neurotic.”
“So you won’t go saying he’s innocent again, will you? for every
servant I’ve got is a spy.” He went to the window. The mali had
gone, or rather had turned into two small children—impossible they
should know English, but he sent them packing. “They all hate us,”
he explained. “It’ll be all right after the verdict, for I will
say this for them, they do accept the accomplished fact; but at
present they’re pouring out money like water to catch us tripping,
and a remark like yours is the very thing they look out for. It
would enable them to say it was a put-up job on the part of us
officials. You see what I mean.”
Mrs. Moore came back, with the same air of ill-temper, and sat down
with a flump by the card-table. To clear the confusion up, Ronny
asked her point-blank whether she had mentioned the prisoner. She
could not understand the question and the reason of it had to be
explained. She replied: “I never said his name,” and began to play
patience.
“I thought you said, ‘Aziz is an innocent man,’ but it was in Mr.
Fielding’s letter.”
“Of course he is innocent,” she answered indifferently: it was the
first time she had expressed an opinion on the point.
“You see, Ronny, I was right,” said the girl.
“You were not right, she never said it.”
“But she thinks it.”
“Who cares what she thinks?”
“Red nine on black ten——” from the card-table.
“She can think, and Fielding too, but there’s such a thing as
evidence, I suppose.”
“I know, but——”
“Is it again my duty to talk?” asked Mrs. Moore, looking up.
“Apparently, as you keep interrupting me.”
“Only if you have anything sensible to say.”
“Oh, how tedious . . . trivial . . .” and as when she had scoffed
at love, love, love, her mind seemed to move towards them from a
great distance and out of darkness. “Oh, why is everything still
my duty? when shall I be free from your fuss? Was he in the cave
and were you in the cave and on and on . . . and Unto us a Son is
born, unto us a Child is given . . . and am I good and is he bad
and are we saved? . . . and ending everything the echo.”
“I don’t hear it so much,” said Adela, moving towards her. “You
send it away, you do nothing but good, you are so good.”
“I am not good, no, bad.” She spoke more calmly and resumed her
cards, saying as she turned them up, “A bad old woman, bad, bad,
detestable. I used to be good with the children growing up, also
I meet this young man in his mosque, I wanted him to be happy.
Good, happy, small people. They do not exist, they were a dream.
. . . But I will not help you to torture him for what he never did.
There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.”
“Have you any evidence in the prisoner’s favour?” said Ronny in
the tones of the just official. “If so, it is your bounden duty to
go into the witness-box for him instead of for us. No one will stop
you.”
“One knows people’s characters, as you call them,” she retorted
disdainfully, as if she really knew more than character but could
not impart it. “I have heard both English and Indians speak well
of him, and I felt it isn’t the sort of thing he would do.”
“Feeble, mother, feeble.”
“Most feeble.”
“And most inconsiderate to Adela.”
Adela said: “It would be so appalling if I was wrong. I should take
my own life.”
He turned on her with: “What was I warning you just now? You know
you’re right, and the whole station knows it.”
“Yes, he . . . This is very, very awful. I’m as certain as ever he
followed me . . . only, wouldn’t it be possible to withdraw the
case? I dread the idea of giving evidence more and more, and you
are all so good to women here and you have so much more power than
in England—look at Miss Derek’s motor-car. Oh, of course it’s out
of the question, I’m ashamed to have mentioned it; please forgive
me.”
“That’s all right,” he said inadequately. “Of course I forgive you,
as you call it. But the case has to come before a magistrate now;
it really must, the machinery has started.”
“She has started the machinery; it will work to its end.”
Adela inclined towards tears in consequence of this unkind remark,
and Ronny picked up the list of steamship sailings with an excellent
notion in his head. His mother ought to leave India at once: she
was doing no good to herself or to anyone else there.
CHAPTER XXIII
Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province,
had been gratified by the appeal addressed to her by the ladies of
Chandrapore. She could not do anything—besides, she was sailing
for England; but she desired to be informed if she could show
sympathy in any other way. Mrs. Turton replied that Mr. Heaslop’s
mother was trying to get a passage, but had delayed too long, and
all the boats were full; could Lady Mellanby use her influence?
Not even Lady Mellanby could expand the dimensions of a P. and O.,
but she was a very, very nice woman, and she actually wired offering
the unknown and obscure old lady accommodation in her own reserved
cabin. It was like a gift from heaven; humble and grateful, Ronny
could not but reflect that there are compensations for every woe.
His name was familiar at Government House owing to poor Adela, and
now Mrs. Moore would stamp it on Lady Mellanby’s imagination, as
they journeyed across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea. He had
a return of tenderness for his mother—as we do for our relatives
when they receive conspicuous and unexpected honour. She was not
negligible, she could still arrest the attention of a high
official’s wife.
So Mrs. Moore had all she wished; she escaped the trial, the
marriage, and the hot weather; she would return to England in
comfort and distinction, and see her other children. At her son’s
suggestion, and by her own desire, she departed. But she accepted
her good luck without enthusiasm. She had come to that state where
the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at
the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many
elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste,
well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or
other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars,
fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is
known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all
practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that
the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a
spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can
be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can
neither ignore nor respect Infinity. Mrs. Moore had always inclined
to resignation. As soon as she landed in India it seemed to her
good, and when she saw the water flowing through the mosque-tank,
or the Ganges, or the moon, caught in the shawl of night with all
the other stars, it seemed a beautiful goal and an easy one. To be
one with the universe! So dignified and simple. But there was
always some little duty to be performed first, some new card to be
turned up from the diminishing pack and placed, and while she was
pottering about, the Marabar struck its gong.
What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite?
What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very
small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed,
incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself. Since hearing its
voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually
envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing
had happened, “and if it had,” she found herself thinking with the
cynicism of a withered priestess, “if it had, there are worse evils
than love.” The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as
love: in a cave, in a church—Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions
are supposed to entail profundity, but—— Wait till you get one,
dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity
made of maggots; her constant thought was: “Less attention should
be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no
sorrow like my sorrow,” although when the attention was paid she
rejected it irritably.
Her son couldn’t escort her to Bombay, for the local situation
continued acute, and all officials had to remain at their posts.
Antony couldn’t come either, in case he never returned to give his
evidence. So she travelled with no one who could remind her of the
past. This was a relief. The heat had drawn back a little before
its next advance, and the journey was not unpleasant. As she left
Chandrapore the moon, full again, shone over the Ganges and touched
the shrinking channels into threads of silver, then veered and
looked into her window. The swift and comfortable mail-train slid
with her through the night, and all the next day she was rushing
through Central India, through landscapes that were baked and
bleached but had not the hopeless melancholy of the plain. She
watched the indestructible life of man and his changing faces, and
the houses he has built for himself and God, and they appeared to
her not in terms of her own trouble but as things to see. There
was, for instance, a place called Asirgarh which she passed at
sunset and identified on a map—an enormous fortress among wooded
hills. No one had ever mentioned Asirgarh to her, but it had huge