A passage to India
and noble bastions and to the right of them was a mosque. She
forgot it. Ten minutes later, Asirgarh reappeared. The mosque was
to the left of the bastions now. The train in its descent through
the Vindyas had described a semicircle round Asirgarh. What could
she connect it with except its own name? Nothing; she knew no one
who lived there. But it had looked at her twice and seemed to say:
“I do not vanish.” She woke in the middle of the night with a
start, for the train was falling over the western cliff. Moonlit
pinnacles rushed up at her like the fringes of a sea; then a brief
episode of plain, the real sea, and the soupy dawn of Bombay. “I
have not seen the right places,” she thought, as she saw embayed
in the platforms of the Victoria Terminus the end of the rails that
had carried her over a continent and could never carry her back.
She would never visit Asirgarh or the other untouched places;
neither Delhi nor Agra nor the Rajputana cities nor Kashmir, nor
the obscurer marvels that had sometimes shone through men’s speech:
the bilingual rock of Girnar, the statue of Shri Belgola, the ruins
of Mandu and Hampi, temples of Khajraha, gardens of Shalimar. As
she drove through the huge city which the West has built and
abandoned with a gesture of despair, she longed to stop, though it
was only Bombay, and disentangle the hundred Indias that passed
each other in its streets. The feet of the horses moved her on,
and presently the boat sailed and thousands of coco-nut palms
appeared all round the anchorage and climbed the hills to wave her
farewell. “So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar
caves as final?” they laughed. “What have we in common with them,
or they with Asirgarh? Good-bye!” Then the steamer rounded Colaba,
the continent swung about, the cliff of the Ghats melted into the
haze of a tropic sea. Lady Mellanby turned up and advised her not
to stand in the heat: “We are safely out of the frying-pan,” said
Lady Mellanby, “it will never do to fall into the fire.”
CHAPTER XXIV
Making sudden changes of gear, the heat accelerated its advance
after Mrs. Moore’s departure until existence had to be endured and
crime punished with the thermometer at a hundred and twelve.
Electric fans hummed and spat, water splashed on to screens, ice
clinked, and outside these defences, between a greyish sky and a
yellowish earth, clouds of dust moved hesitatingly. In Europe life
retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have
resulted—Balder, Persephone—but here the retreat is from the source
of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because
disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though
they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful
and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to
accommodate them. The annual helter-skelter of April, when
irritability and lust spread like a canker, is one of her comments
on the orderly hopes of humanity. Fish manage better; fish, as the
tanks dry, wriggle into the mud and wait for the rains to uncake
them. But men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the
results are occasionally disastrous. The triumphant machine of
civilization may suddenly hitch and be immobilized into a car of
stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to
resemble their predecessors’, who also entered the country with
intent to refashion it, but were in the end worked into its pattern
and covered with its dust.
Adela, after years of intellectualism, had resumed her morning
kneel to Christianity. There seemed no harm in it, it was the
shortest and easiest cut to the unseen, and she could tack her
troubles on to it. Just as the Hindu clerks asked Lakshmi for an
increase in pay, so did she implore Jehovah for a favourable
verdict. God who saves the King will surely support the police.
Her deity returned a consoling reply, but the touch of her hands
on her face started prickly heat, and she seemed to swallow and
expectorate the same insipid clot of air that had weighed on her
lungs all the night. Also the voice of Mrs. Turton disturbed her.
“Are you ready, young lady?” it pealed from the next room.
“Half a minute,” she murmured. The Turtons had received her after
Mrs. Moore left. Their kindness was incredible, but it was her
position not her character that moved them; she was the English
girl who had had the terrible experience, and for whom too much
could not be done. No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what
passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is
officialism every human relationship suffers. In her sadness she
said to him, “I bring you nothing but trouble; I was right on the
Maidan, we had better just be friends,” but he protested, for the
more she suffered the more highly he valued her. Did she love him?
This question was somehow draggled up with the Marabar, it had been
in her mind as she entered the fatal cave. Was she capable of
loving anyone?
“Miss Quested, Adela, what d’ye call yourself, it’s half-past
seven; we ought to think of starting for that Court when you feel
inclined.”
“She’s saying her prayers,” came the Collector’s voice.
“Sorry, my dear; take your time. . . . Was your chhota hazri all
right?”
“I can’t eat; might I have a little brandy?” she asked, deserting
Jehovah.
When it was brought, she shuddered, and said she was ready to go.
“Drink it up; not a bad notion, a peg.”
“I don’t think it’ll really help me, Burra Sahib.”
“You sent brandy down to the Court, didn’t you, Mary?”
“I should think I did, champagne too.”
“I’ll thank you this evening, I’m all to pieces now,” said the
girl, forming each syllable carefully as if her trouble would
diminish if it were accurately defined. She was afraid of reticence,
in case something that she herself did not perceive took shape
beneath it, and she had rehearsed with Mr. McBryde in an odd,
mincing way her terrible adventure in the cave, how the man had
never actually touched her but dragged her about, and so on. Her
aim this morning was to announce, meticulously, that the strain
was appalling, and she would probably break down under Mr.
Amritrao’s cross-examination and disgrace her friends. “My echo
has come back again badly,” she told them.
“How about aspirin?”
“It is not a headache, it is an echo.”
Unable to dispel the buzzing in her ears, Major Callendar had
diagnosed it as a fancy, which must not be encouraged. So the
Turtons changed the subject. The cool little lick of the breeze
was passing over the earth, dividing night from day; it would fail
in ten minutes, but they might profit by it for their drive down
into the city.
“I am sure to break down,” she repeated.
“You won’t,” said the Collector, his voice full of tenderness.
“Of course she won’t, she’s a real sport.”
“But Mrs. Turton . . .”
“Yes, my dear child?”
“If I do break down, it is of no consequence. It would matter in
some trials, not in this. I put it to myself in the following way:
I can really behave as I like, cry, be absurd, I am sure to get my
verdict, unless Mr. Das is most frightfully unjust.”
“You’re bound to win,” he said calmly, and did not remind her that
there was bound to be an appeal. The Nawab Bahadur had financed
the defence, and would ruin himself sooner than let an “innocent
Moslem perish,” and other interests, less reputable, were in the
background too. The case might go up from court to court, with
consequences that no official could foresee. Under his very eyes,
the temper of Chandrapore was altering. As his car turned out of
the compound, there was a tap of silly anger on its paint—a pebble
thrown by a child. Some larger stones were dropped near the mosque.
In the Maidan, a squad of native police on motor cycles waited to
escort them through the bazaars. The Collector was irritated and
muttered, “McBryde’s an old woman”; but Mrs. Turton said, “Really,
after Mohurram a show of force will do no harm; it’s ridiculous to
pretend they don’t hate us, do give up that farce.” He replied in
an odd, sad voice, “I don’t hate them, I don’t know why,” and he
didn’t hate them; for if he did, he would have had to condemn his
own career as a bad investment. He retained a contemptuous affection
for the pawns he had moved about for so many years, they must be
worth his pains. “After all, it’s our women who make everything
more difficult out here,” was his inmost thought, as he caught
sight of some obscenities upon a long blank wall, and beneath his
chivalry to Miss Quested resentment lurked, waiting its day—perhaps
there is a grain of resentment in all chivalry. Some students had
gathered in front of the City Magistrate’s Court—hysterical boys
whom he would have faced if alone, but he told the driver to work
round to the rear of the building. The students jeered, and Rafi
(hiding behind a comrade that he might not be identified) called
out the English were cowards.
They gained Ronny’s private room, where a group of their own sort
had collected. None were cowardly, all nervy, for queer reports
kept coming in. The Sweepers had just struck, and half the commodes
of Chandrapore remained desolate in consequence—only half, and
Sweepers from the District, who felt less strongly about the
innocence of Dr. Aziz, would arrive in the afternoon, and break
the strike, but why should the grotesque incident occur? And a
number of Mohammedan ladies had sworn to take no food until the
prisoner was acquitted; their death would make little difference,
indeed, being invisible, they seemed dead already, nevertheless it
was disquieting. A new spirit seemed abroad, a rearrangement, which
no one in the stern little band of whites could explain. There was
a tendency to see Fielding at the back of it: the idea that he was
weak and cranky had been dropped. They abused Fielding vigorously:
he had been seen driving up with the two counsels, Amritrao and
Mahmoud Ali; he encouraged the Boy Scout movement for seditious
reasons; he received letters with foreign stamps on them, and was
probably a Japanese spy. This morning’s verdict would break the
renegade, but he had done his country and the Empire incalculable
disservice. While they denounced him, Miss Quested lay back with
her hands on the arms of her chair and her eyes closed, reserving
her strength. They noticed her after a time, and felt ashamed of
making so much noise.
“Can we do nothing for you?” Miss Derek said.
“I don’t think so, Nancy, and I seem able to do nothing for myself.”
“But you’re strictly forbidden to talk like that; you’re wonderful.”
“Yes indeed,” came the reverent chorus.
“My old Das is all right,” said Ronny, starting a new subject in
low tones.
“Not one of them’s all right,” contradicted Major Callendar.
“Das is, really.”
“You mean he’s more frightened of acquitting than convicting,
because if he acquits he’ll lose his job,” said Lesley with a
clever little laugh.
Ronny did mean that, but he cherished “illusions” about his own
subordinates (following the finer traditions of his service here),
and he liked to maintain that his old Das really did possess moral
courage of the Public School brand. He pointed out that—from one
point of view—it was good that an Indian was taking the case.
Conviction was inevitable; so better let an Indian pronounce it,
there would be less fuss in the long run. Interested in the
argument, he let Adela become dim in his mind.
“In fact, you disapprove of the appeal I forwarded to Lady
Mellanby,” said Mrs. Turton with considerable heat. “Pray don’t
apologize, Mr. Heaslop; I am accustomed to being in the wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that . . .”
“All right. I said don’t apologize.”
“Those swine are always on the look-out for a grievance,” said
Lesley, to propitiate her.