A passage to India
boy, he needs discipline.”
“Pepper. Civil Surgeon said so. They hope to destroy us one by one;
they shall fail.”
The new injury lashed the crowd to fury. It had been aimless
hitherto, and had lacked a grievance. When they reached the Maidan
and saw the sallow arcades of the Minto they shambled towards it
howling. It was near midday. The earth and sky were insanely ugly,
the spirit of evil again strode abroad. The Nawab Bahadur alone
struggled against it, and told himself that the rumour must be
untrue. He had seen his grandson in the ward only last week. But
he too was carried forward over the new precipice. To rescue, to
maltreat Major Callendar in revenge, and then was to come the turn
of the civil station generally.
But disaster was averted, and averted by Dr. Panna Lal.
Dr. Panna Lal had offered to give evidence for the prosecution in
the hope of pleasing the English, also because he hated Aziz. When
the case broke down, he was in a very painful position. He saw the
crash coming sooner than most people, slipped from the court before
Mr. Das had finished, and drove Dapple off through the bazaars, in
flight from the wrath to come. In the hospital he should be safe,
for Major Callendar would protect him. But the Major had not come,
and now things were worse than ever, for here was a mob, entirely
desirous of his blood, and the orderlies were mutinous and would
not help him over the back wall, or rather hoisted him and let him
drop back, to the satisfaction of the patients. In agony he cried,
“Man can but die the once,” and waddled across the compound to meet
the invasion, salaaming with one hand and holding up a pale yellow
umbrella in the other. “Oh, forgive me,” he whined as he approached
the victorious landau. “Oh, Dr. Aziz, forgive the wicked lies I
told.” Aziz was silent, the others thickened their throats and
threw up their chins in token of scorn. “I was afraid, I was
mislaid,” the suppliant continued. “I was mislaid here, there, and
everywhere as regards your character. Oh, forgive the poor old
hakim who gave you milk when ill! Oh, Nawab Bahadur, whoever
merciful, is it my poor little dispensary you require? Take every
cursed bottle.” Agitated, but alert, he saw them smile at his
indifferent English, and suddenly he started playing the buffoon,
flung down his umbrella, trod through it, and struck himself upon
the nose. He knew what he was doing, and so did they. There was
nothing pathetic or eternal in the degradation of such a man. Of
ignoble origin, Dr. Panna Lal possessed nothing that could be
disgraced, and he wisely decided to make the other Indians feel
like kings, because it would put them into better tempers. When he
found they wanted Nureddin, he skipped like a goat, he scuttled
like a hen to do their bidding, the hospital was saved, and to the
end of his life he could not understand why he had not obtained
promotion on the morning’s work. “Promptness, sir, promptness
similar to you,” was the argument he employed to Major Callendar
when claiming it.
When Nureddin emerged, his face all bandaged, there was a roar of
relief as though the Bastille had fallen. It was the crisis of the
march, and the Nawab Bahadur managed to get the situation into
hand. Embracing the young man publicly, he began a speech about
Justice, Courage, Liberty, and Prudence, ranged under heads, which
cooled the passion of the crowd. He further announced that he
should give up his British-conferred title, and live as a private
gentleman, plain Mr. Zulfiqar, for which reason he was instantly
proceeding to his country seat. The landau turned, the crowd
accompanied it, the crisis was over. The Marabar caves had been a
terrible strain on the local administration; they altered a good
many lives and wrecked several careers, but they did not break up
a continent or even dislocate a district.
“We will have rejoicings to-night,” the old man said. “Mr.
Hamidullah, I depute you to bring out our friends Fielding and
Amritrao, and to discover whether the latter will require special
food. The others will keep with me. We shall not go out to Dilkusha
until the cool of the evening, of course. I do not know the feelings
of other gentlemen; for my own part, I have a slight headache, and
I wish I had thought to ask our good Panna Lal for aspirin.”
For the heat was claiming its own. Unable to madden, it stupefied,
and before long most of the Chandrapore combatants were asleep.
Those in the civil station kept watch a little, fearing an attack,
but presently they too entered the world of dreams—that world in
which a third of each man’s life is spent, and which is thought by
some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.
CHAPTER XXVI
Evening approached by the time Fielding and Miss Quested met and
had the first of their numerous curious conversations. He had
hoped, when he woke up, to find someone had fetched her away, but
the College remained isolated from the rest of the universe. She
asked whether she could have “a sort of interview,” and, when he
made no reply, said, “Have you any explanation of my extraordinary
behaviour?”
“None,” he said curtly. “Why make such a charge if you were going
to withdraw it?”
“Why, indeed.”
“I ought to feel grateful to you, I suppose, but——”
“I don’t expect gratitude. I only thought you might care to hear
what I have to say.”
“Oh, well,” he grumbled, feeling rather schoolboyish. “I don’t
think a discussion between us is desirable. To put it frankly, I
belong to the other side in this ghastly affair.”
“Would it not interest you to hear my side?”
“Not much.”
“I shouldn’t tell you in confidence, of course. So you can hand on
all my remarks to your side, for there is one great mercy that has
come out of all to-day’s misery: I have no longer any secrets. My
echo has gone—I call the buzzing sound in my ears an echo. You see,
I have been unwell ever since that expedition to the caves, and
possibly before it.”
The remark interested him rather; it was what he had sometimes
suspected himself. “What kind of illness?” he enquired.
She touched her head at the side, then shook it.
“That was my first thought, the day of the arrest: hallucination.”
“Do you think that would be so?” she asked with great humility.
“What should have given me an hallucination?”
“One of three things certainly happened in the Marabar,” he said,
getting drawn into a discussion against his will. “One of four
things. Either Aziz is guilty, which is what your friends think;
or you invented the charge out of malice, which is what my friends
think; or you have had an hallucination. I’m very much
inclined”—getting up and striding about—“now that you tell me that
you felt unwell before the expedition—it’s an important piece of
evidence—I believe that you yourself broke the strap of the
field-glasses; you were alone in that cave the whole time.”
“Perhaps. . . .”
“Can you remember when you first felt out of sorts?”
“When I came to tea with you there, in that garden-house.”
“A somewhat unlucky party. Aziz and old Godbole were both ill after
it too.”
“I was not ill—it is far too vague to mention: it is all mixed up
with my private affairs. I enjoyed the singing . . . but just about
then a sort of sadness began that I couldn’t detect at the time . . .
no, nothing as solid as sadness: living at half pressure
expresses it best. Half pressure. I remember going on to polo with
Mr. Heaslop at the Maidan. Various other things happened—it doesn’t
matter what, but I was under par for all of them. I was certainly
in that state when I saw the caves, and you suggest (nothing shocks
or hurts me)—you suggest that I had an hallucination there, the
sort of thing—though in an awful form—that makes some women think
they’ve had an offer of marriage when none was made.”
“You put it honestly, anyhow.”
“I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere.”
Liking her better, he smiled and said, “It’ll get us to heaven.”
“Will it?”
“If heaven existed.”
“Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?” she said,
looking at him shyly.
“I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.”
“How can that be?”
“Let us go back to hallucinations. I was watching you carefully
through your evidence this morning, and if I’m right, the
hallucination (what you call half pressure—quite as good a word)
disappeared suddenly.”
She tried to remember what she had felt in court, but could not;
the vision disappeared whenever she wished to interpret it. “Events
presented themselves to me in their logical sequence,” was what
she said, but it hadn’t been that at all.
“My belief—and of course I was listening carefully, in hope you
would make some slip—my belief is that poor McBryde exorcised you.
As soon as he asked you a straightforward question, you gave a
straightforward answer, and broke down.”
“Exorcise in that sense. I thought you meant I’d seen a ghost.”
“I don’t go to that length!”
“People whom I respect very much believe in ghosts,” she said
rather sharply. “My friend Mrs. Moore does.”
“She’s an old lady.”
“I think you need not be impolite to her, as well as to her son.”
“I did not intend to be rude. I only meant it is difficult, as we
get on in life, to resist the supernatural. I’ve felt it coming on
me myself. I still jog on without it, but what a temptation, at
forty-five, to pretend that the dead live again; one’s own dead;
no one else’s matter.”
“Because the dead don’t live again.”
“I fear not.”
“So do I.”
There was a moment’s silence, such as often follows the triumph of
rationalism. Then he apologized handsomely enough for his behaviour
to Heaslop at the club.
“What does Dr. Aziz say of me?” she asked, after another pause.
“He—he has not been capable of thought in his misery, naturally
he’s very bitter,” said Fielding, a little awkward, because such
remarks as Aziz had made were not merely bitter, they were foul.
The underlying notion was, “It disgraces me to have been mentioned
in connection with such a hag.” It enraged him that he had been
accused by a woman who had no personal beauty; sexually, he was a
snob. This had puzzled and worried Fielding. Sensuality, as long
as it is straight-forward, did not repel him, but this derived
sensuality—the sort that classes a mistress among motor-cars if
she is beautiful, and among eye-flies if she isn’t—was alien to
his own emotions, and he felt a barrier between himself and Aziz
whenever it arose. It was, in a new form, the old, old trouble that
eats the heart out of every civilization: snobbery, the desire for
possessions, creditable appendages; and it is to escape this rather
than the lusts of the flesh that saints retreat into the Himalayas.
To change the subject, he said, “But let me conclude my analysis.
We are agreed that he is not a villain and that you are not one,
and we aren’t really sure that it was an hallucination. There’s a
fourth possibility which we must touch on: was it somebody else?”
“The guide.”
“Exactly, the guide. I often think so. Unluckily Aziz hit him on
the face, and he got a fright and disappeared. It is most
unsatisfactory, and we hadn’t the police to help us, the guide was
of no interest to them.”
“Perhaps it was the guide,” she said quietly; the question had lost
interest for her suddenly.
“Or could it have been one of that gang of Pathans who have been
drifting through the district?”
“Someone who was in another cave, and followed me when the guide
was looking away? Possibly.”
At that moment Hamidullah joined them, and seemed not too pleased
to find them closeted together. Like everyone else in Chandrapore,
he could make nothing of Miss Quested’s conduct. He had overheard
their last remark. “Hullo, my dear Fielding,” he said. “So I run