A passage to India
to curtail, came to its natural conclusion.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Dead she was—committed to the deep while still on the southward
track, for the boats from Bombay cannot point towards Europe until
Arabia has been rounded; she was further in the tropics than ever
achieved while on shore, when the sun touched her for the last time
and her body was lowered into yet another India—the Indian Ocean.
She left behind her sore discomfort, for a death gives a ship a
bad name. Who was this Mrs. Moore? When Aden was reached, Lady
Mellanby cabled, wrote, did all that was kind, but the wife of a
Lieutenant-Governor does not bargain for such an experience; and
she repeated: “I had only seen the poor creature for a few hours
when she was taken ill; really this has been needlessly distressing,
it spoils one’s home-coming.” A ghost followed the ship up the Red
Sea, but failed to enter the Mediterranean. Somewhere about Suez
there is always a social change: the arrangements of Asia weaken
and those of Europe begin to be felt, and during the transition
Mrs. Moore was shaken off. At Port Said the grey blustery north
began. The weather was so cold and bracing that the passengers felt
it must have broken in the land they had left, but it became hotter
steadily there in accordance with its usual law.
The death took subtler and more lasting shapes in Chandrapore. A
legend sprang up that an Englishman had killed his mother for
trying to save an Indian’s life—and there was just enough truth in
this to cause annoyance to the authorities. Sometimes it was a cow
that had been killed—or a crocodile with the tusks of a boar had
crawled out of the Ganges. Nonsense of this type is more difficult
to combat than a solid lie. It hides in rubbish heaps and moves
when no one is looking. At one period two distinct tombs containing
Esmiss Esmoor’s remains were reported: one by the tannery, the
other up near the goods station. Mr. McBryde visited them both and
saw signs of the beginning of a cult—earthenware saucers and so
on. Being an experienced official, he did nothing to irritate it,
and after a week or so, the rash died down. “There’s propaganda
behind all this,” he said, forgetting that a hundred years ago,
when Europeans still made their home in the country-side and
appealed to its imagination, they occasionally became local demons
after death—not a whole god, perhaps, but part of one, adding an
epithet or gesture to what already existed, just as the gods
contribute to the great gods, and they to the philosophic Brahm.
Ronny reminded himself that his mother had left India at her own
wish, but his conscience was not clear. He had behaved badly to
her, and he had either to repent (which involved a mental overturn),
or to persist in unkindness towards her. He chose the latter
course. How tiresome she had been with her patronage of Aziz! What
a bad influence upon Adela! And now she still gave trouble with
ridiculous “tombs,” mixing herself up with natives. She could not
help it, of course, but she had attempted similar exasperating
expeditions in her lifetime, and he reckoned it against her. The
young man had much to worry him—the heat, the local tension, the
approaching visit of the Lieutenant-Governor, the problems of
Adela—and threading them all together into a grotesque garland were
these Indianizations of Mrs. Moore. What does happen to one’s
mother when she dies? Presumably she goes to heaven, anyhow she
clears out. Ronny’s religion was of the sterilized Public School
brand, which never goes bad, even in the tropics. Wherever he
entered, mosque, cave, or temple, he retained the spiritual outlook
of the Fifth Form, and condemned as “weakening” any attempt to
understand them. Pulling himself together, he dismissed the mater
from his mind. In due time he and his half-brother and -sister
would put up a tablet to her in the Northamptonshire church where
she had worshipped, recording the dates of her birth and death and
the fact that she had been buried at sea. This would be sufficient.
And Adela—she would have to depart too; he hoped she would have
made the suggestion herself ere now. He really could not marry
her—it would mean the end of his career. Poor lamentable Adela. . . .
She remained at Government College, by Fielding’s
courtesy—unsuitable and humiliating, but no one would receive her
at the civil station. He postponed all private talk until the award
against her was decided. Aziz was suing her for damages in the
sub-judge’s court. Then he would ask her to release him. She had
killed his love, and it had never been very robust; they would
never have achieved betrothal but for the accident to the Nawab
Bahadur’s car. She belonged to the callow academic period of his
life which he had outgrown—Grasmere, serious talks and walks, that
sort of thing.
CHAPTER XXIX
The visit of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province formed the
next stage in the decomposition of the Marabar. Sir Gilbert, though
not an enlightened man, held enlightened opinions. Exempted by a
long career in the Secretariate from personal contact with the
peoples of India, he was able to speak of them urbanely, and to
deplore racial prejudice. He applauded the outcome of the trial,
and congratulated Fielding on having taken “the broad, the sensible,
the only possible charitable view from the first. Speaking
confidentially . . .” he proceeded. Fielding deprecated confidences,
but Sir Gilbert insisted on imparting them; the affair had been
“mishandled by certain of our friends up the hill” who did not
realize that “the hands of the clock move forward, not back,” etc.,
etc. One thing he could guarantee: the Principal would receive a
most cordial invitation to rejoin the club, and he begged, nay
commanded him, to accept. He returned to his Himalayan altitudes
well satisfied; the amount of money Miss Quested would have to pay,
the precise nature of what had happened in the caves—these were
local details, and did not concern him.
Fielding found himself drawn more and more into Miss Quested’s
affairs. The College remained closed and he ate and slept at
Hamidullah’s, so there was no reason she should not stop on if she
wished. In her place he would have cleared out, sooner than submit
to Ronny’s half-hearted and distracted civilities, but she was
waiting for the hour-glass of her sojourn to run through. A house
to live in, a garden to walk in during the brief moment of the
cool—that was all she asked, and he was able to provide them.
Disaster had shown her her limitations, and he realized now what
a fine loyal character she was. Her humility was touching. She
never repined at getting the worst of both worlds; she regarded it
as the due punishment of her stupidity. When he hinted to her that
a personal apology to Aziz might be seemly, she said sadly: “Of
course. I ought to have thought of it myself, my instincts never
help me. Why didn’t I rush up to him after the trial? Yes, of
course I will write him an apology, but please will you dictate
it?” Between them they concocted a letter, sincere, and full of
moving phrases, but it was not moving as a letter. “Shall I write
another?” she enquired. “Nothing matters if I can undo the harm I
have caused. I can do this right, and that right; but when the two
are put together they come wrong. That’s the defect of my character.
I have never realized it until now. I thought that if I was just
and asked questions I would come through every difficulty.” He
replied: “Our letter is a failure for a simple reason which we had
better face: you have no real affection for Aziz, or Indians
generally.” She assented. “The first time I saw you, you were
wanting to see India, not Indians, and it occurred to me: Ah, that
won’t take us far. Indians know whether they are liked or not—they
cannot be fooled here. Justice never satisfies them, and that is
why the British Empire rests on sand.” Then she said: “Do I like
anyone, though?” Presumably she liked Heaslop, and he changed the
subject, for this side of her life did not concern him.
His Indian friends were, on the other hand, a bit above themselves.
Victory, which would have made the English sanctimonious, made them
aggressive. They wanted to develop an offensive, and tried to do
so by discovering new grievances and wrongs, many of which had no
existence. They suffered from the usual disillusion that attends
warfare. The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never
the same; the latter have their value and only the saint rejects
them, but their hint of immortality vanishes as soon as they are
held in the hand. Although Sir Gilbert had been courteous, almost
obsequious, the fabric he represented had in no wise bowed its
head. British officialism remained, as all-pervading and as
unpleasant as the sun; and what was next to be done against it was
not very obvious, even to Mahmoud Ali. Loud talk and trivial
lawlessness were attempted, and behind them continued a genuine
but vague desire for education. “Mr. Fielding, we must all be
educated promptly.”
Aziz was friendly and domineering. He wanted Fielding to “give in
to the East,” as he called it, and live in a condition of
affectionate dependence upon it. “You can trust me, Cyril.” No
question of that, and Fielding had no roots among his own people.
Yet he really couldn’t become a sort of Mohammed Latif. When they
argued about it something racial intruded—not bitterly, but
inevitably, like the colour of their skins: coffee-colour versus
pinko-grey. And Aziz would conclude: “Can’t you see that I’m
grateful to you for your help and want to reward you?” And the
other would retort: “If you want to reward me, let Miss Quested
off paying.”
The insensitiveness about Adela displeased him. It would, from
every point of view, be right to treat her generously, and one day
he had the notion of appealing to the memory of Mrs. Moore. Aziz
had this high and fantastic estimate of Mrs. Moore. Her death had
been a real grief to his warm heart; he wept like a child and
ordered his three children to weep also. There was no doubt that
he respected and loved her. Fielding’s first attempt was a failure.
The reply was: “I see your trick. I want revenge on them. Why
should I be insulted and suffer and the contents of my pockets read
and my wife’s photograph taken to the police station? Also I want
the money—to educate my little boys, as I explained to her.” But
he began to weaken, and Fielding was not ashamed to practise a
little necromancy. Whenever the question of compensation came up,
he introduced the dead woman’s name. Just as other propagandists
invented her a tomb, so did he raise a questionable image of her
in the heart of Aziz, saying nothing that he believed to be untrue,
but producing something that was probably far from the truth. Aziz
yielded suddenly. He felt it was Mrs. Moore’s wish that he should
spare the woman who was about to marry her son, that it was the
only honour he could pay her, and he renounced with a passionate
and beautiful outburst the whole of the compensation money, claiming
only costs. It was fine of him, and, as he foresaw, it won him no
credit with the English. They still believed he was guilty, they
believed it to the end of their careers, and retired Anglo-Indians
in Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham still murmur to each other: “That
Marabar case which broke down because the poor girl couldn’t face
giving her evidence—that was another bad case.”
When the affair was thus officially ended, Ronny, who was about to
be transferred to another part of the Province, approached Fielding
with his usual constraint and said: “I wish to thank you for the
help you have given Miss Quested. She will not of course trespass
on your hospitality further; she has as a matter of fact decided