A passage to India
to pull things straight. At the post office he saw the Collector.
Their vehicles were parked side by side while their servants
competed in the interior of the building. “Good morning; so you
are back,” said Turton icily. “I should be glad if you will put in
your appearance at the club this evening.”
“I have accepted re-election, sir. Do you regard it as necessary
I should come? I should be glad to be excused; indeed, I have a
dinner engagement this evening.”
“It is not a question of your feelings, but of the wish of the
Lieutenant-Governor. Perhaps you will ask me whether I speak
officially. I do. I shall expect you this evening at six. We shall
not interfere with your subsequent plans.”
He attended the grim little function in due course. The skeletons
of hospitality rattled—“Have a peg, have a drink.” He talked for
five minutes to Mrs. Blakiston, who was the only surviving female.
He talked to McBryde, who was defiant about his divorce, conscious
that he had sinned as a sahib. He talked to Major Roberts, the new
Civil Surgeon; and to young Milner, the new City Magistrate; but
the more the club changed, the more it promised to be the same
thing. “It is no good,” he thought, as he returned past the mosque,
“we all build upon sand; and the more modern the country gets, the
worse’ll be the crash. In the old eighteenth century, when cruelty
and injustice raged, an invisible power repaired their ravages.
Everything echoes now; there’s no stopping the echo. The original
sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil.” This reflection
about an echo lay at the verge of Fielding’s mind. He could never
develop it. It belonged to the universe that he had missed or
rejected. And the mosque missed it too. Like himself, those shallow
arcades provided but a limited asylum. “There is no God but God”
doesn’t carry us far through the complexities of matter and spirit;
it is only a game with words, really, a religious pun, not a
religious truth.
He found Aziz overtired and dispirited, and he determined not to
allude to their misunderstanding until the end of the evening; it
would be more acceptable then. He made a clean breast about the
club—said he had only gone under compulsion, and should never
attend again unless the order was renewed. “In other words, probably
never; for I am going quite soon to England.”
“I thought you might end in England,” he said very quietly, then
changed the conversation. Rather awkwardly they ate their dinner,
then went out to sit in the Mogul garden-house.
“I am only going for a little time. On official business. My
service is anxious to get me away from Chandrapore for a bit. It
is obliged to value me highly, but does not care for me. The
situation is somewhat humorous.”
“What is the nature of the business? Will it leave you much spare
time?”
“Enough to see my friends.”
“I expected you to make such a reply. You are a faithful friend.
Shall we now talk about something else?”
“Willingly. What subject?”
“Poetry,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “Let us discuss why
poetry has lost the power of making men brave. My mother’s father
was also a poet, and fought against you in the Mutiny. I might
equal him if there was another mutiny. As it is, I am a doctor,
who has won a case and has three children to support, and whose
chief subject of conversation is official plans.”
“Let us talk about poetry.” He turned his mind to the innocuous
subject. “You people are sadly circumstanced. Whatever are you to
write about? You cannot say, ‘The rose is faded,’ for evermore. We
know it’s faded. Yet you can’t have patriotic poetry of the ‘India,
my India’ type, when it’s nobody’s India.”
“I like this conversation. It may lead to something interesting.”
“You are quite right in thinking that poetry must touch life. When
I knew you first, you used it as an incantation.”
“I was a child when you knew me first. Everyone was my friend then.
The Friend: a Persian expression for God. But I do not want to be
a religious poet either.”
“I hoped you would be.”
“Why, when you yourself are an atheist?”
“There is something in religion that may not be true, but has not
yet been sung.”
“Explain in detail.”
“Something that the Hindus have perhaps found.”
“Let them sing it.”
“Hindus are unable to sing.”
“Cyril, you sometimes make a sensible remark. That will do for
poetry for the present. Let us now return to your English visit.”
“We haven’t discussed poetry for two seconds,” said the other,
smiling.
But Aziz was addicted to cameos. He held the tiny conversation in
his hand, and felt it epitomized his problem. For an instant he
recalled his wife, and, as happens when a memory is intense, the
past became the future, and he saw her with him in a quiet Hindu
jungle native state, far away from foreigners. He said: “I suppose
you will visit Miss Quested.”
“If I have time. It will be strange seeing her in Hampstead.”
“What is Hampstead?”
“An artistic and thoughtful little suburb of London——”
“And there she lives in comfort: you will enjoy seeing her. . . .
Dear me, I’ve got a headache this evening. Perhaps I am going to
have cholera. With your permission, I’ll leave early.”
“When would you like the carriage?”
“Don’t trouble—I’ll bike.”
“But you haven’t got your bicycle. My carriage fetched you—let it
take you away.”
“Sound reasoning,” he said, trying to be gay. “I have not got my
bicycle. But I am seen too often in your carriage. I am thought to
take advantage of your generosity by Mr. Ram Chand.” He was out of
sorts and uneasy. The conversation jumped from topic to topic in
a broken-backed fashion. They were affectionate and intimate, but
nothing clicked tight.
“Aziz, you have forgiven me the stupid remark I made this morning?”
“When you called me a little rotter?”
“Yes, to my eternal confusion. You know how fond I am of you.”
“That is nothing, of course, we all of us make mistakes. In a
friendship such as ours a few slips are of no consequence.”
But as he drove off, something depressed him—a dull pain of body
or mind, waiting to rise to the surface. When he reached the
bungalow he wanted to return and say something very affectionate;
instead, he gave the sais a heavy tip, and sat down gloomily on
the bed, and Hassan massaged him incompetently. The eye-flies had
colonized the top of an almeira; the red stains on the durry were
thicker, for Mohammed Latif had slept here during his imprisonment
and spat a good deal; the table drawer was scarred where the police
had forced it open; everything in Chandrapore was used up, including
the air. The trouble rose to the surface now: he was suspicious;
he suspected his friend of intending to marry Miss Quested for the
sake of her money, and of going to England for that purpose.
“Huzoor?”—for he had muttered.
“Look at those flies on the ceiling. Why have you not drowned
them?”
“Huzoor, they return.”
“Like all evil things.”
To divert the conversation, Hassan related how the kitchen-boy had
killed a snake, good, but killed it by cutting it in two, bad,
because it becomes two snakes.
“When he breaks a plate, does it become two plates?”
“Glasses and a new teapot will similarly be required, also for
myself a coat.”
Aziz sighed. Each for himself. One man needs a coat, another a rich
wife; each approaches his goal by a clever detour. Fielding had
saved the girl a fine of twenty thousand rupees, and now followed
her to England. If he desired to marry her, all was explained; she
would bring him a larger dowry. Aziz did not believe his own
suspicions—better if he had, for then he would have denounced and
cleared the situation up. Suspicion and belief could in his mind
exist side by side. They sprang from different sources, and need
never intermingle. Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant
tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and
unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in
a way the Westerner cannot comprehend. It is his demon, as the
Westerner’s is hypocrisy. Aziz was seized by it, and his fancy
built a satanic castle, of which the foundation had been laid when
he talked at Dilkusha under the stars. The girl had surely been
Cyril’s mistress when she stopped in the College—Mohammed Latif
was right. But was that all? Perhaps it was Cyril who followed her
into the cave. . . . No; impossible. Cyril hadn’t been on the Kawa
Dol at all. Impossible. Ridiculous. Yet the fancy left him trembling
with misery. Such treachery—if true—would have been the worst in
Indian history; nothing so vile, not even the murder of Afzul Khan
by Sivaji. He was shaken, as though by a truth, and told Hassan to
leave him.
Next day he decided to take his children back to Mussoorie. They
had come down for the trial, that he might bid them farewell, and
had stayed on at Hamidullah’s for the rejoicings. Major Roberts
would give him leave, and during his absence Fielding would go off
to England. The idea suited both his beliefs and his suspicions.
Events would prove which was right, and preserve, in either case,
his dignity.
Fielding was conscious of something hostile, and because he was
really fond of Aziz his optimism failed him. Travelling light is
less easy as soon as affection is involved. Unable to jog forward
in the serene hope that all would come right, he wrote an elaborate
letter in the rather modern style: “It is on my mind that you think
me a prude about women. I had rather you thought anything else of
me. If I live impeccably now, it is only because I am well on the
forties—a period of revision. In the eighties I shall revise again.
And before the nineties come—I shall be revised! But, alive or
dead, I am absolutely devoid of morals. Do kindly grasp this about
me.” Aziz did not care for the letter at all. It hurt his delicacy.
He liked confidences, however gross, but generalizations and
comparisons always repelled him. Life is not a scientific manual.
He replied coldly, regretting his inability to return from Mussoorie
before his friend sailed: “But I must take my poor little holiday
while I can. All must be economy henceforward, all hopes of Kashmir
have vanished for ever and ever. When you return I shall be slaving
far away in some new post.”
And Fielding went, and in the last gutterings of Chandrapore—heaven
and earth both looking like toffee—the Indian’s bad fancies were
confirmed. His friends encouraged them, for though they had liked
the Principal, they felt uneasy at his getting to know so much
about their private affairs. Mahmoud Ali soon declared that
treachery was afoot. Hamidullah murmured, “Certainly of late he no
longer addressed us with his former frankness,” and warned Aziz
“not to expect too much—he and she are, after all, both members of
another race.” “Where are my twenty thousand rupees?” he thought.
He was absolutely indifferent to money—not merely generous with
it, but promptly paying his debts when he could remember to do
so—yet these rupees haunted his mind, because he had been tricked
about them, and allowed them to escape overseas, like so much of
the wealth of India. Cyril would marry Miss Quested—he grew certain
of it, all the unexplained residue of the Marabar contributing. It
was the natural conclusion of the horrible senseless picnic, and
before long he persuaded himself that the wedding had actually
taken place.
CHAPTER XXXII
Egypt was charming—a green strip of carpet and walking up and down
it four sorts of animals and one sort of man. Fielding’s business
took him there for a few days. He re-embarked at Alexandria—bright
blue sky, constant wind, clean low coast-line, as against the
intricacies of Bombay. Crete welcomed him next with the long snowy