A passage to India
must be mad. Fancy inviting guests and not treating them properly!
You and Mr. Turton and perhaps Mr. McBryde are the only people who
showed any common politeness. The rest make me perfectly ashamed,
and it’s got worse and worse.”
It had. The Englishmen had intended to play up better, but had been
prevented from doing so by their women folk, whom they had to
attend, provide with tea, advise about dogs, etc. When tennis
began, the barrier grew impenetrable. It had been hoped to have
some sets between East and West, but this was forgotten, and the
courts were monopolized by the usual club couples. Fielding resented
it too, but did not say so to the girl, for he found something
theoretical in her outburst. Did she care about Indian music? he
enquired; there was an old professor down at the College, who sang.
“Oh, just what we wanted to hear. And do you know Doctor Aziz?”
“I know all about him. I don’t know him. Would you like him asked
too?”
“Mrs. Moore says he is so nice.”
“Very well, Miss Quested. Will Thursday suit you?”
“Indeed it will, and that morning we go to this Indian lady’s. All
the nice things are coming Thursday.”
“I won’t ask the City Magistrate to bring you. I know he’ll be busy
at that time.”
“Yes, Ronny is always hard-worked,” she replied, contemplating the
hills. How lovely they suddenly were! But she couldn’t touch them.
In front, like a shutter, fell a vision of her married life. She
and Ronny would look into the club like this every evening, then
drive home to dress; they would see the Lesleys and the Callendars
and the Turtons and the Burtons, and invite them and be invited by
them, while the true India slid by unnoticed. Colour would
remain—the pageant of birds in the early morning, brown bodies,
white turbans, idols whose flesh was scarlet or blue—and movement
would remain as long as there were crowds in the bazaar and bathers
in the tanks. Perched up on the seat of a dogcart, she would see
them. But the force that lies behind colour and movement would
escape her even more effectually than it did now. She would see
India always as a frieze, never as a spirit, and she assumed that
it was a spirit of which Mrs. Moore had had a glimpse.
And sure enough they did drive away from the club in a few minutes,
and they did dress, and to dinner came Miss Derek and the McBrydes,
and the menu was: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas,
pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to
be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on
toast: the menu of Anglo-India. A dish might be added or subtracted
as one rose or fell in the official scale, the peas might rattle
less or more, the sardines and the vermouth be imported by a
different firm, but the tradition remained; the food of exiles,
cooked by servants who did not understand it. Adela thought of the
young men and women who had come out before her, P. & O. full after
P. & O. full, and had been set down to the same food and the same
ideas, and been snubbed in the same good-humoured way until they
kept to the accredited themes and began to snub others. “I should
never get like that,” she thought, for she was young herself; all
the same she knew that she had come up against something that was
both insidious and tough, and against which she needed allies. She
must gather around her at Chandrapore a few people who felt as she
did, and she was glad to have met Mr. Fielding and the Indian lady
with the unpronounceable name. Here at all events was a nucleus;
she should know much better where she stood in the course of the
next two days.
Miss Derek—she companioned a Maharani in a remote Native State.
She was genial and gay and made them all laugh about her leave,
which she had taken because she felt she deserved it, not because
the Maharani said she might go. Now she wanted to take the
Maharajah’s motor-car as well; it had gone to a Chiefs’ Conference
at Delhi, and she had a great scheme for burgling it at the junction
as it came back in the train. She was also very funny about the
Bridge Party—indeed she regarded the entire peninsula as a comic
opera. “If one couldn’t see the laughable side of these people one
’ld be done for,” said Miss Derek. Mrs. McBryde—it was she who had
been the nurse—ceased not to exclaim, “Oh, Nancy, how topping! Oh,
Nancy, how killing! I wish I could look at things like that.” Mr.
McBryde did not speak much; he seemed nice.
When the guests had gone, and Adela gone to bed, there was another
interview between mother and son. He wanted her advice and
support—while resenting interference. “Does Adela talk to you
much?” he began. “I’m so driven with work, I don’t see her as much
as I hoped, but I hope she finds things comfortable.”
“Adela and I talk mostly about India. Dear, since you mention it,
you’re quite right—you ought to be more alone with her than you
are.”
“Yes, perhaps, but then people’ld gossip.”
“Well, they must gossip sometime! Let them gossip.”
“People are so odd out here, and it’s not like home—one’s always
facing the footlights, as the Burra Sahib said. Take a silly little
example: when Adela went out to the boundary of the club compound,
and Fielding followed her. I saw Mrs. Callendar notice it. They
notice everything, until they’re perfectly sure you’re their sort.”
“I don’t think Adela ’ll ever be quite their sort—she’s much too
individual.”
“I know, that’s so remarkable about her,” he said thoughtfully.
Mrs. Moore thought him rather absurd. Accustomed to the privacy of
London, she could not realize that India, seemingly so mysterious,
contains none, and that consequently the conventions have greater
force. “I suppose nothing’s on her mind,” he continued.
“Ask her, ask her yourself, my dear boy.”
“Probably she’s heard tales of the heat, but of course I should
pack her off to the Hills every April—I’m not one to keep a wife
grilling in the Plains.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be the weather.”
“There’s nothing in India but the weather, my dear mother; it’s
the Alpha and Omega of the whole affair.”
“Yes, as Mr. McBryde was saying, but it’s much more the Anglo-Indians
themselves who are likely to get on Adela’s nerves. She doesn’t
think they behave pleasantly to Indians, you see.”
“What did I tell you?” he exclaimed, losing his gentle manner. “I
knew it last week. Oh, how like a woman to worry over a side-issue!”
She forgot about Adela in her surprise. “A side-issue, a side-issue?”
she repeated. “How can it be that?”
“We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly!”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say. We’re out here to do justice and keep the peace.
Them’s my sentiments. India isn’t a drawing-room.”
“Your sentiments are those of a god,” she said quietly, but it was
his manner rather than his sentiments that annoyed her.
Trying to recover his temper, he said, “India likes gods.”
“And Englishmen like posing as gods.”
“There’s no point in all this. Here we are, and we’re going to
stop, and the country’s got to put up with us, gods or no gods.
Oh, look here,” he broke out, rather pathetically, “what do you
and Adela want me to do? Go against my class, against all the
people I respect and admire out here? Lose such power as I have
for doing good in this country because my behaviour isn’t pleasant?
You neither of you understand what work is, or you ’ld never talk
such eyewash. I hate talking like this, but one must occasionally.
It’s morbidly sensitive to go on as Adela and you do. I noticed
you both at the club to-day—after the Burra Sahib had been at all
that trouble to amuse you. I am out here to work, mind, to hold
this wretched country by force. I’m not a missionary or a Labour
Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I’m just
a servant of the Government; it’s the profession you wanted me to
choose myself, and that’s that. We’re not pleasant in India, and
we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something more important to
do.”
He spoke sincerely. Every day he worked hard in the court trying
to decide which of two untrue accounts was the less untrue, trying
to dispense justice fearlessly, to protect the weak against the
less weak, the incoherent against the plausible, surrounded by lies
and flattery. That morning he had convicted a railway clerk of
overcharging pilgrims for their tickets, and a Pathan of attempted
rape. He expected no gratitude, no recognition for this, and both
clerk and Pathan might appeal, bribe their witnesses more
effectually in the interval, and get their sentences reversed. It
was his duty. But he did expect sympathy from his own people, and
except from new-comers he obtained it. He did think he ought not
to be worried about “Bridge Parties” when the day’s work was over
and he wanted to play tennis with his equals or rest his legs upon
a long chair.
He spoke sincerely, but she could have wished with less gusto. How
Ronny revelled in the drawbacks of his situation! How he did rub
it in that he was not in India to behave pleasantly, and derived
positive satisfaction therefrom! He reminded her of his
public-schooldays. The traces of young-man humanitarianism had
sloughed off, and he talked like an intelligent and embittered boy.
His words without his voice might have impressed her, but when she
heard the self-satisfied lilt of them, when she saw the mouth
moving so complacently and competently beneath the little red nose,
she felt, quite illogically, that this was not the last word on
India. One touch of regret—not the canny substitute but the true
regret from the heart—would have made him a different man, and the
British Empire a different institution.
“I’m going to argue, and indeed dictate,” she said, clinking her
rings. “The English are out here to be pleasant.”
“How do you make that out, mother?” he asked, speaking gently
again, for he was ashamed of his irritability.
“Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the
earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God . . . is . . .
love.” She hesitated, seeing how much he disliked the argument,
but something made her go on. “God has put us on earth to love our
neighbours and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India,
to see how we are succeeding.”
He looked gloomy, and a little anxious. He knew this religious
strain in her, and that it was a symptom of bad health; there had
been much of it when his stepfather died. He thought, “She is
certainly ageing, and I ought not to be vexed with anything she
says.”
“The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God. . . The sincere if
impotent desire wins His blessing. I think every one fails, but
there are so many kinds of failure. Good will and more good will
and more good will. Though I speak with the tongues of . . .”
He waited until she had done, and then said gently, “I quite see
that. I suppose I ought to get off to my files now, and you’ll be
going to bed.”
“I suppose so, I suppose so.” They did not part for a few minutes,
but the conversation had become unreal since Christianity had
entered it. Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the
National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence
his life. Then he would say in respectful yet decided tones, “I
don’t think it does to talk about these things, every fellow has
to work out his own religion,” and any fellow who heard him
muttered, “Hear!”
Mrs. Moore felt that she had made a mistake in mentioning God, but
she found him increasingly difficult to avoid as she grew older,
and he had been constantly in her thoughts since she entered India,
though oddly enough he satisfied her less. She must needs pronounce
his name frequently, as the greatest she knew, yet she had never
found it less efficacious. Outside the arch there seemed always an