A passage to India
by bad characters in the meantime. Would you have that? The cook
is deaf—I can never count on my cook—and the boy is only a little
boy. Never, never do I and Hassan leave the house at the same time
together. It is my fixed rule.” He said all this and much more out
of civility, to save Dr. Lal’s face. It was not offered as truth
and should not have been criticized as such. But the other
demolished it—an easy and ignoble task. “Even if this so, what
prevents leaving a chit saying where you go?” and so on. Aziz
detested ill breeding, and made his pony caper. “Farther away, or
mine will start out of sympathy,” he wailed, revealing the true
source of his irritation. “It has been so rough and wild this
afternoon. It spoiled some most valuable blossoms in the club
garden, and had to be dragged back by four men. English ladies and
gentlemen looking on, and the Collector Sahib himself taking a
note. But, Dr. Aziz, I’ll not take up your valuable time. This will
not interest you, who have so many engagements and telegrams. I am
just a poor old doctor who thought right to pay my respects when
I was asked and where I was asked. Your absence, I may remark, drew
commentaries.”
“They can damn well comment.”
“It is fine to be young. Damn well! Oh, very fine. Damn whom?”
“I go or not as I please.”
“Yet you promise me, and then fabricate this tale of a telegram.
Go forward, Dapple.”
They went, and Aziz had a wild desire to make an enemy for life.
He could do it so easily by galloping near them. He did it. Dapple
bolted. He thundered back on to the Maidan. The glory of his play
with the subaltern remained for a little, he galloped and swooped
till he poured with sweat, and until he returned the pony to
Hamidullah’s stable he felt the equal of any man. Once on his feet,
he had creeping fears. Was he in bad odour with the powers that
be? Had he offended the Collector by absenting himself? Dr. Panna
Lal was a person of no importance, yet was it wise to have
quarrelled even with him? The complexion of his mind turned from
human to political. He thought no longer, “Can I get on with
people?” but “Are they stronger than I?” breathing the prevalent
miasma.
At his home a chit was awaiting him, bearing the Government stamp.
It lay on his table like a high explosive, which at a touch might
blow his flimsy bungalow to bits. He was going to be cashiered
because he had not turned up at the party. When he opened the note,
it proved to be quite different; an invitation from Mr. Fielding,
the Principal of Government College, asking him to come to tea the
day after to-morrow. His spirits revived with violence. They would
have revived in any case, for he possessed a soul that could suffer
but not stifle, and led a steady life beneath his mutability. But
this invitation gave him particular joy, because Fielding had asked
him to tea a month ago, and he had forgotten about it—never
answered, never gone, just forgotten.
And here came a second invitation, without a rebuke or even an
allusion to his slip. Here was true courtesy—the civil deed that
shows the good heart—and snatching up his pen he wrote an
affectionate reply, and hurried back for news to Hamidullah’s. For
he had never met the Principal, and believed that the one serious
gap in his life was going to be filled. He longed to know everything
about the splendid fellow—his salary, preferences, antecedents,
how best one might please him. But Hamidullah was still out, and
Mahmoud Ali, who was in, would only make silly rude jokes about
the party.
CHAPTER VII
This Mr. Fielding had been caught by India late. He was over forty
when he entered that oddest portal, the Victoria Terminus at
Bombay, and—having bribed a European ticket inspector—took his
luggage into the compartment of his first tropical train. The
journey remained in his mind as significant. Of his two carriage
companions one was a youth, fresh to the East like himself, the
other a seasoned Anglo-Indian of his own age. A gulf divided him
from either; he had seen too many cities and men to be the first
or to become the second. New impressions crowded on him, but they
were not the orthodox new impressions; the past conditioned them,
and so it was with his mistakes. To regard an Indian as if he were
an Italian is not, for instance, a common error, nor perhaps a
fatal one, and Fielding often attempted analogies between this
peninsula and that other, smaller and more exquisitely shaped, that
stretches into the classic waters of the Mediterranean.
His career, though scholastic, was varied, and had included going
to the bad and repenting thereafter. By now he was a hard-bitten,
good-tempered, intelligent fellow on the verge of middle age, with
a belief in education. He did not mind whom he taught; public
schoolboys, mental defectives and policemen, had all come his way,
and he had no objection to adding Indians. Through the influence
of friends, he was nominated Principal of the little college at
Chandrapore, liked it, and assumed he was a success. He did succeed
with his pupils, but the gulf between himself and his countrymen,
which he had noticed in the train, widened distressingly. He could
not at first see what was wrong. He was not unpatriotic, he always
got on with Englishmen in England, all his best friends were
English, so why was it not the same out here? Outwardly of the
large shaggy type, with sprawling limbs and blue eyes, he appeared
to inspire confidence until he spoke. Then something in his manner
puzzled people and failed to allay the distrust which his profession
naturally inspired. There needs must be this evil of brains in
India, but woe to him through whom they are increased! The feeling
grew that Mr. Fielding was a disruptive force, and rightly, for
ideas are fatal to caste, and he used ideas by that most potent
method—interchange. Neither a missionary nor a student, he was
happiest in the give-and-take of a private conversation. The world,
he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another
and can best do so by the help of good will plus culture and
intelligence—a creed ill suited to Chandrapore, but he had come
out too late to lose it. He had no racial feeling—not because he
was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured
in a different atmosphere, where the herd-instinct does not
flourish. The remark that did him most harm at the club was a silly
aside to the effect that the so-called white races are really
pinko-grey. He only said this to be cheery, he did not realize that
“white” has no more to do with a colour than “God save the King”
with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider
what it does connote. The pinko-grey male whom he addressed was
subtly scandalized; his sense of insecurity was awoken, and he
communicated it to the rest of the herd.
Still, the men tolerated him for the sake of his good heart and
strong body; it was their wives who decided that he was not a sahib
really. They disliked him. He took no notice of them, and this,
which would have passed without comment in feminist England, did
him harm in a community where the male is expected to be lively
and helpful. Mr. Fielding never advised one about dogs or horses,
or dined, or paid his midday calls, or decorated trees for one’s
children at Christmas, and though he came to the club, it was only
to get his tennis or billiards, and to go. This was true. He had
discovered that it is possible to keep in with Indians and
Englishmen, but that he who would also keep in with Englishwomen
must drop the Indians. The two wouldn’t combine. Useless to blame
either party, useless to blame them for blaming one another. It
just was so, and one had to choose. Most Englishmen preferred their
own kinswomen, who, coming out in increasing numbers, made life on
the home pattern yearly more possible. He had found it convenient
and pleasant to associate with Indians and he must pay the price.
As a rule no Englishwoman entered the College except for official
functions, and if he invited Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested to tea,
it was because they were new-comers who would view everything with
an equal if superficial eye, and would not turn on a special voice
when speaking to his other guests.
The College itself had been slapped down by the Public Works
Department, but its grounds included an ancient garden and a
garden-house, and here he lived for much of the year. He was
dressing after a bath when Dr. Aziz was announced. Lifting up his
voice, he shouted from the bedroom, “Please make yourself at home.”
The remark was unpremeditated, like most of his actions; it was
what he felt inclined to say.
To Aziz it had a very definite meaning. “May I really, Mr. Fielding?
It’s very good of you,” he called back; “I like unconventional
behaviour so extremely.” His spirits flared up, he glanced round
the living-room. Some luxury in it, but no order—nothing to
intimidate poor Indians. It was also a very beautiful room, opening
into the garden through three high arches of wood. “The fact is I
have long wanted to meet you,” he continued. “I have heard so much
about your warm heart from the Nawab Bahadur. But where is one to
meet in a wretched hole like Chandrapore?” He came close up to the
door. “When I was greener here, I’ll tell you what. I used to wish
you to fall ill so that we could meet that way.” They laughed, and
encouraged by his success he began to improvise. “I said to myself,
How does Mr. Fielding look this morning? Perhaps pale. And the
Civil Surgeon is pale too, he will not be able to attend upon him
when the shivering commences. I should have been sent for instead.
Then we would have had jolly talks, for you are a celebrated
student of Persian poetry.”
“You know me by sight, then.”
“Of course, of course. You know me?”
“I know you very well by name.”
“I have been here such a short time, and always in the bazaar. No
wonder you have never seen me, and I wonder you know my name. I
say, Mr. Fielding?”
“Yes?”
“Guess what I look like before you come out. That will be a kind
of game.”
“You’re five feet nine inches high,” said Fielding, surmising this
much through the ground glass of the bedroom door.
“Jolly good. What next? Have I not a venerable white beard?”
“Blast!”
“Anything wrong?”
“I’ve stamped on my last collar stud.”
“Take mine, take mine.”
“Have you a spare one?”
“Yes, yes, one minute.”
“Not if you’re wearing it yourself.”
“No, no, one in my pocket.” Stepping aside, so that his outline
might vanish, he wrenched off his collar, and pulled out of his
shirt the back stud, a gold stud, which was part of a set that his
brother-in-law had brought him from Europe. “Here it is,” he cried.
“Come in with it if you don’t mind the unconventionality.”
“One minute again.” Replacing his collar, he prayed that it would
not spring up at the back during tea. Fielding’s bearer, who was
helping him to dress, opened the door for him.
“Many thanks.” They shook hands smiling. He began to look round,
as he would have with any old friend. Fielding was not surprised
at the rapidity of their intimacy. With so emotional a people it
was apt to come at once or never, and he and Aziz, having heard
only good of each other, could afford to dispense with preliminaries.
“But I always thought that Englishmen kept their rooms so tidy. It
seems that this is not so. I need not be so ashamed.” He sat down
gaily on the bed; then, forgetting himself entirely, drew up his
legs and folded them under him. “Everything ranged coldly on
shelves was what _I_ thought.—I say, Mr. Fielding, is the stud
going to go in?”
“I hae ma doots.”
“What’s that last sentence, please? Will you teach me some new
words and so improve my English?”