Nightrunners of Bengal (13 page)

Caversham mopped his face. “Mr. Sanders, there are plenty of the old-pattern cartridges left, I expect?”

“No, sir, there is none, and they are no use, besides, with the new rifles—and the annual musketry practice is due to start at the end of the month.”

“Dear, dear, that’s a pity. Are you sure we have none of the old?”

“Certainly I am sure, sir.” Munro Sanders, though as Scots as McCardle, spoke the pure, accurate English of a man who has learned it in school. He was a big Highlander, the son of a Caithness farmer, and his voice had the Gaelic lilt.

Caversham crumpled his handkerchief into a ball and raised doubtful eyes. “What do you suggest, Major?”

“Get on with the musketry, Colonel. Swear that the cartridges are not greased with this fat, if we must—but after that, by God, insist on discipline. It doesn’t matter what happened in the Thirty-fourth;
this
regiment’s sound.”

Rodney could no longer contain himself; he leaned forward to attract the colonel’s attention. “May I speak, sir? I think this is important. In the last few years the sepoys’ world has been shaken up a lot. Oh, for instance, when they took away the field allowances the garrisons of newly conquered territories used to get—that is still being talked about. Right or wrong, it was a custom to give them, and you can’t play with custom here. Every year the Company creeps forward somewhere. The regiments are stationed farther and farther away from the men’s homes.”

He took a deep breath and to his surprise found that he was on his feet and almost shouting. The hot weather had got him already. The others were looking down at the table, ashamed for him. He raised his voice. “And apart from these Army things, they’re affected by the same things which worry other Indians of their class and caste: suttee forbidden, female infanticide forbidden, Brahmins made subject to the criminal laws. We think those are good and just ideas,
but the sepoys don’t. They used to talk and try to understand our point of view; now they don’t. In my company the men are jumpy and have been for several weeks. I know other company commanders have noticed the same thing, where companies have British Officers. Of course our regiment won’t do anything rash, but I don’t think any more strain should be thrown on them. Can’t the musketry wait till after the rains, when this cartridge muddle will be cleared up? It’s only ten rounds a man, anyway.”

“If your men are jumpy,” Anderson said venomously, “it means you’re not looking after ’em properly.”

“I am!” Rodney snapped. “And I do not command them from my bed, either—sir!”

His temper rose; he’d
make
them understand. He’d spoken to Narain and Godse several times, and he was determined to transmit to Caversham the unease he’d felt. Narain had stroked his drooping grey moustaches and looked at his captain with old, careful eyes. Once or twice something close to his heart had almost found release in speech—but never quite. He’d said it must be the heat; the sepoys were content; he couldn’t think of any cause for discontent; he’d ask again if the sahib wished. Rodney had tried speaking to individual sepoys, but they retired politely into a separate room and shut the door—Caroline Langford’s phrase.

“They’ve got other worries too, sir. You remember the chupattis? That’s unsettling them. I had another instance only this morning.”

“What have chupattis got to do with cartridges? Nothing at all!” Anderson snarled. “Captain Savage is making a mountain out of a molehill, as he’s done before, sir. You’ve given your orders. Let’s get on to more important things.” Caversham had not yet given any orders, but Anderson knew well enough how to force him into a decision.

Rodney made a last effort. “And then, you know, Major Myers takes a Bible down to his lines when he’s—well—not sober? And tries to convert the men to Christianity and rants at them about the wrath of God? Just by chance I happened
to overhear one of my sepoys ask Narain the other day if it were true that we were going to force them all to become Christians. That could be really serious, if they believed it.”

“For God Almighty’s sake, Savage! Major Myers is a fool, but he’s in the Eighty-eighth.” Anderson was beside himself. “What he does is Colonel Bulstrode’s look-out, not ours.”

“Kindly do not blaspheme so frequently, Major Anderson.”

“I apologize, sir—but really! Is it true, sir, that the pay of field officers is going to be raised forty rupees a month? It ought to be——”

“And what about captins? I ’eard——”

They were off. Rodney sat back, hard mouthed, and looked down at the table. The waves of petty controversy surged round him while he jabbed angrily at the paper and at last broke the point of his pencil, Sculley, Geoffrey, Sanders, Atkinson, Torrance—one after the other, round and round. They were all good fellows; why couldn’t they see? Don’t they believe him? Did they really think he was too excitable, an alarmist? Tripe, twaddle, inconsequential piddle. He listened furiously.

“As your adjutant, sir, it is my duty to report that some officahs are allowin’ their men to use bazaar polish on theah leathah, instead of …” “My store will soon become too small for the quantity of equipment I am asked to keep in it, sir. I must have another building. The end hut of Number Two Company now, that will …” “I need all the hutting space I have. The quartermaster doesn’t appear to understand that …” “Mr. Atkinson does not understand …” “How many days’ leave may I grant men during the Holi, sir?”

And on and on and on—till his tunic clung to him, his head drummed and quaked, and the punkah’s steady squeak hurt like a rusty screw turning in his skull. Everyone was pale with nervous anger but far from speechless. They were worse than the women at the Club, and with less reason.

The conference at last ended, nothing settled. Rodney flung out of the room, mounted, and spurred Boomerang into a split gallop up the Pike. The road glared back into his eyes, and the dust grated between his teeth. Nothing settled—except that the sepoys would have to use the new cartridges. Most surely there were too many separate rooms and too few windows.

There was the affair of the little carpenter to prove his point—no, damn it, Caroline Langford’s point. This morning, after he’d given judgment on the two sepoys late back from leave, Piroo the lascar had been brought up with a request. The man was a fixture in the company, and a good enough carpenter; Rodney did not trust him because he never held his head up, never looked anyone straight in the eye, but whined and grovelled and crept round the sides of rooms and huts, hugging the walls. He was always bare above the waist; under a thin mat of grey hairs scars latticed the shiny dark skin of his chest. His ears were large and stuck out from his head, seeming by themselves to support his untidy turban; his eyes were dark, ruminant, rheumy, sunk deep under a bony and receding forehead; his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his sinewy throat. He sometimes wore a loincloth, and sometimes rolled-up green trousers cast off by a sepoy and two sizes too large for him. The corner of a clean black silk handkerchief always peeped out at his waist, and seemed a useless and incongruous ornament, for he never used it, but blew his nose with his fingers like any other Indian. He was a follower—carpenter, odd-job man, noncombatant—and of low caste.

Today, after minutes of crawling abasement, Piroo had asked for leave to go home and rebuild his house, which had fallen down. That was interesting on two counts. Count one: the man must have rare cheek. Every sepoy’s and every follower’s house “fell down” once a year, in the big rains of the monsoon; accordingly every sepoy and every follower asked for leave at that time to go home and rebuild it; so much was rigid tradition. But to announce that your
house had fallen down, and ask for leave on that account, when there had been only a few mango showers—that was cheek! Count two: Piroo said his house was in Devra, eight miles away, and he owned land with it. Rodney had seen in Narain’s expression that the subadar was as astonished as he to hear this. The little man was a whining low-caste lascar in the regiment, but outside the regiment’s back door he might be lord of a hundred acres, and no one know it.

Everyone had a room of his own; and each liked his room and kept it locked and thought secret thoughts in it.

Faster! To hell with the heat and the dust. Drunk on Saturday with McCardle, he’d be drunk again tomorrow at the 60th’s guest night—dead the day after, like Julio. Or Robin might be dead, everyone dead in a welter of petty spite. Faster! Faster!

Boomerang reached out with frantic strides; Rodney spurred him on and swore continuously. The passers-by dived for the shelter of the trees when they saw them storming up the Pike, and put the ends of saris or turbans over their mouths until the dust settled.

A
S SOON as he walked into the 60th’s mess, he sensed that the night would be long and hectic, but not genuinely cheerful. Julio had belonged to this regiment; as clearly as if it had been an order shouted in his ear, he understood that this night they were all to join in determined, furious gaiety to dull the edge of memory, to disperse the cloud of bad temper hanging over Bhowani, to exorcize the smallpox at the Bells’ and the cholera up the Pike.

White covers assuaged the burn in the anteroom’s leather sofas, and the 60th’s grey and silver shell jackets helped to temper the impression of heat. But the look of coolness was an illusion; what air moved through the opened double doors and windows was hot, and the men were flushed, sweaty, and already partly drunk. It was six o’clock and dinner would not be served till eight, an hour ahead of the usual hot weather routine. Rodney liked this room—high and white, Georgian, carelessly elegant with the dash that cantered in the very syllables “Bengal Light Cavalry.” Fox-hunting prints hung, widely spaced, on the walls, and between them standards and guidons captured in Lake’s campaigns in Central India. Standing in the doorway, he eased his shoulders and, while looking for his host, automatically checked to see who was here.

Everyone knew everyone in Bhowani. All but one of the 60th’s officers were present: Gosse, Russell, Hedges, Willie van Steengaard, his host, Long, Bates, Smith, Waugh, Geoghegan, the veterinarian, Herrold the surgeon—the man who was going to become a father in about nine months’ time. Only the regiment’s present commanding officer, Major Swithin de Forrest, was not here. In the same sweeping glance Rodney noted the other guests: Sanders of his own; Bell of the 88th, drinking warily (wife Louisa and mother-in-law Harriet Caversham would give him hell whatever he did, so why didn’t the fool drink up?); and a tall fresh-looking boy of about seventeen with excellent teeth and curly auburn hair. The boy was wearing the 88th’s scarlet with white facings, and Rodney did not recognize him, so he must be young Myers, Rachel’s hero brother, arrived yesterday from Addiscombe.

Anyway, as the 60th had no colonel or lieutenant colonel—and de Forrest must be dining at home—Gosse was senior dining member. He searched again for the bald head, walked over, bowed, and said formally, “Good evening, sir.”

“Evening, Savage, Hey, Willie! Here’s your guest. Let’s all have a drink.”

Rodney relaxed. They were off.

Outside on the lawn the band, dismounted, played English and Irish airs. Liveried mess servants scurried about with silver buckets and silver trays. At first it was an effort to talk, a strain to laugh; but the champagne fizzed cold on his palate, and soon he found he could talk about anything. He argued and swore vehemently and waved his glass, and the champagne kept coming—jeroboams of champagne, nothing but champagne—the golden bubbles—Bengal Light Cavalry!

Dinner at last, and the grey and silver were swimming together in his brain. Life was a sheen, shimmering with music. The regiment had a long table, made of ebony and well polished. A row of Doric candlesticks, severe as the columns of the Parthenon, marched down the centre of it; silver and crystal and white damask floated on it, and their reflections wavered under its surface. The candlelight, rather than the dim walls and distant ceiling, curtained off this place where he was. The score of servants in the room stood outside that magic of golden light; they broke in, like genies, with a plate or cradled bottle, and stepped back and did not exist. Out there it must be dark and silent, and perhaps cold; the clattering and the uncontrolled laughter in the candle circle must die there where the light died. Outside, they looked in and watched the mystical communion. Here the officers partook of the continuing body of the regiment and of the blood spilled in its battles. The parade ground and the offices were for work, mere mechanical efficiency; but here union with a common past linked the officers, so that together they faced the cholera, and Julio’s ghost, and would face together the future’s unrevealed enemies.

A silver trumpeter, the table’s centrepiece, galloped over the ebony’s fathomless black, his head turned round and back, his silent trumpet shrieking to the rafters. His stallion’s long tail streamed in the wind of his imagined passage; his dolman flew out behind him. He was jumping a broken, upturned gun; two gunners sprawled dead across barrel and
trunnions. Behind him, Bengal Light Cavalry had charged in the glory of battle—they were the glory of battle; but they were not here, even in silver—only the inspiration of them, and its reflection in the faces of the officers round the table. The boy trumpeter galloped alone, as he had at Laswari.

Rodney leaned forward to peer at the inscription on the low plinth:
In memory of Trumpeter Shahbaz Khan, 60th
Bengal Light Cavalry, killed in action on November 1st, 1803,
on the field of Laswari.
The words blurred—he had read them many times—and he concentrated on a scarlet blob opposite. Scarlet—not Bell—must be young Myers; face scarlet too; boy’d be under the table soon, sunk in a grey and silver sea.

By eleven o’clock he was drinking brandy in the anteroom and flinging himself into the violent games customary on guest nights—wall racing, high-cockalorum, cockfighting. The moon shone on the lawn, the band played, everything was forgotten except the delights of wine, resilient muscles, and fellowship. The servants smiled at the immenseness of their lunatic energy.

Near midnight glass shattered, and a confused banging and yelling broke out. Rodney heaved up from under a pile of bodies, the wreck of a round of high-cockalorum, and called, “Look at this!”

Eddie Hedges was riding around the anteroom on a frantic band-horse. It sidled and fretted and knocked over chairs and tables. Hedges put the inevitable hunting horn to his lips and blew the racketing
Gone awaaaaay!
Then he yelled, “C’mon, get a horse each—midni’ steeplechase!”

“Good old Hedges! Trust the Buck to think of a good idea.”

“To horse! Out, you lazy pack of buggers! Out! Out!”

The hunting horn screamed. They tumbled, yelling and whooping, on to the lawn.

“Hi, stop! Where in thunder are we going?”

“I don’t know, Willie—whassit matter?”

“Hi, hi,
listen
—le’ss go up the Pike to the ol’ temple. D’you all—all—know it? Then roun’ the well in Bargaon—then back here!”

“Whassat? Sic—six miles? Drummer, hold that bloody horse still—hup!
Achcha, chor do!
My God, the Infantry are coming. Ha, ha!”

“Of course I’m coming. Have you heard ‘bout the cavalry officer who—who was so stupid that—
all the others noticed
it!”

Rodney laughed at his own joke till the tears ran down his cheeks. They were all mounted by now, except Sanders and old Norman Gosse, who watched staidly from the verandah. The bandsmen laughed in the shadow of the trees; a flying fox, disturbed by the racket, flew angrily out of the branches and flapped across the face of the moon. They had taken off jackets, waistcoats, and spurs for the games in the anteroom, and most had their shirt tails out. Geoghegan had lost his trousers and wore no underdrawers. “Ready, you buggers? Go!”

The white shirts flapped across the lawn. They leaped the low wall in a mob, and swung, whooping and screaming, towards the north. Gosse and Sanders turned back into the mess, and the thirty-seven bandsmen picked up their instruments and began again to play for them.

At first the riders were bunched together. They yelled to each other and shouted hunting cries, and woke officers and their wives asleep under mosquito nets on the lawns. The hoofbeats echoed back from the trees lining the cantonment roads. A few minutes later they galloped past the hovels on the northern outskirts, near the 60th’s lines, and reached open country. They began to spread out.

One after the other they turned off at the Pike at the old temple, and the pace slackened. As Rodney rode across the moon-bathed fields some soberness began to dim the clear beauty of his exhilaration. This was hellish dangerous; these fields were a maze of pot-holes, unfenced wells, sunken tracks, and wide thorn fences. He dropped back, fighting to
dispel the woolly cloud in his brain, and began to concentrate on riding. White shirts fluttered dimly ahead like spirits hurrying home to the graveyard at cockcrow. The night air rushed by, drying the sweat on him, and seemed cool; it smelled of horses and saddlesoap and good Indian dust. The horse’s powerful rhythm helped to clear his head and settle the sliding queasiness in his stomach. He was still young, and he would not die like Julio, not yet. He laughed aloud at the madness; it was lucky that no one was expected to explain why he did what he did on guest nights. Rodney remembered he had not seen young Myers on a horse, or on the verandah with Gosse and Sanders. The servants would probably find him under the mess table when they came to clear it up; then they’d carry him home, hand him over to his bearer, and pretend it had never happened. That had been his own introduction to the Bengal Army.

At the Bargaon well he knew that only Hedges, Willie van Steengaard, and Jimmy Waugh were in front of him. He was thinking that he would not disgrace his regiment, or infantry in general, if he kept his present position, when hoofs drummed up on his right and Geoghegan dashed past, swearing and singing. He had torn off his shirt and rode stark naked except for his boots. Ahead, the hunting horn screamed fainter and fainter.

Rodney slowed to a hand canter and peered round. He must be about a mile east of the cantonments, with the Benares Gate of Bhowani City not far off to his left. Bending low over the horse’s neck, he saw housetops silhouetted against the sky, and knew he was right. Any moment now he’d be on top of a narrow, slightly sunken lane which ran through the fields hereabouts. Standing in the stirrups, he saw the lane and saw something moving in it.

The moon shone on the white canvas awnings of bullock carts, ten or twelve of the rare four-wheeled pattern, trailing along one behind the other, each pulled by four bullocks, the noses of each leading pair of bullocks an inch from the tail of the cart in front. He grinned, gave a wild yell, and
urged the borrowed band-horse into a gallop. At the near edge of the track he bent forward, pressed hard with his knees, and yelled again. The horse gathered itself and lifted in a wide arc over lane, bullocks, carts, and all.

The monstrous shadow flew across the moon, and the bullocks in the leading cart snorted, flung their shoulders against the yoke, and dashed up the side of the lane. They thundered away across the field, the cart bouncing and rattling, and Rodney cantered after them, still laughing. The cart driver seemed to be awake, which was unusual, and well seated; he shouted at the maddened bullocks while the cart tore on over the rough surface. At the end of the field there was a dense thicket, and the bullocks, swerving to avoid one tree, jammed the cart heavily against another. The front wheel on the left side broke off and flew away from the axle. The yoke snapped, the driver rolled forward over the struggling bullocks, and the cart turned on its side. Half a dozen wooden boxes and barrels spilled out and spilt open, and a man was catapulted through the canvas top to sprawl cursing in the undergrowth.

A broad column of moonlight shone down through the trees and glinted back in little curved arcs among the bushes. Rodney stared—shells, not solid roundshot but modern explosive shells, probably for twelve-pounder cannon. He leaned forward quickly. Near the shells powder trickled from a big keg. The man in the thicket scrambled to his feet and searched frantically with his hands for something on the ground. Though he wore the plain white clothes of a middle-class townsman, he was the Dewan of Kishanpur.

Even as he noticed these things Rodney had been starting to urge his horse forward. It was a childish prank that he had played, against people who couldn’t protest, and he was ashamed of himself. He had no money on him and was planning to take the driver back to his bungalow and pay him there for the damage, plus a little something.

But when he recognized the Dewan, he checked. Simultaneously the Dewan found what he sought and stood up.
A pistol was in his hand; the driver beside him had a pistol; bare feet pattered across the field from where the cart convoy had halted. What sort of men were these, all armed?

The Dewan stared up with eyes narrowed, trying to see who was the white shape on a grey horse in the dark. When he raised his pistol and began to move forward, and the driver moved with him, Rodney swung the horse around. Stretching out along the withers, he galloped for cantonments. No one shot at him as he went.

He’d better ride to the Commissioner’s bungalow and report at once. Then he could act as a messenger if Dellamain asked for cavalry to be turned out.

He lifted the horse over the low cactus hedge bordering Auckland Road, the eastern boundary of cantonments. Two people on foot were right under him, coming in the opposite direction. He saw the flash of the moon on their clothes, jerked savagely at the reins, and forced the horse to curve its spine and land jarringly off balance. He yelled,
“Hut!
bahin ka chute!”

They would be servants, sneaking out to the city on some shady errand connected with the approaching Holi festival. He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, but a woman’s voice cried out in English from the foot of the hedge. “Captain Savage? Quick! Did you see Shivarao—the Dewan of Kishanpur—out there? We must catch him.”

Caroline Langford stepped forward, and, a little behind her, Swithin de Forrest. Rodney dismounted and told them in brief sentences what he had seen, eyeing them covertly, for they were dishevelled and flushed. De Forrest wore white trousers and shirt, Caroline a low-cut cotton dress and an elbow-length cape. De Forrest shuffled his feet, kept his head down, and gave no sign of interest in the story.

Rodney finished. “I’m on my way to the Commissioner. I’ve never seen an armed bullock-driver before, and the Kishanpur Army is not allowed explosive shells, or cannon bigger than six-pounders. I found that out when I was there—it’s a clause in the treaty, and they thought it was insulting.
But the carts must be going to Kishanpur. I can’t imagine what they think they’re going to do with them. I’d better hurry.”