Nightrunners of Bengal (18 page)

Caroline interrupted. “What is resettlement?” Bulstrode frowned, Rodney bit his lip. It was a disease with her—find out! Then he saw in her face that, in part at least, she had spoken from a wish to make this interview less frightening for Dellamain.

The Commissioner was delighted. “Resettlement, Miss Langford, is a process of land survey which has as its object the reassessment of the land’s agricultural capacity, and hence of the revenues to be collected from it in the way of taxes. In the process of settlement or resettlement we discover and record many facts concerning the ownership of land. It is a long, long task—this territory comprises six thousand nine hundred and eighty-three square miles—and will not be completed until long after my retirement. But it is essential. We are still working from the records taken over from the Rajahs of Kishanpur, and they are unbelievably inaccurate. We have to find the character of the soil, and
assess the value of improved communications and irrigation. When we leased this territory from the Rawans in 1809 the old irrigation works were in decay, for instance; we have put some of them in order and begun to build better ones. Account must be taken of all these matters, and hundreds more, in the resettlement report. It is interesting. Look.”

He spread his hand out on the wall map, dropped suddenly into natural English, and in a few crisp sentences made clear the complicated laws of land tenure, revenue, and inheritance, as they ruled in the territory at the time. He was brilliant and brief, and even Bulstrode had to nod his appreciation. The effect on Caroline was not quite what Rodney had expected; she was interested enough but she was also, he thought, a little jealous. She understood completely and wanted to use her own brain on problems as big and important as this; and she knew she was more hopelessly trapped than Dellamain. He could go to England—when he had made his money—and earn recognition on the wider English stage. One day Palmerston, Gladstone, and Disraeli might acknowledge him, but she could not change her sex, or the traditions which manacled a woman’s capability.

Bulstrode collected himself, shuffled his papers, and belched. In the silence he said, “Sorry to interrupt, Commissioner. Got an important report to make. Miss Langford, you begin.”

Dellamain sat down rather suddenly. As though a hand had been passed over it, his face assumed an air of judicial command. For the third time in the week Caroline told her story. Rodney followed, looking away from Dellamain as much as he could, because he did not like to inflict hurt in cold blood or see the wounded squirm.

The Commissioner paled slightly during the recitals; at the end he flushed a mottled red and raised his protuberant eyes to Bulstrode. He spoke slowly. “And you, Colonel, you permitted this? You ordered out cavalry behind my back?”

George Bulstrode sucked his teeth and swivelled his bulk round to face the Commissioner. “Yes.”

In the long harsh silence Rodney examined his toes. It was obvious now what Dellamain would say. After the long pause, he said it.

He spoke with firmness and conviction. If his plump fingers had not fiddled with a round ebony ruler on the desk; if his voice had not gathered that canonical richness; if Bulstrode had not forecast his story so exactly, Rodney would have been glad to believe him. Caroline was right in seeing that he needed help. Bulstrode was right in seeing that the bribery was unimportant. Charles Dellamain was administering the Bhowani Leased Territory better than anyone else could have; the inner, frightened Dellamain somehow knew the land and the people. These myriads that he ruled did not care what bribes he took; he protected them and gave them peace and justice. What did it all matter compared with the resettlement, the tasks of building confidence and prosperity?

Dellamain did not speak long. He denied that he took bribes or that he had ever countenanced smuggling of any kind. As to the details of the gun-running, he said he was well aware of them; that they were connected with a political matter so delicate and secret that it could not even be committed to paper. He was indeed surprised to learn from them that the Silver Guru was English; but he was glad to know it, because the Guru was an important link in his negotiations, and he, Dellamain, could now be more sure that his trust in him was not misplaced.

At the last, he turned to the attack. He looked from Rodney to Caroline, ignoring Peckham, and spoke with heavy authority. “You two, abetted by Colonel Bulstrode, have been like mischievous urchins playing with gunpowder. Your amateur muddling interference might have endangered the British position in India, no less. I did all I could to discourage you, short of explaining to you things which you should not be allowed to know. You, sir”—he glanced at
Rodney—“are a military officer, and less blame attaches to you than to your superior. But it is clear that your own lack of balance led you to fall in the more readily with his plans. And you, Miss Langford, must be regarded as the instigator of this foolishness. I have attempted to dissuade you. I have dropped hints to your cousin Lady Isobel, which must have reached you. I have appealed to the faith, integrity, and common sense I thought you possessed—in vain. Your faith is reserved for Indian rajahs; you blundered relentlessly on. Colonel Bulstrode, your conduct leaves me with an impression that you lack the sense of proportion appropriate to your high rank. Now”—he had regained full assurance as no one spoke or contradicted him—“let us all forget and return to our respective duties. I should not like my last six months in the Company’s service to be marred by ill feeling and mutual recriminations over this unfortunate affair.”

“You’re retiring in six months? I didn’t know that.”

“You do not, if I may say so once more, Miss Langford, know everything. Yes, I am going. I have been privately in touch with certain parliamentary figures at home and intend to devote myself to politics there.”

He had not altered his voice much, but the last sentences carried the unmistakable plea:
I’m so near escape from this
labyrinth. Be kind.

Bulstrode, who had closed his eyes during the Commissioner’s upbraiding, slapped a wad of papers on the table. “My official report to you—two copies. Sign one as a receipt please, Commissioner, and give it back to me.”

Dellamain seized his pen and scribbled angrily. Bulstrode glanced down. “Time and date, please, Commissioner.”

When they had been added he handed the signed copy to Peckham and rolled out of the room with a parting nod. The others followed. The Commissioner of Bhowani sat shrunk in his chair and stared at the sheets of white paper littering his desk.

Bulstrode and Peckham went towards the station commander’s office; Rodney and Caroline walked slowly north
through cantonments. Men were out scattering water from goatskins to lay the dust in the roads, and the smell was clean and fresh.

Caroline said, “It goes down, layer below layer, each worse than the last. I wish I could believe, really believe, that we’ve uncovered the lowest layer of all. But I can’t. Can you?”

He knew he could not. Down there in the depths were emotions and wisps of suspicion he could not even identify; he knew only that they made him uneasy, and ashamed.

He did not speak, and the girl went on, her voice detached and sad. “I hear the Governor General has a big Georgian house in Calcutta, and the drawing-room is white and gold. I see him, poor man, sitting at a desk, looking out on the garden, and worrying over what will happen if there’s a rebellion in Kishanpur—not for long; he has too many things to worry about. He might know Mr. Dellamain’s name, but he wouldn’t know
him.”

Rodney nodded. The Governor General would know nothing of the nature of this Charles Dellamain who served him—the ability, the banked fires of ambition, the bribes.

“Then the Rani plots, the Dewan plots, the Silver Guru plots. Mr. Dellamain puts a foot into one whirlpool and is dragged into another. Below, other little people plot and bribe.”

And below again—what? She hadn’t been down that far; she didn’t know that down there it became impossible to separate good from evil. In trying, you met an eight-armed god and were of a sudden touched with his desires, ruled by his code of values. The humped white bull licked with a rough tongue; the night smelled of women and dried urine; smoke drifted across a frieze of endless copulation; there was a man in a bright coat, and he had a hawk and a knife, and others threw red and blue powder on him. Where was right, in this?

“There are not two standards for us, for the English—only one. We must keep our standard, or go home. We must
not, as we do now, permit untouchability and forbid suttee, abolish tyranny in one state and leave it in another, have our right hand Eastern and our left hand Western. It is not that India is wicked; she has her own ways. If we rule we must rule as Indians—or we must make the Indians English. But we do neither; we are like Mr. Dellamain. We have one foot in a whirlpool. Sometimes I am sure we will be dragged into another and drowned. God will punish us for compro mising. As He will punish me.”

She turned abruptly into the Hatton-Dunns’, and Rodney walked on alone. She was wearing a pale blue dress today and a wide-brimmed hat. Her wrists were too fragile and her shoulders too thin to support the weight of her concerns. Now that he had studied her face more often he did not know why he had ever missed its beauty; perhaps because it was strong and always serious, especially the eyes. She must not lose that quality of seriousness—he knew too well how barren was a human being completely without it—but she must learn to stand away from it sometimes, and laugh. She had no right, at her age, to throw away her sense of humour and flay herself unrelentingly for the furtherance of God’s purposes. Didn’t God create laughter too? But she was so much kinder than she pretended; he wanted to help her.

Cantonment life lay in wait to enfold him, as on his previous return from Kishanpur. Then he had for a time resisted the cushioning familiarity; now he would welcome it. Parades, drills, the Club; they would be again what they had always been—the dull, strong fabric of living.

April the eleventh. April, the mango showers and a lifting of the air at dusk. May, the blinding noon of heat; in May the sky was clean and blue, shading to iron-grey in the heat of the early afternoon. May was a breathless night on the lawn and the mosquito net flimsy as the veil of a ghost; or an evening dust storm, and they would sleep on the verandah while the watchman threw water, all night long, on the matting screens; or a stirring of the air at midnight when the
earth under the trees cooled and the flower petals nodded. May was drought, parched throat at noon, 115 in the shade, the sun striking the parade ground and lashing back up into the eyes.

In June the air would day by day become more humid, while heavy clouds passed overhead from southwest to northeast. The monsoon would reach Bhowani after the middle of the month—June the twentieth last year, June the nineteenth in ’55, June the twenty-third in ’54, June the eighteenth in ’53. He remembered, as everyone did, the exact date of each annual rescue. There would be electric storms for a few days beforehand—high winds, thunder and dust, a heavy drop or two of rain. Then, on the first day of the monsoon, a tremendous storm of rain, lasting for hours; half a day’s pause—another storm; pause—another. When it rained, large drops fell slowly, then faster and thicker until they were almost a waterfall. It fell too fast for the earth to swallow it; it laid the dust, filled the rivers, and spread a surface of slippery mud on the hard earth. Later it slackened but fell still, a few hours at a time, all through July and August. Between the storms, white cumulus clouds sailed in a blue sky, the temperature was not much over 90, the air was washed clean and felt heavy with more rain and the sound of running water.

In September the rains drizzled to an end. Water stood in the roads and fields, and every disease of India flourished. The earth was soft deep down, and replete; the little streams full, the big rivers overflowing, twenty, thirty, sixty feet above normal, depending on the shape of the banks; the formerly brown grass green, the roof of the jungle green, the night awhirr with moths and flying beetles.

October and November were a golden sun and a cool night, wood smoke, fragrant evening; in those days a patina of calm overlaid the routines of barrack and bungalow and lent them grace. The cold weather: December, January, February; English warm clothes, a fire in the grate, and the punkahs stilled; manœuvres, tents in a mango grove; sunny
afternoons, raw nights, and snapping dawns; duck and snipe, and the leopard in the jungle.

He’d heard a rumour that the regiment was to change stations in January and would go to Dinapore—four hundred miles. They’d take six weeks on the march, and what an upheaval there’d be after five years in Bhowani. The regiment would march; women and children, furniture, pets, and toys would travel in pony traps and bullock carts.

Meanwhile, the embrace of secure monotony. Musketry practice with the new cartridges; his birthday at the end of this month; children’s party at the Club in May—the last outdoor function until September. What was it Sumitra had said to him one long-ago day? “You will die in England as Lieutenant Colonel Savage, B.N.I., retired—dried up and worn out. I have heard what it is like. They will laugh because you eat curry, and laugh when you try and tell them what
this
means.” She had swept her hand round the shimmering jungles. “They will say you are unhappy because you have no black servants to order about.”

That was right; that was how it went. There’d never be a great thing to do, and if there were his countrymen in England would laugh at it when it was done.

T
HE WHITE Club building slept in the dense blue shadow of its thatched roof. As Rodney went in, George Bulstrode’s purple face and congested eyes swam out of the gloom of the centre hall and floated towards him. On Saturdays the old man customarily ate a late tiffin here, after drinking in the bar from ten till two.

“Hullo, Savage. You on duty? H’m, yes—damfool children’s party. Well, bed for me.” He turned and bellowed down the passage,
“Koi hai!
My horse!”

The door slammed behind him. Rodney’s eyes became accustomed to the semi-darkness, and he glanced idly at the papers pinned in overlapping profusion on the notice board. One, on the surface, read:

He pulled out his watch: two o’clock. He had plenty of time. He called for a servant, shouting
“Koi hai!”

Nothing happened. A pulse stirred rhythmically in his temple. The silence caught and imprisoned his shout. Out at the back of the Club the beaten earth of the compound glared like white fire. A lean dog scratched its mange for fleas, got up, and limped away. Rodney tugged at the collar of his tunic, yawned, and went to look for the duty waiter. He found him stretched on the stone flags under the bar, asleep and breathing noisily through his mouth. Rodney leaned over and snarled,
“Koi hai!”

The waiter blinked and struggled to his feet, obviously disliking the taste in his mouth. Rodney felt a sullen sympathy with him—to be on duty at two of a Saturday afternoon in May! He yawned again. “Has the fatigue party from the Thirteenth Rifles come yet?”

It took time for the question to penetrate the heat-fuddle in the man’s brain. “I think they are waiting outside, huzoor. Shall I fetch the jemadar-sahib?”

“No. I’ll go to them.”

He walked down the steps, winced, and plunged into the
trembling furnace of the open air. The sepoys stood in a loose group under the trees at the far end of the lawn. Seeing Rodney, the jemadar in charge of them gave a command and strutted across the brown-green grass to meet him.

“Sir! Jemadar Godse, two naiks, nineteen sepoys, one carpenter, reporting for fatigue duty—present and correct, sir!”

Rodney returned the salute with a gesture of his hand and moved in under the shade. The men made way for him.

“Stand easy, if you please.”

Godse repeated the order, and Rodney pulled out a cheroot. “Well, how are we going to arrange things? Have you brought the gear?”

The jemadar pointed to a pile of wooden poles, planks, canvas, and rope.

“Good. Now, what about it?”

They stood side by side, looking at the lawn, the haphazard trees, the beds of dirty marigolds and sickly zinnias. Godse cleared his throat. “Last year we put up the swings under that far tree, and the awning over there. Shall we do it the same way this year?”

The sepoys stood wooden and silent around, and Rodney tried to make them smile. He said lightly, “And what did we do in 1805, Jemadar-sahib?”

It was not a good joke, but ordinarily it might have amused them. He glanced at their faces and wondered what was on their minds. The carpenter Piroo stood apart from the sepoys and bowed low as Rodney caught his eye.

He waved his cheroot. “Very well. Do it like that. I’ll get the Club servants to carry out chairs. Make sure the awning is near the end of the verandah there, so that the conjurer can stand under the tamarind. Perhaps he’ll want to make something appear out of the branches, eh? Is that understood? Oh, and keep the croquet pitch clear—all those little iron hoops.”

The group dissolved as the men dragged the planks out into the glare; Piroo the carpenter trailed after them, carrying a hammer and a bag of nails. For a minute Rodney stood alone in the shade and watched them. Then, feeling impelled to share at least in part their martyrdom to the heat, he followed them across the grass. The nearest men had begun to make the framework for the swings, and were working hard.

They were talking in low voices and did not see him come up. One of them, holding a post upright, said, “Naik, is it true that the Silver Guru has taken a vow to fast in silence?”

The N.C.O. was Naik Parasiya, who had been in the temple at Kishanpur that night of the Holi. He was stooped down, fastening a guy rope, and Rodney heard him answer, “It’s true.”

“How long is he going to do it for? And why?”

“He said ‘Until the destruction promised by the gods overtakes the wicked.’”

The naik stood up as he spoke, saw Rodney, and muttered, “Quiet. Get on with your work.”

Rodney’s brain ticked over idly. The tunic glowed across his shoulders, and the top of his collar burned where it touched his neck. He wriggled uncomfortably, wondering what the Guru meant. One day, a week or so after the Holi, the leper had reappeared in the Little Bazaar, which meant presumably that they had all settled their affairs in Kishanpur without bloodshed. Perhaps the Guru had given up his intrigues altogether. These remarks about destruction and the vow to fast sounded like phrases designed to attract attention and increase his reputation in this other life of his, the one he lived under the peepul tree in the Little Bazaar. Other things pointed the same way—his intervention in the matter of the greased cartridges, for instance. It was no use fretting about it now.

Rodney saw that all was in hand, and turned up into the Club. A quiet glass or two of brandy, with plenty of cold water, would pass the time; the fatigue wouldn’t be finished
for a couple of hours, and then the English population of Bhowani would begin to arrive, every last one of them—except Curry Bulstrode, snoring in his bungalow. Rodney’s own tiffin of crumbed mutton chops, mango food, and beer lay heavy in his stomach.

He stood in the gloom of the bar, holding the brandy in one hand while he cautiously tested the chairs with the other. Sometimes, at this hour and season, the greater comfort of the leather armchairs made up for their greater heat, sometimes not. He shook his head; today it would have to be a cane chair. He sank back, put his glass in the hole in the arm-rest, swung out the pieces which extended into leg-rests, lifted his boots up on to them, and stared at the ceiling.

A minute later he got up and riffled the leaves of the English periodicals, all four months old, littering a table against the back wall. He did not want to read any of them; he had read them all already, twice each. He sat down again.

A brainfever bird opened up from a tree in the compound: higher, higher, higher, higher—break, pause, begin again;
pippeha pippeha pippeha pippeha, ha ha ha, pippeha pippeha
—higher, higher. The heat seeped in through the thick walls and tight-shut windows, and the air seemed to glow in the darkened room. He took a long drink and licked his lips. Better be careful of that stuff; he liked it Better still, find some task that would engage his whole interest and capacity; that was the real answer. A soldier’s trade ought to have adventures enough; it didn’t though, and nowadays an officer couldn’t tie a lady’s glove to his lance point and ride out looking for them.

That wasn’t quite true. Somewhere in a bureau drawer in the bungalow there was a square of paper. A man in peasant clothes had handed it up to Rodney as he was riding through the Little Bazaar a week before. The man had already dissolved in the press when Rodney glanced up from the note. It was in English, a large black script: “Post still open.
Please
come, at once. S.”
Please
was underlined three times.
She had a nerve to pretend that the night of the Holi had never been. He was not going to answer it.

There was something the matter with the world. Away off to the east the 19th B.N.I. in Berhampore had refused to receive their percussion caps. They’d been disbanded and gone off peacefully to their homes, even cheering old General Hearsey. He was a fine old warhorse. But that was a terrible end for a fine regiment. It was impossible to persuade the men these Dum-Dum bullets were all right Damn it, everyone ought to know better what went on inside other people’s heads, muddled or not. Thank God the musketry had gone off all right here. A word from the Silver Guru, and all is well. God in heaven, who commands this regiment—Anderson or the Guru? Not Caversham, anyway.

He moved his head irritably so that a trickle of sweat ran down into his left eye. Of a sudden the buzzing of the flies infuriated him, and he yelled, “
Punkah wallah!
Wake up and do some work, God damn your eyes!”

He heard the slight noise of the boy awakening; overhead the ramshackle framework began to creak, and the hanging strip of cloth to swing. Dust showered down, with a faint hot draught.

He awoke to the sound of men laughing, and opened his eyes slowly. Abel Geoghegan was leaning back against the bar and laughing at him. Alan Torrance stood beside the veterinarian, a small grin on his face. The two men were dressed so fashionably as to be all but foppish—Torrance in tan trousers, a flowered green waistcoat, a single-breasted tan coat reaching nearly to his knees, and a huge black cravat polka-dotted in green; Geoghegan in black and white dog-tooth-check trousers, double-breasted grey frock coat, and thin yellow tie. Torrance’s youth and floridly Byronic handsomeness suited the style to perfection; Geoghegan looked like a prosperous racecourse tout, an impression strongly reinforced by the hoarseness of his voice.

“See there, Torrance, me boy. Behold the Garrison Captain
of the Week, on duty! Now there’s the way to success in this Bengal Army—and he with a mouth like a barmaid’s armpits, I’ll wager.”

Rodney sat up. “Be quiet, you noisy bogtrotter. You’re hellish early, aren’t you?”

“It’s nearly half-past four, y’know,” said Torrance. “The ladies will be heah any minute. Mrs. Caversham made us promise to help at the swings.”

“More fools you. Here, let’s all have a drink.
Koi hai!”

The world stretched and began to arouse itself. The building creaked, the leaves shook on the trees, bare feet padded in a distant nowhere. A spurt of energy throbbed in Rodney’s muscles, and he swatted quickly at a fly.

Geoghegan shook his head. “It’s no use, Rodney dear—but we’ve only fifty years here, at the most. Aha! an’ I’m goin’ back on leave next year. You can think of me a-sniffin’ the Liffey smells—ah, the brewery of Mr. Guinness!” He wrinkled his nostrils. “Perhaps I’ll not come back, too; no more dust, no more de Forrest—och, the man’s no better than a snake with the piles the way he looks at me when I’m tellin’ him a horse must be cast”

Rodney said, “I’ll wager you do come back.”

“Sure, I’ll have to come back.
You
know how ‘twill be—unless me dear old great-aunt passes on. I can’t afford to live at home in the style to which I accustom meself—no horses, no young lady of me own, me boy.”

Rodney thought, I bet you’ll long to be back here from the moment you reach Dublin. But why spoil the fun? In India the secret was to live a year, ten years hence, in some ecstatic future, and when that future came and was no ecstasy, but a dull present, to look forward again. No one lived their “now” properly, except perhaps Caroline Langford, and she was a visitor; certainly Rodney didn’t himself.

Torrance said, continuing Rodney’s line of thought, “For me, ten years, ten solid endless years.”

“Oh, you’re a chicken, me boy, and why should you be worryin’?”

“My flesh creeps when I think that in ten years—in eighteen
sixty-seven
—I shall still be heah, or in some Club exactleh like this, drinking brandeh on a May afternoon. Why, I shall be——”

“My age,” said Rodney with a grim smile. “You won’t feel quite decrepit, take my word for it. When you’re twenty-one, ten years stretch away for ever in front of you, but when you’re thirty-one they look like nothing at all behind you.”

Geoghegan stroked his thin ginger hair, and his mobile Irish face assumed an exaggerated gravity.

“An’ there’s the Cardinal-Archbishop’s last words.” He grinned cheerfully, showing uneven tobacco-stained teeth. “But listen to this. Have ye heard the latest? ‘Twill be
the
hot-weather campaign this year in Bhowani for sure.”

He gathered their eyes with the infectious enthusiasm of the born raconteur and launched out. “Ye know old Mother Myers had the colic three, four months gone? Of course! Well perhaps ye didn’t know she borrowed a bedpan, in private ye understand, from the hospital stock of our little assistant-surgeon man, John McCardle. It’s a shamin’ thing for a big fat lady like her to be a-thinkin’, ye see, of everyone else a-thinkin’ of her squattin’ on a bedpan like a great grampus, now isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t dream of imagining the circumstance,” said Torrance, reddening.

“Wouldn’t ye now? But plenty would, I’m tellin’ ye. Well now, she recovers from the colic and forgets all about the blushful bedpan. A month later who should have a small go of the dysentery but Mrs. Nose-in-air Cummin’, no less—an’
she’s
so hoity-toity she doesn’t want even our little John McCardle to know about it. So she sends her bearer over to borrow the bedpan direct from Mother Myers, which he does an’, Mother Myers bein’ out, just takes it, an’ no one tells her it’s gone, only later she hears where it is. Now me boys, d’ye see what a wonderful arrangement we have here to keep the ladies happy through the rest of the hot weather an’ the rains?”

“I’m dashed if I do.” Rodney watched the lizard as it darted six inches up the wall and flicked out its tongue at a fly.

“Well of course John McCardle is verra verra seeerious an‘Scawts, an’ last week he wants his bedpan back so’s he can count it properly in his inventory. An’ Mother Myers says she hasn’t it but she
hears
Mrs. Nose-in-air Cummin’ has stolen it away. An’ wee John McCardle doesn’t believe her an’ asks, very stiff, who gives
her
permission to lend
his
bedpan away. An’ Mrs. Cummin’ hears of this an’ becomes in a tearin’ panic for no reason at all, an’ denies she ever seen the blushful thing, an’ sends her bearer out in a black midnight to bury it under a bush at the bottom of her garden, an‘swears every one of her servants to secrecy with passin’ of money an’ bloodcurdlin’ threats.”