The Ravi Lancers (29 page)

‘What’s that?’

‘The cottage goes with the job. If a farm labourer doesn’t like what the farmer pays him, or how he’s treated, or gets sacked for any reason, he’s thrown out of the cottage, too.’

Krishna said, ‘I can see how it could be unfair ... but surely if a farmer’s to get any labourers, he must have cottages nearby for them?’

‘Yes, but the result is that the farmer has the power to make a man work any hours, for any wage ... But in spite of everything there’s very little crime here, except what the gentry call poaching. And if anything is reported, the policeman just goes out and arrests some labourer. The magistrates are all gentry. They don’t care what a working man’s life is like, only about protecting their property. Their pheasants!’

He sawed away with an angry energy, so that Krishna had to work harder to keep pace.

‘And now they’re trying to starve Young Marsh because he won’t go to this war. All kinds of people are telling Mother she must stop employing him. But he’s not going. They’ll never make him ... even if Mother has to give in. And I don’t think she will.’ They sawed on. Krishna thought, it may be true, what he says, but he does not realize how much better off they were here than in India. Yet an Indian peasant would not be looking for the same freedoms, or expecting the same rewards. He’d have his own hopes, and they would be different.

Joan Bateman came out, a man’s old hat on her head. She ran in under the shelter of the carriage house crying, ‘Goodness, you’ve sawn a lot, Ralph.’

Harris said, ‘With His Highness here.’

‘Mother sent me out to tell you it’s lunch time.’ She took his coat off the hook where he had hung it and held it out for him. ‘Here, put this on, Ralph, or you’ll catch cold.’

Harris eased into the coat saying, ‘I was telling Krishna how the gentry oppress the working people here.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Joan said, ‘but that’s almost not the worst of it, though it is really... They’re such appalling bores, talking and thinking nothing but horses and pheasants and foxes. Not one of them has read a book since he left school, or knows the difference between Velasquez and Brahms. If it weren’t for Ralph here I would have died of sheer boredom long since. I didn’t think anyone could be more boneheaded than officers of Indian cavalry, but at least they’ve seen another world, another way of life.’

Krishna put on his tunic and turned to Ralph, a little nettled because all these denigrations could be taken to include Warren. He said, ‘You hate the upper classes, don’t you, Ralph?’

Ralph’s face creased into a sardonic smile. ‘Why not? I’m a byblow of one of them ... old Henry Bateman, seducing my mother when she was a cowman’s daughter and he the vicar here. Mrs. Bateman’s done her best, bringing me up the way she brought up her own children, after my mother died ... but from where I stand everything looks different... different, and bad.’

Joan Bateman laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Ralph dear, don’t talk about it. It doesn’t matter to me ... to Mother ... to anyone who matters ... Come in for lunch.’

They walked away together, across the yard and into the house, looking at each other, not speaking, Krishna forgotten. He felt a cold chill of certainty that they were lovers.

That afternoon Diana said, ‘What a shame it’s such a miserable day. I wanted to ride up on the Plain this afternoon, as it’s your last day.’

‘Let’s go,’ Krishna said, ‘but walking. From what I’ve seen of defence systems in France, cavalry will never be used again. I’d better get used to walking.’

They put on raincoats and Diana wore a sou’wester over her hair, and Mrs. Bateman gave Krishna a blackthorn stick from the umbrella stand in the hall and they strode off side by side down the drive, along the lane, left at the Upavon Road and so up on to the Plain. The rain stung Krishna’s face as they headed south-west. He hardly spoke, for what he had guessed deeply troubled him. Surely it was the war, in some way, causing it, for surely Warren would have been different back in India a year ago, at the training camp, at the cricket, if Joan was already turning away from him then. But gradually the awareness of Diana striding along at his side drove his apprehensions deeper into his consciousness, and finally out of sight. She was more than herself, a young woman, Warren’s sister; she was England, England walking through the rain, her spaniel hunting the dulled scent of rabbits, lonely trees like distant ghosts across the short grass.

Soon after they returned to the Old Vicarage half a dozen children came for a party with Rodney and Louise and after they had all eaten cakes and drunk tea, and pulled crackers, and the maid had cleared away the mess, everyone, grown-ups included, divided into two teams to play Charades. Krishna had never played before--in turns each side acted out a word, syllable by syllable, while the other side had to guess what the word was. He loved it, and loved the bright-eyed eagerness of the children, the whole-hearted way they flung themselves into their parts, how they loved to dress up in the finery Mrs. Bateman brought down from the attic.

‘That’s the best part of Charades for them,’ she said, smiling. ‘Dressing up. We never throw away old clothes, but keep them just for this.’

‘We should give more to the poor people, Mother,’ Ralph Harris said.

‘If they are working clothes, we do,’ the old lady replied equably, ‘but that silk ball gown there which Caroline Gill is wearing ... I wore that to the Hunt Balls in--let me see, Sir George was Master--1877 and ‘78. That would not be much use to a poor woman.’

‘How do you know, Mother?’ Joan Bateman said. ‘It’s up to them to decide how they use it, not us.’

‘Yes, dear,’ Mrs. Bateman said. ‘It’s your side’s turn to go out now. And we shall have to make this the last one. It’s nearly seven o’clock.’

The maid awakened Krishna at six next morning. It was still raining. The fields disappeared green-grey into the thick air, and if any gods existed they were shivering damply in the formless clouds that filled the sky. Krishna washed slowly, dressed, and took out his cigarette case. He looked at the cigarette between his fingers and said aloud, ‘No.’ No more. There was an unpleasant taste of old tobacco smoke in his mouth and in the room, but that was not what led him to empty the case into the wastepaper basket. It was time to give up, to abstain, not to acquire. Warren would not understand. He felt the oppression of sadness again. He would have liked to talk to Diana about Warren and Joan, but that was impossible, now. Another time, perhaps, if he survived. And Warren.

He was going back to the trenches. Back to Warren, his friend and teacher. He felt an uneasy malaise as though he were to face some severe test and did not know how he would pass it. Ralph Harris’s words weighed heavily on him. Those sodden fields and thatched cottages held sorrows, lusts, and angers as bitter as any in India. Cricket would not assuage them. Nor destroying the Hun. Something was breaking here, even as he had seen administration break down on the Western Front. Was the war causing it? Or only exposing it?

He had drunk too much last night--again. But perhaps his malaise came from the fact that he was going to say goodbye to Diana Bateman, and might never see her again. He began to shave, noting how very brown his face looked here, in this pale light.

Krishna Ram ducked under the low door and settled himself quickly at the back of the small crowd. It was another roofless house (were there any with roofs in France?) in St. Hubert, this one allotted for use as a Hindu temple. A tattered tarpaulin suspended from the ends of beams sticking out of the walls covered most but not all of it. A sowar in C Squadron had carved a
lingam
out of another beam, that must have been there for five hundred years, and the Brahmin had set it up in the centre of the tiled floor. A few primroses and snowdrops lay scattered at the base of the
lingam
, a garland of small fresh daisies hung round it, and the top was scattered with turmeric.

It was March 20, the second and most important day of the great Hindu spring festival of Holi. The Brahmin, squatting in front of the
lingam
, rocked back and forth in white robes, palms joined, eyes closed, chanting endless Sanskrit verses of prayer to the Fire God. A dozen sowars seemed to fill the room, some chanting holy names, some praying silently with hands joined and heads bowed. They were all wearing their grey army socks, for the tiles were cold and damp, though the boots were left outside.

O Fire, you are immortal among mortals,
You protect us as a friend does,
In front and at the back and at higher levels and lower levels.
Destroy the strength and might of the demons!

The letter burned like a live coal in the pocket of Krishna’s tunic. Her writing was almost unformed, and certainly the wording was banal enough: ‘It rained hard yesterday and we had to get Young Marsh to come and clear the ditch ... Fudge is getting fat with not enough exercise now that I work for the Women’s Volunteer League every afternoon ... Mother asks what size socks you wear as she is going to knit you a pair of heavy woollen ones .. ‘

O beloved we are celebrating the festival of Holi today in Brij
Two ladies of fair complexion and two of dark have come out of their homes to play Holi

But it was the first letter she’d written him, and it arrived the day the regiment came out of the line a week ago, after a fortnight in the trenches, again opposite Lestelle Wood and Hill 73. That was the first half of March, two weeks of sleet and rain and snow, and raw cold, men going down with pneumonia and influenza and Major Bateman insisting on an even more rigorous discipline, even more aggressive patrolling. Now, in the rear area, he was trying to stop the men from washing themselves every morning by stripping naked, except for the loin cloth, and washing the whole body at a pump or in a bucket. That was the only form of ceremonial cleanliness for a Hindu, but Major Bateman said it was causing pneumonia, from which the regiment was losing 500 man-days a month, and he wanted to forbid it. ‘Why can’t they wash like everyone else does in this climate?’ he demanded of Krishna. ‘A bit at a time, keeping the rest of their clothes on?’

My beloved, the red powder is flying in the air,
And the clouds are red in the sky.
I am drenched in saffron coloured water,
And the people are playing various musical instruments--
Mridang, Jhanj, Dhup, Majera!

Krishna bowed ceremonially, made a last silent prayer, went out, and sat on the step tying his boot laces. It was good to see, at the edge of the wood, the fifty horses which had been brought up for the celebrations.

In this hour before the beginning of the long northern twilight, there was an appropriate breath of spring in the air. Music--Indian music--sounded from the left and Krishna followed it down a narrow alley to its source in a big barn. The regimental band was playing, squatted in a half circle on earth and straw. Half a dozen sowars in the full costume of the Ravi hills danced in the centre of the circle. Two men astride makeshift hobby horses danced after beckoning, escaping girls. The barn was jammed with sowars. There must have been over two hundred of them and from the crests on turbans, and the brass shoulder tides, Krishna saw that many men from the division’s regular infantry battalions--Punjabis, Gurkhas, Dogras, Mahrattas--had come to join in the celebration. A pair of Gurkhas had made huge phalluses out of wood for themselves, and fastened them round their waists and, obviously full of cheap brandy, danced after the men in women’s clothing, to the applause and laughter of the crowd.

Krishna noticed some French villagers at the edge of the crowd and smiled to himself. They would never have seen a celebration of Holi before, or even heard of it; but they would recognize what it was about easily enough. After all, there were spring festivals in every religion, Mr. Fleming had said. Even Easter was a spring festival, timed to replace the old Saturnalias.

The band played more loudly. The dancers spread out from the barn on to the twilit field. A couple of young soldiers ran down from the street and began to hurl red and blue powder. Louder the music, more heavy the beat...

One of the phallus-armed Gurkhas jerked his hips in front of the French women at the edge of the crowd. The women giggled, turned away, looked again, moved their legs comfortably. Their eyes enlarged, focused on the stiffly upthrust phallus jerking there so close against their skirts.

There’d be a lot of men going down the road to Longmont tonight, Krishna thought. Holi was the Rite of Spring. The men had not seen their wives and lovers for over six months now. They were drinking, too, passing round brandy and wine.

He went back into the village. The doors were open, the men inside drinking and singing lascivious songs. Other men ran down the street hurling the red powder, symbol of women’s blood. From behind half drawn curtains French villagers watched, wondering.

At Major Bateman’s billet the orderly sat in the doorway polishing the major’s boots. Through the window, Krishna saw Warren writing by the light of a hurricane lantern set on the table beside him. Krishna stopped. He should go and talk to him. He was the only Christian of the regiment, the only Englishman. He must feel specially alone on an evening like this, when everyone about him was involved in something he could not share. Warren’s family had taken him, Krishna, to the Christian church in Shrewford Pennel. Surely he should do something for Warren now?

But it was different. Warren despised Holi as an obscene heathen spectacle, typifying the worst of India. He had not tried to stop the celebrations, but had told Krishna that he himself would take no part in them. If there was any religious ceremony involved, as in the blessing of weapons at Dussehra, Krishna was to represent him. He was not willing to take whatever the Hindu faith, or the Brahmin, or this gaudy rite of Holi could give him; as Krishna had been willing to take what the little church in Shrewford Pennel held out to him. So he sat there, isolated, working, Shikari at his feet. Krishna thought, is he writing to Joan? Has she told him something, to bring that frown to his face? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but the frown was becoming almost permanent now, together with a jerky, nervy irritability quite foreign to the Warren whom Krishna had known in India. Overwork ... the war ... Joan, perhaps ...