Authors: John Masters
From her cell the Sirdarni shouted, ‘Climb over the wall, you fools!’
Several men ran round the side and began to climb the back wall of the offices. The constable stood pinned, looking at me for a sign, and the young fellow stood bebind me with his club raised.
Two pairs of car headlights jumped on behind us and lit the whole iron fence and us and the backs of the offices and the people trying to climb the wall there. Govindaswami’s voice said, ‘What is the meaning of this?’
Surabhai swung round and gasped, ‘The police! Oh botheration!’ He ran forward, doubtless to give Govindaswami a piece of his mind. I saw a row of perhaps fifteen police, with lathis, ranged alongside the police bus and the Austin, and
three or four more at the flank, with rifles.
The young fellow behind me screamed, ‘Charge them! Kill them!’ and took a swing at my head. I collapsed backward into his knees, and as he stumbled forward I got him hard under the chin with the top of my head. He went down, but I had no time to kill him because I saw Victoria being bowled over in the swirl of the mob. Also I remembered that the killing season was over for a few years, and I would do better to use my other talents. But it was too late to try and calm the people down. The damage was done, and they were surging forward at the police, and stones were flying. The police counter-charged, swinging their lathis, and the two mobs met round the bus and the Austin.
‘Break them into small groups,’ Govindaswami shouted. Everyone was yelling. The police riflemen didn’t take part in the battle, but ran over and pointed their rifles at the men trying to climb the wall. The men scrambled down quickly because they were fully exposed and must have felt very naked.
Good old discipline began to tell, and soon the little knot of police was clearly winning. I picked up a stick and fell on the back of the mob. The intense young fellow had recovered and was in the thick of the flight. He had plenty of guts.
Suddenly Victoria screamed, There’s K. P. Roy!’ But no one heard her except me.
I shouted, ‘Where?’ She came up beside me and pointed and began to say something. Looking where she pointed, I saw a fellow in the
mêlée
swing a police lathi up and round. Then I was unsighted, and I could not swear whether he or another man did it, but the lathi caught Surabhai a real smash on the side of the head. Surabhai fell, the people milled about, and again I saw the lathi swing up—and down. There were no police within fifteen feet of Surabhai. I didn’t have to ask which was Roy then, but I couldn’t see him any more. I dived into the ruck, but someone shouted, ‘Flee! Run!’ and everyone took it up, including Govindaswami, and in ten seconds the moonlight was speckled with the shadows of people running like mad in all directions. In ten more seconds they’d
vanished among the scattered houses and hedges.
I ran to Govindaswami and told him Victoria had recognized Roy in the crowd. Sammy said, ‘Not much use, but we’ll try.’ He turned on the panting police and rattled off orders that sent them running every which way. Some climbed into the bus, and that lumbered off down the Pike. The sentry opened the gate. Sammy ran into his office and began telephoning the police barracks. Soon more constables were hurrying out on bicycles and on foot to patrol the level crossings and road junctions and river fords within a mile of the Kutcherry.
Victoria was sitting there in his office with us, pale but contained. We gave her a drink of water and a cigarette. She hadn’t been hurt physically.
At last the excitement was over and everything had been done that could be done. Then we relaxed, and I asked Sammy how he had managed to put on such a fine Campbellsare-coming act. He said sourly, ‘Private information.’
We talked some more, and then I asked if he’d drive Victoria and me down to the Old Lines and bring me back with him. He nodded, and we went out to get into his Austin.
Partly it was the moonlight making everything white round there, partly it was the excitement and each one of us having had other things to think about—me of Victoria, Victoria perhaps of me, Govindaswami of his job and Roy—but we’d none of us noticed the body lying on its face near the off front wheel of the Austin, the body in a white dhoti and scarlet suspenders, yellow socks, and co-respondent shoes, with a little blood round the head and a Gandhi cap lying stained with blood beside a police lathi five feet off.
Victoria stopped and swayed like a tree in a high wind, but she wasn’t going to faint. She whispered to herself as I put out my arm to hold her. She knelt down. Neither Sammy nor I did, because we knew—partly by the way the body lay, partly by the broken hole in the skull, partly because it was so inevitable.
The darling lifted up his head in her arms and tried to wipe away the blood. She wasn’t disgusted by mere violence any more, as she used to be, just because the results were messy.
She saw a man badly hurt. That was no time to think about the real mess violence causes and is caused by, which is not so easily visible. She was full of compassion. She laid his head down at last and said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
Sammy said bitterly, ‘Yes, they murdered him all right. They even managed to get a policeman to do it for them.’
I said, ‘No. It wasn’t a policeman.’
Victoria said, ‘I saw too. I’m almost sure it was Roy.’
Sammy asked me if I was sure. When I told him yes, he looked hard at me and said, ‘Did anyone else see?’
I didn’t think so. Sammy said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Here’s the lathi. We’ll never be able to make anyone believe it, whatever we say, however much we exonerate the police in an inquiry.’ I thought of suggesting we burn the lathi, but I know the right cries well enough, and I kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the sentry would have seen us.
Victoria said angrily. ‘Are you going to leave him lying here while you work out who is to blame?’
Sammy took her arm and said gently, ‘No, Miss Jones. But if we don’t consider now what is the right thing to do, there will be more blood shed here, and elsewhere in India, because of this.’
She thought a minute and said suddenly, ‘Please take me in your car to get Mrs Surabhai and Ranjit.’
‘Ranjit?’ Sammy said, surprised. But she knew what she was doing, and all at once I did. That was the hell of a woman, and becoming bigger every hour.
As they were leaving I said, ‘Do you want me to carry him in?’
Sammy said, ‘Please. And will you get your doctor? The civil surgeon’s gone to Kishanpur with Lanson. And do you know what for?’
‘No,’ I said, obviously.
Sammy said, ‘Because Brigadier ffoulkes-Jones thinks his Alsatian chef is trying to poison him. The
foie gras
tasted funny last night, he reported.’
They drove off. Surabhai certainly had a knack for wringing good honest comedy out of the most unlikely situations. I car
ried him in, and by the time Sammy and Victoria came back Chaney had examined him and pronounced him dead of a fractured skull. We had also washed his face, closed his eyes, arranged his clothes, and laid him out on Lanson’s table with a handkerchief over his face.
Victoria supported Mrs Surabhai as she came in. She was a battle-axe of a woman, and Sammy had told me she used to give Surabhai hell because he wasn’t a mixture of Rockefeller and Bismarck. Perhaps she loved him. You couldn’t tell, because by custom she had to start keening and yelling and tearing her clothes to pieces. I wished to God that Manbir’s old wife were there to help Victoria look after her. Finally some friends arrived in a tonga, and Govindaswami gave them permission to take the body away.
Then we were left—Victoria, Sammy, Ranjit, and I. Victoria had taken charge, and Sammy waited quietly. She held Ranjit’s hand for a minute and made him sit down. The rest of us stood. She said gently, ‘Ranjit, dear, you are a secret Congress man, aren’t you?’
He nodded. He seemed a lot tougher than he used to be—not chest-beating tough or gangster-tough, but as if a lot of willow had been taken out of him and steel put in instead. I was not surprised. The Sikh religion is strong meat to take on an empty stomach.
Victoria said, ‘And you don’t really like working on the railway, do you?’
He shook his head. He was looking at her and weighing her to see where she was going next, what she was trying to make him do. A week ago she could have twisted him round her little finger, I knew, but not now. He didn’t dislike her—if anything, he loved her more than he ever had—and I knew he’d been in love with her from the same moment I was, perhaps earlier.
She said, ‘Both Colonel Savage and I saw this lathi’—it was in the corner, complete with blood and hair—‘kill Mr Surabhai. But it was not a policeman who did it.’
‘Who was it?’ he said.
‘K. P. Roy,’ I said.
‘No,’ she corrected me. ‘We didn’t actually see Roy do it This is what we saw.’ She explained clearly and finished up, ‘So it was either Roy or another man in the crowd. Roy was the nearest. It was not a policeman. And the rescue only turned into a riot when first your mother told them to climb the wall and after that the young fellow—the one with a pale face——’
‘Mehta,’ Ranjit said.
She said, ‘When Mehta told the people to charge the police I am almost certain K. P. Roy wasn’t with them when they crossed the Pike and caught us, because I was looking for him. He must have been hanging about on the outskirts, waiting for his opportunity.’
‘His opportunity to do what?’ Ranjit said quietly. As I say, he wasn’t antagonistic. This new Ranjit, you had to show him.
‘To start on his campaign to break India from within,’ Sammy said. ‘What’s holding you politicians together now except hatred of the British? Who will succeed Surabhai as local chairman here?’
‘Mehta could,’ Ranjit said, ‘Mehta was getting ready to take over when we were all sure you were going to keep Surabhai in jail—after the fishplate was found.’
I’d always wondered why Roy put the fishplate there. Now I knew.
Victoria said, ‘Mehta could succeed—but so could you, if you left the railway service and came into the open.’
Ranjit sat there a long time, quite still. Finally he looked at me and said, ‘Do you give me your word that it was not a policeman who killed V. K.?’
I said, ‘Yes.’
He got up then and said, ‘Very well. I will think it over. I could out-vote Mehta if I tried. I have never thought of trying before.’
‘Even if you win, you will have a hard fight to get the actual control out of the hands of Mehta and his friends,’ Sammy said. ‘They’ll try to make you into a figurehead.’ He was a cunning bastard, and, of course, an Indian.
Ranjit said, ‘I do not think I will be afraid of that. But you must not imagine that the local Congress, under my leadership, will be any less hostile to you and what you stand for. Or that the struggle for a free, united India will be allowed to the or weaken in Bhowani.’
Sammy said, ‘And I don’t want you to imagine that anything you care to do now will give you the smallest privilege against the law.’
‘I will tell you in a day or two,’ Ranjit said. He turned to Victoria and said, in front of us, ‘You were right to leave the gurdwara, and me, when you did, Victoria. Thank you.’ He took her hand and kissed it gently in a very European gesture—perhaps his last.
Sammy said, ‘Do you want to see your mother for a minute?’
Ranjit thought and said, ‘Yes, please. Alone, please.’
I borrowed Sammy’s Austin and took Victoria home. It was about midnight, and I was thinking of Surabhai and wishing he could have been killed more gloriously—say with Probyn’s at Meiktila. I was betting myself a thousand to one in pounds that even then his last words would have been something as immortally incongruous as ‘Oh botheration!’ when Patrick passed us on his Norton, doing about seventy. He must have come back on 599 Down, the slow train from Bombay to Delhi, which reaches Bhowani Junction at 2329.
The following Sunday we were at the Collector’s again. It was about half past eleven in the morning, and Sammy was signing papers at his desk. A coppersmith bird donged with maddening persistence among the bushes in the garden. I went over to the windows and peered out between the horizontal slats of the venetian blind. The garden was shimmering with
dry heat.
Victoria sat quietly with her hands in her lap and watched me. She had a steady look that finally began to disconcert me, so I said, ‘Do you mind if I go out and shoot that bloody bird, Collector? Or do you keep it as a pet?’
Perhaps Victoria was estimating me as a father. Perhaps she thought I’d eat my young if they whimpered out of whimpering hours.
The tenor bell started ringing in the cantonment church. The coppersmith resented the competition and doubled his rate of donging.
Sammy said, ‘Please don’t shoot it, Savage. It will certainly be sacred to someone, somewhere in this godforsaken country. Don’t you ever go to church?’ The bell tolled, and an ashtray on Sammy’s desk buzzed in its reverberations.
I said, ‘No. I am a decent chap, and my memorial shall be a thousand lost golf balls. Except that I don’t play golf.’
Victoria was fairly well educated and very intelligent, and she had educated herself a lot more since she left school—but as far as general background of culture went, she was a lightweight. Sammy was a light-heavy, and I am a smart welter. My chance remark caused a small look of vacancy to pass across Victoria’s expressive eyes. She rearranged her hands and waited for us to get on to some subject she could undertand. Meanwhile she probably mulled over things, such as the qualities of fatherhood, which she was quietly satisfied that I couldn’t understand.
I looked at the thermometer hanging in the shade of the verandah outside. I said, ‘A hundred and nine, and it’s what? Half past eleven? This can’t go on much longer.’
‘A week, more or less,’ Sammy said. He scribbled his long signature on another document, blotted it, and turned round. ‘Now——’
I sat down, brought out a handkerchief, and tied it loosely, as a neckerchief, round my neck. Sammy’s white suit was immaculate, but his collar hung in wet folds. He ran his finger round it and said, ‘My third to-day. I expect to get through five or six more before bedtime. I put on the second in honour
of an early visitor.’
He waited. He liked his little touches of drama.
I said, ‘All
right!
’ I put the tips of my fingers together and said, ‘I confess that I am baffled, Govindaswami, as to the identity of your early visitor.’
‘Ranjit,’ he said.
‘I am unbaffled,’ I said.
He said, ‘He came here to tell me what he knows aboutK. P. Roy. It isn’t much more than we know already. Roy got a tooth or two knocked out on Friday night. Otherwise he’s in good trim and working hard.’
I asked if Ranjit had seen him (Roy) since the fight at the jail.
Sammy said, ‘He says not. Mehta told him the news—before
he
told Mehta that he was a candidate for the local Congress chairmanship.’
‘He’s doing it, then?’ I said, ‘Leaving the railway and all?’
Sammy nodded, and I said, ‘We ought to give Victoria a medal or something.’
Victoria said, ‘Not me. The Guru Panth.’
Sammy nodded and went on. ‘Well, Ranjit thinks he will be elected at a meeting to-morrow. He is already out of the railway. His mother wouldn’t tell him anything about Roy, but from what Mehta let slip Ranjit thinks that Roy is still hiding in Bhowani.’ I asked Sammy what, if anything, he wanted me to do about it.
He said, ‘Nothing, I hope. The police are at work. This evening I will get some plain-clothes men from Agra and Cawnpore. I have good hopes of catching Roy this time.’
‘It will be the hell of a trial if you do,’ I said sourly, ‘Worse than that I.N.A. farce at the Red Fort. Think, is your trial really necessary?’
Sammy said, ‘A trial will be better in the long run than a mysteriously dead Roy. I am a servant of the Government of India, not of Mr Djugashvili or of the late Mr Schicklgruber.’ He stood up, delicately mopping his brow with a huge white linen handkerchief. He said, ‘All I want you to do is stand by at an hour’s notice. But remember, please, if I am forced to
employ you—no mysterious deaths.’
‘You and your bloody Old Cheltonian tie,’ I said. I stood up and started slowly for the door. He was a strong man, Sammy, and one of the few who really don’t prefer to use their strength against other people. I asked him what they used to call him at Cheltenham.
He said, ‘Nigger, at first. Later, Sammy.’
I asked him if he’d enjoyed it there.
He said, ‘Yes. God knows why. I got my Fifteen cap as scrum half. The other sides used to complain that they couldn’t see me on muddy days.’
I laughed and held the door open for Victoria. The jeep was waiting under the shade of the trees, with Birkhe curled up comfortably in the back seat. We braced ourselves for the hot dry shampoo of air. Victoria put on her dark glasses. Sammy said, ‘We must end the run of Roy’s melodrama with all speed. There’s a famine starting in parts of Madras.’
We spent the day together, in the mess and at my bungalow. A good deal happened, both what was obvious and what could not be seen. When she left me she bent down and kissed the inside of my wrist. Her lips were cool and wet, and the queer forlorn passion of her movement leaped up my arm so that I could not take my hand away. It wouldn’t move, and my knees went weak from love. The tonga driver watched interestedly from below. When she loosed my hand she stumbled down the steps and climbed into the tonga and jolted away. I stood on the verandah till she had gone, and long after that.
She didn’t get the chance to tell me until some time later what happened then, but as her story is complete and mine only joined it half-way through, it is her story that I will tell here.
She found Number 4 Collett Road empty, airless, and like an oven. It smelled different to her—stranger even than when she first came back from the Army. It smelled of meals eaten long ago, of the tang of betel nut from her mother’s secret vice, of Rose Mary’s powerful scent and her father’s pipe.
She wandered about, opening windows to let in the air. The sun was down, and she saw blue wood-smoke and grey coal-smoke dimming the horizons, and heard the squeak of a bullock cart.
With luck, she thought, her family would stay out until she could get into bed and pretend to be asleep. She sat down in her father’s chair in the parlour, kicked off her sandals, and closed her eyes. She meant to rest for only a minute before going to bed. She wanted to think about herself and me—just as I, up in cantonments, wanted to. But I couldn’t. I was worrying about Roy by then, and wondering what I could do to help Sammy.
Victoria decided that during the day she bad been near something final and right—but when, exactly? When was it that she had heard the whisper of a knowledge beyond her own knowledge?
(The circumstances in which she told me of this time were such that she wanted to explain all her thoughts to me. It was another day, another climate, and we will come to it.)
Was it when we had talked, in the mess, of Ledru-Rollin, and she didn’t know what we were talking about? When we played Bartók and told her it was Korngold? When I took ber to the cemetery to see the grave of my great-grandmother? When she had agreed to come out and spend a week-end in camp in the jungle with me? When Patrick came to tell us that he bad failed in Bombay, and we both realized that he had come at that time hoping to find us in bed, to hear us perhaps, and so suffer the last pains of love? In my bitter politeness to Rose Mary, when she and Howland came to the bungalow to get permission to take out a truck—which I refused?
She reached no conclusion, sitting there in her father’s parlour except that she was wildly happy and steadily unhappy. She could place the happiness with great exactitude—it lived in, or grew from, the wide and slippery gulfs of my bed. The unhappiness she could not isolate. The last thing she heard before falling asleep in the chair was an engine whistling for the level-crossing a mile up the line.
She awoke slowly to hear someone saying, ‘Wake up, please,
Miss Jones.’ The voice was small, polite, and flat.
She opened her eyes. A man in a coolie’s loincloth was standing over her. His hand rested on her arm, the fingers pressing gently just above her elbow. There was some light, a creeping-in of visibility through the open windows. The man’s face was neutral, and he was K. P. Roy. He held a big Army revolver loosely in his right hand. His arm hung straight down as though the revolver was too heavy for it.
The slow freeze began at the back of her head, spread forward across her scalp, down her face, into her neck. Suddenly it caught at all her muscles together so that she jerked in a convulsive spasm and sat back where she had been in the chair, but lower.
‘Do not make any noise, Miss Jones,’ Roy said. He talked oddly, like Winston Churchill, because of his missing teeth.
She waited. They were always supposed to say, I don’t want to hurt you, but—and push the pistol forward and bare their teeth and narrow their eyes. But she thought that K. P. Roy didn’t mind whether he hurt her or not. The depth of his indifference was not to be calculated. He said, ‘Can you tell me anything about the Collector’s plans for capturing me? I would like to know where the military and police posts outside the city are. I thought you would know.’
She whispered, ‘No. I don’t know.’ She moved her eyes to the clock. The hands were very dim on its blurred white face. Twenty past nine, or a minute afterward, about. Roy’s eyes flickered and came back to her. She spoke quickly. They didn’t tell me anything.’
He said, ‘You weren’t discussing the plan with Colooel Savage in his bungalow all this afternoon?’
She said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘What were you doing?’
She said, ‘We were making love. That’s all I went there for.’ The revolver was big and shiny blue, and it took away her pride.
Roy said, ‘I see. When do you expect your father, mother, or sister back?’
She said, ‘I don’t know.’
He stepped to the window and glanced out. It was the street light that shone dimly in. Her hands had joined together and were wringing, one in the other, slippery with wetness. Roy’s body gleamed as he moved about.
Roy came back to her. He said, ‘The situation is this, Miss Jones. All the roads and trails leading out of the city are blocked. There will certainly be military patrols in the fields, since Colonel Savage is an efficient officer, but I do not know exactly where they are.’
He was wrong there, by a few minutes. It was 2118 when I persuaded Sammy to let me help, and the first of my patrols didn’t get into position until 2145.
Roy said, ‘I cannot expect for a second time to have such luck as I had in escaping from the affair at the jail. Mr Govindaswami was better informed than I expected. You were not hurt at that time?’
Victoria said, ‘No.’
He said, ‘You were lucky. The railway lines also are blocked, and an armed policeman is in the cab of every engine leaving Bhowani. But I think that with your help I can surmount these obstacles. Mr Dunphy is backing out of the yards now with the Down Goods for the Bhanas branch. It departs every night at about this time, as you know. In a few minutes Mr Dunphy will return through the station and start out. I want you to come with me now and stand by the line and wave some suitable object to induce Mr Dunphy to stop his train. When he does so, you should speak up to him in the cab and keep him busy for a minute or two. You should ask him something, or tell him something, which will seem to him of sufficient importance to warrant your having stopped the train. Remember it is only a goods. What do you suggest?’
She wrung and unwrung her hands. Ted Dunphy was in love with her. He might be able to see from her face that she was in terror. But she would have to control herself, or Roy would shoot her and the policeman, take over the train, and ride his luck.
She said, ‘I could invite Ted to a dance,’
Roy shook his head. ‘To-day is Sunday. There is no dance
occurring sufficiently soon to give your request the necessary urgency.’
She could think of nothing except that she could think of nothing. Roy spoke more sharply. ‘Very well. You shall tell Mr Dunphy that Mr Taylor has threatened to kill you, and you are therefore afraid. You shall ask Mr Dunphy if he knows where Mr Taylor is so that you may hide from him. Yes.’ He nodded. ‘That will do very well, because it will also account for your obvious state of agitation. Kindly put on your shoes now.’
She fumbled with her sandals and at last got them on. Roy squatted on the floor and watched her. The clock ticked. All the noises of the night passed round the little house but never came in. The people next door tuned up their wireless. They must have just come back from somewhere, she thought. The Institute. A visit. The wireless was giving a talk, and the speaker sounded pompous, as though he had a hot potato in his mouth, his voice and the words mashed together to form a meaningless boom like frogs in a pond.
Roy stood up quickly and said, ‘Out!’ and jerked up the pistol so that the big black snout touched her breast. He had seen something outside. She sprang up from the chair, and his arm held her upright against the drag of her knees. They hurried into the passage, turned left, passed out of the back door. He closed the door carefully. She heard her mother’s voice, quite loud and dear. ‘No one told me why it is wrong to——’ It shut off. She wondered, What is wrong? Chewing betel nut? Trumping her partner’s ace? The lecturer thundered and boomed.
They passed behind the servants’ quarters, slipped through the bushes, and stood a moment on the other side. She saw no one up or down the line. Looking to the left along the straight, she saw the lights of the station and among them the white eye of an engine’s searchlight. It was dark there at the edge of the bushes, darker than in the parlour, because the street lamps did not shine there, and the yard lamps were only a glow in the sky.