Colonel Julian and Other Stories (25 page)

‘One before we go in,' he said. ‘Come on. Good old Clara. One before we go in. Good show.'

Shrieks of laughter came suddenly from the house as if someone, perhaps her sister, had ignited little fires of merriment that were crackling at the windows.

‘Getting worked up!' Freddy Williamson said. ‘Going to be good!'

She felt the frost crackling under her feet. She grasped at something that was floating away.
Leise flehen meine Lieder
——
Oh! my loved one
—how did it go?

Twice a month, going back to the tea-garden in the north, he took the Darjeeling night mail out of the heat of Calcutta; seldom without meeting on the station as he departed some returning English nurse with a basket of primroses fresh from the hills, but never, for some reason, seeing these same nurses go. Calcutta, with its vast and sticky heat, its air charged with post-war doom, shrivelled them in the moment of departure into nonentity. The hills revived and reshaped them, so that they returned, carrying their little native baskets of yellow and pink and purple primula, shaded with fern, northern and cool as English spring, like strangers coming in from another world.

He arrived at the last junction of the broad-gauge line at six in the morning, in a cool dawn of exquisite dusty mistiness through which in the dry season the snows were rarely visible. He longed always to see these snows, cloud-like or icy-blue or at their most wonderful like vast crests of frozen sea-foam, and was disappointed whenever he stepped from the cinder-dusted night train on to a platform of seething dhotis and smoke-brown faces, to find that he could not see them in the northern sky. He envied always those travellers who were going further north and would, from their bedroom windows, see Kangchenjunga as they shaved. He thought jealously of the little nurses and the last wartime service girls he never saw on their way to Darjeeling, but only, refreshed and snow-cool, as they came down to the Delta again, carrying their mountain flowers.

Whenever he appeared along the line, especially at the terminus where he drank a cup of milkless tea before driving out in the lorry the sixty miles to the tea-garden, there was a respect for him that was friendly. He had been travelling up and down there, in the same way, for twenty years. He had a long lean figure and a pale face, rather dreamy and prematurely
grey and in very hot weather blue-lipped, that had become almost Indianized, giving him a look of Asiatic delicacy. He had learned, very early, that in the East time is an immensity that does not matter; that it is better not to get excited; that what does not happen today will happen tomorrow and that death, it is very probable, will come between. His chief concern was not to shout, not to worry, not to get excited, but to grow and manufacture a tolerably excellent grade of tea.

There was a clubhouse at the junction, deliciously shaded with large palms and peepul trees, an old white house with exceptionally lofty open rooms through which birds flew freely, where he sometimes shaved in the mornings after the more hideous train journeys and then had a quick breakfast before driving on to the plantation. There was also an army station near, and during the war the club had become a mere transit camp, with both English and Indian officers piling bed-rolls in the doorway, and rather noisy behaviour in the compounds. There were often girls there too, and once he had seen an Indian girl, in khaki uniform, of the very highest type, having cocktails with a bunch of wartime subalterns who belonged to some dismal section of army accountancy and were in consequence behaving like abandoned invaders. It upset him a little. He looked at her with envious deep feeling for a long time. She had a pale, aloof, high-cheeked beauty, with smoky brown shadows of the eyes and purple depth of hair, that he had never grown used to; and he longed to talk to her. But she, too, was going southward at a moment when he was coming north; she was simply one of those entrancing, maddening figures that war threw up for a few illuminating seconds before it snuffed them out again; and in the end he went on to the plantation alone.

He always went on to the plantation alone. In the misty distances of the Dooar country there was a curious tranquillity and it entranced and bored him at the same time. It entranced him by the beauty of its remoteness. It had the strange tenseness, amplified in daylight by heat haze and at night by the glow of forest fires in the Bhutan hills, of a country at the foot of great mountains that were themselves a frontier. There was an intense and overshadowed hush about it. He felt
always, both on the long truck journey across recurrent dried or flooded river beds and then on the green orderly tea plantation itself, that something wonderful and dramatic was about to happen there.

And nothing ever did. His boredom sprang from a multitude of cheated moments. The place was a great let-down. It was like coming down to a meal, day after day, year in, year out, and finding the same tablecloth, impeccably ironed and spread, white in perfect invitation. There was about to be a wonderful meal on it, and there never was.

His visits to the plantation were like that. He expected something wonderful to dramatize itself out of the hazy fire-shot hills, the uneasy nearness of a closed frontier, the deep Mongol distances lost so often in sublime sulphur haze. And he expected Kangchenjunga. The days when he saw the snows of the mountain always compensated him, in a wonderful way, for the humdrum parochial business of going the rounds of the plantation, visiting the MacFarlanes on the adjoining estate, talking of Dundee, doling out the Sunday issue of rice and oils to his workers, and eating about a dozen chickens, skinny and poorly cooked, between Friday and Monday afternoon. He also conceived that he had a sense of duty to the place. He had rather a touching pride in an estate he had taken over as derelict and that was now a place with thirty or forty miles of metalled road, with hardly a weed, and with every tea-pruning neatly burned, every bug neatly captured by yellow pot-bellied children, every worker devoted and contented. And, though he was not aware of it, he was bored by that too.

And then something upset him. One of his workers got drunk on rice-beer, ran madly about the plantation for a day, and then raped and murdered a woman over by the MacFarlane boundary.

When he got down to the plantation on his next visit the murderer, armed with a stolen rifle, was still roaming about the low bamboo-forest country along the river. Everybody was stupidly excited, and it was impossible to get the simplest accurate report. The affair had developed into a gorgeous and monstrous Indian mess, everybody at clamorous cross-purposes, sizzling with rumour and cross-rumour and revived
malice, seething with that maddening Indian fatalism that sucks fun out of disaster and loves nothing better than prolonging it by lying and lamentation.

After he had organized search parties and sent out rumour-grubbing scouts, putting on a curfew for the women and children, he spent most of the weekend driving wildly about his thirty-five miles of metalled road in pursuit of false reports. In the tiring excitement of it he forgot to look for Kangchenjunga, only remembering it when he was far back in the heart of Bengal, in the hot and cinder-blackened train.

When he came back on his next visit, a week earlier than normal, the murderer had not been found. He was worried about it all and did not sleep well in the hot train, with its noisy midnight dislocations. It was a blow to his pride and he was angry that it had ever happened.

Then he fell asleep, to be woken suddenly by the sound of frantic arguments. The train had stopped and he put on the light. He let down the gauze window and saw, in the light of the station outside, a mass of seething dhotis clamouring at each other with brown antennae, like moths. He shouted angrily for everybody to shut up. A bubble of surprise among the dhotis, with explanatory sing-song inflexions, was followed by someone shouting back, in English:

‘Shut up yourself! You're lucky. You've got a compartment. They won't let me on.'

‘I'll be out in a moment!' he said.

‘Oh! don't worry.'

He slipped his dressing-gown over his pyjamas and went out on to the platform, really no more than a length of cinder track running past the metals, and pushed his way among the fluttering dhotis. He heard the English voice again and then saw, among the crowd, under the low station lights, what seemed to him an incredibly unreal thing.

Standing there was one of the nurses he had so often seen coming back to Calcutta on the south-bound train. She was very young and she was waving angry hands.

‘Something I can do?' he said.

‘Yes, you can shut these people up!'

Her eyes had the dark brightness of nervous beetles. Her hair, parted in the middle, was intensely black and smoothed.

‘May I look at your ticket?'

‘Oh! I suppose so.'

He took her ticket, looking at it for a moment under the station lights.

‘This isn't a sleeper ticket. This is just a——'

‘Oh! I know, I know. It's the wrong ticket. I know. That comes of not getting it yourself! My bearer got it. In this country if you want a thing done, do it yourself. I know.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘Darjeeling. On leave.'

‘I've a compartment. I'm not sleeping. You can share with me.'

‘That makes me feel pretty small. Getting so excited.'

‘Oh, everybody in India gets excited. It's nothing. It's the thing.'

‘I'm awfully sorry,' she said.

He called a porter for her luggage; the moth-like dhotis floated away under the station lights; and together they got on the train.

He always had plenty of food and ice-water and beer and fruit packed up in neat travelling baskets, and the rest of the night he and the girl sat opposite each other on the bunks, eating ham and bread and bananas and drinking beer. He was fascinated by her hunger and thirst. They were the hunger and thirst of the very young, and it seemed to him that she talked all night with her mouth full.

‘Ever been to Darjeeling before?' he said.

‘No. They say it's wonderful and it stinks,' she said.

‘You're lucky. You'll see Kangchenjunga.'

She had not the faintest idea what Kangchenjunga was, and he talked of it for some time as a man talks of a pet grievance, a pet memory, or an old campaign. He told her several times how wonderful it was, and then he knew that she was bored.

‘Oh! I'm sorry,' he said. ‘The trouble is that I like mountains. I'm rather in love with mountains.'

‘Really?' She sat cross-legged on the bunk, eating a fourth banana, her shoes off, her knees rounded and smoothly silken, her skirt pulled tightly above.

‘Don't you care for mountains?'

‘Not terribly.'

‘Then why Darjeeling? That's why people go there.'

‘You've got to go somewhere,' she said.

He knew suddenly that she was going there simply because it was a place, a thing, a convention; because she had a piece of time to be killed; because she was bored. She was going to a place whose identity did not matter, and suddenly he was aware of wanting to say something to her; to make, as casually as he could, a desperate suggestion.

He began to make it, and then he found himself trembling unexpectedly and with immense diffidence, so that all he could say was:

‘I—I—I——'

She took another banana and began to peel it very slowly, as if indifferently.

‘What were you going to say?'

‘Oh! it was an idea. But then I remembered it wouldn't—it wasn't possible.'

‘What was it?' she said; and when he did not answer she looked at him with delightful black eyes, teasing him a little, mock serious. ‘Please.'

‘Well,' he said. ‘Well—I was going to suggest you spent the weekend on the estate with me. Oh! you could go on to Darjeeling afterwards.'

She began laughing, her mouth full of banana, so that she hung her head. He saw then that her very black hair was parted in a rigid wonderful white line straight down the middle and he had the first of many impulses to bend down and touch it with his hands.

Just as he felt he could no longer keep himself from doing this she lifted her head sharply and said:

‘I thought you were going to ask me something terribly serious. You know, like——'

He was shocked.

‘Oh! but it is serious. The reason I didn't ask you the first time was because there's a murderer running about the place.'

‘What possible difference could that make?'

‘I'll have to spend most of the weekend trying to catch him,' he said. ‘It wouldn't be fair to you. You'd have to entertain yourself.'

‘Entertain my foot,' she said. ‘I should come with you.'

He discovered very soon that she accepted everything in that same way: without fuss, offhand but rather bluntly, as if things like riding on night trains with strange men, changing her plans and hunting native murderers in remote places were all things of the most casual account to her.

It troubled and attracted him so much that he forgot, in the morning confusion at the junction, to take his customary look for the snows in the north. He did not remember it until he had been driving for ten or fifteen miles along the road to the estate. And then he remembered another simple and curious thing at the same time. He had stupidly forgotten to ask her name; and he had neglected, still more stupidly, to tell her his own.

The three of them, his Indian driver, himself and the girl, were pressed together in the driving cab of a Ford truck. In the back of the truck were a dozen huddled Indians who wanted to be dropped off at hamlets along the road. It was impossible to speak in the roaring, jolting open-sided cabin, in the trembling glare of dust, and it was only when the truck stopped at last to let four or five villagers alight that he said:

‘You can't see the snows this morning. Awful pity. It's the haze. By the way, my name's Owen.'