Nightrunners of Bengal (30 page)

Robin’s eyes were wide and anxious. The headman’s wife was examining the wardrobe; she shook her head and muttered, “We found it on the Pike ten years ago while we were
coming back from a visit. It must have dropped off a sahib’s cart. It is accursed. I will have it burned.”

The headman was trying to pluck the broken bayonet point out of the door, and Piroo was staring from Rodney to Caroline with suddenly shrewd eyes.

Rodney said gently, “What happened then?”

“There were stones in your bed. I was hurrying out to find what had happened to you, and—and—when I opened the door furry things brushed my face, someone hit me on the nose,—and then, and then——”

For the first time she really saw the wardrobe. Rodney’s soothing anxious babble at last penetrated her mind. Her voice broke, she looked at her feet, then up at him, and began to laugh. She rocked on her heels, holding his arm to keep her balance. A vision of her fighting the pelts inside the wardrobe sprang into his mind, and his drawn face creased. He smiled, and there was an aching in his belly. The inhuman zealot girl of January, the inhuman crusader of February, the superhuman saint of May—she was human, a silly girl who’d frightened herself into a fit, and he’d roused the whole village yelling fire and murder.

He began to laugh, shouting joyfully. Villagers packed the outer room; over their heads he saw the flare of torches in the courtyard and heard the anxious buzz and murmur—
What’s happened what’s happened?
Oh, if they could have seen the wardrobe jumping about the floor! He rocked and pumped Caroline’s arm, and cried, “You made a mistake, you made a mistake!”

A rushing torrent of relief sent his laughter up from the pit of his stomach. They were wonderful, marvellous people to see the joke. Caroline was a silly girl, and the world was laughing. Her face was wet with tears and she couldn’t speak properly. She threw back her head.

“Yes, I m-made a m-mistake—just a little one!”

Piroo’s face cracked mysteriously and the small lines deepened round his sunken eyes. Robin caught the infection and chuckled and reached out his hands to them. The head
man smiled in a puzzled way and began to laugh, though he clearly had no exact idea what the joke was. The crowd outside took up the laughter, the torches waved, everybody yelled, the cows mooed. Mrs. Hatch stared from Rodney’s bootless left foot to Caroline’s insecure sheet. She sniffed, tossed her head, and cried, “I’ve never ’eard of such a thing!”

She carried Robin out, a wink and a broad grin twisting her face. The headman’s wife, following Mrs. Hatch’s glance, went off into a fat paroxysm. Seizing Rodney’s arm, she bawled in his ear, “Sahib, sahib, couldn’t you have been more gentle? Virgins frighten easy.”

The crowd passed back the joke and the laughter doubled. Rodney sat suddenly on the bed, while Caroline leaned back against the door and recovered her breath. He looked at her with friendly eyes. By God, it was the best thing that had ever happened. He was sane. Caroline was a silly girl—sometimes—and of course they’d stay and help Chalisgan. It would be unpleasant, but he could laugh again, and he’d made Caroline laugh.

He said, “I’m glad you made a mistake, because it’s saved me making one.”

“Or two,” she said, and slipped out of the room, blushing crimson.

O
R THREE, or four. His mistakes had been many, and she was not a prig or an angel, but a young woman and very mortal. This day Mrs. Hatch had driven him out of the room where Caroline lay sick of the cholera, and ordered him not to come back till dark.

He walked with head hung, crossed the stream, and climbed slowly towards the plateau where they had waited for the deer one early morning in another life. Two hundred feet up he turned, leaned against a tree at the break of the hill, and looked down on the village in the valley. A greasy column of smoke pillared up from the flat place beside the stream where the burning ghats were. A few men squatted by the pyres; the evening sun still shone and dimmed the flames; it was not difficult to imagine death as a slow wind, crowding down the alleys, becoming visible in the quiver of air over the pyres.

The village huddled, close-knit, on the rise of land beyond the burning ghat. The smoke of its dead drifted across it, and he saw the community of it, not close-knit by chance but as a strength against disease, famine, wild beasts, and the stunned loneliness of the hot weather. It was cleaner than the villages of the plains; most of the houses were distempered in white, with here and there among them a few terra cotta or pink. Its many-coloured roofs were like a quilt thrown over it—pale squares of level mud, dark gables of weather-worn thatch, pink slopes of stone tiles. He picked out the headman’s house by its larger roof and the window openings on this side. Those were the windows he had once tested so carefully to make sure Mrs. Hatch’s bulk could squeeze through when the time came. He had been mad indeed; but even if all his fevered dreams had been true their danger was infinitely greater now. After six days of fighting he knew the nature of the enemy, and knew all weapons were toys.

Mrs. Hatch had refused to stay in Chalisgon unless Robin was sent away, so Piroo took the cart and drove off with him into the jungles upstream. They two would hide there until the pestilence had run its course and the fight was over—or until the three remaining here had died. Rodney wondered whether Robin were asleep at this hour. The jungle would be a lonely world to him; perhaps Piroo could make it familiar by telling him the calls of the birds and whittling
animals for him to play with. Piroo could take him to Gondwara by himself if need be.

His son was as safe as anyone could be. The children of the village stayed and played, and died. He could see two small foreshortened figures in a lane between the houses, and knew they were naked boys drawing patterns in the dust with sticks. Their shrill calls came up the hill to him. A young girl washed clothes on a stone by the stream, rhythmically swinging her body to knead and pound.

On the farther slope secondary jungle crowded the houses, and the tangle of undergrowth proved that the land had once been cultivated. A thin line, marked by the greater density of the shadows, followed the curves of the hill’s contour and traced the ruined water channel. There were foundations of houses in that part of the jungle, and scattered blocks, and square stone-lined pits. It was the same lower down the stream. With the decay of good government a town had surrendered its prosperity to the snakes, the creepers, and the improvident monsoons.

Surrendered? Chalisgon had not surrendered; it had been betrayed, as India had just been betrayed, by men who had power but no love. White or brown, it made no difference here; nothing was “foreign” to India, for India was illimitably varied. A foreigner was a man who did not guard the past and foster the future; above all, a man who did not love. The greater a man’s capacities, the wider he must cast the net of his affection. In this little village men fought drought, disease, the sun. They had not the leisure or the learning to know anything outside the village, whether to love or hate. They became foreigners when they walked ten miles. But he and every Englishman need not be foreigners anywhere. The task was plain—to love, as a father his son, a son his father, a lover his mistress, a priest his flock. Any of love’s patterns could be accepted, and flaws in it forgiven. Here, where the shadow of one brown man defiled another, English pride of race mattered nothing; India accepted it as she
accepted the tiger’s perpetual hunger and the ruthless passing splendour of the Moguls.

India had infinite patience, and no meanness. The burden of power here was weighed only by the bearers of it. Without love it was no more than a peacock’s feather, and so it was easier not to love. Leaning against a tree on the knees of the Sindhya Hills, he thought that to men of English blood had been given an opportunity such as God grants but once in a thousand years. After the blind selfishness of two centuries, the hour had come. From here they could ruin themselves with power, or step forward as giants of understanding, forerunners of a new world of service.

It was the crude matrix of that love in Mrs. Hatch, a supremely English “foreigner,” which gave the village its strength now. She cursed and cuffed them, because she was used to swearing at her husband and cuffing her children. She called them “niggers” because she knew no other word, and shouted at them in English, because her Hindustani was bad and because she believed that English was understood anywhere if yelled sufficiently loudly. The people of Chalisgon knew all this without being told; they also knew that Mrs. Hatch loved life and all who lived. Her way of expressing herself was to them just another of India’s three hundred languages, no more harsh or strange than the
glub-
glubbing
words and abrupt northern gestures of the Pathan horse coper who had passed through the village twelve years before. Mrs. Hatch had risen, not by race but by the force of her tempestuous affections, and they were all under her orders—Caroline too.

When he awoke the morning after the wardrobe fiasco, he lay awake on his bed for a time, chuckling to himself. Then he’d thought of Mrs. Hatch and steeled himself to tell her that the party must stay in Chalisgon. He had expected to see fear in her face, fear of the cholera if she stayed, fear of Piroo and the lonely road if she went on. There would be shrill anger that he should force such a decision on her after what she had been through, and all for the sake of a pack of
heathens. So he had dressed slowly and gone with lagging feet to find her.

When the interview was over he had a new humility to set beside his new-warmed charity. He saw the smallness of his understanding, and was a little depressed. If Caroline had been herself, Mrs. Hatch might not have been; Caroline’s exhaustion clearly had something to do with the result. She was there when he braved Mrs. Hatch, and her face was soft but dead white and drained of strength; she had seemed almost to say aloud, “I had one task—to save this man’s mind. By accident I have succeeded. I am spent, and ready to die.” Seeing her, there in the courtyard, Mrs. Hatch swelled up and became an earthy angel of wrath. She roared that she would do nothing unless Robin was sent to safety in the jungle, and shouted at Piroo until the bullocks were yoked in, the food loaded, and the cart out of sight. That took only ten minutes. Then she compressed herself and hurled her force against the resigned melancholy of the village.

Then, when Chalisgon trembled with her activity, Rodney really saw her for the first time. She was not young; here she could get no henna and her hair was more grey than brown. She was a fat Cockney woman, badly jointed, and tiny red liquor veins straggled across the coarse skin of her face. She could neither read nor write her own language. Of all she had been through, he had heard her bewail nothing except the loss of a certain china teapot He knew now it was no callousness, but the ugly courage of the London gutters; not lack of imagination, but the wisdom of the oppressed, who fight only where fighting will avail them and dare not waste their little strength against a world which breaks whom it cannot bend.

At that time Amelia Hatch had taken command of everybody; on him she had forced so much work that he had no time to worry about Caroline. For six days he worked until he was exhausted, and slept without dreams and got up to face more work. When his thoughts strayed from the job in
hand it was only to fret over other jobs ahead, or jobs done insufficiently well to please Mrs. Hatch.

Early on the sixth day, June the third, yesterday, while bathing a dying man’s forehead, he saw Caroline stumble out of the house allotted as a woman’s ward and hurry unsteadily down the lane beside it. He stood in the doorway and watched her return; her face was tightly pinched, the lips compressed and colourless, the great eyes deep-sunk and blazing. He called out to her, but she averted her head and ran into the other house without answering. Behind him the dying man muttered. He had turned back to the smells and sights of the male sickroom.

Up here on the slope he could smell it still. It permeated his shirt, lurked in the curled black hairs of his arm, and clung to his skin. The men lay in tight rows round the walls of each of the three rooms. Smoke drifted in from a bonfire in the lane where the sweepers burned the rags they had used to mop up the stools. When the patients came first they were pale but collected; the helpers stripped them below the waist, and they lay down; a Brahmin would loop up his sacred thread round his ear, so that he might not soil the lower end in his motions. In that early stage they had the strength to go out and squat in the yard, and the diarrhoea was still painless. That did not last long. Hour by hour the flux turned to a bloody paste; their stomachs rumbled; they became too weak to get up, and voided their bowels where they lay. Their faces contorted as the disease took hold and cramped their empty stomachs. They shrank before his eyes as the substance was drawn from every part of the body, turned to paste, and pushed out in those convulsions.

A little later a woman had come running. “The miss-sahiba has it.” He’d dropped the rag from his hand and run to her. She lay on the mud floor and for the first time he saw resignation in her eyes. It frightened him more than anything in his life. He lifted her up to carry her to the headman’s house, so that she could be nursed properly away
from the stink, the splutter, and the dying. She whispered, “In here—not to the house.” He took no notice, and she stirred and repeated her words. Behind the faint voice there was still strength, and suddenly the eyes on him were no longer resigned. He had to turn back and put her down in a little soiled space against the wall between a young girl and an old woman. Mrs. Hatch came running, her eyes heavy from snatched sleep, and sent him to his own work.

Through that night, as through the nights before, the procession continued. Some of the faces were familiar to him; most he did not know. They came in, carried or supported by relatives, and lay down. He made them drink, holding his arm under their shoulders; saw them gulp thirstily; saw them, a minute later, vomit up what they had drunk. He watched the cramps spread upwards from the calves, tighten the thin peasant thighs, knot the flaccid bellies. Later, something would constrict the throat, and panic would come into the man’s eyes. Seeing it, Rodney felt panic himself. Was that look in her eyes? He would turn dizzily away and take water to another feeble man.

Karmadass the bannia came. Through the night his strong voice weakened, and the sheen on his face faded, leaving it a dull chop-fallen mask. He breathed hard under an oppression of pain; his protuberant eyes receded into their sockets; his broad nose became pointed; his fat cheeks sank in; his greasy skin wrinkled and became dead. His eyeballs turned up out of sight, and Rodney pinched his face to bring them down. The eyeballs moved, but the skin had no resilience and stayed where it was, the pinchmarks still indented. When those signs came, the bannia, like the others, had neither fear of death nor will to live. His body could not find the strength even to rattle at its dying. He died near four o’clock in the morning and lay where he died until the burning party came after dawn to fetch him. He was on his back, and still warm to the touch—knees up, arms raised beside his head, clenched fists resting against his ears, belly muscles hard
contracted, eyelids half-closed and encircled by wide blue rings, nose sharp, lips dark brown. There were more who’d followed him, and in the late afternoon Mrs. Hatch came to find Rodney dumb and trembling in the middle of the ward, and sent him out.

It was getting dark. He had been here long enough amongst the clean trees. A blue haze hung over the village, and fires twinkled out in points of gold. The burning ghat was an orange flower against the neutral brown-green of the slope. He walked down the hill and after a minute broke into a run, leaping sure-footed down the dim path and feeling the spring in his muscles as though he would never feel it again.

In the village they told him there was no change. He took an axe and went to hack down trees for the pyres. The fit men were insufficient for the work, and still the cows had to be milked, the land tended, and food cooked for motherless children. Starvation waited always round the corner here, hungry for those whom disease could spare. He swung the axe in bitter blows and swore unendingly. Long after it was full dark he leaned on the helve to wipe the sweat from his forehead. A light was wavering up the hill. When it came near, and he saw the priest’s face, he put his hands behind his back and waited, but could not speak.

The priest stopped and held out his hand. “Tell Hatch-memsahib to give her this. It is good.”

Rodney turned the small dirty-white lump slowly over in his palm—opium, the only specific known for cholera, and very rare and expensive in this part of India. There would be no more in the village. He looked at the priest; the lamp shone up and made his ludicrous donkeys’ ears more prominent; he was grey and pale. The priest wanted to live too, and might have the cholera in him now, or might catch it tomorrow.

He was saying, “Cut it in six parts. Give her one part, with a little warm milk, every two hours. Some she will vomit up, but the rest she may keep. It tends to hold the urine, which is
dangerous—but usually it helps. My friend, there is no other hope. Be quick.”