Two Novels of India

INEVITABLY Louis Bromfield’s new book, The Rains Came (Harpers, $2.75) will be compared to E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, and the champion of either will dislike the other heartily. Forster has portrayed India well through a casual story; Bromfield, with his accustomed skill, has assembled a miscellany of characters and moved them dramatically against an Indian background that seems always factitious and is certainly too weak to motivate, as he intends it should, the psychological upheaval that is the theme of the novel. Any other scene would have done as well: the cataclysms of rain and pestilence affect men everywhere, and this group would just as reasonably have progressed, through love and lechery and sacrifice, to regeneration, in the author’s familiar Middle West.

It is a good story, a neurotic melodrama expertly acted, but, as in any Oriental theatre, its setting must be inferred. Most readers will ignore inaccuracies of detail; they will not care that religious and social aspects are jumbled, or that the vivid essence of India, ‘where people live by fear instead of faith,’ is indicated obliquely. They may have to look twice to find an Indian, but they will be content, with the tale alone.

Bromfield’s Ranchipur was the most progressive state of the Empire, with its schools, hospitals, waterworks, its civilized economy. But the earth was old and idle, parched and waiting for the monsoon rains, and the nerves of the inhabitants were equally worn. They were a strange group. The Honorable Thomas Ransome planned to drink himself to death. Lady Esketh sought new lovers, the Smileys new charities to perform. And surrounding them were the snobbish missionary Simons; Nurse MacDaid, who was plain and powerful; the wise Maharani; the crass Lord Esketh; young Fern, in love with Ransome; Major Safti, the Indian surgeon; and a troop of others who could not from the heat to the hills.

Then the rains came. Flood and earthquake leveled Ranchipur, and plague ran through it. And in that torrential disaster each man was cleansed of his past, some by death, some by abated lust or greed, and some by finding rather theatrically that in service to others lay their sole salvation. All problems are disposed of neatly, by Mr. Bromfield, but unfortunately the reader is left wondering if that disposition is either likely or conclusive.

It is the very slick unriddling that the author has used before, notably in A Good Woman and The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg. One feels that the fag ends are knotted because of the author’s technical needs rather than their own. The havoc of the rains was not final enough for him here, nor was the horror of cholera; as a last resort he razed by fire the stricken city of Ranchipur, symbolically cauterizing the entire cast.

He has always been such an easy and artful storyteller, of such talents for the creation of suspense and narrative flow, that now it. is surprising to find unpruned incidents, and characters which, though interesting in themselves, advance the story not at all. Even the earthquake has a hard time interrupting the spate of case histories. Remembering the solid background of The Farm, one is disappointed to find the characters of this book floating high above a very vague India. Where is the true land beneath them?

Most readers will simply shrug and read on, for there are few writers who can draw European characters that are individuals so deftly as can Mr. Bromfield, or entangle them so curiously. Edwina Esketh and Ransome, who both had lecherously ‘double-crossed the world,’ the addled misses Dirks and Hodge (come straight from The Children’s Hour), the gun-begirt Aunt Phoebe and the heroic Major, stand out exceptionally from the snarl in scenes as memorable as any the author has created, scenes of natural catastrophe that are superb. Ransome hastening suicide by brandy, the Brahmin Bannerjee burning his father. Fern Simon desperately trying to barter her virtue for ‘Life,’ and Lady Esketh denying her urgent body for final peace, are so poignantly real that it seems a pity they should be reduced by literary trickery to fit the thesis that their world must be reborn through pain; for the story is a moving one, of beauty and anguish and power. It is excellent theatre, but fabulous life.

Closer in spirit to E. M. Forster’s splendid novel of India is The Sword and the Rose by A. W. Smith (Little, Brown. $2.50), an author who obviously has lived in his actual scene long enough to recall more than its high lights and to write of it with assurance and ease. This is India as the regimental British know it, the palpable ground of their daily life. That this life should be but lightly touched by the complex culture of the land, or by the natives themselves as other than enemies or wards, is perfectly plausible; Captain Smith has therefore occluded, without sacrificing ‘atmosphere,’ whatever is not essential to his tale. His events must have occurred in India, and nowhere else; and progressing from his premises—that the colonial army is narrow, that India is deep and broad — they must have occurred exactly as he relates. When a Brahmin or Hindu or Moslem appears he is unmistakably real. The ropy legs of the houseboy, the itch of dust, the ammoniac smell of mules, the flavor of blood, the high thin chirruping of caged prostitutes, give substance to a story otherwise dill use and thin.

The regiment quartered at Kurdunagar was not what it used to be in the days of The War, — the South African War, of course, — for the World War had shunted into it a new sort of officer, hardier and sophisticated, and not usually a gentleman. The code was unknown to young Boykett and Pribram and Mansfield when they went to India. They were conscious instead of regimental jealousies and petty hatreds, of ambitions not always honorable, and most distinctly of India, which propelled each despite himsell to murder or heroism or shame. Natasha (who greatly resembles Lady Edwina Esketh of The Rains Came) found herself driven into the tent of Major Vivori, while the god Siva, the omnipotent idol, smiled lewdly from the hill above. And Vivori went out to meet the tiger which his experience despised but despair demanded, for he had breached the Code.

There are a dozen major stories, a dozen lives running through this novel, and, though Captain Smith lacks Mr. Bromfield’s ability to interweave them, they maintain a sort of unity by stemming from India and developing through the completely artificial life of the regiment. The oldsters served tradition, the youngsters a meagre job. I he women waited. All are carefully chosen to mirror as full a view as possible of the scene, and they are excellently drawn in writing that has simplicity and precision and warmth.

HASSOLDT DAVIS