Indigo: A Novel of India

by CHRISTINE WESTON

9

IT WAS still two weeks before the break of the southwest monsoon, and the earth lay breathless. A taut membrane of heat seared the fields around Amritpore and dried up the brown trickles of water which fed them. Buffalo carts and bullocks creaked between acres of indigo, lugging the freshly cut stock to the tanks where air and water would turn it into a primary orange and ultimate blue.

On the headwork of his canal, above the locks, at a point where the river eddied past a high masonry escarpment, the Civil Engineer of Amritpore, Mr. Wall, was fishing for crocodiles. He had invented this original sport in the deep boredom of the season. A coolie crouched above the locks and dangled a dead pi-dog at the end of a rope. The dog hung hideous and enticing just above the brown water, while Mr. Wall sat on a campstool with his rifle across his knees, waiting a glimpse of the blunt snout and hooded eyes of his quarry. Mr. Wall’s cotton suit was dark with sweat; he fell thin and brittle from weeks of intense heat.

Father Sebastien, Madame de St. Remv’s confessor, sat near Mr. Wall, smoking and taking an occasional sip from a bottle of lemonade which stood in a bucket beside him. A lit lie distance away under the acacias Wall’s tonga waited, his syce stretched on the ground beside the unharnessed ponies.

Wall stared at the glittering line of the canal which his labor had traced across the plain. Well, there it stood — for whatever it might be worth. There were moments when he felt well pleased with it, but this was not one of them. With the approach of hot weather, just before a break in the rains, his nervous system suffered a reverberation of all the disappointments, dreams, hopes, despairs, and resignations which had piled up during the year. Now, loathing possessed him—loathing for the climate, loathing for the spiritless people who crept upon the graceless land, loathing for his work. He hated India. He hated exile.

Father Sebastien tilted his pith hat and mopped his rosy forehead with a large silk handkerchief. He had been silent for some time, musing on the Last Sacrament he had recently administered at a village whose protecting grove of mangoes he could see from here. The recipient was young, a widow, and a recreant Christian. But from terror of the new God, her family had sent for Father Sebastien. The priest knew perfectly what. would happen as soon as his back was turned — they would carry her down to the river and complete the rites after their old fashion, and tie bits of rag to poles stuck in the sand, thus leaving nothing undone to placate her pathetic wraith.

Father Sebastien sighed and hitched his campstool closer to the edge of the headwork. He admonished the coolie: “Raise the animal somewhat — do not let it sink out of sight.”

Wall revived. “Flop it about, idiot!”

The coolie gave the bait a couple of enticing wiggles.

“There were three of the brutes last week,” said Wall. “But they’ve probably become wary.”

“Would you like some lemonade?”

He poured the liquid into a cup and gave it to the Engineer, noticing, without appearing to, a faint tremor of the other’s extended hand.

The coolie gave an exclamation and all three craned forward, Wall raising the big double-barreled Greener. Something moved in the water, slid up against the masonry headwork, rolled over and bared its devastated human face. A charred arm saluted them from the current, then sank.

“No mugger this time,” sighed the priest, relaxing.

“Neither Crocodilus palustris nor Gavialis gangeticus,” replied Wall, with a disgusted laugh. “Merely Homo sapiens somewhat the worse for wear. One of your flock, perhaps?”

“We bury ours.”

“In consecrated ground, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Do the jackals respect it ?”

“We employ watchmen.”

Both smiled, pleased with their grisly little exchange, and Wall rose.

“God, if only the rains would break!”

“But the malaria,” murmured Father Sebastien. He stood, impressive in his white summer robes, and stared at the river. “I cannot persuade the children to swallow quinine. They don ’t like the bitter taste.”

“Perhaps they find that death tastes sweeter,” suggested Wall. He had little sympathy with the priest’s calling, but they respected each other and got on well together.

The syce had waked up and harnessed the tonga ponies, and now the coolie hauled in his ugly bait and cut it free. It fell, disappeared, rose a little distance away, then vanished in a vicious swirl that was not resurrection. Wall fingered his rifle. “Damn! I knew the brute was somewhere. Well, we’ll get him next time.”

They slid down the embankment to the waiting tonga, followed by the coolie carrying their campstools and the rope. Wall took the reins and the priest sat beside him, while the servants sat behind. They started down the road in the late glittering sunshine and passed Madame de St. Remy’s creaking bullock carts laden with indigo. Madame’s foreman, Mr. Boodrie, driving a brand-new dogcart, passed them at a smart pace and they had a glimpse of his shoddy tussah suit and his face like a melting chocolate drop.

Wall slowed up to allow the dust to settle. “Swine! I can’t stand half-castes.”

Father Sebastien, realizing that there were many things and many people Wall could not stand, observed mildly: “He is a faithful and intelligent servant to Madame de St. Remy.”

“Pooh! He’s a thief to start with.”

“One must have patience.”

“I know that family. Boodrie’s father does subcontracting and he made a nice thing out of the government’s bid for mortar when we started the canal. I’d like to shoot him.”

“Why?”

“Just for fun.”

“Come to my house and have a drink. Stay for dinner. I am alone, I should like it .”

“Sorry, Father, but I have to get home. I go into camp tomorrow, for a week.”

“Camp, in this weather?”

“I have no choice.”

The priest nodded. “Yes, we have little choice. We must sacrifice, suffer, endure, forgive.” He sounded contemplative rather than persuasive.

Wall grinned. “I belong to the opposition shop, if to any. Yet there are times when I wish I shared your charity. All you fanatics possess an endurance which the rest of us lack.”

“Well, you dig the canals and leave the rest to us fanatics.”

One of the ponies pecked a little, and Wall lashed it with his whip. They tore along for a few minutes, then he muttered in a choking voice: “This bloody country ! ”

The priest remained silent. Presently the verdure of the little civil station opened before them — carefully plotted gardens and the green of trees, a scent of flowering hedges and watered grass. They drove past Madame de St. Remy’s indigo factory and saw her carriage waiting inside the gates.

Wall asked abruptly, “What news of Jacques?”

“I understand he is making a successful adjustment to school.”

“ I miss him, and Hardyal too,” Wall said.

“You should marry,” said the priest kindly.

“Marry? I?” He laughed. “Leave my wife and children in England or in the Hills, or force them to swelter down here with me?

“There would be some happiness. It might be worth that much, to them as well as to you.”

Wall shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ll wait until I retire — if I don’t pop off with dysentery or something before then.”

He suffered from a curious onset of emotion, and speech did not ease it. Presently they were at Father Sebastien’s little house in the church compound, where a water carrier was sprinkling the ground before the dusty oleanders. Father Sebastien got out and stood for a moment looking at the Englishman. ” I enjoyed our expedition. If you should want me at any time, I will come.

Wall smiled dimly. “Thanks. But I’m all right, you know.”

He wheeled out of the compound.

10

WHILE Madame de St. Remy moved among her scorching fields and Father Sebastien and Mr. Wall angled for crocodiles off the canal locks, Jacques sat behind his new desk in the fourth standard classroom of St. Matthew’s School and waited in bored longing for the dinner bell. He listened to his neighbor, His Highness the Raja of Jhori, read aloud from a history of the Plantagenet kings.

His Highness was a day scholar, fourteen years old, undersized, black, and precocious. He usually managed to bribe a classmate to do his lessons for him, but it was impossible to evade the oral test which was his especial misery and torment. He knew that if he stammered or lost the thread of a passage he was done for — he’d have to go back to the beginning and tear through it like a train through a tunnel.

There were about two hundred boys at St. Matthew’s, which accepted other religious denominations and which prepared its students for the Cambridge entrance examinations. The school was run by a Catholic order of Irish Brothers, and from a distance Jacques rather admired this group of able, apple-cheeked men who looked like sportsmen and who joked and laughed a great deal among themselves, and who managed somehow to beat a semblance of scholarship into the amorphous mass in their care.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Jacques should find something inimical in the heterogeneous collection of boys—white, native, and Eurasian — who were his schoolmates. On the day of his arrival they had ducked him in the great drinking cistern, and that night they had locked him up in one of the lavatories at the end of a long, covered passage beyond the junior dormitory.

Jacques had not been entirely unprepared for what might lie in store for him at his first boarding school; he had listened while Mr. Wall instructed Hardyal in the peculiarities of public-school behavior, and Father Sebastien himself had dropped a few valuable hints. Nevertheless Jacques was secretly profoundly shocked. For hours, whenever he found himself alone, he pondered this first inexplicable affront to his dignity. He had lived among adult human beings, and hitherto friendship, as Madame de St. Remy had pointed out to Father Sebastien, had come to him all too easily.

When, later, the boys approached Jacques with overtures of reconciliation, he had nothing to say to them, and they went away disgruntled. “Beast!” “Snob!” “Stinkpot!”

But if Jacques was not prepared to like, he was more than prepared to hate, and it was not long before he found an object in his class-master, Brother Doyle. This man was quite unlike the other Brothers — lean and sallow where they were ruddy and strong, his features negroid, his eyes like stones, his manner blisteringly sarcastic. Between Brother Doyle and Jacques there sprang up an antipathy which, as weeks passed, developed into undisguised antagonism—-to the relish of the rest of the class.

It began three days after Jacques’s arrival — two days after the ducking and the night spent in the W.C. It followed forty-eight hours of gnawing homesickness.

When the class assembled on the morning of the fourth day, Brother Doyle led the morning prayer, then stared down the rows of faces until his glance settled on Jacques, halfway down the middle aisle.

“You, there. Why are you in Macbeth’s seat?”

“ I was told to sit here, sir.”

The Raja of Jhori raised an officious paw. “Pardon, sir! Would state that Macbeth is still absent due to reasons of health.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jacques de St. Remy, sir.”

Brother Doyle smiled. “Sure and I beg your pardon! What does the de signify, if I may be so bold as to ask?”

“Sir?”

“Nobility, I take it?”

“Sir?”

Brother Doyle, who loathed them almost as much as they loathed him, smiled on the class, which ogled back, rapturously.

“I see we have an idiot amongst us. He doesn’t even know the meaning of his own name.”

“But I do, sir!” said Jacques quickly, suddenly aware that he was being baited.

“Oh, ye do? Then sit down!” The command was roared with such ferocity that it swept his legs from under him and he collapsed into his seat. Deathly silence fell on the classroom as Brother Doyle’s glance impaled Jacques. “Ye left the title at home, wherever it is ye come from. Remember that while ye’re in my class.”

After class Jacques locked himself in the lavatory of his own accord, and burst into tears. He stayed in the lavatory until the bell rang for dinner.

11

AFTER long silence a letter came to Jacques from England, from Hardval, who was spending his midsummer holidays in Sussex.

”... When the tide goes down you can hardly see it it lies like a piece of wet string under the sky, and the sands come to life with very small crabs and things. I now find that I swim quite well. We ride when I go to stay with Mr. Wall’s sisters on the Downs. 1 wish you were here. In school some of the fellows call me ‘Wog.’ A Wog is a kind of black doll with button eyes and hair of wool. I do not think that I look like a Wog. I wish you were here.”

The boy whose seat Jacques had usurped in Brother Doyle’s class, John Macbeth, returned to school and Jacques was moved down the aisle. Like His Highness the Raja of Jhori and a few others, Macbeth was fortunate enough to be a day scholar. When Jacques looked him over, he encountered a pair of blue, incurious eyes, and Macbeth smiled very faintly, as though a fly had tickled his nose.

As suddenly as he had appeared Macbeth disappeared, and a note was brought by a magnificent mounted orderly from Colonel Macbeth, to state that his son was indisposed and would not attend class for two or three days. Funny, reflected Jacques —Macbeth didn’t look in the least delicate.

“What’s the matter with Macbeth?” Jacques demeaned himself to inquire of his neighbor, the Raja.

“Worms,” returned His Highness, importantly.

“Fits,” amended someone else. “He falls down and turns blue.”

The situation between Brother Doyle and Jacques became steadily worse. Hanif, Jacques’s servant at home, would have said that the man possessed the evil eye, and certainly there were moments when Jacques felt the sterile flame of that eye consume his will and paralyze his limbs. As for the rest of the class, this unequal struggle offered them a welcome relief from boredom.

Jacques’s accent came in for special attention, for his English, though blameless, was tinged with French sibilance, and he had occasional difficulties with his th ’s and his k’s — difficulties which multiplied under the strain of shyness and fear until he sank helplessly into the protective tenderness of his mother tongue.

Brother Doyle said, “This is not a French lesson, Remy. If ye want to show off your abilities as a linguist, save them for Brother Vincent. He may appreciate them.”

Or it was: “Remy, have ye filled the inkpots this day? Ah, I forgot! The title — de. Naturally, ye can’t be expected to remember inkpots!”

One day Jacques was goaded to white heat — a touch would shatter him. Perhaps Brother Doyle recognized the extent to which he had succeeded, for he played the dogged, silent little fish to a standstill — then prepared to let him go. Jacques had been summoned to the dais, and was in full view of the class. Brother Doyle smiled at him. “Very well—ye may go back to your seat now, Remy.”

It was at that moment that Jacques lifted his head and gave his class-master a long, indescribable look. Brother Doyle flushed.

“Wait a minute. What was it ye were going to say, Remy?”

Jacques was silent, staring now, not at the man but past him.

“Did ye hear me, Remy?”

Silence grew in Jacques, it obsessed him.

“Remy!”

The windows sparkled in the mountain air and Jacques could see butterflies fluttering in the school gardens.

“Will ye answer me, Remy?”

The class craned forward.

Brother Doyle struck him a sudden, glancing blow. Reeling, Jacques caught the edge of the master’s desk, and his fingers closed on a round glass inkpot which stood there. What happened then happened as inevitably as the are of a reflex — his hand flew upward and the inkpot flew through the air, missing Brother Doyle and crashing against the blackboard.

Then Jacques fled — down the aisle between the desks and out through the great doors and across the terrace. The terrace ended in a five-foot drop and he took it in his stride, flying through the air for an intoxicating second which ended in a bed of bracken that closed over his head. Through this he scuttled, twisting and winding, to the hill road below. He had no idea of where he was going or what he intended to do.

The path along which he was half running, half walking, dipped between rhododendrons to the road below, and sauntering along this road, carrying a butterfly net, was John Macbeth.

12

THEY came to an abrupt halt, eyeing each other closely. Jacques, on the verge of hysteria, felt his nerves giving way under the other’s steady stare. But Macbeth had some genius for gauging situations; he shot a swift glance up and down the road, then approached Jacques. “Come along. I know a place where no one can find us.”

Doubt evaporated in a second. They trotted up the path, Macbeth in the lead. The school was well out of sight and there was no sound save the voice of a hillman singing far down on the road.

Macbeth paused, smiled at Jacques over his shoulder, and plunged down the hillside into the low-growing ferns and bushes. They were among a gigantic outcropping of rocks where purple orchids clung to the moss blanket; and here, suddenly Macbeth vanished as though jaws had opened and swallowed him. His voice reached Jacques from a green dimness beside his feet: “Come along — jump! ”

Jacques jumped, crashing through six feet of ferns to land beside Macbeth in a little dell of moss and gravel through which a tiny stream rustled on its way to the lake below. The ferns had closed upon their heads, and sun filtered down in splinters of light ; there was heat, and a smell of mold and flowers.

Macbeth crouched beside the stream and drank, and Jacques beside him plunged his face into the water. They sat back on their heels, embarrassment engulfing both. Macbeth took the initiative: —

“I often come here. No one else knows about it.”

“How did you find it?”

“ By accident, one day, when I was chasing a moth.”

Jacques glanced at the butterfly net propped against the wall of their hiding place. “ I have a collection at home.”

The ice was broken and they made themselves comfortable on the emerald moss. Macbeth removed his hat and took a butterfly from under the sweatband. “I just got it. I had to chase it almost a mile!”

Jacques examined the exquisite creature, and remembrance took him by the throat. His birthday— and Hanif taking a butterfly from his cap and laying it on the dressing table. His mother, Hardyal, Amritpore—the past! He felt lost and betrayed, and laying his head on his knees, he broke down in despairing sobs.

Macbeth stayed quiet. The paroxysm passed and Jacques drew a deep breath. He smiled waveringly at his new friend. “I thought you were ill.”

“Oh, I was, but I’m all right now.”

“Jhori said you had worms.”

“Beast!”

“Laughlin said it was fits.”

“Swine! ”

In Jacques, a characteristic vitality asserted itself—the old magic which Mrs. Lyttleton, for one, would have recognized. “But what can it be, then? You’re absent so often.”

The tacit admission that his absence had been noticed — and regretted — thawed Macbeth. “If I tell you something, will you swear not to give me away?”

“Oh, I swear!”

“ I hate Doyle. I simply can’t stand his beastly face. So I just take cascara.”

“ Cascara ? ”

“ It’s quite harmless, but it makes you go to the bathroom like anything. At first my family kept sending for old Das, the assistant surgeon. He gave me things to stop it, and I had to go back to school. But now it doesn’t bother them as it used to. And I’m very careful not to take too much at a time.”

Jacques felt, breaking all through him, a reviving warmth which had seemed extinguished forever with Hardval’s disappearance.

“Cascara,” he repeated. “Fancy!”

“ If you were to try it, it’d give the whole show away.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t try it, I promise. Besides—” The bleak look returned to his eyes.

Macbeth looked at him keenly. “What about you? Shouldn’t you be at class?”

“ I threw something at Doyle.”

“What?”

“An inkpot.”

“Heavens! Did you hit him?”

“ I missed.”

“Heavens!" Macbeth stared in wonder. “You did, actually? Then you’ll probably be expelled.”

Jacques was silent, his mind in sudden confusion. Somehow he had not thought of expulsion — he had not really thought of anything except a blind escape. He began to see, now, some of the angles of his predicament. “They can’t very well expel me if I don’t go back.”

“That’s true.” Macbeth frowned in an ecstasy of concentration. “But I say, you could put the fear of God into old Doyle if you liked.”

“Could I?”

“You could write him a letter— I’d post it for you —saying that you’d decided to commit suicide.” His imagination on fire, Macbeth craned towards Jacques. “You could leave your shoes and your coat on the shore near the lake. Someone would be sure to find them. Just think what it would do to old Doyle!”

Jacques luxuriated in the thought for several seconds, then cold reason intervened. “What’d be the use? In the end they’d find out that I hadn’t committed suicide.”

“Yes, I suppose they would.” Macbeth relinquished the idea with obvious reluctance, “Well, what are you going to do? You’re in a proper fix, you know.”

They relapsed into silence, and little by little the ominous and reasonable world intruded its logic upon them — its logic and its complication.

“I shall go back,” Jacques said.

“What?”

“Yes, I shall go back.”

He rose and scrambled up the side of the little dell and ran down the path towards the school. There was still some time before the class ended. Round the end of the buildings and across the graveled yard he ran, under the bored eyes of a few strolling Seniors.

Brother Doyle was standing beside the blackboard as a collective gasp went up from the room, though no one said anything. Jacques walked down the aisle to the dais and faced his classmaster. Doyle looked down at this bundle of flesh and breath, with its two hands and its two feet, its straight eyes and precarious mouth, its finite intelligence seeking coherence: “I came back to say— that I’m sorry. I don’t like you. I never shall like you. But all the same, I came back.”

The saving grace to which his vows and his black robes fully entitled him came to Brother Doyle’s rescue — and to Jacques’s.

The Brother laid his hand lightly on the boy’s steamy forehead.

“Go to the infirmary and tell Nurse that I sent you. You’re to stay there until tomorrow.”

When Jacques had gone, as suddenly, almost, as he appeared, Brother Doyle addressed the stupefied class. “We shall hear no more about this incident, in class or out of it. Understand? It is finished. I think — that our young friend had just a touch of fever.”

13

MADAME DE ST. REMY wrote Jacques long letters, which spoke of the heat and of her work. The factory foreman, Mr. Boodrie, had come down with dysentery and she saw little or no prospect of escape to the hills until later— perhaps, this year, not at all. Father Sebastien had been ill, Mr. Wall sometimes dropped in to ask after him, and she had seen Ganpat Rai, who spoke of Hardyal. Hanif had boils, which made him irritable and sulky. Never mind - the summer would pass, and in early December Jacques would return to Amritpore.

Mrs. Lyttleton had not written, but Jacques did not expect that she would, for he remembered her declaring, once, that pen and ink were poor substitutes for flesh and blood. But Jacques was learning to draw the past close to him, to turn over the hoarded occasions, and to ask himself just what it was, now, that he wanted.

Did he really want to go back to Amritpore today — tomorrow — the day after? To find Hardyal gone, himself cut away from Mrs. Lyttleton and restrained to the bitter-sweet companionship of his mother and the towering surveillance of Father Sebastien? To go back — to June’s white heat and a long-drawn existence inside the house, under a flagging punkah; an existence enlivened by reading for the hundredth time The Count of Monte Cristo, or rearranging his butterflies, or galloping alone cross-country in the early mornings?

The truth was, life at St. Matthew’s, as far as Jacques was concerned, had taken a turn for the better. Save for an occasional gibe from Brother Doyle and infrequent scuffles with the heroes who had ducked him, Jacques was not troubled further. What was more — what was best — he had found a friend in Macbeth.

John Macbeth brought his new friend home one week-end shortly after the adventure of the flung inkpot, and presented him to his parents. Colonel Macbeth was an immensely tall, angular soldier with drooping mustaches and pale, clear eyes. He combined a passion for soldiering with a passion for gardening, and it was difficult for Jacques to picture this gentle giant slaying an enemy. The Colonel spent much time in unpacking and labeling tulips from Holland, and in offering exorbitant rewards to the Pahari who brought him rare orchids from their distant valleys.

Mrs. Macbeth was tiny, with big eyes and delicate hair and numerous golden freckles. She was not like any other woman Jacques had ever known — so pretty, so fragile, so full of delicate fun. It was not to dawn on Jacques for a long time that this exquisite creature was almost entirely brainless, for no one cared — least of all those who loved her.

For Jacques, life at the Macbeths’ was as far removed from the uncouthness of St. Matthew’s as St. Matthew’s was remote from the nostalgic charms of home. At the Macbeths’ he discovered grace, gayety, an exciting, unobtrusive formalism. And from the very beginning he detected in it a resemblance to another character which he knew very well: to that mysterious assurance of an authority larger than men.

For the Macbeths, this authority was history — it was, pre-eminently, English history. For Madame de St. Remy it was French esprit and French eapoir, inescapably merged with God. For Father Sebastien it was the Church in God — no more, certainly no less. What it may have been for Colonel Macbeth’s dark soldiers in their passionately curled beards, their fringed turbans and gold-frogged chapkans, was not for them to say — not yet. History had not accumulated to the point where they—and young Jacques de St. Remy-—were finally to stand and say it.

In the meantime there were great doings in the big house up there on the hill. There was much coming and going of the officers from the garrison, all magnificently laced and striped and fringed and frogged, some mild as milk, others fierce as wart hogs. Their glittering presence delighted Jacques, and there were times when he envied Macbeth his time spent among them.

14

ONE Sunday morning as Jacques climbed the hill towards the Macbeths’ house he heard a koel whistling in the valley, and the guttural voices of Bhotiyals driving their borax-laden sheep towards the plains. He passed these cheerful Mongols on the road and they hailed him merrily in a language which he couldn’t understand. Their eyes slanted upward at the corners, they wore their long hair braided with colored wool, and as they disappeared in clouds of dust he could hear them admonish their sheep with barking noises, like dogs.

He reached the hilltop and paused for a moment on the terrace before the house, where every window reflected light and the air tasted of flowers. The Macbeths’ spaniels came wagging to meet him, and a big bearded orderly saluted jocosely as he ran up the verandah steps. The drawing room was cool and dusky and seemed deserted; then he saw a figure rise from a chair beside the piano, and an unknown voice greeted him.

“Are you Jacques?”

He did not answer at once, staring intently through the gloom, which lessened as he stared.

“You must be Jacques,” said the voice calmly. “I am Bertie Wood.”

He went towards her as she rose — a girl of fifteen, with a face in its contours more English than anything else but fashioned out of the alloy of generations; Saxon and Norman tempered by some perverse Mediterranean strain. Bertie’s eyes were a light brown like the eyes of an orange cat, her skin but a few shades lighter, her hair a luxuriant black.

Shyness was no part of Bertie’s accoutrement. She held out her hand and as Jacques took it she stared at him with critical thoroughness.

“You go to school with John, don’t you? He has done nothing but talk about you since I arrived. But he didn’t tell me that you were handsome.”

Jacques dropped his hand, which fell lightly on the piano and struck an inadvertent note. “I — where are the others?”

“They’ll turn up.”

Bertie led him to the big window that gave on a view of the terrace and the colonel’s rose-bed. She stared at the sparkling hills. “No one told me that India could be like this! Huge, beautiful — morebeautiful than anything I have ever seen. All light, all green, all sky!”

Jacques listened to her clean accent, so different from the polyglot of St. Matthew’s. She went on: “I’d like to live here for the rest of my life.”

“So should I.”

“It’s a pity one can’t, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Live here always. Eventually one has to go away again.”

“ Lots of people don’t go away. They stay. They even die here.”

Bertie was looking at him attentively. “You’re a very serious sort of boy, aren’t you? John didn’t tell me that. But you know perfectly well that this is n’t our own country. Someone was talking about it last night at dinner — Captain Ponsonby, I think. He said something about how essential it is for people to stick to their own culture.”

Jacques frowned. “ But what is one to do, if one likes it to live in a place that isn’t one’s own country? I don’t think that I’d care to live all my life in France.”

Bertie thought this over gravely. “I don’t think that that was what Captain Ponsonby meant, really. He meant that if one stays here too long one loses one’s sense of—of identity. That was the word. I don’t quite know what he meant. Something about going native.”

Jacques nodded slowly, and spoke as though to himself: “ I wonder if Hardyal will go native in England, if he stays there long enough?”

“Who is Hardyal?”

Jacques explained.

“Do you mean to say you have a Hindu friend, really? A friend like John? If I’m here next year shall I meet him ?“

Before Jacques could answer, Colonel Macbeth entered the room behind them. “Ah, so you’ve met!” He smiled from one face to the other. “Jacques, you don’t know it yet, but you will before long: this is a most unusual young woman.”

“I know. She can ride and shoot and sail a boat and stand on her head and talk four languages and see in the dark.”

The Colonel turned to Bertie. “I see John has been laying the ground for you, my dear.”

Bertie flung back her dark hair. “What a liar he is! Does he still take cascara when he wants to dodge school?”

The Colonel raised his fair brows. “So that was it! No wonder poor old Das never found out what caused the aches and pains.”

“John wrote and told me all about it,”Bertie explained callously. “He was frightfully pleased with himself. He also told me that he shot a leopard. Did he, Uncle Jack ?”

“No, but there is a chance that he might, next week. I’ve just been talking with Lal Singh, who tells me one has killed several goats near a little village not far from here. Will you come with us and you, Jacques?”

“Will we!” Bertie made a little pirouette. “I’ve never shot at anything bigger than grouse. What do we do — sit up in a tree, or stalk it on foot?”

Like her cousin John, Bertie Wood was an only child, but unlike him she was an orphan whose parents were drowned in a yachting accident on the Norfolk Broads when she was six years old. Bertie spent her childhood with It alternate sets of relatives, under the personal care of Fräulein Eberhard — one of those devoted, deadly leeches known as a governess-companion. Then Fraulein Eberhard died and Bertie, exhilarated by freedom, found herself bored by all her English relatives. She thought yearningly of her favorite uncle, Colonel Macbeth, and of the happy times which she had spent with the Macbeths on their rare furloughs in England. Restive and unhappy, she wrote a supplicating letter to her uncle, and a month later she was on her way to India.

That journey from Southampton to Bombay was her first voyage, her first great adventure, and as the watery leagues slid under the ship’s keel she felt the conscious growth of her own capacity for experience, for wonder, and for delight. England and India, India and England! The ocean was a transfusing element binding them together; or so Bertie felt when she saw the reflections of Bombay breaking on the shallows of the Arabian Sea.

At Benares Station an incident disturbed somewhat her enchantment with the journey. There she saw a tall and dapper Englishman throw a youngish Indian out of a first-class compartment and get into it himself with his wife, his luggage, and all his dogs. The performance — it was necessarily brief — was watched by an interested but passive audience of natives and Eurasians, and Bertie stared in wonder as the Indian picked up his scattered belongings and walked quietly away to a third-class compartment.

The memory of this scene continued to trouble her — she simply could not understand why the Indian, who looked young and strong and civilized, had not defended himself against the Englishman. She thought of the men she had known in England, and she knew that not one of them would have endured such treatment. In the first place, people did not behave like that Englishman unless they were drunk or mad.

When Bertie mentioned the episode to her uncle, he frowned.

“Don’t run away with the idea that we are all like that. I’ve lived in India for twenty-five years and I’ve never raised my hand against a native.”

Bertie’s confusion increased. “But you have fought them! You fought them on the Frontier—”

He smiled down at her with his blue, gentle eyes. “My dear! There is a difference, you know. That was war.”

15

THE following week, Jacques arrived at the Macbeths’ to find the household, as he expected, in a ferment of preparation for the hunting trip which the Colonel had promised them. Tents and baggage had already gone, and the party, it seemed, was waiting for Jacques before setting out on the twenty-mile ride to the camping ground. Bertie rushed to meet him. “Jacques! We were afraid you were not coming.” She clutched his arm and he could feel the excitement running through her.

Macbeth sauntered up. “We’ve got a gun for you. It’s gone with the baggage. Father says I may use his.”

Mrs. Macbeth appeared with the Colonel and Captain Ponsonby, the latter stroking his silky black mustache and looking about him with amused eyes. Mrs. Macbeth was all dove-gray, with a little blue feather in her hat. “I’ll take care of Pedro,” she said in her high, decided voice. “Poor darling, he’d hate to be left behind, leopards or no leopards.”

“Well,” said Colonel Macbeth, shrugging, “remember what happened to Pongo.”

“And to Dumdum,” added Captain Ponsonby, darkly. “And to Gypsy.”

At one time or another leopards had made off with all three dogs, but Mrs. Macbeth refused to be separated from her special pet, a fat and breathless spaniel now miraculously in his fifth year. “Pedro can ride in the dandy with me, and the children will see that he doesn’t wander too far when we get. there.”

“He’s your dog,” her son reminded her, coldly.

Jacques revived in the vagrant thrill which any expedition brings to an unjaded spirit. He tasted the primitive lust for faring forth, for leaving all that is known and stale and turning one’s face in a fresh direction. And he saw at once that the others felt this — he saw it in Macbeth’s nervous smile and Bertie’s expressive eyes; he heard it in a new note of Mrs. Macbeth’s voice and in the Captain’s pointless jokes; above all, he saw it in the youthful gaze of that gentle warrior, Colonel Macbeth.

Bertie exclaimed, “Jacques! We’re going to ride all afternoon — lunch under the trees then camp, with t he charcoal fires and the coolies’ voices coming out. of the dark, and the nighthawk going like this.” She pursed her lips and made the hollow gong-like note of the Himalayan nighthawk as it floats out of a purple shadow.

Jacques stared at her. “How do you know it will be like that?”

“Because I know, I know!”

“Come on, everyone!” shouted the Colonel. Mrs. Macbeth was already seated in her dandy, with Pedro slavering on her lap. Four grunting coolies swung the poles on their shoulders, and their muscular brown legs vanished down the slope among the trees, pursued by Colonel Macbeth and the Captain. The children mounted their own beasts and followed, while behind them straggled the grooms and a man with a straw lunch basket balanced on his head.

Their road led away from the semi-civilization of Gambul towards the lower hills, and presently they were in a warmer air of cultivated terraces and a sudden village of thatched roofs and bleating goals. They rode past a little temple with a red-painted stone beside it, and jostled and were jostled by strings of starved-looking pack ponies coming the other way. Wizened old women with babies slung in rags on their backs smiled up at Bertie and in passing laid their gnarled hands on her skirts. “Bhao! Bhao!” they cried, and held their babies up to her saddletree.

“What do they want?” asked Bertie, laughing down at the leathery faces which laughed back at her.

“Money,” said Jacques. “Don’t give them any or they’ll be all over us.”

“Luckily, I haven’t any,” said Bertie. They rode on and she said: “ I wish I’d had a few pennies, though. I hated to refuse.”

Bertie and Jacques rode together, and at every turn of the road they caught, glimpses of their companions—-Mrs. Macbeth’s parasol bobbing above her white dandy, the Colonel’s tall back and the neater, slighter figure of the young officer. John kept scurrying between the two segments of the procession, bringing odds and ends of information and needless suggestions and commands, and presently they realized that he was engaged in a game of his own—a game in which he lorded it over these separate friendly destinies without their knowledge or connivance.

Bertie laughed suddenly. “It’s queer about John. Whenever he is happiest he seems to be most alone. Have you noticed?”

He had noticed, but had not thought of putting it into words.

“Now I — ” continued the girl, “I am happiest when I’m not alone.” She glanced at Jacques as their ponies came together in a narrowing of the road. “You know, I’m glad we’re friends — the three of us. I’ve never had friends before —not like this. Not the ones I wanted and chose for myself.”

Macbeth came tearing back, his horse in a lather. “I say, wouldn’t it be fun if we should get a maneater!”

Bertie wailed in terror, and Jacques explained that leopards do not attack people. Macbeth gave him a superior glance. “They have been known to. They climb trees after you and even fight their way into houses. Oh, not often, of course. But sometimes.” And with this contribution to natural history he galloped away, all hat and horse.

They rode beside a shallow valley under a sky of interminable blue, and from a sunlit terrace a black partridge called as it had called to Marco Polo from these same terraces: “Shir dharam ke shakrak! (I have milk and honey!) ” Then they began to climb and sprays of yellow dogwood brushed their hats as the ponies snorted and toiled up a slippery pinespilled slope.

The road widened and slipped out of sight round the edge of a gorge which seemed to open on nothing but the sky. Bertie suddenly reined her pony and sat motionless. “Look, she said. Before them, but many miles away, towered a jagged rampart of quartz and cobalt cutting the world in half. Bertie looked questioningly at Jacques.

He answered softly: “Tibet..”

16

THE tents were pitched in a semicircular glade with a fragment of the snows before and a densely wooded slope behind. Underbrush had been cleared and a shelter of boughs erected for horses and men. As the frail blue evening spiraled into night a bonfire sprang up in the center of the semicircle and a charcoal brazier glittered in the dark triangle of the cook’s tent.

They sat round a table improvised out of an old packing case, and by the glow of the fire and the flicker of a smoky lantern ate their soup and their tinned sardines, and heard their own voices disperse in the starry air.

When dinner was finished Lal Singh, the old tracker, squatted beside Colonel Macbeth and they discussed plans, Lal Singh was tall and spare with a fringe of greenish beard and the eternally youthful eyes of the hunter. “I have arranged with the headman of a village not far from here to tie out a young goat. Tomorrow he should bring me word of the kill.”

Bertie looked up quickly. “Must it be killed?”

The Colonel laughed, and Captain Ponsonby, smiling, tilted back in his chair. In the firelight, faces and hands shone like gold, and gestures were abrupt portents flung upon the screening darkness. Jacques emerged from his tent and took his place between Bertie and Macbeth. As Jacques sat down beside her, Bertie whispered: “This is just as I said it would be. Listen!”

He listened, and heard the nighthawk strike its copper notes, two high and two low; and as though in answer to a signal the fire fell together in a burst of sparks.

Long after Macbeth had tumbled into sleep on the next cot, Jacques lay awake, attentive to the Indian dark where there is no such thing as silence — only a subtle shift of key and volume dividing the sound of night from the noise of day. Propped on his elbow, he stared through the opening of the tent across miles of starlit foliage to the pointed snows. He fell asleep sitting up, and slid gently onto his pillow, the faint light touching his head and lying on his closed eyes.

The shriek which roused him roused, with its stroke of terror, the whole camp. A little clot of humanity leaped and gesticulated outside the Colonel’s tent, and among them appeared Lal Singh, majestically wide-awake.

“A leopard, Sahib! A leopard has taken the Mem-sahib’s dog!”

It was true, Pedro had vanished. Leaving the foot of his mistress’s bed, he had paddled forth to investigate the midnight stones, and in a weighted flash his pampered little spirit bubbled into a red silence in the gully behind the camp. Now all the whistling and crying in the world would not bring him wagging out of the darkness.

“By Jove!” exclaimed Captain Ponsonby, sailing out of his tent in pajamas. “ I thought the tribesmen had risen!” His eyes sought Pedro’s mistress, weeping on the edge of her bed with Bertie crouched beside her.

The Colonel stalked out of the tent to quell a babble of grooms and coolies, then turned to Lal Singh. “You are sure? ”

“The dog is dead, Sahib. Not a hundred yards from this tent. I myself ran at once to see—and the leopard, hearing me, dropped the body and made off. But he will come back. Swiftly and silently, we must construct a platform in the nearest tree.” And he vanished into the shadows, trailed by two shivering hillmen carrying axes.

The Colonel glanced at his wife. “My poor darling! But you know that Pedro always was a fool.”

Bertie stared at her with terrified eyes. “ It must have been awfully sudden. He couldn’t have felt any pain.”

“How do you know?” demanded Macbeth in a strange, stiff voice. “That scream. Of course he felt it.”

“We had better toss up,” Colonel Macbeth broke in. “The main thing now is to get the brute. Anybody got a rupee?”

“You needn’t include me,” said Bertie emphatically. “I’m not going to sit up in any old tree. Wild horses won’t make me.”

“Then it’s between the four of us. All right, Ponsonby?”

The coin spun upwards and fell flat on the Colonel’s outstretched palm. “I’m with you, Bertie, said Captain Ponsonby, laughing. He sat down beside them and lighted a cigarette.

The Colonel smiled at the two boys. “All right, Jacques!”

“Heads,” said Jacques, his voice ringing in his ears, dissolving in another sound which seemed caught there — the sound of something screaming in the blackness.

“Heads it is! Now it’s between you and John.”

“Heads,” said Jacques again, premonition gripping him, sending the sweat running over his body.

The coin described its broken arc and landed once more on the Colonel’s outstretched palm. He smiled at Jacques. “You win. Good boy!”

The Colonel picked up a rifle which stood at the foot of his own cot, and Jacques watched stiffly as the brass cartridges slid into the breech. “It’s a bit long for you, my boy, but I think you’ll handle it. Better cock one barrel at a time — you may only need one unless you just wound him, in which case try and get in the second shot as fast as you can. Aim for the shoulder, or just a fraction behind the shoulder, unless you’re sure of a good head shot.” He stared suddenly into the boy’s face. “What’s the matter, old chap? You’re shaking like a leaf!”

Jacques was staring at the rifle which the Colonel had put into his hands. “I-—” he said. “1— ” He looked up and encountered Colonel Macbeth’s eyes. “I don’t know why I’m shivering. Shall we go?”

A coolie escorted them with a lantern, which cast its little varnish on the nearer leaves and the big pale stones of the gully. They found Pedro lying beside a small boulder; his throat was torn open and his tongue hung horribly from a corner of his mouth. The Colonel whispered sharply: “Don’t touch him. We want to leave as little scent as possible. Ah, they’ve got the machan ready. Good work, Lal Singh! ”

The machan comprised two short planks lashed between the branches of a tough little oak which leaned out towards the gully about fifteen feet above Pedro’s body. Lal Singh had contrived a screen of boughs and leaves which made a perfect eyrie for the hunter, and into this Jacques was pushed and hoisted, with a handful of extra cartridges and a few last instructions: “Remember, don’t move. Keep your eye on the kill. Don’t shoot until you’re sure, and then aim for the shoulder. Keep your fingers off the hammer until you’re ready. The moon may come up before he decides to return. Now, good luck!”

They left him there and he watched the lantern dance away among the trees, and with it vanished their voices and the sound of their cautious feet. With their going the night surged upon him like a tide, and he was alone with the bleeding corpse below him and death marauding among the leaves. He was alone, and in a little while the camp, which he could not see, settled itself into indifferent silence. They had cut him adrift, they had abandoned him utterly.

A breath of wind rustled the stiff leaves of the oak in which he sat, and he felt the sweat stealing down his face — felt it wet the palms of his hands which gripped the rifle barrels. The unrelenting steel thrust its precision back into his flesh: Use me, it said, for that’s what I mean, that’s what I am. Holding his breath, he practiced drawing back the hammers, then releasing them, feeling their sinewy strain against the ball of his thumb. All I have to do is pull the triggers and the hills will rock in uproar and every live thing go to earth. Well, why not? Tell them I aimed at a shadow or at a flitting owl, and let them laugh.

Then he saw Colonel Macbeth’s offended eyes and behind them a succession of eyes, the offense of men who abhor a coward.

One of his feet went to sleep, and he stared desperately at the sky, which seemed to change as the moon began to thrust invisibly past a barrier of hills. The silence became unbearable, a tensile web which strove to stifle him. Below him Pedro lay limply dark on the lighter stones, yet he might have been a stone himself, a furred stone from which the blood escaped with lively logic. I wonder, thought Jacques, what is fear? Mauling, uproar, struggle, pain? And he remembered Pedro’s dying shriek; when men die they die like that, like dogs with their throats torn in half.

Jacques clutched the rifle. He was trembling. Then his trembling ceased as he heard the sound for which he had waited —the tiny creak of a dry leaf. It was as though the earth had drawn a faint extra breath, and this disturbed pattern set the hairs rigidly along the back of his neck. There was no further sound, but a stone which had been dark now appeared light, and another which had been light concealed itself. Just as when an hour ago he had known that he was about to win the toss, he now knew that his presence was detected, that he was being pondered and judged, and that calculation had passed from him to an incalculable, inhuman god.

Silence crouched in the slow fire of the rising moon as Jacques, blind with terror, reached forward to tear away the screen of leaves before him, and caught the exploding charge full in his left hand.

17

ACCOMPANIED by Hanif, Madame de St. Remy arrived at the Macbeths’ house. They took her at once to see her son where he lay on the Colonel’s bed, in that little dressing room which smelled of Pinaud’s brilliantine and boot polish, where John Macbeth liked to help his father dress for great occasions. Colonel Macbeth and his wife had left Madame at the door, but Hanif followed her in and crouched at Jacques’s feet, clasping them in his slender brown hands, murmuring over them.

Madame drew a chair towards the bed and sat. down, bending towards her son. They stared at each other for a moment, then she kissed him, holding his right hand in both of hers. His left arm lay across his breast under the sheet. Madame had forgotten to remove her gloves and she felt his fingers play with the little buttons at her wrist.

“Don’t talk,” she said in her soft, precise voice. “Lie very still until you are well again.”

He replied at once, with a vitality that astonished her. “There is something I’ve got to tell you.”

“I know everything.”

“I want to tell you myself.” He gazed at her with his young lion eyes. “They had to cut off my hand, you know, at the wrist.”

It was a cool, measured speech, and she knew chat he must have lain there for hours practicing how to say it. She caught her breath, then murmured: “Yes, I was afraid —”

“The regimental surgeon did it, but Colonel Macbeth saved me. He lifted me down from the tree and put a tight thing round my arm. He helped the dandy-coolies carry me back to Gambul. He and Bertie and Macbeth — and all the time when I felt I was going — you know , Maman, going — t hey held on to me as if they knew — as if they understood that I felt I was going.”

“Don’t talk,” whispered Madame between dry lips. “My darling, don’t talk.”

“ I want to. I must. You see, it wasn’t anybody’s fault, what happened. It wasn’t their fault. Maman, you must promise me —

She freed one hand and brushed the loose hair back from his forehead.

“We’ll talk tomorrow. Close your eyes, let me sit here beside you and hold your hand. Close your eyes. I am here. I shall stay here until you sleep.”

Dinner was brought to her on a tray, and when at last the boy fell asleep she went downstairs to the big, strange, lamplit room where the Macbeths awaited her. John had disappeared but Bertie stayed, curled like a tawny cat on the window seat. Stiffly, with the air of a somnambulist, Madame allowed her hand to be shaken, and accepted the chair which Colonel Macbeth brought forward. Mrs. Macbeth, expressing her concern in faint indefinable murmurs, relapsed into silence, but the Colonel stood before Madame, fixing her with his pale, luminous eye.

“Nothing,” he declared in his deep voice, “nothing could have upset me more than this, Madame — not even if it had happened to my own son!”

Madame de St. Remy returned his gaze with expressionless calm. “But it did not happen to your son, sir. It happened to mine!”

Mrs. Macbeth, seated beside the piano in a little pool of light, stared down at her hands, but the Colonel continued to meet and to withstand the cold shock of their visitor’s gaze. “At least we know now that Jacques will recover. He is young and very strong. We should thank God for that.”

“I shall never cease to thank God. But you, I think, have additional need to thank Him.” After a tiny silence, she went on: “Jacques trusted you. I trusted you. Now I realize that it might have been better had I acted on my first impulse, which was certainly not one of blind trust.”

“Then what was your first impulse, Madame?” inquired the soldier, gently.

“My first impulse was to forbid Jacques to spend his holidays away from the authorities who were charged with his safety.”

Mrs. Macbeth glanced up in distress, but it was Bertie who suddenly interposed in a high, excited voice: “ But good heavens! You couldn’t leave him stuck at St. Matthew’s all the time, could you?”

It was always difficult for Madame to lose her temper in English, and to have lost it in French would have made the whole situation ridiculous, since she was quite sure that these Saxon barbarians spoke nothing except their own tongue. Ignoring Bertie’s interruption, she continued swiftly: “Of course I realize that the English have peculiar ideas in regard to the training of their children, ideas of nobility and courage—virtues which you exact from mere infants. I suppose this is admirable. It is, no doubt, one reason for your great success as colonizers!”

The Colonel twisted his mustache in violent agitation. “Well, upon my word, don’t you know —”

“Enfin, Monsieur, not being English myself I have less exalted ideas. I don’t believe in throwing my children to lions and panthers. I don’t believe in compelling them to sit in trees with loaded guns, and leaving them there for hours on end until they go insane with fright!”

Colonel Macbeth took a short step in one direction, changed his mind, and retraced it. “By Jove, I never thought of it in quite that light. Leopards are quite harmless, really. You see, it was entirely a question of luck.”

“Luck? ”

“Qui porte bonheur!” He smiled with an air of relief, as though he believed that this succinct phrase must clear away all misunderstanding. “Jacques, you see, won the toss.”

She smiled bitterly. “You are wrong. He lost.”

“Oh no, he didn’t!” As she spoke, Bertie rose and crossed the room to her uncle, taking his arm. “If you were to ask Jacques, Madame, he’d tell you himself that he won.”

Madame seemed to notice her for the first time; as a matter of fact she had met them all several hours ago, but then she was conscious of nothing and of no one except her son. Now, as the mist of terror and anxiety began to lift, she perceived these cold-blooded English in the special baleful light in which she had always judged them. Their composure, their acceptance of their own irresponsibility as something which involved no more than a stroke of “luck” or a point in “sportsmanship,” roused the dormant fury in her breast. They were in league as usual; they stuck by each other even when they were in the wrong — perhaps never so loyally as when they were wrong! They submerged their differences and pooled their strength against the stranger, for this too was part of their code.

Feeling suddenly very hot and very tired, she rose, distributed fragmentary bows, and went out of the room. But in the dimly lighted hall she paused for a minute to get herself in hand before going upstairs to Jacques. She stood in an angle of the big staircase, her dark dress merging with the heavy shadow which fell about her. From here she had a partial view of the room which she had just left, and the tableau now being enacted there in the golden lamplight recaptured her attention. The Colonel’s figure loomed amply framed, with his arm still round his niece’s shoulder. Madame heard his deep, undistinguishable murmur followed by Bertie’s voice, as clear as a bell: “I don’t care! She’s going to try and take Jacques away from us. You’ll see. You’ll see!”

Further cavernous murmurs came from the Colonel, then again the ringing young voice: “It is our business! I’ll fight her if you don’t. John and I will fight her together. We’ll fight her tooth and nail! ”

Madame turned away, stepping out from the shadow towards the foot of the stairs, and she saw then that she was not alone, for John Macbeth leaned against the newel post, facing her, facing past her towards the glowing doors of the drawing room. From his expression Madame guessed that he had heard what Bertie said and that he had caught her, herself, in the intolerable role of an eavesdropper. As she prepared to pass him their eyes met, and Madame, smiling bitterly, thought: “Yes, they’re in league, all of them, even the children.”

Her sense of desolation increased as she mounted the stairs and found Hanif squatting like a watchful genie outside Jacques’s door. He rose, reassuringly strong and familiar in his elegant garments. Aladame waited a moment to get her breath. “Does he sleep?” she asked at last, and raised her hand to her own tired eyes.

“He sleeps,” the young man answered softly. “He woke but once, thinking you were near, and asked something of you.”

Madame stared at her servant through the gloom. “Asked something? What was it he asked?”

“Perhaps he was not quite awake, but it seemed to me that he begged you to promise him something.”

She waited, and presently the deferential voice continued: “Have I liberty to speak.? You are my father and my mother, else how would I dare?”

Madame drew a deep breath. “Oh, go on, go on!”

“Then you must know that he has set his heart on these friends. Do not take him away from them, for if he should come to believe that you intend to take him away, he may lose heart — and he must not lose heart!”

When Madame hesitated, a strange anger leaping and dying within her, Hanif waited, his hands clasped before him and his eyes lowered. Then with a curious little sigh Madame put her hand on the door and walked past him into her son’s room.

(To be continued)

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