A Passage to India Read online

  Ronny was by this time rather ashamed of his curtness to Aziz and Godbole, and here was an opportunity of showing that he could treat Indians with consideration when they deserved it. So he said to Adela, with the same sad friendliness that he had employed when discussing the bird, “Would half an hour’s spin entertain you at all?”

  “Oughtn’t we to get back to the bungalow?”

  “Why?” He gazed at her.

  “I think perhaps I ought to see your mother and discuss future plans.”

  “That’s as you like, but there’s no hurry, is there?”

  “Let me take you to the bungalow, and first the little spin,” cried the old man, and hastened to the car.

  “He may show you some aspect of the country I can’t, and he’s a real loyalist. I thought you might care for a bit of a change.”

  Determined to give him no more trouble, she agreed, but her desire to see India had suddenly decreased. There had been a factitious element in it.

  How should they seat themselves in the car? The elegant grandson had to be left behind. The Nawab Bahadur got up in front, for he had no intention of neighbouring an English girl. “Despite my advanced years, I am learning to drive,” he said. “Man can learn everything if he will but try.” And foreseeing a further difficulty, he added, “I do not do the actual steering. I sit and ask my chauffeur questions, and thus learn the reason for everything that is done before I do it myself. By this method serious and I may say ludicrous accidents, such as befell one of my compatriots during that delightful reception at the English Club, are avoided. Our good Panna Lal! I hope, sahib, that great damage was not done to your flowers. Let us have our little spin down the Gangavati road. Half one league onwards!” He fell asleep.

  Ronny instructed the chauffeur to take the Marabar road rather than the Gangavati, since the latter was under repair, and settled himself down beside the lady he had lost. The car made a burring noise and rushed along a chaussée that ran upon an embankment above melancholy fields. Trees of a poor quality bordered the road, indeed the whole scene was inferior, and suggested that the countryside was too vast to admit of excellence. In vain did each item in it call out, “Come, come.” There was not enough god to go round. The two young people conversed feebly and felt unimportant. When the darkness began, it seemed to well out of the meagre vegetation, entirely covering the fields each side of them before it brimmed over the road. Ronny’s face grew dim—an event that always increased her esteem for his character. Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lovers’ quarrel. Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly. It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, but the darkness is alone durable. And the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by the gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars.

  They gripped … bump, jump, a swerve, two wheels lifted in the air, brakes on, bump with tree at edge of embankment, standstill. An accident. A slight one. Nobody hurt. The Nawab Bahadur awoke. He cried out in Arabic, and violently tugged his beard.

  “What’s the damage?” enquired Ronny, after the moment’s pause that he permitted himself before taking charge of a situation. The Eurasian, inclined to be flustered, rallied to the sound of his voice, and, every inch an Englishman, replied, “You give me five minutes’ time, I’ll take you any dam anywhere.”

  “Frightened, Adela?” He released her hand.

  “Not a bit.”

  “I consider not to be frightened the height of folly,” cried the Nawab Bahadur quite rudely.

  “Well, it’s all over now, tears are useless,” said Ronny, dismounting. “We had some luck butting that tree.”

  “All over … oh yes, the danger is past, let us smoke cigarettes, let us do anything we please. Oh yes … enjoy ourselves—oh my merciful God …” His words died into Arabic again.

  “Wasn’t the bridge. We skidded.”

  “We didn’t skid,” said Adela, who had seen the cause of the accident, and thought everyone must have seen it too. “We ran into an animal.”

  A loud cry broke from the old man: his terror was disproportionate and ridiculous.

  “An animal?”

  “A large animal rushed up out of the dark on the right and hit us.”

  “By Jove, she’s right,” Ronny exclaimed. “The paint’s gone.”

  “By Jove, sir, your lady is right,” echoed the Eurasian. Just by the hinges of the door was a dent, and the door opened with difficulty.

  “Of course I’m right. I saw its hairy back quite plainly.”

  “I say, Adela, what was it?”

  “I don’t know the animals any better than the birds here—too big for a goat.”

  “Exactly, too big for a goat …” said the old man.

  Ronny said, “Let’s go into this; let’s look for its tracks.”

  “Exactly; you wish to borrow this electric torch.”

  The English people walked a few steps back into the darkness, united and happy. Thanks to their youth and upbringing, they were not upset by the accident. They traced back the writhing of the tyres to the source of their disturbance. It was just after the exit from a bridge; the animal had probably come up out of the nullah. Steady and smooth ran the marks of the car, ribbons neatly nicked with lozenges, then all went mad. Certainly some external force had impinged, but the road had been used by too many objects for any one track to be legible, and the torch created such high lights and black shadows that they could not interpret what it revealed. Moreover, Adela in her excitement knelt and swept her skirts about, until it was she if anyone who appeared to have attacked the car. The incident was a great relief to them both. They forgot their abortive personal relationship, and felt adventurous as they muddled about in the dust.

  “I believe it was a buffalo,” she called to their host, who had not accompanied them.

  “Exactly.”

  “Unless it was a hyena.”

  Ronny approved this last conjecture. Hyenas prowl in nullahs and headlights dazzle them.

  “Excellent, a hyena,” said the Indian with an angry irony and a gesture at the night. “Mr. Harris!”

  “Half a mo-ment. Give me ten minutes’ time.”

  “Sahib says hyena.”

  “Don’t worry Mr. Harris. He saved us from a nasty smash. Harris, well done!”

  “A smash, sahib, that would not have taken place had he obeyed and taken us Gangavati side, instead of Mara-bar.”

  “My fault that. I told him to come this way because the road’s better. Mr. Lesley has made it pukka right up to the hills.”

  “Ah, now I begin to understand.” Seeming to pull himself together, he apologized slowly and elaborately for the accident. Ronny murmured, “Not at all,” but apologies were his due, and should have started sooner: because English people are so calm at a crisis, it is not to be assumed that they are unimportant. The Nawab Bahadur had not come out very well.

  At that moment a large car approached from the opposite direction. Ronny advanced a few steps down the road, and with authority in his voice and gesture stopped it. It bore the inscription “Mudkul State” across its bonnet. All friskiness and friendliness, Miss Derek sat inside.

  “Mr. Heasiop, Miss Quested, what are you holding up an innocent female for?”

  “We’ve had a breakdown.”

  “But how putrid!”

  “We ran into a hyena!”

  “How absolutely rotten!”

  “Can you give us a lift?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Take me too,” said the Nawab Bahadur.

  “Heh, what about me?” cried Mr. Harris.

  “Now what’s all this? I’m not an omnibus,” said Miss Derek with decision. “I’ve a harmonium and two
dogs in here with me as it is. I’ll take three of you if one’ll sit in front and nurse a pug. No more.”

  “I will sit in front,” said the Nawab Bahadur.

  “Then hop in: I’ve no notion who you are.”

  “Heh no, what about my dinner? I can’t be left alone all the night.” Trying to look and feel like a European, the chauffeur interposed aggressively. He still wore a topi, despite the darkness, and his face, to which the Ruling Race had contributed little beyond bad teeth, peered out of it pathetically, and seemed to say, “What’s it all about? Don’t worry me so, you blacks and whites. Here I am, stuck in dam India same as you, and you got to fit me in better than this.”

  “Nussu will bring you out some suitable dinner upon a bicycle,” said the Nawab Bahadur, who had regained his usual dignity. “I shall despatch him with all possible speed. Meanwhile, repair my car.”

  They sped off, and Mr. Harris, after a reproachful glance, squatted down upon his hams. When English and Indians were both present, he grew self-conscious, because he did not know to whom he belonged. For a little he was vexed by opposite currents in his blood, then they blended, and he belonged to no one but himself.

  But Miss Derek was in tearing spirits. She had succeeded in stealing the Mudkul car. Her Maharajah would be awfully sick, but she didn’t mind, he could sack her if he liked. “I don’t believe in these people letting you down,” she said. “If I didn’t snatch like the devil, I should be nowhere. He doesn’t want the car, silly fool! Surely it’s to the credit of his State I should be seen about in it at Chandrapore during my leave. He ought to look at it that way. Anyhow he’s got to look at it that way. My Maharani’s different—my Maharani’s a dear. That’s her fox terrier, poor little devil. I fished them out both with the driver. Imagine taking dogs to a Chiefs’ Conference! As sensible as taking Chiefs, perhaps.” She shrieked with laughter. “The harmonium—the harmonium’s my little mistake, I own. They rather had me over the harmonium. I meant it to stop on the train. Oh lord!”

  Ronny laughed with restraint. He did not approve of English people taking service under the Native States, where they obtain a certain amount of influence, but at the expense of the general prestige. The humorous triumphs of a free lance are of no assistance to an administrator, and he told the young lady that she would outdo Indians at their own game if she went on much longer.

  “They always sack me before that happens, and then I get another job. The whole of India seethes with Maharanis and Ranis and Begums who clamour for such as me.”

  “Really. I had no idea.”

  “How could you have any idea, Mr. Heaslop? What should he know about Maharanis, Miss Quested? Nothing. At least I should hope not.”

  “I understand those big people are not particularly interesting,” said Adela, quietly, disliking the young woman’s tone. Her hand touched Ronny’s again in the darkness, and to the animal thrill there was now added a coincidence of opinion.

  “Ah, there you’re wrong. They’re priceless.”

  “I would scarcely call her wrong,” broke out the Nawab Bahadur, from his isolation on the front seat, whither they had relegated him. “A Native State, a Hindu State, the wife of a ruler of a Hindu State, may beyond doubt be a most excellent lady, and let it not be for a moment supposed that I suggest anything against the character of Her Highness the Maharani of Mudkul. But I fear she will be uneducated, I fear she will be superstitious. Indeed, how could she be otherwise? What opportunity of education has such a lady had? Oh, superstition is terrible, terrible! oh, it is the great defect in our Indian character!”—and as if to point his criticism, the lights of the civil station appeared on a rise to the right. He grew more and more voluble. “Oh, it is the duty of each and every citizen to shake superstition off, and though I have little experience of Hindu States, and none of this particular one, namely Mudkul (the Ruler, I fancy, has a salute of but eleven guns)—yet I cannot imagine that they have been as successful as British India, where we see reason and orderliness spreading in every direction, like a most health-giving flood!”

  Miss Derek said “Golly!”

  Undeterred by the expletive, the old man swept on. His tongue had been loosed and his mind had several points to make. He wanted to endorse Miss Quested’s remark that big people are not interesting, because he was bigger himself than many an independent chief; at the same time, he must neither remind nor inform her that he was big, lest she felt she had committed a discourtesy. This was the groundwork of his oration; worked in with it was his gratitude to Miss Derek for the lift, his willingness to hold a repulsive dog in his arms, and his general regret for the trouble he had caused the human race during the evening. Also he wanted to be dropped near the city to get hold of his cleaner, and to see what mischief his grandson was up to. As he wove all these anxieties into a single rope, he suspected that his audience felt no interest, and that the City Magistrate fondled either maiden behind the cover of the harmonium, but good breeding compelled him to continue; it was nothing to him if they were bored, because he did not know what boredom is, and it was nothing to him if they were licentious, because God has created all races to be different. The accident was over, and his life, equably useful, distinguished, happy, ran on as before and expressed itself in streams of wellchosen words.

  When this old geyser left them, Ronny made no comment, but talked lightly about polo; Turton had taught him that it is sounder not to discuss a man at once, and he reserved what he had to say on the Nawab’s character until later in the evening. His hand, which he had removed to say good-bye, touched Adela’s again; she caressed it definitely, he responded, and their firm and mutual pressure surely meant something. They looked at each other when they reached the bungalow, for Mrs. Moore was inside it. It was for Miss Quested to speak, and she said nervously, “Ronny, I should like to take back what I said on the Maidan.” He assented, and they became engaged to be married in consequence.

  Neither had foreseen such a consequence. She had meant to revert to her former condition of important and cultivated uncertainty, but it had passed out of her reach at its appropriate hour. Unlike the green bird or the hairy animal, she was labelled now. She felt humiliated again, for she deprecated labels, and she felt too that there should have been another scene between her lover and herself at this point, something dramatic and lengthy. He was pleased instead of distressed, he was surprised, but he had really nothing to say. What indeed is there to say? To be or not to be married, that was the question, and they had decided it in the affirmative.

  “Come along and let’s tell the mater all this”—opening the perforated zinc door that protected the bungalow from the swarms of winged creatures. The noise woke the mater up. She had been dreaming of the absent children who were so seldom mentioned, Ralph and Stella, and did not at first grasp what was required of her. She too had become used to thoughtful procrastination, and felt alarmed when it came to an end.

  When the announcement was over, he made a gracious and honest remark. “Look here, both of you, see India if you like and as you like—I know I made myself rather ridiculous at Fielding’s, but … it’s different now. I wasn’t quite sure of myself.”

  “My duties here are evidently finished, I don’t want to see India now; now for my passage back,” was Mrs. Moore’s thought. She reminded herself of all that a happy marriage means, and of her own happy marriages, one of which had produced Ronny. Adela’s parents had also been happily married, and excellent it was to see the incident repeated by the younger generation. On and on! the number of such unions would certainly increase as education spread and ideals grew loftier, and characters firmer. But she was tired by her visit to Government College, her feet ached, Mr. Fielding had walked too fast and far, the young people had annoyed her in the tum-tum, and given her to suppose they were breaking with each other, and though it was all right now she could not speak as enthusiastically of wedlock or of anything as she should have done. Ronny was suited, now she must go home and help the othe
rs, if they wished. She was past marrying herself, even unhappily; her function was to help others, her reward to be informed that she was sympathetic. Elderly ladies must not expect more than this.

  They dined alone. There was much pleasant and affectionate talk about the future. Later on they spoke of passing events, and Ronny reviewed and recounted the day from his own point of view. It was a different day from the women’s because while they had enjoyed themselves or thought, he had worked. Mohurram was approaching, and as usual the Chandrapore Mohammedans were building paper towers of a size too large to pass under the branches of a certain pepul tree. One knew what happened next; the tower stuck, a Mohammedan climbed up the pepul and cut the branch off, the Hindus protested, there was a religious riot, and Heaven knew what, with perhaps the troops sent for. There had been deputations and conciliation committees under the auspices of Turton, and all the normal work of Chandrapore had been hung up. Should the procession take another route, or should the towers be shorter? The Mohammedans offered the former, the Hindus insisted on the latter. The Collector had favoured the Hindus, until he suspected that they had artificially bent the tree nearer the ground. They said it sagged naturally. Measurements, plans, an official visit to the spot. But Ronny had not disliked his day, for it proved that the British were necessary to India; there would certainly have been bloodshed without them. His voice grew complacent again; he was here not to be pleasant but to keep the peace, and now that Adela had promised to be his wife, she was sure to understand.

  “What does our old gentleman of the car think?” she asked, and her negligent tone was exactly what he desired.

  “Our old gentleman is helpful and sound, as he always is over public affairs. You’ve seen in him our show Indian.”

  “Have I really?”

  “I’m afraid so. Incredible, aren’t they, even the best of them? They’re all—they all forget their back collar studs sooner or later. You’ve had to do with three sets of Indians to-day, the Bhattacharyas, Aziz, and this chap, and it really isn’t a coincidence that they’ve all let you down.”