Читать книгу Voices in the Night - Flora Annie Webster Steel - Страница 14

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There was no quainter spot in all Nushapore than Shark Lane (as the road near the public offices where the lawyers congregated was generally called), though at first sight it seemed to differ little from its neighbours. Broad, white, its tree-set margins were studded with the usual inconsequent-looking stucco gate-posts of an Indian station, which, guiltless of any fence, serve to mark the short carriage-drives leading back to the houses.

And these again--colour-washed pink, yellow, or blue--were even as other houses of the second-class. Yet it did not need the placards on those same gate-posts, announcing that 'Mr. Lala Râm Nâth' or 'Mr. Syyed Abdul Rahmân,' 'barristers-at-law,' lived within, to tell the passer-by that the inhabitants were not European.

To begin with, somewhere or another, there was almost sure to be a grass hurdle visible--the grass hurdle which in India does the duty of a hoarding and ensures privacy. Indeed, a knowledgable eye could infer the exact degree to which the social life within was at variance with the Western architecture in which it dwelt by the number and position of such hurdles. Two or three, merely blocking in an arch of verandah, being indicative of a lingering dislike to publicity in some 'new woman'; a dozen or more, screening in a patch of garden ground, showing the rigorous seclusion of the old.

True, in not a few cases, this sign was absent, but then a nameless air of utter desolation, a blank stare out on the world, told its tale of a keener quarrel still--of family ties, family life, lost absolutely in the chase after Western ways, Western ideas. In such houses the only sign of life from dawn to dusk, barring a furtive wielder of a grass broom raising clouds of dust at stated intervals, would be the rickety hired carriage, like a green box on wheels, which, every morning and every evening, would turn out and in between those inconsequent gate-posts, conveying a solitary young man and a pile of law-books to and from the courts.

Such a very solitary-looking young man, that the question sprang inevitably to the spectator's lips, 'Is the game worth the candle?'

There were others, besides spectators, in Shark Lane who asked the question, and were not sure of the answer. Miriam-bibi, Hâfiz Ahmad's wife, for instance, who, as Aunt Khôjee put it, had been taken away to live as a mem, felt it was not. Of course it was dignified to eat in one room, sit in another, and sleep in a third, as if this trinity of habit were Heaven's decree. Then, undoubtedly, small bronze feet did look entrancing in small bronze high-heeled shoes. But when there could be no novel-reading, no writing of notes, no arranging of flowers and playing of the piano, and when you were accustomed to eat and sleep when the fancy took you? Then one room was quite sufficient in which to be dull and solitary, since there were no friends or relations near to come in for a gossip.

Besides, it was undeniable that the pretty bronze shoes pinched the toes that were accustomed to greater freedom.

Therefore it was a joy, indeed, when, on Sundays, the green box on wheels, instead of taking Hâfiz Ahmad to court, took her back to the close, familiar city; to the evil-smelling bazaars below, and the scented, sensual woman's life above, so full of laughter and quarrelling, so full of sunshine and seclusion, with its unending suggestion of sex.

Full also, to Miriam's intense delight, of betel-chewing and tobacco-smoking; for though Hâfiz Ahmad permitted neither in Shark Lane, he never noticed the resultant signs of either on her return. So proving himself possessed of that master's degree in the art of compromise which young India has to take before attempting even a bachelor's in any other.

For even Miriam found single-mindedness impossible in Shark Lane, and her eulogiums on her new life had to be so strenuous in the city that even simple Aunt Khôjee remarked that 'wise hens never cackled over their own nests unless they were empty!'

On Monday mornings too, after her debauch in city ways, Miriam found it necessary to be aggressively European. She would even go so far as to eat the lightly-boiled egg of civilisation for her breakfast--the egg which calls for saltcellars and spoons, in other words for refinement and luxury. And when her husband had departed in the green box with his law-books, she would yawn dutifully in all three rooms, till nature could no more. So she would send surreptitiously for the cook's wife and baby, and adjourn to a hurdle-closed verandah where her visitors could be properly screened from the new world. Since, let the master do as he chose, there would have been noses on the green in the servant's house had its womenkind allowed the tips of theirs to be seen by strangers!

So Miriam would be comparatively content till the advent of the green box sent her back to three rooms, and a pair of bronze slippers.

On the whole, this double life of hers was a very fair example of most lives in Shark Lane where, despite all the high aspirations after truth and reality, it was quite impossible to reach either; since every one was quite aware that they were trying an experiment, and that a doubtful one.

This was the case more especially in the last house in Shark Lane, just where it merged into the more fashionable River Road. Here, at the corner, a very decorative pair of posts announcing that Mr. Chris Davenant lived within, stood cheek by jowl beside a similar pair with Mr. Lucanaster's name upon them; and though one of the two houses was screened, it was screened by trellises and creepers, behind which a pale pink dress could often be seen fluttering in company with the owner of the other house. For Mrs. Chris Davenant claimed her full share of Western liberty.

So large a share, indeed, that one morning a few days after the races, Krishn Davenund, as Shark Lane persisted in calling him, sate looking hopelessly at his untouched breakfast; in this case also that lightly-boiled egg of civilisation. It stood in a correct silver egg-stand beside a charming arrangement of ferns and flowers; for Miss Genevieve Fuller, now Mrs. Chris, had been that curious product of latter-day London, a vulgar girl of good taste. As she had walked along the streets, her fringe delicately wanton beneath the white veil whose black spots were never permitted to rest in unbecoming places, her cold blue eyes had settled unerringly on all the daintiest creations in the shop windows. And she would pause before a hand-painted sortie de bal or a belaced silk undergarment, and say with equal frankness to her companion, male or female, 'My! that would give poor little me a chance, wouldn't it?'

Even some of the third-rate young men from the city, over whom she had wielded a cheap empire at her mother's boarding-house down the Hammersmith Road, had found such remarks reminiscent of the princess from whose pretty lips toads fell instead of pearls, but Krishn Davenund, student at the Middle Temple, did not know his Mother Goose. Having an all too intimate acquaintance with the poets, however, the superficial refinement of the girl, seen against the background of the only English life he knew, had made him think of the Lady in Comus; for he could have no standard save that of books.

She looked dainty enough for any heroine's part even now, after eighteen months' disillusionment, as she stood before him, in a paucity of pink muslin negligé (which had mostly run to frills) and a plenitude of powder. She had an open note in one hand, a half-smoked Turkish cigarette--of Mr. Lucanaster's importing--in the other, and a rather bored good-nature on her face as she looked at the man she had married because her good taste had told her the truth, namely, that he was better-looking and better-bred than any of her other admirers.

It had been a hideous mistake, of course; but she was shrewd enough to see that the shock of finding, on his return to India, that there was literally no place for him in it had been quite as painful to her husband as to herself. So she exonerated him of blame, with a sort of contemptuous pity and an absolute lack of sympathy. It was nothing to her, for instance, that, apart from the temporal loss of finding himself only the son of a Hindoo widow who had reverted to the most bigoted austerity on her husband's death, instead of the son of a man high up in Government service, whose position had made unorthodoxy tolerable to relations and friends alike, he should have come back to find a change in himself, to feel a wild revolt against the renewed contact with things which he had, literally, left behind him five years before. The things themselves were too hopelessly, incredibly trivial and childish for her to do anything but laugh at them, so he had soon ceased even to mention them; though they meant far more to him.

Despite the mission school training which is the foundation-culture of nearly all young India, his religion was a mere ethical sense, an emotional yielding to the attraction of everything to which the epithet 'Higher' could be applied--mathematics and morals alike. And the giving-in to the disgusting rites necessary before he could re-enter native society on equal terms with those, even, who were of lower caste than himself, had seemed to him degrading. So, despite his mother's prayers and the advice of other men who, in like position, had purchased comfort by acquiescence, he had refused to be made clean on the offered terms. With this result, that the only familiar touch left to him was that which this woman in the demi-mondaine pink negligé laid on his shoulder as, after a time, she flung the note down on the table, and with a tolerant laugh paused beside him on her way from the room.

'Don't be a fool, Chris!' she said cheerfully. 'You can't be expected to understand, of course, so I'm not really angry. It is all right, old man. Heaps of English women do that sort of thing; and I'm going to, anyhow, so it's no good fussing.'

He made no reply. He seemed, even to himself, to have nothing to say; nothing that could be said, at any rate, since the fierce claim for silence and submission (even if it entailed the disposal of a corpse!) which he had inherited from his fathers, had to be smothered. So he only stared at the note, which lay face uppermost. It began 'Dearest Jenny'; and he called his wife Viva!

The difference of style epitomised the situation, since she preferred the Jenny; it reminded her of bank clerks and the top of the Hammersmith omnibus. He realised this now, for he was no fool; only a reader of books, a believer in theories, a dreamer of dreams, who, in the almost brutal blaze of an Indian sun, had awakened, not to realities--that was impossible to one who still had no guide save books--but to a new attempt at dreams. One which made him say pompously, after the fashion in novels, 'I do not wish it, Viva; and you will please to remember that I am your husband.'

His English, barring a faintly foreign intonation, was perfect; but his wife laughed.

'Don't, Chris! It doesn't suit the part. Besides, we were only married at the registrar's. So if you want a wife of that sort, Lucanaster says you can marry one, if I don't object. I've been thinking about it, and I don't think I should----'

He stood up and threw his hands out passionately ere covering his face with them; and the action, utterly un-English as it was, suited him better than his previous calm.

'It--it's a lie to begin with,' he cried hoarsely. 'And even if it weren't--I wont have it said--it--it makes me lose myself.'

She drew back a bit and looked at him. 'You've done that already, Chris, and so've I,' she said calmly. 'Now don't interrupt, please; I've been fizzling for this talk the last month, for we shall rub along together so much better when we thoroughly understand each other. So, I'm not going to pretend any more, Chris! It doesn't work. I tried it at first because--well! because you mean well, and I like to make things comfy while I can. But I'm sick of Shark Lane. Some of the men wouldn't be bad, if they weren't so awfully high-toned--that's what's the matter with you, Chris!--but the women beat me. I went to see that little fool Hâfiz Ahmad's wife yesterday, because I'm a good-natured fool myself and she said she was dull, and you asked me; and as I say, I like things comfy. Well! she wanted me to play old maid, and the cards were--oh! filthy! That finished me. Of course it was only a trifle, but it did the trick. I've chucked. I won't play the game any more, Chris. I am going my own way; and if you want to see Shark Lane here, I shall be somewhere else. You needn't bother or fuss. I can take care of myself perfectly--I went about London a lot, you know. Besides, doesn't it stand to reason that I'm a better judge of what an English lady can do than you are? Why! I might as well try and teach you the etiquette of those disgusting temples where your precious stay-at-home women worship in--in the altogether!' She giggled modestly, and then, seeing his face, gave him a final pat. 'Cheer up, Chris! I'm sure you could marry one--a cousin or something--if you tried.'

He interrupted her with a listless, nerveless dignity. 'You seem to think it all pretence, but I couldn't go back to the old ways; this--this has meant more to me, than that----' his lips quivered as if with coming tears, he had to pull himself together visibly. 'For the rest,' he went on drearily, 'I am not quite so ignorant as you deem me. One reads of--of this sort of situation, and I can shape my course as other men have shaped theirs; only--only do not try my patience too far.'

He meant the last in all seriousness, but neither the thought nor the words were his own; and the pathos of this despairing clutch on book-knowledge being, of course, lost on her commonplace vulgarity, she laughed once more.

'Why, Chris! you've got that as pat as pat! quite the injured hub in domestic drama. Goody me! to think I might be going down still on the top of the dear old red 'bus to the mouth of the pit on a first night! Well, that's over, so we must just both be as chirpy as we can. Goodbye, Chris! I've got to dress, for Lucanaster 's coming for me in half an hour. And don't expect me till you see me. They did talk of tents out, a dance, and a regular night of it. You really needn't fuss, Chris; you can't understand, you see.'

When she had gone, he sate staring helplessly at the boiled egg, as if he expected something to hatch out of it. Even thought forsook him, for the first to come was that this woman was his wife. Wife! the word conjured up such a different idea in the hereditary experience which inevitably underlay all things in him, that he could go no further in bewilderment.

So, in the effort to escape from the thraldom of the old wisdom, which such as he have to make so often, he took up the newspaper which lay beside him, telling himself passionately that the old order had changed, that life held more than his fathers had dreamt of. Yet even as he told himself this, the burden of doubt which such as he have to bear came upon him, a sense of unreality, even in himself, closed round him.

Unreal! Unreal! Unreal!

The word typed itself on the columns of the Voice of India as he read them. The paper was the recognised organ of his class, the exponent of its desires, its beliefs. Yet here even that word pursued him. Here on the first page was a leader stigmatising the temporary withdrawal of independent powers from the Municipal Committee as an unwarrantable piece of tyranny. Unwarrantable! Was it possible for any sane man to call it so, knowing, as all knew, the grievous tale of neglect and wrongdoing in that Committee? Was it possible, even apart from that, for any wise man not to see that with plague clamouring for an entrance, the good of the many claimed a more energetic sanitary reform than the Committee seemed able or willing to introduce?

And as for the hints thrown out that the newly-published plague regulations were but a sop, a blind, hiding a very different policy; what then? Was it possible for any government to do more than legislate for the present? Who but fools imagined that it could or would bind itself to definite action in conditions which could only be guessed at?

So the tale of unreality went on. Here was a well-written, well-reasoned article on the cow-killing grievance; but Chris, being a wielder of the pen himself, happened to know the writer, and could remember seeing him eating beefsteaks at the Temple dinners.

Again, in a paragraph headed 'Government Greed and Peasant Poverty.' Could any detail overcome the indubitable fact that India had the cheapest civilised government in the world?

He ran his eye down another column, and caught the phrase 'social progress' above a signature which he knew to be that of a man who had just married a child of ten.

And what was this? 'The Government to which is opposed the entire intelligence of the nation!' Brave words these, when the proportion between such intelligence and the general ignorance was withheld! What was it? Ten thousand to one!

'The political training of the mass of the people is still, it is true, somewhat incomplete.' It might well be that when the percentage of mere literates was almost negligible.

'Even the Mohammedan policy was better than the English one. True, it did not allow freedom of the press....'

Ye gods! Freedom of the press when there was not a newspaper in all the length and breadth of the land! Could unreality, bunkum, call it what you will, go further than that?

Chris pushed himself back from the table, back from the boiled egg, back from the newspaper, back, so far as he could, from himself, with an odd sound between a laugh, a sob, and a curse.

Was that all? Was that sort of ungenerous, unreliable, almost unimaginable drivel the only indictment which such as he had to bring against those who had depolarised life? Who had neither given India a creed, nor taken one away? Was that the only arraignment for the tyranny of pain such as his?

No! a thousand times no! There was more to be said than that!

So to him came the fatal facility for words which is the betrayal of his race. He sate down to write, and, heedless of the sound of dogcart wheels and a man's and a woman's laughter which came after a time, did not rise until he stood up with sheets on sheets of scarce-dried manuscript in his hand, feeling for the first time in his intellectual life that he was alone. Hitherto he had always followed the thoughts of the great masters. Hitherto there had always been some one on the road before him. Now the question, a burning one to his enthusiasm, was--'Would any one come after him?'

Hâfiz Ahmad's house, the rallying-point of young India in Nushapore, lay close by. It was a court-holiday, and therefore the chances were great that some meeting or another was being held; since meetings are a recognised holiday amusement with those who, amid all the unreality of their lives, are still terribly in earnest.

He would go there and seek an audience.

On his way out, however, he saw Jack Raymond riding up the drive. Jack Raymond, one of the few Englishmen he could count on to be kind, yet who, despite that, had never called on his wife. Was he going to do so now? As a matter of fact, Jack Raymond had had no such intention; he had come over to ask Chris himself about a post which was vacant, and which might keep John Ellison, loafer, out of more mischief; but seeing Chris coming towards him with a pleased expectant look on his somewhat pathetic face, a half-irritated pity made him ask if Mrs. Davenant was at home.

'I'm sorry she has gone out with Lucanaster,' he repeated, unaware of the emphasis he laid on the qualification till he saw poor Chris flinch, when he said hurriedly, 'but I'll come in if I may. I've a question or two I want to ask.'

Whereupon Chris, who, despite his five years of England and his wife's incessant instructions, had never been able to grasp that exclusive use of certain rooms to certain uses, took Jack Raymond straight into the dining-room, where, amongst the litter of an unfinished breakfast, a note, on which quite inadvertently the visitor set his riding-whip, lay face uppermost.

That 'Dearest Jenny,' therefore, stared Jack Raymond in the face all the time he was settling that John Ellison should go for a week's trial as foreman on the new goods station which Chris was building. He knew the writing, and had, what poor Chris had not, a fixed standard of inherited and acquired experience by which to judge the writer. And so a curious mixture of pity and repugnance came to the Englishman as he looked at the face opposite him--the gentle face so full of intelligence, so devoid of character--and thought of that other coarser, commoner one. It was a question of the two men only; the woman, dismissed briefly as a bad sort, counted for nothing in Jack Raymond's mind.

Yet if Lucanaster had been an Englishman, it is ten to one that Jack Raymond would not have said abruptly, as he did say when he rose to take up his riding-whip, 'If I were you, Davenant, I wouldn't let my wife be seen with that man Lucanaster. Of course you can't be expected to--to know--but he's an awful sweep!' As he spoke, his knowledge of himself made him clutch his whip tightly; but Chris only stood silent for a moment with a wild appeal in his soft eyes. Then he tried to speak; finally he sate down again, and buried his face in his hands.

The straining of the long brown fingers, tense in their effort to keep back tears, the long-drawn breath trying to keep back sobs, made Jack Raymond's pity fly before impatient contempt.

'I'm sorry. It's evidently worse than I thought,' he said; 'but that sort of thing isn't a bit of good, Davenant. Put your foot down. Say you won't have it.'

Chris Davenant's face came up from his hands with the dignity of absolute despair. 'How can I? Didn't even you say just now I couldn't be expected to understand? She says it too. And I've no answer. How can I have one when there is no place for me--or for her? That is it. If she had friends--if there was any one to care--any one even to be angry; but there is no one.'

His head went into his hands again, and the pity born of clearer comprehension came back to the Englishman, like the dove of old, with widespread white wings. And like the dove of old, it brought a suggestion of calmer days to come with it.

'I hadn't thought of it that way,' he said slowly; 'but I see your point. A lead over keeps many a horse between the flags. And I'll get one for your wife if I can. Lady Arbuthnot is an old friend of mine,'--he was faintly surprised at himself for this remark, which came quite naturally--'and I'm sure she will send an invitation to the Government House garden-party. Then there's the fête and the Service ball. It may seem a queer cure to you----'

'Everything is queer,' admitted Chris, trying to be cheerful. 'But I know she felt not being asked--I remember her saying----' He broke off; for the remark had been, briefly, that it was no use considering the proprieties if the proprieties didn't consider you.

'Well! that's settled. She'll find the invitations when she comes back; then there'll be the dresses, you know, and all that.'

Chris shook his head. 'I am not sure if I do. It is all new. But it is more than kind of you. If I could do anything for you in return----'

The unreserved gratitude in his face was sufficiently womanish not to rouse the English distaste to all expression of emotion, though, even so, Jack Raymond put it aside jestingly.

'Thank Lady Arbuthnot, my dear fellow; she'--he paused, a remembrance coming to him--'By the way--you're in, I know, with all the Voice of India scribblers--write for it yourself, don't you? Well, what is the meaning of those hints about the plague policy? What have they got hold of? anything definite?'

'So far as I know, nothing,' began Chris. 'It is, I fear, a regrettable fact that there is seldom good foundation----'

Jack Raymond, reins in hand, swung himself into his saddle lightly. 'Yes, thank God! Well! if you should hear of anything, or if you should have a chance of--say, burking anything likely to upset the apple-cart--the times are a trifle ticklish in the city--take your gratitude to me, or rather to Lady Arbuthnot, out in that.'

Chris flushed up. 'Surely,' he began volubly, 'it is the bounden duty, as I have just been writing, of the educated portion of the community to leave themselves free for reasonable criticism by supporting Government, wherever possible, by throwing heart and soul----' The Englishman, holding his impatient mount in a grip of iron, looked down with a bored expression.

'No doubt--no doubt; but the body fills a gap better on the whole. Good-bye. I'll see to the invites, and you can drop me a line if you hear anything definite.'