_ PHASE III. PISGAH HEIGHTS
CHAPTER V
"Broadly speaking, there are two blocks of people--East and West;
people who interfere and people who don't interfere; ... East is a
fatalist, West is an idealist, of a clumsy sort."--STACY AUMONIER.
A mile, or less, of tree-bordered road sloped gently from the Residency gate-posts to the walled City of Victory, backed by craggy, red-grey spurs of the Aravalli range, hidden almost in feathery heads of banyan, acacia, and neem--a dusty, well-ordered oasis, holding its own against the stealthy oncoming of the desert.
North and east ran the screen of low hills with their creeping lines of masonry; but from south and west the softly encroaching thing crept up to the city walls, in through the gates, powdering every twig and leaf and lattice with the fine white dust of death. Shadeless and colourless, to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the
ak plant and gaunt cactus bushes--their limbs petrified in weird gesticulation.
But on the road itself was a sufficiency of life and colour--parrokeets flashing from tree to tree, like emeralds made visible and vocable; village women swathed in red and yellow veils; prancing Rajput cavaliers, straight from the Middle Ages; ox-carts and camels--unlimited camels, with flapping lip and scornful eye; a sluggish stream of life, rising out of the landscape and flowing, from dawn to dusk, through the seven Gates of Jaipur. And there, on the low spurs, beyond the walls, he sighted the famous Tiger Fort, and the marble tomb of Jai Sing--he that built the rose-red City; challenging the desert, as Canute the sea; saying, in terms of stone and mortar, 'Here shall thy proud waves be stayed!' Nearing the fortified gateway, Roy noted how every inch of flat surface was silkily powdered, every opening silted with sand. Would it rest with desert or city, he wondered, the ultimate victory of the last word...?
Close against the ramparts, sand and dust were blown into a deep drift; or was it a deserted pile of rags----? Suddenly, with a sick sensation, he saw the rags heave and stir. Arms emerged--if you could call them arms--belonging to pinched, shadowy faces. And from that human dust-heap came a quavering wail, "Maharaj! Maharaj!"
"What
is it, Bishun Singh?" he asked sharply of the
sais, trotting at his stirrup.
"Only the famine, Hazur. Not a big trouble this year, they say. But from the villages these come crawling to the city, believing the Maharaj has plenty, and will give."
"Does he give?"
Bishun Singh's gesture seemed to deprecate undue curiosity. "The Maharaj is great, but the people are like flies. If their Karma is good, they find a few handfuls; if evil--they die."
Roy said no more. That simple statement was conclusive as a dropped stone. But, on reaching the gateway, he scattered a handful of loose corns.
Instantly a cry went up: "He gives money for food!
Jai dea Maharaj!"[7] Not merely arms, but entire skeletons emerged, seething, scrambling, with hands wasted to mere claws. A few of the boldest caught at Roy's stirrup; whereat Bishun Singh brushed them off, as if they were flies indeed.
Unresisting, they tottered and fell one against another, like ninepins: and Roy, hating the man, turned sharply away. But rebuke was futile. One could
do nothing. It was that which galled him. One could only pass on; mentally brushing them aside--like Bishun Singh.
* * * * *
Spectres vanished, however, once he and Suraj were absorbed into the human kaleidoscope of the vast main street, paved with wide strips of hewn stone; one half of it sun-flooded; one half in shadow. The colour and movement; the vista of pink-washed houses speckled with white florets; the gay muslins, the small turbans and inimitable swagger of the Rajput-Sun-descended, re-awakened in him those gleams of ancestral memory that had so vividly beset him at Chitor. Sights and sounds and smells--the pungent mingling of spices and dust and animals--assailed his senses with a vague yet poignant familiarity: fruit and corn-shops with their pyramids of yellow and red and ochre, and the fat brown bunnia in the midst; shops bright with brass-work and Jaipur enamel; lattice windows, low-browed arches, glimpses into shadowed courts; flitting figures of veiled women; humbler women, unveiled, winnowing grain, or crowned with baskets of sacred cow-dung, stepping like queens....
And the animals----! Extinct, almost, in modern machine-ridden cities, here they visibly and audibly prevailed. For Asia lives intimately--if not always mercifully--with her animals; and Roy's catholic affection embraced them all. Horses first--a long way first. But bullocks had their charm: the graceful trotting zebus, horns painted red and green. And the ponderous swaying of elephants--sensitive creatures, nervous of their own bulk, resplendently caparisoned. And there--a flash of the jungle, among casual goats, fowls, and pariahs--went the royal cheetahs, led on slips; walking delicately, between scarlet peons, looking for all the world like amiable maiden ladies with blue-hooded caps tied under their chins. In the wake of their magnificence two distended donkeys, on parodies of legs, staggered under loads more distended still, plump dhobies perched callously on the cruppers. Above all, Roy's eye delighted in the jewelled sheen of peacocks, rivalling in sanctity the real lords of Jaipur--Shiva's sacred bulls. Some milk-white and onyx-eyed, some black and insolent, they sauntered among the open shop fronts, levying toll and obstructing traffic--assured, arrogant, immune....
And, at stated intervals, like wrong notes in a succession of harmonies, there sprang wrought-iron gas-lamps fitted with electric bulbs!
So riding, he came to the heart of the city--a vast open space, where the shops seemed brighter, the crowds gayer; and, by contrast, the human rag and bone heaps, beggars and cripples, more terrible to behold.
Here the first ray of actual recognition flashed through the haze of familiar sensations. For here architectural exuberance culminated in the vast bewildering facade of the Hall of the Winds and the Palace flaunting its royal standard--five colours blazoned on cloth of gold. But it was not these that held Roy's gaze. It was the group of Brahmin temples, elaborately carven, rose-red from plinth to summit, rising through flights of crows and iridescent pigeons; their monolithic forms clean cut against the dusty haze; their shallow steps flanked with marble elephants, splashed with orange-yellow robes of holy men and groups of brightly-veiled women.
At sight of them Roy instinctively drew rein;--and there, in the midst of the shifting, drifting crowd, he sat motionless, letting the vision sink deep into his mind, while Terry investigated a promising smell, and Bishun Singh, wholly incurious, gossiped with a potter, from whose wheel emerged an endless succession of
chiraghs--primitive clay lamps, with a lip for the cotton wick. His neighbour, with equal zest, was creating very ill-shapen clay animals, birds and fishes.
"Look, Hazur--for the Dewali," Bishun Singh thrust upon Roy's attention the one matter of real moment, just then, to all right-minded Hindus. "Only two more weeks. So they are making lamps, without number, for houses and shops and the palace of the Maharaja. Very big tamasha, Hazur."
He enlarged volubly on the coming festival, to this Sahib, who took such unusual interest in the ways of India; while Roy sat silent, watching, remembering....
Nearly nineteen years ago he had seen the Dewali--Feast of Lights; had been driven, sitting on his mother's knee, through a fairy city outlined in tremulous points of flame, down to the shore of the Man Sagar Lake, where the lights quavered and ran together and the dead ruins came alive with them. All night they had seemed to flicker in his fanciful brain; and next morning-unable to think or talk of anything else--he had been moved to dictate his very first attempt at a poem....
Suddenly, sharply, there rose above the chatter of the crowd and the tireless clamour of crows, a scream of mingled rage and anguish that tore at his nerves and sent a chill down his spine.
Swinging round in the saddle, he saw a spectral figure of a woman--detached from a group of spectres, huddled ironically against bulging sacks of grain. One shrivelled arm was lifted in denunciation; the other pressed a shapeless bundle to her empty breasts. Obviously little more than a girl--yet with no trace of youth in her ravaged face--she stood erect, every bone visible, before the stall of a bangle-seller, fat and well liking, exuding rolls of flesh above his
dhoti,[8] and enjoying his savoury chupattis hot and hot; entirely impervious to unseemly ravings; entirely occupied in pursuing trickles of
ghi[9] with his agile tongue that none might be lost.
"That shameless one was begging a morsel of food," the toymaker explained conversationally. "Doubtless her stomach is empty.
Wah! Wah! But she has no pice. And a man's food is his own...."
As he spoke a milk-white bull ambled by, plundering at will; his privileged nose adventuring near and nearer to the savoury smell. Promptly, with reverential eagerness, the man proffered half a fresh chupatti to the sacred intruder.
At that the starving girl-mother lunged forward with the yell of a hunted beast; lunged right across the path of a dapper young man in an English suit, green turban, and patent-leather shoes.
"Peace, she-devil! Make way," he cried; and catching her wrist--that looked as if it would snap at a touch--he flung her aside so roughly that she staggered and fell, the child beneath her emitting a feeble wail....
Since the days of his imprisonment, cruelty witnessed had a startling effect on Roy. Between the moment when he sprang from the saddle, in a blaze of fury, to the moment when he stood confronting the suave, Anglicised Indian--riding-crop in one hand, the other supporting the girl and her babe--his mind was a blank. The thing was done almost before the impulse reached his brain. He wondered if he had struck the fellow, whom he was now arraigning furiously in fluent Hindustani, and whose sullen, shifty face was reminding him of some one--somewhere....
"Have you
no respect for suffering--or for women other than your own?" he demanded, scorn undisguised in his look and tone.
The man's answering shrug was frankly contemptuous. "All you English are mad," he said in the vernacular. "If she die not to-day, she will die to-morrow. And already there are too many to feed--"
"She will not die to-day or to-morrow," Roy retorted with Olympian assurance. "Courage, little mother,"--he addressed the girl--"you shall have food, you and the sonling."
As she raised herself, clutching at his arm, he became uncomfortably aware that her rags of clothing were probably verminous; that his chivalrous pity was tinged with repulsion. But pity prevailed. Supporting her to a neighbouring stall, he bought fruit, which she devoured like a wild thing. He begged a little milk in a lotah and gave her money for more. Half dazed, she dropped the money, emptied the small jar almost at a gulp, and flung herself at his feet, pressing her forehead on his dusty boot; covering him with confusion. Imperatively he bade her get up. No result. So he stooped to enforce his command....
She had fainted.
"Help, mother--quick!" he appealed to an elder woman who hovered near the stall, and responded, instinctively, to the note of command.
As she stooped over the girl he said in low rapid tones: "Listen! It is an order. Give warm food to her and the child. Take her to the Burra Sahib's compound. There she will be cared for. I will give word."
He slipped two rupees into her hand, adding: "Two more--when all is done according to order."
"
Hai! Hai! The Sahib is a Son of Princes," murmured the favoured one, reflecting shrewdly that eight annas would suffice to feed those poor empty creatures; and gathering up her light burden she bore it away--to Roy's unfeigned relief.
Would Thea scold him--or uphold him, he wondered,--having committed himself. The whole thing had been so swift, so unreal, that he seemed half a world away from the green Residency garden, with its atmosphere of twentieth-century England, scrupulously, yet unconsciously, preserved in a setting of sixteenth-century India. And Roy had a strain of both in his composition.
Across the road Bishun Singh--tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries--was still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned. Again there dawned on Roy the conviction that he had seen that face before. It was not in India. It was linked with the same sensations, in a milder form. It would come in a moment....
It came.
Behind the slight, foppish figure, the eye of his mind saw suddenly--not the sunlight and colour of Jaipur, but a stretch of grey-green sea, tawny cliffs, and sandy shore ... St Rupert's! Of course, unmistakable: the sullen mouth, the shifty eyes....
Instantly he went forward and said in English: "I say--excuse me--but is your name Chandranath?"
The man started and stiffened. "That is no matter to you."
"Perhaps not. Only ... you're very like a boy who was one term at St Rupert's School with me."
"Well, I
was at St Rupert's. A beastly hole----"
He, too, spoke English, and scanned Roy's face with narrowed eyes. "Sinclair--is it? You tumbled down the cliff on to me--and that Desmond fellow----?"
"Yes, I did. Lucky for you," Roy answered, stiffening in his turn. But because of old days--because this unpromising specimen of manhood had incidentally brought him and Desmond together, he held out his hand. "'Fraid I lost my temper," he said casually, for form's sake. "But you put my blood up."
Chandranath's fingers lay limply in his grasp.
"Still so sensitive----? Then better to clear out of India. I only pushed that crazy girl aside. Englishmen knock and kick our people without slightest compunction. Perhaps you are a tourist--or new to this country?"
Words and manner set Roy's nerves on edge; but he had been imprudent enough for one day. "I've spent seven months on the Frontier in a cavalry Regiment," he said; "but I only came to Jaipur yesterday."
"Well, take my advice, Mr Sinclair, and leave these people alone. They don't want Englishmen making pretence of sentimental fuss over them. They like much better to be pushed--or even starved--by their own
jat. You may not believe it. But I belong to them. So I know."
Roy, who also 'belonged' in a measure, very nearly said so--but again prudence prevailed. "I'm rash enough to disagree with you," he said placably. "The question of non-interference, of letting ill alone--because one's afraid or can't be bothered--isn't merely a race question; it's a root question of human character. Some men can't pass by on the other side. Right or wrong, it simply isn't arguable. It's a matter of the individual conscience--the heart----"
"Conscience and heart--if not drastically disciplined by the logically reasoning brain, propagate the majority of troubles that afflict mankind," quoth Chandranath in the manner of one familiar with platform oratory. "Are you stopping in Jaipur?"
"Yes. At the Residency. Mrs Leigh is Desmond's sister. Did you know?"
"That is curious. I did not know. Too much heart and conscience there also. Mrs Leigh is thrusting her fingers into complicated issues of which she is lamentably ignorant."
Roy, taken aback, nearly gave himself away--but not quite. "I gather she acted with Sir Lakshman Singh's approval," was all he said.
Chandranath shrugged. "Sir Lakshman is an able but deluded man. His dreams of social reform are obsolete. We of the new school adhere patriotically to social and religious ordinances of the Mother. All we agitate for is political independence." He unfurled the polysyllables, like a flag; sublimely unaware of having stated a contradiction in terms. "But your Sir Lakshman is of the old-fashioned school--English-mad."
"And your particular friends--are sane, eh?"
The apostle of Hindu revival pensively twirled an English button of his creditably-cut English coat.
"Yes. We are sane--thanks to more liberalising influences. Coloured dust cannot be thrown in our eyes by bureaucratic conjuring tricks, or imperialistic talk about prestige. To-day it is India's turn for prestige. 'Arya for the Aryans' is the slogan of the rising generation." He paused, blinked, and added with an ingratiating chuckle: "You will go running away with an impression that I am metamorphosed into red-hot revolutionary. No, thank you! I am intrinsically a man of peace!" With a flourish he jerked out a showy gold watch. "Ah--getting late! Very agreeable exchanging amenities with old schoolfellows. But I have an appointment in the Palace Gardens, at the time they feed the muggers.
That is a sight you should see, Mr Sinclair--when the beasts are hungry and have not lately snapped up a washerwoman or an erring wife!"
"I'd rather be excused this evening, thanks," Roy answered, with a touch of brusqueness. "I confess it wouldn't appeal to my sense of humour--seeing crocodiles gorge, while women and children starve."
"That is what they call in a book I once read 'little ironies of life.' Good fortune, at least, for the muggers! Better start to sharpen your sense of humour, my friend. It is incomparable asset against the slings and arrows of outrageous contingencies." This time his chuckle had an undernote of malice; and Roy, considering him thoughtfully--from green turban to patent-leather shoes--felt an acute desire to take him by the scruff of his English coat and dust the Jaipur market-place with the remnant of him.
Aloud he said coolly: "Thanks for the prescription. Are you stopping here long?"
"Oh, I am meteoric visitant. Never very long anywhere. I come and go."
"Business--eh?"
"Yes--many kinds of business--for the Mother." He flashed a direct look at Roy; the first since their encounter; fluttered a foppish hand--the little finger lifted to display a square uncut emerald--and went his way....
Roy, left standing alone in the leisurely crowd of men and animals--at once so alien and so familiar--returned to Bishun Singh and Suraj in a vaguely troubled frame of mind.
"Which way to the house of Sir Lakshman Singh?" he asked the maker of chiraghs, his foot in the stirrup.
Enlightened, he set off at a trot, down another vast street, all hazy in the level light that conjured the dusty air to gold. But contact with human anguish, naked and unashamed--as he had not seen it since the war--and that sudden queer encounter with Chandranath, had rubbed the bloom off delicate films of memory and artistic impressions. These were the drop-scene, merely: negligible, when Life took the stage. He had an exciting sense of having stepped straight into a crisis. Things were going to happen in Jaipur.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: Victory to thee, Maharaj!]
[Footnote 8: Loin-cloth.]
[Footnote 9: Melted butter.] _