Whatever Dies

Foreword

These twenty stories vary a good deal in mood and form. The subjects also are sharply contrasted, and I have tried to enhance these differences by the order in which the stories are arranged. They are meant to be read in that order, and some of the point of the book will be missed if a haphazard selection is made. Since they were put together, there have been such great changes in India that it is worth mentioning that fifteen of the stories were written (or in two cases re-written from older drafts) between September 1946 and February 1947. Three, ‘Water Flowed from the Rock’, ‘The Two Griefs’ and ‘No Mortal Beast’, were written in September 1945. Two, ‘The Box’ and ‘Nausicaa’, are included as museum pieces from the dim past, having been written in 1932 and 1928 respectively. ‘Nausicaa’ now seems to me terribly over-written, but I rather like it all the same.

All the characters are imaginary, and no reference is intended to any living person. But perhaps something more than this conventional disclaimer is needed for ‘Better be with the Dead’ and ‘For Want of a Nail’ because, as my small daughter says of another kind of story, they are like history. So I must make it clear that operations Anchovy and Octopus, the airfield Burgundy, and the blanket in the pipe-line come entirely from my imagination. So far as I know, there is neither a Goat Island nor a Banana Island off the coast of Arakan. And of course there has never been anyone at all like General Alston.

None of these stories has appeared in magazines which are on sale to the general public; but ‘The Soldier’ and ‘For Want of a Nail’ have appeared in the Journal of the United Services Institution of India and ‘The Two Griefs in The Himalayan Journal. I am grateful for permission to republish them.

Never Say No

Just before the telephone rang, Ann had said:

‘What are your plans for this afternoon?’

She said it carelessly, standing by her desk, looking down at her engagement calendar, her weight on one leg so that her thin dress showed the graceful droop of the other hip. But she did not move after she had spoken, listening for his answer.

Dick thought that only three months ago she would have asked what they were going to do together. Now she implied that she would be doing something else. He said:

‘Well, for a Sunday, it’s a crowded evening. You know I promised last week that I’d go and see the regiment. There’s a detachment here for a week and I’d like to see how many I know. It’s good of them to remember me, now I’m a civilian. After that there’s this big party at the Commander-in-Chief’s. And now Ayton has said he wants a conference this afternoon, Sunday or no Sunday, because he’s had a most urgent and important telegram about oil policy from London. That’s at half past five.’

‘But earlier than that?’ she asked.

He was going to say that he would do anything she liked, but at that moment the bell rang. She picked up the receiver.

‘It’s Walter,’ she said, and stood aside to let him reach the instrument. As he moved past her, the scent of her hair, the smoothness of her skin like a child’s, the blank look on her face, made him unhappy. He listened while the voice at the other end talked. Then he put his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘He’s going out after lunch to a village only ten miles from Delhi where the Hindus have beaten up a small Muslim colony. He’s covering it for his paper, of course, but he thought we might like to go. We’d be back before five. What do you think?’

‘I don’t feel very bright. A little headache, nothing much but the sun wouldn’t help it. You go.’

He looked at her, disappointed. He said:

‘I wonder if I should. It does rather fill the day up. We shall get no time alone together.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘you’d better go. It would be interesting. Never say no!’

She laughed as she said it, and he brightened, though it was not quite her old laugh, but perhaps that was because of the headache. The phrase was a joke between them, or not so much a joke as a principle, one of those understandings that grow up in a long and close companionship and are meaningless to all but the two who share them. It had started with a chance remark. Long ago they had been talking to a sailor who had been asked to speak about naval strategy to an audience who might be critical. He had protested that he was ill-qualified but had been firm with their suggestion that he should refuse.

‘A naval officer must never say no,’ he had said. Ann had laughed.

‘What, never say no?’ she said. ‘Not to anything? Wait and see what I shall ask you to do!’

She and Dick had treasured the phrase, using it as a symbol for an attitude to life they had cultivated, a determination not to refuse experience, not to get in a rut, not to turn anything down because it was out of the ordinary. It had been a principle, but they used it sometimes in joke as an excuse for petty self-indulgence, another cigarette, a drink before lunch, an extravagance they knew they could not afford. Now it pleased him to hear her use it again. He took his hand off the mouthpiece and said he would go.

Ann was breathless and absent during lunch. He wondered if it was really because she was not feeling well or whether she was concerned with some problem of her own. He talked about the conference with his director in the evening, the future of oil interests, the strange way in which oil had become linked with strategy and politics. He talked at first for the sake of talking, because she was silent; when he realised that she was not listening he went on because he wanted to rehearse what he had to say at the meeting; but part of his mind was conscious as he talked of her nervous inattention. He felt that he was doing just the wrong thing, but continued with a growing nervousness that matched hers.

Walter’s car hooted outside the front door, and they went out together to see him. Dick climbed in. Ann stood on the steps to watch them go. She said:

‘Goodbye, Dick,’ with an odd little breathless smile, and then turned quickly away into the house.

Dick was worrying about her as the car moved off, and he gave only half his attention to Walter’s talk. He did listen; he heard with part of his mind how the rumour had gone about the countryside that somewhere the Muslims were murdering the Hindus, and how in revenge the Hindus from half a dozen villages had banded together and attacked one small Muslim colony. He listened, but at the same time he was wondering whether he had been a fool to marry Ann. He had done it with his eyes open; he had known she had been desperately unhappy when her engagement with Hugh was broken off, he had known she might never again feel for anyone what she had felt for Hugh. He had been only a second-best for her from the start; but he could not have borne to think of her married to anyone else. He loved her so much that it was worth it even as second-best. Reason had told him that the most he could hope for was affection, friendship, loyalty, that she would never be in love with him; but the hope had been there, and had only died slowly, that some day after all she might. That hope had died, and now there was fear in his heart, a fear at which he had hardly dared to look, that he might lose even what he had.

Their marriage had been a success to begin with, a complete success in the eyes of the world, and for him, all he had any right to expect. They had much in common, they had been great friends. Affection had grown; they had done so much together that they were, he had thought, cemented close for ever. They had been happy, though in his heart there was always a little ache that she could never be his, in hers he knew sometimes a longing for the moon out of the sky. But they had been happy.

Then came the war, long years of separation. He had done well, commanded his battalion. He had seen more than his share of operations, in the desert, in Syria, in Italy. She had been in uniform, too; there had been no time for thoughts of the moon in those years of effort and endeavour. And when they met again, the separation did not seem to have harmed their relationship; rather, he had felt in that second honeymoon that she was more nearly his than ever before.

That had been less than a year ago; they had dropped back after the first glow of their reunion into their old affectionate friendship, but he had counted himself a happy man. Until John came. John had been Dick’s friend as well as Ann’s at first; in fact Dick had known him before Ann had. But he had become particularly Ann’s friend. They were always exchanging books and talking about what they had read; when the three of them were together, Dick could sense allusions in their talk to which he had not the key. Their conversation would slide away to a world that was foreign to him, a word of poetry and novels, in which the feelings of imagined people were of more importance than the real events around them that to him were supremely exciting and important. It seemed to Dick that both John and Ann were really bored by politics; the trend of world events was something in which they could not play a part, or at least, not a big enough part; and they were both people who liked a big part.

But there was nothing more than friendship, he was sure. It was just that they had some interests in common which had no meaning for him. Perhaps Ann might have loved John if things had been different, but she was fundamentally too sensible to let herself do anything silly, he was sure of that. At the moment, this friendship was making a distance between them, but it was his own fault; he had been too immersed in things that didn’t interest her. He would manage better now; not stay so long in office; take her out more. He would have things out with her when he got back and they would start again. He turned his mind to Walter’s talk about the massacre, for that was really what it was.

Walter was an American journalist. He wanted to get to the bottom of this business. He just could not see how human beings who had lived peaceably side by side in the same village all their lives could suddenly murder each other because of stories of something happening hundreds of miles away. The tale had gone round that the Muslims in Bengal were killing the Hindus in thousands; and in the rumours that flew about the scene had shifted nearer and nearer. And now suddenly this small colony of eighty Muslims in a village of some five or six hundred inhabitants had been attacked. Forty bodies had been found, some of them charred beyond recognition. Walter had been there twice already, and he described most vividly the huts standing gutted and desolate, the walls bare in a pile of ashes that had been the roof. Today he was going to talk to two women who had escaped with their lives. Dick would be a help, for his Hindustani was good.

They found the two women in hospital, crouched on string cots. One had seen her husband and her five children killed. She had been stunned by a blow with a stick and left for dead. Her limbs were badly burnt, but she had been still living when the soldiers and police arrived. She would recover. But she did not want to talk much.

The other, a woman of about thirty, was ready to tell her tale. Dick thought that perhaps she told it because she wanted vengeance, but she did not say so. She talked without emotion. Dick listened with a sense of unreality, a feeling as though he was miles away, as though this was a film or a play; but she was real enough, crouching on the bed, hugging her forearms, both broken, both cased in splints and bandages, her small face sad, her stained teeth worn flat by chewing coarsely ground corn all her life.

‘It was evening,’ she said, ‘a little before sundown, and we were cooking and feeding the children. I have three children, one of four months old. I was feeding him at my breast. The Hindu neighbours came and said there was trouble abroad and we had better stay in our houses. Perhaps they wanted to collect us all in one place. I do not know. My husband was out, but I dared not send one of the children to find him. I barred the door. Soon I heard people come shouting and talking. They banged on the door and told me to open. I said I would not open. They said they would set fire to the house if I did not. So I opened the door. They seized the baby from my arms and hit him on the head and threw him in the yard. They caught hold of me by the neck. They said the Muslims had been killing the Hindus at the fair last week. I knew one of the men who held me. I had known him all my life, I used to call him uncle. I said to him: “Uncle, why are you doing this to us? You know we have not been killing Hindus.” He turned away his head, ashamed. One of the others lifted a stick to hit my head. I put up my arm to save my head and the stick broke my arm. I put up the other arm, and they broke that. After that, I don’t remember any more. They killed the two other children as well. All three are dead.’

Walter asked many questions, but the answers did not add much to that flat recital. He shook his head as he got back into the car. He was finding more and more material as to how it had all happened, but he was no nearer understanding the minds of the people who had done it. Dick wished Ann had been there; he wanted to tell her about it, to ask her if she believed as he did that some merciful anaesthesia had deadened the feelings of these two women so that they did not understand what had happened to them. He felt sure they could not realise how blank and miserable their future would be; something had killed the pain. It was a world so foreign to Ann’s; his problem and hers were no less real, but they seemed infinitely distant from this village world on the outer margin of human existence. He looked at his watch. He would be home in good time before his conference. He could talk to her before he left.

Walter would not come in, but dropped him at the front door and drove away. Dick had pictured Arm sitting at tea in the drawing-room, but she was not there. She might be lying down in the bedroom. She was not there either. Then he saw a note on his dressing-table. His heart sank; she had gone off somewhere, she was always going off by herself now. Or perhaps it was something worse, some unforeseen calamity. He was miserable and frightened as he tore it open. He read:

‘Dick my very dear, I know I’m a beast. I hate myself and I hate to hurt you. But someone’s got to be hurt, and now I’ve made up my mind. I can’t go on like this, deceiving you; and I can’t give him up. It’s no use struggling against it any longer. I’m in love with John. I’m going away with him. I’ll have gone when you get this. You’re worth ten of me and I hate myself. This seems so inadequate to all I want to say and you will never understand. I shall always love you in one kind of way, dear Dick. Thank you for always being so sweet to me. Try to forgive me. Ann.’

He went slowly back into the drawing-room and sat down. He read the letter again. It did not seem true. It was like seeing a friend lying dead. In a minute, the eyes would open, the smile would come back. It could not be true. Ann who had been part of himself, whose every movement had made him feel that little ache of wonder at her fair clear beauty, of wonder that she should be herself and be there for him to feast on. It was still a pang of joy to him whenever she said his name. Now she had said this. He sat still for a long time.

A servant came in and asked if he wanted tea, and whether the lady would be in for tea. For the first time Dick was aware that beyond his private pain at her loss there was the wound to his vanity, the thought of shrugged shoulders and knowing looks. He said she would not be in and he did not want tea. He looked at his watch. It was time to go to his conference. But what was the use of going? It did not matter now what he did with his life. But it did, he must keep going, he must do his duty, he must show nothing to the world. Never say no.

He got out the car. As he drove, he thought of nothing; he did not picture her as she had been, he was conscious only of his misery and his desire to get away from it. When he reached the house, he thought only that he must be normal. Thank you he had had tea. Thank you Ann was quite well really just a little headache. Thank you he would have a cigarette.

They sat round the table in the Director’s study. They were all very respectable, a long way from the two injured women, crouching sad and lonely on their string cots, a long way from that deadly little note. They talked about the future of India, the Muslim League, the chance of a settlement, the prospect of ordered government. Business depended on an ordered government. Where would India’s oil come from in peace? Where would it come from in war? What would be her consumption? What plans should the firm make?

Dick could see through the window the trees in the garden waving gently as the evening breeze stirred them. The warm gold of the setting sun made them look happy. He remembered Ann sitting up in bed, after they had lost the child, fragile and pale, like a lily of the valley. When they were married, in her wedding-dress. Their honeymoon in Venice. Ann’s lovely body white in the moonlight. Ann in a short tweed skirt, laughing and breathless, on a mountain in Austria. Nestling into a big coat in the car, a cigarette between her lips. Someone was speaking to him, asking his views. He began to talk.

He had thought it all out before and rehearsed it. He did not have to think now. The points he had to make came to him in the right order. It all sounded very far away and unimportant. Now and then he paused and searched for a word, and while his brain searched for him, he thought it’s still there, the pain. It will never go away.

He found he had stopped. That good servant, the mind to which he had fed those thoughts, had turned them all up and played them over to him like a repeating gramophone and now there were no more records to play. The Director looked pleased. He said it was very clearly and ably put and would be a great help to him. Everyone stood up. Yes thank you he would have a whisky and soda. No thank you he wouldn’t stay. Yes thank you he wanted to get back to Ann. No he hadn’t brought her, she had a headache. Goodbye, goodbye, good night.

He sat still in the car. Where shall I go? Not home, to sit still in that lonely house, to pack up her things and tell the servants she wasn’t coming back. What was she doing now? His Ann, his own Ann, sitting in a car with someone else, another man. Paddling in her neck with his damned fingers. She would take his head in her hands, bury her nose in his hair. I’m in love with John. I’m in love with John. He remembered the regiment. And the party at the Commander-in-Chief’s. Misery to go to either. But he must face it. He must go. Never say no.

He found his friends after driving about for some time in the gathering gloom, looking for them among tents arranged in neat bewildering straight lines. It was a smaller detachment than he had thought, only two very young officers. They had got some of the men along, those he knew, and some pipers. They were in a big tent, with a long trestle table down the middle dimly lit by the smoky light of one hurricane lantern. They were glad to see him. Nice of them to remember him. I’m in love with John. In love with John. His Ann. Yes thank you, some rum. What, a whole glass? No water? He’d forgotten the head for rum he’d once developed. Still, never say no. It might kill the pain. He saw for a moment very vividly the cockpit of a wooden ship, the low beams, the smoky light of a lantern, a man in knee-breeches and shirt sleeves pouring rum to kill the pain down the throat of a man lying on a table, sailors holding him still, a surgeon busy on his leg with a saw. But the man still writhed in agony.

He moved among the men, remembering names and faces asking after their friends and their villages. How are things at your home, Autar Singh? How are things at my home?—no one asks that.

The men sat down on the ground, officers at the table. The pipers walked round, stirring the heart with their music. Someone put more rum in his glass. I shall be very drunk, but why not, what else is there to do? A merciful anaesthesia, it’s not so bad when you’re drunk, though you don’t escape it. You still writhe in agony. Some of the men were persuaded to dance. They were shy at first, their movements stiff and forced; but the rum and the music warmed their blood, they forgot their shyness, their movements grew swifter, they threw themselves into their parts, exaggerating every gesture, crouching and stamping, a circle of happy fellowship in the smoky yellow light. They are happy, they have forgotten everything. But I cannot forget, even now, swimming away on the rum.

No, thanks, I can’t stay and make a night of it. Got to be at the Commander-in-Chief’s by half past nine. Well, yes, perhaps some food would be a good thing. It came, great flaps of unleavened bread, a plate of curried mutton, curried eggs, curried potatoes, swimming in rich spicy gravy. Dick mopped up a handful in a flap of the bread; it was good. But he could not eat much with that leaden weight on his heart. Better stay here perhaps; he was in no state to go to an evening party. But there was still time to get home and change if he hurried. Home! No, he wouldn’t go to that house. He couldn’t go there ever again. But by God he would; he would face it. Never say no. Only just time. Must go. Go on dancing. Don’t mind me don’t stop. Thank you so much. Thank you thank you see you again soon.

As he walked to the car the world suddenly swooped and swung wildly. I’m very drunk, he thought, but I mustn’t let it get the better of me, I must hold on tight. And by an effort he steadied the world about him and started the car. He looked back at the tent, the men dimly silhouetted, stamping and crouching with angular arms akimbo; he let in the clutch and drove cautiously. It was all right if he went slowly and took no risks. A sudden wave of nausea and the street lamps swung in golden arcs. He drew up by the side of the road and took hold of himself. I will be steady. I will go on. It passed, and he drove on to his house.

He did not like going into the house and shouting for the servants to bring his bath. It seemed improper to shout, as though there were a corpse in that bedroom they had shared. He did not like walking through the bedroom, but it was the only way to get to his dressing-room. He hurried through with his eyes turned away from the bed as though she was lying there dead, waiting for the coffin and the flowers. To bath, shave and dress in thin evening clothes was routine; it could be done in a few minutes without more effort than was needed to keep hold on himself, to keep the lights steady. He was back in the car; very slow and cautious. He had arrived. He went up the stairs, moving slowly to keep straight; he had shaken hands and was inside without the world swooping in dizzying circles again.

It was an evening party, out of doors, the bushes and trees ornamented with little coloured lights, red and blue and yellow, a space in die centre of the garden flooded with white brilliance. There was a band, and a few couples were dancing on a chalked drugget; but most people found it too hot to dance. They strolled about in pairs chatting, or moved from group to group; they listened to the band, or talked loud to make themselves heard against it. The lights shone up into the varied foliage of the taller trees, outlined against the stars; below, the bright dresses of the women contrasted with men’s clothes, white, buff or black. Dick stood quite still and looked at it. He must be very careful not to give himself away. He put his hand on the back of a chair. Silly to have come. He daren’t dance. Lights and colours swayed and flowed before his eyes. It was beautiful and he was miserable. Ann would have enjoyed it.

He spoke to people. Yes, thank you Ann was all right really just a slight headache. Wonderful headache it’s been. How long can you go on having a headache? Ah, there was Joy; she would help.

He made his way towards Joy. He said:

‘I’m horribly drunk. Will you look after me?’

She took him a little apart and they sat on chairs and talked. His words came slowly sometimes, but he could think. He told her about his visit to the survivors of the massacre; he thought something had killed the pain for them, like giving men rum when you cut off their legs in the Victory. He told her about the conference, and how important it had all been, and how far from the huts standing desolate, gutted by fire; and about the men of his regiment, dancing in the smoky tent, stamping and crouching; and now this brilliant scene, the beautiful night above them, Joy being nice to him. An evening of rich contrast; he had not said no to experience once. If it were only Ann he was telling. I’m in love with John. But Joy was being very nice.

People began to go home. Joy had let him have one drink. He said he would take her home. She asked:

‘Are you sure you can drive?’

He was sure he could drive. He was all right except now and then when the lights swooped at him, and then he could stop and wait till they steadied. She said:

‘All right, you take me home. Straight home, please Dick. I know you’ve got something on your mind besides drink, but making a pass at me won’t help. Bed’s the place for you.’

He said:

‘You’re quite right. You’re always right.’

He drove very slowly and carefully, with a great effort to concentrate. He said good night to her and swung back to his own house. Once he took a wrong turning, but he stopped and thought very hard, trying very hard to get it right. And he did. He got back on the right road. He got to his house. He left the car in front of the door, and walked up the steps to the veranda with a shudder of repugnance. Must go and live somewhere else. This house oozed memories of her.

There was a light burning in the drawing-room. He wondered why. He wondered if there could be someone waiting for him. He went in. Ann was standing on the hearth-rug. She ran forward to meet him, and caught both his hands in hers. She said:

‘Dick, my very dear Dick, I’ve come back to you for always. I want you to help me. I’ve got so much to tell you, there’s so much for you to understand, and then you’ve got to help me to start again.’

He stood blinking stupidly in the lighted room. She went on:

‘I know you’ll forgive me, but will you understand?—that’s the point. I must try hard to explain, and you to understand. Come and sit down.’

She led him to an armchair. He said:

‘I’ve had a drink to kill the pain.’

‘Of course you have,’ she said, but her voice meant that she was not really attending.

Dick sat down. Ann was back. It was all right now. He must listen carefully to what she was saying. She went on:

‘I’m going to sit on a cushion on the floor. I used to sit like that—do you remember?—when we were first married and you used to read to me. I shall put an arm on your knee, just as I did then, and I’m going to tell you everything, to try to make you understand. I’ve felt such a beast about deceiving you, but I did it so as not to hurt you. Now that you know, I’m going to tell you everything. It’s the only way if we’re going to start again. I shan’t find it easy, so don’t move or say anything. It won’t be so difficult if I don’t look at you, but I shall feel you there. I’ve been through it again and again while I was waiting for you. You’ll try hard to understand, won’t you?

She had set her stage, arranged her group. She began to talk:

‘Things were right between us after you first came back from the army. Better than they’ve ever been. I know you felt it too. And then you got more and more absorbed in the office, and business friends, and politics, and I suppose I hadn’t enough to do. During the war I’d been busy, and I’d felt I was being some use, and now there didn’t seem much point in the day. There I was, happily married—and we were happy, weren’t we?—but our marriage was like rice pudding and God and England, something always there, always ready when wanted, something you’re so sure of you can go without it for a little. And you do go without it and think you don’t need it. Until suddenly you go back, and it’s there waiting humbly, better than you’d remembered or even hoped for. But I didn’t realise that then; I just felt it was dull and the war was over, and we hadn’t had any fun for ages, and I was getting middle-aged and into a rut. It was a shock to me suddenly to find that I wasn’t one of the young people any longer.’

She paused, and thought for a moment. She went on:

‘This part is quite easy to explain, although I don’t think I knew I felt like this at the time. I hadn’t analysed it to myself. It was John who explained later and I suddenly realised he was exactly right, and that was just how I had felt. I wanted subconsciously to throw my cap over the moon. You were always so reasonable and sensible and right about everything that I sometimes wanted to scream and scream, or to take all my clothes off and dance a can-can in the middle of the club. And then John came along. Do you remember, we kept meeting him at every party we went to for a bit?—he was always there. He and I liked each other from the start. We had lots to talk about, and it seemed we knew each other a little better every time we met. We talked about books and poetry, and he understood so much about me that you didn’t seem to understand. He attracted me from the start, and I always knew when he came into a room, but I never thought of anything more, I mean not seriously, because I was a respectable married woman, and I thought he was respectable too, and serious all the way through. And then one evening, quite naturally, just as it came into his head, he told me about something that had happened to him ages ago. It doesn’t matter what it was, but it made me suddenly realise that he was the same kind of person as I am, the sort of person who might do something mad and funny, with the same streak of badness as I have, and the same sense of humour. His story filled me with longing and regrets, vain and childish regrets I suppose, for the time when I was young and had nothing to worry about, before I fell in love with Hugh, when there were half a dozen men I could play off against each other, let one have a ride and another one a dance and another a picnic, and be amused by it all. It brought back the days before I belonged to one person, when I could say:

Till then, Love, let my body reign and let
Me travel, sojourn, snatch, plot, have, forget,

—not that I did let my body reign of course. That’s just something from a poem John taught me later. But it expresses the mood, from a man’s point of view.

‘Well, from that moment, I felt quite differently about John. I suppose I really fell in love with him then, though we didn’t start meeting till later. And, of course, he knew. He’s the sort of person who does know that kind of thing. I know we were childish and silly and wrong, but I wanted to see him terribly, and it made me so happy. We began to meet, not very often at first, almost every day when you took to having lunch at the office. I knew he didn’t love me as much as you do. He’s like me, you see. He always sees himself from outside, and he has changing moods, and he’s loved lots of women, in different ways. But there’s no reason why you single-souled people should look down on us because you love one person all your lives with all you’ve got; we can’t help being different. We should like to be like you. Perhaps I might have been like that if I’d married Hugh, or John. And he might have been if he’d married the first girl he loved. I wish I’d been her.

‘I don’t think you’d ever understand what that time was like, but please try to. I felt so young and happy and out of the world with him, not like a middle-aged married woman at all. It was wildly exciting. There can never again be anything like “those night-screened divine Stolen trysts of heretofore”. That’s something else John taught me. It was doubly unfair to you because whenever I was with him I was living with all the life I had; and with you it had to be all the dull things, getting up, and having breakfast, and going to dinner-parties we ought to go to. But I still loved you, only in a different way. John made my life full of colour, a lovely gay blue colour, like the jacaranda or the iris; and with you, there are no half-shades. Things with you are right or wrong, black or white. And this would have been black if you’d known. And then, you see, meeting John like that, he was at his best too; he always told me how beautiful I was, and he would make love to me and then turn it all to laughter and say he didn’t really mean a word of it, and laugh at me and at himself too, in an odd honest way he has. We’re such babies, Dick, all women are; it’s no good our just knowing you love us. We want to be told all the time. At least, I do. And it means so much to be laughed at.

‘I told him at the beginning I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt you, and we agreed that it would just be a light-hearted affair, and we’d have fun and then say goodbye. But it got much more serious suddenly, and I felt I could hardly live without him. Don’t think it was just a flirtation, Dick. It only began like that. I suddenly felt it was everything in the world to me. And when it got like that, he asked me to go away with him for always. But I wouldn’t. I kept saying no. I knew it would be wrong, and I felt I couldn’t hurt you as badly as that. When you got my letter today, I expect you remembered how I’d said goodbye on the steps, and I expect you thought I was meaning to go even then. I wasn’t. I wanted to get you out of the house, and I was waiting to ring up John, but I didn’t mean to go. And then as I stood there, I tried to imagine how I should have said goodbye if I really had been going to run away, and I said it like that.

‘Then John came, and he tried to persuade me. I kept saying no, with all my will but much against my heart. And suddenly I remembered how you and I had always said “Never say no!”—and that made me laugh. You won’t understand that; it’ll seem unspeakably caddish to you, but it did seem funny to use our own phrase, yours and mine, to decide whether I should leave you. And it did decide me. I wasn’t myself, I was swept off my feet; all my defences went. He is so young and eager and I am so much in love with him. I cried and cried and at last I said yes and wrote you that letter, and we went.’

She stopped again, and this time she was silent for several moments. Then she said:

‘This is the really difficult part to explain. It will seem so trivial to you to have changed so quickly. But on the way I felt worse and worse. Dear Dick, I kept thinking, how miserable he’ll be. And I thought of when we lost our little boy, and how much it had hurt you. I thought of all there’s been between us, all we’ve shared and all we’ve done together, and I felt I just couldn’t. I felt God wouldn’t mind all that I’d done before but He would mind my doing this to you. It seemed like murder. I wondered too whether anyone but you would ever put up with me, and whether John would go on loving me when it was all breakfasts and bread and butter. But that wasn’t the point. I’d have risked that because I knew there was nothing in the world I wanted to do so much as to go away with John for ever. But I knew I couldn’t do it because you are worth so much more than me, so much deeper and truer. So I made him stop the car and I told him. I told him he must take me back. He understood; he always understands me. He said he wasn’t going to try to persuade me to follow my heart against my will. He wouldn’t get me worked up again but would do as I wished. He was perfect. I’m still in love with him, terribly in love with him. I feel as though I’d had an operation and some part that I badly need has been cut out of me. I shall get over that, though I shall never feel quite the same again. But I’m sure I’m right to come back where I belong. Only, Dick, we must start again. It’s no use my just being something for you to gaze at. I must try to find a real life of my own, with no frauds or deceits in it. I must never deceive you again. We must start again and make a new relationship. That was why I felt I must tell you everything. Will you try to understand? Will you help me to start again?’

She half rose on to her knees and turned towards him, stretching out her hands to take his, looking into his face.

He was fast asleep.

Ann sprang to her feet. Tears ran down her face, tears of anger and disappointment. She stamped her foot, ran to the telephone, picked up the receiver, put her finger in the little circle against the first digit of John’s number, and paused. She stood quite still. Then she sighed deeply. She went back to Dick and shook him by the shoulder. She said:

‘Come on, old Dick. You’ve been through a lot. Better come to bed.’

Dick woke. He looked up at her, puzzled. Then he smiled. It was all right, it hadn’t been a dream, Ann was there, telling him to go to bed.

‘Never say no,’ he said sleepily. ‘My dear, dear Ann.’

His Time Had Come

Rupni wanted to go home more than anything else in the world. She wanted to go so much that her thoughts could not keep on any other subject for long at a time, and every day she was guilty of some piece of carelessness that brought down on her the anger of her father-in-law. She was so frightened of him that when he was by, she would work attentively; but as soon as his back was turned, her wits would wander again. Just now, after the midday meal on this afternoon of warm dusty March, she was supposed to be cleaning the brass cooking-vessels on the brick platform before the house, but she was not getting on with her work. Her mind was busy with memories of her last visit home.

She had been married more than three years ago and had come to live in the city of Ramnagar. Her heart sank when she first saw her husband; he was fat and greasy, a walking paunch, with a ragged grey moustache, a bald head, a dull eye. She had known from the start that for her there could be none of the happiness in marriage of which she had dreamed; but she had not guessed how bad it was going to be. Her husband was a negative creature, flabby of mind and body, and she did not know whether to be glad or sorry when she found he could not be a real husband to her; but life might have been just endurable with him alone. It was his father, Sohan Das, who made it intolerable. Sohan Das was cruel; the corners of his mouth were set in lines of smug evil. He never lost a chance of making money or causing pain. He licked his lips when he made her wince. She shuddered whenever she thought of his grasping cold malignity.

For most young brides in India, it is the mother-in-law who is to be feared. For Rupni, from the start, it was her father-in-law. Sohan Das was a widower; there was no other woman in the family, but he kept her to her work as well as any woman could have done, and with a malicious pleasure stopped every activity in which she found release from her surroundings. He seldom left the house, and it seemed to her that his eye was everywhere. The moment she raised her head and let the tears fill her eyes at the thought of the happy life she had led at home in Fatehpur, that grating voice would call her name and ask what she was about.

She had thought much, in those early days, of Fatehpur and how happy she had been there. Her thoughts of home were innocent then; she had remembered only the easy-going village life and the simple things that were linked with childhood. The tenants were not many, but they were all good tenants, men of long standing on their land, with hereditary rights; they came round with their rent or to borrow money and told their troubles to her father, sitting and smoking and passing the mouthpiece of the water-pipe, that bubbled slowly between the slow slurred village talk. Sitting there, a little girl behind the circle of men, Rupni would look across the street to a wall of dark red brick with the sky above it. There was a big gate through the little flat sun-warmed bricks, big enough to take a loaded cart. The frame of the gate was of wood; the posts and cross-beam were carved with figures, which they told her were Krishna and the milkmaids; they might just as well have been anyone else, they were so crudely carved, but she was pleased because it was her favourite tale. When she thought of her home that was what she remembered, the circle of white-clad peasants, the broken bubble and gurgle of the water-pipe, the carved black beam with the doves on it against the blue blue sky; and smells, the village smell of dust and straw and dung, the sweet milky breath of cattle, the rich drunken scent of boiling sugarcane, dust and straw and dung, dust and dung and straw.

They had been happy times, those of her childhood, for her father was kind and her mother wise; life had no sharp edges. And she loved her brother Puran very dearly; he was two years older than she, and she gave him a girl’s adoration; everything he did was right and wonderful. And Puran repaid her adoration with a deep love and a pride in her beauty. Indeed, everyone at Fatehpur had loved her for her sweet ways and her beauty. Yes, those had been happy days.

Those were her memories of home, and from the very beginning of her marriage she had wanted to go back so badly that at any moment of the day she might suddenly find that she was crying. But Sohan Das would not let her go for a long time. He put off the customary visit until he could only delay longer with the certainty of an open quarrel with her father. At last he had said yes, and she had been delighted, giving no thought to her inevitable return, still less dreaming of any harm during the visit; and yet it was then it had all begun, the business of Man Singh.

She had been strolling in the evening with her little sister where the crops were divided by a winding brook. There was waste land there, patches of long grass, and big tamarisk bushes, widening out down stream into a wilderness of sand and tamarisk where no crops would grow. It was cool in the evening, down there by the water, where the crops gave way to the waste land; and once the cattle had gone home you saw no one else from the village. That evening, Rupni’s little sister had met some children she knew with the herds who were moving slowly homeward in clouds of golden dust; she had turned aside to play with them and had gone back to the village. Rupni strolled on, thinking the child would follow and catch her, and so it was that she had been alone when she first met Man Singh, with his gun over his arm, looking for partridges. And after that, she had met him whenever she could.

The day after he had first loved her, on the fine sandy ground, in the deep cool shadow of the tamarisks, she had wakened to a new contentment and happiness, calm and complete. She had looked in wonder at her limbs, she had stretched luxuriously and felt them with her hands, wondering whether to other people they could possibly look the same as before, when to her they felt so changed; wondering whether all the world could see what seemed so clear to her, that now they were no longer hers, but his. The happiness had lasted for a few short weeks, calm and strange like a single golden cloud floating near the setting sun and seeming to glow with its own radiance; she had thought only of the last meeting and the next, walking the earth in a dream. And then Sohan Das, her father-in-law, had come to fetch her. He would not let her wait longer. She had screamed and cried, she had begged her father to let her stay, but he was powerless; she belonged to her husband now, and she could not explain why she did not want to go back. She could say nothing. Her father let her go; he told himself uneasily that she would soon settle down. It was only natural when a girl was first married that she should like her home best.

It was much worse after that, living in the city, far from all the happiness she had ever known. Sohan Das seemed even more malignant than before; he delighted in every cut of the lash. It could not be that he knew about Man Singh; perhaps he hated her because he knew his son would never give her a child. She would he awake on her narrow string cot thinking of Man Singh and his lean muscle, the silver play of strength along his arm. Her fingers would remember his supple back, the turn of each muscle, one in particular near his knee, remember them so vividly that when she looked at her hand she was surprised that it was not playing tenderly over the fine reddish-brown of his skin. They had been so happy together, smiling and laughing, not talking much, content to gaze and to know each other there. And now there was only absence from him, that left her sore and aching as though a part of her belly had been cut away; and the voice of Sohan Das in harsh reproof, her greasy husband’s loathed and loathsome presence, the pots and pans to be scoured with grey ashes, and the dust of the city.

On this particular afternoon, Rupni knew suddenly that she must escape. There was no decision on her part; she realised suddenly what she was going to do. Her father was dead now, and since his death she had not been allowed to go back to Fatehpur. Her brother Puran had come to fetch her once, but Sohan Das had refused to let her go and had quarrelled bitterly with Puran. He had forbidden Puran even to see her again. But now she would send him a message and make plans to get away. It was late to go to the market to buy things, but sometimes she did go late, and she would this afternoon. She said she was going out casually, as though it were not important, but she was careful not to be too casual; and to her relief no grating order followed her to stay where she was. She slipped out and walked towards the bazaar.

When she had bought some food, she found a small boy, one of the urchins who hung about hoping to earn a few copper coins by carrying home a basket of vegetables. She showed him a pair of silver earrings, round bobbles with little chains attached, light but of good workmanship. She had no money; Sohan Das saw to that; and she had no other jewels but these which she dared give away. These she never wore, because her brother Puran had given them to her, and they would not let her even mention his name or wear anything of his. Now she promised the boy one earring at once if he would take her messages, and the second when he came back with answers from Fatehpur. He asked her where the village was, and then nodded eagerly. She told him how to find her brother Puran, and then she said:

‘And when you find him, say you have a message from Ramnagar from her of whom he knows. And then say:

‘“My heart is dead within me. Come and take me away. If you do not come I shall make an end.”’

She paused and looked at the boy, and made him say the message again. Then she told him there was another message. He was to find Man Singh, and say to him:

“You and I have loved for two years now. Why do I still wait for help?”

When she was quite sure that he understood, she gave him the first earring. He slipped quickly away, and she went back to the misery of her husband’s house. Next day when she went to the bazaar her heart beat quickly and her mouth was dry. She could not find the little boy at the corner where he usually stood, and she was in despair. She imagined that he had followed her home and given the message to Sohan Das, or had been set upon by robbers and killed, or taken away by the police; but whatever had happened to him, he was lost and she was undone. But she grew a little calmer before she got back to the house, realising that he might be there next day, and that she must somehow get through the time. It never entered her head that she could have walked to the station and, with the price of her earrings, taken the tram to Fatehpur by herself. She never had travelled by herself and never thought of it.

And next day the boy was there, with a conspirator’s grin and his hand stretched out for the second earring. He brought two messages. The first was from Man Singh. It said:

‘I will see you if you come to your father’s house.’

The second was from Puran. It said:

‘I will come to Ramnagar on the second day and I will send you a message where to come.’

She questioned the boy and found that the second day meant tomorrow. The messages filled her with wild excitement. She did not stop to think ill of a lover who would not risk anything to help her; she thought only of her joy at the prospect of seeing him again. And she was sure her brother would manage it. Dear, dear Puran! He would send the message, and she would come to him and he would take her away. She had only to wait till tomorrow; but it would be a heavy task. She must behave as usual. She must not look happy or Sohan Das would try at once to find out what had given her pleasure and destroy it. She must be just as usual, but how could she when her heart was dancing at the thought of meeting Man Singh again? She went back to her husband’s house and moved about her daily work; but every time that Sohan Das looked her way, her breath came short and she thought he must have guessed. It seemed impossible he should not know what she knew.

Next day it was as bad, and as the day wore on it grew worse. Rupni found herself looking over her shoulder at every sound, and no sooner did she begin one task than she dropped it for another. She had to keep near the street and the platform in front of the house, to make sure she did not miss the message. Every time she went to the back of the house, she was in panic lest a small boy should come to the front and be caught by Sohan Das. She put off on one excuse and another her daily visit to the bazaar to buy food. Three times she left her spinning to clean the brass, but each time she left that too unfinished. After the midday meal, her husband settled grossly on a string cot on the brick platform, wearing only a loin-cloth; there was a sultry haze over the city and he felt sleepy. He dozed and grunted; she looked at him distastefully and began to clean the pots as far from him as she could. She could manage to receive the message while he was there; but the presence of Sohan Das, busy with his accounts in the little room just off the platform, was more serious. He had eyes everywhere.

Rupni sat and scoured the pots; she felt that unless an answer came, one way or the other, soon, she would be able to bear the suspense no longer. She would suddenly scream and scream, in a wild unbelieving hope that somehow, somewhere, from her cries and tears would come release from the intolerable present.

What was that? Only a waterman laying the dust. The crows busy about some unholy meal in the street by the corner rose suddenly with a squawk and flutter; a quick-trotting pony with its tiny hooded trap came round the corner but it brought no message for Rupni. A dozen times she leaned forward and drew in her breath to greet him, but sank back in despair. But suddenly there was a small boy, looking round him as though trying to find a house that he knew only by description. She called him at once:

‘Come here, little boy,’ she said, ‘has your father finished the sewing I gave him? How long he has been! Bring it and show me.’

The boy came closer, slowly and shyly. Her husband opened an eye, looked at him, grunted, closed it.

Quick and quiet Rupni said:

‘I am Rupni. Have you a message? What does Puran say?’

‘Come to the Iron Bridge now and he will take you away.’

‘Tell him I’ll try to come at once. If I don’t come soon it will be because I’ve been stopped. Tell him not to come here or they will beat me.’ All this she said quick and quiet under her breath, pretending to look at sewn work. Then she said loud:

‘But this seam is wrong! It should be so. Do you see? And you have not brought the others? Your father is slow and worthless. Go and tell him quickly that it should be done like this. And he must be quick with the others. Go, useless creature; go quickly.’

She scolded as he went. Now he had gone. She must wait; she must not give herself away. Not yet not yet. She must wait as though her going had nothing to do with the boy. Was Sohan Das looking? She risked a quick look over her shoulder; she could see nothing inside the little dark room. Wait, wait, more breathless minutes. I can’t wait any longer. I must, I must. Now.

‘I’ll go to the market now, I think. I ought to have gone sooner. Are you asleep? I shan’t be long.’

A grating voice from the inner room:

‘You’ll not go: send the servant.’

Despair and hopelessness in Rupni’s heart, blank misery; but she turned on him trying to work herself up to a fury:

‘And why not? I haven’t been out all day. Why shouldn’t I go?’

‘That’ll do. You know why not.’

It was no good. She was undone; he knew. She daren’t move if Sohan Das said no. She hung limp as a dead bird; then a sudden electric frenzy seized her nerves, ran her body stiff. She was taut for action, her weight poised on her toes, her muscles tensed, her brain blind with fury, when the cold voice said:

‘And you’re not to jump in the well. Go indoors. Go and sit down.’

For that second, she had been ready to stab them both, drown herself, strangle her own child if she had had one. Then as the rage swelled in her veins, that grating voice had quelled her, like cold water poured into a boiling saucepan, compelled her accustomed obedience. She was limp and hopeless once more. She went indoors.

At the Iron Bridge where he had told her to meet him, Puran waited. He too thought of their childhood and everything to do with it. He knew how much Rupni wanted to go home. He could understand it, because he loved their home himself, and he knew that Rupni loved him and her mother. He did not know about Man Singh; he was a dreamer, passive, but with deep emotions; his was not the alert noticing mind, and he had seen nothing himself. Faint wisps of rumour had begun to curl mistily over the village when Rupni had been there, but they had not reached Puran for no one had dared to speak to him; and now they had for the time being dispersed. No, his thoughts were of Sohan Das; and it was difficult to keep calm when he thought of Sohan Das, a man who would forbid a girl to go home, who would beat her if she saw her own brother; it was unspeakable. And his cold sneering words at their last meeting. Then he had struck her. He had told her to go in brutal, humiliating words, and for a second she had hesitated, looking at Puran for help, her eyes full of tears. Then Sohan Das had picked up a cane and struck her. His beautiful Rupni whom everyone loved. Puran would have killed him if his arms had not been seized by two stout debtors who had been brought there for the purpose. When he remembered that blow with a cane, Puran felt the blood mount to his brain and choke him; for a moment he was dizzy with hate; he could see nothing but a red mist as if he had been looking at the sun. Then the fit passed; he was calm again; he thought with affection of his beautiful sister and of how happy he would make her at home.

The little boy came back. He had found Rupni and given his message and soon she would be here. Puran settled down to wait. He waited quietly and patiently without much thought, not worrying about the future nor of what he would do if she did not come. He did not jump at every sound nor think every woman was his sister, as she would have done in his place. He knew he must wait and so he waited. Twice he asked the time of passers-by.

When an hour had passed he sent the boy again. It was perhaps half an hour before he was back a second time, breathless from running, frightened. When he had come to the house, shyly and cautiously, step by step, like a wild deer coming to something strange, blowing through its nostrils, there had only been Sohan Das on the platform. He had seen the boy and called to him to come nearer, but something in his voice had frightened the child.

‘He would have taken me inside and killed me!’

That was what he thought, and so he had run back as quickly as he could. Now he looked anxiously at Puran, who stood locked and rigid in the grip of hysterical hate. For a whole minute he could not see nor hear, only a sickening red before the eyes, a humming in the head, as though every drop of blood in his body was beating in his distended brain. Hate mastered and sickened him. Then swimming back to life again, glimmering slowly up through green water to the light, he was calm. He said:

‘His time has come. And my time has come too.’

Then he sat down and thought of what he must do. Before he made his plans, he did for a brief moment think of the home to which he knew he must say goodbye. Leaving it was part of what he was going to do; he knew his time had come. But he spared one glance of regret for the place and the life he loved; he did not think separately of all that went to make them up, but he did for the space of three heart beats see, hear, smell, a composite picture to which sights, sound and scent contributed; the oxen slowly circling to tread the corn; the women throwing handfuls of broken grain against a cloth to winnow away the chaff in the hot winds of April; the beam over the gate opposite his house against the blue blue sky; the groan of the stone quern grinding the flour; the twang of the cord as the cotton was pulled from the pod; smoke and the smell of cattle and boiling sugar; his friends moving in a circle round the fire at the spring festival. He looked at it and put it away; he knew what he had to do.

He took the boy with him to a smith. He bought a short curved sword, hardly more than a long knife; he felt its edge and asked for it to be sharpened. The smith glanced at the sky and said that the light was fading; he could hardly do it tonight. But Puran urged him to do what he could at once. When darkness began to creep along the narrow street, he took the sword and led the child to the railway station. Here he washed himself all over at a pump; and then rubbed oil on all his limbs, so that the smooth skin shone like silk. He was wearing nothing but a loin-cloth, but he wrapped a loose sheet over his body before eating. The food he had ordered was a treat for the boy, saffron-tinted rice, unleavened wheaten bread, spiced vegetable stew, spiced curds, with sweets to follow, the round sweet like a powdered damson that is called the rose plum, curly golden twists of sugar, delicate sweets of curded milk and honey. Then when they had washed their mouths, they smoked cigarettes slowly and luxuriously.

Late in the evening, Puran stood up. He said he was going to a wrestling-match, and taking the sword in his hand under the sheet, told the boy to stay where he was till his return. He walked quickly through the streets to the house that Sohan Das had forbidden him to enter again. He did not have to disobey that prohibition, for he found his enemy sleeping on the platform in the open. He slashed and slashed with the short curved sword.

Screams of fear and pain woke Rupni and her husband, sleeping on a veranda at the back. They hurried through the house to find Sohan Das fallen off the cot; his belly was sliced open by half a dozen cuts and his bowels were tumbling out. He had breath before he died to say that Puran had killed him. Neighbours collected; they went running for the police.

Puran had thrown aside the sheet to do his work. He ran away down the lane when it was done. A neighbour sleeping in the open on a string cot woke at the screams, and sat up to see him run past only a yard away. The moonlight glittered on his oiled skin, on the white of his eye, on the weapon in his hand. He did not run far. When he was out of the lane, he began to walk. He knew that the time had come as much for him as for Sohan Das; it made no difference whether he ran or walked. He threw away the sword, and walked quietly and composedly through the silent streets, where the houses threw black shadows in the silver moonlight on the bodies of the sleepers. At the railway station, he woke the boy, who asked why there was blood on his hands and arms. Puran said simply that he had done for Sohan Das. He took a ticket to Fatehpur, and he and the boy travelled there in silence. The telegraph did its work and, when they reached the station for home, they looked out to see the scarlet turbans of the police waiting for Puran.

When the trial was over, when Puran had been hanged for his deliberate, planned murder, Rupni sat again on the platform before her husband’s house, cleaning the brass pots after the midday meal. Her heart was cold and sad. There was nothing any more for which she could hope. At first, there had been some little hope to cheer her, to help her through the shock of what she had seen that night. There had been hope, unreasoning and baseless but real to her, that Puran would be reprieved or would escape, that they would see how good he was and let him go. And then, with Sohan Das no longer there to stop her, the way would be open to Man Singh. But that hope was killed before Puran died. She had had to give evidence and there outside the court she had seen him. Man Singh had come to hear the news. She had seen his tall head and the Rajput turban above the crowd. Her heart leapt; her body turned to water; she wanted to cry out to him. Then he had seen her. He had turned away at once, and the look on his face had been one of distaste and fear. When she saw that look, her hope turned to despair. She knew now that he did not want her any longer.

And so as she cleaned the brass her heart was cold and sad. She had lost her dear, dear Puran; and although the way was open for her to go, because her husband was not a man at all and could not stop her, there was nowhere to go. Puran had known that his time had come; for Rupni there was no hope until her time should come as well.

Better Be with the Dead

The Director of Plans looked round at the circle of tired faces. He was talking to his own staff, as he did every morning before the day’s work began. He said:

‘I don’t know how much sleep any of you have had for the last three nights. I’ve averaged about two hours, and I should think everyone’s in much the same state. And in this climate and at this time of year, that’s apt to fray one’s temper and make one lose a sense of proportion and a sense of humour. We’ve got a meeting this afternoon to discuss Anchovy, with representatives of almost every branch or directorate in this headquarters. And they’ll raise objections and difficulties. They’ve each been working at their own little bit, and they all want it to be perfect. Someone will say there aren’t enough mules, and someone else will say there aren’t enough laundries or clerks or delousing equipment. We’re the people who’ve got to balance all those little points and consider whether any of them are fatal to the operation. And because we’ve been working at little bits of the thing ourselves, even we, after three such days and nights as we’ve had, are apt to get things out of proportion. So if you’ll bear with me, I’ll go over the arguments in favour, just to remind us all of the broad picture.’

He paused. The fans whirred, and one that needed adjustment rattled in an irregular rhythm. The men round the long table moved and leaned forward, their chairs squawking on the concrete floor. The senior airman mopped his brow; the day had not reached its full heat, but he was a large man of a ruddy countenance, and it was five months since he had last been able to say that he was not sweating. The Director went on deliberately:

‘Anchovy is the capture of Goat Island. It can only be carried out between the two monsoons, because the beaches are exposed and during the monsoon the surf is too heavy to get vehicles and tanks ashore. If the decision is taken in the next three days, we could do it between the two monsoons this autumn. If the decision is not taken now, there won’t be time to mount the operation this year, and we shall have to wait till the next favourable period, in the spring.

‘As you know, it’s been decided to use that spring period to carry out Octopus, the assault on Banana Island. That is a bigger affair altogether; there’s a much stronger garrison than on Goat Island and the enemy will do all he can to keep us out of it because it opens the way into the heart of Burma. The argument against Anchovy, the only argument which has any validity, is that it points clearly to Octopus and gives away our intentions. But the enemy must realise that there would be much to be said for doing Anchovy anyhow, even if we weren’t going on to do Octopus, so Anchovy doesn’t make him certain of our intentions. And in any case he must defend Banana Island with all his strength; he can’t afford to neglect it. It is so immensely important to him. We’re all agreed therefore that to do Anchovy wouldn’t really make him put into Banana Island anything that wouldn’t have gone there anyhow. It has been argued that casualties in landing-craft in the little operation might be so heavy as to rule out the big one; but, based on Mediterranean experience of landing-craft casualties, and even adding a substantial margin, we’ve got enough in hand to do both. And there is a clear three months in between for maintenance and repairs.

‘On the positive side, the arguments in favour of Anchovy are overwhelming. The scale of opposition is not heavy and everyone agrees that operationally it’s feasible. Once we get Goat Island, we are a hundred miles nearer to Banana; we can make fighter strips in two months, and then we can operate land-based fighter aircraft when we do Octopus. You all know the difference that will make to the air cover, as opposed to relying entirely on carrier-borne fighters. They’re getting faster every day, but naval aircraft are still slower than land fighters. That’s the big point. With the air support we could get from Goat Island we can make a big reduction in the casualties in Octopus. That’s the thing we must never lose sight of.

‘There are other advantages too. We train everyone concerned in mounting an operation, in a way that no exercises could possibly do. We send morale up sky-high; men are sick of inaction and longing to get at the Jap and finish him. And a successful operation like this—and it will be successful—will show the Jap the tide has turned and lower his morale. And there’s one other point. We don’t think much, as I’ve said, of the idea that this will tell the enemy we’re going to do Octopus. He’s bound to assume we are in any case and act as though he knew it. And it may help to conceal the actual day. From the creeks on Goat Island, craft can reach Banana Island in a few hours’ steaming, under cover of darkness. If they have to sail from any point we now hold, they must use the daylight of the day before and are bound to be seen from the air. In other words, we don’t sacrifice strategic surprise by Anchovy, and we may gain tactical surprise.

‘Those are the arguments in favour of Anchovy. We’ve got to put them across and convince everyone of the importance of taking the decision now. We mustn’t let ourselves be deflected by pedantry, but we must be patient with pedantry. We shall be told that there must be so many dental chairs with a force this size, and we’re two short, so we can’t do the operation; but we mustn’t lose our temper, though God knows it’s hard. We must get general agreement quickly. Pedantry wouldn’t matter if we had infinite time; the Chief would always over-rule it in the end. It’s delay that’s the danger, and loss of temper may cause delay. And delay will cost men’s lives. Some of the men killed who needn’t have been killed may be our friends; they may even be ourselves; what perhaps is even more important is that we are a small nation and can’t afford to waste lives. We can’t fight without spending lives; but we mustn’t waste them. Thank you.’

The chairs squawked again, and the Director was alone with his first-grade staff officer. The Director was young by modern military standards, that is to say, some fifteen years older than Alexander at the battle of Issus, four years older than Wellesley at Assaye. He was young, brilliant, intolerant; he had learnt to curb his intolerance to get his ends, but it was always there. He turned to his staff officer.

‘Tell me, Colin, did I belly-ache too much?’ he asked. ‘I hate to sermonise; it sounds smug, and I think I hate smugness more than anything in the world. But I do feel it’s so terribly important to remember what we’re doing here and what it really means. It’s so easy to forget, if you haven’t seen the results, but I have. I’ve seen dead men hanging on the wire who might have been saved by better planning. Anything is better than to wake up in the night, after the war, and know that men have died because I didn’t take the trouble; because out of politeness I didn’t speak up and say what I thought; because I went out to a date when I might have been mastering facts that would have made just the difference. Better anything than that.’

Colin nodded. He said:

‘Better anything than that.

Better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace.’

‘That’s very apt. Where does it come from?’

‘Macbeth. I’ve often thought of it, being on the shelf as I am. No, I don’t think you sermonised too much, John, and I don t think anyone else would think so. I’m sure you’re right and we do need to be reminded now and then of what we’re doing, and the value of it. It’s a discouraging, frustrating business, working in a big headquarters; and when you’re calling on people for the degree of effort that you are, the more warm and human you are about it, the better. Or so I think.

‘Thank you. Now about this afternoon’s meeting. We shall dispose quite easily of the petty pedantries, the staff-table experts, the high priests of the war establishment, the people who don’t know how to improvise. The movements side is complicated, but we’ve got it settled satisfactorily in advance and they won’t go back on what they’ve said; sea transport and the sailors are people you can do business with. They want to help, and they will. The one obstacle that will cause delay is of course . . .’

‘Personalities,’ said Colin. ‘Two survivals from the Pleistocene age. Two men who ought not to be where they are.’

‘Exactly,’ said John, ‘and yet you know, militarily, they’re both all right. They have the experience, they have the brains, both of them. Alston is brilliant, a perfect organising brain. Set him down in a vacuum, tell him to organise an industry for performing fleas, and he’d see the whole thing in his mind, the training schools and their staff, the recruiting parties, the intake that would be needed to the schools, the output of trained fleas to the touring circuses. It would be a masterpiece.’

‘But it’s as men they both fail,’ said Colin. ‘They’re both petty-souled. They wake up in the morning, and each of them wonders what the day will bring for him. And only after that does he think whether what he’s doing will help the war.’

‘Yes, we need a psychiatrist for senior officers. Never mind, we must be psychiatrists ourselves, just as we have to be everything else. Now what line will these two take this afternoon?’

‘Alston will let us unfold the plan, and then he’ll make a very long and able speech. He’ll say that though he’s well aware of the brilliance of the General Staff, even the most brilliant plans depend on the administrative arrangements. And since he and his staff will be responsible for most of the administrative side, it will require very careful examination. And when we say it’s had very careful examination, and we’ve consulted his staff at every stage, he will say with the air of one talking to the very young that he’s afraid he cannot take on trust the opinion of junior officers. The responsibility is his and he must look into it himself. And of course, he’s quite right. But his staff ought to have consulted him throughout and given us his opinions; and I’ve no doubt that actually they tried their best to do just that, but he wouldn’t give his opinions till he could do it with a splash.’

‘And Nash, who ought to be backing us up, will take evasive action, and look at me disapprovingly and say that of course General Alston must be given a chance to examine the administrative implications. And our three days will be gone.’

‘I wonder how we could handle it. Do you think it would help if you went and talked to Alston beforehand?’

‘I know it wouldn’t. I’ve tried that. No, he’s impervious to soft soap from me.’

‘You might get Nash to see him.’

‘No use. He’s terrified of a quarrel. He believes you get promotion by never quarrelling. And so far it’s worked very well. No, Colin, our immediate superiors have not got our confidence. There’s only one thing I can do. And I’m not sure if I can do that.’

‘I can’t think of anything.’

‘It isn’t cricket, it’s un-English, it’s unmilitary, it’s the sort of thing I was kicked for at my prep school. But in a very guarded way I shall speak to the Chief. I think I can see an opening, and if I do, I shall say that our proposals are being examined again by the administrative side; but I shall add something to the effect that I’m not quite certain that I’ve made myself entirely clear to General Alston on the need for speed.’

‘And he’ll apply the spur. It may work. It won’t make things any easier for next time, of course.’

‘One of us may have been moved, he or I. I hope I am. Oh, Colin, what wouldn’t I give to get command of my battalion in time for Octopus! To get away from this and be a real soldier again!’

‘Perhaps you will, but I don’t know what we should do without you here. I really don’t, John.’

Colin stood up. He resumed his official position as subordinate to John, who was ten years his junior, and said:

‘I’m going over to Q about the loading tables now, sir.’

As he went, he thought of John rather anxiously. He himself had retired from the army before the war, and now as a re-employed officer, unfit for operational command, he could not help feeling guilty and miserable under the responsibility of planning battles in which other men would be killed. He had gone to bed anxiously debating a point already settled, or going over the arguments to make sure that every possibility had been considered; he had fallen asleep and woken with the words he had quoted from Macbeth on the borders of his mind, floating into consciousness for a moment and then fading back into the mist, giving place to things sharper and more edgy, war equipment tables or tank transporters. They swam into the clear space now:

Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace.

For Colin himself it was perhaps unreasonable, but certainly understandable, to have such thoughts as that; but for John it was another matter. He had fought in France and in the desert; he would probably fight again. He was a brigadier now, but he would go back to command a battalion soon, if he was lucky. He is under a strain, of course, thought Colin; the hours he works, this climate, are a strain bound to tell on anyone. But the feeling must have been there before, for the strain to bring it out. Some careless jibe at staff officers sitting in security had probably planted a barb which worked steadily deeper into the flesh. I must try to persuade him to take a few days off; but God knows when. It won’t be possible till Anchovy’s over.

The meeting that afternoon went as they had known it would. Difficulties were pointed out and one by one overcome. The single-line railway leading to the port from which most of the ships and craft would sail would not take all the stores that would be needed; but there was an alternative route by river and canal with a last short stage by motor transport. This could be worked up if one more transport company could be found. And that could probably be done. There seemed no prospect of getting all the material that would be needed for the fighter-strips if they were to be built on orthodox lines; but there was some new surfacing material that was lighter and would last for six months, until after Octopus, and this could be brought in quickly when the island was taken. Docks operating companies, and shipping to bring in anti-aircraft guns to protect the strips; cattle conducting sections to provide fresh meat; field butcheries, field bakeries, bales of metal track to be unrolled as the landing-craft beached to provide a path for tanks and vehicles over the sand; beach masters; beach parties; loud hailers; it went on steadily in a flood of detail.

Colin was not personally concerned with all of this; he had his own subjects, though he had to keep generally in touch with all that happened. He could relax his attention when the matter in hand was not his direct responsibility, and admire detachedly John’s patience, through which only an occasional glow of the fire within was allowed to appear, his mastery of detail, his firm purpose that every obstacle should be overcome. During such a moment of relaxed attention, as Colin was listening with half his mind to a problem about the rapid landing of petrol and oil, he heard behind the voices a flutter of wings, and saw a pigeon perch in the clerestory window. It was a blue rock-pigeon. Colin, not a bird-watcher, saw its beauty as if for the first time, the smoky blue of the body plumage, which his memory told him would be unbelievably fine, soft yet firm, warm, alive; he almost felt the pulsing body in his hand; he saw the lively his of the burnished neck and breast, iridescent bronze and green; ruby eyes, pink bill, pink feet, the warm pink of coral. He saw its beauty for the first time, and was conscious of its vitality as it stood in the opening, turning its head this way and that with quick movements, shining, gleaming with life. The men below were not talking of live things; they were thinking of tons per day, train-paths, man-hours; abstractions wildly remote from humanity. They were not even seeing the mountains of petrol-cases, shells, cartridges, tinned beef, corn, soap, bandages, cigarettes, medicines, chocolate, that would make those tons a day. Their thoughts were away from the world of men, lost in mathematics. And yet their thoughts, their life, the purpose that drove them to war, seemed to Colin one with the glancing glittering life in the blue and bronze pigeon in the window. The same life that they were planning to squander on the wire of beach defences; the same life that made men give up their life rather than submit to something their will did not recognise as its own. But could one go a stage further, and feel a fatherly care looking after that bird in the egg, on its first faltering flight, guiding it to food, preserving it from hawks? One of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

Colin came back with a jerk to the sound of Alston’s voice beginning his speech with just those silky phrases about the General Staff that they had foreseen. A ridiculous inferiority complex, Colin thought, a feeling that somehow it is socially better to be on the operations staff. The voice went on, with irritating precision, marshalling detail with exactitude, but saying always: I have not expressed my views. I must check this. I must say what I think. Further examination. Delay.

John began to explain the time factor. There was a period of only about a month to six weeks during which it was reasonably certain that the surf would permit the landing. Within that six weeks, there were two shorter periods a month apart, of about three days each, during which the moon and the tides would be right. It was already too late for the first. Only the second remained. If the assault was to take place within those three days, the decision had to be taken now. Force commanders had to be appointed; detailed planning to begin; assault ships and assault craft sailed to the little port from which the operation would be mounted; vehicles to be waterproofed; stores to be piled up; a thousand things to be done.

Alston, at his silkiest, was well aware of all these necessities, but that did not mean that he could shirk his own responsibilities and take on trust the opinions of very junior officers. His own staff looked gloomy; they had done their best to express his views throughout the ten days of discussion that had gone before this meeting. And, Alston continued, going over to the offensive, how was it that he was asked to take a decision of such magnitude at such short notice? Why was it necessary to plan in a wild rush, instead of in dignified deliberation, which would ensure the best results?

It should have been Nash, John’s superior, who answered this question; but he was silent. John spoke again. The big thing had been Octopus, the assault on the larger island to which Anchovy was a preliminary. They had concentrated all their work on that, because until that operation had been approved there had been virtually no naval resources in the shape of landing-craft and assault ships. And without ships, it was no use thinking of Anchovy. The moment it was known that the ships were coming, and would be in the theatre in time for Anchovy as well, work had begun.

Alston said that although perhaps it had been inevitable, it was regrettable that he should be rushed into making a hasty examination of a problem of such importance. He spoke as though he had only just heard of it, and his staff had not been working on it for ten days and most of ten nights. It was essential he should look at the whole plan again.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘we cannot afford to make mistakes. Men’s lives may depend on it.’

Colin heard John’s intake of breath, saw him wince. He knew what was coming next. Nash was not going to cross the path of Alston, a notorious man-eater. He began to say that he felt General Alston must be given every opportunity to examine the plan, and it was essential he should not be rushed. Colin leaned back in his chair. The pigeon was still peering and preening in the window. It cocked its head and looked at the men below with one ruby eye; then with a clatter of wings it was gone. Colin sighed.

The chairs squawked on the floor; the meeting was over. John looked at Colin.

‘We’ve lost the first round,’ he said, ‘but I’ve already begun the process of queering the referee. I saw the Chief this morning; he knows how important this is. I only saw him for a moment, but he asked me how things were going, and I told him it would all depend on this afternoon’s meeting. He told me to see him after it. So I shall go and tell him just what has happened. And I think, I venture to think, that Master Alston will be expedited.’

He was. By the following afternoon he signified his general concurrence in the views his staff had already expressed. John, Colin and the other planners sat up half the night, revising their plan, bringing their tables up to date, scanning every line they had written in the light of the last two days. At two in the morning, Colin screwed up his pen and handed the last sheet to the secretary. He knew the paper was good. The logic marched relentlessly. Each paragraph was a single precise sentence, driving to its point like a bullet to the centre of a target. Every thought was backed by figures. There were no loose ends.

‘And now we can go home for a lovely night’s rest,’ he said. ‘All but the secretaries and typists, who will just have time for a bath and breakfast before the nine o’clock meeting. But after all, they’re used to it.’

The Commander-in-Chief held a final meeting with the heads of services to approve of the plan. When John came out, he looked haggard, his face the white of a fish’s belly, but he was happy. He went straight to Colin.

‘It’s on,’ he said. ‘Everything approved. We have to get the sanction of the Chiefs of Staff, of course, but we don’t want any resources from outside the theatre. We’d told them already that we were thinking about it, and they liked the idea. It’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll agree.’

Colin smiled at him.

‘You’ve worked for it,’ he said. ‘You deserve to be Force Commander. Let’s shut up shop early tonight, celebrate a bit, and then sleep for fourteen hours. Here are some signals. I haven’t looked at them yet.’

John nodded. He picked up the pile of papers, and flicked through them quickly. The first few were unimportant. Then he said:

Colin! Have you seen this? I’ve got command of my own battalion! We’ll be in Octopus!’

He was delighted. Colin congratulated him, with a pang at his heart. He would lose a friend; he must start again and teach someone else; but he was glad for John’s sake.

John wanted to go out and tell everyone he knew, but he forced himself to sit down and go through the remaining papers. He stopped at one, read it through carefully a second time, and showed it to Colin.

Colin read the signal. It was from the Chiefs of Staff. It said that things were not going as fast in the Mediterranean as had been hoped. It was essential to finish Germany first before turning on Japan with all the allied strength. It had therefore been decided to undertake an additional operation in the Mediterranean, for which all the naval resources in the eastern theatre were required. They were to be sailed at once; they would be back in time for Octopus, but all thoughts of Anchovy must be forgotten. The disadvantages of undertaking Octopus without Anchovy were recognised and must be accepted.

‘It’s funny, really, ‘John said. ‘I wonder if I’ll be one of the chaps killed in Octopus because we haven’t got land-based fighters. That would be funnier still.’

The decision had been taken far away by three men in London, men who had to think of assault brigades and follow-up divisions, squadrons of aircraft, flotillas of landing-craft and destroyers. No pigeon came into the big gloomy room with the high ceiling, the long polished table; pigeons had to be carefully shut out, and the mind could not be permitted to stray from a committee-room to think of the vigour of life or the fall of a sparrow. For those three, it would have been a betrayal of the living to think of the dead whom they had sent to peace, the men hanging on the wire.

‘They’re quite right,’ said Colin. ‘We must finish Germany first.’

John went to command his battalion, and a new Director of Plans took his place. Six months later, D-day for Octopus arrived. News came through to G.H.Q. fragmentarily, but by the middle of the morning it was known that the assault had been successful; the assault beaches and an area beyond were firmly held. Vehicles, tanks, men, guns, stores, were pouring ashore. But the landing had been expensive. It had taken some time for the naval fighters to establish complete air supremacy. Enemy aircraft had been able to attack the troops on the beaches. There had been craft sunk by coastal batteries which the naval gunfire had not been able to find because enemy fighters had kept our aircraft away.

Details of the casualties on the beaches came in more slowly still. But two days after the assault an airman arrived who had been in Banana Island when the first airfield was taken. He had heard someone say that the commanding officer of John’s battalion had been killed. He did not know his name. Then from another source came the same story.

Colin went about his work. He went to meetings; he talked to Q about loading tables, to Staff Duties about war establishments. But the moment he relaxed the effort he made to do these things, he thought of John hanging on the wire, John shapeless and evil-smelling, with maggots crawling about his nose. He remembered the things John had wanted to do, the kind of life he had hoped for, sometimes spoken of. Rides on the downs in Wiltshire, walks over the stubble in the autumn; teaching his sons to ride, giving them books, playing with them and watching them start to think; a garden, a house of his own. He had been an exile and a wanderer too long; he wanted a home. He wanted England very much. And as soon as he had made a home, he was going to plan for England, to turn to peaceful ends the knowledge he had learnt in war. Now he was dead, hanging on the wire; and his widow would bring up his two sons by herself.

Then came fresh news. John had been found. A bomb had fallen very near him, and he had been buried in rubble. He had been picked up early and taken to a field dressing-station, but they could not identify him. He had lost his identification disc because he had lost his hand. They had saved his life by blood transfusion and the strange drugs of modern knowledge, but he had lost his right arm and one leg was crippled beyond repair. And the doctors were afraid that some deeper injury, perhaps to his spine or brain, was also beyond their art.

They brought him back to life, and when he was at a base hospital and was allowed to see visitors, Colin went to see him. The nurse said:

‘He’s a very good patient; he doesn’t want anything.’

It was quite true. He smiled gently and answered questions, but he did not much want to get out of hospital, to see his wife, to go to England. He did not much want anything. He saw the look on Colin’s face. He said:

‘Don’t worry about me, Colin. I’m quite happy. Really, I am; I’m not just being brave. I used always to be wanting to do something I wasn’t doing; I’m not sure that I was very happy. Now I don’t want anything much, and I’m quite happy. I’m at peace.’

The phrase must have reminded him of Colin’s lines from Macbeth, for he repeated them slowly, and then he said.

‘All the same, perhaps you’re right. Better be with the dead. Perhaps it would be better. But I don’t much mind either way.’

Le Cafard

David reached the little Breton fishing town where he was planning to spend his holiday at the convenient hour of half past five in the afternoon. This gave him time to go to his quarters for the night, unpack his belongings rather slowly and carefully, and find his way to the bar for an aperitif. There was no feeling that he ought to go and explore the town that evening before dinner, as there might have been if he had arrived an hour earlier; and this was important, for David wanted to be lazy. He meant to get away from the habit of feeling that he ought always to be busy about something and the even worse habit of looking at his watch and allowing himself just so long for whatever he was doing. Both had been necessary in the years when he had been building up his practice, but they had grown too strong; he could not drink a glass of beer in a country inn now without that quick look at his wrist and the thought that he could spare just five minutes. He had forgotten how to relax and go to meet the simple pleasures of life; his mind was always strung and tense.

And he of all men needed to have time on his side, time as his ally with gentle fingers to heal sore places, time as his own inner counsellor to guide him in a wise approach to the problem of each twisted mind. So he had prescribed a holiday for himself, as he would for one of his neurotic patients; and he had advised himself to start it with a conscious effort to forget the clock. But in spite of his own advice, he found himself deciding as he went into his bedroom that an hour would do for unpacking, half an hour for the aperitif, dinner at half past seven.

There were two hotels in the town, neither of them very pretentious, but David’s the less so. It was an old inn, the Taverne de la Porte, to which an annexe had been built on with electric light and bathrooms. The bar was in the old tavern, but it had been modified with success. You saw smoky beamed shadows, huge barrels and an old wine-stained wooden bar; but the front had been opened up and there was a sprinkling of little tables and chairs, some in the old bar, some under an awning, before you came to the cobbled street, the low wall, the masts reflected in the clear mirror of the harbour. David liked it at once; he went out and leaned over the wall above the harbour, enjoying the crying of the gulls and the stillness of the water in the evening light. He came in, got a drink from the bar and took it to a table from which he could see the craft in the harbour and the sea where it melted into the sky beyond the jetty, and at the same time watch the bar and the people who used it.

He was rather early, and there were not many people yet; a few local bourgeois, each sitting in that silent saurian contemplation of a tiny coloured glass that seems the chief recreation of their black-coated kind; a plump fair French girl and her very recently married husband amorous in a corner; two artists deep in technicalities and lavish of gesture at the bar. David was disappointed; he had expected more people. He could not look at the boats in the harbour for ever, and the restless habit of energy began to assert itself. He was not used to leisure. Time was passing slowly and boredom was creeping near, a boredom he had forgotten in the quick rush of London events. He stood up and went to find the dining-room.

This was in the newly built annexe, a long room, with a smell of cooking, sparsely decorated, comfortless and suburban; it was filling up with the people staying in the hotel, fat French couples ponderously waiting for food, pigtailed children, a few couples of decorous grey English, parson or schoolmaster on holiday. David felt an immediate wave of fresh boredom and misery. The head-waiter appeared by his side. David asked if he could dine in the café looking over the harbour, and backed his request substantially. Enthusiastic agreement; he was back at once in the café by the old wine-stained bar, beneath the barrels, and soon he was sipping the first glass of a bottle of Burgundy. He felt more cheerful when the soup arrived, thick vegetable soup in a thick bowl, standing on a thick plate; the feel of the coarse, slightly damp napkin was full of memories. The good middle-class cookery of France; the faint savour of garlic; the worn table-knives, sharpened so long that they tapered from their original shape; the coffee strong with chicory; all helped to call back other holidays and to dispel the cloud that had approached when he saw the dining-room. And the bar began to fill; local people, and also foreigners, painters most of them, David guessed, for the place was a haunt of artists who loved its black rocks, green seas and the red sails of the fishing-boats. As the wine glowed within him, David began to feel that he would make friends here, and that already he was beginning to be happy.

He had finished dinner and was considering the question of brandy when a couple came in from the cobbled water-front who at once took his eye and his attention. The place was crowded now, and they had to thread their way carefully between the tables. They passed David’s table and reached the bar close by. They were both tall, both of striking appearance, the woman more obviously but the man none the less a compelling personality when you studied him. The woman was fair, her skin browned by the sun to a warm honey colour, and her hair too the colour of honey except for a lock in front that was a paler, more vivid gold. She was wearing slacks and a loose coat, of linen like the red Breton sail-cloth, over a skirt of a dull, creamy yellow; the clothes suited her slim figure and the easy grace of her walk. She moved like a woman used to being admired. The man wore neither hat nor coat, but a grey woollen shirt open at the neck, and well-cut grey flannel trousers. He too was fair, of a grizzled fairness with no outstanding colour in hair or skin or eyes; but his face was striking because of its shape, a long craggy face, thoughtful, opinionated, self-centred, but capable of passion, David would have guessed.

When they reached the bar, the man ordered drinks and handed one to the woman. She moved it from her to one side and then turned away from her companion, letting her gaze sweep slowly round the room, turning till she had her back to the bar, on which she rested her elbows, letting them take her weight, while she glanced for a moment at her feet and carelessly crossed her rope-soled sandals. Then she looked again to her left, away from her companion, and began to talk, with a rather bored indifferent air, to the man next to her at the bar, one whom David had already set down as a painter.

David’s analytical mind began to consider possibilities about her. She was a woman used to admiration; she did not look as though she had a career of her own. She had turned away from her companion as soon as she reasonably could; was it to look for someone else? For it was an uncommon gesture in a public place; at a private party she might have been expected to leave a husband, if he was a husband, and mix with other people at once, but not in such a place as this. It might of course be that she was not looking for anyone in particular but was simply bored with her escort; but he did not look the sort of man with whom a woman would be bored, at any rate permanently. And another possibility was that her relations with him were still fluid; they were still perhaps in the stage of settling down, of mutual appraisement; there were still perhaps defences and reservations; and in that case it might be that she was deliberately turning away to conceal the extent to which she had already surrendered.

David realised that the waiter was by his side; he ordered his brandy, feeling that he had perhaps been a trifle ridiculous in his surmises. The woman in the sail-coloured suit finished her conversation with the man on her left and her survey of the occupants of the bar. She turned back to her companion and suggested finding a seat. He said:

‘There doesn’t seem to be an empty table.’

They were so close that David could not help hearing. He stood up and said:

‘Won’t you join me? I feel rather selfish with a whole table to myself.’

They thanked him and sat down. The man in the grey shirt said:

‘You’ve just arrived? We come here fairly often in the evenings, and I don’t think I’ve seen you before.’

David explained that it was his first evening, and that he had never been to the little port before, but had heard of it from an artist friend. He asked if the man in grey lived there permanently.

‘No, but we come here most summers. We have a cottage, it’s cheap, and it suits us. I can work here.’

The woman sat silent, but she looked at David with interest. Her eyes were grey, with a hint of hazel, like clear running water in a country of limestone moors, clear water with a touch of peat over clean grey stone. She was very lovely. David noticed a wedding ring, and her companion’s use of the word we, and decided that his third theory was disposed of; she must either be bored or have been looking for someone else. He said to the man:

‘Are you a painter?’

‘No. I write stories.’ The man in grey was not communicative, the statement was curt and final, but David refused to be put off. The waiter brought brandy, and after a slight wrangle David ordered more for his two companions. Then he asked:

‘What kind of stories do you write?’

It had emerged in the course of the altercation about the brandy that the tall man’s name was Renwick, and he spoke to his wife as Gilda. Now he suddenly thawed. David, experienced in such states of mind, felt that Renwick liked talking about himself but was guarded by barriers of shyness and mistrust, which he would not lower unless he was sure he had the right audience. Renwick said:

‘Really, there are only two kinds of story, the kind you force yourself to write for money, and the kind that write themselves. I write so many a month for magazines, all to one pattern. They’re all the same. They bore me profoundly; but they bring in enough to keep us.’

‘But it’s the others I’m interested in,’ said David, ‘the kind that write themselves. What exactly do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that the way they start and grow and form themselves in the mind seems to be a process over which one has no control. Of course, you still have to make the effort to sit down at a desk and put them on paper. But apart from that, they come of themselves. You hear a phrase in a railway carriage, you see a woman’s gesture in the bar of a place like this; sometimes even it may be a dream, or you wake with a phrase on your lips. That’s the seed. You leave it alone and let it germinate. You may have several such seeds in little red plant pots, with glass bells over them, all growing up in your mind at the same time. And suddenly one of them flowers and blossoms; or you see how several of them can be combined into one flower-bed. But you can’t force them to grow. All you can do is to provide suitable ground and wait for the seed to fall.’

‘And by suitable ground you mean exactly what?’

‘A mental attitude, as much as anything. Readiness to recognise the seed when it does fall. Receptiveness, I suppose, is all I mean. But of course it’s more likely to grow if you are in certain places and certain kinds of company.

‘I should have thought that would have made a tremendous difference,’ said David. ‘In a chartered accountant’s office, for instance, if you worked there all day and went home to Surbiton every evening, I should think you’d find that not much seed would fall, as compared with, say, a place like this, where there are many people with leisure and ideas.’

‘Perhaps not much would grow, but you’ve got the wrong reason. It would be because the environment gave one the wrong mental outlook and one got bored and failed to be receptive. The actual seed, the magic phrase or gesture, you might just as likely hear or see on your suburban train as here. It would fall but it might not grow. The advantage of this place for me is that I don’t get le cafard so often as in other places.’

Gilda spoke for the first time. Her voice was deep and amused. She said:

‘That’s the big enemy. When he isn’t thinking about stories he’s thinking about le cafard.’

Renwick’s look said:

‘But I think about you too.’

But it did not say so to her; it was a soliloquy to himself, and she did not see it. She was playing with the stem of her brandy glass and looking at her fingers; long brown, shapely fingers.

David knew very well that le cafard was not the sort of thing he ought to be talking or thinking about on a holiday, but his interest in his profession was too strong, and he said:

‘Tell me more. What exactly does le cafard mean to you, and when do you get it, and what do you do about it?’

‘If you’re really interested . . .’ said Renwick, and seeing that David was, he continued: ‘What I mean is something between boredom and depression, or perhaps I should say a kind of self-distrust and anxiety about one’s own value. A state of utter misery, when nothing seems worth doing. Sometimes it takes the form of remorse, not so much for anything that one has done as for the thousand failures to make the most of one’s talent. Sometimes when it’s very bad it takes a physical form and produces headaches.’

‘And you’re sure it doesn’t come from a physical cause?’ asked David.

‘Oh, quite sure. Of course, if you’re in poor physical condition, your resistance to it is lowered. It comes from some lack of adjustment to one’s surroundings. It comes when time moves slowly.’

‘Yes,’ said David. ‘It’s very well known, and it always has been known, though it’s probably more common now than ever before, because so many people nowadays are without roots. The people who suffer from it most, of course, are painters, writers, anyone whose work demands mental sensitiveness, and who has a certain amount of leisure.’

‘That’s true,’ said Renwick. ‘It never comes in a time of intense effort and activity. But after a period of that kind, then it comes at its worst. And unfortunately, no one can go on writing or painting with all his energy all the time. It’s like making love. You must have periods of rest. There have to be times when ideas are quietly germinating in the mind, getting ready for the next burst of energy. And it is just in those times that the enemy attacks.’

David was looking at Gilda, seeing the warm ivory of her cheek, the beauty of the smooth line from her rather high cheekbone to her chin, wondering what were her thoughts now, and what were her feelings when Renwick had le cafard. For he looked a man who in pain would savagely inflict pain on all about him. David turned back to Renwick. He said:

‘And what do you do about it? How do you prevent it, and how do you cure it?’

‘The prevention and cure are both the same in a sense. They’re both escape from self, by one means or another. For some people, a deep religious faith or a love affair; but one does not buy those from the grocer.’ He repeated the phrase in French as though it were a quotation. ‘And if neither of those is available, excitement of any kind: drink, meeting friends, travel, physical exercise; all these help a bit, but they’re only palliatives, and in a sense they invite a recurrence. If you can turn back to creative work, that’s the only real cure.’

They talked on. The bar filled with smoke till you could hardly see the harbour lights, or their reflections in the gleaming surface of the water. Drinks came and went; talk grew richer, less inhibited, less precise. From outside, on the cobbled waterfront, you saw the smoke floating out below the awning, blue in the lamplight, cut off sharp by the edge of the light; you heard the sound of chatter like a distant torrent; it grew louder and closer, and then as people began to go home it receded and died away. They went home in twos and threes, moving from the pool of yellow light below one lamp to the next, along the cobbled waterfront, past the tangled masts of fishing boats and the battlements of the old town, faint in the night. David, Renwick and Gilda were one of the last parties to break up. David felt he had begun his holiday well, made an acquaintance that would grow to friendship.

He breakfasted next morning on the edge of the shade under the awning, watching the sunlight dance on the water, enjoying the clatter of feet on the cobbles, the tang of tar and sea-wrack and mackerel in the air. Days followed of hunger and sunshine, sleepy soaking of the body in sun, greedy returns to meals of omelettes and figs, long hours of talk over wine, black coffee and Turkish cigarettes. David liked Renwick more and more and listened with increasing pleasure to his talk; he lunched several times at Renwick’s cottage; he bathed with Gilda while her husband was working. They swam out together through small waves sparkling in the morning sun; strolled on the ribbed wet sands and poked the sea-anemones in the small pools; they lay on the white powdery sand above highwater-mark, he sleepily admiring the beauty of her body in a pale green bathing-dress, the colour of the green sea-lettuce stranded on the rocks. But he did not enter into her mind as he did into Renwick’s. She was glad of a companion, accepted his admiration naturally as her due, but gave nothing of herself, asked nothing of him. She was incurious about the real David, about his tastes, his past history, his work. There was no growth of intimacy; she liked to have him with her, but the companionship she asked was that one might expect from a friendly dog. They chattered about superficial things, but she was happiest when he was silent. But it was not, he felt, that she was naturally unresponsive or uninterested in mankind; she was deeply preoccupied, he did not know with what.

There were several other men who came to talk to Renwick and to look at Gilda, and among these the one whom David met perhaps the most often was a painter, Andrew Cargill. He was paintable himself, a big man with thick, close, golden-red hair and beard, a hot blue eye, and the coppery-red complexion that goes with that colouring. He dressed the part of a painter, corduroy trousers, a bright blue shirt, a green sweater in the evenings. He had a boat of his own and spent much of his time sailing, sometimes on long expeditions by himself or with one Breton hand, sometimes going out at night with the fishing-fleet. When he was not out in the boat or painting, he came often to the Renwicks’ cottage or met them in the bar at the Taverne de la Porte. He would sit smoking a short pipe that had cracked and been spliced with twine, silent, watching Gilda as all the men did, and then suddenly he would erupt into the argument, with a boisterous masculinity, a sweep and dash, that were in contrast with Renwick’s style, more thoughtful and precise, but enriched by sudden and unexpected metaphors. Andrew’s pictures had the same qualities of male energy and decision as his speech, but more than that too; they had delicacy as well as strength, a rare sense of colour, an eye for a pattern. He was more of a painter than anyone else there.

David wondered more than once whether he detected in Gilda an outward indifference to Andrew that was a shade more studied than to the others, a deeper and more contented silence in his presence, but he decided each time that it was imagination. He had seen her alone with him several times, but always in the distance, so that he had not been able to observe her manner; and he had seen her with Andrew no more often than she had been with himself or with others. No, she remained a puzzle, equally unresponsive, it seemed, to each of the half-dozen men whose eyes dwelt on her with pleasure, and hardly less so to her husband. But towards Renwick, David was conscious that from time to time and unexpectedly, she showed a sudden warm protective tenderness.

Time moved swiftly with David, the holiday was nearing its end. One evening in the Taverne, David was sitting at a table near the bar with the Renwicks. Andrew and another painter had joined them. Renwick had been silent and morose all evening. He got up and went to the bar for a drink. Gilda said:

‘He has le cafard. It’s very bad just now.’

The fourth man said:

‘It comes to all of us. All who paint or write. When time moves slowly.’

Andrew was sitting next to Gilda. He was leaning forward, with his elbow on the table, very big and colourful. David felt the health and energy and creative force of the man. His vitality and his joy in it were insolent. He said:

‘I used to get le cafard. But I found a way to cure it.’

He said it with a just perceptible air of triumph, and his hot blue eyes challenged each man at the table in turn.

David looked at Gilda. She was motionless, rigid, her eyes fixed on the table. And suddenly David understood; he knew how it was that Andrew cured le cafard. He knew why Gilda looked round when she came into a room. One of those stories that write themselves was being acted before his eyes.

The fourth man said:

‘What is your cure?’

‘It is very personal,’ said Andrew gravely, ‘each man must find his own cure.’

Renwick came back with his drink. He could not have heard them but he looked as though he was aware of everything that had been said, and of the undercurrent beneath the words. He sat down and began to talk. He said:

‘You will have noticed that I have been rude and sulky. I apologise to you all. I have le cafard very badly tonight, but one ought not to inflict it on others. Time has been passing very slowly with me of late, but I have been thinking and I have reached conclusions. In fact, I should say a decision.’

He spoke slowly and chose his words carefully. The four round the table listened in silence, feeling that what he had to say was important. He finished his drink and went on:-

‘It’s a matter of speed and balance, the arrangement of our lives. We must balance what we know to be good and lasting against things that are not really so good but pay a quick dividend. The really good things in life are slow and permanent, but when we have had too much of them, time moves slowly and we have le cafard, and then we take a purge, turn to swift, exciting things that are not always good in themselves. But we must be moderate in our use of the purge or it becomes a habit, and then you have to increase the dose every day. If I drink a little too much here at the Taverne, I shall escape in part from my unpleasant thoughts, and also I take a short cut to friendship, because when we all drink together we reveal ourselves more easily and become friends. If I drink a great deal too much, I may cure my melancholy at the time, but I shall wake with a headache and it will be worse. We try to escape, but it is only for a little, and we know we are only pretending that it is the proper way to live. Unless we go on being children all our lives and come to think our pretence is real, we keep open the way back to reality.’

He waited for a moment, fingering his empty glass. Then he spoke again, deliberately and with restraint, mastering some strong feeling. The tension among the listening four increased.

‘And in the same way as I drink to escape from boredom, probably each of us here has taken refuge from boredom and depression, from le cafard in one form or another, in some kind of emotional adventure, say perhaps a love affair. Perhaps at first you knew it was only an escape from the slow passage of time, and then it meant more and more until at last it seemed quite real and desperately important, as real as that mastery of circumstance, that glow of companionship, that one feels for a time when happily drunk in good company. You seemed to be terribly in love, but even then you knew in your heart that it would pass and that in the end you would go back to whatever in your life is permanent. And in the end you did go back and it died. Perhaps it died of time, slowly and sadly, like an old Viking in bed, ashamed of his end, a cow’s death, not a man’s. Or perhaps you were brave, and ended it sharp and clean, with a bitter wrench, and you thought your heart would break. But you knew it had to end. You knew that the slow sure things, like marriage and being sober and work, were permanent; and though one may vary them from time to time with life lived more intensely, at a quicker speed, with swift gay things, laughter, danger, change—and indeed we must, for these things are the salt—we come back in the end to bread. And the art of living lies in balancing these two and remembering which is which. The great mistake is to let our means of escaping le cafard become our life.’

He paused and looked round. No one spoke for a moment, and then David said:

‘Yes, that is what you think about life, and I for one should be inclined to agree with you. But. . .’

He stopped. He must let the story write itself. He must not interfere. It was Andrew who was brave and said:

‘But how do you apply it? You spoke of a decision. What have you decided?’

Renwick said:

‘My decision is that I, personally,’ and he paused and dwelt on the word, ‘need a little more salt with my bread. I have been enjoying for too long the good slow things of life, marriage and friendship.’ His eyes moved from Gilda to Andrew. ‘It is personal. Each must find his own cure. For others perhaps, the need is for bread. For me it is salt. And so I am going to travel. I am going to the Midi. I shall start tomorrow. And now, as I have to pack, I am going home. Gilda, my dear, are you coming home with me?’

He stood up. He looked at Gilda. Everyone was silent. Gilda sat quite still; she looked at the table. She was pale and drawn. She had to face her heart and overcome it before she could make up her mind. At last she stood up. She said:

‘Yes, I am coming.’

She turned and went without a look at any of the others. Renwick followed her. Andrew sprang to his feet. He said:

‘Gilda . . .’

But she took no notice. They threaded their way between the tables. Then near the water-front she went to the right of one table; Renwick went straight on, he was ahead of her. She turned, and for a moment she stood and looked across the crowded room at Andrew and no one else, quite still, pale and sad, her eyes very wide. Then she followed her husband home.

The Soldier

Keshar Singh felt happy as he stood looking at the dancers. He had good reason to feel happy, though it would never have occurred to him that anyone needed a reason for something so natural. It was the day of the annual feast in the cypress grove at Wan, a day of feasting and rejoicing and dancing. Everyone was happy on such a day, when people came together from all the villages in the valley, as many as seven or eight hundred people all gathered in one place. That in itself was something almost intoxicating; for Keshar Singh was used to herding sheep in the high lonely pastures that were covered with snow most of the year, or to ploughing all day by himself in little winding shelves of field that followed the contours of the hills in strips not half a dozen paces across. There were only twenty odd families in his own village up the hill, and the people did not often meet together; crowds such as there were here in Wan today were the kind of thing that only happened once a year.

He decided to join the dancing, for it was a pity to waste even a moment of the feast day. He ran down a steep bank between the huge boles of the cypress trees and joined the line of men. They were linked arm to arm, a dozen of them, facing a line of women linked akimbo too; they jigged up and down as in country dances all the world over, to the broken pulse of the drums; the two lines facing each other slowly revolved.

It was a scene to make anyone happy, the dancers beneath the vast trunks of ancient trees that had stood for hundreds of years, the sloping green turf, the little stream that sprang ice-cold from the hillside and ran down over the turf, fed by the snows of Trisul and Nanda Devi, huge above the village to the north-east. The spectators moved round, laughing and playing tricks on each other, breaking away suddenly from a group in chase or pursuit, forming again into dark blanket-clad whorls. Everyone was happy.

Behind the dancers they were leading up the goats to be killed for the feast. Each goat, reluctant or recalcitrant, was led forward to the little shrine, not three feet high, where the godling lived who ruled the valley. The priest put a little dab of colour on the forehead between the horns and stuck on two grains of rice. Then as the that he had been happy at the feast, but his mind had not learnt to analyse or distinguish; his memory would not call up the smell of the cypress trees and the green turf, the delicate tang of running water, wet rock and distant snow, the smell of blanket soaked in bitter wood-smoke and men’s sweat. Of all that came to his nostrils now, the only scent that was to be familiar to him in the days to come was blood.

But to him there was nothing sad about the thought of going away. It was one of his reasons for being happy. Another reason was that he had just been married. He would go away to the army in a fortnight, and at first his father had said he should be married when he came back for his first leave, because by then he would have saved some money to pay for the bride; but his mother had pleaded for him and in the end they had borrowed the money from a neighbour, and he had been married. He was lucky in his wife. She was gay and comely, a little round face with dimples below the high cheek-bones when she laughed, and she worked hard too. There she was, dancing in the row of women opposite; he caught her eye and she smiled; someone noticed, and made a rude joke about the newly married. Everyone laughed again.

Present happiness, and a consciousness of adventure and excitement to come; what more could youth ask? For it was very exciting to be going away to Lansdowne to be a soldier, even though it was the need for money that had driven his father to send him. There were three brothers, and that meant three families to be fed by their father’s land, and three bride-prices to be paid. The family land was not very much, and the family hoard of silver was low anyhow, because Keshar Singh’s father, too, had been one of a family of brothers with no girls. So when Keshar Singh came of age to be married, it was clear he must go out into the world and earn his living. They had gone for advice to an old soldier who lived in their village. He had been a sergeant, and was proud of that; he was still more proud that he had been centre-half for his company and later for his battalion. He had loved football and soldiering. He told Keshar Singh that his first days would be very strange, and perhaps he would want to run away; but he must not run away, for he would be punished if he did, and besides he would soon grow to like the army.

‘You will like it so much,’ said the old soldier, ‘that when the time comes to go, the tears will run down your face. And when you come back to the village, at first you will think only of the battalion and when you hear that an officer is coming on tour to give you news of what is happening in the battalion, your heart will leap in your breast with joy. That is how it was with me.’

They made sure in the village that Keshar Singh would be chosen, although in those spring days of 1939, finance was still supreme and the army was so small that only one recruit would be taken from a hundred volunteers. They had heard that the doctors would turn a man down for things that everyone knew made no difference to his worth, a touch of goitre, or a broken tooth. But there was nothing wrong with Keshar Singh, and the old sergeant was sure they would have him. Not a crooked toe or finger. His legs were straight, his muscles firm and supple. His shoulders were broad, his chest deep; and there was a merry willing look in his broad reddish brown face that would attract anyone. Most important of all in the eyes of the village, he had a cousin who was a sergeant, and his uncle, too, had been in the Regiment. Oh, they would take Keshar Singh.

He felt confident himself when he set out a fortnight after the feast, but as he drew near to Lansdowne, he began to feel less sure. It was hotter down here, too hot for Keshar Singh in his thick hand-woven blanket, and the sweat ran down his spine as he walked. Early spring at Wan became full summer as one got nearer the plains, and the heat added to the feeling of unfamiliarity. The mule-track along which he trudged every day grew dustier and drier; the villages grew larger, till he passed through one where there must have been as many people as in all the eight or nine villages of the whole Wan valley. His long hair and the blanket draped round his shoulders looked outlandish here, where people wore coats and trousers made of cotton cloth from the plains.

And then he came on the road. It took his breath away. It was as wide as one of the widest of his fields, smooth and hard and shining; it wriggled away interminably in coils and links and zigzags to the plains. It must have cost a great deal, much labour and much money. And immediately there was a fresh wonder to see, for up the road came two shining mules, legs twinkling, long ears flapping, pulling behind them a box made of iron, with spinning discs of iron below on which it ran. On the box sat two superior beings in khaki clothes, with tall starched turbans on their heads. The time would come when Rifleman Keshar Singh would think very little of a driver in the supply corps; but now they seemed almost divine. For he had never before seen a cart, not even a bullock-cart. He had never seen a wheel.

And hard on this marvel came another. There was a house, a great wooden house, full of people, painted an attractive bright red, moving up the road of its own will, with nothing to pull it. They had told him of such things, but he had not believed them. Surely in a place where such miracles as this could happen, it would be the greatest miracle of all if anyone wanted Keshar Singh. He moved up the road slowly and wonderingly, exclaiming at the telegraph wires, the bridges, the size of the buildings. He held out a post-card with his cousin’s name on it to the first man he met and stood speechless till he was directed the right way.

The old sergeant was right and Keshar Singh was enlisted. They clipped the long hair from his head till nothing remained but the Hindu tuft on top; they washed him and gave him instead of his blanket a grey woollen shirt, khaki shorts and pullover. They fed him; and to Keshar Singh the food was bewilderingly rich and varied. The town-bred recruit in a few years’ time would be complaining that it was monotonous and coarse, but not Keshar Singh, who was used to unleavened pancakes and porridge of millet or barley, and meat only at feasts. Here there was meat daily, vegetables, potatoes, flat cakes of wheaten bread, all unbelievable luxuries to him.

But most bewildering of all was the change in the speed at which he was now to live. He had been used to get up when it was light and sleep when it was dark; in between there was food and the slow labour of the farm, but you ate when you were hungry and it did not usually matter which of the farm tasks you did first. There was less sense of the fleeting hours of day than of the slowly revolving seasons. That was the old life; but in the new, everything went exact to the minute, by the sound of bell and bugle. The singing bugles woke him while it was still dark, and from that waking till lights out he was busy, drilling, playing games, eating, training his body to jump and run, shooting, always learning, and always obeying orders, till obedience became part of himself, and the main part.

He made a good soldier. His muscles filled out and hardened, his back straightened; under the black pill-box hat, his round reddish face shone with health and happiness, an engaging face with a cheerful terrier-like air of being ready for anything. He liked drill, and wanted to drill well. He smacked his rifle-butt so hard that his fingers were numb with pain; he would practise by himself so that he should be perfect. A day came when he was made the right-hand man of the front rank in his recruits’ squad. His heart was full of pride as the sharp word of command sent him forward, with the quick, short, rifle regiment’s pace, stamp, stamp, click; as he waited for the word: ‘Swords!’ that would bring his bayonet out in a sweep and fix it neatly on his rifle. He would have done anything rather than look down at his hands in that tense moment.

But perhaps most of all he enjoyed shooting. When he had learnt to sight his rifle in the miniature range, and later had grown used to the kick of .303 ammunition, he came to love his weapon and everything to do with it, the smell of oil and cordite, the polished brown of the stock. He liked to settle down comfortably, cuddling the stock; he liked the male leap of it when he gently squeezed the trigger in the second pressure, and the satisfaction of seeing his score at the butts mount up. He would have liked more shooting; but it was still a peace-time army which had to be sparing of ammunition. Every round must be accounted for, and empty cartridge-cases had to be carefully collected and handed in after a shoot. Keshar Singh’s frugal peasant mind took kindly to this, and he always brought back the full tale. Yes, he was a good soldier; but he would never make an N.C.O., said his company commander. And this was true; he never did.

The summer of 1939 passed; Hitler went into Poland and the world to war. Keshar Singh was drafted to a battalion; he went to Africa. Italy stabbed France in the back, and Keshar Singh came under fire at Gallabat.

This was before the days of courses to teach men what it was like to go into battle. Keshar Singh had never been fired at, and it was less than two years since he had first seen a mule-cart. Here there were aircraft plunging straight towards him from the sky, hurling bullets. Lead whistled and whined everywhere; he was bombed; he was shelled; bursts of machine-gun fire filled the air with singing danger. Smoke; confusion in the half-light of dawn; the deafening suddenness of explosion; this was all round him. He was frightened; he clung to the ground, he tried to melt into it, he was conscious of nothing but fear and tumult and the nearness of his end. But nothing happened; it did not hurt; he was still alive. The short five minutes of panic passed, and left him excited, stimulated, but dazed and unthinking, remembering only the lessons he had been so carefully taught. He did as he was told; it was the only thing to do. He went on forward, lying down, taking cover, firing. Before the end of the battle, he had found a new pleasure. To take that second pressure, quietly, steadily, as on the range, and see your mark fall; that was better than seeing a bull signalled from the butts. The fighting spirit was born in him, and he knew what the kukri was for that bumped against his hip.

He was a proved fighting man when the time came for the frontal attack on the enemy’s position at Keren, so carefully fortified that they believed it to be impregnable. His battalion went forward against a mountain wall of rock crowned with long-prepared defences. There was no way round; there was nothing else for it. Keshar Singh moved as he had been taught. He was not frightened now; he was a little excited, he wanted to get his man, to see a little figure tumble slowly down the rocks, but he knew he would not be hurt himself. To be hit by a bomb or a bullet was not a thing that happened to him. But it seemed to be happening to a lot of other people. Two men of his own section had been left behind. The section on the right had lost men too.

Keshar Singh’s section was on the extreme left. They worked forward into a little pocket of ground from which they could keep up fire on the enemy in his posts in the high rocks ahead. They could not see the section on the right, but they would see when next it went forward, and then they would go forward too. Meanwhile, there was nothing to do but fire at any movement on the heights. Keshar Singh made himself as comfortable as he could behind a natural shield of two sharp rocks with a V between them, and settled down to the occupation he liked best of all, steadily taking the second pressure whenever he saw a movement.

They were not to know, in that left-hand section, that their colonel had been killed by a burst of machine-gun fire, that every King’s officer was dead or wounded, that the battalion had still gone forward under the command of a subedar until it was ordered to retire. The battalion went back at less than half its strength; fresh officers were brought up. It was to go in again at dawn next day.

But the left-hand section knew nothing of this. Their orders were to go forward and take cover and then fire at the enemy till the next section passed them and then go forward again. And if the next section did not pass them, why then there was nothing to do but to stay where they were and go on firing. After an hour, the section-leader began to have doubts and sent out a man to his right, to find out where the next section might be; but he never came back. A few minutes later a fragment of a bomb killed the section-leader himself. Neither Keshar Singh nor the remaining riflemen were men to think out a tactical problem; they had their orders and that was enough. Keshar Singh thought that he might as well use the automatic; he crept over, pushed aside the body behind it, and fired bursts at every movement on the heights while he had ammunition in the drums. When nothing was left but clips, he went back to the magazine rifle.

By night-fall, the fire died down; nothing came near them now but an occasional rifle-bullet, although there was artillery fire all round and flares every few minutes. The two men decided to sleep in turns. They were very tired. Their clothes were sodden with sweat. They were filthy. There was a smell of blood and death and corruption, hot metal, oil and cordite. They had four water-bottles, but the water was warm. It was not much answer to an African thirst, after a day’s fighting, for excitement had dried their mouths as much as heat. They divided the water, so that it should last them till morning. They did not want to eat.

The man who was waking fired now and then at lights and movements, not enough to draw the enemy’s serious attention. But it was not an easy night; both were haggard and exhausted when the firing began again, just before the dawn. Their movements were languid, as though they had been drunk last night; they felt as though their bellies had been taken away from them. But both were awake; they took their rifles and fired, deliberate aimed fire, at flashes in the half light.

Aircraft came screaming over them again. A bomb fell ahead of them; they were covered with dust, and splinters ricochetted off the rocks. The next was closer still. It was almost a direct hit. There were showers of earth and rock. Keshar Singh felt hard numbing blows in his side and leg. He looked down and in surprise saw the blood seeping slowly through khaki drill and grey wool. This was not the kind of thing that happened to him. He called to his companion Makar Singh:

‘Oh, Makru!’ he said.

But there was no answer. He tried to turn himself round so that he could see over his shoulder. It was very difficult to move, but he managed to do it. Then he saw why Makru did not answer. He turned back again to his V between the two rocks, pulled back his bolt, and put a round into the chamber. The sights were swaying, and the heights ahead seemed to be moving too, but he must keep steady, he must squeeze slowly and lovingly. He saw a figure rise to throw a grenade; sights and figure steadied for a second, he fired. The little figure tumbled slowly down the rocks. It was a hit. Well done, Keshar Singh. But the man had been throwing a grenade, then there must be someone to throw at. The right-hand section must have gone forward and Keshar Singh had not seen them. He tried to get up and move forward but blood ran surprisingly from his mouth, like the blood from the goat at Wan. It had spurted all over someone then; people had laughed. He ought to join in the dance, he would stand opposite his wife and smile at her; it was a pity to waste even a moment of the feast day. But his legs would not carry him into the dance; how silly of him to think of that kind of dance here in Lansdowne where you drilled on the grey gravel all day and the dances in the barracks at night were men’s dances. And anyhow he was the right-hand man of the line fumbling for his bayonet so he couldn’t dance; and he couldn’t find his bayonet; and besides there was no time because you had to pick up cartridge cases and keep moving forward whatever the right-hand section did.

Suddenly his brain and eye cleared. Someone had crawled into the circle of rock and dead bodies. It was an officer. Keshar Singh tried to stand up and salute, but his body did not obey and again there was that red blood from his mouth. But he tried very hard, and at last he was able to speak. He said:

‘Forgive me, lord. I have used too much ammunition and I have not picked up the cartridge cases.’

Then he fell forward cuddling the stock of his rifle and did not move again.

The Button

Charles stood rather wearily in the queue at the post office counter. His hostess had asked him to send off a money-order, and he had of course immediately agreed; but this was the fifth queue he had stood in that morning, and he began to wonder whether his rest-cure from London and the office was really doing him any good.

The woman in front of him in the queue was slim and her fair hair was pleasant to the eye. He wondered idly whether the face beneath the hair would also be attractive. Her cotton dress was not expensive, but the flowered pattern was pretty enough in a not very original way. He noticed that it fastened at the back with four buttons, to which there were four little loops in place of button-holes; and the second button from the top was undone.

Charles shifted from one leg to the other; the queue moved forward, bringing the woman with fair hair up to the counter. He had begun to think of the problems that would be waiting for him when he went back to his office next day when his thoughts were interrupted by raised voices. A dispute had broken out between the woman in front of him and the girl behind the counter.

‘Well, I know I had a pound ready in silver. I put it all together in my purse separately before I came out. I know I gave you a pound.’

‘Well there’s only nineteen-and-sixpence here. You can see for yourself, can’t you?’

‘But I know I had a pound.’

‘Well, you haven’t now. It wouldn’t melt, would it?’

The fair-haired woman surrendered to the inevitable and produced another sixpence. She was ruffled and suspicious. The girl behind the counter did things with forms. Charles had listened to the dispute with interest and a sympathetic amusement; he felt the strained nerves behind it that came from too much housework, too many queues, too many restrictions, monotonous food, the fear and anxiety of the blitz, all the long strain and wear of six years of war. A sudden impulse came to him and he said:

‘May I help you? I don’t suppose you know, but there’s a button undone on the back of your dress.’

She turned round with a startled expression. She was not pretty, a typical English face, fair, rather thin, a little worn just now, quite young, but commonplace. She was reassured by his smile. She said:

‘Is it undone, or has it come off? It was loose, and I forgot to sew it tighter.’ She tried to look over her shoulder, but was encumbered with parcels, and could not see it.

‘No, it’s still there,’ said Charles. ‘Let me do it for you. My hands are free.’

He buttoned it up. She was slightly embarrassed; all she said was:

‘Oh, thank you ever so much.’

He said:

‘One seems to live in queues nowadays. This is the fifth I’ve been in this morning.’

‘Yes, it makes you tired, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘And then this bread rationing on top of everything, a year after the war. It does seem hard.’

Her business with the post office was finished; she took her receipt and turned to go, but first put down her parcels to count her money and tuck away the receipt in her bag. She was still struggling to pick up all her belongings when Charles, too, left the counter.

‘You seem to have a lot to carry,’ he said. ‘Have you far to go?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s only just round the corner from here, really. I’ve managed badly to have so much.’

‘Let me carry something home for you,’ he said. ‘I’m not in a hurry.’

‘Oh, really, I couldn’t dream of it,’ she said. ‘I do think it’s kind of you. Oh, no, I couldn’t let you.’

But she did not resist when he took a string bag which left her hands free for the rest.

They stepped out of the post office, left the main street of the little Surrey town, turned down a lane, and came to one small house in a row of other houses, all alike.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me bringing you to the back door,’ she said. ‘But I always slip out by the back when I’m going for my shopping.’

She led him down a covered passage between two houses, through a green door into a little back garden, a strip of land with a low hedge on either side, overlooked by and overlooking a dozen similar strips. Two tow-headed children were playing at selling things in a shop; one was behind the counter and the other was standing in a queue and giving up coupons. They looked up and said:

‘Hello, Mummie.’

Then they went on with their game. It was a sparse little garden, a few cabbages, carrots, beans and peas, a few flowers, lupins, marguerites, standard roses, American pillars; it was just like the others.

She opened the back door and led him in through the scullery; his eye took in the details, and all they implied, sink, draining-board, refuse-bucket, the after-breakfast work finished, the business of getting ready for lunch still to be done. They went into the sitting-room, and this too was like a million others, portable wireless, geranium in a pot, spindly table, faded curtains. She sat down, fumbled in her bag and began to powder her nose. He offered her a cigarette. She said:

‘Thank you ever so much. I oughtn’t to really, I ought to be cooking the dinner, but you must have a break sometimes.’

‘How do you manage about leaving the children?’ Charles asked, with no particular intention.

‘Oh, a friend next door keeps an eye on them,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to admit people are ever so kind. They do help when they can.’

‘Yes,’ said Charles, sympathetically. ‘I do see what you mean about needing a break now and then. All this housework, and the queues and all the rest of it—they just go on and on, don’t they?’

‘You’re telling me,’ she said with a sudden rich vigour that he found refreshing after her previous refinements. ‘There are times I get that sick of it’—she paused, and added darkly, ‘I feel I might do anything, simply anything.’

It was at this moment that Charles had a second impulse, to which he instantly gave way.

‘Why don’t you come to London tomorrow and have lunch with me somewhere?’ he asked. I’d be delighted if you would.’

‘Oh!’ She was obviously taken aback. ‘What would my husband say?’

‘Need he know? Does he usually come back to lunch? You could tell him afterwards. It would make it more exciting.’

‘No, he doesn’t get back as a rule. I suppose I could just slip out and tell him afterwards. I’ve never done such a thing before. I know Mrs. Gray would give the children their dinner. Yes, it would be lovely to come. It’d make a break, wouldn’t it?’

‘Splendid,’ said Charles. ‘We’ll make it the Berkeley if that suits you, at one o’clock sharp because people still lunch very early at restaurants.’ He could see she did not know where the Berkeley was, and did not like to ask. He added:

‘In Piccadilly, opposite the Ritz. The Piccadilly entrance. Now I must be getting along; and you want to cook your lunch.

‘Thank you ever so much,’ she said. ‘It’ll be lovely.’

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

As he glanced round the lounge at the Berkeley, at five minutes to one next day, Charles wondered whether he ought really to have chosen somewhere else. He wanted to give her a break, to make a pleasant change in the dull monotony of her life, but would it be unmixed enjoyment for her here; She would be embarrassed and nervous, she would feel her clothes were not right; she might feel envious and discontented, though he did not on the whole think that was likely. No, it was more likely to be just an unease that she would suffer, a feeling that she was too hot and her nose was shiny and people were looking at her from behind. Well, he must do his best to reduce the embarrassment; he would start talking at once and be as interesting and charming as he could. To begin with, he would have to do all the talking himself; he would tell her of places he had seen, books he had read, things he had done, a hundred things; and then gradually he must make her talk. He would find out what she thought of people at neighbouring tables, of the food, of the wine. And incidentally of course he would simply order her lunch for her; it would only embarrass her more if he expected her to choose. Then he would ask her what books she had read, what plays she had seen; no, of course, films not plays. On the whole, he felt confident of his ability to send her away with a feeling that she had enjoyed her lunch; and she would certainly look back on it with far greater pleasure than if he had taken her to some obscure little place where she might have avoided that moment of initial fright and uncertainty which ho felt sure she would experience. He pictured her coming in, painfully in her best, looking doubtfully here and there, hesitating; then a sudden expression of relief when she saw him. And then he would set to work to put her at her ease.

At this point in his reflections, Charles glanced at his watch, and noticed with some displeasure that it was five minutes past one. He was not a man who cared to be kept waiting, even by a pretty woman; still less by the rather plain wife of someone who might be a bank clerk. But he took care not to reveal his displeasure by his expression. To pass the time, he looked round at those who were waiting like himself for partners, or who had already met and were talking over a glass of sherry or a cocktail.

There was the usual contrast between those who appear to spend their waking moments at the Berkeley and the Ritz, and the smaller sprinkling of country cousins anxiously wondering whether they have really come to the right place, or whether they have been forgotten. To his left, Charles was aware of two young men telling each other how ill they felt after last night’s party in tones that were languid, but sufficiently loud for everyone in their neighbourhood to hear. They were greeted from time to time by debutantes who had been to the same party but had not drunk so much, and who exchanged with them gossip and reminiscence that was as audible as their conversation with each other, but a good deal more brisk.

Over to the right was a young man in uniform, a gunner, with a serious expression and an anxious eye on his watch and on both entrances. Charles decided that he was waiting for a girl of considerable attraction and far more experience and knowledge of the world than himself. She’s deliberately making him wait, he thought, and probably realises that he will be doubly uneasy because he hasn’t told her which entrance to come by and feels he must keep watching both.

Opposite were a couple who, in Charles’s mature judgment, were in the early stages of a love affair and were warily fencing for an opening, each determined to send home a thrust before lowering a skilful guard, and each fully and amusedly aware of the other’s intention.

Next to them was an unhappy young woman who was acutely embarrassed both by their nearness, and by the lateness of her own escort. She was wondering, Charles was sure, whether he had really said the Berkeley, and whether he had really said one o’clock, and whether she ought to know of some other room which was the right place for an unaccompanied young woman to wait, and whether her clothes were intolerably countrified and unsophisticated. And that, thought Charles with growing indignation, is exactly how my friend from the post office ought to have been feeling from quarter to one onwards, instead of keeping me waiting.

A neat girl in black was claimed by the admiring gunner. The fencing couple went in to lunch, clearly delighted that they were so equally matched. Charles began to consider giving up all hopes of his post office friend and approaching the unhappy young woman opposite. She was just as likely to be entertaining, he thought gloomily, and it would be very good for her escort when he did come. But perhaps he might not be able to persuade her to see that. What a fool he was ever to ask the tiresome woman! It would really be all she deserved if he went somewhere else. At this point, a very smooth and beautifully dressed young man joined the unhappy young woman with a casual apology. He clearly thought he was conferring a favour by coming at all, or so it seemed to Charles, indignant and conscious of his own rectitude.

Twenty past one. Really this was intolerable. Five more minutes and then he would go. And then she came.

There was none of the hesitating advance Charles had expected, no sign of nervousness or of relief when she saw him. On the contrary, she swept in with purpose and determination, as though she were catching a train. She looked even more out of place than he had expected and he noticed with surprise that she was wearing the same dress as yesterday.

She came straight to him and sat down. She had no gloves to takeoff, she wasted no time on powdering her nose, but at once began to talk:

‘I’m sure I’m ever so sorry I’m late, but really, I’ve had such a morning you wouldn’t believe. I never would have thought Jack would take it so, I never would. That’s why I’ve had to come in my old dress. Such a to-do!’

Charles interposed, and suggested that as it was late, they should at once go in to lunch. He ordered food for her, and a carafe of wine. She talked in an unceasing flow:

‘Well, you know, I didn’t quite like to leave telling him till afterwards, like you suggested, because it would have seemed as though I was deceiving him. Well, there wasn’t any harm, so why make a fuss of it? I just mentioned it at breakfast, casual, you know, said I was going to have lunch up West for a change. Well, at first he didn’t take much notice, and then he started asking questions, where had I met you, and did I think it was right to have lunch with a man I didn’t even know the name of, and all that, you know. But it was near time for his train, so I gave him a kiss and shooed him out, and told him not to worry, I’d be all right and home for tea as usual, and off he went. Well, I did the washing-up and the beds and tidied myself up and put on my best dress, and I was just coming downstairs to go to the station, when in my lord walks! I’ve never been so surprised, never. I wouldn’t have believed it. Home he’d come from the bank, got away on some excuse to lecture me. I’ve never known him do such a thing before. We sat down in the parlour and talked it out; and in the end I gave in to him. I went upstairs and changed into my ordinary dress, and then I told him I’d have to go out to get a bit of fish for his dinner if he was going to be in. He looked at me, careful and slow, and then he said: “You go along, Liz,” and I went. I meant to get the fish and come back; but when I turned the corner, I began to think about it again. I thought about you waiting and me not coming, and I couldn’t send a message, because I didn’t know your name. I stood still in the street and thought about it. And you’d only meant to be kind. And I remembered what you said about needing a break; and I thought Jack had never said that, and it’d be a lesson to him, and anyhow there was no harm, and a woman’s got a right to lead her own life. And so I came.’

She drew breath at last. Charles persuaded her to eat, for she had not managed much while she told her story. He did not talk much himself, but regarded her with speculation and some irritation. She had given him no opportunity to put her at her ease by his skilled conversation, and he was a man who liked things to go as he had planned them.

‘And now,’ she said suddenly and dramatically, and so loud that the couple at the next table looked up, ‘I keep thinking about Jack waiting for me, and no bit of fish for his dinner, and him in a fuss. I must get back quick.’

‘Wait a second,’ said Charles, ‘I haven’t paid the bill.’

‘Don’t bother to come with me, I can find my own way. Well, thank you ever so much. It’s been ever so kind of you and I’ve had a lovely time.’

Charles rose to his feet as she went. She walked past him with a final thank you ever so much. His irritation vanished and his eye took in with amusement the fair hair, the slimness, the really very ordinary dress, the four buttons and their loops, that he had idly noticed yesterday. She was two paces from him when the second button from the top refused its duty. It fell on the floor. He took a long step and picked it up. He looked after her, then at the button in his hand. He put the button in his trouser pocket, went back to his table and paid the bill.

Water Flowed from the Rock

When Chabeli Parshad decided to leave his wife and his little homestead in the Central Himalayas, he had no very clear perception of where he should go. He only knew that freedom from his wife was happiness, and that to remain in the house and shop that had been his father’s would mean his entanglement with a world of law courts and lying and gold that was distasteful to his simple spirit. He wanted to be alone and free in the hills he loved, and he also wanted to make his soul, to atone for the wrongs he had done in the world and to make his peace with the unseen.

It was natural that his steps should turn first to ways they knew, and without thinking out his plans at all he followed the path that led to a hill shrine only a few days’ journey from his home, the temple to which he had gone on his first release from bondage, when for the first time he had walked quietly away and left his wife to scold. But he could not stay there. It was too near home. News travels quickly in the hills, at least in comparison with human bodies, and it would not be long before he was seen by someone he knew, and then the word would soon go back to the busy bitter woman in the wayside shop, and his troubles would start again. He moved on after two or three days’ halt near the hill shrine, this time with a definite and more ambitious purpose. He would make the pilgrimage to the holy places of the Hindus that lie at the sources of the Ganges and the Jumna.

It was many days’ journey, even for an active man, and it took Chabeli Parshad a long time, for he was past middle age, and he did not move with the purposeful determination of a man with other affairs in life, who wants to finish his journey and pass on to something else, but rather with the fitful intention of migrating ruminants, who at the change of the year move to new pastures, a few miles one day, a few miles the next, a pause for a week where the grass is good. In his case, it was not the grass but the kindness and prosperity of the villagers that determined his stay. He would walk four, five, or ten miles, talking to the people he met on the way; and when he told them where he was going, someone would sooner or later offer him food and shelter, and he would stay.

When at last he came down from his own western hills to strike the main route of pilgrim traffic going eastward and northward from Hardwar, it was different. The dwellers on this route looked on pilgrims as a source of income, and were not inclined to make much difference between a hillman like themselves and the stream of strange folk who poured in from the plains. But there were charitable institutions, and at every stage along the way it was possible to find a roof and a meal. Chabeli Parshad was an odd figure at these halting-places, for he did not put on the saffron robes of mendicancy, nor smear his naked body with ashes; nor did he look like a pilgrim from the plains; he still looked exactly what he was, a gentle vague old hill Brahman, in his thick coat and trousers of home-spun, home-woven blanket.

He went to the four holy places, and paid his worship with the rest. But he remained vaguely dissatisfied. This was not what he was looking for. The gongs clanged, the trumpets blew; the idols were bathed in butter and milk; incense floated in clouds to heaven; the sacred fire was waved; the hum and drone of Sanskrit rose and fell. It was all very right and proper, and he did what he should obediently, but there at the back of his mind, unexpressed, was the feeling that he had been nearer to the unseen with his sheep and goats on the hillside above his home. Perhaps if the thought had been put to him he would have been shocked, but there was no one to whom he talked about such things. H e listened much, but among none of the teachers did he find the kind of sustenance he desired. He drifted away from the centres of holiness and the pilgrim routes and resumed his wandering life among the villages; but it was still in the name of the great temple of Badri Narain that he was given bread and a roof.

In the hill villages religion owes only a polite allegiance to Hinduism, and he saw many strange things which to him were repugnant. He did not, for instance, care to see a buffalo hacked to death so that the soil might be made fruitful by the fertilising blood. But one custom did indeed appeal to his love of loneliness and of the open hillside. He came to a certain village on the slopes of the high snowy peaks where every year a four-horned sheep is turned loose towards the snows. He was told that there had never been a year when no sheep with four horns could be found; and there had never been a year when the scapegoat had turned back and made for the world of warmth and shelter and food. Year after year, it went up towards the snows and was never seen again.

It was a picture that often recurred to Chabeli’s mind, without his thinking why it should please him. But suddenly, some months after he had seen it happen, the thought came clearly to him that one day he too would walk up into the snows and meet the high presences that would await him there. The idea stayed with him, not so much an intention as a knowledge that this was what he would do when the time came; but he had no feeling of when the time would be.

During the following winter, Chabeli Parshad was conscious from time to time of a strange weakness in his limbs, and a dizziness that was new to him when he moved suddenly or when he was tired. He turned northwards and westwards and began to move towards the hills of his home; but it was not till the summer that the call came to him.

He had followed the streams running up further and further towards Tibet, till he was in a long valley of shepherds and goatherds with glaciers and snow peaks on either side. He stayed for a few days in the largest village in the valley, but not for long, for there was little food to spare. He said goodbye, telling the villagers he would go up for a day or two to the high grazing-grounds which at that time of year are clear of snow and carpeted with flowers. He had a little food, and would find shelter with the shepherds. The call had not yet reached him.

He went up the glen leading to the pastures; but the weakness and giddiness, which had been better for some days, suddenly returned. Half a dozen times the giddiness came, and he had to sit down and rest. He had been much slower than he had expected and he began to wonder where he would find shelter. As he rested by a stream it grew rapidly dark and there came a sudden clap of thunder, so close it startled him; and in a few moments, sheets of icy rain. Chabeli Parshad rose and stumbled on up the glen; he felt weak and old, and his mind was empty of all thoughts but one, that the shelter he hoped to find would be up the hill with the shepherds. He was cold and wet and tired when at last he found a rock leaning out over the path, with beneath it a shallow pit dug in the ground surrounded by a rough wall of stones. The tiny space was full of men and sheep; there was a fire. They took him in and warmed him. He was too tired to eat. He did not know what he told them.

In the night he woke. The rain had stopped; there was no moon; the stars were bright. His mind, too, was clear again. He looked up at the stars and knew that the time had come for him to go up into the mountains as the four-horned sheep had done. There he would meet the gods. He was not conscious of his body; he lay floating, looking at the stars. Then he closed his eyes and slept peacefully till dawn.

Next morning he felt strangely light and happy. He talked to the shepherds but did not eat. He told them he was going up to the grazing grounds. They warned him of the buzzing in the ears and the fainting fits that come to men in the high places, where they are made drunk by the scent of the flowers. But he did not heed them. His intention was quite clear; he would not stop at the grazing grounds but go up till he reached the snow, where he would meet those who would be there. It seemed to him as he went that tall presences went with him, strangers in white of more than mortal size, who helped him over rocks and up the steeper parts of the path, where an old man might fail.

At midday he sat down by a stream and his mind came back a little to its normal abode. He ate a few mouthfuls of coarse millet bread; he drank some water. He remembered distantly, a far off thing, without joy or sorrow, his little farm and the life he had led there as a child, his father, and the line of the hills south towards the plains. But when he rose to go on, leaving his little food behind, those tall strangers returned and helped him on his way, speaking gravely and comfortingly; their voices were like a snow-fed river in his ears.

The path led up through a forest of silver firs and a tangle of stunted creeping rhododendrons, increasingly steep, to an almost precipitous ascent over slabs of rocks, wet with the spray from a white spout of water that fell sheer fifty feet to a pool below. In that last fifty feet, his helpers had to do much for Chabeli Parshad, but he reached the top and stepped haltingly out on to the grazing grounds where there were no more trees. There was a carpet of flowers before him, who had never seen a carpet in his life; but the brilliant colours were blurred in his eyes. The scent was ravishing to his nostrils; there were strange voices and the pulsing of a drum in his ears; the spirits who had come with him prostrated themselves before a radiant presence that filled heaven and earth. Chabeli Parshad too bowed low, but when he tried to rise the sky and the mountains spun round and went dark, and his spirit left him.

Not far away, one Dhani Ram, from a village on the other side of the range, was looking at the clouds and anxiously regarding his sheep. Grazing was not very plentiful on his own side of the range, and in the summer months he had often crossed the pass and ventured some way down on the far side. But he had only once before been in this particular corrie, and he was not sure that if mist came down he would be able to find his way back to the shelter where his companions would be. And the clouds were beginning to look threatening; after yesterday’s downpour, it would be unusual if they did not gather again towards evening. He called to his sheep with a long whistle on a rising note, cut off sharp at the end, and shouted to the boy Partabu who had come with him for the day.

Partabu was sitting under a rock, idly making a toy for his little brother from some rushes. He wrapped his blanket round his shoulders so that it was more convenient for movement and rose to his feet. He too whistled to the sheep, and with his dog at his heels began slowly to move towards Dhani Ram. The dog, whose long stiff black hair made him seem twice the size he was, wore a brass collar four inches wide fitted with spikes; his duty in life was to protect the flock from bears and panthers, and he did nothing to help in the rounding-up. The flock came to the whistle, and slowly formed a huddle behind Partabu, the dog following last of all to guard against an attack from the rear. Suddenly Partabu stopped with a feeling of guilt. There was something like a dead sheep at the top of the steep slope that marked the end of the open grazing and the beginning of the forest. Could a wild beast have killed one of the flock without his knowing? There had not been a sound from the dog. And why had the corpse not been dragged into cover?

He approached warily, pulling out the axe from his girdle. The dog growled, increasing Partabu’s suspicions. But after a few seconds’ examination, he shouted to Dhani Ram:

‘There’s a man here, lying unconscious.’

They turned Chabeli Parshad over on his back, and found that he was still alive. They looked in the pocket attached to his girdle, and into his hat, the usual alternative to a pocket, but there was nothing.

‘He is certainly a holy man,’ said Dhani Ram, ‘for he has no blanket, no axe, no food, no money, not even a flint and steel to make fire. Why should anyone come up here without sheep unless he was a holy man? And alone, without food.’

It was Partabu who had the inspiration which followed, though Dhani Ram afterwards claimed it as his own.

‘This is the man the god spoke of,’ he said solemnly. ‘Don’t you remember what the god said: “A heavenly one shall come over the mountains bringing rain, but the time is not yet”? Well, here is the heavenly one, and the rain has come. It came yesterday.’

‘It will be coming again soon if we stay here talking nonsense,’ said Dhani Ram sharply, for he was the older man and a Brahman, and he did not like to have thoughts put in his mind by Partabu. ‘We must take him to the shelter; help me carry him.’ But the idea that perhaps this was the heavenly one of the prophecy stayed and grew, till he was sure it was true. The god who had foretold this event was a personality known as Kaunr who ruled the valley from which Dhani Ram and Partabu came. He lived in a temple in Mothar, Dhani Ram’s own village and the largest in the valley, and he was propitiated by the slaughter of goats, whose horns were nailed round his door. Even his own priest approached him backwards, with hands held out reversed in supplication, lest he should see the godling’s face and die. He was one of the many little gods who have been in the hills since before the Hindus came; and he spoke through the mouth of his priest, who was therefore a person of great authority in matters of crops and rain, and the fertility of women, sheep, cows and fields.

The priest, Indar Datt, had for the last ten days, been dealing in his own resourceful way with a problem which presented itself to him every two or three years. If it was a good season, there would be occasional thunderstorms and sharp showers to keep the ground moist in May and June, and at the end of June or the beginning of July the rains would come in earnest. But if there were no thunder-showers, and the rains were late, the village began to get anxious. Now there was a remedy for drought. When Kaunr decreed through the mouth of his priest that the time had come, it was necessary to collect the bark of certain trees, and pound it up into a paste, saying at the same time words which the priest knew. Then goats must be killed at Kaunr’s temple, and all the people of the valley would troop down to the stream and throw in the pounded bark with prayers for rain. All the way down from the place where this was done to the rushing ice-fed river below, in every pool, the fish would one by one turn on their backs and float belly upwards to the surface, stunned and unconscious for several hours. Then the villagers would wade into the stream and fill baskets with the fish, splashing each other with water, and throwing the sparkling drops up to heaven so that they fell like rain. And then the rain would come.

Now the problem which Indar Datt had from time to time to face was the necessity of timing this fishing festival so that the rain actually did come within a few days of its taking place. He knew in his heart of hearts that the rain would come in any case, sooner or later, for it is never known to fail in the hills. It was simply a matter of timing. He was not conscious of deception; he did not plan clearly in his own mind to postpone the festival until he was confident that rain could not long be delayed, but that was in fact what he did. He would give vague replies indicating that the rain would come but the time of the festival was not yet; and then if rain came without a festival, he was justified, while if the thought persisted, he could at length be certain that it was safe to decree that the fish should be slain and the rain invoked.

This year there had been no rain at all since early April and the ground was very hard. The rice had been planted out in the low-lying irrigated fields near the mouth of the stream, but it would soon be time to transplant the seedlings to land that must depend on rain. And the soil was too dry to sow the millet in the higher fields. The villagers came in deputation to Kaunr to ask if they should hold the fishing festival. But it was still early for the true rains, and there was not a cloud in the sky. The priest went into a trance.

The time is not yet, said Kaunr authoritatively from the mouth of Indar Datt, in the hoarse voice so unlike his usual tones. ‘But do not fear. The heavenly one will come from over the mountains bringing the rain.’

Now this was only Kaunr’s usual manner of talking, and it meant no more than that rain would come, brought by the god of rain and thunder, Kaunr’s big brother Indra, a genuine member of the Hindu pantheon. The last thing that Indar Datt would have wished was to give any supernatural sanction to a stranger coming into his valley from over the mountains. But events worked against him.

When Chabeli Parshad came to himself it was in an atmosphere with which he was familiar. The smell of wood-smoke contended with damp sheep and woollen coats, a combination he knew only slightly less well than that of wood-smoke and the breath of cattle. The scene on which he looked was one of the first that must be stored in the corporate memory of mankind. There was a sloping roof of rock, a low wall of unshaped stones at the mouth of the cave, a fire of damp wood smoking in the centre of a group of brown faces. The firelight flickered on the faces, and was reflected from the eyes of the sheep, who were packed in an outer circle beyond the men.

They gave him warm milk, and talked to him in a strange dialect, but he could discern their meaning. His mind came back to him with a strange restfulness and sense of peace. He was among friends, and would let the current carry him where it would. He had no longer any wish to walk up into the snows, or indeed to exert his own will in any way. The shepherds treated him with gentle reverence. They had heard the interpretation Partabu had put upon the prophecy; and Chabeli Parshad’s confused attempt to explain the experience he had undergone did nothing to make his supernatural origin less probable. They carried him by easy stages to Mothar, where they lodged him in Dhani Rain’s house and fed him on milk and honey.

The arrival of Chabeli Parshad presented Indar Datt with a new problem though he did not consciously face and appraise it. He did not recognise to himself that he ruled supreme in the five villages of the valley because he was the high priest and mouthpiece of Kaunr, and that he must admit no rival deity near the throne or his influence would be gone. Nor did Dhani Ram perceive consciously that there was a distinction between Kaunr, of whom he was afraid, and Indar Datt as the mouthpiece of Kaunr; he did not say to himself that the present headman of Mothar was an old man, easily persuaded, to whom he himself was next in succession, and that if he was really to rule, he must establish for himself an influence independent of Indar Datt’s. Yet each acted as though this was his conscious understanding of the position.

Indar Datt could not immediately denounce as a pretender the stranger who had appeared so miraculously with the rain in fulfilment of his own prophecy. Indeed, his own prestige and influence were for the moment increased and strengthened; Kaunr had again foretold the future through his lips. On the other hand, he did not want a rival in the valley who might also be supposed to know something of the will of Kaunr, who had sent him. But it did not seem to him that there was any immediate danger, for he at once saw that Chabeli Parshad’s was not a personality likely to make him interfere in village politics or assert himself unduly. It seemed to him best to bide his time for a little and make what capital he could of his successful prophecy, reserving for the moment the possibility of announcing in the voice of Kaunr that the stranger would go away from the valley as mysteriously as he had come, having previously suggested to Chabeli Parshad by a gradual course of insinuation that this would be best.

But he reckoned without Dhani Ram, who had acquired a kind of proprietary right in Chabeli Parshad, and an added prestige which he did not mean to lose. And so one day, in the presence of the headman and several of the elders of the village—but in the absence of Indar Datt—Dhani Ram said gravely:

‘Since Kaunr has sent us this holy man, we must keep him always in our village to bless our fields and bring us rain. You would like to stay here always, would you not?’

Chabeli Parshad agreed. He did not want to wander any more. The current of his own earthly life was failing, and he was content to be carried by the current of events.

The word went round the village that the holy man would stay with them always. It was too late for Indar Datt to suggest that the will of Kaunr should first be ascertained; to attempt now to send the stranger on his travels would mean an open conflict in which he might lose much and had little to gain. Better to acquiesce for the present. It was easy to see that Chabeli Parshad’s ‘always’ would not be for long.

They built a little house of one room close above the village, and every day brought milk and cakes of coarse millet bread, and sometimes rice, wild peaches, or walnuts. The holy man, as was proper, ate very little; but he did not sit cross-legged before his door as a holy man should, his eyes turned inward in meditation. He would go and sit for long hours above the highest fields in the village, those which gave the poorest crops, on a little outcrop of rock below the forest, where the turf was green. He would sit gazing down the valley and at the pine-covered slopes beyond, looking with loving gentleness at the sweep of the hills, at the glancing light reflected from the pines, the smoke rising from the village, or the tender pinks and yellows of the budding oaks in spring. But more often he would wander away to talk to the men with the sheep, or sit questioning the women as they worked at husking the rice or at the spinning; or he would find them gathering sticks in the forest and would bid them rest and sit and talk for a little. He found it strange to live among people who did not use matches, but carried flint and steel and tinder made from dried herbs, who had barely heard of sugar and tea, essentials in the country he had known, but such things meant little to him. He grew used to their strange speech, though never wholly to their preoccupation with the god Kaunr. But he did not dissent; he went to their village festivals and prostrated himself to the unseen without question or discussion.

He did not interfere with Indar Datt by taking part in village politics. He would not attempt to foretell weather or the success of crops. But, by the contrivance of Dhani Ram, he did exercise an influence in the village sufficient to keep alive the faint inward glow of Indar Datt’s hostility. If he was asked an opinion on a problem of conduct, he would give it, gravely and unhesitatingly, for he had a natural certainty of what he believed to be right, drawn from the long and lonely communion with the unknown creator whom he worshipped. Dhani Ram soon learnt in what kind of matters Chabeli Parshad would give his views, and would arrange that he should express an opinion in the presence of others before Kaunr had had the opportunity. And in retailing the holy man’s sayings, he was careful to suggest that this, too, was the voice of Kaunr; so that it was impossible for Indar Datt to make a god who was already committed speak with a double voice.

During the winter after he came to Mothar, Chabeli Parshad felt an increasing feebleness. He grew tired very quickly and shivered in the cold. But his mind was clear; he saw no visions, no confused purpose came to disturb him; he was content to go with the current. He knew that he should see one more summer, and then in the whiter cold he would go.

And so it was. One morning in the second winter, when the first snow was lying only a few inches deep round his hut, he could not get up when Dhani Ram’s son came with his food. He called the boy to his side, and asked him to fetch his father.

When Dhani Ram came, Chabeli Parshad said to him:

‘My son, when I am dead, burn my bones high above the village fields, on the outcrop below the forest where I used to sit. Remember this, my son.’

For he had always loved the high open places and the clear air, and he did not want his body to end in the stuffy thickets by the river.

He died next day, and Dhani Ram told the villagers what he had said. All agreed that so holy a man should be buried, not burnt. But Indar Datt felt that the time had come when open contest was profitable, and that he must delay no longer. If the holy man was buried in a place by himself, there would soon be a shrine in his memory, and men would go there to leave their little offerings. He said at once that Kaunr must be consulted before there could be a breach of the invariable custom of burning the dead where the tributary stream joined the river. Dhani Ram could not gainsay him, and the oracle was consulted. It was unusually definite. The stranger must be buried where the village had always burnt their dead. Dhani Ram felt uneasy and unhappy; he had loved the old man and did not like to deny him his last wish. Many of the villagers shared his feeling, but the holy man had gone and Kaunr was with them, greatly to be feared. They did not dare to protest.

Near the stream in its lower course, just before it joined the river, there was a curved cliff, as though an immense cheese-scoop had gouged deep into the slope of the hill. Below the cliff was a flat meadow through which the stream ran down to the river. There they buried him, at the foot of the cliff.

Three days later the village trembled suddenly at the time of the evening meal. There was a rumble below them in the ground, and the little houses rocked. It was a portent, but no one knew of what until next morning, when a boy came back from the river with an excited face.

‘There is a new spring,’ he said. ‘There is a stream running from the burning ground.’

All the village went to see. There it was, a steady stream of clear cold water, running from the rock, over the newly turned earth where the bones of their holy man lay. The stream ran through the grass and the rushes clear and swift to the river.

‘Wasted!’ was the thought in every man’s heart. For what good was a spring to them there, where the ground was rank and pebbly and lay under water every year in the rains?

‘If we had buried him where he asked,’ said Dhani Ram, ‘we might have used this water to irrigate the barren fields high above the village; and they would have become as good as the best.’

The villagers bowed their heads and agreed. Chabeli Parshad had thought of their good with the last breath he drew.

Nausicaa

The faint and colourless illumination of the dawn had been replaced in Nausicaa’s room by a light actually brighter, yet in appearance more obscure, since it was contrasted with the sharp whiteness of an oblique patch cut from the wall by the morning sun. It was this intense spearhead that she saw first when she awoke, and from the stainless quality of its colour, rather than from its position, she knew that it was still early. It was an awakening with no suggestion of constraint; no sudden sound or shadow had disturbed her, nor had the influence of the growing light at last forced her to reluctant consciousness. She had slept long enough, and, her body being refreshed, she ceased to sleep; the transition would have been as deliciously imperceptible to an observer as it was to herself.

She lay without moving, while the sunlight on the wall broadened by a hands-breadth. Then, with a sigh that expressed at the same time a bodily satisfaction and a resignation to some continued perplexity, she threw off the blanket, and stretched her arms above her head, and her whole body to rigidity. In this contented test of their perfection, her silvery limbs were still, instant for action as a bow-string, and so finely shaped that it seemed as though their passage through air or water would be as swift and easy as a trout’s way or a swallow’s. Then they slackened, she stood up and ran to the window.

There was delight in her eye as she looked out, yet an imperfectly realised regret. Of the expanse of air and earth that was before her, the greater part was sky, still cool in colour, as if hung with a distant veil of transparent silk; beneath her, an open land stretched in a slow rise and fall, like the breath of a sleeper, grey and olive-green, the shape of its familiar undulations to her inseparable from the fine closeness of its living turf, fed by the bitter sea-wind. The steely and impervious glitter of the dawn-lit sea was marked near the shore by a cross-hatching of yards and masts, the harbour of Phaiacia, and on her other hand great hills swept up from the plain and stared down upon it like the frown of Zeus.

Nausicaa drew a long breath, and smiled at the young morning. But her pleasure did not banish another feeling, a want in her mind as vague as the first awakening of hunger in the body, a faint unhappiness, augmented by her inability to understand it. The existence even of this desire was obscure as an image in dull silver; she could discern its presence, but its form was blurred. She put it from her, for the sun still lit the room; she laughed again, her mind as clear as April; then she sighed, and her left hand crept like the tendril of a vine about the white skin of her side.

When she was dressed, she went to her father, where he sat alone in the hall with his cup in his hand, considering what the day was to bring, before he called those who were waiting to see him on one business or another.

‘Father,’ she said. ‘May I have a wagon and take clothes to the river to wash them?’ But she spoke shyly, for he was sometimes angry when she troubled him with her affairs before his court was held. This morning he smiled, and answered:

‘Why is this? You are not usually eager for woman’s work.’

She leaned against his chair, and put her hands on his shoulders, and bent her head over him.

‘I want to go out today, and not to stay in the palace and talk to the young men who run and dance,’ she said; and she was shy again and kissed his hair to hide her face.

He laughed, and his left hand patted hers on his right shoulder, for the cup was in his right hand.

‘Take what you like,’ he said, ‘and come back as happy as you go.’

As she went down to the court where the wagons stood, she felt a desire to be alone that was due both to her happiness and to this mystery which ruffled her spirit like a slow puff of wind across a lake, breaking the clear pictures of trees and houses, coming without warning like a breath from the lips of an unseen god. To be alone she drove on in one wagon by herself, leaving her girls to follow in the second.

She turned her mules to the west, away from the town and the harbour, to where a clear river ran down over many pebbles from a glen in the hills to the sea. The road led across the pleasant land on which the palace stood, where the goats fed, and the young men practised their hurling and their running. But the mountains before her were not like those she saw from her window. Little rain fell on the west side of the island, and these hills looked as though they had never felt the freshness of dew. Against the evening sun they became violet shadows, edged with gold, like a queen’s robe, but at other times, no colour could be seen in them but the sandy yellow brown of a lion’s skin. Yet within what at first sight seemed one even hue, within this minute range, were infinite variations of shade and marking; for although now these hills gave so strong an impression of aridity that it would not have been surprising if whole peaks had crumbled to dust before the light airs of summer, once they must have streamed water like a boulder at the head of a fall. They were cut by the beds of old streams into such profuse and intricate confusion that from a distance the gashes seemed monotonous in their regularity, as if a gigantic fisherman had spread out his net there to dry. There was none of the hillside that was not a part of one or another of these ancient channels, not a yard that was not the bed of a stream, the wall of the corrie it had cut, or the ridge dividing it from the next beyond.

Inhospitable though they were to life, these hills and the brook that divided her from them had always seemed to Nausicaa peculiarly friendly and her own; it was as though they were persons, and she would have been jealous if a stranger had admired them. This morning the coolness of the light seemed to display with an added beauty the warm colouring of the rock, and the sun was still low enough to mark its surface with crossed shadows.

Her mind was more contented when they reached the brook and began the washing. By noon the girls had finished the work, and spread the clean clothes on the pebbles of the beach to dry, for Nausicaa would not let them rest till all was done. When they had come out of the stream and shaken the drops from their limbs, the whole company settled like seagulls in a circle, lying on the rocks that made islands in the sea of heather, or on the cushioned waves between, and eating the bread and raisins they had brought. Now that the work was ended, Nausicaa was merry, and she laughed at the tales the girls told her of their lovers or the sternness of their parents. When they had rested enough, they went down to the sandy beach, where there was a little space between the pebbles and the sea, and played with a ball until the clothes should be dry. They threw the ball from one to another, and each tried to catch it; when it touched the sand, there were laughs at the clumsy hands that missed it, and, whoever held it, each of the others called to her by name. Thus the time passed, until Nausicaa began to tire of the game and to think that she would leave her maids and sit down to watch the wagtail hopping on the stones of the brook, and the bees busy in the heather.

She had not yet left the game when one of the maids facing her screamed. Nausicaa turned to see what had frightened her, and she saw a man coming towards them along the beach. He was naked except for a branch he held before him, and he seemed some god or hero of the sea, for he was of great size and his hair and shoulders were white with brine. The game had stopped, and the girls were clustered behind her, but as the man drew nearer, they called out as if afraid, and ran to hide themselves. Nausicaa was angry with them; she knew that they were not really afraid, but with them it was a kind of instinct to pretend that they knew nothing of men’s ways. She stood and waited for the stranger, and her heart beat a little louder as she wondered if he really were a god.

The man addressed her, outwardly as though he were a peasant speaking to a princess; he knelt and laid his hand on her knees like one asking a favour. He spoke flattering words, and asked if she were a goddess, she had such beauty. But he spoke composedly, as if he would meet danger with a firm mind, being accustomed to evil chances. She knew from his bigness of body and his speech, as well as from the assured manner of his gaze, that he was not a peasant, but a prince or a noble, and she took his arm and made him stand. Then he told her that his ship had driven many days before the wind and had been lost off that coast, and that all his company were drowned but he, who alone had had the strength to reach the shore. He ended his tale, and asked her only the name of the country he had come to, and stood waiting for his answer.

She told him this was Phaiacia, a land of sailors; and she paused wondering how she could bring him to her father’s house, where he would be treated as is proper for a guest. First he must be dressed, and she showed him the clothes on the beach, now dried by the sun. He chose from among them a cloak and tunic of her brother’s, but first he said that he must wash himself in fresh water. Her servants had come back; they were whispering behind her, and this made her more angry even than their screams had done. She told two of them to go with the stranger to bathe him, but he refused their help, and strode along the bank of the brook looking for a pool, with no sign that he had heard the girls’ laughter.

As soon as he had gone, Nausicaa turned on them and scolded them. They clustered round her, and said that they were sorry, but she knew they would do the same again, for they did not understand their fault.

She puzzled for a little how she should bring him to the palace, for neither for him nor for herself would there be an end to the gossip if she drove him in her wagon to the gates. Her mind was not made up when he came from his bath, so splendid in carriage and stature that all that laughing galaxy was silent, waiting to hear him speak. To Nausicaa it was an effort to remember that she was a princess, and he, no one as yet knew what; she felt a weakness in all her limbs; he stopped, and waited as if for her command; she told him to climb into the wagon, took her place by his side, and drove towards the palace. When they came near she told him how the palace lay from where they were, and put him down. He obeyed her with that completeness that is only seen when obedience is wholly from within.

When she reached her father’s house, the day had grown to that gracious maturity when noon is past and evening not yet perfect. Nausicaa ran up the wide stairs to the women’s rooms; she found that no more than this morning could she fix the object of her thoughts, but there was a difference. Then they had been vaporous and unformed, turning and melting like the smoke of dry wood in changing airs, blue and liquid; now they were sharp and alert, quick as a lizard hunting on sun-baked rock. All was centred on the fastening of a pin, or the choice of a scarf, orders to her maids about the clothes she had brought home, or the patterns they were to weave, but between these stepping-stones of energy and action, she came back to the man from the sea, her questions aimed at him with the quick intensity of the lizard’s dart, as bent as he on capture, as undismayed by failure, and as instantly directed to new prey. She wondered who he was, then forgot him in a new pattern a girl had got from her sister, where he came from, what he liked to eat, each query in turn vanishing in the absorption of her work.

Balls in a spun bowl seem of their own volition to seek escape from a force which continually draws them back, and to a god observing dispassionately the successive objects of her thought, Nausicaa’s mind might have seemed thus; but the god would have been wrong, for it was with no effort of repression that she left the man from the sea for silks and threads. For the time, she was like a vase into which wine is poured, from without; she made no question of its kind or colour.

When she was dressed, she went down into the great hall to dinner, glad that she was to see him again. Her father had treated him with honour, and set him in a high seat, and no questions were asked him while they ate. But when dinner was ended, then the man from the sea began to tell his tale. He had been in strange places, and seen strange things; he told of escape from a monster that ate men’s flesh, of sailors changed to beasts, and the loves of a goddess and a witch. And as he talked, slowly he took on character and attributes, until Nausicaa felt he was a man she knew as well as she knew her father and her brothers. She had thought of the uncertain event of war or the hazard of journey by sea as things a man should face for their own sake, or for his, a sharpness like the tang of an olive that gave life its worth. But now she heard a man tell of unimagined perils, and to him they were only difficulties in his way, to be set aside one by one until he reached his home. For his talk turned always to Ithaca, to his father’s home and his wife, to his fields and herds and stalls. A goddess had loved him, but he remembered only Penelope, the careful housewife. He had seen war and conquest and kings’ palaces, but his mind was set on the slow familiar things, the corn ripening, the swine rooting the ground, the goat’s milk warm at evening, the sharp scent of burning oak. A picture came to her of his coming to Ithaca, unknown and unexpected, coming at night to a hut where poor men sat on the ground before dancing flames, and she felt that it would be as dear to him to see those men as to see his own hall; for he loved the island itself, every rock and goat-cropped hummock, every man and beast.

A sadness came to all her body that no one would ever know how much he and she had been one in her thoughts, for she saw that he must go. That mournful uneasiness of her spirit had in one moment realised its object and seen that the object could never be attained. For she had wanted something from outside, a strangeness and sweetness foreign to the homely order of her life, a lovely suffusion of colour that would entice her to a never-ending ecstasy. The vision had shown for a moment like the violet tremble in the air that comes before the misty rainbow; then it had faded. The sadness did not lie in this, that she saw that the man from the sea must go, but in this, that though for her he was clothed in deeds that were splendid because they were strange, to himself only that was splendid which she sought to escape, the old ways of her home and her friends.

He ended his tale. Her father gave him a ship to sail to Ithaca, and begged him to stay before he went. Two days he stayed, but his eyes were always to the South, where the ship lay in the harbour. He was to sail very early in the morning on the third day, and on the evening of the second day she saw him alone. She had reached the broad gallery that ran round the hall, and she leaned over to look down. The wide doors were open in the West, and the deep golden light of the setting sun filled the room with a rich haze of dancing dust, slashed by dark raying lines of shadow from the columns of the gallery. He came through the open doors into that autumn radiance, and turned to look up at the gallery. Nausicaa stood erect, her hands upon the rail; her breath rose and fell, she felt no more than a young larch sighing in a forest. Only her body was filled with a warm life, as though she too were soaked in that mist of light that seemed the essence of the ripening barley. Thus she stood, and then he smiled at her and waved his hand, and was gone, and a servant closed the great doors of the hall.

The Crook

He had been badly knifed, and indeed, when the police first found him, they thought he was dead. He was lying in the ditch by the side of the road that leads to cantonments from the suburb where rich money-lenders and minor officials live, and it was by the merest chance that the patrol flashed a light on his limp body. When they put him on a stretcher to lift him into the police van, he stirred and they knew for the first time that he was alive. They got him to hospital as quickly as they could, and there he came to consciousness for a moment and spoke. He asked to see an officer from military intelligence.

The assistant surgeon who was the resident doctor at the hospital had been in the army. He realised that his patient had not got long to live, and that what he had to say might be important; he rang up the area headquarters at once. They got on to me, and I was at the hospital soon after three o’clock in the morning. He was unconscious when I arrived, and I waited by his bedside for a few minutes till the doctors were ready to give him something that would bring him back to consciousness and let him talk.

The electric light in the hospital was poor. There was one naked bulb in the room, and it must have been an old one and of low power. Its yellow light was depressing; so too was the hospital smell of disinfectant, ether and sickness. The man who had sent for me lay on his back as though he were dead. His face was white, drained of blood, even the lips; his black hair and eyebrows were harsh against the pallor. It was a clean, well-cut face, sensitive and intelligent, the nose straight and sharp, the mouth finely-drawn, not a typically English face; south European, one would have said. It seemed vaguely familiar. I puzzled over the likeness for a few moments, and then suddenly I remembered who he was and where I had met him. Douglas Coates. That was who he was, Douglas Coates of the 159th.

I remembered the first time I had heard his name. The scene was in such vivid contrast with the poor bed in the hospital ward, in the light of that one cheap electric bulb, that I dwelt on the memory, lingering over the details, as I waited for the man on the bed to talk. We had been out shooting duck; I don’t know that it had been different from other mornings, but I must for some reason have been more aware and impressionable than usual, because the memory was so unusually clear. We had waded into the water in the dark, and stood there waiting as the sky grew lighter. We could hear the waterfowl stirring here and there among the reeds, and there was the rank smell of rotting sedge and mud and the marsh. Then suddenly the whisper of swift wings, and the guns were spurting flame in the half light. Speed, and the swift squadrons of the duck, swerving and dipping, quick as thought, and twisting away; the splash of a teal hitting the water, the soft feathers on the lovely limp body, drops of bright blood and bright water. And then the sun, suddenly springing above the flat sky-line, glowing molten gold, turning the water to smooth ripples of liquid gold, lighting the white and gold of the star-like lotus blossom, and with it all the swift rush of the birds’ coming, dipping and diving and turning, and the rank smell of the marsh.

It came back to me very clearly. When we waded ashore to have breakfast there had been some friendly argument about a bird that two of us claimed. I ended it by saying:

‘All right, it’s yours. There is a type that simply can’t help being a crook.’

At that phrase, Mark Auden had looked up with a smile on his square humorous face, and said:

‘Talking of the type that can’t help being a crook, did anyone here know Douglas Coates of the 159th? I see he’s just been permitted to resign his commission at last. Lucky not to be doing ten years.’

Two people did know him, and they began to tell tales of his surprising dishonesties and improprieties, and his still more surprising knack of avoiding the consequences that would have followed for anyone else. Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that he had managed to stay on so long in the 159th, a battalion who despised social accomplishments but were fiercely proud of their battle-honours, the red flashes worn on the shoulder straps which they had won at Assaye, their record of never having failed to reach their objective.

One story about Douglas stuck in my memory; it was typical of half a dozen that I heard that morning. It seemed he was a man who did everything well, and among other accomplishments he was a fine horseman and had the judgment and sympathy that win races. And naturally racing appealed to the side of him that couldn’t help being a crook; it presents many opportunities, even to people who are straight about other things. The tale was that he had gone down to Bombay for the races and had stayed with an Australian trainer. He had ridden one or two winners, and partly because he was so good with the horses, and partly by sheer natural charm, he had completely won the old man’s heart. When Douglas was sure he had his confidence, he had suggested that the trainer’s horses were too well known on the race courses near Bombay to win much. They were handicapped out of the stakes; and you couldn’t get odds on them either. Why shouldn’t Douglas take four of them on a tour of the northern race-meetings, where no one knew them, and they would win sensationally? Douglas and his host would share the profits, which were sure to be considerable. He painted so cheerful a picture that the trainer agreed without putting anything into writing. Douglas took the horses, and his tour in the North was as successful as he had foretold. He had a number of wins and made a good deal both in stakes and bets. Finally he sold the horses quite well. But he never sent a penny to the trainer, who, he maintained, had given him the horses for love. It was one man’s word against another’s, and although no one who knew Douglas had the faintest doubt which of them was speaking the truth, the trainer never got any satisfaction.

‘And yet,’ said Mark, when we had finished the stories about him, which was not till there was nothing left to eat, ‘if Douglas Coates walked round the corner of that bush now, we should offer him a drink, and before the end of the day he would have tried to borrow money from each of us, and I think he’d have succeeded with most of us.’

I could hardly believe this, but it turned out to be true that we could not say no to him, for Douglas Coates appeared that evening at Mark’s house. It was one of those coincidences which are too improbable for fiction but happen in real life that we should have been talking about him only that morning. Mark had asked me to dinner; he told me to come early because we were both short of sleep and he was going to send me home immediately after dinner and go straight to bed. We were sitting on the lawn as the light faded, enjoying one of the nearest approaches to satisfaction that a hedonist can achieve. At least, I know that I should put very high in my list of pleasures the utter relaxation of mind and body that comes from hard physical exercise, and it is better still if it is combined with a consciousness that you have done something well or seen something beautiful. I was remembering the whisper of birds’ wings, the gold ripples on the water, the smell of the rotting marsh; Mark, I expect, was thinking of difficult shots he had brought off; but I am sure neither of us was making much mental effort. We were content to be silent and watch the change of colour in the clear sky above the trees at the bottom of the garden. A servant came out and said that someone had come to see Mark; it was someone he didn’t know who wouldn’t give a name. Strangers were rare; we turned in our long basket chairs towards the house and stood up to greet him as the visitor came nearer; and Mark introduced me to Douglas Coates.

He was wearing one of those cream-coloured suits that business people wear in Calcutta and Bombay, quite well cut, but even in the half light rather crumpled. You don’t see those sort of clothes much in the small stations in the North of India, and it seemed to mark him off as a man who had left our community, the servants of telegraphic orders to proceed immediately somewhere else, and entered another world about whose rules and habits neither Mark nor I knew anything. But I forgot that first impression as soon as he began to talk.

He talked very well indeed. He had charm and humour and he knew how to sound the right note for his audience of the moment. To us he was the soldier, but the soldier with a little money of his own, leisured, intelligent, a man of the world to whom his profession is a pleasant background rather than the absorbing interest it is to some. He spoke as though he had left the army entirely of his own choice, but he was wise enough not to belittle what he had lost. He spoke with a regret that was quite moving of regimental life, the companionship, the silver in the mess, the ritual of guest nights, the bugles. He spoke too of the pride men feel in the record of their regiment and its tradition; he did it very well, in an inarticulate English way, a little ashamed of mentioning it. I thought as he talked that he had the true actor’s temperament; he believed emotionally everything he said. At the moment he said them, his words became true for him, though he probably never gave the subject a thought when he was alone. That was how it struck me.

He was frank, amusing, self-deprecatory about his present life. To anyone brought up in the services, he said, it was a shock to plunge into the cynicism and corruption of business life. He was an agent for a firm in Lahore, selling tractors, steam-rollers, agricultural machinery; without bribery, it was impossible to sell anything to a public body, and private persons don’t buy steam-rollers. He had to shrug his shoulders, lower his standards, and bribe; there was no alternative, but it was a humiliating experience to a soldier. In all he said, there was not the faintest hint, by the flicker of an eyelid, of the truth about himself of which he knew that Mark was perfectly aware; and even with the morning’s conversation fresh in our minds, we were hypnotised into talking to him as though he were still unblemished in character, and almost into forgetting that he was not.

He was very good company. He knew everyone, he had been everywhere, he knew the most amusing stories about everyone worth telling stories about; and when he stood up to go, we were sorry. As we moved towards the house, Mark asked where he was staying.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m not exactly staying anywhere. There’s been a slight miscarriage of my plans, but I don’t want to bother you with all that. I shall get quite a good meal at the railway refreshment room.’

Mark hesitated, but only for a second. He could not bear the thought of condemning to a solitary meal at the railway station someone who had been to a good school and belonged to a good regiment. He said:

‘My dear fellow, we can’t let you do that. You must stay and have something with us.’

Douglas protested of course, but of course he stayed. He told us that he had been about to go back to Lahore, but had suddenly received a telegram from his employer, telling him to do some business in our city of Ramnagar. He had had no time to think beforehand where he was going to stay, but had taken the next train. He had been short of sleep, and dozed in the train whenever he could; and he had suddenly woken from one of these dozes to see the station of Ramnagar sliding past him as the train moved out. It was vital to him not to disregard his employer’s instructions; he jumped out at once, as the train was gathering speed, and his servant and luggage were carried on to Lahore. He had been left with nothing but what he stood up in; but his business would only take him one day, so he decided to camp in the station. And going for a Sunday evening stroll through the cantonments, he had seen Mark’s name on the gate.

It was not really one of his better efforts, because no man living could sleep in the afternoon through the din of a halt at an Indian railway station, and still less would a servant. The truth of the matter must be that he had neither servant nor luggage and was in much worse circumstances than he had previously let us see. Perhaps this was his way of explaining the truth. But all through dinner he continued to talk in the same easy and amusing vein as before, about every subject in the world. It was only after dinner, when we settled down again in long basket chairs on the lawn, for a last half-hour of talk in the starlight, that his tone changed completely, and he told us what had really happened to him after he had been told to leave the army. At least, I felt at the time, and always believed afterwards, that this was what had really happened, though you could never tell with Douglas Coates.

He had had a lot of debts, of course, and his colonel had made it a condition of letting his resignation appear voluntary that he should clear them. He had got through most of his private means already, and even when he had sold his ponies, his Sowter saddles, his guns by Churchill, his boots by Peel, his rods by Hardy, his uniforms, his gramophone, his books, there was barely enough to pay the debts his colonel knew of. But he was left with a little, enough to live in comfort for a few months at least, and he had gone into a business partnership with a Hindu, some kind of tourist agency to Kashmir. This part of the story I accepted with more reserve than the rest, but what he said was that he had been double-crossed; his partner had disappeared with the assets, and he was left to face the creditors. When they had finished with him, he was in Lahore at the beginning of May, with the clothes he stood up in, one spare shirt and two handkerchiefs, half a dozen old books, twenty-two rupees and a few annas.

He found a room that he could hire for a month for ten rupees. He had to pay in advance, and that left him twelve rupees. He found he could just live on four pennyworth of parched gram every day; and that meant that his food would cost him eight rupees for the month he had the room. With what was left, he bought a packet of Lux and a flat iron, because he reckoned that unless his clothes were clean he had no chance of getting a job. He used to wash his clothes every night, after eating the second half of his ration of gram, with the sweat running off his elbows and drying as it splashed on the floor. He said he had never known what heat meant before. He had spent his hot weathers in big bungalows with trees and watered lawns round them, with fans and iced drinks. That sordid room in Lahore bazaar was very different. There was not only the searing heat, but flies, and the smell of greasy cooking in cheap oil, all the noise of the street. All this on starvation rations; and he was a man who had had the best of everything, all his life. He thought of Dives in hell, and wished he had the amount of just one of the tips he had given the head waiter at the Berkeley. It would have meant another month of life.

For he had determined to kill himself if he didn’t get a job by the end of the month. It would be better than dying of starvation in the blinding heat of June. He spent a good deal of time thinking how he would do it, when he wasn’t tramping from office to office, interviewing hard-faced men who wanted to know about his past record. His ideas of the kind of job he would accept were less ambitious every day. None of the good firms would look at him; he had owed most of them money at one time or another, and the rest had heard the rumour of his ways.

At last, on the twenty-seventh day, when he was beginning to feel that going from office to office was simply a wearisome task to be got through as quickly as possible, and that it would be a relief when the thirtieth day came and he could end it all, he went to see a man called Charanjit Lal. A hard, evil man, he said, who, when Douglas had finished speaking, looked at him with a slow smile and nodded. He drew out one hundred rupees and gave it to Douglas straight away. It was an advance of the first month’s wages, and there would be a commission on sales.

Douglas said that in his half-starved state the relief was so great that he fainted. He caught hold of the table and sank on the floor. He must have come back to consciousness quickly, for when he did he was still holding the hundred rupees in his hand as he lay on the floor, and Charanjit Lal was still smiling that evil smile. Douglas knew that he had sold himself to the devil for good now, but he didn’t mind much. He went and had a meal of bacon and eggs at a place that catered for British soldiers. He had whisky with his meal and coffee afterwards; and then he sat smoking a cheap cigarette, blissfully letting the smoke dribble through his nose and taking deep breaths of it. Nothing had ever tasted so good before. Then he went to arrange for somewhere a little less sordid to stay.

That was his tale, and I think it was substantially true. Neither Mark nor I could help feeling sorry for him, in spite of all we knew, and when I stood up to go and Douglas also rose, Mark asked him to stay the night.

He stayed two nights, and left early on the third morning. I saw him again twice, for in those days I was always in and out of Mark’s bungalow, and each time he was the easy, brilliant man of the world. He might have been the Military Secretary to a Governor; you felt he hadn’t a care and found everyone as charming as himself. It was not till some ten days after he left that we found that the business on which he had spent his Monday in Ramnagar had been cashing cheques on a fictitious account at all the shops where Mark had credit.

That was the Douglas Coates I remembered, and there he was, lying at the point of death in the public hospital in Lahore. The doctor came at last and told me he was sure Douglas had only an hour or two at the most before he died; he might be unconscious till he went unless he had an injection. The drug would bring him back, but he might use up his strength in talking, and go the quicker. But half an hour would not make much difference to him, and he had wanted to talk. So he gave him the drug.

A little colour came back to his lips, and they parted; Douglas opened his dark eyes; I saw that he recognised me. He whispered:

‘I know you.’

I reminded him that I had been with Mark Auden in Ramnagar. He said:

‘Yes. Then you know about me. That will save time.’

He asked if I was from military intelligence, and when he knew I was he began to talk. He was very weak, and it was a big effort; I had to bend close to hear his voice. But even so, I think he enjoyed telling his tale. He was an artist in his way and had the temperament that will always play up to an audience. He tried to choose his words and make his story telling, but he wandered a good deal and I had to keep bringing him back to the point.

He told me he had fallen utterly into the power of Charanjit Lal. He had worked for him on a commission basis, and at first he had gone straight. He was very frank; he wanted to size up the position before he tried anything crooked. But he had soon seen how he could swindle his employer; with the real necessity for bribing customers it had been too easy. And once he slipped into it, the amounts got bigger and bigger, till at last Charanjit Lal confronted him with proofs, inescapable proofs which could be produced in a criminal court. He smiled the same slow smile as he put them before Douglas. He had known it would happen, and now he had him. He locked his documents carefully away, and now proceeded quietly and systematically to exploit his power over a man who dared not have scruples.

Douglas did not try to excuse himself to me. He said bitterly that he supposed I should be surprised to know there was anything he thought too dirty, but that in fact he did shrink from the tasks Charanjit Lal set him. He had taken money whenever he could, all his life, by running up debts he never meant to pay, by forgery, trickery, embezzlement, or plain theft; but money had just been something he had a use for and wanted, and the getting of it by dishonest means had been a kind of game for him. He had not robbed the poor and seen the results; he had not deliberately squeezed men dry and ruined them. There was no moral sense in his nature, but equally there was no deliberate cruelty and no hardness. He hated acting as the moneylender’s agent in jobs that grew steadily dirtier and dirtier; but whenever he showed signs of revolt the whip cracked over his back; and he gradually went in deeper and deeper. There were other henchmen too, Indians, and he thought the same tactics were used with them all; once in their employer’s power they were used in a series of transactions that got worse and worse, making it steadily more difficult to escape. He thought he was one of the elite who were kept for the really beastly jobs, and Charanjit Lal liked making him squirm at having to do them. He said there was practically nothing he hadn’t done; more than once he had indirectly taken part in murder, and eventually Charanjit Lal had held evidence that could have hanged him.

He thought the war might save him, but he was over fifty now; they had refused his application for a commission in 1939 on the ground of his past record, and he was too old for the ranks. And so he had gone on during the war as before, except that Charanjit Lal was making thousands now where he had been making hundreds before. Douglas had never known much about the political side of the business, though he knew of course that a man with such wide business interests had to keep a finger in politics, and some of his odd jobs had been political. But he had never known until now that Charanjit Lal was reckoning on the possibility of Japanese victory and actively insuring himself against it.

On the evening of his last day of life, he had been sent for and Charanjit Lal had told him that next morning at eight o’clock he was to present himself in uniform at the gate of Lahore Jail and go to see a certain military prisoner. He had impersonated British officers once or twice before for his employer, but to gain a business advantage, not for any purpose that smacked of espionage. But this project, though a very simple one, fairly stank of it. He was to see a prisoner called Dip Chand and ask him if he knew what had happened to the rest of the party who had landed with him. That was all; it didn’t sound very important.

I must have shown my interest when he mentioned Dip Chand. Through someone’s folly the news that we had caught this man had got into the press; but we hoped that very few people indeed knew that we had captured the rest of the party who had been landed by a Japanese submarine at the same time. If the Japanese knew that, they would not pay the attention we should have liked to the news which those very men were supposed to be sending them. And Dip Chand knew that we had got them. A word from him to anyone in touch with the Japanese would spoil a very elaborate artifice. The news that they wanted to get confirmation from Dip Chand showed that they were already suspicious, and it at once occurred to me that here might be a chance to lull their suspicions. If they thought Douglas was dead and sent someone else tomorrow morning instead, well, perhaps the bogus interrogating officer might be presented to a bogus Dip Chand, who would be positive that his companions had not been captured. And we should not lose sight of that bogus officer. No, it was all most interesting, but the training of silence had become instinctive and even though Douglas had only an hour to live, I did not want him to take all that I knew to another world. All I said was:

‘It’s much more important than you think. And it is very helpful to us to know that they wanted to find out about that.’

Douglas was too weak to smile, but I could see that he was pleased. He seemed clearer in his mind now and did not wander so much. He said:

‘It didn’t sound important, but it had to be something dirty or Charanjit Lal wouldn’t have told me to do it. I guessed there was more in it than there seemed to be. It was the first time I’d been told to do anything that could possibly help the Japanese. I felt it was too much. I thought I’d pretend to do it but really I’d come and tell you people. He must have seen what I thought about it, for he went to his safe. He kept copies there of all the evidence he had against me; only copies, the originals were somewhere else. He read me bits. There was no doubt he could have got me strung up, or a life sentence. I know what it’s like in an Indian jail. I wasn’t going to face that. And I was pretty bitter; I’d tried hard to get back into the army and you wouldn’t have me. None of my own kind would speak to me. I thought what the hell; it’s too late to be fussy. I’ll do it.’

He stopped speaking and his eyes closed. His voice had been getting weaker and weaker, and in that yellow light it seemed there was no blood in his face at all. I thought he had gone; I looked at my watch and calculated how long it would take me to get things moving at the jail. It sounds callous, but I had got the information I wanted from a military point of view, and there wasn’t likely to be any more. However, I saw that there was plenty of time, and I needn’t rush away. I looked at Douglas again. His lips moved and he said something rather difficult to catch about not standing for the King. I didn’t understand at the time, but I remembered later that the 159th drank the King’s health sitting, because they had been raised as marines. Then he seemed to come back a little further. He opened his eyes and spoke again. He spoke very slowly, with long pauses between his words, but very clearly now. He said:

‘He gave me an identity card. I expect they’ve taken it away. It wasn’t my name, but it was my own regiment. I was so bitter I smiled when I saw that. And then he gave me red flashes to put on my shoulder straps. You know about them. We’re proud of them. won them at Assaye. And then I knew I couldn’t. It was too much. Not my own regiment. It was no use trying to deceive Charanjit. I threw them back on the table. He looked at me with that smile. I knew I was done for. I thought I’d be arrested this morning. But they got me on the way. I was coming to tell you. I’m glad . . .’

I never learnt why he was glad, for he closed his eyes for the last time on that word.

When I left the hospital I still had plenty of time; no one would be up for half an hour, and it was no use going to bed. I stopped the truck on the bridge over the river, and leaned over the parapet thinking of Douglas Coates and the one last rag of pride that had survived in him. There was a whisper of swift wings, and a wedge of teal passed over my head. The sun sprang suddenly above the sky-line, glowing molten gold, turning the water to smooth ripples of gold. It had all happened, it was over, nothing was changed.

I stayed some time smoking a cigarette. I looked at the blue ribbon of smoke from the burning end and the grey smoke I breathed out. I had been watching death come, and perhaps it was for this reason, but perhaps only because I had not slept much that night and because I was hungry, that everything I saw seemed strangely significant, like the odd revealing phrase in a play which suddenly lays bare the meaning of a character or a situation. I spread out my fingers and looked at them curiously as they answered my will; I watched the ripples and pools of gold on the water. All seemed vivid with life, all new as though just created.

But it was time to go and arrange that there should be a suitable Dip Chand to be interrogated in case they had found a successor for Douglas; I turned back to the truck and told the driver to start.

The Adventure

Peter was walking reluctantly towards home in the faint darkness of a night in early summer. He had been dining out in Chelsea and he was left with a feeling that the evening was in danger of coming to an end just when it ought to be beginning. His dinner-party had been pleasant but decorous. In another mood it would have been exactly right, but not in May when the horse-chestnuts were in bloom and the lilac in bud. The food and wine had been excellent; they had been designed to release the mind from care and to encourage conversation, which the host had intended should be concerned with matters that were of moment in those early days of 1938, such as the maintenance of our influence in the Middle East, how much weight should be given to the feeling of the Arab world, the future of, let us say, Turkish bauxite. Outwardly, the intention had been achieved, for those were the kind of things the company had talked about; but Peter’s thoughts had been far away. Each sip of wine had beckoned him not to discussion but to adventure. The primrose was in his blood, the air was full of the exciting scent of spring, and tonight he would have been equally ready to give all the bauxite in Turkey to anyone who wanted it or to die for it if his country wished. He felt so young, the surge of life was so insistent, that tonight he could think of nothing but his own need for action and excitement.

He had felt like that when he walked up the steps and rang the bell of the prim narrow-fronted house, tingling with physical well-being, ready for anything but the discussion on politics and strategy which he knew was inevitable. Still, he was a polite young man, and he had listened with an air of candid attention to the talk of molybdenum and strategic areas, and even contributed a little now and then. But inwardly he seethed with a flippant impatience; and the feeling grew stronger as the evening wore on without an opportunity for relief.

The party had broken up early, and now he was walking home slowly in the pale darkness, hoping against all reason and common sense that something would happen. He had refused a lift in a car or a taxi, which would have reduced the faint possibility of some miraculous intervention before he reached his flat. He might of course, have gone to a night club or to a restaurant, though the bars would be closing before long; but to go by himself would be to invite the wrong kind of adventure, one for which he was too fastidious. No, he wanted something quite different; if the Prince of Bohemia were to step out from a dark opening and offer him a cream tart; if a veiled figure were to glide to his side and in thrilling but foreign accents beg him to follow but ask no questions; that would be the kind of adventure that would accord with his mood. Nothing of the sort was perhaps very likely, but there really was no reason on earth why one should not meet a charming girl engaged in a dispute with a taximan, or persecuted by the attentions of an odious person who could be neatly floored by one skilful left to the chin; and then of course, in heaven-sent company, the night club would become attractive, though it would not really matter where one went.

But he walked on and nothing happened. Not a foreign princess, not a scream choked off horribly in the middle, not a debutante pestered by a drunk. And he was getting depressingly near home. He felt the prospect of going lonely to bed with a book so forbidding that he stopped and waited for a moment in the silent streets. He even turned and walked back for a few paces, but this was so obviously absurd that he gave it up and, with an increasing fear that there would be no fairy godmother tonight, found himself drawn slowly towards the block of flats where he lived, like a mariner whose compass is under the pull of a lodestone.

He reached the outer door, looked sadly up and down the street, and despairingly stepped inside. There was an automatic lift, but he would have none of it. He was incurably hopeful; there was still a chance that something might happen on the stairs. He went slowly up, unwillingly to bed.

On the first floor he stopped. From a closed door before him came that sound like surf on a pebbly beach, the unmistakable surging roar of a party in full blast, everyone talking at once. Peter stood still. He stood and looked at the door. In his present ridiculous mood he wanted to go in. He would have joined any party. But he had no idea whose flat it was. It wasn’t everyone who would be amused if a perfect stranger walked in and said he happened to be passing and felt like a party. He stood in hesitation.

The door opened and a young man came out. He wore a well-cut brown suit rather untidily; the trousers were baggy at the knees. An irrepressible lock of fair hair fell across one eye. His face lighted up when he saw Peter.

‘A conjuror!’ he cried. ‘Just what Ambrose needs to make his party go. Direct interposition—interposition—of Providence. I was just thinking it was a long time since I went to a party where there was a conjuror. I was wearing my velveteen I remember. Got your rabbits?’

Peter was wearing a dinner-jacket and he felt sure conjurors wore white ties; but the young man in baggy trousers was clearly in a mood like his own, and disinclined for fine points. Peter took up his cue and replied with dignity:

‘Thank you, I need no equipment. The subjects of my experiments are human beings. I prefer to call them experiments . . .’

‘Not tricks?’ asked the young man anxiously.

‘Not tricks,’ replied Peter firmly. ‘Magicians of my calibre prefer to call them experiments. And we like to be known as prestidigitators.’

‘I should think you would,’ said the young man enthusiastically. ‘I should like to be known as one myself. Come inside.’

The surf of the party roared louder; it swelled like the roar of a rain-fed ford, and dropped to an astonished silence as the young man led Peter in and shouted at the top of his voice:

‘Folks, I have the rare privilege of presenting to you Signor Hey-Presto, one of the greatest prestidigitators of all time.’ He paused impressively and went on: ‘He will turn you all into rabbits. Sit down everybody.’

Then he turned to Peter and said:

‘She’s all yours.’

On any other night, Peter might have felt embarrassed. But tonight the world was at his feet, and he felt irresponsibly ready to send it bouncing down the vaults of time and space, rebounding from planet to planet, clanging brazenly against the sun, to end in a shower of coruscating splinters. He did not mind what he did. He stepped forward, made a professional bow, and began to talk nonsense.

On this evening of evenings, showman’s patter tripped lightly off his tongue. He was no ordinary magician dealing in rabbits and top hats, he explained. His were serious experiments, researches piercing deep into the mysteries of matter and spirit, and they depended almost as much on the philosophical powers of his audience as on his own skill, although this had been commended by most of the crowned heads of Europe. He would begin, with a simple trick, an undeniable miracle that was performed every day. He asked for a whisky and soda, something quite definitely material, and before their eyes transformed it into nervous energy, zest and a profound and deepening insight into life. Now he would reverse the process and turn spirit into matter. For this experiment he must borrow a gentleman from the audience.

‘And mind you,’ said Peter sternly, ‘he must be a gentleman. None of your stockbrokers!’

Someone was pushed reluctantly forward. Peter pointed out that the subject of his experiment was a live human being, and by a few questions demonstrated that he was capable of connected thought and even of simple excursions into metaphysics. Now he was to be turned into something purely material, neither more nor less than a teapot.

It would have been easy to have become a bore, but Peter infected the party with his own enjoyment as he talked and he did not go on too long. He gave up the experiment, on the ground that the audience were not concentrating, and abandoned the rostrum. He found his host and apologised for his irruption, was given another drink and mingled with the crowd.

And now disaster overtook him, for an earnest man with dark hair parted in the middle and very thick glasses seized on him, and congratulated him on his impromptu performance.

‘But I can see you really know a great deal about metaphysics,’ he said, and proceeded to talk on the subject himself with insistence and determination. Peter tried to escape, but the earnest man followed up every retreat and drove him relentlessly into a corner. Peter felt his heart sinking; he looked round wildly for help, but there was no one he knew. One friendly face to whom he could appeal would give him the opportunity of breaking out of this clinch against the ropes; but there was no one.

And then he saw her, a face he knew, an old friend; a round merry little face, friendly and helpful, an elegant figure of an arm-enticing slenderness. He side-stepped the earnest man, took two paces through the crowd, caught her two hands in his, and kissed her.

‘I’m so glad to see you again!’

She said:

‘And I’m glad to see you.’

But, he thought to himself, who who who are you? Where have I seen you before! I know you so well. Who who who?

He began to talk to her. He spoke as to an old friend he had lost sight of. He asked questions. She answered laughingly; there was no difficulty about talking. But he got no further. She would not give him the clue he wanted. As he talked, he flogged his mind to tell him who she was. But his mind would not go that way. It sat back on its haunches, put back its long ears, bared yellow teeth, and would not budge.

From every angle but that of finding out what he wanted to know, the conversation was a success. They liked each other. Each laughed at the other, not at anything that was said but because the mere fact of the other’s existence seemed funny and delightful. At last she said she must go, and Peter noticed for the first time that the crowd was thinning. He said:

‘I suppose I must too. Having crashed the party, I shouldn’t also be the last to leave. What about lunch tomorrow?’

She nodded happily and he told her where to meet him. A round merry little face. Neat dark curls, a slender figure; a fastidious elegance in shoes, stockings, bag. Who was she, who who who?

Next morning Peter woke in a state of some mental confusion. Had he really gone into a strange party and pretended to be a conjuror, or was it a dream? He hoped he hadn’t been a bore; but it had been fun at the time. And then he remembered the charming person he was to meet for lunch. Every detail of her face came back to him, dark curls with chestnut lights in them, merry blue eyes, a face that always seemed merry, but wise too, wise and friendly. Just his own age. She was charming in every way, and there had been an unexpected warmth in her response to that public kiss. It had begun as a railway-station kiss, a sister’s kiss; yes, that was how it had begun. And it would have seemed like that to anyone but themselves. But who could she be? He drove his memory that way again; it reacted as obstinately as before. Where had he met her? The odd thing was that he was sure it had not been a casual meeting; he felt as though he had known her very well, and since it could hardly be that he had known her for any length of time, there must have been some intensity about the situation, something that had immediately brought about this odd intimacy.

He was still puzzling about it four hours later, when he found her in the outer room of the restaurant where they were to lunch. He said:

‘Let’s have a drink here before we go in. What would you like?’

She did not answer at once. She looked up at him with a smile that mocked him only a little, that was kind behind the mockery. She said:

‘Thank you, I think today I’ll have a glass of sherry and, nothing else.’

Then he remembered where he had met her and he knew why his mind did not want to go that way.

It had happened ten years ago, when he first came to London. He had been young and lonely, and needed companionship more than anything. Not that he knew no one in London; there were a dozen friends of his father on whom he could call, but they belonged to an older generation; there were contemporaries from his own house at school, but none with whom he had been intimate, and, more important still, they were established, they knew their London. Peter’s need was someone as young as himself who would find London with him, hand-in-hand. He had started to find it with Joan, and then had come the last evening, the evening he did not like to think of, and his friend with the merry face had come like a fairy godmother to his rescue.

He first met Joan at a party. Someone mumbled their names and left them together. Everyone else in the room seemed to have an intimate knowledge not only of each other but of every well-known person in London, but neither Peter nor Joan knew anyone but their host. Perhaps they were not really much younger in years than the others, but they felt like two children in a roomful of grown-ups. They stayed together till the party broke up, chattering happily, and before they went home they had agreed to lunch together next day. And during the next three weeks they met two or three times a week.

After the first lunch, Peter was quite clear in his own mind. He knew just where he was. Joan was not his girl. He was looking for someone quite different. But she was fun to go about with and meet for meals. She was pleasant to the eye, she wore smart clothes well, men looked at her twice in the street. She was never dull, nor was he dull when he was with her. They talked incessantly and found much to laugh at. But there were many things he would never discuss with Joan. If she mentioned a book or a play, they were poles apart; and in temperament they could not have been more different. For however silly he might sometimes be, Peter could always observe himself with detachment and take over control again when necessary, whereas Joan lived in the moment and was heart and soul in what she was doing, with no thought of what might follow. Most important of all, he thought of her quite calmly and detachedly; her sayings, clothes, possessions, were fragrant with no magic; he knew he would never be in love with her.

All the same, they had some common ground, a field common to all who are interested in people more than abstractions. Joan was superficially less immature than Peter. She told him about a man in the Navy to whom she was engaged. At their second lunch together she began to talk about the last week before her fiancé went to the Mediterranean. At first she had spoken of him conventionally; she loved him in a story-book, happy-ever-after kind of way, she would have Peter suppose. But later she talked of her misgivings; things were so violent between them, they were always so desperately in love or in so towering a passion that it was hard to picture a life spent permanently together.

‘But perhaps with a sailor—’ Peter suggested, ‘there might be much to be said for these ups and downs. Life would be extremely stimulating for a short time. And then you’d have months while he was away which you’d spend in dreams of his return and that would be pleasantly calming.’

Joan shook her head.

‘I’m not the sort of person to sit and dream and darn socks by the fire. I like something stimulating to happen all the time. I don’t know how we shall manage.’

But though she had misgivings, she never seemed to have any doubt that they would marry, and Peter was glad of this. He would like Joan to be happy, and he told himself that she would in the end be happy with her sailor. And in the meantime, it was a good thing to think that she had an anchor. He knew, when he stopped to think, that Joan did like him quite a lot, and if it had not been for the sailor, he might have been afraid that she would come to like him in a way that he knew he could not return. But the sailor was a convenient salve to his conscience whenever he felt uneasy.

It lasted three weeks exactly. On the twenty-second day since they had met, they arranged to go to a theatre together, and as the show began early, to dine in the place where they could get dinner most quickly and conveniently. This was the restaurant below the block of flats where Joan lived. She was waiting when Peter arrived, a minute or two before the appointed time. This was unusual, when he came to think of it afterwards. He suggested a cocktail and she replied:

‘Thank you, I think today I’ll have a glass of sherry and nothing else.’

She drank water during dinner, but smoked cigarettes between the courses, both departures from her usual custom, though Peter thought nothing of it at the time. He did notice that she was more silent than usual, and left him to do most of the talking; he thought she must have had a tiring day and that as the evening progressed she would forget her troubles and laugh as freely as ever. Her change in manner was not marked; probably it would have been unnoticed by anyone who knew her less well, and Peter was not in the least concerned about it.

After dinner she ran up to her flat to get a coat, leaving Peter in the entrance hall. He had ordered a taxi and it was ticking at the door; in five minutes they ought to start, for the theatre was in Hammersmith and it would take some time to get there. After five minutes Peter looked at his watch. He hated the discourtesy of being late, but perhaps he had allowed too long. They would still be in time if they were off in the next five minutes. And she could hardly take more than ten minutes altogether to powder her nose. What they do, he thought irritably, when they disappear like this, I never understand.

But she did take more than ten minutes. She took fifteen, and Peter had smoked two cigarettes and, though an amiable young man on the whole, was beginning to get cross when at last she appeared. She sailed out of the lift and across the hall into the taxi without a direct look at Peter. He followed her and slammed the door. He said:

‘You have been a time.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I won’t do it again. Forgive me.’

She took his hand in both of hers. He gave hers a friendly and forgiving squeeze, and let it go; but he found his hand still held affectionately. He thought of the sailor; but after all, he thought, there’s nothing nowadays in holding hands. And it was rather pleasant. But he would have to see not quite so much of her in future, that was clear.

They did not talk. For a few minutes they sat silent, hand in hand. It was pleasantly restful, Peter felt, for the thought had once or twice flitted like a bat through his mind, in at one window, out through the other, that Joan was almost too vivacious, and that her company might even be tiring if one had more of it than had yet been his fortune. But the placid and comradely affection expressed by their present attitude was exactly the form he would like their relationship to take. And then, it was shattered; impulsively, her hand tightened, she turned to him and said:

‘Peter, you are a darling. Kiss me, Peter.’

And without waiting for a reply, her arms went round his neck and her mouth found his cheek.

Intense surprise was Peter’s first emotion, immediately succeeded by an absurd sense of discourtesy. It was slighting of him to have left this to her, a reflection on her attractiveness and his virility. He took her into his arms and kissed her mouth. He said:

‘It was only because you were engaged that you had to ask.’

It was not true, and he knew it wasn’t, but it had to be said, to be nice to her. And even as he said it and thought of its untruth, the feel of her slim young body in his arms, the scent of her hair, the sweetness of her lips, filled him with desire, an intense wave of desire that for a moment banished everything. She felt it and said:

‘Love me for tonight. I know it isn’t true and you never will, but pretend you love me tonight, just for one night. I shall never love anyone but you. Tonight will be all I shall have, to last me the rest of my life. Love me for one night.’

Peter disengaged himself, leaned forward, and told the driver to go to his flat instead of to the theatre. But even as he did so the acid voice of conscience remarked clearly and quietly that it was indeed the most arrant pretence to call this love, or to suppose that it could be for one night only. For a moment a cold hand laid itself on his heart; he felt a desperate misgiving. But not only was physical desire strong in him but he found it quite beyond his nature to meet this flattery to his manhood by the discourtesy of refusal. He took her in his arms again, and for a few minutes acid voice and icy hand alike were forgotten.

Suddenly the young taut body slackened and went limp. He felt her lifeless for a moment; then she said:

‘Let me go. Let me get out. I feel awful.’

‘I can’t let you get out if you feel awful. What’s the matter?’ She put her head between her hands.

‘I feel frightful. Let me get out, quick, quick, let me go away. Oh, God. That I should be like this tonight, and you see me.’

He said:

‘I must take you home.’

He told the driver to go to her block of flats, and that broad back silently expressed contempt of people who did not know their minds. Joan continued to feel frightful. She leant forward holding her head. She would not say what was the matter. When they reached the flats, she tried to get out quickly but staggered as her foot touched the ground. She caught hold of the door of the taxi with one hand, stood gasping for a moment and then was sick on the pavement. She stood retching and miserable.

Peter stood still in horror. He had to deal with the taximan, get Joan indoors and to her flat; and he did not feel he was now the right person to put her to bed. A small crowd was collecting, and the sense of the crowd was clearly that he had done the poor girl wrong. He pulled money from his pocket and turned to the taximan, and at that moment there stepped out from the swing-door leading to the flats an elegant figure of an arm-enticing slenderness, a round merry little face, friendly and cheerful, which said:

‘Can I help?’

She led Joan indoors, promised Peter to come back and tell him how she was, took her upstairs to her flat.

He had to wait quite a long time. He remembered it all, ten years later, as he stood looking down at that merry little face, very little changed, hardly changed at all by the years. He had waited, anxious and worried, wondering what had happened, what was the matter with Joan, feeling guilty, but flattered to have roused such feeling, guilty towards the sailor, guilty because he had started to take Joan to his flat, disappointed because he had never got there, relieved because he had perhaps escaped the entanglements that would have followed that night of pretence, but above everything else, puzzled. When the fairy godmother did at last come back she had taken him to a sofa in the same lounge where he had paced up and down waiting for Joan, how long ago? Only an hour?

‘How is she? What’s wrong with her?’

‘She’s in bed and she’ll soon be asleep. She’ll be all right. Don’t you know what was wrong with her?’

‘No, of course I don’t,’ said Peter, completely puzzled.

‘What had you been doing all evening?’

‘We met here, had a glass of sherry, dined here and we were on our way to a theatre.’

‘Just one glass of sherry?’

‘Yes. She said that was all she’d have. I still don’t understand.’

The friendly face looked at him seriously. It said:

‘I think she was very nervous and excited about something and determined to take a big risk, and being only a baby she tried to fortify herself, and she overdid it. There’s a bottle of gin on her dressing-table. It’s half empty, and it was only opened tonight, because the lead-foil is lying beside it and the cork is still on the corkscrew.’

Half a bottle. While she was powdering her nose.

‘But—but why?’

‘You ought to know that.’

Peter had jumped to his feet, stammered his thanks, and run away. This piece of desperate folly explained Joan’s shame when she began to feel ill, and told him what she had felt beforehand more vividly than anything else could have done. He had felt he could not bear to talk of it even to his unknown friend. Now after so many years he was back at the point from which he had fled, talking to the same friend, looking into her amused blue eyes, lighting her cigarette. She said:

‘Now at last you remember?’

‘Now at last I remember.’

‘I knew you hadn’t a clue last night.’

‘No, my mind didn’t want to go that way. It just wouldn’t. I hated it so. I’ve never seen her since.’

‘I saw her occasionally, for a long time.’

‘Tell me about her.’

‘She’s married. But she didn’t forget you. I think she will always remember you.’ But the inflexion said that remember was not the word she meant.

‘She was very wholesale,’ said Peter, ‘and I envy the wholesale people in some ways. It’s generous to make your whole self up into a parcel and give it away.’

‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘of course, you were very young. But even so, I was surprised that you and she should have been friends. She was so obviously not your kind.’

‘I knew that, of course. I knew it was only temporary. But as you say, I was young. And I was lonely. I wanted companionship. I wanted a companion, and to have adventures together.’

‘We all want that. But companionship’s a substitute, a poor thing, if you know it’s going to be temporary. The real adventures come when companionship is permanent. That’s generous enough for anyone. You make yourself up into a parcel and give it away for ever. There’s an adventure for you.’

He began to tell her of how the night before he had been hoping for adventure.

The Two Griefs

Sundari was supposed to be husking rice. She put a handful of grain into a depression in a big stone in the paved terrace before the house and pounded it with a thick heavy stick. The stick was more than five feet long and several inches thick, almost deserving the name of a beam. There was a thin hole cut in the middle where two hands could hold it comfortably. Sundari stood up, holding the beam in the middle, and with one end pounded the gram in the egg-shaped hole, which had been cut deep with chisel and mallet. It was hard work, and after a little, she put down the beam, and sat on the rock, gazing out over the valley.

It was the middle of the morning, but the sun had only just reached the long slopes which ran down below her to the north. The pines threw up their arms to heaven, sparkling in the brightness, throwing back the sun from a million dancing needles; the firs and cedars stood like dark pointed pyramids, soaking in the light, giving none back. The open patches of cultivation in the breaks of the forest were beginning to turn to pale gold; it would soon be the time of harvest and rejoicing.

But Sundari had eyes for none of this. She was thinking of her two griefs. She did not formulate these very clearly to herself. She could neither read nor write, nor even understand Hindustani. She could speak only the patois of her little section of the hills, a broad crude speech that did not lend itself to analytical thought. But she knew that these two discomforts were there in her mind.

The first was much the simpler. Her sister had married into a family who lived on the next ridge, and there was no doubt about it, they were doing better than the little homestead where Sundari lived. Their sheep and goats and cattle were increasing. And they were showing their prosperity in a practical form.

At the last fair, Ganga Devi had been loaded with silver ornaments—great hoops of silver in nose and ears, collars and bracelets and anklets, and a heart-shaped piece of worked silver, of intricate device, hanging over her breast. And a rich new bodice of brightly coloured silk, deep crimson beneath a cloak of apple green, and a splash of orange in her petticoats. She had been dressed like a bride and Sundari herself could make no such show. If she was to have such ornaments as that, the homestead must have more cattle and sheep.

If anyone in this part of the hills wants to become more prosperous, he will first consider which god to propitiate. Every valley has its godling, an influence for good or evil, whose kingdom does not stretch beyond the next ridge. They were there before the Hindus came over the Western passes into the plains, and little by little seeped up into the mountains. They will perhaps be there when Shiv and Vishnu are forgotten. The little gods have taken on for the time being a faint smack of Hinduism, but at heart they are no more Hindus than their worshippers. They acknowledge the suzerainty of the great gods, but no more. And in their own kingdoms, they are supreme, terrible little gods who can kill or maim a man or blight a harvest. They are concerned with crops and cattle and rain, the fish in the rivers and the fertility of women; and so long as they are not crossed and many goats are killed before them they will not step outside their limits. They do not meddle in politics, and the big gods leave them alone.

Sundari lived on the crown of a ridge, and there was no reason why she should not go to Kaunr to the East or Bhairab to the West. She might go to either (or rather, she might send one of her husbands) to sacrifice a goat, and beg the god to make her prosperous. But the little gods were inclined to disregard vague prayers of that kind. They were far more likely to interest themselves in something definite, such as destroying her sister’s cattle. But she could hardly send one of her husbands to ask the godling to curse Ganga Devi and her household. Even if she could persuade one of them to go, the priest would tell the villagers; and Ganga Devi might well go with two goats and turn the curse on Sundari. No, the way to the gods could not be a secret way and therefore it did not look a very good way.

Thoughts of her husbands led Sundari to her second grief. This was much less clearly formulated than the first, and she could hardly have put it into words. But it was very real. She had married three brothers. They were joint in ownership of land and cattle and sheep, so that it was natural to share one wife, at any rate until they were rich enough to afford a second. But joint ownership did not in practice work out quite so simply in the case of a wife. The land and animals they truly owned, and with regard to them they could practise some division of function. Though each knew something of the other’s work, one was the husbandman, another the shepherd, and the third, who looked after the cattle, was also the man of business and affairs, and it was he who went to the plains to buy salt and sugar and iron, or to the headquarters of the subdivision to pay land revenue. Now it may be that a wife requires three functions in a husband; she needs a lover to make her happy and beget her children, a master to give her daily tasks and set her to housekeeping, and a protector to fight dragons and wild beasts, if they molest her, or lawyers, tax-gatherers and policemen in a more developed world. If her husbands would have been content to accept these three roles, Sundari would have been happy. Gopalu, the cowherd, was well-fitted to be her protector; Jodliu, the husbandman, might have ordered her daily life; but Autaru, the youngest, the shepherd, ah, he was the lover to please her. And there would have been no difficulty about the children, for all of them, like the whole homestead, would stand in the name of Gopalu, the eldest.

But of course there could be no question of any such pleasant arrangement. All must take their turn as lovers. And although Sundari did not object actively to either of the others, she did not feel she saw enough of Autaru; and in fact she saw less of him than the others, for he was often away in the high grazing grounds with his sheep.

As she brooded on her two troubles, rankling there at the back of her untaught, unformed mind, gradually they turned themselves into problems. How to get more prosperity, more wealth in herds and flocks; how to get more of Autaru to herself. And in neither problem could the godlings help her, for she could only go to them through the husband and the priest.

But at the back of her mind was another way to get her will. It may be the custom of polyandry, which certainly makes them more self-willed than other women, and may, as in Sundari, produce a state of sulky irritancy; or it may be some trick of ancestry or climate; but whatever the reason, the women of these parts are known throughout the neighbouring hills for witchcraft. Just as every Brahman can be a priest on occasion, so here every woman carries with her a knowledge of dark things and she may decide to develop strange powers. Sometimes she has the evil eye; she has built in herself the power to blight any good thing that comes within her influence. She can curdle milk and make sheep barren; she can place her power upon a man so that he will go mad and die. The knowledge is handed down from mother to daughter; it is a weapon in the armoury of each. Perhaps it is needed in a land where brides are sold for silver and a woman’s natural weapons go for nothing; not for her the sidelong glance, the fluttering eyelid; and perhaps the mother who hands on the knowledge of witchcraft is not far distant in intention from her who sends her daughter to a finishing school. The men do not know this secret lore, though they are well aware of its results, and they will not go near a woman who is marked out by her own prosperity and the misfortunes of her neighbours as having taken up her weapons and developed the power of evil.

Sundari sat and brooded. She did not want Jodhu and Gopalu. She did want Autaru. She wanted more cattle and sheep. If she had a ghost at her service, he could make the cattle fertile and the crops grow, as no living man could do. And she knew how to take power over a ghost. If she had one husband less, she would have a larger share of Autaru. Gopalu had gone away for the day; he would not be back before evening. Autaru, her lover, had gone to the high grazing grounds that morning with his sheep. He would be there some days for the lambing. Jodhu was in the fields below the house, spreading dung on a field he meant to plough for the winter crop. Jodhu would come home for his morning meal before long. Jodhu was the man. If Jodhu should die, in a way she knew, his ghost would serve her faithfully; and Autaru would have to stay behind to look after the fields. Her resolution hardened. She stood up and went into the house.

Inside the house she went through certain spells, learnt from her mother. Then she made the vow that was the centre of all the magic. If the nameless one would grant her prayer and turn to poison the food that she would cook, she vowed that she would give the poison to the first man to enter the house. If she did not, the curse would fall on herself and all her food would be poison. Then she went out again and took a leaf of the first green thing she saw. It did not matter what it might be. She took it back into the house and pronounced over it the second and most difficult part of the rite. Then she cut the leaf up very small and mixed it with flour and began to bake a cake. When it was cooked she put her hand on it; if the spell had failed, the cake and the pot would stick to her hand, and she would have to try again. But it did not stick. All was well. Peace, the charm’s wound up.

She turned with the cake in her hand as she heard the bleating of sheep outside. Autaru her lover came in. She gazed at him with stony horror.

‘I had to come back,’ he said. ‘I got up to the shrine at the top of the hill, and tied a rag on the tree to keep away ghosts. Then just as I was leaving, I sneezed. That was bad enough, but there, right in the way, cutting grass at the corner was that witch, Kalyan Singh’s wife. I couldn’t go on, could I? If I had left the shrine after sneezing, and met a witch, the sheep would have been ill. All the lambs would have died. So I came back. Give me something to eat.’

She dared not break her vow. She gave him the cake.

He squatted to eat it.

‘I shall go again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Are you glad I came back?’

But there was no tomorrow for him. He staggered to his feet, his hand to his head.

‘My head is swimming,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand.’

He caught for a moment at the post of the door, reeled outside, and fell lifeless on the roughly paved terrace, with his right hand on the little egg-shaped hollow still half full of partially husked rice.

The True Lovers

Margaret made up her mind once again that she would look at anything but the clock. She had tried before to keep her eyes away for five minutes, but when she thought at least ten had passed and the hour must have struck, she found that there were still eight minutes to go. And he would not be before his time, he never was, he was always deadly punctual. She would count twenty people coming in through the swing-doors before she looked at the clock again.

The people coming in looked much the same as they had done eleven years ago, but the red plush of the seats against the wall looked shabbier, the gilt of the mirrors more tarnished. Or was it only a change in herself? She wasn’t waiting now with the same fresh confidence, the certainty that it would all come right in the end, that she had felt when he had been thirty and she no more than twenty. But there was no real change, no change in her feelings about him. She had learnt to expect less of life, but as far as he was concerned, she would always be the same; she was just as deeply stirred now as she had been then. She had thought that eleven years of being practical and sane would have cured her of this schoolgirl impatience, but it hadn’t. She looked at the clock again, and could have shaken herself for her childishness and irresolution; it was still only six and a half minutes to the hour.

He wouldn’t have changed. He would come in with that same quick expectant step, a little on his toes, as though keyed up by life and ready for anything that it might hold, his head thrown back, as though challenging the world. He put it on, of course, that challenging look; people thought he was conceited, and so he was in a way, but only she knew that it was his mistrust of himself, his perpetual surprise at pulling things off, that made him look like that. He wouldn’t have changed; she would have known if he had really changed, however far away she was. She knew his body as well as if it were her own, the tilt of his head, the swing of his arms, the modelling of knee, back and shoulder. Incredible that no two knees are alike; what is there in one knee to make it different from any other? And yet, the texture of the skin, the contours—oh, she would have known his knee among a thousand! Something in the physical substance of him was hers and like no one else’s; the chemical composition of his body as much as the working of his mind was utterly familiar, and she knew them as one knows the feel of a pair of friendly shoes that are well-made and well-tried. It was a feeling, this oneness and familiarity, that had grown with the years, of separation and had become far stronger and more certain than when they were together. There was a restfulness about it now, whatever might happen. However unhappy the upper storeys of the mind might be, down there in the basement there was certainty.

And suddenly he was there, he really was. He came just as she had known he would come, the quick light step, the head poised and challenging as he looked round, and then he was sitting by her side. He said:

‘Why did you do this? Why did it have to happen?’

She could not speak. Her breath had gone. She smiled at him without answering his question. Then she recovered herself and said:

‘It’s as though it was only this morning after breakfast.’

He said with a quick frown:

‘Yes, it is. That’s what I find so damnable. It’s as bad as ever. The wound’s still green, after eleven years, and you brought me here to rub salt in it.’

‘Didn’t you want to come?’ She smiled as she said it. She knew the answer. A waiter was by their side, bored and in a hurry. Ronald said:

‘Two dry Martinis. Of course I did. I wish I didn’t. I wish I had the strength to say no. I wish I’d had the strength not to come.’

‘Do you really? Why did you write to me after so long?’

‘Well, why did you write to me? Can you remember what I said?’

She smiled again. She was alive and warm and tender now, for the first time for eleven years, really alive, trembling with life, like the buds in spring swelling with sap. She was trembling, but she was sure of them both and she could smile. She said:

‘What do you think? Of course I can remember it. It wasn’t very long. All you said was this:

Is it not sure a deadly pain,
To you I say that lovers be,
When faithful hearts must needs refrain
The one the other for to see?
I you assure you may trust me,
Of all the pains I ever knew
It is the pain that most I rue.

‘Why did you only send that? And why did you write at all after so many years?’

‘I didn’t know where you were before. I’d lost you altogether. You see I’d never known where you came from, who your people were; you wouldn’t tell me. You were like a mermaid from the grass-green sea. And when you went, I was lost. I was utterly lost and alone. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t begin to look for you, I didn’t know where you might be. I put things in the papers, but you didn’t answer. I wrote letters to every possible address, but there was never an answer. At last I gave up looking for you. I tried to forget.’

‘But you didn’t. You couldn’t, any more than I could.’

‘No, I couldn’t forget. But it got less insistent. It didn’t hurt so much. It was there all the time, the meaning to life, that memory of what life could be. And then, three months ago, I met the one person who’d known you then.’

‘Sylvia,’ said Margaret.

‘Yes, Sylvia. She told me you were married and where to find you.’

‘The beast. She promised she wouldn’t.’

‘It wasn’t easy to get it out of her. Then I sent you that poem. It was what I felt. It has been in my ears, just as your face has been in my eyes, ever since that day you went. There was nothing else to say. I didn’t want to make things worse and open it again. But I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten.’

‘I should have known if you’d forgotten.’

‘Just when I’d written, your letter came. We must have written to each other on the same day, after eleven years. Oh, Margaret, why did you do it? Why did you run away from me?’

‘It’s very difficult to explain. A woman doesn’t know why she does things like that; at least, not my kind of woman. I look round, Ronald, at the women I meet, and I wonder whether it’s I who am mad, and they who are all sane, or whether it’s the other way round and I am the only one alive. I hardly ever meet one who knows what it really is to be a lover.’

‘I know. Perhaps only we know that. They don’t understand. But I don’t understand why you went away from me like that. We were part of each other; we still are; and then one morning you’d gone.’

‘It came to me quite suddenly. I can’t explain it. But that morning, after breakfast, it all came at once, the thought of Jean, and you tied to her by loyalty and kindness and decency and her sickness; and the knowledge that you were being forced to deceive her because of me. I was a kept woman, but I didn’t mind that, I would have gloried in it if I’d been any use and if you hadn’t been forced to deceive her. But I couldn’t help you or do anything for you and I knew it was the wrong way for me to live. I knew, quite suddenly but with no manner of doubt, that I must kill our happiness and our way of life to keep our love. So I drew the sword and cut off its head. I walked out on you.’

‘Yes, that’s just what you did. And I couldn’t find you. I can’t tell you what it was like.’

‘I don’t need to be told.’

‘I used to walk about London for hours, peering into faces, hoping I should see you suddenly in the street. I felt it must happen like that, because that was how we first met, and after anything so incredible as that first strange meeting, I felt it could never be that you should simply vanish.’

She said:

‘Yes, it was incredible, that meeting. Do you remember it? It’s silly of me to ask; I know you remember, just as I do. I’m sure you’ve turned it over in your mind all these years, just as I have, whenever I’ve been weak or tired or ill. I’d been out for lunch, and I was going back to my art class. And as I hurried along the pavement, there you were. I just stopped and looked. And so did you. We must have looked very funny, struck still and dumb so suddenly. And then—I wonder what really happened? It seemed ages, but I suppose that really it was only for seconds that we stood still. Then slowly we moved on, I going west, you east. I didn’t want to walk on. I went under compulsion, very slowly.’

‘And then I turned and came after you. I picked you up.’

‘Yes, you picked me up. I was so glad. I remember just what you said. You said: “Do you mind if I talk to you?”’

‘And you said: “No, I should like you to. Why do you want to talk to me?”’

‘And then we were off. Oh, Ron, what a lot of talk there was after that.’

‘Long, long talks. How well we got to know our London! I don’t believe there was an eating-place within a mile of Piccadilly Circus where we didn’t have a meal. Every minute seemed wasted when we weren’t together. Do you remember the lost week-end, when we thought we couldn’t meet, and then found we might have done? I couldn’t get in touch with you nor you with me. Both of us frantically telephoning and pacing up and down and getting no answer. It seemed such a waste. And then you walked out on me and wasted eleven years.’

‘Yes. I had to. I’m sure I was right.’

He looked at her as though he had just seen her for the first time.

‘I was bitter when I came this evening,’ he said. ‘I felt you were turning the knife when you needn’t have done. I’m sorry. I don’t feel like that any more. It’s odd; I started to talk as though we’d only just parted. Now I want to know what’s happened to you. Let me look at you. You’re more beautiful than you were before. Yes, you are. Your face was round then; I like that new curve to your cheek that shows the shape of the bone, and the corner of your mouth that looks a little sad now as well as beautiful. Your lovely dark hair. Your eyes as sunny as ever. The corner of your eye. There are tiny lines that weren’t there before, but I’m glad. I love you more now than ever before. Tell me what’s been happening to you.’

‘Well you know I’m married.’

‘Yes, I know that. Why did you? Why did you need to put something else between us?’

She smiled. She said:

‘Was there ever yet a man who wouldn’t have said that? What did you expect me to do? Sit quite still and do nothing but sigh for you?’

‘I suppose I did. I felt something might happen, and I’d find you again. Lots of women don’t marry.’

‘Women like me?’

‘There’s no one like you. But I know what you mean. You had to marry or become a nun. You couldn’t be a head mistress or an inspectress of something or other, or live alone in a studio for ever.’

‘You do understand. I knew you would. There is that other way. We’ve talked of it before. I’ve gone far enough to know I could take it.’

‘I don’t think I could.’

‘You’re not old enough yet, Ron. You always keep one hand on the edge of the swimming-bath when you get out of your depth.’

‘I suppose I do. Why didn’t you take that other way?’

‘It would have meant giving you up. I should have had to cast out all thought and all memory of you.’

‘And yet you went away.’

‘I had to. I know I can’t explain that.’

‘I think I do understand. But what about—him? The man you married?’

‘Hugh? It’s difficult to tell you. I had to find a life. I suppose I did him a wrong. No, I’m sure I didn’t. He’s so different from us. He’s so much better, so much more kind and good and reliable. So much less alive. So much less understanding. It would have been a wrong to marry anyone of our kind, feeling as I did, but not Hugh. I told him I could never be in love with him.’

‘I never can understand how a man can marry on those terms. It would be so shattering to my pride.’

‘I know. I told you he was nicer than us. He hasn’t got that sort of pride. But usually, a man marries on those terms from conceit. He thinks he can make the woman love him. And usually he’s right. You see, so few people know what it can mean. It’s so small a part of most people.’

‘And was it conceit with him?’

‘Oh, no. It was humbleness, in a way, and a different kind of nature. He is in love with me, he always will be, but it doesn’t tear him or carry him away. It’s just something quiet and abiding; he doesn’t expect so much in return as you or I would do.’

‘You always speak as though you and I were made of the same stuff, and I feel that too; and yet I know I couldn’t take that other way you spoke of.’

‘Not yet perhaps. You’re too busy in the world. But you know what it means. You could take it, if you would be bold and throw away your water-wings. You cling to your little bit of reason and your pride and I suppose to me. Whereas I have only to learn to throw away you, and I should be swimming. I could let go of reason at once and of pride in everything but this.’

‘It’s a strange thing that has happened to us. You’ve been the centre of everything I really am, all this time; and yet when I think of Jean, lying there patiently in her bed and smiling so happily when she sees me, I could no more tell her I was going to leave her and go to you than I could strike her.’

‘I know. That’s why we are true lovers, you and I. We can’t either of us take each other at Jean’s expense or Hugh’s.’

‘I still don’t see why you had to add Hugh to the tangle.’

‘Yes, you do, obstinate. I wasn’t going to see you again. You weren’t the only one to have a bad time, you know. I felt just as lost and alone as you. And some of your letters reached me. Some of them hurt. I had to strengthen myself not to answer them. I had to be very strong.’

‘Tell me what you did.’

‘I went to France. I painted. I painted till I knew that I was too good to be an amateur but not really good enough to be a painter. Then I tried that other way. I knew I couldn’t be alone. I had to have a lover, if not for my body then for my soul.’

‘I loved both.’

‘It’s no use pretending you don’t understand. I had a little money of my own and I’d sold some pictures. I stayed quiet for a little and listened. I tried the other way. But it was like the painting. I went far enough to know it had to be all or nothing.’

‘Is He so jealous?’

‘No, He’s humble and patient. He’s always ready to let you start again, always waiting for you. But you must be utterly in earnest, and I wasn’t. I couldn’t give up the thought of you.’

‘You make me very humble.’

‘Humble? For how long? It isn’t in you to be humble long; self-diffident perhaps.’

‘Well, never mind me; what happened then?’

‘I gave it up. I didn’t know what to do. I was lost, utterly lost, Ronald. And then Hugh turned up. He was on leave from India, and had to spend part of his leave abroad because of income-tax or something, and he came to the little place where I was staying.’

‘What was he like? Tell me more.’

‘I’d known him as a child and so we started to talk as soon as we saw each other. We were both alone, and so we saw a lot of each other. He was a dear companion.’

‘I thought you said he was insensitive.’

‘I don’t think I said that. He’s different. Practical. When I’m tired and difficult, he brings me slippers and hot-water bottles, and keeps out of the way. You never would. You’d be difficult yourself; you’d be thinking of yourself. But you’d understand what I felt like, for all your selfishness, and he never really would, because you and I are made of the same stuff. He’s never loved anyone but me. He’d never wanted love, as you and I did. He’s self-sufficient, as we aren’t, and his love is selfless. Ours isn’t. Anyhow, he wanted me to marry him. I told him how things were with me. I was undecided a long time. I thought and thought. In the end I said yes. When I was bitter, I used to put it to myself that someone might as well be happy. You and I couldn’t, so why shouldn’t he? But when I was more myself, I would have said I was sure I could make a job of being married to Hugh, and it was the one thing I could make a job of. It was a life, and a new one, and an adventure, something worth doing.’

‘And have you made a job of it?’

‘Yes. The world would say a very good job. And I think he would say so too. I’ve looked after him. I’ve been the good wife who gives dinner-parties, when that was what was needed, and I’ve been a good companion to him in loneliness. I’ve been intensely practical. I’ve listened to him and made him talk about all that interested him.’

‘But it wasn’t what interested you?’

‘Oh, yes, it was. Not what interested me most. Because he is really practical and I was only pretending. He thinks about what good it will do, how many mouths will be filled. He doesn’t see the point of the lost cause, the hopeless struggle. If you told him about the charge of the Light Brigade for the first time, he wouldn’t want to write a poem, but would sit down and think about defects in the signalling system. His fingers are a different shape from ours, blunt, capable fingers.’

‘Capable? Do they . . . ?’

‘No, we’ll not talk about that. We’ll be true lovers.’

‘I’m sorry. But I can’t help feeling that. So you were a good wife?’

‘Yes, a good wife.’

‘But all the time . . .?’

‘Yes, all the time.’

‘And then suddenly you thought you’d write?’

‘Yes. It suddenly got worse. I knew you were in India last winter. I was away in the mountains, and you were just as far away, or just as near, doing important things in Delhi and Calcutta, but I suppose that started it. Then Hugh wanted me to go to Lucknow when you were there. But I wouldn’t. I mastered that; I was over it, and then something happened. I was sorry for someone. It was nothing to do with you. It just happened that I was terribly sorry for a boy. His life couldn’t have been more different from yours. But somehow it made it much worse.’

‘I can understand that. You thawed. You came alive again.’

‘I suppose so. I felt I must write. So I did. And two days later your letter came. And then unbelievably I found I was coming home for the summer, by myself. It just happened. It was like our first meeting.’

‘How long are you here?’

‘For the summer.’

‘So what? Margaret. . . No, I don’t wish this hadn’t happened. Any more than I could wish we’d never met. You don’t wish that, in spite of all the unhappiness?’

‘Baby. You know the answer.’

‘Yes, but say it.’

‘If it had only been that one meeting on the pavement, and nothing more, and if it still had cost me all it has for eleven years, I couldn’t wish it hadn’t happened.’

‘Thank you. I am a baby, but I wanted to hear you say it. Margaret, what are we going to do?’

‘Well, very soon we should eat. I suppose you’ll say you’ve got a political dinner or a business banquet or something?’

Yes, I’m afraid so. I must go in five minutes.’

‘And we haven’t begun to talk about what we’re going to do. Except that we’ll be true lovers. To each other and to those other two.’

‘No, we haven’t decided. Margaret, let’s make it like it was. Before you walked out on me. We can for this summer.’

‘Have we earned it, by eleven years of being practical? Or is that a most immoral thought? I wonder.’

‘Immoral?’

‘I mean casting up accounts. Thinking that one ever earns anything. I believe it is deeply immoral. I don’t mean that happiness would be.’

‘Then let’s have one summer of happiness.’

‘It isn’t a thing we can decide in five minutes, Ronald. No, it’s only two minutes now.’

‘Oh, there’s so much to say, so much to think about.’

‘Shall we meet here tomorrow at the same time and try to decide?’

‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ve the summer before us. I must go. Till tomorrow, my dear.’

He stayed for a moment gazing into her face, and then he went. Margaret sat watching him as he went, with that light expectant step, just as he had come, just as he had gone so often before. They were true lovers and they had the summer before them. She looked again at the clock. Twenty-three hours to wait. Now she must go and eat.

Tiger’s Kill

The sun had not yet risen above the trees and the mist still lay in flat white lines in every open glade of the jungle when they came on the pool of fresh blood where the tiger had killed his buck. Charles stared at the trampled grass, the blood, the little pile of dung, and the track where the kill had been dragged into the long grass. It was the first time he had seen anything of the kind, but this episode was easy to reconstruct. There was a patch of young fresh grass among the stones and sand of the watercourse which this season’s spate had passed by. The buck must have come down to graze on this tender herbage, and the tiger had stalked him through the long tawny grass of the river bank, six feet high. Inch by inch he had crept closer; then a quick rush and it was all over.

Bill Smart touched Charles on the shoulder. He laid his finger on his lips, pointed to the blood, the line of the drag leading into the long grass, and the great dimpled paw marks in the sand. Then he led Charles away in the opposite direction from the drag. When he had reached a sufficient distance, he whispered:

‘Quite fresh, not an hour old. A big tiger, and he must be lying up in that grass now, where he’s dragged his kill. It’s perfect cover, long grass and trees dotted about for shade, and there’s water near by. We shall kill that tiger after breakfast. Now, come with me; I’m going round that bit of cover to see how the land lies, but from this moment on till I give the word, not a sound. You see now why I made you bring rubber shoes.’

He set off with Charles behind him, down the course of the river-bed, keeping on the sand to avoid making a sound. A hundred yards down stream, he looked over his shoulder and grinned at Charles cheerfully. Here a tributary stream joined the main one, though both were dry. Bill turned up the tributary and Charles followed, his eyes turned always to the right, and his fingers on the trigger-guard of his rifle. He felt that at any moment he might hear the coughing roar of a charging tiger and see a huge striped form leaping over the six-foot hedge of grass on his right. But nothing happened. They walked up the lane of sand and boulders without hearing a sound except the shrill hoot of a spotted deer a mile away.

After some three or four hundred yards, the grass on their right showed an opening. This part of the jungle was flat, although it lay at the foot of the hills, and for nine months of every year it was dry as a bone. But in the rains it was a tangle of leaping streams, racing down from the hills, tearing away the dry soil and running where they would. Once, not long ago, water must have streamed over the whole patch of thick grass where they believed the tiger lay; and once, more recently, a torrent pouring down the stream-bed they were now following must have met some obstruction and turned across to find a new channel to the main stream where the buck had been killed. The grass and bushes in the new channel were still young, seldom rising above a man’s knees.

Bill turned to Charles with a look that said this was just what he had been hoping for, and led the way into the new channel. It made a narrow lane through the thick stuff. Charles felt this was walking into the enemy’s mouth, but he followed sturdily, pushing through the grass and extricating himself from thorns and briers as quietly as he could. The grass was still wet, and the cool morning air was aromatic with the fragrance of dewy dust and bruised leaves.

Bill’s eyes darted from right to left with purpose. The grass on their right was still high; on the left there was a steepish bank, sometimes a miniature cliff, sometimes running back in a bay with banks less precipitous, but always an obstacle, till they came to a distinct break, with a low tree hanging over it. Bill pointed out the tree to Charles; he held up one finger, and made the gesture of one looking along a rifle; Charles understood that one gun would be placed there. Further on, the bank was broken by a fresh watercourse, which to the right ran down into the grass where the tiger lay and to the left led up through an open glade with big trees into more thick cover. Bill spent some time reconnoitring here, and then pushed on to the main stream where the buck had been killed. Then he turned towards the camp.

On the way back to breakfast he explained more fully.

‘You see, it’s a kind of rough triangle. Two sides are the stream-beds, the one where the buck was killed and the tributary. The third side, the base, is that lane in the grass we came along, with the bank beyond. The base of the triangle is towards the hills, and a tiger almost always goes towards the hills if he’s disturbed by day. In any case he would hate to cross an open sandy place like those two stream-beds. I think it’s ten to one he’s in that patch of grass, and if so, it’s ten to one he’ll try to cross the base of the triangle when he’s disturbed. There are two easy ways across; I’ll put the General in one and you in the other.’

‘How will you disturb him?’ asked Charles. ‘And how do you know where he’ll cross?’

Bill answered the second question first.

‘Well, a tiger’s like you and me; unless he’s got some special reason, he won’t take the trouble of climbing a steep bank if there’s a way round, and there are two easy ways through that bank. The second is much the most likely, because there’s a nice covered approach that he can sneak along, right through the middle of his bit of grass. I’ll put the General there. But there’s a sporting chance he might take that first opening, and you’ll be there if he does.’

‘And you?’

Oh, I’ll go behind the General, fifty yards behind him, in case the tiger needs a finishing shot.’ Smart had shot so many tigers he now preferred finding them for other people.

‘And how will you disturb him?’

‘That’s rather an art. I shall post a very few intelligent men along the far side of the river banks, up trees. They will keep quiet at first, unless they see the tiger meditating a crossing, in which case they’ll make a noise to turn him. Nothing but a bullet will turn him if he’s made up his mind, of course, but if he’s still undecided, very little is enough. Then at the far end, the point of the V, where the two streams meet, we shall make a noise. Not a loud noise. A drum played quietly, two stones knocked together. Then two elephants go into the grass. Their drivers talk to each other quietly and clap their hands. They move about in the grass, weaving backwards and forwards. The men on either side click stones together gently. Then the elephants come up a little; all very quiet. We don’t want him excited. If he’s excited he may charge an elephant and maul him or kill the driver; or he may charge past the guns at full gallop—and it’s very difficult to kill a tiger at full gallop. But if he’s just puzzled, not knowing what it is, he’ll walk quietly up by the easiest line of retreat, just where I want him to go. He doesn’t want to move by day, you know; he’s had a good dinner and wants to keep still and digest it, and, besides, whenever he moves by day, the monkeys shout over his head, like jays over a fox at home.’

They had reached camp and told their news and were just beginning breakfast when a large man on a large horse rode into the camp. He said:

‘Hello, Bill, chasing tigers as usual?’

‘I am. And you I suppose are chasing brigands as usual.’

‘Yes, I’m after my old friend Husaini.’

‘Is he near here?’ Bill asked.

‘Well, he’s somewhere near here, but for the moment we’ve lost the scent. So while I was waiting for fresh news, I thought I’d drop in on you for breakfast. Everyone in the jungle told me you were here.’

While they were eating breakfast, the large policeman, Hugh Oldham, told the General and Charles the story of his hunt for Husaini, most famous of Indian brigands. At the height of his power, Husaini’s name had been so great that once when he rode by a lonely police station, the sub-inspector, in fear of his life, had turned out his force of eight constables in review order and greeted him with presented arms. He moved with a nucleus of picked men, mounted; over all the area he covered there was a local militia, secretly enrolled, two or three professional criminals in a village here, and another little gang four miles beyond. When he planned a raid, he would mobilise these local forces from twenty miles around, men who had often never seen his face; these were his rank and file, staffed and led by his permanent squadron. He would come at night with his men to the rendezvous; then a swift pounce on an outlying village, loot, rape and arson, and by morning, the sack completed, the local men paid off, and he and his body-guard safe in the jungle, fifty miles away. He left no wounded of his own side; if they could not get a man away alive, they killed him for fear of his turning King’s evidence. He wrote letters to Oldham as one potentate to another; he rode a white horse that every villager had heard of for two hundred miles; he boasted of ten women and ten murders in a night.

‘In fact, he’s a real silver-plated bandit,’ said Smart.

‘Oh, he’s a jewel,’ said Oldham. ‘But we’re pressing him very hard just now. He’s alone, or he was when we last heard of him, moving this way from the east.’

They had finished breakfast and were lighting pipes when the news came in of a kill almost as exciting as the tiger’s. A breathless little man in the green and khaki uniform of a forest guard was led in. He could hardly speak for excitement and fear, but after some questioning, his story emerged.

He and another forest guard had been moving up the edge of a strip of jungle, along a watercourse. The two of them had turned aside into the bushes for a moment. He himself had squatted down by a clump of prickly cane not far from the river-bed, but his companion had gone a few yards deeper into the jungle.

‘Then I heard him call out as though he had trodden on a snake. I jumped to my feet to help him. I saw a man getting up from the ground as though he had been sleeping. He had a gun. He fired twice at the forest guard, into his body. I was afraid. I kept still. He could not see me because of the bushes. It was Husaini. I know him, I have seen his photo many times and everyone knows Husaini. He stood still for a minute and looked at the corpse. The gun was smoking. Then he put down the gun and dragged the body deeper into the jungle. Then he came back to pick up the gun. He yawned. He stretched himself. He looked at the sun. Then he laughed. Then he lay down to sleep, in the same place where he had been before.’

The forest guard had waited a long time without daring to move. Then inch by inch he had backed away to the watercourse and hurried to the camp to bring his news.

In the camp they wanted to know just how it had happened. Large-scale maps were produced, and at last the forest guard was pinned down to the exact spot of the murder.

‘There’s no doubt about it,’ said Bill Smart. ‘It can’t be a hundred yards from the place where my tiger is lying. Just above the fork in the stream-bed. What do you think he’ll do, Hugh?’

‘He’s moving north and west, towards the hills; from here he’s bound to make north his general line because of the river. It seems incredible he should lie down and go to sleep again.’

‘I don’t know. I mean, you know his habits and I don’t, but I’d an idea he didn’t like moving by day.’

Charles wondered whether the monkeys would shout over his head, like jays over a fox.

Hugh Oldham agreed:

‘Yes, he likes to move by night as much as possible.’

‘What I’m getting at is this,’ went on Smart. ‘Isn’t he likely to lie up all day in this very thick patch of jungle, ideal for the purpose; with good water in it, sooner than risk crossing open watercourses or forest trails as he must if he goes on by day?’

‘He does like lying up by day, and this would be a good place; but it’s damn near his kill. Very dangerous. I dare say he would have stayed if he hadn’t been disturbed.’

‘But he doesn’t know anyone saw him. He knows these forest guards are generally alone. Remember that he doesn’t know we’re here. At least, does he?

‘No, I don’t think so, because he’s only just come in from the east, and I don’t think he’s spoken to anyone. I’ve got these villagers well trained now, and they tell me at once when he asks any questions. But, Bill, he knows my police are after him.’

‘Yes, but where? You admitted you’d lost the scent. They’re here, aren’t they?’ He pointed to the map. ‘An hour away by lorry, but they wouldn’t have come here if we hadn’t heard of this. And wasn’t it only luck that we were here and heard of this, at once? Wouldn’t the normal thing have been for the kill—I mean, the body—to lie there for a couple of days before anyone found it—and then whoever found it would go to the local police, not to you? Certainly no investigation till it was light next morning? Couldn’t he expect that?’

‘Yes, that is so. He could count on having till this evening and then he’d be able to steal away to the north when it began to get dark. And—I know Husaini pretty well now—he’d enjoy his rest all the more if there was a man he’d killed lying just around the corner. It fits in with all his little ways. And we have got definite evidence that he did lie down to sleep. Bill, I believe you’re right!’

‘Yes, I think he’ll lie up till evening. And anyhow we can soon find out. You see my idea now, of course?’

‘Knowing you, I begin to see what you’re getting at. But go on. Tell the details.’

‘My tiger killed last night within a hundred yards of where your Husaini killed this morning. I’m betting that he’s lying up near Husaini. When he’s disturbed, he’ll go north, just like Husaini. On either side of the jungle are dry watercourses, wide ones, and those are guarded by men up trees, about twenty on each side.’

‘They won’t stop Husaini.’

‘No, but we agreed that he was more likely to go north. And—can your men shoot?’

‘Not bad. They’re specially picked from the ordinary district police, and they fire a lot of courses. They take an interest in it, because they know their lives may depend on it!’

‘Well, there are three or four hundred yards or so to guard on either side. More one side than the other. Let’s measure on the map—three-fifty and a bit, against four hundred and a bit. Not bad for a guess. Now put an armed man of yours every fifty yards—say twenty-two men—between my men, and they ought to get him if he comes out in the open.’

‘I could put two mounted men on each side; I’ve only got four, but they’re no good anywhere else.’

‘Splendid; say twenty on foot and four mounted.’

‘You’re going to beat for him and the tiger at the same time?’ asked Charles, who had been following breathlessly.

‘That’s right. And I bet Husaini comes out first.’

‘But what’s the object?’ asked Hugh. ‘A joke’s a joke, but this is serious for me. I’ve been hunting this man for years. Why should my hunt be framed to fit in with your tiger shooting? I don’t want to spoil your arrangements, but mine must come first.’

‘Of course. But if I’m right in thinking he’s in that patch of grass, how would you get him out?’

‘I’d surround the place—as you suggest. Then call on him to surrender with a loud-hailer and burn the grass if he didn’t come.’

‘Exactly. And how many of your men would he get before he came out? He’d see you without being seen.’

‘Well, yes. We’d have casualties.’

‘Whereas my way, if we beat just as though he were a tiger, he’ll walk out unsuspecting under one of the guns, and we can cover him and shoot him down if he won’t surrender. He’s bound to come out on the north side of the grass when he hears the beat begin. You see in the first place, we’re agreed that he wants to go north, and, in the second, he’s a cunning fellow and a jungle-bred man, and he knows what a tiger beat is. When he hears it start, he’ll know what’s happening, but he’ll think it’s an ordinary beat. He won’t know he’s the game. But he’ll know he can’t get out at the sides, or through the beat without being noticed and possibly recognised; so he’ll go forward and saunter past the guns, knowing they want to keep quiet for a tiger, and knowing it’s most unlikely that a white man should recognise him.’

‘But how shall we know him?’ asked Charles.

‘He’ll be the only man you don’t know carrying a gun, except the police, who’ll be in uniform. Challenge him to stand still; and if he runs, shoot to kill. There are a hundred proved murders against him.’

‘And if the tiger comes?’

‘Shoot the tiger. And then look out for Husaini. He’ll realise he’s got to get away quick, before everyone clusters round to admire the corpse, but he’ll know there’ll be an interval before that happens. He’ll just keep on moving north, but a bit quicker than before.’

And so it was arranged. The beat was to come up towards the north, and across the northern end were two rifle-posts hidden in the tree-tops, in which were the General and Charles. Oldham and Smart went on the elephants in the beat.

In the heart of the jungle, in a thick tangle of cane, the tiger stirred in his midday sleep. He had eaten his fill and drunk deep after a very easy night’s hunting; hardly hunting at all; it was warm, and he didn’t want to move. But there was something happening, something uneasy in the air; a mutter, a pulse, to the south; a queer click, click, clap, clap, clap, that was no natural noise of the jungle; the sound of men’s voices. He moved a little to the east; there again, that click, click, click; to the west, lashing his tail, stopping to listen; click, click, click; clap, clap, clap; men’s voices; he bared his teeth in a silent snarl, an imprecation to himself, the stiff whiskers flexed back. He thought of the quiet jungles to the north, and moved that way; no sound there; he went on slowly, suspicious, stopping at every second or third movement of his great cushioned pads. The sun caught his rich coat, glossy, arrogant, brutal, with rolls of flesh at neck and belly, flashing with stolen life, murder incarnate. He moved north, towards the guns.

Husaini in the long grass by the pool was suddenly awake. Was it distant thunder in the air? No, not that. Then what? A pulse, a mutter to the south. Ah, a drum, very quietly played, or very far away; yes, a drum, getting closer and with it another sound, metallic, a steady click, click, clap, clap, clap, repeated right across the southern front. He moved a little to the east; there again, that steady click; to the west; it was still there. Click, click, click; clap, clap, clap; men’s voices. He flashed his white teeth in a grin:

‘So I am a tiger?’ he said. ‘Well, I have no stripes. I shall walk out.’

He stretched his hard limbs with exultation in their strength. The sun caught his glossy skin, the brown of rich muscle on shoulder and chest; he tossed back the long hair from his face, brutal, cruel, alive and happy. Stopping to listen at every second or third step, he moved north towards the guns.

Charles sat wedged uncomfortably into the fork of a branch, fifteen feet above the ground, and found his hands wet on the wood of his rifle. Two things to remember: not to fire at the tiger unless he had an easy shot, for a wounded tiger might mean a man’s death; not to fire at Husaini without challenging him.

His legs were uncomfortable, but he daren’t move, for at the least shifting of his weight, the whole tree shivered and clapped, every dry leaf hitting the next with startling noises. Behind him, the snows in shimmering loveliness, remote and pure against a brazen blue; in front, an open glade in the jungle, misty with blue flowers like forget-me-not; flame-of-the-forest in tongues of broken fire against the greener leaves, and one dark tree, leafless, its tangled boughs thick with pale iris blossom. The bitter dusty smell of the jungle in April, the dry air scorching nostrils, eyes and tongue, and his hands wet on his rifle; alarm after alarm. Suddenly, a movement among the dry leaves under his tree; something big; just below him; would it come up the tree? Had it seen him? Could he twist his rifle to take it coming up the trunk? He daren’t move to see what it was; heart, thud, thud, thud, shaking the leaves of the tree. The tiger must hear his heart; he must lean forward and look underneath. A deafening noise when he moved; the whole jungle could hear that; what was there? Nothing; yes, two starlings hopping among the dry leaves, turning them over for grubs.

An age passed.

There, look. In the shade of that low tree. It was. It must be. The tiger, motionless, forelegs and shoulder visible, the best place for a shot. Was it? It must be! Raise the rifle slowly, slowly—and a breath of wind disturbs the shadows. Nothing, an effect of light and shade.

A pulse, a mutter to the south, rising, falling away; the beat moving quietly, very quietly to the north. And suddenly, there he was. No doubt this time, and no heart-beats. No mistaking that great head. But there was a bough in the way; when he came forward a step it would be easy, and he was sure to come forward. Perfectly calm. Wait. Hell. He’d moved back a step instead of forward; still visible, but a worse shot even than the first. I can’t let him go, I can’t, Might break his back. Try.

Shattering roar of the old-fashioned rifle, and from the tiger a short coughing roar of pain and fury. A crashing of undergrowth. He’d gone back.

Oh, God. Charles had no bowels left. The one thing he’d been told not to do, and he’d done it, sent back a wounded tiger. Lost his chance and someone would probably be killed. Oh, God! All his fault.

There was a hasty council of war. Husaini had not been seen and the plan had failed; there was not much chance of seeing him now. But a wounded tiger couldn’t be left at large, so they would settle that problem first and then look for Husaini.

On two elephants, the four guns swung slowly through the jungle on the tiger’s trail, the drivers leaning forward to point to blood or broken twigs or footprints in the dust, everyone poised breathless to meet a charge.

‘There! Look!’

A patch of orange, white, black, there, showing through a light screen of leaves, in the grass on the far bank of a dry stream. Is he dead or wounded? Will he lie still, or will he charge with cavernous roar? On each elephant, the driver held his coat and turban ready to throw in the tiger’s path if he charged, a moment’s distraction that might save the thrower’s life. Rifles were raised, waiting for a clearer view. Forward, step by step. One step at a time. Wait after each step for a charge. Now, clear of the leaves; a clear view at last. There he is, black stripes, orange coat, white belly, and something else as well, bright blood, black hair, the glossy brown of a man’s shoulder. A clear view at last, and each of the four can see what he came to find, the tiger, still for ever, the sun in a broken pattern quivering on his rich coat, and under his paw with shattered skull Husaini no less still.

No Mortal Beast

It was a chance remark about maps, something I think about a map that would show the watersheds marked in red, that started him talking.

‘It was the oddest thing,’ he said. ‘I don’t know when I’ve been so puzzled or so conscious of horror. It wasn’t exactly fright, for I didn’t feel it threatened me. It was an intangible horror.’

After this, of course we said he must tell us the whole tale, and at last he began.

‘There’s a peculiar fascination to me,’ he said, ‘about finding that the backbone of the country you’re in, or even the country you’re looking at on the map, is the backbone of a continent. There’s a bit of the map of China where for hundreds of miles two great rivers run side by side, with one straight ridge of hills between them, and then they turn east and west and one goes off and pours its water into the Pacific and one into the Bay of Bengal. And in the Himalayas near Simla there’s a place where, if there isn’t a strong wind, you can spit first to one side and contribute to the Indian Ocean a thousand miles to the west, and then the other way and contribute to the Bay of Bengal a thousand miles to the east; and this impressive ceremony can be performed without taking a step one way or the other.

‘It would be neat and satisfying if you found that the people on the two slopes of that ridge were quite different types; and that when you crossed the watershed there were different faces and clothes and houses and different ways of ploughing the soil. It isn’t so just there, but there is one place in the hills, not very far from Simla, where the spine of the country really does seem to divide the people into quite different races. It’s a long ridge, about forty miles long, running east and west, most of it steep and rocky, and with no low passes in it. On the south side, there’s cultivation everywhere below seven thousand feet or so and the forest above is not too steep and is used by the villagers. They drive their cattle to graze there and the women go to collect firewood and grass, forest contractors come and cut marked trees and float them down the rivers, and you wouldn’t often walk far without meeting someone. And the people are fairly well off, and for hillmen, quite sophisticated. There’s a bridlepath, and even a forest bungalow, and it’s only one day’s journey by mule to the main track to Simla. So the people go to Simla with loads of potatoes and walnuts to sell, and some of the young men go and work in Simla for the summer season. And of course the result is that in the villages they don’t live the old self-contained life of the hill homestead, which was self-supporting except for salt and iron. These people use matches and tea and sugar, and cotton cloth instead of homespun blankets.

‘It’s different on the other side. There’s nowhere in the whole ridge that you could get a mule over, so that if anyone on the north side wanted to go to Simla with a load, he’d have to carry it himself thirty miles to the west before he really began—unless he carried it up to about 12,000 feet by most difficult paths and down the other side. He’d probably prefer to go round if he had a load even in summer—and of course the passes are blocked with snow most of the year. The streams are so full of rocks and waterfalls that you can’t float logs down and the forest contractors never come there. The result is that on the north side of the ridge, the people—there aren’t very many of them—do lead the old-fashioned self-supporting lull life. They carry flint and steel to strike a light, and a little brass case full of dried tinder; their hair and beards are long and as they say themselves they live like bears; they send a party once a year, in the winter, down to the foot of the valley to buy salt and metal, but they never go to the plains themselves, nor to Simla or anywhere where there’s a bazaar. There’s one Mohammedan shop-keeper at the foot of the valley who has some mules which he sends down from time to time to fetch up the things they want, but it’s not much.

‘Well, that’s the end of the geography. I hope it hasn’t been too dull. The story begins when I was on leave in that part of the world once at the end of September. I arrived one evening at the forest rest-house on the south side of this ridge I’ve been talking about, the sophisticated side. The resthouse is well above the level of cultivation, right in the forest, about nine thousand feet above the sea. It’s a charming place in fine weather, and the weather had been delightful, right up to the evening I arrived. But I thought it was looking a little unsettled that evening, and sure enough I woke in the night to hear rain drumming sharply on the roof and dripping from the eaves. It was still raining hard in the morning. One does sometimes get an odd two or three wet days long after the real rains are over, and it looked to me as though it had settled down for a good soak. So rather reluctantly I decided to stay where I was and not move on till it cleared.

‘But I didn’t care much for the idea of sitting all day in a forest rest-house. They can be snug enough at night, when you’ve been out all day and you sit in the evening in front of a roaring fire; but they are usually dark and rather gloomy by day when it’s raining outside. This one certainly was. I went and looked at the rest-house library and found the usual collection of books and magazines. There were old copies of the Illustrated London News and the Field, half eaten away by fish-insects, most depressing; there were Victorian novelettes, mostly with the backs torn off and dismal-looking treatises on the most improbable subjects, a beginner’s guide to Fencing I remember, and something about billiards—Play off the Red Ball I think it was called. But I found one charming mid-Victorian book, a big expensive autobiography by a country squire, and I was also tempted by one or two delicious looking companions of my prep-school days—Rider Haggard and Anthony Hope and the like. I remember taking two books from the cupboard and putting them on the mantelpiece without having decided which to read. Both were tempting, but not just yet.

‘For I felt I should be depressed and livery by the evening if I sat all day in front of the fire. It would be much better to go out, rain or no rain, and come back about tea-time. I looked forward with particular pleasure, I remember, to the thought of coming in wet and rather cold and settling down in front of the fire. I had a servant with me, so I told him to make sure there was a really hot bath by half past four, and a blazing fire, and the kettle boiling; and then I put some chocolate and raisins and biscuits in my pocket and started off.

‘I had stayed here before, and had been up on to the top of the ridge and I remembered the way. If you looked at the whole length of the ridge from the south, it seemed remarkably level, a long undulating line, but of course there were considerable differences in height. Just above this little bungalow, the main ridge was about twelve thousand feet above sea-level, but there was a miniature peak, a little pyramid of rock and grass about five hundred feet higher, which the locals called Baghela Kanta, which I suppose means the Tiger Peak or the Panther Peak; they use the same word for a tiger as for a panther. I didn’t know then why it had this name, though I can make a good guess now. They regarded it as sacred, I knew, and they had a tiny stone shrine up there where they sacrificed goats at some festival in the summer, and there was a path of a kind which according to my memory was fairly easy to see. I thought it would take me about three hours to the top, and I could easily be back by four, to a delicious evening before the fire with Rider Haggard or whoever became my final choice.

‘The heavy rain had stopped, but there was a light drizzle and a kind of Scotch mist which made it difficult to see very much. However, I soon found the place where the path to the peak took off from the mule-track. I remembered the place well, for there was a big cedar, with lots of coloured rags tied to it to keep off evil spirits. But the path itself was worse than I remembered, not only hard going, which I shouldn’t have minded, but sometimes very difficult to find. There would be a steep bit, where one continually had to hoist oneself up by holding on to the roots of trees and climbing over rocks—but in these places it was easy to see the way. Next there would be an open glade where the slope was less, and there it was sometimes very difficult to find any trace of a track through the long wet grass. My boots and stockings of course were soon soaking, but fortunately there were no leeches.

‘I had been climbing about half an hour since I left the mule-track when I realised I had forgotten to bring the compass and aneroid I usually carry in the hills. It was incredibly stupid, for to bring them was second nature; I had had them in my pocket at breakfast and could distinctly remember taking everything out of my pockets to stow the biscuits, and I suppose that something had distracted my attention before I put them back. However, I felt I couldn’t go seriously wrong; to reach the top I had only to go up, and coming back I had only to go down to reach the mule-track. It never occurred to me that I could get on the wrong side of the ridge. I did take the trouble to mark the trees where I went into each of the open glades, and again on the other side when I went back into the trees; and from time to time I turned round and looked back to memorise the look of things. But that was all. I really felt quite confident.

‘I soon got out of the horse-chestnuts and other broad-leafed trees near the rest-house, and I was glad, for I find them rather depressing on a wet day in the autumn, with the rusty leaves lying damp and limp underfoot. Then I left the blue pines behind and got among silver fir and spruce and silver birch—an enchanting combination to me, spruce and silver birch. And then I got right above the trees.

‘Here I think we must have a little more geography, or perhaps I should say description. If you looked at the ridge from miles away in summer, you would see nearly all the top of it bare of trees, either open rolling fell like Westmorland, or rock.

But at two of the lowest places the forest goes right over the top of the ridge; and Baghela Kanta is just between these two saddles of forest. So there is an island of bare country with trees all round, and the peak in the middle. At first, when you come out of the forest, the ground is less steep, just good Westmorland fell, but the five hundred feet up to the top is really quite stiff. It is an almost perfect cone, mostly steep grassy slopes, with rocky outcrops and the slabs mountaineers call boiler-plates here and there.

‘Just as I came out on to the open fell the mist lifted for the first time, and I saw the top quite clearly, though only for a moment. This was most cheering, and I started forward as fast as I could to get there while the clear patch lasted. I couldn’t get on very fast of course—I was only a few days up from the plains and the height made me pant—but I suppose that momentary clearing must have helped to take my mind off the business of getting back, and I didn’t take much trouble to mark the place where I had left the trees.

‘As I had expected, it was about half past twelve when I reached the top. The last part had been quite a scramble, and I was panting hard; I thought of lunch, but decided to get off the top before I sat down to eat it. I had only a woollen shirt and a tweed coat, both pretty wet, and it was distinctly cold. The mist of course had come down again and I could only see about ten yards, and it didn’t seem worth waiting up there and getting chilled to the bone on the off chance that it would lift. I decided to go down almost at once.

‘But before going down I looked round for the little shrine. The first time I had been up there, I had had a local guide, and he had insisted we must leave something as an offering, food or money or flowers—something that was of use or value. We had no money, but I think we left one of my sandwiches. I m not quite sure why I went to look for the shrine again. It was a feeling that wasn’t definite enough to be called superstition. I feel, as I suppose everyone does, very much at the mercy of Providence when I’m among mountains, and particularly in waste and broken country where men seldom come; and I believe I understand how the local people feel and why they make these little shrines. At any rate, I thought I’d look at it. This one was only two long slabs of rock, with a third put over it to make a roof; and it took me a few minutes to find it among the tangle of sharp rock that made the summit. It was not at the highest point but a little way down one slope. You had to stoop to look inside. There was a shapeless stone at the back, which I suppose represented the god, and in front of it something which had not been there the first time I came. It was a tiger carved in stone, crouched in submission before the god.

‘Usually these kind of carvings in the hills are very crude, and you can only guess what they are meant for by some feature like the elephant’s trunk or the tiger’s claws, but this was quite different. The shape of the stone must have suggested a tiger before the chisel was put to it, and with a few strokes it had come to life—crude still, but vivid, so that you felt the ferocity and power of the beast cowering before something stronger. Perhaps I was fanciful; I am never quite myself when I’m alone in high places; but it made me shiver. I had come to the shrine meaning to put a few raisins at the entrance—silly and childish perhaps, but a gesture to the power one feels in such a place—but I changed my mind. A courtesy to an unknown god is one thing; devil-worship quite another. I started to go down at once.

‘Now, as I came up I had consciously worked round the cone from the south face, where I began, to the east face; and it was, I thought, on the east face I started to go down. But I must have lost my bearings a little while looking for the shrine. It was not climbing, in the mountaineer’s sense, at any stage; but it was definitely scrambling, and most of the time on the cone one had to face the hillside. I suppose unconsciously I was working round to the right all the time, and I think I must have traversed right across the north face before I came out on the gentle slopes below and turned round to face away from the hill. I remember feeling braced and exhilarated, and cold enough for the thought of my hot bath and tea by the fire to be very pleasant. I ran down towards the trees planning to lunch when I reached them; but I knew I had to go to my right, for I thought I was still on the east of the cone, and wanted to strike the top of the path on the south. Well, of course, I didn’t; I was more or less opposite to it, on the middle of the north side, or I suppose I was, for I have never been able to go over the ground again.

‘When I first failed to find the path, I cast a little to the right, but I soon found myself on rising ground, which I took to be a kind of spur I had seen on my left as I came up—so of course I turned and went back and explored the other way. After half an hour of wandering backwards and forwards along the edge of the trees, I gave it up. I sat down to eat my lunch and thought it out.

‘It never struck me I could be on the north side of the ridge, and of course in that clinging Scotch mist there was no sun to help me, and no landmarks visible. I reckoned I had only to go down to find the mule-track somewhere or other, and once I was on that I should be sure to find someone who could tell me where the forest rest-house was. I thought I should soon strike a stream, and I would follow that to make sure I didn’t stray too far one way or the other to the side, but keep straight on down the hill. It was too cold to linger long over my biscuits and chocolate, so I got to my feet and plunged into the trees.

‘I must say it was very hard work. There was a lot of rhododendron scrub to begin with, a variety you get about eleven or twelve thousand feet. It shoots out low branches along the ground which are very difficult to negotiate. Then there were wet patches of deep moss, and long fern that one had to struggle through, with broken rocky ground under foot that you couldn’t see. If I had tried to go fast I should probably have broken an ankle, and I couldn’t afford to do that, so I went very carefully, and took a long time. My pleasant evening by the fire began to be more and more attractive and more and more remote. There wasn’t a sign of any living thing.

‘I found a stream soon enough, and I stuck to that to make sure I didn’t wander off to one side, but it didn’t make the going any easier. Several times the water spouted over a cliff and I had to make a long detour to get back to it. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t find a path of any kind, and I really began to get rather anxious. I was soaking wet and had no more food and didn’t at all like the thought of spending the night under a heap of leaves. The rain had almost stopped and there was much less mist now, but the valley was still full of cloud and I could see nothing that could give me any idea where I was.

‘After about three hours of very slow and laborious descent I was back among the blue pines and cedars, and it seemed to me I must be lower than the mule-track. This was really disturbing, but there seemed nothing for it but to go on down the line of the stream, which was bound to lead me to a human dwelling-place some time.

‘I had just assured myself of this for the twentieth time when I stepped out from the thick cover to a little rocky platform where the stream went in a noisy tumble of broken water over a drop of which I couldn’t at first see the depth.

‘This meant that I should probably have to make another detour, and my first reaction was one of obstinate exasperation, the feeling with which one faces one more of a succession of obstacles that seem to have no end. But almost at once this gave way to interest, for below the fall was a clearing, a comparatively level glade, in the middle of which was a temple, the kind of temple you often see in those parts, with a high-pitched roof of wooden shingles curving down gracefully into wide eaves that stood out horizontally from the walls. It was quite small, and didn’t look as though any attendant would five near it; but it was at least the work of human hands, and those hands could not be very far away.

And then I saw the tiger in front of the temple. There is often a tiger by the temples where the destroying goddess is worshipped, but usually it is so grotesque that you take on trust what it represents, just as you accept it when a child shows you a drawing and says it’s a cow. But this was different, or so it seemed to me in the light of that grey and misty afternoon. It was a natural outcrop of rock which had been deeply carved; the modelling was crude and conventional like a child’s model but just as in a child’s work, however badly drawn, you sometimes get a brilliant impression of movement or wind or laughter, in this, behind the simplicity and crudity, was just the same impression that I had felt in the little stone tiger in the shrine on the hill, crouching power and fierceness and cruelty, cowed before something still fiercer and more powerful.

‘I was quite twenty yards away, and as I say, the light was bad. The thing may not really have been the primitive masterpiece I thought it, for I never saw it closer. I stepped forward to the head of the fall to judge its height and to see which was the best way round or down, and there immediately below me I saw a woman.

‘She was standing quite close to the fall and of course could have heard no sound of my movements. She had her back to the fall when I first saw her and was looking towards the temple, or perhaps towards the tiger in front of it, but she turned almost at once and caught up a child, a few months old, who was lying at her feet. She held the child to her for a moment and then held him out towards the fall in a most curious gesture, at arm’s length, so that the child was upright and facing away from her towards the water. She stood rigid for a score of breaths, and then again held the child fiercely to her breast. Then she laid him down and took up a little pot, blackened by the fire. She squatted over this for a few moments, and seemed to put into the pot something she took from the folds of blanket round her body; then, with the pot in her hand, she stood up, and looking once more towards the water held out the pot with both hands, at arm’s length, as she had the child. Her lips moved as though she were speaking. The words ended and her lips closed firmly; slowly, irrevocably, she turned the pot over so that its contents fell into the water boiling at the foot of the fall.

‘She stood for a moment gazing down at the water at her feet and her arms fell to her sides. She put the pot into a fold of her blanket, and stooped rather wearily to pick up the child. Whatever it was that she had been doing with so much intensity of purpose was finished.

‘That was as much as I saw. I had been watching with such interest that I had really forgotten how I came to be there and the importance of finding out where I was. I suppose that when the tension lessened I must have taken a half-step forward with some idea of calling out and making myself heard above the rushing of the water, and probably I put my foot on a loose stone. At any rate, I know now that I fell and arrived unconscious at the feet of the woman I had been watching.

‘The next thing I remember is waking in the night with a cracking headache. It was dark and I could see nothing at all; I had a confused idea that I was in a cow-house and that one of the cows would tread on me. I called out in the sort of vague alarm one feels at waking in a strange place—the same instinct I suppose that makes a baby cry when it’s born. I got much the same reply as a baby; a woman’s voice spoke to me firmly and soothingly. I couldn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear. I was to go to sleep and not to worry; everything was all right.

‘When I woke again, it was broad daylight out of doors, though in the little hovel where I was lying there was not much air or light. It was a room of stone and wood with a low door not four feet high, and only one tiny window less than a foot square. The door was open and a shaft of sunlight fell on the floor and lighted the rest of the room sufficiently to let me see where things were. There were two low beds. I was lying on a couch of dry grass with a blanket over me; my clothes I was still wearing and they seemed to have dried with the heat of my body. Everything in the hut was black with smoke, and the bitter smell of wood-smoke was the strongest smell of many. I can never smell anything that has hung in the smoke of a wood fire now without thinking of that day. The warm scent of cows was the next most important smell.

‘I felt weak and not very anxious to move. The woman I had seen by the water—I found later that her name was Kamala Devi and I might as well call her that now—noticed that I was awake and brought me some milk. She put it on the floor by my side and left me to take it or not as I chose, and went on with her household work. I asked her where I was and how I could get back to the forest rest-house; she answered in a patois I could not understand, but in the same firm definite tones I had heard in the night. It was clear I was not to worry about that or about anything else till I was stronger.

‘I must have had some fever from the shock and I lay dozing and groaning now and then all that day, with no particular wish for anything but to be more comfortable. Most of the time the house was empty. But towards evening I fell into a deep sleep, and when I woke again on the morning of the third day, I was myself. The headache had gone, and I tried to get up, but found at once that there was something wrong with my leg. It didn’t take me long to decide that I had cracked the little thin bone that runs up beside the big one in the shin. I had done it before, and knew that it was simply a question of rest and letting it set itself.

‘I made them understand that I wanted a stick and with its help hopped outside, though it isn’t easy to hop through a doorway four feet high, and sat in the sun on the paved terrace in front of the house. I could see now that I was on the north slope of the ridge, for I knew the shape of the snow peaks across the valley. It was rather a gloomy outlook, for I was very doubtful whether it would be possible for anyone to carry me back the way I had come. They gave me a meal of coarse millet bread and a sort of lentil porridge, and I spent some time watching what was going on and thinking things out.

‘Kamala Devi seemed to run the household entirely. There was an old man, but he was plainly in his dotage, and was very little help to her. There was a boy of fourteen or so, and a girl of twelve, who worked hard at what they were told to do, and there was the baby which seemed to get very little attention; but not a man about the place. I understood now why she had been out all the day before; she had been working on the farm. However, she was within call and when I made up my mind and shouted to her she came towards the house.

‘I made renewed efforts to talk to her, but it was very difficult. I could only catch a word or two of her patois, which was quite different from any I had heard before; but she seemed to understand some words I used, and at last agreed to send the boy to fetch the village headman. The village, I gathered, was further down the hillside. I suppose she was reluctant to spare a hand from the farm. She certainly made that boy work; I had been watching him dig potatoes.

‘I got on a little better with the village headman, but not a great deal. The language differs between each valley and the next in those hills, but this was the most obscure I had struck. I needn’t go through all the details, but eventually they carried me down to the village and made me a sort of camp on the veranda of one of their big granaries. It was a good deal cleaner than Kamala Devi’s house, and I didn’t want to go on eating up her hard-won food. They sent a man to fetch some of my things from the forest rest-house and another to fetch the patwari, who is the local representative of the government and looks after some sixty or eighty villages.

‘The patwari of course was quite intelligible, and I soon arranged with him that they should fix up a kind of litter for me and carry me in two stages down to the foot of the valley, where the Mohammedan shop-keeper would provide a mule or a pony on which I could ride back to Simla. But it would take some time to make sure there was something there to ride, and in any case it was better that I should keep quite still until the bone had begun to knit. So I was booked to stay for a few days where I was.

‘As soon as we had finished our strictly business discussion I began to ask him about Kamala Devi. There was so much about her that was odd. First of all, and much the easiest thing to explain to the patwari, was the oddness of her living up there in an isolated homestead without a man, a thing I had never heard of before in the hills. Then there was the impression of energy and decision I had felt about her, both in her treatment of me and in the way she managed the house and the farm. And then—but I said nothing to the patwari about this—there was the scene I had watched by the waterfall. Whatever she had been doing then, I felt sure had been something immensely important to her; and when it was done, I had had the impression very definitely of something finished and off her mind.

‘The patwari told me that the homestead where she lived and the surrounding fields were called the Baghela Tok. “Tok” simply means a part of the village, and “Baghela” means something to do with a tiger or a panther. I asked him why the peak and the farm had this name, but he answered, I thought evasively, that he didn’t know. The temple above the house, he said when I asked him, was also called the Baghela Temple, perhaps because of the tiger in front of it. But this did not seem a good reason to me, for there is often a tiger before a hill temple—though not such a tiger as that.

‘But he was much more ready to talk about Kamala Devi. He said that she had been betrothed to the son of the old man I had seen, a very good young man, strong and hard-working, but he had strange ideas. Kalyan his name was; he had been the second son and after him there were only the two children I had seen, his brother and sister. Kalyan had decided that he would go away from the valley and see the world, not for long, but for a year or two before he settled down. It is the custom in other parts, but not in this valley, and everyone had tried to dissuade him, but he insisted. At last it was settled and two auspicious days were chosen and fixed; on the first he would be married to Kamala Devi, on the second he would start on his travels.

‘The day before his wedding he fell sick, with a strange sickness, vomiting and fever and sweating and much pain in the head and loins. The sickness lasted three days. But by then the auspicious day for the wedding had passed. Everyone urged him not to go away, but he was firm, and he went on the day that had been chosen, still a bachelor.

‘And then did she marry someone else?’ I asked.

‘“No, she did not marry anyone else. There had been plenty who had wanted to marry her. There was Kalyan’s brother, and the priest of the temple in the village. Although she was not a Brahmini, he would have taken her to live with him, and she would have had much importance in the village; but she would not. This was not a part of the hills where women have more husbands than one, and she was firm that she wanted to marry Kalyan and no one else. But the priest went on troubling her, and so did Kalyan’s brother. Then Kalyan’s brother fell ill. It was a strange sickness like that Kalyan had had on the day fixed for his marriage. There were sweatings and vomitings and much pain. He was not so strong as Kalyan and he died.

‘“Still, Kamala would not marry anyone else; but it is not respectable to remain unmarried, and the priest was troubling her, so she decided to be married by proxy, and she made her father arrange it.”

‘It is a custom that used to be fairly common all through the hills when a marriage has been arranged and the girl is ready for marriage, but the young man is away. She is married to something else which is called by his name, a tree, or a waterfall, or an earthen pot full of water. But now it does not happen often, and only in isolated and backward valleys such as this.

‘“Kamala Devi was married to the waterfall by the temple, the Baghela Temple near Kalyan’s home, where the tiger is. The people from the village tried to persuade her against this, because there is a god in that water, of whom they are very much afraid, but she is a woman who does not change her mind. She went to live at the Baghela Tok and to look after the old man. The priest was very angry.

‘“And then Kalyan came back, and they were very happy. And then a strange thing happened. There is a custom here that every year on the last night of the year, before the first day, the priest from this temple in the village goes to the joining of the two streams and all night he sits where the waters meet, and during the night the god comes and tells him all that will happen during the year, and he tells the people what crops to sow, and sometimes he tells them who will die. And this year when Kalyan had just come back, the priest sat all night and the god came to him. And when he came back he said that Kalyan would die within the year, unless he could find a black goat, all black, without a hair of white, with a butterfly mark on its tongue, to be sacrificed to the god. So Kalyan went to every village in the valley to find such a goat, and he went away to other valleys, but for three months he could not find it. And then at last he found a goat, and it was black, with not a white hair on it, and there was a butterfly mark on its tongue. He brought it back to the Baghela Tok and came to tell the priest and to fix a day for the killing. And the day was fixed, but the goat died. And then everyone knew the god did not want the goat; he wanted the man.

‘“Kalyan sat at home and waited. And in two months it came, the same sickness, the sweatings, the vomitings, the pain and he died. And so now Kamala lives at Baghela Tok with the old man and the two young ones, the boy and the girl, and the baby, who was born after Kalyan died. And the priest is troubling her again. He takes her presents.”

‘I asked how she managed to run the farm herself without a man to help, and among other questions I asked if the crops in that lonely place were not much damaged by wild beasts. He gave me an odd look.

‘“Wild beasts do not go to that place,” he replied very definitely, which seemed to me very surprising, for I have often talked to men who live in these isolated farms surrounded by forest, and they always complain of the damage done by animals. Pigs, bears and deer eat the crops; panthers and sometimes bears take the cows and sheep. But none went to the Baghela Tok—one of the loneliest farms I had seen. He would say nothing more.

‘Well, that was the story I got from the patwari, but it did not explain to me what Kamala had been doing at the waterfall. I was still wondering what it was next morning, when I heard a woman from above the village shouting some news at the top of her voice. A stir of excitement went through the village. People began to come out of their houses and call out to each other. I could make nothing of what they said, but I seemed to hear a note of incredulous horror, and then very quickly the calling and talking died down. A party of men left the village by the way I had come down from the Baghela Tok; and about noon I saw them come back.

‘The patwari was with them, and I called to him to come and talk to me. He came, rather reluctantly I thought, and he was at first evasive when I asked him questions. A little knot of villagers had gathered together and stood at a distance, as if waiting for instructions. The patwari turned round and looked at them over his shoulder; then he seemed to make up his mind about something and he spoke to me much more frankly.

‘“Sir,” he said, “it is no use trying to hide from you what has happened. The priest from the temple in the village has been killed in the Baghela Tok.”

‘“Killed?” I asked. “Do you mean murdered?”

‘“No,” he said, and looked at the ground. “Not exactly murdered. Sir, you will tell no one if I let you know what has happened?”

‘I said that if there was any question of murder, I couldn’t promise that, but if it was nothing too serious, well, this was a State, not British India, and I did not regard its internal problems as my affair. This seemed to satisfy him, and he went on:

‘“He was not killed by a human being. It was a tiger or panther. But I shall report it as snake-bite.”

‘This puzzled me; I could not see why he should not report a death caused by a panther and there was no explanation in this of his very odd manner. Then I remembered what he had told me before and I said:

‘“But I thought you said wild beasts never went to the Baghela Tok.”

‘“No,” he said, “no mortal beast will go there.”

‘It took a lot of questioning to get any more out of him, but at last he said:

‘“The people think it was the god who killed him.”

‘I was puzzled by this too. I said:

‘“But I thought that he was the servant of the god.”

‘“He was the servant of the village god. But the god of the Baghela Tok is different. He lives in the waterfall and the temple belongs to him. The wild animals are afraid of him, and he has servants. No one will go there at night unless they belong there.”

‘“But the priest was killed in the day-time. Why did the god want to destroy him?”

‘The patwari looked at the ground and picked up some fallen grains of millet from the dusty floor of my veranda. At last he said:

‘“Someone must have put a spell on him. There is much magic in the hills. There are charms you say, and you mix herbs in a pot and pour them out on to the ground or into a stream.”

‘I remembered the first time I had seen Kamala and I remembered that she had been married to the waterfall. I asked:

‘“But what is there to prove that it was not an ordinary wild beast, which happened on him by chance?”

‘“Come and see,” he answered. “I am going to fetch the body down. No one has dared to go near it. The young men can carry you.”

‘So I was carried up and saw the body of the priest. It was lying in an open terraced field, just below the farm. There had been rain in the night, and the field was ploughed. There were the priest’s footprints leading in the soft earth to the place where his body lay. There were the footprints of the woman who had found him, and of the others who had come to see. They had not ventured on to the terrace where he lay but had stopped short at the top of the terrace wall. The body was torn about the throat and stomach by long cruel claws. Except the priest’s own, I swear there was no other footprint of man or beast in that field.

‘“Not ordinary,” said the patwari, looking at me and shaking his head. And I could not answer him.’

Want of a Nail

The man in the jeep felt hungry and looked at his watch. It was still barely ten o’clock, but it was four hours since his hasty breakfast at divisional headquarters and it would be as long again before he reached the airfield. Surprising how hungry one gets sitting still in a jeep, he reflected; but probably the jolting on these rough trails is really quite hard exercise. He told his driver to stop, opened his haversack and took out three packets of K rations. He decided that on the whole he was less tired of the breakfast packet than the other two and moved into the back of the jeep where there was more room to spread things about. The driver took his ration to the shade of a clump of bamboos by the side of the trail.

The man sitting in the back of the jeep, with his knees wide apart, bending forward over the packet of food, digging out chunks of chopped ham and egg with the point of his knife, wedging them on to his biscuits, was a sturdy and powerful figure. He contrived to look more untidy than most men even in a bush shirt, a garment that does not make for individuality, and there was a youthfulness and a look of the moss-trooper about him that made his brigadier’s badges a surprise. He was for the moment thinking exclusively about his food, but opening a packet of K rations was a matter of routine and his mind was soon free to think of other things. It turned then to the progress of the pipe-line that was being laid by the side of the trail. All he had seen of it confirmed what he had been told yesterday. It would not be safe to count on its being through to Burgundy, the name for the airfield, in less than two months. And it would take longer still to improve the trail to a standard that would take a truck in all weathers.

He did not think much about the scene before him, because it was too familiar, the clumps of bamboo near the trail, the path winding away up the hill to a Naga village, the blue sky and the circling vultures. Nor did he pay any attention to the small figure of a Naga woman coming down the path from the village. He could not know the part she was to play in his plans, the influence she was to have on the lives of the men under his command.

He finished his breakfast and drove away. The woman came on, down the path towards the trail. She moved hurriedly and looked apprehensively over her shoulder. She was afraid that her sister-in-law might be following her and she had a guilty conscience about her sister-in-law and the blanket she was carrying, hugged tightly to her breast.

Honali and her sister-in-law lived in two little huts, side by side on the outskirts of the village up the hill. The two brothers, their husbands, were now both working for the army, and they only came back for a few days’ leave every six months or so. Honali and her sister-in-law were luckier; their work was close at hand. They were employed on moving earth and stones for the pipe-line and the road. Just now the work was almost at their door. As it progressed, they would be taken up the road in a truck; later still, they would be replaced by villagers from further forward.

The two brothers had just been home on leave, and that very morning had left together. But before that, some months ago, Dwarika, Honali’s husband, had had an extra little spell of a week at home by himself, without his brother; and he had brought with him a great treasure. By some error in the quartermaster’s stores, he had been issued with an extra blanket. Being an honest little man, he had mentioned the mistake, but he had been misunderstood; they thought he was complaining about what he had been given, and he had been pushed impatiently aside. So he had taken it that the extra blanket really was his and had brought it home in triumph for his family. He would certainly not have complained of its quality, for it was a wonderful blanket, thick and warm.

It was the pride of Honali’s heart. Not the least part of the pleasure that its possession gave her was the fact that her sister-in-law had no such blanket, and envied her this; several times Honali had caught her fingering it covetously. And now, what must Dwarika do but sit up gambling with his brother all his last night at home, and lose the blanket and her two best cooking-pots! He had said nothing about it till the last minute, when he had carelessly told her to hand them over to her sister-in-law, just as he was going, pretending he had forgotten till then. Really of course he had been afraid of what she would have said if he had given her time. All she had not said was churning and fermenting within her now and it added to her bitterness. If it had been anyone else to whom she had to give them! But to a nagging, interfering bitch like her sister-in-law, who always knew better than she did about everything, that was too much.

Honali made up her mind that whatever else her sister-in-law might get, she should not have the blanket. Her husband’s brother, Hari, must have told his wife of his winnings before he left; she would come round to collect them before starting for work. Honali decided to start for work herself earlier than usual, taking the blanket with her; the visitor would find no one at home when she called and would undoubtedly then take it upon herself to search for the blanket. Meanwhile, Honali would hide it, somewhere safe, though as yet she had no idea where.

This was the reason why Honali looked over her shoulder as she hurried down the hill towards the pipe-line where the brigadier had been breakfasting in the jeep. A hundred yards before the trail, she looked round again and her fears were confirmed. Another female figure came round the corner where the path turned the hill, and although at that distance no details could be distinguished, Honali knew it must be her sister-in-law because it was still early for the workers to start from the village and in any case the others would start in a party, not one by one.

As quickly as she could without actually running, Honali slipped into a big clump of bamboos by the side of the trail. She looked round for somewhere to hide the blanket, for her sister-in-law was not only a stronger character but was also physically bigger than herself and Honali could hope to keep the blanket only by hiding it. She could stuff it among the bamboos, but a searching eye might easily chance on it in any hiding-place of that kind. And then suddenly Honali saw just what she wanted. There, by the side of the trail, but hidden by the bamboos from the pursuing figure on the path, was a pyramid of pipes, lying ready for the workmen, both ends of each pipe unplugged. Honali did not stop to think why they were there. She hastily rolled the blanket into a thin tube, just as long as the width of the cloth, and pushed it into a pipe. It went in quite easily until its whole length was inside; then, as a little circle of grey wool showed where there should have been an empty opening, Honali took a bamboo stick and poked. She rammed her end of the blanket in about a foot, so that it could not be seen from outside; and in the course of her ramming she jammed the thick material firmly against the sides of the pipe. It occurred to her that it might not be quite so easy to get the blanket out as it had been to put it in, but she was not of a temperament to meet troubles half way. She sauntered away down the line towards her place of work, no longer guilty or apprehensive.

When her sister-in-law caught her up, Honali had her answer pat.

‘Blanket;’ she said. ‘I forgot to give it to you. It’s at the hut, of course. Couldn’t you find it? We’ll look for it this evening.’

She worked all morning, carrying baskets of earth and stones on her head. As she worked, she planned; she was not happy about the pipe as a hiding-place because, however safe it might be from the prying eyes of her sister-in-law, one of the workmen or soldiers might find it. It had suited her at the moment when she had no time to dig, but she would much prefer to have the blanket safely buried for a week or two till she could arrange to take it to her mother’s. At the midday interval work stopped and the women squatted down to cook the food they had brought with them. Honali walked away from the trail into the jungle, as though on a private and purely physical errand of her own, but once concealed from sight she turned swiftly back to the bamboo clump where she had hidden the blanket.

The pile of pipes had disappeared.

Honali questioned some workmen near by. The pipes? Oh yes, they had gone into the pipe-line and been buried that morning. It was a shock for a moment, but then Honali smiled. She had lost her blanket, but her sister-in-law at least would never get it now.

About two hours later, the brigadier in the jeep reached the airfield Burgundy, where his officers were waiting for him. He called them together at once, to explain the situation as he had learnt it from divisional headquarters. His brigade major was there, his battalion commanders, and an American airman whose transport aircraft were vital to the plan. They crowded round him, eager for news.

They knew already that in two months’ time the brigade was to be brought up to this isolated airfield and thence flown south, over hundreds of miles of hill and jungle, to be dropped far behind the enemy’s forward positions. There they were to cut his lines of communication, destroy bridges and railways, divert troops from the main battle, do anything they could to ensure the success of the offensive that would follow. What they did not know was the exact date, the arrangements that were to be made for their send-off.

Although he was physically untidy, the brigadier had a neat mind and explained the situation well. He said:

‘This airfield was built before the monsoon, when you could get a loaded truck up the trail. They got it finished just before the rains broke. Now of course you can’t use the trail for anything but a jeep, and that only in a fine spell. They’re building an all-weather road and a pipe-line for petrol, but neither the road nor the pipe-line will be here for two months and the all-weather road will probably take a good deal longer. The trail won’t be any use for traffic for at least two months either, so that until our operation takes place this airfield is an island; and unfortunately an island in a sea of which we haven’t got command. The jungle and the weather have that. In other words, we can only get stores and petrol on to the airfield by flying them here.

‘That of course was realised when they made the plan. The only way to stock up the airfield was to allot Callaghan’s Dakotas to the job of flying in petrol and stores. They were to bring in enough petrol for the operation of flying in the Brigade, and enough stores and petrol to keep us going for two months. Callaghan will tell you what he thinks of using good aircraft to fly gas about the place . . .’

‘I hate it like hell,’ said Callaghan, ‘but war’s wasteful any way you look at it.’

‘. . . but it had to be done. His aircraft were just enough, doing two sorties a day, to bring in what we shall need for two months. Then for D-day, all the Dakotas in the area of this Corps were to be switched on to this one job and fly us in. Then they were all to go back to whatever they were doing before, except Callaghan’s boys, who were to spend the next two months dropping on us the stores they’d brought up beforehand, using the petrol they’d flown in.

‘That was the original plan. You might think it was a bit lavish to collect two months’ stores and petrol before the start, and that it would have been safe to rely on getting something in after D-day. But this is such a hellish country that there always seems to be a landslip or a cloudburst or a flood or an earthquake just where you least want it and they decided to take no chances. And it’s just as well they did, because there’s already been a development that has reduced the margin quite a lot.

This bit of news was in today’s newspapers, which you won’t see till Thursday, and you might not think it would affect our show, but it does, although it’s nearly a thousand miles away. In the Arakan, a Jap brigade has turned our position, marched right round the flank and come in behind 93 Division. They can’t get any thing by road to 93 Div at all, no stores, no petrol, no ammunition. Now if 93 can hold on where they are, those Japs will be liquidated; but the only way to do it is to supply 93 by air. That’s an extra commitment, quite unforeseen. We thought we were going to attack down there but the horse blew first. It can only be met by scraping up every Dakota we can lay hands on. Half Callaghan’s outfit has to go. I’ve brought him his orders from the group.’

‘Aw hell,’ said Callaghan, ‘just when I’d got to know you boys and was well on the way to making decent American citizens of you. Now I’ll have to start in on another bunch of goddam Britishers.’

‘Don’t worry, you’re not going yourself,’ said the brigadier, ‘you’re staying here with a reduced squadron. And since with half the aircraft you can’t fly in two months’ petrol as well as two months’ stores, you’re to start flying in the stores. You won’t need to re-fuel here, and there won’t be any gas here at all. We take a chance on getting the pipe-line through by D-day. If it looks as though it won’t be through in time, you’ll have to switch over to flying in gas a fortnight beforehand. But by that time, we hope the business in the south will be settled, and they’ll be able to give us back all your Dakotas and perhaps a few more. How soon the pipe-line gets through depends on the weather.’

During the next two months the brigade went on with its training in Central India. The pipe-line crept steadily forward towards the airfield. Sometimes a spell of bad weather slowed it down, but there were none of the major cataclysms which allied Soldiers and airmen had come to regard as part of the normal climate of Assam. Honali and her sister-in-law went back to village life as the head of the line moved out of their area. The spells of bad weather grew less frequent, and there seemed nothing likely to stop the pipe-line reaching the airfield by D-day and starting to deliver petrol during the next week. But the aircraft that were to be collected for the fly-in would have to re-fuel at Burgundy before they took off with the gliders full of troops for that long stretch southward over the jungle. So for the last week Callaghan’s reduced squadron flew in gas, and nothing but gas. But there was only enough for the fly-in; for the months ahead, the food and ammunition that was the blood of the brigade depended on the pipe-line.

D-day came, and the tugs and gliders flew in. The Dakotas released the gliders, circled round to see them land on the natural clearings that had long been marked down for the purpose, and flew back to Burgundy. The units of the brigade sorted themselves out and moved off to their appointed tasks. The third day the brigadier came back in a light aeroplane which could land and take off in a forest clearing. He re-fuelled at Burgundy and flew on to report to his divisional commander.

He found the general looking serious. A neat, spare, precise little man, his finicky speech and habits were the result of years of self-discipline; inwardly he was a romantic and whenever he allowed his mind to be idle, it would call up pictures of himself, his youth recovered, sitting by a camp-fire with his platoon, crawling in the dark on a single-handed attempt to pass the enemy’s picquets, running back as he touched off the fuse that would destroy the bridge, parrying with unwonted verbal skill the thrusts of the female super-spy. On the night of the fly-in, he had dined with a battalion of his own regiment, the 159th, one of the three under the brigadier’s command. He sat on a packing-case and ate from a mess-tin; it was very different from the guest nights of peace. But he liked the faces he saw round him, cheerful, young and eager. They had come from all over the world, from every kind of peace-time job, but the army had absorbed them, the regiment had set its seal upon them. He was proud of them and they were proud of the regiment, its men and its battle honours. But later that night, as the Dakotas one by one roared away into the darkness with their load of gliders, his heart had been sad that he could not go with them, and sad too because he did not know how many of those cheerful young faces he would see again. Now, three days later, he was grieved by the thought of what was in store for the brigade. He explained to the brigadier. The two men could hardly have been less alike in appearance or in their mental approach to a problem; but they understood each other.

The general sat upright on his packing-case, leaning slightly forward, talking slowly and carefully. The brigadier lolled, nursing a knee, watching the neat fresh-coloured face, the serious blue eyes, listening as his commander explained that before the roads had been opened to let stores go through to 93 Division, the Japanese had done the same thing again in the centre. Once again, they had attacked, making a great circle through the jungle to come in behind Indian and British troops. But once again, if air supply could be arranged, the tables would be turned on the enemy. It would be he who would be fought and starved until death or surrender released him. But it meant more Dakotas. Every Dakota in the command was needed for the job. An appeal had been made to the Mediterranean for help, but in the West too there was a crisis and no more could be sent. The long and short of it was that, far from being reinforced, Callaghan’s reduced squadron had been still further reduced.

The brigadier thought for a moment.

‘We can just manage on that, sir,’ he said. ‘I know Callaghan and he’ll do all he can to bring up our stores. He’ll work his pilots till they drop rather than let us go short.’

The general shook his head. He said;

‘Wait. I haven’t finished. You know we were depending on the pipe-line. It was through on D-day, and we were reckoning on it to give us the petrol for Callaghan’s aircraft. But there’s an obstruction. Nothing will come through. They’ve got to pull it up bit by bit to find where the block is. They might have some luck and find it quickly, but they might take a month.’

The brigadier uttered a short indeterminate sound, which might have been taken to mean that this was indeed a bitter blow, but that it was fate and Assam and the workings of an inscrutable providence, and you had no right to expect more. Also, that he felt sorry for the general who had to give him such news. The general went on:

‘I tried again to get more aircraft, after hearing this news, but it’s no good. Everyone has to go short until they get through by road to the 47th Division. It means Callaghan will have to fly up petrol one day and carry stores on to you the next. It would have stretched him to the limit to give you the stores you need if he’d had the petrol at Burgundy. Now he’ll have to stretch himself just as tight to give you half.’

The brigadier thought. He said:

‘They do realise, of course, Sir, that our scale is a pretty hard one at the best of times, and that we don’t get everything that’s dropped for use’

‘Yes, I’m afraid they do. It was a hard decision to make, but when all the facts were before me, I had to agree that it was right.’

The brigadier stood up. He said:

‘Very good, Sir, there’s nothing for it but to manage as best we can. I’ll let you know daily by signal whether the emphasis is on food or ammunition. Please tell Callaghan from me not to work his pilots so hard that they fly into a hill in their sleep. We shall want every one of them.’

It was some three weeks later that the brigadier next flew back to Burgundy. The general had chosen to drive up to meet him in a jeep. He had decided on this instead of flying in order to see what progress had been made towards finding the block in the pipe-line.

The brigadier looked much older than he had done a month ago. He had bitter news to tell. He said:

‘It’s the 159th, Sir; they’ve had a bad time. They had long marches to make anyhow, as you know, and they were on half rations. Then they missed a drop. I don’t know where it went but they didn’t get it. That meant twelve days from one drop to the next. Three days rations for twelve days. I’ve seen them and they’re walking skeletons. What happened wasn’t the men’s fault, nor the officers’. They gave all they had. But three marches short of the railway at Kyaukchaung, Jack Elliott had to decide whether to leave half of them behind and push on with the fittest or reduce his pace. He knew he’d have to fight when he got to the railway and would want every man he’d got. Also, if he split he made the next drop more complicated and increased the chance of missing it. So he reduced the length of his marches and reached the railway a day late. He got his drop. Half rations instead of quarter. I think he was right. Anyway it was his decision. But it just made the difference. The Japanese must have got wind of his movements somehow, and their brigade from up the line got past on the day Elliott ought to have got to Kyaukchaung. Instead of being neutralised away in the jungles to the north-cast, that brigade is on its way to the main battle. Elliott of course didn’t know this. He still thought he had to cut the line. There was a Jap battalion holding Kyaukchaung, and Elliott attacked them. He had a lot of casualties and hadn’t got into the town when I called him off. I did that as soon as I knew the Jap brigade had gone through. No point in cutting that line now. I’ve sent him south to the junction. He had hoped for food in Kyaukchaung but he may find some at the junction of course. I’m sorry, Sir. They’ve failed to do what they went for and lost a lot of men and some good officers. It wasn’t their fault. It was a miracle they did so much. It went wrong because they slowed up, and they slowed up because they hadn’t enough to eat. It was that pipe-line.’

There was much else to report and discuss, and the conference went on. When it was over and he was alone, the general’s mind went back to his old regiment, his friends, the faces he remembered the night they flew in. He went over it till his mind was dazed with fatigue but he could not see anything more he could have done to help them. But he felt all the same that he had failed them. It had been the pipe-line. No one could have foreseen that block.

He woke next morning to miserable realisation of what had happened to his regiment. Their present sufferings were in his mind all the time, and as he drove back to his headquarters he asked every party of men he saw for news about the block in the pipe-line. He thought of what it had meant, the hunger of the brigade, the casualties to the 159th, that extra Japanese brigade in the main battle that might have been stopped. He got no news till about half-way back to his headquarters. Just as he was thinking that he was hungry and it was time to stop and eat, he saw a party of sappers by the side of the line, a group of villagers watching.

The officer in command of the sappers came up and saluted. He said:

‘We’ve found the blocked section, Sir. They’ve got it up and they’re just getting the obstruction out.’

The general walked forward to look. One of the sappers was pulling on a metal hook, while others held the pipe section. The obstruction began to give, and slowly there emerged the beginnings of a shapeless grey mass, which suddenly came out with a run and revealed itself as a petrol-soaked army blanket.

One of the Naga women from the group of villagers ran out, and snatched the blanket up. She hugged it to her breast. But another woman sprang forward and in a torrent of shrill abuse claimed it as her own. She tried to snatch it away but the first woman resisted. The general decided to stroll a little way up the hill and eat his food in a quieter spot. As he walked away, the two women were still arguing fiercely.

## Un Coup de Champagne

Dust had been what they had thought about most for the last two days. You could shut every door and window of the railway carriage, but it made no difference. Dust filtered in through the window-joints and under the door, and although a man got in and cleaned the floor and seat at every station, half an hour later the fine desert sand had covered everything you possessed with a gritty coat. Your teeth were on edge with the taste of sand, your nose was rimmed with it, there were little moraines of sand from either eye, and the brush would not go through your hair because of that dry pervading resistance.

But it was over now, and they had come to Kusait. They were on their way back from leave, and tomorrow they would be puffing down the Gulf by the slow mail, and then they would be back in India, and work would begin again. It was over now, and in Peter at least the knowledge that their journey had come to an end induced a feeling of sorrow and a desperate resignation to fate. He felt that he had been all his life saying goodbye to people and leaving places where he had been happy. His will did not dispute the need to go back; it was his job and the right thing to do and he had to do it; but his heart was sad. When he stopped to think about it, he could analyse his sadness and divide the different strains of regret and unhappiness. There was regret for a time of youth and happiness in a country he loved; it would never come again, it had gone, one more spring, one more sight of the blackthorn in blossom, one more summer glory of the cornfields. There was regret for friends from his days at school and Oxford, for his parents and home, whom he would not see again for three years. There had been the sharp pang of saying goodbye to Patricia, and a deeper sorrow behind that. Still there it was, the break had to be made, and it was no use being too sentimental about it. And certainly there could be no better way of making the break than by this journey across Europe and Asia Minor with Rex, because there was something interesting every day to take one’s mind off either the present or the past, and Rex was an ideal companion. He was not insensitive, but he was unobtrusive. He did not pry into your affairs or unduly expose his own.

They had come slowly, stopping where they were interested, refusing the attentions of guides and the lure of the obvious, and they had both contrived to live in the moment and feel their time well spent until that two days’ journey by slow train across the desert, a journey which no one could enjoy. And now their mood changed. The journey was over, they would soon be at work again. They had lived on goat’s milk and cheese and grapes in Syria, and in the desert principally on sand; now they wanted bright lights and music and the company of their kind. It was doubtful if such things could be found at Kusait in the early ’thirties, but they would try to find them. Youth and the desire for excitement were in the ascendant; just for tonight they wanted to be light-hearted and irresponsible.

They found the ship in which they were to travel tomorrow, changed their clothes and went on deck, enjoying the feel of clean shirts and the smell of fresh dates that filled the ship.

‘And now,’ said Peter, ‘for your friend what’s his name. Where’ll we find him?’

‘Pocock,’ said Rex. ‘We’d better try his ship first.’ So they chartered an Arab boat, as ungainly as a Brazil nut, and were taken out to the ship, where a seaman stopped polishing his brasswork for just long enough to tell them that Mr. Pocock was on shore, and probably at the mess. Back they went; long lines of palm trees, and Arab dhows, strangely medieval in their hulls but wholly Eastern in their sails, and the brassy afternoon sun on the water. A taxi to the mess, and there they found Pocock and a very, young officer gazing disconsolately at an enormous tea.

‘They couldn’t come today; they had to rehearse, but they said they’d come tomorrow,’ the very young officer was explaining. His name was Trevelyan.

‘Who couldn’t come?’ Peter asked, and was told that there was a cabaret show at the local night-club, and there were three girls who danced.

‘So we went round to ask them to tea,’ said Trevelyan.

‘Well, it’s a good thing they couldn’t come as it turns out,’ said Pocock, ‘because we can eat the tea you ordered for them; and then we’ll go out to my ship, and then I think we’d better dine here, as I’m temporarily attached here. We’ve only just come here from down the Gulf. My first night ashore for weeks. We’ll do everything you can do in Kusait.’

So that was settled, and Peter and Rex ate the dancers’ tea and after tea they went back to the ship. Straight bare roads and dust, open American cars driven with a wild disregard for convention, notices in English and Arabic; the tin roofs and native policemen, the drab orderliness lightly imposed on an eternal untidiness, that mark the trail of Trade and the Flag in the tropics. Another Brazil nut, and this time the sun setting over the desert behind the palm trees, saffron against darkest purple, with the water dark and glittering below; sad and inhuman, the dying sun across the desert, as though the miles of sandy waste had a meaning that coloured the evening light. The desert! Whatever it might be by daylight, at evening and under the moon it was true, all that the word seemed to mean. Deserts and antres vast! Solemn and very sad and beautiful tonight.

The ship. Up the ladder, and into the wardroom. A long chair, and a glass of whisky at your elbow, and you knew you were back in the East. The man in the next chair had once been in the Indian Cavalry. Bengal Lancer? Oh, yes, knew him once. The first part’s marvellous, the polo and pigsticking, but all that stuff about Yoga. . . ! Had he got his tongue in his cheek? I know all the country he used to stick pig over; brings it back to you wonderfully.

And so on, easy sliding talk without much thought behind it, and there always seemed at least two glasses of wardroom whisky waiting. Partridges in the Lebanon, partridges in the Persian mountains; ibex, and the Himalayas; polo, and the psychology of women.

‘I knew a woman once—knew her rather well as a matter of fact—damned attractive, and always had crowds of men in tow—very smart, too—but people always got a wrong impression of her at first sight. Clever she was, and interested in all kinds of things, but fundamentally absolutely cold, naturally cold, I mean. Just incapable of understanding what some women do feel. Not that it had been bludgeoned out of her, as it has with some; she’d just never had it. Anyhow, I once asked her. . .’

‘Well, he was a typical sapper, you know. . . .’

‘They had over a hundred Arab ponies on board, that they were taking to Bombay. The rest of the cargo was fish manure. It can get pretty warm in the Gulf, so you can imagine what it was like by the fourth day. . . .’

‘No, he didn’t hit the panther, he hit the goat. . . .’

‘I believe in the next war land battles will be much more like sea battles. I was talking to a soldier just out of the Staff College, most original fellow. He thought land battle-fields would be covered with thick smoke, for miles in every direction, with squadrons of high-speed tanks cruising about in it, trying to locate each other. Interesting, I thought he was. They’d have to learn something from naval tactics then. . . .’

‘It’s a very sporting little bird and gives you a lot of fun. . . .’

Peter finished the last of the accumulated whiskies, and refused several more. Out again to the night and the harbour, goodbyes and hospitality, everyone talking at once; into their Brazil nut and back to the shore. The night was fresh and clean there on the water; absurd to say it was the same place as it had been under the sun that afternoon. The startling cool, after the glaring day and the full wardroom; the dark water and the moon; could you want anything more lovely’ The boat made milky ripples in the water, long gleamings of light in the clear dark. Water, clear and dark, and the moon . . . It made you feel sad, and yet you knew the sadness wasn’t real. Like saying goodbye to Patricia; you knew you hadn’t lost her, you’d always be friends, even when that maddening lift of her eyebrow and that impish air of mockery quickened your heart no longer. What a darling she was, and how miserable Peter had felt when he said goodbye; nothing else had really seemed to matter, and yet even then he knew that he’d feel quite cheerful about it all next day, or at any rate the day after. Saying goodbye to Joy, ah, that had been different; no, don’t think about that, it was too real. Don’t go too far into the past. Not tonight, one mustn’t be hurt tonight.

‘Where are we going now?’

Someone said they must go and see the Rileys. No one quite knew why, but everyone agreed that they must, so in more American cars through the cooling air, swinging round bewildering square corners, roaring up to top speed, with the lights of the car behind suddenly showing your faces as you swung round again and were piled in a heap on the back seat. Slow at last and this must be the Rileys. The gramophone was playing and the Rileys had apparently begun to think of changing for dinner, but they didn’t mind an invasion by half a dozen cheerful young men. They were what is known as bright and cheery, the Rileys, and they put on a funny record and gave everyone gin. It was a bright and cheery little house, with orange lampshades decorated by silhouettes of nymphs without any clothes chasing butterflies; Pierrot and Pierette kissed chastely on tiptoe in a circle of roses on a white background on the walls, and cigarettes or matches could be found in cunning little devices on the mantelpiece, brightly coloured and neat and not too expensive. Red and black clocks, orange chairs with cushions of black and shiny peacock-blue; a bright little man with a cheery little wife, fair and pretty, and inclined to be plump, ready to laugh and ready to flirt. There was a little man and he had a little wife. . . .

‘No, thank you, no more gin.’

Careful of the step; everyone talking at once; but it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s happy, and what more do you want? There’s the moon again; don’t look at it this time, don’t think about things like that. Mustn’t think of lovely things tonight; just be cheerful.

‘Where do we go now?’

‘Dinner, I think, and then a cinema and then this cabaret. That all right?’

‘Sounds all right. Looking forward to the cabaret; that’ll be where Trevelyan comes into his own.’

‘Oh, yes; the cabaret king. He goes every night, and sleeps with a photo of one of them under his pillow. I forget which it is, though.’

Cars again, and they were at the mess. Much nicer than this afternoon, it looked.

And so through dinner, rather hurriedly, and cars roared up straight roads, white in the moon, and swung round corners, and stopped at last in a square between a cinema and a mosque.

As soon as they were in their seats:

‘Wheeskee, sir?’

‘Beer,’ said the young man next to Peter, and was asleep almost as soon as he put down his glass.

There was an interval, when you went to a bar, where you were introduced to people and asked them if they were any relation of Jenkins who’d been at Winchester or Bolitho in the 57th Masalchis, and then they told you stories; and then back to the cinema and immediately everyone fell fast asleep again.

At last a brightly coloured photograph of the king, standing in a howling gale in front of the Union Jack, and everyone swayed rigidly to attention. Outside, the moon still heavenly fair; stop for a moment and look at her; a mosque and two palm trees tilted askew with the moon behind, just like a picture of the East in a magazine; stop and look and feel rather sad, sad because beauty slips through your fingers and you forget Patricia and daren’t think about Joy; but don’t look too long. Into the cabaret, where Trevelyan is to come into his own.

‘I’ve arranged for them to come to our table as soon as they’ve finished their dances,’ said Pocock, and everyone settled down at the edge of the space cleared for dancing. A long room, very crowded; Iraqis in cleft hats like Glengarry bonnets, Persians in their black kepis, Syrians with the flowing Arab head-dress, Turks, Indians, French; the dancing-floor ran down the middle, only a few feet across. The dancing was not very remarkable; a French girl, dark, quick, supple, a narrow face, hard and bitter and sad, but a face to look at all the same; another French girl, younger, shorter, plumper, with a sentimental round face set in fluffy dark hair, a chocolate-box prettiness. Then a tall girl, very fair, a good figure and very little to hide it, the worst dancer of the three.

‘Standard Hollywood blonde,’ thought Peter. ‘Now to see Trevelyan do his stuff.’

But when they stood up to greet the three dancers, Peter forgot to look what Trevelyan was doing, absorbed in swinging a chair into place between himself and Rex, and steering the Hollywood blonde to the chair. She was in normal evening dress now, a light crimson dress that she carried well. Fair hair and velvety brown eyes; Joy had always wanted brown eyes with her fair hair, and said how attractive it was; damn, don’t think of Joy.

‘Tell me, Mademoiselle, what shall we speak? French? English? German?’

‘As you will, French or German,’ she said, ‘which ever is easier for you.’

‘Then French,’ he said. ‘You have brown eyes and fair hair, Mademoiselle. It is a very attractive combination. But many men must have told you that.’

‘Oui, on me l’a dit.’

She was curiously unresponsive, but Peter found himself becoming interested in her as a person for just that reason. He liked the colour of her hair; her back was beautiful, supple and white in the backless dress; her white shoulder was round and firm. She pleased and attracted the eye, but as a person she was miles away, she would take no single step forward to meet a fellow human being.

They were dancing. Peter said:

‘I am sorry I do not dance better.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘you cannot dance.’

Peter was surprised. Most girls would have said he was not so bad as all that, and this one made her living by this kind of thing. He said:

‘Tell me, what shall I call you?’

‘Call me Itza.’

‘You are from where?’

‘From Vienna.’

They talked about Vienna. Then she said:

‘And you? You are English’

‘Yes, I am English.’

‘The English are cold.’

‘Why do you say that? Have you known an Englishman?’

‘On me l’a dit.’

Peter looked at her quizzically.

The words might have conveyed an invitation, but her manner did not sound as though that was her meaning. Still, it was always a good thing to make quite sure what people did mean. He said:

‘Viens dehors au clair de la lune. On peut parler dehors. Ça sera plus convenable.’

She shook her head.

‘No, I am paid to dance on this floor. I cannot go out.’

The music ended.

‘Then what would you like to do?’

‘Je veux boire un coup de champagne.’

They were all three quite frank about it. A glass of champagne cost five shillings, and the girl for whom it was ordered got a metal token, for which the management would give her one shilling and sixpence next morning. Pocock drank from the glass he had bought the dark vivid girl, and made a face.

‘That’s not champagne. Cold tea and soda-water, that’s all it is. I wouldn’t mind paying for champagne, but I won’t for that stuff.’

The music began, and Peter was dancing with Itza again.

He said:

‘Tell me your age, Itza.’

‘I am nineteen.’

‘Nineteen. It is very young. Tell me, Itza, do you like being here?’

‘It is not bad.’

‘And before this, where were you?’

‘In Damascus.’

‘Did you like that?’

‘It was nice in Damascus.’

‘You liked Damascus. Why did you like Damascus so much?’

‘It was nice.’

‘It was nice! You mean, you loved a man there. No?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It was nice.’

‘Ah, come, tell me more. Was he kind to you?’

‘I was married in Damascus.’

‘Married? Oh. Is your husband here?’

‘No, I have divorced him in Damascus. He was a Syrian.’

‘How long were you there;’

‘Six months.’

‘Six months—and nineteen—and married and divorced—and a Syrian;’

‘Yes.’

‘My poor lamb. Are you really only nineteen?’

‘Do I look older?’

‘No, but it’s a lot to have happened to you before you’re twenty. Are you sad?’

‘Sad? I don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry for you!’

‘Oh, men, they say they’re sorry.’

‘The music is stopping. Viens parler dehors, au clair de la lune.’

‘Non, je veux boire un coup de champagne.’

That was all she wanted. Whenever the music stopped, she said:

‘Je veux boire un coup de champagne.’

Whenever it began, she danced obediently with Peter. But she was quite clear; she was paid to dance, and when the café closed she would go decorously home. She would risk no adventures in that dangerous moonlight; perhaps in her too it awakened feelings she did not like to face. It was strange. With every dance, she seemed to Peter more of a person, less a beautiful body to be looked at. But he came no nearer to her. He said:

‘And where will you go after this?’

‘I do not know. It will be for my manager to decide.’

‘And after that? Will you go on doing this for ever? Do you want to settle down and have children? Do you want to go back to Vienna?’

‘I cannot tell. Something will happen. Who can know what will happen to us? It will happen and I shall do it, whatever it may be, when the time comes.’

‘And you make no plans?’

‘What is the use of making plans? Things happen, and you do as you feel you have to do.’

‘And you never dream of the way you would like things to happen?’

‘Ah, dreams. One grows out of those when one is very young.’

She was no longer young, too much had happened to her. There was nothing she wanted. Men—no, she looked on them as toads, she almost shuddered; and yet she had a friendliness for Peter, if he hadn’t been a man. She had no resentment for his questionings, but she did not respond. Those brown eyes above the white shoulder, they gave no answer. Queer how inscrutable a body is, Peter thought; there it is, and it reveals nothing of all that is going on inside. It stands and looks at you, and you don’t know what it hides any more than if it belonged to a polar bear.

It was over, the band was packing up, the lights were going out. She picked up her bag and her pile of metal tokens.

‘Good night, Itza; don’t say the English are cold, will you? You haven’t really tried them. And don’t forget me for a week!’

‘No, I shall not forget you; you have a nice shirt, and you are clean. Good night, Peetairre.’

Out into the darkness, cool now after the stuffy room. The moon was low, only a radiance behind the tilted palm trees and the dome of the mosque. More cars through the sleeping streets, stumble over the cases of dates on the quayside; good night, good night, thank you very much. A wonderful evening. See you tomorrow before we sail.

Rex went to his cabin. Peter leaned over the rail of the ship. He could see the moon from here, still serenely riding the sky above the fringe of palm trees on the other bank, making a path of broken silver over the dark water to the ship. The ship, the moon, the silver night, the dark water, just as lovely and as sad as it had been that night with Joy. But that was long ago, and now he was here on the other side of the world, and the moon was the same as then; he knew no more now than then about the moon or the world she shone for. You moved here and there about the world, but the moon and the flowing water and the trees went on just the same, as inscrutable as a body that stands there and looks at you, when you haven’t the key to its spirit.

The Box

When the telephone bell rang, Peter was in the middle of a dissertation on the folly of the social call.

‘It’s silly enough in England,’ he had been saying, ‘where you go round to see people just when you think they’re most likely to be out, and hope they will be; but there at least you do make some pretence of going to see them. But in India you don’t even pretend. The good lady hangs up a little white box on her gatepost marked: ‘Mrs. Smith. Not At Home’, and you drop two cards in it and move on to the next. It really is too ridiculous.’

‘And a pretty good rocket you get if you don’t do it,’ his hearer agreed. ‘Blenkinsop was sent for a year to a place where there wasn’t another Englishman, because he forgot to call on the Commissioner’s wife.’

‘Well, that of course was asking for trouble. It’s a religion for Commissioners’ wives. In fact, it comes long before religion with several. All the same, the thought that I have to waste hours of my precious life in observing this inane ritual is making me wonder whether I’m an atheist as far as this particular god is concerned.’

It was at this point that the telephone bell rang, and he picked up the receiver.

‘Superintendent of Police speaking,’ he heard. ‘Listen, we’ve got a fellow who was one of the Sultanpur gang. You know, armed robbery and several murders that we know of. Hamid’s lot. Well, this fellow has confessed, and among other things he says they used to get cartridges from an Indian Christian in the city here, a fellow called Francis. We’ve got some of Hamid’s cartridges, home-made ones, and they may be the same. Now, you know as well as I do that if I send a policeman round with this man to Francis’s house, no judge will ever believe that he found any cartridges there like the ones we’ve got; they’ll say he put them there himself. So would you mind going round with him? He’ll show you the house—my prisoner, I mean—and if you find any cartridges there like Hamid’s, we’ve got him. Record my prisoner’s statement first, of course, and take him there with his face covered so that nobody’ll recognise him—you know all the precautions.’

All right; I’ll go at once. It’ll be an excuse for not dropping cards in Mrs. Gordooly’s box till tomorrow.’

‘Good man; thanks awfully. Goodbye.’

Peter went round to the police station, and in a bare room interviewed the prisoner.

‘Take off his handcuffs and leave him alone with me.’

‘But, Lord . . .’

‘Oh, he won’t hurt me. He hasn’t a bomb or anything, and you can guard the doors in case he tries to escape. Now, Loki—is that your name?’

‘Yes, Presence.’

‘Has anyone tried to make you tell me?’

‘No, Presence.’

‘And you understand that anything you say . . .’

And so the familiar catechism went on. N or M. And the wretched man stumbled again through the recital he had already rehearsed to two police officers and would repeat again before the magistrate, and again before the judge—and he would be lucky if re-trial weren’t ordered and he didn’t have to begin all over again six months later.

‘And Hamid told me to go to Francis and buy some cartridges. He gave me fifteen rupees and told me to bring forty-five, and to hide them very carefully, and so I did. . . .’

‘All right; and now can you show me where Francis lives?’

‘Yes, Presence.’

So they went to another police station, nearer to the house, and collected a sufficient number of police, and set off in a procession that made Peter smile. First, the prisoner, heavily chained and with his face hidden, so that no one could say at his trial that witnesses had been brought to see him pass and to identify him later as one of the gang. Two stout policemen held a rope that went round his waist. Then a straggling procession of obvious policemen in plain clothes, and at last Peter and the Indian police officer. Between tall houses, where in defiance of municipal by-laws privies on the first floor drained down the outside of the walls, past the sweetmeat-sellers’ shops and the butchers’, black with flies, down a whole street of jewellers squatting over tiny open fires and hammering their thin debased silver, stepping aside for sacred bulls and pushing bullock-carts and buffaloes out of the way. At last the traffic became thinner; and the unforgettable flavour of India, that thick, sugary, smoky taste rather than smell, grew lighter; they were coming to the edge of the city. Loki stopped before a small brick house.

‘This is the house, Presence,’ he said.

‘This is the house, Lord,’ said the Indian police officer, striking a theatrical attitude and pointing with his right hand; he made a fine if somewhat portly figure, with his left hand clutching a bundle of papers behind his back, in the Napoleonic convention; it was fortunate that a constable was in time to divert a foraging goat which came up behind him and very quietly began to browse on Loki’s confession and the depositions of the witnesses.

‘Ah,’ said Peter, when order had been restored. ‘Then let us search it.’

They were met at the door by the voluble son of the house, a highly educated young clerk, who assured them that there was nothing to conceal and that they might look everywhere. They did: but before they began Peter looked about him with interest.

The house was better than the ordinary mud hut of the village, but it was built on the same principle; there was a small court in the centre, ringed by four low verandas, from two of which rooms opened. On one veranda, herself, as the Irish phrase would go, was cooking the family meal at an open fireplace, a little mud erection against the wall. She squatted over her cooking until her husband told her to leave it, and she stood up to look at the intruders. Greasy grey hair hung out from under the Indian head-covering in untidy wisps; her features were large and coarsened, her brown skin dirty. Her body was a heap of flaccid sacks, looking as though they would come apart if the clothes that held them together were removed. She pushed past the police, and went into an inner room, followed by some of the smaller of her children, as bitter a comment on the female principle carried to its final conclusion as a sow lying on her side in the filth to suckle her farrow of eleven.

Francis himself was a small man to be the mate of this Ashtaroth. His dark colouring showed that, before Christianity freed them from caste, his family had been of the lowest orders; his shirt hung out over his soiled pyjamas; his melancholy head was bald above a thin and wrinkled neck. Before he retired, he had been, he explained, a bailiff to a judge’s court. He had earned about a pound a week.

Flies; ragged and dirty clothes lying here and there; remains of food—nothing finished or tidy, that was the house. Only here and there were any signs of energy, the son’s hockey-stick, a shelf of books, the father’s gun.

The cartridges were not hidden. They were there, they were home-made, they were of the same pattern as the notorious Hamid’s, and Hamid had a score of murders and robberies to his credit. Francis admitted he had made them, and there were guns in the house that should not have been there. He was arrested, and released on bail.

‘Almost as sordid as the house,’ thought Peter; ‘Hamid at least risks his neck; he has excitement, shots in the dark, plans and forays and sudden flight; but this creature just sits here and makes his little profit on the material for murder. Not a nice man.’

At last every formality was complete; lists were made and signed, witnesses affixed their thumb-impressions, and the police were ready to go.

It was only when they had left the house that Peter saw it. In front of the door grew a young tree, and to the tree was nailed a small white box, on which was painted in black letters:

MRS. FRANCIS
NOT AT HOME

Whatever Dies

At first, the thread of attraction between them was tenuous. Geoffrey had dropped in at the War Room to study on the maps the forward sweep of the allied armies across France; but he was interested in his fellow-creatures, the kind of man who cannot look into a shop window without a sidelong estimate of the habits and temperament of other gazers, and he was at once conscious of a slim and well-tailored figure by his side, with A.T.S. badges on her tunic. He threw a quick glance at her face in profile before he bent his attention to the flags and pins and coloured arrows. Aloof and elegant, that was his first impression, a well-tailored face that suited her figure; not a person who would make friends easily. And vaguely, quite unaccountably, he felt a sudden pity for her aloofness; it surprised him, for her face was calm, controlled, self-possessed; she did not ask for pity.

The next day he was there again at the same time. It was the most convenient moment to study the news because the transport that took the officers of the headquarters to lunch started immediately in front of the War Room, and the maps were brought up to date between twelve and one. He saw her at once, standing in front of the big map with the same air of elegant absorption. He took his place beside her, and began to look at the map. He was not thinking of her or consciously speaking to her when he said aloud:

‘They’ll be in Paris tomorrow!’

She turned towards him and smiled. Her smile flashed across her face and lighted it to brilliance. She’s beautiful, he thought with surprise. In profile he had thought her face cold, he had not been aware of the wide and tender arch of her brows, nor the warmth of her mouth. She said:

‘At last! Poor Paris!’

‘Do you know Paris well?’ he asked.

‘I did once,’ she said. ‘Yes, I knew Paris well once.’

He felt that something had happened to her in Paris. But they both resumed their study of the map and said no more.

On the third day he passed the War Room rather earlier than usual, and he was about to turn in when he checked himself. No, wait till one o’clock, he thought; I expect she always goes at the same time. He smiled at himself for the indulgence; he had not consciously made up his mind to speak to her, but it would be nice to see her again, for she had the look of someone to whom things have happened. He went to his office and worked there till one; as he walked up to the map at five minutes past, he felt a pang of disappointment because she was not there. He looked at the disposition of the armies, but a corner of his mind refused to concentrate on flags and arrows. When he did become conscious of her presence, he would not immediately permit himself to turn; he continued to look at the map. But he could feel the scent and warmth of her. When at last he did turn, she turned too, as a wedge of teal swerve with a single impulse.

‘We seem to have chosen the same time to bring ourselves up to date with the news,’ he said.

‘It’s the most convenient,’ she said. ‘I hate waiting for transport.’ They were walking now towards the door.

‘It seems rather ridiculous,’ he said, ‘to waste the lunch hour travelling backwards and forwards in an uncomfortable truck just to eat one’s food in a stuffy mess. In this Italian weather, I’d really rather eat out of doors near at hand. I must order a haversack lunch and have it here.’

‘I quite agree,’ she said, ‘that’s what I do sometimes. But I don’t always, because when I’m by myself I read, and I read too much anyhow.’

He paused for a moment, but his was not a nature to hesitate, to say no, to refuse experience. He said:

‘Why shouldn’t we join forces and picnic tomorrow on the hillside above the headquarters;’

‘Why not indeed? Let’s.’

‘Then I’ll pick you up here at the same time,’ he said.

She turned to him with that sudden illuminating smile:

‘I don’t think your choice of words is very happy,’ she said, and went to the truck that was to take her to her mess for lunch.

Their first lunch together was spent in a delicate exploration of each other’s circumstances and character. Elizabeth’s husband was a sailor, a regular naval officer; she had not seen him for three years. It was two years since Geoffrey had seen his wife or children. He was indignant at being sent to this big headquarters, far from the fighting; he was trying to get to something nearer active service and did not expect to stay long. They passed on to books, pictures, plays. She delighted him by her quick response to his interests. The background to her mind was utterly different from his, for she had known a different kind of people, read different books, thought on different lines, but the way her mind was made, its attitude to life, was like his own, amused, not expecting too much, yet young and fresh, essentially interested in her fellow creatures. For all her air of elegant aloofness, she too was eager for experience, for the full flavour of life.

They met for lunch half a dozen times in the course of six weeks. The friendship progressed, they lent each other books, their minds opened to each other, quick-flowering and rejoicing; each meeting was an oasis in the week. Then they found a mutual friend in an American, one Virgil Smith, a publisher by trade, temporarily in the army, and engaged in one of those strange secret semi-military organisations of which the war was so prolific. He asked Geoffrey and Elizabeth to dine with him one Saturday evening in the town and go on to a dance. He had a car at his disposal with a civilian body and number plate, a big Chrysler two-seater. His own partner for the evening was an American, a Captain in the W.A.C., alert, humorous, neat in clothes and hair and shoes.

The evening was a success. Wine and food were by wartime standards superlative; the four laughed at the same things, and found much to laugh at in the headquarters they all served. There were many ideas to exchange; they stayed talking long at the dinner-table, and could have stayed longer. The pleasure continued when they came to dance; Geoffrey enjoyed dancing with both women, but with the American he had to preserve an alertness, the wariness that one can seldom wholly lose with someone of another nation. He was slower to perceive her meaning, had sometimes to explain his own. He came back to Elizabeth with a feeling of restfulness, of coming home to a well-tried friend.

It was one of those evenings when everything seems right, when ideas chime together like bells, when nothing is too preposterous. They talked nonsense; the war would soon be over now, the long strain past. They were on the crest of the wave. It was delightful to be together. The thought came to him of younger days, when this growing intimacy would have plunged him in excited inner debate as to the moment when he should bring all to the touch. But there was no question of that now; I suppose I am becoming middle aged, he thought, and I rather like it. There was no need to get in a state; it was purely delightful, a growing and tender affection on both sides that nothing need spoil. That first excitement before I spoke to her, that’s at rest now, he thought; not but what if things were different it wouldn’t be very nice . . . but they aren’t. Things are as they are!

They were dancing together when the band began to play national anthems, and at that moment both felt a pang of disappointment that they must part. Geoffrey’s feelings shook sharply into a new pattern. They looked at each other for a long moment with a new awareness, smiling because of pleasure past and the certainty that had come to them both. Each knew what the other suddenly felt. He took her hand to lead her back to the Americans who were already at their table. Their hands closed warmly, each on the other’s. It’s happened, he thought; I didn’t mean it to happen. Being middle-aged doesn’t seem to make one immune.

‘Let’s get out of this,’ said Virgil. ‘This place goes dead when the band stops. Let’s go have a drink at my place.’

He led the way to his car. He said:

‘Someone’ll have to go in back. These roadsters are not a practical proposition for night work. It’ll be cold.’

Geoffrey began to climb into the back.

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Elizabeth, and sprang lightly after him. The moon was bright and each could see the other’s face. They smiled happily. They had no doubts, they knew what had happened. They sank deep in the roomy dicky and tenderly, certainly, without a word, each came into the arms of the other, their lips met.

After a little, he raised his face to look at her and said:

‘How beautiful you are.’

She did not speak, but drew his face to hers again. Later, he said:

‘I was sorry for you when I first saw you looking at the map. I wonder why.’

‘Sorry for me?’ she repeated in a gentle question. ‘But now there’s no reason for anyone to be sorry for me.’

He said:

‘This is the first time this has happened to me since I was married.’

She said, very softly:

‘It’s the first time for me too. The first time this has happened.’

‘And it’s the first time,’ he went on, ‘that I’ve loved anyone like you, tall and dark and aloof.’

‘Aloof. Am I aloof?’

‘Not now. Not a bit. But you look it, or so I thought.’

‘What sort do you usually love?And have there been so many?’

‘Oh, they were small and fair as a rule. But that was a long time ago. It was nothing like this. How beautiful you are.’

‘We should be cold if we weren’t kissing each other,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s talk.’

They turned in at the gate of the camp. Then they were in the hut and Virgil was pouring out drinks. Geoffrey and Elizabeth entered one of those situations that are purgatory for lovers, when each mind is teeming with a hundred questions that cannot be asked, when the need to be alone together is dominant, insistent, and impossible of realisation. She was quiet. He talked at random, of strategy, of supplies, of the vehicles and aircraft of each nation, of the differences of national outlook, of their causes of misunderstanding. He felt he was doing well, but the American girl sensed their abstraction. Shrewd and kindly, she said:

‘Virgil, we don’t want to keep these poor creatures up all night. You see me home, it’s only a step; and then come back for them.’

They were alone for two minutes.

‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘I can’t; it’s my day off and I’m fixed up with a girl all day. If I’d known this was going to happen. But I can’t put her off without making it conspicuous.’

‘Then it’s lunch the day after.’

‘Yes, that’s it. It’ll seem a long time.’

‘An age. There’s so much to say.’

Geoffrey woke next morning in a mood of alternate elation and anxiety. For a few minutes he would feel irresponsible, joyous, the tide of life flowing in every vein, his joy in every circumstance and his love of all creation heightened; then he would be anxious, concerned not for himself but for her. He was no deliberate philanderer, but a man avid of affection; he could not be happy with a circle of acquaintances, he sought always a pivot of deep affection. He had made himself strong moorings in life, moorings so strong that nothing could shake them, and he was confident that he himself could enjoy to the full, with boyish zest, this sudden and unexpected upspringing of new growth in his heart, and return to harbour unscathed. But could she? Would she be hurt? Unless she honestly and wholly felt a like confidence in herself, they must part. Perhaps already she was regretting a momentary folly; but he did not think so. She was no adolescent cuddler, to whom that twenty minutes would be simply one event in a series, and no more was she one to turn back from the beginning of an experience that promised so much. The question was just how strong her moorings were; and that he did not really know. A lifetime’s training in mental concentration was no use; he could not work; he was plunged in that chaos of distraction that lovers have known since love began.

They met in the War Room on the Monday with a new constraint and walked in silence to their usual picnic place. They put down their haversacks and sat down; then he smiled and said:

‘You look remarkably well for a young woman who’s kept a man from his work and his sleep for the last forty-eight hours.’

‘Have I done that?’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I haven’t been able to think at all. I could do nothing this morning; and I kept thinking to myself that Geoffrey wouldn’t be in this state; he would be able to concentrate whatever he felt.’

‘Not a bit,’ he said, ‘I kept seeing your face as it was in the moonlight.’

‘And I kept thinking how nice it was to have you kissing me,’ she said simply.

‘But we must talk seriously,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think so? I know it sounds pompous and fussy and I hate to say it. But we must see where we’re going before we decide to go on.’

‘But I want to go on,’ she said, like a child.

‘So do I. Only we must know what we’re in for. I used to love stealing apples when I was a boy, not that I really needed them, because we had lots of our own, but because of the excitement. There’s an element of that excitement in this. Or isn’t there?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course. There’s an element of that.’ She turned away her head.

‘It’s one element. But then I knew what I was in for if I was caught stealing apples. And no one was hurt but myself. Whereas, in this, we may hurt other people. The thing I must say—pompous and self-centred though it sounds—is this. I’m on rock. My marriage is a happy one. It couldn’t be happier. I’m going back to it. I may not be here long; I’ve asked to go. So if we go on, it can only be temporary.’

Her face was turned away. She was silent for a moment only. In that moment she faced the facts and made her decision. She turned back and said:

‘But isn’t my position just the same? What’s the difference?’ It was what she had told him before, when he had spoken of his marriage. From the start, pride had not let her meet him except on equal terms.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ she smiled. ‘I can promise you a lightness of heart equal to your own. You needn’t be frightened.’

‘I was frightened,’ he said. ‘Frightened I might know it was the right thing to stop. Do you remember in the book I gave you:

I can love her and her and you and you
I can love any, so she be not true?

I know just what he felt when he wrote that. Though it’s only a mood. Another side of me can’t help regretting that it must be temporary.’

‘And a part of me too. One always wants both. When I said just now I wanted to go on, I spoke like a child that wants to eat a slice of cake and a meringue at the same time. But we ought both of us to be old enough now to know that this won’t last for ever. We shan’t go on feeling like this. And since our nice solid reliable plum cake is miles away and we can’t either of us eat it—why shouldn’t we enjoy this delicious meringue while it lasts?’ Her smile flashed as she spoke; he had not yet learnt that this was her social smile, quite different from her own smiles, tender, intimate or gay.

He sighed with relief.

‘I’m so glad you feel like that. It’s just the same with me. You are quite sure, are you? Because situations of this kind have a way of not remaining static.’

‘I know. But it’s all right. You needn’t fuss any more. You’ve made your point, and I like you for it. I understand, and know what I’m in for. And it so happens we’re in just the same boat. I promise to be as frank with you as I am with myself. And I rather like, if I may suggest it, to be taken at my word.’

‘Then you’re a very unusual woman.’ He produced a thermos from his haversack. ‘I’ve brought a cocktail with me, as this is an occasion. What shall we drink to?’

She paused for a moment:

‘To the motto of this affair,’ she said deliberately. ‘We’ll share and share alike and tell each other the truth, and our motto shall be Fifty-fifty.’

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Fifty-fifty.’

They drank.

‘That reminds me again of Donne,’ he said. ‘He’s a remarkable person for putting in words one’s feelings in an affair of this kind.’

‘Of this kind,’ she repeated softly. ‘Well, he was a person with a very wide range of experience.’

‘I go on doggedly with my thought,’ he said, ‘and refuse red herrings, however tempting. Do you remember when he says:

Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die?’

She nodded.

‘That’s it exactly. Whatever dies, was not mixed equally.’ She sighed. He filled her glass. And then she smiled, her own smile, tender and mischievous, and looked at her glass.

‘Is this mixed equally?’ she asked.

‘Food,’ he said. ‘What have they given us? Chicken! What a treat! I feel like a child at Christmas! And I’ve got a wishbone. We’ll pull it presently.’

They pooled their resources, and chatted happily on the old plane again. When it came to pulling the wishbone, he said seriously:

‘Now you must put your left hand on your heart and wish carefully; and you mustn’t tell anyone your wish. And whoever gets the biggest piece gets his wish.’

They pulled; there was a tiny snap and the bone split up the middle, leaving a piece of equal size in the hand of each. They burst out laughing.

‘Then we both get our wish!’ she cried.

‘Yes. Fifty-fifty. Wasn’t that funny? You know, I can’t resist telling you. That was my wish; that it should always be fifty-fifty between us.’

There was a tiny pause before she laughed. Then she said seriously:

‘I hope you haven’t spoiled your wish by telling me.’

A fortnight later he wrote her a letter, late at night:

‘I’m always shy,’ he wrote, ‘of using the word love, because it means such different things to different people. I know in my heart that I love Joan always and deeply. I wonder if I love you. I know I’m in love with you. I see your face dancing before me whenever I close my eyes; and I love it. I love the way your hair sweeps back from your temples, and the drooping corner of your lovely mouth, and your long lashes and the proud arch of your eyebrows, and your eyes, those wood-browned pools of Paradise. I want to close your eyes with a kiss when they’re tired, and gently, gently soothe you with light brushing kisses till you’re not tired any longer, and then wake you with kisses that are quite different kisses. Warm and firm and hard and many. I think of you all the time. When I go to a party and you aren’t there, as I did tonight, I sit and listen and smile and look idiotic, but I feel that all I hear is the crackling of thorns under a pot, nothing, absolutely nothing. And every minute, I say quietly to myself “Darling Elizabeth, Darling Elizabeth!” I want you all the time. My heart jumps when you say my name, or when I hear anyone else say yours. Is that being in love? I don’t know what else it is. And yet all the time, a corner of me knows that this madness will pass, and that I shall go back to that deep permanent root in me which is Joan. I hate to think it will pass, and yet I know it will; and the only consolation is I am sure that one day after we have parted we shall meet again and then we shall settle down to a nice respectable friendship. I think we can, just because we have shared everything; just because we have kept nothing back. We share so warm and complete a companionship; there has been so much between us we shall always be part of each other. I’m sure we can come back to firm ground if we can stick to our motto and be honest with ourselves and with each other, and share and share—“if thou and I love so alike . . .” Don’t you think so? Oh, darling Elizabeth, I do want you so; you are so beautiful; knowing you has been so happy. Good night, my darling.’

He took the letter with him next morning to his office, and gave it to her at lunch time. She put it in her bag to read afterwards. He said:

‘I wrote that last night. This morning when I got to the office, I found orders waiting for me. I’m off.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She turned away from him as she knelt on the grass over the lunch haversack. ‘How long have we got?

‘Three weeks,’ he said.

She was silent. Then, she said:

‘Let’s not speak of it again, not till it’s on us. Let’s just pretend it isn’t true. Three weeks is a lovely long time. Think if you were just beginning three weeks’ leave how long it would seem.’

So they did not speak of it, and each day was a joy and an excitement; but the days passed, each happy with a pang at its heart, and suddenly, inevitably, unbelievably, it was upon them. He was to go tomorrow. Elizabeth said:

‘So it’s all over. I’ve just thought, as far as today and no further. There’s nothing to think of after today. I feel as though everything would stop.’

Geoffrey said:

‘I know. It’s a dreadful feeling. I feel like I used to as a small boy just before I was beaten. It gets you at the pit of the stomach. We clutch at every last minute together, and yet sometimes I wish desperately it could be over. I remember the first time I wounded a bird, and I picked it up and saw its dying eye and hated myself for hurting it, but felt I must kill it quickly, quickly, to get it over; and I hated the bird at the same time because I had hurt it. When I want this to be over, I feel like that.’

They were silent, and then he said:

‘It’s worse for you, because you’ll stay on here, and everything you see will remind you. I feel a beast to leave you.’

She said:

‘Well, my eyes were open. I knew what I was doing. And even at this moment, I don’t regret it. What I have had, I have had.’

After a little, Geoffrey said:

But, Elizabeth, we shall meet and be friends again. I’m sure of it. We shall make full circle of our banishment and amazed meet.’

She shook her head.

‘It won’t be us. We shall neither of us be the same. We shall change in ourselves, and we shan’t be the same to each other. When you say goodbye to a person, it’s for ever.’

‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘That’s true. How are we going to do it? We must decide. Our real goodbye will be tonight. Tomorrow we can only have a few minutes. Let’s do it in public. Then tonight we needn’t feel it’s the end and we can look forward to something more tomorrow; but tomorrow, in public, we shall have to keep up our defences.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s the best way.’

So it was in the public lounge of a hotel turned into an officers’ mess that they said goodbye. He looked at his watch:

‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘Darling, darling, darling. It has been perfect. Fifty-fifty. We’ve stuck to that. Let’s be quick. Let’s walk together towards the door and then I go out and you go to the left. Go thou to East, I West.’

They got to their feet and walked towards the door. Their eyes met; each saw the other’s stiff muscles, the set expression; neither could speak. They stopped. He nodded as though he were leaving a casual acquaintance for five minutes. She turned away. Three more paces they walked side by side and then he was through the doors into the street and she had turned towards her quarters.

The wind flapped the canvas against the side of the truck. He put his feet on his valise and pretended to look at his pass and movement order. He must look at something to hide his face. It’s over now, he thought. I shall feel better presently. Mustn’t blow my nose yet. I know I shall feel better presently. Never again. What a fool I am. I shall be all right in the aircraft. It’s all over now. All over. Never again.

She went to her quarters, her face rigid. She locked the door and lay on the bed. She lay on her back and gazed at the ceiling. If only something would end that ache. If she could cry and if crying would help. But she knew she could not cry. There was no way of release. The ache was there for always.

The Simla Thunders

Sheo Dat looked at the clock. He spent a good deal of time looking at the clock, because really no one could be expected to take any interest in lists of boots. He belonged to a comparatively unimportant part of General Headquarters, which in 1943 was in Simla because there was no room for it in Delhi, and his work was to copy out the total at the foot of each return of boots that came in from units all over India and Burma and Ceylon, and then to add up the results. He had to make fifty entries in an hour, and if he did not, the superintendent of his section would keep him back after five o’clock. It was not a difficult standard and he could do it easily if he did not spend too much time dreaming about other things or gossiping in the corridors with his friends. And it was worth doing his quota, because there was no escape from staying behind if his superintendent said he must. If he ventured on defiance, he would be out in the street, and although sixty rupees a month was not much nowadays it was a great deal better than nothing at all. He hated staying behind, because once the door of the office closed he could hurry away to a new and exciting world that had only just opened to him, which had really brought an interest into his life. And today he was particularly anxious to get away.

He was thinking of that new world now as he looked at the clock and saw it was twenty minutes to five. He had finished thirty-seven entries already that hour, so there would be comfortable time to make thirteen more and add up the total. He could spare a moment for a glance in his mind at the stuffy little upstairs room over Gauri Shankar’s food-shop in the Lakar Bazar, where he and his friends met to conspire against the tyranny that oppressed their country and to debate on how they could strike a blow for freedom. That little room made an entrancing background to his thoughts. There was the thrill of doing something that would horrify his superiors in the office and make them shake in their shoes and there was the breathless feeling that at any moment the police might burst in upon them. Yet at the same time it was comforting to know that so far they had not actually done anything for which they could be punished, and to enjoy the conviction that their efforts were morally praiseworthy and all in the cause of patriotism. Sheo Dat for a blissful moment saw the faces of his friends, thought of the burning zeal and heroism they had so often expressed, and pictured the interest with which they would meet their new member this evening. Then he bent irritably to his work and made the thirty-eighth entry of the hour.

When he had first found that his friends Bhola Nath and Badri Parshad had ideas like his own, they had made the habit of meeting at Gauri Shankar’s shop and eating their evening meal together, without any idea that their meetings would go any further or that the proprietor might eventually join them. But he must have overheard some scrap of the three young clerks’ conversation, for one day when they had finished eating he came and sat down with them and ordered for each of them a big brass tumbler full of tea. He began to talk, rather cautiously at first, but he gradually revealed more and more of his mind, until at last he suggested that they should form a secret society. They agreed enthusiastically.

It was Sheo Dat’s idea that they should call themselves the Simla Thunders, but it was Badri Parshad who devised most of the precautions against betrayal or discovery which gave the proceedings their peculiar fascination. The whole of the first meeting was spent on drafting a declaration of the high aims of the society and an oath, which the members must all swear and sign, to preserve perpetual secrecy and fidelity. At first Badri Parshad had intended that the whole declaration as well as the oath should be written in blood; but blood was found to be so unsatisfactory as a writing fluid that they contented themselves with ink for the declaration and blood for the oath. And of course the signatures were in blood.

Next came the question of where the documents should be kept. It was agreed after much debate that it would be unsafe for the members to take turns, as Badri Parshad had first suggested, at wearing them in a packet next the heart, suspended by a string from the neck. No, inglorious though it might be, it was much wiser to hide them beneath a floorboard in the meeting-room, which, on payment of a reasonable rent to Gauri Shankar, had now become Bhola Nath’s bedroom.

Then there had been the long discussion about the password. ‘India’s Freedom’ had been Sheo Dat’s choice and in the end this had prevailed over ‘Death to Tyrants’, the runner-up. The ritual for admission had been suggested by Badri Parshad.

When all these preliminaries had been settled, the Simla Thunders were ready to conspire. But here a serious difficulty for the first time arose. For they did not know what to conspire about. They did not know how to begin. They wanted to help the enemy but they did not know anyone who could tell them what sort of help the enemy needed. It was no good Sheo Dat making his lists of boots more slowly because, quite apart from its being inglorious and unromantic, no one could seriously believe that this method would change the course of the war, while it would certainly rebound on his own head and he would find himself out of a job. And it was a job that someone else could easily be found to do. No, they could get no further by slowing down the work. And as for information, which they were constantly urged by posters to withhold from the enemy, they did not know how to get their information to the Japanese even if they had any.

‘And we haven’t really got anything to give them,’ Sheo Dat said gloomily. ‘It can’t be any use sending them lists of boots. It is true the lists are marked secret, but the British mark everything secret just to deceive us. They are very cunning.’

That had been the deadlock which they had reached about ten days ago. Then Sheo Dat had his bright idea. He finished his work at five o’clock sharp that day and hurried away. He had some preliminary inquiries to make, for he was not going to present his friends with a half-baked plan with none of the details worked out. He thought he would just have time to finish his reconnaissance and get back to the meeting-place.

It took him longer than he thought, and the others had begun to eat when he arrived. He was bursting to tell them all about it, but it was a rule never to talk about the society downstairs in the eating-room, and except for a few mysterious hints he kept quiet. He gobbled his food and was finished soon after the others. It was another rule, one of Badri Parshad’s, that they should leave the room one by one. Sheo Dat was the last, for Gauri Shankar had warned them he could not come that night. He was often busy about the shop.

At last Sheo Dat had finished and it was safe to move. He went quietly upstairs and tapped on the door with their secret knock, three times quickly and three times slowly. Badri Parshad whispered a formula at the door and Sheo Dat answered with the password. He slipped in and took his place. Then at once he began to expound his plan.

‘We shall need to make dummy revolvers,’ he began. ‘Real ones would be better but they would be very difficult to get. And we shall need masks and electric torches and a sharp knife. When the night we have chosen comes, we will creep out to the big school on the spur to the east, where the white-faced boys are trained to grow up as tyrants and oppress us. We shall cut the telephone wires. There is only one watchman, and it will be easy to threaten him with a dummy revolver and tie him up. Then we must creep into the long room where the boys sleep at night. One of us will be the guide and will hold each boy still as he lies in his sleep while another cuts his throat. It will be enough to kill six or so because by that we shall show that boys cannot be trained to be serpents with impunity and that the might of India is awake. It is better to kill the snake in the egg. Then we shall escape eastwards over the hills. We will not go down to the plains by the usual ways because they will be watching the road and the railway. When we come to the plains we will go by train to Bombay.’

They were all impressed by the splendour and daring of this plan, though probably any one of them would have wept if he had pictured the grief of his victim’s mother when the plan had succeeded. But that they did not think of.

There were six of them now, counting Gauri Shankar, who was away the night the plan was broached; he had introduced two more very young clerks to the society. They talked it over and portioned out the tasks of getting the masks, the dummy revolvers, and the other things that were needed. Then Badri Parshad made a very important contribution to the scheme. He said:

‘But in case our plan goes wrong, we must not fall into the hands of the police, to suffer torture and humiliation. Sooner than that we must end all. We must each carry a phial of poison to be taken in case of emergency.’

Everyone agreed to this too, though none of them knew how to set about obtaining the poison. But Gauri Shankar, they thought, might be able to help over that.

They went ahead with their plans for the rest of the week and by the sixth night had collected every thing except the poison. The sixth night Gauri Shankar came to the meeting; it was the first he had attended since Sheo Dat’s plan was accepted. When he heard about it, he shook his head.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘this will not do. The boys who go to that school are never going to be high officers. They are the sons of station masters. And no one would approve of your act. It is shameful to kill children and everyone who has any right to be called an Indian would agree.’

The young men were ashamed. They saw it at once when Gauri Shankar put it to them. And of course they were disappointed that their week of effort should go for nothing. But after all, said Sheo Dat more cheerfully, dummy revolvers and masks and torches might well be useful in some other plan.

‘And the poison,’ said Badri Parshad eagerly, ‘that we shall certainly need whatever we do.’

Gauri Shankar agreed, and said that he knew someone who, he thought, would be able to find the poison for them.

‘I have been thinking for some time of bringing him into our society,’ he said, ‘but at first I was not quite sure of him. I had doubts that he might be a C.I.D. man. But now I am sure that he is all right. I asked him some questions last night, and I am sure he is a patriot. And he may be able to help over the poison because he was once a chemical student at Benares Hindu University. But he was expelled after a year because of his patriotism.’

They discussed this for some time and then authorised Gauri Shankar to produce the new member. He came the next day, a bird-like little man with a sallow complexion and a way of thrusting his neck forward and peering into your face. He listened to them and talked a good deal himself, fluent speeches about oppression and tyranny which assured them of his good faith. He said he was sure he could get the poison, but it would cost at least five rupees a bottle, and it might be more. In the end he collected five rupees from each of the six; Gauri Shankar said he would pay later. The new member also said he might be able to suggest a way of helping the enemy, but he would have to make inquiries and it would take three or four days.

That was why Sheo Dat looked so eagerly at the clock at twenty to five, and turned more irritably even than usual to the entries in his list of boots. The Simla Thunders were going to get their poison tonight, and also to hear how they could strike a blow at the British by helping the Japanese. As soon as he could, he completed his totals and hurried away up the hillside to meet Badri Parshad, with whom he was going to spend the time until the meeting. A tiresome period it was, to two persons as eager and impatient as these, but at last it was over and they were sitting in the little upstairs room.

The new member produced six tiny phials of colourless liquid. He explained that this was one of the swiftest and most deadly poisons known to science.

‘It looks like water,’ said Sheo Dat.

‘That is a great advantage,’ said the new member earnestly. ‘No one will suspect anything if they see it. No, I beg you! Do not undo the stopper! Even a sniff would make you ill.’

They talked about the poison for some time, and at last decided that at present it was unnecessary to carry it with them wherever they went, so the poison too joined the other properties in the hiding-place under the loose board. Then they came to the question of how they could help the enemy. The new member became very mysterious. He leaned forward and peered into each face in turn. He asked if they were each certain of the good faith of all the others, and he would not begin to talk until he had heard their protestations and looked again at the oath written in blood which they had all signed. At last he said:

‘There is a German Embassy in Kabul. That is where we can sell our knowledge and strike a blow for our country.’

He explained that he knew a man who had a friend in Peshawar who traded into Afghanistan. And he would carry a letter.

They were all impressed and excited by this. It was some time before Sheo Dat said:

‘But what shall we put in the letter?’

‘Write first that we want to hurt the British, and then that we are clerks in General Headquarters who can get secret information. Say that we will get it if they will tell us what kind of information they want and will send money. We must ask for money because, with their low mentality, they will not believe that we are doing this for patriotism.’

They were eager to waste no time and Sheo Dat was deputed to draft the letter at once. They all had suggestions and alterations to make, but at last they were agreed and a fair copy was made and handed over to the new member. They decided not to meet again for two days and then one by one they slipped away.

The new member had stowed the letter in the inside pocket of his coat. He waited till the last, and even when all the others had gone he stayed a few more minutes talking to Gauri Shankar. There were not many lights still showing in the house-fronts when he left the shop and went down the steep hill, turning sharp to the left at the bottom below the rickshaw works. He seemed a little uneasy, for he stopped now and then as he went and stood still as if listening; but he walked purposefully between his halts. He knew where he was going.

He reached another little tea-shop, much the same as Gauri Shankar’s. It was the last to be still open and the proprietor was half asleep, but he had not closed because he still had one customer. A big man who looked like a Pathan money-lender, was lolling in the corner reading a newspaper. The new member asked for tea with cardamom seeds in it, an odd order for anyone so obviously not a Tibetan. He had to speak rather loud to waken the proprietor, who went grumbling to fetch it. The Pathan lowered his newspaper and took a long look. The new member began to sip his tea; the Pathan resumed his reading, but after a few minutes threw down the paper and went out. He turned away down the hill and followed a road leading out of the bazaar.

The new member finished his tea, paid for it and went out. He too went down the hill. He stopped and listened, but moved on as if reassured. A little way beyond the shops he heard a cough from the shadow of a big cedar. He turned aside and squatted to make water. When he stood up the Pathan from the tea-shop put his hand on his shoulder. It was very dark, too dark to recognise a face. The Pathan said something in a low voice and a few seconds later went on down the hill but took the first turn up to his left, back towards the street fights and the bazaars. The new member stayed a few minutes in the shadow of the cedar and then he too moved away.

Two mornings later Sheo Dat’s letter lay on the desk of an office in Delhi. The officer who was reading it seemed pleased. He said:

‘This will save us a lot of trouble, and they will write much more convincing letters for us than we could ever invent ourselves. It was lucky those ham-handed policemen in Security happened to mention this instead of rounding them up straight away.’

The letter was sealed up again and went on its way. It went by the hand of an officer to Peshawar, where it was handed over to a policeman of a special kind. He did with it just what the new member of the Simla Thunders had promised. He gave it to an inconspicuous man who passed it on to a trader whose habit it was to go up and down through the passes to Afghanistan, with a string of pack animals, in the spring and autumn of every year. A few days later the trader started on his journey.

Here ill-fortune befell the letter. The last time that particular trader had been through the territory of the Pathan tribes on the Border he had made a mistake. Quite a small one, but enough to make the tribesmen wonder whether he was something else as well as the trader he seemed to be. To resolve their doubts, they went through his belongings very thoroughly. They found nothing to prove that he was spying on themselves, but they did find and read the letter from the Simla Thunders.

Now the tribesmen were not interested in the World War except to the extent it affected them. It had sent up the price of ammunition shockingly, and it had made the British rather more long-suffering than usual, that was all. They were not particularly interested in who won and certainly had no desire to help the British. But here was someone whom they suspected of spying on themselves caught in the act of plotting to help the Japanese. It was their immediate and unanimous reaction to destroy him and gain credit for themselves by betraying him to the British. So the letter went to British territory.

But the trader had followed a devious route. He had turned away westward from the Khyber, and the letter which had gone into tribal country from Peshawar came back to Malakand, where some little time was spent in sorting out the curious antecedents of that double-faced trader. Meanwhile, here was a clear case of someone trying to communicate with the enemy. The letter had invited the German Embassy to reply by the hand of the bearer to an address in Simla. Obviously the writer would not be found at that address, but it could be made the starting-point for inquiries. And it was.

The Simla Thunders had spent some time in thinking out the matter of the address. They had given a fictitious name and the address of a sweet shop whose proprietor knew none of them and had not been consulted at all. But in his employment was a friend of Badri Parshad’s, who usually took the letters when the postman came, and who would certainly hear if a letter arrived for someone unknown. He believed that Badri Parshad was engaged in a love affair. If the letter was handed to him by the postman, he would say nothing about it to his employer and simply give it to Badri Parshad. There was always the danger of course that the sweetmeat-seller might meet the postman himself and refuse to accept a letter for someone he did not know, but he was inquisitive by nature and was more likely to take it and say he would make inquiries. In that case, he would probably leave it lying about and forget it, and it would soon find its way to Badri Parshad. Even if he did refuse the letter, Badri Parshad’s friend would hear of it and could run after the postman.

One day at lunch time, Badri Parshad’s friend came to the office and sent in a note to Badri Parshad by a messenger who was sunning himself outside the building. A few minutes later Badri Parshad came out of the building and walked up to the Mall, where he met his friend and engaged in earnest conversation with him. After a few minutes talk, he turned away and hurried back towards the office. A rickshaw coolie who had been leaning against the railings of the Mall sauntered down to the gate by which he had entered and spoke to the policeman on duty.

Badri Parshad hurried through the building to find Sheo Dat.

But there was no Sheo Dat to be found; he had gone out and none of the clerks in his office knew where. Badri Parshad left a message asking him to come and see him as soon as he arrived, and meanwhile went to his own office where he sat quaking until Sheo Dat came. He led Sheo Dat outside and explained in breathless tones that the police had been making inquiries at the sweetmeat-seller’s shop. So far everyone had professed ignorance and no one had been arrested. He was frightened and had no idea what to do. But Sheo Dat was made of sterner stuff. With hardly any pause for thought he said:

‘We must destroy the evidence at Gauri Shankar’s; you had better say you have a stomach-ache and leave office at once. Go straight there, warn Gauri Shankar and burn everything. After this we must not meet again for a long time. If we are questioned, we none of us know anything about it. I will go and warn the others.’

Sheo Dat had always been the leader, and Badri Parshad hurried off at once to do as he was told. Sheo Dat went round to tell the others. Then he went back to his lists of boots.

But he did not make any entries. He sat staring at the page, thinking how he would confront his captors, how he would refuse to speak and betray his comrades, how he would be led forth to execution. He had paused on his way to the firing-squad for a few noble words to a group of weeping relatives when the harsh voice of the superintendent pointed out that he would have to stay behind if he did not finish his quota by five o’clock. Sheo Dat bent to his work again, but a new thought struck him. Execution he could face, but not the humiliation of submitting to the police, the torture and indignities they would put upon him. He must have the poison! He had forgotten to tell Badri Parshad to bring him that.

He went quickly to the superintendent. He said he felt dizzy and ill, and he would make up the quota tomorrow. He was not a bad clerk as a rule and grudging permission to go was given. He hurried away to Gauri Shankar’s shop.

He found Badri Parshad standing by the side of a smoking fire.

‘The poison!’ he cried. ‘Give me the poison!’

‘The poison?’ Badri Parshad was surprised and conscience-stricken. ‘I’m sorry. I threw it in the fire for fear the police should use it as evidence against us.’

The Hermit

‘If you go up to the glacier tomorrow,’ they told John Inglis, ‘you will be the first person this year from the outside world. Very few go there; often no one for two years. And you will be able to find out what has happened to the holy man. He went up before the deep snow fell last year, and we have heard nothing since.’

John exclaimed in surprise. The Satopanth glacier lies between fourteen and fifteen thousand feet above sea level, and to winter on a glacier at that height would be an achievement for a fully equipped polar or alpine expedition; for a Hindu hermit who would scorn material aid it seemed possible only by supernatural intervention. But the high priest and his acolytes were positive that last autumn the holy man had started up the valley which led to the glacier, naked, and carrying only a blanket and a bag of flour. They were equally sure that he had not come back; but they were less certain of his fate. He had meant to spend the winter by the tarn that lay frozen among the deep ice of the glacier until in the summer for a few short weeks the sheet ice on the surface cracked and broke into filmy plates. They seemed to think it quite possible that he might still be alive. He had in the past successfully practised great austerities, and there certainly were cases of men who had remained buried in snow without food for six months. John had heard stories of the kind himself, though never at such heights as this. He had intended in any case to go to the tarn on the glacier; the story of the hermit was an additional and unexpected interest.

He had come to the Himalayas to find flowers and to forget a face. Or rather, it was the other way round. If he had not already half decided that he must tear himself away from Averil, he would probably not have accepted the commission Kew had offered him to collect roots and pressed blossoms. There had been love affairs in his life before, of course, but they had not been like this; they had come and gone, and even at their height he had known in his heart of hearts that they would pass. At thirty, after ten years of varied wandering about the world as a journalist, he had thought he knew something about the depth of emotional disturbance of which he was capable. His boyhood’s romantic hope of an all-absorbing passion for the one woman in the world would never be realised now; he was not likely, he would have said, to be swept off his feet again. He would find the right woman some day and make a safe suitable marriage, with someone whose tastes were like his own. And then this feeling for Averil had come upon him with an all-pervading force. He had no reservations about this; it was a passion that filled him and that nothing would change. The only doubt he felt was whether passion was enough, and it was a torturing, disturbing doubt that at last had driven him away.

When he first met Averil, his happiness was unmixed. The sharp pang of attraction was there from the beginning, and he had soon known that it was the same with her. They met with increasing frequency, their intimacy grew deliciously, life took on a new zest, a glowing joy that suffused every moment, even when his conscious thoughts were directed away from her. It was only when they began to make plans for a future together that the rift appeared, and it was not till their first separation that he began to feel definitely unhappy.

John followed a profession which frequently breeds an observer’s attitude to the world, a broad tolerance of everything but pomposity, but he had remained fundamentally serious. Perhaps his dislike of what he thought was pompous in other people was a defence against his own self-knowledge, he told himself ruefully during that first fortnight when he had had to leave London and Averil and had tried to think things out in detachment. Perhaps he knew it was a pomposity of his own that made him take himself seriously, and that was why he disliked it in others. But he could not help it, and it was a big difference between them. It would not matter, he felt, if it was only that they disagreed about formulated creeds; whatever your theory of life or religion or politics, the working out in practice would be a matter of character more than belief. And he did not doubt the strength of her character, her courage or her honesty. But the differences which he felt were almost bound to be fatal were in taste, in the lines on which life should be helped to develop, in reactions to people. There was a corner of him which loved the racket of big cities, contact with successful people, knowledge of the inner springs of policy and decision. But it was not the corner he liked best, and it was a small one. These things were flavouring to him, pepper and tomato sauce to be added occasionally, boring if they came too often; to Averil they were meat and drink, the main stuff of her sustenance. The real springs of his being came from solitude and mountains, the clouds and the sky, wind and the growth of plants. To her these were week-end recreation, a relaxation like a hot bath and clean sheets when the day was over. Her intense vitality and enjoyment had no outlet in solitude or in the country; among slow-moving and slow-thinking people, they turned inwards upon her and made her irritable and unhappy.

Thinking it over as he lay awake at night, analysing every aspect of what had been and what might be, John was sure that he had been right about one thing. There was no easy way out. It must be all or nothing. A friendship without passion was out of the question. And a temporary liaison could not solve their problems, because it would never exact the effort needed to bring them together in a workable relationship. A real effort would be needed for they were both developed characters, and it seemed to John that only in the deep permanent tie of marriage had they any chance of release from perpetual jangling. To accept that tremendous bondage and take the chance that it would bring release was an irrevocable step, the most fateful of decisions; and John was afraid to take it. At every re-calculation the chance of success seemed more slender, the probability of disaster more certain.

They had argued it out together till they were stale and weary, irritated with each other and the world, and they got no further. And then, suddenly, came the offer from Kew. The expedition had been arranged for someone else, who had fallen sick. If John would like to go next week, he had nothing to do but pack a suitcase and step on board the ship. Tents, equipment, food, everything was ready. The offer came at a moment when he felt there was nothing for it but to run away. He had to take one or the other of two hard decisions; he could not let himself drift on as at present. He decided to go. He hardened his heart against himself and all he wanted, and flung himself feverishly into the business of cutting free. He would not think of Averil again; he would think of anything and everything else. He had made up his mind; he kept the thought of changing it at bay, desperately and savagely at bay; he would not let it come near.

That had been four months ago, and the scar was no easier yet. The night before he went up to the glacier was a bad one. In spite of living all day in the tingling air of high places, in spite of daily using to the full his bodily strength, at night the knowledge of what he had lost would come back to the surface of his mind; and he would he awake, staring blankly into a future in which he could see no interest and no possibility of interest. The things he had enjoyed, creative work, sweat and the effort of the body, mountains, the keen air, the smell of snow, in none of them could he take whole-hearted pleasure now; and he felt he never would. They had been his food; now they were drugs to kill pain. Nor would any other woman ever stir him, even with the faintest ripple. There was no future. And then he thought of Averil until he almost felt she was beside him. He remembered the wide range of her voice, its deep note in amused and cynical comment, its high excited vivacity when she was trying to explain something to him or convince him. The turn of her head and the gestures of her hands he could not quite see; they were on the edge of his memory, like a tune you cannot recapture, but the effect was there, that spirit of eagerness and vitality, and that unnameable something that gave beauty to everything she did, that made even washing-up seem amusing and the sink a place of charm. There was something in her to push the sudden lilies through the heart, the gaiety and trustfulness of a child, and a child’s absorption in the moment; so that even to look at her had wrung his heart as the sight of a beloved child can wring it. The back of her neck below her short hair was like a child’s, the fair skin, unbelievably delicate, slightly browned to a golden tinge where the sun could reach it, but white when you lifted the hair and let the fingers travel up the valley leading to her finely shaped skull. He lay rigid in his sleeping-bag and clenched his fingers, trying by the tension of his muscles to relax his mind. She had the gift of making her clothes peculiarly her own, so that they seemed to express her personality; he remembered her dresses one by one. Then he tried to shut her from his mind and set it tasks. He went through lists of flowers and the valleys where he had found them, but always, confused and weary, his thoughts came back to her. It was no good; the wound was just as bad. He had finished his job for Kew, but he must not go back yet. He would cable to friends in London and get a job in Delhi for the winter, covering Indian politics. Towards morning he slept.

Next morning, when he started up the valley to the glacier it was better. The conscious part of his mind did not think of her directly, though he knew all the time that he was sick and incomplete. Sunshine at first; sheets of dwarf iris carpeting the ground; green turf, and peat, and low stone walls here and there round tiny fields of pink flowering buckwheat; but the fields were few at ten thousand feet. The hills ran up on either side in scree and grass and rock; they were steep near at hand so that you could not see the higher slopes, and there was no snow except here and there in a gully facing north, where the last remnants of a big drift still froze hard every night.They went through one village, the last and highest, its little low cabins roofed with wooden shingles cut from the forests down the valley and carried up; here John and the men with him asked about the hermit. They got the same answer as before; he had gone up last year, nearly twelve months ago, and had not come back.

They camped that evening where the valley was split by a tower of rock, on either side of which glacier and moraine in vast imperceptible movement crawled untidily down from the high snows. The two streams of curdled milky water that poured down from the glaciers met just below the camp; there was a triangle of level ground, set with rocks and stunted juniper bushes, bounded by the two streams and by a low bank of scree. It was the last point at which there was any natural fuel. They cooked supper on a fire of sharply scented juniper.

John’s thoughts that night were as tangled and unhappy as the night before, but he did not lie awake quite so long. He woke unrefreshed and as soon as he was conscious remembered his pain. After breakfast he started for the tarn, with a local man as guide, and as additional company a hill Brahman who was acting as interpreter and two other camp followers who came from a mixture of curiosity and a feeling that they would acquire religious merit by the journey. They went almost at once on to the moraine on the eastern side of the western glacier. It was slow work. They had to move over a gigantic pile of boulders, ranging from the size of a small cottage to that of a large armchair, heaped on top of each other in confusion by the glacier’s movement. It was like the progress of a beetle over a pile of road-metal, except that a beetle would have had the advantage of six legs. The rocks were slippery with water or ice, and often you had to leap down from the top of one to a lower ledge over a cavernous drop to gurgling icy water. It was tiring.

But at last they could look down from above on the icefall at the snout of the glacier, and were high enough to get on to the glacier itself. This was easier going, a strange hummocky sea of dirty ice stretching up to a snow pass at the head of the valley. On their left hand was a long ridge parallel with the glacier, soaring up at the further end in a clean sweeping line to the peak of Nilkanta. The ridge rose straight from the glacier in a sheer black cliff five miles long, crowned with a heavy overhanging cornice of snow, white and pure in the sunshine. If you watched it, you would see a sudden little puff of fairy vapour glide down the snow slope above the cornice, over the rim, across the face of black rock, exploding and expanding in a cumulus cloud at its foot. And later you would hear a tiny rumble like a far distant train. But the avalanches were too far away to concern John and his party. He was going only as far as the tarn.

John spread his cloth hat on a hummock of ice and sat down on it to rest and to eat some chocolate. He looked in succession at each of the dazzling snowy peaks that surrounded him, so close, so huge, so bright. He felt, as he had often done before, how strange it was that one should be so intensely conscious of the power of God in a place where there was none of its most usual manifestation, as in a city or a jungle. Nothing grew. The only living things he had seen all day had been the jackdaws in the cliff above the camp and a flight of snow pigeons. There was no movement visible but the occasional distant avalanche. The air was still. Only book knowledge taught him that the ice below his feet crept day by day towards the heart of the earth. But there it was, you were far more conscious of the power of God here, in this place sterile and stripped of life, than where life surged upward in continual effort. The splendour of God! It was the favourite oath of one of the Norman kings. Looking round at those glittering peaks, you were abashed at the audacity of man, that a beetle on a pile of stones should use such a phrase in jest. Splendour and mercy and power were close upon you here.

He got up and moved on. It was easier going now, and they reached the tarn before midday. The hermit was there. He was sitting on a rock on the ice, quite naked, except for a pair of steel spectacles of which one lens was missing and the other cracked. He was very thin. There were a few straggly grey hairs on his withered and shrunken chest. John tried to detect an expression of spiritual beauty, or even spiritual abstraction, in the wrinkled face, but try as he might, he could not honestly find it. But there were stirrings of feeling; it seemed as though the hermit felt some beginning of pleasure at seeing them. John wondered whether he was glad that at last someone had seen what austerities he had practised, whether he was conscious of some gratification that his success was known in the world of men; but he felt ashamed at the cynicism of the thought, and dismissed it. In any case, it could hardly be more than a guess what the old man’s feelings might be, for he would not speak. Slowly, doubtfully, like one who has forgotten human ways and the use of speech, he moved his head twice in negation when the Brahman questioned him. The others crowded round, inquisitive but respectful. At last the Brahman gave it up.

‘It is no use,’ he said, ‘he will not speak.’

And at that moment the hermit leaned forward and with the finger of one skinny hand wrote in the gravel which the ice had piled against his rock. He traced the Sanskrit characters for the sacred syllable OM; and by that, explained the Brahman, he meant that the proper occupation for man was to merge his consciousness in that which has neither beginning nor end, and not to answer frivolous questions. John felt that the translation, necessarily free, was possibly inaccurate; but he agreed that it was a signal of dismissal.

Before they went, they looked at the cave where the hermit had spent the winter. On the edge of the ice was one stone lifted above the others. It was possible to crawl underneath; the space within, which was just big enough for a man to lie down in or to kneel in, had a floor of grey ice-ground gravel. It contained a blanket; an eating-bowl of wood; a sack which might originally have held about four stone of flour, and now held about one; nothing else. The Brahman explained that the hermit would have mixed a little of the flour occasionally with cold water, and eaten it raw. There was no fuel. John made a rapid calculation. An average of less than two ounces of raw flour a day had kept him alive for nearly a year in a tomb of rock and ice. He must have spent most of the time in a trance.

John was used to weighing evidence, and he was convinced of the truth of the physical achievement. It had been mentioned so casually by the high priest and others at the temple. There had been no attempt to convince; and indeed Hinduism does not try to convert or even to astonish. It is indifferent to the opinions of others. There would have been no point in arranging an elaborate hoax; it would have been to no one’s advantage; and it would have been almost impossible to carry out because it involved not only everyone at the temple but all the villagers on the way. No, he believed the hermit had spent the winter there.

But had there really been any spiritual gain to set off against this reduction of physical life to a reptile, an almost vegetable, level? That was the question the West must ask. The answer could at best be an opinion; but, if he was to go by feeling, and there was nothing else to go by, John could only say that he felt no spark of the spirit about the wrinkled creature by the tarn-side. In the middle of the glacier, he had felt the power and the splendour of God with a deep certainty; but the hermit had seemed foreign to the ways of God or man or nature. John had met other men of the Hindu religion in whom he had felt something he recognised as sanctity; but not here. It had been like a conversation with a tortoise.

These were his thoughts as he sat eating his lunch on the side of the tarn and gazing across at the snowy peaks. And then he forgot the hermit and lost himself in the beauty of snow and air and dazzling space and sun, silver and blue and gleaming white; the peaks, so close, so huge, so bright. But he did not lose himself for long; if he was to get off the moraine before dark, it was time to go and he began the journey back again, his head now buzzing with the height. By the time they got on to the moraine and had to begin the tiring business of scrambling and leaping from rock to rock, he was sick with lassitude and migraine. Back at last, in the camp between the two streams, he filled himself with whisky and aspirin and went to bed. A shameful weakness of the body, he thought confusedly, as he began to doze, and one he would not have suffered if he had conquered the body like the hermit. Nor would the hermit have lain awake night after night and thought of Averil.

He slept long and woke refreshed, with his head clear, and a feeling of relief. He sat up, hungry and languid, wondering why he felt as though a burden had been taken from him. Perhaps, he thought, I have taken some deep decision in my sleep; but more likely it’s because I was afraid I should wake with a headache. And then he remembered his pain. For many months, that had been always the first thing he had remembered on waking. Today it was the second. But it was no less acute now it had come, a vivid hunger and longing that was there all the time. He was still thinking of it consciously as he finished breakfast and started on the return journey to the temple.

Perhaps he ought to cable for the assignment in Delhi as soon as he reached a telegraph office. It was clearly no good going back to England and risking an encounter with Averil yet. And he began to wonder what had happened to her. She had written twice, but he had steeled himself not to answer; it was no worse for her than for him and he had felt he must have courage for them both. In his thoughts she had stayed the same as when he left her; how self-centred I am, he thought gloomily, that all this time I have not pictured the possibilities for her. And as he walked on he considered the dangers of the state of mind in which she must be, swept and garnished and empty, feeling that he had deserted her; an easy prey to the first comer. But what does it matter to me, he asked savagely, for I have no part in her any longer?

In the evening, when he reached the little bungalow for visitors that stood on a bluff above the ice-fed river, opposite the temple, he was told that it was occupied. They put up the tents, little triangles three feet high of fine wind-proof fabric. But he had had enough of eating from a plate on his knees inside the tent, and besides it would be a pleasant relief to have company. So when the tents were ready he strolled round to the bungalow in the hope that he would be asked to dinner there. He found the new arrival standing outside the bungalow, gazing up at the evening light on the peak of Nilkanta, whose classic purity of line could here be seen from another angle, framed in a deep cleft between two closer hills. He turned at the sound of steps, and John was immediately attracted by his smile. It was the face of a man who would come to meet you, who was not only friendly but sensitive, who liked his fellow creatures and was interested in them. They talked for a few minutes of what each had been doing; then the stranger apologised for having been the first to secure the bungalow, and they arranged to eat together. John said he would bring some whisky.

It was a minor but quite definite pleasure for John to put his knees under a table again, but it was an incomparably greater pleasure to talk to his host. He was a teacher, a schoolmaster taking two months’ holiday; and his talk confirmed the impression his smile had made. Their reserves vanished quickly, because they liked each other, and because for a long time they had not been used to conversation. John told him of his immediate plans and recounted his visit to the glacier and the hermit; he tried to express his failure to find any link between the hermit and anything he could himself regard as spiritual experience. The schoolmaster had once met a man who had been buried six months in the snow.

‘But mine,’ he said, ‘had not quite so horny a carapace as yours. He was quite young, and quite ready to talk; but he couldn’t begin to explain to me the spiritual significance of what he had done, nor how it differed from a bear’s hibernation. Like you, I couldn’t be sure whether it was my fault or his; but I’m afraid I became cynical when he said he would come in a dream and explain to me when I was asleep. We had a fairly large audience.’

‘And you didn’t dream’’ John asked.

‘If I did, I had no conscious memory when I woke,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘But I’ve thought about it a good deal since; and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was not only my ignorance that prevented me from understanding, but something fundamentally wrong in what he was trying to do.’

‘Go on,’ said John, ‘explain. I’m interested.’

‘Well, this hibernation is an offshoot, and no doubt an intelligent Hindu would admit that it was not a very good offshoot, of the Buddhist and Hindu ideal, which is I take it the abstraction of self from the physical world and the soul’s union with the infinite. No doubt that’s putting it crudely, but I think that is what it means. It is, I think, their religious ideal to get in this life as near as possible to that ultimate union; the hermit, of course, is simply someone who has stuck on the way; he has reached a stage from which he ought to have gone on, but he finds it easier to stay where he is. But that doesn’t alter the ideal, which takes notice of nothing but the one individual self and the absolute; and I believe that that fact is responsible for much in India for which it’s common to blame other things, such as English rule, bad education, purdah, caste, anything you like. I think the fundamental thing wrong is that instead of a Christian tradition there is this ideal of the abstraction of self. It looks only at the self, which it tries to overcome by negation.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said John, ‘what about the Christian contemplative orders? Is their ideal so different?’

‘Utterly,’ said the stranger. ‘In the first place, I think you’ll find they all enjoin that some work for others must be performed. Their ideal is active self-sacrifice, not passive self-denial; active love, not union with nothing. And secondly they pray for mankind. Their prayers sweeten the world and help to atone for its wickedness. But I was thinking more of the immense weight of Christian tradition in a Western country, even among those who wouldn’t claim to be Christians. Even when performance falls hopelessly short, there is an ideal of doing things for other people; people would like as a rule to be thought unselfish even if they are in fact very selfish; and what is almost as direct a result of Christianity, there is a spirit of adventure, a desire to mould external circumstance to man’s will. Surely the whole point of Christianity is that the word must become flesh. The infinite must become the finite. So instead of vaguely yearning for the infinite, man defines, he probes; he makes barriers against vagueness. He crosses oceans to find new continents, he lives in perpetual adventure. That was the spirit that started the Crusades, Columbus’s voyage, the discovery of the power of steam, the boy scout movement, women’s suffrage, anything you like to mention. I don’t necessarily admire the result of any of those things, but the spirit I admire immensely. It’s the same spirit that makes people try to climb Everest. It would never occur to a Hindu, except in imitation of us.’

‘But looking at Europe now,’ said John thoughtfully, ‘a Hindu would have some grounds for a complacency equal to yours, if I may say so.’

‘But, my dear fellow,’ cried the stranger, whose ardour as a conversationalist was sometimes inclined to carry him away, ‘the present state of Europe rather strengthens my case. It is directly due to the fact that one immensely powerful nation rejected the Christian tradition.’

The argument went on. John took the side of the East because he felt his host overstated and oversimplified his case, and also because he wanted to be convinced of the essential truth of the other side. At last, good nights and thanks were said. John went through the athletic process of undressing in a tent with a ridgepole three feet high. As he pulled his shirt over his head he remembered for a moment the hermit’s skinny finger, writing in the ice-ground gravel the word OM. He emerged, and the light of the lantern showed him his own firm sun-browned hand, the long scar up the wrist that Averil’s finger had so often traced. He wriggled into his sleeping-bag and put out the lantern. He lay on his back; it was a clear night, and the moonlight shone through the fine windproof fabric.

He had to make up his mind whether to cable for the position in Delhi or go back to London and Averil. A few hours ago he would not have said that a decision was needed. It had been all settled; he was to stay in India. But now the question was open again. He turned over on his side, finding the right place for his hip-bone with the ease of custom. Was it open after all? He had a feeling that there was nothing left for him to decide. The case had already been heard and argued in some court whose proceedings were not public. Judgment had already been given; all he had to do was to find out the terms of the decision.

As he lay there and thought it out, his mind went back to the conversation that had just ended. He felt that the schoolmaster had made things too simple; Christianity was the main strand in the tradition of the West, but there were other strands as well. Surely climate played a part. And he was still far from sure that his host had been right in rejecting so completely all that negative self-denial which the hermit might be taken to stand for. But whatever good there might be in it for others was surely not for John. Self-denial was not leading him to any positive good to take the place of what he was giving up.

John’s mind went back to the night before he went up to the glacier. How long ago was it? Two nights he had spent in the camp between the streams; it was only three nights ago, but it seemed an age. He had not thought, as he lay awake then, of any other course than what he now saw as refusal and flight. But the purpose of his flight had been to recover his self, the old self, all he had thought best in his life. Perhaps it was not too fanciful to compare that attempt to go back to an earlier stage with the hermit’s effort to escape from the self he knew. John felt it was the wrong course for the hermit; he knew now that it was wrong for himself. Even three nights ago he had known, if he would have faced it, that his flight was not achieving its purpose. It had seemed to him then that he could never any more feel an interest in the things in life that he had loved. If that were so—and it still was so if he stayed on in his tomb of ice—he had cut Averil from his life in order to save the things in himself which he thought had most value, but they too had withered and he was left with nothing. Active self-sacrifice for an ideal, that would have been the Christian teaching; but he had taken a road of blank negation. And it was foreign to his blood and spirit. In his blood was that of the captains who fought at Trafalgar, in his spirit were memories of Salamis, Roncesvalles and Runnymede, all the centuries during which the West had fought to keep the infinite at bay, to find the secrets of this life by experiment. He too must go on to something new, shrink no longer from the irrevocable step that had frightened him. He must take the way of adventure and mould his life by his own effort.

He smiled. I’m being absurdly pompous, he thought; Averil would laugh at me. What can have happened to her? I must know. I must know at once. I must. I must. I mustn’t be too late.

The End