The Faraway Drums (25 page)

“All right, Bertie, no report. Bobs can report it if he wishes.”

“It is Mala’s business, not mine,” said Mahendra.

“Why don’t you just scatter the poor girl’s ashes to the winds and forget all about her?” Bridie was burning, but she would leave no ashes.

“That is not in very good taste, Miss O’Brady,” said the Nawab stiffly. He had taken on another character altogether, but it didn’t fit him. He had played the second-hand Englishman too long, the plummy Oxford accent kept asserting itself as if mocking him.

“I know,” said Bridie. “But I don’t think any of you are in good taste. You are all trying to pass
the
buck. The poor girl’s death should be investigated.”

“By whom? Sherlock Holmes?”

She looked at all three of them and saw that they were allies, if uncomfortable ones. “Oh my God! Doesn’t anyone care for the girl?”

“I do.” The Nawab looked genuinely hurt and Bridie was instantly sorry for her remark.

“We have our rights,” said Mahendra. “We, not the English, rule our own States. We have power over life and death, so they say.”

That sounded a little melodramatic, Farnol thought; but he knew it was true. He was ashamed that Ganga’s death could be put aside; yet it suited his purpose for the time being. He had to stay on speaking terms with the Nawab and Mahendra. He would learn nothing if he cut himself off from them. In a land where the population, especially the educated minority of it, loved talking as much as breathing, one always stood the chance of catching a slip of the tongue.

“So no one will do anything about her death?” said Bridie. She might have been harrying some District Attorney due for re-election.

“We did not say that.” The Nawab moved his horse up beside that of Mahendra, showing Bridie his back and the horse’s rump, closing the subject.

Bridie looked at Farnol and he shook his head, silently asking her to be silent. She shut her lips tight and he remarked how plain even a good-looking woman can be when she is disapproving.

Back in the coach, with Zoltan Monday riding beside it like some better-class postillion, the three other women and the Baron had been very quiet, each for his or her own reason.

Magda, bored and drowsy, glanced lazily out at her husband, wishing they were in bed together. She did not enjoy these excursions to the outlands of the world; she was a woman for pavements. She did not mind accompanying Zoltan out of Europe if it meant they stayed in some hotel like the Perapalas in Constantinople; she would have enjoyed the stay in the palace at Serog had the circumstances been different. But the dreary, dusty trips to meet clients were a dreadful bore; lately, the trips seemed to be getting longer and drearier, as if the customers for armaments were retreating to the outposts of the world they hoped to conquer. She was no student of revolutionary politics, she longed only for the journey in which clients came with their lists and their cash to hotels like Shepheard’s in Cairo or the Grande Bretagne
in
Athens.

“Not much longer, my love,” said Zoltan in Hungarian, as if reading her thoughts.

“I think it would be much better manners if we all spoke English,” said Lady Westbrook, coming out of her own torpor.

“My husband was making love to me.” Magda smiled, coming awake. She delighted in verbal thrusting, just as she did the other sort. “Would it be good manners if he spoke in English?”

“It would be entertaining and perhaps enlightening,” said Lady Westbrook, forgetting her own manners.

“Is love-making so different in England and Hungary?” The Ranee languidly sat up straighter, glanced at Zoltan, wondered if she had missed something there under the deerstalker cap and the tweed knickerbockers.

“Ladies, please,” said the Baron. “Spare my blushes. I’m still capable of them, even at my age.”

Zoltan Monday smiled indulgently at his wife, but not before he had seen the Ranee glance towards him. He had heard of her reputation before he had come up to Simla; he gathered intelligence even more thoroughly than the clients who used the weapons he sold them. He wondered what she would be like in bed, if she thought the
Kama Sutra
just a primer or an advanced study book; but he would never attempt to find out. Afraid of losing Magda, he never allowed himself to be unfaithful to her. But there was another hunger in the Ranee besides her sexual hunger: he recognized the lust for power. After all, he had been selling to that vice all his business life, it was as familiar to him as the catalogues in his suitcase.

They passed through several small villages, where the villagers came out to pay their homage and the children hoped for a coin or two from the Ranee or Prince Mahendra, which they didn’t get. In the late afternoon the caravan crossed the river again, this time over a solidly constructed bridge; now they were in Pandar. The countryside didn’t change and only a few in the caravan appreciated that they had crossed a boundary. But Farnol felt it, like an itch in his back. He knew, more than most, that crossing a state boundary meant entering another state of mind.

“Do you have to request permission to pass through, Bertie?”

“My cousin and I are the best of friends.” But the Nawab’s tone was not reassuring. “Our families haven’t fought in two generations.”

“
Bertie’s family was on the English side in the Mutiny,” said Mahendra. “Sankar’s grandfather backed the sepoys. The English have never forgiven them for that. Nor have the princes.”

“What about Sankar? Is he for the English?”

“Of course,” said the Nawab, cutting in ahead of Mahendra.

“Did you see him often in England?”

The Nawab seemed to hesitate; or perhaps he was just steadying his horse. “He lived on the Continent.”

“Where?”

“Clive, how you do ask questions!”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do. Where did he live?”

The Nawab’s horse was restive again. “In Germany, at Baden-Baden. He loves to gamble.”

“He must wish for a casino at Simla. He’d find the whist or bridge parties rather dull. He must dislike us English for being so staid.”

“He is one of us, dear chap. We princes are realists. We know the Raj and ourselves are complementary. We shouldn’t exist without each other.”

“We know how much the English depend on us, all 562 of us.” Mahendra suddenly seemed to have a passion for detail; or anyway selective detail. “The big ones like Kashmir and Hyderabad, the medium-sized ones like Dholpur and the small ones like us.”

“There are many smaller than you,” said Farnol. “Don’t cry poor.”

Then they turned a corner in the road through the hills and there was a large village and, just outside it, a guard post. Four armed soldiers came out of a grass hut and stood hesitantly in the middle of the road, nonplussed by this army coming down on them.

“Move aside,” said Mahendra at the head of the column.

“Your Highness—” The senior soldier kept his rifle slung over his shoulder; he knew when belligerence was foolhardy.

“There is a road tax for travellers. His Highness the Rajah has just declared we must collect it.”

“How much?” said the Nawab.

“One anna per person, Your Highness.”

“
Ridiculous,” said Mahendra.

“Write him an IOU,” said Farnol, sitting easy, amused at this display of fiscal banditry. He wondered just how recently Sankar had decreed that tax must be paid. An hour ago, perhaps?

“It is not a joking matter,” said Mahendra. “I should not dream of taxing Sankar if he rode through my territory.”

My
territory: Farnol noted the possession, even if it was only illusory.

“Perhaps I’d better take over for a moment.” He pushed his horse forward, assuming authority, certain that Mahendra and the Nawab would not want to lose face by disputing it in front of the four soldiers in the roadway. He looked down at the senior soldier. “I am Major Farnol, a British officer. I am escorting Their Highnesses and Her Highness the Ranee of Serog down to Delhi as the guests of the Government. As such they do not have to pay taxes. You will let us through.”

“Yes, sahib.” The man knew a real soldier when he saw one. He called himself one of the Rajah’s soldiers, but he knew it was a joke. His rifle was his uniform; without it he looked like everyone else. But he knew how to stand to attention. “Yes, sahib. But you will explain to His Highness the Rajah if you see him—?”

“Of course.” Then Farnol looked at the two princes: “As you said, we’re complementary. We have our uses for each other. I’ve saved you all of six or seven rupees.”

They passed through the village, which spread out on the narrow stretch of flat ground on either side of the road and climbed in terraces up the sides of the hills. Clouds hung like kapok on the mountains and there was a smell of rain in the air. Smoke from the evening fires had flattened out till it looked like a floating roof above the village. The main street became crowded as the caravan moved down it and Bridie, riding at the head with Farnol and the two princes, felt like an American queen. Perhaps, when she got back to America, she should look for some politician who might one day be President . . . Unlike certain others in the caravan, she did not crave power, but she found she liked all the benefits that went with it. Power corrupts everyone, even consorts and ladies-in-waiting. And newspaperwomen, she admitted wryly.

Camp was already set up by the advance guard a quarter of a mile down the road from the village. Hawkers were squatting around it like beakless vultures; children held out the tiny begging-bowl of their hands and asked for
baksheesh
. The escorts cleared them away with loud authority and they went
uncomplainingly,
with that resignation that Bridie, becoming familiar with it now, found distressing.

“If only they’d protest,” she said to Farnol. “Why do they let themselves be pushed around like that?”

“If we stayed here, they’d be back tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. They win, in the end. You finish up buying from them just to get rid of them. They know that.”

A merchant came into the camp with a cart drawn by two camels, having bribed two of the escort to turn their backs. He looked about him and saw a tourist.

“Memsahib!” He pulled back a tarpaulin and exposed rolls of silk in the cart, in colours so rich they challenged the dusk. He whipped out a roll and flung an end over Bridie’s shoulder and looked at Farnol. “Buy a sari for the lady, sahib.”

“No,” said Bridie. “I’d feel an impostor, a fake.”

“You’re right.” But Farnol could see her in a sari and the image excited him. Saris came off so much more easily than dresses and petticoats and all those damned things women wore. “The English ladies in Delhi would blackball you. East is East and West is West and never the togs should meet . . .”

“Do you wear a turban with your dress uniform, like the Bengal Lancers?”

“Of course. It’s the way we chaps in the Indian Army distinguish ourselves from the British Army. Men are allowed to dress up. The ladies excuse it because they like us to look dashing. We all looked dashing before the Victorians spoiled everything.” Then he spoke to the merchant: “Does the road go past the Rajah’s palace?”

“No, sahib.” He was a portly man with a waxed moustache and the slyly friendly eyes of a man who never sold on credit: he had to convince one of his own honesty while he suspected yours. “The palace is further back in the hills. The side road to it is blocked by guards.”

“Do you ever see His Highness down here?”

“Never, sahib. We have never set eyes on the new Rajah. Nor on the old one, either. Life is very quiet here, except for the new taxes.”

“There are other taxes beside the road tax for travellers?”

“Oh yes, sahib. Taxes for this, taxes for that. They say it is because of the Durbar. It was like that at the other Great Durbar, eight years ago. The people have to pay so that our masters can look princely and
magnificent.”

“You’re a socialist?” Farnol smiled, agreeing with the man but not prepared to let him know.

“A socialist—me? Sahib, I’m an entrepreneur.” He had once hawked books around army barracks, getting an education while he made a living. He had a vocabulary that he rarely had the opportunity to use. “Some day I shall live on Malabar Hill in Bombay. Could a socialist do that?”

“But you resent paying taxes?”

The merchant looked over his shoulder. “What merchant does not, sahib? Do Mr. Fortnum and Mr. Mason pay willingly?” He lit a lamp, hung it on the side of his cart, beamed and winked in its light. He was a man of the world, here on a back road in the hills. “I’ll come again in the morning, sahib, bring you some wonderful presents for the memsahib. Which is your tent?”

Farnol smiled again. “I’ll be up, watching for you. Bring some jewellery, some stones. But good stuff, if you have any.”

“I have everything, sahib.” The waxed moustache seemed to move with a flourish under his hooked nose. “I am an entrepreneur.”

He went away, taking his evil-smelling camels with him, and Bridie said, “I shan’t allow you to buy me an expensive gift.”

He smiled. “I told you, you finish up buying from them just to get rid of them. Otherwise he could follow us all the way down to Delhi.”

7

I

Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady
:

I WAS
saddle-sore and longed to be riding in an automobile. In 1911 there were 500,000 automobiles on the roads of America, but in India they were still few and far between. Sitting in my canvas bath that evening, easing the soreness out of my bottom, I began to think of travelling the rest of the journey down to Kalka in Prince Mahendra’s victoria. But even as I luxuriated in the thought of that comfort I knew I’d be back on my horse tomorrow morning, riding beside Clive. I fear women like a little masochism in their love for a man.

Not that I had yet admitted I loved him, even to myself. I kept reminding myself of the circumstances, that I was past the age for infatuation (as I grew older I realized, of course, that there is no limit to the age for infatuation). The test would be if and when I went to bed with him (can this be a lady of 79 writing this? Call it the truth of senility). In those days that
was
a test; even fast girls did not fall into bed as quickly as they appear to today. Listening to my granddaughters talk about some of their friends I wonder why some of them ever bother to get dressed. A bath, a peignoir and clean sheets and they’re set for life.