The Lotus and the Wind (10 page)

Robin took out his pistol to make sure that it was loaded. He did not think he would be able to kill anyone, but he had better look as if he meant to. The snow had caked into ice on the butt, and the pistol slipped from his hand. It fell, hammer down, against a jutting outcrop of rock and exploded. Robin heard the roar and felt the explosion as a slap in the face, but he did not know why he was sitting in the snow. He did not know how or why he had grabbed the pistol and now held it smoking in his hand. Light red blood ran out strongly from his right leg, staining the snow around him.

From their expressions as they came running to him he knew that no one had seen the pistol slip from his hand. No one in the world had seen it, though he had been standing among them. In that one second they had all been looking to something else--even Maniraj, even Jagbir.

With a gigantic effort he stopped himself from crying out. It was not physical pain, for as yet he suffered none. It was not even anger that they could believe he would inflict a wound on himself rather than face the ghazis. With gritted teeth and dry eyes, he held down a swelling melancholy greater than that which inspired the lament of ’Lochaber No More.’ He had to live among people, being alive and human, and he was not equipped with the means for the task.

He tried to get up, but the bullet had tom the muscles of his leg. At last he managed it and hopped forward, leaning on Jagbir’s shoulder. ‘Advance, Subadar-sahib,’ he cried.

‘Advance! Quick! I’m all right.’ The bugler blew, the subadar yelled the men into a run; but the general’s curt voice was imperative.

‘Go and stop him, Green. Let his subadar take the company up. Tell him to wait there beside the road until a surgeon arrives.’

The company disappeared into the driving snow. The last Robin saw of them was Maniraj’s tearful face, before the subadar turned and stumbled away up the slope. The general and his staff moved a hundred yards farther along the road and out of sight.

His leg began to throb. Major Green had bandaged it with rough skill in a silence that showed that he did not trust himself to speak. Officers and orderlies came up from the rear and passed by on their way to headquarters. None of them had been here when it happened. How, then, did they know what face to wear as they passed? Mostly they became absorbed in earnest talk as they drew near, or saw something interesting in the snow flurries on the other side of the road.

At Robin’s side a hoarse voice said, ‘Sahib, what’s this written on the jezail?’

He turned and stared into Jagbir’s eyes. ‘Why aren’t you with the company? Are you afraid?
Kaphar hunnu bhanda marnu ramro
, isn’t it?’ Bitterly he repeated the Gurkha proverb, ‘It is better to die than be a coward.’

‘I’m not afraid, sahib,’ Jagbir answered quietly, his dark eyes sharpening minutely at the insult, then opening again. ‘The jezail. There’s writing on it.’

Robin clenched his fingers. He must push down the melancholy. He must not let anger replace it. That would be too easy. He said carefully, ‘I know, Jagbir. You mean the chasing on the barrel? It’s a few lines from the Koran, their holy book, written in Arabic.’

‘Not that. Here. Look.’

Jagbir pointed to the underside of the stock, where a man about to fire the jezail would have gripped it. Robin took the weapon and wiped off the snowflakes with his finger. See the nice toy! He could pretend; he could do nearly anything now, not to hurt Jagbir. He said, ‘Yes. You’re right.’ Indeed someone had scratched letters into the wood, using a nail or the point of a knife. ‘I can read it, even. You see, my books and examinations have some use, don’t they, Jagbir? Ha ha! It says
“Atlar shimal.” Atlar
means “horses,” I think.
Shimal
means “north.” Horses, north. That’s all.’

‘I wish I was an educated man,’ said Jagbir suddenly. ‘I want to be able to read and write.’

‘What would you do if you could?’ A furious battle began to rage on the hidden hill behind them. He heard the concerted distant roar of the company.
‘Ayo Gurkhali!’

‘I’d learn where all the animals came from,’ Jagbir said breathlessly and shut his mouth with a click of teeth. Robin did not speak. For a minute more the shooting continued, then all was silent. The snow fell harder but made no sound. Soon a surgeon came with an orderly and a khajawa-camel, and re-dressed Robin’s wound. He too had heard.

With her gloved right hand Anne patted the mare’s neck, whispering, ‘Come back, Beauty, wait, wait.’ A couple of hundred yards ahead the master of the Peshawar Vale Hunt began to work his hounds along the bank of a scrubby draw. The plain stretched away to the south, in front the hills rose sharply, washed by the raw light of early morning. The dark trees and blue smoke-haze of Peshawar lay like a solid island in the east, binding together the empty plain and the thin, yellow sky.

Anne smoothed down the thick twill of her habit, touched her back hair under her topi, and adjusted the dark veil which annoyingly dimmed her view. Two young men were talking to her, one on each side, and Major Hayling was only a few yards off. She had got to know all the young bachelors in the station since her arrival here. These two were nicer than most, but she hardly listened to them, answering automatically--’No?’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘Really, Mr. Handy?’--as their vaguely heard intonations seemed to demand. Every day the necessity of getting out of the bungalow and away from her mother pressed more urgently upon her. Gerald Handy would take her out if she would let him. So would Rupert Hayling. Their attentions only sharpened her desire for Robin. He must come quickly for her sake--and for his own, to confront the rumourmongers and force them to eat their vile words.

Before she met Robin she used to feel warm when a man obviously admired her. It used to be like a radiance inside, and she would feel her skin tingling as though the sun shone on it and would know that she looked better than she had a minute before. Now she found only that she was sorry for them and sorry for herself that her own chosen man was not here instead of them. Well, the days were past when she could be forced to marry someone against her will, whatever her mother thought.

She saw Edith Collett on a great chestnut. A major of infantry was with her to-day. She sat her horse with superb grace, the major like a sack of potatoes. He looked flustered.

Anne frowned severely at her thoughts. The young man on her right backed away, saying plaintively, ‘I say, Miss Hildreth, you look as if you want to kill us or something; and I don’t believe you’ve been listening to a word I’ve been saying. I was telling you--’

She smiled suddenly. ‘Oh, yes, I was. You were telling me about your part in the dramatics last November. It must have been very amusing--But look, I think they’ve found.’

A horseman on a distant mound lifted his arm silently and pointed west. The master waved his cap in acknowledgment. The whips broke out into a yelled volley of oaths. Anne remembered that she had once used one of those words at home, and her mother had sat down suddenly and called for smelling salts. The hounds streamed out across the plain, and the master’s horn tootled. Anne set Beauty at once into a bounding gallop, taking the young men by surprise, so that in a second she was free of them. She settled down to ride. Without turning her head, she knew that Rupert Hayling rode at her side.

After a while he said, ‘Bored with the young?’

‘Not a bit, Major Hayling. At least, not as bored as I sometimes become with older gentlemen,’ she said crossly. She had found that Major Hayling did not like to be treated with great respect. With him the directest remark was the least wounding. From the corner of her eye she saw his smile. He said, ‘The ability to give a good insult is certainly one of the marks of sophistication, and I know how badly you want to be thought sophisticated. But I have my duty to do, remember?’

Anne had no answer to that. Sometimes her father came out with the hunt, but to-day he had not been able to, and her mother had told her she could not go without a chaperone. Anne had suggested Edith Collett, to be told angrily that that was worse than no chaperone. Then, when the matter seemed to have reached an impasse, Major Hayling came to visit and said smoothly that in view of his advanced age and undoubted respectability he might perhaps be trusted to--er--Her mother had accepted after a small, false hesitation. Major Hayling had added that as he possessed only one eye he was in less danger, by half perhaps, of being carried away by her daughter’s beauty. Hateful, beastly, kindly, understanding man! This morning that lone, gleaming eye had scanned her from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, as if she had been a shapely vase. She had wanted to smack his face, except that---teasing or serious--his look had been admiring, so she had felt sorry for him. Besides, try as she would, she could not rank him with the rest. They only wanted her for themselves, while Hayling--well, she’d find out soon enough.

She lifted Beauty over a wide ditch. The mare scrabbled with her back legs against the far slope, got a hold, fought for balance, and at last heaved up on to the level. Hounds ran strongly to the right. The master blew a peremptory toot on his horn, and the whips cracked. The hounds gave tongue, and the shrill, strange music ran out ahead of them over the frosty plain. In front Anne saw Mrs. Rodney Savage, Robin’s stepmother. The slight figure in black and grey, topped by a small, hard, black hat, sat trimly upright on a big gelding. Anne watched the hat rise easily and sail, first of all the field, over another ditch. She would have liked to ride up alongside and talk about Robin. She wanted to tell Mrs. Savage that she didn’t believe the rumours, that Robin was--’not a coward,’ she would have said, but she ought to say, ‘My man, the man I’m going to marry, and I love him, and I don’t care if he is a coward or not, although I know he isn’t.’ Most especially she ought to say all that--and soon, now that her mother was busy denying that there was or ever had been anything between her and Robin.

She had to talk to someone--Hayling, even, in spite of everything. Or because of it. She could talk to him more easily than to anyone else in Peshawar, anyone she’d ever met. She slowed the mare’s pace and at last said, ‘I think Beauty’s got a stone.’

The hunt flashed by. The young men made to stop, but she smiled at them and waved them on. Hayling swung down beside her and spent several minutes lifting up Beauty’s hoofs one by one. When the last rider had passed he vaulted into the saddle and walked his horse at her right side. She touched Beauty’s flank, and they trotted slowly after the others. The hunt remained in full view across the treeless plain.

She said, ‘Did you find it?’

‘You must not imagine, Miss Hildreth, that because I find you desirable I am feeble-minded. To do so would be to insult your own superbly-shaped charms. There was, of course, no stone. What is it, my dear?’ he finished with a sudden, hard sympathy that cut down her anger. She did not want any sentimentality. He was a very difficult man to deal with.

After a minute she said, ‘Robin. The rumours.’

‘I’ve heard them. Mclain, the MacDonald subaltern concerned, has been in hospital here for a couple of weeks.’

‘They’re not true! He’s not like that. He’s quiet, but he’s as brave as anyone--braver.’

‘Perhaps. Speak up, please, and tell me some more about him.’

‘He’s not tall,’ she muttered. ‘About five feet nine, I suppose, rather pale except for the sunburn--brown hair--’

‘Curly?’

‘No, it’s--you don’t have to be nasty about it. He has long eyelashes and long fingers. He’s quite slight.’

‘As you describe him he sounds a thought effeminate.’ She looked up quickly, but he did not seem to be teasing her. Of course Robin did not look at all effeminate, but it was difficult to describe him without giving that impression. The fact was that he was different from other men--that would account for it. She wanted to tell Hayling that his jaw became straight and hard when something hurt him, but she only said, ‘He has a thin, high-bridged nose.’

‘When did you meet him?’

‘In Mrs. Cornell’s drawing-room in Simla, on Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of May.’

‘By the door or by the window?’

‘He was standing near the--you are a beast!’ Hayling was leaning back in the saddle and laughing silently, and after a minute she had to laugh too. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, again serious, almost sad. ‘Sometimes the choice is between laughing and crying. You and your mother were in Simla for the hot weather, weren’t you, and Robin had a company of the Thirteenth down from Manali as the Viceroy’s Guard?’

‘Yes,’ she said sulkily.

‘And what exactly is the trouble? How can I help?’

She blurted out, ‘I want to marry him, and I won’t marry anyone else, but he hasn’t asked me, and my mother won’t agree even if he does. I’m sure he’d like to, but he’s afraid, and--’

‘Wait a minute. He’s afraid. That’s an extraordinary thing to say, isn’t it? Do you mean he’s afraid of you? Or of your mother?’

‘Not my mother. Unless he thinks I might grow up like her,’ Anne said bitterly. The truth was that Robin was afraid of himself. She knew it because she loved him, and for that reason couldn’t explain it to anyone else. Sometimes she became a little afraid herself, contemplating what she knew and guessed of him. One night, lying in bed and thinking, she had suddenly seen Robin as the driver of a winged crystal chariot whose winged horses, of silver filigree, stamped and pawed the earth and looked up at the empty sky. Where would that flimsy, breakable thing take her? How long would it hold together?

Hayling said quietly, ‘And you’re worried that the gossip will affect him?’

‘Yes.’

After a bit he said, ‘I don’t think I can give you an honest opinion, honest advice. You know that I love you, Anne.’ In his voice there was the astringent melancholy that she liked best of all his moods.

She mumbled, ‘Oh, I don’t know what to say, but I’m afraid it’s not--it won’t-----’

‘I can see that. All I can say is that you won’t find the answer to your problem in other people--nor much help, either. You’ve got to take the responsibility yourself.’