The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (10 page)

“We’ll see the Subinspector and tell him.”

But they did not see the Subinspector. Five miles beyond Tanpur they found what looked like his truck, upside down on the roadside where it had been overturned in the place where it must have been parked, next to a telegraph pole. If the truck belonged to the Subinspector then he had found where the wires were cut, but not been given time to repair them. They lay tangled and coiled in the ditch at the side of the road.

“We must go back,” Mr. Chaudhuri said. “They have abducted Subinspector Govindas Lal.”

“And the linesmen,” Miss Crane pointed out.

“Perhaps it was the linesmen who abducted him. The Posts and Telegraphs people are sometimes very bolshie.”

“But there were only three linesmen. And the Subinspector had a man with him and was probably armed. There must have been other men.”

“Which is why we should turn back, Miss Crane,”

The sky was clouded over, but there was still no rain. “It’s
ridiculous,” she said. “Yesterday I drove along this road and everything was as quiet as the grave and safe as houses. Now suddenly there are cut telegraph wires, upturned trucks and vanished subinspectors of police. It is really very
silly.”
She laughed. “No, Mr. Chaudhuri, if you like I’ll take you back to Tanpur, but I shall press on afterwards to Mayapore because I’ve just seen the
funny
side. But if I take you back to Tanpur the people will know we’ve gone back for a good reason, and then it will come out about the Subinspector. And the assistant subinspector will probably panic and the funny side might stop being funny.”

Mr. Chaudhuri was silent for a while. Presently he sighed and said, “I don’t follow your reasoning, Miss Crane. It is an example no doubt of British phlegm. You are mad. And I am mad to let you go, let alone go with you. All I ask is that if we see a crowd of people on the road, you put your foot hard on the accelerator.”

She turned her head and again they looked at each other straight. She had stopped smiling, not because she was annoyed with him for calling her mad or had already stopped seeing the funny side, but because she felt there was between them an unexpected mutual confidence, confidence of the kind that could spring up between two strangers who found themselves thrown together quite fortuitously in difficult circumstances that might turn out to be either frightening or amusing.

And for Miss Crane there was something else besides, a feeling she had often had before, a feeling in the bones of her shoulders and in the base of her skull that she was about to go over the hump thirty-five years of effort and willingness had never really got her over; the hump, however high or low it was, which, however hard you tried, still lay in the path of thoughts you sent flowing out to a man or woman whose skin was a different colour from your own. Were it only the size of a pebble, the hump was always there, disrupting the purity of that flow, the purity of the thoughts.

“Yes, I will try,” she said, “try to put my foot down and keep it there,” and then wished that there were words she could use that would convey to him the regard she held him in at that moment, a regard deeper, harder than that she had felt for the ragged singing children years ago; deeper, harder, because her regard for the children had sprung partly from her pity for them—and for Mr. Chaudhuri she had no pity; only respect and the kind of affection that came from the confidence one human being could feel in another, however little had been felt before.

“Then,” Mr. Chaudhuri said, “let us proceed.” His lips looked very
dry. He was afraid, and so was she, but now perhaps they both saw the comic side, and she did not have to say anything special to him just because his skin was brown or because she had never understood him. After all, he had never fully understood her either. She set the car in motion again and after a while she began to sing. Presently to her surprise and pleasure he joined in. It was the song she always liked the children to learn. All over India, she thought, there were brown and off-white children and adults who could sing the song or, at least, remember it if they ever heard it again and, perhaps, remember it in connection with Miss Crane Mem. She sang it now, not sentimentally, but with joy, not piously, but boldly, almost as though it were a jolly march. When they had sung it right through once, they began again.

    
There’s a
Friend
for little
chil
dren

        
Ab
ove
the bright blue sky,

    
A
Friend
Who never
changes,

        
Whose
love
will never
die;

    
De
da,
de da, de
da,
dum

        
And
change
with changing
years,

    
This
Friend
is always
worthy
—

Ahead of them rioters were spread out across the road.

“I can’t,” she said as the car got nearer.

“You must,” he said. “Blow the horn, keep blowing it and press the accelerator,
press.”

He leaned out of the window to show his dark Bengali face, and waved his arm in a motion demanding right of way. “Faster,” he shouted at her. “Faster, you’re slowing down, keep pressing and blowing.”

“I shall kill someone,” she shouted back. “I can’t. I can’t. Why don’t they move away?”

“Let them be killed. Faster. And blow!”

For a moment, closing on the crowd, she thought she and Mr. Chaudhuri had won, that the men were moving to give way, but then they cohered again into a solid mass. They must have seen her white face. A man in front began to wave his arms, commanding them to stop.

“Keep going!” Mr. Chaudhuri shouted. “Close your eyes if you must but keep going!”

She tightened her mouth preparing to obey, but failed. She couldn’t
drive into a mass of living creatures. “I’m sorry,” she cried, and began to press on the brake pedal. She stopped the car some twenty yards from the man who was waving his arms, but kept the engine running. “They weren’t going to move, they’d have died. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t speak,” Mr. Chaudhuri said. “Now leave it to me. Don’t speak.” He put a hand on her wrist. “Trust me,” he said. “I know you never have but trust me now. Do whatever I say.
Whatever
I say.”

She nodded. “I trust you. I’ll do what you say.” In her physical panic there was a kind of exhilaration as though she were drunk on the Deputy Commissioner’s brandy. “But don’t run risks. I’m not worth risks. I’m old and it’s all gone and I’ve failed.” She laughed. The men were approaching, swaggering. “After all, it’s me they want,” she said. “Not you. So that’s it. If this is where it ends for me, let it end.”

“Please, Miss Crane,” he said, “don’t be ridiculous.”

The car was surrounded now. She found it difficult to distinguish face from face. They all looked the same, they all smelled the same: of liquor and garlic and sweat-soaked cotton cloth. Most were dressed in white homespun shirts and dhotis. Some wore the white Congress cap. They were chanting the words that the whole of India, it seemed to her, had been chanting since early in the spring.
Quit India! Quit India!
Mr. Chaudhuri was talking to the leader. The leader was asking what he was doing riding in a car with an Englishwoman. Mr. Chaudhuri was not answering his questions but trying to shout him down, trying to tell him that Miss Crane was an old friend of India, that only that morning she had saved the lives of many Indian children from drunken power-mad policemen and was on her way to a secret meeting of the Congress Committee in Mayapore whose confidence she enjoyed and whose efforts to overthrow the English she wholeheartedly endorsed.

The leader said he did not believe Mr. Chaudhuri. Mr. Chaudhuri was a traitor. No self-respecting Indian male would ride with a dried-up virgin memsahib who needed to feel the strength of a man inside her before she could even look like a woman, and what would Mr. Chaudhuri do if they decided to take the memsahib out of the car and show her what women were for and what men could do? Not, the leader said, spitting onto the hood of the Ford, that he would waste his strength and manhood on such a dried-up old bag of bones. “She speaks Hindi,” Mr. Chaudhuri said, “and hears these insults. Are you not ashamed to speak so of a guru, a teacher, as great a guru as Mrs. Annie Besant, and a
follower of the Mahatma? Great evil will come to you and your seed if you so much as lay a finger on her.”

“Then we will lay one on you, brother,” the leader said, and dragged open the door, whose lock Miss Crane had failed, month after month, to have repaired. “Go,” Mr. Chaudhuri said, as he was taken out. “Go now. It’s all right. No harm will come to me.”

“Pigs!” she cried in Urdu, trying to hold on to Mr. Chaudhuri’s arm, using the words she had used years ago, in Muzzafirabad. “Sons of pigs, cow-eaters, impotent idolators, fornicators abhorred of the Lord Shiva. . . .”

“Go!” shrieked Mr. Chaudhuri, from outside the car, kicking the door shut, his arms held by four men, “or do you only take orders from white men? Do you only keep promises you make to your own kind?”

“No!” she shouted back. “No, no! I don’t!” and, pressing the accelerator, released the brake, nearly stalling the engine so that the car jerked, paused, and jerked again, throwing the laughing men away from the hood, and then it leapt away so that they had to jump out of its path. A couple of hundred yards further on she stopped and looked back. Three of the men were chasing after the car. Behind them Mr. Chaudhuri was being pushed from one man to the other. A stick was brought down heavily on his shoulders. She shouted, “No! No! Mr. Chaudhuri!” and opened the door, climbed out. The three men held their arms out, laughing, and called, “Ah, memsahib, memsahib,” and came towards her. Remembering, she reached into the car and found the starting handle, stood in the road, threatening them with it. They laughed louder and struck postures of mock defense and defiance, jumped about grinning, like performing monkeys. Mr. Chaudhuri had his head covered by his hands. The sticks were coming down, thwack, thwack. Then he was on his knees, and then out of sight, surrounded by the men who were beating him. Miss Crane cried out, “Devils, Devils,” and began to move towards the three men, still waving the starting handle. They moved back, pretending to be alarmed. The youngest of them reached into his dhoti as if about to expose himself, shouted something at her. Suddenly they turned and ran back to their leader who had called out to them. The other rioters were standing over Mr. Chaudhuri who lay unmoving in the middle of the road. A couple of them were going through his pockets. The leader was now pointing at the car. Five or six men left the group surrounding Mr. Chaudhuri and came towards Miss Crane. Instinctively she backed, but held her ground next to the car. Reaching her
they pushed her aside, roughly, angrily, as if ashamed they had not yet summoned up the courage to disobey their leader and attack her. Bending to the task they got their weight under the running-board and the fenders and began to heave rhythmically, until of a sudden the car turned over. From this display of strength one of them, anyway, got courage. Turning from the car he came at Miss Crane, raised his hand and hit her across the face, once, twice, then pushed her back towards the ditch and, using both arms, tumbled her down the three-foot embankment. Falling, she lost consciousness. When she came to and had collected her senses and strength she scrambled up the bank on her hands and knees and found the Ford burning and the rioters in the distance.

Limping, she walked to where Mr. Chaudhuri still lay. Reaching him she knelt and said, “Mr. Chaudhuri,” but could not touch him because of his bloody face and open eyes and the awful thing that had happened to the side of his head. “No,” she said, “no, it isn’t true. Oh God. Oh God, forgive me. Oh God, forgive us all,” and then covered her face and wept, which she had not done for years, and continued weeping for some time.

She dried her eyes by wiping them on the sleeve of her blouse, once, twice, three times. She felt the first heavy drops of rain. Her raincape had been in the back of the car. She said, in anguish, “But there’s nothing to cover him with, nothing, nothing,” and stood up, crouched, got hold of his feet and dragged him to the side of the road.

“I can’t help it,” she said, as if to him, when he lay bloody and limp and inhuman in the place she had dragged him to. “There’s nothing I can do, nothing, nothing,” and turned away and began to walk with long unsteady strides through the rain, past the blazing car, towards Mayapore. As she walked she kept saying, “Nothing I can do. Nothing. Nothing.”

A hundred yards past the car she stopped. “But there is,” she said, and turned and walked back until she reached Mr. Chaudhuri’s body. She sat down in the mud at the side of the road, close to him, reached out and took his hand.

“It’s taken me a long time,” she said, meaning not only Mr. Chaudhuri. “I’m sorry it was too late.”

As Mr. Poulson said afterwards, the troubles in Mayapore began for him with the sight of old Miss Crane sitting in the pouring rain by the
roadside holding the hand of a dead Indian. On that day, the day of the arrests of members of the Congress subcommittees in the district, Mayapore itself had been quiet. The uprising got off to a slow start. Only Dibrapur and the outlying districts appeared to have jumped the gun. Mr. Poulson set off from Mayapore in the afternoon, in a car, accompanied by one of Mr. Merrick’s inspectors of police, and a truckload of constables, to investigate rumours of trouble in the subdivisions that couldn’t be contacted by telephone, and although when he reached the village of Candgarh he found the Subinspector of Police from Tanpur, one constable and three linesmen from the Posts and Telegraphs, locked in the police post, it was not until he proceeded along the road to Tanpur and found first of all Miss Crane’s burned-out car and then Miss Crane herself that he really began to take the troubles seriously.

The troubles which Mr. Poulson and several others began by not taking seriously took until the end of August to put down. Everyone in Mayapore at that time would have a different story to tell, although there were stories of which each individual had common knowledge. There was, to begin with, the story of Miss Crane, although that was almost immediately lost sight of following the rape of the English girl in the Bibighar gardens on the night of August the 9th, at an hour when Miss Crane was lying in the first delirium of pneumonia in a bed in the Mayapore General Hospital. Later, when Miss Crane found it impossible to identify any of the men arrested that day in Tanpur, for a short while she came again into prominence. People wondered whether she was genuinely at a loss to recognize her own attackers and Mr. Chaudhuri’s murderers, or whether she was being obstinate, overzealous in the business of being fair at all costs to the bloody blacks.