The Ravi Lancers (42 page)

‘I’m afraid that’s hardly for me to choose,’ Krishna had answered, not smiling. The memory of the gas itself was less terrible to him than the memory of the Germans in their masks and--worst of all--the look of his own people, thus deformed into monkeys.

He realized that a voice was calling, ‘Nigger, nigger!’ and glanced around, to see three urchins running behind him, darting back and forth and cocking snooks at his back. He was walking down a long row of soot-stained brick houses, offal and dirt in the gutters, women sitting on the steps. The urchins were barefoot, their feet black, their clothes ragged. A workman in corduroy trousers and heavy flannel shirt, walking the same way, turned on the boys. ‘Garn, he ain’t a nigger. ‘Es an Indian.
Thik hai
, mate?’

Krishna Ram said,
‘Thik hai’

The man stared more closely and said, ‘Gawd, a major! ... No, wot they called a Subadar-Major-Sab, eh?’

‘No,’ Krishna said, ‘I am a major. I am from an Indian State--Ravi.’

‘Never was there, sir, just seven years in Patna and Bareilly. Gawd, what ‘oles.’ Then, to the urchins, ‘Now cut along, you little bastards. Leave the gent alone.’

He turned down a side alley with a touch of his cap and Krishna walked on. Nigger ... they were only nine or ten years old, of course, but where had they learned such scorn? They were lower class, but that made it worse, in a way. They, who were not masters of anything, but mere instruments of the aristocracy, felt the same scorn for his brown skin. Why not? He himself had thought white was superior, once. In some ways it still was. He remembered his grandfather showing him where a hundred white British soldiers had stormed Basohli Fort in the face of a thousand ... drunk perhaps, debased, brutal, as ignorant as these urchins, but sure of their superiority.

The streets became dirtier, narrower, more full of humanity. The bricks were blackened, windows broken, dirt-stained flowers trying to grow in home-made window boxes, a dead puppy in the gutter, five boys swinging a cat round and round by its tail then hurling it against a wall. He went on, past tall factory gates, walls ten feet high of yellow brick, topped with broken glass, revolving spikes, endless buildings, six storeys high, with grimed window panes, from inside the grind and roar and clack of huge machines. Girls walked towards him their young faces drawn, rings under the eyes, mouths tight, stockings holed, shuffling, shuffling. Soot in his hair, ash under his tongue, the smell of privies in the sunless heat, urine in every corner, dog shit slimy on the pavement under the bare feet of the girls playing hopscotch, wafts of stale beer, like the blast from some dank engine room at every pub, men face down in the gutter, vomit on their clothes, their faces in grey-green pools. He walked faster. Where was escape? It was the gas attack again, but here the poison was everywhere, in the air men breathed, in the sky that covered them, in the water they drank--this noisome silent canal beside him, a dead rat bloated in it, another swimming, another eating something the far side, the water sheened with oil, full of metal refuse, dense with the perpetual rain of soot falling on it from above, foul bubbles breaking the thick surface. He wanted to run, but dared not for fear that all the drawn white faces listlessly watching him would recognize his panic and break away from the walls and windows and corners and come after him, grey rats, snarling, teeth bared...

He reached Diana’s factory nearly an hour early and found a grimy bench by the river and sat down. Slowly, as his panic subsided, giving place to a terrible pessimism, he thought that he had been looking into the fundament of the war being waged and to be waged in France and Flanders. There was no romance there, only the desolation of machines fighting machines and grinding man to pieces in the process. Those machines were made in this sulphurous blight--which they had created. Without this, there would be no such war. Without the war, perhaps, this could not exist.

When she came out he was waiting at the tall gates, wondering how working in this place would have changed her. She was wearing her hair done up tight in a dark blue bandanna and looked tired, like those girls he had seen on the nightmare walk, and like them she had dark circles under her eyes. She stopped when she saw him and said, ‘Oh, Krishna--you look tired! ‘

‘Me, too?’ he exclaimed, then, ‘I walked,’ knowing that was not the reason for his appearance and expression.

‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said; then, ‘See, I’ve had to give up my hair.’ She took off the bandanna and shook her head. Her hair was cut short, not much longer than a boy’s.

‘The war demands women’s hair now?’ Krishna said.

She linked her arm in his. ‘No, silly. If we don’t keep it short it won’t fit inside the bandannas, and then it might get caught in the machinery.’

She was guiding him down the street. Her manner had become more familiar since he last saw her in Shrewford Pennel; not that she was anything like the women who had shouted to him from their doorsteps, the blowzy girl hiccuping endearments at him from outside a pub, her skirt half way up her plump, dirty thighs--she was just no longer a parson’s daughter from Wiltshire.

‘More bloody drunks,’ she muttered, dodging a man careening from side to side of the pavement. ‘Oh dear, I do apologize. You wouldn’t believe the language the other girls use--most of them. I didn’t know half the words existed, let alone what they meant.’

He wondered whether she wished she still didn’t. This Diana, who had come with her mother to see him in hospital the day after he arrived from France, was not the Shrewford Pennel girl. She was losing not exactly innocence but a country placidity, something rooted in the heavy Wiltshire earth.

‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘I’m ravenous. I hope you are, too, because really, the food’s not very good.’

It was the dining-room of an old-fashioned pub on the river front, and as they ate Diana gradually reverted to her old manner, as though slowly sloughing off the influence of the factory. Contrary to what he expected, as she drank sherry and then beer, she became calmer and less talkative. He told her of his selection to play for A Surrey XI, and she cried, ‘Oh, how marvellous, Krishna! Can I come and watch, and then we’ll catch the late train down, as we were planning to?’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll get you a good ticket. Do you want to bring anyone with you?’

‘Who?’ she said. ‘I don’t have any men friends and I certainly don’t think I’d like having one of the factory girls with me when I was watching you ... You’ll make a century! ‘

‘I doubt it,’ he said, smiling at her. Her eyes were warm and for a moment they looked at each other without saying a word. Then she took up her beer and said, ‘Look at me drinking beer! I’d never done that until I came here.’

‘You’re changing,’ he said, and knew that he meant not only her, or Warren Bateman her brother, but all England, all Europe. He wished suddenly that he could talk to Prince Ranjitsinhji and ask him whether he, who had known England well through cricket for twenty years, had noticed any change in the people’s character and outlook since the war started.

‘Some of the girls rush to a pub as soon as the hooter blows, and have a port and lemon,’ Diana said. ‘Can you imagine! And others take neat gin. Do you know what they call it? Mothers’ Ruin!’ She smiled, the shyness of the smile belying the pertness of the words. She said, ‘The person who really ought to be seeing you play is Warrie.’

‘Yes,’ Krishna said cautiously.

‘He’d be so proud of you.’ Her face clouded. ‘I wish he could come back ... for good.’

Krishna said quietly, ‘Why?’

‘Oh,’ she said, her hands knotting together. She looked up at him then down at the table. ‘It’s Joan.’

‘What about her?’ he insisted. He thought he knew what she was trying to say and was trying to help her say it.

‘She’s ... growing away from him,’ Diana said.

‘I saw that last time I was over,’ he said. ‘It seems to be caused by the war. They have different ideas about it. Is there anything else?’

‘No, no,’ she said suddenly breezy. ‘Let’s not talk about her, but about you. Tell me about the trenches, the battles, about Warrie...’

He sighed. She could not bring herself to share the truth with him. Not yet, at least. He tried to switch to her new mood and after a time began to succeed. The horror of the afternoon’s walk faded. It did not leave him. It would never leave him, he knew--but it stepped back and down, into some deep, hidden part of him, where it would always remain, to stain certain emotions, thoughts and ideas with a sense of debasement and squalor. But for now, the immediacy of his fear was gone, and this Englishwoman with her openness, her slow smile, her new and transparent urban veneer, had done it. When he took her to the door of the dingy house where she lodged, she said, ‘You’re looking much better now, Krishna. Perhaps you hadn’t eaten enough for lunch.’ She went inside with a wave of her hand. In the train back to Charing Cross, and the bus to the convalescent home, Krishna realized that he was hovering on the edge of falling in love.

Falling in love, he thought, with a shock of surprise. That meant marriage ... making love. And he had contracted a vile disease with a French whore. Was he really cured? It was somehow impossible to associate sex with Diana, and yet whenever lustful thoughts came to him the un-faced female body that he used--he had to admit it openly to himself now--was hers.

Saturday was a grey day of low clouds and a hint of rain in the air. Mr. Wilkinson, the captain, said before they went out to field, ‘Keep a sharp eye on the ball today. It’ll be easy to lose it against the gas works or the crowd.’ The ground was almost full, but Krishna felt no nervousness as he walked out with the rest of the side, only pride that he was playing cricket at the Oval. How proud Mr. Fleming would be of him now, if he could see him; and Diana was there, watching. The match had two faces, obverse and reverse of the same medal. On one side were the white flannels, the red ball, the golden-varnished stumps, the shaved turf, the easy gait of the famous professionals, the umpires in their long white smocks, like the ritual robes of Brahmins; and on the other the gas works hunched in appalling ugliness over the ground, the close-packed crowd, smoke rising from a thousand chimneys all round; but the latter was necessary to pay for the former.

The London Military District side contained several names he recognized from his study of Wisden. ‘Put in cushy jobs back ‘ome to keep ‘em from being sent to France,’ one wizened old pro muttered as he read the other side’s batting order. They played well and declared two hours after lunch with a score of 208 for 6. Krishna took one easy catch at mid-on, but did not bowl. Back in the pavilion the Surrey captain said, ‘We can make it if we don’t try to hurry. There are nearly four hours of play left. Any special things we should look for, Hobbs?’

Hobbs said, ‘Just watch that Kendrick, sir. He’s a foot quicker off the pitch than he looks to be.’ Then he and Sandham went out to open the innings, as they had done a hundred times before for Surrey; but now, in the batting order below them were only two or three names that anyone had ever heard of, the rest in Flanders, above or below ground, or in warships on or under the North Sea.

It wasn’t Kendrick who got Hobbs, but an unknown club player who bowled him an unintentional yorker before he’d got his eye in, and the scorers had to put down one of the very few 0s ever to follow Hobbs’s name on a score sheet. Kendrick then bowled two men in quick succession, and a little later had another caught in the slips. Four for 37 when Krishna went in to bat, a very different kettle of fish from 209 to make and all wickets in hand. And, as the last man out muttered with an oath, the pitch was crumbling at the gasworks end. Hobbs touched Krishna’s arm as he went out and said, ‘Concentrate, sir ... concentrate, and you’ll do all right.’

He walked out on to the green turf, his bat under his arm. Diana was sitting there near the steps. He knew that if he didn’t see her now he would be thinking of her when he was at the crease, and that would ruin his concentration. He searched for her in the crowd as he walked down, and at last she shyly waved her gloved hand. He smiled at her, touching his free hand to the peak of his yellow and white Ravi cap.

He took guard and faced the last two balls of Kendrick’s over. The second lifted viciously and for a fraction of a second, the vital one, he lost sight of it. It struck him hard on the ribs and the bowler was already spinning round shrieking ‘Huzzat?’ But the umpire turned his head away with a look of immense disdain, and Krishna had survived.

He watched the old professional, Nash, stonewall an over from a cunning slow left-hander at the other end, then again faced Kendrick. Kendrick bowled exactly the same ball that had hit Krishna last time, but now he was sunk in the utter concentration he had known at the nets, and with the same sense that Hobbs was watching not his play, but looking inside his head, gauging his concentration. The ball floated up seeming as big as a football, but slower. He hooked it over the square leg boundary for 6. For a moment he heard the clapping before his concentration again closed in, this time never to relax, so that he heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing, but the ball. He straight drove the next three in succession for 4 each then ran a sharp single past cover. When he faced the slow bowler he scored 19 off him in an over, and the man was taken off. Kendrick again, by now getting angry and trying to bump him. Twice he cut him for 4, and once, down on one knee, swept him over the leg boundary for 6. Then, seeing that Kendrick was recovering his guile in proportion as he was losing the aggressiveness of the attacking fast bowler, and realizing that the time for shock action was over, Krishna batted very carefully, scoring only 21 runs in an hour. By then the back of the bowling was broken, and though the pitch was rapidly deteriorating--so rapidly that three wickets were lost by easy catches to balls that stood up in the air--the Surrey XI had no difficulty in passing the 208 half an hour before stumps were due to be drawn, Krishna walking back with 103 not out on the big board against his number. The pavilion rose to him as he came in, an unknown young pro at his side. He raised his cap silently, again looking for Diana. She was there, clapping like a madwoman, then holding her hands pressed to her chest, gazing at him. He went inside the pavilion, her worshipping face a vision steady before his eyes.