The young man looked exhausted and tragic, also gentler than usual. He always showed deference to his superiors, but now it came straight from his heart. He seemed to appeal for their protection in the insult that had befallen him, and they, in instinctive homage, rose to their feet. But every human act in the East is tainted with officialism, and while honouring him they condemned Aziz and India. Fielding realized this, and he remained seated. It was an ungracious, a caddish thing to do, perhaps an unsound thing to do, but he felt he had been passive long enough, and that he might be drawn into the wrong current if he did not make a stand. Ronny, who had not seen him, said in husky tones, “Oh please—please all sit down, I only want to listen what has been decided.”
“Heaslop, I’m telling them I’m against any show of force,” said the Collector apologetically. “I don’t know whether you will feel as I do, but that is how I am situated. When the verdict is obtained, it will be another matter.”
“You are sure to know best; I have no experience, Burra Sahib.”
“How is your mother, old boy?”
“Better, thank you. I wish everyone would sit down.”
“Some have never got up,” the young soldier said.
“And the Major brings us an excellent report of Miss Quested,” Turton went on.
“I do, I do, I’m satisfied.”
“You thought badly of her earlier, did you not, Major? That’s why I refused bail.”
Callendar laughed with friendly inwardness, and said, “Heaslop, Heaslop, next time bail’s wanted, ring up the old doctor before giving it; his shoulders are broad, and, speaking in the strictest confidence, don’t take the old doctor’s opinion too seriously. He’s a blithering idiot, we can always leave it at that, but he’ll do the little he can towards keeping in quod the——” He broke off with affected politeness. “Oh, but he has one of his friends here.”
The subaltern called, “Stand up, you swine.”
“Mr. Fielding, what has prevented you from standing up?” said the Collector, entering the fray at last. It was the attack for which Fielding had waited, and to which he must reply.
“May I make a statement, sir?”
“Certainly.”
Seasoned and self-contained, devoid of the fervours of nationality or youth, the schoolmaster did what was for him a comparatively easy thing. He stood up and said, “I believe Dr. Aziz to be innocent.”
“You have a right to hold that opinion if you choose, but pray is that any reason why you should insult Mr. Heaslop?”
“May I conclude my statement?”
“Certainly.”
“I am waiting for the verdict of the courts. If he is guilty I resign from my service, and leave India. I resign from the club now.”
“Hear, hear!” said voices, not entirely hostile, for they liked the fellow for speaking out.
“You have not answered my question. Why did you not stand when Mr. Heaslop entered?”
“With all deference, sir, I am not here to answer questions, but to make a personal statement, and I have concluded it.”
“May I ask whether you have taken over charge of this District?”
Fielding moved towards the door.
“One moment, Mr. Fielding. You are not to go yet, please. Before you leave the club, from which you do very well to resign, you will express some detestation of the crime, and you will apologize to Mr. Heaslop.”
“Are you speaking to me officially, sir?”
The Collector, who never spoke otherwise, was so infuriated that he lost his head. He cried, “Leave this room at once, and I deeply regret that I demeaned myself to meet you at the station. You have sunk to the level of your associates; you are weak, weak, that is what is wrong with you——”
“I want to leave the room, but cannot while this gentleman prevents me,” said Fielding lightly; the subaltern had got across his path.
“Let him go,” said Ronny, almost in tears.
It was the only appeal that could have saved the situation. Whatever Heaslop wished must be done. There was a slight scuffle at the door, from which Fielding was propelled, a little more quickly than is natural, into the room where the ladies were playing cards. “Fancy if I’d fallen or got angry,” he thought. Of course he was a little angry. His peers had never offered him violence or called him weak before, besides Heaslop had heaped coals of fire on his head. He wished he had not picked the quarrel over poor suffering Heaslop, when there were cleaner issues at hand.
However, there it was, done, muddled through, and to cool himself and regain mental balance he went on to the upper verandah for a moment, where the first object he saw was the Marabar Hills. At this distance and hour they leapt into beauty; they were Monsalvat, Walhalla, the towers of a cathedral, peopled with saints and heroes, and covered with flowers. What miscreant lurked in them, presently to be detected by the activities of the law? Who was the guide, and had he been found yet? What was the “echo” of which the girl complained? He did not know, but presently he would know. Great is information, and she shall prevail. It was the last moment of the light, and as he gazed at the Marabar Hills they seemed to move graciously towards him like a queen, and their charm became the sky’s. At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill. Lovely, exquisite moment—but passing the Englishman with averted face and on swift wings. He experienced nothing himself; it was as if someone had told him there was such a moment, and he was obliged to believe. And he felt dubious and discontented suddenly, and wondered whether he was really and truly successful as a human being. After forty years’ experience, he had learnt to manage his life and make the best of it on advanced European lines, had developed his personality, explored his limitations, controlled his passions—and he had done it all without becoming either pedantic or worldly. A creditable achievement, but as the moment passed, he felt he ought to have been working at something else the whole time,—he didn’t know at what, never would know, never could know, and that was why he felt sad.
Dismissing his regrets, as inappropriate to the matter in hand, he accomplished the last section of the day by riding off to his new allies. He was glad that he had broken with the club, for he would have picked up scraps of gossip there, and reported them down in the city, and he was glad to be denied this opportunity. He would miss his billiards, and occasional tennis, and cracks with McBryde, but really that was all, so light did he travel. At the entrance of the bazaars, a tiger made his horse shy—a youth dressed up as a tiger, the body striped brown and yellow, a mask over the face. Mohurram was working up. The city beat a good many drums, but seemed good-tempered. He was invited to inspect a small tazia—a flimsy and frivolous erection, more like a crinoline than the tomb of the grandson of the Prophet, done to death at Kerbela. Excited children were pasting coloured paper over its ribs. The rest of the evening he spent with the Nawab Bahadur, Hamidullah, Mahmoud Ali, and others of the confederacy. The campaign was also working up. A telegram had been sent to the famous Amritrao, and his acceptance received. Application for bail was to be renewed—it could not well be withheld now that Miss Quested was out of danger. The conference was serious and sensible, but marred by a group of itinerant musicians, who were allowed to play in the compound. Each held a large earthenware jar, containing pebbles, and jerked it up and down in time to a doleful chant. Distracted by the noise, he suggested their dismissal, but the Nawab Bahadur vetoed it; he said that musicians, who had walked many miles, might bring good luck.
Late at night, he had an inclination to tell Professor Godbole of the tactical and moral error he had made in being rude to Heaslop, and to hear what he would say. But the old fellow had gone to bed, and slipped off unmolested to his new job in a day or two: he always did possess the knack of slipping off.
Adela lay for several days in the McBrydes’ bungalow. She had been touched by the sun, also hundreds of cactus spines had to be picked out of her flesh. Hour after hour Miss Derek and Mrs. McBryde examined her through magnifying glasses, always coming on fresh colonies, tiny hairs that might snap off and be drawn into the blood if they were neglected. She lay passive beneath their fingers, which developed the shock that had begun in the cave. Hitherto she had not much minded whether she was touched or not: her senses were abnormally inert and the only contact she anticipated was that of mind. Everything now was transferred to the surface of her body, which began to avenge itself, and feed unhealthily. People seemed very much alike, except that some would come close while others kept away. “In space things touch, in time things part,” she repeated to herself while the thorns were being extracted—her brain so weak that she could not decide whether the phrase was a philosophy or a pun.
They were kind to her, indeed over-kind, the men too respectful, the women too sympathetic; whereas Mrs. Moore, the only visitor she wanted, kept away. No one understood her trouble, or knew why she vibrated between hard commonsense and hysteria. She would begin a speech as if nothing particular had happened. “I went into this detestable cave,” she would say dryly, “and I remember scratching the wall with my finger-nail, to start the usual echo, and then as I was saying there was this shadow, or sort of shadow, down the entrance tunnel, bottling me up. It seemed like an age, but I suppose the whole thing can’t have lasted thirty seconds really. I hit at him with the glasses, he pulled me round the cave by the strap, it broke, I escaped, that’s all. He never actually touched me once. It all seems such nonsense.” Then her eyes would fill with tears. “Naturally I’m upset, but I shall get over it.” And then she would break down entirely, and the women would feel she was one of themselves and cry too, and men in the next room murmur: “Good God, good God!” No one realized that she thought tears vile, a degradation more subtle than anything endured in the Marabar, a negation of her advanced outlook and the natural honesty of her mind. Adela was always trying to “think the incident out,” always reminding herself that no harm had been done. There was “the shock,” but what is that? For a time her own logic would convince her, then she would hear the echo again, weep, declare she was unworthy of Ronny, and hope her assailant would get the maximum penalty. After one of these bouts, she longed to go out into the bazaars and ask pardon from everyone she met, for she felt in some vague way that she was leaving the world worse than she found it. She felt that it was her crime, until the intellect, reawakening, pointed out to her that she was inaccurate here, and set her again upon her sterile round.
If only she could have seen Mrs. Moore! The old lady had not been well either, and was disinclined to come out, Ronny reported. And consequently the echo flourished, raging up and down like a nerve in the faculty of her hearing, and the noise in the cave, so unimportant intellectually, was prolonged over the surface of her life. She had struck the polished wall—for no reason—and before the comment had died away, he followed her, and the climax was the falling of her field-glasses. The sound had spouted after her when she escaped, and was going on still like a river that gradually floods the plain. Only Mrs. Moore could drive it back to its source and seal the broken reservoir. Evil was loose . . . she could even hear it entering the lives of others. . . . And Adela spent days in this atmosphere of grief and depression. Her friends kept up their spirits by demanding holocausts of natives, but she was too worried and weak to do that.
When the cactus thorns had all been extracted, and her temperature fallen to normal, Ronny came to fetch her away. He was worn with indignation and suffering, and she wished she could comfort him; but intimacy seemed to caricature itself, and the more they spoke the more wretched and self-conscious they became. Practical talk was the least painful, and he and McBryde now told her one or two things which they had concealed from her during the crisis, by the doctor’s orders. She learnt for the first time of the Mohurram troubles. There had nearly been a riot. The last day of the festival, the great procession left its official route, and tried to enter the civil station, and a telephone had been cut because it interrupted the advance of one of the larger paper towers. McBryde and his police had pulled the thing straight—a fine piece of work. They passed on to another and very painful subject: the trial. She would have to appear in court, identify the prisoner, and submit to cross-examination by an Indian lawyer.
“Can Mrs. Moore be with me?” was all she said.
“Certainly, and I shall be there myself,” Ronny replied. “The case won’t come before me; they’ve objected to me on personal grounds. It will be at Chandrapore—we thought at one time it would be transferred elsewhere.”
“Miss Quested realizes what all that means, though,” said McBryde sadly. “The case will come before Das.”
Das was Ronny’s assistant—own brother to the Mrs. Bhattacharya whose carriage had played them false last month. He was courteous and intelligent, and with the evidence before him could only come to one conclusion; but that he should be judge over an English girl had convulsed the station with wrath, and some of the women had sent a telegram about it to Lady Mellanby, the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor.
“I must come before someone.”
“That’s—that’s the way to face it. You have the pluck, Miss Quested.” He grew very bitter over the arrangements, and called them “the fruits of democracy.” In the old days an Englishwoman would not have had to appear, nor would any Indian have dared to discuss her private affairs. She would have made her deposition, and judgment would have followed. He apologized to her for the condition of the country, with the result that she gave one of her sudden little shoots of tears. Ronny wandered miserably about the room while she cried, treading upon the flowers of the Kashmir carpet that so inevitably covered it or drumming on the brass Benares bowls. “I do this less every day, I shall soon be quite well,” she said, blowing her nose and feeling hideous.
“What I need is something to do. That is why I keep on with this ridiculous crying.”
“It’s not ridiculous, we think you wonderful,” said the policeman very sincerely. “It only bothers us that we can’t help you more. Your stopping here—at such a time—is the greatest honour this house——” He too was overcome with emotion. “By the way, a letter came here for you while you were ill,” he continued. “I opened it, which is a strange confession to make. Will you forgive me? The circumstances are peculiar. It is from Fielding.”
“Why should he write to me?”
“A most lamentable thing has happened. The defence got hold of him.”
“He’s a crank, a crank,” said Ronny lightly.
“That’s your way of putting it, but a man can be a crank without being a cad. Miss Quested had better know how he behaved to you. If you don’t tell her, somebody else will.” He told her. “He is now the mainstay of the defence, I needn’t add. He is the one righteous Englishman in a horde of tyrants. He receives deputations from the bazaar, and they all chew betel nut and smear one another’s hands with scent. It is not easy to enter into the mind of such a man. His students are on strike—out of enthusiasm for him they won’t learn their lessons. If it weren’t for Fielding one would never have had the Mohurram trouble. He has done a very grave disservice to the whole community. The letter lay here a day or two, waiting till you were well enough, then the situation got so grave that I decided to open it in case it was useful to us.”
“Is it?” she said feebly.
“Not at all. He only has the impertinence to suggest you have made a mistake.”
“Would that I had!” She glanced through the letter, which was careful and formal in its wording. “Dr. Aziz is innocent,” she read. Then her voice began to tremble again. “But think of his behaviour to you, Ronny. When you had already to bear so much for my sake! It was shocking of him. My dear, how can I repay you? How can one repay when one has nothing to give? What is the use of personal relationships when everyone brings less and less to them? I feel we ought all to go back into the desert for centuries and try and get good. I want to begin at the beginning. All the things I thought I’d learnt are just a hindrance, they’re not knowledge at all. I’m not fit for personal relationships. Well, let’s go, let’s go. Of course Mr. Fielding’s letter doesn’t count; he can think and write what he likes, only he shouldn’t have been rude to you when you had so much to bear. That’s what matters. . . . I don’t want your arm, I’m a magnificent walker, so don’t touch me, please.”
Mrs. McBryde wished her an affectionate good-bye—a woman with whom she had nothing in common and whose intimacy oppressed her. They would have to meet now, year after year, until one of their husbands was superannuated. Truly Anglo-India had caught her with a vengeance, and perhaps it served her right for having tried to take up a line of her own. Humbled yet repelled, she gave thanks. “Oh, we must help one another, we must take the rough with the smooth,” said Mrs. McBryde. Miss Derek was there too, still making jokes about her comic Maharajah and Rani. Required as a witness at the trial, she had refused to send back the Mudkul car; they would be frightfully sick. Both Mrs. McBryde and Miss Derek kissed her, and called her by her Christian name. Then Ronny drove her back. It was early in the morning, for the day, as the hot weather advanced, swelled like a monster at both ends, and left less and less room for the movements of mortals.
As they neared his bungalow, he said: “Mother’s looking forward to seeing you, but of course she’s old, one mustn’t forget that. Old people never take things as one expects, in my opinion.” He seemed warning her against approaching disappointment, but she took no notice. Her friendship with Mrs. Moore was so deep and real that she felt sure it would last, whatever else happened. “What can I do to make things easier for you? it’s you who matter,” she sighed.
“Dear old girl to say so.”
“Dear old boy.” Then she cried: “Ronny, she isn’t ill too?”
He reassured her; Major Callendar was not dissatisfied.
“But you’ll find her—irritable. We are an irritable family. Well, you’ll see for yourself. No doubt my own nerves are out of order, and I expected more from mother when I came in from the office than she felt able to give. She is sure to make a special effort for you; still, I don’t want your home-coming to be a disappointing one. Don’t expect too much.”
The house came in sight. It was a replica of the bungalow she had left. Puffy, red, and curiously severe, Mrs. Moore was revealed upon a sofa. She didn’t get up when they entered, and the surprise of this roused Adela from her own troubles.
“Here you are both back,” was the only greeting.
Adela sat down and took her hand. It withdrew, and she felt that just as others repelled her, so did she repel Mrs. Moore.
“Are you all right? You appeared all right when I left,” said Ronny, trying not to speak crossly, but he had instructed her to give the girl a pleasant welcome, and he could not but feel annoyed.
“I am all right,” she said heavily. “As a matter of fact I have been looking at my return ticket. It is interchangeable, so I have a much larger choice of boats home than I thought.”
“We can go into that later, can’t we?”
“Ralph and Stella may be wanting to know when I arrive.”
“There is plenty of time for all such plans. How do you think our Adela looks?”
“I am counting on you to help me through; it is such a blessing to be with you again, everyone else is a stranger,” said the girl rapidly.
But Mrs. Moore showed no inclination to be helpful. A sort of resentment emanated from her. She seemed to say: “Am I to be bothered for ever?” Her Christian tenderness had gone, or had developed into a hardness, a just irritation against the human race; she had taken no interest at the arrest, asked scarcely any questions, and had refused to leave her bed on the awful last night of Mohurram, when an attack was expected on the bungalow.
“I know it’s all nothing; I must be sensible, I do try——” Adela continued, working again towards tears.
“I shouldn’t mind if it had happened anywhere else; at least I really don’t know where it did happen.”
Ronny supposed that he understood what she meant: she could not identify or describe the particular cave, indeed almost refused to have her mind cleared up about it, and it was recognized that the defence would try to make capital out of this during the trial. He reassured her: the Marabar caves were notoriously like one another; indeed, in the future they were to be numbered in sequence with white paint.
“Yes, I mean that, at least not exactly; but there is this echo that I keep on hearing.”
“Oh, what of the echo?” asked Mrs. Moore, paying attention to her for the first time.
“I can’t get rid of it.”
“I don’t suppose you ever will.”
Ronny had emphasized to his mother that Adela would arrive in a morbid state, yet she was being positively malicious.
“Mrs. Moore, what is this echo?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No—what is it? oh, do say! I felt you would be able to explain it . . . this will comfort me so. . . .”
“If you don’t know, you don’t know; I can’t tell you.”
“I think you’re rather unkind not to say.”
“Say, say, say,” said the old lady bitterly. “As if anything can be said! I have spent my life in saying or in listening to sayings; I have listened too much. It is time I was left in peace. Not to die,” she added sourly. “No doubt you expect me to die, but when I have seen you and Ronny married, and seen the other two and whether they want to be married—I’ll retire then into a cave of my own.” She smiled, to bring down her remark into ordinary life and thus add to its bitterness. “Somewhere where no young people will come asking questions and expecting answers. Some shelf.”
“Quite so, but meantime a trial is coming on,” said her son hotly, “and the notion of most of us is that we’d better pull together and help one another through, instead of being disagreeable. Are you going to talk like that in the witness-box?”
“Why should I be in the witness-box?”
“To confirm certain points in our evidence.”
“I have nothing to do with your ludicrous law courts,” she said, angry. “I will not be dragged in at all.”
“I won’t have her dragged in, either; I won’t have any more trouble on my account,” cried Adela, and again took the hand, which was again withdrawn. “Her evidence is not the least essential.”
“I thought she would want to give it. No one blames you, mother, but the fact remains that you dropped off at the first cave, and encouraged Adela to go on with him alone, whereas if you’d been well enough to keep on too nothing would have happened. He planned it, I know. Still, you fell into his trap just like Fielding and Antony before you. . . . Forgive me for speaking so plainly, but you’ve no right to take up this high and mighty attitude about law courts. If you’re ill, that’s different; but you say you’re all right and you seem so, in which case I thought you’ld want to take your part, I did really.”
“I’ll not have you worry her whether she’s well or ill,” said Adela, leaving the sofa and taking his arm; then dropped it with a sigh and sat down again. But he was pleased she had rallied to him and surveyed his mother patronizingly. He had never felt easy with her. She was by no means the dear old lady outsiders supposed, and India had brought her into the open.
“I shall attend your marriage, but not your trial,” she informed them, tapping her knee; she had become very restless, and rather ungraceful. “Then I shall go to England.”
“You can’t go to England in May, as you agreed.”
“I have changed my mind.”
“Well, we’d better end this unexpected wrangle,” said the young man, striding about. “You appear to want to be left out of everything, and that’s enough.”
“My body, my miserable body,” she sighed. “Why isn’t it strong? Oh, why can’t I walk away and be gone? Why can’t I finish my duties and be gone? Why do I get headaches and puff when I walk? And all the time this to do and that to do and this to do in your way and that to do in her way, and everything sympathy and confusion and bearing one another’s burdens. Why can’t this be done and that be done in my way and they be done and I at peace? Why has anything to be done, I cannot see. Why all this marriage, marriage? . . . The human race would have become a single person centuries ago if marriage was any use. And all this rubbish about love, love in a church, love in a cave, as if there is the least difference, and I held up from my business over such trifles!”
“What do you want?” he said, exasperated. “Can you state it in simple language? If so, do.”
“I want my pack of patience cards.”
“Very well, get them.”
He found, as he expected, that the poor girl was crying. And, as always, an Indian close outside the window, a mali in this case, picking up sounds. Much upset, he sat silent for a moment, thinking over his mother and her senile intrusions. He wished he had never asked her to visit India, or become under any obligation to her.
“Well, my dear girl, this isn’t much of a home-coming,” he said at last. “I had no idea she had this up her sleeve.”
Adela had stopped crying. An extraordinary expression was on her face, half relief, half horror. She repeated, “Aziz, Aziz.”
They all avoided mentioning that name. It had become synonymous with the power of evil. He was “the prisoner,” “the person in question,” “the defence,” and the sound of it now rang out like the first note of new symphony.
“Aziz . . . have I made a mistake?”
“You’re over-tired,” he cried, not much surprised.
“Ronny, he’s innocent; I made an awful mistake.”
“Well, sit down anyhow.” He looked round the room, but only two sparrows were chasing one another. She obeyed and took hold of his hand. He stroked it and she smiled, and gasped as if she had risen to the surface of the water, then touched her ear.
“My echo’s better.”
“That’s good. You’ll be perfectly well in a few days, but you must save yourself up for the trial. Das is a very good fellow, we shall all be with you.”
“But Ronny, dear Ronny, perhaps there oughtn’t to be any trial.”
“I don’t quite know what you’re saying, and I don’t think you do.”
“If Dr. Aziz never did it he ought to be let out.”
A shiver like impending death passed over Ronny. He said hurriedly, “He was let out—until the Mohurram riot, when he had to be put in again.” To divert her, he told her the story, which was held to be amusing. Nureddin had stolen the Nawab Bahadur’s car and driven Aziz into a ditch in the dark. Both of them had fallen out, and Nureddin had cut his face open. Their wailing had been drowned by the cries of the faithful, and it was quite a time before they were rescued by the police. Nureddin was taken to the Minto Hospital, Aziz restored to prison, with an additional charge against him of disturbing the public peace. “Half a minute,” he remarked when the anecdote was over, and went to the telephone to ask Callendar to look in as soon as he found it convenient, because she hadn’t borne the journey well.
When he returned, she was in a nervous crisis, but it took a different form—she clung to him, and sobbed, “Help me to do what I ought. Aziz is good. You heard your mother say so.”
“Heard what?”
“He’s good; I’ve been so wrong to accuse him.”
“Mother never said so.”
“Didn’t she?” she asked, quite reasonable, open to every suggestion anyway.
“She never mentioned that name once.”
“But, Ronny, I heard her.”
“Pure illusion. You can’t be quite well, can you, to make up a thing like that.”
“I suppose I can’t. How amazing of me!”
“I was listening to all she said, as far as it could be listened to; she gets very incoherent.”
“When her voice dropped she said it—towards the end, when she talked about love—love—I couldn’t follow, but just then she said: ‘Doctor Aziz never did it.’”
“Those words?”
“The idea more than the words.”
“Never, never, my dear girl. Complete illusion. His name was not mentioned by anyone. Look here—you are confusing this with Fielding’s letter.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” she cried, greatly relieved. “I knew I’d heard his name somewhere. I am so grateful to you for clearing this up—it’s the sort of mistake that worries me, and proves I’m neurotic.”
“So you won’t go saying he’s innocent again, will you? for every servant I’ve got is a spy.” He went to the window. The mali had gone, or rather had turned into two small children—impossible they should know English, but he sent them packing. “They all hate us,” he explained. “It’ll be all right after the verdict, for I will say this for them, they do accept the accomplished fact; but at present they’re pouring out money like water to catch us tripping, and a remark like yours is the very thing they look out for. It would enable them to say it was a put-up job on the part of us officials. You see what I mean.”
Mrs. Moore came back, with the same air of ill-temper, and sat down with a flump by the card-table. To clear the confusion up, Ronny asked her point-blank whether she had mentioned the prisoner. She could not understand the question and the reason of it had to be explained. She replied: “I never said his name,” and began to play patience.
“I thought you said, ‘Aziz is an innocent man,’ but it was in Mr. Fielding’s letter.”
“Of course he is innocent,” she answered indifferently: it was the first time she had expressed an opinion on the point.
“You see, Ronny, I was right,” said the girl.
“You were not right, she never said it.”
“But she thinks it.”
“Who cares what she thinks?”
“Red nine on black ten——” from the card-table.
“She can think, and Fielding too, but there’s such a thing as evidence, I suppose.”
“I know, but——”
“Is it again my duty to talk?” asked Mrs. Moore, looking up. “Apparently, as you keep interrupting me.”
“Only if you have anything sensible to say.”
“Oh, how tedious . . . trivial . . .” and as when she had scoffed at love, love, love, her mind seemed to move towards them from a great distance and out of darkness. “Oh, why is everything still my duty? when shall I be free from your fuss? Was he in the cave and were you in the cave and on and on . . . and Unto us a Son is born, unto us a Child is given . . . and am I good and is he bad and are we saved? . . . and ending everything the echo.”
“I don’t hear it so much,” said Adela, moving towards her. “You send it away, you do nothing but good, you are so good.”
“I am not good, no, bad.” She spoke more calmly and resumed her cards, saying as she turned them up, “A bad old woman, bad, bad, detestable. I used to be good with the children growing up, also I meet this young man in his mosque, I wanted him to be happy. Good, happy, small people. They do not exist, they were a dream. . . . But I will not help you to torture him for what he never did. There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.”
“Have you any evidence in the prisoner’s favour?” said Ronny in the tones of the just official. “If so, it is your bounden duty to go into the witness-box for him instead of for us. No one will stop you.”
“One knows people’s characters, as you call them,” she retorted disdainfully, as if she really knew more than character but could not impart it. “I have heard both English and Indians speak well of him, and I felt it isn’t the sort of thing he would do.”
“Feeble, mother, feeble.”
“Most feeble.”
“And most inconsiderate to Adela.”
Adela said: “It would be so appalling if I was wrong. I should take my own life.”
He turned on her with: “What was I warning you just now? You know you’re right, and the whole station knows it.”
“Yes, he . . . This is very, very awful. I’m as certain as ever he followed me . . . only, wouldn’t it be possible to withdraw the case? I dread the idea of giving evidence more and more, and you are all so good to women here and you have so much more power than in England—look at Miss Derek’s motor-car. Oh, of course it’s out of the question, I’m ashamed to have mentioned it; please forgive me.”
“That’s all right,” he said inadequately. “Of course I forgive you, as you call it. But the case has to come before a magistrate now; it really must, the machinery has started.”
“She has started the machinery; it will work to its end.”
Adela inclined towards tears in consequence of this unkind remark, and Ronny picked up the list of steamship sailings with an excellent notion in his head. His mother ought to leave India at once: she was doing no good to herself or to anyone else there.
Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, had been gratified by the appeal addressed to her by the ladies of Chandrapore. She could not do anything—besides, she was sailing for England; but she desired to be informed if she could show sympathy in any other way. Mrs. Turton replied that Mr. Heaslop’s mother was trying to get a passage, but had delayed too long, and all the boats were full; could Lady Mellanby use her influence? Not even Lady Mellanby could expand the dimensions of a P. and O., but she was a very, very nice woman, and she actually wired offering the unknown and obscure old lady accommodation in her own reserved cabin. It was like a gift from heaven; humble and grateful, Ronny could not but reflect that there are compensations for every woe. His name was familiar at Government House owing to poor Adela, and now Mrs. Moore would stamp it on Lady Mellanby’s imagination, as they journeyed across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea. He had a return of tenderness for his mother—as we do for our relatives when they receive conspicuous and unexpected honour. She was not negligible, she could still arrest the attention of a high official’s wife.
So Mrs. Moore had all she wished; she escaped the trial, the marriage, and the hot weather; she would return to England in comfort and distinction, and see her other children. At her son’s suggestion, and by her own desire, she departed. But she accepted her good luck without enthusiasm. She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity. Mrs. Moore had always inclined to resignation. As soon as she landed in India it seemed to her good, and when she saw the water flowing through the mosque-tank, or the Ganges, or the moon, caught in the shawl of night with all the other stars, it seemed a beautiful goal and an easy one. To be one with the universe! So dignified and simple. But there was always some little duty to be performed first, some new card to be turned up from the diminishing pack and placed, and while she was pottering about, the Marabar struck its gong.
What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, “and if it had,” she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, “if it had, there are worse evils than love.” The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church—Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but—— Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: “Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no sorrow like my sorrow,” although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably.
Her son couldn’t escort her to Bombay, for the local situation continued acute, and all officials had to remain at their posts. Antony couldn’t come either, in case he never returned to give his evidence. So she travelled with no one who could remind her of the past. This was a relief. The heat had drawn back a little before its next advance, and the journey was not unpleasant. As she left Chandrapore the moon, full again, shone over the Ganges and touched the shrinking channels into threads of silver, then veered and looked into her window. The swift and comfortable mail-train slid with her through the night, and all the next day she was rushing through Central India, through landscapes that were baked and bleached but had not the hopeless melancholy of the plain. She watched the indestructible life of man and his changing faces, and the houses he has built for himself and God, and they appeared to her not in terms of her own trouble but as things to see. There was, for instance, a place called Asirgarh which she passed at sunset and identified on a map—an enormous fortress among wooded hills. No one had ever mentioned Asirgarh to her, but it had huge and noble bastions and to the right of them was a mosque. She forgot it. Ten minutes later, Asirgarh reappeared. The mosque was to the left of the bastions now. The train in its descent through the Vindyas had described a semicircle round Asirgarh. What could she connect it with except its own name? Nothing; she knew no one who lived there. But it had looked at her twice and seemed to say: “I do not vanish.” She woke in the middle of the night with a start, for the train was falling over the western cliff. Moonlit pinnacles rushed up at her like the fringes of a sea; then a brief episode of plain, the real sea, and the soupy dawn of Bombay. “I have not seen the right places,” she thought, as she saw embayed in the platforms of the Victoria Terminus the end of the rails that had carried her over a continent and could never carry her back. She would never visit Asirgarh or the other untouched places; neither Delhi nor Agra nor the Rajputana cities nor Kashmir, nor the obscurer marvels that had sometimes shone through men’s speech: the bilingual rock of Girnar, the statue of Shri Belgola, the ruins of Mandu and Hampi, temples of Khajraha, gardens of Shalimar. As she drove through the huge city which the West has built and abandoned with a gesture of despair, she longed to stop, though it was only Bombay, and disentangle the hundred Indias that passed each other in its streets. The feet of the horses moved her on, and presently the boat sailed and thousands of coco-nut palms appeared all round the anchorage and climbed the hills to wave her farewell. “So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final?” they laughed. “What have we in common with them, or they with Asirgarh? Good-bye!” Then the steamer rounded Colaba, the continent swung about, the cliff of the Ghats melted into the haze of a tropic sea. Lady Mellanby turned up and advised her not to stand in the heat: “We are safely out of the frying-pan,” said Lady Mellanby, “it will never do to fall into the fire.”
Making sudden changes of gear, the heat accelerated its advance after Mrs. Moore’s departure until existence had to be endured and crime punished with the thermometer at a hundred and twelve. Electric fans hummed and spat, water splashed on to screens, ice clinked, and outside these defences, between a greyish sky and a yellowish earth, clouds of dust moved hesitatingly. In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but here the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them. The annual helter-skelter of April, when irritability and lust spread like a canker, is one of her comments on the orderly hopes of humanity. Fish manage better; fish, as the tanks dry, wriggle into the mud and wait for the rains to uncake them. But men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the results are occasionally disastrous. The triumphant machine of civilization may suddenly hitch and be immobilized into a car of stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to resemble their predecessors’, who also entered the country with intent to refashion it, but were in the end worked into its pattern and covered with its dust.
Adela, after years of intellectualism, had resumed her morning kneel to Christianity. There seemed no harm in it, it was the shortest and easiest cut to the unseen, and she could tack her troubles on to it. Just as the Hindu clerks asked Lakshmi for an increase in pay, so did she implore Jehovah for a favourable verdict. God who saves the King will surely support the police. Her deity returned a consoling reply, but the touch of her hands on her face started prickly heat, and she seemed to swallow and expectorate the same insipid clot of air that had weighed on her lungs all the night. Also the voice of Mrs. Turton disturbed her. “Are you ready, young lady?” it pealed from the next room.
“Half a minute,” she murmured. The Turtons had received her after Mrs. Moore left. Their kindness was incredible, but it was her position not her character that moved them; she was the English girl who had had the terrible experience, and for whom too much could not be done. No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers. In her sadness she said to him, “I bring you nothing but trouble; I was right on the Maidan, we had better just be friends,” but he protested, for the more she suffered the more highly he valued her. Did she love him? This question was somehow draggled up with the Marabar, it had been in her mind as she entered the fatal cave. Was she capable of loving anyone?
“Miss Quested, Adela, what d’ye call yourself, it’s half-past seven; we ought to think of starting for that Court when you feel inclined.”
“She’s saying her prayers,” came the Collector’s voice.
“Sorry, my dear; take your time. . . . Was your chhota hazri all right?”
“I can’t eat; might I have a little brandy?” she asked, deserting Jehovah.
When it was brought, she shuddered, and said she was ready to go.
“Drink it up; not a bad notion, a peg.”
“I don’t think it’ll really help me, Burra Sahib.”
“You sent brandy down to the Court, didn’t you, Mary?”
“I should think I did, champagne too.”
“I’ll thank you this evening, I’m all to pieces now,” said the girl, forming each syllable carefully as if her trouble would diminish if it were accurately defined. She was afraid of reticence, in case something that she herself did not perceive took shape beneath it, and she had rehearsed with Mr. McBryde in an odd, mincing way her terrible adventure in the cave, how the man had never actually touched her but dragged her about, and so on. Her aim this morning was to announce, meticulously, that the strain was appalling, and she would probably break down under Mr. Amritrao’s cross-examination and disgrace her friends. “My echo has come back again badly,” she told them.
“How about aspirin?”
“It is not a headache, it is an echo.”
Unable to dispel the buzzing in her ears, Major Callendar had diagnosed it as a fancy, which must not be encouraged. So the Turtons changed the subject. The cool little lick of the breeze was passing over the earth, dividing night from day; it would fail in ten minutes, but they might profit by it for their drive down into the city.
“I am sure to break down,” she repeated.
“You won’t,” said the Collector, his voice full of tenderness.
“Of course she won’t, she’s a real sport.”
“But Mrs. Turton . . .”
“Yes, my dear child?”
“If I do break down, it is of no consequence. It would matter in some trials, not in this. I put it to myself in the following way: I can really behave as I like, cry, be absurd, I am sure to get my verdict, unless Mr. Das is most frightfully unjust.”
“You’re bound to win,” he said calmly, and did not remind her that there was bound to be an appeal. The Nawab Bahadur had financed the defence, and would ruin himself sooner than let an “innocent Moslem perish,” and other interests, less reputable, were in the background too. The case might go up from court to court, with consequences that no official could foresee. Under his very eyes, the temper of Chandrapore was altering. As his car turned out of the compound, there was a tap of silly anger on its paint—a pebble thrown by a child. Some larger stones were dropped near the mosque. In the Maidan, a squad of native police on motor cycles waited to escort them through the bazaars. The Collector was irritated and muttered, “McBryde’s an old woman”; but Mrs. Turton said, “Really, after Mohurram a show of force will do no harm; it’s ridiculous to pretend they don’t hate us, do give up that farce.” He replied in an odd, sad voice, “I don’t hate them, I don’t know why,” and he didn’t hate them; for if he did, he would have had to condemn his own career as a bad investment. He retained a contemptuous affection for the pawns he had moved about for so many years, they must be worth his pains. “After all, it’s our women who make everything more difficult out here,” was his inmost thought, as he caught sight of some obscenities upon a long blank wall, and beneath his chivalry to Miss Quested resentment lurked, waiting its day—perhaps there is a grain of resentment in all chivalry. Some students had gathered in front of the City Magistrate’s Court—hysterical boys whom he would have faced if alone, but he told the driver to work round to the rear of the building. The students jeered, and Rafi (hiding behind a comrade that he might not be identified) called out the English were cowards.
They gained Ronny’s private room, where a group of their own sort had collected. None were cowardly, all nervy, for queer reports kept coming in. The Sweepers had just struck, and half the commodes of Chandrapore remained desolate in consequence—only half, and Sweepers from the District, who felt less strongly about the innocence of Dr. Aziz, would arrive in the afternoon, and break the strike, but why should the grotesque incident occur? And a number of Mohammedan ladies had sworn to take no food until the prisoner was acquitted; their death would make little difference, indeed, being invisible, they seemed dead already, nevertheless it was disquieting. A new spirit seemed abroad, a rearrangement, which no one in the stern little band of whites could explain. There was a tendency to see Fielding at the back of it: the idea that he was weak and cranky had been dropped. They abused Fielding vigorously: he had been seen driving up with the two counsels, Amritrao and Mahmoud Ali; he encouraged the Boy Scout movement for seditious reasons; he received letters with foreign stamps on them, and was probably a Japanese spy. This morning’s verdict would break the renegade, but he had done his country and the Empire incalculable disservice. While they denounced him, Miss Quested lay back with her hands on the arms of her chair and her eyes closed, reserving her strength. They noticed her after a time, and felt ashamed of making so much noise.
“Can we do nothing for you?” Miss Derek said.
“I don’t think so, Nancy, and I seem able to do nothing for myself.”
“But you’re strictly forbidden to talk like that; you’re wonderful.”
“Yes indeed,” came the reverent chorus.
“My old Das is all right,” said Ronny, starting a new subject in low tones.
“Not one of them’s all right,” contradicted Major Callendar.
“Das is, really.”
“You mean he’s more frightened of acquitting than convicting, because if he acquits he’ll lose his job,” said Lesley with a clever little laugh.
Ronny did mean that, but he cherished “illusions” about his own subordinates (following the finer traditions of his service here), and he liked to maintain that his old Das really did possess moral courage of the Public School brand. He pointed out that—from one point of view—it was good that an Indian was taking the case. Conviction was inevitable; so better let an Indian pronounce it, there would be less fuss in the long run. Interested in the argument, he let Adela become dim in his mind.
“In fact, you disapprove of the appeal I forwarded to Lady Mellanby,” said Mrs. Turton with considerable heat. “Pray don’t apologize, Mr. Heaslop; I am accustomed to being in the wrong.”
“I didn’t mean that . . .”
“All right. I said don’t apologize.”
“Those swine are always on the look-out for a grievance,” said Lesley, to propitiate her.
“Swine, I should think so,” the Major echoed. “And what’s more, I’ll tell you what. What’s happened is a damn good thing really, barring of course its application to present company. It’ll make them squeal and it’s time they did squeal. I’ve put the fear of God into them at the hospital anyhow. You should see the grandson of our so-called leading loyalist.” He tittered brutally as he described poor Nureddin’s present appearance.
“His beauty’s gone, five upper teeth, two lower and a nostril. . . . Old Panna Lal brought him the looking-glass yesterday and he blubbered. . . . I laughed; I laughed, I tell you, and so would you; that used to be one of these buck niggers, I thought, now he’s all septic; damn him, blast his soul—er—I believe he was unspeakably immoral—er——” He subsided, nudged in the ribs, but added, “I wish I’d had the cutting up of my late assistant too; nothing’s too bad for these people.”
“At last some sense is being talked,” Mrs. Turton cried, much to her husband’s discomfort.
“That’s what I say; I say there’s not such a thing as cruelty after a thing like this.”
“Exactly, and remember it afterwards, you men. You’re weak, weak, weak. Why, they ought to crawl from here to the caves on their hands and knees whenever an Englishwoman’s in sight, they oughtn’t to be spoken to, they ought to be spat at, they ought to be ground into the dust, we’ve been far too kind with our Bridge Parties and the rest.”
She paused. Profiting by her wrath, the heat had invaded her. She subsided into a lemon squash, and continued between the sips to murmur, “Weak, weak.” And the process was repeated. The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.
Presently the case was called.
Their chairs preceded them into the Court, for it was important that they should look dignified. And when the chuprassies had made all ready, they filed into the ramshackly room with a condescending air, as if it was a booth at a fair. The Collector made a small official joke as he sat down, at which his entourage smiled, and the Indians, who could not hear what he said, felt that some new cruelty was afoot, otherwise the sahibs would not chuckle.
The Court was crowded and of course very hot, and the first person Adela noticed in it was the humblest of all who were present, a person who had no bearing officially upon the trial: the man who pulled the punkah. Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he sat on a raised platform near the back, in the middle of the central gangway, and he caught her attention as she came in, and he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god—not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her. This man would have been notable anywhere: among the thin-hammed, flat-chested mediocrities of Chandrapore he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish heaps. Pulling the rope towards him, relaxing it rhythmically, sending swirls of air over others, receiving none himself, he seemed apart from human destinies, a male fate, a winnower of souls. Opposite him, also on a platform, sat the little assistant magistrate, cultivated, self-conscious, and conscientious. The punkah wallah was none of these things: he scarcely knew that he existed and did not understand why the Court was fuller than usual, indeed he did not know that it was fuller than usual, didn’t even know he worked a fan, though he thought he pulled a rope. Something in his aloofness impressed the girl from middle-class England, and rebuked the narrowness of her sufferings. In virtue of what had she collected this roomful of people together? Her particular brand of opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctified them—by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilization? Mrs. Moore—she looked round, but Mrs. Moore was far away on the sea; it was the kind of question they might have discussed on the voyage out before the old lady had turned disagreeable and queer.
While thinking of Mrs. Moore she heard sounds, which gradually grew more distinct. The epoch-making trial had started, and the Superintendent of Police was opening the case for the prosecution.
Mr. McBryde was not at pains to be an interesting speaker; he left eloquence to the defence, who would require it. His attitude was, “Everyone knows the man’s guilty, and I am obliged to say so in public before he goes to the Andamans.” He made no moral or emotional appeal, and it was only by degrees that the studied negligence of his manner made itself felt, and lashed part of the audience to fury. Laboriously did he describe the genesis of the picnic. The prisoner had met Miss Quested at an entertainment given by the Principal of Government College, and had there conceived his intentions concerning her: prisoner was a man of loose life, as documents found upon him at his arrest would testify, also his fellow-assistant, Dr. Panna Lal, was in a position to throw light on his character, and Major Callendar himself would speak. Here Mr. McBryde paused. He wanted to keep the proceedings as clean as possible, but Oriental Pathology, his favourite theme, lay around him, and he could not resist it. Taking off his spectacles, as was his habit before enunciating a general truth, he looked into them sadly, and remarked that the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but notvice versa—not a matter for bitterness this, not a matter for abuse, but just a fact which any scientific observer will confirm.
“Even when the lady is so uglier than the gentleman?” The comment fell from nowhere, from the ceiling perhaps. It was the first interruption, and the Magistrate felt bound to censure it. “Turn that man out,” he said. One of the native policemen took hold of a man who had said nothing, and turned him out roughly.
Mr. McBryde resumed his spectacles and proceeded. But the comment had upset Miss Quested. Her body resented being called ugly, and trembled.
“Do you feel faint, Adela?” asked Miss Derek, who tended her with loving indignation.
“I never feel anything else, Nancy. I shall get through, but it’s awful, awful.”
This led to the first of a series of scenes. Her friends began to fuss around her, and the Major called out, “I must have better arrangements than this made for my patient; why isn’t she given a seat on the platform? She gets no air.”
Mr. Das looked annoyed and said: “I shall be happy to accommodate Miss Quested with a chair up here in view of the particular circumstances of her health.” The chuprassies passed up not one chair but several, and the entire party followed Adela on to the platform, Mr. Fielding being the only European who remained in the body of the hall.
“That’s better,” remarked Mrs. Turton, as she settled herself.
“Thoroughly desirable change for several reasons,” replied the Major.
The Magistrate knew that he ought to censure this remark, but did not dare to. Callendar saw that he was afraid, and called out authoritatively, “Right, McBryde, go ahead now; sorry to have interrupted you.”
“Are you all right yourselves?” asked the Superintendent.
“We shall do, we shall do.”
“Go on, Mr. Das, we are not here to disturb you,” said the Collector patronizingly. Indeed, they had not so much disturbed the trial as taken charge of it.
While the prosecution continued, Miss Quested examined the hall—timidly at first, as though it would scorch her eyes. She observed to left and right of the punkah man many a half-known face. Beneath her were gathered all the wreckage of her silly attempt to see India—the people she had met at the Bridge Party, the man and his wife who hadn’t sent their carriage, the old man who would lend his car, various servants, villagers, officials, and the prisoner himself. There he sat—strong, neat little Indian with very black hair, and pliant hands. She viewed him without special emotion. Since they last met, she had elevated him into a principle of evil, but now he seemed to be what he had always been—a slight acquaintance. He was negligible, devoid of significance, dry like a bone, and though he was “guilty” no atmosphere of sin surrounded him. “I suppose heisguilty. Can I possibly have made a mistake?” she thought. For this question still occurred to her intellect, though since Mrs. Moore’s departure it had ceased to trouble her conscience.
Pleader Mahmoud Ali now arose, and asked with ponderous and ill-judged irony whether his client could be accommodated on the platform too: even Indians felt unwell sometimes, though naturally Major Callendar did not think so, being in charge of a Government Hospital. “Another example of their exquisite sense of humour,” sang Miss Derek. Ronny looked at Mr. Das to see how he would handle the difficulty, and Mr. Das became agitated, and snubbed Pleader Mahmoud Ali severely.
“Excuse me——” It was the turn of the eminent barrister from Calcutta. He was a fine-looking man, large and bony, with grey closely cropped hair. “We object to the presence of so many European ladies and gentlemen upon the platform,” he said in an Oxford voice. “They will have the effect of intimidating our witnesses. Their place is with the rest of the public in the body of the hall. We have no objection to Miss Quested remaining on the platform, since she has been unwell; we shall extend every courtesy to her throughout, despite the scientific truths revealed to us by the District Superintendent of Police; but we do object to the others.”
“Oh, cut the cackle and let’s have the verdict,” the Major growled.
The distinguished visitor gazed at the Magistrate respectfully.
“I agree to that,” said Mr. Das, hiding his face desperately in some papers. “It was only to Miss Quested that I gave permission to sit up here. Her friends should be so excessively kind as to climb down.”
“Well done, Das, quite sound,” said Ronny with devastating honesty.
“Climb down, indeed, what incredible impertinence!” Mrs. Turton cried.
“Do come quietly, Mary,” murmured her husband.
“Hi! my patient can’t be left unattended.”
“Do you object to the Civil Surgeon remaining, Mr. Amritrao?”
“I should object. A platform confers authority.”
“Even when it’s one foot high; so come along all,” said the Collector, trying to laugh.
“Thank you very much, sir,” said Mr. Das, greatly relieved. “Thank you, Mr. Heaslop; thank you ladies all.”
And the party, including Miss Quested, descended from its rash eminence. The news of their humiliation spread quickly, and people jeered outside. Their special chairs followed them. Mahmoud Ali (who was quite silly and useless with hatred) objected even to these; by whose authority had special chairs been introduced, why had the Nawab Bahadur not been given one? etc. People began to talk all over the room, about chairs ordinary and special, strips of carpet, platforms one foot high.
But the little excursion had a good effect on Miss Quested’s nerves. She felt easier now that she had seen all the people who were in the room. It was like knowing the worst. She was sure now that she should come through “all right”—that is to say, without spiritual disgrace, and she passed the good news on to Ronny and Mrs. Turton. They were too much agitated with the defeat to British prestige to be interested. From where she sat, she could see the renegade Mr. Fielding. She had had a better view of him from the platform, and knew that an Indian child perched on his knee. He was watching the proceedings, watching her. When their eyes met, he turned his away, as if direct intercourse was of no interest to him.
The Magistrate was also happier. He had won the battle of the platform, and gained confidence. Intelligent and impartial, he continued to listen to the evidence, and tried to forget that later on he should have to pronounce a verdict in accordance with it. The Superintendent trundled steadily forward: he had expected these outbursts of insolence—they are the natural gestures of an inferior race, and he betrayed no hatred of Aziz, merely an abysmal contempt.
The speech dealt at length with the “prisoner’s dupes,” as they were called—Fielding, the servant Antony, the Nawab Bahadur. This aspect of the case had always seemed dubious to Miss Quested, and she had asked the police not to develop it. But they were playing for a heavy sentence, and wanted to prove that the assault was premeditated. And in order to illustrate the strategy, they produced a plan of the Marabar Hills, showing the route that the party had taken, and the “Tank of the Dagger” where they had camped.
The Magistrate displayed interest in archæology.
An elevation of a specimen cave was produced; it was lettered “Buddhist Cave.”
“Not Buddhist, I think, Jain. . . .”
“In which cave is the offence alleged, the Buddhist or the Jain?” asked Mahmoud Ali, with the air of unmasking a conspiracy.
“All the Marabar caves are Jain.”
“Yes, sir; then in which Jain cave?”
“You will have an opportunity of putting such questions later.”
Mr. McBryde smiled faintly at their fatuity. Indians invariably collapse over some such point as this. He knew that the defence had some wild hope of establishing an alibi, that they had tried (unsuccessfully) to identify the guide, and that Fielding and Hamidullah had gone out to the Kawa Dol and paced and measured all one moonlit night. “Mr. Lesley says they’re Buddhist, and he ought to know if anyone does. But may I call attention to the shape?” And he described what had occurred there. Then he spoke of Miss Derek’s arrival, of the scramble down the gully, of the return of the two ladies to Chandrapore, and of the document Miss Quested signed on her arrival, in which mention was made of the field-glasses. And then came the culminating evidence: the discovery of the field-glasses on the prisoner. “I have nothing to add at present,” he concluded, removing his spectacles. “I will now call my witnesses. The facts will speak for themselves. The prisoner is one of those individuals who have led a double life. I dare say his degeneracy gained upon him gradually. He has been very cunning at concealing, as is usual with the type, and pretending to be a respectable member of society, getting a Government position even. He is now entirely vicious and beyond redemption, I am afraid. He behaved most cruelly, most brutally, to another of his guests, another English lady. In order to get rid of her, and leave him free for his crime, he crushed her into a cave among his servants. However, that is by the way.”
But his last words brought on another storm, and suddenly a new name, Mrs. Moore, burst on the court like a whirlwind. Mahmoud Ali had been enraged, his nerves snapped; he shrieked like a maniac, and asked whether his client was charged with murder as well as rape, and who was this second English lady.
“I don’t propose to call her.”
“You don’t because you can’t, you have smuggled her out of the country; she is Mrs. Moore, she would have proved his innocence, she was on our side, she was poor Indians’ friend.”
“You could have called her yourself,” cried the Magistrate. “Neither side called her, neither must quote her as evidence.”
“She was kept from us until too late—I learn too late—this is English justice, here is your British Raj. Give us back Mrs. Moore for five minutes only, and she will save my friend, she will save the name of his sons; don’t rule her out, Mr. Das; take back those words as you yourself are a father; tell me where they have put her, oh, Mrs. Moore. . . .”
“If the point is of any interest, my mother should have reached Aden,” said Ronny dryly; he ought not to have intervened, but the onslaught had startled him.
“Imprisoned by you there because she knew the truth.” He was almost out of his mind, and could be heard saying above the tumult: “I ruin my career, no matter; we are all to be ruined one by one.”
“This is no way to defend your case,” counselled the Magistrate.
“I am not defending a case, nor are you trying one. We are both of us slaves.”
“Mr. Mahmoud Ali, I have already warned you, and unless you sit down I shall exercise my authority.”
“Do so; this trial is a farce, I am going.” And he handed his papers to Amritrao and left, calling from the door histrionically yet with intense passion, “Aziz, Aziz—farewell for ever.” The tumult increased, the invocation of Mrs. Moore continued, and people who did not know what the syllables meant repeated them like a charm. They became Indianized into Esmiss Esmoor, they were taken up in the street outside. In vain the Magistrate threatened and expelled. Until the magic exhausted itself, he was powerless.
“Unexpected,” remarked Mr. Turton.
Ronny furnished the explanation. Before she sailed, his mother had taken to talk about the Marabar in her sleep, especially in the afternoon when servants were on the verandah, and her disjointed remarks on Aziz had doubtless been sold to Mahmoud Ali for a few annas: that kind of thing never ceases in the East.
“I thought they’d try something of the sort. Ingenious.” He looked into their wide-open mouths. “They get just like over their religion,” he added calmly. “Start and can’t stop. I’m sorry for your old Das, he’s not getting much of a show.”
“Mr. Heaslop, how disgraceful dragging in your dear mother,” said Miss Derek, bending forward.
“It’s just a trick, and they happened to pull it off. Now one sees why they had Mahmoud Ali—just to make a scene on the chance. It is his speciality.” But he disliked it more than he showed. It was revolting to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess.
“Esmiss EsmoorEsmiss EsmoorEsmiss EsmoorEsmiss Esmoor. . . .”
“Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor. . . .”
“Ronny——”
“Yes, old girl?”
“Isn’t it all queer.”
“I’m afraid it’s very upsetting for you.”
“Not the least. I don’t mind it.”
“Well, that’s good.”
She had spoken more naturally and healthily than usual. Bending into the middle of her friends, she said: “Don’t worry about me, I’m much better than I was; I don’t feel the least faint; I shall be all right, and thank you all, thank you, thank you for your kindness.” She had to shout her gratitude, for the chant, Esmiss Esmoor, went on.