The Faraway Drums (29 page)

“I worry for you, Clive,” Bridie said. “Last night I was so sick I couldn’t sleep—”

He knew then that he wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to her in Delhi. But he didn’t know what else he would be able to say.

Then Magda came storming towards them. Zoltan had kept from her the news that he was under
arrest,
but at last she had noticed that he had been accompanied all day by the bearded Sikh or the glum Irishman. A few minutes ago she had learned why they were keeping so close to him.

“Major Farnol, how dare you arrest my husband!”

“Mrs. Monday—”

“
Madame
Monday!” It sounded better: she had taught herself all the nuances of social elevation. “You have no right to do such a thing! My husband is no criminal. People are being killed and all you can do is arrest my husband for going about his business!”

“Is he really under arrest?” said Bridie. “That’s something you didn’t tell me.”

He wanted to tell her it was none of her business. Why did she have to keep putting on her reporter’s hat? “Mr. Monday knows the reason,” he told them both. “I think it would be best, Madame Monday, if you left the matter to us men.”

“Oh my God!” said Bridie, putting on her feminist hat.

“Horseshit!” Magda lost all her social elevation: she was back on the Fisherman’s Bastion in Budapest. Then she remembered where she really was, tried to recover a few rungs in the ladder. “Excuse me. I get so angry and excited when someone insults my husband. Dear Zoltan—all he is trying to do is make a happy life for me.”

Farnol had the grace not to laugh. “Madame Monday, I’m sure Mr. Monday is a devoted husband and a good man. Unfortunately, he happens to sell arms . . . I shall see that he is put to no indignity. But I also have to see that for the time being he is out of business. Just look at it as a holiday, a vacation. Sit back and enjoy the rest of the journey.”

“What happens when we reach Kalka?”

“There, I’m afraid, things will be taken out of my hands.”

She went back to the camp. Women don’t walk gracefully when they’re angry, especially if they are wearing high-heeled boots. Bridie, looking after her, decided that if ever she had to make an angry exit she would not hurry. Then she looked at Farnol.

“Are you two-faced?”

“Possibly.” But it hurt to be thought so. “I’m in good company—Janus was a god, you know.”

“You’re not only two-faced, you’re insufferable.”

“
It’s a family virtue.” Then he took her hand again and lifted it to his lips. Magda, sneaking a look back at him, thought he looked very dashing and Hungarian. But she wouldn’t tell Zoltan that. “In the job I’ve had for the past three years, if one doesn’t look both ways at once, one doesn’t survive. Being two- faced isn’t always a nasty fault.”

She pressed her hand against his lips. “I’d love my father to meet you. He’d have you in the US Senate in no time.”

The camp that night was quiet. The atmosphere at the dinner table was strained, but no arguments arose. Everybody went to bed early and everybody rose early, as if eager to get the last day of the caravan over and done with as soon as possible. Prince Mahendra appeared at breakfast with a smile, which he displayed as if it were a birthday gift for everyone. The Nawab, his grief for his young wife now put aside (or perhaps inside: grief, like the heart, becomes shabby if worn on the sleeve too long), told a cricket joke that no one but Farnol appreciated. The Baron replaced the straw hat he had been wearing with a white topee and looked younger and quite dashing. The Ranee, Lady Westbrook and Magda took their places in the coach and raised their parasols against the morning sun as if they were running up celebration flags. Bridie, her bottom becoming more accustomed to the saddle, took her horse up to the head of the column beside Farnol. The Nawab and Mahendra rode at the very front of it and Zoltan Monday, flanked by Karim Singh and Private Ahearn, rode at the rear, just behind the coach and ahead of the last escorts. The caravan crossed the border from Pandar to the Punjab, but not even Farnol noticed any difference in the air. He could not imagine the revolutionaries, if and when they surfaced, stopping to mark the boundary.

The detachment of troops from Kalka met them on the road in mid-morning. A platoon of infantrymen, khaki uniforms dusty and sweat-stained, topees pushed back from their flushed faces; two camels drawing a water-cart, another two camels harnessed to a kitchen-cart; half a dozen bearers; and a pink-cheeked lieutenant on a horse. The soldiers were whistling
Soldiers of the Queen
and somehow managed to make their whistling sound satirical and even obscene. The whistling died away when they saw the caravan bearing down on them.

“Christ Almighty, it’s Hannibal and his fooking elephants!”

“Don’t get too close to ‘em. You ever seen them dark spots on an elephant’s foot? That’s all that’s left of slow coolies.”

The
troops were recently arrived from England and today’s march was the longest they had so far made. They were hot, footsore and already hated the young officer who had his horse to prevent his being footsore. He was Lieutenant Lord Bunting and his father, so they said, was a bloody belted earl.

“Freddy Bunting, Major. Northern Fusiliers. Jolly warm, isn’t it? The ladies must be feeling it, eh?” He sounded bluff and confident, but he was actually shy. He was just twenty and India pressed down on him with more than just the heat of its sun. His troops stood easy and contemptuously behind him and he wondered how long it would be before he could gain their respect. He longed for action, to take the Khyber Pass on his own and prove himself. “I’d like to rest my men for an hour. Then we can start down again.”

“Did the O.C. manage to get us a special train?”

“Afraid not. The Railway Superintendent’s almost off his rocker, poor chap. We got a message through from Solan about the landslide that stopped the train from Simla. The Superintendent’s sent a train up to meet them, but they’re going to be rather squashed. Only two carriages, it’ll be rather stacks on the mill.”

But Farnol knew that everyone from Simla would get down to Delhi, if they had to build pyramids on each other’s shoulders.

Mahendra said, “The Superintendent will have to find a train for us.”

The second son of an English earl and the Indian prince stared at each other. Freddy Bunting had been told how arrogant some of these rajah blighters could be. “I think you’ll have to take that up with him, old chap. I don’t work for the railways.”

“Then how do we get down to the Durbar, old chap?” said the Nawab. “We have to be there, y’know. We can’t insult His Majesty by not turning up.”

Bunting wished he could be there himself. As a six-year-old boy he had seen the Diamond Jubilee parade of Queen Victoria.
Look at it, my boy
, his father had said,
that’s the glory of the Empire
. It seemed to him that the whole world had ridden through the streets of London on that shining day. And heroes, too: Roberts of Kandahar, Wolseley of Tel-el-Kebir: they brought the blaze of Empire with them. He had looked forward to the Durbar, but as soon as he had arrived at Bombay he had been shunted up-country. The old hands had grabbed the Durbar for themselves, it was theirs and no Johnny-come-lately was going
to
share it with them.

“You had better see if one of your own chaps can help,” he said. “There’s a special being got up today in the yards at Kalka. It belongs to the Rajah of Pandar, I think.”

IV

They reached Kalka just after dark, into an evening still warm from the day. The station was crowded, as if everyone in the Punjab had decided he would try for a seat on a train to Delhi. But only some of them were travellers and most of those were not interested at all in going to Delhi: they only wanted to get home, to Moradabad, Lucknow, Allahabad; but all the trains via Delhi were booked by the damned sahibs and the
chee-chee
desk-wallahs and the princes with their damned elephants. The rest of the crowd in the station, the majority, was made up of hawkers, thieves, beggars, spectators and the homeless who came there every night to sleep under the corrugated-iron roof of the platforms.

Farnol went with the Nawab and Bunting to the Railway Superintendent’s office, picking their way carefully over the shrouded figures that were already stretching out for their night’s sleep. The station was a cauldron of chatter, a shriek occasionally bubbling to the top as a boy tried to steal a fried cake from the portable stove of a woman vendor. A grey-white cow nosed its way down the platform and the shrouded figures, seemingly without seeing it, rolled gently to one side to make way for it. In the yellow-lit smoke under the roof sparrows swooped and darted as if day and night no longer meant anything to them. An engine whistle blew out in the yards and the would-be travellers, recognizable by their cardboard suitcases or their bundles, stood up and looked expectantly into the darkness. But nothing appeared and they subsided again with a laugh, as if amused by their own foolish hope.

“They’ll annoy the hell out of you half the time,” Farnol told Bunting. “The other half, you’ll finish up admiring them.”

“There are so
many
of them. At school one read about them, but
millions
don’t mean anything when one reads of them in a schoolbook—”

“Where did you go to school?” The Nawab turned his head, his attention distracted; he trod on a sleeping form, walked over it as if it were a bag of rubbish. “Harrow? I say! You must come up to Simla some time. Do you play cricket?”

The
Superintendent’s office was crammed with complaining travellers who looked as if they might not travel for at least another week. Fists were raised and tickets waved like empty grenades: they were just as useless. A
chee-chee
minor official yelled that there would be no refunds, everybody would have to wait till there were trains available. A stout Parsee, wife and three children clinging to him as if he were some beast of burden, turned and shouted at Farnol and Bunting, the two Englishmen, that it just wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do at all, the Government should be ashamed of itself, it wouldn’t have been like this under Lord Curzon.

The Superintendent was a Scot, a hunk of Grampian granite dumped down here in northern India. He picked up a long cane and swished it round him and the crowd fell back against the walls. He ran a hand through the barbwire of his red curls and grinned balefully at the newcomers.

“To think I could’ve gone to bloody Canada!”

Bunting introduced Farnol and the Nawab. “I’ve explained, Mr. Morton, that you had to let the special go that was intended for them.”

“I’ve got no bloody engines, that’s the trouble. Get me an engine and I’ll give you a couple of carriages and some wagons, but that’s all I can do for ye.”

The Nawab said, “I understand my cousin, the Rajah of Pandar, has a special train. Has it gone yet?”

“No, it’s still out in the yards. If His Highness doesn’t mind hitching the extra carriages and wagons on . . . Ask the mon himself. He’s over there in the corner.”

Farnol turned towards the corner where, despite the crush in the rest of the room, there was a clear space. A man sat there on a rickety chair that his very presence turned into a throne; two tall, muscular guards stood behind him, swords hanging from their belts. He was dressed in a dark blue
achkan
and pale blue turban and he was smiling at the surprise on the face of his cousin, the Nawab.

“You and your friends are welcome to travel with me, Bertie.”

Farnol had seen him only once before and then only fleetingly; but there was no mistaking the hooked nose, the deep-set eyes and the black beard. He was the brown-robed mystic who had been on the terrace of the monastery in the high mountains on the day Farnol had talked with the lama.

8

I

Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:

THE RAJAH
of Pandar’s special train did not get away from Kalka till midnight. He did not invite any of the women aboard his own carriage and we were left to make ourselves comfortable in the single carriage, instead of the two promised, that the Railway Superintendent was able to make available to us.

“The engine just won’t be able to pull any more,” he explained. “Not with all your wagons loaded with elephants. You’re lucky as it is that the track is downhill all the way. Well, have a good trip.”

It was a car that Pullman or Wagon-Lits would have used for the transportation of criminals, if they had been in that business. The windows were barred, both those on the corridor and those on the outside of the compartment; the door was stout teak with heavy bolts on it and a sign above it,
Beware of Dacoits
; the seats, which doubled as bunks, were smeared with cracked leather rather than covered with it. It was a mobile slum.

“I’m sorry about this,” said Clive, inspecting the accommodation. “I’m afraid things are better for us men.”

“I’m sure,” said Viola Westbrook, who had lived a life that was always better for men.

“It’s nothing luxurious. Sankar seems a rather austere chap. There’s just more room.”

“I’d settle for that,” I said. “I’ll take the top bunk, Viola. Goodnight, Clive. Enjoy being a man.”

He grinned at both of us, backed out into the corridor and bumped into the Ranee. “Clive, have you seen this carriage? I can’t travel in something like this! I’m sure it hasn’t been used since the Mutiny!”

“That’s what we should do,” said Viola. “Mutiny!”

Backed up behind the Ranee in the corridor were Magda and the Nawab’s five wives. Beyond
them
was the train’s conductor, a thin Hindu wearing an ill-fitting uniform and an equally ill-fitting expression of authority.

“Allow me passage, ladies. Stand aside, ladies—” He reached the Ranee. “Allow me, Your Highness—”

She hit him across the face with her jewelled handbag, a several-thousand-dollar thwack; he staggered back with blood instantly spurting from a cut across his nose. She didn’t even look at him, but continued to glare at Clive. “Tell Sankar I wish to see him—at once!”