A passage to India

CHAPTER X

The heat had leapt forward in the last hour, the street was deserted as if a catastrophe had cleaned off humanity during the inconclusive talk.Opposite Aziz’ bungalow stood a large unfinished house belonging to two brothers, astrologers, and a squirrel hung head-downwards on it, pressing its belly against burning scaffolding and twitching a mangy tail.It seemed the only occupant of the house, and the squeals it gave were in tune with the infinite, no doubt, but not attractive except to other squirrels.More noises came from a dusty tree, where brown birds creaked and floundered about looking for insects; another bird, the invisible coppersmith, had started his “ponk ponk.”It matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides.Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed.Nor are the lower animals of England concerned about England, but in the tropics the indifference is more prominent, the inarticulate world is closer at hand and readier to resume control as soon as men are tired.When the seven gentlemen who had held such various opinions inside the bungalow came out of it, they were aware of a common burden, a vague threat which they called “the bad weather coming.”They felt that they could not do their work, or would not be paid enough for doing it.The space between them and their carriages, instead of being empty, was clogged with a medium that pressed against their flesh, the carriage cushions scalded their trousers, their eyes pricked, domes of hot water accumulated under their head-gear and poured down their cheeks.Salaaming feebly, they dispersed for the interior of other bungalows, to recover their self-esteem and the qualities that distinguished them from each other.

All over the city and over much of India the same retreat on the part of humanity was beginning, into cellars, up hills, under trees.April, herald of horrors, is at hand.The sun was returning to his kingdom with power but without beauty—that was the sinister feature.If only there had been beauty!His cruelty would have been tolerable then.Through excess of light, he failed to triumph, he also; in his yellowy-white overflow not only matter, but brightness itself lay drowned.He was not the unattainable friend, either of men or birds or other suns, he was not the eternal promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness; he was merely a creature, like the rest, and so debarred from glory.

CHAPTER XI

Although the Indians had driven off, and Fielding could see his horse standing in a small shed in the corner of the compound, no one troubled to bring it to him.He started to get it himself, but was stopped by a call from the house.Aziz was sitting up in bed, looking dishevelled and sad.“Here’s your home,” he said sardonically.“Here’s the celebrated hospitality of the East.Look at the flies.Look at the chunam coming off the walls.Isn’t it jolly?Now I suppose you want to be off, having seen an Oriental interior.”

“Anyhow, you want to rest.”

“I can rest the whole day, thanks to worthy Dr. Lal.Major Callendar’s spy, I suppose you know, but this time it didn’t work.I am allowed to have a slight temperature.”

“Callendar doesn’t trust anyone, English or Indian: that’s his character, and I wish you weren’t under him; but you are, and that’s that.”

“Before you go, for you are evidently in a great hurry, will you please unlock that drawer?Do you see a piece of brown paper at the top?”

“Yes.”

“Open it.”

“Who is this?”

“She was my wife.You are the first Englishman she has ever come before.Now put her photograph away.”

He was astonished, as a traveller who suddenly sees, between the stones of the desert, flowers.The flowers have been there all the time, but suddenly he sees them.He tried to look at the photograph, but in itself it was just a woman in a sari, facing the world.He muttered, “Really, I don’t know why you pay me this great compliment, Aziz, but I do appreciate it.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, she was not a highly educated woman or even beautiful, but put it away.You would have seen her, so why should you not see her photograph?”

“You would have allowed me to see her?”

“Why not?I believe in the purdah, but I should have told her you were my brother, and she would have seen you.Hamidullah saw her, and several others.”

“Did she think they were your brothers?”

“Of course not, but the word exists and is convenient.All men are my brothers, and as soon as one behaves as such he may see my wife.”

“And when the whole world behaves as such, there will be no more purdah?”

“It is because you can say and feel such a remark as that, that I show you the photograph,” said Aziz gravely.

“It is beyond the power of most men.It is because you behave well while I behave badly that I show it you.I never expected you to come back just now when I called you.I thought, ‘He has certainly done with me; I have insulted him.’Mr. Fielding, no one can ever realize how much kindness we Indians need, we do not even realize it ourselves.But we know when it has been given.We do not forget, though we may seem to.Kindness, more kindness, and even after that more kindness.I assure you it is the only hope.”His voice seemed to arise from a dream.Altering it, yet still deep below his normal surface, he said, “We can’t build up India except on what we feel.What is the use of all these reforms, and Conciliation Committees for Mohurram, and shall we cut the tazia short or shall we carry it another route, and Councils of Notables and official parties where the English sneer at our skins?”

“It’s beginning at the wrong end, isn’t it?I know, but institutions and the governments don’t.”He looked again at the photograph.The lady faced the world at her husband’s wish and her own, but how bewildering she found it, the echoing contradictory world!

“Put her away, she is of no importance, she is dead,” said Aziz gently.“I showed her to you because I have nothing else to show.You may look round the whole of my bungalow now, and empty everything.I have no other secrets, my three children live away with their grandmamma, and that is all.”

Fielding sat down by the bed, flattered at the trust reposed in him, yet rather sad.He felt old.He wished that he too could be carried away on waves of emotion.The next time they met, Aziz might be cautious and standoffish.He realized this, and it made him sad that he should realize it.Kindness, kindness, and more kindness—yes, that he might supply, but was that really all that the queer nation needed?Did it not also demand an occasional intoxication of the blood?What had he done to deserve this outburst of confidence, and what hostage could he give in exchange?He looked back at his own life.What a poor crop of secrets it had produced!There were things in it that he had shown to no one, but they were so uninteresting, it wasn’t worth while lifting a purdah on their account.He’d been in love, engaged to be married, lady broke it off, memories of her and thoughts about her had kept him from other women for a time; then indulgence, followed by repentance and equilibrium.Meagre really except the equilibrium, and Aziz didn’t want to have that confided to him—he would have called it “everything ranged coldly on shelves.”

“I shall not really be intimate with this fellow,” Fielding thought, and then “nor with anyone.”That was the corollary.And he had to confess that he really didn’t mind, that he was content to help people, and like them as long as they didn’t object, and if they objected pass on serenely.Experience can do much, and all that he had learnt in England and Europe was an assistance to him, and helped him towards clarity, but clarity prevented him from experiencing something else.

“How did you like the two ladies you met last Thursday?”he asked.

Aziz shook his head distastefully.The question reminded him of his rash remark about the Marabar Caves.

“How do you like Englishwomen generally?”

“Hamidullah liked them in England.Here we never look at them.Oh no, much too careful.Let’s talk of something else.”

“Hamidullah’s right: they are much nicer in England.There’s something that doesn’t suit them out here.”

Aziz after another silence said, “Why are you not married?”

Fielding was pleased that he had asked.“Because I have more or less come through without it,” he replied.

“I was thinking of telling you a little about myself some day if I can make it interesting enough.The lady I liked wouldn’t marry me—that is the main point, but that’s fifteen years ago and now means nothing.”

“But you haven’t children.”

“None.”

“Excuse the following question: have you any illegitimate children?”

“No.I’d willingly tell you if I had.”

“Then your name will entirely die out.”

“It must.”

“Well.”He shook his head.“This indifference is what the Oriental will never understand.”

“I don’t care for children.”

“Caring has nothing to do with it,” he said impatiently.

“I don’t feel their absence, I don’t want them weeping around my death-bed and being polite about me afterwards, which I believe is the general notion.I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child.Other people can have children.No obligation, with England getting so chock-a-block and overrunning India for jobs.”

“Why don’t you marry Miss Quested?”

“Good God!why, the girl’s a prig.”

“Prig, prig?Kindly explain.Isn’t that a bad word?”

“Oh, I don’t know her, but she struck me as one of the more pathetic products of Western education.She depresses me.”

“But prig, Mr. Fielding?How’s that?”

“She goes on and on as if she’s at a lecture—trying ever so hard to understand India and life, and occasionally taking a note.”

“I thought her so nice and sincere.”

“So she probably is,” said Fielding, ashamed of his roughness: any suggestion that he should marry always does produce overstatements on the part of the bachelor, and a mental breeze.“But I can’t marry her if I wanted to, for she has just become engaged to the City Magistrate.”

“Has she indeed?I am so glad!”he exclaimed with relief, for this exempted him from the Marabar expedition: he would scarcely be expected to entertain regular Anglo-Indians.

“It’s the old mother’s doing.She was afraid her dear boy would choose for himself, so she brought out the girl on purpose, and flung them together until it happened.”

“Mrs. Moore did not mention that to me among her plans.”

“I may have got it wrong—I’m out of club gossip.But anyhow they’re engaged to be married.”

“Yes, you’re out of it, my poor chap,” he smiled.“No Miss Quested for Mr. Fielding.However, she was not beautiful.She has practically no breasts, if you come to think of it.”

He smiled too, but found a touch of bad taste in the reference to a lady’s breasts.

“For the City Magistrate they shall be sufficient perhaps, and he for her.For you I shall arrange a lady with breasts like mangoes. . . .”

“No, you won’t.”

“I will not really, and besides your position makes it dangerous for you.”His mind had slipped from matrimony to Calcutta.His face grew grave.Fancy if he had persuaded the Principal to accompany him there, and then got him into trouble!And abruptly he took up a new attitude towards his friend, the attitude of the protector who knows the dangers of India and is admonitory.“You can’t be too careful in every way, Mr. Fielding; whatever you say or do in this damned country there is always some envious fellow on the look-out.You may be surprised to know that there were at least three spies sitting here when you came to enquire.I was really a good deal upset that you talked in that fashion about God.They will certainly report it.”

“To whom?”

“That’s all very well, but you spoke against morality also, and you said you had come to take other people’s jobs.All that was very unwise.This is an awful place for scandal.Why, actually one of your own pupils was listening.”

“Thanks for telling me that; yes, I must try and be more careful.If I’m interested, I’m apt to forget myself.Still, it doesn’t do real harm.”

“But speaking out may get you into trouble.”

“It’s often done so in the past.”

“There, listen to that!But the end of it might be that you lost your job.”

“If I do, I do.I shall survive it.I travel light.”

“Travel light!You are a most extraordinary race,” said Aziz, turning away as if he were going to sleep, and immediately turning back again.“Is it your climate, or what?”

“Plenty of Indians travel light too—saddhus and such.It’s one of the things I admire about your country.Any man can travel light until he has a wife or children.That’s part of my case against marriage.I’m a holy man minus the holiness.Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.”

Aziz was charmed and interested, and turned the new idea over in his mind.So this was why Mr. Fielding and a few others were so fearless!They had nothing to lose.But he himself was rooted in society and Islam.He belonged to a tradition which bound him, and he had brought children into the world, the society of the future.Though he lived so vaguely in this flimsy bungalow, nevertheless he was placed, placed.

“I can’t be sacked from my job, because my job’s Education.I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.It’s the only thing I do believe in.At Government College, I mix it up with trigonometry, and so on.When I’m a saddhu, I shall mix it up with something else.”

He concluded his manifesto, and both were silent.The eye-flies became worse than ever and danced close up to their pupils, or crawled into their ears.Fielding hit about wildly.The exercise made him hot, and he got up to go.

“You might tell your servant to bring my horse.He doesn’t seem to appreciate my Urdu.”

“I know.I gave him orders not to.Such are the tricks we play on unfortunate Englishmen.Poor Mr. Fielding!But I will release you now.Oh dear!With the exception of yourself and Hamidullah, I have no one to talk to in this place.You like Hamidullah, don’t you?”

“Very much.”

“Do you promise to come at once to us when you are in trouble?”

“I never can be in trouble.”

“There goes a queer chap, I trust he won’t come to grief,” thought Aziz, left alone.His period of admiration was over, and he reacted towards patronage.It was difficult for him to remain in awe of anyone who played with all his cards on the table.Fielding, he discovered on closer acquaintance, was truly warm-hearted and unconventional, but not what can be called wise.That frankness of speech in the presence of Ram Chand, Rafi and Co.was dangerous and inelegant.It served no useful end.

But they were friends, brothers.That part was settled, their compact had been subscribed by the photograph, they trusted one another, affection had triumphed for once in a way.He dropped off to sleep amid the happier memories of the last two hours—poetry of Ghalib, female grace, good old Hamidullah, good Fielding, his honoured wife and dear boys.He passed into a region where these joys had no enemies but bloomed harmoniously in an eternal garden, or ran down watershoots of ribbed marble, or rose into domes whereunder were inscribed, black against white, the ninety-nine attributes of God.

PART II: CAVES

CHAPTER XII

The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream.Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan.The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India we call immemorial came into being.But India is really far older.In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea.They are older than anything in the world.No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless æons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom.If flesh of the sun’s flesh is to be touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills.

Yet even they are altering.As Himalayan India rose, this India, the primal, has been depressed, and is slowly re-entering the curve of the earth.It may be that in æons to come an ocean will flow here too, and cover the sun-born rocks with slime.Meanwhile the plain of the Ganges encroaches on them with something of the sea’s action.They are sinking beneath the newer lands.Their main mass is untouched, but at the edge their outposts have been cut off and stand knee-deep, throat-deep, in the advancing soil.There is something unspeakable in these outposts.They are like nothing else in the world, and a glimpse of them makes the breath catch.They rise abruptly, insanely, without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere, they bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen.To call them “uncanny” suggests ghosts, and they are older than all spirit.Hinduism has scratched and plastered a few rocks, but the shrines are unfrequented, as if pilgrims, who generally seek the extraordinary, had here found too much of it.Some saddhus did once settle in a cave, but they were smoked out, and even Buddha, who must have passed this way down to the Bo Tree of Gya, shunned a renunciation more complete than his own, and has left no legend of struggle or victory in the Marabar.

The caves are readily described.A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter.This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is a Marabar Cave.Having seen one such cave, having seen two, having seen three, four, fourteen, twenty-four, the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all.He finds it difficult to discuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind, for the pattern never varies, and no carving, not even a bees’-nest or a bat distinguishes one from another.Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation—for they have one—does not depend upon human speech.It is as if the surrounding plain or the passing birds have taken upon themselves to exclaim “extraordinary,” and the word has taken root in the air, and been inhaled by mankind.

They are dark caves.Even when they open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber.There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match.Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit: the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished.The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone.A mirror inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers, delicate stars of pink and grey interpose, exquisite nebulæ, shadings fainter than the tail of a comet or the midday moon, all the evanescent life of the granite, only here visible.Fists and fingers thrust above the advancing soil—here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquired by the animals, smoother than windless water, more voluptuous than love.The radiance increases, the flames touch one another, kiss, expire.The cave is dark again, like all the caves.

Only the wall of the circular chamber has been polished thus.The sides of the tunnel are left rough, they impinge as an afterthought upon the internal perfection.An entrance was necessary, so mankind made one.But elsewhere, deeper in the granite, are there certain chambers that have no entrances?Chambers never unsealed since the arrival of the gods.Local report declares that these exceed in number those that can be visited, as the dead exceed the living—four hundred of them, four thousand or million.Nothing is inside them, they were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil.One of them is rumoured within the boulder that swings on the summit of the highest of the hills; a bubble-shaped cave that has neither ceiling nor floor, and mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely.If the boulder falls and smashes, the cave will smash too—empty as an Easter egg.The boulder because of its hollowness sways in the wind, and even moves when a crow perches upon it: hence its name and the name of its stupendous pedestal: the Kawa Dol.

CHAPTER XIII

These hills look romantic in certain lights and at suitable distances, and seen of an evening from the upper verandah of the club they caused Miss Quested to say conversationally to Miss Derek that she should like to have gone, that Dr. Aziz at Mr. Fielding’s had said he would arrange something, and that Indians seem rather forgetful.She was overheard by the servant who offered them vermouths.This servant understood English.And he was not exactly a spy, but he kept his ears open, and Mahmoud Ali did not exactly bribe him, but did encourage him to come and squat with his own servants, and would happen to stroll their way when he was there.As the story travelled, it accreted emotion and Aziz learnt with horror that the ladies were deeply offended with him, and had expected an invitation daily.He thought his facile remark had been forgotten.Endowed with two memories, a temporary and a permanent, he had hitherto relegated the caves to the former.Now he transferred them once for all, and pushed the matter through.They were to be a stupendous replica of the tea party.He began by securing Fielding and old Godbole, and then commissioned Fielding to approach Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested when they were alone—by this device Ronny, their official protector, could be circumvented.Fielding didn’t like the job much; he was busy, caves bored him, he foresaw friction and expense, but he would not refuse the first favour his friend had asked from him, and did as required.The ladies accepted.It was a little inconvenient in the present press of their engagements, still, they hoped to manage it after consulting Mr. Heaslop.Consulted, Ronny raised no objection, provided Fielding undertook full responsibility for their comfort.He was not enthusiastic about the picnic, but, then, no more were the ladies—no one was enthusiastic, yet it took place.

Aziz was terribly worried.It was not a long expedition—a train left Chandrapore just before dawn, another would bring them back for tiffin—but he was only a little official still, and feared to acquit himself dishonourably.He had to ask Major Callendar for half a day’s leave, and be refused because of his recent malingering; despair; renewed approach of Major Callendar through Fielding, and contemptuous snarling permission.He had to borrow cutlery from Mahmoud Ali without inviting him.Then there was the question of alcohol; Mr. Fielding, and perhaps the ladies, were drinkers, so must he provide whisky-sodas and ports?There was the problem of transport from the wayside station of Marabar to the caves.There was the problem of Professor Godbole and his food, and of Professor Godbole and other people’s food—two problems, not one problem.The Professor was not a very strict Hindu—he would take tea, fruit, soda-water and sweets, whoever cooked them, and vegetables and rice if cooked by a Brahman; but not meat, not cakes lest they contained eggs, and he would not allow anyone else to eat beef: a slice of beef upon a distant plate would wreck his happiness.Other people might eat mutton, they might eat ham.But over ham Aziz’ own religion raised its voice: he did not fancy other people eating ham.Trouble after trouble encountered him, because he had challenged the spirit of the Indian earth, which tries to keep men in compartments.

At last the moment arrived.

His friends thought him most unwise to mix himself up with English ladies, and warned him to take every precaution against unpunctuality.Consequently he spent the previous night at the station.The servants were huddled on the platform, enjoined not to stray.He himself walked up and down with old Mohammed Latif, who was to act as major-domo.He felt insecure and also unreal.A car drove up, and he hoped Fielding would get out of it, to lend him solidity.But it contained Mrs. Moore, Miss Quested, and their Goanese servant.He rushed to meet them, suddenly happy.“But you’ve come, after all.Oh how very very kind of you!”he cried.“This is the happiest moment in all my life.”

The ladies were civil.It was not the happiest moment in their lives, still, they looked forward to enjoying themselves as soon as the bother of the early start was over.They had not seen him since the expedition was arranged, and they thanked him adequately.

“You don’t require tickets—please stop your servant.There are no tickets on the Marabar branch line; it is its peculiarity.You come to the carriage and rest till Mr. Fielding joins us.Did you know you are to travel purdah?Will you like that?”

They replied that they should like it.The train had come in, and a crowd of dependents were swarming over the seats of the carriage like monkeys.Aziz had borrowed servants from his friends, as well as bringing his own three, and quarrels over precedence were resulting.The ladies’ servant stood apart, with a sneering expression on his face.They had hired him while they were still globe-trotters, at Bombay.In a hotel or among smart people he was excellent, but as soon as they consorted with anyone whom he thought second-rate he left them to their disgrace.

The night was still dark, but had acquired the temporary look that indicates its end.Perched on the roof of a shed, the station-master’s hens began to dream of kites instead of owls.Lamps were put out, in order to save the trouble of putting them out later; the smell of tobacco and the sound of spitting arose from third-class passengers in dark corners; heads were unshrouded, teeth cleaned on the twigs of a tree.So convinced was a junior official that another sun would rise, that he rang a bell with enthusiasm.This upset the servants.They shrieked that the train was starting, and ran to both ends of it to intercede.Much had still to enter the purdah carriage—a box bound with brass, a melon wearing a fez, a towel containing guavas, a step-ladder and a gun.The guests played up all right.They had no race-consciousness—Mrs. Moore was too old, Miss Quested too new—and they behaved to Aziz as to any young man who had been kind to them in the country.This moved him deeply.He had expected them to arrive with Mr. Fielding, instead of which they trusted themselves to be with him a few moments alone.

“Send back your servant,” he suggested.“He is unnecessary.Then we shall all be Moslems together.”

“And he is such a horrible servant.Antony, you can go; we don’t want you,” said the girl impatiently.

“Master told me to come.”

“Mistress tells you to go.”

“Master says, keep near the ladies all the morning.”

“Well, your ladies won’t have you.”She turned to the host.“Do get rid of him, Dr. Aziz!”

“Mohammed Latif!”he called.

The poor relative exchanged fezzes with the melon, and peeped out of the window of the railway carriage, whose confusion he was superintending.

“Here is my cousin, Mr. Mohammed Latif.Oh no, don’t shake hands.He is an Indian of the old-fashioned sort, he prefers to salaam.There, I told you so.Mohammed Latif, how beautifully you salaam.See, he hasn’t understood; he knows no English.”

“You spick lie,” said the old man gently.

“I spick a lie!Oh, jolly good.Isn’t he a funny old man?We will have great jokes with him later.He does all sorts of little things.He is not nearly as stupid as you think, and awfully poor.It’s lucky ours is a large family.”He flung an arm round the grubby neck.“But you get inside, make yourselves at home; yes, you lie down.”The celebrated Oriental confusion appeared at last to be at an end.“Excuse me, now I must meet our other two guests!”

He was getting nervous again, for it was ten minutes to the time.Still, Fielding was an Englishman, and they never do miss trains, and Godbole was a Hindu and did not count, and, soothed by this logic, he grew calmer as the hour of departure approached.Mohammed Latif had bribed Antony not to come.They walked up and down the platform, talking usefully.They agreed that they had overdone the servants, and must leave two or three behind at Marabar station.And Aziz explained that he might be playing one or two practical jokes at the caves—not out of unkindness, but to make the guests laugh.The old man assented with slight sideway motions of the head: he was always willing to be ridiculed, and he bade Aziz not spare him.Elated by his importance, he began an indecent anecdote.

“Tell me another time, brother, when I have more leisure, for now, as I have already explained, we have to give pleasure to non-Moslems. Three will be Europeans, one a Hindu, which must not be forgotten.Every attention must be paid to Professor Godbole, lest he feel that he is inferior to my other guests.”

“I will discuss philosophy with him.”

“That will be kind of you; but the servants are even more important.We must not convey an impression of disorganization.It can be done, and I expect you to do it . . .”

A shriek from the purdah carriage.The train had started.

“Merciful God!”cried Mohammed Latif.He flung himself at the train, and leapt on to the footboard of a carriage.Aziz did likewise.It was an easy feat, for a branch-line train is slow to assume special airs.“We’re monkeys, don’t worry,” he called, hanging on to a bar and laughing.Then he howled, “Mr. Fielding!Mr. Fielding!”

There were Fielding and old Godbole, held up at the level-crossing.Appalling catastrophe!The gates had been closed earlier than usual.They leapt from their tonga; they gesticulated, but what was the good.So near and yet so far!As the train joggled past over the points, there was time for agonized words.

“Bad, bad, you have destroyed me.”

“Godbole’s pujah did it,” cried the Englishman.

The Brahman lowered his eyes, ashamed of religion.For it was so: he had miscalculated the length of a prayer.

“Jump on, I must have you,” screamed Aziz, beside himself.

“Right, give a hand.”

“He’s not to, he’ll kill himself,” Mrs. Moore protested.He jumped, he failed, missed his friend’s hand, and fell back on to the line.The train rumbled past.He scrambled on to his feet, and bawled after them, “I’m all right, you’re all right, don’t worry,” and then they passed beyond range of his voice.

“Mrs. Moore, Miss Quested, our expedition is a ruin.”He swung himself along the footboard, almost in tears.

“Get in, get in; you’ll kill yourself as well as Mr. Fielding.I see no ruin.”

“How is that?Oh, explain to me!”he said piteously, like a child.

“We shall be all Moslems together now, as you promised.”

She was perfect as always, his dear Mrs. Moore.All the love for her he had felt at the mosque welled up again, the fresher for forgetfulness.There was nothing he would not do for her.He would die to make her happy.

“Get in, Dr. Aziz, you make us giddy,” the other lady called.“If they’re so foolish as to miss the train, that’s their loss, not ours.”

“I am to blame.I am the host.”

“Nonsense, go to your carriage.We’re going to have a delightful time without them.”

Not perfect like Mrs. Moore, but very sincere and kind.Wonderful ladies, both of them, and for one precious morning his guests.He felt important and competent.Fielding was a loss personally, being a friend, increasingly dear, yet if Fielding had come, he himself would have remained in leading-strings.“Indians are incapable of responsibility,” said the officials, and Hamidullah sometimes said so too.He would show those pessimists that they were wrong.Smiling proudly, he glanced outward at the country, which was still invisible except as a dark movement in the darkness; then upwards at the sky, where the stars of the sprawling Scorpion had begun to pale.Then he dived through a window into a second-class carriage.

“Mohammed Latif, by the way, what is in these caves, brother?Why are we all going to see them?”

Such a question was beyond the poor relative’s scope.He could only reply that God and the local villagers knew, and that the latter would gladly act as guides.

CHAPTER XIV

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere.“As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror”—it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.

It so happened that Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested had felt nothing acutely for a fortnight.Ever since Professor Godbole had sung his queer little song, they had lived more or less inside cocoons, and the difference between them was that the elder lady accepted her own apathy, while the younger resented hers.It was Adela’s faith that the whole stream of events is important and interesting, and if she grew bored she blamed herself severely and compelled her lips to utter enthusiasms. This was the only insincerity in a character otherwise sincere, and it was indeed the intellectual protest of her youth.She was particularly vexed now because she was both in India and engaged to be married, which double event should have made every instant sublime.

India was certainly dim this morning, though seen under the auspices of Indians.Her wish had been granted, but too late.She could not get excited over Aziz and his arrangements.She was not the least unhappy or depressed, and the various odd objects that surrounded her—the comic “purdah” carriage, the piles of rugs and bolsters, the rolling melons, the scent of sweet oils, the ladder, the brass-bound box, the sudden irruption of Mahmoud Ali’s butler from the lavatory with tea and poached eggs upon a tray—they were all new and amusing, and led her to comment appropriately, but they wouldn’t bite into her mind.So she tried to find comfort by reflecting that her main interest would henceforward be Ronny.

“What a nice cheerful servant!What a relief after Antony!”

“They startle one rather.A strange place to make tea in,” said Mrs. Moore, who had hoped for a nap.

“I want to sack Antony.His behaviour on the platform has decided me.”

Mrs. Moore thought that Antony’s better self would come to the front at Simla.Miss Quested was to be married at Simla; some cousins, with a house looking straight on to Thibet, had invited her.

“Anyhow, we must get a second servant, because at Simla you will be at the hotel, and I don’t think Ronny’s Baldeo . . .”She loved plans.

“Very well, you get another servant, and I’ll keep Antony with me.I am used to his unappetizing ways.He will see me through the Hot Weather.”

“I don’t believe in the Hot Weather.People like Major Callendar who always talk about it—it’s in the hope of making one feel inexperienced and small, like their everlasting, ‘I’ve been twenty years in this country.’”

“I believe in the Hot Weather, but never did I suppose it would bottle me up as it will.”For owing to the sage leisureliness of Ronny and Adela, they could not be married till May, and consequently Mrs. Moore could not return to England immediately after the wedding, which was what she had hoped to do.By May a barrier of fire would have fallen across India and the adjoining sea, and she would have to remain perched up in the Himalayas waiting for the world to get cooler.

“I won’t be bottled up,” announced the girl.“I’ve no patience with these women here who leave their husbands grilling in the plains.Mrs. McBryde hasn’t stopped down once since she married; she leaves her quite intelligent husband alone half the year, and then’s surprised she’s out of touch with him.”

“She has children, you see.”

“Oh yes, that’s true,” said Miss Quested, disconcerted.

“It is the children who are the first consideration.Until they are grown up, and married off.When that happens one has again the right to live for oneself—in the plains or the hills, as suits.”

“Oh yes, you’re perfectly right.I never thought it out.”

“If one has not become too stupid and old.”She handed her empty cup to the servant.

“My idea now is that my cousins shall find me a servant in Simla, at all events to see me through the wedding, after which Ronny means to reorganize his staff entirely.He does it very well for a bachelor; still, when he is married no doubt various changes will have to be made—his old servants won’t want to take their orders from me, and I don’t blame them.”

Mrs. Moore pushed up the shutters and looked out.She had brought Ronny and Adela together by their mutual wish, but really she could not advise them further.She felt increasingly (vision or nightmare?)that, though people are important, the relations between them are not, and that in particular too much fuss has been made over marriage; centuries of carnal embracement, yet man is no nearer to understanding man.And to-day she felt this with such force that it seemed itself a relationship, itself a person who was trying to take hold of her hand.

“Anything to be seen of the hills?”

“Only various shades of the dark.”

“We can’t be far from the place where my hyena was.”She peered into the timeless twilight.The train crossed a nullah.“Pomper, pomper, pomper,” was the sound that the wheels made as they trundled over the bridge, moving very slowly.A hundred yards on came a second nullah, then a third, suggesting the neighbourhood of higher ground.“Perhaps this is mine; anyhow, the road runs parallel with the railway.”Her accident was a pleasant memory; she felt in her dry, honest way that it had given her a good shake up, and taught her Ronny’s true worth.Then she went back to her plans; plans had been a passion with her from girlhood.Now and then she paid tribute to the present, said how friendly and intelligent Aziz was, ate a guava, couldn’t eat a fried sweet, practised her Urdu on the servant; but her thoughts ever veered to the manageable future, and to the Anglo-Indian life she had decided to endure.And as she appraised it with its adjuncts of Turtons and Burtons, the train accompanied her sentences, “pomper, pomper,” the train half asleep, going nowhere in particular and with no passenger of importance in any of its carriages, the branch-line train, lost on a low embankment between dull fields.Its message—for it had one—avoided her well-equipped mind.Far away behind her, with a shriek that meant business, rushed the Mail, connecting up important towns such as Calcutta and Lahore, where interesting events occur and personalities are developed.She understood that.Unfortunately, India has few important towns.India is the country, fields, fields, then hills, jungle, hills, and more fields.The branch line stops, the road is only practicable for cars to a point, the bullock-carts lumber down the side tracks, paths fray out into the cultivation, and disappear near a splash of red paint.How can the mind take hold of such a country?Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile.The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home.India knows of their trouble.She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth.She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august.But come to what?She has never defined.She is not a promise, only an appeal.

“I will fetch you from Simla when it’s cool enough.I will unbottle you in fact,” continued the reliable girl.“We then see some of the Mogul stuff—how appalling if we let you miss the Taj!—and then I will see you off at Bombay.Your last glimpse of this country really shall be interesting.”But Mrs. Moore had fallen asleep, exhausted by the early start.She was in rather low health, and ought not to have attempted the expedition, but had pulled herself together in case the pleasure of the others should suffer.Her dreams were of the same texture, but there it was her other children who were wanting something, Stella and Ralph, and she was explaining to them that she could not be in two families at once.When she awoke, Adela had ceased to plan, and leant out of a window, saying, “They’re rather wonderful.”

Astonishing even from the rise of the civil station, here the Marabar were gods to whom earth is a ghost.Kawa Dol was nearest.It shot up in a single slab, on whose summit one rock was poised—if a mass so great can be called one rock.Behind it, recumbent, were the hills that contained the other caves, isolated each from his neighbour by broad channels of the plain.The assemblage, ten in all, shifted a little as the train crept past them, as if observing its arrival.

“I’ld not have missed this for anything,” said the girl, exaggerating her enthusiasm.“Look, the sun’s rising—this’ll be absolutely magnificent—come quickly—look.I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.We should never have seen it if we’d stuck to the Turtons and their eternal elephants.”

As she spoke, the sky to the left turned angry orange.Colour throbbed and mounted behind a pattern of trees, grew in intensity, was yet brighter, incredibly brighter, strained from without against the globe of the air.They awaited the miracle.But at the supreme moment, when night should have died and day lived, nothing occurred.It was as if virtue had failed in the celestial fount.The hues in the east decayed, the hills seemed dimmer though in fact better lit, and a profound disappointment entered with the morning breeze.Why, when the chamber was prepared, did the bridegroom not enter with trumpets and shawms, as humanity expects?The sun rose without splendour.He was presently observed trailing yellowish behind the trees, or against insipid sky, and touching the bodies already at work in the fields.

“Ah, that must be the false dawn—isn’t it caused by dust in the upper layers of the atmosphere that couldn’t fall down during the night?I think Mr. McBryde said so.Well, I must admit that England has it as regards sunrises.Do you remember Grasmere?”

“Ah, dearest Grasmere!”Its little lakes and mountains were beloved by them all.Romantic yet manageable, it sprang from a kindlier planet.Here an untidy plain stretched to the knees of the Marabar.

“Good morning, good morning, put on your topis,” shouted Aziz from farther down the train.“Put on your topis at once, the early sun is highly dangerous for heads.I speak as a doctor.”

“Good morning, good morning, put on your own.”

“Not for my thick head,” he laughed, banging it and holding up pads of his hair.

“Nice creature he is,” murmured Adela.

“Listen—Mohammed Latif says ‘Good morning’ next.”Various pointless jests.

“Dr. Aziz, what’s happened to your hills?The train has forgotten to stop.”

“Perhaps it is a circular train and goes back to Chandrapore without a break.Who knows!”

Having wandered off into the plain for a mile, the train slowed up against an elephant.There was a platform too, but it shrivelled into insignificance.An elephant, waving her painted forehead at the morn!“Oh, what a surprise!”called the ladies politely.Aziz said nothing, but he nearly burst with pride and relief.The elephant was the one grand feature of the picnic, and God alone knew what he had gone through to obtain her.Semi-official, she was best approached through the Nawab Bahadur, who was best approached through Nureddin, but he never answered letters, but his mother had great influence with him and was a friend of Hamidullah Begum’s, who had been excessively kind and had promised to call on her provided the broken shutter of the purdah carriage came back soon enough from Calcutta.That an elephant should depend from so long and so slender a string filled Aziz with content, and with humorous appreciation of the East, where the friends of friends are a reality, where everything gets done sometime, and sooner or later every one gets his share of happiness.And Mohammed Latif was likewise content, because two of the guests had missed the train, and consequently he could ride on the howdah instead of following in a cart, and the servants were content because an elephant increased their self-esteem, and they tumbled out the luggage into the dust with shouts and bangs, issuing orders to one another, and convulsed with goodwill.

“It takes an hour to get there, an hour to get back, and two hours for the caves, which we will call three,” said Aziz, smiling charmingly.There was suddenly something regal about him.“The train back is at eleven-thirty, and you will be sitting down to your tiffin in Chandrapore with Mr. Heaslop at exactly your usual hour, namely, one-fifteen.I know everything about you.Four hours—quite a small expedition—and an hour extra for misfortunes, which occur somewhat frequently among my people.My idea is to plan everything without consulting you; but you, Mrs. Moore, or Miss Quested, you are at any moment to make alterations if you wish, even if it means giving up the caves.Do you agree?Then mount this wild animal.”

The elephant had knelt, grey and isolated, like another hill.They climbed up the ladder, and he mounted shikar fashion, treading first on the sharp edge of the heel and then into the looped-up tail.When Mohammed Latif followed him, the servant who held the end of the tail let go of it according to previous instructions, so that the poor relative slipped and had to cling to the netting over the buttocks.It was a little piece of Court buffoonery, and distressed only the ladies, whom it was intended to divert.Both of them disliked practical jokes.Then the beast rose in two shattering movements, and poised them ten feet above the plain.Immediately below was the scurf of life that an elephant always collects round its feet—villagers, naked babies.The servants flung crockery into tongas.Hassan annexed the stallion intended for Aziz, and defied Mahmoud Ali’s man from its altitude.The Brahman who had been hired to cook for Professor Godbole was planted under an acacia tree, to await their return.The train, also hoping to return, wobbled away through the fields, turning its head this way and that like a centipede.And the only other movement to be seen was a movement as of antennae, really the counterpoises of the wells which rose and fell on their pivots of mud all over the plain and dispersed a feeble flow of water.The scene was agreeable rather than not in the mild morning air, but there was little colour in it, and no vitality.

As the elephant moved towards the hills (the pale sun had by this time saluted them to the base, and pencilled shadows down their creases) a new quality occurred, a spiritual silence which invaded more senses than the ear.Life went on as usual, but had no consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo or thoughts develop.Everything seemed cut off at its root, and therefore infected with illusion.For instance, there were some mounds by the edge of the track, low, serrated, and touched with whitewash.What were these mounds—graves, breasts of the goddess Parvati?The villagers beneath gave both replies.Again, there was a confusion about a snake which was never cleared up.Miss Quested saw a thin, dark object reared on end at the farther side of a watercourse, and said, “A snake!”The villagers agreed, and Aziz explained: yes, a black cobra, very venomous, who had reared himself up to watch the passing of the elephant, But when she looked through Ronny’s field-glasses, she found it wasn’t a snake, but the withered and twisted stump of a toddy-palm.So she said, “It isn’t a snake.”The villagers contradicted her.She had put the word into their minds, and they refused to abandon it.Aziz admitted that it looked like a tree through the glasses, but insisted that it was a black cobra really, and improvised some rubbish about protective mimicry.Nothing was explained, and yet there was no romance.Films of heat, radiated from the Kawa Dol precipices, increased the confusion.They came at irregular intervals and moved capriciously.A patch of field would jump as if it was being fried, and then lie quiet.As they drew closer the radiation stopped.

The elephant walked straight at the Kawa Dol as if she would knock for admission with her forehead, then swerved, and followed a path round its base.The stones plunged straight into the earth, like cliffs into the sea, and while Miss Quested was remarking on this, and saying that it was striking, the plain quietly disappeared, peeled off, so to speak, and nothing was to be seen on either side but the granite, very dead and quiet.The sky dominated as usual, but seemed unhealthily near, adhering like a ceiling to the summits of the precipices.It was as if the contents of the corridor had never been changed.Occupied by his own munificence, Aziz noticed nothing.His guests noticed a little.They did not feel that it was an attractive place or quite worth visiting, and wished it could have turned into some Mohammedan object, such as a mosque, which their host would have appreciated and explained.His ignorance became evident, and was really rather a drawback.In spite of his gay, confident talk, he had no notion how to treat this particular aspect of India; he was lost in it without Professor Godbole, like themselves.

The corridor narrowed, then widened into a sort of tray.Here, more or less, was their goal.A ruined tank held a little water which would do for the animals, and close above the mud was punched a black hole—the first of the caves.Three hills encircled the tray.Two of them pumped out heat busily, but the third was in shadow, and here they camped.

“A horrid, stuffy place really,” murmured Mrs. Moore to herself.

“How quick your servants are!”Miss Quested exclaimed.For a cloth had already been laid, with a vase of artificial flowers in its centre, and Mahmoud Ali’s butler offered them poached eggs and tea for the second time.

“I thought we would eat this before our caves, and breakfast after.”

“Isn’t this breakfast?”

“This breakfast?Did you think I should treat you so strangely?”He had been warned that English people never stop eating, and that he had better nourish them every two hours until a solid meal was ready.

“How very well it is all arranged.”

“That you shall tell me when I return to Chandrapore.Whatever disgraces I bring upon myself, you remain my guests.”He spoke gravely now.They were dependent on him for a few hours, and he felt grateful to them for placing themselves in such a position.All was well so far; the elephant held a fresh cut bough to her lips, the tonga shafts stuck up into the air, the kitchen-boy peeled potatoes, Hassan shouted, and Mohammed Latif stood as he ought, with a peeled switch in his hand.The expedition was a success, and it was Indian; an obscure young man had been allowed to show courtesy to visitors from another country, which is what all Indians long to do—even cynics like Mahmoud Ali—but they never have the chance.Hospitality had been achieved, they were “his” guests; his honour was involved in their happiness, and any discomfort they endured would tear his own soul.

Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing that it is tainted with the sense of possession.It was only when Mrs. Moore or Fielding was near him that he saw further, and knew that it is more blessed to receive than to give.These two had strange and beautiful effects on him—they were his friends, his for ever, and he theirs for ever; he loved them so much that giving and receiving became one.He loved them even better than the Hamidullahs, because he had surmounted obstacles to meet them, and this stimulates a generous mind.Their images remained somewhere in his soul up to his dying day, permanent additions.He looked at her now as she sat on a deck-chair, sipping his tea, and had for a moment a joy that held the seeds of its own decay, for it would lead him to think, “Oh, what more can I do for her?”and so back to the dull round of hospitality.The black bullets of his eyes filled with soft expressive light, and he said, “Do you ever remember our mosque, Mrs. Moore?”

“I do.I do,” she said, suddenly vital and young.

“And how rough and rude I was, and how good you were.”

“And how happy we both were.”

“Friendships last longest that begin like that, I think.Shall I ever entertain your other children?”

“Do you know about the others?She will never talk about them to me,” said Miss Quested, unintentionally breaking a spell.

“Ralph and Stella, yes, I know everything about them.But we must not forget to visit our caves.One of the dreams of my life is accomplished in having you both here as my guests.You cannot imagine how you have honoured me.I feel like the Emperor Babur.”

“Why like him?”she enquired, rising.

“Because my ancestors came down with him from Afghanistan.They joined him at Herat.He also had often no more elephants than one, none sometimes, but he never ceased showing hospitality.When he fought or hunted or ran away, he would always stop for a time among hills, just like us; he would never let go of hospitality and pleasure, and if there was only a little food, he would have it arranged nicely, and if only one musical instrument, he would compel it to play a beautiful tune.I take him as my ideal.He is the poor gentleman, and he became a great king.”

“I thought another Emperor is your favourite—I forget the name—you mentioned him at Mr. Fielding’s: what my book calls Aurangzebe.”

“Alamgir?Oh yes, he was of course the more pious.But Babur—never in his whole life did he betray a friend, so I can only think of him this morning.And you know how he died?He laid down his life for his son.A death far more difficult than battle.They were caught in the heat.They should have gone back to Kabul for the bad weather, but could not for reasons of state, and at Agra Humayun fell sick.Babur walked round the bed three times, and said, ‘I have borne it away,’ and he did bear it away; the fever left his son and came to him instead, and he died.That is why I prefer Babur to Alamgir.I ought not to do so, but I do.However, I mustn’t delay you.I see you are ready to start.”

“Not at all,” she said, sitting down by Mrs. Moore again.“We enjoy talk like this very much.”For at last he was talking about what he knew and felt, talking as he had in Fielding’s garden-house; he was again the Oriental guide whom they appreciated.

“I always enjoy conversing about the Moguls.It is the chief pleasure I know.You see, those first six emperors were all most wonderful men, and as soon as one of them is mentioned, no matter which, I forget everything else in the world except the other five.You could not find six such kings in all the countries of the earth, not, I mean, coming one after the other—father, son.”

“Tell us something about Akbar.”

“Ah, you have heard the name of Akbar.Good.Hamidullah—whom you shall meet—will tell you that Akbar is the greatest of all.I say, ‘Yes, Akbar is very wonderful, but half a Hindu; he was not a true Moslem, which makes Hamidullah cry, ‘No more was Babur, he drank wine.’But Babur always repented afterwards, which makes the entire difference, and Akbar never repented of the new religion he invented instead of the Holy Koran.”

“But wasn’t Akbar’s new religion very fine?It was to embrace the whole of India.”

“Miss Quested, fine but foolish.You keep your religion, I mine.That is the best.Nothing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing, and that was Akbar’s mistake.”

“Oh, do you feel that, Dr. Aziz?”she said thoughtfully.“I hope you’re not right.There will have to be something universal in this country—I don’t say religion, for I’m not religious, but something, or how else are barriers to be broken down?”

She was only recommending the universal brotherhood he sometimes dreamed of, but as soon as it was put into prose it became untrue.

“Take my own case,” she continued—it was indeed her own case that had animated her.“I don’t know whether you happen to have heard, but I’m going to marry Mr. Heaslop.”

“On which my heartiest congratulations.”

“Mrs. Moore, may I put our difficulty to Dr. Aziz—I mean our Anglo-Indian one?”

“It is your difficulty, not mine, my dear.”

“Ah, that’s true.Well, by marrying Mr. Heaslop, I shall become what is known as an Anglo-Indian.”

He held up his hand in protest.“Impossible.Take back such a terrible remark.”

“But I shall; it’s inevitable.I can’t avoid the label.What I do hope to avoid is the mentality.Women like——” She stopped, not quite liking to mention names; she would boldly have said “Mrs. Turton and Mrs. Callendar” a fortnight ago.“Some women are so—well, ungenerous and snobby about Indians, and I should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like them, but—and here’s my difficulty—there’s nothing special about me, nothing specially good or strong, which will help me to resist my environment and avoid becoming like them.I’ve most lamentable defects.That’s why I want Akbar’s ‘universal religion’ or the equivalent to keep me decent and sensible.Do you see what I mean?”

Her remarks pleased him, but his mind shut up tight because she had alluded to her marriage.He was not going to be mixed up in that side of things.“You are certain to be happy with any relative of Mrs. Moore’s,” he said with a formal bow.

“Oh, my happiness—that’s quite another problem.I want to consult you about this Anglo-Indian difficulty.Can you give me any advice?”

“You are absolutely unlike the others, I assure you.You will never be rude to my people.”

“I am told we all get rude after a year.”

“Then you are told a lie,” he flashed, for she had spoken the truth and it touched him on the raw; it was itself an insult in these particular circumstances.He recovered himself at once and laughed, but her error broke up their conversation—their civilization it had almost been—which scattered like the petals of a desert flower, and left them in the middle of the hills.“Come along,” he said, holding out a hand to each.They got up a little reluctantly, and addressed themselves to sightseeing.

The first cave was tolerably convenient.They skirted the puddle of water, and then climbed up over some unattractive stones, the sun crashing on their backs.Bending their heads, they disappeared one by one into the interior of the hills.The small black hole gaped where their varied forms and colours had momentarily functioned.They were sucked in like water down a drain.Bland and bald rose the precipices; bland and glutinous the sky that connected the precipices; solid and white, a Brahminy kite flapped between the rocks with a clumsiness that seemed intentional.Before man, with his itch for the seemly, had been born, the planet must have looked thus.The kite flapped away. . . .Before birds, perhaps. . . .And then the hole belched and humanity returned.

A Marabar cave had been horrid as far as Mrs. Moore was concerned, for she had nearly fainted in it, and had some difficulty in preventing herself from saying so as soon as she got into the air again.It was natural enough: she had always suffered from faintness, and the cave had become too full, because all their retinue followed them.Crammed with villagers and servants, the circular chamber began to smell.She lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn’t know who touched her, couldn’t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck her face and settled on her mouth like a pad.She tried to regain the entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back.She hit her head.For an instant she went mad, hitting and gasping like a fanatic.For not only did the crush and stench alarm her; there was also a terrifying echo.

Professor Godbole had never mentioned an echo; it never impressed him, perhaps.There are some exquisite echoes in India; there is the whisper round the dome at Bijapur; there are the long, solid sentences that voyage through the air at Mandu, and return unbroken to their creator.The echo in a Marabar cave is not like these, it is entirely devoid of distinction.Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof.“Boum” is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or “bou-oum,” or “ou-boum,”—utterly dull.Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce “boum.”Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful.And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes, which writhe independently.

After Mrs. Moore all the others poured out.She had given the signal for the reflux.Aziz and Adela both emerged smiling and she did not want him to think his treat was a failure, so smiled too.As each person emerged she looked for a villain, but none was there, and she realized that she had been among the mildest individuals, whose only desire was to honour her, and that the naked pad was a poor little baby, astride its mother’s hip.Nothing evil had been in the cave, but she had not enjoyed herself; no, she had not enjoyed herself, and she decided not to visit a second one.

“Did you see the reflection of his match—rather pretty?”asked Adela.

“I forget . . .”

“But he says this isn’t a good cave, the best are on the Kawa Dol.”

“I don’t think I shall go on to there.I dislike climbing.”

“Very well, let’s sit down again in the shade until breakfast’s ready.”

“Ah, but that’ll disappoint him so; he has taken such trouble.You should go on; you don’t mind.”

“Perhaps I ought to,” said the girl, indifferent to what she did, but desirous of being amiable.

The servants, etc., were scrambling back to the camp, pursued by grave censures from Mohammed Latif.Aziz came to help the guests over the rocks.He was at the summit of his powers, vigorous and humble, too sure of himself to resent criticism, and he was sincerely pleased when he heard they were altering his plans.“Certainly, Miss Quested, so you and I will go together, and leave Mrs. Moore here, and we will not be long, yet we will not hurry, because we know that will be her wish.”

“Quite right.I’m sorry not to come too, but I’m a poor walker.”

“Dear Mrs. Moore, what does anything matter so long as you are my guests? I am very glad you are not coming, which sounds strange, but you are treating me with true frankness, as a friend.”

“Yes, I am your friend,” she said, laying her hand on his sleeve, and thinking, despite her fatigue, how very charming, how very good, he was, and how deeply she desired his happiness.“So may I make another suggestion?Don’t let so many people come with you this time.I think you may find it more convenient.”

“Exactly, exactly,” he cried, and, rushing to the other extreme, forbade all except one guide to accompany Miss Quested and him to the Kawa Dol.“Is that all right?”he enquired.

“Quite right, now enjoy yourselves, and when you come back tell me all about it.”And she sank into the deck-chair.

If they reached the big pocket of caves, they would be away nearly an hour.She took out her writing-pad, and began, “Dear Stella, Dear Ralph,” then stopped, and looked at the queer valley and their feeble invasion of it.Even the elephant had become a nobody.Her eye rose from it to the entrance tunnel.No, she did not wish to repeat that experience.The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became.She minded it much more now than at the time.The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life.Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth.Everything exists, nothing has value.”If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same—“ou-boum.”If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present, and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge or bluff—it would amount to the same, the serpent would descend and return to the ceiling.Devils are of the North, and poems can be written about them, but no one could romanticize the Marabar because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind.

She tried to go on with her letter, reminding herself that she was only an elderly woman who had got up too early in the morning and journeyed too far, that the despair creeping over her was merely her despair, her personal weakness, and that even if she got a sunstroke and went mad the rest of the world would go on.But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished” only amounted to “boum.”Then she was terrified over an area larger than usual; the universe, never comprehensible to her intellect, offered no repose to her soul, the mood of the last two months took definite form at last, and she realized that she didn’t want to write to her children, didn’t want to communicate with anyone, not even with God.She sat motionless with horror, and, when old Mohammed Latif came up to her, thought he would notice a difference.For a time she thought, “I am going to be ill,” to comfort herself, then she surrendered to the vision.She lost all interest, even in Aziz, and the affectionate and sincere words that she had spoken to him seemed no longer hers but the air’s.

CHAPTER XV

Miss Quested and Aziz and a guide continued the slightly tedious expedition. They did not talk much, for the sun was getting high. The air felt like a warm bath into which hotter water is trickling constantly, the temperature rose and rose, the boulders said, “I am alive,” the small stones answered, “I am almost alive.” Between the chinks lay the ashes of little plants. They meant to climb to the rocking-stone on the summit, but it was too far, and they contented themselves with the big group of caves. En route for these, they encountered several isolated caves, which the guide persuaded them to visit, but really there was nothing to see; they lit a match, admired its reflection in the polish, tested the echo and came out again. Aziz was “pretty sure they should come on some interesting old carvings soon,” but only meant he wished there were some carvings. His deeper thoughts were about the breakfast. Symptoms of disorganization had appeared as he left the camp. He ran over the menu: an English breakfast, porridge and mutton chops, but some Indian dishes to cause conversation, and pan afterwards. He had never liked Miss Quested as much as Mrs. Moore, and had little to say to her, less than ever now that she would marry a British official.

Nor had Adela much to say to him.If his mind was with the breakfast, hers was mainly with her marriage.Simla next week, get rid of Antony, a view of Thibet, tiresome wedding bells, Agra in October, see Mrs. Moore comfortably off from Bombay—the procession passed before her again, blurred by the heat, and then she turned to the more serious business of her life at Chandrapore.There were real difficulties here—Ronny’s limitations and her own—but she enjoyed facing difficulties, and decided that if she could control her peevishness (always her weak point), and neither rail against Anglo-India nor succumb to it, their married life ought to be happy and profitable.She mustn’t be too theoretical; she would deal with each problem as it came up, and trust to Ronny’s common sense and her own.Luckily, each had abundance of common sense and good will.

But as she toiled over a rock that resembled an inverted saucer, she thought, “What about love?”The rock was nicked by a double row of footholds, and somehow the question was suggested by them.Where had she seen footholds before?Oh yes, they were the pattern traced in the dust by the wheels of the Nawab Bahadur’s car.She and Ronny—no, they did not love each other.

“Do I take you too fast?”enquired Aziz, for she had paused, a doubtful expression on her face.The discovery had come so suddenly that she felt like a mountaineer whose rope had broken.Not to love the man one’s going to marry!Not to find it out till this moment!Not even to have asked oneself the question until now!Something else to think out.Vexed rather than appalled, she stood still, her eyes on the sparkling rock.There was esteem and animal contact at dusk, but the emotion that links them was absent.Ought she to break her engagement off?She was inclined to think not—it would cause so much trouble to others; besides, she wasn’t convinced that love is necessary to a successful union.If love is everything, few marriages would survive the honeymoon.“No, I’m all right, thanks,” she said, and, her emotions well under control, resumed the climb, though she felt a bit dashed.Aziz held her hand, the guide adhered to the surface like a lizard and scampered about as if governed by a personal centre of gravity.

“Are you married, Dr. Aziz?”she asked, stopping again, and frowning.

“Yes, indeed, do come and see my wife”—for he felt it more artistic to have his wife alive for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said absently.

“She is not in Chandrapore just now.”

“And have you children?”

“Yes, indeed, three,” he replied in firmer tones.

“Are they a great pleasure to you?”

“Why, naturally, I adore them,” he laughed.

“I suppose so.”What a handsome little Oriental he was, and no doubt his wife and children were beautiful too, for people usually get what they already possess.She did not admire him with any personal warmth, for there was nothing of the vagrant in her blood, but she guessed he might attract women of his own race and rank, and she regretted that neither she nor Ronny had physical charm.It does make a difference in a relationship—beauty, thick hair, a fine skin.Probably this man had several wives—Mohammedans always insist on their full four, according to Mrs. Turton.And having no one else to speak to on that eternal rock, she gave rein to the subject of marriage and said in her honest, decent, inquisitive way: “Have you one wife or more than one?”

The question shocked the young man very much.It challenged a new conviction of his community, and new convictions are more sensitive than old.If she had said, “Do you worship one god or several?”he would not have objected.But to ask an educated Indian Moslem how many wives he has—appalling, hideous!He was in trouble how to conceal his confusion.“One, one in my own particular case,” he sputtered, and let go of her hand.Quite a number of caves were at the top of the track, and thinking, “Damn the English even at their best,” he plunged into one of them to recover his balance.She followed at her leisure, quite unconscious that she had said the wrong thing, and not seeing him, she also went into a cave, thinking with half her mind “sight-seeing bores me,” and wondering with the other half about marriage.

CHAPTER XVI

He waited in his cave a minute, and lit a cigarette, so that he could remark on rejoining her, “I bolted in to get out of the draught,” or something of the sort.When he returned, he found the guide, alone, with his head on one side.He had heard a noise, he said, and then Aziz heard it too: the noise of a motor-car.They were now on the outer shoulder of the Kawa Dol, and by scrambling twenty yards they got a glimpse of the plain.A car was coming towards the hills down the Chandrapore road.But they could not get a good view of it, because the precipitous bastion curved at the top, so that the base was not easily seen and the car disappeared as it came nearer.No doubt it would stop almost exactly beneath them, at the place where the pukka road degenerated into a path, and the elephant had turned to sidle into the hills.

He ran back, to tell the strange news to his guest.The guide explained that she had gone into a cave.“Which cave?”

He indicated the group vaguely.

“You should have kept her in sight, it was your duty,” said Aziz severely.“Here are twelve caves at least.How am I to know which contains my guest?Which is the cave I was in myself?”

The same vague gesture.And Aziz, looking again, could not even be sure he had returned to the same group.Caves appeared in every direction—it seemed their original spawning place—and the orifices were always the same size.He thought, “Merciful Heavens, Miss Quested is lost,” then pulled himself together, and began to look for her calmly.

“Shout!”he commanded.

When they had done this for awhile, the guide explained that to shout is useless, because a Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own.Aziz wiped his head, and sweat began to stream inside his clothes.The place was so confusing; it was partly a terrace, partly a zigzag, and full of grooves that led this way and that like snake-tracks.He tried to go into every one, but he never knew where he had started.Caves got behind caves or confabulated in pairs, and some were at the entrance of a gully.

“Come here!”he called gently, and when the guide was in reach, he struck him in the face for a punishment.The man fled, and he was left alone.He thought, “This is the end of my career, my guest is lost.”And then he discovered the simple and sufficient explanation of the mystery.

Miss Quested wasn’t lost.She had joined the people in the car—friends of hers, no doubt, Mr. Heaslop perhaps.He had a sudden glimpse of her, far down the gully—only a glimpse, but there she was quite plain, framed between rocks, and speaking to another lady.He was so relieved that he did not think her conduct odd.Accustomed to sudden changes of plan, he supposed that she had run down the Kawa Dol impulsively, in the hope of a little drive.He started back alone towards his camp, and almost at once caught sight of something which would have disquieted him very much a moment before: Miss Quested’s field-glasses.They were lying at the verge of a cave, half-way down an entrance tunnel.He tried to hang them over his shoulder, but the leather strap had broken, so he put them into his pocket instead.When he had gone a few steps, he thought she might have dropped something else, so he went back to look.

But the previous difficulty recurred: he couldn’t identify the cave.Down in the plain he heard the car starting; however, he couldn’t catch a second glimpse of that.So he scrambled down the valley-face of the hill towards Mrs. Moore, and here he was more successful: the colour and confusion of his little camp soon appeared, and in the midst of it he saw an Englishman’s topi, and beneath it—oh joy!—smiled not Mr. Heaslop, but Fielding.

“Fielding!Oh, I have so wanted you!”he cried, dropping the “Mr.” for the first time.

And his friend ran to meet him, all so pleasant and jolly, no dignity, shouting explanations and apologies about the train.Fielding had come in the newly arrived car—Miss Derek’s car—that other lady was Miss Derek.Chatter, chatter, all the servants leaving their cooking to listen.Excellent Miss Derek!She had met Fielding by chance at the post office, said, “Why haven’t you gone to the Marabar?”heard how he missed the train, offered to run him there and then.Another nice English lady.Where was she?Left with car and chauffeur while Fielding found camp.Car couldn’t get up—no, of course not—hundreds of people must go down to escort Miss Derek and show her the way.The elephant in person. . . .

“Aziz, can I have a drink?”

“Certainly not.”He flew to get one.

“Mr. Fielding!”called Mrs. Moore, from her patch of shade; they had not spoken yet, because his arrival had coincided with the torrent from the hill.

“Good morning again!”he cried, relieved to find all well.

“Mr. Fielding, have you seen Miss Quested?”

“But I’ve only just arrived.Where is she?”

“I do not know.”

“Aziz!Where have you put Miss Quested to?”Aziz, who was returning with a drink in his hand, had to think for a moment.His heart was full of new happiness.The picnic, after a nasty shock or two, had developed into something beyond his dreams, for Fielding had not only come, but brought an uninvited guest.“Oh, she’s all right,” he said; “she went down to see Miss Derek.Well, here’s luck!Chin-chin!”

“Here’s luck, but chin-chin I do refuse,” laughed Fielding, who detested the phrase.“Here’s to India!”

“Here’s luck, and here’s to England!”

Miss Derek’s chauffeur stopped the cavalcade which was starting to escort his mistress up, and informed it that she had gone back with the other young lady to Chandrapore; she had sent him to say so.She was driving herself.

“Oh yes, that’s quite likely,” said Aziz.“I knew they’d gone for a spin.”

“Chandrapore?The man’s made a mistake,” Fielding exclaimed.

“Oh no, why?”He was disappointed, but made light of it; no doubt the two young ladies were great friends.He would prefer to give breakfast to all four; still, guests must do as they wish, or they become prisoners.He went away cheerfully to inspect the porridge and the ice.

“What’s happened?”asked Fielding, who felt at once that something had gone queer.All the way out Miss Derek had chattered about the picnic, called it an unexpected treat, and said that she preferred Indians who didn’t invite her to their entertainments to those who did it.Mrs. Moore sat swinging her foot, and appeared sulky and stupid.She said: “Miss Derek is most unsatisfactory and restless, always in a hurry, always wanting something new; she will do anything in the world except go back to the Indian lady who pays her.”

Fielding, who didn’t dislike Miss Derek, replied: “She wasn’t in a hurry when I left her.There was no question of returning to Chandrapore.It looks to me as if Miss Quested’s in the hurry.”

“Adela?—she’s never been in a hurry in her life,” said the old lady sharply.

“I say it’ll prove to be Miss Quested’s wish, in fact I know it is,” persisted the schoolmaster.He was annoyed—chiefly with himself.He had begun by missing a train—a sin he was never guilty of—and now that he did arrive it was to upset Aziz’ arrangements for the second time.He wanted someone to share the blame, and frowned at Mrs. Moore rather magisterially.“Aziz is a charming fellow,” he announced.

“I know,” she answered, with a yawn.

“He has taken endless trouble to make a success of our picnic.”

They knew one another very little, and felt rather awkward at being drawn together by an Indian.The racial problem can take subtle forms. In their case it had induced a sort of jealousy, a mutual suspicion.He tried to goad her enthusiasm; she scarcely spoke.Aziz fetched them to breakfast.

“It is quite natural about Miss Quested,” he remarked, for he had been working the incident a little in his mind, to get rid of its roughnesses.“We were having an interesting talk with our guide, then the car was seen, so she decided to go down to her friend.”Incurably inaccurate, he already thought that this was what had occurred.He was inaccurate because he was sensitive.He did not like to remember Miss Quested’s remark about polygamy, because it was unworthy of a guest, so he put it from his mind, and with it the knowledge that he had bolted into a cave to get away from her.He was inaccurate because he desired to honour her, and—facts being entangled—he had to arrange them in her vicinity, as one tidies the ground after extracting a weed.Before breakfast was over, he had told a good many lies.“She ran to her friend, I to mine,” he went on, smiling.“And now I am with my friends and they are with me and each other, which is happiness.”

Loving them both, he expected them to love each other.They didn’t want to.Fielding thought with hostility, “I knew these women would make trouble,” and Mrs. Moore thought, “This man, having missed the train, tries to blame us”; but her thoughts were feeble; since her faintness in the cave she was sunk in apathy and cynicism.The wonderful India of her opening weeks, with its cool nights and acceptable hints of infinity, had vanished.

Fielding ran up to see one cave.He wasn’t impressed.Then they got on the elephant and the picnic began to unwind out of the corridor and escaped under the precipice towards the railway station, pursued by stabs of hot air.They came to the place where he had quitted the car.A disagreeable thought now struck him, and he said: “Aziz, exactly where and how did you leave Miss Quested?”

“Up there.”He indicated the Kawa Dol cheerfully.

“But how——” A gully, or rather a crease, showed among the rocks at this place; it was scurfy with cactuses.“I suppose the guide helped her.”

“Oh, rather, most helpful.”

“Is there a path off the top?”

“Millions of paths, my dear fellow.”

Fielding could see nothing but the crease.Everywhere else the glaring granite plunged into the earth.

“But you saw them get down safe?”

“Yes, yes, she and Miss Derek, and go off in the car.”

“Then the guide came back to you?”

“Exactly.Got a cigarette?”

“I hope she wasn’t ill,” pursued the Englishman.The crease continued as a nullah across the plain, the water draining off this way towards the Ganges.

“She would have wanted me, if she was ill, to attend her.”

“Yes, that sounds sense.”

“I see you’re worrying, let’s talk of other things,” he said kindly.“Miss Quested was always to do what she wished, it was our arrangement.I see you are worrying on my account, but really I don’t mind, I never notice trifles.”

“I do worry on your account.I consider they have been impolite!”said Fielding, lowering his voice.“She had no right to dash away from your party, and Miss Derek had no right to abet her.”

So touchy as a rule, Aziz was unassailable.The wings that uplifted him did not falter, because he was a Mogul emperor who had done his duty.Perched on his elephant, he watched the Marabar Hills recede, and saw again, as provinces of his kingdom, the grim untidy plain, the frantic and feeble movements of the buckets, the white shrines, the shallow graves, the suave sky, the snake that looked like a tree.He had given his guests as good a time as he could, and if they came late or left early that was not his affair.Mrs. Moore slept, swaying against the rods of the howdah, Mohammed Latif embraced her with efficiency and respect, and by his own side sat Fielding, whom he began to think of as “Cyril.”

“Aziz, have you figured out what this picnic will cost you?”

“Sh!my dear chap, don’t mention that part.Hundreds and hundreds of rupees.The completed account will be too awful; my friends’ servants have robbed me right and left, and as for an elephant, she apparently eats gold.I can trust you not to repeat this.And M.L.—please employ initials, he listens—is far the worst of all.”

“I told you he’s no good.”

“He is plenty of good for himself; his dishonesty will ruin me.”

“Aziz, how monstrous!”

“I am delighted with him really, he has made my guests comfortable; besides, it is my duty to employ him, he is my cousin.If money goes, money comes.If money stays, death comes.Did you ever hear that useful Urdu proverb?Probably not, for I have just invented it.”

“My proverbs are: A penny saved is a penny earned; A stitch in time saves nine; Look before you leap; and the British Empire rests on them.You will never kick us out, you know, until you cease employing M.L.’s and such.”

“Oh, kick you out?Why should I trouble over that dirty job?Leave it to the politicians. . . .No, when I was a student I got excited over your damned countrymen, certainly; but if they’ll let me get on with my profession and not be too rude to me officially, I really don’t ask for more.”

“But you do; you take them to a picnic.”

“This picnic is nothing to do with English or Indian; it is an expedition of friends.”

So the cavalcade ended, partly pleasant, partly not; the Brahman cook was picked up, the train arrived, pushing its burning throat over the plain, and the twentieth century took over from the sixteenth.Mrs. Moore entered her carriage, the three men went to theirs, adjusted the shutters, turned on the electric fan and tried to get some sleep.In the twilight, all resembled corpses, and the train itself seemed dead though it moved—a coffin from the scientific north which troubled the scenery four times a day.As it left the Marabars, their nasty little cosmos disappeared, and gave place to the Marabars seen from a distance, finite and rather romantic.The train halted once under a pump, to drench the stock of coal in its tender.Then it caught sight of the main line in the distance, took courage, and bumped forward, rounded the civil station, surmounted the level-crossing (the rails were scorching now), and clanked to a stand-still.Chandrapore, Chandrapore!The expedition was over.

And as it ended, as they sat up in the gloom and prepared to enter ordinary life, suddenly the long drawn strangeness of the morning snapped.Mr. Haq, the Inspector of Police, flung open the door of their carriage and said in shrill tones: “Dr. Aziz, it is my highly painful duty to arrest you.”

“Hullo, some mistake,” said Fielding, at once taking charge of the situation.

“Sir, they are my instructions.I know nothing.”

“On what charge do you arrest him?”

“I am under instructions not to say.”

“Don’t answer me like that.Produce your warrant.”

“Sir, excuse me, no warrant is required under these particular circumstances.Refer to Mr. McBryde.”

“Very well, so we will.Come along, Aziz, old man; nothing to fuss about, some blunder.”

“Dr. Aziz, will you kindly come?—a closed conveyance stands in readiness.”

The young man sobbed—his first sound—and tried to escape out of the opposite door on to the line.

“That will compel me to use force,” Mr. Haq wailed.

“Oh, for God’s sake——” cried Fielding, his own nerves breaking under the contagion, and pulled him back before a scandal started, and shook him like a baby.A second later, and he would have been out, whistles blowing, a man-hunt. . . .“Dear fellow, we’re coming to McBryde together, and enquire what’s gone wrong—he’s a decent fellow, it’s all unintentional . . .he’ll apologize.Never, never act the criminal.”

“My children and my name!”he gasped, his wings broken.

“Nothing of the sort.Put your hat straight and take my arm.I’ll see you through.”

“Ah, thank God, he comes,” the Inspector exclaimed.They emerged into the midday heat, arm in arm.The station was seething.Passengers and porters rushed out of every recess, many Government servants, more police.Ronny escorted Mrs. Moore.Mohammed Latif began wailing.And before they could make their way through the chaos, Fielding was called off by the authoritative tones of Mr. Turton, and Aziz went on to prison alone.

CHAPTER XVII

The Collector had watched the arrest from the interior of the waiting-room, and throwing open its perforated doors of zinc, he was now revealed like a god in a shrine.When Fielding entered the doors clapped to, and were guarded by a servant, while a punkah, to mark the importance of the moment, flapped dirty petticoats over their heads.The Collector could not speak at first.His face was white, fanatical, and rather beautiful—the expression that all English faces were to wear at Chandrapore for many days.Always brave and unselfish, he was now fused by some white and generous heat; he would have killed himself, obviously, if he had thought it right to do so.He spoke at last.“The worst thing in my whole career has happened,” he said.“Miss Quested has been insulted in one of the Marabar caves.”

“Oh no, oh no, no,” gasped the other, feeling sickish.

“She escaped—by God’s grace.”

“Oh no, no, but not Aziz . . .not Aziz . . .”

He nodded.

“Absolutely impossible, grotesque.”

“I called you to preserve you from the odium that would attach to you if you were seen accompanying him to the Police Station,” said Turton, paying no attention to his protest, indeed scarcely hearing it.

He repeated “Oh no,” like a fool.He couldn’t frame other words.He felt that a mass of madness had arisen and tried to overwhelm them all; it had to be shoved back into its pit somehow, and he didn’t know how to do it, because he did not understand madness: he had always gone about sensibly and quietly until a difficulty came right.“Who lodges this infamous charge?”he asked, pulling himself together.

“Miss Derek and—the victim herself. . . .”He nearly broke down, unable to repeat the girl’s name.

“Miss Quested herself definitely accuses him of——”

He nodded and turned his face away.

“Then she’s mad.”

“I cannot pass that last remark,” said the Collector, waking up to the knowledge that they differed, and trembling with fury.“You will withdraw it instantly.It is the type of remark you have permitted yourself to make ever since you came to Chandrapore.”

“I’m excessively sorry, sir; I certainly withdraw it unconditionally.”For the man was half mad himself.

“Pray, Mr. Fielding, what induced you to speak to me in such a tone?”

“The news gave me a very great shock, so I must ask you to forgive me.I cannot believe that Dr. Aziz is guilty.”

He slammed his hand on the table.“That—that is a repetition of your insult in an aggravated form.”

“If I may venture to say so, no,” said Fielding, also going white, but sticking to his point.“I make no reflection on the good faith of the two ladies, but the charge they are bringing against Aziz rests upon some mistake, and five minutes will clear it up.The man’s manner is perfectly natural; besides, I know him to be incapable of infamy.”

“It does indeed rest upon a mistake,” came the thin, biting voice of the other.“It does indeed.I have had twenty-five years’ experience of this country”—he paused, and “twenty-five years” seemed to fill the waiting-room with their staleness and ungenerosity—“and during those twenty-five years I have never known anything but disaster result when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially.Intercourse, yes.Courtesy, by all means.Intimacy—never, never.The whole weight of my authority is against it.I have been in charge at Chandrapore for six years, and if everything has gone smoothly, if there has been mutual respect and esteem, it is because both peoples kept to this simple rule.New-comers set our traditions aside, and in an instant what you see happens, the work of years is undone and the good name of my District ruined for a generation.I—I—can’t see the end of this day’s work, Mr. Fielding.You, who are imbued with modern ideas—no doubt you can.I wish I had never lived to see its beginning, I know that.It is the end of me.That a lady, that a young lady engaged to my most valued subordinate—that she—an English girl fresh from England—that I should have lived——”

Involved in his own emotions, he broke down.What he had said was both dignified and pathetic, but had it anything to do with Aziz?Nothing at all, if Fielding was right.It is impossible to regard a tragedy from two points of view, and whereas Turton had decided to avenge the girl, he hoped to save the man.He wanted to get away and talk to McBryde, who had always been friendly to him, was on the whole sensible, and could, anyhow, be trusted to keep cool.

“I came down particularly on your account—while poor Heaslop got his mother away.I regarded it as the most friendly thing I could do.I meant to tell you that there will be an informal meeting at the club this evening to discuss the situation, but I am doubtful whether you will care to come.Your visits there are always infrequent.”

“I shall certainly come, sir, and I am most grateful to you for all the trouble you have taken over me.May I venture to ask—where Miss Quested is.”

He replied with a gesture; she was ill.

“Worse and worse, appalling,” he said feelingly.

But the Collector looked at him sternly, because he was keeping his head.He had not gone mad at the phrase “an English girl fresh from England,” he had not rallied to the banner of race.He was still after facts, though the herd had decided on emotion.Nothing enrages Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed.All over Chandrapore that day the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community.Pity, wrath, heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated.

Terminating the interview, the Collector walked on to the platform.The confusion there was revolting.A chuprassi of Ronny’s had been told to bring up some trifles belonging to the ladies, and was appropriating for himself various articles to which he had no right; he was a camp follower of the angry English.Mohammed Latif made no attempt to resist him.Hassan flung off his turban, and wept.All the comforts that had been provided so liberally were rolled about and wasted in the sun.The Collector took in the situation at a glance, and his sense of justice functioned though he was insane with rage.He spoke the necessary word, and the looting stopped.Then he drove off to his bungalow and gave rein to his passions again.When he saw the coolies asleep in the ditches or the shopkeepers rising to salute him on their little platforms, he said to himself: “I know what you’re like at last; you shall pay for this, you shall squeal.”

CHAPTER XVIII

Mr. McBryde, the District Superintendent of Police, was the most reflective and best educated of the Chandrapore officials.He had read and thought a good deal, and, owing to a somewhat unhappy marriage, had evolved a complete philosophy of life.There was much of the cynic about him, but nothing of the bully; he never lost his temper or grew rough, and he received Aziz with courtesy, was almost reassuring.“I have to detain you until you get bail,” he said, “but no doubt your friends will be applying for it, and of course they will be allowed to visit you, under regulations.I am given certain information, and have to act on it—I’m not your judge.”Aziz was led off weeping.Mr. McBryde was shocked at his downfall, but no Indian ever surprised him, because he had a theory about climatic zones.The theory ran: “All unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30.They are not to blame, they have not a dog’s chance—we should be like them if we settled here.”Born at Karachi, he seemed to contradict his theory, and would sometimes admit as much with a sad, quiet smile.

“Another of them found out,” he thought, as he set to work to draft his statement to the Magistrate.

He was interrupted by the arrival of Fielding.

He imparted all he knew without reservations.Miss Derek had herself driven in the Mudkul car about an hour ago, she and Miss Quested both in a terrible state.They had gone straight to his bungalow where he happened to be, and there and then he had taken down the charge and arranged for the arrest at the railway station.

“What is the charge, precisely?”

“That he followed her into the cave and made insulting advances.She hit at him with her field-glasses; he pulled at them and the strap broke, and that is how she got away.When we searched him just now, they were in his pocket.”

“Oh no, oh no, no; it’ll be cleared up in five minutes,” he cried again.

“Have a look at them.”

The strap had been newly broken, the eye-piece was jammed.The logic of evidence said “Guilty.”

“Did she say any more?”

“There was an echo that appears to have frightened her.Did you go into those caves?”

“I saw one of them.There was an echo.Did it get on her nerves?”

“I couldn’t worry her overmuch with questions.She’ll have plenty to go through in the witness-box.They don’t bear thinking about, these next weeks.I wish the Marabar Hills and all they contain were at the bottom of the sea.Evening after evening one saw them from the club, and they were just a harmless name. . . .Yes, we start already.”For a visiting card was brought; Vakil Mahmoud Ali, legal adviser to the prisoner, asked to be allowed to see him.McBryde sighed, gave permission, and continued: “I heard some more from Miss Derek—she is an old friend of us both and talks freely; well—her account is that you went off to locate the camp, and almost at once she heard stones falling on the Kawa Dol and saw Miss Quested running straight down the face of a precipice.Well.She climbed up a sort of gully to her, and found her practically done for—her helmet off——”

“Was a guide not with her?”interrupted Fielding.

“No.She had got among some cactuses.Miss Derek saved her life coming just then—she was beginning to fling herself about.She helped her down to the car.Miss Quested couldn’t stand the Indian driver, cried, ‘Keep him away’—and it was that that put our friend on the track of what had happened.They made straight for our bungalow, and are there now.That’s the story as far as I know it yet.She sent the driver to join you.I think she behaved with great sense.”

“I suppose there’s no possibility of my seeing Miss Quested?”he asked suddenly.

“I hardly think that would do.Surely.”

“I was afraid you’ld say that.I should very much like to.”

“She is in no state to see anyone.Besides, you don’t know her well.”

“Hardly at all. . . .But you see I believe she’s under some hideous delusion, and that that wretched boy is innocent.”

The policeman started in surprise, and a shadow passed over his face, for he could not bear his dispositions to be upset.“I had no idea that was in your mind,” he said, and looked for support at the signed deposition, which lay before him.

“Those field-glasses upset me for a minute, but I’ve thought since: it’s impossible that, having attempted to assault her, he would put her glasses into his pocket.”

“Quite possible, I’m afraid; when an Indian goes bad, he goes not only very bad, but very queer.”

“I don’t follow.”

“How should you?When you think of crime you think of English crime.The psychology here is different.I dare say you’ll tell me next that he was quite normal when he came down from the hill to greet you.No reason he should not be.Read any of the Mutiny records; which, rather than the Bhagavad Gita, should be your Bible in this country.Though I’m not sure that the one and the other are not closely connected.Am I not being beastly?But, you see, Fielding, as I’ve said to you once before, you’re a schoolmaster, and consequently you come across these people at their best.That’s what puts you wrong.They can be charming as boys.But I know them as they really are, after they have developed into men.Look at this, for instance.”He held up Aziz’ pocket-case.“I am going through the contents.They are not edifying.Here is a letter from a friend who apparently keeps a brothel.”

“I don’t want to hear his private letters.”

“It’ll have to be quoted in Court, as bearing on his morals.He was fixing up to see women at Calcutta.”

“Oh, that’ll do, that’ll do.”

McBryde stopped, naively puzzled.It was obvious to him that any two sahibs ought to pool all they knew about any Indian, and he could not think where the objection came in.

“I dare say you have the right to throw stones at a young man for doing that, but I haven’t.I did the same at his age.”

So had the Superintendent of Police, but he considered that the conversation had taken a turn that was undesirable.He did not like Fielding’s next remark either.

“Miss Quested really cannot be seen?You do know that for a certainty?”

“You have never explained to me what’s in your mind here.Why on earth do you want to see her?”

“On the off chance of her recanting before you send in that report and he’s committed for trial, and the whole thing goes to blazes.Old man, don’t argue about this, but do of your goodness just ring up your wife or Miss Derek and enquire.It’ll cost you nothing.”

“It’s no use ringing up them,” he replied, stretching out for the telephone.“Callendar settles a question like that, of course.You haven’t grasped that she’s seriously ill.”

“He’s sure to refuse, it’s all he exists for,” said the other desperately.

The expected answer came back: the Major would not hear of the patient being troubled.

“I only wanted to ask her whether she is certain, dead certain, that it was Aziz who followed her into the cave.”

“Possibly my wife might ask her that much.”

“But I wanted to ask her. I want someone who believes in him to ask her.”

“What difference does that make?”

“She is among people who disbelieve in Indians.”

“Well, she tells her own story, doesn’t she?”

“I know, but she tells it to you.”

McBryde raised his eyebrows, murmuring: “A bit too finespun.Anyhow, Callendar won’t hear of you seeing her.I’m sorry to say he gave a bad account just now.He says that she is by no means out of danger.”

They were silent.Another card was brought into the office—Hamidullah’s.The opposite army was gathering.

“I must put this report through now, Fielding.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“How can I not?”

“I feel that things are rather unsatisfactory as well as most disastrous.We are heading for a most awful smash.I can see your prisoner, I suppose.”

He hesitated.“His own people seem in touch with him all right.”

“Well, when he’s done with them.”

“I wouldn’t keep you waiting; good heavens, you take precedence of any Indian visitor, of course.I meant what’s the good.Why mix yourself up with pitch?”

“I say he’s innocent——”

“Innocence or guilt, why mix yourself up?What’s the good?”

“Oh, good, good,” he cried, feeling that every earth was being stopped.“One’s got to breathe occasionally, at least I have.I mayn’t see her, and now I mayn’t see him.I promised him to come up here with him to you, but Turton called me off before I could get two steps.”

“Sort of all-white thing the Burra Sahib would do,” he muttered sentimentally.And trying not to sound patronizing, he stretched his hand over the table, and said: “We shall all have to hang together, old man, I’m afraid.I’m your junior in years, I know, but very much your senior in service; you don’t happen to know this poisonous country as well as I do, and you must take it from me that the general situation is going to be nasty at Chandrapore during the next few weeks, very nasty indeed.”

“So I have just told you.”

“But at a time like this there’s no room for—well—personal views.The man who doesn’t toe the line is lost.”

“I see what you mean.”

“No, you don’t see entirely.He not only loses himself, he weakens his friends.If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line.These jackals”—he pointed at the lawyers’ cards—“are looking with all their eyes for a gap.”

“Can I visit Aziz?”was his answer.

“No.”Now that he knew of Turton’s attitude, the policeman had no doubts.“You may see him on a magistrate’s order, but on my own responsibility I don’t feel justified.It might lead to more complications.”

He paused, reflecting that if he had been either ten years younger or ten years longer in India, he would have responded to McBryde’s appeal.The bit between his teeth, he then said, “To whom do I apply for an order?”

“City Magistrate.”

“That sounds comfortable!”

“Yes, one can’t very well worry poor Heaslop.”

More “evidence” appeared at this moment—the table-drawer from Aziz’ bungalow, borne with triumph in a corporal’s arms.

“Photographs of women.Ah!”

“That’s his wife,” said Fielding, wincing.

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

McBryde gave a faint, incredulous smile, and started rummaging in the drawer.His face became inquisitive and slightly bestial.“Wife indeed, I know those wives!”he was thinking.Aloud he said: “Well, you must trot off now, old man, and the Lord help us, the Lord help us all. . .”

As if his prayer had been heard, there was a sudden rackety-dacket on a temple bell.

CHAPTER XIX

Hamidullah was the next stage.He was waiting outside the Superintendent’s office, and sprang up respectfully when he saw Fielding.To the Englishman’s passionate “It’s all a mistake,” he answered, “Ah, ah, has some evidence come?”

“It will come,” said Fielding, holding his hand.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Fielding; but when once an Indian has been arrested, we do not know where it will stop.”His manner was deferential.“You are very good to greet me in this public fashion, I appreciate it; but, Mr. Fielding, nothing convinces a magistrate except evidence.Did Mr. McBryde make any remark when my card came in?Do you think my application annoyed him, will prejudice him against my friend at all?If so, I will gladly retire.”

“He’s not annoyed, and if he was, what does it matter?”

“Ah, it’s all very well for you to speak like that, but we have to live in this country.”

The leading barrister of Chandrapore, with the dignified manner and Cambridge degree, had been rattled. He too loved Aziz, and knew he was calumniated; but faith did not rule his heart, and he prated of “policy” and “evidence” in a way that saddened the Englishman. Fielding, too, had his anxieties—he didn’t like the field-glasses or the discrepancy over the guide—but he relegated them to the edge of his mind, and forbade them to infect its core. Aziz was innocent, and all action must be based on that, and the people who said he was guilty were wrong, and it was hopeless to try to propitiate them. At the moment when he was throwing in his lot with Indians, he realized the profundity of the gulf that divided him from them. They always do something disappointing. Aziz had tried to run away from the police, Mohammed Latif had not checked the pilfering. And now Hamidullah! —instead of raging and denouncing, he temporized. Are Indians cowards? No, but they are bad starters and occasionally jib. Fear is everywhere; the British Raj rests on it; the respect and courtesy Fielding himself enjoyed were unconscious acts of propitiation. He told Hamidullah to cheer up, all would end well; and Hamidullah did cheer up, and became pugnacious and sensible. McBryde’s remark, “If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line,” was being illustrated.

“First and foremost, the question of bail . . .”

Application must be made this afternoon.Fielding wanted to stand surety.Hamidullah thought the Nawab Bahadur should be approached.

“Why drag in him, though?”

To drag in everyone was precisely the barrister’s aim.He then suggested that the lawyer in charge of the case would be a Hindu; the defence would then make a wider appeal.He mentioned one or two names—men from a distance who would not be intimidated by local conditions—and said he should prefer Amritrao, a Calcutta barrister, who had a high reputation professionally and personally, but who was notoriously anti-British.

Fielding demurred; this seemed to him going to the other extreme.Aziz must be cleared, but with a minimum of racial hatred.Amritrao was loathed at the club.His retention would be regarded as a political challenge.

“Oh no, we must hit with all our strength.When I saw my friend’s private papers carried in just now in the arms of a dirty policeman, I said to myself, ‘Amritrao is the man to clear up this.’”

There was a lugubrious pause.The temple bell continued to jangle harshly.The interminable and disastrous day had scarcely reached its afternoon.Continuing their work, the wheels of Dominion now propelled a messenger on a horse from the Superintendent to the Magistrate with an official report of arrest.“Don’t complicate, let the cards play themselves,” entreated Fielding, as he watched the man disappear into dust.“We’re bound to win, there’s nothing else we can do.She will never be able to substantiate the charge.”

This comforted Hamidullah, who remarked with complete sincerity, “At a crisis, the English are really unequalled.”

“Good-bye, then, my dear Hamidullah (we must drop the ‘Mr.’ now).Give Aziz my love when you see him, and tell him to keep calm, calm, calm.I shall go back to the College now.If you want me, ring me up; if you don’t, don’t, for I shall be very busy.”

“Good-bye, my dear Fielding, and you actually are on our side against your own people?”

“Yes.Definitely.”

He regretted taking sides.To slink through India unlabelled was his aim.Henceforward he would be called “anti-British,” “seditious”—terms that bored him, and diminished his utility.He foresaw that besides being a tragedy, there would be a muddle; already he saw several tiresome little knots, and each time his eye returned to them, they were larger.Born in freedom, he was not afraid of muddle, but he recognized its existence.

This section of the day concluded in a queer vague talk with Professor Godbole.The interminable affair of the Russell’s Viper was again in question.Some weeks before, one of the masters at the College, an unpopular Parsi, had found a Russell’s Viper nosing round his class-room.Perhaps it had crawled in of itself, but perhaps it had not, and the staff still continued to interview their Principal about it, and to take up his time with their theories.The reptile is so poisonous that he did not like to cut them short, and this they knew.Thus when his mind was bursting with other troubles and he was debating whether he should compose a letter of appeal to Miss Quested, he was obliged to listen to a speech which lacked both basis and conclusion, and floated through air.At the end of it Godbole said, “May I now take my leave?”—always an indication that he had not come to his point yet.“Now I take my leave, I must tell you how glad I am to hear that after all you succeeded in reaching the Marabar.I feared my unpunctuality had prevented you, but you went (a far pleasanter method) in Miss Derek’s car.I hope the expedition was a successful one.”

“The news has not reached you yet, I can see.”

“Oh yes.”

“No; there has been a terrible catastrophe about Aziz.”

“Oh yes.That is all round the College.”

“Well, the expedition where that occurs can scarcely be called a successful one,” said Fielding, with an amazed stare.

“I cannot say.I was not present.”

He stared again—a most useless operation, for no eye could see what lay at the bottom of the Brahman’s mind, and yet he had a mind and a heart too, and all his friends trusted him, without knowing why.“I am most frightfully cut up,” he said.

“So I saw at once on entering your office.I must not detain you, but I have a small private difficulty on which I want your help; I am leaving your service shortly, as you know.”

“Yes, alas!”

“And am returning to my birthplace in Central India to take charge of education there.I want to start a High School there on sound English lines, that shall be as like Government College as possible.”

“Well?”he sighed, trying to take an interest.

“At present there is only vernacular education at Mau.I shall feel it my duty to change all that.I shall advise His Highness to sanction at least a High School in the Capital, and if possible another in each pargana.”

Fielding sunk his head on his arms; really, Indians were sometimes unbearable.

“The point—the point on which I desire your help is this: what name should be given to the school?”

“A name?A name for a school?”he said, feeling sickish suddenly, as he had done in the waiting-room.

“Yes, a name, a suitable title, by which it can be called, by which it may be generally known.”

“Really—I have no names for schools in my head.I can think of nothing but our poor Aziz.Have you grasped that at the present moment he is in prison?”

“Oh yes.Oh no, I do not expect an answer to my question now.I only meant that when you are at leisure, you might think the matter over, and suggest two or three alternative titles for schools.I had thought of the ‘Mr. Fielding High School,’ but failing that, the ‘King-Emperor George the Fifth.’”

“Godbole!”

The old fellow put his hands together, and looked sly and charming.

“Is Aziz innocent or guilty?”

“That is for the Court to decide.The verdict will be in strict accordance with the evidence, I make no doubt.”

“Yes, yes, but your personal opinion.Here’s a man we both like, generally esteemed; he lives here quietly doing his work.Well, what’s one to make of it?Would he or would he not do such a thing?”

“Ah, that is rather a different question from your previous one, and also more difficult: I mean difficult in our philosophy.Dr. Aziz is a most worthy young man, I have a great regard for him; but I think you are asking me whether the individual can commit good actions or evil actions, and that is rather difficult for us.”He spoke without emotion and in short tripping syllables.

“I ask you: did he do it or not?Is that plain?I know he didn’t, and from that I start.I mean to get at the true explanation in a couple of days.My last notion is that it’s the guide who went round with them.Malice on Miss Quested’s part—it couldn’t be that, though Hamidullah thinks so.She has certainly had some appalling experience.But you tell me, oh no—because good and evil are the same.”

“No, not exactly, please, according to our philosophy.Because nothing can be performed in isolation.All perform a good action, when one is performed, and when an evil action is performed, all perform it.To illustrate my meaning, let me take the case in point as an example.

“I am informed that an evil action was performed in the Marabar Hills, and that a highly esteemed English lady is now seriously ill in consequence.My answer to that is this: that action was performed by Dr. Aziz.”He stopped and sucked in his thin cheeks.“It was performed by the guide.”He stopped again.“It was performed by you.”Now he had an air of daring and of coyness.“It was performed by me.”He looked shyly down the sleeve of his own coat.“And by my students.It was even performed by the lady herself.When evil occurs, it expresses the whole of the universe.Similarly when good occurs.”

“And similarly when suffering occurs, and so on and so forth, and everything is anything and nothing something,” he muttered in his irritation, for he needed the solid ground.

“Excuse me, you are now again changing the basis of our discussion.We were discussing good and evil.Suffering is merely a matter for the individual.If a young lady has sunstroke, that is a matter of no significance to the universe.Oh no, not at all.Oh no, not the least.It is an isolated matter, it only concerns herself.If she thought her head did not ache, she would not be ill, and that would end it.But it is far otherwise in the case of good and evil.They are not what we think them, they are what they are, and each of us has contributed to both.”

“You’re preaching that evil and good are the same.”

“Oh no, excuse me once again.Good and evil are different, as their names imply.But, in my own humble opinion, they are both of them aspects of my Lord.He is present in the one, absent in the other, and the difference between presence and absence is great, as great as my feeble mind can grasp.Yet absence implies presence, absence is not non-existence, and we are therefore entitled to repeat, ‘Come, come, come, come.’” And in the same breath, as if to cancel any beauty his words might have contained, he added, “But did you have time to visit any of the interesting Marabar antiquities?”

Fielding was silent, trying to meditate and rest his brain.

“Did you not even see the tank by the usual camping ground?”he nagged.

“Yes, yes,” he answered distractedly, wandering over half a dozen things at once.

“That is good, then you saw the Tank of the Dagger.”And he related a legend which might have been acceptable if he had told it at the tea-party a fortnight ago.It concerned a Hindu Rajah who had slain his own sister’s son, and the dagger with which he performed the deed remained clamped to his hand until in the course of years he came to the Marabar Hills, where he was thirsty and wanted to drink but saw a thirsty cow and ordered the water to be offered to her first, which, when done, “dagger fell from his hand, and to commemorate miracle he built Tank.”Professor Godbole’s conversations frequently culminated in a cow.Fielding received this one in gloomy silence.

In the afternoon he obtained a permit and saw Aziz, but found him unapproachable through misery.“You deserted me,” was the only coherent remark.He went away to write his letter to Miss Quested.Even if it reached her, it would do no good, and probably the McBrydes would withhold it.Miss Quested did pull him up short.She was such a dry, sensible girl, and quite without malice: the last person in Chandrapore wrongfully to accuse an Indian.

CHAPTER XX

Although Miss Quested had not made herself popular with the English, she brought out all that was fine in their character.For a few hours an exalted emotion gushed forth, which the women felt even more keenly than the men, if not for so long.“What can we do for our sister?”was the only thought of Mesdames Callendar and Lesley, as they drove through the pelting heat to enquire.Mrs. Turton was the only visitor admitted to the sick-room.She came out ennobled by an unselfish sorrow.“She is my own darling girl,” were the words she spoke, and then, remembering that she had called her “not pukka” and resented her engagement to young Heaslop, she began to cry.No one had ever seen the Collector’s wife cry.Capable of tears—yes, but always reserving them for some adequate occasion, and now it had come.Ah, why had they not all been kinder to the stranger, more patient, given her not only hospitality but their hearts?The tender core of the heart that is so seldom used—they employed it for a little, under the stimulus of remorse.If all is over (as Major Callendar implied), well, all is over, and nothing can be done, but they retained some responsibility in her grievous wrong that they couldn’t define.If she wasn’t one of them, they ought to have made her one, and they could never do that now, she had passed beyond their invitation.“Why don’t one think more of other people?”sighed pleasure-loving Miss Derek.These regrets only lasted in their pure form for a few hours.Before sunset, other considerations adulterated them, and the sense of guilt (so strangely connected with our first sight of any suffering) had begun to wear away.

People drove into the club with studious calm—the jog-trot of country gentlefolk between green hedgerows, for the natives must not suspect that they were agitated.They exchanged the usual drinks, but everything tasted different, and then they looked out at the palisade of cactuses stabbing the purple throat of the sky; they realized that they were thousands of miles from any scenery that they understood.The club was fuller than usual, and several parents had brought their children into the rooms reserved for adults, which gave the air of the Residency at Lucknow.One young mother—a brainless but most beautiful girl—sat on a low ottoman in the smoking-room with her baby in her arms; her husband was away in the district, and she dared not return to her bungalow in case the “niggers attacked.”The wife of a small railway official, she was generally snubbed; but this evening, with her abundant figure and masses of corn-gold hair, she symbolized all that is worth fighting and dying for; more permanent a symbol, perhaps, than poor Adela.“Don’t worry, Mrs. Blakiston, those drums are only Mohurram,” the men would tell her.

“Then they’ve started,” she moaned, clasping the infant and rather wishing he would not blow bubbles down his chin at such a moment as this.“No, of course not, and anyhow, they’re not coming to the club.”“And they’re not coming to the Burra Sahib’s bungalow either, my dear, and that’s where you and your baby’ll sleep tonight,” answered Mrs. Turton, towering by her side like Pallas Athene, and determining in the future not to be such a snob.

The Collector clapped his hands for silence. He was much calmer than when he had flown out at Fielding. He was indeed always calmer when he addressed several people than in a tête-à-tête. “I want to talk specially to the ladies,” he said. “Not the least cause for alarm. Keep cool, keep cool. Don’t go out more than you can help, don’t go into the city, don’t talk before your servants. That’s all.”

“Harry, is there any news from the city?”asked his wife, standing at some distance from him, and also assuming her public-safety voice.The rest were silent during the august colloquy.

“Everything absolutely normal.”

“I had gathered as much.Those drums are merely Mohurram, of course.”

“Merely the preparations for it—the Procession is not till next week.”

“Quite so, not till Monday.”

“Mr. McBryde’s down there disguised as a Holy Man,” said Mrs. Callendar.

“That’s exactly the sort of thing that must not be said,” he remarked, pointing at her.“Mrs. Callendar, be more careful than that, please, in these times.”

“I . . .well, I . . .”She was not offended, his severity made her feel safe.

“Any more questions?Necessary questions.”

“Is the—where is he——” Mrs. Lesley quavered.

“Jail.Bail has been refused.”

Fielding spoke next.He wanted to know whether there was an official bulletin about Miss Quested’s health, or whether the grave reports were due to gossip.His question produced a bad effect, partly because he had pronounced her name; she, like Aziz, was always referred to by a periphrasis.

“I hope Callendar may be able to let us know how things are going before long.”

“I fail to see how that last question can be termed a necessary question,” said Mrs. Turton.

“Will all ladies leave the smoking-room now, please?”he cried, clapping his hands again.“And remember what I have said.We look to you to help us through a difficult time, and you can help us by behaving as if everything is normal.It is all I ask.Can I rely on you?”

“Yes, indeed, Burra Sahib,” they chorused out of peaked, anxious faces.They moved out, subdued yet elated, Mrs. Blakiston in their midst like a sacred flame.His simple words had reminded them that they were an outpost of Empire.By the side of their compassionate love for Adela another sentiment sprang up which was to strangle it in the long run.Its first signs were prosaic and small.Mrs. Turton made her loud, hard jokes at bridge, Mrs. Lesley began to knit a comforter.

When the smoking-room was clear, the Collector sat on the edge of a table, so that he could dominate without formality.His mind whirled with contradictory impulses.He wanted to avenge Miss Quested and punish Fielding, while remaining scrupulously fair.He wanted to flog every native that he saw, but to do nothing that would lead to a riot or to the necessity for military intervention.The dread of having to call in the troops was vivid to him; soldiers put one thing straight, but leave a dozen others crooked, and they love to humiliate the civilian administration.One soldier was in the room this evening—a stray subaltern from a Gurkha regiment; he was a little drunk, and regarded his presence as providential.The Collector sighed.There seemed nothing for it but the old weary business of compromise and moderation.He longed for the good old days when an Englishman could satisfy his own honour and no questions asked afterwards.Poor young Heaslop had taken a step in this direction, by refusing bail, but the Collector couldn’t feel this was wise of poor young Heaslop.Not only would the Nawab Bahadur and others be angry, but the Government of India itself also watches—and behind it is that caucus of cranks and cravens, the British Parliament.He had constantly to remind himself that, in the eyes of the law, Aziz was not yet guilty, and the effort fatigued him.

The others, less responsible, could behave naturally.They had started speaking of “women and children”—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times.Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in the private life.“But it’s the women and children,” they repeated, and the Collector knew he ought to stop them intoxicating themselves, but he hadn’t the heart.“They ought to be compelled to give hostages,” etc. Many of the said women and children were leaving for the Hill Station in a few days, and the suggestion was made that they should be packed off at once in a special train.

“And a jolly suggestion,” the subaltern cried. “The army’s got to come in sooner or later. (A special train was in his mind inseparable from troops.) This would never have happened if Barabas Hill was under military control. Station a bunch of Gurkhas at the entrance of the cave was all that was wanted.”

“Mrs. Blakiston was saying if only there were a few Tommies,” remarked someone.

“English no good,” he cried, getting his loyalties mixed.“Native troops for this country.Give me the sporting type of native, give me Gurkhas, give me Rajputs, give me Jats, give me the Punjabi, give me Sikhs, give me Marathas, Bhils, Afridis and Pathans, and really if it comes to that, I don’t mind if you give me the scums of the bazaars.Properly led, mind.I’d lead them anywhere——”

The Collector nodded at him pleasantly, and said to his own people: “Don’t start carrying arms about.I want everything to go on precisely as usual, until there’s cause for the contrary.Get the womenfolk off to the hills, but do it quietly, and for Heaven’s sake no more talk of special trains.Never mind what you think or feel.Possibly I have feelings too.One isolated Indian has attempted—is charged with an attempted crime.”He flipped his forehead hard with his finger-nail, and they all realized that he felt as deeply as they did, and they loved him, and determined not to increase his difficulties.“Act upon that fact until there are more facts,” he concluded.“Assume every Indian is an angel.”

They murmured, “Right you are, Burra Sahib. . . .Angels. . . .Exactly. . . .”From the subaltern: “Exactly what I said.The native’s all right if you get him alone.Lesley!Lesley!You remember the one I had a knock with on your Maidan last month.Well, he was all right.Any native who plays polo is all right.What you’ve got to stamp on is these educated classes, and, mind, I do know what I’m talking about this time.”

The smoking-room door opened, and let in a feminine buzz.Mrs. Turton called out, “She’s better,” and from both sections of the community a sigh of joy and relief rose.The Civil Surgeon, who had brought the good news, came in.His cumbrous, pasty face looked ill-tempered.He surveyed the company, saw Fielding crouched below him on an ottoman, and said, “H’m!”

Everyone began pressing him for details.“No one’s out of danger in this country as long as they have a temperature,” was his answer.He appeared to resent his patient’s recovery, and no one who knew the old Major and his ways was surprised at this.

“Squat down, Callendar; tell us all about it.”

“Take me some time to do that.”

“How’s the old lady?”

“Temperature.”

“My wife heard she was sinking.”

“So she may be.I guarantee nothing.I really can’t be plagued with questions, Lesley.”

“Sorry, old man.”

“Heaslop’s just behind me.”

At the name of Heaslop a fine and beautiful expression was renewed on every face.Miss Quested was only a victim, but young Heaslop was a martyr; he was the recipient of all the evil intended against them by the country they had tried to serve; he was bearing the sahib’s cross.And they fretted because they could do nothing for him in return; they felt so craven sitting on softness and attending the course of the law.

“I wish to God I hadn’t given my jewel of an assistant leave.I’ld cut my tongue out first.To feel I’m responsible, that’s what hits me.To refuse, and then give in under pressure.That is what I did, my sons, that is what I did.”

Fielding took his pipe from his mouth and looked at it thoughtfully.Thinking him afraid, the other went on: “I understood an Englishman was to accompany the expedition.That is why I gave in.”

“No one blames you, my dear Callendar,” said the Collector, looking down.“We are all to blame in the sense that we ought to have seen the expedition was insufficiently guaranteed, and stopped it.I knew about it myself; we lent our car this morning to take the ladies to the station.We are all implicated in that sense, but not an atom of blame attaches to you personally.”

“I don’t feel that.I wish I could.Responsibility is a very awful thing, and I’ve no use for the man who shirks it.”His eyes were directed on Fielding.Those who knew that Fielding had undertaken to accompany and missed the early train were sorry for him; it was what is to be expected when a man mixes himself up with natives; always ends in some indignity.The Collector, who knew more, kept silent, for the official in him still hoped that Fielding would toe the line.The conversation turned to women and children again, and under its cover Major Callendar got hold of the subaltern, and set him on to bait the schoolmaster.Pretending to be more drunk than he really was, he began to make semi-offensive remarks.

“Heard about Miss Quested’s servant?”reinforced the Major.

“No, what about him?”

“Heaslop warned Miss Quested’s servant last night never to lose sight of her.Prisoner got hold of this and managed to leave him behind.Bribed him.Heaslop has just found out the whole story, with names and sums—a well-known pimp to those people gave the money, Mohammed Latif by name.So much for the servant.What about the Englishman—our friend here?How did they get rid of him?Money again.”

Fielding rose to his feet, supported by murmurs and exclamations, for no one yet suspected his integrity.

“Oh, I’m being misunderstood, apologies,” said the Major offensively.“I didn’t mean they bribed Mr. Fielding.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“They paid the other Indian to make you late—Godbole.He was saying his prayers.I know those prayers!”

“That’s ridiculous . . .”He sat down again, trembling with rage; person after person was being dragged into the mud.

Having shot this bolt, the Major prepared the next.“Heaslop also found out something from his mother.Aziz paid a herd of natives to suffocate her in a cave.That was the end of her, or would have been only she got out.Nicely planned, wasn’t it?Neat.Then he could go on with the girl.He and she and a guide, provided by the same Mohammed Latif.Guide now can’t be found.Pretty.”His voice broke into a roar.“It’s not the time for sitting down.It’s the time for action.Call in the troops and clear the bazaars.”

The Major’s outbursts were always discounted, but he made everyone uneasy on this occasion.The crime was even worse than they had supposed—the unspeakable limit of cynicism, untouched since 1857.Fielding forgot his anger on poor old Godbole’s behalf, and became thoughtful; the evil was propagating in every direction, it seemed to have an existence of its own, apart from anything that was done or said by individuals, and he understood better why both Aziz and Hamidullah had been inclined to lie down and die.His adversary saw that he was in trouble, and now ventured to say, “I suppose nothing that’s said inside the club will go outside the club?”winking the while at Lesley.

“Why should it?”responded Lesley.

“Oh, nothing.I only heard a rumour that a certain member here present has been seeing the prisoner this afternoon.You can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, at least not in this country.”

“Does anyone here present want to?”

Fielding was determined not to be drawn again.He had something to say, but it should be at his own moment.The attack failed to mature, because the Collector did not support it.Attention shifted from him for a time.Then the buzz of women broke out again.The door had been opened by Ronny.

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.

CHAPTER XXI

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.

CHAPTER XXII

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.

CHAPTER XXIII

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.”

CHAPTER XXIV

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 not vice 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 he is guilty. 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 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.

Suddenly it stopped.It was as if the prayer had been heard, and the relics exhibited.“I apologize for my colleague,” said Mr. Amritrao, rather to everyone’s surprise.“He is an intimate friend of our client, and his feelings have carried him away.”

“Mr. Mahmoud Ali will have to apologize in person,” the Magistrate said.

“Exactly, sir, he must.But we had just learnt that Mrs. Moore had important evidence which she desired to give.She was hurried out of the country by her son before she could give it; and this unhinged Mr. Mahmoud Ali—coming as it does upon an attempt to intimidate our only other European witness, Mr. Fielding.Mr. Mahmoud Ali would have said nothing had not Mrs. Moore been claimed as a witness by the police.”He sat down.

“An extraneous element is being introduced into the case,” said the Magistrate.“I must repeat that as a witness Mrs. Moore does not exist.Neither you, Mr. Amritrao, nor, Mr. McBryde, you, have any right to surmise what that lady would have said.She is not here, and consequently she can say nothing.”

“Well, I withdraw my reference,” said the Superintendent wearily.“I would have done so fifteen minutes ago if I had been given the chance.She is not of the least importance to me.”

“I have already withdrawn it for the defence.”He added with forensic humour: “Perhaps you can persuade the gentlemen outside to withdraw it too,” for the refrain in the street continued.

“I am afraid my powers do not extend so far,” said Das, smiling.

So peace was restored, and when Adela came to give her evidence the atmosphere was quieter than it had been since the beginning of the trial.Experts were not surprised.There is no stay in your native.He blazes up over a minor point, and has nothing left for the crisis.What he seeks is a grievance, and this he had found in the supposed abduction of an old lady.He would now be less aggrieved when Aziz was deported.

But the crisis was still to come.

Adela had always meant to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and she had rehearsed this as a difficult task—difficult, because her disaster in the cave was connected, though by a thread, with another part of her life, her engagement to Ronny.She had thought of love just before she went in, and had innocently asked Aziz what marriage was like, and she supposed that her question had roused evil in him.To recount this would have been incredibly painful, it was the one point she wanted to keep obscure; she was willing to give details that would have distressed other girls, but this story of her private failure she dared not allude to, and she dreaded being examined in public in case something came out.But as soon as she rose to reply, and heard the sound of her own voice, she feared not even that.A new and unknown sensation protected her, like magnificent armour.She didn’t think what had happened, or even remember in the ordinary way of memory, but she returned to the Marabar Hills, and spoke from them across a sort of darkness to Mr. McBryde.The fatal day recurred, in every detail, but now she was of it and not of it at the same time, and this double relation gave it indescribable splendour.Why had she thought the expedition “dull”?Now the sun rose again, the elephant waited, the pale masses of the rock flowed round her and presented the first cave; she entered, and a match was reflected in the polished walls—all beautiful and significant, though she had been blind to it at the time.Questions were asked, and to each she found the exact reply; yes, she had noticed the “Tank of the Dagger,” but not known its name; yes, Mrs. Moore had been tired after the first cave and sat in the shadow of a great rock, near the dried-up mud.Smoothly the voice in the distance proceeded, leading along the paths of truth, and the airs from the punkah behind her wafted her on. . . .