A Good Soldier Read online

  He and Lumsden dismounted at the steps leading up to the high veranda of the bungalow to go in, bathe for the third time that day and change for dinner in mess.

  They paused to make much of their horses, gentling muzzles, patting flank and croup. “Good to be back from Calcutta, isn’t it, Hugh?”

  “Yes, there’s nothing there I really miss. It becomes boring, like living wrapped in cotton wool.”

  “Looking forward to seeing the Forty-Seventh go aboard after dinner. Should be an interesting tamasha.”

  “I too.”

  It was the first time troops were being moved by steamer on an Indian river. Professionally, it would be an event full of interest: not only because it was unique but also because the whole procedure of embarking eleven hundred men, the officers’ chargers, baggage, commissariat and arms must have been carefully worked out; and one learned by doing or watching. It should be a colourful sight, too: those hundreds of disciplined men in their red tunics and blue shakos marching aboard in good order under the flaring resinous torches, the yellow oil and brilliant white acetylene-lamps, the great paddle wheels whipping the brown river into creamy foam as the ships moved off to the cheers of the men’s comrades who were staying behind. There would be Hindu and Sikh priests and Muslim mullahs to perform ceremonies for good luck. A lot to look forward to.

  Hugh Ramsey went indoors feeling at peace with the world, secure but not necessarily satisfied. The ambition which he had brought to India still burned brightly. In his heart he knew he could never reconcile himself to leaving here a poor man. But for the time being he was, at least, enjoying the tranquillity he felt all round him.

  Chapter Two

  Sailing from the east coast of America, Bombay was the nearest Indian port. The Whittaker family had taken passage in a barquentine for the 12,000-mile voyage down the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Indian Ocean. Some five months of fair weather and foul, sweltering calm, buffeting gale and seasickness. A diet which Mrs. Whittaker said fluctuated — she was a notably articulate woman — between barely edible and revolting: except when the cooks caught fresh fish, and then it became monotonous.

  They leaned on the port side rail, the ship approached the Malabar Coast, the Bombay shoreline began to take shape. The brown water was littered with flotsam and jetsam carried out by the tide. There was a definable dividing line between it and the blue-green of the open sea.

  Henry Whittaker sniffed the odours of Hindustan borne on the humid offshore wind. There was a good spicy tang to it, he thought, but it was masked by the stench of raw hide, dried fish and worse. Manure and rotting vegetation came into it. His nose, a noble feature of his long, lantern-jawed face, had inhaled some gamey smells in 47 years, but nothing quite like this. As for the detritus that drifted by or bumped the hull: he had seen, through those deep-set, enquiring grey eyes, enough scalped heads and charred or mutilated bodies on the prairies not to be queasy. But it was not pleasant to see portions of dead humanity and drowned animals as an introduction to the mysterious Orient. And other stuff which suggested that the folks hereabouts didn’t know about sewage.

  He pointed to a row of tall, round towers along the seafront. “Those must be the Towers of Silence. Where the Parsi put their dead.”

  “Most romantic.” Constance could be caustic on occasions and this was one of them. She held herself as stiffly as a statue and she was a statuesque, beautiful woman. Tall as she was, she had to raise her head to give her husband the full effect of her fine cornflower-blue eyes. He smiled at her. In repose his face, with a short, neat beard and closely trimmed moustache, looked serious, if not stern; but he smiled readily and his eyes and the corners of his mouth were marked by laughter lines.

  He understood his wife. They were in harmony most of the time. He loved her. Most of the time, he liked her as well: until she irritated him; but irritation soon passed.

  “Maybe we’ll see elephants when we’ve gotten closer to the shore.”

  Constance compressed her lips. They did not compress well, being full and wide, too soft to show anger even when she pressed them together hard. They were a sensual temptation and directly responsible for Henry having snapped her up in marriage at a dewy 18. She was five years his junior and if he hadn’t swept her off her feet someone else would have. With her looks she was a highly sweep-offable commodity and they married young in the newly-United States.

  She was not reluctant to tell her lady friends that she adored Henry. But what loyalty prevented her from adding was that she had never quite reconciled herself to the broad adventurous and romantic streak which didn’t seem, to her, really proper in a banker. First there had been that venture out West. And now this. Seeing India creep inexorably, inescapably, and, she thought, with not much resignation, inevitably closer had injected acid into her mood.

  “And maybe there’ll be a welcoming committee of Rajas on their backs. Sitting cross-legged like the Sioux, in their howdahs... isn’t that what they’re called?”

  Ruth, standing on her father’s other side, tilted her head too. It was more of an effort for her to look up to him than for her mother. At 20, she stood not much over five feet. Her father had said, all her life, that what she lacked in inches she made up in spirit and liveliness, courage and directness. If she lacked inches between the soles of her small feet and the crown of her honey-coloured head of glossy hair, she didn’t elsewhere. She was a full-bosomed girl with her mother’s eyes and mouth and a prettiness of her own.

  “Why do they do that, Papa?”

  “The Parsi? Religion. They don’t bury people or burn them, they give them back to Nature.”

  Vultures circled over, and alighted on, those dire-looking towers.

  “I see what you mean.” Ruth could be as dry as either of her parents and she took refuge in it now to hide her nausea. She had been out West with them, but seeing buzzards at work on buffalos and broncos was one thing and this was quite definitely something else.

  She adored her father too and without any strictures about the adventurous and romantic spirit which had led him so far from their native Massachusetts. It was not impulsiveness but enterprise that had taken him to Wichita, Cheyenne and Laramie. She knew why her mother could not reconcile herself to ventures which had already cost the lives of two fine sons. She mourned her brothers as deeply, but life couldn’t stop because of tragedy. She was eager to confront whatever this new country held in store.

  The anchor went down with a splash that made a shower of droplets rise from the murky water, momentarily translucent and scintillating like diamonds until they fell back and became again just particles in the polluted, discoloured brew that lapped against the barquentine’s tarred planks.

  A clumsy boat rowed by six loin-clothed men seated side by side in pairs butted through the floating debris and made a painter fast to the platform at the foot of the gangway. Two men climbed to the deck where the supercargo awaited them. The score or so of passengers leaned over the rail, looking at them curiously. Both were brown-skinned, thin, with flat buttocks and no hips. They wore European clothes and broad-brimmed white straw hats.

  Constance gave her husband an amused look. “I hardly suppose those are a fair specimen of Rajas. But at least they’re not wearing war bonnets or flourishing tomahawks, which is something to be thankful for.”

  “Are they Indians, Papa?”

  “By their shape, they couldn’t be British who’ve been out in the sun too long. I guess they’re what are called Eurasians, half-castes.”

  One of the men went off with the supercargo. The other advanced on the passengers. In a voice that was totally strange to them, an accent full of unexpected explosive sounds when he pronounced a “t” or a “d”, a thickening of every “th” and with the stress on unusual syllables, the latter addressed them.

  “Good monning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mister Davis, and I am representative for this line, isn’t it. Anything I can do to help you I am at-your-service.�
� He ran the last three words together.

  Whittaker raised his voice. “Right here, Mr. Davis. I guess we can use your help. My wife, my daughter and myself are on our way to Calcutta. We have to tranship here.”

  “Yes-yes, Calc’ta, very good, I am arranging everything for you, isn’t it. What is your name, sir, may I ask?”

  “Whittaker. How long will the voyage to Calcutta take? How soon is there a vessel sailing?”

  “My God, sir, is taking perhaps four weeks. Not to worry, I am arranging everything. God willing, there will be a sailing within one week.”

  “We have no time to waste. I have affairs to attend to in Calcutta and then we have to travel up country as soon as possible.”

  “Yes-yes, monsoon is coming, isn’t it.”

  “What is monsoon, Henry?”

  “I’ve heard about it from the captain. It’s the rainy season.”

  “I see.” Constance’s tone said plainly: That’s something else you haven’t mentioned. So now we have to plough our way through rainstorms, do we, after all those gales we’ve been through?

  Ruth slipped an arm through her father’s. “It will be so good to get our feet on dry land again, Mother.”

  “It doesn’t sound as though we are going to get them on dry land for long.” Her mother’s tone did not encourage further conversation on this topic.

  *

  The Majestic Hotel was not at all majestic; and if this passed for majesty in India, there was a considerable distortion in the popular fables about the sumptuous glory of the Rajas’ lifestyle. So Constance Whittaker remarked.

  Ruth had quite another preoccupation. “Mother, did you see that?”

  “Yes, dear, I did, and I am trying to pretend I didn’t.”

  “That” was a naked man cross-legged under a tree. His body was dusted with ashes, his hair fell below his shoulders, his eyes gazed fixedly in front of him. They were set deep in their sockets and flies crawled around them. His male member was exposed. The only male nakedness Ruth had ever seen was her brothers’ when very young. She flinched as her eyes rested on the Sadhu’s and she felt her cheeks burn, knew she must be the colour of a beetroot. The holy man’s organ, artificially extended by brass rings which shone obscenely in the sunlight filtering through the foliage, was grotesquely long. A young woman crouching before him reached out reverently to touch it, then put a coin in a brass bowl at his side.

  This was not the only shock to their eyes or the only sight to prompt an exclamation of disgust and cause a twinge of nausea. While Whittaker was at the shipping agent’s office, the two women were out walking. They had not gone far from the entrance to the hotel drive when they were accosted by a boy leading a goat. Both exuded a strong smell. The boy was grinning, holding a clay cup, pushing it almost into their faces, begging. From the goat’s shoulders a fifth leg sprouted where it had been grafted on early in the animal’s life.

  “Go away, you little monster.” Constance pushed the child’s arm aside but he followed, whining for money. She stopped and raised a hand to him. “If you don’t run away this instant I’ll box your ears. You know, I do declare this wretch isn’t begging for compassion for the poor animal: he’s trying to charge us for the entertainment.”

  Further down the street a man and a young woman squatted against a wall. It and the ground around them were blotched by red stains of spat-out betel nut juice. Between them a girl of about five years sat with her back to the walk and her legs stretched out. The right leg had been twisted round so that the knee and foot were almost completely turned about. A crutch lay by her. Her head was immovably tilted to one side. Her left arm was withered between elbow and wrist. The hand, in contrast, was twice the size it should be.

  Constance turned white. “God have mercy!” She dropped a rupee into the child’s palm. The little girl smiled up at her with eyes clouded with pain and hunger. “Let’s go back to the hotel, Ruth.”

  The owner of the hotel, a fat Cockney retired quartermaster sergeant of the Bombay Army, was on the veranda.

  “You’re soon back, ladies.”

  Constance glared at him, transferring her loathing and resentment.

  “We have seen the most degrading sights.”

  “You have to get used to them, Madam, in this country.”

  “A dreadfully deformed child, poor little mite. Are there no doctors here?”

  “The parents deform them deliberately, at birth. Especially if they are daughters... unwanted. They’re lucky if they aren’t suffocated when they’re born. They either keep them to prey on people’s charity or sell them.”

  “Deliberately? Sell them?”

  “Yes, Miss Whittaker. I’m afraid that’s the gospel truth.”

  Ruth looked at her mother. “This is no country for us, Mama.”

  “You and I know that already, dear child. But try telling your father.”

  “I hate it here already.”

  “The people are despicable. Even more savage than the Sioux and the Mohicans. The American Indians cherish their young.”

  Chapter Three

  Sher Mahommed Khan waited at the foot of the veranda steps for Ramsey’s return.

  “The big ships arrived an hour ago, Your Honour.”

  “You have seen them?”

  “Yes, Huzur. Never have I imagined ships of such size.” He followed Ramsey into the bedroom. “Each has a tall pipe like the civilian sahibs’ hats, and as black, from which come smoke and sparks. From their bowels come sounds like the roaring of tigers and the jhanjhanahat of heavy chains.” “Sher” meant a lion or tiger and as a name it signified “courageous”, so Sher Mahommed Khan naturally considered himself an expert on tigers.

  A bearer was pulling off Ramsey’s boots. One did not, unless indifferent to a knife in the throat, invite a Pathan to render this service. Ramsey gave his orderly a grave look over the stooping servant’s head.

  “That is what they call machinery. It makes a noise like a tiger because it has the strength of a thousand tigers. The jhanjhanahat is not made by chains but by the machine which turns the big wheels that send the ship through the water.”

  “Great must be the strength of such machines to take the ships across the sea without sails.”

  Ramsey stood up. He and Sher Mahommed Khan were of a height and he looked straight into his eyes. His voice had hardened from its easy conversational tone. “These ships are built only to travel rivers, never the sea. Understand?”

  “It is all one to me, Sahib. Am I an idolator that I should fear damnation if I were to cross the Kala Pani?”

  “You know better. And you should know that such ships do not cross the Black Water. Make sure your Hindu comrades are as well informed as you are.”

  “Our regiment is not being sent to a foreign country, Huzur.”

  “We have talked of this before. I am weary of repeating myself: the Forty-Seventh are marching to Burma. These ships are only to take them upriver to shorten the journey.”

  “Sahib, we enlightened ones know this. The Muslims of the Forty-Seventh have no qualms. If the ships were to take them across the sea, it would not disturb them. But the Hindus are still spreading rumours and there is talk that they will refuse to go on board.”

  “There is still such foolish talk?”

  “Sahib, I have heard it even in the last two hours while Your Honour has been on the maidan.”

  “You did well to tell me this.”

  The warning buzzed at the back of Ramsey’s mind at dinner, intruding on the cheerful conversation around the long table. Colonel Howell was dining in mess, as this was a special occasion, instead of in his own bungalow. Ramsey kept looking at him and wondering. He had already mentioned to him, once, some days ago, that he had heard whispers of possible trouble when the 47th were ordered to embark. The Colonel had scoffed.

  While the officers of the 69th drank their Madeira and smoked their cheroots, they could hear the sounds of men falling in on the huge parade ground under the f
ull moon. Ramsey wondered whether the 47th’s commandant had taken the precaution of ensuring that the astrologers had confirmed this to be an auspicious day for departure. Looking out from the mess they could see the flickering glow of lamps and torches around the dusty parade ground, which brightened the moonlight. They heard the roll and tap of side drums and the music of the regimental band, the tramp of feet, the thud and rattle of muskets being brought to the shoulder or the order arms.

  When they went into the ante-room, Ramsey made up his mind and went to stand beside the Colonel’s chair; prepared for a rebuff.

  The Colonel looked up genially.

  “Well, Hugh, any news from home lately?”

  “Two days ago, sir. My parents sent their remembrances to you and Mrs. Howell.”

  “They are well?”

  “Yes, sir, thank you.”

  “Something is on your mind, my boy. Out with it.”

  “Forgive me, Colonel, but I feel I must mention to you again that strong rumours are circulating that there will be trouble with the Forty-Seventh this evening.”

  The Colonel, mellowed by wine, looked tolerantly amused. “Not that old nonsense again?”

  “I fear it is more than nonsense.”

  “What grounds have you for such an assertion? Who is your informant this time?”

  The Colonel’s manner was less tolerant.

  “My orderly is reliable, sir. He warned me only this evening, while I was changing for mess, that it is said the Forty-Seventh will refuse to embark. Or, at least, the Hindus will.”

  Colonel Howell looked annoyed.

  “Your orderly? A Pathan, and you take notice of his prejudiced ‘warning’? I am surprised at you, Ramsey, I really am. You know this country and these people better than that. Rumours like this are always current whenever anything unusual is afoot.”

  The Colonel glanced around at his officers. So did Ramsey. A few of them looked grim or glum or apprehensive. Most of them wore smiles which mocked Ramsey’s words.