the best thing to be in this place.”
“Owing to my work and so on, I don’t get up much to the club.”
“I know, I know, and we never get down from it. I envy you being with Indians.”
“Do you care to meet one or two?”
“Very, very much indeed; it’s what I long for. This party to-day makes me so angry and miserable. I think my countrymen out here must be mad. Fancy inviting guests and not treating them properly! You and Mr. Turton and perhaps Mr. McBryde are the only people who showed any common politeness. The rest make me perfectly ashamed, and it’s got worse and worse.”
It had. The Englishmen had intended to play up better, but had been prevented from doing so by their women folk, whom they had to attend, provide with tea, advise about dogs, etc. When tennis began, the barrier grew impenetrable. It had been hoped to have some sets between East and West, but this was forgotten, and the courts were monopolized by the usual club couples. Fielding resented it too, but did not say so to the girl, for he found something theoretical in her outburst. Did she care about Indian music? he enquired; there was an old professor down at the College, who sang.
“Oh, just what we wanted to hear. And do you know Doctor Aziz?”
“I know all about him. I don’t know him. Would you like him asked too?”
“Mrs. Moore says he is so nice.”
“Very well, Miss Quested. Will Thursday suit you?”
“Indeed, it will, and that morning we go to this Indian lady’s. All the nice things are coming Thursday.”
“I won’t ask the City Magistrate to bring you. I know he’ll be busy at that time.”
“Yes, Ronny is always hard-worked,” she replied, contemplating the hills. How lovely they suddenly were! But she couldn’t touch them. In front, like a shutter, fell a vision of her married life. She and Ronny would look into the club like this every evening, then drive home to dress; they would see the Lesleys and the Callendars and the Turtons and the Burtons, and invite them and be invited by them, while the true India slid by unnoticed. Colour would remain—the pageant of birds in the early morning, brown bodies, white turbans, idols whose flesh was scarlet or blue—and movement would remain as long as there were crowds in the bazaar and bathers in the tanks. Perched up on the seat of a dogcart, she would see them. But the force that lies behind colour and movement would escape her even more effectually than it did now. She would see India always as a frieze, never as a spirit, and she assumed that it was a spirit of which Mrs. Moore had had a glimpse.
And sure enough they did drive away from the club in a few minutes, and they did dress, and to dinner came Miss Derek and the McBrydes, and the menu was: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of Anglo-India. A dish might be added or subtracted as one rose or fell in the official scale, the peas might rattle less or more, the sardines and the vermouth be imported by a different firm, but the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it. Adela thought of the young men and women who had come out before her, P. & O. full after P. & O. full, and had been set down to the same food and the same ideas, and been snubbed in the same good-humoured way until they kept to the accredited themes and began to snub others. “I should never get like that,” she thought, for she was young herself; all the same she knew that she had come up against something that was both insidious and tough, and against which she needed allies. She must gather around her at Chandrapore a few people who felt as she did, and she was glad to have met Mr. Fielding and the Indian lady with the unpronounceable name. Here at all events was a nucleus; she should know much better where she stood in the course of the next two days.
Miss Derek—she companioned a Maharani in a remote Native State. She was genial and gay and made them all laugh about her leave, which she had taken because she felt she deserved it, not because the Maharani said she might go. Now she wanted to take the Maharajah’s motor-car as well; it had gone to a Chiefs’ Conference at Delhi, and she had a great scheme for burgling it at the junction as it came back in the train. She was also very funny about the Bridge Party—indeed she regarded the entire peninsula as a comic opera. “If one couldn’t see the laughable side of these people one ‘ld be done for,” said Miss Derek. Mrs. McBryde—it was she who had been the nurse—ceased not to exclaim, “Oh, Nancy, how topping! Oh, Nancy, how killing! I wish I could look at things like that.” Mr. McBryde did not speak much; he seemed nice.
When the guests had gone, and Adela gone to bed, there was another interview between mother and son. He wanted her advice and support—while resenting interference. “Does Adela talk to you much?” he began. “I’m so driven with work, I don’t see her as much as I hoped, but I hope she finds things comfortable.”
“Adela and I talk mostly about India. Dear, since you mention it, you’re quite right—you ought to be more alone with her than you are.”
“Yes, perhaps, but then people’ld gossip.”
“Well, they must gossip sometime! Let them gossip.”
“People are so odd out here, and it’s not like home—one’s always facing the footlights, as the Burra Sahib said. Take a silly little example: when Adela went out to the boundary of the club compound, and Fielding followed her. I saw Mrs. Callendar notice it. They notice everything, until they’re perfectly sure you’re their sort.”
“I don’t think Adela’ll ever be quite their sort—she’s much too individual.”
“I know, that’s so remarkable about her,” he said thoughtfully. Mrs. Moore thought him rather absurd. Accustomed to the privacy of London, she could not realize that India, seemingly so mysterious, contains none, and that consequently the conventions have greater force. “I suppose nothing’s on her mind,” he continued.
“Ask her, ask her yourself, my dear boy.”
“Probably she’s heard tales of the heat, but of course I should pack her off to the Hills every April—I’m not one to keep a wife grilling in the Plains.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be the weather.”
“There’s nothing in India but the weather, my dear mother; it’s the Alpha and Omega of the whole affair.”
“Yes, as Mrs. McBryde was saying, but it’s much more the Anglo-Indians themselves who are likely to get on Adela’s nerves. She doesn’t think they behave pleasantly to Indians, you see.”
“What did I tell you?” he exclaimed, losing his gentle manner. “I knew it last week. Oh, how like a woman to worry over a side-issue!”
She forgot about Adela in her surprise. “A side-issue, a side-issue?” she repeated. “How can it be that?”
“We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly!”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say. We’re out here to do justice and keep the peace. Them’s my sentiments. India isn’t a drawing-room.”
“Your sentiments are those of a god,” she said quietly, but it was his manner rather than his sentiments that annoyed her.
Trying
