LIFE on a trooper is not eventful. Victoria was not so deeply absorbed
in her mourning or in the pallid literature borrowed from Molly as not
to notice it. Though she was not what is termed serious, the perpetual
quoits on the upper deck in company with Alastair and his conversation
limited by smiles, and with Mr Parker and his conversation limited by
uneasiness palled about the second game. Bobby too was a cypher. It was
his fate to be known as 'Bobby,' a quantity of no importance. He
belonged to the modern school of squires of dames, ever ready to fetch a
handkerchief, to fish when he inwardly wanted to sleep in a deck chair
or to talk when he had a headache. Such men have their value as tame
cats and Victoria did not avoid his cheery neighbourhood. But he was
summed up in the small fact which she recalled with gentle amusement a
long time after: she had never known his name. For her, as for the
ship's company, he was 'Bobby,' merely Bobby.
The female section too could detain none but cats and hens, as Victoria
put it. She had moved too long like a tiny satellite in the orbit of Mrs
Colonel So-and-So to return to the little group which slumbered all day
by the funnel dreaming aloud the petty happenings of Bombay. The heavy
rains at Chandraga, the simply awful things that had been said about an
A.D.C. and Mrs Bryan, and the scandalous way in which a Babu had been
made a judge, all this filled her with an extraordinary weariness. She
felt, in the presence of these remains of her daily life, as she would
when confronted for the third time with the cold leg of mutton.
True there was Cairns, a man right enough and jovial in spite of his
cynical assumption that nothing was worth anything. He could produce
passing fair aphorisms, throw doubts on the value of success and
happiness. There was nothing, however, to hold on to. Victoria had not
found in him a teacher or a helper. He was merely destructive of thought
and epicurean in taste. Convinced that wine, woman and song were quite
valueless things, he nevertheless knew the best Ruedesheimer and had an
eye for the droop of Victoria's shoulders.
Cairns obviously liked Victoria. He did not shun his fellow passengers,
for he considered that the dullest people are the most interesting, yet
she could not help noticing from time to time that his eyes followed her
round. He was a good big man and she knew that his thick hand, a little
swollen and sunburnt, would be a good thing to touch. But there was in
him none of that subtle magnetism that grasps and holds. He was coarse,
perhaps a little vulgar at heart.
Thus Victoria had roamed aimlessly over the ship, visiting even the bows
where, everlastingly, a lascar seemed to brood in fixed attitudes as a
Budh dreaming of Nirvana. She often wandered in the troop-deck filled
with the womankind and children of the non-coms. Without disliking
children she could find no attraction in these poor little faded things
born to be scorched by the Indian sun. The women too, mostly yellow and
faded, always recalled to her, so languid and tired were they,
commonplace flowers, marigolds, drooping on their stems. Besides, the
society of the upper deck found a replica on the troop deck, where it
was occasionally a little shriller. There too, she could catch snatches
which told of the heavy rains of Chandraga, the goings on of Lance
Corporal Maccaskie's wife and the disgrace of giving Babu clerks more
than fifty rupees a month.
Perpetually the Indian ocean shimmered by, calm as the opaque eye of a
shark, breaking at times into immense rollers that swelled hardly more
than a woman's breast. And the days passed on.
They were nearing Aden, though nothing on the mauve horizon told of the
outpost where the filth of the East begins to overwhelm the ugliness of
the West. Victoria and Cairns were leaning on the starboard bulwark. She
was looking vacuously into the greying sky, conscious that Cairns was
watching her. She felt with extraordinary clearness that he was gazing
as if spell-bound at the soft and regular rise and fall of her skin
towards the coarse black openwork of her bodice. Far away in the
twilight was something long and black, hardly more than a line vanishing
towards the north.
'Araby,' said Cairns.
Victoria looked more intently. Far away, half veiled by the mists of
night, unlit by the evening star, lay the coast. Araby, the land of
manna and milk--of black-eyed women--of horses that champ strange bits.
Here and there a blackened rock sprang up from the waste of sand and
scrub. Its utter desolation awakened a sympathetic chord. It was lonely,
as she was lonely. As the night swiftly rushed into the heavens, she let
her arm rest against that of Cairns. Then his hand closed over hers. It
was warm and hard; something like a pale light of companionship
struggled through the solitude of her soul.
They stood cold and silent while the night swallowed up the coast and
all save here and there the foam tip of a wave. The man had put his arm
round her and pressed her to him. She did not resist. The soft wind
playing in her hair carried a straying lock into his eyes, half blinding
him and making him catch his breath, so redolent was it, not with the
scent of flowers, but of life, vigorous and rich in its thousand saps.
He drew her closer to him and pressed his lips on her neck. Victoria did
not resist.
From the forepeak swathed in darkness, came the faint unearthly echoes
of the stokers' song. There were no fourths; the dominant and the
subdominant were absent. Strangely attuned to the western ear, the
sounds sometimes boomed, sometimes fell to a whisper. The chant rose
like incense into the heavens, celebrating Durga, protector of the
Motherland, Lakshmi, bowered in the flower that in the water grows.
Cairns had drawn Victoria close against him. He was stirred and shaken
as never before. All conspired against him, the night, the fancied
scents of Araby, the unresisting woman in his arms who yielded him her
lips with the passivity of weariness. They did not think as they kissed,
whether laying the foundation of regret or snatching from the fleeting
hour a moment of thoughtless joy. Again a brass drum boomed out beyond
them, softly as if touched by velvet hands. It carried the buzzing of
bees, the calls of corncrakes, in every tone the rich scents of the
jungle, where undergrowth rots in black water--of perfumes that burn
before the gods. Then the night wind arose and swept away the crooning
voices.