SHARK LANE
There was no quainter spot in all Nushapore than Shark Lane (as the
road near the public offices where the lawyers congregated was
generally called), though at first sight it seemed to differ little
from its neighbours. Broad, white, its tree-set margins were studded
with the usual inconsequent-looking stucco gate-posts of an Indian
station, which, guiltless of any fence, serve to mark the short
carriage-drives leading back to the houses.
And these again--colour-washed pink, yellow, or blue--were even as
other houses of the second-class. Yet it did not need the placards on
those same gate-posts, announcing that 'Mr. Lala Râm Nâth' or 'Mr.
Syyed Abdul Rahmân,' 'barristers-at-law,' lived within, to tell the
passer-by that the inhabitants were not European.
To begin with, somewhere or another, there was almost sure to be a
grass hurdle visible--the grass hurdle which in India does the duty of
a hoarding and ensures privacy. Indeed, a knowledgable eye could infer
the exact degree to which the social life within was at variance with
the Western architecture in which it dwelt by the number and position
of such hurdles. Two or three, merely blocking in an arch of verandah,
being indicative of a lingering dislike to publicity in some 'new
woman'; a dozen or more, screening in a patch of garden ground, showing
the rigorous seclusion of the old.
True, in not a few cases, this sign was absent, but then a nameless air
of utter desolation, a blank stare out on the world, told its tale of a
keener quarrel still--of family ties, family life, lost absolutely in
the chase after Western ways, Western ideas. In such houses the only
sign of life from dawn to dusk, barring a furtive wielder of a grass
broom raising clouds of dust at stated intervals, would be the rickety
hired carriage, like a green box on wheels, which, every morning and
every evening, would turn out and in between those inconsequent
gate-posts, conveying a solitary young man and a pile of law-books to
and from the courts.
Such a very solitary-looking young man, that the question sprang
inevitably to the spectator's lips, 'Is the game worth the candle?'
There were others, besides spectators, in Shark Lane who asked the
question, and were not sure of the answer. Miriam-bibi, Hâfiz Ahmad's
wife, for instance, who, as Aunt Khôjee put it, had been taken away to
live as a _mem_, felt it was not. Of course it was dignified to eat in
one room, sit in another, and sleep in a third, as if this trinity of
habit were Heaven's decree. Then, undoubtedly, small bronze feet did
look entrancing in small bronze high-heeled shoes. But when there
_could_ be no novel-reading, no writing of notes, no arranging of
flowers and playing of the piano, and when you were accustomed to eat
and sleep when the fancy took you? Then one room was quite sufficient
in which to be dull and solitary, since there were no friends or
relations near to come in for a gossip.
Besides, it was undeniable that the pretty bronze shoes pinched the
toes that were accustomed to greater freedom.
Therefore it was a joy, indeed, when, on Sundays, the green box on
wheels, instead of taking Hâfiz Ahmad to court, took her back to the
close, familiar city; to the evil-smelling bazaars below, and the
scented, sensual woman's life above, so full of laughter and
quarrelling, so full of sunshine and seclusion, with its unending
suggestion of sex.
Full also, to Miriam's intense delight, of betel-chewing and
tobacco-smoking; for though Hâfiz Ahmad permitted neither in Shark
Lane, he never noticed the resultant signs of either on her return. So
proving himself possessed of that master's degree in the art of
compromise which young India has to take before attempting even a
bachelor's in any other.
For even Miriam found single-mindedness impossible in Shark Lane, and
her eulogiums on her new life had to be so strenuous in the city that
even simple Aunt Khôjee remarked that '_wise hens never cackled over
their own nests unless they were empty!_'
On Monday mornings too, after her debauch in city ways, Miriam found it
necessary to be aggressively European. She would even go so far as to
eat the lightly-boiled egg of civilisation for her breakfast--the egg
which calls for saltcellars and spoons, in other words for refinement
and luxury. And when her husband had departed in the green box with his
law-books, she would yawn dutifully in all three rooms, till nature
could no more. So she would send surreptitiously for the cook's wife
and baby, and adjourn to a hurdle-closed verandah where her visitors
could be properly screened from the new world. Since, let the master do
as he chose, there would have been noses on the green in the servant's
house had its womenkind allowed the tips of theirs to be seen by
strangers!
So Miriam would be comparatively content till the advent of the green
box sent her back to three rooms, and a pair of bronze slippers.
On the whole, this double life of hers was a very fair example of most
lives in Shark Lane where, despite all the high aspirations after truth
and reality, it was quite impossible to reach either; since every one
was quite aware that they were trying an experiment, and that a
doubtful one.
This was the case more especially in the last house in Shark Lane, just
where it merged into the more fashionable River Road. Here, at the
corner, a very decorative pair of posts announcing that Mr. Chris
Davenant lived within, stood cheek by jowl beside a similar pair with
Mr. Lucanaster's name upon them; and though one of the two houses was
screened, it was screened by trellises and creepers, behind which a
pale pink dress could often be seen fluttering in company with the
owner of the other house. For Mrs. Chris Davenant claimed her full
share of Western liberty.
So large a share, indeed, that one morning a few days after the races,
Krishn Davenund, as Shark Lane persisted in calling him, sate looking
hopelessly at his untouched breakfast; in this case also that
lightly-boiled egg of civilisation. It stood in a correct silver
egg-stand beside a charming arrangement of ferns and flowers; for Miss
Genevieve Fuller, now Mrs. Chris, had been that curious product of
latter-day London, a vulgar girl of good taste. As she had walked along
the streets, her fringe delicately wanton beneath the white veil whose
black spots were never permitted to rest in unbecoming places, her cold
blue eyes had settled unerringly on all the daintiest creations in the
shop windows. And she would pause before a hand-painted _sortie de bal_
or a belaced silk undergarment, and say with equal frankness to her
companion, male or female, 'My! that would give poor little me a
chance, wouldn't it?'
Even some of the third-rate young men from the city, over whom she had
wielded a cheap empire at her mother's boarding-house down the
Hammersmith Road, had found such remarks reminiscent of the princess
from whose pretty lips toads fell instead of pearls, but Krishn
Davenund, student at the Middle Temple, did not know his Mother Goose.
Having an all too intimate acquaintance with the poets, however, the
superficial refinement of the girl, seen against the background of the
only English life he knew, had made him think of the Lady in Comus; for
he could have no standard save that of books.
She looked dainty enough for any heroine's part even now, after
eighteen months' disillusionment, as she stood before him, in a paucity
of pink muslin negligé (which had mostly run to frills) and a plenitude
of powder. She had an open note in one hand, a half-smoked Turkish
cigarette--of Mr. Lucanaster's importing--in the other, and a rather
bored good-nature on her face as she looked at the man she had married
because her good taste had told her the truth, namely, that he was
better-looking and better-bred than any of her other admirers.
It had been a hideous mistake, of course; but she was shrewd enough to
see that the shock of finding, on his return to India, that there was
literally no place for him in it had been quite as painful to her
husband as to herself. So she exonerated him of blame, with a sort of
contemptuous pity and an absolute lack of sympathy. It was nothing to
her, for instance, that, apart from the temporal loss of finding
himself only the son of a Hindoo widow who had reverted to the most
bigoted austerity on her husband's death, instead of the son of a man
high up in Government service, whose position had made unorthodoxy
tolerable to relations and friends alike, he should have come back to
find a change in himself, to feel a wild revolt against the renewed
contact with things which he had, literally, left behind him five years
before. The things themselves were too hopelessly, incredibly trivial
and childish for her to do anything but laugh at them, so he had soon
ceased even to mention them; though they meant far more to him.
Despite the mission school training which is the foundation-culture of
nearly all young India, his religion was a mere ethical sense, an
emotional yielding to the attraction of everything to which the epithet
'Higher' could be applied--mathematics and morals alike. And the
giving-in to the disgusting rites necessary before he could re-enter
native society on equal terms with those, even, who were of lower caste
than himself, had seemed to him degrading. So, despite his mother's
prayers and the advice of other men who, in like position, had
purchased comfort by acquiescence, he had refused to be made clean on
the offered terms. With this result, that the only familiar touch left
to him was that which this woman in the _demi-mondaine_ pink negligé
laid on his shoulder as, after a time, she flung the note down on the
table, and with a tolerant laugh paused beside him on her way from the
room.
'Don't be a fool, Chris!' she said cheerfully. 'You can't be expected
to understand, of course, so I'm not really angry. It is all right, old
man. Heaps of English women do that sort of thing; and I'm going to,
anyhow, so it's no good fussing.'
He made no reply. He seemed, even to himself, to have nothing to say;
nothing that could be said, at any rate, since the fierce claim for
silence and submission (even if it entailed the disposal of a corpse!)
which he had inherited from his fathers, had to be smothered. So he
only stared at the note, which lay face uppermost. It began 'Dearest
Jenny'; and _he_ called his wife Viva!
The difference of style epitomised the situation, since she preferred
the Jenny; it reminded her of bank clerks and the top of the
Hammersmith omnibus. He realised this now, for he was no fool; only a
reader of books, a believer in theories, a dreamer of dreams, who, in
the almost brutal blaze of an Indian sun, had awakened, not to
realities--that was impossible to one who still had no guide save
books--but to a new attempt at dreams. One which made him say
pompously, after the fashion in novels, 'I do not wish it, Viva; and
you will please to remember that I am your husband.'
His English, barring a faintly foreign intonation, was perfect; but his
wife laughed.
'Don't, Chris! It doesn't suit the part. Besides, we were only married
at the registrar's. So if you want a wife of that sort, Lucanaster says
you can marry one, if I don't object. I've been thinking about it, and
I don't think I should----'
He stood up and threw his hands out passionately ere covering his face
with them; and the action, utterly un-English as it was, suited him
better than his previous calm.
'It--it's a lie to begin with,' he cried hoarsely. 'And even if it
weren't--I wont have it said--it--it makes me lose myself.'
She drew back a bit and looked at him. 'You've done that already,
Chris, and so've I,' she said calmly. 'Now don't interrupt, please;
I've been fizzling for this talk the last month, for we shall rub along
together so much better when we thoroughly understand each other. So,
I'm not going to pretend any more, Chris! It doesn't work. I tried it
at first because--well! because you mean well, and I like to make
things comfy while I can. But I'm sick of Shark Lane. Some of the men
wouldn't be bad, if they weren't so awfully high-toned--that's what's
the matter with you, Chris!--but the women beat me. I went to see that
little fool Hâfiz Ahmad's wife yesterday, because I'm a good-natured
fool myself and she said she was dull, and you asked me; and as I say,
I like things comfy. Well! she wanted me to play old maid, and the
cards were--oh! filthy! That finished me. Of course it was only a
trifle, but it did the trick. I've chucked. I won't play the game any
more, Chris. I am going my own way; and if you want to see Shark Lane
here, I shall be somewhere else. You needn't bother or fuss. I can take
care of myself perfectly--I went about London a lot, you know. Besides,
doesn't it stand to reason that I'm a better judge of what an English
lady can do than you are? Why! I might as well try and teach you the
etiquette of those disgusting temples where your precious stay-at-home
women worship in--in the _altogether_!' She giggled modestly, and then,
seeing his face, gave him a final pat. 'Cheer up, Chris! I'm sure you
could marry one--a cousin or something--if you tried.'
He interrupted her with a listless, nerveless dignity. 'You seem to
think it all pretence, but I couldn't go back to the old ways;
this--this has meant more to me, than that----' his lips quivered as if
with coming tears, he had to pull himself together visibly. 'For the
rest,' he went on drearily, 'I am not quite so ignorant as you deem me.
One reads of--of this sort of situation, and I can shape my course as
other men have shaped theirs; only--only do not try my patience too
far.'
He meant the last in all seriousness, but neither the thought nor
the words were his own; and the pathos of this despairing clutch on
book-knowledge being, of course, lost on her commonplace vulgarity, she
laughed once more.
'Why, Chris! you've got that as pat as pat! quite the injured hub in
domestic drama. Goody me! to think I might be going down still on the
top of the dear old red 'bus to the mouth of the pit on a first night!
Well, that's over, so we must just both be as chirpy as we can.
Goodbye, Chris! I've got to dress, for Lucanaster 's coming for me in
half an hour. And don't expect me till you see me. They did talk of
tents out, a dance, and a regular night of it. You really needn't fuss,
Chris; you _can't_ understand, you see.'
When she had gone, he sate staring helplessly at the boiled egg, as if
he expected something to hatch out of it. Even thought forsook him, for
the first to come was that this woman was his wife. Wife! the word
conjured up such a different idea in the hereditary experience which
inevitably underlay all things in him, that he could go no further in
bewilderment.
So, in the effort to escape from the thraldom of the old wisdom, which
such as he have to make so often, he took up the newspaper which lay
beside him, telling himself passionately that the old order had
changed, that life held more than his fathers had dreamt of. Yet even
as he told himself this, the burden of doubt which such as he have to
bear came upon him, a sense of unreality, even in himself, closed round
him.
Unreal! Unreal! Unreal!
The word typed itself on the columns of the _Voice of India_ as he read
them. The paper was the recognised organ of his class, the exponent of
its desires, its beliefs. Yet here even that word pursued him. Here on
the first page was a leader stigmatising the temporary withdrawal of
independent powers from the Municipal Committee as an unwarrantable
piece of tyranny. Unwarrantable! Was it possible for any sane man to
call it so, knowing, as all knew, the grievous tale of neglect and
wrongdoing in that Committee? Was it possible, even apart from that,
for any wise man not to see that with plague clamouring for an
entrance, the good of the many claimed a more energetic sanitary reform
than the Committee seemed able or willing to introduce?
And as for the hints thrown out that the newly-published plague
regulations were but a sop, a blind, hiding a very different policy;
what then? Was it possible for any government to do more than legislate
for the _present_? Who but fools imagined that it could or would bind
itself to definite action in conditions which could only be guessed at?
So the tale of unreality went on. Here was a well-written,
well-reasoned article on the cow-killing grievance; but Chris, being a
wielder of the pen himself, happened to know the writer, and could
remember seeing him eating beefsteaks at the Temple dinners.
Again, in a paragraph headed 'Government Greed and Peasant Poverty.'
Could any detail overcome the indubitable fact that India had the
cheapest civilised government in the world?
He ran his eye down another column, and caught the phrase 'social
progress' above a signature which he knew to be that of a man who had
just married a child of ten.
And what was this? '_The Government to which is opposed the entire
intelligence of the nation!_' Brave words these, when the proportion
between such intelligence and the general ignorance was withheld! What
was it? Ten thousand to one!
'_The political training of the mass of the people is still, it is
true, somewhat incomplete_.' It might well be that when the percentage
of mere literates was almost negligible.
'_Even the Mohammedan policy was better than the English one. True, it
did not allow freedom of the press_....'
Ye gods! Freedom of the press when there was not a newspaper in all the
length and breadth of the land! Could unreality, bunkum, call it what
you will, go further than that?
Chris pushed himself back from the table, back from the boiled egg,
back from the newspaper, back, so far as he could, from himself, with
an odd sound between a laugh, a sob, and a curse.
Was that all? Was that sort of ungenerous, unreliable, almost
unimaginable drivel the only indictment which such as he had to bring
against those who had depolarised life? Who had neither given India a
creed, nor taken one away? Was that the only arraignment for the
tyranny of pain such as his?
No! a thousand times no! There was more to be said than that!
So to him came the fatal facility for words which is the betrayal of
his race. He sate down to write, and, heedless of the sound of dogcart
wheels and a man's and a woman's laughter which came after a time, did
not rise until he stood up with sheets on sheets of scarce-dried
manuscript in his hand, feeling for the first time in his intellectual
life that he was alone. Hitherto he had always followed the thoughts
of the great masters. Hitherto there had always been some one on the
road before him. Now the question, a burning one to his enthusiasm,
was--'Would any one come after him?'
Hâfiz Ahmad's house, the rallying-point of young India in Nushapore,
lay close by. It was a court-holiday, and therefore the chances were
great that some meeting or another was being held; since meetings are a
recognised holiday amusement with those who, amid all the unreality of
their lives, are still terribly in earnest.
He would go there and seek an audience.
On his way out, however, he saw Jack Raymond riding up the drive. Jack
Raymond, one of the few Englishmen he could count on to be kind, yet
who, despite that, had never called on his wife. Was he going to do so
now? As a matter of fact, Jack Raymond had had no such intention; he
had come over to ask Chris himself about a post which was vacant, and
which might keep John Ellison, loafer, out of more mischief; but seeing
Chris coming towards him with a pleased expectant look on his somewhat
pathetic face, a half-irritated pity made him ask if Mrs. Davenant was
at home.
'I'm sorry she has gone out with Lucanaster,' he repeated, unaware of
the emphasis he laid on the qualification till he saw poor Chris
flinch, when he said hurriedly, 'but I'll come in if I may. I've a
question or two I want to ask.'
Whereupon Chris, who, despite his five years of England and his wife's
incessant instructions, had never been able to grasp that exclusive use
of certain rooms to certain uses, took Jack Raymond straight into the
dining-room, where, amongst the litter of an unfinished breakfast, a
note, on which quite inadvertently the visitor set his riding-whip, lay
face uppermost.
That 'Dearest Jenny,' therefore, stared Jack Raymond in the face all
the time he was settling that John Ellison should go for a week's trial
as foreman on the new goods station which Chris was building. He knew
the writing, and had, what poor Chris had not, a fixed standard of
inherited and acquired experience by which to judge the writer. And so
a curious mixture of pity and repugnance came to the Englishman as he
looked at the face opposite him--the gentle face so full of
intelligence, so devoid of character--and thought of that other
coarser, commoner one. It was a question of the two men only; the
woman, dismissed briefly as a bad sort, counted for nothing in Jack
Raymond's mind.
Yet if Lucanaster had been an Englishman, it is ten to one that Jack
Raymond would not have said abruptly, as he did say when he rose to
take up his riding-whip, 'If I were you, Davenant, I wouldn't let my
wife be seen with that man Lucanaster. Of course you can't be expected
to--to know--but he's an awful sweep!' As he spoke, his knowledge of
himself made him clutch his whip tightly; but Chris only stood silent
for a moment with a wild appeal in his soft eyes. Then he tried to
speak; finally he sate down again, and buried his face in his hands.
The straining of the long brown fingers, tense in their effort to keep
back tears, the long-drawn breath trying to keep back sobs, made Jack
Raymond's pity fly before impatient contempt.
'I'm sorry. It's evidently worse than I thought,' he said; 'but that
sort of thing isn't a bit of good, Davenant. Put your foot down. Say
you won't have it.'
Chris Davenant's face came up from his hands with the dignity of
absolute despair. 'How can I? Didn't even _you_ say just now I couldn't
be expected to understand? She says it too. And I've no answer. How can
I have one when there is no place for me--or for her? That is it. If
she had friends--if there was any one to care--any one even to be
angry; but there is no one.'
His head went into his hands again, and the pity born of clearer
comprehension came back to the Englishman, like the dove of old, with
widespread white wings. And like the dove of old, it brought a
suggestion of calmer days to come with it.
'I hadn't thought of it that way,' he said slowly; 'but I see your
point. A lead over keeps many a horse between the flags. And I'll
get one for your wife if I can. Lady Arbuthnot is an old friend of
mine,'--he was faintly surprised at himself for this remark, which came
quite naturally--'and I'm sure she will send an invitation to the
Government House garden-party. Then there's the fête and the Service
ball. It may seem a queer cure to you----'
'Everything is queer,' admitted Chris, trying to be cheerful. 'But I
know she felt not being asked--I remember her saying----' He broke off;
for the remark had been, briefly, that it was no use considering the
proprieties if the proprieties didn't consider you.
'Well! that's settled. She'll find the invitations when she comes back;
then there'll be the dresses, you know, and all that.'
Chris shook his head. 'I am not sure if I do. It is all new. But it is
more than kind of you. If I could do anything for you in return----'
The unreserved gratitude in his face was sufficiently womanish not to
rouse the English distaste to all expression of emotion, though, even
so, Jack Raymond put it aside jestingly.
'Thank Lady Arbuthnot, my dear fellow; she'--he paused, a remembrance
coming to him--'By the way--you're in, I know, with all the _Voice of
India_ scribblers--write for it yourself, don't you? Well, what is the
meaning of those hints about the plague policy? What have they got hold
of? anything definite?'
'So far as I know, nothing,' began Chris. 'It is, I fear, a regrettable
fact that there is seldom good foundation----'
Jack Raymond, reins in hand, swung himself into his saddle lightly.
'Yes, thank God! Well! if you should hear of anything, or if you
should have a chance of--say, burking anything likely to upset the
apple-cart--the times are a trifle ticklish in the city--take your
gratitude to me, or rather to Lady Arbuthnot, out in that.'
Chris flushed up. 'Surely,' he began volubly, 'it is the bounden duty,
as I have just been writing, of the educated portion of the community
to leave themselves free for reasonable criticism by supporting
Government, wherever possible, by throwing heart and soul----' The
Englishman, holding his impatient mount in a grip of iron, looked down
with a bored expression.
'No doubt--no doubt; but the body fills a gap better on the whole.
Good-bye. I'll see to the invites, and you can drop me a line if you
hear anything definite.'