THE LONG DAY
One travels dak by relays casually disposed along the route at the whim
of the native contractor. Between Badshah Junction and Kuttarpur there
were ten stages, of which the conclusion of the first was at
hand--Amber having all but abandoned belief in its existence.
Slamming recklessly down the bed of an ancient watercourse, the tonga
spun suddenly upon one wheel round a shoulder of the banks and dashed
out upon a rolling plain, across which the trail snaked to other
farther hills that lay dim and low, a wavy line of blue, upon the
horizon--the hills in whose heart Kuttarpur itself lay occult. And, by
the roadside, in a compound fenced with camel-thorn, sat an aged and
indigent dak-bungalow, marking the end of the first stage, the
beginning of the second.
It wore a look of Heaven to the traveller. In the shade of its veranda
he read an urgent invitation to rest and surcease of sunlight. He
approved it thoroughly; the ramshackle rest-house itself, the sheds in
the rear for the accommodation of relays, the syce squatting asleep in
the sunshine, the few scrawny chickens squabbling and scratching over
their precarious sustenance in the deep hot dust of the compound, even
the broken tonga reposing with its shafts uplifted at a piteous angle
of decrepitude--all these Amber surveyed with a kindly eye.
Ram Nath reined in with a flourish and lifted a raucous voice, hailing
the syce, while Amber, painfully disengaging his cramped limbs, climbed
down and stumbled toward the veranda. The abrupt transition from
violent and erratic motion to a solid and substantial footing affected
him unpleasantly, with an undeniable qualm; the earth seemed to rock
and flow beneath him as if under the influence of an antic earthquake.
He was for some seconds occupied with the problem of regaining his
poise, and it was not until he heard an Englishwoman's voice uplifted
in accents of anger, that he remembered the other wayfarer with whom he
was to share his tonga, or associated the white-clad figure in the dark
doorway of the bungalow with anything but the khansamah, coming to
greet and cheat the chance-brought guest.
"Where is that tonga-wallah who deserted me here last night?" the woman
was demanding of Ram Nath, too preoccupied with her resentment to have
eyes for the other traveller, who at sight of her had stopped and
removed his pith helmet and now stood staring as if he had come from a
land in which there were no women. "Where," she continued, with an
imperative stamp of a daintily-shod foot, "is that wretched
tonga-wallah?"
"Sahiba," protested Ram Nath, with a great show of deference, "how
should I know? Belike he is in Badshah Junction, whither he returned
very late last night, being travel-worn and weary, and where I left
him, being sent with this excellent tonga to take his place."
"You were? And why have I been detained here, alone and unprotected,
this long night? Simply because that other tonga-wallah was a fool, am
I to be imposed upon in this fashion?"
"What am I," whimpered Ram Nath, "to endure the wrath of the sahiba for
a fault that is none of mine?"
"I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl, turning to Amber, "but it is
very annoying." She looked him over, first with abstraction, then with
a puzzled gathering of her brows, for he was far from her thoughts--the
last person she would have expected to meet in that place, and very
effectually disguised in dust and dirt besides, "The tire came off the
wheel just as we got here, late yesterday evening, and in trying, or
pretending to try, to fit it on again, that block-head of a
tonga-wallah hammered the rim with a rock as big as his head and
naturally smashed it to kindling-wood. Then, before I could stop him,
he flung himself on the back of a pony and went away, saying that it
was the will of God that he should return to Badshah for a better
tonga. Since when I have had for company one stable-syce, one
deaf-and-dumb patriarch of a khansamah and ... the usual dak-bungalow
discomforts--insects, bad food, and a terrible fear of dacoits."
"I am so sorry, Miss Farrell," Amber put in. "If I had only been
here...."
The girl gave a little gasp and sat down abruptly in one of the veranda
chairs, thereby threatening it with instant demolition and herself with
a bad spill; for the chair was feeble with the burden of its many
years, and she was a quite substantial young person. Indeed, so loudly
did it croak a protest and a warning that she immediately arose in
alarm.
"Mr. Amber!" she said; and, "Well ...!"
"You'll forgive me the surprise?" he begged, going up on the veranda to
her. "I myself had no hope of finding you here."
"But," she protested, with a pretty flush of colour--"but I left you in
the States such a little while ago!"
"Yes?" he said gravely. "It seems so long to me.... And when you had
gone, Long Island was a very lonely place indeed," he added, with
calculated impudence.
Her colour deepened and she sought another chair, seating herself with
gingerly decision. "I'm sure you don't mean me to assume that you've
followed me half round the world?"
"Why not?" He brought another chair to face her. "Besides, I haven't
seen anything of ... India for a good many years."
"Mr. Amber!"
"Ma'am?" he countered with affected humility.
"You're spoiling it all. I was so glad to see you--I'd have been glad
to see any white man, of course----"
"Much obliged, I'm sure."
"And now you're actually flirting with me--or pretending to."
"I'm not," he declared soberly. "As a matter of solemn fact, I had to
come to India."
"You _had_ to?"
"On a matter of serious business. Please don't ask me what, just yet;
but it's very serious, to my way of thinking. This happy accident--I
count myself a very happy man to have been so fortunate--only makes my
errand the more pleasant."
She regarded him intently, chin in hand, her brown eyes sedate with
speculation, for some time. "I believe you've been speaking in
parables," she asserted, at length. "If I'm unjust, bear with me;
appearances are against you. There isn't any reason I know of why you
should tell me what brought you here----"
"There's every reason, in point of fact, Miss Farrell; only ... I can't
explain just now."
"Very well," she agreed briskly; "let's be content with that. I am glad
to see you again, truly; and--we're to travel on to Kuttarpur in the
same tonga?"
"If you'll permit----"
"After what I've endured, this awful night, I wouldn't willingly let
you out of my sight."
"Or any other white man?"
She laughed, pleased. "I presume you're wondering what I'm doing here?"
"You were to join your father in Darjeeling, I believe?" he countered,
cautious.
"But I found he'd been transferred unexpectedly to Kuttarpur. So, of
course, I had to follow. I telegraphed him day before yesterday when I
was to arrive at Badshah Junction, and naturally expected he'd come in
person or have some one meet me, but I presume the message must have
gone astray. At all events there was no one there for me and I had to
come on alone. It's hardly been a pleasant experience; that incompetent
tonga-wallah behaved precisely as though he had deliberately made up
his mind to delay me.... And the tonga's nearly ready; I must lock my
kit-bag."
She went into the bungalow, leaving him thoughtful, for perhaps.... But
the back of Ram Nath, as that worthy busied himself superintending the
harnessing in of fresh ponies, conveyed to him no support for his
half-credited hypothesis that this "accident" had been carefully
planned by Labertouche for Amber's especial benefit.
He vexed himself with vain speculations, for it was perfectly certain
that he would get nothing in the way of either denial or confirmation
out of Ram Nath; and, presently, acknowledging this, he called the
khansamah and ordered a peg for the sake of the dust in his throat.
The girl joined him on the veranda in due course, very demure and sweet
to look upon in her travelling-dress of light pongee and her pith
helmet, whose green under-brim and puggaree served very handsomely to
set off her fair colouring. If she overlooked the adoration of his
eyes, she was rather less than woman; for it was in them, plain to be
seen for the looking. The khansamah followed her from the bungalow,
staggering under the weight of her box and kit-bag, and with Ram Nath's
surly assistance made them fast to the front seat. While Amber gave the
girl his hand to help her to her place, and lifted himself to her side
in a mute glow of ecstasy. Fate, he thought with reason, was most kind
to him.
They rattled headlong from the compound, making for the distant hills
of blue. The girl drew down her puggaree, with its soft, thin folds
sheltering the pure contours of her face from the dust and burning
sun-glare. He watched her hungrily, holding his breath as the thought
came to him that he was seated elbow to elbow with the woman who was to
be his wife, his hand still a-tingle with the reminiscence of her
gloved fingers that had touched it so transiently. She caught his
intent look and smiled, her eyes lustrous through the veiling.
She was very tired after her night-long vigil, and after a few words of
commonplace as they drew away from the station, he forebore to weary
her with talk, and a silence as sweet as communion lengthened between
them as the stage lengthened. He was very intent upon her presence; the
consciousness of her there beside him seemed, at times, almost
suffocating. He could by no means forget that she had in a curious way
been assigned to him--set aside to be his wife, the partner of all his
days; and she tolerated him kindly, all unsuspicious of the
significance of his advent into her life.... If she were made to
suspect, to understand, what effect would it have upon their relations,
slight and but lately established as they were? Would she shrink from
or encourage him?
His wife! He wagged his head in solemn stupefaction, trying to
appreciate the intangible, the chimerical dream of yesterday resolved
into the actuality of to-day; realising that, even when most intrigued
by the adventure of which she was at once the cause and the prize, even
though he had met and been charmed by her before becoming enmeshed in
its web of incident, he had thought of her with a faint trace of
incredulity, as though she had been a thing of fable, trapped with all
the fanciful charms of beleaguered fairy princesses, rather than a
living woman of flesh and fire and blood--such as she proved to be who
rode with him, her thoughts drowsily astray in the vastnesses of her
inscrutable, virginal moods.
To think that she was foreordained to be his wife was not more
unbelievable than the consciousness that he, her undeclared lover, her
predestined mate and protector, was listlessly permitting her to delve
further into the black heart of a land out of which he had promised to
convey her with all possible speed, for the salvation of her body and
soul.... Yet what could he do, save be passive for the time, and wait
upon the turn of events? He could not, dared not seize her in his arms
and insist that she love him, marry him, fly with him--all within the
compass of an hour or even of a day. For words of love came haltingly
to his unskilled tongue, though they came from a surcharged heart, and
to him the strategy of love was as a sealed book, at whose contents he
could but guess, and that with a diffidence and distrust sadly
handicapping to one who had urgent need of expedition in his courting.
With a rueful smile and a perturbed heart he pondered his problem. The
second stage wore away without a dozen words passing between them; so
also the third. The pauses were brief enough, the ponies being
exchanged with gratifying despatch. The tonga would pull up, Ram Nath
would jump down ... and in a brace of minutes or little more the
vehicle would be _en route_ again, Amber engaged with the infinite
ramifications of this labyrinthal riddle of his, and the girl
insensibly yielding to the need of sleep. She passed, at length, into
sound unconsciousness.
Thus the morning stages flowed beneath the tonga, personified in a
winding ribbon of roadway, narrow, deep-rutted, inexpressibly dusty,
lined uncertainly over a scrubby, sun-scorched waste. Sophia napped
uneasily by fits and starts, waking now and again with a sleepy smile
and a fragmentary, murmured apology. She roused finally very much
refreshed for the midday halt for rest and tiffin, which they passed at
one of the conventional bungalows, in nothing particularly unlike its
fellows unless it were that they enjoyed, before tiffin, the gorgeous
luxury of plenty of clean water, cooled in porous earthen jars. Amber,
overwhelmed by the discovery of this abundance, promptly went to the
extreme of calling in the khansamah to sluice him down with jar after
jar, and felt like himself for the first time in five days when, shaved
and dressed, he returned to the common living-room of the resthouse.
The girl kept him waiting but a little while. Lacking the attentions of
an ayah she had probably been unable to bathe so extensively as he, but
eventually she appeared in an immeasurably more happy state of body and
mind, calling up to him the simile, stronger than any other, of a tall,
fair lily after a morning shower. And she was in a bewitching humour,
one that ingenuously enough succeeded in entangling him more thoroughly
than ever before in the web of her fascinations. Over an execrable
curry of stringy fowl and questionable rice, eked out with tea and
tinned delicacies of their own, their chatter, at the beginning
sufficiently gay and inconsequent, drifted by imperceptible and
unsuspected gradations perilously close to the shoals of intimacy. And
subsequently, when they had packed themselves back into the narrow
tonga-seat and again were being bounced and juggled breathlessly over
shocking roads, the exchange of confidences continued with unabated
interest. Amber on his part was led to talk of his life and work, of
his adventures in the name of Science, of his ambitions and
achievements. In return he received a vivid impression of the lives of
those women who share with their men the burden of official life in
British India: of serene days in the brisk, invigorating, clear
atmosphere of hill stations; of sunsmitten days and steaming nights in
the Deccan; of the uncertain, anchorless existences of those who know
not from one day to another when they may be whisked half across an
Empire at the whim of that awful force simply nominated Government....
For all the taint upon her pedigree, she proved herself to Amber at
heart a simple, lonely Englishwoman--a stranger in a sullen and
suspicious land, desiring nothing better than to return to the England
she had seen and learned to love, the England of ample lawns, of
box-hedges, and lanes, of travelled highways, pavements and gaslights,
of shops and theatres, of home and family ties....
But India she knew. "I sometimes fancy," she told him with the
conscious laugh that deprecates a confessed superstition, "that I must
have lived here in some past incarnation." She paused, but he did not
speak. "Do you believe in reincarnation?" Again he had no answer for
her, though temporarily he saw the daylight as darkness. "It's hard to
live here for long and resist belief in it.... But as a matter of fact
I seem to understand these people better than they're understood by
most of _my_ people. Don't you think it curious? Perhaps it's merely
intuition----"
"That's the birthright of your sex," he said, rousing. "On the other
hand, you have to remember that your father is one of a family that for
generations has served the Empire. And your mother?"
"She, too, came of an Anglo-Indian family. Indeed, they met and courted
here, though they were married in England.... So you think my insight
into native character a sort of birthright--a sense inherited?"
"Perhaps--something of the sort."
"You may be right. We'll never know. At all events, I seem to have a
more--more painful comprehension of the native than most of the English
in this country have; I seem to feel, to sense their motives, their
desires, aspirations, even sometimes their untranslatable thoughts. I
believe I understand perfectly their feeling toward us, the governing
race."
"Then," said Amber, "you know something his Highness the Viceroy
himself would give his ears to be sure of."
"I know that; but I do."
"And that feeling is----?"
"Not love, Mr. Amber."
"Much to the contrary----?"
"Very much," she affirmed with deep conviction.
"This 'Indian unrest' one reads of in the papers is not mere gossip,
then?"
"Anything but that; it's the hidden fire stirring within the volcano we
told ourselves was dead. The quiet of the last fifty years has been not
content but slumber; deep down there has always been the fire, slow,
deadly, smouldering beneath the ashes. The Mutiny still lives in
spirit; some day it will break out afresh. You must believe me--I
_know_. The more we English give our lives to educate the natives, the
further we spread the propaganda of discontent; day by day we're
teaching them to understand that we are no better than they, no more
fit to rule; they are beginning to look up and to see over the rim of
the world--and we have opened their eyes. They have learned that
Japanese can defeat Caucasians, that China turns in its sleep, that
England is no more omnipotent than omniscient. They've heard of anarchy
and socialism and have learned to throw bombs. Only the other day a
justice in Bengal was killed by a bomb.... I fancy I talk," the girl
broke off with her clear laugh, "precisely like my father, who talks
precisely as a political pamphleteer writes. You'll see when you meet
him."
"Do you take much interest in politics?"
"No more than the every-day Englishwoman; it's one of our staples of
conversation, when we've exhausted the weather, you know. But I'm not
in the least advanced, if that's what you mean; I hunger after
fashion-papers and spend more time than I ought, devouring home-made
trash imported in paper-covers. I only feel what I feel by instinct--as
I said awhile ago."
Perhaps if he had known less about the girl, he would have attached
less importance to her statements. As it was, she impressed him
profoundly. He pondered her words deeply, storing them in his memory,
remembering that another had spoken in the same manner--one for whose
insight into the ways of the native he had intense respect.
As the slow afternoon dragged out its blazing hours, their spirits
languished, and they fell silent, full weary and listless. Towards the
last quarter of the journey their road forsook the spacious, haggard
plain and again entered a hilly country, but this time one wherein
there was no lack either of water or of life: a green and fertile land
parcelled into farms and dotted with villages.
Night overtook the tonga when it was close upon Kuttarpur, swooping
down upon the world like a blanket of darkness, at the moment that the
final relay of ponies was being hitched in. The sun dipped behind the
encircling hills; the west blazed with the lambent flame of fire-opal;
the wonderful translucent blue of the sky shaded suddenly to deep
purple lanced by great shafts of mauve and amethyst light, and in the
east stars popped out; the hills shone like huge, crude gems--sapphire,
jade, jasper, malachite, chalcedony--their valleys swimming with mists
of mother-of-pearl.... And it was night, the hills dark and still, the
sky a deeper purple and opaque, the ruddy fires of wayfarers on the
roadside leaping clear and bright.
With fresh ponies the tonga took the road with a wild initial rush soon
to be moderated, when it began to climb the last steep grade to the
pass that gives access to Kuttarpur from the south. For an hour the
road toiled up and ever upward; steep cliffs of rock crowded it,
threatening to push it over into black abysses, or to choke it off
between towering, formidable walls. It swerved suddenly into a broad,
clear space. The tonga paused. Voluntarily Ram Nath spoke for almost
the first time since morning.
"Kuttarpur," he said, with a wave of his whip.
Aloof, austere and haughty, the City of Swords sits in the mouth of a
ravine so narrow that a wall no more than a hundred yards in length is
sufficient to seal its southerly approach. Beneath this wall, to one
side of the city gate, a river flows from the lake that is Kuttarpur's
chiefest beauty. Within, a multitude of dwellings huddles, all
interpenetrated by streets and backways so straitened and sinuous as
scarcely to permit the passage of an elephant from the Maharana's herd;
congested in the bottom of the valley, the houses climb tier upon tier
the flanking hillsides, until their topmost roofs threaten even the
supremacy of that miracle in white marble, the Raj Mahal.
Northwards the palace of Khandawar's kings stands, exquisite, rare, and
marvellous, unlike any other building in the world. White, all white,
from the lake that washes its lowest walls to the crenellated rim of
its highest roof, it sweeps upward in breath-taking steps and wide
terraces to the crest of the western hill, into which it burrows, from
which it springs; a vast enigma propounded in white marble without a
note of colour save where the foliage of a hidden garden peeps over the
edge of a jealous screen--a hundred imposing mansions merged into one
monstrous and imperial maze.
Impregnable in the old days, before cannon were brought to India,
Kuttarpur lives to-day remote, unfriendly, inhospitable. Within its
walls there is no room for many visitors; they who come in numbers,
therefore, must perforce camp down before the gates.
Now figure the city to yourself, seeing it as Sophia was later to see
it in the light of day; then drench it with blue Indian night and stud
it with a myriad eyes of fire--lamps, torches, candles, blue-white
electric arcs, lights running up and down both hillsides and fringing
the very star-sheeted skies, clustering and diverging in vast,
bewildering, inconsequent designs, picking out the walls and main
thoroughfares, shining through coloured globes upon the palace
terraces, glimmering mysteriously from isolate windows and balconies;
and add to these the softly illuminated walls of a hundred silken state
marquees and a thousand meaner canvas tents arrayed south of the
city.... And that is Kuttarpur as it first revealed itself to Amber and
Sophia Farrell.
But for a moment were they permitted to gaze in wonderment; Ram Nath
had little patience. When he chose to, he applied his whip, and the
ponies stretched out, the tonga plunging on their heels down the steep
hillside, like an ungoverned, ungovernable thing, maddened. Within a
quarter of an hour they were careering through the city of tents on the
parked plain before the southern wall. In five minutes more they drew
up at the main city gate to parley with the Quarter Guard.
Here they suffered an exasperating delay. It appeared that the gates
were shut at sundown, in deference to custom immemorial. Between that
hour and sunrise none were permitted to pass either in or out without
the express sanction of the State. The commander of the guard
instituted an impudent catechism, in response to which Ram Nath
discovered the several identities and estates of his charges. The
commander received the information with impartial equanimity and
retired within the city to confer with his superiors. After some time a
trooper was sent to advise the travellers that the tonga would be
permitted to enter with the understanding that the unaccredited
Englishman (meaning Amber) would consent to lodge for the night in no
other spot than the State rest-house beyond the northern limits of the
city.
Amber agreed. The trooper saluted with much deference and withdrew. And
for a long time nothing happened; the gates remained shut, the postern
of the Quarter Guard irresponsive to Ram Nath's repeated summons. His
passengers endured with what patience they could command; they were
aware that it was necessary to obtain from some quarter official
sanction for the opening of the gates, but they had understood that it
had already been obtained.
Abruptly the peace of the night was shattered, and the hum of the
encampment behind them with the roar of the city before them was
dwarfed, by a dull and thunderous detonation of cannon from a terrace
of the palace. The tonga ponies, reared and plunged, Ram Nath mastering
them with much difficulty. Sophia was startled, and Amber himself
stirred uneasily on his perch.
"What now?" he grumbled. "You'd think we were visitors of state and had
to be durbarred!"
Far up on the heights a second red flame stabbed the night, and again
the thunder pealed. Thereafter gun after gun bellowed at imperative,
stately intervals.
"Fifteen," Amber announced after a time. "Isn't this something
extraordinary, Miss Farrell?"
"Perhaps," she suggested, "there's a native potentate arriving at the
northern gate. They're very punctilious about their salutes, you know."
Another crash silenced her. Amber continued to count. "Twenty-one," he
said when it seemed that there was to be no more cannonading. "Isn't
that a royal salute?"
"Yes," said the girl; "four more guns than the Maharana of Khandawar
himself is entitled to."
"How do you explain it?"
"I don't," she replied simply. "Can you?"
He was dumb. Could it be possible that this imperial greeting was
intended for the man supposed to be the Maharana of Khandawar--Har Dyal
Rutton? He glanced sharply at the girl, but her face was shadowed; and
he believed she suspected nothing.
A great hush had fallen, replacing the rolling thunder of the State
ordnance. Even the voice of the city seemed moderate, subdued. In
silence the massive gates studded with sharp-toothed elephant-spikes
swung open.
With a grunt, Ram Nath cracked his whiplash and the tonga sped into the
city. Amber bent forward.
"What's the name of that gate, Ram Nath--if you happen to know?"
"That," said the tonga-wallah in a level voice, "is known as the
Gateway of Swords, sahib." He added in his own good time: "But not
_the_ Gateway of Swords."
Amber failed to educe from him any satisfactory explanation of this
orphic utterance.