Benefit of Doubt/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
“Twenty-five years later.”
Poona, Bombay Presidency. Three words to a man who knows the western side of India like three sniffs in the dew to a hunting dog. They tell the whole story. Poona, summer government headquarters, depot for artillery, cavalry and favored infantry, sick-and-short-leave station—second-class Simla, as it were, where the pale-faced men and women who have bridled the rising Eastern peril meet once in a lustrum and exchange remarks, was the same after the war as before it. Only the people had changed a little. There were new faces, and the old ones were older. That was all.
Pig-sticking, polo and gymkana dovetailed into the day's work, and the nights were fabulous-Arabian. India lends herself to that. Hot skies and hard sport go together. The star-powdered Indian sky is the background of them all for nodding paper lanterns. Turbaned servants, flitting on naked feet among shadows darker than themselves, suggest intrigue that never sleeps. A khaki uniform looks golden, a white one silver, and a woman's bare shoulders like a glimpse of heaven.
The fortnightly dance at the gymkana differed in no wise from a hundred that. preceded it. A dozen scattered men in evening dress among two hundred only punctuated the color scheme and made the whirling pattern easier to read.
One of the men in black was Cotswold Ommony. He never wore uniform, being of the Woods and Forests. You could tell at a glance that he never walked abroad without a gun under his arm—a sturdy, stocky man with a queer old-fashioned look that made you take a second glance at him.
He was the only man in the room who wore a beard; one of the very few who danced in the new style. Most of them waltzed round and round in the Victorian way that Byron thought so scandalous and that looks so absurdly antique to Americans. But Ommony did the fox-trot and the one-step. He was no expert, but an enthusiast, and the high and mighty into whom he bumped did not approve. They said so at intervals, and Ommony smiled; whereat you knew immediately why he held his job.
Among the scandalized objectors was young Mrs. Wilmshurst, so-called because her husband was a middle-aged high court judge. She angrily chafed an elbow as she talked with Athelstan King against the veranda rail, with a blue Chinese lantern swaying gently overhead. They stood together exactly at the point where the yellow ballroom glare outpouring through wide doors and windows met dark night and defeat.
King was safe to dance with. He had not learned the new tricks. Moreover, he did not dance too much and get too hot, and had no beard; and women always liked to talk with him because he had never been known to make love to any one, and in a case like that there is always hope.
Although both men were in evening dress he looked as different from Ommony as a carriage from a cart-horse—taller, although the two were really the same height—lighter, although they weighed about the same—younger, although they were the same age—darker-complexioned, in spite of Ommony's dark gray-shot beard—more active, although Ommony was prancing like a satyr, and King stock-still.
Mrs. Wilmshurst was in her bitterly cynical mood, which she believed becoming to a high court judge's wife whose elbow has been hurt by a Woods and Forests man.
“Has India seeped into your blood and made you mad, that you should have left the army in your prime, Major King?”
“Perhaps,” he answered. He was thoroughly bored with her, but quite able go be bored without letting her know it.
“I suppose there's more money in your present job.”
“No. Less money.”
“Gracious! Then you surely are mad! Do explain! I'm crazy about complexes. My husband has been reading Freud and talks about it at breakfast.” She tapped his shoulder familiarly with her fan. “Come, let me analyze you!”
King turned to face the ballroom and leaned his back against the rail.
“There's a man enjoying himself! Look at Cot Ommony!” he laughed.
Mrs. Wilmshurst understood that she had failed to please, and her bitterness became as nearly genuine as anything she usually felt.
“Does he prance that way in the forest-glades?” she wondered. “What a pity a man said to be so brilliant should waste his time among monkeys—and learn manners from them!”
“Ommony has learned more from the beasts than most of us learn anywhere,” King answered.
“Oh, is he a friend of yours? I see you're huffed. So sorry. I thought you had no intimates—so everybody says.”
“Ommony and I are friends.”
“I suppose it would be rude to say I don't envy either of you! I like warmth about my friendships. How can you possibly be friends, when he lives in his great forest, and you disappear over the Himalayas for months on end? Do you write each other billets-doux?”
“Practically never write. I think your next partner is looking for you,” King answered. “Here you are. Don't let me rob you, Campbell.”
She left on Campbell's arm, but had the last word and took care that King heard it.
“So glad you came, Captain Campbell. I was frightfully bored.”
King chuckled and lighted a cigar. A moment later Ommony joined him wiping the inside of his collar with a handkerchief.
“Hello,” said Ommony.
“Hello, Cot.”
“You're lean. What's the matter?”
“Nothing. Got a scratch up Khyber way. Brass bullet in the stomach. All right now.”
“Where are you going next?”
“To stay with you.”
“Excellent.”
Ommony pulled out a gold watch that must have been an heirloom, because nobody nowadays would buy such a thing.
“Seventy-two minutes. One a. m. train.”
“Ready when you are.”
The fact that they had not met for nearly four years was as unimportant as the water that had tumbled during that time over Poona bund. They resumed where they had left off, those two, hardly troubling to exchange remarks over a whisky and soda at the bar, then striding side by side into the darkness to interrupt gambling by candle-light and send their “boys” in search of baggage.
Servants and baggage went in a tikka-gharri to the station, but they walked, characteristically saying no good-byes. Ten words from each of them and their servants went about the business of going somewhere—anywhere—with that unsurprized contentment that is the homage of elementary intelligence to men who know their minds. There is more than art or violence in being well served; more also than money payment.
They had not more than enough time to catch the train, but you could have hurried an era just as easily as either of those men. Two things—knowledge of the exact number of minutes at their disposal, and an all-absorbing interest—took them out of their way through winding streets instead of straight down the high road to the station. Add to that the faith in their servants of two men who have kept faith, and you have their whole motive. But it was promptly misinterpreted.
India never sleeps. And because the long night of her subjection to innumerable despotisms has probably begun to wane and life moves in her hidden roots, night is the time when secrets draw near the surface. Just as you can hear the jungle grow at night, so you can see India seeing visions, if you look. Not very many trouble to look.
There were voices on the roofs. Guttering candles made a beautiful golden glow among shadows where only hate lurked. Light emerged from the chinks of shutters, sound crowding through after it—mostly of men talking all at once, but now and then of one man's voice declaiming. The gloom of the narrow streets, with the occasional ineffectual-looking “constabeel” under a lamp at a corner, produced an unreal effect as if they were walking in a dream.
A door opened violently as they passed, and a copper-colored man with his long hair coiled in a chignon and sweat running in streams down his naked, hairy belly, stood boldly with a hand on each door-post and eyed them as agreeably as a caged beast eyes-its captors. His eyeballs rolled, and he spat into the gutter. Then, turning with slobber on his jaws as if frenzy had gone beyond control, he shouted in the Maharati tongue to the men in the room behind him:
Illustration: Partial map of British India
“Come and look at them! O brothers, come and look at them! How long shall we endure? Those lords, eh! See them swagger down the streets! We labor to pay their salaries, but”
Some one pulled him in by the waist-cloth and the door slammed shut. The constable at the next corner, who had heard every word of the tirade, saluted rigidly and stared after King and Ommony in a sort of dumb perplexity. He was not obliged to salute them, for they were not in uniform.
“I've been up and down India recently,” said King. “It's like that everywhere. It isn't honest discontent that common sense and guts could deal with. It's something else. The troops are beginning to get it. They're wondering. Did you notice that policeman? Nothing but his pay between him and anarchy. What's happening?”
“God knows,” said Ommony.
“Of course, living in your forest”
“You can learn a lot in a forest.”
“Granted. But”
“This, for instance—goats will keep a forest down. Control the goats, and they do it good; it grows. Turn them loose and they kill it. That's us. We controlled the goats for a hundred years, and India grew. We were so busy policing goats that we overlooked other things. The forest's getting out of hand.”
“I often think we English are the blindest fools that breathe,” said King.
“Queer, isn't it?” Ommony answered. “I've puzzled over it. Read a lot—'specially foreign criticism. But the critics don't help. They only sneer at our faults, as if we weren't aware of them. The nearest I've come to explaining it is that we're so busy policing goats—jailing robbers—passing cautious laws—cleaning unhealthy places—that we can't see beyond that. We're near-sighted.”
“And where there is no vision—” King suggested.
“No foresight, yes.”
“—the people perish. May I die with my boots on!”
“Amen!” said Ommony. “Some of us will, some won't. There'll be all kinds of us, in all sorts of predicaments when that hour comes. If that brass bullet didn't let all the steam out of you we'd better put on speed now. We've exactly seven minutes.”