Bhowani Junction (11 page)

The Collector said, ‘Our main problem here is going to be the reaction of the civil population—and of the Indian Army. You realize that there are people about who want this to de
velop into a blood bath, another Great Mutiny? Another eighteen fifty-seven?’

Colonel Savage said, ‘God help us all if they succeed.’

I got an idea that they were speaking like that for Ranjit’s benefit. It was not quite the way they had talked to each other before.

‘God help us all, especially the Indian National Congress,’ the Collector said slowly. ‘I don’t think there’s much else we can do tonight. Ranjit, do you know if the news of the R.I.N. mutinies has got up here yet?’

Ranjit hesitated so that we all noticed it, and then answered, ‘Yes. I heard it before I came here.’

‘From whom?’ the Collector snapped quickly.

‘A shopkeeper,’ Ranjit said unhappily, ‘someone in the street. I did not know him.’

‘I see,’ the Collector said. After a while he spread his hand in a very Indian gesture and added, ‘Lanson has a few extra police out, and my personal spy ring is in operation.’ He smiled a queer smile. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Savage. I’ll come to your office.’

When we were outside, Colonel Savage said, ‘Macaulay hasn’t rung up yet about the goods train at Malra. I’ve got to go and find out. I’ll walk across.’ He told Birkhe to drive Ranjit and me wherever we wanted to go, and then left us.

‘I have to go to the starion, please,’ Ranjit said, and we went there first. He said nothing on the way; he sat in the back seat, and I could hear him shuffling his feet on the floor and tapping his fingers on the side of the jeep. Before leaving him at the station I felt I must say something to him, because he was obviously very upset. I said, ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it? What do you think’s going to happen?’

‘I don’t know, Miss Jones,’ he answered, while Birkhe sat quietly in the driver’s seat beside me. I wondered whether Birkhe understood any English, but I didn’t care. Ranjit said, ‘I can tell you, if the British murder those sailors, who are only protesting, there will be trouble everywhere—bad, serious trouble. There are people who will not put up with it any more. There are leaders who know how to make our protests
effective.’

We drove away then and left him standing there, looking thin and unhappy under the lights in the station yard.

In bed I lay awake a long time, listening, wondering whether I would hear the growl of crowds, or shots, or the awful clanging of a derailed train. Pater might be driving the first train to reach the break. I saw a great engine rolling, plunging down the embankment. I heard the splintering and grinding and breaking and tinkling, and a scream from a hundred men and women, but all that was only a background to the roar of superheated steam filling the overturned cab where Pater was. Or was it Patrick? I could not see; he was huddled there with his arms across his face. It was one of us, though, in a topi.

In fact I heard none of those things, only the ordinary sounds of the night; yet I imagined there was something different, something urgent, about those sounds on that night. Anxiety prevented me from sleeping except in fits and starts.

At four o’clock in the morning I awoke with a jump. I heard a steady rumbling noise and soon made out what it was. It was the faint thunder of aircraft high in the sky. I lay awake for half an hour, listening, as they passed up there from north to south. They were going to Bombay.

At five o’clock I remembered Colonel Savage saying confidently earlier that very night, ‘There will be no mutiny.’ That made me feel better. I would remember that. I would use it one day, when he was so cocksure that I could not stand it any longer. Then at last I went to sleep.

The Royal Indian Navy mutiny began on Wednesday evening. The next Sunday I was working in the battalion offices, as I had done every day of the week. I found that work slowly accumulated on me. I liaised with the railway, and while I was doing that I became responsible for operational maps, which were sprouting like big green cabbage leaves on the walls of my office. More and more Colonel Savage gave me Intelligence Summaries to read, collate, and pass on. I knew WAC (I)s were not meant to do this kind of work at the headquarters of a battalion. A battalion is a fighting unit.

I wondered sometimes what I would do if Colonel Savage ordered me out on operations or manoeuvres in this role I had somehow got of Battalion Intelligence Officer. I had only to send a telegram or a letter to G.H.Q., and half a dozen senior WAC (I) officers would be down there like a ton of bricks. But against that, Colonel Savage had his infuriating knack of making everybody do what he wanted. And I stayed there because I had a nice feeling, which I think most women will understand, of being the only woman who’d ever been allowed so close to the real soldiers, as one of them. There are nurses, of course, but they are different and even they don’t go as far down as a battalion. I felt like one of those Russian women you see in pictures, carrying tommy-guns. Besides, I told myself, he is short of officers, and I am doing a useful job in a real emergency.

Colonel Savage had ordered me always to leave the connecting door open between his office and mine—‘So that you can hear me without my having to yell,’ he had said with a cold smile. He still thought I was looking for opportunities to flirt with Macaulay. I didn’t care what he thought. The order prevented Macaulay from making himself much of a nuisance, although he often had to come into my office. When he did he always spoke to me in the same way, a mixture of joking and
slyness that was uncomfortable but not sufficiently bad to let me be really rude to him in return. And sometimes, unfortunately, he made me laugh. He had a gift for turning a sentence, especially about Colonel Savage, whom he always called ‘the Sahib’, so that I could not always keep my face straight.

The trouble is that I am an ordinary woman and I could not keep my aoger at boiling-point all the time, against Macaulay or Colonel Savage or any of them. I thought, too, that Macaulay must realize by now that I did not want him to make love to me. Even the next thing that happened that Sunday did not warn me as it should have.

About eleven o’clock Colonel Savage left his office to go to the Lines on some business. Macaulay came in to me a few minutes later and began to copy some details off one of the maps into his notebook. Half-way through he turned and said, ‘Why did you want to go telling the Sahib about—about our misunderstanding? Can’t we keep the old men out of this? I apologized, didn’t I?’

I looked up, surprised, and said, ‘I haven’t told him anything.’ That sounded too friendly, so I added quickly, ‘But I will if you make me.’

Macaulay looked absolutely dumbfounded He said, ‘You didn’t? You’re joking, Victoria—you
must
have. Well, I’m
damned
! The cunning sod! He took me to his bungalow the other day and sat down, looking like a hungry wolf, and asked me
why
I’d done it. Of course I confessed. Extenuating circumstances got me off a court-martial.’ Macaulay made motions in the air outlining a woman’s breasts. ‘The sahib tore into me as if I was a little boy he’d caught making a mess on the carpet. He’s stopped all my leave for six months.’

‘You deserve it,’ I said as curtly as I could. I began to puzzle out what Colonel Savage’s various actions and innuendoes could mean. Macaulay said, ‘I say, the Sahib isn’t turning sweet on you himself, is he?’ He had come close to my chair and was looking at me suspiciously.

‘No,’ I snapped. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I wouldn’t have anything to do with Colonel Savage if he was the last man in the world. He’s a—he’s a
swine
.’ I know my face was flushed, and
I found myself standing up.

Macaulay said, ‘Well, that’s good. But oh, honey, don’t be angry with me. I admit I was a fool and I do apologize. Please forgive me. Please let’s start all over again, properly this time.’

I have sometimes seen myself in the mirror when I am getting into a bad temper, and I can’t deny that it makes me look better than usual. My chest was heaving, and I suddenly noticed Macaulay’s eyes fixed on it. They had gone dull again, and the end of his tongue was just out, moving from side to side and licking his moustache. His eyes wandered down over me, to my stomach, to the middle of my skirt.

It is impossible to think of less attractive, less woman-like chothes than WAC (I) uniform, and yet he licked me with his eyes as though I had no clothes on at all. I sat down quickly and said, ‘Go away. At once.’

He said, ‘Not until you forgive me.’

To get rid of him I said, ‘All right. I forgive you. But that’s all.’

He said, ‘You must be in love with somebody else—that railway pal of yours, Taylor.’

I said, ‘Yes. No. But I’m not going to start anything with you.
Please
go away.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful; I’m young and healthy; I love you.’ He kept on talking, but the spasm had passed, and his eyes looked normal again. He asked me to go to the flicks with him, and I had just refused when a Gurkha orderly marched in with a signal form.

I interrupted Macaulay by saying, ‘Ah, this is the final reckoning of what’s missing from that goods train at Malra. I’ve got these figures already. Do you want to keep the message?’

‘Yes, please,’ he said and stuffed it in his pocket. He sat down on the near corner of my table and said, ‘My God, I thought the Sahib was going to chew the inkstand to pieces that morning, didn’t you?’

‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’ I said.

Sulkily he said, ‘Oh, all right,’ and left me.

As soon as he had gone I sat back with a phew of relief. I rummaged in the table drawers and found a list: 3,000 pounds
of PEK; 96 detonators; 6,000 feet of cordtex; 1,000 feet of slow-burning fuse; 12,000 rounds of SAA .303 Mark VIII Z; 96 grenades—a lot of oddments. Then at the end was a note we’d had from the ordnance depot: ‘All the above explosives and ammunition are
DEFECTIVE AND DANGEROUS
to use though safe under storage conditions. All stores on this train were en route for drowning under Operation Neptune. See G.H.Q. No….’ and then the usual long reference number.

I lit a cigarette. The goods train stopped by the strike at Malra that night had been looted, and it had contained a few wagon loads of explosives and ammunition. They were scrapings from an ordnance depot in northern India, which were being sent to the coast to be loaded into ships, taken out to sea, and dumped overboard in deep water. The same thing was going on all over India as the ordnance depots cleared up after the war.

Whoever looted the train had known beforehand that it contained ammunition. They can’t have known that it was going to be held up exactly at Malra, but they probably had a general idea of where it would be when the strike began.

The train had been in Malra about three hours, in darkness, before Colonel Savage found out it was there. Then he had ordered soldiers from the Malra bridge to guard it, but when the Gurkhas reached the train they found it already looted. Hardly two tons had been taken, but the thieves had come and gone and got clean away. There were the marks of bullock-cart wheels beside the train, but Colonel Savage thought the ammunition had very soon been transferred to a car or a lorry. Anyway, it had vanished.

No one was to blame. Colonel Savage had been very quick to get a guard on the train at all, considering it might have been full of nothing but ballast or gravel. Patrick had done nothing wrong. Nor had Ranjit. Only I couldn’t help wondering in the bottom of my mind whether Ranjit might not know something. When he said, ‘There are leaders who know how to make our protests effective,’ did he mean ‘by arming us?’ I said nothing of this, which was much smaller than a suspicion, to Colonel Savage.

Colonel Savage returned just as I finished my cigarette. He said, ‘I’m going round the city with the Collector. Do you want to come?’

I said, ‘Very good, sir,’ got my cap and bag, and followed him. The Collector’s little black Austin Seven saloon was waiting in front of the steps. I squeezed into the narrow back seat. Colonel Savage sat in front, his knees hunched up under the dashboard. The Collector was wearing his usual white duck suit and bow tie. On his head he had a panama hat with a faded black and red ribbon. The little car buzzed down the Pike and into the city.

The narrow streets of the ramshackle old city were crowded, as usual, but the atmosphere of the place was peculiar. People stood in groups, talking noisily, or squatted in rows under the house walls and shouted to one another, or were gathered in the dark back parts of the open-fronted shops. The rain earlier in the week had brought out millions of flies. The air was still a little moist, though it had become very hot again.

The Collector drove slowly, hooting all the time on his bulbhorn. People moved out of the way slowly, often frowning and sometimes turning to shout or mutter at us as we squeezed past. The men against the walls stared at the car and at us cooped inside it like monkeys in a cage. It was a bad feeling, and I was glad that Colonel Savage had his carbine. He always carried it now. ‘The citizens are not in a good temper,’ he said.

The Collector said, ‘No. There’s too much noise for it to be serious yet, though. When the city becomes quiet, and no one’s in the streets, then you have to be ready.’

We drove on, and after going slowly all round the city we went to the station. Patrick was there, getting on to his Norton. He stopped kicking the starter when he saw us, and came over. He said to the Collector, ‘I was just going to look for you. I have been trying and trying to reach you on the telephone, but the servant said you were out.’

‘As you see,’ the Collector replied, smiling. We were all out of the little box now.

‘Well, it is jolly serious,’ Patrick said. ‘Just now someone
shot at Dennis. He is guard on an up goods train. A bullet went through his brake van while it was passing the level crossing at the Street of the Farriers. I want to know what you are going to do about it.’

‘Try and catch the man who did it,’ the Collector said. ‘You’ve told the police, of course?’

Patrick said, ‘The police? Oh, no. I was trying to tell you.’

The Collector turned to me. ‘Quick, Miss Jones,’ he said, ‘ring Mr Lanson, and see that Mr Williams is told too. Tell Dennis to wait here until the police come.’

I hurried off, thinking, Really, Patrick is a fool; he needs looking after every minute of the day.

When I came back Patrick was arguing loudly with the Collector. He was saying, ‘We have the rifles in the Auxiliary Force kote here.
Why
can’t we give them to our guards and drivers? The strikers throw stones at us—from hiding, of course. Now we are being shot at. You must do something.’

Mr Govindaswami kept calm. He said, ‘I will, Taylor, but not that. Such a step would merely exacerbate an already touchy situation. You agree, Colonel?’

‘Oh, yes, Collector,’ Colonel Savage said. ‘Disloyal rascals would certainly distort your motives.’ He spoke in that odd voice again, and I saw with anger that he was laughing behind a straight, stern face.

‘Precisely, Savage,’ the Collector said. He was laughing too.

‘Well, it is your responsibility,’ Patrick shouted. ‘Do not come and blame me if the drivers and guards refuse to take the trains! Do not blame me, that is all.’ He stalked away.

We squeezed back into the Austin and rattled off toward the Collector’s bungalow. Savage said, That fellow Taylor’s got ten thumbs and a soul like a boiled ham. I’ll put a couple of my men on each train if you like, one with the driver and one with the guard.’

‘Can you spare the men?’ the Collector asked.

Colonel Savage said, ‘Not really. Don’t forget I’m responsible for security over the whole of your civil district as well as on the railway. And People-Psmythe might riog me up any moment and demand a guard for his art class.’

The Collector stopped the car with a jerk and held out his hand. The Deputy Superintendent of Police, Lanson, was coming the other way in his old Chevrolet station wagon. The Collector talked to him for a few seconds about the shooting, across the gap between the two cars, then Lanson said, ‘A couple of houses are on fire at the other end of the city. Near the Benares Gate. Did you pass there?’

‘Not right by it,’ the Collector said.

‘The fires must have started just afterwards, or you would have seen them,’ Lanson said. ‘The police report that the crowds are moving together now. I’ve got all my chaps out on duty.’

The Collector nodded, the cars separated, and in a moment we reached the big bungalow. Colonel Savage walked quickly to the telephone and began giving orders. Five minutes later three jeeps arrived—his own, his command radio jeep, and a third with a trailer, both jeep and trailer full of armed Gurkhas.

I sat near the telephone in the hall. Messages kept coming in. The first soldiers had been put on the first train. The platoon standing by in the yards reported by walkie-talkie that all was quiet there. Colonel Savage came out and spoke in Gurkhali on the set, ordering the jemadar to leave a section guarding the yards and to take the rest at once to the station. Lanson rang for the Collector. The Collector said, ‘Yes... No... Yes … No … Soon.’ I found my hands were not quite steady.

The Collector put down the telephone. ‘Mr Surabhai is leading a large crowd toward the station,’ he said.

Colonel Savage said, ‘The chairman of the local Congress committee?’

The Collector said, ‘Yes. They’ve got banners—“Long live the mutineers!” “A blow for freedom!” and of course “Quit India!” They’re quite calm except that they’re shouting slogans and won’t disperse.’ His hands behind his back, he walked up and down the big stone-flagged hall under the portraits of British governors and collectors who had ruled from that house before him.