Bhowani Junction (34 page)

They crossed the main line and moved, one behind the
other, Victoria in front, in the triangle of wasteland. On the other side of it the Bhanas branch runs in a steep left-handed curve, turning from south to east. They crouched down beside the single stretched wire that leads from Bhowani South Box to the branch line’s Up Distant signal. The houses were close and dark opposite.

She heard the shimmer of sound in the rails as soon as he did. Straining her ears, she could hear the slow beat of the engine’s exhaust. Ted Dunphy was coming out. The headlight shone on the main line behind them, then on the wasteland as the engine took the points for the branch, then on the branch line. The wheels’ flanges ground against the inside of the rail. Roy said, ‘Stand up now.’

She stood up. She had to wave something, he had said. She had nothing to wave. If she lifted her hand Ted might just wave back at her and not stop.

Roy said, ‘Here, Miss Jones.’ He pushed something soft into her hand. She recognized it as the little bolero jacket of the dress she’d been wearing all day. Roy said reassuringly, ‘I will be right behind you, but concealed.’ She heard the clank of the coupling rods and the roar of the blast. The light blinded her, and she began to wave the jacket. The focus of the light narrowed to a single glare in her eyes, then faded, passed by, and spread out. She heard the grinding of brake shoes, and the buffers went
bang-bang-bang
all down the train.

The cab stopped directly above her. Dunphy stuck his head out and said, ‘Victoria. I thought it was you. What is the matter?’ Behind him the constable lowered the rifle he had held aimed at her while the train slowed.

She glanced wildly round with an idea that that would tell him something was wrong. But she realized at once that it would seem perfectly natural—as soon as she had said her piece. She tried with her eyes to make the constable understand that he was not to look at her but to jump out and run back down the train. That is a hell of a message to pass with the eyes. She saw Roy crouched under the overhang of the tender.

She said, It’s Patrick.’

‘Patrick?’ Dunphy said foolishly.

She caught a movement under the tender. They were on the right of the train, so the guard, looking out from his brake van, would see nothing on this sharp left-handed curve. She thought that it wouldn’t be long now before Roy was on the train, and then she would be free.

She said, ‘Patrick’s talking about killing me. Where is he? I want to hide from him. I’m frightened.’ She felt worse about telling that lie than anything else.

Dunphy was worried for her, but he had the train to take to Bhanas. He said, ‘I don’t know where he is. Isn’t your father at home?’

She said, ‘No,’ and Dunphy licked his lips uncertainly. Up there in the cab his face and the policeman’s were red and shadowless in the glare of the firebox. At last Dunphy told her to go to his house, where Mary would have to help her until her father came in. He was troubled, in spite of knowing about me, because he couldn’t leave the train and help her himself.

She said, ‘All right. I’ll be all right. Thank you,’ and stepped back.

Dunphy couldn’t do any more. He opened the regulator, and the wheels began to turn. The tender ground past her. She looked for Roy and could not see him. The first wagon passed, and the second. They kept on passing. She began to breathe more easily. She was beginning to feel weak from relief, but when she got her lungs filled she was going to scream. The brake van would come, and the guard would hear. She decided Roy was a fool.

Her mouth was open, ready to scream, when the voice spoke behind her, again urgent and now as hard as—as mine, she said. It said, ‘Up!’

The train had picked up to walking speed. All goods wagons have a long handbrake bar, which is held in position, either on or off, by metal pins. The brake bar lies horizontally just outside one of the projecting axle-boxes. Roy seized the back of the waist of her dress, and a bunch of skin inside it, and forced her forward against the wheel of the coal wagon. She had only one escape from being pushed into and under the wheel. She
caught the handgrip above the brake bar and jumped up. Her dress fluttered out and hung against the greasy axle-box. She was furious, even in her fright, because it was a white dress and would get filthy. She scrambled on up, one foot on the brake bar, then got her hands over the side of the wagon. She tried to scream but had no breath. Roy’s hand rammed up under her behind, and she fell over into the wagon. A second later Roy followed her.

She lay beside him on top of the piled coal. Her chest hurt where he had forced her over the side, and she wanted to cry, but she managed to hold it down. Roy worked quickly, heaviog coal to one side. The wagon rattled and groaned and swayed and rushed on. Roy said, ‘Help, please. This is now urgent.’ He had tucked the revolver into his loincloth.

She knelt on the coal and pulled it aside as he was doing, until her fingers hurt. Soon Roy said, ‘Lie down there.’

She lay down in the hollow, and he pushed the coal back over her with his foot. The lumps slid down until they covered all but a tiny piece of her face. Her dress wasn’t white any more. The big lumps lay three and four deep, hard on her chest, and harder underneath where they pressed up into her spine. Roy bent over her and said, ‘If the train is searched, do not move or make any kind of sound. But, should I say “Get up,” then get up quickly. Do you understand?’

She said, ‘Yes,’ and told him she couldn’t breathe.

He said, ‘I think you can. I shall be close by, Miss Jones.’

She watched the stars that hung steadily in the sky above. The moon was coming out from behind cloud. Sometimes branches of trees whipped over and flung back. Roy had a form ready in the coal, but he did not get into it. He sat up near her, his head just poking over the side of the wagon.

The train’s speed increased to about twenty-five miles an hour. She thought that a long time passed. Then the rattling and grinding began to slow, and she heard the engine labouring and the exhaust blasts separating out as Dunphy lengthened his cut-off for the Sindhya bank. Devra station is a mile up the bank. After that the line climbs all the way, through Bharru, Pathoda, and Adhirasta to Sindhya Tunnel summit—
which meant that the train wouldn’t be doing more than ten or twelve miles an hour. The jungle begins just beyond Devra.

A signal passed by, and she saw it was green. They stammered over a set of points. There were electric lights to the side and a load gauge sweeping directly overhead. A load gauge is a metal bar, curved to conform to the shape of the top of a wagon or carriage roof, which is hung on chains above the line in certain places to show how high open wagons can be loaded—with machinery, for instance—on that particular stretch of line.

That was Devra. She heard the engine whistle and a Hindi phrase from a man beside the line and more points. Roy sunk his head as the lights passed.

A little later the vacuum brakes ground on all down the train. On that upgrade it came to a stop quickly and stood, the metal creaking for a time until each piece settled under the new stresses. She understood at once, and remembered. A kachha road crossed the line about there. There were empty fields on both sides and no cover, except for a patch of scrub on the right a little farther back. She decided I must have put a search post here to cover the railway, the kachha road, and the main Bhowani-Kishanpur road, which was a hundred yards off to the left. She remembered that the line curved there, and noted that her wagon was tilted to the left on the banked rails.

Roy said, ‘Now be very still.’ He lay down in the trough he had scratched for himself and pulled down coal until it covered him. Something shoved noisily through under the coal near her face and pressed against her ear. It was cold, round, and hard.

She heard a faint crunching on the gravelled lineside path. It was coming from the front of the train. Listening hard, and holding her breath so that the coal would not creak and drown the sounds, she tried to interpret what she heard. It was nailed boots on the gravel. The boots were coming regularly closer in a smooth rhythm of movement:
crunch-crunch,
for ten or a dozen paces—the dang and scrape of steel on steel—a pause—another dang—a thud—
crunch-crunch
. On both sides of the train.

She worked out that Gurkhas were coming down the train, climbing up to look into each open wagon or inspect the door seals of the closed wagons, then jumping down again.

The muzzle of the revolver seemed big enough to engulf her head. She prayed, Oh God, make them not see us because I don’t know what he’ll do. She swears she thought of me and told herself that if only I was there in person all would be well. She closed her eyes.

She heard the dang against the side of their wagon. Another pair of boots was moving about, stamping, on the gravel below. She heard the heave and the small gasp of effort as the Gurk scrambled up. A light flashed against her eyelids. He
must
see. She opened her eyes, peering up through the interstices of the coal and hoping the light would reflect back from her eyes. But the light wandered away. It clicked off. The Gurk (he was Baliram, a nice kid but no ball of fire) jumped back to the ground with a thump. Coal-dust tickled her nostrils. She breathed in deep, wrinkling her nose trying not to sneeze. The boots crunched along to the next wagon, which was a high closed one. She heard the metal seals rattle on both sides, and the heavy bolts shake. The pistol pressed a little harder against her ear. She swallowed the sneeze. The engine blew off steam with a drumming roar that seemed close, although she knew they were much nearer the back of the train than the front.

Soon the steam pressure dropped and the engine fell silent. In the silence she heard car engines and saw lights sweeping across the sky above her. Roy struggled out from under the coal and knelt up to peer over the side. She moved her head to watch him, and the coal grated against her cheek.

Faintly from the back of the train someone shouted, ‘
Sab
thik chha
’—the Gurkhali for ‘Everything okay.’ From the front someone else acknowledged the message. The brakes clicked off, the engine exhaust gave out a loud whoof, the wagon rolled back a few inches, then jerked forward. The train began to move.

That was where I came in.

When she left my bungalow I tried for a time to think dispassionately about us. The effort failed (
a
) because I am not dispassionate, and (
b
) because I thought Sammy was making a mistake in not using my battalion more in this attempt to catch Roy. I worked out a plan whereby we could help, warned Chris, and after some argy-bargy got Sammy to agree. Soon my jeeps and six-by-sixes were moving out to cordon the roads and railways and form flying patrols in a few of the more likely jungle areas.

I went myself to Taylor’s house in the Old Lines, knocked on the door, and walked straight in. It was a chummery he shared with another bachelor. It was what I had expected—dark furniture, antimacassars and gimcrackery, a mixture between Victorian respectability and the special ramshackleness that only a bachelor in India can achieve. Except for one thing—the trophies. Taylor stood up slowly when I came in, but I wasn’t looking at him. At some time or other he had shot a good buffalo, a black buck, two bears, a leopard, the usual things. As decorations for a house they were terrible; as a sidelight on Taylor, they were unexpected. He had been very clumsy that night we searched the villages round Malra.

Taylor stood up, his face settling obstinately. He was like a bull waiting for more goading.

I said, ‘Taylor, we’re out after K. P. Roy. Would you like to come with me? Let’s see if we can’t share the honour of catching the bugger.’

After a while he said, ‘I’m not lucky, Colonel. If I go with you, you won’t catch him.’ That room was as lonely as an asylum, in spite of the congress of dead animals peering glassily at us. I was surprised at Taylor’s reaction to me. I had expected abuse, refusal, perhaps even a fight. Something had beaten him down a few sizes. But for purely selfish reasons, I
didn’t want him to be so perpetually up against it. So I said, ‘But
I’m
lucky. Here.’ I held out my hand. ‘I’m in love with her, goddamn it.’

He took my hand slowly, and I thought he was going to cry. In some ways he had a hide like a rhinoceros, in others he was worse than the princess with the pea. He pressed my hand and said, ‘I know you are. I have just realized it. I hope you will be very happy.’ I’ve never seen a fellow look more miserable. He said, ‘I didn’t tell you this afternoon. I threatened Mr Wallingford with the revolver when he refused to stop the sale of St Thomas’s. I was mad. I lost my temper. It was only Mr Stevenage who persuaded Mr Wallingford not to send me to jail.’

I waited. There would be more.

He said, ‘On the way back I threw the revolver into the Nerbudda so that I wouldn’t be able to do anything silly with it again. Now I have a telegram from the Deputy Chief Traffic Superintendent asking me to explain why I was absent without leave.’

I counted in my mind: a charge of intimidation, and probably assault as well; a court-martial for losing an Army revolver and six rounds of ammunition; dismissal from the railway; sale of St Thomas’s. What a man. The miracle was that he was still here, subdued but basically unchanged.

I said, ‘Forget it. We’ll see what we can do later. Meantime, bring a rifle and come along.’

He didn’t talk any more but got out a rifle and came with me. In ten minutes he was quite cheerful again. He had extraordinary resilience. I drove straight back to my battalion headquarters and found Chris Glass in a state about a report that had just come in from Ranjit, via Govindaswami, on the telephone. Ranjit said he had reason to believe that Roy was trying to escape from Bhowani on a train. That had been about twenty minutes ago. The cordon was in position by then, but I thought I would go out and take a look for myself. I asked Taylor if there was any train regularly scheduled at this time. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Yes. A mixed goods to Allahabad, via Bhanas.’

The phone rang. It was Sammy. He said, ‘Kartar Singh has just come in to tell me that the night goods to Allahabad stopped on the branch line for a minute, and he saw a woman in white talking to the driver—fifteen minutes ago. Kartar lives near——’

I am alive to wear my M.C.s because in certain matters my brain goes off like a bomb. I said to Taylor, ‘Who’s the driver of that goods? Quick!’ He thought and said, ‘Dunphy, probably.’ I dropped the telephone and ran for the door. Taylor just managed to get in over the side as I got the jeep moving. Birkhe dived head first into the back seat.

I don’t know what a jeep’s maximum speed is, but we did it, all the way.

The goods train had been searched when we reached the cordon, and was just starting off again. I blared on the horn and flicked my lights on and off and yelled, ‘Stop!’ Dunphy saw me and stopped his train. I couldn’t afford to waste time wondering. I had to act as though I knew Roy and Victoria were on the train, not just thought they might be.

Lilparsad came running, and I told him to get his two vehicles out in the fields, one on each side of the train, with their headlights on. Their lights went on, Victoria said later, just in time to stop Roy from breaking for it. He was on the point of going over the side when he saw my jeep arrive.

The Gurks spread out, and I got a couple of Bren guns down beside the vehicles where the gunners could see along the lights. The guard of the train left his brake van and started to walk forward to see what was happening.

That was Roy’s chance, and he saw it much quicker than I did. I went slowly on with the line of Gurkhas, keeping level with the men, who were now breaking into every locked wagon and examining every open wagon inside and out, top and bottom. We were well past the middle of the train when Lilparsad, on the other side of it, shouted, ‘
Hinnu lagyo, sahib!
Terain hinnu lagyo!
’

By God it was, or rather five wagons and the brake van were. Taylor was beside me, and I shouted, ‘Patrick, the back of the train’s rolling. Stop it!’ Then I realized the guard was
nearly up with us, and nobody could stop it. Simultaneously I realized it was no accident. Thank God my jeep was up beside me, with Birkhe at the wheel. The runaway wagons were perhaps fifty or a hundred yards away and gathering speed downhill and disappearing beyond the reach of my headlights.

Someone fired a shot, and I saw the guard roll over. He’d been nearest to the runaway part and must have run back, but Roy had got him while he was trying to unpin a brake lever and hold down the handbrake on the wagon nearest us. I saw Roy and Victoria scrambling toward the brake van.

By then Taylor and I and Birkhe and two others were bounding over the field in the jeep. Birkhe ran the jeep alongside the runaway, which wasn’t going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour, and we hurled ourselves at the end wagon. Roy began to fire at us from the brake van up front. Ranbahadur ’92 got hit in the arm and fell off. Birkhe was in the jeep, and so three of us were in that back wagon—Taylor, Rifleman Bishansing, and me,

Victoria had lost a sandal here. Roy must have been here under the coal with her. Obviously he must have been in this wagon to get down, seal and disconnect the vacuum pipe between it and the next one ahead, uncouple, give the disconnected part of the train a push-off down the slope, and jump in.

The wagon immediately ahead of us in the runaway section was a high closed one. We couldn’t see a damned thing unless we got on top of it. Taylor was wild with excitement. He charged across the gap and went up like a gorilla. Immediately a bullet whanged against it on the other end. Taylor dropped on his stomach as we followed him up. We crawled to the forward edge. From there we could see. Ahead of us, in order, were a wagon full of sacks, one full of wood, one that looked empty, and the brake van. Roy leaned out of the brake van’s right window and fired twice at us. I fired quickly with the carbine but missed. We were doing over twenty then, and the lights of Devra station were close in front.

I gathered myself to jump down into the well of the wagon in front. Roy couldn’t kill two of us if Bishansing stayed up
there and kept his head down with the Sten whenever he tried to poke it out to fire.

Just as I jumped I saw Victoria’s head and shoulders appear in the moonlight, and an arm with a revolver right beside her ear. Taylor had bunched to jump with me, but he saw Victoria too, and instead of jumping forward his reflexes sent him leaping up, shouting, ‘No! Stop, we——’ and then a shadow like an eagle’s wings flashed over my head, and Patrick disappeared with a clatter and an extraordinary
whoomph
. We were running through Devra station, and the lights blinked flash-flash-flash on us, faster every second. I looked back and saw Patrick hanging on to the load gauge, his legs dangling and his body draped like a scarecrow’s across it. The
whoomph
was the air being driven out of his lungs, and the clatter was his rifle falling on to the wagon top and thence to the ground.

He had jumped up to warn me not to go on, because of Victoria, and the load gauge had swept him off.

He might have been killed, his ribs crushed in against the steel bar of the gauge. He might have fallen down unconscious fifteen feet and some inches and broken his back. But he wasn’t, and he hadn’t. He was hanging up there like a clown in a circus, with his legs kicking. The Devra platform staff might be rushing with ladders to get him down. But they wouldn’t be. They would be hiding, thinking that he was K. P. Roy, while he groaned and swore and shouted for someone to come and get him down. I couldn’t do anything about getting to Victoria, and I didn’t think Roy would hurt her without cause—if only because it would waste time and ammunition—so I knelt on the sacks and called Patrick every name I could think of.

I hadn’t had time to give Lilparsad any further orders but, as I’d once pointed out to Victoria, I wasn’t running a kindergarten. The two six-by-sixes were tearing down the road, which ran parallel with the line there about a hundred yards over, and gaining fast, their headlights and the moon churning the dust into gigantic luminous galloping wraiths.

The map of the country spread out in my head. Where was there cover? Roy had the vacuum brake lever in his van and could stop us any time he chose. I remembered a patch of
rocky scrub jungle that faltered off into water channels, ditches, hedges, and two straggly villages—an impossible place in which to catch a single and singularly skilful man.

It was a sweet taste, like honey and whisky, to see one of Lilu’s trucks jerk off the road and head across the fields at forty miles an hour to get behind that area of dirty country. What the hell did I want another wife for?

But Lilu ought to have had my crown and pip while I took his three stripes—only three were more than I deserved. For not until then did I realize what an utter fool I’d been. I jumped up, leaned over the forward edge of the wagon, and shot a hole in the vacuum brake coupling. The brakes jammed hard on, sheets of flame streamed out, the steel screamed under the torture, and I all but went over on to the rail. While I struggled to save my balance the brake-van door opened with a crack like an eighteen-pounder, and Roy stepped off. He hit the right of way, folded, and rolled forward like a ball in a cloud of dust. I got in one shot before he found his feet, then he was running like a hare among the stones and scrub. We had stopped on the very edge of the bad country. Two seconds earlier, and he’d have had thirty yards of open ground to cross; I would have found my balance, and I couldn’t have missed. Bishansing sprayed the trees with his Sten gun, but it was no good. I jumped to the ground and ran after Roy for a minute, but when Lilu’s men arrived I handed over to them and went back to the little line of wagons.

She was lying on the floor of the brake van, and I got very cold inside. I knelt down, preparing myself to say good-bye to her. I put out my hand, and she stirred and muttered, ‘Are you hurt—hurt—badly hurt, oh, Patrick, ’rick?’ She’d got a bang on the head when the brake van stopped so suddenly. She spoke in a thick muddled way and didn’t know what she was saying, but she was going to be all right.

Because I had tightened up to say good-bye for ever, what she did say was not terrible. The welling-up of love and relief in me could have absorbed worse than that without a wince. But still I wouldn’t give in.

I had a hard job keeping my voice steady when she came to
properly and asked whether I was all right, and held on to my hand, and then—much later—asked after Patrick.

Patrick arrived on a bicycle. He was in some pain, but I had decided that the only part I could play was the part of R. Savage, and let the audience file out in good order when they’ve had enough. I said, ‘A hell of a time you choose to practise pull-ups. Take your coat off.’

He took off his coat and shirt, and I had a look at him. He was badly bruised, but I didn’t think any bones were broken. Chaney would see to him when we got back. But something else had happened to him. I won’t say he actually grinned at my crack, or that he actually answered back, but he somehow shrugged the whole thing off. The bend of his back, in his pain, said, Better luck next time, and showed much more of his true character than he was capable of putting across in words. The eerie thing was that this new ‘feel’ in him had been put there by nobody else but R. Savage. On the way back to Bhowani I gave him another couple of verbal jabs, just to make sure. All he did was nearly pulverize my hand when we left him at his bungalow and said, ‘By God, I wouldn’t have missed that for anything, Colonel. And you saved Victoria. She would have been a goner without you.’

Then I drove Victoria to her bungalow, and kissed her before I took her in, but gently, and she thought I was the most beautiful tiger she’d ever come across in her walk, as a woman, through the jungle.