The Lotus and the Wind (13 page)

Whirling round in the waltz, cautiously so as not to split her dress, she glanced in the long mirror as she passed. The cream silk looked well against Robin’s near-black green. A looping emerald sash hung down at her waist and kicked up behind over her bustle. A green stone sparkled at her throat. She wondered if there had been an emerald, a real one, in the ring that Robin did not buy.

There was only one officer of Highlanders on the floor, a tall young man with his right arm strapped to his side and a red scar, three-quarters healed, down the left side of his forehead and face. She said to Robin, ‘Is that Mr. Mclain, in the kilt?’ She knew it must be.

He turned his head, looked, and answered plainly, ‘Yes. Alan Mclain.’

She caught the young Highlander’s bright blue eyes then, and lifted her head and looked away. ‘He seems very pleased with himself,’ she said ‘--the Wounded Hero.’

‘Oh, no,’ Robin answered quickly. ‘Really he’s modest and as straight as a die. Seeing me here has upset him--made him remember things, places, that he’d like to forget.’

She said softly with a touch of pique, ‘Do you remember what you said the other day on the road?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true? Without the “must”? Do you really’--she put her head close for a moment of the whirling dance, whispered, and pulled away--’love me?’

Robin said, ‘I think so. We must talk. Not here. There are too many people.’

She was tall for a girl and did not have to look up much above the level of her own eyes. His eyelashes were long, and now the light from the hanging chandeliers shone on them. All the skirts rustled, hissing under the violins. She was alert, wary, and excited. She was waiting for some opportunity, but she did not know what it would look like or exactly where it would lead.

At the table a group had formed around an array of glasses of brandy and soda. Her mother nursed her usual glass of port. Anne was permitted to have one glass of port or sherry on these occasions, but Major Hayling signalled with his finger, and on the instant a bearer trotted forward with a bottle of champagne. Mrs. Hildreth made to protest when the waiter filled Anne’s glass, but checked herself and instead glanced sharply at Anne. In this rather staid circle the breaching of a champagne bottle foreboded certain definite things. Anne wondered what the major was up to now, and saw that her mother was wondering too. Was he, who understood things, trying to give her a little extra courage?

Men kept appearing at her shoulder--young men, old men, fat men--to ask if they might have the honour of a dance. She would write their names in her programme, then listen and talk a little, then sweep out to dance on the arm of some gentleman coming to claim her, return after a while, thank her partner, sit down, listen, and talk--and begin all over again. The champagne sparkled in the glass and in the back of her head. She had only tasted it four or five times in her life. Major Hayling went away once or twice, but she never saw him on the floor. Her father circled sedately from time to time with duty-partners or with the youngest girls he could find. Robin never left his chair.

The fourth or fifth time that she came back the men were talking about Asia. She heard Hayling say, ‘Asia has come to the crossroads. Perhaps the bottom of the hill is a better way to say it. For all practical purposes the continent is split up among three empires, and only one of those three--the Chinese--is truly Asiatic. And in large parts of the Chinese Empire one sort of Asiatic, the Chinese, is ruling other sorts who don’t like it or him--Mongols, Turkis, Kirghiz, some Uzbegs, Tibetans. Now the three empires are beginning to jostle each other because they’ve used up all their room for manoeuvre--the Chinese did long ago.’

Her father said something about the rascality of the amirs of Afghanistan; then a partner was bowing at her side. Just as she left she heard Robin joining in the talk.

On her next return they’d got to Russia. It was Hayling again. ‘. . . It’s fourteen years since the Russians moved against Tashkent, twelve since they took Bukhara and Samarkand. Seven years ago they gobbled up Khiva. Now they have a frontier with us on the Pamirs, where the Chinese Empire meets ours too. Farther west the Russians are down to the Oxus, so in that direction only Afghanistan lies between us and them. They’re getting too close. If they get any closer India will never survive, whether it belongs to us or whether Macaulay’s hope has come true by then and it’s a separate empire.’

She listened perfunctorily, trying to catch Robin’s attention. But, after rising briefly when she sat down, he had leaned forward to ask Hayling a question. ‘But what do they want, sir? Do they want to put all that desert and steppe and pamir under the plough?’

‘They say officially, Savage, that they don’t want it at all, that they are being dragged forward by circumstances. It is a fact of history that no strong power has ever been able to prevent itself from fighting, taking over, and at last absorbing any unruly or turbulent areas or peoples on its borders.

We did it in India--we just had to, though half the time the government at home was trying to force the Governor-General, the man on the spot, to go backwards, not forwards. The Americans did it in the West and in Texas. The Chinese did it in Mongolia and Inner Asia.’

Someone else said, ‘Why haven’t we taken over Afghanistan, then? Heaven knows it’s unruly enough.’

‘We nearly did--perhaps we should have--after the first war, in forty-two. Then the khanates, Samarkand and so on, would have been the buffer between us and the Russians, and we’d have been that much farther forward. Now it’s too late because the Russians have reached Afghanistan’s northern frontier. Afghanistan is therefore the buffer. You know, a buffer state is in a very enviable position. It can do just about anything. Neither great power dares interfere in its affairs, because the other will suspect an offensive move if it does. So Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey are now the three buffer states between us and Russia. And . . .’

Then another young man with long moustaches came for her, and she had to go.... Back again soon, and they were talking about some other part of Asia. For her it was like a showing of lantern slides, lacking continuity. The group around the table had grown. A civilian and a captain were leaning over the backs of chairs and throwing in words of agreement or sage questions. Edith Collett was there. A resplendent major of Madras cavalry stood beside her. He had a royal-blue high-necked jacket with half a hundred gold buttons running up the edges, a crimson waistcoat, and long, tight blue trousers. Anne noticed his eyes; they hovered over Mrs. Collett’s body like hungry, fawning little dogs; his nostrils were pinched in, and his hands moved ceaselessly.

Then Edith Collett leaned over with a friendly smile and whispered behind her fan, ‘Your Mr. Savage is very
good
looking, Anne. Does your mother approve?’

‘She won’t,’ Anne muttered. ‘And he hasn’t--well, I mean--’

‘I see. If you want him, dear, get compromised. That’s my advice.’ She drew away, her deep violet eyes smiling still into Anne’s. Then she rested her fingers momentarily on the cavalry major’s arm and swept out of the circle. Anne watched the major hurry after her, stumbling over his precious dignity in his haste and not even noticing that he had left it behind him. Anne sighed and turned again to listen.

‘The tribes who live astride this frontier were a problem to Alexander the Great and they’ve been a problem to everyone since then, including us.’ That was the civilian, his thumbs in the lapels of his coat. She wondered when Robin would notice what dance it was.

‘The tribes want to shoot each other. They do not want law and order. They want the blood feud. They want to guard their own idea of honour in their own way. Therefore’--the civilian wagged a forefinger at Hayling, who was seated across the table from him--’are we guilty of oppression when we enforce peace, law, and order on them?’

Robin was on his feet, looking anxiously at his programme. He had noticed at last; but he had something to say. Standing now at the edge of the group, he broke in. ‘But do you think any man, even a Pathan, is born wanting to die in a blood feud? Isn’t it possible that circumstances--poverty, custom--force them to live by this code of killing and violence? I don’t think anyone is actually born with a desire to hurt other people, to fight.’

‘S-some people don’t wanna fight, all right. Some people don’t have the stomach to.’

Anne whipped around. It was Mclain, drunk, his face flushed and his words running together. He was standing at Robin’s shoulder.

A pimply young man of the commissariat, one of her father’s juniors, said loudly from Robin’s other side, ‘No. Some don’t want to fight at all, do they, Alan? I think dirty cowards like that ought to be tarred and feathered.’ She heard another voice raised in agreement, like a yelp. Suddenly they were so many dogs, snarling and snapping at one who had lost his footing among them. She put down her fan and, trembling with a white and senseless rage, reached slowly out for a glass from the table, never taking her eyes off Mclain.

Robin turned to Mclain and said steadily, ‘Hullo, Mclain. I’m very glad to see that you’re better.’

Mclain raised his arm and smashed the back of his hand across Robin’s face, then again. The skin of her body shivered, and she could hardly keep her seat, could hardly see. This was what Mclain had done after the tragedy at Tezin Kach. Robin had told her. But then grief and pain had driven him mad; now he was just drunk. The glass shook in her hand.

‘Again?’ Robin said.

Mclain raised his arm, and Anne threw the full champagne glass into his face with all her strength. It splintered above his eye, and the pieces fell tinkling to the floor. The wine ran down his nose and his scarred cheeks. He swung around and met her eyes and started back with a cry.

Major Hayling stood up abruptly. ‘Mr. Mclain, you’re drunk. Leave the club. Captain Golliatt, Mr. Twombly, take him home.’

Anne sank back in her chair. A sickness of excitement rose in her throat. She felt strong, and when she saw her mother staring at her, open-mouthed, she glared her down.

Mclain stood a moment, swaying on his heels, looking belligerently from Robin to Hayling but at all costs not at Anne. Then he bowed slightly and muttered, ‘Very well, sir.’

Major Hayling said, ‘Bearer! Sweep that up. Look here, we all need another bottle of champagne. This band is bad enough to . . .’

At her side Robin said, ‘This is my dance, I think, Anne.’ Her mother was signalling to her to remain seated, to make an excuse. Anne frowned angrily at her, walked to the floor on Robin’s arm, and slid into the dance. His face was white, and all the skin stretched tautly over the fine bones beneath. His eyes flared and snapped, and his hand gripped hers firmly. It seemed to her that the other couples on the floor kept moving away from them, leaving them to dance alone in a widening circle of isolation.

He said, ‘You’ll do that for me?’

‘Anything.’

‘I didn’t buy that ring because I thought, sooner or later, you would be hurt if you accepted. I can stand alone.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘That’s it, Anne. Here, now, I don’t want to. But--oh, don’t you see?--I might have to.’

She did not understand exactly what he meant. He spoke from the depths, and she should try to understand. But she couldn’t now. All that would come later when a year or two of time had proved to him that he could trust her. Then he would let her become a part of him and he would no longer know the meaning of aloneness. She whispered urgently, ‘We’ve got to fight, Robin, or you’ll be ruined. They’ll make you hate everyone. They’ll make you--kill yourself. It’s happened before.’

Twice in a long circuit of the floor he opened his mouth to speak. Twice he said nothing. The third time he said, ‘Anne, will you marry me?’

The opportunity for which she had been tensely waiting was upon her. In a few minutes, as this hypertension and ruthlessness faded in her, it would be gone. She whirled in his arms until they were in front of the band. There she stopped and, holding Robin’s hand, beckoned to the bandmaster. Still playing his violin, he leaned over, and she whispered in his ear. He smiled, turned to his musicians, and raised his bow authoritatively. The music died in the middle of a phrase. Anne said to Robin, ‘Tell them.’

The pianist struck a resounding chord. On the dais she gripped Robin’s hand more tightly and faced the floor. The people’s faces were like so many floating white balloons. None of them possessed any expression; they had not eyes or mouths or noses--except her mother. She saw her mother pushing forward through the dancers, her face pinched in horror.

Robin said in his high, clear voice, ‘I would like to announce that Miss Hildreth has done me the honour of saying that she will become my wife. Thank you.’

The pianist struck a succession of chords and stopped to await the customary burst of handclapping and shouted applause and the rush across the floor. Of course it was also customary for the engaged girl’s father to make the announcement--but what could the bandleader do? Anne knew there would be no applause and at Robin’s side she stepped down to the floor. The only sound in the ballroom was a moaning shriek from her mother--’Ooooooh!’

Major Hayling was there with her mother, half supporting her, when Anne arrived with Robin. She could not see her father anywhere. Major Hayling said to Robin, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever know how lucky you are.’ The sting in his voice robbed the words of their innocence.

Around them Anne heard the whispering, the hissed questions and answers. The whispering died, and there was silence. Everyone stood where he had been when the music stopped. At last the bandmaster caught the overpowering embarrassment and tapped his foot twice and began to fiddle furiously. Unsteadily, one by one, the band struck up ‘The Blue Danube.’

As she tightened her chin-strap she yawned and had to wait till the yawn was finished. She felt discouraged this morning, and a little uneasy in her stomach. She turned up the watch pinned to the outside of her dress and saw that it was not yet quite six a.m. She was riding down the Grand Trunk Road towards Pabbi for a meet of the P.V.H. Hayling rode at her side. Above the clipclop of hoofs he said, ‘And what time did you get to bed last night?’