The Lotus and the Wind (3 page)

‘Anne is a very brave girl, Mrs. Hildreth.’

A chair scraped. ‘She’s a very silly and wilful one sometimes, Major Hayling’--then hurriedly, ‘not but what she couldn’t learn--in the right hands, I mean.’

‘She’s a very beautiful girl too. Of course, she inherits it, so--’

‘Now, Major Hayling!’--more chair creakings and scrapings, and a high laugh. Anne lay furious and stiff. He knew she was awake. How dare he pretend he didn’t!

Hayling continued, ‘I mean it--but have you noticed how exactly like Hogarth’s shrimp girl she is?’

‘Well, really, I don’t think I have, I mean--’

‘Surely, ma’am! The wide mouth, the laughing eyes, her air of health and normality. And, if I may say so, a sort of provocativeness which only the utterly innocent possess.’

‘Well, now, Major Hayling, I don’t know, it never struck me--‘

Anne could tell that her mother did not know the ‘Shrimp Girl’ and had not at first been sure that the comparison was complimentary. She would be thinking that shrimp girls were not usually of aristocratic descent. Anne closed her eyes and felt a flush rising in her cheeks. Her mother would have been furious if it had been Robin who’d said that just now. But Robin never would. Did he think her provocative, or--awful thought--innocent, namby-pamby? She loved him and would be everything, do anything, for him.

Imprinted on the darkness behind her eyelids she saw herself standing naked before a long mirror. Her skin was smooth and creamy white, and she was beautiful---provocative, not innocent. But, oh dear, she was innocent. She had never seen herself like that since she was fifteen, when she’d looked once out of curiosity and her mother had caught her and scolded her furiously and been breathlessly outraged. She must look better now. Behind her eyelids she certainly did; and Robin was there, looking over her shoulder, and she liked it. Then Robin dissolved, and Major Hayling was there, looking with his one eye, but her mother came and prevented her from covering her nakedness with her hands.

She opened her eyes. She knew for certain that as far as her mother was concerned Major Hayling could do no wrong. He was a gentleman by birth, a major, and well paid. He had lost an eye and a hand at Lucknow in the Mutiny. Her mother didn’t know, or care, that he loved Anne--but Anne knew, because she was twenty-three, and it made her care. She did not want him to be hurt. She had only got to know him since Robin went away to the war. He was not so different from Robin in spite of the gap of years between them. Only, Robin’s shyness made people want to walk around him at a distance, while Major Hayling’s presented itself and invited you to break through it.

Her father said importantly, ‘This war, Hayling, what do you make of it? Think it will last long?’

‘That largely depends on the Czar of All the Russias, Hildreth. He and his advisers persuaded the Amir of Afghanistan to refuse to accept our mission last year, which caused
that
campaign. We have no evidence the Russians were behind the massacre of Cavagnari’s party this September, but of course it’s possible.’

‘And if they were, you mean they’ve got something up their sleeves, eh? You mean the Russians must have foreseen that if our envoy to Afghanistan was murdered we’d have to go to war again, eh? And that would give them their chance to interfere?’

Hayling did not answer at once. Anne wondered whether these questions were closer to his work than he cared for. Her father had no tact at all. At length Hayling said, ‘That’s something we have to think about.’

‘And find out about, eh?’

‘If we can.’

‘I hope you do, by George! Those dashed Russians have been gobbling up Asia like--like hyenas! Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara--what’s the name of that place Burnaby rode to?--Khiva. If we don’t put our foot down they’ll be on the damned Khyber!’

‘Edwin!’

‘Sorry, sorry. I meant--’

A light knock on the outer door interrupted him, and Anne leaned up on her elbow, trying to see around the door of her bedroom. A new voice said, ‘Major Hayling? I’ve got the maliks here.’

‘Oh, thank you, Preston. They’d better come in first and have a look at him. Then we’ll talk on the verandah.’

She heard the sounds of several pairs of bare feet crossing the centre room, and the swish of robes; a long silence; the feet returning to the outer door, the door opening and closing. Four or five men started talking on the verandah outside her bedroom in the harsh, deep tones of the Pushtu language. Major Hayling spoke, the others answered. Then, after a quarter of an hour, in English--’That’s interesting.’

The man called Preston answered, ‘Yes. But not very helpful.’

‘Not to you. To me it may be very useful.’

‘Of course. Can the maliks go now?’

‘Yes. And thank you. Good night.’

When Hayling re-entered the centre room Anne’s father said, ‘Find out anything?’

‘Only that the maliks disclaim any knowledge of the shooting. They’d heard about it long since, but they swear no local men were responsible. They don’t know the two men who were shot, and they don’t know him.’

‘Damn liars! Trust a snake before a woman, and a woman before a Pathan, eh?’

‘I don’t think they’re lying this time. I can often tell, and of course Preston knows them all personally.’

‘Very strange.’

‘Yes.’

Anne heard in Major Hayling’s voice that he did not want to discuss the affair any more. It was time she got up. She was hungry. She called out, ‘Mother, I’m awake. Can I have something to eat?’

When her mother came Anne said she would like her food brought in to the bedroom, but her mother answered, ‘Nonsense, we’ll wrap you up and you can come and lie on the couch. Major Hayling won’t mind, I’m sure.’

The servants came in to set the table. The lone man lay on the floor, his eyes wide open. Anne said, ‘How is he now?’

‘The same. I’m afraid it’s only a question of time.’

Mrs. Hildreth said, ‘He’ll put me off my food, I’m sure. I couldn’t eat a thing with him lying there and staring. He can’t understand what we say, can he?’

‘I doubt if the poor fellow can even hear, Mrs. Hildreth, let alone understand.’

‘Well, it’s horrible, really--ah, chicken giblet soup!’

Anne pulled up her knees and, when she had finished her soup, said, ‘I had such a lovely dream. I dreamed that Robin was in Peshawar to meet us.’ That would teach her mother to try and sell her to Major Hayling in her sleep. It would warn Major Hayling too. But the major only smiled and put up his hand to adjust the black patch on his right eye.

Her father grunted through his soup. Mrs. Hildreth said, ‘Robin? Do you mean Mr. Savage? I hardly think you know him well enough to call him Robin.’

‘I do, Mother. You know I do.’

She began to blush and became furious with herself. She only wanted to warn Major Hayling that she loved someone else. If she could do it lightly he’d believe her, yet he would not be hurt. But she had to blush and simper!

Her father grumbled, ‘That boy’s too thin, in my opinion. Thin in the face, too. Sometimes I thought I could see right through him. His father, now, there’s a fine figure of a man.’

‘Colonel Savage is indeed very striking,’ Mrs. Hildreth said. ‘He somewhat overshadows Mrs. Savage in that respect. She is in Peshawar already, I have heard.’ She sniffed, but the sniff did not have the same import as the one for Edith Collett. This Mrs. Savage was Robin’s stepmother and a peer’s niece, and some thought her stiff-mannered. Robin never talked about her or about his father.

Mrs. Hildreth continued. ‘The son, this Mr. Robin Savage, is--I don’t know--he makes me feel uncomfortable. So reserved. It’s not natural in a young man.’

‘Not usually, ma’am. But I know the family a little. I suppose you are aware that the young man suffered some ghastly experiences as a young child? His mother was killed before his eyes, I believe. Then his father had to push him down a deep shaft to escape from the Rani of Kishanpur.’

‘In the Mutiny?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why should that make any difference? That was twenty-two years ago.’

‘Twenty-two years is not a long time for memories. I was twenty-five years old in the Mutiny, when I got these’--he touched the black eye-patch with the hook--’and that was in fair fight too, in daylight. Yet the experience has altered my life. It made me something different from what I would have been--what I wanted to be.’ He spoke seriously. Suddenly flippant, he finished, ‘Instead I became a wicked and cynical old man.’ He smiled at Anne, and she flushed but could not help smiling back.

Mrs. Hildreth raised her voice, harking back to the subject of Robin Savage for reasons well understood by her daughter.

‘Nevertheless Mr. Savage is not quite normal. There was a time, you know, when her father and I seriously feared that Anne here was becoming--well, too fond of him. Anne doesn’t mind me speaking about it, I know--do you dear?--because I’m sure it blew over. When are we going to get the next course served?
Koi hai!
’

Anne tightened the grip of her arms on her knees. She minded very much. It wasn’t all over. She would not know how to tell any young man that she loved him, and Robin wasn’t just any young man. His eyes were like the surface of a river that moved and shone and hid what was below. For herself, she knew. She loved him. She would never love anyone else. She had not been blind all those years while she was growing up. She knew he was strange, giving nothing, asking nothing. She knew it was love that made her want to give him presents and tell him stories that would bring a smile to his face. It was love that made her--who hated dependence--feel that there could be no life unless she and he came to depend upon each other. She did not know what he thought or felt, and had not been able to find out. He would talk quietly with her, say good-bye, and return to his company on Viceroy’s Guard. Sometimes he seemed to come forward and open up his heart a little, until she really thought he would ask her father’s permission to pay formal court. Then he would step back and close down, all with unfathomable politeness. He had once said, contrasting himself with another man they had been discussing, ‘He likes people. He needs them.’

The servants brought on the next course. Anne took a few mouthfuls, wiped her lips, and said distinctly, ‘It’s not all over, Mother. When Robin comes back to Peshawar on leave, he will ask Father if he can pay me his attentions. And when he asks
me
, I shall say yes.’

‘You’ve been writing to him! Behind my back!’

‘I have, Mother, but not behind your back. You knew I was. Do we have to discuss this subject in front of Major Hayling?’

The major rose to his feet, came over, and bent down beside the couch to take her hand. ‘Miss Hildreth,’ he said throatily, ‘we all wish only for your happiness.’ He closed his eye slowly, while squeezing her hand. She stared up at his face. Forty-seven years old, sometimes shy, sometimes sly--a secret-service man who loved her but didn’t know how to show it any more than she knew how to show Robin. And he seemed to know something, to understand something, about Robin. She pulled her hand away gently.

The man on the cot breathed louder. Anne forgot everything else and heard only the grating of the air in his lungs. She watched Hayling as he knelt by the lone man’s head.

Her mother began to speak. ‘I think--’ but Hayling hushed her curtly, and the four of them waited in silence, and the servants by the door froze where they stood. The lone man stared at the ceiling. The front of his robe lay open. Bandages made of shirts criss-crossed his chest, and there was a bandage around his head. His breath rasped more slowly, more loudly. Cautiously Mrs. Hildreth began to eat again. The desperation of the man’s effort struck out at Anne so that she gripped the couch and prayed that God would reach down with His fingers and touch the man to lend him back a part of the power he had once had, just a tiny part of the strength that had sent him racing down the hill. He only had to speak to be at rest.

But the breath rattled in his chest and died there, and was swallowed in the small, secret clatter of Mrs. Hildreth’s fork on her plate. From cantonments a bugle blew a peremptory call--the new discipline marching forward to order the wastes of Central Asia.

Major Hayling went out, and came back with a mirror and held it to the lone man’s lips. ‘He’s dead.’

Major Hildreth said, ‘Poor chap. Can’t you cover his face, Hayling, or something? As a matter of fact, really, I think you might have him taken outside now.’

‘I will. Here, bearer,
madad dena
.’

Anne had not been able to see the lone man’s face before, even when she looked at it. Now that he had gone and lay wrapped like a mummy on his cot in the cold outside, she saw it clearly. It was strong, deeply-lined, black-bearded; it could be kind even when it was stern. She turned away, stared at the curtained windows, and began to cry.

The next day they had twenty-seven miles to cover to Peshawar. It was cold in the dawn, hot at noon. The dust lay thick in the road, and the carts raised it, and young Pathan gentlemen rode through it like wild princes on wild horses, hawks on their wrists; the marching soldiers swore at them. The bullock cart bearing the body of the lone man travelled in front of the Hildreths’ carriage. Major Hayling rode nearby, for most of the day wrapped in silence, sometimes tempting Anne out of her sadness with his anecdotes of the places they passed through and the men who lived in them.

It was an uneventful journey, except for a confused little incident in Pabbi, eleven miles east of Peshawar. Major Hayling had just said to her, ‘This is Pabbi we’re coming into. It has the worst reputation for robbery and violence of any place in the district.’ Then, as if the local inhabitants wanted to prove how right he was, five or six Pathans burst out of a shop on the left of the road and pushed through the travellers, shouting and shaking their fists. A couple of donkey boys joined in, and some more men, and a man on a horse. For a minute Anne was frightened. The quarrelling Pathans milled around the carriage and the bullock cart; a woman screamed from a housetop; Major Hayling shouted angrily in Pushtu. As suddenly as it had arisen, the storm subsided. ‘And there’s Pabbi for you,’ Major Hayling said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.