The Lotus and the Wind (8 page)

‘They’re dead, nearly all of them. All. I fought till--couldn’t fight. They didn’t kill me. Couldn’t. McPherson’s dead. Graham. Robertson. McIntosh and McKenzie. McLaughlan. All the MacDonalds. Laidlaw.’ He dragged in breath between the names and wept so bitterly that the watchers and the men supporting him cast down their eyes in order not to see the young officer’s utter loss of himself. But Robin watched every tear and heard every sob and recognized them all. He did not remember seeing and hearing this thing, but from his earliest years he had known it. This that he now experienced again, not this time as a halfmemory from babyhood but as a fully felt reality, was the root from which he had grown and must continue to grow. Mclain spoke from the pit where men are not men but so many grasping fingers of evil; where love and courage, hate and cowardice, are all equally vile because equally human, all equally far from the silence and solitude of God. Mclain wept on the gaunt sides of Glencoe, Robin over the Mutiny--he knew it now. Perhaps for a time Mclain would fear man as Robin did. These others, who could not bear to watch, had never known what Mclain had just learned. They would never know the pit. Or silence.

‘We got--right place--’ Colonel Findlater tried to help Mclain up, but he needed to kneel and had to speak. Embarrassment flooded the general’s face, and the soldiers kept passing, shuffling on under the lacy snow.

‘The Gurkhas wouldn’t come. We got over the--down into the valley--a hundred, two hundred. With knives! They never--rifles. And we--not--Not time! They--’

His wandering, blank eyes passed over Robin’s face. Robin stood still, limp from the welling flood of his understanding of the young man who had been thrown down into the same lonely place with him. He could not have borne for anyone to pass between them, cutting off the almost visible reaching-out of his spirit.

Mclain said again, ‘They--they--they--’ He tore loose from those who held him. He hit Robin in the face with the back of his bloody left hand, and again with the palm. ‘You--wouldn’t come. Oh, coward. You were afraid. Your skin!’ He began to scream, grasping Robin by the throat and feebly shaking him.

Robin felt the sting of blood on his bruised lips. One loose tooth grated against another. The snow fell like touches of an icy sword on his cheek. The Gurkhas of his company stood behind and around him, watching, their faces set in utter impassivity.

He said softly, ‘I wasn’t afraid, Mclain.’ He would not say any more now. He understood. If he did not explain it might still all blow over.

‘Yes, you were!’ Mclain had returned from Glencoe. If he remembered now that he had been there, he was ashamed of it. When he spoke he had regained a wavering control over his voice. ‘You’re a coward, like all your bloody Indians. My men saw you. My men saw him, sir’--he turned to Lieutenant-Colonel Findlater--’two of them I sent up with a message, asking him to come. He was skulking behind a wall on the hill. There was just a little sniping. Oh, you--oh, God, you--’

‘Have Mr. Mclain carried to the surgeon at once, Findlater, and well taken care of,’ the general said harshly, raising his voice to cut into Mclain’s ugly, panting fury. ‘The matter will be investigated. And about those men, your dead’--the general fumbled for words, then blurted out with awkward brusqueness--’I can only hold up the advance for an hour.’

Findlater muttered, ‘I understand, sir.’

The general swung his horse’s head and turned down the valley, not acknowledging Robin’s salute. Robin stood by the side of the track. Along the column the bugles blew ‘Stand Fast!’ Mclain had gone, carried away, retching, on a stretcher. Colonel Findlater spoke briefly to a captain of his Highlanders; the soldiers ranked behind the captain stared at Robin or up the hill. The captain asked some question, Findlater answered, and a sergeant-major ran to halt two passing camels of the baggage train. The camels were loaded with picks and shovels. The captain gave an order, almost silently, and the Highlanders began to march, wheeling left and climbing slowly up the hill.

Robin watched the fall of the snow. And what was he, if to his mind silence and solitude were just--nothing? The answer was always the same: nothing. This that had come about to-day might make Anne understand without his having to hurt her.

The rest of the 13th would not be up for some time. He said, ‘Maniraj-sahib, see that our wounded are taken care of by the field hospital.’ Then he began walking up the hill with the Highlanders.

A lieutenant at the tail of the climbing column said curtly, ‘There’s no need for you to come, Savage.’

‘I must.’

He walked up through the snow, knowing that he was alone, although Rifleman Jagbir Pun, carrying a service rifle and a long jezail, walked in his steps behind him.

A new, light wind whirled the snow across the crest of the ridge that separated the main valley from the shallow gorge into which the MacDonalds had strayed. Thin snow dusted the rocks so that the gorge knew neither life nor colour--only the whiteness, and the blackness under the lee of the rocks and under the hunched bodies.

The first they passed lay on his back, propped against the steep hillside, his young face turned to the sky and the snow falling into his open mouth. A single, fierce, upward knife-stroke had entered his belly and slashed up through belt and tunic and skin so that his entrails hung out over his kilt. His rifle and ammunition pouches were gone. And another nearby, his kilt up, displayed a mangled red mush at the base of his stomach to show that he had been castrated. Another, sprawled forward, lay separate by ten feet from his head and the glaring eyeballs in it. Up and down the gorge floor and on the steep sides, the Highland men lay in the isolation of death. The corporal who had brought Mclain’s message lay here. They had taken his kilt, and the richly woven fabric would be cut and shaped to cover a Ghilzai woman’s head against the next snow.

The Highlanders who had come to bury their dead stood huddled together in the ravine. No one among them spoke, and Robin felt the current of their emotion begin to rise, striking from one man into another, spreading outward, doubling and redoubling in strength as it passed. The soldiers began to growl together like animals in a pit.

The captain spoke, the sergeants shouted hoarsely, the men ran to get picks and shovels from the camels. In the bed of the ravine, the only place where their picks could break the iron soil, half of them began to dig furiously. The other half spread in threes on the hill, sought out the bodies, and carried them down. The lieutenant stood at the edge of the widening grave with a notebook and a pencil, and wrote down the name and rank each corpse had held. The colour-sergeant emptied the first pack to be brought to him, and thereafter searched each body and put the rings, the money, and the tobacco from it into the pack, while the lieutenant wrote.

Up and down the gorge sentries peered into the snow. The diggers and the searchers carried their rifles slung across their backs, though all knew that there was now no need. The Ghilzais had made their ambush and killed their enemies and gone. An instant of time, an opportunity seized, had wiped out the general’s cautious combinations and sound manoeuvrings. The Ghilzais would not return.

Robin sat down on a rock and groped back through time to the fight in the ravine. The men and their actions came easily before him--the eruption in the mist, the bayonets and swords, a few startled shouts, the overwhelming silent storm of the knifemen. He sought further, below the actions to the emotions, to the place where Mclain had been. Only there could he gain full contact with any other human being.

It was no good. Mclain had come back to his pride and did not know him any more. No one did. No one in the world. Certainly not his father, Colonel Rodney Savage, C.B. Nor his stepmother, Caroline, for all her strange insights, because she had long ago turned her spirit to face his father’s. She hadn’t liked his mother, either; she couldn’t have, or she would not have married his father, not so soon.

It was no good, and it was better so. He had known people and trusted them once--his mother, for instance, and his father. No clear image of that time survived with him, but sometimes he felt a glow like a distant fire and recognized it as the memory of childish love. He gathered snow in his hands and waited for the bite of it, watching the diggers and thinking--had he actually seen his mother suffer the pains of death, and greater pangs before dying? Had his father whispered of love while pressing him down into darkness? The snow was no colder than the sphere of glass within which those memories had for ever enclosed him. Worse, inside that diving bell he must have grown away from the human pattern, because to him men and women were scarcely more comprehensible than fish. They would come and open and shut their mouths outside the glass, threatening him or enticing him out to join them or begging him to let them in; but he’d die if he went out, and they’d die if they came in.

He sifted the snow through his fingers and put his hand in his pocket to find Alexander’s coin. As a boy he had tried to forget all about them, the fish, and live only on what was inside his bell, which was just himself. Later he’d taken to watching them through the glass to find out whether he was indeed different from them or whether the difference lay only in his imagination. So to-day would be important all his life, because the events of to-day had proved to him that a difference in imagination separated man from man as surely as gills or wings separated species from species, fish from birds. He had interpreted people’s actions as a man might interpret a shadow play, guessing what had to be done to cause a particular result or guessing on from the observed action to the emotion it would arouse. He saw that one man smiled and held out his hand on meeting another, and knew that they called it ‘friendship.’ He had no means of finding out whether what he felt on meeting Maniraj was that same emotion, although he too smiled and held out his hand. Love of women, avarice, ambition, hate--they used the words, and he had to, but the cold glass lay between him and them. Even fear was different; to-day’s fight showed that. When you were about to be stabbed you felt fear--that might serve as a definition of fear; but whatever it was that he had felt in face of the Ghilzai on the hilltop, and it had been strongly felt, it was unlike what Jagbir or Maniraj or Bolton felt. To them it must have looked like curiosity, the way he had stood there without a pistol and peered into the eyes of the man seeking his death. Perhaps it was what they called fear that he felt when anyone came too close to his glass and looked in as though wanting to break it for love of him--such as his father, and Anne.

He held the coin tight. God, God, I don’t want to be a freak.

At that moment the distant fire of remembered love warmed him. He could go out. All would be well. Anne loved him. From her he could learn what ‘love’ was, and so love her. But--if he went out to her the mysterious thing in him would die, and he and Anne would have murdered it.

He had sat here a long time, by the corporal’s body. A sergeant and two privates came. The sergeant said roughly, ‘Move over, sir, we have to take the corporal to the grave.’ No respect for Robin’s rank veiled the belligerence in his eyes. Robin moved away.

He heard steps behind him, turned, and saw Rifleman Jagbir, carrying the two rifles. ‘Why don’t you leave me too, Jagbir?’ he said with sudden bitterness. But if no man could be a part of him, if his spirit only sprang up to meet the wind’s, why did tears well up in his eyes?

‘Where shall I go, sahib?’ Jagbir asked with no warmth in his voice, but no coldness either, just wanting to know. Robin muttered, ‘Stay.’

Two more men had arrived on the gorge side. One wore a shapeless khaki uniform and a clerical collar, and kept wiping the snow off his thin-rimmed spectacles. The other was a tall private with a bagpipe under his arm. The captain saw them and called up. ‘We’re ready, padre.’ The presbyter took out a book, and the soldiers stood with heads bowed and topis in their hands while the snow fell on the cropped stubble of their hair.

Robin turned when the prayers were over and climbed quickly up the hill. The snow muffled the clang of the flying shovels. Faintly from the crest he heard the Highland lament, ‘Lochaber No More.’ It has no weakness in it, nothing of tearful sentimentality. It came from that place of the spirit which he sought so hard to find--from a strong, lonely valley.

When he reached the track the 13th was just arriving, the head of the battalion drawing level with Robin’s company where the men sprawled at rest at the foot of the hill. Maniraj gave the order to fall in, and Robin heard Major Whiteman, the second-in-command, ask, ‘Where’s Savage-sahib, Maniraj?’

Then he came up and saluted. ‘I’m here, sir.’ The groom held his horse’s reins, he mounted, and rode up alongside the major.

‘Oh, there you are. Where have you been? What’s happened? What are all these rumours? Blood! Are you wounded? Did you have a good scrap?’ The major’s large, round face peered half anxiously, half exultantly into his. ‘Bolton heard there’s been a big battle. A brigade galloper said nothing’s happened. Someone else said the MacDonalds are wiped out. The general’s sent for the colonel. What casualties have you had?
Are
you wounded?’

‘No, sir. We had two killed and seven wounded taking the hill. Nothing down here. The wounded are with the field hospital. Mclain’s company of the MacDonalds was ambushed over there and wiped out.’

‘Phew! All their rifles taken?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Phee-ee-ew!’

Robin said, ‘Mclain escaped. He says my company didn’t go to his help because I was frightened.’

The major swung heavily around in the saddle. ‘What, what! Did you hit the cad?’

‘No, sir.’

It was no use trying to explain to any of them how it had been, or how it had come about. He did not think that the muddle would ever be untangled. Mclain had been in the wrong place at the right time. On this occasion Robin ought to have hurried to the sound of the firing. On another occasion he would have been wrong to do so. British troops were always half asleep. So was he. Major Whiteman mumbled angrily to himself about the honour of the regiment. How would he react when he heard the other version of the story--the true version? Except that the Gurkhas certainly had not been afraid.