Far to Seek Part 30

At that the starving girl-mother lunged forward with the yell of a hunted beast; lunged right across the path of a dapper young man in an English suit, green turban, and patent-leather shoes.

"Peace, she-devil! Make way," he cried; and catching her wrist--that looked as if it would snap at a touch--he flung her aside so roughly that she staggered and fell, the child beneath her emitting a feeble wail....

Since the days of his imprisonment, cruelty witnessed had a startling effect on Roy. Between the moment when he sprang from the saddle, in a blaze of fury, to the moment when he stood confronting the suave, Anglicised Indian--riding-crop in one hand, the other supporting the girl and her babe--his mind was a blank. The thing was done almost before the impulse reached his brain. He wondered if he had struck the fellow, whom he was now arraigning furiously in fluent Hindustani, and whose sullen, s.h.i.+fty face was reminding him of some one--somewhere....

"Have you _no_ respect for suffering--or for women other than your own?"

he demanded, scorn undisguised in his look and tone.

The man's answering shrug was frankly contemptuous. "All you English are mad," he said in the vernacular. "If she die not to-day, she will die to-morrow. And already there are too many to feed--"

"She will not die to-day or to-morrow," Roy retorted with Olympian a.s.surance. "Courage, little mother,"--he addressed the girl--"you shall have food, you and the sonling."

As she raised herself, clutching at his arm, he became uncomfortably aware that her rags of clothing were probably verminous; that his chivalrous pity was tinged with repulsion. But pity prevailed.

Supporting her to a neighbouring stall, he bought fruit, which she devoured like a wild thing. He begged a little milk in a lotah and gave her money for more. Half dazed, she dropped the money, emptied the small jar almost at a gulp, and flung herself at his feet, pressing her forehead on his dusty boot; covering him with confusion. Imperatively he bade her get up. No result. So he stooped to enforce his command....

She had fainted.

"Help, mother--quick!" he appealed to an elder woman who hovered near the stall, and responded, instinctively, to the note of command.

As she stooped over the girl he said in low rapid tones: "Listen! It is an order. Give warm food to her and the child. Take her to the Burra Sahib's compound. There she will be cared for. I will give word."

He slipped two rupees into her hand, adding: "Two more--when all is done according to order."

"_Hai! Hai!_ The Sahib is a Son of Princes," murmured the favoured one, reflecting shrewdly that eight annas would suffice to feed those poor empty creatures; and gathering up her light burden she bore it away--to Roy's unfeigned relief.

Would Thea scold him--or uphold him, he wondered,--having committed himself. The whole thing had been so swift, so unreal, that he seemed half a world away from the green Residency garden, with its atmosphere of twentieth-century England, scrupulously, yet unconsciously, preserved in a setting of sixteenth-century India. And Roy had a strain of both in his composition.

Across the road Bishun Singh--tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries--was still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned.

Again there dawned on Roy the conviction that he had seen that face before. It was not in India. It was linked with the same sensations, in a milder form. It would come in a moment....

It came.

Behind the slight, foppish figure, the eye of his mind saw suddenly--not the sunlight and colour of Jaipur, but a stretch of grey-green sea, tawny cliffs, and sandy sh.o.r.e ... St Rupert's! Of course, unmistakable: the sullen mouth, the s.h.i.+fty eyes....

Instantly he went forward and said in English: "I say--excuse me--but is your name Chandranath?"

The man started and stiffened. "That is no matter to you."

"Perhaps not. Only ... you're very like a boy who was one term at St Rupert's School with me."

"Well, I _was_ at St Rupert's. A beastly hole----"

He, too, spoke English, and scanned Roy's face with narrowed eyes.

"Sinclair--is it? You tumbled down the cliff on to me--and that Desmond fellow----?"

"Yes, I did. Lucky for you," Roy answered, stiffening in his turn. But because of old days--because this unpromising specimen of manhood had incidentally brought him and Desmond together, he held out his hand.

"'Fraid I lost my temper," he said casually, for form's sake. "But you put my blood up."

Chandranath's fingers lay limply in his grasp.

"Still so sensitive----? Then better to clear out of India. I only pushed that crazy girl aside. Englishmen knock and kick our people without slightest compunction. Perhaps you are a tourist--or new to this country?"

Words and manner set Roy's nerves on edge; but he had been imprudent enough for one day. "I've spent seven months on the Frontier in a cavalry Regiment," he said; "but I only came to Jaipur yesterday."

"Well, take my advice, Mr Sinclair, and leave these people alone. They don't want Englishmen making pretence of sentimental fuss over them.

They like much better to be pushed--or even starved--by their own _jat_.

You may not believe it. But I belong to them. So I know."

Roy, who also 'belonged' in a measure, very nearly said so--but again prudence prevailed. "I'm rash enough to disagree with you," he said placably. "The question of non-interference, of letting ill alone--because one's afraid or can't be bothered--isn't merely a race question; it's a root question of human character. Some men can't pa.s.s by on the other side. Right or wrong, it simply isn't arguable. It's a matter of the individual conscience--the heart----"

"Conscience and heart--if not drastically disciplined by the logically reasoning brain, propagate the majority of troubles that afflict mankind," quoth Chandranath in the manner of one familiar with platform oratory. "Are you stopping in Jaipur?"

"Yes. At the Residency. Mrs Leigh is Desmond's sister. Did you know?"

"That is curious. I did not know. Too much heart and conscience there also. Mrs Leigh is thrusting her fingers into complicated issues of which she is lamentably ignorant."

Roy, taken aback, nearly gave himself away--but not quite. "I gather she acted with Sir Lakshman Singh's approval," was all he said.

Chandranath shrugged. "Sir Lakshman is an able but deluded man. His dreams of social reform are obsolete. We of the new school adhere patriotically to social and religious ordinances of the Mother. All we agitate for is political independence." He unfurled the polysyllables, like a flag; sublimely unaware of having stated a contradiction in terms. "But your Sir Lakshman is of the old-fas.h.i.+oned school--English-mad."

"And your particular friends--are sane, eh?"

The apostle of Hindu revival pensively twirled an English b.u.t.ton of his creditably-cut English coat.

"Yes. We are sane--thanks to more liberalising influences. Coloured dust cannot be thrown in our eyes by bureaucratic conjuring tricks, or imperialistic talk about prestige. To-day it is India's turn for prestige. 'Arya for the Aryans' is the slogan of the rising generation."

He paused, blinked, and added with an ingratiating chuckle: "You will go running away with an impression that I am metamorphosed into red-hot revolutionary. No, thank you! I am intrinsically a man of peace!" With a flourish he jerked out a showy gold watch. "Ah--getting late! Very agreeable exchanging amenities with old schoolfellows. But I have an appointment in the Palace Gardens, at the time they feed the muggers.

_That_ is a sight you should see, Mr Sinclair--when the beasts are hungry and have not lately snapped up a washerwoman or an erring wife!"

"I'd rather be excused this evening, thanks," Roy answered, with a touch of brusqueness. "I confess it wouldn't appeal to my sense of humour--seeing crocodiles gorge, while women and children starve."

"That is what they call in a book I once read 'little ironies of life.'

Good fortune, at least, for the muggers! Better start to sharpen your sense of humour, my friend. It is incomparable a.s.set against the slings and arrows of outrageous contingencies." This time his chuckle had an undernote of malice; and Roy, considering him thoughtfully--from green turban to patent-leather shoes--felt an acute desire to take him by the scruff of his English coat and dust the Jaipur market-place with the remnant of him.

Aloud he said coolly: "Thanks for the prescription. Are you stopping here long?"

"Oh, I am meteoric visitant. Never very long anywhere. I come and go."

"Business--eh?"

"Yes--many kinds of business--for the Mother." He flashed a direct look at Roy; the first since their encounter; fluttered a foppish hand--the little finger lifted to display a square uncut emerald--and went his way....

Roy, left standing alone in the leisurely crowd of men and animals--at once so alien and so familiar--returned to Bishun Singh and Suraj in a vaguely troubled frame of mind.

"Which way to the house of Sir Lakshman Singh?" he asked the maker of chiraghs, his foot in the stirrup.

Enlightened, he set off at a trot, down another vast street, all hazy in the level light that conjured the dusty air to gold. But contact with human anguish, naked and unashamed--as he had not seen it since the war--and that sudden queer encounter with Chandranath, had rubbed the bloom off delicate films of memory and artistic impressions. These were the drop-scene, merely: negligible, when Life took the stage. He had an exciting sense of having stepped straight into a crisis. Things were going to happen in Jaipur.

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