Far, Far The Mountain Peak Page 21

  She sat thinking. It was wrong that bad men should shelter behind good men; worse that they should use their position to prevent things being done to improve the people’s condition. The results of Peter’s Machiavellian plan would probably be good--but the means? And the people? Adam Khan must be in a terrible state, having been made to put the knife, for however good a cause, to the throat of his own child; for that was what the C.G.G. was--his, and secretly, Peter’s. What about Roshani, floundering about in a trap set for other game altogether? And Baber? And even Harnarayan the idealist who disagreed with, but loved, Adam Khan?

  She said heavily: ‘I don’t think it’s right.’

  ‘I know,’ Peter said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She looked at him miserably, near tears, and put out her hand, trying to show him that though she could not approve, and would always try to prevent him from doing things like this, yet she loved him.

  The bearer came in, his usually impassive face quite charged with excitement. ‘The Old Captain prays permission to see you--also, his son.’

  Peter stood up, glancing at his wrist-watch. ‘I’ll see them here,’ he said, ‘and tell the khansamah to keep tiffin for us till two. Tell Lord Wilcot not to wait.’

  Emily got up to go. Peter said: ‘Stay here, unless you’re too tired.’ She sat down again.

  The Old Captain strode in, the huge sabre in its scabbard held loosely across his waist. His feet were bare, for he always took off his shoes on entering any house. Adam Khan followed a little behind his father. After greeting Peter, the Old Captain looked at Emily and said: ‘It is man’s business that brings me here, sahib.’

  ‘Let her stay, sahib,’ Peter replied. ‘Roshani has told her of your affairs.’

  The old man looked disapprovingly at her for a moment and then plunged into his story. It was a brief summary of all that had happened since Adam Khan came back from Cambridge, culminating in the news he had heard last night, that Adam had voted for a protest in favour of some Bengali murderer. Now he heard that the protest was not going to take place after all, but that made no difference--though it was typical of the lily-livered rascals who were his son’s boon companions that, once they had made up their footling minds to protest, they couldn’t even go ahead and do it. For his part, he had had enough. He had dismissed his son from his house, with the woman. He was keeping his grandson, and would continue to raise him as he had been doing, as a Punjabi gentleman. He had sent for Adam Khan and brought him here in order that the Deputy Commissioner Sahib might be a witness to the justness of his decision. Also because his miserable son, a friend of lawyers and tradesmen and snivelling agitators, had threatened the law on him to have his son back. ‘But the boy does not want to go, sahib, and rather than let him go, whatever the courts say, I will send him down to my relatives in Montgomery. I have finished.’ He folded his arms, the sword sticking up across his left shoulder.

  Peter said: ‘Sahib, you should know that it was at my suggestion that Adam Khan voted for the protest.’

  He began to explain what he had just told Emily. She was watching Adam Khan. He had been taut and nervous when he came in, but as his father’s recital had proceeded he had calmed down, and now he listened with an almost detached air while the Old Captain, at first frankly incredulous, gradually came to understand what had been and was being achieved through Adam Khan’s position in the C.G.G. The old man was delighted, and once or twice laughed so that his jaw waggled and his big dyed beard shook and the sword rattled in its scabbard.

  At last he clapped Adam Khan on the shoulder and cried: ‘Excellent, my son, excellent! Though I can see it was the Deputy Commissioner Sahib’s brain that thought of this plan, and not yours. But why did you not tell me? Am I not to be trusted? Am I a babbler?’

  He was, of course, and probably would have been even more delighted if Adam had said so. But Adam kept that look of sombre detachment and now spoke for the first time since entering the room. ‘I did not tell you, Father, because Peter, the Deputy Commissioner Sahib, told me to tell no one. I agreed with him. For that reason I have not seen him, who was my closest friend and the man I most admired in the world, for nearly seven years, except in hurried midnight visits, or in assignations at far places. I was going to vote against the protest until he showed me what we could achieve if I voted the other way. I thought nothing could make me break our agreement of secrecy but when Roshani came to me in tears, and I knew I had lost my son too, it was like the breaking of a stick--a weak stick, Peter, not a treacherous one, only human and weak. All night I thought of what I had done. I knew that I had come to love my companions in the C.G.G. as I came to understand them. Even the weak, the foolish, the wrong-headed ones--they more than the rest, even.’

  The Old Captain was stirring uneasily, his prominent eyes fixed with growing hostility on his son. Adam Khan turned suddenly to Emily, and, though he wore his usual Punjabi clothes, they two were back at Cambridge, or in the cirque below Cader Brith. He said: ‘Emily, I saw that if I am to live I must break away. I am miserable at the thought, but I must. Tell Gerry--make him understand.’ He swung round on Peter. ‘When I come to see you again, Peter, I’m coming on my own terms.’

  ‘That has always been so,’ Peter said coldly.

  ‘Yes--but now I am myself, Adam Afzal Khan, a muddle- headed Indian with a B.A. from Cambridge, nothing more. Tomorrow, when the vote on the dissolution of the C.G.G. comes up, I am going to vote to keep it in being, just as it is. I know some of the group are dangerous--but this is the only way. It doesn’t matter what the end is, how important, how great. The means must be this--people like us struggling and talking among ourselves.’

  Peter said: ‘It’s more comfortable in a crowd.’

  The Old Captain cried: ‘Traitor!’ in a loud voice.

  Adam went on. ‘I’m going to do more. I’m going to approach the Indian National Congress, and try to affiliate the C.G.G. with them in some way, or join them as a group if necessary.’

  ‘That would effectively save you from having to make any decisions,’ Peter said.

  Adam flushed and said, his voice rising: ‘We will have a voice in a council representing all India.’

  ‘Most of political India,’ Peter amended, ‘about three per cent of the country, perhaps, not including your father, or your son.’

  ‘I have heard enough,’ the Old Captain said harshly. ‘Congress! Now it is proved that I am right to keep my grandson. If you try to bring lawyers to get him back, the Deputy Commissioner Sahib will send you to jail.’

  ‘No, I won’t, sahib,’ Peter interrupted sharply. ‘Adam, do you want Baber?’

  Adam hesitated. ‘Of course I want him, Peter. I love him. But you are quite right--I am cutting myself off from the India that my father belongs to, and the one you love. The kind of life I lead--and it will get worse--is no life for a boy to grow up in. We snap and snarl like rats, and I sometimes think that when we become free we shall be so warped that we are not Indian. Let Baber stay with my father--especially as he would run back to him if I took him away. Then there’ll be real Indians to use the freedom, with generosity, that we will have given up our good tempers to earn for them. But I must be able to see him when I want to.’

  ‘I’ll see to that,’ Peter said. ‘Also that he’s free to come to you if he changes his mind.’ He sounded quite normal, as though nothing that had been said or done in the burning room, full of anger and sadness, had affected him closely, though Adam Khan had stabbed him under the heart. Emily thought of Gerry, and the long dagger ready in her own hand, concealed behind her back, which she intended to place beside the other in Peter’s spirit.

  Adam Khan looked at Peter for a long time and said gently: ‘Of course. I’d trust you before anyone else in the world.’

  Peter turned to the Old Captain and said: ‘Let it be so. It is just. .. . There is permission.’

  The Old Captain began to speak, even after those last words of abrupt dismissal; but though he was not a sensitive man he s
aw something in Peter’s face that even she could not see--she supposed it was because they had both hoped for so much from Adam Khan--and he held out the sword hilt for Peter to touch, and there were tears in his eyes.

  When they were gone Peter said: ‘Has Gerry finished his report on the new hospital? This morning I was promised the rest of the money we need to get started. It won’t be as big as it should be, but we can at least make a beginning.’

  She was weak from hunger, and it was past two. Gerry made a point of keeping out of their way before tiffin time, though he usually ate with them. By now he would have finished and be back in his room. Now was the time.

  She said: ‘Gerry’s going to give you the money to build the hospital the right size, and he’s going to work in it as a doctor.’

  Peter said: ‘Is he?’ He looked fully at her, his eyes bitter cold.

  She jumped up and clung to him and could not speak properly, only sobbed, but forced the words out somehow so that they should be said before she lost the will to say them. ‘He can’t be a politician,’ she cried. ‘He can’t. It’ll break him and no one, not even you, can stand over him all the time and make all his decisions for him. He doesn’t want to rule people, only to heal them. He lies awake, thinking of being a governor, or the Viceroy, of having to order this and suppress that, sacrifice people like Mr Philipson or people like Adam Khan. It’s worse than a nightmare. Let him go, Peter--please, please, darling, let him go!’

  Peter said abruptly: ‘There was so much we would have done. A doctor in a miserable little hospital! If it was research, I could understand it--to find the causes of disease, and wipe them out at the root, for the whole world. But this--it’s like painting a house over and over again, and still it cracks and peels. Parkash is the man for that. Dr Tanner at Llyn Gared. Thousands of them. Gerry’s too good. He can do more. Why have you put this idea into his head?’ He looked at her with a kind of sadness that she had seen seldom--and no one else, perhaps, ever.

  ‘It was not my idea, it was his,’ she said. ‘Peter, you haven’t done anything wrong. You showed Gerry that a man must live for something, but what you wanted him to live for was not right for him. That’s all. You brought him to India to show him one thing, power--but what he saw was people ill, and poor. He wants to work in the new hospital all his life.’

  ‘He won’t if you can help it,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘You want him to go to England. But suppose he does stay? Am I to spend the rest of my life here too? Am I to follow Gerry, instead of the other way round?’

  It was all coming out, and now of all times was the time to speak the truth and go on speaking it until all was said. She said: ‘Yes. Yes! You know Rudwal, and the people know you. No one who’s ever been here has used it as a stepping stone. They’ve made it their home, as I have. I don’t want to leave Rudwal.’

  Again it was near, the thing that she had been trying for so long to put in Peter’s mind instead of, or alongside of, to give balance to, his drive towards the peaks. It was a vision, perhaps too female for him to see without difficulty, of achieving happiness and knowing fulfilment by staying, not by moving; by being, not by working. It was the ideal of the flower; and his, of the towering clouds--the lotus and the wind. She held out the budding flower to him now and she thought the lineaments of it were beginning to show themselves to him because he was very tired and bled in secret places from two wounds. He wanted to believe her, and, most desperately, he wanted rest and shelter such as she promised. Like a brave soldier, gravely hurt, he wanted to believe that it would not be cowardly of him now if he let her take him back and show him peace. She thought she was winning, that his indomitable, almost insane urge to fight on and up had been beaten to its knees, perhaps mortally stricken--when Gerry came in.

  He rushed in, the newspaper in his hand. ‘Peter,’ he cried, ‘have you seen this? Look.’

  She read over Peter’s shoulder. There was a small item low down on the front page: ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO BE MADE ON MERU. She read on: an expedition had been formed in England, under the auspices of the Alpine Club, to make a second attempt on Meru. The leader of the expedition was Mr Henry Walsh, the well-known mountaineer, who had been deputy to Mr Peter Savage, I.C.S., on the previous attempt. The other members of the expedition were to be . . . Three names were listed. The attempt would take place this year, 1914. The party was due to sail for India late in April. The permission of the Government of India had been obtained.

  She looked at Peter. It was all gone, all the peace, and the wind was rising, strong, and edged now with a bitter edge.

  ‘Haven’t they asked you?’ Gerry said.

  ‘No,’ Peter said. ‘For one thing, Harry knows I can’t get away. For another, he wouldn’t ask me. The Government of India haven’t asked me either, as D.C. of Rudwal. I shall get a note from the Chief Secretary in Lahore soon, letting me know that the Alpine Club asked to go through into Parasia and that he wired permission because he knew I’d have nothing against it. The Chief Secretary doesn’t like me.’

  ‘Harry ought to have asked you to join the expedition,’ Gerry said.

  ‘Or you,’ Peter said.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to go without you,’ Gerry said. ‘Not to Meru.’

  ‘Why not?’ Peter said. ‘You don’t have to worry about me. If Harry Walsh is going to walk up Meru by the route we discovered, why shouldn’t you go with him, and share the glory?’

  She knew, because of what had been passing between them before Gerry came in, that he spoke with a lightly controlled sarcasm. Gerry did not know and did not guess, particularly because sarcasm was foreign to Peter’s nature and he very rarely employed it.

  ‘Anyway, he hasn’t asked me,’ Gerry said. ‘If he did, I’d have a damn good mind to go so that I could plant a flag on the top, labelled “By Courtesy of Savage and Wilcot.” ‘

  Peter said: ‘I’m going to have tiffin,’ and left the room. Before following him, Emily said: ‘Gerry, I’ve told him about your wanting to be a doctor--and that you’re going to give money to the fund for the new hospital.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Gerry asked anxiously.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘But he understands. Why don’t you go down to Lahore tomorrow and make arrangements to study for your--whatever it was?’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ he said. ‘Peter’s leaving for an inspection of the breeding station, isn’t he?’

  ‘This evening,’ she said, and kept her face calm until he had closed the door behind him. Then she stumbled to the bedroom and lay down slowly, her eyes closed, feeling like a murderess.

  Chapter 18

  She was at the hospital again, but now it was near the end of May of that year, 1914, and now, however hot the inside of the dispensary might seem, it was hotter outside. She almost dreaded the moment when Gerry would finish checking blueprints out there with the master builder, for then she would have to put up her parasol and go out into the leaden furnace of May, when the sun had turned to dull copper, and the eyes hurt so that they could not distinguish sunlight from shade, and the heat struck like hammers across the forehead.

  Dr Parkash had been called away before they came--to the dak bungalow, where the members of the expedition to Meru were staying--but no one knew why. It might be that one of the climbers--Mr Lyon, probably--had an upset stomach; or it might be that the watchman’s wife was at last giving birth to the twins, already a month late, who had been causing her so much illness. Emily stirred uncomfortably in the rickety chair. Five weeks to go. Lord, nine months was a long time.

  Gerry came in, taking off his topee and mopping his brow. ‘Parkash not back yet? I wonder. . . . Perhaps we should go by the dak bungalow and find out?’

  She shook her head. ‘Harry will let us know if it’s anything serious.’ Besides, she added privately, I can’t face the detour, even in the carriage. I want to go home.

  The syce brought the carriage out from under the feeble shade of a tree, and they got in. ‘Is everything going w
ell?’ she asked Gerry when the slight wind of their movement had begun to cool her face.

  ‘Fine,’ Gerry said enthusiastically. ‘Of course, there’s not much to see yet. They’re still digging the foundations--but it’s coming along.’

  She agreed and thought: So is Gerry. The university authorities had kept him a week at Lahore, somewhat at a loss as to what to do with a Cambridge B.A. who wanted to do work that medical students should have completed before joining the university; and finally sent him back to Rudwal with a trunk full of books and old examination papers, and a suggestion that if he really wanted to continue on the strange course he had outlined he should read them and report to the university in the first week of September. They would then decide whether to enroll him as a second- or third-year student.

  So he had been working late each night on the books of chemistry and biology, and, when he went to bed, sleeping properly. There had been no more walkings and shufflings in the night, and even when Peter was away he slept soundly. That was as well, for fate seemed to have been conspiring with her to keep Gerry clear of Peter’s influence, at least from the direct rays of his personal presence, ever since she had told him of Gerry’s wish to become a doctor. One thing after another had required the Deputy Commissioner Sahib’s presence--at the other end of the district, in the Northern Tehsils, at Lahore to attend an emergency conference of D.C.s--and finally, during the last two weeks, a sudden threat of famine in a small but backward area farther down the Maghra.

  On the rare occasions when Peter had been at home she tried to be doubly affectionate towards him, but he was in a strange, sombre mood, and not easy to approach. He was working with the same tireless efficiency, and approached each new crisis with the same awesome incisiveness, like a circular saw, but she had begun to wonder whether this was not mere habit. One stifling night, when nothing could bring sleep, the thought had come to her that Peter was lost; that the defection of Gerry and Adam had drained away his heroic will to do. Had he then been driving himself for their sakes? Did he need them as much as--more than--they had thought they needed him? If so, she had truly done a terrible thing to him--but what else could she have done? And how much was actually her doing, and how much the will to self-preservation in Gerry and Adam, which must warn even the most loyal of men that they are heading for destruction?