The Deceivers (15 page)

In the morning his party started northward on the road to Madhya. When they reached the village of Andori, on the south bank of the Nerbudda opposite Chikhli, they stopped to rest, and William sent for the ferrymen. The owner of the boat came forward with his three assistants. The escorting lancers stood or squatted in the shade of the big trees. The strong sunlight fell down through the branches and picked out the gold facings on their blue uniforms. The horses rested their weight first on one leg, then another, and ceaselessly swished their tails at the flies.

William watched the approaching ferrymen, and his heart sank. As they shuffled forward they looked about them at the soldiers and prisoners. William saw that their faces were closing visibly, like oysters, and veils were coming down across their eyes. Before, when he had talked to them, they had done their best to help him by remembering what they could. They had given him descriptions. Now the men they had described were confronting them. Perhaps they had never expected that. Perhaps they had invented the descriptions in the first place, to satisfy him and get rid of him. Now it was different. These prisoners had not done them, personally, any harm. The courthouse was a long way off; cases took a long time to reach the magistrate; who would work the ferry? They had written nothing down on paper. The spoken word could be forgotten, disavowed. It was an inborn habit of India’s poor, bred over turbulent centuries of intrigue, when the shifts of power made it safer to forget than to remember.

William said to the boat owner, ‘You remember me. I was asking you three or four days ago about people who had used your ferry.’

The old man blinked cautiously, hesitated, and seemed to decide it was safe to recognize the Collector of Madhya.

‘Yes, sahib. I remember.’

‘Look at these six men here. Have you seen any of them before?’

The travellers glowered at the ferryman. The ferryman looked slowly from face to face, obstinate stupidity congealing in his expression.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them before.’

Mary exclaimed angrily, and William bit his lip. He turned and surveyed the prisoners. One of them was not at all average, and, once remembered, could have been forgotten again only on purpose. He hardened his voice. ‘Look here, ferryman, you said that on that day a short, broad Mohammedan crossed. You described him. You said he had a face pitted with smallpox and no forefinger on his left hand. Do you see that man here?’

The prisoner second from the left wore a Mohammedan kulla under his turban. He was short, broad, and pock-marked. He had no forefinger on his left hand.

The old ferryman looked carefully at each of the resting lancers, then let his glance wander over the prisoners. ‘That gentleman there is a Mohammedan, I think, and he has no forefinger on his hand. But he is not the man. I don’t remember that I have ever seen him in my life before.’ The three other boatmen whined in chorus, ‘Nor I, nor I, nor I.’

William’s temper snapped. He shouted, ‘You’re lying,’ and turned to the cavalry jemadar in charge of the escort. ‘Jemadar-sahib, take them into arrest, all of them.’

Now no one would be able to cross the river here. Travellers would have to go down to Kerpani or up to Shahpura. Traffic would be disrupted. There would be many complaints, and the tales would be carried to Sagthali. William did not care.

It was the same story all up the road to Madhya. The witnesses who before had recalled faces and quirks of dress now forgot them.

William ploughed grimly ahead on the course he had set himself. He had to plumb the depths of the quagmires surrounding him. He experienced a savage satisfaction in acting so far out of character. He had always been reasonable and understanding; it was a delight to be neither. He would not be hanged as a lamb but as an obstinate and furious lion.

He threatened the village patels, browbeat the witnesses, and arrested everyone who had given any information on the case. His column grew, and when the troopers of the escort rode with snaffles jingling and saddles creaking into Madhya, twenty-seven sullen prisoners walked between the files.

There was no place in Madhya to lodge such a crowd. William jammed them into the four cells of the jail, where they set up a great wailing clamour. That done, at seven o’clock in the evening he walked to his bungalow. The townspeople stopped talking as he passed and looked covertly at him. Pleaders’ touts ran past him in the opposite direction, towards the jail, and salaamed obsequiously as they squeezed by.

In the bungalow he went straight to his study, sat down at his desk, and pulled out a parchment sheet. Mary stood at his side. He said, ‘I am not going to let those people loose, habeas corpus or not. I am going to send all our police out, to the ends of India if necessary, to trace the thakur’s belongings and check against what these prisoners had on them. And now I am going to tell your father what I am doing.’

He began to write steadily in slow-formed, large characters:

To: The Agent to the Governor-Generalfor the Kaimur and Mahadeo Territories.
From: The Collector of the Madhya District.
Sir, I have to inform you . . .

In the same study, a week later, Mr Wilson stood in front of the fireplace, his hands joined behind his back. The bungalow had a fireplace in every room, not so much to disperse the raw cold of January and February evenings as to remind the man who had built it of his home in England. No fire crackled now behind Mr Wilson’s coat-tails; these were the perfect October nights, warm, earth-scented, and companionable. Mr Wilson looked out of the tall windows, where the light of bonfires rose up in the sky and flickered on the window-panes. In the town they were beginning their celebrations of Dussehra, the most important festival of the Hindu year.

Green curtains hung down beside the windows, and between them, as between green pillars, a distant rocket fizzed up into the sky. William’s mind jumped out and rode up with the red rocket, where the wind rushed in his ears and he could see down on the town, on the great masonry water tank, on the little Mohammedan temple on the hill. From up there he saw the Hindus’ procession snaking through the narrow streets, its banners waving. This year he had managed to prevent the town’s three hundred Mohammedans from holding a procession of their own across the path of the Hindus. This year there might be no Dussehra riot. Then again, there might.

He knew Mary was in the bedroom, standing near the open door. Not dignified -- but she never worried about dignity; nor did he, any more. She wanted to hear; so when Mr Wilson had closed the study door, William managed to open it again, a little crack, so that their voices would carry to the bedroom. It was important that Mary hear, because then she would be beside him, and he would know it, and would not be afraid.

Already he had been in here with Mr Wilson for two hours. The two men fought a fight, but it was not a duel, because each also grappled with extra, unseen adversaries. William spoke past Mr Wilson at bulky phantoms of rectitude, which had power but no inner vision. Mr Wilson wrestled sharply with William, and with the forces that had made William so different a man.

Mr Wilson did not grow angry. His mind was fixed in its course. A thing was right or wrong; there could be no argument about it, no need for anger. He studied William with intensity, trying to find the explanation of the inexplicable. William Savage -- would not, could not, have done these things. William Savage might have -- William Savage
had
-- earned rebuke because of his slowness; but he had always been ploddingly correct. There had been nothing strange about him in the past -just that he was a man perpetually one step behind decision.

But Mr Wilson had come down to investigate reports of a man running ahead of decision, an angry, intemperate man, a man so little afraid of power that he used it like a shoe. Mr Wilson stepped cautiously into William’s mind to track down the gadfly that had driven him to these acts. Mr Wilson’s daughter too was being carried headlong to disgrace.

‘There is no doubt, nor do you deny, that in concentrating on the attempt to apprehend these murderers you have neglected the other affairs of your district. .

Mr Wilson began a severe lecture. William listened, noting dispassionately the things he had left undone. The list was long and black, but no worse than similar lists which he and Mr Wilson could have prepared for some other British officials.

‘. . . now this matter of the arrests. You know that you have acted without a shadow of justification in law. I would be inclined to place some of the blame on George Angelsmith, except for the letter you wrote in Khapa stating explicitly that he was acting only at your urgent request. In that affair you misused the military arm -- to no purpose. The military are already too apt to think that we civilians are a flock of incompetent owls. You have confirmed them in their opinion. You have failed to catch the real culprits -- that is mere ill luck, and not at all blameworthy, though I must point out that it is extremely unfortunate that this man -- what was his name? Hussein? -- escaped from your custody. But, having failed, why this madness of arrests without evidence and holdings without charge?’

William went close to him and said, ‘Why? Mr Wilson, there is nothing more important in my district than to run down these murderers. There is nothing more important in all the territories under your control, I believe.’

‘That is as may be. But it does not give you power to disregard the law, our law, the justice for which we are striving so hard to inculcate a respect among the people.’

‘What does justice mean?’ William burst out passionately. ‘Fair trial, the rules of evidence, no double hazard, no hearsay, and so on and so on? Or protection against injustice, against violence? The means, or the end? You’ve read the report Elphinstone wrote on these Mahratta territories when we first took them in ‘17?’

‘Yes, Captain Savage. I helped to prepare it.’ Mr Wilson looked at William with a sort of respect, as if he had imagined before that William could not read. ‘I think I know to what part of the report you are referring -- where Elphinstone wrote that we must consider whether perfect fairness is more important than the prevention of crime? Quite. He pointed out, as I recall, that with the Mahratta territories in the condition they were, the two were incompatible because there existed in the people no respect for law. Well, Captain Savage, we have chosen -- if we had a choice, which in my opinion we did not. On the one hand we could continue despotism, under British instead of Mahratta rulers. On the other we could plant the impersonal rule of law, and with our strength guard its growth through all trials and adversities.’

‘What does the rule of law matter to the man who gets killed? Or to his wife and children?’ William said bitterly. ‘How can a rule of law flourish where people call themselves “servants of Kali” and kill because a goddess orders them to?’

Mr Wilson shifted his feet impatiently.

William went on, ‘Oh, I know we have no evidence about them yet. That’s just what I mean. I tell you, sir, they cannot be run down within our rule of law! Indians aren’t English. “No man dies by the hand of man,” they think, so they won’t give evidence because they are not angry with the murderers. They think men who kill are driven by God to kill. And there are too many jurisdictions, too far to go to give evidence, too long to wait. We’ve got to go outside the law to catch them, to prevent more murders.’

‘And I will not permit you or anyone else to go outside the law, to prevent this or any other crime.’

Mr Wilson was a massive thing, not human, a great block of granite in front of the cold fireplace. Through the windows the moan of conch horns and the clang of bells sounded faintly in the room. The bonfires brightened the sky and dimmed the lower stars. This Dussehra was the feast of Shiva the Destroyer and of Kali, the dark-blue goddess with the dishevelled hair and the cincture of bloodstained hands and the tongue protruding from her bloodstained mouth -- Kali, who ordered her servants to kill. Dussehra marked the beginning of the season of war and travel. At Dussehra men set out on enterprises of great moment, armies put on their trappings and prepared for war. The throngs pushed huge idols through the streets, the bleeding heads of sacrifices fell into the dust.

William strode to the windows and flung them open. The surge of noise rode in on the October night -- deep, uncontrolled, dark with blood and vivid with life, a thing of killing, being killed, dying, living, struggling, spilling of blood, pouring of seed, rotting, bearing. The smell poured in, and the smoke of cowdung and burned powder, and a dead cat in an alley, and the breathing earth.

Mr Wilson understood. He drew himself upright, not proudly or pompously but like a man standing against overwhelming physical force. Sure of his inner strength, he stood braced against the clamorous, writhing night. He said, ‘No one, for no reason. The law will prevail.’

William closed the windows slowly, the noise beat against the glass, in the study it was quiet. Solomon slipped in with a small mew and jumped up on the desk and began to rub his neck and head against William’s hand. William stroked the cat gently, curling his fingers under its ears. The low purring sounded louder than the muted roar of Dussehra.

Mr Wilson said, ‘Captain Savage, I am going to relieve you of your position. To save trouble, I recommend you apply for transfer back to the military department, on any personal grounds you choose. I wish to have your formal application before I leave in the morning. I regret that I must do this, but it is right. You are not fitted for employment in the civil administration of India. I must do it, especially --’ He did not finish the sentence, but William could have finished it for him -- ‘especially because you are married to my daughter.’

Here it was. Here was the worst they could do. It did not feel bad. It did not feel as bad as the nights when he did not know where right was and where wrong was. Now at last he had ploughed into the quagmire, and for his people’s sake touched the bottom of it.