The Broken Road Part 20

The maid took the parcel away.

Violet Oliver, with a sigh of relief, drank her tea. At last, she thought, the end was reached. Now, indeed, her life and Shere Ali's life would touch no more. But she was to see him again. For two days later, as the train which was carrying her northwards to Lah.o.r.e moved out of the station, she saw from the window of her carriage the young Prince of Chiltistan standing upon the platform. She drew back quickly, fearing that he would see her. But he was watching the train with indifferent eyes; and the spectacle of his indifference struck her as something incongruous and strange. She had been thinking of him with remorse as a man twisting like Hamlet in the coils of tragedy, and wearing like Hamlet the tragic mien. Yet here he was on the platform of a railway station, waiting, like any commonplace traveller, with an uninterested patience for his train. The aspect of Shere Ali diminished Violet Oliver's remorse. She wondered for a moment why he was not travelling upon the same train as herself, for his destination must be northwards too. And then she lost sight of him. She was glad that after all the last vision of him which she was to carry away was not the vision of a youth helpless and despairing with a trouble-tortured face.

Shere Ali was following out the destiny to which his character bound him. He had been made and moulded and fas.h.i.+oned, and though he knew he had been fas.h.i.+oned awry, he could no more change and rebuild himself than the hunchback can will away his hump. He was driven down the ways of circ.u.mstance. At present he saw and knew that he was so driven. He knew, too, that he could not resist. This half-year in Chiltistan had taught him that.

So he went southwards to Calcutta. The mere thought of Chiltistan was unendurable. He had to forget. There was no possibility of forgetfulness amongst his own hills and the foreign race that once had been his own people. Southwards he went to Calcutta, and in that city for a time was lost to sight. He emerged one afternoon upon the racecourse, and while standing on the gra.s.s in front of the Club stand, before the horses cantered down to the starting post, he saw an elderly man, heavy of build but still erect, approach him with a smile.

Shere Ali would have avoided that man if he could. He hesitated, unwilling to recognise and unable quite to ignore. And while he hesitated, the elderly man held out his hand.

"We know each other, surely. I used to see you at Eton, didn't I? I used to run down to see a young friend of mine and a friend of yours, d.i.c.k Linforth. I am Colonel Dewes."

"Yes, I remember," said Shere Ali with some embarra.s.sment; and he took the Colonel's outstretched hand. "I thought that you had left India for good."

"So did I," said Dewes. "But I was wrong." He turned and walked along by the side of Shere Ali. "I don't know why exactly, but I did not find life in London so very interesting."

Shere Ali looked quickly at the Colonel.

"Yet you had looked forward to retiring and going home?" he asked with a keen interest. Colonel Dewes gave himself up to reflection. He sounded the obscurities of his mind. It was a practice to which he was not accustomed. He drew himself erect, his eyes became fixed, and with a puckered forehead he thought.

"I suppose so," he said. "Yes, certainly. I remember. One used to buck at mess of the good time one would have, the comfort of one's club and one's rooms, and the rest of it. It isn't comfortable in India, is it? Not compared with England. Your furniture, your house, and all that sort of thing. You live as if you were a lodger, don't you know, and it didn't matter for a little while whether you were comfortable or not. The little while slips on and on, and suddenly you find you have been in the country twenty or thirty years, and you have never taken the trouble to be comfortable. It's like living in a dak-bungalow."

The Colonel halted and pulled at his moustache. He had made a discovery.

He had reflected not without result. "By George!" he said, "that's right. Let me put it properly now, as a fellow would put it in a book, if he hit upon anything as good." He framed his aphorism in different phrases before he was satisfied with it. Then he delivered himself of it with pride.

"At the bottom of the Englishman's conception of life in India, there is always the idea of a dak-bungalow," and he repeated the sentence to commit it surely to memory. "But don't you use it," he said, turning to Shere Ali suddenly. "I thought of that--not you. It's mine."

"I won't use it," said Shere Ali.

"Life in India is based upon the dak-bungalow," said Dewes. "Yes, yes"; and so great was his pride that he relented towards Shere Ali. "You may use it if you like," he conceded. "Only you would naturally add that it was I who thought of it."

Shere Ali smiled and replied:

"I won't fail to do that, Colonel Dewes."

"No? Then use it as much as you like, for it's true. Out here one remembers the comfort of England and looks forward to it. But back there, one forgets the discomfort of India. By George! that's pretty good, too.

Shall we look at the horses?"

Shere Ali did not answer that question. With a quiet persistence he kept Colonel Dewes to the conversation. Colonel Dewes for his part was not reluctant to continue it, in spite of the mental wear and tear which it involved. He felt that he was clearly in the vein. There was no knowing what brilliant thing he might not say next. He wished that some of those clever fellows on the India Council were listening to him.

"Why?" asked Shere Ali. "Why back there does one forget the discomfort of India?"

He asked the question less in search of information than to discover whether the feelings of which he was conscious were shared too by his companion.

"Why?" answered Dewes wrinkling his forehead again. "Because one misses more than one thought to miss and one doesn't find half what one thought to find. Come along here!"

He led Shere Ali up to the top of the stand.

"We can see the race quite well from here," he said, "although that is not the reason why I brought you up. This is what I wanted to show you."

He waved his hand over towards the great s.p.a.ce which the racecourse enclosed. It was thronged with natives robed in saffron and pink, in blue and white, in scarlet and delicate shades of mauve and violet. The whole enclosure was ablaze with colour, and the colours perpetually moved and grouped themselves afresh as the throng s.h.i.+fted. A great noise of cries rose up into the clear air.

"I suppose that is what I missed," said Dewes, "not the noise, not the mere crowd--you can get both on an English racecourse--but the colour."

And suddenly before Shere Ali's eyes there rose a vision of the Paddock at Newmarket during a July meeting. The sleek horses paced within the cool grove of trees; the bright sunlight, piercing the screen of leaves overhead, dappled their backs with flecks of gold. Nothing of the sunburnt gra.s.s before his eyes was visible to him. He saw the green turf of the Jockey Club enclosure, the seats, the luncheon room behind with its open doors and windows.

"Yes, I understand," he said. "But you have come back," and a note of envy sounded in his voice. Here was one point in which the parallel between his case and that of Colonel Dewes was not complete. Dewes had missed India as he had missed England. But Dewes was a free man. He could go whither he would. "Yes, you were able to come back. How long do you stay?"

And the answer to that question startled Shere Ali.

"I have come back for good."

"You are going to live here?" cried Shere Ali.

"Not here, exactly. In Cashmere. I go up to Cashmere in a week's time. I shall live there and die there."

Colonel Dewes spoke without any note of antic.i.p.ation, and without any regret. It was difficult for Shere Ali to understand how deeply he felt.

Yet the feeling must be deep. He had cut himself off from his own people, from his own country. Shere Ali was stirred to yet more questions. He was anxious to understand thoroughly all that had moved this commonplace matter-of-fact man at his side.

"You found life in England so dull?" he asked.

"Well, one felt a stranger," said Dewes. "One had lost one's a.s.sociations. I know there are men who throw themselves into public life and the rest of it. But I couldn't. I hadn't the heart for it even if I had the ability. There was Lawrence, of course. He governed India and then he went on the School Board," and Dewes thumped his fist upon the rail in front of him. "How he was able to do it beats me altogether. I read his life with amazement. He was just as keen about the School Board as he had been about India when he was Viceroy here. He threw himself into it with just as much vigour. That beats me. He was a big man, of course, and I am not. I suppose that's the explanation. Anyway, the School Board was not for me. I put in my winters for some years at Corfu shooting woodc.o.c.k. And in the summer I met a man or two back on leave at my club. But on the whole it was pretty dull. Yes," and he nodded his head, and for the first time a note of despondency sounded in his voice.

"Yes, on the whole it was pretty dull. It will be better in Cashmere."

"It would have been still better if you had never seen India at all,"

said Shere Ali.

"No; I don't say that. I had my good time in India--twenty-five years of it, the prime of my life. No; I have nothing to complain of," said Dewes.

Here was another difference brought to Shere Ali's eyes. He himself was still young; the prime years were before him, not behind. He looked down, even as Dewes had done, over that wide s.p.a.ce gay with colours as a garden of flowers; but in the one man's eyes there was a light of satisfaction, in the other's a gleam almost of hatred.

"You are not sorry you came out to India," he said. "Well, for my part,"

and his voice suddenly shook with pa.s.sion, "I wish to heaven I had never seen England."

Dewes turned about, a vacant stare of perplexity upon his face.

"Oh, come, I say!" he protested.

"I mean it!" cried Shere Ali. "It was the worst thing that could have happened. I shall know no peace of mind again, no contentment, no happiness, not until I am dead. I wish I were dead!"

And though he spoke in a low voice, he spoke with so much violence that Colonel Dewes was quite astounded. He was aware of no similiarity between his own case and that of Shere Ali. He had long since forgotten the exhortations of Luffe.

"Oh, come now," he repeated. "Isn't that a little ungrateful--what?"

He could hardly have chosen a word less likely to soothe the exasperated nerves of his companion. Shere Ali laughed harshly.

"I ought to be grateful?" said he.

"Well," said Dewes, "you have been to Eton and Oxford, you have seen London. All that is bound to have broadened your mind. Don't you feel that your mind has broadened?"