Wives to Burn, page 16
“What about the bird that brought me my tea this morning? He was a big Hindu, with a scar on his right cheek, and a gray walrus mustache.”
“He’s fairly new here, I believe,” Brinker said; “I’ve only noticed him about these last few days. Don’t recall having heard his name, in fact.”
“Was he here last night when you came to Seaside House?”
“I didn’t notice him. But then as you know, I didn’t go in. I waited on the veranda for Mr. Hatton.”
“I don’t mean the time you were here with Hatton,” Gabriel said. “I mean the time before—when you came with James Curring.”
Brinker stared blankly at the detective. “Who told you I was here with Curring?” he asked.
“Well, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was—after a fashion. That is, I walked as far as the corner of the garden with Curring.”
“And then you hurried back to warn Mrs. Curring that her husband was on the warpath?”
“I see now.” Brinker seemed relieved. “You’ve been talking to Rhoda. She told you of my visit?”
“She told me a lot things. I was just wondering why you hadn’t told them to me yourself, since you’ve gone to all the trouble of coming down here to pay me a call before breakfast.”
Brinker took out a handkerchief and blew his nose deliberately. “I came here to exculpate myself,” he said through the handkerchief, carefully weighing every word. “I didn’t see it was my place to incriminate another.”
“You know what the D.O. says about obstructing justice.”
“But I’m not obstructing justice. I’ve merely neglected to relate perfectly innocent circumstances which might place poor old Curring in a bad light.”
“For instance?”
“Well, a casual witness might say that Curring met Lucy Steel at the station when she arrived last evening. As a matter of fact, he was there to meet me.”
“Tell me more,” said Gabriel.
“Curring sent word yesterday afternoon to ask me to meet him in the refreshment room of the station, fixing the hour. When I got there, the Madras Mail was just pulling out and Curring was standing on the platform, talking to a rather attractive blond woman. Naturally, when he came over to me, I asked him about his gaudy new friend. He said he hadn’t the slightest notion who she might be—that she had merely asked directions to the dak bungalow.”
“And you believe him?”
“I see no reason not to. After all, it was quite natural for her to address the only European she saw on the platform.”
“You don’t think his rendezvous with you was just a ruse to explain his being at the station when the Madras Mail came in?”
“It’s possible, of course. On the other hand, Curring did have a legitimate reason for wanting to talk to me. His affairs have been going very badly of late. Indigo plantations practically gone to pot, in fact. The Bank of Shakkarpur holds several considerable notes of his that he has no prospect of meeting. He was wondering what the new bank manager would do about the notes when I leave, and whether it wouldn’t be better to give up and go through bankruptcy. We discussed the matter over several chota pegs, and then went for a walk along the beach.”
“As far as Seaside House?”
“Beyond, if I’m not mistaken. Then we came back.”
“You didn’t see Lucy Steel come down the hill to Seaside House as you were walking along the beach?”
“I didn’t, no. I can’t say about Curring. He didn’t mention it, in any event. When we got as far as the corner of the hotel garden, Curring suddenly said, ‘Damn it all, I’m going in and have it out with Oaks!’ ”
“About Rhoda, was it?”
“That’s what I supposed, naturally, and I still think it was in the back of his mind, although Jim Curring is not a chap to talk about his domestic troubles. He had another story—about Oaks getting him into some jam with Government.”
“How?”
“Well, it seems that Fred Oaks claims to have found the same geological formations on Curring’s plantations as in the Vizagapatam manganese fields—post-tertiary with outcroppings of Gondwana strata, I think—and talked Curring into doing a little speculative mining. Curring ordered dynamite, and Oaks hired the labor through Hajji Ahmed. Oaks paid the bills and was to get a small share in the company that would be formed to exploit the manganese—if there was any. Curring was of course delighted at the prospect of getting out of his financial difficulties, and readily agreed to everything—including Oaks’s plea for secrecy. Then the dynamite disappeared, and he began to suspect that he was being used as a blind to furnish explosives for some Moslem uprising. He spent the afternoon talking to Hajji Ahmed, who of course denied everything. Then he made the appointment with me, to ask my advice.”
“Why didn’t he go straight to the D.O. and tell his story?”
“I don’t know, really. He seemed to think that Hatton wouldn’t believe him. Might think he was an accomplice of Oaks. Queer chap, Curring. Never was any love lost between him and the D.O. At any rate, he preferred to have it out with Oaks himself.”
“Why did you get Rhoda Curring to put in her oar?”
“Because I rather like Curring, and didn’t want to see him get into any worse trouble. I thought his wife would keep him from doing anything rash—if only for the sake of Oaks.”
“And then you went home to your game of bridge?”
“Wasn’t much of a game,” Brinker said. “We didn’t finish a single rubber, what with the D.O. buzzing off every quarter hour on one thing or another, and dragging me with him.”
Gabriel stood up, replaced the packet of letters he had been reading tenderly in the trunk, closed the lid. For a long time he stood looking out the window, his eyes half closed against the dazzling blue of the Bay of Bengal.
“Brinker,” he said after a long pause, “I think I know who killed Lucy Steel and Gwendolyn Small.”
“Good!” the banker exclaimed. “I hope you see that they get what’s coming to them.”
“I’ll do my best,” the detective said. “Do you happen to know where Jim Curring is this morning?”
“No, I don’t. Home, I fancy.”
“You didn’t stop by the Curring bungalow on your way over here, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. I was rather in a hurry to get to you before you left the hotel.”
Gabriel continued to look out the window. “You know, Brinker,” he said, “I have a sneaking hunch that Curring didn’t come home last night.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Riot at the Station
At daybreak, Fred Oaks was safely if uncomfortably hidden in a pile of empty boxes on a balcony opposite the railway station. The balcony jutted from the second story of the shop of a Marwari dealer in religious ornaments, specializing in lingams and other Shiviate trappings. The second story was crowded with empty boxes these days, because the Marwari was doing a land-office business in lingams imported from Japan—this year’s Shivarat pilgrims being apparently unprejudiced against having their phallic emblems stamped “Made in Osaka” particularly as they were large and handsome, made of imitation ivory or bronze, and costing no more than the crude native-made lingams of wood or soapstone. Fred had picked the place because of its proximity to the station and because of the obvious pragmatism of the importer of phalli—whose good-will he purchased by the old expedient of giving him half of a hundred-rupee note and promising the other half on good behavior. The Marwari was behaving very well.
Fred had a good view of the station, and when the sun came up, he knew he would not have much longer to wait. He had sent a chit to Ganeshi Lal, saying there had been a slip-up in the arrangements for the delivery of the rifles, and suggesting how they had best be taken possession of. Ganeshi Lal did not have to be told twice.
The men began to drift into the station half an hour before the arrival of the Mail from Madras. Fred spotted them at once, although they were a motley lot—Ooria coolies, water venders, beggars, pilgrims, bikhri-wallas. Something about each one of them—perhaps a sort of impatient muscularity—distinguished them from the legitimate passengers. He chuckled with satisfaction as he saw the bullock carts take up their strategic positions, and approved Ganeshi Lal’s sense of timing as the sacred bull was maneuvered into the crowd, just as the train pulled into the station. He did not see the exact technique used on the bull, but he heard the bellow, and saw the instant outbreak of the make-believe riot in front of the station.
It was not entirely make-believe, either. The two Moslems who had been set upon because they were accused of striking Nandi, the sacred bull of Shiva, were soundly whacked. So were the Hindu whackers, when the first Moslem reinforcements arrived to aid their fellows. And there were encores all around when the police came and began laying on indiscriminately with their lathis.
Ganeshi’s men kept the uproar and pate-cracking going in front of the station until the train was again on its way. The distraction was so successful that no one noticed that the dozen large packing cases which had been unloaded from the luggage van had been immediately appropriated and loaded upon waiting bullock carts. No one that is, except the Assistant Station Master (who was quickly overcome and locked in the men’s room for third-class passengers), and Fred Oaks (who enjoyed every moment of it), and Virginia Hatton.
Fred was so fascinated by the neatness and artistry by which Ganeshi Lal had accomplished the rape of the contraband rifles that he didn’t notice Virginia until the last of the bullock carts was rolling down the dusty road.
The girl was standing in the doorway of the first-class waiting room. The glittering debris of a broken window pane lay at her feet, and an occasional overripe mango spattered against the wall beside her, but she seemed completely indifferent to the battle still going on before her. She even ignored the efforts of the Subadar of Police to get her back inside the station, out of range of stray missiles. She continued to stand in the doorway, a determined little figure in a blue linen dress and a big straw hat with black ribbons that hung down her back, like a school girl watching a parade, craning her neck and standing on tiptoe to see something or someone she was especially looking for. When Fred saw her, she had just caught sight of the bullock carts, rumbling down the dusty road, and from her demeanor he knew that she realized that the big packing cases contained rifles—the rifles that had been addressed to her. For a moment he thought she was going to call to the Subadar, to send him and his men off in pursuit of the bullock carts, but she didn’t. She continued to turn her head and crane her neck, looking for someone.
Fred swallowed hard, as he watched from bis hiding place on the balcony across the street. He wanted very much to go to her, but that was impossible, of course. Besides, there was no good in his telling her how much he admired her recklessness in coming down alone to beard the lion, to take over the cases she knew were contraband. There was no good in his trying to be protective and rushing her out of range of the trumped-up riot, which was subsiding anyhow. She was obviously making a last minute attempt to show him, by her own courage, that he was following a blind and futile road and that he had better detour while there was still time to follow her to a useful and social life.
Useful life! Strange that he should be thinking in such terms. He had never pretended, even to himself, that his own life had been anything but useless, yet he had always been content with it—until last night. Ever since he fled from Seaside House, with the fragrance of Virginia’s kiss still sweet upon his lips, he had been thinking of the emptiness of his petty triumphs in the past, the hollow ring of excitement which had been his music for so many years, the paltry use to which he had put the independence he prized so highly! He had even questioned, for the first time, this thing he was doing in India—not the violence of it, which was unimportant, but the fact that it was destructive, illogical. Why wouldn’t it be just as exciting, he seemed to hear Virginia say, to make all the perverse factors of modern India work together, instead of driving them further apart? Shakkarpur was modern India in a microcosm: The tradition-steeped fanaticism of Hajji Ahmed; the quiet, mystic wisdom of Shivaji Lal; the agnostic, aggressive modernism of the younger Lal; the selfless Occidental science of Dr. Forsythe; even the stern, colorless, English justice of Reginald Hatton. Why wouldn’t it be exciting to take a hand in welding them into the new India—with Virginia? Probably it would be. Anything would be exciting with Virginia—anywhere.
He crawled a little farther from his packing case to see her better. The girl was still looking for someone. The proud stance of her blue-clad figure, young, eager, brave, was calling to Fred, eloquently, persistently. He rose to his knees to answer, then, with a deep pang of forlorn hopelessness, sank back again. It was no use. By his own actions he had cut himself off from her forever. He could not stay here with her because British justice would separate them. He could not take her away with him because in fairness to the girl he could not condemn her to the fugitive’s life he had chosen for himself. He had spoken the truth last night when he said it was too late. He wanted her desperately, yet he knew he could never have her. He would stand by the decision he had made. He would put Virginia and Shakkarpur behind him just as quickly as possible—and he would do it irrevocably, so there would be no regrets from any quarter.
He had finished his job in Shakkarpur. Ganeshi Lal and his Hindu hot-heads had been furnished with rifles. Hajji Ahmed and the Moslems had dynamite. They would be fighting by nightfall, and the ferment of unrest would be carried across India by the thousands of the pilgrims of both sects when they returned home. Fred wouldn’t even, have to start the fighting, probably. The little melee at the station would be enough impetus to carry through the day, building up to a violent climax at night. If it didn’t, he had two sure-fire devices in reserve. He would see that a pig was released in the Mosque, and a sacred bull killed somewhere near the Temple of Shiva. That would be all that was needed. The gentlemen Fred had met in Burgos should be well pleased. Yes, he could pull out tonight.
Fred turned his back on the station, tore a sheet of paper from his notebook, began writing:
Dear Rhoda:
Last night you wanted me to take you away from Shakkarpur on my own terms. If you still want to get away, here are the terms: the railway, of course, is out of the question. However, there is an indigo dhow from down the coast tied up at River Ghat today. Since it is unloading indigo to be fermented in your husband’s vats, you will have a legitimate excuse to visit it. Talk to the captain, and arrange for him to sail us down the coast as far as the first port of French India. Yanaon will do, if he can’t make Pondicherry, although we will have a harder time getting transportation beyond. See that the dhow is stocked with enough civilized food and drink for the trip; nothing fancy; just a tin or two so that we won’t have to subsist entirely on dried fish and cold boiled rice, but not enough to arouse suspicion ashore. Arrange to go aboard after dark, and you had better forget about luggage. I’ll join you aboard by nine-thirty or ten and tell the captain that we had better get under way immediately after.
I shall be eternally grateful to you, Rhoda dear, if you can make these arrangements—although I cannot promise to be eternally faithful. You know exactly how I feel in the matter, I think. We shall merely be a couple of rogues together—and for as long as we can stand the sight of each other, which probably won’t be inconveniently long for either of us.
If you can possibly make the arrangements with the captain of the coastal boat, just take a ghari to Chunder Bose’s godown before three this afternoon, and ask for Major Smith. There is no Major Smith, of course, but I shall know then that everything is in order, and will join you aboard tonight.
Yours,
F.
Fred arranged for the Marwari to send the chit to Rhoda. Curring’s bungalow. He was fairly certain that Rhoda would not fail him.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Listening Woman
During the course of the morning Hindu crowds set fire to four Mohammedan butcher shops rumored to be selling beef. Moslems retaliated by wrecking six Hindu shops in the cotton bazaar as a starter, then by dismantling a Hindu chhinal-khana and chucking into the river the Madam and eight bedizened, bewildered inmates, still tired and sleepy from the overwork of pilgrim season. A Hindu mob caught a Mohammedan elder and pulled his beard out in handfuls—a humiliating experience for one of the Faith. The police and Dr. Forsythe’s clinic were never busier. And through it all, at irregular intervals, the bullock carts which had rolled away from the railway station just after the arrival of the Mail from Madras, returned to Chunder Bose’s godown, their large packing cases now hidden under loads of sugar cane or millet or sacks of dal.
Ganeshi Lal, the sleeves of his gaudy silk shirt rolled up, was himself directing the unpacking and the storing of the rifles. His wife, her dainty hands and bright sari smeared with cosmolene, was taking an active part.
The actual work of unpacking was being performed by the pseudo-drivers of bullock carts and those principals of the railway station riot who were not in jail. They were husky Orientals, ex-sepoys and Calcutta pahare-wallas, most of them, and they could all handle a rifle. They constituted Ganeshi Lal’s army of liberty—a small army, to be sure, but large enough to take over the railway station, the telegraph office, the bank, the District Officer’s headquarters, and the police station with its miniature arsenal. Troops would probably be despatched from Andherabad, the nearest cantonment, and that would be the signal for an uprising at Andherabad. Young Lal had been in communication with a militant Swarajist there. First, however, the possibility of opposition from the local Moslems must be removed. The Moslems had dynamite. It must be destroyed—tonight.
Early in the afternoon, Shivaji Lal came in. The old Brahman squatted on his haunches, watching in detached silence as his son bustled officiously about, gesturing ostentatiously with a .38 revolver, a little souvenir from America that the younger Lal had smuggled past the customs on his return to India. As the afternoon wore on, the old man’s solemn expression grew more and more wistful. At last he spoke to his son’s wife.
