Wives to Burn, page 2
His slow, irresponsible smile made him look younger than his 30 years, but his eyes made him look older. They were searching, cynical eyes, dark with disillusion. They gave the impression that there was a little of the rascal in Fred Oaks, just as his smile gave the even stronger impression that there was much that was likable about him. The two traits had a contradictory appeal to women, who undoubtedly explained to themselves that he really had a good heart and needed only the steadying influence of a great love to become a solid citizen; whereupon they could go ahead and admire his proud forehead, his thin, sensitive nose, his stubborn chin, and his wavy hair. They probably would never admit that if his hair had been straight and darker and parted in the middle, he might have been taken for a gigolo.
Fred Oaks was not a gigolo. He was not even a remittance man, although he might have been if he had had any relatives sufficiently interested in him to remit. He had never found any difficulty in living by his own resources. He did a number of things well, but found little satisfaction in the act of doing them—not even in making love. Women were mildly amusing, but they rapidly became either predatory or monotonous or both; and they were never as helpless as they pretended or as independent as they thought. They were neither as stimulating as wine—and the morning after was worse—nor as soothing as opium—and opium made him violently ill. Most of the men who had posed as his friends made him violently ill, too, although he was always careful not to puncture their pose until after he had used them. They were his career.
Technically, Fred Oaks was a soldier of fortune, although he had never loved fortune enough to hang on to it when he had it within his grasp; and he was a rotten soldier. He had tried being a soldier, of course. He liked the idea of danger—it was the only true escape from boredom he had found—but he had a strong aversion to the idea of dying, impersonally and untidily, on some battlefield. This was strange because, in his more soberly morose moments, he had no particular love for living either. It may have been just the perverse result of the notion that his death would make no difference to anyone. If one person, only one, anywhere, would have been somehow affected by his disappearance from the face of the earth, he probably would have been glad to die—just to be contrary. That is why, he told himself, he had pulled out of the Spanish civil war, after six weeks and four brief engagements, although he told people he had quit because he got no pleasure out of killing women and children.
And the reason he had left Spain—not the war—was that an Intelligence Officer in Burgos had discovered that Fred had been born in India and could speak Hindustani. A court-martial for desertion would only be robbing the cause of a potentially useful agent, he decided, so the Intelligence Officer called in five of his colleagues. None of the officers spoke Spanish, and their English, when they shouted at Fred, was thick with both German and Italian accents. “We do not trust you, Oaks,” they told him, “but we need you. And we have men in Shakkarpur who will watch your every move. So that if you attempt to desert again, or if you plan to betray us—” The implied menace did not bother Fred Oaks in the least. He was quite pleased at having escaped an Insurgent firing squad, and he was even more pleased at the prospect of doing what he liked best: Employing his charm and disarming smile to take advantage of people who otherwise would be only too happy to take advantage of him. It was because of this that he visited the Currings.
He had no special desire to take advantage of Rhoda Curring; it was her husband that he had been using—professionally, of course. Once or twice Fred wondered if Curring didn’t suspect that he might be an unwitting tool of international intrigue, but always dismissed the thought immediately. James Curring was a lumbering, obtuse sort of person with only one-tenth the awareness that Rhoda had.
Rhoda came out of her bedroom, a flutter of pale gold chiffon which was just the right shade to set off her halo of copper-colored hair. She was a small woman, rather thin—but not too thin. Otherwise she would not have dared, even on the excuse of the heat, to wear such a provocatively diaphanous dress, which struck an exact balance between concealment and revelation. From gallant habit, Fred arose and held out his hand. Rhoda held out two hands, with just the proper angle of invitation between them, and before he knew what he was doing, Fred had kissed her. He regretted it instantly. The light in her green eyes disturbed him.
“Fred darling,” she said, “we’re in luck. Jim’s been detained at the plantations. He won’t be back before tomorrow.”
“Unexpectedly, of course.”
“But naturally, darling. Otherwise I wouldn’t dare ask you to dinner. You know how people talk.”
“Yes, I know.” Fred wanted to say that something equally unexpected had come up which made it impossible for him to stay for dinner, but he didn’t. He found himself, for once in his life, at a loss for words. Staring down into Rhoda Curring’s keen, sensuous face, he realized that he had known her complete psychology the moment he first laid eyes on her. She was a romantic, who had dreamed of India with the aid of Rudyard Kipling, and who had married a gaunt, taciturn, raw-boned, painstaking man 20 years her senior, largely because he represented her chance to see the glamorous East. She had thought she was coming to the India of durbars and levees and Maharajahs’ garden parties, of gay uniforms and polo and gallant flirtations in fabulous cities sweet with incense and heavy with the mystery of the Arabian Nights. Instead she had found herself a prisoner in Shakkarpur—in an India of squalor and unbelievable smells, of people who lived in hovels plastered with cow-dung and drank water from tanks green with scum, of damp hot nights that strangled sleep and brought on the maddening rash of prickly heat; of, above all, the soul-suffocating boredom of the small out-station. Fred Oaks supposed he should pity her, but he didn’t. He felt nothing for Rhoda Curring but the most profound indifference. The only reason he was staying for dinner at all, he told himself, was that her Madrassi cook made a superlative yellow chicken kedgeree, and Fred thought he could detect the pungent aroma of curry drifting from the kitchen.
When the dinner turned out to be overdone mutton chops and curried brinjal, he began to lay plans for an early escape. He talked just enough to divert the conversation into channels other than the one he felt was inevitable. He was unable, however, to prevent Rhoda’s sudden question:
“Freddie darling, are you in love with that silly Hatton girl?”
Fred put down his fork with a ring of annoyance and turned on his most charming scowl. “Virginia Hatton is not silly,” he said, “but I am not in love with her. As a matter of fact, I have always made it a point of dishonor never to become emotionally involved with any woman I happen to make love to.”
“What a pity!” Rhoda said. “Because you make love so extraordinarily well that some day your emotions are going to play you a rotten trick and get completely out of control. Or someone else’s control.”
Fred laughed. “Certainly not yours, Rhoda.”
“Why not? If I were in love with you, I should definitely do drastic things to keep you.”
“But you’re not in love with me,” said Fred jauntily, to cover a feeling of uneasiness.
Rhoda leaned across the table, suddenly very tense, and grasped his hand in her slim, hot fingers. Her lips were white beneath the lipstick as she said, “As a matter of fact, Fred darling, I am.”
“Nonsense.” Fred wondered if he could best break her mood by being insulting, or merely paternal. “It’s just the heat,” he said.
“It’s not the heat.”
“It’s the heat,” Fred repeated, “plus Shakkarpur, plus the rest of India, plus a virulent case of chronic ennui. Why don’t you get Jim to send you to Ootacamund or some other hill station for the hot weather?”
“When are you leaving Shakkarpur, Fred?”
“Next week, probably.”
Rhoda’s hand still clasped Fred’s. Her fingers tightened. “Take me with you, darling,” she said.
“No.”
“Please. I’m not asking you to marry me.”
“Thanks.” Fred grinned broadly. “I appreciate your disinterested offer and all that, but—”
“There is someone else, isn’t there, Fred?”
“Of course there isn’t. I’m traveling light, that’s all. I can’t be encumbered with excess luggage.”
“I won’t be excess luggage, Fred. I swear it. I’d go mad if you went away without me. I do love you, darling. And please don’t tell me again it’s the heat.”
“All right, it’s not the heat; it’s the humidity.” Fred’s grin grew broader, but he was getting more and more uncomfortable. He tried unsuccessfully to disengage his hand.
“You are in love with that Hatton girl!”
“I’m not.”
“If you were, I think I could kill her.”
“You say that very glibly—with the glibness of someone who has never killed a human being.”
“Have you ever killed anyone, Fred?”
Fred looked at her curiously as he deliberately wiped his lips with his napkin. A disquieting thought flashed through his mind. Was this an act—to trap him into some damning admission? She did seem sincere…. “I wonder if I could have some more of that brinjal curry,” he said. “It’s very good.”
Rhoda at last withdrew her hand. She stood up, her lips parted, as though ready for a peroration. Before she could say anything, the bearded khansama came in and murmured something to her in Urdu. Without troubling to excuse herself, Rhoda went quickly to the side door.
Fred turned to watch her, but she held the door partly closed, so that he could not see who was outside. She talked for a moment in low tones. He heard the indistinct rumble of a man’s voice answering her, but he did not recognize it. He was about to get up and satisfy his curiosity, when Rhoda banged the door shut and came back directly to Fred. She bent over him, grasped his shoulders. When he looked at her, he felt a jab of cold at the pit of his stomach.
The change in Rhoda’s face was startling. The pink spots of make-up on her cheeks seemed detached, unreal, like paint on the waxen cheeks of a doll. Her drawn lips were tight against her teeth. The avid restlessness, the thwarted hunger in her green eyes, was gone. In its place there was a nameless fear, closely akin to horror. Her hands trembled violently as they gripped his shoulders. With great effort she managed to say:
“Darling—the Calcutta Express—in half an hour—we could take it….”
“No, Rhoda.”
“Is that—final—Freddie?”
“Final as the Day of Judgment.”
“Then you take it, Freddie—alone.”
“But I’m not leaving until next week, Rhoda.”
“You’re leaving now. You must.”
“Now, wait a minute.” Twenty minutes ago, Fred would have been overjoyed at the prospect of escape from the Curring bungalow. Now that Rhoda wanted him to go, he resisted. It wasn’t entirely the obstructionist in him, either. He had to know what caused the amazing change in Rhoda. He asked, “Was that your husband you were talking to just now? Did he come back unexpectedly?”
“Jim would have come into his own house. He wouldn’t have talked to me through the screen door.”
“Was it the durwan, with advance word that Jim would be back tonight, after all?”
“This has nothing to do with Jim. It was no one you know, Fred. You must go! It’s not safe for you to stay!”
“Safe?” Fred threw back his head and laughed loudly—but briefly. His teeth clicked shut. “Why isn’t it safe?” he snapped.
“You know better than I do, Fred. Too many people know. You must leave, Fred! Now!”
Fred Oaks leaned back in his chair and smiled. He meant it to be his usual disarming smile, but it wasn’t. It was cryptic, with a hint of defiance at the corners of his mouth. Something of Rhoda’s panic had communicated itself to him, yet he couldn’t follow her command to flee. He had to find out what it was all about. He had to make her talk. And if he left now, he would learn nothing.
“I can’t go yet,” he said. “I haven’t had my coffee and brandy.”
“Please go, Fred!”
“Now, Rhoda! What kind of a hostess have you turned out to be? You wouldn’t send a guest away without—”
“Fred!” Rhoda stared at him, her whole slim body frozen in a gesture of frantic despair. Her back was rigid, her elbows pressed closely against her sides. Only her fingers moved, twisting and untwisting a napkin she had picked up from the table. Then, without a word, she turned and walked swiftly into the next room. A door slammed.
Fred looked thoughtfully at the closed door for an instant. Then he got up. She would be back. She always came back. He got up and sauntered to the buffet in which he knew Jim Curring kept his cigars. He found a Trichinopoly cheroot, lighted it, sat down again. The khansama came in to clear away the dishes.
“Coffee and brandy, khansama,” Fred ordered, loudly enough to be heard in the next room.
The red-turbaned servant set a cup and a verre à dégustation in front of him. Fred drank half the brandy, poured the rest into his coffee. His eyes did not leave the door of Rhoda’s room as he sat puffing nervously on his cheroot. When the tobacco had burned to within an inch of his lips he began to wonder about the strange silence in the house. He called the khansama again.
“Tell the mem-sahib I am leaving,” he said.
“The mem-sahib is not here, Sahib.”
Fred dropped ashes down the front of his shirt. “Not here?”
“No, Sahib. She left by the back door ten minutes ago.”
Fred sprang up, tamped out his cheroot in the bottom of his coffee cup. He brushed past the khansama, strode through the drawing-room, flung open Rhoda’s door.
The bedroom was empty. There were traces of a hurried departure—a half-open dresser drawer, high-heeled slippers that had been kicked off and lay as they had fallen, clothes hangers on the floor, the pale gold chiffon dress thrown across a chair in careless haste. Fred was asking himself why, if she were in such an obvious hurry, Rhoda had taken time to change. Then the gleam of metal caught his eye. He stepped forward, intent on half a dozen lead-nosed brass cylinders scattered on the bed—as though an uncertain hand, trembling with nervous precipitation, had spilled them there while loading a revolver.
Fred picked up one of the little cylinders. It was a .32 caliber cartridge. He dropped it into his pocket, rushed from the room, leaped down the veranda steps three at a time.
Chapter Three
The Trouble Brewer
Reginald Hatton was much too important a man to be District Officer of the zil’a of Shakkarpur. He was convinced of it. Shakkarpur had, by easy stages, become perhaps the most insignificant port between Bengal and the Coromandel Coast. The craftsmen who made its once-famous muslins and chintzes had been displaced, first by Manchester white goods and more recently by Japanese cotton. Its garrison had been moved away by Kitchener in 1906. Most of its sugar factories had closed in the late 1920’s. Even the carefree Calcutta ladies who used to drink shandygaff on the white beach and run squealing into the surf under the tutelage of sleek black Tamil fishermen with miterlike bamboo hats, no longer came to Shakkarpur. Thus when Shakkarpur suddenly threatened to become important not only to India, but to the Empire, perhaps to the peace of the world, Reginald Hatton was delighted.
For the past ten days there had been several terse warnings from Delhi. Look out for trouble…. Look out for Hindu-Moslem riots…. Look out for subversive activities…. Send for troops at first sign of outbreak…. India must be kept in hand while the situation at home is rolling toward the climax…. Germany is determined to go into Poland and England is just as determined not to go into anothèr Munich…. Hatton gloried in ignoring the Viceregal warnings. He welcomed the rotation of Hindu and Mohammedan calendars which brought Muharram and Shivarat so close together, and he was glad that Shakkarpur had both a great temple of Shiva and a mosque sacred to the Shia Mohammedans—because he could see how these facts might suit the ambitions of the new imperialists.
It was an ingenious technique the upstart empire builders were using against England: Keep the British lion worried overseas so his claws can’t be too sharp in Europe. The Germans were busy among the Boers in South Africa and would doubtless continue to be busy, even if war were declared and Herzog gave way to Smuts and a strong pro-Empire policy, British prestige was being sapped in Egypt. The Arabs had been goaded into bloody revolt in Palestine. It was normal that India should come next. Keep India in ferment and England won’t dare withdraw her 100,000 white troops when trouble explodes in Europe. Make India dissatisfied and the great source of manpower will no longer be available to augment a British army fighting a European war. It was simple—and Shakkarpur offered an ideal starting point. But Shakkarpur would remain calm. Moreover, it would remain calm without a show of force. No matter what happened in Europe, Reginald Hatton wouldn’t need troops. He merely called Hajji Ahmed and Ganeshi Lal to his bungalow late that afternoon and talked sense to them.
Hajji Ahmed was head of the Moslem community. He was portly, bewhiskered, and rich. He made his money furnishing coolies to labor recruiters from the Malayan rubber estates, the tea gardens, the indigo plantations—anybody who needed contract labor. He also dabbled in foreign exchange and cotton futures. He kept a herd of cows, which he allowed to roam the Hindu bazaars by day, because the Hindus, regarding the cows as sacred, would feed them. At night the cows came home to be milked and Hajji Ahmed sold the milk to the Hindus.
