The Bridge Party was not a success—at least it was not
what Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested were accustomed to
consider a successful party. They arrived early, since
it was given in their honour, but most of the Indian
guests had arrived even earlier, and stood massed at
the farther side of the tennis lawns, doing nothing.
“It is only just five,” said Mrs. Turton. “My husband
will be up from his office in a moment and start
the thing. I have no idea what we have to do. It’s
the first time we’ve ever given a party like this at the
club. Mr. Heaslop, when I’m dead and gone will you
give parties like this? It’s enough to make the old
type of Burra Sahib turn in his grave.”
Ronny laughed deferentially. “You wanted something
not picturesque and we’ve provided it,” he remarked
to Miss Quested. “What do you think of the Aryan
Brother in a topi and spats?”
Neither she nor his mother answered. They were
gazing rather sadly over the tennis lawn. No, it was
not picturesque; the East, abandoning its secular
magnificence, was descending into a valley whose farther
side no man can see.
“The great point to remember is that no one who’s
here matters; those who matter don’t come. Isn’t
that so, Mrs. Turton?”
“Absolutely true,” said the great lady, leaning back.
She was “saving herself up,” as she called it—not for
anything that would happen that afternoon or even that
week, but for some vague future occasion when a high
official might come along and tax her social strength.
Most of her public appearances were marked by this air
of reserve.
Assured of her approbation, Ronny continued: “The
educated Indians will be no good to us if there’s a row,
it’s simply not worth while conciliating them, that’s
why they don’t matter. Most of the people you see
are seditious at heart, and the rest ’ld run squealing.
The cultivator—he’s another story. The Pathan—he’s
a man if you like. But these people—don’t imagine
they’re India.” He pointed to the dusky line beyond
the court, and here and there it flashed a pince-nez or
shuffled a shoe, as if aware that he was despising it.
European costume had lighted like a leprosy. Few had
yielded entirely, but none were untouched. There was a
silence when he had finished speaking, on both sides of
the court; at least, more ladies joined the English
group, but their words seemed to die as soon as uttered.
Some kites hovered overhead, impartial, over the kites
passed the mass of a vulture, and with an impartiality
exceeding all, the sky, not deeply coloured but translucent,
poured light from its whole circumference. It
seemed unlikely that the series stopped here. Beyond
the sky must not there be something that overarches
all the skies, more impartial even than they? Beyond
which again . . .
They spoke of Cousin Kate.
They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life
upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class
English people they actually were. Next year they
would do Quality Street or The Yeomen of the Guard.
Save for this annual incursion, they left literature alone.
The men had no time for it, the women did nothing that
they could not share with the men. Their ignorance of
the Arts was notable, and they lost no opportunity of
proclaiming it to one another; it was the Public School
attitude, flourishing more vigorously than it can yet
hope to do in England. If Indians were shop, the Arts
were bad form, and Ronny had repressed his mother
when she enquired after his viola; a viola was almost a
demerit, and certainly not the sort of instrument one
mentioned in public. She noticed now how tolerant and
conventional his judgments had become; when they had
seen Cousin Kate in London together in the past, he had
scorned it; now he pretended that it was a good play,
in order to hurt nobody’s feelings. An “unkind notice”
had appeared in the local paper, “the sort of thing no
white man could have written,” as Mrs. Lesley said.
The play was praised, to be sure, and so were the stage
management and the performance as a whole, but the notice
contained the following sentence: “Miss Derek, though
she charmingly looked her part, lacked the necessary
experience, and occasionally forgot her words.” This
tiny breath of genuine criticism had given deep offence,
not indeed to Miss Derek, who was as hard as nails, but
to her friends. Miss Derek did not belong to Chandrapore.
She was stopping for a fortnight with the McBrydes,
the police people, and she had been so good as
to fill up a gap in the cast at the last moment. A nice
impression of local hospitality she would carry away
with her.
“To work, Mary, to work,” cried the Collector, touching
his wife on the shoulder with a switch.
Mrs. Turton got up awkwardly. “What do you want
me to do? Oh, those purdah women! I never thought
any would come. Oh dear!”
A little group of Indian ladies had been gathering in a
third quarter of the grounds, near a rustic summer-house
in which the more timid of them had already taken
refuge. The rest stood with their backs to the company
and their faces pressed into a bank of shrubs. At
a little distance stood their male relatives, watching the
venture. The sight was significant: an island bared by
the turning tide, and bound to grow.
“I consider they ought to come over to me.”
“Come along, Mary, get it over.”
“I refuse to shake hands with any of the men, unless
it has to be the Nawab Bahadur.”
“Whom have we so far?” He glanced along the
line. “H’m! h’m! much as one expected. We know
why he’s here, I think—over that contract, and he wants
to get the right side of me for Mohurram, and he’s the
astrologer who wants to dodge the municipal building
regulations, and he’s that Parsi, and he’s—Hullo! there
he goes—smash into our hollyhocks. Pulled the left
rein when he meant the right. All as usual.”
“They ought never to have been allowed to drive in;
it’s so bad for them,” said Mrs. Turton, who had at last
begun her progress to the summer-house, accompanied by
Mrs. Moore, Miss Quested, and a terrier. “Why they
come at all I don’t know. They hate it as much as we
do. Talk to Mrs. McBryde. Her husband made her
give purdah parties until she struck.”
“This isn’t a purdah party,” corrected Miss Quested.
“Oh, really,” was the haughty rejoinder.
“Do kindly tell us who these ladies are,” asked Mrs.
Moore.
“You’re superior to them, anyway. Don’t forget
that. You’re superior to everyone in India except one
or two of the Ranis, and they’re on an equality.”
Advancing, she shook hands with the group and said a
few words of welcome in Urdu. She had learnt the lingo,
but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of
the politer forms and of the verbs only the imperative
mood. As soon as her speech was over, she enquired
of her companions, “Is that what you wanted?”
“Please tell these ladies that I wish we could speak
their language, but we have only just come to their
country.”
“Perhaps we speak yours a little,” one of the ladies
said.
“Why, fancy, she understands!” said Mrs. Turton.
“Eastbourne, Piccadilly, High Park Corner,” said
another of the ladies.
“Oh yes, they’re English-speaking.”
“But now we can talk: how delightful!” cried Adela,
her face lighting up.
“She knows Paris also,” called one of the onlookers.
“They pass Paris on the way, no doubt,” said Mrs.
Turton, as if she was describing the movements of
migratory birds. Her manner had grown more distant since
she had discovered that some of the group was Westernized,
and might apply her own standards to her.
“The shorter lady, she is my wife, she is Mrs.
Bhattacharya,” the onlooker explained. “The taller lady,
she is my sister, she is Mrs. Das.”
The shorter and the taller ladies both adjusted their
saris, and smiled. There was a curious uncertainty
about their gestures, as if they sought for a new formula
which neither East nor West could provide. When Mrs.
Bhattacharya’s husband spoke, she turned away from
him, but she did not mind seeing the other men. Indeed
all the ladies were uncertain, cowering, recovering,
giggling, making tiny gestures of atonement or despair
at all that was said, and alternately fondling the terrier
or shrinking from him. Miss Quested now had
her desired opportunity; friendly Indians were before
her, and she tried to make them talk, but she failed, she
strove in vain against the echoing walls of their civility.
Whatever she said produced a murmur of deprecation,
varying into a murmur of concern when she dropped her
pocket-handkerchief. She tried doing nothing, to see
what that produced, and they too did nothing. Mrs.
Moore was equally unsuccessful. Mrs. Turton waited
for them with a detached expression; she had known
what nonsense it all was from the first.
When they took their leave, Mrs. Moore had an impulse,
and said to Mrs. Bhattacharya, whose face she liked, “I
wonder whether you would allow us to call on you some
day.”
“When?” she replied, inclining charmingly.
“Whenever is convenient.”
“All days are convenient.”
“Thursday . . .”
“Most certainly.”
“We shall enjoy it greatly, it would be a real pleasure.
What about the time?”
“All hours.”
“Tell us which you would prefer. We’re quite
strangers to your country; we don’t know when you
have visitors,” said Miss Quested.
Mrs. Bhattacharya seemed not to know either. Her
gesture implied that she had known, since Thursdays
began, that English ladies would come to see her on
one of them, and so always stayed in. Everything
pleased her, nothing surprised. She added, “We leave
for Calcutta to-day.”
“Oh, do you?” said Adela, not at first seeing the
implication. Then she cried, “Oh, but if you do we shall
find you gone.”
Mrs. Bhattacharya did not dispute it. But her husband
called from the distance, “Yes, yes, you come to
us Thursday.”
“But you’ll be in Calcutta.”
“No, no, we shall not.” He said something swiftly
to his wife in Bengali. “We expect you Thursday.”
“Thursday . . .” the woman echoed.
“You can’t have done such a dreadful thing as to
put off going for our sake?” exclaimed Mrs. Moore.
“No, of course not, we are not such people.” He
was laughing.
“I believe that you have. Oh, please—it distresses
me beyond words.”
Everyone was laughing now, but with no suggestion
that they had blundered. A shapeless discussion
occurred, during which Mrs. Turton retired, smiling to
herself. The upshot was that they were to come
Thursday, but early in the morning, so as to wreck
the Bhattacharya plans as little as possible, and Mr.
Bhattacharya would send his carriage to fetch them, with
servants to point out the way. Did he know where
they lived? Yes, of course he knew, he knew everything;
and he laughed again. They left among a flutter
of compliments and smiles, and three ladies, who had
hitherto taken no part in the reception, suddenly shot
out of the summer-house like exquisitely coloured
swallows, and salaamed them.
Meanwhile the Collector had been going his rounds.
He made pleasant remarks and a few jokes, which were
applauded lustily, but he knew something to the discredit
of nearly every one of his guests, and was consequently
perfunctory. When they had not cheated, it was bhang,
women, or worse, and even the desirables wanted to get
something out of him. He believed that a “Bridge
Party” did good rather than harm, or he would not
have given one, but he was under no illusions, and at the
proper moment he retired to the English side of the lawn.
The impressions he left behind him were various. Many
of the guests, especially the humbler and less anglicized,
were genuinely grateful. To be addressed by so high
an official was a permanent asset. They did not mind
how long they stood, or how little happened, and when
seven o’clock struck, they had to be turned out. Others
were grateful with more intelligence. The Nawab
Bahadur, indifferent for himself and for the distinction
with which he was greeted, was moved by the mere
kindness that must have prompted the invitation. He
knew the difficulties. Hamidullah also thought that
the Collector had played up well. But others, such
as Mahmoud Ali, were cynical; they were firmly convinced
that Turton had been made to give the party by
his official superiors and was all the time consumed with
impotent rage, and they infected some who were inclined
to a healthier view. Yet even Mahmoud Ali was glad
he had come. Shrines are fascinating, especially when
rarely opened, and it amused him to note the ritual of
the English club, and to caricature it afterwards to his
friends.
After Mr. Turton, the official who did his duty best
was Mr. Fielding, the Principal of the little Government
College. He knew little of the district and less against
the inhabitants, so he was in a less cynical state of mind.
Athletic and cheerful, he romped about, making numerous
mistakes which the parents of his pupils tried to cover
up, for he was popular among them. When the moment
for refreshments came, he did not move back to the
English side, but burnt his mouth with gram. He talked
to anyone and he ate anything. Amid much that was
alien, he learnt that the two new ladies from England
had been a great success, and that their politeness in
wishing to be Mrs. Bhattacharya’s guests had pleased
not only her but all Indians who heard of it. It pleased
Mr. Fielding also. He scarcely knew the two new ladies,
still he decided to tell them what pleasure they had given
by their friendliness.
He found the younger of them alone. She was looking
through a nick in the cactus hedge at the distant Marabar
Hills, which had crept near, as was their custom at
sunset; if the sunset had lasted long enough, they would
have reached the town, but it was swift, being tropical.
He gave her his information, and she was so much
pleased and thanked him so heartily that he asked her
and the other lady to tea.
“I’ld like to come very much indeed, and so would Mrs.
Moore, I know.”
“I’m rather a hermit, you know.”
“Much the best thing to be in this place.”
“Owing to my work and so on, I don’t get up much to
the club.”
“I know, I know, and we never get down from it. I
envy you being with Indians.”
“Do you care to meet one or two?”
“Very, very much indeed; it’s what I long for. This
party to-day makes me so angry and miserable. I think
my countrymen out here must be mad. Fancy inviting
guests and not treating them properly! You and Mr.
Turton and perhaps Mr. McBryde are the only people
who showed any common politeness. The rest make
me perfectly ashamed, and it’s got worse and worse.”
It had. The Englishmen had intended to play up
better, but had been prevented from doing so by their
women folk, whom they had to attend, provide with
tea, advise about dogs, etc. When tennis began, the
barrier grew impenetrable. It had been hoped to have
some sets between East and West, but this was forgotten,
and the courts were monopolized by the usual club couples.
Fielding resented it too, but did not say so to the girl,
for he found something theoretical in her outburst. Did
she care about Indian music? he enquired; there was
an old professor down at the College, who sang.
“Oh, just what we wanted to hear. And do you know
Doctor Aziz?”
“I know all about him. I don’t know him. Would
you like him asked too?”
“Mrs. Moore says he is so nice.”
“Very well, Miss Quested. Will Thursday suit
you?”
“Indeed it will, and that morning we go to this Indian
lady’s. All the nice things are coming Thursday.”
“I won’t ask the City Magistrate to bring you. I know
he’ll be busy at that time.”
“Yes, Ronny is always hard-worked,” she replied,
contemplating the hills. How lovely they suddenly
were! But she couldn’t touch them. In front, like a
shutter, fell a vision of her married life. She and Ronny
would look into the club like this every evening, then
drive home to dress; they would see the Lesleys and the
Callendars and the Turtons and the Burtons, and invite
them and be invited by them, while the true India slid
by unnoticed. Colour would remain—the pageant of
birds in the early morning, brown bodies, white turbans,
idols whose flesh was scarlet or blue—and movement
would remain as long as there were crowds in the bazaar
and bathers in the tanks. Perched up on the seat of a
dogcart, she would see them. But the force that lies
behind colour and movement would escape her even more
effectually than it did now. She would see India always
as a frieze, never as a spirit, and she assumed that it
was a spirit of which Mrs. Moore had had a glimpse.
And sure enough they did drive away from the club
in a few minutes, and they did dress, and to dinner came
Miss Derek and the McBrydes, and the menu was:
Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage
bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be
plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines
on toast: the menu of Anglo-India. A dish might be
added or subtracted as one rose or fell in the official
scale, the peas might rattle less or more, the sardines
and the vermouth be imported by a different firm, but
the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by
servants who did not understand it. Adela thought
of the young men and women who had come out before
her, P. & O. full after P. & O. full, and had been set
down to the same food and the same ideas, and been
snubbed in the same good-humoured way until they
kept to the accredited themes and began to snub others.
“I should never get like that,” she thought, for she was
young herself; all the same she knew that she had come
up against something that was both insidious and tough,
and against which she needed allies. She must gather
around her at Chandrapore a few people who felt as she
did, and she was glad to have met Mr. Fielding and the
Indian lady with the unpronounceable name. Here at
all events was a nucleus; she should know much better
where she stood in the course of the next two days.
Miss Derek—she companioned a Maharani in a remote
Native State. She was genial and gay and made them
all laugh about her leave, which she had taken because
she felt she deserved it, not because the Maharani said
she might go. Now she wanted to take the Maharajah’s
motor-car as well; it had gone to a Chiefs’ Conference
at Delhi, and she had a great scheme for burgling it
at the junction as it came back in the train. She was
also very funny about the Bridge Party—indeed she
regarded the entire peninsula as a comic opera. “If
one couldn’t see the laughable side of these people one ’ld
be done for,” said Miss Derek. Mrs. McBryde—it was
she who had been the nurse—ceased not to exclaim, “Oh,
Nancy, how topping! Oh, Nancy, how killing! I wish I
could look at things like that.” Mr. McBryde did not
speak much; he seemed nice.
When the guests had gone, and Adela gone to bed,
there was another interview between mother and son.
He wanted her advice and support—while resenting
interference. “Does Adela talk to you much?” he
began. “I’m so driven with work, I don’t see her
as much as I hoped, but I hope she finds things comfortable.”
“Adela and I talk mostly about India. Dear, since
you mention it, you’re quite right—you ought to be more
alone with her than you are.”
“Yes, perhaps, but then people’ld gossip.”
“Well, they must gossip sometime! Let them
gossip.”
“People are so odd out here, and it’s not like home—one’s
always facing the footlights, as the Burra Sahib
said. Take a silly little example: when Adela went
out to the boundary of the club compound, and Fielding
followed her. I saw Mrs. Callendar notice it. They
notice everything, until they’re perfectly sure you’re
their sort.”
“I don’t think Adela ’ll ever be quite their sort—she’s
much too individual.”
“I know, that’s so remarkable about her,” he said
thoughtfully. Mrs. Moore thought him rather absurd.
Accustomed to the privacy of London, she could not
realize that India, seemingly so mysterious, contains
none, and that consequently the conventions have
greater force. “I suppose nothing’s on her mind,”
he continued.
“Ask her, ask her yourself, my dear boy.”
“Probably she’s heard tales of the heat, but of course
I should pack her off to the Hills every April—I’m not
one to keep a wife grilling in the Plains.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be the weather.”
“There’s nothing in India but the weather, my
dear mother; it’s the Alpha and Omega of the whole
affair.”
“Yes, as Mr. McBryde was saying, but it’s much
more the Anglo-Indians themselves who are likely to
get on Adela’s nerves. She doesn’t think they behave
pleasantly to Indians, you see.”
“What did I tell you?” he exclaimed, losing his gentle
manner. “I knew it last week. Oh, how like a woman
to worry over a side-issue!”
She forgot about Adela in her surprise. “A side-issue,
a side-issue?” she repeated. “How can it be
that?”
“We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving
pleasantly!”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say. We’re out here to do justice and keep
the peace. Them’s my sentiments. India isn’t a drawing-room.”
“Your sentiments are those of a god,” she said quietly,
but it was his manner rather than his sentiments that
annoyed her.
Trying to recover his temper, he said, “India likes
gods.”
“And Englishmen like posing as gods.”
“There’s no point in all this. Here we are, and we’re
going to stop, and the country’s got to put up with us,
gods or no gods. Oh, look here,” he broke out, rather
pathetically, “what do you and Adela want me to do?
Go against my class, against all the people I respect and
admire out here? Lose such power as I have for doing
good in this country because my behaviour isn’t pleasant?
You neither of you understand what work is, or
you ’ld never talk such eyewash. I hate talking like
this, but one must occasionally. It’s morbidly sensitive
to go on as Adela and you do. I noticed you both at the
club to-day—after the Burra Sahib had been at all that
trouble to amuse you. I am out here to work, mind,
to hold this wretched country by force. I’m not a
missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental
sympathetic literary man. I’m just a servant of the
Government; it’s the profession you wanted me to choose
myself, and that’s that. We’re not pleasant in India,
and we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something
more important to do.”
He spoke sincerely. Every day he worked hard in
the court trying to decide which of two untrue accounts
was the less untrue, trying to dispense justice fearlessly,
to protect the weak against the less weak, the incoherent
against the plausible, surrounded by lies and flattery.
That morning he had convicted a railway clerk of
overcharging pilgrims for their tickets, and a Pathan of
attempted rape. He expected no gratitude, no recognition
for this, and both clerk and Pathan might appeal,
bribe their witnesses more effectually in the interval,
and get their sentences reversed. It was his duty. But
he did expect sympathy from his own people, and except
from new-comers he obtained it. He did think he ought
not to be worried about “Bridge Parties” when the
day’s work was over and he wanted to play tennis with
his equals or rest his legs upon a long chair.
He spoke sincerely, but she could have wished with
less gusto. How Ronny revelled in the drawbacks of his
situation! How he did rub it in that he was not in
India to behave pleasantly, and derived positive satisfaction
therefrom! He reminded her of his public-schooldays.
The traces of young-man humanitarianism
had sloughed off, and he talked like an intelligent and
embittered boy. His words without his voice might
have impressed her, but when she heard the self-satisfied
lilt of them, when she saw the mouth moving so
complacently and competently beneath the little red nose,
she felt, quite illogically, that this was not the last word
on India. One touch of regret—not the canny substitute
but the true regret from the heart—would have made
him a different man, and the British Empire a different
institution.
“I’m going to argue, and indeed dictate,” she said,
clinking her rings. “The English are out here to be
pleasant.”
“How do you make that out, mother?” he asked, speaking
gently again, for he was ashamed of his irritability.
“Because India is part of the earth. And God has
put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other.
God . . . is . . . love.” She hesitated, seeing how much
he disliked the argument, but something made her go on.
“God has put us on earth to love our neighbours and to
show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how
we are succeeding.”
He looked gloomy, and a little anxious. He knew this
religious strain in her, and that it was a symptom of
bad health; there had been much of it when his stepfather
died. He thought, “She is certainly ageing, and
I ought not to be vexed with anything she says.”
“The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God. . .
The sincere if impotent desire wins His blessing. I think
every one fails, but there are so many kinds of failure.
Good will and more good will and more good will. Though
I speak with the tongues of . . .”
He waited until she had done, and then said gently,
“I quite see that. I suppose I ought to get off to my
files now, and you’ll be going to bed.”
“I suppose so, I suppose so.” They did not part for
a few minutes, but the conversation had become unreal
since Christianity had entered it. Ronny approved of
religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem,
but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.
Then he would say in respectful yet decided tones, “I
don’t think it does to talk about these things, every
fellow has to work out his own religion,” and any fellow
who heard him muttered, “Hear!”
Mrs. Moore felt that she had made a mistake in mentioning
God, but she found him increasingly difficult to
avoid as she grew older, and he had been constantly in
her thoughts since she entered India, though oddly enough
he satisfied her less. She must needs pronounce his
name frequently, as the greatest she knew, yet she had
never found it less efficacious. Outside the arch there
seemed always an arch, beyond the remotest echo a
silence. And she regretted afterwards that she had not
kept to the real serious subject that had caused her to
visit India—namely the relationship between Ronny and
Adela. Would they, or would they not, succeed in
becoming engaged to be married?
