The Rains Came/Part II

Mr. Bannerjee's house was that rare thing in Ranchipur, a house constructed of lath and stucco. It was in every way a very odd house, designed and built cheaply seventy-five years earlier beneath the eye of Lady Streetingham, the eccentric wife of the Resident during the reign of the Wicked Maharajah, to house her guests. Being a woman o great sociability and considerable wealth, married to a bore and exiled by her husband's duties to a barbarous state, it was her habit to invite everyone she met to come and stay with her as long as he liked; and so she had constructed a house which was rather like a tavern with a great many ramshackle outbuildings to house the servants.

The house itself, perhaps because of its odd shape, had a bizarre charm. It was octagonal, with a piazza on the ground floor, and a balcony on the second which ran the entire way around the house, and the roof was flat, with a stairway leading up to it, so that the guests might use it in the fashion of the East and on hot nights lie there in the open air beneath a brilliant blue sky spangled with glittering stars. At the back, like a clumsy tail, there was a barrack-like wing added as an after- thought when the main house became too small to house all the adventurers and remittance men who accepted the invitations of the Resident's rich and eccentric wife; for the building quickly became a kind of boarding-house for people who were down and out, until at last it achieved a spectacular notoriety and brought about the recall of the Resident himself. In its day, it had done more to lower the prestige of Europeans in Ranchipur than any other element in the history of the place. The sight of the piazza dubiously ornamented by the figures of Lady Streetingham's strange guests, the rumors of the debauchery and drunkenness which took place inside its walls, the murder of a servant and finally the murder of one guest and the suicide of another all these things and many more had given the house such a name and such a legend that for years after the retirement, it remained tenantless, and even the lowest coolie never passed it without a faint scornful curl of the lip. This, the people of Ranchipur told themselves, was a spectacle of what European civilization was like.

In those days it took a long time for news to find its way across the whole of India from Ranchipur to Government House in Calcutta, and an even longer time for those in power to believe that things in the guest- house of the Resident's rich and eccentric wife were as bad as they were reported to be. The murder and suicide put an end to the Resident and his wife and to the guest-house itself, but by that time the damage was done and for thirty years afterward the legend of its bawdiness lingered, corrupting the opinion of the twelve million inhabitants of the great rich state of Ranchipur, making it a difficult state filled with troubles and complications and smothered rebellion. But in an odd way the legend of the guesthouse had been a great help to the old Maharajah in his efforts to enlighten his people and fill them again with the pride which had once been theirs, because it had weakened and corrupted that mysterious weapon which the European called "prestige," and brought to the natives of Ranchipur a sense of equality. It weakened, too, the authority of the central government, which before long discovered that the guests of Lady Streetingham had rendered it extremely difficult to manage the people of Ranchipur, and so the people and their Maharajah were given a free hand. The central government turned away its face for the sake of peace, and permitted Ranchipur to go its own way.

The house was already falling into ruin when the Maharajah reclaimed it as a residence for his librarian, Mr. Banner jee. The librarian was by nature rather like old Lady Streetingham, extremely hospitable and indiscriminate in his hospitality; luckily his taste was more conventional. The Resident's lady had not much cared whom she had for guests so long as they were outwardly human, could talk, and remained sober enough to play whist with her; Mr. Banner jee, on the other hand, behaved rather like a professional Mayfair hostess. He was the leader of a society which was neither Indian nor European, but a mixture of the two. Mr. Bannerjee was a snob. He had been educated at Oxford, and there, largely by observation and instinct rather than by contact, he had acquired a snobbery which in its essence was not British, but something purer than that; it was English. His snobbery lay imposed like a veneer on the darker Indian side of his character. He was very like his own parties, a strange mixture of elements which he was never quite able to bring together into a harmonious whole. As the leader of the cosmopolitan set in Ranchipur, important guests of the Maharajah were sent to him for at least one dinner or tennis party. The British suburban set, ruled over by Lily Hoggett-Egburry, professed to hold him in scorn, although in their hearts they were eaten up with rage and envy that the real plums like Lord and Lady Esketh were always entertained by Mr. Bannerjee and seldom seen by themselves. On the other hand, the real Indians distrusted Mr. Bannerjee and his Oxford ways and held him in scorn because he seemed forever unable to decide upon which side of the fence he meant to descend. But Mr. Bannerjee had created a world and a position of his own, a world which at times seemed a little like the world which had used his house as a club in the time of Lady Streetingham. It was known as "Mr. Bannerjee's set" and his awareness of this filled him with pride and made him bear himself in Ranchipur with a strange manner in which arrogance and timidity were in perpetual conflict. And he was rich, as a leader of society needs to be, for when the older Mr. Bannerjee, his father, had retired from an extraordinarily prosperous counting-house and insurance office in Calcutta to withdraw into a life of meditation, he had given everything he possessed to his son. Mr. Bannerjee also had a beautiful wife and a position of eminence and authority and even power, but he was not a happy man, for there was a great deal which Mr. Bannerjee had to conceal from the world.

There was his own indecision and the weakness of a character and a personality that was cleft exactly in twain. Only someone with an all- seeing eye could have known this, for only someone with an all-seeing eye could have believed that the Mr. Bannerjee, debonair and a little arrogant, passing out cocktails at a tennis party and talking about the theater in London and the races in Paris, was the same man who in the early morning crept out from the octagonal house into the maze of ramshackle outbuildings at the far end of the compound to cut the throat of a goat before a small and monstrous statue of Kali already smeared with the blood of a hundred sacrifices. And no one but himself could know those awful moments in the very midst of a worldly and cosmopolitan dinner party when suddenly he became cold with fear and terror, when in a second of horror it was as if he saw Kali the Destroyer appear above the head of one of the guests to accuse him of having betrayed his blood, his race, and his faith. Only Kali herself could know that he had no children, not because his beautiful wife was barren, but because her silent scorn of him was so great that from the very beginning he had never been able to exercise his rights as a husband. She had never said anything. She talked to him scarcely more than she talked to the European guests beside whom she found herself seated now and then entirely by circumstance. The scorn was the same terrifying silent scorn of which Ransome himself had been aware again and again; it had tantalized Ransome with a perverse desire to humiliate her; Mr. Banner jee it merely frightened into impotence.

Ransome went frequently to the Bannerjees* because, next to the palace itself, it was the only place where one sometimes met people who appeared to have brains. Now and then, there appeared in Ranchipur, a scientist or a writer or an architect or someone interested in Indian music or painting or sculpture or history. Ever since Mr. Bannerjee had come to Ranchipur, thirteen years before, the old Maharajah had cherished the illusion that at Mr. Bannerjee's the state guests could obtain a glimpse of real Indian life, although what one found there was neither Indian nor European but simply Mr. Bannerjee's somewhat fantastic idea of what a fast party was like in Park Lane in the time of Edward the Seventh.

But Ransome was fond of Mr. Bannerjee in a way, and sorry for him, because at times he came very close to understanding that Mr. Bannerjee's indecision and misery were not so different from his own. And of course, there was always Mrs. Bannerjee, cold and beautiful, chewing her fan and gossiping and giggling in a corner with some woman friend, exciting him only to leave him baffled and unsatisfied. But he was not happy at Mr. Bannerjee's house and he could never remember ever having enjoyed himself at one of the parties. What it was that depressed him he could not define exactly, save that it had the quality of something sinister. From the moment he entered the house until he left it he always felt faintly ill at ease and even awkward, as if somehow, instead of being

Ransome, the man who had seen everything in the world and had known every sort of person and was able to hold his own anywhere, he was simply a small boy at his first party. In the beginning he had merely been uneasy and bored, but when it happened again and again, he began to wonder at it and made an effort to analyze the feeling. At first he had told himself that in some half-mystical fashion it was the aura of the house itself, with its memories of two murders and a suicide, of drunkenness and debauchery, indulged in long ago by people now dead and in their graves. There were, too, the personality of Mrs. Bannerjee and the atmosphere of bitter marital unhappiness and the knowledge that always in the house only a little way from you, behind a wall or even perhaps behind a screen, there lurked the presence of Mr. Bannerjee's father, whom no one in Ranchipur save the Bannerjees and Major Safti and one or two servants had ever seen.

Once or twice in the enclosed garden at the back of the house where Mrs. Bannerjee kept her pets, Ransome had caught a glimpse of a white robe disappearing among the dustry shrubs. But the face and the figure of old Mr. Bannerjee he had never seen. Now and then his son spoke of him, quite casually, as if there was nothing mysterious about him, but into the face of the son there always came a look of reverence and awe at the mention of the old man's name. He told Ransome that the elder Mr. Bannerjee in his old age had given up all worldly pleasures to find wisdom, to contemplate, to prepare himself for another life; and the reverence and awe in the voice of the son impressed Ransome, not because he had any special respect for the Hindu faith, but because it seemed extremely odd that a worldly man like the son could be so profoundly moved by the old man's accession of holiness. And once, but only once, he asked somewhat irreverently, "What is this contemplation? What is it that he contemplates which is beyond the understanding of the rest of us? What is it he contemplates that he might not contemplate while living in the midst of his fellow men?"

Politely but with a certain coldness Mr. Bannerjee answered, "It is difficult to explain. It is something which you would not understand i you do not already see it." And then quickly he had changed the subject; but Ransome was aware he had been quietly snubbed and that suddenly Mr. Bannerjee had become frightened. In the way in which his face twitched a little and his eyes avoided those o Ransome, he was like a frightened hare.

He did not suppose that the air of sinister mystery about the house had anything to do with secret nameless sacrifices or hidden orgies of the kind cheap journalists had a way of ascribing to Hindu rites. It had its origin, he was certain, in nothing so obvious and sensational as that; yet it was, he came to feel more and more, a perfectly real and almost a tangible thing. It was there. If you had sharp eyes and ears and any sensibilities whatever, you felt it each time you went to the house. It hung like a subtle rather corrupt fragrance about the personalities of Mr. Bannerjee and his wife. It was in all the rooms. At moments it came sharply to light in an intonation, in a frightened glance, in the way the personality of even Mrs. Bannerjee herself could change suddenly while you were talking to her and become, instead of something which, however cold and aloof, was real and even familiar, something shadowy and half-savage and frightened. It was not an experience which Ransome found confined to the Banner jees alone; he had encountered it a hundred times, a thousand times before in Indians; even the old Maharani, fierce and proud and independent, he had seen change suddenly in the same mysterious fashion while he was talking to her. In the Banner jees' house it was simply more acute because Mr. Bannerjee was a Bengali and because all Mr. Bannerjee's pretenses at being an enlightened Indian and a model of European behavior, made the contrast more painful and the mystery doubly noticeable.

It was, Ransome slowly became convinced, the thing which set most Indians and Europeans apart, dividing them in the very midst of intimacy, desiccating the closest friendships and leaving them withered and empty. It was that thing which writers referred to vulgarly as "the mystery of India," yet Ransome, in his intelligence, could not accept this any more than he could accept the cheap tricks of the fakirs. He did not suffer mysteries easily, because he had found that in the end mysteries, even the most esoteric Hinduish ones, always had explanations which were perfectly simple.

After a time he began to ask questions of Indians whom he looked' upon as friends, but he made very little progress until he went to Major Safti. It was no good, he soon discovered, in asking Raschid Ali Khan.

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No Muslim understood it; indeed the bluff and hearty Raschid held the opinion that it was this mystery which made the Hindu cowardly and treacherous and unreliable and lay profoundly at the root of the troubles between all Muslims and Hindus. It appeared to irritate and puzzle the Muslims far more than it irritated and puzzled Ransome himself.

But Major Safti was a Hindu, a Brahmin who was "free," freed perhaps by ancestors who, instead of cowering before the mystery and the terror, had fought it, freed too perhaps by his own faith in science and the power of man's intelligence against the evil of Nature enshrined in the bodies of mysterious gods.

"It is," he said, "the great Indian sickness. You might call it the Hindu evil. It stifles and suffocates and paralyzes. It is like the stench which hangs over the poor quarter when there is an outbreak of plague or smallpox."

They discussed it again and again, sometimes on the verandah of Ransome's house, sometimes in the Major's office at the hospital, when Miss MacDaid would corne in for a moment to listen, and then snort in scorn that they should be wasting their time talking about things which made no sense. All that was needed to save India, she would say, was education and cleanliness and enough to eat.

The Major liked talking about it, as if each time he talked of it, the thing became somehow a little clearer to himself. And each time he made it seem a little clearer to the reason and understanding of Ransome himself.

"It is mystical in its origin," he said, "and still, I suppose, mystical in its manifestations. To understand it you must know and understand the whole history of the Hindu religion its origins, its rise, its decay. I don't know anything quite like it in history save perhaps the strange hysterical faiths of the Dark Ages in Europe when hermits took to caves to 'contemplate' like that mysterious old fraud, Mr. Banner jee's father. Men of intelligence went into monasteries because that was the only place left where they might keep alive the flame of culture and civilization. It is like the cloud which hung over all Europe in those times ... a cloud of what might yes, what must, I suppose be called faith and religion despite all its baseness and superstitions, when Christianity became for a time an evil compound of the teachings of Christ strangely mixed with Druid paganism and superstitions born long before in the swamps of Germany, sprinkled with a reasoning of Roman and Greek ideas and superstitions. It entered every house and the life of every man save those shut away in monasteries or living like animals in caves. It filled the minds and lives of even intelligent people with hosts of witches and demons and incubi and made them live by terror and faith in evil rather than faith in good. It occurred during the break up of a great empire, of a whole civilization.

"You see, a retired insurance agent like old Mr. Bannerjee is afraid and so he retires to become holy because all his life he has not been holy at all. All the money he has piled up did not come from too holy a beginning and he is afraid, of what he doesn't quite know, but he is afraid. And Bannerjee himself is afraid. For all his fine manners and his high talk he is a coward and now and then he becomes terrified by the vast imponderable mass of things beyond his understanding."

He chuckled suddenly and said, "Even the old Maharani is afraid sometimes. I've seen her when she forgets that she is enlightened, that she has founded a high school for girls and put through a law which makes it honorable for Hindu women to divorce their husbands. It doesn't make any difference. Sometimes the thing takes possession of her and makes her again the half-wild, superstitious creature she was when they brought her here from the hills long ago. It hangs over all India like a cloud ... a religion which has never known a reformation, a religion which, like all faiths, was born out of nature itself and rose once to great heights and now has descended again, corrupted and wasted to the level of a savage religion of images and taboos, which worships the principle of evil and destruction as much as the principle of good and creation. Perhaps in its manifestations it is more savage and terrifying than the pagan Christianity of the Dark Ages ever was, but that is not because the people are different. It is because of India itself... not the people, but the earth, the sun, the sky, the very life of India which is cruel and ruthless. It is a country of burning sun and dry plains and wild cloudbursts where nothing is ever wholly peaceful and green and pleasant, a country crawling with life and where the very principle of life itself seems at times to become menacing and evil and destructive ... a country filled with snakes and wild beasts and floods and droughts and

earthquakes, where even nature itself is more hostile than elsewhere. And yet a continent swarming with life ... as overcrowded, as overfertile, as Africa is empty and sterile."

And then the Major would suddenly grow still and grave and even sigh and say, "You see, that's what it is ... this India. That's why it has always been tortured and tormented... why its rulers have always been incredibly splendid and barbaric, why its misery and sickness are beyond the misery and sickness of other nations. It is a country of savage exaggerations where cruelty is more cruel than elsewhere and beauty more beautiful, and out of that came an all-embracing faith which rose to great heights and then decayed again into a worship of the savage principle of destruction. Anywhere in the world nature is always an enemy until subdued by the hand and the intelligence of man, but in India nature is a monster whom we have never tamed even a little. One has, I suppose, to worship her in the figure of Kali because nothing else seems logical. Miss MacDaid is partly right. We can educate Indians. We can feed the children properly. We can try at least to stamp out disease, but in the end nature will always win. We have gone a long way in Ranchipur, but in the end we may be defeated by India herself, India the continent, the unconquerable.

"What Mr. Bannerjee is afraid of is not simply these vague symbols which have been set up as gods, but of something far more savage and profound. He is terrified of India itself. The gods are only shadows. It is the drought and the monsoons and the earthquakes, the leprosy, the plague, the typhus, the burning sun and the barren sky, which lie at the root of his terrors. But Mr. Bannerjee is not very intelligent, so he thinks it is Kali whom he fears. He is aware, and rightly, that in spite of all his Oxford education and his talk of London and Paris he is Indian and that he can never escape India." Again he sighed and added, "Perhaps we shall be defeated. I don't think it is as simple *as Miss MacDaid believes. Anyway, we can try. But it's not easy when all your people live by fear instead of by faith. You in Europe are dying because you no longer have faith, but sometimes I think no faith at all is better than ours. Because it is fear that we have to overcome, fear and denial and negation. That's where our friends the Muslims have the upper hand. They aren't afraid of anything on heaven or earth... not even of India. They came

nearer to subduing her than any men have ever done, but they too were defeated. She has never been conquered even by the British. They are here by sufferance until one day India with all that is evil and good stirs in her sleep and gives one mighty roll, and then they will tumble off. like Asoka and Alexander and the Moghuls and the Tartars and the Chinese."

In the voice and eyes of the Major there were sadness and defeat, the sadness and defeat which Ransome had seen so many times in so many Indian eyes, but there was, too, a kind of smouldering triumph and pride, perhaps in the knowledge that he was a part of the vast, unconquerable, tragic continent. The Major had neither the tough optimism of Raschid Ali Khan, forever proudly aware of his conquering blood, nor the bird- like cheerfulness of Mr. Jobnekar, freshly released from the servitude and oppression of centuries. The Major was more intelligent than either of them and he had, as well, the instinct and the sensibility of a race and a caste whose age could scarcely be measured by time.

There were moments when even the Major was frightened. For Ransome that was a part of his fascination that he was at once a boy and yet as old as time, that he found life too painful to be borne save by plunging full into the midst of it, by losing himself in its very horror and confusion. For the Major it would be forever impossible to withdraw into the deep negation of the contemplative life.

Ransome left the house on foot to go to Mr. Bannerjee's because he was drunk and filled with a sudden fierce conviction that contact with the monsoon storm might free him from the depressing sense of pettiness and evil with which Fern's story had infected him. Tipsily he felt that despite the old mackintosh and felt hat he wore, the rain would wash him clean. "Cleanness," he said, half aloud. "That is what I want, cleanness."

He thought, "If it is raining hard when I come home, the Major can drop me off."

He did not want to be brought home by Edwina. He did not even want to make the short journey of two minutes in the same car with hen And he knew well enough that if she came to the door she would come in and talk and have a drink, for she was a child of the night who hated sleeping save by day, and was never properly awake until after sundown. By daylight there was at times something faded and tired about her, but at night she always appeared fresh and cool and lovely. It was as if the darkness brought her vitality and fascination. She would want to come in and talk, and he knew how that would end. They would drink and talk until presently even talk would grow wearisome and then they would repeat what had happened at the palace on the night of the dinner, for no reason at all save that the same weary, perverse attraction would drive them to it, as if they were under a compulsion born of satiety and exhaustion. And in the morning he would feel sick again and soiled and degraded. No, drunk now, walking through the rain, he saw the whole thing that drew them together quite clearly for the first time. It was if they were tired and frightened and embraced as a weary gesture of defiance at the rest of the world. They were like naughty, insufferable children thumbing their noses. He knew now. It

was as if that night at the palace they had said to all the others, "

you!" in a gesture of defiant exhibitionism, aware that no matter what they did or how they did it, the world would go on accepting them because they were both attractive and most of the world was so dreary and so mean, so like Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry and Fern's awful mother. There was even in Edwina's weariness and depravity something bright and dazzling ... yes ... something even that was clean. That was what made her power of corruption so devastating. God had given her too much, long ago in the beginning.

And then halfway to Mr. Bannerjee's the rain almost stopped and for a moment a sultry sun appeared just above the horizon, bathing everything in an evil sulphurous light. The houses, the walls, even the freshly washed green of the trees seemed to absorb and then give back the unearthly yellow glow. It was the kind of light, he thought tipsily, which must be provided by God to illumine the end of the world a sick, leprous yellow light with the quality of decay and horror in it. It fell now full on Mr. Bannerjee's octagonal house, even touching the figures of the guests whom he could see through the opened windows; and the old feeling that the place was invested by some evil power returned to him more sharply than ever. Mr. Bannerjee's house, it seemed to him, should always be illumined thus.

Then, before he was halfway down the muddy drive, the sun vanished quickly below the horizon and left the still air damp and heavy and green once more, filled with that strange ominous sense of fertility which infected it during the rains when the air itself seemed so thick and so rich and damp that the plants and trees might live by air alone, drawing nourishment from it without the need of roots or soil. By the time he reached the verandah the yellow light had faded so that the sinister old house itself lay in darkness, its windows lozenges of light in which he saw the figures of the Bannerjees and Edwina, Miss MacDaid and Major Safti and Miss Murgatroyd talking and drinking cocktails.

As he climbed the steps he noticed that the barren aspidistras and rubber plants which ornamented the verandah had burst miraculously into bloom. From their dull green leaves, as if by some piece of magic, the blossoms of the marigold, the zinnia, the hollyhock, the begonia, the carnation had burst forth in a riot o color. It was a spectacle of madness and decadence in the world of plants which offended the gardener's sense in Ransome; and then he understood. The strange flowering was the work of old Mr. Bannerjee, who evidently considered the dinner one of the greater occasions in the social life of his son. On gala evenings he ornamented the sterile rubber plants and aspidistras with the blossoms of more showy and fortunate plants, tying each flower carefully on with a bit of thread. This time, Ransome thought, the ornamentation must be in honor of Edwina. Even old Mr. Bannerjee in his retirement and meditation was a snob.

There was never any need of being announced at Mr. Banner jee's. The sound of a footstep on the verandah was enough to raise a chorus of shrieks and growls, screams and yappings, from Mrs. Bannerjee's Pekinese and from the dozens of parrots and macaws and parakeets who lived in cages and on perches the whole length of the verandah a chorus whichj like the plague, spread to all the birds and animals and children which lived in that huddle of outbuildings at the far end of the compound. Mr, Bannerjee's house and garden were a kind of India in petto, overcrowded^ confused, swarming with noisy life.

Inside the house Mr. Bannerjee, very neat and smart in white clothes made in Savile Row, was pouring cocktails for Edwina, Miss MacDaid, and the Major. In a corner on a divan sat Mrs. Banner] ee and her confidante, Miss Murgatroyd, a little apart from the group, removed not alone by space but by an atmosphere of psychical detachment, as i their corner, hidden behind an invisible barrier, remained inviolate and Indian.

Miss Murgatroyd was a thin little spinster in her late thirties who acted as assistant to Mr. Banner jee in the management of the libraries. She belonged neither to the Indian nor to the European world of Ranchipur and she had never married, partly because she was neither rich nor very attractive and partly because there was no one for her to marry save an Anglo-Indian like herself, and Miss Murgatroyd regarded all Anglo-Indians, sometimes even herself, with contempt. Although everyone in Ranchipur knew her secret, although anyone with the feeblest perception could guess it at once, although the odd color of her hair, the muddy texture of her skin, the blue eyes surrounded by yellowish whites, and the thin collapsible Indian hands all betrayed her, Miss Murgatroyd went through life cherishing the illusion that no one l^new. She always said that her parents had died while she was a child and that her father had been a magistrate in the Madras Presidency, and she always dressed in European clothes which did not suit her and made her seem even plainer than she was. In a sari she might have passed for an Indian and kept a certain authenticity and even a certain dignity, but European clothes gave her a kind of fancy-dress appearance, full of falsity. The effect was the same as that of a middle-aged thoroughly Anglo-Saxon spinster dressed in a sari and bangles for a fancy-dress party. It was not only that she dressed as a European woman, but that she chose her frocks as badly as possible, selecting costumes which would have suited only the palest and fluffiest of blondes. Now, sitting primly beside the handsome and exotic Mrs. Banner jee, she wore a gown of pale-blue taffeta ornamented with little garlands and rosettes of tiny flowers.

Ransome never saw her save at the library or at the Banner jees' and apparently she had no other life. There was something timid and frightened and groveling about her which always made him feel a little sick, not only at the spectacle of Miss Murgatroyd herself, but at the human cruelty and prejudices which had deformed her whole character and personality, as disease may slowly deform a whole body which should have been sane and healthy. For the handsome Mrs. Bannerjee she was a kind of slave, fetching and carrying for her, flattering her, giggling with her in corners as she was now doing, appkuding with gratified bitterness the mockery with which Mrs. Bannerjee treated nearly everyone who came her way. It was, Ransome thought, as if she were revenged through Mrs. Bannerjee upon all those, both Indians and Europeans, who snubbed her, as if it were only through Mrs. Bannerjee that she could discover enough self-respect to go on living.

The relationship existed, Ransome was certain, not because of any fondness Mrs. Bannerjee felt for her, but because on the one side Mrs, Bannerjee found her useful, and on the other Miss Murgatroyd would have found life unendurable without the little fillip of confidence which the relationship provided. After a long time, after having watched them together at dinner after dinner and tennis party after tennis party, the suspicion came to him that Mrs. Bannerjee, the proud Bengali, tortured Miss Murgatroyd, the timid Eurasian; Miss Murgatroyd, he suspected, was a kind of whipping-boy upon whom Mrs. Bannerjee might vent her hatred of everything European. But Miss Murgatroyd, it seemed, bore tie cruelty and even welcomed it because it was the only thing in her life which made her seem important. Her worship of Mrs. Bannerjee was like that of the dullest, plainest girl in the school for the one who was most gifted and beautiful.

When he came over to the divan, Mrs. Bannerjee only stirred languidly but Miss Murgatroyd sprang up and began to gush.

"Oh, good evening, Mr. Ransome," she said. "It's been such a long time since we've met. I was hoping you'd be here. I was afraid you might have gone off to the hills."

"No," said Ransome, "I never go away any more."

Even through his drunkenness he felt the old nausea returning; the spectacle of Miss Murgatroyd, squinting and gushing, always made him despise the whole of the human race. She was so like an ill-used mongrel puppy, wagging his stumpy tail, crawling toward you on his stomach, full of friendliness but secretly terrified of receiving a beating. The gushing of Miss Murgatroyd he had, he knew, brought upon himself because in his impulse to make up to her for the snubs and ostracism she suffered, he had always paid her a kind of exaggerated attention, as if he really had an interest in her. He spoke to her when others ignored her; he always made it a point of saying good-night to her when others walked

out of the room without so much as looking in her direction. He did not in the least mind Miss Murgatroyd being an Anglo-Indian; he did mind her being an appalling bore.

Mrs. Bannerjee said good-evening and went on chewing her betel leaf as if impatient for him to leave her in peace. Miss Murgatroyd went on gushing, until Ransome, in desperation, murmured something about a cocktail and left them to join Edwina, who seemed to have withdrawn a little from the others and to be waiting for him.

Edwina said, "Do you think you ought to have another cocktail?"

He grinned. "Why not? One more or less can't make much difference."

"Some night you'll take just one more and fall flat on your face, and then, I suppose, people will suspect that you drink. Anyway, I'd like to have you make sense when you're talking to me."

"Am I as bad as that?"

And while they were talking he became suddenly aware that behind Edwina on the divan there was a fresh outburst of whispering and giggling and all at once he was certain that Mrs. Bannerjee and Miss Murgatroyd were talking of Edwina and himself. He was certain that they knew what had happened in that lower room at the palace. He was a fool to have supposed that everyone in Ranchipur had not heard the story within twenty-four hours. By tomorrow, the other story would be about too, enlarged and garnished until it had become a melodrama in which he had raped Fern Simon. And while he went on talking to Edwina, he thought: "Perhaps Fern was right. Perhaps I should clear out of Ranchipur," and suddenly, for the first time, Ranchipur with all its intrigues and gossip seemed unendurable to him worse even than Grand River had been when his marriage with Mary had begun to go on the rocks.

Aloud he said to Edwina, "How is your husband?"

"The same . * . delirious. I suppose I should have stayed at home by his bedside, only the Major forbade me that. Anyway, I can't begin doing that now if we're going to be kept here for weeks."

Now, suddenly, he felt drunk enough to risk asking what he had wanted to ask from the beginning. He said, "Do you care very much?"

Deftly she avoided the answer. "About having to stay on here? No, I've made up my mind to it. It'll be a good story to tell back in London. I can dine out on it when everything else fails."

He was aware that she was evading him and he was determined that she should not slip out as she always slipped out of everything. "No, I didn't mean that/' he said. "I mean do you mind very much about your husband."

"No, I don't."

"I didn't think you did."

"I never pretended, did I?"

He laughed. "No, it might have made you seem more human if you had."

"What's wrong with you? Why the evil temper? Being drunk used to make you more agreeable."

Through their talk he could hear the voices of Mr. Banner jee and Miss MacDaid and the Major talking about the cholera, about the terrifying speed with which the river had risen, and beyond that the giggles of Mrs. Bannerjee and Miss Murgatroyd, apart, aloof, as if they had nothing to do with the dinner party, and above everything the dull roar of the rain and the sound of the river itself and the persistent coughing roar of one of the lions in the zoo on the other side of the bridge.

"And the doctor..." he said.

"He seems to know his business."

Neither her eyes nor her voice betrayed her, so he said, "Are you finding out about India instead of reading about it?"

She did not answer him at once, and when she did, she spoke looking him directly in the eye. She said, "Why are you doing this?"

"What?"

"It's because you're drunk. Everything that's nasty and feminine in you is coming out,"

"I apologize."

"And don't be grand and ironic. It isn't because youVe jealous."

"No ... yes ... perhaps it is."

"No ... not directly jealous. It's very complicated."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"If I know anything, it's about things like this."

His only answer was a grin. She put her hand on his arm and said, "Listen, Tom. We've double-crossed nearly everybody in the world. We mustn't turn on each other." And even through the haze o drunkenness he was aware that she was appealing to him, that all the trivial hardness had slipped away from her for a moment. He thought, "Edwina the glittering, Edwina the fortunate, Edwina the heartless ... the self-sufficient Edwina, is frightened."

Aloud he said, "No, we'd better stick to each other. Neither of us has anyone else."

"Let me have my fun. Don't be nasty about it."

"All right. Do as you please. It's all the same to me. I wasn't worrying about you. You can pick up and sail and that'll be an end to it I was thinking about the evil you might leave behind you."

"You can be an awful bastard sometimes."

"Perhaps that's my proper role."

She started to speak, quickly, and then checked herself. He waited, and when she remained silent he asked, "What were you going to say?"

"No, I couldn't say it. You wouldn't understand me. You'd only make a crack and think I was sentimental. I don't understand it myself."

And now the Major joined them and he saw at once that either she could not hide the effect he had upon her or she was shameless, or it was possible that no one but himself could read the signs. No one else could notice that the blood seemed suddenly to course a little faster beneath the lovely pale skin, that a new richness came into her voice. No one but himself could see the light which came into the lovely blue eyes eyes, he thought bitterly, which in spite of everything, were innocent, as if they were always expecting something which could never be, which perhaps had never existed. And suddenly, intimations of something he had never thought of before came to him, filling him with a sense of melancholy. Never once before had he ever thought of her like that, and almost at once he said to himself: "No, it's no good in being sentimental. That doesn't help anything."

There was no escaping it. In the end they were closer to each other than he would ever be to anyone in Ranchipur, or to anyone in all the world, for that matter. They were bound together beyond escape. He was afraid for the Major, whom he loved and respected, and jealous of him because until now it seemed to him that the Major was the only man he had ever known who had not disappointed him. Nevertheless, he must always, in spite of everything, be on Edwina's side. He thought, "If I were not drunk, I would never have understood suddenly that look in her eyes."

And then he noticed Miss MacDaid. She was talking to Mr. Bannerjee, but clearly she was not hearing anything he was saying. She was looking straight past his dapper little figure at Edwina and the Major, and as he watched her plain worn face with its ridiculous coating of rouge, he knew that she had divined what was happening and was in agony.

The dinner, it seemed to Ransome, went on interminably. Something, he could not discover what, although he attempted dully to discover, had altered the effect which drink usually had upon him. It still made him believe that nothing mattered, that nothing was important, but the knowledge did not make him gay now, but only filled him with a kind of aching despair. It was a mood very near to suicide. It was worse even than the pain and despair which attacked him when he was sober. Seated between Edwina and Miss Murgatroyd, he heard neither the sharp comments of the one nor the gushings of the other, but he was aware persistently of the sound of the rain and the roaring of the river; it was like an awful ringing in the ears. He thought, "Maybe this once I have taken too much. Maybe Edwina was right. Maybe this is what the beginning of delirium tremens is like." And then above the sound of the river there rose again the sound of lions roaring in the zoo, not one now, but three or four or five the lions which had been sent to the Maharajah by the Emperor of Abyssinia. There was something ominous in their roaring, something which filled him with distress and anxiety. He had wakened in the night many times to hear them roaring, but always it was a solitary lion or at most two of them, never this chorus of coughing roars that was at once so beautiful and so terrifying.

Presently Edwina paid no more attention to him, but talked to the Major across the table or to Mr. Bannerjee, whose small Nepalese face was alight with the knowledge that he was entertaining here in his own house one of the most fashionable peeresses of England. And then suddenly the dinner was ended, and Mrs. Bannerjee was rising and the ladies were leaving the room. He saw them hazily, full of disgust that he was betrayed by his own drunkenness, aware that never before had he felt like this.

And as Ransome turned politely in his chair and looked up at Mr, Bannerjee he discovered a look of terror in the face of his host. It was not anything obvious; if Ransome had not seen it there many times before, he would never have divined its significance. Mr. Bannerjee was frightened, by what Ransome did not know, unless it was the sound of the rain and the river, or the unearthly roaring of the lions. Mr. Bannerjee wasn't any longer a dapper, worldly little man in white clothes from Bond Street; he was a frightened villager from the remote jungles of North Bengal.

He glanced at the Major, and the Major grinned. "He has a rendezvous with Kali," he said in a low voice. "To appease her for having caused the death of the skinny chickens we've just eaten/'

Ransome made a desperate effort to pull himself together, thinking, "This is the first time in my life I have ever been ashamed of myself quite thoroughly. This is the first time I have ever seen myself through the eyes of someone else. I am looking at myself through the eyes of Safti, and a pretty spectacle I am."

The Major was leaning across the table toward him now, smiling* He said, "You look ill. I wouldn't take any of that brandy."

"I feel ill," he said. "Perhaps you're right."

There was a little silence and the Major said, "There's something I'd like to say, but I'm not sure how to do it." Ransome did not answer him and he continued. "I don't want you to think me impertinent or priggish." His hand came across the table and touched Ransome's. Then slowly, gently, it took Ransome's hand, and then the Major said: "Look here, old fellow, if there's anything I can do to help, you must call on me. I know that sounds bloody sentimental. It took a lot of nerve to get it out, but it's done now. I only wanted you to know."

Ransome looked away from him at the glass of brandy and murmured, "That's good of you. I understand. But there isn't anything you can do. There isn't anything anyone can do." And at the same time he thought, bitterly, "What a pretty spectacle this would be for the General,

for all those boys who talk about prestige! I've let them all down... all of them. Prestige, s !"

Then the Major withdrew his hand and lighted his cigar and said, "I've a couple of pieces of bad news. Could you take them now or would you rather I kept them until tomorrow?"

"I can take them," Ransome said, sullenly. "What are they?"

"One is about our poor friend Miss Dirks."

"Yes, I think I know what that is."

"Well, the worst that you can think is true. If she'd come to me months ago I might have been able to do something. There isn't anything to do now. It isn't any use thinking of operating unless we wanted to kill her. That might be better..."

Suddenly Ransome began to laugh, drunkenly, hysterically, but the sounds he made were not laughter. They were worse than the sound of wailing. While he laughed he saw poor Miss Dirks as she had been that day on the verandah, sitting with her hands in her lap, hidden beneath her jacket, white-faced, clutching her stomach when the pain became overwhelming. His own voice inside his brain kept crying out to him: "Poor Miss Dirks! Old Dacy Dirks' daughter who never had any fun! Poor Miss Dirks! She knew she was already dead!" He went on laughing, aware that the Major was watching him, not alarmed but somehow understanding his awful drunken mirth. "Oh, my God! Poor Miss Dirks!"

Then presently the paroxysm came suddenly to an end and, choking, he drank a glass of water and said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't help it. But do you know why she didn't come to you long ago?"

"I think I know."

"You're right. It was because she couldn't undress in front of a man. The poor old thing is dying because Dacy Dirks and all the ugly people behind him for generation upon generation taught her to think that men were lascivious and evil and the body something to be ashamed of. The poor old thing is dying of slow torture because of a thousand evil Nonconformist clergymen ... a thousand perverted Christians." Then suddenly he felt quite sober and said, "Did you give her stuff to help the pain?"

"She won't have any more pain. I gave her all she needs... and more ... to use as she sees fit."

"She'll never use it that way. Maybe she won't use any of it at all. She's like that."

"I know," said the Major. "She's very English. She must have been going through agony day and night for weeks."

"What's the other thing?" asked Ransome. "It couldn't be as awful as that." He was aware again of the roaring of the lions. The great coughing roars seemed very close now, just outside the windows.

"No, it's pretty bad, but not so awful as that. It's only that Esketh has plague."

After a moment Ransome asked, "Are you sure?"

"There isn't the faintest doubt. I sent a blood sample to Bombay. The telegram came just before dinner."

"Where could he get such a thing?"

The Major gave him the same answer he had given him that morning in the corridor of the old Summer Palace, only this time he did not grin. "Even great English lords have been known to have been bitten by fleas." And then he added, "It must have happened at the stables when he went to look at His Highness' horses. The rats are dying there. Two stable boys are already dead."

For a moment Ransome felt something that must have been a little like the terror of Mr. Banner jee, a terror of the monstrous evil of Nature. Then he asked, "Have you told her?"

"No. I thought it might be better coming from you as an old friend." Then he looked sharply at Ransome. "Will she take it very hard?"

He was still sober enough to think before answering. Through a haze he knew that he could answer in such a way that it would put an end forever to her chances with the Major. He had only to tell the Major the truth; and then he heard her voice again saying, "Let me have my fun... We mustn't go back on each other;" and saw again that unsuspected look of innocence in her eyes; and again he thought, "I mustn't play Jehovah." Soberly he said, "I don't know. It isn't a pretty situation. He's always been rather a brute. She's stuck to him through a lot more than most women would put up with. In a way, I suppose she's been very gallant. She's had..."

He never finished the sentence, for suddenly the table shook so that all the glasses jarred together with a singing sound. The curtains at the window opposite him seemed to stand out into the room as if blown by a wind, but there was no wind. The floor rocked and two of the Persian miniatures fell from the wall, followed by bits of plaster from the ceiling. He thought, "I must be passing out," and at the same time he saw a look of extraordinary astonishment on the face of the Major and then the lights went out. Above the clamor of parrots and macaws and Pekinese he heard the hysterical screams of Miss Murgatroyd from the other room.

It was the Major who acted. Calling across the table to Ransome, he said, "Come along. We must get the women out of the house."

Stumbling in the darkness, knocking over chairs and glasses, Ransome followed him toward the drawing-room. On the way he stepped in the darkness full on the face of a Moghul painting which had fallen from the walls. At the feel of his heel grinding the glass into its fragile beauty he sprang away as if he had stepped upon a snake.

In the other room Miss Murgatroyd was on her knees in the darkness, still screaming, not hysterically now, but efficiently at perfectly regular intervals as if she found a kind of enjoyment in the noise she was making. Miss MacDaid was trying to pull her to her feet and drag her to the comparative safety of the verandah, but Miss Murgatroyd, behaving as if Miss MacDaid were attempting to drag her off to torture, simply kept on screaming and resisting. From across the room Ransome could see their figures oudined against the faint light in the doorway. Then suddenly Miss MacDaid slapped the Eurasian woman with all her force, saying, "Come on, you bloody fool! One more like that and the house will be down on all of us!"

The slap did the work and Miss MacDaid dragged her through the doorway on to the verandah. Then there was a moment of extraordinary stillness, with only the sound of the river and the falling rain, and then the lions began again to roar, and from the huddle of buildings at the end of the garden there rose a sound of screaming and wailing that was like a single voice of terror and despair.

With a great effort Ransome resisted the hazy temptation to let everything slide, to hope that a second shock would come quickly and destroy them all It was as if physically he took hold of his own body and slapped it, as Miss MacDaid had slapped Miss Murgatroyd, back into sobriety and action.

In the darkness he called Edwina's name, and out of the darkness her voice came back to him, not frightened, but queer and strained.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes," her voice came back. "Extraordinary, wasn't it?"

"Maybe it isn't finished yet."

"What are we going to do now?"

"I don't know. Better leave it to the Major."

The Major had been collecting them, urging them, off the verandah into the shelter of the forte cochZre, the one spot which was at the same time safe and sheltered from the awful flood of rain. Suddenly he asked, "Where are the Bannerjees?"

No one seemed to know. If Miss Murgatroyd knew she was unable to answer. She did not scream now, but whimpered with terror.

"For God's sake stop that noise!" Miss MacDaid said. "It's bad enough with all that yelling from the compound."

The Major shook her and said, "Where is Mrs. Bannerjee?" but all she did was to go on sobbing and saying, "I don't know. I don't know." And almost at the same moment Mrs. Bannerjee appeared, coming down the stairs, carrying an old-fashioned paraffine lantern and surrounded by a feathery ripple of yapping Pekinese. She moved slowly, as if there were no danger and no reason for haste, walking very erect with a kind o dignity which Ransome had never seen in her before. The light shining upward threw the planes of the beautiful face into relief, bringing a new modeling to the high cheek bones, the faintly slanting eyes, the finely chiseled nose, and even in the midst of the confusion Ransome, watching her, thought of what Miss MacDaid had once said... that beside the beauty of an Indian even the most lovely European face seemed an anemic pudding.

And then as she moved across the room a new sound came from the verandah overhead ... a single isolated sound of wailing and terror, the voice of Mr. Bannerjee raised in prayer; but almost at once it was drowned by still another sound, faint at first, like the distant hissing of a million snakes, then growing louder and more , distinct, increasing in volume, and as the group beneath the forte cochere turned, it grew into the unmistakable sound of rushing water, and across the darkness there appeared a narrow white line of foam about the height of a man which seemed to gather out of die thick darkness every faint ray of light that came from a moon completely hidden by clouds, light which otherwise was not apparent and now seemed phosphorescent. It came toward them swiftly, smashing the distant mud wall of the garden, as the hiss changed into a roar which drowned the distant wails, the roars of the lions, the barking of the Pekinese, and the terrified moans of Mr. Bannerjee.

Ransome pushed Edwina before him into the house, Miss MacDaid took care of herself, and the Major picked up Miss Murgatroyd like a sack of meal and shouted, "Make for the stairs! It's the waterworks. The dam has broken!"

Ransome was the last to gain the stairs. He reached the bottom step at the very moment the wall of water struck the old house. For an instant the walls trembled as if shaken by a second quake, and Ransome thought, "This is the end. It can't hold against this." But it did hold. The flood poured in at the windows and doors, rushing halfway up the stairs at the very heels of the refugees.

Outside, the wall of water swept across the garden and engulfed the buildings at the end, stifling the sound of wailing and despair in the fresh sound of broken beams and brickwork. Then the roaring began slowly to die away again into a distant hissing, and from the city there rose a new veil of sound made by the voices of those who had seen death coming toward them across the great square before the old wooden Palace.

In the hallway at the top of the stairs there was no sound; even the dogs of Mrs. Bannerjee, huddled about her feet, were terrified into silence. Still holding the lantern, she stood leaning against the wall. At her feet Miss Murgatroyd had collapsed unconscious from terror into a huddle of blue taffeta and garlands and rosettes. The Major and Miss MacDaid stood looking at each other, listening, an expression of horror on both their faces, and Ransome knew that it was not of themselves they were thinking, but of their hospital and the helpless patients inside it, of the destruction which had come in an instant to everything for which they had given their lives. Opposite Mrs. Bannerjee, Edwina leaned against the wall. She was not looking at any of them, but beyond them, it seemed, through the very walls. There was a curious light in the blue eyes and her lips curled a little at the corners as if she were smiling in spite of herself.

Ransome was quite sober now, the fogginess gone completely from his brain, and in the midst of the disaster he was aware of a melodramatic beauty in this scene in the Bannerjees' upper hallway Mrs. Bannerjee and Edwina, opposite each other, the one so dark, the other so blonde and fragile, the dogs huddled about Mrs. Banner jee's feet, the pathetic crumpled pale blue of Miss Murgatroyd's silly taffeta gown, the Major and Miss MacDaid regarding each other with fixed looks of horror, the whole scene lightened by the yellow glow of the lantern.

Then outside the house the night was still again save for the sound of one or two distant isolated screams rising from the heart of the town on the opposite side of the bridge, which died almost at once, leaving only the sound of the river and the flooding rain. The lions were still now, for good, and Ransome thought, "Poor brutes! Drowned in their cages." There was in the sudden stillness something more awful than all the noise and confusion of the earthquake and the flood.

Miss MacDaid said, in a strange dead voice, "My God! We've got to get to the hospital somehow." And from the upper verandah the voice of Mr. Bannerjee was heard again, praying in Bengali to all the Hindu gods.

Long afterward, whenever Ransome thought of that night, the memory of it came to him without reality, a little because the catastrophe had happened at the very moment when in his drunkenness the world was becoming unreal and fantastic, and a little because in its suddenness there had been no time for either the body or the mind to adjust itself. In one sense his having been drunk gave him an advantage over all the others because each sound, each impression of the catastrophe, did not strike him directly but came to him, muffled and veiled, with a lag between the moment of the impact and the moment of realization. That was why he had not been terrified that and because he alone, out of all the little group, had had no fear of death, but, on the contrary had been indifferent to the prospect. And so he had taken it all the shock of the earthquake, the flood, the despairing cries from the huddle of the houses at the end of the garden, the distant wail from the square, and the death of the lions calmly, with detachment, as if all these things were simply part of a play which he was watching from a great distance. That was why, in the very midst of the confusion, he had experienced a sharp sense of pain, almost of anguish, at the feel of his heel grinding the broken glass into the lovely painting of Jehangir and his courtiers practicing the art of falconry, and why for a second he had been aware of the theatrical beauty of the scene at the top of the stairs. That was why the Major, instead of himself, had acted, taking command of the situation while he, functioning more slowly, simply obeyed.

It was only at the moment, when the first violence had passed and Miss MacDaid spoke, that he turned away from the others lest they should see by the light of Mrs. Banner jee's lantern that he was laughing. It was laughter that was quite beyond his control, like the savage laughter which took possession of him when the Major told him that poor old Miss Dirks was dying; but this laughter was different in quality, laughter born of the ridiculous and the sudden memory of Miss Murgatroyd screeching methodically until Miss MacDaid slapped her into silence; of Mrs. Bannerjee coining quietly down the stairs surrounded by Pekinese in the midst of an earthquake; of the sound of poor little Mr. Bannerjee's voice raised in terror; of the vision of all of them the able Miss MacDaid, the capable Major, Mrs. Bannerjee and her dogs, Edwina, one of "England's most fashionable peeresses," and Miss Murgatroyd, the Eurasian librarian, carried like a bag of meal, all bolting before the flood. Whatever their secrets, their despair, their trouble, they had all wanted to live, desperately. And* so it was funny, but it was more than that. Deep inside him he was aware that the scene brought him a sense of satisfaction. If only the flood and the quake between them could have encompassed the whole world ... if only he could have witnessed bankers and statesmen, millionairesses and labor leaders, journalists and dictators and politicians, scuttling for safety in Washington and Whitehall, the Quai d'Orsay, the Quirinal, and Unter den Linden ... if only he could have watched that... What if in the end the prophets of the Old Testament were right? That would be a good joke with a bitter laugh in it.

He felt the Major shaking him and saying, "Miss MacDaid and I are going to make a try at the hospital. You'll have to look after the others. Banner jee is no good."

"Okay," said Ransome. "But you're crazy. It can't be done." And he thought, "They mustn't be lost. Of all the people in Ranchipur, in all India, they are the most precious just now." And aloud he said, "You've no right to take any risk."

"We won't take any risk. Here, give me a hand with Miss Murgatroyd." Between them they lifted her and carried her into a room where there was no furniture save cushions and an Indian bed. Edwina followed them and Mrs. Bannerjee with the lantern.

Then, surprisingly, Edwina said, "I'll stay with her," and to Ransome, "Get some water and some brandy if you can find any."

Mrs. Bannerjee, still carrying the lantern, led the way down the stairs just as a servant, shaking and moaning and almost naked, appeared in the hallway. In Gujerati Mrs. Bannerjee told him to stop whining and fetch some candles.

Water still covered the floor of the drawing-room to the depth of a foot or more, and even while they stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking about at the wreckage, a fresh wave, but a tiny one this time, no more than a foot in height, poured through the doorway. "You can't make it," said Ransome.

"Well, anyway, we can have a try at it/' said Miss MacDaid. "If it doesn't rise any more, I think we can make the bridge." Miss MacDaid hitched her evening dress above her knees and, following the Major, with Ransome holding the lantern, they reached the verandah. One corner of the forte cochere had been swept away so that the roof hung, sagging, above their heads. The Major's Ford lay on its side in a tangle of grass and wreckage on the verandah itself. The aspidistras and rubber plants were gone, and a large part of the railing. The Major looked at his motor, grinned, and said, "Well, that's that!" "I'll come with you," said Ransome.

"No, you'd only be a liability. No special use and maybe a hell of a lot of trouble."

Miss MacDaid said, sharply, "Don't be a fool," and Ransome knew that she did not want him to come because it was to be their expedition hers and the Major's. The presence of anyone else would spoil it.

"There's no special reason for you to come along," the Major said to her.

"Nothing could make me stay here. A lot of good you'd be without me/' and a look of excitement came into her lined and painted face, and a note of exultation into her deep voice.

Ransome thought, "The Major will belong to her alone." There was no one else who could be of the least use. She was indispensable.

Then he watched them set out, the Major walking ahead, carrying the lantern, Miss MacDaid following, her skirt tied about her waist in a knot at the back like a bustle. From the verandah above them the monotonous voice of Mr. Bannerjee went on and on in a kind of high-pitched drone, like the sound of the bees in the great chandeliers at the palace.

The muddy water came to their waists and they had to struggle against it, although there was almost no current now, but only a little wave now and then crested with a line of white foam, which each time forced them back a step or two. Watching, he waited until the lantern disappeared at the end of the drive behind what remained of the compound wall.

When he turned, Mrs. Bannerjee was still standing on the steps with the whining servant, who had found candles and another lantern. As he approached she said, "You'd better look for the brandy in the diningroom. If it hasn't been swept away, it's in the cabinet." He found the brandy, and when he returned, she said, "You'd better fetch the bridge cards out of the secretary. They're in the top drawer," as if there had been no earthquake and no flood and the evening was going on just as she had planned it.

The secretary had been whirled completely about by the force of the water but it still stood upright and in the top drawer he found the cards, not too damp, and he thought, "Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe we all are."

He gave the cards to Mrs. Bannerjee and took a lantern from the servant, saying, "I'm going to the end of the garden. There may be some one there who needs help."

Then as he splashed through the water on the verandah, his world began to expand, no longer confined to the people in the house and what had happened to them, but including all of Ranchipur, And first of all he though of Fern, feeling thankful that she had gone home instead of to Raschids. The Mission was nearly three miles away and stood on higher ground, and the flood, he knew, must have followed the course of the river. She would be safe if the quake hadn't brought down the old stone barracks of a house on the top of all of them. He saw now that Mr, Banner jee's house had stood up against the quake because it was light and made of wood and therefore flexible. A stone house might have collapsed. And all at once he was aware that he was frightened for the first time, not for himself, but for Fern. Nothing must happen to her. The thought that he might never see her again was unbearable to him, and suddenly he could not picture life in Ranchipur without her.

Struggling, he came at last to the spot at the end of the compound where the huddle of houses had been. Holding the lantern above his head, he tried to find some mark by which to guide himself, because he found nothing at all and believed that he must have taken a false direction. The huge banyan tree which grew in the very center of what had been the compound was still there but there was no trace of a single house, not so much as a post or a beam emerging from the muddy water. And then he knew what he could not believe was true. The houses with everyone in them, men and women, children, babies, grandparents, a whole tiny village, had been swept away completely into the mad current of the roaring river by that first wall of water.

He was there alone, horribly, terrifyingly alone; standing in water up to his waist, holding the lantern above his head in the presence of death, only there was no sign of death, but only a sea of muddy water beaten by the rain and covered with floating bits of rubbish and the branches of trees. And then he noticed that above the town the clouds were turning a yellowish pink with the reflected glow of fire, and in a moment the flames were visible through the mango trees, from the direction of the square.

Quickly he thought of the Smileys and Raschid, and the Jobnekars and their fragile, silly pink house in the low part of the town near the wells of the Untouchables, and of Miss Dirks and Esketh, one dying of cancer in the tiny bungalow and the other of plague in the old Summer Palace, and the Maharajah and Maharani in the vast new palace with its dozens of fragile towers and pinnacles and minarets.

He thought: "I've got to get out of here. I've got to find out what's

happened to them," and pushing with all his strength, he found his way, against the water, back to the house, but as he climbed on to the verandah it seemed to him, by the reflected light from the burning town, that the water was rising again. Inside the drawing-room he was certain of it. On the stairway it was a whole step higher than when he had left. Going to the front of the house, he waved the lantern and shouted the names of the Major and Miss MacDaid, but there was no answer. Against the wall of rain his voice could not carry more than a few feet.

In the little house perched on the rim of the dam close by the safety gates there had never been more than two guardians, and on the night of the disaster there had been only one, for the head jobedar had gone down into the town to spend the night with his wife, an excursion which did not save his life, for he was drowned with all his family when the great wave crushed their house. The guardian who remained behind was a timid black little man, and at the first shock of the quake he rushed out of the little house into the rains along the wall of the dam. There he found no safety for almost at once he heard before him, above the sound of the rain, the roar of rushing water through the broken barrier and when he turned and ran in the opposite direction the same sound came toward him out of the darkness. Trapped and in terror, he threw himself on his face in the rain and called upon Shiva and Krishna and Rama and even Kali the Destroyer, to protect him, but even while he was praying the stone beneath him crumpled and gave way and he plunged, lost in a mass of rocks and pouring water, to the top of the electric plant a hundred feet below. Then the safety gates tottered, groaned, and fell, and suddenly the whole lake, seven miles long and three miles wide, poured out with a wild roar into the valley below.

The electric plant, with the thirty-one men who worked there, was simply overwhelmed and swept away and afterward nothing of it was found at all but only a great hole where it had been.

Down the wide flat valley the wall of water rushed, sweeping away two villages and a hundred farms, carrying with it men, women, and children, cattle and donkeys, goats and sacred monkeys, following the course of the already swollen river, sweeping over the low ground and curling round the higher parts. At the edge of the town it struck the

barracks of the beautiful Sikhs whom Miss Hodge admired, drowning half those who had not already been killed or injured in the quake. It lapped hungrily at the distillery and the chemical plant, destroying all the expensive apparatus the Maharajah had had brought from Germany. It rushed, shallow now, because it was on high ground, across the tennis courts at the Simons' house and into the Smileys' garden, carrying with it the hyena, the barking-deer and the wild pigs from the little inclosure at the back. It rushed across Engineering School Road, avoiding the high ground about the great palace, licking the sides of the bungalow where Miss Dirks and Miss Hodge lived; across the tank into the great square before the old wooden palace filled now with terrified men, women, and children who had sought refuge beside the tank from the quaking houses and cinema; through the bazaar where one by one the little wooden buildings collapsed like paper houses; through the first floor of the old Summer Palace where the first Lord Esketh lay abovestairs, tortured and swollen with plague; through the low-lying Untouchable quarter where the mud houses melted away as if made of sand; through the zoological gardens where the beasts were drowned in their cages; across the burning- ghats and once more into the open country a tempest of water and houses, corpses and uprooted trees.

Across the plain it followed the course of the river toward Mount Abana, checked for a second or two by the two bridges with the low- lying arches, until at last it reached the narrow gorge where the river passed through the ring of hills, and here it became dammed by a barrage of its own making, by a horrible accumulation of rubbish and trees, of the bodies of men, women and children and animals which it had carried on its breast for twenty miles. Driven higher and higher by the wreckage, the torrent of water presently became almost still and began quietly to spread back and back toward the ruined city, fed always by the terrible rains and the roaring torrent of the river, until at last over all the drowned valley and the stricken city there was only silence.

At the moment of the disaster, the Maharani, bored and restless in the heat, sat playing six-pack bezique with Maria Lishinskaia. The game went badly and the Maharani found that she beat her companion too .easily to find any pleasure in the contest. She was bored with the cards, bored with Ranchipur, bored with Maria Lishinskaia. Maria, like herself, had had too much of the monsoon. She looked pallid and ill, and seemed to have little spirit.

"Perhaps," thought the old lady, "things are not going too well with Mr. Bauer, or perhaps she is just tired." After all, Maria wasn't young any more. The Maharani wondered how old she was, and presently she asked not, "How old are you, Maria?" because she knew Maria would lie in answer to any question so direct, but "How old were you when the war ended?" and Maria, caught, answered quickly and truthfully, "Twenty-one."

Yes, the Maharani calculated quickly, that made her thirty-nine, and at thirty-nine one wasn't young and fresh any more, especially if you'd led a life like Maria's. There were times when Maria looked younger than her age, and times when she looked much older. She was, the old lady had observed, very changeable. In those moments when she was more Asiatic than European she became as old as time itself, old and frightened and despairing.

"Would you like me to read to you?" asked Maria.

"No. I think I'll go to bed."

Maria lighted a cigarette and fell to playing patience, and while she was laying out the cards, an extraordinary change came over the palace. The air seemed to grow insupportably heavy and suffocating and there was a sudden silence as if the world itself had been checked in its turning. More and more slowly Maria laid down the cards until suddenly, as if she were aware of some danger, she stopped, listening and waiting, a look of terror in her eyes. Her sallow face grew white as wax, and opposite her the Maharani braced herself unconsciously in her chair.

The old lady knew what was about to happen and suddenly she was transported back again across more than fifty years into the dusty little village in the Deccan from which she had come to be Maharani of Ranchipur. She knew that feeling in the air. It made her see again the whole village collapsing into the streets in a cloud of rubbish and dust. She heard again the cries of those buried in the wreckage of the fallen house...

And then the floor seemed to heave beneath their feet as if there were an enormous monster just beneath them. Bits of plaster fell from the ceiling and the nets which kept out the giant bats swayed at the windows. And then one by one the towers and pinnacles of the vast palace began to fall and the lights went out. Sitting in the darkness, they heard the towers crash through the roof, one by one, with a horrible slow interval between each collapse, and presently Maria Lishinskaia began to scream wildly and horribly, the screams rising above the sound of wailing and terror which had risen from all over the palace.

Savagely the old lady shouted at her, "Stop that bloody row! Stop screaming! It helps nothing!" And in the voice of the old woman there was the timbre of a terrifying authority and scorn, as if she felt only contempt for a woman who grew frightened and hysterical in the face of death, abandoning the dignity without which man became something a little lower than a dog.

Then the faint rocking and sound of the falling towers ceased and after a moment she said, "It's over now. The palace is going to stand. Go and fetch my electric torch. Don't be a fool!"

There was no answer, but in the darkness the Maharani knew that Maria Lishinskaia had obeyed her. In a moment the companion returned, preceded by a little circle of light. The wailing in the palace seemed to have taken on a rhythm now, rising and falling, loud enough to drown the roar of the water descending on the city from the broken dam.

The old lady took the torch from her and said, "Come. We must go to His Highness," and Maria, no longer frightened now for herself, prayed, "O God, don't let anything happen to him! Keep Harry safe for me!"

The fierce timbre of the MaharanTs voice, the absolute ring of authority and command in her speech, were like a violent slap on the cheek: it had shocked the terror out of her. Suddenly she felt calm and resigned and Asiatic; and as they made their way along the hall over shattered glass and fallen plaster, past the wide arched windows, she saw herself suddenly with complete objectivity, perhaps for the first time in all her muddled existence. She thought, "How did I come here ... I, Maria Lishinskaia, born in Kieff ? What am I doing trailing along the hall of an Indian palace after a Maharani in the midst of an earthquake?" And she knew that she was no longer afraid, not because she was courageous, but because she was tired, so tired that she no longer had any

desire to go on living, tired from all that had happened to her, tired from the ravages of her passion for Harry Bauer, so tired that she saw everything quite clearly now, as if she were already dead. There was nothing left to her but her body, and now her body, too, like her spirit, was tired and worn*

And this Harry Bauer, who was he, that she should ever give herself to him . . . she, Maria Lishinskaia, with a wit and a brain and childhood filled with exciting and important people, none of whom would have accepted Harry Bauer save in the role of a servant? Who was he? Nothing but a fine animal with a lovely body, without wit or sensibility or brains or cultivation. And against the sound of the wailing she saw herself almost as if she were watching a picture in the cinema, sitting in her father's flat in Moscow long ago, beside a round table covered by a bit of plum-colored plush which fell to the floor; and on the table was a green-shaded lamp of the sort students use, and beyond it sat her father, his round Tartar head bent over a book Nicholas Michailovitch Lishinsky who knew more of organic chemistry than any man in Russia, a leader of the Liberals who had been too weak, too intelligent, believing too much in the goodness of mankind, believing that only liberty and education were needed to turn all men into angels. And then in a little while the door would open and her mother would come in from the theatre, perhaps with the make-up still on her face, to ask if Leonid had gotten off safely from the Central Station... Leonid who was going away to be killed in the Carpathians because his battalion had been sent cartridges which did not fit their rifles and because bayonets, backed by all the courage in the world were no good against Skoda shells and German machine-guns... Leonid who should have been the father of her children, sitting now on the other side of a table with a green lamp on it, as her own father had sat long ago. And where was he now, her father? In some ditch outside of Kieff, his bones all mixed with the bones of other intellectuals, of other Liberals like himself, who had been fools enough to believe that man was essentially intelligent and good. * . . And her mother dead of pneumonia because she had not had enough to eat and there was not enough coal to keep her warm... her mother who had been so gay and pretty and clever and carefree.

No, she had had too much. Before now when she threatened to kill herself she had always known in her heart that she would never do it, because she had neither the courage nor the indifference; she had not had the courage even that time in Prague when she was beaten with a whip by a fat, elderly commercial traveler, nor on that night of horror in a bedroom filled with red plush and crystal and mirrors in a hotel in Leipzig. No, she could do it now. It was easy when you were tired, too tired to reach the end of the corridor. It would be wonderful never to wake again, never to have to begin another day . . . just sleep, eternal sleep, just oblivion, nothing more.

The sound of the Maharani's voice shouting in Gujerati shocked her out of the hazy state into which she had fallen. Before them in the circle of light from the old lady's torch lay two Untouchable serving-' women, flat on their faces, wailing. Savagely, with contempt, the Maharani kicked them with her bare jewelled foot and again shouted in Gujerati. Then one of the women raised her head and, finding herself in the royal presence, forgot her terror, prodded the other, and rose to her knees to salaam again and again.

Beyond the two women the way seemed barred by a great pile o mortar and stone where one of the towers had fallen through the roof, but after a moment the Maharani found a way through, and climbing over the rubbish, they found themselves in the passage which led to the Maharajah's apartments. There the Maharani pushed open the door of the antechamber and hurried past the guards, who still stood in their scarlet and gold on either side of the bedroom door as if nothing had happened. Inside, the old Maharajah was leaning on a chair by the window overlooking the town. Harry Bauer stood beside him, supporting him with one arm about the old man's body and when the ex-swimming-teacher turned toward them and Maria Lishinskaia saw the stupid beauty of his face and the set of his shoulders, she forgot death, saying to herself, "Thank you, God! That he is still alive! Thank you, God!"

In all the room she saw nothing but him. She did not see the face of the old Maharajah as he turned toward them, nor the look of horror and tragedy in his eyes. Distantly she heard the faint wailing that rose from the square as the people there saw death coming toward them. What was wailing now, and what death? She did not hear the cry of the Maharajah, nor that of his wife, as she saw the old man, despite the strength of Harry Bauer, slip to the floor. Half-aloud she said, perversely: "Thank you, God ! Send him to me tonight in the midst of horror and disaster, for that is all you have left me."

And then she knew what it was she found in him, not sensuality, nor even physical satisfaction; it was at once more complicated and more simple than that. There was something about him that was vigorous, uncorrupted and uncorruptible, as old as time, yet eternally new. He had in him the strength of the earth itself, with all its simplicity and beauty. He had come from the earth and he would return to it, untroubled by doubts or theories or ideals, unchanged and unchangeable* He was the antithesis of fear and weariness, for he belonged to the eternal earth. Without him she was lost, already as good as dead.

When the first rush of water had passed, Miss Dirks dragged Miss Hodge to the sofa, and in the darkness found her way to the cupboard where the brandy was kept. After five minutes, when Miss Hodge had been slapped and given brandy, she opened her eyes and said, "Where am I?" and began almost at once to cry, and Miss Dirks patting her, said, "You're all right. There's been a flood and an earthquake. Something must have happened at the waterworks. Do stop crying and try to pull yourself together."

"I'm doing my best," sobbed Miss Hodge. "I really am. It was so silly of me to faint."

"Not so silly. It was enough to make anyone faint. There's still six inches of water on the floor."

"Did it hurt anything? Did it break the East India Company china?"

"I don't know," said Miss Dirks. "Do be quiet now for a moment."

She kept stroking Miss Hodge's head and Miss Hodge, closing her eyes, felt for a time very dizzy and then presently she felt very happy because this was the the first time in years that Sarah had stroked her head thus, and it made her feel again like a small child who was being petted and spoiled and for that she had been hungry now for so long.

They stayed thus by the faint blue light of the alcohol lamp which Miss Dirks used in ordinary times for her chemistry experiments, having come so close to death that when it had passed they emerged cleansed and purified, both of them aware in the precious moment of stillness that they were close to each other once more. All the bickering was gone, all those waves of emotion that were forever stranding Miss Hodge higher and higher on the beach of discontent, all the pettiness and neurasthenia which was forever corrupting their friendship.

Presendy Miss Hodge said, "What's that funny noise?"

"It's the natives wailing," said Miss Dirks. "You know how they grow hysterical at the least excuse." And after a time she said, as if she had been considering the question, "They have no self-control They can't stand anything. That's what is the matter. They're soft. Are you feeling a litde better?"

"Yes... much better. I'm such a fool. I'm never any good in a crisis, I'm always a burden. I've always been a burden all my life to somebody." And she began to cry again.

Miss Dirks started to answer her, and then, caught by a paroxysm of pain, was made speechless, and before she had recovered Miss Hodge said, "I wanted to tell you something, Sarah. I've been wanting to tell you all day. I'm ashamed of myself for behaving as I did about the tea party. Ill write a note to Lady Esketh this very night and leave it at the Summer Palace on the way to school."

"I don't think it matters now. I don't suppose, after this, that people will be thinking of tea parties. And I don't think there will be any school tomorrow. Maybe there never will be again."

"Why? Is it as bad as that?"

"We're on high ground here and we're half under water... and there was the earthquake, too."

"Was there an earthquake?"

"That's when you fainted."

"I wonder how bad it really is."

"I'm going out presently to discover."

Miss Hodge seized her hand hysterically, "No. No. Don't do that. Don't leave me."

Miss Dirks did not answer her. She only said, "Elizabeth!"

"Yes?"

"You've never regretted it, have you? I mean coming out here with me."

"No, Sarah, no. I suppose I've had a more interesting life than I had any reason to expect. I suppose it's been a lot more interesting than Birmingham would have been."

"I didn't mean any of those horrid things I said to you."

"I know you didn't, dear."

"It was nerves. My nerves have been so bad lately. I wanted you to know, that's all."

"I did know," said Miss Hodge.

And then Miss Dirks fell silent and embarrassed and after a long time she said, quite simply, "I'm going out now."

"No ... no. Don't leave me."

"Don't be foolish, Elizabeth. You'll stay here. I couldn't rest without knowing what's happened to the school and all those lovely new books from home. It would be awful if they were all ruined now because no one moved them upstairs."

"I'm afraid. I'm afraid."

"There's nothing to be frightened of. You'll stay here. I'll be back in half an hour."

"It'll be all dark at the school."

"I have my keys. I know my way about."

"I'm afraid," murmured Miss Hodge.

"If you want to help you'll behave yourself and stay right here till I come back. There's no danger now. The water has passed." Then she rose with something of the decision she had always shown, and said, very practically, "If you feel afraid, take a little more brandy. Take as much as you like. I don't even suppose it would matter if you made yourself drunk tonight."

Then Miss Hodge started up from the sofa. "I'll go with you. I couldn't think of you going there alone."

Miss Dirks was already putting on her worn mackintosh. "No, my dear," she said, firmly, "you'd only be a nuisance. You might faint again and then what would I do with you?"

Then Miss Hodge felt suddenly dizzy and lay back on the sofa because she could not sit up. "Don't go. Don't go," she kept on repeating. Miss Dirks poured a whole glass of brandy slowly between her lips and again began stroking her forehead, and Miss Hodge, crying, said, "Forgive me, Sarah, for having been so mean and horrid."

"There wasn't anything to forgive you for, my dear. I understood all that. Now lie back and be comfortable. I'll be back before you know I've gone. Try and sleep,"

And then she was gone before Miss Hodge, in her dizziness, was aware of it. Presently she tried to rise again, but fell back weakly, calling out, "Sarah! Sarah! Wait for me! Wait for me!"

A second time she tried to rise and this time she succeeded. Stagger' ing a little, she made her way to the little entrance hall and, taking down her mackintosh, put it on and went down the steps of the bungalow, As she descended, the water crept slowly up to her knees. She was ter" rifled of snakes at night but now in her haste she forgot them.

"Sarah!" she cried into the darkness. "Sarah! Wait for me! Wait for me, Sarah!"

In the gateway she halted, standing in water up to her waist, listening, but no sound answered her save the distant ghostlike noise of wailing from the palace. Again she cried out, wildly this time, "Sarah! Where are you? Wait for me! It's Elizabeth! Sarah! Wait for me!"

Still no answer came out of the darkness. She listened again, cursing herself because she was weak and silly and incompetent, but there was only the gurgling sound of the dark water which, dammed to the east of Mount Abana, had begun again to rise. The clouds above were bright with the light of a fire burning somewhere near the center of the town*

In the night school beyond the bazaar the Smileys herded together the twenty-seven boys of the class and led them onto the roof of the one-story extension. The building was new and built of reinforced concrete with a steel frame, and although it rocked and cracks appeared in the walls, it stood fast, and there on the roof there was little danger even if a second shock followed the first. From the roof they heard the roar of the approaching water and the cries of terror from the square before the old wooden palace. They heard it rushing toward them up the street of the bazaar, knocking about the ancient wooden houses as it approached, and Mrs. Smiley falling on her knees, closed her eyes and prayed. She had not prayed in months because she had never been able to find time and because she knew that somehow God would understand and forgive her, and she prayed now not for herself or Mr. Smiley, but for the twenty-seven boys, huddled in terror at her side who still had all their lives before them, lives which would be unbelievably better than the lives of their fathers because she and Mr. Smiley had worked for them. She prayed, too, because she knew that only God by some miracle could save them, and she really believed in God, or at least in the vague principle that in the end good did win over evil.

As the water struck the night school, the heavy building shuddered and new cracks appeared in the roof beneath the feet of the refugees and from all about them out of the darkness came the sound of crashing walls and falling timbers as the little houses in the bazaar crumpled and were swept along by the flood; but the school itself stood fast, like a rock in the midst of ruin, a refuge for twenty-seven low-caste Indian boys and Mr. and Mrs. Homer Smiley of Cedar Falls, Iowa.

As the roar of the flood died away Mr. Smiley peered over the side of the house with caution, straining to discover what remained of the familiar street after the passing of the flood, and Mrs. Smiley, aware now that the miracle had occurred, opened her eyes, rose from her knees, and said, "What shall we do now, Homer?" And in Mr. Smiley some impulse, some instinct, some power dormant since he was born, stirred and came to life. It was almost a physical sensation like waking from sleep, not drowsily and unwillingly, but with pleasure and confidence and a sensation of vigor and strength. In the blood of the humble, quiet Mr. Smiley there came to life a whole procession of ancestors of whose presence there he had been quite unaware until this moment... Jed Smiley, the Indian fighter, and Grandpa Smiley, who had carved a rich farm out of a wilderness, and Morgan Downs who had been the companion of Daniel Boone during his Kentucky adventures, all of these with their heroic female companions and their tough and vigorous offspring, all capable of inhuman endurance, endowed with a genius for surviving in the midst of disaster, resourceful and courageous to the point of recklessness. They were all there in his blood and now suddenly they came to life. Within the slight, colorless middle-aged body of Homer Smiley heroism and the excitement of adventure unexpectedly asserted themselves.

Heroism there had always been the dull, dogged, unspectacular heroism which was needed for fighting filth and ignorance and disease, but for this new peril a new kind of heroism was needed, and now, without searching for it, Mr. Smiley, with a sudden pleasant sensation of excitement, knew it was there the spectacular heroism which called for a cool head, for resourcefulness which demanded the triumph of vanquishing impossible obstacles.

The blood ran more quickly through his small wiry body and he felt young and strong younger and stronger than he had ever been at eighteen. And when, out of rain and darkness, he heard Mrs. Smiley 's voice addressing him, he knew that he was not alone. He knew from the very sound of her voice that in her thin tired body the same capacity for heroism had come alive. Together they would be equal to anything, to floods and earthquakes, to all the assaults of a malignant Nature. He knew then that it did not even matter i, losing, they were destroyed, because they would go down together, fighting, full of trust in each other. And for the first time in all his gentle existence, Mr. Smiley experienced intimations of what passion might be, of its full glory, its excitement, of the catharsis it brought with it ... not the comfortable affection he had always had for Bertha Smiley, but something magnificent and glowing, not lyrical but savage. In darkness and disaster Mr. Smiley became aware that he was a male, as much a male as the noisy, violent Raschid or the handsome Major. And without knowing it, he had been waiting all his life for that moment.

He answered his wife in a voice which Bertha Smiley knew was different, a voice which told her that she could count on him through everything as a guide and a protector.

He said, "We'd better get out of here on to high ground. I'll go downstairs and have a look around. You stay here with the boys and keep them from doing anything silly."

He left them and, re-entering the school building, went down the stairs. There was a metre or more of water still in the rooms on the ground floor, but for the moment there was no danger. When he returned to the roof he said, "111 go out and do a little reconnoitering" (exactly as if he were preparing a sortie from a blockhouse in a wilderness infested by redskins).

But Mrs. Smiley objected (exactly like a pioneer wife). "No," she said. "You might get lost or cut off from us. Well be just as safe going with you as staying here, and at least we'll be together. It's much better that way." She had to shout to make herself heard above the sound of the rain and the terrified whimpering of her charges.

It was difficult even to get the twenty-seven boys under way because six or seven of them had become paralyzed with fear and would not stir until Mrs. Smiley told them in Gujerati that they would be left behind, and even went so far as to make a feint at leaving them. The feint forced them into action, for all of them were terrified now of being left by these two middle-aged Europeans who did not seem to be afraid. With Mr. Smiley leading the way, and Mrs. Smiley bringing up the rear like a faithful sheep dog, the party straggled down the stairs and, in water above their knees, made their way into what remained of the street. In the darkness it was impossible to see more than three or four feet on any side, but the going was less evil than Mr. Smiley had expected because most of the houses and the wreckage had been swept clean away. There was no use in attempting to follow what had been the street. There were no landmarks, and even if they had existed, one could not have seen them. So Mr. Smiley had to rely upon his sense of direction, something which until this moment he had never been called upon to use. He knew perfectly well what he meant to do. Avoiding the site of the bazaar, he meant to execute a circle based roughly upon the Summer Palace and the Girls' High School, swinging round in the end across Engineering School Road into the high ground where the great palace stood.

The little procession advanced with abominable slowness, not only because of falling constantly over wreckage and into holes filled with water, but because the boys were terrified and unmanageable. Once Mrs. Smiley, putting out her hand to save herself, seized at something white floating near her, only to find that she had seized the thigh of a floating corpse, and again Mr. Smiley very nearly took hold of a small python which had wrapped itself firmly about a floating beam. Every few minutes as they advanced, Mrs. Smiley kept calling the roll of the class, shouting out their names in order to make certain none of them had gone astray. She had no faith in them, for she knew the weaknesses of the Hindu spirit which in terror and despair might, like the male camel, suddenly lie down and die simply because the desire to go on living was no longer there. Now, in their terror, most of them were like small, irresponsible children and not like boys who would be men in another year or two. Not one of them, she knew by now, felt any responsibility toward the others or even toward himself and she knew that to God she and Mr. Smiley were responsible for all twenty-seven lives; so, stumbling and falling, drenched and out of breath, her hands bleeding, she kept prodding them on, barking at their heels, calling out their names, threatening them when they weakened before the horrors of floating snakes and corpses.

And presently from the head of the line, she heard the voice of Mr. Smiley shouting back, "It's all right. I missed the Summer Palace, but here's the High School. It's still standing." And the building, partly wrecked, loomed out of the darkness, twenty feet to the left of them.

As they passed it, Miss Dirks, standing on the steps, heard the voice of Mrs. Smiley shouting threats and encouragement in Gujerati and calling the roll for the tenth time, and for a moment, standing there with her hand on the door of her precious school, she felt, like an old sheep dog which has been left behind, a sudden desire to join them and help in the shepherding. Vaguely above the biting pain, she felt a sudden envy of Mrs. Smiley, wishing that all her girls, half of them probably drowned by now, might have been herded together like the Smiley low-caste boys and driven to safety, with herself barking at their heels. For a moment she felt an impulse to call out to them as they passed, to join their little procession on its way to safety, to return once more into the current of life, to build as she had done before all that had been destroyed in a moment; but almost at once she knew that she was old and tired and no longer had the strength, the terrible strength and the terrible patience that were needed and she thought, "What am I thinking of? I, who am already dead."

So she kept silent, still pressed against the door, as if to hide herself from the little procession she could hear but no longer see, thinking, "No, this is much the best way. It will be so much easier for Elizabeth. It is much the quickest and the easiest way." Still listening, still wishing in her spirit to follow the little procession, she waited in the darkness as the voice of Mrs. Smiley, encouraging and threatening her little flock grew fainter and fainter until at last there was only the sound of the rain and the rising water lapping about her feet.

Beyond the High School, Mr. Smiley, still swinging in a great circle, stumbled into the Engineering School Road and made the discovery that the water had begun to rise again and that they had made their escape with scarcely a second to spare. Staggering in the darkness, he came suddenly upon the wall of the park exactly where he had expected to find it and felt a quick thrill of satisfaction at his cleverness. He was uncertain of the exact spot where he had come upon the wall, but after a moment he decided that if he turned to the right he would come presently to the Great Gate where the Maharajah's band played each evening at sunset. Again the instinct of the pioneer was right, for after hurrying along the wall, he came presently to the Great Gate itself rising, it seemed to him, up and up into dark infinity. Calling out in Hindustani to the guards, he got no answer and found that the niches where the Sikh horsemen usually stood were empty. Then, halting the procession for a moment, he read once more the names of the class to make certain that none had been lost, and he was about to give the order to go ahead when Mrs. Smiley called out, "Listen, some one is calling!" and out of the darkness and the rain and above the distant sound of wailing, he heard a woman's voice from somewhere on the opposite side of the road calling out, "Sarah! Wait for me! Sarah! Sarah!" and he knew that it was Miss Hodge.

Mrs. Smiley called out, "Shall we go back for her?" and in an instant Mr. Smiley was forced to make a terrible decision. The water, even in Engineering School Road which was comparatively high ground, had risen almost to his waist. Five minutes more and it might be over the heads of the smaller boys. Thinking quickly, he called back, "No. We'll get the boys to the palace first and I'll come back for her." It was the life of one middle-aged old maid against the lives of twenty-seven low-caste boys who had scarcely begun to live.

"Hurry!" he called out, and in Gujerati, he urged the boys through the great silent gateway and along the curving drive, for there was still a good five hundred yards to cover before they might consider themselves safe.

As they staggered along the drive, one o the smaller boys whimpered and lay down in the water to die. Mrs. Smiley would not have known it save for the cries of the boy nearest to him, whose hand he had been holding. Groping her way, she found him and yanked him to his feet. Then she slapped him, and herself took his hand, dragging him, whimpering and crying, through the water.

Presently the ground began to rise beneath their feet and the water to grow more and more shallow until at last they were walking on earth that was soaked but free of flood water. It was easy enough to follow the contours of the metaled drive and in another moment or two the enormous mass of the half-ruined palace, bare now of pinnacles and towers and turrets, rose in front of them, visible only because it was more opaque than the darkness. Then they were safe within the dubious shelter of the broken forte cochtre and Mr. Smiley climbing the steps, led them toward the Hall of Honor. But he had gone only a few feet when he found the way blocked by masses of stone and plaster which was all that was left of the great tower. He knew then what had happened that the great tower had fallen, blocking the Hall of Honor and crushing all the gold leaf and mosaic and sandalwood in the Durbar Hall. The faint perfume of splintered sandalwood hung in the damp air, and from a distant part of the palace came the sound of wailing and lamentation. Then close by him there rose a sound of scuffling and chattering and a troop of sacred monkeys scuttled away into one of the anterooms.

Then for the last time he made certain that none of the boys were missing, and said to Mrs. Smiley, "I'll go back now and see what I can do for the old maids.'*

And Mrs. Smiley found herself crying out, "No! Don't go! Don't go! There's nothing to be done now." And then abrupdy she was silent and ashamed of herself, for she knew that Mr. Smiley had to go, that nothing could stop him, and that she herself had no right to attempt it. In her spirit she knew that she had no desire to stop him, that if he had stayed behind now he would have lost some of the new glory with which the rescue and escape had endowed him in her eyes. It was her body which cried out, the body which until now had always been docile and indifferent, a mere machine which had served the spirit. Her spirit had always loved Mr. Smiley, but now her body was in love with him, with his resourcefulness, his bravery, his determination. He was a new Mr. Smiley, and suddenly, in some strange way, she was a new Mrs. Smiley. The sensation glorified and puzzled her. In the darkness and confusion she felt a great singing inside her, a kind of exaltation because together they had defeated the earthquake and the flood and all the horrors of the darkness and the rain. She heard him saying, "But I must go, dear" in his familiar gentle way, and at once she answered, "Of course you must, but do be careful!" feeling at the same time that the words she spoke and her voice itself were pitifully inadequate and banal beside what she was feeling inside her.

She was aware that in the darkness he was trying to find her, and putting out her hand she found his and drew him to her. Quickly they embraced and then he was gone into the wall of rain, but she knew from the way he kissed her that he was feeling what she felt, and again the sense of exaltation, more wonderful than anything she had ever experienced, swept over her. And presently she began to cry, feeling wonder that she was a woman and no longer simply an instrument of God, and after a time her tears ceased and she fell on her knees again to pray, and this time she prayed alone for the safety of Mr. Smiley.

For two hours she waited, now praying, now keeping watch over the low-caste boys who lay huddled together near her, some of them asleep, some of them still shivering and whimpering. And every few minutes she went as far as the ruined forte cocker e to call, "Homer! Homer!" again and again into the darkness, terrified by the lonely sound of the voice that was stifled so quickly by the rain.

After a time the sounds of lamentation from the distant parts of the palace died away and the night grew still save for the gurgling sound of the water. It was still rising, for each time she went to the porte cochZre it was a little higher on the steps. The perfume of shattered sandalwood still hung in the air, and after a time, in spite of hope, of desire, of f aith> she began to doubt that he would ever return, and vaguely her brain began to consider how she would carry on without him, especially now after what had happened to her. And then out of the darkness she heard his voice, calling, "Bertha! Bertha!" a voice that was weak and hoarse from exhaustion, and she felt suddenly faint and sick with joy.

Almost at once he sank down on the marble floor and said, "I couldn't get anywhere near them. I had to swim for it myself. It's nasty. The water is full of snakes now." And then he slipped into unconsciousness, his head lying in her lap. And at the same time out of the darkness, into the ruined hallway, staggered the figure of a white man, a European whom Bertha Smiley had never seen before. By a flash of lightning she saw a narrow white face with a long nose and narrow eyes and saw that he was dressed oddly in a morning coat such as the British officials wore at the durbars of the Maharajah. The man stumbled over one of the Untouchable boys and fell without making an effort to rise. It was Bates,

From Ransome's house, Mrs. Simon, agitated by an odd mixture of emotions which included rage, exultation, triumph, suppressed lechery, and confusion, drove in her ancient Ford to the bungalow of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry. It stood at some distance from the town on the edge of the parade-ground. When Mrs. Simon arrived she found her friend alone, seated morosely in a vast chair, corsetless and clad in a flowing peignoir of pale pink and lace, brooding over the absence and neglect of Mr. Hoggett-Egburry, who had gone off, as usual, alone, to Delhi, leaving her behind to swelter in Ranchipur. She was not drinking, because she had reached the saturation point a little after she had returned from her trip to Mrs. Simon's to relate the "news," and once the saturation point had been reached more brandy only made her feel sullen and sick. Most of Ranchipur knew when Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had reached the saturation point; she became petulant and quarrelsome and the curious accent which she had invented for herself slipped away beyond control, replaced by her native Putney cockney. Also she ceased to talk put^a and had even on occasion been known, while saturated, to use such expressions as "God blimey" and "bloody."

In spite of her saturation she brightened a litde at the sight of Mary Lou Simon stepping out of the old Ford. Immediately she said, pouting a litde as if she were still nineteen and possessed of a flossy prettiness: "You must stay to tiffin and keep me company. I have a terrible migraine."

Mrs. Simon accepted at once and sent a servant to say that the Reverend Mr. Simon was not to expect her. It always flattered her that Lily Hoggett-Egburry should desire her company, and now she was full of exciting news the revelation about the depravity of the Smileys, the outrageous behavior of Fern, the description of the interior of Ransome's house which had "intrigued" Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry for so long, but above all the prospect, which she knew would dazzle her friend, of Fern's marriage to Ransome. In fact, she was fairly bursting with items certain to titillate the bank manager's wife, saturation or no saturation.

All this Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry had been waiting impatiently, too impatiently, perhaps, with a brandy bottle in the house, to hear since five in the afternoon. At once Mrs. Simon proposed that they go into the sitting room where what she had to tell was less likely to be overheard by some barefooted servant.

This room was as overcrowded as Ransome's rooms had been empty. In it were crowded masses of bric-a-brac, Benares brass, photographs, cushions, dubious objets d'art, including an enlarged, colored, and life-sized photograph of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry in her prime, at the moment she had made her first appearance on the stage in "Puss in Boots." All these things were arranged without plan of any sort; in fact, the room very closely resembled the inside of Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry's head at the moment her friend had discovered her on the verandah.

Amid the magpie collection of souvenirs they put their heads together while Mrs. Simon, breathless, recounted all the terrible things she had discovered since they had last met two hours earlier, and here Harry Loder found them a little later, just at that point in the story where Mrs. Simon related how she had written a letter to the Missionary Board in Iowa and "fixed" the Smileys once and for all.

He was a big man of thirty-one, beefy rather than muscular, with black hair and brown eyes and a fine complexion which, despite a good deal of drinking, had remained fine and high-colored instead of going white and pasty like the skins of most Europeans in India. He had survived the heat, the climate, the drinking through a heavy animal vitality. He was healthy, rather stupid, male, full of blood, and coarse. There was an animal beauty about him which struck both women whenever they saw him, and now as he charged into the room, a certain perkiness entered their manner. Now in their forties they were able to appreciate a man like Harry Loder, and tonight he seemed more impressive than ever, more agitated and more red-faced, more charged with rich masculine promise.

When he had checked the first bull-like rush of his entrance, he said, "Excuse me for crashing in like this, but I wanted to see Mrs. Simon." To Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry he said, "I'm sorry, but it's very important," and then they both knew that he too had "heard."

Mrs. Simon said, "It's all right. Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry knows everything."

Now, at sight of Harry Loder she began to weaken a little in her determination to have Ransome for Fern's husband. After all, if he wasn't as rich as Ransome and his family wasn't as good, there were things about him... And he was much easier to snare. She would have liked him herself (she even half-admitted it) but failing that... then Fern...

"I meant about Fern," he said, and his nostrils dilated and he breathed heavily.

"Yes, about Fern," and in a lowered voice, appropriate to the circumstances, she added, "It was Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry who told me." She took out her handkerchief, and although there was no moisture in her eyes, she wept in pantomime... and her heart beat with an odd ex^ citement when Harry Loder shouted, almost like an old Southern gentleman: "111 shoot the blackguard! Such things aren't done!"

"No," said Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, with tipsy wisdom, "you certainly can't do that."

"Why can't I?" Loder roared back at her.

"Considering who he is," continued Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry, her idea becoming a little clearer to her, "It's not as if he was a common soldier or even an inferior officer."

"I suppose you mean because his brother is a bloody earl?"

"Captain Loder!"

"I beg your pardon, but my feelings got the better of me."

Mrs. Simon, at the fine spectacle of a professional male in jealous :rage, grew a little more excited, and forgetting even Fern, said, "In mah j>art of the South, they call that kind of man a nigger-lover."

And then like the vengeance of God the earthquake happened, noisily, "with a clatter and bang because there was so much brass and bric-a-brac

to fall all about them. Both women began to scream, and still screaming they were dragged to the verandah where Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry promptly fainted. Then while her friend and Harry Loder were reviving her, the flood swept down the valley, just below them, roaring and whining above the distant sound of wailing, and as Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry raised her head for the first time and moaned faintly, it occurred to Harry Loder that he should be back at the barracks where all sorts of terrible things might have happened, and not here on the verandah with two hysterical middle-aged women.

He said to Mrs. Simon, "Now she's all right, 111 leave you and get to the barracks," but Mrs. Simon cried out, "No, no. You can't leave us fiow"

"That's where I belong, 5 ' he answered. "Stay here and 111 come back for you as soon as I'm able."

Then Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry cried out that she could not be left, and Mrs. Simon, intoxicated a little by the spectacle of Harry Loder in male action, said, "No Lily, let him go." And to Loder she said, "Go! Go! Do your duty!"

Then suddenly he was gone and Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry heard the strange horrible sounds from the town below them and said, "What is that?"

"It's people yelling," said Mrs. Simon, and again she turned to where Harry Loder had been, and said, "Go! Your place is at the barracks.'* But he was already gone.

Skirting the edge of the flood, he drove the wheezy old Morris through the rain, sometimes on the road, sometimes across the sodden fields, for he knew every inch of the way only too well, so well that he was damned sick of it, even now in all the excitement; and as he drove he was frightened, not by the fear of death which he had never experienced^ but by a kind of vague, indescribable animal fear, like the panic fear of a startled buck in thick jungle, a dread of something which he did not understand. It was terror of that damned interminable rain, of the fiercely burgeoning vegetation, of fevers, of snakes, of the hatred he sometimes felt about him everywhere, a fear of the dank stillness that preceded the quake and a fear even now in his excitement of his own Indian troops, so sleek and obedient beneath his iron hand, and yet somehow so evasive and insolent and in their spirits disloyal. It was a dread of the very landscape which he could no longer see in the driving rain, and of the very trees whose branches seemed to reach down into the yellow circle of light to seize him from the car.

He had been like that nervy for a long time, he knew now; he could remember the definite feeling coming over him for the first time about three years ago, but it had, he knew, been going on much longer than that beneath the surface of his healthy skin, from the very moment he had arrived in India, hating its smells, even the pleasant smell of jasmine and spices which other men, men whose health had been broken long ago, found nostalgic and agreeable. He had hated the whole bloody thing and most of all he had hated the Indians themselves. He couldn't, when he tried, think of one you could trust. He couldn't understand them. Hindus or Moslems, it was the same kettle of fish. If you were friendly, they turned arrogant and insufferable; if you treated them as a soldier should, the sly bastards had a way of making you feel inferior, as if you were some kind of half-savage animal. For ten years he had stuck it out, hating the country and the landscape and the people, homesick for Devonshire and wishing all the time he were in Burma, which was at least lush and green, or Shanghai or any bloody place but India. It hadn't even hurt his health, the vulnerable spot with most men. It had struck him from behind, subtly, undermining the nerves of a man who had no nerves. Not even the pig-sticking and panther-shooting, not even the pleasure of killing that was always in his blood, the pleasure of an expert thrust of a spear or a perfect shot from a high-powered rifle, could make up for the other thing, that horrible nameless dread that had been eating into him for so long. Once in the hills beyond Mount Abana when he had been panther-shooting, he had had a mild attack of fever and experienced a horrible dream in which he kept on killing panthers, one after another until there was a great pile of corpses before him and his aching arms could no longer hold up the rifle. They had kept on coining, leaping at him from the top of the heap of carcasses until at last when he no longer had strength to fire, one leapt at him and dragged him to the ground. And in the dream each panther was India.

Driving faster and faster along the road, the dread overcame even the rage he felt that Ransome should have gotten Fern Simon before him, the rage which he had managed somehow to turn from jealousy and injured vanity into outraged virtue and honor with the peculiar dull hyprocrisy of men who live by what is called a "code." He forgot even that he had planned to do the same thing and had not done it simply because the girl would not have him. And in his vanity there was a kind of physical pain that such a girl, the daughter of ordinary common missionaries, should prefer a bloody drunk like Ransome to himself, to whom most women fell victims at once. But through the fury and dread he saw that Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry was right. He couldn't shoot Ransome. He wasn't worth it, or that little tart, either! After all, he had his future to think of, and what happened to Fern wasn't important. Now he didn't want her any longer, but his vanity wanted balm. No, he wouldn't shoot Ransome, but he'd beat the hell out of him the first chance he got.

Then in the lights of the car he saw the white corner post of the race- course road and knew that he was only a little way from the barracks, and at the same time he heard wild shouts and cries and the sickening unnameable fear took entire possession of him again and he thought, "Maybe they've turned! Maybe they're murdering the boys!" and in the next moment the lights of the car turning in at the drive, struck the place where the barracks should have been, only there were no barracks now but only a great heap of rubble with jagged and broken beams emerging here and there. He heard the wild cries of the Indian soldiers scurrying like ants in the drenching rain to clear away the shattered stone and mortar, and at the same time he thought, "That's where the mess was. They must have been at mess. They're all beneath it ... Cruikshank and Culbertson and Bailey and Sampson." Then the soldiers came running toward him, staring into the lights, shouting things which he did not understand, and he thought, "This bloody country! This God-damned bloody country!" and began to sob.

Without stopping the motor he jumped out and cried in Hindustani, "Where is Lieutenant Bailey? Where are the officers?" and the three men who had run toward him no longer shouted, but stood half in the circle of light from the motor, paralyzed and tongue-tied, and then one

called Pashat Singh, a sergeant, choked and blurted in Hindustani: "He's in there. All the sahibs are in there. The house fell on them." Then the men began to make incomprehensible noises and to salaam again and again in the most unmilitary fashion as if they were in some way responsible for the disaster.

Loder cried out, "Get to work, you bloody bastards! Get to work! Dig them out of there!" He shouted and swore to cover the sound of his own sobs, for his men must not know that he, a British soldier, was sobbing; but he could not stop the sobs now, even by stiffening every muscle. The sobs were a physical paroxysm which shook him from head to foot like spasms, and between the paroxysms he shivered in his drenched clothing. He thought, "God help me to pull myself together! God help me!" He had not felt like this since he was a child of four, frightened by the great dog which had jumped into his crib in the middle of the night once long ago at his uncle's house in Surrey.

And as he ran toward the mass of stone, he saw that there was no use in hurrying to get them out... Cruikshank and Bailey and Culbertson and Sampson . . . nobody could be alive beneath all that mass of stone and beams and mortar. He would never again see them alive.

With Pashat Singh beside him he began to tear at the heap of stones, cut long ago from the depths of that eternal Mountain Abana, wildly and without plan, cursing and sobbing, and almost at once he came upon the piano, that poor, awful, tinny piano, ruined by heat and dampness, which Cruikshank used to play after tiffin in the evenings. He thought, "Perhaps he was playing the piano. Perhaps well find him here." And then suddenly they found the body of poor Cruikshank beneath the battered piano, crumpled, broken, bloody and quite dead, and clenching both fists, Loder raised them toward the pouring sky, shaking them and crying out, "This bloody country! This bloody awful country!"

For a long time after Loder left them, the two middle-aged women remained huddled together on the floor of the verandah, Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry sobbing hysterically, Mrs. Simon trying to comfort her, and then presently they both were silent from emotional exhaustion and sat listening, straining to hear the distant sounds from the stricken town which came to them, muffled and hideous through the rain, as if in some way they could read them and discover what had happened.

Then Mrs. Simon said, in a low voice, "I wonder what has happened to the boys . . . and to Hazel and Mr. Simon."

Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry said: "Thank Gawd 'erbert wasn't 'ere. 'Is nerves could never 'ave stood it."

"I've got to get home. I think I can drive the car."

Then Mrs. Hoggett-Egburry began again to cry drunkenly: "Don't leave me. You cawn't leave me."

"Get me your driver."

"I can't move. I cawn't get up. Call him. Call the 'ouse boy."

Mrs. Simon clapped her hands, but there was no answer and then she tried shouting the name of the head boy, weakly at first and then louder and louder as the terror grew again.

"Dalji!" she shouted, "Dalji!" again and again, and when no one answered she fell silent, filled with terror worse than her terror of the quake. Beside her the "Duchess," the wife of the manager of the Ranchipur Bank who came of county people in Shropshire, with an accent she had invented for herself, began to scream again, this time in cockney. She wasn't any longer the "Duchess," but simply the vulgar beauty she had been long ago when Herbert Hoggett-Egburry married her out of passion and weakness and innocence, to the ruin of his whole career, a woman who had been left behind in Ranchipur because in Delhi he was ashamed of her, now that her beauty and his passion were spent. The two middle-aged women, one from Unity Point, Mississippi, and the other from Shropshire, clung to each other, deserted, terrified, forgotten.

In the Summer Palace the solid ancient walls cracked at the first shock of the quake and for a little time, held together by their own vast weight, tottered before falling, the east side inward, the west side outward upon the ornate forte cochere over the beds of cannas and geraniums. The east wall buried Miss de Souza, the nurse, Lady Esketh's two frightened maids and four Indian servants, and the west wall put an end to the two Sikhs and the porter on guard at the entrance. The servants who escaped ran from the house into the park in the direction of the bazaar, and here the flood caught them, sweeping them to death in a wall of water and corpses

and broken houses. In what remained of the palace Lord Esketh, in the teakwood bed ornamented with mother-of-pearl, alone remained alive. The wall and part of the roof slipped away and the driving monsoon rain swept in, striking his face, soaking the bedclothes, rousing him for a moment to consciousness out of the delirium which for fourteen hours had kept him writhing on the bed, crying out at the phantoms which tormented him, now cringing, now trying to throw himself on the floor, for the fever and pain were violent and drove him to behave like a madman. Two hours before the quake the glands in the groin had begun to swell and the dread buboes to appear beneath the arms and in the throat, and with them came the lancinating pains which burst even through the wall of morphine which the Major had built between him and torment, dragging him by its awful violence back to a kind of consciousness in which he was aware clearly of his own misery and agony.

Now, wakening slowly in little gusts of consciousness beneath the flood of the monsoon rain, he thought at first that he was back again in the luxury of the house in Hill Street and that a pipe had burst in a room above his head. He would try to shout for Bates, and then the delirium would seize him again, thrusting him back into a horrible world of dreadful shapes; but with each returning wave of consciousness his mind became a little more clear, and each time the wave lasted a little longer, until presently he was able to understand by the glare from the burning town that he was in a strange place, in an unfamiliar shattered room, and that the water which fell on his face came not from a broken pipe, but from the sky itself, a sky thick with clouds which reflected the light of the flames on the earth below him. The glowing clouds seemed to press down onto his bed, and in his groin and beneath the arms there was a terrible grinding pain, and in the distance the sound of wailing as of souls in torment.

Again he tried to cry out the name of Bates, but this time he found that no sound came from his mouth. It was filled, choked with some substance which, when he attempted to speak, seemed to suffocate him. Then slowly he understood that he could not speak because the curious substance was his own tongue, so swollen now that it filled his whole mouth, and wildly, half in delirium, he thought: "I am dead. I am already in hell" and horror took full possession of him.

Then mercifully the delirium intervened for a time with horrors more kind than the horror of the conscious pain and the monstrous swollen tongue, and he tossed and struggled until the morphine, receding again In waves, freed his consciousness once more and again he tried to cry out the name of Bates; but his mouth made no sound. And at last a little before midnight the morphine wore away altogether, leaving his mind quite clear but still a prey to pain which made him clutch his own body as if by tearing it apart with his own hands he could find peace from the agony. Throbbing with each beat of the powerful heart, the pain came and went in spasms, and in the intervals it became slowly clear to him where he was and how he had come there and he wanted to cry out: "Where are you? Why have you all left me here in this hell?" And then he remembered the bargaining with the Maharajah over the horses and the bargaining with the Dewan over the mills, and clearest of all the quarrel with Edwina, and again he tried to shout, not the name of Bates this time, but of Edwina, thinking, "She can't leave me here like this. She doesn't hate me so much as that. It is not the sort of thing she would do." But again his throat contracted and the muscles of his jaws worked desperately but no sound came from the swollen tongue.

Then, half-delirious, half-conscious, he began to live over again in snatches the whole of his life the days when as a boy he had gone out of Liverpool on his bicycle on holidays to watch the gentry riding over hedges and ditches in their pink coats, the day of his final quarrel with his father and mother when he had run away to London never to see either of them again, the days in Macassar and Borneo, and then the Malay States when, as a young man, planning and scheming the future, watching people, studying them shrewdly, he had sold cutlery and cheap watches. Between stabs of tormenting pain and moments of delirium he lived again that feeling of triumph touched with bitterness and contempt for his fellowmen, a feeling which he knew each time he swindled one of them and made a great coup. And at last he came to this final voyage, to this India which he hated, this India which was being ruined as a great market because there were stupid men in the India office who refused to treat the Indian people harshly, as one must always treat those from whom profit is to be drawn this hateful India where there were men like the Maharajah and that wily Dewan. It all passed through his brain, muddled and confused and shot through with the pain and the new misery of the chills brought on by the soaking rain. And in a sudden moment of clearer vision, he thought: "I must not die. Not till I've done all I mean to do ... not till I've got all this bloody world owes me..." Not till he had more wealth and more power and had written all those leaders with which his newspapers were to smash the bloody Bolsheviks and those weak bastards who were all crying out for peace. Who wanted peace? Whoever made profit out of peace? Look at the bloody League of Nations... Wildly he thought, "I must get out of here... I must get away."

Raising himself with a frantic effort, he tried again to make the hideous swollen tongue articulate the name of Bates. Then desperately he managed to slip to the side of the bed, where the jagged knife was thrust again into his groin and turned this way and that while he slid to the floor, every muscle cramped by the awful pain. Then it passed and only the throbbing which came from the bull-like heart which would not let him die, remained, and the obsession returned: "I must get out of here... out of this bloody place and this bloody country." And crawling on his hands and knees, he struggled toward the door.

Inch by inch he made his way under the beating rain across the Turkey- red carpet. Twice he fell, stabbed again in the groin and the armpits and the throat by that dreadful knife, by those worms, those horrible microscopic animals which were devouring him; and at last he reached the door, and with a surging of that monstrous vitality, raised himself slowly until at last he was standing, tearing at the gilt door handle. But the door did not move because behind it there lay tons of fallen stones and beams and the crushed bodies of Miss de Souza and Edwina's two maids. Wildly he tried to force it open, gurgling and choking in an effort to make the swollen tongue cry out: "Help me! Save me! I am Lord Esketh... the great and powerful Lord Esketh. I'll pay you what you want. I'll give you everything I have, only get me out of here. Help me! Save me!"

But the tongue was silent, so swollen now that it had begun to choke him. Then in the wild delirium he had a sudden vision of the face of Bates, cold, white, damp, hating him, full of contempt. The door handle came away suddenly, and in a final paroxysm of pain he fell with all his huge weight, and his aching, burning head struck the marble top of the Victorian washstand. Then mercifully he was beyond pain, beyond delirium, and in the reflected glow, from the burning city he lay still at last on the soaked Turkey-red carpet beneath the flood of the monsoon.

It was the Untouchable quarter which suffered worst of all because it lay in the lowest part of the city just across the river from the burning- ghats and on it fell not only the weight of the water itself, but the whole burden of shattered trees and wrecked houses and corpses which the flood bore upon its angry breast.

At the first shock of the quake Mr. Jobnekar, taking his wife and three doll-like children with him, had gone down into the little square to join the crowd which had gathered there, but before he was able to speak and reassure even his nearest neighbors, the distant roaring began, and above it the curious muffled sound of terror which rose from the city above them, not the sound of a thousand separate voices raised in terror, but the sound of a single voice as if the whole city had seen destruction coming toward it and had cried out in agony.

Mr. Jobnekar, quicker, more intelligent, more educated than the others, understood the meaning of the sound and cried out, "Flood! Flood! Take to the roofs!" and all about him the cry was picked up and carried along until the voices in the Square of the Untouchables joined the sound of terror that rose from the upper city. Seizing two of the children, with Mrs. Jobnekar carrying the smallest, they ran back again into the little pink house with the Nottingham lace curtains, up one flight of steps and then another until they came to the roof. Neighbors pushed up the stairs at their heels, all screaming and shouting with terror. Behind them the panic-stricken mob poured out on to the flat roof until there was no more room and children disappeared, trampled in the agony of fear. Mr, Jobnekar had only time to pull his wife close to him and shelter the three whimpering children between them when the flood with a wild roar struck the square, sweeping aside one house after another, crushing with its weight of wreckage and corpses the few miserable men, women, and children who still remained in the square itself. And at the same moment Mr. Jobnekar knew that there was no hope and tried wildly to gather his wife and the crying children all within the compass of his

arms, turning his back against the flood in a last gesture of protection. As the flood struck the house, it swayed, creaked and groaned, and almost at once the far end collapsed with all its weight of terrified humanity. Then the rest gave way, slowly, like a stricken animal sinking to its knees, and Mr. and Mrs. Jobnekar and the frightened, crying children, slowly sank with it beneath the torrent. As the water closed over his head he pressed the children closer to him as if to comfort and reassure them, and thought, "I must not die yet, when there is so much to be done..." When the flood had swept on across the flat plains toward Mount Abana, not one house remained in all the Untouchable quarter.

For twenty-three years since the day the dam was finished as one of the wonders of India the fault had remained hidden. For twenty-three years the Maharajah in his pride, the Sewan in his wiliness, Raschid the Police Minister, Mr. Jobnekar, the councilors of state and the humble of Ranchipur had believed in the great dam with a faith that was like their faith in the ring of hills and the unchanging desert beyond, like the faith they had in the sacred mountain of Abana rising eternal, crowned with white temples against the brazen sky; for in the hearts of all of them save perhaps the old Dewan, who was as old as time, there was a kind of mystical child-like faith in the miracles which could be worked by the great engineers from the West... things which no Indian could conceive or execute. Had they not built the huge barrages of the north and the great bridges over the Ganges and the Brahmaputra? And who among them could be trusted more than the smooth and plausible Aristide de Groot, who had, he said, built dams and bridges and factories in Switzerland and Austria, in Italy and Sweden, in Brazil and China?

After nine thousand people had lost their lives in the great flood there were those in Ranchipur who remembered Aristide de Groot and even recalled suspicions, partly imaginary, which they had had long ago that he was not as he had said, a Swiss, nor anything else very definite but simply a man without a country, an adventurer, and a swindler. They remembered him as a swarthy squat little man who already spoke a half dozen languages when he came to Ranchipur and who learned Hindustani and Gujerati with astonishing swiftness. He had been plausible and even engaging company, with no prejudices as to race or creed or color, with a tongue which had a lightning quickness like the tongue of a Russell's viper. One or two clever people like the Dewan and the old Maharani remembered Aristide de Groot, twenty-three years afterward, only as a pair of eyes, cold eyes like those of the deadly fyrait, which must have regarded all men as exactly alike simply because they were potential victims of Aristide de Groot. But his viper's tongue had been smooth enough to persuade not only the lowly and the good and the simple like the Maharajah, but even men like the worldly Viceroy himself, that he was a great engineer.

After the disaster when the first news of its horrors reached the Dewan, surrounded by his innumerable family in Poona, the old man, running his lean fingers through the long white beard, thought, sadly, "There was some fault in the dam. I can scarcely remember that man de Groot save for his eyes. In his eyes was hidden the whole tragedy of European greed."

He knew, sitting there in his cool garden, that long ago he should have trusted the instinct which had never failed him; but that knowledge did little good now. After a morning of contemplation the memory of the Jyait's eyes made him think, "Men like that should be stamped out like serpents. If they are not stamped out, the West is finished. It will destroy itself." And sitting there, immensely wise and immensely old, the thought did not displease him. But the memories of old suspicions did nothing to restore to life the nine thousand men, women, and children who were dead, nor save from destruction all that it had taken the old Maharajah more than fifty years of struggle and heartbreak to create.

And the fault in the dam was nothing which anyone could prove, least of all in a court of justice where Aristide de Groot would sit, surrounded by rich and corrupt lawyers; and there was always the shock of the earthquake which accompanied the flood as an excuse for the collapse. Nevertheless it was plain to be seen after the flood when the great reservoir lay empty, that the construction of the shattered dam had been shoddy, that the reinforcements and the steel work had been insufficient, and that sand from the sea, impure and filled with salt, had been used because it was near at hand and cheap. It was quite impossible to prove that any of these things had been responsible for the disaster; the worst verdict to be expected was that Aristide de Groot had been a

bad builder, and such a verdict would have made little difference to de Groot, for he had other irons in the fire and had forgotten long ago that he had ever been a contracting engineer.

It was the British Government which uncovered in detail the rise of the famous Aristide de Groot since the comparatively lean and shoddy days when he had constructed the great barrage of Ranchipur. Those who had the investigation in charge discovered that he was no longer, as indeed he had never been, a proper engineer, and that long ago he had abandoned any pretentions in that direction; now he had interests in oil and foreign exchange and munitions and even more shady undertakings. Out of the misery of bankrupt nations and the death of men he had built a fabulous fortune which was vague and untraceable. Some of it was in New York, some in London, a little in Paris, some in Amsterdam, and some in Sweden. And the British Government discovered that behind a dozen petty wars and revolutions and disorders there always lurked the sinister presence of the man with eyes like a J^rait and the tongue of a Russell's viper, a man with a genius for creating markets for rifles and shells and cannon and machine guns. It discovered too that he had swindled a dc facto Chinese Government out of two million pounds on a munitions contract, that he had smuggled arms into Afghanistan, that he had had a strange association with the early Hitler and had an interest in a huge underground syndicate which dealt in drugs.

And almost at once Aristide de Groot became the beloved "mystery man" whom the journalists are forever seeking, and vanished from his chateau near Compiegne wearing dark glasses and bound for a holiday in Peru. He need not have taken the trouble to run away, for the British Government discovered that there was not much to be done about Aristide de Groot since he numbered among his intimate friends too many "statesmen" and senators and bankers in continental countries. He was as well protected as possible. The British Government even discovered with a certain shock that four or five important men in London, including Lord Eskcth and his journalist rival, Lord Pakington, had spent weekends with Aristide de Groot on his yacht or at his chateau near Compiegne or his house in Biarritz. The Government discovered that the tragedy of Ranchipur could even be listed as one of de Groot's minor crimes; but

even about that there was nothing to be done unless as Lord Pakington (who outlived Lord Esketh) wrote in one of his famous leaders "we are willing to unleash the whole spirit of Bolshevism to work its deviltry upon the unprotected women and the countryside of England." Suddenly everyone felt that the less said about Aristide de Groot the better, and after a little while he returned from Peru to rejoin the wife he had found long ago in a Trieste brothel, in their handsome Louis Treize chateau not far from the gate where Joan of Arc was captured.

And, anyway, it did not matter very greatly to a Christendom tormented by its own festering wounds that nine thousand heathens had been crushed and drowned in a few minutes, or that Ranchipur, the bestgoverned state in the East had been crippled by the disaster for a whole generation. All that was very far away, although it was alarmingly nearer than it had been half a century earlier. Still, it was far enough away so that the disaster did not add its anguish to the burden of threats and conferences, civil war, secret alliances, intrigues, greed bigotry and bitterness and hatred which already festered in the repository of Western civilization.

The dam had been in a way a kind of symbol the symbol of Oriental faith in Occidental practical achievement and honesty, organization and superiority, a faith which like the dam itself had long since cracked and fallen.