The Faraway Drums. Jon Cleary
and soap he began to itch. The same irritation affected him whenever he was within smell of a desk-wallah. ‘Righto, whatever you say. I’ll put it all down in clear first. The gist of it is that I think there is a plot to assassinate the King.’
Savanna gave a half-cough, half-laugh. ‘Oh, I say! You expect me to put something like that on the telegraph to Delhi? They’d laugh their heads off. What proof have you?’
Farnol sighed again, scratched himself once more: Savanna, more than any of the other desk-wallahs, always did get under his skin more than the dirt and the lice. ‘None. Just suspicions.’ He quickly recounted the story of the ambush. ‘It ties in with what I heard further up in the hills.’
‘What did you hear? Rumours?’ Savanna shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, old chap. I can’t put that sort of clap-trap on the telegraph. It would be one thing to mention it personally to Lathrop, one can bandy suspicions back and forth all day across a desk. But to put it in code on the telegraph –’ He shook his head again, adamantly this time: after all, he was the senior officer, even if their ranks were the same. ‘Can’t be done. There have been plots and rumours of plots ever since the days of John Company. There’s sure to be one about His Majesty – what better way to create a little mischief? You know what these Indians are. But no one down in Delhi would believe it was anything more than a rumour. They’re all too busy getting spruced up for the Durbar.’
Farnol knew that plots to kill the British, or their leaders, were not new. Ever since the East India Company, John Company as it was called, built its first trading post in 1640, there had been resistance to the British presence in India and the neighbouring countries. The Indian Mutiny of sixty years ago had not blown up on the spur of the moment; the Afghan Wars had not been riots of sudden bad temper. Conspiracies for independence had been uncovered; one or two princes had rebelled and been firmly put back in their place. But no Viceroy, the King’s representative, had died from an assassin’s bullet or knife. They had died from cholera or malaria or boredom, but that had been only the climate of the country and not the climate of the population demanding its wage or revenge. Savanna was right: now, especially now, no one would take any notice of a rumour that hadn’t a shred of concrete evidence to back it. Farnol had been at the Great Durbar, Curzon’s durbar of 1903, and he remembered how for a month before it no one had had any thought for anything but the social events that accompanied it. With the King and Queen due within the week he could imagine the pushing and jostling, like beggars scrambling for coins in a bazaar, that would be going on down in the new capital.
‘All right, I’ll hold the report till we get down to Delhi.’
Savanna stiffened with six years’ seniority. ‘You can still write it in clear and give it to me.’
‘I’ll write it on the train going down.’ Farnol straightened up, daring Savanna to command him to write the report immediately. But the other knew his limitations, knew when he sounded petulant rather than commanding. He stayed silent and after a moment Farnol said, ‘Do I have to dress for dinner? Are there only you and I?’
‘Of course you’ll dress! The Ranee of Serog is coming to dinner and also the Nawab of Kalanpur – you know Bertie, a very decent chap. And there will be Baron von Albern and Lady Westbrook.’
‘Damn! I think I’ll dine in my room.’ Then he looked down and saw the girl in bowler hat and riding habit come into the hall below. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Miss O’Brady. An American gel. Evidently she met His Excellency and Lady Hardinge down in Delhi, told them she was coming up here and they invited her to stay at the Lodge. Can’t understand why. She’s not only American, she’s also one of those damned newspaper reporters.’
1
Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:
I have been to several memorable dinner parties in the course of a long and, forgive my smugness, very rewarding life. Once, when he and his wife had had a falling-out, Richard Harding Davis, that most handsome and dashing of foreign correspondents, took me to dinner at the White House; President Taft himself had to rescue me from the attentions and intentions of the French Ambassador, who had had a falling-out with his wife. On another occasion Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, known to everyone as Honey Fitz, called me up, knowing I was in New York for the night, and asked me to dinner with him at Rector’s with some friends from Tammany Hall. There amidst the cigar smoke, the bubbles of champagne and the giggles of the girls from the Music Hall chorus, I learned more about how a democracy is run than in several months of covering City Hall for the Boston Globe. I sometimes feel that one’s education can be improved more over the right dinner table than anywhere else, with the possible exception of under the counterpane. I speak, of course, as a lady of mature years whose education in both spheres was completed some time ago.
The most fateful dinner party, in personal terms, that I ever attended was at Viceregal Lodge in Simla in India in December 1911. The guests were as varied as one can only find in outposts of Empire; or could find, since empires, if they still exist, are no longer admitted. The acting host was a dull little man named Savanna, but everyone else at the long table in the huge panelled dining-room seemed to me to be an original, even the Nawab of Kalanpur, who did his best to be an imitation Englishman. But the most striking one there in my eyes, even though he may not have been strikingly original, was Major Clive Farnol.
He sat next to me as my partner and through most of dinner I saw little more of him than his profile. He told me later he had only that evening shaved off his beard; that accounted for the paler skin of his lower cheeks and jaw against the mahogany of the rest of his face. He had a good nose, deep-set blue eyes; but his face was too bony to be strictly handsome. He also had a nice touch of arrogance, an air I have always admired in the male sex. Humble men usually finish up carrying banners for women’s organizations.
‘You are writing the story of Lola Montez, Miss O’Brady?’ The Ranee of Serog was dressed as if for a State dinner or a trade exhibition of jewels. Of the upper part of her body only her elbows and armpits seemed undecorated with sparklers; she looked like Tiffany and Co. gone vulgar. She was a walking fortune, several million dollars on the hoof, as they say in the Chicago stockyards. She was dressed in a rich blue silk sari and once one became accustomed to the glare of her one could see that she was a beautiful woman. She was about forty which, from the youth of my then twenty-five years, seemed rather close to the grave. Now I am rather close to it myself I smile at the myopia of youth.
‘My grandfather knew her when she was Mrs James, a very young bride here in Simla,’ the Ranee said.
‘My father always boasted he was one of her first lovers.’ Lady Westbrook was an elderly woman of that rather dowdy elegance that the English achieve absent-mindedly, as if fashion was something that occurred to them only periodically like childbirth or an imperial decoration. But, I learned later, she drank her wine and port with the best of the men and smoked a cheroot in an ivory holder. ‘But that was only after he learned she finished up as the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria. I suppose all men would like to think they shared a woman with a king.’
‘Not with King George,’ said the Nawab of Kalanpur and spilled his wine as he laughed. ‘I understand the Queen sends a company of Coldstream Guards with him every time he goes out alone. She’s rather a battle-axe when it comes to morality.’
‘I say, Bertie, that’s going too far.’ Major Savanna was a stuffed shirt such as I had only hitherto seen on Beacon Hill in Boston; I suppose one finds them all over the world, a breed hidebound by what they think is correct behaviour. ‘I hope you won’t put any of this conversation into your newspaper articles, Miss O’Brady?’
I had come to India to cover the Great Durbar in Delhi, one of the few women correspondents granted such permission. Females were still considered lesser beings in those days, even in the so-called enlightened