A Passage to India. Edward Morgan Forster
in the bazaar. No wonder you have never seen me, and I wonder you know my name. I say, Mr. Fielding?”
“Yes?”
“Guess what I look like before you come out. That will be a kind of game.”
“You’re five feet nine inches high,” said Fielding, surmising this much through the ground glass of the bedroom door.
“Jolly good. What next? Have I not a venerable white beard?”
“Blast!”
“Anything wrong?”
“I’ve stamped on my last collar stud.”
“Take mine, take mine.”
“Have you a spare one?”
“Yes, yes, one minute.”
“Not if you’re wearing it yourself.”
“No, no, one in my pocket.” Stepping aside, so that his outline might vanish, he wrenched off his collar, and pulled out of his shirt the back stud, a gold stud, which was part of a set that his brother-in-law had brought him from Europe. “Here it is,” he cried.
“Come in with it if you don’t mind the unconventionally.”
“One minute again.” Replacing his collar, he prayed that it would not spring up at the back during tea. Fielding’s bearer, who was helping him to dress, opened the door for him.
“Many thanks.” They shook hands smiling. He began to look round, as he would have with any old friend. Fielding was not surprised at the rapidity of their intimacy. With so emotional a people it was apt to come at once or never, and he and Aziz, having heard only good of each other, could afford to dispense with preliminaries.
“But I always thought that Englishmen kept their rooms so tidy. It seems that this is not so. I need not be so ashamed.” He sat down gaily on the bed; then, forgetting himself entirely, drew up his legs and folded them under him. “Everything ranged coldly on shelves was what I thought. —I say, Mr. Fielding, is the stud going to go in?”
“I hae ma doots.”
“What’s that last sentence, please? Will you teach me some new words and so improve my English?”
Fielding doubted whether “everything ranged coldly on shelves” could be improved. He was often struck with the liveliness with which the younger generation handled a foreign tongue. They altered the idiom, but they could say whatever they wanted to say quickly; there were none of the babuisms9 ascribed to them up at the club. But then the club moved slowly; it still declared that few Mohammedans and no Hindus would eat at an Englishman’s table, and that all Indian ladies were in impenetrable purdah. Individually it knew better; as a club, it declined to change.
“Let me put in your stud. I see … the shirt back’s hole is rather small and to rip it wider a pity.”
“Why in hell does one wear collars at all?” grumbled Fielding as he bent his neck.
“We wear them to pass the Police.”
“What’s that?”
“If I’m biking in English dress—starch collar, hat with ditch—they take no notice. When I wear a fez, they cry, ‘Your lamp’s out!’ Lord Curzon did not consider this when he urged natives of India to retain their picturesque costumes. —Hooray! Stud’s gone in.—Sometimes I shut my eyes and dream I have splendid clothes again and am riding into battle behind Alamgir. Mr. Fielding, must not India have been beautiful then, with the Mogul Empire at its height and Alamgir reigning at Delhi upon the Peacock Throne?”
“Two ladies are coming to tea to meet you—I think you know them.”
“Meet me? I know no ladies.”
“Not Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested?”
“Oh yes—I remember.” The romance at the mosque had sunk out of his consciousness as soon as it was over. “An excessively aged lady; but will you please repeat the name of her companion?”
“Miss Quested.”
“Just as you wish.” He was disappointed that other guests were coming, for he preferred to be alone with his new friend.
“You can talk to Miss Quested about the Peacock Throne if you like—she’s artistic, they say.”
“Is she a Post-Impressionist?”
“Post-Impressionism, indeed! Come along to tea. This world is getting too much for me altogether.”
Aziz was offended. The remark suggested that he, an obscure Indian, had no right to have heard of Post-Impressionism—a privilege reserved for the Ruling Race, that. He said stiffly, “I do not consider Mrs. Moore my friend, I only met her accidentally in my mosque,” and was adding “a single meeting is too short to make a friend,” but before he could finish the sentence the stiffness vanished from it, because he felt Fielding’s fundamental good will. His own went out to it, and grappled beneath the shifting tides of emotion which can alone bear the voyager to an anchorage but may also carry him across it on to the rocks. He was safe really—as safe as the shore-dweller who can only understand stability and supposes that every ship must be wrecked, and he had sensations the shore-dweller cannot know. Indeed, he was sensitive rather than responsive. In every remark, he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life though vivid was largely a dream. Fielding, for instance, had not meant that Indians are obscure, but that Post-Impressionism is; a gulf divided his remark from Mrs. Turton’s “Why, they speak English,” but to Aziz the two sounded alike. Fielding saw that something had gone wrong, and equally that it had come right, but he didn’t fidget, being an optimist where personal relations were concerned, and their talk rattled on as before.
“Besides the ladies, I am expecting one of my assistants—Narayan Godbole.”
“Oho, the Deccani Brahman!”
“He wants the past back too, but not precisely Alamgir.”
“I should think not. Do you know what Deccani Brahmans say? That England conquered India from them—from them, mind, and not from the Moguls. Is not that like their cheek? They have even bribed it to appear in text-books, for they are so subtle and immensely rich. Professor Godbole must be quite unlike all other Deccani Brahmans from all I can hear say. A most sincere chap.”
“Why don’t you fellows run a club in Chandrapore, Aziz?”
“Perhaps—some day … just now I see Mrs. Moore and—what’s her name—coming.”
How fortunate that it was an “unconventional” party, where formalities are ruled out! On this basis, Aziz found the English ladies easy to talk to, he treated them like men. Beauty would have troubled him, for it entails rules of its own, but Mrs. Moore was so old and Miss Quested so plain that he was spared this anxiety. Adela’s angular body and the freckles on her face were terrible defects in his eyes, and he wondered how God could have been so unkind to any female form. His attitude towards her remained entirely straightforward in consequence.
“I want to ask you something, Dr. Aziz,” she began. “I heard from Mrs. Moore how helpful you were to her in the mosque, and how interesting. She learnt more about India in those few minutes’ talk with you than in the three weeks since we landed.”
“Oh, please do not mention a little thing like that. Is there anything else I may tell you about my country?”
“I want you to explain a disappointment we had this morning; it must be some point of Indian etiquette.”
“There honestly is none,” he replied. “We are by nature a most informal people.”
“I am afraid we must have made some blunder and given offence,” said Mrs. Moore.
“That is even more impossible. But may I know the facts?”
“An