“You are coming to dinner with me as arranged,” said Fielding, looking away. “I don’t stand this. You are coming to dinner with me. You come.”
They had reached the hospital now. Fielding continued round the Maidan alone. He was annoyed with himself, but counted on dinner to pull things straight. At the post office he saw the Collector. Their vehicles were parked side by side while their servants competed in the interior of the building. “Good morning; so you are back,” said Turton icily. “I should be glad if you will put in your appearance at the club this evening.”
“I have accepted re-election, sir. Do you regard it as necessary I should come? I should be glad to be excused; indeed, I have a dinner engagement this evening.”
“It is not a question of your feelings, but of the wish of the Lieutenant-Governor. Perhaps you will ask me whether I speak officially. I do. I shall expect you this evening at six. We shall not interfere with your subsequent plans.”
He attended the grim little function in due course. The skeletons of hospitality rattled—“Have a peg, have a drink.” He talked for five minutes to Mrs. Blakiston, who was the only surviving female. He talked to McBryde, who was defiant about his divorce, conscious that he had sinned as a sahib. He talked to Major Roberts, the new Civil Surgeon; and to young Milner, the new City Magistrate; but the more the club changed, the more it promised to be the same thing. “It is no good,” he thought, as he returned past the mosque, “we all build upon sand; and the more modern the country gets, the worse’ll be the crash. In the old eighteenth century, when cruelty and injustice raged, an invisible power repaired their ravages. Everything echoes now; there’s no stopping the echo. The original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil.” This reflection about an echo lay at the verge of Fielding’s mind. He could never develop it. It belonged to the universe that he had missed or rejected. And the mosque missed it too. Like himself, those shallow arcades provided but a limited asylum. “There is no God but God” doesn’t carry us far through the complexities of matter and spirit; it is only a game with words, really, a religious pun, not a religious truth.
He found Aziz overtired and dispirited, and he determined not to allude to their misunderstanding until the end of the evening; it would be more acceptable then. He made a clean breast about the club—said he had only gone under compulsion, and should never attend again unless the order was renewed. “In other words, probably never; for I am going quite soon to England.”
“I thought you might end in England,” he said very quietly, then changed the conversation. Rather awkwardly they ate their dinner, then went out to sit in the Mogul garden-house.
“I am only going for a little time. On official business. My service is anxious to get me away from Chandrapore for a bit. It is obliged to value me highly, but does not care for me. The situation is somewhat humorous.”
“What is the nature of the business? Will it leave you much spare time?”
“Enough to see my friends.”