Voices in the Night

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

UNCERTAINTIES

There were many people in many parts of Nushapore that Sunday evening who were echoing Jân-Ali-shân's estimate of the danger and discomforts of uncertainty.

For, far and near, from Government House, where Grace Arbuthnot sate at the head of a glittering dinner-table round which half the empire-making bureaucracy of the province was gathered, to the veriest hovel on the outcast outskirts of the city, where two women--the lowest of the low--were grinding at the mill for their daily bread such sweepings of the corn-dealers' shops as they had been able to gather during the day, the feeling that none knew what the coming dawn might bring to hovel and house, home and country, and people, lay heavily, almost suffocatingly.

It is a feeling which comes to India, none can tell how, or why. It is in the air like plague and pestilence. There is no remedy for it, and the fact that we aliens have learnt to recognise its existence is often the only difference between the vague unrest which dies away, as it came, irrationally, and that which brought us the mutiny, and which may, conceivably, bring us one again.

There is only one thing certain about this feeling. Whatever passion, or injustice, or ignorance, causes the first quickened heart-beat, it is not long before, however obscurely, the great problem of sex becomes involved in the quarrel between East and West. For there lies the crux of toleration, of loyalty.

So, with plague and its inevitable interference with domestic life looming before them, the hard-worked officials who for six days of the week had borne the heaviest burden men can bear--absolute executive responsibility, when the executive authority is limited--knew perfectly well, as they deliberately tried to forget that burden round the dinner-table at Government House, that very little would suffice to upset that unstable equilibrium of law and order, which--taken in conjunction with the peaceful, law-abiding temperament of the people--is so remarkable in India.

And there was so much that might conceivably upset it. To begin with, the tape machine under lock and key in the private secretary's office next the dining-room! At any moment, in the middle of a jest, or a pâté de foie gras, its electric bell might begin to ring, and the verdict of British ignorance, embodied in a message from a Secretary of State, print itself out in obliteration of the verdict of practical experience. For telegrams had been coming fast and frequent of late; would inevitably come faster and more frequent every year, every month, every day, as the lessening length of time between India and England made the pulsebeats of either audible to the other.

Then, every one round the table knew that those days, those hours were, also inevitably, bringing nearer and nearer that quarrel as to whether cleanliness comes next to godliness, or godliness to cleanliness, which has yet to be settled between East and West. Between a race which prides itself on asserting the former in its proverb, yet in its practice insists on sanitation and leaves salvation to take its chance; and a race which, while asserting that salvation is impossible without physical purity, practically ignores cleanliness. A quarrel which is surely the quaintest dissociation of theory and practice which the world can show! All the quainter in that the Western proverb is a quotation from the sacred wisdom of the East.

The question therefore, 'When will the plague come?' with its corollary, 'If it comes, what shall we do?' underlay the laughter of two-thirds of the guests. For they were men. The remaining third, being women, were as yet unconcerned; the danger had not yet come within their horizon of personal good or evil. All except Grace Arbuthnot; and that it had come into hers was due simply to an enlargement of that personal horizon; not from any general sense of duty.

Yet, in a way, the men also limited their wonder to their own line of work. The city magistrate with reference to the back slums of Nushapore, peopled by the idlest, most dissolute, most depraved population in India. The Inspector-General of Hospitals thought of his native doctors, his dispensaries. The police-officer of his bad-character list, his licences to carry arms. The General-in-command of the station, again, thought of his garrison, of the four hundred sick in hospital out of eighteen hundred men, who might be wanted ere long. His were not pleasant thoughts, and they were urgent. Only that morning he had driven down from cantonments to catch the Lieutenant-Governor before he went to church and discuss the doctor's fiat that nothing short of a complete change, a complete severance from the bazaars which, crowding round the barracks, placed the troops, as it were, in the midst of a native town, was likely to do any good. So they had discussed the question during service hours, while others were saying 'Good Lord, deliver us' from a variety of evils; with the result that Sir George had promised to go down to cantonments the very next day, and see for himself what the state of affairs was.