Kabanata Kabanata 23 · Chapter XXIII

. Chapter XXIII

Lady Mellanby, wife to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province,

had been gratified by the appeal addressed to her by the ladies of

Chandrapore. She could not do anything—besides, she was sailing

for England; but she desired to be informed if she could show

sympathy in any other way. Mrs. Turton replied that Mr. Heaslop’s

mother was trying to get a passage, but had delayed too long, and

all the boats were full; could Lady Mellanby use her influence?

Not even Lady Mellanby could expand the dimensions of a P. and O.,

but she was a very, very nice woman, and she actually wired offering

the unknown and obscure old lady accommodation in her own reserved

cabin. It was like a gift from heaven; humble and grateful, Ronny

could not but reflect that there are compensations for every woe.

His name was familiar at Government House owing to poor Adela, and

now Mrs. Moore would stamp it on Lady Mellanby’s imagination, as

they journeyed across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea. He had

a return of tenderness for his mother—as we do for our relatives

when they receive conspicuous and unexpected honour. She was not

negligible, she could still arrest the attention of a high

official’s wife.

So Mrs. Moore had all she wished; she escaped the trial, the

marriage, and the hot weather; she would return to England in

comfort and distinction, and see her other children. At her son’s

suggestion, and by her own desire, she departed. But she accepted

her good luck without enthusiasm. She had come to that state where

the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at

the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many

elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste,

well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or

other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars,

fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is

known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all

practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that

the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a

spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can

be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can

neither ignore nor respect Infinity. Mrs. Moore had always inclined

to resignation. As soon as she landed in India it seemed to her

good, and when she saw the water flowing through the mosque-tank,

or the Ganges, or the moon, caught in the shawl of night with all

the other stars, it seemed a beautiful goal and an easy one. To be

one with the universe! So dignified and simple. But there was

always some little duty to be performed first, some new card to be

turned up from the diminishing pack and placed, and while she was

pottering about, the Marabar struck its gong.

What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite?

What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very

small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed,

incapable of generosity—the undying worm itself. Since hearing its

voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually

envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing

had happened, “and if it had,” she found herself thinking with the

cynicism of a withered priestess, “if it had, there are worse evils

than love.” The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as

love: in a cave, in a church—Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions

are supposed to entail profundity, but—— Wait till you get one,

dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity

made of maggots; her constant thought was: “Less attention should

be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no

sorrow like my sorrow,” although when the attention was paid she

rejected it irritably.

Her son couldn’t escort her to Bombay, for the local situation

continued acute, and all officials had to remain at their posts.

Antony couldn’t come either, in case he never returned to give his

evidence. So she travelled with no one who could remind her of the

past. This was a relief. The heat had drawn back a little before

its next advance, and the journey was not unpleasant. As she left

Chandrapore the moon, full again, shone over the Ganges and touched

the shrinking channels into threads of silver, then veered and

looked into her window. The swift and comfortable mail-train slid

with her through the night, and all the next day she was rushing

through Central India, through landscapes that were baked and

bleached but had not the hopeless melancholy of the plain. She

watched the indestructible life of man and his changing faces, and

the houses he has built for himself and God, and they appeared to

her not in terms of her own trouble but as things to see. There

was, for instance, a place called Asirgarh which she passed at

sunset and identified on a map—an enormous fortress among wooded

hills. No one had ever mentioned Asirgarh to her, but it had huge

and noble bastions and to the right of them was a mosque. She

forgot it. Ten minutes later, Asirgarh reappeared. The mosque was

to the left of the bastions now. The train in its descent through

the Vindyas had described a semicircle round Asirgarh. What could

she connect it with except its own name? Nothing; she knew no one

who lived there. But it had looked at her twice and seemed to say:

“I do not vanish.” She woke in the middle of the night with a

start, for the train was falling over the western cliff. Moonlit

pinnacles rushed up at her like the fringes of a sea; then a brief

episode of plain, the real sea, and the soupy dawn of Bombay. “I

have not seen the right places,” she thought, as she saw embayed

in the platforms of the Victoria Terminus the end of the rails that

had carried her over a continent and could never carry her back.

She would never visit Asirgarh or the other untouched places;

neither Delhi nor Agra nor the Rajputana cities nor Kashmir, nor

the obscurer marvels that had sometimes shone through men’s speech:

the bilingual rock of Girnar, the statue of Shri Belgola, the ruins

of Mandu and Hampi, temples of Khajraha, gardens of Shalimar. As

she drove through the huge city which the West has built and

abandoned with a gesture of despair, she longed to stop, though it

was only Bombay, and disentangle the hundred Indias that passed

each other in its streets. The feet of the horses moved her on,

and presently the boat sailed and thousands of coco-nut palms

appeared all round the anchorage and climbed the hills to wave her

farewell. “So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar

caves as final?” they laughed. “What have we in common with them,

or they with Asirgarh? Good-bye!” Then the steamer rounded Colaba,

the continent swung about, the cliff of the Ghats melted into the

haze of a tropic sea. Lady Mellanby turned up and advised her not

to stand in the heat: “We are safely out of the frying-pan,” said

Lady Mellanby, “it will never do to fall into the fire.”