have almost persuaded myself that my subsequent words were the same as those an honest man would have used: myself, if this attachment had not existed. Liaison I cannot say, since liaison implies a mutual attraction and I have no sort of evidence for this other than my oh so fallible intuition. I long for the seventeenth. Already I am beginning to murder time, like an ardent boy: such an ugly crime. The sea-?festival will perhaps knock six innocent hours on the head.’
The ceremony took place all along the shore of Back Bay, from Malabar Point to the Fort; and the broad parklike stretch of grass before the Fort was one of the best places for viewing the preparations. Like all Hindu ceremonies he had seen, this appeared to be going forward with great excitement, great good humour, and a total lack of organisation. There were some groups already on the strand, with their leaders standing waist-?deep, wafting flowers into the sea, but most of the inhabitants of Bombay seemed to have gathered here on the green to mill about in their best clothes, laughing, singing, beating drums, eating sweetmeats and saucers of cooked food from tiny stalls, breaking off now and then to form a vague procession, chanting a shrill and powerful hymn Great warmth, an infinite variety of smells and colours, the bray of conchs, deep hooting trumpets, countless people, and winding in and out among the people elephants with crowded castles on their backs, bullock-?carts, hundreds and hundreds of palanquins, horsemen, holy cows, European carriages.
A warm hand slipped into his, and looking down Stephen saw Dil smiling up at him. ‘Art very strangely clothed, Stephen,’ she said ‘I almost took thee for a topi-?wallah I have a whole leaf of pondoo, come and eat it before it spills. Mind thy good bazaar shirt in the dung - it is far too long, thy shirt.’ She led him across the trampled grass to the rising glacis of the fort, and there, finding an empty place, they sat down. ‘Lean thy head forward,’ she said, unfolding the leaf and setting the turgid mess between them. ‘Nay, nay, forward, more forward. Dost not see thy shirt all slobbered, oh for shame. Where wast thou brought up? What mother bore thee? Forward.’ Despairing of making him eat like a human being, she stood up, licked his shirt clean, and then, folding her brown jointless legs under her she squatted close in front of him. ‘Open thy mouth.’ With an expert hand she moulded the pondoo into little balls and fed him. ‘Close thy mouth, Stephen. Swallow. Open. There, maharaj. Another. There, my garden of nightingales. Open. Close.’ The sweet, gritty unctuous mass flowed into him, and all the time Dil’s voice rose and fell. ‘Thou canst not eat much better than a bear. Swallow. Pause now and belch. Dost not know how to belch? Thus. I can belch whenever I choose. Belch twice. Look, look; the Mahratta chiefs.’ A splendid group of horsemen in crimson with gold-?embroidered turbans and saddle-?cloths. ‘That is the Peshwa in the middle: and there the Bhonsli rajah - har, har, mahadeo! Another ball and all is gone. Open. Thou hast fifteen teeth above and one less below. There is a European carriage, filled with Franks. Pah, I can smell them from here, stronger than camels. They eat cow and pig - it is perfectly notorious. Thou hast no more skill in eating with thy fingers than a bear or a Frank, poor Stephen: art thou a Frank at times?’ Her eyes were fixed upon him with alert penetrating curiosity, but before he could reply they had darted off to an approaching line of elephants, so covered with housings, paint, howdahs and tinsel that below nothing could be seen but their feet shuffling in the dust and before nothing but their gilt, silver-?banded tusks and questing trunks.
‘I shall sing thee the Marwari hymn to Krishna,’ said Dil, and began in a nasal whine, slicing the air with her right hand as she sang. Another elephant crossed in front of them, a trim pole set up on the howdah, bearing a streamer that read Revenge as it floated on the breeze: most of the ship’s starboard maintopmen were there, clinging to one another in a tight mass, while their larboard colleagues ran behind, calling out that they had had their spell, mates, and fair was fair. A competing elephant from the Goliath, almost hidden by a mass of delighted seamen in shore-?going rig, white sennit hats and ribbons. Mr Smith, a sea-?officer of the small, trim, brisk, round-? headed, port-?wine kind, once shipmates with Stephen in the lively and now second in the Goliath, rode by on a camel, with his legs folded negligently over the creature’s neck to the manner born: he cut nimbly between the elephant and the bank, with his face at Stephen’s level, some fifteen feet away
the Goliaths roared out to Mr Smith, waving bottles and cheering, and Smith waved back to them His mouth could be seen opening and closing, but no sound pierced through
the din. Dil sang on, hypnotised by her unvarying chant and the flow of words.
More and more Europeans appeared, now that the day was growing cooler. Carriages of every kind. A disreputable drove of midshipmen from the Revenge and the Goliath, mounted on little Arab horses, asses and an astonished bullock.
More and more Europeans; and incomparably more Hindus, for now the climax was coming near The strand was almost covered with white-?robed brown figures and the sound of horns drowned the low thunder of the sea; yet even so the crowds on the green grew thicker still, and now the carriages advanced at a walk, when they advanced at all. Rising dust, heat, merriment: and above all this immense activity the kites and vultures wheeled in the untroubled sky - effortless rings, higher and higher, the highest losing themselves at last, black specks that vanished in the blue. Dil sang on and on.
Bringing his eyes down from the vultures and the glare, Stephen found himself looking directly into Diana’s face. She was sitting in a barouche under the shade of two apricot-?coloured umbrellas with three officers, leaning forward with lively interest to see what had stopped them. Immediately in front of the carriage two bullock-?carts had locked their wheels together: the drivers stood there shouting at one another, while the bullocks leaned inwards together against the yoke, closing their eyes, and from behind the shutters the purdah-?ladies shrieked abuse, advice and orders. With a dense procession filing by for ever on the right-?hand side and the steep slope of the glacis on the left, it was clear that the barouche would have to wait until the bullocks were disentangled: she twisted round with a movement Stephen had forgotten but that was as familiar as the beat of his heart. The servants perched behind with the umbrellas ducked and swerved to give her a better view, but there was no retreat through the crowd and she sat back in her seat, saying something to the man opposite her that made him laugh; and the apricot shadow swept over them again.
She was, if anything, better looking than when he had seen her last: she was a little too far from him to be sure, but it seemed that the climate, her almost native climate, which turned so many Englishmen yellow, had been kind to her, bringing to her a glow that he had not seen in England. At all events that remembered perfection of movement was there: nothing studied about that sinuous turn, nothing that loosened all his judgment so.
‘What is amiss with thee?’ asked Dil, breaking off and looking up at him.
‘Nothing,’ said Stephen, staring still.
‘Art sick?’ she cried, standing up and spreading her hands upon his heart.
‘No,’ said Stephen. He smiled at her and shook his head: he was quite composed.
She squatted, still staring up; and Diana, looking quickly from side to side, made some mechanical smiling reply to her neighbour’s remark. Her eyes swept along the glacis, passed over Stephen, suddenly returned and paused, with a growing look of doubt and then the most extreme astonishment, and all at once her face changed to frank delight:
it flushed, turned pale; she opened the door and sprang to the ground, leaving astonishment behind her.
She ran up the slope, and Stephen, rising, stepped over Dii and took her by her outstretched hands. ‘Stephen, upon my soul and honour!’ she cried. ‘Stephen, how glad I am to see you!’
