A Passage to India - E. M. Forster [67]
They knew one another very little, and felt rather awkward at being drawn together by an Indian. The racial problem can take subtle forms. In their case it had induced a sort of jealousy, a mutual suspicion. He tried to goad her enthusiasm; she scarcely spoke. Aziz fetched them to breakfast.
“It is quite natural about Miss Quested,” he remarked, for he had been working the incident a little in his mind, to get rid of its roughnesses. “We were having an interesting talk with our guide, then the car was seen, so she decided to go down to her friend.” Incurably inaccurate, he already thought that this was what had occurred. He was inaccurate because he was sensitive. He did not like to remember Miss Quested’s remark about polygamy, because it was unworthy of a guest, so he put it from his mind, and with it the knowledge that he had bolted into a cave to get away from her. He was inaccurate because he desired to honour her, and—facts being entangled—he had to arrange them in her vicinity, as one tidies the ground after extracting a weed. Before breakfast was over, he had told a good many lies. “She ran to her friend, I to mine,” he went on, smiling. “And now I am with my friends and they are with me and each other, which is happiness.”
Loving them both, he expected them to love each other. They didn’t want to. Fielding thought with hostility, “I knew these women would make trouble,” and Mrs. Moore thought, “This man, having missed the train, tries to blame us”; but her thoughts were feeble; since her faintness in the cave she was sunk in apathy and cynicism. The wonderful India of her opening weeks, with its cool nights and acceptable hints of infinity, had vanished.
Fielding ran up to see one cave. He wasn’t impressed. Then they got on the elephant and the picnic began to unwind out of the corridor and escaped under the precipice towards the railway station, pursued by stabs of hot air. They came to the place where he had quitted the car. A disagreeable thought now struck him, and he said: “Aziz, exactly where and how did you leave Miss Quested?”
“Up there.” He indicated the Kawa Dol cheerfully.
“But how———” A gully, or rather a crease, showed among the rocks at this place; it was scurfy with cactuses. “I suppose the guide helped her.”
“Oh, rather, most helpful.”
“Is there a path off the top?”
“Millions of paths, my dear fellow.”
Fielding could see nothing but the crease. Everywhere else the glaring granite plunged into the earth.
“But you saw them get down safe?”
“Yes, yes, she and Miss Derek, and go off in the car.”
“Then the guide came back to you?”
“Exactly. Got a cigarette?”
“I hope she wasn’t ill,” pursued the Englishman. The crease continued as a nullah across the plain, the water draining off this way towards the Ganges.
“She would have wanted me, if she was ill, to attend her.”
“Yes, that sounds sense.”
“I see you’re worrying, let’s talk of other things,” he said kindly. “Miss Quested was always to do what she wished, it was our arrangement. I see you are worrying on my account, but really I don’t mind, I never notice trifles.”
“I do worry on your account. I consider they have been impolite!” said Fielding, lowering his voice. “She had no right to dash away from your party, and Miss Derek had no right to abet her.”
So touchy as a rule, Aziz was unassailable. The wings that uplifted him did not falter, because he was a Mogul emperor who had done his duty. Perched on his elephant, he watched the Marabar Hills recede, and saw again, as provinces of his kingdom, the grim untidy plain, the frantic and feeble movements of the buckets, the white shrines, the shallow graves, the suave sky, the snake that looked like a tree. He had given his guests as good a time as he could, and if they came late or left early that was not his affair. Mrs. Moore slept, swaying against the rods of the howdah, Mohammed Latif embraced her with efficiency and respect, and by his own side sat Fielding, whom he began to think of as “Cyril.”
“Aziz, have you figured out what