Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [81]
And when he asked Smithers what sort of complement he thought he would need, Smithers replied, “Why, Brewster and I can probably deal with everything all by ourselves, sir. We don’t want a great silly crowd of bearers and trackers, you know, to distract us as we try to cope with those musical specters in the desert.”
Quickly I looked at Brewster and saw that he was as amazed as I was to find himself requisitioned for the expedition. But he made a quick recovery and managed a grin of boyish eagerness, as if he could think of nothing more jolly than to go trekking off into a pathless haunted desert with his hero Smithers. And Yule showed no reaction at all to Smithers’s request: once again he demonstrated his approval simply through silence.
Of course, getting to the Thar would be no easy matter. It lies at the opposite side of the subcontinent from Calcutta, far off in the northwest, beyond Lucknow, beyond Agra, beyond Delhi. And, as I have said, all of this was taking place at a time before we had built the Indian railway system. Smithers had just made the round trip from Calcutta to Bikaner and back, fifteen hundred miles or more, by an arduous journey down the Grand Trunk Road, India’s backbone before the railways existed. I have no idea how he traveled—by horse, by camel, by bullock-cart, by affiliating himself with merchant caravans, by any such means he could. And now he—and Brewster—would have to do it all over again. The journey would take months.
I should mention that Smithers had been engaged for the past year and a half to the Adjutant’s daughter, Helena, a young woman as notable for her beauty as for her sweetness of temperament, and the wedding was due to take place in just another dozen weeks or so. I wondered how Smithers would be able to prevail on her for a postponement; but prevail he did, either through his own force of personality or the innately accommodating nature that is so typical of women, and the wedding was postponed. We held a grand farewell party for Smithers and Brewster at Fort William, where nothing was asked and nothing was volunteered about the reason for their departure, and in the small hours of the night we stood by the bank of the river with brandy glasses in hand, singing the grand old songs of our native country so far away, and then in the morning they set out to find whatever it was that they were destined to find in the Great Indian Desert.
The weeks passed, and turned into months.
Helena, the Adjutant’s lovely daughter, came to us now and again to ask whether there had been any word from her wandering fiancé. Of course I could see that she was yearning to get him back from the Thar and take him off to England for a lifetime of pink-faced, fair-haired children, tea, cool fresh air, and clean linens. “I love him so,” she would say.
The poor girl! The poor girl!
I knew that Smithers was India through and through, and that if she ever did get him back from the Thar there would be another quest after that, and another, and another.
I knew too that there had been an engagement before she had met Smithers, a Major invalided home from Lahore after some sort of dreary scandal involving drinking and gambling, about which I had wanted to hear no details. She was twenty-six, already. The time for making those pink-faced babies was running short.
The months went by, and Smithers and Brewster did not return from the Thar. Yule began to grow furious. His health was not good—the air of India had never been right for him, and Bengal can be a monotonous and depressing place, oppressively dank and humid much of the year—and he could see retirement from the Service not very far in his future; but he desperately wanted to know about that valley in the Thar before he left. And, for all that desperate curiosity of his, work was work and there was a railroad line to build