第61章

A week later Colonel Innes had got his leave, and had left Simla for the snow-line by what is facetiously known as 'the carriage road to Tibet.' Madeline had done as she was bidden, and was waiting for the rains to break.Another day had come without them.To write and tell Innes, to write to tell Violet, to go away and leave the situation as she found it; she had lived and moved and slept and awakened to these alternatives.At the moment she slept.

It was early, very early in the morning.The hills all about seemed still unaware of it, standing in the greyness, compact, silent, immutable, as if they slept with their eyes open.Nothing spoke of the oncoming sun, nothing was yet surprised.The hill world lifted itself unconscious in a pale solution of daylight, and only on the sky-line, very far away, it rippled into a cloud.The flimsy town clinging steeply roof above roof to the slope, mounting to the saddle and slipping over on the other side, cut the dawn with innumerable little lines and angles all in one tone like a pencil drawing.

There was no feeling in it, no expression.It had a temporary air in that light, like trampled snow, and even the big Secretariat buildings that raised themselves here and there out of the huddling bazaar looked trivial, childish enterprises in the simple revelation of the morning.A cold silence was abroad, which a crow now and then vainly tried to disturb with a note of tentative enterprise, forced, premature.It announced that the sun would probably rise, but nothing more.In the little dark shops of the wood-carvers an occasional indefinite figure moved, groping among last night's tools, or an old woman in a red sari washed a brass dish over the shallow open drain that ran past her door.At the tonga terminus, below the Mall, a couple of coughing syces, muffled in their blankets, pulled one of these vehicles out of the shed.They pushed it about sleepily, with clumsy futility; nothing else stirred or spoke at all in Simla.Nothing disturbed Miss Anderson asleep in her hotel.

A brown figure in a loin-cloth, with a burden, appeared where the road turned down from the Mall, and then another, and several following.They were coolies, and they carried luggage.

The first to arrive beside the tonga bent and loosed the trunk he brought, which slipped from his back to the ground.The syces looked at him, saying nothing, and he straightened himself against the wall of the hillside, also in silence.It was too early for conversation.Thus did all the others.

When the last portmanteau had been deposited, a khaki-coloured heap on the shed floor rose up as a broad-shouldered Punjabi driver, and walked round the luggage, looking at it.

'And you, owls' brethren,' he said, with sarcasm, addressing the first coolie, 'you have undertaken to carry these matter fifty-eight kos to Kalka, have you?'

'Na,' replied the coolie, stolidly, and spat.

'How else, then, is it to be taken?' the driver cried, with anger in his argument.'Behold the memsahib has ordered but one tonga, and a fool-thing of an ekka.Here is work for six tongas! What reason is there in this?'

The coolie folded his naked arms, and dug in the dust with an unconcerned toe.

'I, what can I do?' he said, 'It is the order of the memsahib.'

Ram Singh grunted and said no more.A rickshaw was coming down from the Mall, and the memsahib was in it.

Ten minutes later the ponies stood in their traces under the iron bar, and the lady sat in the tonga behind Ram Singh.Her runners, in uniform, waited beside the empty rickshaw with a puzzled look, at which she laughed, and threw a rupee to the head man.

The luggage was piled and corded on three ekkas behind, and their cross-legged drivers, too, were ready.

'Chellao!' she cried, crisply, and Ram Singh imperturbably lifted the reins.The little procession clanked and jingled along the hillside, always tending down, and broke upon the early grey melancholy with a forced and futile cheerfulness, too early, like everything else.As it passed the last of Simla's little gardens, spread like a pocket-handkerchief on the side of the hill, the lady leaned forward and looked back as if she wished to impress the place upon her memory.Her expression was that of a person going forth without demur into the day's hazards, ready to cope with them, yet there was some regret in the backward look.

'It's a place,' she said aloud, 'where EVERYBODY has a good time!'

Then the Amusement Club went out of sight behind a curve; and she settled herself more comfortably among her cushions, and drew a wrap round her to meet the chill wind of the valley.It was all behind her.The lady looked out as the ponies galloped up to the first changing-place, and, seeing a saddled horse held by a syce, cramped herself a little into one corner to make room.The seat would just hold two.

Ram Singh salaamed, getting down to harness the fresh pair, and a man put his face in at the side of the tonga and took off his hat.

'Are you all right?' he said.His smile was as conscious as his words were casual.

'Quite right.The ayah was silly about coming--didn't want to leave her babies or something--so I had to leave her behind.Everything else is either here or in the ekkas.'

'The brute! Never mind--they're not much use in a railway journey.

You can pick up another at Bombay.Then I suppose I'd better get in.'

'I suppose you better had.Unless you think of walking,' she laughed, and he took the place beside her.

Ram Singh again unquestioningly took up the reins.

'Nobody else going down?'

'Not another soul.We might just as well have started together.'

'Oh, well, we couldn't tell.Beastly awkward if there had been anybody.'

'Yes,' she said, but thrust up her under lip indifferently.

Then, with the effect of turning to the business in hand, she bent her eyes upon him understandingly and smiled in frank reference to something that had not been mentioned.'It's goodbye Simla, isn't it?' she said.He smiled in response and put his hand upon her firm, round arm, possessively, and they began to talk.