Free The Faraway Drums by Jon Cleary

which they’re not entitled! Look at all those children! They should have been left at home with the cats and dogs—Ah, Bertie!” She had sighted the Nawab, came barging along the platform like a runaway junk stall. “Do you have a spare seat in your carriage? Of course you must with all those wives. They can sit on each other’s laps. In there!” She waved a hand to her servant and he struggled into the Nawab’s carriage with her trunk and suitcase. “Is Miss O’Brady travelling with us, Bertie?”
    To my surprise the Nawab did not seem annoyed at Lady Westbrook’s intrusion. Instead he laughed and shook his head at me. “Ah, do you not love the English? They walk all over us and expect us to love them.”
    “Wrong, Bertie,” said Lady Westbrook, taking out a cheroot and fitting it into her ivory holder. “We never look for love, that’s not an English need. What about you Americans, m’dear—do you look for love?”
    “All the time.”
    “ Foolish—you’re due for so many disappointments.” She puffed on her cheroot, looked up and down the platform. “Well, we’re going to be a jolly little party, aren’t we? If only they can keep those damned children quiet . . . Be off!” She slapped at some children who were chasing each other round us. “Ah, here comes Major Farnol. My, how handsome he looks!”
    She looked at me as soon as she said it and I recognized her as another of those banes of the lives of young presentable girls. She was a woman who, with too much time on her hands, exercised herself by playing match-maker. I looked away from her and at Major Farnol as he approached. Unlike most military men he moved with considerable grace; West Pointers, for instance, tend to walk like flagpoles. He was dressed, as he had been this morning, in his field uniform of khaki tunic, breeches, highly polished riding boots and topee. It was drab in its colour but somehow he gave it a dash of glamour, though we did not use that word in those days. He saluted me and Lady Westbrook and winked at the Nawab, with whom he seemed on intimate terms.
    “Are we all sorted out? Am I still riding with you, Bertie?”
    “Of course, old bean.” The Nawab seemed eager to play the genial host. “But I thought you’d be riding down with Mala.”
    “Nothing ever escapes the gossips up here, does it?”
    “It’s food and drink to us,” said Lady Westbrook. “Are you having another affair with her? The Ranee’s a man-eater,” she explained to me. “Destroyed more men than any tiger.”
    “But not me.” Major Farnol smiled, winked at the Nawab, then, as an afterthought, winked at me. “I’ve reformed, Viola. I’m positively monkish.”
    “Like those monks in The Decameron .” But Lady Westbrook gave him an affectionate smile.
    Then the station-master blew his whistle and the assistant station-master blew his and the engine-driver blew his; we were whipped aboard the train by a chorus of thin blasts. The train drew out past a packed mass of smiling faces and waving hands, the Europeans left behind standing in the front of the crowd, the Indians bringing up the rear. I had noticed on my journey up from Bombay and then from Delhi up to Simla that railroad stations in India are never empty, that even in the middle of the night there were always people standing, sitting or lying fast asleep on the platforms. They came there for company, for shelter, for some distraction from their poverty; but they always looked to me as if they were waiting to be asked aboard, to be given a ticket on a journey to anywhere but that spot where they waited so patiently and hopelessly. I sometimes wept at the hopelessness one found in India and I understand it has got no better, is even worse now than then.
    We all settled down in the Nawab’s private car, which was far more luxuriously decorated and furnished than any Pullman car I had seen back home, even that of the President. The wives sat at one end, cramped together on two