A Passage to India - E. M. Forster [114]
“It is not a question of your feelings, but of the wish of the Lieutenant-Governor. Perhaps you will ask me whether I speak officially. I do. I shall expect you this evening at six. We shall not interfere with your subsequent plans.”
He attended the grim little function in due course. The skeletons of hospitality rattled—“Have a peg, have a drink.” He talked for five minutes to Mrs. Blakiston, who was the only surviving female. He talked to McBryde, who was defiant about his divorce, conscious that he had sinned as a sahib. He talked to Major Roberts, the new Civil Surgeon; and to young Milner, the new City Magistrate; but the more the club changed, the more it promised to be the same thing. “It is no good,” he thought, as he returned past the mosque, “we all build upon sand; and the more modern the country gets, the worse’ll be the crash. In the old eighteenth century, when cruelty and injustice raged, an invisible power repaired their ravages. Everything echoes now; there’s no stopping the echo. The original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil.” This reflection about an echo lay at the verge of Fielding’s mind. He could never develop it. It belonged to the universe that he had missed or rejected. And the mosque missed it too. Like himself, those shallow arcades provided but a limited asylum. “There is no God but God” doesn’t carry us far through the complexities of matter and spirit; it is only a game with words, really, a religious pun, not a religious truth.
He found Aziz overtired and dispirited, and he determined not to allude to their misunderstanding until the end of the evening; it would be more acceptable then. He made a clean breast about the club—said he had only gone under compulsion, and should never attend again unless the order was renewed. “In other words, probably never; for I am going quite soon to England.”
“I thought you might end in England,” he said very quietly, then changed the conversation. Rather awkwardly they ate their dinner, then went out to sit in the Mogul garden-house.
“I am only going for a little time. On official business. My service is anxious to get me away from Chandrapore for a bit. It is obliged to value me highly, but does not care for me. The situation is somewhat humorous.”
“What is the nature of the business? Will it leave you much spare time?”
“Enough to see my friends.”
“I expected you to make such a reply. You are a faithful friend. Shall we now talk about something else?”
“Willingly. What subject?”
“Poetry,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “Let us discuss why poetry has lost the power of making men brave. My mother’s father was also a poet, and fought against you in the Mutiny. I might equal him if there was another mutiny. As it is, I am a doctor, who has won a case and has three children to support, and whose chief subject of conversation is official plans.”
“Let us talk about poetry.” He turned his mind to the innocuous subject. “You people are sadly circumstanced. Whatever are you to write about? You cannot say, ‘The rose is faded,’ for evermore. We know it’s faded. Yet you can’t have patriotic poetry of the ‘India, my India’ type, when it’s nobody’s India.”
“I like this conversation. It may lead to something interesting.”
“You are quite right in thinking that poetry must touch life. When I knew you first, you used it as an incantation.”
“I was a child when you knew me first. Everyone was my friend then. The Friend: a Persian expression for God. But I do not want to be a religious poet either.”
“I hoped you would be.”
“Why, when you yourself are an atheist?”
“There is something in religion that may not be true, but has not yet been sung.”
“Explain in detail.”
“Something that the Hindus have perhaps found.”
“Let them sing it.”
“Hindus are unable to sing.”
“Cyril, you sometimes make a sensible remark. That will do for poetry for the present. Let us now return to your English visit.”
“We haven’t discussed poetry for two seconds,” said the other, smiling.
But Aziz was addicted to cameos. He held the tiny conversation