Tales of the legendary, fabulous wealth of the Indian potentates were commonplace in Company circles; tales of chests full of gold, of rubies as large as pullets’ eggs, of great diamonds that were blinding to look at. Such tales were lent substance by known facts; the state elephant of the Rajah of Bholobad, for instance, on really great occasions had worn four anklets, each four inches wide, crusted with emeralds and sapphires. As Surunda reached for the heavy gold-topped staff which he used for his rare essays in walking, Linda permitted herself to hope. It was
just possible that he was now about to lead her to his treasure-room and give her a ‘keepsake’ that would make Richard laugh in quite another key.
As Surunda took his first shuffling steps across the pavilion, she thought of something else; something she had often wanted to say to him but had never quite dared.
‘Your Highness, there are two doctors in Fort St George; one, Dr Adams, is very clever. He would come to see you, I am certain, and he might do something to make you less lame. May I ask when …’
‘No, no,’ he said testily. ‘My doctors do well; I am living these many years.’
Well, she thought, at least he is consistent; he will have no business with the English and asks no favours. India for Indians, and Indian doctors for Indian legs wounded by Indian spears.
Outside the pavilion they turned sharply and stood before a gate in the marble wall. Surunda opened it and said:
‘There are stairs; go with care.’
She recognised the place; it was the vast courtyard in which he kept his menagerie and it joined, at one point, the even larger court in which his elephants were stabled. Why was he bringing her here this afternoon? Perhaps, she thought, only half-mockingly, he intended to give her an elephant! Such a grotesque keepsake would be, somehow, in character. And one could have worse gifts. An elephant could carry all their baggage down to the coast, and would fetch a good price at the fort.
Surunda closed the gate and descended the stairs slowly, painfully. As he moved draggingly towards the first cage —the one which held the black-maned Nubian lion—she recalled that on the first occasion when he showed her his beasts he had been carried in a small litter, like a sedan chair. Thinking of this and the size of the yard, she said, as she would have said to any man, elderly or infirm:
‘Would you like to take my arm? I’m really very strong.’
‘No, no,’ he said in the same testy voice, but this time
the refusal was accompanied by a glance of … could it be? … disgust. She remembered that never once had he touched her, never shaken her hand, never shared a couch. Probably there was some law against it. Memories of childhood flashed back again, all those things in Genesis —‘he shall be unclean for forty days’.
‘I am managing.’ Surunda said less crossly. ‘I am slow, but there is light yet, and when the light goes there are torches.’
They passed the lion; and the long-necked, spotted giraffe; and the elephant that was here and not in the other courtyard because it had been born an albino; two striped wild horses from Africa; a reindeer which had been ailing on her previous visit and was now moribund; and an English hound dog with melancholy eyes.
The cages were much better built and cleaner than the hovels in which most of Surunda’s subjects lived, the courtyard immeasurably better kept than any of the city streets, but the unmistakable, acrid odour of captivity was all about, a miasma of sadness. She thought of the Rajah’s women, collected, held captive in much the same way. Then she shrugged the thought aside. Why should I pity them? Am I free, who chose my own gaoler?
They came to the archway which led to the elephant stables; they passed on. So it is not to be an elephant. Have I lost my sense of direction and are we in reality taking a short cut to some part of the palace? Perhaps a pullet-egg ruby after all.
Beyond the arch. the bird cages lay. Surunda, panting from exertion, had not breath for speech and passed the birds as he had passed the animals, almost without a glance. Linda, from a mixture of politeness and interest, looked for the second time at the tall ostriches, the birds of paradise, the humming-birds brilliant and fragile as flowers, the lone, duck-billed platypus. She too was silent lest any comment should evoke a response for which breath would be grudged. But before the cage of the tiny birds which looked like blossoms she said, ‘How beautiful!’
“Wait. Until now you are seeing nothing.’ In front of the last cage he paused, moved the stick forward and leaned on it with both hands. ‘The golden pheasants of China,’ he said simply. There were two of them; and even upon eyes so lately dazzled by the humming-birds their beauty struck with a pang. About the disposition of their green and white, red and blue, yellow and bronze feathers there was a suggestion of deliberate artifice, as though upon the instinctive skill and prodigality of nature a more mature and cunning design had been imposed. By comparison the other birds were gaudy, the work of a happy haphazard child: these were from a master hand; and it seemed that they knew it, for in addition to their complete beauty there was a real dignity, a matchless grace.
Now she knew why he had brought her here; to show her his newest and loveliest acquisition. She said, without the care with which she ordinarily chose her words with him:
‘They are the loveliest things I have ever seen in all my life.’
‘I am glad,’ he said. ‘They are for you.’ They had arrived only two days earlier. He had wanted them for years, just as he had wanted one of the tiny dogs with feathered tails which were also Chinese. It was very difficult indeed to get anything out of China. All China was closed to all trade, just as he had closed Kilapore to the Company’s trade. Nothing came out of China by legal means. Some silk, some porcelain was smuggled out, because hungry peasants and avaricious merchants could lay hands on silk and porcelain; but the golden pheasants were to be found only in the gardens of the wealthy, and the little dogs were strictly the preserve of royalty. Surunda had wished, but he had never hoped to own a specimen of either rarity. Almost four years earlier he had done one of his minor Polygars a great favour, and when repayment was mentioned he had brushed it aside airily, saying, ‘One day you may give me a Chinese pheasant, or one of the dogs of Pekin’; which was tantamount to saying, One day
you shall give me the moon or a slice of a rainbow.
Yet, two days ago they had arrived, beautiful and dignified in a cage of wickerwork, with nothing to show that almost four years, a sum of money equivalent to two thousand English pounds, and the lives of five men had been expended upon their transportation from one place to another. And because they were new, and so beautiful, they were, of all his countless possessions, the things which Surunda held dearest on the afternoon when Linda Shelmadine came to say goodbye to him. And for that reason he must give them to her.
Earlier in the day he had, with an eye to choosing a ‘gift for memory’, taken stock of his treasures. He had opened, and then dived into, several chests, the contents of some well known to him, others which he had forgotten, if he had ever seen them—sapphires bluer than the sky; emeralds green as young corn; diamonds, pearls. He had tumbled them back, dissatisfied. He had given too many jewels to too many other women, even to dancing girls who had relieved an hour’s tedium. A jewel was far too ordinary a gift to mark the end of a friendship so rare. And with that thought came the knowledge of exactly what was the apt, the suitable, in fact the only gift.
Now, looking at the beautiful birds, he was satisfied with the Tightness of the gesture. It did not occur to him to reflect that by tomorrow or by the next day the Chinese pheasants would have lost their novelty and therefore their charm for him. Nor did he wonder whether a pair of largish birds, however rare and beautiful, was, in a practical sense, exactly the right gift for a woman about to set out on a journey of several thousands of miles. Even the look of blank dismay on Linda’s face did not enlighten him; he took it for astonishment at his munificence. She had a vision of the pheasants in their wicker basket on top of the jolting ox-wagon which would carry their luggage to the coast; she knew in anticipation the difficulty of finding a place to put them while they waited to take passage; and finally the picture of their arrival in London drifted before her inward eye—a drizzling day at