Black Narcissus Read online

  The wind blew, the ponies shifted; a groom blew his nose on his fingers, and still these strange white women sat staring at the snows.

  ‘Kanchenjunga reminds me,’ said Sister Philippa, ‘of the Chinese house god that always sits in front of the door.’ As she said it she looked over her shoulder. The others followed her gaze, and moving together, reined their ponies back on the path.

  Under a deodar tree, solitary among the saplings, a man sat on the ground on a red deerskin spotted with white. The colour of the skin and his hands and face and clothes blended with the colour and twistings of the roots of the tree, so that it was easy to see why they had not noticed him before. By his robe and the wooden beads round his neck, they knew he was a Holy Man, a Sunnyasi; there, at the foot of the tree, was the platform of whitewashed earth and string of marigolds that marked his shrine. Among the roots was his bowl of polished wood and his staff, and against the tree leant a hut. He sat cross-legged and took as little notice of them as if they were flies; his head did not move, nor his eyes. In the teeth of the wind he seemed to have on nothing but his cloth robe, his arms and chest were bare and his head was shaved.

  Sister Philippa’s voice seemed to ring on the air, and the clatter of the ponies’ hooves and the creaking of their saddles. They felt curiously abashed and silently followed one another down the path.

  2

  It was the General’s father, the late General Ranajit Rai, who had first made his estate at Mopu. He was the sixth son of the second son of the Governing House; but he had quarrelled with his second cousin, the Prime Minister of the State, and with his wife’s elder brother, the Commander-in-Chief, so that the wiser members of his family had nothing to do with him. He found himself lonely, with nothing to do, and he crossed the Range into India to spend the season in Darjeeling. He found that so pleasant that he said he would never go back to the State.

  The General Ranajit was given to whims which he called Good Ideas, and suddenly he asked the Government of India if he might lease from them the tract of land which lay beside the frontier, on the slope of hill facing the Range; a sweep of hill from the forest to the River, and the valley in the River basin, and the forest rising on the further bank to the Range. Government wished to compliment the State and also to occupy the General, who was becoming a problem in official circles; they leased him the land, with the clause ‘for experimental development’ tactfully inserted.

  The General liked to make experiments, and he built himself a house, a country palace, on the wild hill a mile above the River facing the greater peaks of the Range. ‘It will have the finest view in India,’ he cried.

  ‘But who will live in it? And who will pay for it?’ asked his aide-de-camp, who was also his Financial Secretary.

  It certainly was very expensive. ‘But we needn’t live in it,’ said the General, and built himself a modest cottage on the hill above it, round the bluff and out of the wind. It was a cottage of ten or twelve rooms, with ornamental balconies and a fountain in the garden. That had to be carried from Darjeeling; it took the porters eight days to bring it on the route that usually took two, but it was worth it, for the people came for miles to look at it. It was better than going to the Fair at Goontu.

  The General called the little house ‘Canna Villa’ after the manner of houses in Darjeeling, and he dropped into the habit of staying there for three or four days, even a week at a time. He had been known to stay a fortnight and, to make it more pleasant, he had the Good Idea of installing his wife and ladies in the Palace just down the hill. It was pleasant to have the ladies at Mopu, it was convenient and sensible, for there he had leisure to attend to them; soon he left them there altogether and rode out from Darjeeling now and again to see them. It was a good Good Idea, and he felt that his Financial Secretary, who was also his aide-de-camp, should have been very pleased with him for the economical use he had put the Palace to.

  ‘Think of the money we’ve saved,’ he said, ‘keeping them all out at Mopu, instead of here in Darjeeling.’

  ‘It was certainly very expensive to have so many ladies here,’ agreed the Secretary. ‘And sometimes it was rather difficult,’ he added. He was also Political Secretary, and lately he had often asked the General: ‘Do you have to take them all about with you everywhere?’

  ‘All? What do you mean “all”? There are not so very many of them,’ said the General indignantly.

  ‘Government doesn’t quite understand –’ began the Secretary gently.

  ‘Why not?’ The General had a violent temper, and the Secretary, who was also the Surgeon Adviser, had to beg him to calm himself; too many ladies and too many experiments had played havoc with the General’s health. It was a Good Idea to keep the ladies at Mopu.

  The people called the Palace ‘the House of Women’ in those days. They could see lights shining there to all hours of the night, and hear the music; since the General’s wife died there was no order kept in it. Picnic parties came down to the River, with carrying chairs and ponies; the ladies wore fine gauzes and had coloured umbrellas; the shrieking and laughing went on until the sun went down and they went back to the Palace up the hill. The people did not think much of them, but it was nothing to do with them.

  Soon the General died and was succeeded by his son, the present General Toda Rai. General Ranajit had not liked his son Toda. To begin with, he looked like a coolie; of pure Rajput descent, or so they had always been led to suppose, Toda had the squat figure and slit eyes of a Mongol, and how that happened no one knew, for his mother at any rate was above suspicion. If it had been his father now … He had grown to be a model young man, in whom his father’s Good Ideas came out in such model things as Progress, Welfare and Improvements. He had served to some purpose in the State Army, was popular with his relations, and had prudently married the wife that the richest of them had nominated. By the time he inherited his father’s rather vague estates, he had a considerable one of his own.

  But he was far from being self-satisfied; always at the back of his mind he knew that his father, the dashing impetuous scornful Ranajit Rai, had thought him undersized, ugly and dull; that had kept him human and a little wistful in the midst of his success.

  Now he was elderly and very rich, very cautious and filled with an intense desire to benefit others. He was at the honourable end of his career in the State, and he decided to retire to Mopu and develop the land and help the people of the valley and the hills.

  He found that they helped him immensely. They helped to make Mopu a profitable and prosperous estate; a tea garden was opened on the land between the Palace and the River, and where it was too low for tea to grow, they made him an orange grove, and where it was too high and windy above the Palace, they planted him a nursery of valuable coniferous trees. They gave him cheap and plentiful labour and continued to live their lives as before.

  A village grew up around Canna Villa, and now there were enough people to have a market of their own there, instead of going up to Goontu. ‘If there was no market,’ they said, ‘think of the way the General would have to send for his vegetables and fruit!’ Everything was peaceful and well arranged; they assured him he had only to smile and grow rich.

  These people were not exactly of the State, nor exactly of India; they were free; they lived on the General’s estate, but they were not exactly his. They had no laws, and life happened to them with extreme cheerfulness and often with extreme cruelty. The people of the heights were the equal of the people of the valley, and the people of the valley of those of the heights, just as a yak and a pony might look each other in the face and still be different.

  On the bony slopes of the Range, the wind blows down the passes, cold with ice and show; there is often a day’s march between the villages where the roofs are fastened down with boulders to keep them from the wind. The goats and the ponies and the people are thick-set and solid, built low to stand against it; they are solitary and silent, and they have names like the mountains of their Range; Lashar, K
abru, Kabur, Maku and Kanchenjunga. In the valley, the natives plant their rice and gather their fruit and crops, and fish a little in the River and get drunk at weddings on their own rice beer. They came up from the valley to work for the General; a few came down from the villages below the Range and, once again, they all assured him that he had only to smile and grow rich.

  He could not even govern them. They settled their own quarrels with their own blows, and there was no stealing, because the people of the valley had everything and the people of the heights had nothing, and they never mixed; there was no lying, because it was foolish to lie when everything was known to everyone, and there was no pride and no fear. He could not even protect them, because there was nothing to protect them from, except a few leopard and bear in the foot-hills, and these they managed quite nicely for themselves, with their slings and stones and bows and arrows.

  ‘I must do something for them,’ he said to his English agent, Mr Dean. Then his eye fell on the Palace.

  He often lived in Canna Villa, but he would not have stayed a night in the Palace; he did not like it at all, though he was careful to respect it. He considered it a disgrace and yet, in a perverse way, he admired it; it held all the family shame and, mysteriously, some of the family glory as well.

  He had turned out the women at once; after all, they had been behaving badly in a most unbridled way and abandoned all attempt at being good, even in their fashion. He could send them away, but he could not wipe them out. Sometimes it seemed to him that the house had a bad wild life of its own; the impression of its evil lingered, in its name, in its atmosphere, and, worst of all, in his sister Srimati.

  She had been brought up there by Angu Ayah, in the atmosphere of the House of Women. She was graceless and beautiful, a gazelle of a girl with great soft eyes, and her father prudently married her off while she was still very young; but she never forgot what she had seen and learnt as a child. When finally her husband had disowned her and she was not allowed into the State, the good young General Toda Rai had still countenanced her and let her live in the Palace with her children until she died. He thought, now, that that had been a mistake; the house seemed to bring out the worst in her and she had half killed herself before he persuaded her to leave it. He had paid for the trip to Europe in an effort to cure her when she was dying, and he had not been known to put money into a profitless scheme before. Her death left him curiously softened; he would do sudden unpractical and unbusinesslike things, and he had taken her children, legitimate and illegitimate, and provided for them all.

  They were not all the cares that Mopu laid on him; there was Uncle, who had been the great General Krishna Rai, rich with honours and fame. Suddenly, in late middle life, he had given them all up, after visiting, on his way back to the State from Paris, his brother, Ranajit Rai at Mopu. He had never continued his journey, and now he sat on the hill above the Palace under his deodar. General Toda could not forget him, and was bothered by an uneasy feeling that he should go and do likewise. In the middle of his dinner, he would remember the bowl that the village people filled once a day; trying on his new long coat from London he saw the tattered ochre robe, and at night he woke in his bed and thought of the hut in the wind, with the skins laid on the bare ground. He sent his Uncle a Jaeger rug, but could never find out if he used it; in all those years he had not spoken, and no one had seen him, except in one position on his deerskin mat. He was undoubtedly a very holy man and the wickedness of the house below him seemed all the more dreadful by contrast.

  All this was in the General’s mind as he thought of his people, and his eye lighted as it fell on the Palace. He had a Good Idea.

  He offered the Palace and an endowment to the Brothers of St Peter for the opening of a school.

  ‘This is pro-gress,’ smiled the General, as he welcomed them to Mopu. ‘You will change the house and make it useful.’ But at the end of five months they gave it all back to him. They were curiously reticent. ‘There is no scope,’ they said. ‘We feel we are not needed here. Our energies will be better employed in another place.’

  They had changed nothing at all, and Ayah, who by now seemed to belong there, was left in the Palace alone.

  3

  She was quite alone. The Palace was hidden by the hill from the village and Canna Villa, from the coolie lines and the Agent’s bungalow, even from Uncle among the firs above. It was on a ledge cut like a lip from the face of the hill and it seemed to be perpetually riding into the north. It faced the mountain Kanchenjunga with the valley and gulf between.

  It was strange how little you noticed the valley or the River where the green snow water streaked the jelly whiteness of the stream. You noticed the gulf where the birds flew level with the lawn; across it was the forest rising to bare and bony ridges, and behind them and above them, the Himalayan snows where the ice wind blew.

  Sometimes they were like turrets of icing sugar, pretty and harmless; on some days they seemed as if they might come crashing down on the hill. On others they were hidden behind drifts of cloud and a spray floated from one to another; but however they looked, there was always the wind to remind you of what they were. The wind was always the same.

  That was why the Palace was only one storey high. The General had chosen the site full in the wind, it had no shelter. Its roof came down close to the ground and it had no open verandahs; every space had a thick glass pane. To step into the house was to step into stillness, into warmth even when it was damp and unlit; but after a moment a coldness crept about your shins. The wind could not be kept out of the house; it came up through the boards of the floor and found passages between the roof and the ceiling cloths; at Mopu Palace you lived with the sound of the wind and a coldness always about your ears and ankles.

  No one visited it now but Mr Dean, the General’s Agent. There was something he liked about it, and in time he came to cherish it. It was a queer Palace, always creaking and straining in the wind, with a sense of power and life of its own. Its thin white walls crossed with beams and red tin roof gave it a look of tidy innocence, but inside it was divided into low little rooms smelling of musk and fungus, and it had a central room, a salon with gilt chairs and a chandelier and powdered blue walls painted with hard gold stars. Only the half-finished class-rooms on the west side showed that the Brothers had been there; no other trace of them was left, except that the bell they had placed on the gong posts hung there rusty and still.

  In front of the house was a terrace where no flowers could grow, except orchids and ferns in the cracks of its wall; but, to the right of it, seven roses had grown as high as trees and spread along the drive, making a sheltered walk. In summer the wind smelt of roses and the languorous orange flowers from the groves far below in the foot-hills above the valley.

  The drive swept in a curve up the hill and ended in nothing; it was planted with an avenue of deodars and had gateposts of granite, and scrolled iron gates that opened on to the hill and a little pony track that led away through the forest. Through the garden was another track that passed Uncle’s hut and came down the hill, with steps so steep that they were like a flight of stairs, going down from the forest to the River against the sky. That was the highest place of all, where Uncle sat and the coolies rested their baskets on the stones above the avenue of deodars, and stood up again with their baskets on their backs against the sky.

  The Palace had a garden on the West where the wind was broken by bamboos planted thickly; there was a terrace cut from the hill for flowers and more terraces above it running behind the house, but there only rhododendrons and shrubs like azaleas would grow. On the level of the bamboos was an orchard of apple trees, and the drive went down past it to the stables and servants’ houses, which were put away on a ledge out of sight.

  It always seemed to Mr Dean that there were thickets of silence in the orchard, that it would not speak though the bamboos were never still and the wind was always above it on the hill. It was the one reserved and circumspect place in the whole
Palace, and he liked it with its rows of still green trees with their arms stretched out.

  The rest of the house amused him; he liked to feel its spirit, and, most evenings, he used to come up and sit on the front entrance, with its scrolled railing that was too flimsy for the wind and the great buttresses that banked it like a fortress. He could easily have asked to live there, but he never did.

  He had always disliked what he could easily have; he had a passion for the untouched. ‘There isn’t a man who hasn’t his price,’ he said, ‘and most women are half price.’ He could not help taking them, dirt cheap though they were for him.

  When he was a small, fierce though weak little boy, his mother gave him pennies to buy those lollipops on sticks, called in the sweet shops ‘pommes d’amour’, but by vulgar children ‘all-day suckers’.

  ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why? I thought you loved them so.’

  ‘I do to look at but, as I eat them, they get worse and worse and they leave a nasty taste on your tongue.’

  ‘Then why do you buy them?’

  ‘That’s the difficult part. While I can get them, I have to go on having them. It’s so difficult to know when you don’t want to.’

  He was still wise enough to know how difficult it was; because of that he had come to Mopu. For fifteen years he had worked amiably with General Toda and amiably with the people, who amiably understood his habits and assisted him when they could. For this he liked them and despised them a little.

  Then one day the General sent for Ayah.

  ‘Ayah, I have invited some ladies to live at the Palace.’