‘What’s happened?’ she exclaimed.
‘We’re in the soup, that’s what’s happened!’ said Ellis angrily, feeling at the back of his neck where a stone had hit him. ‘The Burmans are all round, shying rocks. But keep calm! They haven’t the guts to break the doors in.’
‘Call out the police at once!’ said Mr Macgregor indistinctly, for he was stanching his nose with his handkerchief.
‘Can’t!’ said Ellis. ‘I was looking round while you were talking to them. They’ve cut us off, rot their damned souls! No one could possibly get to the police lines. Veraswami’s compound is full of men.’
‘Then we must wait. We can trust them to turn out of their own accord. Calm yourself, my dear Mrs Lackersteen, please calm yourself! The danger is very small.’
It did not sound small. There were no gaps in the noise now, and the Burmans seemed to be pouring into the compounds by hundreds. The din swelled suddenly to such a volume that no one could make himself heard except by shouting. All the windows in the lounge had been shut, and some perforated zinc shutters within, which were sometimes used for keeping out insects, pulled to and bolted. There was a series of crashes as the windows were broken, and then a ceaseless thudding of stones from all sides, that shook the thin wooden walls and seemed likely to split them.
Ellis opened a shutter and flung a bottle viciously among the crowd, but a dozen stones came hurtling in and he had to close the shutter hurriedly. The Burmans seemed to have no plan beyond flinging stones, yelling and hammering at the walls, but the mere volume of noise was unnerving. The Europeans were half dazed by it at first. None of them thought to blame Ellis, the sole cause of this affair; their common peril seemed, indeed, to draw them closer together for the while. Mr Macgregor, half-blind without his spectacles, stood distractedly in the middle of the room, yielding his right hand to Mrs Lackersteen, who was caressing it, while a weeping chokra clung to his left leg. Mr Lackersteen had vanished again. Ellis was stamping furiously up and down, shaking his fist in the direction of the police lines.
‘Where are the police, the f— cowardly sods?’ he yelled, heedless of the women. ‘Why don’t they turn out? My God, we won’t get another chance like this in a hundred years! If we’d only ten rifles here, how we could slosh these b—s!’
‘They’ll be here presently!’ Mr Macgregor shouted back. ‘It will take them some minutes to penetrate that crowd.’
‘But why don’t they use their rifles, the miserable sons of bitches? They could slaughter them in bloody heaps if they’d only open fire. Oh, God, to think of missing a chance like this!’
A lump of rock burst one of the zinc shutters. Another followed through the hole it had made, stove in a ‘Bonzo’ picture, bounced off, cut Elizabeth’s elbow, and finally landed on the table. There was a roar of triumph from outside, and then a succession of tremendous thumps on the roof. Some children had climbed into the trees and were having the time of their lives sliding down the roof on their bottoms. Mrs Lackersteen outdid all previous efforts with a shriek that rose easily above the din outside.
‘Choke that bloody hag, somebody!’ cried Ellis. ‘Anyone’d think a pig was being killed. We’ve got to do something. Flory, Macgregor, come here! Think of a way out of this mess, someone!’
Elizabeth had suddenly lost her nerve and begun crying. The blow from the stone had hurt her. To Flory’s astonishment, he found her clinging tightly to his arm. Even in that moment it made his heart turn over. He had been watching the scene almost with detachment–dazed by the noise, indeed, but not much frightened. He always found it difficult to believe Orientals could be really dangerous. Only when he felt Elizabeth’s hand on his arm did he grasp the seriousness of the situation.
‘Oh, Mr Flory, please, please think of something! You can, you can! Anything sooner than let those dreadful men get in here!’
‘If only one of us could get to the police lines!’ groaned Mr Macgregor. ‘A British officer to lead them! At the worst I must try and go myself.’
‘Don’t be a fool! Only get your throat cut!’ yelled Ellis. ‘I’ll go if they really look like breaking in. But, oh, to be killed by swine like that! How furious it’d make me! And to think we could murder the whole bloody crowd if only we could get the police here!’
‘Couldn’t someone get along the river bank?’ Flory shouted despairingly.
‘Hopeless! Hundreds of them prowling up and down. We’re cut off–Burmans on three sides and the river on the other!’
‘The river!’
One of those startling ideas that are overlooked simply because they are so obvious had sprung into Flory’s mind.
‘The river! Of course! We can get to the police lines as easy as winking. Don’t you see?’
‘How?’
‘Why, down the river–in the water! Swim!’
‘Oh, good man!’ cried Ellis, and smacked Flory on the shoulder. Elizabeth squeezed his arm and actually danced a step or two in glee. ‘I’ll go if you like!’ Ellis shouted, but Flory shook his head. He had already begun slipping his shoes off. There was obviously no time to be lost. The Burmans had behaved like fools hitherto, but there was no saying what might happen if they succeeded in breaking in. The butler, who had got over his first fright, prepared to open the window that gave on the lawn, and glanced obliquely out. There were barely a score of Burmans on the lawn. They had left the back of the Club unguarded, supposing that the river cut off retreat.
‘Rush down the lawn like hell!’ Ellis shouted in Flory’s ear. ‘They’ll scatter all right when they see you.’
‘Order the police to open fire at once!’ shouted Mr Macgregor from the other side. ‘You have my authority.’
‘And tell them to aim low! No firing over their heads. Shoot to kill. In the guts for choice!’
Flory leapt down from the veranda, hurting his feet on the hard earth, and was at the river bank in six paces. As Ellis had said, the Burmans recoiled for a moment when they saw him leaping down. A few stones followed him, but no one pursued–they thought, no doubt, that he was only attempting to escape, and in the clear moonlight they could see that it was not Ellis. In another moment he had pushed his way through the bushes and was in the water.
He sank deep down, and the horrible river ooze received him, sucking him knee-deep so that it was several seconds before he could free himself. When he came to the surface a tepid froth, like the froth on stout, was lapping round his lips, and some spongy thing had floated into his throat and was choking him. It was a sprig of water hyacinth. He managed to spit it out, and found that the swift current had floated him twenty yards already. Burmans were rushing rather aimlessly up and down the bank, yelling. With his eye at the level of the water, Flory could not see the crowd besieging the Club; but he could hear their deep, devilish roaring, which sounded even louder than it had sounded on shore.
By the time he was opposite the Military Police lines the bank seemed almost bare of men. He managed to struggle out of the current and flounder through the mud, which sucked off his left sock. A little way down the bank two old men were sitting beside a fence, sharpening fence-posts, as though there had not been a riot within a hundred miles of them. Flory crawled ashore, clambered over the fence and ran heavily across the moon-white parade-ground, his wet trousers sagging. As far as he could tell in the noise, the lines were quite empty. In some stalls over to the right Verrall’s horses were plunging about in a panic. Flory ran out on to the road, and saw what had happened.
The whole body of policemen, military and civil, about a hundred and fifty men in all, had attacked the crowd from the rear, armed only with sticks. They had been utterly engulfed. The crowd was so dense that it was like an enormous swarm of bees seething and rotating. Everywhere one could see policemen wedged helplessly among the hordes of Burmans, struggling furiously but uselessly, and too cramped even to use their sticks. Whole knots of men were tangled Laocoön-like in the folds of unrolled pagris. There was a terrific bellowing of oaths in three or four languages, clouds of dust, and a suffocating stench of sweat and marigolds–but no one seemed to have been seriously hurt. Probably the Burmans had not used their dahs for fear of provoking rifle-fire. Flory pushed his way into the crowd and was immediately swallowed up like the others.
A sea of bodies closed in upon him and flung him from side to side, bumping his ribs and choking him with their animal heat. He struggled onwards with an almost dreamlike feeling, so absurd and unreal was the situation. The whole riot had been ludicrous from the start, and what was
