Night Train to Jamalpur(55)

On the Monday evening Lydia had taken up most of the luggage I would need for the hills, or what she thought I would need. This included my golf bag, my dinner suit, the new Duxolite oiled silk cape she’d bought me (because it might be raining up there), and the new cotton tweed suit she’d bought me (because it would also be cooler). These were stowed in the new cabin trunk she’d also bought from the North West Tannery Company of Calcutta at a cost of well over two hundred rupees (it was the one the elephant stood on in the newspaper advertisements). Lydia and Bernadette would be in Darjeeling by now – ought to be, at any rate, dropping and, it was to be hoped, receiving calling cards. Lydia had not telephoned or wired to say she had arrived safely but I wasn’t unduly worried because, whilst I had asked her to do that, she had not actually agreed to do it.

I had arranged to meet Fisher at 8 p.m. by the ticket gate, and I saw him through the colourful crowd before he saw me. He stood beneath a flickering electric lamp, beside a flower stall. That was all wrong: Fisher wasn’t the flower-giving type. He had his own kit bag, tiffin basket and a traveller’s portfolio. It seemed he meant to do some office work on the train. He had exchanged his cream linen suit for brown cotton twill, and he had a lightweight top-coat over his arm. He had polished his shiny black bulbous boots and, it seemed, his moustache. As I closed on Fisher, I was studying his suit coat, trying to make out the bulge of a pistol in a shoulder holster.

‘All right?’ I said.

‘Tolerably well,’ he said. ‘Yourself?’

Here, I thought, is a man with excitement in prospect, and there was more to it than simply a holiday in the hills.

I asked him if he’d heard about Poole. He had done; he didn’t express any interest, but said, ‘There’ll be no bloody snakes on this trip anyhow. They’ve all been on the East Indian.’

They’d all been on the main line of the East Indian Railway as well, but that might just have been the law of averages, since most trains departing from Howrah went that way. As Fisher and I walked through the ticket gate, I thought of the statement made by Poole, which had been forwarded to Fairlie Place. Most of it I already knew. Poole had been travelling to a meeting with a railway officer whose title was Traffic Supervisor (Coal) at Asansol, and he’d been asleep. He’d also been having a nightmare, which he did not describe in the statement. As a result of the nightmare, he’d woken to see the snake crawling on to his boot. He’d tried to kick it off, and it had struck, but only at the boot itself, and this had occurred just as the train pulled into the spot called Ondal, two stops before Asansol.

Fisher and I went through the gate with a crowd of people who seemed to be carrying every article they owned. Most boarded second or third class carriages, but we approached one of the two firsts. This time, the reservation chart was in place on the side of the carriage, but the typing was badly smudged, and in the dirty evening light of the station, I couldn’t make it out without my reading spectacles, and they were stowed away. As I peered at it, Fisher climbed up.

‘Excuse me.’

I turned around to see a European holding a portmanteau. He was a little bloke with a little triangular beard.

‘Are you boarding in first?’

I nodded.

‘Well, if I were you, I’d think twice about it. A sawscale viper was found in a first class compartment of this service yesterday.’

‘But . . . I would have heard of it.’

‘The Company’s seen all the trouble on the other line. So they’ve hushed it up.’

I said, ‘How do you know about it?’

‘I’ve a friend who works for this lot.’

I immediately thought of the wife and Bernadette, and the lack of a telegram. ‘No snake was found on Monday, was it?’

‘Not as far as I know. My friend would have said.’

‘Anyone hurt?’

He shook his head. He was clearly rather disappointed that no one had been hurt.

‘I’m off along to second,’ he said, ‘and I recommend you do the same.’

I said, ‘I’ll have a word with my pal,’ which was a funny way of referring to Fisher.

Little-beard headed off along the platform, and I climbed up into the airless first class corridor, where the attendant was showing Fisher into a berth that was little more than a light blue tin box, with light blue bunks already made up. It had none of the battered grandeur of the Jamalpur Night Mail, but there was a good fan, spinning fast. The first thing I did was look under the seats for snakes, at which Fisher said, ‘What’s your game?’ But the attendant knew what I was about. He said, ‘This train very safe, sahib,’ which told me the bearded man had been telling the truth. Without a by-your-leave, Fisher climbed on to the top bunk, so I threw my bag on the bottom bunk, and lay down upon it with that day’s Statesman. I called up to Fisher, ‘A snake was found on this service yesterday. Sawscale viper. The Company’s keeping it under wraps.’