The Faraway Drums by Jon Cleary

Author:Jon Cleary [Cleary, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 0688007902
Google: RdIgAQAAIAAJ
Amazon: B00DLHK4QO
Barnesnoble: B00DLHK4QO
Goodreads: 4350520
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 1981-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

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Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:

I DON’T know if I joined in the cheer when Clive, Karim Singh, the mahout and the elephant were at last drawn safely up on to the road. It seemed to me that I had been holding my breath ever since Clive had gone down to put the harness ropes in place; if I did cheer it could only have been a silent one. My legs were suddenly just sticks of jelly and I sat down without really looking to see if there was anything behind me. Fortunately there was a rock, a hard rough seat that I barely noticed against my bottom.

I was wet through. My hair had come loose and was hanging down about my face. I felt weak and almost ill; yet I was thrilled and full of admiration. I had just seen the rescue of the man I was coming to love, though I had not yet admitted that to myself; but I had also seen what made the British Raj work. It was the beginning of my education in the British in India.

Up till then all I had seen, possibly because it was all I wished to see, was a master-servant relationship, with all the advantages to the master. Like most Americans, but not all, of that period, I was anti-colonial, a firm, if unsworn, enemy of imperialism. So far I had sent home two despatches and both of them had been tinged with my American distaste for the British presence in India; it was the sort of story that the Boston Irish readers, and particularly my father and Mayor Honey Fitz, would relish reading. Like all nationalities we Americans have convenient memories and eyes that can turn blind on a whim. Our occupation of the Philippines wasn’t really imperialism, though of course there were some Americans who were honest and stupid and proud enough to claim that it was and what was wrong with it, anyway? Too, even as I had written my despatches, American bankers had, with their acquisition of the National Bank of Nicaragua and the state railroads, virtually been allowed to buy Nicaragua. Imperialists are like certain seducers: it is only rape when the other fellow does it.

Now, beside the wrecked bridge on the banks of that remote river in the Himalayan hills, I had seen what made the Raj work. It was leadership, the quality that impelled a man like Clive Farnol to risk his life to save that of a young mahout and an elephant. He could have stood safely on the bank and sent several of the hundred or so servants, the easily replaceable, out to risk their lives on the bridge. But he hadn’t; and I saw that all the servants, the ordinary Indians, respected him for what he had done. They might not love the British nation and its institutions, as the Nawab professed to do, but they could admire and sometimes love the individual Englishman. Of course, in the end, individuals do not prevail.

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