The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott Page B

time for an old nation to die by its own hand. You will hasten nothing by failing to distinguish between the English who really rule us and the English who interpret and administer that rule. Haven’t you yet understood that we are part and parcel of the Englishmen’s own continual state of social and political evolvement and that to share the fruits we must share the labour and abide by the rules they abide by?’
    ‘You mean,’ Mohammed Ali said, ‘submit to being shot down for protesting the freedom to speak our minds?’
    ‘For this they have shot down their own people, and not so long ago. Out here we shall always be a step behind whatever progress the English make at home.’
    Mohammed Ali smiled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we shall be several steps ahead.’
    For a while the old man was silent, not because his son had stumped him. He was merely considering the violent landscape so casually mapped.
    ‘Perhaps I am too old,’ he said eventually. ‘I can’t see small print without my spectacles and even then I get a headache. I think the lady who donated this money also finds it difficult to read the small print. She is anyway only concerning herself with the capital letters of an ancient contract. In your contract is everything writ large, or is it that your eyesight is superhuman?’
*
    John Layton was in his twenty-sixth year when he came back to India in 1919. In the last year of his service abroad he was acting adjutant of the battalion. On returning to Ranpur he relinquished the appointment to an officer of the 2nd Battalion who was senior to him. Temporarily he was without regimental employment. He was the natural choice for the role of Recruiting Officer Sahib. He went up to Pankot in May, with Mabel. They lived in the bungalow near the golf course that he had shared with the senior subaltern in the October and November of 1913.
    Both Mabel and his father had talked of retiring to Pankot when the time came. They had had their eye on a place called Rose Cottage, inconveniently placed on the other side of the main hill dominated by the Governor’s Summer Residence but to them the most attractive of the few privately owned houses and bungalows: attractive because of its garden, its views, and the fact that it was owned by an elderly widower who had been in tea in Assam and couldn’t be expected to live much longer.
    Layton’s father had not been a rich man. What little he left Mabel inherited, but she had money of her own and money from her first husband who had died well-breeched in spite ofhaving lived extravagantly. Since Mabel was childless he would eventually inherit everything. It would be useful. In peace-time an officer found it virtually impossible to live on his pay – he was not expected to – few attempted to however simple their tastes – he found it quite impossible to save. To serve the empire he needed money of his own. For the moment Layton had no worries on this score. Until his death his civilian father had paid sums of money into his account whenever he could afford them; and Layton suspected – surprised at the amount standing to his credit – that Mabel had contributed regular sums herself. Furthermore she declared her intention of handing over to him in full the principal she had inherited from his father, and the accumulated interest, directly he got married. Such funds together with what he had been able to save while on active service represented the kind of basic security without which a man of his kind would feel at a disadvantage when it came to thinking of the future in terms of fatherhood and of a proper education for his children.
    When his Surrey grandfather died – and the old boy surely couldn’t go on much longer – he imagined he would inherit the Surrey property into the bargain. His own children might spend part of their childhood there, with their mother (whoever she might be) or their grandmother Mabel, or some relation of their mother’s. The long-term plan