The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  I felt a sudden urge to send her flowers. In the lunch-time siesta I went to Matier’s and ordered a bunch to be sent to her hotel.

  “You have a card to enclose?” they said.

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t matter about a card.”

  I thought just sending her the flowers was enough, and would relieve the feelings that were pressing inside me. I found that I was thinking of her all the time; it was like a disease, and I wanted to rid myself of it, because it distracted me from things that I really wanted to do. I felt better when I had sent the flowers, and in the evening I went to the Cricket Club and bathed and thought I had been behaving like an idiot. I ordered an iced coffee, and drank it in a deck-chair by the side of the swimming-pool, reading a book and taking in most of what I read. I felt perfectly at ease and happy, and was glad I had sent the flowers without a card. I was all right until I was in bed; and then it all came back with a sudden surge and I desperately wanted to see Miss Wei, and I promised myself that the next day I would go to her hotel. The next day was Saturday, and I went in the afternoon.

  I stood about in the hall whilst a bearer went up to inquire. The hotel was called the Mayfair, but it was more like one of the older hotels of Belgravia, rather gloomy and hang-dog and full of Victorian fittings. It had seen better days, but kept up its prices despite everything. I began to wish I hadn’t come: not because of the hall’s gloominess, but because I now felt some trepidation. One moment I thought that coming here was an obvious gesture of politeness, beyond criticism, and that if she was in bed and did not wish to see me she could easily send down a message. And the next, I wondered if it would be clear to a child that I had been pitchforked into this by a ridiculous infatuation, and that I was making a fool of myself. On the whole, I wanted to drop the business and go; go and forget it all in a fan-cooled cinema. But I knew if I did that, when the surge came again I should despise myself for my cowardice. I knew I had to live up to my feelings even when they were absent.

  The bearer reappeared.

  “It is number forty-three room, please,” he said.

  “I’m to go up?”

  “The lady says please to go.”

  I was carried to the second floor by an old clanking lift and ejected into the corridor. I found the door of No. 43, and knocked. Miss Wei’s voice called me in.

  It was a big room with a high ceiling, lighter than the rest of the hotel, but dingily furnished. Only the bed looked new with its perfectly white sheets and white pillows; and there Miss Wei was sitting, propped up against the pillows, very small and a little forlorn all alone in the room. But I had never seen her looking so lovely as this, her black hair framing her little, pale face, and her slender hands lying on the sheet beside her. All the reluctance left me at once and I was filled with delight, and I wanted to say all kinds of things to her that I knew were impossible. Instead, I went through the rigmarole of genteel compliments and sympathy, and sat down in the chair several yards from the bed.

  “Really,” she said, “I am just swinging lead. It is only a little headache.”

  “You’ve seen the doctor?”

  “He comes and gives nasty pills.”

  “I expect it’s the sun,” I said. “You ought to have taken things easily at first.”

  “I am lazy woman, that is the trouble. I think at school everyone will be angry with me. Please, did the Brigadier send you to scold?”

  “Yes, he’s furious with you.”

  “You’re pulling leg now. That is very naughty.”

  “We were all very worried about you,” I said.

  “Somebody has sent me beautiful flowers. Please can you tell me if it was school people?”

  “It might be.”

  “You are teasing,” she said. “I think you know who sent flowers.”

  “Is there nobody else but school people who might have sent them?”

  “There is one friend, but he has already sent nice grapes.”

  “Have you only got one friend in Bombay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is all. Except for the nice school people.”

  “You are sabishii . . .?” I thought that was one of the best of all Japanase words, the most expressive, Sabishii—said lingeringly, like the wind sighing sadly. But it was not sadness, not loneliness; but something between, a sad-loneliness, a sentimental yearning. Miss Wei was sabishii—I could tell by her eyes, although at first they had seemed quite gay.

  “I am very happy,” she said. “I have got lots of reason to be happy, except for sick headache. And now I really have two friends. I have person who sent grapes and person who sent flowers. It is nice of people to be friendly with Japanese.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you are,” I said, “so long as you have a good heart.”

  “I have got selfish heart.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, I have. All I think of is me.”

  “Is that why you’ve come all the way out from England to help us?”

  “That is because I like English people; and they have been good to me. In Japan there is a lot of badness.”

  “It isn’t easy being with people who are fighting your own country.’’

  “I try not to think much about fighting own country,” she said. “Please, would you like to drink tea?”

  She pulled an enormous Victorian bell-rope that hung by the bed, and the bearer came. He brought the tea, and we did not talk any more about fighting Japan, though we talked about living in Japan, and tea ceremonies, and wearing Japanese clothes, and sometimes we talked a little bit of Japanese. I found that I could make her laugh, and when she laughed in front of me alone she did not put anything in front of her face as though she was crying instead. Her laugh was very pretty and gentle, and for a time her eyes were not in the least sabishii. I also laughed a great deal, though it was not because there was anything funny, but because my blood was joyous and singing through my veins. I thought that in all the world there could be no greater pleasure than gradually getting to know a beautiful woman, and being with her alone.

  When I left, I did not call a ghari, but walked all the way home. I was still smiling, and all the uncomfortable pressure inside me had burst out of the safety valve.

  (3)

  Then my dysentery started again. I had suspected it for a day or two, and that morning it became a certainty. The germs were tearing out my inside, and I knew it was useless to try to stop them with a chemist’s potion. Instead of going to the school, I went to see the Service doctor.

  “Pack your bag, old son,” he said. “You’re going off to hospital.” I returned to the hotel in an ambulance van to get my things, and leave notes for Peter and my bearer, Bahadur. After that I told the driver to go round by the school. I went up to see the Brigadier and collect a Japanese grammar from my locker. Whilst I was talking to the Brigadier, he told me that Miss Wei was coming back to teach in the afternoon.

  That made me more than ever regretful that I had to go into hospital. It seemed absurd that one’s body should suddenly let one down in this way, and I was as angry with my bowels as I might have been with a person who had treated me inconsiderately.

  The hospital was six miles out, not far from the racecourse at Mahalkshmi—a dozen long, low buildings in a compound. I was taken to the dysentery ward. The officers sitting on the verandah in their pyjamas looked at me with mild curiosity. I followed the Sister into a room where there was one empty bed and two already occupied. I felt like the last person to get into a railway carriage.

  “Amoebic or bacillary?” one of the two officers asked. He was an Army officer called Gregory.

  “Bacillary, I hope.”

  “If it’s amoebic you’re in for the hell of a time.”

  “It was bacillary last time,” I said. “I never quite got rid of it.”

  “I’ve got am
oebic. I’ve been here a month. The fifth time this year. Now I’m for the boat.”

  “That’s some compensation.”

  “I don’t want to go,” he said. “I like India.”

  I took off my tropical clothes and put on pyjamas.

  “Where’s the holy of holies?’’ I asked.

  “Through that door.”

  I went out, and afterwards I wrote my name on a piece of paper and left it there. I got into bed, and before long an orderly brought lunch on a tray. There was soup and chicken mince and jelly. I was quite hungry, and, except for the inconvenience of the disease, I felt in good health. I hated being a patient and having to eat thin, unappetising food, and I thought Gregory looked like the kind of Army officer who was dumb from the neck up, not the type to be shut up with. The other officer was asleep. He woke up for his lunch, and nodded a dim hullo, and after he had eaten he went to sleep again. The wireless didn’t disturb him. It was Gregory’s wireless, and he kept it on full blast. The room was palpitating with jazz.

  I began to think how wretched it would be if my dysentery turned out to be amoebic. No more Japanese, probably. No more Bombay. No more fun. I should go home. But not straight away; there would be a year, perhaps, spent in and out of hospital, like Gregory, until its incurability under Indian conditions was proved. No more drinking. Amoebic or bacillary, it was probably drinking that had started it up again now. Drinking bad whisky and gin.

  And now I didn’t want to go home. After Burma, I would have been glad of amoebic dysentery, malaria, a wound, anything that would have given me also a passport back to Tewkesbury. All I wanted was to see the green meadows full of buttercups, a glimpse of the abbey’s tower or the Malvern Hills, and the warm stone lintels of the house, welcoming me as I came up the drive . . . how I’d longed for those! A refugee from the jungle then, I had seen heaven in the cool, clean sheets and in the mute efficiency of English nurses. But now, in a better hospital, these things meant nothing. I didn’t want them. I wanted to go on living as I had been. All of a sudden life had seemed exciting.

  I was restless and irritated as I lay in bed. The wireless was insufferable, but I thought I had not been in the ward long enough to start complaining of such things. Captain Gregory began to tell me about his job. I don’t remember what it was, but it was a staff job of sorts. Only four months before he had been a Second­ Lieutenant. Now he was a Captain on staff pay, and smug in a way that only staff can be smug when they retrospectively mistake a lucky chance for their own astuteness. Listening to him I under­stood the feeling that I had noticed in Burma—a feeling which ran backwards from the front positions, each man more contemptuous than envious of those behind him. The forward man in a platoon, perhaps only the width of a road in advance, would think, ‘Those damned non-combatants in the ditch behind! No bullets flying there!’ And the platoon commander in the ditch would be thinking of the soft jobs at Brigade H.Q., and the Brigade officers would think of the babus, the office-wallahs, at Division. And so on, right back to G.H.Q. in New Delhi, where the red-tabs sat in the air-conditioned Secretariat. And in summer, even the red-tabs were thinking of their colleagues in the hills.

  Well, you can’t put G.H.Q. where snipers can pot at it. Nor can you blame a man for being pleased to be on the staff; but there was no need to speak of the men in front of you as though it was only through ignorance and stupidity that they had found for themselves no safer or more remunerative positions.

  I knew I should quarrel with this Gregory. It was after a news bulletin that he said:

  “The little bastards. The slit-eyed monkeys.”

  “Who?” I said, though I knew quite well whom he meant. “The Japs.”

  “Perhaps they’re not all bastards,” I said.

  “Perhaps they are.”

  “Do you know many Japanese?”

  “I don’t know any, and I don’t want to, thank you.”

  “Then how can you condemn them so sweepingly?”

  “I know sufficient about them to hate the lot. Don’t you hate them?”

  “I thought I did once, but I don’t really. Not all of them.”

  “You’d hate them if anyone you liked had got into their hands.”

  “Do you know someone?”

  “I know people whose sons were at Singapore. I can appreciate their feelings.”

  “My brother was at Hong Kong,” I said.

  “He was captured?”

  “Yes. I don’t suppose he died very nicely.”

  “Well, all I can say is you’ve no depth of feeling.”

  “That is illogical,” I said.

  “It’s perfectly logical. If you have any feelings it’s only natural to hate the people who killed your brother ‘not nicely.’”

  “If my brother was killed by a car whose driver was drunk, I should hate the driver but not all the passengers.”

  “Oh God!” the Captain said. “You’re one of those people, are you? There are good Germans and bad Germans, good Japs and bad Japs. I hope there aren’t people like you in power after the war.”

  “What do you think should happen to the Japs after the war?”

  “I think they should all be exterminated.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I said.

  “Certainly I do. It would be easy. You could wipe them out with gas. You could kill them in their millions. It’s easy to gas them.”

  “I hope you’re not in power after the war,” I said.

  “If I am, I shan’t have people thinking sloppily like you. It’s damn treachery.”

  “It’s stupid to say that.”

  “Well, do you want to win the war against the Japs or not?”

  “We’ve got to win it.”

  “We won’t win the war by saying they are nice people. ‘Awfully sorry, old man, and all that, but I shall have to shoot you.’ You’ve got to be fanatical.”

  I would like to have said, ‘It must be frustrating to feel fanatical with a pencil in your hand all the time, wishing it were a bayonet.’ But that sarcasm was too cheap, and anyway who was I to talk, with a safe sedentary job and wings on my tunic that referred to the past?

  “I’m afraid I’m not fanatical,” I said. “I think this war is a damned unpleasant duty, like shooting mad dogs.” And I added, “I hate war.”

  “That is obvious,” he said.

  “But I hate most of all what it does to people, and that is not so obvious.”

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “let’s have some music.”

  He twiddled the knob of the radio and a torrent of sound deluged the room. I lay trying to think and trying to stem the waves that assailed my ear-drums. When the Sister came round with a thermometer my blood was still angry, and it sent the mercury up to 99 and my pulse beat to 96.

  “You’re not feeling well?” she said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You look feverish,” she said, entering up my chart.

  “It’s nothing at all.”

  And yet like a fever the thoughts of Miss Wei came back to me. It was on her account that I had so bitterly resented the words of the Captain; I had changed all my ideas to include her. I had said, “I don’t hate them all . . .”; but I was only thinking that Miss Wei was beautiful and had beautiful hands, and that she had deep­brown eyes with a look that was sabishii. I began to remember all the expressions of hers, in the classroom and in the bazaar, and whilst we drank tea in her room, and everything about her seemed more pretty and gentle than anything else I had ever known. I told myself, “But it is too quick. You know nothing of her, nothing! Your imagination is creating someone for you.”

  But my imagination was on fire, and in its flames these protests of my reason were burnt like brittle dried leaves, and their ashes lifted away and lost in the air.

  (4)

  Next morning my temperat
ure was normal and my pulse ticking over at a steady 65. The doctor came on his rounds and delivered his sentence:

  “Bacillary dysentery. Don’t worry—we’ll clear you up in ten days.”

  The Sister proffered four white tablets on a spoon. I crunched them in my mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of water. They were as tasteless as chalk.

  I felt fine. I got up and examined the hospital books on the shelf; but the covers were torn and dreary and the contents looked drearier still. I wandered out on to the balcony and sat down in an armchair just out of the sun, watching the lethargic construction of a bungalow across the road. Women moved at snail-pace, carrying baskets of bricks or pieces of roofing on their heads—women heavily draped in red with carriages proudly erect. After a while a motor-car drew up and the Sikh contractor, magnificently bearded, white-turbaned, egg-paunched, got out and swaggered across. But no one paid any attention to him; in the morning heat the Indians went on working in slow-motion. A bullock-cart passed. The animal looked dreamily unconscious of the yoke hooked over its hump, regarding one side of the road and then the other, the loose folds of skin flopping beneath it. Behind it the cart rose and fell creakily with each turn of the roughly hewn wheel. Then a taxi rushed by, blowing its horn, and through the windows I caught a glimpse of two pink faces and the glittering buttons of a uniform. It was gone, leaving a thin cloud of dust; and whilst this still hung in the air two figures emerged from it—a tall, lean man with a muddy dhoti and bare, dusty feet, and a few yards behind him his wife, bearing on her head all their household chattels. They moved past me, mutely. Another car sped by, swirling up the light-brown film that had hardly had time to settle on the surface of the road. After that, unhurried and supercilious like an old duchess, a camel moved noiselessly on its soft flesh-padded feet.