She spoke with the mincing articulation of the Anglo-Indian. She was neither very young nor beautiful, with her full, rather Semitic face and her podgy, ringed fingers; but she had a bright, teasing manner, and I am sure that if she had cared to set about it she could have aroused a great deal of ardour in a man. There was something about her which seemed to indicate that she had often cared to set about it, and with success; and that now she did not care so much as she did, but that she had forgotten how not to be provocative.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s much better.”
“It isn’t a romantic disease, is it?” she said, smiling over her shoulder as she turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs.
“It isn’t.”
“But it was nice having Sisters to look after you. They are nice girls, Sisters, aren’t they?”
“I called our Sister ‘nurse,’” I said. “And she never quite forgave me.”
“Oh, that is bad. You should not be rude to Sisters.”
I had tea sent up to my room; then I lay reading for an hour. A delicious calm pervaded me. I remembered when I had lain on this same bed weeks before and felt only a hollowness, and I was glad that this had gone. It was natural that it should have done so.
At five o’clock I bathed and shaved. When I was dressing, Peter came in with his fat dictionary and exercise books under his arm.
“Ah, the prodigal son!” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re doing your toilet preparatory to taking me out to dinner. We’ve all been saying you’ll have saved enough money to treat us for weeks.”
“I’m convalescent,” I said. “It’s your duty to pamper me.”
“We’ve no money. I’ve borrowed from Mervyn, and Mervyn from Mario and Mario from the Brigadier. The Brigadier has turned out to be an absolute treasure. We all adore him.”
“What else has been happening?” I asked.
“There are no really succulent morsels of scandal. But this will please you. You must get a pencil and write it down before you forget, in case you ever write a book and want to use it. It’s about Fenwick.”
“I don’t think I shall ever write a book about Fenwick.”
“Well, anyway, he came into the bar at Green’s the other day full of his nauseating brand of bonhomie and said, ‘Let’s have a discussion. I maintain that rugger is a better game than baseball and brings out better qualities in a man.’ Of course he’s never played either in his life. Whilst he was enlarging on his theme all the half-wits in his audience were nodding their heads solemnly, and afterwards one of them said to me, ‘Isn’t Fenwick a grand chap! He must be most interesting to work with.’ I reserved this specially for you. No copyright. And that reminds me of some more news . . .”
I hoped that he was going to speak of Sabby, because it was only of her that I really wanted to hear. But he was talking of Miss Jackson now. He had spent a whole evening ‘looking into her,’ and had found her an uncommonly interesting study, besides being a woman of great sympathy with a heart of gold. And when Peter said that of someone, you could be sure it was true. I never knew anyone like him for ferreting out what was worth-while in a character; nor for that matter did I know anyone like him for so ruthlessly discarding the trivial and dull, not caring whom he offended or angered.
“Her name’s Rosie,” he said. “And you’ll do well to be on the right side of her, my young fellow, because she knows a lot of gairls. She always talks about gairls, exactly like the wife of a vicar at home. ‘She is such a nice gairl, with such nice gairls.’ All Rosie’s gairls are nice gairls, too. And she thinks we’re all such nice boys. She told us that before the war she used to live in Rangoon. She came out on the last ship, with all her gairls on a string. It was sheer patriotism that made her leave; she didn’t say so in so many words, but there’s no doubt about it. She wasn’t going to leave her protégées to the mercy of Japanese warriors. And so here she is, running a respectable establishment. Only she can’t bear to see young men like us, thousands of miles from home and family comforts, deprived of the solace due to our sex and noble vocation. Oh, Rosie is a jewel—and her anecdotes about pukka sahibs déshabillé are uproarious.”
“It’s all most interesting,” I said. “And I suppose you’ve also been making great strides with your Japanese?”
“No. I’ve been writing a book. I go back to the school in the evenings and write it in the classroom. It’s going to be the great book of the war. An epic. What All Quiet on the Western Front was to the last war, and For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Spanish war, my book will be to World War Two. Unfortunately I can’t make up my mind whether it shall be The War Office Murder, or One of our Bodies is Missing. But my detective wears an eyeglass and went to Eton, and will stand alongside Mr. Micawber and the Scarlet Pimpernel as one of the great original characters of literature. He will also make me thousands of pounds so that I may entertain one of Rosie’s gairls in all the best places. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”
“I think it’s wonderful.”
“Then I shall have gold-backed hairbrushes, and a thirty-horse power automobile with a horn which is worked by an expensive device that detects earnest and impoverished souls that are pursuing art for art’s sake. Whenever it passes one of these in the street it will automatically scream ‘Sucker!’ My lips will then twist into a smile of cynical derision, and I shall turn back to my immodestly perfumed mistress. Now what about this dinner?”
“I can’t go with you,” I said.
“But you can’t discard me in this way, like an old sucked orange. I shall go with you.”
“You may if you like.”
“No, I was only joking. I know everything.”
“I doubt if you do.”
“You’re meeting the delectable Hanako at six-thirty in the entrance hall of the Taj.’’
“How did you know that?” I said.
“She told us in class.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Oh, she’s a little minx. She tells us everything.”
“She didn’t tell the whole class?”
“Very nearly. She was so excited this afternoon that anyone sufficiently perspicacious would have known she was going to a tryst. But fortunately for you I’m the only one writing a detective story. You see, I’m becoming very clever. I can tell from that ash tray that you’ve been here at least an hour.”
“But the place and the time?”
“That’s clever, too. You’re all ready to go out, which means you’ll be at the Taj at six-thirty. Of course it’s the Taj, because in Bombay nobody meets anywhere else.”
“You gave me a fright,” I said.
“I meant to. You’re going to have such a happy time, it’s only just you should have a fright first. But you can rely on me to answer to all the world that you’ve taken Rosie to the pictures. Rosie will swear too.”
“You’re a great friend,” I said.
“Oh, that’s nothing. I’d do it for anyone. I like to see young hearts beating together in romantic ecstasy.”
“Go and drown yourself,” I said.
Outside I took a ghari, because I was cool and wanted to remain so. If you get hot and then cool again, it is never quite the same so if you had not got hot at all after your shower. It was also cool in the Taj. I was ten minutes early, so I looked through the books on the kiosk. There were a great many about Japan—Japan’s Feet of Clay, The Yellow Peril, Bushido and Terrorism. Several of them had hideous caricatures on the front, like the caricature we had seen on the poster of the Japanese face with its prognathous jaw. Then I saw one called Two Faces of Japan, on which the cruel male face stood out in front of a faint drawing of a kneeling woman. The woman was pretty. I looked inside the book, and there were a great many more pictures of pretty, laughing Japanese girls. Facing each there was a picture of steel-helmeted Japanese youths or a threatening
display of bayonets, or a Japanese atrocity in China. Most of these were horrible to look at; they were all of them photographs. They turned my stomach, so that I replaced the book and drew another one from the shelf. It was called The Three Bamboos. I thought it looked interesting, and I began to turn the pages. Then I turned back to the beginning to see who was the author, and as I did so I noticed the dedication. It was ‘to the gentle, self-effacing, and long-suffering mothers of the cruellest, most arrogant and treacherous sons who walk this earth—to the women of Japan—who will, as always, reap the richest harvest of suffering as their reward.’ I read the sentence over several times because I thought I would like to know it by heart. I was still reading it when I felt someone at my side.
“How are you?” Sabby said in Japanese.
“O-kage-sama de . . .” In Japan it is always ‘by your honourable shadow,’ by your influence, that one is in good health. After three weeks in hospital, it was about all the Japanese I could remember.
“You are honestry better?” she said in English.
“Honestry,” I said.
“Oh, you are teasing me.”
“I’m not teasing,’’ I said. “Please always say honestry. It is beautiful.”
“You must teach me to speak proper English. Honest-ly. Honest-ly. Oh dear, it is so very difficult!”
“After a drink it won’t be so hard.”
We mounted the palatial staircase and sat down by a table by an open window overlooking the bay. The waiter hovered over us.
“What will you have?” I said.
Sabby shook her head.
“You don’t want anything?” I said.
“No, thank you.”
“There must be something you’d drink?”
“No, really.’’
“You ought to have told me before we came here.”
“I would like to see you have drink. It is nice here.’’
“I’ll get you a soft drink.”
“Please, I don’t even want even soft one.”
“It makes one happy to drink,” I said.
“I shall be happy without drink. With drink I shall perhaps be very sick and ashame you.”
“All right,” I said, and I turned to the waiter to order something for myself.
“It doesn’t shock you if I smoke cigarette?” Sabby said.
“I’m sorry, I’m very rude—you ought to have one of mine.’’
“Please,” she said. “These are open.”
I took one from her case. It was a fine silver case with an intagliated design, and her initials engraved in the centre, H. T. I knew what the H. meant—Hanako, the Flower Child—but she had never told me about the T., her real Japanese surname before she called herself Wei. It made me wonder all of a sudden about her past, whereas up to that moment I had only thought of Sabby in the present. But I was not in a hurry to know about the past. I watched her snap the case closed and put it in her handbag; then I lit a match for her and held it whilst she sucked in the flame with the tip of her cigarette.
I looked at her face very closely, objectively; I wanted to see it as I knew on some future occasion I might not be able to help seeing it. I began to search it for any little imperfection that could irritate me, a twisted mouth, a bad chin, a nervous habit, any ugliness that might later cause me to wonder how I had loved despite that. But there was nothing with which I thought I could ever find fault. Like her hands, her face was fashioned with that exquisite delicacy of an Oriental figure in ivory; and yet it was impossible for me to regard her as an ornament only, for I seemed to see strange depths of experience in her, as though all the suffering and happiness of womanhood had been hers. I looked at her eyes, just aslant and almond-shaped when she smiled, trying to brush aside my feelings and see them as Oriental eyes were supposed to be, cruel or sly or inscrutable. But there was nothing like that to be found there, and I allowed all my feelings to come back again with a rush, and was certain that they were the most expressive and tender and beautiful eyes in the world, East or West. I felt guilty at having been so calculating and mistrustful, and letting Sabby detect it.
“Why you look so curious?” she said.
“Curious?”
“Perhaps it is not curious I mean. I wish I could speak clever English. I mean you look at me through window.”
“Detached?” I said.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“It was only for a moment. I wanted to find out if I could ever dislike you.”
“Can you dislike?”
“No.”
“Can you always like me?”
“Why not?” I said.
“That is not answer. No, please don’t say anything. I wish I had not asked such silly question.”
“It wasn’t silly.”
“There is no reason why you should like me at all. Look, there is very beautiful woman behind you who is intelligent and sophisticated. I am awfully stupid and childish.”
“That is modesty,” I said in Japanese, because I happened to remember the word and because it was really modesty.
“No, it is true, I am sometimes awfully childish. I have often been told.”
“It’s attractive,” I said. “You’ve probably been told that, too.”
I drank my whisky slowly, and Sabby smoked three or four cigarettes. Afterwards we went in to have dinner. There was a band and dancing, and the room was full of uniforms and saris and evening dresses, and movement and kaleidoscopic colour. I was not in the least drunk with the whisky, but I might have been drunk the way my senses recorded this swirl of people around us, out-of-focus and dim, and all that was in-focus and real was Sabby and the table between us and our little cave of stillness stolen out of the festivity of the room.
“This is first meal together,” Sabby said.
“We had tea in your room.”
“That was second time of meeting. Private meeting. I mean.”
“This is the fourth.”
“Ought I still to say Mr. Quinn?”
“It doesn’t matter what you say. You can say Mr. Quinn if you like. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“But I would like to say Michael.”
“Say Michael, then. Whatever you say, I feel as though I’ve known you for years and years.”
“That is funny thing.”
“That’s how it feels. Sometimes you meet people hundreds of times and you never know them. They might be a gatepost for all they do to you. And sometimes you only have to meet people once or twice, and you feel more natural with them than with people you were brought up with.”
“They fit like old pair of shoes?”
“Yes, just like that. If you put on new shoes you don’t expect them to feel quite right. Its rather a surprise when they do.”
“Am I old shoe?”
“Well,” I said, “you feel like an old one.”
“But you said it is first time you meet Japanese woman.”
“It doesn’t matter. I seem to have known you before. I’ve seen your hands before. Only perhaps they weren’t hands then.”
“What were hands?”
“They might have been flowers, or clouds, or doves.”
“You talk like Japanese poet.”
They were very small, pretty, fluttering hands, and afterwards in the ghari when I enclosed one in my own, I was half afraid that should crush it because it was so fragile. I thought it was like having the tiny body of a bird in my palm, its soft feathers covering a quivering little skeleton.
In the ghari it was cool and the hood was drawn, and the driver perched up aloofly, ignoring us, and busy manipulating his horse.
“Do you like Bombay at night?” Sabby said.
“Sometimes.’’
“Better than in daytime?”
“It is more lovely at
night with the lights.”
“It is nicer than London?”
“The last I saw of London was in the black-out, bumping into lamp-posts and tripping over kerbs.”
“I did that, too.”
“I can’t imagine you in London,” I said.
“I liked London so much. I was very happy there, you see. You ought to die when you are happy, otherwise you must become sad again.”
“You’re not sad now?”
“No, not now. Now I am happy.’’
“And you’ll always be happy,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Life is not like that. I must become terribly sad, because now I am so terribly happy.”
“That doesn’t mean you’d like to die now?”
“No, please not—not just now.”
We were at her hotel. I gave the driver some money, and we went in. The hall was badly lit and gloomy. The clerk at the reception-desk grinned good evening and the liftman took us up in the clanking lift. But Sabby’s room looked lived-in, and the dressing-table was alive—alive and feminine, with its bright pots and bottles, and profusion of things that were in use.
“I am so ashamed,” Sabby said. “I have left everything untidy. I am a scatter-brain, an awatemono. Please forgive.”
I went out on to the balcony whilst she pottered about barefooted in the room. On the balcony you could look up at the stars or down at the street, and it did not matter which you did, for one was serene and had the beauty of eternity, and the other was a little colourful glimpse of the huge mosaic that was life—and both in their way were exciting; and on the balcony one was in between. I leant on the balustrade and looked down at the movement below—each brightly lit shop a miniature scene on its own, framed by the gloom. The dry smell of charcoal fires drifted up to my nostrils. Mysteriously draped figures glided along the pavements; others were seated in a circle round a fire on which something was frying and the flames gave to their faces a strange unreality. A beggar looked up and caught sight of me; and because he could see my face was pale, he lifted a skinny hand like a claw as though to drag an apple from a tree. I made no movement and he kept his hand raised, and a feeble, trembling voice, inarticulate, floated up to me. He stood there like a Moses gazing up to heaven, his face desiccated, and yet with a dull light of hope burning in his eyes. Hope for an anna, a penny. I threw him down a coin and it tinkled about the street. He went after it like a monkey, on all-fours, pushing between a forest of brown legs. When he found it he examined it curiously, turning it over in his fingers. He did not look up again. He continued down the street, unevenly like a drunk.
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