The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  “Are you sorry you didn’t go back to Japan?”

  “No, darling. I don’t want to marry anyone that I am told to.”

  “But now there is a war, and you’re a long way from home. You’re on the wrong side of the line.”

  “No,” Sabby said. “I’m lucky. I’m terribly lucky. It is my mother who is on the wrong side of line.”

  (2)

  I returned to school in the afternoon. It was not necessary, because I had a certificate in my pocket to say that I was excused duty for a week. But I wanted to be at Sabby’s class; or perhaps it was that I did not want the others to have her when I was not there, too. I did not want to fall far behind in Japanese, either. Already, in three weeks, the rest of the class had made a great deal of progress. They used words and expressions that I had never heard. Itsumi San laid stress upon this.

  “I am going to see how much you have forgotten,” he said. And then in Japanese, “Since when have you been in hospital?”

  “Since three weeks.”

  “In the hospital bed did you with might and main study the Japanese language?”

  “That is not so,” I said.

  “Your illness was too severe?”

  “That is not so.”

  “Then for what reason did you not with might and main study the Japanese language?”

  “Because when someone else in the hospital is playing a fearfully loud wireless it is not possible to study anything with might and main.” Only I said this with difficulty and ungrammatically.

  “Once more the same sentence, please,” Itsumi San said.

  “There was a fearfully loud wireless,” I said.

  “What else?”

  “For that reason I did not study in the least bit.”

  “How old are you?”

  “That is a rude question,” I said, because I could never think of numbers quickly.

  “Did you read today’s newspaper?”

  “It is so.”

  “What was the most important item?”

  “It concerned Russia.”

  “What about Russia?”

  “Oh hell,” I said in English. “I’m excused duty. Please go on to somebody else.”

  “You don’t want to learn Japanese?”

  “Yes,” I said. “With might and main I wish to study the Japanese language. Only my brain has not yet recovered.”

  “I think your illness was an illness of the belly.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Therefore you must now endeavour—’’

  “With might and main,” everyone said in chorus.

  “This is a very serious, important thing,” Itsumi San said. “It is not a joke. It is serious. It is serious and important. Moreover, it is for your own good. To me it does not matter in the least whether or not you learn to speak cleverly. I am thinking of you. Upon your proficiency will depend your promotion. I would like to see you all high officers. I am a civilian. But notwithstanding this, it is my desire to see you successful. Some people in my position would not care. But I work at nights with might and main to prepare lessons for you. I would prefer to go out and entertain myself. I do not do this. I think of your promotion. Therefore it is also your duty to study.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Please then pay attention. It is for your own benefit. I will ask you one more question. Where were you born?”

  “I was born at a place called Tewkesbury in England.”

  “Very good. Very good indeed. If you try you can succeed. Now we will continue . . .”

  When Sabby came in, she was less severe. She did not look at me at first, and then she looked quickly and away again, and she blushed a little. Later on she grew bold. She began asking questions round the class, and when it came to my turn she asked, “Are you a person who keeps promises?”

  “It depends on the promise,” I said.

  The next time round she said, “Do you keep promises that you make to women?”

  I said, “It depends on the woman.”

  Her eyes twinkled mischievously. She thought it was great fun, this little personal allusion in the middle of the class: she did not think that anyone could possibly suspect that there was anything behind it. And everyone thought that Sabby was great fun, and I could see that during my absence the formality with which she had been received at first had given way to an easy intimacy. Her hour went quickly. She tried to teach some grammar, writing words up on the board, and rubbing them out before anyone had time to see. After she had rubbed something out she put the duster up on the side of the board as though there was a hook there, and when she let it go it fell to the ground. When she needed it again at first she could not find it; but always she tried to put it where there was no hook and was surprised when she saw it on the floor. And somehow in this little careless action there was a naïveté that started a responsive wave of tenderness within me, and I found that I was whispering to myself, “Sweet darling Sabby, my child Sabby.”

  Yet she was not a child, she was a woman, and there was as much woman as there was child in her, a deep age-old womanliness. I wondered how she could be so womanly, so warmly responsive, so passionate, and yet retain that wide-eyed innocence. Perhaps the others had wondered, too, because someone asked:

  “How old were you at the time of the great earthquake?”

  “I was seven.” She knew it was a device to find out her age, and she did not care. We all counted on our fingers. She was twenty-six. But what did the years matter? It takes more than the passing of time to make an age. Sabby was seventeen and seven and seventy all at once.

  After the class Lamb spoke to me.

  “You know,” he said, “Hanako’s the goods. I didn’t know I could fancy anything East of Suez. But this is talking, what do you think?”

  What I thought was that his words sounded crude; and there was a nasty taste in my mouth, and I felt for perhaps the first time a spark of the pristine gallantry, “How dare you, sir, speak thus of a woman’s name. Choose your own weapons!” But I also thought, how comic to feel this! And I wondered whether my uprush of indignation was a form of hypocrisy. As a kind of counteraction to hypocrisy I said:

  “She’s the goods all right.” (How easy to be misjudged by one’s words! I thought.)

  “I’ve a good mind to ask her out to dinner.”

  Jealousy plucked lightly at a chord within me. I had liked Lamb, as a kind of gay ruffian. His moustache was bushy, almost intentionally villainous, and he did not care for pretences. Now suddenly I disliked him.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I think I shall see what’s doing.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  He went off. I went to the window, and I saw him appear through the doorway below and stand waiting on the steps, with his books under his arm. He looked up, and screwed his face into a grimace that meant ‘This is something good,’ and he stuck up his thumb above a clenched fist and waved it. I was ashamed. It may have been that I was ashamed of him; or else that he was making me feel ashamed of myself. Then I remembered that I was happy, and that I thought Sabby was happy too, and I could not see any reason why I should feel badly like that. And yet wasn’t this grimacing and thumbing exactly the same thing as I have only differently expressed? And wasn’t my way more insidious, more dishonest? There are various ways of picking pockets—you can do it promiscuously in a tramcar and risk the conseqences; or else you can do it under the cover of friendship, by creating a trust and then abusing it, knowing you will not be arrested as a common thief. Of course the second way is more cowardly.

  “I have never been so happy in my life,” I had said. I had said it three times. Yes, and I had meant it, I had really meant it and believed it, I had never, never been so happy. But supposing Lamb also were to have said that, and to have meant it, and tomorro
w to have said it again and meant it again in the arms of one of Rosie’s girls? It is so easy to say things and mean them when you say them.

  O God, I thought, what is the matter with you? Why this guilty conscience all of a sudden?—you have never felt like this before. Is it because Sabby is half child, because of the way she naïvely hangs the duster? Do you think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew? Are you afraid of responsibilities, and after one night’s bliss would like to call it a day? Would you like to do that?

  And here was Sabby on the steps below. I could see her come out, gaily swinging her bag. She went quickly down to the pavement and looked about for a ghari. Lamb followed. I could see he was saying something to her, but I could not hear what it was. She smiled questioningly. Lamb touched his moustache and beamed like a gay buck approaching a pretty woman to whom he has not been introduced. He spoke. Sabby looked shy; I could tell somehow from the position of her head that her eyelids had drooped. Lamb brought a hand into action; he spread it flat and moved it through a semicircle, making specious offers. Sabby’s head inclined; it said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry, please forgive me.’ Lamb was sheepish; he made a final desperate appeal. He touched his dictionary—of course, he wished to dine with her to improve his knowledge of Japanese. Why not? Sabby’s head, her black hair, were eloquent, ‘Please understand, please.’ Lamb shrugged. Now a ghari had drawn up. Sabby made her series of half curtsies. ‘I am so sorry.’ She turned and climbed in, and sat down with a scarcely perceptible but extra haste, and was gone. Lamb looked up at me. He made a wry face and his thumb pointed downwards. Then a second later his expression was devil-may-care.

  “Shikata ga arimasen,” he called—the fond phrase of the Japanese (‘It can’t be helped; there is nothing to be done’). “After all,” he said, “what is thirty rupees between friends?” He was whistling as he went away.

  And I was singing. For a moment I did not notice it, but then I found a sudden joy was bursting out of me. Good for Sabby! And good for me; for perhaps, after all, I was not like Lamb. (But don’t be too sure, I warned myself, don’t be too sure.) I did not want to call it a day, not with any part of me; or else I should have rejoiced, not in Lamb’s rejection, but in his acceptance. Good for Sabby, darling sweet Sabby . . . I do not want to be treacherous, I want to make you happy. But what will come of this? What is going to happen to us . . .?

  “You are coming?” said Peter.

  “Oh yes . . .”

  “You’ve a lot to tell me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Perhaps not. You’ve told it already. You were flirting outrageously in class.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  “But you were. And Hanako! I’ve never seen anything like it. You’ll both hang for this. It’s lèse-majesté.”

  “Nobody but you would notice.”

  “But you must be careful. You must tell her to be good. She’s such a light-hearted little thing she’d gaily embrace you in public. You must keep billing and cooing out of the schoolroom. Be wise. Be expedient.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “But I don’t feel very wise.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re in love.”

  “Oh!” I said. “It’s so easy to say these things about other people.”

  “You talk as though I was saying you were a fool.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “No, I wasn’t saying that.”

  “Let’s talk about the weather,” I said. “It’s very hot.”

  “Yes, it’s pretty hot. In summer it’ll be hotter still.”

  We took a ghari back to the hotel. We had calculated that we could only afford to take a ghari on special occasions; but it was wonderful what an aptitude we had developed for investing occasions with a special nature. It was a special occasion when we were happy, and the happiness obliterated all thoughts of the expense; and it was a special occasion when we were sad, for it was worth the extra money to make life that much easier. This was a happy special occasion. At least I was happy, and Peter was maintaining satisfactorily the status quo of his equanimity.

  Bahadur was waiting quietly in our room, sitting cross-legged on the floor; he insisted that this was the position he preferred, and it was probably the case, though even had he preferred to use one of our chairs or the bed, I think he would have refused our invitation to do so. He knew ‘his place,’ and all his instincts compelled him to this as the force of gravity brings a pendulum to its position of rest. And as reluctantly as the pendulum yields to the power that swings it, he yielded to pressure that tried to elevate him; and with the pressure removed, back he would swing to ‘his place.’ Instead, on the chair were my garments for the evening, laid out like the display window of a tailor’s shop—a clean handkerchief folded with no overlapping edges, and placed with geometrical precision on the centre of the seat, and a sock either side of it folded in the way proved to be the easiest for the insertion of a foot. And in the bathroom, all my paraphernalia parading regimentally for my use in the order Bahadur had observed I used it—first my toothbrush and tub of paste, and then the shaving-brush, the soap, the razor, an antiseptic tube in case I cut myself, and then my face flannel, a snow-white towel and a tin of powder. I dared not think with what horror Bahadur would have gazed into the chaos of any servantless apartment I had occupied; and yet in England I could have returned gladly to chaos. Here in India, however, I thought Bahadur was worth his weight in gold. But it took him a long time to earn even the weight of his little finger in gold; his wage was only fifty rupees a month, and that is not two rupees a day, not two rides in a ghari. And these fifty rupees, in arrears, he received not avariciously, but with such gratitude that I might have been opening up to him the coffers of a Maharajah. He salaamed worshipfully, not only on his own behalf, but on behalf of his wife and his daughter for whose roof and garments and daily rice I was through him responsible. He did not think that he lived in poverty. He lived respectably, and in comfort, and happily. I said to him:

  “Bahadur, wouldn’t you like someone to lay out your socks and your jacket and your turban?”

  He was vastly amused; and he chuckled as though I had told him some funny story about Eskimos, for the subject was no less remote to him than that. It was an entirely new idea. I might have asked “Bahadur, wouldn’t you like to be an elephant?”

  “I am very pleased to do these things for master,” he said, afraid that I was suspecting him of discontent. And he added as an afterthought, as though to show after all that there were some things of which he disapproved, “But I think it is time the Sahib bought a new pair of shoes . . .”

  When I had changed my clothes it was only half-past six. I wished it had been half-past seven, because I had told Sabby that I would call for her at a quarter to eight, and I was impatient for the time to pass. And then I could not wait for it to pass, and I went downstairs to the telephone and rang her.

  “You still want to come tonight?” I said.

  “Don’t you want me to?”

  “I thought you might prefer to have dinner with Lamb San.”

  “Oh, Michael darling,” she said unhappily, “was it terribly rude of me to refuse him? Was it, darling?”

  “You could have gone with him another night,” I said.

  “I want to be with you another night. You know I am selfish. I am hard-hearted bitch.”

  “Say that again. I love to hear you say it.”

  “Bitch,” she said. “It is all right when I say it, but when you begin to say it to me I shall jump in river. Perhaps already Mr. Lamb is saying it.”

  “He was disappointed to find that you weren’t one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll explain later. But why didn’t you go with him?”

  “Darling, he has such awful moustache. It is really not nice at all.”

&nbs
p; “If I had a moustache like that, would you still go out with me?”

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Then I’m not really like Lamb. I mean apart from the moustache?”

  “That is silly question to ask.”

  “You really mean I’m not like him?”

  “You are nothing, nothing like him at all.”

  “You are biased,” I said. “But that’s all right. I just wanted to make sure that you were biased. I was fishing.”

  “What is fishing?”

  “I’ll explain that afterwards, too. I’d like to come straight away and explain it.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “Please come straight away.”

  “All right. I think that’s what I’ll do.”

  I took a ghari; it was a special occasion, very special, and I said “Julde!” to the driver so that he whipped the horse anything but gently and we galloped away with the air quite cool on my face.

  Then when we arrived I gave him twice as much fare as was necessary, and thought, so this is true what one reads in books—in happy towns the happiest people of all must be the cab drivers.

  Sabby was in her kimono, in the middle of changing.

  “Please look the other way,” she said, wrapping it tightly round herself. On the carpet I could see her feet, and feet are usually anything but beautiful, but I thought that these were lovely; little ivory feet, delicate like her hands. When I went out on to the balcony I could hear them pattering about the room. I liked even this sound. Could I ever listen with such joy to the pattering of English feet? Something Mervyn had said in the Yacht Club butted its way into my memory; something about the taste of tobacco after betel-nut. But I did not care for this intrusion, and I pushed it back where it came from and said:

  “Why aren’t I allowed to watch you dressing?”

  “It is a convention.”

  “It’s like being given a dinner by someone, with champagne; and then borrowing a tu’penny ha’penny stamp and insisting on handing over the coppers.”

  “You must not say things like that.”