The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  “Very well,” I said. “You may be right. I’m afraid to love her. But mightn’t that be a good thing? She’s Japanese and I’m English, and there’s a war. Don’t you think I’m right to be afraid?”

  “My dear, that is your affair, you know.”

  “You’ve uncovered the problem. Couldn’t you solve it?”

  “Do you think that if I said this or that, it would be a solution? Now off with you and go to bed, or I shall start once again trying to make love to you, and afterwards you would have to leave this house because in the morning you would see I am rather old and worn. You would be embarrassed—that is the kind of person you are. Go to bed quickly, and forget everything; and if you are now being honest with yourself, soon you will know whether you are right to be afraid.”

  I left Rosie, but I did not go to bed. I went out and began to walk aimlessly about the streets; and somewhere else Mervyn was walking the streets because he hated India and was thinking how he might escape. I did not go out to think but because I knew that in bed I could not help thinking, and my thoughts would be hopelessly confused. Walking, I did not have to think. After the air of Rosie’s room, the night seemed fresh. I looked at the lights and the dim, fantastic façades of the buildings, and the heaps of rags on the pavements that were sleeping human beings. I went along Marine Drive past the school. The lights of Malabar Hill hung over the bay like a crown of stars, their reflection a jewelled necklace in the sea below. What beauty there was in this great city—and what squalor! Here the fan-cooled luxury of expensive flats, and somewhere behind them the verminous chawls; here books and typewriters and gin and easy chairs, and there smoking cooking stoves and urinating children. The Taj Hotel, and the smelly streets of cages . . . and everywhere men and women reproducing their species, sometimes crudely, sometimes with infinite complexity. And not only in Bombay. All over the world, kings and dustmen, lawyers and sheep-farmers, all like marionettes on nature’s strings. And what an endless laugh nature was having, peeping between covers of books and into theatres, into parks and flats and hovels and palaces, to see how seriously and with what variety its simple theme was being played. And the words, the millions of words spun round it . . .

  Stop thinking, I said to myself; you are always thinking. Stop it and use your eyes. You will find out what is good for you without thinking. Go on walking in the good night air. Look at the stars, if you like, look at the vast universe, and go on looking until you know that it is bigger than yourself, bigger than the Taj, and the Gateway of India, bigger than India itself and the world. Bigger than all your own conventions and prejudices, bigger than life. And go on walking . . .

  I don’t know how long it was that I went on walking. But when at last, without thinking, I went to Sabby, I know that I was immensely tired.

  (2)

  I thought I had never loved her so much. We clung together until our bodies had melted together and my heart was beating with hers, and when she sobbed I sobbed with her. We cried and dozed; and when it was dawn we were wide awake and we took cigarettes and talked and knew that we were very much in love.

  I told her about Rosie and she kissed me softly; and afterwards she talked about herself.

  “I wanted to tell you to begin with. It was wicked not to tell, but I was afraid you wouldn’t love me. Please now will you promise not to stop loving, because I don’t think I could bear it.”

  “I promise,” I said. “But you needn’t tell me if you don’t want. I don’t mind any more—it couldn’t make any difference.”

  “Perhaps it does make difference, and I am so ashamed.”

  But of course what she told me made no difference at all, unless it was to make me love her more. And if for nothing else, I could have adored her for the way she told the story with a funny forced brightness and tears in her eyes.

  “You see, I was still at school when it was decided I must marry Japanese friend of my father’s. I thought he was very horrid, and I simply couldn’t bear to be even in the same room. I was such obstinate little donkey! I was not like my mother at all. She was always so kind and patient, and oh so much she had suffered! It was not my mother who wanted me to marry, because she loved me too much. It was my father, who wanted to make a nice business arrangement. And when I refused for the third time, he because very stern and said that I was bringing shame upon the family by selfish behaviour, and that even for the sake of my mother I must do as he told. My mother used to cry a lot, but she also told me I must marry. I used to think then that she was crying because I was bad and didn’t want to marry. But afterwards I found it was because she also didn’t want me to, and it was only duty that made her support my father.”

  “But you never married?” I said.

  “No, darling, I didn’t marry. Perhaps I should have married for the sake of my mother, if the nasty thing hadn’t happened. I loved my mother very much. I hadn’t loved anyone else but my mother, and when my father said that it was for her happiness that I must marry I gave him a promise to try to make up my mind. Sometimes we went to the theatre with the man I was supposed to marry, and sometimes he would come to the house. Always there was someone else with us, until once on purpose my father left us alone to walk in the garden at night. . . .

  “Oh, darling, if that had been with you! In Japanese garden, at night it is so beautiful with little funny bridges over rock pools, and the moon so round and handsome! I think in Japanese garden you would love me twice as much as in Indian hotel. Only I should not like you to be in Japanese garden with anyone else, because I don’t think I should trust you to remember Sabby.”

  “Didn’t the Japanese garden make you want to marry?”

  “No, because you see I couldn’t think once of garden, only of how much I wanted to be with my mother and how I hated Japanese man. But now I knew it was a shikata-ga-nai thing—there was nothing to be done. I let him take me into the summer-house among the trees, and he began to make love to me. . . . Darling, do you think there is need for me to go on?”

  “No,” I said. “You needn’t go on.”

  “But I think, after all, I had better! I love you so much I want to tell you exactly. You see, I was only eighteen, and nobody had told me what happened when people made love. I thought because my father had sent us into the garden together that this must be what he expected me to do. It was so horrible that I screamed; and then the man I was supposed to marry put his hand over my mouth, and after that I don’t remember anything until I was lying in my bed and my mother was beside me in tears. She was so terribly miserable! She thought it had all been her fault and it made me sicker than ever to see her, because she was the gentlest and sweetest person in all the world. It was such a shock to everyone that my father sent us away for a holiday to the mountains. I don’t think he ever quite forgave me for what had happened, because I had behaved so badly and hurt his business; but he did not try any more to make me marry. Afterwards he took us to England, and all the rest I have told you quite truly. I am sorry I did not tell you truly at first, but now you will understand why I never wanted to go back to Japan. In England everyone was good to me, and Lord Durweston was the kindest man I had ever met. Until I met you, darling—only now I think you will not want to love me any more.”

  I was so moved by the pathetic expression in her eyes and the funny, cheerful smile that she kept on her lips that I could find no words in which to reassure her—and I tried to do so instead with caresses, and by taking her nose between my teeth and repeating those other familiar little actions that belonged to‘ us and no one else.

  Afterwards I asked her about Mr. Scaife and why she was afraid of him; and she told me what I had already guessed, that he too had tried to make love to her, in a furious access of un-yogi-like passion. She had been able to resist; but he had pestered her with a series of letters and ’phone calls which showed the curious unbalanced state of his mind. I found myself feeling sorry for him; and
at the same time I felt, not elation at having succeeded where he had failed, but a deep humility—because I knew I had no qualities to make me deserving of Sabby’s love.

  “And that is all, darling,” she said. “Now there is not anything about me that you don’t know.”

  “No,” I said. “Not about the past. But what about the future? Do you want to go back to Japan when the war’s over?”

  “Darling, I don’t know. Please don’t let us think about after war.”

  “Some time we shall have to think about it.”

  “You can think about what you will do after war.”

  “I shall have to think of you, too.”

  “No, please don’t worry about me, I don’t want you ever to think of that. I only want you to love me now whilst we are together, and then afterwards you may go and love who you like. You may go and love Rosie, darling, and I won’t mind. Only please don’t love her now, not just for the time being whilst you are loving me.”

  “I shall always love you and worry about you,” I said.

  “No, darling, please don’t think that. You will never have to marry me. You will hate me if you think I shall always hold on to you. I only want you to give me a little happiness, and then I will let you go. Please remember, darling, always. Whatever happens, you will never have to marry me.”

  “All right,” I said. “I shall try to remember that.”

  Chapter Five

  (1)

  From the middle of June we had thirty-one days’ leave. The monsoon was due to break at any moment over Bombay, but we got away in time. We had booked an air-conditioned coach on the Frontier Mail; and although I have always had a childish excitement before starting on a holiday, I have never climbed into a train with such a wonderful sense of happiness and relief.

  For weeks past, like children, we had been counting the minutes—multiplying the days by twenty-four, and again by sixty, and that was exactly how long we had to wait, in the only unit of time that was bearable to count. The days themselves went too slowly. A month in the Himalayas with Sabby still seemed to me to be something too marvellous to come about; yet it was the only thing in the future that mattered, and there was no future beyond it. After I had made the reservations I kept taking the receipts from my pocket and reading over and over again every dull word that was printed on them, because they were the only tangible evidence that our idea was more than a dream. And the minutes went by. We lay together and knocked five, ten, twenty off the total. It was good practice for counting in Japanese, because now I was making myself use the language with Sabby.

  And then I was waiting on the station. I was early. I had brought a whole battery of thermoses, full of cold drinks and tea, and more fruit than we could possibly have consumed in a week. I had also bought some flowers, arranging them in a jar in the compartment; and a camera, and a tin of Flit, and volumes of books that I knew I should never read. There was also Bahadur. A week before I had told Bahadur that I was in love, and he had said, “Michael Sahib is loving since Miss Wei is in the school”; and it was clever of him, because I had never spoken of it before. Or perhaps it was not so clever, and perhaps he and Peter and Mervyn and Rosie were not the only ones who knew. But what did it matter. . . .? For the next month we should be far away by ourselves, and Bahadur didn’t mind, he was willing to come. “It is your honeymoon,” he said, and he would not call it anything but honey-moon, although he knew we had not been married. “Because it is your honeymoon, it is necessary that I am with you. By yourself you will drink bad water, and that will be the end of the honeymoon before it is time.”

  Until Sabby turned up on the platform, I was still afraid that something would go wrong. I had rung her up twenty minutes before when she was on the point of leaving her hotel; but I thought anything might happen—an accident, a broken leg or a last-minute interruption by Scaife. Fate was jealous; it would surely not allow us this happiness.

  But Sabby came. She was punctual to the minute. She came with her excitement restrained, and all she said was, “Hullo,” very softly, and I also said “Hullo.” And then we got into the carriage, and she too had brought thermoses and fruit and boxes of expensive sweets, and she had brought a present for me, a pipe, because I had always said I would take to smoking one instead of cigarettes. It was touching; but what was more touching still because of the thoughtfulness was the tobacco and the packet of white wire pipe-cleaners, and a little gadget for pressing down the tobacco. This also included a cigar-end slicer, and since Sabby could not give a present that was not entirely complete, she had added a cigar. Whilst I was still discovering these, one after the other, the train began to move; and this was the moment we had longed for, and there were no more minutes to count. It was not disappointing. I looked at Sabby and I looked out of the window where the suburbs of Bombay were slipping away, and I tried to savour the moment, because I did not think that in all my life it could ever be repeated.

  We went to bed early that night. We lay on the narrow bunk and could only faintly distinguish the sounds when the train stopped in a station, because the carriage was almost sound-proof. It is great fun to go to sleep in comfort on a train, thinking that you will wake up hundreds of miles away; and the first peep out of the window in the morning is exciting. I have been told that it is childish excitement, and that the time comes—as it does in a similar way with so many things—when you no longer bother to peep out immediately you awake; but without some of these childish things life would become dull. However, it always intensifies fun if it is shared, and this was the first time I had shared this particular experience. It was like a new experience altogether. When I got up that morning I felt wonderfully well, and ate with relish the breakfast that Bahadur brought. Sabby stayed in bed and drank tea, and I learnt two Japanese words meaning to lie in bed late in the morning so that I was able to tease her.

  During the morning we stopped at a station where there was an awning stretching across the platform. The train pulled in slowly so that a special carriage stopped opposite the awning, and then we waited a long time. When we started off again I saw the name of the station as we passed, and it was Dhanapore. I thought the awning must have been for the Nawab, with whom I had been at school, so I sent Bahadur off to find out if he was on the train. He had never been sent to inquire about a Nawab before, and in his mind this must have made up for my numberless deficiencies as a pukka sahib. He came back and said that the Nawab was indeed there, so I sent him back with a note, though he was almost too overcome with excitement to carry out this mission. It was not until the next stop that a letter came back, on fine crested paper and in an elegant hand, asking if I would do the Nawab the honour of lunching in his coach. I was not going to desert Sabby on this important day, and I replied that I had my wife with me. Another invitation came for us both.

  I was not sure how to address him, whether it should be ‘Your Highness’ or ‘Your Excellency,’ but at any rate it could not be ‘old Dhanapore,’ which is what he had usually been called at school, in the days before he had succeeded his father. When it came to the point, however, it didn’t matter at all, and my practice bows in my own carriage were wasted, because he shook me by the hand. He said, “I’m awfully pleased. Have you heard from Miss McCance and if she is well?” Miss McCance was the Scotch matron at the school, who had always looked after him, hiding her awed respect for his rank behind a grim disciplinary façade.

  His own wife was also present, and she had done us the honour—or perhaps it was the opposite—of discarding her purdah veil. She was a beautiful girl of not more than nineteen with a sleek river of black hair that flowed from her forehead and fell swiftly down her back. She had a small body and tiny hands, and was built delicately and perfectly, like Sabby. They sat next to each other and were exactly the same height, and if they had not been of different nationalties, one would have said they were twins. I saw at once that there was an immediate bond of sympa
thy between them. They looked at each other frankly and smiled, and as soon as we two men had fallen to talking about school and raking up old incidents and names, they also began to whisper, as intimately as if they too had been friends before. I began to think of the times at home when my father had invited a friend from the golf club, or a business friend, asking him to bring his wife to dinner; and whilst the men had sat over their cigars, my mother would establish a quick friendship with the wife, discussing things of mutual feminine interest. I would probably be in bed, or else hanging over the landing bannisters trying to catch bits of the conversation. And now, half a generation later, I had an adult role in a similar sort of scene on the other side of the earth, with an Indian potentate, and his wife who did not go shopping in Tewkesbury with a big wicker basket, but who saw the world only through a mesh of finely worked lace—and with a Japanese girl whom I loved.

  A servant produced whisky. He brought it from a trunk that opened to become a cocktail cabinet, glittering with fittings like an expensive bar. Lunch came from another trunk even more opulently equipped. I had heard of Maharajahs’ picnics, and this was it, with all the plates show-pieces and the food prepared decoratively in palace kitchens, looking like a display in a Lyons Corner House foyer. I had the instinct to say, “But you did not expect us, you will not have enough for yourselves.” But one did not observe such politenesses to Nawabs when there was manifestly enough food for a whole Indian village.

  Whilst we were talking about old times, we were schoolboys again in grey flannel trousers and open-necked shirts. And then we exhausted these reminiscences and were suddenly ourselves once more—he the Nawab who was very pro-British and I an officer on leave from Bombay. He became more distant, though still suave and polite. I listened to him with fascination. He talked about agriculture and the government, and after that about the war, and then about the people of his State. He talked about them with the benevolence of someone who is conscious that he has the power to chop off their heads. I looked at the embossed silver finishings of the cocktail trunk, and wondered whether I should like to possess it; but I thought I did not care about it so long as I possessed Sabby, and if he were to ask us to stay in his palace, I would rather have Sabby alone in the cool, remote mountains. But he did not ask us to stay. He gave me a grey hand to shake, and he said wouldn’t I kindly ‘look him up’ some time; and his pretty wife shook hands warmly with Sabby, her eyes quite steady and beautiful, and Sabby’s black lashes fluttering happily. We returned to our carriage and had tea out of railway crockery, and because we were thinking of the same things, Sabby said: