I thought he was charming, because he had no self-importance, no illusions about the causes of his own reverses, and his conversation was full of perspicacity and a gentle irony. I listened for a long time, and then we talked about the war in Burma and he said:
“I shall get killed this time in some useless little jungle skirmish. It’s curious not to mind a great deal one way or the other.”
“What’s going on up near Imphal?”
“Nothing much. The Japs say they’re going to get the place by the monsoons. Perhaps they will. We shall get it back.” He asked where I was going.
“Corps Headquarters,” I said.
“You’ll be all right there. No snipers.”
“Some people in your shoes would have said that resentfully.”
“Why should they?”
“I’m going to the rear and you’re going to the front.”
“That doesn’t make a life good or bad. I expect your life has its rough passages.”
“On the whole, I’ve been very lucky,” I said.
“And happy?”
“I think so?”
“I haven’t. Even if I’d been lucky I shouldn’t have been happy, so I’ve nothing to complain about.”
“There must have been some way you could have turned your life to good account.”
“I think not. I’m just a kind of misfit.”
“I don’t know about that.”
It was one o’clock. We turned off the light, and somebody on a lower bunk turned over and began to snore. The moon shone through the window on to the floor of the compartment. I was hot, and removed one blanket and lay under a sheet. I tried to work out whether or not I was happy, and whether the gentle ache under my heart was only the thought of Sabby; but I was not thinking very clearly, and soon I fell asleep with the monotonous clatter of the train.
(2)
The Captain’s name was Manning. I came to know him well, because we travelled a long way together and there is nothing like a railway journey for making friends.
But our journey was not only by rail. Neither of us had priority passes for the Assam Railway, so that from Dhubri it was necessary to proceed by boat up the Brahmaputra. It was an old, duty paddle-steamer, and we boarded her at night-time by the yellow light of oil lamps. I could see the black faces of the crew, the sweat glistening and their black hands hauling ropes. There was a great deal of noise and shouting, and some drunkenness. Two of the crew were drunk. They fought on the narrow deck, slogging each other wildly and rolling together to the rails. No one stopped them. The lamps flickered, and everything was yellow and black and unreal.
I dug out my bottle of whisky, and we hung over the rails drinking from mugs, while the paddles churned in the water pushing us out into midstream. It was a wide river, muddy and slow like the Jumna and Ganges, and to me the kind of river that was India, as the Wye and Severn and chuckling rock streams are England. The moon came up late. It was yellow at first like the swinging lanterns, and it rose lethargically from the paddy-fields. Somehow it seemed more like a dying sun.
We began to get drunk. It was good Scotch whisky, and we took it straight. I told Manning about Sabby, and he told me of a girl in England he had loved in 1934, and been engaged to, until he had broken it off because the water-softeners weren’t selling and he thought she was too good for him. In Rangoon he had had a jealous little Burmese mistress who had wanted to follow him out of Burma with the Army. Now he thought she would be a Japanese officer’s mistress, and as jealous.
We went on talking most of the night. It became cooler, the moon whiter. There was a faint breeze up the river, overtaking the steamer. We had finished the bottle of whisky. Inside me there was a little core that was not intoxicated, a pea-size remnant of sanity, and I tried to grasp hold of it, to keep myself from spinning altogether out of reality. I kept telling myself, “This is the Brahmaputra. You are going to Imphal. The wooden deck-rail is under your hands.” At the same time I could hear myself talking aloud. My tongue, considering it was working independently, was spinning words with remarkably good sense. It was saying deeply philosophical things about life. I heard it quoting Lala Vikrana. And then all of a sudden I felt a great warmth towards my friends, Mr. Headley and Rosie, Lord Durweston and the Brigadier, and Peter and Mario, and Manning too, and I wished they could all be there on the cramped deck of the paddle-boat with the moon and the reflection in the water and the white, flat paddy-fields. Without them a sadness suffused me; I was becoming sober. I walked up and down the deck and it was all more real than it had been since we had first come on board. I no longer had to remind myself where I was and why I was there. We went down below, and brought our bedding up on to the deck and unrolled it. It was cool, and the sky was clean and beautiful and immensely far distant.
All next day we went on up river. We drank coffee and ate bully-beef and sat watching the flat banks with their jungles and tea plantations and paddy-fields. Sampans and paddle-steamers passed downstream, making their way through the slow surface. Our own engines chugged and creaked and pushed us on unhurriedly. It was strange to think that we were going to war.
In the evening we disembarked at Gauhati. There was a waiting train, already full of people who had come up by railway. But we found cramped seats, and dozed in them until the morning, when we came to Dimapur.
There was a transit camp there, with bamboo and straw bashas in which we erected our beds, and a perforated petrol-drum hoisted on a tree for a shower. We had to wait for a truck to take us over the mountains to Imphal, to the lush little plain that was sandwiched between India and Burma. We saw two lorry convoys set off, and someone told us ‘there was a flap on,’ the Japanese were on the 109 milestone on the Tiddim Road beyond Imphal, and Kennedy Peak had gone and reinforcements were being ‘rushed up.’ Because we had arrived individually, nobody seemed to care about rushing us up, and we hung about for two days.
The second day two letters came for me. The mail was flown forward up to this point, and I intercepted them at the Army post-office. One was from Sabby. She said that she was trying to be strong and only crying a little before she went to sleep, and that whatever happened nothing could ever take away the wonderful times we had had together. And she ended: “Darling, it was such happy times we had, wasn’t it? I’ve never had half that much happiness before, only I do hope you were not just pretending happiness. You have got to be so happy always.” And the quaint Sabby touch to the English, more than anything else, made me think that she was beside me saying these things.
The other letter had followed me through Bombay and Cawnpore, and it was written in a childish hand that I could not recognise. I opened it and looked first at the signature, and saw ‘Margaret and Jennifer.’ It said:
Dear Uncle Michael.—We have been trying to make up our minds to write to you for ever such a long time, and haven’t done it because Mummy said we mustn’t worry you, but now we simply can’t help writing to find out if your darling Sabby is all right. You may have to go away from her, and she won’t tell you if she is ill, because she thinks also that you mustn’t be worried. But we both think you ought to know everything, otherwise you can’t help her, and that would hurt you too when you find out. That is why we are telling you, but on your honour you must not tell Sabby we have written, and we are not telling Mummy either, because in a way we promised not to say anything to you, and the only reason we are breaking the promise is that you are a man and we don’t think you can always understand what Sabby is feeling, like us who are women. We think you ought to understand before anything awful happens, so that you will know what to do.
Please don’t be angry, we are writing because we think Sabby and you are marvellous, and you have only got to tell us and we will come and do anything for you straight away.
Margaret and Jennifer.
P.S.—We are going up to the mountains next week and you can
write to us there. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could come too, we promise not to stop Sabby and you being alone as Mummy said we did last year.
Something seemed to collapse inside me when I read this, and all the sap was gone out of my limbs, and I went in a daze back along the dusty road to our basha, dropping down on to my camp-bed.
“What on earth’s up?” Manning said.
I shook my head, feeling too broken to speak.
“Do you want a doctor?” he said. “There’s one in the camp.”
“It’s not that.”
He saw my letters. “Bad news?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s very bad.”
It was suddenly all so clear. Whatever was the matter with Sabby, I was the only person who didn’t know, I who had had the most opportunity of knowing and who had professed to understand her so well. What unbelievable, unforgivable blindness! I had thought only of our happiness, of Sabby’s pretty ways and her beauty, of all those things that pleased or flattered me; but my selfishness had prevented me from looking into the depths of her—from seeing what Sabby had been selflessly hiding to spare me. Yet even the children had known! They had discovered in a month what in a whole year had passed me by—and my humiliation at the thought of this was deeper than any humiliation I had ever known. But at the present moment it was not so much this as my fear that was making me wretched. What was this dreadful thing that Sabby had hidden from me? Was it something that was going to take her from me?
One by one there came back to me a series of incidents—or at least I now saw as a series what at the time had seemed but unconnected events—that pointed to something dark and forbidding. I remembered Sabby saying: “You needn’t always love me. Do you think you can love me for a year?” And in the beautiful house at Bombay she had said again: “Can you really love for another six months?” She had refused to marry me. Wasn’t it that she was afraid of giving me a new and terrible responsibility? Then Lord Durweston had said: “I’m going to rely on you. It may not be easy.” At the Taj Mahal Sabby herself had talked of dying, about not caring if she died after such exquisite happiness; and that night she had taken many aspirins and I had woken to hear her moaning, and she was clinging to me tightly as if she were in pain and afraid. There was her own letter, too: “Whatever happens, nothing can take away our wonderful times.”
One by one I remembered these things, over a thousand miles away in a basha in Assam, when I was about to move not closer to her where I might comfort her, but yet farther away. I felt a panic grow inside me. I wildly thought of plans to get back to her; to take a train back now and be in Delhi before my absence in Imphal was discovered. But I should not be able to stay with her. It was useless. I was hemmed about by stone walls and trying to batter my head against them, and the bitter sense of frustration sickened me.
Later on I began to see things in a calmer light. Nothing had really happened yet. Margaret and Jennifer were children, and they had no subtlety of expression, and their alarm might be exaggerated. All the other things, too, might have more simple explanations. Nevertheless, I went to the Army post-office at Dimapur and wired the girls: “Please write to Sabby,” I said, “and look after her if she needs it.” I felt happier then because I knew they would really look after her with their tender competence.
Then I asked an officer in the post-office if he knew anyone who had a wireless. He said there were one or two in the village; there was one in a pukka house a few hundred yards away where someone called Major Crossley was living.
I went off at once and found it; it was only a small bungalow, pukka because it was made of stone and plaster instead of bamboo. A servant came out and grinned; he knew no English. The Major himself appeared behind him and dismissed him with a laconic phrase. I called him ‘Sir,’ and began to explain my mission. I wanted to listen to his wireless for a few minutes. He was puzzled but willing, and he led me into his living-room. I got the wavelength just as the suave voice of an English woman was announcing. It sounded incongruous out here, this voice that made you think of London drawing-rooms and the façades of Piccadilly. “This is Delhi. For the next quarter of an hour there will be news for Japanese listeners.” There was a pause. The silence petrified me. All my consciousness was concentrated into my ears. It went on and on, the silence. Then it was broken, and the voice was Sabby’s.
The relief and joy of hearing her burst inside me. I only heard vaguely what she was saying in the sing-song way she read the news. I began to smile and laugh, and the Major watched me from his armchair with a stern, mystified expression. When it was over and I switched off the set, he said:
“For Japanese listeners?”
“It’s a friend of mine,” I said. “I thought she might be ill.”
“You understand Japanese?”
“It’s my job here.”
He asked me to remain for tea. He was a middle-aged bore, a man on whom experience abroad had made no impression. He was from Yorkshire, as much a piece of Yorkshire as a farmhouse on the Pennine Range. But there was plenty of kindness beneath his grey and stony exterior. When I told him I was expecting to get a place in a convoy up to Imphal the next day, he said that he had to go there himself. He was a transport officer and had a car; if I cared to join him it would be more comfortable than the tedious journey in a truck. I mentioned Manning. There was room for both, he said.
I left him and walked back to the basha. On the way I called in at the post-office and sent a telegram to Sabby. I said that I had heard her voice and it had made me very happy. I added: “Less than six months to Himalayas.”
But when I tried to sleep that night I could not bring myself to think of the Himalayas. I was still afraid that the children were not exaggerating.
Chapter Three
(1)
There were four of us in the car, including a Sikh driver. It was a kind of shooting-brake with high chassis and fat tyres, and not particularly comfortable, but it took the gradient at good speed, overtaking the convoy of trucks that had set off before us. The road had been put into excellent condition. The Major told us that before the war it had been scarcely motorable in wet weather; and now it was metalled and well graded, though the bends followed one another in endless succession. The Sikh tore round these with screeching tyres, the horn blaring ferociously.
He was a Subahdar, a Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer—a finelooking figure, immaculately turbaned and magnificently bearded. I tried to imagine him without his beard, and thought his face would still be noble. Whiter, he might have been typical of the better products of a rugger-playing English public school. And unshaven, in obedience to the tenets of his religion, he was wholly patrician in appearance. He called the Major ‘Sir,’ not obsequiously but with a frank acceptance of rank, his own two silver shoulder pips, set in their thin red and yellow bands, raising him little higher than a British sergeant. He spoke English in a slow, deliberate tone, giving his mistakes an air of correctness. He talked to me now of the time he had fought his way out of Malaya.
“There was too much bombing. All day long we heard the voice of the aircraft. There were aircraft with one fan and aircraft with two fans.”
“Now it is different,” I said.
“Now we give them too much bombing. It is too much, but it is not enough.’’
“You don’t like the Japanese?”
“Sir, in Malaya I cut off the head of a Japanese with my sharp knife. It is not a nice thing to do, to cut off a man’s head. But this I would do again with pleasure.”
In the back of the car Manning and the Major were talking about England. The Major was dogmatic and wore a smile of intolerable smugness. Glancing round at him, I caught a glimpse of his face at an angle which revealed all his pig-headedness in his brief, pointed nose and ignorant chin but as I said, there was a certain kindness in him. So long as you did not try to assail his bastions of ignorance he was amiab
le. At first he was amiable with Manning, because he was not sufficiently observant to notice the humorous derision with which Manning regarded him. Then he became suspicious; and after that in self-defence he became more aggressive in conversation, the Major deigning to talk to the Captain. He tried to win me: “Our young airman friend here will bear me out.”
It took only an hour and a half to reach Kohima, perched at five thousand feet on a saddle in the Naga Hills. We arrived there at ten-thirty to find the morning still gloriously fresh and something in the air like an English spring. The exhilarating atmosphere rushed over me from the open windscreen, and I opened my mouth to it and swallowed it like a tonic, and all the cool freshness went through me, but always round the dark, numb core in my heart which had been there since the day before.
I was excited, because in Kohima we seemed suddenly to be in the war. There were troops moving about in a slow, hardy, battletried way. There was no nonsense about clothes. They were pressed for the jungle, and had mostly been in the jungle and gamed a jungle confidence. Some stood round a tent drawing tea. They looked casual and unhurried; but as though beneath the rather bored exterior there was a fanatical stubbornness. Some of them were joking lazily, and one of these made a rude sign at the car. The sign had another meaning, too, but he meant the rude one; yet not rudely, only as a comical gesture. I expected the Major to stand on his dignity and show anger or pretend to ignore it. Instead he said unexpectedly:
“It’s a good thing we have chaps like those.”
I liked him better for saying that. He was not clever enough to have thought of it only to save himself from looking ridiculous, and it was a genuine flash of broadmindedness.
As we came over the saddle the tremendous panorama opened up to us, an incredibly beautiful view. To the right the hills rose high in a range that ran southward, and to the left the jungles of India and Burma merged at an unmarked frontier in fold after fold of deepening blue. I had never forgotten the blue of these jungle hills from the time of my first passage through them—a blue veil whose intensity varied with the sky, that never lifted to reveal the green, tangled valleys and steep, dense slopes. From a distance, and aloft, it was beautiful, and the blueness soft and lavish.
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