The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  Simpson stared away from the photograph to where, on the deserted jetty, the Malay boys were piling his bags, his bed-roll, and his rifle case in a careless heap like junk; and he suddenly yelled:

  ‘Hi! Be careful with that rifle! Don’t sling it about like that –’

  The boys took not the slightest notice and Captain Custance lifted his brittle Newcastle voice to shout in Malay. A pretence of piling Simpson’s bags more neatly followed at once, and Captain Custance said:

  ‘You better begin to learn Malay. It’s easy enough. No grammar to bother with. Just phrases – you’ll pick it up like steam-o –’

  Uncomfortably Simpson remembered the Malay-English phrase book, bought in a Singapore bazaar, with which he hoped to conquer everything, and at the same time he handed back the photograph to Captain Custance.

  ‘No, keep it,’ the Captain said. ‘No good to me. You can give it back to Malan. He’s probably had fifty like her since then if I know him. She looks a bit delicate, don’t she? The funny thing is the climate isn’t bad. Same all the year round, more or less – it isn’t bad. Keep the photo anyway.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Simpson said. ‘Well, I’d better say good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye, young fellow,’ Captain Custance said. ‘Give the picture with my best compliments to the great Malan.’ He broadened the crusty ridges of his yellow-brown face into a taut smile. ‘Interesting to see what he says.’

  ‘All right.’ Simpson shook hands, suddenly liking the broad garrulous Custance far too much, not wanting to go. ‘I might see you as you go back.’

  ‘I’ll toot you on the whistle,’ the Captain said. ‘And if you want anything be here – Thursday midday. Not lonely, are you?’ Captain Custance winked heavily. ‘Ought to look out for a nice little Chinese skirt. Pretty as little bantams. Stick to you like burrs off a hedgerow.’

  Simpson, suddenly more lonely than ever, could not speak. As he went down the gangway and stood beside his baggage on the landing-stage he told himself that he would not turn, at any rate until the last, least painful moment, to wave good-bye, but the scream of the Roselay’s whistle startled him violently and before he could prevent it he was staring up at the receding ship, already churning fast away from the jetty like a flat smoking factory, with Captain Custance beaming fierily, an unbearably friendly figure in white cap and ducks, caught like a flapping bird on the high cage-like bridge as he waved good-bye.

  He picked up his rifle case and slung it over his shoulder and walked up what had once been the road, leaving his baggage on the quay. A horrible thrust of nausea, sharp, almost caustic, a sensation of being alone on the edge of a continent, penetrated violently his whole body, seeming to drain the blood away. He heard a final blast from the Roselay’s whistle exploring – as if it were really for him, to make sure that there was no kind of barrier to stop the cut of sound and echo and re-echo in the surrounding infinite emptiness – the roof of forest on either side of the river, losing itself finally in the blue-dusty line of hills.

  The silence afterwards brought on him something worse than a mere nausea of loneliness. Successive waves of panic, a conviction that there really was no one there among the deserted office shacks, not even a bandit – no bandits within a hundred miles, old boy, no trouble at all, Ford and Harrison had told him, you’re lucky there, old boy – made him suddenly want to dash back, as if ghost-driven, to the friendliness of his own baggage on the quay. Dismally, at the same moment, he remembered that Captain Custance had forgotten the chlorodyne.

  Abruptly all these sensations were dispelled by the appearance, up the road, of a turbaned, bearded figure bringing with it its own hasty cloud of dust.

  It raced towards him on a bicycle.

  As it alighted he had sense enough to see that it was almost as remote from a Malay as he was himself. Two big black Sikh eyes, a genial barbaric flashed Sikh smile from between beard and moustaches, a sort of happily brandished gesture of both hands as they slung the bicycle into the dust – every suspicion of foreignness was confirmed a moment later by a flood of speech in what, he thought, were three languages.

  English was not among them. It was lucky, he thought, that a combination of geniality and barbarism in the Sikh temperament understood the importance of a smile. The black facial bear-skin broke into repeated arcs of delighted, almost merry whiteness. Overcome too, he shook hands, and the Sikh saluted.

  ‘English, English?’ Simpson said. ‘You speak English?’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Good God. Nothing? No English?’

  ‘No, no, no –’ and with it the smiling half-shake, half-nod that could, as he discovered afterwards, mean anything.

  He held down his despair. For another second or two the Sikh, taller than himself by some inches, stood grinning down. Simpson went through a few pantomimic, rather exaggerated gestures of washing his hands. The Sikh understood them and broke into cries, pointing down the road.

  A few minutes later Simpson was at the bungalow. It was actually, he saw with delight, of brick, with the framework of windows and doors in teak and a roof at least of sunproof palm. There was a long, shaded veranda, piled up now with neglected and punctured sacks of fertilizer put there under cover from rain.

  As the Sikh showed him all this with pride, unlocking the door with a little ceremonious fling of his hands, the fertilizer stank, stale and low and insistent, in the heat of the afternoon.

  ‘Sahib, Sahib, Sahib,’ the Sikh kept saying, bowing repeatedly; and Simpson walked into the bungalow, into a shrouded world of teak and wicker and wooden chests, the rattan blinds down against the sun. Familiar though it was, almost too precisely in colonial key, it struck him with an effect of amazing unreality. There was even an English fireplace, built of brick, with mantelpiece of fumed oak colour, the bricks reddled scrupulously, and down on the hearth, like a strayed wedding present, one of those sets of glinting oxidized accoutrements for brushing up dust and cinders. He wondered if Malan had built it: if perhaps this masterpiece, this piece of provincial monumental, were a key to Malan. He wandered about, opening doors, peering about him and returning always to the Sikh, who watched him with delight and friendly pride.

  ‘Wash?’ he said at last, ‘wash?’ and again made the pantomimic exaggerated gesture with his hands.

  When the Sikh took him through the kitchen it began gradually to appear that Malan had had something of a genius for creating comfort for himself. A shower, operated by ingenious treadle devices from outside, worked excellently, he afterwards found, over the cool concrete slab of bath floor. The Sikh brought him towels and he washed his hands. In the kitchen there were devices, looking like old-fashioned boot cleaners, for dusting shoes. Neat racks kept a great paraphernalia of crockery and cutlery in rigid order. A piece of beautiful ingenuity, in the sitting-room, made it unnecessary for anyone sitting down some distance from the window to go through the tiresome necessity of getting up in order to pull the rattan blind. By an arrangement of cords, clever, but not at all complicated, the sitter could work the blind. ‘Malan?’ he said. ‘Malan Sahib?’ and the Sikh bowed with unexpected gravity, without a smile.

  There was one other room. The company had put it down, originally, as a billiard-room: a solacing piece of civilization for men cut off from gaieties in Singapore.

  The Sikh let up the rattan blind. Light revealed the billiard-table to be still there: but covered now, Simpson saw, with boarding. And there, on the boarding, laid out with an efficiency almost terrifying, almost beautiful, a model railway.

  He stood looking at it: a pattern of complicated steel, of elliptical crossing-veins, of bridges and signalling systems, trucks and sidings, gradients and stations, crack expresses. An infinite number of gadgets, he discovered later, were concealed about it like tricks. It was governed, always, without fail, by an astonishing, maddening fluency.

  When he saw that it worked by electricity he put his finger on the switch. Nothing happened; and the Sikh cried his one word of
English, ‘No, no, no,’ high-pitched, almost mocking, pointing to the dead arc light above the billiard-table, shaking his head.

  Next morning, just beyond the veranda, Simpson found the inevitable generator that would give light to the house and power to the magnificent Malan-made toy. Meanwhile he was to exist, apparently, by oil lamps. He took a last incredulous look at the Malan-made world of trucks and and sidings, and grinning, said to the Sikh:

  ‘Malan?’ And then the natural unthinking echo of Captain Custance: ‘The great Malan?’

  In return, once again, the Sikh had nothing to offer, even in mockery, by way of a smile.

  That night, just before rolling over to sleep, while the small oil lamp was still alight at his bedside, he remembered the photograph of Malan and the girl. He sat up for some time under the mosquito net, looking at it. The girl, in her white tennis frock, with her dark eyes set with engaging and minute precision at the camera, her pretty dark hair and her delicate nature – she had a slender and almost ephemeral fragility, he thought, not sick, but so very young and so physically light and strange – attracted him at once much more than Malan. He thought Malan looked, in the conventional riding breeches and checkered cap and waistcoat, like a dummy snugly stuffed with the straw of a terrible ordinariness. He sported what seemed to Simpson to be an impossibly curled moustache. A feeling of airy and intolerable pride – whether for himself or for the girl Simpson could not tell – flooded the entire picture.

  Simpson gazed at it a little longer, wondering what sort of woman Malan was going to bring out with him this time. What was it that Captain Custance had said? – forty or fifty of them since this one? In the excitement and exhaustion and the momentary loneliness of the trip up the river he had forgotten that Malan had gone home, to England, for that special purpose. Within a month he would be bringing Mrs Malan back with him.

  And Simpson, going to sleep with a jumble of crossing impressions that included the model train, the girl in the tennis frock and the taste of pineapple in Captain Custance’s appalling little saloon, decided that to give the photograph back to Malan would not, after all, be the tactful thing.

  At least, not yet.

  Next morning the Sikh – he thought it would be much easier and more friendly to call him George – served him the first half of many pineapples, succeeded by several small fried eggs, for breakfast. It was ripe and delicious, without a tang of that sharp and wasping acid you experienced with pineapples at home, and he enjoyed it so much that he ordered the other half.

  After breakfast he and the Sikh toured what was left of the estate on bicycles. An exquisite early morning, blue and powdery, gave way to a stunning heat. The bicycle on which he rode belonged, inevitably, to Malan. It was fitted with a number of neat and silvery gadgets which included a barometer and, strangely, a mirror in which traffic, if there had been any, could be seen approaching from behind. He felt he would not have been at all surprised if a radio had been concealed in the handlebars or a refrigerating device under the saddle. There was in fact a special receptacle, with tube, from which you could drink thermos-cooled water as you rode along, without the disagreeable business of alighting.

  In due course it would be the job of Malan, with himself as assistant, to destroy every pineapple in the place and restore the estate to rubber. Already, on the wall of the bungalow sitting-room – in the so-called offices, by the quay, the Sikh was still keeping chickens – Malan’s map of the new estate, all pink and green and blue, correctly and admirably contoured, a gem of neatness, was hanging for him to see. It struck him several times that Malan might have hung it there quite purposely, so that the young and uninitiated assistant should have no doubt, on arrival, where his duties lay.

  Meanwhile the Sikh and himself, single-handed, quite alone on the actual estate except for the chickens, flocks of predatory paroquets that came to raid the Sikh’s admirably irrigated little kitchen garden and some snipe that Simpson shot most days before breakfast, had nothing to do. Simpson reflected that he could not even amuse himself, even if he had wanted to, with the railway train.

  He decided, instead, to learn Malay.

  With his phrase book on the table between them, he faced the Sikh for several hours a day. Youthful and dogged, he would repeat from the phrase book, as best he could, one of those sentences of dialogue intended for the guidance of passing travellers:

  ‘Have you any idea where I can find a post-office? What time is it? Could I have the bill for my room?’

  In this way, question by question, answer by answer, simply by having nothing to do from six in the morning until darkness fell with a scarcely perceptible breath of coolness from the river, he learned Malay.

  The following Thursday he heard the toot of the Roselay’s whistle coming up the river and he went down to talk with Captain Custance on the quay.

  Captain Custance, more voluble than ever, came down to the landing-stage with several letters: three for Simpson himself, the others for Malan.

  ‘Forgot the chlorodyne,’ Captain Custance said. ‘How’s your guts? All right? I’ll bring it up next time – you’ll need it if your guts go wrong. There’s nothing better if your guts go wrong. How’s your Malay? Coming on? Getting it going?’ He rattled off several exploratory phrases, keen and garrulous with delight that Simpson could reply. ‘Brushing up your billiards? They tell me there’s a damn nice table there. I got half a mind to push her a bit harder downstream next Sunday and stop for an hour and have a drink and play you for a bob.’

  ‘The table’s covered with a railway.’

  ‘Covered? Covered with what?’

  As Simpson explained Captain Custance manipulated stringy clots of spittle between rubbery and astonished jaws and finally ejected a long swift arrow to the quay.

  ‘I got to see that,’ he said. ‘Christ Jesus that’s something I got to see.’

  ‘Bring your prayer book,’ Simpson said.

  ‘Bring what?’ Obtuse astonishment put grey film on Captain Custance’s eyes and irony was lost on him.

  ‘Stay to lunch,’ Simpson said. ‘I’ll get the drinks as cold as I can and George can do a curry.’

  Captain Custance was so astonished, in a groping and simple kind of way, that he did not even ask who George could be.

  Of Simpson’s letters two were from Ford and Harrison. Friendly as ever, hearty and with a certain charm, they recalled for him evenings in Singapore and hoped he would soon return. The other was from the Company. It too was friendly, in a formal way, and requested him ‘to explore, as soon as is convenient to your good self, the question of local labour. Preliminary inquiries only at this stage, as to numbers available, are required, and no question of remuneration should be discussed, or suggested, at the present stage. Our Mr Malan will deal with such problems as may arise in that field on his immediate return.’

  He rode off next day, with the Sikh, along roads of bludgeoning and dusty heat to the nearest village, four miles away. His taste for pineapples had declined. Even so he was glad, once on the outward journey and once as they returned, to stop and get the Sikh to slash open for him one of the fruits he could not destroy. Simpson sucked at it with dazed greed, washing the dust from his face at the same time.

  At the village – he judged it to have, perhaps, three hundred people, housed variously in small palm huts, under bamboo stilts supporting sheets of corrugated iron and in square compounds of palm frond – the question of assessing local labour was not difficult.

  There was no local labour to assess.

  But a curious thing happened. He was pushing the bicycle along an open track dividing two rows of palm huts that had something of the look of a collection of crouching ant-hills when a figure ran down from one of them to meet him, laughing and holding out her arms.

  She was one of the little Chinese women, pretty as bantams, delicate-eyed, slender arms branching beautifully from a simple frock of sleeveless shantung, of whom Captain Custance had spoken. As she came running down fi
rst one and then the other of her heel-less straw slippers fell off. In her excited joy she did not notice them and they lay behind her in the dust, looking like two tongues of scarlet, the silk of their bright linings gleaming as if polished by the rubbing of her feet. Without them she ran springingly, the side slit of her skirt dividing as far as her thigh, and from twenty or thirty feet away he saw her mouth open in a flutter of laughter, tumbling and delighted as she called something to him over and over again.

  ‘O! Ka-Kăsih’ it sounded like, ‘O! Ka-Kăsih,’ the word so much part of her laughter that he could not relate it to anything the Sikh had taught. ‘Ka-Kăsih –’

  And then, ten feet away from him, she stopped. He saw her look from the bicycle to his face, and then from himself back to the bicycle. She put both hands to her face, stopping her mouth, and then let the fingers run upward into her black hair like rigid ivory curls. She gave a little blubber of frightened astonishment and then looked from his face to the bicycle, shocked almost to despair, for the last time.

  A moment later she turned and began to run. She darted back towards the house, as if remembering the slippers. A stunning yell came at the same moment from one of the huts, and she doubled round, floundering and swift, exactly like a tiny scuttling hen, dipping and darting between hedges of creeper and vine. From the hut a young Tamil, in a pair of greasy shorts tied up with rope, came running in long furious strides, yelling hoarsely, skidding in the dust as he seized on the fallen slippers, his voice squeezed to a long thin scream as he hurled them after her.

  Still yelling, he came straight on for Simpson, who caught the incredible gleam of a knife whipped from the waist-band of the shorts.

  And then the Tamil, exactly like the girl, stopped. He too seemed stunned by the relation of Simpson and the bicycle. He stood, panting, spitting his surprise sideways into the dust, moving the knife in his fingers with short venomous twists at body height, at about the level of the gleaming handles of the bicycle, before he suddenly turned and walked back to the hut.