“You should have told me earlier that you had applied for transfer, Mr. Crabbe. I cannot understand that you did not say before. It would have saved so much trouble for both of us.”
“A transfer, Mr. Jaganathan?”
“Yes. You are to be moved. Perhaps you have not yet heard?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I hear these things often before other people. It is a question of knowing clerks in the right places, that is all. It is always the clerks who know.”
Jaganathan was right. Crabbe went to see Talbot almost at once, taking the long painful road to the town in a trishaw. He had not yet bought another second-hand car. The insurance cheque for two thousand dollars still lay snug in the office of Inche Mat bin Anjing. In the Education Office Talbot was enjoying his elevenses—a dish of smoking mee, a couple of curry puffs, a glass of murky iced coffee.
“Come in, Victor. You might as well get to know your new place of work. I’m sorry I’ve not been able to tell you the glad news before now. There’s been such a hell of a lot to do. You’re taking my place. You’re going to be C.E.O.”
“Let’s have that again, slowly. I’m still weak, remember.”
“You’re taking over. I’m going to K.L. I don’t suppose you’ll be more than a temporary fill-in until they’ve found a Malay to take your place. This State’s being Malayanised pretty fast, and all the top jobs are going to Malays. The Indians and Chinese aren’t going to like it, but there it is. This is a Malay State. I suppose you’ll be following me fairly soon, into the citadel. All the Europeans will be drawing into the centre. The end is nigh.”
“The night in which no man can work.”
“I wouldn’t say that, you know. Nothing’s permanent, there’s always enough time if you make enough time. I’d say we’ve got to work now as we’ve never worked before. But not in the classroom and not in the office. We’ve just got to talk to people, that’s all. Talk to them over a meal, over a couple of whiskies, try and give them a bit of a friendly warning, a bit of advice. Try and get them to think a bit. We didn’t need to do that in the old days. We did the thinking for them. Now we’ve really got to teach them. Rapidly, earnestly, under pressure. I’ve written a poem about that. I’ve got it here somewhere.” He rummaged in a crammed in-tray. “This is only a first draft. It needs tidying up, but I think you’ll get the general idea.” In his harsh flat voice, without nuances, he intoned his lines. The clerks took no notice, being used to him.
“In moments of crisis hunger comes, welling
Up through the groaning tubes, and feeding-time
Is the time of waking or perhaps the time before
Night settles on the land, endless night.
Light, whether of dawn or evening, turns
The river to glow-gold syrup, the trees
To a fairyland of fruit. …”
His mouth watering slightly, Talbot put down the manuscript. “You get the general idea,” he said.
“Who’s going to be Head of Haji Ali College?” asked Crabbe.
“Oh, yes, one in the eye for old Jaganathan. They want a Malay, you see, and the one with most service is Abdul Kadir. I daresay Kadir will be all right. Perhaps this promotion will sober him up a bit.”
“Well,” said Crabbe. “For fuck’s sake.”
After leaving Talbot’s office Crabbe collected his two thousand dollars from Inche Mat bin Anjing. Then he sought Hardman. But Hardman’s business premises were locked up, and none of the towkays in the shops on either side had any information. And the house also was empty. Noobdy seemed to know anything of the whereabouts of either Hardman or ’Che Normah.
Except Haji Zainal Abidin. In the early afternoon Crabbe visited him. His house was a two-roomed wooden structure on high stilts, a rickety wooden stair leading from the yard—loud with chickens and children—to the dark warm hole of the living-room. In this living-room sat Haji Zainal Abidin’s wife, busy at a Japanese sewing-machine, surrounded by further children. She was a handsome black-browed woman, her nose hooked and Arab. In Malay she told Crabbe that her husband was asleep, that she dare not wake him. She also gave Crabbe a frank come-hither glance which Crabbe ignored.
In Haji Zainal Abidin’s sleeping brain the purdah curtain twitched, his wife showed her face to the intruder. Haji Zainal Abidin awoke and came into the living-room, clad in a striped sarong and a pyjama jacket, the best of both worlds.
“My dear fellow,” he said. “I am honoured. What have we? Have we whisky? Brandy? There is only Wincarnis which my wife takes for her anæmia. Where is our Number One son? At school. Our Number Two? Only Number Five, and he cannot be trusted. It is a fat lot of use having children when they cannot be trusted to carry out even the simplest mission. Very well, we shall send little Hadijah to the corner shop. She shall bring us some beer.”
“You’re very kind,” said Crabbe, “but I didn’t really intend to stay.”
“And so,” said Haji Zainal Abidin, “because I am only a Malay you will not accept my hospitality. Because I am only a poor bloody Malay and do not live in a fine European house with a fan spinning all the time. I tell you, you English bastard, there will never be peace on earth until the Europeans have learned to treat their black brothers like brothers. Intolerance all the time.” He offered Crabbe a cigarette and noisily ordered a small pretty child to find matches.
“I’m looking for Hardman,” said Crabbe. “Nobody seems to know where he is.”
“Hardman,” said Haji Zainal Abidin, “my son in God. Hardman has gone away for a time. He has gone on the pilgrimage. He has seen the light.”
“Do you mean he’s gone to Mecca?”
“Where else would he go on the pilgrimage? I tell you, ignorance will kill the hopes of the world.”
“Has he gone alone?”
Haji Zainal Abidin laughed loudly, showing his uncountable teeth and his red gullet. “He wished to go alone, but his wife would not let him. She said she had as much right as he to become a haji and, besides, it is her money. What she says is true, but it is a pity for Hardman. The Arab women are the loveliest in the world, the only ones for which a man could have any appetite. Any appetite.” With appetite he stared at his wife who simpered coyly at Crabbe. “So you see,” said Haji Zainal Abidin, “Hardman will come back a haji. Like me, a haji. But a very junior haji. I am the senior haji round here. I am —” he paused before delivering the mot juste—“the prototypical haji. Do you know that word? Prototypical. I say that word to my boss this morning and he does not know the meaning. To think that I speak the white man’s tongue better than the white man.” He laughed harshly and long, but still with appetite in his eyes. Crabbe judged that it was now time to leave. Haji Hardman. Well …
19
June 14th.
I HAVE TO talk to somebody or to something. I will talk to paper, a thing I have not done since I was at school. This is the diary of a Pilgrim’s Progress. She, sleeping in the narrow bunk, thinks that our terminus is Mecca. She is wrong as far as I am concerned. I am going home. Raffles remembered me—but, indeed, who that has ever known me could forget this face that I see now, looking up for a moment, in the mirror of the dressing-table? The face of a very white man, one whom the sun would not accept. Though those scars are new, stigmata that Raffles has not seen. I’ll say there is much kindness in the Jew. He knew of my flying career. He says that he will lend me a plane if I will take a small cargo home with me. I do not propose to inquire into the nature of the cargo. He says that the man who is on leave will bring back the plane. It seems a very sensible arrangement.
She turns over in her sleep and utters a single harsh Malay word that I do not know, that I do not wish to know. The Indian Ocean glints through the port-hole and the whole rumbling ship is asleep in the Indian Ocean afternoon. A pilgrim ship. Not like the pilgrim ships of Lord Jim, a mass of arms and legs and snoring mouths, page after page of them, a squalid net full of fish and broken crab-legs and tentacles, heaving in sleep towards M
ecca.
Crabbe might have helped. He could have helped. Only when I am on solid English ground, under rain and northern winds, clad in my gown again, back to the world I should never have left, only then will I think of forgiving him. And what do I do about the Church? We’ll see about that. Georges wasn’t exactly a shining witness, ready to sell his soul to be back in China. Poor Georges. And who is saying about me: ‘Poor Rupert?’ Stop feeling bloody sorry for yourself.
There are people here who cook their food on the decks. There are others who have rice thrown to them, like chickens. They gobble up the rice with a sea-air appetite. Our food is not too bad. Curries mostly. It will be good to be free of the eternal rice, away from the rice-myths, back to the corn-myths, bread and wine.
Normah isn’t eating much. She’s been seasick a good deal. I can always feel sorry for people who are being sick. And when I can feel pity for her that’s easily turned into a sort of love. What made her like that, I wonder? She’s not hungry for me or for any man. Perhaps if she’d had a child it would have been different. And now it’s too late. In the East women want to identify themselves with their biological function. And that makes them all woman. Compartmentalisation is our big crime in the West. Normah should have been the Great Earth Mother. Frustration in her tears at the world with ravening claws, the world being man. It will soon be time for tea.
June 16th.
The ship is a Dutch ship. I seem to be the only white pilgrim, and most of the Asiatic passengers seem to take me for a member of the crew, perpetually off duty. One Indonesian this morning addressed me in Dutch. Normah, from her languid deck-chair, answered for me. This led to a fascinating monologue about her first husband, Willem, and how she did for him after all his wickedness, drunkenness, perfidy. She has great hopes for me now and says frankly that she doubts if she will ever have to call the axemen in. It is enough that I have realised my wickedness and repented. God will forgive the repentant sinner. She sees the two of us entering heaven, hand in hand, both clad in the shining costume of pilgrims. She then suggested that we repair to our cabin for a while but I said I did not feel very well.
True enough. I played cards and drank secret gin with the chief engineer, the ship’s doctor and the restaurateur in the chief’s cabin last night. Normah believed that I had gone to a reading of the Koran.
June 17th.
Colombo and a few more pilgrims. Normah did not feel like leaving her bunk. I thought, with a sort of luxurious sensuality, as the launch took a number of sightseeing passengers to the misty island through moist northern-seeming sea-air, that now I could, if I wanted, make the break. But I wouldn’t get very far. And undoubtedly she would suddenly turn up to drag me back by the ear, creating one of her all too special scenes, magnificent and all too much war. At Jiddah I must be very careful.
Most of the books in the ship’s library are in Dutch. And so, strangely enough, and to Normah’s great pleasure, I have been reading an English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has. And then I remember that I am, officially, a Muslim. Nay, I am even a Muslim pilgrim.
This afternoon mail comes aboard. There is a letter for me. Raffles is really a good chap. He says it will be a midnight matter and how to get from Mecca to Jiddah late at night and where to meet him or the Arab who works for him. He knows a man who will do the sixty or so miles for me fairly cheaply. He is, strangely enough, a Malay pilgrim who decided to stay in Mecca, who makes money enough with a coughing taxi from the Holy City to the port.
June 18th.
Normah sick again this morning, despite calm sea. I write this drunk, having had bottle of Bols with the Second Officer in his naughty cabin plastered with brassière advertisements. This I say not right for pilgrim ship. I tell him that good Muslim not tolerate such pornography in holy boat. He say to hell and more Bols, Bols being the operative word. He say has girl in Hull, admire English though such bloody fools. Out like light afternoon on bottom bunk, she sleep on top bunk. Haha.
June 20th.
Granted that the whole problem of life is integration, who is to tell us how to integrate and what do we mean when we say a man is thoroughly integrated? If we mean man is balanced and knows what he wants, I say he is a pipe-smoking moron with the sort of laugh that I associate only with stupidity or madness. For I would say that it is death to be properly integrated, for then there is no change and one is independent of change in the world about one. I would be as I am, a thin and white nervous wreck, having made a marriage that becomes more and more fantastic as we travel towards Aden, demi-paradise, and, having, in prospect, an Arabian Nights tale to tell to the cosy Western world reading its evening paper on the Underground. Hurray. The doctor is a very good man and he has cherry brandy in his cabin and tonight he reads to me from Robert Herrick, whose work he likes. Now why should he like Robert Herrick? I mean, what is there in that lustful lyrical Devonshire parson to appeal to a fat stolid medical man from Hilversum? And they talk about integration! Pah!
June 23rd.
Coming to Aden through dolphin-jubilant Arabian Sea. Normah has been to see doctor. He says what she will not believe. I do not believe it either. He says no possible doubt. Discuss this with doctor and second officer over Bols, followed by cherry brandy.
Ah, the shimmer of sea over the taffirail! The phosphorescent night, illuminating in marine benediction what one gives to the deep. Man is never so much alone, never so completely to grips with the fundamental problem of integration as when, under the mast and the steady star, he yields to the sea what the sea will but too readily take. And, flopping on the bench on C Deck, the lines by Blake sing out:
Him Moira found dwelling in highest bliss,
Creating gods (no ecstasy like this.)
Took him, as, calmed by flowers of Beulah, Los,
Or conscious Christ on an adventitious cross.
Moira being Fate, which the Orientals render Kismet.
June 24th.
Broiling in the Red Sea. It is the humidity. I gasp for air over a game of chess with the Chief Engineer, choking, throwing away twice-puffed cigarettes. I had forgotten it was like this. Shirts stick transparent to men’s backs, women go slowly by on the deck, each exhibiting, through a dress like soaked paper, the straps of a brassière. And so we approach the Holy City.
June 25th.
Normah is definitely pregnant. She lies in her bunk, transformed, transfigured. I may go off to do what I like. I flirted with the Dutch stewardess who, a large blonde from Ryswyck, breathed Edam cheese after her kisses. I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women. Sitting with the doctor late at night, I see with shock through Herrick and cherry brandy that I have left something of myself in the East. That omphalic cord will pull like rubber over eight thousand miles. I can never be the same again.
June 27th.
We approach the port, Normah’s fingers clasped in mine. For the first time in their lives the pilgrims bend towards the East. They have come home. I have come home, or nearly. Gods of the soaring wing and steady engine, fail me not. My big day is coming. I too bend towards the East.
20
“BUT WE MUST put this on a commercial basis. That is only fair.”
All day long the cars had passed, a gleaming butter-smooth convoy, towards the port. The Abang was going. The lights were going on on Jalan Laksamana, two dark gaps in the row of shops like gold-filled teeth.
“Brother, I have done so much for you in the past. I have been your financial prop and stay. Come now, this is but a small return for many kindnesses. Moreover, it is a thing I cannot take seriously.”
“Not take seriously? But it is a science, it is based on a philosophy of the universe, it requires considerable training and skill.”
Teja Singh set up his bed outside the Grand Hotel, ready to guard the residents, the casual eaters and drinkers, the fat woman who was
in charge and the thin dark woman who entertained the business men from Penang and Bangkok. Teja Singh yawned as he sat down, admiring the schoolmaster’s new second-hand car.
Kartar Singh, two shining stripes on his sleeve, smiled full-beardedly at his co-religionist who bent his turban over the fat uncomplicated palm, examining the exiguous headline, the thick line of luck, the plump hump of Venus.
Victor Crabbe smiled faintly from his high stool by the bar. Next to him was perched Abdul Kadir, blinking above tie and clean shirt and creased trousers, sipping a small beer.
“I still cannot understand,” said Abdul Kadir. “It is not as if I were a really good man. Not like our Mr. Din, for instance, who has an Indian degree and does not drink and does not swear very much.”
“Grace falleth where it will,” said Crabbe. “There is nothing that anybody can do about it.”
“It is a very strange world,” said Abdul Kadir.
Crabbe scrutinised again the photograph on the front page of the Singapore Bugle. It showed Chinese terrorists boarding the ship that would take them to their Mecca, to the land of hard work and drab grey uniform for all and sufficient rations and not much fun, his own undergraduate Utopia. Forget about that, forget about her blue jumper and her records of Shostakovitch, her warm white neck and the solace of her compact and willing body while the casserole simmered in the oven of their flat, the woman he could not leave alone. And that particular face, smiling wryly above the squat Chinese bodies, the large mouth and the frank eyes, the crew-cut, surely he knew that face?
“And how do you find the house?” asked Crabbe.
“It is a bloody good house. I mean,” said Abdul Kadir, “I like the house very much. But it is too good for the likes of me.”
“You learnt that humility from the lower deck,” said Crabbe. “Come on, enter into your inheritance, remember that this is your country.”
“But it does not seem right,” said Abdul Kadir. “It is something new, a white man giving up his house for me, and himself living in a little hotel room. I cannot understand it.”
The Malayan Trilogy Page 38
