by H. E. Bates
‘I was going to England.’
She did not go on. By the time he got to know much more it was already April. Heat, in waves of depressing humidity, was rising up from the Delta and even nights were becoming so much thicker and more suffocating that there was beginning to be no relief even by water. He began to think more and more of England. April weather, lilac wet on rainy evenings, daffodils and cherries in blossom, a cool and delicious freshness everywhere. That, above all, was what he wanted; the freshness, the sea-swept air, the changing island climate. After India’s frowsy and beastly humidity it would be like plunging down between fresh clean sheets. Well, it couldn’t be long now. He had written his mother to get his trout rods overhauled.
‘You see, I was to be married,’ she said.
It appeared there had been a man named Kippington, or Kippingsley: some such name. Afterwards she never could remember exactly which; it might have been Kippings or Kippingsford.
‘That was a name to start with,’ he said. Already he felt he detested the fellow.
‘He was a planter,’ she said.
‘Tea?’ He felt it must be tea; somehow they always sounded so smug in tea.
‘Yes.’
Good guess, he thought. It seemed the man had lived in a pleasant bungalow in a country of wide snow-swollen rivers under the frontier of Bhutan. She had spent an occasional week-end there. She had loved the tea-gardens with their slender and delicate overhead trees of shade; the butter-fat Mongolian children picking grubs from tea-bushes; the English flowers, sweet-peas and marigolds and phloxes, blooming in the garden; the mountain forests rising like dark green crust out of the high northern haze.
She would talk about this, disjointedly, almost casually, as they lay by the river. What it possibly had to do with the foot he could not imagine for some time. He gathered they had lived as man and wife at the week-ends; and then at last Kippington or Kippingsley or whoever he was had gone back to England on leave. It seemed that on this leave he was to stay with his mother in Berkshire. In due course he was to get some sort of office job, a tea-taster or something, with a firm of tea brokers in Mincing Lane. Later he would come back to India to fetch her and later they too would live in Berkshire. It was all stupendously ordinary and conventional and unadventurous.
‘She wrote to me several times. His mother,’ she said. ‘I sent her photographs and things.’
He thought of his own mother. A sudden misgiving that she might not understand his instructions about the fishing-rods bothered him considerably. She would probably take them to some local wallah who would ruin them, he thought. They had to go to London: to Farlow or Hardy or somebody first-class like that. He would have to air-mail her again tomorrow. Mothers never understood about these things and had a most ghastly way of bodging things up.
He broke free of these thoughts to realise that the girl had stopped talking. Across the river, sprinkled with shore lights and an occasional slow-swinging lantern from the boats that were fishing in midstream, all was quiet now, the air deadly, stifling and serene, after the excitement of the important pujah.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think you were listening.’
‘Oh! I was listening.’
She stared for some moments at the fishing boats swinging lanterns in the darkness of midstream.
‘You just mentioned this chap’s mother and it made me think of mine,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘What is your mother like?’
‘What are mothers always like?’ he said. ‘I’ve just written her about my fishing-rods. A thousand to one she’ll have them repaired by the local carpenter.’
‘Would that be terrible?’
‘Oh! really——’
She said quickly: ‘I’m sorry. Women never really understand all these things.’
‘What about this Kippings fellow?’ he said. ‘I still don’t understand how——’
‘He was a little late coming back,’ she said. ‘Two months late.’
The essence of it all began now to appear as something terrifyingly simple. She cabled him several times and there was no reply. There was always the possibility of some trivial, explicable misunderstanding; but the heat of India, corrosive and yet festering, had the effect of sharpening and magnifying every triviality in a fierce highlight of doubt.
When the cable came at last it was from his mother. ‘Pip already sailed Mooltan arriving 30th.’
She went down to the docks on an afternoon of sombre and sickening heat, just before the break of the monsoon, to meet him. Pip Kippingford, he thought; what a name. Only the true English, bowler-hatted, umbrella-ridden, citified, churchified, colossally smug, undertaking the daily great adventure from Berkshire to Mincing Lane could have fitted a name like that. A friend of his, a man in jute named Porter, had kindly driven her to the docks in his car.
That afternoon, when she arrived, she knew that everything about Kippingford, as far as Kippingford was concerned, was dead. He came through the dock-gates with the loving enthusiasm of an ironed white-duck statue. She had waited a very long time for that moment and she held out her arms to be taken. She wanted to be kissed. He did not take her; and she afterwards knew that there had never been the remotest question of kissing her.
She remembered the three of them driving home in Porter’s car. Kippingford or Kippingsley or whoever he was sat at the front with Porter, leaving her alone at the back. She felt lost and insecure. She remembered framing in her mind some simple remark, flat and trivial and yet of immense importance, about the monsoon. Its importance rose from the fact that she presently discovered her tongue would not go through the simple mechanics of uttering it. That was all. A cold bar seemed to have clamped down across it, locking it down on her teeth.
She remembered nothing else but getting out of the car and falling down. The great Kippingford was busy with his baggage, and it was Porter who picked her up and carried her into the house.
‘That’s how the foot began.’
He did not know what to say. He sat rather stupidly watching the swaying lanterns of the fishing boats groping about the dark stream.
‘At first it was both feet,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t speak either, and there was one arm——’
‘There’s a name for it,’ he said. ‘A proper medical expression.’
‘Really?’
‘I know there is. I just can’t think of it,’ he said. ‘I shall ask old Burnett about it tomorrow.’
The next evening he said, ‘I got old Burnett to write down on a piece of paper what your foot was. Now I’ve gone and left the paper in my other kit. Anyway he was damn funny about the whole thing——’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s terrifically unorthodox and has practically no use for these ordinary medical wallahs.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Damn funny, really.’ Tonight many more fishing boats, like a cluster of fireflies, were swinging about in midstream, making an island of winking dancing gold on the dark water. ‘He said that since something very emotional caused it something emotional would eventually cure it. Rather difficult to explain.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Like falling in love,’ he said, ‘and so on. Emotional shock—like the man who picked up his bed and walked——’
She sat with her lips parted: as if perhaps she had been about to say something, to follow up his remark, to ask whatever it was he meant about that casual so on. He saw the soft far-off light of the little boats fall on her open lips. Quivering and delicate, the reflection of them swam about in the blackness of her eyes.
It was more simple to kiss her than to speak again. Heat had parched like a stretch of concrete the attempted lawn of new grass along the terrace and it was so hot that he had taken off his bush-jacket and folded it into a pillow so that she could put her head on it where they lay together. She lay looking at the stars. The extraordinary pale fragility of her face gave it the effect of a single lar
ge white petal. He kissed her several times again and presently her long thin arms came up to wind about him and inexorably, like tight thin wires, to hold him down.
Something about it made him uneasy and he remembered Burnett. ‘He said of course that treatment would help too——’
‘Don’t talk about it any more,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to talk about it.’ For the first time he could hear little fretting fires of anger in her voice. ‘I’m so bored about it—I’m so bored, so bored, so tired of it. I can’t bear it any more.’
He stared away from her, not speaking, quite baffled.
‘Don’t go away from me,’ she said. ‘Come here. I want you——’ and once more he felt the thin inexorable arms reach up and hold him. He remembered how when he had first seen her the arms, with their pitifully fragile buds of pink nails, had seemed almost too delicate; he remembered her astonishing sick frailty and how, as she held up the silks for him, he felt she would be blown away.
A long way down the river a ship blew a deep low blast on a siren and he said:
‘God, this heat’s terrible. It gets worse every day. Thank God I’m——’
‘It’s Sunday tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Would you take me to the pool?’
‘But could you——?’
‘I think I’d like to swim,’ she said. ‘It’s been such a terribly long time——’
For about a week after that he began to meet her most days at the Swimming Club, and after the first shock of seeing her swimming, easy and graceful, there was nothing by which you could tell the foot was not exactly like any other. You could not tell, he thought, watching the long slim golden legs in the water, that it was not already healed.
Some days later there were wild rumours of embarkation and Sergeant Puddefoot began to rush about Headquarters frantically packing impossible bags with skins of water-lizard and python and cotton carpets bought in bazaars. ‘Mr Sedgwick,’ he kept saying, ‘Mr Sedgwick, we’re bleeding well going home.’
Sedgwick cabled his mother an affectionate and ominous hint about fishing-rods.
A week later, when he saw the girl along the riverside, beyond clumps of hibiscus that heat was already stripping of all flower, it was for the last time.
‘I’m sure the swimming has done the foot good,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’
‘It’s much better,’ she said.
For some time he lay on the grass, on his back, staring at the stars. He wanted to say something that would express what he felt for her. He was leaving, going to England, and he wanted her to know that he would remember her. As he lay there he heard, some distance down the river, a few native voices crying in excitement, a wail of staccato singing, and then a single drum beating softly, murmuring, almost droning, across the stream.
‘Is it a pujah?’ he said.
‘A little one,’ she said. ‘Not important this time.’
‘I shall miss the old pujahs,’ he said.
He lay for a few moments listening to the drum and the intermittent rather scraggly voices.
‘There’s only one drum,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s just a little affair.’
How was he going to speak to her? He wanted if possible to make it—it was very difficult—he wanted to express something more than mere remembrance. She would always have a place in his heart—would that do? Could he say that? Hardly, he thought. It was what he meant and yet it was not quite so easy as that. It was not quite what he wanted to say.
After a time he thought it better to say something quite simple; and he said:
‘This is good-bye.’
For some moments she lay very quiet, not speaking. When she finally spoke it was dreamily, almost impersonally; she looked straight overhead and spoke to the sky.
‘I’d like to come to England,’ she said.
‘Well——’
Suddenly she twisted her body and held him against her; her arms were again like stiffened anguished wires and he felt her mouth drawing at him like a flame.
Afterwards, for a time, there was nothing he could think of to say. He lay listening to the thin monotonous sound of the single drum. It did not beat into his heart with the plunging exultation of the many drums of the earlier pujah. In the deep hot silence it was like a poor and irritating echo that irregularly rose and died.
For a few moments longer he lay listening to it. Her remark about England woke his own thoughts about home: fishing-rods, mayfly rising, lily-leaves unfurling in the river, apple trees and laburnum in bloom, the spring-time, the sea-freshness everywhere, his mother. It would be marvellous: nothing quite so marvellous as that.
‘If I can’t say good-bye to you,’ he said, ‘I’ll say goodbye to your foot.’
She did not answer.
‘I’ve got very fond of your foot.’
Once more she did not answer; and he said, perfectly certain it was better to be quite lighthearted after all:
‘You know what the cure is. Soon you’ll be able to get it better.’ He paused to laugh. ‘And if I may say so you’re rather good at the cure.’
Because she did not answer again he sat up. Across the river the fleet of night boats, with their lights like fireflies, were widely scattered, not in a central glowing island as before; and down the river now he became aware that the drum of the little pujah was not beating.
‘The drum has stopped,’ he said.
She stared at the sky, arms outstretched, lips very slightly parted.
‘It never really stops,’ she said. ‘It goes on. You only think it stops.’
He listened.
‘Sooner or later it always begins again,’ she said.
Across the river the crowd of night-boats, with their swinging lights so like fireflies, began to drift together; and after a second or two the drum, exactly as she had said, began again, and like a single heart-beat went on.
The Evolution of Saxby
I first met him on a black wet night towards the end of the war, in one of those station buffets where the solitary spoon used to be tied to the counter by a piece of string.
He stood patiently waiting for his turn with this spoon, spectacled and undemonstrative and uneager, in a shabby queue, until at last the ration of sugar ran out and nobody had any need for the spoon any longer. As he turned away he caught sight of me stirring my coffee with a key. It seemed to impress him, as if it were a highly original idea he had never thought of, and the thickish spectacles, rather than his own brown kidney-like eyes, gave me an opaque glitter of a smile.
‘That’s rather natty,’ he said.
As we talked he clutched firmly to his chest a black leather brief-case on which the monogram of some government department had been embossed in gilt letters that were no longer clear enough to read. He wore a little homberg hat, black, neat, the fraction of a size too small for him, so that it perched high on his head. In peace-time I should have looked for a rose in his buttonhole, and in peace-time, as it afterwards turned out, I often did; and I always found one there.
In the train on which we travelled together he settled himself down in the corner, under the glimmer of those shaded bluish lights we have forgotten now, and opened his brief-case and prepared, as I thought, to read departmental minutes or things of that sort.
Instead he took out his supper. He unfolded with care what seemed to be several crackling layers of disused wallpaper. He was evidently very hungry, because he took out the supper with a slow relish that was also wonderfully eager, revealing the meal as consisting only of sandwiches, rather thickly cut.
He begged me to take one of these, saying: ‘I hope they’re good. I rather think they should be. Anyway they’ll make up for what we didn’t get at the buffet.’ His voice, like all his actions, was uneager, mild and very slow.
I remembered the spoon tied to the counter at the buffet and partly because of it and partly because I did not want to offend him I took one of his sandwiches. He took one too. He said something about nev
er getting time to eat at the department and how glad he would be when all this was over, and then he crammed the sandwich eagerly against his mouth.
The shock on his face was a more powerful reflection of my own. His lips suddenly suppurated with revulsion. A mess of saffron yellow, repulsively mixed with bread, hung for a few moments on the lips that had previously been so undemonstrative and uneager. Then he ripped out his handkerchief and spat.
‘Don’t eat it,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake don’t eat it.’ He tore the sandwich apart, showing the inside of it as nothing but a vile mess of meatless, butterless mustard spread on dark war-time bread. ‘Give it to me, for God’s sake,’ he said. ‘Give it to me. Please don’t have that.’
As he snatched the sandwich away from me and crumpled it into the paper his hands were quivering masses of tautened sinew. He got up so sharply that I thought he would knock his glasses off. The stiff wallpaper-like package cracked in his hands. His handkerchief had fallen to the seat and he could not find it again and in a spasm of renewed revulsion he spat in air.
The next thing I knew was the window-blind going up like a pistol shot and the window clattering down. The force of the night wind blew his hat off. The keen soapy baldness of his head sprang out with an extraordinary effect of nakedness. He gave the revolting yellow-oozing sandwiches a final infuriated beating with his hands and then hurled them far out of the window into blackness, spitting after them. Then he came groping back for his lost handkerchief and having found it sat down and spat into it over and over again, half-retching, trembling with rage.
He left it to me to deal with the window and the black-out blind. I had some difficulty with the blind, which snapped out of my hands before I could fix it satisfactorily.
When I turned round again I had an impression that the sudden snap of the blind had knocked his spectacles off. He was sitting holding them in his hands. He was breathing very heavily. His distraction was intolerable because without the spectacles he really looked like a person who could not see. He seemed to sit there groping blindly, feeble and myopic after his rush of rage.
