“And am I?”
She switched off the light again and lay softly against me. “No, I don’t think you’re pretending,” she said.
Chapter Two
The days that followed were wonderfully happy, and I worked better than I had ever worked before.
Once I had been incapable of serious work with another person in the room, for I would feel self-conscious; but I found Suzie’s presence comforting, and indeed it had soon become so much a habit that I could hardly work if she was not there. Her patience was infinite, and while I worked she would sit cross-legged on the bed, often for hours at a time, looking through a picture book or else simply engrossed in her own thoughts; for she had a natural aptitude for contemplation. And from time to time she would break the silence to ask a question about whatever matter was on her mind, and afterwards would sum up her conclusions.
“I think the Nam Kok must make God feel very happy,” she said once, after a long cogitation about religion. “You see, I don’t think God cares whether men and women get married. He doesn’t make animals get married, or fish, or flowers—and there are man and woman flowers just like us, you know.”
I said, “And you think we’re just the same to God as animals or flowers?”
“Yes, we have got a better brain, that’s all. I have got a better brain than a cat, but we have both got life inside us just the same, and maybe God likes the cat better than me. I don’t see how anybody knows. We just know that he puts life inside us, and makes us want to make love, so that after we’re finished there’ll be plenty more cats and flowers and people to carry on. That’s all he cares about, that the world is carried on. So when he looks down and sees the Nam Kok bar very busy, because the sailors all want to make love with a girl, he must rub his hands and think, ‘I did a good job with those sailors. They’re more interested in girls than anything.’”
I laughed. “And what about when he sees the girls going off to get injections—do you think he rubs his hands then?”
“No, I don’t think he likes girls getting rid of babies. I think those injections must make God very chokka.”
Every day we went out for a walk; and each walk was a new adventure, for happiness sharpens perception, and even the most familiar streets would continually yield fresh crops of discoveries. We explored alleyways and sat at street stalls eating nameless entrails, and pored over the windows of Chinese druggists with their displays of twisted roots, dried sea horses, powdered pearls, and big glass jars of pickled snakes. We spent a day in a fishing junk, went up the Peak, and giggled at the delicious concrete vulgarities of the Tiger Balm Pagoda, commemorating the successful promoter of that universal panacea. And we made a collection of characteristic Hong Kong sounds: the massage man’s rattle announcing his passage down the street; the spoon seller’s clatter as he manipulated a dozen porcelain spoons in his hand like a fan; the clop-clop-clop of wooden sandals echoing down an empty street at night; and of course the noise of the mah-jongg rooms. And then the noise we forgot about until the morning we were woken by ear-shattering explosions that sounded like a barrage of machine-guns, and I was convinced for a moment that the communists had crossed the border and war had begun, and then we both looked at each other and laughed and exclaimed together, “Firecrackers!”
The source of this early jubilation turned out to be three flag-bedecked junks crossing the harbor with cargoes of roistering holiday makers; and we learned presently from Ah Tong that it was the festival of Tien Hou, the patron goddess of the boat people. And provoked by the firecrackers into a festival mood ourselves, we took a bus out to a fishing village and watched the portable shrines and roasted pigs and trays of pink dumplings carried past in long processions led by lion dancers in masks; and we lit joss sticks in the temple, burned paper gifts for Tien Hou, and ate a huge lunch of roast pork, while those pernicious firecrackers continued to explode round us all day, splitting our ear drums and scorching our clothes.
I would also read to Suzie for at least an hour every day. I borrowed books from the British Counsel Library, and I got the knack of simplifying difficult words as I went along. Suzie’s curiosity was voracious, and she enjoyed fiction, biography, or travel; but the greatest success of all was de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” the story of the patriotic little French prostitute whose bourgeois traveling companions, after first scorning her, proceed to use her for their own ends, and persuade her against her own will to sleep with a Prussian officer. Suzie hung on every word. She wanted the story read again and again, and at each reading was freshly moved; and she asked endless questions about the characters as if they had been real. How had Boule de Suif started in her trade? How many clients had she had a day, and what had she charged? And what had become of her? Had she never got married?
She told the story to the other girls down in the bar, where it also achieved such a success that she was obliged to repeat it many times. But whereas de Maupassant had ended his story with the little courtesan once more scorned and in tears, Suzie eschewed such cynicism and added a romantic ending of her own; and this went further at each telling, until Boule de Suif had not only been happily married, but also blessed with a family. And here a note of tragedy crept in, for identifying herself with Boule de Suif, she related that the first child, a boy, had been involved in a coach accident, and his mother had found him dead by the roadside—mutilated, and without an arm. However, another baby was on the way, and it might have surprised de Maupassant to know that eventually his heroine became the happy mother of six.
The story impressed the girls deeply and they always crowded round when Suzie began her narrations; and it was not long before little Jeannie, with her lusciously rounded curves, was nicknamed Wun Tun, which meant boiled dumpling, and was the nearest equivalent to boule de suif in the Chinese cuisine.
Suzie now presided in the bar like a queen, conscious of the dignity and position that she had acquired by virtue of our established liaison; for such a permanent arrangement was the girls’ romantic ideal, and she appeared to her old girl friends as the embodiment of success. My own fall from grace had been forgotten now that I had taken Suzie back, and the girls treated us with all the respect due a married couple. They paid social visits to our room, brought us little gifts, and tactfully withdrew when they thought we wanted to be alone. Our most frequent visitors were Gwenny Ching and a new girl called Mary Kee, who was very shy and inexperienced. Suzie had taken Mary under her wing, giving her solemn advice and worrying endlessly over the problems of her initiation. And I would watch the two girls in conclave on my balcony: Suzie very protective and motherly, and Mary slightly awed by the older girl who had made good. And I would smile to myself, thinking that they resembled nothing more than a prefect and a new girl at school.
And now Suzie, when she spoke of me to the other girls, no longer called me “my boy friend” but “my husband.” She confessed this to me herself, a little ashamed of herself for taking such a liberty, saying, “I think ‘my husband’ sounds much nicer—only I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first.”
“I couldn’t care less what you call me, Suzie.”
“But I tell them that we will never really get married. I tell them, ‘My husband is a big man. One day he will be famous. You will see his picture in the newspapers, and at the cinema in the newsreel. So he can’t marry me. He will have to go off and marry an English girl.’”
“I don’t know, Suzie. I haven’t thought much about the future.” It was the afternoon, and we were lying on the bed after making love. I was filled with that infinite tenderness for her that always came at such times; for Suzie made love with a range and maturity of feeling that was in strange contrast to the deceptive childishness of her manner, and that touched depths in me that had never been touched before, and left me with a deeper satisfaction. We lay in silence for a long time. And then Suzie said, “What does goss-something mean?”
�
��Gossamer?” I remembered the word in the book that I had been reading to her at lunch.
“Yes, gossamer.”
I explained, and we went on to talk about spiders and how they made their webs; for spiders had always fascinated me, and in Malaya I had spent hours studying their methods of web-spinning and trying to solve the mystery of how they managed to stretch the first strand of a web between two trees. (I had discovered that they would hang suspended from the branch of one tree until the wind swung them across to the other, whereupon they would haul in the loose thread and anchor it tight; and with this aerial bridge once established, they could run back and forth at will.) Suzie listened intently and asked questions, and I fetched a piece of paper and pencil to show her the different patterns of web made by different species; and we marveled together at the nature of instinct, which enabled young spiders to spin perfect webs without teaching. Suzie’s hunger for knowledge had always been a sheer delight to me, and I experienced the creative satisfaction of a pedagogue who watches a pupil’s mind opening under his guidance. Her lack of education and her illiteracy were one of her greatest charms for me, and I would not for the world have had her otherwise. And so it was that suddenly, in the midst of this discussion about spiders, I thought: I am happier with Suzie than I have been with anybody before. I would like to marry her.
Until that moment I had taken for granted that marriage was out of the question—I had not even considered it. One might live with water-front girls, but one didn’t marry them. But why shouldn’t I marry Suzie? I didn’t care tuppence about her past—indeed it now seemed so remote from our present life that I was able to discuss her former experiences with her with complete frankness, as if we had been discussing another woman. Besides, it made her out of the ordinary, more interesting; and it made what was good and innocent in her all the better because of what it had survived.
And I was so carried away by the notion of marrying her that I was on the point of interrupting the talk about spiders and proposing to her impulsively there and then—but at that moment a voice inside me nagged, “Don’t be a fool—you know you’ll regret it! You only want to marry her because her ignorance inflates your ego—because she makes you feel like a god.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” I asked the inner voice defiantly. “Why shouldn’t I enjoy feeling like a god? Anyhow, sometimes she makes me feel the opposite. Sometimes she makes me feel very humble, because her own vision is so much more innocent, so much fresher than mine. I learn as much from her as she learns from me. I am learning from her all the time—seeing life freshly through her eyes.”
Inner voice: “All right, it might be all very fine being married to her out here—but you could never take her back to England. Your friends wouldn’t have her in the house.”
Me: “Then they could go to hell. But I bet some would.”
Inner voice: “Yes, and treat her as a prize exhibit. ‘My dear, I’ve the most fascinating couple coming to dinner. The wife was a water-front tart in Hong Kong. Yes, honestly, cross my heart . . . No, don’t dress. As George said, she’s probably more used to undressing.’”
Me: “Then I won’t take her back to England. I much prefer living out East.”
Inner voice: “Even out East she’ll be a social handicap.”
Me: “You talk as if I had social ambitions. I’m not in the colonial service. I’m a painter. And I won’t be the first painter to marry his favorite model.”
Inner voice: “Well, if you can’t restrain your impetuosity for your own sake, restrain it for Suzie’s. Don’t say anything to her until you’re absolutely sure. You know what you are with your sudden enthusiasms—by this time next week you’ll have come to your senses.”
However, during the next few days the enthusiasm, so far from abating, increasingly possessed me. Yes, I shall marry her, I thought happily; and I had just decided that at the first suitable opportunity I would ask her, when something happened that for the time being put the notion out of my head.
It was something as wonderful as it was unexpected. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and I was busy painting at the easel when there was a knock on the door. Suzie was out on the balcony with Gwenny and Mary Kee, and she came hurrying through the room to see who it was, for she took very seriously her duty to protect me from interruption. I heard her whispering to Ah Tong. Then she closed the door again and came over to me, looking very self-important. She held out an envelope.
“This cable just came for you.”
“Be an angel and open it for me, Suzie,” I said, guessing how much she would enjoy performing this service in front of Gwenny and Mary.
She glowed with pride. She took good care to open the envelope in full sight of her audience. She handed me the contents. It was the longest cable I had ever seen, and I thought for a moment that it could not be meant for me at all. Then I saw that it was from Mitford’s in New York. It ran to twelve lines, and the gist of it was that a well-known American pictorial magazine, with international circulation, had made an offer for my Hong Kong paintings and pastels to display as a feature. Furthermore they wanted to commission me to follow it with a “Japanese sketchbook” for which, in addition to the fee, they would pay my air passage to Japan and expenses for two months.
The combined fee for the Hong Kong work and the work to be done in Japan was stated in American dollars, and was so large that I felt sure it must have acquired a couple of extra naughts in transmission. It would have been sufficient as it stood to keep Suzie and myself at our present standard of living for over a year.
The last three lines of the cable urged me not to scorn this commercial debut in the States, since it would greatly enhance interest in any gallery exhibition that I might give later.
The persuasion was superfluous, and I promptly cabled back my unconditional acceptance, and at the same time asked for a clarification of the fee. Forty-eight hours later came the reply. The figure given had been correct. And for the first time since Rodney’s departure I wished he had been there, for if it had not been for him this would never have happened, and I was so happy that I would have liked to throw my arms round his neck.
An hour later another cable arrived, advising me that a sum of money representing the return fare to Japan and the first installment of my fee had been made available for me at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and requesting me to make tracks for Japan forthwith.
I collected the money and bought a tourist-class return ticket to Tokyo at B.O.A.C. I had been paid for first-class, and with the difference I took Suzie shopping. Since the loss of all her possessions she had bought herself only a couple of cheap cheongsams and a few underclothes, for she had hated spending my money; but now we let ourselves go. We bought shoes, sandals, stockings, jeans, cheongsams, and a whole lot of other little feminine items of which she had so long been deprived. Then, loaded with parcels and paper bags, we returned to the bank to see Gordon Hamilton and open an account in Suzie’s name. She received her first check book, and Hamilton told her that whenever she wanted some money she could come to him, and he would write out the check for her and she could sign it. And she sat down to inscribe a specimen signature, which she did very carefully, biting her tongue, and writing Suzie with the Z characteristically large, disjointed, and back-to-front; and Hamilton said, “Bravo, well done. I wish everybody’s signature was as easy to read.” And eighteen hours later I was in the aircraft, peering through the little window as we took off and catching a last glimpse of Suzie in her new jeans behind the wire-mesh fence as she jumped up and down waving good-by.
A few hours later we landed at Okinawa to refuel. We took off again shortly, and at sunset were twenty thousand feet over the sea. I watched the light drain out of the sky until all was black except for a long streak of violent blazing orange across the horizon. Then all at once I noticed a cone-shaped silhouette against the orange. “Mount Fuji,”
said the air hostess—and I had caught my first glimpse of Japan.
Half an hour later we landed at Haneda airport. I went into Tokyo on the airline bus and spent the night at the Imperial Hotel, and in the morning called at the local office of the magazine.
“Coke?” said the American manager. “Miss Yamaguchi, two Cokes,” and we sat chatting and nursing our bottles and drinking the ice-chilled liquid through straws. But the sumptuousness of the office intimidated me, and likewise the manager’s apparent assumption that I was an artist of standing. I felt like an impostor. I had started painting for pleasure and could not rid myself of my beginner’s sense of guilt at being paid for doing what I enjoyed. I blushed at each mention of my enormous fee; and when the manager began to talk of my expenses in terms of living and traveling de luxe, I kept self-consciously assuring him how modest were my needs. Finally I beat him down to a daily allowance that would have sufficed for a fortnight in Hong Kong with the odd dance girl thrown in. I also beat him down on the number of places he was recommending for inclusion in my tour, for I knew that I should do my best work with the minimum movement and the maximum time to browse. There was no obligatory itinerary or theme for my drawings, and we worked out a rough plan of campaign that gave me a week in Tokyo, a month in Kyoto and the south, another week in Tokyo, then a fortnight up in the southern island of Hokkaido.
Next I moved out of the international atmosphere of the Imperial into a Japanese-style hotel. And all at once I was immersed in an alien world, and what seemed an alien age. I removed my shoes at the front door and proceeded in my socks, squatted at a foot-high table for meals, wallowed in near-boiling water in a huge sunken bath, slept on a mattress on the floor, and was dressed, undressed, and waited upon hand and foot by half-a-dozen little serving maids in pretty kimonos chirruping round me like a flock of sparrows. And at all my departures and arrivals the whole flock would be in attendance at the porch, falling to their knees and bowing with their hands spread on the matting in front of their knees and their foreheads touching the floor.
World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) Page 28
