The ship had a small library which was, in those seas, deserted. After finishing Kim in less time than it had ever taken me to read a book, I went and rummaged among the shelves. The material had a strong Eastern bias. Every magistrate who had ever sat on an Indian Bench or soldier who had put down a rebellion seemed subsequently to have written a volume of memoirs. As for most of the other writers, about the only one I had heard of was Somerset Maugham. I took Of Human Bondage down from the shelves, and killed time until we got to Marseilles.
We had half a day in the docks, so the Hong Kong Bank men, the Jardines man, and I were going to ‘do the sights’. There was some kerfuffle about passports and transit visas and the like, which the Jardines man solved by speaking fast, confident, surprising French, and then we were let loose in the old part of town. Abroad, I could quickly tell, was different from England. The light and the smells and the people were all different.
My plan had been to keep the news about the sisters to myself. Perhaps the others would get tipsy and appear at dinner flushed and garrulous; perhaps they would gorge themselves in Marseilles and miss dinner. One way or another, my secret knowledge would give me a crucial advantage in making the all-important first impression.
In those days I had trouble keeping secrets. The two Hong Kong Bank men quickly went into a routine of saying ‘Ooh la la’ every time they saw an unaccompanied Frenchwoman under the age of sixty. We sat in a café where the Jardines man ordered us beers all round. The drinks were stingingly cold. A girl carrying a parasol over her shoulder walked by, sparing us a cool sidelong look as she did so.
‘Ooh la la,’ said both the young bankers.
‘There may be some of that a little closer to home,’ I said, unable to resist.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Oh, you know, rumours.’
‘What sort of rumours?’
I made a point of observing the Marseilles streetscape at my own speed.
‘You’ve noticed our table is missing two of its full complement.’
This had been the subject of open speculation.
‘And?’
‘Perhaps I happen to know that two glamorous young sisters are embarking on their own great journey eastwards.’
This news had all the effect I had hoped for. All three men sat back in their chairs. The Jardines man recovered first and said, in a note of dazed wonder, ‘the fishing fleet’. This was the P&O term for single young women travelling East in search of a husband. Failures encountered on the homeward journey were known as ‘returned empties’.
‘How do you know?’
‘I have my sources.’
My companions were not so much exhilarated, which is what I suppose I had expected, as thoughtful. I did not know then that in those days the life of a company man out East was close to that of a young army officer, in the sense that it was ordered within narrow social confines, and the opportunities to meet young women were not all that common. Both the bankers, for instance, were going to live in the ‘mess’ – company quarters for junior bachelor staff. The idea of young women made them feel pre-emptively wistful and sorry for themselves, with, of course, a wild romantic optimism bubbling underneath. They had all gone to single-sex boarding schools; they were almost totally ignorant of what women were actually like.
‘What else do you know about them?’
By now I was beginning to feel chastened by their reaction. The giggles and high spirits had vanished; they were behaving as if this was an extremely serious development. A note of consternation was present. Expectations of the journey were undergoing upheaval.
‘Nothing that I haven’t told you. I’m in the dark.’
I could tell that they didn’t believe me. It was a muted foursome who spent the next few hours ambling about Marseilles; cries of ‘Ooh la la’ fell into abeyance. We went to visit the Sailors’ Church at the top of the hill and the sight of the crowded bay, so dramatically curving round, and the thought of the number of sailors who’d seen this as their last ever glimpse of land, were sobering. We lunched, also soberly, in a brasserie by the old port which I remember not so much for the food, though that must also have seemed surprising, as for the wildly different nature of the restauration.
‘There’s no English equivalent to this,’ I told my companions.
Then we simply wandered about, that skill of the young. By now we were all at the stage of pretending to be casual.
‘I think I’ll just have a wash and a brush-up before dinner,’ said Cooper. Potter – they were sharing a cabin – agreed. The Jardines man muttered something about a quick snooze. Nobody was at ease.
At seven-thirty I went through to dinner, skipping a preliminary drink in the bar on grounds of not wanting to appear dissolute. I’d heard stories of what the East could do to a man and did not want to be seeming to get an early start. All three of my day’s companions were already seated at the table. The other seats filled up over the next quarter of an hour. Our waiter brought a tureen of soup and began ladling out portions. I had my head lowered to the bowl and was taking a mouthful when I heard the dining-room door swing open and knew without having to look up that there were the sisters, making their entry. I straightened from my dish. On the one hand, the Third Officer had clearly been lying about the two women being sisters, since one was European and the other Chinese. On the other hand, he had been telling the truth, because it was apparent from their grey habits that the two of them were missionary nuns.
Chapter three
Their names were Sister Maria and Sister Benedicta. They were Catholic missionaries from the Order of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. The order was founded in the early nineteenth century. It was based in France and had an emphasis on education in Asia and Africa.
Sister Benedicta was the older of the two. She was a wiry Frenchwoman in her mid-forties, and was senior in the order’s hierarchy. I found her intimidating, not least because she was alarmingly frank and – this was something I later came to expect from Catholic missionaries, though it was a shock on this first encounter – interested in and well-informed about all worldly subjects. Her special area of interest was politics and her sympathies were always and provokingly on the side of the local peoples. She made no bones about seeing all us young men setting out Eastwards to make our fortunes as a type; by no means her favourite type, either. The only time I heard her implicitly admit some sympathy for a governing power was when she spoke about French Indo-China. If I hadn’t been so frightened of her I would have liked her very much.
The Chinese nun was Sister Maria. She was my age, more or less, tough and delicate at the same time; quick-witted; not so much pretty as perfect, as small-boned Chinese women can be. It was much later that I heard her story. She came from an inland part of the province of Fukien, a wild backwater famous for producing pirates. Her parents died when she was young and she was sent to live with relatives in Canton. A branch of the family had converted to Catholicism; they took her up and sent her to missionary school, where she simultaneously discovered her vocation and a talent for languages.
‘It’s the gift of tongues,’ she told me. When she spoke of religious subjects her manner became heavy and serious, as if there were some increase in the level of gravity. Along with her lively side there was this pompous religious persona. She could switch between the two in a moment. I never got used to it.
Maria joined the Order when she was eighteen, and went to work in a mission school in Hong Kong, where she learnt her fluent English, which in those days had a faint and rather lovely Chinese–French accent. At this time she also spoke French, Mandarin, Cantonese, as well as several different varieties of Fujianese and Chiu Chow. She never made a big fuss about this, it was just something she could do.
‘People are always more interested in what is impossible for them,’ she once said.
The arrival of the two sisters at our table caused upheaval, though not in the way I had been expecting. The Jardines and Hong Kong
Bank men – the other bachelors, if you exclude the absent Gunner – teased me about the nuns for a few days and then let the matter drop, referring to it only occasionally and affectionately in the past tense, like a favourite practical joke that somebody had played at school. (‘That was a good one,’ I said to the smirking Scottish Third Officer the next time I saw him.) They dealt with the nuns surprisingly easily, notwithstanding Sister Benedicta’s obvious scepticism about the promising young Englishman as a genre. I suppose they had established models for dealing with women in a quasi-official capacity, formed by encounters with nannies, school matrons, and housemasters’ wives. They were polite and interested when Sister Benedicta spoke about politics. Before long, the Jardines man had developed a technique for responding to her opinions – diatribes would be too strong a word – about British India, by asking innocent-sounding questions about the regime in Hanoi or Algiers.
All was not harmony and peace at our dinner table, however; on the contrary. For some reason the arrival of the two missionaries seemed to strike Marler on a psychic sore point. Right from the start, when he was introduced to them, he behaved like a man inflamed, provoked beyond all reason. His opening words to the sisters were:
‘Off to save souls?’
This came out so bluntly, so much like a direct insult, that the rest of us simply laughed, as if this were a deliberate exaggeration of his usual directness, a clumsy attempt at humour. It seemed impossible that anyone would be this consciously rude, at first meeting, to somebody he didn’t know. Even his wife looked embarrassed. But that didn’t impede Marler in any way, and it did not take long for the first proper argument. In fact, it happened during the dinner the first night after Marseilles. Sister Benedicta had asked the army man whereabouts in India he was headed. He said he was going to the Punjab.
‘Ah, the Afghan frontier. So troubling to you British for so long now. Subject peoples are often so ungrateful, are they not?’
Many of us may have been thinking, steady on, this is a bit much for someone we’ve only just met, but everyone smiled politely, except Marler.
‘I think that those remarks are extraordinarily offensive,’ he said at considerable volume.
Sister Benedicta gave him a long cool French look.
‘You are challenging the idea that the so-called North-West Frontier of your Indian Empire has been disputatious?’
‘We brought order and justice to half the world. There was no such thing as India before the British arrived there and civilised it. I simply will not accept this easy jeering from a citizen of a less successful empire whose only real objection to British achievements, if the truth is admitted, is that they were British and not French. As for the Catholic Church, systematically spreading superstition, idolatry, ignorance, and wishful hocus-pocus wherever it lands, the whole institution, with its greedy corrupt priests and credulous populace, casts a dark shadow on the earth and the world would be better off without it.’
‘Hocus-pocus is an accurate term. It is derived from “hoc est corpus meum”,’ said Sister Maria.
‘It is enviable to be able to speak with such confidence on subjects about which one knows so little,’ said Sister Benedicta. ‘I was briefly in Peshawar, in which we have a little mission teaching medical skills to the local people as part of our mission to spread darkness and unreason over the earth,’ she said, speaking to the army man, who was listening with his eyes while continuing to eat soup. ‘They have a remarkable range of unfamiliar breads which I think you will enjoy. As for the British bringing civilisation to India,’ she went on, turning to Marler, ‘you will find, if you have the opportunity to spend some time there, that the Indians were civilised many hundreds of years before the Roman Empire first brought the light of reason to your homelands.’
It went on from there.
*
The next day, as we chugged across the tideless Mediterranean on our way to the Suez Canal, most of the passengers had settled down to a quoits tournament. The prize was a dinner for two at the Captain’s table, with champagne. (Although meals were included in the ticket price, we had to pay for our own drinks.) I had teamed up with Cooper.
‘What did you make of all that then?’ I asked him.
‘Bit rum,’ he said. ‘Not sure you should speak to a woman like that, however much you think she’s talking rot. Still, bit of a rough diamond, isn’t he?’
‘Bit of a bully,’ I said.
‘You have to get along with people if you work in an office,’ he said, apropos, I then thought, of nothing.
We got as far as the semi-final stage of the quoits tournament before being knocked out by the eventual winners, the Purser and a young Welsh passenger. The Purser had the physical agility of a plump man and had also had lots of practice. His quoit throwing was a revelation.
I went into dinner that evening without a thought in my head, beyond hoping there wouldn’t be another argument. On that score I was in for a major disappointment.
It began innocuously enough. People had been talking about the next few days’ sailing and the question of whether or not they were going to have a chance of spending some time ashore at Aden; it depended on our speed of progress.
‘I’ve always wanted to see the souk,’ said Mrs Scott-Duncan, blushing. The young Australian made some casual remark about how much he was looking forward to going through the Suez Canal.
‘A remarkable triumph of vision, perhaps even more remarkable as such than as a feat of engineering,’ said Sister Benedicta. ‘A victory of the imaginative and theoretical over the mere empirical. De Lesseps was convinced a canal could be built because his historical researches told him that the ancient Egyptians had managed to do it, and he was sure that anything accomplished in the past by guesswork and forced labour could be matched by the skills of French engineering. Many sceptics, not least some of your own countrymen’ – Sister Benedicta appeared here to be bracketing the Australian in with the rest of us Anglo-Saxons – ‘proclaimed the self-evident impossibility of the scheme. A favourite objection was that the desert winds would fill the canal with sand. De Lesseps of course paid no attention, as confident in his researches as in his calculations and his imagination. As a result the canal is a united triumph of reason and faith, so perfect as almost to resemble a parable.’
‘Typical,’ said Marler promptly and loudly. ‘The French dressing up their imperial aspirations in a fog of claims about this and that. The simple truth is that we are a world power, you’re not, and you want to be. No offence,’ he then added.
‘Not everything is about power,’ said Sister Benedicta. This made Marler even more angry.
‘Come off it, France is the most power-mad country in the world, the only one to conduct their foreign affairs without even a shred of concern for anything beyond national self-interest and self-aggrandisement. Power is precisely what French foreign policy has been all about since before the tyrant Bonaparte.’
‘Reason and enlightenment are universal values and France has done what she can to spread them. Not every country can say the same.’
‘It fails to make any sense to me how a member of an institution as corrupt and benighted as the Catholic Church can spout about reason. Your church spreads superstition and ignorance wherever she goes. Talk about power, that’s the only thing your church has a significant interest in – the slightest real interest.’
Sister Maria responded by saying:
‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Then can I drown an eye unused to flow
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since-cancelled woe,
And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell
o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.’
There was a silence.
‘An Irish nun, Sister Bernadette, taught me that poem,’ she said to Marler. ‘I suppose she was only interested in power, too.’
‘Well –’ he said, but she went on:
‘The Church brought me out of darkness and ignorance into light. It taught me that thanks to God’s grace I have a gift, and thanks also to his grace I can share some of my gift with other people through teaching.’
‘And shoving a bucketload of superstitious claptrap down their throats at the same time.’
‘Nobody shoves anything down my pupils’ throats. Education is the opposite of ignorance.’
‘I am sure you have great gifts, Sister, and I’m sure you’re wasting them in such a backward institution.’
‘I can reach more of the people I need to reach where I am than in any other body on this earth.’
‘But they can’t learn as much as they would if they were being taught in an atmosphere that didn’t reek of superstition and idolatry.’
‘On the contrary, our students learn quicker than in secular schools.’
‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘Nonetheless it is so.’
‘It’s easy to make claims when there is no way of substantiating them.’
‘Who said there was no way of substantiating them? I can take a person wholly ignorant of a language and raise him up to a functional standard within a matter of weeks. I could do it with any of the gentlemen around this table tonight. I could even do it with you, Mr Marler.’
‘I find that also difficult to believe.’
And then, I suspect for no other reason than that she was sitting next to me, she said:
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