Coromandel!

by John Masters

  She said now, ‘Mabel Popeyes doesn’t care where you dance, does she, as long as she can watch you? Have you told her I’m not your sister?’

  Jason said shortly, ‘Yes. This has nothing to do with her.’

  Actually Mabel had said that of course he must go on with his dancing. He liked to dance, and she was happy only in helping him do what he liked. Emily was jealous, that was the trouble. What right had she to be jealous? Why did she think she could be nice to him and kiss him, and then go off with Lord Nailsworth and expect him to love her just the same?

  He and Mabel had never mentioned marriage, but she had made it plain that anything he liked she would like. Would he want to have younger girls as well? She would expect that, as long as he did not leave her or lose his affection for her.

  Emily said, ‘And when is Popeyes going to put the halter on you?’

  Jason said nothing. Dick o’ the Ruff laughed.

  How would a murderer and pimp like Dick understand what was between him and Mabel? Let him laugh his evil head off, but, when they decided to get married, they would.

  ‘You!’ Emily said. ‘Twenty, and a dancer? Wandering about with cow eyes after a woman old enough to be your grandmother.’

  ‘She’s only forty,’ Jason snapped.

  ‘She’s paying for you to learn to read. That’s the only reason, isn’t it? When you can read, you’ll leave her crying, and she’ll go back to her fiddlers and tapsters.’

  Jason slapped her face hard. Dick o’ the Ruff drawled, ‘Popeyes must bake gunpowder into her cakes. They’ve turned our capon into a hero. You wouldn’t like to do that to me, would you?’

  ‘Don’t you dare, Jason!’ Emily said quickly and caught Jason’s arm as he stepped forward. Her cheek was blazing red where he had hit her. Dick began to laugh, a high whinnying cackle, and, still laughing, went out and down the long stairs.

  Jason went to the looking-glass and examined his face and collar. Let the whole lot of them stew in hell. The power to read, that was what mattered. He had learned a little, but not much so far. He could spell cat and rat, but the words in Mabel’s Shakespeare play--it had turned out to be The Tragedy of King Richard II--were too long. He could remember them better than he could read them. He had made the clerk read some of it aloud:

  O, who can hold a fire in his hand

  By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

  Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

  By bare imagination of a feast?

  Or wallow naked in December snow

  By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?

  Well, he could. Master Shakespeare must have been thinking of other people, people who could walk past Stonehenge at dawn without a tremor.

  ‘Jason.’ Emily’s voice was low and trembly. He did not answer her. She was a sullen strumpet and nothing more.

  ‘Jason--did you ask the clerk to read the map of Coromandel for you?’

  God’s blood, he had been a fool to mention the map to Emily. As a matter of fact he had, as a joke, asked the clerk to read some of the words on it. The clerk had peered at the writing and said, ‘This here is Latin. Quae visa, vera; quae non, veriora. That means--’ Then Mabel had broken in laughingly, ‘It’s just a silly old map! You know it’s not even true, Jason, don’t you? You told me about that wonderful old rogue--Voy, you called him.’ Jason had kept his finger down on the map and asked the clerk, ‘What does it say here?’ The clerk read:--’Ye City of Pearl. That is most interesting.’ But Mabel snatched the map away and said, ‘I won’t have you dreaming of these horrible places. Aren’t you comfortable here?’ It was a very comfortable house, Mabel’s; and the cook was good too. Ye City of Pearl. You might call London a City of Gold. . . .

  Emily said, ‘Jason, are you really going to Coromandel some day?’

  He said, ‘Yes.’ He thought: Someday, yes, I’m going.

  He thought again, with sudden harshness: You whoreson liar, you’re not going anywhere. You’re going to eat Mabel’s cakes, and they haven’t got any gunpowder in them.

  Emily said, ‘I’ll never have pigs or chickens or a horse.’

  He said, ‘No, you won’t.’

  She said, ‘I have always pretended to myself that I wanted a farm with pigs and chickens and a horse, but I don’t really. I don’t dream about them. I can’t see myself there in the country with them. Jason--couldn’t, can you take me to Coromandel with you?’

  Jason started violently. Coromandel again! With Emily! He blurted, ‘What do you know of Coromandel? You’re a whore!’

  She leaned back as if he had hit her, and for a moment he thought he was going to have the barbaric satisfaction of seeing her wailing and crying in anguish. But she recovered herself. Her mouth hardened and, with the old tears still streaking her face, she said, ‘I wouldn’t come with you, anyway, you dirty, selfish--pimp!’

  Jason began to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ He began to go towards her, to tell her he loved her, or could love her; that if she dreamed of Coromandel she was already his lover; but she turned her back and said coldly, ‘Run along to Popeyes.’

  In Mabel’s house the clerk’s voice droned on, low, obsequious. Mabel had a lot of money. The cook and the kitchenmaids stepped softly in the kitchen, and set their pots down gently on the fire. The faint smell of rich food seeped under the door into the room where they were. The winter sun made long patterns on the floor. His new doublet reflected the light from its stiff folds. Mabel’s skirt crinkled like cloth of gold. She had given him a Bible and the play of Will Shakespeare. Now he had four. Her voice was low and musical beside him. ‘The cat bit the rat.’

  Did he like cinnamon cakes? Did he care for turmeric in his stews? The ceiling is low there, with a beam across--mind your head. We venture outside into excitement, but that is not our home. This is our home. We bring back the memories of the dancing and the music to here, like the flowers we pluck by the river’s bank to press between the pages of the new books. The flowers are still there in the books many days later, but they are not the same.

  ‘B-o-o-k, l-o-o-k.’

  Here she had Canary wine in bottles. But who made the wine--where, how, under what sun? Perhaps that was all written in books, as the descriptions of danger and voyaging were. But the book didn’t smell of gunpowder, nor the bottle smell of the full vats gurgling in the hold of a ship.

  ‘H-a-t. Aitch, ay, tee--hat. H--write it, stroke up, stroke down, across.’

  ‘Cathy, please light the fire for us. Jason, you look cold. Come and sit this side, dear, closer to the fire. There.’

  Mabel watched him closely but looked away when she thought he might glance up and catch her doing it. He was very young. She remembered being young as though it were this morning; and then a clock struck twelve and it was afternoon, and she was old; but only a minute had passed between morning and afternoon, and if there had been no clock no one would have known.

  She loved him. But she’d loved all her men, including her husbands. She had never done anything without love.

  Love wasn’t enough. Suppose this wild dream he had, of Coromandel, would not die after she had fed him and wined him and made him comfortable? Then he might run away. He might.

  But the clock strikes for him, too. He is going to learn that you don’t have to travel to discover things. She had learned that through not being allowed to travel, but it was hard to teach the lesson to anyone, harder to a young man, hardest of all to teach it to Jason.

  Suppose she could find enough wisdom to divert his passion for movement into some other kind of passion? Suppose she could show him how to translate his dreams into poetry, or music? By the good Lord who’d blessed her, she’d be happy then.

  He thought she didn’t know that he was in love with Emily. He was very young. He thought she really didn’t mind it when his eyes wandered over the young women in the Cockpit, just because she said she didn’t mind. He was very young. She could bear it, though.

  The danger was, how much did Emily lo
ve him? What was Emily? A dancer and a loose woman, but perhaps, if you were a young man, and could talk to her alone at night, you’d find something else--foolish matched dreams, even love.

  For herself--she looked down at the rings on her plump fingers--she had little to fight with, except money and love. They were more use together than young people sometimes realized.

  It was getting near time for the second dancing. Jason glanced round the crowded room to find Emily. The first dancing had been the best yet. Mabel, beside him at the table, was ordering a roast duck for afterwards. Jemmy, the host, leaned attentively over her with a large skewer in his hand. No one ever laughed openly at Mabel, because she had a lot of money. Now, while Jason was with her, people were extra attentive. Jason was the best dancer in London. They were saying it everywhere, even in Whitehall.

  He was, too, and he loved dancing, but just now his belly quaked inside as though he were standing on the edge of a steep and crumbly quarry.

  Mabel caressed the gold locket hanging on a gold chain about his neck and said, ‘It suits you.’ Jason looked down his nose and saw the dull links falling in their twin streams across the red silk of his doublet to join at the head of the heart--shaped locket. There was nothing inside the locket yet, though. Mabel was going to have a little miniature painting of herself done, and put it in.

  He saw Emily, and the queasy feeling became stronger. How could he think of going to Coromandel with her? No, he’d done right. He was doing right. He had followed the map Old Voy sold him, and it had led him here. He had saved some money and would save more. He would not even need money when he and Mabel were married, but it would be good to have some of his own. Emily was a dancing partner, nothing more. Dick o’ the Ruff insulted him often but would not quarrel with him, because he made too much of Dick’s money. As long as he did not wound Dick’s fearful vanity Dick would be there to protect him against ruffians, judges, justices, and aldermen. Mabel loved him. He--loved Mabel (liar!). She was so kind that it was difficult to imagine anything that could make her turn against him.

  But--Coromandel!

  He nodded at Emily. She let go of Lord Nailsworth’s hand and came to him. He took off his new chain and his doublet and left them with Mabel. He said apologetically, ‘The chain would fly out while I was dancing, and might hurt Emily.’

  Mabel said, ‘Of course. You were wonderful in the first dance, Emily.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  They stepped into the small cleared space at the side of the room. The fiddler tuned up, and the tabor man rattled a ruffle. The people shouted and settled in their places and fell silent.

  The tabor man called, ‘Meadowsweet, meadowsweet, one, and two, and away we go.’

  After a time Emily shot him a look as she turned, and muttered, ‘A little faster, Jason. You’re dragging the tune.’

  Her warning smile flared into a bright light in his head; the words knocked around his ears like the message of a heavy drum. He shook his head. What was he doing here, with his map forgotten and tucked away in the sack in Dick o’ the Ruff’s upper room? Why was he dancing the Harvest Ring with tobacco smoke streaming in a thin layer under the rafters and the tabor banging away in his ear in the little room--a drum within a drum within a drum, and the City of Pearl ten thousand miles away? Why did the young men shine in satin, standing on the chairs and benches, their faces rapt as though they were at a hanging? Why did the lord with the ginger beard ogle Emily’s legs? Why did Emily paint and scent and puff out her breasts? Because she was a whore. So was he a whore.

  ‘Slower!’ Emily said with sharp anger. ‘You’re spoiling it!’

  Faster, he danced--faster, faster. The fiddler chased his racing feet, Emily sweated to catch him, but he left them both behind. The watchers blurred and whirled. He knew steps better than any of these--faster, wilder steps. He was always in the centre of the whirling blur, his head in smoke, and the blue-white-red-green-brown flying round him--faces, beams, windows, pots, faces; always Emily’s face steady before his eyes while the rest raced round. She was the middle of the world. No, for himself he must be the middle; he was, he was. She only stayed there because he held tight to her hands, leaned back and whirled her round like a stick.

  He let go. Emily flew across the cleared space, cannoned into a table, fell over it, lay on her face among the broken glass, spilled ale running down her legs--kicking, showing all her legs and more than her legs, her big white woman’s cheeks. The men shouted wildly, crazy with laughing and seeing that. Jason walked over and slapped her sharply on her naked buttocks.

  She jumped up and grabbed the nearest thing that came to hand. Her deep eyes burned full and fiery. She threw the baked fish at his head and screamed, ‘I hate you. I’ll never dance with you again.’ She ran off, sobbing.

  But Jason stood with his breathing under full control, and wiped pieces of mackerel off his face and shirt. Dick had paid for that shirt, and he would be annoyed, but not annoyed enough. No one was angry enough yet, except perhaps Emily. He went and sat down calmly beside Mabel.

  She said anxiously, ‘Did you mean to do that, Jason?’ She was worried, although she knew what good dancers they were, and although she could not really like Emily much. She was very kind.

  ‘Yes, I meant to do it,’ Jason said. He thought of calling for a bottle of wine and drinking it all, but he must be sober or they would forgive him, saying, Jason was only drunk, he didn’t mean all those things he did.

  He put out his hand suddenly and covered Mabel’s plump one beside him. The moment had come. He said, ‘Mabel, dear, I’m going to Coromandel.’

  Her fingers curled up and held his tight. She said, ‘With Emily?’

  He said, ‘No. By myself. I’m sorry, Mabel. I must.’

  She said, ‘Dick o’ the Ruff won’t let you go. You’re making too much money for him.’

  Jason said, ‘I think he will if I can insult him. I must humble him in front of someone else. Then he will be glad I’ve gone.’

  ‘He might kill you if you did anything like that.’

  Jason said in a low voice, ‘I can kill too.’ He showed her the knife hidden in the top of his breeches. He got up suddenly and looked straight at her. ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye. Oh, Jason!’

  He went out, remembering that her eyes were dry and her voice steady. It had looked for a time as though they might be happy together, and he was sorry. But the sun of Coromandel shone too strongly on the crinkled sea, and comfort and good food and kindness were not for him, nor could he lie to her or to himself a moment longer, saying that he loved her.

  At this time of night Dick was often down by the river, getting gossip from the wherrymen. About now he usually came back to the tavern to collect the money from the bully who picked it off the floor.

  Jason edged back into a deep doorway and hunched his shoulders. It was a bitter night--black frost on earth, and the stars crackling in the sky, and the cobbles ringing like bells to a footstep. A man went hurrying home under the houses opposite, and glanced at Jason and rested his hand on his sword until he had passed. His breath hung frozen in puffs behind him.

  It was warmer in the doorway, from the drowsy house and the banked fires inside--stock in the pot and the servant girl asleep on the rushes, frowsty in her clothes, dreaming of perfumed silk.

  He heard sharper footsteps and glanced out cautiously. It would not matter how many men Dick had with him as long as there was at least one. Four or five might be difficult, because they could prevent him doing what he had to do; but none would be much worse, because then there would be no one to tell the tale, and Dick could pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Dick and one. Dick and a woman. Dick and Emily. That wasn’t good; it ought to have been one of Dick’s fawning cronies to see the humiliation. But this was the time, and there could be no waiting.

  Jason peered into the street. The refuse was hard-frozen into lumps and sheets. There were thrown-out slops there, and horse dung, and
ordure from the houses. It would do. It might not be too hard all the way through.

  He heard Dick’s nasal ‘I--I--I’ coming closer.

  He stepped out and said, ‘Dick, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Who ? Oh, it’s Jason. I want to talk to you. Emily came running to tell me that you made a mess of the dancing and insulted her. She says you were drunk. What do you mean by it?’

  Emily was looking at him calmly. She was not angry now. He thought she was going to say something, but she only waited, standing a little to one side of them.

  Jason turned to Dick. Now he must begin. He said, ‘Go and hang yourself. I want my money. I’m leaving, and I want my money--all of it. I know you’ve been cheating me.’

  Emily sighed. Dick looked at him more closely and said, ‘Why, you’re not drunk.’

  ‘God’s blood, who said I was?’ Jason snarled. ‘I said, I want my money. ‘

  Emily said, ‘There’s no need to make him angry, Jason.’ But Dick was speaking too, in a forced-friendly voice, saying, ‘Let’s talk sensibly, Jason. Emily’s angry with you, but you know I haven’t been stealing any of your money. It’s not worth my while. I want to keep you happy. Tell me what happened.’ He caught Jason’s arm in a gesture of familiarity. His face was twisted into a white smile. ‘Let’s be reasonable,’ he said.

  ‘Reasonable!’ Jason shouted. He stooped, grabbed up a handful of clotted filth, and rammed it in Dick’s face. Then he seized Dick’s huge ruff in both hands and tore it off, shouting, ‘You’re a fool, a fop. Look at this ruff! Do you think there’s a bully in London doesn’t wet himself laughing, seeing you strut by in this? There, there, there!’ He ripped the heavy starched cotton into shreds as he shouted, and threw the pieces into Dick’s face.

  Dick seemed to realize at last that it was he, Dick o’ the Ruff, who was being treated like this. As he whipped out his sword Jason kicked him in the fork. The sword fell singing in the gutter; Dick fell to his knees and rolled, gasping and gnashing. Jason kicked him in the side of the jaw, and he lay still. Jason knelt quickly beside him, appalled at what he had done.