Colonel Julian and Other Stories (23 page)

‘You didn't tell me what you'd been doing with yourself.'

‘Sitting by the river,' he said.

‘Doing what?'

‘Oh, watching the coolies plant grass.'

‘Odd occupation.'

‘No, there's a lot to it,' he said. ‘Watching them dibble that grass in, root by root, like cabbages. Making it grow in this heat, too.'

‘I should be bored out of my head,' she said.

‘Oh! if you get bored,' he said, ‘there's always a background of dead bodies floating down. That's interesting. Life and death.'

‘Don't talk about it, it's foul,' she said. ‘Have your tea now. Reach for another sandwich. So you didn't go racing?'

‘No.'

‘You're an odd boy,' she said. ‘You never seem to do anything.'

‘I'm interested in the country.'

‘In India?' she said. ‘God, when you've lived in it as long as I have you'll be interested, let me tell you. That is if the dust and filth and heat of it haven't finished you off.'

‘You don't like it much, do you?' he said.

‘You're lucky,' she said. ‘You don't have to stay here. You don't have to stay here like us. Wait till the monsoon comes, and then you'll feel what it's really like. We can't get out. But you can. You can get out. You can go.'

‘Yeh, I can get out,' he said. ‘Minus my foot.'

‘I didn't mean that,' she said. ‘That isn't what I meant at all.'

He did not answer. He simply sat staring out to where sunlight laid a strong brassy bar violently across burnt grass. Great black Indian crows were circling slowly in the heat. So
powerful was the light of mid-afternoon that the flowers of bougainvillea seemed now to have melted into a mass of molten purple, half aflame. Whether it was that he was watching she did not know. There was no sound in the room but the sound of the punkah, whirling the hot air, and she did not know how to span the break in the conversation. It was hard to explain to these young people, new to the country, coming in from far away, exactly what she herself and people like herself had to endure. Sometimes she felt that all the years of one's life in India were wasted years. One was trapped. Of course, perhaps in the old days, when you got good bearers and things were plentiful and the clubs were not infested with strangers, the place was not so bad. The river was very beautiful. In the parks the trees, of which she did not know the names, blossomed in scarlet and purple and blue and yellow, and in the evenings little lights in the rickshaws trembled all along the dark streets like many fireflies. And sometimes it was very beautiful, too, in winter, in the cool season, with all the English flowers blossoming on terraces and in gardens; but the beauty, like everything else, seemed to have no permanence about it, and always from outside there was the dirty sickening clash of sombre and uneasy violence over it all. And oh! how tired, how tired you got of the sun.

Armstrong was really thinking about his foot. Dentz, the surgeon, a colonel, had given it a thorough and not entirely unbrutal once-over that morning, and the result seemed final. He was never going to walk decently again. Dentz was no fool. Nor, it seemed, were they going to let him fly again. He was oppressed by a sense that his life had reached an empty, pointless ditch. There was a taste of dust in his mouth. He was very young to be out of it all.

By coincidence, but also because she was sorry for what she had said and wanted to make up for it, she said, ‘You never told me about your foot. I mean how it happened. I never knew anything except that you came down in the mountains.'

‘In the strict interest of truth,' he said, bitter again, ‘I was shot down in the sea.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘The British picked me out a thousand miles from the Delta here,' he said.

Quite obviously he did not want to talk about it. She was silent and he pretended a sudden interest in Untouchables.

‘Who exactly are they?' he said. ‘I hear a hell of a lot about them. Are these coolies planting the grass Untouchables?'

‘I really don't know,' she said. ‘The whole thing is so mixed. There are so many creeds.' It was no use pretending. ‘They're all as bad as each other. Just low swindlers, all of them. They'd cut your throat for an anna. What about your leg? Were you in the sea very long?'

‘Oh! quite a while.' He was not eating much. He had, however, finished the tea, and was ready for more. She reached across the table, and, without asking, took his cup.

‘I get bothered by these things,' he said. ‘There was another thing I was going to ask you.'

‘What things? What else were you going to ask?'

‘The problems of this country. For instance, these girls. The half-whites, what about them?'

‘I'll tell you what about them,' she said. She looked up from pouring tea, and regarded him with direct savagery. ‘They're going to get a hell of a shock when this war is over. That's what!'

‘When it's over? I see half of them in a state of shock now.'

‘What do you mean?' she said. ‘Shock? Aren't they having a good time? Aren't they having a better time than any of us? Look at their status! Look how that's raised. War has done that for them. They should think themselves lucky. What has it done for decent women here?'

‘They're kids mostly,' he said.

‘Yes, they're kids,' she said, ‘and what do they behave like? You know what they behave like.'

‘Like human beings?' he said.

‘They want to be taken for English!' she said. ‘That's all they want. To be equal with us. Do you think we're going to stand for that?'

‘I know a kid, one of them,' he said. ‘There's many a New Orleans girl hasn't a thing on her for colour. She's as white as you and me.'

‘Well, you keep away from her if you know what's good for you!' she said.

He was silent again, looking out beyond the bar of sun. She did not speak, either. The thought of the Anglo-Indian girl produced in her new depths of sharp disturbance. Sometimes she had imagined Armstrong coming into the house alone, but not to speak like this. Every three weeks or so her husband took the Darjeeling Mail north and then drove fifty or sixty miles north-east into the tea country north of the foothills of Bhutan, to the plantation there. It was very remote, very green and very boring country, socially populated by distant bungalows of parochial Scots planters and their wives, and she now never went with him there. Her husband had tea on the brain; he had never been really happy out of the hills. It would have been nice to have Armstrong alone in the house. It would have been nice to walk down, after darkness, in the warm evening, to the river, and listen there to the sound of wind in the palm trees, like the echo of water.

Because of these things she was sorry to be antagonistic; she did not want to be antagonistic; on the contrary. But people who had lived here ten or twenty or even thirty and more years had a right to feel that they knew what they were talking about. Of course, many of these girls were in a way very beautiful. But they were not English; they were not white; it was no use pretending that. They were not the same; blood would tell.

‘Don't tell me you're falling for one of these girls,' she said.

He did not answer. She felt blind for a moment and then when she recovered found herself looking at Armstrong's foot. It was curled away under him, and suddenly she felt that she had to ask about it again. It fascinated her.

‘How were you shot down?' she said. ‘What happened?'

‘Just one of those things,' he said.

‘Yes, but how?'

‘We burnt up.'

She looked at his dark and rather inscrutable face, with the remarkably old, fine and troubled eyes. It would have been nice to drive down to the lakes together and afterwards come back to swim and lie together in the sun.

‘Can you swim?' she said.

‘I had enough swimming,' he said. ‘Thirty hours at a stretch is enough for two lifetimes.'

‘Two lifetimes?' she said. ‘How do you arrive at that?'

He looked at her suddenly, as if all his patience were imperilled by that remark: almost as if he were at the end of talking.

‘I tried to drown myself,' he said. ‘That's how. I put myself under. I got hellish tired. I didn't want to live on mouths of salt water and on nothing but sun all my life. So I put myself under.' He was talking with great quietness, in a detachment of plain fury. ‘And every time I put myself under I came up again. That's how it was.'

Suddenly he gave it up, no longer interested in sustaining even that savage interest in himself, and looked away from her, beyond the verandah, to the sun. She did not know what to say. The uneasy heat of the afternoon seemed to gather down below, on the dusty compound, and rise in a single oppressive breath of wind. She caught with it the acrid and musty smell of some remote native village fire, and then the taste of burnt dust rising with the wind, disturbing and bitter in her mouth. In twenty years she had not got used to that smell.

It seemed to disturb Armstrong, too. He got up and said: ‘Well, I guess I better get along. I have a snooker game with the major at five.'

‘Must you?'

‘I must,' he said.

‘You know you ought not to walk across there without something on your head,' she said. ‘I'm telling you. I know this country.'

‘No sun can burn me,' he said.

She did not answer at once; she went as far as the steps of the verandah with him and then said: ‘Come over to dinner some evening, why don't you? I'll put on an evening dress and we'll have Madras curry and beer. I know you like that.'

‘Thanks. It's very kind,' he said. ‘I'll get along now.'

‘And don't stop in the sun on the way, watching coolies plant grass. That doesn't pay any dividends in this heat.'

He grinned and went down the steps, crabwise, and out to the compound below. She stood for some moments watching him limp across the grass that had once been so beautifully kept and was now only a harsh arena of dust in the sun. Even
after he had disappeared behind the last rows of tents she stood gazing at the colours of the bougainvillea, flaming and turbulent in the heat, before she decided at last to go into the house, unsettled and depressed about something, to have one of her violent rows with the bearer about the foul way he had behaved at tea.

She gave lessons in voice-training in the long room above the music shop. Her pupils won many examinations and were afterwards very successful at local concerts and sometimes in giving lessons in voice-training to other pupils. She herself had won many examinations and everybody said how brilliant she was.

Every Christmas, as this year, she longed for snow. It gave a transfiguring gay distinction to a town that otherwise had none. It lifted up the squat little shops, built of red brick with upper storeys of terra-cotta; it made the roofs down the hill like glistening cakes; it even gave importance to the stuffy gauze-windowed club where local gentlemen played billiards and solo whist over meagre portions of watered whisky. One could imagine, with the snow, that one was in Bavaria or Vienna or the Oberland, and that horse-drawn sleighs, of which she read in travel guides, would glide gracefully down the ugly hill from the gasworks. One could imagine Evensford, with its many hilly little streets above the river, a little Alpine town. One could imagine anything. Instead there was almost always rain and long columns of working-class mackintoshes floating down a street that was like a dreary black canal. Instead of singing Mozart to the snow she spent long hours selling jazz sheet-music to factory workers and earned her reward, at last, on Christmas Eve, by being bored at the Williamsons' party.

Last year she had sung several songs at the Williamsons' party. Some of the men, who were getting hearty on mixtures of gin and port wine, had applauded in the wrong places, and Freddy Williamson had bawled out ‘Good old Clara!'

She knew the men preferred Effie. Her sister was a very gay person although she did not sing; she had never passed an examination in her life, but there was, in a strange way, hardly anything you felt she could not do. She had a character like
a chameleon; she had all the love affairs. She laughed a great deal, in rippling infectious scales, so that she made other people begin laughing, and she had large violet-blue eyes. Sometimes she laughed so much that Clara herself would begin weeping.

This year Clara was not going to the Williamsons' party; she had made up her mind. The Williamsons were in leather; they were very successful and had a large early Edwardian house with bay-windows and corner cupolas and bathroom windows of stained glass overlooking the river. They were fond of giving parties several times a year. Men who moved only in Rotarian or golf circles turned up with wives whose corset suspenders could be seen like bulging pimples under sleek dresses. About midnight Mrs. Williamson grew rowdy and began rushing from room to room making love to other men. The two Williamson boys, George and Freddy, became rowdy too, and took off their jackets and did muscular and noisy gymnastics with the furniture.

At four o'clock she went upstairs to close the windows of the music-room and pull the curtains and make up the fire. It was raining in misty delicate drops and the air was not like Christmas. In the garden there were lime trees and their dark red branches, washed with rain, were like glowing veins in the deep blue air.

As she was coming out of the room her sister came upstairs.

‘Oh! there you are. There's a young man downstairs who wants a song and doesn't know the name.'

‘It's probably a Danny Kaye. It always is.'

‘No it isn't. He says it's a Christmas song.'

‘I'll come,' she said. Then half-way downstairs she stopped; she remembered what it was she was going to say to Effie. ‘By the way, I'm not coming to the party,' she said.