by Herman Wouk
“Mr. Tudsbury?” said a young officer at the gangway. “The admiral’s compliments, sir. Please follow me.”
They went to the head of the line. The admiral, a surprisingly small man with crusted gold shoulder marks on his white uniform, held out a small scrubbed hand. “Frightfully pleased. Very keen on your broadcasts.”
He presented them to several stiff old men lined up beside him. Their sharply tailored tropical uniforms showed knobby gray-haired knees and elbows; their military titles were majestic, the highest brass in Singapore. The roar of airplanes interrupted the pleasantries; wave upon wave coming in low from seaward, scarcely clearing the Prince of Wales’s masts, then zooming over the waterfront. Distant guns boomed. Beyond the city, clouds of white smoke puffed up against the blue sky. Tudsbury shouted to the admiral, “Would those be our famous coastal guns?”
“Just so. Heaviest calibre in the world. Jolly good marksmanship, my target-towing ships report. Approaching Singapore in anger from the sea not advisable!”
“I’d like to visit those guns.”
“It will be arranged.”
All this was a series of yells through the racket of the air show. Tudsbury gestured upward. “And these planes?”
A tall grayhead in RAF uniform, standing next to the admiral, flashed pride from filmy wrinkled eyes. “Vildebeest and Blenheim bombers leading the pack. The fighters are American Buffaloes. Can’t touch our Spitfires, but dashed good, better than what the Japs have got.”
“How do you know that, sir?”
“Oh, Jap planes have fallen in China, you know.” The gray eyebrows arched in cunning. “We have the book on them. Second-rate, rather.”
Rule and Pamela stood at the rail amid a crowd of beaming British, watching the planes. He picked drinks off a tray passed by a Chinese boy. “God, Pam, your father does have a way with the brass. That’s Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham talking to him. Boss of the whole theatre, Commander-in-Chief, Far East. They’re chatting like old school chums.”
“Well, everyone wants a good press.”
“Yes, and they know he’s got the popular touch, don’t they? All acid and disenchanted in tone, yet in the end it comes out straight Rudyard Kipling, every time. For God and for Empire, eh, Pam?”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“Why, it’s pure gold. False as hell to the future, but why should he care, since he believes it?”
The planes were dwindling in the distance. Pamela sipped her drink, peering fore and aft along the gigantic deck. “You know, Phil, Captain Henry visited this ship when it brought Churchill to Newfoundland. Now we walk its deck off Malaya, and he’s commanding a monster like this in Hawaii. Unreal.”
“Rather on your mind still, your Yankee captain?”
“That’s why I’m here. Pearl Harbor’s my destination. Talky knows that.”
Rule grimaced and pulled at his mustache. “Look, I’m staying at the home of Jeff McMahon, the head of the Malayan Broadcasting System. Let’s all go to dinner at Raffles tonight, shall we? Jeff wants to meet your father and put him on the air. Talky will like Elsa. She’s the most beautiful woman in Singapore.”
“Then her husband’s a fool to have you in the house.”
“Why, darling, I don’t abuse a man’s hospitality.” Pamela’s response was an arched eyebrow and a contemptuously wrinkled mouth. “You’ll come to dinner, then?”
“I don’t mind. I can’t speak for Talky.”
Later the fat old correspondent, in the highest spirits, readily agreed to dine with Singapore’s most beautiful woman. “Of course, dear boy. Smashing. I say, the air chief marshal’s a brick. I’m to visit the most secret military installations here. Not one door closed. And I’m to write what I bloody well please.”
Elsa McMahon wore clinging ivory silk jersey, the only modish dress Pamela had yet seen in the colony. Her heavy glossy black hair might have been done in Paris. Four children milled and clattered about the rambling house, pursued by scolding servants; but the woman had a willowy figure, a cameo face, and the clear smooth skin of a girl, tanned to a rosy amber by tennis. She showed Pamela her house, her books, a whole wall of phonograph records, and before the sunset failed, her tennis court and the garden: a big disorderly expanse of lawn, high palms, flowering bushes and trees — gardenias, hibiscus, jasmine, and jacaranda —in air almost chokingly perfumed. Her easy English had a Scandinavian lilt, for her father had been a Norwegian sea captain. Her husband kept eyeing her as though they had been married a month.
They were killing time over drinks, waiting for Tudsbury to get away from an interview with the governor, when he rang up. The governor had just asked him to dine at the Tanglin Club. He was at the club now. Would Pamela and her friends forgive him, and join them, at the governor’s invitation, for a drink?
Rule said testily, as Pam still held the phone, “Pamela, that’s damned rude of him. Our dinner was all set. Tell him and that pompous-ass governor they can both go to hell.”
“Nonsense, he can’t turn down the governor,” said Jeff McMahon amiably. “The Tanglin Club’s on our way. Let’s go.”
It was a short drive from the McMahon house. Pulling to a stop at the club entrance, the director of the Malayan Broadcasting System turned to Pamela. “Here you are. Elsa and I will buzz on to the Raffles bar. Don’t hurry for dinner. The music goes on till midnight.”
“Nonsense. Park the car and come on in. The governor invited all of us.”
“I resigned from the Tanglin, Pam, when I married Elsa.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Elsa McMahon in the front seat turned her head. The dark eyes were solemn, the lovely mouth taut with irony. “My mother was Burmese, dear. See you at the Raffles.”
The Tanglin was spacious, sprawling, and stuffy. Full-length court portraits of the king and queen dominated the foyer; London magazines and newspapers were scattered about; and under the slow-turning fans, the everlasting white-coated colored boys hustled with drinks. A bibulous and strident noise filled the club, for the evening was well along. Tudsbury sat at the bar amid the same people Pamela had seen aboard the Prince of Wales. The men were getting quite drunk. The women’s evening dresses were as dowdy as their daytime getups. The governor was a placid, unbelievably dull person. Pamela and Rule downed one drink and left.
“Well, the McMahons didn’t miss much!” she said, as they came out into a moonlit night heavy with flower scent. British clear through, Pamela believed in the happy breed’s superiority, though she never spoke of it. She knew such clubs had such rules; all the same, the exclusion of Elsa McMahon had enraged her.
“Come along, you’re surely not just discovering the hard facts of imperialism.” Rule beckoned to a waiting taxicab. “How do you suppose twenty thousand whites, most of them frail ninnies, manage to rule four and a half million Malayans? Not by hobnobbing with them.”
“She’s as much a native as I am.”
“One can’t allow exceptions, love. The dikes of imperial snobbery hold back a raging sea of color. One pinhole, and they crumble. That’s doctrine. Elsa’s a wog.” He put on a nasal aristocratic voice. “Dashed pity, and all that — so in you go, and let’s join our wog lady friend.”
In the open palm-lined courtyard of the Raffles, a five-piece band of old white men played listless out-of-date jazz. It was very hot and damp here. The McMahons sat at a table, watching three gray-haired couples sweatily shuffling on the floor. Their greeting to Pamela and Rule was untainted by rancor. They gossiped about the governor with tolerant amusement as they ate.
He was a harmless sort, they said, the son of a vicar. The heat, the bureaucracy, the confusion and complications of his job, had reduced him in seven years to a blob of benign jelly. Nothing could shake, change, or ruffle him. The Malay States were an administrative madhouse, with eleven separate local governments — including some touchy sultans — to deal with. Somehow half of the tin and a third of the rubber that the democracies used came o
ut of this mess. There was money to be made, and it was made. Dollars had been steadily flooding into the British war chest. The people who did the work — two million Moslem Malays, two million Buddhist Chinese, about half a million Indians — all disliked each other, and united in loathing the white handful who ran things, headed by this serene white invertebrate living in Government House, on a high hill inside a big park, far from the congestion and smells of native Singapore. He had had seven years of continuous commendation from London, for keeping the wheels turning. He had done absolutely nothing except let it happen. In the British Colonial Service, said Jeff McMahon, that approached genius.
“Perspectives differ,” Rule observed. “I heard a three-hour tirade today against him. The Associated Press man, Tim Boyle, says he’s a tough bully with a censorship mania. Tim wrote a piece about the night life here. The censor killed it dead. Tim demanded a meeting with this governor, who bawled him out like a coolie. The governor’s first words were, ‘I read that story. If you were an Asiatic, I’d put you behind bars.
“Ah, that’s different,” said Elsa. “The British Colonial Office has a long memory. America started as a colony. Once a native, always a native.”
The McMahons ate little. After the coffee they got up and danced sinuously to the thin music. Rule held out his hand. “Pamela?”
“Don’t be an ass. I break out in a sweat here, with every move I make. Anyway, you know you can’t dance. Neither can I.”
“You asked Slote to dance with you in London.”
“Oh, I was cutting you.”
“Sweetie, you can’t still be angry with me.” The red mustache spread in an unoffended grin. “It all happened in another age.”
“Granted, Phil. You’re a yellowing diploma on the wall. Just hang there.”
“Crushed again! Well, I like your indignation over Elsa. But she’s a popular woman, and the Tanglin Club is a bore she can do without. What about the Chinese and Indians you saw uptown, swarming like rats in a garbage dump? That’s Singapore’s real color problem.”
Pamela was slow to answer. She had no political, social, or religious certainties. Life was a colorful painful pageant to her, in which right and wrong were wobbly yardsticks. Values and morals varied with time and place. Sweeping righteous views, like Victor Henry’s Christian morality and Rule’s militant socialism, tended to cause much hell and to cramp what little happiness there was to be had. So she thought.
“I’m a duffer on those matters, Phil. You know that. Hasn’t Asia always been more or less like this — a few rajahs and sultans eating off gold plate, building temples and Taj Mahals, while the masses multiply in cow dung and mud?”
“We came to change all that, love. So says Kipling. And Alistair Tudsbury.”
“Haven’t we made things better?”
“In a way. Railroads, civil service, a modern language. But Pam, there’s just been the hell of a flap here at the Tanglin Club. They barred from their swimming pool the Indian officers — the officers, I repeat — of the Fifth Indian Regiment! Educated military men, stationed here to lead soldiers to fight and die for the Tanglin Club! The decision stuck, too. It undid fifty years of Kipling.”
The McMahons left early to get back to their children; polite as they were about it, Talky’s defection had made the evening pointless. Philip Rule walked with Pamela through the hotel lobby. “Tuck your mosquito netting in firmly, darling,” he said at the stairway. “Check every edge. A few of those creatures can drain you like Dracula.”
Pamela looked around at the Chinese boys in white coats, crisscrossing through the broad lobby with trays. “The boozing, the boozing! Does it ever stop?”
“I was told, the first day I came,” said Rule, “and I’ve since heard it forty times in the white man’s clubs — that Singapore is a place of ‘drinks, Chinks, and stinks.’ “ He kissed her cheek. “Good-night. I shall now hang myself back on the wall.”
The first bombs fell on Singapore at four in the morning. Pamela was half-awake, sweating under the mosquito net, when she heard thrumming overhead. Vaguely she thought it was a night fighter exercise. At the first distant thumps she sat up, swept aside the netting, and ran into the sitting room. Tudsbury lumbered out of his room blindly blinking, clutching pajamas over his hairy belly. “That’s bombing, Pam!”
“I know it is.”
“Well, the yellow bastards! They’re really trying it on, are they? By Christ, they’ll regret this!”
Airplane roars came and went overhead. Bombs were bursting closer and louder. Pulling off his pajama top, Tudsbury stumbled back into his room. Pamela called from the french windows, “Talky, we haven’t even blacked out!” The streets were brilliantly lit. Clouds overhead reflected the glow. She saw no searchlights or tracer bullets, heard no sirens or ack-ack. It was nothing like a London raid. The one difference from other warm odorous Singapore nights, in fact, was that invisible planes overhead were dropping bombs, which the city was serenely ignoring.
His muffled answer came, “Well, nobody was expecting this. There are no land-based Jap bombers with the range to hit Singapore. Brooke-Popham told me that himself.”
“Then what on earth is going on?”
“Carrier raid, maybe. Of course, the Prince of Wales will intercept and sink any flattop around, if the RAF doesn’t get them first. One can’t reckon on suicidal madness in the enemy.”
Soon he hurried out of his room, untidily dressed. The bombing had moved farther off, but planes still drummed in the sky. She was at the desk, half-nude in her brief nightgown, dully leafing a typescript, hair falling around her face. “This broadcast is obsolete now, Talky.”
“Why? My military summary stands. That’s the meat of it. It’s twice as timely now! I need a new opening about this onslaught, and a resounding wind-up. Have a go at those, won’t you? I’ll redictate your draft when I return.”
“Where the devil do you think you’re going, during an air raid?”
“Army Public Relations. I rang Major Fisher. He’s holding a press conference right now, and — what’s the matter?”
Her head was sinking on the desk in her naked arms. “Oh, it just depresses me so! The whole thing, starting up again out here.”
“Courage, girl. These aren’t Germans. The planes up there are made of bamboo shoots and rice paper. We’ll smash these bastards. Ye gods, look at the lights, will you? This town’s really ablaze like a Christmas tree. Somebody will catch hell for being asleep on watch! I’m off. You’ll draft that new stuff?”
“Yes, yes. Go along,” she muttered into her arms.
Pamela was thinking that Clipper flights would certainly stop at once; that the sea lanes to Hawaii would become infested with Japanese submarines; that in fact she was cut off from Victor Henry for years or for good. To have come so far in vain! Would she even be able to get out of Singapore?
Dawn was breaking, and a faint cool breeze through the open french windows was freshening the room with garden scents, when her father burst in, trumpeting like a mad elephant, “Pam! Pam, have you heard?” Still in her nightgown, she looked up blearily from the typewriter. “Have I heard what?”
“Why, you silly frippet, we’ve WON THE WAR!” Tudsbury’s eyes were bulging from his head, and his hands were shaking. “Those yellow sods have gone and attacked Pearl Harbor!”
“What!”
“You heard me. Huge carrier raid! All kinds of enormous damage. The Yanks are in it, Pam! In it up to their necks this time! What else matters? We’ve won the damned war, I tell you! I must have a drink on it or I’ll die.”
He splashed whiskey into a tumbler, gulped it, and coughed. “Whew. We’ve won it. Won it! What a close-run thing. We’ve really won this damned war. I’ll have to rewrite that piece from page one, but by God, what a glorious moment to live in! These are the days of the giants, Pam. Their footsteps are shaking the earth —”
“What ships were hit?”
“Oh, the Yanks aren’t talking, naturally
. But the damage is immense. That much comes straight from the wire services in Honolulu. We weren’t caught short here, thank the Christ! They tried to come ashore at Khota Baru airfield, but we shoved them back into the sea. They did gain a beachhead in Thailand. We’ll be marching up there this morning to knock them all on the head. Two crack divisions are on the border, ready to jump off. The Japs have really run their heads into a noose this time, and — now what’s wrong?”
The back of her hand to her eyes, Pamela was striding to her bedroom. “Nothing, nothing, nothing!” She gestured at the desk. “There’s your damned draft.”
Tudsbury’s broadcast brought telephone calls and cables of congratulations from London, Sydney, and New York. He spoke of vast secret stockpiles and fortifications that he had seen with his own eyes; of heavy reinforcements on the way, as he knew from the highest military sources; of the striking calm of Europeans and Asiatics alike under the bombing. His draft script had cited the street lamps burning during the raid, as a humorous instance of Singapore’s sangfroid. Hesitantly, apologetically, the censor had asked him to cut this. He had amiably agreed.
Reeling off the statistics of America’s giant industrial resources, Tuds-bury closed with this peroration: “Wars are not fought by cold statistics, true, but by warm-blooded suffering men. Yet statistics foreshadow outcomes. This war, though it must yet cause grisly tragedy to mankind, will be won. We know that now.
“For the grim closing struggle, I can report, Fortress Singapore is ready. Fortress Singapore does not expect a tea party. But it is well prepared for its uninvited guests. Of one thing, let the outside world rest assured. The Japanese will not enjoy — if they ever get close enough to taste it — the bitter brew that awaits them at Fortress Singapore.
When he walked into the bar of the Tanglin Club after the broadcast, the people there rose to a man and clapped, bringing tears trickling on his fat face.
The bombers did not come again to Singapore. There was little word of fighting up-country, either. For Pamela it was a queerly evocative tropical replay of the “phony war” in 1939: the same lift of excitement, the same odd unreality, the same “back to business-as-usual.” The blackout was regarded as awkward novel fun, though the shortage of dark cloth gave the club ladies a cause for anxious twittering as they sat rolling bandages in sultry flowery gardens. Air raid wardens in tin hats self-importantly stalked the streets. However, there were no air raid shelters.