The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  Title

  Richard Mason

  THE WIND

  CANNOT READ

  Contents

  Contents

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Dedication

  To

  the Memory of

  My Mother

  Epigraph

  “Kono hana wa

  Kataku oru-na! to

  Iu tate-fuda mo,

  Yomenu kaze ni wa

  Zehi mo nashi.”

  —japanese poem

  “Though on the sign it is written:

  ‘Don’t pluck these blossoms’—

  it is useless against the wind,

  which cannot read.”

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  (1)

  It took all of April and May to get out of the jungle. My birthday was at the end of April, and I had laid my gold watch against Peter’s signet-ring that I should never live to celebrate it. He would have had the gold watch if by April 27th it had not been smashed beyond repair. I told him to take it and sell the gold; but he said we hadn’t been able to celebrate the birthday anyway, unless another jungle sore and a sock full of rice could be called a celebration; and, in any case, if the other thing had happened, he wouldn’t have left his signet-ring for the Japs to loot from my corpse. “And what do you mean, sell the gold?” he added. We did not think even then we would come through to civilisation.

  Behind us they were fighting their way out. Our only concern was retreat, but no one knew exactly where the line was, and once the Japs had crept ahead of us and blocked the road. We had to abandon our transport and get through the jungle as best we could. All our equipment had gone, except for a water-bottle and a haversack and a sock for rice.

  Many people were dropping out altogether from fever and exhaustion. They were left—whilst we had these things still—with a rifle and five rounds. They were supposed to have only one round because of the ammunition shortage, but we left them five to use as they liked on the Japs or themselves.

  There were bad dysentery cases, too, who discarded their pants and went on in their shirt tails. I had dysentery mildly; but my worst complaint was the sores that had started—four of them the size of half-crown pieces that ate into the flesh like acid, down to the bone.

  At night we slept on the side of the track when there was track to sleep on the side of, and to hell with mosquitoes and malaria. And to hell with tigers, for that matter—though fortunately we never saw a tiger to say to hell with.

  The nights were harder to bear than the days, especially when you slept. In the day there was some defence: a cynical humour, companionship, the preoccupation of sipping water, or longing for water, or dragging yourself up hillside; and distances and sizes were what you expected. But in the dark your fears reared up grotesquely. You were terribly small and alone. No British army, no Indian army, no General Alexander; only yourself in the clutches of a nightmare. I think a nightmare can be more real than the real thing; for you do not know it is a nightmare when you are sleeping, but when you are awake you can pretend life is all a dream.

  Once when we awoke in the morning Peter had gone. Two miles up the track we found him coming back to meet us. He had gone off in his sleep thinking we had left him behind. Another time a sergeant woke me. “I can see them!” he cried. “Look!” He pointed into the moonlit jungle. The perspiration was streaming down his face. Then he asked the time, and rolled over and was quiet. Afterwards he did not remember.

  Sometimes deserters joined us from the fighting battalions. Later, in India, most of them were awarded long sentences of imprisonment by a General Court Martial. We could not desert because there was nothing to desert to, and I was often glad there was not that alternative.

  So we crawled back, ill and shattered and depleted. I never saw a Jap outside of my dreams, not until later when one was shot down out of his aircraft 15,000 feet over Assam. You could see a dent the shape of his body in the paddy-field, arms out like a cross.

  It was the jungle and the sun that had broken us; and God knows how through all that one nurses the life spirit. I did not know how I could suffer this much and live, nor that I could remain sane through such torments of mind. Yet I was nothing like the worst.

  We thought that we would die and that the Japs would stick our rotting corpses with bayonets for fun. We did not die. We reached a camp near the Indian frontier, and the newly dead were carried from their beds to make room for us. Then there was a lorry and at last a train. On the train there were five hundred sick and wounded, with no doctors, no medical orderlies and no destination. We seemed to go all over India looking for a hospital that was not already too full to take us. At stations we made the natives unravel the muslim dhotis from their waists, and we washed them to use as bandages. We also put down the dead at stations.

  We were three nights on the train, and it was nearly mid­summer and the fans were not working. I thought the heat and the smell of sweat and wounds were as bad as anything in Burma.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day we reached Kachatola, and there were ambulances at the station. By five o’clock we were in bed. The hospital had hardly been completed, but there were white sheets and fans, and cool rooms with clean white walls. There were white nurses, too. And there was tea, and hot water, and medicine, and the attention of doctors.

  I knew that I was not going to die; at least, not yet.

  (2)

  I lay between the cool, white sheets, and there was the smell of hospital. I thought, heaven will smell like this, and angels will wear starched things like nurses and God will operate with rubber gloves. It will be just like this: you will come dirty and worn from the jungle of life, and you will be sponged and shaved and given fresh, beautiful clothes, and your pain will be assuaged and your sores healed, and there will be anodyne for the griefs and the bitterness and the hatreds of the soul. Then, purified and shining, you will step out amongst the lawns and the flowers and the fountains . . .

  There were no flowers or fountains in the hospital compound, only the brown earth and burnt grass; but it was near enough to heaven for me, especially when I woke suddenly in the night to find myself searching for my revolver in frenzied terror. Then I would discover that the dark shape I had seen was not a Jap, but one of the posts of the verandah, and I would sink back on to the pillows with indescribable relief. It is curious how persistent were those retrospective nightmares. When I asked the doctor about them, he said:

  “Perhaps they’re to intensify your joy when you find out where you really are.”

  “And when I dreamt of home in the jungle?” I asked. “Was that to intensify my horror when I woke up to reality?”

  I was only three weeks in bed. After that I used to sit in an arm­ chair on the balcony, smoking and thinking. It was not at once that I found I could think clearly again. All through Burma my thoughts had been feveri
sh and sick; I had said to myself a thousand times, “Was it I that had sat on the lawn by the river at Tewkesbury, reading fine, leather-bound, good-smelling volumes?” And reason, what remained of it, had said, “It was you, the same body-you. But not the same mind-you.” That was it, the body was the common denominator; and except for the body I was someone else, someone alien, doing things that had no connection with the self that I had been long ago.

  Now very gradually, serenity descended upon me once more and my old self drifted back. I felt a continuity with the person that I had been; yet when I sent my thoughts back to England it was not, so to speak, as the crow flies, but through Burma; through the jungle, through that period of time when my real self had been almost extinguished. So, like a convict whose completed sentence always has a place in his consciousness, I was in that respect changed.

  I savoured this peace in delicious content, and I wanted it to continue. I wanted to go on for ever smoking cigarettes and thinking, and sitting on the balcony just out of the sun. I did not want a woman, or whisky, or to play poker or listen to the wireless. In the ward they kept the wireless on all day long, anything at all so long as it was noise, and mostly it was the awful metallic cacophony of a jazz band. Instead I watched the tree rats in the compound; because, of course, they were not rats at all, but had tails like squirrels, and jumped like monkeys, and moved jerkily like lizards; and they were very pretty with their striped fur. I watched these and listened to the birds, and at night to the haunting cries of the jackals. I was happy, not wanting to come to grips with life again. Often I thought I would have done well to get something worse than jungle sores and dysentery, something painless but incapacitating.

  I was in no hurry to leave the hospital, though when the time came I was given a month’s leave, and went up to Simla. They all said, you won’t remember a minute of it, with all your accumulated pay you will be drunk for twenty-four hours a day. But I remember it all, not the effects of whisky and gin, but the long line of the snow-covered Himalayas behind the town, and the cool walks amongst the deodars, and looking down 6,000 feet to the hot, dusty plains, and feeling like a god. I found a servant, a bearer, who suited me well. He was a gentle person called Bahadur, who spoke English and understood my moods, though I think he was offended when I refused to let him dress me. He had soft brown eyes, and I liked him because he spoke fondly of his family and did not offer me his daughter for three rupees a night.

  In the evenings I sat in the garden of the hotel, sipping long drinks of gin and lemon, wishing that this month could be for ever. All the same, I knew that if it were for ever I should want to step down into life again, to my friends, and to change, and disorder, and new, interesting things. It was six weeks since I had seen Peter. He had been out of hospital before me and gone down to Madras, believing in a livelier recuperation. I didn’t want to see him again at once. But in time I should need the stimulation of his friendship and his conversation. My serenity would at length desert me, and I should lose that supreme detachment with which I gazed on the plains. I was never made to live in a cloud; I needed earthier sustenance.

  Besides, there was no choice. Beggars can’t be choosers—nor airmen, either.

  It was early September. Bahadur said, yes, Sahib, he would always be my bearer, he would come with me to Delhi; indeed, he must come with me to Delhi to see I drink no bad water on the train. He must see I do not wear one shirt two days.

  Thus, together, we descended to the plains.

  Chapter Two

  (1)

  I knew I was through with flying, and I wasn’t sorry. When I was in Burma and the dizziness had started, I had pretended nothing was the matter. After two or three bad scares I nearly crashed the aircraft, and that was the end. For the last three days before we got out I stood on the airfield and watched the others take off, feeling like a worm.

  There was good reason for feeling like that. I think the dizziness had come because part of me was afraid and did not want to fly any more, just as once appendicitis pains had started when I was scared to go back to school. There must have been some cause, and though the doctors would not say so, I still believe that was it. If I had not been dizzy, I would have gone on flying, because the fear of being thought a coward is the biggest fear of all; but the mechanism of the subconscious is so damnably clever.

  I felt like a worm, then, when the others were still flying; but later on the jungle made short work of my lingering heroics, and I did not care if I never saw an aircraft again in my life. If anyone asked me why I was off flying, I told them without any bad conscience of the dizziness. It was one of the little dishonesties that I allowed myself.

  I had a Medical Board in Delhi, and was officially ‘grounded.’ They might have added ‘with honour,’ for the Wing-Commander patted me on the shoulder, and shook my hand, and said:

  “It’s not so exciting at ground level. But life is good fun.”

  He fluttered the certificate which he had signed; he knew what his signature meant.

  “We’ll find you something interesting,” he said.

  “Quick promotion and staff pay?”

  “You never know,” he said.

  I did not care a great deal. The war in Europe would last a long time, and in the East it would last longer still. I would be in it to the end. I saw time stretching away, and I saw it in terms of the hot, sandy plains of India, insufferably dreary. Perhaps the dreariness would drive me at length to flying again . . .

  “Is there a good bar in Delhi?’’ I said.

  “There’s Davico’s,’’ he said. “Or the Imperial.”

  “Life is good fun,’’ I said with a weary jest, and he smiled.

  I began to stroll down the long avenue. After a while I found myself perspiring, and called a tonga.

  “Davico’s,’’ I said.

  The horse moved off at a trot. I said, “Slowly!” to the driver, but he did not understand. He flicked the back of the horse with his whip, and we went faster. I was banged about uncomfortably in the narrow, open carriage, and was glad when we reached the bar. “Two rupees,’’ said the driver. He could see that I was a newcomer. I don’t know what it is, but they can always tell.

  I held out to him a single rupee note. He took it between his fingers, looking at it as though I had insulted him by giving him an old cigarette end. Then he followed me with reproachful eyes, and as I went through the door of the bar I could hear a plaintive cry of “Sahib!” I went on, feeling uncomfortable, and angry with him for trying to cheat me, and sorry for him because even if I had cheated him the police would have taken no action. I remember once I saw two drunken soldiers get out of a carriage and refuse to pay. When the driver demanded his money, one of the soldiers struck his hand. There was a policeman close by, and he came over reluctantly; but it was only to tell the driver not to cause trouble.

  As I went to the bar I saw Peter was there with Mervyn Bentley. It was an exciting reunion. We didn’t know where to begin.

  “I should have known you were here at the best bar,” I said.

  “Only because it’s the best whisky.”

  “You find that fast enough.”

  “I’ve been here weeks,” Peter said. “Doing my Lutyens.”

  “I’ve done it this morning. It’s utterly soulless.”

  “I’m so glad you agree with me.”

  “It costs a rupee to get from one building to another, and then you can’t get in because it’s the Viceregal Lodge or the Commander-in-Chief’s house.”

  “You must be an Air-Marshal,” said Mervyn, “and have a super- charged Chrysler. Then New Delhi’s a paradise.”

  “The avenues were built for supercharged Chryslers.”

  “And the marble palaces for stuffed shirts.”

  “It was the right idea,” Peter said. “I’m going to be a stuffed shirt—very soon.”

  “It was bo
und to happen sooner or later,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m going to be a stuffed shirt. I’m going to join the Gymkhana Club now. Hurry up with that whisky.”

  I drained my glass. It was Scotch whisky, and it made me feel very happy. I forgot all about my serenity in Simla, and was glad to be with Peter again, and even with Mervyn, though I did not like Mervyn as much as I liked Peter. I had been with Peter on the boat from England and again in Burma and in the jungle. He was only twenty. He had been so young when the ‘phoney’ war was on that he had been allowed to go to the University of Grenoble to study French. Then the break-through had come, and he had been trapped in Unoccupied France. He had had a good time ski-ing in the Pyrenees, until he thought it was time to come home and join the Air Force. He walked over the Pyrenees, but they picked him up with a forged visa in Spain and put him in prison for six months. By that time there was something wrong with his ear, so that he was disqualified from flying. Now he was an Intelligence Officer in the Air Force.

  His name was Peter, but everyone said that it ought to be Algernon, because of the moustache that he had carefully cultivated, pushing it up at the ends. In London he used to take it to Maurice’s for its upkeep, and that is proof of how keen he was about his moustache. He was thinking particularly about its future, when it would be quite grey and exquisitely groomed. He liked to think of himself in the rôle of English Gentleman, which in fact he was by birth. He also wanted to be a good conversationalist, a connoisseur of wine and food, and a writer. He was doing excellently for his age in all these respects.

  “For God’s sake!” exclaimed Mervyn. “Isn’t this a lousy, rotten hole!”

  The fury and hatred in him had suddenly blown up like a gale, and his voice shook with vehemence. It was no particular surprise.

  We had seen too many of Mervyn’s neurotic outbursts to be either alarmed or impressed.

  “I was such a damned fool to come!” he went on.

  “Come where?”