The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  I sat on, enjoying the Indian scene with its hurried Occidental interludes. The sun came round the corner and I could not be bothered to move. I closed my eyes and the heat lay heavily on my lids. I began to doze.

  I was woken by Bahadur. I was glad that he had come out to see me. He had discovered all kinds of things that he thought I ought to need in hospital. He placed his suitcase on the floor and produced them one by one, explaining why he had brought each of them. There was a pair of nail scissors, because even though I was lying in bed my nails would grow just the same; three more pairs of pyjamas, and would I please give him the ones I was wearing for the dhobi; and a writing-pad, since it was my filial duty to write home every week; and here was a little book that he had seen in a shop, and which he would like me to accept from him as a present, because once in his presence I had expressed a desire to know more about Indian birds, and he was ashamed that he didn’t know the names of any except something with white on its wings called a shama. Now, with this book I could sit on the verandah and compare the birds I saw with the illustrated plates.

  Then he stood over my chair and gazed down at me sorrowfully over his drooping moustache.

  “I should not have let you eat bad food,” he said.

  “It was not your fault, Bahadur. It was a germ.”

  But Bahadur did not believe in germs. He shook his head and smiled tolerantly, as though it was I who was superstitious and was speaking of evil spirits that inhabited my belly.

  “When Bahadur is not there, you go to bad places to eat and have hot, bad Indian foods that disagree. You are an Englishman, perhaps one day you become a great Englishman, but there is no use trying to be an Indian man with an Indian stomach.”

  “I will try to behave,” I said.

  “At four o’clock in the mornings you must not eat old eggs in bad Indian places.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Peter Sahib tells me all that you do.”

  “You tell Peter Sahib from me that he’s not to give away any more of my secrets.”

  “Peter Sahib and I talk for a long time about Michael Sahib. There are many things which I hear.’’

  “And you’re not going to leave me?”

  “I remain with Michael Sahib if Michael Sahib still wishes Bahadur.”

  It was not until he was on the point of leaving that he took two or three letters from his pocket. “I keep purposely these nice things to the last,” he said, but I suspected that he had not given them to me before lest I should be too interested in reading them to listen to his admonishment.

  There was an airgraph and an airmail letter from home, and the other note was from Peter:

  Cher ami. So there’s disease in them there bowels! Hard lines. But this will enable me to slack off for a day or two without feeling I am dropping too far behind you. So it’s an ill wind, etc. Had a scare myself at lunchtime when Mervyn told me I looked yellow. Visualised an attack of jaundice being used by the Air Force as an excuse to drop me over Tokyo, a Lawrence in natural disguise. However, it was only the peculiar light, not bile, and I am saved from the Nipponese firing squad and the other little inconveniences that would have transformed me overnight into the Great British hero of World War II.

  Mention of your tropical malady started Itsumi San off on a half-hour diatribe on dirty water—excrement—methods of dis­posing of same in all countries of the world (this man is a guide­ book, with an absolutely ubiquitous curiosity)—hygiene—great cleanliness of Nips as compared with Chinese. I really think he is under the orders of the Emperor’s Ministry of Propaganda.

  The lovely Wei, of course, quite desolated by your absence. I am wildly jealous.

  Sayonara,

  PETER.

  I read the letter over twice, and the final sentence several times more. Of course it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. But was it perhaps a half-truth? Had she noticed my absence, had she commented on it? Or was it all Peter’s joke, a leg-pull, a long-vowed retaliation for the time when I had slipped the Cellophane from a box of his scented soap, and inserted oranges and let him go back angrily complaining to the shop. But no—he would never expect me to take this seriously at all. Quite desolated, indeed!

  And then I suddenly found myself thinking: I shall write a letter to Miss Wei. It is absolutely necessary for myself that I do so. It is impetuous and mad and letters are dangerous, but I shall write her a letter because I cannot exist in hospital for another weekend and do nothing. I shall write saying that I am glad to hear she is better, and that I am sorry I am missing her classes, but perhaps when I am better she will come and have dinner with me—and please don’t bother to reply, and I am hers—hers what? I am hers sincerely. No, I am hers affectionately—nothing very outrageous in that. And she would have to reply. It would take one day for my letter to reach the Mayfair Hotel. She might not answer immediately. Allow two days-and one more day for the letter to arrive. Four days in all. An eternity! And even then, what could I expect except a formal note? That would be something, anyway.

  I took the pad Bahadur had brought me, and ten minutes later the letter was written, in an envelope and sealed.

  Then, because it was written and the impetuosity had expended itself, I was not sure that I would send it. I put it on the bedside table, and lying back on my pillow tried to make the decision. But the wireless was blaring hideously. I was quite unable to think.

  I was still in a dilemma when the Sister came into the ward to tidy the beds. She saw the letter.

  “Do you want this posted?” she said.

  “Oh—yes, please.”

  I was glad it had gone; for the time being a little bit more steam had been let out of the safety valve. I felt better, but still evil-tempered with the Captain called Gregory. I asked him to turn down the wireless. I suppose I might have asked him more politely. We began bickering like fishwives, and he said:

  “Ever since you came into this ward you’ve been damned impertinent and unsociable. What’s the matter with you?”

  “For heaven’s sake let’s stop tearing at each other’s throats,” I said.

  “Of course you want to stop now.”

  “We’ve got to live in this room together,” I said.

  “Well, you might learn some manners.”

  “Great Scot!” I said. “If you had any manners you wouldn’t inflict that excruciating noise . . .”

  The Sister came back into the room, and I was ashamed to be caught engaged in this childish squabble. “Oh, hell,” I said. “Don’t let’s go over this again.”

  “You’re Flying-Officer Quinn, aren’t you?” the Sister said. “There’s a visitor to see you.”

  She held open the door, and in that instant I thought, “Good, this is Peter—he will cheer me up, and I can ask him to explain his letter, and I shall hear about Miss Wei.”

  But it was not Peter.

  It was Miss Wei herself who came into the ward.

  (5)

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

  For a fraction of a second I thought she had come because of the letter; and then I remembered that I had only completed it half an hour ago and that she must have come of her own accord. I was trembling with excitement like a schoolboy.

  “I didn’t know whether it would matter coming,” she said. “Is it honestry all right?”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “It’s wonderful.”

  I got out of bed and put on my dressing-gown, and we went out together on to the verandah. We sat down in two armchairs in the shade, and for a moment I could think of nothing to say.

  “Tell me,” I said at last. “How’s the school?”

  “I am so bad at teaching. But everyone is good to me.”

  “Even Fenwick?”

  “He hasn’t been nasty again. We have had lots of fun playing games. There is no need f
or me to teach when we play games.”

  “What sort of games?”

  “Someone thinks of something, and then everyone asks questions in Japanese to find out what it is. It is always something funny. Mr. Lamb thought of the Brigadier’s grandmother.”

  “Did you think of anything?”

  “Yes, they made me.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “I shall ask Peter,” I said.

  “It was somebody’s little finger nail.”

  “Whose?”

  “It was yours. We had been talking about you because you were ill—that is how I knew you were here. But I got into awful trouble. I didn’t know whether finger nail was animal, vegetable or mineral. I said mineral, and nobody could guess. They were all very angry with me.” She sniffed her diminutive nose sadly, and her big eyes were warm and brown and humorously solemn.

  I looked at her in silence. It was the first silence we had had without any embarrassment, and you can tell a lot by silences.

  “You shouldn’t have sent those flowers,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “It was naughty of you to spend money.’’

  “How did you know they were from me?”

  “Afterwards I went to the shop, and they described person like you. But I guessed already, because I had found out you were kind.”

  “I wrote you a letter today,” I said. The Sister to whom I had given it was standing farther along the verandah. I called to her and asked her if she had still got the letter. She took it from her uniform pocket and handed it to me.

  “There’s no need to post it,” I said.

  “Please show me,” Miss Wei said.

  “There’s no need. I can tell you everything that’s written in it.”

  “Please.” She held out her hand.

  “Really,” I said. “There’s nothing in it.”

  “I would like to see.”

  “No, it’s a silly letter.”

  “But it is addressed to me, and has stamp. It is not your letter any more.”

  “I’ve got it,” I said.

  “Give it to me,” she said, with mock sternness. “I am your school teacher. You have got to do as you are told.”

  “All right,” I said, and handed it to her. She tore open the envelope and read it through, taking a long time, and then she folded it up carefully and put it in her handbag.

  “It’s rather embarrassing to have one’s own letters read in one’s presence,” I said.

  “It was kind of you to write. It is a nice letter.”

  “It isn’t a true letter. It’s formal and silly, and not in the least what I meant to say.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “That if you didn’t reply I should be angry and sad, and sit sulkily through your classes, and that even more than a reply I should like you to come and see me in hospital. But if I had said that you wouldn’t have come.”

  “I might.’’

  “I shouldn’t have deserved it. I would also have asked you in my letter why you sometimes looked sabishii.”

  “But I try to look happy.”

  “That isn’t the point,” I said. “It isn’t how you try to look. It’s how you are.”

  “I am really happy.’’

  “Perhaps that’s true,” I said. “Part of you is happy, and full of sunshine. When you laugh you’re very happy. But there is also part of you that’s sabishii.”

  “I don’t see how you know.”

  “It’s because you have expressive eyes.”

  “I shall wear spectacles, and then I shall become real school- mistress. I shall use stick.”

  “You’ll still feel the same,” I said.

  “But you will not know how I feel behind spectacles.”

  “Do you mind my knowing?”

  “Not if you don’t care about sabishii.”

  “I think it’s very beautiful and soulful,” I said. “I’m going to call you sabishii. Only it had better be Sabby for short. Sabby! That’s rather a good name—perhaps better than your real name.”

  “My real name is Hanako.”

  “The Flower Child! That’s a good name, too. But I’m going to call you Sabby.”

  “I already know what you are called,” she said.

  “Quinn is such an easy name to remember.”

  “But I also know other name, because your friend always uses it at school. It is Michael.”

  “What is it?”

  “Michael. Isn’t that the way I should pronounce?”

  “Yes, that’s the way.”

  “Michael,” she said.

  “Sabby.’’

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well?”

  When she went I walked to the gate with her in my dressing­gown and slippers, and saw her into the taxi. The driver had gone to sleep with his mouth open, and I had to wake him by shouting into his ear. Then I went back to the ward. As I entered the Captain looked at me disagreeably.

  “You can put on your wireless,” I said. “I don’t care if you blow off the roof.”

  “Thank you very much,” Gregory said with forced sarcasm.

  “Not at all,” I said, and I began to laugh. And then suddenly I realised that I couldn’t stop laughing.

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  (1)

  I would like to write a book about being in hospital. For many people it is an experience unique in their lives, when the mind, no longer bound to the routine of wage-earning and domestic habit, has the opportunity to take wing like a bird released from a cage—and so often, flopping about in new freedom, learns that its wings are clipped; and learns, too, on what an intricate mechanism it is dependent, infinitely more intricate than an aeroplane engine, and more difficult to control, more difficult to repair. I think that as many philosophies have been formed in hospital as in any study or garret; and as many resolutions made there as in any parlour on New Year’s Eve. Then I would also like to write the story of the people who passed through a ward in which I was bedridden, and how each one, by the things he brought with him, by a gesture, a word, a look, dropped clues to his personality. Like a wild animal advancing over soft ground, each man leaves his spoor. He may tiptoe or sidetrack; but the clever hunter will follow through a labyrinth to the secret lair.

  I thought I would like to try my hand at hunting in the hospital at Mahalakshmi. The Captain and the Lieutenant were discharged some days before me. Their beds were occupied by others; and because these new cases turned out not to be dysentery, after all, the beds were emptied again and filled again. I saw six new patients in all; and it was amusing to guess from their faces how they would call the sweeper, or from the way they called the sweeper how they would react to an anecdote. It was like playing jigsaws, fitting together the pieces of each personality. To each picture there were a thousand pieces, and sometimes the wrong ones linked comfortably and for a time were deceptive. And I soon found that when you play jigsaws it is dangerous to guess too soon at the nature of the picture. If there is a ship it is not necessarily on the sea; a child may be floating it in the bath-tub. The bird may be stuffed and on somebody’s hat.

  I watched, and began to make up my mind about people. And then I thought: but they too must be making up their minds about me, unconsciously perhaps, by the way I call ‘Sweeper!’ and the books I read, and my face and my accent and the ordinary things I say to them. They will be thinking I am a good fellow or a snake in the grass, or that I am pleased with myself or have an inferiority complex. They will have a picture of me.

  But how curious to be pictured in this way—what a different thing to picturing somebody else! For how can it be said of yourself that you are this or that, you are good or bad; for you are this and that and go
od and bad, you are a good fellow and a snake in the grass, and there are a hundred different people inside you. You have a hundred facets—and how, when the centre to which they turn is darkly incomprehensible to yourself, may others understand it and pass judgment on the actions and feelings that originate there?

  It is because we do not really understand that we pass judgment. ‘What a fool,’ we exclaim, ‘to marry a little bit of stuff like that!’—as though the man had been able to make a rational choice of whom he married. We rarely look deep enough; yet we often expect others to look more deeply into ourselves, so that they might see through our eyes the person whom we love, the ‘exquisite mirage.’ So I thought it might be said of me by people who did not understand, ‘What a fool to get himself mixed up with a Japanese woman! What an idiot!’ And I did not believe that anyone else could see in her all that I saw—poetry in a tiny movement of her hand, and in a look from beneath her dark lashes, a warm, flowing, generous passion.

  When I was a boy at school I had written a story about a man and a woman. The English master was a poet with a great understanding of human nature, and in red ink at the end he had written, ‘Yes, my dear, but people do not fall in love as quickly as all that, you know.’ I think my characters had declared their mutual love at the second meeting. The poet may have been right about love; but I afterwards found out that a lot can happen very quickly. If you put a flaring match-head to another, that too will flare up, because it is already a potential fire. In the conflagration they will stick to one another. But the flame will die . . .

  I did not see why this fire that had flared up in Bombay should not die, as fires have died in a million hearts elsewhere, and in my heart too. I expected it to die; but you may warm your hands before hot red coals this afternoon that by midnight will be cold grey ashes.

  When I went out of the hospital at Mahalakshmi it was in the afternoon.

  (2)

  As I went up the stairs of the hotel, I met Miss Jackson, the proprietress.

  “Ah, it’s Michael Quinn,” she said. “How is the funny tummy?”