“Darling, when you make journey would you rather have cocktail cabinet than Sabby?”
I said “Yes,” but she knew I meant “No,” and when she pretended to sniff sadly I also knew that I had never seen her look less sad. And I asked her:
“Would you rather have a holiday with an Indian prince who could give you jewels the size of blackbird’s eggs—or with a poor British officer who can’t even give you a nice ring to put on your finger?”
“I don’t like jewels,” Sabby said. “Couldn’t Indian prince give something else?”
“Oh yes. He could set you riding on a gorgeously caparisoned elephant.”
“I don’t understand caparisoned, but I should like to have an elephant.”
“Perhaps I will find you an old elephant that is going cheap.”
“Please, darling. That would be lovely.”
“But really, it is true you know. I couldn’t even afford to buy you a ring with a decent stone. I’ve got hardly any money.”
“Do you wish to have lots of money?”
“Yes, I’d like to have shares in gold-mines, and chemical industries, and Woolworths. It would make the morning papers much more interesting.”
“Then you would only be interested in the dull columns of figures and you would not care about me. I am glad you have hardly got any money.”
“Wouldn’t you like just one ring? I might save up enough money for that, and then people would think we were really married.”
“I don’t mind what people think.”
“Not really?”
“No, darling. Not except you.”
“You know what I think,” I said.
“I tell myself that I do, because that is the only way that I can be happy. I do hope that I am right, and that it is not just that you are being kind to me.”
“There’s no need to worry about that,” I said.
That evening we reached Delhi, and when we got out of the train the temperature was about 100 degrees. At Bombay it had never been so hot as that at night, and after the air-conditioned coach it was over-powering. We changed into a train on which there were no special coaches, only small fans that did no more than blow a stream of hot air into our faces. We lay on separate bunks because it was cooler and thought of the Himalayas three hundred miles in front of us. I don’t think we slept at all, though we drank a great deal of water with which we had replenished our thermoses. Bahadur had given his licence for this operation to be carried out in Delhi, which was one of the few places where the water could be relied upon. The next morning we had another change, and by lunch-time we were at the foothills. I had not seen any mountains since my convalescence up at Simla, and after the flatness of Bombay, and the plains of the Jumna and the Ganges, the sight was exhilarating. We could not wait for the bus that would have taken us the last fifty miles. We said who cares, anyway, about rings with good stones or about Woolworth shares, we were going to have a car. It was an old car with a desperate driver, who went round corners like all native drivers do wherever there are precipices and horseshoe bends. I was scared because it was the beginning of the holiday and I kept calling to the driver. But he only smiled and nodded his head and drove a little faster. It did not seem to trouble Sabby in the least. She rested her head against the tall back seat and a smile played softly on her face. Her eyes were round and bright as she looked at the distant peaks that appeared and disappeared again as we swung round the corners. It became perceptibly cooler as we climbed noisily in gear. This new sun, brightening the mountains, might not have been the same one that was burning up the torrid land below. Here it shone down benevolently, creating instead of destroying, giving pleasure to your eyes instead of blinding. We put down the hood of the car, and the air was good. When you have breathed air that is like brackish water, you know that it is a good description to say that mountain air sparkles and is like champagne. Only this was not expensive and in bottles; it was champagne showered over us, champagne everywhere in lashings. It made us a little drunk.
It also made us ready for our tea when we arrived at Jali Tal.
(2)
It was Mr. Headley who had told us about Jali Tal. I had told him the kind of place I wanted, somewhere quiet and remote; and though I had not explained the reason, I knew that he guessed, because of the wise, understanding look that he gave me and because of the smile in his eyes that was not repeated by his mouth. He said, “Jali Tal is quite nice, quite nice. It’s not like the usual Himalayan resort—no dancing there, you know.”
If he had said it was Shangri La we should not have been disappointed. And because he had only said it was quite nice, and really it was a place of unimaginable beauty, we were speechless with delight, like a child who tears the paper from a Christmas parcel and is confronted by a wonderful toy he had never dreamed of possessing.
It was a lake set in the mountains. It might have been Switzerland, only instead of a single back-cloth of glittering peaks the mountains towered up one behind the other in an endless succession, each higher than the next and a different colour, until somewhere in the distance, somewhere that was no longer the same world, the last visible range hung unbelievably in the sky. I have always wanted to climb mountains when I have seen them—but not these. These were not real, and when you are awake you cannot climb mountains that belong to a dream. They were like a mirage, like something that the atmosphere and the rays of the sun had concocted and from which we dare not take our eyes lest they should disappear. They were something that you could not look upon and think small things without shame, any more than you could be foul-mouthed in the depths of a cathedral.
There were only a dozen houses by the lake, and a mile away a native village. Our hotel was a hundred feet up, and from the windows of our two rooms the whole fantastic vista could be seen. Even there, not a third of the way to the snow-caps, we felt our spirits raised above the world of struggling humanity, as though a train fare and a few gallons of petrol had brought us to the state that Lala Vikrana would have had us attain by breathing exercises and chastity. Bahadur carried up tea to our sitting-room, and we sat at the window watching the colours change as the afternoon drew on, greens and lavenders and purples in a dozen hues, and the white crown glowing like mother-of-pearl. And when, the next morning, too late to see the dawn break, we gazed out again, the entire landscape had been washed by its night-bath and young sunbeams danced about the lake; and the mountains stood out in new attire like freshened giants, and above them, still, was the halo of dazzling snow. There was no end to the excitement of these transformations.
In the hotel there were a dozen other guests, all of them English except for a tall, cultured Indian whose name was Sir Ram Nath. If it had not been for the darkness of his skin and also of his eyes, he too might have been taken for an Englishman. He had been to Oxford and the Sorbonne, and he spoke of Devonshire and the South of France with something like nostalgia. Someone had once said to me, “Suspect any Indian with a title. He is a collaborator.” But I liked Sir Ram at once. I liked him because of his very gentle toleration of things that were evil, as one so often likes people with a quality one is conscious of lacking. And I liked him for his sincerity and the good reason behind his convictions. Sometimes in the evenings I would let Sabby go first to bed, and I would have a night-cap with him and one of his cigars. He opened himself up to me only slowly; but as the time went by I realised that, without using the same terms in which I had thought of it, he was teaching me the philosophy of gentleness of which I had caught a glimpse before. The philosophy that Sabby, using no words at all, was also teaching me. He taught me not to confuse gentleness which was love with gentleness which was only weakness.
Amongst the others in the hotel there was a mother with her two young girls, who had come up from Calcutta for the summer. She had another child, a son, at school at Winchester, and I thought she was like so many of the mothers whom I could r
emember would come down to my own school at half-term to see their sons, and would sit watching the cricket match with a masculine interest. Only now I knew the interest was not really masculine, but a very feminine sympathy with the interests of their boys. This woman was of big build, and she wore a tweed skirt and strong shoes. She loved her son more than her daughters, perhaps because he was farther away; and perhaps due to that, as though to make up for it, she would do anything for the girls that they wanted. She went out of her way to show kindness to Sabby and myself, though with a kind of restraint as though she was afraid that we would think she was trying to interfere. I believe she was interested in me because I was English and, to her, young—two things in common with her son. And possibly she was imagining to herself her own son married to a Japanese, and thus making herself peculiarly sensitive to the difficulties, she wanted to help smooth them away. I don’t think she ever suspected that we were not really married. We usually spoke Japanese together now, and this must have suggested that I had lived in Japan, and probably been married there. I could not talk about the real reason for my knowledge of the language.
We did not keep up the pretence that Sabby was Chinese. As Mr. Headley had said, there was no need. Everybody was good to her. I sometimes thought that they made too much fuss of her and I did not have her enough to myself; but also I was sufficiently human to feel a reflected glory in her success. The elevated atmosphere had not cured me of my earthly egotism.
We went riding. There were fine ponies there, sleek and strong and sure-footed as one would expect to find in that bold country. The two girls, ten and twelve, handled them fearlessly. They had been here every year since they could walk, and they had been given freedom here, and they knew the animals as they knew the natives and the trees and the valleys and the mountain-tops, and nothing frightened or deterred them. They might have been stranded somewhere all night, and they would have looked after themselves with the knowledge of the woodsman and the lack of superstition that was their Western inheritance. They taught us to ride. Or rather they left me to my own devices with only an occasional prompt, and circled round Sabby on their ponies, and lectured her with serious, mature little faces, using technical words that she didn’t understand. When she was bewildered they were patient like their own school-mistresses, and explained in simple terms, helping each other out, as though they were themselves as old as the hills behind them and speaking to a child. Sabby nodded her head, and she was rather like a child, much more like one than them.
“This time, not pull rein so hard,” Sabby said. When she was a little confused her English always deteriorated.
“I won’t pull the rein so hard,” the girls said in chorus, looking disapprovingly at me, because Sabby had told them that I did not bother to correct her English, and they had appointed themselves very seriously to this task.
“Oh dear,” Sabby said. “I shall never learn. This pony is very angry with me because I am stupid.”
“It loves you,” said one of the girls.
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course it does. It thinks you are sweet, and so do we.” I could not really see her face change colour from where I was, but I know that Sabby blushed. It touched her to be told this by the children. “But you must not let it think you are not firm with it, or it will try to show off. You must pretend to it that you know a lot about horses.”
“How pretend?”
“You must make noises to it.”
Sabby made a tentative clucking noise, and said, “Come on, nice pony.” I wanted to laugh with delight, because it was charming the way she said it, and she did not think the pony was nice at all now she was sitting on top of it. But Margaret, who was the eldest, gave me a quick, silencing look, and Jennifer, without twitching a muscle, gave her official approval. Of course their psychology was faultless, and in half an hour Sabby was trotting about looking happy and saying “Nice pony, nice pony,” beginning to grow honestly attached to it. Then the girls, whose ideas always coincided, said it was time to stop.
“Please,” Sabby said. “Please may I ride a bit more?”
“No,” said Margaret. “You’ve had enough today.”
“This afternoon couldn’t I have short time with pony?”
“The pony. No, not until tomorrow.”
“The pony will forget all about me.”
“Oh no; you will see it’ll recognise you at once. You have done very well for the first time.”
“Honestry?”
“Honestly,” we all said.
When we became used to the ponies the girls suggested all kinds of expeditions into the hills, that were to last anything up to a week. They thought our presence would make Mrs. Mather amenable to the idea, and I believe that she would have consented but for consideration for Sabby and me. She was afraid that the children were making themselves a nuisance to us. They had grown fond of Sabby, and now they called her “Sabby darling,” leading her about by the hand and showing her all their local discoveries—ruined peasant huts, birds’ nests, the source of a stream. I was only “Mr. Quinn,” and tolerated as her husband; though often they would take me on one side and tell me how I must treat her, and they would watch me to see that I carried out their instructions. Once they found a beautiful yellow wild flower, the name of which I don’t think we ever discovered; and this they put in her hair. They were mad with excitement over the result, and I agreed with them that it did enhance her beauty; only she needed her kimono then to complete the picture. She had to wear this flower until the petals were dropping off, and although we searched the hillsides as if prospecting for gold, we never found another like it. I was told that when we got back to Bombay I must arrange for a regular delivery of flowers, as nearly like this as possible, so that Sabby should never be without this indispensable addition to her charms. It was all Mrs. Mather could do to prevent Margaret and Jennifer from following us on the occasional day that we had completely to ourselves. We went off with a sense of guilt at our selfishness, leaving them standing on the verandah looking after us, like two dogs that had not been allowed to go for a walk. We took sandwiches and a thermos, but we did not go far. We found a comfortable spot under a deodar tree, overlooking Jali Tal and the serried lines of mountains to the gargantuan range at the end of the world. We did not talk a great deal, because when feelings are sure and the surroundings themselves eloquent, there is not a great deal to be said. I began to understand why a yogi like Lala Vikrana would sometimes take a vow of silence: because words, however beautiful, are bound to fall short of a perfect experience; and words are powerful and can drag you down to their level, as they can also bring you up to their level if they are greater than your best experience. But then if you are an ordinary person you cannot go for long without any words at all. And in beautiful places, and especially when you are in love, you can say very simple things without being ridiculous. So we said to each other little things without much meaning, and asked old questions and tried to think of new answers; and then we went down again to the hotel and thought that in all our lives a day had never been more perfect. And we also thought that about the night when we went out after the children had gone to bed, and the moon was a vivid white disc in the sky and all the lake shimmering. Then we were even closer than during the day, and when we were in bed the moon still drenched half the room. We talked then, until the moon had gone and it was dark.
Sabby painted a little. I remembered now for the first time that long ago in the Taj she had told me she ‘tried to paint,’ and this I passed on to the children, whom I knew would not let her hide her talent under a bushel. They had their own box of watercolours, and they asked their friend the carpenter in the local village to make an easel to their precise design. After that Sabby could not refuse. First of all she painted large Japanese characters for them with the brush. She did them beautifully with a swift, easy stroke, and told them that she had written their names. Th
ey were wide-eyed with wonder; and when I told them that in Japan such writing was thought of as a work of art, they said impatiently that anybody could see it was a lovely thing, although they couldn’t understand the meaning. Afterwards Sabby painted small landscapes. There was no mistaking them for the work of anyone but a Japanese; and yet it was how we had all seen the mountain in the distance, rising up as though on a mist, mysterious mountains that might themselves have been a vapour—and in the foreground, in our world, a deodar like a sentinel, challenging intruders. Then, because we all insisted, she painted portraits. She painted Jennifer first, and then Margaret, Mrs. Mather and me; and though she insisted it was not so, and she had not meant it, we all looked like Japanese. It was partly her style, which was Japanese; but in addition she had given us all, unconsciously, an Oriental physiognomy. When we teased her, she wanted to tear these up. But the girls were delighted, and they took them away and hid them.
The month slipped away. The days fell over each other and were gone, and nothing could stop them; and yet although they passed so quickly, at the same time the school and Rosie and the Mayfair Hotel seemed infinitely remote, as though at least a year had intervened. I could not imagine myself fitting into the school life again after this and I did not want to go back to Rosie’s. Sabby must have thought the same, for it was she who said:
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