by Emily Hahn
“Hunt Ball?” said the Major scornfully, the first time friends made the suggestion. “Never!”
The friends, aided by me, won the day nevertheless. I wanted an excuse to wear evening dress, and a Hunt Ball is almost the only occasion where evening dress is worn. The Major had reason on his side. He didn’t have a dinner jacket and could hardly be expected to go out in the only similar garment the Japs had left him, his formal red regimentals.
“But you still have your pink coat,” I reminded him, stumbling a bit over that word “pink,” which is sheer understatement. “Or have you outgrown it?”
“Certainly not,” he said, stung. “If you’ll guarantee nobody will come up in the middle of the floor and demand my subscription for the past ten years, I’ll wear it. I don’t want this to set a precedent, Mickey; one Hunt Ball will be enough. Is that understood?”
Everyone looks very beautiful at a Hunt Ball, especially the men, at least those who wear their pink coats. But at first I was the victim of a strange sensation: where else, I wondered, have I attended a binge like this? It must have been long, long ago, I told myself. Then I realized that it was only that New Yorkers have long since got out of the way of subscription dances of any sort. Only debutantes and suchlike small fry really dance back in the States, and my nostalgic memories were of fraternity parties or high-school dances. The illusion was heightened by the fact that the band kept playing music which I used to dance to at those same parties. Jive hasn’t reached Dorset as yet. I don’t suppose it ever will. Waltz succeeded two-step, one-step succeeded waltz, and though nobody carried those dear little programs with tiny pencils attached, the general impression was of that era. The big house, the conservatories—it was all in period. Yet the ladies were well turned out, the men were dazzlingly handsome, and the bar was thronged.
“Starving England!” said the Major scornfully. “You’d have thought the Government would put a stop to all this.”
Since he was obviously trying to scandalize our host, his very old friend, our host refused to be scandalized.
Somebody was sounding a horn, leaning out from the upper gallery of the main hall. “Now it begins,” muttered my partner, who was not wearing pink. “Hunting noises. Why I ever come to these things …”
A group of young men near the bar answered the horn joyfully with whoops and halloos. Someone started a snake dance on the floor and we all joined in, even my scornful partner. Perhaps, after all, the Major didn’t. He was in the bar. The evening wore on. Little by little the crowd thinned out, the younger people going home first and the older ones hanging on to the end. We should have stayed, but the Major didn’t want to.
“Why does one come to these things?” I heard a lady in silver lame ask a big fat man in pink. Then, full of the joy of spring, they skipped out for the Lancers.
The Major dragged me away, though I went protesting. I felt old enough to carry on indefinitely.
It was our third Hunt Ball. We had weakened, as we always knew in our hearts we would, and had fallen for the fugitive nostalgic charm of the Cattistock. Now staggering news had taken the edge off the evening and put it on a far more important matter: the future. Driving over to the Ball, we told our host.
“What do you think, Jeff?” I demanded. “Charles is going to be a professor!”
Jeff didn’t take it in at first. “What’s the joke?” he asked. “Have they turfed you put of the Army at last, Charles, or what?”
“No, but I hope they will; it would simplify matters,” said the Major.
“It’s not a joke,” I said, “or if it is, it’s a good one. Charles is honestly going to be a professer at King’s College, Jeff. Professor of Camoens— What was it, Charles? I always get it wrong.”
“Camoens Professor,” said the Major patiently, “of Portuguese History and Literature, or Literature and History, I forget which. Good salary and, as far as I can see, no work, at least not what I’d consider work. All I have to do is publish as much as I can, and give an occasional lecture.”
“Good oh!” Jeff was hearty, though puzzled. “Look here, old boy, what’s the racket? You haven’t any degrees or anything, have you? I thought you went through the ordinary mill, Sandhurst and so on; how do you get away with this?”
“The thing is, nobody in England except Charles was ever crazy enough to specialize in Portuguese History. There really isn’t anybody else they could get. Isn’t that it, Charles?”
“That’s it,” said the Major. “It’s like the duck-billed platypus: I’m the only one of my kind. Now my problem is to get out of the Army. They’re cutting down the Forces and you’d think they would welcome a chance like this, but they didn’t.”
“I know,” said Jeff, who is in the Navy. “I know. They’ll be sticky if you want to get out, whereas plenty of chaps who want to stay in are getting the sack.”
“Exactly.” They brooded over it for a little. “Moreover, it’s not as if I were the slightest use to them,” continued the Major. “One operation after another on this bloody hand, and in between I do damn all down in Dorset, and I’m on full pay all the time. They’ll never give me the sort of job I’d want; plenty of Staff College people are ahead of me on the list. You’d think—”
“Oh no, I wouldn’t, old boy. No, I wouldn’t.”
“It’s partly a ramp about my wound pension, of course,” said the Major. “If I quit before my time’s up—that’s two years to go and I’m not having any—I sacrifice the pension. I looked it up last week. I can’t go on with all this hanging in the air, though; I’ll have to hand in my resignation when the medical report goes through, or I’ll miss this chance.”
“No, no, you mustn’t do that.… Well, well, it’s extraordinary.”
“Isn’t it!” I said happily.
“It’s hardly fair,” said Jeff. “All that luck.”
“Well, you should have studied Portuguese harder when you were a schoolboy. Now you know.”
What can it be like, I wondered, to get out of the Army when you’ve been in it all your life? Once I laughed because Beryl’s husband, the Brigadier, who has been on most of the fronts in the war, said, “One leads such a sheltered life in the Army.” He was not being humorous, either; he meant it. Later I knew I had been silly to laugh, because in a special way it is quite true. Everyone knows it is true in peacetime, but even in war there is uncommon security for most soldiers if they have been well trained. They know what they are to do in this case and what in that. They know the codes. Soldiering is the one international profession, and if you follow the rules you will be all right, as long as you aren’t blown up or cut down. You haven’t as many decisions to make as you would if you were a civilian. You haven’t the crushing weight of responsibility, neither for your wife, your children, nor yourself. The Army takes care of your wife and children, after a fashion, and it takes care of you. You are insured. The bank at home takes care of your income tax, which is all cut and dried. If you are wounded but survive, the Army hospitalizes you; the Army does your dentistry; the Army—After all, what is the Army but a totalitarian state within a state?
Even a captive soldier, I reflected, going back to an old grievance —even a military prisoner of war is better taken care of, in occupied territory, than are most civilians. Military prisoners are housed and fed according to international law (except when the victors are like the Japs and disobey the rules). There are no international laws to protect civilians who simply flop and flounder, and struggle along as best they can.
Just the same, I thought, and brightened as I thought it, the civilians in occupied territory are free, and the military prisoners are not. This, too, was not always true in the last war, but in general it is. In fact, I continued, you don’t have to qualify it; even in unoccupied territory the civilian is free whereas the soldier is not.
So. Here is the Major, I reflected, about to taste adult liberty for the first time in forty-three years. He’s earned it. Completely on his own and just because the s
ubjects interested him, he learned Portuguese and Dutch, and their history in the Far East from the beginnings of the early explorations and conquests. He became expert in documentary research. Nobody helped him at first, or took any interest, but he was probably glad of that because it wasn’t too good to be known as a “clever” boy. He wasn’t clever; he was just quiet. He kept his studies quite apart from everything else.
Still, if you keep publishing papers, however special they may be, other specialists read them. Now his sins had found him out. The Major was a professor.
“Of course Charley always was clever, wasn’t he?” said Elaine.
I didn’t think at this late date that Charles would mind. Quite frankly and without flinching, I admitted it.
10. LOUISE
Imperceptibly things began shaping themselves. Sometimes, glacierlike, the Army seemed to move forward toward the Major’s formal release, when he could become what I called an honest workingman. In the meantime we planned. How could we manage a dual town-country existence? Many people in England do live in the country and work in the town, but we are a long way off for that sort of commuting, especially nowadays, when trains are few and slow and crowded. We watched the advertisements for some sort of possible flat or set of rooms within a possible price. There weren’t any.
“We want rooms in a house where somebody else lives all the year round and through the week ends when we’re not there,’’ said the Major, “so we won’t be burgled.”
Burglars were becoming very prevalent, considering that we were in honest England. I can never be so surprised and indignant as the British about this, because I am used to living in China, where burglaries are all in the day’s work. One morning in Shanghai, for instance, I woke up to find myself absolutely without a stitch of clothing except my nightgown and a stocking, the mate to one which the burglar had used to tie up his bundle comfortably. But the burglars in England are more annoying because one can’t go out and buy more things to replace the lost ones.
“We’ll have to wait and ask everybody,” I said. “What about a service flat?”
“At least ten guineas a week, and we’d have to pay the year round,” said the Major. “No.”
“Well, naturally. No.”
In the meantime, during our infrequent visits to the Great Wen we did as everyone else was doing in England or the States: we moved in on friends. In Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, or wherever some unlucky acquaintance had an extra bed, we moved in on friends. Like everyone else we sometimes brought our sheets. One lady suggested we bring blankets as well, but the Major was angry, and on that visit we stayed with somebody else.
As a young girl I used to laugh bitterly at old returned Colonials who sat around miserably in London or San Francisco, living only for their reunions with other old Colonials. It came to me as rather a shock when I realized I was an old Colonial myself. We were forever making dates with dear old pals from Hong Kong or Tokyo, and getting together with them for Chinese food at the Hong Kong Restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue—yes, and using chopsticks to eat with. Isn’t life peculiar? I have even sat shrinkingly with shame in the Rajah while my escort complained loudly to the waiter that the curry wasn’t hot enough. He might at least, I reflected, have said it in Urdu. Then I reflected further that I am just as bad in my Chinese restaurants. One day, indeed, I went to a new one— new to me, that is; we stick to the Hong Kong mostly, because it is near everything, and because you can’t get rice in any of them anyway unless you are lunching with the Chinese Ambassador. That day I had been drinking cocktails with a girl I used to know in Shanghai, and out of pure memory and Shanghai habit, I suppose, I got a little drunk. It could not have been the cocktails, because drinks in London are very small and weak nowadays, but I was, certainly, a little drunk, and in the restaurant I talked Chinese to the waiter. To my astonishment, he answered me.
Now nearly all waiters in Chinese restaurants, all over the world except perhaps in China, are southerners who speak dialects of the south; if not Cantonese itself, Hakka or Fukienese or one of the others. I would never have essayed my halting Mandarin if it had not been for the cocktails, and even the cocktails did not blunt my surprise when the waiter answered me so fluently.
“How does this happen?” I said. “How many of you northerners are there in London, anyway?”
“I am one of the only three waiters from Shantung in all of London,” he said proudly, “and I should like to go back there.”
Then he took away everything we had ordered—”You don’t want to eat that muck,” he said scornfully—and brought us roast pork, and good vegetables, and melon soup. He gave me an armload of bean sprouts and noodles to take home with me, and let me in on a secret about soy sauce: I could make it myself, he said, with Bovril, just the way they do in the restaurants. We were all grinning like Cheshire cats. I was very happy indeed, until I realized I was acting just like any old Colonial.
Oh well, the whirligig of time.
“At least we don’t act like prisoners of war,” I said to Michelle, “or do we?”
Michelle tactfully did not reply immediately. She is teacher of French in Hong Kong University, and had come down to Conygar to spend a week with us, waiting for the ship which was taking her back from a year’s leave.
“I don’t think we do,” I continued, becoming a little uneasy. “Naturally there are times, when Charles’ old pals from jail are here and they get started talking about the good old days when they stole potatoes from the guards. That sort of thing. Sometimes it almost sounds as if they had fun there. But you and I are just the same sometimes, and it’s a deceptive impression. Frankly, you’re the only person I knew during the war that I seem to be able to talk to about anything but the good old days. Are you looking forward to meeting all the dear old faces we saw so endlessly?”
“I can scarcely bear the idea,” said Michelle with passion.
“Now, Louise—”
“Louise,” said the Major, who had just come in to steal a postage stamp, “seems to have had no existence before she was interned.”
“Certainly that’s all she talks about,” I said. “Morning, noon, and night. Louise never takes a cigarette without being reminded of the balsam needles they had to smoke in Stanley. And the Stanley infidelities, and what a lovely girl Vivienne was, who lived in Block B, and that awful bitch Nellie—”
“For God’s sake, don’t you begin,” said the Major. “You weren’t there, no matter where Louise was. Why doesn’t she ever talk about life before the war? I think she’s actually homesick for Stanley.”
“But, my dear Charles, of course she is,” said Michelle. “It’s still the only world that has any reality for her, and she’s not the only one. All those people who were in camp with her are the same, they are all homesick. Haven’t you seen them in the London Chinese restaurants?”
The Major and I looked at each other guiltily.
“They are pitiful to see,” continued Michelle, not noticing. “They are overjoyed to be together again; they talk like magpies. I think they feel cold, alone, and out in the world after all those years of huddling together.”
The Major looked dubious. He himself has no desire to return to his camp, but then a military jail is not quite like a concentration camp.
“Besides, you must remember,” said Michelle, “that Louise, like all Chinese, is fond of company. She is not used to the country. Chinese like to talk.”
“Yes, they do that,” I said in heartfelt tones. “But after all there are ten people in this house right now.”
Michelle pointed out, with justice, that it was not the same. I had to agree. Between twenty-five hundred internees jampacked into a camp, passionately united in hatred against the Japanese nation, and ten individuals peacefully rattling around on the outskirts of an English village, there is all the difference in the world. Camp was exciting in its dingy way; Conygar was not. Louise wrote letters and got letters, stacks of them, and kept in touch with her camp com
rades who were in England. One by one, though, or two by two, the girls slipped away, back to the East, as their husbands were sent out to rejuvenated business houses, or as the Foreign Office found space in ships for people who had been repatriated but who now wanted to be re-repatriated. Louise waited anxiously for her own commands. She, too, was on the Foreign Office list, and when if ever she was summoned for her free trip home she would be given little time for preparation. The situation was worrying and nebulous. The day the last of her very closest twelve pals went sailing away, Louise was blue.
I kept a wary eye on her. Louise wasn’t looking well, and Ian had undergone quite the worst teething period I ever saw, with countless soiled nappies and many nights of howling. Louise had never really been trained as a housekeeper and mother. As an ordinary middle-class Chinese she would have learned a little something in that direction, though not much, because in China there is always a coolie for the scrubbing and an amah for the baby. But Louise wasn’t an ordinary middle-class Chinese; she was a Shanghai stenographer, excellent at office work but more ignorant in housekeeping affairs than, well, than I was: Stanley had given her a lick- and-promise training, but it had come late. She looked after Ian in her way. She washed his things incessantly. But she was too softhearted to housebreak him; she hadn’t the heart to wake him at night and put him on the pot, and that meant a wet bed to wash every day; she couldn’t bring herself to make him stay on the pot when he cried, and that meant dirty pants three times a day; she couldn’t be firm about making him keep quiet at night when he wanted to wake up and play, and that meant a tired, cross baby and a weary mother every day. Also, as Ian grew and learned to walk, he went far afield. We borrowed two playpens and put one in the garden, one in the bedroom, but Louise couldn’t bear to put Ian into a playpen because when she did he cried, and so he continued to wander about, getting lost, getting into mischief as only an eighteen-month-old baby can, and getting terribly on the Major’s nerves.