by H. E. Bates
But Miss Jackie had no hatred; she had nothing to say. She roamed absently about the garden, among her passions. Emptily beating her hands, she could think of nothing but the night-light, the plum-branch and the way she had lain in the warmth of the bed.
A Place in the Heart
He found her quite by accident in one of the white lofty mission houses, in a mango-shaded courtyard of chattering birds, in the older and more elegant suburbs of the city.
She was working behind a long counter of coloured silks and native embroideries brought down from other mission houses in the hills. Gravely, for some time, she insisted on holding up only lengths of vivid colour for him to see: silks of glaring parrot green and acid yellow and one violent tomato-orange sari that made her drained pallor seem as delicate and insubstantial as tissue paper. She looked tired and ill, he thought: her arms like thin golden branches flowering into pink buds of painfully fragile nails. If a sudden breeze were to blow in from the courtyard and catch her holding one of the silk lengths she would, he thought, simply float away. Only her enormous black-brown eyes seemed to have permanence or solidity. All the time they transfixed him with a sort of troubled amazement: as if somewhere or other she had seen him before.
He explained at last about the silks:
‘They are for my mother,’ he said. ‘Not too loud, you see.’
He thought she seemed, if anything, more troubled than ever. The big dark eyes grew in brightness. The pale pink-budded hands enfolded themselves among masses of green and yellow and tangerine; and she said:
‘How old is your mother?’
Curious question, he thought. Did it matter?
‘She’s not that old,’ he said. ‘About fifty.’
‘In England?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to England,’ she said. ‘It’s something I long to do.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ he said, laughing.
‘I suppose not,’ she said.
Gravely she made a sort of apologetic smile, unfolding a length of palest blue silk with tiny scarlet frettings.
‘Your mother could wear this,’ she said. ‘This blue.’
She held it up, triangularwise, across her body. Her face, thrown up into contrast by the blue, was warmed out of its pallor into life. She seemed suddenly disturbingly beautiful. And all at once he was flattered by her graceful, warm and delicate stare into thinking she found him attractive too.
Well: the war was over. It was finished; who cared? In three weeks he would be going home. There wouldn’t be many more chances.
‘Would you care to come and talk about England?’ he said.
‘With you?’
Well, who else but him, the young officer? He smiled.
‘Of course I look better in my best bush-shirt.’
He could always make his mother laugh with such casual drollery; she liked that sort of thing. But the girl, staring past him with large eyes, stood speechless, as if it too confused or troubled her.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘Invitations for dinner tonight are now being sent out——’
‘You mean it?’
‘Of course.’ The bush-shirt made him look taller; there was no doubt it really did make him look better. ‘Shall I pick you up here?’
‘If you really want to——’
Gravely and slowly she began to fold the blue silk; he saw that its frettings were really little scarlet crosses. Her eyes absorbed themselves in the movement of her hands and he said:
‘About six? We can have a drink somewhere first——’
‘If you want to.’
Oh! good grief, why the hell did she keep saying if you want to? Of course he wanted to. There were about twenty females of all shapes and colours in the room beside her. The city was full of them. She ought to have been rather flattered that an officer had picked her out.
‘About six,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a taxi. All right?’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘If you don’t find me as you wish you can just take me home. I won’t mind——’
Oh! good grief, he thought. He turned sharply, in impatience to go; and then for the first time he saw her smile. She combed fragile pink-budded fingers through her black hair and all at once her amazed bemusement was drawn away. In its place there flowered in a most tender and friendly way a smile of extraordinary beauty.
In the evening, as always, the Sikh taxi driver lost the way. He spent a distracted quarter of an hour in the last blaze of daylight driving round strange quarters of the city. Daylight began to fade with smouldering and maddening suddenness and it was a quarter past six, with the last sunlight about to plunge from rosy-copper to purple, when he saw the white columns of the mission under the mango trees.
His first impression was that the girl seemed to be limping as she came from the mission gates and got into the taxi.
‘Hurt your foot?’
She did not answer.
‘I thought you seemed to be limping——’
He stopped suddenly; and for some time longer he tried not to look down at the iron on her twisted left foot.
The taxi was an open one and in the last burning moment of daylight, fiercely purple and copper, her face was intense. He suffered clumsy embarrassment, not knowing what to say. He felt he would rather her face had had a scar. In the street there was a delicious scent of trees opening night-flowers. Little flares of paper-shaded light embalmed the pavement fruit-sellers. Darkness, hot and starry, suddenly shut out the distances and in old courtyards there was a brittle evening stirring of palms.
Well; he had to go through with it. He tugged hard at his bush-jacket. It was just for one night. Sooner or later the wretched thing had to be spoken about and he said:
‘Was it an accident? The foot?’
‘In a way.’
‘You didn’t always have it?’
‘Oh! no. Only for three or four years——’
Well, that was something. He felt better for having mentioned it; he was relieved it was not one of these permanent, congenital things.
‘Take me home if you like,’ she said.
‘Oh! no. Good grief, no,’ he said. The taxi was coming to the heart of the city. Moth-like crowds were besieging traffic crossings, swarming on buses. ‘You’d like a drink, wouldn’t you? We’re almost there.’
‘Very much,’ she said.
Afterwards it was never possible, as he sat in the shaded bar staring at her and tinkling the crushed ice in his glass, to believe completely in the reality of her foot. He went through the business of trying to fog himself up. He had several drinks quickly and every now and then he brought off the trick of believing the foot was normal and the iron not there. It was something so brutally clumsy and hideous that it could not be reconciled with the fragile grace of the rest of her body.
Some hours later, after dinner, he took another taxi and drove back across the city with her, taking her home. Wonderfully delicate and dreamy and fragile, she lay back on the seat, staring at the sky. He wanted to kiss her: and at the same time dreaded it, his senses horribly tangled by thoughts of the foot. It did not occur to him that she dreaded it too.
She lived with her mother in a flat by the river. There was a little square compound, shaded by peepul trees, with scarlet and salmon hibiscus luxuriantly drooping from blistered walls. She told him where to stop the taxi and he leaned over and began to pay the Sikh.
‘Oh! won’t you keep it? Down here by the river you’ll never get another.’
‘I’d like to walk,’ he said.
‘Oh! it’s so far.’
‘I like the city at night,’ he said. ‘It shuts out the things you don’t want to see.’
He was not puzzled by the fact that she began walking away in the darkness while he waited for the Sikh to find his change. It did not occur to him to wonder if she moved out of dread or anguish or pure politeness; and in any case it was not possible to tell. Nor was it really possible to tel
l, as she walked away from the range of car light, crushing fallen scarlet patches of hibiscus petal, whether she limped much or not.
‘This is where I live,’ she said. She stood by the gate of the compound. Old creepers entangled with hibiscus and bignonia smothered the crumbling wall behind her and framed her pale face. She was not wearing a hat. A breeze from the river stirred her hair and once again she smoothed it down, silky and dark, with her fragile fingers. Somewhere along the river a pink-orange flash of flame, as if from a firework, splashed the sky with brilliant light, so that he saw her face in it, waiting, cool and not startled. A few voices began shouting. He said ‘What’s that?’ and she began explaining, telling him that some sort of pujah, a feast, an important one, was going on. He then remembered weird purple-powdered figures dashing about the streets, whooping and scarring other figures with violent green and pink and magenta powders. One had splashed Sergeant Puddefoot, a cockney from H.Q., with a shower of violet dust and very promptly Sergeant Puddefoot had beaten him up. He smiled at the ridiculous thought of the outraged Puddefoot being peppered into fury and said ‘I remember now——’
A drum began to beat down the river. Nothing but a warm stir of wind among overhead palms broke the air into which every drum-beat fell like a soft velvet punch, monotonous and yet exciting. The girl stood waiting for him to say good-bye. He had nothing to do, now, but take the long delicate fingers, clasp them and tell her how charming it had been. The foot, invisible, need never bother him again. It was a mere interlude; he had simply to forget it, to turn back, to let it go.
In some curious way the drum-beat entered his consciousness, becoming part of his stimulated heartbeat. He began to kiss her. He felt the cool flatness of her lips harden with resistance. He tried to hold her against the wall and he felt her fighting against what he knew afterwards she thought to be simply a reluctant and polite good night.
‘I don’t want you to kiss me. Please—there isn’t any need——’
‘Can we walk down to the river?’ he said.
‘Please go home if you want to,’ she said.
‘Can we get to the river?’
‘If you want to——’
The echo of the sentence that had startled him in the afternoon had the opposite effect on him now. He took one of her hands and held it by the tips of the fingers. She began to walk forward. Down the river a second explosion gave a vast pink and orange glow to trees among which were massed, as he afterwards discovered, a queer collection of crumbling palaces, slums and temples. Then the drum, accompanied now by another, went beating on.
At the end of the street a new river terrace was being built. A white balustrade of stone stretched for fifty or sixty yards along the water-front until it broke among a collection of stone blocks, a rubble-shoot and a crane. Beyond the opposite end he could see where, half a mile away, the pujah was in celebration. A fire was burning quite close to the water’s edge, throwing what looked like a layer of orange oil half-way across the breadth of river.
‘Tell me about the foot,’ he said.
That was pretty clumsy, he thought; he had not thought of putting it delicately and it sounded like a command. She did not answer. Down the river the two drums seemed to join and then separate in louder beats of antagonism. The sky glowered with light and he heard the yell of triumphant weird voices, ritually excited.
She leaned against the balustrade and once again he tried to kiss her.
‘There’s no need—please,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry.’ This is never going to get us anywhere, he thought.
‘It isn’t anything to do with being sorry. It’s simply that I don’t want you to feel that because——’
He stood with his back to the river, looking at the new terrace and the flats where she lived above the compound. Lights along the verandahs showed tiers of railings and their canopies painted white against the sun. New grass had already been planted along the promenade and in the renewed flare from the pujah he saw it dotted about in regular rosettes of vivid green.
‘I didn’t tell you my name,’ he said. ‘Sedgwick. John.’
She did not speak. Now there seemed to be four or five drums beating down the river. The fire flared up, higher and more brilliant than before, embalming her face with its glow.
She was staring at the stream, her skin rosy-orange in the glow of fire. ‘What’s yours?’ he said.
‘Rina. Don’t you want to go home?’
‘Let me hold you,’ he said. ‘Do you mind that?’
No, she said, she did not mind that; and for nearly an hour afterwards he stood holding her there, watching the stream, the flares of the pujah, and the dazzling and unblemished night sky, rich with stars. A few fishing boats swung lanterns sleepily about the river and all the time the mounting and deepening punch of drum-beats drove into his consciousness. The soft dull pulsations of sound filled him with odd excitement. He drew his fingers down the entire length of her arms, fired by the oily smoothness of the flesh into wanting to kiss her again.
At that moment she stirred, lifting her head sharply. Some people were moving in the compound and from one of the verandahs he heard voices.
‘You ought to go now. Please.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘It’s very late,’ she said. ‘And there are people coming. You really ought to go.’
Listening, he felt the accumulated excitement of drum-beats urge him forward again. He held her face in his two hands, looking at the black quiet eyes.
‘If you kiss me,’ he said.
‘I told you——’
‘I said if you kiss me,’ he said. ‘I mean you—you see, the other way round.’
A drum, louder than the rest, seemed suddenly to explode with tremendous central fervour that had a terribly strange effect on her. She began kissing him, crying at the same time.
There was no sort of violence in her tears to disturb him; she cried quietly and as she kissed him he experienced a queer sensation of vanity and exultation. The light from the fishing boats began to disperse like fireflies about the stream. Whether she cried from joy or relief or pain he did not know at first; and in the exultation, the drum-beats exploding with their curiously exciting fervour and the general exquisite feeling of the warm night, the river and the stars, it hardly seemed to matter.
Then she explained it: ‘I cry when I’m tired. I’ve been standing all day and it was hot. It’s been much hotter this week——’
Yes, it was warming up, he thought. You heard it in bars and clubs and messes. ‘Warming up, old boy.’ Well: he would be gone before the worst of it.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘What about tomorrow?’
Either she was astounded or she did not seem to understand about tomorrow; so that he had to say:
‘Won’t you come? Wouldn’t you like to?’
‘With you?’ she said again. ‘You don’t have to——’
‘The day I don’t want to I shan’t ask you,’ he said, ‘and then you’ll know.’
He said this in a jocular sort of way and she was quiet, her head averted. A few voices could still be heard from the compound and it was still as if she were listening to them.
‘All right!’ he said. ‘At six again?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and then in the steadiest, levellest of tones: ‘It’s very sweet of you.’
He left her by the gate, under the thick arbour of vine and bignonia and hibiscus. Twenty or thirty yards up the street he stopped to light a cigarette. He could still hear the drum-beats of the pujah from down the river, like soft velvet punches in the darkness. They were curiously like the magnified echo of endless heartbeats too: a tireless throbbing in the blood-stream, warm and exciting.
After that he began to meet her almost every evening. He liked to take her home in a rickshaw; it was quieter, nicer, more intimate that way. At the completed end of the terrace a concrete seat had been built; they could sit there and watch, across the river, under a vast glow
, the greater part of the city. After a few days the pujah was all over, but on the dark stream the little fishing boats were always swaying and winking, like fireflies.
‘Tell me about the foot,’ he would say. His vanity that he could do something about it for her finally made her speak of it.
‘I want to ask Colonel Burnett about it,’ he said. ‘He’s an orthopaedic man. He’s unorthodox, but what he doesn’t know——’
‘The doctors have seen it,’ she said.
‘What doctors?’ He was quite irritated by her tone of acceptance, by the queer feeling of her tired-out complacency. ‘There are doctors and doctors. You want it to get better, don’t you?’
‘It will get better.’
‘That’s all very well——’
‘It is getting better already,’ she said. ‘A little every day. There was a time when I couldn’t move it at all. Now I can move the toes a little. It takes time.’
She spoke flatly, formally, in a little recitation; she seemed in a deliberate way to place a sort of hermetic seal on every emotion the foot might possibly arouse.
‘Could I look at it?’ he said.
‘There is nothing to see.’
‘I’d like to. Please,’ he said.
She stretched out her foot on the stone seat. Slowly and gently he took off the shoe with its iron and then held her foot in his hands. Drum-beats from the pujah no longer broke the air, but it was as if he could still feel them in himself distinct and exciting as ever, hammering at the core of his throat as she unfastened her stocking and rolled it down, leaving her long pale leg and the foot itself naked and free.
It was exactly as she had said: there was nothing to be seen. He was aware simply of her long naked leg, pale and smooth and beautiful.
‘Tell me about it. How did it happen?’
‘Some other night——’
All at once he lay down with her on the seat. ‘Please,’ he said. She lay very quiet, answering flatly.