But now all that pity was gone. Now my feelings had swung to the other extreme, and I saw the sailors as stupid and brutalized, and their drunkenness and their indiscriminate loveless love-making as shameful to the human race. And even the girls had turned sour on me: I saw the qualities that I had admired in them as being only skin-deep, or else mere pretenses cynically adopted as useful tools for their trade. The good manners were only a deceptive oriental façade; the kindness, the tenderness, the generosity, were but a veneer that thinly covered insensitivity and greed. Innocence of heart? Here I had made my most elementary mistake of all, confusing innocence with ignorance.
This revulsion was accompanied by a complete inability to work; for my work had depended upon a sympathetic feeling for my surroundings, and upon whatever resources I could find in myself of pity and compassion—resources that had never, indeed, been enough, but that were now altogether exhausted. My vision had become fogged by disillusion; and my past work now seemed to me so sentimental, so false, so meretricious, that I could not even look at it without nausea. I lost all impulse to continue. A few weeks ago, standing with palette and brush before a canvas, I had known exactly what I had wanted to achieve, however limited my ability to achieve it; but now I would stand staring at a canvas blankly, without compulsion or motive. It was like setting out on a journey without a map, to a destination in which I had no interest—and at the first excuse I gave up.
One day I received a letter from New York: it was from Mitford’s, the gallery-agency owned by Rodney’s uncle. Two months previously, when we had still been on comparatively good terms, Rodney had written to his uncle about me, and in reply his uncle had invited me to send samples of my work; and I had duly shipped off a selection of pastels and oils. I had received a formal acknowledgment of their arrival two days after Rodney’s departure, and now came this letter, bearing the signature of Henry C. Weinbaum, whose name also appeared at the top of the paper as codirector with Rodney’s uncle. It ran to two pages, and was full of effusive praise. My style, my draftsmanship, the originality of my subject matter, all came in for their share of hyperbole. Moreover it promised me a one-man show in New York if I would send enough material. The writer also suggested very diffidently—for far be it from Mr. Weinbaum, who knew so well the nature of the creative impulse, to try and jog an artist’s elbow—that one or two more general pictures of Hong Kong might help to give the other work a background and place the Nam Kok in perspective.
A month ago this letter would have sent me sky-high. But now, in my state of revulsion and disillusion, I read it cynically—indeed had to make an effort to read it at all, for any reference to my pictures filled me with the same sort of nausea as the pictures themselves. I found the phraseology suspiciously overfulsome; and the emphasis on the subject matter clearly indicated an interest in sensation rather than art. Not even the prospect of making money could shake me from apathy. And I put the letter aside unanswered, thinking, “I’ll try and knock something up for them one day.”
Nor did my disenchantment end with the Nam Kok and my work. It spread to the whole of Wanchai. Now in these teeming streets, which had once so stimulated and delighted me, I felt self-consciously alien, divided by a thousand barriers from the busy, noisy, spitting Chinese. I began to long for the European company that I had formerly eschewed, and only pride prevented me from ringing up those English acquaintances whom I had once so summarily dismissed as bores. Now their very dullness held nostalgia for me, for it was so comfortable, so familiar, so English. And then one day in the bank Gordon Hamilton came over to chat, stroking his handle-bar mustache, and when he said presently, “You must come and have dinner,” I was so grateful for the invitation that I could have flung my arms round his neck.
Then I remembered our last meeting in the Kowloon restaurant and said doubtfully, “But what about your wife? I don’t think she exactly approved of me.”
“Don’t worry, she was thoroughly ashamed of herself after that evening,” Hamilton twinkled. “In fact she kept me awake half the night, saying ‘Those poor water-front girls, I wonder what one could do to help them?’ I told her, ‘I don’t know, but I bet they make far more money than I do at the bank, so I can think of plenty of ways they could help us.’ No, Isobel will be delighted. Make it Thursday about eight.”
“I’ll look forward,” I said with a great deal more truth than he could have possibly known.
Two evenings later I took the Peak tram to a mid-level station and made my way to the Hamiltons’ flat, which for a bank assistant’s residence was uncommonly spacious and expensively furnished, for his wife had money of her own. I found that it was to be a dinner party for a dozen people. Isobel Hamilton greeted me warmly, trying anxiously to make amends for the offense she was afraid she had caused me; she gave me a drink, chatted for a time, and released me among the other guests.
And then there began to unfold all those threadbare little patterns of colonial cocktail-party conversation that I knew so well: that I had known first in Malaya, then during my first weeks in Hong Kong. I had the sensation of stepping back into a room where a gramophone had been endlessly playing. The grooves were perhaps a little more worn, the needle a little more blunted—but it was the same old record, and I knew every topic, every phrase. I knew with deadly certainty that no unexpected word would be uttered, no fresh viewpoint expressed. And now that the dullness became a reality, my nostalgia died within me.
Presently we went in to dinner. And at table the conversation turned to the discussion of a girl of mixed Chinese and English blood who had gone to Oxford, achieved almost unheard-of scholastic honors, qualified as a barrister, and returned to Hong Kong to practice her profession and to advance the cause of her fellow Eurasians. There were random contributions from all the guests.
“Of course she’s as clever as a cartload of monkeys. But that chip on her shoulder stands out a mile.”
“I met her once. Too damned uppish.”
“That’s the trouble with Eurasians. If you’re nice to them, they just take advantage and begin to think they’re as good as you.”
“Personally I wouldn’t have her inside my house.”
“Nor would I, though mind you I’m always polite to her if I meet her in the street. I think one should be polite. I told her the other day, ‘My dear, you can’t help being—well, you know what I mean—it’s not your fault. Of course I know some people are very narrow and prejudiced—but I was brought up to believe in good manners, and I always treat Eurasians exactly like anybody else.’”
“You know she’s supposed to be having an affair with Dick Kitteridge?”
“Supposed? My dear, she’s quite flagrant about it—you don’t think she could resist showing off such a feather in her cap?”
“Somebody asked me the other day, ‘Why shouldn’t one marry a Eurasian?’ Of course he was a young man just out from home, and rather ‘pink.’ I said, ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, because one doesn’t.’ He said, ‘I wonder what Jesus Christ would have said to that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, and frankly, although I’m a good Christian, I don’t care—because far too many people pass opinions without ever having been to China, and He couldn’t possibly have judged unless He’d lived there as long as I have.’”
And this lack of charity for fellow human beings—for a minority of unhappy, race-less people fathered by ourselves—seemed to me an incomparably worse sin than any to be found at the Nam Kok; and my respect and affection for the Nam Kok girls, who were in the main incapable of such intolerance and inhumanity, came back to me in a great overwhelming flood.
We adjourned to the drawing room. Soon another guest arrived, a man in his sixties with white hair, a brown wrinkled face like an ancient tortoise, shrewd twinkling eyes, and an old-world courtesy. His name was O’Neill, and he was an “old China-hand” who had just come out of China after clo
sing down his business under pressure from the communists; he was spending a fortnight in Hong Kong before sailing for England. He had pleaded another engagement that had prevented him from dropping in earlier, though I suspected that this had only been an excuse to shorten an evening that he had feared might prove tedious. Somehow the conversation turned once more to Eurasians, and soon the whole catalogue of colonial platitudes was being resurrected. O’Neill listened for a time and then, turning to Gordon Hamilton, said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Well, now that I’m leaving China for good I suppose I can come out with it. My grandmother was Chinese.”
There was a shocked silence. Everybody stared at him. It was true that there was a hint of Chinese in that wrinkled tortoise face and those dark twinkling eyes, though perhaps no more than in many another old China-hand—for long residence in China had a curious way of imprinting itself on the features.
“I’m rather pleased with myself for getting away with it for thirty years,” O’Neill went on, speaking to Hamilton as though unaware of the sensation he had caused.
Then the woman who had been brought up to good manners, and who had reassured the Eurasian girl that she always treated Eurasians exactly like anybody else, said, “Anyhow, Mr. O’Neill, I’m sure your grandmother came from a good-class family. That does make a difference.”
“No, as a matter of fact she was my grandfather’s wife’s amah.”
While this sank in there was another silence, broken only by the rattling of skeletons in the cupboard—two skeletons now, the twin skeletons of Chinese blood and illegitimacy.
At last one of the guests, a matron with loud downright voice, decided that the time had come to change the subject.
“Hilda, I told you that I couldn’t play bridge tomorrow, didn’t I?” she boomed across the room. “I hate letting you down, but it’s my day at the Services’ Club. And it does mean so much to those poor lonely boys to see a real Englishwoman’s face behind the tea counter.”
Half an hour later O’Neill, saying that he was an old man and liked early nights, took his leave, and I made an excuse to depart with him. We strolled together along the road that led to the mid-level station on the Peak tram, with the lights of Hong Kong and the harbor spread below.
“Were you pulling their legs?” I asked him. “Or was your grandmother really Chinese?”
He chuckled. “One of my grandmothers came from Richmond, and the other from Bury St. Edmunds. No, I’m afraid I was just having a lark. I’ve rather a schoolboy sense of humor, and I couldn’t resist it.”
I laughed. “It was a terrible shock to them. To think you’d been allowed to get away with it for thirty years!”
“Of course you don’t want to take those people too seriously. They don’t mean so much nowadays. That mentality’s as doomed as the Empire which bred it—and which they have somehow got the impression bred the Empire, though of course it did nothing of the kind. In fact it has done a great deal, with its inflexibility, to hasten the losing of it. With due apologies to our hosts, I am afraid that most of our fellow guests tonight were second-raters. And the real Empire builders, in their own way, were first-raters.”
We became so absorbed in conversation that to prolong it we walked down into the town instead of taking the Peak tram; and when we reached the Gloucester, where O’Neill was staying, he invited me in for a nightcap. I thought him charming, and by now had begun to tell him about the Nam Kok and Suzie. Over the whisky I described our last meeting in my room, and when I had finished, he said, “Of course you were mad to let her go! Quite mad!”
I watched his twinkling eyes, not sure whether or not he was pulling my leg. “You mean I was mad not to take her, sailors and all?”
“Certainly! Mad as a hatter! She sounds to me a girl of quite remarkable character, and obviously devoted to you—and speaking as one for whom the greatest pleasures of life have always been derived from the opposite sex, I know that such a girl is not to be sneezed at. Naturally there is always some drawback or other, whether a taste for expensive jewelry, or a husband, or lack of a husband—which of course can be much worse, if she starts to fancy you for the role. And it seems to me that as drawbacks go, a few sailors are really quite trivial.”
I laughed. “I don’t believe you mean a word of it. I’m sure that if you’d been in my place you’d have behaved in exactly the same way.”
“Nonsense, my dear fellow. I was once in a very similar situation and did nothing of the kind. The lady was an actress in Chinese opera in Hankow, and I assure you very bonny. She was the concubine of a rich old gentleman, who was by no means too old, however, to enjoy her. She had also taken on a second rich gentleman, purely for financial reasons, since she was supporting a dozen members of her family. She then fell in love with me, an attitude which I heartily reciprocated.
“Now, naturally she did not tell the first rich gentleman about the second rich gentleman or myself—and indeed, if he had ever found out he would have been most displeased, for as the first comer, he was in the position of husband. On the other hand the second rich gentleman, in the position of lover, knew all about the first rich gentleman, and of course had no objection whatsoever—in fact it gave him a certain satisfaction to think that he was daily making the other a cuckold. But he naturally knew nothing about me, and if he had done so he would have taken the strongest exception.
“As for myself, the last arrival on the scene, I knew about them both and had no objection to either. In fact I thoroughly approved, since they relieved me of any financial burden and kept the lady out of mischief, while presenting no rivalry for her deeper affections.”
“And supposing she’d taken a fourth lover?”
He twinkled. “I should have been extremely angry. However, that only goes to support my contention that the act of making love has no intrinsic importance, and that its importance depends entirely on the point of view. And in my opinion you should have been no more discouraged by those sailors than I was by my Hankow lady’s two rich patrons; and indeed you might have derived the same satisfaction from contemplating their financial advantages.”
I laughed. “You’re an old cynic.”
“On the contrary, I am an incorrigible romantic. There is nothing in the world that touches me more than to see two young people in love. And since I myself am too old to participate without making a tedious old fool of myself, nothing delights me more than to give them advice: which usually amounts to telling them not to expect every circumstance to be perfect, not to waste their precious youth because of trivial difficulties, and—in short—to get on with it.”
“Well, I’m afraid it’s too late for me to do much about it now,” I said.
I met O’Neill several more times during the next ten days, and finally went to the boat to see him off when he sailed for England. After he had gone I felt that I had lost my only real friend in Hong Kong, and was plunged back into depression. His parting advice to me had been, “Go and grab that girl back—or else forget about her and take another girl. But at all events make up your mind to do one or the other, and do it resolutely.” I knew this was good advice, and considered the former alternative of grabbing Suzie back; but although it would have been a fine dramatic gesture, I still did not think I could reconcile myself to the sailors, and we should simply have found ourselves back in the same situation as before. Then go down to the bar and take one of the other girls? No, it would somehow be a breach of faith. It would cost their respect for me.
So I did nothing, but continued to wake each morning with a sickening dread of the day stretching bleakly before me, and to wait longingly for the knock on the door.
Then one day I heard from Typhoo that she had met Suzie in town. She had come up for a day’s shopping, and had told Typhoo that she did not intend to pay me a visit; she had decided that while living with Rodney it was better not to do so. And so now the
re was no longer even hope to sustain me, and I fell into a worse state of desolation than I had ever experienced before, a spiritual vacuum in which all seemed futility, a dark night of the soul. It was not a negative state, but as positive as some sickness: I could feel the ache of it like poison in my blood. I tried to make myself work—stood staring, pastel in hand, at an unfinished drawing on the easel, wondering blankly what to do with it, feeling already exhausted by the effort of overcoming my inertia enough to make myself stand there at all. Blackness enveloped my mind. I gave up and went out, and walked the streets carrying my desolation about with me like a shroud. I came back and sat alone on the balcony. The magnificence of the view meant nothing to me; I would have derived as much pleasure from a brick wall. I opened a book, but lacked the concentration to read. Nobody came. Nobody was going to come. I heard voices behind the wooden partition dividing my balcony from its neighbor: a man whispering, a girl giggling. I closed my eyes. I had no existence except as an ache. The long, long ache of loneliness.
And then I could no longer bear it, and I thought: I will take O’Neill’s advice. I will be resolute. I will go down and get a girl, and bring this loneliness to an end. And then my interest in life will come back, I shall be able to work again.
I went downstairs to the bar. I felt as guilty as if I was intending to pick a friend’s pocket. I sat down at a table, and Gwenny came over to chat.
No, I thought, not Gwenny. I know Gwenny too well. Like a sister.
I watched Wednesday Lulu go to the juke box, put in a coin, press a button. She is very pretty, I thought. She is beautiful. I could grow very fond of her. But what about her principles? She would say I was Suzie’s boy friend and refuse me, and I would feel ashamed because I had asked. No, it couldn’t be Wednesday Lulu.
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