The Incident at Badamya

by Dorothy Gilman

  She thought. Fishermen don't part lightly with their boats, even for a day. Ba Tu may find one boat quickly but two boats will need more time and more money, and he said three .., is it wise to tell the others about Ba Tu today?

  The rhythmic struggles of the grasshoppers distracted her. She thought of the delicacy of their pale green wings and imagined how they must be yearning for the cool tall grass and its shade; they would soon enough tire from their efforts.

  It will surely be kinder to say nothing of Ba Tu's visit yet, she decided, and in her mind she counted over her reasons: there were first of all the boats to find, as well as a way to move seven people down to the river, but the most important reason of all was that her temple companions occupied themselves all day by talking in loud voices, and they might be heard speaking of this matter as they digested her news. She decided that it would be too much food for them; as Ma Nu said, A wise man knows too much food is poison. This would be her secret, they all had secrets and this would be hers.

  She stood up and carried the bucket across the compound to the nearest fence and stood below it. Reaching under the hat into the bucket she gently removed one of the grasshoppers, held it up, whispered, "Jump high!" and tossed it over the fence. Six times she did this, absorbing into herself their joy at being free, and then she picked up the empty bucket and went back into the temple.

  10

  That evening, crouched around the coals of their cooking fire, Lady Waring closed the book Vampire Love and nodded. "Very satisfying," she said, and smiled pleasantly at Mr. Gunfer. "We certainly thank you for rescuing it from the boat. Incidentally, how long have you been a travel writer, Mr. Gunfer?"

  He looked startled by this unexpected amiability. "Not long."

  "How long?" she pressed him.

  "I told you, not long. Actually I consider Burma a real feather in my cap, I plan a book—or did," he added. "I've had two or three articles published in travel magazines but I'm counting on this to establish me."

  "Interesting," she murmured. "Whereabouts on the steamer did you find the book?"

  He shrugged. "Tucked behind the bunk in the cabin."

  "That, too, 1 find interesting," she continued amiably, "especially since I note that the copyright date of the book is 1949 and we are only a few days into the first month of 1950—a very recent book," she said deliberately, "and I understand that we're the first non-Burmese people allowed to travel on the river since insurgency broke out. One wonders who could have hidden the book there."

  Mr. Gunfer looked startled. "Very mysterious, yes, now that you mention it."

  "What's the matter?" asked Gen, aware of an undercurrent beneath Lady Waring's pleasantness, and of a growing tension.

  "Not quite so mysterious as one might think," said Lady Waring, her voice sharpening. "I don't believe you just happened to find this book in your cabin, Mr. Gunfer, I think you must have brought it with you from America, isn't that so?"

  "Nonsense," said Mr. Gunfer, and Gen thought that even his goatee quivered with indignation.

  "I also think," said Lady Waring calmly, "that you wrote the book, Mr. Gunfer... I think you're Cynthia Gore."

  "I beg your pardon!" gasped Mr. Gunfer.

  Holding up the book she said, "I dare you to deny it."

  He gaped at her, closed his mouth with a snap and said, "This is preposterous, what's worse insulting."

  "Mr. Gunfer?' breathed Helen Caswell.

  Baharían said, "What makes you think—?"

  "A real author?" said Gen eagerly.

  "Stop—stop!" cried Mr. Gunfer. "This is outrageous!"

  "You see, I began to notice all the phrases in the book identical to ones that you use in conversation," she told him. "In fact I heard your voice in so many places, especially Rudolfo's. No, I'll amend that," she said, "it didn't begin to haunt me until page twenty-seven and then—"

  "Ridiculous," said Gunfer.

  "—and then of course," she continued, "I also found it mystifying as to how such a recent paperback book in English had reached Burma, halfway around the world from New York. It's true that a certain number of foreign experts are arriving in this country to help in its recovery from the war, and one of them could have brought it along, but I can't believe that any of them would have chosen to travel upcountry on a steamer that takes ten days to reach Mandalay. Then, too, I was told with great authority in Rangoon that no Europeans had been allowed on the river until now, it was simply not considered safe. I was told this over and over again, and certainly the consulates, the ministries and the shipping line wouldn't all of them lie about it. Come, come, Mr. Gunfer, admit that you're the author of—" Consulting the book's jacket she said, "The Secret of the Labyrinth, Mrs. Carlisle's Folly, Blood on the Moon, and Vampire Love."

  To their utter astonishment Mr. Gunfer burst into tears.

  "Stop, I can't bear it—don't," he sobbed, and buried his head in his hands. "Don't—it's too—too humiliating, you can't understand how humiliating."

  "What is?" asked Mrs. Caswell.

  "To be found out?" asked Miss Thorald.

  "No no," he cried. "To be accused of writing anything so—so superficial and inane."

  "Now you're insulting me," said Lady Waring coldly. "Not to mention Helen—Mrs. Caswell. You don't deny you're their author?"

  "No," he said miserably. "No, I wrote them."

  "And how did that happen?" said Baharian, looking amused.

  Gunfer's face was wet with tears; U Ba Sein reached into his longyi and politely handed him a shred of cloth with which to dry his eyes.

  "It happened because—oh I wrote such a splendid book," Gunfer said, gulping down a sob. "Such an important book. . , maybe you've heard of it, The Eye of God?" When no one responded he said bitterly, "No, of course not, nobody heard of it. It was a novel about—about the darkness of man's soul," he said, his voice turning eloquent. "About trial, doubt, illusions and delusions, the destruction of hope, the renascence of spirit.., it was a book I poured myself into—it was my life's work, and the reviewers—" A sob escaped him. "The reviewers—the two who reviewed it—called it pretentious and boring." He added savagely, "And it sold only nine hundred and twenty-three copies."

  "Doesn't sound a very cheerful book," commented Baharian.

  "Spare me," said Gunfer acidly. "Is life cheerful? My book plumbed its depths, it spoke."

  "To nine hundred and twenty-three people, yes," said Baharian.

  "And five years devoted to writing it!" cried Mr. Gunfer with passion. "Five years of hope and dedication and living on day-old bread and canned beans, working day and night and when it was over I had nothing." He said angrily, "That's when I sat down and angrily wrote The Secret of the Labyrinth in four weeks—four weeks I" he cried in an anguished voice. "And it was published and sold thirty-five thousand copies."

  Mrs. Caswell nodded. "I read that one, too, it was really exciting and quite fun."

  "Fun!" shuddered Gunfer. "Pure escapism!"

  "Yes, from darkening souls and destruction of hope," said Baharían dryly.

  "You make fun of me!" shouted Gunfer. "You enjoy humiliating me!"

  To Gen's surprise Mrs. Caswell lifted her voice and shouted back at him. "Don't you dare speak of Vampire Love that way, how dare you! Reading it I forgot to worry about Harry's blood pressure and how his blood pressure must be skyrocketing from worry about me, and reading it I forgot I'm hungry and I forgot I'm tired and forgot I can't walk away from this temple and go home. I thought you an awful man before and I think you're awful now. Worse, you're selfish through and through." And she, too, burst into tears.

  This time it was Baharían who patiently supplied the handkerchief for her to wipe away tears.

  "Now see what you've done," said Lady Waring.

  "See what you've done," Gunfer said waspishly. "Humiliation after humiliation."

  U Ba Sein said, "Excuse me. . .you have been much wounded, one sees this, Mr. Gunfer, but is it that you do not wish to giv
e people pleasure?"

  He was ignored, for Gunfer was still confronting Lady Waring. "I'll never forgive you for this," he said in a venomous low voice. "Never. Look at you—rich, aristocratic, moving only in the best circles, thoroughly spoiled, you know nothing about compromise or prostituting yourself. You're insulated against hurts, against reality—"

  She said scornfully, "You think in stereotypes, you know nothing of my life."

  "I happen to be a socialist," he said warningly, "so I can guess very accurately how you live. No humiliations for you!"

  Miss Thorald said wistfully, "He does have a point there, you know. You must have had a very romantic and glamorous life, Lady Waring, being English and a titled lady and rich."

  "Really?" said Lady Waring dryly. "Then to puncture one of your misconceptions I'm not English at all, I was born one of the three Bartlett sisters of Boston, Massachusetts, and the least beautiful of us, too, I might add. Rich yes, but American, and the three of us groomed for marriages. Important marriages."

  "You're American, too?" cried Gen.

  Gunfer glared at her suspiciously. "Hard to believe."

  "Is it? For fifty years I've been English, ever since I met Ambrose aboard ship on my first trip abroad, when I was eighteen and he was thirty-eight, but for eighteen years I was American, and born one."

  "He was twenty years older?" Gen said doubtfully, accomplishing sums in her head. "Was he very handsome?"

  "No, but he was kind," said Lady Waring. "Or seemed so to me, for I'd not known much kindness. I thought him a god, 1 thought—I thought too much."

  "Too much why?" asked Mrs. Caswell.

  "Because he was habitually and compulsively unfaithful." Turning to Mr. Gunfer she said, "You think I've never experienced humiliation? This man I married could no more look at a woman than begin an affair with her. It seemed that other women were moved by his kindness, too," she added dryly.

  Shocked, Mrs. Caswell said, "Did you know that before you married?"

  "Of course not," she said scornfully, "I was swept off my feet and we married two months after meeting. Nine months later Jane was born, and ten months after that came Barbara. It was two years before I lifted my head from a domestic tyranny of nannies, prams and babies to discover that the great romance I thought I occupied was only an arrangement, a sham."

  With a cold glance at Mr. Gunfer she said, "You speak of humiliation, Mr. Gunfer.. , yours is private and self-inflicted, mine was very public. I was a convenience to a man who had decided to marry late and start a family to gain an heir. Heaven only knows how many affairs there'd been during the two years I was involved in the nursery."

  "Oh how sad," said Mrs. Caswell.

  "It chilled me," Lady Waring said. "I felt of no value at all; worse, it killed something in me."

  She was silent, looking back, and they were silent, too, watching the changes of expression in her face and in her eyes.

  "After that," she said, "Ambrose and I saw very little of each other. I can't say that Ambrose wasn't kind—he was, whenever we met—but once I knew about his incessant and very public infidelities—and he knew I knew—I felt nothing except betrayal."

  "You stayed married," pointed out Baharian.

  She nodded. "I had two daughters but most of all I had pride. And frankly," she admitted, "nowhere to go if I left, and so for years I played my part, doing all the proper things and being Lady Waring." To Miss Thorald she said, "Romantic? Exciting? No."

  "Oh dear," said Mrs. Caswell with feeling.

  "But didn't anything nice ever happen?" pleaded Gen. "Something happy?"

  Lady Waring was silent, her eyes turned inward as she gazed into her past, and after a moment she said with a small and secret smile, "Once . . , yes, once something happened."

  They waited.

  "And since it scarcely matters now, perhaps—yes, I can speak of it. How strange," she said, looking into their faces one by one, "how strange to speak of it here. Now. To strangers."

  "Oh please," Gen said, "I want to hear that something nice happened to you."

  Lady Waring's face softened. "Thank you, my dear." She hesitated, and then, "It began because I thought— because I wanted—to find a refuge from all the falseness and the pretending and the demands. An odd desire but I was nearing forty and there never seemed time to think. And so I went looking—which occupied me for several months—and found—oh, the simplest cottage in Cornwall, near the sea. A garden. A low stone wall. Five rooms. And I would go there...

  "It happened in 1921—after another war," she said softly. "In the spring, when there were lilacs in the garden, and at a time when the only changes in my life were the changing of the seasons. There was an accident," she said. "An accident on the narrow winding road in front of my cottage."

  Her voice broke, and Mr. Gunfer removed his glance from the floor and gave her a sharp glance.

  "My daughters were at school in France," she went on, "and my husband in London. He had never been curious or interested in seeing my cottage, which is how things were at that time. And I was alone, blessedly alone, without even a maid or a woman from the village. A car went berserk, slammed through the wall, narrowly missing the lilac tree, and turned over when it hit the old stone wall-sweep in the center of the garden."

  She said dryly, "The man who was in the car had traveled all the way from Switzerland, it seemed, to plow up my garden and ruin the old well-sweep that had been there for a century."

  And to change my life, she might have added.

  Her voice and her eyes had grown tender, and when she began again Gen understood that she was no longer speaking to them or even aware of them, but was remembering and re-creating something important.

  "I called the doctor—it was Doctor Stiner then," she said, "and the man was carried into my cottage and upstairs to the spare room where it was discovered that—miraculously—he'd suffered only concussion and a broken arm, but he was not to be moved yet, which I thought a great annoyance at the time." She smiled faintly at this. "So he slept in my spare bedroom, his face empty of expression, completely dead to me, his head a skull with thinning gray hair, his nose a shade too long between high cheekbones. He was simply there ...

  "One might say," she added idly, "like the furniture.

  "On the second day he woke," she said, her voice quickening, "and he wasn't the same person at all—I'd forgotten how emptied a person can look when asleep. . ." She paused, remembering how those bright, interested eyes had rested on her when she'd brought him breakfast on a tray and later, coming into the kitchen from pruning her roses, how she'd found him waiting for her at the door. You should be in bed, she told him and he'd said, / don't know your name . . , mine is Matthew von Damm, and yours?

  "He wanted his books," she continued, "and I brought him the heavy duffle bag that had been stowed away in the hall cupboard, and for two days I went about my small chores coming on him in strange places. He loved to talk. I remember him holding up one of his books and saying in that accented voice of his, 'Do you know Aeschylus?' I didn't know what or who he meant—and then he recited to me those words of Aeschylus written over a thousand years ago—" She closed her eyes to speak them: " 'God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. . . And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our despair—against our will—comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.' " Opening her eyes she said simply, "Because of this—because of the way he spoke those lines—I knew, suddenly, a great deal about him."

  At first she'd paid him little attention but gradually, unaware, she'd begun to listen closely. He was a mining engineer and he seemed to have traveled everywhere—to the Sahara, to South Africa, Australia, Persia—and read widely as well, so that she began to understand what a small life she had lived, and how uneducated she was. He was humorous, too, and she was unaccustomed to humor in a man, and always she was aware of his presence and that imperceptibly the atmosphere of her cottage was changing. At first
she resented this, because this was her sanctuary, her refuge.

  "I would be working in the kitchen," she said, "and suddenly I'd sense he was behind me in the doorway, watching. One noontime when I was basting a chicken I glanced up and found him staring at me with great intentness, and for a long moment we looked at each other and then he turned and stamped away as if he was angry with me.

  "He'd begun to have dinner with me at the little table overlooking the garden, and that evening—the doctor had told him he could leave the next day—we were very quiet. I cut his portion of chicken for him because his arm was still in a cast... I remember there was a small fire in the fireplace and a thick fog outside, shutting out the world, and when we'd finished dining he stood up and I went around the table to gather up his empty plates."

  Her eyes closed, remembering. "As I reached over to grasp a platter my arm touched his, and it was like—like a charge of electricity between us. He said in a startled voice, 'Sara?' and I found myself incapable of moving away and I knew—" Her voice faltered. "I knew what was about to happen and I told myself it was madness, we were both mad."

  She opened her eyes and said almost harshly, "It was spring and the lilacs were in bloom and the sun was warm and the fruit trees were blooming and the fragrances were summer fragrances—of fresh-cut grass, warm earth, honeysuckle—and I was nearly forty and knew nothing of love or even of tenderness so that nothing—nothing," she said fiercely, "had prepared me for this sudden late awakening, this rush of passion..." She stopped and then, softly, "We asked nothing of each other, we simply accepted and lived it, savoring each other, enjoying, and no one knew, and four weeks later when he left—"

  "Oh no," cried Gen in a heartbroken voice.