Singapore Dream and Other Adventures

by Hermann Hesse

  He came to breakfast with hollows under his eyes and fatigue on his face. He glumly dawdled with his spoon in his fragrant tea and sullenly fiddled at peeling his banana until Mr. Bradley appeared. The latter said his usual curt and cool good morning, set the houseboy and the water carrier scurrying about with a series of loud commands, painstakingly picked out the yellowest banana from the bunch, and then ate it quickly and disdainfully while a servant led his horse out into the sunny court.

  “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about,” said the missionary, just as the other was about to leave. Annoyed, Bradley looked up.

  “Well? I have very little time. Does it have to be right now?”

  “Yes, that would be better. I feel duty bound to tell you that I am aware of your illicit relations with a Hindu woman. You can imagine how painful it is for me—”

  “Painful!” shouted Bradley jumping up and breaking into contemptuous laughter. “Sir, you are a bigger jackass than I thought! Of course I couldn’t care less what you think of me, but that you are snooping around in my house and spying on me is beyond the pale. Let’s make this short. I’ll give you until Sunday. Between now and then, kindly find new lodging in the town, because I will not tolerate your presence in this house a single day longer!”

  Aghion had expected a difficult outcome, but nothing like this. Nevertheless, he did not allow himself to be intimidated.

  “It will be my pleasure,” he said, keeping his composure, “to liberate you from my burdensome tenancy. Good morning, Mr. Bradley!”

  He walked out, and Bradley watched him, half aggrieved and half amused. Then he stroked his stiff mustache, pursed his lips, whistled for his dog, and went down the wooden stairs to the courtyard to ride into town.

  This brief stormy outburst, which had brought some clarity to the situation, was actually welcome to both men. Aghion, however, was now unexpectedly confronted with worries and decisions that an hour ago had been pleasantly far away. But as he gave serious thought to his situation, it became clear to him that his quarrel with Bradley was only a side issue. He saw that now he had come to the point where it was an inescapable necessity for him to straighten out the confusion of his whole approach to his life. The clearer this became, the better he felt about it. Living in this house with his energies lying fallow, enduring the empty hours and his restless desires, had become an ordeal which his uncomplicated nature would not in any case have been able to tolerate much longer. Thus he quite naturally began to look forward to the end of this semi-imprisonment, let come what may.

  It was still early in the morning, and a corner of the garden, his favorite spot, still lay in cool partial shadow. Here the branches of unpruned bushes hung over a very small walled pool that had once been intended for bathing but had fallen into neglect and was now home to a small tribe of yellow turtles. To this spot he dragged his bamboo chair, lay back in it, and watched the silent little beasts swimming sluggishly at ease in the warm green water, quietly peering at him with their clever little eyes. Beyond, in the stable yard, the unoccupied hostler squatted in his corner and sang. His monotonous nasal song drifted over to Aghion like ripples flowing and ebbing in the warm air. After his sleepless and agitated night, fatigue snuck up on the missionary. He closed his eyes, his arms went slack, and he fell asleep.

  A mosquito bite woke him up. Ashamed, he realized that he had slept away the entire morning, but he now felt fresh and untroubled. He at once resumed where he had left off, setting his thoughts and desires in order and patiently analyzing the confusion of his life. What had been unconsciously crippling him and troubling his dreams for a long time now came out into the clear light of day. While traveling to India had without doubt been a good and intelligent thing to do, he lacked the right inner vocation and drive to be a missionary. He was humble enough to see this as a defeat and a troubling inadequacy, but not as grounds for despair. Rather it seemed to him, since he was now resolved to look for more suitable work, to have found in India a good refuge and home, rich and full of possibilities in every way. Though it might be a sad thing that the indigenous people had committed themselves to false gods, it was not his job to change that. His job was to conquer this country for himself and to get the best out of it for himself and other people through his insight, his knowledge, and his youthful exertion, and to be ready for whatever work came his way.

  The evening of the very same day, after an interview that lasted hardly an hour, he was hired by a gentleman residing in Bombay, a Mr. Sturrock, as his secretary and overseer for his nearby coffee plantation. Aghion wrote a letter to his former patron in which he explained the actions he had taken and engaged to pay back the money he had received from him, and Sturrock promised to forward it to London. When the new overseer returned to his lodging, he found Bradley sitting alone in his shirtsleeves at the evening meal. He told him, before he even sat down, what had taken place.

  Bradley nodded with his mouth full, poured a bit of whisky in his water, and said in an almost kindly fashion, “Have a seat and help yourself. The fish is already cold. Now we are more or less colleagues. I wish you the best. Growing coffee is easier than converting Hindus, that’s for sure. And possibly it’s just as worthwhile. I didn’t think you were that sensible, Aghion!”

  The plantation he was to move to was two days’ journey inland, and Aghion was to set out for there with a company of coolies the day after next. Thus he had only a single day to put his affairs in order. To Bradley’s amazement, Aghion offered to join him the following day for an outing on horseback. But Bradley refrained from questioning him about this, and the two men, after having had the lamps with a thousand insects flying around them taken away, sat in the warm black Indian evening across from one another and felt nearer to each other than in all the foregoing months of forced cohabitation.

  “So,” said Aghion, after a long silence, “you must surely not have believed in my missionary plans right from the beginning.”

  “Oh, I did,” Bradley replied quietly. “I could plainly see that you were serious about it.”

  “But you must have also surely seen how little suited I was to what I was supposed to do and think here. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was none of my business. I don’t like it when people meddle in my affairs, so I don’t do that to them either. Besides, I have seen people try many crazy things here in India and succeed. Converting the natives was your job, not mine. And now you’ve seen some of your mistakes. At some point you might see others.”

  “Do you have an example in mind?”

  “For example, regarding your tirade this morning.”

  “Oh, you mean the girl!”

  “Exactly. You were trained as a clergyman. Nevertheless, you will admit that a healthy man cannot live and work for years at a time and stay healthy without occasionally having a woman. For God’s sake, you don’t have to blush! Now look here, a white man in India who didn’t bring a wife over here with him from England at the beginning has very little choice. There are no English girls here. The ones who are born here are sent back to Europe as children. The only choice left is between the sailors’ whores and Hindu women. Myself, I prefer the latter. What’s so bad about that?”

  “Listen, Mr. Bradley, here we do not agree! For me, as it says in the Bible and as we are told by our church, any relationship out of wedlock is wrong and evil!”

  “And if nothing else is available?”

  “Why is nothing else available? If a man really loves a girl, he should marry her.”

  “But surely not a Hindu girl?”

  “Why not?”

  “Aghion, you are more broad-minded than I! I would rather bite one of my fingers off than marry a colored girl, you understand? And later you’ll see it that way too!”

  “Oh, please, I hope not. Since we’ve gotten this far, I might as well tell you. I love a Hindu girl and it is my intention to make her m
y wife.”

  Bradley’s expression became grave.

  “Don’t do it!” he said almost imploringly.

  “But I am going to do it,” Aghion continued excitedly. “I’m going to get engaged to the girl and then educate her and instruct her until she’s ready to receive Christian baptism. Then we’ll get married in the English church.”

  “So what is her name?” asked Bradley pensively.

  “Naissa.”

  “And her father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there’s still a long while between now and the baptism. Think it over some more. Of course our sort can fall in love with an Indian girl; they’re beautiful enough. They’re also supposed to be faithful and tractable wives. Nevertheless, I tend to see them as a kind of little animal, like a playful goat or a beautiful deer, not as my own kind.”

  “Isn’t that a prejudice? All men are brothers and the Indians are an old and noble people.”

  “You know more about that than I do, Aghion. As far as I’m concerned, I have a lot of respect for prejudices.”

  He got up, said goodnight, and went to his bedroom, the same bedroom where the previous night he had had the big, pretty laundry woman.

  “‘Like a kind of animal,’ he said,” Aghion thought, and belatedly began to feel resentful.

  Early the next day, before Bradley came to breakfast, Aghion had a horse led out and rode away while the monkeys in the tossing treetops were still doing their morning scream. And the sun was not yet fully up when he reached the vicinity of the hut where he had met beautiful Naissa. Tying up his horse, he approached the dwelling on foot. The little son was sitting naked on the threshold and playing with a baby goat, which he laughingly let butt him again and again in the chest.

  Just as the visitor was about to turn off the road to enter the hut, a young girl stepped over the squatting boy, whom he immediately recognized as Naissa. She came into the lane, carrying a tall earthenware jug hanging empty from her right hand. She walked past Aghion without looking at him. He followed her with his eyes, entranced. He quickly caught up with her and called out a greeting. She lifted her head and replied softly, looking coolly at the man with her beautiful golden brown eyes as though she did not know him. He reached out and took her hand, but she recoiled and continued walking with quickened steps. He accompanied her to the walled-in water hole, where the water from a weak spring ran thin and sparse over old, mossy stones. He tried to help her fill and lift the jug, but she fended him off without a word and with a disdainful look. He was surprised and disappointed to find her so stand-offish, and he reached into his pocket to take out the present that he had brought for her. He was rather hurt to see her immediately drop her unfriendliness and reach out for the thing he had brought. It was a small enameled box with pretty images of flowers on it. On the inside of the round lid was a little mirror. He showed her how to open it and put the thing in her hand.

  “For me?” she asked with innocent, childlike eyes.

  “For you!” he said, and while she played with the box, he stroked her velvet soft arm and her long black hair.

  She thanked him and hesitantly reached for the full water jug. He tried saying loving and tender things to her, but she obviously only half understood him. He tried to think of the right words and stood awkwardly in front of her. Suddenly the chasm between her and him seemed immense, and he thought sadly of how little the two of them had in common, and what a long, long time it would take for her to become his bride and friend, to understand his language, to grasp who he was, to be able to share his thoughts.

  In the meantime, she had started back toward the hut, and he walked beside her. The boy was engaged with the goat in a breathless game of tag. His dark brown back glowed metallically in the sun, and his bloated rice belly made his legs look too thin. In an excess of alienation, the Englishman realized that if he married Naissa, this nature child would be his brother-in-law. To get his mind off this thought, he looked again at the girl. He gazed at her fine, charming face with its big eyes and cool, childish mouth, and he began to wonder if he might not actually succeed in getting a kiss from those lips this very day.

  He was shocked out of this tender vision by a form that suddenly emerged from the hut and stood before his unbelieving eyes like a ghost. The figure that appeared in the doorway, stepped over the threshold, and stood before him was a second Naissa, a mirror image of the first. The mirror image smiled at him, greeted him, and took something out of the pouch at her hip, which she triumphantly raised over her head. It glittered brightly in the sun and he presently recognized it as the little scissors he had given Naissa not long ago. The girl to whom he had given the box with the mirror in it today, into whose lovely eyes he had gazed and whose arm he had caressed was not Naissa at all, but her sister. As the two girls stood side by side, still hard to tell apart, the love-smitten young man felt unspeakably deceived and misled. Two deer could not have been more alike, and if at this moment he had been given the choice of choosing one of them to take with him and to have and to hold forever, he would not have known which of the two he was in love with. True, he was gradually able to make out that the real Naissa was older and slightly smaller than her sister. But his love, which a few moments before he had been so sure of, was now as though broken into two halves like the image of the girl that had now doubled before his eyes in such a weird and unexpected way.

  Bradley heard nothing of these matters, and moreover was not asking any questions, when Aghion, who had returned home, sat mutely with him eating the midday meal. The next morning Aghion’s coolies appeared, gathered up his trunks and bags, and began carrying them away. When Aghion thanked Bradley and, in a gesture of farewell, offered him his hand, Bradley took it firmly and said, “Have a good trip, my boy! Eventually a time will come when you will no longer be mooning over those sweet Hindu girls but pining away for the sight of the honest, leathery face of an Englishwoman. Pay me a visit then, and we’ll be of one mind about a lot of things that we see differently today!”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HERMANN HESSE was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels included Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons.

  During World War I, Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in antiwar tracts and novels. Hesse’s lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919).

  When Hesse’s first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.

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