‘It wouldn’t be nothing if the steward had come in,’ said Lionel grimly.
‘What harm if he did come in?’
‘Give him the shock of his life, to say the least of it.’
‘No shock at all. Such men are accustomed to far worse. He would be sure of a larger tip and therefore pleased. “Excuse me, gentlemen . . . “ Then he goes and tomorrow my secretary tips him.
‘Cocoa, for God’s sake, the things you sometimes say . . . ‘ The cynicism repelled him. He noticed that it sometimes came after a bout of high faluting. It was a sort of backwash. ‘You never seem to realize the risks we run, either. Suppose I got fired from the Army through this.’
‘Yes, suppose?’
‘Well, what else could I do?’
‘You could be my assistant manager at Basra.’
‘Not a very attractive alternative.’ He was not sure whether he was being laughed at or not, which always rattled him, and the incident of the unbolted door increased in importance. He apologized again ‘for my share in it’ and added, ‘You’ve not told that scruffy Parsee of yours about us, I do trust.’
‘No. Oh no no no no and oh no. Satisfied?’
‘Nor the Goanese steward?’
‘Not told. Only tipped. Tip all. Of what other use is money?’
‘I shall think you’ve tipped me next.’
‘So I have.’
‘That’s not a pretty thing to say.’
‘I am not pretty. I am not like you.’ And he burst into tears. Lionel knew that nerves were on edge, but the suggestion that he was a hireling hurt him badly. He whose pride and duty it was to be independent and command! Had he been regarded as a male prostitute? ‘What’s upset you?’ he said as kindly as possible. ‘Don’t take on so, Cocoa, there’s no occasion for it.’
The sobs continued. He was weeping because he had planned wrongly. Rage rather than grief convulsed him. The bolt unbolted, the little snake not driven back into its hole – he had foreseen everything else and ignored the enemy at the gate. Bolt and double-bolt now – they would never complete the movement of love. As sometimes happened to him when he was unhinged, he could foretell the immediate future and he knew before Lionel spoke exactly what he was going to say.
‘I think I’ll go on deck for a smoke.’
‘Go.’
‘I’ve a bit of a headache with this stupid misunderstanding, plus too much booze. I want a breath of fresh air. Then I’ll come back.’
‘When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.’
Further tears. Snivellings. ‘We’re both to blame,’ said Lionel patiently, taking up the cigarette-case. ‘I’m not letting myself off. I was careless. But why you didn’t tell me at once I shall never understand, not if you talk till you’re blue. I’ve explained to you repeatedly that this game we’ve been playing’s a risky one, and honestly I think we’d better never have started it. However, we’ll talk about that when you’re not so upset.’ Here he remembered that the cigarette-case was one of his patron’s presents to him, so he substituted for it a favourite old pipe. The change was observed and it caused a fresh paroxysm. Like many men of the warm-blooded type, he was sympathetic to a few tears but exasperated when they persisted. Fellow crying and not trying to stop. Fellow crying as if he had the right to cry. Repeating ‘I’ll come back’ as cordially as he could, he went up on deck to think the whole situation over. For there were several things about it he didn’t like at all.
Cocoanut stopped weeping as soon as he was alone. Tears were a method of appeal which had failed, and he must seek comfort for his misery and desolation elsewhere. What he longed to do was to climb up into Lionel’s berth above him and snuggle down there and dream that he might be joined. He dared not. Whatever else he ventured, it must not be that. It was forbidden to him, although nothing had ever been said. It was the secret place, the sacred place whence strength issued, as he had learned during the first half-hour of the voyage. It was the lair of a beast who might retaliate. So he remained down in his own berth, the safe one, where his lover would certainly never return. It was wiser to work and make money, and he did so for a time. It was still wiser to sleep, and presently he put his ledger aside and lay motionless. His eyes closed. His nostrils occasionally twitched as if responding to something which the rest of his body ignored. The scarf covered him. For it was one of his many superstitions that it is dangerous to lie unclad when alone. Jealous of what she sees, the hag comes with her scimitar, and she . . . Or she lifts up a man when he feels lighter than air.
V
Up on deck, alone with his pipe, Lionel began to recover his poise and his sense of leadership. Not that he and his pipe were really alone, for the deck was covered with passengers who had had their bedding carried up and now slept under the stars. They lay prone in every direction, and he had to step carefully between them on his way to the railing. He had forgotten that this migration happened nightly as soon as a boat entered the Red Sea; his nights had passed otherwise and elsewhere. Here lay a guileless subaltern, cherry-checked; there lay Colonel Arbuthnot, his bottom turned. Mrs Arbuthnot lay parted from her lord in the ladies’ section. In the morning, very early, the Goanese stewards would awake the sahibs and carry their bedding back to their cabins. It was an old ritual – not practised in the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay or even in the Mediterranean – and on previous voyages he had taken part in it.
How decent and reliable they looked, the folk to whom he belonged! He had been born one of them, he had his work with them, he meant to marry into their caste. If he forfeited their companionship he would become nobody and nothing. The widened expanse of the sea, the winking lighthouse, helped to compose him, but what really recalled him to sanity was this quiet sleeping company of his peers. He liked his profession, and was rising in it thanks to that little war; it would be mad to jeopardize it, which he had been doing ever since he drank too much champagne at Gibraltar.
Not that he had ever been a saint. No – he had occasionally joined a brothel expedition, so as not to seem better than his fellow officers. But he had not been so much bothered by sex as were some of them. He hadn’t had the time, what with his soldiering duties and his obligations at home as eldest son, and the doc said an occasional wet dream was nothing to worry about. Don’t sleep on your back, though. On this simple routine he had proceeded since puberty. And during the past few months he had proceeded even further. Learning that he was to be posted to India, where he would contact Isabel, he had disciplined himself more severely and practised chastity even in thought. It was the least he could do for the girl he hoped to marry. Sex had entirely receded – only to come charging back like a bull. That infernal Cocoa – the mischief he had done. He had woken up so much that might have slept. For Isabel’s sake, as for his profession’s, their foolish relationship must stop at once. He could not think how he had yielded to it, or why it had involved him so deeply. It would have ended at Bombay, it would have to end now, and Cocoanut must cry his eyes out if he thought it worth while. So far all was clear. But behind Isabel, behind the Army, was another power, whom he could not consider calmly: his mother, blind-eyed in the midst of the enormous web she had spun – filaments drifting everywhere, strands catching. There was no reasoning with her or about her, she understood nothing and controlled everything. She had suffered too much and was too high-minded to be judged like other people, she was outside carnality and incapable of pardoning it. Earlier in the evening, when Cocoa mentioned her, he had tried to imagine her with his father, enjoying the sensations he was beginning to find so pleasant, but the attempt was sacrilegious and he was shocked at himself. From the great blank country she inhabited came a voice condemning him and all her children for sin, but condemning him most. There was no parleying with her – she was a voice. God had not granted her ears – nor could she see, mercifully: the sight of him stripping [stripping: Forster’s substitution for topping a dago] would have killed her. He, her first-born, set apart for
the redemption of the family name. His surviving brother was too much a bookworm to be of any use, and the other two were girls.
He spat into the sea. He promised her ‘Never again’. The words went out into the night like other enchantments. He said them aloud, and Colonel Arbuthnot, who was a light sleeper, woke up and switched on his torch.
‘Hullo, who’s that, what’s there?’
‘March, sir, Lionel March. I’m afraid I’ve disturbed you.’
‘No, no, Lionel, that’s all right, I wasn’t asleep. Ye gods, what gorgeous pyjamas the fellow’s wearing. What’s he going about like a lone wolf for? Eh?’
‘Too hot in my cabin, sir. Nothing sinister.’
‘How goes the resident wog?’
‘The resident wog he sleeps.’
‘By the way, what’s his name?’
‘Moraes, I believe.’
‘Exactly. Mr Moraes is in for trouble.’
‘Oh. What for, sir?’
‘For being on board. Lady Manning has just heard the story. It turns out that he gave someone in the London office a fat bribe to get him a passage though the boat was full, and as an easy way out they put him into your cabin. I don’t care who gives or takes bribes. Doesn’t interest me. But if the Company thinks it can treat a British officer like that it’s very much mistaken. I’m going to raise hell at Bombay.’
‘He’s not been any particular nuisance,’ said Lionel after a pause.
‘I daresay not. It’s the question of our prestige in the East, and it is also very hard luck on you, very hard. Why don’t you come and sleep on deck like the rest of the gang?’
‘Sound idea, I will.’
‘We’ve managed to cordon off this section of the deck, and woe betide anything black that walks this way, if it’s only a beetle. Good night.’
‘Good night, sir.’ Then something snapped and he heard himself shouting, ‘Bloody rubbish, leave the kid alone.’
‘Wh – what’s that, didn’t catch,’ said the puzzled Colonel.
‘Nothing sir, sorry sir.’ And he was back in the cabin.
Why on earth had he nearly betrayed himself just as everything was going right? There seemed a sort of devil around. At the beginning of the voyage he had tempted him to throw himself overboard for no reason, but this was something more serious. ‘When you come back to the cabin you will not be you,’ Cocoa had said; and was it so?
However, the lower berth was empty, that was something, the boy must have gone to the lav, and he slipped out of his effeminate pyjamas and prepared to finish the night where he belonged – a good sleep there would steady him. His forearm was already along the rail, his foot poised for the upspring, when he saw what had happened.
‘Hullo, Cocoanut, up in my berth for a change?’ he said in clipped officer-tones, for it was dangerous to get angry. ‘Stay there if you want to, I’ve just decided to sleep on deck.’ There was no reply, but his own remarks pleased him and he decided to go further. ‘As a matter of fact I shan’t be using our cabin again excerpt when it is absolutely necessary,’ he continued. ‘It’s scarcely three days to Bombay, so I can easily manage, and I shan’t, we shan’t be meeting again after disembarkation. As I said earlier on, the whole thing has been a bit of a mistake. I wish we . . .’ He stopped. If only it wasn’t so difficult to be kind! But his talk with the Colonel and his communion with the Mater prevented it. He must keep with his own people, or he would perish. He added, ‘Sorry to have to say all this.’
‘Kiss me.’
‘No’
The words fell quietly after his brassiness and vulgarity and he could not answer them. The face was close to his now, the body curved away seductively into darkness.
‘Kiss me.’
‘No.’
‘Noah? No? Then I kiss you.’ And he lowered his mouth on to the muscular forearm and bit it.
Lionel yelped with the pain.
‘Bloody bitch, wait till I . . . ‘ Blood oozed between the gold-bright hairs. ‘You wait . . .’ And the scar in his groin reopened. The cabin vanished. He was back in a desert fighting savages. One of them asked for mercy, stumbled, and found none.
The sweet act of vengeance followed, sweeter than ever for both of them, and as ecstasy hardened into agony his hands twisted the throat. Neither of them knew when the end came, and he when he realized it felt no sadness, no remorse. It was part of a curve that had long been declining, and had nothing to do with death. He covered again with his warmth and kissed the closed eyelids tenderly and spread the bright-coloured scarf. Then he burst out of the stupid cabin on to the deck, and naked and with the seeds of love on him he dived into the sea.
The scandal was appalling. The Big Eight did their best, but it was soon all over the boat that a British officer had committed suicide after murdering a half-caste. Some of the passengers recoiled from such news. Others snuffled for more. The secretary of Moraes was induced to gossip and hint at proclivities, the cabin steward proved to have been over-tipped, the Master at Arms had had complaints which he had managed to stifle, the Purser had been suspicious throughout, and the doctor who examined the injuries divulged that strangulation was only one of them, and that March had been a monster in human form, of whom the earth was well rid. The cabin was sealed up for further examination later, and the place where the two boys had made love and the tokens they had exchanged in their love went on without them to Bombay. For Lionel had been only a boy.
His body was never recovered – the blood on it quickly attracted the sharks. The body of his victim was consigned to the deep with all possible speed. There was a slight disturbance at the funeral. The native crew had become interested in it, no one understood why, and when the corpse was lowered were heard betting which way it would float. It moved northwards – contrary to the prevailing current – and there were clapping of hands and some smiles.
Finally Mrs March had to be informed. Colonel Arbuthnot and Lady Manning were deputed for the thankless task. Colonel Arbuthnot assured her that her son’s death had been accidental, whatever she heard to the contrary; that he had stumbled overboard in the darkness during a friendly talk they had had together on deck. Lady Manning spoke with warmth and affection of his good looks and good manners and his patience ‘with us old fogies at our Bridge’. Mrs Marsh thanked them for writing but made no comment. She also received a letter from Lionel himself – the one that should have been intercepted in the post – and she never mentioned his name again.
E.M. Forster
The New Collected Short Stories
Forster's short stories are amusing, profound, lighthearted, mysterious, wise and witty. He was a master of the art. This new collection of his stories is the most comprehensive collection available. Besides the classic anthologies originally published as The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment, it includes the three most important stories published after Forster's death: ‘Dr Woolacott’, ‘The Life to Come’ and ‘The Other Boat’.
‘These fantasies . . .’ said E.M. Forster in his introduction to the first edition of Collected Short Stories in 1947, ‘. . . represent all that I have accomplished in a particular line.’ This was true in its way, but there was a parallel, hidden line of fiction-writing, on the theme of homosexual love, which Forster kept private during his lifetime, showing his work only to selected friends. T.E. Lawrence, for instance, wrote to Forster that ‘Dr Woolacott’ was the ‘most powerful thing I ever read . . . more charged with the real high explosive than anything I've ever met yet.’
P.N. Furbank, Reader in Literature at the Open University and author of E.M. Forster: A Life, has written a valuable introduction to this new edition which evaluates the short stories in the context of Forster's life and his other writing.
Jacket design: Bartholomew Wilkins and Partners
Front cover illustration: E.M. Forster by Dora Carrington
(National Portrait Gallery)
ISBN 0-283-99195-X
Sidgwick & Jackson Limited
; 1 Tavistock Chambers, Bloomsbury Way,
London WC1A 2SG
The New Collected Short Stories Page 29