“I don’t know what he meant. Or how he meant it. But I felt it to be a compliment of some sort. And you may think this strange but when you stand with Nautaung and see the mountain it makes you feel that if you could only get up there that there wouldn’t be any sacrifice too great. I can’t explain exactly but I know from that why men must climb mountains. And I know that these climbers speak the truth when they say they don’t exactly know why they must climb but they must. And more important I know the real reason they climb is not to have any great adventure or to conquer even, but for some other reason that is more than that.”
Her eyes were closed but her lips were half parted with a floating weightless serenity and he felt that she did not sleep and wanted him to continue. Then, before he could begin again she sighed once deeply and he knew she slept.
He walked noiselessly out to the kitchen and told Rima to cover her with a blanket and let her sleep there on the couch until she awoke and to take the phone off the hook and where to call him should she begin to cry again, otherwise he would be back tomorrow.
Half-way back to the hotel it began to rain. Then little pebbles of hail stung his face. He breathed deeply of the fresh cool air. He paused in the lobby bar to say hello to M. J. Turner and Nickie and her young wounded subaltern, Guy Wilson. The subaltern was sober. Con begged off having a drink, then looked in on Danny and stayed to sup with Doc Travis. Immediately after dinner he went to his own room and to bed.
Doc Travis called him at six in the morning. Danny’s fever had broken and he was conscious. Con came right away and the Doc gave him a couple minutes.
“You scared the ass off me. Glad to have you back.”
“I’m pissed you know,” Danny said weakly. “What day is it?”
Con told him.
“It must have been a bloody good show. I’ve been this way before. Was I difficult?”
“You talk too much, boy. I got enough on you to keep you embarrased a couple of lifetimes.”
“You wouldn’t use it,” he grinned feebly.
“I wouldn’t?” Con asked archly.
“No sympathy, eh.”
“Not a bit.”
“You’ll have to give me a little or I won’t tell you about my dream. What a beautiful trip I took.”
“Too much morphine no doubt. Now shut up and rest. You’ve damned near ruined my holiday as it is.”
“You wouldn’t dare have fun with me flat on my ass.”
“Like hell I wouldn’t. Go to sleep, boy.”
“Give me my monocle and I will.”
Con smiled taking it from his breast pocket and inserting it. Danny smiled weakly, looking himself again. Then like a tired, satisfied infant tucked safely away with his favorite toy, instantly slept.
Con stood there for a long moment. He swallowed hard and felt the mist in his own eyes. You sentimental jerk, he said to himself. Then turning walked briskly from the room feeling suddenly as light as if he had removed the heavy pack from his back after a long march.
He wired the Colonel and talked to Delhi, then spent the morning playing gin-rummy with M. J. Turner in the lobby bar. Con won eightysix rupees and invited M. J. Turner to lunch. The G.M. executive saw that his money was put to good use by ordering a bottle of Mumm’s Thirtyone champagne to go with their lamb curry and rice. Then Con walked out to Carla’s.
When he got there Rima said Carla had just gotten up and was preparing her toilet. Carla called out who was it and Con called that Danny’s fever had broken. She told him to come in and he traced her voice through the bedroom and opened a door. She was in the tub.
“Sorry,” he said. “I misunderstood.”
“Come in,” she invited. “Sit down.”
The way she said it she could have been inviting him to tea. He hesitated for an instant, his mind quickly recalling her background. I suppose, he thought, where she comes from it’s quite customary. For a second he wondered how many other men she invited into her bath, then sat down in the wicker chair opposite the tub.
Her fine breasts and shoulders were wet and she was scrubbing her neck with a wash cloth and he knew that his eyes betrayed his every thought as the rushing warm suddenly turned hot currents of his maleness welled up achingly in him flowing from his knees to his throat and back again in tremulous waves.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked a little awkwardly his eyes on her eyes but unable to forget the rest.
“I never moved from the couch,” she said. “How does the patient look?”
She was herself again, he knew, cool and tightly composed.
He told her what the Doctor had said and about his short chat with Danny. “It must have been cerebral malaria. It came out this morning that he’s had it before. He’ll have to be watched closely the next few days. Travis says that more than likely he’ll be very depressed; he says severe depression usually follows a maniacal delirium.”
She had slid down into the tub now, her arms resting on the sides so that only her shoulders were above the water, that was remarkably clear for soapy water, looking at him as coldly objectively, as unconcerned over her nakedness as if she were meeting him for the first time, fully clothed, teacher to parent at a local meeting of the P.T.A.
“I didn’t think Danny was maniacal,” she said as if defending him. “At times his delirium was remarkably coherent even if it showed fantastic imaginative powers.”
“Fantastic is the word all right,” he smiled. “But I think Doc Travis used maniacal in the medically-expressive sense; referring to the violence he showed at times.”
She was thoughtful, contemplative for a moment: “The important thing is that he’s better. If you’ll excuse me now,” she said, her face a mask, “I’ll get out of the tub.”
Then looking at him with those cool impersonal eyes: “I’ll be out in a few minutes if you care to wait.”
He couldn’t tell whether it was an invitation or an ultimatum to leave the premises.
“I’ll be in the livingroom,” he stood up.
“Help yourself to a drink,” she said politely, ladylike.
He was staring down at her suddenly very irritated by her politeness and irritated again for the other reason, doubly irritated with a raw irritation that burst suddenly into a tenacious anger that spread slowly redly, gradually changing his expression. Then looking down at her as he had wanted to look at her since he first came into the room, fully and carefully and even more slowly than he really wished, and when he had finished walked out at the last instant tenaciously suppressing his desire to slam the bath door.
He kept occupied in the livingroom. Fervently he had thought for a moment, what he would say to her when she joined him, then knew if he thought about it anymore he wouldn’t know how or what to say. He poked at the fire with a poker then quickly leafed through a couple of copies of Punch magazine. Then he began to browse among her records, which were almost all classical records, settling finally on the lightest thing he could find, an album of Strauss Waltzes.
He had figured out that she would keep him waiting at least half an hour. He was paying the penalty, he felt, the prerogative of womanly vengeance because she probably thought I looked at her indecently in the bath. Why was she that way? What made her see things so errantly? Why did she want to hide the real true beauty of her as he had with his own eyes seen it exercised upon Danny. Don’t you know, he said to the sudden vision of her, that I could never see anything but the serenity that is you, the grieving goodness of you, naked or unnaked, gowned, or simply clothed as by Danny’s bed. Not any one thing but all the things that come of the beauty that originates far down in the mine of you, in the very pit of the mine of you. The beauty that is not describable but is like that of certain holy men or even like that of Nautaung. Whatever, he said to the vision, makes you want to withhold, to destroy the goodness of you.
And then because he did not expect her, because only ten minutes of the half-hour he had allowed her had elapsed, he was startled when she spoke.<
br />
“You like Strauss,” she repeated what he had not heard the first time.
“Yes. From my mother I like him,” he said.
She was in tailored grey slacks with a strictly tailored white men’s style shirt very unlike the vision. But her hair was tight with a pony tail and no make-up as was the vision, and the slightly tilted child’s face was as serene as any vision ever if you did not look at the eyes which were now coldly vacantly dead as she stood longly poised but not posed at the edge of the fire.
He came up to her and put his hands gently on her shoulders.
She felt weightless and her eyes said nothing.
He kissed her firmly but not hard on the mouth.
He felt in return only an empty deadness that was not even a rigidness. He stepped back. He waited. Her eyes said nothing.
“You insist that’s the way it is?”
“That’s it.”
“Why?”
“Don’t be funny,” she said instantly hating herself for saying it. Did she have to be cruel, too.
“Why? Damn it. Why?” he asked incisively.
“Because, Captain, I’m not in the market for an affair.”
“Neither am I.”
“What about your American Red Cross worker? It didn’t take you long to get over that.”
“This is something else entirely. And you know it. I know you know it.”
“I know when I’m well off.”
“Is that why you invited me into the bathroom?”
“In my country there isn’t anything wrong with that.”
“This isn’t your country and you know damn well I wasn’t accustomed to it.”
“All right. I didn’t think. I had just gotten up. I was half asleep. A second after I invited you in I wished I hadn’t. It was a mistake. Does that satisfy you?”
“No. Not at all.”
“All right then. I was cruel. I was cruel because that’s what I think of you and your love.”
“You’re wrong, Carla,” he said in another voice. “Fear of love is cruel. Not love.”
“And what do you know about love? The Colonel told us about your love. Your Margaret. Is love the kind of thing you can get over in two weeks? Is that what you think love is?” she said sarcastically, bitterly.
“The Colonel presumed too damn much. Anyhow, I suppose it’s a crime to look for love. To mistake it for something else. Does that make you stop looking?” he asked incisively, fervently. “I’ve thought about loving you. A lot. It would be a full time job to do justice to loving you. I can’t give you that now I know. But this war’s not.…”
“But you can give me a little bastard,” she raged. “Or leave me when you’ve had your fill. Or a wireless telling me how very dead you are and another dream that can’t be fulfilled. I’m sick of broken dreams. Sick,” she almost shouted. “You’ve got ideas about love. I know the reality of love. That’s the difference. I learned my lesson and I don’t forget my lessons. You don’t know what it’s like to be trained to love. To be married off at fifteen. Fifteen. The age when the world hasn’t had a chance to take away your tenderness. The age of adoration. The age when a woman is more capable of love than ever. At least a love of the senses. To return from your wedding trip to find you don’t know your husband at all; an actor who had played one role for your sake then resumed his ordinary self. Married, you suddenly realize, till death do you part for the sake of his getting closer to an influential member of your family. The marriage broker still waiting for his commission,” she laughed sarcastically. “Married to an outwardly neat and kind loving man. A Chesterfield sprinkled with toilet water. Toilet water to hide the odor of filthy soggy socks that he was too lazy to change until they ran holes. What do you think it’s like at fifteen to visualize spending the rest of your life with that? That was my lesson in love,” she said bitterly.
“Or to love your child. To begin to believe it’s all worth while if only because of the child. Finding not all but some fulfillment in that. Then having that taken away from you because you’re in your husband’s country where your capability to love and care for your own child is measured by your politics or lack of it. Or because a woman is considered a lesser man.
“Unlike your American women, Captain, I was schooled for love. I knew when I was thirteen that most men can’t love unless they can instruct. That the first attribute of a good wife was to be a good pupil. I knew that a good wife like a good pupil should grow not only physically and socially graceful in the eyes of her teacher but one who grows morally too. A woman capable of discerning right from wrong. Right from wrong as her instructor husband saw it. Because basically all men are moralists. And I grew to find out that their moralism was in direct proportion to their wickedness. Because in their stupid exploration of your virtue they find the other end of freedom for a moment. The end opposite their wickedness. For how can a man say he has been truly free unless he has explored it all; good and bad. I was even brought up to believe it was just fine for my husband to beat me. It showed his responsibility and concern for his pupil.
“Our first home was the embassy in Constantinople. I was like a student four years behind the rest of the class. I tried to adjust but everywhere we went it was the same. Always there was someone else that he’d rather instruct than me. But as we went along the disillusionment dissolved. I thank God for the time. I found out, slowly and alone, that I didn’t ever want him to begin to instruct me because there wasn’t anything he could instruct me in that had meaning, that was worthwhile. Then once our marriage was no longer politically convenient he simply ended it and made another.
“Don’t feel sympathetic, Captain. You don’t have to. Except for my child, and I have hopes there because for once I think my husband has chosen the wrong side, I’m glad it all happened. I learned something. It was fortunate even, I realize now, that he was unkempt and physically unattractive. Had he not been I might never have seen through him as I did. My only fear is in thinking that it might not have happened as it did. That I would still be a part of that life. And from that life I conclude to what I am right now. A woman who does not believe that a woman was born to see life as it was dictated to her. A woman that believes that no human has the right to mold themselves over in the image of someone else until they have found the mold of themselves.…”
There was a long silence that grew silently louder.
“Now will you go, Con. Please.”
He waited another long moment.
“No,” he said compassionately. “At least not until I’ve been heard, because suddenly Carla, a lot of things have become clear to me. I know, that unknowingly, you have told me what I want most of myself. To find as you do, a concreteness, a mold if you wish, that I lack but believe to be the most worthwhile thing of all. I can’t place what it is exactly, but at this moment it’s closer than ever. I don’t even consider it odd that at this instant I think of this war and its death of having value.
“For I know now that living close to death has more than anything taught me the value of life. It is a different value from those of my people in America for every day we seem to grow more distant in our beliefs. No longer do I see death as something that we must contemplate and prepare for but rather the pure joy that can come of living. And the concern should be of living; the dying a separate thing. For how could we know any success or joy in death unless we had known it in life.
“Had I met you three months ago maybe I would not have loved you. Three months can be a long time. A few months before that I lost a man, a Kachin, who was very dear to me. Then several more. Recently another man who I was not close to but did respect. It is funny that I could not learn from the second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth death what I have just learned now, and in the last week, when I am as far away from death as it has been possible for me to be. I thought, and it is the probable reason for my companionship with the monkey, that if I stayed away from men I would not have to suffer their loss or they mine, should death oc
cur. It was a simple solution. I even tried to find ways, I realize now, to dislike Danny and Nautaung and the others, the whole Kachin race. And now thinking about it, it frightens me that had I been successful I would never have known any of the beauty of the beautiful things that each in their own way showed me. I would have been like an American who travels Europe and stays only in the hotels of other Americans. I might as well have stayed at home. I might never have learned the lesson that men died to show me.
“Now suddenly, Carla, I know I must give myself fully to Danny and Nautaung and the People of the Hills. And even to one you have not heard of and is not considered nice. Danforth by name. And all equally. And from them I must find out what I lack of myself. And love them without fear or selfishness. Allowing that part of me that dies with them, if they should die, to die in the faith that I am not the lesser but that death is more than an end. As life is so. As Nautaung told me long ago.
“I have no right to avoid any longer. Because I understand now. And I will not avoid you either. And if you and I suffer for it we should welcome the suffering as the price we pay for our growth. And if we love maturely and honestly and sincerely and believe that love, whole and without fear, is the greatest growth of all, then someday we will outgrow these personal concerns that are the only things that separate us now,” he said. And he knew he but hardly knew what he was saying, yet, that he was expressing his belief.
“And if I love you for myself now it is only because I am not as tall as I would like to be for you. But someday, I will try very hard, to love you for yourself first. And that will be love as it is intended. Love so formulated that we will not even be concerned with its relationship to us; because we will know that the true concern of love is another purpose of some kind, and the concern of that will be greater than you and I.… I believe that is what we both want.”
One solitary tear ran streaming down her cheek, and then they were in each other’s arms. Both half-terrified, that but for an idle word or an unknown gesture that this moment would have never been; both bursting with a joyous thankfulness that it had not escaped.
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