“Not so bad, Mr. Legatt,” said Crowther genially, as he descended to the porch. I was waiting for my baggage to be taken ashore. “Have a drink before you go?”
“I think not,” said I, towering frostily.
I caught a gleam of amusement in Crowther’s eye.
“I believe you’ve got a come-over against me, Mr. Legatt,” he said. “You think I’ve not treated that girl up the river as a gentleman should. You do indeed! I fancy you’ll appreciate me better when you have more experience of this country. But it’s clear you don’t appreciate me at all now and I have a real respect for you, Mr. Legatt. I want you to have the same for me.”
“That’s quite out of the question,” I returned, looking him in the eye.
Crowther poked his head forward very earnestly.
“No, Mr. Legatt, you’re wrong there. I can prove to you that you misjudge me.”
I laughed, scathingly I hoped.
“How?”
“This way.”
Crowther took the small silk bag from his side pocket and balanced it on the palm of his left hand. He made it dance a little so that the trinkets which it held tinkled.
“I’ll hand this bag over to you with all its contents, here and now, on condition that you with your own hands return it to Ma Shwe At at Tagaung.”
He was as impressive as a man working the confidence trick, but I was not to be taken in so easily. I shook my head.
“With all its contents — yes. But without the sapphire.”
Captain Crowther drew himself up. He was dignified, he was hurt that anyone should hold so low an opinion of his probity. With the neatness of a conjuror demonstrating that there was no trickery in his magic, he untied with his right hand the string of the bag and opened the mouth.
“Please, see for yourself, Mr. Legatt.”
“I don’t wish to.”
“You accuse me. I ask you to be fair.”
I had let myself in for this test. I did not see what else I could do but obey him. I shrugged my shoulders and dipped my fingers into the bag. The first thing which I pulled out was a stone wrapped in a strip of linen.
“Will you open the wrapping and make sure that I haven’t tricked you?”
I had not a doubt now that it was the sapphire which I held. The stone was square, about the right thickness and the right size. Yet I felt that I had been tricked — tricked into making a fool of myself. I dropped the stone back into the bag.
“That’s all right,” I said reluctantly, and still more reluctantly: “I am sorry.”
“Now will you take it back to Tagaung?”
“I will not,” I cried.
I was angry. I was on my way home. I had a few days’ work waiting for me in the office at Rangoon which I must complete before I started.
“I’ll have nothing to do with it,” I added.
“One day and one night upstream,” said he.
“Your affairs are no concern of mine, Captain Crowther.”
Captain Crowther appeared to be perplexed. He tilted his cap back with his right hand and scratched his forehead.
“Yet you seemed to take a very definite interest in them, Mr. Legatt. Come! Oblige me!”
He was still holding the little bag balanced on his outstretched palm. I could not help wondering what would happen if I then and there took it and agreed to return it. It was possible that Crowther had thought over his conduct during the night and come to a more honest mind. I might be wrong and hasty in my judgement. He had already surprised me once by his fear of this easy and indolent country. Why not a second time? I was tempted. I could not, however, sail upstream until to-morrow. It would take me a day and a night to reach Tagaung, and there I should have to wait perhaps the best part of a week for a steamer to bring me back again. No, certainly not! Besides, though I seemed to recognise a sign of grace in this proposal of Captain Crowther’s, I wished that no link of any kind should bind us together. I thrust my hands into my pockets.
“You’ve a surer way to return those ornaments.”
“How?” Crowther asked earnestly.
“By handing them to your First Officer.” I remembered the smile with which the First Officer had heard my remark to Crowther that I supposed that he was meaning to tie up at Tagaung for the night. “He’ll recognise Ma Shwe At, and I shouldn’t. Give the bag to him.”
“With that fine sapphire in it? Not on your life, Mr. Legatt.”
“Seal up the bag then and trust it to one of your brother captains.”
“To no one but you, Mr. Legatt. I don’t want the whole world to think me dippy just as I’m stepping off on a new career. It’s up to you or up to no one.”
He shook the bag again at me till the ornaments inside of it clinked and tinkled. Then with a sigh of resignation he dropped it again into his pocket.
“Here’s to-day’s good deed sticking out a yard and we’re both of us turning our backs upon it. You were in such a taking last night, Mr. Legatt, that I felt sure you’d oblige me this morning. However, I can’t say I’m sorry,” and he suddenly burst into a laugh and made a gutter-boy’s grimace at me. My word, he had been laughing at me the whole time! He had seen my baggage being taken on shore and carried up the beach. He was confident that I would never turn round and go back to Tagaung.
“Captain Crowther,” I said, “I think that you are the most detestable person I have ever met.”
“Well, you do surprise me,” replied Captain Crowther.
It was odd, but it was true. I must suppose that he expected me to take him for a humorist. He was not speaking with any sarcasm. He really was surprised.
Chapter 4 Prisoners of the Sun
I SPENT THE first year after my return to England in the London office of my Company, acquiring knowledge of its internal economy, and enjoying myself in the intervals. But the forest had set its seal on me and I could never hear the wind rustling the leaves in a town square without flying back upon the carpet of my dreams to the vast woodlands of the Irrawaddy and seeing the elephants carry and arrange the huge teak logs. At the beginning of the second year my father died, and what with the settlement of his estate and the new dispositions which his death entailed, I could not hope to find my way back again to Burma for another eighteen months. I was thus two years and a half in England and chiefly in London. Yet during all that time I neither met nor heard of Michael Crowther. For all I knew he might be entertaining the great world in Mayfair or occupying a cell in Maidstone Gaol. I thought the latter alternative the more likely. If he had rattled the Stock Exchange, as he promised to do, he had done it very quietly. But I could never quite forget him, for from time to time I felt a foolish twinge of remorse in that I had not taken him at his word and carried the silken bag with its trinkets and its sapphire back to Ma Shwe At at Tagaung. I did have the time, and I might at all events have sustained her pride by pretending that in the interval Michael Crowther had died. But that small opportunity had gone.
It was not, then, until the decline of the third year that I could with any honesty towards my Company propose another visit to Burma. I made my plans to leave England during the second week of December, being persuaded to that date chiefly because it would save me from the festivities of Christmas, an uncomfortable season for a man without a family. My luggage was packed days before it was to be collected by the Shipping Company’s agents; and on the afternoon of a dank, raw Sunday, the darkness beginning to fall and the air heavy with mist, I wandered out from my lodging into a small neighbouring street of garages and reconstructed houses much favoured by film stars. The hub of that street, however, is a mighty church, and as I passed its door the thunder of its organ called me in.
I stood at the back, facing the great altar ablaze with the golden light of its many candles; and a tall priest with a red stole upon his shoulders mounted into a pulpit set aloft above the congregation against the farthest pillar of the nave. He preached in a high, clear voice upon a text from Hosea about the valley of Achor
and the door of hope. So much I remember, and then my attention was diverted. For in front of where I stood, at the end of the last row of benches, separated from me by an open passage-way, sat Michael Crowther. It was the last place in the world I should have expected to find him. I could only imagine that, like myself, he had wandered by chance into the church as a refuge from the chill and gloom outside. I noticed, however, that he sat very still, like a man enthralled, and I wondered whether he had got religion, as the saying goes. His head, with its thick and bristly hair, stood out in relief against the distant candles on the altar and never moved. His face was turned towards the preacher so that I could just see his heavy jaw thrust out as I had seen it when he was feeling his way amongst the sand-banks on the porch of the Dagonet. I made up my mind to speak to him as soon as the service was over. But I did not get the chance. For as the offertory plates began to be handed along the benches and the chink of coins to be heard, Michael Crowther rose without shame to his feet, and stalked past me out of the church. I said to myself: “That’s Michael D. He may not have rattled the Stock Exchange, but he’s true to type.”
Towards the end of the week I travelled overland to Marseilles and embarked for Rangoon with two complete years ahead of me before I needed to return. I spent the first year in the forests of the Salween River. But at the beginning of the second, I had occasion to travel again to the upper waters of the Irrawaddy. I took the night train from Rangoon to Mandalay, saw my baggage placed in my cabin on the steamer and then, having still a few hours to spare, I took the usual walk towards the Zegyo Bazaar. I say “towards,” for I never reached it. In the street of shops which led to it, a name upon a board caught my eye. The board stretched above a shop and I should probably not have noticed it at all but for the queer circumstance that at this very busy hour of the morning a boy was putting up the shutters. Once I had noticed it I could not turn my eyes away. For the name painted in bold white letters on a black ground was:
MICHAEL CROWTHER.
There might be two Michael Crowthers of course, and both linked with some sort of shackle to Mandalay. Coincidences are after all more usual in life than in fiction. Or the great assault upon the Stock Exchange had failed and its strategist had fled back to the lines he knew. It occurred to me that if that were the case, the sooner I pushed along to the Bazaar the less risk I had of being annoyed. To this day I don’t know why I loitered. But I did. I waited amongst the creaking bullock-carts and the streams of passers-by: now a Shan from the hills with an enormous hat upon his head, now a group of girls with tuberoses in their black hair and silken skirts, and more gaiety in their laughter than even in their clothes, a monk in his yellow robe with a shaven head, a party of tourists holding above their helmeted heads white umbrellas which would have condemned them to the stocks in King Thibaw’s day. I waited there in the blazing sunlight, and gradually and slowly I was bewitched by an intense and inexplicable expectation. The feeling was vaguely familiar to me. Yes, some where and when I had experienced it before. It could really have nothing to do with Crowther’s name upon a board, I argued, for I had seen Crowther himself in the Farm Street Church and not a nerve in me had thrilled. Yet here was I in a street of Mandalay — enthralled. A man with a terrier dog at his heels pushed by me, and I remembered when this same sense of expectation had possessed and controlled me. It was in a moonlit clearing of the forest north of the Second Defile. There I had waited for a panther — and something else. Here I waited for Michael D. Crowther — and something else. There nothing had happened. Here Michael D. Crowther did. For as I stood and waited, he came bouncing out of his shop.
“Of all people, you!” he cried, and I drew back with a little jump. It was perhaps the oddest circumstance, at all events at that time in our acquaintanceship, that though he was often in my thoughts, the moment I heard his voice I wanted to break away. “Now isn’t that a piece of luck?” he continued eagerly.
“Is it?” I asked. “For whom?”
Michael D. grinned.
“Cold!” he said, wagging his head at me. “Oh, very cold and biting, Mr. Legatt. You know all the talk there is of Gandhi and his Untouchables. Well, when I read of the Untouchables I always think of you.”
“Thank you!” said I. “Good morning!”
As I moved on all the truculence left him. He ran after me and caught me by the arm, and his hand shook as he held me.
“Please don’t go!” he implored, with so notable a change of voice and so humble a prayer in his eyes that I could not but stop. “I withdraw every word. My tongue ran away with me. It often does with witty people. But I’ve got to speak to you. I’ll get a hat and give an order to my boy. I won’t be a second.”
He was back in his shop almost before the sound of his words had ceased. I thought: “What a fool I was not to slide past the shop with my head turned the other way!” I asked myself immediately upon that: “After all, aren’t you a bit of a prig? Why shouldn’t you stop and listen to him?” And by the time I had put those questions Crowther had rejoined me.
He led me to a café. We sat in the open under an awning. In front of us across the road the wide, lily-starred moat slept about the walls of Fort Dufferin; and as each of us drank a cool lime squash Crowther went back with a curious eagerness and flurry to the last conversation we had held four years before.
“You must have been surprised to see me here, Mr. Legatt?”
It was a difficult question to answer. I sought unwisely to put him at his ease by suggesting that he had suffered no more than the common lot.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. He was up in arms in a second. You might disapprove of him, but you must not forget him. Above all you must not find him uninteresting and become indifferent as to whether he failed or succeeded.
“You can’t have forgotten all those ambitions of mine,” he cried indignantly.
I in my turn was a little nettled.
“I really don’t see why I shouldn’t have.”
He glared at me. Then he chuckled.
“But you haven’t, anyway.”
I laughed and climbed down.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then you must have been surprised to see me,” he insisted with some petulance.
“All right. I was surprised. I ought not to have been, but I was,” I acknowledged.
But Crowther was not appeased.
“And why oughtn’t you to have been surprised, if you please, Mr. Legatt?”
“Because I have been three years in London and never once in business or any other circles did I hear your name.”
Here was something Crowther could not question. He sat back in his chair and nodded his head gloomily.
“I’ve been a great disappointment to myself, Mr. Legatt. I had stayed in the East too long. I was a prisoner of the sun after all. Funny! Governors and soldiers and big business chiefs can go back and hold their own — men really of the same calibre as myself. I suppose that I am more sensitive than most people, what?” I was careful not to interrupt and to keep a very straight face. “Yes, I had got the habit of the cheroot, and Havanas made me ill. I didn’t realise it at first. No. I hired a little flat in South Kensington and stood in Piccadilly Circus and made a noise like Dick Whittington. I looked up all the smart fellows I had any sort of link with. Queer thing! Most of them were a good deal more cordial to me as a Captain on the Irrawaddy than as a man starting in their own line of big business. There was one, the head of a great financial family, who fairly sickened me, Mr. Legatt. I sent in my card one morning and I was shown into the holy of holies, and he sat back in his chair and looked at me without a word. I said to myself: ‘That’s good! That’s the way! I’ll make a note of that. He puts me at a disadvantage.’ So I started in on him. I had come home to put a little pep into English methods, and he just looked at me. I could help him and he could help me; I said Michael D. Crowther was going to get to work; and he looked at me. I reckon I lost my head a bit then, but he only looked at
me, and I just had to come away. And he had never spoken one word. I tell you I wondered for a moment whether pep didn’t really mean simply saying nothing. However, others put bits of business in my way. But here’s the amazing thing. They were little bits of business, but I didn’t bring them off. No, sir, I didn’t succeed.”
He was now merely Michael Crowther, a woebegone Englishman consoling himself by the recital of his experiences. He had meant to be the big noise; he was not even the baby’s gurgle. He had planned to hit the skies; he had not even flapped up off the earth.
“Other things besides the hustle made me shudder. The east wind, the clear brown fog ten foot high and the miles of black soot on the top of it, the cars bearing down on you and hooting death at you, and above all the utterly damnable, chilly, disobliging loneliness of it all. I began to pine for the colour and the ease and the good humour of the life I knew here under skies which really laugh and a sun which really warms. I wanted to hear the copper-smith bird tell me a real summer is coming. Yes, Mr. Legatt, I had Burma in my bones, and the want of it made me ache from head to foot. I’d have given all the hooting motor-cars in Piccadilly for the creak of one bullock-wagon in Mandalay. The Havana cigar — you can have the crop. What I wanted was a Watson Number One”; and as though he had forgotten it in the need to pour himself out from a bottle and hold himself up in a glass against the light, he pulled a cheroot from the pocket of his white drill jacket and lit it.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 639