I cannot bear this hour—I cannot bear it—
I cannot watch its slow and tremulous dying.
Shall I deny it—mocking my denying—?
Or shall I weave a veil of words and wear it?
Yet, having woven it, shall I not tear it
With tears? I heard a messenger come crying—
_Lo, here is thy lost joy_.... But he was lying.
The thief who stole my joy would never share it.
Then cried the messenger—_Come, cease thy grieving,_
_Thy joy was terrible and exquisite,_
_Yet here are other joys, for God is kind_....
But I will pay no heed, for I am weaving
A veil of words ... a veil of words ... that it
May fall about my heart and make it blind.
They were in a sampan crossing obliquely towards Chungking.
“S’posing we collide with a corpse ...” said Stone.
“You adorable kid,” said Tam, and the sampan rocked as he leaned over to
pull the boy’s hair.
They collided with no corpses, nor with any of the sampans, loaded with
retreating soldiers, coming from Chungking. The steps at the foot of
which the sampan landed were moving with soldiers. A few earthenware
jars stood on the lowest step, abandoned by their owners. On the beach,
below the steps, a herd of beggars were raking with their fingers
in a wilderness of refuse. One boy, who had committed some breach of
muck-raking etiquette, was being held down by two women; his legs were
being stretched by another boy and the taut muscles pounded by yet
another avenger. His screams followed the travellers as they climbed the
steps. There was a half open arched gate through the city wall at the top
of the steps. The town within the wall was so silent that, for a long
time, they could hear the screams of the beggar boy on the mud shore.
Many of the booths and the shops were shut. Shopmen with black caps and
long gowns stood expectantly outside their barred doors. Tense faces
looked from the leaning upper windows into the abyss of the narrow
street. A closely curtained light chair was carried swiftly by, and a
young Chinese woman with a frightened face pushed aside the curtains
and looked out when she heard the booted tread of the three foreigners.
Perhaps she hoped they were wild wicked soldiers and would see her. The
houses leaned together, propped up by their own crooked shadows; a fringe
of gilded shop signs swayed so low that the occasional cavalrymen had to
dismount and lead their horses. Soldiers passed, all facing towards the
river gate. The soldiers swaggered by the dubious, watching citizens.
The soldiers looked afraid, but their mouths opened to shout confident
things.
“Buy nice ivory?” said one of the shopkeepers to Tam in a soft voice.
The shopkeeper clasped his hands and bowed himself slightly towards Tam.
Stone was sitting on the rough counter of a deserted booth watching the
soldiers. Tam and Edward left him in the street and entered the shop when
the shopman had taken down one shutter.
“This feller knows me,” said Tam. “It was here I finally found the
cigarette-holder that Emily wanted.”
The shopman brought down various and unlikely things for their
inspection, an opium pipe, a large porcelain figure, a curly animal made
of dull jade the color of a shallow sea, a polished screen of blackwood.
Tam fingered the porcelain figure as he talked.
“I promised you I’d tell you various things about Emily. I met her first
about three years ago, soon after I had married Lucy. She and I met Emily
at a theatre party.... I am a wholehearted man and an obstinate man; at
the play I was irritated because Emily seemed so conscious of her own
cleverness. I didn’t want to be forced to be conscious of her. I find
Lucy adorable because I am never conscious of her—she is like air to me.
I am clever myself and I refuse to be distracted. Emily has once or twice
very nearly succeeded in distracting me—against my will. I have been
hardened against her, simply because she tried so hard. I like awfully
being with her. With her I can be much wittier than without her. With
her nothing ever falls flat. And Lucy was fond of her too; Lucy insisted
on my bringing Emily round the world as my secretary. When that was
arranged, Emily said to Lucy, ‘How d’you know I won’t steal Tam? What
would you call that, Lucy—committing astigamy?’ It shocked Lucy. Lucy’s
mind wears tight stays, you know. That fact makes things easier for me.
She never disconcerts me. On the other hand she is often disconcerted by
me. Emily never is. To me, after that sally, Emily said—‘How d’you know
I don’t love you? What would you call that?’ Somehow Emily ... never
paid back the loan of life. Emily never let me forget her. She could
not believe that I could continue not to love her. If she had not been
so clever I might have loved her. She put her wits between herself and
me—a shining armor. She did most fatally watch me, and if there was an
increased softness or success between us at any time—her eyes seemed to
seize that moment and devour it, so that the moment, for me, was gone.
She knows herself and everything that is happening to her too well.”
His fingers seemed trying to knead the china figure in front of him. The
shopman’s assistant had placed two bowls of tea before them.
Something had been heard outside. Edward had not heard it. Everyone was
moving. The assistant ran two stout horizontal bars across the shutters.
He had not time to put up the missing shutter. He was driven indoors by
the sound of running feet down the street. Even Edward could hear that
sound. A strange voiceless whispering of many bare feet. Men and children
ran by, all in one crowd, arms bent, mouths open, distorted, breathless
faces. They made no sound except with their running whispering feet. The
assistant lifted the porcelain figure as one lifts a baby and crouched
behind the counter with it. The shopman stood with his eye to a crack in
the shutter. Edward and Tam sat on two blackwood stools at the foot, as
it were, of a ghost, a blue and green and gold mandarin coat crucified on
a screen.
There was no sound anywhere.
Then there was a faint shuffling. Two soldiers came uncertainly down
the street. Their uniform was new to Edward, a mustard-yellow one. They
carried their rifles alertly, pointing forward. They walked with a
crouching gait. Their faces looked dark and drunken.
There was another silence. Then a hum of muttering voices rose from
behind closed shutters.
“Well, well, better go while the going’s good,” said Tam in a prosaic
voice. “Where’s Stone, I wonder?”
The shopman made pacifying gestures and tapped his ear. There was a very
distant sound of rifle fire.
Edward and Tam leaned back against the broad coat. “Better wait here a
bit. D’you want me to go on about Emily?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know whether you’d want me to tell you that I have been Emily’s
lover. Once. Champagne makes her blessedly silly and uncaring ... she
sits smiling like a baby then ... she is serene at last. I adore people
who are tranquil, who don’t compete ... Emily, gentle, is absolutely
perfect. Lucy is always gentle but she is not perfect. She is not—Emily.
Well, I suppose I ought to say Emily—plus champagne. You see I tell
you this to show that I am not trying to make the best of myself. It
became, I suppose, harder for Emily after that. She was bad-tempered
often, dull often, after that. Once she cried in public and she talked
sometimes pathetically about herself to me—a thing I can’t stand. I am
not interested in pathos. I am not interested, I may say, in people from
their own point of view, especially women. I don’t see pathos in myself,
why should pathos be expected to appeal to me?”
“We ought to go,” said Edward. He had seen a picture of Emily crying,
Emily with red staring eyes full of tears, crying, behind a wet
handkerchief, to find words that might effectively array her grief before
a man who was “not interested in pathos.”
“Let’s go,” said Tam. “I wonder where Stone is. Excellent person, Stone,
what? Always falls on his feet.”
They walked down the deserted street. The city gate to which they first
came was shut and within its arch on the inner side was a group of
soldiers of the retreating army. Stone Ponting was leaning against the
shoulder of one of the more passive soldiers, watching the others. Stone
was spitting, preparatory to inserting a new piece of gum. The soldiers
seemed too busy arguing to resent Stone’s close inspection.
“Bum soldiers, I’ll say,” said Stone when he saw Tam. “I’d like to see
our doughboys act this way. Say listen, I saw a guy chasing off with a
sack of silver and—by golly—it split. Gee, there was iron men all over
the sidewalk and he didn’t stop to pick many ofum up. The soldiers did
that forum. They should worry. What gets me’s that I came up too late.”
The argument among the soldiers ceased suddenly as the gate was half
opened. They filed through one by one. “Look as much like Chinese
infantry as you can and we’ll go with ’em,” whispered Tam. They all three
passed out among the soldiers and the man in charge of the gate did not
challenge them.
The mud beach between the city wall and the river was crowded with
soldiers; by sheer force of numbers they were shouldering the beggars and
the outcast women out of their heritage. They had one common desire—to
get away. Every boat that could be commandeered was over-filled with
soldiers the moment it could be brought to the beach. Each boat pushed
away bristling like a porcupine with upright figures and with bayonets.
As the current caught the boats and swung them down the river, desultory
shouts came from a distant bank upstream.
“Well, well,” said Tam. “It looks as if we shall have to wait till the
end of the war to get across the river. I wish I could talk Chinese and
then I would ask one of these soldiers what it feels like to be so much
afraid. Do you know, it may sound vain, but I don’t know what fear is.
I’ll tell you a yarn——”
“We can get on board that boat,” said Edward.
Some unexplained argument among the thronging soldiers was keeping half
empty a boat which had just been brought to shore. Tam, with his arrogant
Englishman’s manner, pushed the soldiers apart and led his companions
into the boat.
“Sailee acrossee, what?” he said in a bright charming voice to the
nearest oarsman. Whenever Tam used that voice he obviously expected every
face to light up with tolerance and smiles. He was accustomed to this
result. His charm failed to work now. For the Chinese, boat space meant
life and the lack of it death. A loud noise of protest arose from all the
soldiers within earshot. Angry hands sawed the air in the direction of
the three intruders. Hands pushed their shoulders. No-one was smiling.
Edward jumped quickly ashore again. He had an exaggerated terror of
finding himself unwelcome.
“Hey, hey....” shouted Tam, for once losing his confidence. “Come back,
Edward. This is an outrage. You blithering fools. Have got muchee money,
what? Two piecee dollar per headee ... three dollar ... four dollar ...
what you likee, blast your eyes....”
He and Stone were pushed on shore again. They were ankle-deep in soft
mud. The boat filled with soldiers and was pushed off. Tam was furious.
He had been made ridiculous. They sat in a sombre row on the steps.
There was a long silence. They watched the boat that had refused them
make its difficult way across the river. They were all half conscious of
the hope that it might be hit by a stray bullet or two, that they might
be avenged. But all the shots went wide. White upright needles of water
showed where the shots fell, far short of the path of the crossing boats.
“Emily did come here, though, didn’t she?” said Edward in a strained
voice.
Tam’s face brightened. This story ministered to his vanity. He was
enjoying the telling of it.
“Why, of course she did. She was a wonderful secretary. If she’d wanted
to go, I wouldn’t have allowed it. She didn’t want to. All the way up
the river she kept up these curious fantastic moods. She would say the
most extravagantly affectionate and admiring things about Lucy. She
talked—curiously enough—a great deal about you, Edward. You don’t mind
my saying that she laughed at you a lot. When Emily is malicious she is
very amusing. That side of her cleverness doesn’t annoy me; that form
of her humor is a sort of complement to my humor—which is essentially
unmalicious. I love everyone. I really do. I love loving—so I love. So
she and I don’t collide there, as it were. However, it evidently relieved
and pleased her to think and talk a good deal of you. She had a devil’s
manner to me; it was hardly bearable sometimes. She never missed an
opportunity of slighting me. She put on a sort of disguise of sneering
humility. She would offer to go away if she were sitting with Lucy and I
came up.”
Poor Emily. Edward knew so terribly well these heartbreaking defiances of
the mind. She had sneered at him—Edward. Perhaps it had really relieved
her to hide herself in sneers. Self-torturer though he was, he could not
conceive that she would really sneer at him with her heart. He thought he
could face this possibility but actually he vaguely imagined witty and
gratifying criticism of his modesty and his intensity. He only imagined
mockery from her that he could have borne to hear. He thought, “Our
selfless hero is willing to be sacrificed on the altar of her pain.”
Tam was saying, “Yes, of course she came here. She was here for three
days.”
There was another uproar among the soldiers on the beach.
“Gee, there’s some white men in trouble,” said Stone. He jumped to his
feet and hurried towards the scene of the trouble. Two Englishmen in a
motor-boat were holding themselves several yards from the shore. Their
intention was to pick up a third Englishman who was waiting on the
beach. But the intention of about fifty Chinese soldiers evidently was
to board the boat as soon as it touched the shore. Everyone was angry.
Tam and Edward and Stone joined the marooned Englishman on land. This
re-inforcement rather disconcerted the soldiers. The motor boat drew in.
Tam, Edward, Stone and the stranger flew into the air at the same second.
There they were, safe in the boat. Edward had slightly sprained his
ankle. A Chinese soldier was unfortunately found to be safe in the boat
too.
“Push him over,” said the steersman in a savage voice.
“Oh, let him stay,” said Tam, laying his hand on the nervous soldier’s
knee. “He’s equalled my long-jump record. He deserves to be preserved.”
Everyone except Edward smiled and felt kindly towards Tam and the
intrusive soldier. The boat made a noise like a mammoth typewriter and
faced upstream.
Their laborious and slanting course brought them finally to the opposite
bank near to the point at which the Ichang steamer was moored.
“I’ll come on board and have a drink with you,” said Tam. “No need for us
to part until we must.”
Whiskies and sodas stood like a bond between them. Stone wished he could
really enjoy the taste of whisky. He hummed a little as though he were
enjoying it, but he took his glass forward to empty it secretly into the
Yangtze.
Tam and Edward stood against the railing of the steamer and watched the
escaping soldiers land. The soldiers on this side seemed not very much
disturbed by the fact that the advancing army was now in the city of
Chungking and was firing from the walls upon the river. The fugitives
on this side could not have been disturbed any more by anything. They
were exhausted; they crept up the slopes limply, trailing their rifles
in the mud; their mouths were open, their sunken eyes apparently shut;
they made little whining sounds. Some of them lay resting, as flaccid as
dead worms. A few had energy enough to impress the citizens of the town
into their service. The sight of arms seemed to enchant the civilians.
A long line of coolies, collected by soldiers, stood roped together
in a slanting row up the steps, like cattle. Upon their sullen yet
unprotesting shoulders would be placed the burdens which the soldiers
themselves were too weak to carry.
Edward watched one soldier blindly seeking a human animal on which to
place his pack. A child could have knocked that soldier down. He was
thin and immature; he could pretend to be a man no longer; his shoulders
drooped forward, his hanging head swayed between them; his eyes seemed
shut; he dragged his rifle in the mud; he walked awry like a drunken
man. Six big boatmen saw him coming towards them. He followed them as
a senseless ghost or curse might follow, slowly and sightlessly. He
followed them on to a moored junk and from that on to another. On the
last junk in the line he came up to them. They would not fight; they
could retreat no further. Still without seeming to see them he selected
one. That one did not protest; he was driven away to be roped to the end
of the growing line of cattle-prisoners on the steps.
“They’ll never come back, those men,” said Tam. “The soldiers shoot ’em
when they’re through with ’em. Poor devils.”
He said “poor devils” in an intense tremulous voice, as though he were
really sorry for the afflicted townsmen. Edward imagined him saying to
himself, “I’m a tender-hearted chap, a man of wide sympathies. I must
make that quite clear.”
“People never undeceive self-deceivers,” thought Edward. “We all conspire
to pretend we are deceived.”
Tam took Edward’s arm with a roughly loving flourish and said in a brisk
voice, as though brushing from his mind’s eye an unmanly tear—which he
was nevertheless proud of—“A heart-breaking sight, old man, let’s sit on
the other side of the deck.”
They did so. The sharp needles that denoted rifle fire from the other
side were being injected into the shining body of the river. But though
even Edward could sometimes hear the mewing twang of shots in the air, it
was obvious that the marksmen were giving the foreign ship a fairly wide
berth.
“I’ll go on about Emily,” said Tam in a rather luxurious voice. “It’s
an unhappy yarn for me to tell, of course, but you have a right to hear
it. Lucy turned her out of our house. We had been here three days. Lucy
is ... rather dumb in this story, if you know what I mean. Lucy has
always escaped storms. She thinks emotions are indecent—any kind, I
mean, and any degree. But especially misery or ecstasy. If you said to
Lucy, ‘I believe in God,’ outside of a church, she would think you were
irreverent. If you said, ‘I love you better than my life,’ outside of a
decorous marriage or recognised flirtation, she would think you improper.
All along you could see that she was hiding the situation from herself.
But, I suppose unconsciously, she developed a habit of being obviously
proud of me in Emily’s presence. She had a way of looking round when I
said anything clever, as if saying, ‘Look what he can do—and he’s mine.’
Several times Emily, who never hides anything from anyone, least of all
herself, commented with a sort of swagger on this trick of Lucy’s. Once
she said, ‘Lucy, you look as if you’d helped the Lord to create him.’
‘Mother Lucy’s chicken,’ she called me once or twice. But one night at
that bungalow it was fearfully hot——”
At that bungalow! Emily’s sure clear presence had really parted the
pine-shadowed air of that garden. The sound of Emily’s steps clicking up
those steps had really travelled on this warm damp wind to an unquickened
hearing.
“Lucy put her hand on my arm and said in her tolerant and reproachful
way, ‘My darling’—like that, ‘My darling’—as a check to some flippant
profanity I had just indulged in. And Emily stood up and—you know her
way, even in small things—jumped with her heels on the floor. She
clutched her clenched hands to her breasts and drew the corners of her
mouth down and shouted, ‘Not your darling—not your darling—not your
darling—’ many times. It seemed as if she would never stop. My God, we
were all perspiring—we were so sick with heat and with disgust, somehow,
even I, who am not afraid of emotions. Emily came and beat with her hands
upon my chest. ‘Oh, Tam’—she cried, ‘Oh, Tam—save me....’ Then you could
see that Lucy had been expecting something of the sort all along—she
was so quick. Lucy had her. Lucy had her fast by the shoulders. Lucy
pushed her in a sort of fussy, curious, shocked way out of the room. Lucy
was dark red and she was making a sort of stammering blubbering little
voiceless sound between her lips like someone shooing away a hen. ‘Now
you can go right away at once....’ I could hear Lucy saying in a loud
trembling voice in the next room. I could hear the shuffle of Emily’s
things being thrown into the suitcase.”
Emily’s things! There was something unbearably poignant to Edward in
that. That delicate fawn-colored silk dress that had held her body, the
beads from her neck, the shoes from her dancing feet ... all Emily’s
things outraged, not wanted, the things she had chosen to be part of her
presence—despised.
“Lucy worked absurdly hard. She insisted on carrying the suitcases out on
to the verandah; she made her insistence somehow insulting. She pulled
Emily’s arm as they went to the verandah, as though to make it clear that
this was a forcible ejection. Well, there was nothing for it. I fetched
the chair-coolies. There was nothing to be done. Emily seemed to be
beyond help—she was beyond her own control; she was crying so violently,
crying with a sort of grin, a downward grin, in the violent way a child
cries....”
And now Edward was crying. He had his head upon his arms on the railing.
He was crying without pretence. There was a whirlpool of helpless fury in
his heart. To cry was all that he could do—because Emily had been made to
cry so terribly.
“Well, well, it’s a hysterical yarn altogether,” said Tam. He laid
his hand on the back of Edward’s neck. The touch was meant to be
sympathetically manly, but his fingers seemed to pinch Edward’s neck
almost spitefully.
“You poor thing ... Edward ... You’re a poor thing. You poor things can
never be happy. Sorrow gravitates to people like you. You—poor—thing....”