A boy and girl if the good fates please
Making love say,
The happier they.
Come up out or the light of the moon
And let them pass as they will, too soon
With the bean flowers boon
And the blackbird's tune
And May and June.
It loosed our tongues and we began to speak--all of us except
Jessop--as men seldom speak together, of love. We were sentimental,
romantic. We told stories of our first loves. We looked back with
regret, with yearning to our youth and to love. We were passionate
in our belief in it, love, the great passion, the real thing which had
just passed us by so closely in the moonlight.
We talked like that for an hour or so, I suppose, and Jessop never
opened his lips. Whenever I looked at him, he was watching the river
gliding by and he was growing. At last there was a pause; we were all
silent for a minute or two and then Jessop began to speak:
"You talk as if you believed all that: it's queer damned queer. A
boy kissing a girl in the moonlight and you call it love and poetry
and romance. But you know as well as I do it isn't. It's just a
flicker of the body, it will be cold, dead, this time next year."
He had stopped but nobody spoke and then he continued slowly, almost
sadly: "We're old men and middle-aged men, aren't we? We've all done
that. We remember how we kissed like that in the moonlight or no light
at all. It was pleasant; Lord, I'm not denying that--but some of us
are married and some of us aren't. We're middle-aged--well, think of
your wives, think of--" he stopped again. I looked round. The others
were moving uneasily. It was this kind of thing that people didn't
like in Jessop. He spoke again.
"It's you novelists who're responsible, you know. You've made a world
in which every one is always falling in love--but it's not this world.
Here it's the flicker of the body.
"I don't say there isn't such a thing. There is. I've seen it, but
it's rare, as rare as--as--a perfect horse, an Arab once said to me.
The real thing, it's too queer to be anything but the rarest; it's
the queerest thing in the world. Think of it for a moment, chucking out
of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages.
A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold
cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast
always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against
another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that
it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its
beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for
existence, the whole world. And instead there comes a flame of passion
for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or
her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting--yes
that's it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him.
He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn't tired or bewildered or
ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars.
"And that's love, the love which you novelists scatter about so
freely. What does it mean? I don't understand it; it's queer beyond
anything I've ever struck. It isn't animal--that's the point--or
vegetable or mineral. Not one man in ten thousand feels it and not
one woman in twenty thousand. How can they? It's a feeling, a passion
immense, steady, enduring. But not one person in twenty thousand ever
feels anything at all for more than a second, and then it's only a
feeble ripple on the smooth surface of their unconsciousness.
"O yes, we've all been in love. We can all remember the kisses we
gave and the kisses given to us in the moonlight. But that's the body.
The body's damnably exacting. It wants to kiss and to be kissed at
certain times and seasons. It isn't particular however; give it
moonlight and young lips and it's soon satisfied. It's only when we
don't pay for it that we call it romance and love, and the most we
would ever pay is a £5 note.
"But it's not love, not the other, the real, the mysterious thing.
That too exists, I've seen it, I tell you, but it's rare, Lord, it's
rare. I'm middle-aged. I've seen men, thousands of them, all over
the world, known them too, made it my business to know them, it interests
me, a hobby like collecting stamps. And I've only known two cases
of real love.
"And neither of them had anything to do with kisses and moonlight.
Why should they? When it comes, it comes in strange ways and places,
like most real things perversely and unreasonably. I suppose
scientifically it's all right--it's what the mathematician calls the
law of chances.
"I'll tell you about one of them."
There was a man--you may have read his books, so I wont give you
his name--though he's dead now--I'll call him Reynolds. He was at
Rugby with me and also at Corpus. He was a thin feeble looking chap,
very nervous, with a pale face and long pale hands. He was bullied a
good deal at school; he was what they call a smug. I knew him rather
well; there seemed to me to be something in him somewhere, some power
of feeling under the nervousness and shyness. I can't say it ever came
out, but he interested me.
I went East and he stayed at home and wrote novels. I read them; very
romantic they were too, the usual ideas of men and women and love.
But they were clever in many ways, especially psychologically, as it
was called. He was a success, he made money.
I used to get letters from him about once in three months, so when
he came travelling to the East, it was arranged that he would stay a
week with me. I was in Colombo at that time, right in the passenger
route. I found him one day on the deck of a P and O just the same as
I'd last seen him in Oxford, except for the large sun helmet on his
head and the blue glasses on his nose. And when I got him back to the
bungalow and began to talk with him on the broad verandah, I found
that he was still just the same inside too. The years hadn't touched
him anywhere, he hadn't in the ordinary sense lived at all. He had
stood aside--do you see what I mean?--from shyness, nervousness,
the remembrance and fear of being bullied, and watched other people
living. He knew a good deal about how other people think, the little
tricks and mannerisms of life and novels, but he didn't know how they
felt; I expect he had never felt anything himself, except fear and
shyness: he hadn't really ever known a man, and he had certainly
never known a woman.
Well, he wanted to see life, to understand it, to feel it. He had
travelled 7000 miles to do so. He was very keen to begin, he wanted
to see life all round, up and down, inside and out; he told me so as
we looked out on the palm trees and the glimpse of the red road beyond
and the unending stream of brown men and women upon it.
I began to show him life in the East. I took him to the clubs; the
club where they play tennis and gossip, the club where they play Bridge
and gossip, the club where they just sit in long chairs and gossip. I
introduced him to scores of men who asked him to have a drink, and to
scores of women who asked him whether he liked Colombo. He didn't get
on with them at all, he said 'No thank you' to the men and 'Yes, very
much' to the women. He was shy and felt uncomfortable, out of his
element with these fat flanelled merchants, fussy civil servants, and
their whining wives and daughters.
In the evening we sat on my verandah and talked. We talked about life
and his novels and romance and love even. I liked him, you know; he
interested me, there was something in him which had never come out.
But he had got hold of life at the wrong end somehow, he couldn't deal
with it or the people in it at all. He had the novelist's view, of
life and--with all respect to you, Alderton--it doesn't work.
I suppose the devil came into me that evening. Reynolds had talked so
much about seeing life that at last I thought: "By Jove, I'll show
him a side of life _he_'s never seen before at any rate." I called
the servant and told him to fetch two rickshaws.
We bowled along the dusty roads past the lake and into the native
quarter. All the smells of the East rose up and hung heavy upon the
damp hot air in the narrow streets. I watched Reynolds' face in the
moonlight, the scared look which always showed upon it: I very nearly
repented and turned back. Even now I'm not sure whether I'm sorry
that I didn't. At any rate I didn't, and at last we drew up in front
of a low mean looking house standing back a little from the road.
There was one of those queer native wooden doors made in two halves;
the top half was open and through it one saw an empty whitewashed room
lighted by a lamp fixed in the wall. We went in and I shut the door top
and bottom behind us. At the other end were two steps leading up to
another room. Suddenly there came the sound of bare feet running and
giggles of laughter, and ten or twelve girls, some naked and some half
clothed in bright red or bright orange cloths, rushed down the steps
upon us. We were surrounded, embraced, caught up in their arms and
carried into the next room. We lay upon sofas with them. There
was nothing but sofas and an old piano in the room.
They knew me well in the place,--you can imagine what it was--I
often went there. Apart from anything else, it interested me. The
girls were all Tamils and Sinhalese. It always reminded me somehow
of the Arabian Nights; that room when you came into it so bare and
empty, and then the sudden rush of laughter, the pale yellow naked
women, the brilliant colours of the cloths, the the white teeth, all
appearing so suddenly in the doorway up there at the end of the room.
And the girls themselves interested me; I used to sit and talk to
them for hours in their own language; they didn't as a rule understand
English. They used to tell me all about themselves, queer pathetic
stories often. They came from villages almost always, little native
villages hidden far away among rice fields and coconut trees, and they
had drifted somehow into this hovel in the warren of filth and smells
which we and our civilization had attracted about us.
Poor Reynolds, he was very uncomfortable at first. He didn't know
what to do in the least or where to look. He stammered out yes and
no to the few broken English sentences which the girls repeated like
parrots to him. They soon got tired of kissing him and came over to me
to tell me their little troubles and ask me for advice--all of them
that is, except one.
She was called Celestinahami and was astonishingly beautiful. Her
skin was the palest of pale gold with a glow in it, very rare in the
fair native women. The delicate innocent beauty of a child was in her
face; and her eyes, Lord, her eyes immense, deep, dark and melancholy
which looked as if they knew and understood and felt everything in
the world. She never wore anything coloured, just a white cloth wrapped
round her waist with one end thrown over the left shoulder. She carried
about her an air of slowness and depth and mystery of silence and of
innocence.
She lay full length on the sofa with her chin on, her hands, looking
up into Reynolds' face and smiling at him. The white cloth had slipped
down and her breasts were bare. She was a Sinhalese, a cultivator's
daughter, from a little village up in the hills: her place was in the
green rice fields weeding, or in the little compound under the palm
trees pounding rice, but she lay on the dirty sofa and asked Reynolds
in her soft broken English whether he would have a drink.
It began in him with pity. 'I saw the pity of it, Jessop,' he said
to me afterwards, 'the pity of it.' He lost his shyness, he began to
talk to her in his gentle cultivated voice; she didn't understand a
word, but she looked up at him with her great innocent eyes and smiled
at him. He even stroked her hand and her arm. She smiled at him still,
and said her few soft clipped English sentences. He looked into her eyes
that understood nothing but seemed to understand everything, and then it
came out at last; the power to feel, the power that so few have, the
flame, the passion, love, the real thing.
It was the real thing, I tell you; I ought to know; he stayed on in
my bungalow day after day, and night after night he went down to that
hovel among the filth and smells. It wasn't the body, it wasn't kisses
and moonlight. He wanted her of course, he wanted her body and soul;
but he wanted something else: the same passion, the same fine strong
thing that he felt moving in himself. She was everything to him that was
beautiful and great and pure, she was what she looked, what he read in
the depths of her eyes. And she might have been--why not? She might
have been all that and more, there's no reason why such a thing
shouldn't happen, shouldn't have happened even. One can believe that
still. But the chances are all against it. She was a prostitute in a
Colombo brothel, a simple soft little golden-skinned animal with
nothing in the depths of the eyes at all. It was the law of chances at
work as usual, you know.
It was tragic and it was at the same time wonderfully ridiculous. At
times he saw things as they were, the bare truth, the hopelessness of
it. And then he was so ignorant of life, fumbling about so curiously
with all the little things in it. It was too much for him; he tried to
shoot himself with a revolver which he had bought at the Army and
Navy Stores before he sailed; but he couldn't because he had forgotten
how to put in the cartridges.
Yes, I burst in on him sitting at a table in his room fumbling with
the thing. It was one of those rotten old-fashioned things with a
piece of steel that snaps down over the chamber to prevent the
cartridges falling out. He hadn't discovered how to snap it back in
order to get the cartridges in. The man who sold him that revolver,
instead of an automatic pistol, as he ought to have done, saved his
life.
And then I talked to him seriously. I quoted his own novel to him.
It was absurdly romantic, unreal, his novel, but it preached as so
many of them do, that you should face facts first and then live your
life out to the uttermost. I quoted it to him. Then I told him baldly
brutally what the girl was--not a bit what he thouget her, what his
passion went out to--a nice simple soft little animal like the bitch
at my feet that starved herself if I left her for a day. 'It's the
truth,' I said to him, 'as true as that you're really in love, in
love with something that doesn't exist behind those great eyes. It's
dangerous, damned dangerous because it's real--and that's why it's
rare. But it's no good shooting yourself with that thing. You've
got to get on board the next P and O, that's what you've got to do.
And if you wont do that, why practise what you preach and live your
life out, and take the risks.'
He asked me what I meant.
"The risks?" I said. "I can see what they are, and if you do take
them, you're taking the worst odds ever offered a man. But there they
are. Take the girl and see what you can make of life with her.
You can buy her out of that place for fifteen rupees."
I was wrong, I suppose. I ought to have put him in irons and shipped
him off next day. But I don't know, really I don't know.
He took the risks any way. We bought her out, it cost twenty rupees.
I got them a little house down the coast on the sea shore, a little
house surrounded by palm trees. The sea droned away sleepily right
under the verandah. It was to be an idyl of the East; he was to live
there for ever with her and write novels on the verandah.
And, by God, he was happy--at first. I used to go down there and
stay with them pretty often. He taught her English and she taught
him Sinhalese. He started to write a novel about the East: it would
have been a good novel I think, full of strength and happiness and
sun and reality--if it had been finished. But it never was. He
began to see the truth, the damned hard unpleasant truths that I had
told him that night in the Colombo bungalow. And the cruelty of it
was that he still had that rare power to feel, that he still felt. It
was the real thing, you see, and the real thing is---didn't I
say--immense, steady, enduring. It is; I believe that still. He was in
love, but he knew now what she was like. He couldn't speak to her and
she couldn't speak to him, she couldn't understand him. He was a
civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she--she was
an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful.
I watched it happening, I had foretold it, but I cursed myself for
not having stopped it, scores of times. He loved her but she tortured
him. People would say, I suppose, that she got on his nerves. It's a
good enough description. But the cruellest thing of all was that she
had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her
master. Jessop stopped. We waited for him to go on but he didn't. The
leaves rustled gently in the breeze; the river murmured softly below
us; up in the woods I heard a nightingale singing. "Well, and then?"
Alderton asked at last in a rather peevish voice.
"And then? Damn that nightingale!" said Jessop. I wish I hadn't
begun this story. It happened so long ago: I thought I had forgotten
to feel it, to feel that I was responsible for what happened then.
There's another sort of love; it isn't the body and it isn't the flame;
it's the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed
women of the East. It's the love of a slave, the patient, consuming
love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and
his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami
for Reynolds. But it wasn't what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more
than anything which got on his nerves.
She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to
talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook
rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. And when he looked into
her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in
love with, what he knew didn't exist. It began to drive him mad.
And she--she of course couldn't even understand what was the matter.
She saw that he was unhappy, she thought she had done something
wrong. She reasoned like a child that it was because she wasn't like the
white ladies whom she used to see in Colombo. So she went and bought
stays and white cotton stockings and shoes, and she squeezed herself
into them. But the stays and the shoes and stockings didn't do her any
good.
It couldn't go on like that. At last I induced Reynolds to go away.
He was to continue his travels but he was coming back--he said so
over and over again to me and to Celestinahami. Meanwhile she was
well provided for; a deed was executed: the house and the coconut
trees and the little compound by the sea were to be hers--a generous
settlement, a donatio inter vivos, as the lawyers call it--void,
eh?--or voidable?--because for an immoral consideration. Lord! I'm
nearly forgetting my law, but I believe the law holds that only
future consideration of that sort can be immoral. How wise, how just,
isn't it? The past cannot be immoral; it's done with, wiped out--but
the future? Yes, it's only the future that counts.
So Reynolds wiped out his past and Celestinahami by the help of a
dirty Burgher lawyer and a deed of gift and a ticket issued by
Thomas Cook and Son for a berth in a P and O bound for Aden.
I went on board to see him off and I shook his hand and told him
encouragingly that everything would be all right.
I never saw Reynolds again but I saw Celestinahami once. It was at
the inquest two days after the Moldavia sailed for Aden. She was
lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered
room behind the court. Yes, I identified her: Celestinahami--I never
knew her other name. She lay there in her stays and pink skirt and white
stockings and white shoes. They had found her floating in the sea
that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little
bungalow--bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white
stockings and shoes.
*****
Jessop stopped. No one spoke for a minute or two. Then Hanson Smith
stretched himself, yawned, and got up.
"Battle, murder, and sentimentality," he said. "You're as bad as the
rest of them, Jessop. I'd like to hear your other case--but it's too
late, I'm off to bed."