Colonel Julian and Other Stories (22 page)

In the men's room he took out his false teeth. I had forgotten all about them. He was a little unsteady. And without his teeth he did not look like the spruce proud man we had first known at the hotel on the lake below. The toothless mouth had quite an aged, unhappy, empty look of helplessness.

Swaying about, he wrapped his morning teeth in a small chamois leather bag and then took his afternoon teeth from an identical bag. Both sets were scrupulously clean and white.
I had often wondered why he changed his teeth three times a day and now he told me.

‘Gives me a feeling of keeping young,' he said. ‘Renews me. One gets stale, you see, wearing the same teeth. One loses a feeling of freshness.'

He put his afternoon teeth into his mouth very neatly, and I could understand, seeing him now with the fresh bright teeth, how much younger, fresher and more sprightly he might feel.

‘You have your own teeth?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘It's the one thing I'm awfully sensitive about. Really awfully sensitive. That's why I change them. I am very self-conscious about feeling a little old. You understand?'

I said it was a good idea.

He said he was glad I thought so. For a moment he swayed about in a confidential lugubrious sort of way, so that I thought he might cry. ‘It would have to be something really frightfully bad to make me forget to change them,' he said.

We rumbled down the mountain in the train all afternoon. Slowly out of the dark tunnel we came down into the dazzling flowery light of the Scheidegg and once again Mrs. Martineau, altogether oblivious of the scenery and the flowers, was height-sick as we waited on the station for the lower train. All the way down through the lovely meadows of high summer grass, rosy with lucerne, the major had a much needed nap, sleeping in the corner of the carriage with his mouth open, so that I thought once or twice that his teeth would fall out. Mrs. Martineau did not speak and the major woke with a start at Interlaken. He looked about him open-mouthed, like a man who had woken in another world, and then he looked at Mrs. Martineau. She looked young enough to be a reprimanding daughter.

‘Really, darling. Honestly,' she said.

The major worked his teeth up and down as if they were bothering him, or like a dog that has nothing left to bite on.

We parted at the hotel.

‘Oh! dear,' I said to my wife, and this time she did not ask what lay behind it. She, too, had rather given up. It was one of those excursions on which enemies are made for life, and
for some reason or other I thought that neither the major nor Mrs. Martineau would ever speak to us again.

It was Saturday, in fact, five days later, before we came near enough to them to exchange another word. Somehow we always saw them from a distance. We saw the major running back to the hotel with Mrs. Martineau's bag; we saw them on the steamers, where the major no longer enjoyed the pink-eared ham sandwiches or made eye-love to the waitress; we saw them shopping in the town. Mrs. Martineau wore many new dresses; she seemed to go in very particularly for short-skirted, frothy things, or day-frocks with sailor stripes of scarlet and blue, so that she looked more than ever like a young bright girl and the major more than ever like a father too painfully devoted.

On Saturday came the affair of the eucalyptus tree. It was one of those trees that the Swiss are fond of for courtyards and balconies in summer; it was three or four feet high and it had soft tender blue-grey leaves that I always thought looked charming against the red pot on the major's sunny balcony.

At half-past five that afternoon we heard the most awful crash on the floor below. I went to the balcony and looked down. The eucalyptus tree lay shattered in the courtyard below, and on the balcony the major, looking very unspruce and dishevelled and shattered himself, was standing in his undervest and trousers, staring down. For a moment I could not tell whether the major had thrown the eucalyptus tree down there in a terrible fit of despair, or whether Mrs. Martineau had thrown it at him in an equally terrible fit of anger.

A waiter in a white jacket and then the manager came running out of the hotel to see what had happened and at the same moment Mrs. Martineau shouted from the bedroom: ‘Come inside you decrepit old fool! Stop making an exhibition of yourself, for God's sake!'

‘Please!' I heard the major say. ‘People are coming.'

‘Well, let them come!' she shouted. ‘If you've no more sense than to take a room with a eucalyptus tree when you know I loathe eucalyptus, when you know I've a phobia about eucalyptus——'

‘It isn't that sort of eucalyptus,' the major whispered.

‘Any kind of eucalyptus is eucalyptus to me!' she shouted.

‘Please,' the major said. He leaned over the balcony and called down to the waiter and the manager below.

‘An accident! I will pay!'

‘Oh! for God's sake come inside!' she shouted. ‘What's it matter?'

‘I will pay!' the major shouted down again.

Back in the room Mrs. Martineau began throwing things. ‘You're always fussing!' I heard her shout, and then there was the enraged dull noise of things like books and shoes being thrown.

‘Please, darling, don't do that,' the major said. ‘Don't do it please.'

‘Oh! shut up!' she said. ‘And these damn things too!'

I heard the most shattering crash as if a glass tumbler had been thrown.

‘Oh! not my teeth!' the major said. ‘Please, darling. Not my teeth! For God's sake, not both sets, please!'

He rushed into the bedroom. I went back into my own.

‘Whatever in the world?' my wife said.

‘Just the eucalyptus tree,' I said. ‘The major will pay.'

The following afternoon the major and Mrs. Martineau went away. On the lake the steamers were very crowded and under the lime trees, at the restaurant by the landing-stage, the Sunday orchestra played very loudly to crowds of visitors in the hot afternoon. It was glorious weather, and on the four o'clock steamer as it came in there were crowds of happy Sunday-laughing people.

On the landing-stage neither Mrs. Martineau nor the major looked very happy. The hotel porter with his scarlet cap stood guarding their luggage, three trunks, two brown hide suitcases, a military-looking khaki grip, a pigskin hat-box and a shooting-stick, and the major, who was no longer wearing his spruce shantung but a suit of grey tweed, did not see us on the quay. Beside us the two Italian Swiss with their guitars were waiting to catch the steamer too.

When the boat came in there was some difficulty about getting the major's luggage aboard. The trunks were fairly large and the porters grew hot and excited and everyone
stared. But at last it was all finished, and on the landing-stage the hotel porter raised his scarlet cap in polite farewell.

As the steamer moved away the major stood by the rail, watching the shore. I could not see Mrs. Martineau. Somewhere behind him the two Italian Swiss struck up with their guitars and began to play their little hungry-sweet gay tune.

At that moment the major saw us. He lifted his hand in recognition, and almost eagerly, I thought, in sudden goodbye. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but the steamer was already too far away and his mouth remained open and empty, without a sound. And in that moment I remembered something. I remembered the eucalyptus tree falling from the balcony and the crash of the major's teeth on the bedroom wall.

‘How beautiful the Jungfrau is today,' my wife said.

From the steamer the major, with his wrong teeth in, gave the most painful sort of smile, and sweetly from across the lake came the gay sound of the guitars.

From where she sat in the cool recesses of the white verandah, well above the brown dust of the compound, Mrs. Vincent could see the entire violent mass of bougainvillea flowering on the north side of the hospital. It had something of the appearance of a vast map of vermilion tributaries covering all that side of the house. Its liquid brilliance, faded here and there to salmon by the heat of the sun, threw into lifeless relief all the dusty grass, covered with a score or more of khaki tents, that lay between herself and the wall of flowers. It was not, of course, quite as it used to be. She remembered the time when thirty or forty coolies, with no more identity than so many white and chocolate shadows, would be working all day to brush every leaf from the grass, so that when you walked across it in the late evening, and the shadows of the riverside palms lay soft and long across it after the high violence of the day, it created for you in the hour or so before darkness the clean feeling of England. In those days, too, the grass, even in the hot weather, was quite green. But of course the war had changed these things.

She watched the young American, Armstrong, coming across the track between the lines of tents, seeing him with a curious mixture of apprehension and pleasure. Armstrong was twenty-one and had left some essential part of his left foot—or so she understood, since he never talked of it—in a mountain valley south-east of Akyab, so that he now swung it with an odd half-circular motion, walking as if deformed, with crab-like tenacity. Usually three or four of the boys walked across from hospital to tea. It was nice to have them; her job was to give them a feeling of home. To have Armstrong alone was something that had not happened before. It was something quite disturbing. She did not know if it arose from the fact that she was twenty years older than he was, or from the fact that she knew India quite well, whereas he, of course, being
very young and a stranger, did not know it at all. She did not know quite what it was. Armstrong was rather handsome, with dark fine eyes and abrupt black hair and sallow tones of skin, but there was also something repellent about the way he swung his left foot. It held her transfixed in the remaining few moments as she watched him coming across the grass in the hard light of sun.

Armstrong was swinging his way up the steps to the compound when she called the bearer to bring in tea. For some few moments the boy did not come, and she spent the time rearranging the table, laid out already with small sandwich-dishes, each covered with a cloth of coloured beaded lace against flies. Then when the boy did come it was with complete silence as usual, on bare feet, so that she did not hear him at all and was startled to hear him say, close against her shoulder, ‘Mem Sahib call?' in a way that filled her with malice against him.

She was shouting, ‘The tea, you idiot! What do you suppose? The tea, of course!' as Armstrong swung up the last of the steps from the compound and on to the verandah.

‘Hullo,' he said. He looked very hot and rather pale from the exertion of walking, but not astonished.

‘You're terribly silly to walk like that in the sun,' she said. ‘You should wear a topee.'

‘One of those things?' Armstrong said.

‘You don't know this country!' she said. ‘If you did you wouldn't talk like that.'

‘Does anybody know it?' he said.

She did not take any notice of that question, but said, ‘Where are the boys today?' and he said, ‘Oh! sleeping, I guess. Too hot,' a remark she could not let pass without saying ‘Too hot? This is wonderful. Just wait till you get June here. This is March. Just wait till the heat really begins. June and July, and then September. That's when it kills.'

‘Well, I don't know about killing,' he said.

There was nothing she wanted to say to that, and she sat down, lying back in the long chair, so that her body was a flattened slope of pure white, her bare brown legs outstretched. Armstrong sat down too, opposite her, dragging his left foot awkwardly under him.

The bearer at that moment brought in tea. She saw Armstrong look up at him, observing with a sort of oblique interest the dark face, not the face of a boy but the face of an ageing man, with its grey drooping Chinese-shaped moustache and broad fine-outlined lips that seemed for ever on the verge of a terribly patient smile. He wore long white trousers that were too short, and a white coat and hat. She waited for him to set the teapot on the table. He moved very slowly, setting the teapot carefully down, then smoothing the cover over it with his long pink-black fingers, as if the ultimate achievement of his life lay perhaps a century ahead and time did not matter.

The slowness of it all infuriated her, and she sat up with a jerk. ‘A plate for sahib, a plate for sahib,' she said. ‘Sandwiches for sahib.' She spoke with a suppressed and emphatic violence that quite startled Armstrong, who said ‘Oh, heck, I can reach those things,' and leaned forward just as the boy, emerging as it were out of a grim coma, put the sandwiches under his face.

‘What have you been doing with yourself?' she said. The boy hovered uncertainly about the table with the sandwich-dish, looking uneasily forlorn. He was a Bengali; she hated all Bengalis out of accumulated habit and principle. They were the lowest of the low. She waved furiously for him to go away. The cook came from the Dooars and was different, but she hated him no less. Not one of them could be trusted. At last the boy turned and, moving with a kind of pained delicacy, walked out of the room.

‘Infuriating,' she said. ‘You can't trust them to do the simplest, easiest thing.'

‘He looks like an old man,' Armstrong said. ‘What caste is he?'

‘Oh! I really haven't the faintest,' she said. ‘I never ask about these things. When are you going to be able to play tennis again with that leg of yours?'

‘Well, if I were honest I should say I was never going to play tennis again,' he said.

‘Oh! nonsense,' she said. ‘Of course you're going to play tennis.'

‘No, I'm not.'

‘Not ever?'

‘Not ever,' he said.

She supposed it was suppressed bitterness that made him talk in these cryptic sentences, but she wished that he wouldn't. It made her uncomfortable. Conversation cut into such sharp segments of pointed meaning always embarrassed her. She looked at his dark face. The eyes carried great strength and were older than the face itself. Pouring tea, she said, glad to be able to think of something pleasant: