The New Collected Short Stories (36 page)

‘I hope I never shed blood,’ the other said. ‘I do not blame others, but for me never.’

‘I don’t expect you ever will. You’re not exactly cut out for a man of war. All the same, I’ve fallen for you.’

He had not expected to say this, and it was the unexpectedness that so delighted the boy. He turned away his face. It was distorted with joy and suffused with the odd purplish tint that denoted violent emotion. Everything had gone fairly right for a long time. Each step in the stumbling confession had brought him nearer to knowing what the beloved was like. But an open avowal – he had not hoped for so much. ‘Before morning I shall have enslaved him,’ he thought, ‘and he will begin doing whatever I put into his mind.’ Even now he did not exult, for he knew by experience that though he always got what he wanted he seldom kept it, also that too much adoration can develop a flaw in the jewel. He remained impassive, crouched like a statue, chin on knees, hands round ankles, waiting for words to which he could safely reply.

‘It seemed just a bit of foolery at first,’ he went on. ‘I woke up properly ashamed of myself after Gib, I don’t mind telling you. Since then it’s been getting so different, and now it’s nothing but us. I tell you one thing though, one silly mistake I’ve made. I ought never to have mentioned you in that letter to the Mater. There’s no advantage in putting her on the scent of something she can’t understand; it’s all right what we do, I don’t mean that.’

‘So you want the letter back?’

‘But it’s posted! Not much use wanting it.’

‘Posted?’ He was back to his normal and laughed gaily, his sharp teeth gleaming. ‘What is posting? Nothing at all, even in a red English pillar-box. Even thence you can get most things out, and here is a boat. No! My secretary comes to you tomorrow morning: ‘Excuse me, Captain March, sir, did you perhaps drop this unposted letter upon the deck?’ You thank secretary, you take letter, you write Mater a better letter. Does anything trouble you now?’

‘Not really. Except——’

‘Except what?’

‘Except I’m – I don’t know. I’m fonder of you than I know how to say.’

‘Should that trouble you?’

O calm mutual night, to one of them triumphant and promising both of them peace! O silence except for the boat throbbing gently! Lionel sighed, with a happiness he couldn’t understand. ‘You ought to have someone to look after you,’ he said tenderly. Had he said this before to a woman and had she responded? No such recollection disturbed him, he did not even know that he was falling in love. ‘I wish I could stay with you myself, but of course that’s out of the question. If only things were a little different I——Come along, let’s get our sleep.’

‘You shall sleep and you shall awake.’ For the moment was upon them at last, the flower opened to receive them, the appointed star mounted the sky, the beloved leaned against him to switch off the light over by the door. He closed his eyes to anticipate divine darkness. He was going to win. All was happening as he had planned, and when morning came and practical life had to be re-entered he would have won.

‘Damn!’

The ugly stupid little word rattled out. ‘Damn and blast ‘ Lionel muttered. As he stretched towards the switch he had noticed the bolt close to it, and he discovered that he had left the door unbolted. The consequences could have been awkward. ‘Pretty careless of me,’ he reflected, suddenly wide awake. He looked round the cabin as a general might at a battlefield nearly lost by his own folly. The crouched figure was only a unit in it, and no longer the centre of desire. ‘Cocoa, I’m awfully sorry,’ he went on. ‘As a rule it’s you who take the risks, this time it’s me. I apologize.’

The other roused himself from the twilight where he had hoped to be joined, and tried to follow the meaningless words. Something must have miscarried, but what? The sound of an apology was odious. He had always loathed the English trick of saying ‘It’s all my fault’; and if he encountered it in business it provided an extra incentive to cheat, and it was contemptible on the lips of a hero. When he grasped what the little trouble was and what the empty ‘damns’ signified, he closed his eyes again and said, ‘Bolt the door therefore.’

‘I have.’

‘Turn out the light therefore.’

‘I will. But a mistake like this makes one feel all insecure. It could have meant a courtmartial.’

‘Could it, man?’ he said sadly – sad because the moment towards which they were moving might be passing, because the chances of their convergence might be lost. What could he safely say? ‘You was not to blame over the door, dear Lion,’ he said. ‘I mean we was both to blame. I knew it was unlocked all the time.’ He said this hoping to console the beloved and to recall him to the entrance of night. He could not have made a more disastrous remark.

‘You knew. But why didn’t you say?’

‘I had not the time.’

‘Not the time to say “Bolt the door”?’

‘No, I had not the time. I did not speak because there was no moment for such a speech.’

‘No moment when I’ve been here for ages?’

‘And when in that hour? When you come in first? Then? When you embrace me and summon my heart’s blood. Is that the moment to speak? When I rest in your arms and you in mine, when your cigarette burns us, when we drink from one glass? When you are smiling? Do I interrupt then? Do I then say, “Captain March, sir, you have however forgotten to bolt the cabin door?” And when we talk of our faraway boat and of poor pretty Baby whom I never killed and I did not want to kill, and I never dreamt to kill – of what should we talk but of things far away? Lionel, no, no. Lion of the Night, come back to me before our hearts cool. Here is our place and we have so far no other and only we can guard each other. The door shut, the door unshut, is nothing, and is the same.’

‘It wouldn’t be nothing if the steward had come in,’ said Lionel grimly.

‘What harm if he did come in?’

‘Give him the shock of his life, to say the least of it.’

‘No shock at all. Such men are accustomed to far worse. He would be sure of a larger tip and therefore pleased. “Excuse me, gentlemen . . . “ Then he goes and tomorrow my secretary tips him.

‘Cocoa, for God’s sake, the things you sometimes say . . . ‘ The cynicism repelled him. He noticed that it sometimes came after a bout of high faluting. It was a sort of backwash. ‘You never seem to realize the risks we run, either. Suppose I got fired from the Army through this.’

‘Yes, suppose?’

‘Well, what else could I do?’

‘You could be my assistant manager at Basra.’

‘Not a very attractive alternative.’ He was not sure whether he was being laughed at or not, which always rattled him, and the incident of the unbolted door increased in importance. He apologized again ‘for my share in it’ and added, ‘You’ve not told that scruffy Parsee of yours about us, I do trust.’

‘No. Oh no no no no and oh no. Satisfied?’

‘Nor the Goanese steward?’

‘Not told. Only tipped. Tip all. Of what other use is money?’

‘I shall think you’ve tipped me next.’

‘So I have.’

‘That’s not a pretty thing to say.’

‘I am not pretty. I am not like you.’ And he burst into tears. Lionel knew that nerves were on edge, but the suggestion that he was a hireling hurt him badly. He whose pride and duty it was to be independent and command! Had he been regarded as a male prostitute? ‘What’s upset you?’ he said as kindly as possible. ‘Don’t take on so, Cocoa, there’s no occasion for it.’

The sobs continued. He was weeping because he had planned wrongly. Rage rather than grief convulsed him. The bolt unbolted, the little snake not driven back into its hole – he had foreseen everything else and ignored the enemy at the gate. Bolt and double-bolt now – they would never complete the movement of love. As sometimes happened to him when he was unhinged, he could foretell the immediate future and he knew before Lionel spoke exactly what he was going to say.

‘I think I’ll go on deck for a smoke.’

‘Go.’

‘I’ve a bit of a headache with this stupid misunderstanding, plus too much booze. I want a breath of fresh air. Then I’ll come back.’

‘When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.’

Further tears. Snivellings. ‘We’re both to blame,’ said Lionel patiently, taking up the cigarette-case. ‘I’m not letting myself off. I was careless. But why you didn’t tell me at once I shall never understand, not if you talk till you’re blue. I’ve explained to you repeatedly that this game we’ve been playing’s a risky one, and honestly I think we’d better never have started it. However, we’ll talk about that when you’re not so upset.’ Here he remembered that the cigarette-case was one of his patron’s presents to him, so he substituted for it a favourite old pipe. The change was observed and it caused a fresh paroxysm. Like many men of the warm-blooded type, he was sympathetic to a few tears but exasperated when they persisted. Fellow crying and not trying to stop. Fellow crying as if he had the right to cry. Repeating ‘I’ll come back’ as cordially as he could, he went up on deck to think the whole situation over. For there were several things about it he didn’t like at all.

Cocoanut stopped weeping as soon as he was alone. Tears were a method of appeal which had failed, and he must seek comfort for his misery and desolation elsewhere. What he longed to do was to climb up into Lionel’s berth above him and snuggle down there and dream that he might be joined. He dared not. Whatever else he ventured, it must not be that. It was forbidden to him, although nothing had ever been said. It was the secret place, the sacred place whence strength issued, as he had learned during the first half-hour of the voyage. It was the lair of a beast who might retaliate. So he remained down in his own berth, the safe one, where his lover would certainly never return. It was wiser to work and make money, and he did so for a time. It was still wiser to sleep, and presently he put his ledger aside and lay motionless. His eyes closed. His nostrils occasionally twitched as if responding to something which the rest of his body ignored. The scarf covered him. For it was one of his many superstitions that it is dangerous to lie unclad when alone. Jealous of what she sees, the hag comes with her scimitar, and she . . . Or she lifts up a man when he feels lighter than air.

V

Up on deck, alone with his pipe, Lionel began to recover his poise and his sense of leadership. Not that he and his pipe were really alone, for the deck was covered with passengers who had had their bedding carried up and now slept under the stars. They lay prone in every direction, and he had to step carefully between them on his way to the railing. He had forgotten that this migration happened nightly as soon as a boat entered the Red Sea; his nights had passed otherwise and elsewhere. Here lay a guileless subaltern, cherry-checked; there lay Colonel Arbuthnot, his bottom turned. Mrs Arbuthnot lay parted from her lord in the ladies’ section. In the morning, very early, the Goanese stewards would awake the sahibs and carry their bedding back to their cabins. It was an old ritual – not practised in the English Channel or the Bay of Biscay or even in the Mediterranean – and on previous voyages he had taken part in it.

How decent and reliable they looked, the folk to whom he belonged! He had been born one of them, he had his work with them, he meant to marry into their caste. If he forfeited their companionship he would become nobody and nothing. The widened expanse of the sea, the winking lighthouse, helped to compose him, but what really recalled him to sanity was this quiet sleeping company of his peers. He liked his profession, and was rising in it thanks to that little war; it would be mad to jeopardize it, which he had been doing ever since he drank too much champagne at Gibraltar.

Not that he had ever been a saint. No – he had occasionally joined a brothel expedition, so as not to seem better than his fellow officers. But he had not been so much bothered by sex as were some of them. He hadn’t had the time, what with his soldiering duties and his obligations at home as eldest son, and the doc said an occasional wet dream was nothing to worry about. Don’t sleep on your back, though. On this simple routine he had proceeded since puberty. And during the past few months he had proceeded even further. Learning that he was to be posted to India, where he would contact Isabel, he had disciplined himself more severely and practised chastity even in thought. It was the least he could do for the girl he hoped to marry. Sex had entirely receded – only to come charging back like a bull. That infernal Cocoa – the mischief he had done. He had woken up so much that might have slept. For Isabel’s sake, as for his profession’s, their foolish relationship must stop at once. He could not think how he had yielded to it, or why it had involved him so deeply. It would have ended at Bombay, it would have to end now, and Cocoanut must cry his eyes out if he thought it worth while. So far all was clear. But behind Isabel, behind the Army, was another power, whom he could not consider calmly: his mother, blind-eyed in the midst of the enormous web she had spun 
–
 filaments drifting everywhere, strands catching. There was no reasoning with her or about her, she understood nothing and controlled everything. She had suffered too much and was too high-minded to be judged like other people, she was outside carnality and incapable of pardoning it. Earlier in the evening, when Cocoa mentioned her, he had tried to imagine her with his father, enjoying the sensations he was beginning to find so pleasant, but the attempt was sacrilegious and he was shocked at himself. From the great blank country she inhabited came a voice condemning him and all her children for sin, but condemning him most. There was no parleying with her – she was a voice. God had not granted her ears – nor could she see, mercifully: the sight of him stripping [stripping:
Forster’s substitution for
topping a dago] would have killed her. He, her first-born, set apart for the redemption of the family name. His surviving brother was too much a bookworm to be of any use, and the other two were girls.

He spat into the sea. He promised her ‘Never again’. The words went out into the night like other enchantments. He said them aloud, and Colonel Arbuthnot, who was a light sleeper, woke up and switched on his torch.