11
I FOUND BEASTLY THERE AND PHILIP BROWN AND Uncle Emmanuel and Colonel Ishibaiashi and a fair proportion of the Diplomatic Corps, in short, white, tail-less evening coats, all moving about on the matted floor in their socks, our shoes having first been removed in the hall, and I noticed that Beastly had a hole at the big toe. Not that this disturbed him at all, for he drank many cocktails and chaffed Philip Brown, guffawing loudly as he gave those ironical heavy nods with his head, as if to ask what indeed the world was coming to!
Percy Beastly was a Cockney by birth, and the years that he had spent in Canada as a youth had not contrived to polish his naturally rough-and-ready personality. He and Brown were each representative of the cruder class of their respective countries. (Brown, before the war, was a detective.) They were not individuals: they were merely samples of a type. They prided themselves on going through life with eyes open, but could only see ‘graft’ or ‘bluff’ in all human activities; they said ‘they weren’t born yesterday’, asked if you could see ‘any green in their eye’, and always suspected that someone was ‘pulling their leg’. The world has a strange way of ‘pulling the leg’ of such people! Beastly was very free and cheery, and chaffed the geisha girls at his side and drank much lukewarm saké with the officers who crouched up to each of us in turn to drink our health, and ate little pieces of shark and whale, it seemed cheerfully enough. But the unaccustomed cuisine had, I gather, played havoc with his sorely-tried digestion; and when a stout and cheery old Englishman came up to him in the hotel next morning and said, as men say over cocktails, ‘Well, Major, what d’you think of Japan?’ he answered, with some feeling:
‘There’s only one decent place in the whole of Japan, and that’s the British Embassy.’ And guffawed loudly.
A geisha girl perched on either of Uncle Emmanuel’s knees, and he seemed very content. ‘Don’t look!’ he said, as I turned round. And all the time he tried to press the Japanese officers at his side into taking him that very night to the ‘good’ Yoshiwara. But the Japanese officers only laughed and chaffed and promised gingerly. Anyway, I left without him.
When next morning I called to take Sylvia to the station, Uncle Emmanuel had not yet returned.
12
SHE LEANED OUT OF THE TRAIN WINDOW, AND I came up to say goodbye. My hat nearly came off as we kissed, and so the kiss was too slight; we barely brushed each other’s lips. She stood at the window and looked at me with her large, luminous eyes. Her broad black velvet hat gave her a kind of Spanish appearance, and there was her nose faintly retroussé, nearly as good as her mother’s — but too heavily powdered. And pink powder on her cheeks, too.
‘You have a natural complexion,’ I told her, ‘but when you put powder on top you make it seem artificial, and that’s a pity.’
She laughed, and showed a gold crown at the end of her mouth; and even that crown seemed exceedingly sympathetic.
‘Back to the Sacred Heart!’ she purled, blinking.
I looked up with something like anguish. ‘What will you do there all these long months without me?’
‘Well — I’ll play hockey,’ she said.
Then the train pulled out.
I stepped into a rickshaw and drove back to my aunt’s. Gladness, like the sun-lit sea, engulfed me, choked me, but the white-winged bird in me came to the surface, saying: ‘I am glad. I am glad.’ So the screaming sea-gull bathes in the pearly air, its white wings glistening in the sun as it turns a salto mortale. And God seemed to say: ‘I knew what I was doing.’ When did I love her first? When last? There seemed no beginning and no end. And as I drove along the yellow sun-bespangled lane, the sun-lit verdure at both sides bowed low to me as I continued my triumphant progress in between, almost impelling me to raise my hat as if I were the Prince of Wales acknowledging the cheers of thronging crowds that lined my way.
I came back whistling. Sylvia’s room being empty, I had cancelled mine at the Imperial Hotel, and at the invitation of my aunt now occupied my cousin’s bedroom. I was happy, and moved, strolling about, breathing in her scent of Cœur de Jeanette, examining her bric-à-brac, when Berthe came in with a foreboding look on her face and a telegram in her hand. ‘I had feared all along,’ she said. ‘I had a sort of feeling — why, I don’t know, but I had it even when she talked of the Allahs. I had it when I opened the telegram. Your uncle has still not come back. Now what are we to do?’ And she gave me the missive.
I read it — and I sat down, Berthe having done likewise.
‘You’re the only relative here,’ she said. ‘I suppose you had better tell her.’
‘I shall wait till Uncle Emmanuel comes home. He’d better tell Aunt Thérèse.’
‘Poor Anatole,’ she sighed. ‘To be killed on the eve of the Armistice.’
‘I pity the mother most.’ And I thought: with opinions like those — opinions that cause murder — what right have they to hope that their sons will survive? I saw Anatole but once, when he was on leave in England. Like his little father, he wrote sentimental poems à la Musset, and read them aloud to his intended as he held her white hand in his own and she dropped her fair head on his shoulder. In matters of love he had, like his father, been indefatigable. His mother spoke of him as of an angel imbued with one thought, one feeling — herself. But the only time I saw him he boasted to me that he knew how to ‘get round her all right.’ ‘Oh! — maman; we don’t take her seriously. We don’t tell her things, and wink at what she says.’ And winking he got off a bus at Leicester Square and went away with a young siren. He was dead.
Death is like this: you go along happy-go-lucky and suddenly somebody hits you over the head with a poker: whack! That is to mean that you are no more. Why do men die? To make room for others. That is all very well so far as it goes. But what are the other men for? If you think you understand death, I congratulate you.
Uncle Emmanuel was still away at the ‘good’ Yoshiwara. Late that night he returned. We took pity on him and did not tell him.
All next day till dusk I rickshawed about Tokyo, with the telegram in my pocket, guarding a dismal secret, wondering whether I should spare them their pain a little longer, and how much longer. The clouds had closed in, hung dark, leaden and foreboding; the weather could not make up its mind. I felt angry with humanity talking murder today only to whine on the morrow, and I felt wretched and miserable at guarding a sorrow I could not lessen. Of course, they’ll make a hero of him, I thought: they will make a hero of that muddy eddy of confusion they call ‘life.’ But they will not apply themselves to the kindling of the divine spark in us, the feeble flame flickering in a void. Anatole too was a militarist at heart. He had the spirit of detached generosity to a cause that would have made him a valuable recruit in the fight for more life and more light. But his cause for which he had fought with a wholly admirable courage and devotion had, centuries ago, ceased to be a holy cause, was a carcass like the man who died for it. It had died centuries before the man who had just sacrificed his life for its hollow sake was born — and now he too was a carcass.
And I thought: the one thing that makes for war is just that speck, that pinpoint of weak thinking in men’s minds which is the pivot of this gruesome cycle of unending war. Somehow, while nobody was looking, the idea had got into the thinking people’s heads that wars were unavoidable. It would be really better at that rate if they did not think at all. But the unthinking people seem to be more interested in the shape of Winston’s hat than in the contents of the brow it hides. I may be an eccentric, but somehow I can’t bring myself to see that my cousin’s death in Flanders is an event which is perfectly in order. The cold army missive would suggest that it was so. My aunt’s own attitude to this young death would be, I knew, that it was tragically necessary. But she would not see that it was tragically necessary only because the world had men and women of her foolish outlook. Then why these tears? Oh, why these tears, good tears, falling upon ashes where they cannot thrive? I felt embittered that these tears should fall upon the barren ground of human folly and so lend it meaning. One wonders what Jesus died for.