"Peut-on avoir l'honneur?"* Pyle was saying in hister-rible accent and a moment later I saw them dancing in silence at the other end of the room, Pyle holding her so far away from him that you expected him at any moment to sever contact. He was a very bad dancer, and she had been the best dancer I had ever known in her days at the Grand Monde.
It had been a long and frustrating courtship. If I could have offered marriage and a settlement everything would have been easy, and the elder sister would have slipped quietly and tactfully away whenever we were together. But three months passed before I saw her so much as momentarily alone, on a balcony at the Majestic, while her sister in the next room kept on asking when we proposed to come in. A cargo boat from France was being unloaded in Saigon River by the light of flares, the trishaw bells rang like telephones, and I might have been a young and inexperienced fool for all I found to say. I went back hopelessly to my bed in the rue Catinat and never dreamed that four months later she would be lying beside me, a little out of breath, laughing as though with surprise because nothing had been quite what she expected.
"Monsieur Fowlair." I had been watching them dance and hadn't seen her sister signalling to me from another table. Now she came over and I reluctantly asked her to sit down. We had never been .friends since the night she was taken ill in the Grand Monde and I had seen Phuong home.
"I haven't seen you for a whole year," she said. "I am away so often at Hanoi." "Who is your friend?" she asked. "A man called Pyle." "What does he do?"
"He belongs to the American Economic Mission. You know the kind of thing-electrical sewing machines for starving seamstresses." "Are there any?" "I don't know."
"But they don't use sewing machines. There wouldn't be any electricity where they live." She was a very literal woman.
"You'll have to ask Pyle," I said. "Is he married?"
I look at the dance floor. "I should say that's as near be ever got to a women." "He dances very badly," she said. " Yes." "But he looks a nice reliable man."
"Yes."
"Can I sit with you for a little? My friends are very dull." The music stopped and Pyle bowed stiffly to Phuong, then led her back and drew out her chair. I could tell that
formality pleased her. I thought how much she missed in her relation to me.
"This is Phuong's sister," I said to Pyle. "Miss Hei." "I'm very pleased to meet you," he said and blushed. "You come from New York?" she asked. ''No.FromBoston" "That is in the United States too?" "Oh yes. Yes." "Is your father a business man?"
"Notreally.He'saprofessor."
"A teacher?" she asked with a faint note of disappoint-ment. "Well, he's a kind of authority, you know. People con-sult him."
"About health? Is he a doctor?"
"Not that sort of doctor. He's a doctor of engineering though. He understands all about underwater erosion. You know what that is?"
"No" Pyle said with a dim attempt at humour, "Well, I'll leave it to Dad to tell you about that." "He is here?"
"0h,no."
"But he is coming?"
"No. That was just a joke," Pyle said apologetically. "Have you got another sister?" I asked Miss Hei. "No. Why?"
"It sounds as though you were examining Mr. Pyle's marriageahility."
"I have only one sister," Miss Hei said, and she clamped her hand heavily down on Phuong's knee. like a chairman with his gavel marking a point of order. "She's a very pretty sister," Pyle said. "She is the most beautiful girl in Saigon," Miss Hei said. as though she were correcting him. "I can believe it."
I said, "It's time we ordered dinner. Even the most beautiful girl in Saigon must eat." "I am not hungry," Phuong said.
"She is delicate," Miss Hei went firmly on. There was a note of menace in her voice. "She needs care. She deserves care. She is very, very loyal." "My friend is a lucky man," Pyle said gravely. "She loves children," Miss Hei said. I laughed and then caught Pyle's eye: he was looking at me with shocked surprise, and suddenly it occurred to me that he was genuinely interested in what Miss Hei had to say. While I was ordering dinner (though Phuong had told me she was not hungry, I knew she could manage a good steak tartare*
with two raw eggs and etceteras), I listened to him seriously discussing the question of children. "I've always thought I'd like a lot of children," he said. "A big family's a wonderful interest. It makes for the stability of marriage. And it's good for the children too. I was an only child. It's a great disadvantage being an only child." I had never heard him talk so much before.
"How old is your father?" Miss Hei asked with gluttony. "Sixty-nine."
"fOld people love grandchildren. It is very sad that my sister has no parents to rejoice in her children. When the day comes," she added with a baleful* look at me. "Nor you either," Pyle said, rather unnecessarily I thought.
"Our father was of a very good family. He was a man-darin in Hue."*
I said, "I've ordered dinner for all of you." "Not for me," Miss Hei said. "I must be going to my friends. I would like to meet Mr. Pyle again. Perhaps you coald manage that."
"When I get back from the north," I said. "Are you going to the north?" "I think it's time I had a look at the war." "But the Press* are all back," Pyle said. "That's the best time for me. I .don't have to meet Gran-ger." "Then you must come and have dinner with me and my sister when Monsieur Fowlair is gone." She added with ifamoge courtesy, "To cheer her up." After she had gone Pyle said, "What a charming, cultivated woman. And she spoke English so well." "Tell him my sister was in business once in Singapore," Phuong said proudly. "Really?Whatkindofbusiness?" translated for her. "Import, export. She can do short-I wish we had more like her in the Economic Mission." "I will speak to her," Phuong said. "She would like to work for the Americans."
After dinner they danced again. I am a bad dancer too and I hadn't the unselfconsciousness* of Pyle-or had I possesed it, I wondered, in the days when I was first in love with Phuong? There must have been many occasions at the Grand Monde before the memorable night of Miss Hei's illness when I had danced with Phuong just for an opportunity to speak to her. Pyle was taking no such opportunity as they came round the floor again; he had relaxed a little, that was all, and was holding her less at arm's length, but they were both silent. Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle,* I was in love again. I could hardly believe that in an hour, two hours, she would be coming back with me to that dingy room with the communal closet and the old women squatting on the landing.
I wished I had never heard the rumour about Phat Diem, or that the rumour had dealt with any other town than the one place in the north where my friendship with a French naval officer would allow me to slip in, uncensored, uncontrolled. A newspaper scoop? Not in those days when all the world wanted to read about was Korea. A chance of death? Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was farmore.certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people al-Always. everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends tiey preserved for pain and vacuity.