‘No, sir, none. I entirely agree. I’ll be glad to be back with you.’ Nothing could disguise the relief in the officer’s voice.
Lawrence rang off and stood for a moment watching the proprietor and his staff like an actor on the far side of the footlights. As he did so he noticed a shadowy flutter of a reflection on the glass beside him. He looked around and there, alone, her face almost against the glass, was the girl with her blue eyes and all their wide, candid expression contracted into a single question of some overwhelming intent. The look stirred him deeply because it was of quite a different order to that on the faces of the proprietor and his staff. But if he remained within the booth any longer it would be counteracting the impression he wanted to create. So he opened the door slowly and stepped out. Immediately the proprietor was at his side and wanted to know if Lawrence had heard any news he could tell them. He knew, he said, that he had no right to ask for any military secrets but could not Lawrence just indicate whether it had been good or bad?
Lawrence told him quietly that it was news concerning his military mission. It was like the calls in the night, a routine one from his superiors, and there would be many more of them. As the proprietor knew, he was an English officer and a stranger to the country. It wouldn’t be at all right for him to pass on what could only be his own inadequate impressions of the general situation. The Dutch authorities were the only ones who could do so without distortion and he was certain that when there was anything of importance to be announced it would be announced soon enough over their own wireless. Meanwhile if the proprietor would excuse him, his breakfast was waiting and he had a great deal of work to do.
The man spread his large hands out in front of him in a melodramatic gesture of submission to what he regarded as unnecessary military reticence. Grumbling that if the news had been good Lawrence would have let it out soon enough, he worked off his disappointment by clapping his plump red hands and ordering his waiters peremptorily back into position beside empty tables. They tripped back lightly, almost girlishly, into the dining-room to stand there so still and preoccupied with their own impressions of what had just occurred that had it not been for their black hats they might have been images carved out of their native djati by the hereditary sculptors of Bali.
Lawrence was left alone with the woman still standing and still watching him, her eyes gravely beseeching. She was the first to speak in the tone he had first heard only more muted than ever. Holding out her hand as if importuning for alms she asked: ‘Please, what did you hear on the phone?’
‘You’ve heard what I have just told the proprietor. I’m afraid . . .’ he began automatically.
‘Oh, please don’t say things like that to me!’ she interrupted and for the first time the shadow of a personal defeat showed in her wide eyes. ‘You can’t say “no” to me.’ She stopped as if the truth of this passionate assertion were self-evident and looked him straightly, even a little defiantly, in the eye. Yet at the same time she put her left hand to her heart as if ready for the support it might need.
‘Why not?’ Lawrence asked the question abruptly.
Trained in a school of life which regarded all natural emotion with suspicion he feared he had no great ‘finesse’ in dealing either with his own or that of others. Now, however, the unaccustomed emotion evoked in him was made more formidable by a feeling that he stood in a special relationship of responsibility towards this woman. That was the most confusing part of the encounter because at that time nothing could have appeared more absurd and irrational. Looking back, however, he realized how accurate the feeling had been. He had recognized a quality in her that no one else among her companions, judging by the reprimand from that comfortable matron he had overheard the evening before, was in the least aware. The recognition laid special responsibilities on him for were we not all ultimately charged to live not according to general rules but by our own specific recognition of one another’s quality? However, having the courage of one’s recognitions was a lesson only slowly and painfully to be learnt and on that early morning in the hall of the hotel he was aware only of conflict between his upbringing, a long established sense of duty, and this strange new feeling about the woman. All that made him sound curt, almost rude to her, whereas he was really only being rough with himself.
To his amazement she seemed to see straight into the core of his predicament and ever to be encouraged by it.
‘Why not?’ She repeated his question and went on straight away to answer it. ‘Because I have to know. I can’t go on any more with rumours. I shall be utterly lost if I can’t somewhere find not the whole truth – I’m not asking that – but just one real fact to build on. You’ve no idea how we’ve been deceived and lied to these past months. . . . They say it’s for our good, as if we are children in need of pretty bedtime stories to lull us to sleep. . . . That may be true of men like the proprietor and these poor unhappy women and their worn-out children – but it’s not true of me. All my life I’ve feared only the dark . . . only what is secret and hidden. These others may have to cling to their illusions. They may need lies to guide them to their moment of truth. They might panic if they knew what I believe you know. I would not. Only one thing can make me panic – not knowing.’
Her voice had not faltered but it struck a deeper note that nearly blurred its clarity as she begged him to tell her the truth and so help her to be stronger. She emphasized that he was the only one who could help and so, as she saw it, he had to help. There was no alternative to the soul of honour which she took him to be. Then she added persuasively: ‘Besides, you can’t tell me anything that I don’t in a sense already know. You can only give the horror a name, a time and a place. However frightful your knowledge may seem to you it couldn’t be as great as this nameless terror I’ve carried about inside myself these past few months. Oh! I wish you could know for how long I’ve felt disaster creeping down on us. For weeks I’ve even smelt death in the air and today I know it is very near. But I promise you I shall not tell a living soul. No matter how bad it is I can hold it all.’ She made an eloquent gesture with her hands like a potter demonstrating he had black clay enough to shape a vessel that would hold securely whatever life chose to pour into it.
Moreover she had spoken all this, Lawrence said, not only with a passion that carried its own conviction but also with a certain instinctive poetry that would have sounded out of place in a drawing-room and doubtless was normally foreign to her, too. Yet in that sombre moment in the evolution of the vengeance of outraged fate, in that Far Eastern version of a world Eumenides into whose ancient chorus fate had conscripted them both, no other language would have been so appropriate. And – Lawrence added it with a tone of pleading for our understanding – he was utterly convinced by her. He was suddenly convinced that of all the decisions he had had to take in his life this slight choice of whether to speak or not to speak was the most fateful. He did not hesitate. He did not even feel it necessary to pledge her again to secrecy. Against all the rules, against all his training and upbringing he told her. Looking straight into her eyes and quietly so that his voice did not carry beyond her, he said: ‘They’ve landed.’
‘I thought so,’ she replied without change of expression. ‘When and where? Near here?’
Lawrence told her what he knew and was amazed how for awhile emotion vanished from their exchanges. Conversation became spare and matter-of-fact.
In the end she asked, ‘But were not the landings opposed by our Dutch troops?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ he answered.
‘Is there any chance of the Japanese being driven back into the sea?’