Mrs. Vincent

by H. E. BATES

FROM where she sat in the cool recesses of the white veranda, well above the brown dust of the compound, Mrs. Vincent could see the entire violent mass of bougainvillaea flowing 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 her 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, having for her 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 green. But of course the war had changed 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 southeast of Akyab, so that he now swung it with an odd half-circularwise motion, walking as if deformed, with crab-like tenacity.

Usually three or four, and sometimes even six or eight, of the boys walked across from the 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 well, whereas he, 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 something repellent in 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 the 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 many small sandwich dishes, each covered with cloths of colored 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 crazy idiot! What do you suppose? The tea of course!” as Armstrong swung up the last of the steps from the compound and onto the veranda.

“Hullo,” he said. He looked 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.

2

THE bearer at that moment brought in tea. She saw Armstrong look up at him, and regard with a sort of oblique interest the dark face-not the face of a boy, but the face of an aging man, with its gray drooping Chinese-shaped mustache and broad fineoutlined lips that seemed forever on the verge of a terribly patient smile. He wore long white trousers that were too short and a white coat and turban. 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 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 those things. When are you going to be able to play tennis again?”

“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:-

“You didn’t tell me what you’d been doing with yourself.”

“Sitting by the river,” he said.

“ Doing what? ”

“Oh, watching the coolies plant grass.”

“Odd occupation.”

“No, there’s a lot to it,” he said. “Watching them dibble that grass in, root by root, like cabbages. Making it grow in this heat too.”

“I should be bored out of my head,” she said.

“Oh, if you get bored,” he said, “there’s always a background of dead bodies floating down. That’s interesting. Life and death.”

“Don’t talk about it-it’s foul,” she said. “Have your tea now. Reach for another sandwich. So you didn’t go racing?”

“ No.”

“You’re an odd boy,” she said. “You never seem to do anything.”

“I’m interested in the country.”

“In India?” she said. “God, when you’ve lived in it as long as I have, you’ll be interested, let me tell you. That is, if the dust and filth and heat of it haven’t finished you off.”

“You don’t like it much, do you?” he said.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “ You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to stay here like us. Wait till the monsoon comes, and then you’ll feel what it’s really like. We can’t get out. But you can. You can get out. You can go.”

“Yeah, I can get out,” he said. “Minus my foot.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “That isn’t what I meant at all.”

He did not answer, but sat staring out to where the sunlight laid a strong brassy bar violently across the burned grass. Great black Indian crows were circling slowly in the heat. So powerful was ihe light of midafternoon that the flowers of the bougainvillaea seemed now to have melted into a mass of molten purple, half aflame. Whether it was that he was watching she did not know. There was no sound in the room but the sound of the punkah, whirling the hot air, and she did not know how to span the break in the conversation. It was hard to explain to these young people, new to the country, coming in from far away, exactly what people like herself had to endure. Sometimes she felt that all the years of one’s life in India were wasted years. One was trapped.

Perhaps in the old days, when you got good bearers and things were plentiful and the clubs were not infested with strangers, the place was not so bad. The river was very beautiful. In the parks the trees, of which she did not know the names, blossomed in scarlet and purple and blue and yellow, and in the evenings the lights on the rickshaws trembled all along the dark streets like many fireflies. And sometimes it was beautiful too in winter, in the cool season, with all the English flowers blossoming on the terraces and in the gardens, but the beauty, like anything else, never seemed to have any permanence about it, and always from outside there was the dirty sickening clash of somber and uneasy violence over it all. And oh, how tired, tired, you got of the sun!

Armstrong was really thinking about his foot. Colonel Dentz, the surgeon, had given it a thorough and not entirely unbrutal once-over that morning, and the result seemed final. He was never going to walk decently again. Dentz was no fool. Nor, it seemed, were they going to let him fly again. He was oppressed by a sense that his life had reached a broken, empty finality. There was a taste of dust in his mouth. He was very young to be out of it all.

By coincidence, but also because she was sorry for what she had said and wanted to make up for it, she said, “You never told me about your foot. I mean how it happened. I never knew anything except that you came down in the mountains.”

“In the strict interest of truth,” he said, bitter again, “I was shot down in the sea.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“The British picked me up a thousand miles out from the Delta here,” he said.

Obviously he did not want to talk about it. She was silent and he pretended a sudden interest in Untouchables.

“Who exactly are they?” he said. “I hear a hell of a lot about them. Are these coolies planting the grass Untouchables?”

“ I really don’t know,” she said. “The whole thing is so mixed. There are so many creeds.”It was no use pretending. “They’re all as bad as each other. Just low swindlers, all of them. They’d cut your throat for an anna. What about your leg? Were you in the sea very long?”

“Oh, quite a while.”He was not eating much. He had, however, finished the tea and was ready for more. She reached across the table and, without asking, took his cup.

“I got bothered by these things,”he said. “There was another thing I was going to ask you.”

“What things? What else were you going to ask?”

“The problems of this country. For instance, these girls. The half-whites, what about them?”

“I’ll tell you what about them,” she said. She looked up from pouring tea and regarded him with direct savagery. “They’re going to get a hell of a shock when this war is over. That’s what!”

“When it’s over? I see half of them in a state of shock now.”

“What do you mean?" she said. “Shock? Aren’t they having a good time? Aren’t they having a better time than any of us? Look at their status! Look how that’s raised. War has done that for them. They should think themselves lucky. What has it done for decent women here?”

“They’re kids mostly,”he said.

“Yes, they’re kids,” she said, “and what do they behave like? You know what they behave like.”

“Like human beings?” he said.

“They want to be taken for English!” she said.

“That ‘s all they want. To be equal with us. Do you think we’re going to stand for that?”

“I know a kid, one of them,” he said. “There’s many a New Orleans girl hasn’t a thing on her for color. She’s as white as you and me.”

“Well, you keep away from her if you know what’s good for you!” she said.

3

HE WAS silent again, looking out beyond the bar of sun. She did not speak either. The thought of the Anglo-Indian girl produced in her new depths of sharp disturbance. Sometimes she had imagined Armstrong coming into the house alone, but not to speak like this. Every three weeks or so her husband took the Darjeeling Mail north and then drove fifty miles northeast into the tea country to the plantation. It was very remote, very green, and very boring country, socially populated by distant bungalows of parochial Scots planters and their wives, and she now never went with him there. Her husband had tea on the brain; he had never been really happy out of the hills. It would have been nice to have Armstrong alone in the house. It would have been nice to walk down, after darkness, in the warm evening, to the river, and listen there to the sound of wind in the palm trees, like the echo of water.

Because of these things she was sorry to be antagonistic. She did not want to be antagonistic; on the contrary. But people who had lived here ten or twenty or even thirty and more years had a right to feel that they knew what they were talking about. Of course many of these girls were in a way beautiful. But they were not English; they were not white; it was no use pretending that. They were not the same; blood would tell.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for one of these girls,”she said.

He did not answer. She felt blind for a moment and then, when she recovered, found herself looking at Armstrong’s foot. It was curled away under him, and she suddenly felt that she had to ask about it again. It fascinated her.

“How were you shot down?" she said. “What happened?”

“Just one of those things.”he said.

“ Yes, but how?”

“ We burned up.”

She looked at his dark and inscrutable face, with the remarkably old, fine, and troubled eyes. It would have been nice to drive down to the lakes together and afterwards come back to swim and lie in the sun.

“Can you swim?" she said.

“ I had enough swimming,”he said. “ Thirty hours at a stretch is enough for two lifetimes.”

“Two lifetimes?” she said. “How do you arrive at that?”

He looked at her suddenly, as if all his patience were imperiled by that remark, and as if he were almost at the end of talking.

“I tried to drown myself,”he said. " That’s how. I put myself under. I got hellishly tired. I didn’t want to live on mouths of salt water and on nothing but sun all my life. So I put myself under.”He was talking with great quietness, in a detachment of plain fury. “And every time I put myself under I came up again. You see, that’s how it was.”

Suddenly he gave it up, no longer interested in sustaining even that savage interest in himself, and he looked away from her, beyond the veranda, to the sun. She did not know what to say. The uneasy heat of the afternoon seemed to gather down below, on the dusty compound, and rise in a single oppressive breath of wind. She caught with it the acrid and musty smell of some remote native village fire, and then the taste of burned dust rising with the wind, disturbing and bitter in her mouth. In twenty years she had never got used to that smell.

It seemed to disturb Armstrong too. He got up and said, “Well, I guess I better get along. I have a snooker game with the Major at five.”

“Must you ?”

“ I must,”he said.

“You know you ought not to walk across there without something on your head,”she said. “I’m telling you. I know this country.”

“No sun can burn me,” he said.

She did not answer, but went as far as the steps of the veranda with him and then said, “Come over to dinner some evening, why don’t you? I’ll put on an evening dress and we’ll have Madras curry and beer.

I know you like that.”

“Thanks. It’s very kind,”he said. “ I’ll get along now.”

“And don’t stop in the sun on the way, watching coolies plant grass. That doesn’t pay any dividends in this heat.”

He grinned and went down the steps, crab-wise, and out to the compound below. She stood for some moments watching him limp across the grass that had once been so beautifully kept and was now only a harsh arena of dust in the sun. Even after he had disappeared behind the last row of tents she stood gazing at the colors of the bougainvillaea, flaming and turbulent in the heat, before she decided at last to go into the house, unsettled and depressed about something, to have one of her violent rows with the bearer about the foul way he had behaved at tea.