Читать книгу The Sapphire - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 6

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I SPENT the first year after my return to England in the London office of my Company, acquiring knowledge of its internal economy, and enjoying myself in the intervals. But the forest had set its seal on me and I could never hear the wind rustling the leaves in a town square without flying back upon the carpet of my dreams to the vast woodlands of the Irrawaddy and seeing the elephants carry and arrange the huge teak logs. At the beginning of the second year my father died, and what with the settlement of his estate and the new dispositions which his death entailed, I could not hope to find my way back again to Burma for another eighteen months. I was thus two years and a half in England and chiefly in London. Yet during all that time I neither met nor heard of Michael Crowther. For all I knew he might be entertaining the great world in Mayfair or occupying a cell in Maidstone Gaol. I thought the latter alternative the more likely. If he had rattled the Stock Exchange, as he promised to do, he had done it very quietly. But I could never quite forget him, for from time to time I felt a foolish twinge of remorse in that I had not taken him at his word and carried the silken bag with its trinkets and its sapphire back to Ma Shwe At at Tagaung. I did have the time, and I might at all events have sustained her pride by pretending that in the interval Michael Crowther had died. But that small opportunity had gone.

It was not, then, until the decline of the third year that I could with any honesty towards my Company propose another visit to Burma. I made my plans to leave England during the second week of December, being persuaded to that date chiefly because it would save me from the festivities of Christmas, an uncomfortable season for a man without a family. My luggage was packed days before it was to be collected by the Shipping Company’s agents; and on the afternoon of a dank, raw Sunday, the darkness beginning to fall and the air heavy with mist, I wandered out from my lodging into a small neighbouring street of garages and reconstructed houses much favoured by film stars. The hub of that street, however, is a mighty church, and as I passed its door the thunder of its organ called me in.

I stood at the back, facing the great altar ablaze with the golden light of its many candles; and a tall priest with a red stole upon his shoulders mounted into a pulpit set aloft above the congregation against the farthest pillar of the nave. He preached in a high, clear voice upon a text from Hosea about the valley of Achor and the door of hope. So much I remember, and then my attention was diverted. For in front of where I stood, at the end of the last row of benches, separated from me by an open passage-way, sat Michael Crowther. It was the last place in the world I should have expected to find him. I could only imagine that, like myself, he had wandered by chance into the church as a refuge from the chill and gloom outside. I noticed, however, that he sat very still, like a man enthralled, and I wondered whether he had got religion, as the saying goes. His head, with its thick and bristly hair, stood out in relief against the distant candles on the altar and never moved. His face was turned towards the preacher so that I could just see his heavy jaw thrust out as I had seen it when he was feeling his way amongst the sand-banks on the porch of the Dagonet. I made up my mind to speak to him as soon as the service was over. But I did not get the chance. For as the offertory plates began to be handed along the benches and the chink of coins to be heard, Michael Crowther rose without shame to his feet, and stalked past me out of the church. I said to myself: “That’s Michael D. He may not have rattled the Stock Exchange, but he’s true to type.”

Towards the end of the week I travelled overland to Marseilles and embarked for Rangoon with two complete years ahead of me before I needed to return. I spent the first year in the forests of the Salween River. But at the beginning of the second, I had occasion to travel again to the upper waters of the Irrawaddy. I took the night train from Rangoon to Mandalay, saw my baggage placed in my cabin on the steamer and then, having still a few hours to spare, I took the usual walk towards the Zegyo Bazaar. I say “towards,” for I never reached it. In the street of shops which led to it, a name upon a board caught my eye. The board stretched above a shop and I should probably not have noticed it at all but for the queer circumstance that at this very busy hour of the morning a boy was putting up the shutters. Once I had noticed it I could not turn my eyes away. For the name painted in bold white letters on a black ground was:

MICHAEL CROWTHER.

There might be two Michael Crowthers of course, and both linked with some sort of shackle to Mandalay. Coincidences are after all more usual in life than in fiction. Or the great assault upon the Stock Exchange had failed and its strategist had fled back to the lines he knew. It occurred to me that if that were the case, the sooner I pushed along to the Bazaar the less risk I had of being annoyed. To this day I don’t know why I loitered. But I did. I waited amongst the creaking bullock-carts and the streams of passers-by: now a Shan from the hills with an enormous hat upon his head, now a group of girls with tuberoses in their black hair and silken skirts, and more gaiety in their laughter than even in their clothes, a monk in his yellow robe with a shaven head, a party of tourists holding above their helmeted heads white umbrellas which would have condemned them to the stocks in King Thibaw’s day. I waited there in the blazing sunlight, and gradually and slowly I was bewitched by an intense and inexplicable expectation. The feeling was vaguely familiar to me. Yes, some where and when I had experienced it before. It could really have nothing to do with Crowther’s name upon a board, I argued, for I had seen Crowther himself in the Farm Street Church and not a nerve in me had thrilled. Yet here was I in a street of Mandalay—enthralled. A man with a terrier dog at his heels pushed by me, and I remembered when this same sense of expectation had possessed and controlled me. It was in a moonlit clearing of the forest north of the Second Defile. There I had waited for a panther—and something else. Here I waited for Michael D. Crowther—and something else. There nothing had happened. Here Michael D. Crowther did. For as I stood and waited, he came bouncing out of his shop.

“Of all people, you!” he cried, and I drew back with a little jump. It was perhaps the oddest circumstance, at all events at that time in our acquaintanceship, that though he was often in my thoughts, the moment I heard his voice I wanted to break away. “Now isn’t that a piece of luck?” he continued eagerly.

“Is it?” I asked. “For whom?”

Michael D. grinned.

“Cold!” he said, wagging his head at me. “Oh, very cold and biting, Mr. Legatt. You know all the talk there is of Gandhi and his Untouchables. Well, when I read of the Untouchables I always think of you.”

“Thank you!” said I. “Good morning!”

As I moved on all the truculence left him. He ran after me and caught me by the arm, and his hand shook as he held me.

“Please don’t go!” he implored, with so notable a change of voice and so humble a prayer in his eyes that I could not but stop. “I withdraw every word. My tongue ran away with me. It often does with witty people. But I’ve got to speak to you. I’ll get a hat and give an order to my boy. I won’t be a second.”

He was back in his shop almost before the sound of his words had ceased. I thought: “What a fool I was not to slide past the shop with my head turned the other way!” I asked myself immediately upon that: “After all, aren’t you a bit of a prig? Why shouldn’t you stop and listen to him?” And by the time I had put those questions Crowther had rejoined me.

He led me to a café. We sat in the open under an awning. In front of us across the road the wide, lily-starred moat slept about the walls of Fort Dufferin; and as each of us drank a cool lime squash Crowther went back with a curious eagerness and flurry to the last conversation we had held four years before.

“You must have been surprised to see me here, Mr. Legatt?”

It was a difficult question to answer. I sought unwisely to put him at his ease by suggesting that he had suffered no more than the common lot.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. He was up in arms in a second. You might disapprove of him, but you must not forget him. Above all you must not find him uninteresting and become indifferent as to whether he failed or succeeded.

“You can’t have forgotten all those ambitions of mine,” he cried indignantly.

I in my turn was a little nettled.

“I really don’t see why I shouldn’t have.”

He glared at me. Then he chuckled.

“But you haven’t, anyway.”

I laughed and climbed down.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then you must have been surprised to see me,” he insisted with some petulance.

“All right. I was surprised. I ought not to have been, but I was,” I acknowledged.

But Crowther was not appeased.

“And why oughtn’t you to have been surprised, if you please, Mr. Legatt?”

“Because I have been three years in London and never once in business or any other circles did I hear your name.”

Here was something Crowther could not question. He sat back in his chair and nodded his head gloomily.

“I’ve been a great disappointment to myself, Mr. Legatt. I had stayed in the East too long. I was a prisoner of the sun after all. Funny! Governors and soldiers and big business chiefs can go back and hold their own—men really of the same calibre as myself. I suppose that I am more sensitive than most people, what?” I was careful not to interrupt and to keep a very straight face. “Yes, I had got the habit of the cheroot, and Havanas made me ill. I didn’t realise it at first. No. I hired a little flat in South Kensington and stood in Piccadilly Circus and made a noise like Dick Whittington. I looked up all the smart fellows I had any sort of link with. Queer thing! Most of them were a good deal more cordial to me as a Captain on the Irrawaddy than as a man starting in their own line of big business. There was one, the head of a great financial family, who fairly sickened me, Mr. Legatt. I sent in my card one morning and I was shown into the holy of holies, and he sat back in his chair and looked at me without a word. I said to myself: ‘That’s good! That’s the way! I’ll make a note of that. He puts me at a disadvantage.’ So I started in on him. I had come home to put a little pep into English methods, and he just looked at me. I could help him and he could help me; I said Michael D. Crowther was going to get to work; and he looked at me. I reckon I lost my head a bit then, but he only looked at me, and I just had to come away. And he had never spoken one word. I tell you I wondered for a moment whether pep didn’t really mean simply saying nothing. However, others put bits of business in my way. But here’s the amazing thing. They were little bits of business, but I didn’t bring them off. No, sir, I didn’t succeed.”

He was now merely Michael Crowther, a woebegone Englishman consoling himself by the recital of his experiences. He had meant to be the big noise; he was not even the baby’s gurgle. He had planned to hit the skies; he had not even flapped up off the earth.

“Other things besides the hustle made me shudder. The east wind, the clear brown fog ten foot high and the miles of black soot on the top of it, the cars bearing down on you and hooting death at you, and above all the utterly damnable, chilly, disobliging loneliness of it all. I began to pine for the colour and the ease and the good humour of the life I knew here under skies which really laugh and a sun which really warms. I wanted to hear the copper-smith bird tell me a real summer is coming. Yes, Mr. Legatt, I had Burma in my bones, and the want of it made me ache from head to foot. I’d have given all the hooting motor-cars in Piccadilly for the creak of one bullock-wagon in Mandalay. The Havana cigar—you can have the crop. What I wanted was a Watson Number One”; and as though he had forgotten it in the need to pour himself out from a bottle and hold himself up in a glass against the light, he pulled a cheroot from the pocket of his white drill jacket and lit it.

“I can understand all that,” I said. “I am not so deeply rooted in England myself. What bewilders me a little is not your return, but your name over a shop.”

Before now Michael Crowther had looked at me as if I was not all there. I hate to be taken for a congenital idiot when I am making a perfectly reasonable remark; and mine was a reasonable remark—in spite of Michael Crowther and his question.

“Why should that bewilder you, Mr. Legatt?”

“Because”—I was huffy but I meant to be fair—“because from what I remember of your navigation, you could have got another steamer by asking for it. Or if there wasn’t a steamer, an agency to keep you going until there was.”

Crowther’s manner changed completely. There was a warmth in his voice, a gratitude in his eyes.

“That’s kind of you, Mr. Legatt. It is indeed. When your self-esteem has had the bumps which mine has, an unexpected bouquet here and there is very welcome.”

“What are you going to sell, Captain?” I continued. “Antiquities? You? You’re the last man to be interested in dead and gone things. If I were you I shouldn’t drop down to a shop.”

Crowther remained silent for a little while. He looked straight across the moat to the machicolated walls of the Fort. I thought that he must be considering my advice. But I was wrong. He was merely considering me; happily, however, from a new angle. I say happily, because on looking back, I can see that our acquaintanceship took a turn at this corner. It is too early to say that friendship began here, but at all events we were on the road to it.

“I am going to sell nothing at all,” he said. “We’d better have another drink. We have got time”; and when the cool lime squashes stood on the little table between us, he continued: “I have been brooding by myself so long over my story that I have come to think the world knows it as well as I do. Just wait a second!”

He put his thoughts into an order of words before he spoke them. He was not selecting what he should tell me and what he should keep to himself. Reticence was a word omitted from his dictionary. He was so interested in himself that everyone within his reach must know all about him and exactly.

“I was a failure. I hadn’t made any friends. I was cold. I used to wander about on Sunday afternoons into the Park to listen to the spouters and then through the dead streets to get myself dog-tired. Well, one dreadful afternoon, so damp that you felt your bones were wet inside you and as cold as the Poles and South Ken in one, I found myself in a queer little street, garages and oldy Englishy houses and a church.”

I sat forward.

“Farm Street,” I said.

“Oh? May be. I never knew its name. But there were lights in the church windows, and there would be people in there and it’d be warm. So I went in. A man preached about a valley. He was a sensible sort of man—that’s what made me listen. He said this valley bloomed once and was desolate for a few hundred years. You could work out the chronology for yourself if you liked—for himself he wasn’t interested very much in chronology—that’s what took me in the man—a very few hundred years would do for him—sensible, what?—after that it bloomed again, a door of hope.”

“The valley of Achor,” I interrupted.

“Very likely,” said Crowther. “I didn’t catch on to the name.” Suddenly he stopped and stared at me. “Say! You know a lot about the Bible.”

“I was there that afternoon,” I said.

“You?”

“Yes.”

“In that church?”

I nodded my head.

“A little more than a year ago. I saw you in the back pew.”

“That’s right. Now isn’t that odd?” He looked at me reproachfully. “You might have spoken to me, Mr. Legatt.”

“I hadn’t a chance to. You nipped out before the collection reached you.”

“Instinct, Mr. Legatt,” said Crowther smiling. “Nothing more than instinct. But in that case you can realise how hard that sermon hit me.”

“I’m afraid that I can’t,” I answered. “I wasn’t listening closely. I was watching you.”

That seemed to Crowther very natural. No further explanation was required, and he went on:

“Then I must tell you something about it. The valley of Achor was a door of hope. It had bloomed once and hundreds of years afterwards a second time under the smile of God. That was the phrase which took me by storm. A valley all a-bloom under the smile of God. The valley of the Irrawaddy, eh? Where everyone smiles—not only God. I suppose that every feeling I had of darkness and failure and loneliness and cold, had been working up to this moment, had become so much tinder waiting for a spark to set it ablaze. And here was the spark—a phrase spoken by a preacher on a black, dreary afternoon in Farm Street—a valley under the smile of God. I went back to my little furnished flat in a back lane of South Ken like a man who has had a call—a call to lovely things instead of away from them. I sat in my dingy sitting-room with its ugly deal furniture and its bit of Brussels carpet, and I tell you, Mr. Legatt. I heard music. I was going to wind things up and go back.”

He could hardly spare the time that evening to eat his dinner. He had the table cleared the moment the meal was over, and going into his bedroom rummaged in his big trunk. At the bottom of it lay Ma Shwe At’s little silk bag with its embroidery and its pink string and its jingling trinkets. In his hurry to set his foot on the neck of London, he had tucked it away amongst his odds and ends and forgotten all about it. Now he carried it back into his sitting-room and rolled out the ornaments on to his red baize table-cloth, just as he had three years before on to the white linen of the Dagonet. They were all there even to the sapphire in its strip of napkin. The ornaments were tarnished and dull as pewter, but the sapphire glowed with a spark of fire striking up through the blue of tropical seas; and the walls of his room fell away; and a lorry which passed and shook the house was the rumble of his stern-wheel as it thrashed the water of the Irrawaddy.

“Jiminy! I was glad that you hadn’t taken me at my word, Mr. Legatt, and carried the bag back to Tagaung. I knew that I ran a risk, but you carried your nose so high that I could almost see the vocal cords—now didn’t you?—and I had got to show you you were thinking of yourself all the time like everybody else. But you gave me a jar, Mr. Legatt, I won’t deny. You did stand hesitating whether you’d behave like a medieval knight in an opera or not.”

Frankly I did not like his simile. I had no wish to be a knight in an opera, medieval or otherwise. I prided myself upon my actuality. I was a young man of my age with a fair share of hard common sense. I might have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. But I had gone to the forest instead. Homer and heroics meant nothing to me. Wild beasts and the loneliness of great woods meant a great deal. I was annoyed with Crowther absurdly. For I had been on the point of starting back for Tagaung to return to a Burmese girl I didn’t know the presents of a man I detested; and if there’s one thing a man’s heartily ashamed of it’s an experiment in quixotics. I grew a little hot and uncomfortable. I felt at a disadvantage with Crowther, as I had done on one or two occasions before.

“You might get on with your story and leave me out of it,” I said tartly.

The momentary gleam of his old-time impishness faded out from Crowther’s eyes.

“No offence intended, Mr. Legatt,” he cried hurriedly. “I resoom. There were the ornaments in front of me and I spent the evening polishing them until they shone like a lady’s nails before she’s dabbed the blood on them—the silver ring which Ma Shwe At wore round her tiny ankle, the filigree bracelets for her wrists. I tell you, the warmth of her was there in my drab little sitting-room with the red baize table-cloth. I could feel her arms round my neck and see her dark eyes and white teeth laughing at me an inch off my nose. The taste of the flesh, eh?”

Crowther leaned back in his chair, his teeth closed over his lower lip and sucking in his breath.

“You wouldn’t know, but these Burmese girls have got a trick of sending a little ripple down their arms from their shoulders to their finger-tips, and when their arms are round your neck at the time”—he relapsed into his Americanisms and rubbed his hands together—“oh boy, oh boy!”

I hope that the tip of my nose didn’t rise priggishly into the air. But Crowther certainly hurried on.

“But there was ever so much besides. The fun of her, the chatter, and little Ma Sein dancing up and down on her feet as if she was a puff-ball.”

Yes, I too remembered little Miss Diamond dancing up and down on the sand of the little square at Tagaung. I saw the tiny village, booths and square and pagoda, and the great tamarinds behind lighted up with the golden brilliancy of the headlight and rounded into a circle by the headlight’s shape. I saw it as one sees a scene of marionettes through the spy-hole of a peep-show.

“I remember,” I answered with a smile.

“And even that wasn’t all.” He turned sideways in his chair and leaned across the table, once more surprised by himself. “Do you know that I had been wanting her desperately all this time without knowing it? There was an ache somewhere inside me, something missing, always missing, like someone you have dearly loved, who has been dead for a long while, but you don’t think what it is that’s missing until now and then some association brings you full-face with the knowledge. Well, Ma Shwe At wasn’t dead. I hugged myself when I had worked back to that one vital fact. Ma Shwe At and Ma Sein—Mrs. Golden Needle and Miss Diamond—were still at Tagaung. Those presents were a promise—the preacher’s door of hope. My mind took a hop, skip and a jump—there I was landing from the gang-plank. There they were laughing and waving their hands. The anklet was warm with the warmth of Ma Shwe At as I held it in my hand. I heard myself saying: ‘Beloved Golden Needle, born of the lotus and the moon’—you know the sort of thing—‘here is the treasure you asked me to keep safe for you.’ ”

“Oh ho!” said I. Here was a Michael Crowther whom I did not know, proud of his cunning—that was old—but eager to make restitution—that was new.

“So you are going back to Tagaung!” I said.

“To be sure. That’s why I’ve opened a shop.”

“That’s why you’ve closed a shop,” I corrected.

Crowther raised his eyebrows. He was always astonished if I did not follow at once the working of his mind. He explained compassionately:

“You haven’t got it at all, Mr. Legatt. I’m not going to stay at Tagaung, nor is the shop for me. I’ve got money enough to wait until a good job comes my way. I’m going to bring Ma Shwe At and little Miss Diamond down to Mandalay, and then there’s a shop here to amuse them. All these little Burmese girls love keeping shop. If you trotted into the big Bazaar over there you’d find lots of them selling silks and spices who could well afford to stay at home. They adore having a little business of their own. They make it pay too, I can tell you.”

He laughed with a heartiness which I had never heard in his voice before. It had a ring of enjoyment like the laugh of a friendly man watching children playing cleverly.

“When do you go?” I asked suddenly.

“This morning. On the Moulmein.”

“So do I.”

“I guessed that,” he returned, and to my amazement I caught a note of wistfulness in his voice. “You won’t object, will you? Or call me down if I offer you a drink?”

It was my turn to laugh. Michael Crowther could not live without explaining himself. Conversation was a mirror in which he saw a very interesting person experiencing strange adventures and developing in odd ways through unexpected phases of life.

“I shan’t object at all,” I said. “On the contrary! I find you very much more human than I did before.”

Michael Crowther stared at me and slapped his hand down upon the table.

“That’s the most extraordinary thing,” he cried. “For I was going to say precisely the same thing of you.”

We settled our bill. Crowther’s boy brought to him the key of the shop, and said:

“Master’s bag on board.”

“Good,” said Crowther, and we walked together to the gangway of the Moulmein.

“The door of hope,” said he. “A sensible fellow, that padre,” and he went forward on to the lower deck.