Читать книгу The Sapphire - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 8

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A GOOD many pairs of inquisitive eyes watched Michael Crowther as he came on board. But he never returned a look. People were so much ship’s furniture to him. He walked in and out amongst them, unaware of anyone, and marched through the saloon on to the deck behind it. He sat down there on a seat by the side of the rail; and after I had given him a little time I wandered aft myself and stood beside him. He lifted his head and pleaded:

“You won’t talk for a bit, will you?”

“I didn’t come along to talk,” I answered.

“I know that. Thank you for coming.”

I cannot put into words the dejection of the man. I had nothing to say which could help him. He had failed as the hundred per cent Englishman he had boasted himself to be, who was going to trample in hobnails over his inefficient countrymen. Now he had failed again as the orientalised European. I could not imagine a future ahead of him. The shop in Mandalay would be ridiculous as an occupation for him; and he was not the man to take to drink. All I could do was to offer him the sympathy of a silent companionship.

It was he, therefore, who spoke first. The Moulmein had edged out clear of the bank. Its great wheel was thrashing the yellow water into foam.

“That was a bad affair, wasn’t it?” he said with a rather pitiful bravado and an attempt at a smile. But he could not keep to that pretence. “The smile of God!” he cried in a voice of such bitterness as I had never heard. Then his head drooped again and he clenched his hands so tightly together that the skin beneath the tips of his fingers was white.

“What am I going to do now?” he asked in a whisper, and repeated his question: “What am I going to do?”

I answered him foolishly. He was not thinking of an occupation but of how he was going to live through the succession of days until the day of his death.

“You ought to try to get another ship in the Irrawaddy Flotilla,” I said.

“Perhaps so,” he answered listlessly; but he only knew that I was speaking and did not hear what I said. It was just as well. For no career in the world could have been so repugnant to him at this moment.

The steamer beat upstream past a wall of rice-bags and began to round a low bluff which reached out into the river. I saw Crowther rise slowly to his feet and grasp the rail with both his hands; and I drew closer to him. I had a fear that he was going to fling himself headlong overboard to be beaten to death by the great stern-wheel; he stood poised upon his toes in so tense an attitude. But his eyes turned towards the headland and at once were riveted there; and from that moment, whilst it remained in sight, he had no thought but for what was happening on its broad, flat top.

“My God!” he whispered, as though his throat was parched, and again, but on so low a note that the whisper died away and only his lips finished it: “My God!”

His body relaxed, a great weakness overtook him so that his knees sagged, and though his hands still clung to the rail, they clung to keep him standing, not to give spring to a leap. If he had a thought of jumping overboard he had given it up and I could, myself, safely turn my eyes to the bank.

On the headland a group of children was playing a round game under the instructions of one of them; and the noise of their young voices and shrill laughter floated across the water very happily. It couldn’t be that Crowther grudged them their glee. It might be that they brought back to him with an intolerable poignancy the memory of Ma Sein dancing up and down upon her toes. But it seemed to me that a grief deeper than that of memory gave to his face its look of anguish. There had been some one final shattering blow to deal him, and God had not forgotten it.

The steamer was now abreast of the promontory and I distinguished at last the small significant circumstance which had caught Crowther’s eye from afar and laid yet one more trouble upon his troubled soul. The game which the children played involved a winding in and out in the pattern of a dance. Many mistakes were made and corrected amidst peals of laughter. But the little girl who corrected the mistakes and set all the players once more in their order wore a sun-helmet upon her head and white socks and brown shoes upon her feet. I remembered suddenly that four years ago little Miss Diamond had decked herself out just in that way. She had worn a sun-helmet even after the sun had set, even after darkness had come, and shoes and socks into the bargain. She had been establishing the whiteness of her blood. She had been showing off to all with eyes to see and brains to understand that she was the daughter of the white Captain of the Irrawaddy Company. All the other little girls might skewer their hair to the tops of their heads and come to no harm even at midday. She, Ma Sein, must wear a helmet even after dark to keep off sunstroke. The others might run barefoot over hard-baked ground and take no bruise. She must wear socks and shoes according to the habit and necessity of her race. Ma Sein had been eight years old then, and the little girl now laying down the law with unquestioned authority was older than that. Twelve? I was not very experienced in judging children’s ages, but twelve would be right or near to right.

No wonder Crowther was clinging to the rail of the Moulmein with his eyes fixed upon the group of children. It was Miss Diamond who was the Beau Nash of the ceremonies at Tagaung—the little daughter whom he had come to fetch and whom he was never to see again. She had cried all night, the old man upon the river-bank had told us, but all that was over now. It certainly was over. Ma Sein, lording it delightfully over her friends, was enjoying her game as though the tiniest memory of her father had been obliterated from her thoughts.

Crowther suddenly turned his back and fixed his eyes upon the seams of the deck so that this last and unendurable vision might pass from them the sooner.

“Tell me when——” he said.

“I will,” I answered.

The steamer rounded the bend of the river. The land crept forward like a screen between the headland and the ship. The sound of the treble voices ceased to pluck at his heart-strings. In another minute there were no laughing children to sear his eyes.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Thank you.”

He sat down again upon the bench, but even so hardly daring to look towards the shore. We were quite alone. The luncheon-bell had rung as we moved away from the bank. The passengers were all in the saloon. And a curiously subtle change crept over Crowther. There was a gentleness in his face, a submission in his bowed shoulders which astonished me. Michael D. had ceased to live. And when he spoke, as he did to himself and not to me, it was on a note of pure remorse.

“They were right.... Of course they were right.... I made a mistake.... I hadn’t thought of it.”

The words were so much Greek to me. I touched him on the shoulder.

“Come and lunch!”

Crowther shook his head.

“Not hungry.”

“Please!”

“No! You run along. I’ll stay here by myself for a little while.”

I left him there and went forward to the saloon wondering what was this mistake which he had made and what it was that he had not thought out.

I got some part of the answer from the Captain of the Moulmein. Luncheon was half over when I took my seat at his elbow and in a little while he and I were alone. He said:

“You had an awkward moment down there at Tagaung, hadn’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I was keeping an eye on you both,” he continued. “But we shouldn’t have had time to do much for Crowther. Crowther ought to have known better.”

I pricked up my ears at that statement. It might hold the secret of Crowther’s riddle.

“He might not have thought it out,” I rejoined.

The Captain of the Moulmein smiled.

“He might, you mean, have refused to remember,” he returned. I offered him a cigar, and after he had lit it, he resumed: “Crowther’s story is, of course, known to a good many of us on these steamers. These Burmese marriages, as they call them, are not such simple affairs on the upper reaches of the river as you might think. They have their own primitive ethics. The Burmese girl who lives with a white man acquires prestige. It isn’t a life of sin, as we should call it, in the eyes of her own people. Not a bit. She is the more honourable and—the important thing—more sought after in marriage when she and her white man have agreed to differ. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said I.

“Well, Mr. Legatt, here’s something still odder. She’s still more marriageable, her social position, if one may use such a phrase, is still higher, if she has a child by a white man. It was fairly certain, then, that Crowther, coming back to Tagaung after deserting his girl for four years, would find her comfortably married to someone worth while.”

All this topsy-turvydom was news to me, but I was not fool enough to disbelieve it. The Captain of the Moulmein knew very much more of the people on the upper Irrawaddy than I should ever know if I lived to be a hundred.

“Crowther was only ignorant of that because he wanted to be.” The Captain smoked his cigar for a moment or two and asked:

“Did you notice some children playing on the top of a bit of a hill just outside the village?”

“Yes, I did,” I answered, sitting up. “Ma Sein with the sun-helmet on her head was their leader.”

“Ma Sein. Is that her name? I didn’t know. Crowther’s child, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“You were right, Mr. Legatt. She was their leader. She gave the law. She was it. Prestige, you see. An odd thing, prestige! Ma Sein will have it all through her life, that is, of course, if she remains on the upper river.” And with the utterance of that proviso he climbed up to the wheel upon the roof.

I had there the answer to my riddle. The thing of which Crowther had not thought—prestige. The mistake which Crowther had made—his forgetfulness of its importance on the higher water of the Irrawaddy. Yes, but I was not content, not by any means. If Crowther had forgotten the importance of prestige he had been roughly reminded of it on the beach of Tagaung. He could not have been unaware of it when he returned along the gangway and climbed to the upper deck. There he had sprung to his feet and poised himself for a leap. The more I recalled the scene the more confident I felt that he had meant to dive headlong over the rail and finish with everything. But he had not. He had caught sight of the children on their playground and he had changed his mind. Something had changed it—some gentler thought had touched him, some new concern for the happiness of that gay dancing little daughter of his, Miss Diamond, who had cried all night—“only that was over now.”

“They were right.... Of course ... they were right.”

I had only heard remorse in his voice. But in that remorse there was renunciation, too. Could any facet of prestige shine with a light so revealing? I wondered.

If I set out my speculations so fully it is because I am now sure that the picture of those children playing on the headland under the leadership of little Miss Diamond marked a moment of revolution in Crowther to which the incidents of four years had been tending. “Things had worked together,” he had told me, to produce his little hour of inspiration when the words of the preacher in Farm Street had smitten his ears. Now other things had been added and amongst them this last little baffling circumstance.

I slept ill that night, but Crowther slept worse. The Moulmein was moored that night at Katha, the headquarters of the district, and Crowther went off by himself on shore and came back again when everyone was in bed. I did not in fact see him until my baggage had gone ashore and I myself was saying good-bye to the Captain. He waited on one side until the farewells were spoken. Then he came forward, his eyes heavy, his face ravaged.

“You’re getting off here?”

“Yes. I’m going up by train to Myitkyina.”

“I’m sorry.” He was silent for a second or two. “For myself, I shall go up to Bhamo on this boat and straight down again.”

“To Mandalay?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t an idea.”

He drifted along with me to the companion and suddenly turned round and faced me.

“They were quite right, Mr. Legatt, those men at Tagaung,” he said, in a subdued and gentle voice. “I should have been a brute—shouldn’t I?—if I had taken Ma Sein away with me. I never thought of it until I saw her playing up there on the hill. But it was clear enough then. What would she have been back there at Mandalay? A despised little half-caste bastard. Plain language, Mr. Legatt,” he added, as I rather flinched at his description. “But that’s what she would have been, and in a year or two every pomatum-smeared clerk would have been leering at her over the counter of her shop, thinking her easy fruit. But up there at Tagaung she’s the Great White Queen.” He even smiled as he spoke, finding pleasure and consolation and—yes!—even a trifle of amusement in the child’s magnificence. For the moment Ma Shwe At and the humiliating end of his love affair with her were out of his mind. Little Miss Diamond held his thoughts and his heart in the hollow of her tiny hand.

“The Great White Queen,” he repeated, and now he laughed openly. I shook him by the hand and went off down the gangway. I turned and waved to him once I was on land. The humour, however, had all gone from his looks. It seemed to me that again there was death in his mind and in his face. So there was, too, but it turned out to be not the kind of death which I expected.