Let Me Alone Page 24

  Mrs. Grove smiled to herself, and twisted the end of her Batik scarf. She dressed very much better than the other women. And she continued to smile at Anna in her haughty de-haut-en-bas manner and to ask her questions, with the rest of the room as admiring and respectful audience. Anna got rather tired of it. But she answered as well as she could, and tried to look pleasant.

  She felt hopelessly lost. What was she doing amongst these established, respectable British matrons? She couldn’t imagine what to say to them.

  And presently a silence fell. The three women across the room-they were missionaries and formed a little clique of their own, quite apart from the others – stared, and whispered together. Mrs. Grove stared, twisting her scarf. Everyone stared. Anna felt as though she were some strange animal. And she knew that the weight of feminine opinion had swung over against her. She had made a bad impression in some way. She didn’t know how it had happened, what she had done wrong. She had started with the best intentions, she hadn’t wanted to antagonize them. It was simply that she didn’t know how to behave before them.

  But she didn’t care. She was dazed with bewilderment and weariness. And she was hungry. It seemed an eternity since she had eaten anything. Would it never be time to go? She looked round, cold and despairing, at the whispering missionaries and the out-of-date copies of The Lady on the middle table, at the sinister, languid-voiced Mrs. Grove plucking at her scarf. She shuddered, and felt her heart coldly sinking. The petrol-lamp burned with a faint hissing noise. The room was dreary, dreary. The pale, staring, hostile faces of the women encircled her. She wondered vaguely what had become of all the men.

  At last Matthew appeared – it was time to go away. They drove off again in the dark. And at last Anna could get something to eat.

  Jonsen led the way to the dining-room – then came Matthew, still talking to him – then Anna. The men had not even washed their hands. Their heavy boots made a clatter in the silent house.

  The dining-room was decidedly chilly. It had the peculiar stuffy chill of a room which has been kept shut up for a long time. And there was a pervasive, indescribable smell which seemed to emanate from the heavy furniture, a stale, sweetish and yet acrid smell, very indefinite, but marked, with a slight vinegarish flavour, something like the smell of the inside of an old wine barrel. The furniture was of dark wood, quite well-made, but heavy and clumsy-looking.

  ‘I hope you are fond of curry,’ Jonsen said. He twinkled at Anna across the table which was covered with a coarse cloth, clean, but with the look of having been rough-dried, without ironing. The plates and cutlery were old and of the cheapest description. Nothing matched.

  The room was gloomy and close. Anna felt more and more depressed. But she took up her thick, yellowish fork, and ate the rice and the extraordinary brown mess of meat, burning hot and swimming in an oily sea of unknown ingredients, that was set before her. She was depressed: but the curry was good although it burned her mouth sharply. She got it down and began to feel better. Only there was the stale, unpleasant smell in the room, rather sickly. Matthew sat at the end of the table, and ate in quick, large mouthfuls.

  The servant came in with an elaborate sweet-dish, a sort of shape, ornamented with pink and white sugar. This was for Anna. The cook had made it specially as a compliment to her, because women were supposed to like sweet things. Neither of the men would touch it. But Anna took some out of consideration for the cook’s feelings, and ate as much as she could.

  The servants slithered in and out with plates. They brought fruit, short, stumpy, reddish bananas, little hard oranges, and nuts, and put them on the table.

  So the meal came to an end. They went back to the drawing-room. Anna longed for a cup of coffee. But there wasn’t any. The men had another whisky and soda apiece. Anna drank a little out of Matthew’s glass, although she disliked whisky. She felt she needed the warmth. It was not that the night was really cold: but there was a damp, marsh chill which seemed to lower one’s vitality.

  Jonsen got out his papers. He was determined to stick to business. He sat down with his notebooks and pencil – though Matthew was not very keen. He turned his back upon Anna. And then he began the dreary technical talk again.

  ‘Let’s leave it till to-morrow,’ said Matthew. But Jonsen talked on, keeping him occupied. He was determined that Anna should be left out.

  There was a noise of frogs croaking in the marsh, a thin twanging of insects. This was the usual evening accompaniment. Jonsen monotonously reeled off figures and facts. There was something ogreish about him, simple, childlike as he was.

  Anna went up to bed. No one seemed to take any interest in her, or to care whether she stayed or went away.

  There was a lamp in her room. She turned it up and looked round. Nothing had been unpacked, nothing had been arranged. The room was just as she had left it, hours before. She went to the window. The stars flashed at her. There was a faint sheen of light, like a pale glaze, on the flat ground, ghostly and evanescent. She went out on to the veranda. The frogs made a great noise, an orchestration of hoarse, gruff sounds, almost like dogs barking. It was a marsh-kingdom: the spectral glimmer over the ground, the pallid mist in the distance; the watery smell, and all round the house, rough, raucous voices of frogs coughing and barking. Unearthly, it was – and dismal.

  She got undressed. She was tired out, and stupified with astonishment and depression. She went to wash in the bathroom. The water which she poured out was still in the basin. She felt almost unconscious. Numbly she dragged down the mosquito-net and crawled into the hard, chilly bed. But there were no springs, it was rigid and unyielding as a plank-bed. And the sheets were coarse cotton. The touch of the cotton irritated her skin as though insects were creeping over her. She was restless, but half-stunned with weariness. The net was like a misty wall round her. She was in a trance of dejection and bewilderment. Through the doorless house she could hear vaguely the voices of the two men, talking, talking.

  Presently they came upstairs. Anna started up from a half-sleep. Matthew was undressing in the room next to hers, the middle room. The light of his lamp came under and above the flaps of the doorway. She sat up and looked about her. She hardly knew if she were dead or alive. And she was terrified. And she was lonely. A nightmare terror took hold of her. Matthew put out his light. The ghastly, miasmal darkness covered everything. She felt she would die of the horror of the night, of the dark swamp all round the silent house. She was transfixed with horror. She felt utterly alone, helpless, lost in the horrific strangeness of the alien dark. The loneliness strangled her, she could not endure it.

  Despair was like a dead hand on her heart. Where could she go, whom could she call? She was alone, alone, for ever. Then suddenly she felt her mind go blank, she was relaxed. She felt her exhaustion extinguishing fear, blotting out everything, extinguishing her. A sleep that was stronger than desperation drowned her completely, in a deadening flood.

  CHAPTER 14

  WITHOUT doubt, Naunggyi was rather a nightmare to Anna. And like a nightmare it had its leit motif of horror – the marsh. It was the perpetual influence of the marsh itself which seemed to threaten her with unknown terrors.

  By day it was not so obvious. It was veiled by the bright sunshine: hidden behind the strangeness, the unearthly beauty of the place. For it was beautiful. The marsh itself had beauty. The great, strange lake of swampy ground, mysterious with velvety patches of black ooze; the sinister, sudden gleams of iridescence, like glasses mirroring some magic sky; the succulent, emerald leaves, dangerous and poison-green; the piercing blueness of the small flowers. It had some half-evil glamour. But at night, when the darkness took it, it was a demon world.

  At first she fought against it. She struggled with the influence of the place, to conquer it. But she was overcome. She felt as though she were being poisoned. Time passed imperceptibly.

  There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would se
em to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of the mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This was what had happened to Anna.

  After Haddenham, after Blue Hills, Naunggyi came as the most violent shock to her. She was shocked, utterly, through and through, to the very roots of her being. And she was snatched away from everything that was familiar to her. The shock was too much for her. Really and truly, the shock was too violent. She was overcome.

  Without realizing it, she was in a state bordering upon collapse. She was like a person who has been in a serious accident, and who walks away, apparently unharmed, but suffering a secret, intolerable strain which will later break out in some distorted sickness of the soul. She went about vague, silent, closed within herself. She was utterly bound up in herself; but in a bad way, a destructive way, as a plant becomes pot-bound. She could not get away from herself. She could scarcely bring herself to speak. It was as if she noticed nothing that went on. She wondered vaguely what was the matter. Her reflected face seemed blank and rather unnatural when she looked at it. But she felt nothing particular.

  She was very isolated. The village of Naunggyi was a good mile away, across the yellow, turbulent river. Matthew’s bungalow was one of a collection of some half-dozen houses which formed the English colony, the seat of government. There was the newish, pretentious-looking club where every evening the English people assembled: the social centre. Round about were the other houses, not very near together. Each house stood in the midst of its own compound, a large rectangle of land, more or less wild, with the great forest trees still standing. Matthew’s house was the one nearest to the marsh. In the bazaar at Naunggyi one could buy food, and cheap household necessities, and the beautiful stiff silk from Mandalay, shot with every colour, like a handful of bright flowers. But there were no shops, no amenities of civilization at all.

  But the place was beautiful: beautiful the pure, hot, dazzling days of the tropical winter; beautiful the huge trees, wreathed with their snaky ropes of knotted liana, and tree-orchids flowering in a starry, unexpected fashion. Beautiful, in the bright glitter before midday, to see the people, the natives in their gay clothes, stringing along the white road, on their way to the village. Beautiful to look out at sunrise over the marsh, and see, far off, the line of begging priests, unearthly in yellow robes, pass ghostlily on the distant skyline. Anna was content as far as the country itself went. She liked the strange people and the strange land. But her life, her life among the English people, she abominated.

  The country itself was full of glamour. Sometimes she went out very early when the sun had just risen. And then silently she would walk in the deep dust, already beginning to grow warm as the sun strengthened. She would feel the soft warmth of the deep, powdery dust under her feet, and it was like treading on a living flesh that warmed and upheld her. And she would walk on entranced, while the violet shadows crept under the tall trees, and the sides of the branches burned golden, and in the sky, so dazzlingly bright, the fiery body of the sun reared fiercely, against the dark blue space. The magnificence of it, she felt it in her heart, the grand, upward surge of the sun, ruthless, proud, like the triumphant progress of some savage god, barbaric, gorgeous. She felt the splendour in her blood, like wine.

  But the terror, the sinister suggestion of the marsh was a menace to her. It pervaded everything. It was a kind of emblem of all her dismay, a symbol of her fear and loneliness. Standing on the wooden veranda, and watching Matthew walking away to his office, walking past the palm tree, over the open space, her heart would contract, she would almost cry out with the sense of her isolation. And Matthew was so inhuman, it was so impossible to speak to him, he gave her no support at all. He even increased her loneliness. Sometimes she felt she must die.

  Sometimes she would watch the natives, the handsome brown people, men and women, laughing and singing and talking, as they went by. They looked so happy, with a strange, insouciant happiness that was fascinating to her, a happiness which belonged to some other world. She wanted to talk to them, to get the secret of their happiness. But it was not allowed. A white woman must not speak to a native except to give an order. She was surrounded by a rigid system of commands and prohibitions. So and so and so only must she do. The mysterious threat to British prestige hung like a scarlet danger flag in front of any diversion. And a profound, angry disgust took hold of Anna, a sort of contemptuous despair. She began to despair. There was no hope for her. She had brought her life to an end, she had cut herself off from life.

  All that was left was the little feminine social world of the club. What a world for Anna’s habitation! She felt as though she were living in some restricted era of the Victorian past. Everything was cramped and stilted and uncomfortable, hedged in with iron laws of custom and precedent, a complex system of etiquette. And the whole system seemed to be directed against the exercise of personal freedom – particularly against the freedom of the women. Between the sexes lay a vast, unbridgeable abyss, there was no spot of common ground where a man might meet a woman frankly, as one human being meets another. The thoroughness of this sequestration astonished her.

  At the club men and women did not mingle. There was the ladies’ room where occasionally a man would come and talk for a little while, a visitor from some higher sphere. And here the ladies sat. Into the men’s rooms they were forbidden to penetrate. And at parties, when they assembled at each other’s houses, the same division tended to arise. Sooner or later, as though obeying some natural law, the men would drift together at one end of the room, leaving the women abandoned at the other.

  And then the attitude of the men to the women, and the women to the men – it was false, oh, unspeakably false, artificial to a degree. The men seemed to fall into one of two classes of behaviour. Either they ignored the women entirely, passing them over as though unaware of their existence, boorish to the point of downright rudeness; or they were assiduously gallant, flirtatious. Boorish or flirty, so the male population of Naunggyi appeared to Anna. Never for one moment did any man treat any woman as a rational human being. They seemed to regard the women either as nuisances to be ignored as completely as possible, or as childish, brainless creatures to be flattered and flirted with and forgotten as soon as anything more important turned up.

  The women acquiesced. Most obligingly they fell in with this masculine scheme in which they had their place simply as a recreation ground, a form of light relief to the male world, the world of work and sport and important affairs. The women did not seem to question the godlike supremacy of their men. They even seemed honoured when these super-beings bestowed their ephemeral attentions. Their lives simply revolved round the men.

  The life led by the women was a narrow voyaging between home and club. In the morning, early, before the sun was strong, they would walk a little to one another’s houses, accompanied by a servant of some sort. The incongruity of those stiff, opinionated female figures, their pale, faded faces and clothes, so inappropriate, in the great burning flood of sunlight! They were rather shrivelled, too, from the perpetual sunlight. Or else flabby and overblown.

  Mrs. Barry who lived close by, would come under her green sunshade to visit Anna in the morning. And then, flopping down in one of the cane chairs, Mrs. Barry would talk to her. Anna smiled and tried to seem interested and polite. But what a conversation. It was not really conversation at all. Just a long, rambling flow of trivialities – children and servants and goats and the bad food at the bazaar. Anna was bored beyond words. And yet in her extreme loneliness she was almost glad of the noise, the mere noise of human speech was something to be thankful for.

  Mrs. Barry was kind. They were all quite kind-hearted: except perhaps Mrs. Grove, the commissioner’s wife. Anna would have liked to get on with them, if she could. But she could not. For they all seemed so unapproachable, like a family of matronly dolls, impossible to get to know them. They were all so drearily set, so elderly; and, with it all, so unconvinci
ng. Anna felt as if she were at a mother’s meeting when she sat with them at the club. And they looked at her with suspicion. They seemed to suspect her of evil intentions. They envied her youth and her freshness and her smart clothes and the way the men looked at her, sideways, with a secret expression. They could not forgive her these things. And she was cool and composed in her manner towards them, indifferent apparently, she did not treat them with the deference that was due from a young newcomer. So they began to dislike her. It seemed as if Anna, the stranger, had a certain fascination for them, but a perverse attraction, an attraction of instinctive dislike. They suspected her of looking down on them. When she used a longer word than usual, their backs went up, they privately accused her of being pretentious and conceited and affected. That most dismal of all hostilities, the touchy resentment of the ordinary person for an intellectual superior, had them in its grip. To Anna it sometimes seemed that she must die.

  And the emptiness! The emptiness of the long hours of heat, when the world outside was a burning dazzle of brightness, and there was nothing to do but sit indoors and wait for sunset and the nightly expedition to the club. The other women kept themselves busy with their children and housekeeping and sewing, an apotheosis of domestic monotony. How was Anna to pass the time?

  The house was horrible. It was painful to her to live a single day in such a place. She detested the hideous cane furniture in the drawing-room, the ugly primitive bareness of her bedroom, the stale, sickly smell which pervaded the dining-room. It was all sheer horror. She thought of the careful luxury of Blue Hills, and wondered how human beings could condemn themselves to live in such a place as this. But she did nothing in the way of improvement. She did not know where to begin.

  The house was quite large: and dilapidated. The wood was crumbling with some sort of rot, the white-washed walls were blotched and discoloured from the last rains. It all needed doing up. Probably it needed structural repairs as well. The balcony outside her room was beginning to sag dangerously. Who would do these things? Who would pay for them to be done? She did not know if there were workmen in Naunggyi capable of undertaking the job – even if she could find the money to pay them. She had no energy with which to contend with these difficulties. She was too stunned, too apathetic. In a trance of vague discomfort she endured it all. She sat in the broken cane arm-chair. And from outside came the cries of the parrots by day and of the frogs by night, mocking and unearthly in the solitude.