Ah King (18 page)

“Hullo, what’s this?” he said. “I read a review of it some time ago.”

“I believe it’s very good,” I replied. “I haven’t read it yet.”

“May I take it? It’ll do me for tonight at all events.”

“Of course. Take anything you like.”

“No, that’s enough. Well, good night. Breakfast at eight-thirty.”

When I came down next morning the head boy told me that Featherstone, who had been at work since six, would be in shortly. While I waited for him I glanced at his shelves.

“I see you’ve got a grand library of books on bridge,” I remarked as we sat down to breakfast.

“Yes, I get every one that comes out. I’m very keen on it.”

“That fellow we were playing with yesterday plays a good game.”

“Which? Hardy?”

“I don’t know. Not the one who said he was going to collect his wife. The other.”

“Yes, that was Hardy. That was why I asked him to play. He doesn’t come to the club very often.”

“I hope he will tonight.”

“I wouldn’t bank on it. He has an estate about thirty miles away. It’s a longish ride to come just for a rubber of bridge.”

“Is he married?”

“No. Well, yes. But his wife is in England.”

“It must be awfully lonely for those men who live by themselves on those estates,” I said.

“Oh, he’s not so badly off as some. I don’t think he much cares about seeing people. I think he’d be just as lonely in London.”

There was something in the way Featherstone spoke that struck me as a little strange. His voice had what I can only describe as a shuttered tone. He seemed suddenly to have moved away from me. It was as though one were passing along a street at night and paused for a second to look in at a lighted window that showed a comfortable room and suddenly an invisible hand pulled down a blind. His eyes, which habitually met those of the person he was talking to with frankness, now avoided mine, and I had a notion that it was not only my fancy that read in his face an expression of pain. It was drawn for a moment as it might be by a twinge of neuralgia. I could not think of anything to say and Featherstone did not speak. I was conscious that his thoughts, withdrawn from me and what we were about, were turned upon a subject unknown to me. Presently he gave a little sigh, very slight, but unmistakable, and seemed with a deliberate effort to pull himself together.

“I’m going down to the office immediately after breakfast,” he said. “What are you going to do with yourself?”

“Oh, don’t bother about me. I shall slack around. I’ll stroll down and look at the town.”

“There’s not much to see.”

“All the better. I’m fed up with sights.”

I found that Featherstone’s veranda gave me sufficient entertainment for the morning. It had one of the most enchanting views I had seen in the F.M.S. The Residency was built on the top of a hill and the garden was large and well cared for. Great trees gave it almost the look of an English park. It had vast lawns and there Tamils, black and emaciated, were scything with deliberate and beautiful gestures. Beyond and below, the jungle grew thickly to the bank of a broad, winding, and swiftly flowing river, and on the other side of this, as far as the eye could reach, stretched the wooded hills of Tenggarah. The contrast between the trim lawns, so strangely English, and the savage growth of the jungle beyond pleasantly titillated the fancy. I sat and read and smoked. It is my business to be curious about people and I asked myself how the peace of this scene, charged nevertheless with a tremulous and dark significance, affected Featherstone who lived with it. He knew it under every aspect: at dawn when the mist rising from the river shrouded it with a ghostly pall; in the splendour of noon; and at last when the shadowy gloaming crept softly out of the jungle, like an army making its way with caution in unknown country, and presently enveloped the green lawns and the great flowering trees and the flaunting cassias in the silent night. I wondered whether, unbeknownst to him, the tender and yet strangely sinister aspect of the scene, acting on his nerves and his loneliness, imbued him with some mystical quality so that the life he led, the life of the capable administrator, the sportsman, and the good fellow, on occasion seemed to him not quite real. I smiled at my own fancies, for certainly the conversation we had had the night before had not indicated in him any stirrings of the soul. I had thought him quite nice. He had been at Oxford and was a member of a good

London club. He seemed to attach a good deal of importance to social things. He was a gentleman and slightly conscious of the fact that he belonged to a better class than most of the Englishmen his life had brought him in contact with. I gathered from the various silver pots that adorned his dining-room that he excelled in games. He played tennis and billiards. When he went on leave he hunted and, anxious to keep his weight down, he dieted carefully. He talked a good deal of what he would do when he retired. He hankered after the life of a country gentleman. A little house in Leicestershire, a couple of hunters, and neighbours to play bridge with. He would have his pension and he had a little money of his own. But meanwhile he worked hard and did his work, if not brilliantly, certainly with competence. I have no doubt that he was looked upon by his superiors as a reliable officer. He was cut upon a pattern that I knew too well to find very interesting. He was like a novel that is careful, honest, and efficient, yet a little ordinary, so that you seem to have read it all before, and you turn the pages listlessly, knowing that it will never afford you a surprise or move you to excitement.

But human beings are incalculable and he is a fool who tells himself that he knows what a man is capable of.

In the afternoon Featherstone took me to see the Sultan. We were received by one of his sons, a shy, smiling youth who acted as his A.D.C. He was dressed in a neat blue suit, but round his waist he wore a sarong, white flowers on a yellow ground, on his head a red fez, and on his feet knobby American shoes. The palace, built in the Moorish style, was like a very big doll’s house and it was painted bright yellow, which is the royal colour. We were led into a spacious room, furnished with the sort of furniture you would find in an English lodging-house at the seaside, but the chairs were covered with yellow silk. On the floor was a Brussels carpet and on the walls photographs in very grand gilt frames of the Sultan at various state functions. In a cabinet was a large collection of all kinds of fruit done entirely in crochet work. The Sultan came in with several attendants. He was a man of fifty, perhaps, short and stout, dressed in trousers and tunic of a large white-and-yellow check; round his middle he wore a very beautiful yellow sarong and on his head a white fez. He had large handsome friendly eyes. He gave us coffee to drink, sweet cakes to eat, and cheroots to smoke. Conversation was not difficult, for he was affable, and he told me that he had never been to a theatre or played cards, for he was very religious, and he had four wives and twenty-four children. The only bar to the happiness of his life seemed to be that common decency obliged him to divide his time equally between his four wives. He said than an hour with one was a month and with another five minutes. I remarked that Professor Einstein-or was it Bergson?-had made similar observations upon time and indeed on this question had given the world much to ponder over. Presently we took our leave and the Sultan presented me with some beautiful white Malaccas.

In the evening we went to the club. One of the men we had played with the day before got up from his chair as we entered.

“Ready for a rubber?” he said.

“Where’s our fourth?” I asked.

“Oh, there are several fellows here who’ll be glad to play.”

“What about that man we played with yesterday?” I had forgotten his name.

“Hardy? He’s not here.”

“It’s not worth while waiting for him,” said Featherstone.

“He very seldom comes to the club. I was surprised to see him last night.”

I did not know why I had the impression that behind the very ordinary words of these two men there was an odd sense of embarrassment. Hardy had made no impression on me and I did not even remember what he looked like. He was just a fourth at the bridge table. I had a feeling that they had something against him. It was no business of mine and I was quite content to play with a man who at that moment joined us. We certainly had a more cheerful game than before. A good deal of chaff passed from one side of the table to the other. We played less serious bridge. We laughed. I wondered if it was only that they were less shy of the stranger who had happened in upon them or if the presence of Hardy had caused in the other two a certain constraint. At half past eight we broke up and Featherstone and I went back to dine at his house.

After dinner we lounged in arm-chairs and smoked cheroots. For some reason our conversation did not flow easily. I tried topic after topic, but could not get Featherstone to interest himself in any of them. I began to think that in the last twenty-four hours he had said all he had to say. I fell somewhat discouraged into silence. It prolonged itself, and again, I did not know why, I had a faint sensation that it was charged with a significance that escaped me. I felt slightly uncomfortable. I had that queer feeling that one sometimes has when sitting in an empty room that one is not by oneself. Presently I was conscious that Featherstone was steadily looking at me. I was sitting by a lamp, but he was in shadow so that the play of his features was hidden from me. But he had very large brilliant eyes and in the half darkness they seemed to shine dimly. They were like new boot-buttons that caught reflected light. I wondered why he looked at me like that. I gave him a glance and catching his eyes insistently fixed upon me faintly smiled.

“Interesting book that one you lent me last night,” he said suddenly, and I could not help thinking his voice did not sound quite natural. The words issued from his lips as though they were pushed from behind.

“Oh, the
Life of Byron?”
I said breezily. “Have you read it already?”

“A good deal of it. I read till three.”

“I’ve heard it’s very well done. I’m not sure that Byron interests me so much as all that. There was so much in him that was so frightfully second-rate. It makes one rather uncomfortable.”

“What do you think is the real truth of that story about him and his sister?”

“Augusta Leigh? I don’t know very much about it. I’ve never read
Astarte.”

“Do you think they were really in love with one another?”

“I suppose so. Isn’t it generally believed that she was the only woman he ever genuinely loved?”

“Can you understand it?”

“I can’t really. It doesn’t particularly shock me. It just seems to me very unnatural. Perhaps ‘unnatural’ isn’t the right word. It’s incomprehensible to me. I can’t throw myself into the state of feeling in which such a thing seems possible. You know, that’s how a writer gets to know the people he writes about, by standing himself in their shoes and feeling with their hearts.”

I know I did not make myself very clear, but I was trying to describe a sensation, an action of the subconscious, which from experience was perfectly familiar to me, but which no words I knew could precisely indicate. I went on:

“Of course she was only his half-sister, but just as habit kills love I should have thought habit would prevent its arising. When two persons have known one another all their lives and lived together in close contact I can’t imagine how or why that sudden spark should flash that results in love. The probabilities are that they would be joined by mutual affection and I don’t know anything that is more contrary to love than affection.”

I could just see in the dimness the outline of a smile flicker for a moment on my host’s heavy, and it seemed to me then, somewhat saturnine face.

“You only believe in love at first sight?”

“Well, I suppose I do, but with the proviso that people may have met twenty times before seeing one another. ‘Seeing’ has an active side and a passive one. Most people we run across mean so little to us that we never bestir ourselves to look at them. We just suffer the impression they make on us.”

“Oh, but one’s often heard of couples who’ve known one another for years and it’s never occurred to one they cared two straws for each other and suddenly they go and get married. How do you explain that?”

“Well, if you’re going to bully me into being logical and consistent, I should suggest that their love is of a different kind. After all, passion isn’t the only reason for marriage. It may not even be the best one. Two people may marry because they’re lonely or because they’re good friends or for convenience sake. Though I said that affection was the greatest enemy of love, I would never deny that it’s a very good substitute. I’m not sure that a marriage founded on it isn’t the happiest.”

“What did you think of Tim Hardy?”

I was a little surprised at the sudden question, which seemed to have nothing to do with the subject of our conversation.

“I didn’t think of him very much. He seemed quite nice. Why?”

“Did he seem to you just like everybody else?”

“Yes. Is there anything peculiar about him? If you’d told me that, I’d have paid more attention to him.”

“He’s very quiet, isn’t he? I suppose no one who knew nothing about him would give him a second thought.”