The Daffodil Sky (20 page)

‘Is it a pujah?' he said.

‘A little one,' she said. ‘Not important this time.'

‘I shall miss the old pujahs,' he said.

He lay for a few moments listening to the drum and the intermittent rather scraggly voices.

‘There's only one drum,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It's just a little affair.'

How was he going to speak to her? He wanted if possible to make it—it was very difficult—he wanted to express something more than mere remembrance. She would always have a place in his heart—would that do? Could he say that? Hardly, he thought. It was what he meant and yet it was not quite so easy as that. It was not quite what he wanted to say.

After a time he thought it better to say something quite simple; and he said:

‘This is good-bye.'

For some moments she lay very quiet, not speaking. When she finally spoke it was dreamily, almost impersonally; she looked straight overhead and spoke to the sky.

‘I'd like to come to England,' she said.

‘Well——'

Suddenly she twisted her body and held him against
her; her arms were again like stiffened anguished wires and he felt her mouth drawing at him like a flame.

Afterwards, for a time, there was nothing he could think of to say. He lay listening to the thin monotonous sound of the single drum. It did not beat into his heart with the plunging exultation of the many drums of the earlier pujah. In the deep hot silence it was like a poor and irritating echo that irregularly rose and died.

For a few moments longer he lay listening to it. Her remark about England woke his own thoughts about home: fishing-rods, mayfly rising, lily-leaves unfurling in the river, apple trees and laburnum in bloom, the spring-time, the sea-freshness everywhere, his mother. It would be marvellous: nothing quite so marvellous as that.

‘If I can't say good-bye to you,' he said, ‘I'll say goodbye to your foot.'

She did not answer.

‘I've got very fond of your foot.'

Once more she did not answer; and he said, perfectly certain it was better to be quite lighthearted after all:

‘You know what the cure is. Soon you'll be able to get it better.' He paused to laugh. ‘And if I may say so you're rather good at the cure.'

Because she did not answer again he sat up. Across the river the fleet of night boats, with their lights like fireflies, were widely scattered, not in a central glowing island as before; and down the river now he became aware that the drum of the little pujah was not beating.

‘The drum has stopped,' he said.

She stared at the sky, arms outstretched, lips very slightly parted.

‘It never really stops,' she said. ‘It goes on. You only think it stops.'

He listened.

‘Sooner or later it always begins again,' she said.

Across the river the crowd of night-boats, with their swinging lights so like fireflies, began to drift together; and after a second or two the drum, exactly as she had said, began again, and like a single heart-beat went on.

I first met him on a black wet night towards the end of the war, in one of those station buffets where the solitary spoon used to be tied to the counter by a piece of string.

He stood patiently waiting for his turn with this spoon, spectacled and undemonstrative and uneager, in a shabby queue, until at last the ration of sugar ran out and nobody had any need for the spoon any longer. As he turned away he caught sight of me stirring my coffee with a key. It seemed to impress him, as if it were a highly original idea he had never thought of, and the thickish spectacles, rather than his own brown kidney-like eyes, gave me an opaque glitter of a smile.

‘That's rather natty,' he said.

As we talked he clutched firmly to his chest a black leather brief-case on which the monogram of some government department had been embossed in gilt letters that were no longer clear enough to read. He wore a little homberg hat, black, neat, the fraction of a size too small for him, so that it perched high on his
head. In peace-time I should have looked for a rose in his buttonhole, and in peace-time, as it afterwards turned out, I often did; and I always found one there.

In the train on which we travelled together he settled himself down in the corner, under the glimmer of those shaded bluish lights we have forgotten now, and opened his brief-case and prepared, as I thought, to read departmental minutes or things of that sort.

Instead he took out his supper. He unfolded with care what seemed to be several crackling layers of disused wallpaper. He was evidently very hungry, because he took out the supper with a slow relish that was also wonderfully eager, revealing the meal as consisting only of sandwiches, rather thickly cut.

He begged me to take one of these, saying: ‘I hope they're good. I rather think they should be. Anyway they'll make up for what we didn't get at the buffet.' His voice, like all his actions, was uneager, mild and very slow.

I remembered the spoon tied to the counter at the buffet and partly because of it and partly because I did not want to offend him I took one of his sandwiches. He took one too. He said something about never getting time to eat at the department and how glad he would be when all this was over, and then he crammed the sandwich eagerly against his mouth.

The shock on his face was a more powerful reflection of my own. His lips suddenly suppurated with revulsion. A mess of saffron yellow, repulsively mixed with bread, hung for a few moments on the lips that had previously been so undemonstrative and uneager. Then he ripped out his handkerchief and spat.

‘Don't eat it,' he said. ‘For God's sake don't eat it.' He tore the sandwich apart, showing the inside of it as nothing but a vile mess of meatless, butterless mustard spread on dark war-time bread. ‘Give it to me, for God's sake,' he said. ‘Give it to me. Please don't have that.'

As he snatched the sandwich away from me and crumpled it into the paper his hands were quivering masses of tautened sinew. He got up so sharply that I thought he would knock his glasses off. The stiff wallpaper-like package cracked in his hands. His handkerchief had fallen to the seat and he could not find it again and in a spasm of renewed revulsion he spat in air.

The next thing I knew was the window-blind going up like a pistol shot and the window clattering down. The force of the night wind blew his hat off. The keen soapy baldness of his head sprang out with an extraordinary effect of nakedness. He gave the revolting yellow-oozing sandwiches a final infuriated beating with his hands and then hurled them far out of the window into blackness, spitting after them. Then he came groping back for his lost handkerchief and having found it sat down and spat into it over and over again, half-retching, trembling with rage.

He left it to me to deal with the window and the black-out blind. I had some difficulty with the blind, which snapped out of my hands before I could fix it satisfactorily.

When I turned round again I had an impression that the sudden snap of the blind had knocked his spectacles off. He was sitting holding them in his hands. He was breathing very heavily. His distraction was intolerable because without the spectacles he really looked like a
person who could not see. He seemed to sit there groping blindly, feeble and myopic after his rush of rage.

His sense of caution, his almost fearsome correctness, returned in an expression of concern about the blackout blind. He got up and went, as it were, head-first into his spectacles, as a man dives into the neck of his shirt. When he emerged with the glasses on he realised, more or less sane now, his vision corrected, that I had put up the blind.

‘Oh! You've done it,' he said.

A respectable remorse afflicted him.

‘Do you think it was seen?' he said. ‘I hate doing that sort of thing. I've always felt it rather a point to be decent about the regulations.'

I said it was probably not serious. It was then nearly March, and I said I thought the war was almost over.

‘You really think so?' he said. ‘What makes you think that? I've got a sort of ghastly feeling it will last for ever. Sort of tunnel we will never get out of.'

I said that was a feeling everyone got. His spectacles had grown misty again from the sweat of his eyes. He took them off again and began slowly polishing them and, as if the entire hideous episode of the mustard had never happened, stared down into them and said:

‘Where do you live? Have you been able to keep your house on?'

I told him where I lived and he said:

‘That isn't awfully far from us. We live at Elham Street, by the station. We have a house that practically looks on the station.'

He put on his spectacles and with them all his correctness came back.

‘Are you in the country?' he said. ‘Really in the country?' and when I said yes he said that was really what he himself wanted to do, live in the country. He wanted a small place with a garden—a garden he could see mature.

‘You have a garden?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Nice one?'

‘I hope it will be again when this is over.'

‘I envy you that,' he said.

He picked up his hat and began brushing it thoughtfully with his coat sleeve. I asked him if he had a garden too and he said:

‘No. Not yet. The war and everything—you know how it is.'

He put on his hat with great care, almost reverently.

‘Not only that. We haven't been able to find anywhere that really suits my wife. That's our trouble. She's never well.'

‘I'm sorry——'

‘They can't find out what it is, either,' he said. He remembered his handkerchief and as he folded it up and stuck it in his breast-pocket the combination of handkerchief and homberg and his own unassertive quietness gave him a look that I thought was unexpressibly lonely and grieved.

‘We move about trying to find something,' he said, ‘but——'

He stopped, and I said I hoped she would soon be well again.

‘I'm afraid she never will,' he said. ‘It's no use not being frank about it.'

His hands, free now of handkerchief and homberg, demonstrated her fragility by making a light cage in the air. His spectacles gave an impervious glint of resignation that I thought was painful.

‘It's one of those damnable mysterious conditions of the heart,' he said. ‘She can do things of course. She can get about. But one of these days——'

His hands uplifted themselves and made a light pouf! of gentle extermination.

‘That's how it will be,' he said.

I was glad at that moment to hear the train slowing down. He heard it too and got up and began to grope about along the hat-rack.

‘I could have sworn I had my umbrella,' he said.

‘No,' I said.

‘That's odd.' His face tightened. An effort of memory brought back to it a queer dry little reflection of the anger he had experienced about the sandwiches of mustard. He seemed about to be infuriated by his own absent-mindedness and then he recovered himself and said:

‘Oh! no. I remember now.'

Two minutes later, as the train slowed into the station, he shook me by the hand, saying how pleasant it had been and how much he had enjoyed it all and how he hoped I might one day, after the war, run over and see him if it were not too far.

‘I want to talk to you about gardens,' he said.

He stood so smiling and glassy-eyed and uneager again in final good-bye that I began too to feel that his lapse of frenzy about the mustard sandwiches was like one of those episodic sudden bomb-explosions that
caught you unawares and five minutes later seemed never to have happened.

‘By the way my name is Saxby,' he said. ‘I shall look for you on the train.'

Trains are full of men who wear homberg hats and carry brief-cases and forget their umbrellas, and soon, when the war was over, I got tired of looking for Saxby.

Then one day, more than a year later, travelling on a slow train that made halts at every small station on the long high gradient below hills of beech-wood and chalk, I caught sight of a dark pink rose floating serenely across a village platform under a homberg hat.

There was no mistaking Saxby. But for a few seconds, after I had hailed him from the carriage window, it seemed to me that Saxby might have mistaken me. He stared into me with glassy preoccupation. There was a cool and formidable formality about him. For one moment it occurred to me to remind him of the painful episode of the mustard sandwiches, and then a second later he remembered me.

‘Of course.' His glasses flashed their concealing glitter of a smile as he opened the carriage door. ‘I always remember you because you listen so well.'

This was a virtue of which he took full advantage in the train.

‘Yes, we've been here all summer,' he said. ‘You can very nearly see the house from the train.' This time he had his umbrella with him and with its crooked malacca handle he pointed south-westward through the open window, along the chalk hillside. ‘No. The trees are rather too dense. In the early spring you could see it. We
had primroses then. You know, it's simply magnificent country.'

‘How is your wife?' I said.

The train, charging noisily into the tunnel, drowned whatever he had to say in answer. He rushed to shut the window against clouds of yellow tunnel fumes and suddenly I was reminded of his noisy and furious charge at the window in the black-out, his nauseated frenzy about the sandwiches. And again it seemed, like an episodic explosion, like the war itself, an unreality that had never happened.

When we emerged from the tunnel black-out into bright summer he said:

‘Did you ask me something back there?'

‘Your wife,' I said. ‘I wondered how she was.'

The railway cutting at that point is a high white declivity softened by many hanging cushions of pink valerian and he stared at it with a sort of composed sadness before he answered me.