many people did not like jessop. he had rather a brutal manner sometimes of telling brutal things—the truth, he called it. "they don't like it," he once said to me in a rare moment of confidence. "but why the devil shouldn't they? they pretend these sorts of things, battle, murder, and sudden death, are so real—more real than white kid gloves and omnibuses and rose leaves—and yet when you give them the real thing, they curl up like school girls. it does them good, you know, does them a world of good."
they didn't like it and they didn't altogether like him. he was a sturdy thick set man, very strong, a dark reserved man with black eyebrows which met over his nose. he had knocked about the world a good deal. he appealed to me in many ways; i liked to meet him. he had fished things up out of life, curious grim things, things which may have disgusted but which certainly fascinated as well.
the last time i saw him we were both staying with alderton, the novelist. mrs alderton was away—recruiting after annual childbirth, i think. the other guests were pemberton, who was recruiting after his annual book of verses, and smith, hanson smith, the critic.
it was a piping hot june day, and we strolled out after dinner in the cool moonlight down the great fields which lead to the river. it was very cool, very beautiful, very romantic lying there on the grass above the river bank, watching the great trees in the moonlight and the silver water slipping along so musically to the sea. we grew silent and sentimental—at least i know i did.
two figures came slowly along the bank, a young man with his arm round a girl's waist. they passed just under where we were lying without seeing us. we heard the murmur of his words and in the shadow of the trees they stopped and we heard the sound of their kisses.
i heard pemberton mutter:
a boy and girl if the good fates please
making love say,
the happier they.
come up out or the light of the moon
and let them pass as they will, too soon
with the bean flowers boon
and the blackbird's tune
and may and june.
it loosed our tongues and we began to speak—all of us except jessop—as men seldom speak together, of love. we were sentimental, romantic. we told stories of our first loves. we looked back with regret, with yearning to our youth and to love. we were passionate in our belief in it, love, the great passion, the real thing which had just passed us by so closely in the moonlight.
we talked like that for an hour or so, i suppose, and jessop never opened his lips. whenever i looked at him, he was watching the river gliding by and he was growing. at last there was a pause; we were all silent for a minute or two and then jessop began to speak:
"you talk as if you believed all that: it's queer damned queer. a boy kissing a girl in the moonlight and you call it love and poetry and romance. but you know as well as i do it isn't. it's just a flicker of the body, it will be cold, dead, this time next year."
he had stopped but nobody spoke and then he continued slowly, almost sadly: "we're old men and middle-aged men, aren't we? we've all done that. we remember how we kissed like that in the moonlight or no light at all. it was pleasant; lord, i'm not denying that—but some of us are married and some of us aren't. we're middle-aged—well, think of your wives, think of—" he stopped again. i looked round. the others were moving uneasily. it was this kind of thing that people didn't like in jessop. he spoke again.
"it's you novelists who're responsible, you know. you've made a world in which every one is always falling in love—but it's not this world. here it's the flicker of the body.
"i don't say there isn't such a thing. there is. i've seen it, but it's rare, as rare as—as—a perfect horse, an arab once said to me. the real thing, it's too queer to be anything but the rarest; it's the queerest thing in the world. think of it for a moment, chucking out of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages. a miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. and suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. and instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting—yes that's it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. he goes buzzing on through space, but he isn't tired or bewildered or ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars.
"and that's love, the love which you novelists scatter about so freely. what does it mean? i don't understand it; it's queer beyond anything i've ever struck. it isn't animal—that's the point—or vegetable or mineral. not one man in ten thousand feels it and not one woman in twenty thousand. how can they? it's a feeling, a passion immense, steady, enduring. but not one person in twenty thousand ever feels anything at all for more than a second, and then it's only a feeble ripple on the smooth surface of their unconsciousness.
"o yes, we've all been in love. we can all remember the kisses we gave and the kisses given to us in the moonlight. but that's the body. the body's damnably exacting. it wants to kiss and to be kissed at certain times and seasons. it isn't particular however; give it moonlight and young lips and it's soon satisfied. it's only when we don't pay for it that we call it romance and love, and the most we would ever pay is a ￡5 note.
"but it's not love, not the other, the real, the mysterious thing. that too exists, i've seen it, i tell you, but it's rare, lord, it's rare. i'm middle-aged. i've seen men, thousands of them, all over the world, known them too, made it my business to know them, it interests me, a hobby like collecting stamps. and i've only known two cases of real love.
"and neither of them had anything to do with kisses and moonlight. why should they? when it comes, it comes in strange ways and places, like most real things perversely and unreasonably. i suppose scientifically it's all right—it's what the mathematician calls the law of chances.
"i'll tell you about one of them."
there was a man—you may have read his books, so i wont give you his name—though he's dead now—i'll call him reynolds. he was at rugby with me and also at corpus. he was a thin feeble looking chap, very nervous, with a pale face and long pale hands. he was bullied a good deal at school; he was what they call a smug. i knew him rather well; there seemed to me to be something in him somewhere, some power of feeling under the nervousness and shyness. i can't say it ever came out, but he interested me.
i went east and he stayed at home and wrote novels. i read them; very romantic they were too, the usual ideas of men and women and love. but they were clever in many ways, especially psychologically, as it was called. he was a success, he made money.
i used to get letters from him about once in three months, so when he came travelling to the east, it was arranged that he would stay a week with me. i was in colombo at that time, right in the passenger route. i found him one day on the deck of a p and o just the same as i'd last seen him in oxford, except for the large sun helmet on his head and the blue glasses on his nose. and when i got him back to the bungalow and began to talk with him on the broad verandah, i found that he was still just the same inside too. the years hadn't touched him anywhere, he hadn't in the ordinary sense lived at all. he had stood aside—do you see what i mean?—from shyness, nervousness, the remembrance and fear of being bullied, and watched other people living. he knew a good deal about how other people think, the little tricks and mannerisms of life and novels, but he didn't know how they felt; i expect he had never felt anything himself, except fear and shyness: he hadn't really ever known a man, and he had certainly never known a woman.
well, he wanted to see life, to understand it, to feel it. he had travelled 7000 miles to do so. he was very keen to begin, he wanted to see life all round, up and down, inside and out; he told me so as we looked out on the palm trees and the glimpse of the red road beyond and the unending stream of brown men and women upon it.
i began to show him life in the east. i took him to the clubs; the club where they play tennis and gossip, the club where they play bridge and gossip, the club where they just sit in long chairs and gossip. i introduced him to scores of men who asked him to have a drink, and to scores of women who asked him whether he liked colombo. he didn't get on with them at all, he said 'no thank you' to the men and 'yes, very much' to the women. he was shy and felt uncomfortable, out of his element with these fat flanelled merchants, fussy civil servants, and their whining wives and daughters.
in the evening we sat on my verandah and talked. we talked about life and his novels and romance and love even. i liked him, you know; he interested me, there was something in him which had never come out. but he had got hold of life at the wrong end somehow, he couldn't deal with it or the people in it at all. he had the novelist's view, of life and—with all respect to you, alderton—it doesn't work.
i suppose the devil came into me that evening. reynolds had talked so much about seeing life that at last i thought: "by jove, i'll show him a side of life he's never seen before at any rate." i called the servant and told him to fetch two rickshaws.
we bowled along the dusty roads past the lake and into the native quarter. all the smells of the east rose up and hung heavy upon the damp hot air in the narrow streets. i watched reynolds' face in the moonlight, the scared look which always showed upon it: i very nearly repented and turned back. even now i'm not sure whether i'm sorry that i didn't. at any rate i didn't, and at last we drew up in front of a low mean looking house standing back a little from the road.
there was one of those queer native wooden doors made in two halves; the top half was open and through it one saw an empty whitewashed room lighted by a lamp fixed in the wall. we went in and i shut the door top and bottom behind us. at the other end were two steps leading up to another room. suddenly there came the sound of bare feet running and giggles of laughter, and ten or twelve girls, some naked and some half clothed in bright red or bright orange cloths, rushed down the steps upon us. we were surrounded, embraced, caught up in their arms and carried into the next room. we lay upon sofas with them. there was nothing but sofas and an old piano in the room.
they knew me well in the place,—you can imagine what it was—i often went there. apart from anything else, it interested me. the girls were all tamils and sinhalese. it always reminded me somehow of the arabian nights; that room when you came into it so bare and empty, and then the sudden rush of laughter, the pale yellow naked women, the brilliant colours of the cloths, the the white teeth, all appearing so suddenly in the doorway up there at the end of the room. and the girls themselves interested me; i used to sit and talk to them for hours in their own language; they didn't as a rule understand english. they used to tell me all about themselves, queer pathetic stories often. they came from villages almost always, little native villages hidden far away among rice fields and coconut trees, and they had drifted somehow into this hovel in the warren of filth and smells which we and our civilization had attracted about us.
poor reynolds, he was very uncomfortable at first. he didn't know what to do in the least or where to look. he stammered out yes and no to the few broken english sentences which the girls repeated like parrots to him. they soon got tired of kissing him and came over to me to tell me their little troubles and ask me for advice—all of them that is, except one.
she was called celestinahami and was astonishingly beautiful. her skin was the palest of pale gold with a glow in it, very rare in the fair native women. the delicate innocent beauty of a child was in her face; and her eyes, lord, her eyes immense, deep, dark and melancholy which looked as if they knew and understood and felt everything in the world. she never wore anything coloured, just a white cloth wrapped round her waist with one end thrown over the left shoulder. she carried about her an air of slowness and depth and mystery of silence and of innocence.
she lay full length on the sofa with her chin on, her hands, looking up into reynolds' face and smiling at him. the white cloth had slipped down and her breasts were bare. she was a sinhalese, a cultivator's daughter, from a little village up in the hills: her place was in the green rice fields weeding, or in the little compound under the palm trees pounding rice, but she lay on the dirty sofa and asked reynolds in her soft broken english whether he would have a drink.
it began in him with pity. 'i saw the pity of it, jessop,' he said to me afterwards, 'the pity of it.' he lost his shyness, he began to talk to her in his gentle cultivated voice; she didn't understand a word, but she looked up at him with her great innocent eyes and smiled at him. he even stroked her hand and her arm. she smiled at him still, and said her few soft clipped english sentences. he looked into her eyes that understood nothing but seemed to understand everything, and then it came out at last; the power to feel, the power that so few have, the flame, the passion, love, the real thing.
it was the real thing, i tell you; i ought to know; he stayed on in my bungalow day after day, and night after night he went down to that hovel among the filth and smells. it wasn't the body, it wasn't kisses and moonlight. he wanted her of course, he wanted her body and soul; but he wanted something else: the same passion, the same fine strong thing that he felt moving in himself. she was everything to him that was beautiful and great and pure, she was what she looked, what he read in the depths of her eyes. and she might have been—why not? she might have been all that and more, there's no reason why such a thing shouldn't happen, shouldn't have happened even. one can believe that still. but the chances are all against it. she was a prostitute in a colombo brothel, a simple soft little golden-skinned animal with nothing in the depths of the eyes at all. it was the law of chances at work as usual, you know.
it was tragic and it was at the same time wonderfully ridiculous. at times he saw things as they were, the bare truth, the hopelessness of it. and then he was so ignorant of life, fumbling about so curiously with all the little things in it. it was too much for him; he tried to shoot himself with a revolver which he had bought at the army and navy stores before he sailed; but he couldn't because he had forgotten how to put in the cartridges.
yes, i burst in on him sitting at a table in his room fumbling with the thing. it was one of those rotten old-fashioned things with a piece of steel that snaps down over the chamber to prevent the cartridges falling out. he hadn't discovered how to snap it back in order to get the cartridges in. the man who sold him that revolver, instead of an automatic pistol, as he ought to have done, saved his life.
and then i talked to him seriously. i quoted his own novel to him. it was absurdly romantic, unreal, his novel, but it preached as so many of them do, that you should face facts first and then live your life out to the uttermost. i quoted it to him. then i told him baldly brutally what the girl was—not a bit what he thouget her, what his passion went out to—a nice simple soft little animal like the bitch at my feet that starved herself if i left her for a day. 'it's the truth,' i said to him, 'as true as that you're really in love, in love with something that doesn't exist behind those great eyes. it's dangerous, damned dangerous because it's real—and that's why it's rare. but it's no good shooting yourself with that thing. you've got to get on board the next p and o, that's what you've got to do. and if you wont do that, why practise what you preach and live your life out, and take the risks.'
he asked me what i meant.
"the risks?" i said. "i can see what they are, and if you do take them, you're taking the worst odds ever offered a man. but there they are. take the girl and see what you can make of life with her. you can buy her out of that place for fifteen rupees."
i was wrong, i suppose. i ought to have put him in irons and shipped him off next day. but i don't know, really i don't know.
he took the risks any way. we bought her out, it cost twenty rupees. i got them a little house down the coast on the sea shore, a little house surrounded by palm trees. the sea droned away sleepily right under the verandah. it was to be an idyl of the east; he was to live there for ever with her and write novels on the verandah.
and, by god, he was happy—at first. i used to go down there and stay with them pretty often. he taught her english and she taught him sinhalese. he started to write a novel about the east: it would have been a good novel i think, full of strength and happiness and sun and reality—if it had been finished. but it never was. he began to see the truth, the damned hard unpleasant truths that i had told him that night in the colombo bungalow. and the cruelty of it was that he still had that rare power to feel, that he still felt. it was the real thing, you see, and the real thing is—didn't i say—immense, steady, enduring. it is; i believe that still. he was in love, but he knew now what she was like. he couldn't speak to her and she couldn't speak to him, she couldn't understand him. he was a civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she—she was an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful.
i watched it happening, i had foretold it, but i cursed myself for not having stopped it, scores of times. he loved her but she tortured him. people would say, i suppose, that she got on his nerves. it's a good enough description. but the cruellest thing of all was that she had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her master. jessop stopped. we waited for him to go on but he didn't. the leaves rustled gently in the breeze; the river murmured softly below us; up in the woods i heard a nightingale singing. "well, and then?" alderton asked at last in a rather peevish voice.
"and then? damn that nightingale!" said jessop. i wish i hadn't begun this story. it happened so long ago: i thought i had forgotten to feel it, to feel that i was responsible for what happened then. there's another sort of love; it isn't the body and it isn't the flame; it's the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed women of the east. it's the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. that was the sort of love which grew up slowly in celestinahami for reynolds. but it wasn't what he wanted, it was that, i expect, more than anything which got on his nerves.
she used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. he wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. it exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. and when he looked into her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in love with, what he knew didn't exist. it began to drive him mad.
and she—she of course couldn't even understand what was the matter. she saw that he was unhappy, she thought she had done something wrong. she reasoned like a child that it was because she wasn't like the white ladies whom she used to see in colombo. so she went and bought stays and white cotton stockings and shoes, and she squeezed herself into them. but the stays and the shoes and stockings didn't do her any good.
it couldn't go on like that. at last i induced reynolds to go away. he was to continue his travels but he was coming back—he said so over and over again to me and to celestinahami. meanwhile she was well provided for; a deed was executed: the house and the coconut trees and the little compound by the sea were to be hers—a generous settlement, a donatio inter vivos, as the lawyers call it—void, eh?—or voidable?—because for an immoral consideration. lord! i'm nearly forgetting my law, but i believe the law holds that only future consideration of that sort can be immoral. how wise, how just, isn't it? the past cannot be immoral; it's done with, wiped out—but the future? yes, it's only the future that counts.
so reynolds wiped out his past and celestinahami by the help of a dirty burgher lawyer and a deed of gift and a ticket issued by thomas cook and son for a berth in a p and o bound for aden. i went on board to see him off and i shook his hand and told him encouragingly that everything would be all right.
i never saw reynolds again but i saw celestinahami once. it was at the inquest two days after the moldavia sailed for aden. she was lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered room behind the court. yes, i identified her: celestinahami—i never knew her other name. she lay there in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and white shoes. they had found her floating in the sea that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little bungalow—bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and shoes.
* * * * *
jessop stopped. no one spoke for a minute or two. then hanson smith stretched himself, yawned, and got up.
"battle, murder, and sentimentality," he said. "you're as bad as the rest of them, jessop. i'd like to hear your other case—but it's too late, i'm off to bed."
