Let Me Alone

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 seem 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 unconvincing. 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.

For a time Anna was completely overcome. She seemed submerged. Naunggyi had drowned her, deep, deep, in unfathomable seas of strangeness. It seemed as though she would never come up again. She was done for, drowned. And then something changed in her mind, she altered. It was not that she came to any decision; her vagueness, her bewilderment, her general behaviour remained much the same. But she looked at things from a different standpoint. Whereas before she had been submissive, stunned, indifferent, she now felt herself in violent opposition to everything. She still submitted, she made no effort, but behind her submission there was a new bitterness of resentment. She remained passive and dazed. And yet there was in her a fury of resentment all the time. Furiously her resentment piled up, against her daily life, against Matthew, against the house, against everything.

At times she could hardly bear it. It shook her like a madness, the violence of opposition that was in her. But it seemed that it could find no outlet. Not yet. It was all bottled up inside her, a seething frenzy of unspeakable indignation. But at the same time she was aware of a lightening somewhere. It was too slight, too remote to be called thought. But far off, at the very bottom of her consciousness, there was a stirring, a sensation that the worst was over. The night was black still, utterly, dismally profound; but it had passed the darkest, morning was on the way.

Inward stirrings notwithstanding, her existence continued irksome and monotonous to distraction. She still felt she would die, in the horrible, maddening blankness of it all. Certainly, the country was attractive, with a thrill of magic. But she could never really get near to it, she was shut out. So that even the beauty of the place only added to her sense of lonely futility.

The bungalow depressed her more and more.

‘The place is like a stable,’ she said to Matthew, with a tone of sudden exasperation in her voice. He looked at her in surprise. It was her first complaint.

Matthew’s attitude was rather peculiar. At Richmond, he had been full of apologies for the deficiencies of River House. But here, in Naunggyi, he accepted without demur every discomfort, every sordid detail, and expected Anna to do likewise. This was his world, he was in his true element, the dominant, complacent male. He had his work and his sport, he had Anna. He was a ruler of the people. What more could he want? He fairly pranced with complacency these days.

His satisfaction made him good-humoured. Since Anna was not satisfied with the house it must be embellished. They set out early one day to drive to the bazaar in Naunggyi. The early-morning landscape was wonderful, pale gold and blue and green, the marsh glimmered anew. Natives were going along the road to the village, women in their bright skirts, some of beautiful thick silk with the flowery, intricate patterns, blue, purple, scarlet, green, with baskets on their coiled hair: men with bare bluish tattooed thighs, treading softly in the thick dust: jungle people in single file, fantastic, gnome-like, trotting silently under great mushroom hats.

The bazaar was brilliant, there in the centre of the village, among the bamboo houses on their wooden piles. All the houses were perched up above the ground, as if they were on stilts. It gave the village a quaintly fantastical look, like a village in fairyland. Silks, cottons, slippers, hats, jewellery lay spread out on the low stands under the palm-leaf awnings: further on was the crowded food-market. From bullock-carts bales and bundles were arriving, people came up with every conceivable thing, baskets, coco-nuts, pottery, umbrellas, sweets, cosmetics, and loads of vegetables and fruit and flowers.

Matthew and Anna went from stall to stall, with a man to carry their parcels. Anna bought silk for curtains, and some bowls and ornaments of black and gold lacquer, very Chinese-looking and dragonish, and white mats embroidered in coloured wools for the floor. Matthew went with her, inclined to scoff at her purchases. Rather domineering he was, and bargaining rudely with the sellers. Anna felt ashamed for him. He seemed churlish and uncouth beside the laughing, graceful people.

They went back to the car, and Anna looked round at the lovely press of colour, the brilliant skirts, the huge hats or the jaunty little head-scarves of the men, the golden piles of fruit, the heaped, vivid flowers, the goats and dogs, the pale, elegant bullocks — and she longed to make herself part of it, to take part in that life. But it was impossible for her to take part in it. It was as if she watched it all through a glass window. She could not come near.

If only she could get through the glass. She looked out on the rippling colours of the crowd. The sun was hot on her hands. Matthew was wiping his forehead with a blue handkerchief: he lifted his hat, and she saw his head for a second, black in the golden sunshine. The queer fish. She shuddered in distant repugnance.

And these brown-skinned creatures, what were they? She watched a youth who was passing, playing on a Chinese pipe. The little wail of sound came broken, weaving in and out of the market noises, very thin and clear. The bare, brown torso of the youth was beautiful, she saw the curious shadowy blueness of the tattooing on his slender thighs.

She looked at him, his black hair, his golden body — so close to her, so similar a being, yet so incredibly remote. How great a gulf must always divide her from him! And as she looked at him he turned his head; a sort of recognition flashed in his eyes, an acknowledgment of her. He was aware of her. And he was looking at her over his long pipe, watching with that open, smiling look. He smiled at her. He seemed to look at her with friendliness and good will, and frankly, freely, keeping his own dignity and freedom. He did not impinge on her. He kept his dignity and his restraint, his liberty, intact. And he left hers intact. She felt a quick glow of appreication for him, for his delicacy, his dignity. If only she could communicate with him. She felt him as a human being — one who would not humiliate her, or make demands upon her, or treat her unworthily. He blew a little personal tune for her, his dark eyes smiling. And he passed on. Why, oh why, was he on the other side of the glass?

‘We must get back,’ said Matthew. ‘I ought to be at the office by now.’

She looked at him. She looked coldly, dispassionately at him. She looked for the winsome quality, the suggestion of something pleasant about him which she had seen in the beginning. And now she could not see it, she knew that she would never see it again. Only she saw his obtuseness, his stupidity, his crudeness. He was uninteresting. He was nothing. She had got inside the parcel at last, and there was nothing there. The ultimate secret of her surprise packet revealed itself as a blank. He was nothing at all. She did not specially dislike him. But she resented having to live with him. Living with him was almost too much of an insult. Her cold, indifferent eyes watched him, and repudiated him. He would never be anything at all to her. Even though she yielded him her body.

She got into the front of the car, which was loaded up behind with the things they had bought. She heard the shred of a tune drifting over the noisy crowd, seeking her out.

‘Are you pleased with your shopping?’ Matthew asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered. She looked at him with grey, condemnatory eyes, wherein lurked a sardonic contempt.

‘All that silk stuff will go rotten as soon as the rains start,’ he said, a covert sneer in his voice. It hurt him all at once that the house was not good enough for her. It was good enough for him. He felt that she was slighting him.

They rattled back through the growing heat of the morning. It was very hot by the time they got back to the shabby, gloomy house. The servants came out to meet them. Matthew went indoors with Anna, while the parcels were being fetched from the car.

Anna looked at Matthew impartially. When they were inside, out of sight of the servants, he took her in his sinewy embrace. She saw the smooth, tough skin upon his cheek. And his hair, brittle and dry and lustreless, with a strange dead look, repulsive. How could she endure his embraces, how could she suffer him, and live? In the hot, tropical stillness she felt a chill. But the worst was over. She knew that there would be an end. Some time, she would shake off the nightmare and the marsh, and be for ever undismayed.