The Quiet American

CHAPTER II

The morning Pyle arrived in the square by the Conti-tteritall had seen enough of my American colleagues of the Press, big, noisy, boyish and middle-aged, full of sour Slacks against the French, who were, when all was said,* frgftting this war. Periodically, after an engagement had liteen tidily finished and the casualties removed from the gfeerie.they would be summoned to Hanoi, nearly four fears' flight away, addressed by the Commander-in-Chief, lodged for one nighl in a Press Gamp where they boasted fliiatthe barman was the best in Indo-China, flown over ¹c late battlefield at a height of 3,000 feet (the limit of a heavy machine-gun's range) and then delivered safely and ftfeisily back, like aschool-treat, to the Continental Hotel in Saigon.

Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, sometimes that first day I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. And he was very, very serious. Several times he seemed to shrink up within himself at the noise of the American

Press on the terrace above-the terrace which was popularly believed to be safer from hand-grenades. But he criticised nobody.

"Have you read York Harding?" he asked. "No. No, I don't think so. What did he write?" He gazed at a milk-bar across the street arid said dreamily, "That looks like a good sodafountain."* I wondered what depth of homesickness lay behind his odd choice of what to observe in a scene so unfamiliar. But hadn't I on my first walk up the rue Catinat noticed first the shop with the Guerlain perfume* and comforted myself with the thought that, after all, Europe was only distant thirty hours? He looked reluctantly away from the milkbar and said, "York wrote a book called The Advance of Red China. It's a very profound book." "I haven't read it. Do you know him?" He nodded solemnly and lapsed into silence. But he brok^ it again a moment later to modify the impression he had given. "I don't know him w.ell," he said. "I guess only met him twice." I liked him for that-to consider it was boasting to claim acquaintance with-what was his name? --York Harding. I was to learn later that he had an enormous respect for what he called serious writers. That term excluded novelists, poets and dramatists unless they had what he called a contemporary theme, and even then it was better to read the straight stuff* as you got it from York.

I said, "You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to read about it."

"Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say," he replied guardedly. "And then cheek it with York?"

"Yes." Perhaps he had noticed the irony, because he added with his habitual politeness,

"I'd take it as a very great privilege if you could find time to brief me on the 40

jttiain points. You see, York was here more than two years

ago." • I liked his loyalty to Harding-whoever Harding was. It was a change from the denigrations of the Pressmen and their immature cynicism. I said,

"Have another bottle of heCr and I'll try to give you an idea of things." " I began, while he watched me intently like a prize p"pil, by explaining the situation in the North, in Tonkin,* where the French in those days were hanging on to the ISIta of the Red River,*

which contained Hanoi and the ^nly northern port, Haiphong.* Here most of the rice was grown, and when the harvest was ready the annual battle for the rice always began*

"That's the North" I said. "The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don't come to help theVietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy flelds where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress. . . . But you can rot comfortably in the damp in Hanoi. They don't throw bombs there. God knows why. You could call it a regular war." '"AndhereintheSouth?"

"The French control the main roads until seven in the fevOning: they control the watch towers after that, and the cities-part of them. That doesn't mean you are safe, or there wouldn't be iron grilles in front of the restaurants."

How often I had explained all this before. I was a record always turned on for the benefit of newcomers-the visiting Member of Parliament, the new British Minister. Sometimes I Would wake up in the night saying, "Take the case of the Caodaists.''Or the Hoa-Haos or the BinhXuyen,* all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is liolhingpictutesque in treachery-and distrust.

41

"And now," I said, "there's General The. He was Cao-daist Chief of Staff, but he's taken to the hills* to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . ."

"York," Pyle said, "wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force ."Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might haye saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background* and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher's fragile cranes hovering over the fields* like mos-quitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot's platform,* with his bed and his commercial calendars,* his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes. When I first came I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term; I thought I was tied to what was left of a Bloomsbury square* and the 73

bus passing the portico of Euston* and springtime in the local in Torrington Place.* Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden, and I didn't care a damn. I wanted a day punctuated by those quick reports that might be car-exhausts or might be grenades, I wanted to keep the sight of those silk-trousered figures moving with grace through the humid noon, I wanted Phuong.and my home had shifted its ground eight thousand miles. I turned at the High Commissioner's* house, where the

42

^Foreign Legion* stood on guard in their white kepis* and their scarlet epaulettes, crossed by the Cathedral and came back by the dreary wall of the Vietnamese Surete that seemed to smell of urine and injustice. And yet that too was ^ part of home, like the dark passages on upper floors one avoided in childhood. The new dirty magazines were out on the bookstalls near the quay-Tabu and Illusion* and the sailors were drinking beer on the pavement, an e^y mark for a home-made bomb. I thought of Phuong, who would be haggling over the price of fish in the third street down on the left before going for her elevenses to the milk-bar (I always knew where she was in those days), and Pyle ran easily and naturally out of my mind. I didn't even mention him to Phuong, when we sat down to lunch together in our room over the rue Catinat and she wore her best flowered silk robe because it was two years to a day aij^ we had met in the Grand Monde in Cholon. ^*

(2)

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death. Phuong had risen before I was properly awake and had our tea ready. One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

"Will you stay tonight?" I asked Phuong over the crois-sants* as casually as I could. "I will have to fetch my box."

"The police may be there," I said. "I had better come with you." It was the nearest we came that day to speaking of Pyle.

Pyle had a flat in a new villa near the rue Duranton, off one of those main streets which the French continually subdivided in honour of their generals-so that the rue de Gaulle* became after the third intersection the rue Leclerc,* and that again sooner or later would probably turn abruptly into the rue de Lattre.* Somebody important must have been arriving from Europe by air, for there was a policeman facing the pavement every twenty yards along the route to the High Commissioner's Residence.

On the gravel drive to Pyle's apartment were several motor-cycles and a Vietnamese policeman examined by press-card. He wouldn't allow Phuong into the house, so I went in search of a French officer. In Pyle's bathroom Vigot was washing his hands with Pyle's soap and drying them on Pyle's towel. His tropical suit had a stain of oil on the sleevePyle's oil, I supposed. "Any news?" I asked.

"We found his car in the garage. It's empty of petrol. jli'must have gone off last night in a trishaw-or in some-lody else's car. Perhaps the petrol was drained away."

"He might even have walked," I said. "You know what Americans are."

"Your car was burnt, wasn't it?" he went thoughtfully on. "You haven't a new one?"

"No."

"It's not an important point." "No."

"Have you any views?" he asked. "Too many," I said. "Tell me."

"Well, he might have been murdered by the Vietminh. They have murdered plenty of people in Saigon. His body was found in the river by the bridge to Dakow-Vietminh territory when your police withdraw at night. Or he might have been killed by the Vietnamese Surete-it's been known. Perhaps they did not like his friends. Perhaps he was killed by the Caodaists because he knew General The."

44

"Did he?"

"They say so. Perhaps he was killed by General The because he knew the Caodaists. Perhaps he was killed by the Hoa-Haos for making passes at the General's concubines. Perhaps he was just killed by someone who wanted his money."

"Or a simple case of jealousy," Vigot said. "Or perhaps by the French Surete," I continued, "because they didn't like his contacts. Are you really looking for the people who killed him?"

"No," Vigot said. "I'm just making a report, that's all. So long as it's an act of war-well, there are thousands killed every year."

"You can rule me out," I said. "I'm not involved. Not involved," I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw: I took no action-even an opinion is a kind of action. "What are you doing here?"

"I've come for Phuong's belongings. Your police wouldn't let her in."

"Well, let us go and find them." "It's nice of you, Vigot." Pyle had two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom. We went to the bedroom. I knew where Phuong would keep her box-under the bed. We pulled it out together; it contained her picture books. I took her few spare clothes out of the wardrobe, her two good robes and her spare trousers. One had a sense that they had been hanging there for a few hours only and didn't belong, they were in passage like a butterfly in a room. In a drawer I found her small triangular pants and her collection of scarves. There was really very

45

little to put in the box, less than a week-end visitor's at home.

In the sitting-room there was a photograph of herself and Pyle. They had been photographed in the botanical gardens beside a large stone dragon. She held Pyle's dog on a leash-a black chow* with a black tongue. A too black dog. I put the photograph in her box. "What's happened to the dog?" I said.

"It isn't here. He may have taken it with him." "Perhaps it will return and you can analyse the earth on its paws."

"I'm not Lecoq,* or even Maigret,* and there's a war on."

I went across to the bookcase and examined the two rows of books-Pyle's library. The Advance of Red China, The Challenge to Democracy. The Role of the West-these, I suppose, were the complete works of York Harding. There were a lot of Congressional Reports, a Vietnamese phrase book, a history of the War in the Philippines, a Modern Library Shakespeare. On what did he relax? I found his light reading on another shelf: a portable Thomas Wolfe* and a mysterious anthology called The Triumph of Life, and a selection of American poetry. There was also a book of chess problems. It didn't seem much for the end of the working day, but, after all, he had had Phuong. Tucked away behind the anthology there was a paper-backed book* called The Physiology of Marriage. Perhaps he was studying sex, as he had studied the East, on paper. And the keyword was marriage. Pyle believed in being involved.

His desk was quite bare. "You've made a clean sweep," I said.

"Oh," Vigot said. "I had to take charge of* these on behalf of the American Legation. You know how quickly rumour spreads. There might have been looting. I had all his 46

papers sealed up." He said it seriously without even smiling. "Anything damaging?"

"We can't afford to find anything damaging against an ally," Vigot said.

"Would you mind if I took one of these books-as a keep-sake?" "I'll look the other way." I chose York Harding's The Role of the West and packed it in the box with Phuong's clothes.

"As a friend," Vigot said, "is there nothing you could tell me in confidence? My report's all tied up.* He was murdered by the Communists. Perhaps the beginning of a campaign against American aid. But between you and me-testen, it's dry talking, what about a vermouth cassis* round the corner?" "Too early."

"He didn't confide anything to you the last time he saw you?" . "No.".

"When was that?"

^"Yesterdaymorning.Afterthebigbang." "He paused to let my reply sink in-to my mind, not to his: he interrogated .fairly. "You were out when he called on you last night?"

"Last night? I must have been. I didn't think. . ." "You may be wanting an exit visa. You, know we could delay it indefinitely."

"Do you really believe," I said, "that I want to go home?" Vigot looked through the window at the bright cloudless day. He said sadly,"Most people do." "I like it here. At home there are-problems." "Merde,"* Vigot said, "here's the American Economic Attache. He repeated with sarcasm, "Economic Attache."

"I'd better be off. He'll want to seal me up too." Vigot said wearily, "I wish you luck. He'll have a terrible lot to say to me."

The Economic Attache was standing by his Packard when I came out, trying to explain something to his driver. He was a stout middle-aged man with an exaggerated bottom and a face that looked as if it had never needed a razor. He called out, "Fowler. Could you explain to this darned driver...?" I explained.

He said, "But that's just what I told him, but he always pretends not to understand French." "It may be a matter of accent."

"I was three years in Paris. My accent's good enough for one of these darned Vietnamese." "The voice of Democracy," I said. "What's that?"

"I expect it's a book by York Harding." "I don't get you." He took a suspicious look at the box I carried. "What've you got there?" he said.

"Two pairs of white silk trousers, two silk robes, some girl's underpants-three pairs, I think. All home products. No American aid." "Have you been upthere?" he asked. "Yes."

"You heard the news?" "Yes."

"It's a terrible thing," he said, "terrible." "I expect the Minister's very disturbed." "I should say. He's with the High Commissioner now, and he's asked for an interview with the President." He put his hand on my arm and walked me away from the cars. "You knew young Pyle well, didn't you? I can't get

48

over a thing like that happening to him. I knew his father. Professor Harold C. Pyle-you'll have heard of him?" "No."

"He's the world authority on under-water erosion. Didn't you see his picture on the cover of Timetbe other month?"

"Oh, I think I remember, A crumbling cliff in the background and gold-rimmed glasses in the foreground."

"That's him. I had to draft the cable home. It was terrible. I loved that boy like he was my son." "That makes you closely related to his father." He turned his wet brown eyes on me. He said, "What's getting you?* That's not the way to talk when a fine young fellow..."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Death takes people in different ways." Perhaps he had really loved Pyle. "What did you say in your cable?" I asked.

He replied seriously and literally, '"Grieved to report your son died soldeir's death in cause of Democracy.' The Minister signed it."

"A soldier's death," I said. "Mightn't that prove a bit confusing? I mean to the folks at home. The Economic Aid Mission doesn't sound like the Army. Do you get Purple . Hearts?"*

He said in a low voice, tense with ambiguity, "He had special duties." "Oh yes, we all guessed that." "He didn't talk, did he?"

"Oh, no," I said, and Vigot's phrase came back to me, 'He was a very quiet American.' "

"Have you any hunch," he asked, "why they killed him? and who?" Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola* and their portable hospitals and their wide cars and their not quite latest guns. I said, "Yes. They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lectures made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body he couldn't even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy."

"I thought you were his friend," he said in a tone of reproach.

"I was his friend. I'd have liked to see him reading the Sunday supplements at home and following the baseball. I'd have liked to see him safe with a standardised American girl who subscribed to the Book Club."*

He cleared his throat with embarrassment. "Of course," he said, "I'd forgotten that unfortunate business. I was quite on your side. Fowler. He behaved very badly. I don't mind telling you I had a long talk with him about the girl. You see, I had the advantage of knowing Professor and Mrs. Pyle.. "

I said, "Vigot's waiting," and walked away. For the first time he spotted Phuong and when I looked back at him he was watching me with pained perplexity: an eternal elder brother who didn't understand.