The Seed and the Sower - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Laurens van der Post (ч. 3)

‘Good! Good! Well done! That’s all very clear,’ Lawrence answered with exaggerated emphasis in plain language for the benefit of those faces peering through the glass of the telephone-booth like conspirators into a soothsayer’s crystal, as well as for those ears without doubt listening in at all exchanges along the line. ‘Just go on talking. Say anything you like but keep the line busy while I just sort out in my mind what you’ve told me.’

Then he stood there for a full minute, telephone to his ear, pretending to be listening intently but not hearing a word of the gibberish pouring into the receiver. He did not really need the minute for himself. This is what he had expected all along and tried to discount in advance. He knew exactly what he was going to say but he wanted to give the impression of being casual and unhurried so as to counteract the atmosphere of crisis produced by the proprietor’s behaviour. In the end he told the officer with great deliberation: ‘You had better hand over to your Dutch opposite number at once. Tell him to keep us posted here. Then collect the rest of the unit and come here as soon as you can. Any questions?’

‘No, sir, none. I entirely agree. I’ll be glad to be back with you.’ Nothing could disguise the relief in the officer’s voice.

Lawrence rang off and stood for a moment watching the proprietor and his staff like an actor on the far side of the footlights. As he did so he noticed a shadowy flutter of a reflection on the glass beside him. He looked around and there, alone, her face almost against the glass, was the girl with her blue eyes and all their wide, candid expression contracted into a single question of some overwhelming intent. The look stirred him deeply because it was of quite a different order to that on the faces of the proprietor and his staff. But if he remained within the booth any longer it would be counteracting the impression he wanted to create. So he opened the door slowly and stepped out. Immediately the proprietor was at his side and wanted to know if Lawrence had heard any news he could tell them. He knew, he said, that he had no right to ask for any military secrets but could not Lawrence just indicate whether it had been good or bad?

Lawrence told him quietly that it was news concerning his military mission. It was like the calls in the night, a routine one from his superiors, and there would be many more of them. As the proprietor knew, he was an English officer and a stranger to the country. It wouldn’t be at all right for him to pass on what could only be his own inadequate impressions of the general situation. The Dutch authorities were the only ones who could do so without distortion and he was certain that when there was anything of importance to be announced it would be announced soon enough over their own wireless. Meanwhile if the proprietor would excuse him, his breakfast was waiting and he had a great deal of work to do.

The man spread his large hands out in front of him in a melodramatic gesture of submission to what he regarded as unnecessary military reticence. Grumbling that if the news had been good Lawrence would have let it out soon enough, he worked off his disappointment by clapping his plump red hands and ordering his waiters peremptorily back into position beside empty tables. They tripped back lightly, almost girlishly, into the dining-room to stand there so still and preoccupied with their own impressions of what had just occurred that had it not been for their black hats they might have been images carved out of their native djati by the hereditary sculptors of Bali.

Lawrence was left alone with the woman still standing and still watching him, her eyes gravely beseeching. She was the first to speak in the tone he had first heard only more muted than ever. Holding out her hand as if importuning for alms she asked: ‘Please, what did you hear on the phone?’

‘You’ve heard what I have just told the proprietor. I’m afraid . . .’ he began automatically.

‘Oh, please don’t say things like that to me!’ she interrupted and for the first time the shadow of a personal defeat showed in her wide eyes. ‘You can’t say “no” to me.’ She stopped as if the truth of this passionate assertion were self-evident and looked him straightly, even a little defiantly, in the eye. Yet at the same time she put her left hand to her heart as if ready for the support it might need.

‘Why not?’ Lawrence asked the question abruptly.

Trained in a school of life which regarded all natural emotion with suspicion he feared he had no great ‘finesse’ in dealing either with his own or that of others. Now, however, the unaccustomed emotion evoked in him was made more formidable by a feeling that he stood in a special relationship of responsibility towards this woman. That was the most confusing part of the encounter because at that time nothing could have appeared more absurd and irrational. Looking back, however, he realized how accurate the feeling had been. He had recognized a quality in her that no one else among her companions, judging by the reprimand from that comfortable matron he had overheard the evening before, was in the least aware. The recognition laid special responsibilities on him for were we not all ultimately charged to live not according to general rules but by our own specific recognition of one another’s quality? However, having the courage of one’s recognitions was a lesson only slowly and painfully to be learnt and on that early morning in the hall of the hotel he was aware only of conflict between his upbringing, a long established sense of duty, and this strange new feeling about the woman. All that made him sound curt, almost rude to her, whereas he was really only being rough with himself.

To his amazement she seemed to see straight into the core of his predicament and ever to be encouraged by it.

‘Why not?’ She repeated his question and went on straight away to answer it. ‘Because I have to know. I can’t go on any more with rumours. I shall be utterly lost if I can’t somewhere find not the whole truth – I’m not asking that – but just one real fact to build on. You’ve no idea how we’ve been deceived and lied to these past months. . . . They say it’s for our good, as if we are children in need of pretty bedtime stories to lull us to sleep. . . . That may be true of men like the proprietor and these poor unhappy women and their worn-out children – but it’s not true of me. All my life I’ve feared only the dark . . . only what is secret and hidden. These others may have to cling to their illusions. They may need lies to guide them to their moment of truth. They might panic if they knew what I believe you know. I would not. Only one thing can make me panic – not knowing.’

Her voice had not faltered but it struck a deeper note that nearly blurred its clarity as she begged him to tell her the truth and so help her to be stronger. She emphasized that he was the only one who could help and so, as she saw it, he had to help. There was no alternative to the soul of honour which she took him to be. Then she added persuasively: ‘Besides, you can’t tell me anything that I don’t in a sense already know. You can only give the horror a name, a time and a place. However frightful your knowledge may seem to you it couldn’t be as great as this nameless terror I’ve carried about inside myself these past few months. Oh! I wish you could know for how long I’ve felt disaster creeping down on us. For weeks I’ve even smelt death in the air and today I know it is very near. But I promise you I shall not tell a living soul. No matter how bad it is I can hold it all.’ She made an eloquent gesture with her hands like a potter demonstrating he had black clay enough to shape a vessel that would hold securely whatever life chose to pour into it.

Moreover she had spoken all this, Lawrence said, not only with a passion that carried its own conviction but also with a certain instinctive poetry that would have sounded out of place in a drawing-room and doubtless was normally foreign to her, too. Yet in that sombre moment in the evolution of the vengeance of outraged fate, in that Far Eastern version of a world Eumenides into whose ancient chorus fate had conscripted them both, no other language would have been so appropriate. And – Lawrence added it with a tone of pleading for our understanding – he was utterly convinced by her. He was suddenly convinced that of all the decisions he had had to take in his life this slight choice of whether to speak or not to speak was the most fateful. He did not hesitate. He did not even feel it necessary to pledge her again to secrecy. Against all the rules, against all his training and upbringing he told her. Looking straight into her eyes and quietly so that his voice did not carry beyond her, he said: ‘They’ve landed.’

‘I thought so,’ she replied without change of expression. ‘When and where? Near here?’

Lawrence told her what he knew and was amazed how for awhile emotion vanished from their exchanges. Conversation became spare and matter-of-fact.

In the end she asked, ‘But were not the landings opposed by our Dutch troops?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ he answered.

‘Is there any chance of the Japanese being driven back into the sea?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What are the chances of help from outside?’

‘None, I fear.’

‘Have we any hope at all of holding out somewhere until help can come?’

‘I fear not.’

‘I see.’ She paused then to stare past him at the day unfolding over the blue, smoking, reeling earth. Then, her voice lower than ever, she asked: ‘You said one landing was near here, at Merak. How soon before they get here?’

‘I don’t know. That depends on the resistance put up by the army.’

‘You sound unconvinced, as if you think our soldiers won’t fight. Is that so?’

‘Not on the coast . . . but perhaps here.’

‘Only perhaps?’

‘Yes. Only perhaps. I don’t know for certain. So far the signs have not been good. But the natural place to fight would be along the rim of your great inland plateau. Perhaps that is what your commanders have been waiting to do. If that is so and all goes well this village should soon be in the front line of the battle.’

‘If all goes well?’ she exclaimed sharply repeating his phrase as if not believing she’d heard it correctly.

‘Forgive me!’ Lawrence hastened to explain, smiling for the first time: ‘I was using the word “well” purely in a special military sense. Militarily speaking it is terribly important that the enemy should be made to fight for this island. The harder and the longer he is made to fight here the more time we shall have to organize the far greater campaign in the world outside which will enable us, in the end, to win.’

‘So we’ll lose here but win elsewhere?’

‘Whatever happens here, we shall win in the end.’

‘You really believe that?’

She asked this, Lawrence said, neither out of doubt nor the need for reassurance, but because for so long she had been tricked into accepting counterfeit that now she rang each new coin of thought on the counter of her mind before taking it up. There was indeed, he said, something most noble about her determination not to let one single aspect of the truth evade her. Compared with such dignity of spirit he suspected that there was much in his response that must have appeared inadequate and unimaginative. But one thing still consoled him. He had not fallen for any temptation to hold out false hopes to her. As he looked at that lovely young head poignant in its youth and innocence he was moved as he had never been moved before.

Yet he answered truthfully, although in a voice he hardly recognized: ‘Yes, I believe it. More. I also know it . . . as you have known all these months past of the horror which is upon us now.’

It was her turn now to be convinced and there was no hubris of doubt left in her. Her spirit for all its suffering and disillusionment had the humility to be capable of conviction. The expression on her face lost its tension.

To his amazement she took his hand in hers between fingers that trembled, and said almost inaudibly: ‘Thank you for what you’ve done.’ She raised his hand, held it for a second against her cheek, then let it fall and turned quickly about as if to make for the stairs at the far end of the hall.

She did this all so swiftly that Lawrence feared her to be overcome by what she had heard. Instinctively he caught her by the arm and held her back. ‘I’ve upset you.’

Again she turned to face him. He thought his fear to be justified because tears were bright in her eyes.

But she replied, ‘On the contrary, you’ve helped me no end.’

‘Why the tears then?’ he asked.

‘Don’t you know? There are all kinds of tears,’ she replied, trying to smile. ‘These are tears of a strange, uncomfortable sort of relief.’

‘But the proprietor and the waiters who have seen us talking won’t know that.’

‘My God!’ she exclaimed, startled. ‘That’d be awful after you’ve trusted me so.’

‘It would help, I think, if you came with me now and had your breakfast as if nothing unusual has happened,’ Lawrence stated.

She made such a face at the prospect that he laughed and said: ‘I know how you feel. I’ve never had to go into action without feeling I could never eat again. But I always force myself and it’s extraordinary how it helps. Have a try.’

‘I shall, I promise you, but you know I suddenly feel like having another bath,’ she replied, ‘and putting on different clothes. It won’t take me long. Then you’ll see me eating the biggest breakfast I’ve eaten in days!’

With that she turned and went up the stairs. Lawrence hoped it was not his imagination but her step seemed lighter.

But whatever she did, it took so long that Lawrence was forced to leave the hotel and hasten to the billets of his officers and men. Before she had reappeared there he called his group together and told them, too, what he knew. His experience of small independent commands had long since taught him the necessity of sharing as much as possible his own information and plans with those under him irrespective of rank. He told them that the rest of their unit would join them before nightfall. He wanted them to overhaul their vehicles, check their supplies and, except for a duty group, climb up and down the great volcano snoring there in the sun beyond the village. When their routine fatigues were done they were to do this every day because their lives would soon depend, in great measure, on their physical powers of endurance. Meanwhile he himself and one other was going forward in the direction of the enemy to study the situation at first hand. He was certain the telephones henceforth would be buzzing with fantastic rumours and that personal reconnaissance would be their only means of getting accurate information. None the less he appointed an officer to take his place at the end of the telephone in the hotel. Whenever possible he would communicate with him, but they were not to be surprised if they did not hear from him for a day or two.

Lawrence explained that he told my wife and me all this not because he had any intention of inflicting on us the story of his military adventures, but just to make certain that we understood, in view of what followed, why he was unable to do anything more about the young woman to whom he had in such a confused way admitted a certain responsibility of heart and imagination. Yet despite his lack of time and his desperate professional purpose before leaving, he did write a note to the proprietor of the hotel begging him to get in touch with the appropriate Dutch authorities and implore them to evacuate without delay the women and children to the main town in the centre of the plateau. Their only safety, he was convinced, would be in their numbers and in being far enough away from the fighting so that by the time the Japanese did reach them the battle-fever of their soldiery would have declined. He knew that if this were done he would probably never see that young woman again: and the thought pained him. Since he had only seen her for the first time a few hours before, his reaction appeared absurd and out of proportion. Yet he had to admit to himself that if it had not been for her he might not have written that letter to the proprietor since the matter was not in his military business. Finally, having made certain that his unit would be in readiness to move off at instant’s notice, he set out on the main road towards Merak on the Sunda Strait where the enemy had landed in the night.

He was gone several days and nights. There was no need really to go into the detail of his journey. All that mattered for the purposes of what followed was that as the great indifferent mother-of-pearl days passed to be succeeded by nights glittering with the unrest of creation and resounding with the alarm signals of frightened little men, the devastating feeling of unbelonging and pointlessness which had threatened him ever since he landed in the island, deepened greatly. This was not helped by the retreat of the well-equipped, well-fed Dutch coastal division with which he became briefly entangled. His worst fears were confirmed for this division was pulling back as fast as possible in the direction of the blue and purple uplands behind him without having fired a shot at the enemy. Yet on the return journey he had taken heart because he spent an hour at the field headquarters of an incomplete brigade of his own kin. There in the long level light of a sinking sun under a sky solemn with thunder-clouds and with a view of the jungle stretching as far as he could see to where it was ultimately lost in a smoke of rain on the horizon, he watched a small force of Australians digging in for battle. The men had no fat on them and were unusually tall. They were an extraordinarily young and fine-looking force. The men worked at their defences stripped to the waist, their shoulders burnt a deep tan from two years of war under a foreign sun. They seemed cool and unafraid and though, like Lawrence, they were new arrivals in the island, they moved about calmly and purposefully rather as he imagined the Spartans must have done in the pass of Thermopylae.

Lawrence then told their commander, a V.C. of an Expeditionary Force of the First World War, what he had seen on his travels. The Brigadier smiled the smile of someone who had long since made his peace with his fate and said he knew it all. He and his men were there in order to keep the road from falling into Japanese hands until the Dutch forces had safely withdrawn into their inner defensive ring. That done his orders too were to break off battle – if he could – and follow suit. The ‘if he could’ was uttered with a homely Australian twang and accompanied by a wry smile.

Lawrence asked when he expected the enemy to attack? The commander replied that fast as the enemy was sweeping towards them he did not think it would be before dawn the next day. He thought the best plan would be for Lawrence to keep his unit where it was. The moment the Australian had contact with the Japanese he would communicate with Lawrence and suggest a position which offered the best chance of getting round and behind the enemy when, and if, the battle was broken off.

Before sunset Lawrence was back with his unit. Near as the Australian positions had appeared to the village on his map it was a shock to find that it took him barely twenty minutes by car to reach it. That decided him immediately to send a dispatch rider of his own to the Australian headquarters in case the enemy infiltrated in the night and cut the telephone lines between them. He posted extra sentries on the roads leading into the village and detailed a Signals warrant officer to take over the telephone exchange in the hotel. He also gave orders that the entire unit was to breakfast at first light and stand to, thereafter ready instantly to move off. To give them a clearer understanding of his orders he told them, in the least negative way possible, what he had learned on his reconnaissance. He dwelt at some length on the presence of the small Australian force and stressed how impressed he had been by their spirit and bearing. With luck and good management, he ended, the next forty-eight hours should set them free of entanglement with retreating forces and safely in their own native guerrilla element of the jungle. Then taking his second-in-command aside he told him he was going to the hotel to try and get a good night’s sleep which he had not had for some days. He was not, he emphasized, to be disturbed unless it was absolutely imperative.

By that time the sun had vanished below the horizon but the whole western sky was still aflame with its light. One thunder-cloud in particular glowed from base to summit with a vivid pomegranate fire. In the ditches and along the hedges the fireflies were massing for their nightly fiesta and bats and flying foxes in prodigious numbers beat the brown air around him, emitting as they did so that strange silky squeak of theirs. Unlike the night when he had first arrived, not a glimmer of light showed anywhere in the hotel.

‘The proprietor’s done then what I asked and they’ve evacuated the women and children,’ he told himself. The conclusion was confirmed by the officer who had stood in for him at the hotel during his absence. Lawrence met him taking the air at the main entrance to the building. Lawrence took his report and before dismissing him asked: ‘Why is it so quiet round here tonight?’

‘Oh! don’t you know, sir? They’ve been evacuating the women and children these past two days,’ the officer answered. ‘I believe the last of them went off just before sunset. The hotel is practically empty and if the proprietor’s to be believed most of the native staff have deserted as well.’

Lawrence left him to climb slowly up the stone steps leading to the hall where the telephone booth stood. ‘So that’s that. They’ve all gone, rats and all!’ The bitterness in his thought surprised him until he saw its meaning. He was merely telling himself in the plural that ‘she’ was gone. Though he had done what he could to make certain that the girl would be moved to safety when he returned, he must have secretly nourished a wholly inconsistent and wildly improbable hope that she would have remained.

‘All the better,’ he tried to tell himself. ‘I need all I’ve got to concentrate on my job ahead.’ But he was not at all convinced by himself.

Then from the direction of the entrance of the office at the far side of the hall he detected his first glimmer of light. At his desk, his head sideways on his arms, the proprietor was fast asleep, snoring loudly. Lawrence first called to him and when he did not respond, walked round the desk and shook him. He smelt of gin. After a while the man opened his eyes, smiled feebly at Lawrence and muttered something meaningless. Then the smile deserted him and, despite his obvious drunkenness, his one chink of consciousness showed in his face the full tide of horror welling up fast within him. So terrified was the look that Lawrence believed the proprietor already may have been in the grip of some mysterious intimation of his end. Thirty-six hours later, on the pretext that he had not bowed low enough to a Japanese officer, he was to be bayoneted on the steps of his hotel and his body propped up for days in the village square. But the look of terrible awareness quickly passed, the red eyes shut and the head fell back on his arms. He was asleep again.

‘Poor, poor devil!’ Lawrence thought, not trying to awaken him again. ‘Sleep all you can while the going’s good.’

He turned and retraced his steps towards the veranda-room to see if he could find a waiter who would take an order for dinner. The glass in the windows still burned with the last red of day and the big dark room looked abandoned and empty until out of the shadows at the far end came a very old waiter, his face, with its amber cheeks and skin wrinkled like an over-ripe grenadella, looking most incongruous under his brand-new black hat. He came towards Lawrence, bowed impersonally but elegantly as did all the indigenous peoples of the island and said gently: ‘Good evening, Tuan. Good evening, Lord.’

‘Could you get me some dinner in half an hour?’ Lawrence asked.

‘Yes, Tuan. What would the Tuan like?’

Lawrence ordered a light meal and at the end asked: ‘What’s happened to the other waiters? Are you alone on duty?’

‘The jongens,’ the old man said, using the term for boys which the Dutch applied to their native servants, ‘the jongens have all gone to their homes. There’s only the Tuan proprietor, the Tuan telephone, the operator, old Abdul and his wife in the kitchen, and I, left, Tuan.’

‘And why haven’t you gone home too?’ Lawrence could not resist asking.

‘We are very old, Tuan,’ he answered, ‘and this is all the home we know.’ He paused, then hastened to add as if further diversion into his private world with a superior would be too great a breach of native good manners. ‘Is there anything else the Tuan would like?’

‘Perhaps you would bring me a drink,’ Lawrence answered, suddenly aware of how tired he was and feeling that a drink before his bath and meal would do him good.

He seated himself by an open window and listened to the urgent night sounds of the abundant earth starting up without. Some Gibbon apes, afraid of the dark, settled themselves in for an uneasy sleep on the highest trees in the jungle at the back of the hotel and he heard their barks fade to a series of whimpers. The ape-sound was extraordinarily human as if it came straight out of the world’s beginning like a cry of anguish from the first man when he found himself hemmed in by powerful enemies. How old was the pattern wherein he was caught, Lawrence thought, and how deeply discredited. Yet when and how would life break free of it?

At that point he heard someone coming towards him. He thought it was the old waiter bringing his drink and did not trouble to look round. He preferred, face to face with so overwhelming a night, to keep his eyes on what fire was left on the horizon in the west.

Then a voice he recognized instantly said from immediately behind him: ‘Good evening!’

That he had had no premonition of her coming, always seemed to him proof of how deeply he had accepted the fact that he would never see her again.

Startled, he came to his feet and blurted out: ‘What on earth are you doing here? I thought you’d all gone.’

‘No,’ she answered calmly, not at all put out by his rough manner. ‘There are a few of the younger ones still left. There was not room for us all in the convoy this afternoon. We are due to leave in the morning – if it is not too late.’ She paused, trying to make out the expression on his face in the dim light, failed, and then asked, rather in the tone of the first request she had ever put to him: ‘Is it too late?’

He drew out a chair and offered her a seat beside him. It was, he told her, very late, dangerously late but perhaps not too late. Only she must make certain that she did not delay beyond the next day. If there were no cars or trucks or trains available he begged her to get on to the main road and start walking inland. The road was soon bound to be full of friendly military traffic who would not refuse her a lift. Everywhere the land forces were retreating inland and whatever happened elsewhere this one road was going to be kept safe for a while by men who he knew would fight. He did not know how vast the Japanese forces deployed against these men would be but, judging by the enemy’s past form, he thought it would take him twenty-four hours, if not two days, after the first contact to gather force enough to break through into the main road.

What soldiers were those of whom he was so certain they would fight? When last time they spoke he had not been confident at all that the Japanese advance would be resisted? She asked this, her voice younger than ever with inquiry.

He tried to study the look on her face but it was indistinct in the gathering dark beside him. He was aware only that its brilliant whiteness had been sombred until it glowed like a strange flower which unfolds only in the dark. Below that lotus white of her face there shivered a sheen of gold from the nugget at her throat and a shimmer of silver from the bracelet on her wrist as she raised her hand from time to time to finger her necklace.

He told her about the Australians a bare twenty minutes away by car and described how impressed he had been seeing them at work so calmly in the long light of evening.

‘How wonderful – and yet how terrible,’ she exclaimed. He felt rather than saw her stiffen in her chair as she gripped the rush-work arms tightly. ‘The thought of what is about to happen is almost more than I can bear. How then can they be so brave?’ She paused. The day had now gone utterly and lightning was beginning to flash at the windows. The sound of the night was brilliant, the fever of creation mounting high in the temples of the dark. She asked: ‘When do they expect the enemy?’

‘Knowing your appetite for the worst,’ Lawrence tried to answer lightly: ‘I must confess at once that the battle may even now be on. But I doubt it. For at this short distance we ought to hear the firing if it were at all prolonged and heavy. The Australians themselves believe their battle will come early tomorrow morning or at the latest tomorrow evening.’

Her response to this intelligence was indirect. She told Lawrence that the women she had been with ever since they were abruptly evacuated from Sumatra were always bewailing the fact that they had left their sons and husbands behind, bewailing the fact that they had children who might have to endure a Japanese occupation. She could only say truthfully that she envied them, thought them lucky to be so rounded and equipped for the disaster ahead. She wished she had a child and a husband to take his place with those tall Australians of whom he had told her. Even if her man were to be killed, even if she and her child were to suffer the misfortunes of the damned, it would give a point to all these ghastly circumstances that were coming down on them like a pack of wolves. Even as a child, she confided, she had never doubted that life, whatever her own fate, would prove itself worthwhile. Even in the despair and disintegration which followed the Nazi occupation of Holland from which she had escaped barely a year before she had never doubted that all in the end would be worth it for those who were given the privilege of being able to endure. Her belief in the unending continuity and flow of life from before and beyond any rhyme, reason, idea or temporary arrest of it, was so deep, Lawrence stressed to us, that it appeared to be not a form of belief so much as an irrefutable kind of knowledge built into the heart of that woman. Accordingly, she despised those women who because of the terrible world situation proclaimed that they would bear no more children to suffer as they had suffered. Life was a woman’s answer to the enemies of life, she said. Men like his Australians might have to fight death with death just as, she understood, in Australia they fought bush fires with fire. That was a man’s answer to the death about now and she respected it. But a woman could only answer death with more life. Yet could a man respect the answer from woman irrespective of the form wherein it was given, just as she respected and accepted the brutal necessity of the man’s? All this was uttered with the passion of a proud and pent-up spirit. Yet she did not wait for an answer to her question but put another directly to him, personally: ‘And you? What are you going to do when the battle down the road starts?’

‘Join them,’ he answered. ‘I’m just waiting here at the end of a telephone for news that it has begun and for direction as to where I can most effectively join in with the Australians. I am afraid my summons may come at any moment.’

‘I can’t bear the thought of you going out there to be killed,’ she exclaimed with an anguish that was illogical to Lawrence’s limited understanding seeing she had only so shortly beforehand expressed the ardent wish that she had had a man of her own to take part in the coming battle. ‘I just can’t bear it!’

She put her hands to her face as if about to cry, then quickly dropped them and suddenly stood up. ‘Please,’ she said taking Lawrence’s hand and pulling at it gently. ‘Please come with me, please.’

Her hand was trembling violently like that of a person in a fever. So stirred was he by her concern for him that he too stood up without a word. Taking her left hand in his he went with her out of the room. The journey from there through the hall, past the office wherein the proprietor still was slumped asleep with his flushed face on his arms, up the stairs and down the long corridor at the top of the landing, was not far. But so eventful, so full again had his feeling for life suddenly become, that it seemed to take a crowded hour. His whole being appeared to have become magnified and even the smallest perception of time and space, the most microscopic details of his surroundings, became more than life-size on the screen of his senses. Their footsteps on that empty staircase and along the night-lighted corridor rang out in challenge like the taps of a drum, and the night-sounds from without fell on his ears like the crescendo of an insect chorus. Her eyes, as she pushed open the swing doors of lattice-work with which all rooms were equipped, seemed great, dark and bright with vivid feeling under the corridor light. But inside her room the night was more profound than ever. He could just make out against the sheen at the open window the faint, creamy shape of a mosquito net suspended over a bed. Then a flash of lightning flew in and he saw one forlorn little suitcase on the luggage rack against the wall which presumably held all she possessed, and a nightdress hung over a chair. The lightning passed swiftly. It was blacker than before, the room a vast palace of darkness in which he was lost. He turned about, almost colliding with her as he did so.

‘I can’t bear it,’ she said again and put her arms round him, her head against his chest beseeching him in that muted voice of hers to hold her.

At once his arms went round her and he was about to say something but it was as if she discerned his intention as soon as it was conceived and begged him: ‘Please, do not speak. Please don’t say anything. Just hold me like this. It is wiser than any words you or I could find.’

As she spoke the distant rumble of thunder from the lightning which had greeted their entry into her room broke over their heads like a wave finding the shore. Never, Lawrence said, had he heard so commanding and holy a sound, as if it were the authentic voice of life itself exhorting them to obey. More wonderful still as he stood there holding this strange woman to him she ceased to be a stranger and separate from him.

He was utterly taken aback therefore when suddenly a small low voice breaking the rule it had just made said: ‘I expect you will despise me for this.’

He thanked heaven he was not taken aback for too long, and quickly interpreted the question to be her way of banishing a final fear and so making that sense of oneness between them complete. Up to that moment he had not had time really to think about what was happening, and in the end he was grateful for the question because of the light it shed on the turmoil on his own feelings. It made him realize that from the start the impression she had made on him was that of a singularly true person. The little she had said to him had been enough to reveal an essentially feminine sensibility and intelligence. She had courage too, in the way only that women have courage, and now in this deep concern for life which had made her turn to him she had not shirked a most unorthodox challenge to the special integrity of her sex. Somehow he had taken it for granted that all these feelings that were so strong within him would have been common knowledge between them, and that was his only reason for being taken aback.

Touched by her concern for her honour, in his imagination he would have liked to tell her that he could kneel down before her as a sign of how he respected her and beg her forgiveness for what men had taken so blindly and wilfully from women all the thousand and one years now vanishing so swiftly behind them. But all he hastened to say was: ‘I would have to be a poet and not a soldier to tell you all that I think and feel about you. . . . I can only say that you are all I imagined a good woman to be. . . . You make me feel inadequate and very humble. . . . Please know that I understand you have turned to me not for yourself, not for me, but on behalf of life. When all reason and the world together seem to proclaim the end of life as we have known it, I know you are asking me to renew with you our pact of faith with life in the only way possible to us.’

That, almost word for word, Lawrence told us, was what he had said to her, and we could judge for ourselves how inadequate it was. But it was the best he could do. The hell of it was that he longed for the ability to express the many complex emotions he had about her in a simple and intelligible way, but all he seemed able to do was to put into rough words only the simplest and most arbitrary of his feelings.

Then the suspicion that as he spoke she had started to cry alarmed him. He put his hand to her face and felt the tears on her cheeks.

‘Forgive me,’ he exclaimed, ‘for hurting you. But if only you could see inside me you – you would be blinded by the vision I have of you.’

‘I’ve told you before there are all kinds of tears.’ Her voice was overflowing with a new tenderness. ‘You’ve not hurt me. I’m only crying because I am overwhelmed by my good luck, first in finding you here and then in finding such understanding in you.’

She raised herself, clasped her arms round him and kissed him with great tenderness.

Life, Lawrence said, can have no more than a passing regard for the conventions which men create as preliminaries for these occasions. But in the deep of itself life is profoundly traditional and when all else breaks down it has its own inner pattern of ceremonial of heart and mind to take over so as to confirm, solemnize, bless, dedicate and make whole what happened then between them. From that moment the night became peculiarly their own. He had, he hoped, told us enough about the nature of that island to show how eventful it was. He had never before experienced a nature in the physical world so packed as was that island with events of fire and earthquake, of upsurge of plants and volcanoes, of cloud, thunder, lightning and rain in the sky, and of the unending music of the small first things of life, celebrating with scraping legs, beating wings, and brilliant little voices the various urges of creation minutely entrusted to each of them. Yet that night was even more eventful than any crowded moment he had yet lived through, and each event within it seemed designed to bless and make the two of them more meaningful in each other’s arms. There were times when they were both so stirred by their nearness to each other and to all other living, singing, flashing and shining creatures that they made love close to tears, until finally, utterly resolved they fell into sleep as if they had all life before them.

On the verge of sleep the girl suddenly asked: ‘What’s your name? I know your surname is Lawrence. But your own, your Christian name?’

‘John,’ he replied gently stroking her cheek with the side of a finger: ‘John.’

So near was she to sleep that all her responses were as if anaesthetized. After a pause she said so indistinctly that he could hardly hear her: ‘John, my favourite disciple . . . how strange John of the Cross and John of the Revelation, too.’ She sighed, and said not good night but ‘À Dieu – to God, John.’

She said it not as we do nowadays as a single perfunctory word of farewell but as two, so that the expression seemed to recover its original meaning, but the last word was barely audible and carried her right over the threshold into her sleep.

It was only then that he realized fully how tired she must have been and that recently she must have had even less sleep than he. Indeed she was so quickly asleep that he had no chance to ask for her name and up to that moment it had never occurred to him to do so. It was as if he had assumed that he knew it, so particular did she feel to him and their intimacy of such long standing. Indeed he felt as if he had known her before birth and could go on knowing her beyond death. Thinking, ‘I’ll ask her later,’ he drew her closer into his arms and he, too, fell asleep.

He slept deeply and long until he woke many hours later, his first thoughts being of intense unease. Yes! The telephone in his room next door was ringing loudly in one long, unbroken chain of urgent sound. She was still happily fast asleep. He managed to leave the room without waking her.

The Australian Brigade-Major was on the line. ‘That you, Colonel Lawrence? Good.’ The officer spoke with a suspicious nonchalance which Lawrence knew well came to his kind only in moments of extreme crisis: ‘Thought you’d like to know our night patrols have just come in. The Japs are coming up fast on a broad front. Thousands and thousands of the little bastards everywhere, on foot, on bicycles and in trucks. We shall be at it any moment now and the Brigadier asks me to tell you he expects to give you the directions you asked for yesterday within half an hour.’

Lawrence thanked him and told him that he and his men would be ready to move whenever the Brigadier chose. He then spoke to his own operator, told him to leave the line plugged through to his room and to go at once to his unit, alert his second-in-command and bring a car round to the hotel for him. That done, he hastened back to her room. Thank heaven she was still asleep. . . .

Quickly he collected the rest of his things, went back to his own room, dressed and took out his dispatch book to write her a letter. Hardly had he got his indelible pencil to the paper when he heard faintly but clearly in the distance the sound of gun-fire, spasmodic at first but soon continuous and swiftly gathering in volume. But this as clearly as he could remember was what he wrote.

‘Dear, beloved child of life, the attack has started and I have to go. Here below is the address of my mother in England. Please communicate with me there when the war is over if we do not meet before. In case you should lose this write to me as soon as you can care of the War Office, Whitehall, London. Should I be killed please go to my home and see my mother. My only regret is that I have had no time to tell you all I feel and think about you and how deep my sense of our belonging to life. I take the thought of you wrapped around me like a warm blanket on a cold winter’s night. Please make haste to get away from this place today – I too shall see what I can do to that end before I go. Somewhere in life there will be a dimension wherein we shall be together again. Until then, as you said last night, to God – À Dieu, my dear – John.’

Short as the letter was it was almost too long because the last sentence was scribbled to the sound of the telephone ringing again. He hurried to pick up the receiver.

It was the Brigadier himself this time: ‘That you, Lawrence? Good. Note this map reference. I’ll have an officer waiting for you there. He’ll give you your orders. Get there just as soon as you can.’

Lawrence put the receiver down. The sound of distant fire was much heavier and more sustained.

He went back to her room. She was still asleep. He placed his note carefully on the worn little suitcase, placing one of her sandals on top to prevent some draught from blowing it away. Should he wake her? No. His instinct was emphatic. She would be woken soon enough. Let those subtle partners, chance and circumstance, which had brought them so mysteriously and accurately together now also separate them unaided. Separation coming then would be kinder than if he made his own words of farewell accessories to the fact. But it was not easy. In fact it was about the most difficult thing he had ever had to do. His last look showed her deeply asleep, a flush as of dawn in her cheeks, and the light of the expanding morning new in her hair. He had not seen such a look of fulfilment on a human face before – and he did not see it again until he saw it on the face of our own daughter asleep upstairs with her doll in the bed beside her twin brother.

Down below Lawrence found the proprietor just stirring. ‘Look,’ Lawrence ordered the man who was more frantic than ever now with drink and premonition. ‘Before you do anything else get on to that telephone to your authorities. I don’t care what you say or how you do it but you’ve got to get the last of the women away from here at once. Tell them if you like that it is an immediate order from the Australian General. Should this fail you, get the women on the main road walking inland as soon as possible. They’ll pick up a lift before the day is out. But get them away. And as soon as you’ve telephoned get the women up and breakfasted. The Japanese are attacking down the road and I promise you you’ll be lucky if they are not here by nightfall.’

As he was watching the alarmed proprietor obey these orders his car drew up outside. He gave one last look at the big red-faced man and was reassured to see him talking with determination into the phone. Then he stepped into the car and drove off. At the gates he glanced back at the window of her room. All he saw in it was the sunrise burning in the glass.

What happened to him afterwards then was of no importance to his story except for one thing. He had not driven far, in fact had not even reached his unit before he realized that despite his own desperate personal feeling of separation from the woman, it was a sense of separation designed to make him aware of a feeling of greater belonging. Gone was his terrible feeling of meaningless and despair. He no longer felt trapped. The earth, sparkling like a rounded deep-sea jewel below the opening shell of the day, no longer appeared indifferent. In the night he had been reborn native to it all. He had come home again to life, and in the days that followed, grim as they were, these feelings grew. He would only have to think of the woman and their brief encounter to find the most bitter of circumstances relieved with a living and poignant distillation of sweetness. Yes, even when he was kept in solitary confinement for months in a Japanese cell, tortured, and then condemned to death, the sweetness of the memory would be so acute that it outsmarted the agony and misery of mind and body. The sense of continuity derived erased the effect of what seemed then to be his own inevitable end. Without what that woman had given him out of her own prophetic intuition of life he could not have come through; would not have been sitting by the fireside on a Christmas night speaking to us as frankly as he had done. He had felt that she, too, had found their meeting healing; he only wished it could be more than a feeling.

Lawrence stopped, not so much as one who had reached his conclusion as one not knowing how to continue.

We waited in silence for a while in the hope that he would resume. Then afraid lest he might not do so unless encouraged, my wife asked a question. I had been back so much with Lawrence in Insulinda that I had become impervious even to the voice of the great storm outside now reaching its peak. But as my wife spoke I heard it again and I leant forward to make certain I did not miss anything of what she was saying.

‘Does that mean that you didn’t see her again?’ she asked.

‘I have never seen her since,’ Lawrence replied.

My wife remained silent for a moment. Then she said slowly: ‘So she might have had a child by you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lawrence replied looking straight into the fire. There was a long pause before he added, ‘But I am afraid she did not.’

‘Why do you say that?’ my wife asked quickly. ‘Did you have news from or of her?’

‘No, I never had news from or of her,’ he answered. ‘But I feel certain that if she had had a child I would have seen or heard from her again.’

‘I don’t wish to be brutal,’ my wife said gently. ‘But she might have had a child and died under the Japanese before she could let you know. After all, thousands of women and children died in prison camps in those islands.’

‘I don’t think she died,’ Lawrence answered confidently.

‘Then what do you think happened to her?’ my wife insisted. ‘And what did you do to find her – for I can’t imagine that you didn’t try to do so at the end of the war.’

Lawrence answered the last part of her question first. Yes, he had tried to find her but his effort had everything against its success. We must remember he did not even know her name. He did not even know what happened to her after he left her that early morning asleep in the hotel. It was nearly three and a half years later when he himself came out of a Japanese prison. He went straight back to the hotel to find that the proprietor had been killed by the Japanese, the Eurasian operator vanished, and the old servants who might have remembered them both were either dead or gone. Even so he had visited all the women’s camps possible but many of them were already half-empty because after the surrender of the Japanese in 1944, although the situation was still perilous, numbers of women had left the camps without waiting for official permission or assistance. He knew enough of her not to doubt that her urgent spirit would have made her one of the first to go. He had interrogated one emaciated woman camp-commander after the other, and they were all desperately anxious to help but without her name, without even a photograph or snapshot to help his description she had sounded like that of many others. His only hope was that she would write to him. He had warned both his home and the War Office to that effect but as the months passed and he did not hear, he despaired. For long he thought the only explanation was that she was dead, but gradually the certainty grew in him that she was alive and had come through as he himself had done.

‘But if that’s so,’ my wife exclaimed, ‘what on earth’s the explanation of her silence?’

It was to be looked for, Lawrence told her, in that young woman’s conception of what she had called luck. Looking back at the little time he had had with her and poring continuously over the few words they had spoken to each other, he was amazed how often she had referred to it. All put together it was clear to him that she had thought deeply and reverently about the nature of luck. As a result he was pretty certain that she would have left the decision as to their re-meeting largely to the chance which had brought them together. For instance, he was convinced that had she had a child, she would have regarded that as a sign from life that her relationship with Lawrence was meant to continue. If not, then their experience, so unique in its context of time and circumstances, was complete in itself. It was as if she knew intuitively what he himself now believed consciously, that by freely forfeiting a renewal of their relationship that relationship could become more meaningful. Did we know, he asked, that poem of Manley Hopkins:

. . . The thing we freely forfeit, is kept with fonder a care;

Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept

Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it), finer, fonder

A care kept . . .

He was sure that something of that profound faith in chance, fate, coincidence of life or whatever we call these mysterious and incalculable manifestations of the will of God, had made her decide not to see him again. Men had a terrible tendency to institutionalize life. Fear of life, born from their own wilful estrangement from it, made men build fortresses to hold what they had chosen to select from life. Instead of striving to make permanent the passing forms and shapes of meaning it would be more creative if they entrusted themselves to the natural processes of change and so refused to become ensnared in surface patterns. One of the many things for which he had to thank this woman was that her silence since had taught him not to bend life to his own narrow will. It was amazing once he had believed he understood her silence how alive and near to him she had become again. He could hardly feel closer to her than he was now. All the time he had spoken to us it was as if she had been standing beside him whispering the words he was to use. There was not a day that passed wherein he did not hear her voice again in the wind, not a year wherein he did not see her face in the spring and witness her fulfilled in summer. It was in one sense inadequate even to think of her as having been childless. Looking back to their brief time together he had come to realize that what he was today, what he could become tomorrow was, in a sense, the child of their union. He was reborn through it into a timeless dimension.

And that was his end but not ours. My wife, as he finished speaking, had got up and quietly gone to him. Taking his head between her hands she kissed him tenderly on the forehead. It is difficult to express how happy that made me. I had not mentioned before my anxiety as to how she would accept Lawrence in our relationship, since she had only just met him, but it was real and deep. I knew now I need never fear again in that regard. The image of the young woman of Insulinda, and her insight into the nature of chance and circumstance, I felt had joined us too for good. Even the voice of the storm outside in that silence seemed to confirm it. I mentioned at the beginning the strange harmony at the heart of the storm. Let me end with it because at that moment all the confused and frantic tides of noise outside were gathered together and resolved as if into the music of a vast orchestra combining to render a single theme which rose high above the tempest and the night.

^fn1 Malay foreman.

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