Heat is the title of a novel by an American authoress, Isa Glenn, a name quite unfamiliar. The cover-notice says “Miss Glenn,” but the book is, in the life sense, mature, and seems at least like the work of a married woman. I don’t think any married woman would have written Jane Eyre, nor either The Constant Nymph. In those books there is a certain naive attitude to men which would hardly survive a year of married life. But the authoress of Heat is not naive about her men. She is kindly, rather sisterly and motherly, and a trifle contemptuous. Affectionate contempt, coupled with yearning, is the note of the feeling towards the officers in the American army out there in the Philippines, and to the American fortune-hunting business men. The authoress, or rather, let us say the heroine, Charlotte, is evidently quite a good sport, from the man’s point of view. She doesn’t let you down. And so the men are quite good sports to her. They like her; and she likes them. But she feels a little contempt for them, amid her liking: and at the same time a yearning after some man who will call her his own. The men, for their part, feel very honourable and kindly towards Miss Charlotte, but they are a little afraid of her. They have to respect her just a bit too much. No man could feel tenderly possessive towards the Statue of Liberty. And Charlotte is, in the way of independence and honesty and thinking for herself, just a bit of a Statue of Liberty.
She is not so liberal, though, about the women, the wives of the officers out there in Manila. They are to her just repellent, even if not repulsive. She sees them with that utter cold antipathy with which women often regard other women — especially when the other women are elderly, physically unattractive, and full of flirtatious grimaces. To a man, there is something strange and disconcerting in the attitude of a woman like Charlotte towards other women, in particular her married seniors. She seems to be able to eye them with such complete cold understanding, that it takes one into quite another world of life. It is how a slim silvery fish in a great tank may eye the shapeless, greyish, groping-fishes that float heavily past her.
The story is laid in the Philippines, those islands belonging to the United States far away in the steaming hot Pacific, towards China: islands bought from Spain with good American dollars. A forlorn, unholily hot, lost remnant of the world belonging, really, to the age of the ichthyosaurus, not to our day.
To Manila, then, goes Charlotte, to be a school-teacher to the brown native children: a school-teacher, of course, with high missionary fervour. On the same boat, a transport, goes Tom Vernay, young lieutenant in the American army, fresh from the military school of West Point. There is also a big blond heavy American, Saulsbury, out to make a fortune in cement: modern cement buildings for the Philippines.
This is before the war: twenty years ago, or so. The whole of the first half of the book, at least, is written with the pre-war outlook. Maybe it was actually written before the war.
Charlotte, of course, loves Tom Vernay. But “loves” can mean so many things. She is thrilled by a certain purity in him, and by his intense, but vague, romantic yearning. He is an American who is “different”: he has poetry in him. So Charlotte can feel intensely practical and “wise,” hence a little protective and superior. She adores him. But at the same time, she feels a little protectively superior.
And he? At moments he adores her. At moments, he falls within her spell. He always likes her. He always, unconsciously, relies on her in the background. But! There is always a but! She is beautiful, with her fine gold hair and her girl’s boyish figure. But!
But what, then?
Well, she is not exactly romantic. Going out to be a schoolteacher, to “uplift” brown Filipinos! Going out alone, unprotected too, very capable of looking after herself, and looking after him too! Going out with a great idea that natives and niggers are as good as you are, if they are only educated up to your level. We’re all alike under the skin, only our education is unequal. So let’s level up the education. That kind of thing!
Yes! It was generous and democratic, and he approved of it in an admiring sort of way. But!
Another but! What is it this time?
This time, it is that his music simply won’t play. With the key of her fine democratic spirit she only locks up the flow of her passion tighter, locks it up dead. It needs another key altogether to release the music of his desire.
He is romantic. Manila, shut up tight and tortuous, steaming hot and smelly within the ponderous Spanish fortifications, fascinates him with the allure of the haughty and passionate past. Let it steam and smell! so long as the powerfully sweet flower, the Dama de la Noche, also perfumes the nights, and guitars tinkle in unseen patios, and the love-song scrapes and yearns and sinks in the Spanish throat. Romance! he wants romance.
And as the months pass by, and the heat soaks into his brain, and the strange reptilian moisture of heat goes through his very bones, he wants romance more and more.
Charlotte, poor thing, in a cheap, half-breed lodging-house, spending her days trying to teach insolent brown native children whose heads are rancid with coconut oil, and whose nauseating sexual knowingness seems to be born with them, as a substitute for any other kind of knowledge, does not get so much romance out of it. She is kind to her pupils, she goes to the huts of their parents, and is purely charitable. For which reason, the lizard-like natives jeer at her with a subtle but fathomless contempt. She is only the “ticher,” she is, to put it orientally, their servant, their white bondwoman. And as such they treat her, with infinite subtle disresprect, and that indescribable derision of the East.
Poor Charlotte doesn’t like it at all. A well-born, well-educated American girl, she is accustomed to all the respect in the world. It is she who feels privileged to hold a little contempt for others, not quite as clear and sure as herself. And now, these dirty little sexual natives give off silent and sometimes audible mockery at her, because she is kind instead of bullying, and clean instead of impure. Her sort of sexual cleanness makes the little brown women scream with derision: to them it is raw, gawky, incredible incompetence, if not a sort of impotence; the ridiculous female eunuch.
And there must be a grain of truth in it: for she cannot keep her Vernay in her spell. He has fallen wildly, romantically in love with a mysterious Spanish beauty. Romance, this time laid on with a trowel. The oldest, haughtiest family on the island, selling out to retire to Spain, from under the authority of these dogs of Americans! — a fat, waddling, insolent, black-moustached Spanish mother, with her rasping Castilian speech! and a daughter, ah! a Dolores! small and dusky and hidden in a mantilla! — about to be carried off to Spain to be married to some elderly Spaniard who will throw his hands in the air when he is excited! — Dolores, who has a fancy for the blue eyes and the white uniform of the American officers!
Tom Vernay has blue eyes and a white uniform, and is tall. One glimpse of the nose-tip of Dolores, from under her mantilla, does what all the intimacy with Charlotte could not do: it starts his music wildly playing. He is enamoured, and enamoured of Dolores. Through a little brother, a meeting is brought about. Then there is the daily clandestine stroll upon the unfrequented wall. In all the heat! Dolores Ayala! Ah, heaven of romance! Ah, Tom! He feels himself a Don at last! Don Tomas!
And Charlotte, very much in the background, losing her good looks and the fine brightness of her hair, going thin and raky and bitter in the heat and insult of the islands where already she has sweated for three years, must even now defend Vernay from the officers’ wives.
The love-affair works up. The Ayalas are about to depart. Tom Vernay must marry Dolores. Against her parents’ will, he must marry her clandestinely, in the American church. But he must resign his commission in the army first, for there will be a great scandal, and he must not expose his country to odium.
So, he resigns his commission. The Ayalas are almost ready to sail. A great buzz goes up among the officers’ wives, when the news comes out that Tom Vernay has sent in his resignation. The colonel’s wife is giving a dinner-party at the Army Club: one of the endless perspiring parties. Charlotte is there, because they want to pump her; otherwise they don’t ask her: she is merely the “ticher” of the natives, the school-teacher, shrivelling in the heat, becoming an old maid. Vernay is not present.
As the party moves from the table to go to dance, Vernay, white and strained, appears and murmurs to Charlotte that she must come to his room for a moment. Resentfully, she goes. To find — ah, to find the mousy, muffled-up Dolores there, all thrilled with herself for having escaped the family vigilance and arranged a rendezvous.
Tom Vernay, the romantic, is absolutely unequal to the occasion. Dolores, laughing, throws herself on Tom’s breast, kissing his mouth. Tom, who has honourable intentions, can’t stand it, holds her off and turns her to Charlotte — poor Charlotte! “Listen, dear, you must go home tonight with Miss Carson. And tomorrow morning we can get the chaplain to marry us.”— “Why?” cries Dolores. “I can never marry you! Didn’t you understand?”— “We will talk about that in the morning. Go home now with Miss Carson, like a good girl.” Dolores, instead of being the “good girl,” looks at poor Charlotte. And Dolores refuses to be taken off. “I got here so easily,” she laughed. “I can do this wicked thing often and often, before we sail for Spain. I shall have to crawl on my knees to the Stations in penance. But is it not worth it — your eyes are so blue!”
It isn’t what Dolores would say in real Spanish, but the gist is all right. Tom insists that she go home with poor Charlotte, who by no means enjoys this scene in his bedroom at the Club. He gives Dolores to understand that he has resigned his commission in order to marry her: marry her in the morning.
This is too much for Dolores. She loathes being put off. She loathes the other woman, the very school-teacher, dragged in on her. She never intended to marry him, and have heretic babies, and be carted off to the United States. Not she! But this wicked thing! Ah! But now, without a uniform, she doesn’t intend even to love him. Adios!
The faithful Charlotte smuggles her out of the Club, unseen, as she smuggled herself in. Home goes Dolores. The book, the biggest, romantic part, is finished.
The second part opens some years later. Vernay, his commission gone, has deteriorated rapidly in civilian life, till now he is a mere whisky-lapper, a derelict in smelly clothes, gone native. Charlotte, who has still been teaching school, but far away in a lonely island, returns and determines to find him, to rescue him.
She finds him: but he is beyond rescue. She finds him in a squalid native quarter, down by the ill-smelling river, in a region of broken bottles. He is vague and corrupted, and his reptilian little native wife is big with his second child. It is enough. The book ends.
Poor Charlotte! There is nothing more to be done.
What was there ever to be done? The kind of attraction he wanted in a woman she hadn’t got, and would have despised herself for having. She shuddered at the sexual little beasts of native women, working men up with snaky caresses. Ah, yes, she had to admit it, poor thing, that these native women had a power, a strange and hideous power over men. But it was a power she would loathe to possess.
And lacking it, she lost her Vernay, and went on being a faded school-teacher. We can call it the man’s fault: the man’s imbecility and perversity. But in the long run, a man will succumb to the touch of the woman who, touching him, will start his music playing. And the woman whom he esteems and even cherishes, but who, touching him, leaves him musicless and passionless, he will ultimately abandon. That is, if he gets the chance.