I Was responsible for his nickname.
I had found it for him before he had been at school a week.
He was my junior. But as the head scholar of his group, he had passed into a form that it had taken me a year to reach.
His existence had been announced to me by the headmaster’s wife a week before the term began.
‘I should be very grateful,’ she wrote, ‘if you would keep an eye on Bevan. As the only new boy to pass straight into the Upper School, he is bound to feel rather lost his first few days. He will be in the same dormitory as you, so it won’t be difficult for you to give him hints.’
The letter did not predispose me in Bevan’s favour. Nor did Bevan’s personal appearance. He was lankily over-grown, with a sallow complexion and a pimply chin. His collars were too high, his trousers were too short, his shoulders were spotted with a snow of scurf. He had filled his pockets with so many objects that the coat sagged sideways in heavy grooves. His hair fell forward from his crown, to be swept off the forehead with one sweep of a damp brush. He moved with a loose loping stride as though his ankles were in splints, with all the spring coming from his knees and hips. He wore powerful spectacles.
He introduced himself to me on the first evening after hall.
‘I’m Bevan: the chap you are looking after.’
I looked him over slowly.
‘Are you?’ I said. ‘Am I?’
He took my remark literally. He peered at me with a bright, hawk-like eagerness.
‘Yes, that’s right, and the first thing I want you to explain is the system by which set subjects are organized in relation to form promotion. As far as I can see …’
Convention decrees that a new boy does not ask questions. He may only answer them. But Bevan was beyond convention. There was no side of school life on which I was not cross-examined. At first I thought he was timidly anxious to avoid mistakes. Later I fancied that he was just inquisitive. It was a week before I understood. Then I gave him the nickname that lasted him right through his time at Fernhurst. It was simply that he was ambitious; fantastically, overweeningly ambitious; that he was resolved to be a success and appreciated the value of discovering in advance the precise nature of the race that he was running.
Fantastic and overweening are the only adjectives that can describe ambition such as his.
A single example will suffice.
I had explained to him that when a boy had once reached the Upper Sixth, the form order did not alter; that prefectship was decided by a process of automatic seniority. He pondered that thoughtfully.
‘Then, in that case I must get ahead of anyone who’s likely to be a rival before either of us reaches the Upper Sixth. I’m ahead of the boys of my own year. I ought to be able to stay ahead of them. But it might suit me to go up to Oxford at eighteen. I mean to be Head of the School first. Now, I wonder if there’s any one from the year before that’s dangerous. There’s Parkes in Claremont’s. He’s in the Upper Fifth. I ought to try and catch up with him during the next year, and pass him while we’re in the Lower Sixth together. Then I shall be head of the school in the autumn of 1916.’
It was in September 1912 that he said that. I could not help laughing at such far-sightedness.
‘My dear Bevan, if people are going to start looking that far ahead, I might as well be wondering whether I or someone else is going to be Captain of the XI in 1917.’
‘And so you should. As far as I can see Evans is your chief rival.’
He was no less methodical in the planning of his private life. One Sunday afternoon I found him starting on a solitary walk.
‘All by yourself?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘As usual,’ he replied.
It was a strange admission. Most boys are shy of being seen alone. It makes them look unpopular. I felt sorry for ‘Ambition’.
‘I should have thought you’d have got to know one or two of the new men by now.’
‘I haven’t troubled.’
‘What!’
‘One has to be very careful about making friends. Unless your friends belong to the world in which you propose to move, you have either to drop them when that world has become accessible, or remain in a world that you dislike.’
‘I don’t follow that.’
‘No? I should have thought it obvious. There are larger and lesser ways of living. One should try and live in as large a world as possible.’
He spoke in a petulant, slightly patronizing, slightly irritated voice. But I did not understand: not then. I just thought, ‘Poor old “Ambition”. He’s potty.’
Which was how most of us felt about him. We thought him mad and left him to go his own way unmolested. Strangly enough, he was not bullied. Bizarre though his appearance was, there was nothing of the buffoon about him. He was guarded by an unapproachable, dignified reserve. He went up the school at the rate that he had prophesied, a solitary figure, too absorbed by his ambition to share the communal interests and enthusiasms of house and school. Every term he was the winner of some prize. It was all turning out to plan. But he never seemed particularly happy. Occasionally the eager hawk-like look came into his eyes. But for the most part his face wore a driven, preoccupied expression. He was invariably alone. He availed himself of the Sixth Former’s privilege of a study to himself—a privilege rarely taken. The only person in whose company he appeared with any regularity was a weedy, elegantly languid boy in another house, of no particular distinction in work or games, whose father was vaguely ‘county’, his grandmother having been the third daughter of a peer. Myself, I saw very little of him after those first weeks. We seldom met in the classroom or on the field. His eyesight made him a poor footballer, and a worse cricketer; while my scholastic career followed a desultory course to the safe harbourage of the history Sixth. We went up the school by parallel tracks, always just out of hailing distance of one another.
So little, indeed, did I see of him that I had to think twice before I could place the writer of a letter that I received a year after the war, on the notepaper of the Oxford Union. The handwriting was ornate; so was the style.
‘I am now,’ it informed me, ‘for my faults, follies and lack of courage, directing the embryo literary enthusiasms of putative poets. As their controller, adviser, mentor, I from time to time cajole, flatter and otherwise intimidate those from the larger world “whose foreheads wear Apollo’s wreathed crown”, into succouring, guiding and generally supporting their uncertain ambits with counsel, exhortation, and such animadversions on the craft and aims of letters as may seem appropriate to their broader knowledge. May I therefore as a simple Osric, courtier in this cloistered city, humbly supplicate a Prince of Henrietta Street to pass rapiers of dialectic with an ill-harnessed Laertes of the Alpha and Omega Society on the 29th May?’
On a third reading I realized that this was an invitation to take part in the debate of a literary society of which Bevan was the secretary.
‘Well!’I thought.
It was not so much the phraseology of the invitation as the fact that Bevan was responsible for it that surprised me. I had pictured his Oxford career in very different terms: long hours in the Bodleian and the lecture-room: a permanently sported oak. It astonished me that ‘Ambition’ Bevan should be wasting his time on literary societies.
If his letter has surprised me, his appearance did even more. He had been sixteen when I had seen him last. He had by then out grown his untidy coltishness, but I did not expect to be met at the station by a willowy, elegant, almost distinguished figure in a pale blue jumper and a green tweed jacket, who peered at me through horn-rimmed spectacles and spoke in a high, slow and very mannered voice.
Nor had I expected to find in Bevan’s room a photograph of himself in uniform.
‘I never thought they’d pass your eyesight,’ was my comment.
‘Nor did I.’
‘Did they send you overseas?’
‘I got gassed and wounded.’
‘Didn’t all that upset your plans a little?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘I hardly think so. I am reading a short course, you see.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘I had always pictured you as a Fellow of All Souls.’
He laughed at that.
‘Fellowships, that nursery nonsense!’
He spoke disparagingly of scholastic achievement. A man, he argued, must be educated, must be informed on men and manners. But the scholar lived in blinkers. What was the point of slaving to get a first in Greats only to become a glorified Treasury clerk? One might get a long row of letters after one’s name. But what did that amount to? It wasn’t what a man did but what he was, that mattered. He spoke airily, condescendingly. It all sounded very odd, coming from ‘Ambition’ Bevan.
I asked him if he saw any of the other men from Fernhurst who were up at Oxford then. He shook his head.
‘We’ve nothing in common. I never bothered to make friends with any of them there, why should I here? Fernhurst: well, after all …’ he hesitated. He did not want to say anything against his old school. But that pause struck a very precise note of tolerant disparagement. It was as though he were saying, ‘Fernhurst was a small school. Really prominent men could only regard it as a stepping-stone.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘Barlow’s the only one I see at all. I don’t know if you remember him? In Claremont’s.’
I nodded. I remembered him. The tall languid figure in whose society alone Bevan had appeared to take much pleasure.
‘I see quite a bit of him. He’s, of course … well, how shall I put it? …’ He pursed his lips in the attempt to find the correct phrase of qualified denigration, failed, shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s a restful companion. It’s pleasant week-ending with his people. But, come now, don’t let us waste our time talking about Barlow. There’s so much I want to ask about your life in London. Tell me, what sorts of people do you see?’
As he put the question that old hawk-like eagerness came into his face, as though once again he were asking me to map out for him the geography of the road he had to travel.
It was a question that I did not find it particularly simple to answer.
‘As many different kinds of people as possible,’ I said. ‘A novelist ought to be like the centipede, with a foot in a hundred worlds.’
My answer was clearly not of the kind he wanted.
‘Yes, yes; of course, that is the great advantage of being a writer. You can go anywhere, yet you are received. Tell me now, which of the younger writers would you say counted most?’
‘Hugh Walpole sells a lot.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean really counts. What writers, for instance, would be invited to a reception at Londonderry House?’
‘I haven’t the least idea.’
‘What!’ He stared at me as though I were an unclassified disease. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Merely from the professional point of view. I should have thought that you would have been curious to know how your rivals and contemporaries were faring.’
‘I don’t see that invitations to Londonderry House have anything to do with that.’
‘No? I should have imagined that even in these commercial days a writer would have valued the privilege of mixing with the big world.’
He spoke in part pontifically, in his bored, superior Oxford manner; in part with the fretful impatience that had come into his voice at Fernhurst. Clearly, we were talking at cross-purposes.
‘What are you going to do when you come down?’ I asked. ‘Take a flat in London and look round till I find something that really suits me.’
He spoke with an airy confidence.
That evening I made inquiries about him at the College of which I was the guest. There was a titter when I told them how we had nicknamed him at school.
‘The only ambitions he’s shown any signs of here are social. He’s the most crashing snob that ever walked,’ they told me. ‘He’ll only know peers and honourables.’
‘Does he know many?’
‘A good few. It’s not difficult in a place like this. If that happens to be your racket.’
With this information I felt better equipped to deal with Bevan.
When we met next morning, I directed our conversation into a social channel. He expanded, readily. A society columnist could not have been more full of gossip.
I nodded and smiled and interjected an occasional remark. It was easy now to realize what had happened. Bevan was a provincial; with a provincial’s anxiety to mix in the great world, to make a name for himself, to be a figure. He had naturally regarded a small school like Fernhurst as a stepping-stone. He had avoided friendships that might prove a hindrance to him later, concentrating upon the classics, recognizing that to have been head of his school and a scholar of Balliol would make an effective start to a career at Oxford. But that start once made, he had found it possible without further calls upon his scholarship to mix with members of the world that dazzled him. I watched his face as he spoke of his acquaintance with the aristocracy. He was sunning himself in the light of his achievements. Although he had been content to read a short course instead of becoming a Fellow of All Souls, he clearly regarded himself as unqualified a success at Oxford as he had been at Fernhurst.
He seemed, however, to be no happier here than he had been at school. His face still wore that driven look: the fear of being late for something.
I had proof of this before my visit ended.
We had gone into Blackwell’s to buy a copy of the recent New- digate. A tall, loose-limbed young man wearing an old Etonian tie came over to us. Bevan introduced me. As the introduction was one-sided, I did not learn his name. I did notice, however, how completely Bevan’s manner changed. It was hard to say in what particular. But there was a general atmosphere of constraint, of self-consciousness. A tightening up, a talking for effect.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked when we were in the Broad again.
‘That? Oh, that’s Harry Marshall, Lord George Marshall, you know. The Marquis of Patrixbourne’s younger son. A delightful fellow.’
A rich note of satisfaction like the purring of a well-stroked cat had come into his voice. Yes, I thought, you get an enormous kick out of reminding yourself that you know these people, but you’re not in the least happy when you’re with them.
What, I wondered, would happen to him when he came down? He had a private income of some five hundred pounds a year. A sum on which it is possible to make an adequate display at Oxford, but which does not see a social climber very far in London. I also knew how well-stocked London was with young men from Oxford demanding employment worthy of themselves. It would be amusing to watch the outcome. Not that I supposed I should see much of him. I was not nearly grand enough.
Nor was I. Neither should I, had not a friend of mine chosen to fall in love with him. Her name was Lucy Martin. And I can best describe her by saying that she was a typical 1917 club product. She was, that is to say, in the early twenties. She had become politically conscious during the last months of the war when Liberal opinion was turning towards the Labour Party in protest against a capitalist continuation of the war. She was pretty, in the hour’s fashion: dark, bobbed hair, be-jumpered; with the smoke of innumerable cigarettes drifting across her eyes. Her slogan was ‘personal liberty’. Politically, she was extremely narrow, angrily intolerant of every shade of opinion except her own; but in herself she was genuine, warm-blooded, open-hearted. She was in addition admirable company. She had a zest for life. She always enjoyed what she was doing. I saw a good deal of her during the first half of the 1920s.
She regarded me as a kind of father-confessor. She had, however, the habit of describing her acquaintances by their Christian names, so that I had no means of identifying the ‘Raymond’ of a long, inconclusive, unsatisfactory saga. For weeks she had told me about him: how handsome he was, how brilliant, how misunderstood. ‘He could do anything, but anything; only in the way that society’s constituted now there isn’t anything for him to do.’
I asked her what he did do.
‘Nothing, as yet. He’s waiting till he finds work that’s worthy of him. He’s bound to, soon, of course. But in the meantime you can’t be surprised at his being rather bitter, when he sees third-rate people succeeding everywhere.’
He lived in a maisonette flat in Bloomsbury, spent his mornings in the Museum Reading-Room, devoted his afternoons and evenings to a round of parties. ‘He thinks that the best way of finding the kind of work he wants. It’s degrading for a man of his talents to be forced to that kind of strategy. It’ll be different when the Socialists are in power.’
None of which particularly predisposed me in ‘Raymond’s’ favour.
‘Is he very much in love with you?’ I asked. She shook her head.
‘No. That’s what makes it all so wretched. There’s someone else.’
‘Who is she?’
‘I’ ve never met her. But he’s got her photograph all over his rooms. She must be the explanation. There couldn’t be any other. I think you ought to come and see him.’
It was not till I was actually inside his rooms that I identified ‘Raymond’ as my old friend, ‘Ambition’ Bevan.
It was three years since our Oxford meeting. But Lucy’s account of him, a glance round the room so typical of Bloomsbury with its long rows of bookshelves, its Van Gogh reproductions, its Wyndham Lewis etchings, its bright striped curtains, gasfire, many-cushioned divan; a quick survey of the physical change in Bevan, the loose collar, and tie, the long hair, the sneering expression of the mouth, the pitch of voice, mannered and supercilious, told me what had happened in those three years.
He had come down from Oxford with his inherited income of five hundred pounds. He had no job. He was going to look round for one. And that is a bad platform for a young man in London. A young man earning four hundred a year can have a better time in London, which is a man’s city, than anywhere in the world. A man with four thousand a year and no profession can have an exceedingly amusing time in London, spending it. An independent income of four hundred pounds can be of incalculable value to a young man of industry and ambition, at the start of a career. But the one fatal combination is no job and a small unearned income. Particularly in the case of a young man from Oxford with ambitions, but undefined ambitions. Before Bevan had been long in London he had been forced to realize two things: that jobs are not easy to find, and that he himself with no job and very little money counted for nothing in the large vortex of London’s interests. It was not surprising that he had grown bitter. He was, in fact, the most vindictively bitter person under thirty that I have ever known.
Lucy had said that it exasperated him to watch the success of third-rate people. It would be truer to say that he was obsessed with the desire to prove that all success was of a third-rate nature. Before I had been talking to him five minutes he had provided me with an example of his resolve to disparage and diminish the value of the most mild good fortune.
‘By the way,’ he said,‘I saw a story of yours in some magazine the other day. I should imagine that that kind of thing brings in a lot of money.’
‘No. But it clothes and feeds me.’
‘Really? That’s most interesting. Just what I’d have thought. Now, a writer like Ronald Firbank would not have made enough out of all his books put together to buy a cabinet of cigars.’
‘I should doubt it.’
‘Strange, isn’t it? And there’s not the slightest doubt that in twenty years’ time Firbank will be recognized as the one really important writer of this decade.’
The only writers for whom he had a good word to say were those with three-figure circulations, who could not win a footing in such periodicals as paid contributors.
His interest in the social racket was as keen as ever. When we discussed any former acquaintance, one of his first questions invariably would be, ‘What kinds of people does he go about with?’
We happened to mention a certain Soho restaurant. I told him that I liked it, that I went there often.
‘Would fashionable people go there?’ he asked.
I told him that I did not imagine so.
‘Who do go there then?’
‘It’s hard to say. Quite a number of my friends.’
‘Writers and that kind?’
‘More or less.’
‘Quite, quite. You are very wise to move among the people with whom you feel at ease.’
It would be difficult to convey the exact note of patronizing contempt on which he made that comment. He placed side by side my capacity to sell stories to the illustrated magazines and my preference for the company of such people as frequented the Café X. By this standard I was judged and was dismissed.
It was extremely difficult to remain in his company for long and keep one’s temper. It was absurd that a girl as nice as Lucy should have chosen to fall in love with anyone so sour.
‘I can’t imagine what you see in him,’ I said.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I don’t know. He’s so unhappy, he’s such a mess. And it’s such a pity. It’s all so unnecessary. Such a very little thing is needed to put it straight.’
The remedy was not destined to come from her, however. Bevan let her come to his flat, curl up on a rug before his fire, smoke innumerable cigarettes, read his books, make Russian tea for him, argue about politics and the new world. But his attention was entirely focused on the girl whose photographs adorned his room. I knew her slightly. She was one of those bored, listless, amoral creatures of whom the novelists and the playwrights of the period made such fertile copy. Her hair was cut close about her scalp; she walked as though she had no backbone; her voice was so low-toned and drawled that you felt that she would never have the strength to carry a sentence to a full stop. She was well calculated to make supremely wretched any man who pursued her with ‘honourable’ intentions.
‘Why not chuck it?’ I advised him. ‘You won’t get anything that’s worth having there. And there’s a really nice girl who, for some incomprehensible reason, thinks a lot of you.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Yes. I know. Poor little Lucy. But … oh well, one can’t get mixed up with somebody like that.’
‘What do you mean, “somebody like that”? And what do you mean, “mixed up”? Lucy isn’t the kind of girl to start running you into a registry office.’
‘I know, I know, but … oh well, we really haven’t anything in common. And in a thing like that, it has to be the real thing or no thing.’
The old Bevan: with his insistence on the two worlds; and his resolve to get the one ticket in a lottery.
But I did not see very much of him. He was too acid a companion. It was pointless to subject one’s self-confidence to the incessant pinpricks of his irritation.
I preferred to keep track of his movements through Lucy Martin.
So that it was indirectly, from her, that I learnt of the disaster that in terms of poetic justice was an appropriate corollary to his career.
Weary of doing nothing, acutely conscious of the low level at which his social stock was standing, he had sold out his War Loan and invested the resulting capital in a motor business with young Barlow as his partner. He had hoped to kill two birds with one stone. With Barlow’s connexions he would at the same time make money and move in the world from which his lack of prominence was rapidly excluding him.
To a certain extent and for a time his hopes looked likely to be fulfilled. Barlow did bring clients, the majority of whom were listed in Debrett. Unfortunately, they bought their cars on credit. When a slump came, they handed their cars back. Bevan was not the man to litigate against a peer. A day arrived when he was forced to recognize not only that his capital had vanished, but that on certain of his transactions a most unpleasant construction could be placed in a court of law. He was advised to leave the country.
In a fine fever of indignation Lucy brought the news to me.
‘He’s been swindled, that’s quite obvious. Those fine friends of his are making him their scapegoat. I’ve told him so, but he won’t believe it. Instead of showing them up, he’s saying how grateful he is to them for having got him a job with the police. With the police, indeed! That’s what they’ve done for him, a job with the police: a man like that. In a place like Malaya too! That’s where they’re sending him; they would: they want him out of the way. It’s disgraceful. What a waste of talent. But it’s no good telling you. You never liked him. You were never fair to him. But … oh, it’s tragic to think of a man like that being sent to a place like that. It proves that the world wants turning inside out. The way things are run now, a man of real talent doesn’t stand a chance.…’
Fumingly, the flood of words poured on. ‘It’s good luck for you,’ I thought. ‘You’re well rid of him.’
That was in ‘26.
During the next four years I don’t suppose I thought of him three times; and one of those times was when I read the announcement in The Times of Lucy Martin’s engagement to an exceedingly eligible young stockbroker. I had actually been in Malaya a couple of months before it occurred to me to ask whether anyone had heard anything of a man called Bevan.
It was in the Penang Club that I set that question. I was conscious of a stir round me of inquisitive amusement.
‘We’ ve got a Bevan here all right,’ they said.
‘If it’s the same one, I was at school with him.’
‘Would it be R.F. Bevan?’
‘R. F.? Yes, it might,’ I hesitated. ‘It sounds absurd, but I’m not certain of his intitials. We always called him by his nickname.’
‘What was that?’
‘ “Ambition”. We called him “Ambition” Bevan.’
There was a laugh at that.
‘There’s not much ambition about him now,’ they said. ‘He’s the manager of a second-grade plantation, with a half-caste wife and a couple of coloured brats. There’s not a white man between Siam and Singapore with less to boast about. “Ambition” Bevan, indeed!’ I stared at them amazed. Bevan, the man who had thought himself too grand to have an affair with Lucy Martin, married to a Malayan half-caste.
‘How did it happen? What on earth made him do a thing like that?’ I asked.
The answer was given with a guffaw of laughter.
‘His father-in-law’s right arm.’
‘Tell me the whole story, please.’
Up to a point it was a conventional enough story. Bevan had come out with a job in the police. It wasn’t a particularly good job, and it wasn’t likely to lead to much. But it was a ’pukka sahib’s job’. It was official. And in English communities men with a pukka sahib’s job have got to obey the conventions of their caste. They must not, that is to say, get ostentatiously drunk. Nor must they flaunt a liaison with a coloured girl. Which was what Bevan did: in Kuala Sumut, a smallish river station half-way between Port Swettenham and Penang.
Even then it might have been all right if he hadn’t boasted about it in the Club.
The girl’s father was a man of over sixty. He was the old type of planter: the third son of a West Country baronet who had run up debts, caused scandal, been sent to the colonies with a draft on a Penang bank for a thousand pounds. He had come to Malaya in the rough days, before genteel society was established; when it was a man’s world; when women were left behind in Europe and a man as a matter of course established a native girl in his compound. ‘The good bad days,’ old Penton called them. He had made money, he had lost money; he had stood no truck from anyone. Now, at the end of his life, loud-voiced, a heavy drinker, generous and quarrelsome, he was a man that Kuala Sumut regarded on the whole as a credit to itself. He was a figure, a character; with his broad shoulders, his blue-veined cheeks, his mane of white hair, his loud voice, his great hearty laugh, his capacity to drink men half his age beneath the table.
Old Penton was too big for prudery.
He wouldn’t have minded what happened to the youngest of his Eurasian daughters, as long as the girl wasn’t badly treated. But he was not prepared to hear late in the evening, when he was quarrelsome with a succession of late nights and livery mornings, a bored supercilious voice remarking,‘I suppose I mustn’t keep poor little Sally waiting any longer. A little waiting’s good for her. But not more than half an hour.’
That was more than old Penton was prepared to stand. He rose from his chair. He lurched slowly towards the bar. He was not taller than Bevan, but because of his breadth of shoulder he appeared to tower over him.
‘You ought to think yourself lucky to have a girl like Sally waste her time on you.’
He glowered at Bevan. He had never much liked the man. There was something namby-pamby about him; something supercilious and superior. He was in a bad temper, in need of a focus for his spleen.
‘I suppose you think you are so damned important that you can keep her waiting. I suppose you consider yourself her superior?’
His eye ran Bevan up and down. He was in a mood with which every member of the Kuala Sumut Club was well familiar, which most of them had cause to dread. Bevan was nervous, but he was not a coward, he knew how to put a face on things. He replied in his most Oxonian manner.
‘Well, really, after all …’ He paused. It was said in the pitch of voice to which a monocle would have been appropriate. It increased Penton’s irritation. That a weed like this should speak in that tone about his daughter.
‘I suppose you think you’re too grand to marry anyone like Sally.’
There was an angry glint in his eye. He was in a mood that could only have been treated in one way. A hearty laugh, a slap upon the shoulder, an affectionately jocular, ‘Now, what is all this about, old boy? Let’s have a drink and talk it over.’ But affectionate jocularity was not Bevan’s line. The Oxford drawl came back into his voice.
He never got further than that first ‘Well’. Penton had banged his fist down on the table, his face an apoplectic scarlet.
‘You middle-class rat. You think my daughter’s not good enough for you. My daughter? Young man, I tell you this: either you’ll have married my daughter within two days or as far as Malaya’s concerned, you’re broken. Get that straight.’
There was a silence in the room, as he lumbered back to his seat at the bridge-table. Everyone knew that he meant what he had said. They only wondered whether he would remember next morning that he had ever said it.
He did.
He was waiting on the porch of the Club when Bevan came in for tiffin. He lifted himself slowly from his chair.
‘Have you made your mind up, young man?’
‘What am I to take that to mean?’
‘You know! Are you going to marry my daughter or are you not? I give you three minutes to decide. I count for something here, and this I promise you: while I’m alive and I don’t mean to die just yet, you aren’t going to feel safe walking into a single club in the F.M.S.; because if I were to see you there, I’d pitch you straight into the street. Your life, if you stayed on, wouldn’t be worth living; that’s if you don’t marry Sally. If you do, officially you’ll be ruined, but you can come on my plantation. I’ll give you a house. You can live, like others of your breed, on the generosity of your father-in-law. What of it?’
There were quite a number gathered round the Club veranda. Half of them expected Bevan to cringe, to apologize; the rest thought he would try and bluff it through with an Oxonian superciliousness. None of them expected him to capitulate without a fight: to say, ‘l’ll marry Sally. I’ll be glad to,’ in a quiet voice, on a note almost of relief.
That they had not expected.
Yet that is what had happened. He’d married her, resigned his job, gone to work on his father-in-law’s plantation. He had two children now. As far as anybody knew he’d not left K.S. from that day to this.
‘In that case,’ I decided, ‘I’m going to Kuala Sumut.’
Kuala Sumut is a night’s journey from Penang. You travel down in a pleasantly neat motor-ship. Provided you don’t strike ‘a Sumatra’ it’s a cosy journey. There will probably be another half-dozen saloon passengers, a couple of Chinese planters, a European salesman, an English official. Most of the ship is given up to cargo and steerage passengers. But the saloon is comfortable. You settle down to your pahits as the sun goes down. By the time the Chinese boy has begun to lay the dinner, life wears a friendly look. You wake at six to find the ship anchored in the bend of a river, against a wooden jetty. There is a scattered village, attap huts for the most part. On the hill there is the white, wide-verandaed bungalow of the District Officer. Half-way up the hill is the corrugated roof of the Rest House. The sun has just risen across the bay; the village wears a clean, clear look. Its single street is busy with chattering figures.
I had as a travelling companion a young Englishman called Blunden, who was doing the grand tour before settling down to his father’s business. We had brought with us a letter of introduction to the District Officer. We strolled up to his bungalow after break fast to present it.
The D.O. was a man of about forty. He was short and bald and stocky. He had served in the war and risen to the rank of captain. He wore an old Marlburian tie. His white ducks were spotless and his trousers creased. His face was very red. He was a bachelor. I pictured him as the kind of man who would settle down every night to steady drinking, but who would never lose control of his tongue or faculties.
He shrugged his shoulders when I mentioned Bevan.
‘Poor devil, he’s done for himself out here. Done for himself in every way, in fact. After all, even if a man makes a mess of his own life, he does get a kind of second innings in his children’s lives. He can say to himself, “Well, anyhow, I can protect my boys from making the mistakes I made.” If they do come through all right, one can feel that one’s own life’s not wasted. But in Bevan’s case—what is there for those kids of his? The best his boy can hope for is to become a minor clerk—and that girl of his, who’ll want to marry her? She’ll become a white man’s mistress or a Eurasian’s wife. No, poor old Bevan, I’m afraid he’s finished.’
I wondered what manner of man I should encounter.
It was ten years since I had seen him. I remembered the savage, spiteful, snarling creature whose acquaintance I had willingly let drop. If he had been bitter then, heaven knew what these last ten years would have made of him.
I was to find that out soon enough; the very next morning, as I was sitting in the club over a gin pahit. I recognized him at once, though quite possibly I shouldn’t have unless I had been told that he was there. He was very different. He was in typical planter clothes: khaki shorts, bare knees, brown and scratched; a cotton shirt, not too clean and open at the neck. He was still thin, though considerably stouter than when I had last seen him, with the straining of his linen coat suggesting that he was likely to grow a paunch. His face, that had been pimply and pallid, was sallow now and sunburnt, with blue veins breaking out under the eyes and round the nostrils. Physically he was very changed. But it was not his physical change that I noticed so particularly. It was mentally that he was changed. He was at ease, affable, open-handed. The moment he recognized me he came across with outstretched hand, and a broad grin of welcome.
‘My dear fellow, what a nice surprise. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? Then you could have come and stayed with us. You’ll be much more comfortable at the Rest House, but you’d get much more copy staying on a plantation.’
It was precisely the same speech that he might have made ten years back. But the tone, the spirit, were altogether different. Ten years ago he would have sneered at the writer’s search for copy; he would have been on his guard against a comparison between his bungalow and the Rest House. He had still a distinct Oxford accent, but it was genial, not supercilious.
‘Anyhow, you’ve got to come and have a meal with us tonight. Are you alone?’
I told him about Blunden.
‘Fine! Bring him along, too,’ he said.
Ten years ago Bevan would have been on his defensive against a new acquaintance.
‘He seems happy enough,’ I told the District Officer.
The District Officer shrugged his shoulders.
’Heaven only knows what he’s got to be happy over.’
I looked forward to the evening with excitement and curiosity. We had arranged to meet at the club for a pahit, as soon as was convenient after sundown. In Malaya there is no fixed hour for dinner. Dinner is something that happens when one is tired of drinking pahits. At eight o’clock there was still a crowd of us seated round the large centre table.
The District Officer touched my shoulder. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’
He led me to the veranda.
‘Do you see that?’
He did not point, but faced in the direction of a dusky figure that was standing twenty yards away. She was alone. She was bare headed. She was dressed in European clothes: a cheap kind of printed cotton that made her slight figure seem shapeless and dumpy. In the dusk I could not tell if she was pretty.
‘That’s Bevan’s wife,’ the District Officer told me. ‘She’s always here if he’s not home by eight. She’s not allowed in, of course. She just stands there. Sooner or later one of us sees her and tips him the word. If she has to wait over half an hour he has hell to pay when they get back.’
‘They quarrel?’
‘Like hell. She despises him for having married her.’
I took another look at her. She was a forlorn, pathetic figure, standing there in the dusk, between the Club which was forbidden her and the native village from which her marriage and her white blood had excluded her.
‘She looks pretty shabby,’ I remarked.
‘It’s the best that Bevan can afford.’
By the bar Bevan, the better for six pahits, was recounting a metropolitan anecdote that concerned a peer and his own discomfiture.
‘No,’ I thought,‘I don’t begin to understand it,’ as in spite of the warning shoulder-tap from the District Officer, he proceeded to order another round of drinks.
Nor was it in any mood of bravado that he guided us across the compound to the gravel square where he wife was waiting beside an exceedingly battered Morris-Oxford. He rested his hand affectionately on her shoulder.
‘We’ ve kept you waiting, Sally old girl, I know. I’m sorry. But this is an occasion. We don’t have guests so often. Up you get, both of you. We’ll be there in seven minutes.’
His wife got in the back, with Blunden. She made no comment. Bevan talked cheerfully the whole way home. Either he was deliberately ignoring his wife or was so used to her moods that he did not notice her.
‘Here we are,’ he said.
It was the kind of house in which you would expect to find a coloured overseer rather than the white manager of a plantation. It was one-storied, wooden, with a wide flower-hung veranda. At its back was a small grove of coconut palms. In front, running right up to the porch, was the broad park of rubber-trees, set out like soldiers, in even rows. Less than fifty yards away were the lines where the Tamils slept, the factory where the rubber was made into sheets and packed. From the outside an overseer’s house. And inside, was the bareness, the lack of personal possessions that you would associate with an Eurasian employee. No curtains, no flowers, two garishly vivid oleographs, and a framed advertisement poster for cigarettes. A long refectory table, some straight-backed wicker chairs, a couple of long rattan chairs, two or three occasional tables littered with magazines. The floor was covered with grass mats. The long cushioned window was littered with children’s toys, sewing, newspapers. There were not more than a dozen books in the corner of a set of shelves that served the treble purpose of dresser, sideboard and cocktail cabinet. The whole room had a slatternly appearance. I remembered the punctilious neatness of Bevan’s flat in Bloomsbury, the long stretch of bookshelves, the black-framed etchings, the John Armstrong lampshades. Yet here Bevan had none of the self-conscious defensiveness with which ten years earlier he had in the same breath apologized for his flat, and informed you with the greatest truculence that if you didn’t like his scheme of decoration you were an ignorant and tasteless moron. He had never had then, as he had now, the easy relaxed manner of the host.
’There’s whisky on that shelf there, if you want it. I’m going to splash some cold water over myself and change.’
It was then that his wife spoke, for the first time.
‘If you do that, the dinner’ll be even more spoilt than it is already.’
She spoke in a resentful tone, with a whine that was in part the expression of her mood, in part the natural sing-song note of an Eursasian. It was the first time I had seen her in the light. I was surprised to see how plain she was. One usually imagines that when a white man goes native he receives physical attractions of the highest order in compensation for the loss of caste, of social standing. But Bevan’s wife was infinitely less attractive than the average sales-girl that you would see in a London or New York store. She was not particularly young. She had a shapeless kind of face. Her hair, which was straight, parted in the middle and drawn tightly behind her ears, gave her a severe appearance. Her eyes were fine: large, dark, long-lashed. Her teeth were white and even. But her general effect was definitely unprepossessing.
‘I’d prepared dinner for eight o’clock. It’s quarter to nine. You can guess what it’ll be like by now.’
‘In that case it won’t be any the worse for waiting another fifteen minutes.’
As he pushed back the mosquito-netted division between the main living-room and the bedroom, her voice whiningly implored him not to make a noise and wake the children. And this, I reminded myself, was the man who had thought himself too good for Lucy. I walked over to the dozen or so books that now constituted: apparently, his entire library. They were dog-eared and well-thumbed, all of them. But they were not the kind of books I should have expected. There were no signs of the Bloomsbury influence: no Eliot, Firbank, Virginia Woolf. Instead, there was a Horace, the Iliad, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, the Everyman Shakespeare in three volumes. There were only two novels: Spring Floods, and War and Peace: the kind of library one would have expected to find on the shelves of a school prefect during his last term.
I was still looking at them when Bevan came through from the bathroom. He wore a grey cotton, short-sleeved open-collared shirt, a Javanese sarong of imitation Batik. His hair was wet and brushed in the careless way that I had known it first, the sweep of a damp brush across the forehead.
‘Not much of a library, is it?’ he remarked. ‘But I must say it’s all I want. Everything I need is there.’
It was the kind of remark that I could have pictured him as making ten years ago. But then it would have been made with a superior exclusiveness. He was now stating a fact, uncontentiously.
‘Let’s eat. Come on, you two.’
The other two had been seated in the window. They were laughing as they came towards us. Blunden was one of those rare people who bring out the gayest side of whomsoever they happen to be with. Now that Sally was laughing, I could see her charm. She had become another person. She was carefree, irresponsible, the kind of person who could sing and dance out of a mere zest for living. Blunden had that effect on people. He was like the sun; people were warm, happy, at ease, when he was with them. He made friends quickly. I never knew anyone who could count speedier conquests in the lists of gallantry.
Sally remained standing as we took our places at the table.
‘We’ve no servants. It’s a Tamil feast day: Deepavali: I gave them the day off. If I hadn’t they’d have all got drunk. I’ve had to serve the meal as well as cook it,’ she explained; the surly whining note had come back into her voice.
Blunden jumped to his feet, instantly.
‘I can’t let you do that. I must help.’
‘Oh, no, no!’
‘But yes, I insist. I’m a good cook, too, if anything gets spoilt. Come along.’
She was laughing again now.
‘That’s absurd, really,’ she protested.
But he had taken her by the hand, and led her towards the kitchen. There came the sound of clattered plates, of laughter, of several, ‘No, I’ll take this.’ ‘No, that’s yours.’ ‘Now, be careful there.’ When they came back into his living-room, Blunden gave an imitation of a butler. Sally, who had rarely seen a white man relaxed unless he was half-drunk, was bent double with that kind of cackling laugh that only coloured people can produce. All through the meal Blunden continued his clowning. They had a grand time together. Which was as well. It kept down the friction between Bevan and Sally, and it also prevented us from realizing quite how bad the dinner was. For it was without exception the least satisfactory meal I can remember. Such merit as the soup had ever had, had been long since boiled out of it. There was some fish that might have been hot at eight, but for at least an hour had been left to congeal in another part of the oven into a cool flabby paste. The joint on the other hand, had sustained the full force of an hour’s extra heat. Its blackened crust was half an inch thick, there was merely a core of unburnt meat about the bone. The dessert, apples from a tin, alone was unexceptional. Moreover, there was no cream, nor had Sally remembered to put the beer and soda-water bottles in the ice-chest. We drank lukewarm whisky with disrelish. A shocking meal. Bevan, however, who had once deliberated so pensively on the rival merits of pre-phylloxera clarets, did not seem to notice that the meal left anything to be desired. He talked affably, easily; asking questions about London, about mutual friends. Usually, his questions had a social bias: which writer moved in the big world, who was ‘received’, which were the fashionable restaurants, what was the fashionable dining hour? But the questions were set on a note of detached curiosity. There was never the note of personal acrimony that previously had made his questions ring like the stages of a cross-examination.
When the meal was ended, the villainous coffee drunk, he rose to his feet with the grateful sigh of one who is at ease after good fare.
‘Let’s stroll down to the beach,’ he said.
Blunden turned to Sally.
‘Have you got to wash up?’
‘Naturally.’
‘I’ll stay and help you.’
She burst out laughing. The idea of a white man washing plates was ludicrously amusing.
‘You’ll smash them all.’
‘Bet you a dollar that I smash less than you.’
‘I never smash them.’
It was the kind of badinage that you used to hear on Bank Holidays on Hampstead Heath in the days when the costermongers used to drive up in their donkey-carts and pearly coats. Bevan and I left them giggling among the dirty crockery.
‘It isn’t far,’ he said. ‘A couple of hundred yards, at the outside.’
We walked in silence. It was warm, so warm that one could leave one’s coat unbuttoned. But a breeze was blowing, cooling one’s cheeks. There was a moon, silvering the palm fronds, drawing a broad line of silver across the bay, veiling with a poetic dusk the humped shoulder of the far peninsula. The air was scented with frangipani and the small white blossom of the tropics that is half tuberose, half gardenia. On all sides was the murmur of a tropic night: birds, crickets, the rustle of branch on branch. It was the tropics such as one dreams of finding them.
The coconut grove ran right down to the grey-black powdered sand. The tide was full. We sat beneath a casuarina-tree, watching the successive waves quiver in long phosphorus-shot ripples among the rocks. It was one of those tropic nights for which the traveller, returned to northern latitudes, is for ever a little homesick. The kind of night on which it would be easy to believe that Bevan had found ample compensation here in the exchange that he had made.
I had been long enough in the tropics, however, to know the actuality of that exchange. At that very moment mosquitoes were biting at my ankles, and the mosquito is the symbol of all the malice and poison that lies hidden in the seeming softness of a tropic scene. The climate that seems so much kinder to man than that of our northern latitudes is actually robbing him of his health and strength far faster, far more surely and cruelly than frost and cold and rain. In Europe there is glamour in the idea of a man’s ‘going native’. But actually, a man’s life with a native girl is the equivalent of a man’s marrying a woman whom his friends’ wives refuse to meet. Neither more nor less than that. I had no illusions about the exchange of Bevan’s life.
In silence we sat on there. The mosquitoes had begun to worry at my ankles. Unless I did something about it soon, there would be a swollen rash of irritation by the morning. I stood up.
’I’m going back to the bungalow for a sarong. I shan’t be more than a few minutes.’
I walked back along the path. Between the bending palms the lights of the bungalow shone friendlily. I hurried across the porch; then paused astonished.
In the window Blunden and Sally were seated side by side. The washing-up was finished. They were close together, in the dusk. As I stepped into the room, they moved quickly away from one another. Blunden turned, saw who it was, put his hand to his left ear and tugged it. It was a secret sign between us. It meant, ‘Keep away from here. And see that other people keep away for at least an hour.’ It was not by any means the first time that Blunden had made that sign. I had little doubt as to the outcome.
Without a sarong I walked back to the beach.
Bevan was seated as I had left him, seated on the root, looking across the bay. There was about his pose an irritating quality of complacence.
‘I don’t know what you’ve got to be so pleased about,’ I said. He looked up, surprised.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. You were the most ambitious person that I’ve ever known. You were so ambitious that you never allowed yourself to have any fun, so ambitious that none of the things that were good enough for the rest of us, the friends, the lovers, the books, the careers, the way of life, were good enough for you. You were wretchedly unhappy because you weren’t getting the things you wanted, you made everyone you met uncomfortable. Yet, now, you seem completely happy. I can’t think why.’
The moment I had said it I was sorry. It was hitting a man when he was down. But I’d never liked him much. He had never placed any latchet on his own tongue. Besides, I was inquisitive.
I had thought that my outburst would bring another outburst. It didn’t. It brought a question. ‘What do you mean by happiness?’ It was a rhetorical question. As I hesitated, he went straight on. ‘I’ve never had any doubt about that you see. Happiness lies in the right work, in the right friends, the right way of life, the right position. You look at my life now, you say it’s nothing. Of course it’s nothing. Do you think I don’t know that: work that is un congenial, no position, acquaintances who speak another language, a foreign climate, a marriage that is not even friendship. I know how I’ve finished up. And there’s no hope: not the slightest. I don’t need telling that. But, even so … no, even now … I don’t think that I was wrong.’ He paused. He was looking at the panorama of his past: with a detached, impersonal interest: so that he could speak of it with his voice level, with no note of acrimony.
‘It’s like this, as I see it,’ he went on. ‘The fact that one person fails does not mean that there is no such thing as success. Because one is driven to do work one hates, that does not prove that there does not exist the work in which a man can express his nature. Some men have found it. In the same way there’s such a thing as friendship even though your friend betrays you; such a thing as love though your wife deceives you; such a thing as talented intellectual society though your lot has cast you among boors. Those things do exist. And I wanted them so desperately. While there still seemed a chance that I might get them, that I might pick up what I see now is the thousandth ticket in a lottery, well, naturally, I was difficult. I saw things slipping from me that I couldn’t bear to lose. It’s hard to be philosophical when your life’s in the making. But when it’s once made, when it’s spoilt, irremediably, why, that’s another thing.’
He paused; then said about the truest thing that I have ever heard about the lot of human beings on this planet :
‘It’s quite easy to be happy, when once you know you never will be happy.’