He felt that he must leave as soon as possible, and go back to England. The fit that he had suffered had been a sharp warning to him that his time was getting short. His journey to Burma, he felt, had been a complete fiasco. He had come out from England to locate a beachcomber and set him on his feet if that were possible; instead, he had found him a man of means, happily married, and holding a considerable position for a man of his age in the country of his choice. He had enjoyed every minute of the journey; he would have liked to stay and see more of the lovely country that he had come to, but there was no time for that. His time was very short; he would not waste it. If Morgan did not need his help there would be all the more for Duggie Brent, or for the Negro if he ever got in touch with him. He must get back to Watford and begin again.
He rested all day on the verandah. Morgan came back at about teatime and sat smoking with him, and Mr Turner told him something of what was in his mind.
“Them steamers down the river to Rangoon,” he said. “I got to be thinking about getting back. The firm wouldn’t half play hell if they knew I was sitting here like this with a nice drink ’n a cigar, ’n not doing a bloody thing.”
Morgan said, “Stay a few days more and get yourself quite right. The firm would give you sick leave.”
Turner said, “I don’t think I’d better. I’ve not got much time. I better be getting back to Rangoon.”
“There’s a boat down the river tomorrow, if you really feel you’ve got to go.”
“I better take it. I can’t afford to hang around.”
Morgan glanced at him. “Did you see anyone in England about these fits you get? A doctor?”
Mr Turner said, “Oh yes. I got examined by a specialist after the last time.”
“What did he say about it?”
Mr Turner was silent for a minute. Then he said, “It wasn’t so good.”
“Is it very bad?”
“All be the same in a hundred years,” said Mr Turner quietly. “That’s the way I look at it.”
Morgan said, “It’s kind of—fatal, is it?”
Mr Turner stared at him in admiration. “You’re a pretty sharp one,” he said. “I never told you anything o’ that, did I?”
“No. But it’s right, is it?”
“Aye, it’s right enough,” said Mr Turner. “I got bits of shrapnel going bad inside my napper, ’n they can’t do nothing about it. I got seven or eight months to go, not more. But I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“I’m very sorry.” Morgan was silent for a minute, and then said, “Why did you come out here, really?”
“I told you. I got business in Rangoon.”
“I know. Was it because you got a very bad account of me from my mother, by any chance?”
Mr Turner shifted uneasily in his chair. “I thought if I was out here I might look you up,” he said evasively.
Morgan got up and walked over to the verandah rail, and stood looking out over the river. He turned presently and came back to the table by their chairs, and took another cheroot.
“When you see my mother,” he said, “try and make her understand the way I live out here. Try and make her understand that Nay Htohn isn’t a naked savage, holding me with Oriental wiles. Tell her I’m doing work I can do well. Tell her I’m prosperous and happy. Try and make her understand.”
Mr Turner said, “I’ll go and see her when I get back home next week, ’n I’ll do what I can. But things look kind of different back in Notting Hill Gate, you know.”
“I know.” There was a pause. “You’re going back home at once?”
Mr Turner nodded. “Soon as I can get a seat on a plane.”
Morgan turned, and walked slowly to the end of the verandah, smoking and thoughtful. When he came back he said, “It’s been very, very nice seeing you here, Turner. I’ve had it on my mind for some time that I should have tried to find out something of what happened to you—and the other two in that ward at Penzance. I know a bit about the nigger, but I never heard a thing about you or Corporal Brent.” He stood looking down at Turner in the chair. “I felt a bit of a rotter about that,” he said quietly. “I’ve got on so well myself that I ought to have been able to spare time to poke around a bit and see if you and Brent were getting on all right. We were all in it together then. We ought to have kept up.”
“Well, that’s what I thought,” Mr Turner said. “I mean, I got a nice house at Watford ’n a bit of money saved, in spite of everything and going through a bad patch and that. And then, when the chap in Harley Street said what he did, I kind of thought I ought to get and find out, case any of you hadn’t been so lucky as me.”
“That’s why you came to Burma, really, isn’t it?” said Morgan.
Mr Turner said defensively, “I got business to do in Rangoon as well.”
They smoked in silence for a few minutes; then he said, “It’s been nice of you ’n Mrs Morgan—I mean, your wife—to have me,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d be well off and settled like this, or maybe I wouldn’t have come. I thought … well, things’d be different to what they are.” He hesitated, then said, “I got in prison for ten months after leaving hospital; maybe you know about that. Over them trucks of sugar. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you were a proper magistrate, and that.”
Morgan grinned. “That’s all right,” he said. “You didn’t get away with it?”
Mr Turner shook his head. “They give me a year,” he said, “but I got two months off for good conduct. I went a bit too far that time.”
The pilot said, “You needed money very badly?”
“’Course I did. I got kind of worried.” He turned to Morgan. “I don’t know how anybody gets along these days without they do a deal now and then to get something put by for when they can’t work any longer.” He paused, and then he said, “Time was, in the old days, a chap could save for his old age, or being ill, or that, out of what he earned on a salary. But now with income tax, ’n purchase tax, ’n every other bloody sort of tax, unless you do a deal now ’n again you can’t get to be safe at all. Straight, you can’t.”
Morgan said thoughtfully, “It’s like that in England now, is it?”
“’Course it is. Chaps working on the bench, they got security of a sort. Chaps working for the Government, they got a bloody great pension to look forward to. But chaps working on their own, like shopkeepers, or chaps working in offices like me, they ain’t got nothing to speak of. You got to keep your eyes wide open for a deal all the time, and some of them deals can be pretty slippery.”
Morgan grinned. “Like the sugar?”
“Like that bloody sugar. I knew it was a bad un, but what’s a man to do?” He turned to Morgan. “I was kind of worried,” he said simply. “I mean, I’d just got married, and I thought the wife was going to have a baby. She never, but I thought she was. And I hadn’t got a bean saved—fifty or sixty pounds, maybe, not more. And I got to worrying over what would happen if I got killed or badly hurt, ’n where she would be then. I mean, a chap’s got to do something.”
“I suppose so.”
There was a pause. “Well, that’s all over and done with now,” said Mr Turner. “I got three thousand pounds saved up, ’n a nice house, ’n furniture, ’n all. I wouldn’t like the wife to know the way some of it come, but it’s better ’n leaving her stuck with nothing at all next year. And then,” he said, “I got to kind of thinking about us four in that room in hospital. And I thought, the wife doesn’t know how much I’ve got, so she won’t miss a little bit of it ’n I could pop around before I go and see if you was all all right.”
“I was thinking on the same lines,” said Morgan slowly. “I was thinking I ought to try and find out something about you three. I don’t know anything about Corporal Brent. But I do know a little bit about the nigger.” He glanced at Mr Turner. “There was the hell of a row about that nigger,” he said thoughtfully. “Like to hear about it?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
NAY HTOHN came out
of the house on to the verandah with her sewing in a flat rush basket. The men got to their feet. “I was just starting in to tell Turner about that nigger at Penzance,” Morgan said.
She smiled. “I like that story. I wish we could find out what happened to him in the end.” They sat down again, and Nay Htohn knelt down by her husband’s chair, and began sewing.
Morgan said, “I must try and get this straight—it’s rather a long time ago. But I was interested at the time, of course—and it was damn funny, because when I was at Exeter after Penzance we shared a mess with some Americans, and we used to pull their legs about it.”
He paused, looking out over the wide river. Over the Pegu Yoma in the far distance the great thunderheads of the monsoon were massing for another storm; a little wind blew past them on the verandah, cool and refreshing jungle rats scampered up and down the trunk of the banyan tree, their tails held high; on the river beneath them sampans drifted by.
“There was an American lieutenant in the Army Air Corps who’d been stationed at this place Trenarth,” Morgan said at last. “He came in one day in a B-25, and at lunch I heard him telling the other goddams all about it. I guessed it was our nigger when I heard him telling them.”
Mr Turner asked, “What did he say?”
The American had said, “Colonel McCulloch sure has got himself a mess of nigger trouble dowm at Trenarth. It’s got so the boys down there don’t just know who they’re to take orders from, the Colonel or the landlord of the pub.”
It had been just before closing time when Sergeant Burton blew his whistle as he raced around the corner of the White Hart in pursuit of Private Dave Lesurier. In the bar Mr Frobisher had already said, “Time, gentlemen, please,” to a room full of Negroes, beaming at them as he did so. He used the words that he had used for twenty-seven years each evening to warn his patrons at five minutes to ten that they must drink up and go, at the conclusion of his licensed hours. He beamed, because he was well aware by now of the simple pleasure that the Negroes got from the words which were his common use. They would grin back at him, and drink up, and go quietly on the stroke of ten o’clock. The bar of the White Hart was therefore reeking with Anglo-American goodwill when Sergeant Burton blew his whistle and the jeep came screaming to a standstill in the street outside and the fun started.
The Negroes went tumbling out into the street to see what was going on, and because they had to go anyway. After the last had left, Mr Frobisher walked slowly round the bar, wiping it down with a rag. Then he walked to the front door, to bolt it for the night, and stood for a minute looking out into the street.
In the moonlight he could see the street was full of American soldiers, white and black. There was whistling and the arrival of more cars with Military Police; somebody was standing up in the back of a Command car and ordering the troops back to their camps. There was a good deal of confusion, but the doings of the military did not interest Mr Frobisher very much. He bolted the door and retired into his parlour, and put on the wireless and lit his pipe, and sat down for a quiet smoke before bed.
Within five minutes the U. S. Military Police were hammering on his door. He heaved himself out of his chair and went to open it; he was faced by a sergeant with a couple of soldiers at his back, all armed to the teeth.
The sergeant said, “We got to search this house for a nigger. You got any niggers in here?”
“Nobody in here but me,” said Mr Frobisher. “Not unless my daughter’s upstairs in her room.”
“Well, we got to search this house,” the sergeant said, and made as if to come in.
The landlord said slowly, “Here, steady on a minute. What’s all this about?”
“One of your village girls got raped or near raped by a nigger,” said the sergeant. “The lieutenant said, search all the houses in this block.”
Mr Frobisher said, “You got a search warrant?”
The sergeant stared at him nonplussed. “We don’t need no warrant.”
Mr Frobisher said, “Well, you can’t go searching houses in this country without you’ve got a warrant. You ought to know better. There’s no nigger in this house now, anyway. They all went at ten o’clock.”
“For crying out loud!” the sergeant said. “You going to let us in here, or not?”
“You got to have a warrant if you’re going to search my house,” said Mr Frobisher firmly.
One of the men behind pushed forward. “Let me see if I can do it, Sarge.” The sergeant gave place to him. Private Graves had lived and worked in England for five years.
“Mr Frobisher,” he said, “we’ve got no warrant to search your house. But one of your young ladies has complained that a nigger stopped her and did something to her in the street, and he’s run away. We thought maybe he might be hiding in your back yard or some place. Mind if we come in and have a look?”
“Sure,” said the landlord, “go ahead. Why didn’t you say that first of all?”
Slightly bewildered, the sergeant led his men into the house. They spread out quickly, looked in all the ground-floor rooms, and went out into the yard. Mr Frobisher said to Private Graves, “Take a look upstairs if you want to.” He went with him and knocked on his daughter’s door.
She answered from inside, “Who’s that?”
“Come on out a minute,” her father said.
She appeared in a kimono, and saw her father standing with an American soldier. He said, “This gentleman wants to know if you’ve got a nigger in there.”
She said, “Why, Daddy, what a thing to say! You’d better go to bed.”
He was quite unmoved. “Well, that’s what they want to know.” In a few words he told her what was happening. “You’d better let him take a look.”
A very much abashed military policeman put his head in at the door and looked around, while Bessie regarded him as so much dirt. He went downstairs again with Mr Frobisher, and the girl slammed her door.
The sergeant left one military policeman in the yard and moved on to the next house.
A few minutes after that there was the noise of a jeep being started up, a challenge, and two shots. In the street outside there was turmoil. Cars filled with running men and roared off in the direction of Penzance. Quite suddenly the street was quiet again, still and deserted in the bright moonlight.
Mr Frobisher shut the street door carefully, and shot the bolts, one by one. Then he turned, and Bessie was standing halfway down the stairs, in her kimono.
“Was that shots fired?” she asked, and there was wonder in her voice.
“Aye,” said her father heavily. “It won’t do no good, that.”
The girl said, “Lor’! …” And then she asked, “Who was it got assaulted, do you know?”
“I dunno.”
“Do you know which of the boys did it?”
“I dunno. One o’ them called up from the cotton fields, I should think. Some o’ them don’t seem ever to have been educated at all, not to speak of.”
She tossed her head. “Even so, a girl what’s got her head screwed on right doesn’t have to get assaulted, not unless she wants to.”
“Aye,” he said, “that’s right.”
They went to bed.
Lieutenant Anderson of the U. S. Military Police did not get a great deal of sleep that night. He was a decent man, and secretly concerned at what he had found in the air-raid shelter. Easing his way cautiously around the buttress, gun in one hand and torch in the other, with a sergeant back of him carrying a submachine gun, he had found a young Negro sitting on a seat, his head bowed down on his knees, and drenched in his own blood. He put away his gun in favour of a first-aid kit, and rushed the lad in a Command car to the nearest hospital, in the next street, and left him there under guard. He had then an awkward five minutes with a British police sergeant who turned up and wanted to know all about it. Lieutenant Anderson was well aware that the British civil police had funny ideas about shooting. They went unarmed themselves, and seemed to have no difficulty in deal
ing with the pansy British criminals that way.
This police sergeant was a man of fifty, unimaginative and difficult. “Was that your men shooting in the street just now?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said the lieutenant.
The sergeant said ponderously, “Well, you can’t do that here.” He reached for his black notebook. “Can I have your name and unit?”
“Say, what is this?” said the lieutenant unhappily. “We’re the Military Police. We don’t have to make any report to you.”
“Maybe not,” said the sergeant equably, “but I got to make a report about you. You can’t go shooting off guns in the street like that, not in this country you can’t. You might ha’ killed somebody.”
Lieutenant Anderson realised that some explanation was required from him. “Maybe you wouldn’t know about the color difficulty,” he said patiently. “It’s kind of different when you are dealing with a nigger. They don’t react until you show a gun.”
“Was this Negro armed when you found him?” asked the sergeant.
“Only just his knife,” said the lieutenant. “But the boys wouldn’t necessarily know that.”
The sergeant wrote it all down laboriously in his notebook. Again he demanded the lieutenant’s name and unit, and got it, and wrote it down. “It doesn’t seem to be anything to do with us,” the sergeant said at last. “I’ll have to make out a bit of a report because of the firing, but I don’t suppose you’ll hear no more about it.” He went away at last, leaving Lieutenant Anderson irritated and slightly worried.
He drove back to his camp and, before going to bed, questioned Sergeant Burton rather closely. The sergeant, fat and forty, did not know the name of the girl, but he had seen her in the street several times, and knew where she lived.
It seemed to Lieutenant Anderson that before he made out his report to Colonel McCulloch he should make the matter water-tight by getting evidence from the girl, and at half-past eight next morning he was knocking on her cottage door, with Sergeant Burton at his side.