The Shadow and the Peak Page 7

  Decidedly the brothel. He only wished Pawley would get on with it.

  “Even worse than disease,” Pawley said. “And that brings us to this disagreeable letter that I’ve just received.” He took the letter out of the envelope, but kept it folded. “I apologize on having to pass on anything so unpleasant. But I’ve tried to prepare the ground. I think you’d better read it yourself.”

  Douglas took it. He saw at once that it had nothing to do with his night-life in Kingston. It was an anonymous letter written on cheap lined paper in an uneducated hand. He read it over carefully.

  I feel it a duty to tell you, Sir, that John Cooper who is at your school is not fit to mix with other human beings. His grandfather died in the Spanish Town leper colony, also his aunts, facts which you may prove for your good self. It is well known that leprosy is passed through to children, and therefore, Sir, you must send John Cooper away from your school, otherwise when the facts get about you may confidently expect other children to be withdrawn. In writing this letter to you only your Personal Interest is at heart, Sir, since you do not wish other children to become lepers or to lose your school.

  Douglas handed back the letter with disgust. Pawley said with some satisfaction:

  “Now you see the sort of thing we’re up against in this country, Lockwood.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But from one point of view, I’m not sorry to have received this.” He watched for Douglas’s surprise at the paradox, but Douglas was still feeling too disgusted to look surprised, and he went on, “There are plenty of people who opposed my wife and myself when we started this school. They told us there were already too many schools here, and that in any case it was no use trying anything experimental—it wouldn’t suit the island character.” He flapped the letter. “I think this proves them wrong in both respects. Nobody who read it could claim that Jamaicans were well educated.”

  Douglas couldn’t follow that argument. It seemed to him that the writer of the letter wasn’t the sort of person who would have gone to one of the more expensive schools anyway, but he wasn’t interested in it as a justification of Pawley’s system. He only wanted to know what Pawley intended to do.

  Douglas said, “Well, there’s only one place for anonymous letters. The waste-paper basket.” He was a bit annoyed about all the palaver Pawley was making—why hadn’t he torn up the letter straightaway instead of waving it in front of the staff? For all he knew, Douglas would start talking about it to Morgan, and Morgan would pass it on to someone else, and by the end of the day the rumour would be round the whole school, doing exactly the sort of damage that the writer intended.

  “Quite,” Pawley said, nodding his beard. “But on the other hand we can’t afford to ignore it altogether.”

  “We can send it to the police,” Douglas said. “But I doubt if they’ve any chance of finding out who wrote it­ and investigations are bound to start people gossiping.”

  “I agree with you,” Pawley said. “It would be a great mistake to drag in the police at this point.’’ He sounded as if he had come to that conclusion pretty regretfully—no doubt he would have enjoyed demonstrating to the police that the letter was a complete justification for the existence of Blue Mountain School. “But in fairness to the other children I feel we ought to investigate the accusations.”

  Douglas said, “I don’t see that it matters if the entire Spanish Town leper colony is composed of John’s grandparents and aunts. We know that John’s fingers and toes aren’t dropping off in the bath.”

  Pawley’s eyes goggled patiently through their lenses.

  “Unfortunately—or perhaps I ought to say fortunately—the disease doesn’t always show itself at first in quite such a hideous form. A child might have it without any of the outward signs of a leper.”

  “It wouldn’t be contagious at that stage, would it?” Douglas said, climbing down a bit.

  “It’s far less contagious at any time than most people believe,’’ Pawley said. “The popular fear of it is largely due to superstition.” Douglas couldn’t help feeling that he had just been reading it all up in the encyclopaedia. But Pawley put on a modest smile and said, “You see, Lockwood my two years in Jamaica haven’t been entirely wasted.”

  Douglas said, “Then what do you propose to do?”

  “I’d rather ask, what do you propose to do? As you know, my policy is to leave as much as possible in the hands of individual tutors. I don’t like to think of myself as your superior officer. Only as your guide.’’

  “Then I suppose we’d better ask the doctor to give John a medical examination,” Douglas said.

  “Exactly.” Pawley looked gratified. “I thought you’d agree about that. In fact I’ve already telephoned Dr. Knowles and asked him to come up to the school this evening. You might warn John that he’ll be wanted about half-past five.’’

  “John’s going to think it pretty funny,’’ Douglas said.

  “We can’t help that.”

  “Some of the others might be examined at the same time,” Douglas suggested. “Otherwise all the children will be trying to guess what’s the matter with John—and it any of them have heard rumours about leprosy in his family, they’ll start gossiping wildly. We might ask Knowles to examine the whole dormitory. It would avert suspicion.”

  Pawley looked pleased. “I always said we could achieve the best results by putting our heads together.” He put on a smile of modest humour. “Whatever my faults, Lockwood, I don’t think you’ve ever found me too proud to accept ideas simply because they aren’t my own.”

  John didn’t have leprosy, of course—at least not in any recognizable or contagious form.

  The doctor came up half an hour early, and the boys had to be fetched from all over the grounds. They assembled in the surgery. The only difficulty was what to tell Mrs. Morgan, who was touchy about her authority as O.C. medicine and medical inspections. Douglas knew that if he told her about the letter it would reach the ears of Morgan in a matter of minutes, and the least they would have to put up with thereafter would be a discourse on leprosy, including its history, causes, cures, and the statistics of its incidence. Douglas consulted Dr. Knowles downstairs.

  “Don’t worry,” Knowles said. “I’ll tell her I’m writing a special report on the improved health of boys at school in the hills. I’m just taking this as a representative bunch.” He winked. He was a nice little chap with a nut-brown face and white hair. He was used to dealing with the credulous Mrs. Morgan.

  Half an hour later he came downstairs again. Douglas walked into the garden with him.

  “All poppycock,” he said. “The little chap’s as sound as you or I.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Tell Pawley for me, will you? I’ve got to get off.”

  Douglas found Pawley in his bungalow and passed on the news.

  “I’m very pleased to hear it, Lockwood,” he said, as though there was a possibility that he might not have been. “Very pleased indeed.”

  “I hope it’s the last we hear of it.”

  Pawley smiled ruefully.

  “I hope so. But malice is a bad thing to be up against. I should describe it as one of the most dangerous and primitive of the passions.”

  That sounded a bit second-hand, coming from a man so unpassionate as Pawley. But then Pawley wasn’t too proud to use other people’s ideas—and in any case it was decidedly true.

  Chapter Five

  The crash had been on a Monday, and on the following Thursday Douglas had a day off. It had been arranged for him to take Taylor down to a nursing-home in Kingston in the station-wagon. Taylor’s physical injuries were not very serious, but the shock over his wife and girl had almost paralysed him. He had been lying in bed, looking stunned and not touching any food, and clearly requiring the sort of attention that was not available at the school. Judy, on the other
hand, had continued her recovery. There was no point in sending her to a nursing-home, but the doctor had recommended her to rest for at least a week in the cool of the hills. Before Douglas set off with Taylor, he called in to ask her if there was anything she wanted from Kingston.

  “I should think there is! Will you ransack my room? Shove practically everything you can see into a suit-case. And for heaven’s sake don’t forget lipstick and stuff. I feel like a nun without it—and I don’t honestly think it suits me being nunnish, do you?”

  Douglas and Mrs. Morgan helped Taylor down to the station-wagon. Going through the hall he said, “It’s all right, I can manage by myself.” But the moment they relaxed the pressure under his arms he began to fold up, so they held on to him tight for the rest of the way. They put him in the front seat. Douglas said little for the first part of the journey—he was feeling embarrassed, not wanting to mention the man’s loss, and at the same time afraid of bothering him with small-talk. He was a chap of over fifty, a prosperous businessman from the Midlands, with a smooth round face like a baby’s. His usual manner was probably crude and jovial. He was the kind that invite fun to be poked at them and enjoy it, but underneath the boyish jollity are as shrewd as foxes.

  After they had been going for a while, Taylor said:

  “Difficult road for you to drive on.”

  Douglas told him there were nearly a hundred hairpin bends in five miles.

  “You don’t mean it?” he said.

  “You have to watch what you’re doing. You can’t afford to look at the view.”

  “I’ll wager you can’t.” They went on in silence for half a mile, and then he said, “Lot of corners on this road.”

  “Yes, aren’t there?” Douglas said. “The deuce of a lot.”

  “No time to look at the view.”

  “No; you’ve got to go carefully.”

  Taylor said suddenly, his voice trembling, “My wife didn’t want to fly, you know.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. She was thinking of the girl. I told her it was nonsense to worry. She let me have my own way in the end. She always did.”

  Douglas could think of nothing to say.

  “She was a marvellous little woman,” Taylor said. “She was interested in pictures. Paintings, you know. I laughed at her. She wanted to buy a painting just before we came away. Thirty-five pounds. I wouldn’t let her have it.” His voice stuck in his throat. He tried two or three times, and then managed, “I’ll never forgive myself for that. I wouldn’t let her have it.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference to what happened,” Douglas said.

  “It would have made her happy. And you know what I gave her last Christmas?” He gave a series of gasping laughs, as if he was fighting for breath. “A fountain-pen, thirty-two and six.” He squeezed out the last words in a tiny pinched voice, as if forcing them through a hole in a dam he had built against his grief. But the next moment the dam broke and be began to sob. Douglas drove on slowly. There were few things more affecting than the tears of a grown man

  After a time Taylor pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “I’m sorry, old man. First time I’ve done that. Damn selfish to bother others. I’m not the first person who’s lost someone.”

  “There’s nothing I can do for you?” Douglas said. “Write letters or anything?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. It’s going home that worries me. Going into the house, you know. The wife’s stuff all over the place. Peggy’s room just as she left it. I don’t think I can face it.”

  “I expect you’ve relations who’ll help.”

  “Yes. I’ll probably go to my sister’s for a bit. Might get her to close up the house. I’m wondering if my wife would have liked me to handle her things myself though. I wish I knew.”

  “I’d get someone else to do it,” Douglas said.

  They went on in silence for a good way. He thought Taylor had recovered, but when he glanced at him he saw that his baby-face had crumpled up again and he was silently crying. Taylor noticed him look, and said with difficulty:

  “The trouble is, I don’t know where my wife saw that picture. I can’t buy it, even now.”

  After he had seen Taylor into the nursing-home, he drove on into the town. Down here it was like a sweat-bath, and what with the heat and Taylor’s tragedy he was already feeling thoroughly wretched and exhausted. Taylor’s absurd guilt about the picture, and the tears rolling down his white fleshy cheeks, had upset him more than all the other aspects of the crash put together, including the sight of the charred woman with the one white leg. That was how you always reacted: you could see fifty butchered bodies laid out in a row with only a momentary turning of the stomach, but the frills of a personal tragedy shook you to the core. He supposed it was only the frills that brought home to you that “but for the grace of God . . .” Well, but for the grace of God there were a million other people he might have been apart from Taylor, people he would rather have been than himself.

  There was something about coming into Kingston that always affected him like this—gone was the shimmering enchantment that called him down from the school. Never had a town so lacked distinction, never had there been such unalleviated mediocrity. The mediocrity seeped into him and settled on his soul—settled like a shabby vulture and waited for the pickings as his spirit bled away. Mediocrity calling uncomfortably to his own. He began to see himself, down here, in a new and convincingly real perspective, as he might have appeared to some stranger to whom he gave the main facts of his life—a refugee from a bad marriage and a dull career, now a teacher in a crank colonial school, a man of over thirty with no achievements, no attachments, no fundamental happiness. As he walked through the mediocre streets, they mocked his well-remembered adolescent dreams. Fame, perfect happiness, pure love . . . all the things that had always been just around the corner, that were round the corner even now—not consciously admitted but unconsciously hoped for—until Kingston, like a shabby shop-window, reflected the image and filled him with despair.

  Today he had meant to buy another tropical suit, but instead he drove straight to the Myrtle Bank—the largest hotel in Kingston, and the best refuge from shop-windows and mediocrity. There was a swimming-pool in the gardens. He took off his damp clothes in the changing-room, then had a shower and dived into the pool. In the cool water he felt better at once. He floated about, looking at the fronds of the palm-trees, motionless in the heavy tropical air. Then he climbed out, and sat under an orange parasol and ordered a drink and some lunch. The wretchedness came back to him slowly, sitting there alone. When he was in England and the divorce was over and Caroline had gone, he thought that all he had to do to escape from himself was to cross the Atlantic, to surround himself with bamboos and palm-trees instead of the familiar London streets. Well, it didn’t work, you didn’t change yourself by changing your position on the face of the earth. He remembered the chap in the office in London who’d warned him, “Keep out of the colonies if you’ve anything to forget—they’re all full of memorial stones to fellows who’ve already tried.” It was the same chap who’d said, when he’d told him he was going to teach in a progressive school, “Aren’t those the places where they’re proving the wicked old methods must be right?” He used to think that the chap only made cracks for effect as he made up advertising slogans, but perhaps he had wisdom, after all. When Douglas was down here and thought of Silvia and all her superciliousness and lies, he could have gladly wrung her neck.

  The waiter brought his lunch on a tray and placed it on the low table by his chair. He was an elderly Negro, with grizzled hair like grey Persian lamb’s-wool. Caroline had once had a swagger-coat of Persian lamb, and he began to think of Caroline and wonder what she was doing now. He visualized her, with a pang of envy, lying on a rock in the kinder Italian sunshine, or sitting beneath anot
her parasol on a Paris boulevard, or even in London again, dressing extravagantly for Ascot. Or was Ascot over? He couldn’t remember. The days were all gone when he cared about Ascot, about private art shows and dinners by candlelight, about knowing the right people and being seen in the right places. They’d hardly lasted a year. Their novelty had ended with the war, and one after another the discoveries of new realities had dealt successive death-blows. In Malaya, when the war had ended, he had believed that his love for Caroline had died with his love for the life she represented; he had returned home uneasily from the arms of a Chinese whore in Penang. When he found that her own love had expired more certainly, he was overcome with a fresh desire for her. Vanity! Vanity! He had tried to recapture the detachment from her that he had felt in Malaya; but now there was only the pain of not being loved, the humiliation of her open infidelity. The smarting memories of the next six months still stuck to him like open sores, and he tortured himself by examining them with his finger one by one. Sometimes he tried to spread an ointment across them, telling himself, I don’t love Caroline, we could have found no happiness together. But the ointment of reason seldom cured a wound.

  He brooded and prodded his sores all the time he was eating lunch, and when he had finished he decided that it wasn’t any use going on like that, he would return to the cool of the hills as soon as he could. He changed into his clothes again and went out to the station-wagon. It wasn’t until he was almost out of Kingston that he remembered the things he had promised to collect for Judy. It was funny he should have forgotten. He turned the station-wagon round and went in search of her address. It was a boarding­ house that called itself a guest-house, situated on the out­skirts of the town where incomes were beginning to rise and skins become lighter. The landlady was the colour of coffee, with a girth like Mrs. Morgan’s. When she had read about the crash in the newspaper, she hadn’t known whether to weep with sorrow over the tragedy or laugh with happiness over Judy’s escape. She was still on the verge of both laughter and tears. In the shabby little room she helped him pack Judy’s clothes, while a sound of heavy snoring came monotonously through the thin partition. He carried the bag out to the station-wagon. Twenty minutes later he had left Kingston behind and was beginning to climb. Almost at once he felt the air grow fresher and cooler and he took deep breaths of it into his lungs, and the vulture sitting on his soul ruffled its feathers and flapped disconsolately away. In the distance he could see the lofty summit of Blue Mountain Peak. In some people the great wild mountains induced a sense of their own insignificance or triviality. For Douglas they were an antidote to the town’s mediocrity, their greatness and their wildness called to his spirit. He felt reborn.