He took the risks any way. We bought her out, it cost twenty rupees. I got them a little house down the coast on the sea shore, a little house surrounded by palm trees. The sea droned away sleepily right under the verandah. It was to be an idyl of the East; he was to live there for ever with her and write novels on the verandah.
And, by God, he was happy—at first. I used to go down there and stay with them pretty often. He taught her English and she taught him Sinhalese. He started to write a novel about the East: it would have been a good novel I think, full of strength and happiness and sun and reality—if it had been finished. But it never was. He began to see the truth, the damned hard unpleasant truths that I had told him that night in the Colombo bungalow. And the cruelty of it was that he still had that rare power to feel, that he still felt. It was the real thing, you see, and the real thing is—didn't I say—immense, steady, enduring. It is; I believe that still. He was in love, but he knew now what she was like. He couldn't speak to her and she couldn't speak to him, she couldn't understand him. He was a civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she—she was an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful.
I watched it happening, I had foretold it, but I cursed myself for not having stopped it, scores of times. He loved her but she tortured him. People would say, I suppose, that she got on his nerves. It's a good enough description. But the cruellest thing of all was that she had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her master. Jessop stopped. We waited for him to go on but he didn't. The leaves rustled gently in the breeze; the river murmured softly below us; up in the woods I heard a nightingale singing. "Well, and then?" Alderton asked at last in a rather peevish voice.
"And then? Damn that nightingale!" said Jessop. I wish I hadn't begun this story. It happened so long ago: I thought I had forgotten to feel it, to feel that I was responsible for what happened then. There's another sort of love; it isn't the body and it isn't the flame; it's the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed women of the East. It's the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami for Reynolds. But it wasn't what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more than anything which got on his nerves.
She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. And when he looked into her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in love with, what he knew didn't exist. It began to drive him mad.
And she—she of course couldn't even understand what was the matter. She saw that he was unhappy, she thought she had done something wrong. She reasoned like a child that it was because she wasn't like the white ladies whom she used to see in Colombo. So she went and bought stays and white cotton stockings and shoes, and she squeezed herself into them. But the stays and the shoes and stockings didn't do her any good.
It couldn't go on like that. At last I induced Reynolds to go away. He was to continue his travels but he was coming back—he said so over and over again to me and to Celestinahami. Meanwhile she was well provided for; a deed was executed: the house and the coconut trees and the little compound by the sea were to be hers—a generous settlement, a donatio inter vivos, as the lawyers call it—void, eh?—or voidable?—because for an immoral consideration. Lord! I'm nearly forgetting my law, but I believe the law holds that only future consideration of that sort can be immoral. How wise, how just, isn't it? The past cannot be immoral; it's done with, wiped out—but the future? Yes, it's only the future that counts.
So Reynolds wiped out his past and Celestinahami by the help of a dirty Burgher lawyer and a deed of gift and a ticket issued by Thomas Cook and Son for a berth in a P and O bound for Aden. I went on board to see him off and I shook his hand and told him encouragingly that everything would be all right.
I never saw Reynolds again but I saw Celestinahami once. It was at the inquest two days after the Moldavia sailed for Aden. She was lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered room behind the court. Yes, I identified her: Celestinahami—I never knew her other name. She lay there in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and white shoes. They had found her floating in the sea that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little bungalow—bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and shoes.
* * * * *