And the Rain My Drink by Han Suyin
Author:Han Suyin [Han Suyin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814625548
Publisher: Monsoon Books Pte. Ltd.
Published: 2013-02-01T00:00:00+00:00
* * *
Damp fingers grasping pen, Luke Davis sat and squirmed in his rattan chair, scratched the prickly heat studding his neck with a few white pustules of nascent heat boils, smelt sweat feral trickle down his armpits. He was working on a report on terrorist supplies smuggled across the Straits from the island of Singapore to Malaya.
Luke was happy; not merely was this a strenuous and intricate piece of detecting, long hours of patient fitting together of fact and counterfact, minute collating of more or less reliable information from agents and spies and counterspies (all to be paid out of special funds for the purpose); his absorption freed him of that disturbing inner malaise which made him question the purpose of his efforts and the validity of his intentions.
For he was of the tribe called tender-minded, to whom compunction clings as native skin; who expect others and themselves to act as they ought instead of behaving as they do. Such people are more likely found among those miscalled Intellectual; hard upon their own failings, no dogma is secure with them. Their minds are unable to leave mental stones unturned. They remain for ever suspect, disadvantaged among the many who stifle dubiety with the clamour of conviction.
In a country and in a job where thinking is nearly out of bounds, and bound to withhold action, awareness of this fault kept Luke a little apart from his fellows and consequently lonely. He had gone into the Police hoping to lose this weakness in action, as men sincere enough to know themselves capable of being afraid live dangerously, for ever to test the edge of their fear.
But in the Force he had found another kind of loneliness, that of the white man cut off from the world around him, clinging to disfigured shreds of his own.
This collective loneliness, a morose mass blight, insecurely forgotten in drink and women, gave rise to the all-night stuporous sessions at Club or Mess, when, gathered round stengahs under the star-thick sky, with the brain-fever bird in the black loom of trees pitching high jabbered soliloquy, the frogs booming and the crickets rending the silken stuff of darkness, white men and women talked and talked and went on talking, progressively thicker-tongued and more tedious, of plays seen back Home on leave last year, films seen last week, dances and mess nights long gone ⦠so tired of each other yet making no move to wrest their cramped somniferous minds away, dreading the hour of parting, lingering with hand on car door over the last lamentable joke; anything but to be alone, body thrown back upon itself, brain unriveted to the familiar.
Sitting in the charmed circle round their drinks, unwilling to stay, unable to go, Luke wondered whether they were all slightly insane, their tranced logomachy the senseless parody of the fever bird among the trees.
Within the claustrophilic narrowness of people like themselves they placed all their emotions, pitched their success or downfall. Only the opinion of the circle, the Club, the Service, the Force, counted: they knew no other.
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