"How do I know?" I said. "Did he go to see General The?" "I wouldn't know."*
"He told me if he could not have dinner with you, he would come here."
"Don't worry. He'll come. Make me another pipe." When she bent over the flame the poem of Baudelaire's* came into my mind: "Mon enfant, ma soeur...."* How did it go on?
"Aimer a loisir, Aimer et mourir Aupaysquiteressemble."*
Out on the waterfront slept the ships, "dont l'humeur estvagabonde."* I thought that if I smelt her skin it would have the faintest fragrance of opium, and her colour was that of the small flame. I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.
"I wish I were Pyle," I said aloud, but the pain was limited and bearable-the opium saw to that. Somebody knocked on the door. "Pyle," she said. "No. It's not his knock."
Somebody knocked again impatiently. She got quickly up, shaking the yellow tree* so that it showered its petals again over my typewriter. The door opened. "Monsieur Fowlair," a voice commanded.
"I'm Fowler," I said. I was not going to get up for a policeman-1 could see his khaki shorts without lifting my head.
He explained in almost unintelligible Vietnamese French that I was needed immediatelyat once-rapidly--at the Surete.
"At the French Surete* or the Vietnamese?" "The French." In his mouth the word sounded like "Franking." "What about?"
He didn't know: it was his orders to fetch me. "Toi aussi,"* he said to Phuong.
"Say vous* When you speak to a lady," I told him. "How did you know she was here?" He only repeated that they were his orders. "I'll come in the morning?"
"Sur ie chung,"* he said, a little, neat, obstinate figure. There wasn't any point in.arguing, so I got up and put on my tie and shoes. Here the police had the last word: they could withdraw my order of circulation:* they could have me barred from Press Conferences: they could even, if they chose, refuse me an exit permit.* These were the open legal methods, but legality was not essential in a country at war. I knew a man who had suddenly and inexplicably lost his
cook-he had traced him to the Vietnamese Surete, but the officers there assured him that he had been released after questioning. His family never saw him again: perhaps he had joined the Communists: perhaps he had been enlisted in one of the private armies which flourished round Saigon-the Hoa-Haos* or the Caodaists* or General The.* Perhaps he was in a French prison. Perhaps he was happily making money out of girls in Cholon,*
the Chinese suburb. Perhaps his heart had given way* when they questioned him. I said,
"I'm not going to walk. You'll have to pay for a trishaw." One had to keep one's dignity. That was why I refused a cigarette from the French officer at the Surete. After three pipes I felt my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions easily without losing sight of the main question-what do they want from me? I had met Vigot before several times at parties-1 had noticed him because he appeared incongruously in love with his wife, who ignored him, a flashy and false blonde. Now it was two in the morning and he sat tired and depressed in the cigarette smoke and the heavy heat, wearing a green eye-shade,* and he had a volume of Pascal* open on his desk to while away the time. When I refused to allow him to question Phuong without me he gave way at once, with a single sigh that might have represented his weariness with Saigon, with the heat, or with the whole human condition.
He said in English, "I'm so sorry I had to ask you to come."
"I wasn't asked, I was ordered."
"Oh, these native police-they don't understand." His eyes were on a page of Les Pensees*
as though he were still absorbed in those sad arguments. "I wanted to ask you a few questions-about Pyle." "You had better ask him the questions." He turmed to Phuong and interrogated her sharply in French. "How long have you lived with Monsieur Pyle?"
"Amonth-I don't know" she said, "How much has he paid you?"
"You've no right to ask h^r.-that," I said. "She's not for sale."
"She used to live with you, didn't she?" he asked abruptly. "For two years." J
"I'm a correspondent who's supposed to report your war-when. you let him. Don't ask me to contribute to your scandal sheet as well.".
"What do you know about Pyle? Please answer my questions, M. Fowler. I don't want to ask them. But this is serious. Please believe me it is very serious."
"I'm not an informer. You know all I can tell you^bout Pyle. Age thirty-two, employed in the Economic Aid Mission,* nationality American."
"You sound like a friend of his," Vigot said, looking past me at Phuong. A native policeman came in with three Clips of black coffee.
"Or would you rather have tea?" Vigot asked. "I am a friend," I said. "Why not? I shall begoing home one day, won't I? I can't take her with me. She'll be all right with him. It's a reasonable arrangement. And he's going to marry her, he says. He might, you know. He's a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American," I summed him precisely up as I might have said, 'a blue lizard,' 'a white elephant.'
Vigot said, "Yes." He seemed to be looking for words on his desk with which to convey his meaning as precisely as I had done. "A very quiet American." He sat there in the little hot office waiting for one of us to speak. A mosquito droned to the attack, and I watched Phuong. Opium
makes you quick-witted-perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important. Phuong, I thought, had, not caught bis tone, melancholy and final, and her English was very bad. While she sat there on the hard office-chair, she was still waiting patiently for Pyle. I had at that moment given up waiting, and I could see Vigot taking those two facts in. .
"How did you meet him first?" Vigot asked me. Why should I explain to him that it was Pyle who had met me? I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continentaclass="underline" an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze* he seemed incapable of harm. The tables on the street were most of them full. "Do you mind?" he had asked with serious courtesy. "My name's Pyle. I'm new here," and he had folded himself around a chair* and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up into the hard noon glare.
"Was that a grenade?" he asked with excitement and hope.
"Most likely the exhaust of a car," I said, and was suddenly sorry for his disappointment. One forgets so quickly one's own youth: once I was interested myself in what for want of a better term they call news. But grenades had staled on me; they were something listed on the back page of the local paper-so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon: they never made the European Press.* .Up the street came the lovely fiat figures-the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh: I watched them -with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions forever. "They are lovely, aren't they?" I said over my beer, and Pyle
cast. them a cursory glance as they went on up the rue Catinat.
"Oh, sure," he said indifferently: he was a serious type. "The Minister's very concerned about these grenades. It would be very awkward, he says, if the^ewas an incident-withoneofus.lmean." :
"With one of you? Yes, I suppose that would be serious. Congress wouldn't like it." Why does one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston* his arms full of the books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn't even he^r what I said: he was absorbed already in the dilemBaas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West: heyas determined-1 learnt that very soon-to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element* now with the whole universe to improve.