and I thought how realistic it was of her not to minimise the importance of money and not to make any great and binding declarations of love. I wondered how Pyle over the years would stand that hard core, for Pyle was a romantic; hut then of course in his case there would be a good settlement, the hardness might soften like an unused muscle when the need for it vanished. The rich had it both ways.
That evening, before the shops had closed in the rue Catinat, Phuong bought three more silk scarves. She sat on the bed and displayed them to me, exclaiming at the bright colours, filling avoid with her singing voice, and then folding them carefully she laid them with a dozen others in her drawer: it was as though she were laying the foundation of amodest settlement. And I laid the crazy foundation of mine, writing a letter that very night to Pyle with the unreliable clarity and foresight of opium. This was what I wrote -1
found it again the other day tucked into York Harding's Role of the West. He must have been reading the book when my letter arrived. Perhaps he had used it as a bookmark and then not gone on reading.
"Bear Pyle," I wrote, and was tempted for the only time to write, "Dear Alden," for, after all, this was a bread-and-butter letter* of some importance and it differed little from other bread-and-butter letters in containing a falsehood: "Dear Pyle, I have been meaning to write from the hos-pital to say thank you for the other night. You certainly saved me from an uncomfortable end. I'm moving about now with the help of a stick-1 broke apparently in just the right place and age hasn't yet reached my bones and made them brittle. We must have a party together some time to celebrate." (My pen stuck on that word, and then, like an ant meeting an obstacle, went round it by another route.) "I've got something else to celebrate and I know you will be glad of this, too, for you've always said that Phuong's interests were what we both wanted. I found a letter from my wife waiting when I got back, and she's more or less agreed to divorce me. So you don't need to worry any more about Phuong"-it was a cruel phrase, but I didn't realise the cruelty until I read the letter oyer and then it was too late to alter. If I were going to scratch that out, I had better tear the whole letter up.
"Which scarf do you like best?" Phuong asked. "I love the yellow."
"Yes. The yellow. Go down to the hotel and post this letter for me." She looked at the address. "I could take it to the Legation. It would save a stamp." "I would rather you posted it."
Then I lay back and in the relaxation of the opium I thought, 'At 'least she won't leave me now before I go, and perhaps, somehow, tomorrow, after a few more pipes, I shall think of a way to remain.'
Ordinary life goes on-that has saved many a man's reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, of chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost
for hours together the personal fear. The thoughts of the coming April, of leaving IndoChina, of the hazy future without Phuong, were affected by the day's telegrams, the bulletins of the Vietnam Press, and by the illness of my assistant, an Indian called Dominguez (his family had come from Goa by way of Bombay) who had attended in my place the less important Press Conferences, kept a sensitive ear open to the tones of gossip and rumour, and took my messages to the cable-offices and the censorship. With the help of Indian traders, particularly in the north, in Haiphong, Nam Dinh and Hanoi, he ran his own personal intelligence service for my benefit, and I think he knew more accurately than the French High Command the location of Vietminh battalions within the Tonkin delta.
And because we never used our information except when it became news, and never passed any reports to the French Intelligence, he had the trust and the friendship of several Vietminh agents hidden in Saigon-Cholon. The fact that he was an Asiatic, in spite of his name, unquestionably helped.
I was fond of Dominguez: where other men carry their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being. All that you encountered in daily contact with him was gentleness and humility and an absolute love of truth: you would have had to he married to him to discover the pride. Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride-in my profession a reporter's pride, the desire to file a better story than the other man's, and it was Dominguez who helped me not to care-to withstand all those telegrams from home asking why I had not covered so and so's story or the report of someone else which I knew to be untrue. Now that he was ill I realised how much I owed him-why, he would even see that my car was full of petrol, and yet never once, with a phrase or a look, had he encroached on my private life. I believed he was a Roman Catholic, but I had no evidence for it beyond his name and the place of his origin-for all I knew from his conversation, he might have worshipped Krishna* or gone on annual pilgrimages, pricked by a wire frame,* to the Batu Caves.* Now his illness came like a mercy, reprieving me from the treadmill of private anxiety. It was I now who had to attend the wearisome Press Conferences and hobble to my table at the Continental for a gossip with my colleagues; but I was less capable than Dominguez of telling truth from falsehood, and so I formed the habit of calling in on him in the evenings to discuss what I had heard. Sometimes one of his Indian friends was there, sitting beside the narrow iron bed in the lodgings Dominguez shared in one of the meaner streets off the Boulevard Gallieni.* He would sit up straight in his bed with his feet tucked under him so that you had less the impression of visiting a sick man than of being received by a rajah or a priest. Sometimes when his fever was bad his face ran with sweat, but he never lost the clarity of his thoughts. It was as though his illness were happening to another person's body. His landlady kept a jug of fresh lime by his side, but I never saw him take a drink-perhaps that would have been to admit that it was his own thirst, and his own body which suffered.
Of all the days just then that I visited him one I remember in particular. I had given up asking him how he was for fear that the question sounded like a reproach, and it was always he who inquired with great anxiety about my health and apologised for the stairs I had to climb. Then he said, "I would like you to meet a friend of mine. He has a story you should listen to." "Yes?"
"I have his name written down because I know you find it difficult to remember Chinese names. We must not use it, of course. He has a warehouse on the Quai Mytho* for junk metal." "Important?" "It might be." "Can you give me an idea?"
"I would rather you heard from him. There is something strange, but I don't understand it." The sweat was pouring down his face, but he just let it run as though the drops were alive and sacred-there was that much of the Hindu in him, he would never have endangered the life of a fly. He said, "How much do you know of your friend Pyle?"
"Not very much. Our tracks cross, that's all. I haven't seen him since Tanyin." "What job does he do?"
"Economic Mission, but that covers a multitude of sins. I think he's interested in homeindustries-1 suppose with an American business tie-up.* I don't like the way they keep the French fighting and cut out their business at the same time."
"I heard him talking the other day at a party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen. They had put him on to brief them."
"God help Congress," I said, "he hasn't been in the country six months."
"He was talking about the old colonial powers-England and France, and how you two couldn't expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in now with clean hands."
"Honolulu,* Puerto Rico"* I said, "New Mexico."* "Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Vietminh and he said a Third Force could -do it. There was