I said to Pyle, "Do you think there's anything in the rumour about Phat Diem?"
"I don't know. Is it important? I'd like to go and have a look," he said, "if it's important."
"Important to the Economic Mission?" "Oh, well," he said, "you can't draw hard lines. Medicine's a kind of weapon, isn't it? These Catholics, they'd be pretty strong against the Communists, wouldn't they?"
"They trade with the Communists. The Bishop gets his cows and the bamboo for his building from the Communists. I wouldn't say they were exactly York Harding's Third Force," I teased him. "Break it up," Granger was shouting. "Can't waste the whole night here. I'm off to the House of Five Hundred girls.
"If you and Miss Phuong would have dinner with me. . ." Pyle said.
"You can eat at the Chalet," Granger interrupted him, "while I'm knocking the girls next door. Come on, Joe. Anyway you're a man."
I think it was then, wondering what is a man, that I felt my first affection for Pyle. He sat a little turned away from Granger, twisting his beer mug, with an expression of determined remoteness. He said to Phuong, "I guess you
get tired of all this shop*-about your country, I mean?"
"Comment?"
"What are you going to do with Mick?" the Economic attache asked. "Leave him here,"Granger said.
"You can't do that. You don't even know his name." "We could bring him along and let the girls look after
The -Economic Attache gave a loud communal laugh.* He looked like a face on television. He said, "You young pyople can do what you want, but I'm too old for games. I'll take him home with me. Did you say he was French?" "He spoke French." "If you can get him into my car. . " After he had driven away, Pyle took a trishaw with Biranger, and Phuong and I followed, along the road to Ghholon. Granger had made an attempt to get into the trishaw with Phuong, but Pyle diverted him. As they pedalled us down the long suburban road to the Chinese town a line of '"French armoured cars went by, each with its jutting gun and silent officer motionless like a figure-head under ste stars and the black, smooth, concave sky-trouble again probbably with a private army, the Binh Xuyen, who ran
55
the Grand Monde and the gambling halls of Cholon. This was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here?
Columbus had not yet discovered their country. I said to Phuong, "I like that fellow, Pyle."
"He's quiet," she said, and the adjective which she was the first to use stuck like a schoolboy name, till I heard even Vigot use it, sitting there with his green eye-shade, telling me of Pyle's death.
I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phuong, "Go in and find a table. I had better look after Pyle." That was my first instinct-to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell,* wandering the world, meaning no harm. When I reached the House of the Five Hundred Girls, Pyle and Granger had gone inside. I asked at the military police post just inside the doorway, "Deux Americains?"*
He was a young Foreign Legion corporal. He stopped cleaning his revolver and jutted his thumb towards the doorway beyond, making a joke in German. I couldn't understand it. It was the hour of rest in the immense courtyard which lay open to the sky. "Hundreds of girls lay on the grass or sat on their heels talking to their companions. The curtains were undrawn in the little cubicles around the square-one tired girl lay alone on a bed with her ankles crossed. There was trouble in Cholon and the troops were confined to quarters and there was no work to be done: the Sunday of the body. Only a knot of fighting, scrabbling, shouting girls showed me where custom was still alive. I remembered the old Saigon story of the distinguished visitor who had lost
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this trousers fighting his way back to the safety of the police post. There was no protection here for the civilian. If he chose to poach on military territory, he must look after himself and find his own way out.
I had learnt a technique-to divide and conquer. I chose one in the crowd that gathered round me and edged, her slowly, towards the spot where Pyle and Granger struggled. "Je suis un vieux," I said. "Trop fatigue." She giggled and pressed. "Mon ami," I said, "il est tres riche, tres
vigoureux."*
"Tu es sale,"* she said.
"I caught sight of Granger flushed and triumphant; it was as though he took this demonstration as a tribute to his manhood. One girl had her arm through Pyle's and was trying to tug him gently out of the ring. I pushed my girl in among them and called to him, "Pyle, over here."* He looked at me over their heads and said, "It's terrible. Terrible.''ltmay have been a trick of the lamplight, but his face looked haggard. It occurred to me that he was quite possibly a virgin.
"Come along, Pyle," I said. "Leave them to Granger." I saw his hand move towards his hip pocket. I really believe he-intended to empty his pockets of piastres and green-backs
"Don't be a fool, Pyle," I called sharply. "You'll have them fighting." My girl was turning back to me and I gave her another push into the inner ring round Granger. "Non, non," I said, "je suis un Anglais, pauvre, tres pauvre."*
Then I got hold of Pyle's sleeve and dragged him out, with the girl hanging on to his other arm like a hooked fish. Two or three girls tried to intercept us before we got to the gateway where the corporal stood watching, but they were half-hearted.
"What'll I do with this one?" Pyle said. "She won't be any trouble," and at that moment she
57
let go his arm and dived back into the scrimmage round Granger.
"Will he be all right?" Pyle asked anxiously. "He's got what he wanted-a bit of tail." The night outside seemed very quiet with only another squadron of armoured cars driving by like people with a purpose. He said, "It's terrible. I wouldn't have believed. . ." He said with sad awe, "They were so pretty." He was not envying Granger, he was complaining that anything good -and prettiness and grace are surely forms of goodness-should be marred or ill-treated. Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don't write that as a sneer; after all there are many of us who can't.) I said, "Come back to the Chalet. Phuong's waiting." "I'm sorry," he said. "I quite forgot. You shouldn't have left her."
"SHe wasn't in danger."
"I just thought I'd see Granger safely-" He dropped again into his thoughts, but as we entered the Chalet he said with obscure distress, "I'd forgotten how many men there are..."
(2) -
Phuong had kept us a table at the edge of the dance-floor and the orchestra was playing some tune which had been popular in Paris five years ago. Two Vietnamese couples were dancing, small, neat, aloof, with an air of civilisation we couldn't match. (I recognised one, an accountant from the Banque de 1'lndo-Chine* and his wife.) They never, one felt, dressed carelessly, said the wrong word, were a prey to untidy passion. If the war seemed medieval, they were like the eighteenth-century future. One would have expected Mr. Pham-Van-Tu to write Augustans* in his spare time, but I happened to know he was a student
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^ii Wordsworth* and wrote nature poems. His holidays he spent at Dalat,* the nearest he could get to the atmosphere of the English lakes.* He bowed slightly as he came round. wondered how Granger had fared fifty yards up the road. Pyle was apologising to Phuong in bad French for having kept her waiting. "C'est impardonable,"* he said. "Where have you been?" she asked him. He said, "I was seeing Granger home."
"Home?" I said and laughed, and Pyle looked at me as though I were another Granger. Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, a man of middle-age, with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight, ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger perhaps but more cynical, less innocent, and Isaw Phuong for a moment as I had seen her first, dancing past my table at the Grand Mondein a white ball-dress, eighteen years old, watched by an elder sister who had been detemined on a good European marriage. An American had bought a ticket and asked her for a dance:* he was a little drunk-not harmfully, and I suppose he was new to the country and thought the hostesses of the Grand Monde were whores. He held her much too close as they went round the floor the first time, and then suddenly there she was, going back to sit with her sister, and he was left, strand-ed and lost among the dancers, not knowing what had happened or why. And the girl whose name I didn't know sat quietly there, occasionally sipping her orange juice, owning herself completely.