What He's Poised to Do

It was not to be. Rouse was, by this time, a hard man, impossible to reason with, let alone love, and his abrasive manner drove Pelham Bartlett away from the Ananthanarayanan family. More to the point, it drove her out of Australia; she soon married an American businessman, who then moved to Kyoto. Rouse insisted that Pelham Bartlett’s departure did not bother him, as he had felt nothing for the woman when she was present. Nevertheless, he was keenly aware that his friend was suffering from her absence all over again, and this brought on a nervous breakdown that landed Rouse in Sacred Heart Hospital. “You didn’t want her around anyway,” Rouse wrote to Govindan from the hospital. “She had harmed you. Don’t you remember? Why would you want to keep ties with someone like that? I must confess I don’t understand you. But I am sorry if I have harmed you.”

After six months, Rouse was released, and he returned to the Ananthanarayanan home, where he began to work as a driver for the family. When Rouse heard in 1940 that his former girlfriend had died in a car accident, he was at the horse track with Govindan Ananthanarayanan. “A driver killed her?” Rouse reportedly said. “That evens the score.” He took off his driver’s cap, placed it over his heart, and lowered his head. “My failure to understand human cruelty,” he said, and began to laugh.

COUNTRY LIFE IS THE ONLY LIFE WORTH LIVING; COUNTRY LOVE IS THE ONLY LOVE WORTH GIVING (Virginia, 1937)

WE SET OFF FOR THE STATION THAT MORNING, LILY AND I. I know it pains you to hear this, my dear wife, but I feel I must tell the tale forward. You and I are one, in ways that we once discussed with regularity and even celebrated when you were my wife and I was your husband. Then we were divided. I am sorry, for I prefer love to war, but the truth is standing in the middle of the room and so I will not ignore it. The truth is your absence and Lily’s presence. I say “presence” euphemistically, when what I mean is something more specific. She is standing here, her dress not quite covering it.

We had been living in the city together for a little less than a year, Lily and I. Most of our time was spent in an apartment, exercising one another and dreaming of the day when we might start again in a finer place. I hadn’t known exactly what I meant by that, “a finer place,” until the postman delivered a letter written to Lily by an elderly friend of her parents, one Mrs. Pritchard. This fine woman had heard from Lily’s parents that Lily was looking for a place to spend part of the summer, and she was writing with a suggestion that took the form of a description of a village, and a road in it, and a house on that road that sounded like nothing so much as perfection. You and I once spent a summer in a village, but it was a dingy thing, with narrow paths that made movement through it nearly impossible. This village, as communicated by Mrs. Pritchard, sounded in me like a high note. Lily did not agree, but she did not have to; I heard her agreement in her silence.

At the train station on the morning of our departure, we were ringed by the denizens of the city that we had not, up until that very moment, met, and a more decrepit and disreputable crew I cannot imagine: There was a blind boy who could say only the words “more” and “money,” a crippled girl who tried to stay faithful to her innocent girlhood but was betrayed by the voluptuous flowering of her figure, and a man with a maimed hand who looked at the girl with a rude hunger that left no doubt as to the eventual destination of the hand. The deformities, both of body and of soul, came out of every corner of the station, and they reminded me of the small cottage in the seaside town where you and I stayed on our honeymoon. That was our village, and it was tolerable only because we went there with a hope that protected us from its reality. Do you remember? There were noises in the walls as something scuttled from left to right and top to bottom, like a text we were afraid to read. That was how I expressed it at the time, and you laughed and said that was too beautiful a conceit to waste on such an ugly sight. “The ugly is a component of the beautiful,” I said. You agreed. You were wrong, though you could not have known it at the time. The train station stands as proof of your error.