More Word Craft

Night in Bombay by Louis Bromfield c. 1939 - 1940


His luggage was all ready to be taken ashore, his cabin in order
and now he stood on the upper deck just beneath the bridge
watching the flying fish scud out of each jade green land swell of
the Arabian Gulf like swift pencils of silver and disappear again in
glittering jets of spray. He was a tall, good-looking fellow with
square shoulders over which his Hanover Street tailor found no
need to put any padding. His clothes said " London" in a discreet
whisper, but you knew at once that he was an American. There
was something in the blue eyes, the pitch of the chin, but more
than anything in the generous, full curve of the lips and the tiny
lines about the eyes which betrayed him. His face told you that he
came of a people who were gamblers, who were sometimes reckless,
and a people who knew how to laugh. He was the American who
knew his way about the world, and so in many ways he was danger-
ous, to himself perhaps more than to others.

........................................................

A voice beside him said, "Good morning," and he turned to find
Mrs. Trollope standing beneath his elbow. She was a tiny woman
but very tough, who came from Sydney. She was on her way from
London to Bombay to stop off for a fortnight and then go on to
Australia. ........

"Good morning," he said. "Beautiful morning."

"Yes," said Mrs. Trollope. "But it's always fine here this time
of the year."

"Funny things--flying fish."

"Yes," Mrs. Trollope wasn't much gifted in the appreciation of
nature. She sniffed the air. "Ah!" she said. "Smell it? That Bom-
bay smell."

He sniffed and became aware of a smell he knew at once--a curi-
ous mixed smell faintly dominated by the smell of drying fish.

" Bombay duck."

"Yes."

But there was more to the smell than that. There was in it the
compounded odors of spice and wood smoke, of jasmine and mari-
gold and of dust and copra and cow dung smoke. And for Wain-
wright there was much more in it--there was the strange excitement
of memories--memories of parties, of drinking, of easy seduc-
tions, of extraordinary nights beneath a sky of blue velvet in which
stars glittered like diamonds, of rides in gherries, down from some
garden suspended on the side of Malabar Hill, to the Hotel Taj
Mahal; memories of an immense, cool room of white marble high
above the bay. The man who a little while before had packed so
meticulously and felt so virtuous, trembled a little with apprehen-
sion. It was, decidedly, a dangerous smell, but deliciously exciting."