Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  The cheers for his performance were loud. The chief himself shook his hand, and the great beauty of that last night started from that moment. The singing became like the sounding of organ music in a strange jungle, and the rain on the roof—incessant rain that seemed to accompany the revelry rather than to depress it—was a lullaby to the senses.

  Toward morning, the entire village gathered in a long farewell to their good friend, Joe Harvey. The men were drunk with little gin and much singing. They would sleep all day. And the Indians in the valley would work.

  In the car, as they drove to the airport from which Joe would leave this land forever, Toni finally made up her mind. She allowed McGurn to pull her toward him and after a moment of decent hesitation kissed him. Proudly she whispered, “You were quite a man tonight.” Then she laughed and confided, “Up to now I’ve been afraid of you.”

  “Afraid?” he echoed.

  “Yes. Afraid you were a stuffy, dull person.”

  “I am,” he confessed.

  “But I thought you were hopelessly dull. You aren’t.”

  Then, as the day broke and the airport loomed ahead, they forgot their own love, for they saw Pata Cadi crying. This was her last hour, as it was their first. Impulsively, Toni broke into tears and clasped the little Indian girl to her while Joe went in to weigh his gear. When he came out, he kissed Toni on the cheek, and said, “You made the night a real festival.” He grasped McGurn’s hand and said, “You were a real sport, fellow. I’m glad for both of us that nothing happened.”

  Then his bravado left him, for he was standing face to face with Pata Cadi. He could remember her as she had lain beside him on his pillow. “May you have all happiness,” he began, but his voice broke, and he clutched her tiny body to his.

  “And may all that you do prosper,” she whispered. The roaring engines warming up drowned out her other words.

  Tears in his eyes, blond-headed Joe Harvey climbed aboard the plane that would take him away from Fiji. Rain swept down upon the field and through his shimmering window, he waved good-bye to his friends. He watched Pata as long as he could, but by the goodness of God, he had lost sight of her when Ramcheck Devidas Billimoria broke madly from behind a shed and plunged a writhing stiletto deep into her throat.

  But Louis McGurn, horrified, was there to see the fanatical knife swirl in the air again. Then, as if driven by a force outside himself, he forgot his stiff white shirt and his diplomat’s mission. He lunged furiously at Billimoria, knocking him to the ground. He was pounding his fists at the horrible face when the airport police intervened.

  During the useless dash in the ambulance McGurn kept thinking, “I saw it all coming, and I could do nothing.” Bitterly he recalled his warning to Harvey and the young man’s insolent prophecy, “I’m the kind that doesn’t get hurt.”

  McGurn was sick with fear of what might happen in Fiji because of this morning. Then Pata Cadi coughed. A foam of blood rose to her thin lips and for the second time that day McGurn acted instinctively. He fell on his knees beside her, clutched her frail hands and begged her, in an agonized voice, not to die. She looked at him but could not speak.

  When death came, horrible and gurgling, he felt the terror of a strange land closing in upon him. Always before he had considered problems—the Israeli problem, the Indian problem—as subjects for neat intellectual reports to Washington. But now he saw Pata Cadi as a human being, a rare and true person. In a naked humility such as he had never known before, he looked up at Toni Jacquemart with beseeching eyes. “What shall I do?” he mumbled.

  It was not until they reached Lady Maud at the G.P.H. that they began to get the murder into perspective. She was firm. She said to Toni, “You’ve had a dreadful shock, girl. Go to bed and drink several cups of hot Bovril.”

  With McGurn she was more direct. “You predicted this. You did what you could to prevent it. Now you must dismiss it as an incident. Tragic but inevitable.”

  “An incident?” McGurn cried.

  “As predictable as the tides. I’ve lived through six of ’em.”

  “But I might have done something more!” he accused himself.

  “More! Don’t be an ass!” She poured him a cup of tea and prepared to leave the hotel.

  “Where are you going?” he asked pleadingly.

  “I’m going to the Governor,” she said firmly. “S’Chalz will rant about honor and propriety. He’ll surely volunteer to disqualify himself in the Patel case. I’ve got to get there first and stop such folly. Time comes when a man can be too demmed honorable.”

  Majestically she swept out of the hotel, and McGurn felt as if the source of his strength had disappeared. He did not even recover his spirits when a messenger appeared with his long-delayed cable from Boston. He sat fingering it and wondered how Joe Harvey would hear of Pata Cadi’s death. In a bar some day. A stranger would shout, “Boy, do I know Fiji? Say I heard the damnedest story down there. Seems there was this American …” Well, it would serve him right.

  He wondered if Americans would ever learn to behave in alien lands. He recalled an arrogant colonel he had known in France. “Hell!” the colonel had boasted, “six energetic Americans could run this place like it ought to be run.” Well, he mused grimly, they’ll have their chance.

  He was interrupted by Lady Maud’s return. “The Governor was a dear,” she reported. “Very sensible man.” Then she asked abruptly, “Have you proposed to Toni?”

  “At this time?” McGurn asked.

  “Certainly! This is the right time. Marriage is always the child of crisis. When the world is shaking, people marry for security.” She collapsed into a chair and shouted for some tea. As she poured it she whispered, “For example, S’Chalz had no intention in the world of marrying me. Had his eye on a French widow. I’ve never admitted to anyone what I had to do to trap him, but he’s been quite happy with me.”

  At this point the mynah birds discovered a swarm of insects in the weeping figs and there was a furious clatter. “Those wretched birds!” Lady Maud cried. “Everyone of ’em’s a murderer.” Then she clutched McGurn’s arm, “Go in and see Toni. Now.”

  He walked to the door but found that Toni was sleeping. He started to leave but Lady Maud gave him a firm shove. So he wakened the girl and said, “Will you marry me?”

  She blinked several times and then blushed deeply. “I was going to ask you—at lunch.” She drew his hand to her lips and kissed it, whispering, “At the airport … you were very brave.”

  Overcome with his love for the girl, he fumbled in his pocket. This was the appropriate moment! Proudly he produced the cable and announced, “Wonderful news! You won’t have to be Mrs. McGurn!”

  “But I want to be!” she protested.

  “Read this!” he cried triumphantly. “The court has changed my name. I’m Louis Richardson now.”

  Lady Maud, in the doorway, saw her daughter’s face grow pale. She knew that Toni was on the point of breaking off the whole engagement with this terribly stuffy man. But with an imperious eye Lady Maud stopped her daughter as if to say, “Marry him. All men are fools, but he’s the best we’ve been able to find.”

  So Toni Jacquemart reached up and kissed Louis on the ear. “Toni Richardson,” she mused. “Well, not exciting, but not bad.”

  “It’s an English name,” he explained. “You see, I’m really of English stock. From Surrey.”

  Guadalcanal

  In the South Pacific there is an island, dark and brooding. It is not large as islands go, nor yet so small as to be forgotten when one has seen it.

  It is inhospitable. Around its entire shore there is no harbor, no welcoming anchorage. Disease abounds in many forms, and often the climate is oppressive.

  This curious and brutal island is not even known by its right name. Old planters call it Solomon Island. It is really Guadalcanal (Wady-al-Canar), but in its corruption it has become one of the blood-honored names in American history: Guadalcanal.

  Here the great P
acific enemy was met. In small numbers at first, like the early whispering of an orchestra, and then in terrible crescendo, Japan and the United States hurled men and resources into the battle. At night single soldiers slugged it out hand to hand. In daylight hundreds of the world’s finest planes clashed in mortal combat, while always the battleships and cruisers were aprowl, springing sometimes into tremendous conflict.

  The battle for Guadalcanal should never lightly be termed a victory. Here our Navy took its worst defeat in history, absorbed its most humiliating shame. At Savo we had our cruisers, on whom the operation depended, poised ready for action. We knew a Jap assault force was forming to the north. We had its speed, its direction, its intention. Yet we let it slip into the very shadow of our guns and destroy the backbone of our sea force.

  Our Marines tasted bitter medicine, too. At Henderson Field, on Bloody Ridge and at the Matanikau River they learned what it was to waver under fire. Aloft our Air Forces absorbed a daily punishment from the superior Zeros. The time came when two Americans had to go aloft to meet forty Japs. At Guadalcanal great men lost their lives. Admirals Scott and Callaghan among them.

  Then, in the full bitterness of battle, we rallied. At first the Navy had to rely upon trickery and courage. Admiral Halsey radioed his tactician Fletcher: “Our educated guess is that the Tokyo Express will attempt reinforcements from Rabaul. They must be stopped at any cost. Repeat. Any cost.” Finally our sea strength accumulated and we smashed the express forever.

  In the air Joe Foss and his men held off superior Zeros—“If you’re alone and meet a Zero, run like hell, because you’re outnumbered”—until the P-38’s arrived and crushed the meatballs. In one day Army pilots shot down 110 Jap planes.

  On the ground the Marines and the Army finally pushed the Japs right into the sea. The enemy commander reported: “I had 30,000 of the finest men. 10,000 were killed. 10,000 starved to death. 10,000 were evacuated, too sick to fight.” Guadalcanal was a momentous victory, but it was purchased at great price.

  To me—and to many like me—Guadalcanal has a significance that is hard to explain. For years we had been told, “America is soft. W.P.A. and C.C.C. have ruined the young men. This generation has no vital spark.” We believed these rumors, in part, and what was more important, our enemies believed them. Across the world critics looked at us and reported: “Sports loving, luxury minded, whimpering in depression, unregimented.” The fatal word was passed: “America is through. She’s a pushover.”

  At Guadalcanal my generation threw back the answer. I was stationed there during the war, and I have walked the trails Americans crawled along, flown in their fiery skies and followed the furrows of the sea where their small boats went out to fight battleships. I am proud—vengefully proud, if you will—of what my generation accomplished at Guadalcanal.

  Now when I hear Europeans condemn happy-go-lucky young Americans as soft, purposeless, or without courage, I smile. I learned different in the Solomons.

  Guadalcanal lies at the foot of The Slot, that strange body of water set off on each side by long islands. Planes still fly The Slot. Each fortnight a lonely C-47 with bucket seats flies down from Rabaul to Guadal. At Torokina, on Bougainville, the plane dips low across the Laruma, still in flood, and lands at the fighter strip on the shores of Empress Augusta Bay. A few Australians rush out for letters. They’re probing the jungle for stray materials and often turn up equipment worth thousands. Our fantastic fragment of Bougainville—we held 6% with 5,000 troops; the Japs held 94% with 40,000—shows few scars of our occupation. Some roads have washed away. Two rivulets cut right across the bomber strips at Piva, where we suffered our only full-fledged retreat in the Pacific war. High on a precipitous cliff—“How could any human beings drag cannon up there?”—the Japs unlimbered a daily barrage that made the fields untenable. And Mount Bagana has become a major volcano, with important eruptions of ash and lava.

  From Torokina the C-47 flies south directly over once deadly Buin and Kahili, where Jap anti-aircraft specialists knocked down many of our planes. Now we can see the Treasuries, which had a special significance for me. I was stationed on nearby Stirling, a dot in the ocean surrounded by Japs impotent to attack, because we had the planes and they hadn’t.

  One day word reached us that the enemy had infiltrated Mono Island next door. An Australian patrol set out to investigate, and I went along. We found no Japs, but on the topmost point of Mono we stumbled into a filthy, unpleasant village bearing one of the loveliest names I’d ever heard: Bali-ha’i. From my pocket I drew a scrap of paper, soggy with sweat, and thought: “I’ll take a note of that name. It has a musical quality.” Years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein were to think the same.

  Now we are over The Slot. I cannot describe this home of great battles except to say that for me it is the most beautiful I know in the world. This may offend those who struggled in its skies. It may cause a shudder to those who fell into its waters and paddled their way on rafts to dismal islands. But during the war I flew The Slot, and so help me it was beautiful, passionately wonderful with craggy islands, spangled lagoons and towering clouds. Now that war has gone, it is even more so.

  To the left lies shadowy Choiseul, where silent patrols passed in the dark and did no fighting. The Japs held their end of the island; the Allies held theirs. It was from here that a much-relieved pilot who had come through two dog fights radioed his course in plain language:

  Hey diddle diddle

  Right down the middle!

  Then suddenly the New Georgia group appears on the right. There is circular Kolombangara of the stately curves. Fleecy clouds hang over it, blue coral surrounds it, and at its feet, in fathoms of water, lie many Japs and their arrogant ships.

  Now below us is one of the wonders of the Pacific, Marovo Lagoon. It runs along the north side of New Georgia, an arm of the sea cut off by an arresting and varied coral reef. Some of the fringing islands are long and narrow, like water snakes. Others are jewels. Still others are stars or coronets. Sometimes the water barely covers great patches of silvery coral. At other points the growing reef breaks the waves and a few coconut palms cling to the new-made sand. At Marovo the sea is endlessly varied, angry blue where the waves break, placid yellow above the coral, and dazzling white at the sand’s edge. The lagoon is hemmed in by trees of all descriptions and visited by birds from across the Pacific. Once seen, with pillars of cloud reflected in its quiet waters, it can never be forgotten.

  The Russells are still cut into a dozen vivid patterns by sea channels. Here are the largest coconut groves in the Pacific, occupying entire islands. From aloft the palms are like green stars on a purple sea.

  Then to the left lies Tulagi, where P.T. boats hid during the day to sally forth with deadly accuracy at night. Here on a dominating hill was Halsey’s deeply disturbing sign:

  Admiral Halsey says:

  “Kill Japs. Kill Japs.

  Kill More Japs.”

  YOU WILL HELP TO KILL THE YELLOW BASTARDS

  IF YOU DO YOUR JOB WELL.

  It was erected by men whose comrades had been tortured, beheaded and sometimes eaten. War in The Slot was brutal.

  Beyond lies Purvis Bay, empty and silent in the hot sunlight. No more do the great ships of the fleet huddle here. No more do roistering commanders, home from raids against the Jap, roar down the steps from the Iron Bottom Bay Club. No more aloft the Jap planes, their crimson meatball flashing in the sun. No more the screaming Grumman plunging into the sea.

  And at quiet Halavo, where the Black Cats went out to save more than 800 pilots adrift in the ocean, vines creep over the huts where brave men lived.

  Below us now is the grave of ships, Iron Bottom Bay. More than a hundred major warships lie rusting in the deep waters of this undefined portion of the sea. Off Savo, still sleeping like a tired woman, off Esperance, the cape of no hope for the Japanese, and at Tassafaronga, where the fleets engaged in fury, the sea is placid, satiated with great ships.

  The
n the heart constricts! At least the American heart must always hesitate, for ahead lies Guadalcanal!

  It is strange that so famous an island should be so often misrepresented. Most misconceptions arose during the war when frenzied correspondents sought easy copy and coined such inappropriate phrases as: impenetrable jungle, steaming tropical nights, uninhabitable, rain-soaked morass and lurking dangers.

  Actually, Guadalcanal is divided into three parts, and the colorful adjectives apply only to the first two, where no Americans served. First there is a southern coastal belt which is hot and which contains most of the 12,000 natives; next a central mountainous strip with forbidding peaks rising to more than 8,000 feet; and finally a hospitable northern plain, ten to fifteen miles deep. Experts believe that this broad, flat land where the Americans were could support a European or Asiatic population of more than 50,000.

  It is astonishing to discover that agriculturally the only limiting factor is lack of rain! At Kukum the rainfall is only 62 inches a year (same as Mobile, Alabama), and during July and August falls to less than 3 inches a month. The heaviest rainfall at any point occupied by Americans was 80 inches at the Tenaru (like Juneau, Alaska).

  The temperatures can be brutally hot, but not at night. Actually, the temperature almost never goes above 95. The record is 102. But the sun is directly overhead, and 95 feels like 105! The humidity is high, usually over 80. But nights are cool—cold over 100 feet high—and a blanket is often appreciated, even at the beach. Guadalcanal at night is never so swelteringly hot as either New York or Washington after a real scorcher.

  When seen aloft, the island is spectacularly beautiful. The mountains are arresting with their varied cliffs. River valleys are dramatic as they plunge toward the plains. But one feature is both unique and startling. At spasmodic intervals across the island the soil is such that trees will not grow. Therefore great kunai plains develop, and even at the tops of mountains there are breathtaking sweeps of superb grassy fields, rolling delicately like expensive golf links.